She gasps, silently, like a ghost. A [i]plot![/i]

It's like that one movie, where the female lead, played by Cybill Shepherd, has to blow up a clock tower and then take the mayor's daughter hostage, while her husband is setting up to assassinate the IMF assistant secretary while he's in town and the clock tower is meant to force them to use the secondary meeting site, that he has access to! But then the lady's repressed interest in a con woman named Sofia flares up, and she bails on the plot, and meanwhile her husband ends up shooting a body double instead of the actual target, and it all ends in tears and tragedy.

You know, Goncharov.

It's not actually a great map onto the situation, on second thought, but look! There's the police! Just like the hostage scenes in the watchmaker's shop. Except... no, actually, HOUND is kind of just as bad as the corrupt Naples cops? Like, sure, they're not actually taking bribes, that she knows about, but they get paid well and they still shoot first, and then second, and then demand answers third. Her mom was sure they were temporary but that's almost worse, because now they don't have a reason to actually fix anything because they get all the fancy power and money while there's a crisis. She'd read a really good post about it, which is somewhere buried between food recipes and parkour videos and very good fanart of cat!Lady and cat!Tramp cuddling each other.

But in them meantime, there's a plot, and she doesn't have her ornithopter nearby, and now she can't get to Sunrise Docks easily, or at least not without calling a taxi.

She takes a minute to look down at the HOUND agent, working her way slowly down the building, one ghost-step at a time. She wants to be ready to intervene if bullets start flying. She's [i]going[/i] to be ready, in fact. Positive thinking!