His concerns looked to be unfounded after all - for the most part.

Robin seemed...well...competent enough, he supposed, to pull off the disguise past all of them. Sloan didn't have the same reaction to the kleptomania confession that some of the others did, either. All Butei learned to pack one suitcase, so there wasn't a lot of room for souvenirs, and the Dagula kept his Supra's floor and passenger's seat immaculate to boot, so he wasn't worried about having to bolt too much to the ground around the team leader. [color=00a651][i]No point in getting riled up before he even steals my phone charger.[/i][/color]

The Dagula and his Logi friend seemed competent enough, though one treated him with professional courtesy and the other with barely kept disdain. Ah well. Not like he was gonna please 'em all. As it was, Division Six had been much more tolerant of his Bloodline than even the Dagula instructors had been in his first months as a specialist. [i]Gimme twenty years and three dozen of him,[/i] one had said, [i]and we won't even need a Dagula school.[/i]

It looked like praise on the surface, but Sloan had always read it as job security blues. It was a nicer version of one of his dad's favorite threats:

[color=00a651][i]Boy, you test me with that come hither bullshit one more time, I'm gonna make your skull rattle like a goddamn windchime![/i][/color]

Sloan missed home sometimes. Anyway!

He liked Nadia instantly; if her introduction was anything to go by, she had a good check on herself when not using her bloodline, and she seemed nice enough when they talked. If she needed someone to shoot straight with, there were worse things in the world than holding a conversation with. If not, at least she was a more reliable distraction than Murphy. The good-ol-boy accent was nice and all, but Sloan remembered the look he'd been aimed and the 'If that don't work, use more gun' sentiments of his warning crystal clear.

Suzumi was somewhere in the middle, reminding him so much of Khabif that it was spooky. A good thing...[i][color=00a651]probably[/color][/i]...but spooky. 

Even Nellie and Deuce had surprised him; the team's final Assault Butei was remarkably pleasant, one of the most thus far, and Deuce's icebreaker had been perhaps the most to-the-point of all. He wasn't ready to write off his first impression completely, but at least he wasn't as much of a chatterbox as he'd led everyone to believe. Maybe.

Sloan finished up his scone while everyone was talking and folded up the crumby napkins neatly into a tight, compact square. 

[color=00a651]"I'm feeling good about this,"[/color] he said optimistically to Nadia, still the closest person in earshot. [color=00a651]"I half-expected a real rogue's gallery."[/color]