[center][img]http://i.imgur.com/NYrpWli.png[/img]
[@Silvan Haven][@Crimmy][@Write][/center]

Girls are the strangest creatures. Nowhere else would you feel so content with getting mobbed, piled upon, and squeezed to half death than their embraces.

Fortunately, I'm a man of uncanny experience in these situations, so I knew how to survive a two-pronged deathclutch surprise attack. I have two younger sisters. I would be dust in the wind if I couldn't.

Granted, sisters could only do so much for preparing you for getting hugged by cute girls your own age. They were an entirely different swamping of the senses. Noticing softness, nice smells, warmth, that weird thing they did where your stomach felt colonized by butterflies...

No, Dawn using me as a piggyback ride and April hitting a suplex on me did not compare. Only in terms of surprise and disruption of balance was there a comparison, so I only knew how to survive, you know?

I didn't mind surviving hugs like these.

No, if I'll be honest, it was actually really nice. A good reward for a job well done...

And a staunch reminder of the exhaustion I'd been fighting off. Even as Bianca had clung to me, I felt the tension that had been keeping me focused in during the process of helping her wings recover fade, fade away, everything going slack once the job was finally done and I had managed a small return by patting her on the back. Once Beryl entered the picture, I was little more than a ragdoll in her arms.

That's a strong woman, you know. Her hugs are not things you could fight against if you were ever stupid enough to want to.

[color=007236]"You. Schwarz."[/color]

Our festivities, which at this point consisted of me shaking myself loose and Beryl poised to pounce upon Bianca with Gratia quietly watching, were brought to a halt as an unfamiliar person approached.

Well, unfamiliar to me, anyway. She regarded everyone else with some degree of recognition, and that accent sounded like Bianca's...

She was definitely a Huntress of sorts, if those massive guns on her hips were anything to go by.

[color=007236]"This is for you. Courtesy of Team Vivacious."[/color]

[b]"Vivacious..."[/b] I repeated under my breath as I accepted the envelope, running through a list of team names under my head and finding no match. Maybe she was from Haven, as everyone else here aside from myself was?

[b]"Uh, thank you."[/b] I said after a moment's scrutiny, inclining my head with as much politeness as my tired body could muster. For her part, her cool hazel gaze hadn't seemed to care one way or another that I was getting ragdolled around before this point, and she regarded me with a similar impassivity that I was privileged enough to receive from Gratia.

[b]"What is this?"[/b] I asked, flipping the envelope over to discover that, yes, it was perfectly normal.

After the kind of ride the rest of today had been, surprise delivery included, I wouldn't rule out anything.

I could tell I was gonna pass out tonight.