Ah, blessed break with glorious iced water. As the final set of Belgian Waffles were popped off the grid, Naoko finally let the tension seep out of her body, her form practically becoming a slime as she seeped against the wall. Sipping through a straw, she sat on a stool and watched Sophie flip through the pages of her pilfered paper.

[b]“Uwah,”[/b] she vocalized, eyes scanning over the murders and the war of drugs,[b] “American media is as dreary as ever, huh.”[/b]

But of course crude crimes weren’t anything that interested an Empress. Raising a brow at the headlines extolling some European 1%-er, Naoko sipped on the straw until it started producing obnoxious sounds, before hopping off her stool again, rejuvenated. [b]“Pretty sure any magi family coming over to Boston’s gonna be suspect,”[/b] she replied, [b]“But being the rich fellows they are, they’d probably have summoned some super crazy person like Hercules as an Archer or Lancelot as a Saber, yeah?”[/b]

She turned on the tap, rolled up her sleeves, and started scrubbing away. Lunch rush being down didn’t mean work stopped, sadly. A couple moments of silence passed before she spoke up again. [b]“This totally is a challenge, right?”[/b] Naoko ventured, performing miracles with her steel wool, [b]“Like, wow, gotta be some next level arrogance to announce your presence via the news...but huh.”[/b]

An inkling of something crawled in her mind. It didn’t align at all with her current plan of ‘doing nothing the whole time and just seeing who crawls out of the war’, but maybe a proactive approach was alright as well.

[b]“If you wanna go say ‘hi’, I’m not opposed. Austrian aristocrat’s gotta be hot, right, Sophie?”[/b]