The snarl burns hot on Bella's face. The harder she pushes, the hotter she burns, until she thinks she must be suffering from some new poison of Mynx's, too. One that makes her arms stop shaking. One that tricks her legs into feeling strong again. One that makes her ears tingle with warmth and her cheeks flush hot and her heart flutter strangely as she stares deep into those lizard eyes and the svelte features of the shapeshifter's true(?) form.

...She is blushing. She realizes it too late. Bella hisses and pushes herself back off the ground with comical haste, looking disdainfully at the ground with a sour expression on her face that does less than nothing to hide her embarrassment.

"I am [i]not[/i] being a..!"

She stops herself mid sentence; the giggling is only making things worse. Bella busies herself with straightening her entire outfit again, tugging her sleeves back into place with a pair of little chimes that themselves somehow manage to seem off kilter and flustered. She smooths out the wrinkles in her blouse and vest, and carefully tucks the shirt back into the waistline of her skirt before plucking a tiny amount of the fabric back up as is proper. She smooths the fur on her shoulders and tosses her hair behind her with a careless flick her her hands. She pats away the dirt that isn't there, and her tail snaps with irritation as she takes a deep breath. 

It's only after all of this that she offers her hand down to the trickster still sprawled out and staring at her from the ground. She keeps her head very carefully turned away the entire time.

"Look, we're wasting time, ok? Every second they spend chasing after the Princess is another second she can use to disappear forever. You don't understand how good she is at that. S-so let's just... take this stupid ship already. We can play catch-up and twenty poisons after we're underway."

She's still got a Codexia to dispose of, somehow. She still needs to slip off of the [i]Rex[/i] in the Admiral's own shuttle and get to Redana before the rest of the fleet can. And now she's got to do it with a scumbag faker at her heels, smiling and waiting to betray her the whole time. So why? Why does her chest feel so much lighter, all of a sudden? Why does her face feel so warm? Why does Aphrodite delight in torturing her so?