Chen was just growing relaxed with her routine when Rose sets her down for the sheep and gives her the most [i]undignified[/i] pat on the butt. She lets out an "eep" through the scarf and shoots Rose an indignant glare, ruined [i]entirely[/i] by the renewed blush creeping up her face and the fact that her wriggling butt is in fact more wriggling than, strictly speaking, is needed to settle herself on the ground. 

When Rose then jumps straight to the task of herding the sheep, rather than merely lift the travelers past them and move on, Chen's eyes grow wide and she stares closely at Rose. It's a lesson in movement and style, jumping from point to point, making her presence somehow greater than the whole herd so that they have only a single route to follow. Chen's eyes track her as a practiced learner, taking notes on how she lands, how light she is on her feet even as she asserts herself. Chen wondered if the old world was really like this, though. In her mind, she thought Rose was something special and instead of this impressive showing, the old world probably just had ten knock-off Roses for the same job, each one barely lifting a finger while they stood around under their master's orders. Every time her Mom told such stories, the burrows were always too much heat and excess and it made her feel rather queasy thinking too hard about it.

Instead, her buzzing phone finally gets her attention and she turns to the technomancer and her mask cart. Wait, did she just say that Chen needed a technomancer? Did she think she needed rescuing from Rose? Oh, oh no! Chen squirmed and tried to wriggle to loosen her bonds, squeezing her thighs and then flexing her legs to turn herself in the grass while she wriggled her neck to try and work her scarf down a little bit. 

She needed to explain that wasn't what she...did the technomancer just say Kikil?! No! No no no. Princess Kikil was in the cold alliance, but whenever she visited Sourcefall, Princess Hestia always made sure that Chen was at a safe distance and couldn't get anywhere near her. Something about "static discharge" one time, she couldn't remember anymore. But Princess Kikil was [i]scary[/i]! She liked to fly around wearing that huge burrow mask that stretched almost to the ground when she was standing. The mask had these spiky tips on its bottom half and jagged red and black painted lines like reverse lightning on them! Now that Chen was old enough to travel on her own most of the time, she did kind of want to get to know Kikil. She thought maybe there was a really nice Princess under the mask and it would be neat to learn more about burrow tech, an area where Chen's education was relatively lacking.

But! Even worse than being scary and mysterious, Kikil was scary skilled at her tech! If she showed up with Chen in this state, pictures would find their way onto the phones of every princess in the world, nevermind Rose's legendary sheep herding. Chen would [i]never[/i] live it down, and she was [i]not[/i] prepared to be that deep in Kikil's debt for sparing her that fate. 

Chen tried to squirm again, stretching her shoulders and wriggling her arms from side to side while shaking her head a little that no she did not need a technomancer, thank you very much! If she could just wriggle her hips and her shoulders a little more, maybe she could loosen the tape so she could start working on an escape and...ah would you quit staring with your knowing phone?!?! Embarrassed at hearing her own name (not noticing in the moment that the technomancer is teasing her) Chen starts getting worked up and struggles faster, straining with all her might (okay maybe not [i]all[/i]) to push the tape apart without ruining her scarf, to no avail. She tries to say "I'm fine" but it comes out as "mmphhmm!" instead. Frustrated, she rolls back and forth on the grass and tries to look imploringly over at Rose, who is, alas, busily engaged with some kind of spirit in a hat helping her with the sheep and some kind of car. Oh no, she was on her own here and all she could think about was being strung up in front of Kikil for the entire world as she gets redder and redder. 

[Reputation: 1+3+2=6. A downbeat for the MC.]