Some cruel god or other must have filled her with mercury while she slept. Her body feels heavy when she stirs though not in the way it had the last time. Her muscles are smooth but sluggish, and the effort that would normally buy her feet only manages to roll her over on the hard and somehow also jabby couch. Where she shifts, she feels her center of gravity move with her, pulling her unsteadily in the direction she tries to move until it flips her over and sends her crashing back down again.

The headache brownie tray drops to the floor with a crash louder than King Jaso's thunderbolts. And, oh! It turns out she can move as quickly as ever with the proper motivation. See how her hands fly to cover her ears with the reckless speed of a void skiff? She moves from lying to sitting straight up to hunched over with her head between her knees and her eyes squeezed shut against the blinding light of the room while seeming to skip the frames of motion in between these poses. She groans, or rather she whimpers, from the pain.

But like everything else in this little room, the danger here is a lie. She holds still, and her breathing steadies. The sounds of the room quiet to obnoxious murmuring and rustling with the occasional 'click' she can for some reason feel in her teeth. The knife-sharp light dims until it's safe to open her eyes again, and even flickers often enough to threaten to plunge her back into the familiar dark. The smell is cardboard, plaster, and cheap scented oils to cover all the dust, which tells her exactly who's office she's in without having to look around. 

The muscles in her back come unclenched, bit by torturous bit. Her ears lift on top of her head, tentatively at first, but then to full perk. Bella rises to a proper sitting posture, and her spine keeps curving and loosening until she flops backwards onto the back of the couch with her arms splayed to either side of her. She lifts her head back up to keep an eye on Thelis as she moves about the room. This is a stance of triumph.

Bella scowls. Not ten seconds to rest after the effort of lifting herself and she's already expected to move and respond to something. She'd forgotten how much she hated dealing with other people. Just how stupid and impatient they could be. She leans forward with the grace and control she'd normally associate with the end of a whipping and grabs at the cheap cup full of pills. By the way her new talons tear straight through it, she notices that she is still wearing them and that they have not been plucked off her hands for scrap metal while she slept. She lets out a breath. 

"Whatever."

A gaudy blue and yellow pill rolls about the palm of her hand for a moment as she stares at it without comprehension. How was this supposed to help, exactly? There wasn't a single nanite or a whiff of regeneration-inducing pheromones in the whole fucking container. Nothing of food or wine, either. What was it meant for? What did it do? She drops the cup on the table and lets the contents spill across everything while she eyes the 'food' with equal scorn. 

She did not consider herself a master of cooking. She was good enough to be Redana's favorite chef, which was good enough to not get punished on a daily basis, but Redana was an idiot who thought that pancakes were the height of civilization so that didn't prove anything. To be a master you had to be dedicated entirely to the craft so you had time to absorb all the subtle nonsense that elevated high cooking from low. Bella had too many jobs to do in her old life to ever develop those skills. But even by her low standards, the offerings in front of her were lazy to the point of insult. 

She picks up a sandwich half and sniffs it. Her entire face wrinkles with disgust. Stale, plain bread with such poor texture that it was surely baked by some sort of drone instead of a person, and weeks ago at that. If she was lucky. And what kind of dipshit made sandwiches with only peanut butter in them, anyway? Sticky and disgusting overly sweet garbage... nobody could possibly eat this willingly. Could they? She lifts it with the intention of throwing it atop the pills, but the hollow pit at her center pulls her hand without permission toward her mouth instead. It tastes even worse than it looks: the top of the bread has gone crunchy but somehow underneath that was dense and chewy trash that reminded her of the cup of drugs. It clung to her mouth unpleasantly even without the help of the gloopy filling, which wasn't made from nuts so much as some dumbass' idea of nuts held together with glue and syrup. 

She devours all three in a moment, without asking if she can or should. The egg follows, unseasoned and slightly sour in a way that makes her stomach churn the more she thinks about it. She gulps the milk down greedily without bothering to taste it. The film that covers her tongue manages to be tart and unpleasant anyway. She holds her head in her hands and winces, which is how she notices her beret is missing. If she's being charitable, it must have died in the crash. If she's not...

"What the fuck are you trying to do? What the fuck is all this? What the fuck do you think I... what the fuck?"

She'd eaten the food because she was starving. But she'd kept going even though it wasn't helping, because it meant she was doing something with her mouth other than talking about payments. Money... Bella had a dim awareness of what it was, borrowed from Redana's old pulp adventure novels. Azura pirates flitting about the universe burying troves of treasure. On Tellus it was useless. If she needed something for her work it was simply given to her without transaction, and her position didn't come with compensation. On the streets outside the palace they dealt in strange and shoddy coins, but that was the desperation of a bunch of mangy, dying servitors unfit for duty and the boredom of the humans in between bouts of mutilating themselves with ink. None of it made any sense. 

But this... Bella feels the vague sense of creeping dread of a person who's about to get ripped off for something she wasn't planning on selling in the first place. Money. She'd never thought about [i]money[/i]. As a Praetor she received tribute from every system she visited just to avoid her (Empress') wrath. She was never supposed to wind up here. Never supposed to leave the zone of her Regalia's protection. But here she was, and now she needed money if she was going to get out. Probably?

"Eighten hundred," she repeats unsteadily, "Is that a... trove? Or just a chest?"