"What makes you think [i]I[/i] know? I don't even have instructions this time, other than being here with you, looking like... this. Besides, the way she is right now, she could have laid out the whole fucking thing for me and I'd be lucky if it even got me here. She's gotten so, nnnnnnnrgh."

Bella is tension, looped around more tension. Her muscles squeeze against Beljani's in a contest of strength, firmness, and quiet terror. Her body ripples with the effect of the identity thrust back on her by brute force, with an outfit draped across her that gleefully highlights every twitching tendon and shock of power as it shares the softest and most delicious parts of her all wrapped up in sheer lace and silk as if it somehow could belong to the same body. 

Knowing it was part of the plan did nothing did nothing to settle the pressure crushing her neck and shoulders as if someone had slipped Azura gravity spheres into her jewelry. Knowing Beljani felt much the same way did nothing to unknot her intestines. Her skin is crawling, or... no. It's buzzing in the same way it would if she'd been force fed stimulants, everywhere except where she's being touched. Her arm flexes tighter, and she pulls Beljani closer.

"Doesn't matter. It's over after tonight. We'll either see where this was all going for ourselves, or it'll fall apart without Beautiful and we'll be right back where I said we'd be at the start. So just, don't fuck up. Do your job and I'll do mine. Or we're both fucked."

She can feel her fur sinking into her skin that means Beljani's started pushing her away instead of closer. She doesn't turn her head to look. Click, click, click, click-click go the points of their fancy heels as their steps go out of synch with each other. Bella frowns her blue-painted lips and squeezes her companion even tighter, raking the tips of her claws and her new jeweled talons against the surface of the Oratus' arm just hard enough to leave depressions in the skin where she passes that have to slowly rise in thin white trails back to normal. Only barely not breaking the skin. 

This is all a giant mistake. It was a mistake to come here, orders be damned. It was a mistake to wake Beautiful up in the first place. It would have been better if she'd just kept resting. Even if she couldn't figure out the shape of the plan, it was obvious to anyone with eyes and a brain that she'd stretched herself too thin trying to add a bunch of extra victory conditions to her grand scheme. 

Ha. No wonder it's easier to blow up a solar system than it is to make someone smile. All she needed to be was a plan in a box. The fuck was she thinking, trying to be a person too? If she, if this is what, they never should have, should've been... it should have been Beljani they!!

Bella sniffs, and her nose wrinkles with the taste of skin splitting along the kiss of a razorblade. The smell is pure pain: all the fun of huffing acid fumes mixed with an addictive, rotting sweetness that made a person want to keep taking deeper and deeper whiffs even though each felt worse than the one before it. The air itself smells like danger. Useless trying to describe it any more than that. 

But she sniffs again, and this time she picks up more of the room. The musk of rotting antiques and the strange, slightly fuzzy odor of carpets that have been trampled by a thousand thousand dances where no feet touched the ground. Lacquer and liquor, arrogance and fear, and most importantly of all a wisp of the mind-bending smoke she'd caught a face full of in Thist's office the day she'd first woken up on this planet, curling from underneath maybe half a dozen closed doors as they entered the main gallery as lovers might. 

Her eyes flicker down so that she catches Beljani's attention. Her squeeze this time is a little softer, maybe a little more guilty. And maybe that's obvious in a way you don't need to be an intuitive savant to tell, but Bella pulls and flashes the merest trace of a half-smirk anyway. 

"Hey," she says, her voice barely above a whisper, "These guys use some kind of weird smoke shit here that gets them so high they look kinda possessed. You... You can get away with a lighter touch than normal tonight. Don't spread yourself too thin."

"...Not that I care. But if you turn useless then I have to do all the work tonight. And... this's supposed to be my vacation so don't fucking forget that, got it?"