3V doesn’t really “do” tea. She can drink it, sure. But if water tastes like anything, it should taste like ice; like cold, like relief in the heat, like snow packed down your throat. A faint flavor, as if experienced from another room, just makes her want to go for an actual flavor, the kind that would explode on her tongue and likely kill a sickly Victorian child. Fruit flavors should be bolded and underlined. But, y’know, she can drink it, if that’s what she’s got.

Which is why the tea she hands Junta’s good hand is green, cold, and canned. Like drinking water from the roots of a tree, cupped in your palms, kneeling at something old and wonderful. (That’s the metaphor that gets her through the taste.)

“[i]You,[/i]” she says, bubbly irate iron, a ring of swords swirling in a halo about her (in an aura reading sense), “are going to sit down until you stop shaking, and then we’re going to talk about the research project you’ve been working on.” Deliberately vague. “Thesis statement” provokes follow-up questions about where he’s attending.

The couch already has a tactical blanket deployed, draped over the back five minutes ago. She carefully but firmly maneuvers him around the coffee table until she can squeeze him in, and then she takes a seat on her regular spot (on the armrest). The blanket is going to be wrapped around his shoulders, and he [i]will[/i] drink from the roots of Yggdrasil until he starts spouting some oracular wisdom, in one form or another.