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[color=00a99d]"Wuuuuu-u-u-u-u-u-u-uu-u-u-u-uuugh."[/color] Selma rumbled in response to the dinging notification from her phone, nestled within the length of her fingers. Theirs was an all-important job— securing her one true connection to the world outside this room into place, as oft-misplaced as its history with the academy had seen it, and to shield it from any potential jostling from the vibrations beneath. The earth was solid and sure, yes, but even it could rumble, could shudder, could quake.[color=00a99d]"Do-o-on't b-e ma-aki-n me g-e-e-t u-u-u-u-u-u-u-up Ch-i-i-i-i-i-e..."[/color]

Emerald eyes squinting, she peered closely at the screen she held aloft, arm reluctantly leaving the worn leather upholstery it rested upon. She [i]wasn't[/i] gonna lean forward here, even if the churning motors ended up kneading her back into dough. She had told herself, all through the jelly-legged walk back from today's Operation, that she'd earned this much.

Where she was during all this happened to be not terribly far from Chie, in the grand scheme of things— esconsed within the halls of the Nova Lux Dormitories there was a paltry, quaint little gym, not all too dissimilar to the type you would seen in a hotel's ground floor. Not a place for real serious work, as Selma understood it, but nice enough. Its treadmills could support an urge to run, its small cache of dumbbells a good source for potential zombie apocalypse bludgeoning weaponry, it had the little niceties—

[color=00a99d][i]Tap it over to percussion now, I think.[/i][/color]

And one BIG one.

The motor buzzed as a thudding staccato rhythm pounded her rhomboids beneath the thin mesh veneer on her back, as though the many millions of feet that stomped upon the base earth, and she, impossibly, seemed to sink in [i]further[/i] to the cushioning. A massage chair, frankly, [i]wasn't[/i] in most hotel gyms. Not the kinds like the Dorm's was based off of, at any rate— and according to legend around the residence halls, it wasn't [i]supposed[/i] to be, either. 

She'd heard it was lifted in the dead of night from the finest suites in Palmyra by a graduate with the Elementum of Shadow, a silent heist that made her parting gift to the school that had fostered her. Others called it a gift from an anonymous Duodecim, believing mankind's defenders worked [i]better[/i] with proper R&R. Others still claimed it was found in a junkyard and its refurbishment was cobbled together as a group project, made in secret, by the second and third floor residents some dozen years back, kept in secret until properly integrated too well to make removal worth the hassle.

Hell, there was a story about the Academy [i]trying[/i] to remove it, too, but being forced to back down at the sudden prospect of the entire wing up in arms against them. That one was her favorite— especially on a day like today, when the weight of a hundred years of robotics research had narrowly lost to every fiber of muscle she had. The kinda beating that workload gave you would be [i]insufferable [/i]without some of this tender deep-tissue care.

Her thumb, absently, tapped its familiar patterns along the screen in response to her roomie's query: Something non-committal, as she'd genuinely spent more time hearing how the rumors about [i]them[/i] had started permutating, but felt it too on the nose to mention. A joke about how she didn't think batting back a missile would end too well for either the Magi nor the Missile, for one.

What appeared in the group chat...

>weoildnt itb lowr upminthere faxce.?

>god da,mm#it

... Was less witty.