“I think you are like the monkey,” Redana declares, in the middle of a fight scene against big burly tiger-demons. (They have clubs. The monkey has a magical stick.)

“My face doesn’t look like that,” Bella rumbles back. It’s hard to tell how seriously she means it. She doesn’t look away; her eyes aren’t still, chasing after every true-to-life feat of motion, the ones that the real actors couldn’t match. Maybe this is where it all started. The dream of being like the monkey.

Either way, Redana keeps going, because if she leaves it at that, it will just sit in her stomach fermenting for the rest of the movie how stupid she is. “No, because— look, he’s protecting the monk. And he didn’t want to at first, but… there’s something there. And I think at the end of the story he’s going to decide he wants to keep going even if that crown ends up broken. Because it should be.”

Which is idiotic. The crown is the only thing stopping the monkey from using his incredible skill at violence against the monk. Without that inbuilt leverage, the monk’s journey would be over before it began.

“And even though they started out at odds, I think there’s something there. The looks they keep giving each other.” Which could be anything. Tension, but not necessarily romantic. Could any romance blossom without that crown being broken? “They should kiss,” Dany declares. On screen, the fight is over, and the monkey steals a jacket from one of the tigers, pops the collar, sneers at the fussy little monk. The size difference is palpable. Maybe that’s part of why Redana opened her mouth in the first place.

“And besides,” she keeps going, nuzzling into Bella’s shoulder, feeling both hot and like she’s edging across creaking ice, desperate to try to get the words to come out the way they should, for once, “he’s obviously the most interesting character. The monk just keeps getting in trouble.” (Maybe he’ll be tied up later, her brain unhelpfully suggests.) “Maybe [i]he’ll[/i] get tied up later. And need rescuing. And then the monkey will save him, because that’s this sort of story, and— you can fight like him, too. I don’t fight like that. Like you’re the weapon. All that power’s in you, and you don’t even need the stick to let it out. And—“

Bella’s hand cups her mouth. Careful, but firm. “Watch the film,” she says. One of them talks too much, the other is too used to keeping her words inside. However are the two of them going to make it all the way across the demon-infested wasteland?