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It was a somewhat surreal experience returning to sleep in accommodations where a small-scale battle had been fought, but that was not what bothered Éliane. Between overconsumption of coffee and the paranoia of wondering if there would be a follow up on the failed Valheimian attack, the Skaelan did not manage to sleep. It only took a few minutes of lying awake in bed for her to think to hell with it, and rose again. It didn’t sit right with her to leave her fallen compatriots to the tender mercies of an Edrenian cleanup crew. 

She returned to her original, blood-stained room and sorted out their belongings, and coordinated a proper repatriation effort with the guards that ended up bringing the bodies to the morgue. There was little more that she could do on short notice, but by the time she was done, dawn began to break.

In the end, Éliane had to appropriate another carafe of coffee from the castle kitchens to get her through the coming day. 

Nonetheless, in this vague, zombielike state, she managed to find her replacement team and the chocobos they had been designed, although she was none too amused with their color. Unlike her Viera counterpart, she as displeased not with looking unassuming –there would be little of that when she kept wearing her fancy uniform—but the fact that they were Leonhart’s colors. A proud member of the Guards, mounted on [i]that[/i]? How scandalous!

She moaned and grumbled about it, but she took the gift like everybody else. She wasn’t going to look a gift chocobo in the beak, in the end, especially when the entire quest was ostensibly a multinational effort. She was also apprehensive of the wagon and its driver, having almost exclusively operated with a small, mobile team not unlike team Kirin, but she had to recognize the need of a small logistics train on a long-distance quest like this. 

Éliane was mostly silent on the journey itself as she managed her all-nighter, although she idly listened into the conversations around her. Team Kirin had more of her countrymen than she had originally thought, and she couldn’t help but to overhear the one Arton had with the woman that had recruited her. It was an interesting tale that explained much of what she knew of Izayoi and her demeanor. Her opinion of the invading foreigners fell further, even as she anticipated seeing her fight alongside her in combat with the barbarians from Valheim…

As the surroundings changed, Éliane kept up her guard even as she was reminded by the small moogle. She polished off the rest of the coffee, though long cold, leaving her wanting more. Leifur, who she had immediately recognized as a fellow gunbreaker from Skael upon meeting, suggested they make a stop at a nearby Edrenian town, and she was inclined to agree. [b]“Good idea. I’d rather not go into hostile territory blind and without intelligence, although I doubt information crosses the border overmuch. There is only so much of a border that can be patrolled, so I’m not too concerned about entry yet,”[/b] she replied sleepily. Nonetheless, she turned to Mystel from Osprey expectantly for any helpful information.