Nobody reached for a weapon. Nobody stood up. But attention settled onto her with the smooth, instinctive caution of people accustomed to surviving dangerous environments. Conversations lowered half a degree. Eyes lingered a little longer than politeness required. She knew why. She knew what they saw. [i]Corporate[/i]. Not because of the suit. She had deliberately toned that down before coming here. It simply seemed to be because people who lived on this level of the social hierarchy learned to recognise institutional gravity by instinct as much as eyesight. The posture. The purpose. The sense that consequences travelled with someone. She had to suppress a smile. She knew was going to love that gravitas aspect of her presence more than the salary.

Andrea paused just inside the entryway long enough to take the place in properly.

The bar was expensive in the very specific way anti-corporate spaces often became expensive eventually. Carefully distressed authenticity. Imported tilework pretending [i]not[/i] to be imported. Lighting calibrated to look old world rather than new tech. In short, this was a place designed for people who wanted to feel like they were still adjacent to danger and those ever-elusive 'good old days' from back before the Red Decades. 

The trumpet music helped.

Her optics tagged the occupants one by one automatically. She got the impressions of each, but she paid them no mind. Then her eyes settled on Paradisia. And the man opposite them. Nothing. Not low visibility. Not partial obfuscation. Genuine absence. Her systems kept trying to populate identifiers and finding blank space instead. Shit, that was actually [i]interesting[/i].

Either they were forced to be a Slam Click shill, or they were some sort of netrunner savant who knew how to hide their traces so well that they didn't even make footprints to follow in the first place.

The reijong game itself barely mattered. The rhythm told the real story. Too measured. Too detached. Transaction disguised as leisure because modern surveillance systems had become very good at noticing direct exchanges. It was none of her business. Andrea started walking. She approached the table calmly, aware of every set of eyes tracking her progress through the room. Paradisia looked almost exactly the same as they had over the call; deeply unimpressed by the world in general.

Andrea stopped beside the table and looked down at the board for a moment before speaking.

“You hang up on all your old friends,” she said mildly, “or should I feel specially honoured?"