"Whoa. One week. That's impressive, Panu." She had to give credit where credit was due. He was a seriously smart cookie. "Heavens, no. What you are doing is fine for now, but if you want real practice when it's time no cheating."

> "Can you cheat more? Learn all of Finnish?"

Noel took in a slow breath and let it back out even slower while she debated logistics. "I think this is one of those preparation things. A language..." She shrugged. "I don't know how much space that takes. Do you?" He had folders, for goodness' sakes. Surely he could check the numbers. "I think it can be done. I can't say I've ever tried it before, but I'm willing. If I can figure it out, that is."

Probably a fresh mental connection would be best. One near or on the head. Usually that meant a kiss, but... Noel's eyes flicked down to Panu as they waited for a bus. Yeah. No kissing. Not her normal kissing anyway. Even she had her limits to what she could pretend didn't matter.

> "Losing memories is very good power."

"Right!? No one else seems to get that. They're all offended when I offer to do the same for them." Noel enthusiastically agreed as they took their seats. Panu was the only one she had ever met who understood. Everyone else was just too scared of messing with their brain or whatever.

> "Can you back up memories so you do not lose if one copy is made deleted?"

"I kind of made a backup once." Noel touched her tattoo list, the one with all the names crossed out that declared Everyone will betray you eventually. "I made sure there was one person out there who knew everything, but... I dunno. He probably went and got dead." Jerk. Ty hadn't talked to her in at least a year according to her message log. Her phone calls only bounced back now.

When Panu indicated it was time, Noel moved from the aisle seat to allow him to lead the way off the bus. This neighborhood was serious business. Rich business. She went back to the dragon in Panu's memory. Jaager. The name didn't immediately mean anything to her so she googled him on her phone. The face she found was not a dragon. The dragon was his adult. His adult was Jaager. Jaager was big, rich business.

Oh. That was why he would want to kill her. It was a secret that his adult was a dragon.

Panu frowned, treating her question on space constraints with the seriousness that it deserved. "File size is not problem," he finally said. "Human brain is over a terabyte, maybe more. A list of all words in Finnish language is under 5 meg. But normal human brain is like--is like closet that has never been cleaned since dawn of time, there is maybe a lot of space in there but there are many boxes blocking empty areas and unless you slide things all to the side I think it is hard to make room for a new box, even if it is small. Is that what you mean by prepare? Can you clear out space?"

He could. But then, his brain was maybe more easily organized than most.

"If you want to try, I will help however it is I can be helpful. You are a good psychic, the way your power works is much better than other psychics I have heard of. Just do not move things around when you look at my head. It took long time to make files neat, I do not want to re-order everything again."

Peramies had helped him to order things. Panu had not liked it at first, because it had felt very strange, but he knew now that this was the best way. Things were very easy to find, as long as he was tidy with new data coming in.

>> "Right!? No one else seems to get that. They're all offended when I offer to do the same for them."

"That is stupid," the boy said, suitably offended on her behalf. "They are stupid. I think there is big market for lost memories, but probably people are just afraid to admit that they really do not want to remember. They think it is good to carry their bad things around with them, but all it is doing is making them sick and hurt inside their heads. Brains are most important part of person, everyone should keep theirs healthy."

That is why Panu always, always stored his bad memories remotely. They did not help him, not at all, they only made him want to sit somewhere and tuck his knees to his chest and not move. Noel understood, she was not afraid to change her memories, she knew it was useful.

"It is rule with computers: make many many backups. Just one is no good. Two or three or four, and keep in different places. This is best." The blond boy nodded quite assertively. Non-techies were always forgetting this rule, or maybe they never knew it. But it was very important. He had never regretted making an extra copy, but he definitely regretted the times he had not had a back up. "Is it hard for you, to make back up? Can I help? If you are the kind of psychic who can send thoughts, maybe I can make hard drive copy of memories for you. Video files. You could play on your phone, if you forget. Much more storage space on your phone than on your forearm. Tattoos are inefficient data structure."

He liked this idea. He liked it a lot. He could be very very useful to his new acquaintance. They just needed to get her memories into his head, and then the rest was easy.

...Oh. Wait.

"I am sorry if your friend got dead." He belatedly added. He had maybe missed that part of the translation, in his excitement for the rest. He did not ask if she had seen this person die. She did not know for sure if they were dead, which probably meant she had, and then she had made herself forget because it was better to have hope than to know for sure. Panu had tried that for awhile with Tuonela, but Finnish TV was stupid and always ruining things for him, so he had given up trying to keep it forgotten.

The bus ride felt very short with Noel. Soon they were at Jaager's mansion. Panu did not say anything as Noel googled him on her phone; this was a good and appropriate use of technology, and he stopped walking and waited next to her as she did it. Not everyone could google while they walked.

"Maybe is bad idea," he admitted, too late. But he had not known when he decided to bring her that her power was so good, and she was so awesome.

Her power was good. She was awesome. Jaager would see these things too, and she would be fine. The Fin squared his shoulders.

"This is home of my adult, Mr. Ambrose Jaager. He lets me live here, too. Please come in, Ms. Noel."

Please please please don't get eaten. He would never get to talk to anyone in Finnish if Jaager ate her.

Panu had seemed like such a quiet guy at first. She'd thought that he was scared. Noel knew now that he was only waiting for the right conversation to become animated as he was now.

> "But normal human brain is like--is like closet that has never been cleaned since dawn of time... Is that what you mean by prepare? Can you clear out space?"

"There's no guarantee that I have enough space if I don't make some. I don't have a way to monitor that except maybe that when my head gets too full I get headaches. And hooo boy has my closet been cleaned. Panu, I have a lot of memory dedicated to weapons, guns, defense, and protection. I trained with an immortal for a few years and I can play his memories back whenever. I got to cherry pick out of hundreds of years of experience. I've seen ancient Rome." Well, blips and pieces of it.

The problem with memory being that just in the viewing, she could corrupt the data and degrade the memory. "Your power is a lot more reliable: cleaner organization and less data corruption. Memory is less consistent in a person."

He was possibly the only person who wasn't well and truly weirded out by the idea of a psychic going through his head. Others had offered to help before. Noel knew she'd taken them up on the offer since she had a cobbled together "childhood."

She was a boy on a man's lap, learning to read. She was a man, burning himself on an electric stove. She was a girl learning to braid on a body-less doll.

Noel blinked those images away. She was none of those people really, but they were all a part of her.

He was also the first person to tell her that she was a good psychic.

"I like your organization." She was properly offended by the thought of moving anything. She didn't move things, anyway. She could only delete them and that wasn't what they were going to try here. "Makes more sense than any other mind I have ever read. Computers are logical. People are messy."

> "Is it hard for you, to make back up? Can I help? If you are the kind of psychic who can send thoughts, maybe I can make hard drive copy of memories for you. Video files. You could play on your phone, if you forget. Much more storage space on your phone than on your forearm. Tattoos are inefficient data structure."

Noel would cry if she could. "Uuuugh. I can't send memories. That's why it's so difficult to make a back up. My friend could read memories too. It's the only reason he could do that for me." How amazing would it be to have video back up of memories? "Actually, I've started collecting surveillance from areas when I use my ability. It really does help to see how things happened. Maybe next time I could ask you for help?" If she got into the habit of calling a number or sending a text every time she used her power... maybe it wouldn't be so bad.

Noel waved off any condolences. It wasn't like she remembered who Ty was at this point anyway.

>"This is home of my adult, Mr. Ambrose Jaager. He lets me live here, too. Please come in, Ms. Noel."

They entered a vast and sprawling yard and passed imposing, possibly booby-trapped doors. It was only once they were in the foyer that it occurred to Noel that Jaager did not speak Finnish. So, now would actually be a good time for her to learn Finnish. It could be, like, their code to talk in a way that Ambrose Jaager did not understand. "We should speak Finnish. Then you can help me not get eaten, okay?"

Noel knelt next to Panu and looked between his face and his eye. "I need you to hold still. I'll need to touch you and it might take a moment to process after. It won't hurt. I won't touch your files. Copy only." That was her promise. She was ready to risk her memory over Panu's. She probably had room for another language, right?

Once he understood there was nothing left but to do it. Noel leaned forward and pressed her lips to Panu's cheek. She lingered a moment longer than was strictly polite and then sat back on her heels, eyes vacant as she delved into Panu's file system again.

It was almost like she could feel her brain rearranging. Items had new context. She saw things in a new light. Noel's eyes found their focus on Panu's eager face. Now the scary part.

"English? I still speak English, right?" She sighed with relief as English words came out of her mouth. Yeah. She hadn't overwritten English. "<And Finnish? How's my accent?>" She was slow to speak and the words felt a little strange coming out, but she remembered what it felt like to form those words, she remembered what those words meant and what shades those meanings had. It was fresh in her mind and neatly organized. Provided that she practiced, she might actually have a second language in her head.

>> "I got to cherry pick out of hundreds of years of experience. I've seen ancient Rome."

"I want to see it," the blonde boy said. He was sitting on the edge of his seat, because he realized he had never wanted something so bad. "Your power is best power, I can only get articles about things from internet, but if you find right people you can have anything. Not copy but real." He was so, so jealous, in a way that was happy for her but still very very jealous. She had compliments for his power too, but he could live with messy if he had ancient Rome. And then he could make it so everyone else could see, he would share it--

Except he could not share it at all, if he had her power instead of his. And he could not back it up or maybe even keep it.

Her power was very very good power, but maybe not best power, after all.

"At least you will never forget me," Panu said. "I am remembering now for both of us, so if you forget, I only have to show you."

He would do the same for any information she wanted to share with him. He would be very very good at remembering, so she did not have to be.

When she asked to learn Finnish right now, the only answer Panu could ever give was 'yes.' He did not know what she would do, but he nodded hesitantly. Copy only. Okay. He could hold still, even if he never ever trusted things that started with it won't hurt, and maybe he was a little ready to bolt if that was a lie.

This is when she kissed him. He did not feel her doing psychic things, he only felt warmth spreading out from his cheek up to the tip of his ears.

Then she was talking. At first it was very very disappointing--English. But soon (maybe) (after a little while) his brain started working again, and he realized why she would check that first. She had been afraid she had lost it. She had been willing to lose it, for Finnish. (This was a proper attitude towards Finnish.)

When she spoke again, all the warmth on his face turned into warmth in his smile.

"<Your accent is like a flower in spring, blooming from the snow,>" he said, and his words were not slow or strange at all, they were exactly as they should be.

Today had not been a particularly good day.

Ambrose had arrived at work in a decently good mood. Good moods were relative, of course, but the cure was starting to develop into something useable, much to the relief of the board. They'd poured so much money into the project already that they'd reached the point of no return, and it was good to see that progress was being made.

No, he'd been mostly happy at the start of the day.

It was the meeting he'd had during the actual day that had ruined it.

Seriously. This was the third mutant this week who seemed to want Ambrose to beg for them to join him, as if they weren't easily replaceable. Just because he was new on the scene didn't make him any less capable than they were, and they weren't the ones with a multimillion dollar corporation, were they? They seemed to think he was shortsighted or something for doubting their abilities. No, he wasn't shortsighted - he was looking far to the future, in fact, because arrogance of that sort could end up with devastating consequences in the future. Ragnarok thrived on subordination, and that was not something many of these people were showing.

So, slightly annoyed at life in general, Ambrose had sulked the whole half-hour drive out of the city back to his manor, taking off his jacket to make his wings and spines more comfortable, and removing the blue contact lenses and replacing them with the more comfortable clear lenses so the natural yellow irises showed. He didn't even register that the gate was unlocked when he went in, he was so busy silently raging and taking that anger out on the environment around him. (The ground, by the time he'd walked up to the house itself, was scratched and ripped up in a perfect path from the garage to the entrance door, because he'd taken his shoes and socks off in the car too. When he got irritated like this he liked to allow as much of his natural form to show as possible, as if to assert his evolutionary dominance.)

So when he swung open the door to see some strange woman kissing Panu on the cheek, his eyesight flickered red. His entrance had been mostly quiet, so he stormed over to the two mostly unnoticed, not even paying attention to what they were saying to each other. One he was close enough, he outright lunged at her, pinning her against the nearest wall. His enhanced strength partially carried over when he was in his more humanoid form, so he easily lifted her up against the wall with one hand around her throat, claws tickling the flesh as his yellow eyes narrowed in on her own.

"Who are you," Ambrose snarled, "and what are you doing here." She wasn't supposed to be here. No one but Panu was. And she especially wasn't supposed to be kissing Panu on the cheek like some frightening window into a more domestic reality. If this was another one of Panu's strays that he kept bringing in out of nowhere...

Panu was Noel’s new best friend. Someone who could remember for the both of them? She wanted to paste him at her side at all times, but… well, that wasn’t exactly fair to a human being who would (and should) want to be his own person.

His smile made it worth the mental strain. Yes. She would definitely be practicing Finnish. Noel spared a glance for the door when it opened. Ah. The adult was here. They’d finished up none too soon. The memorymancer glanced down to locate her phone for note taking when she realized, too late, that the adult had been angry.

Ambrose Jaager’s body collided with her quite unexpectedly. This was, after all, a gross overreaction by her estimation. She slammed back into a wall and his hand closed around her throat. He yanked her up to her feet and beyond.

Her first reaction was to slap her hands into his elbow. Her feet scrabbled at the wall behind her for purchase, but there was none. She couldn’t break his grip, or his elbow, without leverage. But it was worse than that. He was so very much stronger than herself.

"<Your adult is hnng.>" His nails dug into the side of her neck with a slight squeeze, a natural response when his snarled question had been all but ignored in favor of talking to Panu in Finnish.

Screw this. She locked eyes with the mutant and let her eyes off their leash so that the pupils vibrated back and forth in their sockets.

’Forget what is making you so angry.’

If this kept up, she would not have been able to keep her power from triggering anyway. So she decided to harness it instead.

”My name is Noel.” She kept her eyes locked on his while her vision cleared after the wipe. She also tried to present a strong expression even if her heart was attempting to hammer its way out of her chest. ”I would like you to put me down now.” Sometimes, the confusion of a wipe was enough to ease tensions. Sometimes a polite tone and a strong insistence would be enough.

If not, she could still move her lower body. He looked male, but she also knew he was a God damn dragon. So it was a guess and the thought that it wasn’t always the best idea to start off a potential employment opportunity with a kick to the ‘nads that kept her from punting him in the crotch.

Panu had only known Jaager for one week. He knew the man was a killer and also that he wanted to destroy probably most of the world. But this seemed very violent, even for him. He did not give either Panu or Noel a chance to explain before he was trying to break the wall with her.

The eight year old's first reaction was to stay very still, so that the man would keep focusing all his bad day not on Panu.

It took the boy only a moment more to process that it was Noel he was going to take it all out on. Noel who could talk about powers with him. Noel who risked her English for beautiful Finnish and Jaager was not even letting her speak it, he was hurting her--

The Fin took in a deep breath and tried to stand up tall, so tall he was almost four and half feet. "Mr. Jaager," he said. "I do not assault your employees. I am please ask you to not assault mine."

He replayed the audio in his head and it sounded brave enough, but now his heart was trying to thump out his chest and his hands were shaking and he could not seem to move his feet so if the man turned on him probably he would be very very bad at running.

Probably running would not have worked with a dragon, anyway.

Probably this thought did not make him feel better.

Her eyes were going spastic.

He was decently sure that wasn’t normal.

His instinctive reaction was to tilt his head predatorily, since he was going to make the assumption that this was her mutation in action, to try and figure out what she was trying to do. The insolence, though - she came into his house and kissed his Panu on the cheek without him knowing and expected him to not react violently - wait a second, did he just think of Panu as his?

Wait another second. Why was he angry again?

Ambrose could still feel the rage bubbling beneath the surface, but for some reason, he wasn’t entirely sure why he was angry anymore. He barely registered Panu’s words - so this was one of Panu’s strays, considering he was referring to her as his employee - but didn’t respond to them, keeping his hand around the woman’s throat.

"My name is Noel,” she said steadily. "I would like you to put me down now.”

That was when it clicked - her mutation. She had done something to make him forget.

Ambrose put her down, all right, but added a bit more downward force than should be strictly necessary. The kind of downward force one might use, in fact, if trying to break the floor. He didn’t think it’d break her, but if it did, he didn’t have any particular issue with it.

"What did you do?” he half-growled, half-asked. Because while he was still angry, it was dying down with no reason for him to be that way. Now he was curious, though he definitely still looked angry outwardly. He switched to Dutch, knowing Panu would be able to understand but she wouldn’t. "<Who is she?>” he said, almost apathetically. ”<And for what absurd reason did you find it acceptable to bring her into this house? I don’t care if she’s one of your pets; you talk to me first before you bring someone here. What if she knows who you were and took precautions so you wouldn’t find out, and she’s exactly where she wants to be because she tricked you so easily? You’re going to have to learn to not be that rash.>”

Well, he put her down. Forcibly. Noel had been trying to gain purchase on the wall behind her so she didn't exactly land on her feet. And since her momentum was straight down, there was no amount of rolling or deflection that would help. She was just dumpstered.

And it pissed her off to no end.

Her first reaction was to lunge, tear, hurt, maim. But he was stronger and this was his house. Panu was afraid of him. She didn't want to make things worse, but she hated feeling helpless more than anything in the world.

> "What did you do?”

"Just a taste, Mr. Jaager, of one of the things I have to offer." She grit her teeth and looked down at the floor. Grovelling was not her style, but she didn't have a weapon to snickersnack his big dumb face off and she did not trust her expression when she felt nothing but murderous intent.

He'd asked the question, but he couldn't have been terribly interested in the answer since he hardly waited before he swapped to speaking with Panu in a language that she did not speak.

Noel touched her neck where the tiniest of blood droplets had formed from his grip. That was not what hurt her most, but it was the most interesting. He had touched her.

She couldn't take him physically. Telling him that she now had access to everything from his shoe size to his personal passwords was not the way to make friends and influence people not to kill her.

The memorymancer looked at her hand before popping her index finger into her mouth. It didn't look any different, but it had to have something of Ambrose Jaager on it because she felt her power kick in.

She'd done it once before today. Why not again?

Noel looked into the language formative years. What was that? Swedish? Dutch? It sound completely made up. And his mind, while meticulous, was haphazardly curated at best. This was no simple ingestion as she had done with Panu. This was a veritable find and replace and equate. It took her a long moment of looking down into her lap to shuffle the pieces into her mind.

She'd missed what he said, but she'd at least be in time to catch Panu's reply.

((ooc: <Single arrows are Dutch>, <<Double arrows are sneaky Finnish>>))

Noel was not strangled. The boy's heart raced as he tried very very hard to think of the things to say that would keep her that way.

"<Mr. Jaager,>" the little Fin began, in Dutch just as good as his English. He tried to keep his voice very flat. The man liked it when he did not sound like a stupid scared child. "<If she is spy and dangerous, then which will you prefer: that I am kidnapped by her to somewhere else, or that I am kidnap her to house where you can deal with her? Also if she is dangerous then house is good, because I can kill her on way into house. Is safe place for us. No eyes in here that are not mine, so it is easy for person come in and no person to come out.>"

There were external defense systems at Jaager's mansion. Almost as paranoid as the ones in Xavier's lawn, and a bit less student-friendly.

"<Noel is excellent Finnish friend. When I say things like <<Don't attack the dragon unless you can kill him>> she is understanding me, because she is speak my language and English both native. I am arrange to tutor with her. If I am your son, it is better that I speak nice English for cameras, yes? I thought this would please you. She is also very talented bodyguard, so it is many goals at same time.>"

Please please please don't murder her. He did not know what else he could say to strengthen that point. Panu took in a breath, and adjusted his headphones. Jaager knew already that he was blind--he had figured it out very very quickly--so Panu did not even try to pretend like he was making eye contact. His organic eyes were pointed somewhere at the man's feet.

"<Nonetheless I am sorry I make you upset. Next time I will ask before I bring, so you know that if I bring without asking it is someone that needs murdering. Is this good compromise?>"

Subtle implication: Noel was not someone who needed murdering. Not at all, not in any way, please stop hurting her.

Well, the boy was learning diplomacy. That was good. And while Ambrose felt like he should be horrifically angry at Panu for... anything, really, because he felt like he was supposed to be horrifically angry at something, the woman - Noel's?- mutation had effectively wiped any trace of whatever it had been. And Panu did need to learn English at some point in time - Ambrose was known for being rather impulsive to the public, but arbitrarily adopting a Finnish orphan for no reason that the public would know of would be sure to raise some eyebrows.

So in that case, he'd have to backtrack a bit with the woman he'd just smashed against the floor.

"Please accept my apologies," he said partially cautiously, partially emotionlessly, turning to face Noel. "We're not particularly fond of strangers here, especially when said strangers happen to be in one's house without any prior warning." He reached out a hand to help Noel up, the claws retracted now, and the fingers looking wholly normal. If she took it, he'd help her up. If not, well, he wouldn't comment, but she and her actions wouldn't particularly sit well with him in the future.

Noel had to admire Panu's pragmatism. From a pure business standpoint, it all made sense. Until she applied the killing part to herself or other hypothetical guests. Until she could kill Jaager, she would take Panu's advice.

Either way, Ambrose was mollified. For now.

He spoke to her and, bewildered, Noel took his hand and rose to her feet.

She caught a word that sounded familiar here or there. Words that had leaked into Ambrose's upbringing despite him not full out learning English until... her eyes widened marginally as she realized what she'd done. Oh no.

Noel smiled in a bit of a strained way to Ambrose Jaager. Her knees had taken the worst of it, but she had only scuffs and bruises which was considerably better than being a corpse."<<Panu. I seem to have made a serious data import error.>>"

Now did not seem like the best time to reveal that error or the reason for it. Nor did it seem the best time to test her connection to Mr. Jaager and take his English skills. She'd been in too much of a rush last time. No way was she making the same mistake again in the span of a few moments unless she absolutely had to.

This was going to get awkward.

Jaager did not kill Noel. He did maybe the opposite, which was helping her to her feet. Inside of his hoodie, the Fin's shoulders relaxed like a puppet set in its case. He inhaled and counted to five, exhaled and counted to five--maybe soon his heart would stop making his chest hurt, it was beating so fast.

Probably breathing and heart both stopped when Noel spoke.

"Thank you, Mr. Jaager. I am promise to be more careful in the future. I am sure Noel feels same. <<What did you overwrite? He should be way angrier than this, did you give him brain damage?>>" He said the last very brightly, like he was saying something cheerful to a friend and not to a friend who was maybe telling him horrible bad news. He did not know what she had done but he knew it would not be good.

He really hoped she would not be murdered still. Really really. He could not live with himself if he had brought her here to be killed. He would have to delete the memory or he would feel terrible.

Really, Finnish? He didn't know any, considering Panu had never spoken it around him, and it wasn't remotely near Dutch from what he could tell. But Noel spoke it, according to Panu, which was why her next words made sense. He was relatively sure "Panu" sounded the same in every language. But what mattered was that she definitely spoke English, as evidenced by the fact that she had, you know, spoken to him in English. So why did she look so confused when Ambrose had spoken to her in English, followed by outright horror and a rather strained smile? She did something with memories, he knew that. So maybe something had gone wrong.

Panu's words were said with relief and then energetically, and that was when Ambrose knew that they were doing the other-language equivalent of passing secret notes to each other behind a teacher's back. He'd deduced at this rate that Noel's news was bad, so it looked as if he was going to have to take his role as the disobeyed teacher to heart.

"Why don't we all stick to English, here?" he asked pleasantly, but in a way that made it very clear that it was less of a question and more of an order. Then he turned to Noel. "Is there a problem?" he asked, looking over at her. And then, rather suddenly, he realized why her speaking Finnish sat wrong with him. She did not look remotely Finnish, or Eastern European at all, for that matter. She'd been sitting on the floor, staring at the ground, when Ambrose had been speaking to Panu, but she had seemingly understood all of what Panu had said. So maybe she didn't speak Finnish as a native language. Maybe her memory power extended to copying memory-based skills. And it seemed as if she'd copied Ambrose's Dutch, too.

"<I'm going to kill you,>" he said slowly and suddenly and very much in Dutch. He wasn't actually going to follow through, of course, and his tone betrayed nothing. But if she was remotely affected by his words, then that would betray the extent of her power. Though, he wasn't complaining. Maybe this stray would be useful.

Noel smiled vaguely as Ambrose continued to talk. She saw the suspicion in his eyes growing, but without google translate in her head, there was no helping it.

Panu was concerned that she had broken his adult. He was not concerned that, should she be capable of killing said adult, that she would. It seemed that he may even been encouraging it. Lots of hypothetical death was being thrown around here. She didn't especially like it. "<<He forgot whatever crawled up his butt and died today to make him so angry.>>" Finnish was a beautiful language.

> "<I'm going to kill you.>"

Ah. Well. That, at least, she understood. Noel made a face. It was not a pretty face. It was a I-just-got-a-whiff-of-something-terrible face. Only that whiff was in her mouth. She needed a Diet Coke. Bad.

"<We both know that isn't true, Mr. Jaager.>" He could change his mind, but for now, even he didn't believe it.

Noel tried to arrange her features into something more pleasant while she let her mind swap over more fully to Dutch. Her accent was a bit halting at first, but quickly developed into exactly the same as Ambrose's. Same vocabulary preferences. Same everything. She really was getting the hang of it.

"<Panu could also use tutoring in Dutch, I notice. Though I will admit I pulled this language purely for selfish reasons at first, I will gladly add Dutch to his lessons should you prefer it.>" And should he let her live, that is. She was a big fan of not getting dead.

And that sneaky Dutch talking? Yeah. She'd heard most of that.