His eyes leered toward Zelsys. He scanned her up and down before he added, with notably less venom to his tone, “You too, snowtop.”

She chuckled at the remark, waiting for the officer to begin walking before she did. He effectively backed into the open doorway, keeping both his eyes and his gun trained on the Ikesians that followed behind Zelsys. She had to bend down slightly to pass through the door, and once inside, what she saw was… Thoroughly underwhelming. The room was a squat rectangle, more of a square really.

At the end opposite the entryway, there stood a table with a relatively nice-looking chair at the user’s end and a pair of rickety metal seats in front of it. There were some lockers behind the desk, and a strange machine up against the wall. The machine had a bulky base which held a slot for a key, a couple unlabeled buttons, and a handle. There was a row of upward-pointed nozzles, which Zelsys suspected to be outlets for Fog. There was a metal door behind the table, clearly not intended for those wishing to cross the border.

It looked well-used, unlike everything else in the makeshift office-space. A thought crossed Zelsys’s mind as she looked around. “Does the guy live here?”

The officer took a seat at his desk, placed his gun on it, and did nothing in particular to prompt any of them to take a seat. They knew better than to try, and all four of them preferred to remain standing.

“Now,” he smiled with venom at the four of them. “Under the… Frankly generous assumption that the three Ikes aren’t war criminals or worse, why should I let you cross the border? Why would anyone of honest heart try to enter a seedbed of scum and degeneracy such as Ikesia?”

Despite his vile demeanor, Zelsys only continued to smile at him. She held no fear, and the officer could tell.

“Scan me, little man,” she rumbled, bending down to look him in the eye properly. ”Be a good soldier.”

One of his eyes visibly twitched at that and his hand shifted slightly toward his gun, but he maintained his composure as he stood and reached into his coat, pulling out a keyring of many keys and inserting one into a slot on the strange machine. With a turn, the machine emitted a chorus of mechanical ticking, a complex internal mechanism audibly coming alive.

He stepped aside, gesturing for Zelsys to approach the machine, while he kept his hand firmly on the key. She stepped squarely into the officer’s personal space, took hold of the handle with her right hand, and squeezed. The metal creaked in her grip. With some difficulty, the officer reached over and pressed two of the machine’s buttons in sequence, prompting its nozzles to sputter puffs of Fog before they began to emit continuous threads of it, much like candles that had just been snuffed out. A warm thrum spread through her hand and to her forearm.