“I’d have gone into seizure if I got half that flustered,” Sigmund chuckled to Makhus just before she got out of earshot. Even still she didn’t take note of what he said, busy trying to fit the key into its slot. It took her a few attempts to realize she was trying to open the door numbered five and rectify her mistake. The key fit into number four’s lock on the first attempt, and with a single turn its mechanism clicked home.

The room she stepped into was nearly dark, but she had no issue finding and lighting the illumination crystals, as they emitted a constant, weak glow even when inactive. They rang out with quiet tones as they came alive, and from the other side of a door she hadn’t yet noticed, a familiar voice yelled.

“That you Zef?” Zelsys asked loudly. Zefaris whipped around to face the source of the sound. What was that room and what was she doing in there? The sound of splashing water answered that question.

“Y-yes, what is it?” she tripped over her own tongue. Zef? Where did that come from?

There was a brief delay before she got a reply, and even then it was just a rather amused-sounding remark of “Nothing, just making sure.”

She let out a frustrated sigh and began shedding the outer layers of her clothes, her heels having grown sore from walking for so long. Even after the war, she hadn’t become acclimated to long marches. Not with the abominations that were these half-assed self-molding boots, for they seemed to only adjust their shape partially.

The markswoman threw her jacket to the side, and stewing in the stench of her own sweat, melted into the immaculate covers of the bed that was closer to the window. She wasn’t exactly content with such smells, but what was she to do about it? A thought sparked as though a light in the Rubedo-fogged confusion of her mental state, eliciting a sigh of annoyance at herself.

“You gonna be done bathing anytime soon?” she asked, hoping that assumption was correct and trying not to dwell on what her words might be taken as.

The answer came after a couple seconds of continuous splashing, “Five minutes!”

And so, five minutes she waited, and surprisingly, it was indeed almost exactly five minutes before the bathroom door opened, and from the cloud of steam that spilled out Zelsys emerged wrapped in a towel, the brown portion of her hair hanging almost to the floor like a cape.

She stared without shame, tracing every curve that her eye could see. Not a single blemish, not a single scar, not a single hair. Only thin, silver lines in the shape of snaking electric arcs broke up the near-uniform bronze shade of her skin. Ridiculous. Impossible. An unrealistic standard of raw physical perfection. Yet there she was, radiating a palpable aura of smugness as she traced wet footprints across the hardwood floor, carrying a shapeless bundle of bandages and clothing in her arms.