Oddly enough, though there was a great deal that could have been said regarding Trinzet Diatom's outrageously nude figure and the extremely indecent pose it was being forced into, the first thought that ricocheted around Tesla's mind was: My God, she's bald. Of course she wasn't hairless; her whole body was covered with fur like any other zoan. Is it because she's a lioness, or are all zoan women bald? Wait, I've seen them out in the city with hair... wigs, maybe?

Book also chose that moment to toss out her basic information, marking her as in yet another pop-up window.

So the wig industry sings the praises of the lioness. The ryujin's eyes strayed down the length of the princess' extravagant figure before snapping away at her Highness' irate hiss. Not that there isn't plenty to praise...

"Seen enough," Trinzet growled, "or do you need more time?"

Tesla shrugged and crossed his arms. "Well, I could just start unstrapping you without considering whether or not the table's trapped, but it's your decision. I'm not the one trussed up like a festival turkey, after all." Naturally, his own sense of humor wouldn't let him focus. Tesla hummed the bars to "Brick House" by the Commodores while he went to work on the multitude of straps that pinned the princess to the erotic torture device; he figured she wouldn't recognize the tune.

Trinzet tugged energetically at her bound wrists, then narrowed her eye at Tesla. Not surprisingly, given where his gaze was automatically drawn, this was the first moment he noticed she was half-blind. A stereotypical, vertical scar permanently closed her right eye. The wound was old, and the fur that grew over it was white in comparison to the tawny colors that came to her naturally. There were few others; Tesla assumed she was either very good at "dodge-and-parry" or, as her Job Class indicated, she wore full plate like a battleship. "Why are you starting at my feet?"

"Because if I start with your hands you'll probably cold-cock me. Please stop wriggling, you're setting off all kinds of secondary motions that are extremely distracting."

The "Lioness of Rodannes" snarled, but stopped moving. "I could still kick you."

"If you do then it would be quite likely that you'd incapacitate me."

"Exactly."

"-Then who would finish untying you?"

"...Bastard."

Tesla worked his way up the table, pausing at the occasional gasp. "What, ticklish?"

"Shut up."

"It's not my fault there's so many straps."

"I swear I'm going to kill you."

"Oh? And then what? Do you even know where you are?"

"Go to hell."

Tesla closed his eyes for a moment. Time to play a little poker. "I didn't think so. The, ah, event that dragged you here must have been abrupt in the extreme. Right now you happen to be roughly in the middle of the Nobles' Quarter in a city called Diatom, which is the capital of a kingdom going by the same name. Ring any bells?"

Trinzet's eye flew open. "The city! How did I get here!? I was at the front when..." She snapped her jaws shut and launched a murderous glare at Tesla.

"I'll take that to mean you're from around here, at least. And, before you ask, no I don't really know why you would be drawn here-" Tesla waved at her half-bound form, "-aside from the prurient obvious. The name's Tesla, by the way, Tesla Stone. -And you are?"

"None of your business."

"Ah." Tesla resumed his work on the straps with a sigh. "Well, "None of Your Business," if you're wondering just exactly who it was that transported you here... well, I don't know."

"What, no business cards?"

"They're all a little busy being dead at the moment to offer their bona fides, and their boss lacked the presence of mind to offer the stereotypical revelations of an evil mastermind while I was clawing out his throat. I'm sorry if that means I've missed out on some deeper machinations here in the city, but survival against what appeared to be trained assassins comes first." Tesla unfastened the strap around Trinzet's neck, which prompted the most squirming by far, then reached for the last binding around her wrists. "If there are any compatriots plotting elsewhere, I couldn't tell you."

Tesla released the final strap and stood back; he might as well not have bothered. Trinzet launched herself from the table with a roar and caught him at the waist in a full body tackle before pinning him to the dungeon floor. There was no way he could have stopped her; the woman's Job Class was twice the level of his Character Class, who knew how powerful she actually was? The lioness unsheathed her own claws around his neck and leaned so close to his stubby little ear-horns her fangs nipped at them with every other word. "A stripling like you slew men who could capture me," she purred, "what manner of fool do you take me for?"

Amazon or not, there was truly a great deal of soft feminine pulchritude pressing down on him in an indiscriminate, marshmallowy fashion that could not be ignored. "Clearly, the type of fool that will mount a grown man she just met while buck naked." Tesla arched an eyebrow provocatively. "Cuddle all that curvature up against me any longer and I might just take you up on the offer."

Trinzet's eye went blank for an instant, then she leapt up from her erstwhile prey with almost-indecent haste. "...Regardless, I'll choose to believe you." The Lioness of Rodannes turned her back on Tesla and continuously twitched her ears up and down in what looked like embarassment.

Thank God, for a second there I thought she was going to kill me. Tesla coughed and carefully stood. "Can we continue this conversation on the way out?"

"Ugh, who was this robe made for? An ailuros? I'm about to fall out through the neck." Trinzet stomped down the Heathers' flagstone road while clinging to the neckline of Tesla's borrowed Temple vestments like a shipwrecked sailor at a lifeline. The woodlands around them were dark, shadowed, and quiet; the massive trunks of the forest seemed to absorb sound as thoroughly as the canopy overhead blocked out the sun. It was almost as if the two were speaking in a broad hallway rather than outside.

"I highly doubt it. Though it's cut for a man my size, I'm impressed with how well that robe's managing to fit around your chest."

"No, seriously; shut up." The zoan woman twisted her head around and glared at the surrounding timber. "I thought you said we were in the city?"

"We are. The Waving Heathers is one of the last old-style estates left in Diatom, if not the last outside of Lonely Mountain itself, or at least that's what the realtor who currently holds the deed told me." Tesla held out his hands to either side, palm up. "Apparently everyone thought the property was haunted, so she couldn't get her hands on any buyers. Must've been this group putting on a mummer's play so they could use the site as a hideout."

"I still feel like I'm wandering out in the wild." The lioness sniffed at the air and frowned. "This growth is old."

"You'll sing a different tune once we pass through the privacy wall. After that, we need to hook up with the local guard and let them know what happened." Tesla shot Trinzet a measuring glance, then continued. "I'm guessing you're a military woman, yourself; you'll need to report in to your superiors and let them know you were abducted."

Trinzet's walk stiffened; only her ears and tail continued to twitch normally. "Naturally." She speared Tesla with a glare of her own. "And what will you be doing?"

"I was promised the property if I could clear the haunt, but the haunt turned out to be a small army of psychos here for who-knows-what. I have to find out if fumigating a pack of glorified rats is equivalent to busting ghosts."

Trinzet snorted. "You were promised the whole property? A couple of hundred square acres of nobleman's land handed over to a commoner for a song and dance?"

"What can I say? She was desperate; said something about the neighborhood threatening litigation if she couldn't sell it in some fashion or another."

"Not much of an agent, then, is she?" Trinzet sounded awfully judgmental of Esperia, a woman she didn't know; Tesla passed it off as lingering distaste from her previous treatment.

"I don't believe she's trying to cheat me. She appeared genuinely pleased at the prospect of dumping the property onto someone else's shoulders."

"Hmph." The zoan tightened her grip on the neck of the priests' robe and released a dismissive snort. "It's already proven to be more trouble than it's worth. You'd be better off not going back to her. Let that strange woman push this rattletrap hole-in-the-wall off on some other poor fool."

Tesla arched an eyebrow. "I didn't know you cared."

Trinzet growled and shook her head. "Whether I like it or not, you saved my life. If that wasn't enough to owe you free advice, what is?"

"Oh, well, it's too late anyway." At last, the property's boundary wall hove into view. Aside from being composed of larger, heavier stones, Tesla determined the wall wasn't that much different from the other privacy barriers he saw through the rest of the Nobles' Quarter. "There are aspects to this real estate that I can't ignore, not the least of which is how easily an armed force was able to infiltrate and establish a command center in the middle of the city. If for no other reason, I'm taking this place just make sure that doesn't happen again." The Heathers' outer gates were, appropriately enough, sufficiently broad to allow a large carriage or wagon to pass through with room to spare. They were composed of hardwood timber and barred with oaken beams thick enough to pass for tree trunks, but some force within them reacted to Tesla's presence as he approached. The beams withdrew into recesses set into the walls without a sound, but the gates themselves creaked mightily as they ground open on their hinges. "Besides, it looks like the Heathers already recognize me as the new "master of the house" even without the deed in hand. I'd hate to disappoint expectations."

Trinzet shook her head. "Your loss."

"That depends on your perspective. From where I'm standing I just saved one precious life, cleaned up a lot of cultural garbage in the process, and picked up a home way out of my price range as a bonus. I'm coming out ahead on this deal."

The lioness stumbled over a flagstone, then quickly righted herself. "God damned silver-tongued dragon;" Trinzet muttered, "precious my fluffy ass."

"What's that?"

"I said, "go kill yourself, jackass," what else?"

Luckily, after just a few corners turned and a mere handful of streets crossed, Tesla and Trinzet ran into yet another young hard-charger of a guardsman desperate to make an impact. Unluckily, for the young guard at any rate, Trinzet had stopped clinging to the neckline of her borrowed garb like it was a mortal wound. Faced with a monumentally prodigious amount of cleavage, the boy nearly had his throat slit with his own dagger when he accused the lioness of prostitution outside of a sanctioned brothel. Though Tesla managed to convince the irate zoan to let the kid off with a thump to the head, this didn't save the youth from the ignominy of being frog-marched all the way back to the nearest guard station with several visible lumps on his noggin. To make matters worse, they were drawing a crowd; by the time the young guardsmen escorted them / was escorted by them to the station they were practically at the head of a parade of onlookers.

The station in question succeeded in turning itself inside-out with great alacrity once Trinzet charged through the front doors and roared to see the captain. In mere moments the princess was surrounded by boot-licking toadies with too much gold braid on their epaulets, from which Tesla gleaned that the face of the Lioness of Rodannes was known even among the bottom-feeders of His Majesty's Royal Army. It didn't take long for excited rumors to begin flying about the civilian observers, too. The ryujin sighed inwardly as he slipped out the door: The officers' reactions were open and honest, if self-serving, and free of any confusion. This meant that the princess wasn't merely a plant inserted into Diatom by the Heathers' faulty programming, which in turn meant that continuity was preserved for the region. At the same time Tesla was dead certain that Trinzet's sudden disappearing act from whichever combat zone she was undoubtedly in charge of would not only stretch that hair-fine preservation of continuity to the breaking point, but also threaten the collapse of that particular front until she could effect her return.

"Right, I want no part of that." Tesla sailed past the station's outer picket unmolested, then stretched like a man who just put down a burden. A light snowfall picked up as the sky darkened overhead. "I wonder if I should go back to the Heathers and call it a day, or try to hit up Enigma Realty before the sun sets? I'm sure I could get the deed, but I don't look forward to hoofing it all the way back to my new home in the dark afterwards. I wonder if Esperia would let me crash in her office for the night?"

A single, clawed fist snatched at the end of Tesla's tail like the vice grip of God. "The absolute last thing you shall be doing is paying a visit to some two-bit hood of a woman in the middle of the night." Trinzet's claws spectacularly failed to dig into the baroque hammer head capping his tail, but the mulish look on her face said she would let them all be ripped out before she let go. "I have transportation inbound; you must be properly compensated."

Tesla reached up and tugged at one of his larger horns in dismay. "Aw, damn it."

Three hours later, "transportation inbound" turned out to be a liveried carriage stamped with the royal seal, a platoon of His Majesty's finest soldiers, and a flying wedge of lady's maids directed by a stern-faced old woman who looked like she mastered the withering glare of disapproval back when she was in diapers. Tesla groaned inwardly as the small circus rounded a street corner, pierced the revolving gaggle of bored voyeurs and rattled across the cobblestones into the guard station. There's no hiding your status from me now, princess. If anyone hears I saw you naked, there'll be hell to pay.

Trinzet's clutch, which she still had yet to relinquish, tightened on Tesla's tail as the contingent of newcomers fanned out across the station with professional ease. The soldiers immediately took control of the station's posts and began bellowing out orders to guardsmen unaccustomed to actually having to work for a living. The coachmen leapt from the carriage and began inspecting their charge for wear or possible damage while feeding the resplendently-feathered rook harnessed to pull it. Meanwhile, the maid team descended upon Trinzet (and, by extension of her clawed grasp, Tesla) in a flurry of ruffles, ribbons, and lace. Led by their venerable director, a human that Book identified as with a tiny additional notation marking her as a so-called "head maid," the entire group gracefully curtsied. "Your Royal Highness, Trinzet Diatom, Princess of the House of Diatom, Duchess of the Rodannes Plains, Warlord of the Eastern Front;" Tesla admired how that was directed more to him than to Trinzet herself. "I have, at the orders of His Majesty King Augustinian Diatom the Forty-Seventh, come to present you to the King at your earliest discretion."

Translation: Get your ass in the wagon before you make a bigger scene than you have already. Tesla affected a "surprised" twitch of his heavy tail, then whistled. "I guess that explains why they were after you, and why you didn't want to tell me your name. Whatever that bunch was after, a royal makes for a serious bargaining chip." There, now I don't have to keep pretending like I don't know who you are.

Refireah sniffed disdainfully. "Do silence yourself, outsider; your input is as unnecessary as it is inflammatory. Princess, please release the commoner. It is unseemly for a woman of your stature to cling to a man's tail like some infatuated teenager."

Trinzet snapped back to herself with an outraged hiss, then shook a finger at the older woman. "Contain yourself, Refireah Linslet; this man is responsible for the fact that I continue to breathe, and is an important witness to what has occurred this day." The expression on her face rapidly changed from anger to confusion. "Regardless, he attempts to wander off every time I look away." Again her features shifted, this time to an unreadable expression Tesla never saw before. "I find it's easier to keep him physically restrained rather than rely on a merely figurative short leash."

Refireah groaned and dropped her forehead into one hand. "Of all the times to suddenly discover you're actually a woman..." she muttered.

"What was that?"

"Nothing, Your Highness. Merely the whimsy of an old maid who was both midwife and wet nurse, yet still finds she can't predict what the impish cub will do next."

Ha, Tesla thought, so lions can blush.

"The carriage! To the carriage!" Trinzet marched away snarling at nothing and no one in particular, but she still wouldn't release Tesla's tail.