"Soup," says Bella. "Well, I already made it. You can have some if you want."

"Go suck a cock, I'm talking to her," Brad says to Celo.

"...Noodle," says Bella, looking nervously at Brad. "Just broth and noodles."

"That's not what you said the other night," leers Brad. "Fuck off, leave us alone."

Bella sits with her own bowl at the table. She attempts to give Brad a wide berth as she heads for the chair, but he follows her, a little too close for comfort.

"That the kind of thing you like? I know a good soup place uptown."

"I'm not going out with you for soup or anything," Bella says.

Celo sprawls into another chair, across the table from Bella and a little ways away from it, with his soup.

"I know you don't have anything better to do!" exclaims Brad. "You're just playing hard to get, but there's nothing stopping you, you aren't even trying to make an excuse."

"I expect to be assigned homework between now and then," says Bella frostily.

Celo snorts.

"You spend so much fucking time studying, you can afford to go out for dinner, you do eat," says Brad, "you can eat in Enwich with me."

"You are spending a truly staggering percentage of your brainpower on whether I can and none at all on whether I want to," says Bella.

"It'll be a nice time! I'll buy you dinner, we'll hang out, I'm not telling you to get on your knees for me on the first date, it's not like you're him."

Celo makes an eloquently sarcastic face.

"Fuck off," Brad tells Celo again.

"Well, I'm sure you can have a nice time by yourself, or perhaps with someone more enthusiastic, but I have apparently gone stark raving mad, because I continue to decline," says Bella.

Celo laughs.

"Dude," says Brad, "I'm not gonna tell you again to get out of here, you can eat your fucking soup in your room. Or the lounge if you can't stand to pass up any opportunity to run into somebody who might fuck you."

"You're not gonna tell me again? Good, it was getting annoying," he says, and he stays right where he is.

Brad stalks in Celo's direction and grabs him by the hair.

Celo carefully puts down his soup.

If you're planning to fight him right here in the kitchen, I could just knock him out, I'm not screened.

"I want," says Brad, "for you to quit interrupting my conversation with Isabella." His grip on Celo's hair tightens and he starts pulling in a less than chair-sitting-compatible direction.

Brad hauls harder. He's not a martial combat major, but delving majors take plenty of the same classes.

Is there some reason I shouldn't just down him right now?

Celo doesn't answer for a moment. He still seems strangely relaxed for someone getting yanked around by his hair, but the way he's staring into the distance is at odds with that calmness.

Brad successfully hauls Celo off his chair. It's largely up to Celo whether he ends this maneuver standing or sprawled on the floor.

"Not a public conversation," says Brad, "and he was interrupting."

Celo doesn't respond. He seems - frozen. Frozen is a good word.

"Let him go," says Bella darkly.

Well, he's breathing a little hard. Interpretations may vary.

"Well, if that's what you're up to I can go eat in my room."

"What, no," says Brad, "I just want him out of here, I want to talk to you, I want to take you out, come on."

"I don't," says Bella clearly, "want to go out with you, so if that's your purpose here perhaps you should go and he should stay."

Brad processes this, then wrenches Celo's head backwards suddenly; Celo's likely to wind up in a heap on the floor. "You're throwing me over for the freaky nymph? Are you fucking kidding me? He's not an excuse either, nymphs are sluts and think everybody else is too, you don't owe him any fucking thing."

Celo does wind up in a heap on the floor. Also, he is now crying.

"Go away, Brad," says Bella, "or I will knock you unconscious and drag you out."

"Bitch," mutters Brad, and he kicks Celo once, not particularly hard, and shuffles out.

Celo curls up on the floor and sobs.

Bella gets up and drops to her knees next to him. [Name.] "Are you okay? What's the matter?"

He doesn't answer out loud, but he does move a tiny bit closer so his forehead is resting against her knee.

"Can I look? Is that okay?"

Hesitantly, still crying, he nods.

Bella looks.

Bella holds him. Here you are. You're here, it's just you and me.

It should perhaps not come as a surprise that, under the circumstances, he feels strongly positive towards her.

She's not surprised. She carries on kneeling there, hugging him, occasionally repeating his name.

"It's okay."

Soup! Soup and hugs?

That might be awkward to manage simultaneously.

Soup and some kind of touching, then, if Bella doesn't object. He'll settle for holding hands.

Bella will hold his hand. "Everyone already thinks we had sex," she remarks.

"...Does that bug you or something?"

"It's not true, and even if it were it wouldn't be any of their business."

"Well, yeah," he says. "But I'm a nymph. Of course people are gonna think we've had sex."

"As in fact they do. One person believed me when I told her different."

"Good for her," he says, smiling.

Bella sighs and drinks the last of her soup. "So, Brad is a problem, apparently."

"He sure as fuck is," says Celo, with a little shiver.

"The thing about thinking about me really hard to get my attention still applies. He's not a subtle artist and I got really good at downing people who weren't shielding, in Utility Psionics the other day."

"Yeah," says Celo. "Will you be okay if he gets you alone again?"

"If he'd touched me he would've woken up alone an hour later with a headache from the part where I didn't catch him when he fell over."

"I'm not sure if he'd escalate like that with me, though, he made a point of comparing me to you and indicating that he was not trying to imply I was nymphly."

He snorts. "Yeah, but did you listen to the way he said it? That is a guy who thinks the whole world revolves around his dick."

"I'm not sure," Bella repeats. "But I know what I'll do if he does."

"Okay," says Celo. "Just - it's not always that simple."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean - sometimes you think you can handle something, and then it turns out you can't."

"...If he did something very distracting, very suddenly, I might not be able to pull it off, yeah."

"I already don't go out alone. I can probably avoid being in a room with Brad, if I keep half a subtle eye on his mind when it's in range... of course, if I'm in the middle of making soup or something here that doesn't help much."

Celo shrugs. "Yeah. I don't know."

"And this is comparatively mild, so far, next to the thing with the elf girls, about which absolutely nothing was done, but I might a-mail some people anyway for the aether trail."

"Bet you they care more when it's not elves," Celo predicts.

"Maybe. There are so many possible special circumstances, I bet if they really feel like it they never have to treat any real situation as a 'standard harassment case' that they're obliged to manage by the book."

He laughs. "Yeah, there's always that."

"Of course, by the same token, I didn't get in trouble for downing that subtle artist elf once she was too distracted to screen; did you ever get in trouble?"

"Nope," he says cheerfully.

"That's good."

Celo finishes his soup.

"Are we friends now?" Bella asks, tilting her head.

"You tell me," he shrugs. "Don't think I've had one before."

"I've had friends but none of them substantially resembled you."

Celo laughs. "No shit?"

"Yes, you probably could've guessed."

She shrugs. "You seem to have already signed up for bailing me out of hazardous situations. I think the rest is good."

Celo grins. "Okay, great."

"I really wish you could figure out that thing, though," she sighs. "I don't make a habit of telling my friends all the details you pick up. I know you've already got what you got, but that just means you'll definitely notice if anything changes."

"I've figured it out some," he says. "It's hard, though."

"You have?" she asks, looking up.

"Yeah?" he says. "Only some, though."

"Can I see?"

He shrugs. "Sure, okay."

Peer.

The essential discovery is that, while there's no way to stop him from perceiving sexuality, he doesn't always have to interpret it. Actually doing so is a little like walking around with your eyes slightly unfocused all the time - difficult, kind of uncomfortable, easy to forget about and end up stopping by accident, but possible.

"Hmm. So you'd still notice if something changed but you wouldn't know what, unless you accidentally interpreted."

"Yeah," he says, "pretty much."

"Tricky."

"...What's tricky?"

"This - entire thing. You're relying on it as a primary sense but it's invasive; you can avoid interpreting it but only so much and it takes all that attention."

"Yeah. Well - it takes whatever the opposite of attention is. Deliberately not looking at something."

"That's a kind of attention too. More outward-focused telepaths than me have to learn it." Pause. "Some of them find various forms of meditation helpful but I don't know if they're related enough to what you're doing."

"...I don't think it's a meditation thing," he says. "Well, I guess I don't know. But I don't think so."

Bella shrugs. "You'd know at least as well as I would."

"Okay. Then I don't think it is."

"I wonder why Mother Khaele makes you guys that way."

"...Because we have to know we're doing it right," he says. "And, I mean - you're getting all hung up on the information part, which I guess is fair because that's the part that worries you, but it's not just about what we know, you know? It's about what we are, what we're made of. I don't think nymphs could be nymphs if we weren't the way we are. It's as much a part of me as my garden or my body. I don't just do sex, I am sex."

"Yeah," says Bella, "but you being sex in the direction of people who don't want you involved in their doing sex - or for that matter their not doing it - has problems."

"Mama doesn't seem to think so," he observes, although it's not clear whether he agrees.

"Or at least considers those problems irrelevant in light of other concerns." Bella scoops up her soup bowl and heads to the sink to wash it.

"Who knows," he says. "I'm not asking."

"I didn't say you should."

He shrugs.

"Avoiding divine attention is one of my goals in life, I don't know about you."

"The last time I talked to my mom, I was still with that guy," he says. "I asked her to do something about it. She said one of these days I'd learn to get comfy with my purpose in life. I told her to go fuck herself. End of conversation."

Bella winces.

He shrugs. "And, you know, I'm still alive, so whatever."

"If," Bella starts, and then she stops and shakes her head and picks up his bowl to wash that too.

"Mm?"

"Nothing. Or nothing I'd feel safe saying, anyway, I have - hubristic tendencies, I try to keep them under control."

"Okay," shrugs Celo.

"When I was eight my mother caught me doing experiments, with the TV. I didn't actually break anything but I could easily have done. And she got me this enormous book that said The Rise and Inevitable Fall of Those Who Sought Science."

Celo laughs. "That's cute."

"It kind of scared the crap out of me, actually, but now I guess I have the appropriate flinch response whenever I start expecting reality to work like fantasies where everything's orderly and well-behaved even when it's important."

"It's cute that you tried it, though," he says with a smile.

"Maybe. I'm just glad I got caught before I tried something disastrous."

He shrugs. "Well, yeah."

"And there's no record of anyone getting smitten for having fun with lucid dreaming."

"...Fun with lucid dreaming?" he inquires.

"Yeah, I get my ridiculous heroic power fantasies out of my system in my sleep in between mind-maintenance and memory review."

Celo giggles. "Awesome."

"It's pretty cool, yeah. Some non subtle artists can learn to lucid dream but it's harder and you can't do as much with it."

"I don't sleep much anyway," shrugs Celo. "And I'd probably use it for different things."

Bella can guess. "Do you not need much sleep or are you just an irresponsible partying college kid?"

"Do I have to pick just one?" he asks, grinning. "Nah, it's the first one. I like my classes."

"What all are you in besides the one with the psycho murder teacher?"

"Two with the murder teacher," he corrects. "Plus a bunch of Domestic Arts stuff."

"I didn't even look at that section of the catalog, I have no idea what the Domestic Arts courses are like."

"Cooking and sewing and stuff," he shrugs. "It's fun, I love it."

"Cool. I have four subtle arts courses - intro perception, utility psionics 1, intro psych, and the lab. And Basic Knife to get my WP out of the way and Imperial History."

"Basic Knife is still hilarious," says Celo. "I mean, I get why you're in it and all, but it's hilarious."

"Next semester I'll take Arcane Self-Defense, how about."

"Much better," he says, laughing.

"But even if I'd decided to take that instead of Basic Knife this semester I'd have to pick up something for WP. Or fill out all the paperwork for a Magical Threat exemption."

"Yeah," says Celo. "The point of the WP requirement is supposed to be safety, but taking Basic Knife doesn't actually make you any safer, that's what's funny."

"Also, so far all the threats I've encountered have been from other students, who are subject to equal requirements regarding learning to wield things."

"Yeah, that too," he laughs.

"You're a freshman, right? Where'd you learn to take out seven elves?"

"I'm not a freshman, and I had one of Coach Sadist's courses last year too," he snorts.

"Do they just sort of tuck the non-human students wherever in this hall regardless of year?"

"Guess so!"