He can be escaped; he did a lot of tromping around in a mud dungeon and barely stayed conscious through his shower, yesterday evening, and went to bed quite tired. "Persimmon."

They don't have any of those. (The part of Cara that vaguely remembers how to be cute and fun and is yearning for a chance to try it out again has aspirations of making a pile of objects Haru mentions while asleep and leaving them on the bed the next morning. She's got no idea if she'll indulge it or not.)

"Lugubriousness."

She has to look that one up, at which point she has to suppress a bitter bark of laughter. He's been holding some of that every night!

Okay. Come on. Get over it.

Count to ten. Try to breathe. And go wash up.

(She does.)

Plumbing noises wake him. When she emerges he's no longer producing nouns.

"Good morning," she says brightly, as she re-enters the room. 

"Morning!" His turn in the bathroom now.

Works for her!

When he gets back, she's gotten dressed for the day and can start solidifying her plans. "Did you have anything scheduled this morning? I woke up to a notice from my agent telling me they want me in San Diego for a bit."

"Unless something has changed I -" phone - "...it has, now they want me in Quebec City instead. If you see a Menagerie critter while you’re there, I know where you can fence it for millions, if they can kill the core this time around."

Huh! "They're worth that much to the OMP?" 

"A panda costs a million in rental fees to China per year, and in spite of the famous difficulty of getting them to do it, pandas are capable of reproducing."

"Huh. Reality has a surprising amount of detail!" She smiles at him. "If I see one, I will do my best to calmly acquire it."

"Probably keep it in your power's sights while you do."

She loses her startle and flinch reactions when more than slightly backlashed, even without an instruction. (She hasn't really mentioned that to Haru.)

"Yeah, I've read about how they work. I'll be careful." (She isn't sure if she'll be staying there long enough for it to matter, but weird things happen all the time.)

"And when you're all done I'll see you then."

"Yeah." She smiles a bit, and gets on her phone and formally accepts the assignment, which will notify both the requesting agency and her agent.  

"What do they want you for in Quebec?"

"It's a fairy themed one, breached and started luring people back to Fairyland, and they think it's psychic not drugs."

The two genders she's not saying that. "Hopefully no biting victims, this time." 

"Hopef-" Phone bleep. "- okay never mind, the city of San Diego wants me to bring Cricket and coax people's Menagerie monsters away from them! That's crazy, Cricket's more expensive than I am - I guess the strategy is something like, hey, I have a monster too, isn't it nice to have a monster, yours doesn't have its shots -"

"Huh! Perhaps they'll have all three of us commute together... have you two ever done anything like that before?" It seems like the kind of thing Cricket might find annoying, but she's not sure - she's still learning how Cricket thinks. (She doesn't know enough about cat body language to know if Cricket's is cat-typical or not, which doesn't help.) 

"No, and I'm not actually sure it's a good idea. Of course, almost anything they try might turn out to be a bad idea! The entire problem with these critters is you can't fully-inform the people they latch onto."

Cara nods seriously. "Yeah. It's a bit of a nightmare." ...seems like they should get a psychic for it, really, but perhaps they already have all applicable ones on site and the legal situation in California in particular - well, no, they did declare a SoE.

"It's worth me accompanying you to San Diego since you're going anyway and that way you can stop more cars, but they might change their minds or an agency lawyer might tell Paula I mustn't touch it or both, so who knows if I'll actually wind up taking any monsters that aren't all by themselves at the time."

"I think they've gotten most of the smaller cars by now, but yeah, plausibly they'll have something else for me to do after the firetrucks." She texts Phoebe to let her know that Haru is coming along.