Thoughts, Observations, and Meeting at Heathrow (3)
Lumina followed Corinth to his food station of choice, a place called the Oceanic Pub and Kitchen, which appeared to be as good as any place one could dine at an airport. At first she had been thinking about just getting a light beer, but when Corinth offered to buy, she changed her mind and ordered a glass of sauvignon blanc.
Just after their beverages were brought, Corinth uttered the dreaded words,
“I read your file”
That probably was a reasonable thing to do given the circumstances, but Lumina still felt somewhat violated, especially since she hadn’t thought to reciprocate. She could feel herself flushing as he continued…
“You’ve been on leave for awhile, getting your head back on straight after your last assignment? Are you good to go now?” Before she could respond, he continued, “What I’m really asking is, can I trust you to do what needs to be to be should things go sideways? To shoot, to kill… all the things. I need to know you got my back no matter what. If you can’t do that, for whatever reason, you’d be better off back at your desk because I can’t do our job while watching my back and yours.”
Lumina was rather taken aback, and her first instinct was to retaliate. Unfortunately, no witty comebacks came to mind, and the more she thought about it, the more she realized that it would be to her detriment to do so. She had penance to do to make up for the fiasco at Hyderabad. If Corinth gave a bad report of her efforts for this assignment, she could find herself even further in the doghouse. Lumina didn’t know if people got fired from the Templars, but she had seen first hand what the Templars did to people that knew too much that they didn’t need or couldn’t use, and it wasn’t pretty… As such, it would behoove her to make as good an impression on Corinth as she could.
Instead, the best she could muster was “I got your back, chief. You don’t need to worry about me.” Lumina was hesitant to talk about killing stuff in a public place like this. One never knew who was listening in, although with all the violence in movies, shows, and video games these days, people talking casually about killing may not be so unusual, so maybe she was just being paranoid.
Corinth seemed satisfied enough with this response and changed the topic. “I have heard this place has good fish and chips. I think I’ll have that.”
Ordering fish and chips in a bar called the Oceanic Pub and Kitchen seemed appropriate, so she ordered the same. Perhaps not terribly creative, but she had a lot of other things to figure out right now. For one, while Corinth was no doubt forming his opinions about her, she believed it prudent to get his measure as well, if only to figure out how best to behave to not incur his ire. But it was also just her nature to dig her nose into anything that she felt mattered and probably too many things that didn’t.
Lumina suspected that Corinth was of a similar bent to herself in this regard. If she gave him the means to do so, Corinth would get her to reveal more about herself than she wanted him to know. To avoid this, she decided to take the first opportunity available once the bartender had taken their orders to go on the offensive. Talking about work in such a public environment was obviously a bad idea, so instead she asked the next non-work related question that came to mind.
“So are you in a relationship with anyone?”
Lumina could feel herself reddening as she realized how improper that question was to start with, but she had found herself checking his hands for rings to see if he was married and had not seen one. Granted, people were less traditional these days than they had been, and in the Secret World, these types of things were even more complicated, but Lumina still found the ring check to be a regular part of her analysis of people.