As far as places to grow into adulthood went, Goug Machine City lacked a certain…something. Sandwiched between a brackish zombie-and-molbor infested swamp and the somewhat less than warm and inviting waters of the sea, overrun with grasping treasure hunters looking to wring every gil they could out of the city's rich archaeological heritage and poorly socialized engineers looking to make it all work again whether or not that was a good idea, Ramza Beoulve felt he couldn't really blame Mustadio for losing whatever sense of humor he might have possessed and developing a capacity for grudge-nursing that Dycedarg would have found admirable. No, Ramza couldn't blame him at all.
Really.
"Mustadio, I said I'm sorry," Ramza entreated for perhaps the thirty-thousandth time in three days, in a tone he hoped was sincere and not exasperated. "Please open the door."
The door did not respond in any way, verbal or physical. Ramza glared at the sizeable !Warning! Do Not Enter! Experiments In Progress! sign plastered to its surface by some investigational epoxy or possibly several years of accumulated grease. Mustadio's private work room/laboratory doubled as his bedroom and, as of the activation of Worker 8, Ramza had been summarily exiled from both.
On the first day, that was understandable. Mustadio was legitimately recovering from the injuries he had, unfortunately, sustained in the pursuit of excellence in science and engineering. Phoenix down and potions, even the excellent potions brewed by the company's chemist corps, could only accomplish so much. And he'd certainly earned his uninterrupted bed-rest. Ramza had whispered comforting words through the door's grease-encrusted ventilation slots concerning his friend's definite likelihood of gaining publication in any number of the city's professional periodicals for his efforts. He didn't find the lack of response troubling (Mustadio had, after all, still been smoking slightly when the medics had carried him upstairs) and was reassured by the reports that the engineer would make a full recovery.
On the second day, Mustadio could be heard thumping around inside the cavelike environs of his domain, groaning and swearing in at least three languages. Ramza, considering this to be an opportunity, left off overseeing the activities of the camp and went up to see how he was doing. When he knocked, the thumping and swearing came to an abrupt halt but, despite his entreaties, Mustadio refused to respond to his request for entry. That was when Ramza began to suspect that the engineer might be holding him just slightly (and possibly completely) responsible for the state of his facial hair and wardrobe. Given that Worker 8 had opened fire at his command, Ramza, being the honorable sort, had to admit to himself that that wasn't exactly an unjust assessment of the situation. He fetched a clean scrap of parchment and a pen from Mustadio's father, who, being somewhat absorbed in his own examinations of the newly awakened iron golem, was completely oblivious to the domestic melodrama beginning to unfold beneath his roof. He penned what he felt was a very sincere and polite note of apology and slipped it through the door's ventilation slits, then beat a hasty retreat to await the response to his eloquence. The note was returned to him two hours later, neatly folded into the wicklike trigger mechanism of a device that, once activated, exploded spectacularly in a cloud of foul-smelling, multi-colored vapor that clung, reeking, to everything it touched. The remainder of that day and much of the evening was consumed in cleaning off the piquant residue of Mustadio's temper and, on Ramza's part, wondering what he had done wrong.
"When did explosives become an appropriate response to an apology?" He'd asked, aggrieved, of the universe in general that night, huddled dripping and miserable in front of the campfire. "The things Gariland doesn't teach you in etiquette class can clearly get you killed. Or at least maimed."
Everyone who had been downwind of the explosion pointedly ignored him. Finally, one of the kinder young women who'd been with him since his days at the Academy – and who hadn't had her very expensive Ryuzan silk dancer's costume drenched in relentlessly foul and sticky chemical warfare agents – came to join him at his (very lonely) fire. "Commander, if I give you a word of advice, would you take it?"
"Of course I would, Lavian. You can tell me anything."
"It's going to require more than a note to put Mustadio's nose back in joint. Trust me on this." The dancer patted his shoulder with one perfectly manicured hand. "He's been flirting with you since Bethla. You were just completely ignorant of his overtures. Tragic. And then you blew him up. Oh, yes, much more than an apology."
Ramza paled, then blushed furiously as all the blood in his body abruptly rushed to his head. Lavian pushed his head between his knees. "Breathe slowly and deeply. Yes, that's right. Very good. Gideon! Black Wind!"
He lifted his head woozily to find himself surrounded by the rest of Lavian's mission group, the bard Gideon and Black Wind, the team's tiny and delicate yet impressively talented young ninja. Lavian mussed his hair affectionately. "The commander requires our assistance on a matter of some…delicacy. A challenge for our talents, I think. Yes."
Which brought Ramza to the point he presently occupied, knocking on Mustadio's door and begging, for the thirty-thousand-and-first time for entry. And for, in Lavian's words, the opportunity to be laid like an expensive Romandan rug. He blushed heatedly just thinking about it, wondering, and not for the first time, if everyone had known that the engineer was flirting with him but him or if the sensitive and discerning nature of dancers, bards, and slinking night-killers had rendered Mustadio's somewhat circuitous technique as transparent as water. Or if he was simply the greatest living fool in Ivalice. From where he stood, they were all equally valid possibilities.
"Mustadio, please."
Silence. Then, a resonant thump as the laboratory's occupant slumped against the other side of the door. "What do you want, Ramza? I assure you, you didn't miss any of my body hair with that little stunt."
"Please let me in, Mustadio. I have something for you."
"New eyebrows, perhaps?"
Ramza resisted the urge to whimper. "Mustadio."
"Oh, all right." The bolts on the door rattled as the engineer shot them open, and the door itself opened a bare crack, enough to reveal a mass of heat-curled blonde hair and a single glaring blue eye. Devoid of brow. "What is it?"
"You'll need to open the door a little more than that," Ramza insisted, gesturing to the strike team waiting further down the hall. "It's…biggish."
Mustadio's single visible eye narrowed slightly but he did as he was asked, stepping back behind the door to hide himself even as he opened it. Lavian entered the room one hip at a time, in the sultry glide that only a true dancer could manage, followed by a procession of squires bearing a rolled rug to lay on the engineer's blueprint papered floor, a finely sanded wooden bath draped in linen, and fourteen steaming buckets of lavender-scented bathwater. Gideon, bearing his lute, and Black Wind, bearing an assortment of oddments, brought up the rear. In short order, everything was arranged, while Mustadio peered suspiciously from behind his door: rug, bath, a painted paper screen to preserve some vague semblance of modesty for everyone involved. The last squire to leave tried to close the door on the way out, only to be thwarted by Mustadio's deathgrip on the handle; the poor boy shrugged, bowed politely to his superiors, and fled. Gideon, far too professional to be rattled, took up station and began to play, a light, sweet tune, and Lavian began to dance, her feet falling lightly on the paper-strewn floor, her silks floating around her like leaves on the wind. Ramza wasn't precisely certain what Black Wind was doing but, so long as it didn't involve blowguns and needles tipped in aphrodisiac substances, he was happy. Smiling hopefully, he turned to face the still-opened door and the man half-hidden behind it.
Mustadio's single visible blue eye was narrowed slightly and the hand that emerged from behind the door made a complicated gesture in the direction of the tableau before it. "What." Not quite a question.
Ramza cleared his throat. "Mustadio, it has been brought to my attention that I have been a profound and inexcusable idiot." Lavian had insisted that a certain amount of abasing oneself before an outraged would-be lover was sometimes necessary in order to establish the proper tone in such situations. "I have been hopelessly and absolutely blind to the love you have attempted to offer me. Moreover, I did you grievous harm out of vast personal folly and compounded that error by failing to apologize in a manner appropriate to the gravity of the offense." Personally, Ramza felt that the speech she'd written constituted a bit more than a 'certain amount' of abasement but considering that the entire thing was his fault to begin with, he wasn't in much of a position to argue. "Please accept these gifts of beauty and comfort in the spirit of heart-felt contrition in which they are offered and bar me not from the doors of either your person or your heart."
Silence. Ramza's heart beat wildly for a moment and he could feel the blush creeping back as the silence lengthened, Mustadio's visible eye wide with some species of emotion that he couldn't identify. In a sudden, swift motion the door swung shut and the engineer fell against it, sinking trembling to the floor with both hands clasped over his mouth.
Laughing.
He was laughing.
Pointing and laughing.
The music and dancing abruptly ceased. Ramza looked helplessly at Lavian, who was, herself, glaring at the cackling engineer as though his mirth were some sort of personal affront.
"Very well," The dancer informed them all. "Plan B."
"Plan B?!" Ramza asked, alarmed. "There's a Plan B?!"
Even as the words fell off his lips, a sudden, sharp sting struck his neck, just below the ear. A yelp from the door suggested that Mustadio had suffered a similar fate. Ramza clawed for the source of the pain, and the sudden pink-and-gold tinged wooziness lightening his head, found the slender needle embedded in his neck and the strike team's ninja smiling cheerfully at him over his shoulder, blowgun still in hand. Lavian planted a hand firmly between his shoulderblades and shoved him forcefully in the direction of the engineer, slumped on the floor with an utterly besotted look on his face. His last coherent thought, as he tumbled into a gun-oil-scented embrace was, This is the last time I take romantic advice from special forces operatives.
For a moment, Lavian and Black Wind stood watching the results of their connivance, with varying levels of approval.
"Good timing on the needles," Lavian observed, "Though I'm still somewhat annoyed that the charm spell embedded in that speech didn't work as it ought – perhaps it was the delivery?"
Black Wind, not a woman of many words at the best of times, shrugged eloquently.
"Perhaps the post-operation critique can wait until tomorrow, ladies?" Gideon suggested, in a somewhat pained tone, as he opened the nearest window. "Why don't we give them a little…privacy?"
Lavian tossed him an amused look, and accepted his hand up onto the sill. "I wonder if we'll get a special mission bonus for this?"