"Now what?" Yume crossed her arms in frustration. Jun had been poking at her for the last several minutes, measuring her up against himself and the other Spartans. He was just about to pull her over next to Jorge when she asked him just what he was doing.

"Trying to see how tall you are exactly. You're just a little taller than the tallest Grunt." He looked at her critically. All she did was glare and turn back to her phone, where she was looking up locations they could visit to fill the rest of the day.

"You look almost as pissed off as me." Emile snarked at her. Yume rolled her eyes.

"You guys hungry?" She asked. "Let's go to Westlake Center. It's right by our hotel, and there are lots of stores so I 'm sure you can all find somethin' to do."

Noble Team shrugged, and Yume flagged a taxi, her the Spartans following her trustingly. . .or so she thought.

"It's a good thing this is a van." Emile glanced back at Jorge, who was climbing in the back again, like on their trip there. The driver looked, stunned, into his review mirror at the seven giant (and one normal sized) people getting into his cab.

"What is this, a diversity meeting?" He said under his breath, taking in the Spartans (and Yume) in awe. Remembering himself, "Where to?"

"Westlake Center, the mall." Yume answered from the back seat, once again between Thom and Rosenda. Carter sat up front with the driver in case one of the more unstable of Noble decide the driver looked suspiciously like an Elite and killed him with a kukri. . .not naming any names.

Once again Emile and Jun sat in the middle, and Kat stooped on the floor, being out of room. It seemed that every time they rode in a car they always had the same seats, and Yume wondered if that was because of rank or simply out of habit.

The cab wove through the city streets, jerking to stops at traffic lights and honking angrily whenever someone got in his way. In a few minutes they were outside of the mall, and Carter was handing over the cash payment. Yume wondered if he had ridden in a cab before, the action was quite natural and he did it unprompted. Maybe he just. . .figured it out. She thought.

They all practically spilled out of the cab, they were so crammed in. After a couple stretches, the team strode forward into-

The mall.

~##~

"So, what is this exactly?" Jun wondered aloud. He and a very uncomfortable Yume stood in front of a crepe booth on the top floor of the mall, called "Galacticrepes"

"They're. . .It's like. . ." Yume struggled to explain them to the Spartan. "They're. . .it's like desert and fruit wrapped in a pancake." She snapped her fingers, sure that would explain them to the Spartan.

"Can I try some?" He turned and looked down at her.

Not entirely sure why he was asking permission, "Uhhh, yeah."

In a few minutes the teenage "chefs" had whipped him up a choco-banana crepe, and he was tasting it tentatively, like it might be poison. "Close to perfect, but not quite perfect." He commented, licking his lips. "Are there any other unusual-but-tasty things we can get here?"

Yume nodded, "If you want unusual, come down to the Japanese store they have down on the first floor! They have all sorts of weird stuff there!" For the first time, Yume was starting to see the mentally unstable Spartan's personality come out, and to be truthful, she was unnerved by it.

They rode the escalator down to the first floor, and as Yume stepped off a large man rushed past them. Jun just stepped aside, but the man ran into Yume and she fell the rest of the way down the escalator. Jun walked the rest of the way down, and set her on her feet.

"How'd you survive so long with such sloppy habits?!" He exclaimed, brushing her off in an oddly familiar gesture.

Apparently remembering himself, he straightened, cleared his throat and asked, "So where's this shop you're so eager to show me." As if he had not wanted to go at all, but was in a hurry to get somewhere else.

"Here." She started toward a small shop with glass fronted windows displaying odd candies and statues. Jun followed Yume in, taking all of it in—the tiny, food shaped toys, the big-eyes dolls in glamorized sailor uniforms, and, most notably, the number of Asians shopping in the store.

"They're so. . .small." He commented, sticking close to Yume as if the short women were going to attack him.

"Uh, yeah." Yume muttered to him, glaring at a package of Pocky-imitations called 'Lucky Sticks'. Shrugging, she threw it in the basket. "I'll buy some snacks and we can eat them tonight."

"Okay." Jun examined a pickle cell phone charm. "Can you read these squiggles?" He picked up a box covered in kana characters, and pointed at the lines of text.

"They're not squiggles. It's Japanese."

"Looks like the Covenant symbols."

"Don't let the Japanese hear that." Yume chuckled. "It says something like, 'A marvelous clock that will wake you before the sun. . ."

"Sounds awful." Jun dropped the clock back into the bin, holding his hands in the air.

With a few bags of snacks and drinks cutting off the blood flow though her arms, Yume finally made it out of the store with Jun. After the first thirty minutes, she had gotten tired of Jun's "What's this? What does this say? How do we use this?" He was unusually chatty, which didn't fit her view of him as a crazy, asocial Spartan who was out to kill her.

"Let's go find the rest of the team." Yume climbed onto the escalator, Jun behind her.

"Don't fall again."

She laughed, "I won't."

~##~

Kat and Carter were like kids in a candy shop. Well, the candy shop. They hadn't been like normal kids for a long, long time, but they felt a little different that day in the mall. Safe, and happy. That didn't happen a lot. It was one or the other.

The shop was tiny, the two Spartans dominated the two skinny isles in the shop. Its walls were completely made off glass, but were lined all the way to the ceiling with bowls of different candies—brightly colored gummies, shaped like cartoon characters from a popular show they'd never heard of, and numerous fruits and nuts covered in chocolate.

"Let's sample this one, next, Commander." Kat pointed to a container with chocolate covered raisins, a little to high for her to reach. "Can you help me get it, Carter?"

Carter sighed, and came up next to his second-in-command. He knew what she wanted—to be close to him. Which is why she kept asking him to either lift her up so she could reach something that she could reach if she stood on her toes, or for him to just touch her as he reached up.

He dug around in the bowl, coming down with a hand full of raisins. He opened his fist, sure that was not the way they were supposed to be 'sampling' things, and Kat took half. The bigger half, of course.

Carter popped the rest of the raisins in his mouth, wiping his chocolate covered hands on his pants.

"Let's move on, Kat."

"Yeah, the clerk is giving you the stink eye." Kat glanced at him coyly, "Not unlike you do to us."

"I do not!" Carter exclaimed, in a useless attempt to keep Kat from teasing him.

~##~

Rosenda sighed, lonely. The entire team had split up into their own little groups, but Rose wasn't as close to the others as the rest. She was a replacement, a substitute. It was rare she ever saw action with the rest of Noble.

Scraping her feet on the floor, she wandered into a chocolate shop. The interior was dark, with fake wood panels on the walls and wine bottles decorating every other empty surface.

There's no way that ten pieces of chocolate cost thirty dollars, Rose thought, picking up the 'sample' pack.

Rosenda knew there was a problem with the fact that she felt constantly alienated, like she didn't belong with the rest of the team. She knew that they trusted her with their lives. But why did she feel so depressed?

A large package of chocolates skidded on the counter as she threw it there. "I'll take this." She said to the clerk. She had to cheer herself up somehow, and eating hundred-dollar chocolates was one way to do it.

"Your total is $110.98. . ."

Suddenly, Rosenda was pretty sure that the chocolates weren't going to cheer her up after that.

~##~

"Ahhh. . ." Emile stretched his arms upward. "I'm beat."

"Too much social interaction?" Thom sniped, grinning.

Emile snapped his head to the side, giving Thom the death-glare that didn't faze his teammates but scared the s*** out of most everybody else.

"Is there anything entertaining here?" Emile grumbled, then suddenly he turned to the side, and veered way off course.

"Hey! Emile, where are you goin'?!" Thom exclaimed, trailing after his friend. "Let's hope someone didn't look at him wrong. I don't want to deliver a casualty report to the Commander today. . ."

Emile had his nose pushed flat against the surface of a glass case, which held many long, sharp knives. He giggled. Pressing his finger against the glass, he called at Thom, happier than he had ever been known to be, "Thom. Thom. Look. It's my kukri."

"So it is." Thom observed the knife that was making his friend act like he was high. It appeared to be exactly the same as Emile's precious kukri. . .And suddenly Thom knew why Emile was acting so giddy. "Emile, I'm sure it's not really your exact knif-"

Too late. Emile had grabbed the front of the clerk's shirt, and dragged him across the counter towards him. "So where'd ya get that knife, eh, comrade?" He growled, dangerously close to the clerk's face.

"I-I-I-I-I-I-I ordered it f-f-f-f-f-f-from Reach." The chubby little clerk stammered. For working in a gun and knife shop, he had an extremely weak constitution, and he was as scared as a mouse.

"From reach, eh?" Emile cracked his neck. "How about from my belt. . .You're gonna die." He spit the last phrase with particular vehemence, and the clerk whimpered.

Thom swore, and flipped open the cell phone the whole team had gotten so they could communicate. ("You have to dial a whole number just to talk to somebody!? I miss the radios."-Jun) His fingers fumbled over the keys, and after a few typos and a new shiner for the clerk, he managed Jorge's number.

"Jorge! We need you up at—Mousy's Gun and Blade shop at the top floor. Emile's cracking up."

Jorge replied wearily, "About 'is knife again? He loves that thing almost as much as Jun loves his sniper rifle. . ."

In less than five minutes Jorge had run up the escalators, sometimes the ones running downward, picking up civilians and placing them to the side, or carrying up two at a time to the floor they were trying to get to. He spotted the store, and skidded to a stop just next to Emile.

There was no time to talk. The clerk's eyes were already swollen shut, and teeth littered the floor. The shop was utterly empty of other customers, having fled before they lost their eyes and, possibly, their extremities. Emile's eyes were filled with the venom that fueled him to kill Covenant, and it was misplaced.

Jorge landed a blow on top of the arm Emile was holding the clerk with. The chubby man fell behind the counter, and curled into a ball and whimpered. Emile turned, growling, at Jorge, then lunged, aiming a punch at his chest. Jorge deflected it with a swipe of his arm, then he kneed Emile in the stomach. As Emile crumpled into a heap, Jorge brought his elbow down onto the back of his head, and the vicious lion Emile had been turned into a sleeping kitten.

A sleeping kitten that was sure to be ticked off when he woke up.

~##~

The group bought several pizzas for dinner that night, and walked back to their hotel. Walking out of the mall, around the block, and into the lobby with Emile on his back got the group some fairly odd looks, more so than normal. Normally, people just looked at Jorge as giant. Now, they saw him as a giant carrying another, sleeping giant.

Like a father carrying his son. . .

All the way up to the room in the elevator, and into the room, Emile slept, and Yume tried really, really hard not to laugh as he cooed in his sleep. He was probably cooing about something horrible and explicit, but he was still cooing.

Jorge laid him down, spread-eagled, on the floor. The rest of them sat around in the guys' room, eating pizza ("This tastes like melted MREs!"), and laughing as people hurt themselves on Eridanus's Funniest Home Videos.

"That's guy's an idiot!" Thom exclaimed, practically rolling around on the bed in laughter. Tears streamed down his face.

"Hey." Jun suddenly sat straight up off the bed he had been "sleeping" on. "Yume, do you have those snacks form earlier?"

"Hwha-? Oh yeah. . .they're over here." She rubbed her eyes and stumbled over to the table, dug around in the pile of bags, and pulled out two bags of snacks.
"If I eat these, will I get more lucky shots?" Jun asked as he opened a box of Lucky Sticks.

"Nope." Yume blinked slowly. She was exhausted, but she didn't want to fall asleep right there in front of the Spartans. Especially not when they were all riled up—who knew what they were capable of.

"Will these give me pimples?" Kat asked, eating a stick of Pocky. "I don't wanna wake up with a pocky face."

The team laughed, and the night was filled with six laughing voices. Yes, six, Emile was probably suffering head trauma and Yume had passed out from exhaustion long, long ago.

Jorge lifted her up and laid her down on one of the beds, covering her up. She moaned a little as she woke, but Thom drew the covers up over her head for a few minutes and she fell back to sleep. Or passed out. Either way, she wasn't moving. So everything had to be alright. Right?