Pamela was up first and she carefully hid her word from view as she spelled it out. She was extremely smug as she unveiled it.
"What do you think, Raphael?"
He looked down at the board and glared at her after giving a shudder.
'RAT', she had spelled rat. Of course, she had. Ziva snorted and shook her head.
"That doesn't give you many points," she told the English woman.
Actually, it gave her the bare minimum of points. Three. Not a good start to the game at all.
Pamela shrugged, not looking particularly concerned at all.
"Couldn't help myself."
Raphael glared at her. "You are making fun of me!" he declared.
"Maybe."
That made him burst into a torrent of, quite frankly, rude French about the "barbaric English" and other words that were definitely not appropriate anywhere. Ziva actually learned a few new uses of words from his explosion. Always useful, even if she didn't know when she would ever be able to use them. Pamela looked far too amused by this. She always did take far too much delight in annoying him. Claimed it was "tradition" and how their countries worked. Whatever that meant.
Raphael eventually calmed down, though his face was still an interesting shade of red. Pamela held out the bag of tiles to him.
"Your turn," she said sweetly.
He glared at her and batted her hand away.
"Do not rush me. Genius takes time."
"You should be very quick then."
That almost started another argument but thankfully the subject was changed.
"Did you see that car that blew up on the news?" Liu asked. "It made me late for a class."
Ziva stiffened imperceptibly at that comment. Cars didn't tend to blow up a lot in D.C so Liu could only be referring to one car. One car that she never wanted mentioned around her ever again.
She didn't want to think of the brief amount of time where she thought Tony was dead. The time she thought his body was that charred lump between her and McGee and she was never going to see him again. No. She was not going to think of it.
"They never mentioned what caused it," said Fakhir and then looked curiously at Ziva. "I don't suppose NCIS knows?"
"What?" Ziva asked, jerking herself out of her thoughts.
"The car that blew up," Fakhir repeated. "Does NCIS know why it did or who caused it?"
"It had nothing to do with the Marines or the Navy," Ziva said quickly, which was true. Not explicitly anyway.
They were already under enough suspicion because of Jenny's unauthorised Op. There did not need to be any more speculation around it, no matter how innocent.
"Pity, it's not every day a car explodes."
Ziva wished she could share that sentiment. Her job with Mossad and NCIS meant that she had seen far too many exploding cars. They really were too easy to blow up.
"Why does it have to be the day I need to get to class," Liu complained.
"Murphy's Law," Pamela said knowingly.
Liu looked at her blankly. Ziva frowned, she had heard of that before but she didn't know why... Maybe Tony had used it?
"Everything that can go wrong will go wrong," Amina stated, not looking up from her tapping of her phone.
"How do you know that?" Pamela demanded.
Amina looked up and made a scoffing noise.
"I am not uneducated," that made Pamela flush with embarrassment, "but Amelia uses it all the time when it comes to her children."
Of course, she did. Amelia's children seemed to be very good at causing all sorts of chaos. Well, that was unfair. All children seemed to be good at that from what Ziva had observed.
"Your turn," Fakhir said to Ziva, nudging her.
Ziva grinned and resisted the urge to rub her hands in glee like the villains in Tony's old movies liked to do. She had been waiting for this - she had the perfect word. One that surprisingly hadn't been thwarted in her wait.
She added a 'P', 'U' and 'E' to Pamela's 'lag', giving her the very ironic word of 'PLAGUE'. The word of the day, it seemed. A very useful word too. It identified that Tony was in fact alive and the points it gave her pushed her into first place.
"Why is everything related to rats today?" Raphael complained with a whine.
"We don't control the letters," Amina said with an eye roll.
"But you can control your own mind. You are all obviously thinking of the nasty creatures."
The all burst out into laughter. That had to be the strangest thing Ziva had ever been accused of. Though she wasn't going to deny that it wasn't true. They had just been talking about them after all.
"We did talk a lot about them," Liu pointed out.
"I didn't want to!"
They just rolled their eyes at his dramatics. Raphael really was a stereotype sometimes.
"Just go," Amina instructed, poking him. "It is your turn."
"What did I say about rushing me!"
But at least he started looking at his tiles. It still took him far too long to decided.
"Ah ha!" Raphael declared excitedly as he finally started putting his tiles on the board.
It took him long enough. He leaned back and folded his arms smugly.
"I believe that puts me in first place."
They all looked down at the board. Ziva raised her eyebrows at the word while Amina snorted. He had put four tiles down, making the word 'CHEESE'.
"Now who's thinking about rats," Amina accused.
"Do rats even eat cheese?" Liu asked. "Or is that just a stereotype?"
"Rats eat anything," Fakhir assured her.
Liu didn't look very assured at that.
"I said no more rat talking!"
Ziva was surprised that Raphael didn't stomp his foot alongside his complaint. He did sound rather like a whiney child.
"It's your fault this time!"
Ziva tried not to sigh too loudly as they all devolved into more bickering. Why did she feel like "No rat related vocabulary" was going to be a rule for future games?
