Squall hid the paper between his bundle of clothes and began to approach the group. Instinctively, he knew there had to be at least ten more minutes before Selphie would barge in and so he faced a decision – did he try to stall so Quistis wouldn't be caught in her case attire or did he let things progress as normal in the hopes she'd change back by then?

As he inched closer, another thought took up space. Why did she cancel? What was bad enough to warrant that? Did his work phone go off for an 'emergency' Selphie wouldn't feasibly be able to discern was urgent versus one of the many paper-thin excuses and cutesy turn of phrases?

No, she'd find a way to accost him privately if she was unsure what constituted as urgent. There was still time before the game began in earnest and Irvine was here — he could have helped out in the interim if it held them up. Bent the rules if she had to. Selphie was always the last to abandon a sinking ship when it came to events planning. Maybe there was something on her end that-

"Holy. Shit. Squall."

Zell's loud voice instantly uncoupled Squall from his runaway train of thought. All three of them were staring at him with intense enraptured expressions as if he was in the middle of growing a second head.

"…Were you expecting something other than completely godawful?" he sardonically retorted.

"Well duh, we were. We're dealing with an unchecked Selphie here." the martial artist flippantly answered. "It's just that…how do I put it, if we didn't know you were, well you, this would work in an ironic hipster kind of way? I mean, you're pale as a ghost and have that disinterested youth vibe. It just…works."

Quistis got up from her seated position with her heart-shaped glasses in hand and silently put them on his face, a small smile blossoming on her lips as she walked back.

"There. Now you're even more hipster. Say something jaded."

While it would have been easy to give them what they asked for in a bid to run out the clock, lightning bolt of an idea struck him. It probably wouldn't afford him as much time but the allure was too great not to pass up the chance.

"I like dogs."

The complete lack of sarcasm in his voice earned him a few blinks. Good.

"Hot dogs are sausage sandwiches."

Predictably, Zell's eye started twitching.

"Sometimes I eat tubs of glitter glue when I want my insides to look prettier. Glitter is my favorite colour."

When even Rinoa, one of the few people who could confirm he had a sense of humour, tilted her head in disbelief, he knew his evil plan was having an effect. Now it was time for the kill before his own brain cells died off en masse from saying these things, even ironically.

"Live, laugh, love!"

"Oh my god, Squall. Stop it right now. We asked for something jaded, not something to induce multiple existential crises." Rinoa pleaded, going so far as to walk over and cup his mouth with her hand. Leaning over, she heatedly whispered into his ear, "…Don't force me to make out with you in front of them to keep your mouth occupied."

After she let the comment steep in his mind for a bit, she removed her hand and shot him a typical 'are you going to behave now?' look. He gave her a level look in return.

"We are going to have to go out of this room in these outfits that will garner massive amounts of negative attention from people who will not understand that we are prisoners." he told her in the coldest tone he could muster without veering into full-on evisceration. "And all puppies get old and die."

The sorceress jabbed her finger squarely into his chest, looking at him angrily for a flash of a second before she pulled in the reins.

"-Well played." she reluctantly conceded. "You got me there for a moment."

The distant drone of the key card mechanism got him before he could make a flippant comment in return. All of them understood his lack of response a few seconds later when the door handle let out a loud click and the door itself made a loud whine.

"…Heeeeeeey!"

The sorceress was the first to pivot on the spot towards the source of the noise. Zell bolted up at the sound and Quistis tensed up.

"Selphie why the heck are you—no, what the heck are you wearing?"

Squall turned around to see Selphie in a yellow and blue jester hat, complete with a body suit in a diamond pattern of the same colour with tall tan boots; the colour scheme was oddly reminiscent of her outfit from the war. Her hands were behind her back as she waltzed forward, smiling as if she'd done nothing wrong.

"Good news for you, bad news for me, I made a teeny bit of a big miscalculation." she announced. "I thought the convention gave the option to buy day passes for any day, not just starting tomorrow. Turns out that the only way you can access the complex today is if you bought the premium four-day pass. It's a bummer, really."

Zell did a bunch of half-finished hand gestures before settling on just pointing in her general direction.

"First off, convention!? Second off, what do you mean, 'it's a bummer?' – the real bummer is that you decided to take our stuff and forced us to do this. Give us back our stuff! I didn't lie to the border guard and basically broke the law just to have you steal my snacks."

"Chiiill, Zell. What do you think I have behind my back?"

"…His dignity?" Squall muttered in spite of himself, earning a playful swat on the arm, courtesy of his girlfriend. Thankfully, Zell did not hear or see this exchange at all.

"Dunno, a key card?"

"You're…half-right. What I have are key-keys!" Selphie practically screeched the last word as she dangled a Malboro keychain full of keys over her head, reprising her role as a wannabe game show announcer. "In room 716, you'll find a small brief case with four key holes on the top of it hidden somewhere. When you figure out where it is and the order of the locks, that case contains your original key chains plus one extra key for the hard-shell suitcase I used to stuff anything that wasn't clothes in it. The suitcases are all in the closet under a blanket."

After the explanation, she lobbed the keychain at Zell's head which he caught with ease and at the point of impact with his open palm, she revealed what was in her other hand – a small remote — and clicked something to make Zell's morph suit change to the same shade of pink as Squall's shorts. The martial artist nearly dropped the keys when he looked down. In rapid succession, Selphie pointed and clicked different buttons to turn the swim shorts into a gradient of white to violet, Rinoa's shirt to a black-and-white checkerboard pattern, the tentacle to light blue and one last click for a strong cotton candy smell to emanate through the air instead of the faint teenage funk.

"Pretty nifty, huh?"

"Pretty nifty but not nifty enough to make us overlook the fact you didn't answer Zell's question about the convention." Quistis pointedly added. "Why force our hands like this to attend it without telling us why? We would have checked it out with you had you asked."

"Ah, well, that's a long story. I can explain along the way back to 716 if you want. There's a really good reason, I swear."

"I somehow doubt that, but I'll take any explanation for this morning at this point." Quistis said, rubbing her eyes blearily. "Does everyone want to get changed so we can go now?"

"Yeah, I'll just throw my clothes back on in a sec." Zell chimed in, before turning towards the couple. "Squall, Rin? You coming with?"

"I will. I have to use the washroom too so I'll probably catch up with you guys later since I still have the 716 card key in my pyjama shorts' pocket." Rinoa answered.

"I'll be later as well."

"Cool, cool."

And with that, Zell scooped his clothes from the desk and retreated into the bathroom. Rinoa busied herself with gathering her clothes and with not much to do since his bundle of clothes was still in his hands, he cast Selphie a look.

"Did my phone go off at any point?"

"Nope. It was as quiet as if I cast a Silence spell on it. Or so I imagine since it was in the hard shell suitcase and none of you heard it."

"…Right."

Zell re-emerged soon after and the three of them left, leaving him with just Rinoa in the room. While she had her clothes bundled in her hands, she chose to sit on the desk chair instead of going to change.

"I find it weird that Zell nor Selphie made some kind of innuendo when you made no attempt to explain why you were staying back. It would have been more par for the course if one of them had." she commented as he shed the inner tube. "Then again, Selphie doesn't seem like herself so maybe not."

He raised a brow. "What makes you say that?"

"Everything about this." she said, gesticulating with a free hand. "We usually don't say no to attending these kinds of things she likes. At least Zell and I don't, at any rate. And it's not like her to overlook such a huge detail like a convention start date. That would have been easy to find on the event's webpage. It makes it even weirder that she went to town on a scheme like this and forgot the most basic of basics."

"It's because she had no time."

Rinoa repeated his own words back at him. "…What makes you say that?"

"Because what she said about Trabia was a well-crafted cover story with some basis in truth." he admitted, tossing the hat and glasses on the bed. "She orchestrated this in four days because I…was hired to do a brain-dead job being paid far too much money as an excuse to keep me around. And…it bothered me. Bothered me enough for Selphie to notice when she came back from Trabia a few days ago and asked if she could do something. I told her, 'just do whatever, Selphie' at 4 am. Nothing good ever happens at 4 am."

The sorceress said nothing, looking at him with newfound concern. He pushed himself to continue — it was now or never.

"I knew there was something off about the contract because it said it had to be me, no substitutions. Xu asked for a ridiculous sum of money during negotiations because it wasn't beneficial to Garden to have me sidelined like this without the income to back it up. It was accepted, no questions asked. They sent Selphie with me as a secondary to ascertain that there was no dangerous ulterior motive for the exclusivity because it didn't have anything to do with my particular skill set." he explained. "Once she assessed there was no risk, she was sent on an alternate task to farm for supplies in Trabia and help with some minor reconstruction at T-Garden."

"So…what was the reason for your client paying the primo price to keep you close?"

"The reason is that the client needed me around because he'd finally built up the nerve to make good on his promise to 'talk when it was all done' two years after the fact. The talk was to tell me I'm his son."

There was no shock present in Rinoa's face at his words, but there was empathy.

"It's ok to feel like you do about that." she offered before her expression dissolved into light confusion. "…you look surprised that I gave you that kind of answer."

"…I don't know what I was expecting. Everything about this is confusing." he confessed. "Every day is another hare-brained excuse and another attempt to gain my favour. He's even gone as far as offer to dig up information on Selphie, Quistis, Zell and Irvine's backgrounds using his connections if I wanted to help them out. I…don't know what to do."

"All I can say is that I'd be a ginormously-gigantic hypocrite if I were to say something like, 'he's obviously trying to connect with you after all this lost time - give him a chance' or anything like that." she told him before getting up from her seat to look him squarely in the eyes. "Just because someone is a blood relative or a quote-unquote 'nice guy,' doesn't mean you owe them your time – you alone get to decide that whenever you feel like you're ready to decide that. You. No one else. Not even me. Not even if you deciding cures world hunger or stops Lunar Cry."

It took him a few seconds to process the words but once they did, the burden he'd been carrying for the past few weeks lightened considerably. While he still had much to work out, it was nice to know someone understood his complicated plight.

"I…needed to hear that. Thank you."

"Any time Squall." she told him, sealing the deal with a small kiss on the cheek. "I'll be here by your side as you figure this all out – don't be afraid to reach out if you need to vent. Just…try to avoid making any decisions at 4 am ever again, ok? Galbadians call it the godless hour for a reason, you know."

In spite of himself, his curiosity was piqued.

"Why do they call it the godless hour?"

"Because no one ever has a good reason to be up at that hour. If you're out that late, something probably went wrong at some point or you're looking for trouble. If you're up that early, it's because you were forced to against better judgement or something unusual happened. It's the prime hour for weird and unlikely things to happen if you think about it that way. Galbadians call it the godless hour because it's like a time where there's no god to intervene."

"I've never claimed to be religious but after today's events, I think they're onto something."

Rinoa nodded in agreement.

"Amen, Squall. Amen."