CHAPTER II
"(You Ain't Nothin' But A) Hound Dog" -- Elvis Presley

The girl picked at the end of one mousy brown ringlet, smacking her gum with the regular precision of Chinese water torture. At her left side stood a tall, hairy dog, panting slightly in the warmth of the room. Enishi eyed the canine suspiciously. Ever since their recent incursion into the Authors' World, he was a little mistrustful of the working breeds.

On the orders of their illustrious leader, he had retrieved the girl and dog from their post-story limbo and brought them here for an audience -- although the reason why Sephiroth had wanted him to summon this duo eluded him. What possible service could a badly-dressed teenage girl and a shaggy Belgian Shepherd render to their cause?

Presumably to answer that question, Sephiroth himself glided into the room a moment later, his calf-length silver hair fanning out to fill the doorway behind him. Enishi drew himself up to subconscious attention in his leader's presence. Out of the corner of his eye, he watched the girl bring out a pocket mirror and examine her makeup, pursing her garish red lips to make air kisses at her reflection. At her side, the dog turned its head and stretched its jaw in a yawn, whining faintly. The upright triangular ears folded back toward the neck, and the dog resumed panting.

Sephiroth stopped before the girl, and towered over her with a faintly amused expression while she finished her cosmetic touch-up. "Ah, Rosaleen," he greeted her suavely, as she tucked the mirror back into her pocket. "I've been looking forward to meeting you."

The girl called Rosaleen tilted her head back to look up at his face. "Who are you?" she asked, sounding overwhelmingly bored. She squinted a moment. "Your eyebrows don't meet in the middle," she added crossly, and popped her gum loudly.

Sephiroth continued without missing a beat, as if he hadn't heard her. "I have a task for you to perform. I'd like you to..."

"Were you born on Christmas?" Rosaleen interrupted, still squinting at him.

The pause in Sephiroth's flow of words was barely an instant, but it was enough for Enishi to notice. There were very few people who had the potential to irritate Sephiroth that much, and even fewer who had survived the encounter to brag about it. Enishi cringed back a step from the girl, expecting something horrible to happen to her at any moment.

"...help me collect someone," Sephiroth finished his sentence, setting his lips in a cold smile. "It's an easy job, but I think it would be best if you and your" --here he glanced down at the dog, which licked its lips and turned away again-- "friend carried it out."

Rosaleen eyed him distrustfully. "Why should I help you?" she demanded. "What's in it for me?"

Sephiroth merely flashed his sinister, beatific smile, and from some hidden place produced a small object. It was black and glossy, about the length of a woman's thumb. It took Enishi a moment to identify it, because it looked so terribly out of place lying on Sephiroth's black leather glove.

"In your favorite color," Sephiroth purred. Rosaleen's gleaming eyes were fixed on the tube of lipstick, and Enishi could practically hear her salivating. Or perhaps that was the dog. He glanced down at the canine, still panting beside her leg. Now that he looked closely, it seemed as though the dog were wearing lipstick, too...

After what seemed an unbearable three-second inner debate, Rosaleen snatched the lipstick from Sephiroth's hand, opened it and cranked it up to examine the color. It was a blinding red, brighter than the paint the geisha used to color their mouths in Enishi's home town. Rosaleen could barely contain her glee as she capped the tube and hid it away in a pocket of her pleated skirt, but she remembered to assemble her face into the requisite scowl before replying.

"Deal," she announced to Sephiroth. "I'll do it."

Sephiroth nodded approvingly. "Excellent. You've made a very grown-up decision." He chuckled to himself at something Enishi didn't understand. "Oh, and I must say," Sephiroth added, gesturing to the dog, "your Tervuren is simply stunning."

Rosaleen's candy-apple lips turned down into a sullen pout. "He's a wolf," she sulked.

Sephiroth's eyes flicked back to the girl's face, and he blinked once, but his expression never cracked. Enishi marveled at his commander's perfect composure. "Of course he is," Sephiroth continued smoothly. "And a fearsome one. I'm sure he'll do nicely for the job. Now, if you and your pet will come this way, I'll have Ignacio show you your target."

He gestured elegantly, and Rosaleen preceded him out of the door, the dog padding along at her heels. As she disappeared into the hallway, Sephiroth's placid expression was replaced by a scowl.

"We must never, ever let her meet Dilandau," he growled to Enishi, before following her out of the room.

Enishi had a few seconds to breathe in private before Vanduri and Vergil interrupted his solitude. He glanced up as they entered, recalling that they'd had their own assignment to carry out. A mishandled recruiting mission had resulted in the accidental retrieval of someone unsuitable for their force, and they had been told to return him to where he had been found. "Did you get rid of him?" Enishi asked them without preamble.

Vergil just rolled his eyes, exasperated, and slouched into the nearest seat. Vanduri nodded stiffly; even the mage looked significantly annoyed. "He is gone," he confirmed. "We deposited him in the first Germanic world we could find."

Enishi's eyes widened. "You just dumped him somewhere? Not the place where he came from originally?"

Vergil groaned from his chair. "You don't understand," he moaned. "The yellow-haired freak wouldn't SHUT UP! That same song about the blue flowers, over and over again..."

Vanduri nodded solemnly. "We were nearly driven mad before we found that place," he confessed. "We could not stand the singing any longer. It was that, or kill him, and we thought this would be best."

"Besides," Vergil added, "he's probably happy there. Everybody else was singing about flowers, too."

Enishi's brow furrowed. "I wonder," he mused aloud. "I just hope it doesn't alert the other organization to our interference. We don't need any more run-ins with them right now."

Vergil snorted his disdain for their enemies, and Enishi decided not to press his argument any further. After all, the damage was done -- there was nothing they could do to alter it without increasing the risk that the SPCFC would become involved.

He just hoped that Sephiroth didn't think to ask him what had been done with the German folk singer.