‘Ah. Miss Florie. Yes. Thank you for coming.“ she smiled. "I’m sorry for not calling, but I figured you weren’t in your office. After all, that Enforcer is running around…. half naked…” she coughed into her hand, looking away.
“Not that I am insinuating anything on your part but…. You all asked for this so I am not going to judge.” she clicked her pen.
“That is besides the point.” she waved her hand. “I hope you don’t mind the…. intrusion of your day, but I wanted to ask you a rather…personal question.” Nyx stood up from her desk and started to pace the room.
“I see that you seem rather close to the other employees. Some I have had the honor of meeting myself recently…. and I just wanted to ask…um…Hmm…How to I phrase this…” she cupped her own chin in thought. “You spoke of trust and being afraid of others…..yet you seem to get along with most of the others…. Unless the footage I’ve seen is wrong…” she sighed. “But… what I’m trying to ask is… um.”
Nyx fidgeted a bit. “Well… How do you…Socialize? I know how to be formal yes, but….being unformal…. has seemed to be….of a challenge for me….."She blushed. "I’ve seen how calm and relaxed you are with the others… and seeing as we are…well… more so on the feminine side…. I figured I’d ask a woman’s perspective… Especially since the men here can be…. a tad eccentric.” she sweated.
“If you don’t wish to answer you don’t have to. But I uh… Hmm..” she clicked her pen again. “I’m am… .curious….”
Florie greeted the other with an amused half-smile. “Oh. Yes, I’m aware. I was watching the cameras. Quite a bit of revealing footage I have there...there were a few requests this morning.” Granted, she had watched that particular camera a bit more closely than the others, but it was still her job. She’d never go as far as to ask to see it.
‘Not insinuating anything’, Nyx said, but Florie wasn’t sure if she meant it or if she was just being polite; she must have seen or heard some things... “But I do wonder why you thought I was not in my office because of him. I might have a certain... ah, reputation for looking at attractive people, but I’m not neglecting my work for something like this. We didn’t exactly ask for people getting undressed in the hallways.”
Thankfully the enforcer dropped this particular topic, but the next one wasn’t any more comfortable for Florie... in fact, it was probably one of the most difficult to talk about. Nyx wanted to hear about her personal life? If you could call it that, it was still very much tied to the Aether Foundation after all.
Her pacing was a bit frightening too. Not so much because Florie felt like she was being put on the spot here (though that was true as well), but because interactions with coworkers were something Nyx genuinely didn’t seem to understand. And because she herself wasn’t the most social person either. If only Nyx knew she was almost as awkward.
“I suppose you aren’t wrong about me getting along with the other employees, but—how do I put this—this is very different from... you know...” Florie fell silent for a moment; sorting out her thoughts on this matter was no easy task for her. Even though she had spent nights on end reflecting on her connections to others, particularly the closer ones, she wasn’t prepared at all to explain it to another person.
“Just getting along with people doesn’t require much trust. I can be calm around them because I know they don’t know anything about me they could use against me. It’s very superficial.”
Florie sighed. “Unless you’re talking about the ones I’m close to... Then you need to consider who they are, and how much you can open up to them. And yes, this requires a lot of trust... the more you tell them, the more power they have to hurt you. You need to be aware of that power, and at the same time, willing and able to ignore what they could do to you.” Especially in certain constellations, she thought, but that was something she didn’t want to address just yet.
“And then I don’t always act the way I really feel, so what you’ve seen- Wait. You’ve watched the footage?” Nyx had actually seen her interact with people, not just observed in passing, but watched recordings? And just how much was on those videos? From flirting with Zenith to her collar talk with Ricardo to- dear Arceus, she hoped nothing of that was caught on camera.
Florie felt her face heat up while she was mentally going through every bit of footage she remembered that could possibly show something that was not meant to be public. Had she slipped up somewhere? She was familiar with the camera positions and did her best to avoid them whenever necessary. She didn’t make mistakes, at least when it was about something so... incriminating. At least some of the things she did were against foundation policy, and she didn’t feel up to explaining.... nor did she want anyone to see.
“W-well! I may act calm, but... a-as you can see... it’s easy to trip me up. Haha.” Goodness. This would just raise more questions.
