'The drop site is compromised.'

He didn't see anyone, but they were waiting for him. Jiraiya kept an easy smile and swaggered on up the road.

'Did my contact sell me out, or is it a third party?'

Whoever it was waited until he'd stuck a key in the post box. The kunai thudded into a metal mailbox when he dodged. A postal worker inside looked up at the sound and screamed. She dropped to her knees behind the counter as the second weapon shattered through the glass that separated the boxes and the mailing area.

Jiraiya winced. "Hey, hey!" He batted a shuriken off course and clapped his hands into rat. "Be careful! It's business hours." The illusion he'd sensed melted away, revealing a minefield of traps.

His eyebrows shot up. "Rude."

A woman wearing the band of a Kiri traitor silently dropped off the ceiling with a jagged sword. He cursed and danced away. She rushed him with a grim look, because that was just how Kiri made their shinobi. He gripped the first kunai and wrenched it out of the mailbox with a tooth-aching screech of metal. He parried her strike almost lazily and stretched his foot out to trip her. She stabbed at it-

Movement behind.

Jiraiya leaned to the side- and the woman's comrade speared her with another kunai. She let out an indignant shout and put a hand up, too late.

"You should get that looked at," Jiraiya said helpfully.

He could see dirt under her blunt nails when she wrapped her hand around the handle of the weapon in her shoulder. She bared her teeth at him, because of course she did.

Jiraiya pre-emptively winced on her behalf because he could see where this was going.

The kiri woman pulled the kunai out in a spray of blood. He caught it out of his peripheral vision because two more shinobi were pincering him in. The next seconds were flashes of blood and steel- mostly their steel, because he was more interested in figuring these people out than impressing them with his repertoire.

Stranger two was male, with no headband at all. Number three declared current allegiance to Sunagakure, but that was probably not true. If Suna was accepting missions to attack Konoha, their ally, they wouldn't do it with village insignia on.

'This is a motley group. Could be what it looks like, but it is rare for missing nin from different villages to band like this.'

A lot of chakra was rising behind him. The kind of chakra that required his full attention. Jiraiya stole stranger 3's sword and kicked him into the wall in one movement. He was cutting out stranger 2's throat before he'd even registered the sound of bones breaking on impact.

The woman from Kiri was mid-summon, using a lot of blood. ...The blood from the wound near her heart.

"Shit," Jiraiya said passionately. He tossed the garbage sword aside as he lunged toward the scroll she was using, reading it as quickly as possible. Something sentient, something from a great lake -

He didn't catch any more and the first thing he thought of was a mirror seal. He smeared it over the seal with the woman's own blood, covering part of her seal and corrupting the whole thing. If he was lucky, it'd create a loop, making the seal useless by calling on the user's chakra instead of the beast she wanted.

But there was smoke, even as the missing-nin gave a strangled scream. It ended on a high, sudden note.

There was a squelch.

She couldn't sleep.

Regina dully weighed the situation yet again. Her battery was at 6% now. She could read a little while longer. Or she could lean out of bed and plug it in, but then she'd have to put the phone down and lay alone with her thoughts.

'I don't want to let my phone die,' she tried to convince herself. 'I need the alarm.'

It felt bleak as hell to even think about going to work in less than 5 hours. She needed to sleep, but she couldn't because all she could think about was things that made her miserable, so she kept her mind busy with reading, which kept her further from sleeping.

Maybe food would help.

Virtuous and bummed out about it, Regina left her phone on the floor to recover. Without turning on the light, she found her slippers on the end of her rug and stuck her feet in before she ventured out onto the hardwood.

She didn't have to step out barefoot to know that it was punishingly cold. That was all you could expect from winter here.

'I feel so weird.'

Regina rubbed at her chest, trying not to wince at just... she didn't know what, exactly. But she felt off.

Tomorrow was going to fucking suck. She should have been asleep three hours ago, but she wasn't, and she was exhausted but going to sleep was absolutely unthinkable.

She made it down the stairs with minimal creaking, which was good. But the fridge seemed utterly uninspiring.

Light caught her eye.

Regina flinched away with a frown, bringing a hand up.

'It's what, 3 in the morning? Who is up?'

She unlocked the door and pulled it open, trying to see what was going on. Someone's headlights, it had to be. But she couldn't see a car out on the road...

'It's coming from the other side of the house.'

Curious, Regina leaned out as far as she could without opening the screen door, but she couldn't see.

"I don't even think there's enough room to fit a car between the lake and the hedge."

Did... did someone put their car in the lake or something?

...Her boots were at the front door, on the other side of the house.

She glanced down at her white slippers and the pristine glitter pompoms at the tips. She hesitated for a moment- she could shuck off her shoes and just go barefoot.

'Fuck it. It's too cold. I can replace these if I can't save them.'

Regina opened the second door and slipped out. The night wind slammed it behind her immediately, but she was already padding out to see what was going on.

The light was gone.

God. If someone was in the lake, what was she going to do? Sprint inside to grab her phone to call 911? She shuffled as fast as she could without losing her shoes. She definitely should not go in after anyone. One more person dying in Lake Superior wasn't going to help whatever drunk bastard had careened into the water.

She cleared the hedge and stopped. She could feel her brow drawing down, forming lines across her forehead and between her eyebrows.

It was eerie quiet.

Her muscles were stiff. Regina had the unsettling superstition that she needed to stay as still as possible, that if she even breathed she would draw some unwanted attention.

Ridiculous. She breathed in.

-and gasped, grabbing at her chest. It was on fire! What was this, some kind of pain, a heart attack? No, it was too far up, almost to her shoulder.

She heard herself making a weird, high noise like a wounded animal. She stumbled back and fell onto the dirt. Her hand was wet. Disbelieving, she craned her neck to stare down, trying to see in the dark. But it wasn't dark anymore. The air was heavy and it stank like iron and salt and the light she'd seen before was ringing her feet, a huge spiral that dipped in and out of the water of the lake she lived too close to.

"This is some shit," Regina said, disbelieving. The light winked out to total darkness- and then it was daylight. She bumped down onto a tile floor and suddenly had full visibility.

Regina grabbed at her shirt and pulled it away from her skin-

"Freaky."

Her clothes were soaked with blood that had to be hers. But there was no wound in her skin. She leaned back shakily, setting her filthy palms onto the floor. And then she wondered what was under her legs. Regina leaned to the side to peer down and then would have screamed if she'd had any air. She scrambled back as fast as she could.

A dead woman grinned up at her, head lolling in a way that looked like she'd been dead when she fell and hadn't controlled her muscles at all.

Broken glass was sparkling around the floor, lit up in the sunlight and drowning in a puddle of blood. The woman was holding a big roll of paper- or her hand was on top of it, anyway.

A man was standing over both of them, and he was looking right at Regina. Her eyes went to his hands- he... he wasn't holding any weapon.

There were more bodies. Two of them.

Her mind was making an unpleasant connection between the three dead people and the very big man in the room. He did not look nonthreatening. He looked scary- he had weird clothes and wild hair and tattoos on his face.

She swallowed.

The man raised his hands, palms facing her, and he said something in a tone that was more bemused than anything else.

She felt her brow furrow. "What?"

He looked as confused as she felt, but he repeated himself. In Japanese. He was speaking Japanese, which, frankly, she wasn't that good at. She'd done one semester study abroad in undergrad. She was not prepared for this sudden test.

'I understood that he said the verb "to know" in the past tense. And he said "she." That's it. That is not very helpful.'

She did not understand what was going on.

Well. She knew how to say that. Regina opened her mouth and let out the saddest little, "分りません. 英語できますか？"

She never did find out if he spoke English, because his expression was suddenly furious. Regina flinched back but he was spinning around, leading with his fist. It crashed into a woman's face and straight-up reversed her momentum to send her flying through the jagged remains of what had been a glass wall.

'Where did that woman come from? Why was she attacking him? Which one of them killed these people?'

Regina couldn't breathe. She kept trying, but it wasn't working and black was flashing around her eyes.

The man straightened and gave her a worried look. "すみません。大丈夫だいよう、心配しないでね。"

She disagreed. It seemed like a really good time to worry to her. She stared over at the woman he'd hit.

She was still, laying splayed on the floor where she'd fallen. By the way that blood was spreading, it was probably a good thing that Regina couldn't see the woman's face.

'That lady is not going to walk it off. She is pining for the fjords. She is pushing up daisies. She is feeding trees. She dead. Dead dead dead what the absolute fuck.'

Her whole body shuddered. She tore her eyes away to look at the only other breathing person in the room- holy shit, was this a post office? Was she having a hallucination about a post office?

The murder-punch man gave her a smile that would have been reassuring if she wasn't terrified of him. He knelt down and carefully gathered up the bloody paper in the dead woman's hands. And then he turned away from her, took two steps towards one of the bodies-

and reached up to pull open a mail box. He emptied it casually, stuffing an envelope into a bag at his hip. He closed the mail box. Turned the key. And put the key back in his pocket.

'Is this death?' Regina wondered. 'Do I deserve this?'

It seemed like some bullshit to her.

The murder-man looked up, face hardening at something in the distance. He must have heard something the way he'd heard that woman attacking him from behind, because he was suddenly urging Regina on her feet. Terrified and baffled, she let him herd her up and out and into a run past a row of quiet, dingy looking Japanese-style houses. He glanced behind them, said something that was obviously a curse, and then picked her up. Like. The way she'd pick up an empty laundry basket.

She did not protest, nor did she have time to. Suddenly, they were going really fast.

Regina watched scraggly green bushes flash away and had a sickening realization hit the bottom of her stomach.

'I'm going to be really late for work.'

She did not adjust that well.

There were some things she was proud of, in retrospect. Namely, her sense of self-preservation was pretty strong. After about a week of being tugged around by Jiraiya, Regina decided that he was no harm to her. But it had still been a good decision to deliberately not be interested at all in the papers that he'd killed those people in the post office for. He had strong feelings about his letters and she was gonna respect that.

She had continued to respect it until he had finished burning all of the papers in the fire he'd made by breathing flames at some tree limbs he'd broken with his huge, horrifyingly strong hands. Because privacy was important. No other reason.

She'd also kept a fairly even head and locked down the screaming panic to deal with at a later time. It hadn't seemed like a good idea to risk annoying Jiraiya by crying all the time.

'Now I'm pretty sure he's more likely to comfort me than get angry with me. Still not ready to try it.'

Other than that, it was a goddamn mess. Traveling with Jiraiya was disorienting as hell. It was either a monotonous trod down dirt roads or being flung over his shoulder whenever he got spooked. He was only fun when they were in a hotel or restaurant.

To be fair, he probably would have been a better travel companion if they could understand each other.

She still didn't have a straight answer about how she'd arrived. Regina had risked his annoyance by asking him twice. She understood most of the words he was using, but putting them all in context wasn't working out that great. She was, like, 70% certain that his explanation hinged on a word she could only interpret at 'the fine arts'. The fine arts. Like. Some dickhead had been inspired to paint, and that had involved her traveling...?

Her mind shied away from any way to finish that sentence.

It was insane to think that she had gone from Minnesota to Japan because of the fine arts. It was even worse that she had the creeping feeling that this couldn't possibly be Japan.

Evidence for her being in Japan was as follows :

People in the area speak Japanese. (convincing)

Some people are wearing traditional Japanese clothes (cool. Is it Kyoto?)

other people are wearing clothes she can only describe as cool and weird, which could easily be a rural Japanese fashion movement that she hadn't seen while she was studying in the city.

A lot of things look old-style Japanese, like houses and gardens and farm plots and statues

Evidence against her being in Japan:

Social norms seemed pretty different. She probably would have noticed in Kobe if people were getting into fistfights on the daily

Magic: what the fuck?

The roads weren't paved.

Number 3 was a very strong point, actually. Japanese infrastructure was no joke. They were seriously on top of things. The priorities were sometimes frustrating and seemed backwards to a Westerner, but you could depend on even tiny winding mountaintops with no cell signal or houses to have paved roads. And a vending machine. She hadn't seen a vending machine since the post office and that was a really bad sign.

"気分悪い、"she said pleasantly.

Jiraiya gave her a concerned look. "何で何で？" He edged ever so slightly away, as if he thought she might vomit at any time.

Regina considered telling him that it was a different kind of bad feeling, but who knows? Maybe she would be ill. Better to keep her options open. She gave him a pleasant smile, feeling divorced from her body. At any moment she was going to float out of her skin, ascend this mortal plane, and she could just switch off the panic.

It was looking a little less rural, though. Gradually, the roads were becoming dotted with signs of life. People were working in fields to the left. There were occasional spots where someone had clearly planted roadside flowers, here and there she saw homes off along intersecting foot paths.

"どこにいきますか？"

Jiraiya took a moment to answer. When he did, it was pointedly slow and probably simple. "kuni' was easy to understand, but the bit before it was a bit weird. Some kind of metal? They were going to metal country?

Regina stretched her memory, trying to figure out why she knew that word. It wasn't gold, or silver. So... the next common metals in conversation might be brass, iron, steel, copper...

Iron sounded right. Iron country.

….kind of a stupid name. That's not even a shiny metal. If I got to name a country, it'd be, like... something pretty or noble. Iron just makes me think of dirty old swords that someone finds in a field in England.'

She paused.

'Or Thatcher. It also brings Thatcher to mind. Or the Iron Curtain.'

Cheery in the extreme.

"おい、おい!" Jiraiya jostled her companionably. "。。。ふりをするでしょう。心配ないで。。。"

Regina hoped that the words she didn't catch weren't that important and nodded. He was going to do something. Or something was going to happen. And he wanted her to not freak out about it. That was probably the gist of it. What more would she need to know?

He grinned at her, winked, and then became a woman.

She stopped in her tracks.

'I could have used a little more information.'

Jiraiya laced an arm through her elbow and steered her onward. "僕は有名人だね、" he mused. And then she didn't catch the rest. Presumably it was about the problems that he encountered because he was a famous person.

'Well.' She pushed her fried brain past denial or shock, because this place was going to continue to be impossible and yelling at it wouldn't help. 'I supposed that becoming a 25 year old woman would be a good way to avoid recognition. If he really is famous.'

...Regina risked a good, long look at Jiraiya. He was now shorter than her, but that made sense. She was fairly tall for a girl with German grandparents, so she'd be conspicuously tall for a Japanese girl. Other than that, his hair had become long, sleek, and dark brown. His odd clothes were now demure and professional, a navy dress with a white collar and shiny black shoes. His face was still slightly broad and his lips thin. Features that had been pretty attractive on him as a man made him a relatively plain-looking woman.

Jiraiya caught her looking. He fluttered his lashes and gave a giggle in his usual gravelly tone.

Hmm.

'I'd say it would be less conspicuous for me to do the talking, but I'm a 5'9" foreigner with a weak grasp of Japanese.'

Actually, Regina would bet that he had a plan for each of them. Maybe he had some magic that would convince listeners he was perfectly unremarkable. He'd probably have a disguise or good cover for her as well that would account for her unusual looks and lack of language abilities.

He was very conscious about when he wanted to make a scene or slide under a crowd's notice. She had to assume there were reasons for the really obnoxious things he sometimes did, because the equally inexplicable quiet things he did often seemed to be helpful. For one thing, he'd gotten her clothes that blended in the last village they'd crossed through. Her slippers were totally ruined, but her pajamas were in a tan canvas shoulder bag he'd scrounged up for her. That bag had come filled with cosmetics and accessories that she saw used in every town they stopped in. That was totally unnecessary. But it made her life better, and it helped the two of them draw less stares.

'If nothing else, I trust that he's competent.'

Jiraiya started chattering at that point. It was good listening practice, so Regina followed along and tried to participate. He talked about the landscape and things they passed, mostly.

She didn't catch all of it, and she definitely wouldn't remember all the new words. But she tried hard to seal away a few new ones and match words to images- apparently that was how onion looks in a field. And those yellow flowers were 'suisen'. Maybe they were daffodils. She wasn't, like, a flower expert.

It was definitely residential at this point. Maybe a kilometer or two ahead, about 5 houses were clustered relatively close. Before that, there was one small, lonely building near the left side of the road.

"それは鉄国の一番大きいな崗です、"Jiraiya chirped. His voice had gone up gradually as he talked. She wasn't sure when it had changed enough, but it sounded convincingly young and female at this point. "二百年前に、一人-" he cut off with a girlish gasp.

Regina startled, moving towards him instinctively. They were looking at the same thing. Someone had suddenly exited the building they were passing. That person gave them a stern look and walked over at a slow, deliberate pace.

She wasn't sure why Jiraiya seemed nervous. Personally, she didn't like the fact that the middle-aged man coming towards them was wearing armor. He had a stick thing at his hip that was probably a sword in the holder. At least he didn't have it out. Nerves made her listening comprehension even worse as the imposing stranger flagged them down.

He stood in front of them. Regina found herself drifting just a little behind Jiraiya as the man began asking questions. Names, where they came from, do thing- what they came to do, she corrected in her head. Oh. Maybe this was a border? Jiraiya said their destination was Iron Country, which heavily implied that before they were in a different country.

'I'm like... 98% certain that he is lying out his ass.' Something Jiraiya said caused the man to look at her. Regina gave a nervous smile and ducked her head a little. 'He didn't say either of our names. He definitely didn't say 'Minnesota' or 'America' at any point.'

Was lying to border patrol a reasonable thing for a famous person to do? It seemed like there had to be more to it than that. Maybe it had something to do with her- she didn't have any papers. But judging by the fact that Jiraiya was not infrequently ditching a town in the dead of the night at a sprint, he... he might be into something shady.

'Other than killing people,' Regina acknowledged internally. 'That seems like a byproduct of whatever he's doing and not the end goal. He isn't hunting people down. They seem to leap out at him from the rafters.'

Did that make him someone really important or valuable? Royalty or some political figure in risk from assassination? She stood a little straighter and wished she knew what was going on. Regina bowed along when Jiraiya did, murmured polite 'thank you's and 'excuse mes' on cue. And then they left the swordsman behind.

The assassination theory wasn't all bad, but it didn't feel quite right. Jiraiya seemed less like a victim running from danger and more like he was encountering danger in the course of his job. That sounded like a soldier, but they didn't do things alone for weeks at a time, wandering according to their own personal whim. Pretty sure.

'Or according to orders,' Regina realized. 'He got those secret papers at a place where people attacked him. Is he a spy?'

….Was she helping a spy get into this place? Was he up to some shady shit?

Jiraiya seemed to catch the look she was giving him. He tilted his pretty little head as if asking 'what?'

Regina sighed and looked away. She wasn't going to get a straight answer- first off, that would be a dangerous question to ask in a public space. Secondly, she probably wouldn't understand what his answer would be.

Also, she did not know how to say 'spy'. She could say... a person who likes secrets. Would he infer 'spy' from that?

'Ha. Probably not. Everything is bullshit, bullshit forever.'

Jiraiya traveled convincingly as a rather bubbly, bouncy woman for the next few days. He left the guise on the first night when they camped in the freaky blankets he pulled from literally nowhere. The second day they stopped in the early evening because he found an inn. She thought he might take the disguise off in the privacy of their room, but apparently he wasn't risking it.

He even kept it on when he went with her to the onsen- but to be fair, that made sense for a lot of reasons. Prudishness would be a really stupid way to blow his cover. Also, he quite probably didn't want to leave her alone for extended periods of time.

He put on a pretty cute act of girlish excitement when they dropped their towels and stepped into the hotel's bath. Regina had to tamp her smile down to reasonable levels of indulgent amusement. Japanese people did really like hot springs, as a rule. And they'd been dirty on the road for long enough that she was blissfully relieved to settle into the water and let her mind wander. There were other customers, but they didn't talk much. Jiraiya was too busy soaking in the beauty of the tree-ringed pool with wide-eyes, and she was drifting close to sleep.

'This is good,' Regina had the presence of mind to think. 'If everyday was like this, I wouldn't even care that much about the fine arts fucking me over like this.'

Jiraiya had to shake her to rouse her out of the pool. She went with sleepy compliance, mildly surprised to see that everyone else had left and the sky was dark.

The day after that, they made it to what must be the capital city. At some point when she wasn't looking Jiraiya dropped the disguise. Suddenly a bear of a man was walking at her left. Her heart jumped in the same instant that her feet skittered to the side.

He glanced down and tilted his head slightly in question. His silver hair blew in a chill wind, looking impressive and dramatic.

'He seems even bigger now.' Regina purposefully turned her head away, but she was hyperaware. 'Goddamn. Jiraiya is built like an entire football team. Who needs that much muscle?'

…She did not contemplate that deeply at all. Ever. Because he was at least, like, 40. And it didn't matter how much of a fox he was, because he murder-punched people who tried to look at his mail. That was a quality that a woman could not tolerate in anyone more important than a traveling companion.

"おい。"He cleared his throat. "仕事のために人と会う。一生に行こうか？"

Regina opened her mouth and then closed it quickly. Did she want to meet someone from his work? If he really was a spy, that seemed like an unnecessary risk. But he also seemed cautious. If it was something she shouldn't see, he wouldn't have asked her. He would have just left her somewhere. "行こう、"she agreed. "どこで会いますか？"

A moment later, she wondered why she bothered asking. It didn't matter where they were going to meet, because the name wouldn't mean anything to her. The answer ended in 'ya'- so... probably a bar? Or casual restaurant?

His work contact turned out to be a dignified older man who was unflatteringly surprised to see her walk in with Jiraiya. His smile dropped off into an open-mouthed double-take until Jiraiya rushed over to clap his shoulders and begin talking on fast-forward speeds.

She grudgingly followed them to the back of a seated-style bar, away from the counter. The work contact introduced himself as Ando and was gracious enough to swallow his shock to try to talk with her about the weather until Jiraiya returned from ordering beer and hauled him into discussion.

Regina sulked a bit before wondering if the problem was Jiraiya and not her.

She got more than her share of second-looks, because her facial features and height were out of the normal range even in bizarro Japan where people sometimes had purple hair or nearly circle-shaped eyes. But this specific series of covert looks between her and Jiraiya seemed less 'stealing chances to gawp at a silent, weird-looking woman,' and more 'trying to figure out how these two were traveling together'.

'Maybe Jiraiya doesn't have many friends,' Regina thought dryly. 'Because he murder-punches people. Just a thought.'

Even in her head she knew she was harping on that point a lot, but it had made an impression.

As the conversation wore on, Regina switched from beer to green apple chuu-hai so that she didn't wind up dead drunk. She stared deeply into the monstrous handwritten menu and ordered a lot of things on the basis of one or two words that she could read and curiosity about what the hell a dish might be. The men were distracted, but Jiraiya still did a good job at consuming whatever she ordered until a 'salad' turned out to be an avocado cut in half with some dressing and assorted greens ringing it on a plate. He absentmindedly stole some with his chopsticks, got the oddest expression, and turned to her with wounded accusation in his big dark eyes.

Regina blinked up at him and raised an eyebrow.

He frowned, raised a finger, and then stopped. Jiraiya shook his head with a sigh and ordered a truly horrifying array of things in the genre 'mysterious bits drenched in sauce on a stick.' Some of it was offal, one was quail eggs and ew, the texture was just so weird. It was everything she didn't really like about boiled eggs, except also it was soggy. Delightful.

But the onions and pork were crazy good. She ate most of that before Jiraiya knew it was there.

'I think they might be talking about movies,' Regina decided. 'Maybe it's code.' She wouldn't have been able to read it anyway, but when Jiraiya pulled out a thick stack of papers and laid it out on the table, she leaned back in her chair and channeled as much innocent disinterest as humanly possible.

Ando-san noticed this and gave her what seemed to be a sympathetic grimace.

Ahah. Apparently she'd guessed right about what her reaction to this spy shit should be. Regina gave him a smile in return.

Ando-san nodded to her in a very dadly way, and then looked at Jiraiya reproachfully.

His next question to Jiraiya seemed to be about her. She sat up very straight, holding up her head in a way that made her neck look long and graceful. More importantly, it made her feel a little bit queenly and she needed that right now.

She... she didn't exactly understand Jiraiya's response, but it did not involve the fine arts, her name, or her home. She had no idea if he mentioned any sneaky spy stuff, because she didn't know those words anyway. But. She was fairly certain it included the word 'model'.

There was no way to feel about that except confused and a little troubled.

The next thing that Ando-san said to Jiraiya was definitely scolding. Jiraiya tilted his head back and laughed. Patrons at the next table turned in their seats to see who was being so loud.

'Is he laughing at me? About me? Or is it totally innocent?' Regina crossed her legs under the table and tried to look like she was above the discussion. She had the distinct impression that she was the butt of the joke, or at least that she would want to say something on her behalf if she knew what had just happened.

Discomfort curled in her gut and she felt a little bit like she wanted to cry. Not knowing what was going on all the time was just too much, but there was no option for her to opt-out because a magic book or something had decided to screw over her in a specific and she couldn't understand any straight answer that she got.

"すみません。"Ando and Jiraiya sort of nodded acknowledgment when she excused herself.

Regina stood, brushed her dress down, and made a tactical retreat to the bathroom so that she could feel sorry for herself in privacy.

She only got to wallow for about 3 seconds. That was when someone dropped down from the ceiling and casually put a sharp thing at her neck. She went with it when a gloved hand pulled her back into their chest.

"I feel very compliant," Regina said, in the most pleasant tone she could manage. She did not crane to see the person behind her, because if they wanted her to see them they would have attacked her from the front. Wait, Japanese, Japanese. She should say something in Japanese. "こんにちは。あなたのために何することが出来ますか？"

The grip might have loosened just the tiniest bit. Which was encouraging. She might not have said "Can I do anything for you?" correctly, but she'd definitely said it very politely. Manners matter.

When everyone else is a knife-wielding lunatic they matter a little bit more, even.