She whistles quietly as she approaches Nel, tapping the other woman on the arm with her wrist as she offers her one of the two champagne flutes with a smile - bright, but not put on.

"Sooo, how'd the outfit end up working for ya?" Nel looks good, in her opinion. The suit look definitely suits her. "Any complaints? I'll be sure to remember them for next time so we can find ya something better."

And now, the far less important but also still relevant question. Yunaka wags her eyebrows playfully as she lifts her glass. "aaaand, what does your date think?"

[ WATER ] - The liquid of life, the quencher of thirst. Served in crystalline glasses. And what’s more dramatic than throwing water at someone’s face!

"Hey, Ferdinand! You taking care of yourself?" Normally, the enthusiasm all the students have is endearing, but she doesn't wanna see them partying themselves to death either! She offers him a glass of water and gestures for him to take it. "Don't be enjoying yourselves too much, now. You know the monastery's gunna make you guys be the ones to clean things up after."

“Professor Yunaka!”

Ferdinand accepted the offered glass readily, though the moment her warning settled in, his expression shifted in a way rarely seen upon his face: genuine alarm.

“clean up… afterwards?” he repeated, as though the concept itself had only just been introduced to him. “you mean to say the monastery intends to keep us here after the festivities conclude?”

his hand, halfway through lifting the glass, paused dramatically in midair. somewhere behind him, the ballroom lights shimmered gold against polished marble, laughter still drifting through the halls in warm waves. and somewhere within that crowd—

his composure returned almost instantly, though not without a visible trace of distress lingering beneath it.

“now, ordinarily,” Ferdinand began carefully, placing a hand against his chest with all the dignity of a man about to defend his thesis before a royal court, “I would consider assisting with the cleanup a perfectly honorable responsibility. in fact, I have often done so willingly.”

a beat.

“however.”

his gaze slid briefly aside, suspiciously toward the ballroom.

“…surely exceptions can be made under certain social circumstances.”

he took a very deliberate sip of water then, as though it might cool the sudden realization overtaking him. oh, he had asked for it, had he not? he even did clean-up during Cupido Bash! for fun! oh... he really had asked for it. “it would be extraordinarily unfortunate if one’s dance partner vanished only to be discovered stacking chairs and collecting discarded napkins at midnight.”

then, quieter, almost horrified by the vision itself:

“saints preserve me. Dorothea would never let me live it down.”

"can you believe it, professor? apparently, that man over there" — she points her chin in the direction of the scout — "is going around saying that he's the one who discovered me. he didn't. it was manuela. and not only that, but she actually took me under her wing."

disdain colors her words , and dusts her expression like the finest pressed powder. dorothea then shifts her weight with visible exasperation.

[ GOSSIP ] - For those who don't want to be the center of attention, sitting on the sidelines and observing those who do is a time-honored tradition. Exchanging thoughts with another while doing so is a rite of passage for a student—it is a slightly worse look for the staff to take part.

Marni is only half paying attention to Yunaka's story. She honestly should be paying attention, because news reaches her slowest of all as a resident of Abyss. She should be paying attention, but there's just something weighing on her mind that won't go away no matter how long she tries to ignore it.

"It's not that I don't care about what embarrassing thing happened to the king of Brodia the other day," Marni cuts her off mid-story. "But there was this guy who walked up to me just before you got here. Blue hair, he was making that face Mauvier makes. You know the one."

She pulls out two lilies from her bouquet, uses the stems to mime eyebrows, and pulls an inscrutable, somewhat miserable looking expression. The stem eyebrows really add a certain je ne sais quoi.

Azama gestures with one of the boxes toward Yunaka. An invitation... and a question both.

"Whatever do you think their logic was with this scheme?? Not just for a conversation piece...?" It'd be disappointing if so.

And yet! Surely it was not merely the handiwork of some bored lone thief. That many a box, if not the majority, have been said to have been found half full (or half empty if you're a silly pessimist)... it speaks to some manner of preplanning.

That said, curiosity shifts on a whim. Starry eyes crack open for fellow star-adorned comrade.

Alcryst thinks he'll always hold a preference for traditional paintings over photographs, but he loves the photo-artifex's ability to instantly capture moments of time. It's so satisfying to just point at something and have its image printed in seconds! He and Lapis played around with something like this many months ago, but he's overjoyed to play with the device's new improvements.

Lo and behold, as she pushes her way through the crowds to the other side of the deck, familiar silver becomes a familiar face becomes a familiar person in turn.

"Micaiah, is that you?" She should know better by now, but as soon as she sees those eyes she gets swept up in the moment. Yunaka rushes forward and excitedly takes Micaiah's hands before she can stop herself. "It is you! Wow, I can't believe you're here! Have you been settling okay? Is the boat making you sick? I- oh!"

Not her Micaiah. She's learned this before, running into other Emblems, but this is not her Micaiah. She drops her hands and jumps back, holding her own up in apology. "S-sorry! Sorry! That was...weird of me, sorry, I didn't mean to scare you."

Unfamiliar as she is with seagoing vessels, Micaiah quickly learned that it is a bad idea to wander the decks when a ship is rolling, and an even worse idea still to hop around on it. The sudden warmth of a pair of hands enveloping her own makes her jump no less than a few inches into the air and lands on an uneven footing as the floor shifts its angle beneath her. However, the grip around her feels trained and strong, and it prevents her from what would've been an embarrassing sight of falling flat onto her behind in front of a dozen fellow students before those hands let go.

When the initial shock passes, Micaiah realizes that the young lady before her seems to not only know her name but recognizes her visage as well. It is confusion that fills her first as she racks her brain in search of reciprocated familiarity, wondering if they have met somewhere before. When the query returns empty, she lets a smile of kindness and curiosity overtake her instead. The woman obviously means no harm, and it isn't out of the question for someone new to identify her given her somewhat widespread fame. Perhaps the girl is one of the Daeinian lives she touched through her actions; or, perhaps, she hails from the distant land of the legendary rings that she heard about thanks to Mauvier. Either of these thoughts sends sparks of warmth through her chest.

She replies with gentleness and sympathy, "Ah, please don't fret! There is nothing 'weird' about feeling excited over seeing someone you may recognize. Even if I don't share the recognition, it is incredibly kind of you to worry about my well-being, and I truly appreciate it. If it soothes you, the seasickness hasn't hit me... yet." Micaiah chuckles sheepishly, praying that she has willed those words into reality for the remainder of the journey.

She's too tired and sore to care about whatever threats Edelgard's retainer might try and throw her way. The minute she finds her, Yunaka grabs her by the shoulder and pushes her somewhere quiet, somewhere where they hopefully won't be seen by anyone who wants to intervene.

Her voice comes out in a furious hiss as she glares at the Emperor. "Is this your big plan? The war you wanted to stop the church?"

She said they wouldn't be hurt. And like a fucking idiot, Yunaka believed her at her word.

Rage and fury makes her hands shake. She clenches them tightly at her sides. "You said that nobody from Elyos would get hurt." She snarls. "If anything has happened to them...I'll be the one to pay it back myself, do you understand me?"

The moment Yunaka ushered her aside, she knew what would follow. It made sense, certainly— That, after indulging a secret as large as she did, the events to follow only seemed to align with sheer chaos and crimson flames engulfing all they once knew. She isn't oblivious to this reasoning. Even so, she will not take the fall. "No," she says in a harsh whisper. "You're mistaken."

For as frustrated as Edelgard is, all she can do is hope to sew the truth in a world tainted by lies; one that Yunaka may hope to understand.

"Recall the situation we find ourselves in." She keeps her words level; spoken in a hissed declaration than sentences for only her to hear. "If I was the one who caused this, would it not be foolish of me to stand here with everyone else? That only invites trouble, does it not?"

"Besides." Her eyes drop towards the professor's shaken fists, keeping distance between the two. "To accuse myself is to say the Empire is capable of all those foes and more that have stood in our way. Do you truly believe this? " But she knows who wants ribbons of doubt shredded apart. Who else holds a seed of hatred towards the church, sewn so deep that they continue to hide and manipulate from their well obscured shadows. She could tell Yunaka. Surely, that may ease the tension. Or, it may only make the grandiose story only stranger.