The fact that Lauryn walked away without getting mad at her was enough for Elsie to think that the matters of money had been waived, at least for the time being. She did wonder if Jekyll was going to have a conniption over the massive tab they were inevitably going to run, but she only wondered in the curious sense, not with any sort of worry. Why should she? It wasn’t her problem anymore. Besides, she had other things to think about now, like the sheer number of her companions who had just walked in, or, worse still, how most, if not all, of them were about to drink poor-quality booze.
Elsie managed to restrain herself on the latter point, though, mostly because she got a particularly mean stare from Corbin that didn’t let up even after she said “What?” all innocent-like. The rest, of course, was her wanting to know just what everyone else had found out. Even though some of them seemed to have ignored her initial approach of a question, that didn’t mean she couldn’t try again. To nobody in particular, she started, “What’s the deal with-”
“Maybe you should talk to them, like, individually,” Corbin said. “They might respond better if you single them out.”
“That’s no fun,” Elsie said.
“Didn’t say it was.”
She would have gone over to Tricky, the one person who had even just returned her greeting, but he seemed more interested in Lopt and Alexandre, and, by extension, whatever card game they were about to play. Not that she wasn’t interested too, but Corbin had said “individually,” and while he certainly had been rude about it, he still was kind of right. She didn’t need vital information passed around in addition to chips and cards. One would just distract from the other.
That left Wada and Lachlan left, each hanging out all by their lonesome, one at the bar and one just flowering on a wall. What was she supposed to do about that besides “Wanna split up? You take hammer boy and I’ll go talk to Lach?”
“Sure,” Corbin said. “Although, if you kiss, you have to tell me all about it.”
Elsie laughed. “Same to you,” she said, and, with that, she left her familiar to his own devices. The last thing she heard him say before tuning out to focus on her own conversation was, after hopping over to Wada’s portion of the bar, “How was your first purview of the place? You learn anything interesting out there?”
Lachlan looked a little sad, Elsie thought. She didn’t have the best solution for that -- happy spells were notoriously fickle, anyway -- but the next best thing, she was sure, was to just get nearer to him and just start talking. “Lach, hey!” she began. “How’s things? I’m pretty excited myself to stay up the whole night looking for monsters, what about you?”
She leaned in and put a hand on the wall to balance herself. “Oh, I guess also I learned why this place is named The Naughty Crow. Would you believe it’s named after the bartender there? She won’t tell me what she did that was so naughty, though. Little disappointed about that, but, you know, it’s whatever.”
It was a two-pronged attack, really. Either she got to learn more about the monsters or she’d get to do more gossip without Corbin’s supervision. What could be better? Maybe this would be fun after all.