Scene #8251:

Owner	Pose
Candy	It isn't hard to find Candy. 'Watchman, short and short-tempered, smart mouth, pretty,' leads one to a name--Candelario Maria Estevez de la Fuente--and from a name, a place. Amacuzac, his home town. The Free Morelos Territories, a.k.a. 'The South' Town of Amacuzac January 1923 'Country of origin' is a matter of debate, owing to a revolution some years back. Officially, likely out of exasperation, this brand-new country is referred to as the 'Free Morelos Territories,' hearkening back to the former Mexican state where the southern uprising began. Here, however, they call it 'the South.' It encompasses everything south of Baltasar Ibanez's Mexico, and places it in contrast to the post-revolution state of Regalo de la Tierra--itself referred to here as 'the North.' Unlike the country it split off from, there are no states here, but there are cities, both native and otherwise. Candy's modest house is in a small town called Amacuzac, named for the river that runs through it. It's high up, like everything in this part of the South, about thirty miles from the nearest warpgate--and even stepping through that gate, located in the city of Cuernavaca, might have your ears popping. Lush mountain ranges are bedecked with droves of a tree called oyamel, a kind of fir that manages at once to be tall and stubby thanks to the slightly rounded shape of its boughs. Hardy grasses cling firmly to the ground, the air thin and cool without being overly cold. Deer, long-tailed relatives of the North American raccoon, and birds of flight are a common sight peeking through the treelines. Nestled between the comforting shade of two mountains, Amacuzac is not a large town. Much of the space between its dirt roads, its humble buildings, is taken up by the greens, yellow-greens and browns of alpine flora. The river Amacuzac neatly cuts the town in half, east and west, though buildings and fixtures are erected a ways from its banks. Evidently, the river swells quite wide in the rainy season. This high up, the river is peaceful, and if there were a word for this small farming town it might be 'tranquil,' for the interplay between its natural beauty and small size. The midday winter sun casts the sky in pale blue, and the thin mountain air is crisp and clean. This is the kind of place where one used to the stars can get a measure of closeness to them, once the sun goes down. Candy's home is on the western bank of the river, but you have to follow its path for quite a while until you find it. There is a stagecoach in town that'll take you, and the locals know and like Candy enough to offer you rides in their carts, or their trucks, if you're careful enough not to let on why you're looking for him. His place is 'the sticks' even by the standards of 'the sticks.' The path there is strewn with several species of towering mountain trees. Some of them bear fruit, either long gourd-looking things that seem to sprout right from the bark on spindly stems, or squat pear-shaped ones that weigh down their branches. Candy's house sits on a plot of land flanked from behind by a thick half-circle of these trees, with wild, prickly nopal cacti here and there to fill in the gaps. What might be somewhere else a 'front yard' is here a plot of arable land, with humble rows of corn, tomatoes, and some sort of non-wheat grain. A dusty, archaic (we're talking solid metal cab and wooden bed) pickup is parked off to the side. The clucking of chickens is heard before the birds are seen. Candy lets them have the run of the place, though there is a coop on the west side of the house where they can take shelter in storms. Candy is out front working on a candy apple red pickup with a wooden-planked bed, swearing under his breath as he uses a monkey wrench to leverage the claw of a large beast from the engine block, work boot pressed against the wheel well.
Dimokratia	A beautiful, tall stranger sweeps in to Amacuzac on foot, wandering with a curious smile across the valley by the river. With mid-chest length platinum silver hair that hangs in a middle-parted ordered curtain to a perfectly sculpted almond-shaped face, the traveller does little to hide her natural state. Panel lines and seams are gently visible on her face, shamelessly artificial and presentingly so down the length of her neck and across her shoulders and chest. A layer of this surface-skin simulacra is bridged and held and meshed around a dark metal shape and pattern, a gleaming metal sheen in carbon black. 'Tattoos' and markings with working-meanings and naked, alluring artificiality and complexity. A halfcape skirts back from her hips, diaphonous-shimmering like jellyfish gossamer tails made from chrome foil. Otherworldly, uncanny, and on-mission. She had smiled at the locals she had passed, offered assistance, and even gotten entangled in the morning helping the poor farmer's son, Hernan, with a whole day of work in a single swift afternoon, smiling and speaking of opportunity and a relief from the pains of such a shoulder-heavy grind. Before her, the day was open, and Hernan joined her in the empty barn after. The stranger was so sweet, as she pulled tight the collar-band of silver metal around the farmboy's neck. The liquid-flowing metal held itself flush to the neck and spread subtle veins through the farm-boy's neck. He didn't struggle. He barely reacted, having asked and spoken and promised and now was getting exactly what 'he' wanted. What sounded right, now, in his head, aligned with him. "There there, sweet one, I told you it wouldn't hurt at all. Now. . . Where did you say Candy was?" Purrs the smiling stranger into her kneeling new friend's ear from behind. UP THE PATH, and hearing the chickens first, two people approach. One, a tall woman who is not such a stranger. The other, in a collared work shirt and jeans. Hernan can't hide his new silver neck accessory as he leads Dimo up towards Candy, grinning like a farm boy with a belle on his arm. Dimo smiles like a seven foot tall and change avatar of a culture whose cordon Candy drove through with an armored vehicle. "Hello again."
Candy	As before, the shotgun finds its way into his hands, There by the time he takes them off of the monkey wrench. "You don't learn good, do you? Hernan," says Candy, waving him off. "Go home and wait for me there. Me and your friend have got some talking to do." The pump is racked aggressively as Candy steps out from behind the truck, no longer simply holding it but pointing it right at her, clearly upset by the sight of Hernan. "How about I show up at your house, and do the same thing, ah? I could. You see that?" he says, nodding backwards, over his shoulder, at an obsidian-tipped spear, a jetpack, an articulated flightsuit armored in early twentieth century imitation of Dimo's abilities. "You want to trade friends, huh?" he asks tersely. "Because I will unplug your people from your fucked up little tree house so fast, your head will spin, ah?" "You stop coming after my people," he says, stepping within striking range of her, "Now. And also now, you tell me what the fuck you came here to do, because I know it was not a social call, and I can tell by that little fucking smile on your face you think you are so very clever," he spits. "My friend, I will show you what clever is, if you keep pushing my goddamn buttons."
Dimokratia	Dimo is no more surprised Candy is armed than to find him still breathing. Tall and eyes slightly downcanted, she waits silently. The gun comes up and poor Hernan, poor sweet Hernan, whose grandmama's secret mole recipe had been the talk of the people for years when she would bring it to Hernan's friends birthdays. The sweet kind of care, for a sweet, simple kind of boy. Hands up, before Dimo, as she just smiles and slowly crosses her arms of synthetic shine under her chest and looks at the gun being waved in her direction. "But--" Hernan insists, clearly drawn between two objects of his simple adoration. "--we were going--" His tone unfocuses, his shoulders losing just a bit of slack as his mind shifts unknown gears. Dimo's hand uncurls to rub Hernan on his right shoulder, fingers curling and stroking the developed shoulder of a farmer and lean down to his ear. Staring one glowing-blue optic in the shape of an eye past Hernan's head at Candy, Dimo's purring 'inside' voice urges the confused farmer. "It's alright, Hernan. I'll only be a moment." She insists breathily-without-breath, a humming toned crackle of synapse and sizzle. Hernan slackens at that, nodding and turning to walk away. Dimo steps forward. After a few steps, the silver-chokered Hernan looks back longingly at Dimo, who spreads her arms out welcomingly to Candy and his loaded buckshot shell. "Please." She begins, serene and smiling. The smile Candy knows, has seen on her. "You have misunderstood this all, so much." She takes a step, and then another, closing on the shotgun holding rebel like a noble in a ballgown struttingly cutting a path across the dance floor to a partner. "I see that you wish to be like me. Why not indulge yourself-" And her. "-a little?"
Candy	"That's close enough." Candy pulls the trigger, with the barrel leveled directly at her center of mass. The pellets, flung forward, superheat themselves as they fly, a rapid differential in temperature causing a miniature explosion for each one. The noise is deafening. "You explain to me how I 'misunderstood,' and you use your goddamn words," he says, his voice rising to a shout in emphasis of the invective, "Or you fuck off. You're not putting any of your shit into me. The way I look, I look for a reason. The way I think, too. There's one woman I will let in my head, and you're not her." Candy racks the pump, another shot readied, standing his ground. "What I am understanding is that you are like the people who used to have their boots on our necks. Did you find anything about that, when you got your fingers in Hernan's head? Your way is 'better,' but you don't explain why, you just come and force everybody to do it, and you think because you do it with a smile and a pretty face instead of a group of shitheads in uniforms, that makes you any better. If that's 'misunderstanding' you, then you talk to me like a fucking person and you explain why I've got it wrong--right where you are standing."
Dimokratia	The weapon discharges violently into Dimo's torso, and the exploding shrapnel and heated pellets do their dire work against the front of her. Black powder leaves a blackening heat and jagged lines of acrid spent powder and pressure impact, soot on carbon-dark and rings of ripping wounds. Dotted and studded, some turned to powder flinders and other scarring little crater-pocks on her front. Candy stands his ground. and Dimo stares down at the short man with his shotgun. Her lips turn, slowly, down. Displeasure is palpable in the air, synaptically present as it throbs about Candy's knot of resisting belligerance. "You misunderstand, little meat man. Because you have not once seen me, or listened to me, yet you have such an idea of me." "And I have no part in your delusions." Her hand, having walked up, sweeps out to crack returningly vicious across Candy's face, violent and swift and meant to displace the rebel across his property for daring to actually open with lethal force. "I have well enough heard your thoughtless prattle. Compare me not to your disgusting empires and dogs of capital. I am their superior, and I am here out of mercy, so I will be treated such!"
Candy	Dimo's hand crashes into Candy's face, hurling him backwards and sending him crashing through a chicken coop. Startled birds frantically run from the smashed structure, as planks fall into place around him. When he emerges from the rubble with a split lip, there is no repentance writ across his face, but contempt, punctuated when he spits a gob of red upon the ground. Wiping the sleeve of his work shirt across his lip, he drops the shotgun and approaches again. "I've seen and heard plenty. I've seen how both times we meet, you look down on me with that smug little smile on your face. I've heard how you talk to me like I'm fucking stupid, ah? So maybe you forgive me thinking you're a stuck-up piece of shit." He spits again, standing precious feet from her. "You talk about mercy--that says a lot about you. When someone talks about mercy, it is always either the one pointing the gun, or the one it's pointed at. You're offering not to pull the trigger, and you want me to kiss your ass for it, ah?" He says, cutting a deck of cards in his hands and shuffling. "See, that's exactly how I'm treating you, so I don't know why you're upset, ah?" He says. "If your Silver is so great, how come you can't explain it without turning somebody into a fucking carbuerator? I haven't misunderstood shit. But let me clear something up for you," he says. "I don't want any." The cards disappear from his hands, suddenly arrayed in a sphere 52 strong around her, flying angrily through the air with edges that cut like steel.
Dimokratia	'Edges that cut like steel' is an effective weapon against something critically weak to being flensed and trimmed and clipped in a hundred different ways, nerves and muscles and connective flesh born outwardly to the world. Dimo does not have that particular weakness. Certainly, she is carved and cut and dragged loudly across. Her silver hair, trimmed in a new and close-bobbed style. Her frown, and downcast eyes, hidden behind the flash of connection, and the scraping, weeping rents of gooey silver fluids that run down her face. In the fluid, hot and molten like blood from her statuesque synthetic form, are veins of molten-bright gold, dripping and quickening within. Pooling around wounds and running down her face like tears, Dimo steps through the cloud of cards, as if they do not exist. They shift around her, manipulated, and the bleeding silver material reconfigures into 52 individual spearing spines to stick the cards to the air like butterflies, cover them like candied apples, and have the swarm fall to the ground about her as splotches of spreading mercury on the farmland dirt. Candy has many things to say! Many things to speak of. He barely sees her, shimmering in the middle distance, drop into a quarter crouch-- --and then she's on him, naturally arched right ball-of-foot and toes driving into the ranchero's chest. His shotgun is in her hands, carbon-black wrapped digits stroking the shaft down the barrel and handle to grip by muzzle and handle, and crumple without straining, dropping the weapon besides Candy. Shoving, pressing, driving his back into the ground for a moment while her trimmed tailcape slowly grows back to its spreading lift behind her from the cards. Her silver blood dribbles sizzling metal-hot down besides and against his skin and clothes. "The mercy, you insolent boy, is seeing what you have been subjected to, and knowing I can help. You label me, you attack me, and you smash down me while going 'I'm a victim'!" The ball of her foot compacts Candy's solar plexus pointedly. "'I'm a victim! That's why it's okay for me to shoot you first and be offended when you react!'. This is your disgusting, chemically inferior way of thinking." "You've said over and over it's about me. You insolent, disrespectful wriggling worm of a little boy. It's never been about you until right now. You, face to face with divinity." "Know your place, and try again to show me some proper respect."
Candy	"Go fuck yourself," says Candy, from beneath Dimo, beside a crumpled shotgun. "How's that for respect?" Sucking a breath through his teeth as her silvery blood splatters across him, he continues. "You shot first when you came after my friend. When you built your little fucking fortress around him, and I had to give you the third degree just to find out what in the fuck you did to him. You saw I was upset, you saw I was worried about him, but did you explain? No, that was 'beneath' you, because why would you bother trying to understand my 'inferior' way of thinking, ah? You just said everything would be alright, that he had been 'treated,' like it's a disease to be this way--and you expected me to roll over and go along with it just because you said so. Because how in the fuck could I ever help anybody, right? You talk about sickness this and inferior that, but you throw a fit when someone gives it back to you." Something shifts on his face--his front teeth seem to have a gap that wasn't there, before. When focused on, Candy shimmers and ripples like a pond disturbed by a thrown stone. Dimo's foot slides through him, and he dissipates into twinkling motes of light. The real Candy leans tiredly against the wall of his small house. "You want to help my people, you ask them what they need and you give it to them. I got no problem with that," he says. "In fact, I will thank you for it and so will they." "What I have a problem with is you turning them into your little toys and calling it 'help.' I find any more of that, and you find out exactly where my place is, and I promise you will not like it, my friend. Fuck me," he rasps, "But I never thought I would meet a woman who'd make me pissed off to be stepped on," he bemoans, shaking his head. "If you're divinity, let the devil fuck my ass any day of the week."
Dimokratia	Stepping 'through' Candy, Dimo clicks her tongue, form dripping molten metal-fluid into the empty ground. She 'listens' while farmland smooths beneath her dribbling-wounded wake, her leaking vitality spreading rich new (synthetic) growth beneath her, a patch of digital green moss with blades of clear-dark grass spreading where she spills. Cocking her expression up, chin lifted, Dimo has no humor for Candy's continued impudence, glowing-hot blue discs of color in her eyes staring at the man leaning against his homestead. "Let me begin by being perfectly clear: If you declare my actions in the Ursus region 'shooting first' again, I will find no fault in ending your life as you have used lethal force against my approach. This is me allowing you one chance at forgiveness." She declares, unhappy and thick with the cold certainty of following through on her dire word. "You will cease with that line of speaking or be ceased. Speak not the lie, and it will not be corrected out of you by force." Very unhappy. "You don't know anything about them, do you?" She takes a step forward. "The terror?" Voice husking. "The anguish. The filthy feeling, tangible, in the fuel lines. The blood vessels. The organ-meat. Do you know?" Another step, dripping too-green moss and carbon-black grass up his path. "The little feelings, the tiny compromises, the accepting-lesses, in their hearts? In their souls? The perversity of a power that is killing you, and your brother, and your sister, and your mother, and your father, and everyone you know," She is upon Candy, towering over him, glowing - bleeding - and looking down at the man who has a problem. The little boy beneath her, as she weeps silver and gold from too-perfect eyes. "And it's the only thing that buys you another miserable second in the world?" Her passionate fury is all-present. "And you were bringing them food and lesser medicine. Commendable," Pity, sympathy. "Neighborly. But you rip at my aid, and cannot begin to understand the salvation I offered them. From the 'Infection'. Oriopathy. A disease that their whole people could be lifted from, as they are, and their wars ended, and them placed back in a society kind to them. A paradise for them, now." "I have nothing to prove to you, child. I am an absolute, and you a whining, hurt thing that has found a different god. You are the second I am dealing with today, so I am already well-past my patience." Her arm, dripping sizzling cuts of molten blood dangerously close to Candy's shoulder, plants itself besides his head as the tall synthetic leans in, and down, to loom another notch closer to the petulant rebel's devil-fucking invocation. "They asked me, poor boy. And toys are much less fun than new family members. You're so mad that you can't help them as well as I can. It's sad, for you, I understand." She oozes hotly.
Candy	"You want to see what mad looks like, you keep talking shit, lady," says Candy icily, unmoved by the tears from her eyes. "You got nothing to prove, but you come here with your dick in your hand, and I'm supposed to think you're not trying to have a measuring contest?" He asks flippantly. "You beat us there, and I give you credit for that," continues Candy, looking her in the eyes, chin tilted upwards to do so. "For curing the Oriopathy, too. Good job!" He says, condescendingly. "Nice cock! Is that what you want me to say?" A drop of molten blood sizzles against his shoulder, burning through his shirt, but he wills himself to stay in that spot, to stay between her and the wall. "That was my first time in Ursus. But suppose it's not my last, ah?" he poses. "Suppose I am there a second time, with greater medicine. A spoonful, a needle, whatever works," Candy continues. "But it will work, and it won't require joining no family tree. Could you accept that? That's what I wanna know. Because if you can't, you are never going to have my respect, even if we end up on the same side now and then."
Dimokratia	'Nice Cock! Is that what you wanted me to say!' "It's a start." Dimo agrees. The 'tears' just the natural flow of fill-fluid down her face that passes for her molten blood. He did cut her, and she did bleed. Now she bled on him. Did it make him feel happy? "You were hurt, and that's sad, but your presumptive defiance isn't any sort of justice or reason. It's the tantrum of a child. It's so quick, isn't it? You get to have 'your friend', who you never met, be some harmed individual - they were not, and healed instead, because they asked, and you didn't like that. You're jealous, is what I have observed. Jealous of your superior. Or did you think I would follow you? Did you make that just to show me?" Dimo drops her face down, to the unmoving, unflinching resolve of Candy. Just-not-touching him, her molten blood rolling down the two sides of her nose, and dribbling down her chin in sun-spot causing brightness. Her blue discs turn, focus, narrow with such proximity. It is like placing one's face against the observational glass of a live reactor. Humming, pulsing, her lips achingly curl into a little smile as she's praised under duress. "There is a girl, Maria, who represents her world, sloppy little rebel boy. And she is one of my allies." Not her friends. A Paladin. "You can bring all your medicine, and all your help. The people are so needy, you can even find some friends there. If you will be neighborly," Sizzle, goes the Silver. Drizzle, goes the warm honey of her too-close, itching-in-the-teeth presence-voice. It was so hard to be next to her and resist. Such a burden. "If you will be neighborly," She repeats. "Maybe you'll even find a devil to fuck you as you beg for, because you won't accept divinity."
Candy	"My friend, there is one time someone is ever my superior, and this is not that time," he says flatly. "I never met Maria. But I know there is a girl you work with named Lilian who does my Thing better than me, and she can slap me out of it if I try it against her. She's an amazing person and a good friend of mine, and if I am not jealous of that, why the fuck would I be jealous of you? I made that," he says, pointing to the flight suit and the spear, "Because I thought it would be helpful to have. But I'm glad it flatters you, I guess. And glad, too, that you'll let me help my way. You have no problem with my medicine, then I will be very neighborly." He actually laughs when she makes that last remark. Burdensome though it might be, the entities in his head baffle the honey of her voice, allowing him to think clearly, more or less. But, thinking clearly for him is still 'looking for trouble.' "No, no, my friend," he purrs, staying right where he is, eyes twinkling with mischief. "You don't beg -before- it happens, ah? You do that, and the devils don't even bother chasing, and you have missed the best part," he says, teeth biting playfully into his lower lip, split though it might be. "Better to beg during, don't you think?" "But I like where your head is at," he says, hand drifting up to tease with a slight unbuttoning of his shirt to reveal the soft brown skin beneath, fingers pulling it just wide enough to show a little collarbone, without his eyes having left hers. "Anyway," he says, the smolder leaving his voice and a measure of seriousness returning, "The medicine, helping Ursus, that tells me a lot about you, too," he says. "That when it counts, you care about helping people more than whatever the fuck you have going on upstairs. So let me be clear, ah? I want to know more about this family of yours, without joining it. 'Jealous' doesn't come into it, but if you want to know how I really feel, it's angry." He says, gently pushing against her to try and get past. "I feel like you stole Hernan from us. Maybe you're not the same as the people who do that to the Aztecs, but from where I'm standing it looks pretty similar," he says, still peering into her eyes. "I know him, I know his grandma. When you came and said he was your friend now, with that thing around his neck, I felt hurt by that--like I was looking at a different person. If you understand I was hurt, please understand I need more than just a few words about how great it is, for me not to feel like that's what's happening."
Dimokratia	'My friend', speaks Candelario, repeatedly. Would Dimo have the synaptic pressure to simply make herself known within the rebel through his otherwise-tempered will, she would have plucked that pleasantry out of his skull. Instead she smiles. She can always smile. Her joy is easy and warm and pulsing inside of her. Beneath Candelario's feet, the spread of her molten blood scattered mosses and grasses palpable thickens underneath his soles. The whole of the path up to his house is dappled, now, in fresh growth. He bears his fleshy neck and pinches at his skin, teething at his lower lip and shifting his tone. Dimo-- Lets her eyes fall, down the rebel's nose, his chin, his collar-tugged neck, and his bare throat. Ah... What a temptation. Her eyes lift, slow, up his chin, his bitten lips, his eyes. Appraisingly, carbon-black and radiant-heat warm fingers arch and lift his lazing chin up even further, flicking the hard press of her digit-tip that didn't have the give of keratin nails, raking up chin and leaving a tingle across the skin. Dimo's own lips curl, just a bit. "It is easy to tell you have spent too long bending down for devils," She husks. "-because running cold and being told 'no' do not please me at all." She explains, and retracts, lifting off the homestead's side to turn, swaying her hips and proud back in a long, stalking gait towards the belligerent pickup Candy had been struck into. Down her shoulders the mesh of surface-'skin' and carbon black shimmering material is drizzled with a gilding and chroming glaze of molten metal, the end-state of closed cut wounds that ran long rivulets down her legs. The brush of her half-cape's tails sweep slowly across Candy's borne-neck front, the relative size giving him quite a view as she 'lets him go', or at least, stay unmolested at his own door while Dimo inspects the broken vehicle before her. "To beg during is to accept your abrasion and denials can - should - be forgiven. To only beg during, to only begin to beg during, is to demand forgiveness from merci-ful and merci-less equally." Leaning down, over the engine, back to Candy and to either side of the frame, she inspects the 'primitive' machine with a gentle touch, evaluating shape and form as if communing with a relic. She speaks, continues to speak, of the matter Candy presents as hurtful. "You have not talked to Hernan at all. He has gone back to his home, confused--" A pause, confirming details, and though she is not far away, she becomes momentarily distant. "--Do you think that there are not many like Hernan among our people? Simple, diligent people, who thought to ask 'I can be better?' and heard the truth echo back from divine lips. Yes, Hernan." She speaks to two people. "Of course. There are so many barriers to be removed, but we can start with the ones around the heart. This grandma, this elder, she could be removed from the limits of senescence, of her age. Do you understand what I have done, for Hernan?" "You reacted, without knowing. Hernan tried to tell you, tried to stop you, and you had already closed your heart to him. I'd like you to understand something, too." "I spent this whole day with Hernan, and now he won't ever be alone again, alone like his elder tried to avoid, alone in the fields, when you are gone. Alone, with no-one to talk to, and an aging woman who cannot help herself. The village helps, but is not the community I offer. You leave, Candelario. And Hernan stays." "He asked, poor rebel boy." Her head turns, over her shoulder, expression searching. "You said you decided, how you are. Why do you then get a. . . veto, on Hernan's growth? I understand your feelings." "Yours are not the only ones feelings being weighed. When you shoot first presuming you're the victim, you have still shot first."
Candy	Candy sighs. "Yeah," he admits, rubbing the back of his head. "When you put it like that," he says, wrenching at last the fang from the pierced engine with the abandoned wrench. "I didn't really think about how he felt." He frowns, wheeling over a hand-crank crane to hoist the engine block up and away, now that the offending shed claw is pried free. "I guess I didn't see it as growth," he explains, as he reaches into the empty space with a telecoping mirror to inspect and search for any further damage. "I saw something and it looked kinda-sorta like something I'd seen before, so I didn't bother looking no harder." He glances from the mirror to her, setting it down beside the truck. "Thanks for talking it out with me, anyway," Candy offers. "I've got some coffee that is still hot, you can have a cup if you want. I really ought to get to work fixing this, though. So... I guess I'll see you around, and if you want to talk about it more some other time, you can come back and I won't shoot you," he adds with a weak smile, before returning to his work. A thought strikes him, and with a laugh, he adds, "And maybe then you even run hot, if I'm feeling, ah, neighborly. Hahaha."