“I caught the girl!” Felix calls out to the first Aero Army soldiers we see, dragging me along behind him. I’m struggling, because I have to, but I’m regretting it already.

Look, I may have been in a few… situations, okay? I’ve been tied up before, once or twice, but generally I have the ability to make myself thinner in order to escape easily. Like this, though… in a plan like this…

Well, these knots are going to be awful to undo, and I don’t envy the one who has to do it.

“Really, Sparks?”

“Yes, sir.”

“What’s her name, then?” another one asks, taking the end of the rope from Felix’s hands and yanking it — hard enough to send me to the floor.

“Hm. Such a pretty girl, isn’t she?”

“If you want to—“

“How about we, uh, don’t do that?” Felix interrupts, looking as uncomfortable as I feel. Sometimes it’s easy to forget he’s only fifteen, because he sure as hell doesn’t act like it.

“Go and see if you can make any more miraculous captures, Sparks,” the first speaker says, altogether too roughly. “I’ll search the lower decks, you check the upper ones. Mariott, you can do what you want with her.”

There’s a couple of, well, tiny complications in that.

What I think Mariott wants to do with me isn’t exactly something I’d like to participate in. Ever.

At all. It’s just not… I don’t want to do this.

For another, and probably more important than my opinion on all this… I’ve not changed anything that didn’t need to be changed to look like Gwen.

Since Gwendolyn doesn’t exactly walk around naked, showing anything off for the world to see… look, I’m sure you know where I’m going with this.

But I guess I have to try, don’t I?

I can’t ruin the plan because I’m uncomfortable, and I definitely can’t ruin it because I’m not a perfect girl.

So I try my hardest to keep calm and change it without Mariott noticing.

And when he does what I expected, I let myself cry. I’m sure that’s the reaction he wanted.