Bambi sat listening, gently running her fingers over the zipper of her big orange slice shaped duffle back. Sophia was so obviously frustrated, and Bambi could imagine. So many nasty surprises in such a short time had a way of making someone feel so small. She had worked her whole life to never be the prey animal, but that work was exhausting and it came crumbling so easily.
There were people tougher than her or Pointe who had gotten knocked on their ass by this. Faster, smarter, stronger, just plain better suited in every single way, people with power bordering supernatural and they still got hurt. People with power that the universe chose again, and again, and again, over and over in every different flavor and circumstance.
Not her or Sophia.
Bambi felt small plenty of times in her life - every week across from her father as he barely made an effort to even project an easier truth onto her, then even more so when he cut it to every two weeks, and every single time the Ijuuin heir made the news for whatever he was making the news for, and whenever she got passed up for a dancer who worked half as hard as her but had fairer skin and and and - but not like this. Not like a child being hunted by monsters no one else could see.
She needed something better than allies. She needed friends. She needed people who would have her back because she would have theirs. She needed to surround herself with people who could make her feel confident enough to fight back with everything she had, and who would feel the same with her in their corner.
First, though, she needed to give Sophia a sense of power she could take away from this. How could she build Sophia up? Bambi was great at building people up, but if she wanted it to stick, she needed to go slow, so Bambi wouldn't take that confidence with her when she left Sophia to home.
Bambi had made good progress with the ice, it seemed. Maybe start there?
She unzipped her bag as she thought, sat it between them. She dug and dug, looking for her carefully labelled and bedazzled pill box in search of the over the counter pain killers she kept. She dug past her extra clothes, sanitary and beauty products, the matchbox for Mel and Milk, the glasses cloth for Hiro and Officer Novella, her multiple box cutters, and kept digging.
"That sucks. Can't even have your whimsy in a arcade without it being a danger to your face."
Now they were getting somewhere!
Pointe beamed at him, scooping up a darling little prog with twitch in its claspers and spinning as she plucked the fascinator from his hands. The fascinator went to the base of the claspers and the movement of the feather when it twitched gave it lovely visual interest. She set it down with a kiss to the flat top of its head.
"We'll have to get them to talk about it then! Probably somewhere else since this is a public space, but they could really bond!" Pointe pulled up the menu again, and chose a fishing hat with colorful decorative lures. "Do you have a prog dedicated to phishing? This would just be perfect." She spins and looks at the progs who are watching them now that one of their companions has a fancy hat shaking fabulously with each tick.
Pointe considered Mothman. Considered the rot comment. He wanted to change the subject, going still at the idea of something taking his NetOp.
"We're still working through the morals of it. Fawn says we're evil now, and i suppose that's fair, if what we're doing is going against status quo. It all sounds very romantic like that." If a rotten society is what they concerned themselves with, though, they would need to get something out of the way. She hated to taint the relationship so early, but Bambi didn't just want to get someone on their side - she wanted a friend.
"We might be what you want to avoid though."
And friends don't keep secrets just because they hurt.
"Fawn is an Achida. We're very rich, and not newly. We're old money and old money is very very dirty."