Yuri had, of course, felt considerable nerves at the prospect of this invitation, but she had been equally unable to come up with an appropriate reason to excuse herself. The Lioness quarters were cramped, to put it mildly, and seemed unlikely she would be able to slip out to her daily duties and then back into her room without the risk of being observed, and the last thing she wanted to do was insult the hospitality of the first regular at LAW to toss her a crumb of interest—however performative that interest might be.
And yet, as she sat arch-backed in her seat, dressed in the tie-and-coat uniform that had become the DDLC's calling card, she began to feel something unexpected. She would not call it
comfort, per se; putting actual words to the way Yuri felt as Corrine meticulously managed their shared experience would have required serious thought, but it reminded her of a kind of YouTube video—the ones that highlight some particularly satisfying aspect of manufacturing processes, such as candy paste being shaped inside molds.
"Oh—! Um..." Yuri started when Corrine passed her the proverbial conversational baton. She had been watching the bamboo whisk, ladle, and two bowls with rapt attention, and it took her mind a moment — and a blushing beat of embarrassment — to pull her various threads together.
She leaned back in her chair and cleared her throat.
"I believe I was expressing that, um. I hope this doesn't seem rude, but I thought that your interest in tea ceremony was...fitting, given your professional reputation in the upper reaches of the service industry. N-not, you understand—" The tallest and oldest of the Doki Champions combed her fingers through her bangs, eyes darting to the side as the anxiety of what she'd just implied tightened in her throat like a coiled spring.
"—That I just think you spend all day making tea! Of course, I understand you probably offer all kinds of services to your clients, many quite enriching and diverse. But, it's more the sort of...practice of tea ceremony, I imagine, has a kind of symmetry with service. Tea ceremony, after all, signifies effortless order, a sort of non-doing doing, where each movement slides both inevitably but also gently into the next—which is I imagine the kind of invisible, supportive environment I imagine a top-of-the-line butler would..."
Yuri would have continued, but the girl beside her — Natsuki, her slim, pink-haired opposite — started to cough.
"HACK—" Her exhalation, far from the demure mew one might expect from her smaller stature, was graceless, loud, and demanded attention. Yuri shrank into her chair as a blush tinged her cheeks.
Before Yuri could continue, Natsuki caught her eyes in a meaningful glare that pursed the taller girl's lips together for good.
"BLECKAK HAKKKKK...HAK!" The smaller girl pounded her own chest and cleared her throat, before scootching up in her chair to hover her hand over the steaming water.
"Sorry, really got something stuck in there. So, like, are these cool enough for eh—whatever's next? Dipping the bags I'm guessing?"
