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Shen and Eileen - Brotherhood party
Shen and Eileen get chatting. When Shen stops tiptoeing, they talk plainly, and then get to dancing.
Shen had to admit that even if she learned nothing else tonight... these Brotherhood kids threw a hell of a party. This was possibly - no, definitely - the coolest party she had ever been to, in terms of setting. She kinda wished she'd known about the neon theme ahead of time, because the grey and black of her outfit left something to be desired, big time.
She'd grabbed a beer from the kiddie pool when she found that the floating, purple-glowing-eyed blonde wasn't too far from her. She'd heard enough about their first encounter with them to nod in her direction and ask, "So you're the one who stopped Tommy short?"
So far, this event the Brotherhood had put together seemed like a hit. Eileen had her doubts, when Pietro had come up with the whole neon thing--when was neon ever a good idea? But she had to admit, seeing it in living, hyper-vibrant color, the effect was pretty damn striking. She felt a bit underdressed, looking at some of the outfits the other kids had put together, but wasn't letting it get to her; her closet wasn't exactly brimming with options, after all. Besides, permanent levitation and glowing eyes more than made up for drab couture, in her mind.
Those glowing eyes widened very slightly in surprise as one of the X-kids--an Asian one, who also seemed to have missed the memo about the neon--spoke to her on her way back from grabbing a beer. Eileen herself was on her third; a nice, low-grade buzz was exactly what she needed to make the night perfect.
"Ugh," she said, though there wasn't any genuine heat in her tone. "Why is that always the first thing everybody wants to talk about? Speedsters are hard, y'know? There's only so many ways to make 'em slow the hell down when they don't wanna." Eileen trailed off in a grumble, "Besides, I said I was sorry." Except she hadn't. She'd implied it, but never come right out and apologized. Certainly not to Tommy's face.
"I'm sure a bunch of us wish they could do what you did," Shen replied with a shrug. She could totally play it all friendly. Besides, what she was saying wasn't completely untrue, especially when Tommy did stupid ass things like skateboard off of an ice slide. She just hoped the skateboard hadn't killed anyone on its way down. "And hey, no one was hurt. Just, maybe ask them to slow down first, next time?"
"Based on my experiences with our speedster, that sounds like a terrible plan," Eileen pointed out, taking a sip from her bottle. "But all right." Maybe theirs was more reasonable, though she kind of doubted it. Superspeed seemed to be tied to a very particular sort of temperament. She shrugged. "Anyway, my powers are great for putting the brakes on people without doing any lasting damage. Though sometimes they might wish they were dead."
"That sounds... less than fun," Shen remarked with a grimace.
"It can be fun for me, depending," she said, and took another contemplative drink. "But that's kinda the least interesting part of what I do, anyway."
Back at Xavier's, Shen would have reacted differently, but right then, she only smiled. "Yeah? What else can you do, then?"
"The whole electromagnetic spectrum is my bitch." Okay, she was absolutely bragging, but it was kind of hard not to. Not with one of the fundamental forces of the universe at her beck and call. "I feel it, like an extra sense. It sings."
Not exactly an answer to her question, but Shen would take it, and she chuckled at that last bit. "It sings?"
"That's the only way I can describe it," she said, her features softening. If there was one thing practically guaranteed to get Eileen to open up, it was talking about her mutation. "It's like ... for the first thirteen years of my life, I was blind, or something. Then, bam all of a sudden I had this whole new sense I'd never experienced before. Like the whole world was brand new again."
She took another pull of her beer. "Sorry," said the blond, making a face. "All I've got is crappy metaphors. It's really hard to describe it."
"It sounds pretty cool, actually," Shen replied with a small smile. That much was completely true.
"Fuckin' A, it's pretty cool," Eileen agreed cheerfully. "I mean, I can feel your phone, your muscles contracting, your nerves pulsing--the way the fields you generate interact with the local, ambient ones, and the ones put out by other people. It's amazeballs, no lie." With visible effort, she reined herself in. "I guess I got off on kind of a tangent there. Is it okay if I ask what you do? Normally, I'd just come right out and do it, but I'm tryin' to make a better first impression tonight."
That really did sound amazing, and Eileen's last words made Shen huff out a laugh. "If you knew the number of kids who don't even seem to realize that asking straight away might be a problem for some of us." At least Eileen acknowledged it, which was better than a bunch of them. "It's okay, yeah. I'm a flyer. I can grow wings."
Eileen barked a laugh. "I can't be too hard on 'em; I usually just come out and ask, too. But that was before I realized there were so many of us." A trivial number, compared to the flatscans, yes, but a helluva lot more than she'd ever expected to meet, too. And even in the Brotherhood, small and close-knit as it was, it was hard not to eventually learn that there were some powers, or aspects of powers, that make the mutants who wielded them self-conscious more than proud. Eileen kind of wanted to kick them for that, since as far as she was concerned, they should all be proud of who they were and what they could do. But recent events had mellowed her kicking instinct a little. They'd figure it out, in the end.
She whistled when Shen revealed the nature of her power. "Damn, girl. How do you keep from doing it all the time? I mean, as soon as I realized I could manage it, I've been floating pretty much everywhere. I have to do spin sessions three times a week to make sure my legs don't totally atrophy."
"The wings make it pretty hard to maneuver in a crowd," Shen replied with an amused smile. Even with a high enough ceiling, things would get cramped fast. "I do get out with them as much as I can, but New York City doesn't seem like the best place for that." Not without a good reason, anyway.
"New York City isn't the best place for a lot of stuff," Eileen grunted, taking a proper chug from the bottle in her hand. "Too many damn people. At least I can tell when there's a camera-phone or traffic-cam aimed my way. But I guess it would suck for a buncha different reasons, if we were all stuck out in Montana or Outer Mongolia or wherever the hell you go when you wanna get away from the crowd."
"I'm sure they have awesome parties in Mongolia," Shen replied thoughtfully. She showed no sign of joking, because she wasn't. But it wasn't exactly surprising that this was all happening in New York, one of the main centers of Western civilization. The Professor was an old white guy, after all.
"Raisin' the roof on those yurts?" Eileen asked humorously. Her expression soon receded back into curiosity. "So. How long you been at that school? It's ... gotta be better than it sounds."
The joke fell flat as far as Shen was concerned, but the plan was not to call out jokes based on cultural stereotypes, here and now. Much better to keep going with the flow of the conversation. "How bad does it sound?" she asked honestly. "Because it's pretty great."
Eileen wrinkled her nose. "Living at a school, though? I mean, I've had nightmares that started that way. It's bad enough living with one authority figure to tip-toe around, but a a whole faculty's worth? No thanks."
"They let us be teenagers, honestly," Shen stated. "I'm more free to do whatever I want now than I was living with my uncle." That didn't say anything about Yang Tian himself; it was more about having even just one parent solely focused on you, by opposition to a whole staff, but many more students.
"Don't take this the wrong way, but I don't really have a frame of reference when it comes to you living with your uncle," Eileen admitted. And she really, really wanted to avoid throwing shade on other people's family, whether they were flatscans or not. For the purposes of this party, anyhow. "I mean, my dad kicked me out not long after I manifested, so my experiences with bio-family aren't great."
"Sorry he was a dick," Shen answered, not at all dismissively (on the contrary). But then... she let it go. No matter how much she wanted to find out about those kids, she wouldn't dig at something like that, especially not here and now. It was a freaking party, nobody wanted to spill their entire family trauma at a party. "My uncle's just. Pretty laid back. But a laid back parent is not as chill as laid-back faculty, apparently?"
Shrugging the apology away--it seemed like a different lifetime, now, and Eileen honestly didn't think about it very much--she was happy to go on talking about the school. Asking why she referred to her uncle as her parent was off the table, obviously, since they'd already strayed dangerously close to downer, family-related trauma. Better to fixate on the other point. "So, what? They just let you guys run wild, then? I gotta say, I did not get that impression, based on Pyro's admittedly biased and kinda vague description."
"You mean when he talked about the party with a lot of booze we had on our school grounds? Unsupervized?" Shen asked curiously, tilting her head to the side. She sounded amused more than anything - and was keeping back any comment about how he hadn't been kicked out, after all. The booze should be enough to make her point.
"To be fair, he spent more time talking about the giant mansion and even more giant back yard of said mansion, so I might have missed a few details." He'd also gone on a bit about the girl who'd burned him, but talking about that was just going to make Eileen irritated. And a party was no place for Irritated Eileen. "You do put a much shinier spin on it."
"Pretty different points of view," Shen answered with a one-shouldered shrug (she missed the shift of her wings that usually came with those). This was kind of a minefield of a conversation.
"Well, this is all spin, too. Obviously," Eileen said waving at the carefully-decorated warehouse. "It came pretty close to a fight in that old lab, and Pyro didn't exactly have an uncomplicated time at your school thing." She shook her head, waving a hand to send her empty bottle bobbing toward one of the trash cans the twins had scattered around the place earlier for empties, to make cleanup in the morning easier. "We shouldn't be at each other's throats, though. I think. Okay, we don't have to agree on every single stupid little thing, but mutants shouldn't be fighting mutants. Not when there's fuckbags like the Right and the Friends of Humanity," it would have been impossible not to hear the sneer in her voice as she cited the latter group, "out there, actively trying to hurt us. Not ever, if I could have my way. So." She gestured toward the room full of neon-lit teens. "Party."
Shen's small smile by the end of Eileen's little tirade was completely genuine. "It's a good spin. I mean, there's booze, good music, and a graffiti wall." She paused, weighed her options, then decided to play it clean. "Look, we were told you were all likely to go terrorist on this issue. Is that true?"
The other girl froze, then waved a hand to pull another beer from the kiddie-pool-cooler. "'Terrorist' is a word that gets thrown around a lot when a weaker group tries to fight a stronger one with the tools it has available," Eileen said at last, calmly, as her fingers wrapped around the neck of her fresh bottle. "Do we plan to blow up flower shops and random commuter buses and community parks? Fuck no. I don't have a lot of use for the average flatscan on the street, but I don't want to kill them, just because they're not mutants.
"But the Right uses us like lab rats--they kill us and toss us away like garbage. And the Friends of Humanity, and people like them, give them the money to do it. Nobody is going to tell me I don't have a right to fight back against that."
"I'm not going to," Shen answered, meaning that completely. Hell, she wanted to join in that fight. "It's the 'hurting innocents' bit I don't like."
She hoped that Eileen was being honest, and that she wasn't blind to where they were headed. She really wanted the Professor to be wrong on this one, because she didn't want to be fighting mutants either.
"I've never hurt anybody who didn't have it coming," Eileen asserted, then looked thoughtful. "Okay, except for your boy, Tommy. That was my bad. But even that wasn't anything he couldn't walk off. Baselines ... honestly don't pose much of a threat to me, except when there're a lot of them and they're trying to be. So as long as they don't come after me, I'm not goin' out of my way to come after them." She nodded to the bottle in Shen's hand. "You good?"
Shen glanced down at her unfinished bottle, then back up at Eileen. "Yeah, all good, thanks."
"Cool." She went back to looking out over the party. "That was kinda a downer note, for a party," Eileen noted. "I think I need something to get me back in the right headspace." Nodding toward the garishly-outfitted open area at the center of the old warehouse, she asked, "You dance?"
"Do I ever," Shen answered with a grin, taking a step in that direction. "You gonna join me on the ground for that?" It was a question more than an invitation; Shen would have no issue dancing with a floating girl.
"Or you could join me in the air," she suggested with a grin. Still, the light shining behind Eileen's eyes dimmed and then went out as she unfolded her legs beneath her, revealing their natural blue color. "What the hell," she said with a toss of her hair as she fell into step beside Shen. "I guess I could use the exercise. Don't wanna get lazy just because I'm totally amazing, right?"
"That would make you a little less amazing," Shen confirmed, amused by the statement. So Eileen seemed actually fun. And she was cute - whether her eyes were shining purple or not - which didn't hurt. "Good thing dancing is awesome whether you're in the air or not."
"Hell yeah," Eileen agreed readily, letting her hips begin to sway a bit to the music. Leave it to Pietro to put together a soundtrack so bouncy it could almost have given her a toothache. She soon added, "But everything is better up in the air, not gonna lie."
Shen chuckled before she could help it. "I haven't tried everything yet." She shot the other girl a smile, then took a sip from her beer, and started moving to the music as they reached the dance floor section of the warehouse. Dancing with the bottle meant not going spastic, but she'd had no intention of doing so, so that worked out well.
In utter contrast to her usual bluster, as the full implications of her sweeping generalization at last dawned on Eileen, a low blush crept into her cheeks. One which she fought valiantly to stifle, with little notable success. "Well. I guess I haven't tried everything either," she said. "I guess that just gives me some stuff to look forward to, right?"
"You and me both," Shen assured her, not really noticing the blush in the low lighting. The beat was good, and she was beginning to really get into it.
Shen had to admit that even if she learned nothing else tonight... these Brotherhood kids threw a hell of a party. This was possibly - no, definitely - the coolest party she had ever been to, in terms of setting. She kinda wished she'd known about the neon theme ahead of time, because the grey and black of her outfit left something to be desired, big time.
She'd grabbed a beer from the kiddie pool when she found that the floating, purple-glowing-eyed blonde wasn't too far from her. She'd heard enough about their first encounter with them to nod in her direction and ask, "So you're the one who stopped Tommy short?"
So far, this event the Brotherhood had put together seemed like a hit. Eileen had her doubts, when Pietro had come up with the whole neon thing--when was neon ever a good idea? But she had to admit, seeing it in living, hyper-vibrant color, the effect was pretty damn striking. She felt a bit underdressed, looking at some of the outfits the other kids had put together, but wasn't letting it get to her; her closet wasn't exactly brimming with options, after all. Besides, permanent levitation and glowing eyes more than made up for drab couture, in her mind.
Those glowing eyes widened very slightly in surprise as one of the X-kids--an Asian one, who also seemed to have missed the memo about the neon--spoke to her on her way back from grabbing a beer. Eileen herself was on her third; a nice, low-grade buzz was exactly what she needed to make the night perfect.
"Ugh," she said, though there wasn't any genuine heat in her tone. "Why is that always the first thing everybody wants to talk about? Speedsters are hard, y'know? There's only so many ways to make 'em slow the hell down when they don't wanna." Eileen trailed off in a grumble, "Besides, I said I was sorry." Except she hadn't. She'd implied it, but never come right out and apologized. Certainly not to Tommy's face.
"I'm sure a bunch of us wish they could do what you did," Shen replied with a shrug. She could totally play it all friendly. Besides, what she was saying wasn't completely untrue, especially when Tommy did stupid ass things like skateboard off of an ice slide. She just hoped the skateboard hadn't killed anyone on its way down. "And hey, no one was hurt. Just, maybe ask them to slow down first, next time?"
"Based on my experiences with our speedster, that sounds like a terrible plan," Eileen pointed out, taking a sip from her bottle. "But all right." Maybe theirs was more reasonable, though she kind of doubted it. Superspeed seemed to be tied to a very particular sort of temperament. She shrugged. "Anyway, my powers are great for putting the brakes on people without doing any lasting damage. Though sometimes they might wish they were dead."
"That sounds... less than fun," Shen remarked with a grimace.
"It can be fun for me, depending," she said, and took another contemplative drink. "But that's kinda the least interesting part of what I do, anyway."
Back at Xavier's, Shen would have reacted differently, but right then, she only smiled. "Yeah? What else can you do, then?"
"The whole electromagnetic spectrum is my bitch." Okay, she was absolutely bragging, but it was kind of hard not to. Not with one of the fundamental forces of the universe at her beck and call. "I feel it, like an extra sense. It sings."
Not exactly an answer to her question, but Shen would take it, and she chuckled at that last bit. "It sings?"
"That's the only way I can describe it," she said, her features softening. If there was one thing practically guaranteed to get Eileen to open up, it was talking about her mutation. "It's like ... for the first thirteen years of my life, I was blind, or something. Then, bam all of a sudden I had this whole new sense I'd never experienced before. Like the whole world was brand new again."
She took another pull of her beer. "Sorry," said the blond, making a face. "All I've got is crappy metaphors. It's really hard to describe it."
"It sounds pretty cool, actually," Shen replied with a small smile. That much was completely true.
"Fuckin' A, it's pretty cool," Eileen agreed cheerfully. "I mean, I can feel your phone, your muscles contracting, your nerves pulsing--the way the fields you generate interact with the local, ambient ones, and the ones put out by other people. It's amazeballs, no lie." With visible effort, she reined herself in. "I guess I got off on kind of a tangent there. Is it okay if I ask what you do? Normally, I'd just come right out and do it, but I'm tryin' to make a better first impression tonight."
That really did sound amazing, and Eileen's last words made Shen huff out a laugh. "If you knew the number of kids who don't even seem to realize that asking straight away might be a problem for some of us." At least Eileen acknowledged it, which was better than a bunch of them. "It's okay, yeah. I'm a flyer. I can grow wings."
Eileen barked a laugh. "I can't be too hard on 'em; I usually just come out and ask, too. But that was before I realized there were so many of us." A trivial number, compared to the flatscans, yes, but a helluva lot more than she'd ever expected to meet, too. And even in the Brotherhood, small and close-knit as it was, it was hard not to eventually learn that there were some powers, or aspects of powers, that make the mutants who wielded them self-conscious more than proud. Eileen kind of wanted to kick them for that, since as far as she was concerned, they should all be proud of who they were and what they could do. But recent events had mellowed her kicking instinct a little. They'd figure it out, in the end.
She whistled when Shen revealed the nature of her power. "Damn, girl. How do you keep from doing it all the time? I mean, as soon as I realized I could manage it, I've been floating pretty much everywhere. I have to do spin sessions three times a week to make sure my legs don't totally atrophy."
"The wings make it pretty hard to maneuver in a crowd," Shen replied with an amused smile. Even with a high enough ceiling, things would get cramped fast. "I do get out with them as much as I can, but New York City doesn't seem like the best place for that." Not without a good reason, anyway.
"New York City isn't the best place for a lot of stuff," Eileen grunted, taking a proper chug from the bottle in her hand. "Too many damn people. At least I can tell when there's a camera-phone or traffic-cam aimed my way. But I guess it would suck for a buncha different reasons, if we were all stuck out in Montana or Outer Mongolia or wherever the hell you go when you wanna get away from the crowd."
"I'm sure they have awesome parties in Mongolia," Shen replied thoughtfully. She showed no sign of joking, because she wasn't. But it wasn't exactly surprising that this was all happening in New York, one of the main centers of Western civilization. The Professor was an old white guy, after all.
"Raisin' the roof on those yurts?" Eileen asked humorously. Her expression soon receded back into curiosity. "So. How long you been at that school? It's ... gotta be better than it sounds."
The joke fell flat as far as Shen was concerned, but the plan was not to call out jokes based on cultural stereotypes, here and now. Much better to keep going with the flow of the conversation. "How bad does it sound?" she asked honestly. "Because it's pretty great."
Eileen wrinkled her nose. "Living at a school, though? I mean, I've had nightmares that started that way. It's bad enough living with one authority figure to tip-toe around, but a a whole faculty's worth? No thanks."
"They let us be teenagers, honestly," Shen stated. "I'm more free to do whatever I want now than I was living with my uncle." That didn't say anything about Yang Tian himself; it was more about having even just one parent solely focused on you, by opposition to a whole staff, but many more students.
"Don't take this the wrong way, but I don't really have a frame of reference when it comes to you living with your uncle," Eileen admitted. And she really, really wanted to avoid throwing shade on other people's family, whether they were flatscans or not. For the purposes of this party, anyhow. "I mean, my dad kicked me out not long after I manifested, so my experiences with bio-family aren't great."
"Sorry he was a dick," Shen answered, not at all dismissively (on the contrary). But then... she let it go. No matter how much she wanted to find out about those kids, she wouldn't dig at something like that, especially not here and now. It was a freaking party, nobody wanted to spill their entire family trauma at a party. "My uncle's just. Pretty laid back. But a laid back parent is not as chill as laid-back faculty, apparently?"
Shrugging the apology away--it seemed like a different lifetime, now, and Eileen honestly didn't think about it very much--she was happy to go on talking about the school. Asking why she referred to her uncle as her parent was off the table, obviously, since they'd already strayed dangerously close to downer, family-related trauma. Better to fixate on the other point. "So, what? They just let you guys run wild, then? I gotta say, I did not get that impression, based on Pyro's admittedly biased and kinda vague description."
"You mean when he talked about the party with a lot of booze we had on our school grounds? Unsupervized?" Shen asked curiously, tilting her head to the side. She sounded amused more than anything - and was keeping back any comment about how he hadn't been kicked out, after all. The booze should be enough to make her point.
"To be fair, he spent more time talking about the giant mansion and even more giant back yard of said mansion, so I might have missed a few details." He'd also gone on a bit about the girl who'd burned him, but talking about that was just going to make Eileen irritated. And a party was no place for Irritated Eileen. "You do put a much shinier spin on it."
"Pretty different points of view," Shen answered with a one-shouldered shrug (she missed the shift of her wings that usually came with those). This was kind of a minefield of a conversation.
"Well, this is all spin, too. Obviously," Eileen said waving at the carefully-decorated warehouse. "It came pretty close to a fight in that old lab, and Pyro didn't exactly have an uncomplicated time at your school thing." She shook her head, waving a hand to send her empty bottle bobbing toward one of the trash cans the twins had scattered around the place earlier for empties, to make cleanup in the morning easier. "We shouldn't be at each other's throats, though. I think. Okay, we don't have to agree on every single stupid little thing, but mutants shouldn't be fighting mutants. Not when there's fuckbags like the Right and the Friends of Humanity," it would have been impossible not to hear the sneer in her voice as she cited the latter group, "out there, actively trying to hurt us. Not ever, if I could have my way. So." She gestured toward the room full of neon-lit teens. "Party."
Shen's small smile by the end of Eileen's little tirade was completely genuine. "It's a good spin. I mean, there's booze, good music, and a graffiti wall." She paused, weighed her options, then decided to play it clean. "Look, we were told you were all likely to go terrorist on this issue. Is that true?"
The other girl froze, then waved a hand to pull another beer from the kiddie-pool-cooler. "'Terrorist' is a word that gets thrown around a lot when a weaker group tries to fight a stronger one with the tools it has available," Eileen said at last, calmly, as her fingers wrapped around the neck of her fresh bottle. "Do we plan to blow up flower shops and random commuter buses and community parks? Fuck no. I don't have a lot of use for the average flatscan on the street, but I don't want to kill them, just because they're not mutants.
"But the Right uses us like lab rats--they kill us and toss us away like garbage. And the Friends of Humanity, and people like them, give them the money to do it. Nobody is going to tell me I don't have a right to fight back against that."
"I'm not going to," Shen answered, meaning that completely. Hell, she wanted to join in that fight. "It's the 'hurting innocents' bit I don't like."
She hoped that Eileen was being honest, and that she wasn't blind to where they were headed. She really wanted the Professor to be wrong on this one, because she didn't want to be fighting mutants either.
"I've never hurt anybody who didn't have it coming," Eileen asserted, then looked thoughtful. "Okay, except for your boy, Tommy. That was my bad. But even that wasn't anything he couldn't walk off. Baselines ... honestly don't pose much of a threat to me, except when there're a lot of them and they're trying to be. So as long as they don't come after me, I'm not goin' out of my way to come after them." She nodded to the bottle in Shen's hand. "You good?"
Shen glanced down at her unfinished bottle, then back up at Eileen. "Yeah, all good, thanks."
"Cool." She went back to looking out over the party. "That was kinda a downer note, for a party," Eileen noted. "I think I need something to get me back in the right headspace." Nodding toward the garishly-outfitted open area at the center of the old warehouse, she asked, "You dance?"
"Do I ever," Shen answered with a grin, taking a step in that direction. "You gonna join me on the ground for that?" It was a question more than an invitation; Shen would have no issue dancing with a floating girl.
"Or you could join me in the air," she suggested with a grin. Still, the light shining behind Eileen's eyes dimmed and then went out as she unfolded her legs beneath her, revealing their natural blue color. "What the hell," she said with a toss of her hair as she fell into step beside Shen. "I guess I could use the exercise. Don't wanna get lazy just because I'm totally amazing, right?"
"That would make you a little less amazing," Shen confirmed, amused by the statement. So Eileen seemed actually fun. And she was cute - whether her eyes were shining purple or not - which didn't hurt. "Good thing dancing is awesome whether you're in the air or not."
"Hell yeah," Eileen agreed readily, letting her hips begin to sway a bit to the music. Leave it to Pietro to put together a soundtrack so bouncy it could almost have given her a toothache. She soon added, "But everything is better up in the air, not gonna lie."
Shen chuckled before she could help it. "I haven't tried everything yet." She shot the other girl a smile, then took a sip from her beer, and started moving to the music as they reached the dance floor section of the warehouse. Dancing with the bottle meant not going spastic, but she'd had no intention of doing so, so that worked out well.
In utter contrast to her usual bluster, as the full implications of her sweeping generalization at last dawned on Eileen, a low blush crept into her cheeks. One which she fought valiantly to stifle, with little notable success. "Well. I guess I haven't tried everything either," she said. "I guess that just gives me some stuff to look forward to, right?"
"You and me both," Shen assured her, not really noticing the blush in the low lighting. The beat was good, and she was beginning to really get into it.