The Honey Pot
Posted on Jun 16, 2016 @ 1:51am by Selyara Chen
Edited on on Jun 16, 2016 @ 1:51am
Mission: Fortress: Earth
("The Honeypot")
(Cont. "Worlds Apart")
* * *=/\=* * *
Location: EARTH
Stardate: 2.160615.2131
Scene: Unknown
Raxl was making Selyara laugh. But she was laughing AT him, not WITH him. Her laugh was creaky with disuse and slightly mocking, but it seemed genuine enough. She clutched her side and tried to catch her breath.
“I said to FLIRT, not act like a- a- a- deranged Risan call girl!” Selyara giggled from behind her hand.
“You SAID to think about how women flirt with ME, and do that.” Raxl glared at her indignantly, feeling more than slightly deflated by her laughter.
“That’s how women flirt with you? What sort of women do hang around with? That’s not flirting that’s… That’s…. THROWING yourself at someone!” Her lips twitched again, and then she tried valiantly to straighten her face. “Look, this guy Stephen is what, a 4 at best? You’re at least a seven if you bothered to scrub up. At any rate, not attractive enough to make him completely lose his senses if you start coming on too strong. He’ll get suspicious, he’ll know you’re trying to get something from him. You’ve got to be subtle, you have to make him like you without him realizing you’re doing it.”
“Why am I doing it, if you’re such an expert?” Raxl groused back, feeling a little bit stung by her assessment of his looks in spite of himself. Her face softened slightly and she patted his shoulder gently with a gloved hand, and smiled.
“Because we don’t know whether he likes women, but we do know for sure that he likes men. It isn’t like I’m asking you to sleep with him or something. The point of this is that people will often do much more for and say much more to people they find attractive. Here, watch me. First things first, when you approach him, request something of him, something small, borrow his pen, what’s the time, make change for a few strips of latinum. Second, maintain eye contact with him about 60% of the time, don’t be creepy about it, if you feel you’ve kept it too long, drop you gaze and look to the side as though you’re embarrassed.” Selyara demonstrated what she meant, and punctuated her statement with a very gentle touch to Raxl’s bicep. “Be tactile- touch him, always gently and always as though to emphasize a point, touch yourself, your neck, your lips, your cheek, it draws his attention there and makes him subconsciously think about touching you there. Smile, laugh if he makes a joke, not too hard, don’t make it sound fake, it helps if you inhale at the end-”
“You’re really disturbing, you know that? Everything is inputs and outputs to you-”
“I was in the Jaros stockade for a long time. There, you either learn to manipulate people or you learn to fight. Manipulation comes with far less broken bones.” Her tone was neutrally patient, but there was a hint of exasperation in it. “And anyhow, many people know these things intuitively. Think about people you know who are charismatic, charming, natural born leaders, they do these things without thinking about it. You too, on occasion. Just because I’m able to verbalize how it works does not make me worse or more cold and calculating than anyone else. We are all social animals, and we all spend our days trying to figure out how to make others like us, even if it means that we pretend to be someone or something we aren’t. If it makes you feel better, don’t think about this as you emotionally manipulating this man, think of it as you being your most charming, best self.”
Raxl sat back and studied the woman as he tried to sort out what were the little kernels of personal truth in what she was saying. He’d noticed over the last couple days she’d begun to be far less cagy with him, and little things were beginning to come out in conversation that he was fairly convinced were genuine. What he wasn’t so sure about was whether it was intentional, to make him feel as though he was getting to know her and make herself more likable to him, or whether it was unconscious, something about being around familiar places where she had history with a capital H.
Raxl was leaning towards the latter option. He’d realized quickly that the safe house they’d been in was too well established to be something she’d set up in the years she’d been in the Jaros Stockade, and prior to that, she’d been a Starfleet officer in good standing, and would have had no need of a safe house. He’d spent some time poking around while she was occupied with her information gathering, and had found a cache of old holophotos of a much younger Selyara dressed first in counseling teal, and then in command red, smiling broadly with a human family. The momentary flashes of honesty felt like the same woman in the pictures.
“What are you smiling at me for?” Selyara was eyeing him, her dark green eyes sharp and suspicious. She sounded annoyed.
“I like you better when you’re being yourself.”
“What?” Her eyes widened slightly, and the expression on her face was somewhere between shock and irritation.
“I like you better when you’re not doing your ‘shadow master’ shtick.”
“Shtick?” Selyara’s brows drew together, and she puckered her lips as though she smelled something nasty.
“Yeah, the superior, smug act, and purposely being as unlikable as possible, taking every opportunity to nettle and prod and goad everyone around you and be a colossal bitch.”
“I’m not-” Selyara’s jaw dropped and her cheeks flushed green, and she struggled for words before muttering sullenly: “You don’t know me!”
“I know that you’re not the heartless criminal mastermind you pretend to be. If you really were, then you wouldn’t have risked your life to get that kid, Larry Declan out of the line of fire in that apartment. If you were really as cold and calculating as you pretend to be then you would have left me to Mister Johnson’s tender mercies in that same apartment.”
“I need you-”
“No. You don’t. You’d just secured help from that Starfleet captain, you could have left, met up with whatever goon he sends down, *AND* kept that communicator. You didn’t, instead you tried to help me, got yourself stabbed, and lost a useful bit of tech. You did that because you didn’t want to see anyone hurt. Besides, this whole thing with Edgerton, I don’t believe for a minute that this is about revenge. You’d be better off waiting, biding your time, creating a plan, and then destroying Edgerton completely, rather than flying off on a half-baked venture. You’re doing this because you know it’s the right thing to do.” Selyara’s jaw clenched, but she didn’t deny it. Raxl went in for the kill. “And you know what? I think I finally know why you act the way you do, it’s because you actually *do* want people to like you.”
“So… You posit that I act like a, and I quote, ‘colossal bitch’ in order to make people… like me? Mister Dreyton, do I *need* to point out the glaring flaw in your logic?”
“No. You, want to people to like you, you want friends, you want companionship, but you’re worried you’ll try and they’ll reject you. So you’re purposely unlikable so that you never have to face that possibility.” Raxl crossed his arms across his chest, and locked eyes with Selyara. The expression on her face was unreadable, but her mouth was thin, as though she was furious. There was a long moment of silence as the two stared at each other. Finally, she spoke, her voice was surprisingly even and calm, at odds with the strained look on her face.
“If you gave half as much brain power to learning what I’ve been trying to teach you as you do to coming up with ridiculous theories, we might already be making contact with our mark. However since you clearly find my lessons uninteresting, I think that’s quite enough of this for the moment. This sort of thing is often much easier to get into the proper mindset for if you look the part, so if you don’t mind, we will find a hotel. I have some clothes for you to put on, and we’ll get you shaved and cleaned up.”
She stood up and spun on her heel.
* * * =/\=* * *
Scene: Plaza near Starfleet HQ
Selyara leaned back in her chair, tossing her hair back over her shoulder, and scoped out the restaurant across the street from under her dark glasses and wide brimmed hat, primly taking a sip of her raktajino. She kept her face smooth and unbothered, unwilling to let her companion know that he’d gotten to her earlier. Raxl was a fairly straightforward being, a man of action rather than deep thinking, but he had proven to be capable of irritatingly-on-point flashes of insight on more than one occasion. He was also irritatingly incapable of keeping his flashes of insight to himself, especially when they concerned her. She supposed she should be grateful that he was so guileless that he didn’t hoard his insight to use against her; at least she knew what he knew, or thought he knew about her.
She glanced across the square at the restaurant where their quarry sat in the outdoor seating area at an ornate white enamelled table, drinking a glass of wine, alone. According to Anissa, her contact, he would be there from 11:30 to around 2. He was there every day, waiting for Leonard to possibly join him for lunch, working away on a padd. He was an antique dealer by trade, particularly enamored of late 20th century Americana memorabilia, and folk art and jewelry from the early 21st century’s bespoke revolution. Selyara had spent the better part of the morning reading anything and everything about antiques of the era in order to build a credible connection with the man, and had gone out and quietly procured a rather striking example of bespoke revolution jewelry, a pendant made of beach glass and silver.
Life on Earth went on beneath the golden net of the Aegis network high above, the lines glowing faintly green against the blue sky. The denizens of Earth still wandered to and fro across the square, although the mood was uncertain, tense, and subdued. Selyara had been worried that the restaurant would remain empty, making contact that much harder, but slowly but surely it was filling up with people trying to forget what was happening and grab an hour of indulgence.
Across from her at the table Raxl tugged at the collar of his shirt, his discomfort clear. He was clean shaven, his hair cropped short into a tidy, trendy cut, and dressed neatly in a white linen suit and a pale lavender shirt. He looked eminently respectable and trustworthy, and extremely uncomfortable.
“Relax, Mister Dreyton.” Selyara said softly, the smile not leaving her face. “You look quite dashing, I assure you.”
“I feel like an ass.” Raxl squirmed. “I look like an ass.”
“You look like a wholesome boy next door, and much more appealing, now that you’re not scruffy.” Selyara smiled at him slightly, and gestured down at her floral patterned sun dress, tidy mary janes, and floppy straw sun hat. “We both need to look the part. Good, moral law abiding citizens, whom he can like, and trust. People who are only trying to what is good and right. Now, that restaurant is filling up. You remember how this goes?”
“We wait until the restaurant fills up, and there’s no more room. Then we walk up there, and we try to get a table, at which point, I approach Stephen, and ask if it would be possible for us to share his table. He’ll most likely accept, and then I turn on the charm, and try to direct him towards talking about Leonard, maybe start voicing doubts about Edgerton. If we can’t get him to that point, we make small talk and convince him to see us again, establish a relationship with him, and work on him.”
“Right. I’ll let you appear to take lead the conversation, but you’ll take cues from things I say to steer the conversation in the most fruitful directions.” Selyara began to put her things into her purse. “Try to keep everything I taught you in mind, I’ll help you if it doesn’t appear to be going well.”
“Will you do your mind tricks if it isn’t?” Raxl indicated her now bare hands.
“I’d prefer not to,” Selyara looked at her hands, then put them behind her back. “As you found, once he realizes I am doing something to him, it is very easy to shake off and undo anything I did. Better to do it organically, let his own mind convince him to do what we want. Besides, going into someone else’s mind is not without its effect on me. I think we should use it as a last resort.”
“Right. Okay.” Raxl took a deep breath, looking very nervous. Selyara reached out and squeezed his hand comfortingly, reaching out very gently with her mind and flicking away his anxiety to the back of his mind. “Let’s do this.”
* * *=/\=* * *
Brought to you by:
Alix Fowler
As
Selyara Chen
Not-quite-mysterious-as-she-thinks-she-is criminal mastermind