Sylus, Nobody Asked You to Network

The heroine tries to pass Sylus off as a fruit vendor in Melodic Weave, and somehow he is not the person having the worst evening. She is. He seems to be having a lovely time. There are witnesses, there is karaoke, and she has introduced a man with far too much confidence into a room full of colleagues who would very much like to know more.

I would be furious if I weren't so busy enjoying her terrible predicament.

A work outing is such an excellent place to put him. You can prepare yourself for danger. You can decide to be brave, put on something dramatic, and enter the room with a plan. Preparing for someone from work to ask how you know that man requires an entirely different sort of courage. Suddenly you need a plausible answer, and the man is right there, being decorative and deeply unhelpful.

Sylus accepts an invitation to join the group. The heroine calls him Skye and tries to keep his identity quiet. He settles into the occasion with considerably less anxiety than she does.

Of course he does. She has to see these people again.

That's the unfair little pleasure of this scene. He can enjoy a conversation as a conversation. She also has to consider the conversation about the conversation that may happen later. I don't need the game to show an actual office debrief to imagine how exhausting that would be. If I were her, I'd be mentally composing tomorrow's explanation before tonight's questions had even finished. It would be a bad explanation. I would have had no time to prepare a good one.

The fruit business has questions.

And I love that her escape plan is so magnificently ordinary. A fruit vendor. A respectable trade that people might acknowledge before moving on to another subject. Except people eat fruit. They have follow up questions about fruit. She has chosen a cover story with customer engagement built into it.

Darling, you needed an occupation nobody wanted to discuss at a party.

The reveal that he owns the resort makes her improvised explanation even funnier to me. His scale of casual spending and her scale of please stop attracting attention are simply not compatible. I could almost forgive a man for being accidentally conspicuous. Sylus makes forgiveness difficult by looking so comfortable with the whole arrangement.

Still, I don't want him to become socially useless just to make the heroine's discomfort funny. The attraction here is that he can participate. He isn't standing in a corner waiting for the ordinary people to go away. There's something delicious about watching a formidable romantic lead enter a mundane social situation and discover that he can cause plenty of trouble without raising his voice.

My personal requirement would be a short briefing beforehand. Your name is this. We met somewhere boring. Please don't introduce any new property holdings halfway through the story. If somebody asks whether we're close, you are allowed one normal answer. I would even write it down for him, although I suspect the paper would become a souvenir of my optimism.

Please step away from the microphone.

Then she hands him a microphone to divert the questions, and the room turns the moment into a duet. That is a truly rotten return on an investment. She wanted less attention. She has accidentally booked a joint performance.

There is no discreet way to be half of a romantic duet in front of curious colleagues. You cannot sing your way into looking less involved. Even if you face the lyrics screen with the concentration of somebody defusing a bomb, another person will decide that your nervousness is adorable. I would like to lodge a complaint with whoever invented recreational singing as a group activity.

The lovely indignity is that Sylus doesn't emerge as a flawless vocalist. Tara would rather he didn't sing again. Finally, a department in which that face cannot do the entire job.

I find that much more charming than another demonstration of effortless excellence. Give me a handsome man who joins in and isn't especially good at it. I don't require every hobby to become evidence for his superiority. Sometimes the pleasure is knowing that we could be bad at something together, then be completely unreasonable about which one of us was worse.

His composure survives the evening. My sympathy for the heroine barely does, because watching her attempt to manage him is too entertaining. I do have one sincere reservation. If I asked someone to help me keep a social situation manageable, I'd want him to remember that my embarrassment is not an unlimited communal resource. A little teasing can be lovely. Eventually, please help me carry the lie.

But as a scene to watch, this is a wonderfully undignified use of Sylus. No grand speech required. Just a room full of interested people, a heroine rapidly running out of explanations, and a microphone that should probably have stayed on the table.

Next time, tell them he audits drainage systems. I cannot promise it will work. I do think it buys you a quieter ten minutes.