Honest Conversations

"Before we even begin to get into how the fuck we respond to this, we need to address the pair of elephants in the room."

"Who or what are you talking about?" Joey asked Charlie for the sake of clarity, though it wasn't difficult to predict what her answer would be.

"I'm referring to your tactically questionable decision to enlist the aid of our enemies daughter and fucking Goebbels over there."

"Hey, I've taken a lot of shit from you since I got here but I draw the line at being compared to that monster" Kayleigh protested angrily "And you think it would have been smarter for Joey to leave us in Washington to be exploited by Senator Adams?"

"No, I think it would have been smarter to bring you here as hostages rather than helpers, which is a plan I have the weaponry for us to switch to very easily."

"Woah! Liv has done absolutely nothing wrong here!" Joey quickly intervened.

"What?! So you're okay with me being held at gunpoint by your psycho Russian friend??" Kayleigh turned to him in shock.

"No, that wasn't what I was saying at all" he began to defend himself, before his mood suddenly turned and he instead went on the attack"Although you weren't too concerned about my well being when you set me up to have that fucking machine explode right in front of me."

"Actually, it was me who made sure it happened while you were still at a safe distance. Their original plan was for them to use cameras and you to get up a lot closer. I talked them into letting me give a signal instead, and I did it early to make sure there was no chance of you being in any physical danger, even if it meant the entire mission failed and I took the blame for it."

"So there was no chance I was in any physical danger from the untested toxic gunk you got me covered in then?"

"They assured me it was safe."

"Oh, it's okay people! The evil fuckers who wanted to mind control the whole planet so they could take over it assured this dumb botch their experimental serum was perfectly safe!"

"You know, you're acting pretty fucking high and mighty under the circumstances" Dawn had her hands on her hips and was glaring at Charlie "It wasn't Kayleigh who hypnotised me into presenting propaganda to millions of people in the nude. And with a recording you'd tricked Joey into giving you, I might add."

"Yeah, and you tried to do the same to me" Kayleigh seized on the unexpected support to turn the tables on her rival.

"Except I couldn't because you were already working with them to double cross me."

"They thought you couldn't be trusted. And rightly so, it transpires."

"Well, sorry for betraying the bad guys while you were busy stepping up to the plate as their most useful idiot."

Joey paused for a moment and briefly tuned out of the conversation, or at least the words that were being yelled. Something about three sexy naked women going at each other like this, while he stood and watched, was pushing all sorts of buttons he didn't know he had.

He began to fantasise about how hot it would be if he used his thought manipulating powers to convince them to resolve their differences via a three way mud wrestling match. Visualising how that might play out was much more enjoyable than attempting to adjudicate this shouting match would be. And by the time he had managed to retrieve his mind from the gutter the conversation hadn't progressed too much.

"All I'm saying is, from where I'm standing, you look like the sketchiest person in the room!" Kayleigh was jabbing her finger accusingly in Charlie's direction "Why the fuck should Joey trust you?"

"He should trust me because I'm the sole reason he's still here. I risked my own life by openly defecting from my mission when they decided Joey was out of control, you were more useful to them than he was and I was given the order to terminate. If that had been any other agent..."

Charlie stopped her outburst when she noticed that Joey had turned pale and had eyes as wide as saucers. The rest of the room was now standing in stunned silence too. It was perhaps the first time anyone other than her had realised quite how serious this now was.

"When?" was the sole word Joey could manage to force out.

"When we went to the TV station. You probably won't remember exactly what was said, but as the armed security sent us away they used my real name and told me to go and have a nice day. Well, 'have a nice day' was the code for, you know.... Calling me out as Natalia was pretty much a direct threat not to even think about disobeying them."

Joey was now completely speechless.

"I mean, you weren't in real danger at an point" Charlie walked over and stroked his arm gently, perhaps realising that particular revelation should have been broken more delicately, if at all "I never would have let them hurt you, let alone done it myself. "

"So my father was willing to kill my boyfriend" Liv realised in disbelief.

"I could have gotten you assassinated" Kayleigh told Joey, looking as if she was about to either burst into tears or pass out at the thought.

The yelling had now been replaced by an eerie silence, which almost felt worse. Nothing had been resolved by any of this, but the stakes seemed to have risen to an even more shocking level.

It was then that Clarissa stepped out into the centre of the room, looking like she was ready to address the nation. It was amazing how much gravitas she was able to project even without a stitch of clothing on her.

"Sometimes in politics you have to work alongside people who have stabbed you in the back before and who you know will do it again at the first possible opportunity they are given once your goals no longer align with theirs, I'm not saying that will happen here, but what I do know is that, right now, all of our goals do appear to align. It also seems to me there is a fairly straight forward plan that can give you all a win, in more ways than one."

"Okay, well we'd love to hear it" Kayleigh told the naked Vice President hopefully.

"I usually find that, wherever possible, the best direction to take is tho path of least resistance. You just have to find a way to make it lead where you want to go."

"I have no idea what that means" Joey admitted.

"It means if that fucker wants to be king so badly then we make sure he gets the crown" Dawn realised.

"Yeah, and then we turn him into Joey's puppet" Charlie caught on "We'd own the fucking President!"

"And after that we could do all the things we originally planned to when we signed up for that charlatans so called cause" Kayleigh had started to sound optimistic again.

"But how do we even get to that point?" Joey fretted "It's going to be virtually impossible for me to get close enough to Senator Adams to speak to him directly, and no way is he talking any calls or opening any emails that haven't been encrypted first."

"I know how" Liv spoke up "But we'd need to go back to Washington first. And preferably find a way to do that without any of us getting shot or stripped."