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Halfway up a winding staircase, Reno sneezes. Huh, he thinks afterward, rubbing his nose into his shoulder. Funny.

Meanwhile, as he climbs the rickety stairs curving slowly up and away from him, the Turk makes absent, uncalculated attempts at soothing the little bear in his arms. He pets her head with one hand and scritches with the other and even dares, once he is absolutely certain that there aren't ninjas watching him from the ceiling or the walls, to brush a kiss across the soft, furred spot between her ears, all while talking softly, consolingly, and watching anonymous doors easing by.

"I'm sorry, I'm sorry, yo. You're absolutely right. I should have showed you off, I know, but he's not quite the... erm, plushie type, yo. Can't appreciate a great bear like you, yo. Sorry."

With a small noise of triumph, Reno selects a door at seeming random and pulls it open, awkwardly shifting his furred passenger to first one side and then the other in order to grip the knob. The room inside is sparsely decorated, to say the least -- in fact, there seems to be no furnishings at all, save for a beaten suitcase leaning in one corner. (There are faded scribbles up and down the lid, in varying scripts: perhaps a written conversation. There's no telling with Turks.)

"Good old suitcase, yo," Reno remarks happily, kneeling before the luggage in question and carefully settling Minnie on the worn carpet beside him. Out comes the pencil, and the young man begins gleefully savaging a small, bronze lock, which rather looks as though it might pop open if given a stern look. "Lasted me, what, eight years? Nine? Good old suitcase, yo. Somebody tried convincing me to get a new one but what's the point? You got loyal luggage, you stick with it, I say, yo."

If Reno notices Minnie's so-called motherly displeasure, he doesn't acknowledge it. He is, after all, far too preoccupied with prying madly at the lock on his suitcase, still talking animatedly as he works. "Rude, especially, yo. He put a plan together once, all let's get Reno drunk and then we'll switch out his luggage! But see how well that worked, yo. You can't get Reno Warren drunk when he doesn't wanna be. And I didn't. I had work in the morning!"

At long last, the little bronze padlock yields to Reno and his pencil -- if, of course, the word yield might also mean crumble away to powdered pieces. The Turk frowns ever so slightly, and dusts his hands, before tossing away the pencil and flinging open the lid of his suitcase.

Inside is not much better than outside. He picks gingerly through unrolled socks that might, under better circumstances, be able to intelligently carry on their half of a philosophical conversation; he tosses over his shoulder what appears to be a potato with a leaf in it. "Stupid Rude, I told him I wouldn't need any potatoes, yo," Reno mutters, before he finally produces a clean, white shirt -- well, clean enough, by most peoples' standards.

He whistles as he shrugs out of his jacket, and, after he has pulled on his clean shirt, he even gives his coat a bit of a dusting. Reno spends a moment self-consciously adjusting his collar, considering a tie, before he abruptly draws a knife from the dark, frightening recesses of his suitcase and gleefully starts attacking the mud caked on his boots. "So, Minnie," he says conversationally as he hacks, "am I starting to look presentable enough, yo?"

"See," Reno explains conversationally, as he tosses his knife into the air and catches it deftly again by the blade, "'m not the kinda guy that owns a suit, yo. Well, I wasn't, until ShinRa was all blah blah blah formal blah blah blah uniform blah blah blah, yo -- and then I kinda had to, y'know, or lose my job... but the point remains!" A final scrape at leather nearly stripped clean, and then the Turk flips the knife carelessly back into his suitcase.

A moment of contemplative silence passes, and then Reno leans down to fish out something from somewhere within a mad heap of what might or might not have once been clothing. "Tie?" he asks warily, holding up a fishtailing piece of scarlet fabric. "No tie? How formal is formal, yo? Oh, fine. Wanna dress to impress, so tie it is, yo." The next few minutes are spent in front of a dingy hand mirror, the handle thrust between and angled in the hinges of his luggage.

If Reno notices Minnie's sharp cry of dismay, he doesn't indicate such -- save for the slightest apologetic smile, that is, and a soothing pat upon the tangle of socks into which the knife disappeared. "It's okay, Minnie, yo! See, Reno Warren knows exactly where all of his things are all of the time... and it's... it's in here somewhere, yo. Anyway. Um." Another pat, this one distinctly nervous, and then he withdraws his hand, not quite whistling. "All the time, yo."

And then there rises his everpresent foe, the Tie. The Tie is a cruel, relentless adversary, and Reno valiantly battles it for a time entirely too long before he finally glances to Minnie. After only the briefest moment of gaping disbelief, the Turk begins to mirror her gestures, if somewhat falteringly... is he really standing in his room, taking instructions from something that used to be a stuffed animal...?

A final slip of sheer fabric, and...

Awkwardly, shamefully, Reno regards his reflection in his hand mirror before shoving it back into his suitcase and snapping the entire bundle resolutely shut. "Kay! We're off, yo!" he announces gleefully (and loudly) to the room at large, moving to the door and then kneeling, arms outstretched, for a Minnie-bear.

It looks like she's got one Turk trained, at least.

It's times like these that Reno wishes he'd paid more attention to Tseng. If only he could accurately mimic the movements of the elusive (and utterly untrustworthy) ninja, perhaps he could... he could... crawl along the wall, stick to the ceiling, something -- anything to make evading his boss that much easier. "I shouldn't've worn the tie, yo," Reno murmurs mournfully to Minnie as he nears the bottom of one of the Observatory's many spiraling staircases.

But maybe Rufus will still be messing with his number thingos. Maybe...

The Turk hesitates, pressing himself against the wall, mentally evaluating his mental maps of the lobby... and then he strides confidently out from the shadows of the stairs' alcove, aimed for the nearest exit. Chin up, chest out, Minnie secure, walk walk walk aaaand look busy!

Almost there, almost there, another eight steps, another six, almost th--

The thought does not so much trail off as it combusts, clapped in the steel jaws of despair. Reno stiffens as Rufus speaks, one eyelid beginning to twitch in a steady rhythm alongside his heartbeat, and his voice is strained when he replies with forced cheer, "Kay, sir, strange noises outside, I'm on it. Was just heading there myself, sir, it's no trouble at all." His stride doesn't so much as hitch. Five steps...

His movements slight with guilt and painfully concise with the sort of layered reluctance that could suffocate small children, the Turk turns to wearily regard his President, noble resignation writ bold in every line of his face. "Yessir," Reno sighs, while he shakes a metaphorical fist at his improvisational talents for jumping ship this early into the game. "I am wearing a tie, sir."

After a short moment, he disengages a hand from somewhere beneath Minnie to uneasily finger the startlingly claret tie in question, and while his discomfort is almost as obvious in that nervous gesture as his heart-wrenching sufferance, Reno manages a ragged smile. "Ha, ha. So how do I look, sir?"

The hand previously occupied with nervously smoothing the bright tie moves instead to nervously pull on the lobe of an ear. And if he'd fidgeted before, Reno fidgets all the more now that he has caught the glare of one little bear -- damn, not another mommy dearest! Isn't D-chan enough?

"Erm," murmurs Reno, glancing guiltily across the lobby to stare out the window. He taps the heel of one de-muddied boot against the toe of another de-muddied boot, rolls his knuckles over his nose, and generally acts like a very tall schoolboy who has, yet again, been caught doing something he shouldn't.

"Why is such a strong question, sir... I mean... do I really, do I really need a reason? I've heard some people, you know, like Tseng, they wear ties all the time, sir." Tseng is also a ninja, so he could have avoided this whole situation, but we won't get into that.

"Dinner, sir." Reno stares very fixedly at the top of one velvet's head. "I was invited to dinner, sir. So I thought I should... dress up a bit, sir. Oh, did you finish your soducko thingo, sir?"

Oh, yes -- quite the valiant evasive maneuver, even if it is rather spoiled by a second doubtful glance, threaded through with belated suspicion and not just a slight trace of something very much like hope. "...Erm, impeccable, sir?"