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Because she lived a life of misery and had a weapon who didn't think things like being burnt alive was worth taking a break, Camille had been out in the Caribbean drizzle performing target practice. Her aim was getting a little better, little being the operative word, but trying to stretch herself into the positions required to fire properly was...well it was bizarre. Not painful, necessarily, but there was a kind of resistance she wasn't used to.

The blip of a text message had her responding a little more eagerly than she perhaps would have normally from Nora. The two girls had both been there but she distinctly remembered having been snapped at on more than one occasion. Putting herself back in that spot wasn't something she was incredibly keen about. Yet she had a promise that it would be 'worthwhile' and so the trainee slogged back inside with a quick text back.



Her coat was hung in the basement alongside her scarf to dry for it was inappropriate on an extreme level to track that level of water into Mimsy's bedroom. One of her endless comfortable lounge outfits was thrown on, feet in slippers as she shuffled into the kitchen and paused. "Oh, nice apron!"

Cami couldn't help but laugh at Nora's assertion that it was all about looking good no matter what you did; she quite agreed! "Harder for me to live up to that lately but I've been trying. I had a friend in college who lived inside thrift shops, she refused to wear anything that wasn't at least twice her age. I swear she had at least three of those." Leaning against the counter fingers touched the damp end of one curl with a smile. "But unfortunately I was just out in the rain. I let Kidana harass me into trying to shoot targets through inclement weather." Rolling her shoulders to ease the discomfort of new skin having to be stretched to make her bow draws fit, she was still nonetheless smiling.

Propping her chin in her hands the redhead snagged a stool. "Lemme know if you need any help with anything. I'm not the best at baking but I can do prep pretty well." Cami was a savory cook, not a baker, so she only knew her way around half the kitchen with any real skill. "What kinda chat?" This was what she was afraid of, and it made her touch the subject with a light hand. She didn't like open-ended situations that she was not sure of the outcome.

Not now.

Sliding off the chair she was halfway to the oven, automatically programming for the Metric system she'd been raised in before the rest of Nora's question hit her. Sarelak? It took the time she went back to the stool to figure out that she'd meant that evil bug pit they'd fallen into before being set on fire. How had she been doing since then? Ignoring that question as long as possible she didn't bother sitting down, instead grabbing two bottles of water from the fridge. One was set down within the other girl's reach should she want it while the redhead took a deep swig of her own.

"I'd take any excuse to be girly. You can bet that beneath any armor I have to wear into battle there'll be something pink and fantastic." Everything she owned was girly in some way or another, save perhaps a few of her most casual sweatshirts. They were over-sized, stolen from old hookups and/or boyfriends, with various institutions and musical genres represented. Unable to avoid it any longer she sighed and looked down at her hands. Should she be honest? Was there a reason not to be?

Taking a breath she let it out and talked as evenly as she could manage. "It's hard. Sleeping, mostly. I expect to wake up and feel my skin burning but there's nothing. I feel like I did before all of this happened, physically, but I shouldn't. Should I?" Another deep drink. "That's why I've been doing so much extra work. Maybe next time..." She trailed off, shrugged. "Making peach cobbler seems like a pretty good idea."

Happy to take direction while they talked each of the mentioned sugars and spices were measured out in precise motions, a knife swiping the top of each measuring cup to make sure that it was perfectly even. If they hadn't been baking she might have just scooped and dumped, it was a fairly standard method for savory cooking, but baking was science. If you weren't precise something was going to be off and, more often than not, something was off when Cami baked. Blessedly this was Nora's project, not her own, so it might actually turn out alright.

It was a mark of how depressed she was that Cami didn't even take offense at the momentary implication that she couldn't cut it as a Deus hunter. She'd been agreeing more and more as time went on but damned if she wasn't trying now. Still even if her face was not anything but neutral her voice carried some of her self-disappointment. "I was about to be a graduate student at Columbia University. Masters in Caribbean Studies. That's the accent." She was fluent in three languages, knew almost everything you could know about the history of the Caribbean region (including chunks of South and Central America), and none of that mattered.

Quirking her lips slightly she looked out one of the kitchen windows. "Guess I am still studying in my field somewhat." They were in the Bermuda Triangle which she'd done a paper on once, the cultural obsession with it, the explanations for it, and all along it had been a window to the Things that Went Bump. "I can't argue that some better expectation of what we're up against wouldn't make these things easier. It seems....counter-productive to allow us to throw ourselves into those sorts of situations without any real idea of what's coming." She was a trainee. What had she been doing in the Sahara with a titan?

Looking down at her hands, thinking about how she'd healed, she shrugged. "Good as new which is the problem, it's new. It doesn't respond the same way I'm used to my skin responding. It's a bit too...taut? Like a new drum." Drums wore in over time as you used them, as the oils on your hands softened the skin of it, and that's what she needed. She didn't believe that the dreams would go away. You couldn't just forget something like that but new nightmares? Those...those she could believe.

"What did you do before Deus? If you don't mind me asking."

It was fortunate that Nora had had the presence of mind to tell her assistant to not squash the peaches or they would have likely been a paste with the force of the redhead's annoyance. "Look, I get that it was counterproductive to be screaming and having a nervous breakdown but that's not something I've ever seen before. I'd only ever been in a single fistfight in my whole life and do you think there's much serious crime on an island with less than 25,000 people?" Despite the irritation in her voice her hands were steady and fairly gentle on the bowl, only the pressure on the spoon any indication of how she was trying to not ******** up Nora's cobbler.

Deciding it wasn't going to be that easy she stopped to rest her hands on the counter. "I ran through that portal after seeing a dead man all but drop out of the sky. My very first corpse. It was a run into a Hell I'd never been warned about or never expected. So I'm sorry that you found my reaction unecessary and difficult but I'm not sorry for my reaction." Squeezing the formica to let out some of the tension Cami picked up the spoon to start stirring once more. "I can give you hope, though, that it likely won't happen again. I know what hell looks like now so it shouldn't surprise me overmuch."

Momentarily she paused on had a kid. Had Nora left her child behind to come to Deus? The question was in her blue eyes but thankfully she had enough tact to not ask. So did you abandon your child and rob them of a mother to come here just didn't quite roll off the tongue in any appreciable manner. "I was a student, still. Worked an odd job here and there mostly as a translator. I grew up hearing Spanish and English mixed all around me so it was a wonder when I went to school in the States and nobody'd really learned how to speak it at all. Good money though."

Looking down at what she'd made, the bowl was tipped. "How's it looking?"