Twirl, twirl, twirl! Spin, spin, spin! Fwumph!

Of course, she'd made it look amazing. Her dress is a Cascade original: of course the skirt can flutter and rise without embarrassing her, of course it looks graceful and eye catching. Her feet have known a thousand thousand dances and royal ballets, so of course those too raise to points and pivot around each other with absolute poise instead of frantically bobbling to keep her weight under her. Almost every eye in the room is drawn straight to her, little flower blossoming on the wind, she.

But that's not the same thing as having any control over her momentum or direction. Alina's curse has always been that everything, absolutely everything, looks intentional. So naturally there are quiet sighs and louder giggles and a general shaking of heads when her face meets cool, pleasant, and above all mysterious softness with that sound of fluttering fabric and soft bodies colliding that mixes with the platters on the buffet table shifting just ever so slightly. What else could she have meant to do? Where else could she have been trying to end up? Oh, Alina. It's like she kept herself that short on purpose.

Nobody's fooled by her squeak of fright or the blush on her face. Nobody's ever fooled by that schemestress anymore. Come on, girl. You have a girlfriend now: you're supposed to stop things like that.

"Sorry sorry sorry sorry!" she squeaks over and over again while she waits for the room to stop spinning.

Alina leans on the buffet table trying to catch her breath. It's a disappointing spread, she can't help thinking despite the fact that there's three of everything swirling around. She can't spot any of her favorites, even the ones from Jedad. Then it occurs to her that hey, maybe she has other things she needs to think about. She shifts her gaze up to the ceiling and slumps her shoulders.

"Lousy," she admits, "I'm stuck in some stupid game between Esmeralda and Kyouko and now I either hand you over to Princess Blackscarf and get her help or she'll throw me on an island somewhere, which..."

Her gaze slowly shifts down, and what she sees freezes the blood in her veins.