Does Romance Give you the Squick?

Well, it does for me.

Oh, not in real life. IRL, I'm a softie who enjoys romance. Not necessarily Romance novels, mind you,* but I meant the concept itself. Yes, yes, I know, somebody alert my wife.**

I also don't mind having romance in video games, because for me that's a personal choice. If you want to romance an NPC, go ahead. If you don't, you don't.

What I meant was romance in pencil-and-paper RPGs, although to a lesser extent romance between two players in an MMO as well.*** 

This was sparked by a video that popped up the other day concerning D&D and romance:

Yes, I follow Ginny Di's YouTube videos. No, I didn't get into her videos from Critical Role, but rather I stumbled on her channel when she progressed to other RPG topics. The algorithm looked at my viewing history and thought "You know, there's this woman who dyes her hair that you might find insightful..." and here I am. She does have some great and insightful comments on a variety of RPG topics, and between her, Pointy Hat, Stephanie Plays Games, Kelsey Dionne, Bob World Builder, and several other 20s and 30s content creators, I feel that our TTRPG hobby is in good hands for the future.****

***

I guess the reason why I watched Ginny's video was due to my own "experience" with romance in a D&D game.

If you've been around this blog for a while, you might recall I was part of a long-running D&D 3.0 campaign. As in a 20+ year old campaign. When our DM got together with us to hash out what the campaign would be about, there were a few ground rules we decided upon: low to mid level magic, use the Greek and Egyptian Pantheons for the campaign and world building, some roleplaying in character but not pure amateur thespian hour, and absolutely no romance. That last one was a hard no from us players, as we were all dating and/or married*****, and we really just wanted to focus on a campaign with no romantic escapades involved. We've had romantic subplots in our campaign back in college, and when it's involving people who are actually dating IRL who then break up, it gets really ugly really fast. Therefore, just keeping things platonic would make it easier for everybody.

We players figured that with the ground rules set, we were ready to play.

Things worked out okay for a while, and outside of us using IM to play (this was 2001-2 after all) things seemed to progress decently well. After a couple of years, however, our DM began trying to slip in romantic subplots. And the occasional Conan-esque nudity into the game. We all knew our DM, who was a bit of a horndog back in college, so we just figured it was him being him and we didn't take the rather obvious bait. 

We kind of kept things at bay until a new player joined the group for a few years. He was a coworker of the DM, and he wanted to play a Bard. 

You can see where this is going, right? 

Yeah, they both went there. The Bard started wanting to screw every woman he met, and this began to wear on us. This isn't what we wanted, and we definitely didn't ask for it, and it kept diverting us from the actual campaign. Then the DM started having NPCs hit on my character, and I began having to be more forceful in my nipping of those subplots in the bud. 

The rest of us began talking among ourselves about whether we need to take a stand with the DM, and then the problem solved itself: the new player had to stop playing, and just like that the division mostly evaporated.

Mostly.

The DM still would try to sneak in some opportunities for romance here and there, but we ignored them and kept the game focused on the campaign. In the last few months of our campaign before it ended, however, the DM began to ratchet up the opportunities and the PG-13 nature of those "encounters". I won't lie and say otherwise, but after 20 years we players had had enough. There were several other things that contributed to our decision to want to end the campaign, but one of the top complaints on our list was that the DM kept pushing the romance and sexual angles on us. 

I think it needs to be said that we're all adults, and we can handle adult themes.****** However, people have to buy into the concept of romance and shenanigans or you're risking a lot by trying to push it on people when they don't want it. I personally would have to be in the right frame of mind to accommodate an RPG campaign with romance, and I'll also freely admit that I am not an actor in that I would have issues separating the character(s) from the player(s). I probably could do it if I were in, say, a play or musical or something, but in a TTRPG? That'd be harder.

***

Okay, that's tabletop RPGs, but MMOs? 

Hoo boy. That's an entirely different kettle of fish.

If Asmongold's your dad, Nixxiom,

I'm a Jelly Doughnut.

Outside of occasionally being hit on by some oversexed player, I've never been in a romantic situation with another MMO player before. And you can't not realize that there's another player on the other end, which separates it from NPC romances, such as the companion romances in SWTOR. MMO RP romances are going to be with another character, and the specter of ERP (and Goldshire's Lion's Pride Inn) hovers over everything. 

There's this too. And yes, I've kept this from
an old Meme Monday just because.

 

Some people can make it work, but I'm almost completely certain that I can't. 

But if you (not me, for certain) want more detail about doing Romance RP in MMOs (yes, it's WoW but applicable in all of them), there's this:

I guess knowing my limitations is a good thing, and that I'm not planning on putting myself into a situation where they would get tested. If you can handle it, more power to you. I think I'll just go do my own thing instead and leave the romance in MMOs to y'all. 

Oh, and because I couldn't resist, here:

Now you'll never hear that old Sonny

and Cher song the same way.

*Although I have made some attempts to check out the genre, because the only way to know if you'll like it is to try it.

**Ironically enough, I think that between the two of us I'm the romantic one. That doesn't mean that I'm not as clueless as the next guy in trying to figure out if someone is hitting on me; actually my son --nicknamed "Mr. Oblivious" or "Captain Oblivious" due to his cluelessness about such things-- is a chip off the old block.

***Spouses and significant others who are playing the other toon you're romancing kind of get a pass on this, since you're obviously thinking of the other person who you're already romantically involved with.

****They don't need me to tell them that, but consider it just an observation that I'm happy the next generation has taken the reins from us older folks and run with it, in the same way that I'm proud my kids have engaged with the hobby over the years. For all of the "get offa my lawn!" sort of behavior from the old guard (who are as old or older than me), I just wanted to get it out there that I'm happy they're showing their love for the hobby and contributing to its overall success. And maybe this year I'll get a chance to run into one of them at Gen Con.

It also goes without saying that some of the Old Guard have opened their arms to the new generation of content creators. People like Matt Colville, Professor DM, and Baron de Ropp could have circled their collective wagons and been assholes toward the new blood, but they haven't. And our hobby is all the better for it.

*****The DM was married to one of the players, in fact.

******If you're NOT an adult, it goes without saying that parental guidance is strongly suggested. My oldest once attended an RPG game session in high school with some acquaintances, and ALL of the guys there tried to hit on her character (and by extension, her). She got really creeped out, and that was the end of THAT.

I Sure Could Use Some Lemonade

With the Summer Doldrums in full swing, I've been busy taking care of some yardwork as well as other small projects. That doesn't mean I've been neglecting Operation Spread the Love, mind you, but I've had my mind on a lot of other things than just leveling toons on the Anniversary servers.

I may have to move Azshandra's hearthstone location
away from Darkshore, although it does provide me
a quick way of reaching Darnassus. The levels are
current as of July 9, 2025.

When the weather reaches 95F/35C with the heat index soaring to 102F/39C, being outside isn't that pleasant. I can't have honest-to-goodness real lemonade (sugar, you know), but I've made do with the "zero sugar" variety.

You know what also makes this weather miserable? Bugs. Lots of gnats and mosquitos and other bugs that annoy and sting and bite at you while you're trying to get rid of weedy shrubs that are choking out the shrubs and trees you'd planted years ago. I'd not really had a chance to maintain that part of the yard very much over the last few years*, so it had gotten into such a mess that I could put it off no longer. 

Hacking through the weeds with a reciprocating saw and a generic cutting blade** made my job a bit easier, but with the miserable heat on the July 4th holiday I was pretty much spent by around 11:30 AM. And I still was stubborn enough to want to finish cutting part of the grass as well before I called it a day, so I retreated inside and drank some fluids to recharge a bit. 

There it was, World of Warcraft, tempting me to "just go and play for a little while" inside the air conditioned house.

Because of course it was.

I'm still not sure how I fended off that urge to just play for a couple of hours away from the heat and humidity, but I finished my drink and went out and got the grass cut before mid-afternoon rolled around. 

***

The leveling process in Operation Spread the Love can feel like that yardwork at times. You know it's a grind, but it's part of the process. Once you get through, you'll feel better and more confident in understanding how to play your class. None of the quests in the L30s or L40s are earth-shaking by any stretch of the imagination, and to my mind that's a good thing. The world doesn't have to be in the balance to have an enjoyable time, and even if the grind can feel oppressive at times, once you get through you'll be able to look back at how the effort was worth it.

But that grind can get annoying. There's no sugarcoating that. It's also not helped by Mages and Warlocks rounding up mobs in the area and wiping them off the map while you're unable to finish the quests you're on. On days like that --and there have been a lot of them-- it's good to have another place to go to in the meantime. 

Such as Gnomeregan.

I'd originally thought I might hit L50 on toons by August, but that might be optimistic. Maybe October at this rate.

 

*Gee, I wonder why...

**Like an idiot I didn't go out to the hardware store and get a wood cutting blade until Monday, which then made the trimming process go much faster with a lot less effort. I still had to haul away the brush to one side of the yard, where it'll stay until I can break it down for removal. It'll likely take 3-4 weeks' worth of trash removal to get that stuff all cleared out. 

Meme Monday: FFXIV Memes

My son still plays FFXIV, but I think he's on hiatus at the moment. So, this is for him.

For the record, he doesn't pester me about
playing FFXIV. I'm grateful for that. From Reddit.

Having blown up the world and starting over,
A Realm Reborn is different than what was expected.
Still, it led to some good stuff later. From Reddit.

Then FFXIV got popular. From Owlturd.

While it may be FFXIV, it's pretty generic for most MMOs.
From Facebook's FFXIV A Meme Reborn group.
And Moon Knight.

And finally I couldn't resist. Just what number
are we up to right now? XVI? From Imgur.

How The Other Half Lives

I'm kind of grateful that my little corner of the internet isn't that popular. 

As I've said in the past, there's less than 100 people who regularly follow the channel (likely closer to 30 than 100), so I very rarely see much traffic beyond web crawlers out there. When you see traffic to the blog on blogger.com that says "5K" but when you go on Google Analytics and see "15", you know that you have a LOT of bot traffic.*

Truth, but I have it anyway. From StatsGlitch.

I realize I'm a bit of an outlier in that I'm perfectly happy not having much of an online presence. There's tons of people creating online content for various reasons, and here I am not really worried that I'm monetizing my blog that much.** 

Consequently, my normally shy self is served by not being recognizable out in public. Ever since I grew a beard in college, I've been able to be anonymous out in public despite being a redhead; people who knew me in grade or high school have a hard time recognizing me now. It's not perfect, since some people do recognize me every couple of years in this metro area of ~2.3 million people, but I can live with that. If I ever became a published author, my nightmare would be that I'd have to go out on a book tour, so maybe it's for the best that I'm not that good enough of a writer to have to worry about that sort of thing. 

But sometimes I do wonder how I'd handle that "being recognized" scenario.

Luckily for me, some YouTubers who are far more well known than I'll ever be have had to deal with that, and they made posts about their adventures.

This first one, from Rebecca Parham, stumbled into my feed a couple of weeks ago. Until that moment, I was blissfully unaware of who she was. While I'm happy that she's doing well, I'm also perfectly aware she exists in a completely different orbit than I inhabit.

Because I watched a few of Rebecca's videos, the algorithm started suggesting to me JaidenAnimations' videos, and as a consequence this one appeared as it dropped Saturday afternoon. If Rebecca's in an entirely different orbit than me, Jaiden is in another solar system. 

I think that it's a good thing that both of them are in the sort of fandom where they don't have to deal with creepers all that much, but I'm also quite aware that their part of the internet only has occasional interactions with mine at best. There was a bit of culture shock involved when I said to myself "Just who are these people?" and went down the rabbit hole for a while, the same sort of culture shock when I noted that the mini-Reds were watching videos some somebody named Pewdiepie and I felt obligated to find out what that was all about.***

Yeah, I think I'm happy being in my own lane. I'm not sure how I'd handle it if the spotlight of fame were to shine on me, even within such a limited topic as MMO video games.

*There's also the fact that apparently a lot of traffic suddenly began flowing from Brazil of all places, and you know that it's a bot of some sort.

**Because I use an ad blocker on all of my browsers, I don't even know if my blog has any ads visible to people. Since I've not allowed custom ads on the site...

Here's the proof.

there ought to not be any ads. If there are any ads, however, I get so little "real" traffic that I'd never see a dime anyway.

***It was a short-lived interest, which was fine with me.

2004 vs 2025

I keep up with YouTuber WillE's videos, because he does spend a lot of time on the Classic WoW side of the house. On Monday, he posted this video...

Which was filled with ways how people have turned the game into speedruns, leveling boosts, and whatnot compared to what it was like back in 2004. The game mechanics are the same, but how we play it is completely different than 20+ years ago.

All I could think of while watching this was "...and here I am, plodding along, eschewing most things that resemble a 'modern' approach to Classic, much less a Retail mentality."

It seems kind of strange that I'm now a rebel and a hipster for wanting to do things the old way. 

I'm not "that guy" who wants to RP as a Hobbit in Molten Core, not wearing boots; since I know that there are expectations placed on you if you raid, I'm eschewing raiding. I do work hard to acquit myself well in group content I do enter into, but I refuse to play the rush-rush-rush game. 

The people who do the behaviors that WillE highlighted in the video are having fun, or at least I hope they are, because I'm having fun playing my way. I'm enjoying playing classes I'd never touched before, and because of that I'm learning how to better play as a Mage. I'm learning how a Feral Druid rotation works, and because of that I know better when I can push as a Mage and when I can dial it back. I understand better the symbiotic relationship a Warlock and a Shadow Priest have, where one complements the other and enhances their overall damage output. 

***

Also this week had the Mists of Pandaria Classic pre-patch drop. One of my little group is all gung ho for it, and I wish her the best, but I'm not touching that place.

I remember three things about Mists: WoW Pokemon, Let's Blow Up Theramore Just Because, and Battlegrounds were horrible. Well, there's also the insane gear scaling, wherein a Mage player I knew had 4-5 TIMES the health my leveling Rogue had because she was wearing raid gear from the second(?) raid from Mists.* And now that I think about it, I stopped playing any instanced PvE content in Mists as well because I got into one instance after an insane multi-hour wait, the tank pulled everything, died, and dropped group, followed by everybody else.**

WoW had turned into a game where I saw nobody out in Pandaria, the guild I was in died due to people leaving WoW, and Blizzard thought it an absolutely banger of an idea to force PvE players to have to go win the Mine Cart BG to progress in the legendary questline. Oh yeah, there were also the tons of bots in BGs, the Alliance had almost no chance to win anything other than the 40 person BGs, and the gear treadmill on both PvP (and I presume PvE) meant that by the time I became barely relevant in BGs the goalposts got moved and I had to start all over again.

And that's not even counting all of the quality of life changes, the so-called*** talent tree rework, and the Scenario content that I already wrote off when I wrote off 5-person instanced content. I mean, if people are silent toxic assholes in 5-person content, why won't they do that in the 3-person variety?

I guess I realized that WoW had strayed too far from the version of the game I fell in love with in 2009, and if the horrible BG experience was just making me angry all the time, why should I keep playing?

So yeah, I'm not going there. I much prefer Vanilla Classic and the relaxed pace (well, my relaxed pace, that is). Speedrunners need not apply.

*Not sure what the second raid patch was, but I know it wasn't the third or the first.

**To this day I still don't know what I was supposed to do in that instance, and what exactly happened and whether it was my fault. There was absolutely no discussion, even after I mentioned this was my first instance in Mists.

***If they're trees, I'm a duck. ::quack::

Yet Another Debriefing

I've wanted to put together an origin story for Linna for quite a while now, so when I began Winter's Veil and the Light as a Christmas story things seemed to fit into place. Unlike the average Hallmark Christmas Movie (tm), I wanted a Christmas story that didn't have romance involved. Okay, yes, there's a few references here and there to romances, but it isn't the focus of the story at all.

It's also quite easy to forget that Linna's actually older than Card by about a year or so, because Card left home ahead of her. I felt that Card being the catalyst for Linna's departure is one thing, but there had to be more to it than that. I've done my share of volunteer work and I know people who chose professions that aren't very lucrative but serve a critical function in society* because they feel the call to serve. To me, the Paladin is an extension of that call to serve, despite in WoW lore the Silver Hand was seen as a path to the nobility. Obviously, people will join an organization for any number of reasons, yet I wanted Linna's desire to help out to manifest in a pretty obvious way. That doesn't mean that she's an overgrown Girl Scout or something, because I once described her as the least serious Paladin in the world. I can easily see her as being an annoyance in the side of Lord Shadowbreaker because she simply will not act with the gravitas as befits her status as a Knight.

The path of a Paladin in World of Warcraft is more than simply based on the historical military religious orders of the Crusades**, given that the members of the Knights of the Silver Hand could marry and have children. The AD&D version of the Paladin (the O.G. Paladin, to be honest) had a very restrictive set of ability requirements for the class, and in the old days of "what you roll on your ability score is what you get", Paladins were quite rare.*** Therefore, I made some extrapolations based on what I knew in-game of the WoW version of the Paladin and came up with the requirement for two sponsors for acceptance into the Order.

But how the initiation would progress kind of stumped me. 

Okay, I knew about Arthas' initiation in Arthas: Rise of the Lich King by Christie Golden, and I thought it might work with some heavy editing, but I cast about for information on how it was interpreted in a roleplaying scenario. It took some searching, but I came across this post on the Argent Archives website, which provides a full RP induction ceremony into the Knights of the Silver Hand.

From argentarchives.org as of July 1st, 2025.

As you can tell, I adapted it to use in the story in the same way that they adapted it from Christie Golden's work. I thought there was too much in the ceremony to simply copy it verbatim, so I trimmed here and there to speed up the story a bit, as well as to add the sponsorship portion. I also thought it appropriate to give the Priesthood more authority over the entire ceremony by cutting out the Silver Hand's direct participation in some of the initiation, reflecting the Catholic Church's authority over the military religious orders in the Middle Ages. Azeroth has too little population --compared to Medieval Europe prior to the Black Death-- to simply let whatever Priest happens to be around to administer the induction ceremony. Sure, one of the Bishops could have run the show, but since the High Priestess is actually there in the Cathedral in-game, it made sense to use her instead.

***

Okay, confession time: for the longest time I had absolutely no idea who Linna's second sponsor would be. Only now in retrospect it seems obvious, but I wrote up several basic outlines for various people who would be Linna's second sponsor, and at various times I tried them all out:

• Elsharin
• Evelyn
• Mona
• Sloan**** 
• Mathias
• Some Faction Lead/Bigwig

The last two I discarded very quickly, because Mathias wants to stay in the background as much as possible despite Mona's past ties to SI:7, and also because I wanted this to maintain more of a "common people" focus than fall into the same "faction lead-focused" trap that Blizzard has with their own Retail story. Still, I knew that in order for Linna to be inducted, there had to be some nobility or higher up involvement (the High Priestess, Lord Shadowbreaker, etc.) but I didn't want that to be the focus of the story. All of the others in the list I deliberately brought up and discarded in the story itself because the story actually provided the TL;DR of why I decided not to use any of them. I also really didn't want to choose Azshandra, because she'd never agree to that. I know her well enough --she lives rent-free in my head, you know-- and she'd have shut that down before I could even put her on the list.

I wanted the second sponsor to be someone that Linna has interacted with, and could potentially represent a larger organization that may or may not be well received by either the nobility or the clergy. To my mind, that meant either a semi-renegade (such as Balthan) or a member of an organization not based in Stormwind: the Cenarion Circle, the Argent Dawn, or the Explorer's League. Of those, the Cenarion Circle made the most sense since Linna has interacted with them before. And it was then that I went "Duh!!" and smacked my forehead. I contacted Ancient, who readily agreed to let me borrow Kitwynn again, and that was that.

***

There was one last loose end I had to clear up, and that was a technical matter. I didn't want to write about Honey Bread without actually having experience in how the damn thing tastes. Yes, I could have just rolled with it and come up with a description based on what I knew of the bread, but I wanted to ground my writing in my own impressions of what it tasted like. Of course, the problem here is that a fictional food isn't something you could readily taste.

Or could you?

Well, in the Before Times, I wrote a post about fandom cooking in July 2021. Among the books I referenced, there was this little gift set:

I still have the apron, btw.

And tucked within it's pages, there was this:

Sindorei this, Sindorei that. It's not like the Queldorei
didn't eat it before them, you know...
From World of Warcraft: The Official Cookbook
by Chelsea Monroe-Cassel, Page 79.

So... I had a recipe to try.

I need not bore you with the details about my testing the recipe out*****, and I did have to make an adaptation to accommodate my low-salt diet, but this was the result:

That's after brushing it with melted butter
once it came out of the oven.

If you want to know how it tastes, well... 'absolutely awesome' kind of covers it. It reminds me a lot of challah bread, given that the ingredients are similar, but the recipes of challah I've used have granulated sugar instead of honey.

Before you ask, 1/12th of Chelsea's recipe comes out to about ~34 grams of carbs, so it's well within my carb budget on a per meal basis. Believe me, I kept an eye on my blood sugar after eating it, and I had no issues with a sudden spike in my numbers. 

My wife really likes the recipe, so I think I might have to put this into regular rotation. Next, I ought to try Chelsea's Mulgore Spiced Bread recipe, which apparently gets rave reviews on Reddit and other websites. 

***

So there you have it. A story that I originally thought I could belt out in a month or so took over seven months and had me bashing my head against a wall for a good while. I have other stories I'm working on in various states of completion, and I'm not sure which one will appear next. I ought to start posting on Azeroth After Dark rather than letting that blog sit there, unused, but we'll see. Based on my pageview data, I know that my fiction doesn't get a lot of eyeballs, but I wanted to get this out there instead of holding onto it.

*Aside from the military, there's teaching, firefighting, police, local journalism, libraries, community outreach (such as senior centers and support), park administration, and religious orders (no, televangelists don't count).

**The Poor Knights of the Temple of Solomon (Templars) and The Knights of the Order of the Hospital of Saint John of Jerusalem (The Hospitallers) are the most well known among the military religious orders, but there's also other Crusades througout Europe that generated military religious orders. Among them are the Teutonic Knights, the Order of Calatrava, the Order of Santiago, and the Order of Montesa. All of these military religious orders mixed a monastic life with military service. Unlike their non-religious chivalric counterparts, the adherents of the military religious orders eschewed worldly possessions and maintained celibacy in the name of service. While those requirements may have held up for individual members, some of the military religious orders became very rich from donations by the nobility throughout Europe (looking at you, Templars).

***Or you had to keep rolling until you got the right combination. I tried that once, and it took me hours before I finally got a Paladin on rolls alone. That minimum score of 17 out of 3d6 for your Charisma is a real bitch.

****You can find Sloan as an NPC vendor in SI:7, and I adapted her in another unfinished story into someone Card interacts with when she finally arrives at SI:7 with Mona's letter of warning to Mathias. That letter of warning is referenced in One Final Lesson, Part 5 and Part 6.

*****If people want to see the details, I can make another post about that later.

Winter's Veil and the Light -- Part 2/2

Previous Installment:
Winter's Veil and the Light -- Part 1

Several days later I paced restlessly in the foyer of the Cathedral of Light. I may not be the focal point of today’s events, but I was going to be in front of the High Priestess of the Church of the Light herself. The Cathedral may not be the Keep, but that didn’t mean the nobles of Stormwind weren’t paying attention.

I paused for a moment to rub at the ache on my shoulder.

“Stop playing with it, Apprentice,” Mistress Elsharin said in Thalassian, her voice thick with disapproval. “It will take longer to heal.”

Pulling my hand away, I rolled my shoulders to move my old purple robe around a bit. “It’s…” I frowned as my voice trailed off. Searching for the right word in her tongue and realizing I didn’t know it yet, I changed directions. “How long before the pain goes away?”

“About a week.”

“A week?” I was about halfway through.

“Surely you’ve been hurt from being out in the sun too long, it’s no worse than that.”

No, it wasn’t, but that burn usually faded after a couple of days, and this was still going strong. I frowned, realizing that this was likely Elsharin’s way of saying “don’t be such a baby,” only since she said it in remedial Thalassian it sounded worse.

While Mistress Elsharin had given me another present –a warm bathrobe—for Winter’s Veil, her primary gift was a tattoo of her family’s crest on my shoulder. The concept of bearing the Dawnweaver crest sounded exciting and sophisticated at first, but the moment the Queldorei tattoo artist began, all those emotions vanished in a puff of smoke. I’d been beaten and stabbed and shot with arrows, but this so-called “small thing” hurt more than it had any right to.

Still, it kept me from thinking about Linna’s acceptance into the Order for a while.

“Remember, Apprentice,” Elsharin said, interrupting my musings, “Give the Knights what is asked, but no more. You have a talent for talking too much.”

“Yes, Mistress Elsharin.” I opened my mouth to continue, but I realized I was about to demonstrate my Mistress’ rather apt critique and shut it instead.

The doors to the Cathedral opened and my family entered, with Linna in front. She was dressed all in white, as was the custom for a supplicant, and she’d even taken care to brush her tangled blonde hair and tie it back into a smart ponytail. Her easy, casual smile was nowhere to be seen.