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Today had been going really well for Ellen.

She'd been called back to the Citadel to report on the RobCo factory status, and she had good results to report. She'd been able to give a coherent account of all the measures taken at Second Diana to ensure that their communications tech was working properly, and it had been accepted. She'd been sent to the Order of the Shield armor labs to give them the Enclave power armor she'd earned from Scribe Bigsley, so that they could retrofit it to her, upgrade it, and repaint it to Brotherhood standards. And she'd even been able to handle Squire Maxson when the boy came to her and asked her, as chaplain, if his parents were really dead and what that meant for him and the rest of his life. Not perfectly, obviously, but well enough that he promised to come back and talk some more the next time she was at the Citadel, and keep on coming back regularly when he needed it. So that had been really, really good.

And then she'd just HAD to go and talk to Senior Scribe Jameson, hadn't she.

She's not sure her face is ever going to stop burning. Talking to the head of the Order of the Quill about- well, it'd been the most embarrassing five minutes of her life that she could recall. So she's gone to the Bar and she's going to stay RIGHT THERE until she no longer wants to pull her power helmet on and do her very best Knight-Captain Gallows impression* for a week.

Feel free to bother her in the meantime, though. It's not like you're from the Wasteland, right?

*Which consists mostly of "...", as Knight-Captain Gallows is widely known as the least talkative man in the Citadel

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"Hey, Ellen!" Annabelle calls. "What's got you looking so out of sorts?"

"Remind me," Ellen mutters, "never to ever ask Scribe Jameson anything again. She's just going to laugh at me."

"Whatever you asked, it can't have been that bad," Annabelle says with a grin as she slides into a chair nearby.

"I asked her about the Brotherhood's fraternization rules," Ellen mutters. "Because I didn't know them. It was a perfectly good reason!"

"Perfectly sensible," Annabelle agrees.

Then there's a pause.

"Er, what's fraternization when it's at home?"

"Socialization and personal association with somebody in your chain of command, basically," Ellen says. "It's more complicated than that but it amounts to rules about who you're allowed to be social with in your off hours."

"Seriously? They have RULES about that sort of thing?" Annabelle shakes her head in disbelief. "Sounds like a damn stupid idea to me, limiting who you can be friends with."

"What did their policy end up being, anyway?" Since Ellen presumably found out.

"It makes more sense than you'd think. If an officer was close friends with some of the soldiers under his or her command, they'd be inclined to keep them out of combat for their own good, even if it put others in danger," Ellen says. "Or if they were dating somebody they could order around and they got into an argument, they could force them into the line of fire, like David ordered with Uriah when he was having an affair with Bathsheba and wanted Uriah dead and out of the way. So if there's rules that say you're not allowed to get close with the people who take your orders or give you your orders, that kind of thing is less likely to happen."

She sighs, and looks away. "Scribe Jameson says that it's not fraternization if it's across the Order line. Knights and Paladins are the combat arm of the Brotherhood, so that's our Order, and the Scribes are noncombatants, so that's their Order- so it's not a problem even if you're all assigned to the same project and you technically outrank them, so long as one of you is in the fighting orders and the other one isn't."

Annabelle has no idea who these David, Uriah and Bathsheba people are, but that's probably not relevant. (She vaguely recalls there being all sorts of weird names back during the 1700s, maybe they lived then?)

The part when Ellen looks away distracts her from that line of thought, however.

"Someone in the Scribes catch your eye?" Annabelle asks with a grin.

"Nothing happened yet! I wanted to check first!"

Annabelle chuckles a bit at Ellen's indignation. "I didn't accuse you of anything, improper or otherwise," she points out with a smile.

"Not going to leave me in the dark about who they are, are you?" Don't make her break out the sad puppy eyes, Ellen.

"Oh, you wouldn't know him- you've never met him," Ellen says. "He just- seemed like somebody I ought to get to know, that's all... and he was one of the Scribes on the factory project, which is my command, which is why I was worried. So I wanted to check, first. Stop smiling like that. Scribe Jameson looked just like that the whole time."

Annabelle coughs. "I can't help it!" she protests. "You asking that questions is just so....you."

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Leela has discovered the rafters above the bar. And she's come to enjoy them rather quickly. They remind her a little of home, minus the occasional aggressive bird of prey defending her clutch. They also make it easy to spot a familiar face.

She hops down and lands about five feet away.

"Hello, Ellen."

Ellen looks up with a jerk of surprise, and then smiles. "Oh- hello, Leela," she says. "I didn't see you there. How have you been?"

"I am well," Leela says. "Much better than I was before.

"And yourself?"

"Doing all right, I suppose," Ellen says. "On balance it was a pretty good day, even if I did get laughed at."

"Were you able to intimidate the warlord?"

"Haven't gotten that far yet. We haven't finished building the army to take with us to his land," says Ellen. "The laughing was from a woman in the Brotherhood, who I went to in order to ask about certain rules."

"Oh? What sort of rules?"

"Oh, I wanted to ask about fraternization. I don't know how the rules are in your tribe, but in the Brotherhood and other armies they don't like to have people who're in command positions get friendly with people who're front-line fighters, and I wanted to ask about the specific rules on that so I didn't do anything improper."

"And what does fraternization mean?"

The Sevateem aren't big on euphamisms.

Ellen doesn't turn red, per se, but she does pink up a bit before clearing her throat. "Getting- really friendly- like, really- with somebody who's subject to your command. Or who you have to answer to, command wise. That's a big no-no."

"Oh, you mean you wished to know your tribe's mating rituals," Leela says. "It is very important to understand those."

"... yes," Ellen says, deciding it's probably best just to cut straight to the chase. "Since I only joined the Brotherhood recently, and don't know them all. It seemed like a good idea to ask before I tried anything, you know?"

She's still pink, but heck, it's out in the open, right?