I was starting to see why Adra had problems controlling his face. “Like eyebrow changes and… and the sort of micro expressions that—”

“There are micro expressions now?” he sounded horrified.

“Yes! Otherwise, you look like bad CGI—”

“I do not know what that is.”

I sighed, and attempted to avoid banging my head against the wall, because he’d probably pick up on that one. “It means you won’t look real.”

“I am not attempting to look real, if by that you mean human. I am attempting to be polite, and achieve normal, working relationships—”

“Which you don’t do by laughing at our dead!”

“I was not laughing; I was smiling at the thought of our victory, but I shall attempt to refrain in future.” He applied a mournful expression which, thankfully, was less exaggerated than the last, and therefore managed not to look like a tortured soul screaming in hell. I decided not to ask where he’d acquired that template.

“You look like you just lost your best friend,” I told him.

“I do not have a best friend.”

I waited.

The mournful expression became slightly less so, albeit with a tinge of crushing depression.

“Now you look like you just got fired and came home to find out that your house burned down.”

“But, if I was on fire, would I not expect—” I held up a finger. He sighed again. “Very well, show me once more.”

I showed him. He, in turn, made an expression that was a mixture of sadness and anger, maybe because I was too annoyed to demonstrate it properly. But it was an improvement on the others.

“Better?”

“Better,” I agreed, and then bowed out of the conversation when the consul came up, with real anger all but boiling off her.

Adra tried out his new expression, and she stopped abruptly, as if caught off guard. He gave me a subtle thumbs up and smiled. And then realized that he’d made a mistake and tried to reapply the mournful mask, but went too far again.

I hotfooted it down the hallway, with the consul’s horrified cry floating through the air after me.

So, yeah, Adra was having issues with his allies. But he put up with it because we were fighting the same enemy. The gods, as he mentioned, had hunted demons, devastating whole races in their never-ending thirst for power.