Lily was physically utterly exhausted. But as Apophis walked in, she forced her mind to set aside the frailties of her body. At this moment, she simply couldn't afford to be too tired to think.
Fighting with Apophis right now was out of the question. They still didn't know anything close to enough about his capabilities and weaknesses for it to be a winning move even had they been fresh. And while none of them were actually injured, that was mostly because of all the healing they had been doing. Lily didn't have enough left in her to maintain that volume of healing through another long battle, and Nope wasn't looking in much better shape than she was. (Well, okay, he was technically in better shape, given that her current shape could be best described as "mostly-wilted half-human-half-plant-monster", but he didn't look much less tired than she felt, anyway.)
But it probably wasn't a good idea to show any weakness or submission either. Even if you could take a guy who styled himself as a god of chaos at his word (protip: you can't) just because he didn't have any intention to fight them now didn't mean those intentions couldn't change.
Acting deliberately to provoke him seemed unwise. And he almost certainly understood the advantage he held in this moment. A display of bravado would only come off as pathetic.
The palatable options, as she saw it, were to either play along in hopes that an extended conversation might give them the opportunity to acquire information, or offer the minimum response that was unlikely to provoke him, in hopes that he'd get bored quickly and go away.
There was no reason to expect that Apophis would reveal much about himself, but that didn't mean there was nothing to learn here. Apophis presented as mad, but Lily's guess was that his actions were more deliberate than he let on. Just seeing how he acted and reacted in conversation would help them piece together some information about his personality, and that could be big game on the longer term. Even just seeing how cautiously he approached the conversation, how freely he spoke, could potentially reveal something about what sort of approaches they might be able to use against him in the future.
Come to think of it...the question, she supposed, really was just how cautiously he was approaching this conversation.
Lily had a guess. It wasn't based on any specific observation, any decisive evidence. She thought it was plausible, but not necessarily probable. But sometimes it paid off to acting with a certainty you didn't feel.
So in response to Apophis's question, Lily held her hands (well, her hand, since the other one was still just kinda dragging along the ground behind her as a limp vine) out in a non-threatening gesture, walked calmly up to Apophis and unless he (or someone else) did anything to stop her...waved her hand at his body.
If it passed through it, she would just raise an eyebrow at him.
If it didn't (or something stopped her) she would nod, walk back to where she had been standing before, and say, politely, "Not right this second, I don't think."
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LOL turn on ALL OF THE SENSES!
Olfactory Perception as Insight to Evaluate with Detect Emotions. (1d20+13)[29].
Re: [M&M 3e] Defying the Future IC
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