It was the same meeting place and the same three people, except Yucheng and Ei looked better and better, while La Signora looked somewhat mentally exhausted and rather unwell, as though she had been on her period.
Huh? Wait, La Signora was already over five hundred years old. Could she still have periods? Surely she had gone through menopause long ago from all that excess heat?
This month of negotiations had been the most mentally exhausting stretch of La Signora's life. She had never been the sort who liked sitting down to negotiate, but now she had to negotiate not only with Kuki Shinobu on Inazuma's side, but also with Pantalone and The Rooster on Snezhnaya's side. She was, one might say, under attack on both fronts.
At first, she had thought this would be a simple job. Why not just give Inazuma whatever it wanted? They were only worldly goods, after all, and it was not as though they lacked them. Yet the negotiation expert sent by Snezhnaya said he had orders from Lord Pantalone to haggle.
Thus began an unprecedented tug-of-war. Both sides held lengthy lists and negotiated one item after another. The scene was just like a shouting match between shrews at a market.
At first, La Signora had been quite patient, but when she learned that their negotiation expert had spent an entire day negotiating with Inazuma over one or two tons of grain, she too realized something was wrong.
Half a month later, when La Signora saw that they had only reached agreement on a third of the supplies on the negotiation list, she could no longer stand it. With a wave of her hand, she froze their negotiation expert into a block of ice, then rushed back to Snezhnaya.
When she returned to Inazuma