The whole venture gave Tony time to drain his glass and wish the closest handful of men and women luck for the rest of the day, offering a few warm handshakes for the privilege. He wasn't sure where the turnaround happened, but this sharing ingestibles routine that Sue was turning out was a welcome change to the anxiety that ruled their meeting in his office, and the rejection on the offense in his workshop. Maybe it wasn't a turnaround, maybe it was just a steady climb up that he kept missing. Either way, it was only getting better-- now if he could just figure out if it was pinging as sexual or just intimate. That kind of subtlety was something he wasn't terribly good at.
It was only in the jeep and started on their way again that Tony admitted, "I was lying. Back there." Which he let hang in the air as he started to pull his own clothes off as Sue had done before him, only with a little less courtesy for her comfort. "The poverty is hurting, and you can't just throw money at it as much as I like to throw money, but I'm saying right now we're in the middle of an actual, on my mother's grave, plague," he continued, which led them into the reason why they were actually there and not following the crew to the next assembly site. He watched her carefully waiting for the sign that she was with him and following before he finished pulling his shirt over his head and swept his hair back. This way, he was a little less prepared for a glamour shot and a little more prepared for running, jumping, riding bikes and jumping into puddles. "The problem is, none of the medical geniuses here, on anyone that's come ahead of us, has found anything really wrong with these people. They're just dying. Up ahead here, I'm told, is where the greatest number of infected have come from." By then, they were driving through what looked like a ghost town; completely abandoned, boarded up and shut down. "Thing is, you fly them out, you move them out of here, they suddenly start to get better. What's your first though? Nuclear, right? No sign, totally clean."