my best self

Carefully Armando set about rewinding the strips of fabric down into more manageable balls. Once they were wound tightly he put each back into the little pouch it had come from and then each pouch went back into his bag. If rejected he'd take those same little pieces of fabric to the next eligible pack and show them off there, so he was taking great care to keep their scent from fading below the point of recognition. Hopefully that effort would prove unnecessary here in a bit with a nod of acceptance from the alpha, but Armando wasn't brazen enough to make that sort of assumption.

He tipped his head to the side as he considered the alpha's question. It was an odd one in his opinion and one he wasn't sure he could answer without causing offense. "To be frank," he said slowly, trying to decide how bold he could get away with being, "I don't think all of this would be worth the effort. I am taking a risk in simply sitting here." He'd picked the outcropping to give himself a bit of height and maybe a smidge of warning if the wolf lunged at him, but Armando wasn't under the impression escape would be easy.

Armando spread his paws in a gesture of meekness. "This way I will go through all of the suspicion and reservation of a new member with the added burden of being a different and suspicious species with a self-professed knack for spying. If I'm ever deemed worthy of pack secrets I imagine it won't be for a long time. It would be far easier to sit up in the trees and munch dumbly on a pine cone, and I would get quite a bit more information that way as who thinks of the squirrels and birds overhead when talking business?"

He shrugged. "My experience with that sort of thing is all I have in the way of a defense." Eligos could dismiss it as nothing but words and there was nothing Armando could do about that, but he had no real way of proving that he was genuine. He was being honest and that, as far as he could tell, was all he could do.