Ford laughed at her question. They were only an hour into the party, or a little farther. "It's a little early for that, Miss," he pointed out. He might have said her name, if he knew it, but she was still hovering in that area of nagging familiarity; he was sure he knew her but still couldn't place her. He could have called her Miss Butterfly or something, he supposed, based on the mask she was wearing, but that seemed a little too silly. He didn't want to invite any commentary on his own mask, since he was sure it probably looked far more ridiculous than hers. Besides, using silly pet names was the sort of thing men did when they were trying to flirt with women, and after the Begonia Belby debacle the last thing Ford wanted to do was give anyone the impression he was trying to flirt with women.

"Hopefully they've thought about the eventuality, though," he continued, with a glance over the edge of the walkway towards the dance floor below. "That would be quite an unpleasant fall for someone who couldn't walk a straight line. Not to mention the poor dancers who happened to be below them at the time." Surely they had planned for something like that, though. It would have been easy to do with magic, putting some sort of safety barrier in, and the Minister had obviously spared no expense on the rest of this fete.

He probably ought to have just left off there, but a thought occurred to him suddenly and before he'd had a chance to think better of it he found himself asking her, "Want to test it?"