Saying that things had changed quite a bit did very little to make Vitali do anything but live in the moment. He was obviously still rather happy to simply live in the here and now. More than anything he wanted this time to be nice and happy. That alone was really his only wish at this point to be perfectly honest.<br/><br/>In real life, there were no magic wands to wish away problems, but he would have liked one to make this moment last forever honestly.<br/><br/>Should she have told him about her mission, Vitali would probably at first have taken it as a joke. As soon as he would have learned that she were serious about it, though, he would probably taken things personally. It would have sort have been like a personal affront to him. Politics and nationalism would have taken a backseat to the fact that it would have been pretty rough to put up with something like that being revealed to him.<br/><br/>Worse, though, was what might have happened if he ended up telling the authorities. He was a member of an ethnic minority, and they wouldn't have wanted a scandal to break out about a national hero anyway. The Communist Party-run media would have made up a story about him having a heart attack before they quietly shuffled him off to suffer in a Gulag in Siberia. While the space program would have suffered an extreme loss, the political leadership wouldn't want someone who had a relationship with a spy to taint the public image.<br/><br/>Even if they were technically on opposite sides, this war didn't seem very different for what each would want to do to failures.<br/><br/>Fortunately none of this had to even be on his mind for the time being. He only had to think of the present, since she hadn't mentioned anything of the sort to him. With a smile, he started to actually lean up against her. "I love to hear you call me that though." Quickly enough, however, his next words were met with a certain level of shock.<br/><br/>"Card and word games? Those could never hold up against the grandiose test that chess is!" Vitali smirked, feigning some sort of seriousness that just made him laugh all over again. "Actually, I know one way you could cheat. When you are in a position where making any move would be bad on your part, pick up a piece and tap it back against the board, making it look like you moved."<br/><br/>He then quickly mockingly added another bit to that.<br/><br/>"...not that I'm saying that I did that to you when we were younger! Alright, so maybe I had!"