"She's too polite to say that I usually mooch food and rooms off of her," Lai Shi Po was saying, her bare feet and raggedy-ass clothing worse off than where Sobon had last seen her. "I'm not much trouble, but the escorts from the family..." she tsked her tongue, even as her eyes were scanning around the courtyard of Sobon's home. "They'll find me. They always do. But I have a little while longer to myself."

Sobon had thought, when she was sweeping her scanner around, that she had sensed the woman's aura somewhere close, but she hadn' t expected the woman to apparently walk clear across the empire to meet with her, without a whole lot of provocation and apparently with no protection. Sobon had also harbored some hope--clearly mistaken--that the woman would have shown some more care in her dress or actions than she had in her own shop.

Not that Sobon was any judge of women's behavior in any society, but it felt distinctly dangerous, like she was inviting trouble of her own accord, and Alassi agreed without hesitation.

"It's dangerous to go out without your guardians," Lady Fau Mide, who I had yet to officially meet, chided the shorter woman. "Even with your strength and talismans, I can't help imagining you falling asleep somewhere, and waking up in chains." The woman shook her head. "Your connections will only help if they can find you, Popo."

But Lai Shi Po had, of her own accord, sensed Sobon's basement and bounced over, ripping the false floor covering off and sticking her head down into the space. Lui startled at the motion like she wanted to run after the woman, and Sobon sighed, knowing that while the structure of the basement itself was too covered to be readable, she had left several projects there, set up on impromptu workbenches, many of which were simply aether frames projected upwards from small quartz discs.

She was not entirely surprised, when she moved up to the entrance, to see Lai Shi Po gripping her sensor matrix by the handle, studying it intently, and not only with her eyes.

"It's tuneable," Sobon said, with a sigh, dropping down into the space. "The channels on the left and right set the focus range, and there is a phantom channel in the middle that--"

"That selects a certain portion of the qi spectrum to analyze," Lai Shi Po interrupted. "For such a delicate instrument, I was expecting there to be some danger of flooding the channels, but you built it sturdy." She was slipping the array to one side and the other, then focused it on one corner of the basement. Sobon thought the woman's hair might start to float on currents of aether, given how hard she was focusing on what she sensed there.

"There's plenty we could talk about," Sobon said, feeling more than a little amused that the woman--clearly an expect in qi scripts--was bouncing from one mystery to the next like a teenager. Predictably, when she couldn't quite peer through the layers Sobon had added to disguise the geometry rods, she set the array aside and instead examined the disc producing the workbench. "But I'm not keen on letting my secrets slip to the Empire, even by proxy."

"You'd be a fool if you did," Lai Shi Po said, her face nearly flat against the ground as she peered at the thin aether channels in the crystal. "How do you form the quartz so perfectly?"

"By knowing what quartz is. And what other substances are." Sobon raised a mote of oathbinding qi, but had to stop. Even far from the woman, Sobon's qi was able to tell the woman would never let a binding stay on her. She, or someone else, would find a way to break it, if only to study it.

In the moment it took to realize that, Lai Shi Po scampered up off the floor and grabbed Sobon's arm, pulling it down and herself up to get a better sense of the qi. Sobon, alarmed but coming to understand just what she'd gotten herself into, let the woman study the qi for several long moments, as Lai Shi Po braced one foot on Sobon's leg in order to hold herself in place, staring intently at it.

"I'm beginning to think you're that one," Lai Shi Po said, apropos of nothing, and hopped down. "I was never one for prophecy, but then, I have always supposed it was something else: a promise."

"What prophecy?" Sobon wasn't the one who asked, since she tended to ignore the concept, even knowing that time-tampering aether was a thing. Sobon looked up to see Lady Fau sitting on the edge of the basement, looking in, with Lui looking embarrassed beside her, and the others behind her, including Lord Shida.

The same Lord Shida who had instantly recognized Lai Shi Po, and been instantly scandalized, though Sobon imagined it wasn't for the first time, not given how he recovered. Still, he hadn't had much to say.

"Promise," corrected the woman. "In the early days of the Empire, the Diamond Lord received wisdom from a force so mysterious, he has refused to even hint about more than its mere existence. A profound force, which taught him what he needed in order to raise up the Djang. But apparently, it also spoke of the doom of the Empire. The language used was odd, but the translations I've heard can be read two ways. Either it is a nameless menace, or a menace of many names."

Sobon remained unimpressed. "That could be used to describe any revolution. Even one led by an obvious leader likely has others..."

But Lai Shi Po shook her head. "You're thinking with words. The intent of the words was an enemy, singular, whose identity cannot be tied to a name. Many have read it as a wise man prophesying doom, but I have always read it differently."

Always? Sobon looked at the woman. "How old are you, exactly?"

"Old enough to know the way I behave is childish," Lai Shi Po shot back, looking... upset? "And more than old enough to be angry at how little I know of the world, even after all these years. Old enough to be mad at old curses and old grudges. But I know what you're asking, and I'm not ancient, no shadow of an age long past accumulating wisdom over the centuries. I have... simply managed to slip through, with the help of the gods. Or rather, one in particular."

At that, Sobon could sense that something masking the pressure from Lai Shi Po's core shifted, small and wide arms--no, tails--rearranging themselves for only a moment, revealing something very different beneath. Sobon, though, ignored the other woman's core--advanced though it was--to study the spiritual god that lay concealed there.

It's actually present, Sobon noted. A spiritual god walking the world with its host, not an effect from afar. She gave a polite nod to it, or where it thought the spirit's center was, and it uncurled further, revealing intense eyes, which thrugh Sobon's spiritual senses, registered somehow as red.

"My reading of the words was a promise," Lai Shi Po continued, as its spiritual guardian calmed and re-covered itself. "From a person who expected to be betrayed, warning that others would come. And the Diamond Lord claims, though many doubt his words, that he defeated that wise creature, and claimed sole dominion over our world. It was this he used as the cornerstone of his mythical right to rule."

Sobon felt herself frown at Lai Shi Po's choice of words, and the other woman didn't miss the expression. Sobon could have forced her expression back to neutral, but chose to ask, instead. "His mythical right to rule?"

"The strongest man, defender of the world, who shattered the hold the heavens had over this planet and took over as its sole owner, its father. The entire world's Diamond Lord, shining in the light of the heavens. The absolute pinnacle of all humankind, the shield that holds back the doom that would otherwise follow." Lai Shi Po's voice held no reverence at all, despite her words. "What has become of him lately, though, I wonder. Caught up in something strange, and his qi is unclear. The few whispered rumors I've heard of him are full of confusion and disappointment. Something should have been different."

Sobon forced herself to stay as neutral as she could, knowing that someone like Lai Shi Po had already seen through her mask, and knowing that Lui, and the others, would recognize how the story Lai Shi Po had just told was a little too much like the story she herself had told. But the differences, especially in intent, were too wide.

"I am a lot of things," Sobon said after a minute, "but I don't believe I am what you are accusing me of being."

"You need to learn to lie better," Lai Shi Po clucked her tongue at Sobon. "It would have been fine if you denied everything. But perhaps you've already said too much? Afraid that you'll be judged for lying to an unstable outside element?"

"I'm a warrior, not a..." Sobon, even with the help of Alassi, wasn't sure what local words would fit without also sounding strange, not that her secrets weren't already leaking out. "...I'm not here to keep secrets. I can acknowledge some things are not meant to be spoken of at all, but on the other hand, some things truly seem like they would only help my mission if they were known to the right people."

"Oh." Lai Shi Po put a heady dose of intrigue behind that one word, although her posture and manner remained neutral, as much as any dirty street urchin could look neutral. "A warrior with a mission. One you have to keep secret from the Djang, but you are not here to end or ruin the Empire."

"I am not," confirmed Sobon, wanting to say more, but choosing hesitating. "As for saying more..."

"Your qi with the element of binding fates was interesting, but not robust," Lai Shi Po said, sounding almost annoyed. "I suppose it was a rush job?"

"And not my specialty," Sobon admitted. "I build and use weapons and defenses."

"Build?" Lai Shi Po stepped closer, and Sobon noticed between one moment and the next that a powerful light seemed to appear behind her eyes. "As a warrior?"

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"Of course," Sobon said, choosing to sound offended. "Look around you. What do you see?"

"Walls of solid qi, built out from projectors cleverly hidden behind. All within the bounds of a false space..." she paused, hesitating.

Sobon just shook her head. "Mian, Ki'el, come in here, please. With your weapons."

Lui and Lady Fau hurriedly stood and moved aside; Ki'el let Mian go first, the man hopping down into the basement with his sword balanced on his shoulder. Without waiting to be asked, he began to cycle his qi, pushing only a slight amount of aether into the collector on the back of the weapon.

Sobon was more than a bit worried that Lai Shi Po would grab the blade, dismissive of the effect on the cutting blade, but when she stepped forward, she kept her head well clear of the entire shaft of the blade, instead staring intently at Mian's hands where they wrapped the hilt. "Clever engravings," she said after a moment, and offered her hand to Mian.

The man looked at Sobon, who only nodded.

When the blade passed into Lai Shi Po's hands, the woman--no surprise--immediately seemed to grasp full control over the weapon, releasing a devastating cutting aura that Sobon guessed was just shy of the script's capacity. She flickered through the controls, adjusting how the cutting aura and blade reinforcements activated throughout the blade, and ran her hand along the back of it, sensing the flow of qi through the weapon.

It was easy to forget that the short woman was barefoot, disheveled, and dressed in rags, if you took your eyes off of her for even a moment.

"Profound," she pronounced after a moment, but deactivated the blade and held the hilt out to Mian, who took it back. "To see such profound understanding of script and qi feels like a master painter took it upon herself to decorate a dog's house. Impressive work, but entirely wasted."

Sobon glanced at Ki'el, who still stood above, and the girl dropped down, throwing her deactivated blade hilt at Lai Shi Po with what Sobon thought was some kind of resentment, although she wasn't sure how or why.

Lai Shi Po caught it, spun it in her hand, and activated the script, producing the flawless aether blade and flicking through its forms. Sobon watched as the woman studied the blade itself, letting her fingers drift in the air near the surface, but not touching it. "As profound as a great artist painting a wall a single color," she decided after a moment. "No one would ever know that it is the work of a master, and yet no matter how you look, you see no flaws, not even in the smallest detail."

"It is something pure," Ki'el said, with what Sobon thought was some kind of cagey defensiveness.

Lai Shi Po turned to look at the girl, then back at the blade for a long moment. "Ah," she said. "It is exactly the tool that you wished for. That makes it all the more profound, then, if still disappointing." Lai Shi Po deactivated the blade and threw it back to Ki'el, who snatched it out of the air... perhaps a bit aggressively.

"But none of this answers what you spoke of--of how a warrior builds weapons rather than using them. It's not that I cannot understand, Shiva Alassi. I want to see it."

Sobon, although she wasn't much of a negotiator, felt like she had the famous inscriptionist exactly where she wanted her. "Of course you do," Sobon said. "And you can already imagine bits and pieces of what you expect to see, but none of the specifics. If you weren't at least that clever, you wouldn't be here."

Lai Shi Po scoffed, as though insulted, but Sobon sat back, content to let the woman consider the implied offer. After a long moment, Sobon added into the contemplative silence, "I am not asking you to do anything. Only keep certain secrets and do what you can to ensure nothing I say is used against me."

"That should certainly depend on what you say," Lai Shi Po responded, demurely. "Even to gain access to great secrets, one such as I cannot be expected to just sit back and do nothing if you turn out to be an embodiment of ruin, or a poison that tears down this world."

"No." Sobon shook her head. "I am only here to prevent harm, not to be anyone's tool for conquest or annihilation."

"A great many have claimed as much."

"Such as the Diamond Lord himself?" Sobon's voice was sharp. "I enjoy the idea of sharing my knowledge with people who are worthy. I would enjoy having someone I could actually talk to about inscription, and math, and chemistry, and physics. And I dislike the idea that I may not have anyone I could call a peer in this whole world, much less nearby."

"But all of that pales to the idea that weapons I design could end up equipping marauding armies of tyrants as they cross this world, crushing anyone who just so happens to cross their path. No friendship or good will would undo such damage. If you aren't willing to swear an oath to keep what you learn secret, and keep these ideas out of the hands of those who do not deserve them, then I'll live with that disappointment."

"If you doubt my resolve on that, I would like you to be fully aware that I have died before," Sobon said, finding that her voice had come to have an incredibly sharp edge to it, but neither embracing it nor letting off on the pressure. "As a professional warrior, I have endured and will endure again much worse."

Lai Shi Po, in her torn and ragged short pants and shirt, stood barefoot in the basement that Sobon had hollowed out with her own power, not far from the burned holes torn into the ground that had been a Mithril Qi elder... and somehow, amidst all of that, the pressure that Lai Shi Po represented, in her poise and in her soul, refused to back down. Sobon wasn't sure what it was--the spiritual god that stood with her, perhaps--but after all of that, even Sobon worried that somehow she had missed something, and that Lai Shi Po would have something, anything, to counter all of Sobon's posturing and threats.

Lai Shi Po let the silence stretch on for more than a minute before she spoke, her voice quieter than Sobon or the others had expected, but with a fire buried inside. "I do not in any way stand behind the awful things that my people have done," she said. "Trust that I could sell them profound weapons and techniques, and do not, not except for the very few whose character I can personally vouch for. There are always ways to make money for people like us, even if it is only painting dogs' houses."

"That is not a promise," Sobon noted, coolly.

Lai Shi Po sighed. "Everything that you've said and implied tells me you are exactly what I said you are, with only your protest that you are not. An agent of the end, a nameless being descended from the heavens. And I know without question that if even if I agree not to speak, you will not tell me everything. A being beyond all space and time, beyond death, but I know you would ask me to be content with breadcrumbs scattered in the dirt like a peasant."

From beside Sobon, Ki'el replied, cattily, "Like a drug-addled thief, dressed in rags and covered in dirt? A filthy creature that thrives in alleyways and has no place in decent company?"

The look that Lai Shi Po threw was dirty enough that Sobon felt its aether passing, but in a flash, Lai Shi Po pulled things from a storage ring somewhere within her body--no, Sobon decided from the aether waves, from a space needle that accomplished the same effect, which had been buried within her arm. There was a brief flash and fog, during which Sobon thought a cleaning pattern wiped down her body, and a number of clothing items were apparated onto her body.

When she cleared away the clinging fog with an impatient qi pulse, Lai Shi Po looked positively respectable--now standing with her fists together behind her back, she was dressed in modest red silks with intricate flowers all down the right side, and matching red shoes, her hair washed and tied in a neat bun, a look of stern disapproval masking the intense, but borderline mad, look that had been on her face before.

Sobon heard Ki'el suck in a breath, and though that she even heard Lady Fau mutter something, sounding astonished. But Sobon only nodded, having studied the inscriptions on the ring for quite a while before adding the intent. Wearing clothes straight from the ring must have been a design criteria for it, and pulling scripted items out to clean her and neaten her hair was a triviality.

"Ah, that's right," Sobon said into the sudden silence, before Lai Shi Po, or anyone else, could say something they might regret. "I suppose I should let you check my work, shouldn't I?" She removed the space ring from her own finger and tossed it to the woman. "I suppose I might have missed some of the subtleties, but I feel confident I did well enough."

Lai Shi Po brought one hand from behind her back to catch the ring, and studied the inscriptions, but the stern look in her face faded into one of irritation, then confusion. "This is... the same ring that I gave you?"

"Of course." Sobon shrugged. "I spent some time considering how to replicate it, but matching the inscriptions to the material is tricky. I heard from Lord Shida that you only accept a small fraction of the ring blanks given to you, but it's hardly a surprise. The various materials and the way they interact with qi are fussy, after all."

"Fussy," Lai Shi Po said, as she rolled the ring between her fingers, peering closely at the inscriptions. "Yes, you can call absolute madness fussy. But I suppose you know all of these things? All the whys and hows of the ridiculous restrictions that I have had to learn by trial and error?"

"No, I don't know them," Sobon said, and waited a beat, knowing she exuded a sense of smugness. "I had them all written down, but unfortunately neglected to bring them with me."

Lai Shi Po turned and flung the ring into the far corner of the basement with a sudden violence that Sobon couldn't help but laugh at, even as she worried for the ring itself, and its contents. But she flexed her Wing, and pulled the ring back, examining it for only a moment to ensure that it was still intact, then slipped it back on her finger.

Lai Shi Po remained turned around, her shoulders trembling slightly from frustration, or perhaps rage.

"I do, however, know the basics. It's all the specifics of materials that make it difficult. There were tables and tables of data..." Sobon shrugged. "Even if someone presented me with the same data, if it wasn't organized the way I used to have it, it would be a lot harder to go through. But I know enough that I expect, in time, to be able to replicate the design... in a slightly larger size."

Lai Shi Po took a few deep breaths, then regained her poise, and turned to look at Sobon. "You really are a demon," she said, though the heat in her voice didn't seem to match her words. "Finding my weakness and tempting me. I don't mind having my loyalty purchased, but never let it be said that Lai Shi Po lets herself be bought cheaply."

"First, you must trade pointers with me. Not to the death, but not holding back from what you know, either. Second, I want to know how this space could possibly have been designed, and a sample of the script necessary to replicate it. And third..." she squinted. "The details of what I need to know to more consistently engrave on complex materials at the scale of those rings."

"The details are a lot," Sobon said, "and I have much to do."

"Those are my terms. If you can meet that, even if you spat in the face of the Diamond Lord himself, I would tell him and his people nothing, and I will not sell anything or give away any knowledge gained from you, without your advance consent. You'll have your privacy and your assurances that you've made nothing worse."

A shrewd businesswoman, Sobon thought. Though I'm not sure exactly what she thinks I'm getting out of this. Instead of answering, she glanced over her shoulder at Lady Fau, who was watching from above with fascination. "And you?"

"Me?" Lady Fau laughed. "I'm an alchemist and an old friend of Lai Shi Po, but I'm no genius. I spent my youth having grand adventures, and while I would be fascinated to learn the doubtless grand nuances of fate, I have no interest in joining nor opposing anything." She let herself become stern. "If you want assurances I won't tell, I'll make them. But, I'd also quite happily be told nothing more, and go about my way. Whether you bring doom, glory, or nothing at all, tomorrow Lord Anji will still need his medicine, and the day after, there will be another, and another, and another." She shrugged. "If there was anyone in the world I would have gossiped to, it's Lai Shi Po, and only because of our shared history. I try to stay out of foolish matters like these."

Sobon forced herself to magic up a mote of Oathbinding Qi for Lady Fau, but it showed more of less what Sobon would have expected--that the Lady would never have done anything to resist it, but that at some point in the future, Lai Shi Po would break it anyway. She still set it, and took the oath from Lady Fau, then turned to the other woman, and nodded.

"We have a deal."