Exterior shot: the late afternoon sun casting its rays through the skyscrapers of Sky Gate City, painting their white-and-chrome surfaces with fire, drowning the color of the ubiquitous gardens and trees in shadows. The clouds rolling in off the mainland are hiding the penthouses and the glider pads, the blinking warning lights and the cloudfishers, leaving only the pillars standing between heaven and earth. The shadows are sharper than usual, harshly defined, and the lights switching on feel feeble in the face of night rising up from the sea.

---

Once upon a time, there was an old man who taught criminals the laws of the jianghu, the world beneath the city, the world of sewers and basements and access tunnels, of hidden dojos and stuttering neon lights, of tournaments and fat stacks of cash and, above all, honor. If a criminal did not have honor, even while breaking the law, what could they ever have?

The Flower Mountain rotated around the axis of that man: mastermind, martial artist, and enforcer of law on the lawless, the law that was the only constraint on those who had mastered their bodies and their abilities. And now that man is dead.

Which is why there is a fire spreading on the twenty-sixth floor of the Providence Tower, inside one of the residential blocks, and the outer windows are beginning to buckle and blacken from the heat.

---

"Pathetic Worm!" Xingtian raises their fist and, from one of the elegant flowers wrapped around their wrist, green-blue-black fire gushes forth, and underneath the hiss of fire is the howl of unquiet spirits. Spectral light throbs across their armor like blood pulsing through the body, and fire licks at the hem of their cloak. Like the snarl carved into their helmet, it's the kind of fashion statement that you have to earn. "You Are All Disgusting Parasites! In My New City, I Will Purge Your Vermin Dens With Cleansing Fire And--"

The Triad enforcer known as Ox jinks to one side, rolls, grabs a foldable bicycle someone abandoned in the chaos, and smashes it across Xingtian's helmet. And, to her credit, Xingtian takes two steps back, rocking on their heels. She follows up with two kicks to the head, sloppy Seven Shadows style, and then gets blasted through the front window of a Viet restaurant by Xingtian's Ghost Cannon, careening through tables and chairs.

Foxpearl! Xingtian's first appearance in the city was robbing from a bank, and there they got away after flying up into the clouds. But that crime had a lot more posturing and smashing through steel doors with that suit of armor, and a lot less fire everywhere in the middle of a nice neighborhood. You've got a vantage point from above (what kind?), and doubtless a theory on what's going on.

---

"Okay, everybody, let's go! You're going to be okay! Keep moving! Don't stop until you get to Tranquility, there should be city personnel there to help you! Nothing here is more valuable than you are! Make sure that you have all your family members!"

You can still distantly hear the Vermillion Princess, Rain. She's traded off going through the apartments on this floor and making sure everyone's evacuated to you, and now she's doing her best to act like the hero of the city, a beacon of calm authority that people can look up to in case of emergency. The slight warble in her voice doesn't matter; she's still making sure that this doesn't turn into a full-blown panic and nobody gets trampled.

You, however, have just found someone who hasn't evacuated.

That's because he's unconscious. And also tied to a chair.

Even by the standards of SGC apartments (tall ceilings, multiple rooms, designed to handle a family comfortably if necessary), this one is fancy. There's a decorative fountain in one corner, non-standard security cameras (the chair being at an intersection of a couple lines of sight), and a somewhat gaudy taste in wall decorations. That's an entire-ass halberd hung in the hallway, for example. And your brain's gonna be running through possibilities while you untie him, anyway, so why don't you scope it out?

When the primordial nothingness at the beginning of time split into four, and then into the infinite trillion things -
When it split into laws and those laws became heat and the light obtained weight and the weight gathered light into dust -
When the dust burned so hot that it became air and the air burned so hot it became water and the water burned so hot that it became life -
When the trillion things looked up at the universe with their eyes and felt it with their senses and were aware of themselves and each other for the first time -
You know, did they realize that they were signing up for an infinity of unpaid labour strapped to the wheel of reincarnation? Having to endure the ecstasy of life just so some primordial collection of cosmic power could experience itself from multiple angles? Well, Foxpearl knew what that was like - and she knew a con when she saw it!

Concept: The big bang was like a foxgirl

She sat atop the Bodhi tree. Why sit beneath? A higher vantage point was spiritually nourishing, that was why they'd invented Nepal. It was also on top of an apartment building's roof garden which was basically just bonus altitude and therefore bonus wisdom.

Her triangular ears twitched in the breeze. The fur on her tail cascaded like autumn napalm. Her lips curved to show a single fang as if to undermine her meditative pose. A huge sixteen-foot scarf, patterned with black fish scales, rippled and arched around her, held on an ethereal breeze like a kite, covering the lower half of her face. A mask. Heroes wore masks. Villains wore masks? Was there an honour code there? If she was caught - if someone got their hands around her scarf and pulled it tight like a leash - would they tear it off when they took her prisoner or let her retain that one modesty? Her thoughts were drifting. Yes, they'd let her keep it. A mask was like a safe word. When a hero wants to retire then they take it off and they're out of the game forever, just like a luchadore. Until then didn't it mean you were still having fun?

Concept: Masks are safewords

Except Xingtian didn't exactly seem to be enjoying this. She didn't get it - Lady Foxfire had always enjoyed her crimes. She enjoyed them so much she'd literally lost a tail rather than not enjoy them as intensely as she did. Parasites were a species of landlord, she knew that, but vermin was a politician and she was pretty sure Xingtian was not the ruler of any city, and if she was she wouldn't maintain the territory for long with her proposed use of incendiaries. She scowled. Ideas were so much easier to process when she could just think about them intellectually. When she was dealing with humans the thoughts always got so complex and poorly argued. Superstition - which she gathered from the context was like arguing badly - was like opium, though she couldn't confirm that because she hadn't gotten anybody to sell her any.

Concept: I should try drugs

So yeah, this felt weird and bad and squishy. Bank robbery and arson were separate career paths and the person yelling their fire-based ideology in allcaps had all the hallmarks of being a foxgirl distraction. Her ears twitched. Her eyes scanned. Someone somewhere was reaching for a wallet while all of this was happening, surely. It's what she would do, if she wasn't so wise, and such a good girl.

[Assess the situation: 8. What here is the biggest threat?]

Hsien!

The biggest threat is obviously Xingtian. Every step they take is full of menace. Remember the bit where they peeled open steel doors with their gauntlets cracking open that bank? They’re also the cause of the fire that’s threatening this entire level of the Providence Tower. Fire is one of the five noble elements, but beyond the risk to the upper levels of the tower, which contain more residential areas and businesses (and some important government offices once you get past the fortieth floor), there’s also the risk of this fire damaging the structural integrity of the building.

Sky Gate City has (as far as you know) never had a skyscraper collapse. There’s a lot of failsafes and safety mechanisms built into every building in the city, to avoid the kind of corner-cutting tragedies that were common in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but water isn’t effective against this ghost-fueled fire.

Here’s an extra bit of intuition for being a good girl with such adorable triangles: this feels like a shell game, but Xingtian’s not the dealer, they’re the cup. Or possibly the table.

The most powerful distractions were things that you couldn't ignore even if you knew they were distractions. Like breasts! Foxpearl looked at her own, and then looked at the flaming ghost-powered power armour. She whispered to them "Look what they must do to imitate but a fraction of our power."

Her breasts caught fire. Then, the rest of her. She fell from the Bodhi tree like Satan from Eden, a comet of coruscating energy. The symbolism was important; to fall into hellfire was to become the master of the hellfire. It burned away her clothes, her hair, everything but the scarf still wrapped around her face, revealing an angelic body made of elemental fire. The trailing ends of her scarf arched up behind her like shadowy wings.

The fire had no chance. It was mere ghostfire, and that could never resist the sheer magnetism of foxfire. It flowed towards her and absorbed into her body, making her grow larger and larger, hotter and hotter, fiercer and fiercer. As Foxpearl rose up, nine feet tall and built like Lucifer sculpted in marble, she knew in her heart that she had this and that absorbing all of this ghost energy was well within her capabilities.

[Unleash your powers: 9; effect is unstable or temporary; tell me how!]

"Good afternoon!" she said brightly - it took more than being made out of fire and stuffed full of ghost energy to muffle a foxgirl's voice. "Can you tell me more about your ideology? I'm trying to figure out if I need to go over or under the table to get to the truth."

This! Rain knows what this is! She's read stories online with this. Secretly this guy is a hostage or something and the fire is meant to be threatening him, and all the video cameras are broadcasting the peril to his loved ones to make them crack and tell secrets or open up the actual vault! Everything else is a sideshow (but an important one, since nobody should get hurt and that's what the blackguards are counting on), and this is what's important, but the Princess is taking care of the other civilians and that means she can take care of what's happening here.

Assuming she's right. She's not always been right about these things.

She peers at the bound man, resisting the urge to wave at the cameras, and frowns under the mask. She saw the halberd and that coooooould cut the ropes but it could also go terribly, terribly wrong. But on the other hand she probably shouldn't leave to get a knife (note to self, add a knife to her go bag, a nice folding one that looks sufficiently spooky for a ghost to use), so she's going to have to find something here. Probably. Or try something tricky. She can't make anybody else into a ghost, unless she's making them permanently a ghost by killing them, but that is not proper behavior and she will chose not to do that. But. But! She might. Miiiiiiight. Be able to do something tricky with making the ropes into ghost-ropes and then pulling them off her. She carefully does not think of alternative uses for ghost ropes. Now is not the time, brain, later with a word document, maybe when she's supposed to be doing accounting practice.

Straight. Up. Creepin'. : 11

- who or what here is not what they seem?
- what here is worth grabbing?

Foxpearl!

The dreadful helmet turns to face you; behind this imposing figure, there is the creak of chairs and tables being shoved aside as the masked enforcer starts digging her way out of the mess of the restaurant. Even with the added height, there's something incredibly solid about this figure; a mountain may weather a wildfire and still remain standing when the wildfire's fury has burnt out completely. In a fight, who's to say whether or not that suit of armor would melt underneath your hands?

Then the villain pumps an armored fist in joy. "Finally! Heaven Has Sent Me A Sign That My Quest To Cleanse This City Of Its Filth And Moral Decay, As Embodied In The Dockside Gangsters Whose Corruption And Iniquity Reveals Itself When Given The Slightest Excuse, As Well As The "Deep State" That Has Accumulated Around The Homunculus That They Created Using The Semen Of The Real Mayor, Is Righteous, Pure And Holy! Join Me, Sylph Of The Highest Airs, In Wiping These Vermin Off The Face Of Our Fair City, Which We Will Rule Together In The Name Of Heaven!"

Various dials (previously looking decorative) suddenly spin, and the ghostfires begin to pour back into the armor, limning the armor in light and, inadvertently, pulling you towards Xingtian. It's... possible that you could get sucked into however that armor's powered and become an adorable trapped power source if you don't shuck that fire off of your, for lack of a better word, self. The air around the two of you is full of shadowy light, incredible heat, and the moaning of the dead disturbed from their rest.

[Xingtian wants you to raise your Savior and drop your Mundane!]

---

Rain!

Here's the thing. He's a tough-looking guy. Like, he hits the gym regular. He's got some neck tattoos, he's got the build of someone who went for body mastery over looking impressively bulky, and he's got the kind of stubble that would drive someone into that sort of thing wild.

Not the kind of person who leaves a phone in a glittery peach-themed case (the fruit, not the princess) kicked under the couch. Or the kind of person who has college textbooks on the history of the Republic, auspicious construction, and modern economics in their trendy, deceptively expensive backpack. More the kind of person who looks after the kind of person who lives here.

The person who is very definitely not here, and probably wouldn't have left their phone behind. As if the lack of a trap waiting for them here wasn't enough to convince you of that. As for anything else worth grabbing-- well, it's not like you're looking for anything expensive, right? If you wanted to go into burglary (that's the right crime, right?), the paintings: cut them out of the frames, roll them up and rubber-band them. Which whoever hit this place didn't do, that's another point in favor of the obvious conclusion: that whoever lives here is currently not here, and not of her own free will, which is almost certainly related to the fire.

You know what. On second thought. Maybe she was wrong.

He prooooooooobably isn't the kidnapped person. Still need to save him. Very important to save him, him and his nice firm muscles and the tasty stubble.

No helpfully placed shiny knife to save him, though. Disappointing. The world is supposed to provide the tools to lead you to prosperity, that's what her family always said and you just need to find the tools and wield them properly. Which is why she is not in fact trying out that halberd. Wisdom in restraint and emptiness in motion or something like that, she wasn't paying too close attention last time the topic came up.

So no, we're back to plan b, which is getting him out of here via the front door and ghost cheating. The sun's still up, she's alive and her heart is stubbornly beating, as it should be, but that's not helping her save this man... name. He's being named Branch now. There's a peach phone there, he supports the peach person, he's Branch.

Rain carefully grabs onto the ropes tying Branch in place and carefully, carefully tries to turn just her hands and the ropes incorporeal.

Unleash powers: 2 - 1 is a 1. Enjoy.

Oh no this is just like that movie where the adorable genie gets dragged back into her lamp, struggling all the way, until she's trapped and forced into the mandatory genie outfit! Rendered an obedient servant to wickedness! In an instant she's gone from the devil ascendant to holding onto the paving stones with her fingernails and screaming as she's dragged inevitably towards that sucking nozzle, fire pouring off her body into the engine -

But while that's happening she has a moment to think through some high powered ideas.

So there was a fascinating little intellectual module here. Xingtian, according to this description, was stating that she had embarked upon this process without knowing that Heaven approved. She had the theory, but had still done a bunch of stuff before Heaven sent a sign, and then took the sign as proof that what she was doing was correct and she should do even more of it.

Concept: I should do things without checking first and Heaven will validate me

[Reject influence: 5]

... but she already did that. She was already a flawless, superb and cute defender of the city while also being a bulwark against moral decay. She knew that any day now Heaven would recognize her as the spiritual equal of any of the highest gods, maybe make her Heavenly Minister of Justice, and apologize for ever doubting Fox Virtue. And this ghost robot girl monster wasn't even disagreeing with her about any of those things! They just thought that she'd be able to do them all even better while inside the ghost lamp box, dressed in diaphanous silks probably, and where was the theoretical grounding to argue that she was wrong? She didn't know. Was the mayor really a semen monster?

Her fingers left long scorch marks on the stone as she was dragged relentlessly across the ground towards the waiting fox prison.

[Marking Hopeless and Insecure]

Foxpearl!

Zoooooooooooop!

That's the sound of a foxgirl getting sucked into a suit of armor. Your energy courses through the armor, which is handmade, which was made with the money of another, which is very frighteningly powerful now that you're powering it, which is like tumbling down a flight of stairs and then being sucked right back up the stairs, which is Xingtian's middle finger to everyone who doubted them, which is The Inexorable March Of The Past Against The Moral Dissolution Of The Future...

And then you manage to pull yourself into the backup capacitor to hide while the rest of your glorious fire is unleashed upon a Flower Mountain enforcer who is frantically running and leaping and trying not to get turned into barbecue by a villain who very much wants them to become said barbecue. The roof is starting to cave in, which would be really bad for everybody who lives here, and also everybody on the floor above. Not the whole building unless the outer and inner supports get melted. Well, a majority of the supports. Well, enough supports that the rest can't handle the strain. But that's probably a good 60%, what kind of idiot civic planner would let a skyscraper collapse into some sort of skyscraper graveyard with less than half of its support gone? It's not like there's 60+ floors above this one are weighing it down too much, after all.

Mentally, the backup capacitor is a prison defined by too much light, potential building up, ghosts stacked on top of ghosts stacked on top of ghosts like green-grey wailing lasagna. Presumably, you're the one who is making it such, using your incredible brilliant mind to turn this into something you can interact with; presumably, you're also the one who put yourself in the mandatory genie outfit and chained yourself to the walls. And, tragically, there's nobody here to leer at you and how hot you look right now.

This is the bit where Empress should show up and pull Xingtian out of the building, toss them up in the air, reinforce the support beams, and catch Xingtian on their way down. But instead, outside, a familiar cinnabar-red scarf wraps around Xingtian's head, and the Vermillion Princess makes a valiant but doomed attempt at pulling Xingtian off their feet, instead just sending herself scrabbling for footing. "Stop this, malefactor," she squeaks. "Innocent people are going to get hurt!" (On one level, you're aware of this because of Xingtian's excellent sensory array in the helmet. On another, it's a TV flatscreen outside your cell.)

---

Rain!

At that very moment, the sun drops behind the mountains, and night descends upon Sky Gate City.

You plummet right through the floor. And the one beneath that. And the one beneath that. And these skyscrapers have decent amounts of space! Finally, you manage to time going unspectral just close enough to the floor that you're able to roll with the chair, absorbing most of the landing on yourself, and neither of you sustain serious injuries.

Still, that's got to sting, right? If you'd panicked and just zapped right back into existence at the top of a floor, you might have sustained serious injuries, not to mention the guy in the chair probably would have gotten a concussion or worse. Your adrenaline is spiked, your heart is racing, and for a minute all you can do is cling to the chair and try to regain control of your body.

[Mark a Condition.]

There's a glow outside. Probably the fires, all weirdly green, because of the ghosts. The lights are off in the private office you've tumbled into, and you have no idea if you are once again on camera or not. If you're lucky, there's just an alarm on the front door, wherever that is. But take a moment and just... celebrate not being dead. More dead, that is.

The gags are conceptual. Think about it! Foxpearl is currently trapped and unable to speak, albeit on the level of raw incorporeal energy. If her self conception didn't involve her being gagged and bound then she'd spend every second fighting against her instincts to move and suffering the virtual reality nausea of having no reaction between her will and her motions. The chains are an illustration of how helpless she is - just like how they'd still be necessary if she was in the claws of someone capable of physically overpowering her without them. S-so that was why this was helpful, it was like knowing in advance which actions were pointless, so plans could be better directed.

Concept: Being bound is the best way to focus attention.

Unfortunately there was only one plan that presented itself: Be rescued.

And that was awkward. She should always act with perfect skill without revealing weakness, a celestial idea that had been really easy to meditate on before she was tied to a wall and used to power an evil flamethrower. But if she wanted to be rescued then she needed to use what little leverage she had to not only make an awkward, ungainly thrashing wreck of herself but she needed to do so specifically so that the Vermillion Princess would see her and come for her. The Princess was so cool, if she knew that she was in trouble her eyes would do that really cool narrowing thing, and her lips would purse and all the awkwardness would fall away and then she'd be... like, a real hero. And save her. Humiliatingly.

[Reject the influence of a lesson: 9. Clearing Hopeless by acting to prove it wrong]

She'd... she'd get her back for this! This was the thought in Foxpearl's head as she started to mmph!! as loudly as she could through her gag, as she started to bang her chains as loudly as she could, as she started to pathetically plead and whine from the inside of the sealed tank. Just see if she didn't! Sooner or later the Princess would get captured and bound and humiliated and then she'd be there, running a finger under her chin and whispering 'how cute' and it would be so devastating that she'd forget that this ever happened! Just see if she wouldn't!!

Omigods omigods omigods.

Breath. Breathing. We are alive. We. We?

Huh. Branch came too.

That. That's new? Maybe she can make other living things into ghosts and... back again, yes, he's breathing. She's breathing too! On purpose, even. 4 in, hold 4, 4 out, hold 4. That's a square.

But Branch is here and breathing and was briefly a ghost and he probably wasn't one before, and isn't one now. So. That was her? Probably? Not what she wanted to do at all. But he's gonna be safe here! Unless the entire tower collapses in which case we all die except for probably Foxpearl and, depending on how good she is at becoming spectral on demand, Rain herself. But that won't happen. Won't.

Could have been the sunset? Or can she just do that all the time? She's taking inventory of the office (locked? maybe?, empty aside from them, lacking in painkillers sadly, no visible cameras) and that's about as far as she gets before the nerves hit. Shaking hands under the coat, deep breaths, and back to the square.

In.

Hold.

Out.

Hold.

Marking Afraid

Foxpearl!

Vermillion Princess switches strategies. If she can’t pull Xingtian off their feet by standing firm, she’s going to flow like water. Which, in this case, means activating the heelies.

(The heelies are odd. She’s embarrassed about them, but at the same time, she’s stood up to Empress about them because they make her better as a hero. She’s pivoted to avoid the subject when you asked; you haven’t seen any other people using them yet, but you’re aware that roller rinks exist near the ground floors of certain buildings. Any theories, Detective Hsien?)

She uses her sash to skate circles around Xingtian, hugging the ground low, as the sash itself wraps around and around Xingtian’s arms, pulling those gouts of furious fire up and away from Princess’s fluttering ponytail. (The sash is, if you were being uncharitable, pulling a lot of Princess’s weight as a hero. Supposedly an epic weapon of antiquity, if it has a maximum length, she hasn’t found it yet.)

The sensors are struggling with the impossible thickness of the sash, which is increasingly effective at blocking out light and sound, even the vibrations all around slowly dying as the sash traps Xingtian’s senses with shocking effectiveness. Which is why neither you or Xingtian hear Princess’s prayer to the Gods of the Four Directions to guide her fist, wrapped in the sash’s other end. No, the only warning is when she punches the armor right above Xingtian’s ass, sending alarms rippling through the armor, and before the repair subprograms (uh-oh) can reroute the rest of your power to reshaping the metal into place, you burst forth into the air along with a gushing of howling ghosts, buoyed up by them as if you’d… well, you don’t have the right analogy to hand. (Geysers, like at Yellowstone, you’ll figure out one day.)

Then you fall, twisting and mmmphing, diaphanous silks and all, into the Vermillion Princess’s arms. And she doesn’t do a cool smirk and one-liner about how she’s owed three wishes now, right? She stares down at you, stock-still in her heeleys, through the lenses of her half-mask. (If you put yours together, or fused together after doing a dance number that revealed your inner character motifs, you’d have one full-face mask between the two of you. That’s how you can see her tongue dart out and run along her lower lip, which makes sense, because it’s really dry in here.)

[She’s pushing Mundane up, Savior down— the opposite of what Xingtian just asserted about you.]

Xingtian’s stomach unfolds into their heavy cannon, a roiling furnace of ghostfire, and Princess squeaks, yanks on her sash, and goes zipping along. If the two of you get blasted with that, it’s game over. Which makes it a wonderful time for Princess’s center of balance to throw her off as she tries to carry you and skate at the same time, sending both of you tumbling onto scorched tiles. And by wonderful, I mean terrible.

---

Rain!

Branch’s breathing shifts. He’s waking up. But he doesn’t groan. He does his best to fake that he’s still unconscious while he tries to adjust to his surroundings. This is somebody who knows how to fight, and is prepared for ending up somewhere tied up on the floor with the lights out.

Finally, he speaks. It’s smoother than you might have expected. Silkier. “The boss is going to destroy you,” he says, matter-of-factly. “You can give Mei back and beg for mercy, right now, and you’ll survive. That’s your only way out of this that’s not sinking to the bottom of the bay or just getting your soul punched out of your body. You ever had your soul punched out of your body before?”

You are, hopefully, one of the only people in Sky Gate City who knows exactly what that feels like, minus the actual punch.

Do you try to put him at ease? Or do you fake him out and try to get more info out of him?

Imperative: Behave as normally as possible.

To behave in any other way upon being asspunched out of hellfire armour into a meet cute anime waifu toss would betray a shocking lack of conviction. To cringe is to experience death, instead one must maintain raw Authenticity at all times. Not react, not attack, not retract. "Mhye," said Foxpearl through the gag, brushing a lock of hair out of her eyes in a super cool and casual way. "Yhh dhn hky?"

Melting down over one little flash of tongue and one little first-hug-ever-sort-of would distract from more important concepts. Such as the discourse implicit in the heelies; a genuine power that allowed for alien movement patterns, to alternate between frictionless and friction. A modern antithesis to the Sash, a belief in the powers of plastic refinery and popular culture to stand in noble contrast to the ancient. A modern statement that implied a freedom from being wrapped too tightly in the bonds of the past, even if a comparatively less practiced modern technology resulted in occasionally unstable wobbles. She loved the heelies, actually.

Concept: I want to steal her shoes.

[Accepting label shift]

"Mmh mlkk mhrr mhouus," she observed in an extremely cool and playful way. One might expect from the situation that she should be shy about this interaction, but she'd taken that into account. While yes, she may have been freed from Xingtian's constraints and thus no longer needed her first conceptual gag, this was an entirely different separate conceptual gag comprised out of a physical manifestation of her shyness. The constraint was focusing; with it out of her throat and filling her mouth she was free to be as slick as she wanted, even giving a wink and fingerguns to the Princess just to let her know she was grateful for the rescue. She was rewarded by the Princess' face turning red and covering with sweat.

It was about this point that Hsien noticed she was still in her fire elemental form. She abruptly and panickedly shut it off.

Then she abruptly turned it back on again after remembering that she'd literally burned her clothes off when activating it. In order to maintain her cool authentic self she needed to force project another set of conceptual gags over the existing ones, but it was worth it because it gave her the presence of mind to stand up and face Xingtian rather than melting down as a less spiritually developed creature no doubt would have done so in that moment.

Soul punched out of body? Uh, technically...

Yes....?

Pause, reboot. No. This guy thinks she's evil. A kidnapping menace. She'd never, she approves of the cute phone decorations too much. But she's supposed to be a dramatic specter. But that means this isn't the time to start talking about experimental metaphysics, which she totally knows about and didn't just go on a wikipedia deep dive over a week ago. She also can't just babbled at him about this to fix the problem, or otherwise confuse him till the problem goes away, which really is almost the same thing when you think about it!

What she needs is a sufficiently spooky and drama-filled way to correct his opinion so he knows that she is in fact a good, helpful ghost? No reason to try to trick this guy, he's clearly a good person since he's looking after a girl with superior phone decorations.

"I believe you have mistaken me for your captives... mortal."

#nailedit

Foxpearl!

You are bravely staring down a tummy laser. See, in legend, Xing Tian was the warrior who survived being decapitated, and his chest became his new face, and it's a little weird that Xingtian (the armored supervillain) has a helmet when the myth was very famous for missing the helmet (because of the decapitation), but that snarling face in the breastplate is crackling with evil ghost power.

Well, morally neutral ghost power being used for wicked ends.

"Damnation! You Allowed The Bloodstained Thug To Escape Her Just Reward For Longer Than She Deserves... And You Will Be Punished For Your Interference, Willing Tool Of The "Deep State"! But First..." Xingtian holds out their gauntleted hand to you, burning foxgirl with your scarf more thickly padded than before. "Return To Me, Be One With Me, Join Me In Our Holy Quest And Together, We Will Overthrow The False Mayor And Restore True Harmony To The City!"

Behind you, Vermillion Princess pushes herself back onto her knees. It'll take her a minute to get back up onto those heelies, even with the sash providing her with some lift. A minute she might not have if you don't distract the raving fire-spewing villain.

---

Rain!

"Oh... hell," Branch says, slowly. "That was it, then. That bitch hit me too hard. Damn it. I thought... so that was it. Twenty years on this bitch of a planet and I get my neck snapped by Horse. Well, I get points for loyalty, right? I died in the line of duty. I didn't let Stone Monkey down. That gets me points with King Yama, right? I looked after my grandma after work. I tried not to be vulgar. I only let my charge get kidnapped the one time, and that's the time that killed me, so it doesn't count. Am I going to be stuck here because of the idiots who did the ghost explosion?"

Those sure are some names! Names that you can follow up on. How much do you know about the jianghu, the underground world of martial artists and criminals, River? Do you know anything beyond the word on the street about their boss getting assassinated?

She knows the words to solve this. She can feel them welling up inside her like a flood, a cascade of lies and flirtations and innuendoes, the birthright of foxes. She could just talk and talk and talk and talk and find all the words and buttons inside Xingtian's head and push them hard with her little foxy paws until everything went just the way she wanted. If only she wasn't gagged. She wished she'd picked a fetish that synergized better with her skillset.

Well. As the theory went, constraints focused the mind. Right now the only thing she was good at was being rescued, so she was just going to have to weaponize that. A purely practical consideration and nothing at all to do with trying to replicate the strange, dizzy, fluttering feeling she had felt when the Vermillion Princess had looked at her.

She started to rush over to Xingtian, reaching out for her extended hand. But - oh no! - she was all tangled up by her own battle scarf, and she tripped! She stumbled, dizzy, off balance, lacking oxygen from all of the gags (don't think about how that worked with the fireshape). In a final desperate movement she reached out with her scarf to wrap it around Xingtian's wrist and knotted it tight with a little bow.

And then she raised a hand to her forehead, fainted daintily, and pitched over the side.

Oh, won't you save her~?

[Provoke: 9; creating a critical opportunity for the Vermillion Princess]

Those sure are a bunch of names!

She's heard of some of these guys. Horse might be Iron Horse, the noodle seller, or it could be, well. The other, more famous Horse. Who is more likely to be involved in kidnappings. Stone Monkey, on the other hand, absolutely is somebody she's heard about, by the last dregs of a group she'd chased out of the Eastern Waterways, cursing her and saying they'd go to him. Or her.

But, but but but. There's a probably gang related bodyguard here. Who thinks he's dead! Whoops. Time to fix that.

"Your heart still beats mortal. Take care that that does not change, and that you do not do more harm than good in the world."

There, suitably cryptic and vague. Time to leave before this gets any more awkward. She steps out through a wall and starts to try to work her way back up to the fight, hopping off walls and then up through floors as needed. It's night, ghost things are easy. It's going to be more a problem to stay solid enough to hit somebody.

Foxpearl!

Your plummet does make Xingtian desperately grab at your scarf and dig in their heels, putting all of their strength into halting you as you tumble down. Sky Gate City is so swank that this kind of multi-story waterfall is a common sight in community spaces in the skyscrapers. It's not just part of the agricultural systems, it's vital to balance the elemental harmony of the entire tower. This one drops down multiple floors, and even though the pool at the bottom is lovely, it's just a little too shallow for a safe landing. How lucky that you end up dangling from that scarf, with the armored menace starting to slowly pull you up.

Then the Vermillion Princess delivers a flying kick to the back of their armor, where she'd hit them before, and the momentum she'd built up on the way there sends Xingtian tumbling out into open air. Their attempt to activate their armor's thrusters just sends them cartwheeling down to the bottom faster, past you, yanking you down with them--

And the Vermillion Princess dives down after you, trailing her Sash, and grabs you by the wrists, your name on her lips.

---

Rain!

Boom!

That is, as you find out by sprinting around a corner, the sound of Xingtian slamming into the bottom of a pool hard enough to crack the foundation. A heavenly cord leads up from the ruin of this villain's fall (like the fall of Lucifer from Heaven in that one American TV show) to the face of Foxpearl, who is suspended between floors by the Vermillion Princess's hold on her wrists. Not exactly the kind of heroic finish that Empress would have done.

In fact, Empress would probably pry the armor off, crush it between her palms, and then deliver the soggy mystery arsonist inside to the tower's security team, but she'd hang around to make sure that she could give a speech about how arson put everyone at risk, how the residents of this tower would be impacted by months of reconstruction, how damaging the tower's supports would have risked an inconceivable civic disaster, and how disappointed she was. And then she'd do the Glare. And then she'd pitch in with the reconstruction, stop to take selfies with residents with her silver hair up in a neat bun, and generally be the example that everyone in SGC is supposed to live up to.

But Empress isn't here right now. She's trying to keep the gates of the underworld shut to give the entire city time to fix the problem of the rampant ghosts. And so there's just you, stepping up to be a good neighbor like Empress knows everybody can be, and there's the fox (who you just found out is one of Lady Foxfire's tails, just like she now knows how you came into your powers), and there's her.

The real superheroine-in-training, stopping Hsien from slamming into the bottom of the pool while you were interrogating a hunky Triad member.

Thoughts on the Vermillion Princess, Rain? And, for that matter, thoughts on what you're supposed to do with Xingtian?

She's so caught up in watching the actual heroes play that she misses her next phased-in foot and goes through a wall and floor before catching herself.

Wow.

Look, now there's a hero! She's saved the day and looked totally smooth and kissable while doing it. Empress was a hero, too, and she's the ideal that the city was forged with. But she's busy trying to fix the ghost-disaster thing that's happening, and it's really too much to presume that she could help and not get in the way with that, in spite of being sort of ghost now, so she's up here. And she's not even doing what Princess is doing, saving people, except she did? Kind of? By accident. And then she scared him and then corrected him and ran away and-

Right, there's a fight. She should help.

She's not a real hero, though, so she works her way up and near the edge of the building, and observes the fight going on, peeking her head out through the wall and down, peering at the well armored menace.

Menace. Meeeeanaaaaaaace. It's got a good mouthfeel to it. She rolls it around her mouth a bit more, while she scopes this out. Well. The fight seems done. The cleanup is next, especially since those cracks are deep enough the water is draining from the pool and down into the foundations. Never good to have water where you don't want it.

But that's not everything here, she's certain. This was cover for a kidnapping and there's a very loud, very obvious angry menace (meeeeenaaaaaccceeeeee) in a metal can who's down for the count.

What's missing from this picture, hmm?

Straight. Up. Creepin'. 5 + 7 is a partial success.

What's my best way in, to the fight or an opportunity here? Exit plans are for somebody with brains.

What would you do if you were a superhero?

There were other ways to be a rogue fox tail with infinite cosmic power and a moral system built on smug superiority refracted through the technicolour lens of leftist shitposting. She could, still, commit to a life as a minor demon, haunting someone's house and making the windows rattle and the chickens mysteriously vanish. She could possess someone's hentai dating simulator, becoming the perfect digital waifu while feeding off their spiritual essence. She could change the direction of the tide whenever the moon wasn't looking just to fuck with some guy on the beach looking up on his phone what direction it was meant to be going. Humans aspired to be a superhero as freedom from mundanity, to engage in the raw sadism of power wielded. That was what lust was, wasn't it? Strength utilized. The erotic thrill of being able to break from constraints and force the world to bend to you.

Foxpearl hangs between the grip on her wrists and the scarf tight around her neck. Her world was already one of an unconstrained billion acts of impulse. What she wanted to do was kiss the Vermillion Princess and pick her pocket and then to bind Xingtian inside a lamp made of her own armour and then give it away as a punishment to a girl who had only pretended to throw coins into the shrine's donation box. Her blood was up. It'd be easy.

Easy except for the leash around her neck, the hands around her wrists. She was getting something different out of this than the humans. She was putting herself in a position where there were stakes. Where she could be hurt. Where the Vermillion Princess wasn't just a first kiss to steal and heart to break, two things which she would then brag about to all the other foxes, but a valued teammate whose approval mattered. And that was fascinating, captivating.

Idea: Virtue is what restrains lust.

The scarf she wore was assisting in that restraint; it did its best to cover the absence of her clothes, wrapping her in criss-crossing prayer-threads. In a lot of ways it was an inferior sister to the Princess' Sash. Righteous thought without righteous deeds had a much smaller metaphysical weight, and Foxpearl was very sure that was unfair and if the purity of her thoughts were accounted for then she'd be far more powerful.

But on that topic, just like if humans drank too deep of lust they'd become supervillains, if she drank too deeply of virtue she'd probably become a harvest goddess and sit around all day smiling and blessing crops while waiting to get railed by passing storm goddesses. And if she did that then she wouldn't find out what the fuck was up with the mayor. So she looked at the Vermillion Princess, batted her eyelashes, and gestured at her mouth in case she wanted to, you know, remove this gag.