Katherine Isabella Fluffybiscuits was ladling soup. It should've been something nicer but someone went and blew up the fridge while she was busy saving the day and also she didn't really know how to cook anything fancy. But soup really just needed a big enough pot to throw a bunch of stuff into and enough salt that you could keep dumping it in until everything tasted ok. It wasn't a smart person's dish, but she didn't need it to be. 

She did need food. If there's one thing she learned from a lifetime of perching on Yue's shoulder it was that after a bunch of fighting and shouting the most important thing you could do is have dinner. And as luck would have it all the rain from that big scary storm had attracted a school of very delicious looking skyfish so there was actually a pretty nice smell coming out of the bowls as she handed them out. But yeah, dinner. It's not like she asked for this but her Princess Adventures Party turned out to be more of a Loosely Strung Together Alliance of Convenience (which nobody in their right mind would think as being half as fun or worth getting into trouble for) and if she didn't do something to smooth all that "we were all just enemies until a couple hours ago" stuff real quick the whole rest of this adventure was just gonna be...

"Spirit." said Diaofei with a forced calm that nobody was buying.

Ivar turned her head to watch a fresh bowl of broth splash all over the table after an uneven chunk of fish fell into it mid-pour. She smiled.

"...Spirit."

"I did not ask for you to speak, little monk."

"You will tell me why I am in chains."

"To punish Actia, of course," said Ivar, "There are no tortures I can conceive of more horrible than being forced to endure your--"

Cyanis cut across the moment with a dramatic sigh that saw her splay her entire body across the table in an even more dramatic flop. For as petite and slender a figure as she cut, with those three tails all floofed to maximum floofness she could take up a surprising amount of space when she wanted to. She wore sunglasses over her eyes and another pair resting on her forehead. In the most dramatic move of all, she shoveled a spoonful of soup[1] into her mouth. 

"Oh, [i]I[/i] see how it is! How [i]convenient[/i] that you figured out how to not kill people after YOU MURDERED MY POOR, BEAUTIFUL ARCHER! He was so sweet! So innocent! A perfect little angel and you killed him with your stupid jerk sword you jerk you jerk you stupid... jerk!"

She punctuated every fresh insult with a jab of her spoon, flicking little bits of soup[2] everywhere.

"If you lament the loss of your Servant that much you ought to have provided him with your support, child. You cannot possibly have thought that nobody would die in a war."

"Uh, yeah I thought someone would die?? YOU????? This is so- why am I even explaining myself to you? I won already! I outfoxed everyone, I did all the work and I won fair and square! I should have four, no, five tails already and handmaidens feeding me grapes and massaging my poor aching feet! Instead I'm the only one at the table whose lost her Servant! Cheaters! Cheaters, all of you! Mean to me!!"

Avenger stiffened, though she did not stir. Her eyes made the briefest of flickers across the room to where her sword lay against the wall, but she mastered herself before she could so much as twitch in that direction. Berserker snarled at her anyway from overtop her bowl of soup[3].

"...And I suppose if you stupidly put a piece on a board for no reason and I captured it, that would be cheating as well?"

Cyanis' mouth hung open. Her fingers let slack and her soup[4] spoon fell with a clatter and a splash.

"Wh-who," she asked in a trembling voice, "Taught you how to play Wolf Go?"

No one answered. Kat cleared her throat in preparation, but that it seemed had been the final straw. Cyanis gathered herself up with every ounce of dignity[5] she could muster (which was a lot, as she was a Cool Big Sister in spite of everything that had happened) and stormed off into the other room. Though not before grabbing herself a bowl of ice cream[6] for dessert.

...So yeah, disaster. Everyone hated everyone else, and if they didn't then they were so injured they still hadn't woken up even with all of the delicious smells wafting about them this whole entire time, like Actia and Angelesia, a name Kat only knew from context. Not for the last time, she wished she could call Yue and ask for help. But that was a terrible, awful, stupid wrong bad idea for dummies because if she told Yue what was happening, then Yue would know what was happening and really did she even have to unpack that thought any further to know she didn't wanna do it?

But ooooooooof, did it really feel like she bet on the wrong horse. Er, shark? Girl? Miss Saber (even now it didn't feel right calling her by those other names. 'Avenger' especially seemed like something she didn't [i]want[/i] to be) was the principle cause of most of the infighting happening in her Loosely Strung Together Alliance of Convenience, not to mention the one who wrecked her Secret Base and destroyed her Apology Souvenirs so that Kat would have to get lucky enough to find replacements before she finished saving the world or else it was Cutie Fox Island for life she just knew it. 

Erm, anyway. Miss Saber carried herself with a confidence like she thought she could take on Princess Qiu (and make you believe it too) but this new shape of her was... sad. Her wings had melted and sunk inside of her body, like she ate them or something to gain enough power to keep herself around even after burning an entire Command Seal (actually, how'd she get those? how does that... work, exactly?) to keep her promise. And even after all that, the place where Kat had, uh, um, uh u-uh-uh-uhhhhhhhh [i]gotten through to her[/i] was still bleeding. It was a wound that refused to close and it was plainly bothering her, though she sat there hunched over trying very hard to maintain the illusion that it wasn't. Her braid had come undone when the bands holding it in place had all snapped, so instead of wings or a cloak she had this massive waterfall of almost colorless-white hair, like snow made out of glass tumbling every which way.

She looked sad, is the main thing. Not, like, defeated, but sad. Like she was carrying the weight of failure after failure after failure on her back and the only thing that kept her going was the idea that not walking it off was worse than laying down or something. All in all it made her wonder if maybe she should have just cut and run for it and tried her hand at things with just Berserker, who by the way was super duper strong and hadn't lost to anybody yet. But... no. She needed [i]help.[/i] She needed someone who she could talk to, darn it, and who talked back and understood anything that was happening but also very crucially was not out to flip the tables on her and try to win a Fox Game. And Miss Saber, whatever her flaws might be, was the only one who owed Kat a favor. Also the only one who'd called her wise? 

She didn't want to believe that was a lie.

Anyway, soup[7]. Getting it to everyone took a bit of doin', and getting everyone to actually start eating it took even more doin', but y'know a funny thing about a hot meal, especially when it turns out extra tasty and nice like this one did? It gets hard, real hard when you're full and warm to hate anything or everything quite so much. Even if you're an ancient warrior-ghost or a very, very, very sad monk or a bored dragon or really any other weird thing you could maybe name. They ate, and though they did not laugh or joke with one another, they at least stopped scowling quite so much, and looked up to the horizon together.

The sun, with her ever-perfect sense of timing, broke through the clouds with her first pale rays of dawn. In that light, the world looked pretty darn saveable. Y'know?

[1] melted ice cream
[2] still ice cream
[3] actually soup
[4] ice cream again
[5] ice cream
[6] hot, steamy soup
[7] I trust you this time