Yuki!

It feels like it takes entire days for Aadya to answer. She stares down into her teacup, slowly swishing the dregs at the bottom as if trying to divine the future, to see which route the stars have declared for Thellamie. I'm afraid it doesn't work like that, darling, not unless that terrible old bird brings down more dictates from those self-obsessed stick-in-the-muds. And yet she tries anyhow, or at the very least that's the vibe, as you kids say. Some people might say that there's not much going on in her head. (I'm looking at you, Miss Fullbright.) But her thoughts are grinding along like stone on stone, slotting into place.

"I wish they hadn't chosen him," she concludes. "Why couldn't it have been you?" Her hand reaches across the table: a bid for companionship, for solidarity, for acknowledgement. "Why not you? You trapped Azaza, you know our world, you could have chosen someone to be tamed by and we'd be done with the whole thing, and we could worry about the maids making some new bid to impress their sleeping dragons afterwards. And the Khagan! The Queen of Light would..."

Her voice dies. She can't make herself assert that a Queen of Light would see the Khagan as a problem to be solved. Not when there's other things to turn her hypothetical hand to, not when the Paladins might be able to handle things on their own, not when there are problems that Aadya hasn't taken it onto her own shoulders to try and fix.

Her finger brushes against the side of your hand.

---

Handmaidens, Howeverso Many You Be!

It's as you're walking through the humid Castle of Ginger, its psuedo-walls made of towering stalks, its rushes made of leaves, descending deeper into the sweet spice, that Morning makes herself known. One moment she isn't there, and then like an optical illusion it becomes clear that you were looking at her all along: that her scales look like ginger leaves on colorful tiles, that her beard looks like ginger-moss, that her clouded eyes are the color of sunlight filtered through the vine-windows, and that she is the entire world before you, her coils wrapped around stalk-pillars, her leaf-shaped tail closing off the way back.

[fight me] she says, as she demands of all heroes. Nothing more, nothing less. Her head sways, trying to see every part of you all at once. But Tsane would tell you all, she would, that Morning is a terrible foe to meet here in the Outside, because she wants to devour you- not in the way that you would devour a sandwich, but in the way that you (or her, at least) would devour a book.

It would be very, very perilous to remind her that Sayanastia is before her. Then she might remember not knowing anything at all, and she would drown you in the weight of how the nothingness beneath the world would fight the creation that accreted around the Nails.

I do not think Injimo has ever fought her before. Am I correct?

---

Hazel!

"You're here!" Juniper does a little dance-in-place, tail swishing furiously. "Oh, we have so much to show you! Right now we've made our way to the Fragmenthold, and once the storm clears, we'll have some time to show you around this place before the Khagan shows up! This is a place of making things, of piecing them together: the whole castle's broken and ruined but if you spend time gathering fragments and seeing how they fit, you can make all sorts of things, and there are these crabs which steam really well and then you put their shells together and usually they make a shield, wouldn't that be great for you? Because I don't really see you as being an attacker, an aggressive one, maybe if we made a crabshell--"

Olesya snaps her fingers and Juniper stiffens, blushes, glances over to her and then back to you. Pulls the breakfast bowl close to her chest and sways a little in place, fidgeting, happy.

"Make sure he's fed before serving him your sweets," Olesya says. Juniper scoots over to sit next to you, kneels right next to you, smiles with a twitch of her ear.

"Shall I feed you? Or would you prefer your own sluzhankas to do so?" She scoops a bit of egg on her fork (shining, a little chitinous, its handle curved organically). "We are happy to serve, noble guest." And she means it. She's ready to feed you the whole thing if it will make Olesya happy, and it will make her happy to do it. Welcome to the Khaganate.

---

Erika!

The shudder in Timtam is betrayed by her veil of beads, by the slight scrape of her fingernail on the cards, by the light that falls slant through the window, in the slight interruption in her breath. You have won a hit, Miss Fullbright: you have flirted with her when she is not herself, and someone else has done so not as herself, if you understand me. There are things truer to Timtam than this, but she can no more ignore what you have done than you could help yourself from enjoying a lovely gingersnap sheep with tufts of wool-frosting.

"You flatter me," she asserts. "Can you even see these lips to name them soft and precious?" She toys with one of the beaded strings, allows for the briefest glimpse. "Or are you, perhaps, seducing me for information to give your employer, Erika Fullbright? Or is this simply the sort of thing you say when you have nothing else to say? Do you like to say such things in order to make the people around you happier? If it does make someone happy, does it matter?"

The crack, the snap, of cards being sharply shuffled. "Do not answer," she demands, her demeanor changing again. "I have not earned any questions from you yet. It is a game of taking tricks. We play this in Aestival from the time that we are old enough to count. The distinction of this game is that we play our cards face down, Miss Fullbright. We tell each other what we have played. If a player likes, they may challenge the table entire, and anyone who has been caught lying is punished. And if no one was lying at all, well. Well~"

The way she rolls that well around in her mouth (oh, how it would roll around in yours, passed from one mouth to the other) brings to mind trick-taking games as played in the Mansion. Seven Prophecies. Nine Lives. Cravasmaid. Extreme Wizard. Plucky Princess. Bids run high and hot, don't they? And the punishments, well.

Isn't the best part of losing the part where you sit in the winner's lap?

Injimo!

Has she fought...?

No, she has not fought Kholessia the Flame Autoklave, who guards the Sealant Hills. She spent those hours sitting by the clock, learning to lunge to one side every nine seconds exactly, just so she would be ready to teach Heron if she ever needed to learn. No, she has not fought Meridiyen Twotusk, the Boar of the Earth, and the month spent learning to walk balanced on speartips was only so that Heron might not fall into her quicksand. And she did not learn to fly because she ever thought this moment would come.

But muscle memory is a hell of a thing.

The hurricane potion hits the ground and she is leaping over it a moment later. Solid rip on the windchute cable at the exact apex of her jump, catching the updraft and hurtling herself up into the sky. Just like she practiced for hours and hours in the mechanical junkyard of the training ground, where creatures larger than life were simulated with conveyor belts, mechanical cranes, and intricate obstacle courses layered with traps. She goes up. Up, away from the floor that is the Morning, who might twist perilously beneath her. Up, away from the branches that are the Morning, who might snare and hold her. Up, away from the eyes of the Morning, who might realize their mistake and see that she is not a hero after all. That edge is all she has to exploit; if the Morning has taken her for Heron, then she will expect a spark of genius in this battle.

She soars high on the most perilous of hopes, based on nothing and demanding everything. That the Morning will not see her stupid, rehearsed attack for what it is: a step-by-step replication of exactly the way Heron fought her the last time.

She nears the apex of her flight and she releases the windchute to whirl off into the sky, a kite in tiger's heraldry. She draws her bow. There will be a second when she ceases to rise but has not yet begun to fall when she will have perfect stability to fire a perfect shot.

And she does.

She could live in that moment forever. All the strength, speed and training of her life abruptly called upon and demonstrated in a single moment of sublime perfection. She can feel it in her muscles, in the callouses on her fingers, on the scars on her back, on the sweat of her hairline, on the surface of her beating heart.

It feels so good that she almost forgets that she is not firing an enchanted obsidian arrow capable of piercing dragonscale, but an ordinary hunting broadhead that will shatter pointlessly when it strikes the rising Morning upon her brow. Perhaps if she had given herself a moment she might have thought up a better plan, one that did not waste her one perfect technique on an attack that had no possibility of inflicting damage. But, as was said, muscle memory is a hell of a thing.

[Fighting her: 7
Take a string
Create an opportunity for an ally]

Erika notices (after far too long) that she is chewing on the tips of her hair. In her defense, it has no detectable flavor. The texture is oddly natural, and if her mind were otherwise engaged it would not be surprising at all to learn that it would feel natural enough not to call attention to itself. The good news is that her mind was engaged: she'd just collected a lot of very useful information, even enough to mark another line in her ledger and begin sketching an outline of Timtam's disguise, now that she knew it was a specifically relevant detail.

That cut the need off of... you could lose, you know. You could lose spectacularly. Don't you think? Wouldn't you rather? What does winning even get you? An answer or three? Respect? What good have those ever done anyone~? But losing, mmmmhmhmohohoho! They might blindfold you, peel you bare, but -- heeeee!! -- aren't you a detective? Be entertaining about it and you might be invited behind that veil? What secrets could you pry out of her tongue using yours instead of her stupid rules? Isn't this optimal, even? Won't there never be another chance like this? Isn't it worth the gamble, isn't it the only way to win? Don't you think that, when it gets right down to it, losing is just better than winning????

Erika notices her hair is in her mouth. Again. Hadn't she spit that out? Her cheeks flush as her elbow slips on the table and she almost plunges her face into the tea. She coughs twice, loudly, and hides her face behind her teacup.

"Mmm. Aha. Then. As the ante is paid in information here, am I correct in assuming there isn't much you can tell me about our fellow players? The game within the game would seem to be learning to read the tendencies of each member of the table the fastest. It would be, ah, crass. I would say. To have invited only a single new player?"