[b]Yue![/b]

The tower seems to go on forever upwards, but with carefully timed jetpack bursts followed by wall-running you're making amazing progress. So amazing that Princess Kikil has to bust out a special enemy just for you.

Two innocuously small drones soar out into the air above and in front of you, and then with a flare they burst into pink and violet flames that immediately shapes itself into the form of two enormous hands. From the tips of these hands drop strings - and on the end of those strings, a machine, held like a puppet. It is tall, refined, strong, feminine, made of a deep black metal that reflects like chrome and shifts like water. It flexes into a stance, a short spear held in one hand and a long whip held in the other. And then it launches backwards because you're still going up the tower together. This is part fight and part race.

The biggest problem here is that you're not quite sure what you're fighting. Are you fighting the hands or the puppet? Is the goal to cut the strings or the drones right in the centre? How are you supposed to deal with the whip? Nobody's ever fought you with a whip before - eeek! 

Something about it reminds you of Rose, though. It reminds you of your relationship with her. Everything about this technique from Princess Kikil is too complex, too alien, too incongruous with the rest of this place's aesthetic to seem like it came entirely from her own heart. This is something that she learned from one of [i]her[/i] friends. What a marvelous person they must be!

[b]Rose and Chen![/b]

Oh, Chen. Oh, Rose. You do understand what you have become, don't you? 

You have become tyrants. Cutie gaolers. The cruel authorities whose unjust demands and threats have instantly created an entire organized fox underground. It is time for fox magic to conjure the finest suits, dresses, and jazz music of the Prohibition era. It is time for foxes to develop fox-speakeasies where revolution might be plotted against their evil mistresses. And within these hotbeds of fox crime it is swiftly agreed: that what Chen [i]really[/i] wants is to be tied up so that obviously correct foxes can take over captainship of the ship, and the only one preventing her from embracing that fate is the heartless fox-brutalizer Rosepetal, peer only to Meibelle for her cruelty and heartlessness.

It is time for every righteous fox to join [i]la resistance[/i]. 

The practical result of this is that for the first time ever things go quiet. They go way too fucking quiet. Nary a bushy tail to be seen. Only half-glimpses of shadowy foxes glimpsing out from around corners or behind doorways. Ten minutes ago they seemed to occupy every available space on this ship but now they are working to prepare a greater act of mischief than they ever could alone.

And about this point you hear thunder in the distance and see a storm rolling in.

[i]This[/i] part is not unexpected. Some branch of the Heavenly Bureaucracy was assigned to overseeing the imprisonment of the foxes. In the distance, from a spyglass, you can see martial war gods assembling in the clouds, and on the seaside cliffs below you can see human monks, eyes closed in meditation, a wall of waiting martial artists. These are the [i]legitimate[/i] cutie tyrants, the forces of monasticism and order who imprisoned the foxes in the first place and have amassed now to ensure their breakout ends before it begins.

And you are caught in the political centre. Too orderly to be embraced by the cutie radicals, too chaotic to be accepted by the cutie reactionaries.