[b]Foxpearl! Shifu![/b]

“I’m not mad,” Joshua Chan lies. “I’m just disappointed.”

Outside, green-grey rain begins to lash at the panes. Below, evacuation barges mingle with early morning shipping. In here, the burnt water smell of coffee begins to fill the apartment attached to the cafe.

“As far as hiding places go, this is… not a very good one.” He eyes the blushing Vermillion Princess, dangling from one of the ceiling plant hangers, over the frames of his glasses. “Somebody’s going to put two and two together and make Shifu out of it pretty soon.”

But, like, where else could you go? ArAN’s place? She’d lecture [i]Foxpearl[/i] for leaving kidnapped heroines on the furniture. Wherever Rain lives? She vanished away at the end of that fight.

“Also, Izi‘s still leading her raid,” Joshua points out. The sound of her hammering the keyboard with enthusiasm floats through the door. “She definitely saw you, she’s just too busy to pay attention to the news yet. This isn’t just going to be a circulation on the Granny Network letting tower security know they need to have a talk with you three. That dipshit Li’s going to be on the news talking about how Foxfire’s clearly made a miniature version of herself and— [i]Hsien. What. Are you doing.”[/i]

[hr]

[b]Rain![/b]

Down in the dark. Not a lot of well-to-do people come all the way down here, you know? The closest most respectable people come is checking some shop in the basement levels of the towers. But elemental earth is a vital part of the city.

Somewhere up above, an idiot cop vents one of Xingtian’s power generators, and the ghosts drain down the tower, down to the earth, down into the dark. They flow around you in the dark, whispering, and if you listened carefully you might be able to make something out—

[i]—be sure to tell that daughter of mine
—was the finale any good
—my cat’s ghost is going to fret if I’m out too long
—I just want to go back to sleep
—I was dreaming
—I’m still hungry
—tell Yama there was a mistake
—wasn’t the fire exciting[/i]

—all mumbled, sleepwalking. The restless dead. There’s a reason that all those exorcist horror movies are about “laying the dead to rest.” They’re all wispy, fragmented, and one whisper might start a fragment and another might finish it.

The tragedy of this crisis isn’t that the living might be harmed by ghosts. Spooked, maybe. Chilled, yeah. Hurt by someone who’s using all that phantasmal magical power as a power generator? That’s becoming a big risk.

But the tragedy of this crisis is that the dead are awake without the proper rituals, and that they can’t go back to sleep.

Could [i]you[/i] sleep down here, if you had to, once the adrenaline drains? Could you sleep while listening to the half-aware whispers of the dead? Or would that have an [i]odd[/i] effect?