Winning vote:
[] "This is from a sky-garden tender."
Somehow, this is still enough to make Jay's eyes widen as he realizes what you've got for him; he's too used to Remnants being too rare and too valuable to throw around like you are. That's fine, but it just means that he didn't realize that less than half a dozen Remnants wasn't a big purchase for a large group of grateful families in Great Crevasse, so he didn't expect to get the same sort of consideration you gave your sister. "That's... very nice of you," he says, as he considers it the Remnant.
"Back in Great Crevasse, there's whole companies of people who make a living tending to vertical gardens on the high canyon walls. It's not quite the same as tending orchards, but it is still seeing after plants. Most of them also have some element of Cloud or Wind in their paths, because it's a little safer. You don't fall very often when you're living in Great Crevasse, but..." You screw up your face as you try to remember the expression. "There's some funny saying about how this helps you fall twice. I can't remember it."
"I haven't used much wind madra lately," Jay says, still staring at it.
"No reason you can't." He tears his eyes off his ticket to Gold to look at you. You shrug with all four arms. "I don't use just life madra. My brother uses poison and life. Wind and life will be better for some plants. I don't know which ones, but this is your opportunity to find out, to find your own niche within what we all do here."
"That's... thank you."
Bosc manages to pull her husband's attention away by poking him in the side. "Okay, that's enough thanking everyone. It's late. C'mon, let's leave my parents' house and go to our house. I'll carry the Remnants."
"Okay." Jaylon stands up from the table, then hesitates. Bosc isn't moving. He waits for an awkwardly long ten or fifteen seconds before adding, "Did you mean...?"
Bosc pouts and leans backwards in her chair, arching her back in a display of the extreme despair she feels since she has to explain herself. "Pick me up. You know what a bridal carry is, right? Well, I'm the bride."
Jaylon laughs a little sheepishly, but he figures out how to delicately pick her up as she holds the Remnants. She flashes you a smug smile from his arms as he navigates opening and closing the door without setting her down.
The happy couple sleep in the next day, but everyone else turns out to say good-bye. Dad has to pick you up and give you a tight hug. Mom gives you an uncomplicated hug once you're set down again. Naia is a little awkward about it, trying to avoid touching your Goldsigns as she says all the normal things. You aren't opposed to hugging Thantiriiz, but he manages to communicate with a small gesture that it's fine not to. Argen stands there with his arms crossed and doesn't look like he wants a hug. When he says things in the 'good-bye, thanks for coming and bringing something nice, be well' vein, it sounds like pulling teeth. You skip that hug, too. Olerac's farewell is most of the same words, but it sounds a lot more genuine, and he has no shyness about hugging you.
Then Dad just has to hug you again.
He bends down to do it, this time, then puts both huge hands on your physical shoulders. "Keep showing those Kingdom people what a Forrester can do!" Then he glances to one side and says "Keras?" in an uncertain tone.
You glance over, to find that your Goldsign hand is petting Olerac's Goldsign wolf ears. He's apparently frozen in place, not sure what to do about that. His tail is wagging, though: the Remnant he took in has no complicated feelings about friendly contact.
"Sorry!" You force the hand to stop. "My Goldsigns... do that sometimes."
"It's fine."
Now you're the one pausing for a few awkward seconds. "Uh... good-bye, everyone! Thanks for everything! It was good to be back, but Beti and I need to get back to Lord Cheng as quickly as we can. Bye!"
You take to the air with almost indecent haste.
You're desperately casting about for some distraction as the Thousand-Mile Cloud climbs for height, and the first thing that comes to mind is Etaja. You glance here and there, but... it's hard to locate the rocks he'd crashed in, where the entrance to his current little lair is. Weirdly so. You don't fly often, but it shouldn't be this hard. <How do you hide so well?>
Etaja gives you a mental shrug. {It's subconscious, at this point. My innate powers try to make things around me be a little quieter and less dramatic. It's nothing major. Just, the closer you are to me, the easier it is to locate me, moreso than normal. Your language doesn't have the words for it, but I can do an analogy, yeah? When you're just idly looking around, you're more likely to see a camouflaged fish if you look at it than if you don't, no matter how good the camouflage is. So the best camouflage a fish can have is for their section of coral to be less interesting and flashy than a reef it's not on. But you can't go too far the other way: if it's totally quiet and still, things start looking closely, in case the reason nothing's moving there is because a shark or barracuda is looking for a meal. The best way to hide is to be just a little below-average interesting or weird.}
You turn that over in your head for a few minutes, before you realize something. <You don't usually do explanations that involved for your stuff. You're trying to distract me.>
{I am, yeah!}
<Thank you.> It is helping.
It's kind of impressive how little things change when you return back to Great Crevasse. You greet Luxe Jyothi, you move back into your same little room, Lyn doesn't seem to have even noticed that you were gone, and Cheng immediately has tasks for you and Beti.
Beti's not yet had a single evening back in her familiar atrium before the Underlord is there, wasting almost no time on any sort of welcome. "Ah, Keras. Did you know that Grand Golden Bees sometimes manage to store enough madra in their honeycombs that the honeycombs themselves can leave Remnants? I only just found out!"
He drops a pair of giant, sealed buckets on the soil in front of you. "It's got some potentially interesting properties on retaining other powers, especially cloud and earth. Cloud and earth! That's a strange pairing to discover together, isn't it? Anyway, don't entirely render down the honeycomb Remnants, because definitely the madra matrix will come undone if you do that, but the smaller a chunk you can get while not disrupting that, the better. I'll need it small enough to form a pill around it, while still being edible." In other words, it still has to fit in someone's mouth. Cheng keeps talking even as you do your best to note his requirements, though. "Why isn't Beti moving?"
"She's tired. We just got back from a lot of travel. Give her eight hours and she'll be good again."
Cheng grunts, then turns on his heel and leaves.
While Beti rests, you spend a little time hunting for books in Cheng's place that deal with the Remnants of bees or other insects, as well as some theory on dissecting Remnants.
By the time Beti is ready to help you, you've figured out a plan. Beti holds chunks of honeycomb in place with an array of vines, gently pulling so that they won't move and are at the perfect height for you. You sit there and feel the Remnant honeycombs with your spiritual sense and fingers. Most of the Remnant is separated into, essentially, the individual cells that make it up. The Grand Golden Bees would focus on one at a time, filling it with various types of pollen and the like. In their minds, there was no sub-division possible below this level, so that is the smallest the Remnant can be divided.
So, gently, carefully, with slow precision, you work the point of your halfsilver knife into the Remnant 'wax' separating each of them. The halfsilver disrupts madra, and so here it serves as an excellent cutting implement. The biggest potential problem is actually just how ready it is to disrupt the dead matter of the Remnant: the flat of the knife would go straight through this Remnant just as easily as the blade does, so you're very slowly and meticulously using just the tip of the blade to carve through it.
It's tedious, mind-numbing work, which is of course why Cheng gave it to you instead of doing it himself. Sometimes he absolutely needs Beti to process materials. Sometimes you're just more convenient. You have a little script-circle you chalked onto a chunk of bare concrete in the atrium, something meant to prevent the honeycomb-pieces from unraveling the rest of the way, and as you methodically finish carving each little cell off, you gently pile it in your circle. They're only about the size of your thumbnail, so well within the size a pill can be. Maybe one in a hundred you don't manage to save: either you misread the madra or else your hand slips a little bit, and the halfsilver does its work.
You don't really think much about how most refiners with three times your experience would do this slower and with more mistakes. You just work. Later, Cheng comes and collects what he needs.
Eventually, it's time for your next scheduled meeting with Prachi. Sometimes he has you meet him out and about, but other times, like today, you meet with him in the Luxe place, in one of the scripted dojo rooms that serve as safe spaces to fling madra around.
For just about the first time, you find Prachi fiddling with a control panel here: the room has an embedded, advanced Forger technique that can generate simple faux soldiers for someone to fight against, but apparently it's both expensive to use and the soldiers aren't the most skilled. "Keras," he says, by way of greeting. "Welcome back. How is your family doing?"
"Good," you say, giving him a smile. "It was nice to see everyone again, and actually having your dream tablets with me helped me help one of my friends."
Prachi cocks an eyebrow at you. "Surprising," he says, but he doesn't ask for details. With his walking stick to support him, he comes up to you, and you hand back the dream tablets. "They helped you, as well, I trust?"
"I think so."
He grunts. "Good. Even if you settle on a fighting style that is quite different from my own, we can devise a good training routine for it. You will need to drill again to ingrain any adjustments, as practice makes permanent. When you practice your forms enough hundreds of times, they will become second nature. Until we get there, accuracy is the most important thing."
You nod. This isn't something new from him, so you echo familiar words back. "Right, because practice makes permanent." If you do it wrong each time, then that is what becomes permanent.
"Exactly. So, I will be using this room's embedded technique to generate foes for you. Compete at one-half speed, but otherwise do not hold back. I will understand the vision you are going for from observation."
Prachi walks back to the control panel. You take a deep breath and cycle your madra until he activates the room. A pair of abstract human figures Forge themselves out of yellow light, each holding a straight sword in one hand.
A fake Enforcer technique flares in one of them, and it moves to engage you while the other brings up its hands, pouring madra into what looks like a Striker technique.
Sometimes the correct tactic is clear, and not so much a style. That's also part of why this is a half-speed fight, so you don't react without thought, and only move as you actually intend to. You swing around, putting the melee enemy between you and the Striker one.
It tries to feint a horizontal slash before pulling back and going for a thrust, but you read its intent. It's barely started the thrust before you've grabbed its wrist with one hand. A Goldsign fist punches the enemy's face, and its head rocks back. That's enough to put it off-balance.
Your other physical hand swings your axe into its chest, and you follow up with a flat-palm blow to its center of mass, hurling the partially-mangled Forged enemy into the other one.
This only briefly disrupts the Striker enemy, as it takes a moment to try to dodge and then to get free of the one you'd hit it with.
But the reason that you could do that so well against these two is because they're notably inferior to you. Two more Forged enemies rise up behind you. This is where you'll begin to show what you've been working out in your head, as further techniques kindle in your hands.
You don't know yet just how quickly you'll have to make use of what you're beginning to learn.
What sort of style will Keras focus on learning? These all build on what Keras already knows and are all slightly different narrative options, as we are reaching a point where Keras has to pick what to prioritize, granting certain bonuses while having certain areas that are not as easily handled. This will also influence how Keras welds their techniques into their approach to combat. No style can do everything, but all of these options allow Keras to fight better against certain types of foes while having a type of foe they are little better against than before undertaking this more involved training.
[] A vicious style
Keras will focus on offense, trusting in their techniques to keep them safe and to recover while making every effort to incapacitate a single foe as quickly as possible. Hard offense with powerful axe-strokes allow Keras to crash through defenses. This will be strong against defensively-focused foes, but is lacking when outnumbered.
Strength from C to C+
[] An adamant style
Keras will focus on defense and resilience, relying on self-healing and resistance to pain, shifting to aggressive attacks when an opening arises. This is a well-rounded style that relies on shifting stance and weight to deny foes' opportunities and seize your own. It is strong against fast foes and swarms of weak attacks, but is lacking against sufficiently powerful single blows.
Toughness from C- to C
[] A technical style
Keras will focus on precise and accurate movements, relying on their sister's example and their own spiritual sense and Enforcer move to eke out small edges against foes, seeking to build them into larger openings by denying the foe a chance to find balance. It is strong when outnumbered or against singular mighty blows, but is lacking against swifter foes.
Coordination from C+ to B-
[] A swift style
Keras will rely on their spiritual senses and speed to try to overwhelm foes, flowing from one strike to the next while remaining very mobile and circling for advantage. This is a classic approach to combat for a reason. It is strong when surprising a foe or against a well-rounded or mobile foe but lacking against heavily-armored or otherwise very defensive foes.
Speed from C+ to B-
