Mumei sits cross-legged atop a large flat stone beneath a sky-lily, ignoring the occasional drip of condensate from the massive leaf. Everything is humid sticky here all the time anyway.

She looks at her communicator, then appraisingly around the space. Second lefthand split in the main path, past the pond full of not exactly koi, to the table stone. Yep. Shifting the freshly charged goggles from the top of her head to her eyes, she lays back on the stone, staring up through the canopy and the trippy alien view afforded by the goggles.

Tsugiharu made it a point not to be late at least. He wasn't a real big guy, but in the quiet of the early morning, he also wasn't particularly stealthy. He glasses were charged and at the ready. It would be interesting to see what the Osprey made of the garden. The Daidoji had clearly not cared for it. Then again, barring pulling a fighter craft out of his pocket like a tanuki, he didn't think he was going to impress her over much.

The insights of the Osprey in to such a unique location should prove more interesting, he hoped.

"Good morning, Nakauchi-san. Thank you for agreeing to meet me so early in the morning." he said with a bow.

She popped upright, eyes a bizarre shade of haze green seen from the other side of the goggles. Lifting them to rest atop her head as she slid off the rock, she called back. "Not that early, I'm used to ship schedules where I'm up at pseudodawn to make sure the breakfast dispensers are happy. A crew with cold tea and miso soup is not a happy crew." Once on the ground, she offers a bow, a deeper one as befits greeting a great clan. The ragamuffin has a smidge of etiquette training at least.

"Hope you've found your time here worthwhile so far. Did you get a bird yesterday?" She almost asks what he'd named it, but realized that pausing for an answer to the current question first was wise.

He nodded.

"I did. I can certainly say it's like nothing I've ever done before, I will likely do again." he said with a small smile. "Named him Goliath. And you?"

"Hiroki is the most beautiful of Otori, of course." She grins with the memory of racing through the fields with her minor clan compatriots. "Her sapphire feathers gleam like fine silks, and I'm pleased to call her friend for a short time at least."

She gestures at the growth around them. "Have you had a chance to wander here yet? I assumed at least enough to pick this spot."

"That's been about the extent of my exploration." he admitted. "The last person I visited with....I don't think she was particularly interested in gardens."

He slipped his glasses on.

"Not that I want someone to silently walk with me through the gardens, but when you see something like that plant over there." he said gesturing to a specimen that was rather more interesting with the glasses on. "It deserves to enter the conversation, wouldn't you say?"

She lowers her own visor and looks toward the indicated flower? fungus? The distinctions blur in this alien vision when rings of neon gold and tenuous violet bloom in patches across the spreading fungal cap. Mumei walks slowly closer, footing feeling oddly uncertain when the ground no longer looks normal. "Have to wonder what those spots are for the fungus." She reaches to touch the amorphous gold and finds it sticky. "catching bugs?"

"Some aren't interested in the parts of the world they can't use directly. Hard to hear the spirits in it all and think like that."

Tsugiharu watched as a rainbow hued multi-winged insect landed on the sticky fungus. With the glasses, there was an almost romantic vibe in a sense of it being lured to nourish the fungus.

"Hm, it would seem so." he said. "But that is true about people too. You can make all the pretty analogies you want, but to those who cannot interact with the kami directly, a campire is pretty, and warm, and something you can cook over....but that's it. They'll never really feel it, ya know?"

She nods, watching the insect struggle to rise, wings abuzz creating sparkling, everchanging cascades of light. "That is a beautiful dance, with only death at the end." She thinks of the Crab and Spider circling the dance floor on weary legs the previous night with a soft smile of insight. And where she might have reached out to free the creature, or simply shorten its tiny bug misery, she turns aside to let them find their own destinies.

"I think some poets get it, the essence of fire or rain or plum blossoms. But only shugenja poets seem to get the thoughts of those." She offers a self-deprecating shrug. "Bunked with a Crane engineer and wannabe poet on my first job. Turns out that if you can endure enough poetry you eventually hit something you like."

"Also turns out that still doesn't mean you can write the stuff," she adds with a chuckle, moving toward a low-growing swath of actual flowers that waved in the slight breeze with sparkles of blue and purple visible in the lenses. "I'll stick to dancing out my impressions."

Tsugiharu nodded as he watched the blue and purple light show the low flowers offered. Were they signalling to each other? To the bugs? Were they fighting?

"Poetry is a challenge, that's true. I knew a programmer who thought that if you just plugged all of the 'rules' of poetry into a program you could simply produce poetry. How did that one go?

"Desiccate mountain
How a rhesus, monkey roars
betrayed by the lake."

He chuckled a bit.

"Which I think is probably the poetic equivalent of people meowing at their cats."

"All the right sounds and none of the right meaning?" She brushes a hand across the flowers, watching her oddly dark fingers flutter the light. "I think I can manage that level of poetry."



"OK, makes more sense than 'dessicate mountain', maybe."

Tsugiharu smiled a bit.

"Well, it's no poem of the fire kami which is just the word burn 17 times, but there is at least meaning to Nakauchi-san's words if not necessarily grace." he admitted.

He looked up the path a bit as the Osprey petted the flowers.

"Hmm, look over there, Nakauchi-san. Those flowers over their shifted hue when you started brushing the ones over here."

"Oh?" She turns, and watches the distant batch as she runs her hand through the flowers again. "Are they....talking to one another?" She turns back to the flowers. "Are you little guys chatting? is that root touches or special connections to the air kami? What's up?" Not that they answer without some serious communing, most likely.

"They do seem entirely natural at least. It's not some technical special effect."

"Wonder how far the effect goes? Could you send messages or something across the city with them, do you think?"

Tsugiharu tapped his chin.

"Hm. It's an interesting thought. If they could, you could use it as the basis of a tale of romance." he suggested. "Every day he would brush the flowers, and she watched her flowers in return."

He shrugged.

"Or something like that. Writing's not a specialty of mine."

"Same, or I'd be better at poetry. But that is definitely a pillow book plot...even if they're only good at this distance. Makes a good code for the forbidden lover story. 'when the flowers blinked three times, she knew the coast was clear to jump the wall and climb to the window' or something like that."

She startles as a froglike thing, mostly dark, but with patches of that gold and blue leapt onto the path and kept going. The shiny bits had certainly let it blend in.

"So..not writing, and not poetry? What are you specialties Kuchiki-sama?"

Tsugiharu smirked a bit.

"Ah, married to my job mostly. Beyond that I try to learn a little bit about everything, you never know when any given piece of information will prove valuable." he admitted.

He nodded at the toad like thing.

"Like that animal. Is it dangerous? Tasty? Does it have medicinal or recreational value? Would it make a good pet? One can spend many lifetimes asking such questions and yet still questions remain."

He paused a moment.

"Or, on a less serious note, I'm a solid choice for trivia night. What about yourself, Nakauchi-san? Do you have passions outside of being a stellar engineer?"

She chuckles. "Not an engineer. I don't fix things, I just chat them up to see how they're doing and alert the folks who do fix things. As you might guess, that's not a job held in great esteem, but they need something for us to do while gaining experience and learning the tenor of the stars well enough to navigate among them."

"I dance and attune to the stars and worlds wherever I travel, so I know them again. Attuning to the drones and ship's computers and the like is a lesser version of that."

There's a flippancy, talking about her current work that falls away to be replaced by reverence when she speaks of the stars.

A lopsided smile forms. "I guess I'm kind of at the opposite end of things as you, communing with things so large they're almost unintelligible while you're looking at things so tiny they barely have thoughts."

Tsugiharu chuckled.

"Oh I don't know if size really relates to communication that strictly, Nakauchi-san. I've met plenty of people whose worldviews are so tiny they barely have thoughts, or have become so full of themselves to become nearly unintelligible." he joked.

He looked over at a flower, whose blossoming when struck with the first rays of sun created a burst of new colors through the glasses.

"A flower at least knows to turn towards the sun."

She chuckles. "There for sure some engineers that focused. Not that they barely have thoughts...just that they barely have any outside of their job. But they seem to like it that way."

"And really, that's what I tend to think of when someone's 'married to their job'" She shrugs, "I have no room to cast shadows about it though, I mean, my hobbies are dancing and finding altered states that might get me closer to communion with a given world or star...but that's still part of my job."

Berating someone for a flaw, and then admitting you yourself had that flaw did not particularly draw a smile out of the Spider.

It didn't even paint a particularly pretty picture when viewed through cool uv glasses.

"Well, my own hobbies are a bit more unrelated to my job than yours are to yours Nakauchi-san. Fantasy Fight, and I have learned a couple of dance steps out of necessity. But hobbies are just that, hobbies."

He shrugged a bit.

"Then again, I don't think a person is defined solely by the things they excel at, Nakauchi-san. We are composed of many different elements, some are strengths, some are flaws, but we have a bit more depth than some might think we possess."