I think I should stop pretending that I can play in this game and just drop. Sorry, and thank you.

Finding absolutely no trace of her designated conversation partner throughout the premises, Ryoko decided to give up and just hit whatever garden was nearby to do something productive, i.e. phase out.

She shrugged again, this time with shoulders, then cupped some water and poured it over her face, letting it trickle back down by whatever pathway it chose. "Is this all your life is about, Kakita-san? Hunting that darkness?"

"There is one run by them. I was invited there in the morning." Her finger tapped her lips, like before. "But I can't remember what it was called. Something with flowers."

"If the darkness pesters that family, it may linger where they tend to congregate." She shrugged with brows rather than shoulders.

"That's rather specific if you think about it."

Ryoko was wandering about, looking for her conversation partner.

"Do you know of any particular place in the city they may frequent?"

"I can understand the need for subtlety." She sighed and stretched in the water, wiggling her toes beneath, which had stiffened for some reason. "I might be able to help you. Do you expect it to be lurking nearby?"

"Depending on circumstances, I could try to do exactly that." She mused, looking at him with kindled curiosity. "The closer it is, the more familiar the place, the greater the chance to find it. Are you hunting darkness, Kakita-san?"

"I can see the tapestry of the universe." She declared with sudden solemnity, bringing her hands back to protect her modesty, wrapping them across her chest. "Though illusions covering it usually don't give in without a fight."

"Of course I don't, it gives back no light!" She threw her hands in the air. "But I can know where it is by how I can't see it while I can all else."

"I do too!" She chuckled into a balled fist, apparently amused, but then her gaze and voice took more haunting tones. "But this is not a metaphor. I am telling you of the real world, Kakita-san, not the world your eyes see. In the Void, light goes everywhere unrestrained, illuminating everything in ...

"It indeed does. Because it travels in all directions at once. And the less air there is, the faster it travels." She pointed up. "You don't feel the breath of stars, it shall never reach you, but you see their light. Wouldn't you rather be like light then, Kakita-san?"

She tapped her bow-shaped lips in thought. "Tell me, Kakita-san, if you light a candle, does its flame look the same to you from both front and back? Think how light travels. Of that candle, or of a distant star." She looked up. Some of them were showing up on the darkening blue.

"And if the space you passed through were curved, would you still move straight forward?" She blew the droplet and the rainbow shattered, leaving no trace of it on the increasingly shadowed surface of the water in the spring.

"How can I get angry at any day if I know it dies old every dusk whilst I survive to see her offspring time after time? My mother wouldn't forgive me such a lapse in compassion." She smirked, her eyes focused on a single droplet of water dancing on the tip of her index finger raised to her - and Kak...

"The day is blinded by the light it owns, reflected by all that snow, so it has seen me weakly and blurred, a grainy speckle on the canvass of the world." She looked up at him quizzically with her strange, otherworldly coloured eyes, as if recognising his presence only now, recognition slow to arriv...

At some point, a steamy soak companion materialised; perhaps she'd been there all the time, or he'd phased out and hadn't seen her coming, or she'd just emerged out of the wisps of the steam, like an ancient spirit. Whatever was true, she didn't care to explain, but leaned back and sighed.

Friends of her father were very appreciated and the young one even quietly shared one of Hikaru jokes as a sort of a code word for not having fallen too far from Koyama's heritage. However, greater reminiscing and basking in cultural uncledom of Sora would have to wait for another, more private occa...