In the late hours of the morning, the mall was still thriving despite a good portion of the samurai looking like they just woke up from the world's longest bender. After all, they still needed to eat the and the bevy of food courts in the mall would provide the little something to soak up any remaining alcohol.

Thankfully unburdened with hangover, Akuta sat at one of the tables of a noodle shop, a pile of broken chopsticks in front of him. The ronin idly bends several pairs in his hands, flexing them until their breaking point until finally one pair doesn't snap and he nods. Finally, a decent set... He uses the Ronin Approved(tm) tools to begin eating a simple noodle dish, people watching as he does so.

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OOC: Inv/Per, 21 vs TN20, success.

"Hey there, familiar face."

Seika plops down into the seat opposite Akuta, dropping a shopping bag by her feet. "Good to see you're still in one piece. And well fed."

Slurping down some of the noodles, Akuta continues to people watch...at least until a Mantis takes a seat across from him.

"Oi there, Watanabe-hime...I don't know about well-fed, but at least I'm in one piece."

He pushes the noodles a bit between them, gesturing to the pile of chopsticks he hasn't snapped yet.

"Had your noodles yet today?"

"Oh, I wouldn't take your..." Seika starts to demur, but the sizeable stack of fresh chopsticks diverts her attention. Then she notices the pile of broken ones.

"What did those chopsticks do to hurt you, Akuta-san?" Her right hand, arrested halfway through a keep your noodles wave-away gesture, turns palm-up in perplexity. "Or are you, like, planning to build a tiny bonfire for Rebirth Night or something?"

"Stress testing. Figuring out which ones are good enough to keep and which ones aren't. Good pair of chopsticks is hard to come by."

He slurps up another couple noodles as another small box of them is delivered by an attendant, which is pushed off to the side of the table by the ronin, murmuring something to himself much like in their previous encounter.

"Not all of us have space-age Mantis chopsticks made out of blessed sun metal or something, Watanabe-hime."

Seika signals the waiter to bring her a bowl too.

"They're disposable, aren't they? You're not supposed to keep them."

She picks up a pair at random from the pile and separates them. "No splinters, good enough for me. I keep forgetting to bring my travel ones." Her lips quirk. "Even if I remembered, though, they're just bamboo composite, not star iron. Not sure I'd want to put that in my mouth, you know? What if it was spiritually active?"

"Spoken like someone who never had to re-use something meant to be disposable."

He grins and polishes off his noodles as she poses her question and he chuckles, taking a drink of some sugary juice.

"I don't know. Maybe it'd heat your food for you or make it taste spicy. Also, people are spiritually active and in each other's mouths all the time, can't be that bad. Unless it's like...Jigoku chopsticks or something made out of some Spider's shinbone. Then I'd probably wash it first at least."

"If you're gonna use up a dozen pairs anyway, you might as well just pocket them all. Attracts less notice, and then you got redundancy." Seika smirks as she polishes an invisible splinter off her chosen pair. "Waste not, want not."

"Oh, whoa, no, people are different, living people. Our spiritual energy is pretty much all getting used already." She shakes her head, more entertained than scandalized. "Closed system. Usually. Not a lot of chance of getting cursed or mutated or whatever that way. When a lot of spiritual power gets bound in something inanimate is when stuff gets interesting." She sobers a bit. "Or explosive."

"Is some attendant going to yell at me or something? 'Oh no, that mean ronin is breaking some chopsticks!'. Pfft. Also, maskers can afford some more chopsticks I'm sure."

When she explains regarding spiritual energies and such, he picks a few loose remaining noodles from the bottom of his container. "Eh, if you say so. This is why I just stab things. Don't need to worry about these fancy questions about how spirits got stuck in stuff or how my inner Earth is balanced out by my Water or something...but good to know I guess."

"Yeah, well, you don't need to know all the theology to know there are some things you're better off avoiding." Seika chuckles as she digs her own chopsticks into the bowl of noodles just delivered to her. "I mean, you wouldn't chew on something glowing that came out of the Desolation, I bet." Then she remembers that one literally glowing thing coming out of the Desolation happens to be the grey-market glimmerstones, and this sobers her a bit.

"Fair enough I guess...and yeah, I try not to touch most stuff coming out of the Desolation unless I absolutely have to. Only thing that likes coming out of there are angry spirits and the glimmers. People like the glimmers at least...some random gaki with horns and a grumpy face isn't enjoyed as much."

Leaning back a bit, he seems to catch gaze of something and frowns slightly. "At least you'd drown on a Mantis world hopefully before some tentacled beast came up out of the depths and turned you into a snack."

"Hey, by the way. I wouldn't mess with those glimmerstones if I were you. People actually using them... either they don't know what they really are or they don't care. Either way, it's disrespectin' the dead." Seika frowns at that, but brightens at the mention of Mantis worlds.

"I mean, we got wildlife. But it doesn't roam around the cities on the water worlds." She chuckles. "You'd have to go out looking for it if you want to get eaten."

"Disrespecting the dead, eh? I'll take your word for it. Some kinda spiritual mumbo jumbo I assume, yeah?"

Finishing off his juice, the cap is screwed back on and Akuta tosses it into a nearby trash bin, the empty jug bouncing off the rim a few times before falling in proper.

"And here I thought you'd have cities built on the backs of turtles or kraken. Really ruining the mystique here, Watanabe-hime," he says with a smirk.

"If it's real, it's not mumbo-jumbo," Seika huffs, mostly to herself. "The spiritual energy in those things comes from the people who died there. I mean, you're not a shugenja, so you're mostly in the clear, but I wouldn't want to hang around the kind of priests who'd use one."

She chuckles. "If you want turtle-back cities, maybe the Kitsune could hook you up, but we Mantis have a pretty normal relationship with the animal realms. I did get some pretty cool holorecorder shots of sea life when I was on New Kalani last year, though. The cities there are half underwater to protect them from the weather, right, so you can look right out the windows at the reefs, or go diving..."

Mention of the spiritual energy coming from the people who died almost instantly hardens the expression of the wolf, who had begun to idly tap his fingers but now rather abruptly stops. "Yeah...fuck that. I'll be on the lookout for them and the people who would use 'em."

When she mentions the half-underwater cities, his expression softens into something more thoughtful. "Must be a hell of a thing to see. Not much of a swimmer though. Haven't had much opportunity..."

Seika just nods to acknowledge Akuta's promise about the glimmerstones. Shouting the stones' true nature from the rooftops the minute she'd learned it would have put her clan in an awkward position, but telling every local ronin and out-clan visiting shugenja she knows may get to the same result in time.

"You don't go to the shore islands much, I guess?" she asks, softening a bit. "Somebody I met here who grew up ronin told me she used to go out there with her parents, to the public beach. It's not too different from the shores of the Shark islands on Zuiryu, or the north continent coast on Dawn," she adds, naming a couple of Mantis-settled worlds.

"I don't know about you, but they tend to want to keep shabby people like myself off of the beach. Lower the property value or something like that."

As Seika names the Mantis worlds, he closes his eyes for the moment, picturing such places in his mind.

"Sounds like it could be a good time. Hope to see it sometime if I make it off this rock."

"If?" Seika arches her eyebrows. "You know... I've got some pull over at the House of Storms while I'm here. If you actually want to get off this contaminated dirtball, I could probably swing it." She plucks a vegetable piece out of her noodles and delicately crunches it down. "'Cause I like you for some reason, you know? And there's a couple lords on Zuiryu and New Kalani that I've heard are short-handed."

"Nothing's really free, so I guess you'd have to do some kind of favor to get in the Embassy's good books, but maybe think about it?" Seika shrugs. "Meanwhile, if you wanna try out swimming, I can at least tell the staff to add you to the whitelist for our beach. That's an easy one," she adds with a mischievous grin. "It's not that exclusive."

"Do a favor, eh?" He considers, idly rolling a shoulder. "Probably swing something like that...and private Mantis beach, eh? I'll have to buy some swim trunks so I'm not jumping in naked or in my fundoshi."

As his gears turn mentally, his fingers begin to drum on the tabletop again. "So...what sorts of jobs are these lords looking to have done, anyway? I've been told I can put on a mean face if I have to...and well, I have a sword so stabbing people isn't typically too hard."

"On Zuiryu and Kalani? Security, yeah, there's a lot of mineral extraction and shipping goin' on and some of those goods are pretty valuable. And exploration, if you're into that." Seika hesitates slightly. "There's also the space fleets and the ground forces. You'd probably have to train up some before they'd take you, though, with war on in the Crossroads. Tactics and procedures and... stuff. " She's a little vague on the details. "Lords like to send samurai to the fleets when they can, though, it looks good upstairs. And there's the free privateers, too, of course." Those tend to be a bit less strictly disciplined.

"No stabbing here, though," Seika adds, waving this off with a hasty flourish of her chopsticks. "If we need somebody stabbed around here in peacetime we are definitely doin' something wrong," she says with the assurance of a woman who is blissfully unaware that only a few miles away the True Scions of Gusai are in fact preparing to do many things wrong, nominally in the Mantis cause.

"Most've what we can use around here is just... information. Who's got dirt on who, who's buying from where, that kinda stuff."