Sometime before local noon, a small figure meanders down one of the lanes in the cheap part of Pear Blossom Dome. She doesn't look out of place, precisely. Her clothing is of the type and quality often favored by ji-samurai and ronin with more style sense than disposable income, and it looks comfortably lived-in. But something about the look isn't quite right; the fabrics are a little different than the ones the World of Dreams' factories churn out, and the cut is slightly different from the current local styles. In other words, off-world.



Nevertheless, Seika moves like she knows how to carry herself in a place like this, alert but confident. At the moment, though, part of her alertness is devoted to her holorecorder, lining up the perfect still shot of a shimmerwing perched on a power line with an inspirational poster behind it.

Not too far away another figure was tinkering with their own holorecorder, well one of them, making sure everything was in proper working order. Replacing them was too expensive to consider outside of a big score so sweat and hard work would have to count.

Dai glanced up to scrutinize the samurai photographer. Poseurs slumming it to try and cultivate a gritty and cool persona for their equally privileged friends were less uncommon than one might expect but the air to this one was a little different.

Click!

Seika straightens up, smiling to herself with painted lips as she inspects the shot on the diminutive screen of her holorecorder. "Hah. Gotcha." She doesn't usually think of herself as, like, a wildlife photographer, but she hadn't been able to pass up the serendipitous trick of perspective that made the scraggy shimmerwing appear to be sitting on the head of provincial lord governor Bayushi Mizuki, who is staring sternly out of the grimy poster a few feet behind the avian's perch.

She fusses with a couple of settings on the holorecorder before noticing that someone else in the vicinity--Dai--is doing much the same thing.

"Oh, hi." She lifts her non-recorder-holding hand in a casual gesture of greeting, sauntering over in his direction. "I don't recognize that rig. Is it a local brand? Looks solid."

From the front, one can see that she has a green scarf tucked into her jacket collar; stylized praying mantises are worked into its geometric print. Not wearing some kind of clan marker would be a bit rude, as a visitor.

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Edit to add a roll for the picture because it amuses me: D1 LM--Artisan: Holorecorder for fluff, say TN 15 + 1R | 5k3 ⇒ 29 (TN: 20)

"Oh, uh, yeah it's local. Imports are an arm and a leg and this does the job just fine."

The holorecorder itself has clearly seen some very rough love likely over the course of years. Only a few flecks here and there suggest it might once have had a paint job and, even then, do not give enough clue as to what it might have looked like. Scratches mar it here and there and... is that a claw mark?

"Whoa." Seika tilts her head for a closer look. "Looks like you really put it through the paces. I don't know the Scorpion models, but I guess they build 'em to last here." She sounds mildly surprised about that. Scorpion engineering and sturdy aren't closely associated in her mental database. I'm biased, though, she admits to herself without the slightest bit of contrition.

"Oh, hey, I'm Yoritomo Seika, by the way. Didn't mean to just, like, charge over and stop you in the middle of your business."

Whatever that is. Something that involves recording... and sharp objects... apparently?

"Oh... right... um I'm Dai, Delvin' Dai, nice to meet ya." He looks back to the holorecorder, "Imports are an arm and a leg, somethin' sturdy like this was just an arm... A lot of them are pretty damn flimsy but you end up spendin' more replacin' them then you do investin' properly up front."

"No kidding," Seika agrees, hefting her own device, which isn't anywhere near as battered as Dai's but still looks well-loved. The Watanabe Shinmei 4x logo, stamped in green on the front, is still quite intact. "I thought I lost this guy a couple of times back on New Kalani... nope, needed a new display screen one time, is all."

Of course, she could have afforded a replacement. But it's the principle of the thing.

"Delvin' Dai, hm? Nice to meet you, too. What's that name about?" Seika props her shoulder against the nearest poster-bedecked wall, apparently not in a hurry to be anywhere else. No surname means Dai isn't just a local Scorpion with an edgy taste in clothes, but he's still clearly samurai, so she doubts this ronin is, like, a literal miner. It'd be a weird nickname for a miner anyway. They all delve, right?

The ronin clearly looks impressed at the holorecorder and the care put into it, not quite drooling but definitely appreciative, "I do broadcasts... well that's a strong word, the Scorpion ain't lettin' a ronin sully their network... I do recordin's of urban exploration. The folks who follow and circulate them started callin' me Delvin' Dai and I guess it stuck."

Seika's brows arch. "That's quite a niche. Sounds fun! I would've loved that when I was in Kyuden Sango... well, but I was trying to keep a low profile at the time, so..."

While mulling this she scrunches around in one of her pockets, extracting a packet of chewing gum. "Want one?" She holds the packet out toward Dai with casual courtesy. The packaging would probably be unfamiliar--it's an off-world brand, Watanabe Confections' Yuzu Burst! flavor.

"Can you make a living off that? Or is it like a side thing?"

He happily accepts the gum then wavers a hand at the question, "It's growin'. Make a few coins sellin' the recordin's and even managed to snag a sponsor." He pulls out and offers her a can of White Wolf in return, "But, yeah, most of the money right now comes from what I pull out of the ruins."

"White... Wolf?" She takes the can with a nod and flips it around, taking a look at the label. "Energy drink, huh?" If it's anything like the kind she's used to, she'll regret tasting any of it while also chewing gum... with a slight pang, she disposes of her still-good piece of gum using the silvery paper it came in and cracks the can.

"So... ruins? I thought you were talking about like, exploring rooftops and steam tunnels and stuff at first. But you mean you search inside that pit where the spirit furnace blew everything into the next life?"

The official guide book she'd consulted on the voyage here from Thunder's Home had said very little about the accident site, other than recommending tourist areas far away from it. The internal communications by Moshi and Yoritomo engineers analyzing what little news of the disaster had leaked into Mantis channels were almost equally light on details, but contained a lot more informed speculation. Seika's current Flarenet project, if it works as planned, is meant to relieve the necessity of siting spirit furnaces in populated areas. In theory, anyway.

She sniffs delicately at the opened can of White Wolf and then takes a sip. "Huh. That's not bad." Then, after a beat, with a self-conscious laugh, "Wait, I guess this means you're pretty good at what they pay you for, actually!"

He chuckles and grins, "I do my best at everything I do. You don't keep workin' as a ronin for long if not. As for the ruins, yeah, I started off recordin' regular urban exploration and it got a few people's attention. But things didn't start growin' until it started gettin' dangerous."

Seika's bold-painted lips quirk at a slightly pained angle. "That's way too true, isn't it."

She sips the energy drink with a thoughtful air. "Maybe it's fate we ran into each other, Dai-san... anyway, I'll be straight with you, I've been curious about that accident ever since I first read about it. I blame all these radiant-power engineers I work with." She shakes her head slightly, her expression turning to a mix of indulgent and exasperated at the foibles of nerds. "How dangerous is it really, in there? I'm surprised they let people inside on their own."

His look gets more serious, "Very. Very dangerous. I understand curiosity but I do what I do because I'm good at it and because I need the coin to survive and roughin' people up, or takin' them out, isn't my thing. Don't go in there unless you're bringin' people willin' to die fightin' ghosts and demons on your behalf. I reckon the Scorpion let us in because there's stuff in there they want found and taken out and they don't want to go riskin' their own to do it."

Seika sucks air between her teeth, suitably cautioned. "Okay, okay. I didn't mean I'm interested in barging in there, necessarily. I like living," she adds ruefully. "And people make enough danger without going looking. What I meant is, it just so happens spiritual power-gen research is where I draw my koku from my lord these days. And that--" she waves a hand around in directionally-vague emphasis "--that's the nightmare scenario, you know? Critical overload in the middle of a town. Ten lifetimes of kharmic atonement type of screw-up. You can't blame me for being curious how it happened."

She frowns, thinking something over. "There's stuff they want found? They're not worried you're going to find something you're not supposed to, huh?"

"Sorry if I came across a bit strong. Just you seem nice and there seem to be a lot of folks lately who seem keen on jumpin' into that mess without proper warnin'. As for pullin' stuff out... I mean that's just me guessin' but if there was stuff they had an eye out for the Scorpion are pretty good at hearin' it's surfaced and gettin' their hands on it."

Seika nods and nurses her White Wolf for a few beats, considering. This leads to a few thoughts... one of which is that this stuff is not formulated to be slowly savored. "It's fine, it's fine. You seem like a good guy, Dai-san. You didn't even offer to sell me a map to the lost nemuranai cache at the heart of the disaster zone for a cool hundred koku or whatever. Plenty of ronin wouldn't give a crap about how a clan samurai from offworld chose to get herself killed."

She slugs back a bigger portion of the can's contents. "Were you here? When it blew up."

The ronin nods, "Yeah, happened about five years ago. I was still a pretty dumb kid back then so I remember it bein' a big thing but I didn't pay much attention. It was an industrial and research park so it's not like I spent much time there before the blast." He frowns a little, "Guess it's the upside of bein' a streetkid - not many folks in your life to lose let alone in the important parts of the city."

"Oh. So... on your own for a while, huh."

An uneasy pause ensues on Seika's side of the conversation. Chattering away with ronin like one simple human being to another had been easier when she was one, even if she'd still had the secure rescue harness of her musha shugyo status wrapped tight under her worn clothes back then. There hadn't been quite this on-and-off sense of... yawning open space between the other person and herself. And as rough as Kyuden Sango could be on its ronin denizens at times, she's getting the feeling the World of Dreams might be harsher.

Another nod, "It is what it is. As I was sayin' before I'm not a big one for rough stuff so never had a place in any of the gangs so I've made do best I could."