Seika sits crosslegged before the sitting room table in her suite. Open windows let in the warm sea air, but for once she has no attention to spare for the beach scene below--she's absorbed in examining the small irregular crystal Dai sold her yesterday. What on earth--or not on earth--are you? What made you?

Eventually, she flips from the 'Notes' app in her densai to another one titled 'SunnyScroll,' and pulls up an incantation she hasn't used in a while.

---
D7 EA--Reflections of Pan Ku on the glimmerstone. Raises don't do anything here. Water 1 spell. | 4k2 ⇒ 27 (TN: 10)

Reflections of Pan Ku
Ring/Mastery: Water 1 (Divination)
Range: Touch
Area: One object
Duration: Instantaneous
Raises: None
If this spell is successfully cast on an object, you automatically learn all powers and abilities that object possesses. This is most frequently used to identify any supernatural qualities an item possesses, such as a nemuranai or a cursed weapon, but it can also identify the spell contained within a shugenja's prayer scroll. This spell will not allow a shugenja to read a scroll if it is written in a cipher he does not understand, but he can at least identify the spell in question. This spell will also grant the caster knowledge of the item's origin in very broad strokes, such as where it was forged, the Clan of the individual who has carried it the longest, or something similar at the GM's discretion.

"Uh." Seika swallows and, without realizing it, scoots back a little on her seat cushion, further away from the glimmerstone. "Shit. This is so not my department." She almost can't believe she just... bought this thing off a ronin at the KFC. Like a chunk of cool quartz geode or a moon rock or something.

"Okay, okay." She takes a deep breath and thinks it over. "It's not blasphemous if I'm just, like... looking at it. That's all I'm doing."

Uneasily, she swipes through screens on her densai to the most common invocations.

--

D7 EA--Commune: Earth. Rank 1 spell, school deficiency. | 3k2 ⇒ 12 (TN: 10)

Basic Commune:Earth with no extra raises succeeds.

An earth kami that had seen better days, it's teeth chattering like old lava stones as it spoke.
"Summoned I come, child of stronks... storks... storms? Why do you... uh... er.. dis... distrau... disturb my slumber?"

"Hey there, o noble spirit of the earth," Seika greets it. One should always be polite to elemental spirits, however mangy. "I won't bother you for long, but, uh, there's something really important I gotta ask."

"So... stuck inside of this crystal of yours, there's a human soul, or... at least part of one. How can I release it back to the great cycle? If you know."

"To relapse... relay.. release the them, break the shed... sheaf... shellac you must, chip... chirp of storks. But care you must tick... tack.. toe!"

"Care? What happens if I'm not careful?" Seika had originally thought to ask the spirit of the stone chip What happened to you????, but she can at least kind of guess at the likely outline of that answer, whereas this sounds... potentially dangerous. For somebody.

"If Stork of Stronks does not relearn them in the right space, aha-ha, they end to a realm-world that is flat and ass... asp.. ashen grey!" As quick as the mangy spirit had materialized, it drifted out of existence, leaving a faint smell of old sake lingering in the air.

"Thanks, o spirit of the earth." Seika claps her hands together and bows her head as the scraggly spirit-ling returns to quiescence.

The right space... a gray realm... "This stuff is above my pay grade," Seika mutters nervously to herself.

This isn't strictly true, of course. Yoritomo no Watanabe Seika almost certainly draws a bigger stipend for her service than the average expert in spirits and magical objects. But outside her expertise? That, definitely.

Seika pops a piece of Acid Apple gum out of the open packet lying on the table next to her densai and chews on it for a bit, thinking intently.

Well, one thing I can do, anyway-- She taps her communicator, pulls up the code belonging to the ronin Dai, and inputs a series of asynchronous text messages.

'MsgTo: Dai' wrote:Yoritomo_Seika: hey
Yoritomo_Seika: hi
Yoritomo_Seika: sooo
Yoritomo_Seika: looking into the glimmerstone u sold me and this shit is weirder than it loos
Yoritomo_Seika: looks
Yoritomo_Seika: there are souls trapped in these things~ human souls~ stuck bc its hyperdense magically charged material
Yoritomo_Seika: well its more complicated than that but anyway~ did u say u sold these to shugenja before? &nobody said ANYTHING about this??
Yoritomo_Seika: anyway just fyi

---
Messages were PMed to Dai before day change, included here for public IC chain!

Seika puts her communicator away. Then, feeling uneasy with the glimmerstone just sitting out on the table, sparkling judgmentally at her, she carefully wraps it in a silk kerchief and tucks it into one of the brightly lacquered boxes decorating the shelves of her suite.

It occurs to her that the hefty new book she'd bought at the Realm Expo yesterday might actually help her figure out some of this. At the very least, it's worth a look before she tosses the problem into the lap of...

...Well, who is she going to toss it at, anyway? The Soshi priests at the ancestral temple downtown? It seems hard to believe they could be unaware of this problem after five years of living with the Desolation in their back yard, but anything is possible. Anyway, Seika will see what she can decipher on her own first.


---
D7 EA (with permission)--Mental Quickness to decipher the Earth Kami's gnomic utterance. Fire 2 | 6k3 ⇒ 25 (TN: 15)

D7 EA (with permission)--Lore: Spirit Realms/Int to decipher the kami's warning. MQ. Using the cool new encyclopedia for +2. Call a Raise to know more? | 5k4+2 ⇒ 36 (TN: ?)
That would hit a base TN of.... 31. With one Raise called for effect.

Seika spends a solid hour rifling through her new encyclopedia and old notes on her densai, jotting down new notes as she goes. After this, she's going to need to go for a walk on the beach with her holorecorder to clear the book-fog from her brain...

/fade to research
/scene