POV: yumi
Summary
Yumi takes a moment to understand what just happened: the white-haired woman from the kitchen has called Painter by name across the bar at the Noodle Pupil. Someone can see him. Design catches herself, plays it off loudly to the other patrons as clumsy meat-fingers and not a ghost sighting at all, then crouches behind the bar with the broken bowl as cover. Yumi grabs a cloth and kneels with them to clean up — aware that three people whispering at the floor is, if anything, more suspicious than the original noise, but ignorant of how locals would have handled it.
Behind the bar, Design explains. She is not human at all but, she says, an immortal essence of pure Investiture with a fleshy shell stapled on; her strong Cognitive aspect lets her perceive what Painter currently is — a Cognitive Shadow — and the line of Connection joining him to the body Yumi is wearing, which is in fact Nikaro's body, only rewritten. She turns the same gaze on Yumi: a storming-strong Spiritual aspect, highly Invested in some strange way, which is what has let her rewrite the body with her own soul, the bones shrinking and the muscles shifting to match her sense of self. The work should get easier each swap, Design adds, as the body fights her less. Painter is appalled. Design tells him she has been pretending to be a woman for years and finds it largely fine, the sexism aside, and assures him his body will probably snap back when Yumi is no longer wearing it.
Yumi eats her soup — first spoonful too much, third spoonful divine — and asks the obvious next question: is Design a spirit? Depends on the definition, Design says, and lets Yumi describe what spirits are to her: souls of her world that rise from the ground when called by a yoki-hijo's stacks, and take shapes of power and utility for a time. Design cheerfully accepts the label, mentions the region is littered with Virtuosity's Splinters because yoki-hijo-craft is the mix of math, art, and human focus that her Shard responded to in life — and slaps Yumi on the head with a spoon when she tries to start a prayer of devotion. No worshipping bits of God on vacation, Design declares; it is a rule she has just made up.
Painter asks the more important question — can she fix this? — and Design admits she is not particularly good at this sort of thing. The expert is Hoid, who understands Realmatic Theory better than anyone she knows. She points at the copper coatrack-statue by the door. That, Painter realises with some chagrin, is the person Design has been trying to tell him about. They are welcome, she says, to try waking him — she has been trying since they arrived, and meanwhile has learned seventeen kinds of noodles and acquired a loyal clientele. Their world, she adds, is the strangest she has been to, stranger even than Threnody; nightmares creeping out of a miasma of raw Investiture is the kind of thing that happens to a planet when a god has been killed, and that — investigating that — is why Hoid brought her here in the first place, before he went rigid the moment they landed. Design hands Yumi a coupon, which Yumi has no idea what to do with, and warns them Painter's body is about to fall asleep in its soup.
Yumi excuses herself to Akane's table — mortified at having spent the entire meal aside, blaming it on Design grabbing her — and she and Painter walk home. *They're the popular kids*, Painter mutters about the group's small offended look at her absence; *everything offends them.* She changes into pyjamas and starts arranging blankets on the floor. Painter tries to delay sleep: he reaches a ghost-finger to the hion line feeding the viewer and finds, to his surprise, that he can switch it on. Seasons of Regret, he tells her — a historical drama set a hundred years ago and therefore, he reckons, suitable for her old-fashioned tastes. Two actors fill the screen. Yumi's eyes widen, and then she switches the viewer off.
No. She is a yoki-hijo. She has a duty, and while Painter is wearing her body so does he. They will fix this as quickly as possible. He will subject himself to her training on her world; she will learn his art on his, in case the stable nightmare really is what the spirits sent her here to confront. No more shopping, no more dramas. *Do we have an agreement?* she demands. He nods curtly: *I just want my life back.* She does not say it aloud, but she thinks, lying down on the cold floor: *I don't.* Then makes herself unthink it, because Liyun would have been proud of the part where she resisted.