Sapphire Ambassadors

Still working through the tea rooms, Sriyani visits the one honoring the season of cold. Given the one just past, she wasn't quite ready to join them in such enthusiasm for the season itself, but she could appreciate the sand garden and some tea. The plum spice reminds her of seasonings from her home, and the sand is both a reminder of her past, while being in a form that would be so utterly alien to the woman she'd be if she'd remained there.

She meditates on the past and future, letting the present curl around her without notice...until the purring. That's a tabby curled up around her stocking'd foot. With a quiet smile, she begins to quietly stroke the friendly feline.

Choudai really wasn't too keen on patronizing tea rooms he literally wasn't a patron of, but he kind of felt a need to see how his exhibition went before going and doing the closest thing to an apology a samurai could give a heimin.

He hadn't particularly cared for the atmosphere of the Whitened Branch, but he also figured there wasn't any harm in returning to a place he'd been before.

And besides. The Winter's Brew was so hilariously overstuffed that he had a sport of horrified interest in it.

So he ducked in, saw the place was mostly empty, and visibly relaxed a little. He nodded to the Unicorn- the one he hadn't really spoken to since the fourth day of the competition- and placed his order.

She looks up at the sound of another entering, then looks to her cup as she reaches for it. The chill of her regard is entirely in her own head, and certainly not extending in tendrils of frost across the floor.

Though the kitty looks a bit startled, stands, walks a few steps away, and flops to the floor with one leg raised high to begin proper cleaning routines.

Choudai looked about again, and saw little indication of, well, welcome from the Unicorn.

Hm, we seemed to chat reasonably amicably the other day, but... I see little sign of amity now.

Did I overcook that meat or something? I followed the recipe, but...

The fact that the Unicorn, of all people, might be offended by his having served it at all simply didn't occur to him.

A truly perverse part of him wanted to walk over, sit down next to her, and start yammering away about his day. But the part of him that remembered that the armies of the Scorpion Clan had been decimated in Naishou knew that starting a war with the Unicorn over some stupid self-destructive impulse was probably a terrible idea, and the way is luck tended to run, pissing off just this one shugenja might well do it.

Whatever she's upset about, my track record for helping people is pretty lousy.

So he picked a somewhat... triangulated position, roughly equidistant from both the Unicorn and the cat.

Pity she couldn't send a mildly poisoned pot over as illustration of how unpleasant working out of assumption and stereotype could be. But she suspected the proprietor would be mortified at best, and bring in a magistrate at the worst. She sips at her tea, considering options as the cat, seeing another seated human, pauses midlick to trundle over for appropriate attention.

He was nursing his tea, trying to stay focused on his brief interlude with Hatsuki- oh, Fortunes, you absolute bastards, I can't even hate you, because she's in my life at all, but...

But he wanted more.

That's always been my problem.

He grimaced as he sipped the utterly wretched, overdone blend.

Now that, that I don't want more of, Bayushi's balls that's too MUCH-

He felt the cat twine around his ankles. His first reflex was to kick it, and kick it hard, but he stopped himself. He wasn't among Scorpion, and great allowances had to be made for different customs.

He gingerly reached down and stroked the animal's head. Maybe that would satisfy it?

And of course the little bastard starts purring.

He looked about to see if there was any help, but there just the Unicorn.

And so assiduously looking away. Yes, I have definitely offended on some level.

Well. I can't apologize for an offense I'm not clear on, and I rather doubt she wants to hear it anyway.

So don't say anything. Just... pet this Fortune-forsaken cat.

The silence was starting to get to him, though. He was used to slinging verbiage about, or listening to others, but here, in this place...

Well, if Horiuchi-san doesn't even fele like offering an insult, I guess I'll do all of the talking.

So Bayushi Choudai addressed the cat.
Whatever its name was.

"You know, your species isn't too highly thought of back home. No, no it's not." He scratched the cat behind the ears. "See, Daikoku likes rats and we like Daikoku, and you guys eat rats... although I've yet to see a cat that could handle a really big rat. You'd think we'd hate snakes more, but there it is. Maybe we pick on you because you're more likely to hang around? Or do we just do it to be contrary?"

He actually thought about it for a moment and chuckled.

"Honestly, without you guys looking after our grain stores, the rats would carry off plenty, so we plainly didn't think that thing through..."

A deep breath, eyes tracing a raked 'ripple' of sand as the quiet is broken. Of course, why would even a teahouse be left in peace?

She looks up from her tea. "I doubt the Fortune cares much about it, or he'd plague the cats himself. He leaves bandits to chase his favored merchants after all." Typical nonsense. "Offer the rats of his temples respect, leave the cats to their work, and there'd be no fuss." Contrary wasn't the word she'd use. It was a performance, like everything Scorpion seemed to be. She'd be contemptuous of the performance of piety to begin with, but piety grounded in nothing the Fortune even wanted, rhymed a bit too closely to recent events, earning extra scorn.

He looked up. Shrugged, and kept stroking the cat.

"I see we're in broad agreement on this particular point, Horiuchi-san. I wish I could say it was the most nonsensical thing custom leads us to do, but it doesn't lack for competition."

He paused. Scratched the feline behind the ears.

"Since today is to be devoted to Honesty, and we appear to have a reasonable degree of privacy at the moment? I appear to have offended you in some way. I will not ask you to clarify how, life is too short to force you to explain yourself to me, and I sincerely doubt I'm important enough to be more than a pebble in your sandal in the long run. But I never sought to cause you any distress."

He looked down at the cat again.

"Not that I expect that to matter to you. Careless actions have a great many unintended consequences, and saying we didn't mean for them to happen doesn't change the outcome. I would apologize, but I feel that asking your forgiveness would be... presumptuous on my part. Unearned."

The cat purred and started kneading at him with its claws.

"So as soon as this animal has done with me, I will leave you in as much peace as I am able. It seems the best thing I can do."

There's a chill set to her jaw for sure, as she scoffs. "So...that was accidental?" She thinks a moment. "Well...imagine for the moment that the Empire thinks the Scorpion clan's made up of a bunch of honorless villains who've got nothing better to do most days than decide who to poison that night. I know...it's a stretch."

"Come winter, imagine arriving at a court whose host, trying to make all their guests comfortable, greets everyone with little touches of home. Announces that the Crab have the stone-walled rooms, and the Crane the best views of the garden. They openly gift their Scorpion guests with an array of crude poisons and a set of schematics showing all the secret passages in the castle."

She sips her tea, calming a voice grown sharp. "I think the other guests'd be really uncomfortable, and the Scorpion offended...whether or not any of them really was an honorless villain. For that matter, some of the Crab would resent how cold stone rooms a northern castle are...and so on. I certainly wouldn't call the whole scene courteous."

Now she does let her voice shift to anger. "You might be a pebble, but that nonsense strikes at my Clan's reputation here... and my own in that moment, as you laid a trap in which I had no good path, only one that was less horrible...and pulling people I care for into that spiritual pollution because they believed it was _for my sake_, makes you an awfully annoying pebble."

"If that was accidental, at least your clan has a fantastic, if inconsistent social saboteur to send around."

"I prepared a Unicorn recipe my grandmother learned during her exile in the Burning Sands."

He sighed.

"To leave out a fundamental part of the recipe struck me, in the moment, as less Courteous than including it- I was not ashamed to cook it, nor to eat it. I do not think it polite to demand that all samurai honor their ancestors and heritage, then demand that the Unicorn deny theirs where others can see it. No one tells us to leave our masks at home, no one tells the Togashi to hide their tattoos, no one makes much of a Sparrow eating a yam, and certainly, no one dares criticize all of the horrible things done by all sides every time we go to war with one another. That was my reasoning."

He bowed his head to the Unicorn. The cat, alas, hadn't moved.

"But as you have plainly been grievously insulted by my actions, I was obviously mistaken."

He sighed, and bowed his head again.

"An apology will not undo the harm I have done you, so I hesitate to offer one. But if you wish it, I will give it."

"Was your courtesy directed at your grandmother, to fear altering her recipe? That was maybe honoring *your* ancestors, not mine. We eat goat, for starters, and no meat at all more often than you apparently think."

"I'll thank you not to assume any knowledge of which parts of my heritage I should treasure and don't *use* me *or* my heritage--when you're ignorant of both--to make what you think is a clever point." The cup hits the table harder than intended. "You don't even know what you're apologizing for."

"There are a thousand recipes in any corner of our lands. Flatbread wasn't exotic enough, you needed to stink up the whole gallery? Could even have told you where to trade for olives...now those are a kami-blessed treat out here. Guess it's lucky you didn't know to use goat...they'd still be getting the smell out of the rafters." She throws up her hands. "the Shi Tien Yen Wang take roast offerings, the kami do not. Guess what I don't do in their shrines, and the Fortunes' temples? A child knows such discretion. But not you."

Choudai simply kept his head bowed.

There was nothing he could say that would do any good, not in the moment.

Not the fact that a gaijin beverage had been promoted without censure, not that one Crane had repeatedly depicted another spewing flatulence without censure, not that it had taken their hosts two days- and now, he strongly suspected, this woman's input to take any direct concern with what he had done, not that he, not the Unicorn, was subject to the onus in this matter.

She didn't want to hear any of it, which made speaking it aloud pointless.

She had not, after all, told him that an apology would hold any water.

The cat shifted, and he gave it an absent stroke.

The Crane's choices of who to censure, or not, had very little to do with the offense offered, so it was just as well it wasn't an argument she needed to have.

After a long moment, in which nobody speaks (though there isn proably a purr from the cat), she drinks the rest of her tea in a gulp and steps out to the 'sand' garden. It's more gravel than sand at this size, raked as they usually were to give the appearance of water rippling around mountains. With a certain angry vigor, she rakes them into snaking dunes roughly perpendicular to the stone 'mountains.'

Choudai, who had done far worse things than what she was so furious about without any negative consequence (he had, in fact, earned standing in his Clan through the impersonation of a dead man from another Clan, a guise in which he had seeded the underbelly of a war-torn province with criminal corruption that still plagued it), simply stayed as he was.

There was still nothing to say.

And if he felt this level of fury undeserved, well, he certainly merited even worse for other things, so there was a certain sick comfort in her hatred.

He paid her actions in the sand garden no mind whatsoever... not least because he thought sand gardens were a ridiculous affectation at the best of times.

Some energy is vented upon the stones, the rattle and scrape of them obscuring her own constant bits of jingle and clatter and piquing some small interest from the cat. Not enough interest, however, for the obviously well-fed feline to bother chasing the few displaced grasshoppers that bounded away from the disturbance.

The rake is set back in its place, until someone decides to reshape representations of dunes into representations of water once more. She offers a shallow bow, probably to Choudai, but possibly to the cat. "If you figure out what there actually is to apologize for, I've reason to know notes slip under the Jinbaori doors just fine, Bayushi-san. May the Fortunes offer as you deserve." It was clear she didn't think he deserved much beyond bare courtesy of a spoken farewell, but she wasn't about to dictate to the Fortunes.

If unimpeded, she'll
/exit

Wait, so she DOES want an apology?!

He waited until she was gone, then spoke to the cat.

"You know, I don't think Horiuchi-san is very good at clear communication. Nothing but polite amity at the time, then simmering resentment, then, when I offer an apology, she doesn't ask for one until she's worked herself into a freshly towering fury, then she says I should apologize... that said..."

He sighed and gave the animal another scratch behind the ears.

"I suppose I'd better work on my calligraphy."

[/Scene, and thankya!]