"There's nothing we need help for."

She leads the way into the gym. "I'm trying to be polite and helpful to everyone, thereby accruing goodwill." She says the last part a bit sarcastically. "And because I know I'm lucky to have the chance to cultivate at all."

"You really don't enjoy being indebted to others, do you?"

"...I suppose not. But that's not quite centrally the thing. It's more that I don't feel like I deserve support or a chance to prove myself and have to earn every step."

"That kind of attitude will get you killed. Take it from the one of us who's died."

"Well, I didn't turn down Senior Winter Rose's gift of blood and qi pills..." Sigh.

"That's the spirit. So, the Friendly Contracting Altar."

She sets down her backpack on the floor and pulls out an elaborate talisman that takes up most of a sheet of A4 paper. 

"This is the seal that serves as the focus for the technique. You need to focus your qi in a particular way and channel it through the paper - it does the hard work for you. You speak the contract aloud and then seal it. I'll do one with Yuki just to show you how it works."

She sits down with the contract in front of her. "Yuki, do you swear to buy me chocolate the next time we're in town?"

"This is shameless bribery. Okay."

Butterfly Dancer pushes qi into the diagram, and there's a flash of bright light. 

"There. Contract sealed. Yuki is now bound to get me chocolate on our ghost hunting expedition."

"It's a little less obvious the contract has been accepted if you're working with an non-person ghost. Leave that part to me, you just need to channel qi into the seal at the right time."

"It doesn't seem too complicated. I'm curious how that works- How do you make paper that focuses for particular techniques? And- Are you sharing senses? That's neat."

"Yeah, it's one body for the both of us so we share everything. You can see why we're Dao Companions. The seal is like a talisman but more elaborate - it's basically a formation recorded down onto paper so anyone can use it."

"I thought you needed to be Spirit Sovereign level to make those?"

"To actually make them, yes, but you can do the theory much sooner and just have your results infused by a friendly senior. This is a collaboration between me and Eight Tails - I did the design work, she provided the power."

"I see. I'd be very interested in learning how to do that. I need more broad skills, can't just work out and spar all day."

"We can teach you some things once we get back from our ghost hunt. Ready to try the contract sealing?"

"Sure, for an equally harmless contract, just to get the feel for it I assume. I thought since you said the suspected ghost spirits comes out at about 4 AM we would have to wait until then, but is that true?"

"I figured we'd go and get a late supper from a 24 hour place, explore London at night a bit, and stake out the subway good and early. It's, uh," she gets out her phone, "three hours from here to London by car, and I don't think we'd want to drive at night... but yeah fair we've got the whole day. Just wasn't really thinking this through."

"Well, I've done 14-hour workdays starting at 4 AM before, but pulling an all-nighter about it sounds non-ideal. I get that you don't need as much sleep as me, but making a super early night of it and then driving into London would work alright - or getting a couple of hotel rooms there. I just want to make sure I'm nice and rested before anything risky goes on."

"Yeah. So we should budget three hours to drive in to london and eight hours to sleep once there and an extra hour for complications and half an hour for food and an hour for staking out the subway, from four A.M that says we need to leave...' 

She pauses. "Uh... midnight minus eight is four P.M, minus an hour and a half - two thirty. We need to leave at two thirty."

"Sounds about right! ...Would you like to spar? After I try out the contracting altar. I think I'm benefitting from getting beaten into the ground on a regular basis. Ask Cocoa."

"I would love to spar. Have you done any weapons practice yet?"

"No. Just fist and foot against fist and foot. I have some brass knuckles Ravenous Blade made me as a welcome present, but I've been avoiding using those for sparring since they hit pretty hard."

"There should be wooden practice weapons in the gym. I'm surprised Silver Starlight didn't use them with you. She must have wanted to focus on refining your use of Canadian Fist."

"Well, I'm very much in Foundation Building. And there's a qi technique for Canadian Fist, which probably makes it more effective than untrained use of a sword? I don't have a sword technique. Oh! I should have gone swimming when Cocoa and I went sailing the other day, really put Turtle Breathing to the test... Oh well. Fun can wait, work now."