Rebecca looks vaguely chastised, but in an unoffended and very slightly amused way.

"My people have medicines, but since we do not channel qi as you do, we have none for this sort of qi poisoning. So it sounds like your plan is to follow your instincts to attempt to naturally purge the corruption, and if that fails, to travel towards the heart of the kingdom to seek advice?"

So Wen isn't particularly attached to this town, and was defending it purely out of the goodness of her heart? That's remarkably charming, if true. And Rebecca is glad she didn't offer to stay and help out, now.

"That is my plan, yes. I should go ask <mayor?> Gao or his wife if any spiritual rice is going spare. It would help with healing. It's a little bit <???> but it's for a battle wound, so it should be fine."

"If there is nothing I can help with, I may go ask if there is a library I can attempt to peruse. I will assume that you prefer there not be distractions while you perform your katas and cycling? Is there a standard way to contact you, or vice versa?"

She could probably Dressing Room some radios, but not now.

"Yes, I prefer that at least a little bit. You can just ask a servant to come find me, I'll be coming back here after. If you mean <communication?> techniques, I don't know any besides beast speak. Which does not work far away. -Oh. I should mention, it may be wise for you to hide that you are from a hidden realm, or other realm. I feel like most hidden masters would have required me to swear an oath to the Heavenly Dao to keep it to myself, simply because that reveals... A lot about you to potential enemies, in theory."

...She's still acting like she's the biggest fish in town. With Battle Maiden, her original powers and the enhancements the Spirit stacked on top, it may still be true, but the leader of the demonic practitioners was able to hurt her a little, and this is apparently a remote frontier town. This is a completely new context with its own powers, not any old backwater Earth she's dropping onto.

"Thank you for the pointer. I had not been thinking of myself as acting in secrecy, but on reflection of how much I don't know, it is clearly wise, at least until I am better established. I would then request that you keep it secret, though I will not ask for an oath now, since you are the one who told me of it." And since she doesn't know what an oath to the Heavenly Dao is and how she can verify one. "I meant something like a servant, yes. I will ask a servant to find you the morning after tomorrow, then; is that a good time or do you need longer to check for progress?"

"That will be fine, senior."

She stands again, and does a nod and a fist-on-palm salute.

Rebecca returns the salute and takes her leave.

Anyone around for her to ask directions from? She wants to know about her room, and if there is anywhere she can find books. Also, if there's been signage around, what do the characters look like? Familiar or unfamiliar? She knows simplified and traditional modern Chinese characters but not specific historical scripts.

A man in plain clothes is waiting outside the first guest house, to show her to the second guest house and fetch anything else she requires. He's perfectly deferential and obsequious, almost as if using his job to divert attention from grief.

There is not any signage around. One of the soldiers who bow to her as she passes has 'fang' written on his sword sheath. There's one piece of flowy calligraphy as decoration on Wen's semi-detached guest house wall- A poem about a boulder growing worn in the wind and rain. And a similar poem about a field passing through the seasons in the other semi-detached house, which she is shown to. Most of the characters are familiar, if stylized.

Chinese logography, the great equalizer of regional dialects.

She picks up on the man's mood and does not comment on it, but acts appropriately somber and thanks him sincerely. Once she's shown the guest house, she will dismiss him for now, informing him she has no physical needs and will take a while to herself. Where should she fetch a servant if she wants to send a message or ask something later?

There is a pull-bell, and also they will be available in the small servants' house at the main gate.

She picks up a few rocks from the yard or wherever is convenient and checks out the interior.

There's rubble leftovers still around. 

The house has a sitting/dining room, a bedroom identical to Wen's, and a bathroom with clay-pipe plumbing and a large iron tub.

The indoor plumbing is a surprise, but maybe it's period-appropriate; the Chinese had some of the greatest cities of history. With Personal Hygiene and much to catch up on, she's unlikely to partake, but she's still pleased on general principle.

She sets her rocks down on a table and changes into a more comfortable T-shirt and stretch pants.

All the pressing emergencies are handled. She needs to take a second to think.

Wen's comment on secrecy highlighted a mistake which could have been critical:

Rebecca doesn't have a plan.

Or not plan, per se, but—operating model. She isn't aligned.

In her defense, she was dropped onto an ongoing emergency with no warning and no preparation. Still, not having an operating model is one thing, and not noticing you don't have one is a different one far less forgivable.

In retrospect, today she was falling back to an old but familiar script: that of her early days as Alexandria, trying to build a place in Los Angeles at the turn of the 90's, when public opinion was on the backswing from the initial novelty of superheroes, and she had to fight and barter for every inch of purchase. A paradigm where the most important thing was to make herself seen, understood and trusted, and reticence was a luxury not afforded. She had to perform to prove that parahumans could be more than lawless vigilantes and thrill-seekers, and that's what she's been doing today: performing.

And it takes a fool to strut about like a peacock when there's nobody to impress. So who is she performing for?

Gao Gao and his townsmen, perhaps. She had a reflex that she was unknown and needed to make herself known; that must be what triggered this presentation instinct. This town don't mean much in the grand scheme of things, but the people will talk, and it's important to spin a consistent story. Wen, whose assistance she wishes to enlist. You catch more flies with honey than vinegar. Herself and the Spirit behind her shoulder, to an extent; that she has to admit. Is that enough to justify her approach?

Concrete actions: what did she do that she shouldn't have, knowing what she does now? This is broadening into a more general post-mortem, now, but that's fine.

She shouldn't have spared the invaders? No, that's hindsight bias; even though she knew it was likely they would be executed, making an enemy of the state is more difficult to undo than having erred on the side of mercy. She shouldn't have used containment foam; that part was an error on two fronts, first the logistical difficulty of disposing of it, second the reckless flaunting of her unique resources. She didn't have better options, but—

What she should have done was consult the man clearly in charge before haring off after her prey. An old flaw of hers she's never managed to shake: trusting her judgment over seeking the facts.

And there's the error that provoked this inspection in the first place: information security. Telling Wen was unavoidable, she maintains, since Rebecca's total ignorance is impossible to hide; she needs at least one person in the know to feed her the right lines. The story about leaving her home to find a weapon against a great threat is mere flavor for her legend, irrelevant to any enemies; she hardly regrets that. Not asking Wen to keep a secret was the mistake, now corrected.

Was it a mistake to Dragon Fairy Elf Witch Wen without asking? No, the decision was justified and has proven its worth.

Was it a mistake to declare herself in debt to Wen? No, it's a legitimate ingratiation tactic and she intended it as such, and she made sure to include the relevant disclaimers.

Was it a mistake, that absurd exchange about burning the bodies—it has occurred to her at this point that Gao Gao's deflections about not burdening her were attempts to reject her politely—but no, that was a straightforward failure of thinking, not anything she can systematically amend. A general advice to check her cultural assumptions, perhaps.

What are the corrections she needs to make?

In the immediate term, she hasn't created any problems she desperately needs to fix. The people of the town know nothing important, except Wen, whom Rebecca already has maneuvered correctly, albeit with some prodding from the fox herself.

Next: as she already figured out, she needs to develop a considered approach to the future.

Getting the lay of the land. That's the theme of the short term. Keeping a low profile, earning favor and power where possible, but with understanding as the top priority. She can't make a plan without all the information. And she needs to fix Wen's problem, obviously.

In the medium term: resources. Making allies, earning money, arranging contingencies, and simply accumulating raw power with Dragon Fairy Elf Witch and Anything You Can Do. Simple to say, less simple to do. How much noise she's willing to make at this stage, and what services and knowledge are safe to trade away, depends on the findings of the first.

In the long term, she needs a method of multiverse travel and eventually weapons that will aid her against Scion. Both are projects that will last, but if she doesn't keep them in mind, they're not going to happen.

Laid out that way, it's dumbfoundingly obvious.

Are there obvious holes in that prioritization? Rebecca scans through the usual checklist. There's a case to be made that she's falling for action bias when she theoretically has all the time in the world, but she does have her metanarrative guarantees, and isn't actually made out of patience. The information gathering stage is the important part, really, and any tricky detail work hinges on what she finds out.

What that means in concrete details: she's going to read as much as she can and acquire off Wen basic competency in navigating this universe. When they reach a major city, she's not going to hit a jewelry trader, she's not going hit a publishing house, and she's not going to go evildoer-slaying to make a name for herself. What they will do is a question for then.

Anything else?

That seems to be it.

She sets herself on the ground, walks over, and picks up one of her rocks.

She memorizes the rock from every angle. Then she changes into a jacket with pockets, pocket the rock, and changes out of the jacket.

The rock sure is deleted.

Can she get the jacket with the rock back—yes. Same rock, when she inspects it.

She repockets the rock. Can she disappear the jacket and don a different jacket with the rock in its pocket? No. Can she move the rock to a different pocket on the same jacket? No. Can she just vanish the rock without changing her jacket and get it back the same, by "changing" into versions with and without the rock? Yes.

She puts the rock back on the table and tries to summon the jacket with the rock again... no.

She tries to summon the jacket with the rock again, picturing the exact rock and exact jacket—that outfit she was wearing a few moments ago—that works.

She memorizes her pile of rocks, turns around, scrambles them around, and pockets one without looking. She unjackets, rejackets, takes out her pocket rock, duplicates the rock, and takes out the duplicate. She turns around and checks her collection against the two rocks she's holding. Did it successfully return and copy the rock that she took from the pile?

Yes.

So Dressing Room acts as a pocket dimension, in a way. You can get back out objects which you put in, even if you don't know exactly what you put in. You can duplicate objects with more effort. She'll need something more exotic to know if the objects stored still meaningfully exist in a way when they're deexisted.

She examines the coin in her reward pouch. imagines the outfit of a rich merchant from historical China, with gaudy flowing robes and, importantly a small purse of coin at his hip.

It works.

She tries to think, this is my purse now, I own it, changes back to her previous outfit, and tries to put on a jacket with her coin purse in the left pocket; no dice—no, that wouldn't work since she can't transfer pocket contents between outfits. She changes back into merchant wear, removes the coin purse to the desk, then changes back into her normal clothes, puts the purse into a jacket pocket, and rejackets. The purse stores and comes back fine. Maybe she'll be able to do the first thing with more practice. She duplicates the purse a few times and puts copies into pocket storage on a few different outfits. Can she also just don the coin purse on arbitrary outfits as an accessory itself...?

Once she has a handle on the right frame of mind, yes.

Then she will spend an hour scavenging her memory for supplies with Dressing Room. She conceals in her infinite swappable pockets:

• 16 ration bars, taken out of the foil wrapping and rewrapped in her best guess at period-approriate paper.
• A variety of first-aid resources.
• 20 concussive-explosive charges.
• 20 incendiary charges.
• 20 contact shock charges.
• 20 freeze charges.
• A small handheld writing pad.
• A nondescript pencil.

The bars and first-aid kit are from PRT camping equipment, and the charges are from her specialized costume loadouts—when you gets into her tier of Brute, you loop back around to being the best solution for annoying Breaker/Movers, because you can just rush them and detonate a incendiary point blank in their force-immune faces. It's exactly what she could have used against that guy who kept turning into blood. The freeze ones are tinkertech, so she'll have to find somewhere to test that she recreated them correctly later.

Theoretically she doesn't need to store multiple copies of the charges, since she can duplicate them on demand, but she's not sure if it'll be as easy to do the duplication trick in a live situation when she's farther away in time from the outfit she's trying to reproduce. She also have to figure out later what exactly counts as a "quiet moment to herself". She's not sure if she wants to reveal those exact capabilities to Wen, but it is rather hard to test without assistance.

Once she's done, and she's ready to head out again.

Well. There is one other thing. But she's not going to try that in the middle of town. Later.

She will go for a walk.

Do the servants know where she can find books? To buy, to borrow, to browse. She's looking more for histories, almanacs, textbooks and the like, but fiction or historical fiction would also do.

There is, unfortunately, not a library or bookseller per se in this frontier town. The closest thing would be Old Gu's place, the town's schoolteacher, and he may have textbooks. The administration building has a few petty law and mercantile reference books and almanacs, and the Gao family of course has a modest shelf of tomes and scrolls which she may peruse.

The best place to build foundational knowledge is probably the schoolteacher's place. The place where she's most likely to find actionable information may be the Gao family collection.

The place least strange for a distant traveller to start at, and least likely to draw attention to what exactly she's reading, is likely the administrative collection.

She will head thataway and see if she can gain entry without rousing too much of a fuss.

To avoid being unnecessarily accosted by conversation she's not equipped to navigate, she will fly, but lowly over the town. She scans the streets on the way for what people are wearing and the way they move. She needs to start building an intuition of how to fit in—and she needs clothes to plagiarize.

Peasants walk like ordinary, if tired, people. Soldiers aren't much different. One gets the impression that most of the guards are effectively slightly stronger peasants. They've mostly changed back out of armor into durable and easy to move in duan-da, a sort of shirt and pants combo. A few people are instead wearing things describable as robes.

...The teenage boy at the admin building will!! Assist the Honored Cultivator as much as he can!! And go fetch the Clerk from his current work tallying the dead if required!!!

She will memorize the robes, guardwear and peasantwear all and see if she can reproduce them later. For now she'll stick with the same clothes she showed up to the town in; they've already seen her in it, and better to dress strange than wrong.

She smiles politely at the boy in a trying-but-not-particularly-hard-at-feigning-attention kind of way. She doesn't need to see the clerk, just to peruse their books. Unless the clerk is needed to approve that, in which case she can wait.