"What do all of those techniques do?"

"Bolt. Project bolts of spirit energy. Burst. Make your aura explode, destroying the area around you while leaving you unharmed. Can be combined with Bolt to make the bolts explode. Resilience. Increases how often you can draw upon your aura. Clothing. Allows you to form your aura into any set of mundane clothes. Spikes. Allows you to form a shell or wall of aura spikes within your arms' reach. Sphere. Create a protective sphere of spirit energy. Can be combined with Burst to produce a blast of energy when struck. Beam. Maintains a continuous beam of spirit energy for ten seconds. With burst, can once again cause explosions where it impacts objects. Lash and Naginata summon weapons of the appropriate type, formed of your spirit energy. Breath. Allows you to go without breathing and ignore the effects of pressure and radiation. Form. With tremendous effort, separate your spirit from your physical body and act with supernatural strength. Collapse. If you should die, your aura will destroy everything within ninety-six feet. Fade. Temporary invisibility. Mask. Disguise your physical features. Clone. Temporarily duplicate yourself. With burst, yet more explosions."

Aura techniques: Resilience. Clothing. Breath. Sphere. Bolt.

Riya takes another deep breath.

"If I chose the Hermit with the closest possible appearance to my own, body specializations of agility and learning ability, a Gymnastics talent in parkour, one-eighth of my aging rate; the Spectral Lotus aura manifestation with the Lilting Lotus's second power of health and sickness-banishing and the Brilliant Lotus's first power of unbounded lifespan and the Jade Lotus's fifth power of making myself faster and the Hidden Lotus's second power of invisibility; the five aura etchings of safe mind, hidden aura, aura reading, levitation, and grace-and-safe-falling; and the aura techniques of Resilience, Clothing, Breath, Sphere, and Bolt, what else would be left that I could have made a choice about and didn't?"

"Nothing."

The shadow's aura settles, seeming to simmer with cruel satisfaction.

It isn't angry at her, which is surprising, so maybe she missed something else...

"...What else is wrong with that list, then?"

The shadow blinks.

How did she--?!

But the golden chains are already compelling it to speak.

"You may only select five aura techniques or etchings. If you select five techniques, you may not select any etchings, and vice-versa."

Well. That settles that. The aura techniques seemed mostly undesirable anyway.

"Then I want the Hermit," she says, "with the closest possible appearance to my own, body specializations of agility and learning ability, a Gymnastics talent in parkour, one-eighth of my aging rate; the Spectral Lotus aura manifestation with the Lilting Lotus's second power of health and sickness-banishing and the Brilliant Lotus's first power of unbounded lifespan and the Jade Lotus's fifth power of making myself faster and the Hidden Lotus's second power of invisibility; and the five aura etchings of safe mind, hidden aura, aura reading, levitation, and grace-and-safe-falling."

"The deal is struck. Accept your card."

The Shadow extends the Hermit card towards Riya. It gleams silvery.

With her real body, she reaches hesitantly towards the card...

...and as her fingers close on it, her inner reflection reaches out and snatches all the reflected cards out of the reflected shadow's hands.

There is a flash of light, a sense of twisting space -

And then she is alone in her room again.

Something is different. Was the view outside her window always of a city?

No. The view outside her window is of a forest. This is not her house and not her window and - her self is all wrong - she looks at the glittering silver fragments fading from her reflection's hand.

It seems she didn't quite manage to snatch any of the cards from the Shadow's mirror-self, but these fragments definitely did something to her...

Not to mention the larger changes from the Hermit card itself.

She curls up under her blanket and examines her reflection. She can tell which things are from the Hermit card and which things are from the fragments. For some reason, all the fragment-things seem to be about parkour. She did not want this much parkour. Why is there so much parkour.

The parkour seems to like her, regardless of her blandishments. Running, jumping, climbing, leaping! How to find the best line and jump small buildings in a single bound! Parkour!

Well, it's not like she precisely objects... anyway. She has all of the options she chose. Is there anything different about her that the shadow didn't warn her about?

Her thoughts seem clearer somehow, more crystalline. Easier to hold simultaneously in her head.

Her body reacts perfectly to her commands, with fluid, natural grace. This is more than simple agility - every motion seems aesthetically pleasing somehow.

Her bed-head appears to have fixed itself, not a single hair out of place. And she smells faintly of vanilla for some reason.

She investigates her reflection until she sees exactly how and where everything is attached. It would be terrible not to know herself. It's already terrible enough to have been changed like this.

Still, it's not so bad being able to think easier and move easier and having... very convenient hair? Smelling like vanilla is weird but she can probably get used to it.

All this self-examination takes her a lot of time. Now she's hungry. She sits up in bed and sends her reflection tentatively out of the reflected room to look around for where she might go to find food here.

There is a place that is recognizably a kitchen, with a set of cupboards, a pantry, and a large strange humming box filled with fresh food. Apparently it keeps things cold: there is an interesting little box at its base, pumping hot air out of the insulated compartment.

What an... object.

Are there any people around? She would like to avoid them if so. She does not want to interact with any people at this time.

There are people in bed in another room nearby. They seem soundly asleep.

Good enough.

Her real body sneaks down to the kitchen and acquires an acceptable quantity of food and sneaks back up to her room. Then she sits on her bed and eats while her reflection pokes around to examine the reflected house.

There are all sorts of unusual objects. Some are recognizable variations on things she knows: some are completely foreign to her. Many things are made of a strange, unnaturally smooth material, like the black, polished bones of some ancient beast. Copper wires snake this way and that, through the walls, from one strange device to another: what arcane purpose could they serve...?

It's very odd. But when she follows and studies the wires, she figures out soon enough that they connect to mysterious objects. Some sort of bizarre local magic. This must be a strange place indeed, to have produced the bone-hearted shadow with the golden-chained mouth. It makes sense that there would be all kinds of bizarre magic here.

Now she is done eating the food. Her reflection returns to her reflected room, and curls up in bed at the same time as she does. But only the reflection cries.

Eventually, the sun rises.