She laughs.

"'There's no inverse or conservation law of cutjitsu', as Radiant Heart Topaz~ likes to say. If anything, it's probably the other way around." 

"Cuteness begets more cuteness?"

She shook her head. Not the point.

"I have no idea what is going on at this point."

"It does! People being cute to each other makes it inherently more plausible that the reactions are cute, and being cute naturally lets more people be cute." 

She smiles softly.

"And besides - the physical bit is pretty easy once you get started cultivating? An appearance touch-up is something that you'll pretty much always get from starting out." 

"As for what's going on... Do remember that the answer is allowed to be 'nothing'. Otherwise... I can serve you a meal, show you what the wind tastes like, take you for a walk, help with your cultivation, or just help with the future? It's okay if you'd just like me to pick one of those options, too." 

She rubbed her face with her free hand. "Those all sound too great..."

"I feel like I should be figuring out plans, but that meal option sounds pretty great..."

"Thinking over an empty stomach is never the best idea, Hailey." 

She hums quietly, and squeezes her hand. 

"Would you like me to make you something from what you have or just with what I brought?"

She blushed softly again at the reminder of still holding the hand of her pretty mentor, but squeezed back.

"You're welcome to anything I've got. I'm curious about the Sky Shrubs you mentioned bringing..."

She blushed a little more. "Can you decide that one, though?"

"Okay~" 

She takes out her satchel, laying onto on the table, before squeezing her hand firmly, sliding it out from her grip, and dissapearing for a moment, reappearing with two of her bowls placed in front of each of them. 

She sticks her hand into the bag, and grabs them, then - 

A blizzard falls down in front of them, a sweet wind washing through her senses, drifting down like windswept leaves as a soft brown-green light shimmers across them, before they glide into place, arrayed across the bowl like the petals of a lotus. 

The moment passes, and she smiles brightly. 

"Feel free to dig in~!"

Why did letting go of Romana's hand feel like losing something?

Whoa.

"This looks like art, Romana. The preparation was art — but really fast art. It almost feels like it would be a shame to eat it."

That was a question she remembered what to do with, though: it may be art, but it was still here to be eaten — and in time she'd be doing things this amazing too. She took a long moment to savor the experience before her, the lingering memory of the storm of motion that produced it, and the elegant presentation of the leaves in the salad. She leaned down, closing her eyes and inhaling slowly, enjoying the scent of green freshness and a hint of sharp ozone.

She sat back up straight, picking up a fork and taking her first bite. A crisp crunch gave way to a fresh, green, sweet taste, carrying a hint of morning drew with it. A faint sense of storm and gust blew through her briefly with the taste, carried along behind a subtle savory aftertaste that underscored the flavor and made the whole experience stand out.

She turned to look at Romana, starry-eyed.

"This is amazing. You're amazing. I'm going to learn to do this?"

She laughs softly, smiling warmly.

"Thank you. And yeah! The foundation of sky shrub salad I made you is the technique I was most thinking of first teaching you - then the rest are just a bunch of flourishes I've picked up along my path. If I gave you the techniques, you could make a lower grade version of this - albeit a lot less cinematically - in maybe like a day or two? It'll more realistically be a good bit longer than that, but there's all sorts of lovely things you can make even really early on."

She digs in herself, little fuzzy brown forcefields manifesting to serve as chopsticks or forks as she bites into it happily. 

"It's there to be eaten, but doesn't mean that it's not important to tend to that, too, so please don't worry! I do..." 

She waves her hand a little. 

"I guess the simplest way to put it is 'plant formations' sometimes? It's nice to get to make more permanent work, even if the mono no aware is excellent, too."  

Hailey grinned, eyes wide. "That soon? Hell yes. And obviously not to the same degree of elegance and style you just did, not yet, but... It would be damn cool to be that awesome while I'm cooking eventually."

She paused to savor her next bite more fully again, eyes closed and a wide smile over her face as she chewed.

"Mmmm~."

Opening her eyes again, she noticed and was reminded of Romana's utensils. "Oh, and what? You have a utensil technique?"

She laughs quietly.

"It's just a barrier technique - it's a decent control exercise and I can afford to create weak ones whenever - The Firmament Fortress Fields aren't quite designed to go this low, but that's part of what makes it fun to use them." 

She nodded. "Yeah, I'd love to learn that too at some point, if you don't mind sharing. Ain't much you've got that I don't want to learn, though, honestly," she finished with a sheepish grin.

"Which really brings me to the question that's been tugging at me. I love my collection of cookware, but that's about the only thing I love in this city — and even it's not that great, no matter how much love I've put into fixing everything up. The only thing keeping me tied here is a degree I only wanted to be able to explore and work in storms."

Why was it so nervous-making to ask this? Romana was just her amazing gorgeous mentor.

"You mentioned help with the future? I don't like the future I've got in the mortal world."

She nods understandingly. 

"Unforunately, it's an earth technique that judging from your results you almost certainly have a terrible affinity for, and it's only learnable once you hit the third realm, so it'd be a while even if you were compatible... Might be worth looking for a barrier technique that fits you better, though." 

She hums softly. 

"You'll have all the mortal money you want after you finish out your training with me, so don't worry about that? You can do whatever you'd like, in the mortal world or as a cultivator, more or less, and you don't need to follow what you thought you could do, before."

"That's a good point about the barrier technique. Earth being a terrible fit for me makes sense, honestly, too. Guess I'll have to keep an eye out for an air-aligned barrier?"

She hummed in thought, then suddenly stepped across to her desk quickly, coming back with a notebook.

"I should make a list! So much to keep track of."

She quickly noted down the air barrier idea in swooping handwriting.

"So what are my options regarding the training? I basically want to go all-in on this."

"Normal all-in or cultivator all-in? There's... a really large difference between those. Of course, it also depends on how much debt from resources being spent on you you are okay with? It's hard to enumerate options without talking about that..."

Hailey gulped briefly, but nodded. "Cultivator all-in, I think. I don't know how well I understand the gap, but I've slashed and burned my life before, and I want to do it again. As for the debt... as long as it's worth it, and I've got a good shot of paying it off in a time-frame that makes anything resembling sense, I'll just handle it."

"Yeah, I'm... not too sure? At minimum though, I can probably mostly get around any need for sleep you have and get you training harder throughout the day just from access to the cultivation spots we have around. I could probably arrange for maybe 10 hours of kitchen time, probably a lot of that hands on and with me or someone else, if I end up finding some else more suitable or if I can't be around, fill up the rest of it with some more book learning, cultivation time and such? I don't know how much you are okay with mental effects and side-effects - especially if you go for the best bang for buck pills it'll be really really painful and potentially more awkward later down the line, and it's not like that trade off totally doesn't exist in spiritual food." 

She stims, a little, fretting. 

"I don't think that it really makes sense to sign you up for the maximally intense things from the start? It probably makes more sense at that sort of budget to just try to spend a lot of time doing things in a relatively comfortable fashion thoroughly? I'm happy to support you on this, but I'm not especially willing to wreck your mind and/or foundation to give you just-below crippling levels of debt and that sort of nightmare to just get forward. It's probably more important to just get things settled, and going too hard for your current mental set-up can end up ruining your foundation or adding in some risk of death so... It might not even be worthwhile to go like that? It depends on how you end up reacting to it." 

"Wait wha—" That's what cultivator all-in looked like? She couldn't. She had to. She needed to catch up. But—

Hailey deflated a bit, downcast. "Apparently I have even more to learn than I thought. I guess I mean normal all-in, I don't know. I don't know what I need. I just want to start fresh, have this new opportunity be my focus. I don't want to come back to a stupid tiny apartment and study for pointless classes and keep any of this senseless grinding loop I'm doing."

"I just don't know how to do better right yet..."

Nod nod. 

"That's ok. A big part of the reason why I offered the chance to go slower is that making those judgements is pretty difficult. If you'd like, I can give you a few ideas for the level of commitment and focus I was thinking of?"

Hailey nodded, softly. "That's probably a good idea, yeah."

"Ok so." 

She spreads her hands. 

"The most basic option would be basically me providing you 'cultivator university'. There'd be regularly scheduled classes for say, three hours a day except Sunday, some homework, which will probably be just some reading and basic cultivation and cooking work to play around with on your own, and maybe one or two classes that involves field missions. For this, I'd probably end up mostly just making sure you get through your early stage cultivation with a good foundation and get you to the point where you can function well as an immortal chef." 

She pauses for a moment.