"See, you say that, but also I'm still not betting her well-being on the things you say with your face hole. And it's not like she could confirm or deny if she doesn't remember you. Isn't it kind of presumptuous to call someone Jiejie who doesn't know you from the weaver girl?"

"I've called her it before. Do you have a way to contact her, to ask if she recalls?"

"Not that I can be sure wouldn't tell you where she was, considering that you kidnapped me based on internet conversations where I didn't tell you where I was!"

"All I want is to help her. Does she have friends? Does she have a house? If you can tell me with a straight face that she's doing fine, that she's happy, I will let you go without further ado."

"I didn't ask her about any of that! She didn't seem unhappy but she did seem to, uh, have some resource constraints, if you let me go and give me a hundred bucks I'll do my best to make sure she gets it." 

"Suppose I let you go, give you fifty thousand bucks, and if it shows up in your expenditures, we will have to have another conversation."

"That seems reasonable. I mean, I'm not super thrilled with the part where it would involve you stalking me, but you'd be trusting me with fifty thousand bucks and have already kidnapped me, so, within the available bounds, super reasonable."

"If it is any consolation, someone who was very good at stalking people would not have needed to kidnap you."

The wall releases Wei Ying.

She rolls her shoulders. 

"I don't know enough about stalking to confirm or deny that but sure, I guess it makes me feel a little better." 

She leans back through the curtain of flowers, says something in a language Wei Ying does not speak, and retrieves fifty thousand dollars in a paper bag inside a heavy-duty plastic one to give to Wei Ying.

Wow. Okay. Wei Ying takes the bag with the gingerness of someone who has never seen that much money in one place before. 

"If you get it to her successfully, you can keep a few hundred for your trouble. If you can't, you can tell Noon where to pick it up."

"Cool cool cool." 

This is EXTREMELY WEIRD. She tucks the bag under her arm and looks around for any kind of exit. 

The flower curtain parts for her. Flower curtains continue to part for her, leading her through corridors till she is spat out on the curb of a strip mall trash alley.

Cool. 

She...doesn't have her phone on her. Or any money not part of weird-maybe-stalker's gift. Well. Time to find out if hitchhiking is as dangerous as Madam Yu always said. 

She is pleasantly unsurprised to find out that it is not, or at least didn't happen to be on this particular occasion, although being in her nightgown did get her plenty of odd looks. She is very pleasantly surprised to discover that she hasn't been gone so long that she can't sneak back into the house before Madam Yu or Uncle Jiang notice she was gone. 

As soon as she reaches her phone again, she calls Lan Zhan. 

Lan Zhan picks up on the first ring. Wei Ying never voluntarily wakes up before nine, and it is barely past Lan Zhan's own preferred rising time of five. And it's a Saturday. "Wei Ying?" she asks, deeply concerned. 

"Okay, so first of all, don't panic." 

Absurd. Lan Zhan would never panic. Panic is deeply inconducive to solving problems. She does, however, get some pre-emptive Deep Concern going. 

"So I slightly got kidnapped,"

WHAT. 

"It's fine, they let me go, I'm back, but, like, it appears to have been about that magical girl we had lunch with. Remember what I told you about noon9834?"

"Yes." This sounds LESS THAN MAXIMALLY FINE.

"Well, it turns out they have some ability to control monsters or something," and then she recounts her encounter with "Noon," adding a few stylistic embellishments and eliding over the bit where torture was discussed. 

"There could be a tracking device on the money." 

"The thought had occurred to me. Do you wanna come over and help me look for one? 'Cause I think she could probably use fifty thousand bucks."