(Lan Zhan is quietly relieved that Wei Ying has decided to stop poking the kidnapper.)

Rhonda improves very, very fast. 

She quickly adopts a style involving dual-wielding her sabers, only partly because she's already familiar with doing so because of the Cossack sword dance thing. She's very cautious and scrupulous about following her mentor's safety advice, but within the area she feels confident in, she dishes out destruction to monsters and familiars with ever-growing ease. 

"When I graduate, how much experience do you think I should get before I start offering to mentor younger girls?" she asks, one afternoon. "You've been really awesome and I want to pay it forward."

"Aww! I think you should be at least, like, twenty or so. You can give people tips and spare seeds younger than that but being responsible for two people instead of just one in a real witch is tricky. I would say twenty-five but teleporting is a hell of a backup plan."

"That makes sense. Although in that case I should probably work harder on being safe for people to be within touching range of while I'm killing things, 'whirling dervish of death' is a good look on me but it's not the most passenger-friendly thing I've ever done."

"It is not! You could stand on a force platform and let your mentee grab your ankle?"

"I feel like that would involve the mentee having to deal with more than their fair share of monster bullshit. But maybe. I can experiment when I find weaker monsters that handicapping myself with weird experiments shouldn't kill me in."

"Smart! One of the little bubblegum ones, maybe, catch it early before the gumballs hatch."

Nod. "Rule zero: don't get overconfident and take stupid risks."

"Rule zero, funny. Do you have other ones?"

"Rule one: keep track of your soul gem's current charge, don't just assume you'll be okay. Rule two: check to make sure a movie or album or book or whatever isn't reviewed as incredibly depressing before consuming it. Rule three: Don't piss people off for no reason. Rule four: if you're in a shitty mood, eat some chocolate or punch something about it before it can drain too much charge."

"You could go on the prophylactic Zoloft, you know. I'm on it."

"I'm still working with my doctor to figure out which antidepressant works best for me in the long run. And antidepressants don't prevent all bad moods anyway. If I run into my parents it's going to ruin my day no matter what chemicals are hanging out in my bloodstream."

"Good reason to live in another city!"

"Yeah, but I still visit my brother sometimes. I might quit that if he insists on maintaining close ties to Mom after he turns eighteen, but," shrug. "It's not his fault he isn't eligible to skip out sooner."

"Kidnap him and teleport him to Disneyland and drop him off six blocks from his house."

"I don't generally run into our parents when I visit him, and there are other potentially day-ruining things that could happen to me. I want to be prepared, is all."

"There goes your perfectly good excuse to go to Disneyland!"

"Like I need an excuse! Want to go to Disneyland?"

"Hell yeah I do!"

She grins and grabs her mentor's hand and teleports them to Disneyland. 

Where they can have a lovely time! Shi Qingxuan still loves flying best but roller coasters take no charge.

"Can you get that kind of scary high flying?" she asks, giggling, as they debark a particularly twisty roller coaster. "Or is it one of those things like how it's harder to tickle yourself than someone else."

"I can fling myself and then stop controlling it for a bit!"

"Oh, fun. I bet that doesn't have such abrupt twists, though." 

"Well, once someone dared me to fly into a tornado. ...but I got scared and killed the tornado."