Shi Qingxuan resumes swatting her with the sword, enough to sting till she has the hang of putting the pain away where it can't bother her.

"Okay, I think I've got it," she reports after a half a dozen swats.

"All right, good. You don't want that all the way up, you want to notice if something bites you in the ass with six rows of li'l teeth, but you want to be able to keep going if you're down an arm, you know? Anything that can take your arm off can make you regret stopping to fix it. Though I guess you could also just teleport out if that happens to you."

"I could, but I suspect that if my arm comes off I'm going to have a time stopping the bleeding before blood loss becomes a problem. I mean, I could be wrong, but it's not the kind of thing it's convenient to check in advance." 

"So, blood loss is actually not as big a deal. You run on magic now. You still want all your blood to stay where it belongs, and in fact on that subject if you never wanna have another period you can do that, but you won't fall unconscious from it."

"--Those are both really good to know!"

"Yeah-huh! You can still get dizzy and chilly and blurry and stuff but you will be awake to, uh, enjoy that."

"Sounds better than the alternative."

"That's the spirit. Do you want to go out hunting tonight or do you want a bit?"

"I'm ready if you don't think it's a bad idea. --Although maybe I should top off first. Just in case."

"Very wise of you!" Shi Qingxuan produces a seed from a beribboned pocket and brightens the both of them up.

She grins and bounces on the balls of her feet. 

"Do you want to start dowsing here, or elsewhere? I haven't had a chance to try dowsing for real, I didn't want to run into a monster alone the first time, and I don't know where's good to hunt--if monsters are more common where there's lots of people then here or some other city seems good but if they're geographically uniform probably less mobile magical girls don't get to rural monsters as often--"

"They're more common where there's more people, but so are other magical girls, and if we wind up killstealing or getting kill... stolen... then there can be arguments about who gets the seed. So we split up the area, here, and right now I have this section." She points at a blue pin outline on a large map of Seattle and environs on the wall. "This doesn't mean nobody ever wanders over the edge but it cuts down on the arguments."

"Neat. I should check what kind of range dowsing has, maybe I could grid-search a rural area really efficiently...but that's for later. Let me just--" she looks up a google street view of the relevant area. "--I target better with a good mental image." She holds out a hand. 

"Ooh, I was thinking you'd want to save the magic but count me in." Hand.

"I wished for teleporting, it's pretty cheap." 

And then they are in a random neighborhood inside the blue-pin area. 

"All right. So, dowsing is a little tricky to get the hang of, but go ahead and give it a go, see if you turn up anything. You might not, sometimes you strike out."

She nods and turns her soul gem from ring mode into dowsing mode. 

Shi Qingxuan bounces on the balls of her feet, watching the gem - flicker, there it goes. "Ooh, there's a beastie."

"Ooh," she says, excited. Is this what people who like fishing feel like when there's a bite on the line? Not important, stay focused, these things kill careless young magical girls. She follows the bauble's direction. By foot, teleporting ahead really would be a frivolous use of charge. 

Shi Qingxuan follows along, letting Rhonda lead for the dowsing practice.

The witch is hidden behind a dumpster.

She takes a deep breath, un-baubles her gem, summons her sword, and steps inside. 

Her buddy is right there behind her. "Oh, I've seen this kind before. Watch out for the - clam things, they're surprisingly mobile for clams, but nothing especially sneaky. We're looking for a toothy pink mermaid with a long strangly tail wrapped around a treasure chest, you gotta take its head off."

She nods and steps forward, keeping a sharp eye out for clams. 

There are clams - cartoonishly huge wrinkle-shelled monstrosities that can spring into the air on no notice on their feet and need to be stabbed inside the shell to get them dead. There are slippery floors and the smell of the ocean and tripwires made of seaweed and singing fish on plaques on the ceiling that scream when they pass and everything has a quivery dim quality to it, like they're underwater, though they are not, and an oppressive pressure pops their ears as they make their way through the maze to the center, where there is indeed a strangly mermaid. Shi Qingxuan has at it with her fan.