"Well, don't worry about it, at any rate. I think there was only one of it."

"I wasn't asking because I was afraid, I was asking for science."

"Well, we hadn't invented science back then."

She blinks and tilts her head. 

"What, not even astronomy?"

"It was pretty mixed up with astrology. My teacher told me I was born under an ominous star."

She waves a hand. "You still need to, like, know things about the stars to do astrological bullshit. I wasn't expecting you to have a sheaf of research notes, but even anecdata is better than no data! --Which is not to suggest that anecdata is more important than not asking nosy questions. Or at least backing the hell off when you find out they're nosy."

"Mm. - do you think Wen Ning is anxious about the results of the trip -"

"--Quite possibly--Rhonda--"

Rhonda grabs Wei Ying and Lan Zhan and teleports off to her apartment. 

"Wen Ning!" she calls. 

"Oh--you're back." She stands up from where she was poking at a laptop. "How did it go?"

"Not as well as I'd've liked, not as badly as I feared. Uh, what are the characters of your name?"

"Wen like warm, Ning like a preference." 

"Cool, awesome. So, uh, we didn't actually meet the Empress, just Ling Wen, her secretary, not that that's not pretty freaking high up. She wanted to know a lot about you including, like, where you are at all times, which I think is super unnecessary because Hua Cheng said you were fine but of course we weren't going to bring up Hua Cheng first. So I think you should try to figure out Hua Cheng's being in lots of places trick in case of Imperial assassins."

"I'm gonna go make popcorn. Wen Ning, can you eat people food?"

"I don't know." 

"We'll find out, then." She walks out of the room. 

"I'm not sure I should be--making myself harder for the Empress to deal with. If she has to."

"But Weeen Niiing, she wanted to know all kinds of stuff about you! And she wouldn't say why! It was so suspicious, Wen Ning." 

"Stuff like what?" 

"Like how many grief seeds you have and whether that number changes over time."

"I can't think why she would want to know that." 

"Neither can I and I don't like it. And she told me not to cure ANY more witches until we had more data on you over time. I said I wouldn't scale it but I pointedly did not agree to zero more witches cured. And like maybe that's just sensible caution but maybe not and I don't have a super high baseline respect for authority!"

"I do. I do not know that Wei Ying is right. But I do not believe it to be unwise to take precautions in case she is." 

"See? Anyway, if you did have a relapse probably you couldn't use the barrier trick any more, it sounds like it needs complicated philosophical thought about concepts like 'existence' and 'location' and stuff."