"Very well, then. I'll have someone escort you out, and we'll see you a week from now, at the same time as today."

"Perfect!" she says with a glimmer of excitement in her eyes.

He gestures to one of the mages to lead her out, and turns to the jewel. The mages start talking quietly, and the door cuts off their conversation before she can hear anything.

And back she goes!

"How'd it go?" Tetsuma asks, after greeting Dayo with a hug.

"It went well! That jewel is so cool" because not all of Kaede's nerdy enthusiasm was faked "and so weird, I don't understand it at all—" She explains the same things she did to the Lord, in more technical detail since Tetsuma knows how this all works.

"Cool! And yeah, a defense mechanism is totally possible. I'd guess that the jewel was made or altered with fuinjutsu somehow, that's the type of thing it can do, though unfortunately I don't know much. Just storage scrolls and explosive tags."

"But if all fox spirits have it wouldn't it be an inherent part of their nature or some such?"

"Yeah. I'm not really too sure how it works, fuinjutsu is just my best guess, and it might be the best thing to use to analyze the jewel. Could be something else going on, of course. ...I wonder if those runes we picked up would help? I've had my clone learning them."

"Ooh maybe! Honestly I think if we figure out what it's for everything will be so much easier. It's just baffling."

"Well, at least my clone will be to Reim soonish, we can ask him then, but I'd like to figure it out for ourselves of course in case he lies again..."

"When's the clone getting there?"

"Should be a day or two before you're due to go back to the lord, assuming there's no delays."

"So in the meantime we ought to come up with new ways to figure out just what the heck that is."

"Yeah. Any ideas?"

"I'm wary of dropping more chakra into it in case it has some critical point past which it does something unexpected, but on the other hand I kinda want to see how deep that rabbit hole goes and what's on the other side..."

"You'll have to be extremely careful about chakra exhaustion, if it's also draining you, but yeah, that's one idea. Also it's probably possible to use fuinjutsu to draw chakra out of it from a distance, but I wouldn't know how."

"Yeah I'm wary of trying to develop or learn altogether new techniques for this, we only have a week and I'm posing as an expert."

"Yeah. Hmm... You could try resonating your chakra to it - basically instead of pushing or pulling, line them up side-by-side and sort of try to match your chakra signature. I'm probably explaining that poorly, but it's what I do when I disguise my clones' chakra signatures."

"Oh, yeah, I think I know what you mean, that makes sense..."

"You can try practicing it on me, if you want."

"Okay..." She closes her eyes and starts trying, paying attention to Tetsuma's chakra.

Tetsuma flares their chakra slightly to help.

It's hard - Tetsuma's clearly there, but getting patterns beyond that is difficult. Still, gradually something starts to come through, a gentle wave like a tree branch quivering in the wind.

And she can try to—wave with—music metaphors work probably—

Getting her own chakra to sync is even harder; it really doesn't seem to want to leave its current pattern.