Sora is going to have to be the big brother today, it seems. This is his least favorite part of the job.

"Shiro, we should—"

"Get a head start on practicing for tomorrow? Tell you what, each of us will pick ten hands from that multi-table tournament we played a while back and analyze whether—"

"Whether they could've been played better if we were present at the casino for the event? I dunno, I bet they'd throw us out if we came to an IRL tournament without freshening up a little. Getting banned from the premises is bad for your ROI, wouldn't recommend it."

Shiro makes a face. This is one of those arguments she isn't going to win, which means the best she can do is put up a fighting retreat.

"Do I have to?" she whines.

You are going to have a bath if it's the last thing I do, child.

"Do you have a laundry service we can use while we're bathing?" Sora asks, ignoring Shiro.

(Sora learned this technique from a book on parenting. It doesn't work every time, but it has a certain appeal even when it doesn't.)

"Laundry runs on an overnight schedule. I'll have the staff lay out an evening wardrobe for you two while we're occupied."

"Perfect. We'll blend right in. Lead the way, Stephanie!"

Shiro debates forcing Sora to physically pick her up off the bed and carry her to the bathing facilities. On the one hand, she feels like it. On the other hand, it would embarrass Sora in front of the only person they've interacted with beyond pleasantries in what feels like forever. Decisions, decisions.

"Urgh," she groans, and rolls off the bed.

The baths are up on the sixth floor. One of Elkia's lofty aqueducts delivers water to the castle through a hole in the wall linked to a cistern, drained via copper pipes into every washroom and kitchen and from there down into the sewers. The entire system is gravity-operated. The baths are located nearby, underneath a second cistern kept bubbling-hot day and night, and consist of a series of sunken pits flooded with slow-flowing steamy water. The entire floor of the castle is doused in the scent of smoking incense and fresh flowers.

Shiro sits in one such bath, hunched over so far that her face is submerged up to her nostrils. The water drifting past her body is ever so slightly discolored, though it's more because she's in the bath than because she's bathing. Her technique for washing herself is probably best compared to a barkeep lethargically polishing a chipped mug with a grimy dishrag, although in her case it's actually a grimy bath sponge.

It's belatedly crossing Stephanie's mind that Shiro might have some kind of disability. Normal girls her age do not need assistance cleaning themselves. It does happen on occasion that a person is enormously gifted in one area and deficient in another… no, she's just a precocious semi-feral child being recalcitrant.

Nevertheless, Stephanie is stuck with her for the time being, and there is no way she's letting her out of this room without being presentable.

She gives her another three minutes of moping around aimlessly, then gets out of the water and hops over to Shiro's bath. "Here, let me help you with that."

The indignity of this almost stirs Shiro to action!

Almost. There's no one else here to witness the princess humiliating her, so she's going to take the path of least resistance and let the humiliation proceed.

Stephanie runs a fingertip across Shiro's shoulder, leaving behind a visible trail. She shudders. Time to use the strong soap.

Shiro tolerates being lathered and scrubbed within an inch of her life with minimal whingeing, although it does make her wonder why this whole affair doesn't count as violence. It's not as if she's happy to be here. The consent point at which abuse tips over into violence and becomes forbidden is lower than she naively expected.

Stephanie (regrettably) cannot get away with dunking Shiro's head underwater, but she can grab a bucket and dump sudsy water over her hair, which is almost as good. That's about where the line is, when it comes to violence.

"Mmm, had a question about cheating," she says, tilting her head down to keep the soap out of her eyes. "Cheating is – breaking 'presumed rules' and not 'unwritten rules', yeah?"

"More or less," Stephanie agrees.

"What makes something a presumed rule rather than an unwritten rule? I don't mean the definition of set membership, I mean, what mechanism separates them?"

Stephanie shrugs. Pointlessly, since Shiro can't see her. "We aren't sure. The rules of games are a social construct – that is, they're willed into existence when we play, to the extent they exist at all. When I say 'the rules of Rock Paper Scissors' your mind immediately forms all the same connotations that are in my mind, and we can play together without re-litigating whether paper really beats stone."

"But what if it doesn't? If we start playing under the illusion of transparency and genuinely disagree, something has to be the final arbiter of who's right."

"The literal answer to your question is Tet. The answer you're looking for, I don't know. Gods are… extensions of mortal areas of concern." Among other things. "Tet is our desire to play games made manifest; the rules of those games aren't coming from him. Games can evolve over time, but if you and I agreed to play 'chess' and I claimed you were cheating by moving the pawn forward two squares because it was against the rules a thousand years ago, that wouldn't cut it. We all collectively decided to change the rules, so they changed. In that sense I can predict Tet would disagree with me too, but not because he's imposing his personal opinions on our game."

"Can we not have codified reference rulebooks? 'I want to play chess in accordance with The Shiro Rules, second edition—' ouch! Stop that!"

Stephanie eases off on the pressure. "Sorry. Err, you could, but nobody would want to play with you. Codified rules have their place in formal settings, like the Succession Tournament, but if you enumerate every possible way that a game could be played people will suspect you of trying to sneak in an exemption for whichever way you're planning to cheat. It's empirically safer to rely on the common understanding of the rules."