She's going to dart in and grab the guy directly. Does he dodge that?

Nope.

She's going to shrug off the girl and foam her first. The she'll presses him against the ground, foam most of his back, roll the whole thing over, foam the front, and then repeat until there's enough contiguous foam mass that he's trapped inside the shape, sloughy trick or not. Does that work?

He can't seem to repeat the full liquidation trick, so this works. Eventually.

Once everyone is foamed, she takes to the air again, changes out of the containment foam system and back into her previous outfit, and surveys the fields. If there's nothing pressing, she'll go back to the town. What's happening there?

Soldiers are sweeping through the streets in three large groups, starting from the center and pushing outward, making a huge racket to attract any motile zombies and slaying them all, while avoiding the remaining rifts. The town is at this point mostly navigable through the gaps- Only a few large rifts still block off whole streets or intersect buildings. A few of them have come across foamed blood users and are treating the foam as unknown and potentially dangerous. One of the blood users whose head was unfoamed has acquired a mysterious neck wound. Well, not so mysterious. The civilians are staying in the courtyard for now, and there are still a bunch of soldiers still on guard around the place. The fox is not visible from the air, but her 'feeling' is still around the courtyard somewhere.

Mr. Silk and Gold is leading the smallest group of soldiers. He bows in her direction when he notices her, before shouting out in mangled Mandarin - an offer to take care of all the trash that is not worthy of her attention, if she's reading through the flubbed words and tone correctly.

She will let the soldiers handle the cleanup and set down a good distance away from Mr. Silk and Gold before approaching on foot. When they're in speaking distance, she offers a fist and palm salute without bowing.

She needs to stop using Backchannel as a crutch. There's no emergency now, and if she uses it on this guy now she'll have to explain why she suddenly can't speak properly later. She'll start learning the local dialect the hard way. Again reusing words she's heard where possible, she tries to say:

"Apologies for my ignorance of appropriate address. I come from afar and am unfamiliar with this tongue."

While they speak, she will listen in on the ambient conversations to learn more, both of the language and what's going on. Does it sound like most of the vocabulary is shared with the dialects she knows, just with linguistic drift she needs to figure out and the usual custom grammars and turns of phrase? She will also pay attention to how people react and what they're noticing when they look at her: her clothes? her face? her fox ears?

(She's wearing a modern women's blazer and dress trousers. Perfect Hair, A Hundred Ships and Emerald Orbs are doing their thing, though she has the last on autopilot and isn't sure what her eyes look like right now; she trusts it's narratively appropriate. Her hair is as it was on Bet: long flowing and black; she's very firm on that. She's also visibly hispanic.)

The common language in use here has had a lot of linguistic drift and possibly melded into a patois with several other languages, but has at least retained some of the central features of Chinese dialects. There is some vocabulary overlap- Or at least vocabulary near-miss, where 狐狸 (Húlí) (Fox) has become something more like 'Xúlí'. So- Not much direct vocabulary, but enough that the way words sound can be used with context clues to guess sometimes.

People are mostly treating her like an unfamiliar maybe-a-hero? There's the awe, and thankfulness, and admiration and a sort of instinctive deference. But also a deep wariness. The clothes are unknown and exotic but who's going to ask her about her clothes right now; Of course she's pretty, higher realm masters always are, best not to stare too obviously; The fox ears are the source of much of the wariness, but they also seem to be reassured after thinking about it for a bit.

"No apologies are necessary, honored expert," Mr. Silk and Gold begins in a very formal tone. "I will explain anything I say that you do not understand. This humble village of the Valley of <???> is pleased to receive your assistance against the demonic practitioners. My name is Gao Gao, but of course you may call me-" an unfamiliar title, presumably Mayor. "-Or truly, whatever you wish. The blood tree demons have - bothered us for some time, and their attack today was - bold. We did not expect it. They ambushed and poisoned my son and his wife, who would have been our greatest warriors. I will do everything in my power to see you and your-" Hesitation. "-Fellow <ascended?> fox rewarded for this <vengeance?>."

Shouldn't be difficult to pick up, then. She'll probably have enough down within the day to sound merely like a mediocre second-language speaker and not someone trying to Frankenstein sentences out of linguistic scrap. For now, though, she'll have to work at it.

So she has a decision to make here. She can admit to Dragon Fairy Elf Witch, which might dispel some of the concerns about her foxy nature—by their reactions she guessed right that is a concern, though they seem to be on good terms with the fox girl specifically, perhaps—but it also might tick off the fox that Rebecca copied her. Her impression from home of fox spirits (ascended foxes?) is that they can be capricious and prideful, and she essentially stole their heritage.

But keeping her mouth shut is a worse idea. She doesn't know how to act right, and she's not going to stop Dragon Fairy Elf Witching things, so it'll come out eventually. And for the fox spirit, Rebecca is reasonably sure she can take the girl in a fight, and she thinks the girl believes it, so even if they can't smooth it over, it's not a huge disaster. And hiding it and having it come out later would make the girl more mad, even if she wouldn't have been inclined to it orignally.

So she says, "My condolences for your son and his wife, and I hope that they recover. I only recently arrived in this land, so if your people would host me for some time and explain the land and its ways and people for me, I will consider that ample reward."

A pause.

"I do not know the other <ascended> fox, though I commend her for her valor. I am not originally an <ascended> fox, but <shapeshifted> into the form because I saw the other <ascended> fox was able to <resist/repel> the cracks." She points at one of the still-open rifts. "The cracks are new to me, but I can assist in closing them now." She thinks.

(She's using a version of the word "shapeshift" that, in the Chinese she knows, has a slight but not definitive connotation of a higher being taking a lower form to act among mortals.)

"Unfortunately, they have both perished... By the hand of the very man you helped slay, which soothes my rage. I have hope they will find joy in the next life. I cannot claim to understand the higher mysteries of the Heavens, in my own time I have only managed to barely <breach?> the humble foundation. If you can banish the energies of the blood techniques, that would surely be welcome. Wen Huli is known to us, but she is - <reserved?> - and I did not wish to offend should you hold some relation."

She is not certain what that last part means, but:

"We do not hold relation, and rather I feared she might take offense if I did not clarify. I did not have time to ask her permission before copying her form, so I wish to speak to her once she is recovered to account for the transgression in person, but I do not need to do so now. I will excuse myself to banish the energies of the blood techniques, if you permit."

She will take a small step back and see if he has anything more to say. Otherwise, she will fly to the largest rift and try smoothing it out.

"I will inform miss Wen of your intent. Did you wish to question these evildoers? We can gather them to one place for you."

"I do not know enough about them to question them. I captured them alive because I did not know how you prefer to mete justice or if you wanted to question them. You may do with them as your laws declare. I do have the ability to tell truth from lie, if you wish for my assistance in questioning." She remembers they don't know what containment foam is. "The solid foam is safe to hande. I can pick up the ones in the field after; they are far and will be inconvenient for you to move, and I can do it quickly. If you have difficulty cutting them out, I have a way to dissolve the foam."

"They are murderers and invaders, not to mention thieves, desecrators of corpses, rapists, and <cannibals?>." He spits on the ground. "Demonic practitioners, that is to say, those that consume others for power, are to be put to the sword anywhere within the Three Jades Kingdom. There may be some value in locating whatever they call a camp. We will gratefully accept a way to remove this... Foam, or else dispose of it. A fascinating technique. Thank you again."

Medieval justice it is. She's not going to be precious about it. Extended incarceration as a penal instrument is a luxury afforded only by modern rich civilizations. Also—Three Jades Kingdom. That's a name. She nods, taking that as a dismissal. "I will remember that for the future."

Now: rift?

This one takes a little longer! For all that they're slowly shrinking on their own, they're also leaving sort of... Knots? It feels like it could snap instead of smoothing if she rushed it, and like it'd leave something behind if it went away naturally.

Can she unknot it? Can she inspect the topology and character of the knot with her new senses? Maybe she can find one of the smaller ones to practice first. Snapping the fabric of space probably has consequences she won't like.

While she works, she brainstorms how best to unfoam the demonic practitioners. The foam system comes with a small amount of solvent if she specifies the 117 model, but it's not a lot.

She can get a feeling of the topology - and start guessing where each particular rift and portal leads in the real world, in fact - but the 'knot' itself seems to be more like a sticky mass of everything running together. It's weird. Something about being closed loops is important for the rifts to actually lead elsewhere, and when multiple ones intersect each other they form lots of small extra loops that intersect each other, putting the whole thing in tension with itself.

...

While she's here, can she get a sense of how these rifts work and the moving parts to creating and directing them? It's probably a terrible idea to try, but maybe something she can study or ask about later. Portals are astoundingly useful.

Can she cut the loops? Is that something she can do and does it look like a terrible idea? Can she... selectively tangle or cut some of the intersecting groups from each other, and recursively break them apart like that until they're gone?

The rifts feel extremely bloody. They're doing something weird and spirally - off in this direction that doesn't actually exist - there's a sort of braiding thing going on, slightly different types of ugly tied together. This does not result in a flash of insight in how to do it herself.

What she can do is really more analogous to burning. She can strategically select threads to burn that reduces the number of intersecting loops, letting everything remaining join into bigger loops with less energy in them, that looks reasonably safe.

She will do that. Sort of like foam coalescence, but not really.

How fast is this going? At this rate, can she clean up the big rifts around town in a reasonable amount of time?

Now that she has the hang of it, looks like it'll take something like half an hour. Maybe less.

Good enough.

She will commit the braiding patterns and spirally things to memory if she can, even if she can't understand them. She suspects the people who did this were fucking everything up royally on the implementation level on top of the object level, and she shouldn't be emulating them even if she does go into portals, but there's no harm in it.

If she sees anyone still working on zombie cleanup, she'll drop in to bail them out if they're in trouble. Otherwise, she will finish healing the rifts.

The locals seem to have the zombies handled. They're moving on to cleanup. Sweeping rubble and washing off blood. A bunch of civilians are crying. Fox is nowhere to be seen. 

Gao Gao approaches her again with a large leather pouch that clicks of coin. "For avenging us and ending the threat. We may have to abandon this place yet, with no strong heir, but we yet live and that deserves a reward. However small it might be to ones such as you."

Bow.

The town is pretty destroyed, but to condemn the entire place? Because of "no strong heir"? Gao Gao said that his son and the son's wife were their strongest warriors, and they were killed—is the state of the art of settlement defense here "having a strong martial hero", a necessity as important as a source of water?

Accepting the pouch with a nod of gratitude, she says, "I am sorry it is all I could do. Do you frequently come under threat like this? Is there no lord of the county or province willing send you protection? I'm not familiar with how these affairs are managed in the Three Jades Kingdom."