"Thomas."

His foster father's voice is as clipped and unemotional as it was eight years ago, the last time they spoke.

"Your sister's ship is docking at Port 44 tomorrow at 5PM. Please meet her there and bring her to the Golden Flower Tearoom. I will be there."

The message cuts out.

It was left at 10:00 PM exactly, the previous night.

It is currently 3:12 PM.

...joy. Jauhung hasn't seen Raymond in... eight years, now? To be honest he hadn't really expected to ever see him again, and he's not sure how Raymond found his number but, well, it's not like Jauhung knows much about him in the end, is it? He's always said stuff like "you don't need to let the past catch up with you", so as far as Jauhung knows Raymond is a spy of some kind.

Well, whatever. He can do that. He didn't have any particular plans for today. He takes another drag of his cig then puts it out, takes another swig of his bottle of—what even is this, cheap baijiu?—gets dressed, and leaves. If he walks he'll get there a bit before 4:30PM so that'll work out fine.

Jauhung lives in a tiny apartment above a restaurant that's a front for a triad he's technically not a part of, and when he comes downstairs it's reasonably empty, though that's unsurprising given the time of day. "Oi! Yòukǒng!" calls Xiǎo from where he's sitting at the counter nursing a drink. He always uses the Mandarin pronunciation of Jauhung's name, for some reason, even though he speaks Cantonese alright—with a bit of a Japanese accent, but still, perfectly understandable.

Jauhung walks over to him, hands in his pockets. "Yo."

"Did you just wake up? Party hard last night?"

He shrugs. "Don't remember."

Xiǎo grins. "'Course. Got plans today?"

"Yeah. Meeting my sister."

"You got a sister?" he says, eyebrows shooting up into his bright green bangs.

"From back in America."

"Damn. She hot?"

"I wouldn't know."

He grins again. "'Course not. Pah, was hoping you were free, I'm bored as fuck and don't have an assignment until tonight."

"I'm sure you can find someone else to entertain you."

"Yeah, yeah," he says, turning back to his drink and waving a hand to dismiss Jauhung. Then he pauses and looks up to him again. "Zyu Hoi told me to tell you to eat somethin', if I ran into you. Consider yourself told."

Zyu Hoi's name he uses the Cantonese pronunciation for.

"I've yet to die of starvation," he says with a sigh and a shrug, but he does add "get something to eat" to his todo list on the way to Heoi.

There's food carts all over the place, because of course there are. It won't delay him by much to pick something up.

The docks aren't exactly bustling, despite the hour. Dock 44 in particular doesn't see frequent use. It's not just numerology, though that might be some of it; it's also too close to the Walled City. Nothing that close to the Walled City is popular with anyone except the wrong sort - broadly construed.

Jauhung is absolutely the wrong sort, no doubt about it. Most people, even most of the wrong sort, often feel uncomfortable and uneasy in a hard-to-define way the closer to the walls they get—or so he hears. He's always considered it yet another sign of his depravity or some such that he instead feels drawn to them whenever he gets close. They're a popular destination of his aimless wanderings, when he doesn't have a particular place in mind he wants to go and his feet just take him there. He doesn't usually stay there long, there's nothing particularly interesting to do while staring at the walls, but they draw him nonetheless.

He gets something to eat, goes to dock 44, finds somewhere to sit, and waits, smoking through his pack.

A familiar face gets off a speedboat. (Presumably she made most of the trip by some other means. Speedboats don't usually go transPacific.)

Ariel's tusks have gotten a little longer, but other than that, she was full-grown when he left. Her muscles are about where they were, impressive for a human but practically svelte for an ork. She's got a couple of arcane fetishes braided through her hair, and her piercing count's gone up. There's a tattoo around her throat and trailing down her biceps, some kind of spiky tribal design. She's wearing a lot of leather, some of which looks more armored than fashion-oriented. Not that any of it doesn't look good. But Ariel looks good in anything. It's about confidence.

She notices him and almost trips on the transition to dry land.

"...I was expecting Ray," she says. In English.

"...I wasn't," he replies in the same language. He puts his cig out and gets to his feet. "He told me you'd be here and that I should bring you to the Golden Flower Tearoom, said he'd be there."

"Right."

...sure. That might as well happen. "Don't think that's news."

"News doesn't have to be that new if I haven't heard it in a decade. And you looked better than this a decade ago. We get to that tearoom, I'm buying you a steak."

He sighs. "Such a pain in the ass."

"Your ass pains me. Because it's just two cartoon femurs. Sticking out of a place where an ass might otherwise be."

She lets go and pats his shoulder. "Let's have some tea with Ray, shall we? ...probably I should switch to Cantonese before I'm in a room with him where he can throw shoes at me for speaking English, though." She switches. "We must eat grass. The water. Grass water. On Ray. I will be easier when I talk taller. Fuck."