>"Don't worry, I think that as long as I go in respectfully, things should work out. At the very least, whoever this is, it's bound to be miles better than that spider youkai I had to deal with on the last job."
>Sigh. "Man, she was a real nasty piece of work. Ain't my fault those spiders tried to have a mouse dinner and got kebab'd for their troubles."
>"I suppose I cannot rightly say," she answers with a wary look, "but she is, as I hear it, a youkai of the highest rank. Surely one could be of no other kind, to have wrought such a place by their own hand. Presuming, of course, that her hands were involved in the process at all - perhaps they were not! Perhaps she controls this power of hers with a glance or a breath or a wiggle of her eyebrows, yes - I certainly cannot claim any authority over how she wields it. Far more mundane my own meager skill with plants is, no matter the decades of experience I might have - nothing that cannot be taught to any other of any nature." She chuckles slightly. "I suppose there would be otherwise little point in such a profession as mine, no?"
>"Sorry, I wasn't. I was just thinking of an old friend of mine from back home. She's the type who'd love to spend some time in a garden like that. Well, apart from the 'ancient, dangerous youkai', that is, that might give her some pause."
>"But I haven't let that stop me before, not about to stop now. Though I do appreciate the warning, and the extra advise. Another option is always welcome."
>She nods slowly. "About her temperament, I fear I also cannot venture - perhaps she is as bad as some say, or perhaps she is not. Some say she is very bad indeed, I should warn, though people have said many things, yes - many things both true and otherwise, of falsehood willful and also otherwise. An unfortunate thing that is - the willful falsehoods, I mean, of course. Yes, yes, a complicated enough undertaking my discipline is without needing to separate truth from lie, but perhaps I may be drifting away from the point. I have not met this youkai, nor do I expect I ever shall, and I suppose I can be happy enough for that. Yes, no adventure in this blood - enough of what might be called such in early life to serve all the rest of it, I think. Without that, even, I might have done quite as well. Or perhaps even better, yes. You... well, one assumes your profession would not be as it is if you were as I am." She smiles. "No offense intended to either party, yes?"
>"In any case, her privacy is, one reasonably assumes, quite prized or she would not choose such isolation, no? Though perhaps this isolation would foster need of company more than scorn of it?" She frowns. "...somehow, I do not think so. For that matter, I cannot even say that bittercress could be found among that garden, bountiful though it is said - not among the most prized of flowers will you find it, no. Nor indeed among those lesser prized than that, though... not altogether unpleasant it is, no - an understated beauty, one might say. At any rate, if anywhere in the world is to be found a bittercress in bloom at this moment of this year of this cycle among all the cycles one could choose to have need of it - rather unfortunate this is, I suppose, though not surprising in the main, given the wealth of days without this flower to the scarcity of those which are otherwise - it is there."
