Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

Lan Hui

Lan Hui knew he had to be sensible about this. A-Fei lived in a bus with his boyfriends, and the bus was for driving -- so of course they were leaving.

They had always said they were leaving again, eventually.

Li Lianhua had even tried to leave once, without the other two, Lan Hui had gathered one evening when his dad had been quietly talking with Chun-er’s dad on the balcony while the kids had been watching a movie about a green-haired forest sprite.

Lan Hui had a secret passion for old cartoons where animal people did ridiculously dangerous things to each other and still weren’t hurt at the end; but he could see why the grown-ups didn’t think them valuable for building, well, their kids’ values, so green-haired wood sprites it was.

He had a little TV on the computer in his own room now, and could watch silly old animal cartoons about greedy cats and clever mice with A-Liu as much as they both liked.

“If you feel that A-Liu is uneasy about something you are watching, just stop,” A-Fei had explained, “otherwise, just go ahead and watch fun things instead of educational ones.” A-Fei knew best how to take care of a kid that had been unhappy in their life before, because he had been unhappy in a very similar way when he was a kid, which was a long time ago and in China.

“And look what a great guy you have become!” Lan Hui had said, and A-Liu had giggled and hugged A-Fei.

A-Fei, whom he ought to call Di-gege because he was a grown-up, but he’d first heard of him as A-Fei, back on Halloween in the coffee shop near where Teddy’s dad lived. A-Fei who didn’t really like kids because when he had been a kid, all the kids around him had been little monsters, and so had he been (he said). But on both points, exceptions were made for Lan Hui, and now also for Feng Yangliu, who was called A-Liu for short.

A-Liu, who was doing very well in their expensive private school and for whom people were queueing up to sponsor their next semesters, years, their entire education -- so Teddy’s dad had said to Lan Hui’s own dad, who had offered to pay for the kid’s education as well simply because Lan Hui had never had such a good friend and shouldn’t lose them.

Nobody knew whether A-Liu was a boy or a girl, not even A-Liu themselves. “I know what bit I was born with,” they had confided in Lan Hui, “but I don’t know what it means. I’m just me. I’ll figure it out later.”

Everybody respected that, which was another reason to keep them at Lan Hui’s school -- people weren’t so easy about such things elsewhere. Elsewhere, the bathrooms for kids were stalls separated by gender, and it was considered a very bad thing to go to the ‘wrong’ bathroom. In Lan Hui’s school, there were many little single bathrooms and had been for a long time, not because of gender stuff but to prevent bullying. It had been like that much longer than the gender stuff was even talked about, the older kids said.

Today, though, was supposed to be a fun day and not one to be worried about coming things, be they friends leaving or gender stuff. Today, Di Feisheng had collected both kids with the bike rickshaw and was taking them to the hardware store before they’d go to the place where A-Fei’s coffee boyfriend worked, and then they could have cake and chocolate milk until Teddy’s dad would pick them up.

They were improvising today because they’d left granddad’s village early; the son and nephew of granddad’s old friend and landlord had both had a terrible accident with a firecracker on Spring Festival, and the village needed to go into emergency mode, dad had said, and not entertain visitors from the City. Teddy’s dad had helped granddad prepare a huge amount of calming tea mixes for the villagers, and then they had gone home.

A-Liu was very happy to see him back early because the family he was living with had a scary grandma who didn’t like him, and even another just as scary grandma who lived on a lotus farm in the south and was going to come for a visit before the lantern festival, so getting away was important. A-Fei had volunteered to help out, on the one condition that it would really just be those two kids.

Additionally, plans were in the works that the Lotus Bus and its inhabitants should come to the village that Teddy’s dad and Zhang-gege were originally from next summer, and get an entire old farm house to renovate. Apparently, the prospect had made A-Fei very happy; he liked having big projects like that.

When Lan Hui asked him about it, later, at the coffee shop, he said it was true, and he said that Lan Hui and A-Liu could help him if they wanted to. “It’ll involve a lot of natural and traditional materials like reeds and clay, so you’ll watch me flail a lot and reinvent the wheel, rather than learn something tried and true.”

Both kids assured him they didn’t mind; they could flail along with him.

Mo Xuanyu

Mo Xuanyu looked at the booth where Fang Duobing’s tall scary handyman boyfriend was entertaining two little kids from the Lan Jue polycule, wondered whether they were still good, then decided to go over and ask anyway.

“If in doubt, ask,” Fang Duobing had told him. “We’re baristas, not waiters, so we don’t serve the patrons at their tables, we make and sell them good coffee; but if you have a regular who lingers for a while, or maybe even a casual customer who settles down for hours of work at the laptop tables, it’s okay to go and ask them if they are good when there’s a lull. They will have to come and pay anyway, so it’s not as if we were a café or anything, but reminding them is a good idea. They have probably forgotten that they could have another coffee because they’re so absorbed in their work, their book, their doom scrolling or what have you.”

Mo Xuanyu nodded. “More coffee is always the answer; the answer is always more coffee,” he said, one of the unofficial mottos of the place. Also, the first half was the WiFi password, spelled in camel case, and with a few numbers thrown in.

Fang Duobing was in the kitchen, arranging freshly baked cookies on a plate to take them out and put them in the display case, so he went to talk to Di Feisheng and his little friends on his own.

“Hi,” he said a little awkwardly. “Are you still good? Need anything? We are getting fresh warm white chocolate and cranberry cookies ready right now.”

Both kids looked at him as if he hung the moon.

“He wants us to buy them,” Di Feisheng said with the tiniest smirk, as if he was trying to not make things too easy for his boyfriend’s successor at his job.

“I have money,” the little boy with the neat haircut said, “I can afford cookies for me and my friends.”

He got out a little snap-closed coin purse in red and gold that looked like a dragon face; apparently a little gift that had come at the Lunar New Year, replacing the envelope bit for one of the red envelopes. Metal jingled inside.

“I don’t have money,” the other kid said; it was the non-binary one with the messy hair. “So I have to throw myself upon the kindness of strangers?”

It was said with a little odd smile, as if somebody had said that to them in earnest. Which would be horrible if true, Mo Xuanyu thought, but not outside his own scope of experience. His aunt had been like that -- but would anybody say that to a kid today?

“This is my invitation,” Di Feisheng said, “so trying to pay for something yourself is sneaky and not polite. You certainly remember that game your grown-ups have at restaurants trying to beat each other at paying the bill for everyone?”

“Then we need to turn up our charm on A-Fei and get him to buy us cranberry cookies,” the neat boy said.

“I think,” Mo Xuanyu said, “that someone in the kitchen may have broken a cookie; so maybe, if a good regular customer ordered another round of drinks, I could cut up that one and add it as a freebie?”

“This is how clever people sell you things,” Di Feisheng told the kids. “Just like the extra tiles in the hardware store just now, remember?”

“But you bought them!” said the non-binary kid.

“Yes, because that guy is a good salesman,” Di Feisheng said. “Also, it is true that tiles can break when the bus has to take a very bumpy road, so it is a good idea to bring a few extra of every kind so I can replace them on the road as needed.”

“So we’re buying more drinks,” the neat boy said. “I’ll have a vanilla rooibos tea, A-Liu probably wants another chocolate milk, and A-Fei?”

“I’d like some simple green tea, nothing fancy,” Di Feisheng said. “Strong and ordinary. I still have plans tonight, but I may have had too much coffee already.”

“There is no such thing as too much coffee,” Mo Xuanyu declared. “But we offer a lot of choices here, so how about a simple strong bancha tea from Japan? It’s a rather workday kind of tea, but it fits what you are asking for. Also, people like to drink that after a meal.”

“That, then,” Di Feisheng allowed. “And keep a dirty matcha ready to go -- Li Lianhua should come and join us any minute now.”

He grinned at somebody behind Mo Xuanyu’s shoulder, most likely Fang Duobing.

“Give me five minutes,” Mo Xuanyu said, “and then you kids can come and fetch your order at the counter.”

He turned around and there was Fang Duobing, putting the cookies on display and giving him the thumbs-up.

He could do this just fine.

Sui Zhou

Sui Zhou was making noodles with ground beef for everybody; they were a speciality of his. His kitchen was well lived-in again by this point, all his tools and implements at hand so that cooking was as natural as breathing both for him and for Dong-er.

Tang Fan was still not allowed to cook, only to eat.

At the moment, while Sui Zhou prepared the noodles themselves and Dong-er chopped vegetables and seasoned the beef, Tang Fan was sitting at the big kitchen table with their guests and a stack of manila folders full of print-outs from the system both the police and the district attorneys used in the City. It was the same system that Zhang Ping was in charge of at the municipal IT department. He was the ‘service owner’ -- that was the technical term from the British system that public IT entities around the world used.

“ITIL,” Tang Fan supplied. “That’s what it’s called. It’s IT process management. But still, some things need to be signed in person, in the real world. Not everybody has a digital signature app as yet, and people need to be able to legally sign.”

As so often, Sui Zhou felt oddly enamored of the fact that Tang Fan and he arrived at the same conclusion, term, or definition by so wildly different routes. That was the word he had been looking for, mentally.

“What are we signing, though?” Li Lianhua asked, nibbling on the piece of leftover niangao cake that Tang Fan had served them with their tea. Tang Fan was allowed to brew tea; he couldn’t really ruin that.

“The final version of your statements,” Tang Fan said, “both in the harassment case and in the phone hacking allegations against Xue Yang. We need to add your agreement to the files before we can close them. Also, here are some agreements that say you won’t litigate for civil damages, and you’re okay with our dropping some of the charges against Xue Yang for his cooperation.”

“You mean,” said Di Feisheng, “that we’re okay with all the plea bargaining and won’t come complaining that you brushed off our problems in order to get at the juicy bits Xue Yang promised?”

“Yes, basically,” Tang Fan said without missing a beat. “You were stalked and attacked; we are taking that seriously. Sui Zhou explained it to you from the word go. We’re not just steamrolling your concerns in the name of public interest.”

“We don’t do that,” Sui Zhou agreed from where he was pulling noodles, “only Wang Zhi does it, That’s his speciality, steamrolling.”

“So he’s not here,” Fang Duobing said with a giggle, “so nobody could claim we were steamrolled into signing?”

“Enough with the banter,” Di Feisheng said. “I want all this behind me. It was very unpleasant, but it ended with profit for everybody, so I’m fine with it. Give me the papers I am to sign so I can read all the text and then sign them. If they mention Xiangyi or Xiaobao, I’ll ask them, of course.”

Sui Zhou dropped the noodles into the boiling water and started the wok for the beef part, spring onions going in first.

The Lotus guys each took their own folders and started reading, occasionally conferring with each other in whispers while they went through their own statements, making sure it really was what they had said.

“I didn’t say that, that’s much too polite,” Di Feisheng said at one point. “I would never…”

“They wouldn’t write ‘cunt’ in an official document,” Li Lianhua said.

“I wouldn’t say cunt, either,” Di Feisheng said. “I think I said bitch.”

“They wouldn’t write bitch, either,” Fang Duobing said.

Tang Fan had got up and came to stand behind Sui Zhou, craning his neck to put his chin on his shoulder. “This looks very good already,” he said, reaching around Su Zhou’s ribs for the cutting board.

Su Zhou lightly hit his hand with a spatula. “No interference with the cooking process!”

“You’re just unlucky that way,” Dong-er giggled.

Sui Zhou turned his head and smirked right into Tang Fan’s bright and insolent eyes.

“You heard her.”

“Okay,” Li Lianhua said from the kitchen table, “I can safely say we are ready to sign this. It all sounds fair, and is factually true, if not” -- beat -- “verbally.”

Tang Fan let go, and returned to the table.

Usually, they didn’t conduct their official business at home, but the Lotus guys had been so helpful, and Li Lianhua had been such an eager culinary student the last few months, Sui Zhou felt they could make an exception.

“Dinner will be ready in five minutes,” he said, “but please don’t take this as coercion to sign faster. It will still be ready in ten minutes.”

Xue Yang

“Of course we could give you a different electronic shackle,” Wang Zhi said during today’s brain-picking session.

That was really what he was calling it; he asked Xue Yang a lot of random questions and made some sense out of the answers, no matter how random, or even truthful, they were.

“You know things,” Wang Zhi claimed, “and I see patterns. It doesn’t even matter if you’re trying to not tell me the truth.”

“It’s to make me stand out, not to actually make sure I stay in my lane and can be found at any time,” Xue Yang said, about the shackle.

“I could give you a soldered-shut and slightly altered fitness tracker,” Wang Zhi nodded, “and a modified pet chip that will need your life signs to function and will raise the alarm the second you cut it out of yourself. If you stay within the limits of the City, and away from the places where we don’t want you, then you could almost move like a free man. No stigma.”

“And what’s the catch?”

“Do you really want a chip inside your body, and a fitness tracker that would record everything? It would send the data straight to us, in real time, and tell us whether you are sleeping, fighting, shitting, having sex or getting high. We could triangulate your position to within a foot or less. No bodily autonomy. No privacy.”

“Better than having that shackle mess up the look of my boots,” Xue Yang said. “Go ahead and mine my data. Average day of your average black hat hacker, why don’t you?”

“Okay,” Wang Zhi said. “I need you to sign a piece of paper that says I'm allowed to use all your data, and then we can do it.”

He got up, left his office, and made a few half-audible calls out in the corridor; then he came back inside.

The printer in the corner came to life with heavy wheezing and spat out a single piece of paper.

“We’re doing this,” Wang Zhi said. “Ding Rong is on his way with the equipment, I have told the regular police, and once you sign here, your soul belongs to us. Or at least all your life signs.”

The apparatus to inject the chip was a monster, far larger than what you would use on a house cat or probably even a lion, so Xue Yang soon found himself with a comically humongous syringe stuck in his bottom while Wang Zhi live-tested the position of the chip as it moved into the fatty tissue on the side of his glutes.

“Stop laughing,” Ding Rong commanded. “You will only make it harder for me to properly position the chip.”

Ding Rong, of course, never laughed, and Wang Zhi only ever smiled ominously, so Xue Yang laughed all the harder.

When they were done, and had taken the original shackle off, Xue Yang put his pants back on, proudly rolled up the cuffs to above his ankles, and turned to leave.

“Remember, we will log the places you’re taking Mo Xuanyu to for the lantern festival,” Wang Zhi said instead of good-bye. “And sex in alleys can get you arrested, regardless of the genders involved. It’s public indecency.”

“I am not taking Mo Xuanyu anywhere for the lantern festival,” Xue Yang said, “that is so cringe! But sex in an alley sounds like a good idea. Let’s see if I manage to be done before your guys arrive. If I’m not seen being indecent by any member of the public, is it public indecency? Ta-dah!”

He wiggled his fingers at Ding Rong and Wang Zhi, and skipped down the corridor.

Jiao Liqiao

“I’ll be working through the lantern festival, but feel free to take the day off for gamboling,” she said at today’s weekly creative meeting, smiling down at everybody around the long, long table. “We need to prepare for the Big Fool Run on April 1st and are bringing in a few celebs to see what we are planning; of course we have everything hashed out with their management company already. We need to make a selection; I sent everybody the list we got so far.”

There were some of the prettiest young men in the entertainment and sports industry on that list, all willing to do a short-term cooperation with the shoe manufacturer, who was lately giving Jinyuan Communications more work than ever before.

Further down the table, one of the attending junior designers gave an involuntary little squee.

Jiao Liqiao smiled her sweetest smile, fully confident that her lipstick was still perfect.

“Now, take that reaction and amplify it by ten thousand -- all of them sporty ladies who will be running while wearing some silly hats, for the honor of randomly receiving a pair of running shoes from the hands of one of those pretty boys at the end. I have a guy working on how to truly randomize the winners actually based on their results in the race; we’re exploring several options. Xue-po is organizing a top notch buffet dinner for the preparation meeting; we’ll make sure everybody who takes part in the selection meeting won’t have to go out for food. Also, you can each invite one person from your private circles to the facilities downstairs during your break.”

That would hopefully get them a few new recruits. Also, she would discreetly put out condoms in the changing rooms of the basement health club, for while boyfriends were welcome (to work here as well), babies definitely were not.

Her little followers were all peering up at her from the whole length of the table, some still a bit dubious, but most of them hopeful.

They were ensnared. She could do this, even on the day of the lantern festival. It would be a fun day at work everybody would text home about.

“I’ll see all of you here next week as usual,” she ended the meeting, “and hope you’ll come up with some fun ideas for the run until then. Just brainstorm -- remember, nothing is ever too crazy! And we will have a bunch of famous pretty young men to implement our ideas with. Go wild, ladies and others!”

Most of her employees were female, at least the high achievers. Men had always found Jiao Liqiao a bit scary, and it had become even more so, lately. Women just adored their Jiao-jie.

After all of them had filed out, she turned to Pangzi, who had been poking her giant phone as usual and not paying attention to her pep talk. That wasn’t all that strange, as they had brainstormed it together.

“I had an email from the City,” she now said, sitting up straight to look at Jiao Liqiao. “Di Feisheng and his” -- pause -- “guys signed off on dropping all charges the other day. Not that there ever were any against us, but now he can’t even invent anything if we ever get back there.”

She nodded. Thinking of the whole affair was almost cringe-worthy now, as if she had caught herself at a momentary lapse in judgment and (worse) style.

Di Feisheng was still probably the most handsome man she had ever seen, and it was still irksome that he had been unwilling to work with her, back then, so she had to resort to extreme measures. But in a way, he had been brought back into the fold, after all. There had been a TikTok post from that little City princess the other day that showed the man teaching two kids associated with the anti-Jinfeng project how to play basketball, one a neat little boy, the other a scruffy thing that was possibly a girl, she would guess, for the sake of inclusivity and gender? You really couldn’t tell with the little creature.

And all three had been very visibly wearing the shoes. In a way, her mission in life was complete. Everything from now on would be extra. Ten thousand cheering women running towards a bunch of pretty and famous guys holding the shoes would be very extra, and she was determined to enjoy it.

“The old man, you know the one, turned up dead, by the way,” Pangzi added. “You know, we thought he had merely had to resign at the orphanage because foreign intelligence now knew about him? Seems some of his backers from local politics or the underworld, or maybe both” -- she grinned toothily -- “thought he had become untenable. He’s history. Literally -- his remains were collected from three different Ming Dynasty temples in the county. These provincial tycoons always have to overdo everything.”

“Do you have pictures?” Jiao Liqiao asked.

“It really doesn’t look nice,” Pangzi said, admitting that she did.

“I don’t want to look at them myself,” Jiao Liqiao smirked. “I would like you to send them to Mo Xuanyu and make sure he passes them on to Di Feisheng. Think of something.”

Pause.

“And now let’s go get lunch. I’ve called a limo; going to an actual place where real things are will be a nice break from all the screens.”

Pangzi, who was wearing all black today, with a poison green bobble hat, smiled and nodded with great enthusiasm.

Qing-er

Only because she had been extremely old, and lived far beyond the ordinary human lifespan, didn’t mean old Madam Ouyang wasn’t mourned. Her funeral had pink, even red, accents, to show that people were celebrating her long life and huge flock of descendants; but still, there were people sniffling among the attendants.

Qing-er had come with her dad, originally; the deceased had been so ancient and her huge extended family was so important, it warranted the presence of the mayor. But when she realized that Xiaobao and his boyfriends were here, and would stay for the entire proceedings, she had decided to hang on for a little bit as well.

“Normally,” Fang Duobing said, “no doctor is happy to go to a patient’s funeral, but Li Lianhua’s brief had been to make her last weeks and days comfortable, and get her to the New Year so she’d see her great-great-grandkid’s first fireworks. He’s still not exactly happy, though.”

Li Lianhua was talking to several of the old lady’s relatives; apparently, it was about how to best donate the medical equipment the family had bought for its matriarch over the years. Also, food. As this was the family who had given the van life guys all that amazing food the last few months, Li Lianhua wanted recipes so he could keep making it.

Di Feisheng was standing beside him and tried to provide a calming presence. “I can’t do that,” Xiaobao had told Qing-er while he poured tea for both of them, “I get carried away too easily as well. But HuaHua is mostly just jaded and can’t be bothered, until he can. When he commits to the bit and picks a hill to die on, it’s almost impossible to stop him. Only A-Fei has this way of going Slow down, Xiangyi that he might listen to eventually. He’ll only confuse everybody trying to talk wonton fillings and rollators at the same time if he carries on like this.”

That rare state of high energy that he was in, more than anything else, betrayed the fact that Li Lianhua was taking the death of his patient to heart, after all; and he needed Di Feisheng to lean on and ground him.

All the Ouyangs were perfectly fine with that; nobody raised an eyebrow at the extremely mild PDAs that Li Lianhua required as support. There were granddaughters who actually sobbed on the shoulder of their husbands, and a nurse who was clinging to his sweet, tiny wife; so the lotus guys were allowed as well. They were all equal opportunity mourners.

“She had a good life,” Xiaobao was saying, “so it’s right to remember her in triumph rather than only grieve her. Her rollators, canes and wheelchairs will go to the old folks in Moluo-cun who survived the Jinfeng toxins with their health in shambles, and we will be thinking of her when stuffing wontons. Also, she has apparently made another trust fund just two days before her death, for the education of Feng Yangliu, up to and including university. Whatever happens, they will be secure and cared for. There is talk that the Jin-Jiang household might hand them over to the Ouyangs outright, not because they cause problems there but because they are so scared of the grannies, Madame Yu and Madame Jin. Who are both terrible and terrifying, to be honest.”

“Who is Feng Yangliu?” Qing-er asked; whatever it was he was talking about, Xiaobao was quite invested in, so she’d like some context, thank you.

“The non-binary kid from the orphanage who was poisoned with the same Jinfeng toxin as Shulin’s and Zhang Ping’s village,” Fang Duobing said. “You know them -- you posted that terribly cute TikTok with A-Fei teaching Lan Hui and A-Liu to play basketball? That kid; their full name is Feng Yangliu.”

“Ah, the kid you were going around with on Lunar New Year?” she said, smiling. “Shy at first, but very funny when you get to know them? They told me they were going to pick either Robin or Marian as an English name, as both names could be either gender, and they like foxes.”

“Yes, that one,” Fang Duobing nodded. “They’re fun; I think they might want to live with us in Moluo-cun in the summer. We’re getting a whole farmhouse anyway.”

“That’s a lot of future there,” Qing-er said. “With that kid relying on Di Feisheng, you’re signing up for years of stability and predictability. Won’t it make Li Lianhua panic?”

Fang Duobing nodded. “We plan to always travel part of the year, and A-Liu will always live with somebody else -- the Lans, the Ouyangs, perhaps even my aunt and her husband. I think HuaHua would seriously freak out if somebody expected him to get a kid to school on time every morning for the next ten or twelve years, so nobody is even considering it. Nah, we’re going to Australia and New Zealand next year, with one of the truck ferries that leave from the New Quay?”

“And from there?”

“Well, back here of course,” Fang Duobing said. “With another one of those ferries. We need to be here for the autumn and winter season; there is a lot of money for us all to earn here during those months. We need to get funds for our travels in some way. I could try blogging and getting sponsorships, but that is so much hassle. I’d rather just do posts when I feel like it and share the fun bits, with no expectations involved. We’re going to do the route of ‘Priscilla Queen of the Desert’ from Sydney to Alice Springs, we have already decided. Posting about that will be fun.”

She pondered this for a moment.

“That’s a lot of future as well,” she then said.

“Yep,” Xiaobao said, beaming proudly.

Li Lianhua

Li Lianhua had met quite a number of fellow TCM doctors while in the City, not just Shulin and Wu Xi; he had talked to them on the official groupchat and at the semi-official gatherings that Wu Xi hosted on the roof terrace of his husband Jing Beiyuan’s office, and sometimes even when seeing a patient at their home.

Compared to some of them, he felt like a rank amateur. This was especially true for those he secretly and by himself called the double majors -- people who held a university degree in western medicine and then had taken up Traditional Chinese Medicine as their specialty. Among his circles, those were mainly Wu Xi himself, and Guan Hemeng, who had studied in Berlin and London, doing his internship at the world famous children’s hospital at Great Ormond Street, with the equally famous and prestigious Charité in Berlin a little bit further back in his CV. Now, he worked at one of the City universities (the one where Ye Baiyi taught -- in fact, he was the man’s contact there who had got Zhou Zishu his antivirals a day or so faster shortly before western New Year) and practiced a very studied and rational approach.

Compared to him, Li Lianhua felt like a quack and a fraud.

Then there was Pei Huai, husband of Tang Fan’s sister; her kid from her divorced first marriage also went to the Blue Polo Shirt School where all the other kids in their circles went. He specialized in gynecology and only afterwards had added the TCM approach to his practice; by now, he was the go-to specialist for ‘women’s problems’ in the City, at least among the TCM crowd. Rumor had it that most of his parents were infatuated with him because he was so nice to them, but he got results and mostly avoided breaking hearts. He was the one who’d overseen the breeding and hatching of the Scorpion’s spawn, as to say, he was the one trans men went to about the issues adjacent to not (yet) having had bottom surgery. He had a temper, and had infamously slapped an older and very respectable colleague for jokes about ‘pregnant men’ at the City TCM Society’s yearly symposium.

Compared to him, Li Lianhua felt like he had neither knowledge nor principles.

Then, on the other hand, there was Su Xiaoyong, who was young and cheerful and entirely practical; she fully acknowledged her limits in ways Li Lianhua would never dare, and was very good at getting patients out of a rut, making them change their habits and re-instilling hope. Li Lianhua had worked with her on several occasions and was always impressed by her go-getting attitude; at first, she had been a tiny bit smitten with him (no, that wasn’t his vanity talking, she had been very open about liking him), but after the first time she’d come to the Lotus Bus and met the other guys, she had just laughed and remained a friendly colleague who let him use her workshop if he needed to mix any more complex prescription.

Compared to her, Li Lianhua felt listless and ineffective.

Still, those three were the ones sitting around the meeting table at the TCM Society’s offices today, in addition to Wu Xi and Shulin.

Among all of them, Shulin was the one who had the least truck with Western medicine, and was the most willing to try weird experiments that sounded like something from Xianxia dramas, advanced needle techniques from scrolls found at Mawangdui or suchlike historical sites, or mysterious ethnobotanical ingredients. The fact that his jungle herbs helped to detoxify the victims of the Jinfeng disaster like nothing else had given him a credibility that made people double-take all the more when he rolled out the crackpot theories.

Compared to him, Li Lianhua felt dull and conventional.

In the middle of the table, there were the case files of all the patients Li Lianhua had worked with since arriving in the City -- starting out with Director Fang and his liver trouble, and ending with Madame Ouyang’s end-of-life care.

The fearsome panel of three colleagues and two friends picked them up, one after the other, read them, passed them around, whispered, and then asked Li Lianhua questions about his decisions and reasoning.

And then, they decided to which of them he should refer those patients, if they still needed ongoing care.

Li Lianhua didn’t like exams and had, at one stage, decided he would never again take one; but here, under the harmless guise of ‘dividing up his remaining cases before he left, which was the only responsible thing to do’ he found himself faced with a rigorous examination based entirely on real life problems he could not bullshit his way out of.

More than once, he felt like just getting up and leaving, especially when they got to the second part of the meeting, which consisted of them pulling out their own real life medical files, giving him printed-out reports and results in successive pieces, and asking him about his opinion.

He plowed on, his commitment to his own bullshit ironclad and outwardly unstoppable, but inwardly, he was howling and cringing like Gollum.

“... and that is exactly what I meant,” Guan Hemeng was saying, in response to whatever Li Lianhua had extemporized about the case the man had pulled out of his briefcase. “Your speciality is the detective approach to diagnostics; you look at the people and their circumstances and then find elements they can change to make things better and solve their problems. It doesn’t even have to be medical; give them tea to strengthen them, because of course a doctor must prescribe medicine, but sometimes it’s just the change in attention to their health that brewing and drinking the tea three times a day will bring them. You know, that patient told me about the cat only at our third appointment; you read the first anamnesis and immediately knew that a cat was involved. That House MD approach is something you have been uniquely contributing to our community since you arrived last summer.”

Li Lianhua felt a mild sense of surprise.

“Yes, like the time you told me the husband had to be gay, and no matter how dutiful he was, the wife would have to divorce him to normalize her periods,” Pei Huai added. “Our patients are people first and foremost, and you know how to deal with people and to encourage them to get well. You cut straight through their bullshit.”

“Probably because you’re a master bullshitter yourself,” Shulin said. “Nobody pulls the wool over your eyes; that kind of eye-wool is completely transparent to you because you know how to deploy it on others.”

“Erm, thank you,” Li Lianhua said, now a bit confused.

“I think you passed,” Su Xiaoyong said, beaming at him.

“He definitely did,” Wu Xi said. “We were wondering whether to make you a lifetime member of the City TCM Society, with a shiny plaque you can screw to your bus and all, but Shulin suspected if we offered and set you a formal interview, you would simply not show up. So we decided to talk over your files and just make you the offer afterwards if we thought it fitting.”

Li Lianhua stared at them.

“You know who we are,” Shulin said, with his sweet, small, and entirely unhinged smile. “Why are you still astonished when we out-think and out-bullshit you? We are all like you, and there are more of us.”

“I’ll get the plaque to you before you leave,” Wu Xi said. “And now, let’s take a short walk; it’s Friday, and Qi Ye is hosting the first afterwork of the year. We need jackets, and the coffee will be hot, but there are people on that beautiful roof terrace, and we are going to join them.”

The TCM Society’s office was in the colonial part of the City, across a park and down a bit of beautiful boulevard from Jing Beiyuan’s office, so everybody got up, gathered their files, and made ready to leave.

Almost dazed, Li Lianhua went along.

When they got to the office and the roof terrace, half of everybody they knew were there -- Rong Changqing and Ye Baiyi, of course, in big puffy jackets, and Zhou Zishu who was clinging to Wen Kexing from behind because he was cold, and the other guys from Shulin’s polycule, plus little Theodosia, who was crawling and toddling around on the terrace and attempting to grab and try everybody’s drinks.

And then, in a corner, Li Lianhua spotted his own lovely men, A-Fei and Xiaobao, trying to get an ominously hissing espresso machine to work. It wasn’t a huge Italian one like the baristas preferred, it was one of those fully automatic ones that were more intelligent than most of the people who bought them, and that liked to utter scathing messages on a little display at their hapless owners.

He made a bee-line for them, neatly stepping over Teddy who was trying to steal somebody’s ominously green drink from a low table.

“A-Fei,” he said when he was close enough that only they would hear the exhaustion in his voice, “I really urgently need a tall drink of water, and here you are!”

Di Feisheng turned around, slung his long arms around him, and just held him.

Li Lianhua could feel himself decompressing by the second, letting off steam just like the unhappy espresso machine.

“I heard they were making you a lifetime member?” Fang Duobing said, viciously cranking something inside the machine. “You really are good at what you do. I keep telling you! When you had enough of that water, there will be coffee, I promise.”

“I will never have enough of that water,” Li Lianhua said, leaning his cheek on Di Feisheng’s shoulder and feeling almost at peace with the world again. “Never! But coffee would be welcome. Thanks.”

Di Feisheng

“That must be more than half your stash, and almost a third of your tools,” Nie Mingjue said, peering at the stack of bags and boxes they had carried into the boat house.

“Yes, I guess,” Di Feisheng said, adding the last few vegetable crates full of assorted leftover tiles on the left side. That would make sure the bag of wood cuttings wouldn’t fall over if there was some little earthquake while they were gone. Technically, the City was in the catchment area of the Pacific rim plate tectonics, and earthquakes did happen. No bad one, though. They were too far from the next fault line, and the ground was a bit too squelchy and not rocky enough.

“Still, your stuff looks ridiculously small in this place,” Nie Mingjue says, pushing another crate closer. “Even when you add the stilts.”

“There’s a lot of room here,” Di Feisheng nodded. “Wen-laoban said I can use the boat house as a workshop when we come back. I’m going to build myself proper storage and a sturdy workbench, and will have room for a table saw, a miter saw, and a jigsaw!”

“Wen-laoban will make you work for that,” Nie Mingjue said. “He does that.”

“But he pays fairly, so what if he claims first dibs on my work?” Di Feisheng said. He really didn’t care; the idea of having his own permanent workshop was too enticing. So what if it came with strings?

“You’re ready to put down roots, huh?” Nie Mingjue said. “Just as you’re leaving, too.”

“We’re just leaving to hang out on warm beaches,” Di Feisheng said, “and then, to renovate a farmhouse in Moluo-cun, Shulin’s village. It’s not as if we’d just up and drift away with the clouds. We have a plan, and coming back is on the list.”

“So leaving is part of the roots, I guess,” Nie Mingjue mused as they headed back to the bus. After dividing the tools and materials, their next job today was testing and fine-tuning the engine. When they finally left, they wanted to be able to do that without any embarrassing engine breakdowns. The bus hadn’t moved for more than half a year now.

The jacks, those metal bones of contention at the time when Li Lianhua had tried to leave, were now officially taken out and stacked on the bed of Nie Mingjue’s truck. For the last few days in the City, the bus would rely on its own tires and suspension again. They had already checked the tires, and adjusted the air pressure.

For the first few hundred miles, they would keep the suspension sharp as they drove down main trade roads and wide highways; but then, they would enter dirt road terrain, and Di Feisheng was all set to soften the suspension so the bus wouldn’t take any hard hits.

Li Lianhua was the one in charge of maps, and he had found a route that would take them away from civilisation within a day while getting them as far as possible towards their destination, which was of course as vague as possible -- there were thousands of miles of warm beach within a week’s traveling distance. They would be able to amble along the coast, relax and swim, eat good food, catch their own fish, and take short-term jobs as the opportunity arose.

They had lived like that before, and it had been fun.

You met people who needed your help, people who told you stories, and occasionally people you needed to show clear boundaries. That did not always involve physical fights, but if it did, they would be ready. Xiaobao especially could do some serious damage if the situation demanded it.

“Let’s have some water before we tackle the engine,” Di Feisheng suggested. It wasn’t hot yet, but the first rule of good hydration was to drink before you got thirsty.

They went inside to refill their water bottles; the other two were gone today. Xiaobao worked his very last shift, and Li Lianhua took a colleague around to the patients he was handing over to her.

“I’m looking forward to the journey,” Di Feisheng admitted as he was leaning against the countertop, watching Nie Mingjue refill the bottle, drink half of it, then refill it again. “And I’m looking forward to coming back. I know now that I have a good life, and that it’s okay to enjoy the details. As long as no quinoa is involved.”

Nie Mingjue saw Yao Mo as well; he could talk to him -- not about feelings as such, but about the process of learning life lessons and improving the perception of his own standing in the world.

“You’ve relaxed a lot,” Mingjue said, grinning at Di Feisheng from under his mustache. “Even more so in the last few days. I guess you are looking forward to traveling again.”

“That,” De Feisheng said, “and the good old-fashioned satisfaction of seeing your enemy dead.”

“She was that bad, huh?”

“Nah,” Di Feisheng said. “Not her. She’s still alive and doing good business, and I find I don’t mind as long as she’s doing it far away from me. I mean it literally. The old man who ran the orphanage where I grew up has been murdered, presumably by his own underworld contacts.”

“That’s not the kind of news that copiously comes out of China as a rule,” Nie Mingjue said, slowly.

“And it doesn’t,” Di Feisheng said. “As far as I can tell, it must have been Xue Yang who noticed it while digging around beyond the Great Firewall. At least Mo Xuanyu came to me the other day and brought me pictures and articles he said he ‘found’, about the case, including gory photos of the evidence. Apparently, the old man was cut up and distributed around three different temples. Authorities from the provincial capital have taken charge of the orphanage.”

“And you have pictures?” Nie Mingjue said, almost incredulously. “As much as I do approve of justice being served, I guess I would prefer a more formal approach.”

“I do have pictures,” Di Feisheng said. “I didn’t tell the guys yet because I don’t want to scare them, but all I feel is a dull satisfaction that he got what he deserved, and that his last moments were probably as terrible as those of all the kids that died in his orphanage. I see the picture of his severed head and see the terror on his bloodied features, and feel relieved. He won’t hurt anybody ever again. The kids still in the orphanage will be free.”

“I see where you are coming from,” Nie Mingjue finally said. “There is no hurry, but you should tell your guys eventually. Perhaps not show them the pictures. To them, it’s just graphic images of an off-putting corpse.”

Di Feisheng nodded. He stepped around Nie Mingjue to refill his own bottle.

“Let’s tackle that engine.”

Fang Duobing

Tonight, it was Fang Duobing who cycled the bike rickshaw.

Di Feisheng sat in the back, on the passenger bench, with Li Lianhua beside him and A-Liu on his lap. The kid had claimed ‘scary granny’ again to be exempt from Lantern Festival activities with their host family, but at this point, Fang Duobing suspected that the actual motivation was ‘would rather hang out with A-Fei’.

Fang Duobing liked the kid; they were mostly quiet, sometimes very funny, quite adaptable, eager to learn and helpful in many small ways.

Li Lianhua was the one who was least used to kids, and most responsibility-averse among the three of them, but what with old Madame Ouyang’s trust fund, it was clear nobody was asking him to take any responsibility, just share in the fun, like the best kind of uncle, so he was game.

Actually, he was explaining to A-Liu about the different kinds of traditional and modern lanterns, and why sky lanterns should always be handled with care.

“Somewhere in Europe, a single miss-aimed sky lantern set a zoo alight a few years ago,” he said. “The monkey house burned to the ground. Animals that the kids from that city loved very much and interacted with a lot all died. Imagine telling that to your class on the first school day of the new year! You should only have sky lanterns when you know where the wind blows, and that the path is clear.”

“It must have been terrible for the animals, too,” A-Liu said, in a small voice. “Monkeys are very clever; they must have been so afraid!”

“If you make them bawl with your environmental morality tales,” Di Feisheng grumbled at Li Lianhua, “you won’t get even one more drink tonight, and not a single kiss when we get home.”

A-Liu giggled at that, sniffles because of the poor monkeys prevented. “You can’t do that,” they said. “You love him -- it would be as bad for you to not kiss him!”

“The little guy has a point,” Fang Duobing said, swerving to avoid a (presumably) straight couple walking down the street with eyes only for each other, not the traffic. Admittedly, most of the Old Town was pedestrian, or pedestrian-first, these days. The bike rickshaw was probably breaking the speed limit as it was.

There was a shop open at the left, doing a brisk business in bubble tea and sweet rice balls.

“No more sad stories,” Li Lianhua acquiesced immediately. “The world is sad often enough; let’s not add to that tonight of all nights.”

“Look, there is a flying dragon!” A-Liu said, pointing up; above the roofs, a tethered traditional lantern was floating, made of several separate parts that came together to form a dragon undulating sinuously in the ocean wind.

Fang Duobing looked up to admire the glowing red creature, and then had to brake hard to avoid a pair of policewomen patrolling on foot, one Chinese, one red-headed as if from Scottish stock, both giggling at something on their phones. They had their back to them, so it really was on him to avoid them.

“Sorry!!” he said when the Chinese one turned her head and scowled at him; but the Scottish one pointed at something on her phone, looking like a map of these streets, and giggled again.

Fang Duobing rode around them, then avoided a group of three ladies and eight kids, all of them earnestly carrying lanterns on sticks, and turned into the street that led to Four Seasons Manor. “I think the dragon is theirs,” he told A-Liu, “so if we’re lucky, we will meet the craftsperson who made the dragon, and they can tell you how it works!”

Mere yards from where the Manor’s walls began, Fang Duobing spotted something else from the corner of his eye, stopped the bike as hard as he could, jumped off the saddle, and ran back to the mouth of the alley he had noticed in passing.

“Are you crazy!!” he hissed. “Police are coming -- you have a sensor on you, you idiot!”

In the alley, among the shadows beyond a few green garbage bins, were Xue Yang (standing) and Mo Xuanyu (squatting among the grime), engaged in -- well…

“Collect your junk and run!” he commanded them, yanking Mo Xuanyu to his feet. “The police are coming! Wang Zhi must have texted them your coordinates!”

Mo Xuanyu had told him about Yue Yang’s new surveillance equipment while they took a last shift together, luckily.

Xue Yang lazily stuffed his junk back into his trousers, which was a bit -- unwieldy. Heavens, Fang Duobing so hadn’t needed to see this tonight. Or at any time, really.

“It was a dare,” he said, languidly as he sauntered out of the alley behind the frantic Mo Xuanyu. “I didn’t have ’Helpful friend actually warns us’ on my bingo card, though.”

“Because you didn’t used to have helpful friends,” Fang Duobing said, mercilessly.

“Ouch, touché!” Xue Yang giggled.

“You’ll have to explain at the Manor!” Fang Duobing said, and then he dashed back to the rickshaw, jumped into the saddle and stepped into the pedals again.

“Care to explain what that was about?” Li Lianhua asked.

“Nope,” Fang Duobing said. “Crisis averted, is all you need to know.”

“Was that about the people making out in that alley?” A-Liu asked, with the tactlessness and sharp eyes of a typical kid.

“I am going to -- drag them to Mawangdui and throw them into the mercury sauce!!” Fang Duobing said, desperately pedaling the last few yards to the Manor’s main gate. He remembered about the overspecific threat thing that would make sure kids wouldn’t get scared. It was a good tactic.

“Like Lady Dai?” A-Liu asked. They had learned about the Mawangdui excavations in school recently; Fang Duobing had heard all about that the last time the kids had been at the coffee shop.

“Exactly like her!” Fang Duobing said.

And here they were, at the gate of Four Seasons Manor, lit with many traditional lanterns, with many familiar faces milling about.

“There is Teddy!” A-Liu said, jumping off Di Feisheng’s lap and jumping over the high threshold of the Manor. “She is running around on her own again.”

Well, almost; Fang Duobing could see Shulin, talking to some lady while keeping an eye on his wayward daughter.

She was safe, among many people who all knew and loved her.

“Make sure she doesn’t steal someone’s prosecco!” Di Feisheng called after A-Liu; he had climbed off the seat already and offered his hand to Li Lianhua.

“She is a tiny, tiny menace,” Li Lianhua said, fondly. “Okay. Let’s go and party!”

Rong Changqing

Zhang Ping from the municipal IT department was very helpful, at least on the phone.

“Yes, of course!” he said. “I see the point. They’re going away, so you don’t want them to have any tidying-up to do before they leave. We pop up with everything, have one last brunch, fold up the tables, and they can leave right away.”

Zhang Ping wasn’t in awe of Rong Changqing at all, despite his reputation among all the IT people of the City; but he was very unafraid of authority in general. Rumor had it that he was friends with the next likely candidate for Governor General, simply because he was totally unimpressed with his official titles.

If you’re IT support, everybody is just a user. Rong Changqing approved of the attitude.

“Why isn’t Wen Kexing organizing this, though; that’s what he usually does?” Zhang Ping asked next.

Rong Changqing smirked at Ye Baiyi, giving him the thumbs-up. They had a bet about how many of the people they talked to would suggest turning to Wen Kexing; so far, every single one had.

“He deserves a break,” Rong Changqing said. “People keep expecting him to cook and organize everything. He’s still dealing with dismantling the decor from the Lantern Festival. Did you see that dragon? It was amazing.”

“So, you’d like suggestions for renting seating, cutlery and crockery,” Zhang Ping said, “and then, you’d like Chen Chou and me to bring food, too?”

“Yes,” Rong Changqing said. “Shulin said I should talk to you directly; he’s footing part of the bill. Or maybe Lan Jue is; you can never quite tell with them. Erm, as you probably know.”

Ye Baiyi was giggling in his lounge chair, listening while looking out over the city, Longbei in his lap. This was the first nice day that had enticed them out onto their glassed-in balcony, with the glass walls partially open, having actual iced coffee in tall glasses.

Baiyi was even wearing sunglasses. He also wore an eggshell-coloured sweater and off-white corduroy trousers against the potential chill, but it was probably the thought that counted. He wanted it to be spring. He willed it to be spring!

“I know,” Zhang Ping said, with a little sigh. “My brother has absolutely no qualms there. But I don’t need to be paid to help make a good-bye brunch for actual friends. I’m going to ask them to pay for the ingredients we use, that is all, because they offered.”

“And Chen Chou?”

“He says I’m an idiot with no sense for business,” Zhang Ping admitted. “But he says that all the time.”

“You don’t need a sense of business,” Rong Changqing said. “It’s a hobby for you.”

“Not for Chen Chou,” Zang Ping said. “For him, it’s his livelihood.”

“But he likes those guys as well…”

“Of course,” Zhang Ping said. “Everybody does, by now; they provide a lot of color. I love the ongoing secret competition between my brother and Li Lianhua to see which of them is the more devious and cunning old fox. Pity the Lotus guys are leaving; having somebody around who was able to give Shulin a run for his money was fun. Now, he will undisputedly be the sneakiest again.”

“The Scorpion isn’t bad, either,” Rong Changqing said, loyally.

“He’s become more aboveboard with every additional kid,” Zhang Ping said. “So there is hope for my brother yet; he won’t want Teddy to catch him lying and cheating when she gets older. As for the Scorpion -- I hear that Arhat is pregnant again, so with that third kid, I guess the Scorpion will turn completely mainstream, start wearing mom jeans and striped tee-shirts, and all his playlists will devolve to iterations of Hao Pengyou.”

Zhang Ping was completely tactless at times; while everybody else discreetly accepted that the physical provenance of the Scorpion spawn wasn’t talked about, as if the Scorpion and his partner had actually physically spawned them off their venomous stingers, Zhang Ping did not.

Arhat was a guy, of course, but he could get pregnant; Pei Huai was in charge of the medical details, and of preventing bouts of dysphoria. Shulin would be in charge, this time around, of getting the Scorpion to reliably lactate, which Arhat couldn’t -- because of both dysphoria and top surgery. So what? Rong Changqing didn’t personally see the point of pretending otherwise, but he believed his friends that it was very rude not to. Zhang Ping, on the other hand, totally had no qualms.

He was much more like his brother than he liked to admit.

“Tell you what,” Zhang Ping now said. “We have a basement room full of dusty trestle tables and fold-up benches from back when we were working fairs; you can hire them from us for a regular price rather than going to a professional event outfitter. Then, Chen Chou can’t complain about not doing business, and you don’t have to phone around for that.”

“Then only the plates and cups and bowls and glasses, spoons and knives and chopsticks aren’t accounted for. In the old times, we would just have bought plastic cups, paper plates and one-use bamboo…”

Ye Baiyi pretended to spit-take on his iced coffee and made a terrible face.

Rong Changqing loved him very, very much.

“I know that’s not an option,” he said. “But there are bio-degradable alternatives made from palm leaves; I can just get those, and when we are done, we can bury them in somebody’s compost heap.”

“My brother has one, for his herbs,” Zhang Ping said.

Ye Baiyi gave him the thumbs-up.

“I am getting the bread from that bakery where we got the dough for the f-things in December,” Rong Changqing went on, “and pretzels for the kids. I’m not sure what we’ll do for tea and coffee, but we won’t be hordes, just an ordinary large brunch group, so a large percolator and a big electric kettle should be enough. Not everybody has to have artisanal coffee all the time.”

Ye Baiyi laughed out loud.

“Your husband is making fun of you, is he?” Zhang Ping said, with amusement in his voice.

“Apparently, I’m still the straightest bi person of all time,” Rong Changqing said cheerfully. “I guess I’ll call the Scorpion about the percolator; he’ll know where to get those. I might buy a used one online and re-sell it after the event, actually.”

Ye Baiyi cleared his throat.

“You do realize we have a very large Library of Things at the Ghost Valley’s maker space?” he said. “Your own son can get you your percolator. And probably cups, glasses and plates, too.”

Now it was Zhang Ping’s turn to laugh out loud.

“Okay,” he said. “That’s all settled. I’ll see you on Wednesday, then!”

Rong Changqing hung up, and ticked several items off the list on his tablet.

Ye Baiyi held out his empty coffee glass, and even Longbei looked at him hopefully.

Rong Changqing loved them so, so much; so he went to the kitchen to get his husband more iced coffee, and a little bowl of lactose-free cream for the cat.

Sometimes, things did have to be a bit artisanal. Especially if you made them for the people (and cats) that you loved.

Shulin

It was just an ordinary Wednesday morning, but everybody was there.

Shulin was sitting beside Peizhi, who was leaning against Mowen on his other side, and together, they were giving Teddy tiny bits of different foods to try.

“That is salmon!” Mowen explained to her, and then they all smiled at the way she licked her lips. Apparently, she liked salmon.

“She’s a Teddy,” Lan Hui said; he sat on Shulin’s other side and was very tamely eating an avocado sandwich. “Teddies are bears. Bears like salmon. What did you think?”

He smiled to himself, and took another bite.

Li Lianhua had announced on Saturday that they would be leaving on Wednesday, which was today; when the back of the Lotus guys was turned, Rong Changqing said “Goodbye brunch?” and the Scorpion had said “Definitely!” and then everybody jumped into action.

Now it was Wednesday, and the three Lotus guys were sitting at the head of the long table made of trestles from Chen Chou’s basement, and looked positively dazed. Fang Duobing had given a very short speech earlier, just to thank everybody for the good-bye party; Di Feisheng and especially Li Lianhua seemed a bit too pole-axed to say anything to the crowd, instead only talking to people as they came up individually.

Under the table, Li Lianhua was secretly holding Di Feisheng’s hand; but of course, Shulin noticed that the doctor was using his chopsticks with his left hand, which he normally never did, while Di Feisheng used his right as always, and their other hands remained strictly unseen.

The long table was set up parallel to the bus; Shulin and his family were on the side facing the vehicle, so he could see the touched-up lotus decorations, the shiny new plaque from the TCM Society beside the door, and the cat Wenjing looking unhappily through the kitchen window. "He's staying inside," Li Lianhua had announced when the whole party had rolled up and set up the table, "or he'll go for a jaunt with the harbor cats and won't come back until evening, and that's not the point of a goodbye brunch. We are leaving!"

They had given him some salmon, though.

Zhang Ping and Chen Chou were in charge of the food, while Wen Kexing for once got to sit and heckle everybody else; Lan Hui’s little friend A-Liu was asking Zhou Zishu about kung fu lessons, and Ye Baiyi had gotten into a detailed argument with Wei Wuxian about artificial intelligence.

The secretary at the blue polo shirt school was probably wondering why so many parents associated with Four Seasons Manor, its martial arts school, and the hacker collectives from both universities had excused their kids from class today; Shulin ran a few scenarios and picked two that she was most likely to stick with. He would spontaneously mention one of them when he went back there next Monday, for the next step in enrolling Teddy for the early education pre-kindergarten class. The older Scorpion spawn already attended those, and the smaller one was due to follow in September, so Shulin had decided it was never too soon to make sure Teddy got to go there as well, so she would find little friends exactly her age. She already spent a lot of time with older kids, of course.

And no, he did not feel ridiculous for doing so, he assured everyone who looked even slightly dubious when he mentioned it. Thank you for asking.

The event photographer came around to ask a few more questions, and Shulin said to take all the pictures he liked. They could still weed out the indiscreet ones later.

Having a dedicated photographer was a joined effort of their shoe sponsors and Ye Baiyi’s niece; she had worked with this guy before. He had taken the photos of Di Feisheng playing basketball with Lan Hui and A-Liu that they used in the social media campaign for the cooperation of the shoes and DETOXIFY!!

His presence here meant that people were encouraged to put their own phones down and be in the present; everybody would have pictures later.

Of course, some did photograph their food; the mayor’s daughter probably didn’t even know how not to. But ‘people photographing their food’ was a subject for an event like this, anyway. The photographer, a very attentive young man, did catch on to her doing it, with a smirk.

Teddy pointed at her sippy cup, and Peizhi handed it to her.

Then she pointed at a piece of cheese, and Nie Mingjue handed it to her from across the table.

She put it in her mouth, and immediately spat it out again. “Bahh!”

Before Shulin could bend to pick it up, the dog Fox Spirit was there and gobbled it up.

“Gou!” Teddy said. “Wangwang!”

“That was definitely a two syllable word,” Paizhi said, approvingly.

The dog, apparently, thought so as well, and wagged her tail at all of them.

“Can I have more beef noodles?” Di Feisheng asked from the top of the table, and his request was relayed to Zhang Ping, who got a bowl ready, and then sent it up the table via bucket chain -- everybody passed it on while they kept talking.

Yep, the man was definitely having his hand held. Clung to, most likely. Li Lianhua was positively overwhelmed by the surprise from all his friends and did his very best not to show it. Good thing he had his A-Fei and his Xiaobao, so he could weather his own emotions and didn’t have to run away.

Cute, really.-

Xue Minglin

The photographer’s senior assistant had set up a large Macbook on the now abandoned food table, with a clump of people all around looking at the fresh pictures, objecting to a few of themselves and their kids. The photographer’s second assistant, in charge of legal and financial aspects, was taking notes about all the objections.

Minglin thought it only polite -- before the studio uploaded the pictures and distributed the access codes to the people who had been here, they had to make sure nobody was offended. The one of the little toddler spitting out cheese was a favorite, and luckily, Gu Qingzhang didn’t object to it. The guy was very savvy; it was a joy to work with him for the shoe sponsorship.

The photographer himself, in the meanwhile, was busy following the Lotus Bus with a drone as it drove away. Actually, as Minglin could see on the second Mac that showed the live drone footage, he was flying it gradually higher, not sticking to the bus’ exhaust pipes; that would give a nice sense of good-bye.

The bus had left five minutes ago and was already out of sight from the ground. People had stopped waving and started packing up everything from the brunch.

Two guys from Gu Qingzhang’s polycule were busy comforting some bawling kids; apparently, they had really liked the Lotus guys. The photographer’s third assistant, the one in charge of the camera equipment and equipped with a camera himself, saw that, and wisely refrained from trying to take pictures. Instead, he turned his lens on where four tall, strong men (among them Rong Changqing and Rong Xuan) were loading the benches onto the truck belonging to a fifth tall strong man, this one with a mustache.

Yep, that was a better subject than the bawling kids.

As she could see on the live feed, the bus had by now left the harbor district and was driving down a tree-lined boulevard of the colonial part of the City; and that was where the photographer abandoned it, recalling his drone. The feed stopped. The drone would, of course, bring back high-res footage from which the photographer's technical assistants would be pulling stills.

Minglin didn’t know the Lotus guys all that well; after their initial encounter at the escape room, they’d only run across each other at the Manor and at Gu Qingzhang’s clinic occasionally, that was all. But as she had been the connecting point to pull them into the orbit of all these people, Rong Chanqing had insisted she had to be there.

As the tables were folded up and loaded onto the truck as well, Wen Kexing and some little helpers -- his future son-in-law, and Zhou Zishu’s foster son-slash-disiple -- came with water hoses set on high.

Having a bus parked in one spot for over half a year, most of the time with jacks and wooden planks underneath, would of course leave marks on the pavement -- where the wind hadn’t reached, and where the rainwater had washed last autumn’s leaves against the jacks to rot and stain the concrete black. There was even lichen that had grown in the shadow of the tires.

The water fanning out from the high pressure hoses soon dealt with that, leaving the concrete of the quay pale gray and pristine. The kids were of course fascinated, and were allowed to help pressure-wash the concrete, with a grown-up keeping a careful hand on each hose.

The photographer’s fourth assistant, in charge of heavy lifting and crowd control, pointed his boss to the effects of the water on the ground; there were even a few rainbows to be had.

The photographer’s fifth assistant, in charge of making everybody feel comfortable, brought towels for the kids' shoes -- so of course they took them off and splashed barefoot in the flow-off from the hoses.

Soon, the place looked as if the bus had never even been here.-