I cook, by my insistence and to popular acclaim; potatoes and onions grated in perfect ease through a contraption simply called a slicer, mixed with some starch and egg and then fried in oil on a shimmering slab of metal. I pair it with thin slices of a gourd of some sort that’s green and has a soft, edible outside, which I fry similarly, and make an attempt at a sauce, tiny minced pieces of this and that vegetable and some herbs and spices in a tangy yoghurt, everything made incredibly easy by the astonishing magical gadget. I can tell it’s a bit bland for my companions’ palettes and they can tell it’s a little too much to be ideal for mine, but we all enjoy it well enough.

Really, though. A device that, when its head is passed over a bowl or plate, simply slices the food in those and nothing else? A device that has no risk of self-injury or ruining your dishes, which has settings aplenty, ones for blade width and six dimensional configurations alike in the basic mode?

If this is an apology, well, it might only be a drop in the bucket, but I give respect to the drop.

The conversation over food focuses on tactics. There’s no sense in preparing for a specific matchup, since we don’t know anything about what the seeding will look like other than the fact that we won’t get matched up against Rei’s team, but we can and do go over the seeding and pre-match advantage-setting mechanisms.

They’re like a tiny draft encounter of their own right, five one-on-one battles of wit and skill. There’s a five-by-five square grid with an empty center, twenty four elements, and moderately complex rules around in which circumstances you’re able to select more than one square. It’s an elimination game; once you’re down to eight, you reform the square by switching off placing the squares in a three-by-three grid, again with a missing center, and then you do one last removal. This one’s a full row or a full column each, and you’re left with either two or three squares.

These are your constraints. You each propose something non-lethal that fulfills the constraints, be it a riddle competition or arm wrestling or a musical contest, and then each file any objections to the other’s selection on the basis of not fulfilling the constraints. There’s a sort of half-mediation, half-arbitration mechanism by a panel of judges to help assess those, and then you sort of hybridize the proposals. So a riddle competition done in verse, maybe, but usually the contestants will both be angling for something similar, and you just wind up with a somewhat clever variant of one thing.

Any derivative of a game called Downbeat is always popular. One beat of motion or of magic to three of stillness is the standard, which means you need to be both defending and attacking at the same time, in a way; Vonne talks about variants that involve different rhythm patterns, including ones like one-in-three, one-in-three, one-in-two, one-in-two which aren’t steady, and she talks about variants that involve somewhat arbitrary constraints like never being able to repeat the same spell or motion twice or having to cycle through the elements in a set order.

There’s no knowing what the twenty-four words are that will form the constraints, but the Tournament isn’t just about winning, for the Imprints who will continue to dwell in the Temple after we leave. They want to play to the crowd because the crowd is their friends, their connections they want to improve, their rivals they want to upstage; that’s why Downbeat is so popular, and why pretty much anyone aiming for it has a better than even chance of their gambit being accepted.

I need to avoid Downbeat and any other combat simulation at approximately all costs. I don’t have anywhere near the physical combat skills to keep up with a real fighter and I wouldn’t be allowed to backload orbs, which means I’d be unable to do more than desperately try to unravel my opponent’s spells on a one-orb-to-one-spell basis.

Untenable.

There are plenty of alternatives, and I make note of them. I’m going to wind up paired against a backliner from whatever team we’re matched up against, but with Sara on our team I’m as likely to wind up against an archer as I am a mage. Something like a footrace or climbing a glacier would be welcomed by the one while being denied at all costs by the other, and the reverse, most likely, for something like a riddling contest or any of a half-dozen spell-synthesis-or-deconstruction games.

Runework isn’t even on the list; I’m that unlikely to find someone who can do it, so it’s purely something that I can tactically threaten with as a way of getting an opponent to knock it out and knock out something they’d rather keep on the board in the process.

Most of the team has something in that realm. Nobody’s going to be playing Downbeat with Zidanya, and Amber’s joke about a competitive heal-off gets a couple of laughs, in part because she’s a lot more likely to wind up matched against a shield-bearing nephil or orc than against a healer. But we can’t only think about what we’re taking off the table; unless we have an overwhelming number of choices for ways in which we’ll have a comprehensive advantage, which Amber might well have, we need to plan for what we’ll offer, like we’re making a deal. Well, more like we’re running a con, really. Anyone getting into a filthy jokes contest with Sara is going to regret it, because while she’s emphatically not the type, she’s got a couple dozen of them memorized, perfect delivery and all. She calls them a gift from Rei that was not entirely without redeeming quality in that icy delivery that means she’s trying to be civil, and I remind myself yet again that murder is probably a bad idea even after we get out of the Temple.

We don’t spend too much time on planning. We’ve got days ahead of us before it all becomes relevant, after all; four days, specifically. One day of rest, one day with the melee finalists in the morning and the wildcard round in the afternoon, followed by the round of eight’s seed placements; after that, a day of combat and another day of rest, and then it’ll be our turn to fight.

The days of rest turn out to be in part for replacement of teammates. It’s a bit of a horrifying notion, and I resolutely don’t imagine it happening to any of us, but it’s routine for any number of people on even the winning team to die. It’s exceptionally rare for there to be a double-wipeout, but even that’s happened; and there’s rules and precedent around it all. But even without that, the day of rest is needed for healing and for getting back to your perfect edge, so that you can make your absolute best showing.

Besides, they need it for the art.

Not just in the sense of ink-on-paper or other traditional visual arts. There’s demonstrations of process by artisans and artists ranging from sculptors to grafters of trees the size of my thumb to painters with oil and ink and illusion, working on works that take cycles upon cycles to complete. There’s competition after competition, song and dance and more in singles up to dozens; everything that isn’t lethal combat, there’s a competition for.

I laugh, initially, when Vonne mentions offhand that there’s a contest of mimicry, of pretending to be someone else at the tournament, whether played up tenfold on a stage or played as true as possible in a party where the real person is also present. Zidanya’s concurrence and her mentioning that she’s been at those parties herself leaves me boggling a little and laughing at the notion.

I still reject the idea of us all going to one, though. So much of me is deeply, thoroughly revolted by the notion of dancing with someone whom I think is a companion of mine and who turns out to be engaging in pretense. It leaves me, trying to explain leaves me raw and shaking, wrapped around Amber as I remind myself that she’s here and real and not, in fact, someone who’s going to be leaving in a short few months.

By the time I get myself back together, helped by Amber’s warm, quiet murmurs of affection and affirmation, the mood is thoroughly shot. Pie helps, apple pie generously topped with a mixture of refined sugar and molasses, especially served warm alongside a cup full of ice slivers that’s had a sweet syrup drizzled over it.

Amber eventually sweeping me into her arms and bodily carrying me back to bed helps too, and not only because of how wildly different it is from any of my relationships back on the Spirit. I relax, pulling her head down for a kiss, revelling in the casual and impossible strength of her arms and shoulders and back, and that helps even more; and a few moments later, when she’s straddling me with her hands pulling my hair out of its braid, when her lips are on mine and her breasts are in my hands, my fears have withdrawn enough that we can salvage the night, if not the evening.