#part of the KokoLisa chronic fatigue prompt i claimed from the prompt meme

[canonical-transformation]

Tag from @cadriona

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Kokomi wanders the length of the boat, feeling in good spirits with the sea all around her and the skies as clear as her schedule for the coming weeks.

Towards the cargo hold, she stumbles across a woman in distress.

The woman is using her arm as a cushion as she bangs her head against the wall, slowly and rhythmically. In her other hand is an expensive looking mechanical contraption, all weights and sliding pieces and hooks, which she is spinning around like a nunchaku or maybe a children's toy.

"Every time I go to Mondstadt," the woman sighs. "Every time."

(The Liyuean accent suggests she is not an elk youkai, contra Kokomi's first guess.)

"Are you all right?" says Kokomi.

The woman looks startled to find she's not alone. "Oh! You surprised me." She laughs awkwardly. "Hi there! You're Inazuman... You must be the Tri-Commission delegation registered on the manifest?" She stops fidgeting with her sliding-spinning device immediately, looking a little sheepish. "Oh, whoops... anyway, I glanced at it when I boarded... never hurts to know who you're at sea with."

"Indeed," says Kokomi. She takes a seat on a nearby crate. "You boarded at Liyue Harbour, I take it?"

"Hah, yeah." The woman rolls her eyes and grins self-effacingly. "Pretty obvious, huh."

Some strangers—the majority, even—require a lot of energy to interact with, but here, Kokomi feels rather at ease. She's used to this level of nervous energy and chattiness from some of the shrine maidens. Not to mention the Liyuean woman exudes the same sort of innocent non-judgementalness that Sara and Ayaka do.

"May I ask what was troubling you a second ago?" Kokomi asks.

"Well, I'm not supposed to be working right now, but I was playing with my steelyard..."—she waves the device she was spinning around, which does look a bit like a scale now that Kokomi looks—"...and something was messing with the readings, right? Like a magnet near a compass, but instead of messing with directions it was devaluing everything nearby... so I thought to myself, hey, I already read all the textbooks I brought with me, I'm bored, maybe I'll try to figure out what's going on here... solve a little mystery, maybe impress the shipping company while I'm at it. And then it turns out..."

The woman stills.

"Omigosh," she says, "I should have led with that."

"Led with what?" says Kokomi.

"Half a dozen crates in this hold have custom tamper-proof seals on them," says the woman. "The kind that send a message to the Abyss."

Kokomi takes this in, and reconsiders the slightly chastened look on the woman's face.

"...and I'm sitting on one of them, aren't I," she sighs.

The Liyuean woman nods. "Every time I go to Mondstadt," she says. "Eula's never going to let me hear the end of it... say, I don't suppose that Hydro Vision of yours has ever seen combat use?"

"Once or twice," smiles Kokomi.

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