But she’s smiling. “If that’s not sentient, I’m a manatee,” she says, laughing, and before the red thread can attempt once more to make a fool out of him, Seokga shakes back the sleeves of his hanbok and begins the illusion. For Kisa, he’ll conjure more than a rain cloud. He’ll weave an entire storm.

Drawing from the well of divine power deep within him, Seokga begins to weave strands of thought together. In his mind, he pictures a tumultuous gray sky, heavy and ripe with cold rain. The bottom swell of a cloud, almost navy blue, dark and delightfully ominous. The air would smell fresh, heavy with hints of the coming ozone, rich with the ground’s damp, expectant soil.

Kisa’s delight fills him as the bedroom darkens, the ceiling overtaken by a blanket of swirling storm clouds. Her hair…Seokga longs to see it flutter in a cold, rain-tinted breeze, and so it does. “Brilliant,” she whispers as he brings forth a crack of lightning that illuminates her upturned face in a burst of white. The thunder is next, a contralto rumbling that grows to a crescendo just as fat raindrops burst from the clouds, freezing cold, splattering to the bedroom floor below and forming glistening puddles.

She laughs, and it is (as always) the most gorgeous sound Seokga has ever heard. Kisa jumps from the bed and twirls around in the rain, Hwanin’s giggles mingling with her delight as she spins him around. With eyes misty from the rain (just the rain, nothing else at all), Seokga watches with trembling pride as they grin up at his creation and find it beautiful.

As Hwanin, Seokga mills about the ship, doing his best to look Absolutely Authentically Hwanin-y. He has interpreted this as smiling at passersby (the horror), maintaining an indulgent expression of humble superiority at all times (quite hard, he’s used to an expression of plain derision), and stopping various times to spit his own hair out of his mouth (not what Hwanin usually did, but what Seokga must do as a necessity—it’s so long).

Kisa with Hwanin, Hajun, and Somi all trail him from various points as he makes his rounds. The hope is that his presence will draw out the murderer, fool them into thinking that Hwanin somehow survived that fatal night (sans heart), et cetera. It’s a long shot, but it’s the best any of them have got. It also can’t hurt to keep up appearances, reassure the world that Hwanin is most definitely alive and well.