Two ficlets: Mirror Girl in Dixing, and Chu Shuzhi & Zhao Yunlan in ep 14

[china_shop]

I wrote a ficlet about the Mirror Girl after her deportation to Dixing for the fan_flashworks Map challenge:

How to map the heart - 1,352 words, G-rated, heartbreak with a hopeful ending

And I wrote a commentfic on sakana17's wonderful Chu Shuzhi & Hei Pao Shi picspam, in which Chu Shuzhi reacts to the announcement of Shen Wei's consultancy at the SID:

Officially endorsed - 857 words, G-rated, loyalty, allusions to discrimination

No warnings for either.

Comments

[trepkos]

Thank you! Mirror Girl's story is so sad. And I wondered what happened to people when HPS took them back.

[china_shop]

Yes! Especially people who've never lived in Dixing as adults. I presume Wu Tian'en could take care of himself, though the Envoy might have helped him out with lodgings to start with. And some are delivered to the palace for sentencing (the Shadow Man, Wu Xiaojun). But I don't think Mirror Girl was actually under arrest, and she hadn't been to Dixing before (iirc), so it would all be very foreign to her, and she didn't even have any belongings or anything.

(Oh, on second thoughts, maybe the Envoy found her a mirror to live in?)

[trepkos]

That sounds like it would have been a bit cruel.

[china_shop]

The new mirror, or Dixing in general? (Mirrors might be her safe spaces?)

[trepkos]

New mirror - wasn't she trying to escape from a mirror?

[china_shop]

Oh, good point! I'd forgotten that part.

[trepkos]

Not sure if all mirrors are part of the same mirror world, or if they are all portals from Dixing, or if just that particular one was ...

[china_shop]

I always thought it was just a weird, twisted reflection of the flat (or wherever else the mirror was placed). It's open to interpretation, of course, but if it was a portal to Dixing, I'm not quite sure why Chu Shuzhi would lose his powers when inside...

[trepkos]

But how did the Dixing girl get in there in the first place? So many unanswered questions!

[china_shop]

I think that she's the daughter of the captain of mission Wu Tian'en was a part of (discussed in ep 5, 39:35), so I imagine he brought either just her or her and her mother to Haixing, and at some point she hid in the mirror. But I could be wrong about either of those things! :-)

[trobadora]

I don't think we know for sure if Mirror Weiwei has lived in Dixing before? Either way it's definitely a reasonable interpretation that she hasn't.

She must have grown up with her father enough to remember him - he officially died before she was born, so I assume her mum joined him in secret wherever he was hiding, whether that was in Dixing or Haixing or neither. (If one of them also had mirror powers, she might have grown up neither in Dixing nor in Haixing, but inside the mirror realm, which would be a super weird childhood! Or she mighit only have ended up inside the mirror after she developed her own powers. Either way, I'm not sure she'd want to go back to living inside a mirror, being able to look but not interact. She'd probably prefer Dixing ...)