practicality

Daitou knelt in seiza on the floor of his small Section 1 apartment. The cat was locked outside, for now - not his usual habit, but he didn’t want to be interrupted in the middle of this. He took the little black silk pouch out from the front of his kimono - he’d been keeping it close over the last few days, until he had a nice long break to sit down with whatever Locke’s mysterious gift was. He pulled the drawstring open - ‘simply let it fall onto your hand’, he had said, but Daitu tipped the bag out into the floor instead. He wasn’t to keen on the idea of surprises. A single item dropped out of the bag, clattering onto the hard wood floor. It was a small, pale crystal, seemingly glowing with it’s own light. A metal ring surrounded it, like a setting on a gemstone. It looked like... a memory crystal, actually, from the descriptions he’d been given. Carefully, he reached out and brushed the ring with his finger tips - nothing but cold metal. He picked it up by ring, taking a closer look at it - but he couldn’t see anything that stood out to him. He reached up with his other hand to touch the crystal in the center of the ring with one finger.

( 'I am a demon's child' )
With that, Daitou was abruptly thrown back into his own body, able to feel again, able to turn his head to glance around the apartment. The ring was still gripped between his two fingers, but the shine had gone out of the crystal. Used up, he supposed. He rose, a little shakily - there had been a lot to process there - and tucked the crystal into his clothes chest, before unlocking the door and letting a less than happy Prestidigitation back inside. Codes, laws... ‘Shinsengumi’. He had killed someone, it seemed - though that only confirmed what he had suspected from his dream, from the tattoos he’d been given. ‘Murderer’. They had spoken the truth. He would have to think on all this for a while.

From Shinsengumi Imon Peacemaker, Vol 2 pgs 25-29