<div class="floatleft">(https://elliquiy.com/elluiki/images/9/93/Lishin.jpg)</div><strong>Name :</strong>Judge Fu Li Shin<br/><strong>Element :</strong>Fire<br/><strong>Location &amp; Time :</strong>Palace, evening<br/><strong>Tagging :</strong>Heini<br/><br/><hr/><br/>A Judge oughtn't let anger cloud her sense. When she found herself casting embers through her gaze at Heini, she corrected herself. Cold, unaffected, that was the way of the Judge. "That there is an incurable amount of laziness and vagabonding in the world is no excuse to do nothing." The tiny lights out on the dark riverbank caught her eye as she turned away. "Look, the paper boats arrive on the shore. You could be out there turning your luck around with good fortune, if you hadn't tried to cheat Pai Sun's hard-working potters. Take responsibility."<br/><br/>It was a march Li Shin made proudly, between the blazing stone lanterns of the long palace approach. The heat she found purifying on a night like this. "The Legalists of old knew how to combat a problem like counterfeiting. Catch one criminal, and make example of her such that a hundred more will give up their misdeeds. Matching crime for punishment, that's foolishness. An endless struggle. But those were more severe times, when Judges were far fewer." Her smiling eyes rest on the east gate of the palace, where it faced the moon flanked by Wardens and an alarm gong greened with age. “Luckily for Pai Sun, there are more Judges than ever now. And more Wardens, as well.” As the guards opened the gates, she considered the Warden accompanying Heini. As a man from the forest villages, he may well have been a bandit, before the ranks swallowed him for the festival. Li Shin did not utter a word to him.<br/><br/>“I warn you not to run. The Buddha’s stone-scattering palm pierces to the heart of what it seeks, unshaken by obstacle.” Her hands went for Heini’s. A moment of infuriating realization: they were not tied correctly. Or, wait... they had been untied. This girl was more than she seemed.<br/><br/>It was then that the bong of a deep bell sounded within the palace. The Honorable Judge Fu Li Shin hurried inside, explaining the meaning of the old bell to Heini’s escort. “The walls have been breached, Warden! The enemy is within our midst.” But it was a dead man she was speaking to- the fresh young Warden’s body slouched off the path and into eternal sleep, tagged by a poison dart. An assassin in black moved among the pear trees, seeking to slip by Li Shin and Heini and escape back into the night.<br/><br/>“Hey, you,” she addressed Heini, “If you value your life, take responsibility and help defend the palace!”<br/><br/>A second dart zipped out to snuff a life. Judge Fu Li Shin's strike turned it aside into the bark of a tree. The Buddha's stone-scattering palm was true.