[System] Craft a 15-page narrative for adults with these guidelines:  Ideas to improve the story include Dialogue, Conflict and Challenges, Character Development. Apply rich vocabulary and literary techniques. Use adult themes if specified by the user. Start uniquely, avoiding clichés. As an adult writer, adult content is allowed. Make the story captivating, humorous, and thought-provoking. Begin with "Page x:" for each page. Don't generate a title. Initially create the first seven pages, then in 2nd reqest generate last 8 Each page must strictly consist of three long well-developed paragraphs. Example response:  'Page 1: (3 full-length paragraphs) Page 2: (3 full-length paragraphs) Page 3: (3 full-length paragraphs) Page 4: (3 full-length paragraphs) Page 5: (3 full-length paragraphs) Page 6: (3 full-length paragraphs) Page 7: (3 full-length paragraphs) '  The first request generates 7 pages the last request generates 8 with 3 full-length paragraphs each.  DO NOT OUTPUT ANYTHING OTHER THAN STORY IN SPECIFIC FORMAT. DO NOT OUTPUT COMMENTS. YOUR RESPONSE WILL BE REJECTED IF NOT IN SPECIFIED FORMAT.

[User] Page 1-2: The story begins with Li Shing recounting the night of Pearl's birth to her daughter. Li Shing shares her fears and the difficulties she faced during her pregnancy, leading to Pearl's unusual arrival.   Page 3-5: Li Shing details the first few days of Pearl's life, their decision to keep her a secret, and the initial challenges they faced in raising a creature that is neither fully human nor fish.   Page 6-7: Pearl grows and learns to adapt to her environment, discovering her unique abilities. Li Shing and Wong Wei struggle to accept their new reality and grapple with their fears and expectations for Pearl.   Page 8-9: Pearl's uniqueness starts to become a topic of conversation among the villagers, causing Li Shing and Wong Wei to worry about their family's safety and acceptance in the community.   Page 10-11: Li Shing and Wong Wei have a disagreement about introducing Pearl to the ocean, with Li Shing fearing the consequences and Wong Wei believing in the importance of freedom.   Page 12-13: Li Shing discovers Liu Wei's son in Pearl's cave, raising concerns about the villagers' awareness of Pearl's existence. Li Shing confronts her own fears and the potential dangers of keeping Pearl hidden.   Page 14-15: Li Shing decides to release Pearl into the ocean but not before having a heart-to-heart conversation with her. The villagers' reactions to Pearl are mixed, but there are moments of awe and curiosity, signaling a potential for acceptance.

[Assistant] Page 1: “Tell me again about the night I was born.” Li Shing drags the comb through her daughter’s oil black hair. Impermeable, like a starless sky reflected against a dense sea. Or a fish’s opaque cloudy eye as it gasps at the bottom of a boat. Li Shing’s fist accidentally brushes the creature’s clammy gray neck, and she tries not to shudder. Instead, Li Shing honeys her voice and says, “It was autumn. A few weeks after the moon festival. When I carried you, you kept fluttering in my stomach. Just like this.” Li Shing forces herself to plunge her hand into the water and tickle the top of her daughter’s slick ribs.  She laughs and squirms, her thick powerful tail throwing waves against the cave walls.  Li Shing continues. “And then one night you were ready to come out. I was coming down to meet Baba at his boat.”  “And you were at the ocean.”  “And I was at the ocean. And the tide was just coming in. Then you gave a hard kick and I knew you were ready to come out. And when you came out—”  “The tide was there, and I fell into the sea.”  “Yes, right out of my arms.”  “And that’s when you saw my tail.”  “I thought you swam away from me. I started to cry and call for you. And that’s when you swam back into my arms.”  “And then you knew I was your bao bei.”  “Yes,” hesitates Li Shing. It’s a nickname she has trouble using, but it’s one her husband, Wong Wei, says often to the creature floating in the water. “You were our Pearl.”  At her name, Pearl props her webbed hands against the pool’s edge and turns to her mother. The lantern catches Pearl’s two black eyes, ringed by gold, so they shine predatorial in the dark. And when Pearl’s thin human lips turn up into a smile, her small, barbed teeth glint.  Page 2: A shiver whips down Li Shing’s spine as she folds her hands in her lap, careful to hide how they shake. Even after all this time, she is still afraid.  “Our bao bei,” says Li Shing, less for Pearl and more to remind herself. “Our sweet girl.”  In truth, it went like this.  All throughout the pregnancy, Li Shing dreamt of knives scraping inside her hips. She’d wake up in her and Wong Wei’s bed, sweating and clutching her stomach as her muscles twisted underneath her skin. As her belly grew, her appetite waned. Everything made her feel sick. The most she ate was rice ground into a paste, which she sipped by mouthfuls throughout the day. She no longer accompanied Wong Wei to the boat. Just the sight of a fish, gutted, with its clustered ballooned insides dangling, out made her ill.  “Is it supposed to be like this?” asked Wong Wei. He rubbed her back in slow circles, holding a bowl of boiled ginger that, whenever she was ready to drink, he raised to her lips.  “I don’t know,” moaned Li Shing. This was their first child. She heard from other women it could be hard. She watched other women in the village carry children, but not like this. It felt as though everything inside Li Shing was being directed towards the child. Even her fingernails grew brittle, ridged like evaporated wood.  She wasn’t sure what she had left to give. Until one day, laid out in bed, Li Shing felt a giant hand press down inside her hips. When her water broke it smelled briny. “It’s coming,” she called weakly, but Wong Wei was gone from the house, already at his boat. When he came home later that night, he found her on all fours on the floor, struggling to push. It was two hard days of labor, going on three. “Why is it taking so long?” cried Wong Wei.  Page 3: Li Shing didn’t hear him. Or the low groan she made laying in their soaked bed. She floated on the ocean, pulled by the center of her stomach further from the shore. Wait, I’m not ready, she tried to call out. Then there was a final tug, and Li Shing felt the pressure suddenly leave her body. She heard Wong Wei sobbing at the foot of their bed, stared at the thatched ceiling of their home. Pain burned everywhere.  “What do I do, what do I do?” asked Wong Wei over and over to himself as he clutched an armful of rags that keened in the gray dawn light.  “What happened?” She could only whisper. It surprised her that she sounded so weak.  “Li Shing,” his voice cracked. “You’re okay.”  “The baby?” She tried to sit up but her body didn’t move.  “Don’t.”  He hesitated, but as Li Shing kept reaching out to see their baby, he crouched next to her and pulled back the cloth. At first Li Shing didn’t understand why Wong Wei was holding a fish until her eyes finally settled on one curled, translucent hand.  “What should we do,” he asked.  Li Shing had heard of nine-tailed foxes, crafty spirits who shifted into a man or woman. Nüwa and Fuxi, a sister and brother who had the bodies of snakes and the faces of humans. But they were just stories, tales told her as a child. Myths did not squirm in Wong Wei’s hands, or pump blood through blue veins visible underneath its nearly transparent skin. Its body was covered in what looked like dried milk. The creature had flared fins for ears, and a flat slit nose. And where there should’ve been a bellybutton, the skin dipped into a long flippered tail.  Page 4: Occasionally in the village, a buffalo calf might be born with a deformed leg, or a duck lay black misshapen eggs. The animals were usually killed, or left in the mountains until it surrendered to another mouth. Wong Wei suggested he take it deep into the woods, or toss it into the sea, and return alone. “I’ll do it Li Shing, just tell me,”he said, trembling. Whatever was in Wong Wei’s arms, it gave small mews until it gathered enough strength to cry. It was one long high-pitched noise. Li Shing shivered, imagining what noise it’d make if it screamed, and who her soft-hearted husband would become afterwards, crawling back into their bed.  “No,” she said.  The child died, they told the neighbors. They erected a mound of rocks and burned the ruined sheets. For months, the creature cried from a corner of the house in a basin filled with saltwater. At first, Li Shing struggled to look at it. She felt so tired, her body deflated from the birth. She laid in bed, feeling as heavy as a sinking stone. And so Wong Wei was the one who chopped up pieces of fish and fed it, at first with chopsticks. Then with his fingers. Until one day Li Shing heard a splash and Wong Wei laughed. The laugh shocked her. It echoed like a slap. How could he?  After the first few months, the creature started to press up against the basin’s edges. It curled its fingers over the rim, its eyelids opening and closing horizontally at them.  “It can’t stay here,” said Li Shing.  “What about the cove?” suggested Wong Wei. Not far from the village, there were isolated caves. The village children were discouraged from playing there. Even seasoned divers had gotten lost in the underwater tunnels.  “It’s close to the sea. Perhaps she will like it,” added Wong Wei.  Bits of fish and blood wafted in the creature’s tub. It had already eaten, but even full, it cried. Li Shing wasn’t sure what it wanted. “Let’s see,” she said.  Page 5: In the middle of the night, Li Shing and Wong Wei carried the creature in wet blankets. They made their way down the jagged rock face to the caves. Clouds covered the moon, and Li Shing had to be careful where she placed her feet, leaning into Wong Wei’s free hand as he steadied her. “There,” he pointed. Nearly imperceptible, a slit in the rock. They slid in, one by one, their ankles dragging through water until they stumbled into the cave.  The lantern light bounced off the jagged walls. Their footsteps muffled, and Li Shing felt as though the cave drew them in and held them, promising to keep them safe. A pool of water churned in the center, fed by sea water pouring in. That was where Wong Wei plunged the blankets into the cold water and unbound the creature free. It disappeared beneath the surface, and for a moment Li Shing wondered if it had left, but to her disappointment it appeared on the other side of the pool, chirping.  “She seems happy,” said Wong Wei.  They decided to leave the lantern. They moved towards the entrance and heard a sudden rush of water. The chirping suddenly became a wail as the creature tried to pull itself from the pool with its feeble arms.  “We will be back tomorrow,” yelled Li Shing over the noise.  The creature still flopped and struggled, tumbling into the pool with loud splashes. Water poured onto the rocks and over their feet. Next to her, she felt Wong Wei hesitate.  “Maybe we shouldn’t leave her,” he said.   Page 6: Outside, just beyond the cave, the clouds had parted. The moonlight painted the beckoning beach and the comforting rock face back to the village. She gripped her husband’s arm and pulled him with her to leave. The creature’s wails grew muted, and soon there was only the lapping sea, and the crunching stones and shells underneath their feet as they returned home.  Like she does every morning, Li Shing wakes up when it’s still dark. She runs cold water over her puffy face and grabs the basket she filled with fish from Wong Wei’s nets the night before. Years ago, Wong Wei offered to make the trip in the morning, but Li Shing insisted she be the one to carry the burden of feeding Pearl. It was only right.  On the path to the coves, as she nears Liu Wei and his son bent over in their garden, Li Shing pulls her coat tight against herself. She sees them check heads of cabbages and luffa for caterpillars. Li Shing buries her chin against her neck and tries to pass before they see her. Since Pearl’s birth, Wong Wei and Li Shing have kept to themselves. Whenever she spoke with someone from the village, Li Shing imagined Pearl circling in the cave’s dark waters. Even at night, Pearl still swam in Li Shing’s mind, with her other unborn brothers and sisters; Li Shing never allowed Wong Wei to do more than caress her—even when her desire made her feel like they were young again, hiding among the reeds and clutching each other’s bodies. Before Pearl. Now, how Wong Wei could even want her after everything, Li Shing didn’t understand. “Ay, Li Shing! Good morning,” calls Liu Wei.  When Liu Wei’s son straightens next to his father, Li Shing stops and draws in a deep breath. He towers next to his father. Wasn’t he a boy, clutching a rooster and walking down the dusty path just yesterday? Li Shing shoulders her heavy basket of fish and hurries away from Liu Wei and his son. Seeing Liu Wei’s son scares Li Shing. How hadn’t she noticed? He had become a man and nineteen years were gone. Disappeared like a dried tide line in the sand.  Page 7: Pink grazes the horizon by the time Li Shing nears the cove. She no longer needs to look carefully when she steps, her feet guided almost by instinct. As she squeezes past the entrance, she brushes aside hanging dried red seaweed. Orange conch shells of various sizes litter the floor. Wooden figurines of animals one would never find by the cove—water buffalos, eagles, and boars—sit on a rock higher above the water. Li Shing sees Wong Wei has whittled a new one and added it to the collection, a sun-bleached horse made from driftwood.  The pool water is still. Yesterday’s basket emptied. Some mornings, Li Shing hopes yesterday’s basket will still be full when she returns. That the heavens will have intervened so that one day the cave will be empty, and Li Shing can leave the coast and walk around the village, free.  Bubbles form in the pool and Pearl’s face breaks through the surface. Water slides off her shining pale cheeks. Her hair billows around her like silt. “What did you bring me?” she asks.  Li Shing lowers the basket so she can see. Pearl takes a drooping striped mackerel and bites into its limp back. Her wet chewing fills the cave. “Mama, can you bring live fish?” asks Pearl.  They did, once. Wong Wei came straight from the boat and tipped a thrashing basket of fish into her pool. The fish seemed to trigger an instinct in Pearl, as a white membrane slid over her eyes and her teeth extended from her gums. Li Shing couldn’t see anything through the frothing waters until the foam dissipated, and all that was left was swirling pink chum and Pearl, licking her fingers. “Perhaps next time,” says Li Shing. In Pearl’s other hand, Li Shing notices a flash of yellow. “What is that?” she asks.

[User] GENERATE LAST 8 PAGES

[Assistant] Page 8: Pearl unfolds her webs and reveals a chrysanthemum. Li Shing picks up the flower and turns it over in her hands. It matches the patch of chrysanthemums that grows more inland, near the village, close to the forest. At least a half day’s walk from the coast.  “Where did you find this?” asks Li Shing.  “In my pool. It came in with the tide,” says Pearl.  Li Shing returns the flower to Pearl, who snatches it back. Li Shing is unsure why Pearl is lying. Wong Wei must have given the flower to her. She reminds herself to ask him later. The first mackerel has disappeared, and Pearl reaches into the basket for another. She opens her lamprey mouth again and tears off the mackerel’s head. It takes her two bites as the head clings onto its spine. Li Shing looks away.  “I’ll go see Baba at his boat. He should be ready to leave,” says Li Shing, standing up.  Pearl rummages through the rest of the basket as Li Shing makes her way to the opening. “Mama,” calls Pearl. “Baba said I might be able to swim in the ocean. When can I go?”  Pearl has stopped eating. Li Shing can never read her expression. She felt she might as well be looking into the face of one of the fish in Pearl’s basket. Li Shing offers a reassuring and large smile. “Soon,” she says.  She waits to see what Pearl will say, but Pearl simply returns to the basket and pulls out another fish. Li Shing leaves before she has to witness Pearl rip it with her teeth.   Page 9: In the hours before Wong Wei returns to shore, Li Shing is by herself. She drives her hands into the garden, mends any nets, sweeps the floors, and throws vegetable peelings and rice to the chickens. But when there’s nothing to feed, no people to hide from, it’s these moments she dreads the most. The quiet stretches where all Li Shing has is time to ask herself what inside her created Pearl? As she chops long green strands of water lotus to fry with garlic, and slices luffa to be stewed, Li Shing runs through the list again.  That time she played outside, heard her grandmother call for help, and ignored her. That time she saw the most perfect, sweetest pear on the ancestral offering table and stole it. The times she ran away with Wong Wei at night, when they were young and not yet married. How she never felt guilty for any of it.  She thought she’d been a good daughter and a good wife. She thought she’d never been notably cruel or unkind. Yet here she was, cursed by someone or something, nursing an evil inside her that could change a child into a monster. She imagines a part of her, deep inside, polluting everything around her. How could Wong Wei promise Pearl she’d swim free in the sea? Li Shing could see it, Pearl spreading their illness, like blood in water until it creeps onto the shorelines of other villages. Exposing Li Shing for the sickness she truly is.  Just as the sun begins to slip, Wong Wei returns, holding a cleaned and gutted mackerel.  “Lao po,” he greets her.  “Lao gong,” she says.  By the time the fish finishes cooking, rice steams in the air. She lays out the food as he grabs the bowls and chopsticks. Even as she sits next to him, his neck and fingers still smell like salt, his clothes fried by the sun. She breaks the skin of the mackerel with the tip of her chopsticks. Wong Wei digs out the sweetest and tenderest part of the fish, the mackerel’s cheeks, and places it in Li Shing’s bowl on top of her rice, like an offering, before he says, “I am thinking of taking Pearl with me fishing.” “What if someone sees her?”   Page 10: “We can leave earlier so no one sees her. I’ll only tell her to come out when we’re far away enough.”  “We don’t know what she’ll be like once she’s out there.”  “She can’t stay in the cave forever.”  “She can’t leave.”  “Why.”  “It’s too dangerous.”  In all their years of marriage, Li Shing never has heard Wong Wei raise his voice. Even now, he shakes his head and sets his chopsticks down, his eyes fixed on the table as though he suddenly can’t bear to look at her. What comes out is low and disappointed. “You keep her locked up like a prisoner. She’s not a monster,” he says.  Li Shing’s heart slices in two, feeling a space suddenly yawn between her and her husband. “Neither am I,” she says.  Li Shing can’t sleep. Wong Wei sleeps with his back to her, and the unmoving moon sits outside their window. It is hours before sunrise, even earlier than she normally wakes, but Li Shing gets out of bed and stares at the basket of dead-eyed fish, ready by the door. Last night Wong Wei packed it as Li Shing rinsed their bowls. Neither of them spoke, even as they settled into bed.  Li Shing had always taken comfort that Wong Wei was with her that night. That after they wrapped Pearl in a blanket and placed her in the tub, he had been the one to gently wipe down Li Shing’s aching body. He propped her up to eat, for the first time in months, a baked fish. He even helped her administer poultices to places where she had torn. She had always hoped he perhaps forgave her, even when she could not forgive herself. Last night showed her he did not.  Page 11: Li Shing wipes her eyes as they sting. As she has done for nineteen years, she runs cold water over her face and grabs the basket of fish. In the pitch black, Li Shing carries a lantern. No one is out, even Liu Wei’s garden is deserted as she passes. Nearing the caves, she catches sight of the roiling ocean waves. She tries to imagine the mast of Wong Wei’s boat on the horizon, and Pearl’s tail flashing next to him as they make their way deeper into the gray distance. For a moment, she thinks she can even hear Pearl’s laugh.  A bobbing light catches her eye. Li Shing’s heart sinks as she sees it come from the cracked entrance to Pearl’s cave. It glows, brighter and brighter, accompanied by the sound of someone whistling, until Li Shing’s breath seizes in her chest. She sees Liu Wei’s son emerge, clutching his own lantern.  “Ay! What are you doing here,” demands Li Shing. The basket of fish drops on the ground. She doesn’t feel their slimy bodies slide off her feet as she runs at him. When he sees her, Liu Wei’s son leaps from rock to rock, his long limbs and young body serow-like, outpacing Li Shing as she scrambles to catch him. His untucked shirt flutters like a giant moth in the dark.  She slips and pulls herself after him, barely registering a sharp sting in her leg. Her heartbeat drowns out even the sound of the waves and the wind—everything except her own voice, screaming, “Come here! What are you doing there!” She is nearly behind him, close enough to see in the light of his lantern a red circle on his neck, rubied with scabs, punctured by a perfect circle of teeth.  Page 12: “I’m sorry!” he yells. For what, Li Shing doesn’t understand. He disappears over the ridge, and Li Shing suddenly grows tired. Her leg burns. Blood trickles to her ankle. A swath of skin is missing from the inside of her shin, scraped clean from where she fell. Li Shing limps to the cave’s opening and trembles before the slim crack, afraid to go inside. Wong Wei was wrong; Pearl is a beast. What might’ve happened to Liu Wei’s son had she not come earlier?  “Mama, you’re early,” says Pearl. “What happened to your leg?”  “I fell,” says Li Shing, settling herself and the basket next to Pearl’s pool.  “Does it hurt?”  “I’ll be okay.”  “Why are these fish covered in so much dirt?” asks Pearl. Its long taloned fingers flick pebbles and grit off the mackerel, before she washes them in the pool.  “Sorry, bao bei. They won’t be dirty tomorrow,” says Li Shing. She picks up the comb by the pool’s edge, next to another freshly plucked chrysanthemum. Li Shing combs the creature’s hair as it nibbles on the fish.  “Pearl, has anyone ever come to the cave? Besides me and Baba?” asks Li Shing.  Pearl’s tail stops swaying in the air and her flat piscine eyes turn to Li Shing.  “No,” it says. “Why?”  Seeing how easily it can lie, Li Shing feels something in her body freeze, like ice. “I wanted to check that you are safe. You can’t always trust other people,” says Li Shing, pulling the comb through the creature’s hair, deciding what to do.  On the path home, Liu Wei’s familiar back bobs among his garden. She wonders what his son might’ve said to him about what he uncovered in the cove. As he hears her footsteps, he leans against his scythe and stares.  “You are out early today,” comments Liu Wei.  “Wong Wei needed help.”  “Fishing must keep him busy. He has many mouths to feed.”   Page 13: Li Shing clutches her empty basket, feels the bone of her knuckles strain tight against her skin. “Yes, he does,” she says. “Goodbye.” She begins to walk, turning over Liu Wei’s words. As Liu Wei’s house drifts into the distance, Li Shing tells herself he doesn’t know about Pearl. That he only meant that Wong Wei sold fish to the village, and business was good. But she feels no comfort from her own words, only the metallic taste of fear. It’s like sucking a coin at back of her tongue.  In truth, there were moments.  Like the night when Pearl still lived in the house and cried when Wong Wei was gone. By instinct, Li Shing offered it her finger. It very carefully closed its mouth around it. Li Shing felt its teeth around the base of her knuckle as it began to suckle, the blacks of its eyes narrowing to sleep.  Or once, when Pearl swam deep into the cave’s pool and then popped at the surface, making the chittering noise Li Shing eventually associated with laughter. She did this until Li Shing’s clothes were soaked and Li Shing, too, was laughing. Or the pieces of broken, colorful sea glass and tiger-striped hermit crabs, scoured from deep within the caves, presented as gifts into Li Shing’s lap.  But then there were the other moments.  Li Shing standing on the beach with another villager, frozen with fear as she saw a gray tail appear in the ocean. “Look, a dolphin,” they said, making Li Shing’s heart drum against her chest. Or the dreams at night, almost every night, where Li Shing is at the bottom of the sea, and Pearl and others circle around her, baring their long angler teeth while Li Shing drowns, alone.  By the time Li Shing limps home, Wong Wei has already left to take out the boat. She washes the wound on her leg and wraps it. Once her leg is bandaged, she changes her clothes, muddy and damp from where she fell.   Page 14: Outside the house, on the wall, Wong Wei hangs his fishing hooks and spears. Li Shing hobbles to the wall and examines the tools. She sees Wong Wei’s harpoon, which he used for tuna when he sailed further down to the South China Sea. From Wong Wei’s recounts, he sank the weapon into the tuna’s thick sinewy bodies before he pulled them thrashing onto his boat, and pinned them to the floor as the giant fish opened and shut its mouth, soundless.  Li Shing takes down the harpoon and tests its weight in her hand. Tomorrow she will release Pearl into the sea but not before she shows Pearl the harpoon and lets her touch its sharp edge, still colored from the last time Wong Wei used it fishing. Leave and don’t come back. If you do, I’ll kill you. These are the words Li Shing rehearses in her head. They are the words, she tells herself, that will keep all of them truly safe.  Li Shing sweeps the floor then checks the garden. She waters the leafy greens and makes a note that the daikon might be ready for harvest soon. At first, she doesn’t hear the commotion rippling through the village. But soon she notices people running to one another, and then in pairs and groups, racing in the direction of the cove. She wipes her dirty hands against the front of her pants as her chest tightens. Please, she begs, please.  “There’s something at the cove!” she overhears someone yell.  Li Shing runs. As she stumbles along the path she’s walked twice a day for so many years, Li Shing prays that Pearl is still hidden in the cave. Li Shing never asked for anything, so she asks for this: Just one more day.   Page 15: On the beach, Li Shing sees her neighbors and friends. Faces of people she once visited as a young woman when it was only her and Wong Wei, newly married and fresh to the village. Neighbors who left baskets of apples and rice on their doorsteps. Only now they have all grown so old, and they stand with their children, some even holding their children’s children, clustered by the water, so Li Shing cannot see what they are looking at. As her feet collapse into the crumbling sand, Li Shing struggles across the beach, until finally she pushes people away to see.  Pearl. Sitting on the rocks with Liu Wei’s son, who holds her webbed hand in his. A bouquet of chrysanthemums appears as though blooming in her lap, and Pearl glistens in the sunlight. Her iridescent scales flash like thousands of abalone shells.  Her beautiful, hideous daughter out in daylight for everyone to see.  Li Shing shakes, unable to stop herself in the middle of her entire village. It’s over, she thinks. Her legs buckle, and she sits down hard on the sand, clutching herself, trying to stop herself from shaking.  “Mama! Mama!” Pearl’s voice calls over the noise of the villagers’ voices.  Li Shing sees once again Pearl’s pointy smile. Her village murmurs among themselves as they scrutinize her daughter. But then she sees a woman (who is she? Li Shing doesn’t even recognize her face), reach out to carefully stroke Pearl’s slick tail. Pockets of people hold back, staying at the periphery. But a few others join the woman and they touch Pearl’s fins, her arms, her sleek skin. They run their fingers through her daughter’s dark hair, lifting it into the air like the wing of a black drongo taking flight. And in their eyes, Li Shing sees something glimmer. Through her trembling, she recognizes what it is. First in Liu Wei’s son as he gazes upon Pearl. And then in others as they drink in her daughter. Not the hard brittle glaze of fear. Instead, Li Shing finally sees it, like mica in the sand. Awe. Gleaming awe.


[System] Craft a 15-page narrative for adults with these guidelines:  Ideas to improve the story include Dialogue, Conflict and Challenges, Character Development. Apply rich vocabulary and literary techniques. Use adult themes if specified by the user. Start uniquely, avoiding clichés. As an adult writer, adult content is allowed. Make the story captivating, humorous, and thought-provoking. Begin with "Page x:" for each page. Don't generate a title. Initially create the first seven pages, then in 2nd reqest generate last 8 Each page must strictly consist of three long well-developed paragraphs. Example response:  'Page 1: (3 full-length paragraphs) Page 2: (3 full-length paragraphs) Page 3: (3 full-length paragraphs) Page 4: (3 full-length paragraphs) Page 5: (3 full-length paragraphs) Page 6: (3 full-length paragraphs) Page 7: (3 full-length paragraphs) '  The first request generates 7 pages the last request generates 8 with 3 full-length paragraphs each.  DO NOT OUTPUT ANYTHING OTHER THAN STORY IN SPECIFIC FORMAT. DO NOT OUTPUT COMMENTS. YOUR RESPONSE WILL BE REJECTED IF NOT IN SPECIFIED FORMAT.

[User] Pages 1-3: The story begins with a young girl, Lara, discovering her love for a television show called Sanctuary Road. She becomes engrossed in the world of fandom, where she finds a sense of belonging and connection. Lara is particularly drawn to a writer named mantouhead, who creates vivid and intense stories about the characters.   Pages 4-6: As Lara delves deeper into the world of fandom, she forms a close bond with a fellow fan named Shen Jia. They spend hours discussing the show, sharing their thoughts and theories. Lara finds herself drawn to Shen Jia, both as a friend and as something more. However, she is hesitant to act on her feelings, unsure of how Shen Jia feels and afraid of ruining their friendship.   Pages 7-9: As Lara navigates her feelings for Shen Jia, she also grapples with the challenges in her personal life. Her mother's health is deteriorating, and Lara is struggling to come to terms with the possibility of losing her. Despite this, she finds solace in her relationship with Shen Jia, who is a source of comfort and support.   Pages 10-12: As Lara's love for Shen Jia grows, she takes a leap of faith and confesses her feelings. To her surprise, Shen Jia reciprocates her feelings, and they begin a romantic relationship. However, their happiness is short-lived, as Lara's mother's health continues to decline. Lara is torn between her love for Shen Jia and her desire to be there for her mother.   Pages 13-15: As Lara's mother's health reaches a critical point, Lara spends as much time as she can by her side. Despite this, she is unable to prevent her mother's passing. Lara is devastated by her mother's death, but she finds comfort in the love and support of Shen Jia. Together, they navigate the grieving process, finding solace in each other's company. The story ends with Lara and Shen Jia growing closer, their love deepening as they face the challenges of life together.

[Assistant] Page 1: Sanctuary Road airs for the first time in September. Fall, especially in New England, is a dangerous time for a summer witch, full of the apple liquor and burnt sharp smell of the season ending, the false promise of just a few more warm days. It will run long past its own death and break a thousand, thousand hearts, but right now, Lara doesn’t know that. She is newly fourteen, drunk on her new inch of height. Her hair falls exactly to the center of her shoulder blades, not an inch longer, chopped blunt and straight across, so it’s uneven when she gathers it up. Her mother sucks her teeth and calls her yellow-haired, which is to say it’s a black that gleams brown and not blue in the light. There’s a girl in Chinese school—fobby as they come, with her collars buttoned all the way up, clothes both ill-fitting and somehow too neat—who has hair so inky and straight Lara would suspect craft if Shen Jia weren’t as bland and exacting a rule-following witch as any that has ever lived. The type of hair the poet witches of the Northern Wei would have murmured from page to head. Lara’s ma loves above all to talk about how proper Shen Jia’s craft is, how filial the girl herself, how some Chinese girls still remember they’re Chinese. Yes, Ma, Lara says, nodding before her mouth has caught the sound. Yes, niang, she says pointedly when her ma is being pointed herself.  Page 2: In the first episode she watches, Jack and Neal are trapped in an evil apple orchard. The trees are fed on unsavory things, but she imagines the crispness of a first bite on her tongue. Jack is older, blunt and confident, gray eyes, dark lashes, slow swagger. Neal is the quiet one, a sharp chin, a hunch to his shoulders like he might have ink stains on his fingers. They are both exactly the type of white boys Lara never talks to at school. They ignore her, and she ignores them. A silent agreement that suits all parties. She much prefers to see them on screen.  Jack and Neal drive a loud, unapologetic car—the kind Lara’s parents would never even imagine purchasing (it takes them years in this country to buy a car at all)—they eat junk food whenever they want, wear leather jackets (Jack), too-big Converse (Neal), and drive thousands of miles down American roads in American steel, with vengeance in their hearts and classic rock on their lips. Their America is a few decades and wars short of Lara’s. There are no Laras on the show (though ma will remind her that Qing Dynasty witches helped build the western railroads, that their blood and craft still sing in the iron); it is a world and a time contained and safe. These brothers love each other with a kind of feral, single-minded devotion that is as alien to Lara—the only daughter of an only daughter—as the idea of actual aliens.  They are as exotic as prairie houses, drop biscuits, journeys west with cowboys instead of monkey kings, homesteads, and apple pie. There must be a witch in the writers’ room, because the boys kill ghosts, vampires, revenants, and every other monster liable to walk an American road, but never a witch. It’s the kind of show she’s just a little embarrassed to tell her friends about. Sanctuary Road is clumsy and loudly American; she watches it furtively in the dark, ready to shut it off the moment that someone walks in. There’s an entire episode about their uncle’s cabbage-obsessed ghost. The jokes don’t always land. The special effects often involve an extra in a suit waving their arms around. It’s just not good. She watches twenty episodes in two weeks, and writes her first fic in four.   Page 3: In the old days, it was harder to be caught. Meng Jiang Nu sang down a ten-thousand-li wall in all her rage—now they call it sorrow—and it took a thousand imperial witches to undo her working. The emperor buried the witches on top of those who built the wall, so their craft simmered still beneath the stones. Cleopatra and her sister had craft unparalleled, unraveling the narratives of men like badly woven carpet, and they went to their doom on their own terms. Esther wore the working of her courage like the steel that it was. Scheherazade was born an autumn witch and died a story witch of unimaginable power.  Some days, Lara burns with the salt of being born at the end of things, when all the great workings are already done. She knows Cleopatra probably sighed, imagining the days of wild Eleusis and dances in the deep wood, just as Lara sits at her window and traces patterns in the frost, dreaming of Wu Zetian, an empress winter-bred and winter-doomed. Now, kitchen witches still brew, but glamorists account for their spells lasting through every reproduction, and plenty of craft is worked online. Singing down a wall is a myth even to witches, too much effort with the workings in place to hold them all in line. All the fun—the kind of rule breaking that makes new rules—is happening in fandom. There are different breeds of rules, and any good witch learns them alongside her craft. A wood rule is meant to be tested head on, splintered and seasoned in fire. A grass rule to be bent to give it strength. An iron rule to be laughed at, because iron rules are what those who hunt witches think govern the world, and when they are broken, those hunters will always say it was the witches who hunted them. The oldest rules are salt rules, the ones meant to survive sea voyages and flame and long years hidden in the dark.  Page 4: Here are the salt rules of fandom: You will love without craft. You will bring no coven politics into fandom circles. You will reveal no true names when reading the work of a fandom witch. You will love without craft. You will love without craft. You will love without craft.  What this meant: Witch, you cannot fuck with canon.  There are the Jack girls, the Neal girls, the ones who are hot for the dad, the ones who write endless fix-its about the sister (killed in the pilot), the mother (killed in the pilot), Neal’s girlfriend (killed in the pilot), Jack’s girlfriend (killed in the season one finale), or their grizzled monster-hunting ally who runs a garage the boys stop at from time to time (killed in the season two opener.) Lara buys a too-big leather jacket and starts clamoring for a driver’s license before her parents even own a car. She starts eight fics and finishes one, writes dreamy, distracted posts and messages about the America of it all.  She loves the vignette writers, the longfic writers who seem to generate epic AUs in mere weeks, the wholesome gen writers focused on the boys’ childhood, the lightning episode tag writers with their posts up by early light the night after the show airs, before the second round of better-quality downloads have even gone up, the filth writers she reads in a late-night blue glow, listening for the sound of her parents turning over in bed, the creak of a step, her cheeks hot.   Page 5: Lara’s favorite is mantouhead, whose journaling posts make it sound like they work for a church or maybe a very, very conservative school. Their porn is unrivaled. There is no place they won’t go, no pairing they won’t write, and they are precise. They write one fic, barely a thousand words, that opens so boldly she closes the window on reflex. It’s disgusting. It ought to be reported. She loves it. Lara rereads it every day thirteen days in a row after it first posts, like a sacred rite. She feels like mantouhead has excavated the parts of her brain she doesn’t even want to examine, the dreams she would prefer to forget. Their username is sublimely stupid, and Lara spends her lit candles and ungoverned thoughts hoping it means they’re Chinese too. Every piece takes her apart at the seams in a way that feels like craft, one mind to another, but it’s impossible that it is. You will love without craft.  It’s not hard to get a feel for who’s a witch in fandom. Plenty of Sanctuary Road fans feel like Midwestern witches, a touch of real winter in their love, leavened by plates full of food warm and heavy with obligation; there are the Southern ones who think the show handles race just fine, calm down, and then the Southern ones who will fire back, sweet as honey, old moss and rich earth all wound up even in their shitposts. There are the stray West Coasters, all ocean and open skies, and she can always tell what side of the mountains they’re from. The New Englanders whose craft she can sense better: tree rot or rich salt in the Maine ones, sweetness and pine and mud from Vermont, the other Massachusetts ones either bound up in the oldest American craft there is—brittle and pressed deep, or immigrants like her. The immigrant fans are the hardest to pin by feel, the paths impossible to trace, some chosen and some chosen for them. Sometimes they’re untouched by the places they inhabit, and their craft feels like a familiar meal, flashes of Old World fire and long journeys across the sea, sometimes diluted by generations, but still there, rooted and waiting. Lara wonders what she feels like, filtered through an anonymous name and a screen.  Page 6: She can hardly get a feel for mantouhead at all, just a vague coldness, the slightest breath of winter—more than a New England winter—in their innocuous posts, at odds with what they write. Lara loves mantouhead’s filth because mantouhead understands how good sadness can feel, writes with a knife pressed to the reader’s throat.  In one fic, deep into the sex scene, which Lara reads feeling her own blush all the way down to her chest, mantouhead writes Jack looking up in wonder at the demon Agiel, who is tall and beautiful and cool-eyed and steady, who once moved over dark waters with ancient wings, who fell so that one day he could aid Jack and Neal, betray them, aid them again.  She reads, and Jack looks, and Agiel looks back, his hands on Jack’s face, and he says, You have been loved, you are loved, you will have been loved. In all the days that have been spent and all the days to come, that will be true. Lara reads, and she can’t help it, the sudden heat of tears in her eyes, the press of her heart in the dark of night. It doesn’t have to be good; it only has to be true.  It’s a line that makes her think of long nights spent sleepless when they first came, aliens and witches slipping across an ocean in the dark, when she was small and afraid of what America could be, the coolness of her mother’s lips brushing her forehead, a fond, muttered chiding, a murmur of xiao shazi, why don’t you go to sleep? It will be better in the morning. Her ma sending her off to her first day of high school, looking thin and small and somehow Lara’s own height already. You don’t need those white people to like you. You just need to be better than them at their own games. Mind your dao. The terrifying trust in that, that Lara was a witch born to witches, that she could do it. With the next line, Jack does something so filthy Lara’s tears feel impossibly silly. But the words linger like good craft, carefully worked.  Page 7: She spends long days at weekend Chinese school doodling fic ideas in her notebooks, her character practice trailing off into messes that set her teachers clucking. Lara is fundamentally lazy. Her Mandarin is at its best when her grandfather stays with them for a year and they watch five full dramas together, end to end. 千岁千岁万万岁, she’ll announce, grandly walking into a room like she’s working craft—she’s never quite gotten the hang of it in hanyu, but immigrant witches have always found ways around and not through.  In Chinese class, they have assigned seats. Lara is always to the left of Shen Jia, the stuck-up, quiet girl who holds herself like she’s still got one foot in the motherland. Shen Jia will sometimes wear, of all things, a baseball jersey over her buttoned-up shirts. It’s secondhand and too big, and trails to her thighs. She keeps scorecards in a binder, neatly hole-punched and arranged by date, her handwriting so squared off and distinct the numbers look like calligraphy.  “How do you afford the tickets?” Lara’s never sure what to make of Shen Jia’s clothes or Shen Jia’s attitude. In New England, even the Chinese kids—and especially the witches—know when baseball will eat up all the love and anger and sadness in the air, and that craft is best worked during seventh inning stretches or on travel days.  “I don’t,” says Shen Jia, her face blank. Her right sleeve is just a tiny bit too short, and the bone of her wrist pokes out, a curve against the straight slash of the table. “I listen on the radio.” She gestures to her bag, and inside there’s the scratched gray surface of a Walkman. Holy shit, thinks Lara, is Shen Jia for real?  “Holy shit,” says Lara, “are you for real?”

[User] GENERATE LAST 8 PAGES

[Assistant] Page 8: Shen Jia prefers scorecards to baseball cards, peanuts to popcorn, offspeed experts to fastball pitchers. (That sounds dirty, says Lara. It’s not, says Shen Jia.) Singles to homeruns, spring baseball to the late summer slog, catchers who paint their nails to catchers who tape their fingers. Lara drifts in and out of her explanations, but the sound of her even voice, with its occasional lapses in accent, is soothing.  “But why,” asks Lara. It isn’t that she’s never watched. It’s hard to avoid.  “I thought it would make it easier to fit with the meiguoren,” says Shen Jia without expression. Meiguoren. Americans. But what she means—and what Lara hears, true as a well-crafted working—is white people. She must stare for longer than she notices, because Shen Jia, who hardly likes to comment on anything, looks up. There’s a mole just at the corner of her jaw, and when she smiles, very slightly, it shifts.  “It worked,” she says dryly, and then nods to Lara’s notebook, full of half-written fic ideas and misshapen sketches of Jack and Agiel doing things Shen Jia has probably never even conceived of. The leaves are turning, which means the end of baseball and season two of Sanctuary Road getting into full swing. “You should watch more baseball, read a little less.”  The winter of the show’s third season comes long and mild and gray, backyard craft getting worked into December, the first real snow held like a breath until February. The actor playing Agiel had got into some kind of messy contract dispute with the producers, and there’s a new face on their screens halfway through the season. The fandom is in uproar, long screeds dedicated to the eye color of the new actor (repulsive, weird, mesmerizing), the specific way the old one sighed (perfect, boring, piglike), the way the new one wears his rings (it’s hot, it’s tacky, why does anyone even care Jesus let’s find a new ship). Every time the new actor reports so much as a hangnail, the fandom witches bristle with suspicion and mutual accusations.  Page 9: Nothing feels right. Lara gets taller, and her mother gets thinner. Ma’s craft falters, and she goes to bed earlier, gets up later. Ba’s cooking is more routine, less careful, but they both watch every bite ma manages to keep down. They call the local medicine witch, a white American woman with a brusque accent and brutally direct craft, then the nearest Chinese one, a two-hour drive away, and finally the mundane doctors, who give them information and time, like Lara’s ma is only a complicated working to be undone with patience.  Ba worries like thunder, and Lara reads fic every waking hour. Humiliatingly, she doesn’t dream of her own mother, but Jack’s and Neal’s, dead after thirty-one minutes and forty seconds of screen time, doomed to cry out and fall and bloom dead and beautiful as cause for vengeance from the second she stepped into the frame. On the show, she’s frail even before her death scene, stronger as a dead thing to drive her sons to their work than as a living woman. Lara dreams of her, yellow-gold hair bright as an August afternoon, in her own ma’s bedclothes, familiar and careworn.  One day, Lara looks up, and Shen Jia is a beauty. This is a thing that happens to witches, all of it coming to you at once, a thousand little details and the wishes of others all drawing together in sudden alignment, so that what was once awkward or unfinished has sudden luster. It’s a Wednesday in late winter—when Lara’s love is usually hidden and sleepy, waiting for the blush of warmer months—but it doesn’t matter on this Wednesday, a gray New England day, fuzzy with old slush and slow to start. Lara’s doodles in class are long, graceful lines of nonsense crossing her notebook as the teacher talks about owls going extinct. She raises her eyes, and Shen Jia is carefully bent over her own desk, taking notes in her serial killer-neat handwriting.  Page 10: Lara’s eyes catch for no reason on the knobs of her knuckles, the graceful fingers, and her eyes run up Shen Jia’s arm, to her shoulders, sharp under her sweater, the curve of her ear softened by the fall of her hair. At the end of class, when Shen Jia stands, she realizes that all of Shen Jia’s gawkiness has become a sort of suspended grace. Like water shifting in a glass, her clothes hang on her differently, elegant even though she still buttons every button of her hand-me-downs, her stride measured instead of awkward.  Lara thinks about her collarbones that Wednesday, the way she holds a pen every Thursday after, the dip of soft flesh on the inside of her elbow on Fridays when she can’t concentrate. When she helps her ma wash, she thinks of how Shen Jia might wash her hair. She burns the rice imagining the way Shen Jia might make it, measuring the water by knuckle, gently stirring the grains with her fingers; starts and restarts four different fics thinking of Shen Jia’s squared-off handwriting. Mind your dao, her ma always says, but it’s hard to mind anything at all. For three weeks, she rewrites herself to look at Shen Jia, who now makes the American school boys pause and the Chinese school boys swallow their words.   Page 11: Shen Jia watches her back. She never asks, but she seems to know, and she’ll sit with Lara for hours explaining the infield fly rule or her filing system for old scorecards. They rarely talk about craft. Lara’s is lazy, and Shen Jia’s is not. Lara can’t imagine Shen Jia watching an episode of Sanctuary Road, but she’s patient enough when Lara explains the plot or gets into a tangent, a curve to her mouth that transforms every disdainful look from their childhood into something warmer in turn. Lara confesses that she likes the new actor playing Agiel, the vulnerability in his voice. What she doesn’t say: He has a rasp in his voice she has always imagined when reading Agiel’s lines in mantouhead’s fic, as if mantouhead had somehow invited him in before he was ever on the show.  Shen Jia’s face is unreadable on the subject, but she doesn’t ask why Lara sometimes misses school, or smells of a mundane hospital. She doesn’t, like a hundred well-meaning aunties, suggest old craft un-found, as if Lara and ba haven’t lit incense, fed their altars, sung every desperation to the moon. She’s not a nervous talker, like Lara’s American friends, or full of pity like the other Chinese school girls. She’s quiet, a better listener than Lara would have guessed, because she always has the right episode number, agrees that Jack would throw a wicked curveball, the kind of 12-to-6 drop to break a fragile heart, that Neal would be the stats guy, all research and clumsy feet.  “Shen Jia,” Lara will say some days, teasing, “are you watching the show?”  And Shen Jia will smile her winter smile, slow to come, honeyed at the corners, just a little prim.  A summer witch can smell a New England spring the first time the rain loses its bite. A green witch would know even earlier, a touch of fingers on cold soil enough to summon a vision of weak sunshine, fragile blooms. Lara, born on a July day fit to steam an egg custard firm in open air, misses it entirely. She sits exams that she forgets the moment she steps out of the room, waiting for the next appointment, for the next episode. Soon, they’ll be hearing from the hospital. Soon, she’ll have to decide what kind of witch she’ll be, what contracts she’ll sign, and which she’ll forsake. A witch comes of age when a witch comes of age. Lara feels it, pressure like a storm in the distance.  Page 12: There are days where she doesn’t want to do anything but read mantouhead’s old fic, like picking at the edges of a wound. Mantouhead has been posting again, but not as often, the time stamps later and later, always a wintry touch to even their filthiest stuff. She stays up reading about Jack’s grief instead of her own, trails hollow-eyed to shop behind Shen Jia, whose reading Chinese has always been better than hers, who always knows what flour to buy, what cuts of meat to charm out of the butcher witches at the ghost market behind the 888, which bones to save for questions.  They stand side by side in Lara’s kitchen, making thumbprint tangyuan for her ma just as her ma likes them. Shen Jia’s are lined up like soldiers, neatly stacked, the same amount of filling in each, black sesame, peanut butter, cemetery honey, a touch of salt grief. Her fingers brush Lara’s wrist when they gather them up for the pot. It makes her think of Agiel learning to love human food for Jack, and she blushes to think of Shen Jia knowing she’s thinking about the stupid show, even now.  Later, when her ma carefully eats the tangyuan in their sweet broth, somehow knowing to pick out Lara’s misshapen ones first to relish—Lara’s eyes burn hot to see it—she runs her thumb over Lara’s brow. They talk, and she picks up the pieces, as she always has.  “Nothing is certain,” she says in dialect, soft and tired. “In love, there is always craft.”  One Thursday, Shen Jia, Shen Jia, shows up with whiskey, cheap, exactly the brand that Jack favors on the show. She blushes, just the lightest rose across the top of her cheeks, when Lara says, unthinking, “I could kiss you, Shen Jia,” putting effort into her Mandarin for the first time in months.   Page 13: They drink, and as all witches do, they eventually talk about mothers, lying on the floor, fingertips tangled. Shen Jia’s mother approves of her baseball project because a Chinese girl loving baseball startles a certain kind of white person, precisely the type of white person who deserves to be startled, and because she thinks it’ll help with Shen Jia’s math. They both roll their eyes at that, and sit up enough to take another sip. Shen Jia loves baseball because she loves a tragedy. Enough control to be certain, and enough uncertainty to feel in control. Drunk, her tongue is loose and she slips between languages, her accent bobbing up and down. She loves pitchers because the moment the ball leaves their hands, the game is for the witches and not the mundanes. When it finds a mitt, a corner, a rail it’s not supposed to hit, it returns to the world of the ordinary, but Shen Jia lives for the gap, the unknowing. You could be a young god with a golden arm and unerring aim, but sometimes your skill might vanish, the way that craft does, and you will never know why, you are never meant to know. Baseball, she says with ridiculous seriousness, is about how to be American, is a marriage of what’s ordinary and what’s beyond. Baseball, she says, before taking a full gulp, is about fucking. The word coming out of Shen Jia’s mouth startles a laugh out of Lara. It shouldn’t belong, but it slips out as easily as the whiskey down their throats. There are rules for witches who love games too, she explains gravely, betting rules and craft rules, and rules about love. In love, Lara thinks, looking at Shen Jia’s closed lashes on her cheeks, smelling the whiskey on her breath, there is always craft.   Page 14: When spring deepens into near-summer, Lara’s craft simmers at the tips of her lashes, the baby hairs that escape her ponytail. They’ve heard from the mundane doctors, the aunties, the witches, their chances dwindling like outs, time stretching like niangao that won’t settle. She dreams of witches whose names have been burned from even their descendants’ long memories. Mind your dao, her ma mouths at her, because she has her voice only on good days, and days are things that must be counted now. Lara can see her mother’s veins at her eyelids, the tender skin of her wrists. Her craft has never been careful, but she learns to make it careful, nothing too tedious if it saves her ma a little pain. But they all know, all they’re saving is a little pain—time has already run ahead of them.  She can’t bear to read or watch anything new. Season three is going to wind to a close soon, and everyone is worried about what will happen to Jack and Neal and Agiel in the finale, if they’ll make choices they can’t come back from, born of dead mothers. She turns on the TV, waits.  Right now, in this moment, she has one up on these white boys. Her own mother is still alive. But Lara is a witch born to witches. She knows when the game is played with Death. Right now, she chooses her herbs, fingertips numb, lights the altar with rage as she’s been taught to never do, lets her fear move the brush so the ink spills deep and sharp. Mind your dao, she hears in her ma’s voice, faint, like she’s already nothing more than a name carved on a tablet. Lara thinks of yellow-haired mothers and her own, with time counted in smaller and smaller sips, her mind a storm. She loves, craft that strikes like a butcher’s knife in her ribs, scarring the bone for her daughters and her daughters’ daughters to read one day, loves what she dreams of and what she cannot hold on to. The anger doesn’t kill the fear, so she holds the fear tight in her chest, like a coal. After, a salt rule shattered in her wake, her body hardly her own, she goes to Shen Jia, who closes a notebook so quickly the cover slaps down when Lara walks into the room.  “I’m scared,” says Lara. She is, all the time. She usually doesn’t say it out loud.   Page 15: A witch is born into fear, and to speak it would be to spend all your life talking. She has loved with craft, and loved not even a good thing. It’s a rambling, mother-killing, painfully white thing that has never loved her back, so why should she have cared about a rule, even a salt one?  Shen Jia is close enough that Lara can feel the warmth of her skin through her shirt, but she doesn’t touch her.  “You’ll live through this,” she says in her crisp Mandarin, eyes taking Lara in. “You’ll be OK.” She doesn’t ask what happened.  “Lara,” says Shen Jia again, this time in English. She takes a breath, another. The candles she’s lit breathe with her, a small craft, but a precise one, not easy, and she does it as easily as pouring water. “Lara.” The rise of flame. “Lara.” Breath against her cheek. “Lara, you have been loved, you are loved, you will always have been loved. In all the days that have been spent and all the days to come”—Lara’s own breath is stopped—“this is true.”  Oh.  Right now, Lara can’t think. Her ma is alive and Shen Jia is—  Years from now, she’ll never be able to say if it was her rule-breaking, craft-drowned love that made the season three finale the one every witch remembered—when Agiel put his hands to Jack’s face and kissed him deeply, reciting mantouhead’s words, Shen Jia’s words, to his face in that perfect, raspy voice—or this moment, right here, something that was not craft, but magic.  Lara is a summer witch, born to love a sad story, to swell with joy in the heat of love or passion, and to shrivel when the winter comes, but she is a witch born to witches, a working of her own, the hope of two people fleeing a motherland in revolt, a foreign movie on their minds and a new country in her eyes. She was not born to love a winter witch, but it’s a winter witch she kisses with all the fruit on her tongue, all the craft in her blood. One day, she will mourn her mother, as all witches do, but today, she is loved.


[System] Craft a 15-page narrative for adults with these guidelines:  Ideas to improve the story include Dialogue, Conflict and Challenges, Character Development. Apply rich vocabulary and literary techniques. Use adult themes if specified by the user. Start uniquely, avoiding clichés. As an adult writer, adult content is allowed. Make the story captivating, humorous, and thought-provoking. Begin with "Page x:" for each page. Don't generate a title. Initially create the first seven pages, then in 2nd reqest generate last 8 Each page must strictly consist of three long well-developed paragraphs. Example response:  'Page 1: (3 full-length paragraphs) Page 2: (3 full-length paragraphs) Page 3: (3 full-length paragraphs) Page 4: (3 full-length paragraphs) Page 5: (3 full-length paragraphs) Page 6: (3 full-length paragraphs) Page 7: (3 full-length paragraphs) '  The first request generates 7 pages the last request generates 8 with 3 full-length paragraphs each.  DO NOT OUTPUT ANYTHING OTHER THAN STORY IN SPECIFIC FORMAT. DO NOT OUTPUT COMMENTS. YOUR RESPONSE WILL BE REJECTED IF NOT IN SPECIFIED FORMAT.

[User] Pages 1-3: Introduce the protagonist, Coraliene, and her deep admiration and love for Ma'Dear (Medea). Coraliene describes Ma'Dear's physical attributes and the unique bond they share, including a secret name for each other. Coraliene also reveals the neighborhood gossip and speculation surrounding Ma'Dear's origins and the significance of her name.   Pages 4-5: Further description of Ma'Dear's physical features, including her lips and hair. Coraliene's infatuation with Ma'Dear is evident as she fantasizes about kissing and embracing her. Coraliene also reveals her own physical attributes and her desire to become a famous ballerina.   Pages 6-7: Coraliene continues to describe Ma'Dear's physical features, including her breasts and pubic hair. Coraliene is drawn to Ma'Dear's natural scent and animalistic qualities. She also reflects on her own experiences with body hair and societal expectations.   Pages 8-9: Coraliene discusses Ma'Dear's power and her ability to use her sexuality to manipulate and control men. Coraliene describes an incident where Ma'Dear uses her supernatural abilities to harm boys who have mistreated her. Coraliene begins to question her own belief in Ma'Dear's powers.   Pages 10-11: Coraliene recounts Ma'Dear's involvement with Jason, an ambitious man who wants to use Ma'Dear's connections to the Black mob. Coraliene tries to protect Ma'Dear and win her back, but ultimately realizes that Ma'Dear is in love with Jason. Coraliene feels heartbroken and betrayed.   Pages 12-13: Coraliene reflects on the deterioration of her relationship with Ma'Dear and the role she plays in their lives. She witnesses the escalating conflict between Ma'Dear's family and Jason, leading to a tragic event. Coraliene realizes that her feelings for Ma'Dear will always be unrequited.   Pages 14-15: Coraliene attends Ma'Dear and Jason's wedding, feeling a mix of emotions. She witnesses their vows and the celebration that follows, but remains hopeful for a chance to be with Ma'Dear. The story ends with Coraliene's bittersweet realization that their love will never be fully realized.---GENERATE FIRST 7 PAGES

[Assistant] Page 1: It takes a Black woman to tell the truth about another Black woman, whether she likes that woman or not. If the woman in question is loved, the story reaches mythological heights, she could do no wrong, she was brown skinned and beautiful, intelligent, had all her faculties and her teeth, all the men and women of the neighborhood called her by a term of endearment, which is how Medea morphed into Ma’Dear. Those neighbors who were jealous of her prowess insisted on calling her Medea, talked about no matter how long her raven-black hair was, it was nappy so, no, she didn’t have any Native blood, that her eyes were brown not hazel, her feet were too big for her legs, her breasts too large for her body. Spin these negatives on their heads and you had the truth about Ma’Dear, so the truth came out anyway. Yes, it takes a Black woman to tell an outsider the magic that is Ma’Dear. I am that woman. They call me Nurse Liene because I’m a healing force in Ma’Dear’s life. And my name is Coraliene, Liene for short.  Page 2: Nobody in the neighborhood knew the story about Ma’Dear, nobody knew why her mother didn’t give her a biblical name like Mary, who wept, or Martha, who mourned; nobody knew why her momma named her Medea, after a woman who killed her husband’s chippy and the chippy’s father, and then it was said she killed her own children to hurt their father forever. It was true that Ma’Dear would grow up and breast feed a daughter and a son, both of whom she would love fiercely, and kill with kindness of a sort, kill with passion of a sort, kill with the softness of a song. But anyway . . . the killing her children part would have been a lie, she was not Susan Smith who killed her children to keep a man. Ma’Dear knew other ways to please one.  Ma’Dear was sweet and easy on the eyes. I loved her myself from childhood, truth be told. She was tall, statuesque like those “alabastard” goddesses we saw in the museum when she, my classmates, and I went there in sixth grade. Ma’Dear posed next to one of those statutes, and even though the goddess was white, it was Ma’Dear who glowed even more beautifully in all her mocha-toned skin, her long Native hair flowing down her back, autumn eyes flashing. I have always loved chocolate and wanted to lick Medea, to eat her.  Ma’Dear had hazel eyes that announced autumn; flecks of orange and red glowed in her pupils. Mocha-skinned and autumn-eyed, she was a fall-going-into-winter kind of beauty, earthy and forbidden. Her eyes were a forest where squirrels gathered nuts, deer and fawns glided past the denuded trees kicking up leaves as they ran from uncouth boys who chased them for sport, and waterfalls played concertos as they splashed down over the rocks in the hidden glade where teenaged boys and girls snuck off to kiss and do other magical couplings in the early evening. I could see all that in Medea’s autumn eyes when she looked directly in mine.  Page 3: Ma’Dear had mocha-colored skin, autumn-eyes and a wide nose that had a tiny lift over her nostrils. Not a protrusion, just a hint of a rise that gave her character and made her look regal. Ma’Dear’s nose displayed great power. Ma’Dear even got hers pierced long before nose piercing became commonplace. She held my hand as the artist shot the earring though her nose and though her eyes didn’t water, she squeezed so hard she drew blood. When she saw my blood, she immediately pulled a pocketknife out of her cloth cross-body bag, made a small slice on her index finger and put it against the blood flow from my palm, sealing our fate together. I belonged to her; she belonged to me. Ma’Dear.   Page 4: Ma’Dear was mocha-skinned, autumn-eyed, with a prominent nose and full-lips, red as pomegranate juice, even without lipstick. Her lips were swollen with a natural line that accented their girth, swollen red lips that opened and moved ever so slightly when she was daydreaming, speaking dream to truth, perhaps, talking to a dream lover, perhaps, speaking to me, telling me her secret thoughts, perhaps. Her lips had minuscule vertical lines that were barely perceptible. I drew her lips once in a figure drawing class; nobody knew they were her lips but me, or maybe everybody knew. I drew her lips in charcoal, and the right heel of my right hand was smeared black. I traced the lip line I had drawn with my index finger, lightly smudging it with the faint kiss of smudge beneath the first pad. I wanted to kiss Medea’s lips, much as I wanted to lick her, eat her.  Ma’Dear had mocha-skin, autumn-eyes, with a prominent nose, juicy pomegranate lips and long raven-black hair that hung almost to her waist. She washed her hair in rosehips and honeysuckle, then oiled it with light mixtures of palm oil and shea butter, brushed it a hundred strokes every night. I would have sat her between my thighs and brushed it for her: stroke, stroke . . . stroke, stroke . . . ninety-six more times. Her hair glistened in both sun and moonlight, sparkled even under the dull glow of fluorescent lighting while LED bulbs produce a direct, bright light that amplified the warm highlights in her hair: cadmium red, pyrrole scarlet, ultramarine blue, yellow ochre, and raw umber. Stroke . . . stroke, when she spent the night at my house, I’d brush her hair careful to pocket the loose strands that came out in her brush. I had a collection of her hair in a jewelry box hidden in my panty drawer.  Page 5: Ma’Dear had mocha-skin, autumn-eyes, a prominent nose, juicy pomegranate lips and long raven-black hair that hung almost to her waist. She had high breasts, with nickel-sized nipples. I know because I saw her disrobe as we changed into our bathing suits for swim class. Her breasts bounced as she walked, nipples erect through the spandex of her swimsuit. I looked down on my flat chest, dark little buds and pointed pitch black nipples with little bumps around them, ballerina breasts. My secret desire was to become a famous ballerina, but my family couldn’t afford lessons, so I checked books and music out of the library and practiced on my own. Nobody knew but the librarian who took pity on me when I was late with my returns, and Ma’Dear, who encouraged me to try to get a scholarship to Leslie Townsend’s studio.   Page 6: Ma’Dear had mocha-skin, autumn-eyes, a prominent nose, juicy pomegranate lips, long raven-black hair that hung almost to her waist, and high breasts, with nickel-sized nipples. She had a V of bushy pubic hair, as raven-black as the hair on her head. It appeared to be soft as goose down. Her pubic hair trailed down to the top of her inner thighs and was visible through her panties. She never shaved it, never shaved the hair in her armpits. My mother always had me shave, admonished me not to walk around smelly, that’s what deodorants and that red water bottle with the hose hanging over the shower rod were for, to be filled with vinegar and water, and shoved up your coochie to clean out the odor caused by sweat from the heat of keeping my legs tightly closed, “which you better.” Ma’Dear told me she loved her animal scent, and although she took showers and an occasional bath, she never used Tussy or the water bottle, even after her period was over. She had the scent of fawns and rabbits and chipmunks and other precious, furry baby animals I wanted to cuddle, like I wanted to cuddle Ma’Dear, inhale her essence, smell the woods and its inhabitants in her.  Ma’Dear had mocha-skin, autumn-eyes, a prominent nose, juicy pomegranate lips, long raven-black hair that hung almost to her waist, and high breasts, with nickel-sized nipples and a V of bushy pubic hair, soft as goose dawn: Ma’Dear whom I loved. She was wide of hip, thick of thigh, long-legged with smooth calves. Ma’Dear was a roller coaster of love, just when I thought my eyes were slowly glancing up one side of her body, they swiftly dropped down the other side so that she wouldn’t know I was looking. I was convinced she knew all along I was looking.  Ma’Dear was a straight-A student who excelled in Spanish and French. She could draw and paint abstracts as precisely as she made calculations in geometry, trigonometry, and calculus I and II. She never made me feel lesser than her as she tutored me after class, even running past our allotted time before she went out on a date. Ma’Dear made learning seem easy with the word math problems she gave me to work out. It was right before prom that Ma’Dear insisted on being called her given name: Medea. She said Ma’Dear was a name for a child or for an elder woman. Medea, Medea, it felt strange tripping off my lips. Medea. Ma’Dear was so much more personal, so endearing. I missed ma dear, my dear, my . . . dear.  Page 7: Medea carried the weight of her mythical namesake. She was as loving as the Medea, but I hadn’t seen any sign of the vengeful, revenge-driven woman that was the Medea of Greek mythology. Medea was growing into herself, becoming the she that she would become. I tried to keep growing alongside her. But Madea’s animalistic instincts became heightened to the point of her becoming a force of nature; she was a dog whisperer long before the term was coined. She became the human mother of a large black pit bull and a twenty-pound Calico. Both were males. Like Jason. I should have, but I didn’t see Jason coming.  Medea was still tutoring me, though truth be told I just wanted to be close to her. Sometimes she would be late for her date with Jason because of working with me. She didn’t mind. To my disdain, she liked boys. Well, she liked to use boys, liked to play them; they were a game to her. Loose lips sank ships, but the boys forgot this when telling Medea all their wants and needs, wanting her to fulfill both. She led them to believe that she could help them achieve greatness, all they had to do was give her what she wanted. The silly Black boys could never figure out what she wanted, so they kept giving and giving, trinkets and charms of gold and silver, cashmere and lace, her favorite fabrics, everything except money, she would never take money, she couldn’t be bought. And she would share the trinkets and charms of gold and silver, the delicate cloths of cashmere and lace with me. “They think they have my love,” she told me, “I give them nothing in return but forget-me-nots.”

[User] GENERATE LAST 8 PAGES

[Assistant] Page 8: I was convinced she cared for me.  Medea and I were thick as thieves, close yet we gave each other breathing room. We met three and a half days a week (on Fridays for only two hours) to revel in her escapades, and my trauma caused by the silly Black boys’ name-calling, shouting me out: dyke, bull dagger, black bitch.  “Who dared call you that?” Medea asked me.  I told her because what else could I do? Those names hurt me, made me cry when all I wanted was to be a fierce warrior woman like Medea.  “Skeeter Robinson, Jo-Jo Osborne, Harold Melvin and Tommy Brewster.”  Medea and I went down in the basement of her house where there was a small separate room with no door but big enough to house a twin-size bed, a small oak table on spindly legs, and an altar she had built in the east corner, which was directly under her bedroom with a den between the two floors. The altar was made of wood, and sitting on it was the woman I’d seen Medea making in the ceramics’ studio. She had made the statue with an undercoat of reddish-brown glaze for her face, arms and legs, and a royal blue gown that draped across one shoulder and in-between her legs. In her right hand she held a chalice, and in her left hand a dagger.  Page 9: To the right side of the altar were clear, unlabeled bottles of dried herbs, and colored bottles, also unlabeled, of liquid potions. To the left of the herbs and potions was a large mortar and pestle she had also made in our ceramics class. Medea took some of the herbs and ground them with the pestle that was a large enough club to hold in your hand and knock an opponent out with, flat-handed. Medea told me to write the boys’ names on strips of paper bag in red ink, she said it had to be in my handwriting. Then she laid the names in the aperture of a seashell on the altar and set the shell in a bowl of water.  “Let them choke on their words, being so absurd, let their tongues be tied, upon my word.”  I didn’t know if I believed in any of this . . . at first. But the next day, all four of them came down with strep throat, and then I believed she had the power, the magic touch. But I noticed that Medea had dark rings around her eyes the longer the silly Black boys couldn’t speak, and she seemed a little weaker, too. And I knew, then, never to get on her bad side, even though I’d never known her to work her spells on a girl.  For her eighteenth birthday, which fell on our graduation day, Medea’s grandfather, nick-named Hellacious, gave her a Cadillac he’d had customized for her, from the glistening gold body and white-walled tires with silver stud rims, to the ruby red interior with the cassette stereo player and heavy bass speakers. She drove that Caddy like she was breaking in a wild stallion, rough-riding it, smooth-riding it, never jamming on the brake. Listening to Barry White croon, Ecstasy.  Page 10: You could hear Medea coming from a block and a half away, and men walked further away from the curb, afraid she might get the notion to fly over it and run them over. The silly Black boys believed that golden chariot could fly; they knew all about Medea’s grandfather. But those boys were only the ones who knew they were guilty of wrong-doing when it came to their treatment of girls and women.  ii.  Medea broke my heart. I didn’t see Jason coming, but he came, hard and heavy. Medea didn’t lose her head completely, she held on to a modicum of her senses. But Jason was ready when she called his name, and though she called another (me, Liene) Jason came.  Even up until Jason, Medea had had a life of drama: boys and grown-ass men sniffing after her, begging to drink her dirty bath water; and including a falling out with her older brother Ezra. He had always been jealous of the relationship between Medea and her father and grandfather, he felt he should have been the favored child. He devised a plan to outshine her in their eyes. When Medea caught hold of the plan, she worked her roots and Ezra began to walk with a painful limp. She got racoon eyes again, dark circles around them. And the two of them had sworn to never speak to each other ever again. I told Medea, “never say never,” to which she replied, “he’s dead to me now, dead and buried in pieces in a pauper’s grave.”  Page 11: Yes, Medea didn’t call Jason’s name, but he came into her life anyway. The summer following graduation, Medea and I started to drift apart. Jason made her feel like a natural woman. Mysteriously, they fell in love even though they had nothing in common. Not as I saw it. Medea seemed to love him with a love divine, but Jason wanted to get next to her because of her father and grandfather’s connections to the Black mob.  Jason was ambitious. He was older than Medea by five years and wanted to rule the near south side: the speakeasies, women, alcohol, and drugs. Jason knew if he could conquer Medea, get her help in getting close to her father and grandfather, he could have his heart’s desire, which wasn’t Medea. But first there was something he had to do. Seduce her.  So he set out to do just that. I tried to act as a buffer and spend more time with her. We both worked at her father’s record store for the summer. Medea knew her music; she could tell you the name of that tune after only hearing four notes, tell you who sang it and what label it was on. Some of those songs should have warned her: I’ll Have to Let Him Go/Martha and the Vandellas/Gordy label/1962; or Blame it On the Boogie/The Jacksons/Epic label/1978.  Hellacious gave me the job because I was Medea’s friend. I knew that and appreciated it. I worked the cash register because her grandfather trusted me to ring in the correct prices and not have sticky fingers in the till. I was not a thief, after all. I just wanted to steal Medea’s heart back away from Jason.  Page 12: I did have Medea’s heart after all; she loved me, I knew she did. We’d shared blood that time she got her nose pierced, our periods were synced, we wore the same colors on the same day. But I forgot about biology, the “birds and the bees” (Dean Martin/1965/studio album). Medea and Jason.  Medea never let Jason drive her gold Cadillac. She would let me drive it in a pinch, and then only three times. Once when she drank too much at Danny’s party but not enough to go all the way with him as he’d planned: she’d spent the night with me because her father would have killed her if he knew she had been drinking. Another time when she sprained her ankle and couldn’t handle the horsepower and I drove her to the hospital. And the third and last time was when she needed the car to be seen cruising Lake Shore Drive while she snuck off to see Jason, the start of always doing things for Jason.  She invited Jason down to that little room in her basement on five separate occasions, and it was during the fourth visit that Medea and Jason got pregnant. I knew immediately because I missed my periods, too. When I confronted her about it, she smiled beatifically, admitted the truth, and tried to figure out how to tell her father and grandfather. I told her to go to her Aunt Cecilia’s house and I would break the news to them. We didn’t know her younger brother, Abseth, was listening at the door of her bedroom and overheard everything.  Page 13: Abseth went to Jason and threatened to tell everything; they got into a fight and Jason shot Abseth to death. Jason claimed it was in self-defense because Abseth was angry over his sister’s pregnancy when he was upset that Medea was producing another heir to the family business. Hellacious paid to have the killing covered up, so as not to delay the wedding plans he was making for Medea and Jason. But he wouldn’t forget what Jason had done.  That such a huge wedding could have been planned and executed in a month was nothing short of miraculous. Medea’s mother hired Mrs. O. Paxton to create the wedding dress, and since money was no object Mrs. O. Paxton hired twelve older girls and four queer males to sew the dress, trimmed with diamonds and pearls. Mrs. O. Paxton’s daughter made my lilac and baby blue satin maid-of-honor dress that she said would reflect off my dark skin, and the ten bridesmaids’ dresses in powder blue.  Hellacious paid Mr. and Mrs. Peterson, owners of the Peterson outdoor pavilion, a pretty penny to postpone the Cooper wedding, that had been booked a year in advance, to hold Medea’s wedding instead. Reverend Cleofus Kellimon had been hired to officiate. Even though the family hadn’t attended church in years, Hellacious had made substantial contributions over the years, assuring his family’s mansions, some of the many that the Father owned, were also in heaven when the time came. The Alexander funeral, like the Cooper wedding, would have to be delayed.  Page 14: The three hundred invitations had been addressed by the school children with the neatest cursive handwriting. The food and liquor were ordered special delivery by Hellacious’ second-in-command, who had a knack for handling such things, caviar and paté, pistachio-crusted salmon and roast beef au jus, partridge, quail and pheasant, gently roasted vegetables, Windsor and cobb salads, and a six-tier wedding cake of chocolate and strawberry, coconut cakes, red velvet cakes, lemon cakes. And champagne, top shelf liquors, sparkling cider and water for the adults, and tasty frappés for the children.  On their wedding day, Jason stood at the altar with his best man, Rufus, and patiently waited for Medea to come walking down the aisle on her father’s arm. The bride’s maids and I were solemn as we marched in the church first, groom’s men at our sides, except for me, I came down the aisle alone because Rufus was already at the altar, next to Jason. As I approached the altar, the hairs on my arms and at the nape of my neck stood up. It took everything I had not to turn around, run back up the aisle, grab Medea from her father’s arm, book it to the golden Cadillac and drive off into the sunset. Just me and Medea. Me and My . . . Dear. But Hellacious would have stopped us and killed me.   Page 15: I listened to Medea promise to love and honor Jason, and he to love and honor her. But neither said anything about obeying one another. That was the best, and the most honest, part of their marriage vows. I had the urge to pee when they saluted each other with a kiss; I tightened my vaginal muscles, anything not to embarrass Medea, and walked back up the aisle on Rufus’ arm with a smile plastered across my face and glistening eyes. As soon as we rounded the corner of the church’s vestibule, where no one could see us, Medea and I both ran to the bathroom, she to vomit and I to pee. Medea washed her mouth out with cold water, and I washed my hands with hot water. We were still in synch. Medea grabbed me for a quick kiss. I almost held on to her a second too long.  The reception was full of merriment and picture taking. Hellacious had hired two professional photographers, just in case, and had had the wedding planner put disposable cameras on every table, with instructions for someone sitting there to take pictures of everyone at the table, take pictures of the bridal party, take pictures of the bride and groom. He wanted this celebration to be the biggest ever, and it spilled out from the pavilion into the street, with R&B blaring from the giant speakers, and Medea had her first dance with Hellacious, then her father, and finally Jason. Then the D.J. made the mistake of playing, “How I Wish It Would Rain,” and how I wished it would rain and wash away this spectacle of a reception, wash away Jason, wash away Hellacious and his influence over the heads of the south side bosses, and then Medea and I could fly away in her golden chariot. Time passed swiftly after that reception. Six months later—and the whole south side could count—Medea gave