Po spent the next half hour writing down some more ideas on his list of activities. He tried wracking his brain in an attempt to remember what it was that was crossed out on the list. But alas, nothing came to mind. After a while, he decided to walk around and wait for Jai-Rong to come and get him. He had be considerably lucky that everyone had found him so fast. He had expected there to be a mass wave of confusion over where everyone was. As Po walked across the grounds, eventually making his way towards the main stairs in the direction of the peach tree, he considered all the events that had transpired during the day and how and where each girl had found him. Or where he had been directed to find them. It then finally occurred to Po that the girls had probably asked the guards for an eagle eye on his location, since it was their job to keep an eye out for any trouble, which would make it so much easier for them to find him. 

"Hello, Master Po!" came a voice from behind. 

Po jumped and turned around to see Neikan laying casually on top of the main gates. She had a big smirk on her face, probably from the enjoyment of startling him out of his thoughts. 

"Oh, hey General Kori-Kara-......" Po stumbled to his embarrassment. "Sorry, I totally forgot your last name." 

"Kurosawa," Neikan reminded him as she sat up and smiled at him. "But you're Tigress' new bff, so you can just call me Neikan. If you want." 

"Oh, sure. That's cool. Wait, Tigress said we're best friends?! I mean, I kinda knew that, but I've never heard her call me her bestie! That's so awesome!!!" 

Neikan laughed. "She said something along those lines," she told Po. "And even if she hadn't, it's pretty obvious. Nice to know someone else can get her to loosen up when I'm away." 

"What's going on over here?" Tigress demanded curiously as she rapidly approached the two from the direction of the training hall. 

"Oh hey Tigress!" Po called over. "We were just talking about us all being in a best friend group!" 

"Indeed."

"What took you so long, Almighty Dragon Warrior?" Neikan joked as she hopped off the wall. "You were supposed to be here half an hour ago!"

"I was busy," Tigress replied flatly. 

"Okay, well you're about to be unbusy, because we are hanging out in my quarters with a relaxing cup of tea." 

"I've had nothing but three years of ultimate intense training, Neikan. Good luck on that one." 

Po laughed. "I can see why you guys get along so well," he noted. "You're regular peas in a pod." 

Neikan smirked. "You're absolutely right we are," she agreed as she slyly turned and looked at Tigress. "In fact, I propose a little contest. If I can't get you to slump in your chair with a relaxing tea blend, then I'll have to show you my entire secret collection. But if I do, you have to show me yours." 

Tigress immediately turned blood red and gave Neikan a look. "You're not taking so much as one peek," she warned, trying to not sound embarrassed. "I'll talk your ear off all night so you won't even get a chance." 

"Challenge accepted. You keep me up all night or I knock you asleep within two hours. Deal?"

Tigress sighed. "Fine," she said, trying to smile and look resilient. "But I'm warning you; I've learned a lot over the years." 

Neikan laughed as they started walking away. "Oh, you know I love a challenge, Ressa," she admitted. Po watched them walk away before laughing a little more to himself. They reminded him a lot of himself and Tigress...minus of course for the fact that Tigress wouldn't even let Po say anything remotely close to what Neikan had just said unless there was a sparring session involved. But Neikan had a more audacious personality, so perhaps that was why. 

The girls were soon out of sight and Po returned to the task of figuring out where Jai-Rong was. He didn't have to look very long though as he heard Jai-Rong calling his name from across the main grounds. 

"Good evening!" she greeted cheerily. "I'm assuming you've probably been there plenty of times today, but I wanted to do our meeting by the peach tree. I like the view up there." 

"That sounds like a plan to me! I've actually only been up there once today." 

"Oh great! Let's get going then. I made dessert while you and Lu-Shi were talking."

The two then proceeded to walk away from the main stairs and across the varying slopes of the Jade Palace grounds until they got to the peach tree. Set up at the base of the tree was a small blanket, some tea, and a small plate of almond cookies. Po nearly drooled at the sight of them. 

"So, I wasn't sure what food you liked and didn't like, so I asked one of your friends for help," Jai-Rong admitted. "He told me you liked eating all his almond cookies, so I went with that." 

Po laughed. "Monkey's never going to let that go, is he?" he noted. "I only did that a few times when I first got here." 

"How many is a few?" Jai-Rong asked with a smirk on her face. 

Po thought for a moment. "Six or seven?"

Jai-Rong laughed but then coughed and took a sip of tea to help clear out her throat. 

"Are you still feeling under the weather?" Po asked sympathetically. 

"A little," Jai-Rong admitted. "But it's just my throat that's given me trouble. Honest. I've been sticking to smooth foods and tea to try and help it out." 

"Well, I hope you feel a lot better tomorrow," Po told her. "Getting stuck with a sore throat is the worst." 

"It's more clogged than sore, but I get what you mean. I had strep throat one time and let me tell you, that was no fun." 

Po winced. "I had river fever as a kid," he said. "Usually you just get a little sneezy, a bit twitchy, and really really hot. But of course I was the one kid out of the whole village who vomited, so of course, dad wasn't too happy about that." 

"Aw, you poor thing," Jai-Rong sympathized. "My brother and I caught it back to back. He came home from school and caught it and then I caught it from him, and my dad was away at the time so my poor mom had to deal with two sick kids at the same time." 

"You have a brother?" Po asked curiously. 

"Yep. Zhouhui. He's three years younger than me. And a lot shorter, but that's pretty normal for guys. Or at least the guys I know." 

"What's he like?" 

"Very enthusiastic. And high energy. And also a bit of a know-it-all which gets sort of annoying," Jai-Rong told him with a little laugh. "But hey, that's what family's for, right? They get on your nerves and you don't care all that much because you love them to death." 

Po laughed. "Yeah, that's pretty true," he agreed.  "Not that I know anything about siblings, but I know that's true for family in general." 

Po took a cookie and started munching on it while Jai-Rong finished her tea and poured herself some more. "So, I'm assuming you worked with your dad at the restaurant before you became a kung fu master?" she asked. "Or did you do something else?"

"No, I worked with dad. I considered doing other things every so often, but they never lasted long. Kung fu was the only thing that I consistently liked."  Po laughed. "Dad even got me shurikens to practice with when I was a teenager, even though I could never get the stupid things to stick into the target on the wall." 

Jai-Rong smiled. "Sounds like fun though, at least," she offered. 

"Yeah it was. And I did get a little better at that over time. When I first came here and I started doing real training, that was one of the few things I could actually do. I got to battle Tigress with weapons and I actually managed to throw stuff accurately enough to pin her to the wall! Except then she quickly got loose and knocked me out of the training hall with one of the staffs and both sets of doors wound up getting broken....." 

Jai-Rong laughed. 

"What do you do?" Po asked her. 

"Mail travel," the colubrid serpent answered with a wide smile. "When someone needs to mail a letter, sometimes the recipient lives somewhere hard to get to or very far away, so my family runs an air-mail company that helps with that."

"That's so awesome! Is it new? I've never heard of it."

"Yeah, it's new. Dad started the company when he was younger, and then mom married him and joined right in, and now we all help out." 

"Do you have other people or is it just you guys for now?"

"There's a new guy who's joined the business with dad. He thinks that in a few years the company will boom and then we can hire more people to fly out and up. At the moment, the most common delivery address is up on the mountain where the roads are either not paved or just don't exist. But dad's working on getting mail all the way over to the Caucasus Pass." 

Po paused from eating his cookie to staring at her in surprise. "But that's so far away!" he exclaimed.

"We know. But the better we make our balloons, the farther we can go, and right now dad's working on something to help the balloon go faster so we don't just have to rely on air current traffic. At the moment he just has a couple of discarded drafts, but he'll get there one day." 

"That would be so cool! If he ever manages to do it, let me know! I've never traveled in a hot air balloon before!" 

Jai-Rong promised to let him know and took another sip of her tea. Po shoveled another handful of cookies into his mouth and asked her about where she lived, what she did for fun, had she ever dated anyone before, and so on so forth. Jai-Rong answered the questions slowly due to still having a bad throat, but she soon told Po all about the grassy plateau she had lived in since she was born and how much fun it was trying to play hide and go seek with the other kids as she had an advantage with her size and ability to camouflage in the grass. 

"We don't have a lot of trees around our home, so that makes it a lot harder for everyone else," she had laughed. 

Her and Po swapped some childhood game stories, Po admitting that he had always been terrible at hide and go seek because of his size (which Jai-Rong pitied him for since that hadn't been his fault) and then dived right into the topic of past dates which Po had originally brought up. 

"I dated a couple of guys, but none of them I was really interested in after a while," Jai-Rong admitted. "I've never had much luck in the dating department." 

"I know the feeling," Po said with a sigh. He grabbed four more cookies and leaned back against the peach tree. "The only person I've ever really sort of dated was Song. And Lu-Shi, but that was more of an arrangement thing. And all that stuff was more circumstantial than it was just meeting someone and asking them to go on a date." 

"You've never dated in high school?"

"None of the girls liked me in high school, but dad says I didn't miss much since high school kids are always stupid." 

Jai-Rong laughed. "Well, he does have a point," she agreed. "Not everyone has the right perspective and insight when it comes to dating at that young of an age. You need to communicate and compromise and work together as a team rather than throwing in the towel after one fight. My high school boyfriend and I fought a lot. And it was usually over something really stupid, like the fact that I hate the color red and he ALWAYS got me something red whenever he'd get me a gift. I didn't care that he went out of his way and got me something. I thought the gift was ugly!"  She sighed. "I was sort a jerk back then when I really think about it," she reflected. 

"Well, you're not now, so I say that's an improvement," Po assured her. 

Jai-Rong laughed. "I suppose so," she agreed. "Growth is good." 

Po finished devouring his cookies before finally pouring himself a cup of tea to wash it down. Jai-Rong, who hadn't touched anything on the plate, smirked at how nearly empty it was.

"Madame Zhou was right," she said. "You really can hold down a lot of food." 

Po turned red. "Yeah, I....yeah. I kinda' always have."

The two turned to look back over the valley which was now washed over in the soft blue of darkness, with pale clouds just barely outlined in the sky with a few stars peeking out to say hi.

"If you could see any place in the world, where would you go?" Jai-Rong asked the master. "I've always wanted to go to Cameroon."

Po looked concerned. "Isn't it dangerous to go there?" he asked. "I hear the terrain isn't very safe." 

"That's the fun part! Apparently one of the local landmarks is the Magma Rapids. They're so fast and have so many deadly rocks that no body dares cross the bridge to get to the other side to get to the nearby mountain and see the view."

Po frowned in thought. "Have you ever crossed deadly rapids before?" he asked. 

"No, but it's something I've always wanted to check off of my list of things to do. Don't you have something like that?"

"A list of stuff I've always wanted to do? Oh, yeah, absolutely! I've always wanted to meet the Furious Five, which I definitely have, and I've always wanted to eat the spiciest food alive, though so far that goes to the Reaper dumplings I tried recently, and then I've always want-" 

The mini gong went off, ending the hour that Po and Jai-Rong had to talk. 

"Man!" Po grumbled. 

"We can continue this conversation another time," Jai-Rong promised him. "In the meantime, this has been a very nice chat." 

"Thanks," Po said with a smile. "Thanks for the cookies. And I hope you feel better tomorrow." 

"Thanks. Have a nice night!" 

Po waved goodbye to her and then headed off to rest before having the last meeting of the day.