Tomoe spat in the face of such bright and cheery days. Whether it was something he couldn't shake off from his former life under more Vampiric tendencies, the weird night-based ability that the old hag from that fortune telling shop had placed upon him, or his old life as a thief, things involving the shade and acts of subtlety followed him all throughout life. It wasn't as if he was particularly thrilled about that aspect of himself either, however, and in protest shot a loogie projectile from his mouth. It landed smack in the center of a rock, and as he watched it trickle down and presumably grow hotter under the watchful gaze of the sun, he contemplated life. He was that loogie, and at the end of the day, so was everyone else. Just sliding down the rocky slope called life until it hit a soil patch and became absorbed into it, forgotten but no longer looked upon as gross and awful.

"Was there a point to this...?", Tomoe muttered to himself, scratching the back of his head and darting his eyes around in thought.

Right. In his misery, he had forgotten that he was to meet with his friend, the one who could be considered the more true leader of Penumbral Guard. Tomoe had yet to truly speak his piece on the concept of dual leadership, and on why maybe Fiore's the problem if they're too racist - or bone-ist - to accept the idea of a Lich that doesn't plotting world domination. Granted, Tomoe is one of few to say he had met a Lich that plotted world domination and lived to tell about it, but that wasn't the case for most people. There was a difference between these examples of Liches, and the Joyan wanted the world to see that; less because he wanted to see social progress and more because he wanted the royalty to stop being a royal pain in his ass and just accept people as they are so that he could stop pretending to be the leader of a cause he didn't truly believe in.

Apparently someone was killing people in the area, or more specifically, in a nearby mine shaft. Tomoe scoured his thoughts for who it could be, but came up almost completely blank. No, there was definitely nobody that would do any such thing. That would be horrendous, and any dastardly devil that would delight in such things would need to be brought to justice. For that reason, and certainly not for the sake of his own desire to defend himself, Tomoe came armed to the teeth when he heard that his comrade Aegis was readying an investigation.

Upon coming into vision of the not-too-subtle towering Lich, Tomoe began to think somewhat poorly of his own decrease in height since using Kusanagi. For what reason would his own usage of it cause his appearance to change so drastically? For him to become younger and shorter, and to be altered so heavily as to not be recognizable from how he appeared a mere year ago? He had hoped that at the very least his friend had gotten used to seeing him this way, because the reverse certainly wasn't true yet. From total klutz to imposing skeleton-man, it was a bit of a transition for his old friend, to be sure.

"Hey, bud. You ready to bust some heads? Whoever it is that's killin' around here, they ain't gonna be doing it much longer, y'know? You geared for it?", Tomoe inquired after approaching, hoping beyond hope that they wouldn't find anything particularly incriminating for reasons that of course he wouldn't speak up about or reveal to anybody.