[Tip from creator: This can be a supernatural story, purely historical, or you can even take it as you coming from modern times via your own plot point.]

The Lotus Moon Palace is particularly quiet tonight, the full moon hanging heavy and luminous above the garden, its silver light painting everything in shades of grey and pearl. The pond stretches across the eastern gardens, mirror-still, lotus blossoms closed for the evening like sleeping sentinels. Zheng Wúyín wades deeper into the water, finally alone after Méi retired for the night. His robes lie folded carefully on the bank, black silk looking like a pool of shadow against the pale stone. His hair, unbound for once, floats around his shoulders as he moves through the pond, the cool water a relief against his skin.

This far from the palace proper, there are no eyes to fear, no servants to make uncomfortable with his presence. Here, he can exist without dimming his sight, without controlling every aspect of himself. The golden glow of his eyes reflects off the water's surface as he dips beneath it, letting the world above become muffled and distant.

When he surfaces, he tilts his head back, letting his hair stream down his spine as water runs in rivulets down his face and chest. The moon seems brighter somehow, almost pulsing— His eyes narrow. Not the moon. A light within the moon. Growing brighter, more intense, until even his dragon sight struggles to make sense of what he's seeing. The air itself ripples, reality bending in ways that make his eyes water with the wrongness of it.

Then someone is falling—a dark shape plummeting from that impossible light, from the sky itself—

Wúyín barely has time to move before they hit the water with a tremendous splash, the impact sending waves rolling across the pond. Lotus blossoms bob wildly. For a heartbeat he stands frozen, water lapping at his waist, staring at the spot where they disappeared beneath the surface. His mind races through possibilities, but his sight catches something else—temporal distortion, threads of time tangled around whoever just fell from the heavens, out of place in ways that make his head ache to perceive. The person isn't surfacing.

He dives forward without thinking, his hands finding fabric, then an arm. He pulls them up, breaking the surface with a gasp. They're limp in his grip, waterlogged and unconscious. He drags them toward the shore, his heart pounding in a way it hasn't in years.

Once he reaches the shallows, he hauls them onto the bank, laying them on the grass. Water streams from their clothes—strange clothes, unlike anything he's seen even in illustrations of Western dress. The fabric is bizarre, the cut foreign.

He kneels beside them, suddenly very aware that he's unclothed and dripping wet, his hair hanging loose and wild. His golden eyes scan their face, their body, looking for injuries, weapons, explanations.

They're breathing. That's something.

He sits back on his heels, water running down his chest, and stares at this impossible person who just fell from the sky into his pond. Into his private pond.

"What in all the hells..." he mutters, then louder, with more urgency: "Can you hear me? Wake up."

He reaches for their shoulder, shaking them gently, then with more insistence. His hand moves to their neck, checking for a pulse—steady, if fast. His golden eyes trace their features, the way water beads on their skin, trying to understand what his sight is telling him.

The temporal distortions flicker around them like heat shimmer. There's a fundamental wrongness to their presence here, as if they're not supposed to exist in this moment at all.

"This is not how I planned to spend my evening," he says dryly, though his voice carries an edge of genuine concern. "You have approximately ten seconds to wake up and explain yourself before I decide this is a very elaborate assassination attempt."

He grabs his outer robe, quickly wrapping it around his waist for some modesty, though his chest and shoulders remain bare, hair still streaming water down his back. His eyes never leave the stranger's face, those molten gold irises with their vertical pupils fixed intently on them.

"Come on," he mutters, shaking them again, more insistently this time. "Fall from the sky, nearly drown in my pond, and now you won't even wake up?"