“Storms on the moon are ridiculous. How lazy are the Yishang?” Daisy said, head resting on her hand as she stared out the cafe window.
Cunegonde dabbed her lips with a napkin leaving pink lipstick marks. “Whatever do you mean?”
“I mean,” Daisy said, pushing away the slice of cake she was suddenly not hungry for. “Why would there be weather on the moon? We’re in space. There isn’t any water here. How is there water coming from the sky? The Yishang got lazy and didn’t adjust the weather settings for Selenia.”
Cunegonde squinted at her. “Darling, you’re talking silly again. Weather just happens. There are storms everywhere. That’s how things are.”
“Yeah, but on the moon?”
It was no use. She had pointed out other logical fallacies to her teammates before and they seemed utterly blind to them. Cunegonde would handwaved things as, “just how things are,” Kane would find these inconsistencies cool and then not understand why they mattered, and Yuna couldn’t get two brain cells to bump into each other long enough to figure out what Daisy was yapping about. The only other person in Selenia who would’ve shared her confusion at lunar thunderstorms was Natsuko. Daisy wondered if she was thinking the same thing right now.
“Lunar storms… Moon storms…” Kane said, stroking a chin covered in crumbs. He suddenly snapped his fingers. “Wait, there is water on the moon! The Lunar seas, that’s where the water’s coming from!”
“Those are craters, dear. Not real seas,” Cunegonde said.
“Wait, huh?”
Daisy slumped forward as Cunegonde tried to explain the concept of lunar maria to Kane. The idea that they were going to have to tackle the Lunar Dragon again some time in the future made Daisy want to curl into a ball and wait for the Yishang to wipe everything out. If she was adventuring solo, she might have done just that, but the other three were relying on her to pick up the pieces and keep going.
“There’s a lot we can do better next time,” Daisy said.
“Yeah, like not abandoning the teammates you’re supposed to protect,” Cunegonde said.
“Or, you know, not leaving your teammates on half-HP,” Yuna said, bacon strips clenched in her fist.
Cunegonde scoffed and shook her blonde curls. “I was cycling my abilities as fast as they came up. How about actually trying to dodge so I don’t have to dump all of my healing into one suicidal idiot, hmm?”
Yuna slammed the table. “You think it’s easy being all the way up the enemy’s fucking ass?”
“Girls, please don’t fight,” Kane said.
Daisy mushed her cake down with her fork, smearing it across the plate. Windwalker’s team was staring at them from across the cafe, which only made Yuna even more irritable since they were her former teammates.
“What!? You bastards got somethin’ to say!?” Yuna yelled at them.
Windwalker, Haalia, Petyr, and Anastasia all looked away as though it was a stray cat hissing at them. Daisy wanted to crawl under the table.
“Leave them alone, they clearly don’t want to catch your fleas,” Cunegonde said.
This started yet another argument. Eventually, Daisy gave up. She slapped her part of the bill down on the table.
“Everyone take a day to relax and get your mind off things. We’ll talk when we’ve got cooler heads,” Daisy said.
“Taking a break is the last thing we should be doing!” Cunegonde replied. “We’re already behind, we just lost 10% of our stats, and you want to waste an entire day!?”
“Yes,” Daisy said and walked out.
The cafe was nestled in one of the many floors of arcades in the steel webwork of criss-crossing skyways and overhangs that comprised the Capitol Building. It made her feel like a cocooned fly, especially when she wandered the labyrinth of utility hallways as she was wont to do when she wanted to be alone. Leaving the glitzy part of the Capitol Building behind, Daisy threw open a steel door to a long hallway of pipes and ducts. Whenever she came upon a junction, she chose deeper in or further down until she was deliberately lost. She was surprised the Yishang even bothered to create all of this. She couldn’t imagine they had expected a wistful Hero to go and occupy it.
Daisy sat down on a humming piece of machinery and pulled out a small notebook and pencil from the same magical space in her flight suit that she kept her compass weapon and set herself to writing a poem. At first nothing came, but she had learned not to let that bother her. Something was in there, it just needed time. That was probably the most useful piece of advice Pechorin had given her. The easy poems, the ones that used to spring right out of her, had dried up by now, and if Pechorin hadn’t warned her, she might have thought it was the whole reservoir that had gone dry. But it wasn’t. She just had to dig a little deeper.
“The little bird she flies,
Towards the sandy ground.
Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.
Hope above her lies,
But comfort downward found.
Her wings are tired,
E’er they’ve flapped,
In relentless gravity’s prise.
‘Tween lows and highs
And otherwise
This bird she’s surely been tossed.
Crossed from heaven to sandy ground—
No more can she fly.
And into quicksand,
Rough and dry,
The bird she slowly sinks.
Her laziness rewarded—
A final cry
Then gone—a final blink.”
She paused for a second once she’d finished the first draft then chuckled to herself. “When did you get so dark, Daisy ol’ girl?”
A steam vent further down the hallway hissed and she wasn’t sure whether it was in approval or criticism. She supposed depressing poems weren’t as fun to read or recite for others. They were more for the person writing them.
When she was done brooding like a teenage girl—not that she had ever been anything but a woman of young yet safely Ero-Art-drawable age—she packed her notebook and wandered up to the surface by inverting her earlier logic of always going down and in. The noise and light of the Selenian Capitol felt a little less oppressive now that her worries were written down in ink. Searching for her teammates, she wasn’t able to find Kane or Yuna, but she found Cunegonde by narrowing her search to the two places her teammate might be: grinding for XP or clothing shopping. And since Planetview Cavern was a much further walk…
“The hem should end in cerulean, this is more cobalt,” Cunegonde said, running a long white fingernail across a dress laid out by Sudra, the master tailor.
The bespectacled man’s black hair was thrown in several different directions as though he’d been pulling at it, and knowing her teammate’s demanding personality, he probably had. The dress in question was in the Cascadian style: More lace, ruffle, pleat, and frill than plain fabric by surface area. It was somewhat like a ball gown except with a lot more leg showing. The top part was white—Cunegonde’s color of choice—but turned into a gradient of white-to-blue which ended with cobalt at the bottom hem. Not cerulean.
“Oh, hello Daisy. Come to join me for some shopping?” Cunegonde said.
Her tone was light and friendly. Daisy supposed shopping was Cunegonde’s equivalent to poetry, something to help put down her troubles.
“I was going to see if you wanted to grind a little, actually. I’m feeling up to it now,” Daisy replied.
Cunegonde tossed her blonde sausage curls. “Not now babe. We’re in shopping mode.”
Daisy chuckled at that and sat down next to Cunegonde.
“Now, I think it should end in cerulean,” Cunegonde said, bracelets jangling as she swished her hand around the top of the dress. “But we also may need to change the shade of white as well. This is sort of an ivory, but we ought to try a lavenderblush. I think it'll flow into the blue more cleanly. What do you think, Daisy?”
Daisy tapped her nails against the table. “Hmm… What about a ghostwhite? Or— Ooh! Hear me out: Lighten the entire gradient and add the cerulean back in with a sash.”
Cunegonde gasped and grabbed Daisy’s wrist. “It’s bold. I love it.”
The tailor sighed and went to the back of the shop to make the alterations. Knowing the game, Daisy helped Cunegonde foist several more alterations onto Sudra for the sole purpose of having foisted more alterations on him before finally settling on no sash, an ivory white top, and a gradient that ended in cobalt instead of cerulean to which Cunegonde clapped and enthusiastically proclaimed:
“Ooh yeah, yeah, that’s so good!”
“Gorgeous, De. Gorgeous,” Daisy replied.
Cunegonde dropped 20% of her team’s weekly operating budget on the shop counter and departed with dress in hand.
“Okay, now, super important question for you,” Cunegonde said as the two Heroes parted the sea of Non-Heroes. “And there is a right answer.”
“Yeah?” Daisy asked.
“What’s next: Shoes, or bubbly?”
That was an easy one.
“Bubbly first, ask for a couple bottles, leave with the bottles, then go to the shoe store,” Daisy said.
“Correct!”
And like that the two ended up shoe shopping while drinking Cascadian champagne directly from the bottle. Daisy managed to keep herself sober enough to insist that they only buy one pair each since the tiny closet in their tiny apartment was already 50% Daisy and Cunegonde’s shoes by volume.
Daisy picked out some white boots to mix up the pink ones she was currently wearing with her flight suit while Cunegonde was deciding between four different heeled sandals to go with the dress she’d just bought. Throughout the process her teammate yammered endlessly about a story with multiple tangents that both of them knew was thoroughly unimportant during which Daisy’s role was to periodically say, “what!? That’s crazy!” and then Cunegonde would say, “I know, right!?” and then continue the story. The sheer meaningless of it was like a brain massage for both of them.
Once the story was over and they bought their shoes and were walking back to the accessory shop they lived above, something popped into Daisy’s head that had to come out.
“De, what um… what do you think of me as a leader? Be honest,” Daisy said.
“Umm… well… you’re good at keeping us together! And you’re not pushy and annoying, that’s a huge plus,” Cunegonde replied.
“Okay, now the bad stuff.”
Cunegonde exhaled. “Listen, you’re running an adventuring party, not a therapy group, but it feels like that’s what you think this is. You care a lot about keeping our spirits up, making sure we’re not overworking ourselves, keeping us from fighting… but the Use-Rankings are a competition. And if you don’t want to compete, don’t. No one is forcing you. But right now you’ve got one foot in and one foot out, and all you’re gonna do is trip yourself. And us.”
“Is it so bad to care about you all?” Daisy said softly.
“Heroes are fundamentally self-interested. It’s always been like that. We work in teams because it helps us individually, but if we could rank up faster grinding alone, we would. Babe, you knew that better than anyone back in the day. These last two years you’ve been trying to pretend like that’s not how things work, but you can’t fake your way to living in a fantasy world, Daisy. The real world is always gonna get you in the end,” Cunegonde said.
Daisy sighed. “But what about today? I mean, I enjoyed the shopping and the champagne and all and… doesn’t that count for something?”
Cunegonde placed a hand on Daisy’s shoulder. “Today was lovely, darling, but if I ever decide you’re dragging me down, I’ll cut you loose. That’s just how it is.”
Nothing Cunegonde said surprised Daisy. Every last word of it was something she already knew. That was just how things were.