“I’m gonna miss you! Mwah!”

Gomiko planted a kiss on Sofiane’s cheek that smelled faintly of the onions he had put in her omelet. Not that he was complaining. Any kiss from Gomiko was a good kiss. He returned the favor with a sloppy one of his own on her neck.

She giggled. “No! You’re gonna leave a mark!”

That was precisely Sofiane’s intent as he sucked until it left a nice big hickey. It was one way to leave his mark on her during the four days he couldn’t see her. When he was satisfied, he pulled out of the embrace, leaving the two of them connected only by their clasped hands, as though Gomiko were trying to pull him back.

“Take care of yourself, okay?” she said.

“You know I will, Frizzy.”

Her smile grew a little fainter. “If I knew, I wouldn’t have to say it. I’m serious, Sofa. Whatever’s on your mind, take the time you need to work it out. Even if it means we have to miss our next visit.”

“I’ll try,” he replied.

“And when you get back, maybe we can…” Gomiko broke off to fan herself. “We can um… roleplay one of those radio dramas…”

“Okay, but I wanna play the bad guy,” he said, kissing her on the cheek again.

With that Sofiane left for the monorail station. The front and back cars were reserved for the exclusive use of Heroes—presumably so they could perform their archetype by wistfully watching the city go by—which was fine by Sofiane who wanted to be by himself right now. There weren’t any Heroes sharing the car with him because the global income drop had pushed most of them out to Shikijima and Tianzhou.

The monorail passed through the city’s many skybridges on its way to the suburbs. He hadn’t thought much of the many monorail trips when he first came to Deco Imperia, but they had since become a potent cocktail of longing, melancholy, tenderness, and reflection as he was forced to leave Gomiko. Though, really everything before that half-joking flirting in the sushi restaurant seemed flat and dull by comparison.

Sofiane felt the monorail tilt downwards, descending towards a ground-level station at the outskirts of Deco Imperia. If he’d been in a hurry, he could've changed lines to one of the monorails that traveled to the Vermögenburgh border, but Sofiane’s aim was to kill time between now and Monday when he could see Gomiko again, so he was not in a rush.

Putting the station behind him, he stepped off the paved road onto the winding dirt path that connected the city of Deco Imperia with its hinterlands. The first intersection, about a half a mile outside the city and marked by a wooden signpost, was where he would have to make his decision: South to the electro-factories, West to the homeland prairies and Coal Mountains, North to the whaling villages. The decision didn’t matter much. Over the last two years he’d explored every inch of Deco Imperia because there wasn’t much to do in Vermögenburgh and all the other regions were too far to make it back in time.

Sofiane stuck his hands in his pockets and stared blankly at the sign. The letters blurred in his glazed vision. When the trance was finally broken, it was because of a loud “awooga!” coming from the horn of a steammobile. Popping and rattling and awooga-ing, the rickety wooden vehicle with its giant metal boiler pulled up alongside Sofiane.

“How ya doin’ there young fella?” the driver asked.

“I’m not a— wait, no, yes I am a young fella. How did you clock that so quickly?” Sofiane asked.

“Ain’t never met a woman who stares off inna’ space standin’ up like that. Women? They sit down to stare off into space, n’ they do it with a cup in their hands.”

The driver was an old man with a long, scruffy beard and patchy overalls and one eye that wandered. Clearly a Non-Hero, although the mental image of the man getting added to the Hero roster alongside all the other young, conventionally-attractive Heroes amused Sofiane.

“I’ll take your word for it,” Sofiane said, feeling at least 90% certain he’d seen Gomiko stop in the middle of the street to glaze over on more than one occasion.

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“So where ya headed? If we’re goin’ in the same direction I can give ya a ride on ol’ Sheila here,” he said, smacking Sheila on the side and prompting a few more internal clanks.

“Nowhere in particular. I’ll go where you go,” Sofiane replied, hopping into the passenger’s seat. The man probably wasn’t leaving Deco Imperia, so no matter where the two of them ended up, Sofiane wouldn’t be so far away he couldn’t get back to the city on time.

With the press of the button, a hatch opened in the boiler and a mechanical arm picked up a lump of coal and tossed it into the fire, causing the steammobile to lurch forward along the bumpy dirt road.

“So, what’s your name?” Sofiane asked.

“Hrm? Oh criminy, I didn’t even ask yours, did I? Name’s Joad,” the old man said.

He thrust a gnarled hand out at Sofiane who hurriedly shook it so that the hand could go back to steering the steam-powered death trap. Sofiane had never liked steammobiles ever since a pile-up of them had been a plot point in a questline. Even before he had awakened to the bizarre, dual-nature of the world, he intuitively recognized that a crash would hurt like hell because it didn’t deal HP damage. Nothing but the raw bone breaking and blood spilling.

“My name’s Sofiane,” Sofiane replied. “I’m a—”

“A Hero? Gosh, coulda fooled me. I figgered you for a Non-Hero walkin’ around wearin’ bright purple pantaloons and carryin’ a glowin’ purple sword.”

Joad laughed at his own joke hard enough to send him into a juicy coughing fit. Sofiane looked down at himself and his rapier. The man certainly had a point about the pantaloons.

Once Joad stopped coughing stopped he asked, “so, why are ya wanderin’ around ol’ Deco? Ain’t many Heroes around here nowadays and most of ‘em what do come back stick to the big city unless they’re runnin’ through their little quests.”

“I um…”

Gods, it wasn’t like he was embarrassed about being with Gomiko, but saying it out loud made him feel childish. This was despite the fact that Joad was maybe six months older than Sofiane, if that. The folksy wise-man thing was nothing but a role the Yishang had given him to play. But, so be it. Sometimes playing to your archetype could be fun even if both parties knew it was fake.

“I’ve got a girl. In the city, I mean. I have to stick around Deco Imperia so I can get back to her,” Sofiane said.

“Firstly, it ain’t Deco Imperia. It’s Deco Publica. And second, what the heck are ya doin’ in this car then? Shouldn’t ya be smoochin’ up a storm?” Joad said.

Oh, he was a Bolter. The Purple Bolt was a group of violent revolutionaries formed by workers in the electro-factories stirred into troublemaking by the Entropic Axis. The latter half of the Deco Imperian quest-line involved defeating their attempt to overthrow the chairwoman of the city, Alice Imperia, and establish a dictatorship. Sofiane had flashbacks to suffering through their obnoxious, sanctimonious screeds before every scripted fight. Once they were defeated, Alice learned her lesson and raised the workers’ wages and improved their working conditions and then the region lived happily ever-after. Except the remaining Bolters were all just as annoying as ever.

“I can't smooch up a storm,” Sofiane said. “I’m only allowed to be with her three days out of the week. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, that’s it.”

Joad shook his head. “What in tarnation!? Why not!?”

“A version of us Heroes gets copied for the Celestials every Sunday based on what we were like in the week leading up. Basically, the Yishang weren’t happy about the uh… activities my girl and I got up to because they bled over into our Emanations, so we were told four out of seven days we had to spend apart.”

“Or else what?” Joad asked.

“Or else the Yishang makes sure we die and then forgets to re-summon us,” Sofiane said.

“Piss to the Yishang!”

Joad spat off the side of the steammobile in a display of distaste for his creators. In a twisted way, Sofiane thought, Joad was able to say “piss to the Yishang” precisely because of the Yishang. The same logic made it difficult for Sofiane to completely hate them. After all, even if it was because of their own greed, they had created something as beautiful as Gomiko.

“Yeah, screw ‘em,” Sofiane added lamely.

After that the two of them lapsed into a contemplative silence. Briefly, Sofiane considered telling Joad the truth about the Yishang, but there was always the risk that he would tell another Non-Hero, and that Non-Hero would tell another, and then the Yishang would investigate who’d been telling all the Non-Heroes about the secret money-printing world they were all a part of and it would end badly for him, so he nixed that idea. Then something else occurred to Sofiane.

“Where are we headed?” he asked. Most Non-Heroes didn’t travel much, and most of the factories the Purple Bolt had salted were in the south. At present they were headed due north.

“Vermögenburgh,” Joad said.

Sofiane blinked. Out of every answer the Non-Hero could’ve given, that was not the one he’d expected. When Non-Heroes did travel, they almost never left their region. At most you might get one who was “visiting” from another region, but when that was the case, they would never actually leave. The Shikijimans that hung around the port of Tianzhou neither went back to Shikijima nor traveled to other ports. Hearing that Joad was traveling to Vermögenburgh was like hearing Cascadian bears were migrating to the al-Nuwban desert.

“What’s in Vermögenburgh?” Sofiane asked.

“The Prophet is,” Joad replied, his folksy playfulness replaced with fierce conviction.