Sofiane stared at Shuixing like she had just proposed dimension-jumping themselves. “Uh... Shui, I think telling her would be a very bad idea.”

Shuixing huffed. “Why not? She clearly has no illusions about the Yishang meddling in things. Telling her about that can’t be too much of an issue."

“What is “that,” exactly?” Vidorgia asked.

Sofiane ignored her. “Shui, how do we know she won’t turn around and tell the other Non-Heroes? And then how long do you think it’ll take the Yishang to realize who let the secret get out? We have nothing to gain and everything to lose from telling her or any other Non-Hero.”

“What secret?” Vidorgia asked again.

“Don’t ask about the damn secret before we’ve decided whether we’re going to tell you the damn secret!” he yelled.

Vidorgia put her hands up defensively.

“This world is fake and the Yishang sell copies of us to the Celestials for money,” Shuixing said.

On Shui's face was a very Natsuko-like expression of stubbornness. Sofiane rubbed his temples. Shui was supposed to be the thoughtful, intelligent, rational one. If Natsuko was off making smart decisions somewhere, the universe was officially done for.

“Wow, very cool,” Vidorgia said.

“You think we’re joking?” Shuixing said.

Vidorgia put a hand on her hip. “Put it this way, you don’t sound any less convincing than Mr. Prophet.”

Shuixing did her best to bring Vidorgia up to speed on everything she had learned about the Yishang while Sofiane interjected to explain it all in terms that Vidorgia could actually understand. As the story went along, Vidorgia’s mild amusement turned into confusion and discomfort as she realized this wasn’t just another Special Event plot point.

“I guess I'll buy that for now,” Vidorgia said. “At least until you let me try this compound. I’m not sold on everyone being numbers, but whatever. What do you need from me? Just getting you to your lab?” Vidorgia said.

“Killing Baphomet would be nice,” Sofiane said.

“No can do. We’re in a Special Event. I can’t touch him.”

Sofiane scoffed. “But we explained how to take control of Special Events!”

“Weren’t you saying two seconds ago we need to be discreet? The script is that a Hero is supposed to kill him. If I do it there's a giant neon sign pointing to us saying, ‘funny business here!’ See why that's a problem?”

Sofiane was gutted that a Non-Hero was thinking more clearly than he was, especially one that should be reeling from having her entire perception of the world shattered.

“Sure, fine,” Sofiane said. “But frankly I'm a little suspicious how easy you’re taking everything we just told you.”

Vidorgia scoffed. “Maybe it was a shock to you Heroes who thought the world existed for you to run around and slay enemies and complete quests and make numbers go up, but us Non-Heroes have always known what it’s really like. I’m meant to be shocked the Yishang is making us dance for the Celestials? Babe, that’s what being a Non-Hero is.”

Sofiane didn’t appreciate her attempt to guilt him so he stomped off to go put on the anti-royalist outfit. It fit much better than the overalls, being roughly about his size and much more his style. The red liberty cap that went with it also fit his bunched up hair under it. Shuixing looked slightly less convincing only because of her beaten-up glasses—eye correction being an aristocratic decadence—but if she kept them in her pockets she passed. Both she and Sofiane made sure to grab a force dimension-jump arquebus. Once disguised, Vidorgia led them to Vermögenburgh.

In their week-long absence, the entire town had been sacked. Nothing was outright damaged due to the 4am clean-up, but the strange properties of “ownership” (the mechanism that let people keep things in-between days) rendered the “damage” visible through the turning out of interiors. Bottles of alcohol lay shattered on the ground beside outdated weapons and armor, books now “owned” by a looter were strewn about the pavement, and carts were overturned in the fountain. Clothes, shoes, and food had also been looted, as Shuixing saw Non-Heroes walking around wearing Vermögenburgh cloaks and dresses and snacking on rye sandwiches.

Fortunately, the anarchy made for excellent cover. No one noticed amid the whirl of flowing outfits and faces the resemblance of one of the anti-royalist women to a certain Hero who had attacked their Prophet. Sofiane seemed horrified by the anarchy, but Shuixing found herself fascinated by the rapid-pace exchanging of identities. Having explored the ways in which the Yishang had—quite literally—codified certain groups and regions, the entropy of Baphomet’s grand gathering had dissolved this codification in a carnivalesque fire. Sibe-Lander tribesmen had traded their horses for Bolter steammobiles while Shikijiman rebels walked around in Cascadian fur coats and carried al-Nuwban scimitars marked with force dimension-jump geometry. And while Shuixing hadn’t noticed it when she put it on, the pins in her stolen liberty hat were Tianzhounese jade. Whether all this was good or bad, she couldn't say, but even without checking Numberspace, she could tell there had been an enormous jumble of numbers.

Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.

“What do you make of it?” Shuixing asked Vidorgia as the three of them walked up the winding road to the Mage’s College.

“You mean the Special Event?” Vidorgia asked.

Despite the term’s lofty connotations, “Special Event” felt like a short sell of what was happening.

“No— I mean, yes, but about the Non-Heroes mixing specifically. It’s probably the first time most of them have ever seen a Non-Hero from another region,” Shuixing said.

Vidorgia sniffed. “It’s a mess is what it is.”

Sofiane agreed, but Shuixing still felt as though something important was happening here. If she had been asked what she thought of it all before her excursions into Numberspace, she might have agreed with them. And there was no denying that it inconvenienced the native Vermögenburghers quite a bit. But after exploring the nature of Entities (she refused to use the Celestial term “characters”), she had reached a hypothesis that an intermingling, or the introduction of entropy or chaos into a static equilibrium, was often necessary for conceptual leaps.

The carnival atmosphere ended abruptly one block from the Mage’s College where severe Sibe-lander horse archers patrolled the perimeter. They would be easy to fight, but there were so many of them that at least one would slip away and alert Baphomet. Sofiane glanced at Vidorgia who didn't slow her pace. Two horsemen trotted up to meet her.

“Hi guys, Baphy in?” Vidorgia said.

They glared at her and one said, “you will refer to him as The Prophet. At the moment he is away. If you must leave him a message, we will make sure he gets it.”

The other rider was eyeing up Sofiane and Shuixing. Sofiane met him with an appropriately-Cascadian look of haughty disdain. Shui, however, winced under the scrutiny.

The horseman frowned. “Who are you two?”

“W-Who, us?” Shuixing stuttered. “W-We, um, we’re freedom fighters, t-tearing down the tyranny of the uh… the queen!”

Vidorgia looked at Shui like she'd just asked permission to assassinate Baphomet. Sensing something was amiss, the horseman drew a rod from his saddlepack.

Sofiane cleared his throat and laughed. “Hon hon hon! Citizen Justine is acclimating to her liberation, you see. Her head is still full of Yishang nonsense, don’t mind her. As for me? I am her sister, Juliette. We are both from Cascadia, as you can see.”

Juliette gave a little curtsy which a blushing Justine imitated. The Sibe-Lander horsemen seemed no less irritated, but stuck his rod back in his pack.

“All you Cascadians are silly people,” he said.

The one Vidorgia had been speaking to turned back to her. “Well? Your message?”

Vidorgia put her hands on her hips. “It’s not a message. We need something from one of the labs inside.”

“For what?”

Vidorgia replied with a blank stare. Juliette, seeing that both her fellow spies were in a race to see who could be the most suspicious, jumped in again. “Some of the professors in the college are working on a way to bring back the regions wiped out by the Yishang. Some kind of anti-anthro— antro— enta— ugh, I don’t know the stupid jargon! I just know we need to get the eggheads their silly science juice."

“I haven’t heard about any of this. Have you?” one rider asked the other who shook his head.

“Well! Neither had I until one of you hairy brutes came up and ordered us on this little errand," Juliette said. "And to be quite honest with you, I’d rather be done with it so I can go have a glass of wine. Now would you please get out of our way, Monsieur Horsehumper?”

The rider sneered at her. “Which militia are—”

“We,” Juliette pointed to herself and Justine, “are with the 11th Citizen’s Militia out of Île-de-Amhl. I’m sure you know where that is, non?”

He snorted. “Matter of fact, I do. Got to talking with some bowmen from there. And I happen to know it’s a First People village, not a Cascadian one, and you sure look Cascadian to me.”

Justine—or rather, Shuixing—desperately tried to keep her face from showing the panic boiling beneath the surface. There was no way Sofiane—or rather, Juliette—had an answer for that. But words spilled out of Juliette at a galloping pace:

“When the Yishang were setting up our illusory conflict with Her Royal Maj—” Juliette coughed “—the queen, the citizen’s militias were spread around all of Cascadia, including Île-de-Amhl, so we could pretend we were fighting her on all fronts. I am aware how silly it is, mon perte de temps, I am the one who had to stomp around the woods for three straight years. If I find a handkerchief I will give it to you so you can cry for me, but right now I need you to get the hell out of my way because you are keeping me from my afternoon wine.”

The rider stared at Juliette, eyes glazed over from the sheer velocity with which the horseshit came from her mouth, but being entirely unaware it was horseshit and confident there wasn't much trouble a loudmouthed Cascadian woman could get up to in the Mage’s College, he exhaled deeply and said, “fine. We’ll escort you to get this “science juice”.”

“Merci,” Juliette replied.

The two Sibe-Lander guards dismounted their horses and escorted the three-ish women into the Mage’s College. Just like the rest of Vermögenburgh it was in a strange state of chaotic disarray without any visible damage. This mostly entailed scattered papers and books and ink, but what Shuixing did not see were any faculty or students, and this concerned her, though she put this aside for the moment.

Their group eventually came upon her old laboratory. Unlike the first time it was ransacked, the room was tidy, albeit missing her chemistry equipment and research files as well as her maps of Numberspace, her compiled findings, and all 12 notebooks of the Algorinomicon, no doubt pilfered by Baphomet. The thought of her hard work being taken by an idiot like Baphomet who was blindly following a Pengwu’s order made her exceedingly angry.

“O-Oh, hehehe, we must have made a wrong turn. Haven’t we, Justine?” Sofiane said, trying to cover for the fact that the “science juice” they had been sent to fetch was nowhere to be seen.

“My work! Do you have any idea—!?” Shuixing said, putting her cracked glasses back on with hands shaking in rage.

Her two escorts fumbled for their FDJ rods.

“Rrragh!” Shuixing screamed at them, swatting them both with her own rod first, turning them into spasming polygons slowly sinking into the ground. Sofiane put his palm in his hand.