The day after receiving the bad news about the retrieval mission, Sofiane suited up to go to Deco Imperia himself. He placed Joad in charge while he was gone and picked out three steammobiles full of Purple Bolters to help him search for Team Harald. It was clear to those working under him that Sofiane wasn't thinking straight, and Medea, Vronsky, and Zicheng all tried to persuade him that his mission committed too many resources in the event of a Hero attack. But Sofiane refused to listen, driven by a feverish need to see Gomiko safe. It was therefore to everyone's immense relief when Team Harald showed up in Vermögenburgh of their own accord half an hour before Sofiane planned to depart. Sofiane, helping to pack supplies into the steammobiles, was the first to spot them.
Sofiane grabbed a nearby Non-Hero. “Do you see that?”
“Huh? You mean those Heroes… shit!”
The Non-Hero reached for his rod. Sofiane laughed and told him to put it away. Now that he knew they weren't a sleep deprivation hallucination, he allowed himself to get excited and sprint towards the four figures coming out of the forest. Though glad to see him, his four teammates looked weary. Gomiko especially appeared distant and distracted in a way he’d never seen before.
“Are you all okay? What happened?” Sofiane asked, grinding to a halt on the gravel path in front of them.
“We’re alright. Just a run-in with some other Heroes,” Harald answered suspiciously quickly.
Gomiko gave a strained smile and nodded as though approving of this specific answer. Something was off, but he couldn’t tell whether it was an outright lie or just a half-truth. Both possibilities made him feel hurt. It was the first time he knew of where she had deliberately kept something from him. At the same time, he had to trust it was for a good reason.
He threw her into a hug. “I missed you, Frizzy. I’m glad you’re safe.”
She rubbed his back. “Me too, Sofa."
A bit of her usual cheer was working its way back into her voice.
In his head he had pictured this moment as being a grand celebration where he would show them around, introduce them to the committee members, have them say hello to Daisy and Natsuko, and make sure they had something to eat and drink before explaining their new mission. All of that was out the window. It was clear the only thing his team needed or wanted at the moment was rest, which was the one thing that slipped his mind to arrange.
Sofiane walked with them back to the tent city and snapped—more harshly than intended—for someone to go find Joad. All of the Mage’s College had been requisitioned by that point, but Sofiane was sure he could do better for them than Shuixing’s old apartment with its single sofa. If anyone would know where a spare apartment was, it would be Joad. A few minutes later, the Logistics Officer came tottering through the crowd.
“Ya found ‘em, eh, young fella?” Joad said.
He whistled at the sight of Margaret in a low-cut red cocktail dress and long blonde waves draped over one eye and made a noise not unlike a steammobile horn.
“Phew! What a dame! Lucky man you are, son,” he said, slapping Sofiane on the back.
“Err, this is my teammate, Margaret. Margaret, this is Joad, our Logistics Officer,” Sofiane said.
“A pleasure,” she said with a smile, extending a white-gloved hand.
“How’d’ya do, ma’am?” Joad said, shaking it.
“To her left and right are Faisal and Harald,” Sofiane said, gesturing at the two who similarly shook hands. “And this is Gomiko, my partner.”
“Aha, I see! How about that? Nice to meetcha,” he said, shaking her darkly-colored hand a little less enthusiastically than Margaret’s.
“They’ve been through a lot getting here, so I was hoping you could find them a room with a bed somewhere,” Sofiane said.
Joad scratched his neck. “City’s packed right now so I can’t guarantee a bed... but I should have a nice wagon around here somewhere.”
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Sofiane squeezed his shoulder. “I’m sure if you look real hard you can find an unoccupied room, right Joad?”
Joad shook his head. “I get your insinuation, young fella, but I ain’t kickin’ anybody out just cuz some fancy-pants Heroes came ‘round late. No difference ‘tween Heroes and Non-Heroes, just like Ms. He said.”
Sofiane pinched the bridge of his nose and wondered how easy it would be to fire and replace Joad. “Listen, Joad, this is different, okay? The circumstances are—”
“Sofa, it’s alright. A tent is fine. We don’t need special treatment,” Gomiko said, taking his right hand in both of hers. Despite the cold, her palms were warm, though he felt strange indentations around her wrists that he hadn’t seen before because of the dark coloration on her forearms and calves.
“No, I—”
She squeezed. “Please.”
Sofiane exhaled. “Alright. The best wagon you’ve got. If you want a bed though, Frizzy, I’m staying in an apartment up at the Mage’s College. You’re welcome to use it whenever. Or any of you, honestly. Gods know I hardly do.”
“Thanks,” she said, letting go of his hand. “But I… I want to be near everyone else right now. For comfort’s sake.”
He looked in her eyes and saw an anxiousness that made him go mad with a need to comfort her and know what happened. Harald, Faisal, and Margaret were grim, but not as much as Gomiko. For a moment he considered dropping everything he had that day to be with her, but he couldn’t. There was work to do.
He took both her forearms in his palms and squeezed. “I wanna talk tonight, okay? Just rest for now. I’ll find you this evening."
Gomiko's lip trembled and she nodded. “Okay.”
As his four teammates walked away with Joad, it occurred to Sofiane that he’d been holding something back too. He was going to have to explain to them all that the world was ending in a little over a week, and that they were now thrown in with a last ditch effort to fight the gods inside their own creation. Why had he decided to keep everything a secret? It felt silly in retrospect to hide the truth about the world from them. What did he think he was going to do when the time finally came for Po-Lin to shut down? He probably would have become more and more anxious until Gomiko pressed him on it. Well, it didn’t matter. He would explain everything to them that night and in the meantime he had work to get back to.
Heading back up to the Mage's College, Sofiane was barely able to get back to planning smoke signal placements with Vronsky before his plans were interrupted again, this time by a stone bird landing right outside the room they were mapping placements in. Rationally, he knew it was good to have Daisy back, but the chipper attitude he found her in irked him.
“Hey Sofi, we’re back! I brought friends!” Daisy announced, dropping Yuna and some pretty boy Sofiane had never met on their backsides when she abruptly de-summoned Peng.
Sofiane put his hands on his hips as Daisy skipped up to him.
“Sofi, you know Yun-Chan, of course,” she said, indicating the surly Water Samurai who glared at him for the sin of watching her fall on her ass. He nodded in her direction. That was all the respect he felt like giving her considering their last interaction had been her proposing to lynch him and Shuixing.
“And this is my other teammate, Kane,” Daisy said, indicating the sandy-haired guy in a convoluted Imperian outfit of purple jacket and trouser and more accessories and doo-dads than cloth by weight. He looked like he was in the amalgam of three different Heroes' ensembles.
Kane waved at him from the ground. “Howdy!”
Sofiane squinted. He didn’t like how Daisy-like that “howdy” sounded. One Daisy was bad enough when he was trying to brood. Two was a nightmare.
“Howdy to you,” Sofiane said flatly. “Have you already given them the low-down on what’s happening?”
Daisy clicked her pink heels together and saluted. “You bet I have!”
“Good. Joad will fix them up with somewhere to sleep. Afterwards have them report to Spriggansnout so he can fit them into our defense plans,” Sofiane said, turning to leave.
“The hell I’m reporting to anybody! I do what I damn well please,” Yuna said, picking herself up.
Sofiane rubbed his temples. He had to remind himself of his own insistence that every hand mattered. Especially two former Top-Tier Heroes. But damned if they weren’t pissing him off.
After Sofiane left, Yuna snorted. “What crawled up his ass and died?”
“He misses his girlfriend,” Daisy replied soberly. “It’s terribly romantic.”
Yuna’s fists curled. “If he keeps ordering me around, he’ll be missing some teeth too.”
“Why’s that?” Kane asked, genuinely wanting to know why Sofiane would lose his teeth.
“Cuz they’ll end up in my fist.”
“You think he’s gonna bite your fist?”
Daisy put her hands on her hips and let out a big ol’ snort laugh that drew the attention of the Non-Heroes around her. Sofiane’s sour attitude was clearly a cry for help. What he and the others desperately needed was some Daisy magic. First things first, however, she took Sofiane’s recommendation of seeking out Joad and setting Kane and Yuna up somewhere to sleep. On the way to finding him, Daisy put her arm around Kane’s shoulders.
“Kane, buddy, I got a project for ya.”