Shuixing gulped.

Her brain finally put together the trap Natsuko set for her. The Medico-Mage had played right into her adversary’s hand by specifying Daisy's giggling as the bar for what counted as ‘having a good time.' In her hubris in assuming Cognition was the sole stat involved with cleverness, she forgot Insight too played a role, and that Natsuko always had good Insight, particularly when it came to her friends and companions.

The moment of realization came when the Cascadian pampering experts pulled away the foot soak in preparation for the exfoliating part of the pedicure. Natsuko was watching with a cheshire grin over the top of her champagne flute.

“You! You planned this…” Shuixing said, nose wrinkling in disgust at her so-called friend’s dirty tactics.

“Hehehe. Well, well, well Ms. Smartypants, did you think I was going to be as easy to beat as Baphomet? We’ve been together too long, Shui. I know all your weaknesses. All of them.”

Shui closed her mouth. Talking would do her no further good. Her only salvation now was her storehouse of willpower. Her hands curled around the arms of the reclining seat, nails digging into the stuffing. If there were gods higher than the Yishang, she prayed to them now as the fear of what came next built in her mind. All the technician had to do was cup her foot to force a squeak from her.

“Hmm? What’s wrong, comrade?” the revolutionary nail technician asked, smiling innocently.

Shuixing let out a low whine and bit her lip. She felt wetness around her tooth but didn’t dare check whether it was blood or saliva, her hands were occupied with grounding her to the chair. When the first swipe of the pumice stone came, her entire body shuddered. Natsuko’s enormous grin somehow found even more space to expand and the other girls—sans Yuna, blissed out of existence—noticed something was amiss and turned their gazes to Shuixing, tense and shivering.

“Oh no!” Natusko said, covering her mouth. “Shui, don’t tell me you’re—”

“Do not. Say it,” Shuixing said through grit teeth. Already she was locked in an internal struggle to convince her body the sensations it was feeling weren’t that bad, that it was all in her head. The dreadful sensation was nothing but numbers in an algorithm. In reality, nothing was—”

“Heee!” Shuixing squealed as the pumice stone was brought to bear against her insteps.

“Oh there’s nothing to be ashamed about being ticklish, Shui,” Daisy said. “Heck, so am I! But that’s part of the fun of a pedicure—”

“Stop! Talking!” Shuixing yelled.

For this Shui had to unclench her jaw for half a second which came dangerously close to allowing the rolling boil in her stomach to overflow her mouth. If she did, there would be no putting the lid back on. She would be at the mercy of the nail tech’s ministrations and Natsuko would win the bet, dooming all of Po-Lin. It was ludicrous. Senseless. Insane.

Gomiko said, “Guys, if she’s not having a good time—”

“No, that’s exactly what this is about! If she laughs, she’s having a good time, so she has to keep hanging out with the girls. That’s the deal,” Natsuko said.

“Yeah but—”

“You can’t laugh and cry at the same time!” Daisy said with the confidence of prophetic wisdom. Shui, tears beading around her bulging eyes, begged to differ.

“How— Much— Longer?” Shuixing asked.

“About two minutes,” the technician replied. “But then we need to get your cuticles and paint your nails and moisturize… and the massage, of course. That’ll all be about half an hour.”

At the mention of a massage, Shuixing’s fearful eyes darted to Yuna drooling away in the corner, her sentience stolen by two masseuses kneading her legs into a pair of limp noodles. Yuna was Shui’s only ally in this, flanked as she was by two villainesses plotting her downfall and two neutral parties too weak to stand against them.

Hoping to ease the mounting pressure, Shuixing emitted a groan of, “nohohoho!”

She realized her mistake a moment too late. One moment of leniency spelled her downfall as the last ‘ohoho’s’ morphed into ‘hahaha’s’ and from there to scream laughing. Set loose, she almost kicked the woman administering her pedicure in the face. The techs working on Gomiko and Margaret rushed to their comrade’s aid and soon had Shuixing pinned down and helpless against the tortorous exfoliating. Daisy and Natsuko air high-fived across the room.

“Uh-oh, looks like someone’s having fun,” Natsuko said.

“Yeah, a real laugh riot!” Daisy said, snorting at her own pun.

“You cheheheated!” Shuixing screamed in-between fits of laughter.

“Cheating? Moi?” Natsuko said in an impression of Sofiane.

The impression caused Daisy to giggle with the same cadence as Shuixing. Realizing she was done for and with no escape, Shui let her muscles go lax and allowed the nail techs to do with her what they would. As soon as she did, something strange happened.

She started to have fun for real.

Or, rather, the part of her brain convinced the only path towards salvation from their terrible circumstances was a linear, logical one, was scrubbed away like dead skin. By the time the techs moved onto the more manageable stage of applying cerulean blue polish to her nails, Shuixing looked—and felt—exactly like the defeated Yuna in the corner. And with defeat and its acceptance came a new frame of mind where everything felt fluffy and pointless, and it was precisely the pointlessness that felt so good. It was like meditation.

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“So? How do you feel?” Natsuko asked.

“I feel…” Shuixing blushed at having to say it out loud after putting up such a fuss, and from having to dignify Natsuko and Daisy’s unmitigated insanity, but she finally said, “it feels good.”

Daisy gave a tiny, excited clap. “Yippee! Daisy claims another victory!”

Diays's other victory was moaning and drooling with her eyes rolled back in their sockets as her two masseuses gave her a simultaneous shoulder and foot massage.

Witnessing all of this, Gomiko turned to Margaret and said, "Thank you for being normal.”

“You too,” Margaret replied.

“Okay gals, while we wait for our nails to dry, we gotta move on to the next thing: Talking about who we like!” Daisy announced.

“I mean… I like my team…” Gomiko said.

“No, like, like like, y’know? Like…”

“Sofiane,” Gomiko said.

“Great! How about you, Margie?”

Margaret grimaced at that nickname but had given up trying to stop Daisy. Clearing her throat, she said, “if you mean who I’m attracted to... no one really. I’ve never had the time or inclination to pursue… um… a relationship.”

Daisy watched Margaret’s eyes flick once or twice in Yuna’s direction which was enough evidence for her to spawn a smug grin and declare herself master detective. Not that she was going to pressure Margie to confess anything. How rude would that be?

“How about you… uh… Yuna?” Daisy asked.

In her blissful stupor Yuna muttered something about the spirit of the Shikijiman nation.

“How poetic! You Shuixing?”

Shuixing sighed. “I’m focused on my work right now. I’ll have time to worry about matters of love once we escape.”

Natsuko’s heart pounded knowing she was next. Something sour and acrid percolated in her throat. The easy way out was to say Vronsky since that would have a whiff of factuality to it. Ultimately, though, it wasn’t true. Vronsky was really hot, and if he asked for a one-night tumble her answer would be, ‘hell yes!’ But did she ‘like like’ the Non-Hero? No. She barely knew him. But then the question became whether she ‘like like’d’ anyone, and if it came to that, she would have to start making sense of how she felt about Pechorin. That was too big a task for her right now. Especially since he was kind-of dead, kind-of not.

“How about you, Daisy?” Natsuko asked, hoping to head Daisy off and redirect the conversation before it was her turn to answer.

“Me?” Daisy asked, as though surprised by her own question. “Hmm… no one! I’m a solo kinda gal. Never been interested in anyone else.”

“Why did you ask the question then?” Gomiko asked.

“Cuz it’s what you do at a girls’ day, duh!”

No one but Daisy and Shuixing were certain where Daisy was getting her ideas about what a girls’ day involved from.

Daisy knew it was because the concept was a transcendental one, existing a priori the concept of either ‘days’ or ‘girls’ and thus was a universal principle waiting to be discovered in any and all arrangements of a physical universe.

Shuixing knew it was because Daisy was interfacing with the Central Probability Algorithm which utilized datasets coming from outside both Po-Lin and the Yishang’s corporate ecosystem. No doubt the Celestials had some notion of what ‘ought’ to be involved with a social gathering of women, and this notion bled into their textual corpus which in turn fed into the CPA to give them all verisimilitude to the Celestials. In other words, by sheer random chance, Daisy had stumbled upon a social phenomenon the Celestials themselves engaged in. The gods, too, had girls’ days.

“Okay, now we’ve gotta go around and spill gossip about our— Wait! Natsu! You didn’t say who you like yet!”

Natsuko choked on her champagne. “O-Oh… Ahaha… I um—”

“Pechorin!” Shuixing suddenly blurted out.

Natsuko’s ears burned and she opened her mouth to protest.

“I know how we can get Pechorin back! A-And I think I know how we can escape Po-Lin!” Shuixing said.

Her eureka came to her once her brain was given freedom to roam and play and be influenced by something other than her own tired train of thought. The key lay in how outside data flowed into and interacted with the Central Probability Algorithm. And, more specifically, how and where that data was stored.

Shuixing bolted up from the chair. “Someone go find the others and we’ll meet at the Mage’s College.”

“Wait! Your nails aren’t dry yet!” Daisy said.

----------------------------------------

“I think that one looks like a goblin,” Harald said, pointing at a tall, bulbous cloud with protrusions vaguely resembling limbs.

“I see a teddy bear,” Faisal said.

“You guys have such good imaginations!" Kane said.

Sofiane refrained from saying what he himself thought the cloud looked like because those same protrusions resembled little round ears to him. Half the clouds in the sky looked like a certain raccoon girl to him, but after the boys gave him shit for the second cloud he pointed out that looked like her (even though Harald and Faisal agreed it looked like her, the bastards), he stopped pointing them out. That was fine since the boxed moscato had him going non-verbal anyway. Despite the initial awkwardness, boys’ day turned out pretty alright, even if it mostly involved drinking, sitting around, and roasting some space weenies—a kind of textureless sausage from Selenia. Now they were pointing out shapes in clouds.

“That one looks like… shoot, it’s on the tip of my tongue,” Harald said.

“A Tianzhounese junk ship?” Kane offered.

Harald paused to burp, toss his can into a pile of six other cans, crack open another cold one, and then said, “yup. Exactly."

Kane sipped on his own beer, carefully rationing what was left of his juice box so he didn’t have to taste the bitter drink. “Man… I love you guys.”

“Yeah, man. Today was fun,” Faisal replied.

Harald grunted an agreement into the beer he was chugging.

Sofiane rolled his head back and exhaled. “It’s been a pretty good day. I’m ready to get back to Gomi, though. No offense to you all.”

Harald snorted and nudged Faisal. "Under 4pm. You win."

“Fuck off,” Sofiane replied, throwing the empty box of wine at him.

Harald tried to throw a can back but Sofiane grabbed a stick and Perfect Parry’d it out of the air to Kane’s immense amusement. The four took that as their cue to douse the fire and head back to Vermögenburgh since the girls would be finishing up with their business.

“Wait! We gotta do one more thing,” Kane said in uncannily Daisy-like fashion.

“What’s that?” Faisal asked.

Kane spread his arms and made a circle motion with his hands to beckon them to bring it in until the boys brought it in.