On the return trip to the surface, Natsuko felt like she was adjusting to the leaps through the darkness between planes. The analgesic quality of incorporeality was also a nice little perk considering her cauterized finger stump was still throbbing away. When she popped out the other side, however, she was confronted with the double-shock of being once again in a physical body as well as in a body of water. Panic set in as her brain caught up with the danger. The water in her mouth was salty, not the freshwater of the Vermögenburgh moat, meaning she'd jumped them all into the ocean to the east of the region. This was already a pretty bad miscalculation, but drowning was also one of the few methods that worked equally well to kill a Level 1 as a Level 105 Hero. You had a breathing meter which lasted exactly 30 seconds before you died, regardless of stats.
Natsuko picked a direction and prayed it was up. To her horror, her hands found the bottom. Turning herself around, she kicked off the sand and began struggling in the direction of the dark surface. Right as her breathing meter was about to tick down, she broke the surface, gasping for air. On the beach 20 yards away Pechorin and Kane were watching her while being annoyingly dry.
“Need help?” Pechorin called out.
Natsuko’s next challenge was to ignore the embarrassment of almost dying 20 yards from shore in an ocean that was probably not designed to go deeper than a hundred feet or so at any point. Fortunately, the sea salt creeping into her wound was more urgent than her embarrassment. When she got to the beach she shook herself off, but her clothes were already soaked through.
“Let’s just get back to town. I need to dry off and I can’t start a fire out here with Cuntagonde flying around,” Natsuko said.
Kane didn’t understand the nickname and looked like he was about to ask her about it.
“Don’t,” she said.
Fortunately, the city of Vermögenburgh was closer to the eastern coast of its region than the western. Within half an hour they were on the trail of the city's glowing ball of light and after another half hour they arrived at the copse of trees behind the city where Natsuko first tried her hand at poetry. She deliberately took the two of them along a path which brought them near the reedy moat.
Pechorin hummed for a moment then popped out with:
“Reeds in the wind—
Though the way ahead is dark,
They bend toward the light.”
It was probably the first time Natsuko found herself wondering what his poems meant, or at least what inspired them. Glancing down at the reeds, she realized the haiku was literal: The reeds were indeed blowing in the wind which was pushing west towards Vermögenburgh and the light of its many lanterns and searchlights. The side facing them caught the light and glowed golden in the dark. Natsuko wanted to add a couplet but at the last second realized she had nothing beautiful to add and kept silent. A badly-paired couplet would only ruin the effect.
“You really like poetry, huh?” Kane asked.
“I dabble,” Pechorin replied.
Natsuko snorted.
“So does Daisy,” Kane said. “But she doesn’t really recite it to anyone. She just writes it in a notebook we’re not allowed to read.”
“I’ve heard a bit of it. She’s a good poet,” Pechorin said.
That statement bothered Natsuko for reasons she couldn’t fathom. After all, Daisy and Pechorin had connected with each other over poetry countless times back when they were first traveling together. And it was entirely reasonable for Pechorin to compliment her.
“I’ve picked it up too,” Natsuko said. “It’s not very good, but, you know, I just started and all…”
Pechorin nodded, his gaze fixed on the town. The walls were manned and ranged FDJ weapons pointed toward them.
“I heard your couplet. May I hear another?” Pechorin asked.
Natsuko blushed. “Y-You mean, just like— right now? Off-the-cuff?”
“It’s an act, not a text. If you’re connected with your subject, the words will come unbidden and surprise you with their suitability,” he said.
Natsuko nodded, took a deep breath, and let the poem come:
“Though the reeds face… dark,
Maybe there is also comfort—”
Shit, that was eight syllables. She wanted to stop and restart, but the other two were waiting for her to spit out the last line.
“Umm… in the cool darkness."
Pechorin nodded thoughtfully. She gazed up at him. The anxiousness of waiting to hear his response was somehow worse than her throbbing finger stump.
“I think the problem is that you don’t have your own personal poetics yet,” he said. “You shouldn’t replicate someone else’s theory of poetry, but you should at least begin from one before developing your own sense for what poetry is meant to accomplish and how to compose it in such a way to best accomplish this end.”
Natsuko frowned. “Pech?”
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“Yeah?”
“You’re an ass.”
He blinked. “I apologize if that came out sounding curt. I meant no offense by it. I simply take poetry seriously and want to help you—”
“Stop talking,” she said.
Kane looked between the two of them, trying to figure out what killed the vibe. He knew asking the two of them directly would make matters worse—a lesson he learned from his own teammates—so he put up with the awkward silence as they walked around to the front of the city walls. When they arrived at the bridge, Sofiane was waiting for the three of them looking deeply unamused. His carefully constructed look of irritation crumbled, however, upon seeing Pechorin again. Pech stuck out a hand for him but Sofiane ignored it and threw his former teammate into a hug.
“Gods, I saw you'd popped back onto the Use-Rankings, but it didn’t feel real until I saw you in the flesh,” Sofiane said. “How are you feeling?”
“Heavy with the weight of my sins,” Pechorin replied.
“Same as always, great to hear. Now where the hell did you two get off too!?” Sofiane asked, turning to Natsu and Kane.
Natsuko explained, “I was showing Kane around Vermögenburgh and we were attacked by Cunegonde. We—”
“Why were you wandering off when we’re dealing with Hero incursions!? What if you two got dimension-jumped!?” Sofiane said, hands on his hips.
Natsuko grinned. “We did get dimension-jumped. Isn’t that right, Kane?”
“Hmm?” Kane said, snapping out of his thoughts which were preoccupied with wondering where that weird dog Natsuko called Charles had gone. “Oh, uh, yeah but you were the one that did it, Natsu.”
Natsuko put her face in her palm. The next thing she needed to explain to Kane was how to commit to a bit.
“Look, I get that it’s boring waiting around for something to happen, but— gods woman, what the fuck happened to your hand!?” Sofiane said.
Natsuko brought her hand up and looked at the stump as if it were a minor curiosity. “I lost my finger.”
“Yeah. Where? How? Can you, I don’t know, un-lose it?”
Natsuko wiggled the stump at him. “Nope! I have confirmation from Cunegonde herself, who is a Xian now, for your information, and one of her new abilities is that anything she destroys stays destroyed. When you think about it, Kane and my excursion was really a fact-finding expedition, and—”
Sofiane groaned and rubbed his temples. “We have an intelligence team for that very reason. Please don’t wander off again, okay? If the other Heroes attack us while you're gone it would be a complete rout. Daisy would stand no chance against the Top 8, who I assume are all Xians like Cunegonde?”
Natsuko nodded.
“Fuck me…” Sofiane said. “Not like we can do anything about it, I guess. I’ll call it a win that we have Pechorin back. Especially since I suspect we can turn his guns into the FDJ weapon to end all FDJ weapons.”
“And! And, and, and, I got even more information,” Natsuko said, gesticulating with an invisible finger. “The Yishang are holding the Xian back for something, so if we put the research team to work on trawling the Yishang’s letters to each other, we might be able to figure out why.”
“Natsu?” Sofiane asked.
“Yeah?”
“Thank you. But don’t wander off again.”
“Fine. Do you know if Shuixing is free? I wanna talk to her about cleaning up my finger.”
“Not happening,” Sofiane replied. “She’s gonna be busy with research. I’ll see if I can find someone else.”
True to his word, Sofiane found someone in town who technically had medical experience. Natsuko felt hopeful about getting her wound treated until she arrived at Team Harald’s wagon and learned that this medical professional was Margaret who, in her own words, had, “dressed up as a nurse for a Halloween special event one time.”
“I… don’t know about this,” Natsuko said.
Harald, Faisal, and Gomiko, sitting at the other end of the wagon and pretending they were focused on literally anything but the mutilated and scorched finger stump they snuck peeks at, said nothing about Margaret’s dubious credentials.
“Trust me, dear, a costume is as good as the real thing as far as our world is concerned. Style is content, as they say,” Margaret said as she began pulling things out of the toolbox Joad scrounged up for her. The tools included hammers, nails, wrenches, and chisels. Natsuko bit her lip as she watched.
“Um… I think I’m good with just the fucked up stump, actually,” she said. “It’ll scab over. It’s fine.”
“Nonsense!” Margaret replied, pulling out a scalpel. “I know enough from my time roleplaying a sexy nurse to irrigate and debride the wound before putting bandages on. Luckily, I can also install a porcelain mechanical finger in its place.”
“Huh? How does that even work?” Natsuko asked.
Margaret shrugged. “The CPA tells me it should.”
Against her better judgement, Natsuko decided to place herself at the mercy of a sexy fake nurse and slapped her hand down on the barrel Margaret was sitting at. As they were about to get started, Harald came over with a leather strop and a bottle of rye whiskey from Deco Imperia.
“I’m trying to cut the drinking,” Natsuko said.
“Yeah… maybe consider a cheat day for this,” he said. “Oh, and the strop is for biting.”
Natsuko assumed that the CPA was also feeding him good advice from the Celestial realm and pounded down a few shots of whiskey before sticking the bit of leather in her mouth and biting into it. When Margaret brought the scalpel to bear against the charred stump, Natsuko started to see the wisdom in both the whiskey and the strop. Even through the fuzzy inebriation, the scalpel hurt more than Cunegonde’s initial wound, and the potions Gomiko dumped onto the wound to irrigate it were still worse. By the time they were done cleaning the wound Natsuko had nearly bitten a hole through the leather strop. The wound, though, was clear and flushed and could now be safely wrapped in alcohol-soaked bandages.
“Holy shit…” Natsuko said in-between swigs of whiskey. “I never thought I’d have to put this much effort into fixing an injury. Do the Celestials have to go through all this, or can they just eat food to regrow a finger?”
Putting away her potions, Gomiko said, “if we have to go through all this, it’s because all that information from outside Po-Lin says that’s how you treat a wound. That’s how Sofa said the algorithm works anyway. I’m guessing the Celestials probably can’t heal injuries by eating a sandwich.”
Natsuko wiggled her stump and wondered whether the world after Po-Lin would also have permanent injuries. She tried not to think too hard about it. Painful as the severed finger was, anything was better than quietly submitting to the lights being turned off. Before Cunegonde’s attack on her, she'd imagined they were all fighting for a paradise to come, but that wasn’t the complete truth. Clearly whatever came after would also involve suffering and injury, perhaps of the same variety that the Celestials were hoping to escape from by playing their versions of Po-Lin's soft, fluffy world, and as she curled her incomplete fist, Natsuko resolved to fight for that world of suffering anyway.