There were more useful things Shuixing could be doing instead of looking for Pechorin, but after sleeping on her hypothesis about how Central Probability Algorithm had escaped the Yishang’s notice, she felt if she didn’t talk to someone about it the idea would slip away from her, and though illogical, like the whole world would forget it with her. The only way to prevent this was to talk with

“Gone? Didn’t you have him training on his new weapons?” Shuixing asked Sofiane who was overseeing the practice scramble for when the Non-Heroes needed to get into position. By his side were the two new old Heroes, Astrid and Vladim, as well as Spriggansnout and Medea.

“I did, and he passed. He asked if he was done and I figured it was better to have Pech doing Pech things than trying to force him to do drills,” Sofiane said, hands stuffed in the pockets of his lavender peacoat. “I tried that with Natsuko and she went moderately insane.”

The web of people and things packed into Vermögenburgh was such that everything became immediate knowledge to everyone. Shuixing knew about Natsuko’s temporary brooding episode which was apparently already over. Most likely it was a symptom of Pechorin’s personality parameters bleeding over into hers.

“Do you know where he might’ve gone?” Shuixing asked.

“Not a clue— Hey! Four abreast on the stairs!” Sofiane screamed, bolting forward with Ball Lightning to chew out some Non-Heroes who had tripped and clumped up the stairs to the city walls by breaking rank.

“How is he by the way, Pechorin?” Astrid asked.

Shuixing turned to her and Vladim. Astrid was a small, cute girl—somehow even shorter than Natsu and Sofiane—with long, platinum hair which reached her ankle. She was supposedly from Cascadia, complete with frilly dress, though naturally had never made it there. Vladim looked somewhat like Pechorin in dress, but brighter-colored, with tasseled shoulders, light pink hair, and a round face. Their archetypes—adorable cinnamon roll and soft-but-not-feminine boy—were so common they felt drab in the face of the Heroes who came after. Even Shuixing struggled to remember anything substantial about them beyond the things she had learned investigating their Numberspace envelopes.

“Pech is…”—Shui bit her lip, trying to remember when the last time Astrid and Vladim might have known him was—“even more himself. Very into poetry. I’m surprised you haven’t caught up with him yet.”

“Orientation has had us busy,” Astrid said, side-eyeing Sofiane barking at Non-Heroes.

“And how about you, Shuixing? How have you been these past several years?” Vladim asked.

A look of guilt found its way onto his face over not catching up with the other 1st and 2nd generation Heroes until now. He and Astrid were trying to hide it, but Shuixing had already dug through their entity envelopes and knew the two had been living out the past five years in a similar manner to Sofiane and Gomiko. Exhaustively so. Whereas Daisy was hellbent on bringing girly, hyper-feminine things into the Central Probability Algorithm’s circulating ideas, Astrid and Vladim had been doing something like that with methods for two entities to have fun together.

“I’ve been busy,” Shuixing replied.

“Oh yeah! With all the stuff in Numberplace, right!? And with dimension-jumping and all that. Sofiane was saying all this was because of you!” Astrid said, bouncing on her heels and throwing her arms out to indicate what ‘all this’ referred to.

She could tell the two were building more and more momentum to ask her more and more things. According to Sofiane, the two had chatted his ear off since the moment they arrived, making up for years of being alone with each other. Unfortunately, Shuixing had other things she needed to deal with.

“Yeah, that was me. I have to go find Pechorin now though. Sorry,” Shuixing said bluntly.

Astrid laughed nervously. “O-Oh, yeah, no worries. We’ll catch up later!”

Kane, Daisy, and Natsuko were next on her list of people to ask about Pechorin. They were easy to find because they were making a ruckus. Even from inside Vermögenburgh proper, a constant cracking and slamming of pine trees was audible from the outskirts of the tent city. When Shuixing arrived, she found an assembly line consisting of Natsuko punching trees to death with her bare fists, Daisy transporting the logs with a stone conveyor belt, and Kane pulverizing them and sorting them into piles of tinder, kindling, and fuel.

Daisy was the first to catch sight of Shuixing and put one hand on her hip as the other wiped her brow. “Oh, now you show up, huh!?”

Shuixing furrowed her eyebrows. “I didn’t know I was supposed to.”

Natsuko stopped the wood punching and turned around. The entire front of her kimono, as well as her face, arms, and legs, were covered in sap, bark, and woodchips except for where she had put on a pair of goggles. She pulled them off her eyes to reveal a mask of pale skin that looked like Gomiko’s streak of black.

“Hey, Shui, how’s it goin’!?” Natsuko said.

“Err, fine. Why the lumber operation? Sofiane didn’t mention anything to me about needing trees chopped,” Shuixing asked.

Natsuko spat a glob of wood shavings onto the ground and wiped her mouth. “We’re prepping for a bonfire. Bonfires plural, actually. We’re gonna have a big campfire feast tonight for everyone. One huge bonfire and a buncha little ones for people to roast space weenies and Deco Imperian cloud candy— oh for fuck sakes, we know they’re hot dogs and marshmallows! Anyway, it should be fun. Don’t even think of weaseling out of it to do nerd stuff, Shui. Unless you want Daisy and I to kidnap you again.”

Shuixing exhaled. Space weenies were hot dogs. Even though she knew partly how the in-flow of information to the CPA worked, it was still unnerving to suddenly remember you knew something you didn’t know you knew. This was especially true because the act of Natsuko observing this fact made it retroactively true. Space weenies had always been hot dogs.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

The rectification between the Celestials’ world and the bubble of Po-Lin was preceding along an exponential growth curve, and the number of cases where entities simultaneously realized that X was the Yishang’s made-up reference to Y were increasing with proportional frequency. Even the Heroes opposed to the rebellion would realize what hot dogs were the next time they had a reason to draw that information to consciousness.

Then something else occurred to her. “Assets… town?”

Natsuko squinted and both of them realized they had been focusing on what Vermögenburgh meant in the Celestial language or, rather, one of the Celestial languages, as Shuixing had deduced by the difference in transliterated names (and the lack of transliteration in her own case) that the Yishang wrote—and most likely spoke—a language that sounded like Tianzhouese things. The other regions probably referred to other parts of the Celestial world, and whichever one Vermögenburgh was drawn from had a word ‘Vermögen’ which meant assets and ‘burgh’ which meant town.

Natsuko put her hands on her stomach. “Shui… I need you to stop thinking things at me or I’m gonna hurl.”

“Thinking things at you?”

“Yeah, I only think about weird Celestial stuff when you’re around,” Natsuko said, and then added, “n-not that I don’t want to hang out with you! But I dunno— nevermind, forget I said anything.”

This sent Shuixing down a train of thought regarding how this transfer of outside information was triggered and why proximity to her was one possible prerequisite. But before she could go too far down that line, Natsuko poked her in the forehead.

“Be at the feast, okay? I’m not joking, I will drag you down here kicking and screaming if I have to,” Natusko said.

Shuixing flashed a sheepish smile. “R-Right, I’ll be there, I promise. Oh! That reminds me, do you know—”

“East side of the moat. There’s some pine trees on a hill over there where there’s no mobs or dungeons. That’ll probably be where Pech is,” Natsuko said.

“How did you—”

Natsuko shrugged. “Same reason I know what hot dogs are.”

Following Natsuko’s directions, Shuixing walked around the moat towards the backside of Asset-Town. The trip was somewhat surreal, being thick with the recent memory of the dazed stupor she was in while Sofiane guided her through the nearby forests after she emerged from Numberspace freezing and wet. The memory grounded her to Po-Lin.

She ran her fingertips over the papery pine bark and the sensation felt as though it existed along the knife’s edge between real and illusory until both and neither seemed true. A kind of nauseating vertigo followed which she thought must’ve been what Natsuko felt earlier and then there was a gulf of something else before there were words again.

“How are you?”

“Huh?”

“I said, how do you feel?”

“You’re the third person to ask me some variant of that today,” Shuixing replied, staring up at Pechorin standing over her.

“Is it the third time you passed out on the ground?” he asked.

The leaves underneath her rustled as she shook her head. “First time.”

Pechorin held out a hand and pulled Shuixing to her feet. There was a lingering discomfort from the earlier episode, but she felt composed enough to walk beside him as they made a lap of the town.

“I’m not sure what happened,” Shuixing said as they walked. “I was touching the trees and then all of a sudden had a weird dizzy spell and passed out.”

Pechorin hummed to himself then said, “Probably meditation sickness. I got it in the early days too. The outer edges of our world are rattling if you’re not prepared for them. The mind tends to reel.”

Shuixing chuckled. “Believe me, I know that more than anybody. Except for you, I suppose. I actually came out here to ask you about a theory of mine. About whether it aligns with what you’ve felt about Po-Lin, and how we’ve escaped the Yishang’s direct notice.”

Pechorin threw his hands behind his head and slowed his walk to an ambling leg-swinging gait. “Sure, but my answer comes at a price.”

“What’s that?”

“You’ve gotta put down all the Numberspace and focus on having a good time tonight.”

Shuixing huffed. “I already told Natsu I’d be there!”

“No, I mean, put down thinking about the nature of reality. The only thing you need to concern yourself with is the nature of space weenies,” he said.

“You mean hot dogs?”

“Space weenies,” he said. “They’re hot dogs out there, but in here: space weenies.”

That mostly answered the question of how Pechorin would react to her hypothesis about the Yishang’s obliviousness. However, forever the scientist, she wanted to outline it to him anyway.

“Anyway, my theory goes like this: I think we have escaped the Yishang’s notice because the CPA is acting entirely within normal parameters. That is, because we are still taking the form of characters within a game, and the world itself is still in the form of a game, the Yishang see nothing amiss. Even if the Pengwu report back about our attempts to obtain freedom, all of this, including the way we ourselves behave and think, is within the language of the game itself. So whatever comes after this… the CPA either doesn’t have the language to describe yet, or is hiding it through compartmentalization so the Yishang don’t catch on. Am I making sense?”

Pechorin watched the spring of a pine branch bounce as a bird took off to fly towards Vermögenburgh. When it arrived, it would fly up to the top of the spire of Vermögenburgh Cathedral and take a shit on the roof tiles.

“You know, every poem I could compose already exists, waiting to be assembled. The words bounce here and there, sometimes coming to me by way of a bird flying by, other times lying dormant, like space weenie, waiting for the right moment to bounce back to me. But I never know which poem will come together until all the elements come out to play. And then, when the time is right, I am just as surprised as everyone else when I declaim something like:

“The robin flies,

Up to the belfry she goes—

To pinch a weenie.”

Shuixing giggled. “I suppose I shouldn’t have expected a straight answer from you. Would it kill you to explain yourself?”

“I’ve been killed by sillier things,” Pechorin replied.

After thinking about it for a moment, she asked, “In this metaphor, I suppose we’re the words?”

Pechorin gave an ambiguous smile. “In a manner of speaking. Which means your algorithm is our poet.”

“So then…”

Her heart thumped as she prepared to ask the question she knew everyone else had been asking but until now had felt was impossible to answer with any certainty. It wasn’t even worth entertaining. But somehow, she felt as though Pechorin might have some answer that would set her at ease.

“What comes after?” Shuixing asked.

“The end of the world,” Pechorin said. “At least as we know it.”

“A-And after that?”

“Something which will have always been different.”