Contra to Natsuko’s notion of what campfire roasting entailed, Joad had discovered that their stocks of space weenies amounted to only around 20 sausages and, worse still, there were only 16 buns for them for reasons Natsuko could only assume were some kind of bug. Instead, as Pechorin informed them, the bonfire feast was to be a free-for-all roasting of whatever one could get their hands on while Joad’s logistics personnel emptied their stores one serving plate at a time. This made Natsuko nervous. It was essentially the same as her experiments in ‘anti-cooking,’ or cooking something through natural processes rather than the Yishang method of throwing loosely related items in a boiling pot to create fixed dishes. Most of her anti-cooking meals did not come out well.

However, as the first roasted foods came off of sticks and entered mouths, Natsuko made a critical discovery: Roasting things over a fire was a cheat code. It was the dimension-jumping of cooking. With only a few notable exceptions, everything tasted good roasted over a fire, and the exceptions were mostly things where the process was physically impossible as she learned while trying to roast a block of cheese and having it melt directly into the fire. But compared to her adventures in trying to use an oven to make salad, bonfires seemed like the way to go.

Next to Natsuko on their shared log, Daisy squealed. “Oh my gods! Cheesecake is so good warm!”

“I’ve got to try that,” Sofiane said.

He and Gomiko had an entire platter laying across their laps on which Sofiane, inspired by the culinary possibilities of fire roasting, had assembled a platter for them to experiment with. His most innovative discovery was that there was nothing stopping him from roasting an already-processed food. At the end of his stick was a slice of pizza that should’ve been ready to eat, but he was allowing the crust to warm and char and the cheese to melt over the fire.

“Babe, lemme see the pizza,” Gomiko said.

Sofiane retracted the slice from the fire and set it down on the platter while Gomiko sliced the sausage she’d smoked into coins to put on the pizza. Though she wasn’t eating much herself, Shuixing was watching this experiment with rapt attention. The only thing staying her hand from taking notes was her promise to Pechorin.

“This is game-changing…” Shuixing muttered. She turned to Natsuko. “The number of possibilities now… it’s infinite. Or, functionally infinite. Every single food item now has infinite permutations. Some better than others, no doubt, but compared to the finite set provided for us by the Yishang, this is…”

“Fhmmkng dmlshm,” Natsuko replied with a roasted sandwich in her mouth.

By leveraging her own experience with anti-cooking, she had solved the melting cheese problem by placing the cheese between two firmer food items which could suspend the melted cheese between them. In this case it was two hamburgers with the melted cheese between them.

She swallowed down the six layers of bun, patty, and cheese. “Try it!”

Shui accepted the monstrous, oozing thing and pinched off an end so that she didn’t have to unhinge her jaw to eat it as her friend was doing. Popping it into her mouth, it felt like re-experiencing the immediacy of Po-Lin all over again. It was beautiful. It was spiritual.

“I-If I wrote poetry I would write a poem to this sandwich,” Shuixing said as she handed it back.

Natsuko pushed it back to her. “Keep it. I’m already onto the next thing.”

The next thing was the same thing except this time she was using two Cascadian maple-salmon croquettes with a block of al-Nuwban goat cheese between them.

The spirit of the feast seemed to float high into the air with the smoke so that the enthusiastic chatter about food combinations and their deliciousness was like a singular phenomenon which ebbed and flowed and changed while retaining its singularity. The only deviation from this seamless event was standing behind the logs, watching the fire with his arms folded.

“Pech, come eat something before it’s gone!” Natsuko yelled.

“My thirst for vengeance robs me of my hunger,” he replied.

Natsuko blinked, not expecting such a blunt return to his archetype. “Come on, dude, it was silly even before we knew your whole backstory was written by an algorithm. Eat.’

He shook his head. “It’s not silly. It’s there whether we like it or not. Effortless action comes from accepting the archetype and acting how we must within it.”

“Oh my gods, man, just sit down and eat.”

Sofiane gulped down his slice of roasted pizza with a swig of wine. “Mm! I don’t know, he might be onto something. Shuixing’s still an egghead scientist, just like the Yishang made her. I’m still a cocky diva”—Harald and Faisal both stifled a sudden cough—“And Daisy is about as Daisy as she’s ever been. I don’t know, I think there’s something to Pech’s point. Whatever parameters the Yishang put in us are still there, like it or not.”

Natsuko spat on the ground. “Not me. I pulled that shit outta me.”

Sofiane shrugged. “Fine. You get to be the exception then. But the rest of us aren’t. Why do you think the rest of us have been able to occupy ourselves and only you and Daisy couldn’t settle down? At least until Daisy gave up trying and went back to doing what she does best.”

Daisy raised an eyebrow. “Which is, Mr. Sofa?”

His eyes flicked between Daisy and Natsuko and Pechorin. “Being a nuisance.”

She huffed, though it was a huff of, ‘okay, you’re probably right.’

Sofiane turned back to Natsuko. “Without knowing it’s what we were doing, I think all of us came back to our archetypes eventually under our own terms. I’m not saying keep up the dance the Yishang wants, otherwise I wouldn’t have ended up with Frizzy here, but at some point you just gotta work with what you have. And to be honest with you? I think you’re the only one of us that hasn’t done that yet.”

A million reasons bubbled up in Natsuko’s mouth about why Sofiane was wrong but nothing came out as their campfire party lapsed into silence. A stick in the fire crackled and snapped in half.

“Bullshit! The whole point of us fighting the Yishang is to get rid of all the shit they put in us! I don’t have to be anything I don’t want to be, least of all some obnoxious, naive, shallow, bubbly little mascot!” Natsuko said, her volume drawing the attention of the surrounding campfires.

If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it.

Sofiane shook his head. “Whatever. I’ve got pizza to eat. Frizzy, roast us some peppers, would you?”

Natsuko took Sofiane’s refusal to continue arguing as proof that she was right. Whatever his reasons might be for fighting the Yishang, hers was for personal freedom. No one was going to assign her an archetype or a trope or a role that she didn’t want.

“How do you know what you want?” Pechorin asked.

Natsuko jumped, not realizing he had moved around behind her.

“Gods-dammit, dude, don’t sneak up on me!”

“I cleared my throat very loudly first, you were just lost in thought. I was attempting to provide a helpful pointer in the right direction,” he said.

“Yeah, uh-huh. Your obscure ass navel-gazing is super helpful, bud—”

Natsuko was suddenly bumped from the front by Daisy who had gotten up to attend to the fire. To both of their chagrins, she fell back into Pechorin.

“Oopsie! Sorry,” Daisy said in an utterly unconvincing tone.

Pechorin pushed her upright, though rougher than he’d intended due to his surprise so that it was more like a shove. Both of them knew perfectly well what Daisy was doing, but the shove surprised both. Natsuko particularly, since she liked it.

She cleared her throat. “A-Anyway, like I was saying… um… what was I saying?”

The shove gave him an idea. “Natsu, you’re a dumbass.”

She blinked. “What?”

“I said you’re a dumbass. You’re the only one that hasn’t figured what we’re talking about.”

“H-Hey! What happened to staying in-character, huh?” she said.

“Do you want me to fit my archetype or not?”

“No?”

“So, I’m just gonna come out and say that you’re a dumbass,” he said.

Sofiane and Gomiko shared a glance.

“Can you two go talk somewhere else? We’re focusing on pizza over here,” Sofiane said.

Natsuko scoffed. “No, I’m not—”

Shuixing tugged at her sleeve. “Hear him out, okay?”

Before she could continue protesting, she felt a hand on her shoulder. She looked up at Pechorin looking almost ghostly against the flickering fire.

“Would you just come with me for a second? You’re free not to, but I’d like it if you did.”

The phrasing was the exact same as Frederick asking her to watch his last moments. She decided to give Pechorin the benefit of the doubt and assume this wasn’t some cheap trick, because otherwise she would’ve had to punch him. Instead, she accepted the hand he held out and allowed him to help her up.

The two of them walked in silence through the field of campfires until the heat of the fires was behind them. Pechorin waited until they were far enough away that only the pine trees accompanied them before speaking.

“You value freedom, I know that.”

She nodded. “More than anything.”

“So, in wanting to be free, you turned your back on the background the Yishang constructed for you,” he said.

She folded her arms. “What I turned their back on were their lies. I never had a background. I was created out of nothing, same as you were. What’s your point?”

“Do you remember how you pulled me out of my funk to go climb a mountain?”

“Yeah?”

“Was that fake?”

“No, but… it was compelled. I was only like that because the Yishang made me that way, plugging whatever hopes they had for my character into their number crap. The fun, spunky, adventurous Natsuko was a commodity,” she said.

He shook his head. “No, it wasn’t. To the Yishang, maybe, but not to you. To you that personality was just yourself.”

She threw her hands up. “You’re being obtuse and you know it! They set me up with that personality hoping I would be the same as those characters on rails in their other worlds. The ones Hemiola was talking about. But I chose to be different! If I’m miserable or if I’m annoying, so what! I chose that.”

“Wouldn’t it have been the other Natsuko who chose? At what point did she stop being you?”

Natsuko paused. The thought gave her a feeling of discomfort not unlike when Shuixing started talking about all those heady Numberspace things. If she thought about it, there wasn’t really a line she could point to where she felt she had free will on one side and was a manufactured commodity on the other.

She exhaled. “Okay, I get what you’re trying to say. I’ve always been free, right? So I can just go back to being happy-go-lucky?”

“No, I’m saying you’ve never been free. None of us are free, and I think we never will be. How many times has Shuixing explained that we’re all bleeding into each other? That rough shove when I pushed you up, did that seem like something I would do, or something you would do?” he asked.

Suddenly remembering it and the associated sensation in her gut, she flushed. “I-I don’t know.”

“I don’t either. At this point, it could be either of us. But the fact is, we’re formed by a bunch of different little things that aren’t us. The Yishang gave you an archetype and a body, and it’ll be there for as long as you are you, because even if you rebel and become a surly, depressed alcoholic, that’s still defined by your rejection of the Yishang. And then from there you add on your friends and everyone else you meet and everything else you do and at the end of the day, you’re made up of a bunch of little pieces of not-Natsuko, same as I am. There is no freedom from that, it’s happening all the time to everyone. Even the Central Probability Algorithm is being fed with all kinds of new things. It’s not supposed to have hot dogs in it, but it does now.”

Realizing he sounded too sincere and didactic, Pechorin coughed and lowered his voice in order to paint the finishing touches of his rant in poetic colors. “We can’t be free, Natsu, but we can choose our shackles.”

She looked at him for a second, seeing his dark brown eyes gazing down at her like two distant planets, and burst out laughing.

“Oh gods, Pech, you and your edgy—”

“Natsu?”

She saw him start leaning down and the part of her brain that knew what was happening went to war with her common sense and it felt like nothing in her brain functioned anymore until his lips pressed themselves to her. There was a part of her, the part that kept a running narrative of who she was and how she ought to act, which demanded her to push him away and call him an idiot and ask him what the hell he was doing. But she realized it that moment she had no more reason to pay attention to it than the part telling her to be spunky and peppy, and when she quieted it, she found that the rest of her had wanted this moment for a very long time and she allowed it to unfold how it would.

How it unfolded was like this: First, his arms went around her and pressed her closer. Next, she became aware of the tangy, metallic taste passing between their mouths. Lastly, she watched specks of white flit past her and settle on his long, black hair and on the shoulders of his trench coat.

She savored the kiss for a moment longer then pulled away to say, “it’s snowing.”

“Yeah,” he replied.

“It’s earlier than usual.”

Both tried to go back in for another kiss, but Natsuko’s comment had stirred something in their brains which was fighting to be heard amongst the silent fireworks going off inside both of them.

“The Yishang, they…”

“…usually start special events…”

“…with dramatic weather.”

They saw their own anxiousness fill their partner’s eyes.

“Fuck! We need to go!” Natsuko said, sprinting for the dancing bonfires on the horizon.