After locking up her laboratory—not that this had done much the first time—Shuixing sprinted to the Devil’s Cut and alerted Natsuko to the burglary. Soon, Shuixing, Natsuko, Sofiane, Pechorin, and Daisy were all taking in the sight of the pillaged lab. Everyone except Shuixing was very, very drunk.

“Whaddabouta wine bottle now?” Daisy said.

“Erm, should we be telling people we just—hic—met what your wine bottle does?” Sofiane asked.

With her legendary alcohol tolerance, Natsuko was the least plastered. “Sofiane, we literally told you right away.”

“Oh yeah,” he said. “It kills people. Like, permanently. Dead dead.”

Daisy’s mouth made a large, dramatic O and she slapped her cheeks which prompted Pechorin to giggle. He forgot about playing his archetype whenever he got drunk, so he was free to giggle without guilt.

Shuixing took a deep breath. “What it does is forcefully induce dimension jumping regardless of whether there is anything below to ca—”

“Oh. Gods!” Daisy shouted.

“—to catch—”

“To catch you! Oh no! That’s horrible!” Daisy said, starting to tear up.

Sofiane looked up at her. “Uh…”

“I’m sorry! I get really emotional when I’m tipsy!”

Pechorin hugged her around the shoulders. “It’s okay… Emotions prove to us that we’re alive. Just as our skin measures temperature, emotions are our bodily instrument for measuring Truth."

Natsuko pinched the bridge of her nose. “Ugh. I prefer you when you’re an edgelord. Okay, Shui, let’s uh… figure this out. People leave evidence behind, right?” She started walking around amongst the debris, glass and paper crunching under her boots. “We’ve just gotta find some.”

“The first step is to stop messin’ up the crime scene ya—hic—moron. You’re damagin’ all the’vidence,” Sofiane said, bumping against a lab table and knocking a rack of utensils to the floor.

“Out! Everyone out!” Shuixing said, hurrying them with her hands. The fault was hers for inviting a bunch of drunkards into her lab, but she had panicked and didn’t know what else to do.

“But I live here…” Natsuko said.

“Then go to your room.”

“But I wanna go out and keep drinking…”

“Then out!”

Shuixing shut the door. Once she was alone, she put her back to the door and sank to the ground. Once there, she put her cold palms to her cheeks. The panic had subsided somewhat, but it was replaced by a roiling anxiety at what she had released into the world. She knew it was possible someone might steal her research, and that what she was researching had the potential to be extremely dangerous, but she had wanted to see it through. Research into dimension-jumping had been her own answer to dropping out of the Use-Number competition. That drive to do something with herself, to come up with something truly new, overrode her sense of responsibility. Blind to the consequences, she had produced something evil.

And now the knowledge of how to replicate it was in someone else’s hands.

Her thoughts turned on this guilt for hours into the night before she eventually lost consciousness and fell asleep still slumped against the door. She woke up to a bump. Sunlight was streaming in through the windows and glinting off shattered glass.

“Shui? You in there?” Natsuko asked.

Shuixing groaned in the affirmative and got to her feet. She was surprised how early Natsuko was up until she checked the clock hanging askew on the wall to see it was almost noon.

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

Natsuko barged in the second she unblocked the door. Natsuko’s face was stuck in a tender wince. “Hey! So, can you…”

Shuixing materialized her rod in her hand and cured Natsuko’s hangover.

“Thank you, love! Now we can get down to investigation mode."

“Where’s everyone else?” Shuixing asked.

“Sofiane is still passed out naked in the town fountain, Pechorin disappeared after he got booed offstage for trying to declaim poetry, and I haven’t seen Daisy since she threw up in my lap after telling me I was her best friend and the only one who understood her,” Natsuko said.

“Hmm,” was all Shuixing had to add. She was reminded why she didn't care for drinking.

Natsuko snatched a magnifying glass from the rack of examination instruments and began gleefully scanning surfaces. Shuixing watched her, feeling too numb to say anything.

“What uh… what are we looking for exactly?” Natsuko eventually asked.

It was like they’d traded moods overnight. Shuixing was paralyzed with a feeling of hopelessness and Natsuko was in high spirits.

“A-Anything that didn’t originally belong to the laboratory,” Shuixing said. “Why are you in such a good mood? Aren’t you worried?”

Natsuko shrugged. “A little bit. But see, this actually matters. Gimme a concrete goal like tracking down the shitheel that tossed your lab and beating the stuffing out of them and I’m on fire! I just need to have something to do. Oh, do you know if they nabbed my bottle too?”

“I-I don’t think so, actually. I put it up…” Shuixing ran her hand along the unassuming equipment cabinets. Pulling one open, there was Natsuko’s bottle taking up an entire shelf by itself. Shuixing hefted the giant thing out of the cabinets and held it out for Natsuko.

“Hey, there’s a bright spot, right? At least they’ve only got some papers and not the real deal,” Natsuko said.

“The papers are all you need to recreate something like your bottle,” Shuixing said.

“Yeah, but that takes time, and they’re probably not a genius like you are. That means we’ve got time to track them down. And heck, we can narrow it down further. It’s almost undoubtedly a Hero, right? A Non-Hero has no reason to care about your research because what are they gonna do with it? So, now we’ve figured out that we’re looking for a Hero who was in Vermögenburgh yesterday and who will be hiding somewhere remote to tinker with making another murder bottle. And uh…”

Hearing Natsuko yap endlessly lifted Shuixing’s spirits somewhat. Despite the verbosity, everything she was saying was completely rational. They did have at least some time to track her papers down before things got worse. Ironic that Natsuko was the one who thinking clearly this time around.

As Natsuko combed through the rubble for evidence, Shui tapped her on the shoulder. “Maybe you should go grab the others while I look.”

Natsuko pulled her magnifying glass away from the pencil she’d been scrutinizing. “Sounds good! Daisy too?”

“If she's willing. Having the help of the fourth strongest Hero in the world would certainly be appreciated."

“Well, fourth most popular amongst Celestials, to be specific. But I see your point,” Natsuko said. “Off we go!”

Making her way down from the Mage’s College, Natsuko anticipated the search for the others to be an all-day challenge. However, this proved not to be the case. Far from vanishing without a trace, it was now abundantly clear where Daisy had gotten off to last night. The backside of the Vermögenburgh Cathedral hadn't been visible on the walk uphill to the Mage’s College, but facing the other way, Natsuko could see where Daisy had summoned a large stone bird and ridden it into the side of the cathedral, leaving a crater in the roof where she was currently sleeping off a hangover. The Non-Heroes weren’t going to be happy, especially Abbess Emilia, but oh well, Daisy had plenty of money to stick in the donation box.

Sofiane would be easy to find because once Natsuko saw he had vacated the fountain, she suspected she would find him back in his room. However, in the Foxtrot inn lobby, she instead found Pechorin sitting in a rocking chair staring into the hearth fire while the innkeeper, Grisella, swept around him.

Natsuko snuck up behind him and into his ear yelled, “morning sunshine!”

Pechorin didn’t react. His eyes were glazed over, the flames of the hearth flicking in the coals of his pupils.

“Do you think life is worth living, Natsu?” Pechorin asked.

“What? Uh... right now I do. Why?”

“Even as, day-after-day, we throw ourselves like logs onto an eternal bonfire of suffering? Then, when we tire of this, we take drink, in the hopes of burning ourselves faster, that we may return to the ash of the world and—”

“Shuixing can fix your hangover. She’s up at the laboratory.”

Pechorin immediately got up and shuffled towards the door.

“Did you see the little purple puffball come in here this morning?” Natsuko asked Grisella.

The elderly innkeeper looked up from her sweeping. “Oh the little girly fella? Yeah, he ran right in still naked, grabbed some things, n’ came runnin’ right back out again. Seemed in a real hurry.”