Natsuko awoke with a gasp, the stars twinkling above her where she lay sprawled across the deck.

“What’s wrong, Natsu?” Shui asked, sitting up and fumbling for her glasses.

“Just had a nightmare where I got force dimension-jumped into some kind of hell world. It had numbers that never went up, just like ours, except there weren’t even any monsters to kill, you just went to a room and punched little buttons for twelve hours straight and that was how you got Ying.”

Shuixing finally found her glasses and pushed them onto her face. “Maybe don’t drink so much grog before you go to sleep?”

Natsuko flopped back onto the deck and pulled her blanket up around her. “Another nightmare like that and you might see me quit cold turkey.”

After another day of sailing they were within sight of the famous Shikijiman volcano: Mt. Tomiji. Its dark, ashy-brown surface stood in contrast with the bright green vegetation and shimmering waters that wreathed it. At its base lay a palace complex on a plateau which rose over large gridded streets and a busy harbor. Poking through the cityscape were the spires of innumerable temples and shrines, the most famous of temple being Kairakuji Temple near the summit of the volcano.

“Land-ho!” came a call from the crow’s nest.

“You mean Daisy?” Natsuko mumbled, turning over in the hammock she stole from Sofiane. Several bottles of grog lay depleted beneath her. Sofiane’s foot kicked her and set the hammock rocking causing her to flail wildly.

“Get up, we’re not gonna wait for you,” Sofiane said.

“We’re not even there yet, asshole!”

“Start packing.”

“I already have everything I own on me!”

Sofiane made his way up to the bow to watch the city of Kazan-to pull itself into view. The capital of the Shikijima archipelago was by far its most impressive city, which did not speak well of the other ones. He snorted at how parochial it looked. All wood and thatch, the city still existed only by the good graces of the Yishang rebuilding any damage. If the city obeyed the strange physics of that forgotten dungeon he’d visited, one forgotten stove would have turned the whole city into a bonfire.

“Looks like shit once you’ve been to Cascadia and Deco-Imperia,” Sofiane said to Pechorin who joined him up on the bow.

“I’ve never been so I wouldn’t know,” Pechorin replied.

“Really? That’s wild. Not even to visit without doing any quests?”

“The monsters nearby are too dangerous.”

“Bummer. Well, at least the food is good in Shikijima. And the clothes. And I guess the poetry for you. Kinda shit outside of that.”

Pechorin grunted. “Idle fun has never been my forte.”

“You should ask the monks if they’ll let you self-flagellate with them. That might be up your alley,” Sofiane said.

An hour later their ship docked. A troupe of stiff officials wearing dark kimonos and sheathed swords were tramping up the boardwalk. After mooring the ship, the captain walked down the gangplank to meet them. Natsuko leaned over the railing to watch the proceedings and found the officials glaring back at her, so she hocked a loogie at one of them. It landed squarely on their expensive silk kimono. This was met with a look of disdain and repugnance.

“Gods-damned fascists,” Natsuko said to Shuixing at her side.

“Being that that is the case, perhaps you should not deliberately antagonize them?” Shuixing said.

“Never! No jackbooted thug tries to arrest me for public intoxication and gets away with it,” Natsuko said.

“Oh, now it makes sense,” Sofiane said, descending from the foredeck.

“That and the repression of the people and all that,” Natsuko said. “They do other, equally bad things besides accost innocent revelers in the middle of a night out on the town. Like indefinite imprisonment of political dissidents. They really like indefinite imprisonment.”

“Okay,” Sofiane said, “but what you’re not going to do is draw unnecessary attention by pissing them off. You’re gonna be a good girl and do whatever the hell they tell you, because if we have to blow up half of the Imperial Guard, every Hero from here to the Sibe-Lands is gonna know where we are. Comprendre?”

“Tch.”

“No, I want to hear, “yes, Sofiane, I’m not going to be my usual dumpster fire self”.”

Natsuko ignored him. Once they were off the ship, she would find a nice little bar that sold plum-rum and forget about everyone and everything, but especially her two least favorite high Use-Number assholes. And maybe pawn her expensive outfit. Although she needed a roof over her head to change first, and that seemed like more effort than she wanted to deal with before at least three cocktails.

Below, the conversation with the officials was getting louder.

“You have Heroes among your passengers?” an official asked.

“Aye, I do. Four of ‘em,” the ship’s captain replied.

“And were you aware that there is currently a ban on the coming and going of Heroes due to increased rebel activity?”

“I was unaware, sir.”

Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

Sofiane turned to Shuixing. “Uh…”

“Should we go down there and negotiate?”

“Or, I have another idea,” Sofiane said as he walked over to the other side of the boat and leapt into the water.

Taking the spirit of the idea and modifying its overall wetness, Shuixing followed him, deploying her glider, and sailing across to another part of the dock that had less officials on it. After a bit of splashing around, a sopping wet Sofiane joined her on the dock.

“Y’know, I probably should’ve used my glider too,” he said.

“The best ideas often come to the second person to tackle a problem,” Shuixing said.

She looked back over at the ship. Natsuko was watching them and shrugging.

Sofiane rolled his eyes. “She’ll catch up later. Or get caught, I don’t know. Let’s get something to eat that isn’t hardtack.”

Shuixing followed Sofiane’s lead. Admittedly, she was also a bit fed up with Natsuko’s sour mood after spending a day and a half stuck on a ship with her. She was worried Natsuko would do something to blow their cover, but her friend wasn’t quite that stupid. She hoped.

~~~

While all this was going on, Pechorin left the ship. There wasn’t much to be said for his method of exiting, other than that no party involved was aware of it. In short order he found himself walking along the shores of Shikijima again for the first time in years. Phantom memories resuscitated his long dead heart only to carve it open anew.

The first day they arrived in Shikijima, they—Pechorin, Natsu, Shui, and Hemiola—all laid out on the sand, basking in the bubbling excitement of a new region, a new set of quests, new enemies to fight, new dungeons to clear, with their successes in Tianzhou still glowing in them. To his left, where the beach flowed into a stone road, were the very same hibiscus bushes they had napped under.

The Autumn-blooming Red Hibiscus: The official flower of the Shikijiman Empire. How could he have overlooked it in his search for a poetic subject? It was the seasonal subject par excellence. Thus, his list now included seagulls and the Autumn-blooming Red Hibiscus. It was all he could do not to start adding everything in his visual field to the list in his enthusiasm.

With a bird and a flower in his satchel, Pechorin decided he needed some more mundane flora to set off against the vibrant hibiscus, something which represented autumn in transit, and perhaps some type of food.

It was tempting to fill the first box with the ubiquitous palm trees lining the seafront, yet, despite their classic appeal and appearance in many traditional Shikijiman poems, the state was in turmoil, and the Empire in rebellion. Would not the poetic mind be turned towards novelty in such times? Palm trees were too conservative. Below him lay sea oats, crushed beneath his boot, and he decided that these would do quite nicely for a more modest, yet progressive object of imaginary fixation.

The beach was too cold for bathers, so the only people on it were grizzled fishermen with leathery faces and women in white diving clothes pulling up baskets of shellfish. Pechorin caught the eye of a fisherman and he gave the man a cool nod and the fisherman gave him a cool nod back.

“Need somethin’ son?” the man said, a scar running up the left side of his face.

“I do, I just wish I knew what it was,” Pechorin replied. “I’m a wanderer. I don’t end up staying in one place for long.”

Pechorin didn’t smoke or pick his teeth, but he wished at this moment to have something betwixt his lips. Pechorin reached down and plucked a stalk of sea oats and stuck it in his mouth.

“Y’alright?” the fisherman asked with a concerned look on his face.

“As much as anyone can be in this world of woe,” Pechorin replied.

“Uh-huh. You grievin’ ‘bout somethin’?”

Pechorin’s eyes lit up. “Sit down awhile and I will tell you the fate of my clan.”

The fisherman looked for help from his fellow workers but found none. No one could save him from Pechorin’s backstory, laid out in all its sublimity and horror before him. The sheltered life of this simple Non-Hero had left him ill-prepared for such grief as was now being painted upon the theater of his mind.

“My own brother, with the blood of our mother smeared across his face—”

“Hey, fella, I gotta pack up this fishing gear. Mind helpin’ me out?”

Pechorin looked around to make sure no one was watching the small lapse in his rugged, emotionally-unavailable individualism and, finding the coast clear, said, “sure.”

He bundled up some of the rods and nets and brought them up to a communal storage shack that the fishermen shared. While in the process of moving things, Pechorin thought to ask the fisherman a question.

“I don’t suppose you would know a poetic allusion to the passing of seasons for autumn, would you?”

“You a poet? Huh, didn’t figure you the type,” the fisherman replied, hefting a coil of rope over his shoulder.

“Poetry is the verse which soothes the savage beast within me.”

“Tell ya what, you bust out a good haiku right here, and I’ll give ya some pointers. But if it sucks, no deal.”

Pechorin turned his chin to the sky to think for a moment, and when inspiration struck, he answered:

“At the ocean’s feet,

The flash of a diver’s smile—

Pearls have washed ashore.”

The fisherman whistled. “I’ll be damned, boy, ya got some chops. Once we put up the gear we’ll go have a drink and I’ll learn ya some poetry.”

Pechorin gathered up the oars and headed for the shack.

~~~

Sofiane yawned and stretched as he and Shuixing walked through a market street somewhere in the heart of Kazan-to. It was only late afternoon, but the sleep he’d gotten on the ship had been dreadful and was preceded by an entire weekend of drinking himself silly.

To their left and right were everything from daikon radishes and persimmons to steel halberds and Imperian phonograph records. For how quaint the two-story wooden buildings were, with their paper screens and bamboo mats, clearly the harbor brought in quite a bit of Ying.

“What kinda food do you wanna get?” Sofiane asked.

“I don’t really have a preference,” Shuixing replied. “Something fresh, I guess.”

“Something fresh… How about sushi?”

With no protests against it, Sofiane steered Shui towards one of the many eight-seater sushi shacks. Any of them would do. The one he found was a long, thin room with an ice shelf running the length of the counter and a shaggy-haired old man behind it working his gleaming sushi knife.

“Irrashaimase!” he screamed at them

“Irrash-hi to you too,” Sofiane said, grabbing a stool. Shui folded her hanfu under herself and took a seat next to him.

“What’ll ya have, lass?” the sushi chef asked.

“I’m not— hell, I don’t really care right now. Omakase,” Sofiane said, giving the magic command that meant, “whatever raw fish you feel like giving me.”

“I’ll have the same,” Shuixing said.

“Hai, douzo,” the chef replied, speaking in the Shikijiman language that served absolutely no functional purpose since everyone spoke a common tongue anyway.

He grabbed a pink snapper from the ice shelf and started cutting it up.

“Heroes, eh? What brings you to Shikijima?” the chef asked.

“Dungeons we forgot to clear,” Sofiane said, leery of the chef’s inquiry.

“I didn’t figure it was for swimming,” he said with a laugh. He snapped his fingers. “Damn. Forgot something. I’ll be right back.”

The sushi chef wiped his hands on his apron and came out from behind the counter and through the door to the shop. Shuixing raised an eyebrow at that.

“Odd behavior,” she said.

“They’re a little looser out here on the islands,” Sofiane explained. Leaning over the counter, he saw what he was looking for: A nice bottle of plum wine. Grabbing it and a glass, he poured himself a cup. “We’ll pay for it when he gets back.”

A few minutes later, the chef returned with a squadron of police officers with their swords drawn.

“Sofiane De La Nuit and Shuixing He, you are both under arrest for illegal border crossing and suspected espionage on behalf of a terrorist group,” one of the officers said.

Sofiane groaned. “Gods-dammit Natsuko!”