Ogawa the fisherman slugged back his shot of plum-rum, chased it with a mug of beer, and wiped the foam from his mouth.

“Ahh… That’s the stuff right there. Nothing like a shot of liquor and a pint of beer after a day of fishing,” he said.

Inhibitions lowered by not being around other Heroes, Pechorin ordered a cocktail of apple and fig liqueurs, maple rum, persimmon syrup, and yuzu. Delightfully fresh, yet seasonally appropriate to autumn. Nonetheless, it was very sweet. He would never have dared get it in front of another Hero, least of all Natsuko who would undoubtedly mock him.

Pechorin and Ogawa were seated on a couple of barstools facing out towards the ocean. They were in a quiet little open-air tiki bar along with other fishermen Non-Heroes similarly nursing a beer and a shot of plum-rum. Behind the counter, a bartender who acted very much like Klaus, was scrubbing a pint glass clean.

“So, ya wanna do some Shikijiman poetry, eh?” Ogawa said.

Pechorin nodded. “Please teach me.”

Ogawa stroked his rough, tanned chin, hands making a sandpapery sound against his afternoon stubble. “Well, ya got the basics down. No hoppin’ between subjects, gotta have a seasonal association, and some kind of turn to subvert expectations. I guess if I had to say what I think ya lack it might be a kind of— aw hell, I don’t know how to put it in words. Oi! Tanaka!”

The bartender looked up. “Yeah?”

“This whippersnapper wants to learn poetry. He’s missin’ somethin’ but I can’t find the words for it. Why don’t you take a listen and tell me what ya think,” Ogawa said.

Tanaka set down the mug and in a gruff voice said, “alright, let’s hear ‘er. What’d’ya got?”

“Right now?” Pechorin said. Being asked to compose a poem on the spot was more nerve-wracking than he anticipated.

Tanaka the bartender nodded. “Yeah, right now. Ya gotta be able to bang one out on the spot if you wanna write Shikijiman poetry. All of us can do it. Ogawa, show him.”

Ogawa cleared his throat.

“Fall winds rush

Through the bar’s window,

Sighing with salt.”

The fisherman punctuated his poem by slamming down another swig of beer. Pechorin swallowed. These were not men to be trifled with. He decided to respond with a couplet, as he heard was done in Shikijiman poetry parties.

“Red hibiscus blooms nearby,

Like a drunk fisherman’s cheeks.”

Ogawa and Tanaka laughed uproariously at that.

“It weren’t pretty, but ya got a quick mind, kid. There’s potential there,” Tanaka said, leaning his elbows on the counter. “Now, let’s hear a proper composition.”

Pechorin’s heart pounded. No more humorous couplets, he had to get serious. A poorly-composed poem in this moment would disgrace him in the eyes of these fearsome men. Should he fail, he would have to borrow Natsuko’s bottle and dimension-jump himself into oblivion to redeem his dishonor. He swallowed.

“Knocking a gourd,

Charming sound meets my ears—

Then, silence.”

Tanaka stroked his chin and Ogawa nodded quietly. The lack of response filled Pechorin with anxiousness. What if his earlier poems had been mere flukes? What if he truly did have no talent? Worse still, the entire bar was now listening.

“Not bad. Not bad at all. But you’re right, Ogawa, it’s missing a certain something. I just can’t pin it down. We might need a third opinion. Oi, Shimura!”

~~~

“Get your hands off me you damn fascist! It’s not public intoxication if I only have four drinks in me!” Natsuko yelled, jerking away from the police officer grabbing her arm.

“Ma’am, you can either come quietly, or we can get the Imperial Army involved,” one of the officers said.

There were six of them and they had all decided to accost her while she was innocently sitting on the porch of one of any number of tiki bars along the beach and nursing her fifth glass of plum-rum and waiting for her sopping wet kimono to dry. Worse still, they were standing in her clothes-drying sunlight.

“Leave me alone or you’ll be waking up at four in the morning,” Natsuko said.

“Please do not make this difficult. If you resist, the Imperial Clan will be forced to put up a bounty for your arrest.”

Which Natsuko realized meant a whole lot of attention. Nonetheless, putting herself at the mercy of a Non-Hero royally pissed her off, not least of which because she could tell by the smirk on his face that the police officer was enjoying having authority over a Hero that could turn him into a lump of charcoal with one Fire Gale.

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Natsuko grumbled and slammed back the rest of her rum. “Fine. But I’m not drunk.”

“Public intoxication is not the charge against you,” he replied.

“What the hell is it then?”

“High treason against the Empire, illegal bor—”

“Yeah, yeah, Shikijiman goes abroad and that’s high treason to the Empress, whatever.”

Natsuko figured this was coming. Her backstory included deserting the Imperial Guard out of protest for the former Emperor’s ill-treatment of his subjects. This was the supposed reason for her leaving in exile and joining the Knights of Innocentus in Vermögenburgh, and she had even played an important role in the culmination of the Emperor’s exorcism and abdication at the end of the mainline quests in Shikijima. Ironically, on the eve of her obsolescence.

There was a Non-Hero who filled that role for new Heroes running through old quests, but Empress Sadako had never forgiven Natsuko, or any other Shikijiman expat. As for how in the world the Empress found out Natsuko was in the region again, she suspected it was those damn secret police. Goddamn fascists.

Natsuko growled. “You’re joking…”

The police officers had produced a set of wooden pillory stocks for her neck and wrists.

“It’s procedure, ma’am,” the officer said with a self-satisfied sneer. Whether it was procedure or not, he’d clearly picked up on the fact that Natsuko was interested in avoiding a bounty being put out on her.

She glared at him as the officers put the stocks around her neck and wrists. “When all of this gets cleared up, I’m coming for you specifically, you jackbooted son of a bitch.”

~~~

“It’s missing a kind of dignity…” Otsuka said.

“No, no, there are plenty of famous poems that aim for something other than dignity,” Hani replied.

Tanaka the bartender folded his arms. “I think Otsuka’s on to something, but “dignity” isn’t the right word for it.”

“Sublimity?” offered Tsubasa.

“No! You’re overlooking the need for playful spontaneity,” Hani replied.

Pechorin was swarmed by a crowd of a dozen fisherman and one bartender all arguing over the core Shikijiman sensibility which his poems were currently missing. They had pushed him to compose ten or eleven poems by now, debated and critiqued each one, and were now more unresolved and doubtful than when they had begun the aesthetic exercise. All Pechorin had learned was that if you got twelve Shikijiman fishermen in a room, you would leave with thirteen different theories of poetry.

“Yes to spontaneity, but “playful” seems reductive as to what it’s doin’, that make sense?” Yukichi said.

“Hmm…” Ogawa said, rapping his knuckle on his third pint of beer. “We gotta think about what ties all those things together. Clearly, we can find a poem that evokes any of those moods, but we gotta get at what’s behind ‘em all. Where do dignity and spontaneity and sublimity and all that come from?”

Pechorin stared at the bamboo counter, his cocktail forgotten half-finished. His mind was so full of aesthetic theory that it felt like everything they were saying was pouring out of his ears and eyes the second it reached his brain. Ogawa was right that there was something at the core of all of this, but… what if it couldn’t be expressed in words? What if it was something felt in passing? Such a thing would be like a river, constantly passing, yet never graspable. It would slip the yoke of words like water through fingers. Maybe it was…

“Blood moon in daytime—

A myriad existence,

Is spoken anew.”

“That’s it!” Ogawa shouted. “He’s got it!”

The fisherman toasted with a cheer and slapped Pechorin on the back. Pechorin wasn’t quite sure what he had “gotten,” but he supposed that was the point. There was, after all, nothing really to get.

~~~

With a shove, the jail guards pushed Natsuko into a jail cell made of wooden bars. It was ridiculous, since she could burn the whole thing down with Fire Gales if she wanted to.

“Can you at least take the stupid pillory off? I need to scratch my nose,” Natsuko said.

“No,” the guard said before slamming the cell door.

Having no other recourse, Natsuko was forced to awkwardly lean forward and press her nose to the rough stone the wooden cell was built against and rub it up and down to get at the itch. In the middle of doing this, Shuixing and Sofiane were led into the cell.

“Oh no, her last brain cell finally died!” Sofiane said.

Natsuko flushed. “Fuck off puffball, I had to scratch my nose. How come you two don’t have to wear this stupid thing?”

“I don’t know, but if I had to guess, you deliberately pissed them off.”

“Only cuz they pissed me off first! What are you two doing here, anyway?”

“I don’t know, firecrotch, that’s a great question,” Sofiane said, folding his arms and leaning against the bars. “Why don’t you tell us?”

“Probably because these sons of bitches are FASCISTS!” Natsuko said, screaming so that the guards could hear her. Shuixing winced.

Sofiane scoffed. “What, are you hoping to get gagged too? Clearly you managed to do something stupid and illegal in the, what, three hours we’ve been here? If you can shut up with the “fascist” stuff for a second and wrack your smooth little brain for what you possibly could have done, we can start figuring out what to do next.”

Natsuko filled him in on her backstory and the bad blood between her and Empress Sadako.

“So, they’re arresting us just to screw with you?” Sofiane said.

“That and we did actually enter the region illegally,” Shuixing said, sitting on the floor with her back to the wall.

“But somehow they also think we’re working with the rebels? How does that work?”

“It doesn’t need to make sense,” Natsuko said. “Shikijima is a totalitarian shithole. The Imperial Clan can do or say whatever they want. They just got lucky they pulled this shit when I can’t burn their entire stupid city down.”

“You wouldn’t do that, Natsuko,” Shuixing said.

“Maybe, maybe not.”

Sofiane exhaled and sank to the floor, arms wrapped around his knees. “I’m sure we can just explain things to the Empress, tell her we’re not working with Yuna, and she’ll let us go. I mean, we’re Heroes! It’s not like you can execute someone who’s just gonna be re-summoned the next morning.”

“Speaking of,” Shuixing said, “your bottle’s in the evidence lockup, right?”

Natsuko nodded, which required her to bend her entire torso.

“That… has me nervous,” Sofiane said.

“Yeah, well, I wasn’t about to say, hey can you let me keep that? I need to be able to murder people in an emergency,” Natsuko replied.

With that last exchange, all three of them ran out of energy to continue talking. Already down before setting off on their quest to get Shui’s research back, this was a rock bottom they couldn’t have dreamed up even in a nightmare. Sitting in different corners of the cell, the only thing they could do was wait, and Natsuko was terrible at waiting.

“I wonder how Pechorin is doing,” Shuixing said softly.