As much fun as Pechorin was having with the poetry jam, the sun had set by now, and he did not wish to inconvenience the others.

“I should probably go find my teammates,” Pechorin said.

“Ya sure ya can’t stay for one more round? C’mon, just the one,” Ogawa said, clapping him on the back.

“We’ve had seven “just one”s,” Pechorin said to the two or three Ogawas waving in his vision. He didn’t drink as hard as Natsuko, but it had seemed impolite to refuse offers to buy him a round. By this time, there’d been a few rounds of poetry-linking, he and the fishermen taking turns coming up with alternating tercets and couplets, each link demanding a shot.

“We’ll seeya ‘round then, Kurashi,” Ogawa said, using the pen name they’d come up with for Pechorin which meant The Dark Poet.

“Make sure to swing by again ‘fore ya leave Shikijima, got that?”

Pechorin tried to stand up but had to grip the counter to steady himself because wobbling over was not badass and he needed to seem like he could handle his liquor, even if it was just chain-drinking fruity cocktails. Once stable, he gave a respectable bow to his teachers and went on his way through the darkening streets of Kazan-to.

Unlike the bright lights and glitz of Tianzhou City, the Shikijiman capital was more subdued. Due to the mandatory curfew, the only lights after dark came from lanterns and candles inside the winding array of houses and shops. It was a shame his usual method of cowboy bootstrapping his way into shelter was illegal in Shikijima.

His main issue was that he had no idea where his party members had gotten off to. He tried the first and best idea that came to him, which was to wander aimlessly through the streets.

“Sir, you are in violation of the curfew law. I am afraid I will have to arrest you,” a police officer said to him.

“Time challenges have always been my weakness,” Pechorin said.

Not wanting to draw extra attention to himself, he let the officer take him to jail. The building was about halfway up the inland hills from the harbor and set into exposed volcanic rock. Due to his cooperation and light misdemeanor, the officer was cordial with him. The incident seemed mostly a matter of formalities to be cleared up in the morning.

Even better, they led him directly to his party members. Or, almost directly. He was given a roomier cell that shared one wall of bars with them and had its own bed.

“Good evening,” he said to them after the officers left.

“Hey! How come you get your own cell with a bed? That’s not fair!” Natsuko said.

Pechorin glanced up at the stone ceiling and saw the cool moonlight shining through the small barred window. He felt something welling up within him:

“Stripes of silver,

Through the—”

“Now’s not the damned time for poetry!” Natsuko said.

“For once, I am in agreement,” Sofiane said.

“Sorry, Pech. It’s been a long day for all of us,” Shuixing said.

Pechorin supposed there was no sense in declaiming to ears that would not hear anything and so aborted his poem. To him, moments of consternation and peril necessitated poetry as a balm. Nonetheless, if they wished for his silence, so it would be. Hours passed in silence, an abominable silence, which beckoned for words to aestheticize its dreadfulness.

“You know,” Pechorin said, startling Natsuko awake from a doze. “As everything eventually turns into its opposite, perhaps what seems in this moment to be misfortune may prove a blessing in disguise.”

“Shut up,” Natsuko said, slapping the wooden pillory around her neck against the bars.

“What do you mean?” Shuixing asked.

“If I knew, it wouldn’t be in disguise,” Pechorin replied.

For a fleeting moment, hope had plastered itself on Shuixing’s face before she realized this was another Pechorism. She sighed and rolled over on her spot on the floor. From somewhere else in the jail, water dripped against stone.

“Do you think this is punishment for trying?” Sofiane said. “Defying the natural order of things?”

“The natural order of Use-Rankings?” Shuixing asked.

“Yeah. Maybe we’re supposed to fade into obscurity. Maybe there is no fighting it, and the more you do, the faster you drop.”

“I don’t know,” Shuixing said, although his statement pricked at her precisely because it seemed true.

Pechorin hummed for a moment, then said, “Is it worth nothing to have tried?”

Outside the barred windows, palm trees shook from a cold ocean wind that bore the smell of salt and hibiscus on it.

“It wasn’t worth a damn,” Sofiane said.

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Nothing much was said after that. All four of them, for their own reasons, wanted to be by themselves, even if they were still in a jail cell. More than anything else, it was their enforced proximity that grated against their nerves. With nothing to do but muse, Pechorin thought that this might be because all of them had secretly hoped the answer to their predicament—the grand predicament, not the petty predicament of getting arrested—lay with the others, that somehow the group in its totality would produce the key to get them all out of their individual hells.

But no solutions had come forth. No answers. No escape. And now they were mired even more deeply than if they had all stayed in quiet little Vermögenburgh and lived quiet little obscure lives. But then again, Pechorin thought, Frederick had tried that, so maybe there wasn’t much hope there either.

“What to do, what to do?” Pechorin muttered to himself after the torches had been snuffed out by the guards.

“Go the fuck to sleep,” Natsuko said in reply.

After a restless night, the sun transmuted the silver streaks in front of Pechorin’s window into gold. In front of his door was a bowl of rice porridge and pickled vegetables which he took to as quickly as decorum permitted.

“Shui, feed me,” Natsuko moaned.

Shuixing had to bring the bowl of food up to her friend’s mouth in an awkward operation that ended up with a lot of spilled food.

“I’m gonna kill them,” Natsuko said between munches on pickled radish.

“The seagull bellows,

Over a desolate beach.

The waves echo back.” Pechorin said.

At this point no one was paying him any mind at all. For the rest of the morning, the other three tried to come up with a plan of action for how to proceed, treading a middle line of not burning Shikijima to the ground and not letting themselves get thrown in prison, with Natsuko mostly coming down on the pro-burning side and Sofiane and Shuixing resolutely on the anti-burning one. By noon they’d gotten nowhere.

“Okay, if we were to break out, we would be scavenging around Shikijima. That’s all well and good,” Sofiane said. “But then the Empress scrambles her police to look for us and puts out a bounty. So the only way I can see this working is we just reason with Her Majesty.”

Natsuko grunted. “I’ll reason my foot up her ass.”

“That does not sound very reasonable,” Pechorin said.

“Shut up! I’ll mount her head on—”

The door swung open and a squadron of guards stood ready to escort them.

“—my lap. I love her,” Natsuko said.

“Your hearing is in half an hour. We are to escort you to Her Imperial Majesty’s court room,” one of the guards said.

“Yeah, yeah, whatever,” Natsuko said, flapping a trapped hand.

The guard sneered. “Not you, deserter. You will be dealt with separately.”

“What!? No, I demand to be dealt with jointly!”

“Your betrayal of Shikijima is much more severe than illegal border crossing and aiding terrorists. As such, you will be tried separately.”

Natsuko looked at Sofiane and Shuixing who looked equally bewildered.

“Erm, could we also be tried for treason, then? Would that solve it?” Shuixing asked.

The guard squinted in confusion. “You want to be tried for treason, despite not being Shikijiman?”

Shui nodded. “Y-Yeah.”

“That’s not… that’s not how treason works,” the guard replied.

“Listen, friend, pal, chum, what’s your name?” Sofiane asked, stepping forward to pat the man on the arm before seven drawn katanas encouraged him to stop.

“You can call me Tatsuda, or Sir,” Tatsuda said.

“Okay, Tats, listen, we are willing to swear complete and undying loyalty to the Empress if you’ll let us,” Sofiane said.

Tatsuda looked back at his fellow, equally-confused guards. None of them was aware of any kind of bureaucratic precedence for this situation. But that also meant there was no explicit law against it.

“So, you’ll swear allegiance to Her Imperial Majesty, Empress Sadako, Third of Her Name, prostrating yourself before Her Hibiscus Throne in an act of eternal loyalty? You understand that doing so will not acquit you, correct?” Tatsuda said.

“That’s fine. We’ll do the whole kowtowing thing,” Sofiane said.

Tatsuda, accompanied by his cadre of guards, led Sofiane, Shuixing, and Pechorin out of the jail and onto the steep, winding streets leading to the palace complex at the foot of Mt. Tomiji. Their procession attracted the attention of everyone they passed by. In a way, it felt to Sofiane like a joke version of their entrance to the Card Tournament. He supposed all great statements happened twice: First as glamor, second as farce.

The palace complex rose out of a band of tropical trees that wreathed its perimeter. Its outer walls stood stately and imposing, being made of sloped stone walls over which were built fortifications of tropical hardwood and finally capped with vermillion tile roofs. Once through the iron gates, they found themselves in a tropical garden the size of several Tianzhounese city blocks. On the far side lay a six-story palace connected to other buildings with wooden skybridges.

Sofiane yawned. He’d already rushed through the quests in Shikjima, so the palace meant to overawe its visitors looked desolate. The locus of activity and importance had long ago moved on, despite whatever painstaking efforts had been made to build this palace up.

“Over luscious trees

Rise stately red roof tiles,

Watching years go by,” Pechorin declaimed.

Before Sofiane could tell him to shut up, the guards grunted in acknowledgement.

“That’s a fine poem,” Tatsuda said.

“Very fine,” said another.

A couple of guards looked even more awe-struck. “Do you think…”

“No,” Tatsuda said. “I doubt it. But perhaps they are suitable candidates to become Shikijiman after all.”

At first Sofiane thought they were playing some kind of joke but, no, the guards were genuinely impressed with Pechorin’s stupid little poem. Was there some kind of poetry event currently going on? Or some kind of quest? There had to be some reason the guards were that naturally enthusiastic. No one was that enthusiastic about poetry.

“Is there some kind of special event happening? With the poetry I mean,” Sofiane asked.

“Every poem is an event,” Tatsuda replied.

“Yeah, but like, one that actually matters. With money and prizes and stuff.”

Tatsuda looked at Sofiane like he had just said the Yishang didn’t exist. “No, poetry is its own reward. It needs no extrinsic motivation.”

Sofiane looked back at Tatsuda like he had just said the Yishang didn’t exist.

Proceeding through luxurious banquet halls filled with flower arrangements and elegant scrolls, they eventually arrived at some kind of reception-slash-throne room, with a wooden throne shaped and painted to resemble a red hibiscus. They took off their shoes before stepping onto the tatami-matted floor.

To either side of them were court officials and bureaucrats sitting on cushions in their neatly-folded robes. Tatsuda forced Shuixing, Sofiane, and Pechorin to kneel in the center of the room and wait. And wait. And wait.

After a long enough stretch of time that Sofiane was starting to reconsider the “burning down Kazan-to” option, Empress Sadako finally swept into the room.