“Oh, Daisy, Daisy, Daisy. This is for you,” Daisy said, sinking underneath the steaming hot spring water.

She blew bubbles until she felt the last of her reservoir of stress leave her lungs and then she popped back up. She plopped a cold towel across her forehead and tilted her head back to watch the night sky and its twinkling stars. The rain clouds had passed and left the gorgeous open firmament that usually characterized the Sibe-Lands. She thought it was strange that the Element associated with the region was Metal and not Wind, but Vermögenburgh had taken that title.

The springs she was stewing in were a little off the beaten path. She had flown to the Razor Mountains on Peng’s back which ate up the rest of her afternoon and then had to kill a Zmei Forge Dragon to get access to its open-air quenching tub. The “springs” were heated by a giant, twelve-foot tall greatsword sitting across the pool from Daisy with its crossguard splayed like arms so that it looked like it was chilling out with her.

The advantage of stealing the dead dragon’s forge was that no one was going to bother her. It was in the complete ass end of Po-Lin on a cliff that faced the still-Misted side of the Sibe-Lands, so there was quite literally nothing worth doing or seeing here beyond a couple lonely camps of disposable monsters. And on top of that, you had to kill one of the most challenging monsters in Po-Lin to even get here. This was how Daisy made absolutely sure that no one could disturb her while she was ruminating on her ethical quandary.

Naturally, that meant someone was going to walk in on her. She heard the intruder’s footsteps echoing out of the forge dragon’s cave and groaned.

“Nice to see you too,” Ailing said.

“I was sort of hoping to have some Daisy time,” Daisy replied, tilting her head down which led to the cold towel falling in the water. “Rats!”

“Mmm… You are a complex woman,” Ailing said, stepping up behind her.

Daisy could make out Ailing’s jade white-and-gold stockings and the tail of her dress in her peripheral vision. If she looked straight up, she would see the rainbow of butterflies on Ailing’s dress staring back down at her. But she didn’t, because Daisy’s eyes were fixed on the opaque mist in the black void in front of her.

“Complex how? I feel like I’m a pretty simple lady, truth be told,” Daisy replied.

“Is that so?” Ailing said. “Because from my perspective, about half the time you refuse to be alone and pile people on like they’re layers of clothes, and the other half you don’t want anyone to even remember you exist. Sometimes your head is full of numbers, and sometimes it’s full of poetry. Sometimes you’re pushing people out of windows to get ahead, and other times you’re worried about some quaint has-beens at the bottom of the Use-Chart. The only constant is the bubbly, ditzy socialite that the Celestials get to see. I can’t figure you out, Daisy.”

Daisy rolled her neck against the edge of the tub. “If I was meant to be figured out I would’ve been reincarnated as a dungeon puzzle.”

“That sounds like it would make for an interesting book. But you’ll have to forgive me for trying to figure you out anyway.”

Without saying anything else, Ailing ditched her boots and stockings and sat down next to Daisy with her legs in the water. Now there was no ignoring the chromatic barrage of butterflies on Daisy’s retinas. If her own preference wasn’t for eye-searing pink, she might have had grounds to call it tacky.

“I hope you’re at least up to answering questions?” Ailing asked.

Her teammate’s tone wasn’t accusatory or judgemental, and unlike Boulanger, Daisy felt roughly on equal footing with Ailing despite her being a level higher than Daisy. But Ailing was ruthless in her own right, and Daisy had a sneaking suspicion that the end point of this impromptu interrogation wasn’t going to be a newfound flowering of rapport between battle partners, but a cross-examination of Daisy’s private life.

No one liked secrets at the top of the Use-Rankings. Secrets could be advantages, and someone else’s advantage could be deadly to your own statistics. Being teammates did not absolve Daisy of the crime of having secrets.

“It’d be a whole lot more hassle if I said no, wouldn’t it?” Daisy asked.

Ailing laughed a dark, warm laugh and then said, “yes, it would.”

Daisy sighed and rolled her face in the warm water. Why couldn’t she just have a bath?

“Bwah!” she said, popping her head out of the water. “Alright, it was something Zhidao asked me to do. You were gonna ask why I scurried my little hiney over to Vermögenburgh a couple weeks ago, right?”

“To bake pies,” Ailing said.

“To bake pies. Zhidao said it might be a good idea to keep up my archetype. And, you know how it is with the Pengwu, it’s never about what they say it is.”

“It was about who you were baking with.”

Daisy shrugged. “Something like that. He just said I’d find some interesting company there, and I made a snap judgment and decided that some forgotten Heroes who’ve been living under a rock might be interesting and—”

Ailing held up her hand to wait. A thousand feet down, at the base of the cliff, there was a roving pack of Medingradian Animatons—clockwork attack animals, these ones in the shape of wolves—wandering across the plains. Instincts honed not to pass up cheap experience, Ailing snapped them up.

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The animations didn’t have time to react. The only thing they saw was the ground slowly brightening until they were caught in a spotlight, and as they looked up, a silvery beam of moonlight a hundred feet in diameter incinerated them. Ailing didn’t have to move from her spot in the tub.

“Sorry. Continue,” she said.

Daisy made sure to hurl a rock down at one of them so that she got shared experience credit for being part of combat.

“Ahh… where was I?”

“The Heroes living under a rock,” Ailing offered helpfully.

“Ah, yes, our rock-dwelling Heroes. That would be Natsu, Shui, and Pech, although I suspect our good pal Zhidao was more interested in the first two,” Daisy said.

The butterflies fluttered in Daisy’s irises as Ailing folded her robed arms. “Nicknames?”

Daisy bit her lip. “We got acquainted.”

“Because they happened to stumble on the secret to forced dimension-jumping?”

“No, because they bake a darn good pie!”

Daisy chuckled at that. Ailing did not. No one at the top had a damn sense of humor, she thought, other than maybe Windwalker. And Jouchi, if you were a sadist who enjoyed tormenting other Heroes by making them do unpleasant things for money. Daisy was not.

“Ugh. Yes, I was interested in Natsu’s bottle. And, probably more importantly, Shuixing’s research into the bottle. She can replicate—”

“Boulanger told me that part,” Ailing said in her buzzing contralto.

Where Boulanger’s brusque arrogance manifested in a demanding softness, Ailing’s was a smooth, almost motherly tone. She was the example par excellence of the “vaguely-threatening and dominant mature woman” archetype, for whose prime seat she had beat out three or four more forgettable Heroes, including the blonde one that the mystery figure had killed in the anomalous dungeon. Her name escaped Daisy. Not that it really mattered.

Daisy groaned, already sick of the recap interrogation. “Look, if Boulanger told you that, then you already know everything I can tell you. Someone stole Shui’s research, we went after it because, yeah, Boulanger was right, it probably can be used to upset the Use-Ranking hierarchy, and things went south at the Card Tournament. You are up-to-date with everything I know.”

“You wound me! I wasn’t here for an oral history, I wanted to know about you, my dear little Daisy,” Ailing said, tracing long, sharp fingernails laden with jewelry across the length of Daisy’s back, causing her to shiver. She pulled Daisy in until her shoulder rested against her teammate’s leg. “This is just a talk between us girls. And I was just so curious about why you want to drop everything to have us swoop in and save your pet Heroes. Usually it’s Jouchi that likes to play around with triples.”

Heroes with triple-digit Use-Rankings, that was. Daisy grimaced. Was it better to deny she felt somewhat attached to the Heroes she’d been traveling with or admit it? Or—and this frightened her most of all—was “pet” exactly the right term for what appealed to her about Natsuko, Shuixing, and Pechorin?

No. It wasn’t. That much she was absolutely certain of. Natsuko was fun to party with, Shuixing was a fascinating mind, and Pechorin was an unrecognized poetic genius. Even Sofiane, for as much as he still had the stench of the Use-Ranking desperation clinging to him, had an aesthetic eye she was both jealous with and fascinated by. She liked and respected them on a level basis.

Daisy said as much to Ailing and her teammate’s reaction was to laugh.

“Oh, Daisy, Daisy, Daisy. It was the bottle, wasn’t it? This Natsuko, she had power over you, and you were forced to see her as an equal and it was intriguing. That’s what it was, wasn’t it?” Ailing asked.

Daisy sank lower in the tub. “N-No, I genuinely like them, and I don’t want to see them torn apart by a mob directed by Yuna. That’s all.”

“By Yuna? Oh, you would’ve been on your way here when the Pengwu were going around with the announcement,” Ailing said, releasing Daisy from her grasp.

Daisy turned her head and looked up at her teammate for the first time. Ailing’s knee-length, platinum-white hair and vajra earrings framed a soft, motherfly face, dragon horns, and scales along her cheeks. Her amber eyes were reptilian slits that tread the line between carnivorous and compassionate.

“What do you mean?” Daisy asked.

“The Yishang put out a bounty on the “people or persons” responsible for murdering Shrike and some 1st-gen called Frederick. And it sounds like everyone has a pretty clear idea about who they think is responsible,” Ailing said.

Daisy frowned. This was a lot worse than Yuna putting everyone on a mad chase. “What are they offering? Ying? Special weapons?”

“Stats. Supposedly enough to make the Top Ten.”

Daisy sank below the water and furiously blew more bubbles. Her reservoir of stress had shot right back up to full capacity and needed to be emptied again. Unfortunately, the bubbles weren’t proving as effective this time around.

“Bwah!” she said, tossing her limp, wet ringlets back over her shoulder. She wiped a few more strands from her eyes before looking up at Ailing once again.

“Why me? Is that what you’re thinking?” Ailing asked.

Daisy’s hand lifted out of the water and fired at her teammate with the weakest, smallest-caliber finger guns she had ever produced and emitted a depressingly lackluster, “bullseye.”

“Because you like to waste your time on silly business,” Ailing said, paddling her feet in the water. “Boulanger was right. You should’ve told Zhidao to stuff it. I don’t know what the Yishang are playing at, having you go investigate the 1st-gen fools that stumbled onto forced dimension-jumping right before putting the bounty of all bounties on them, but it’s bad news.”

Ailing tickled the nape of Daisy’s neck with her fingernails which felt like electricity frying her brain. “My advice to you, Daisy, my sweet, sweet girl, is to drop out of all this while you can. Boulanger is still deciding whether it’s better to go get that nice stat increase ourselves, or to let the others have a go and take the brunt of your little Natsuko’s bottle. We won’t be on the chopping block either way. It’s Yuna, Leenhardt, Sultana, and Higalik that need to be worried about being replaced.”

The worst part of all this was that Daisy’s teammate was sincerely trying to be comforting and to give her good advice. No, actually, the worst part was that it was good advice. Now that some maniac was running around with another dimension-jumping weapon, anyone near Shuixing was at risk. Whoever that mysterious black figure was, they had already figured out that Shui had to go first, lest she reproduce her research and dilute their monopoly on force dimension-jumping.

Her newfound acquaintances were the most wanted people in Po-Lin, and associating with them would add Daisy to the list. But if she did nothing, they were guaranteed to get caught, and whatever the Yishang wanted to do with them—and the Yishang were the preferable alternative—was probably not good.

“Argh!” Daisy said, tugging at her wet hair. “I came here to not think thoughts and you went and made me, dammit!”

Ailing chortled. Daisy felt her teammate’s hand rubbing her upper back. “Only for your own good, dear.”

“Fine, fine,” Daisy replied, feeling a mixture of relief and guilt. “I’ll cut them loose.”