Daisy hopped off Peng who crumbled into sand to match the rest of the beach. With her feet on the ground, she put her fists on her hips, gave a big huff, and said, “well y’all have been busy!”

“I’m about to be busy putting my foot up your ass,” is what Natsuko would have said if she wasn’t on her best behavior courtesy of Sofiane’s chewing out. Instead, she bit down really hard on her lower lip and said nothing.

“Not of our own choice,” Shuixing said.

“I can see that. Oh, and there’s the little raccoon girl again!”

The raccoon girl pouted. “I have a name you kn—”

Before she could finish, Daisy squeezed her dark-colored cheeks. Unfortunately for her, the difference in power meant that Harald and Faisal couldn’t have stopped Daisy if they tried. Not that they would have. Unlike with Natsuko’s team who had become desensitized to Daisy’s celebrity status, Harald’s team was star struck into inaction.

Daisy released the raccoon girl from her pinching clutches.

“Phew! Well, as much as I’d like to head back out immediately, I’m pooped! I’ve been on Peng more than my own two legs for the past… gods, five days now? Six? Ol’ Daisy needs some rest, so first thing’s, let’s find somewhere for me to snatch a nap,” Daisy said.

“Right now? While we’re being chased by… uh, everyone?” Sofiane asked.

“Sure! I mean, ya got me now, right? I can blow up anyone who might come after us.”

“What about your teammates?”

It could have been Sofiane’s imagination, but he thought he saw Daisy start to sweat a little despite the weather being in the upper 40s.

“Uhh… well, they at least won’t be coming after us,” she said, eyes looking at everything but Sofiane’s gaze.

“But they’re not going to help either,” he said.

Daisy sighed. The dark circles under her eyes were a lot more noticeable now that Sofiane was looking. Her usual cheeriness seemed forced. “I did what I could. But like I said, they won’t be among the hunting parties, so that’s a plus.”

Sofiane’s head dipped in disbelief. “Boulanger turned down a guaranteed permanent stat increase? How in the world did you manage that?”

Daisy shrugged. “He did cuz he did. Anyway, chatter later, nap now! Onward to… what’s the village around here again?”

“Kajimata Village,” Shuixing supplied. “North by northeast on the jungle trail.”

Shui surprised herself with that knowledge. It’d been at least three years since she set foot on the island, let alone visited Kajimata Village. Her brain worked in strange ways sometimes. Rarely did it ever do exactly as she bid, as now when she couldn’t make it parse the physical anomalies she’d been cataloging, but it could happily provide the name of an unimportant village. If she had to apply a metaphor to it, it was like herding a cat.

By early afternoon, their party of eight exited the jungle at the top of some dunes overlooking a village entirely on stilts. Kajimata was built over the beach and water and resembled one seamless pier stretching from sand out to the harbor full of moored tuna-fishing boats. The only other thing of note about it was the best sushi restaurant in Shikijima, which made it indisputably the best sushi restaurant in Po-Lin. The restaurant was built over the water and looked like a fishing shed with “Taki’s Sushi” scrawled across its front.

“Taki’s for dinner, my treat,” Daisy said as she stumbled her way down the sand dunes on wobbly legs. Shuixing noted that the Vitality stat did not appear to fortify stamina when it came to the effects of mental fatigue on the mind-body connection. Tired was tired.

“How thoughtful,” Natsuko said flatly.

The “hotel” was also Daisy’s treat, but it was a treat in the way that a bowl of dry cereal was. It was nothing but a couple side rooms in the fishermen’s work hall, which itself was just a kitchen, and adjoining meeting hall. The two rooms had to be cleared of fishing supplies and, once clean, were a good fit for one person. Less so for four.

“It… smells like tuna,” Sofiane said, unconcerned with offending the village chief who was giving them a tour of the place.

“I know, isn’t it great?” the raccoon girl said.

“Would we be better off sleeping under the stars?” Pechorin asked.

“Do what ya want,” Daisy said, “but it seems a mite safer for y’all to be hidden indoors.”

Natsuko moved the sliding bamboo door back and forth in its frame to emphasize the ironclad safety it provided.

Unlike the rest of them, Daisy had no qualms about throwing her sleeping bag down on the floor and passing right out. The other seven stood around and marveled at her speed.

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“Is that an archetype thing? The immediate sleep?” Harald asked.

“Gods I wish,” Sofiane said.

He had flashbacks of being kept awake by Daisy’s pestering evening talks on the road to Tianzhou. If anything, she had a bad habit of refusing to go to sleep, even if the conversation devolved into, “if you were a Pengwu, what kind of animal would you shapeshift into?” He’d never met someone who was more of a chatterbox besides maybe Pechorin if you asked him to write a poem.

With nothing to do but wait for Daisy to wake up, Harald’s team went for a walk down the beach to confer about some things, which left the usual crew standing around the docks. Being a Sunday, the fishing boats were all in and the villagers were running errands or chatting. The village children were playing a game where they pretended to be Heroes. Natsuko watched with amusement as the game devolved into an argument about who had the higher Use-Number. She appreciated the kids’ attention to realism.

“Care for a walk down the beach?” Pechorin asked Natsuko.

Natsuko was startled at the comment. “Huh? Oh… um… not… right now. I was going to talk with Shui about… things. And stuff. Stuff and things.”

Shui perked up. “Ah! Good idea. Maybe I need another mind to bounce ideas off of.”

Pechorin nodded and then made a few moves like rocking on his heels and sticking his hands in his jacket pockets which gave off the impression of nonchalance to make sure Natsuko knew that it was whatever.

Sofiane waited for Natsu and Shui to walk away before saying. “Ouch. Tough luck, buddy.”

“The cool autumn wind—”

“That wasn’t an invitation to poetry.”

As Shui and Natsu walked along the beach, the cool autumn wind rolled through the jungle out to sea, lending the dense foliage an impression of airiness. Focusing on navigating the sand drew Shuixing out of her head and back into her body, while having her friend alongside gave her a sense of security. Shuixing was already starting to feel more collected.

“I had a feeling you were mulling something over,” Natsuko said, her hands folded behind her head.

“How so?” Shuixing asked.

“You’ve got two modes of deep thinking from what I’ve seen,” Natsuko said, holding up one finger. “In the first, you’ve got a goal and all the steps in mind and you’re going through ‘em, one by one. That’s how you were when you were working on my bottle.” She held up a second finger. “The second mode is when you’ve got no idea what you’re supposed to be thinking about and it’s driving you nuts. And basically since we left Tianzhou, you’ve been Shuixing Mark II, babe.”

“I had the cards to focus on then,” Shuixing replied.

“And now you don’t. So, what’s running through that enormous and convoluted mind of yours, Shui-shui? Lay it on me. I can take it!”

Natsuko could take it because she tuned out as soon as things got complicated or abstract, Shuixing thought. Not that this was a problem. It might even be the case that Natsuko was such a good sounding board precisely because she would start yawning the second Shui brought up complex polygons and convex hulls and elastic collisions and so on and so on.

“Ever since we went to that dungeon with Sofiane—”

“The one with Charles?” Natsuko said.

“Who?”

“The little not-quite-a-Pengwu thing that I made my pet for a few hours.”

“Oh! I completely forgot about that thing. I guess we all took something different away from that trip,” Shuixing said.

For her it was the physical laws of the place. Apparently for Natsuko it had been Charles. She made a mental note to ask Sofiane what his takeaway was on the off-chance that it might give her some additional insight about the dungeon that she was blind to.

Shuixing cleared her throat. “A-Anyway… After we went to the dungeon where things didn’t dissolve when they were broken, I started to notice more and more instances of physical anomalies in our world. Like… well, how a boat can be instantly summoned from nowhere, and this doesn’t seem strange to us.”

Natsuko squinted. “Y’know… I never really thought about that. It just seemed, uh, normal?”

“That’s what I mean!” Shuixing said, her voice gaining in excitement. “If I’m only noticing these things now, and you’re only noticing them when I point them out, how many more are hiding in plain sight!?”

“Yeah!” Natsuko said. “Like what if beaches… don’t really exist!”

Shuixing looked down at the sand and dug her toes into it. They certainly seemed real, but Natsuko was on the right track.

“I think the beach is real,” Shuixing said. “Or, rather, by real I mean not inconsistent with physicals laws of causality—”

And there went Natsuko’s attention span. Her friend’s eyes still looked encouraging and excited on her behalf, but Shuixing imagined that if she opened up her friend’s head, she would hear a record playing the phrase, “Plum Rum Happy Hour!” on repeat. That was alright. Natsuko’s enthusiasm was authentic, and that was enough for Shuixing to take heart.

“I-I think… I think I can develop a new theory which ties all these strange, illogical occurrences together. Or at least, that’s what’s been turning me into Shuixing Mark II, as you put it. So I do apologize for my general reticence of late and—”

Natsuko mashed her face into Shui and rubbed her cheeks against her.

“Aww, I wouldn’t even care if you were Shuixing Mark 42! I know this is what you live for, and even if I don’t get all the sciencey jargon, I want to do what I can to make sure you can work on it in peace. Even if I have to beat up every other Hero to do it.”

“You’re gonna have a tough time with that,” Shuixing said.

“Not if I had my bottle!”

The waves lapped and seagulls called in the gulf of awkward silence that followed. In her excitement, Natsuko had touched on something that both of them, without realizing it, had been trying to ignore: Another bottle, or something like it, would be an incredibly useful deterrent against the Heroes hunting them. But it also meant once again recreating the means of permanent death.

“Natsu, I don’t know if that’s a good—”

“No, no! I wasn’t suggesting— I just meant that, like, you know… I meant it as a hypothetical. I wasn’t suggesting that you…”

Shuixing frowned behind her glasses. The one thing she absolutely would not do was bring more forced dimension-jumping into the world. She had made that mistake once and was still paying for it. Repeating it would be unconscionable, even for self-defense. Just the thought sent her into a cloud of angst and self-doubt.

With nothing else to say, Natsuko pulled Shuixing into a bear hug. Neither of them said anything. The hug was enough.