The noise in “Taki’s Sushi” was a dull murmur as six Heroes filed in. Being the only spot for good food in the village, it was where all the date nights went on simultaneously for the parents who had left their kids to run around under their grandparents’ supervision. The inside was warmed by charcoal braziers over which Taki’s two assistant cooks were grilling appetizers while the chef himself performed works of magic upon fish filets to turn them into “objets d’art et gastronomie,” as Sofiane put it.

Despite its famous reputation, seating at Taki’s was on a “seat yourself” basis, and if you were out of room, good luck. Fortunately, the couples were ignoring the long, low-seated table on a raised platform in the back corner, leaving it to the group of Heroes who had just become the center of attention for everyone but Taki (for whom only tuna held that honor).

The seating immediately became an ordeal. Daisy took the head of the table, but Natsuko refused to sit either across or next to her, requiring her to be at a far diagonal. With Harald sitting at the opposite end, Pechorin tried for the spot next to Natsuko but was cut off by Shuixing. He moved around to sit on the other side of Natsuko, but Faisal had already taken that one. The closest he could get was diagonally from Natsuko, forcing Sofiane and the raccoon girl to sit on either side of Daisy and cutting the raccoon girl off from her teammates.

The result was that everyone but Daisy and Shuixing had a vague sense of the inadequacy of the arrangement but too much social tact to ask for a rearrangement. Once they were seated, one of the cooks came over from their brazier and took their drink orders.

“Hoo boy, it’s gotta be the plum rum, doesn’t it?” Natsuko said.

“They have a punch here, don’t they?” Sofiane asked.

Natsuko’s pupils dilated. “They have a punch!?”

The cook nodded.

“We’ll take three pitchers for the table,” Natsuko said.

“I don’t drink…” Faisal said.

“And a glass of milk for the baby.”

“I’ll have tea,” Faisal said.

Everyone else was happy enough with the plum rum punch, lava red with an autumn hibiscus floating in it. Following this, Daisy ordered every appetizer on the menu without asking for their price while Natsuko asked about their price purely to know exactly how much value she was shaving off Daisy’s benefaction.

As they waited for the appetizers, Pechorin tried to start a conversation. “So, how’d the talk with Shui go?”

“Heartwarming,” Natsuko said, then turned her head towards Faisal and Harald. “Hey, you two, how far did you get in al-Nuwba before you got your ass whooped?”

Pechorin grimaced. Ever since Natsuko had thanked him for rescuing her, their interactions had been short and perfunctory. He wasn’t sure what he’d expected when he finally achieved his grand sacrificial display, but it wasn’t this. The only change had been that Natsu—mostly—stopped being rude to him and telling him to shut up, but he would’ve preferred that, because at least it wasn’t an interminable lack of interaction. Neither was it outright rejection, which Natsuko was not the kind of person to beat around the bush about. It was instead a strange, subtle thing which he’d never associated with Natsuko, for whom the term “subtle” was an alien concept.

On the other hand, the protracted pain of this stage in their relationship was deliciously aestheticizable, so Pechorin couldn’t complain. This was the torture part of being a tortured poet.

“You good? That’s your third glass of punch, man,” the raccoon girl said, gesturing at the ceramic cup of sticky red liquid in Pechorin’s hand.

“I can handle my liquor,” Pechorin replied in a dangerous exercise in dramatic irony.

“If you say so,” she replied.

Making the best of the seating arrangements, Sofiane decided to do something he hadn’t done in a long time—at least since first meeting Shuixing and Natsuko—and flirt shamelessly. He made it his goal to fluster the raccoon girl.

“You’re not a lightweight, are you?” he asked her.

“Huh? Me? Well, yeah, I guess. I don’t drink a lot.”

“You’re a stronger Hero than me, mon cheri,” Sofiane said, lifting his cup up. “But tonight is a celebration, so drink up!”

The raccoon girl looked confused. “A celebration? Of what?”

Sofiane raised his eyebrows over his cup and swallowed. “Of finally learning your name, of course.”

“O-Oh! Right, I guess I haven’t gotten around to it. Um, it’s Gomiko…”

Sofiane made a feigned look of shock and placed a hand on his chest. “Goodness me, I hadn’t expected it to be so beautiful.

“I mean…” the raccoon girl took a swig of her own drink and wiped her mouth with her forearm. “The meaning in Shikijiman is—”

Natsuko had already started laughing. “Trash girl! Ahahaha, oh that’s funny! The Yishang did you dirty!”

The raccoon girl frowned, her dark eye sockets crinkling. “Yes. Haha. It’s hilarious. Raccoons and trash. They must have wracked their brain for that one.”

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

Thankful to Natsuko for unwittingly playing the “bad cop” wingman for him, Sofiane leaned forward to grab Gomiko’s attention.

“Well then, if the name isn’t beautiful, that can only mean the beauty belongs to the one who bears it.”

Gomiko blinked, taking a moment to process the compliment. “O-Oh! Um, w-why thank you…”

The raccoon girl glanced away and brought the cup up to her mouth to give her hands something to do besides fidget nervously. It wasn’t beyond Gomiko to recognize how cheap and corny the line was, but it had been awhile since anyone complimented her—or asked her name, besides Pechorin—so Sofiane’s cheesy line hit its mark. Her teammates picked up the slack by rolling their eyes for her.

“Damn, puffball got game,” Natsuko said. “Coulda fooled me.”

“Yeah, there’s a reason you’ve never seen it, firecrotch.”

“Thank you for saving me the second-hand embarrassment.”

“Oh wow, this punch is good,” Daisy said.

The appetizers arrived and the table was filled with a buffet of spicy edamame, karaage, deep-fried spam, pineapple kebabs, and more. The conversation slowed as everyone realized how hungry they were and filled their mouths with appetizers.

“And for the main course?” the cook asked.

“Omakase, all the way around!” Daisy said.

“Very good, okyakusama,” he said before turning and screaming the order at Taki carving up a tuna.

“Omakase?” Harald asked.

“It means we’re letting Taki pick what he serves us,” Gomiko explained.

“Why not just say that then?”

“Because this is the Shikijiman way of ordering it,” Faisal said.

“They speak the common tongue! I don’t understand why—”

And with that the appetizers and punch were held up for a few minutes as they talked Harald down from a rant that was embarrassing to everyone but him. The excitement was enough that Sofiane put the pause on his womanizing act, but Daisy was enjoying it, so she reached under the table to poke his leg and jerk her head towards Gomiko who was silently looking around the room with a cup of punch in her hand that Daisy had been kind enough to keep topped off for her.

As soon as Sofiane leaned forward to speak again, Gomiko’s gaze flicked back to him.

“So, I know what those three have been up to in their post-adventuring life,” Sofiane said, gesturing at his three teammates. “But how about you? What do you fill your time with?”

Gomiko rubbed her arm. “Oh, um… I… write poetry actually. And stories too. I just like writing in general, really.”

“Poetry? I adore poetry, and I’d love to hear some of yours,” Sofiane said.

Pechorin and Daisy both stared at Sofiane and his shameless about-face. Pechorin felt particularly betrayed. Gomiko, however, went wide-eyed.

“R-R-Right now? O-Oh no, I couldn’t…”

“Is everyone a gods-damned poet!? Good grief!” Natsuko said.

Sofiane side-eyed Natsuko.

“We can save it for when we have a bit more privacy.”

The word privacy had Gomiko’s heart thumping. Even though Sofiane had killed Harald before, and mocked their team, and was nowhere near as polite and gentlemanly as he was pretending, his flirting was working. This made her even more frustrated. Was it the punch? Was it turning her into an excitable idiot? Or was it that she had gone so long without talking to anyone but her team who were like siblings to her? Regardless, the more she thought about how stupid it was to fall for Sofiane’s womanizing, the more she felt like she was falling for it.

“Is it hot in here? I feel like it’s hot in here,” she said, wafting herself with a napkin. Gomiko’s face was like a checkerboard, red where it wasn’t black. “I’m gonna go outside to cool off for a sec. Be right back.”

Once she had gotten up and gone outside for some cool air, Faisal and Harald both glared at Sofiane.

“What’s the idea here?” Harald said.

“Idea?”

“Don’t play coy. Why are you messing with our teammate? What’s the endgame?”

Sofiane raised his eyebrows. “Messing with? You wound me, mon ami, we are just having a bit of flirtatious fun. And I do mean we. Your dear teammate is waltzing with me of her own volition.”

Faisal folded his arms. “And does she know that this waltz is going nowhere?”

Sofiane shrugged. “Who’s to say where it goes? That’s up to her.”

Daisy was positively living for the drama. She was popping edamame into her mouth like popcorn and sipping on punch. She was still anxious about her choice to leave Boulanger’s team, but compared to their work-hard-play-never policy, this was so much more fun. She wanted the night to go on and on.

“I-I think you should make your intentions a little bit clearer, Sofi,” Shuixing said.

“Clarity is the death of intrigue. Titillation thrives in the dark,” he opined.

The discussion was put to a close by Gomiko returning from outside looking quite cooled off and ready for some sushi. The remaining appetizers were cleared away against Natsuko’s insistence on having them put in a to-go box and a sushi spread was laid out nestled in a two-foot long wooden boat. Shuixing wisely waited a moment for the gunshot of Natsuko’s arm to go off before plucking a few pieces for herself.

As Shui nibbled on a piece of tuna, she ruminated on the wonders of pair-bonding and what purpose it served for Heroes. As a zoologist by archetype if not by inclination, she was well aware of the notion of procreation, but for some reason it felt thoroughly inapplicable to human nature. Both Heroes and Non-Heroes were summoned into being by the Yishang, and despite the existence of children, there was a sense that they had always been children and would always be children, no different than a wooden house would always be a wooden house again at 4am, whether it was destroyed by an Ice Wyvern or not.

So this left her with the question of what was impelling Sofiane to pursue Gomiko? Was the template of romance as a mode of interaction the vestigial leftover of an unnecessary sexuality put to the service of archetype-building? That was to say, the form of romantic pursuit was more important than—

“You gonna eat that?” Natsuko said, pointing at some pieces of fatty tuna languishing on Shui’s plate.

“Hmm? Oh, no, please take it.”

Right as Shuixing was about to dive back down into the tempest of abstract thought experiments, Sofiane and Gomiko both got up from the table.

“We’re gonna go for a walk on the beach, we’ll catch up later,” Sofiane said, leading Gomiko out by the arm.

Across from Shuixing, Pechorin was watching Sofiane with an amalgam of jealousy, admiration, and awe. To her left, Natsuko was watching her fatty tuna with an amalgam of jealousy, admiration, and awe.