“Wait, who are you?” the Padishah asked.

Seated on a gold and purple velvet throne flanked on either side by guards armed with muskets, the Padishah of al-Nuwba, Unifier of the Eighteen Tribes, Sentinel of the Sands, looked very confused. He seemed to recognize Dasiy, but was lost on the other four.

“We slew the Scytheworm so that uh…” Natsuko trailed off. She forgot what the deal with this quest was. The Entropic Axis had implanted the worm with devices to create earthquakes or something. “So that your realm can remain at peace. I think.”

“Sure, sure,” the Padishah said, waving his jewel-bedecked hand. “I just don’t remember sending you all out. I mean, you Heroes are in-and-out so quick, but the last one I sent to kill a—sorry, slip of the tongue—the Scytheworm was some small girl.”

“Koyon…” Sofiane muttered.

“Umm, we took a while to complete the quest, Your Excellency” Shuixing said.

The Padishah stroked his thick, bushy white beard. “How long?”

“About three years,” Pechorin said.

At that the Padishah broke into hysterical laughter which infected his otherwise stoic house guard. Natsuko’s eye twitched. Only her good mood kept her from beating the piss out of the Padishah.

“It wasn’t exactly top of our priority list,” Natsuko said with a fake smile. “Now, let’s talk rewards.

“Hoohoohoo, yes, right, hehe, rewards. Here is the 10,000 Ying,” the Padishah said, beckoning a servant to bring forth a small chest.

Natsuko pumped her fist and did a small jig around the room in celebration of the hefty reward.

Sofiane leaned over to Daisy. “You think she knows dinner last night cost twenty times that?”

Daisy shrugged. “I’m just happy for them. I thought that was a real impressive showing!”

“For what it was,” Sofiane replied.

The source of his bitterness was the jubilation from Natsuko, Shuixing, and Pechorin on the flight back to al-Nuwba City. The three of them took turns recounting the fight from their perspective and laughing at the silliness of missing the obvious weaknesses of the boss and how nice it was for numbers to go up again. All that was fine and dandy, Sofiane had celebrated plenty in his life.

But it was also a miniscule win in the grand scheme of things that did almost nothing to put them in a better position to fight the Daisy-tier threat of Hemiola (which Sofiane still thought was the figment of Natsuko’s overactive imagination) or all of the other Heroes nipping at their heels for that permanent stat increase. All of this after Natsuko insisted on wasting time by turning down Daisy’s assistance.

He’d expected Natsuko to leap on any excuse to party, but seeing Shuixing caught up in it when she was usually so rational and pragmatic and coolheaded bothered him.

“Wooh! Time to go get fucked up,” Natsuko said, swaggering towards the door of the Padishah’s throne room. The other four jogged to catch up with her stride.

“I thought you were drinking to deal with depression?” Daisy asked.

“Yeah, but then I also drink to celebrate not being depressed. I gotta cover all my bases,” Natsuko replied.

The sprawling city of al-Nuwba knew no paint because the color came from the variety of rocks, stones, and minerals the buildings were made of. Glossy red granite apartments lay beside green marble mansions along the amber-colored Aleanbar River wherever the land was high enough not to flood.

Winding through every street of the stone city were steam-trolley tracks. Tired of flying, Daisy waited for the next trolley to come through. Like all al-Nuwban trains, the trolleys were shaped like seafaring vessels with chimney stacks clickety-clacking across land. The intracity ones resembled wide rowboats, while the trains that carved through the desert were basically galleons on wheels.

Daisy sank into some backwards-facing seats at the front of the trolley and slumped down. Sofiane took up a seat near her while the other three crowded around and continued regaling each other with the same retellings of the Scytheworm fight they’d already given.

“Pech was like: Yawk Yawk Yawk Yawk! Had that worm twitching like a snake in an electric chair! The Molten reactions were hittin’, man. We were comboing everything, man!” Natsuko said, gesticulating in a three foot radius.

Sofiane rolled his eyes, crossed a leg, and sprawled his arms across the trolley seats. He wished he could just not care about it like Daisy did, but it was so gods-damned annoying. He was starting to think he preferred moody, stick-in-the-mud Natsuko.

“The moment we realized how the tactics worked was exhilarating,” Shuixing said. “It was like the world opened up, not having to worry about an unblockable attack.”

Pechorin cleared his throat.

“The shifting sands,

Cool with autumn’s night breeze—

Part before us.”

Shuixing gave a small golf clap.

“Hey, that one didn’t suck so much,” Natsuko said. “Write more poems about us doing badass things instead of like, the transience of life or whatever.”

Pechorin grunted. He preferred poems about the transience of life or whatever.

“You all understand we’re still in a shitload of danger, right?” Sofiane said, reaching his limit with the banter.

“Yeah… and?” Natsuko said.

“So take things more seriously, okay? I’m happy you all finished that little quest but, how did you put it this morning Natsuko? Ah, right, it means you have 16,000 hp to lose instantly instead of 8,000. If you want to celebrate, go ahead, by all means, have a great fucking time. But don’t put me in danger by letting your guard down.”

There was an awkward moment of silence before Natsuko adopted a shit-eating grin and sidled up to him on the bench.

The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

“Oh-ho! I know what this is really about,” she said.

Sofiane used his arms to shove her away. “It’s about exactly what I said.”

“Nuh-uh! Noo~ You’re salty you got blue-balled by Hemiola showing up, aren’t you? You’re so up-tight cuz you didn’t get to pop your champagne, that’s what it is.”

Sofiane scoffed. “No, it is not! Unlike you, I take the threat of your former teammate seriously. There’s a reason I’m not drinking tonight.”

Shuixing had Sofiane fixed in a gaze under the full focus and force of her analytical mind as it took a well-deserved vacation from developing her new theory. It was with that focus that she ran through a list of possible reasons for Sofiane’s outburst according to probability. Natsuko’s hypothesis was among those short-listed, but it was not at the top. That honor was given to this hypothesis:

Based on what Shui knew of his former teammates, Sofiane had never been on a team that was supportive. Rather than having to adapt to the hitherto dysfunction of Natsuko’s team, it had felt familiar and normal. It was Natsuko, Shuixing, and Pechorin’s return to a more congenial atmosphere that disturbed him.

She debated confronting him about this but before she could open her mouth, Pechorin started poeticizing again:

“Purple plum jam, all stuck in a jar,

The lace around it winds.

Will you not open, you silly old jar?

The maid, she softly whines.

Yet in a cold cellar, the jar has been stuck,

For many a day and night.

Not butter, nor water, nor hard counter struck,

Can hope to open this jar,

But time and warmth and light.”

Being more to Daisy’s taste than the stark, minimalist poems that Pechorin usually composed, she found herself clapping giddily.

“Your rhyme and meter were off on the last three lines,” Sofiane said.

Pechorin shrugged. “It was as good as I could do while improvising.”

Shuixing got the message and dropped the subject.

Eventually they arrived at Daisy’s chosen destination and rang for the trolley to stop. The stone gears inside the engine box ground to a halt to let them off before continuing on its way.

Rising up before them was a building of glossy quartzite blocks stretching twelve stories into the sky and topped with a gold spiral dome. A brass sign lit by oil lanterns proclaimed it to be the Tanzimat Hotel with another sign for the adjoining restaurant and bar called Rich’s Café Imperian. Natsuko’s mind swam with images of all the food and drink she was going to put on Daisy’s tab.

Just like in Tianzhou, the employees of the Tanzimat bent over backwards to give Daisy the penthouse room (despite it being occupied) and lavished her with every amenity possible. This time around, Shuixing was more in the mood to enjoy it, although this was marred by Sofiane going straight to the room rather than joining them at Rich’s Café.

“Eh, let him sulk,” Natsuko said, cruising on over to the bar. “He’d ruin the party.”

In advance of Daisy’s arrival, the bar had prepared a mint julep for her. Now that Pechorin was back to having to maintain his appearance in front of Natsuko, he elected for a shot of Imperian whiskey neat (the bar’s special, despite being located in al-Nuwba) and a pint of Cascadian beer. Shuixing settled on a glass of champagne (from the Champagne region of Cascadia).

“How do you make your New Imperian iced teas?” Natsuko asked.

The bartender described the proportions to her.

“Double it,” she replied.

Shuixing took her glasses off to dust them. “Are you sure you wouldn’t prefer a glass of champagne, Natsu?”

Natsuko tapped her chin. “Hmm… Could be interesting. Bartendie, gimme a splash of sparkling in that iced tea.”

Shuixing sighed. “I was thinking without the other stuff.”

“How the heck do you expect me to get drunk on champagne? I need like three glasses to catch a buzz!”

Shuixing side-eyed her. Without her glasses, Shuixing’s face had a somewhat ominous and judgemental appearance, like a cross between a dictator and a librarian.

“Uhh… forget about doubling it, bartendie.”

Unlike the Yongfu Hotel during the card tournament, both the Tanzimat Hotel and Rich’s were as dead as could be, aside from whoever management kicked out of the penthouse for Daisy. With the bar to themselves, Daisy regaled them with humorous stories about the other high ranked Heroes.

“So, so, so, Boulanger is absolutely deadpan, and he’s lookin’ at this sheep—snort—he’s lookin’ at this sheep, pointing at it, and saying,” Daisy switched to an impression of Boulanger’s soft, authoritarian voice, “the quest marker says here. This sheep is the monster we have been sent to kill. I don’t care if it’s a simple animal, this is our job.” And then he absolutely, completely, utterly obliterates the sheep! He nuked the thing, right? Complete sheep annihilation. You could see the fire for miles around, the crater was the size of this building. And then we wait. And wait. And wait. And then—”

Daisy paused for effect.

“On my life I swear this is true: Boulanger asks if he missed the sheep.”

The other three cracked up.

“So I say, “hey Boulanger, I think I see a white spot over there, maybe it regenerates from its wool. Any guesses what he does next?”

Natsuko was red from laughing. “Please tell me he nukes the white spot, oh gods…”

Daisy blasted Natsuko with her finger guns. “Bingo! You’re gosh dang right he does. So he drops the second gigantic nuke and I’m laughing my ass off now and he’s getting mad at me for not taking it seriously, which is only making me laugh harder, which is making him madder. Meanwhile, I’ve figured out what’s going on, but I can’t tell him cuz I’m laughing too dang hahahard!”

The story was paused while the storyteller herself cried tears of laughter every time she opened her mouth.

“It was below the ground, wasn’t it?” Shuixing asked.

Through heaving snort laughter, Daisy managed to say, “Y-Yeah! It was under— bwahahaha!”

Shuixing laughed along, though without Daisy’s intensity. There was something strangely poignant about the story. It wasn’t the literal events of the #1 Hero thinking a sheep was the evil boss monster they’d been sent to defeat, but rather that his logic had failed him. He was right on top of the quest marker, so from his two-dimensional perspective, he was correct. The existence of a third dimension to the problem had never occurred to him.

Wasn’t Shuixing in the same spot? That was why she kept circling all of these logical inconsistencies without being able to harmonize them. She could see what connected them on two dimensions of a matrix, but there was a third dimension to it. Everything she had conceived of so far: Dimension-jumping, the Yishang’s imperfect knowledge, inconsistencies of logical cause-and-effect, were nothing but the sheep. That was why she hadn’t gotten anywhere: She had been tilting at an inductive problem from a deductive approach.

Unlike Daisy in the story, who simply had to think in terms of vertical space, Shui didn’t come equipped with pre-existing knowledge of what this extra dimension was. Perhaps no one did. The elusive conclusion demanded the logical equivalent of a dimension-jump. It required the leap of faith necessary to arrive at a conclusion through raw instinct and work backwards to attempt to falsify it.

So what did she do now? What could she do? What was the mental equivalent of Natsuko’s wine bottle that could knock her through the floor? Alcohol wouldn’t do, it made her brain too sluggish and unconcentrated, which left…

“I’ll be right back,” Shuixing said.

The others continued their partying as she rode a chain elevator to the penthouse floor. Knocking on the door, she was met by a tired and disheveled Sofiane who had already changed into fluffy pajamas.

“Done with the party?” Sofiane croaked.

“Sofi, I apologize for the strange request, I promise I mean nothing by it, but I need you to kiss me.”

Sofiane shook his head and woke up a little. “I’m sorry?”

“Just do it.”

“Look, Shui, what Natsuko said about—”

“This isn’t about that. This is about the Yishang. I need a dose of insanity to get to the bottom of what’s happening, and this is the only way I can do it,” Shuixing said.

“Uhh… okay?”

As soon as she had his assent, Shuixing smashed their lips together. It was something she had never done before, and in the process, it lit up her brain in a thoughtless explosion of newness. Even the idea of utilizing it as a way to expand her mind was wiped away. She held the kiss for almost a minute and then pulled away.

Sofiane stared at her. “Listen… um… Shui, this was—”

Her eyes went wide as, unrestrained by the shackles of intention and rationality, her mind moved along a new plane.

Her mouth dropped open. “We’re living in a playground…”