Forgotten Girl Quest

Knowing they were now on a timer, Shuixing sprinted for the cabinets in her lab and threw them open praying anything had been left behind. Outside of some basic supplies, however, Baphomet had cleaned the lab out under the—correct—assumption that she'd been stockpiling something of strategic value.

Shuixing tore at her hair. “Gods, if he injected any of it…”

“What would it do for him?” Sofiane asked, keeping half an eye on the corridor outside.

“I don’t know,” Shui replied, feeling as though there was something she was forgetting to tell him. “But forget about that because we can’t fight him anyway, and even if we could, we'd still be wading through a mob of pissed-off Non-Heroes with FDJ weapons. We need to figure out where he took my materials.”

The two of them looked to Vidorgia who held up her hands. “I got nothing. They didn’t pick me to be in his inner circle for this event."

“So who is?” Sofiane asked.

“Uh, some old guys. Well, they’re not both old. Or guys. But they’re from Vermögenburgh so they’ve been around for a while. Medea, I think? Some Goblin Lord Whosewhatsit?”

“Spriggansnout?” Shuixing asked.

Sofiane vaguely remembered something about a goblin he had to fight for a quest he completed in five minutes.

Vidorgia stared blankly. “Uh… sure, Spigganbop. And that weird ass Entropic Axis mage with the freaky purple hair and annoying voice who’s supposed to be my predecessor or something. Anyway, those two are the only core members of his circle that know it’s all a bullshit Special Event. I only know because some octopus Peng-wu came and told me not to get dimension jumped before the finale quest for Selenia.”

Shuixing was more familiar than the other two with the villains of the Vermögenburgh arc. Unfortunately, her interactions with them were only during quests, so she couldn’t quite say what their personalities were like independent of the Yishang’s script. But even if the two villains wouldn’t be of immediate use, a new hypothesis about the Non-Heroes and their potential role in the fight against the Yishang was beginning to crystallize in her head. The only scary part was that any new hypothesis could only be tested once. In other words, it was blind faith.

“I also haven’t seen any of the inhabitants of the Mage’s College," Shuixing said.

“No idea where they would be,” Vidorgia said.

“But if you were Baphomet, where would you take them?”

“I don’t know! I’m not a damn Hero, and I don’t think like a damn Hero!” Vidorgia replied.

Shuixing stroked her jaw for a second. “No, wait, why would Baphomet care about them? I thought he might need the professors to reverse-engineer and build the FDJ weapons, but if this was all Yishang meddling, they'd give Baphomet his weapons regardless.”

Vidorgia raised an eyebrow. “So?”

“So! So—” Shuixing trembled a little, as though her tiny body were a rattling machine, jamming up after being thrown onto its max setting. “Well! Right now there are three sides, not two. We have the Yishang puppeteering Baphomet to increase their Use-Numbers. That’s one. Then there are the Heroes trying to stop him. Two. But the Non-Heroes who are supposed to be his followers are a third party in all this. Baphomet got them together and whipped them into a fury, but they’re also acting independently. Even if they don’t know everything that’s going on, they’re still angry with the Yishang. That means if the inhabitants of the Mage’s College were taken somewhere, it might be his followers that took them, not Baphomet.”

Sofiane waited a moment after she was finished to see if Shuixing would continue talking since she hadn’t arrived at anything that would help them find the research materials that Baphomet took. When he realized that was the big revelation he groaned.

“Ugh. Are you saying we go free them? Cuz we don’t have time."

Shuixing turned and marched towards the main lecture hall on the north end of campus. Sofiane and Vidorgia caught up and tried to dissuade her and explain, in rational terms, why there was no point in going to find her former Non-Hero colleagues, but in a thoroughly Natsuko-like fashion, Shui ignored them. Such was her conviction that she barreled straight into a pair of Purple Bolters turning the corner. Sofiane reached for his FDJ musket but Shuixing stomped on his foot.

“Can we help you?” one of them asked.

Sofiane cleared his throat. “Er— yes, we um, have business with—”

“I want to talk with the Vermögenburghers,” Shuixing said.

“The eggheads?” the other Bolter asked.

“Yes.”

He glanced at his fellow guard who looked equally confused. “Are we allowed to let anyone in to see them? I’m pretty sure you need approval from The Prophet or one of his—”

“Let me into the damn lecture hall,” Shui said.

His partner squinted at Shuixing. “Hold on. Just who in the hell—”

Shuixing grabbed the Bolter by the zipper of her purple apron. “Why do we need to ask The damn Prophet’s permission? We can organize ourselves! Screw the—” Shuixing couldn’t quite make herself swear “—freaking Prophet! No wonder the Vermögenburghers want nothing to do with us. They think we’re a cult, not a revolution!” Shuixing stabbed her finger at the door behind them. “But I’m going to go in there and tell them they can fight the Yishang without worshipping a Hero with a messiah complex. If you want to stop me, try.”

Shuixing let go of the apron and pointed her musket at the two Bolters. Vidorgia took a step back. Sofiane tightened his grip on his own musket but kept it at his side. After staring at the tip of Shui’s musket for a moment, the female Bolter raised her arms. “Alright, we won’t stop you. Gods know you might have more luck than we’ve had. But if I were you, I’d keep your thoughts about The Prophet to yourself.”

Shuixing frowned and said, “I will not.”

Sofiane bit his lip, expecting that to be the last straw, but their interrogators walked off.

“How the hell did you sell that?” he asked Shui in a low voice.

“Because I wasn’t lying,” Shuixing replied.

At the end of the corridor were a pair of heavy wooden doors which Shui threw open as though they weren’t twice her size. As she anticipated, the faculty and students were sitting in quiet, somber circles inside the lecture hall. At first she was met with nervous, weary expressions, but one by one, the Non-Heroes of the Vermögenburgh Mage’s College recognized the wide, round spectacles and tufts of cerulean hair sticking out from under her liberty cap and jumped up to greet Shuixing.

“Dr. He!” Dr. Cox exclaimed.

She jerked a finger to her mouth, telling him to be quiet. Once Vidorgia and Sofiane were inside they shut the lecture hall doors and Sofiane jammed a chair under its handles to ensure they wouldn’t be interrupted.

“Thank gods, we’re saved!” Dr. Cox said in a quieter voice, hugging Shuixing.

The stubborn determination melted from Shuixing’s face and she greeted her former colleagues individually. Due to her self-enforced solitude, it had been at least two years since they'd seen her in the flesh, though her reception was as welcome as when she returned from her quest to get her papers back.

“They haven’t hurt you in any way, have they?” Shuixing asked.

“No. Not physically, in any case. They know killing us would just help us escape,” Dr. Cox said. “Instead they’ve been pulling us out one by one and trying to convince us to join their dreadful cult, claiming the Yishang are actually the Entropic Axis and other silly nonsense and—”

Dr. Cox suddenly noticed Vidorgia standing by the door in her over-the-top villainess outfit looking very much the part of the “real” Entropic Axis and recoiled.

“O-Oh, erm… there’s a lot of things I need to explain, but I think you should join them,” Shuixing said. A ripple of surprise and confusion went through the faculty and students.

“B-But Dr. He! Baphomet and his band of hooligans blaspheme against the Yishang! We’ll be re-formatted if we go against them!” he said.

Vidorgia rolled her eyes. “No you won’t. It’s an event. The Yishang themselves orchestrated all of this.”

The Vermögenburghers didn’t seem to understand what she was saying and looked to Shuixing for clarification who looked back at them helplessly, unsure of how to explain it any clearer without telling them the truth about the world. Or… perhaps she had to. Her conviction, after all, was that Non-Heroes could manage their own business and make their own decisions without either the Yishang or the Heroes. So she told them everything, taking long enough that Sofiane began anxiously pacing the hall. From his perspective, these were minutes, even seconds that could be put to better use finding her research materials and plunging into Numberspace to find an escape route. But Shui was spending them explaining her abstract theories to a bunch of Non-Heroes who didn’t even understand them. Sofiane wanted to bash his head against the wall.

“Shui, enough. We need to go,” he finally said.

“They deserve the right to know what’s happening,” Shuixing replied.

“Why!? What good’s it gonna do if more Non-Heroes are running around with FDJ weapons? Who the hell cares if they know the Yishang are a bunch of bastards!? We’re wasting time!”

“We’re not wasting time. I don’t know why, but this is important. I have faith in that,” she said, using Pechorin’s choice of words for what she called a “single-test hypothesis.”

If she had to put it into words, this hypothesis might be that her conception of Heroes and Non-Heroes had collapsed. The Yishang had given Non-Heroes peripheral roles to play, and much lower (if any) stats, but how was that any different from Shuixing’s own situation for the past several years? Within the Yishang’s playground, there was little difference between a forgotten Hero and a Non-Hero. In numberspace, both she and Dr. Cox were complex entities. She had probed into his code (and once again, she felt something inadequate with the Celestials’ terminology) and found herself there in little habits or thoughts. All the while she had been researching the bottle, Dr. Cox had been researching the 4am reset and compiling data about how the Yishang picked some things to reset and not others. In that code she also found how he'd fallen in love with his colleague, Dr. Venstein, and how the two held secret trysts whenever they thought the Yishang couldn’t see.

Having witnessed that complexity, that intertwining of herself and them, and they and others, Shuixing couldn’t possibly dismiss the Non-Heroes as useless without dismissing herself. So whether the time she spent winning them over was worth it or not, she didn’t know for certain. But she felt that it was.

“I think I understand what you mean, Dr. He,” said Dr. Cox, looking slightly less bewildered than the others. “And I can see you and your friends have important work to do. The continuation of your experiments these past two years, no doubt. If you believe it is best for us to mingle with the—” he cleared his throat of the word ‘hooligans’ “—rebels, then you have my full confidence. We will do our best to spread your heterodoxy.”

Shuixing hadn’t even thought to give him that much instruction, mentioning only the truth about Po-Lin and the reason for rebelling against the Yishang and nothing about undermining Baphomet. But through his own path, Dr. Cox arrived at the conclusion that their next step was peeling the Non-Heroes away from Baphomet and his cult of personality. Great minds, Shuixing supposed, thought alike.

Once this was decided, Sofiane unbarred the door and checked to see if the coast was clear. Finding no one in the hall, he beckoned for Shui and Vidorgia to follow him. This time around, he took point, darting from corner to corner and peeking around them to find openings. Shuixing herself seemed more relaxed and less agitated, as though convinced her research materials would fall into their lap at their own pace. It was becoming hard to keep track, Sofiane thought, whether Shuixing was acting more like Natsuko or like Pechorin.