Forgotten Girl Quest

“Wait,” Shuixing said. “I smell it!”

Vidorgia and Sofiane stopped mid-jog. They smelled nothing other than the college’s usual mothball and mildew, but Trusting Shui’s nose they followed her to an unmarked door. She tried the handle and found it locked.

“I can bust down the door, but it won’t be quiet.” Sofiane said.

“I should mention,” Vidorgia interrupted. “Baphomet’s back.”

“Why didn’t you tell us earlier?” Sofiane asked in a sharp whisper.

“The change in the Special Event just happened. You’re getting a live update. The Yishang must’ve told him to come back.”

“Shoot! Because of us? How did they know!?” Shuixing said.

Vidorgia shook her head. “Not cuz of you, I can tell you that much. My guess? Heroes up in Selenia figured out what was happening and are coming to fight him. I guess it wasn’t you two in the script after all. Might be the perfect opportunity for a smash and grab.”

Sofiane grabbed the door handle and tore it from the door, leaving a gaping hole where the locking mechanism had been. The de-locked door swung open to a break room once used by faculty but now filled with requisitioned lab supplies and equipment. Baphomet had confiscated everything without knowing what belonged to Shuixing. Undeniably hers, however, were the vials of luminescent gold and blue and murky red liquids slotted into a rack. Emptied vials and spent needles and syringes lay on a table in front of an overstuffed armchair.

“Oh dear!” Shuixing said as she scurried around collecting everything that would fit in her robe pockets.

“So he’s been to Numberspace?” Sofiane looked at the empty vials. “Several times, apparently.”

In a stack beside the chair were the first four volumes of Shuixing’s Algorinomicon. Sofiane picked up the first volume and rifled through it. Every page was covered in yellow highlighter and dense notes in the margins. The pages themselves, Shuixing’s own notes, were even more abstract and dense.

“You said earlier you didn’t know what he could do with access to Numberspace. Is there any chance you might be able to tell based on what he marked up?” Sofiane asked.

Shuixing scuttled over, pockets of vials clinking with each step, and plucked the notebook from his hands and flipped through it, stopping in a few spots, humming to herself, then continuing to flip. Sofiane took it as a good sign she didn’t seem worried. Until she started seeming worried.

“This could be very bad,” Shuixing said, double-checking her own notes against Baphomet’s marginal ones.

Sofiane bit his lip. “Specifics, Shui. What could be very bad?”

“This is the section where I outlined how to find and alter statistics numbers. It’s how I gave myself a Cognition stat of 3,825,” she said.

“You did what!?”

Even Vidorgia, blasé about almost everything related to the strange metaphysics of her universe, whistled. There was something transcendentally real about the hard numbers of Hero statistics. Even though they were the pinnacle of arbitrary abstraction, stat numbers maintained an eminent mysticism about them. Or, Shuixing supposed, perhaps precisely because they were so abstract and arbitrary they seemed to stand above anything and everything else. Heroes could lie, cheat, murder, and bluff as much as they pleased, but stats were the hard, meritocratic structure which held everything together.

Several questions popped into Sofiane’s head, but the first to leave his mouth was: “Why only boost Cognition?”

“I was afraid the Yishang would notice if I boosted everything and suddenly jumped in ranking. And for what I was doing I only needed Cognition,” she replied.

What the mental component of Cognition did, as Shuixing now understood, was to deepen and widen the associational parameters of her interfaces with the Central Probability Algorithm. It didn’t make her more “intelligent,” per say, but it let her cast a truly enormous net when synthesizing the ocean of numbers comprising Numberspace. She wondered (but had never dared find out) what advantages an equally disproportionate Insight stat might confer.

“So from where I'm standing, right now you have two problems,” Vidorgia said, butting into the conversation. “One, Baphomet doesn’t care what the Yishang think, so if he knows how to boost his numbers, he's probably walking around with capped out stats right now, whatever that number may be…”

Shuixing did know. There was a good chance Baphomet now had 9,999 in all stats. His HP would be well over a million, his dodge and crit chances were 99%, he could one-shot almost any Hero outside of the Top Ten, and tank a direct shot from every Desperation Art from every Hero all at once and walk away with health to spare. On top of that, he also had an FDJ weapon.

“So whoever the Yishang sent him back to fight is fucked, basically,” Sofiane said.

“Yeah,” Vidorgia replied.

“Two… you said two problems…” Shuixing said.

“Oh, yes. Problem number two: If the Yishang is letting him get away with editing his numbers, they know you can do it too.”

Natsuko had been fighting the urge since leaving Selenia to blast ahead of Peng with Black Fire, but separating from Daisy had already proven a bad idea. Stuck with her for several hours then, she had with Daisy one of those conversations where both parties felt like they ought to know each other, but enough time had elapsed that on some level both knew they were talking to someone not quite the same as the one they knew. Flavors of this had steeped their conversation at the Halloween party, but now, brought out into the light of day with neither intoxication nor mortal danger to disguise it, there was nothing but the naked fact that Daisy and Natsuko felt awkward around each other.

“So… what’d you think of the Jade Realms questline?” Natsuko asked as they soared over the redwood forests of Cascadia. All the strategic details—the big talk—had been exhausted in the hour after they fled Selenia. Only small talk remained.

“Oh, um… I haven’t thought about it much. I guess the time loop thing would’ve been a neat gimmick if we didn’t, you know, go home in-between quests and pretend it wasn’t happening,” Daisy said.

“Yeah, that was a dud. Even my teammates thought it was silly and I hadn’t even told them about the Yishang yet,” Natsuko said with a tiny chuckle.

Talking about the Yishang’s quests felt meaningless to the point of being sad. It didn’t help that it was also a reminder of their own stupidity in running away from their responsibilities to go chase the pleasure of playing Hero in a world they no longer believed in. But because that's what they'd done, playing Hero was also all they had to talk about. Ironically, the other three, the ones who hadn’t been completing quests and grinding experience and getting stronger, probably had more interesting things to talk about.

“I um… I’m sorry for taking your spot, by the way,” Natsuko said.

“Nah, it’s fine. That’s the game,” Daisy replied.

Over the roaring wind, Natsuko couldn't tell whether Daisy meant that or not. It was trivial now that the end of the world was thirteen days away, but feelings of betrayal had a way of biding their time in the darker parts of the mind where words like, “nah, it’s fine,” could not penetrate. Daisy lost her spot on Team Boulanger (and thus the Top Ten) the moment she abandoned her team to go back to Shikijima. But when the news broke that Natsuko was Daisy’s replacement, Daisy stopped looking her in the eyes. Whether that was out of shame, hurt, or guilt, neither of them could say.

“No, I mean… we were friends. We went through shit together. And it's on me for letting that lapse,” Natsuko said.

“It was on both of us,” Daisy replied, eyes straight ahead in the curious way she liked to talk as though speaking to the sky in front of her. Or maybe it was just that a good chunk of their conversations had taken place on the back of her stone bird.

“But alright, want me to be honest with ya? And if ya say yes and get mad, I’ll kick you off this bird!” Daisy said.

Natsuko giggled. After the fawning, saccharine attention she’d been the recipient of, the rougher give-and-take she was familiar with was a relief. At one time or another, she had hurt her friends, and they her, but the bonds between them, forged as much by participating in a silly card tournament as struggling against the gods, made the occasional abrasiveness something to be put up with. It was the price for the awkward, messy, painful process of becoming entangled with other people which was still infinitely preferable to fluffy, harmless, nothing which preserved everyone as a solitary, intact bundle of numbers.

“Gimme the truth, babe. Let’s hear it,” Natsuko said.

“Well, I thought you cheated your way to a top spot by screwing the rest of us over and taking the Yishang’s offer for yourself,” Daisy said, unfurling one finger. “I thought you were a hypocrite after complaining about how unfair the Yishang are then shuttin’ up as soon as you were benefittin'.” A second finger. “You were an arrogant, patronizing ass as soon as you were on top…” A third finger. Natsuko started counting the number of fingers Daisy had left. “You let Boulanger and Ailing blow wind up your ass about how great you were. You turned yourself into the Yishang’s lil’ mascot and damn near took them up on the offer to abandon everyone.”

Four. Five. Any more grievances and Daisy would have to start flying Peng with no hands. But right as Daisy seemed like she was about to crescendo to a sixth, she deflated. “I’m just happy you’re back."

Natsuko hugged her from behind which caused Daisy to jerk and accidentally send Peng into a vertical climb. Once she righted him, her muscles relaxed into the hug.

“And I’m glad you stopped drinking, too,” Daisy said.

“Would you still be glad if I told you it was cuz of Ailing?” Natsuko asked.

Daisy chuckled. “I’m not that petty. Ailing’s got her good side too, same as other folks. Even if she did try to kill us. If anything I’m disappointed it was her that did the trick. Remember how I said our fallin’ out was on both of us? I guess that’s my half of the mess.”

“Yeah,” Natsuko said, scratching her neck. “But I also kinda underestimated the pressure you were under back when you were helping us. This ‘staying on top’ shit is grueling.”

They lapsed into silence after that. If they kept going, the conversation would turn into a competition to see who could apologize harder. Natsuko instead looked ahead at the sky, letting her eyes fall into the great bowl of blue curving to the horizon.

“When we’re finally free from here, we’ll have all the time in the world to fix our problems,” Natsuko said.

Daisy grunted. Whether that was true or not, the belief that it was was enough for her.

Another few hours of flying and by mid-afternoon the line of redwoods broke in favor of the spiny quilts of Vermögenburgher pine trees. Being much smaller than the other regions, the town itself was already a gray blob on the horizon. As they approached, a pinprick of red light detached itself from the blob and arced through the sky in their general direction.

“What the hell is that?” Natsuko said, squinting to try and make it out.

It didn’t take them long to notice the pinprick was growing in size.

“That’s not a Hero, is it?” Daisy asked.

Natsuko shook her head. “Can’t be. Only me and Boulanger move that fast. There aren’t any other Fire Heroes that powerful.”

A few seconds passed and Natsuko realized the comet blazing towards them was, in fact, moving quite a bit faster than herself and Boulanger. With half a second's warning, she had time to realize roll off the back of Peng, but not enough to warn Daisy. Above her, the sky flashed with a fiery explosion that shattered the stone bird into pebbles. Daisy tumbled out of the cloud of smoke. Baphomet followed after her and slammed the bunt of a giant wine bottle into her.