Forgotten Girl Quest

After the planning committee meeting, Natsuko was left with an oddly familiar sensation. It took her a few minutes to recognize this feeling as Idleness. Since getting her Yishang-sponsored glow-up she'd been in a non-stop sprint to the top. She forgot how much being idle sucked.

Even worse, the break between her two adventuring careers had left a scar of habitual idleness. Her new life of constant hustle was at war with her learned laziness and it made her pull the reins on the endless grinding, but once she did, she would be haunted by guilt. Ironically, now that every second counted and she needed to be doing something productive, something that actually mattered unlike her pointless number-raising, she had no idea what to do.

Alone on Vermögenburgh’s city walls, Natsuko leaned against the battlements, sipping on a cup of coffee in the cold. Her alcohol cravings were coming back. When she was with others she could forget them, but when she was alone, they returned like a lost dog. Already she was thinking how much better her coffee would taste with a bit of whiskey and cream liqueur. Had Shuixing not been by her side, there was no way Natsuko could have dumped the wine out.

“Fuck me, man…” she muttered, staring out at the pine forest she annihilated yesterday. When the coffee got cold she tossed the rest over the battlements. She needed to be useful and of the things she could do, helping Shuixing was the most obvious and important so that's where she needed to go.

Shuixing's lab, when she arrived, looked completely different. Aside from esoteric decorations plastered all over the wall, Shuixing, instead of quietly tinkering away, was giving a lecture on whatever Numberspace was to a large group of faculty and students. The lecture stopped upon Natsuko’s entrance.

“Sorry! Didn’t mean to interrupt. I was just… seeing if you needed any help,” Natsuko said.

Shuixing smiled guiltily. “I’m sorry, Natsu, this is a bad time. And I, er, don’t think our research is the most efficient use of your skills.”

That was a polite way of saying she didn’t have the smarts for learning all the number stuff. Which was true, of course. Natsuko kicked herself for not considering that before bothering Shuixing. She mouthed an apology and shut the door. The last thing she saw was the utility closet with its door thrown open piled high with buckets of stuff. Lab stuff. Sciencey stuff.

As she walked away, it occurred to Natsuko that she had very little time left with Shuixing, and the morning they spent dumping out her wine bottle might have been the last quality time they would spend together. At least in Po-Lin. Over the next twelve days, her friend would be in Numberspace or coordinating research efforts. Even if Natsuko did try to meet up with her, it would just hamper Shuixing’s research efforts. What if she doomed the world because she was lonely?

Natsuko shook her head. This was all temporary. Her role was to defend Shuixing, and if she threw herself into it, everything would be alright, and wherever they went—and Natsuko became nauseous thinking any more about this than “wherever”—they would have all the time in the world to spend together.

It was clear now where she was needed: Helping Sofiane.

She found him outside Vermögenburgh. Or rather its walls, as Vermögenburgh’s inhabited area had ballooned out of the city and across the bridge to accommodate the new arrivals. A city of tents and wagons and steammobiles as large as Vermögenburgh itself now lay on the opposite side of the moat, still growing. Sofiane was at the outskirts of the camp debating something with Medea, Spriggansnout, Vronsky, and a couple other Non-Heroes. She almost didn’t recognize him as, in lieu of his usual opulence, he wore Imperian factory-produced purple hoodie and jeans.

“Never thought I’d catch you in something that wasn’t hand-tailored by Master Sima,” Natsuko said, slapping Sofiane on the back.

He startled at that, glared and said, “uh-huh,” and turned back around to the assembled committee members. “So, to summarize the pros and cons of both options, if we elect to defend the outer city we stretch our manpower thinner and open ourselves up to area-of-effect abilities one-shotting most of our forces. But utilizing the tents provides excellent camouflage for getting off quick hits with FDJ weapons on Heroes attacking by ground. Conversely, pulling everyone back to the inner city provides more protection from abilities and consolidates our manpower, but concedes ground and we give up the guerilla strategy of attacking from tents. Did I miss anything?”

“I would just note that most Heroes who can attack by air are more powerful in general, so we’ll want our Statlings inside,” Medea replied, arms folded across her chest.

“Statlings?” Natsuko asked.

“Non-Heroes with stats. The ones that won’t be one-shot by a single source of damage,” Vronsky explained in his buttery, lightly-accented voice. Natsuko could listen to him all day.

Sofiane shoved his hands in the pockets of his hoodie and exhaled a cloud of air. “Optimally, Daisy and Natsuko intercept them before they get close, though I don’t want to overestimate how much they can accomplish by themselves. I’m sure the Yishang have some nasty surprises for us. Their goal is to script this so the Heroes win, and they know Daisy and Natsuko are on our side.”

“I’m #1 baby, don’t even sweat it,” Natsuko said, flashing a thumbs up.

Sofiane chuckled caustically. “Checked the charts recently?”

“Huh? Wait, what the fuck!?”

Not only was Natsuko no longer #1, she wasn’t even in the Top Eight. She read off the names of the people ahead of her: Koyon, Boulanger, Windwalker, Petyr, Ailing, Haalia, Anastasia, and…

“Cune-fucking-gonde is #8? What the hell happened!?” Natsuko said.

The Non-Heroes looked away as though avoiding something embarrassing. Sofiane rolled his eyes for the same reason. Caring about rankings this late in the game was ridiculous.

“We don’t know what happened, that’s the problem," Sofiane said. "It probably means the Yishang are boosting their numbers. Now, to your point Medea, the problem with pulling all our Statlings inside is we’ll have to give up the guerilla strategy at that point. Having only irregulars outside means Heroes can blow us up from a distance with abilities.”

“Can they not do that already?” Vronsky asked.

Spriggansnout hocked a loogie. “Not if we got our own folks in there ready to bomb ‘em back.”

“We could pull some ranged irregulars from the wall if Dr. Cox delivers on his promise of ranged FDJ weapons,” Medea added. “Sniping Heroes before they get close could be our ace in the hole.”

“For now let’s err on the side of not building our tactics around something that might not happen,” Sofiane replied.

“Whoa, wait, ranged dimension-jumping!?” Natsuko asked.

Sofiane groaned and rubbed his temples. “Do you need something, Natsuko?”

It felt weird for him not to call her firecrotch. Or make a dig at her.

“I figured I'd help with defense prep,” she replied.

“Your role is to take out or at least delay stronger enemy Heroes. I thought that was pretty clear,” Sofiane said.

“Sure… but that’s days from now! I gotta keep myself occupied until then.”

“Natsu, we don’t know for sure when they’ll show up. It could be today for all we know. Daisy’s leaving to go persuade her old teammates to join us, so we need you on stand-by. That’s your job. I know you want to help, but that’s how you can help.”

“O-Oh. Okay. Got it. Can do,” Natsuko said, giving a vague salute and bowing out of the conversation.

Between not having anything to contribute to the defense efforts, not being able to see her friends, and falling from her #1 spot—which she told herself didn’t matter but absolutely did matter—Natsuko felt wretched. If she’d been less up her own ass about becoming an adventurer again and making her numbers go up, she could've spent the little time she had with her friends, or learning to do something actually helpful. All she had now were her crazy high stats, for a battle where death was decided by the single swing of a rod.

She thought about going to see Daisy and talking with her before she left, but before she returned to town, Peng took off in the direction of the Selenian Space Elevator. The only other thing she could think to do was visit the Devil’s Cut and maybe talk to Klaus or the old regulars, but she found the entire bar taken over by Non-Heroes using the counter and tables as a workshop to chisel dimension-jump surfaces onto new weapons. There wasn’t a drink left in the bar. She gave a sad little laugh drowned out by chisels scratching metal. Of course that wasn’t an option either. Fuck, she wanted a drink.

Having no idea what else to do, she left Vermögenburgh and walked around to the far side of the moat, back to where there was nothing but filler trees and hills and no monsters or dungeons. An empty and pointless space in Vermögenburgh that rhymed with how she felt. She sat down there in the reeds on the banks of the moat.

This was the kind of moody brooding Pechorin would’ve loved, she thought. Her current funk wasn’t the stuff of alcohol-induced self-pity, but a cold and sober confrontation with the self. Gods, he would’ve eaten this up. The thought made her laugh out loud, and the laugh bore like a trojan horse the beginning of a cry and tears long in the making ran down her aching cheeks and she hugged her knees and wondered where the hell this had all come from. In her post-cry clarity, she realized she hadn’t fully internalized Pechorin’s being gone. All the absurdity of her teammates’ deception and the flight from Selenia and seeing her friends again and the strange not-quite-dead state Pechorin was in had prevented her from fully comprehending the fact he was gone. She couldn’t see him, touch him, or hear him. He was not there and would never be again until they all—gods, please—escaped somewhere else.

She finally noticed this absence because he would’ve been in the same boat as her: Completely useless.

No wonder she was thinking like him all of a sudden. This state of not being able to do anything or be of use to anyone was how he’d lived after their team disbanded. Even Natsuko, for all her faults, had the Vermögenburgh Wyvern Attack Weekly Special Event she was obligated to help with. Pechorin had had nothing. Nothing, she supposed, except poetry.

She plucked a stalk from among the reeds and held it like a quill. Only, she had no idea what to write. Poetry was new to her. Being Shikijiman though, by background if not by experience, she tried her hand at doing those haikus Pechorin was always rattling off. They were short and simple, so they couldn’t be that hard.

“Reeds blowing in the—” She didn’t know if it was a good idea to just break up a sentence to form a new line, but oh well.

“Reeds blowing in the—

Wind. They bend but they don’t break.

And I think that’s cool.”

No, that sounded dumb. Pechorin’s haikus sounded cooler and more mysterious than that. For several minutes she tried copying Pechorin’s cool and mysterious style, but she couldn’t get it right. The syllables wouldn’t line up or she couldn’t think of the right word to fit it all together and even when she did it came out cheesy or flat. Shit, poetry was a lot harder than she thought. Knowing she had no hope of getting something right in an hour that Pechorin had practiced for years, she started screwing around.

“Roses are red,

Violets are blue.

How do you do this, Pech?

I’ve got no fucking clue.”