Forgotten Girl Quest

The two Heroes—Natsuko and Shuixing—walked side-by-side up the cobbled hill towards the gleaming white towers of the Mage’s College. Ironically, not a lot of research was done there. The Non-Hero mages in Vermögenburgh mostly puttered around rearranging shelves of alchemy and enchantment supplies, waiting for Heroes that might need them.

“Sorry, Shui,” Natsuko said.

“It’s fine,” Shuixing said with a sigh.

“What can I do to make it up to you?”

“Really, it’s fine Natsuko.”

Natsuko jogged around in front of her friend and threw herself down on her knees with hands clasped. “Please, give me my penance, dearest Shuixing! I am unworthy of your mercy.”

Shuixing blushed. “We’re in public, would you stop it?”

Natsuko hopped back up and walked backwards with her hands behind her head. “Not if you keep making it fun to mess with you. Plus, without me to fire you up, you’d be moping in a dark room all day frowning over—ow!”

The blacksmith’s sign smacked her on the back of the head. She furiously rubbed at it to make the pain go away. “Son of a bitch! Who put a sign there!?”

“You mean the same sign that’s been there for five years?”

“Yeah! That sign!” Natsuko said, punching it and sending it swinging on its chains.

The Mage’s College was quiet and peaceful in a way that drove Natsuko nuts. Out front was a courtyard with two fountains on either side of a path lined with immaculate topiary that never needed maintenance. Above, three stories of regal windows looked down over columned walkways while a clocktower rang the hour. Everything, down to the butterflies fluttering along the flowering bushes, made Natsuko want to pull her eyes out. She wanted purpose. Action. Not peace.

Shuixing, meanwhile, refused to move anywhere else, even at the promise of experience and leveling. She was in the same boat as Natsuko, but it was also cheaper here. The food and lodging in other regions became increasingly expensive, as though to prevent poorer Heroes from having another go at relevance.

“Oh, good afternoon, Professor Gershwin!” Shuixing said, nodding to a scholar in the same blue robes as herself emerging from the huge double-doors of the college’s entrance.

“Good afternoon!” the professor called back. The two of them stopped to discuss some very boring academic things before finally parting.

Natsuko rolled her eyes. “You’ve really gotta dig doing absolutely nothing to hang out here.”

Shuixing shifted the stack of papers to her other arm as Natsuko propped the door open for her with a flourish.

“I’m not doing nothing, Natsuko, you know that. You live in my laboratory closet after all. You ought to know I’m…” Shuixing paused, questioning the truthfulness of her statement. “Doing... err... serious work.”

Staring at and writing down tiny angles all day did not sound like Natsuko's idea of fun. What she preferred to do—and was currently doing—was to swipe Professor Cox’s brass nameplate off his office door again to add to her collection. She was up to 62 brass “Cox” sitting in her dresser drawer. But so long as they kept showing up again at 4am, she was going to keep stealing them.

“I am more baffled that you are not interested in the properties of your wine bottle, Natsuko. You remove things from our world entirely!”

Natsuko shrugged. “So? Doesn’t bring any numbers up, it just chucks things out of existence."

“But what if we can replicate the effects?” Shuixing said, hands gesturing in every direction. “Think of all the good we could do by ridding Po-Lin of the Entropic Axis! Of evil! For all time!”

There was something funny about her friend getting so excited. Shui’s cheeks puffed up and her eyes got all wide and filled the frame of her oversized, circular glasses and her fists pumped up and down at her side.

“Nah, more stuff’ll just pop up to replace it. It always does. Same as that stupid ice wyvern," Natsuko replied.

Shuixing gave an exasperated sigh. “Maybe so. But… there’s gotta be an end, right? It takes a lot of time and effort for villains to build up that much power, so surely the world must be able to contain only so many world-ending threats?”

“Then they’ll start comin’ from outer space. And then the multiverse! Wooh~” Natsuko said, making wiggly motions with her fingers that earned her weird looks from the Mage’s College students walking down the hallway.

Shuixing giggled at that. “I hope not.”

Eventually they reached Shui’s lab, which doubled as the entry foyer for Natsuko’s bedroom, which was also the supply closet. Shuixing set her papers down on an already overcrowded workbench.

“Please put it up here,” she said, tapping an examination table.

Natsuko set her three foot tall wine bottle down on the rack Shuixing had built for it and backed away, giving the scientist her space. Shuixing fiddled with her glasses for a moment before three spectral rings of glowing amber projected out of them. While Shuixing pulled examination tools from her robes, Natsuko walked around behind her to view the funky magnification effects of the rings. From her angle, they made everything look like a funhouse mirror.

With two metal rods like extremely thin chopsticks, Shuixing tap-tap-tapped along the ribbed angles of the wine bottle’s glass bottom, having long ago lost her fear that it would send her through the floor. The killer effect had something to do with speed and momentum.

“Strange. So strange. What are you doing, little guy, that is sending people straight through the ground? How do you break the laws of physics?” Shuixing said, talking to the bottle like it was on the verge of telling her its secrets.

On some level, Natsuko enjoyed listening to her friend talk through her thought processes. Shuixing’s half-whispered voice was soothing and quiet, and it reminded her of when the two were part of an adventuring party, back when they were on top of the Use-Number game. Shuixing would always talk through her process for figuring out what crafting materials did what, or what strategy they should employ to tackle a dungeon. While this went on, Natsuko stretched out like a cat across another table.

“It’s the faceting. It’s got to be the faceting. I know it must be, because you have no magical properties whatsoever…”

Natsuko rolled over to face her. “I know I’ve probably asked you this before, Shuixing, but—”

“Shush! I’m working!”

“Sorry, sorry,” Natsuko said.

Natsuko rolled off the table and returned to her humble, laboratory-closet bedroom. She eased herself around the various junk she had accumulated—or inherited from the supply closet’s original supply—towards the dresser in the back. After chucking another brass nameplate inside her dresser, she paused on the Opto-Box photo lying on top. In it, she could see herself with her arm thrown roughly around a shy Shuixing. Standing at an angle and dressed in his black-and-red high-collared jacket was Pechorin the Gunslinger. The sight of him trying so hard to look edgy and mysterious while coming across like a dork still made Natsuko giggle years later.

Last but not least was Hemiola, lying on his side with one arm propping his head up and the other clutching his lute. Of the original four in their party, he was the only one who wasn't around anymore. While conventional death was impossible for both Heroes and Non-Heroes, it was possible to make a mistake while dimension-jumping—essentially what Natsuko's bottle did—and end up... somewhere. No one knew where, but your name disappeared from the Use-Ranking list. That was where Hemiola was now.

Natsuko turned the picture over to read the words on the back.

Always fight for what’s right,

even if it’s suicidally stupid!

She snickered at that. They had taken a vote on what to write on the back of everyone’s photo and her phrase had won because the alternatives were Pechorin’s: “The darkness within begets the darkness without,” which was too goofy for anyone to take seriously, and Shuixing’s, “Fraternitas summa virtus est,” which no one but her could remember no matter how many times she repeated it.

Looking at the photo made Natsuko want to drink again. Before she set the picture down, one more thing caught her eye. In the corner of the frame was a peach-colored fox with white stripes and a little hovering halo of two-interlocking rings. Its name was Zhidao, and it was a member of a shapeshifting species of faerie-animals called Peng-wu. Zhidao had been their group’s mascot until they broke up and he moved on to a new group. Everyone else liked the little guy except for Natsuko, who thought it knew more about things than it ought to.

While Natsuko pontificated about her disdain for Peng-wu, and Zhidao specifically, the door to Shuixing’s laboratory was thrown open.

“I was told an old 1st-gen hero named Shuixing resides here?” a voice said, sounding harried.

Natsuko poked her head out of the door to see a short girl in a poofy purple-and-gold waistcoat, pantaloons, silk stockings, and a feathered cavalier hat with a rapier tucked into her belt. Her face had a no-nonsense look about it, framed by a mid-length lavender bob. Shuixing turned and gave the girl a small smile. Natsuko wanted to give the girl a knuckle sandwich for the “old” comment.

“Whoever you spoke to was likely referring to myself and my friend Natsuko,” Shuixing said, pointing out Natsuko looking out from the supply closet.

The girl raised her eyebrows and looked them over, clearly unimpressed. “They only mentioned one. A Medico-Mage by the name of Shuixing He?”

Shuixing nodded. “That would be me.”

“I’m Natsuko,” Natsuko said from the closet.

The girl gave her a strange look. “I’m very happy for you, but I am only looking to speak to Heroes at the moment.”

Natsuko threw the door open and strode towards the girl. “Listen here you little ass girl, I happen to be—”

He scoffed and rolled his eyes. “I am a boy, thank you very much. Sofiane de la Nuit is my name. And this is precisely the root of my problems, madames. Someone else has taken my character archetype and now my Use-Ranking is threatened.”