Chronicles of the Exalted Sun Child

The two men, despite belonging to different factions, equally stiffened and reddened in outrage. The first one, who had rudely told Yuriko and Carina to leave, choked on his own vitriol as his hand darted to his sidearm, which happened to be a large handgun, or rather, a revolver with large-calibre bullets, quite unusual for the plasma bolt shooting weapons.

"You trying to kill-steal?" the man with the revolver asked aggressively.

Yuriko snorted derisively. "I'm not interested in a piddling golden ferret, but I'm not letting you decide where I get to go."

"Oh, yeah? You and what army?"

Yuriko grinned, "I'm more than enough."

Before the man could invade her space, Carina interjected, "Whoa, whoa. Dial it down, please. Karn, we don't want any trouble."

The aggressive man, Karn, glanced at Carina and snorted. "Trouble always finds you, Evanova. It's in your nature." A look of pity crossed his eyes when he looked at Yuriko, though it disappeared after a moment. "I'd stay away from Greenie here, not unless you want to be ash'ed."

"Ash'ed?"

"What are you, a newbie?" Karn scoffed. "Dead. Anything that dies here turns to dust and ashes." He paused as he really looked at Yuriko. Her hood had been up throughout the journey. It was only when someone was close enough could they see her face. He whistled reflexively, but shook his head. She was keeping her Charm Mien in check after all.

Carina didn't appreciate the jab at her and shot back. "Yeah, at least I try to go further than just the first layer!"

"And your team has had more deaths than anyone else."

"Hey," the second man interrupted. "I don't care about this drama." He glared at Yuriko, Carina, and Karn. "Just stay away from the ferret, go around if you want to."

With that, the unnamed man spun on his heels and trod back to his team. Karn scoffed and did the same.

"Brokehorn gits," Carina cursed under her breath, shook her head, and gave Yuriko a wary glance. "Sorry you heard about that…"

Yuriko hummed, but didn't say anything. Instead, she gestured towards the fight. "Where to? Let's put some distance from these insecure boys before we talk."

"Right," Carina said, though Yuriko could tell she was a bit upset.

They circled around the fight, but it seemed to have resolved itself by the time they were at the edge of her current perception range. The door frame that led into the biome was unexpectedly near the center of the biome. Once again, they headed south.

A couple of hundred paces from the door, a ferret attacked. The shorter grass, coupled with the ferret's brighter fur, made spotting them relatively easy. The difference between these beasts and the horned bunnies was that they aggressively stalked and hunted the travellers. Either way, she stopped the first attacker with an easy pin using her Animakinesis, followed by Carina drilling a hole in its head with a well-placed plasma bolt. In the meantime, Fluffington and Sir Blue ranged ahead and killed their own ferret. Nothing was left when they were Dusted, so they continued walking.

"Anything on your mind?" Yuriko asked Carina after the chatty woman remained silent for several minutes.

"I…yes. Did what…Karn say bother you?"

"About? The fact that he was blatantly being a rotter by driving us off?"

"What? No, I mean, what he said about my track record."

"Oh that? Superstition? How would he know your track record anyway? Was he stalking you?"

"No. It's a public record. The guilds update and track teams, putting emphasis on fatalities and near total wipeouts."

"I see. Is there anything to it, then?"

Carina furiously shook her head. "No! It's just bad luck!"

"Care to elaborate?" Yuriko asked, pressing on the woman slightly with her Mien to make her loosen up from her anxiety. While she didn't know Carina all that well, Yuriko found her an entertaining distraction. She was also rather curious about the discrimination and figured it would be a good way to judge the general trend of the people living in the orbital rings. They'd be here for Seasons, maybe years, so it was just sensible to find out.

"I, well, it's just that every team I join gets into accidents when we push past the first layer. Expeditions encounter rare monsters just a bit too powerful for the lineup, we get stuck in a biome more often than average, and all that. I don't know if I'm just unlucky, or the opposite, since those things often involve finding something good if we'd overcome it."

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Carina's forehead was damp with sweat despite the temperate air, which, now that Yuriko thought about it, was unusual considering they were in the beginning week of the Season of Water. It should be cold enough to freeze out here.

Considering the nature of the orbital rings, she wasn't surprised by the controlled weather, but she didn't expect the same with Shangria.

"So, bad luck then, for you being in a team not strong enough to overcome adversity?"

"No, I wouldn't put it that way," Carina immediately refuted. "That would be disrespectful of the fallen, but those expeditions I was in weren't composed of rookies."

"I see."

"I…are you hesitating about our possible collaboration?"

"No."

"You aren't?" Carina's surprised expression made Yuriko giggle, much to the other woman's consternation.

"I am strong. So are my companions. I am confident, too."

"Not overconfident, I hope?"

"No, which is why I'm exploring Shangria with you now, to find out what we're likely to encounter."

"Oh."

They continued to explore the biome for a few more minutes. It was about twice the size of the first one, which meant an hour's careful walk. Considering the limitations of daily travel, Yuriko thought there was no sense in hurrying only to be forced to wait at the locked gate. It was better to find out what dangers the biome held before it ambushed them late at night, or when they were transitioning one at a time through the door frames.

They eventually managed to get a drop from the ferrets. A bone fragment it was called, but functionally identical to the horned bunnies' horn fragment. Same use and price too. It reminded her of hunting for Chaos dust and shards back in Rumiga, honestly. Weren't the prices the same too? Or close enough.

One credit wasn't really much in the orbital rings, but it could buy a plain sandwich or something. According to Gwendith's messages, seventy-nine credits paid for a room at the hotel. A single room, at least. There were eight of them, including Fluffington, so her lovers booked a multi-room suite that cost five ninety-nine creds a night. Come to think of it, they collected half a dozen frags and split up; that was only thirty credits, wasn't it? One in ten bunnies dropped a frag, so a delver would need to kill roughly eighty bunnies to afford a night's rent?

Hmm, no, the economics would make sense considering Gwendith probably picked the best hotel in node 626. They also still had a stash of actual gold coins that they didn't turn in at Dragon Fall City, so they weren't in the red. She wondered how much rent for a Cycle costs, then? Considering a single frag would be enough for a couple of good meals.

Then again, the monsters deeper into the layer probably had more valuable leavings. There was probably a list…

"Oh! A clover." Carina pointed at a patch of grass a couple of dozen paces away. She walked over and peered at the leaves, then reached down and plucked one that had four leaves. "A good reagent. This is worth fifty creds to an apothecary," she said.

"Is there a book of valuable herbs?"

"There is, of course, and there are methods to preserve them away from their biomes. A clover is special in that nothing's needed to be done to bring it out. The tools are bulky and most delvers don't bother."

"Alright."

Her ruminations aside, the current delve wasn't so bad. Now if only her incarnation body wasn't bored to tears.

The table reading of the script for The Last Warrior had gone on for longer than she expected. The movie's production start date had been pushed back, considering the relatively recent event that was the Unfettered attack. Not that Yuriko protested it, but the scheduled time with a therapist had eaten up her time, and then, it was the year-end holidays. Now, progress had been cut back since the script had been modified and rewritten to include more dialogue for supporting actors, as well as more action scenes for her character. Those scenes could not be properly emulated during a table reading, and they've gone over the entire thing three times already. Thankfully, it was all over.

On her way to her car, Yuriko was intercepted by Zachary Russell, her co-star and the male lead of the movie, and ostensibly Jeannette Marau's (her character) lover, as well as a fellow Lunite, survivor of their accidental foray into interstitial space.

"Hey, Zach, what do you want?" Yuriko asked, a bit curtly since she wanted to get home. Scarlett wasn't with her today, and with the smol girl guilt ridden, apparently over forcing herself on Yuriko that night, Yuriko didn't want to let her spiral badly. She'd decided to do something about it, now that her emotions weren't spiking too much. Alas, it was an aftereffect of Scarlett's Alteration event. Not the power she gained, which was remarkably similar to every other club member who survived the massacre, but the actual event had left its mark on her brain.

Superior healing. Scarlett and all the rest received the same Alteration. They could heal a papercut in seconds and a stab wound in a day, probably. In Scarlett, it came with the inability to forget, at least the events during the massacre. It wasn't completely an eidetic memory either, just that certain events were indelible in her mind. Yuriko got all of that information piecemeal throughout the weeks since the event. Perhaps teaching the girl how to create a mind palace would help, but for that, she needed access to Animus or have an awakened Anima.

"Lilibeth, sorry for delaying you," Zach said while scratching the back of his head. "I've received a message from an unknown number claiming to be Graham Lowe."

Yuriko's eyebrows rose in surprise. Graham was a fellow survivor of Hotel De Lune and he had disappeared weeks ago. "What did it say?"

"He wants to meet." Zach shook his head. "About something important. He didn't say what."

"He's hiding something?'

"Or it's not him. The message included snippets of things that happened in Lune, something nobody who hadn't been there would know. Or something he told someone else."

"Did you tell the police?"

"No." Zach shook his head. "It's about that stuff after all. You know how it is."

"I do," Yuriko sighed.

This insistence on secrecy was annoying, but she understood. For Zach and the other celebrities, revealing their Alteration would probably kill their careers. Not like she was any different, but in all probability, those already affected by her Mien wouldn't care. But it wasn't her livelihood that was on the line, so she didn't make waves.

"What are you going to do?"

"I wanted to ask you for help. You're the strongest amongst us," Zach said, with not a hint of a blush for his temerity.

Yuriko sighed, but she ultimately agreed. Whatever had happened to Graham, and probably Sandra and Victor, would affect her too. Besides, she felt a hidden hand manipulating things to their advantage and to her detriment. She'd been too lazy to swat it away, mainly because she had to look where it was touching first.

Perhaps it was time to find out who the hidden mastermind was, and if appropriate, crush them beneath her feet.