Chapter Text
Suika huffed as she carefully took the bottle into her hands and plugged the cork into it. This time she was confident it would work.
It was the smoothest run after all.
The clay pots she used didn’t have any foreboding cracks, and there weren’t any contaminants as far as she could tell. Even the grapes she used seemed to have fermented properly instead of just molding over for a fourth time.
She carefully pressed the plug in tighter while still being careful to not push it to the point of fracturing; this might finally be the batch to revive Senku after all.
She set the bottle to the side as she carefully put away all the equipment. It was important as the last time she had left it unaccompanied, a rogue bird or something had come through and knocked over the entire set-up. And as confident as Suika could be about her latest batch, she had just used up the last portion of alcohol, and there was no guarantee that the next batch would ferment properly either.
Though, she was quite proud that after 5 years of practice, her pottery skills had leveled up significantly. Of course, it was thanks to the spinny table that she had made for herself. Before leaving the village, she remembered some of the old ladies complaining about their master craftsman being whisked away.
“Oh dear, with Kaseki gone, we will have to be extra careful. No one else can make pots that last as long as his,” one of the ladies groused.
Senku and Gen were there, mostly off to the side doing whatever they did. They were attached to the hip, and were rarely seen without the other. But no one ever questioned it, so neither did Suika.
But this time, they were conspiring very obviously, and so she decided to pay more attention.
“Senku dear, whatever shall we do to elp-hay these poor, sweet old ladies.”
Senku just looked at him funny, similar to the expression he wore when Gen had asked Senku to make him a “soda fountain.”
She remembered that part easily because she was flabbergasted at the request. Once Ryusui had revived, he had commissioned himself a nice house in return for a hefty sum of Dragos. One of the parts of his new place was a water basin with a column in the middle that bloomed up to reveal another sink. The strangest part of it all was how the water managed to climb up the inside of the tube so it could fill the upper sink and then pour out from the sides to the main, lower basin.
Suika knew that Senku was pretty smart, but making a whole fountain out of soda seemed like an idea that would probably be difficult to execute well. She shivered at the image of all the bugs that would make themselves at home in the pool of sugary soda.
But the confused expression quickly changed to one of understanding as his posture relaxed and his eyes rolled
“We could probably just fashion up a treadle wheel.”
“Now what is a treadle wheel, Senku dear?”
Gen made sure to put emphasis when saying “Treadle wheel” aloud, sparking the curiosity of many of the villagers around them. If there was something that the villagers would get excited for, it was a new invention to streamline their daily lives. Many of the village’s top folks being hoisted across the seas would make it a lot harder to get by, so their ears were open.
“It’s a wheel they use to create pots. A relatively simple piece of technology that is actually quite easy to make. It’ll spin a disk around at an even pace only using your foot to do it.”
“How do we make it?”
“Is there anything I can do to help?”
Many of the older folks of the village offered their help, them knowing best the hardships that would occur from not having good vessels.
It made Suika wonder what would have been if Senku and the rest of the old-worlders hadn’t shown up. Kaseki had no real successor besides Yuzuriha. Yes, Chrome and Kaseki had become a good team, but they were only brought together by Senku.
It was a real good thing they were here.
Soon, a table-looking thing was constructed.
Yuzuriha had taken one look at it and absolutely exploded with excitement, cheekily asking if she could take it for a spin (Suika giggled at that, and Taiju roared with laughter along with her).
It had two wheel parts: one at the top, and one at the bottom. Both wheels were connected, but the bottom wheel was the one with more going on. There was a wooden beam that one of Yuzuriha’s feet simply rested on. The other one was atop another beam that was pulled and pushed by her foot. It had another, tinier beam attached in the middle with full range of motion. The other end of it was connected to the wheel below it. As the Big beam was pushed and pulled, the tiny beam moved with it, but not back and forth, but in a circle. Suika was a bit confused at the exact reason why it was able to do that, but it looked cool.
She was stuck sitting in front of the machine for a long time as Yuzuriha attempted to teach some of the other villagers. She was entranced by the mechanism, slowly engraving it into her head.
Suddenly, Senku approached the lesson.
“Looks like the treadle wheel is a success. How’s teaching?”
Yuzuriha turned to Senku with a big smile plastered on her face, but it looked heavily strained.
“Senku, the wheel might make it easier to create stuff out of clay, but it doesn’t make it a walk in the park. It still requires a lot of skill, y’know.”
Senku blinked a couple of times, clearly not expecting that response. But only for a couple of seconds, because then he returned to his normal, sarcastic self.
“Huh, is that so? I guess you have your work cut out for you. Of course, I expect that you’ll be able to handle it. After all, you’re a craftswoman with god-like talent, patience and repetition has to be a part of your repertoire.”
That smirk was going to get him in real trouble one day. Suika could tell by the veins popping out of Yuzuriha’s forehead.
“It fell.”
Yuzuriha’s fake smile dropped into something a little bit more genuine and encouraging as she turned briefly to explain why the clay kept collapsing to the poor villager who was sitting in between the two friends.
She straightened back up after giving a few pointers. Her eyes were closed, but based on her smile, she would likely be able to kill a man with just her stare.
“Know, Senku, I will have your head one day,” She said in her usual sing-songy voice. Ignore the murderous edge.
Senku, on the other hand, put his hand up to his chin and nodded thoughtfully. “Yeah, that seems fair.”
She still remembers Gen’s outraged screech at how much respect (Could this really be counted as respect?) Yuzuriha was getting when he kept getting dragged into grueling manual labor without any warnings, praises, or apologies.
Gen’s remarks were ignored.
So when Suika was revived, one of her top priorities was to make the treadle wheel. Equipment, and therefore containers, were needed to do anything and everything.
Unfortunately, building the wheel was the easy part. Yuzuriha wasn’t lying when she said that using the wheel required a lot of skill. Good thing she had nothing but time to kill.
And after 5 years, she would like to consider herself a pretty good Pot-maker. Perhaps it was a bit cavalier to call herself an expert or a master at it, but she knew that Kaseki would likely be quite happy with her progress.
She turned back to collect more of the equipment she had made, her attention catching to the furnace she had made a couple years ago after she realized that 1) Senku had mentioned before that glass was a much better material than clay due to its non-reactive nature and ability to deal with higher temperatures (that second point being very important as Suika had lost track of how many of her clay pots has exploded due to the heat). And 2) There was no one here to tell her not to do it. It was very dangerous work, that much was clear with how no one besides Kaseki, Chrome, and Senku were allowed to go near the glass workspace. But desperate times call for desperate measures.
Too bad desperate times didn’t mean you could perform the desperate measures.
There was a whole pile of shiny blobs of all different colors sitting to the side of the furnace, because–it turns out–glass-making is a really difficult task.
She’d managed to start making hollow vesicles, but that was the extent of her handiwork. It didn’t help that she was also lacking a lot of the tools necessary to create the equipment. She had barely sourced a long metal tube to blow the glass with; she carefully cleaned a broken-off barrel of a gun to do so. There were other pieces of equipment she had to fashion for herself, like the scissor-things they used to cut into the melted glass, or the cooling area so that the glass wouldn’t shatter.
There were many occasions she would drop the melted goo and nearly burn herself right by the furnace, and she would have to avoid the area for a few hours because it cooled slowly with the hot fire right beside it. Suika wasn’t known for her cautiousness, but the idea of molten glass getting on her skin was definitely enough for her to exercise the most careful precautions.
Her skills in gardening, crafting, and surviving were, overall, a work in progress. But she was optimistic, and she knew that one day, she would surely create a proper dose of revival fluid!
After she had successfully put all the equipment away safely, she dusted off her hands and made her way back to the bottle she had set down earlier.
Only to realize, when she returned, that she had placed it next to 2 other bottles of similar shapes.
“Right. Great, wonderful, convenient.” She said with the same level of joy a fly might have when seeing a toad.
She blinked. Senku’s sarcasm was rubbing off on her and he wasn’t even here to do that.
She quietly cursed herself for not being more careful, as well as creating bottles that looked too similar to each other (though, that reprimand wasn’t taken too seriously as she was quite proud of her consistency).
Carefully, she took all 3 bottles into her arms and started making her way to Senku. Unfortunately, they had similar weights to them.
Luckily (Ha! That wasn’t a word she often used) She knew that the smell of the proper batch of nital would distinguish itself from the smell of whatever the other bottles had in them.
Bottle number 1, she fought with the cork–the habit of tightly inserting it applied to everything–but eventually got it to open. The inside sloshed as she got a strong whiff of the nitric acid she had just used. Her face pruned at the smell, but she simply corked it and tucked the bottle into her elbow.
Bottle number 2, she struggled to open the cork once again, but got it loose with a little bit of twisting and turning. She sniffed the inside, but there was no discernable smell, meaning it was likely just water. She drank the contents of the bottle and tucked it into her elbow as well after closing it.
Bottle number 3, using the process of elimination, was the bottle containing the nital, Suika deduced.
And most people would just walk over and open it when they got to Senku, because what else could bottle 3 be?
Unfortunately, a niggling voice in the back of Suika’s mind was asking whether her vision had glazed over a bottle, or if bottle 1 had actually been the revival fluid and she had been mistaken.
That made the alarm bells start to ring, and she immediately started frantically trying to open bottle number 3. She had stopped in her tracks to do so, about 30 or so meters away from the lineup of statues.
That’s when possibly the worst possible scenario occurred.
The strength Suika thought she would need to uncork the bottle was far more than necessary, meaning that when the cork came out instantly, both hands went flying in opposite directions.
Her hand slipped and lost its grasp on the bottle, and it was like the world had gone into slow motion. She could see the clay bottle flying through the air and she knew her body couldn’t react fast enough to save it, so she had to watch in horror as the bottle flew 3-4 meters, crashing at the base of a statue she had willingly paid little mind to since her revival.
For what felt like a minute, there was no reaction. No sound, no movement, and no breaths taken. She simply stood frozen in place, petrified.
And when she heard the cracks, she couldn’t help but squeal. She knew theoretically that the cracks would occur. But the only time she had witnessed the depetrification process, it had occurred with a low humming sound, not the sound of breaking clay.
It was jarring.
She remembered Kinro telling her that the sounds of Matsukaze’s depetrification were almost ominous, but to see (or “hear,” she supposes) it was to believe it.
Slowly, the stone layer shed itself from the form and she could make out the human underneath. The first thing that got her attention were his eyes. Eyes that were, terrifyingly, looking right at her.
He began to move, and she continued to not.
Rolling his shoulders, he began to stretch. It was only then that Suika realized that the person in front of her was only wearing a leaf skirt. At that, she let out a tiny shriek and covered her eyes.
She had spent the last 5 years alone. Except, those past 5 years had, uh, changed her.
Kohaku and some of the other older women of the village had always been very open about what would occur once she became a certain age. Bleeding that would typically occur once every lunar cycle, growth spurts, and potentially even attraction. It was often embarrassing and boring every time they mentioned it, but in hindsight, considering she had to start the process without anyone else’s support, she was glad that she didn’t go into it unprepared. Otherwise the week of bleeding would have been terrifying.
Unfortunately, the changes also made it incredibly awkward to look at the rest of the Kingdom of Science. A few years into petrification, many of their clothes were rotting away. She hadn’t minded it too much at first, making a mental note to try and recreate them later. But the barer they got, and the more she grew, the more awkward it got to look at them. Her eyes always focused anywhere else but the places most private. She had seen plenty of bare statues as a kid, but now, it was a lot more… uncomfortable. Especially because she knew them all.
That's why she had covered them all up with leaf skirts. They were temporary, until Suika could find the time and material to recreate their clothing. After all, she just knew the basics of sewing, nothing advanced like dyeing and tailoring.
Only last year did she manage to create something for Senku. And it was only after finally, finally finding a blue dye (and then having to painstakingly concentrate it like she did for the alcohol) was she able to create a dress reminiscent of Kohaku's old one a few weeks ago.
Their enemies received similar treatment with the plant garments. Although she didn’t particularly like them–what, with all the murder and all–, she still couldn’t bring herself to leave them bare.
Unfortunately, the sight of a real human in a leaf covering was a lot more scandalous than a statue for some unnameable reason.
So here she was.
In front of a nearly-naked man who had murdered–or had mortally wounded–nearly all her friends seven years ago. All alone. And very much about to cross into the other world.
In front of Stanley “Xeno’s ride back home” Snyder.
She wished she could run. Hide. Perhaps shriek in fear.
But no~.
her body chose this time of all times to stop cooperating with her brain.
Stanley took in his surroundings as the final stone flakes abandoned his skin. He seemed to understand the situation immediately and say something.Too bad her ears were out of order with nothing but the sound of her heartbeat ringing through them.
He eventually stopped moving his lips, realizing that he wasn’t about to get an answer. Instead, he started moving.
That’s when she blacked out.
…
Okay well-
It was more like she stopped taking in any sort of feedback from the outside world for a solid five seconds, but she hadn’t actually lost consciousness.
Although, she probably was about to lose consciousness, considering how she was about to get murdered and whatnot.
Yeah.
Yeah, what was it that Gen always said?
She slowly turned back at the only other human being alive and carefully observed.
Stanley Snyder was depetrified and in peak serial-killer condition. The worst threat to the Kingdom of Science was walking across their base where he had massacred the people she cared about.
‘Senku dear, you uly-tray have the worst luck.’
Would he say it in this context?
… Unfortunately, she could see it.