Chapter Text
The road to Sumeru City wound through green that never seemed to end.
Lumine had thought Inazuma's storms were something to get used to — the crack of thunder over Tenshukaku, the endless rain on Narukami — but nothing had prepared her for humid. The air here clung to her skin like a second layer of clothing, thick with the smell of wet soil and something floral she couldn't name. Every few steps, some new insect the size of her palm buzzed past her ear, and Paimon shrieked at every single one.
"Paimon does NOT like this jungle," Paimon announced, fanning herself uselessly with both tiny hands. "It's hot, it's sticky, and everything has too many legs. Paimon misses Inazuma. At least there it was just wet."
"We just left Gandharva Ville," Lumine said, amused. "You were fine an hour ago."
"That was an hour ago! Paimon has decided the jungle is bad now. Also Paimon's stomach is doing the empty-rumbling thing again, but that's unrelated." A pause. "Mostly unrelated."
Tighnari had given them decent directions before they'd left — follow the marked trail, don't touch anything that glowed unprompted, and if a fungus looked friendly, it almost certainly wasn't — and Collei had waved until they were out of sight, still a little shy but warmer than when they'd first met her. Sumeru City lay ahead, a few hours out yet, and the forest between here and there was doing its best to make the trip memorable.
It was Paimon, of course, who noticed him first.
He was standing off the side of the trail in a small clearing where the canopy broke just enough to let a shaft of pale light through, and at first glance Lumine mistook him for a lost local kid — small frame, unhurried stillness, the kind of stance that suggested he'd been standing there a while and saw no reason to stop. Cyan hair, cut close, and when he turned his head slightly at their approach, his eyes caught the light in a way that felt a beat too sharp for how young he looked.
"Um, excuse Paimon," Paimon said, zooming ahead before Lumine could stop her, "but what's a kid doing all alone in the middle of a jungle?! Do you know how dangerous this place is?! There's tigers, and treasure hoarders, and things with too many legs, and—"
"Couldn't I be the danger?"
The reply came flat, almost bored, like he was stating a fact about the weather. Paimon stalled mid-sentence, hovering there with her mouth still open.
"...Well — I mean — that's a weird thing to just say to someone!" she recovered, indignant. "Paimon supposes it is kind of rude to just yell 'what are you doing here' at a stranger, but in Paimon's defense, we're heroic adventurers, not some grubby treasure hoarders looking for trouble!"
Lumine caught up and set a hand lightly on top of Paimon's head, more habit than correction at this point. "Sorry about her," she said. "We don't mean any harm. We're just passing through — heading to Sumeru City."
The boy studied her for a moment. It wasn't quite the look of a child sizing up a stranger; there was something more measured in it, something that lingered a half-second too long before he seemed to decide she was, in fact, harmless.
"I didn't think you did," he said. Then, after a beat: "Neither do I."
"That's good to hear," Lumine said, and offered a small smile. "I'm Lumine. This is Paimon."
Paimon huffed, then immediately forgot to be offended. "Are you from around here? Are you a student — from the Akademiya?"
He considered the question with more weight than it seemed to deserve. "No," he said eventually. "I'm here on something more like... a study abroad program, you could say."
"Ooh, fancy," Paimon said. "So what's your name, kid?"
Something crossed his expression — not hesitation, exactly, more like he was running through a short list and picking an answer off it. "You can call me Dot."
"Dot?" Paimon repeated, tilting in midair. "That's a weird—"
Lumine elbowed her, not gently, before she could finish that sentence in whatever direction it was headed.
"Ow — Paimon means, that's a nice name!"
Dot let out a short laugh, the kind that seemed to catch him a little by surprise. "It's fine. It's an old nickname, from when I was small — easier to say than my full name. People tend to default back to it."
From when I was small, Lumine noted, filing the phrase away without quite knowing why it snagged. Kids didn't usually talk about being small in the past tense.
"Anyway," Dot went on, brushing a bit of dust off his sleeve, "my field study here is done, and I'm heading into the city myself. If you're headed the same way — there's safety in numbers, as they say. Assuming you don't mind the company."
"The more the merrier!" Paimon declared immediately, all earlier suspicion evaporated. "Especially if it means less chance of getting eaten by something with too many legs."
"I don't mind," Lumine said. "Lead the way, or — should we?"
"After you," Dot said, falling into step just behind her shoulder, hands folded loosely behind his back. "I know this stretch fairly well."
That turned out to be an understatement.
They hadn't gone twenty paces before he nodded toward a cluster of pale, bell-shaped fungi growing along a fallen log. "Don't step near those if you can help it — Airborne Spores, they release a cloud if disturbed. Mildly toxic, mostly just makes you cough for an hour, but unpleasant regardless." A little further on, he pointed out a patch of unassuming red flowers: "Those root systems interfere with Electro conductivity, which is why you'll sometimes see them growing wild near old ruins — something about the local soil composition."
"You sound like Tighnari," Lumine said.
"Do I?" Something flickered behind Dot's eyes — brief, unreadable, gone before she could place it. "I'll take that as a compliment. He's well-regarded, from what I understand."
"He's the best forest ranger ever," Paimon said through a mouthful of some fruit Dot had apparently deemed safe and handed over without being asked. "Wait — how do you know so much about all this stuff if you're not even an Akademiya student?"
"I did say I was here for study," Dot said mildly. "I just never said whose classroom I learned it in."
Paimon blinked at that, clearly deciding it was too complicated a sentence to argue with, and went back to her fruit.
Lumine, walking a half-step behind them both, said nothing — but she found herself watching the line of his shoulders, the unhurried, deliberate way he moved through underbrush that should have, by rights, been unfamiliar to someone his apparent age. It wasn't suspicion, not yet. Just the quiet, persistent sense.
She filed that away too, the way she'd learned to file away everything since Mondstadt. Sumeru City was still hours off. There would be time to find out more.
For now, the jungle kept unfolding around them — humid, loud with insects, and, if she let herself admit it, a little less dangerous for having a guide who clearly knew every inch of it far better than any student should.
---
The trees thinned by degrees. What had been a solid ceiling of green overhead gave way to broken light, then to proper sky, and the ever-present hum of insects faded under a different sound — voices, low and rough, coming from somewhere off the trail.
Paimon caught it first. "...That doesn't sound like Sumeru City greeters."
It wasn't. Five of them stepped out from behind a scatter of moss-eaten ruins flanking the path — the patchwork leathers and dented pauldrons were unmistakable anywhere in Teyvat.
"Well, well," the one in front said, cracking his knuckles with the particular smugness of a man who thought the numbers were in his favor. "Travelers this deep in the wilds, huh? That's either real brave or real stupid. Hand over the mora and the goods, nice and easy, and maybe you get to keep walking."
"Treasure hoarders," Paimon groaned. "Of course. Right when Paimon thought the jungle couldn't get any worse."
Lumine's hand was already on her weapon before she finished the thought, angling herself half a step in front of Dot without quite deciding to. She had no idea if the kid could so much as throw a punch — best not to find out the hard way.
"Stay behind me," she said.
Dot glanced sideways at her, an expression that might have been mild surprise, or possibly something closer to curiosity. He didn't argue. He stepped back.
It wasn't much of a fight. Five treasure hoarders against a Traveler who'd already leveled fortresses of Fatui and burned down an entire tree's worth of corrupted roots was, frankly, an unfair matchup, and Lumine dispatched three of them in the time it took Paimon to finish shrieking about the noise. A fourth went down trying to flank her from the ruin's shadow.
She didn't notice the fifth had circled wide until it was too late.
"Not so fast, girl!"
The shout came from behind her — and by the time she'd spun around, the last hoarder had an arm locked around Dot's shoulders, a knife glinting inches from the boy's throat.
"Ah — Paimon — Paimon can't watch this—" Paimon's voice pitched somewhere near a shriek, darting behind Lumine's hood. "Lumine, do something, he's got the kid, he's got Dot!"
Lumine froze mid-stance, weapon still raised, calculating angles she didn't like the answer to. A hostage situation with a civilian bystander — with a child — was not something she could brute-force her way through.
"Drop the weapon," the hoarder barked, dragging Dot half a step back for emphasis, "or the brat gets it! Slow, real slow — hands where I can see 'em!"
What she had not expected — what made her hesitate a half-second longer than she should have — was Dot's face.
He didn't look afraid. He didn't even look particularly inconvenienced. If anything, his expression had settled into something closer to mild annoyance, the look of someone whose schedule had just been interrupted by something beneath his notice.
"You can let go now," Dot said, in the same flat, matter-of-fact tone he'd used to point out poisonous fungi an hour earlier. "This has gone on long enough."
The hoarder actually barked out a laugh. "The nerve on this kid — you're the one with a knife at his throat, and you think you're in a position to negotiate?"
"I wasn't asking."
Lumine saw it happen almost too fast to track — a small motion of Dot's free hand, sliding from his sleeve, and then a short, precise jab into the side of the hoarder's neck. Something glinted there for half a second — glass, a fine needle — before it was gone again.
"What did you—" The hoarder's grip loosened as his voice slurred mid-sentence, anger curdling fast into confusion. "What did the brat do to me—"
He didn't finish the sentence. His knees buckled, and he crumpled sideways into the underbrush, out cold before he hit the ground.
Silence, but for the insects.
"HE KNOCKED HIM OUT!" Paimon wailed, zooming in a frantic circle above the unconscious hoarder. "Wait — did he? Or — Paimon can't tell — did Dot just kill a man?! Right in front of Paimon's very own eyes! Paimon is going to have nightmares about this for WEEKS—"
"He's not dead," Dot said, sounding faintly put-upon, like he'd been asked this exact question one too many times in his life. He tucked whatever device he'd used back into his sleeve with the unbothered efficiency of someone putting away a pen. "It's a simple knockout compound. He'll wake up in a few hours with a headache and nothing worse." A beat. "Frankly, a lethal dose would be an unnecessary waste of resources on someone so — replaceable."
Lumine lowered her weapon slowly, studying him. The unhurried voice. The utter lack of panic during a knife-to-the-throat hostage situation. The syringe that had appeared and vanished from his sleeve like a card trick.
"Why," she said carefully, "does a kid carry something like that?"
She'd met stranger children before — Klee's idea of a "harmless" bomb alone had rearranged half a mine shaft — so she kept her tone light. But the question sat there, and she found she genuinely wanted the answer.
Dot brushed a bit of dirt from his sleeve where the hoarder's grip had wrinkled it, entirely unhurried about the whole ordeal. "I come from a family of...doctors. Scientists, more precisely." He said it plainly, like a fact from a textbook rather than anything personal. "We don't carry Visions — none of us do — so we've learned, over generations, to rely on other means for... self-preservation, on journeys like this one."
"That's, uh." Paimon had finally stopped circling, hovering warily a good few feet from the fallen hoarder. "That's a pretty scary family business, no offense."
"None taken," Dot said, with the faintest ghost of a smile. "It tends to come in useful."
He turned back toward the thinning treeline, toward the pale gleam of towers just visible now over the last of the canopy, as though the entire encounter had already filed itself away as a minor and unremarkable footnote.
"Sumeru City isn't far now," he added, glancing back at them both. "Shall we?"
---
They made it the rest of the way without incident — no further hoarders, no more surprises from the underbrush, just the last stretch of jungle giving way to terraced stone and the distant hum of a city waking up around its great tree. By the time the gates came into view, Paimon had entirely recovered her spirits.
"A city! An actual, proper city, with actual, proper beds!" she declared, already spinning little victory circles in the air. "Paimon wants a bath, and then a nap, and then food, and then maybe another bath! In whatever order works out best!"
"That does sound appealing," Lumine admitted, brushing a stray leaf out of her hair. Even the humid press of the air felt different here, tempered by stone and shade.
Dot slowed as they passed beneath the outer arch, glancing toward a side street that peeled away from the main thoroughfare — narrower, quieter, the kind of route that didn't show up on tourist maps. "This is where I part ways with you both, I'm afraid. My accommodations are a bit off the beaten path." A small, polite nod. "Thank you for the company. It made for a more interesting walk than I expected."
"No, thank YOU," Paimon said solemnly. "For knowing which mushrooms not to step on. Paimon respects that kind of expertise."
"High praise," Dot said, something almost like real amusement flickering at the corner of his mouth. "I imagine we'll cross paths again, here and there. Sumeru City isn't as large as it looks from outside."
He'd already half-turned to go when Lumine spoke up.
"Wait — before you head off." She studied him for a beat, weighing how to put it. "Are you actually okay? You had a knife at your throat less than an hour ago. That's not exactly a small thing."
Dot paused. When he looked back at her, his expression was unreadable in the particular way it had been through most of the walk — pleasant, composed, giving nothing away by accident.
"I'm fine," he said, with the faint shrug of someone brushing dust off a shoulder. "Things like that happen, in a world this cruel. One learns to get used to it."
"I don't think that's true." The words came out before Lumine had fully decided to say them, but she meant them. "I don't think anyone should have to get used to that. Especially not—" she hesitated, "—especially not someone your age."
Something crossed Dot's face at that — not offense, not quite surprise either. More like he was turning the sentence over, checking it from a few different angles to see if it held up under examination. For a moment he didn't answer at all.
"...Mm," he said eventually, mostly to himself, quiet enough that she almost missed it. "I see why Childe speaks so highly of you."
"What was that?"
"Nothing important." The polite mask slid back into place, seamless. "I wish you the best of luck with whatever brings you to Sumeru. Truly." He inclined his head, already stepping back toward the side street's shadow. "Though I'd be remiss not to leave you with a word of caution."
"A warning?" Paimon perked up, wary again. "About what — more treasure hoarders?"
"Nothing so simple." Dot's voice had gone a shade quieter, almost thoughtful, the cadence of someone choosing each word with unusual care. "This city likes to present itself as civilized. Rational. Safe, in a way the wilds could never be. But rationality has its own kind of teeth, Traveler. Sumeru City can be every bit as deadly as the jungle you just walked through — it simply prefers its knives sheathed in decorum."
He offered one last, faint smile — courteous, unreadable, and just a touch too knowing for a face that young.
"Do be careful in there," he said. "I'd hate for our next meeting to be under less pleasant circumstances."
And with that, he turned down the side street and was gone, swallowed by the crowd and shade before Lumine could think of a reply.
Paimon hovered in silence for a moment, staring after him. "...Okay, not that Paimon's keeping score, but that kid says a LOT of weird stuff for someone his age."
"Yeah," Lumine murmured, still watching the empty street. "He does."
She filed the name away with the rest of it — Childe — a name she hadn't mentioned once on this entire walk, tucked somewhere Dot clearly hadn't meant for her to catch. Sumeru City rose ahead of them, its great tree glowing faintly gold in the afternoon light, looking every bit as peaceful as advertised.
She found herself, despite everything, not quite believing it.
---
The building Dot slipped into, several streets deep into the quiet side of the city, wore its disguise well. From outside it looked like any other merchant's storefront — dusty shutters, a faded sign, the kind of place a passerby's gaze slid past without registering. It was only past the threshold, past a door that looked like a supply closet and wasn't, that the disguise fell away layer by layer, like a mask peeled back in stages instead of all at once.
The passage beyond sloped downward, cut through stone that predated the some of Akademiya's own foundations by some measure — older tunnels, repurposed and reinforced, the kind of architecture that suggested someone had gone to a great deal of trouble to make sure the majority of Sumeru's scholars never learned what was humming directly beneath their libraries. Fatui guards lined the walls at intervals, and each one straightened as he passed, murmuring the same two words like a reflex too deeply drilled to require thought.
"Lord Harbinger."
The segment wearing the name Dot didn't break stride for any of them. His footsteps were unhurried, almost idle, hands folded loosely behind his back the same way they had been in the jungle hours earlier — as if the transition from "wandering scholar" to "high-ranking agent of the Fatui" required no adjustment at all, because to him, perhaps, it didn't.
The staging area opened up at the passage's end: cold, clinical light spilling over rows of dormant machinery, cables snaking along the floor toward something built into the far wall, veiled for now beneath tarps and scaffolding. It smelled faintly of ozone and older, more chemical things underneath that. A project not yet finished. A god not yet born.
Someone was already waiting for him there.
The rhythmic tap of a foot against stone had clearly been going on for some time — long enough to have worn a groove of irritation into the sound itself, each strike a fraction sharper than the last. Scaramouche stood with his arms folded, shoulders drawn tight, an expression that had crossed from impatience into something closer to simmering resentment several minutes before Dot ever arrived.
"What took you so long, Doctor?"
"I took a detour." Dot ambled the rest of the way into the chamber without any particular urgency, utterly unbothered by the tone. "There's nothing wrong with stopping to smell the Sumeru roses now and then."
"Bullshit." The foot stopped tapping only because its owner had decided to close the distance instead, crossing the room with the brisk, coiled motion of someone who'd rehearsed this exact confrontation in his head more than once while waiting. "Segments don't take detours. The rest of you are supposed to be punctual to the point of being insufferable about it. That's the one consistent thing about all of you."
"Mm. Fair point, generally speaking." Dot exhaled, the sound almost fond, the way one might indulge a complaint from a particularly predictable child. "I ran into the Traveler on the way in, as it happens. Good company — surprisingly so — even with the chatterbox fairy glued permanently to her shoulder."
Whatever thin patience Scaramouche had scraped together visibly curdled on the spot. "Wonderful." The word came out flat and venomous, each syllable bitten off. "The goody-two-shoes hero is already in the city. Fantastic. Exactly what this project needed, on top of everything else." A pause, the edge in his voice sharpening. "She's not going to be a problem, is she?"
"If anything," Dot said, tone still infuriatingly level, "her presence might light a fire under our dear Grand Sage. Push him to move faster than his ego currently allows." He tilted his head, considering the machinery along the far wall with something between clinical interest and open contempt. "Honestly, the man's so drunk on his own authority he's forgotten there's an actual timeline attached to this project. A little external pressure might do wonders."
He let the observation sit a moment before adding, almost conversationally, "Though I will say — I can see why you're a little infatuated with the blonde one. The two of you have more in common than either of you would probably like to admit."
*FFFZZZ WHAM*
The wall beside Dot's head cracked before the sound of the impact fully registered — an electro-charged fist, driven with enough force to spiderweb the stone straight through, close enough that a scatter of sparks caught in Dot's hair and died there, harmless.
"Are you mocking me?"
Scaramouche's voice had dropped low, stripped of pretense, all the venom finally given somewhere to go. He'd leaned in until there was barely a hand's width of space left between them, close enough that Dot could see, clearly, the particular flavor of anger that lived behind those eyes — not the clean, simple anger of an insult taken personally, but something older. Something that had been sharpened over years, on a whetstone this exact segment had helped build.
"I'm stating facts." Dot didn't flinch. If anything, his expression remained precisely as unbothered as it had been a moment ago, studying the fist an inch from his skull with the mild curiosity of a man reviewing a familiar variable in an old experiment. "You didn't belong in Inazuma. She doesn't belong in this world at all. Neither of you fit where you've ended up, and neither of you asked for the situation you were dropped into. It's not an insult, Balladeer. It's an observation. You, of all people, should recognize the difference — you were built to notice details like that."
Built.
The word landed exactly where it was meant to. Scaramouche's jaw tightened, the current along his knuckles crackling brighter, angrier, and for a moment something in his composure cracked wider than the stone behind Dot's head ever had.
"Don't," he said, quieter now, and somehow more dangerous for it, "talk to me like I'm still one of your specimens on a table. That ended a long time ago."
"Did it?" Dot's voice stayed level, almost gentle, the way a doctor might deliver an uncomfortable diagnosis to a patient who'd already guessed the answer. "You still flinch at the word, all these years later. That's data too, you know. I'd have thought a puppet as meticulously reworked as you are would have learned to mask a reaction like that by now." A pause, and something almost like genuine reflection crossed his face — not remorse, precisely, but the closest a segment of the Doctor was capable of producing. "For what it's worth, I wasn't the one who signed off on most of what was done to you. That predates my involvement by some measure. But I understand why the resentment doesn't much care which segment happens to be standing in front of you when it surfaces."
"How considerate of you," Scaramouche spat, though the current along his fist had already begun to ebb, some of the fight visibly draining out of him even as the bitterness stayed lodged behind his eyes, sharp as ever. "Spare me the segment's professional detachment. I don't need your observations, and I definitely don't need you comparing me to some wide-eyed hero who thinks kindness fixes anything broken."
"No," Dot agreed easily, still entirely unbothered by the fading sparks still drifting off Scaramouche's knuckles. "You need this project finished. And you need me to finish it — which, conveniently, is the only reason you're going to let this particular conversation go, the same way you've let the others go every time we've had it." He reached up, unhurried, and gently pushed the smoking fist aside from where it had lodged in the cracked stonework, the gesture almost tender in its casualness, like moving an obstacle rather than defusing a genuine threat. "You're fortunate I'm the segment assigned to this job, Balladeer. I don't take pleasure in relitigating old history for its own sake. I'm here to do a task, efficiently, and then go home." A faint, almost rueful distaste crossed his face. "Some of the others enjoy getting under a puppet's skin rather more than professional necessity would require. Figuratively." A beat, deliberate. "And, on occasion, quite literally. You know this as well as I do."
Scaramouche said nothing to that — there was nothing to say to it, and they both seemed to know it — but he pulled his fist back from the wall regardless, the current guttering out along his knuckles as he turned away first, unwilling to hold the doctor's gaze a moment longer than necessary.
"Just get the project finished," he said, voice clipped, flat, all the earlier venom compressed down into something colder and more tired. "I don't care how many roses you stop to smell on your detours, or how many old wounds you feel like poking at along the way. Just finish it, Doctor."
"Of course." Dot's tone had already smoothed back into its earlier, pleasant register, as though the last several minutes had been nothing more than idle small talk between colleagues. He turned toward the humming machinery at the heart of the chamber, toward the veiled shape waiting beneath its scaffolding. "That's what I'm here for."
Behind him, Scaramouche didn't answer — only stood a moment longer in the wreckage of the wall he'd struck, staring at the cracked stone rather than the segment now walking calmly away from him, as if some part of him were still deciding whether the anger had actually left, or simply gone somewhere quieter to wait.