Now that the Kingdom of Science won, you basically settled in Tsukasa's Empire. With everyone building furnaces, houses and anything that you might need, Gen decided to revive a manga artist. As soon as he filled him up on the whole situation, he handed him some paper and told him to get going and make some manga. Now that the war was over and that the Kingdom of Science started to settle in, now was the time to bring all those entertaining things Senku promised everyone about.
At some point, Yo came out of the bushes, saying something about him having amnesia up until yesterday. Of course, everyone who knew him didn't trust him. He said he'd be more than happy help, but when Yuzuriha showed him the tons of statue pieces to put back together, he was clearly already regretting his choice.
"Guys, I'm going!" you walked passed them.
"Uh, where exactly?" Gen asked, noticing your bag.
"I'm gonna look for my trumpet in the forest."
"Can't you just ask Kaseki for another one?"
"Of course not. It's in perfect condition, it'd be a total waste of material to just let it be lost. Plus, I really like that one, I don't want to replace it so soon."
"Aha! An expedition?!" Yo suddenly stood in front of you, making you flinch. "You're lucky to have me! I know these lands better than the back of my hand! Fine, I accept! I'll accompany you!"
"I didn't ask you anything." you glared at him.
"(Y/n)-chan." Yuzuriha whispered to you. "At least he's trying to help."
You sighed.
"I guess I'll need someone in case a wild animal comes around." you gestured for him to follow you. "Come on."
"Ha! I knew you'd need me for this!" he quickly followed you. "Guess you're not that stupid of a woman after all! You know you can count on me (wrong name)!"
"Uh-hu." you sighed.
"Her name is (Y/n)."
You looked at Gen, walking beside you.
"You're coming too Gen?"
"I don't want you to get lost because of this guy." he quietly told you.
You smiled.
"Thanks."
He just hummed and kept looking ahead.
Indeed, Yo didn't seem like he knew where you were going or where you were. You and Gen managed to remember the route you took when you left the village, from the point when you got separated. And you arrived at the cliff you fell over. On the way, you encountered Taiju, Magma and Ukyo. They were collecting the bits of statues broken by Tsukasa. You recalled when Tsukasa said he never forgot about every single person he's killed, you were there and you had to turn away because the feels were crushing your heart.
Speaking of him, you visited him everyday since. You fed him and did your best to nurse him, but you couldn't spend as much time with him as you wanted. Gen pressed you on the promise you made to the village and so after getting your trumpet back, you asked Kaseki for a few things.
First, you leveled your percussions by acquiring a whole drum set, using the same metal as the trumpet to make the cymbals. You could even get each drum and play them separately.
"What's the point?" Magma asked. "You're just gonna make twice as more noise!"
"I mean, you're not wrong." you smiled as you sat on the stool to test the instrument out. "But you know, it's easy to make noise, but it takes practice to make some sweet rhythm."
"Pfff!" he folded his arms. "Prove it then!"
"Mmh...Are you sure? I don't want to bother you with my noise."
"What? Are you scared or something?!"
'Just say you wanna hear me play dude!' you chuckled, rotating the drumsticks in your hands.
When you were done, you could see the expression of wonder he tried so hard to hide. After all this time, you started to understand how he worked a little bit.
Next, you wanted to make a guitar. Because it's used in a lot of musical genres, you thought it'd be a good idea to get one. But you had no idea what it'd take to make one.
"Guts?! Like, real guts?!"
"Don't look so disgusted." Senku said after asking the hunting team to fetch a sheep or a boar. "We don't have the materials necessary to make guitar strings like the ones from our era, so we'll have to go the traditional route. The three first strings made from animal guts and the three bass strings with a silk core, and coiled by gut strings. So while they take care of the guts, we'll go collect some silk."
"Silk, from worms? It'll take forever then." you followed him to gather whatever you needed for your expedition.
"Silkworms aren't the only one that produce silk, any insects which go through complete metamorphosis produce silk to make their cocoon, or Hymenoptera insects like bees and ants-."
"Ants?! Ants can produce silk?"
"Yeah, you got the weaver ants for example. They use silk to make their nest by braiding leaves together."
"Woaw~ I wanna see that!"
"But~ this kind looking for exists in south Asia and Australia, so we'll have to settle for spider webs and cocoons. Lucky for us, it's butterfly season, which means it'll be easier to find them."
"...Is there really no way for us to take a more modern approach?"
"Unless you give me all the component necessary to make nylon."
"Well you also said it was impossible to finish the cellphone, and literally overnight, I got you some scheelite."
"Haha, true. But no, seriously." he scratched his head. "The only ingredient we have is nitric acid, but even in the modern world we'd need some serious and intense chemistry work for the other ones." he looked at you. "Trust me, if there was a way, I'd gladly take it."
You smiled, knowing that he said that, not because he was also disgusted, but because he would've loved himself some serious and intense chemistry work.
The entire day was spent in the forest, looking for bugs, sometimes you had horrible encounters with the bigger ones or when spiders wouldn't let you guys take their home, but there were some nice moments too.
"Oh my god-Senku check it out!" you stopped and knelt down to look at a rock.
"What?" he walked up to you.
"A rhino beetle!" you pointed at the insect. "Look at him go!"
Senku sighed.
"(Y/n), this is not a school trip-Woah?" he said as you gasped.
You both noticed a second rhino beetle walking in the direction of the first one. Once they were facing each-other, they stopped moving. You could feel the tension between them.
"Ow shit." you leaned closer a bit. "Are they gonna fight?"
"It is mating season, they must be in competition for some female beetle."
The two insects walked towards each-other again.
"Don't let him take your girl!" you cheered. "My money's on the first one, 'cause he was there first."
"How do you know he was there first?" he smiled, leaning on a tree trunk.
"I just saw it in his glare. He went through some shit."
"What glare? What'd his backstory?"
"Uh..." you waved your hand, not looking away from the fight. "I'm too focused to improvise something for him."
Senku chuckled, he guessed he could let you have this little break. Plus watching you cheering on your beetle-boy was funny. And at some point, though he never said anything, he got into it as well.
The two beetles were pushing each-other, trying to throw there opponent away. You and Senku were staring intensely, this fight was more full of tension than both of you expected. After a while, you gasped when your beetle-boy was thrown away, flying high in the air, it bumped on Senku's chest who then caught the insect in his hand. You gasped.
"You saved the boy!" you stood up.
"Kukuku, you're welcome." he looked down at him.
"Look at his horns." you looked closer. "They're different from the beetles we had, aren't they?"
"Must be the thousands of years of evolution." he poked the horns. "They're slightly bigger and pointier."
"It's weird though how things changed only slightly, it has been more than 3,700 years."
"Evolution doesn't go that fast."
"...I said more than 3,700 years!"
"Yeah, and it takes millions for species to develop."
"Oh yeah, okay that makes more sense."
After saying goodbye to the boy, you went back to the task at hand.
You noticed Senku staring at a tree branch, with almost unblinking eyes, motionless.
"Senku?"
Without looking away, he gestured for you to come closer to check it out. Curious, you stood beside him and gasped. It was a cocoon, but that one has just beginning to hatch, you could see it wiggle around. You let out a little 'oh' and stared in silence beside him. The process was very slow, but almost hypnotizing, you didn't realized how much time have passed. The little crack was getting bigger and you began to see a bit of the insect's orange-brown color.
"Hurry up! We need your cocoon!" Senku exclaimed, making you giggle.
But your smile quickly faded away when you noticed the particular shape of its antennas.
"They look like feathers." you mumbled.
When the head popped out you let out a shriek, surprised at how big it was compared to the cocoon, and you instinctively grabbed Senku's sleeve, whose eyes widen.
"How lucky, it's a silk moth! Their silk are resistant and elastic!"
"Cool..." you said, keeping a certain distance in case it flies into your face. "Oh you can still see some green from the larva state!"
You were both mesmerized and disturbed by this scene of nature. You waited for it to completely get out, then it began to walk away.
"Okay, it's done now, we can take the silk right?"
"Well the metamorphosis isn't complete yet. Now he's gonna go somewhere safe where his wings can expand." Senku kept looking at it. "Say goodbye to the boy (Y/n)."
"I will not." you began to carefully take the cocoon.
"What do you have against moths? You were fine with the beetle."
"Well beetles have shells which is kinda cute, and they have those little horns too. Moths have this weird fluff and also they're big, and if you look closely at their face you can...uh, see their demon form."
Senku chuckled and you both continued onward.
When it was getting dark, you decided to get back home and you passed by that spot again. The moth's wings had now double in size, and the insect was flapping them and moving around, but it didn't move from its spot on the tree.
"What's it doing?" you asked.
"He's doing stretches."
"Like, working out?"
"Yeah, he needs to warm up for the night."
You smiled, you were also warming up to it.
"You're alright boy." you pointed at it. "Sorry I was so disgusted the first time I saw you."
"In the first seconds of his life, he got someone to talk shit about him."
You laughed.
"Yeah but now we're cool."
The silk moth's wings twitched widely. You yelped and pushed Senku in front of you as a meat-shield.
"As long as I'm as far away from it as possible."
He puffed a chuckle.
After the first day, you figured that with just the two of you, it'd take months to get enough silk to make strings. So you gathered a team with Kohaku, Yuzuriha and Suika. Yo also tagged along and he ended up pestering a bunch of hornets. To get away from them, he jumped into a river, but it wasn't as deep as he expected, so he jumped right into some sharp rocks. You had to patch him up after that.
"You have like, THE worst of luck." you said.
"Or maybe! It was all part of the plan!"
"What plan?"
He seemed to be thinking really hard for a moment before looking into your eyes with the cheesiest of smile.
"I get to be alone with you."
You raised an eyebrow.
"Uh-hu." you exhaled and went back to your bandaged.
Yo closed his eyes, overwhelmed by loneliness and rejection.
Overall, it took around a week of intense work for the six of you to gather enough silk. Good for you, you weren't there when they prepared the guts into strings. A few days of preparation later, you had your instruments in your hands. A large smiled formed on your face and you prepared yourself to play it. But it turned out than it was beyond out of tune. So it took you some extra time to tune it properly. Despite that, you were very impressed by how the strings turned out. You would've never tell it was made from silk and guts.
"So (Y/n), you said this 'guitar' was used for different types of music, correct?" Ruri asked. "What kind of music?"
"Well there's the most obvious of all, where only a guitar or a piano can be used, it's called ballad." you explained. "It's mostly love songs."
"Love songs?"
"Yeah. It's basically what it sounds like. A lot of people fall for musicians thanks to that, when they write a song just for the person they love. At least, that's what I heard."
"People fall in love because of a song? I don't understand."
"Yeah I don't really get it either. I guess you just have to experience this kind of thing." you smiled at a non-existent camera. "And we'll experience it soon enough! Haha!"
Soon enough, the guitar was tuned and you played a few scales. But while thinking about what piece to play to commemorate this instrument, you thought of something, and in the end you didn't play anything.
Now wasn't the time.