Author: Lurina

134: Happy Ending (𒐁) - The Flower That Bloomed Nowhere | Royal Road

Ran had mentioned the 'cook' in passing, but I hadn't processed the implications fully until I actually went for dinner. But there she was, standing in plain sight when I eventually stumbled into the dining hall after Seth and Ptolema had shown up to tell me it was ready and, knowing them less well, I'd felt too awkward to tell them I didn't have an appetite.

I only saw her as she was serving the food, but there was no mistaking it. Balthazar had spoken the truth: It was the woman I'd known as 'Anna' for the latter half of the weekend-that-hadn't-happened. She was dressed completely differently - in the same grey uniform that Sacnicte and Yantho wore - and had shorter, straighter hair that tightly framed her face down to her chin, but there was absolutely no mistaking it.

And yes, the real Anna was there, too, seated at her same spot at the rear of the table. She even had her hood down to eat.

It was baffling. Well, I guess not unto itself - having someone step into what seemed like an isolated space and someone else coming out was easy to explain with just a hidden door, especially since the Order had kept everyone except Fang from even getting close. But the implications were baffling, because it meant that not only the entire inner circle, but Yantho and Sacnicte too, had to have known and kept it secret. And on top of that, Vijana, someone who was ostensibly just a chef, had possessed detailed knowledge about the Order and the sanctuary itself, and had been skilled enough at runescripting to rewrite half the stuff in the security center.

...actually, wait. Maybe it wasn't baffling after all?

I mean, we'd learned that the entire Order had been lying to us for the whole weekend. We'd learned that the device Fang had delivered at Neferuaten's behest hadn't even been used, and the entire series of events we'd experienced had essentially been following their script, albeit with tweaks as the situation developed. So the runes probably hadn't needed to be rewired at all. As for the information she had, well-- They could have just briefed her on a few things they thought might come up. It wasn't like my grandfather and the nature of the sanctuary hadn't been hot topics even prior to our conversation. And since she'd been facing away from me that whole time, it wouldn't even have been difficult to lie.

Hell, maybe she hadn't been briefed. Maybe she just pulled it all out of her ass on the spot. It's not like I'd be able to tell with all the other confusing garbage that had happened.

The only real points of confusion were oriented around Yantho, and when exactly this plan had been hatched in the first place. When you considered the fact that she was seemingly performing her role normally in this world, it gave the impression that it had been some sort of slapdash choice made out of circumstance. She obviously was an actual cook (I even went into the kitchen to see her physically cooking things, and she either knew what she was doing or was about the luckiest improviser in the planes) and wasn't purely someone they'd brought into the sanctuary under that pretense to play the role of 'Anna' for them. And then you had events that didn't seem to benefit the Order in any capacity. Again, why had Yantho been unconscious in that room? Who was the corpse we'd discovered?

But then, when considering what Theodoros had confessed, maybe that made sense too, even if not in the specifics. He said that Yantho had killed 'Vijana' (who he might have thought really was her) in an attempt to get the Order to abort their plan before it started, and then had Theodoros clean up the body later. Maybe the woman he'd killed had been the original imposter to-be.

It felt like a bit of a stretch, but you could sort of hypothesize an order of events.

1) On the first day, Yantho lures out Woman X to the security center/underground passageway, then kills her in one of the complicated ways Kamrusepa described to use the bioenclosure transition zone to obfuscate her death. However, he was injured or exhausted in the struggle, and ends up going back up to the kitchen - probably through the wine cellar - and collapsing, failing to properly clean up the scene.

2) On the next day, he has Theodoros go and fix it in the morning, not wanting to risk returning to the scene himself. Then he finds some way to innocuously alert the Order, who pull Vijana away before any people not involved in the conspiracy see her face. Either the Order plants the note like Linos claimed, or he was lying and Theo does it. The latter would explain why the initials would be wrong, since he didn't know her and could have just made a mistake.

3) Finally, when we all visit the security center on the nights the murders have begun, Yantho insists on being the one to examine the body to feign compliance with their plot to Linos. Or... Something?

No, wait. I'm missing something. Why would it matter whether or not Kam or I went down and looked instead? It wasn't like we knew either of their faces, so it'd be all the same. Why had he insisted?

And wasn't the idea of the body going undiscovered for almost an entire day a little too convenient? In fact, that now that I thought about it, Yantho had established the fact that Vijana was missing back when we'd found him unconscious, and the Order had seemingly gone along with it. In this conception of events, that made no sense. Because she wouldn't have disappeared. The Order had no reason to hide her from us until they learned Woman X was dead and retooled their plan. And Yantho suggesting she had was just inscrutable.

My chronology had to be wrong. The Order had to already know Woman X was dead.

But then Yantho asking Theodoros to clean up the body made no sense.

There was something I didn't understand. A false assumption, something I didn't know beyond any doubt, clouding my evaluation of the situation. Was it to do with Yantho? I'd considered briefly, based on how he'd died, that maybe he was another puppet-person like Zeno and Linos. That could be another explanation for why we'd found him like that in the kitchen. A puppet with its strings cut...

But that raised so many questions, I didn't even know where to start.

And again, did it even matter now? With everything else?

I just didn't know.

Dinner, which was once again being held in the much larger and more gothic dining hall with the fireplace, proceeded smoothly. Kam had been the most vocal (big surprise) about what Vijana should prepare, so we'd ended up with a mostly vegetarian assortment of food to choose from. She liked Saoic and Lluateci cuisine, so there was a lot of noodles, peppers, limes, and tofu, all marinated in strong sauces. There was even a bit of the colored rice Ran had been talking about at the start of the weekend.

I ignored everything healthy and ate some cheese-and-nut-stuffed bell peppers instead. They were delicious. I also got slightly drunk on the Order's wine, which was pretty good.

Now that everything was over, the mood was a lot more relaxed than the previous two nights. Everyone was chatting more casually, even the inner circle members, though Durvasa hadn't bothered to show up this time and Anna left almost right away. Bardiya had ended up in another argument, this time with Zeno, but the tone was different insofar as the latter seemed to have provoked it on purpose having heard what happened the other night. She (once again, they were inhabiting their female body) seemed to be fixated on annoying him, but Bardiya had only grown increasingly stoic. This had resulted in more of a wrestling match sort of atmosphere as everyone - excepting Ophelia and Mehit, who seemed sort of perturbed - watched with amusement or egged them on, with things escalating as people drank more and more wine.

"If you want to see what real failure in government looks like," Zeno declared, "you need only look at the originator of Paritism itself. Despite being the most populated single nation in the Mimikos, Mekhi is 7th in gross domestic product. 39th in per-capita. Behind Turaggoth. Behind half the Rhunbardic Exarchates. It barely beats the Settler's Coast, and half the people there have their brains damaged from the Alliance ripping out their Wyrms after the Great Interplanar War." She snorted. "That's what you want for every country in the world? A broken system? A failed experiment?"

"I hope you'll pardon me being a bit of boorish nationalist, Zeno," Neferuaten cut in, smiling to herself as she wound noodles around her chopsticks, "but it's perhaps a little loaded to refer to something that's been going for - let's see - coming-up-on 800 years an 'experiment', don't you think?"

"Oh, don't get pedantic at me, you hag," she said, poking the air with her fork. "It is absolutely an experiment, at least on a relative timescale. Mankind has been a mercantile species since the damn great flood. You don't breed that out of the collective consciousness with a dozen centuries of distributing property through lottery while pretending it's not making everyone with sense fucking depressed."

"I will happily assent that the Mekhian system is not without its own problems," Bardiya said calmly, as he placed a pepper in his mouth. "For whatever its virtues, it is ultimately still a top-down system that stifles dissent through the use of state violence, and often embraces reactionary social sentiment under the pretense of stability. Yet to frame a system which characterizes itself through prioritizing egalitarianism and quality of life over economic productivity as a failed because it is insufficiently economically productive feels akin to condemning a heifer on the basis that it cannot match the speed of a horse."

"Is that right?" Zeno intoned musically, the delivery more condescension than words. "So you're saying it just, what-- It's just a meaningless technicality that they don't produce shit of value? That the country sits in the corner of the world stage jacking itself off without even being able to afford lube?"

"That's not what I'm saying," Bardiya responded flatly.

"Oh no, I'm sure they'd agree with you!" Zeno ranted, faux-laughing mockingly as she spoke. "I'm sure all the Mekhian children who are still playing games from a century ago on their shitty, state-issued logic bridges would agree with you. I'm sure the Mekhian engineering guilds- oh, I'm sorry, 'state cooperatives' - who can't get any research and development done because they're constantly bleeding arcanists to countries that will actually reward their presence would agree with you. I'm sure mothers who have to tell their children, 'oh, I'm so sorry we have to live in this shitty hovel, dear, but you know, it's all so worth it if you think about it, because Amet the world famous physicist down the street, who actually made something of his miserable little life, has to live in a shitty little hovel too! And you know, one day - when you're all grown up and living as an unmotivated layabout after realizing going to university would be pointless - the kindly hand of the government will reach down and gift you a shitty little hovel all of your own--"

"Y'know, the Mekhian average house size is actually one of the biggest in the Mimikos," Seth said. "Only Irencan ones are bigger, and that's 'cause they're psychos who build cities like they're designing a giant office complex."

"Hey!" Ptolema objected, frowning. "Minos is a beautiful city!"

"They did rather name it after the labyrinth for a reason, Ptolema," Kam pointed out, giggling as she sipped from her wine.

"There's gardens everywhere, and it's so convenient!" Ptolema continued, ignoring the interjection. "You're never more than five minutes from a grocer or a tram stop!" She huffed indignantly. "If you wanna talk about cities designed by psychos, you should be talkin' about Old Yru. It's like being in a forest made out of bronze and grey rocks, and I'm always scared I'm gonna fall off something."

"I think I'm falling off something with this conversation," Linos muttered jovially. "Sacnicte, could you pour me another shot?"

"It doesn't matter if the houses are big," Zeno continued dismissively. "It's about what they contain. And what they contain is a bunch of old garbage from the 13th century because everyone is broke."

"Poverty is a relative concept," Bardiya spoke, his tone patient but grave. "It is true that we in the Mnemonic nations have created the conditions for a thriving luxury economy. But that increasingly comes at the expense of necessities for many. Housing. Food. Gas. And community welfare. The frailty of the supply chains concerning those resources, despite replication arcana conferring theoretical abundance, was arguably the greatest cause for the revolution." He sipped from his water. "But to meet you on your terms, governments will obviously design metrics that favor them - that frame other societies as playing the same 'game', so to speak - but if we're comparing them, I would note Mekhi is ranked at 5th in terms of declared happiness. I would argue that is significantly more important than economic productivity."

"Well it's not," Zeno countered. "Fuck me-- Even if you accept such an ambiguous data-point, do you seriously think it matters, on the big picture level, if the average plebeian is happy?"

Bardiya glanced up from his food, seeming a little thrown off by Zeno's extreme bluntness. "...I would say it's somewhat reductive to dismiss it, professor," he stated, raising an eyebrow.

"You're so naive it's painful," Zeno chided him, with an irritated shake of the head. "If everyone had your attitude, humanity would have gone extinct in the collapse. We'd probably have never figured out the steam engine. Your ideology is nothing but bleeding-heart short-termism, pretending the universe isn't competitive by nature so you can focus on coddling people, willfully ignorant of how it will come back to bite you. Do you know how homo sapiens beat out the neanderthals? They were more productive. How the Hellenes and Phoenicians crushed the tribes of Western Europe? They were more productive. How the Assyrians and Seresians colonized outer Asia and Makaria? Because they were more productive."

"I believe that was in fact smallpox," Hamilcar commented neutrally in his mechanical voice.

Zeno scowled as several people laughed. "Will you people stop fucking harrying me?"

I didn't really contribute to the conversation other than occasionally laughing and nodding a little. It still felt wrong, deep in my bones, to see them all like this. Every time I looked at them, I saw their decomposing corpses in my mind's eye. Bardiya's every word reminded me of his shattered face.

I knew these people could be driven to slaughter one another. That many of them could be keeping awful secrets even now... Or maybe not.

I wished I could just forget. If only I'd taken Samium's book in this reality, maybe it would be good for at least that much.

When dinner was over, everyone fanned out into the rest of the floor for some final more informal conversations with the council members. I saw Kam corner Zeno with her most mechanically deferential smile as Ezekiel was in the process of sucking up to him, while Hamilcar spoke with Ran and Ptolema. Linos was comforting a visibly uneasy Ophelia. Bardiya seemed content to relax and talk with Yantho by the logic bridge in the main hall. Only Seth and Theo seemed to have excused themselves.

I just sat around on one of the sofas, feeling too awkward to go to bed yet. Eventually, Neferuaten approached me again, having a look on her face like I was a wet cat she felt a compulsion to take care of. She sat next to me, a glass of some hard liquor in her hand.

"Been quite a weekend, hm?"

"Yeah," I said, looking down at my clasped hands. "I guess."

"I know I said you shouldn't feel obligated, but as your former teacher, I do feel I should recommend you network with Hamilcar just a little before the night's over," she told me. "I know he comes across as a little intimidating - with the, well, giant mechanical legs and all - but he's a surprisingly helpful person to know when it comes to getting academic introductions. I owe my position in the House of Resurrection to him, among other things." She chuckled to herself. "He's a much gentler more soft-hearted type than you'd expect, too. He always sends me birthday gifts and cards at the holidays. It's almost a little ridiculous."

"...sorry," I said, in a small voice. "I have some, uh, stuff on my mind. I'm not sure I could really hold a conversation right now."

She raised her brow slightly, then smiled softly. "...I see." She sipped from her glass. "Well, that's fine. The utility of these events are overblown anyway. I can always introduce you another time."

"Mm, I appreciate it," I mumbled.

She nodded contentedly, then cast her eyes around the room, eventually looking to regard Ran. "Your friend has been at it more than I expected today, even if she's obviously pushing herself a little. I'd got the sense that she was rather unhappy to be here at first, so I'm glad she's at least getting something out of it."

I gave a stiff smile, still looking at the ground. "Ran's always been good at pushing herself, I guess... And making the best of things."

"Her presentation yesterday was extremely good," Neferuaten went on. "Perhaps the highlight of the entire affair. She's got a promising career in medical scholarship ahead of her."

My expression stiffened further. "...I don't even know if she really wants one," I said, very quietly. "She only really became a healer in the first place for my sake."

Neferuaten raised an eyebrow. "How do you mean?"

I exhaled, closing my eyes. "Never mind. I don't-- I don't really want to get into it."

She nodded sympathetically, "Well, for whatever it's worth, I did sense some genuine passion in her yesterday. Sometimes the paths by which we come to our callings aren't always what we expect. I never particularly wanted to be a healer until circumstance compelled it, but..." She chuckled again, putting a hand to her chest and adopting a tone of faux-pride. "Well, I think I'm rather good at it, if I do say so myself."

I laughed slightly. "I suppose so..."

Neferuaten looked at me fondly in silence for a moment, then turned back towards the wider room. "I'm not certain I'd be able to this late into the weekend, but would you like me to try and arrange for you to speak to Samium again?" She set her glass down, placing her hands on her lap. "I know you don't want to talk about it, and I won't pry. But it's hard not to conclude that something happened."

I made a sullen expression. "No, it's fine. Don't worry about it."

"If you're certain," she said, with an accepting nod.

A few moments passed. The shadow of one of the planar objects from the orrery passed over us.

"Grandmaster," I asked, "what... Made you like me? Back at the university?"

She scoffed. "That's a little bit of an awkward question to ask, Utsushikome. It's hard to really self-evaluate when it comes to violating one's own professional morals."

I didn't say anything, just looking up at her. I'm not sure what exactly was going through my mind.

Her eyes looked like they glazed over for a few moments, and she turned towards the tall ceiling of the hall. She wrinkled her lip.

"It's a little dire," she eventually said. "But I suppose you reminded me of myself, when I was young."

At just a little past 11, Linos - the only Order member who hadn't undergone the Allagiypnou Process - started to get tired, and that ended up being the trigger for everyone deciding to go to bed. We headed collectively back to the abbey, and while several of the others decided to stay up a little later in the lounge - or go out to the bathing area again, as Seth fielded - I didn't. I climbed the stairs and returned to my room.

Once I'd undressed, I took out my acclimation log out of habit, but ended up just staring at it listlessly. It wasn't like I'd thought the habit was meaningfully accomplishing anything in years, but now that I had confirmation that there was no hope, it was like a spell had been broken, and it made me feel sick to even look at it. Yet the idea of going to bed without performing the ritual felt wrong. So I was stuck, just sitting there in front of the mirror. I couldn't even look at myself. At Shiko.

After a while, it felt like a dam in my heart burst, and I suddenly, finally, had no choice but to look the truth in the face. That what I had done could never be undone. That no one would ever look out of these eyes again but me.

By then it was very late at night, and my mental state was such that the events felt jumbled. I ended up heading over to Ran's room in the dark and thumping on the door, waking her up. She didn't seem angry at me - almost like she'd been expecting this - and just let me sit on her bed and talk at my own pace.

I didn't cry. With everything else I didn't talk about hanging over me, it felt like I couldn't relax enough to do so. But I managed to pass on the answer Samium had given me in full, more or less. Ran had barely reacted, just nodding in silence. She'd obviously inferred this already from the way I'd been behaving, as anyone with a brain would have and she essentially already conveyed back in the graveyard.

...gods. Now that I thought about it, she'd probably sent Sacnicte to my room in the morning because she was afraid I'd done something. That was grim.

After I was done, I didn't know what to say for a while. So we just sat there in the dark, side by side.

I should have said that I was sorry. Sorry for dragging her through this futile endeavor for so many years. Sorry for ruining 12 years of her youth. Sorry for using her love of the girl I'd murdered to make myself feel like I still had a faint hope of redemption.

But instead, the listless words that left my mouth were just "what should I do now?"

She sighed deeply. "Well, you did your best, I guess," she said, almost casual in her resignation. "...or, well, we did. We went all the way to the top of the chain. Probably above and beyond what would have been a reasonable point to give up."

I nodded distantly.

"I think we can pretty safely say there's fuck all left to try, so..."

"So... What?" I asked, my voice frail.

She closed her eyes, making a flat expression. "So... That's it."

"That's it?"

"That's it," she repeated. "We were looking for an answer. We got it. So we let it go."

"Let it go?"

She frowned at me, irritated. "Gods, Su. Am I talking to a fucking parrot?"

I flinched backwards. "S-Sorry."

"No, it's-- It's okay." She clasped her hands in front of her face for a moment, trying to gather her thoughts. "What I mean is, it's over. We put all this behind us and just... I dunno. Move on with our lives. Whatever that means." She grimaced. "Shit. This is coming out wrong. Too damn tired..."

"I mean... It's okay, but... What do you mean, move on with my life?" I flopped my arms to my sides. "It's not my life to move on with. It's Shiko's. You always said so."

"I've said a lot of shit," she said tiredly.

"If we can't bring her back, if I'm holding this all for someone who'll never be back... What does that mean?"

"It means you're released," she said. "Obligation fulfilled. Did absolutely every-fucking-thing you could, didn't work, it's finished. You're free to do whatever you want." She rubbed her eyes again. "I said this to you before, didn't I? Back in the carriage."

I winced. My eyes watered a bit, but I still didn't cry properly. "You can't say that, Ran. Not after all this."

"Why not?" she confronted me, a little frustrated. "Why can't I say it, Su?"

"Because you can't!" I declared, my voice cracking. "You can't just-- You can't act like someone's life works on-- On missing pet rules, or something!" I flailed my arms like a child, grimacing. "Didn't you always say that? That it's Shiko's life, and I don't have a right to live it, to do anything with it that isn't trying to save her? Even that day, after I tried to-- To jump off the--"

"Fuck what I said," she cut me off. "Forget it." She shook her head sharply. "It's your life. Get a girlfriend, quit the academy, strip naked in front of a mirror as much as you want or piss in the fucking street if you feel like it. Get rid of your stupid braids! Take all the garbage I told you back then and pretend you never heard it. Shit, pretend none of this happened if you want!"

"That's horrible!" I said painfully. "I couldn't do that to her--"

"'Her'? There is no 'her'," she declared. "There's only two ways you can interpret the situation, right? Either Shiko is just a part of you, in which case I'm talking to 'her' right now, or she's dead and doesn't give a shit one way or the other. Either way, nobody's actually getting wronged. It's just some bullshit we made up based on the assumption this could magically be fixed. But it can't be fixed, so fuck it!"

"I did this to her!" I hissed, clenching my fingers. "I killed her! I don't have a right to just take over her life!" I gripped the back of my scalp in manic frustration, craning my neck towards the ground. "You're the one who's supposed to be telling me this!"

"Gods," Ran said, exasperated. "This is my fault."

"It's not your fault," I said quickly. "It's my fault. This is all my fault. I shouldn't have... I shouldn't..."

"Okay, look. Su, look at me. Look at me."

She took hold on the sides of my face, squishing my cheeks and forcing me to meet her eyes. Her gaze was fixed in a painful grimace.

"I was wrong, okay? I was a stupid kid upset about something fucked up happening to a person I liked. It's not your fault, you didn't kill her. Hell, even if you had killed her, it wouldn't matter at this point! You've spent twelve years trying to-- To..." She bit her lip in frustration, like she just couldn't find the words she wanted, no matter how deeply she searched. "...you remember what you said to me? That sometimes you're worried that you don't even feel guilt, and the only reason you've been trying to make things right at all is because enough of her will is still in you, and hates what's happened?"

"Y-Yeah," I mumbled, my face going red.

"What do you think she'd want now? Do you think she'd want to just die? Or would she want things to be as okay as they can be, even if things are permanently fucked?"

"I don't... I don't..."

She took a sharp breath. "If there's anything left of her, and there definitely is, it's part of you now. And if you don't want to be told that you can do whatever you want, then-- Then you have a responsibility, okay? A responsibility to that part of her. To everything she hoped for and cared about. If you can't let this go, then let it tell you what to do!"

"Again, forget all the shit I said. I shouldn't have treated you like a different person. I shouldn't have acted like this was that simple. I shouldn't..." She bit her tongue. "Right now, I'm looking at your face. Utsushikome of Fusai. That's you, okay? It doesn't matter if you remember being someone else, because those are just thoughts. No one else knows about this. We can just let it go." She swallowed. "It's fine."

I felt an awful, sharp feeling in my chest, like a razor carving through my heart. My face twisted in a horribly pained, mournful frown. I averted my eyes.

"I said look at me, Su," she insisted. "Look at me!"

I looked back. Her eyes were wet too, gleaming in the shadows. But even though she'd made the request, she didn't seem to know what else to say. She just looked at me, the frustration in her features softening slowly into a gentle sorrow, like air slowly deflating from a punctured balloon.

And then, to my surprise, she was the one to properly cry, recoiling her face as painful, hoarse sobs escaped her throat. I held her in my arms. I felt like scum.

I was scum.

I ended up staying in Ran's room, though that phrase implies a lot of stuff that didn't happen. We'd just ended up lying there, her at a seeming loss for words, until eventually I'd somehow fallen asleep, probably having exhausted myself from wandering around the sanctuary all day and tying myself in mental knots. When I'd come to at about 5 in the morning, I saw that she'd excused herself from the bed, having taken a pillow and gone to sleep on the rug.

I laid the blanket over her and went back to my room, my mind feeling emptied. I showered again, got dressed, and then just sat on my bed until dawn.

I had breakfast punctually, and this time did my best to act normally. I watched everyone get a final round of advice from Linos and some more personal well-wishes towards me and my mother and father, which I smiled and nodded along to while trying not to think about how he was a compulsive liar who I would probably never trust again, regardless of whether what I remembered had been a counterfactual fantasy.

Then, at 11, we gathered our bags and he, Hamilcar, Neferuaten and Sacnicte saw us off. Fang was with us this time, though not Balthazar-- Presumably he'd be departing separately with Zeno.

"I shall say again, it has been an honor to host you all for this 708th Conclave of the Universal Panacea," Hamilcar said in a dignified tone, standing with his staff beside Aruru and addressing our assembly in the garden. "You each and all have promising futures ahead of you in the realm of arcane healing, and I pray we have managed to impress some small amount of our wisdom and knowledge that you shall carry forward in the years ahead."

"The honor was ours, Grandmaster," Kamrusepa replied. "Thank you for hosting us. It's been a pleasure."

Hamilcar nodded firmly in reply. "I hope we shall meet again, and I wish you all a safe journey home."

We were split off into two gendered groups again, as weird as that seemed, and escorted to our respective transposition chambers. I mentioned to Neferuaten that I'd contact her later, and she said that was fine.

Even up until the very final moment, I'd still been expecting something to go wrong in the back of my mind. During the nightmare version of the weekend, we'd had the prospect of escape tangled in our faces over and over, only for it to be snatched away. It felt like that pattern would continue.

But in the end, nothing happened.

We sat in the transposition chamber, waited for our time again, and just like that, we were back in the Empyrean Bastion.

It was the Monday of a new week. And our class trip to the Conclave of the Universal Panacea had come to an end.