Author: Lurina

172: Nostalgia Trap (𒐆) - The Flower That Bloomed Nowhere | Royal Road

Inner Sanctum Underground | 9:33 AM | ∞ Day

"Following me?"

"Following you," she repeated slowly, as if I were a child that might not understand the words. "Stalking. Observing your movements."

"Just physically, you mean?" I asked, thrown off. "On foot?"

"Or in the air, yes."

"I--" I paused for a moment, trying to articulate why this question felt as silly as it did. "Do people even do that, here?" I eventually managed. "Since everyone can use the Power so easily, wouldn't you just use Divination if you wanted to find out what someone is doing?"

I hesitated for a moment as I finished. Actually, that was kind of a creepy thought. The stuff I could do with the Death-Sensing Arcana, or even more advanced tricks like Moment-Emulating Arcana, were ultimately small potatoes compared to the kind of things the school could accomplish with multiple people and large quantities of eris. Assuming your brain could stand the cacophony of incoming information, you could theoretically track thousands of people at once down to minute details of information - what they were saying, hearing, their heartbeat...

"No," the woman dismissed me bluntly. "That would be too easy to detect. They'd be trying to keep it plausibly incidental."

Easy to detect for everyone else, maybe. "Well, then no," I told her. "I haven't seen anyone. But then, I haven't exactly been in the state of mind to pay close attention to my surroundings."

"I see." She made another note.

"Why would someone be following me?" I asked. "Is someone?"

"You are a popular woman, Miss Fusai," she said without looking up, her tone without humor. "I've received several reports of people of import taking some notice of your arrival, even if I can as of yet only theorize as to why."

"What sort of people?"

"One of my superiors on the assembly, for a start," she explained. "Nabonassar, one of the permanent members. As well as the Last Mountain, a prolific extremist organization."

My eyes boggled. "Wh-- Why would they be interested in me?" I asked. "I don't know anyone here."

Maybe they know about the hourglass thing, somehow? It's not like I remember whatever I told people the last time I was awake.

"I just told you that I can only theorize," she replied with a hint of aggression, making it clear I would not be permitted to turn this into a conversation where I was the one asking questions.

"What do you mean an 'extremist organization'?" I tried regardless.

"Religious fanatics," she said harshly. She flipped the page on her board. "I also have a more direct report of someone seen lingering outside the property in which you are currently residing in the valley, albeit only for a short time yesterday evening. While obviously not definitive, I would suggest keeping an eye open for such things in the future, and to notify the Waywatch at once if you have any suspicions."

I didn't know what to say. My eyes wandered to the corner of the room.

"Setting aside the issue of you being monitored," she continued, "has anything of particular note happened to you since your arrival in the Crossroads? Anything unusual?"

"Not really," I said, my instincts making the decision before I'd even made a conscious choice to lie. "I mean... everything here seems unusual, but nothing in particular I haven't had explained."

She narrowed her eyes. "You left the Domain overnight yesterday. Where did you go?"

"My own Domain," I answered truthfully. "I was experimenting with some of the things a friend told me I could do here... with the Power, I mean. Or whatever you call just being able to do that here."

"You are lying to me," she stated. It wasn't phrased as an accusation, per-se, but rather a statement. It almost felt like she was saying it more to herself.

"I-- Why would I be lying?" I asked, my poker face probably crumbling faster than an Inotian cavalry line.

"You've likely been fed information that makes you concerned about being expelled from the Crossroads by the same people who have involved you in their subversive efforts," she again stated. "You've been to the Manse. Your window of absence lines up neatly."

"No I haven't!" I denied fruitlessly.

Moron. You should have pretended that you didn't even know what it was.

She made another note in the file, then snapped it shut sharply. "I'm going to give you a warning, It is the same warning I give to every relatively fresh instance that comes to this town, but I would strongly recommend that you listen especially closely." She gave no chance for me to respond before launching into the meat of it. "Right now, you are still attached to the life and values you believe you held in the Reflection, and that is not something that will change for a very long time. This makes you pliable and easy to manipulate, but more importantly than that, you cannot understand the mindsets of your peers."

My lip twisted slightly as I thought back to what I'd seen in Bardiya's room. That was certain.

"That makes you a problem. For the Crossroads, since you seem to be electing to stay here. For me." She looked at me severely. "What do you currently see as the ultimate goal in your life, Miss Fusai? Above everything else?"

I blinked. How can I possibly be expected to answer that? "I-- I don't know. To be happy?"

Been on the back burner for a while, but, y'know, in an ideal world.

For some reason, she looked slightly displeased at this response. Like she'd had one in mind for a snappy retort, and I'd subverted her expectations. "What motivates almost everyone here in reality is, primarily, boredom," she went on regardless. "For a small but not insubstantial percentage, that manifests as an inability to accept the nature of the world. Who either envy the shadows of men that dwell in the Reflection, or desire some other, more specific impossible change to how things work here. Judging by your predicament, you may well have been one of them."

She looked at me with especially unfair-feeling judgemental regard. I shrunk in my seat. It had been a long time since I'd been considered young and unesteemed enough to be treated with this level of explicit hostility.

"There's no other word for it but a sickness. To those people, someone with your sort of delusion is like a balm. If not an explicit piece of the world they want to inhabit, then at least a tangibly loose piece of this one. A toy they can use to make their fantasy real, until the shine is gone and it's time to throw it away. I've seen it more times than I can count." She narrowed her eyes. "999 times out of 1000, the only person in the scenario who gets hurt is you. They aren't even serious about stirring the pot. But every so often..."

I waited for her to finish, but she trailed off outright, staring at me suspiciously. Finally, she set the file down on her desk, flicking a single loose strand of her tightly-bound hair from her eye.

"If you're wise, Miss Fusai," she resumed, "you'll cut ties with whoever is putting you up to this, and lay low until whatever makes you interesting becomes less so. And if you're especially wise, you'll come back here and give me honest answers. And keep an eye open on those around you." Her lips turned downward slightly. "And regarding the Manse. Whatever you've been told, it is futile to imagine you will get anything from it where your precursors have failed for time immemorial. But to even entertain a fantasy of upsetting the order of your world for your own personal indulgence speaks to an arrogance and self-centeredness that can only have been imported from the mortal world. I can't speak to my superiors, but if you can't wash it off quickly, I'm inclined to nip the problem in the bud regardless of who's pulling your strings."

"Do you have lawyers, here?" I asked. "I kind of feel like I should be talking to a lawyer."

"Here's your residency paperwork," she said, flicking a finger and causing a few sheets of parchment to fly from the folder. "You've been granted a guest pass for the next month with full access, after which there will be a review to determine whether you are eligible for full citizenship." She inclined a head towards the door. "You can show yourself out."

This just keeps getting better and better, I thought as I left the building, heading back into the square alone.

I wondered if it was even possible for the situation to keep getting more complicated. Not only was my entire life before the last few days fake and I was going to live in a weird afterlife forever, and not only was I (probably) uniquely cursed by a goddess who had some unspecified past relationship with me, but now I'd somehow become some person of interest in Dilmun at large.

It's not that surprising, the part of me that always liked to pretend nothing was ever a big deal said. Even the very first people you met had some idea of the story of what happened at the sanctuary, so the names of everyone there probably float around in certain crowds, even if it's not widespread knowledge. Combined with autospective dreaming apparently being rare enough to be noteworthy, it's not surprising some people would take notice.

'Some people'? A more skeptical part replied. Like a major politician? And a cult?

I sighed to myself. I wished I'd had the bravery to try and force clarification out of her. She was so scary, though! Gods, how had I lived so long while still being a doormat?

Whatever the case, this was going to make everything a little more difficult. For one thing, I was going to have to be a lot more circumspect in my activities. I was going to need to need to be a lot more careful about having conversations like the one I'd had with Bardiya, and visiting to the Manse again in the near term - and even in the long term, without doing a lot more to obfuscate my movements - was clearly out of the question.

I still didn't fully understand why they even cared so much about it. Like, the governor had been right - millions of years had passed without anyone solving it, and no one even knew exactly what doing so would even accomplish. Even I had only a little information; the Lady had stubbornly resisted clarifying the point beyond saying it had the potential to 'fix my problem', which didn't even per-se mean solving it. So why were they so worried?

I mean, you believe you can solve it even where thousands of people have failed over literal epochs, I pointed out to myself. In terms of magical thinking about the topic, I'm not sure you ought to be casting stones.

I grumbled at the cognitive dissonance. I wish I could just explain to these people that the only thing I cared about actually fixing was the fact I was going to die.

The other thing, of course, was that it was now going to be a struggle not to spend every moment here in a state of apparently-somewhat-justified paranoia. Who could be trying to watch me, and why? The fact that she'd asked me all those questions about what I remembered doing before awakening in Dilmun, despite that seeming completely irrelevant, felt like some kind of hint. But I knew so little about the different groups and actors here that speculating meaningfully felt impossible.

Learning more about the minutia of society here was definitely something I'd need to put on my agenda. Even setting that concern aside, there was probably a lot of useful knowledge about the Manse floating around that, even if it was uninformed of the critical context, could be helpful.

Probably want to find more members of the class, too, I mused. If they each remember their own version of the loop, those are bound to contain useful information.

I felt resolved. Even if this task was futile, I was going to make a fucking go of it. I wouldn't just lie down and disappear quietly, or even on the off-chance that Bardiya's warning had been correct, simply stop thinking and entrust what would happen to me to fate.

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The anxiety and indignance I'd experienced back in the governor's office had given me another shot of adrenaline, and a little more of the determination I'd had earlier had come back to me even if I was still exhausted to the point of delirium. First, though: Food.

Since I didn't want to have to go through the social interaction I'd need to grab anything from the stalls (especially since they'd probably expect conversation in lieu of any other form of compensation for their work), I went hunting around town for another self-serve cafeteria, or better yet another assembler. It was a bit of an adventure considering the charming but strange layout of the place, but I eventually found one of the latter in the fenced-off garden I'd spotted on my way out of the guardhouse, which seemed presently unused.

I asked it for a bowl of beef and noodle soup with half bison meat and bone marrow stock, which was perfect and I devoured ravenously. Then I took to the air, flying back to Ptolema's cabin as I'd originally planned.

When I knocked on the door, however, no one answered, and she wasn't around the back with the pigs - currently lounging in the sun, with the exception of a larger, black-furred one that was making a spirited effort to overturn the water trough for some reason - either. I thought again about calling her, but making her abandon whatever she was doing just to unlock a door for me felt almost ruder than having her escort me back.

I decided I'd wait at her porch for at least a while first. She had a couple of cloth chairs and a small table on it, and it was a nice day (did the Valley even have bad weather? Presumably it had to, unless the plants were all being kept alive using the Power) so there was a good chance It'd be easier to focus out here anyway, considering the state of the interior.

I'd picked up a pen at some point over the past two days, and other than the residency permit, the paperwork I'd been given seemed to also include some outlines of the Crossroad's laws and services that weren't legally important. I flipped them over, set them on the table, and took a seat.

All right, I thought. Let's look at this from the top.

The first thing to do was to cut the problem down a reasonable size.

Despite also introducing a pile of new, far more confusing questions, the conversation I'd had with the Lady had ultimately clarified two very important points: That the events of the loop were self-contained. Obviously there'd been a few exceptions to that in the one I'd experienced, but the rule was supposed to be that we'd all experienced the weekend as if it were the real thing-- With, as she'd put it, 'fidelity'.

That meant that the loops were - again, largely - self-contained. Though someone might have been responsible for initiating them and some people might become aware of what was really happening during one - like Fang, and eventually all of us by extension - there was ultimately no mastermind who remembered everything and was actively tormenting us using complete foreknowledge of what was going to happen.

I mean. Unless It was Balthazar.

I shook my head. No, that's not likely. He spent the whole weekend disinvolving himself as much as possible.

Except for when he shot me in the head.

I clicked my tongue. Why did Balthazar remember, come to think of it? I should have asked the Lady that when she was going over everything. Was it just another aspect of the loop breaking down, like the pantry and my moments of deja vu?

I sighed. We'll come back to him. Based on the data from the security center, he physically couldn't have done most of the murders, anyway.

Anyway: That meant the loops could largely be viewed in isolation, as well. All this stuff about how and why they'd been created, and these rules and borderline-supernatural beings governing and directing them, were not ultimately relevant to what was materially happening. It all had an explanation grounded in human terms; whodunnit, howdunnit, whydunnit.

So, at least in terms of the truth the Manse seemed to demand, all of that could be set aside.

So. In the conclave I remembered, other than all that stuff, what outstanding questions actually remained?

No, that's backwards. It's easier to start with the questions that were answered. What you know beyond any--

Yeah, yeah. So: What actually had I learned, back then?

First, I tried to come up with a list of everything strange that happened at the sanctuary, or at least the ones big and distinct enough that they couldn't have a mundane explanation or be rolled into something else. Start with the simple stuff first, then work from there. I tapped my pen against the table for a few moments, casting my mind back through the decades, then scrawled out a basic list.

1) Balthazar being invited to the sanctuary at all.

2) Yantho unconscious in the kitchen.

3) The corpse at the bottom of the armory shaft.

4) The strange behavior of Seth, Ezekiel, Theo and Bardiya.

5) Fang's sudden arrival with the artifact that fixes the Apega.

6) Youthful 'Anna'.

7) The masked figure I saw out in the water.

I took a breath. Those were the easy ones to think back on. From here...

8) Neferuaten's corpse hanging from the bell tower.

9) Bardiya's death in the abbey kitchen.

10) The bloodstain, broken floor and trail leading to the 'summoning circle'.

11) The sabotage of the sanctuary's defenses.

12) The human remains scattered in the mask room.

13) Sacnicte's poisoning, and Yantho's subsequent unexplained death.

14) Hamilcar and Lilith's betrayal.

15) The Order's initiation room, trashed and portrait--

I paused. Was I going to show this to anyone else later? Eh, fuck it.

--from grandfather's box, depicting Wen, displayed prominently.

16) Creepy room filled with books in weird fake language.

17) Samium's corpse in the bushes below his room.

18) Giant silhouette of a woman while someone shooting at us from the inner sanctum roof.

I paused. I'd been about to write about the whole story of the monster chasing everyone around the sanctuary, but then hesitated. If I included things I'd only heard about happening, that could quickly make this overcomplicated. No; it was better to keep it to mysteries I could personally confirm existed.

19) Fang shot in the room with the fake puppet monster.

20) Ophelia and 'Anna' disappear in an event (which seems to be) a contact paradox. Threatening message left on wall of bathing room.

21) Message left by Fang--

I stopped myself. Wait, no. That counts as time loop bullshit.

You know what? Let's just make a separate category.

I resumed.

21) Message left by Fang--

21) Mysterious and seemingly-abandoned hidden part of the sanctuary, containing various mysterious things including: Room filled with emptied cabinets. Note containing name of dropped-out Exemplary Acolyte. Larger, mostly emptied room containing strange induction bed. Library filled with extremely illegal books. Entropy-free grass.

22) Corpse of Mehit, Lilith, and Anna strung up on strange statue.

23) Linos doesn't have a brain when he's shot. (did he ever?)

Okay, that about did it for everything 'mysterious', since what followed was primarily a mix of extreme violence and actually straightforward information.

I pursed my lips. Obviously there were lots of strange little mysteries I was omitting here - the Phantasm-Projecting Arcana the security system had picked from underground a little after we'd holed ourselves up in the main hall, for example. Was I forgetting anything critical?

I blinked. Oh, right, of course. This just came up earlier.

24) The strange, key-like object Zeno gave me.

That was probably fine. I quickly added the final section:

CONFIRMED TIME LOOP CONTAINMENT ZONE
a) memory problems
b) all the stuff with the pantry
c) balthazar
d) fang and their note (even if a lot of it seemed pretty suspect)

Oh, and thinking about 'time' had reminded me of one more thing for the main list.

25) Physical clocks across the abbey mysteriously stopped just after 1 in the morning.

That one was one of the most inscrutable of all, now that I was thinking about it again. It'd seemed small at the time compared to everything else that was happening, but looking back, it was one of the few for which I couldn't even guess as to an explanation.

I sighed a little. Those 25 - a nice and elegant number - were the big questions that had arisen over the course of the tragedy, and pertained to it exclusively.

Of course, this method was imperfect. As much as I was trying to avoid it, it was perfectly possible that more of these were connected to the time loop after all; just because Fang was the only one who had announced having knowledge somehow passed down from another loop indirectly, for example, didn't mean there couldn't be others who were merely more subtle. That was something I could maybe seek clarification on later, since it seemed like it laid outside the parameters of the 'scenario', as the Lady seemed to term them.

But for the time being, it was simplest to just accept things as they were.

Now we could get to the answers. Once again excepting the stuff related to the time loop, the two major revelations at the end had been the Order's plan to fake their deaths, and Theo's confessed killings. While still mysterious in their own right - why the Order had wanted to do such a thing was a question that had persistently bothered me for my entire life - but between them, these cleared out, at least in part, fully half of this list.

I began a new table to reflect this... a lot of points ended up feeling more ambiguous than I'd originally hoped.

ORDER DEATH FEIGNING PLOT:

4) As confessed by Ezekiel and Seth, they were all in on it, and using it for their own plan to steal information.

7) This was one of the members of the Order trying to establish the whole avatar-of-death mythology that would be used explicitly by Hamilcar during the main event. (But how would they have got over there? We were sitting close to the pond the whole time, and everyone had been present in the conference room for the conclave just beforehand. Had they rushed straight there before we'd had a chance to head outside, just on the off-chance someone would look? Doesn't add up)

I was frowning significantly even writing this much, but that frown deepened once I reached Neferuaten on the list.

Had her death been faked? On the one hand, when I'd examined it - both initially, and again using Ran's workshopped camera - it had seemed like a sure thing... but then Linos's 'death' raised the possibility that the entire Order was using faked bodies, with real ones stored elsewhere. The security system hadn't given any indication to suggest that, of course, but that didn't mean anything. After all, the entire thing had been a setup from the start.

...but then I thought about something.

Rule 6. Once identified by the protagonist, all corpses shown are guaranteed to be both human remains, and dead.

I frowned sharply. Again, I was trying to keep this line of reasoning uncontaminated by any of the absurd context I'd gained here in Dilmun... but it was hard to avoid it. Since I was, as the playwright had said, the 'protagonist' of my scenario... did that mean I couldn't have got it wrong? That anything I was sure were human remains had to have been human remains?

That was how it worked in detective fiction, after all.

And then there was rule 3. 'All systems indicated cannot break their own rules defined by the narrative, unless indicated otherwise'. There had never been an indication that the security center had been tampered with. Did that mean it couldn't have happened? What did 'indication' even fucking mean?

I felt myself starting to go cross eyed.

I shook my head. No, I can't get sidetracked by all this right now. Stay focused on the mundane; we can clear this up later.

Even if you set aside the question of the body, there were other factors that left Neferuaten's death feeling ambiguous. The disruption in her room overnight that made it look like she'd left suddenly. Her trip to the Everblossom. She'd been among the council members to 'die' in the event eight months later in the real world, yes, which suggested she was part of the same conspiracy-- But it wasn't certain.

We'll leave her off this list for now, then.

10) Planned by the Order as confessed to by Linos.

11) Planned by the Order as confessed to by Linos.

12) Planned by the Order as confessed to by Linos. (Though it's not entirely clear who they belonged to, if not Durvasa. It had definitely been a human. I saw brain matter. Maybe his actual body, his faked death subverted by the real killer?)

I bit my lip. 13, Sacnicte and Yantho's death, was another complicated one. You could assume the Order had planned it, and Theo had seemed adamant as such. But... well, I'd come back to it.

14) Planned by the Order as confessed to by Linos. (Though based on Hamilcar's speech to us/Zeno at the end, he didn't want to go through with it? What was going on?)

17) Not mentioned by Linos, but possibly part of the Order's plan if he was also involved (despite terminally ill anyway?). Small possibility I killed him by tossing him out the window and don't remember. Hopefully I didn't.

18) Planned by the Order as confessed to by Linos.

23) Presumably fake body controlled by logic bridge using Zeno's technology (Did he survive? Where? Linos said the other members of the Order were really dead and the plan was ruined. How did he know?)

I furrowed my brow furtively at that inconclusive note, then outlined the next segment.

THEO KILLS PEOPLE IN PARANOID RAMPAGE

3) Claimed to be killed by Yantho, with him cleaning up the body. But that wasn't Vijana-- She was the real identity of the younger 'Anna' we saw. So who was the body? Was Yantho lying? Was it even a real corpse?

9) Again, planned, but claimed Bardiya ultimately committed suicide through smashing his head into the barrier. (Why?)

20) Confessed to explicitly. But he couldn't/shouldn't have written the message on the wall - he was unconscious with the rest of us. Bodies of Ophelia and Vijana never seen due to nature of murder method, making situation ambiguous.

I paused. Was that... really it?

Gods. At the time, it had really felt like Theo was confessing to being the mastermind behind everything, but in retrospect he'd barely accomplished anything. It wasn't enough to make me feel bad for him - he'd still murdered Ran - but the impression those three events gave was that he was just a stooge being made an accomplice in scenarios he didn't fully understand.

All of those theories Kam had made about him right before the end had really been giving him too much credit. I wondered how much he'd even been deliberately manipulating everyone during the chase around the headquarters, and how much he'd stumbled into it all by complete chance.

When had she told me that? What was I... remembering, exactly?

I set my pen down for a moment. My eyes boggled.

This was strange. I'd obviously thought a lot about the events of the alternative conclave over the course of my life... and so I was certain that the conversation I was recalling right now, where Kamrusepa spelled out her theory of Theodoros being the killer in exhaustive depth, hadn't been in my memories two days ago.

In fact, it didn't even make sense to have happened; we'd been right at the climax of the final argument, with her preparing to shoot Linos in the head. It wouldn't have all just stopped to let us have some extensive one-on-one about the specifics of how the sanctuary's security system and our respective attitudes to self-preservation and pursuing our goals.

Thinking about it all felt like I was touching a loose thread in my cognition. Like I was mixing the events of a drama I'd watched with reality.

I stared into the middle distance for a moment, then rubbed my eyes slowly. This place is going to drive me insane. Even if I somehow figure this out, I'm going to spend the next million years in a vegetative state.

Another thing I'd have to ask about later. For now, though, I'd finished outlining the basics of what I understood. 12 points. Half, roughly and even then many had elements of potential skullduggery, especially Ophelia and Vijana's death.

It would definitely be folly to take it all at face value, but it was still a foundation of things I could tentatively assume to be true until it became prudent to do otherwise.

From here, the next step was to build a list of questions. And then, with this new vantage point, find the easiest.