Author: Lurina

182: Death Masquerade - The Flower That Bloomed Nowhere | Royal Road

Inner Sanctum Underground | 9:33 AM | ∞ Day

I have two favorite echo games, depending on your definition of the word 'favorite'. The first, if you take 'favorite' to mean 'the one I like the most', is Twilight over Saneng, a horror game by eccentric scripting director Muyang of Kantau set in a small satellite city in the mountains of Daixue. You play as a college-aged man named Jun, who along with his perverted best friend Shui, childhood friend and on-and-off-girlfriend Biyu, and her misanthropic best friend Zhihao (the best character) set out to investigate a purposefully stupidly-named phenomenon known as 'the reckonbeckoning', where people are seemingly summoned to another world, returning either as corpses or with irrevocably changed personalities, refusing to discuss what transpired. The game is bait-and-switch that initially presents itself as a sort of story-driven collectathon - the gameplay orienting around finding and cataloging the various supernatural entities haunting the city, and charting their relationships via a sort of conspiracy board - but gradually devolves into an increasingly surreal and discordant narrative that leaves you questioning both the sanity and truthfulness of the characters and, by extension, the veracity of their discoveries. After a series of insane plot twists (and a boss fight against Shui, now transformed into a hermaphroditic slug monster (though possibly only symbolically, there's a lot of facets to the debate)) the surviving three eventually travel into the alternate reality, where they are forced to face their demons and systematically found wanting, unwilling to accept their true natures and desires. Virtually the entire cast dies, with the moral of the story being the folly of trying to systematize an ultimately unjust and incomprehensible world.

The Echo Chamber, the largest echo game journal in the Dai League, gave it two out of five stars, with reviewer Patomokai of Hiseyo describing it as an 'occasionally inspired but fundamentally mean-spirited title that seems to despise its own medium'. It fucking rules. As Fang would have put it, inject that shit into my veins.

On the other hand, if you take the definition as 'most frequently played', my favorite echo game is Save the Ship!, a puzzle game for children. In it, you play an ant named Antios from the planet Antiokheia, whose beetle-themed voidship is stranded in space with a low supply of fuel. The player must navigate around increasingly-complex obstacles in the frictionless vacuum using a finite amount of engine thrusts, with the goal being to either reach the end of the stage (on normal mode) or a new fuel tank (on campaign mode). The gameplay primarily revolves around timing the movements of the ship and making gut level judgements of how it will interact with the various obstacles; how much damage you can safely take bouncing off of things without damaging any part of the ship, which is divided into four segments - aft, starboard, port, stern - and what will propel you towards your goal vs. send you careening to your doom. A record board encourages you to complete stages as quickly and with as few thrusts as possible, which at the time the game was popular led to lively competition.

Though my memory means I could probably do it, I have avoided counting just how much of my time has been occupied playing the game, which means that the following statement is blessedly a mere educated guess: I have spent more time playing Save the Ship! then I have spent doing any other specific activity in my life. More than doing Thanatomancy research, more than thinking about my childhood regrets, more than I've probably even spent eating or sitting on the toilet. (Sleeping would beat it, though, if that counts.) It is a universal background noise that has conservatively occupied tens of thousands of hours of the 230-ish years that I have lived, or at least remember living.

I could not tell you in any concrete sense why I have done this, or even really what I like about Save the Ship!. Despite me normally being attracted to narrative-heavy experiences, there is almost no context as to what you're doing within the game whatsoever, with even the loose story I recounted a moment ago clarified only by the promotional material. I am also not particularly exceptional at the game-- Like, I'm good, but only in the sense that it's impossible to spend such an enormous amount of time on something and not be at least 'good'. It barely agrees with my actual skill set at all; even if they're decent, reflexes have always been my worst elementary skill in terms of being an arcanist.

Anything I could say would be extremely basic, applying just as well to a hundred other echo games I've played. I like how much time it gives you to think about what move you're going to make. I like how challenging it can be despite the simple premise. I like the sound when your ship bounces off something. I like how there's always some way to further improve.

Perhaps what distinguishes it is not what it does well, but the absence of ways that it's offensive. Another echo game I played a lot of, Mage Tower - a puzzle builder that was otherwise objectively superior - had stages that were marginally longer, taking about three minutes as opposed to one, but even this petty increase in commitment alone was enough to confer upon me a degree of hesitation that Save the Ship! simply lacked. It is a game that asks nothing of you beyond the moment, that casts no shadow in any regard. Less a game at all, maybe, but more of a mental chair. Something just engaging enough to forget everything else, like a kid jumping between the cracks in the concrete.

I often feel like human beings, when thinking about who we are, focus on our active traits whilst ignoring the negative space within ourselves, the sort of other who takes over when we simply don't have the energy to pursue our passions. You could perhaps associate that with the 'living as a spider' idea I've gone on about before, but I think it's more universal than that. Even the brightest of us, the Fangs of the world, surely spend the majority of our time reverting to some kind of baseline, massaging our brains according to their primal patterns.

So how much could that be said to be our 'real selves'? How much can be discerned about me from what I find myself doing when I want to do nothing?

Sorry, I don't really know where I'm going with this.

Anyway, the reason I bring this up is that, four days following that initial drafting of the outstanding questions of the conclave, I had, despite my initial passion, more or less stalled out. Ptolema had returned by evening that day - having been meeting some friends in the City - and, after rightfully expressing some unhappiness and confusion at me having disappeared for a whole day, then sat on her porch for hours instead of just contacting her - and, at dinner, I'd told her about my leads. She'd promised to ask around and try to put me in contact with Neferuaten (or Linos), Balthazar, Yantho or Vijana, but warned me that she not only had zero memory of meeting the latter in Dilmun but didn't even know who she was, the chef never having even appeared in her loop. So that idea was probably a wash for the time being.

After that, I'd resolved to deduce as much as I could in the meantime, whereupon I'd spent the next half-a-week doing absolutely fuck all.

Like, it was all well and good to decide to just figure it out, but really, who the hell was I kidding? It wasn't like I'd gained that much new information. So the entire thing took place in some artificial reality created by a maybe-goddess-maybe-esoteric-transmundane-phenomenon, big whoop! All that did was suggest some loose explanation for some of the more seemingly-supernatural events, like the pantry and the accounts that we found that somehow accurately described the run-up to Ophelia's death as people would have given them, and even in that sense it mostly raised more questions once you got to the nitty-gritty. It explained nothing about the unanswered murders (or even how some of the non-outstanding ones were actually performed), offered little clarify on the motivations of any of the council or the boys' group save for perhaps Neferuaten, and actually rendered some outstanding metaphysical questions around the affair even more confusing, like whether the fact we weren't in the real world somehow undermined Kamrusepa's Time-Inferring Arcana.

The more I thought about it all, the more little questions I remembered. Why had Durvasa covered up the arcane lens overlooking the conference room for the second half of the event? What was up with the 'favored piglet' thing-- Did that even happen? Why did Zeno seem to think I was my grandfather? Did Lilith actually shoot her own mother, or did Hamilcar, wearing the bird-spider costume, do it? Was Fang a fucking time looper or not?!

It was hopeless! Nothing made sense. And yes: I could have asked for more clarification on applying the Lady's weird rules from one of the Advisors, or read more of Kam's account, but it all just felt too overwhelming.

So after a few hours going in circles scribbling out tentative connections, I ended up spending more and more time just fucking around in Ptolema's living room. She brought the assembler out from her room so I could use it without butting into her personal space, and I'd started using it for requests beyond food and drink. Initially I just asked for a logic engine to help with my note-taking (which it couldn't, since the Tower of Asphodel didn't exist here, but it nevertheless produced a similarly-functioning replacement, which apparently still wasn't powerful enough to classify as an 'advanced computing tool'), but then it occurred to me that maybe it could replicate media, too.

And it could! Not all media, obviously - Nora would presumably be out of a 'job' were that the case - but anything remotely mainstream seemed to be on record. Thus, I'd slowly colonized the area around the Ptolema had made for me with various familiar objects: The novel I'd been planning to read next when I got my diagnosis, the next issue of a drama magazine I liked (which I read half of before realizing only a handful more issues would ever exist, and so decided to savor) and, yes, the echo maze for Save the Ship!.

(I also tried, out of curiosity, to ask if it could produce original fiction; it informed me this was banned in the Crossroads outside of communally-approved events, and that if I asked again it would have to notify the Assembly of my request, which of course resulted in me dropping the idea instantly. It was really going to be a while until I got any sense of this place's various taboos.)

Plus more straightforward stuff like a box of my favorite snacks. So that was where I was at: Spending all day in one room, eating snacks, ostensibly working but not actually working, occasionally reading but mostly just playing games. Generally living in my own filth in someone else's house.

On the morning of the fourth day, as I considered the possibility of asking the assembler to make me a copy of the historical strategy game I'd been just started before coming here so I could do something a little more involved that still wasn't what I was supposed to be doing, Ptolema - who was seeming progressively more perturbed about the situation - ducked in for a visit on the way to take care of the pigs.

"Morning, Su," she spoke, with a wary smile.

"Mmph," I said, as I stuffed a chocolate bar into my mouth, cross-legged on the bed, trying to navigate my ship around a colorful piece of debris. "Good morning."

"How's the, uh, investigation going...?"

Even her asking the question caused a twinge of anxiety in my gut. The last thing someone who is avoiding an obligation wants is to be reminded of it, doubly so when it's self-imposed. "It's going," I told her. "Got some theories about what really happened with Fang and Vijana before they found us in Samium's room kicking around."

This was a lie. I had been thinking about it, somewhat, but I didn't have any theories. At the time I'd assumed Fang had figured out enough to put Vijana on the spot and force her to go along with their plan to expose the conclave, but the combination of Fang having loop foreknowledge and Vijana's actual identity called too much into question. Plus, in Fang's version of events we found in the secret bioenclosure, they'd even gone down to check out the body that was supposed to be her, and had treated it like a legitimate, freshly-dead corpse. Since the other accounts at least represented what the testifying party would have said, was that true here, too? If so, why, and in what context? Was this (hypothetical) Fang just continuing the front their real self upheld to lull Linos into a false sense of security, or were they just (hypothetically) excluding the part where they confronted Vijana about her identity, with the corpse having been either manufactured artificially by the Order, or belonging to yet another unrelated actually-dead person?

What a nightmare. No wonder nobody had figured this out in a billion years.

"That's great," Ptolema, who would clearly have said this no matter what, said. "You've been at it a while, y'know. Why not take a break? There's this theatrical drama debuting today that's like a horror thing-- A golem girl goes rogue and kills a bunch of people or somethin' like that. The whole thing is supposed to last like 36 hours, but if we go tonight when it's like eight in, we can probably catch a few of the kills. I'll introduce you to a couple of my friends, too! What do you think?"

"I dunno," I told her, not commenting on the '36 hours' part. That sort of stuff rolled off my back at this point, at least. "That sounds more like a slasher than the kind of horror I'm into. ...and I need to stay focused, anyway. I only have so much time." My ship went marginally off course, crashing into a perfectly spherical asteroid. It exploded and instantly reappeared at the starting location.

"I mean, you said she made it sound like you had years, right? You can't just sit here the whole time... working." She glanced towards the echo mazes. "You've gotta take breaks or you'll go nuts."

"I'll-- I'll take a break eventually." I rubbed my eyes. "I just need to get my head around it all."

"How do you mean...?"

"Just get my head around it all," I repeated mutely, bouncing my ship off the gravity well of a mini black hole. "Maybe when I see her next, I'll be able to get her to tell me how much time I have left, then I'd..."

I trailed off. My hand reached for another chocolate bar, but they were too deep in the box. It flopped uselessly.

"...right. Well, lemme know if you change your mind," Ptolema replied, her smile fading slightly. "Actually, I had a couple things I wanted to talk to you about."

"Mmgh?" I questioned, having successfully obtained another bar in the intervening moment and crammed half of it into my mouth.

"So, I know I brought this up before, but how would you feel about moving, like, somewhere a little more permanent?" She asked, and then stuck her thumb towards the garden. "I could add an extra building for you 'round the back, get you some furniture set up. And a bathroom too, so we won't have to fight over the shower."

"I don't use the shower," I told her.

Ptolema blinked. "You... don't use the shower."

"I just default my form every morning," I explained aloofly. "That way I don't have to worry about getting any more sets of clothes."

"It's... kinda not good for you rely on that stuff too much, Su," she spoke hesitantly. "Psychologically, I mean. Maybe I gave you the wrong idea when I showed you how it worked. Made it look too cool or something."

"It's fine," I told her. "Again, I'm only doing it in the morning, so it can't screw up my sleep pattern too badly."

"Uh, still, though, I'm sure you'd like to have your own space generally, right? You don't wanna live in a tip like this, with me always messin' up your privacy to go looking for stuff."

I made a dismissive gesture. "I don't want to be a bother," I said, with a genuine absence of self-awareness.

Well, okay, maybe not a completely genuine absence. Even though it was claustrophobic, I'd grown kind of accustomed to living in Ptolema's living room. I liked the weight of history in it, and more than that, her presence through the usual beats of the day - breakfast, lunch, dinner, snoring at night - felt like they grounded me in something. Even if it'd only be on the other side of the pig pen, the prospect of sitting in an empty cabin felt lonely, cold, uneasy. I could see myself submerging myself even deeper into escapism just to stave off that feeling, then running down the hourglass before I knew it.

Also, it felt like it would mean Ptolema would stop cooking for the two of us whenever she was around. Even if I didn't need it, I liked people cooking for me. It made me feel important.

"It's no bother," Ptolema insisted. "It'll take like 10 minutes."

I hummed noncommittally, being absorbed back into the game. I used a thrust at the last moment as I approached a cloud of debris, propelling myself perfectly into the goal, though fell short of my best time. When I figured out how to Spectate properly, I'd need to go back to my apartment and get the memory maze from my logic engine.

"...or, y'know, there's a bunch of places around that'll put you up in a free room. Even serve meals. Some people love to do that stuff." She pointed. "There's even one not far from here, just past the village."

It took a few moments for this information to register in my brain, whereupon I frowned. "What if they mess with my stuff?"

"Well, they can't," she said. "It's your prop, remember?"

"I suppose." I considered for a few moments, or possibly minutes. "I should... do that soon. Get out of your hair."

"Yeah," I said, noncommittally.

Several moments passed. I exhausted my chocolate bar, and reached for another, peeling off the papyrus.

"...uh, anyway," she resumed - perhaps with a rare hint of annoyance for a moment - "I got a tip on where Neferuaten might be."

This got my attention. I stopped peeling, pausing the game. "You did?"

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

"Yeah," she affirmed. "Heard from this guy I know from back when I lived in the Keep, we still hang out sometimes, and he knows her because she's a consultant on a research project he's been doing. Apparently there's a place she frequents pretty much every day in the Crossroads, and they've had to go looking for her a couple times."

"What time of day?"

"Usually from like, ten in the morning to three in the afternoon, he said. The Keep's day/night cycle is desynchronized from ours by about eight hours, so I guess that's early evening." She scratched her head. "Unless they changed that from when I lived there. I dunno."

"We should go today, then," I said eagerly. What a stroke of luck! To think the person I was so eager to contact would be easiest to find. Though I suppose it made sense - Ptolema had mentioned her as one of the few she saw around regularly.

"Yeah, uh, about that," Ptolema said, scratching the side of her head. "I don't wanna-- Y'know, I don't wanna try and butt into stuff that isn't my business, Su, especially since things are still probably really confusin' to you, but are you sure this is like. A good idea?"

"What do you mean?" I inquired. "Am I sure what's a good idea?"

"Tracking all these people down to try and figure out what happened at the conclave, I mean." She hesitated. "I've been kinda thinkin' about that stuff Bardiya told you, and y'know, he made some pretty good points. Like, the only reason I could figure you wouldn't remember the voice we all heard when the loops ended would be because you didn't forget, but blocked the memory yourself, and you came here from the Magilum where they do that sorta stuff on a lark."

I hesitated a bit as I was reminded of Bardiya and what I'd seen in that room, then furrowed my brow. "Ptolema, don't do this. I'm psychologically dependent on at least one person believing me."

"Hey, nothing's changed!" She held up her hands. "I said I kinda believe you, and I still kinda believe you." She paused for a moment, her lips flattening. "But y'know, there are lots of ways people have figured out to mess with your own mind here, and really strange and physics-breaking stuff people have figured out how to make. And if the stuff the captain of the Waywatch said was true, then what if you, I dunno, fell in with a weird group there a long time ago? And they convinced you to do all kinds of weird stuff?"

"You think I'm brainwashed."

"No! I mean." She sucked on her lip. "I'm sayin' it's not impossible you've been brainwashed."

"What about Kamrusepa's log?" I asked her. "That's physical evidence."

"I mean. It's just a book. Anybody could have written that."

I sighed through my nose. "Ptolema, I'm not going to give up on this. Even if all the stuff with the Lady is just some kind of induced hallucination, the worst that can happen if I take it seriously is that I waste some time and maybe blow my chance to solve the Manse. Meanwhile, if I don't, I could die."

Of course, the reliable narration rule meant that it couldn't be a hallucination. But I didn't tell her that because I didn't want to sound like a crazy person."

"I'm not saying to stop trying to figure it out completely," she replied. "But like. You have some, uh, weird history with Neferuaten, right?"

"That's one way to put it."

"I just dunno if gettin' involved with her, in terms of all this stuff, is maybe the best idea for you. Considering everything."

"I'm not a child any more, Ptolema," I spoke flatly. "I'm not going to start screwing her again the second we strike up a conversation. I just want to ask her some questions about the Order."

Ptolema's face flushed. "I wasn't saying that, just that... I dunno. If you've got baggage with somebody, good or bad, they can have kinda a pull on you. I brought my grandma here as a tertiary once, and she--" She stopped herself suddenly, pushing her lips together and making an uncertain hum. "Well, never mind that. My point is, it could get weird. She could be weird."

"I appreciate you thinking of me, Ptolema," I lied patronizingly. "But really, I can handle it."

"She's kind of a known eccentric here, too," she added. "Lot of rumors about the sorta stuff she's involved with around."

I squinted. "What sort of rumors?"

Ptolema shifted uneasily, looking out at the pigs.

"I... dunno if it's my place to say."

If I were in a different, less single-minded mood, my curiosity might have latched on to this and led me to squeeze the answer out of her. But instead, in a decision that would have mildly hilarious consequences, I just said: "Then I'd rather see for myself."

She sighed. "Fine."

The structure was part of the City, technically, yet was separated physically from the rest somewhat, not being part of the central spiral or the city center at its apex. Instead, a path near the bottom split and protruded outwards into a short bridge, in turn leading to a large and crescent-shaped floating island, the periphery covered by a number of small, sparsely-decorated gardens.

Ptolema had informed this sort of real estate was reserved for establishments that required more space than the City proper allowed, but had proven themselves of 'enduring cultural value', unlike something like the Kataff arena. Having heard her describe where we were going (and then for a second time, after failing to process it) the fact that it was given this descriptor was so bizarre it became actually funny to me. Even now, a few hours later, I still wasn't completely over it.

It stood, extending both upwards and downwards, in the remainder of what would have been the crescent's circle. The building was - in a way I found myself respecting - extremely unsubtle about what it was. In contrast to striking white-gold of the rest of the city, it was made of a pitch-colored stone almost as dark as False Iron, and was utterly featureless, more resembling a skyscraper-sized tombstone than a building. In fact, as we flew in, I initially thought it was just that: Some kind of giant monument, and that our destination was hidden at some strange angle.

It was only when I noticed the doorway - the subdued character of its sliding glass doors starkly out of place, looking like they belonged at the entryway to a distribution center or something - that I realized what I was looking at, and the sheer scope of it as a single facility. You could fit the entire Aetherbridge dock in it and still have space to spare.

"How is this so big?" I commented, as we touched down at the end of the bridge.

"Oh, it's even bigger than it looks," Ptolema commented, with a fatigued note in her voice that suggested even she, despite living here for gods-know-how-long, didn't completely get it. "They use a lotta what you'd call Aetheromancy to make the inside bigger than the outside."

"Why?" I asked, and then - realizing this might be taken in too much a big-picture way - added, "Why would they need that much space?"

"Some of the scenarios they have in there are, uh, pretty elaborate," she explained. "Or just require a lot of room to work convincingly. I'd give you some examples, but... well, you'll see for yourself in a minute." She glanced at me. "You're gonna wanna put a barrier up, by the way."

"Really," she confirmed. "At least, assumin' you're not into the idea of, like, some pretty crazy stuff happening to your body. Which I assume you're not, since you're new."

I gulped like a character from an action flick. "How strong?"

"Really strong. Like, just pick some crazy number."

I stared at her for a moment, then nodded warily. I cast the Entropy-Denying Arcana around my body, putting an absurd, 12-digit number of eris into the incantation-- Enough that even if the Orphaned Continent was ripped out of the Mimikos and tossed at me at a thousand times the speed of sound, it'd still stop dead. The casting went off without a hitch. I was never going to get used to that.

"Also," Ptolema added, "do you know how to turn your sense of smell off using the Power?"

I considered. "Not... really? At least not comfortably."

"You're gonna wanna use this, then."

She retrieved a small piece of prop from her pocket which, despite me expecting some futuristic device, turned into a wooden clip. She stuck it on my nose. I looked at it, cross-eyed, a subtle anxiety building in me.

"Okay," she declared. "I think we're good to go."

We headed to the sliding doors, which were thicker than they looked at a distance, and they opened at our approach, feeding us into a small, banal-looking white-walled entry chamber. It was large, empty, and served no obvious purpose. Another sliding door stood about twenty meters ahead.

"The Assembly made 'em add this room a few years back," Ptolema explained. "People kept complainin' about the smell getting out the front door."

"Oh," I said, having no choice but to accept this information into my brain. "I see."

We walked for a moment, then passed through the second sliding door, passing into the reception area, and I experienced the most radical contrast between environments in my life up to that point.

Seeing it, the first thing that came to mind was a dungeon. I don't mean in the sense of a castle jail, mind you; no, we're talking 'dungeon' more in the 'a party of adventurers gets eaten by a giant lizard' sense, though even that failed to fully describe the atmosphere. The architecture was gothic, the stone comprising the floor and walls roughly-textured and cast in menacing lighting by four braziers in the corners, with various gargoyles looking down from overhead, though this was not what my attention was drawn to immediately. No-- More notable were the meter-length indentations dug into the floor that ran from either side of the entrance to the far end, covered by metal grates through which seeped a thick, sickly-colored steam. I glanced down, and saw that they were filled with a violently-boiling, transparent liquid.

"Oh," Ptolema said, in the tone of voice one might use to remark upon the weather. "It's acid today, I guess."

Someone appeared to be in the acid, though fortunately I was only aware of this from the thrashing - occasionally splashing some fluid to the surface and immediately confirming the wisdom of Ptolema's suggestion - and the screaming, though it was actually quite difficult to say the screaming was coming from them specifically. There was, as a matter of fact, rather a lot of screaming, to the point that little regarding it could be said definitively whatsoever. It came from all directions, at all distances, at just about every tone and volume I could conceive of. Some sounded forced and melodramatic, while others would be genuinely quite bone-chilling in another context. Other colorful sounds were present too: Grinding, gunfire, loud machinery, explosions. Ambiguously-wet cracking sounds. A buffet of the macabre for the discerning ear.

A jarringly-pleasant male voice rang out softly from an overhead speaker as we entered. "Welcome to the Hall of Death!" it proclaimed. "If you would like to experience a standard death, please consult the listing on the terminals to your left. If you would like to request a new custom death, please approach the counter and speak to the receptionist. If you would like to re-experience a regular custom death and it has been less than three months since your previous visit, please proceed directly to your assigned room. Memento mori."

The word 'terminals' drew my eyes to the left, where a series of smaller gargoyles held up glass scrolls depicting holographic text, while the word 'receptionist' drew them to the front desk, which was evil and lined with skulls. A horned woman in a black, funeral-themed uniform stood there, attending to a different woman with blue skin and unusual leather clothing. To the right, a bored-looking man sat reading a book. These were the only people around. Visibly.

"I..." I trailed off at the sight. "I don't know what to say." My voice came out slightly silly and nasally due to the clip.

"I warned you," Ptolema told me impassively.

"Why is it like this?"

"Dunno," she said, with a shrug. "I guess the kinda people into this stuff like them to lean into the bit."

I nodded, like this was somehow an acceptable explanation. The acid man swam nearby; flecks touched my barrier and stopped, dropping to the ground and steaming.

Ptolema gestured loosely forward. "Well, let's get on with it. I don't wanna hang around this place longer than I gotta."

"Yeah, we... better get on with it," I replied distantly.

We approached the desk. The blue-skinned woman, who I now realized was probably supposed to be some kind of elf, was in the process of giving some kind of complex explanation to the receptionist, who I realized was not actually a human but a golem. Among many other things I'd heard about over the past few days, I'd learned that golems in Dilmun could look essentially identical to a human, though it was cultural convention to give them glowing, mechanical looking eyes to set them apart even in these cases so that they could be easily told apart at a glance. (Though Ptolema had also warned me that some people got a kick out of pretending to be golems themselves and changed their appearance to that effect, and would be thrilled to meet someone like me who couldn't identify Primaries, Secondaries and Tertiaries on sight, and that I should be wary until I could.)

A silver plaque was nailed to the wall behind the desk, bearing the cross symbol which I now knew was effectively the heraldry of the Domain. It was addressed to the Hall of Death, applauding it for 'exemplary services provided to the community'. I jolted slightly from the culture shock.

"...setting for the second part should be the side of a shady coaching inn, somewhere far out in the badlands, where there's barely anything but dust and weeds from horizon to horizon, maybe a mesa in the distance to sell the setting," the elf continued. "They haul me out of the caravan, smash my legs in again for good measure - maybe spit on me a few times - and then drag me by my hair out off the path, maybe a half mile. They tie a rope around my neck, and every time I try to scream, they strangle me to the brink of unconsciousness. Once we get there, they bind me completely-- Legs to wrist, gag, grind my face into the dirt, maybe play with my face a bit with their knives. Then, suddenly, they fall silent. An hour passes. The sun sets, and all four of them assume their true, lupine forms. They dive down - how they do this is important, they should be rabid, like ravenous animals - and tear off my binds, each of them taking one of my limbs. They bite the fingers and toes off first--"

"Hey, sorry to interrupt, this'll just take a second," Ptolema cut in, stepping to the side of the woman to address the golem. "We're lookin' for our friend, Neferuaten. Is she here at the moment? She should have put herself down as willing to be interrupted."

The elf stared at her, outraged. "Hey, what the hell?! I was in the middle of my description, asshole! Wait your turn!"

The golem smiled placidly. "One moment, please," it said pleasantly, then fell silent for about three seconds. "You're in luck! Miss Neferuaten isn't far. She's booked in room 49 here on Tartarus Floor, and currently has the premises to herself. Is there anything else I can do for you?"

"Nah, we're good," Ptolema answered with a shake of her head. "Thanks."

"Very well! Have a pleasant visit." The acid man's arm clanged against the metal grating nearby.

Ptolema turned towards the rightward corridor immediately, leaving. I followed; she seemed to know where she was going.

"Fuck you, lady!" the elf exclaimed as we left. "Rude as hell!" The screaming soon drowned out her voice.

"That was kind of rude," I said after a moment.

"Ehh, she was gonna go on with that stuff forever," Ptolema stated indifferently. "I know that type-- Always gotta have everything just so. It's annoying, and I really don't wanna spend too long in here."

I wasn't sure quite what response to give to that. On the one hand, it was extremely self-evident why someone would dislike being here - I was finding it harder to laugh at now that I was actually inside - but on the other, I'd never seen Ptolema in quite this mood before, irritated in a fatigued way rather than her usual energetic style. It was unusual, and made me a little wary of annoying her.

So I kept the questions simple. "How long will it take to get to Neferuaten's room?"

"Not long," she said. "If I remember right, it should just be down a couple hallways."

I nodded. The hallway itself was a lot less remarkable then the entrance, with the same style of torch-lit stonework but none of the extra flourishes beyond the occasional gargoyle. Occasionally we passed an open door, though - presumably for the 'standard deaths' that the voice had spoken of, that anyone could participate in - which revealed all sorts of bizarre scenes. An alleyway where a man was being brutally beaten by a pack of thugs. A swimming bath where another man was being drowned by a group of beautiful, black-haired women. A wall where someone was being executed by firing squad. A hospital room where an old woman lay surrounded by golems playing loved ones.

Ptolema was right - actually seeing it, the amount of space occupied more than made sense. Hearing it, I wouldn't have imagined it'd go this far.

"You're coping with all this pretty good," Ptolema commented, as we passed a room where a woman was being hung and quartered in front of a crowd.

I shrugged, the clip flopping up and down with my body. "I mean, I've seen a lot of horror, and this is all kind of too cartoonish and overwhelming. Doesn't really feel real."

"Well, it's not real," she pointed out.

"You know what I mean," I told her. "Physically."

"It's not even that physically real a lot of the time, honestly." I noticed her eyes were always facing forward; she never so much as glanced in the rooms. "A lot of the people who are into this stuff disable their mind's abilities to feel pain, or sometimes even request they use illusions instead of anything real. It's all just screwing around, basically." A pause. "Well, not everybody, obviously. Some do go all the way with it."

I nodded hesitantly. "I know I said this already, but I really don't understand what the, uh, appeal is supposed to be, here." Inside another room, a man and a woman together were fighting a losing battle against a group of tigers. "I mean, beyond just run-of-the-mill masochism."

"I mean, it's not complicated," Ptolema said. We turned a corner. "People here can't die. It's the one part of life that's off limits." She shrugged, sounding more and more exerted by the process of physically speaking, as if the very building was somehow draining away her vitality by the minute. (Actually, that would fit the vibe pretty well, but I didn't feel any different.) "Obviously it's gonna take on an appeal for a bunch of reasons."

"But... like you said, they can't actually die," I questioned. "So isn't it just, well, weird torture?" I fondled my hair nervously. "I mean, I suppose there's probably an emotional component, I guess-- Being able to live out scenarios you wouldn't be able to experience otherwise, like in a role playing game. But... that still feels like it ought to be more niche than this."

"I mean, it is niche, at least in terms of foot traffic," Ptolema all but mumbled. "Only a bit over a hundred people come here a day, probably."

I frowned. "Then why is it held in such high regard?"

She shrugged. "Dunno. Ask Neferuaten. She's the one doin' it."

Even if that felt like something she would know, I could tell by the tone this was the end of the conversation. We fell silent, and I focused on being a voyeur, looking at the rooms we passed. Appropriately, all the ones that could be freely entered seemed to focus on a form of death that was definitionally public in some way - executions, bloody fights outdoors, widely attended events. I wondered what sort of scenes were playing out in the remainder, hidden from view.

Before I knew it, we were at room 49, the door to which was closed, but opened when Ptolema pushed down the heavy metal handle. Even at first blush, the setting within was quite starkly different from the others. It looked like the interior of a long-abandoned, half-crumbled warehouse, a place of filth, stained metal, and shattered windows; the only source of light, little more than slits perched close to the high ceiling.

The chamber was empty save for some broken-down industrial machinery, or - more accurately - props intended to evoke broken down industrial machinery. Ambiguous chains hung from towering cranes and ceiling-mounted conveyors, disassembled engines lay rotting in corners. The door closed behind us as we entered, silencing the screams of the wider building and leaving only the sounds of creaking metal, dripping water, and the skittering of rats.

Ptolema walked forward, saying nothing further, and I followed, eventually spoiling the atmosphere by casting an illumination incantation. For a moment, I was so overwhelmed by the size of the place that I wondered if it'd be difficult to find her, or maybe that somehow us arriving here would also have factored into her plans, and she'd make the whole thing some kind of stupid test. I wouldn't have put it past her.

But then... we found her.

She was hanging from some of the chains, a visual vaguely reminiscent of how I'd found her on the bell tower, but there the similarities ended. Instead of being strung up by her neck and mutilated grotesquely, the chains were instead strapped to her arms, spreading her body outwards as if crucified; a pose with a strange sort of dignity, despite the grey rags that adorned her.

She looked emaciated; skin paled almost a grey shade, eyes sunken and dark, lips dry as a bone-- In every sense someone on the verge of death. But more than that, she looked so much younger. All the lines were gone from her face, flesh clinging to bone with a natural tightness and swollen, even in this state, with a more fundamental vitality. Her slender lips and nose, qualities that gave her an air of elfin dignity as my teacher, now instead conferred a vaguely neotenic, almost pouty countenance, though her prominent cheekbones still gave it a certain fortitude. Her eyes, though, remained unchanged; as dark and piercingly inquisitive as ever.

It took me a moment to realize how she was actually dying. It was the sound that tipped me off - a barrel beneath her feet, fluid dripping into it one drop at a time. I saw: The tips of her toes had been cut, the wounds held open by metal clamps, and blood was very slowly draining from her, drawn out at a snail's pace by gravity alone. Assuming she wasn't numbing her pain as Ptolema had described, it seemed like a shockingly awful and protracted way to die. Based on the amount of blood, she'd need to have been in here for hours already.

Why would anyone want to do something like this to themselves? What possible pleasure could there be in it?

And then, suddenly, she looked at me, her gaze jumping up at once from what I'd assumed to be partial unconsciousness to stare me dead in the face. And suddenly it hit me: After all this time, 200 years, I was face-to-face with the living (almost, technically) embodiment of a good half of my life's outstanding questions.

And then, dismissing any remaining possibility that she wasn't lucid, she spoke.

"Oh," she said, seeming at most mildly surprised. "Hello again, Utsushikome. You made it."