Author: Lurina

185: Death Masquerade (𒐂) - The Flower That Bloomed Nowhere | Royal Road

Inner Sanctum Underground | 9:33 AM | ∞ Day

"Yes, that's what I said," Neferuaten affirmed, not even sounding particularly coy. "What about it?"

We were inside the building now, which despite a pretentious name - 'Madam Karni's Specialty Victals' - seemed to be little more than an over-designed distribution center with too many staff. Wooden counters and pedestals at excessive remove displayed a variety of raw ingredients in small grid-like containers, each individual item displayed in a separate little segment as if to loudly declare 'look, they're different! We didn't copy or fabricate any of them!' Some were familiar, while others were plants that appeared completely alien, like a bulbous green fruit shaped roughly like a peanut. Considering the timescale of Dilmun, it shouldn't have been surprise that Biomancers would become a little more adventurous, though nevertheless I was surprised; I'd spent my life living under the Covenant, which meant artificial life was often taboo (well, unless you lived in Viraak).

Being spoiled by a lifetime of replicated ingredients, I honestly found it all a little gross. I didn't like the idea of eating something dug up out of the ground. The whole place had this sour, earthy smell too, though I wasn't sure if that was coming from the produce or a little indoor garden with a tree they had at the center of the tower, tall enough to reach up several stories.

Neferuaten walked idly towards this area as I regarded her with some consternation. "Why did you use that term for it?" I asked her.

"Well, it's what happened," she stated. "At least to the best of my knowledge. We acted out the same events over and over again."

"How do you know about that?" I questioned, my tone veering into being accusatory. "Did you speak with her?"

She raised an eyebrow. "This is a deeply strange conversation, Utsushikome. I know I told you to feel free to forgo context and simply ask whatever questions came to mind, but I fear we might be starting to stress that framework for exchanging information to the limit of its usefulness."

"I'm talking about the Lady."

"What lady?"

"The one we were just talking about," I clarified, frustrated. "The embodiment of entropy. Who created this world."

"Oh." Her eyes widened just slightly in recognition, and she nodded. "Pardon me, I was confused by your use of the mythological name. Yes, I spoke with her."

"You did?"

"Yes. To the best of my knowledge, she's spoken to many of us who were present there that weekend."

I opened my mouth to speak, hesitated, and then shut it tightly. It probably said a lot that my first reaction to this was reticence; suspicion that she actually had no idea what I was talking about, and was merely ad-libbing based on my clumsy questioning. That I'd said too much, overreacted based on her simply using a word for the loops that she could well have arrived at independently. It was hardly implausible; Bardiya had never used the term 'loop', and I wasn't sure Ptolema had before I'd used it, either. If all the information you had was a distant recollection of one-and-a-half versions of the weekend alongside the knowledge that other attendees recalled different ones, there were probably a lot of ways you could interpret that metaphysically rather than a 'loop'. Like false memories, or us all having been placed in an entirely separate reality.

No, she's probably fucking with you from the other angle, my paranoia speculated. Dropped it on purpose to gauge your reaction. She probably already knows everything; it's the grandmaster, after all.

Stop putting her intellect on a pedestal like you're still twenty-five, a more relaxed voice countered. Besides, who cares if she even does? It's not like you have any meaningful reason to hide the truth from her, anyway. We were just thinking about telling her anyway a second ago.

I twitched. Why was I being so neurotic about this? Did this woman really still hold this much power over me?

"You seem a little flustered again, Utsushikome," Neferuaten remarked considerately, picking up a large pouch of a white substance from a shelf she'd navigated us to with telekinesis. Nearby - on the other side of the tree - an employee gave detailed descriptions to a pink-haired customer on the precise flavor profile of a selection of bell peppers. "I am sorry that talking to me is so difficult for you. We can reconvene another time, if you'd prefer."

I blinked, then squinted in disbelief. "Is-- Is that cocaine? Did you bring me here to shop for cocaine?"

"Mm? No, this is flour." She lowered it into her bag. It didn't look like flour. "They add some kind of spice here, akin to cinnamon with a touch of saffron-- Sort of. I can never get it quite right myself, and it's important for my baking." She glanced back to me as she began strolling to another part of the store, further towards the back. "In any event, I have to admit I am curious how you know about her, considering your situation. You really are keeping me guessing with all this."

"When I mentioned her to Ptolema and Bardiya, they had no idea what I was talking about," I stated. "It sounded like they didn't think any of our class did."

Although Kamrusepa self-evidently did, at one point, but who could say how long ago that was.

"Well, we only spoke a few times, and it was some time ago now. I wouldn't be surprised if they've simply forgotten that she exists."

"But not you."

"Mm, you know me, Utsushikome. I endeavour never to forget anything I might regret later." A wistful sigh. "The way memory works in this place does give life a rather surreal quality, though, where distant things feel close and close things often distant. Talking to you about all this, it really does feel like only yesterday that I enacted that silly plan. But suddenly I think about that and the years strike me like a wave." She looked at me strangely. "And though I remember that, I have no recollection of meeting you in this world at all. It's almost surreal, to see you in person, outside of my memories."

"I could say the same thing," I muttered. "It feels like talking to a ghost."

"I have truly missed you, you know," she spoke warmly. "I believed I'd never see you again."

I spoke nothing, walking in silence for a moment. If Neferuaten was bothered by this total non-response to such an emotionally loaded statement, she didn't show it.

"How did I die, out of curiosity?" she inquired as she selected an orange-red fruit vaguely reminiscent of a large apple from a selection of about 40. "You're quite right that I ought to know already, but still, I can't hear you recount my final moments without wanting to know the post-mortem."

"...assuming you really didn't fake your death, it was just a couple minutes after you'd given me that note," I told her. "You and the rest of the Order stepped into the gallery at the top of the tower overlooking the auditorium, and someone shut and locked the door behind you before our class could catch up. When we broke it down, it looked like you were all dead. Decapitated."

She looked intrigued. "Decapitated, you say?"

"Yeah." I took one of the 'apples' myself. If she was going around grabbing this stuff while little more than a guest, surely my temporary residency status would be sufficient. "Though the others fared worse, or at least it appeared that way. Your body had just been left sitting in a chair, but they looked like they'd been ravaged by a monster. The headmaster and his assistant were in there too, but they survived." I hesitated. "Well, the latter did-- The former died in intensive care a few hours later."

"Was he mauled, as well?"

"No. It looked like the Power had been used to drain his vitality somehow, and though we never learned what was in the autopsy, I heard there were some strange chemicals in his body. But the investigators didn't find any arcana up until the point we'd broken the door down."

A nod. "And the assistant?"

"Just unconscious," I explained, wondering why I was bothering telling her all this. "Her head was a little injured, but the investigators concluded it was probably some kind of chemical that did it."

She shook her head. "All that, in just a couple of minutes... my goodness. The others must have really gone all out." She briefly stopped her shopping altogether, holding a finger to her lips in quiet contemplation. "Did you hear any sounds behind the door?"

"No," I said. "But that might not mean much. I heard it was borderline soundproof."

"Fascinating." Another few moments of thought. "If the Anomaly-Divining Arcana truly revealed nothing, it seems all but inconceivable that such a complex and gruesome scene could have arisen organically in such a short period of time. The most obvious conclusion is that the state of the room was prepared in advance somehow - save for whatever happened to the poor Ishkibal and his aid - while our true selves absconded." She clicked her tongue. "But that would require fake corpses for the entire council, which are almost impossible to create in a manner that will hold up to close professional scrutiny. But perhaps the Censors were bribed? A bit of an overreach even with the Order's connections, but perhaps manageable as a sort of swan song."

I offered no commentary. Frankly, with the context I had now, the question of how exactly the Order faked their deaths (or most of their deaths) in specific didn't feel particularly pressing in the grand scheme of things. The howdunnit wouldn't even nessecerily have been the same as whatever they'd planned to do in the sanctuary.

"If I recall, there was only one entrance to that tower, other than the windows. Perhaps someone could have absconded through there."

"The investigators told us they were all locked."

"Locked?" She looked at me curiously. "In what way?"

I frowned. "...I don't know. It's not like they gave us the police report. Presumably just the regular way." I scratched the side of my head. "We saw they were all shut when we came in, though, and they only close from the inside. So barring some kind of trick with string or something, it's not really relevant."

"I see." She let out a single chuckle, then finally resumed walking. "So a locked room, then! I suppose I ought to be thankful the others at least gave me a glamorous send-off."

"Technically, it's only a locked room if no one is alive inside," I countered, my inner mystery pedant awakening. "It's unlikely, but the headmaster's assistant could have somehow done it and then just knocked herself out. Or something like that."

"My daughter used to be a fan of murder mystery novels," Neferuaten revealed, a statement that I would later reflect on for almost an hour while staring at the ceiling in bed. "She used to say that there were only ever three solutions to them. Either there's a secret exit, some sort of trick with the lock or door itself, or the culprit is still inside the room when it's opened."

"I've heard that before," I told her. "There's a fourth solution that just doesn't get used very often, though."

"Oh?" She navigated us to the next counter over, this one at the edge of the tower, where a long set of windows overlooked to the capitol area. Due to the shape of the City and the direction of the artificed gravity, it appeared to protrude out horizontally, as if the five strange buildings had been erected out of a cliff side.

"The murder being performed remotely," I explained. "Through a trap, a weapon fired inside... or some kind of device controlled using technology." I gave her a pointed look at this last suggestion.

She smirked a little at this, gathering up a few leeks - at least, they looked like normal leeks - let her gaze wander out the window, digressing. "I wonder if they really did kill me there, or spirited me away to be disposed of quietly elsewhere. Or perhaps I'm misremembering and I actually escaped after all and began a life in hiding. Now that's a romantic thought-- Perhaps I found love again, only for me and my beloved to be torn apart by the ghosts of my sordid past..." She sighed. "One can hope."

"You could just go check yourself," I said flatly.

She scoffed, glancing back at me as she stepped over to another shelf, this one seeming to be devoted to different types of coffee and cocoa beans. "Now where would be the fun in that?" She looked at the jars inquisitively, then glanced back in my direction. "What do you think? A Mekhian or Uana breed, today?"

"I don't know," I stated, baffled the choice was even that simple considering everything else about this place. "I don't have strong opinions about coffee."

"Mm. Uana it is, then." She plucked the according jar from the shelf, then started walking in the opposite direction "So what did I write in the note?"

I furrowed my brow. I was starting to feel like I'd lost control of the conversation. I really wanted to know about the circumstances in which she'd spoken to the Lady (and why she hadn't mentioned it even once, despite her existence seeming to directly conflict with the idea of the entity as some unknowable being barely even able to understand our reality), and I was still filled with outstanding questions about her explanation of what she'd done at the conclave, not to mention the Order more broadly. She'd barely explained anything about the apparently world-spanning conspiracy, and even though she had to know everything about the Order's death-faking plan, it felt like she was being somehow circumspect about the details.

But I did want to know about the stupid notes. Maybe they weren't actually how I'd ended up here, but they still felt inscrutable.

Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.

"It said, 'Should you come to fear death, return to the gateway to the Sanctuary. Here, you shall begin your journey, as Gilgamesh once did,'" I explained reluctantly.

She winced. "Oh dear. How pretentious." She shook her head. "I suppose an imminent death must do strange things to one's sense of taste."

"What do you think it means?"

"Well, it doesn't seem particularly sophisticated as riddles go," she said. She grabbed some peanut-like things from a shelf as we passed, not even bothering to look at them properly. "There's a secret chamber, so to speak, accessible only from the room with the mural. I probably intended you to stand in the spot where Gilgamesh begins his journey - embarking out of the city of Uruk - and imagined you'd notice it from that perspective." She made a dismissive gesture. "To be honest, I forget exactly how it all works now, but I believe the eye of one of the images of the serpent protrudes outwardly, and you push it in for access-- Frankly, it's all a bit camp. But standing there would definitely make the protrusion clear, though why I wouldn't just explain that part to you directly is a bit beyond me."

There's a particular feeling one gets when learning an answer that is simultaneously stupidly straightforward, while also being something one would never arrive at under one's own power in a million years. I experienced this feeling. The idea that the turn of phrase referred to a place for me to physically stand in the room had never even entered into my mind.

But of course it would be that stupid snake's eye! I'd noticed it during the loop; how it seemed strangely tangible and almost glinting with humanity compared to everything else. No wonder, if it had been a physical object! (Though whether it'd been made so creepy intentionally remained an open question.)

"I think I know what you're talking about, but that was in the sanctuary, wasn't it? Not the version in the Empyrean Bastion."

"Well, the whole chamber moves," she explained. "That's how it works."

I blinked. "And the secret chamber with it?"

She nodded. "That's correct."

What were we talking about, here? A closet?

"That seems, uh... inefficient," I remarked.

"Don't look at me," she said, rolling her shoulders. "I didn't design it."

"What's even in there when the chamber isn't there?"

"Just empty space, as far as I know." We arrived at an extremely long counter displaying baked goods; Neferuaten carefully extracted some flatbreads and a fluffy sourdough loaf, then stopped to consider some more strangely-shaped items I couldn't place the name of. "Well, and the other passageways, of course-- There's another that leads through the mural to the research tower, on top of the obvious ones."

"I remember. We took it during my loop." I bit my lip. "So what's in this secret room?"

"I'd have to presume I left something for you there. Probably records of what the others had been planning, my fate, your grandfather's notes-- More or less what we've talking about now, though more comprehensive." She looked to me. "That's just guesswork, though. I could check to give you a more definitive answer later, if you like."

"That... would be helpful," I said hesitantly, though somewhat glad she was even suggesting the possibility. Then I recalled: "There was also a logic bridge address."

She raised an eyebrow. "Oh? What was it?"

"1274-3309-4735-9509-1542," I recited. "When I tried to call it, though, no one answered."

A drawn out hum. "Doesn't ring a bell, I'm afraid-- Must have been something I put into place after everything was over. But I could look into that as well, I suppose."

I nodded reticently.

"I'm surprised to hear your other self never went, though," she continued. "I would have thought you'd be curious, though I suppose I couldn't blame you if the horror of what transpired afterward made it too difficult to consider. I can only apologize for that, I suppose, even if it was in another life."

"I did go," I told her. "Eventually. From my perspective it was just a few days ago."

She inclined her head curiously. "Why?"

"I found out that I was dying, and was desperate," I told her bluntly. "I thought I'd find some kind of treatment there. Some miracle cure that the Order was keeping in its pocket." I blinked, and my thoughts caught up with me. "Why would you write it like that, if that's all there was? 'Should you come to fear death'? My grandfather's research into all this wouldn't have helped me live any longer-- It's not like I could have built the Apega from scratch. And even if I had, you would have known it was used already."

Neferuaten frowned slightly. "I don't know, Utsushikome. Perhaps I hadn't meant 'fear death' literally."

"What would you have meant by it?"

"Didn't I say something to you back then, in the initiation chamber? We fear death because of our ability to conceptualize how the world will end at the moment of our death? I remember I worked out how to phrase it all in advance-- I thought it would be something you'd intuitively understand, with the way you always talked about meaning."

I vaguely remembered this, but it still felt like a non-sequitur. I wasn't thinking on the level she seemed to want me to be at all. "Self-conceptualize? What does that even mean?"

She exhaled through her nose, looking down at some kind of weird double-ouroboros shaped bagel.

"Grandmaster," I urged.

"I really don't understand why you're taking this tone with me, Utsushikome," she spoke tiredly. "I'm trying to answer your questions, it's just a little difficult, since I'm struggling to understand where you're coming from and how much you know." She smiled at me again, though her eyes were a little sad. "Couldn't we just talk about things normally, for a little while?"

"It doesn't feel like you're just trying to answer my questions. You're being--" I hesitated, but felt a strange sense of anxious frustration well up in me. "You're being slippery."

"What am I being slippery about?"

Like, what do you even mean 'how much I know'?" I explained. "Why does that even matter?"

"Well, there are certain parts of all this that it's still not really my place to speak about," she explained.

Vindication. She's holding things back, even though that makes no sense. "How can there be things it's not your place to speak about? From your perspective, this all happened eons ago, didn't it?"

"I could say the same thing to you," she stated calmly. "It's understandable for you to be confused and want closure considering your situation, and I'm happy to help you with that as best as I am able. But you're behaving as though you're on the hunt for some sort of reckoning." I noticed a brown haired man a little ways away was staring at us, and two voices simultaneously suggested that maybe he was one of the people spying on me, and that maybe this conversation was getting a little intense for a public space. The mental winds again favored the former. "That's just not how it works here-- It's why I divulged all those secrets so freely. We're past all that now. It's... not relevant."

"When did you meet with the Lady?" I asked her. It was one thing to slowly spell out my situation as the dialogue required, but I didn't like the emotional tone things were taking. I just needed to get my answers, then be done with this. "Why?"

"As I said, it was a long time ago," Neferuaten replied. "She originally invited me to her Domain to ask some old questions about the Order, but after that we had a series of meetings about the design of its place and its rules, and how things might be improved. Since you've only just arrived, I fear the specifics might go over your head."

"This world is immutable," I declared confidently. "It can't be changed. Unless you were talking about the Manse-- Were you trying to solve it yourself?"

"Utushikome..."

"And why didn't you mention her earlier? If you knew she existed, then you know your story about needing to die for entropy to understand you makes no sense. The consciousness from the child the Order implanted the connection to was already there."

Now she was giving me a very odd look, like there was a rapidly-growing boil on my noise. "That's not exactly how it works, Utsushikome. Even if they share a connection, it's not strictly correct to consider her and the entity the same being. Remember we're talking about something that exists outside of time; to whom everything that transpired in the Remaining World was nothing but indecipherable noise.

"That's not what she said at all," I protested. "She said she created this world herself, according to her own design. That the proxy only imposed restrictions on her actions-- Her actions. So what's the truth of the matter? Are you saying that she lied?"

Neferuaten, who seemed to have abandoned the idea of choosing bread altogether, folded her arms with disquiet, looking to the side.

My muscles felt tense. No, this is stupid. You're letting her distract you again-- None of this is even relevant to what happened at the conclave.

I needed to calm down. Focus on the thing I'd set out to learn about.

"If you won't talk about that," I said, "then let's go back to the Order's plan. You explained part of why they faked their deaths, but not how." I took a breath. "I was-- I was trying to hint at this a minute ago when we were talking about the closed room, but at the end of my loop, Linos was shot. But when his head was destroyed, instead of a brain, all that was there was the device Zeno was using to manipulate his fake body." I narrowed my eyes. "Now, obviously that's how he was going to fake his death, but did the whole Order have the same modus operandi? And if so, where were there real bodies? How did they plan to hide from detection by the security center? Linos mentioned that they really had died, but didn't explain how he could have known. Was the whole system rigged, compromised?

She hesitated. "This is one of those topics that is a little more delicate to discuss, Utsushikome. Why we go sit down somewhere, and you can tell me--"

"Why. Why is it delicate?" I stared at her. "Just give me a straight answer. I don't want to have some long dialogue."

For the first time since our reunion, she looked actually a little upset, put off. "Why are you angry at me, Utsushikome?" She asked. "I thought something might have happened, but if the last time we met was so soon after the conclave, I genuinely don't understand. Was it just that I left you without catharsis, despite it being clear in retrospect that I suspected I was going to die? Or did something else happen to you to make me like this?" Her tone was sad. "Please, you can tell me."

I twitched.

It was strange. Before this conversation - before this moment - I never really thought of myself as being angry at Neferuaten. Yes, my opinion on her and our relationship had soured over the years, the significance of the affection she'd shown me at my lowest, loneliest point fading, while the more frictious elements of the affair felt all the more prominent; the power dynamic, the fact I'd been led to betray Shiko, and yes, the way it all ended. Growing more sentimental about Ran had probably had a hand in it, too-- She'd always been a little suspicious of Neferuaten, and the more wistful I grew over that friendship, the more I found myself internalizing those perspectives.

But still, it didn't feel like it made me mad. It was regrettable, yes. A little gross. But it wasn't some great injustice done to me; I'd never been forced or even pressured into something.

Yet though I hadn't noticed it while it was happening, a feeling had been brewing in me as we'd talked. And hearing her say that...

"I--" I stuttered sharply, to the point I almost coughed. "How-- How is it not obvious?"

She frowned. "What do you mean?"

"Grandmaster," I said, my voice raised and my head inclined sharply, "you slept with me when I was practically a child."

"What?" Her eyes spoke confusion.

"When I enrolled in the House of Resurrection, I hadn't even turned 25 years old," I went on, my tone turning almost instructive. "I had by the time we seriously started talking, but only just barely. And you were-- I don't even know, I assume in your 400s, late 300s at minimum? I wasn't even 10% your age."

For a few moments, Neferuaten seemed genuinely stupefied. Like she was a logic engine I'd just fed bad data, or I'd just told her that she'd left the house without wearing any clothes. "I..." She blinked several times, snapping out of this reverie. "Utsushikome, we talked about this back then-- Joked about it, even. Even if you were young, you were a fully grown adult. Regardless of social mores, how mature someone is cognitively and emotionally isn't something that can be boiled down to age. There were people my age, back then, who were closer to children than you."

My eyes boggled. I did remember those conversations; where we'd laughed about how our relationship would be viewed by others, and how contradictory and self-righteous society could be about taboos that, really, were fundamentally illogical. 'Our means have completely become our ends,' Neferuaten had said. 'Think about how we punish incest. What was once a taboo with a logical biological basis - the genetic health of children - has degraded twice, first into one predicated on toxic social dynamics - the emotional baggage between siblings - to now one entirely based off of gut feeling, where even a homosexual union between two separated at birth would still be considered inappropriate. It's nothing but socially acceptable Iconism; the social politics of aesthetics, without a lick of substance.' Laughs. Wine down throats.

And I had believed it; that it was different, that my circumstances had rendered me different. An old soul. But still, to see her respond like this... It just...

"Grand--Neferuaten," I spoke, cutting myself off. "It doesn't matter what we said, or that I did it willingly. I was a kid. I barely knew anything about relationships. And you-- You were my teacher. It would have been unprofessional even to try and befriend me - especially considering the relationship you had with my grandfather - but we had sex. You asked me to have sex with you."

Her face had started to flush a shade I wasn't sure I'd seen since the aforementioned event, and even I found myself feeling hot with embarrassment. She broke eye contact. "I never forced you," she said weakly. "In fact, I... I tried to be cautious. I only did anything when it seemed to be making you happy." She forced herself to look at me. "Weren't you?"

I was tempted to say no, but didn't. "More things matter than what I felt in the moment!" I yelled. "You were the one who'd lived through two eras and a great war! You ought to have known that! You ought to have known better!"

Her eyes fled again. Now she looked utterly miserable; worse than I'd ever seen her. The fact that she'd been supernaturally restored to the peak of youth was not helping the vibe of this conversation; in spite of the context, she was the one looking like a tertiary schooler who'd been stood up for a date.

"And fuck," I continued, "the fact that you could even think of me back then as being 'cognitively and emotionally mature' says better more than anything about how good a judge you were of my emotions anyway. Grandmaster, I was a fucking train wreck of a person back then! Barely holding myself together, not even feeling like a human being, having to mutter mantras about my reason for living every day to keep myself from jumping off a building! Shit-- I probably would have humped a goat back then if it'd told me that I mattered and everything would be okay! I--I..."

I trailed off; it was a mistake to bring up my mental state at the time. The moment I did, the energy started to leave me, and the doubt flowed in. Did I really have a right to judge Neferuaten like this? After all, I was the one who'd done something far, far worse to Shiko and her body. What right did I have to position myself on any sort of moral high ground on the issue? I wasn't even really being forthright about why I felt this way. Wasn't this just projection? Was I even really mad at her at all, or just using a social technicality to lift myself up at her expense?

Everything suddenly felt muddy.

Muddy? Don't be ridiculous, Shiko's voice said. The situation isn't ambiguous at all. You were an enthusiastic participant.

Having her talk to us in the way she did, touch us in the way she did - it was exactly what you desired. You, repressed and feigning at self-sacrifice to satisfy your own ego, your loneliness and maternal issues and base lust mingling.

The real reason you're mad at her is that the moment someone gave you what you really wanted, all your convictions about me didn't mean a thing.

"...come on, Utsushikome," Neferuaten managed to resume. "I know I said it, but-- Well, do you even really believe in something like 'emotional maturity? The whole idea that any of us grow up... don't you think it's mostly just conceit?" A flickering smile began to form on her face, but all her usual confidence faded, replaced by a bitter fragility. "We're all just children clinging to things, in the end."

"Oh," I said hoarsely, running on fumes but still running. "I see. So that's-- That's what you meant with all that 'bitter new beginning' stuff all this time, huh."

"Am I wrong?" she asked. "You remember living another two centuries, now, but do you really feel like you've changed that much, fundamentally? I never did."

"Of course I've changed!" I snapped, genuinely unsure in the moment whether I actually believed this or not. "Two hundred years-- How could you live for that long and not change?! I've had to go through a million things, clog myself up with more bullshit than you could imagine just to stay functional! To keep living!" The doubt caught up with me, and I drew back physically, feeling another wave of heat hit my face, my breath growing short-- But momentum and sheer manic embarrassment carried me forward. "And even if that doesn't count, even if I haven't changed, that wouldn't-- That doesn't mean I'm going to turn into a fucking ephebophile through sheer arrested development!"

Neferuaten let out a little gasp, her whole body seeming to shudder a bit like I'd just thwacked it with a stick. Her eyes went wide and began to water, and her frown curled into a full crescent, her lip wrinkling.

And then she did something I hadn't anticipated when I'd started this tangent, that my imagination could not have conceptualized happening under any circumstances prior to this point. She dropped her bag, turned away from me sharply, and half-ran out of the store.

I stared at the spot she'd been standing for upwards of a minute, my emotional state locked into a mix of flustered anxiety and disbelief. Eventually, I looked towards the brown-haired men. He was still staring at me, having completely abandoned his attempt at shopping. He glanced away conspicuously as my eyes met his.

I sighed. Well, great.