Author: Lurina

213: The 1,000,000 Ways to be Murdered by Utsushikome of Fusai (𒌋) - The Flower That Bloomed Nowhere | Royal Road

Inner Sanctum Underground | 9:33 AM | ∞ Day

"Not to seem uncharitable after what you did a moment ago, but you'll need to drop the gun as well," she said, her eyes briefly flicking towards my right hand. "Just set it down right there."

Honestly, the fact that I was still armed and standing right next to potential cover in the form of the doorway made her control of the situation much weaker than she was trying to broadcast it. I had a feeling (mostly based, admittedly, on watching a lot of gunfights in dramas) that if I dove sharply to the side and then started shooting through the wall, there was only about a 50/50 chance she'd get me.

But that sort of thinking was a product of the game's growing sense of finality and derealization. If I were taking this seriously - and even as my attempts at roleplay became more and more awkward, I felt obligated to at least attempt to - then obviously, no one who wasn't a hardened fighter would refuse an order with a gun pointed at their head unless they had a very good reason to doubt the threat was credible. And while it didn't feel likely that Summiri was the culprit (though why didn't it? I was still playing catch-up with my own thoughts) I did not get the sense that she'd fail to make good on it.

I frowned, then lowered myself towards the floor and placed the gun on the floor. Summiri smiled. "Good." She blinked-- Though less with alarm and more like she was recalling something. "Where is Hildris? She should come out too, if she's in there with you."

"She just walked in here and vanished like a ghost," I told her coldly. "We're in terrible danger right now-- Whoever is responsible has to still be within spitting distance! I don't know what you're trying to do, but you're going to get us both killed."

She narrowed her eyes slightly. "Step out of the room. Let me see."

I left as instructed. For a moment I thought she was going to investigate herself and turn her back to me - potentially giving me a moment to ambush her or make a run for it - but instead, in an annoyingly clever move, picked up a mirror for the dresser, angling in front of her as she moved from side-to-side so as to view the interior without having to turn from me at all. After a few looks she put it back, then - still keeping the gun pointed squarely at my forehead - took a step backwards, knelt down, and picked up the pistol I'd just dropped.

(Something about this room, about all of this, was bothering me, but I couldn't place it. My mind kept directing itself back to the question of how it even existed in this state to begin with, thinking of the ways the three rooms could slide to the left and right. There was just no way. There was no way!)

"Yes, she seems to have vanished," Summiri said thoughtfully. "I can only assume the Uqartul has consumed her as well. Or perhaps it was assuming her form."

My brow flattened. "You can't be fucking serious."

"I'm entirely serious."

"Is that why you're pointing a gun at me?" I asked indignantly. "You think I'm one, too?"

"It's not impossible, but that's not the primary reason," she explained. "At this point, it's simply a matter of rational self-interest to take as great a degree of control of the situation as possible."

"I just saved your life! Bahram was dragging you off to do who-knows-bloody-what!" I couldn't say the word 'bloody' authentically, even with the Kasua filter. I sounded like an asshole.

"Yes," she conceded. "And again: I don't mean to seem uncharitable. I am grateful, truly."

"Then why is it 'rational self-interest' to hold me at gunpoint?!"

"Because I don't know you, Kasua. Or, no, it's more accurate that your motives are unknowable." She narrowed her eyes. "In my bedroom, you took the Last Winter instead of the photographs that would have shown you the truth of your mother's death. Why did you do that?"

"I already explained," I reminded her. "I thought that the fact Rastag had the photographs at all meant he must have been complicit, so chose the painting as leverage to bring people over to my side."

"That's not all you said," she reminded me in turn. "And of course it isn't, because in isolation that reasoning makes no sense. I would be dead, so there would be no one to expose, and no clue to lead you back to my co-conspirator. No; you said you thought I was still alive."

"You are still alive."

"Well, sort of, yes. But you didn't know that before, and more to the point, you haven't done anything to suggest you even view the situation in that way now. You would hardly have saved me from Bahram if you believed me to be your mother's killer-- Even if you wanted me alive in order to extract more information, it would have been to your advantage to at least shoot me, as well, so I'd be at your mercy. Not to run after Hildris."

I frowned. "You offered me an alternative explanation. That the camera was automated."

"And that was the truth. But it could just as easily have been a far-fetched platitude intended to throw you off the scent." She tilted her head to the side, her expression analytical. "If you were confident enough in your suspicions to throw away a chance at definitive proof, something like that wouldn't be enough to deter you. You must have been absolutely certain. So what were you certain of, Kasua?"

She got me. No good excuses or alternative explanations came to mind. Only my stupid theory.

I sighed. "...I thought that Phaidime was Rastag."

She furrowed her brow. "Interesting." Her eyes flicked downward for a moment, then back up. "Why?"

I tried to think of a way to put it that wouldn't seem deranged or make it obvious I'd been breaking the rules. "Because Phaidime is a ghost with no past, despite supposedly having been his twin, who has acted suspicious over the entire night, especially during dinner. Because he died in a way that didn't leave an identifiable corpse. And because Noah - the original Noah - told me that he'd fabricated Rastag's entire identity for him wholesale when they first met." I winced. "There were other things, too, like his relationship with women. I can't remember all of it off hand."

She pursed her lips, not quite amused but definitely feeling some flavor of enthusiastic surprise. "You don't think the others would notice if a stranger was actually an old friend in drag?"

"Phaidime was supposed to be his twin."

"Fraternal."

I frowned. "People are easily fooled by anything outside of the range of their expectations."

She looked at me for a few moments, seeming to consider this. "I can't disagree with that much, at least." She tapped her thumb idly against the pistol's safety. "See, this is the problem. Kasua. Everyone else here, I have a predictable model of them in my head. I anticipated Bahram's violent reaction towards me, even if I didn't think it was a certainty, and Hildris and Tuthal have been almost laughably predictable in their motives." She chuckled to herself as if this was an inside joke. "However, we're barely acquainted, and my attempts to predict your thinking have failed catastrophically, thrusting us into a dangerous situation. So I must resort to a more direct form of managing you."

I frowned. Was this some kind of meta dig at me not behaving like I was supposed to? Was everyone here secretly seething with annoyance at me, and the moment the game was declared formally over I'd get an earful?

"You think I'm somehow the cause of all this?" I asked, in lieu of voicing those anxieties. "Because I took the painting?"

"Not that specifically, no. Though, well, it hasn't helped." She glanced at the walls - above the desk, at the world map of the Mimikos. "Don't worry, I'm not going to hurt you. I just need you to assist me in a few tasks that will ensure our safety, since the others have gone and seemingly got themselves killed."

"What sort of tasks?"

She sighed. "To start with, we're going to need some alcohol." She shifted around the room a little again - towards the window - then indicated the dresser, which now that I was looking at it more closely included a small cabinet at the edge. "Open that up. There should be a few bottles in there."

I felt like there was an opportunity for a snappy line here - something about her being an alcoholic, or needing to get her priorities in order, along those lines - but I couldn't think of anything, so I obeyed in silence. There were four bottles; two wines, two types of whiskey, and a clear spirit of some sort.

"Take them all," she instructed. "Get the corkscrew, too."

It was a little tricky to do this elegantly, but I managed it, stashing the smaller bottles and the screw in the pouches at the side of my dress and holding one wine bottle in each. Summiri smiled.

"Good," she said, and then in an eerily casual motion, raised one of her two pistols and shot the corpse of the not-detective in the head. "Alright, let's get moving."

"Why did you do that."

She smiled brightly. "No more questions until we're somewhere safe, I think."

She urged me out the door, pointing the pistol she'd appropriated from me. There were no new surprises waiting out in the hall; Bahram had been left beside one of the windows, seemingly unconscious. The wound I'd given him on his leg was bleeding, though not severely; I'd succeeded in avoiding anything vital. Still, without some form of medical attention, he'd be dead within the next hour or two.

Summiri closed the door behind us. "Pop open those wine bottles and pour them about a little. A meter or two in both directions should do the job well enough. Throw one of the whiskey bottles in too, for good measure."

It wasn't difficult to ascertain where this was going. "You're going to start a fire."

"We're going to start a fire," she corrected me. "It's the only way to be sure we'll kill the beast - or beasts. As I said, they could be anything, from a piece of furniture, to a wall, to the entire car."

I gave her a flat look. "You can't really believe this nonsense. You're obviously capable of some degree of rational thinking. You can't think we're being menaced by a pack of folkloric monsters."

"Please follow my instructions, Kasua. I don't want to hurt you."

"If we start a fire here, it'll spread to the entire train," I stated. "Unless we run out into the steppe, we'll both be 'hurt', whether you want it or not."

She chuckled. "Don't be silly. Obviously we're not going to let that happen." She glanced to the right. "Our destination after this is the engine room. We're going to detach this whole part of the train and move a little distance down the track; close enough that we'll be found alongside the fire when help arrives. Kill two birds with one stone."

"What about Bahram? Are we just going to leave him here?"

A roll of her eyes. "Obviously not. You're going to carry him. We'll see to his wounds once we're safe."

I grumbled to myself. This was absurd.

Nevertheless, I followed her orders. I uncorked the wine bottles and spread their contents up and down the hall, then hefted Bahram - he was lighter than I expected, all skin and bones - over my shoulders. Summiri withdrew her lighter, instructing me to move towards the door to the engine car.

Wine, it should be noted, isn't actually that flammable; even the strongest vintage won't get anywhere near 1/4th alcohol content. It's not like this made Summiri's plan a non-starter; it wasn't going to hurt, and train carriages from this era were mostly wood, so the whole thing was certain to go up in flames regardless. But it drew me back to that idea that had bothered me over and over again during the night. Was it a mistake of Summiri, the character? Summiri's player? Or the author of the entire scenario?

Or was I wrong, and wine actually was flammable to make this worth doing? It wasn't like I could look it up on the spot.

Going beyond the mystery genre for a moment, epistemological nihilism is the belief that nothing is truly knowable, because no knowledge exists divorced from perspective and circumstance. The logical end-point of skepticism, where you can't even sit in a chair because you can't know if the chair is real. When a story falls apart, a life falls apart, you can never relax. Everything becomes chaos.

"This'll destroy Phaidime's body, too," I reminded her. "The whole scene."

"Yes, it's unfortunate," she said, looking up at the bump in the ceiling. "I was hoping to ascertain her true identity, but it can't be helped. I doubt there's much the police could have done for a situation like this, at least."

"It's a little convenient."

She raised an eyebrow. "Are you accusing me of being involved?"

I genuinely wasn't sure if I was. I felt so unmoored I was going essentially off pure vibes.

When I didn't reply, she ignited the flame, preparing to throw it.

"It'll kill your cat, too," I suddenly remembered. "She was still in here, last I saw. I saw her out in the hallway, but she could have gone back into your room. We never got the door open."

Summiri stopped what she was doing, falling oddly still for a moment, then looked back at me in an awkward, jerky motion, a stiff expression on her face. "my-- My cat?"

"...yes," I said slowly, obviously curious about this sudden shift in behavior.

She was silent for a moment, looking strikingly uncomfortable. I heard her mutter something very quietly to herself. "yes, i-- I'd forgotten," she eventually said. "If she got out and about, there's no way to know where she is now. The Uqartul could have well consumed her as well." She looked back sadly. "There's... well, there's nothing for it. I'll just have to hope she made her way to one of the other carriages, or that she at least... gets away."

I raised an eyebrow. "Are you crying?"

"I'm not crying," she said. She was definitely crying. "It's fine."

I was about to say something further, but suddenly - faintly - I once again saw, this time not out of the corner of my eye but straight-up directly in my line of sight, something swoop past the window. It was only a faint shadow, but it looked almost like a person; I saw a midsection, limb-like protrusions, and even a hint of fabric, although it might also have been fur.

It was flying. It lurched towards the ground first, and then upwards.

"W-- Did you see that?!" I exclaimed, looking up, already doubting, already wondering if it had just been some trick of the light - forgetting, of course, that nothing in this world happened for no reason.

Summiri, rubbing her eyes, smiled. "Come on, Kasua," she said. "You can't expect me to fall for something that basic."

Then, she finally lowered the lighter at the edge of where the wine stained the floor, which - proving the error was not with me or the creator, at the very least - did not instantly cause a blaze, but rather a small flame that began to quickly spread along the carpet. She turned back to me sharply.

"Come on. We'll need to do this next part quickly."

With no time offered for further investigation, we proceeded back into the liminal chamber, which remained unchanged. "Set Bahram down for a moment," Summiri instructed as she shut the door. "You'll need to detach this connective room from the wider carriage."

"Wouldn't it have been better to do that before you started the fire?" I asked flatly.

"Don't worry, the walls here are built with insulating materials that act as firebreaks. Unless the blaze is out of control enough to reach the roof, it shouldn't be a problem." She scooted around me, then gestured her pistol at the door we'd just passed through. "Besides, the process is very straightforward. First, there's a series of four clamps on the side of and top of the door. You'll need to unscrew them - counter-clockwise - first, then pull them off."

I did this, which true to her word was a lot easier than I imagined it would be-- The clamps sprung off with just a little strength in a way that felt too modern for the era, rather than the laborious manual effort I'd been expecting. She then directed me to a larger set of clamps she said connected at the corners of the room.

"Just pull back the wooden paneling and you'll see them," she said.

I did, and indeed they were there - basically larger, more oblong versions of the ones I'd just unplugged.

What felt more notable, however, was what wasn't here. I remembered that the last time I'd seen one of these rooms with the walls taken down, on my way into the front carriage, the edges had been completely obfuscated by a wall of tightly-compressed fabric. I'd guessed after the fact that had been part of the mechanism - a bendable material that could contort and unfold to extreme degrees as needed with the train. But it seemed that role was actually just filled by some flexible metal plating significantly further back.

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"The cloth material I saw on the way into your private carriage isn't here," I vocalized.

"Hm," She furrowed her brow. "I wasn't sure what that was either, actually. There have obviously been modifications to the train I'm unaware of."

I squinted at her. Was she lying? It was too dark in this little room to get any sense of it.

I disconnected the larger clamps with only a little more difficulty, then finally moved on to the load-bearing one at the bottom of the train, removing part of the floor in the process. This one had a little lever I needed to spin up and down to unscrew the mechanism, but this also only took a minute or so, and then we were done. Summiri let out a subtle sigh of satisfaction, then directed me to pick Bahram back up.

This time, however, he let out a little moan as I did it. "Ugh... nn..."

"Oh dear," Summiri said. "I do hope he doesn't wake up yet. It was sheer fluke I managed to knock him out without a serious head wound last time; I wouldn't want to have to chance it again."

"He's going to wake up sooner or later," I told her. "What are we going to do when we get to the driving area?"

"There's a small compartment I added for the drivers to sleep in between shifts," she explained, which now that I thought about it I remembered spying through the window when I was first inspecting the train. "We'll lock him in there after treating his wounds. If he wakes up, it'll be a good opportunity for me to try and settle all this with him non-violently." She smiled wistfully. "He really is a good man, just a little too sentimental and prone to wallowing in things. I'm sure that I can make him understand the situation if we can just talk properly."

"I don't know about that," I said skeptically. "He's seemed pretty consistently murderous towards you." I blinked, remembering. "When he grabbed you, he said that 'wouldn't be controlled again', and that he was going to take you to Rastag."

She clicked her tongue. "Did he say that? I confess I was rather preoccupied trying to prevent him from breaking my neck."

"You're avoiding the implicit question."

"I believe I said there would be no questions until we arrived." She gestured with the pistol. "Come along, Kasua."

There's not a lot to say about the next 10 or so minutes after this. The door to the driving area was already open when we arrived, and despite it being the one part of the train that I hadn't explored yet, there didn't seem to be any great twists within. It was just a rectangular, mostly empty room with a control panel with a chair, a little metal door where the engine could be accessed directly, a small wooden cabinet, and two tiny side-chambers protruding from the walls which I saw contained a bunk bed and a toilet+sink respectively, both of significantly more proletarian quality than what we'd had in our rooms. Through the windows on both the left and right, I could see the inscrutable navigation mirrors which could be turned to reveal the front, rear, and even sky overhead the train, but failed to yield any new insights. I couldn't even get a good enough look at the side of the rest carriage (if I could just get one look! I almost wanted to push my luck and dive out the window just to satisfy my curiosity) before all was said and done. Suffice it to say, the whole thing was something of an anticlimax.

We also, despite me half-expecting to see yet another corpse, found Wiliya standing around in a state of general befuddlement, though there was notably no sign of Gaizarik. Summiri shut down any chance to interrogate this or for the three of us to talk as a group, and had me bandage Bahram's leg while Wiliya restarted the engine, drove us about 50 meters forward, then stopped it again. Afterwards, she coralled him into the 'bedroom', where we also placed Bahram's unconscious body. Then she locked the door, sat in the room's single chair - a plush stool adjacent to the controls, which she moved forward so that it was out of view of both the windows - and commanded me to sit on the floor adjacent to the dresser. She never once lowered the gun.

By this point, I could faintly see the fire starting to consume the rest carriage through the mirrors, though so far it amounted to little more than a faint glow and a little smoke, an island of light in a seemingly endless ocean of darkness. There still wasn't a single break in the clouds, the light of the stars and the Lesser Lamp completely swallowed.

"This feels strange," I muttered as I sat down.

"Strange how?" Summiri asked.

"Like everything was unraveling into madness, and now it's just... stopped."

"Isn't that a good thing?" she asked, looking puzzled. "That's the power of a well-conceptualized and smoothly executed plan, without the influence of irrational actors. Order from chaos. All civilization begins from coordination."

I was briefly left stumped by hearing Summiri describe herself as a 'rational actor', resulting in a silence that ended up taking hold for over a minute. My mind started to wander, finally attempting to make sense of the events of the previous half hour, but I couldn't let myself relax. Despite the atmosphere, there had to still be a killer at large. Anything could happen at a moment's notice.

"What now," I asked coldly.

"Now we do absolutely nothing," she stated. "Even in this weather, the fire will soon grow large enough for it to be visible at one of the watch posts. They'll send out a party that will arrive within a few hours. Until then, well, it's as Eirene had planned." She smiled. "So long as I don't move from this spot, I can shoot you, and anyone who comes through the door. It's the safest position possible."

"They could come through the windows," I pointed out. Or out of the engine.

"Yes, they wouldn't be able to get a shot at us directly. And even if you are a little inscrutable, I'm confident enough in your self-interest that I believe you'd see the advantage in alerting me if someone were trying to get in."

"What about the monsters?" I asked her, my tone somewhat facetious. "Aren't you worried about that any more?"

She quirked her brow. "You've already forgotten? So long as there's a large open flame nearby, they won't approach. That's another reason I had Wiliya only move us a few yards along." She let out a small sigh. "I doubt they'll return tonight. This may have been a disaster in terms of my original intent, but I'll live to fight another day, which is what's important."

I stared at her with narrowed eyes, my lips parted slightly.

"What's that look for?" she asked curiously.

"I'm just wondering the same thing I was a few minutes ago," I told her. "Whether you actually believe any of this, or it's all just some ploy." I shifted my legs a little; the floor wasn't comfortable, so I was having trouble finding a bearable position. Kasua's body bothered me more when I was forced to be aware of it. "You sounded like you really believed it back when we were on top of the train, sort of. But now it feels like you're just going through the motions. And if that's the case, I'm wondering why you're really doing all this."

"Mm." She nodded thoughtfully, in a way that reminded me of my therapist (from a few decades ago, obviously I hadn't had a therapist when I was living in my own filth in Deshur). "So you do think I might be the mastermind behind all this."

"Well, you already confessed to having arranged this entire weekend as some sort of 'test'. It doesn't seem out of the question that it could turn into a punishment because of some perceived failure, or even for you to have some completely different motive that you're using all this supernatural pretense to obfuscate."

"I'm not a murderer, Kasua," she stated with subtle offense. "If I were, I would have killed you and Bahram back in the rest car, where the flames would have swallowed your bodies too. Or, if for some reason I didn't wish to dirty my hands, locked both up anywhere I pleased for whoever you're presuming my accomplice to be to dispose of. It wasn't as though I needed your help to get here, after all."

"You shot the detective."

"He wasn't the detective," she reminded me. "And he was already dead, so it doesn't count."

I was silent for a moment, staring at her inquisitively. "...you're right," I eventually said. "I don't like the conclusion that you somehow were somehow behind everything, either."

"Then what do you think I'm doing?"

I looked down at my hands, still bruised and bloodied from the fight with Noah that felt as though it had happened at least a day ago by now. Everything hurt; it was so hard to just think. "It's not just that you're a liar. You don't make sense as a person. No, even Rastag doesn't make sense to me as a person. How can someone be logic-oriented, but also such a complete crackpot? Believing in things that stand in obvious contradiction to the scientific reality of the world?"

Summiri said nothing, just smiling gently.

Fuck it, I thought.

"When I mentioned the cat," I continued, partially a new thought and partially an extension of the previous, "it was like when Bahram first punched you. You stopped acting like yourself for a moment, like there are two people in your head, and 'Summiri' seized control from 'Rastag'. But that sort of thing isn't possible. The human mind can't sustain multiple perspectives at the same time, like in a story."

I'd decided to go for broke in terms of challenging the premises of the story directly and in-character; I couldn't keep worrying about accidentally stepping on the toes of the writers or the performers. Kasua was supposed to be a rationalist. This was what it made sense for her to say.

"That's somewhat reductive, don't you think?" Summiri asked, with a tilt of her head. "It's true that the human brain can, in strict terms, only hold one aware 'self' in the moment, but there's nothing that precludes holding competing self-conceptualizations, or at a more fundamental level, competing values and beliefs, many of which may be tightly associated with one another while still broadly existing in isolation to the rest of one's cognitive space."

I clicked my tongue. This was an irritating turn towards the philosophical, especially considering the topic. I had to think how to filter what I wanted to say - what I knew, first hand (like, honestly, who was this pulpy roleplay character to talk to me about this subject?) - through Kasua's perspective without it seeming forced.

Iwa had once told me (though she probably read it in a magazine or something) that you can define how good an actor is by how completely they construct the character within their mind. Disregarding bad actors who aren't really actors at all but just ham up some aspect of their own personality, a mediocre actor will think of their character as a sort of language, a set of principles of communication, actions and catchphrases they need to learn. Meanwhile, a good actor will regard them more as a set of beliefs, while a truly great actor will conceptualize them in terms of their history and formative experiences.

The more comprehensively you create a character within your mind, the more they become real, and so easy to 'be'. But there are limits to that.

"...people can hold contradictory opinions and self-images, but there's a core to every human being that transcends aesthetics and their relationship with the world, like a compass of the self." I grimaced at her. "Almost everything we do is performance to some degree or another. But you can only ever be one person."

Summiri shook her head. "I don't know what to say, Kasua. I disagree with that completely. In fact, I think it's an irony that you consider my outlook on the supernatural absurd, while at the same time professing a belief in what is essentially a soul." She looked down at one of her pistols and idly enabled the safety, then began playing with it in her palm. "However, I do think that point of view serves to illuminate why you would find my outlook contradictory."

"In what way?"

"I've said repeatedly that I don't believe myself to be literally Rastag, but I sense that you haven't quite understood what I meant by that." She flicked the pistol to and fro. "As I said, the self is information. 'Rastag' a set of concepts. I possess full knowledge of those concepts. Ergo, I am able to 'be' Rastag, in the same way that you are able to 'be' Kasua Inarsduttar."

"I am Kasua Inarsduttar," I said. "I've lived my own experiences. Made my own choices. Obviously." (The levels of both personal and metafictional irony were piling up to intimidating levels. I tried to avoid thinking about it.)

"But if the world is a wholly mundane place, then consistent self is illusory," she countered. "There isn't a set of atoms that define the idea of 'Kasua'. Merely a pattern, information, that gives birth to a series of 'selfhoods' with relative consistency moment-to-moment."

"Even if that's true, the very fact that you 'lapsed' into a different personality shows that you don't even have that pattern. If you were really Rastag, you'd be able to be him under all conditions."

"What makes you think that Rastag was able to be Rastag under all conditions? That his self-conceptualization was not something also constructed, deliberately, over a period of time, painting over something else in the process? I won't deny it: I do not always feel like myself. The process was imperfect. The vestiges of Summiri - of my younger self before she came into Rastag's care, if you want to put it that way - exist within my mind, incompatible with the person I have become. She has different values which occasionally reassert themselves. But they are not more genuine simply because their associative web has been here longer. They are both equally 'myself'."

Wait a minute. This was just Dilmun shit again! The same exact logic I'd heard from Nora a few days ago that I thought I'd got away from!

Oh my god, this culture was fucked. They couldn't get away from these concepts even in their art.

"But you're choosing to act like Rastag," I countered. "So there is a real you. An executor making the decision. And that you, that's the truth-- The real truth."

She shook her head. "You really are very similar to your mother. It's unsettling, in some ways."

"You don't even know my mother," I said. Kasua's mother didn't exist.

"Let me put this another way," Summiri said, glancing out the window for a moment. "You saw the fire ritual the tribes use out on the steppe. Why do you think they perform it, if the Uqartul doesn't actually exist?"

I almost said 'people don't need a rational reason to believe things' but stopped myself just in time as I realized this was 1) stupid and dismissive, and 2) not even something I really believed. In truth, social behaviors that had literally no role didn't survive-- There was always some purpose, if not in isolation than as part of a wider narrative. People needed narratives, just like I needed the narrative that was making me have this argument that suddenly felt like it wasn't even about the mystery any more.

"...fire rituals exist for all sorts of reasons," I answered. "Fire obviously serves a number of useful roles to pre-industrial societies. It keeps people warm, it destroys things that are diseased. It can cause moisture to rise and produce clouds, sometimes shifting the weather, which is of course the most famous instance of a ritual in early history that actually has its intended result, even if the participants don't know why."

"Those are a lot of examples that aren't actually an answer to my question," Summiri pointed out.

"Well, when we passed the bonfire, they were leading people close to it one at a time in a queue," I recalled. "So I'd assume it is - or at least was, at some point in history - some sort of inspection process. Using the light or the heat to check for something. Maybe disease marks, fever, something like that." I looked at her. "It could also be a deprecated form of... our own religion, since they were also part of the Rhunbardic Party originally. I read that scholars believe that began as something akin to lighthouses, helping people navigate to major towns and keeping community centers warm. That doesn't fit as cleanly, though."

Summiri nodded. "In other words, it's useful. People believe in it, and it produces a meaningful result."

"What? No." I frowned. "No, now you're being reductive."

"But let's escalate that to a grander form of ritual," Summiri asked. "What is a nation, Kasua? What is the Rhunbardic Empire?"

"A group of people organized according to a set of rules and cultural symbols and values," I told her. (Considering the time period, I probably should have said something about ethnicity too, but the scenario could withstand that small departure from fidelity, I thought.)

"In other words--"

"No, I see where you're going with this," I cut her off, because she had a chance to repeat what she'd just said in response to my last answer. "You can't say that all of these things are the same. It might be true that identity, ritual and society itself are all to some extent useful constructs, but there are things that underlie those constructs. Nations are built on the material concerns of the population. Rituals only work because of some physical principle. And there is a fundamental self, regardless of the things we construct in our minds."

"'Truth'," she said, echoing my words from a minute ago.

"Science," I countered, my tone harsh.

"And what is 'science'?"

"Provable reality determined through known principles and logical inferences from those principles," I responded. "Neurology. Biology. Physics."

"And what establishes a 'known principle'."

"Replicable experimentation," I answered, deadpan. I felt strangely irritated being forced to vocalize these secondary school level concepts.

"Isn't the idea of a 'replicable experiment' just another sort of results-oriented thinking?" Summiri challenged. "There's no aspect of the cosmos which we understand fundamentally. It's true that the scientific process has delivered us a tremendous aptitude for predicting reality based on observed patterns, and in that sense it's of course an incredibly valuable thing, but regardless we've still come no closer to perceiving why those patterns exist. Even though we've ascertained the nature of particles and the existence of the Timeless Realm, we still don't know where they 'came from', or why they're assembled as they are. Is it something we should accept as being the nature of the world for no particular reason? We also constantly encounter exceptions to the principles we believe we have established, forcing us to establish new principles that account for those exceptions. Science is forever in flux, assigning tentative explanations that are inevitably proven reductive. How is that different, in the end, from what the tribe we passed earlier was doing? From any other form of mythmaking?"

"The difference is that science is self-aware about its own deficiency," I told her. "You're being disingenuous, or outright ignorant, by using the term 'principle'. What you should be saying is theory. Science works in terms of theories, whereas mythology prescribes reality. They're not treating the Uqartul as a conceptual stand-in, they think it's literally real. As do you, apparently."

She raised an eyebrow. "Do I?"

I was flustered. I would have stammered if it weren't for Kasua's body. "I should fucking hope you do! Otherwise you just had us destroy a crime scene for no reason, and you probably are the culprit!"

"I don't mean to be rude, Kasua, but the way you perceive reality betrays a certain lack of self-awareness. You say that what separates science from mythology is its self-critical element, but the argument you're making doesn't seem to value that at all. Rather, you're using it as a bludgeon to enforce a perception of reality. I suppose I mean that in two ways-- On the one hand, invoking it to support your idea of an ultimate, indivisible self is, well, simply incorrect. Even as far back as the New Kingdoms era, there were experiments to literally split the two hemispheres of the brain, and they were shown to be able to operate independently."

"That's different," I began countering. "That's a physical separation. I'm talking about a neurologically unified mind."

"Alright, but what is your scientific basis for asserting it exists in those cases?" She seemed to be bored of the gun but didn't know what to do with it, holding it over the floor for a moment before setting it on her lap. "I'm sure you're aware that we only understand how consciousness arises from physical processes in the broadest of strokes. How can you know it works like you think?"

"Because I'm a conscious being. I can make the inference logically from my own experiences."

"Well, that's just solipsism."

"No it isn't," I objected. "Human brains are all more or less anatomically the same-- Yours doesn't magically work differently. We might not understand the minutiae of consciousness, but we understand that the brain is a decision making network. It necessarily has values that are in competition and are prioritized to varying degrees, and in the right circumstances those priorities emerge. That's the real you, not the information you possess. Everything else is just an affect, at best fooling yourself."

"How bleak."

"Reducing almost the totality of human selfhood to performance," she elaborated. "If you deny everything about an individual save for who they are when pushed to the absolute limit, everything which emerges in the infinite states of circumstantial subjectivity we spend 99% of our lives within, how much is actually left? At that point, you might as well deny not just free will, but the concept of a 'person' entirely. It would reduce us to a set of reflexes, barely even living beings."

"But those 'reflexes' are the truth," I said, even though I could see at this point where she was going with this. "Everything else is just a shadow."

"Well, if we are creatures of shadow, it is only appropriate. After all, we live in a shadowed world." She leaned forward. "That's the other thing I meant a moment ago, Kasua. In trying to use science as not just a tool but a source of truth, you ultimately serve to make reality only more inscrutable. The world itself must be dismantled around a neverending, recursive process of questioning. You wonder how I can be capable of logical reasoning and still believe in the seemingly irrational - I ask you, what isn't irrational? Certainly our nation is nothing more than an illusion. Our rituals. Our conceptions of others."

Murder mysteries.

"You literally believe in shapeshifters!" I exclaimed.

"Even our basic ontological frameworks are founded on challengeable assumptions. How can we trust our senses? You cannot understand my thinking because you have not truly reckoned with the unknown, accepted it into your heart. You would sooner deny the world out of fear, then embrace the wonders it contains beyond your ability to understand. To embrace not the rationally true, but the intuitively true."

Suddenly, it hit me like a truck of bricks. Summiri was talking about the exact same existential bullshit I returned to every other week: The emptiness of life without some kind of narrative framework to prop it up. Except that while I framed this as people needing what were basically delusions to survive, she was framing that idea as the delusion. That the world was actually a place rich with inherent meaning which was deliberately destroyed through over-examination; not being worn away by the tides, but ground down like a mill.

I saw my identity as inescapable on a moral and literal level, but she saw hers as completely subjective and fluid. She was Rastag or she wasn't, depending on the moment.

Summiri wasn't me. She was the inverse of me.

"When you said that civilization emerges from coordination earlier, you weren't talking about taking the most rational actions," I realized in horror. "You were talking about establishing a... framework, for the situation. A narrative."

"You could put it that way, yes."

"You didn't set fire to the carriage because you believed there was a literal monster threat. Or, no, you don't think about it that way at all. You did it because it felt correct."

"In part," she said. "I did weigh it against the knowledge we had on-hand. But the Uqartul obviously has great significance in this situation, so it seemed prudent to act on the assumption it was present, either literally or figuratively."

"What the fuck does that mean," I said. "That doesn't make any sense! It's either here or not. What are you even saying?"

Summiri looked at me curiously, silent.

"You're insane," I told her, my teeth gritted. "You're going to get us both killed."

This insult didn't seem to affect her. "You asked earlier who I thought had killed your mother, and I said I'd tell you once things had settled down. " She smiled slightly. "Let me tell you now. You deserve to know the truth, about all of this."