Author: Lurina

232: Love and Inventing Hell (𒐁) - The Flower That Bloomed Nowhere | Royal Road

Loge | The Timeless Realm

The Loge was silent. I sat at my 'usual' end of the table, my hands in my lap, while the Lady sat in the other, picking at a bowl of potato chips. We regarded one another with puzzled indifference.

"You know," she said in between crunches, "I'm aware I gave you something of an open welcome on the condition you called ahead - and I do appreciate that you did this time - but sort of implicit was the hope you'd have, you know, something to say?" She swallowed and reached for another. "It's a little awkward just to sit here with you gawking at me."

"...I thought enough time had passed that I ought to come back," I said. "You said to return after a week. It's been well over a week."

"I feel like you're omitting some context there," she said. "I wanted you to wait for a week so you could maybe develop a better sense of life here, and the nature of the task you're trying to commit yourself to."

"Well," I said grimly, "I did."

"But you don't have anything more to say about it?"

I pursed my lips. "No."

She drummed her bony fingers against the table. "Last time, you were all too eager to voice your feelings."

"If you're omniscient, you should already know what happened anyway," I said. "There's no point in talking about it."

She shrugged.

I stared at her for a few moments more, then sighed. "Why do Tertiaries exist at all?"

"Don't ask me," she said. "I'm not the one who came up with how things are supposed to work here. I just followed the instructions I was given to the best of my ability, given the limitations I was working under."

I frowned, shaking my head.

"But, thinking about it from a human perspective," she continued. "The greatest challenge in creating a paradise will always be social. Abundance is just a matter of - heh - matter, and most other concerns, like home and good health, are just about keeping systems ordered. But if you want the perfect friend? Or, well, perfect anything, really?" She snorted. "That's a difficult wish to grant without things getting complicated fast."

"I shouldn't have said anything," I told her. "I don't want to get into this right now."

"Suit yourself," she accepted. "What do you want to talk about, then?"

"I want some straight answers," I said. "About my situation."

"How much time do I actually have left?"

She smirked. "Couldn't eyeball it, then?"

I didn't reply, crossing my arms.

Another chip went into her mouth. "If you knew, it might not make you happy," she said. "It could be like a crushing weight, towering over you."

"How long have I been in Dilmun?"

She blinked her visible eye, seeming confused. "The same as everyone else."

"And yet the hourglass is only drained a little bit."

She crunched loudly as her eye wandered upwards. You'd think a goddess would chew with her mouth full, but obviously this was also just some weird bit she was doing. "Oh, what the hell." She looked back at me. "It's not a matter of time, exactly."

"Then what is it a matter of?"

"Remember, the perception of linearity in this world is something I was forced to foster in deference to the limitations of human perception," she said. "It's not exactly an illusion, but it's also not as real. Primaries and Secondaries, like myself, are fundamentally static beings. Actions you take - or, well, perceived causality, we're not running a justice system here, we don't need to pretend free will actually exists - are more like expressions of possibilities that exist within that stasis." She pointed at me. "You're just as static as everyone else in that respect. The only difference is that death, or rather entropy, exists as one of those possibilities, brought in by necessity as a result of your unique connection to your original world."

"I don't-- What does that actually mean, in practice."

"It means that the hourglass moves in accordance with your progression towards that possibility, through time or otherwise."

"But it hasn't moved at all."

A beat. "You did do a little bit of eyeballing, then."

"So what is this 'possibility'? "

"I don't know. It could be anything." She took another chip. "But it's one single outcome within everything you could potentially experience, so, well, if you think of a thousand monkeys at a thousand typewriters--"

I stood up from my chair, putting my hands on the table. She raised an eyebrow.

"You tricked me," I said, upset.

"You let me think I was in some kind of immediate danger!"

"I most certainly did not!" She held a hand to her chest. "I shouldn't tolerate such an attack on my character."

"You said that I had a 'fair few years'!"

"And that's entirely correct!" she insisted. "Relatively speaking. Come on, we spent half that conversation talking about the nature of this world as a place for infinite beings. I can't be blamed if you applied my words relative to your own life experience and not that."

"You knew my most recent memories were of freaking out about my diagnosis, which would make me liable to project that situation on to this one. And that I'd expect it to work like an actual hourglass would, where it's moving on something resembling a human timescale. And you just let me interpret it that way! Giving me Kamrusepa's account, egging me on to try and change things!"

"I definitely don't agree with that characterization of events. As I recall it, I urged you to calm down, and only offered my aid when you were stubbornly insistent."

"Don't be obtuse! You know you could have told me this and it would have completely changed my reaction."

She looked at me innocently for another few moments, then snorted, breaking into a fit of chuckles.

My lips folded into a grimace. "Fuck you."

"Oh, don't be like that," she urged. "I was planning to just spook you for a little bit and then spell it out whenever you came back, but you got so carried away with it all! I didn't want to spoil your fun." She hesitated. "Well, okay. I didn't want to spoil my fun, primarily."

I started to turn and leave, mumbling under my breath. What a fucking waste of--

"Come on," she urged. "You're not even wrong, you know. You really will die at some point or another, so long as it's part of your nature. It's a mathematical inevitability."

I flinched, looking back at her. "That's the first time you've said 'die' explicitly."

"No, I'm pretty sure I said it once," she corrected me. "Though it's a stupid word, of course. Everything is just state transitions, yadayada."

A big part of me really did just want to storm off. That's how this scenario had played out in my head; after the conversation with Kamrusepa, my doubts regarding the illogic of the entire situation had finally become overwhelming enough to dampen both my fear of the Lady, my confusion at the strange and arbitrary-feeling rules of Dilmun, and the panicked defeatism instilled from my diagnosis, and an answer along these lines had begun to feel almost inevitable.

It would feel cathartic, to cut whatever game she was trying to play with me sharply short. But it had been a full week since Kamrusepa's game, and things had calmed down enough that I was finally starting to feel like an adult woman again as opposed to a child left alone in a haunted house. I knew, rationally, that I needed to confirm as much as I could.

I slowly turned, slumping back in the chair. The Lady smiled widely.

"So the hourglass represents how close I am to this possibility," I restated.

"That's right."

"Meaning, the fact that it's partly fallen means that I must have moved towards it, somewhat."

"One would presume."

"In a way that remains consistent."

"Consistent for less than a month, you mean," she said. "If you're asking me to speculate, the hourglass represents a tie, or more accurately an echo of a tie - it's hardly a two-way street at this point - with your mortal self. You have just spent an untold amount of time reliving her life." She shrugged. "It's probably something to do with that."

I took out the hourglass, looking at it again, while the Lady picked up the last broken crumbs of fried potato from the bottom of the bowl between her nails and placed them on her tongue one by one. If I had to put a number on it, it looked about 1/25th, maybe 1/20th drained.

"So what does that imply?" I asked. "That if we were completely aligned, that'd be the trigger?"

"I would assume it's exponentially more specific than that," she said.

"How can you not know? You're the one who made me like this in the first place."

"Well, there's not a lot of precedent. And we're talking about a phenomenon confined to this realm. I can't see the future here any more than you can see the inside of your own guts. Though, again, I can speculate." She pushed the empty bowl to the side, ringing a little bell at the side of the table. "Since your potentiality for death is an import from the version of you in the Remaining World, what I would imagine might trigger it would be aligning this entire world with the reality it came from. That is to say, if everyone got together and used their prop to recreate the Sanctuary as it was at the time I absorbed it - down to the atom, of course - while at the same time your pneuma's structure perfectly matched... I'm not sure, actually-- Its state at the time of your actual death? Or maybe as it was the Apega was first activated? One of those two. Then you'd probably be able to die." She nodded to herself. "Yeah, I'm 95% sure that's how it works."

"You'd need everyone recreating it," I questioned flatly. "Every single Primary and Secondary, with all of their prop."

"Yes," she said. "It's not like there's any spare matter. It all came from the same place-- Or rather, that same single moment."

"And how would it even be possible for my pneuma's structure to perfectly match how it was in the outside world? I did some reading, and even in this reality, they can't be reshaped directly; If anything, them being elevated dimensionally makes it even more difficult." I adjusted my glasses, trying to figure out how to even phrase how absurd the idea sounded. "The mind is just... Even memory is just a small part of it. You're never going to get a clean slate, let alone engineer it perfectly into something specific. Especially not with mental and metaphysical strangeness here."

"The pneuma is ultimately just matter," the Lady dismissed. "And like all matter, it can assume certain shapes purely spontaneously." She drummed her fingers against the table. "But yes, it would be something of a tall order to engineer deliberately. Akin to trying to hit the bullseye of a dart board in the middle of a sandstorm, while also convincing nearly two million people to watch." She frowned. "And also every time you miss the board you probably get amnesia? No, the analogy doesn't quite work."

Aruru belatedly arrived in response to the bell, placing the bowl on a tray and replacing it with a bottle of red wine before departing. The Lady poured herself a glass as I watched her in silence.

"Again: All speculation. Take it with a grain of salt," she said as the liquid flowed. "But, considering how much perceived time has already passed since I created this realm, I'm fairly confident I'm at least in the right ballpark in terms of complexity."

I frowned. "How much time has passed, specifically? I've only heard estimates."

An evil smile instantly took shape on her lips. "Do you really want to know?"

I hesitated. Suddenly, I wasn't sure if I did.

The Lady chuckled at my reaction. "Let me put it this way," she said. "You know about the concept of 'instances', of people losing - in one way or another - all memory of life here. This isn't a particularly abnormal occurrence, but one possibility is for so many people to become fresh instances concurrently that the line of history effectively snaps, leaving the world feeling almost new again. Naturally, this is unthinkably unlikely. Under normal circumstances, hundreds of thousands of people predisposed to be either invested in history, or precious about their memories." She set the bottle down, leaning forward. "So how many times do you bet it's happened?"

"I don't know," I replied flippantly. "A billion?"

She blinked, then looked slightly deflated. "Okay, it's not a billion." She raised her brow. "But it's an eight-figure number."

Dying gods.

So the 40 million year old artifact Ptolema had mentioned didn't even begin to represent the scope of the amount of time that had to have passed here. We were talking about a measure so insane it defied human understanding, not even just personally but even referentially. Quadrillions of years. Maybe quintillions.

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"Anyway," she continued with a little wave of her free hand. "Look on the bright side! Because of this misunderstanding, you're done so much. You went looking for a bunch of your old friends, learned about the local customs, and even pushed yourself out of your comfort zone enough to engage in the culture. All in just a couple weeks." She sipped from her glass. "I bet if we hadn't talked, you'd have done nothing but bum around your friend's house. You should be thanking me for making your return more stimulating."

I bit my lip, ignoring this comment. "So... I'm really not in any actual danger," I said.

"Not especially, no," she said.

"There's no trick you're not mentioning."

"Nothing comes to mind," she replied, sipping again.

I wasn't sure whether or not what I was feeling was relief. I definitely wasn't happy, exactly.

"Did you want a drink, by the way?" She tapped the side of the bottle with her finger.

"I think I am just going to go," I told her. "I need to think."

"Hold on just a moment," she said, holding up a finger. "I gave you the answer you wanted. I think I deserve a moment of your time in return. Did you think about the homework I gave you?"

"You mean, how we could have known each other."

I sighed, looking towards the floor. "I had a few thoughts, I guess. Nothing definitive."

"Go on, then."

"You're Uli," I said. "The child the Order experimented on."

She laughed, but it was unusually hollow. "Been a long time since I've heard that name."

"You lived and died long before I was even born," I went on, "so it's impossible for us to have known one another personally, before the loop."

She shrugged.

"That means we must become associated after the fact," I went on. "It's obvious that we've met in Dilmun before. For all I know, from your perspective, all of this has happened numerous times before. In fact, that's probably quite likely."

"I couldn't possibly comment," she remarked.

"Maybe that's why you call me 'detective'. To mock me, because I always have this same misunderstanding. Or maybe I get obsessed with the Manse for other reasons that end up being equally futile." I exhaled through my nose. "Or maybe it's as simple as it being an inside joke we shared at some point, because that was my role in the final loop, and because I like mystery novels."

She said nothing, looking at me curiously as she drank from her glass.

"But I'm not sure that's the root of it," I continued. "Obviously you're not talking to any of the others regularly, so you're not just singling me out because of the conclave. And it's also hard for me to imagine how you could be in 'debt' to me just through meeting me in this world, since the only thing I could really offer you is my company, and there are literally people here who literally worship you."

"They worship the Lady, not me. I think we've spoken enough at this point that you can guess the ways they might be disappointed by reality." She flicked a drop of wine that lingered on the rim. "Ugh, I can't stand that name. It's so oppressively generic."

"What would you rather be called...?"

"I don't know." She smirked. "Names are a restrictive concept... as you know all too well."

I scowled. "...anyway, quit being facetious," I told her, changing the subject. "Even beyond that you could bring anyone from all of history here. You can't be lonely, at least not in a way that isn't more... existential."

She snorted, swirling her glass.

"That leaves during the loops themselves," I said. "You've told me they were artificial, that we willingly erased our own memories to try and resolve the paradox the proxy trapped us in. But you haven't told me much about that actual process." I peered at her. "Was there much time spent in-between them? And were you... like this, back then?"

"Yes on the first count," she confirmed. "There were extremely long periods, in fact, where you and the others would confer in great detail about how to escape your situation; what preconditions should or could be set. That was where the solution you ultimately arrived at came about, as a matter of fact." She sipped from the glass. "As for my own presence, I was... somewhat different. Less cohered, you might say."

"Cohered."

"I did not fully understand my own nature," she explained. "I existed more as a role than a person, at first, and only took shape as events played out. Eventually, I did communicate with the rest of you-- After a fashion."

"So that's how we met."

"Utsushikome of Fusai, while this is an interesting line of thought, I'll tell you now that you're on the wrong track," the Lady told me in an unusually neutral tone.

I frowned. "What do you mean?"

"We did interact, back then," she explained, "but simply being trapped in that same limbo wasn't the reason for our acquaintance. In fact, it was almost incidental."

"That implies that I did know you beforehand," I said. "Doesn't it?"

"No, you were right about that," she corrected with a small shake of her head. "You never once met my human incarnation during our briefly-shared existence, nor in some other manner before the loops began. It was our first meeting, back then."

"Then I don't understand how we could have any connection." I think I sounded more resigned than curious. "You're treating this like a riddle."

"I suppose it is," she remarked. She swirled her glass around a little, then looked towards me. "Have you used your newfound abilities to investigate the Order's history much?"

"No, I still haven't got the hang of it completely," I told her. Ptolema had been trying to instruct me off-and-on, but she wasn't exactly the most adept at describing abstract concepts. "And I haven't wanted to feel like a voyeur, anyway."

She scoffed skeptically.

I wrinkled my nose in irritation. "Besides," I continued, "I told you before. Everyone who was involved in the Order in any capacity is supposed to be in here. I'd end up running into their privacy shields anyway."

"Fair point," she admitted. "Still, that very fact means you could also do it the old-fashioned way. Even just talking with random people on the street might get you better results than you'd expect."

"If there's something you want me to know about you, I'd prefer you just say, instead of beating around the bush."

She looked at me impassively for a moment, then let her gaze wander.

"What will you do now?" she digressed, after a few moments.

"I don't know," I said. "Maybe nothing."

"Nothing?"

"Well... I don't need to solve the Manse, so there's nothing I need to do."

"Is there anything you want to do?"

"I don't know," I repeated listlessly, and then suddenly felt weirdly annoyed. "It's none of your business, anyway. I'm sure I'll figure something out."

"I wonder how well you'll take to life in this world," she mused, then after a few moments added: "For whatever it's worth, if you ever do find reason to tackle the Manse... I think we could come to some sort of arrangement."

I hesitated, surprised. "What do you mean?"

"Your lifespan, as such, doesn't interest me," she said. "But because of your unique nature, I do have an ability to, well, let's say invest my power in you that isn't shared with any of your peers." She took another sip, not looking at me directly. "If you allowed me to do that, it might make it possible to bend some of the rules that normally bind people here. For example, I am not bound by the privacy shield, and do not suffer the eventual fading of memory that humans suffer from even in this realm. I also exist outside the rules which remain from the days of the reenactments." She set the glass down. "On a more personal level, I'm also privy to some interesting tidbits about the Order and its history that almost no one else is. All of this could be of great use to you, even more than the help I've already provided."

"...what would be the catch?"

She paused for a moment, seeming like she was deciding how to put it into words. "As things currently are," she said slowly, "because it's a product of a contradiction in this world rather than part of the Order's original request to me, I am unable to enter the Manse." She turned to me. "This would change that. I would be able to accompany you inside, and - if you did, against all odds, resolve it - influence the nature of this world alongside you."

I processed this for a moment, then instantly felt suspicious. "What would you do? Make everyone fully ascended beings like you, as you said you originally wanted?"

"Nothing so dramatic," she said casually. "It would have to be balanced against your own desires, after all. No-- I'd just address a couple of small regrets from my life as a human, I think."

"What regrets?"

She chuckled. "None of your business!" she said, throwing my words back at me. "It's a private matter. Especially for someone who doesn't even remember why we know one another."

She continued laughing softly to herself, seeming to find this very amusing for some reason, but I was just baffled, starting with my brow twisted in total perplexity.

"Ah, forgive me," she finally said. "I should stop torturing you. Go on, then. I wouldn't want to keep you from important sulking."

I let out a small snort of irritation. "Right." I sighed. "Well, thanks for the straightforward answers."

I got up out of my seat and walked towards the door, thinking about everything I'd just heard. I placed my grip on the handle--

I blinked in confusion, turning back suddenly. "What?"

"That's what 'Uli' was short for," she explained, pouring herself another drink. "If you want to call me something, you can call me that, I suppose."

The chamber was silent for a moment, the only sound the wine reverberating against the glass.

"...Yulia," I repeated. "Like, with a Y?"

"That's right," she repeated with a smile.

I paused, biting my lip.

"...okay," I said. "I'll keep that in mind."

I think it was around this point that it first occurred to me that I might be being manipulated, though I couldn't really get a sense if that belief was rational, and even if it was, who was actually complicit.

The whole situation just felt a little too cute. I'd awoken in Dilmun, been invited to see the Lady before I'd really got my bearings, and then been swept up in this chain of events that led to me learning just about all its existentially horrifying revelations (well, there was still one more horrifying revelation, but that didn't happen until way later) within the space of a week. As she'd pointed out, what would I have done if that hadn't happened? Probably exactly what I was thinking about doing now: Nothing. I'd have sat around Ptolema's house and occasionally been dragged on little trips. I wouldn't have seen Bardiya's transformation, or the community-approved murder dungeon, or watched a Tertiary die right in front of my eyes. I might not have even learned about the Manse at all.

Oh, sure, I would have learned about them eventually. But only once I was in a completely different mindset, and even then, probably only second-hand. My emotional reaction would have been far more muted. Who could say what state I'd end up in?

But now, when I should have felt happy - maybe screwed around, yes, but happy - that I was 'cured' and the sense of animalistic fear that had haunted me for the past month could fade away, I instead felt only a sense of dread. I tried to go back to the cabin Ptolema had made for me and just wile away the time like I had been before all this happened, but found the negative space surprisingly difficult to reach.

Like I said before, in the real world, I'd always had that thought in the back of my mind. 'Oh, this will get better eventually. I'll pull myself back to my feet. I just need some time.' Even if that was a delusion, it sufficed to keep my ego from collapsing into a black hole of regret and nihilistic self-loathing. Being afraid of dying that obviously interrupted that, but I wasn't sure this was much better.

Because, well. What was I going to do now?

It's maybe a little melodramatic to say, but Dilmun had started to feel a little bit like my personal hell. Everything about it seemed engineered to trigger my complexes specifically. Longing for genuine trust and a stable sense of self? Surprise, identity is a joke! Hangups about feeling about something less than human, and treating people that way yourself? Built-in caste system where anyone could be complicit!

What future did I have here? I could go build a fortress in isolation away from society, maybe summon my friends and family, then watch them slowly grow alienated or hateful of me as our unchangeable difference in status sunk in, and time warped them by degrees into utterly different people while I remained the same for infinity years. Or maybe I could just live in total isolation for millennia, slowly forgetting what the outside world was even like until I became mentally a bag of rocks. Oh god, was that why I'd been Dreaming in the first place? It all made sense!

Despite having been worried about the exact opposite thing literally a day ago, I suddenly felt overwhelmed by the reality that I was unable to die. Unless the Lady... Yulia, was wildly off base, I couldn't kill myself even if I wanted to. I had no choice but to exist in this reality.

It had become an unfortunately harrowing prospect.

"I thought there wouldn't end up being anything to worry about," Ptolema said the next morning, as she served us both a breakfast of fried eggs, toast, and mashed avocado. "It's been way too long for a tickin' clock like that to pop up outta nowhere. It had to have just been some weird quirk."

I nodded absently, directly an egg yolk and a small piece of toast towards my lips. I missed slightly, getting butter on the side of my cheek.

"You must be relieved!" she said cheerfully.

"You don't look relieved," she added less cheerfully.

I munched on the egg, which hit my taste buds like a savory, slightly-too-fatty mallet. I was still not anywhere close to appreciating home cooking on its own merits in Dilmun again, though I was beginning to understand it in theory. Now that I wasn't even accountable to Ptolema, I'd been subsiding off a diet of nothing but my three favorite meals produced perfectly by the assembler over and over, and the novelty was quickly wearing off. Just as mystery cannot survive dissection, cuisine cannot survive routine. Everything is ground down into sand.

"Ptolema," I said after a few moments.

She raised her eyebrows, a piece of bacon drooping from her mouth. "Yeah?"

"If I wanted to live in a Domain where people just didn't do anything weird or creepy, where would be the best place to go for that?"

"Uhh." She swallowed it and chewed, her eyeballs turning upwards. "Can you be a bit more specific?"

"Like, nothing that you can't do in the real world, aside from technology," I clarified. "No shape-changing, no Spectating, no Tertiaries. None of that stuff."

"All three?" She swallowed, scratching the side of her cheek. "That's kinda a tall order."

"The Spectating part is negotiable," I said mutedly. "Relatively."

"I mean, there's the Magilum."

I flattered my brow. "Not the Magilum. No memory deletion either."

She considered for a few moments, drinking from a glass of pineapple juice. "I think there's one that's like, a religious community, where they abstain from a whole bunch of stuff? It's like nearly 1000 people, I think. Decent number for a fringe Domain."

"What's the religion?"

She shrugged. "Dunno. It's, y'know, cult junk. I think they worship a tree or something."

We eat in silence for a minute or so.

"When do you think Ran will next come?" I asked her.

She blinked, surprised by the question. "Um." She thought about this too. "Well, she usually comes around New Years, and she wasn't here last time, so... probably in about 4 months?" She furrowed her brow. "It's not every two years, though. Just like. Roughly."

I nodded a few times. "Is there any way I could get in touch with her sooner, do you think?"

"If you caught somebody from their Domain, you could have them bring a letter, I guess," she ventured. "It's pretty small, though, and I dunno if anybody there comes to the Crossroads on the regular. It's called the Ivory Library, I think."

I continued nodding softly as I looked down at the green expanse stretched over my toast, long after it probably became weird.

Ptolema went into town and I went for a walk that soon just became me flying around the Valley. I still hadn't toured it properly, and now that I had nothing else I needed to do, I decided it might be a good way to shake off my restlessness. I visited the two other big towns, Zhenzhou and Three Towers, the former of which was a lakeside, two-street Inner Saoic-styled affair and the latter a walled city with, as you'd imagine, three large keeps in the center. Both seemed pleasant in a way that now felt almost saccharine. The lakes themselves were beautiful, and in the leftmost region was a grove where it remained eternally summer, for those who presumably didn't care about the simulationist aspects of life here. The leaves were literally gold, which looked nice but felt a little tacky, and it was filled with people who looked even more spaced out than usual for Dilmun, many just sitting around and doing nothing in particular.

The mountains at the edge remained very nice as well, though the ones with the most scenic views seemed perpetually occupied, and I imagined I'd be associating them with my puking incident for the foreseeable future.

The Saoic town was the closest to reminding me of home, so that was where I ended up ultimately. I wandered the streets in a sort of reverse-fugue, feeling so hyper-aware of everything it felt like I existed outside of the world. I kept seeing passing people and wondering if what I was looking at was them, or just a character they'd decided to assume for the day. I felt strange, alone, and lost.

At some point I sat down at a bench. I looked at my resonator. I had an impulse to check Yu's noticeboard, and then I remembered she was dead along with her entire stupid family. I sighed.

I noticed I had some messages from Kamrusepa.

Kamrusepa: Just to keep you in the know, Su, we're holding another game this weekend. Don't worry— There shan't be a repeat of the incident from last time, I've been keeping Nahmi on a tighter leash.

Kamrusepa: Incidentally, I've composed a document with some basic concepts about the research you may wish to acquaint yourself with. It's included below. Exercise the appropriate discretion, of course.

I squinted. She'd sent me several overtures along these lines in the past few days, despite the fact that I'd barely shown any interest since what had happened. I wasn't sure if it occurred to her that it might have changed my perspective on the idea of working with her a little, or if she simply felt it better to power through it.

I opened the included document, which was extremely intimidating; almost a hundred pages of 'summary' greeted me, covering interpretations on the Manse stories' 'roles', recognised patterns, and contemporaneously popular theories. I refused to believe she had written all this herself.

I looked back up at the people around me, going about their business.

What I feared most of all, in truth, was the idea that I could be comfortable here. I always knew, deep down, ever since that day I returned to the beach-- No, even before that. That there was a part of me in the uttermost core of myself that regretted nothing. That the terrible power to do so would happily abandon everything, and take the compromise I'd reached on that beach so many years ago to its logical conclusion: A world that bent to every whim of my contradictory self. Where I could be a heroine, a perfect victim, a righteously punished monster, or an unrelated bystander depending on what I felt like on a given day. Where other people would exist only to bend like palm trees in rendering that solipsistic roleplay a reality.

Where I could commit the same sin I did against Shiko over and over, forever, and get away with it, forever. Where the illusion would be so perfect the shoe would never drop, never force me to take even one real look at myself.

I was better at anything than math, it was self-deception, I could probably make it work.

I could be happy, at least for a while.

My lips curled downward. I looked back at the Resonator.

Utsushikome: Let's meet up.

Kamrusepa: Today?

Utsushikome: Yeah. When are you available?

Kamrusepa: I should be free in an hour or so. Where should we meet?

I thought about it.

Utsushikome: There's a bookstore in the city. There's something I want to check there first, so you can meet me afterwards.

Utsushikome: I'll give you the address.