Author: Lurina

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

Inner Sanctum Underground | 9:33 AM | ∞ Day

"To begin with," Kam began, flicking a finger against the page, "these ideas at the end-- How many of them have you actually followed up on?"

"Well, I talked to Neferuaten about the council, like I said," I told her, then quickly moved on before the subject could be dwelt on. "But I haven't gone back to look at how the Order faked their deaths in the tower at the academy. And I meant to ask Ptolema about Vijana, but, uh."

Actually, I didn't really have a good reason for failing to do that. I'd just been lazy.

Kamrusepa pondered this. "When it comes to the latter... when you say 'Vijana', I assume you mean the chef?"

I nodded. "In my loop, she impersonated Anna, after the Apega was allegedly tested by the council. I never even realized she was the cook until-- Well, I guess until I Spectated the aftermath, because we found what we thought was the latter's body at the bottom of a shaft in the armory, but never had a chance to confirm it properly."

I say 'never had a chance', but what I really mean is it was your stupid idea, I thought, but didn't say out loud. Obviously she would just repeat that she couldn't be held responsible for what some other version of her did, even if in this case it was technically the same instance, just without her memory.

She nodded. "The Order using her to replace Grandmaster Amtu-Heddu-Anna happens more often than not," she confirmed. "According to the members I've managed to speak to - who actually remember it happening, at least - it's to obfuscate the true purpose of the Apega and the dispute regarding it to our class after Grandmaster Neferuaten forces their hand, while also giving Anna an excuse to vanish as part of their larger disappearance plan, killing two birds with one stone. Though, judging by the fact she's conveniently absent on the first day - thus enabling the switch in the first place - there may be more specific motives on the individual level."

"Do you know why she disappears?" I asked.

"It's not a matter of disappearance, to my understanding," she explained. "According to Yantho, she's simply late to arrive."

"That's..."

Circumspect, I thought. In the weekend I lived, when we found Yantho conspicuously unconscious, he claimed that she'd left the sanctuary, not that she'd never even arrived. And then later, he was the one who supposedly led Theo to her location to murder 'her'.

Was he lying? Or were the circumstances actually different...? Obviously leaving the sanctuary wouldn't have been a real option, so someone had lie at some point even about just that. But the whole situation...

"Su?" Kam had her eyebrow raised at my trailing off.

I shook my head. "S-Sorry, I was just thinking about how that could square with what I know already."

She frowned curiously. "How so?"

"Well, in my game, Yantho gave a different excuse why she wasn't present. Both to me and Neferuaten."

"What did he say?"

I explained, but figured I wouldn't mention the part about him being the apparent mastermind yet, just in case she said something to him and he changed his story. If he really was deeply involved in crime itself, then his motives even now were suspect. Even if they were involved in trying to solve the Manse, unspoken was the reality that only one person could ultimately did it, which meant everyone had an incentive to hold back information.

This wouldn't be simple, that was for sure.

Kam hummed pensively. "It's possible she could be at the root of it. Neferuaten would be the one member of the council who would know that something was going to happen with the Apega well in advance. It's a little far-fetched, but she might have guessed their next move. You didn't happen to ask her--"

"No," I quickly said. "She's been pretty cagey about what the council was doing, aside from her own objectives."

"Mm, I see." She tapped a finger against the armrest of her chair, looking up contemplatively. "All that aside, beyond her role in the Order's little story, your best guess regarding Vijana's actual motivations might not be so far adrift my own. No one I've spoken to has any idea where she is."

"But you must know some things. From the council, from Spectating."

She nodded. "We do, but it's all rather banal. She joined the Order around the same time as Grandmaster Melanthos, and held a number of mostly backseat, clerical roles. I understand she was associated with your grandfather's faction. According to Linos, she was posing a servant so that an arcanist we weren't aware of would be able to keep an eye on our class and, once the 'murders' began, work to maneuver our group from within using her position of ostensible powerlessness."

"According to Linos," I stated flatly. Actually, thinking about it, the first half of that is almost identical the explanation he gave when Kamrusepa and I first told him about finding her body after Bardiya's death.

"...it's probably not like that," she said. "I'm not saying he's trustworthy, exactly, but he's different then he was back then. He's not worried about protecting the Order's secrets in the way he was, for obvious reasons."

I gave her a skeptical look.

Kam sighed. "You know, you really are rather presumptuous for someone tens of thousands of lived experience behind the rest of us."

"People don't ever fundamentally change that much," I told her. "If anything, coming here has only made that more obvious."

She clicked her tongue. "Let's not get derailed into a bloody philosophical argument. I'm not in the mood today." She shifted forward a bit in the chair, looking directly at me while waving my papers in front of her. "But going back to your notes-- As for what happened to the Order, I'm surprised you don't know the truth already."

"You mean, you've figured it out?"

"Su, I 'figured it out' the first I looked at it. Have you taken a single look at the scene since you wrote this?"

My face flushed slightly. "...no."

She rubbed her eyes. "You really are sending me mixed signals here." She blinked a few times, then clapped her hands. "Right, well, when life gives you lemons, etcetera. Let's make a challenge of it."

"A challenge?" (I don't know why I asked; I already knew where she was going with it.)

"I want to see you arrive at the truth of the matter yourself," she clarified. "You've shown me that you have some knack for solving a fictional mystery - well, half of one, at least - now let's see if you can do it with reality."

"Do you really expect it to be that easy?" I asked, kind of annoyed. "People have been-- People were trying to figure out what happened to that day for more 200 years. It wasn't like what happened at the Conclave; it was a whole media event. They made documentaries about it."

Although I'd only seen one, an obnoxious and vaguely problematic series where a self-styled 'great detective'(actually a celebrity journalist with a haircut that probably cost enough to buy beachfront property) went around 'solving' historical crimes, by which I mean drawing an arbitrary, improvable conclusion and then tying a neat little sentimental bow on it in the last quarter when they ran out of clout-chasers to interview. Like basically everyone else, she had concluded our class conspired to do it, though at least her case the junior headmaster was framed as the mastermind.

"That doesn't matter. Rather, I expect people could spend 10 million years talking about the facts of the case as reported and never discover the truth." She narrowed her eyes. "But we were there. You were there. So yes, I do expect it to be that easy. In fact, I'll be disappointed if you can't solve it within 10 minutes."

I balked at this claim. "What do you expect me to see? You know I have a good memory. How is seeing it fresh going to make so much of a difference?"

"What is human memory, Su?"

"A record of the human senses."

"And what are the senses? What is vision, particularly?"

I looked at her like she was being ridiculous. "It's information reported from the eyes to the..."

Oh, wait. I thought, trailing off. I see where she's going with this.

Kamrusepa raised an eyebrow, and I frowned, taking a breath. "Alright, fine. I'll see for myself."

I closed my eyes. Over the course of the past couple weeks, between Ptolema's help and a grotesque overabundance of free time, I'd slowly got a tentative hand on Spectating, but it was still pretty touch-and-go. One of the first things she's told me was that it was much easier to find yourself in the Reflection than anything else, and I'd found this to be correct, although the term 'easier' may be misleading it was the only thing that felt possible for me whatsoever. Slipping into the observation state reminded me of looking at cells under a microscope before I knew anything about biology; a foggy chaos where you didn't understand what you were seeing on even a basic enough level to even process the information.

Within that chaos, my own perspective (or, well, perspectives) shone like a lighthouse, a comprehensible nugget of orange carrot amidst an indistinct brown stew. But it was still a fragmented mess, spread out across time with inconsistent density like the stain of drink dropped from a moving vehicle. I could, like creeping across a narrow beam, slowly narrow things down once I was in roughly the right year, but getting there felt like a series of stabs in the dark.

So I was already five minutes into Kam's time limit when I finally managed to get to the right day. When other people with privacy shields were around, you couldn't leave your own perspective without the world becoming an indistinct blob. So the only thing I could do was watch the sequence of events play out exactly as I remembered it.

Neferuaten gave me her note, then dashed up the stairs as the council went through the door.

I talked to Kam and Ran for a few moments, then the outreach head noticed the door refused to open.

We all rushed up, questioned Miss Ombrit, tried to break it down, and failed.

I proposed using the Entropy-Accelerating Arcana, and did.

And there, as I remembered it, was the scene. The headmaster dying on the floor in front of us, the bodies of the Order's leadership strewn about in manner of horrible ways, destroyed to a seemingly-impossible degree considering they'd been walking around with us moments earlier and, according to Ran, the Power had never been used.

The sense of inhabiting my own past self's consciousness was eerie and disorienting, and made returning to the sight feel much more viscerally upsetting than I'd expected as I felt her reaction as if it were my own; confusion, horror, physical disgust to the point my gut clenched up. But distancing myself from it and trying to analyze it, there wasn't anything new that really struck me.

I went through the next minute or so just to be sure. The headmaster's final words, the hell that briefly broke loose as the situation sunk in and gave a cursory examination of the bodies, and finally the resolution quickly reached that we should avoid disturbing the scene and contact the police. It was over even faster than I remembered, maybe because it'd left me in a state of shock.

"Getting anywhere?"

"I'm thinking," I said, a little frustrated. "I really feel like you're expecting too much."

Still, being thought of as stupid was a powerful motivator. I tried to break it down in my head, first of all establishing what about the situation was impossible. A lot rested on the idea that Ran had been truthful in her use of the Anomaly-Divining Arcana, though of course I intuitively trusted her, and the idea that the police wouldn't check for themselves felt kind of ridiculous anyway.

A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

So accepting that premise, the idea that the bodies we saw actually belonged to the people we'd been walking with moments earlier was obviously absurd. Even disregarding the fact that the room wasn't soundproofed and - even assuming the inner circle was consensually and quietly being slaughtered - it would be impossible to render such spectacular carnage in the space of a minute without making some kind of noise, the timescale was just not remotely realistic. Hamilcar's body was torn apart, and it was made of metal. That would be a whole operation unto itself, and that's without considering Anna being pinned to the wall, Linos crushed under all the room's furniture, Durvasa seemingly eviscerated...

Neferuaten, simply decapitated and left on a chair, was the only person who could have realistically been killed and her body arranged in good enough a time, and even the circle of blood around her was pushing it.

That led to an obvious conclusion: The scene had already been set up by the time we arrived. The bodies (which were headless, and we've talked plenty about headless corpses), with the possible exception of Neferuaten, did not actually belong to the people who'd been walking through the campus. The police had identified them as real, which was a bit of a complicating knot, but that much, at least, was certain. And of course it made sense-- They were faking their deaths.

So the impossible element was not how they all died and ended up in this positions in such a short time, or who was responsible, because all that had probably happened well before we'd even arrived in the auditorium. No; the question was, where did the people we'd been walking with disappear to?

Moving on for now, the other outstanding questions pertained to the door and to headmaster Ishkibal. The former was a mystery because, despite not being locked, it had refused to open. The latter had been a mystery because, well, what could even do that to a person - leave them looking like a living corpse - without the Power?

I adjusted my glasses. "...there was one thing I figured out," I told Kam. "Out in the real world, I mean. But I've never told anyone."

I peered at her. "You know where I'm going with this."

"I have a guess," she said. "You don't have to go into it if you don't want to, however. It's not the revelation I'm trying to summon in you-- That's to do with the council."

"No, there's no point in not laying everything out on the table. It's not like it matters now anyway." I gave a heavy sigh. "I... think I probably killed the headmaster."

She nodded pensively. We were on the same page, then.

"I've never seen what the Entropy-Accelerating Arcana does to a person," I told her. "But I have used it on plants. They decolor, dehydrate... All the different parts of the organism loose connectivity with one another and break apart. They go very cold very fast. It doesn't exactly look like what happens to them when they wither organically, but it's pretty close." I held my hands together, looking down. "The door wasn't locked, either with arcana or mundanely, and it didn't turn out to be barred or blocked off when I broke it down. That really only leaves one realistic possibility for why it couldn't be forced open, which is that someone was holding it shut from the inside."

The room was silent for a few moments, save for the whirring of my logic engine in the background.

"When did you know?" Kam asked. Her tone was soft, but more curious than sympathetic.

"I... suspected pretty much immediately," I told her uncomfortably. "A week after it happened, the police singled me out for a longer interview, and they wanted a lot of details about the incantation. I remember it occurring to me as I was leaving, but it might have been in the back of my mind even before then." I made an odd face I didn't feel quite aware of in the moment; one of those frowns that twists back up to become a smile, except it twisted twice over. "I guess I've been half-denying it since then. The whole thing was so surreal, it was easy to imagine it as just another trick, and write it off as just another part of the Order's unknowable machinations or whatever."

I was being a little dishonest here, because in truth a part of me did still think it was a trick. Why would he have had no resistances at all? I guess some people just didn't, and there would certainly be ways to induce their absence long before he ever stepped into that room.

"Looking back, I think my parents must have pulled some strings to make it disappear for me. The information that I was the one who cast it was never made public."

Kam scoffed. "It was an accident, Su. You would never have been held liable."

"I could have been more cautious and targeted the door properly. I only did it crudely because everyone was panicking." I twiddled my thumbs. "If I were a nobody, I could have been charged with involuntary manslaughter through negligent casting. Even if it didn't land me in prison, I would have destroyed my reputation."

She clicked her tongue. "Those who live in a peaceful world are always eager to judge those willing to take action."

Pot calling the fucking kettle black there.

"In either case, what happened, happened. There's little point in being fretful."

"I suppose." I scratched my head, then looked up at her. "Anyway, if you suppose that's true, then it seems obvious that the headmaster was an accomplice to whatever happened. He might have even said the whole 'death herself' line on their instructions, not realizing what had happened to him."

Although... that did feel a little too convenient, with the shredded resistances. Maybe they were trying to dispose of him? Or...

"So if he was holding the door," Kam urged me on, "what would he have been delaying for, do you think?"

"I don't know," I said. "The scene was clearly fabricated, so... To buy them time to hide? To escape?"

"Escape where?" she prompted.

I narrowed my eyes.

I went back and inspected the scene again. Unless there were secret passages or compartments that had somehow gone undiscovered by the police (it was amazing how little of the world could be understood if one stopped pretending the powers-that-be were even basically competent) then there weren't a lot of options. The room was medium sized and evenly rectangular. It was completely empty save for two small snack tables, the bodies, and the pile of furniture crushing Linos, which was haphazard enough as to be a obstacle even one person would struggle to hide behind or within, let alone six.

The left and right walls were bare stone, while the back wall was occupied largely by the tall, unopenable clear windows. My past self hadn't looked up, but the proximity to the roof made the ceiling conveniently low, ruling out even that possibility. And I'd been in the room enough times that I could confidently say the proportions looked right, meaning there weren't any false walls or the like.

I guess they could be hiding in the walls, depending on how thick the stone was. There weren't any mystery rules protecting me here. People could go in walls.

But that didn't feel like the answer. Kam had said it wasn't a question of memory. What could be lost even if you remembered a scene perfectly.

I bit my lip, my fingers digging into the mattress, my eyes drifting as I focused singularly on the information being broadcast directly into my brain. Similarly to how I said there are really only three solutions to a locked room mystery, there are also only really only three types of mystery trick, to obfuscate the truth. The first, of course, is just to hide it straightforwardly. A good example of this would be what happened with Hildris after the triple-murder in the game, hiding under the bathtub. You just a put a physical object between the thing and whoever is looking for the thing.

The second is to mislead the observer about where the trick is happening. This is probably the most common of the three is mystery novels. The quintessential example is the false scene of the crime. Someone dies (or sometimes just sustains a lethal injury) in one place, and then is moved to another where the way they died appears impossible or gives the wrong impression. You could call what happened with Phaidime and the horse a mix of this and the next method, but there are a million ways to do it.

...actually, I guess you could argue that both of those are really the same trick, fundamentally? They're ultimately just about separating evidence, just one is trying to conceal it altogether, while the other separates them enough that you don't draw an association...

Well, maybe that's getting a little too high-minded about it.

Regardless, the third method is what one could probably call information fabrication. Where instead of hiding or separating clues, you create - or else create the perception of -fake, misleading ones. This can be done crudely, like coating a fake murder weapon in blood and leaving it lying around, but often these are the most complicated type of trick because they tend to involve outright illusions. Mirrors to make rooms smaller, disguises to make people be where they're not, etc. Stage magic stuff.

Notably, they're the only one of the three where it's possible to fall for the trick without any strict failure of or judgement or imagination. Because a perfect illusion is not perceptible as an illusion. The trick happens before it reaches the mind-- At the senses.

The truth could not be hidden, because there was nowhere to hide.

The truth could not have been separated, because all the evidence was in one place.

Therefore, the truth was concealed by an illusion.

How did they leave? It was obvious.

There was only one way out. So what prevented their passage couldn't be real. My eyes had misreported what they were seeing.

I looked again.

> The gallery was a large room, nearly twenty steps from one end to the other, and most of it was empty space. There were a few long snack tables and a small seating area at the back where you were supposed to be able to see down to the auditorium - presently you could, the glass vividly clear - but otherwise its only notable features were part of the structure itself. The floor was covered in an elaborate mosaic depicting Nalo, the Dying God of healing (among other things), and the ceiling painted with a more understated floral pattern, almost like a ballroom. It was one of those places that felt smaller than they were because there was so little to see.

'The glass was vividly clear.'

Too clear. Much too clear, especially for a day when it was freezing, and the whole roof of the auditorium covered in ice!

"You've got to be fucking kidding me," I rasped.

Kamrusepa beamed enthusiastically.

"There-- There are no windows?"

She began applauding cordially. "Congratulations!" It tapered off quickly. "Unfortunately, that was actually 11 minutes, so I'm afraid our friendship is over."

"That doesn't even make sense!" I shouted, ignoring this. "How could the police not have noticed?"

"Because they were re-inserted by the time they arrived," she explained. "If you recall, the room of the auditorium was crawling with those small golems clearing the ice, that conspicuously scuttered off once we were filing in. Apparently some of them were set up for maintenance. Since 'we' so helpfully left the chamber unattended and the Order had the headmaster in their back pocket, setting it all up was presumably easy enough."

I was shocked. It felt so obvious now that I felt ridiculous for having gone so long without ever drawing the conclusion. It even explained why the auditorium had been so absurdly cold that way; if they'd run the boilers, we would have noticed the disparity in temperature when we'd stepped into the room.

So... was that it? They just left? Climbed down? There was still the question I'd glossed over earlier.

"I... do you know why the police bought all of this?" I asked. "Assuming they were all just cloned puppets like the one Zeno used, surely they wouldn't be able to make them bioidentical. Even high-fidelity replication still falls a little short. There would have to be a whole conspiracy." Though I guess with everything I've learned, that's not even that far-retched.

Her smile faded, and she held a finger to her lips thoughtfully. "No, I don't think there was a conspiracy. My assumption would be that the bodies in that room were essentially the genuine articles."

I frowned. "Then the ones we were with were imposters? And if that were the case, why would the heads be cut off?"

She clicked her tongue. "Let's put a pin in that one for now. We still have a lot of ground to cover." She lifted up the note again. "So that's your three primary avenues of investigation knocked out?"

"I mean, setting aside any follow-up, I guess." I bit my lip. "I could probably come up with with more now, though. It's been a while."

It did feel like I ought to have been riding the high of knocking that mystery out a little more, but at least for now, it didn't actually feel like I'd learned that much. After all, I already knew the Order were faking their deaths. It had just been a question of how.

Though, the extent to which the headmaster was involved did raise some questions about the conclave itself.

"Well, let's have a look through these other points, just to make sure I understand you correctly." She glanced back at the page, holding it out as she leaned back in the seat. "The note about the clocks-- You mean stopped on the day the murders began, correct?"

I nodded. "That's right." It remained one of the weirdest parts of the whole affair.

"And this, er, 'time loop containment zone'..."

"O-Oh, right." I felt slightly embarrassed, all of a sudden, that Kam was seeing something I'd written so roughly. "So, the loop I remember was apparently the final one we went through, which meant that-- Well, I guess the process governing it was starting to fall apart at the seams. There were a bunch of strange anomalies that kept happening. The pantry wasn't resetting with everything else, and at the end Fang... or, well, they claimed to be Fang... left this long letter about they'd been passing messages between themselves through the different loops."

"Hm." She considered this for a moment. "The pantry thing isn't novel for any of us, as far as I know."

"It's not?"

She nodded. "In fact, I've had a working theory that the loops we all recall are the last several to every occur for some time now, and this more or less clinches it. Though the fact that yours was the very last..."

I waited for her to finish, but she didn't, trailing off with a sharp, considered look.

Eventually, she shook her head. "Pardon. Lost my train of thought." Her eyes wandered back to the sheet. "21 I assume is neatly knocked out by the earlier part of our conversation?"

"Uh, yeah, more or less." If you ignore the fact that it's also raised about 1000 other questions. "Though I'm surprised you know about that place. We only stumbled onto it by a freak accident."

She shook her head. "It appears frequently. It seems as though it opens every time you go down that passage."

"When I go down."

"Yes." She gave a considered nod. "It appears to have been set up that way in its automated systems, which..."

"Were set up by my grandfather," I finished.

She gave a simple nod.

I scratched the side of my head. "I have no idea why he'd do that. Like, I can't even read whatever the language is. "

"English."

I blinked. "Sorry?

"That's what it's called. They call it English."

I frowned. "Sounds kind of Turaggothic."

"It's from Alba, in their version of history, by way of Kimbrios. So some similar roots." She looked back at the sheet again. "Who is 'Wen'?"

I jolted. Shit, I forgot that was in there. "Uh, someone from my grandfather's youth," I handwaved quickly. "It's not relevant beyond the fact it was in his box in the Order's weird memento vault."

Kam regarded me skeptically for a moment, then sighed. "This is probably the wrong way to go about this, me picking at these individual points without any sense of a broader picture. Not very economical." She set the parchment to the side. "Tell you what. We don't we just go through both our respective loops? Then we can compare them both in a big picture sort of way."

"I thought you didn't want to tell me the rest of your account until I'd committed to, uh, sharing more of my own perspective."

"Well, this is a kind of sharing," she replied. "I'm only speaking about broad strokes here. The murders, and other notable things that happened."

I nodded slowly. "Alright. That seems reasonabl--"

The door to the room flew open suddenly. "Hey, Su, I was just talking to Nora, she said that you guys were talking. She wanted me to..."

She trailed off, making eye contact with Kamrusepa. Kamrusepa looked back. Her eyebrows raised slightly, but otherwise unperturbed.

"Oh," Ptolema said.