Author: Lurina

243: What Killers Always Do (𒐃) - The Flower That Bloomed Nowhere | Royal Road

Inner Sanctum Underground | 9:33 AM | ∞ Day

Like Kam and to a lesser extent Ptolema, he didn't seem much different in either appearance or general impression. His face was the same as it had ever been - though absent the usual bags under his eyes he always had from being overloaded with work - and even his haircut was mostly unchanged, just a little shorter. The only real changes were in his fashion sense (he was wearing a kinda hideous-looking white tunic with loose brown trousers) and the fact that he now had a modestly-sized beard.

He looked simultaneously relaxed and somewhat fatigued in the way I remembered him, though maybe this shouldn't have been surprising. Though we'd never met again in the real world, I had looked him up sometimes like everyone else, and it seemed as though he'd never really changed all that much. He'd been a practicing physician for a few decades but failed to rise up the ranks in accord with his qualifications, then eventually had been abruptly bumped up to a management role while still within the medical field. He'd done a few of those until he ended up in a military-adjacent role near the start of the war, then quit being a doctor and transferred outright, where he'd apparently gone further, though not that much further.

There was no nice way to say it: Out of all of our classmates who hadn't dropped off the map entirely or died, he'd probably accomplished the least. Even Ezekiel had pioneered some interesting treatments which had made it into the books, and Theo and Ptolema had at least been, well, more committed to being nepo babies in a way that paid off for them.

Looking at the situation at the surface, it was easy to construct a narrative of a man who, like Theo, had been forced into a career they hadn't been truly passionate for as a result of family expectations, but instead of coming to embrace it, had bounced around without ever really finding his calling.

But of course, I knew better than to believe I could understand the finer details of someone's life by looking them up on the logic sea once every two years.

(I guess one distinction that set him apart from what seemed to be the majority of our class was that he did get married and actually have children, although I didn't know anything about his family beyond a couple pictures. His wife was some Viraaki lady with chin-length hair. (I'm not going to make any accusations, but there are probably some lines to be read between there.))

But I'm getting off topic. He raised a hand in a small wave along with the others. "Hey, Kam," he said, with a weary friendliness.

Kamrusepa lit up like Akitum decorations, smiling widely. "Ahh, Seth!" She gave me a brief, knowing glance before advancing on him and the attached group. "So good to see you! Though I thought this was one of your off-weeks?"

He shook his head. "Nah, I'm taking a break from the Blank Canvas."

I recognized the name as one of the major Domains Ptolema had told me about when I'd first arrived, though compared to the other big ones I'd heard surprisingly little about it. Maybe that was because of how it was, in her words, 'creepy'.

"Oh? Did something happen?"

"Yeah, the old guy in charge quit outta nowhere for some reason," he said, exasperated. "Now they're doing one of their freaky contests."

"Dear me." She raised a hand to her mouth. "It's not a repeat of the last time, is it?"

"It's fuckin' crazy, Kam!" The enthusiastic girl next to Seth interjected, leaning forward. (She leaned against him as she did so; was she his girlfriend?) "They turned the arena into this whole giant maze-farm thing this time! It's like they've reinvented eugenics from first principles!"

Wait, what?

"Goodness." Kam put a hand on her hand. "No offense intended for any invested parties, naturally, but I'm shocked that place hasn't fallen apart yet. If there's some sort of barbarian appeal to their customs, it's lost on me."

Seth laughed nervously. "It's, uh, probably gonna be a long break." He coughed, then smiled. "So Kam! You and Nahmi, uh, finished with your recruiting for the season?"

"Nahmi's still mopping up, but it's essentially a wrap, yes." She glanced towards me. Speaking of which, this is--"

"Susan," I cut in. Kam can't possibly think 'Sue' will fly if we're trying to get under the nose of someone I actually know, but at the same time, I can't contradict it directly in case one of the two from before shows up. "Hi."

"Hey," Seth replied.

To her credit, Kam continued without so much as flinching. "--she's our latest. We finally managed to nab another with one of the roleplay games, although frankly, I do think they're a little more trouble than they're worth. It's been fun to let my creative impulses run loose, but the fact is that attendance is terribly poor. It's difficult to attract attention in what's become such a crowded niche, and sadly Nahmi has been struggling with understanding the unspoken elements of narrative appeal."

He gave her a flat look. "Oh yeah? What do you think we should do instead?"

She scratched her chin. "The cultural atmosphere in the Crossroads has become rather desperate and detached from reality of late. It might be prudent to start another cult."

Seth ignored this, looking back towards me with a smile. "Uh, so. You're a Primary? Surprised I haven't seen you around."

After the last conversation, I'd decided it would be better to have a plausible reason for being disproportionately ignorant, and had prepared a good half-truth. "Mm. I was in the Magilum until about a couple years ago."

His eyes widened slightly. "Oh. Like, in it?"

I nodded hesitantly.

He whistled. "Sheesh. Was starting to think they'd locked that place down so tight nothing would change until the assholes on top got bored."

"So, wait," some guy to Seth's right said. He had red hair, but it was an unnatural shade, bordering on violet. "You thought you were a caveman until recently?"

"I mean, it's more late neolithic, but more or less, yeah."

"Dude, that has to be such a trip!" he replied. "Going straight from the dark ages to this, that'd scramble even my brain!"

"It's not that weird, Koni," some third lady with short black hair said. "People still do full-immersion games all the time."

"Yeah, but they don't lose their memories for good," he replied. "She's probably had her brain turned to soup by now."

"Have some tact!"

"So what made you interested in the Manse, Susan?" The first girl asked.

Before I could say anything, yet another guy, this time weirdly tall and with brown hair, chimed in. "Crossroads banned it so hard, it's only natural to be curious if you're coming in fresh, I bet."

I was starting to feel a little overwhelmed. "Well, I... That's basically it, I suppose. I was having trouble fitting in with the culture of the Crossroads, and I didn't like how some of this world seemed to be set up--"

"You're kidding," 'Koni' said. "You're gone from living in a mud hut to this in two years and you're already sick of it? And as a Primary, too! Shouldn't you be kicking back in a palace or something?"

"It might be hard for you to understand, but a lot of people stayed in the Magilum for a reason, you know," the black haired girl said.

He rolled his eyes. "I know that. I'm just saying--"

I lost track of this thread of the conversation as the enthusiastic woman spoke to me directly. "So you just heard about this all recently? From Kam herself?"

"Y-Yeah."

She held up her hands and emitted a squealing sound. "Eee, that's so cool! Being brought in by one of the 22 themselves."

Kam held up a hand. "Now, now, we've talked about this. We're all equals here, so..."

"Oh, that's a thought," the tall man cut in. He gestured towards Seth, a knowing smile on his lips. "Do you know who this is, Susan?"

"He's--" I hesitated, then looked towards Seth. "You're... one of the others, right? Who were at the conclave."

He laughed softly, embarrassed but with an unexpected hint of pride. "You really are new to this, huh?" He nodded. "That's right. I was one of the students back then."

I looked at him for a moment, then at Kam - once again she only offered one of her winning smiles in return, categorically useless - and then at the group at large, trying to figure out how I wanted to play this. How could I fool Seth, act realistically, and not come across as disrespectful in some way?

Easy. Defer, defer, defer.

"That's... interesting, but Kamrusepa and Nahmi told me the historical event theory was only one of several." I tried my best to sound authentically confused.

The tall man scoffed. "Kam would say that. She hates getting all the attention around here." He glanced to Seth tellingly for a moment.

Kam laughed stiffly. "Well, I only put forward the concept. It was Nahmi who argued the case. You know how she is."

"Fucking abstractionists," Koni said. "I'm surprised she hasn't defected on us."

"Hey, hey!" The cheerful girl held up her hands. "Let's not say things like 'defected', here, okay? We're all on the same side."

"You would say that," he replied. "You're a sympathizer."

"I just think that we shouldn't be fighting over something so silly!" she replied. "People who love the books are hard enough to come by as it is! We don't need to be drawing lines over what place they're supposed to be about."

Suddenly, a bell rang out from the direction of the table. A woman in a white apron had left one of the buildings accompanied by two of the glass-faced golems common in the Crossroads. It seems breakfast was served.

"Finally," the dark-haired woman muttered.

Seth stretched his arms up over his head, letting out a sigh. "Guess we better head over." The others, as if waiting for his permission, made sounds of assent, but before departing he looked back in our direction. "You guys joining us?"

"We will in a minute," Kam answered for both of us. "I want to catch her up on just a couple more things first."

"Alright," he said with a nod. "Sorry for the awkward welcome, Susan. This a trial run, or are you here for good?"

"...just a trial run for now," I replied.

He nodded. "Well, hope you decide to stick with us. We could use some new blood." He winked.

"Bye, Susan!" The cheerful woman said as they left. "Nice to meet you!" A couple of the others might have bid me farewell, but I was too busy thinking about that final gesture to process their words completely.

Was that just flirting, or does he suspect?

For whatever reason, people seemed to take meals here very seriously, and soon most everyone who had been milling about a few moments earlier was convening around the dining area. Kamrusepa, however, ushered me over to the side for a moment instead, so that one of the cottages obfuscated the area.

"Su," she said in a hushed voice, perhaps slightly terse. "If we're going to do things this way, please don't just start improvising off the cuff. You're going to stumble into something inadvertent."

I scoffed. "Are you seriously going to fuss about this? All I did was try and make the name you picked less obvious."

"That's not what I'm talking about," she said. "You said that Nahmi and I told you that the centrality of our class is just one of many interpretations."

"That literally happened!"

The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

"No, she told you that. I've never treated the concept as anything other than ridiculous."

I hesitated for a moment at this obscene nitpicking, then exhaled through my nose, looking away. "Why would that even matter?"

"It doesn't, much. It's not a serious thing in this case." She narrowed her eyes. "But even on your timescale, you should know how complicated social dynamics can become. My 'authority' here - and Seth's, for that matter - is based on our presumed connection to the Manse. Suggesting that I am in any sense skeptical of that authority may plant the seeds of doubt in people's minds."

I frowned. My instincts told me this was ridiculously neurotic, but it wasn't like I had any intuitive understanding of power. Evidently having an oversized confidence in one's own importance was part of it.

"Besides," she added, "you need to be considering the impression you give in mind to the idea that we'll be pulling the mask back on you, down the line."

"What? Aren't we just going to ditch this identity and start over?"

"Don't be ridiculous. In case you haven't read between the microbially-thin lines here, we're not expecting any more new recruits for some time. Just because people won't jump to a conclusion about your identity now doesn't mean it won't be extremely obvious in retrospect."

My face flushed. "I don't like this."

"What don't you like."

"Those people were all bunched around Seth like a... I don't know, a celebrity," I complained. "They seemed really excited to see you, too."

Her lips flattened. "Well-observed, Su. Though he rather leans into the bit compared to me-- Well, that's another story."

"You told me that people didn't see us that way."

She rolled her eyes. "I meant in general. Obviously in here, the Domain specifically oriented around it, the niche space with scarcely a hundred people including Tertiaries - yes, we command a certain amount of clout."

I crossed my arms, wrinkling my nose in discomfort.

"Oh, Dying Gods," she complained. "Didn't you get some award directly from the First Administrator? And you were in our class in the first place! You can't possibly be that mortified by the idea of being seen as a person of import."

"Those were both just, like, standing for photos and being one name on a list in articles barely anybody reads." I bit my lip. "No one treats you like some kind of idol for being a success in academia. I don't know how to deal with people who have some kind of-- Personal parasocial interest in me, or whatever, who are going to be right up in my face about it. Especially for something this... sensitive."

Kam was shaking her head. "We can't get mired in this right now. We need to get to breakfast before people start asking questions and trying to snoop on our conversation." She squinted. "You should focus on taking in the culture. We can find some way to navigate this later, I'm sure."

In other words, she's kicking my discomfort into the grass and hoping I get over it.

"...fine. Okay, sure." I shifted uneasily. "Is there anything I need to know before we do this?"

"No. Just let it happen. It'll be fun."

Well, that's ominous.

We headed back to the breakfast tables, which were now bustling with people. A great deal of food had been served, varying from traditional breakfast fare - you know, eggs, ham, bread, fruit, why am I explaining to you what fucking breakfast is - to somewhat weirder and out-of-place dishes, like a whole roast lamb. (Hopefully they conjured it already dead, and didn't murder an actual animal for this.) There was even a plate full of flowers, including ones I was pretty sure weren't edible, but I guess that was just more of the post-death food culture.

Conveniently (for me), by the time we arrived, there were very few spots left in prominent positions. Someone offered Kam their seat near the head of a table, but she declined, so instead we ended up taking seats close to the bottom, near the edge of the bioenclosure wall, where the light of the adjacent Everblossom was cast pleasantly. I served myself some of the normal items - some eggs, salmon and orange juice - and tried my best to settle in.

Kamrusepa stopped talking for a bit, so I had a chance to take in some of the ambient conversation. Some of it was banal stuff; small talk, interpersonal gossip I didn't have any context for (though I did get the vague impression that people were separated somewhat factionally, since Isaac was sitting off at one of the other tables), plans to visit other Domains and the culture and media thereof.

But probably close to half of it was, well, people discussing mysteries. However much these people supposedly needed a place to escape pondering the Manse, apparently that didn't extend to any adjacent interests. I caught a little conversation akin to the brief exchange I'd have with Lucy, people talking about their favorite works, but most of it wasn't even that.

I'm sure you've had plenty of your own experiences with this, but when you and a friend are both fans of something, you don't actually have many conversations about the thing itself. While it's certainly cathartic to take each individual piece of a work or set of works (or member or game played by a team, I guess, I don't really understand the essence of being a fan of a sport. I'm not stupid; obviously it's partly about the self-insert cult of personality element, and partly about pseudo-political sense of shared triumph and defeat, and partly about the specific technical elements of play, but I just don't parse the core drivers in the way I do for most entertainment. I tried to ask my brother about it once, but he just started making jokes with my mother about how I didn't understand soap operas either. Of course I understand soap operas! Do they think I'm some kind of golem that doesn't understand human emotions, just because I have the barest bit of introspection? Whatever.) and compare how you responded to them, there's only so much mileage you can get out of it. After that, all subsequent conversation tends to become more and more meta, even paratextual. The patterns that can be seen in the art and things like it, why it is the way it is, how it could have been different. Breaking it apart and constructing it anew from the base components, like a child building a tower of blocks only to knock it down over and over again.

Putting it like that, it all sounds so grey and dreary. But it's also one of the most magical experiences one can have.

I've heard it said that art is something that can only be experienced twice: First conventionally, then in deconstruction-- You play with the animal, and then you eat the animal. But if it's something you truly love, there's so much more to it than that. Before I was a fan of pretentious mysteries and echo games, when I was still a kid living in a loft in a house full of people who were at best indifferent to me (or that I at least conceived as so through the black-and-white gaze of youth), my favorite work of fiction was a series of novels called The Maggot Princess, a work in the subgenre that could uncharitably be called school-shooting-of-age fiction.

You've read it before, if not literally then in spirit. A beggar girl, oppressed to the point of parody by seemingly everyone in the comically ahistorical dark fantasy setting in which she inhabits, suddenly develops magical abilities by which she can attain vengeance upon all who wronged her. She ascends rapidly through society, accumulating respect while making moral choices which are extremely compelling and thought-provoking to people old enough to spell 'conscientious' but not old enough to know what a tax return looks like, then finally saves the world from a series of increasingly contrived political and metaphysical threats and gets the respect she deserves.

I adored that story with the volcanic intensity that only stupid kids can adore something. It felt like conceptual chocolate syrup, that I'd done something wrong because enjoying something so much couldn't be legal; A high of sheer energetic joy that an adult couldn't reach even atop a mountain of the finest cocaine. I read it again and again and again, feeling like if I just committed hard enough, I could leave my world behind and reside in its instead.

I wanted to make it real, real enough to replace reality. Finding other people to talk about it with was just another piece of the puzzle. One of the few exciting events of my early life on Itan, before I met Shiko, was when I attended a book signing for the series. I remember the incredible rush I felt, the way my heart raced, just by virtue of being around a few other children who happened to like the same pulp garbage I did, the sense of unity between my inner world and the outer world. The unfolding, just through the presence of a few other people, of an infinite world filled with only the things that I, personally, cared about the most, a ball bouncing between just a few surfaces at myriad angles, extrapolating such a petty thing over and over again until it was deeper than the ocean.

It was like that here. The people around me were talking about mystery in a manner like it was the whole world, deeper even then I did most of the time. Not just tricks and tropes, or even commentary on tricks and tropes, but commentary on the commentary. A pair of men a few seats down spoke deeply and specifically about the old idea of servant characters being more likely to be the culprit. But they weren't just talking about the backlash to it, and the subsequent spoken-and-unspoken rules that you weren't allowed to do it. Instead, they seemed to be discussing the precise cultural roots of why it had emerged, and the cycle of subversion and reinvention across all cultures, trying to form some kind of Grand Unifying Servant Culprit Theory in some high-effort, almost academic way.

Further away, a larger group seemed to be having an argument about tricks that relied partly on luck - like the culprit relying on a conductive pole to attract lightning to break a rope, or the much more common tropes of convenient bad weather and unrealistically-trusting or foolish victims - but it wasn't about whether or not they were fair, or even understandable on a storytelling level. Instead, they were connecting it to politics, and how some people are predisposed to assume the world is ultimately predictable and manipulable by those with power, while others see all human action as essentially chaotic, and how these two perspectives could be used to predict a writer's plotting style based on their views on social and economic issues.

It was fascinating, how deep they were in on all this, even knowing there was a creepily-personal ulterior motive behind it all. In the real world, no one really cared about mysteries, especially the more technical type I tended to prefer, all that much. It wasn't difficult to understand; the whole genre was kind of dry. I couldn't even really claim that most of the mystery novels I liked were good, just that-- Well, we already went over my specific reasons during Kam's game, all the stuff about the sense of provable meaning, etc. But if you set that aside, they usually weren't even particularly satisfying as puzzles.

So what I was seeing in front of me ought to have felt exciting, almost miraculous. There were so many things I could say, that once I would have been eager to say.

But I wasn't. It all just felt... odd.

What had happened to me? Really?

I couldn't put it all down to that final day on the beach, not really. Even thinking that, ironically, was just another type of narrative, another way to try and paint an immutable, melodramatic arc to my life that didn't exist.

I'd still felt passion for things. Not just for my big achievements in my relationships and career (though it is probably weird that I got more of a rush out of learning to draw hands with decent perspective when I was back in university versus getting my grandmaster certification), either, but even for small things like works of fiction. Twilight over Saneng and Solitary Animal were both works I'd discovered decades after everything was over, and they'd equally set my heart aflutter in different ways, ambushed me with how much I'd loved them despite having written off the idea of that even being possible.

So what had changed? What had made me so hollow that nothing seemed to reach the core of my being other than fear, anger, and at best tired contentment? When had the negative space of my existence reached up and swallowed me whole?

'I gave up.' 'I got too good at deluding myself.' 'The last embers of real hope went out.' 'I was insincere for so long that I forgot myself.' All of these lines filled my head, but they were just platitudes too, post-hoc reasoning for the killer, howdunnits and whydunnits with no whodunnit, no smoking gun.

It had to be that night with Rekhetre, some alliance between my emotional awareness and logic concluded. Before that day, since being brushed off by Samium and failing to tell Ran-- No, since the day he died, you've lived your life in anticipation of finally finding another person who you could reveal the truth to, waiting for the perfect moment. It's the same old dream. They'd see the root of you, past all the high-minded affect to the base and simple jealousy of lust, and you'd be destroyed. And then it would all have been real again, parlor scene, unmasked, and you could come back to life just in time to die.

But when you told her, it was all exposed as a fantasy. No one in the world will give you the kind of judgement you want, because real judgement, the kind you get from human beings, is definitionally reductive and indifferent. She loved the part of you she saw, and so she forgave you easily, and the same was true for Samium in a different way. But even if she'd been disgusted, even if it'd been Ran instead, it would have been just as much of a misunderstanding. Even if an eternity passes, no one will ever be capable of hating with the technical specificity with which you hate your--

"Su?" Kam's brow was furrowed. "Are you listening to me?"

I stared at her stupidly, a little bit of scrambled eggs dribbling out of the corner of my mouth. "Uh. Wffght?"

She clicked her tongue. "Were you not listening at all? I've been trying to say something for the better part of a minute."

I glanced briefly down at my plate. There was a piece of fish on my fork. It seemed to have been there for some time.

I swallowed. "S-Sorry, I got lost in my thoughts. What were you saying...?"

She rolled her eyes. "I was saying, that I have an idea of how we're going to break through Ophelia's silly stubbornness. I need your help composing the message." She tapped her resonator, which was already in her hand; she seemed to have finished eating.

I hesitated. To be honest, I didn't really care that much about speaking to Ophelia, especially when she seemed so obviously wary of me. At this point, it felt like there was practically a glowing arrow pointing to Yantho like I was playing an echo game. But she was my host, so, well, I guess I had to go with the flow.

"Okay," I said. "What do you have in mind?"

"It's simple," she said with a smile. "You're just going to apologize."

My lips parted and un-parted a few times. "Apologize? For what?"

"For what you did to her in the loop, of course."

I balked. "That's fucking-- I don't... That's ridiculous."

"What's ridiculous about it?" She tilted her head.

"I mean, where do I even start?" I sat back in my chair. "Firstly, I murdered her. That's not something that can be fixed with an apology. And secondly, how can I apologize for something I don't even remember?"

"Su, you always overthink everything. It's by far your most self-destructive character trait."

"I don't agree with that at all!" I protested. "If anything, I don't think about things enough--"

"Take it from me," she bulldozed. "I've had plenty of management experience by this point, and I'll tell you now, almost every human conflict just amounts to simple status politics. When a party is pushing a disagreement, all they really want is supplication, regardless of their alleged motives, even if the gesture is largely emotionally symbolic. Conciliatory gestures are tremendously effective."

"She wasn't even comfortable being in the same room as me!"

"Because she associates you with fear," Kam said. "It's a fight or flight response. She just needs to win the 'fight', and her nerves will soothe and her other motives will take precedence."

"You-- You're talking about her like she's a fucking deer."

"No, the deers live in the Unending Grassland Domain." She looked back down at the resonator. "I'm trying to hit on the right phrasing here. What do you think: Should we go for the straightforwardly submissive 'deeply wishes to make amends', or the more emotionally-loaded 'just wants a chance to say a few words'?"

"Both of those are terrible!"

"You're right; we need something with a little more FOMO," She curled her lip, glancing upwards. "But we can't push it too far, or she'll see through us. Maybe 'she wants to make amends while she's here'? Tch, no, that's practically corporate, and doesn't really sell it anyway. Perhaps 'she's hurt, but wants to put things right'? Mm, that might be centering you overmuch."

"Kam, you can't just..." I hesitated, realizing the table was suddenly falling silent, everyone looking off towards the left.

Kamrusepa kept musing for a moment, but then noticed this, perking up and whispering. "Ah! It's starting."

I hesitated. "What's starti--"

But my question was cut off by a sudden, strangled scream from the next table over, where everyone's collective gaze had come to rest. The source, I realized after a moment, was the short black-haired girl from earlier, the one who'd been arguing with Koni. Her face had gone a terrible color, and she was scratching at her throat desperately, eyes practically bulging out of her skull.

The sight was eerie. No one moved to help her; they just watched with a mix of discerning and amused expressions. The only exception were the people right next to her, a couple of whom wore sympathetic smiles or faces of exaggerated, cartoonish horror.

Finally, she reached out a hand theatrically, pointed towards the lamb joint in front of her... and promptly collapsed, her head smashing a little too loudly into her plate.

"OH MY GOD," someone shouted arbitrarily. "SHE'S DEAD!"