After my weird conversation with the bird man, my very weird conversation with Ophelia, and my extremely weird conversation with Kamrusepa, I found myself unexpectedly looking forward to a situation where I could just be a bystander. This was none of my business; as a newbie, my intervention would be explicitly unwelcome even if I had been inclined to offer it.
As anticipated, when we passed into the central bioenclosure, it became clear a large crowd had gathered outside of the Manse, more so even than had been present at breakfast. Other than Seth and a couple of his friends, virtually everyone I'd seen so far was present. Loukas, the man Kam had spoken to briefly earlier in the abbey, was standing vigil at the edge of the crowd as if awaiting her, while Isaac and Lucy were further in. I spotted the man with glasses, and the woman with main character syndrome, even the Great Detective watching from some remove. Even Ophelia was somehow there, standing with some guy I didn't know. I suppose she'd teleported to get ahead of us.
At the center of it all was an Uan woman, deep ruddy brown complexion, black hair in two braids so tight and complex they looked like the spine of some kind of lizard, the sort that people always used to say would look better on me than my loose and bulky ones when I was a kid but that I always found uncomfortable and kind of a pain in the ass. She was, as expected, in front of the Manse's porch.
"Illari, be reasonable!" some guy with reddish-silver hair I'd never seen before shouted from the center of the huddle. "You think you're going to be different from anyone else who's thrown their pet idea at the wall without any refinement? You're going to waste the most valuable thing you'll ever have on a whim!"
"He's right," some lady said. "If you're so confident in whatever this theory is, then let us subject it to peer review! Even if you're correct, there's bound to be errors. There are always errors, you know this."
"No!" The woman at the center of the drama - Illari I guess - spoke defiantly. "I have it, I'm sure of it! I only need to confirm a few more things in the books. If I show to you people now, you'll just steal it for yourselves!"
"I keep telling you, Illi, you're on the wrong fuckin' track!" Someone jeered. "Nobody believes in High Priestess mid-scenario switch theory any more!"
"Shut up! Shut up!"
Obviously the scenario was reminiscent of trying to talk down someone attempting suicide (something that, despite the impression I've probably created, I'd never actually experienced myself from either end directly, never having been truly close to many people and being too cunning to tip anyone off in advance personally), but the context rendered it petty and absurd in a way that left the dissonance kind of hilarious. Like, obviously I understood intellectually that giving up your chance to solve the Manse was an extremely big deal - literally the only scarce thing in this world that could be lost permanently other than information - but come on.
Kamrusepa sped up a little as we drew near, forcing me to take hold of the stupid overly-big and loose skirt that came with Kasua's template to keep pace. Why the hell did Rhunbardi people dress like this? Did living in a cold climate drive people aesthetically insane? She spoke to her subordinate in an almost military tone. "What's the situation?"
"Hasn't changed much since I messaged you," the hard-jawed man answered, hands in his pockets. "Illari thinks she has the answer but doesn't seem to really believe it. She's trying to psych herself up, but more and more people keep turning up to try and talk her out of it. It's been going on for nearly 20 minutes now."
She tutted. "Does she have anything?"
"It's hard to tell, but I doubt it," he replied flatly, then turned his gaze deeper into the crowd. "The bigger danger is what they're planning to do."
Following his eyes, I could see he was referring to Isaac and Lucy, who along with their cadre were close to the center of the action. They were speaking in quiet, concerned tones, much like everyone else who wasn't actively shouting at the lady at the center.
"Going to try and play this up as a way to move the culture away from seeking actual solutions, eh? We'll see about that." She put her hands on her hips. "Let's have a word with him and Illari."
With that, they advanced forward. I followed along as far as I could without having to squeeze too much between anyone, which was still pretty close. Even this muster couldn't have amounted to more than 50 people at most.
Isaac turned to Kamrusepa as she approached. "Ah, Kamrusepa! I'm glad you're here," he said with complete sincerity. I wondered how much this ideological conflict that Kam seemed a little obsessed with was completely one sided. "We've got ourselves a bit of a crisis, it seems."
"I can see that," she said flatly.
"Oh, I would hardly call it a crisis, Isaac," Lucy said, with a dismissive and incredulous tone I wouldn't have expected. "It's nothing more than a bid for attention."
He looked at her disapprovingly. "Now, Lucy, there's no need to be unkind. It's not our business to presume anyone's motivations. We're all friends here. Our only goal should be to make sure no one makes any regrettable choices."
She rolled her eyes. "You're making too much of it! She's not going to do anything. Obviously she's not going to do anything." I was thinking to myself how it was kinda funny how she had the exact same attitude as Kamrusepa about the whole thing when she unexpectedly turned towards me despite our distance. "Hello again, Sue!"
"Oh. Uh, hey."
"How's the tour been going?"
"Good!" I smiled awkwardly. "Good."
"Wonderful!" Her unmoving face craned forward. "I'd love to hear about your chat with the Great Detective later, if you're willing."
"M-Maybe, yeah!"
She seemed satisfied with this vague assurance, turning her attention back to the people actually around her. "But yes: She's just making a fuss! She doesn't need all these attempts at rational counterargument. What she needs is a mug of cocoa and a warm blanket. That would do the trick much better, yes."
Kamrusepa acted as if Lucy did not exist. "Isaac, what have you been able to piece together of her hypothesis?"
"I'm going to do it!" Illari shouted loudly enough that it pierced the rest of the conversation. "I'm going to!"
He sighed. "It seems to be based off of the anomaly scenes in book 660, 3849, and 11704, where the High Priestess appears to resurrect and take more actions after ostensibly being killed. She's connecting that to the sudden appearances of the killer in 82, 5331, and 27363. Presumably along with some others she hasn't mentioned yet." He brushed his facial hair with his forefinger. "Her theory is that the High Priestess represents a sort of prelapsarian variant of a 'killer 2', who is primarily a creature of inaction that relies on 'killer 1'. But that when she actually kills, the role unspokenly ceases to exist."
"That's ridiculous," Kam said. "There's a thousand pieces of evidence that show the roles never shift relationships between people after the start except in the usual pair-patterns. How long is it going to take this bloody concept to die?"
I was trying to follow what they were saying, but without too much success.
"Oh, Kamrusepa! You're wasting your breath," Lucy said, ironically seeming a little desperate. "I'm telling you, it's not about the theory. There's no point in trying to pick it apart like you always do." She let out a muffled, melodic sigh. "We ought to bring back the detox program we used to run in the Umbilician Bioenclosure. Illari is banned from the Crossroads and the Prism and the Keep. Where is she going to go to unwind? The Blank Canvas?"
"We're not bringing back the bloody detox program, we already debated this at the last meeting," Kam finally snapped at her. "You lot will turn it into an excuse to have tea parties all day until half the Domain is doing nothing but lounging about in there. Absolutely not."
"Now, Kam, you shouldn't get too worked up either..." Isaac spoke soothingly.
She huffed. "I'm going to talk some sense into her. Stay here, don't try to interfere." She directly approached the woman with an air of authority, Loukas following close behind.
Kam then launched into a comprehensive takedown of her hypothesis - offering a litany of citations and logical fallacies I had never heard of, while interrupting her every time she tried to voice an explanation. Despite the fact that this seemed like an absolutely terrible idea (people were even jeering for her to stop, despite the special status she enjoyed) it seemed, inscrutably, to be working. She seemed so overwhelmed that the Manse was almost forgotten altogether, mere scenery to a confrontation that was now entirely a matter of esoteric rhetoric.
At least that was how it appeared on the surface. When I caught glimpses of Illari's eyes, she had a look of desperate frustration, like Kam was trying to drown her, or maybe keep her from drinking when she was overwhelmingly thirsty. Pouring mud on something very carefully cleaned.
Speaking of suicide, I'd been thinking about it lately. No, don't jump to conclusions. Rather, I'd been thinking about it intellectually on-and-off for the past couple years before I'd been sent to Dilmun, and then recently again based on something Kam had said when we'd been talking after the game: 'Even the impulse towards suicide arises from a perverted survival instinct, imagining an escape from an intangible danger.'
Was that actually true? Or, well, was it the totality of the matter?
Like everything else, I'd framed suicide in terms of narrative and meaning. I'd attempted it because I felt trapped in a position that was impossible to exist in without dismissing the things that felt the most essentially meaningful, or the better word is 'redemptive', about my existence. My gratitude and love, however hopelessly twisted, for Shiko. My belief that at my core I was basically a good person who had just done a very bad thing, and needed to atone. (You know all this already, you don't need me to rehash it.)
And if I reached, I could stretch that experience to make Kam's statement true, to describe what I'd been facing as a sort of 'existential danger'. And for more typical motivations, it was definitely a better fit. Like, I could try to staple on my framework of narratives to a situation where someone was trapped in an abusive household or with debilitating chronic pain - like, 'oh, you're choosing to see yourself as suffering because you have this vision of a better life and aren't willing to let go of it' - but obviously that made me sound like a complete asshole, like some priest from the Old Kingdoms Era trying to convince a starving peasant that his problem was actually that he wasn't grateful enough for what he did have.
Likewise, it didn't really fit for those driven to the brink by the feeling of being a burden to those around them either. I was self-centered even in my guilt, fixated on an arc within myself that I wanted to come to a satisfying rest. The idea of being shamed to death not for anything I'd actively done, but merely failing to be of sufficient service to others-- Well, it felt alien to me.
But still... People killed themselves for lots of reasons. During the Iconists' ascent to power, every so often a protester would set themselves aflame - or jump off a tall building, or shoot themselves, not all of them were inclined towards the spectacular - in front of the Convention assembly hall in Old Yru, making the news for a couple days, or at least within the more liberally-minded freeholds. Could the definition of 'intangible danger' be stretched even to the political realm, even if the person dying could still have lived a perfectly happy and well-adjusted life if their ideals hadn't compelled them to quit so far? Similarly, it felt contrived.
Increasingly, I was starting to think that the universal essence of suicide, at least insofar as it had one, was that of protest. Going back again to that idea of humans having evolved as persistence hunters who now applied our cognitive perception of 'prey' to more and more abstract targets, what happened when you couldn't catch the doe? When the world refused to stop exhausting and hurting you, refused to change?
As social animals, humans have an intuitive belief that our involvement in an enterprise is what sustains it, even when that's not strictly true. If you believe a business is acting unethically but the police refuse to take action, the natural impulse is to boycott it, and in a material sense that does work, although maybe not very well if the business is really big. But as I can personally attest as a fan of them, the same vindictive desire to walk away can also arise when one gets stuck at a puzzle game. The game doesn't care, but somehow it feels like it does, as if the human consciousness is some font of existential mana without which any concept, however abstract, will starve.
Taking that to its logical conclusion, suicide could be seen as an attempt to starve reality itself. It was a strange, inverted sort of logic, but because death was the end not just of one's life, but one's perception of reality - of the entire universe, from a solipsistic perspective - in a sense, if you were angry at reality, hurting yourself was the only way you could hurt it. Reclaim the upper hand. Make your disapproval known.
Again, humans are social animals. With enough passion, or rather enough of what I would call 'narrative', we can project ourselves on external entities. Our drive for self-preservation can give rise to self-sacrifice. Dying to kill the doe can become acceptable so long as the tribe, so long as something which is seen to represent ourselves, gets to feast.
So paradoxically, rather than being the act of extreme interpersonal selfishness it was regarded as culturally (and, well, usually was in practice), I'd started to feel that suicidal feeling was actually better described as a sort of misguided altruism, not just for those who were self-loathing, but for virtually everyone. Hurting some aspect of an unjust world for the benefit of a conceptual successor.
Not escaping danger. Lashing out at danger. Not flight, as Kam had said, but fight.
It was the same way for my old self, in a sense. After all, a pneuma wasn't 'you'. It was just an echo of you, an interdimensional shadow on the wall. They'd died for a concept.
"So tell me, then!" Kam demanded, the conversation long having entered utterly incomprehensible realms. "If you're so certain about this mid-scene role switch in 3849, which I will remind you takes place in the pantry, a room with no windows and precisely one exit which is in plain view no matter where one stands, then what exactly are you imagining happens to the former Magician, who may I remind you is established as already being in the same room?"
"I'm not going to just let you bait me into telling you the entire theory!" Illari protested. "You can't keep me here! I don't have to explain myself!"
And yet keep her there Kam did, continuing: "I merely expect you to suggest how they would have exited the chamber without appearing to have done so, or if you think it went unnoticed, to cite a precedent to that effect. Otherwise, I can't treat your claim that you even have a theory with real seriousness, Illari."
"There are numerous books where the state of the pantry differs from what's previously established!" she asserted, which did actually make sense to me because of the whole loop blind spot thing, even if I still had outstanding questions about how that was supposed to have worked. "In some the shelves are described as damaged! Something could have happened to them to block the view!"
"That's ridiculous. Even if we accept the notion of them differing in such an unorthodox way - despite any accounts that comment on them only mentioning variety in the contents, not the placement of the shelves themselves - they're all backless. You can see right through them."
"I-I've done the tests in there myself! They're not all uniform. You can arrange them in a fashion that blocks line of sight!"
"Know it better than someone who was actually there, mm?" Kam said, pulling rank.
"That's not even relevant!"
"You're not even addressing my argument. It's not about whether someone could physically hide behind them. It's about the people in the room not acknowledging it happening."
"They could be ghosts of consent!" What the fuck is a 'ghost of consent'?
"This early on? In a group this size? For the Magician?"
Regardless of my inability to follow the argument, I was starting to agree with Lucy, of all people. Illari's argument did seem to be falling apart, but I wondered if treating her theory - and possible personal crisis - with such a harsh attitude would really keep people enthusiastic about the Manse in the way she wanted. Maybe our conversation beforehand had put her in an (even for her) combative mood.
Well, it was none of my business. My eyes wandered as my attention waned again. Ophelia kept giving me wary looks only to turn away as soon as I returned her gaze, while Isaac was watching the argument as if he was enjoying high art theater. Lucy had wandered off to the bother the 'great detective', apparently having noticed his isolation and relatively available status.
Feeling increasingly disinterested, I glanced over my shoulder...
... and instantly forgot about the dialogue unfolding in front of me altogether.
Because, right at the edge of the bioenclosure, there was a figure watching. Short, tan skin, medium-length dark brown hair, robes.
You probably know this already, but whenever a human sees an object, their brain goes through two entirely separate processes to evaluate what that object is, processes which evolved hundreds of millions of years apart-- The first taking place exclusively in the hindbrain, and the latter primarily the temporal cortex. They even access memory in different ways, the first getting a rough summary through the perirhinal cortex, while the latter employs the hippocampus like a normal part of the brain.
Famously, this phenomenon can be used to explain many accounts of seemingly supernatural experiences. You see, the reason this redundancy survived in evolutionary terms is that it allows humans to respond slightly faster to threats; if a tiger is jumping at you from a bush, it's more advantageous to shave 0.5 seconds off your reaction time then get the precise details of what it looks like. But as a result, if the brain is in a state of heightened alertness or the object moves too quickly, the second check doesn't get done at all, the occipital lobe left to just piece something together from scraps.
For that reason, I couldn't tell you what I really saw in that moment. But what my brain said was: It's Ran.
The figure was already in the process of opening the bioenclosure door when I turned, so without so much as moment's hesitation or thought for how it would look to the people around me, I instantly bee-lined in their direction, running as fast as Kasua's stupid legs would carry me. The first door was finishing the process of sealing shut when I finally got there, so I hurriedly pulled the release lever, waited for it to slide open again, rushed into the liminal hall (the second door was similarly just shutting, causing me to yell an expletive, though I couldn't tell you which), pulled the second lever, then finally entered the inner sanctum bioenclosure.
You could have just blown a hole in the wall or something, y'know, I realized as I was stepping through. There's probably not even real water.
The figure was already close to the main building, sprinting to and up the steps encircling the statue of Phui. For a bit I pummeled my legs into the ground with such force that I started getting chest cramps and tore the stupid skirt, but then remembered I could fucking fly and traced the incantation, finally taking off and closing the remaining distance in barely four seconds.
It was a good thing everyone was preoccupied with Kam's debate, because by this point I probably looked like an absolute crazy person.
But by this point she'd slipped through the doors. I followed quickly into the conference hall, half-running and half-flying, but all I could hear was an echo of footsteps in the bell tower. I wasted absolutely no time in my pursuit, my instinct to cry out her name barely suppressed by what logical faculties I still had active, and darted up the circular stairwell. Finally, I came to the top...
...and there was no one there. Not at the top of the tower, nor the roof, nor the grounds. Not a soul in sight. I levitated much higher into the air just to make sure I wasn't missing something, then even used the Death-Sensing Arcana. Nothing.
A number of conflicting emotions ran through me as I lowered myself back to the ground. Confusion, embarrassment, suspicion. More embarrassment. I avoided the majority of disappointment - though there was a bit, lingering strangely in my gut like the feeling you get when you smell something from your childhood you can't quite place - only because it had all happened so quickly that the higher parts of my brain had barely even processed the situation.
In fact, now that I did have a moment to think about, I felt pretty stupid, frowning and crossing my arms. Obviously Ran wouldn't be here-- Ptolema had already confirmed she lived in some other Domain. And if she did come in here too, Kamrusepa would've... Well, I was 80% sure she would have mentioned it, and if not her than one of the others.
Which meant one of two things. Either I'd seen someone who vaguely looked like her, overreacted to a borderline psychotic degree, and chased them halfway across the Domain until they gotten freaked out and teleported... or, alternatively - since this entire place was based around the conclave - some creep had styled their appearance after her, either incidentally or as part of some deliberate gambit. And I'd reacted to that in the weirdest and most telling way possible.
I sighed to myself. Great.
Still, I felt really shaken up. I'd known I'd wanted to see Ran again, but a reaction that extreme...
Well, I guess I hadn't met anyone in Dilmun who had actually died yet. Even as parts of it had sunk in, the most miraculous elements still felt distant and unreal.
I sighed, mumbling to myself, and began to descend back down the tower, just using my legs so as to try and calm down. Honestly, I felt more fretful about being scolded by Kamrusepa and acting strange in front of so many people than I did about being potentially outed as to my identity. It was obvious at this point I would have to join this Domain formally if I was going to get what I needed out of it. That much had to be sucked up.
As I walked downwards, passing the various portraits, an idea struck me, perhaps because I was feeling self-conscious. I'd been assuming for a while now that the portraits in the tower - the memorials to the Order's dead loved ones, as had been explained to me at the time, though I supposed there was a good chance they were very much alive now - which weren't painted by Neferuaten had been created by Uli, Yulia, the artist of the mural, the subject of the entropy experiment.
And...
...my mind went on a quiet tangent back towards the conversation Kam and I had been having a few minutes ago, but I dismissed the thought.
Anyway, I'd been treating that as if it were true, but I'd never actually confirmed it. I wasn't sure if the paintings here were perfect reproductions that would even have signatures hidden under the frames, since that would be contingent on them being provided by a member of the Order who had been alone with them, but they certainly looked like what I remembered, so-- Probably?
It was easy to tell the ones done by Neferuaten, bright and slightly abstracted, from the rest, realistic and with a faintly eerie and sorrowful quality that in a vague sense did evoke the mural. I picked one at random, a portrait of an Ysaran woman in an elaborate headdress. I was utterly certain they had the entire sanctuary's data ready to restore at a moment's notice, but just to avoid causing a fuss, I quickly incanted a simple Replication arcana to store the material composition of the object at total fidelity (an act that in the real world would have spent enough eris to blow up a major city).
Then I took off one of my shoes and used it to smash the glass open.
After that, it was simple enough to pry the canvas out of the frame. Brushing what shards had fallen to the side, I sat down on the steps and scanned the edge for a signature.
It was very small, and written in a purple ink that blended in with the off-black at the bottom of the canvas in a way that made it hard to make out, but eventually I found one, at the terminus of one of the folds of the woman's long dress. The signature, blocky and delicate, was just as I remembered it. Uli. So that clinched the matter. It was them.
...but then I realized something was amiss.
Because unlike the mural, this painting was also dated. And said date read:
14/8/923
923. The closing years of the Tricenturial War. 700 years ago.
That--
That wasn't what it was supposed to have been. Not even close.
The child who was the subject of the experiment was supposed to have been born not that long before the conclave, maybe a bit over a century at most. The sanctuary had been expanded in anticipation of their life, and their death supposedly marked the beginning of the fall of my grandfather's star in the Order, the transition into the focus on the new discovery, whatever it was.
No-- Focusing on that aspect of the timeline wasn't even the issue! The Apega had been built only after my grandfather's faction had effectively seized control of the organization, that had come up multiple times. The whole thing was his and Neferuaten's idea. But this wasn't just before that, it was before he would have even joined in the first place. This would have been when he was still serving in the military with Samium! Still repairing boats in the Illykrian Corridor!
So how could this be possible? Was it a mistake? Had I just jumped to the wrong conclusion based on Linos's story and a bunch of little context clues, and Uli was someone completely unrelated, and the Lady was just fucking with me based on that misunderstanding? Just someone else who happened to paint.
That felt like the only possible explanation, but at the same time, it felt ridiculously unsatisfying.
But then... What?