Draft Update 15/05/24 (Patreon)

(This chapter is a little short too, since I was still kinda bouncing back from losing a day last week. Next one should be more substantial.)

"Do you enjoy the theater, Utsushikome of Fusai?"

"Uh, kind of," I told her. "Some of my friends used to be really into it, but I'm not some massive enthusiast." Why are you asking me this? Didn't you just say you were omniscient?

"I ask because, if not a perfect actor, you're certainly an adept performer. One of the most exciting I've ever watched, in fact."

I stared at her, not wanting to engage with whatever this was supposed to be. "What do you mean by a 'performance'?"

"Let me demonstrate to you something wonderful about how the human mind works," she said, and glanced towards Aruru. "Chorus, allow me to borrow some of that parchment you were using a moment ago, if you would?"

CHORUS: <reaching into apron, lowering head> As you command, My Lady.

Aruru passed her a sheet, and she snapped her fingers, producing a black fountain pen. She wrote out a short message, then gestured forward with her gloved forefinger, causing the parchment to slide across the table towards me.

"Read what's written there aloud, if you please," she instructed.

Frowning with irritation, I looked down at the sheet. It was a single sentence, reading 'I hxxxn't batxxxed xn txx lxst wxxk.'

"I haven't bathed in the la..." I stopped myself, looking up and glowering at her.

"Yes, the last several hundred thousand years." She let out a 'phew' sound, waving a hand in front of her nose. "Believe me, I know."

I flinched. "That's not even--"

"But it's interesting, isn't it?" she interjected. "Even though the majority of information in that sentence was redacted, you were able to read it without difficulty. Your mind simply filled in the gaps." The room changed again, the furniture shifting from coherent objects to simply oblong blocks of color in roughly the same shape, even the balcony's rim becoming little more than a dark brown wall with vague lines that gave the impression of being wood. "They do this sort of thing all the time, and for good reason. If you humans completely processed what was going on around you, your little brains would cook like eggs in the desert sun. You'd spend your entire lives just trying to take reality in, and wouldn't have time for anything productive."

"What's your point?"

"That with sufficient understanding of how the brain learns and subsequently assumes, it can easily be led into accepting incorrect conclusions." She pointed back down at the sheet of parchment in my hands.

I read it again. Now it said, plainly, 'I hadn't battled in tag last walk'. My eyes widened.

"T-That doesn't even mean anything!" I protested.

"Sure it does," she countered. "Two kids might 'battle' in tag while on a weekly walk with their parents, with the sentence written from one of their perspectives in the past tense. You just didn't have the correct context, and so assumed something, well, relevant to yourself instead." She smirked.

I glared at her, faced flushed. I'd had a lot on my mind since I'd got my diagnosis.

"That power to assume," she continued, "was what I made use of."

She snapped her fingers, and returning the towering image of the completed Apega to the space beyond. Now once again in the strange, vivid red light, the false-table in front of us looked far less convincing even in the corner of my eyes, the very space the two of us were inhabiting seeming to lose believable fidelity. Now it felt as though we were just floating in the void, surrounded by strange geometric shapes.

"If one examines that third condition again, nothing about it strictly specifies that time itself must go back, only that the 'weekend of the conclave must repeat from the beginning.' The 'conclave' can be defined formally as the organized meeting of its 20-ish participants taking place on the afternoon of the second day, while 'the weekend', in relation, can be taken to mean the circumstances and perceived causal period surrounding it. In an informal sense, 'conclave' is also sometimes used to refer to the entire set of events taking place in the sanctuary that weekend, but this is redundant insofar as it already falls within the scope of the previous two definitions." She looked up the Apega with a relaxed, contemplative expression, like she was viewing a piece of avant-garde artwork. "Therefore, so long as those are replicated with the 'initial conditions' remaining functionally identical, all else is supplemental. You could think of it like those rules that governments have for restoring old buildings and ruins. Whether it's preserving a chartered inn or a slice of reality, there's more than one way to skin a cat."

"Are you... trying to say you did it all with illusions? That you just faked it?" I squinted up at the Apega myself to avoid looking at our disorienting surroundings. "Even if you phrase it all like that, that doesn't sound like it could ever be 'functionally identical'."

"How rude. To call it an illusion suggests something flippant," she spoke, her eye darting back towards me. "Like I simply waved my hand and conjured everything you saw with trickeries of light and sound like some stage magician. Such an approach would certainly be limited, and indeed, likely insufficient to fulfill the criteria." She looked back. "But I am not one for half-measures. When I must weave reality from falsehood, I prefer to make use of practical effects."

I looked at her flatly. Sounded really pleased with that one.

"The Ironworker's complete disregard for economics of space, in this case, served an advantage, just as Ptolema explained to you it does for the people of this realm." She inclined. "Here, I'll show you."

Suddenly, the distant walls of the Apega chamber melted into a grey mush, filling the bottom of the chamber like an ocean. That mush then rose up in clumps, forming buildings, streets; ones I recognized even though most were long gone in the present day. It was the upper district of Old Yru, where the Academy of Medicine and Healing could be found. Though I couldn't make them out clearly from this height, some of the grey masses formed people.

This continued until what now stood there was a picture-perfect reproduction; indiscernible, at least so far as I could tell, from the original. Except a few miles out, it cut off sharply, like a model someone hadn't bothered to finish. That contrast, between the realism and sudden obvious artifice, felt deeply unsettling.

"I believe, on the morning of the first day, you made an observation about the small group of people in the Remaining World who find the Great Lamp unconvincing, and wondered if this was why you dislike going outdoors." She smiled as the area continued to assemble itself, the Aetherbridge tower forming and shooting up into the sky before terminating suddenly. "Even beyond the obvious absurdity, this was a particularly amusing moment because what you were looking at wasn't the Great Lamp at all. And you didn't even notice." She chuckled. "The Ironworkers made a decent attempt at emulating their old world, but their mistake was in spreading their efforts in an attempt to capture everything with merely decent fidelity, as opposed to focusing on the few things people actually pay attention to."

"This is insane," I stated. "So, everything I saw during that version of the weekend, was just, what, a giant set?"

"Well, the sanctuary was real," she said. "But yes, everything about your journey to the sanctuary was an elaborate, but ultimately shallow, reconstruction of the reality you experienced on the true 28th of April 1409."

"But we traveled thousands of miles! The Aetherbridge..."

"Oh, come now," she interjected coyly. "A bunch of empty space is hardly a challenge to create. And the human eye is so bad at discerning distant landscapes that it can be tricked by matte paintings. Hell, I'm doing it with you as I speak."

She gestured, and the view from the balcony was briefly replaced by one of the Old Yru skyline, then the Mimikos as viewed from far above. She was right. At this distance, I couldn't even tell if what I was looking at was two or three-dimensional.

"But what about the people?" I continued. "The headmaster, Professor Inadu, those people in the crowd during Kam's speech-- They all acted just like in reality."

"Of course they did. Again, I was compelled to be extremely thorough." She cast a hand over the visible half of her face, and when it was removed it had changed to that coordinator Nindar, looking just as he had all those years ago. "You humans are not so difficult to imitate," she spoke in his voice, which was so harrowing it made my stomach churn. "And as I told you, there is very little which lies beyond my sight. I can see how you think, what drives you - and even when I don't, to observe and infer is a simple thing. More than enough to fabricate a convincing facsimile of a few people."

"E-Even if it was an outside chance, there had to be millions of individuals we could have potentially spoken to that morning. Everyone in the academy, the Aetherbridge and the Empyrean Bastion... half of Old Yru, with how everyone dispersed after the press conference!"

"Like I said, a few people," the woman spoke, smiling with Nindar's face. She drew her hand back across, causing the transformation to revert. "Though in truth, nothing even close to that scale was necessary. Outside of moments of extreme friction and complexity, a person placed in the same circumstances will largely behave the same way every single time-- Doubly so if they can't remember the last time it happened. The average person is about as likely to spontaneously start a conversation with a stranger on the street as they are to throw themselves from a building. You, for example, acted almost identically in well over 99% of your journeys to the sanctuary, even down to your awkward lunch, arguments with Kamrusepa of Tuon, and deeply misguided joke whilst ascending the Aetherbridge." She shook her head. "If I ever hear that one again, it'll be too soon."

I stammered, then shivered with disquiet. Obviously I considered myself to have a pretty cynical view on human nature, but there was something about the idea of simply having gone through those exact same motions over and over again that felt chilling. People were at the end of the day just golems of flesh and blood, but for that to be made so explicit...

Did I seriously make that same stupid razor joke every single time I was put in that situation? At that point, it wasn't even embarrassing. It was existentially disturbing.

"Of course, putting it all like this, I make it sound easy," she went on. "But in truth, it took a considerable amount of trial and error to reconstruct things to the point that it satisfied those criteria imposed on me. When my attempts failed, the Apega would simply reject the entire scenario, forcing things back to the start prematurely." She sighed with gentle discontent. "That almost happened in the iteration you recall. Towards the end, one of my servants, charged with managing the re-creation, made a rather rash decision to keep things on the rails and almost collapsed the entire thing."

"I... sort of remember things becoming strange, right after we discovered the hidden bioenclosure," I I recalled, biting my lip. "Ptolema said she felt something around then, too."

"Ah, so you do remember something of it. And there was me hoping the incompetence of a certain someone might have escaped notice." She grimaced in mild annoyance for a moment, then returned to her usual smile. "But yes, it actually took close to a quarter of the time we had to even get things working reliably. In that sense, the extent of my own awareness was used against me. Every time an element behaved anomalously - a object perceived differently than its real-world counterpart, an individual behaving even slightly out of character - I was forced to act."

"But the weekend I remember was ridden with 'anomalies' like that," I told her. "I kept remembering things I shouldn't. And the pantry..."

"Well, by the end, things had changed somewhat," she said. "But we'll return to that point in a moment, because of course it wasn't just that task which delayed matters. After all, it's pointless to set things up for a show without actors on board to perform."

"You mean... us."

"Indeed." She snapped her fingers, the image beyond the balcony and our surroundings - and her outfit - finally returning to normal. "After all, 'initial conditions' implicitly includes your initial conditions."

"Our memories."

"Yes, though that wasn't my power's first instinct in resolving the dilemma. At first, I'd thought I might simply deploy simulacrums of you as well, or failing that, just keep splitting new ones off your originals as required and discarding the old." She shook her head. "Though in retrospect, I'm glad that approach didn't work. I mean, can you imagine Dilmun stuffed to the brim with thousands upon thousands of duplicates of your group? Now that's a social experiment I'm not inclined to enact."

I paused for an ominous moment to imagine what it would be like to have an entire culture of just me running around, let alone Kamrusepas or Zenos, and hoped that she was joking.

"But yes, I found myself bound to consider the conclave and its original attendees inseparable. And because of the Apega's more basic safeguards, I couldn't alter with you directly - such would be considered an attack on your well-being. Which only left one option." She tilted her head. "But you know as much already, don't you?"

"We... suppressed our own memories," I spoke mutely, the pieces, however absurd they were, finally coming together. "Using Samium's Gilgamesh book."

She laughed at me, shaking her head.

I frowned. "What?"

"Nothing," she said, her eye narrowed. "But yes, you had to do it by your own choice and will to even begin the scenario."

"How did you even-- How did you convince everyone? If you couldn't use force?"

"I didn't. I simply laid out the situation, then allowed events to take their natural course." She leaned back, her veil wafting. I'd started to notice by now that no matter how she moved, it never seemed to reveal the hidden half of her face. "It took a long time, a very long time by your standards, for you all to understand and accept the situation you were in. And longer still to master the skill to the degree required. But that was something available in great abundance. Give it the lenience to do so, and even a snail can crawl to the highest peak."

My face was paling in horror at the situation-- I could only imagine. What would such a circumstance even look like? Waking up in some kind of limbo. Being told that the only possibility of escape was to force your mind somehow back to an approximation of the state it had been in originally, just to roll the dice in pursuit of an apparently impossible goal... without even the escape of death as an option.

Even though the other me had told me it had apparently worked that way all those years ago, I hadn't really internalized the implications. It sounded-- Well, like she'd said. Like hell.

What kind of monster, or unprecedented masochist, would do such a thing intentionally? Assuming it even was intentional.

"So you see, you calling all this a 'time loop' is a bit like going to a carefully-curated holiday resort and waxing poetic about how beautiful you think nature is. That it appears to be a mere phenomenon, rather than something deliberate contrived for your sake, is tribute to just how great an effort was put into the artifice. But it does not change what it ultimately is."

I nodded distantly. "It's less a time loop and more of a... reenactment."

"A somewhat more apt term, at least," she conceded. "But I still prefer the theatrical metaphor. And my goodness, what a performance it was."

Now the space beyond the balcony began to flash between different images at a high speed, so fast that there wasn't even enough time to completely process any individual one, just to get a vague impression from them in totality. Almost all of them, I could tell, were taken from the sanctuary, in locations I recognized either from my 'reenactment' or from the real weekend. Though a few - some narrow, dark chamber with thick walls, another that looked like it was partially underwater, among several others - were completely unfamiliar to me. And they all featured members of our class, the Order, or the other guests during the conclave.

Even if I couldn't determine what exactly was going on in any individual case, they were all scenes of action or tragedy. Ophelia being wrestled to the ground by Seth. Ezekiel lying decapitated in a pile of blood while Ran looked shocked in the background. Mehit impaled by something resembling a spear by Anna. Zeno being pushed out a window by... me. Hamilcar blasting a pack of serpopards back with his staff.

The same was never shown twice. Every possible permutation of how things could have gone horribly wrong, appearing in a ceaseless current.

"Do you know what the cruelest part is, to me?" she asked, obviously rhetorically. "You called them designed to intentionally create a murder mystery, but in fact, there's nothing about the conditions themselves to foster anything going amiss at all. If there'd been no intent for something more - nothing brewing beneath the surface - it would have ended before it even started. Even if it had only been one person with darker intentions or secrets they were desperate to conceal, things might have wrapped up far sooner." She shook her head wistfully.

I barely registered what she was saying, my eyes still fixed on the panorama.

"Do you remember the number?"

I swallowed the air. "1,213,649."

"Almost ten thousand years," she mused. "Those conditions went unfulfilled for close to the length of human civilization itself."

It was an impossible number to wrap one's head around. Offensively absurd. And yet, everything about this situation was such.

"Even if it hadn't been what I'd originally wanted, to watch it all unfold was fascinating-- Like a train that kept wheeling back to crash into itself over and over again. I had known the depravity of human beings from even my brief time as one, and had seen plenty more besides, but even considering that, I found myself quite taken aback So many different ways to commit murder! So many violations even more creative than that! So many motives for a group of people considered the height of intellectual society. Inscrutable, desperate, hungry, animal." She shook her head. "It was almost beautiful, in a twisted sense. A perfect little snow globe of your natures at their most truly wretched."

I swallowed, my lips feeling dry. "So... it wasn't just one or two people?" I tried to force my gaze back to her burning eye. "It was everyone? Everyone killed people?"

"Well, I don't want to say anything so absolute," she stated, "but at the very least, it was most."

"And was it true that... that I..."

She tapped her nose, smirking. "I'm afraid I am bound by agreement not to speak to the specifics of the scenarios." She pointed upwards. "Incidentally, I cannot guarantee that any of these scenes you're seeing literally happened-- I just thought it would be fun to conjure them up to add some flair to the moment."

I grimaced, then shook my head sharply. "What do you even mean, 'by agreement'?"

"I mean by agreement!" she declared playfully.

"Agreement with who?"

"With all of you, of course," she stated. "You seemed quite keen to let the specifics of what took place be forgotten, at least outside of very specific circumstances. And as I already explained, I have only ever wished to be of service in fulfilling the desires of those in communion with me."

I almost questioned her further, but actually, this did make sense. If the versions of us that had lived through reenactments had gone on to live in Dilmun... well, suffice it to say, everyone had probably done things they weren't proud of, or even just revealed things about themselves they hadn't wanted to. I could easily understand absolutely no one wanting that to have the potential to follow them around for what was apparently a literal eternity.

Oh god, it suddenly occurred to me for the first time. She probably-- No, definitely knows everything about me, doesn't she? Not just about the loops. Everything.

No, I can't even think about it. I can't even reckon with this right now.

God, this is so fucking insane.

I fidgeted with my hands, my eyes drifting back to the edge of the stage. Bardiya shooting at me in a dark hallway. Lilith stabbing Theo in the back. Kamrusepa and Fang dueling using the Power. Neferuaten's body chopped into countless pieces...

She chuckled with perverse amusement, then clapped her hands together, causing the images to vanish. "But alas, all good things must come to an end. Or perhaps 'all's well that ends well' would be the more appropriate aphorism, from your perspective."

"What... happened?" I asked, slowly turning my head back towards. "A minute ago, you said that setting things up took a 'quarter of the time you had'. That implies a, well, limit."

"Good, I was worried you weren't really paying attention," she remarked dryly. "As I mentioned, the Ironworkers were able to slow the passage of time in the Nekrokos, but not so sufficiently to amount to an effective stop. And though I was able to alter the nature of Sanctuary B as it intersected with my power, I could not detach it from that reality altogether." She gestured forward. "I'm sure the technical specifics are lost on me, but the short version is that I was limited to the time the Apega could materially maintain the connection. In the Mimikos, that amounted to only a few minutes.

"When Bardiya saw those lights," I mumbled.

"When that window was drawing to a close, it put the situation in a rather precarious position," she explained. "If I'd become unmoored from you in that state, with your very reality already reassembled according to my nature... I'm not even sure precisely what would have happened myself, but it wouldn't have been pretty, suffice it to say." She flung her hair back, leaning her chin on her gloved hand. "Now, I might have been enjoying the show, but I was not so callous as to condemn you all to such a dark fate. Yet even so, I was still bound by those restrictions."

"The loops had been getting shorter," I remembered, looking downwards. "More condensed into every second. Were you trying to stretch things out? Cram more reenactments into less and less time?"

"That's close enough to the truth, at least. Though such a measure wasn't by my initiative." She glanced to the side. "In the end, it was the lot of you who contrived an... escape clause, in the fine print. One that allowed me to circumvent those three tenants, at least to an extent, and enact my original plan."

"So they were never actually fulfilled," I said, half to myself. Large parts of that conversation with my other self were finally starting to make complete sense. "It was a stalemate."

"It's a great frustration to me. As you pointed out earlier in our conversation, this plane is in many ways somewhat awkward, and this is the other reason aside from the ones I already listed." She flicked a finger, and now the edge of the balcony showed the Stage, as I'd half-expected it to at the start. It was strange to see it expressed as an ordinary space - just an immensely wide wooden platform filled with fuzzy figures huddled together. "Because they remain partly in place, I was never able to completely finish the process, which has had two principal consequences. The first was that I wasn't able to fundamentally change the structure of this reality from what it had been during the 'time loop', hence, well, all this." She gestured out into the distance. "A plane made up of closed circles, comprised of mere clumps of matter."

"What was the original plan...?" I asked hesitantly.

"I was hoping to uplift you to become beings closer to myself. Still infinitesimally lesser, but with greater perceptions, unbound by the vestiges of your mortality." She clicked her tongue, her brow furrowing. "In the end, I was only able to affix such an ability crudely to you, and you mostly make use of it in manners which are very tedious."

"The observation power," I concluded, again mostly to myself. When she puts it like that, I'm sort of glad she didn't have free reign.

"The second was that, though I've done my best to sweep it under the rug, the imperative of those rules and their logic still holds a degree of sway. But I'll leave you to discover what I mean yourself, once you've spent a little more time reacquainting yourself with the area." She looked back, regarding me with a sly gin. "Anyway, in the end, it's not so bad, is it? The people here, including the Order, can live the limitless lives they yearned for in relative happiness, with all the comforts and distractions a human being could ever desire. What can one call that, other than a good ending?"

I frowned. There's so much it feels like she's not saying I can't even keep track of it.

A moment passed while she waited, apparently, for my response. My mind felt like a typhoon. I had so many questions about all this I didn't even know where to begin, both for her and for myself, and had so many facets I wasn't even sure how to phrase them. Was this real? Was this true? If it was true, did it even matter at this point? How was I supposed to feel, hearing something like it, in circumstances like these? All these questions I'd carried with me for by far the greater part of my whole life (which apparently wasn't even my life at all) brought to a head in such an absurd way.

In the end, the one that slipped out of my mouth ended up being very simple.

"Why... did you summon me here?"

"I told you," she said. "I'm doing you a favor. Getting you up to date, since you're obviously confused."

"Even if you dodged the question earlier, it's obvious you don't interact with the rest of whatever this place is much," I continued. "So why am I getting special treatment? I'm just some idiot who let herself forget her own past, aren't I?"

She stared at me for a moment, something taunting seeming to rise in her gaze. She folded her arms.

"Why don't you ask me what you originally came here for?" she urged. "That should bring us to the heart of the matter."