The Simulacrum

~Chapter 144~ Part 1

Home, sweet home.

The common idiom said that a man's house was his castle. I always wondered if being a King of Knights made that more metaphorical or less so. It didn't really matter, but whenever I was tired, my brain just loved to dredge up weird thoughts like that, and oh boy, was I tired!

"We're home," I announced as I stepped through the door. It was a habit I developed as an ironic call-out to a certain trope, back when I was living alone. Things have changed quite a lot since then, and I was welcomed by a cacophony of greetings.

While I slipped out of my shoes, Arnwald closed the door behind us. At this point, he more or less moved in, along with Morgana, ostensibly to keep up the illusion of being the parents of the Dunning household in case the child protective services decided to bother us again. In practice…

"Welcome home, dear," our Dame Gorgon, wearing a white apron over her casual clothes, came over to greet us in the entryway with a demure smile.

"Y-Yes. I'm home… Morgana."

Trying to ignore the grown adults going through a weird honeymoon phase that was blindingly obvious to everyone with working eyes and ears, I walked into the living room. To my momentary surprise, I couldn't see anyone else, but then I noticed the sounds coming from the kitchen.

The girls were already waiting for me upstairs, and I was even running a little late, but I was still curious. I could've just Far Glanced there, but it was just a couple of steps away, so I decided to check it out in person. The sight welcoming me was both unexpected and a little bit wholesome.

"L-Like this?" Penny asked uncertainly, hunched over a large metal bowl and nervously trying to break open an egg.

"Yes, just like that. You're doing great," my other sister encouraged her with gusto, her hands balled up in front of her and acting like she was breathlessly watching someone about to break a world record.

"M-My Lady! How much salt did you say we need?" Tajana spoke with a skittish voice, holding up a teaspoon. "Is… this enough?"

"That's a bit too much. Half of it is enough."

"O-Okay!"

My knightly sister and the Abyssal spymaster were both wearing their hair in tidy buns mirroring Morgana's, and they had the same kind of aprons as well. On the other hand, Snowy was in full-on maid mode, wearing the entire outfit including the frilly headdress. They were so busy that it took them until this point to notice my presence, but then my Abyssal sister's expression lit up at once.

"Leo! Welcome home!"

"Hi, guys. What are you making?"

Penny answered in her stead, puffing out her chest and declaring, "We're baking muffins!"

Snowy followed that up with a slightly more exhaustive answer.

"Mom… I mean, Morgana asked me to teach her how to cook, and everyone joined to learn together."

As if waiting for her cue, Morgana entered the kitchen as well, and she immediately tried to explain herself.

"It's shameful to admit, but I have never had the chance to learn how to cook homemade meals before. To uphold the image of the mother of the household, I deemed it necessary to learn the basics."

"And you're making muffins?"

"The dinner's already done, so we're making the dessert!" Penny declared a tad too loudly and flashed a smug little smirk. "I helped a lot with the stew, you know? Even Snowy praised me!"

"Yes, yes. Good work, kiddo. I'll make sure to try it."

"I-I didn't make it because I wanted you to try it or anything…"

Ignoring her random outburst of tsundere, I glanced at the conspicuously quiet woman in the back of the kitchen. She was pretending to be completely immersed in measuring the amount of salt in her teaspoon and not looking at me at all. However, when I pointedly cleared my throat, she instantly twitched and sneaked a peek at me.

"What about you?"

"The muffins were Tajana's idea," Snowy chimed in. "She wanted to learn how to make them."

"Really? How unexpected."

My comment was completely ignored by the hapless spymaster, so after a slightly awkward beat, Morgana let out a soft chuckle to dissipate the tension and told me, "I believe she wanted to gift those to someone."

"T-That was supposed to be a secret!" Tajana protested, finally turning towards me, only to immediately shrink back.

A gift, huh? Considering it was her we were talking about, the list of potential recipients was rather short. If it was a present, it made little sense to give it to the ones making it, so my sisters and Morgana could be struck from the list. We didn't exactly have a great relationship, so there was no way it was meant for me. Then we had Arnwald and Roland, and while she was a bit closer to the latter, it wasn't likely that they were at the stage when baking pastries for him made any sense. By process of elimination, that left us with…

"The Fauns?" I guessed, and her eyes opened wide, visibly shocked by my deduction.

It didn't last long though, and she soon crossed her arms with a huff.

"So, what if I want to give it to them? What does it have to do with you?"

"It's my kitchen and my ingredients," I pointed out, just to tease her, and after a beat of silence, I relaxed my expression and added, "Not that it matters. Do you want me to deliver the end results to them?"

"No. I already made a deal with Rabom."

Hearing his name, I glanced over to the Faun standing in the far corner of the kitchen, cloaked under the thin orange layer of his invisibility Sigil. When our eyes met, he flashed a sheepish smile and scratched the back of his head. He was on duty today, watching over Tajana. She might've been on her best behaviour as of late, but I didn't slacken her surveillance just yet. By the looks of it, she not only made her peace with her observers, they got to the point where they were conspiring on muffin-deliveries, no doubt for a cut of the sweet, sugary profits. This… might have been the first time I'd seen her do anything even remotely resembling the actions of a spymaster, and it was for the sake of pastry. Go figure.

In the meantime, she must've read something into my silence, as she indignantly huffed and puffed before telling me, "Since you still don't let me see my retainers, this is the only thing I can do for them!"

She sounded entirely convinced of that, but I had to say, chocolate chip muffins would've been pretty low on my list of 'things I can do for my captured minions'. Chances are, my sisters planted the idea in her head, because they were still working hard to subvert her through family integration. I didn't want to interfere with that, so I dismissed her comment with a lazy wave of my hand.

"Sure, sure. You're free to do whatever you want, so long as you don't try to escape." Since most of my initial curiosity was sated, I was about to leave the kitchen and head upstairs, but on a whim, I decided to throw her a bone first. "Your Fauns are behaving themselves very well. If you also remain on your best behaviour, I might just take you to visit them one of these days."

"Really?"

Tajana's expression lit up at once, and after I assured her, she got fired up all over again. Good for her.

In any case, I left the kitchen and returned to the living room, where Arnwald was sitting on the couch and watching the news. Morgana followed after me, and the two of them started discussing their day, which was very wholesome, but not something I was particularly invested in. As such, after that sidetrack, I finally headed upstairs and entered my room.

"Hi, Leo!" the princess greeted me from the floor, sitting cross-legged on one of my spare pillows.

On her left, Judy was similarly seated, while my third guest, Ammy, opted to sit on the edge of my bed instead. Between the three of them, there were a whole lot of notes, soft drinks, and snacks. If I didn't know better, I would've been tempted to think they were having a sleepover or some kind of study group. Of course, I did know better.

"Hi, girls. Sorry I'm late. The day's been hectic."

"As they always are," Judy noted, deadpan as usual, and patted the cushion next to her on the floor. "Come. Take a seat, and then we'll get started."

This was our third meta-meeting, so I already knew the drill. As busy as I was during the past couple of days, we still managed to squeeze in at least an hour or two of discussion time every evening. We burned through quite a number of topics, but there were still lots more to discuss, so I had a feeling these gatherings would become part of our daily routine for the foreseeable future.

"So, what were you three talking about before I came home?" I opened the discussion, but Judy shook her head.

"No. We were only discussing subjects unrelated to the Simulacrum."

"Such as."

"Girl things," she stated emphatically, which signalled that I shouldn't pry any further.

"Oh, okay then."

Following that exchange, the princess raised a hand to draw our attention to her.

"Where did we leave off yesterday?"

Elly's question prompted the hitherto silent class rep to shift to the corner of the bed and state, "The invisible ninja maids."

She paused, her face showing that she never thought she would be saying a line like that with one hundred percent sincerity, but she quickly shook it off and doubled down.

"We didn't finish talking about them. Or 'it'?" She levelled a dispassionate gaze at me and adjusted her glasses. "You said it was a 'legacy term', was it?"

"Yeah, I just called the phenomenon like that on a whim," I admitted.

"So there aren't any intangible housekeepers."

"No."

"And they aren't ninjas or maids either."

"Since they don't exist, then by definition, they can't be either of those things," I pointed out, and the class rep let out a thoughtful hum.

"But you're destiny now, so if you wanted to, can you make them real?"

Stifling a groan, I held my head in my hand and tried not to sound as weary as I felt.

"No, I'm not 'destiny'. I told you to stop conflating that with the Narrative, didn't I?"

She didn't respond right away, but instead she tweaked her glasses again and locked eyes with me.

"You said that this 'Narrative' is part of you."

"It would be more accurate to say we are both parts of a bigger whole."

Ignoring my correction, she barrelled on.

"And said 'Narrative' had the capability to steer events towards a pre-determined outcome."

"Yes, but…"

"That's what destiny is, isn't it?" She capped her train of thought and then further insisted, "And you also told me yesterday that this Narrative, or destiny, or whatever you want to call it, no longer functions because you changed the past with your powers, and now you have to do its job yourself. Q.E.D., you're destiny now."

"That's not how it works," I protested, but she remained adamant. "Girls? Support?"

"I'm taking notes," Judy answered even as her fingers danced on her phone's screen, while Elly had a thoughtful finger perched on her chin.

"I don't know. What she says makes some sense."

"Et tu, princess?"

Feeling that she was in the saddle, the class rep immediately tripled down.

"Now that we are clear on that, please answer the previous question: could you, as something analogous to destiny, change the world so that the Invisible Ninja Maids Phenomenon would be accurate to its namesake?"

"No, of course I can't!" I denied it on the spot, quite vehemently at that, but then I took a deep breath to cool my head and tried to explain it in detail. "Listen, we didn't get to it yesterday, but the ninja maid thing is not something that's designed into the Simulacrum, but more of a… How should I put it? Okay, so, recall our tabletop game." Ammy frowned at the sudden right-turn in the conversation, but let out a hum in acknowledgement all the same. "So, when you're playing Milfeulle, what are the things you care about?"

That was meant to be a rhetorical question, but she readily answered it.

"Reaching level nine and getting access to fifth circle spells."

"Right, thanks for demonstrating the point. You care about mechanical things. If I asked the others, they would probably say similar things. Heck, even I'm the same with Grognar. When you play the game, you care about the quests and your build, and if you're Josh then you might also roleplay your character for better or worse, but you don't exactly care about the socio-economic state of the Kingdom of Winterspire, or where the food comes from, or when your character needs to go to poop and whether there's a centralized sewage system to take care of that poop. You just skim over these things, because they aren't important for the adventure, but from the perspective of the setting, they still have to have an answer. The Simulacrum kind of operates on the same principle, just on an infinitely more complex level."

"Is that the reason why your kitchen has everything?" Judy inquired, only briefly glancing up from her phone, and even the princess was taking notes.

"Pretty much. It's rather inconsequential in the grand scheme of things, so the Simulacrum just defaults to what a kitchen is 'supposed to be'. A fridge is supposed to have food in it, so it does. We live in this house, so it's supposed to be clean, therefore it is, even if we don't do any housework. Timaeus is supposed to be a prosperous city, so the streets are well-maintained and free of trash. It's that kind of thing."

"Is that the explanation behind the Ninja Maid Phenomenon?" Ammy interjected, and when I nodded, her brows descended once again. "That's good to know, but you're dodging the question. Judy told me that, according to your past observations, your perspective and expectations can passively change the world."

"Like when Leo was expecting music streaming to be a thing, and it was!" Elly exclaimed with a grin. "Hehe! If he hadn't helped us jump ship early, our company would've been in so much trouble!"

I didn't know why she was grinning while she said that (maybe because it gave the family more profits?), but I didn't have much time to contemplate, as the class rep immediately yanked the rudder of the conversation back to her.

"Among other things. Now, it's obvious such grand changes were only possible because of your intrinsic ties to destiny," she said, doggedly refusing to change her terminology, "but couldn't the same have happened to the Invisible Ninja Maids if you were genuinely expecting them? You brought up our tabletop game for comparison, right? So, if I get it right, all of this works similarly to how Angie would skip over details as the game master, but when you ask her about them, she would fill in the blanks. As you said, the fridge is supposed to have food, so if you asked her about the contents of one, she would just tell you there's food in it, and because she's the game master, it's just how it is."

"Yes, in broad strokes, it's comparable."

"In other words, the same could apply to other parts of the… what was the term we used?"

"Worldbuilding," Judy chimed in from the side.

"Yes, that. Thank you. We can presume that because you in particular had certain expectations about the world, it acted as a question to the Simulacrum, which then 'filled in the blanks' in the worldbuilding to answer them. But if so, what if you didn't just accept the fact everyone's fridges got restocked every night as just a quirk of the Simulacrum, but demanded answers, could it have resulted in the Invisible Ninja Maids becoming reality in the name of the Simulacrum's worldbuilding?"

"That's a fair question," Judy responded briskly, and after tapping her phone a few times, pointed a finger at me. "Chief?"

Sighing, I rubbed my forehead before responding in earnest.

"No, it wouldn't have happened. There are limits to everything. Before anything else, a setting has to be consistent. Since we keep using our game for examples, imagine that Angie lost her notes, and she gave us a quest from a character who was already dead. That's a break of continuity and consistency that would take us out of the story, so she would have to fix it.

One way to do it would be to retcon it, replacing the name of the quest-giver. So long as we all agree on it, it's a simple, but inelegant way to fix the problem. Then she could turn it around and make that into a plot hook. Say, it turns out that someone else impersonated the dead NPC, and we would have to find out why. Works much better, but then if it turns out that the impostor was a robot from Alpha Centaury, and it's piloted by a tiny hamster, it would cause more problems than it would solve, calling the integrity of the entire campaign and the setting into question.

For the record, the ninja maids are the hamster-mecha equivalent of answering the 'why does my kitchen keep restocking itself' question. Do you get the gist of what I'm saying?"

"Yes, but since you brought it up, there's another thing we need to take into consideration." The class rep took a deep breath, as if to prepare herself for something big, and she pushed her glasses up the bridge of her nose. "You can change the past, right?"

"If you mean the retcon, then yes," I confirmed.

"Meaning you can actively change the world and make it so that the Invisible Ninja Maids Phenomenon involved actual, flesh-and-blood unseen infiltrator domestic servants, right? Just like how you already altered the past once?"

"Well, okay, I could theoretically maybe do that, but that's a silly hypothetical. That time it was an emergency, involving the lives and future of Angie and Josh, while this is… it's like saying since I have infinite money, I could build a city in Antarctica. It might be technically true, but… why? Why would I want to do that?"

"It's not the point," Ammy insisted. "What I'm trying to say is that it is possible, and because of how it works, no one would be any the wiser about it if one day you decided to do it."

I wanted to point out that the entities outside of the Simulacrum would, but Elly beat me to the punch.

"We would."

For emphasis, she showed off her faintly glowing engagement right, followed by a girlish, borderline silly giggle. Following her lead, Judy also presented her hand, and Ammy's eyes were glued to the simple jewellery. Those artifacts, using lots of reverse-engineered and heavily modified arrays from the enchantment that once housed Ichiko, were designed to safeguard my girlfriends' records, and consequently their consciousness, in case of the Simulacrum suffering some kind of existential failure. It also granting them effective immunity to external manipulation, such as the consequences of my retcon, was but an unforeseen but pleasant side-effect, and ever since we discovered it, they never took them off. Not even in the shower. Don't ask how I knew.

"But are you sure of that?" Ammy, ever the deliverer of uncomfortable queries, asked in a low voice. "If Leo has the ability to alter the past in any way he deems fit, then can you say for sure that it didn't include your memories being manipulated to think you weren't manipulated?"

Before the girls could get a word in, I raised my voice first.

"What the hell, class rep!? Do you think I would do that? Or that retconning things is that easy and straightforward? It's not as simple as walking to the grocery store and deciding whether I want white bread or whole bread! Do you think I can just do it all willy-nilly in any way I want? It's so freaking complicated I don't even know where to even begin explaining it to you!"

To be fair, that was mostly because after my stunt with retconning Angie so that she wouldn't be fully Deus'd, I apparently sealed off most of the memories of the process for the sake of my sanity, but that was beside the point. However, before I could fume any longer, Judy put a hand on my knee and looked me in the eye.

"Calm down, Chief. Amelia's question isn't entirely unwarranted, at least from her perspective."

"That's right…" the class rep responded a touch more sheepishly than usual. "I'm just asking questions."

"And to answer it," Judy began and presented her ring once more. "The reason why we never asked that question was not only because we experienced the events slightly differently than everyone else, but because we trust and love the Chief."

"Yes! Exactly!" Elly declared, and if my dear assistant wasn't sitting between us, I was sure she would've given me a bear hug right then and there.

"I understand, it's just…" Ammy's words trailed into a whisper, and after a few long seconds of stillness, her expression changed. She made up her mind and looked me in the eye again. "I mean, it's not like I don't trust you. In fact, I trust you a lot, so… can I also have one of those?"

Was it just me, or did the temperature in the room drop to the freezing point in an instant? I probably wasn't the only one who noticed, because Ammy's face was bleached and she hastily raised her hands towards Judy.

"I-I didn't mean an engagement ring! I meant an artifact! One like yours!"

"Really?" Elly asked with narrowed eyes, and the girl on the bed became even more flustered.

"Of course! I already have Mike, a-and anyways, I would never even think about Leo that way, you know…"

And with that, all the seriousness of the previous meta-conversation evaporated in an instant and got replaced by weird sitcom shenanigans. I'd say I was surprised, but I really wasn't. This kind of thing happened two or three times every single time we sat down to have a discussion on these topics.

Knowing that this sidetrack would last a couple of minutes, I let out a shallow breath and picked up a half-empty bag of chips from the middle. I was getting a bit peckish, and I doubted we would have dinner before the muffins finished baking downstairs, so it was good enough to tide me over until then.

For now, I sat back, watched the situation unfold, and made a mental note about trying to get to the bottom of why the class rep was so pinpoint-focused on the invisible ninja maids. One step at a time. Who knew? At this rate, we might even reach some kind of proper Theory of Simulacrum by summer. My inner pessimist immediately asked 'which summer', but I ignored it, grabbed a soda bottle, and just took my small break, happy to have one wherever I could find it.