The Simulacrum

~Chapter 146~ Part 1

"Chief. You don't have to do this."

"No, Dormouse. I must!" I declared not-at-all overdramatically and struck a very natural pose in the middle of my room, with my head thrown back and a finger on my temple. "It is a sacrifice I must make myself! I can't ask any of you to do it in my stead. It would be just unethical."

"No, I meant that literally," my dear assistant insisted with the deadpannest of deadpan reactions. "We have already done this experiment."

"That was back then, and this is now," I explained patiently, yet she was still unconvinced. "Look, this is the quickest way to figure out if my hypothesis has legs to stand on or not. Yes or no?"

"Yes."

"Exactly. So don't try to stop me!" Saying so, I unbuckled my belt and grabbed my trousers at my waist. "This is for the greater good! Or at the very least, for my peace of mind!"

Judy continued to eye me with a distinct and almost tangible sense of exasperation, and noted, "It seems like spending the afternoon at the bowling alley did help to ease your depression."

"What depression? I wasn't depressed, just a bit tired and overwhelmed." I realized that I was sounding a touch too defensive there, so I quickly changed the subject. "But yeah, it was fun. I'm not sure it was fun enough to make it my officially designated hobby yet, but it's nice. And the restaurant had pretty good pizzas, to boot."

"So I've heard."

"Do you want to come with me next time?" I proposed on a whim. "I mean, just between you and me, Sebastian sounded a bit lonely, so I was planning to tag along with him next weekend anyway."

Once again, my lovely assistant eyed me through ever so slightly squinted eyes, as if I just said something wildly uncharacteristic.

"Since when are you getting along with von Fraenir well enough to feel concerned about him?"

"I… don't know?" I admitted and would've probably shrugged if my hands weren't still grabbing my waist. "I guess we just grew on each other. Time can do weird things like that." However, since I got reminded of my pants, I quickly shook off the side-tangent and looked at the door. "All right. That was enough foreplay. Let's get on with the experiment."

"For the record, I'm not taking any notes."

Ignoring Judy's dismissive attitude, I cleared my throat and locked my eyes on the entrance. "I feel like changing my clothes, but I'm not sure I properly closed the door. It would be really embarrassing if someone walked in on me while I was undressed, but what are the chances of that, am I right?" I held my breath for a second, then winked at my skeptical assistant and loudly declared, "Oh well. Here I go. Everything will be juuust fine."

At this point, I unceremoniously let my trousers go and they slid down to my knees, revealing the silly koala-print boxer shorts I specifically put on for this test. Eyes locked onto the door, I waited for the other proverbial shoe to drop. And waited. And waited some more. And…

"Chief, please pull your pants up," Judy called out to me, followed by a soft grumble. "It's distracting."

"What? I didn't know you have something against koalas." Seeing that her patience was rapidly running thin, I raised my palms in surrender. "Fine, fine. Seriously though, normally Penny should've already burst through the door at this point or—"

'Something', is what I would've said, if my attention wasn't drawn to the faint sound of hinges turning. Except, it wasn't the door, but the window.

"Leonard-dono! I bring urgent—!" Mountain Girl, with one foot on the windowsill, called out to me, only to freeze the moment she noticed the pants around my ankles. Her eyes darted over to Judy, and then after a long beat she added, "Is Rinne interrupting?"

Ignoring her, I snapped my fingers and pointed an index at her.

"Ha! See, Dormouse? I told you those annoying rules of comedic timing were still in effect!"

"Rinne… doesn't understand."

"Don't mind that." Judy got up from the bed and walked over to the window. "Come in. The air is cold outside and the Chief is going to catch a cold."

Still slightly confounded, Rinne hopped inside and my girlfriend closed the window behind her. In the meantime, I pulled up my trousers with my lips locked in a grin hovering somewhere between self-satisfied and relieved. While this was about as far from a rigorous scientific experiment as it could get, as far as preliminary findings were concerned, it confirmed my idea that while the Plot was in shambles, the Simulacrum (or maybe even Narrative-me himself) still enforced the common tropes.

While that might've sounded problematic on paper (and if the class rep was here, she would've probably started interrogating the subject from the direction of free will and predestination and whatnot), but as far as I was concerned, it was a good thing. I was really overwhelmed by the notion that I would have to take over the job of Narrative-me without all the required secondary superpowers. I mean, I did have those but…

Okay, time out. What are 'required secondary superpowers'? It's mostly a thing in superhero comics, but it's applicable in other contexts as well. For example, let's say we have a speedster character. Someone who can move really, really fast. That doesn't intuitively sound like one would need complimentary superpowers to make it work, but let's look at it from a physics perspective.

First off, they had to be super-tough, or at the very least have a way to mitigate air resistance, otherwise they would just get shredded by it. And talking about shredding, they would need to simultaneously be able to ignore friction, otherwise they would burn up from moving too fast, but at the same time they needed to have super-friction on their soles to be propelled to those speeds without losing traction. Not only that, they had to be able to change its intensity depending on their speed, and it also had to work in a way that it neither ripped pieces out of whatever material they were running upon nor turn their feet into minced meat.

In other words, even the seemingly simplest superpowers required other powers to be practical, or to function at all. In this context, what Narrative-me was doing would be categorized as a sort of reality-warping superpower, and for it to work as advertised, it required other, similarly extraordinary powers. To manipulate events and circumstances to the degree we'd already seen in the past, it needed the ability to be aware of all of the surrounding conditions all the time, aka. omnipresence. On top of that, all of that information had to be processed in real-time, which was already bordering on omniescense, but I'd argue that in order to manipulate things effectively, the ability to extrapolate all of that information into reliable predictions was also necessary.

So that's, what? Three required secondary superpowers just to get Narrative-me's reality-warping shenanigans off the ground? Needless to say, I didn't have any of those. Until now, I was low-key freaking out about how I was supposed to fill in Narrative-me's shoes, but if the Simulacrum was still enforcing tropes as necessary, it put everything into a new perspective.

This way, I could use my knowledge of tropes as a crutch to help set up certain scenarios and sub-plots, and while the Simulacrum itself took care of the nitty-gritting details, I could fully focus on the big Plot and the bigger climax. Or at least so I hoped.

On second thought, maybe I shouldn't put all my eggs into a single basket just yet. Mountain Girl showing up at this specific moment could be a coincidence after all. It wasn't very likely, but it was better to be safe than sorry, so I would have to repeat the experiment a few more times under different conditions, just to make sure.

But that reminded me… what exactly was her deal again?

"Say, Rinne?"

"Yes, Leonard-dono? At your service!"

"Why did you come through the window of all things?"

Before she could respond, Judy looked up from her phone (she said she wouldn't be taking notes, but she sure as heck looked like she was doing just that) and said, "I believe you claimed it was a jinxing-induced gag."

"No, I meant that in a Watsonian sense."

"… Rinne still doesn't understand."

With a shake of my head, I focused my full attention on my highly visible ninja.

"I asked why you used the window instead of the front door."

"It's because there's an urgent message for Leonard-dono," she stated as if that explained her behaviour.

"Which is?"

"Naoren-san told Rinne to ask Leonard-dono if Leonard-dono could meet Naoren-san tomorrow morning, because Naoren-san wanted to discuss something personal with Leonard-dono."

As usual, her dogged refusal to use any pronouns made untangling her sentence a bit tricky, but once I did, I let out a short breath and buried my face in my palm.

"You guys do realize that phones are a thing, right?" Mountain Girl nodded at once, looking at me as if was asking something dumb, and she even pointed at the one in Judy's hand. "That's not what I… You know what? Never mind. Tell him that I'll visit him tomorrow, around lunch-o-clock."

"As Leonard-dono commands!"

Not even waiting for me to say anything else, she threw the window open and leapt off without even bothering to say goodbye. Slightly baffled, I stepped up to the windowsill and yelled, "And tell him to buy a damn phone too!", and then closed it behind her.

"In conclusion, the Narrative is still nominally active" Judy noted without much enthusiasm.

"Fortunately, it seems to be the case."

She let her phone down and looked at me funny, punctuated by the words, "I never thought I would ever hear that from you."

"Context is always king," I responded with a sort of faux-profundity and walked over to my PC. "Anyhow, what were we talking about before the experiment?"

"The Submerged Ones, and how you may or may not be related to the concept," she responded diligently, skipping over to my side and clicking on the text file on the tray. The same one I sent over to her in the morning. "This part."

"Yep. This is my biggest bugbear at the moment. I'm getting a clearer picture on the Emergents, but I still don't quite understand what these guys are. In the context of the world itself, I mean." Looking at my notes, I clicked my tongue. "Besides that I have to somehow stimulate them, and that's apparently going to complete the Crowned Coalescence's grand plan. Which, mind you, I know nothing about."

"Welcome to the club, Chief." Ignoring her subtle dig at me, I waited to see if she had something more constructive to say. After some thinking, she did just that. "Based on the transcript of the discussion you had with the girl, as you call her, she seemed to consider you something of a peer, but 'young'. Could it be that you're a Submerged One already in the process of emerging?"

"Nah, that's too simple. Antidramatic, even," I told her, and my dear assistant frowned at me. Not 'frowned by Judy standards' either; it was a bona fide, genuine, one hundred percent home made frown I'd only seen once in a blue moon on her face.

"These Emergents exist outside of the Simulacrum, so I doubt their metaphysics are beholden to the rules of dramatic storytelling."

"My bad, that was the wrong word," I retreated, as this wasn't a hill worth dying for, and tried to explain it from a different perspective. "What I was trying to say is that the situation of the Submerged Ones is more complicated than that. It's like… they aren't 'people' in the sense we understand, but kind of part of the fabric of the Simulacrum itself. I seriously don't think that any one individual in the Simulacrum can just magically ascend into a higher plane of existence and become a star-person or outer-god or multi-dimensional-consciousness embedded in space-time or whatever."

"Hold on for a moment," Judy stopped my train of thought, and highlighted a portion of the text file on the screen. "According to your current hypothesis regarding yourself, you have some kind of super-ego Leo, and you, other-you, and Narrative-you are all reflections of it. Maybe this super-Leo is a Submerged One?"

"I… no, I don't think so."

My response didn't fill her with confidence.

"Why don't you think so?"

"It's just… Just trust me on this one, okay? It's…" I wanted to say 'more complicated than that', but that would've be just reiterating an already vetoed argument, so I shook my head and cut the sentence there.

"Okay."

That was surprisingly easy, so I blurted out, "Okay?"

"You're the one in tune with the extra-Simulacral entities and metaphysics, so if you say so, I have no choice but to trust your judgement." Even while speaking, she casually added a few lines to my notes corresponding to what we just discussed, and then turned to me. "Anything else to add?"

"Not right now. I think it might be best to interrogate The Girl a bit more before trying to come up with further theories."

"Agreed." With that, she saved the file, and then immediately sent a copy to her own e-mail address. I looked into it, but cloud-based file sharing was still in its unstable, stone-age level infancy, so this was still the best way to share documents at the moment. Then, she turned to me, and narrowed her eyes. "But speaking of the girl…"

"The Girl," I corrected her.

"I just said that."

"No, you didn't capitalize her name."

"… How can you tell?"

"I can just do, okay."

She eyed me for a moment, and then let out a dramatic sigh. Once again, not the 'by Judy standards' variety, but a proper one. Was my girlfriend getting more expressive or what?

"Oh no." On the other hand, her delivery was as deadpan as ever, so… the more things change, the more they stay the same? Let's go with that. More importantly, she pretended to swoon, and added, "My boyfriend became a verbal grammar national socialist. I must call Elly and we much stage an intervention before it's too late."

"Oh, ha, ha," I grumbled and poked her on the forehead. "I'm not a grammar nazi, I'm just telling you that's her name. It's supposed to be capitalized."

"In spoken language," she deadpanned at me again, disregarding the fingertip pressing against her noggin.

"Yes. The language of the Emergents is all kinds of screwy like that. I told you about this."

"Fine. Point taken," she finally relented. "I still don't know how you can say you can tell the different though."

"It's all about intent," I answered vaguely.

She apparently deemed that tangent finished, as she looked me in the eye, her expression dead serious.

"Returning to the previous topic, I just want to remind you that just because she's an unfathomable entity existing outside the Simulacrum, it doesn't mean you shouldn't uphold the anti-harem countermeasures we developed."

I had a feeling she was just teasing me, but I responded in earnest anyway.

"Oh, come on, Dormouse! I'm not going to flirt with The Girl!"

"You say that, but we have already established in the past, based on observational data, that you are an expert when it comes to accidentally flirting with the opposite sex."

"What? Okay, just saying 'opposite sex' is already kind of sketchy when it comes to Emergents, being star-people and all, but there's no way I would flirt with her, accidentally or otherwise! I mean, for god's sake, she looks like a—"

"Hiii!" We were both startled at once when an orange-fringed hole suddenly appeared on the other side of the room, and a twin-tailed girl poked her head through. "Sorry for interrupting, but I just wanted to tell you that the ****************** is doing a ****************** to look for traces of ********************, so it's probably best you don't try to contact me for a while. I'll drop by once the coast is clear, okay?" I nodded, and The Girl let out a chirping giggle before giving us a cute wave. "Gotta go! I have a meeting to attend, so bye-bye!"

And with that, she disappeared back into the hole in reality, and then said hole also collapsed with a soft popping noise. The silence in the room was positively deafening for the next couple of seconds, but after the first shock, I turned the finger still on Judy's forehead towards the place where The Girl disappeared.

"That. She looks like that."

"… I see." Judy sounded even more deadpan than usual, which was her way of hiding her surprise. "What did she say? I couldn't quite understand."

"The Predator Moon is planning to do something like a security sweep looking for the Crowned Coalescence in the Simulacrum," I translated, and she nodded, though not looking any less unbalanced by the experience. To ease the mood, I joked, "Hey, so… Do you think this counts as an interruption based on the unwritten rules of comedic timing?"

"If it does, it would mean the Emergents are also beholden to those rules, which is… troubling. In a metaphysical sense," she answered me, eyes still glued to the spot where the hole used to be, as if expecting that The Girl would pop up again.

On a whim, I let my hand down and put an arm around her instead, pulled her to me so that our sides touched.

"Not as troubling as the way she keeps popping up, eh?" My dear assistant finally looked up, but her expression said she was more confused by comment than anything else, so I clarified, "I mean, it's kind of disconcerting how she can just show up, at any time, completely unannounced like that, right?"

"… Chief. We need to work on your self-awareness."