The Simulacrum

~Chapter 150~ Part 2

Breathe in. Pat. Breathe out. Pat. Breathe in. Pat, pat, pat. Breathe out.

"Okay, I think I'm calm now," I said, but yet-another-me… Actually, let's just go with 'Bel' for now, it should be less confusing. Anyhow, he was rummaging through a bunch of nearby boxes and didn't even look up to answer me.

"No, you're not. Don't try to rush this."

I wanted to complain, but he was right. While I managed to suppress my outrage on the surface, I was still fuming on the inside. This whole situation made no sense. Why was there another version of me running around, disguised as Bel, and potentially from the… Oh god, my blood pressure's spiking again. Calm down, Leo. Calm thoughts. Happy thoughts.

While I was trying to keep my potential-time-travel-plot-induced aneurism in check, I figured I might as well give a quick Far Sight check to the situation at the banquet venue. It should help clear my head a bit if nothing else.

From a glance, things were mostly okay; nobody was injured, and things seemed to be under control. In one corner, Penny, Angie, and Josh were vigorously trying to one-up each other while proclaiming their undying loathing of Bel of the Abys. In another, much quieter corner, Snowy and my girlfriends were huddled together and discussing this development and if it was one of my secret plans. On the adult-front, Duncan already showed up with a contingent of Squires and was listening to a debriefing from Arnwald, while the three main characters of the banquet occupied a guest room, where Naoren and Yseult were still arguing while Rinne was sitting on a nearby bed and acting like it was none of her business. Typical dense protagonist behaviour, if you asked me.

Anyhow, after doing all that, I felt better, so I turned to Bel again. Strangely enough, he was still sifting through one of the boxes.

"What are you looking for?"

"A copy of Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe," he answered nonchalantly, his hands still moving without a hitch.

"… Why would there be a book in those boxes?"

"Hey, don't ask me. I haven't the foggiest idea either, but it was here the last time, and… Ah, here it is!" With that, he turned around and presented a worn paperback book to me. "You see?"

"I do, but… What does Robinson Crusoe have to do with anything?"

"Oh, nothing at all. I'll just need a book for illustrating a point later." Bel walked over to my side, casually picked up one of the old metal chairs stockpiled in the corner, and placed it down in front of me. He took a seat, placed the book in his lap, and inhaled a deep breath. "I think you should be calm enough now. Let's get started."

"Let's," I answered bluntly and let Pudding-kun off to the floor before crossing my legs and levelling an appropriately serious gaze at Bel. "So, are you from the future, or not?"

"Technically speaking, I'm not. You are the one who's in my past," he pointed out, and when I narrowed my eyes, he hastily added, "Hey, I know it sounds like some dodgy semantic bullshit, but I swear it's important."

"… Okay, let's just take that at face value. Does that mean that you are…?"

"I'm in the present. Well, my present at any rate."

"And this is…?"

"The past. My past."

"And you came back here, which means you time-travelled," I concluded, but he shook his head.

"Nope. It's a bit more complicated than that." I was just about to tell him I was all ears, but he raised the book he just scavenged, interrupting my momentum before I could get started. "Stop. Let me just give you the low-down of this whole situation first, and then we'll do the back-and-forth questioning thing. Sounds good?"

"I would appreciate that."

Bel flashed a smile and crossed his legs, mirroring my pose before starting. Now, what followed was a solid twenty minutes of pretty damn dry info-dumping full of complicated terminology, so let's just skip all of that for now. I was planning to dissect the whole thing anyway.

"So, if I get this right," I started, one hand already massaging my temple. "We're in the middle of a retcon."

"Yup."

"You took the homunculus we made, and retconned it into existing in the past as a kind of proxy of yours. You, the original body, are still in the future and you're currently remote-controlling this body I'm talking to."

"Yup again."

"And once we get to that point in time, I'll do the same." He nodded, and I squinted again. "Isn't that just a time loop?"

"It is, but it's also technically just part of the linear timeline," he told me with a patient expression and lightly waved the book he had scavenged. "Time, from the perspective of the Emergents, is like this book." He opened it in the middle and tapped a finger on a page. "The events happening in this are both linear and causal, like how a person would experience time normally, but from the point of a reader, all of it is one 'block' of time. There's nothing stopping you from reading it from the beginning, or the middle, or backwards. Of course, if you want to properly experience it, you would have to go through it linearly from the start, but it doesn't change the fact that the contents of the book, even the parts that you haven't read yet, are already there. From the viewpoint of an Emergent, the Simulacrum is like that as well, and this 'time loop' is already embedded in it."

"Wait, slow down. Wouldn't that mean that the future is set in stone already? I mean, if time is in static 'blocks', then doesn't that mean all things are already predetermined?"

"It would be, without the Free Actors," he told me, but then he clicked his tongue. "Wait, The Girl hasn't explained that bit yet, has she? Whatever, she'll tell you about that later."

"That didn't answer my question."

"Okay, then look at it this way: retconning something is, essentially, altering the past, which then subsequently alters the present and the future. In that way, changing things is obviously possible. However, when the retcon is done, it is now the official timeline, and it appears to be predetermined. It's just like how you can rewrite parts of a book, and when someone reads is afterwards, they will only know about your version, so it will look like things were never changed at all."

"Like how, when I retconned Angie's relationship with Deus, it created this continuity."

"Bingo. And the only ones who are aware that a change happened are the ones who 'read' the previous edition," he continued with his book analogy. "In other words, us, the girls, and the Emergents."

"Speaking of them, won't this retcon of yours piss them off?"

"That's the best part: it won't. From their perspective, Bel of the Abyss always existed in the scenario since the last retcon you did, so Bel doing Bel things doesn't throw up any red flags the same way changing Deus's nature did. Of course, doing it this way is also trickier than just brute-forcing the changes in the timeline, but hey, we do have a working time loop, so we know it works, and unless they go through the whole scenario manually, they shouldn't notice anything strange."

"But… you said the Emergents perceive time as a big block."

"They perceive it, yes, but to experience things, they still have to go through it linearly. They modelled themselves after humans after all, and the human mind isn't designed to experience past, present, and future at the same time."

"But they can still perceive it. Doesn't that mean they should be able to see our future then? If they can just take the book, and go to the last chapter, couldn't they figure out the Crowned Coalescence's plans and everything?"

"I don't know."

His straightforward answer gave me a pause.

"You don't?

"Hey, give me a break. I'm not that far ahead of the timeline, linearly speaking. I haven't figured out everything yet. It probably has to do something with how Free Actors can muck up the plot, or maybe they are just allergic to spoilers, or something. We'll ask them when we'll get there."

I eyed my simultaneously helpful and obnoxious future self and exhaled a tired breath.

"Okay, but how does retconning yourself back in time actually work? Isn't it just asking for a paradox?"

"Ah, right. I remember not getting this the first time around either." He put down the book and looked me in the eye. "Simply put, I have already changed the timeline when I retconned Bel into the past. You could say I already rewrote the script at that point in time, and now I'm only going through the motions to play it out."

"So you have no agency now," I concluded, and he nodded along. "You're just following this script."

"Yep."

"How does that even work?"

"It's not that bad, actually," he told me with a shrug, sounding rather disinterested in the topic. "It's kind of like playing a game, where I already know the whole story and which are the right dialogue choices, and I just have to pick them when I get there. It's pretty laidback, really."

"I still don't quite get it."

"You will. It's not that big of a deal."

I still had my reservations about this whole thing, but the metaphysics of this whole debacle was already starting to give me a headache, so I decided to move on.

"Fine. Let's just say that I accept the whole premise for now. You're me from the future who retconned yourself as Bel into the past to maintain a time loop or something. Let's just leave it at that. Now what? Are we going to make you into the big bad, and ignore the whole original plan with the homunculus?"

"Nah, that won't work. The Simulacrum hates overlaps." He sat up straight and exhaled a long breath. "Actually, we might as well quicky discuss this now. Simply put, the Simulacrum's framework has some hard-coded rules about roles. In this case, Leonard Dunning can be either the Hero, or the Villain, but not simultaneously. If you tried to execute the original homunculus plan as-is, it would've meant you would be both at the same time. To the Simulacrum, that would be the equivalent of one of those logical paradoxes, like a married bachelor or saying 'This statement is a lie'. You're either the big good unifier and reformer of the World of Mystics, or the big bad orchestrator of chaos. You're currently the former, but if you lean into the Bel role too hard, he'll become the 'main persona', and then the Simulacrum will try to passively shoehorn you into the role. Which would be bad."

As usual, my first instinct was to argue, but this was future me I was talking to, so I had no choice but to accept his words at face value and consider them carefully. When I did, my eyes opened wide, and the more I thought about it, the more sense they made.

"So the reason why I got a second chance to pull Cal from its stone…"

"Yep."

"And the reason why everyone, Knights, Draconians, and Celestials alike were following me and accepting my reforms…"

"Yep yep."

"And back then, after the tournament, Roland came out and tried to convince everyone that Bel wasn't an arch-villain because…

"Yep yep yep.

"And… at the time when Angie managed to grab my Bel mask and reveal my identity… It was because I was leaning too much into Bel and so my role was about to be shifted over?"

"Quadruple yep."

"That's fucked up."

"Yeah, the foundational functions of the Simulacrum are insidious like that, but not as bad as they used to be. It's a work in progress kind of deal. Ask The Girl about it."

"Will do." I closed my eyes for a second to collect my thoughts. There were a lot of them. "Okay, so the Simulacrum itself would make me the villain and conspire to reveal my identity if I overdid it as Bel, because it can't allow me to be both Leonard and Bel simultaneously, but then how are you here at all as Bel?"

"Oh, that's easy," future-me responded as if waiting for this question, and flashed a toothy grin. "I told you that I technically still exist in the future, and this is a proxy that was retconned into my past. Because of that, the Simulacrum doesn't recognize me as 'Leonard Dunning', only as 'Bel of the Abyss'. Of course, once the loop ends there's only going to be one me again, but at this moment in time, the Simulacrum views us as two completely different entities. It's a loophole."

"And you know about all of this… how exactly?"

"I was also warned in my past by my future self about this happening. You know, time loop stuff." Seeing that I was confused (or more likely, remembering his own confusion at this time), future me threw me some crumbs. "My best guess is that there was a kind of 'bootstrap timeline' at some point, where things went horrifically wrong and we got shoehorned into the role of the final villain of Josh's story, forcing us to do another big retcon like the one with Angie. That created the circumstances that led to the establishment of this loop, and now we're just passing whatever information remained about this original timeline between each other like this."

"Ugh… dammit, my head is starting to hurt again…" I crossed my arms with a groan and threw my head back for a second or five before returning to the conversation again. "Okay, let's say I've got that." I narrowed my eyes again. "If this is all a retcon, how far is it going? How much are you changing?"

"If you mean since when I've been here as Bel, it's been right after the Angie retcon."

"Damn…" I whispered, then asked the next relevant question. "Were you the one who burned down the Celestial Archives during that whole mess?"

"Yes."

"Why?"

"I don't know. It's just something that's on my bucket list that always has to be done. It's probably related to that bootstrap timeline. It will have some positive-ish results, so it's fine."

Feeling another headache coming, I tentatively asked, "So you've been doing other things in the background as well?"

"Oh yes. Lots."

"And you only showed myself right now, in front of everyone like this because…?"

My words trailed off as I tried to put myself in the shoes of this future me for a moment, and when our eyes met, we both pointed finger-guns at each other.

"Drama."/"Drama!"

We spoke at once, though his response was in considerably higher spirits than mine.

"There has to be something else though," I pressed on with a frown. "We were in the middle of a big event there; there's no way you only interrupted it for the sake of dramatics."

I knew myself, and I knew that I wouldn't do something like that unless I had good reasons to do so. Bel grinned and started playing with the spine of the book in his hands, yet his eyes remained serious and trained on me.

"That was one of the developments in need of retconning. It's a bit of a 'you broke it, you fix it' kind of situation."

"We broke it," I repeated after him, and he nodded.

"You have no idea how dangerous our Narrative influence can be," he stated solemnly and raised the book again. "Think of it this way: do you remember that whole childhood promise thing between Naoren and Yseult?"

"Yes? It was kind of the centerpiece of the whole drama."

"That centerpiece didn't exist last week."

"… Excuse me?"

Seeing my skeptical reaction, Bel opened the book and asked, "What's the name of Friday's mother?"

"I… Do you mean the character in Robinson Crusoe? I don't know. Was she even mentioned?"

"No, she wasn't. In this regard, Friday's history has a blank spot. However, if the narrative required her presence, this spot could be filled in at any point, and you wouldn't find it strange at all. After all, people have mothers, right? And it's normal that we don't know every little detail about a character's background, right?"

"I see you're trying to make a point. Is it that this childhood promise used to be another blank spot that got filled in recently?"

"Exactly. Because you were convinced that you were seeing a stereotypical romance story development, the actors were arranged and the holes in their backgrounds filled out to fit your preconceived notions. Just like how you could disable the Colossi because it made sense that Polemos would have authority over them, your expectations have twisted the histories of Yseult and Naoren to fit the situation you imagined would happen."

"That's… actually… Wait, does that mean there was a duel challenge at the end because…?"

"Because Elly reminded you that it's how Draconians would resolve an argument, and it got immediately integrated into the scene."

For a few seconds, I could only stare blankly as the new information sank in. Did that mean that I was wrong when telling Judy about how I wouldn't subconsciously warp reality? Wasn't that ridiculously dangerous?

"Honestly, that's the smaller problem," Bel told me with a sour expression and tapped the book against his palm for emphasis. "You were expecting things to develop in the usual, East-Asian romance fiction template, but you forgot to interrogate what that actually meant. If Yseult is designated as the villainess, it would mean she would have to play out her role, but do you remember what that is?"

Wracking my aching head for a few seconds, I quickly came up with an educated guess.

"The villainess usually gets denounced, then they do something stupid, like trying to assassinate the heroine, which leads to their downfall. Their family falling to ruin along with them, getting exiled, or executed, are also common developments."

"Okay, now apply that to Yseult."

When I did that, a soft curse inadvertently escaped my mouth.

"Bloody hell…"

She was one of the highest-ranking representatives within the Draconic Federation. If the villainess template played out with her, it would've not only created a rift within the organization, but losing the support of the Albions and all of their branch- and allied families would've been an enormous blow to our claims of legitimacy.

"Exactly," Bel stated softly and pointed at himself. "My appearance will cause all developments to halt for a while, because the 'main plot' takes precedence over the 'side plot' in the Simulacrum's priority list. You'll have to sort it out before this whole powder-keg explodes."

"Okay, and how do I do that?"

"Can't tell you," he responded curtly, throwing me on a loop for a moment.

"You can't tell me? Why?"

"Spoilers."

Was he pulling my leg, I wondered. He didn't seem like it. In fact, he looked dead serious about it.

"You mean, it would create a time paradox," I hazarded a guess, and he shrugged.

"That too."

I continued to eye him, but he didn't (or couldn't) talk about it. Maybe it had something to do with that whole 'sticking to the script and going through the motions' thing he mentioned before, I ventured. In any case, I decided to drop the topic for now and move on.

"So, what's the plan?"

"I continue doing Bel things and building an Axis of Evil for the finale, you keep doing Leonard Dunning things and keep your narrative-ness in check as best as you can. Mainly, you should try to work out all the sudden romances and related plots that have been cropping up around this time. Oh, and also look into the whole Melinda situation."

"Why?" I blurted out, mildly alarmed. "I thought Judy and Elly already have it covered."

"Nope."

"Sounds annoying."

"It is." He paused and then pointed at me. "Anyhow, the girls are already going to be freaking out because you disappeared for half an hour, so let's continue this conversation later."

"No objection here." Saying so, I stood up, and the sudden movement made Pudding-kun skitter over to our side again. "I should discuss this with them anyway. Maybe by the time I explain everything, I'll have a better understanding of this timeline nonsense as well."

"It could be worse. Imagine if this wasn't a retcon, but real time-travel," Bel chuckled and stood up as well, then reached for his mask on a nearby box. "Grandfather paradoxes, as far as the eye can see."

"Don't jinx it."

The words slipped through my teeth on their own, and Bel let out a stifled laugh.

"You sound like Judy."

"Couples tend to start resembling each other," I answered off-handedly while he put on his mask.

"Oh well. It was nice meeting you. Now if you excuse me, I'll go ahead. I still have stuff to do today."

"Stuff?"

"You know? Recruiting evil minions, making fake doomsday devices, and stopping the second tournament arc by harassing the Feilong elders a bit. All in a day's work."

"… Figures."

I waved Bel goodbye and he responded by striking a dapper pose and disappearing into thin air. The storage room suddenly felt rather lonely with his departure, but I quickly shook off the sentiment. First, I placed the book he kept waving around back in its box, then returned the metal chair to the stack, and finally petted Pudding-kun a bit more before standing in the middle and exhaling a deep, pent-up breath.

Honestly speaking, I still didn't know how to feel about this. On one hand, I just gained a reliable ally and co-conspirator, which was always a good thing. On the other hand though… I still wasn't sure this didn't count as a time travel plot, and that just irkedme.

"I'll go ask Judy for a second opinion."

And with that, I also disappeared from the storage room, full of conflicting emotions.