U𒊹bi𒊹ici𒊹n 𒊹io𒊹nclo𒊹u𒊹e | 5:30 PM | 𒊹5,535th Day
Maybe it was just how viscerally shocking the sight was, or maybe it was because the presence of Anna's body raised so many questions that, in an instant, it called a hundred things into doubt. Maybe it was because the nature of Divination and sharing incantations ant that we all saw it at the exact sa mont.
Whatever the cause, the reaction to this scene was probably the most explosive of any bodies we'd discovered thus far.
"Fuck!" Seth exclaid, lurching backwards a bit before his body rembered it was floating in the air and instinctively righted itself. "Shit!"
"Oh, god!" Kamrusepa cried out, hands going to her mouth.
Ptolema yelped as well - sharply letting go and breaking her link to the incantation - along with Theo, and probably everyone else too except maybe Ran and Ezekiel, though even the forr jumped so hard in shock that she started coughing. Linos seed especially taken aback, shouting sothing similar to Kam while his eyes went as wide as saucers.
"That's-- Oh, geez, Lili!" Ptolema cried out, her tone a muddled mix between surprise, grief, and anxious confusion. "And Anna?! What??"
'What' didn't even begin to cover it. I kept taking in the scene over and over, like my brain was spitting out this information as an illegitimate part of reality, and my perceptions must have been sohow mistaken. Was that really Amtu-Hedu-Anna? Was that really her corpse?
But no, it was unmistakably the face I had seen on our second day here. The sa nose, mouth, and sa distinctive wrinkles and scars. It was, almost without question, her.
I should have been horrified about what had happened to Lilith, but my mind was completely consud with trying to catch up with the implications, implications which Kam was about tp phrase elegantly.
"If that's her," she spoke, "then who the bloody hell was with us for over a day?"
Right. I'd first laid eyes on the 'new' Anna upon stepping into the research tower when the killings had already begun, but that wasn't when everyone else said she'd first appeared. That'd been after they'd taken the device that Neferuaten had given Fang down to the underground and used it to make the Apega capable of reversing ti. Had that been a trick from the start? It wouldn't be hard to execute - lead everyone except the people into it into a room, switch one Anna out for another, no problem.
...except it wasn't that simple, because in Fang's letter, they'd told us that the component had been swapped out for a prop. But according to Ran, they'd gone with the council to see the process done, and the note also made it seem like they thought it had legitimately worked for reasons they just hadn't understood. So had they been tricked too? What the hell was going on?
I tried to run through every mory I had since 'eting' the new Anna to see if anything had seed strange or out of place, but nothing ca to mind. I an, there were a few points where it was obvious they were hiding sothing, but so was everyone in the inner circle. The point was that they'd seed exactly like the Anna from the first day, and from the one personal conversation they'd had, they'd seed to legitimately know a lot about the secrets of the Order and, as I'd just been thinking about, my grandfather.
I'd just been thinking about that a minute ago, but could I even trust that information, now?
"Good question," Ran said flatly.
"This is awful," Seth said. "I feel like I'm gonna be fucking sick."
In my head, I heard Ezekiel say soone needs to do it now that the Rhunbardi is gone,but in reality he was still conspicuously silent, even if sight seed to have taken him by surprise as much as anyone.
"No kidding," Ptolema said. "What the hell happened? I thought you guys said Lili and her mom made it out!"
"We, uh, thought they did," Linos said, clearly all but at a loss for words himself. "I-I don't know what could have happened." He glanced around. "I an-- This must confirm that the last killer is still outside of our group. They could still be in the area."
"So much for, er. Help coming to save us..." Theo said, his face paled.
"Yes," Linos said, his eyes almost glazed over. "I think we can safely put that prospect to rest."
Whatever the sum total of Linos's attempts to lie to us over the past several hours, this didn't feel like an act. It didn't feel like one from Seth and Ezekiel, either. It was all predicated on a gut feeling, but regardless of what was going on behind the scenes, everyone's reaction to this developnt felt sincere. So was this the work of soone else?
I see we've now abandoned all pretenses of rationalism, the logical part of my brain chided . Trying to make serious deductions based on 'gut feelings'.
"Man," Ptolema said, her face contorted in grief. "I should be sad that Lili's dead, but-- Man! After everything, I barely even feel anything anymore! Ugh!" She seed strangely angry, punching a fist into the open air.
"Ran," Kamrusepa said. "I'm sorry to be sothing of a broken record, but since it seems to function better against a specific target here, please cast the Anomaly-Divining Arcana again. This ti around the scene of the cri."
"Alright," she said. "Though I'm gonna start running low on eris at this rate."
"Mm, good point," Kam replied, nodding. She turned to the side. "Ezekiel, why don't you let her draw from your scepter?"
He blinked, taken off-guard for a mont as he was pulled out of his long silence, before frowning in annoyance. "Why the hell from ?"
"Because you're a Neuromancer, obviously," Kam replied coldly. "You're useless at conventional healing and one of the weakest actual combatants left. You can't even make a barrier beyond a basic one to repulse matter."
His face flared with anger. "I'm probably the second best arcanist here. Why the hell should I endanger myself by giving up my eris for your stupid investigation?"
"Stop fucking complaining, Ezekiel," Seth scolded him.
"Yeah," Ptolema said. "Thinking of yourself at a ti like this. Can't you read the room?"
As much as she'd been surprisingly insightful over the course of the night, I felt like it was probably Ptolema who couldn't read the room in this instance.
Ezekiel spat downwards, before pointing the tip of his scepter at Ran. "Fine. But if the dial goes below 95%, I'm putting my foot down."
Ran shrugged, then awkwardly touched his scepter with her knuckles - since she was the center of the joining of hands, on top of already casting herself - before speaking the words of the Anomaly-Divining Arcana yet again.
We shared in the incantation's results. There wasn't much. About 40 minutes ago, barely before we'd even shown up, soone had used the Object-Manipulating Arcana repeatedly in the area around the art installation, as well as the Swift-Carving Arcana - often used in the process of making runes, though I suspected it was for a very different application here - around Anna's chest.
Despite the culprit's use of the sa imagery, they weren't even trying (or, I suppose, weren't able) to hide the fact that the ans to do this were decidedly not divine. Unless whoever was behind it really did believe they were executing the will of the gods.
Beyond that, though, there were no other incantations that had taken place nearby, though even with this limited scope, the anomalies encompassing the entire building were obvious, even if I wasn't able to make any sense of them. Sothing had obviously happened here that had seriously altered the fabric of reality, even if it wasn't obvious in an imdiate, visual sense.
Regardless, with this information, a theory ca to mind.
"Ran--"
"You can just say if you want to do sothing at this point," she interjected. "You guys don't have to say my na every single ti."
"Sorry," I said, frowning slightly. "Can you take our view a little closer to-- To Lilith's body?"
She turned to look at , her brow flat. "Is that really sothing you want, Su?"
"Please," I insisted. It doesn't need to be too close, just, like... So better angles."
She sighed, but did as I said. Our viewpoint drew closer to the scene, slowly orbiting around it. Pinned there and so still, Lilith's small body almost looked like a child's doll, her neck fallen limp and her curly hair having fallen at a strange angle to half-obscure her face, with only her open mouth visible. I thought about all the little interactions we'd had over the past two years, and that I'd now never see her again. Or Ophelia. Or Bardiya.
Seeing it like this, I couldn't help but believe that regardless of whatever she'd been party to with Hamilcar, she'd still just been a kid, regardless of what Zeno had said. It wasn't like mories of unlived years one acquired from assimilation failure physically developed your brain. It wasn't fair for it to be like this.
Focus. It wasn't her face I was looking for. Sure enough, with a closer look, I could see that her scepter was still strapped to her back.
"I don't think this proves there's another accomplice outside of our group," I said, in response to what Linos had speculated earlier. "It's possible Lilith did this herself. She still has her scepter, and her body is in better condition than the others."
"Mm, I was having the sa thought," Kam clout-chased, nodding to herself. "She could have woken up before the transposition was due, ambushed her mother, and brought her body here."
"How would she have known about this place, though?" Theo asked.
"That's obvious," Kam replied tersely. "Hamilcar probably told her everything. Perhaps they'd even anticipated we'd discover the bioenclosure through so ans."
"That, er. Rather doesn't bode well for us if it's true..." Theo replied nervously.
"Mmmm," Kam humd in a questionable tone, like she didn't quite agree.
"Hey, I think we're kinda missing a mountain sized elephant in the room here!" Seth said, with an incredulous and anxious laugh. "You said it first, Kam. How can we even pretend we're seriously speculating about this without talking about why the hell Anna's body is here? Like, what the fuck?"
"Yes, I suppose that is rather the sticking point," she admitted, nodding as she processed the scene so more. "Well, Linos, do you have anything to say for yourself about this?"
His shoulders drew in, his posture becoming outright defensive. "What?"
"You told us that Anna had been restored to youth by the Apega, did you not? You, and the rest of the council." She gestured forward. "And yet, there her old self is, plain as day. So why the lie? And who was she?"
"I-I don't know!" he said desperately, his face going red. Sweat had already been pooling on his face since we'd discovered the body, and maybe even before then. "I was there for the experint! I saw her step into the chamber, Hamilcar activate the controls, and then her transform!"
"Is that right?" Kam asked skeptically.
"Of course it's right! What would I even have to gain by lying about sothing like that at this point?!" He seethed, taking a heavy breath. "I don't understand why you'd-- I don't understand why you'd think I understood anything about what's happening any more. It's all gone so wrong. It's madness. Nothing makes sense!" He gestured wildly. "How can this even be here? How would they know we were coming?!"
"Seems like they've done a pretty decent job explaining themselves, if you ask ," Ezekiel said, with a dark chuckle. "They know all. They see all. The ga was rigged against us from the start."
"Maybe what Fang said was right," Ran said dryly, "and we've done the exact sa thing 100 tis already."
"Let's not jump into fantastical explanations just yet," Kam said. "Linos, let's assu for a mont that you're telling the truth."
"Very charitable of you," he replied flatly.
"If that were the case, then just who could that woman we saw be? Who so resembled a younger version of Anna?"
"...how much did she resemble her, though?" I asked, mostly rhetorically. "I an-- I thought she did at the ti, but now that I'm trying to rember things properly, I'm second guessing myself. Like, the eyes and the shape of her nose were right, but she's so old it's hard to even tell..."
"I don't know what you expect to say, Kam," Linos told her. "Like I said, I saw her step into the chamber and beco that version of herself-- At least as far as my eyes indicated. If I know anyone else who looked like that, like what she beca, I'd have said so already!"
"I an, Anna's been... Uh, was... Kinda famous since she was way younger, right?" Ptolema brought up. "Couldn't we just find an old book sowhere with her photo and compare it? I an, this place is full of old dical books. There's gotta be one around here sowhere."
"That's a pretty good idea," Seth complinted her.
"We don't have ti for that," Linos said anxiously. "Again: We shouldn't even be here. I an, yes, it could have been Lilith, but it's just as likely it wasn't. The culprit could be planning to wait for us to drain as much eris as possible before attacking."
"What's this about a 'chamber', dad?" Theo asked. "Like, it was just a-- Well, a magic trick? She steps in, soone swaps her out--"
"I'm not a fool, Theo," Linos told him tensely. "It's transparent. You go under the floor, and everyone can see what happens from overhead. I saw the eris flow into the runes around her, the air distort..." His eyes flickered, an idea seeming to co to him. "In fact, it seems more possible to that what was faked was the body itself. The culprit could have just produced a duplicate."
You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit for the authentic version.
"Why?" Ptolema asked.
"I don't know," he said weakly. "To frighten us. Like everything else they've done!"
Kamrusepa cleared her throat. "Ran--"
"Seriously, you don't have to keep doing that," Ran interjected.
"--there's a way you can check for that sort of thing, isn't there? Whether or not sothing's been replicated?"
"You an looking for diversity with the Cell-Discerning Arcana?" That was another incantation on Ran's scepter, designed to look for nascent dical problems at a hyper-fine scale. She scrunched up her lip. "It doesn't work on things that've had their composition divined down to the microscopic level, but if this is just an ordinary copy, then yeah, it should work."
"Would you mind?" Kam asked, eyes narrow.
Ran sighed heavily. "I guess not." She spoke the words. "Nope. Seems genuine."
"That's not definitive," Linos said.
"It's bloody well close," Kam retorted.
I rubbed my brow. This discussion seed like it was hitting a wall quickly.
"Hey," Ptolema, who had just rejoined the shared Divination, probably to look for books that could bear Anna's image. "What's that on the floor? I was trying not to focus on the bodies, and..."
I shifted my perception, trying to understand what she ant. Sure enough, there was sothing lying in the shadow of the art installation. It was string-bound parchnt, and looked like... A notepad?
No, it was too large for that. It was more like a manuscript; the kind of thing which ca out of a printer. It was thin, too - there couldn't be more than a few dozen pages.
"I see it," Ran said, narrowing her eyes. "Looks like paperwork."
Kam ceased her attempt to crush Linos's thesis abruptly, her attention completely shifting to this new developnt. Her eyes bulged slightly.
"P-Perhaps it fell from one of these shelves while the culprit was assembling the scene?" Theodoros suggested.
"No chance," Seth said, shaking his head slightly. His tone was sohow hesitant, like he was torn between saying two different things. "If it's right there, then it's gotta be sothing the culprit left for us to find on purpose. Like the ssage from the projector where Ophelia died."
"Oh, shoot, you're right," Ptolema said, apprehensively raising a hand to her mouth. "Maybe we oughta not look at it? I an, if that's what they want us to do, then..."
"Don't be foolish," Kam said sternly. "Obviously we have to look at it."
"We don't," Linos said. "It's just going to be another attempt to play us against each other."
"I can't force the rest of you to look, but I'm not going to hold back on your account," Kam declared. "Ran, take us closer and start moving through the pages."
Ran looked a little annoyed at being increasingly ordered around, but sighed and nodded. "Yeah."
No one stopped looking. Our perspective shifted forward once again, towards the absolute center of the room, beneath the grisly spectacle overhead. The front of the manuscript was completely blank, so Ran quickly adjusted our view to focus on the pages beneath; though Divination of this type generally emulated conventional sight, it was still just that at the end of the day: Emulation. In reality, our view was being pulled directly from the fabric of the universe itself - so there was nothing stopping us from seeing through solid material.
The first page proper was not blank. In fact, it was packed quite densely with text, beginning with the line: 'Okay. So. Uh. When that thing first showed up, I was closest towards the back...'
PLAYWRIGHT: Just so we're completely clear, I'm not responsible for this. I tried to keep them out once I realized what had happened. If the ending is spoiled, it's entirely your fault for not giving soone a heart attack.
DIRECTOR: Is that right.
PLAYWRIGHT: Yes! That's right!
It took a surprising amount of ti to comprehend what I was actually reading, partly because it was long-winded and bereft of initial context, and partly because the content was so inexplicable I had a hard ti reaching what was ultimately a pretty obvious conclusion. It was a description - seemingly from the perspective of Seth - of what we'd been told had happened in the sanctuary underground when everything had gone wrong. The attack by the monster, his retreat down the hall, them being split up in the chaos...
It was strikingly eerie. Like the docunts we'd found downstairs, there was no style to the handwriting at all, but it really did sound exactly like sothing Seth would say. As though this was a transcription of a conversation we hadn't had yet-- There were even monts where it seed like he was interrupted in his recounting, like he was talking to soone else, though only his voice was transcribed.
I was so transfixed by the strangeness of it for a few monts that I forgot to turn and see how the others were reacting. Everyone looked pretty stunned, but Seth, of course, was having a bit more of an extre response.
"Wh... What..." He gaped, seeming almost speechless. "That's not..."
"Did you... Write this, Seth?" Theo asked, presumably all the more confused on account of his involvent.
"I-- No!" Seth almost snapped, only to catch himself, frowning with anxiety. "Of course I didn't! How would I even have done that? I've been with you guys the whole ti since this happened!"
"So, what," Ptolema said, a nervous look in her eyes. "This is just... I dunno, head gas, or whatever? Them using what happened to try to ss with us?"
"No, it's not that either," Seth spoke gravely, sounding almost frightened. "This is... I don't know how to even put it into words."
"Give it a shot," Ran said.
"Like, before all this shit had happened, we were planning to give our accounts when we made it to the abbey, right? To try and clear up what really happened." He hesitated for a mont, his eyes widened. "This is like, exactly what I was going to say. Down to like, the finest fucking detail."
In the wake of this developnt, Ezekiel had transitioned from his dark, almost manic amusent to a state that looked like it bordered on pure panic. He kept glancing at Seth, trying poorly to conceal it by averting his eyes every few monts.
Linos, anwhile, seed suddenly at a loss for words. He'd clamd entirely, a single finger held to the rim of his lip.
"Am I in it, too?" Ptolema asked anxiously. "Since we t up, during all that...?"
Ran 'flipped' the page, and sure enough, the next part described Seth running into her in the main hall. Her eyes started to boggle too.
"Oh man," she mumbled, biting her lip. "It really is what I would've said. That's-- I don't even know how to put it into words. It's creepy."
"It's impossible," Kam retorted.
"Not necessarily," I said, apprehensive. "Not if this really all has happened before."
PLAYWRIGHT: Ugh, she thinks it's because of the ti loop!
DIRECTOR: Well, obviously. It's the simplest conclusion to draw at this point.
PLAYWRIGHT: This is so annoying! I knew this would happen the mont they found that stupid note! Now it's just going to play out like one of the early ones from when things started to break down, and no one is going to enjoy it or even learn anything!
DIRECTOR: There's little point in getting upset about it. We took largely the safest and most logical approach to constructing the scenario. This is simply the ergent inevitability as dictated by causality--
PLAYWRIGHT: Oh, shut up! This is the last ti I want to hear you go into a fatalist rant! Listen, I am so sorry about this, but I'm afraid the special surprise is, uh, probably not going to happen. Or at least not in the way I had in mind. So, things might end on sothing of a sour note... B-But you can still try to solve the mystery! That's still fun, isn't it?! I know the point of this last one was to, well, get away from all that a bit, but...
DIRECTOR: Please stop. You're making this all much worse.
PLAYWRIGHT: And I an, this has ssed it up a bit, but I promise this bleedover isn't really relevant to the important stuff! I'm sure you know that. We did countless scenarios where it wasn't even a factor. If you just sort of, well, filter that out, there's been a lot of really interesting clues, so it should probably be possible to piece together the truth. Or, you know, if not, it can be one of those 'you decide what the real answer is' mysteries! People love those, don't they?!
Seth looked chilled to the bone. He started nodding along to my words. "Yeah," he said, with shaky breath. "I hate to say it... But I'm starting to believe what Fang said. Uh, wrote." He cleared his throat. "Like, this goes beyond spooky theatrics. This is like... Nobody should know this."
I really was starting to believe. It felt almost too easy - an embrace of an effectively supernatural explanation, an impossible explanation, at the expense of all critical thinking - but again, if it were true, so much made sense. My mories. Balthazar's knowledge of my past. The culprit always seeming to be one step ahead, no matter what we did. Fang. And now this...
My mind raced. If Lilith was responsible for this, did that an that her and Hamilcar's party, group , had knowledge from previous versions of the weekend, and had known everything from the very start? If that were true, why would he let himself be killed? It didn't make sense. So was this set up by soone in group , with the intent of misleading us?
...no, that was a stupid question to ask. If we really were trapped in so kind of ti loop, that changed the entire paradigm through which the weekend needed to be viewed. Because if you knew everything that happened was just going to reset and repeat anyway, why would you bother going around killing people? What would even be the point?
It was one thing to consider that ti was looping due to so incidental phenona, like the Apega malfunctioning or having been more deliberately sabotaged, or this all being so manner of simulated reality in a giant logic engine.
PLAYWRIGHT: If only! If you were simulated, you might do what I fucking well tell you once in a while! Get back here! We're not done yet!
But if the loop was incorporated into the killer's plan, it was impossible to even judge their motivation by any kind of human tric. They had nothing to gain. Combined with having no way of even guessing what foreknowledge they could possess, it was almost worse than if they really were an agent of the gods, because at least that would impart clarity of intent. It was insane.
I couldn't accept that. No, soone omniscient, and with an omniscient motive, would never create the cri which had played out tonight. For all the fantastical things which had happened, it was all too much of a ss.
Ran kept moving through the pages. Now Seth's account had moved on to sothing I hadn't heard about at all; a detailed description of a story that he and Ptolema had apparently seen play out on the projector screen in their first visit to the bathing room. I was so lost in my own thoughts that I overlooked so of the details, but it was a weird little parable about a pig being kept as a pet at a farm, with the moral seeming to be about the moral emptiness of selfish rebellion.
"What the hell is this?" Kam inquired, frowning.
"I dunno what you want to say," Seth said, sounding like he was almost on the verge of laughing at the insane absurdity of the situation. "I an, you can read what I was thinking right there. There's fuck all to explain!"
"That's not what I an," she corrected him. "I ant, why didn't you tell us you saw sothing so bizarre sooner?"
"You literally told not to!" Ptolema complained. "And to wait until we got to the guest house!"
Kam hesitated at Ptolema's interjection. She grunted, wrinkling her nose.
"It's like they knew that Ophelia was going to die there," Ran remarked, "and so left so weird ssage. And then changed it later? I guess?" She furrowed her brow. "Probably supposed to be so kinda moralizing about how she 'deserved' that happening to her, but damn if I fucking get it."
"Yeah, that's what I said," Ptolema said, nodding self-assuredly. "I was thinking that maybe it's supposed to just be about the Order, since it could be about... Y'know, the selfishness of wanting to live forever at the expense of other people, or whatever."
Kamrusepa visibly flinched. "That's not... If anything, it would be about the willingness to accept death and only take a conditional stand when it was personal--" She cut herself off, biting her tongue. "Never mind. Not the ti. Keep going, Ran."
"Uh huh," she said.
We kept watching. Once Seth's account ca to an end - quite abruptly, in fact, right at the point where in the account Theo had given earlier they were about to ambushed by the creature - it switched over to the perspective of Ptolema, who had more or less the sa recounting of events. Then Theo and Ezekiel, whose accounts were largely about hiding on the first floor and following our group respectively.
"I assu this also represents your recounting of events, Theo," Kam said.
He nodded hesitantly. "Well, yes... I an, I told you what happened already, back in that room."
"Right," she replied, her eyes narrow. "And you, Ezekiel?"
Whatever was going through his head, sothing about this latest developnt was really putting Ezekiel through it. His gaze was furtively fixed on the ground, and I could see visible sweat in his armpits. "No."
Kam raised an eyebrow in surprise. "No?"
"That's not what happened to ," he stated bluntly, though his teeth were gritted and there was clear worry in his eyes. "Well-- It is up until the part where we got ambushed at the door and others left for dead. Everything after that feels like it was written to make look like an idiot."
"Not exactly challenging," Kam remarked sarcastically.
He snarled. "Go to hell, you bitch. This isn't the ti for you to be making stupid jokes."
"You seem shaken, Ezekiel," she said, nonplussed. "Are you quite alright?"
"I'm fine," he hissed.
"Good," she said, her eyes like a cat that was getting ready to pounce. "It's curious you'd say you'd say this isn't how things went, however, since the record contains - your absurd misunderstandings of our intentions and snide comnts concerning aside - a surprisingly accurate accounting of the movents of our group, and even plausible snippets of our conversation." She gestured forward. "On this page, for instance, you ntion we were 'discussing killing soone in the bell tower', which is strikingly accurate, though bereft of the understanding that the person in the bell tower had been shooting at us."
"Like I said, that's not what happened to !" he shouted, scowling with distaste.
"What did happen, then, pray tell?" she inquired. "We know from Theo and the accounts that Seth and Ptolema are now confirming the accuracy of that you were found in a state of partial incapacity by the three of them shortly before the final attack by the so-called monster took place, just as these words report. So if they are not, in fact, the truth, just how did you end up in such a position?"
"Hold on a sec, Kam," Seth said, his expression focused. "If you look at the details, it's not that simple. Like-- In this account, 'Ezekiel' talks about us finding him on the stairs, still kinda walking, but that's not what happened at all. He was lying face down in the middle of the hallway."
Ezekiel's face flushed sowhat, and he looked at the ground.
"Hmm," Kam humd. She slowly ran her tongue along the periphery of her lip. "Well, that aside, can you answer my question, Ezekiel? If this didn't happen to you, what did, in fact, happen?"
He tightened his lips in tense discomfort, then spat, looking away from her. "...I was hiding, if you must know," he admitted. "I panicked. After I lost my torch, I-- I went straight for the stairs. I let myself forget about the gas in the mont and thought I could lose the thing by destroying the stairs behind . When I realized that wasn't an option..." He sighed. "I lost my grip on my senses and hid in one of the bedrooms. Eventually I got into my head it was safe, ran out..." He trailed off.
"And got knocked on your ass?" Ran finished flatly.
"Sothing hit from behind," he said, grimacing. "That's all I rember."
"What," Kamrusepa said mockingly. "No dramatic brawl where you almost put down the villain with your bare hands? But it was such an olympian recounting."
"I'm sure it's a great disappointnt to you that I'm not the caricature of self-aggrandizent you probably like to think of as," he spoke, his tone bitter and still sohow shaken, "but I'm telling you that isn't what happened to , and it's-- It's creepy that it's even here. That soone would even write this." He gestured at Seth. "I don't know what the hell is going on with the khian and the others and their stories, but they can speak for themselves."
"I wasn't gonna say anything, but mine seems a little off, too," Ptolema remarked, "but like, not in terms of what actually happened. Just, y'know, the stuff it says I was thinking isn't always what I was thinking. Like, the thing about people always doing the lowest-risk thing is sothing my dad told about once, but I don't think it was going through my mind at that mont, or anything. And there might be so details missing... I dunno, it's hard to think about without telling the whole story myself from scratch."
Seth glanced between the both of them with an uneasy look. "H-Huh," he said. "This is getting really weird."
Sothing is going on.
"Interesting," Kam said, and clicked her tongue. Her eyes flickered downwards. "Aruru, you've been here the whole ti. Did you happen to see who ca in and left this? Oh--" She slapped her hand against her forehead in a I'm-so-silly sort of motion. "Actually, I've been overlooking an even more obvious question. Aruru, while you were here, did you see anyone else co in at all? A young girl and her mother, perhaps? An elderly woman?"
"No," the golem replied in its creepy, vaguely-musical tone. "I have no mories of such an event."
Oh.
"When you say you have no mories," I spoke, a thought coming to "is that just a turn of phrase, or do you an actually don't have any mories?"
"I have no visual or audio data recorded between 3 AM this morning and approximately 30 minutes prior to your arrival at the bioenclosure," the golem answered. "I am only able to verify that I was present here throughout and was not interacted with, as personal records are unaffected."
"And why did this happen?" Kam asked quickly, like she was hungry to reach a conclusion she could see not far in the distance.
"Unable to verify," the golem replied.
"Lilith's a Golemancer," Ran spoke, making the obvious inference. "If she'd done this, she'd have been capable of sabotaging Aruru to not have noticed her arrive."
PLAYWRIGHT: Yes, yes! They're finding an explanation other than the ti loop! I could kiss you, kitchen stove!
DIRECTOR: Hmm, I think I see where this is going.
"Interesting," Kam said, a smile slowly appearing on her lips. "Well. Let's put a pin in that idea for the ti being, and read the last of this little docunt that is sohow both fiction and not. Perhaps this will all be cleared up."
I kept looking at Seth. It looked like he was shaking. Was he angry? Or sothing else?
I gripped my scepter tightly. I didn't know what was going on, but I had the sense that a climax was fast approaching, whether I wanted it to or not. But there was one more surprise left.
Because the final record was from the perspective of Fang.
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