The Flower That Bloomed Nowhere

Inner Sanctum Loft | 11:50 AM | Second Day

In retrospect, we'd spent a lot of time screwing around, and Theo was already with the others by the time I made it back, all of them wondering what'd happened. Regardless, I somehow managed to sell Kamrusepa's half-baked story without too much difficulty. Like I said, when I needed to be, I was a good liar.

Ran was the only one to look skeptical. But then, she had what amounted to special training in terms of picking up on my horseshit.

Whatever Kam did in that chamber, it didn't take her long, as she reappeared in less than five minutes after I did. She made her apologies, and then we continued on. As if nothing had happened.

The mental image of Vijana's presumed corpse lingered unwaveringly in my mind for what must have been at least fifteen minutes, and kept coming back constantly for hours after the fact. Splayed out, head half annihilated. Single remaining eye barely distinguishable, staring blankly upwards forever. I thought of the body rotting there, the sallow flesh slowly softening and bloating, the blood drying into a sticky brown stain.

I was so anxious about it, about the whole decision, that it felt like my gut was going to tear itself to pieces. But there was nothing to be done about it now. All I had to do was have faith that Kam's unwavering dedication to her own reputation and social advancement would drive her to handle it well for both of our sakes - and that nothing would take place in the interim to make anything more complicated.

We still had one more part of the sanctuary to see, but at about noon, just was we were heading back into the garden, Yantho approached Neferuaten and gave us the news that Ophelia had supposedly made a largely full recovery, and affirmed she wanted to go ahead with the public part of the whole event as originally planned. Thus, Hamilcar had decided to hold some last-minute meeting among the council members to make sure everything went as smoothly as possible.

"It's typical of him," Neferuaten said after we heard the news, shaking her head softly. "Always getting neurotic about things at the last minute, even if it's already been planned to death." She sighed. "I'm sorry. It looks like we'll have to cut this short, after all."

"Will there still be time to visit the research tower, some point later on?" Kamrusepa asked.

"Oh, almost certainly. It might have to be rather late in the evening or even tomorrow, but the weekend is yet young." She smiled. "Besides, like I told you before, I'll only be able to show you my own laboratory. So it probably won't take much time."

Kamrusepa pursed her lips. "Mm, if I'm not mistaken, Linos offered to show us his own yesterday, too, so perhaps we could all go together." She glanced at me. "That did happen, right, Su? You know how I get when I'm excited."

"Uh? Oh." I blinked. "Yeah, I think you talked him into it right before I went out with Theo."

"I remember that, too," Theo said.

"I'll have a word with him," Neferuaten said. "Perhaps some of the others, as well. It'd be nice if we could make an actual event of it."

But was there any chance that could actually happen, now? If Kamrusepa told everyone about what we'd found as soon as both of our business was finished, then if weren't all sent home immediately, then I doubted the atmosphere would be one where going on little tours to amuse ourselves would be appropriate. It could only happen if Samium took a long time to give an answer, and I ended up having to keep asking Kam to put it off.

I wasn't sure my heart could handle this tension being dragged out for that long, frankly.

"Ah, dear, I almost forgot," Neferuaten said, clicking her tongue. "We never did run into your father, did we, Theo? Even though checking on him was part of the reason you came along to begin with." She looked a little embarrassed. "Sorry about that. I might've got a little carried away with my monologuing."

"No, it's, er. It's quite fine," he said, holding up a hand. "I actually ran into him while I was out of the room back underground earlier, so all's well that ends well, heheh."

"Ah, is that so...?" She asked, raising an eyebrow.

I bit my lip instinctively at the awkwardness of the moment. Based on what Theo had actually said up until this point, this statement made no sense whatsoever. He'd told us he was only stepping outside to check something on his logic engine. And while Kam had joked back then that he'd sneaked off to the lavatory... He'd accompanied us to it later, so there wasn't really a simple way this could be a misunderstanding.

I was pretty sure that everyone present realized this, but evidently, no one had an appetite to point it out. After a moment, Neferuaten rubbed her eyes, and her expression softened again. "Well, I'm glad," she said.

Why would he lie about something like that? Not that I was in a position to worry about other people keeping secrets.

"In any case," she went on. "I suppose I'll see you in a couple of hours for the climax of this sordid affair." She clasped her hands together. "I don't want to put anyone on the spot, but try not to fret too much. All our audience are academics, so no one's going to be expecting theatricality in your presentations - gods, you could read straight from a script, and I doubt anyone would pay it mind. Beyond that, just remember that you're only here on account of being provably talented. I'm sure you'll all do fine."

This was transparently directed to Theo, but we all nodded along and expressed appreciation at the sentiment.

And then her and Yantho left, leaving the rest of us to prepare or otherwise do as we wished. The original schedule had called for the presentations to begin at 2 o'clock, but with what'd happened, it wasn't clear if things would be pushed back a bit once all the dust had settled. Nevertheless, we decided to return to the abbey together. We headed back across the field, and through the tunnel into the visitors bioenclosure, making idle conversation of little substance.

That was so stupid, I kept thinking to myself, unable to pull my mind away from the subject. Honestly, did it not occur to you that the room might've been under a surveillance incantation, or for that matter, any number of arcana that could have prevented you from gaining a full understanding of what was going on? How could you feel remotely confident in being complicit in this serious a lie without even the ability to check for the Power?

If there was a surveillance incantation, they would have found the body already, I reasoned to myself. Don't be paranoid.

What a ridiculously narrow assumption, the other part of my brain replied. There are a thousand scenarios in which they could have detected you and not it. Maybe they have an incantation which only triggers when someone passes through the doorway, or one which passively records data that simply hasn't been checked since the incident happened. Hell, they don't even need the Power. Once they know the truth, the fact that you were gone for so long in that location will become incredibly suspicious!

I clenched my fists. Gods. Why did I only ever become smart after the stuff I needed to be smart for was already over.

I'd definitely need to try and talk to Kamrusepa later and hash out a better story. This wasn't going to do at all.

Hesitantly, I glanced over in her direction. Her face was a picture of perfect calm, happily chatting with the others in her usual way as if nothing was wrong whatsoever. As if she hadn't just made us both complicit in something that, worst-case-scenario, could get us accused of murder.

But I knew she wasn't a perfect liar-- Rather, she just had different weaknesses than I did. She could hold up a story fine so long as if was simple, but if things got too complicated, her overconfident nature would often tie her in knots. Not to mention what happened if someone pushed one of her emotional buttons.

I started down at the grass. Just try not to think about it, I thought. There's nothing you can do right now.

We continued on, approaching the flower arrangements and trees which surrounded the abbey. It was around this point that there was a brief interruption.

"Oh," Theo said, pointing upward. "Would you look at that..."

Our eyes followed, and I saw, beyond the reinforced transparent shielding, a great dark shape moving by overhead. At first, before I remembered where we were, I thought it was flying - an airship, or one the dragons they'd engineered in Palaat. But no; it was some great sea beast, with a titanic body nearly ten meters wide and five times as long, soaring through the waters on fins large enough to cast a shadow over half of the strangely-colored garden.

"Huh," Ran said. She reached her arm as to take out her camera for a moment, but then stopped, probably realizing there wouldn't be enough time. The silhouette was already fading, its edges becoming indistinct from the rest of the murky darkness.

"My, quite a sight," Kamrusepa said, her eyebrows raised. "Hard to believe anything can survive this far into crush-depth, let alone of that size."

"We might be close to the rim," Ran suggested. "Gravity isn't as strong there on the Atelikos, since it's all flat."

"It feels normal here," Theo said.

"Could be partially artificed," she retorted, stepping a foot up and down on the spot as if to judge the feel - though if it'd been done by an even half-way competent Aetheromancer, you wouldn't be able to tell so simply. "I could cast and check, but I don't really feel like picking through all the background incantations."

"That's fair," he said.

Gravity, infamously, had been one of the most difficult phenomena to replicate in the reconstructed reality of the Remaining World. For millennia, it had been understood that it operated divergently at different scales due to the influence of the Higher Planes and the complex interdimensional chemistry of material reality - if you measured the forces at work drawing atoms to one another, and then compared that to the sort of capital-G Gravity that bound whole solar systems or galaxies together, or even a person to the ground beneath their feet, you'd get frustratingly inconsistent results.

By the time of the apocalypse, there was a relatively comprehensive understanding of even the specifics of what was going on, but still, it proved incredibly difficult to emulate. The larger the model for the cosmos, the greater the errors which occurred, and the greater the disparity felt at the human level... Which, since the whole idea was to preserve humanity, mattered more than strict fidelity.

This was why the Ironworkers eventually abandoned the idea of a globe-shaped world in their final attempts, and why the Mimikos had ended up like it was. Rather than bothering with an attraction at all on the grander scale, it had proved easier to simply push everything down equally with electromagnetic force. And so, the same edifice that moved the Great Lamp from one side of the sky to the other had a structure, infused with arcana of an almost unfathomable scale, for doing just that.

And what was the best shape for a surface area with consistent distance to a single point? Well... A bowl. Despite itself, the Mimikos had been an engineering project, and the same basic principle applied to it as any other: Do the simplest thing that works, even if it seems stupid.

It was funny-- I always found my mind wandering to scholarly subjects like this, whenever I was under stress. It was probably a roundabout form of escapism. The world of facts, of bullet-point lists, existed as almost a a numb, quiet alternative to the complex, painful needs associated with actual life. It had become more and more easy for me to slip into that comfortable world, thinking exclusively of unliving things.

"You alright, Su...?" Ran asked. "You're still staring at the roof."

"Oh," I said, and jerked my head back down. "Uh, sorry. I was just thinking about something."

She furrowed her brow at me slightly. I wasn't just if I saw suspicion in the look, or if I was just being paranoid.

It only took us another minute to get back to the guest house after that. The lounge area was cleared out when we returned, save for Sacnicte, who was still hanging around 'in case any one needed her'. We made conversation for a few minutes, and she reported that she'd witnessed Mehit leave earlier - presumably to seek out her absconded daughter, though we didn't mention our meeting with Lilith back in the logic engine room - and also that Bardiya and Seth had stepped out for a little bit, before ultimately returning about 30-40 minutes ago.

Kamrusepa asked her, in jest, if she'd spotted Ezekiel at all during the morning, and she paused for what felt like a slightly strange amount of time before answering that she'd brought him up a late breakfast at his request, but otherwise hadn't, and that she'd barely spoken to him overall.

He really had seemed like a ghost for the entire weekend so far, but him secretly not being in attendance (or having been murdered and that now being subject to some sort of cover-up) felt, unfortunately, like wishful thinking. It was probably something to do with whatever odd thing the boys in the class had been obviously keeping to themselves, ever since Seth had shown up to the Sanctuary looking like he'd been tossed in the mud.

Frankly, I couldn't stay focused on the conversation. As soon as we'd entered the abbey, the stress I was already feeling started to be compounded with an increasing last-minute axiety about my presentation. At least on the latter point, the others seemed to feeling the same way, and soon we agreed to head back to our rooms and review our notes.

I'd half-expected Kam to take me aside then and there, but she must've thought it would look suspicious, because no such thing happened. We said our farewells, but while Ran and Kam were heading upstairs, I broke with them and approached Theodoros on my own.

This wasn't really something I felt in anything close to the appropriate mood for, but corpse or no corpse, it felt inappropriate to just leave it after having realized.

"Uh, hold on, Theo," I said. "Could I talk with you for a second?"

He looked hesitant. "Sorry, I really ought to go and rehearse for my presentation." His gaze was evasive. "I probably should have been doing that all morning instead of going out, really..."

Once again, it was almost as though he was avoiding me. This wasn't like him - when Theo was worried about something, he usually wanted someone to vent his anxiety to, even if he wasn't explicit about it. Usually that ended up being Seth, who was probably his closest friend in the class and his most regular confidant. It was strange.

"It's okay, it won't be much," I reassured him. "I just wanted to apologize. I remembered earlier that you asked me to come and talk to you about something last night, but after everything that happened at dinner, I completely forgot." I rubbed my eyes. "I don't know how. It's not like me at all."

He looked at me with an odd expression for a moment, like he wasn't processing exactly what I was saying. "Oh-- Oh, right," he said, after a few moments. "That's fine... It wasn't anything important. Just, ah. Little bit of interpersonal drama that was on my mind." He chuckled to himself awkwardly.

'Interpersonal drama'. Weirdly clinical way to put it, whatever 'it' was.

"Well... Even so, I'm sorry. It was thoughtless," I said, trying to sound as genuine as I could. "Do you still want to talk about it?"

"No, don't worry about it," he said. The words had come out very quickly-- Like he'd been expecting the question. "It's all been sorted out now, so it would be just be indulgent."

"Oh," I said. "...well, if you're sure."

"Now, ah, I should be going--"

"Theo," I interjected, cutting him off as he was already starting to step away. "Is everything alright...? You've been acting sort of... Odd, this morning."

"Y-Yes," he said, with a stiff nod. "Sorry, it's just the, uh. The whole idea of this event again, of being watched by so many people. It's got me out of sorts. I must not have mentally prepared for it as much as I thought."

"Are you sure?" I asked. "If something is going on with you, or with some of the others in the class in the class... It's seemed like there might be... You can tell me about it. I won't go and blab about it to everyone."

Why was I making an offer like that? I didn't have the time of emotional resources for it. It had just slipped out.

He took off his glasses, rubbing his eyes. "I appreciate it, Utsu. But no, it's really nothing for you to worry about." He put them back on, and gave me a serious expression. "I'll be alright. I just-- I need to get back in my room. To think about some things."

So he didn't deny something was going on. He just didn't want to discuss it. That was simpler to deal with than outright obfuscation, I guess.

"Well, alright," I said, hesitant. "If you do want to talk about anything, just let me know, okay?"

He sighed, a tired expression on his face. "Mm. T-Thank you."

Then he turned, and before I could really process if this were a good point to let the conversation end, had slipped behind his door, a lock clicking in his wake.

Well, I thought. That was reassuring.

Unfortunately, I didn't have the stamina to really dwell on whatever he could've been dealing with. I headed back down the hall and upstairs, towards my own chambers, and as soon as I was on my own and let my mental defenses down, I suddenly felt completely exhausted and overwhelmed.

I took a couple steps forward, then collapsed, back-first, onto the bed.

Thinking about it, it didn't make sense to beat myself up for the decision to go along with Kam's plan. When I thought about it rationally, she was objectively right that reporting it would almost certainly get the event cancelled and scupper my plans, especially since even Neferuaten didn't know just how important this all was to me, even if I'd shared a little bit with her. Likewise, it wasn't as though not having explored the room and remaining ignorant would've been an objective improvement. If there was anything suspect about the whole situation, it was better for at least the two of us to be armed with the facts, rather than no one at all.

The only negative to come of it was the possibility we'd be implicated ourselves, and even then, Kam taking responsibility for the note and the scene made it much more likely that consequences would fall on her rather than myself. Which, again, led to have faith that she would be able to handle it, when push came to shove. For all her faults, Kam could be frighteningly competent, when push came to shove. She was head of the class for a reason.

Yet, still, I couldn't shake the sense that something awful was looming over my head. A scythe, waiting to strike my head off.

And so, I closed my eyes, and once again asked myself:

What do I know, beyond any doubt?

Basically nothing, really. As I'd already noted, we couldn't check for the Power, so huge aspects of what we saw could technically have been outright faked. The note, the blast from the weapon on the wall, the body. Illusions, replications, and Neuromancy could make a farce of them all - just about the only thing I was sure of was the basic nature and contents of the room itself, and the fact that there had at least been an impression of a dead woman at the bottom of a pit.

Tch. Once again, I was stumbling around in total ignorance of anything happening around me.

I took a deep breath, trying to focus. To organize unreasonable situations into something easier to comprehend, it's basic logical thinking to sometimes pretend that certain things are true, and then extrapolate conclusions from that basis. Because even if reality is more complicated and those conclusions aren't completely sound, in arriving at them, you might be able to perceive things from a new perspective and gain new information.

So I decided to exercise Occam's razor, and make an assumption that there was no special ncantations in effect in that room. The fact they hadn't found the body made it at least unlikely that the order had any set up, and as for a potential killer, using the Power would actually make it more difficult to frame something as a suicide, since anyone could cast the Anomaly-Divining Arcana and realize something was a amiss. So it wasn't unreasonable to just take what I'd seen at face value.

If that were the case, then the likelihood of something sinister going on in terms of the suicide itself seemed low. After all, we saw no signs of a struggle, and everything seemed to line up perfectly. The body, the shot in the wall...

...actually, was that really true?

It was at this point that I started to realize that Kam's on-the-spot observations, while they'd left me stumped at the time, weren't at all absolute. She'd pointed out the pistol and the wall marking, but if one assumed a scenario where the culprit had a motive to try and paint what had happened as a suicide, it would be trivial to fake both. The killer could have shot them down on the lower level, planted the pistol in their hands, then simply climbed the ladder and shot the wall at that particular angle themselves.

In fact, the more I thought it, the more plausible that seemed. After all, if Vijana had really died up at that spot we'd been perched, wouldn't there be some more evidence? At such a high setting, a pistol would blast through a lot of flesh outright, but shouldn't there have been some amount of viscera around the hatch from a head wound that catastrophic? Chunks of bone, hair, maybe a small amount of blood...

Yet, there was nothing at all. Of course, it was perfectly plausible that it had all gone down the pit with her, depending on the angle she'd been kneeling. Or we could have simply missed it in the poor lighting.

Something popped back into my head. The bleach smell. The room had been recently cleaned. I'd almost forgotten about that amidst everything else. Could that have been to get rid of any signs of a conflict which didn't fit with the narrative? In fact, how could there be any innocent explanation for someone cleaning that room recently, since they'd have surely noticed the body? Didn't that unambiguously point to some sort of cover-up?

That gave me the shivers. The idea of strong evidence that there really was a murderer.

But then, even that didn't make sense. You couldn't scrub out evidence of a refractor pistol shot of that strength. So the killing couldn't have happened up in the armory except in the one position by the hatch. But then, if it had happened there, there'd be no reason to clean up anyway, because it would support the narrative of a suicide they were trying to create. And if it had happened in the tunnels instead, then there'd be nothing to clean up at all. The whole notion led in a circle.

Ugh, this hurts my head.

Maybe that whole idea was just catastrophizing after all. The room could have just as easily been cleaned a little while before the... Death, and still smell and look fresh. It didn't prove anything.

I felt like I was making realizations, but at the same time, it wasn't really helping or making me feel better. And it was obvious I wasn't going to be able to reach any sort of absolute conclusion. All I could really say with confidence was that (1) someone died, and (2) the circumstances were pretty fucking dubious. And that wasn't even touching on the letter I'd discovered, or the content of the suicide note itself.

Knowing that, was there another action I could take...? Well, no. Not really.

That's not true, a small part of me protested. You could give up on all of this and tell the truth, for everyone else's sake. Go home.

But just as much as it'd been when I'd been feeling vague bad portents the previous day, or when I'd had the same the same thought before my meeting with Neferuaten, I knew that even thinking that was kidding myself.

After all, there wasn't a 'home' for me to go back to. Not really.

I rolled over on the bed, staring towards the window, the curtains still undrawn from the morning. I still couldn't believe, even having been preparing for it for so long, that the meeting with Samium was actually happening. If one pursues a goal for long enough, it eventually stops being something tangible, a real thing that you want to happen, and instead becomes something that only exists in the abstract. That point had been passed a long time ago. I'd almost forgotten what it was like to have hope.

I didn't know what to make of the feeling, now that it was potentially so close. It was at once both wonderful and terrifying, a liberation that crushed me with its finality.

I let out a long sigh, staring at the branches of the trees.

Stay focused on one thing at a time, a voice within me said. Get the presentation done for now. Everything else can wait.

That was right. After all, if I screwed this up badly enough, then I could end up going into one of the most important meetings of my life feeling embarrassed out of my mind.

I stood up, and headed for my desk.

Earlier, I'd unpacked some of my notes, and a few handouts with the Negenthropic-Resuscitating Arcana inscribed on for the conclave members. I wasn't doing anything complicated involving artifices or logic engines - my plan was simply to explain the nature and intention of the incantation, go over a little how it works and how I iterated upon since its original development, and then give a demonstration. Straightforward, professional, by-the-numbers. That was the way I liked it.

Unfortunately, it it was based on returning something clinically dead back to life, that made it a little difficult to demonstrate. So I'd had to bring one special prop. After looking over what I already had out and making sure there was nothing amiss or that I was forgetting, I headed over to my trunk and withdrew a medium-sized brown box. I undid the hatch, and opened the lid.

Inside was a grey-colored, unrealistically-uniform simulacra of a human torso, downsized, dried, and without skin. This was a quaintly-named anatomy doll - a hyper-specialized golem designed to basically act as a crude substitute for the human body for the purposes of research of education. Right now, it looked more like it was made of cloth than flesh and blood, but that would change shortly.

I went to lavatory and retrieved some water. Then, following the instructions, I poured it, along with a bright, nectar-esque calorie goop that came with the kt into a box at the head of the golem, before flushing then both into the pseudo-organs below. I waited a few minutes, then used the Power to generate heat in a second compartment at the bottom.

Slowly, the organs began to animate, coming to 'life', or something that was close enough, fluid starting to form on their colorless surfaces. The intestines pulsed slightly, and the heart began a soft but growing beat.

I smiled to myself. At least one thing about this was going right.

"Alright," I said, cracking my knuckles. "Let's do a little practice."