The Flower That Bloomed Nowhere

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 meant that we all saw it at the exact same moment.

Whatever the cause, the reaction to this scene was probably the most explosive of any bodies we'd discovered thus far.

"Fuck!" Seth exclaimed, lurching backwards a bit before his body remembered 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 former jumped so hard in shock that she started coughing. Linos seemed especially taken aback, shouting something 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 somehow 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 same nose, mouth, and same 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 consumed 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 time. 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 memory I had since 'meeting' the new Anna to see if anything had seemed strange or out of place, but nothing came to mind. I mean, there were a few points where it was obvious they were hiding something, but so was everyone in the inner circle. The point was that they'd seemed exactly like the Anna from the first day, and from the one personal conversation they'd had, they'd seemed 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 someone needs to do it now that the Rhunbardi is gone,but in reality he was still conspicuously silent, even if sight seemed 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 mean-- 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 development felt sincere. So was this the work of someone else?

I see we've now abandoned all pretenses of rationalism, the logical part of my brain chided me. 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 seemed strangely angry, punching a fist into the open air.

"Ran," Kamrusepa said. "I'm sorry to be something of a broken record, but since it seems to function better against a specific target here, please cast the Anomaly-Divining Arcana again. This time around the scene of the crime."

"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 moment as he was pulled out of his long silence, before frowning in annoyance. "Why the hell from me?"

"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 time 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, someone 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 same imagery, they weren't even trying (or, I suppose, weren't able) to hide the fact that the means 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. Something had obviously happened here that had seriously altered the fabric of reality, even if it wasn't obvious in an immediate, visual sense.

Regardless, with this information, a theory came to mind.

"Ran--"

"You can just say if you want me to do something at this point," she interjected. "You guys don't have to say my name every single time."

"Sorry," I said, frowning slightly. "Can you take our view a little closer to-- To Lilith's body?"

She turned to look at me, her brow flat. "Is that really something you want, Su?"

"Please," I insisted. It doesn't need to be too close, just, like... Some 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 memories 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 same 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 some means."

"That, er. Rather doesn't bode well for us if it's true..." Theo replied nervously.

"Mmmm," Kam hummed 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 some 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 experiment! 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 something 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 me," Ezekiel said, with a dark chuckle. "They know all. They see all. The game was rigged against us from the start."

"Maybe what Fang said was right," Ran said dryly, "and we've done the exact same thing 100 times already."

"Let's not jump into fantastical explanations just yet," Kam said. "Linos, let's assume for a moment 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 mean-- I thought she did at the time, but now that I'm trying to remember 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 me to say, Kam," Linos told her. "Like I said, I saw her step into the chamber and become that version of herself-- At least as far as my eyes indicated. If I know anyone else who looked like that, like what she became, I'd have said so already!"

"I mean, Anna's been... Uh, was... Kinda famous since she was way younger, right?" Ptolema brought up. "Couldn't we just find an old book somewhere with her photo and compare it? I mean, this place is full of old medical books. There's gotta be one around here somewhere."

"That's a pretty good idea," Seth complimented her.

"We don't have time for that," Linos said anxiously. "Again: We shouldn't even be here. I mean, 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, someone 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 come to him. "In fact, it seems more possible to me that what was faked was the body itself. The culprit could have just produced a duplicate."

"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 something's been replicated?"

"You mean looking for diversity with the Cell-Discerning Arcana?" That was another incantation on Ran's scepter, designed to look for nascent medical 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 seemed 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 meant. Sure enough, there was something lying in the shadow of the art installation. It was string-bound parchment, and looked like... A notepad?

No, it was too large for that. It was more like a manuscript; the kind of thing which came 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 development. 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 somehow hesitant, like he was torn between saying two different things. "If it's right there, then it's gotta be something the culprit left for us to find on purpose. Like the message 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 mean, 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 someone a heart attack.

DIRECTOR: Is that right.

PLAYWRIGHT: Yes! That's right!

It took me a surprising amount of time 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 time 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 documents we'd found downstairs, there was no style to the handwriting at all, but it really did sound exactly like something Seth would say. As though this was a transcription of a conversation we hadn't had yet-- There were even moments where it seemed like he was interrupted in his recounting, like he was talking to someone else, though only his voice was transcribed.

I was so transfixed by the strangeness of it for a few moments 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 extreme 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 involvement.

"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 time since this happened!"

"So, what," Ptolema said, a nervous look in her eyes. "This is just... I dunno, head games, or whatever? Them using what happened to try to mess 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 moment, 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 development, Ezekiel had transitioned from his dark, almost manic amusement 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 moments.

Linos, meanwhile, seemed suddenly at a loss for words. He'd clammed entirely, a single finger held to the rim of his lip.

"Am I in it, too?" Ptolema asked anxiously. "Since we met 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 time 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 moment 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 emergent inevitability as dictated by causality--

PLAYWRIGHT: Oh, shut up! This is the last time 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 something 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 mean, this has messed 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 memories. 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 mean 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 someone in group , with the intent of misleading us?

...no, that was a stupid question to ask. If we really were trapped in some kind of time 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 time was looping due to some incidental phenomena, like the Apega malfunctioning or having been more deliberately sabotaged, or this all being some 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 metric. 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, someone omniscient, and with an omniscient motive, would never create the crime which had played out tonight. For all the fantastical things which had happened, it was all too much of a mess.

Ran kept moving through the pages. Now Seth's account had moved on to something 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 some 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 me to say," Seth said, sounding like he was almost on the verge of laughing at the insane absurdity of the situation. "I mean, you can read what I was thinking right there. There's fuck all to explain!"

"That's not what I mean," she corrected him. "I meant, why didn't you tell us you saw something so bizarre sooner?"

"You literally told me 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 some weird message. And then changed it later? I guess?" She furrowed her brow. "Probably supposed to be some 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 time. Keep going, Ran."

"Uh huh," she said.

We kept watching. Once Seth's account came 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 same recounting of events. Then Theo and Ezekiel, whose accounts were largely about hiding on the first floor and following our group respectively.

"I assume this also represents your recounting of events, Theo," Kam said.

He nodded hesitantly. "Well, yes... I mean, 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, something about this latest development 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 me," 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 me for dead. Everything after that feels like it was written to make me look like an idiot."

"Not exactly challenging," Kam remarked sarcastically.

He snarled. "Go to hell, you bitch. This isn't the time 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 comments concerning me aside - a surprisingly accurate accounting of the movements of our group, and even plausible snippets of our conversation." She gestured forward. "On this page, for instance, you mention we were 'discussing killing someone 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 me!" 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 somewhat, and he looked at the ground.

"Hmm," Kam hummed. 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 moment and thought I could lose the thing by destroying the stairs behind me. 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.

"Something hit me from behind," he said, grimacing. "That's all I remember."

"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 disappointment to you that I'm not the caricature of self-aggrandizement you probably like to think of me as," he spoke, his tone bitter and still somehow shaken, "but I'm telling you that isn't what happened to me, and it's-- It's creepy that it's even here. That someone would even write this." He gestured at Seth. "I don't know what the hell is going on with the Mekhian 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 something my dad told me about once, but I don't think it was going through my mind at that moment, or anything. And there might be some 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."

Something is going on.

"Interesting," Kam said, and clicked her tongue. Her eyes flickered downwards. "Aruru, you've been here the whole time. Did you happen to see who came 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 come 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 memories of such an event."

Oh.

"When you say you have no memories," I spoke, a thought coming to me "is that just a turn of phrase, or do you mean actually don't have any memories?"

"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 time 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 time being, and read the last of this little document that is somehow 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 something 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.