The Flower That Bloomed Nowhere

Inner Sanctum Underground | 9:33 AM | ∞ Day

"Ptolema," I said as we floated through the air, "There's something else I've been meaning to ask."

"Yeah?"

"I If I had been Dreaming for literal centuries, why would I have snapped out of it right at the moment I came back to the mural chamber, after all those years?" I frowned quizzically. "Even if the note Neferuaten left for me was about something unrelated, that still feels like too perfect of a coincidence."

It was hard to tell while we were both flying through the air at a respectable speed, but I was pretty sure I saw Ptolema physically stiffen. "Well, uh. Maybe just bein' really strongly reminded of what happened was enough to snap you outta it," she lied. "That kinda thing can happen. Whenever I smell the shortbread like my mom used to make when I was a kid, it's like my whole brain goes back in time, y'know? It's crazy the kinda connections your subconscious can make without you even realizing it."

I squinted quizzically. "Why are you lying about this?"

"Hey, this way!" she declared, raising her voice slightly. "The entrance is just over here!"

The glass enclosing the habitat spirals must have been for some aesthetic or otherwise secondary purpose, because they weren't in any way pressurized - Ptolema flew us over to a circular opening where the street simply protruded into the void like some kind of weird dock, and we went straight in.

We ended up in an area that was sort of reminiscent of the interior of a massive luxury voidship, but far grander and more alien. Something that could be alternatively described as either a street or an extremely wide hall stretched out before us, with businesses and housing built into the central structure on the right and a view of the surreally-colored sky through the glass on our left, the whole thing curving steadily upwards as it extended forward. The architecture defied comparison, but if I had to try I would call it some manner of avant-garde, postmodern fusion of Lluateci and and Rhunbardic styles - a lot of it was blocky, but with little flairs of sculpture that wouldn't be out of place on a cathedral, but I scarcely find a single aspect that wasn't somehow experimental and strange. It was built to a more oversized scale than seemed practical, but that was the least of it.

Much of it was wrought out of the same white stone as the inner tower, but that was about the only aspect of it which could be called uniform. The various storefronts and housefronts experimented with all manner of strange, physics-defying shapes - I saw upside-down gardens, stairs placed at impossible angles, and whole buildings that seemed to fold in on themselves in ways that only made sense for beings for whom physics was a mere suggestion. The street itself was wooden and naturally smooth in a way that gave the impression this had all been built on a branch of some mythological world-tree, and was contoured by silver archways of ambiguous purpose. A shallow canal of sparkling water ran along the edge, the water flowing into the abyss from which we'd just arrived.

It looked like the kind of place you'd see in a dream or a painting, designed more around evoking certain emotions than any sort of logic, though all of it had the same deliberate care that I'd observed in Raurica. Yet it clearly did not exist merely for the purpose of art, as it was immediately clear that it was far more densely populated than any part of Dilmun I'd seen thus far, with more people just hanging around the street than I'd witnessed in all the three settlements I'd visited so far put together.

Though the fashion here continued to be all over the place - a scattershot mix of different cultures alongside outfits that were just plain bizarre - most of them, likely at least 90%, were still conventionally human or only had slightly exotic aspects to their appearance. But among the remaining 10%, I saw several that were even stranger than the panther. At the lower end was stuff like people with additional extremities - cat tails and extra arms, that sort of thing - while at the higher end were ones who were more golem than human, or who had animal heads like the ancient Mekhian pantheon. I wasn't even sure if the most extreme were people at all; one group appeared to be engaged in conversation with something that looked like a floating blob of quicksilver. I tried extremely hard not to stare.

But what was maybe even more uncanny, far more so than it had seemed in the small-town environment of Raurica, was how few people seemed to be going anywhere.

Well-- I should qualify that statement somewhat, since obviously there were people walking up and down the street or between the buildings, and I even saw a few joggers. What I mean, though, is that virtually no one moved with any of the intent that one associated with cities. The standard pace seemed to be a leisurely stroll, and many people were just, like I said, hanging around. Outside of buildings, on benches, and in one case just in the middle of the street, a group of five having apparently set up some kind of picnic. Most of them were chatting among themselves, but a surprising number weren't doing anything in particular at all. Some were reading or listening to music, but I witnessed many who were just, as Fang might have put it, vibing. Often with a vacant look in their eyes.

So even though it had the layout and the population of a city, my gut interpreted the atmosphere as something between a university campus, a convention hall, and a retirement home. An intimate and friendly-feeling place that, despite being very busy, came across as almost eerily peaceful.

"Well, here we are!" Ptolma said, spreading her arms wide with a moderately enthusiastic smile as we took our first few steps down the wooden road.

"Seriously, Ptolema," I said, looking at her with concern. "This isn't the first time you've straight-up avoided explaining something. It's making me feel like the answer is probably something really disturbing."

"So what do you think?" She asked over-enthusiastically. "First impressions?"

I gave a resigned little sigh, deciding to let the topic drop for the time being, then bit my lip as I looked around. "It's... impressive, I guess," I said hesitantly. "Sort of overwhelming."

She dropped her arms, her brow flattening. "That's all? 'Sort of overwhelming?" She scrunched her lips to one side of her face, looking out ahead herself. "I kinda thought this would blow your mind a bit more, since you just got here."

I smiled awkwardly. How could I possibly convey to this Ptolema how much everything here confounded my senses? How unreal it felt on every level?

I shrugged weakly. "I mean, it's architecturally incredible, obviously. I've never seen a structure incorporate so much of the Power in my life." I scratched my head. "But it feels like the part of my brain that can be taken aback by things is all burnt out."

"Huh, I feel like I remember you saying somethin' like that back when we found the bodies of the Order in my loop, too." She blinked, biting her lip.

I nodded distantly. "That's just how my brain works, I suppose. Goes numb when it's overstimulated." I glanced at her. "You don't look all that enthused yourself."

An indecisive hum. "I mean, this place is fine, I guess. You can get pretty much everything under the sun here without going too far from the Valley, so it's way comfier than living in the Keep or some fringe Domain, even if you do have to give up a ton of your prop." She crossed her arms. "Still, it's kinda over-the-top. I guess the thought was that if the Valley was for nostalgic types who really miss the Remaining World, they wanted to go really hard in the other direction for the alternative, but it kinda makes my head hurt. It's hard not to miss the city they had in the last hegemonic Domain."

"'Hegemonic Domain' means the biggest one, right?" I said, recognizing the term from earlier conversations and drawing the obvious conclusion.

"There's kinda some more complicated history to the concept, but yeah, close enough," she said, nodding. "You said you wanted to get a better feel for things around here, right? Wanna walk and talk?"

"Mm," I hummed. "That's probably a good idea."

We set off up (literally, in terms of the curvature) the street. Once we got away from the terminus leading out into the void, the crowd thinned out a little bit, though there were still plenty of people about. I felt increasingly out of place the more we saw, but nobody seemed to be paying us much attention, so I must not have actually come across as anything out of the ordinary.

Most of what we passed seemed to just be housing - apartments, in many cases, towering beyond the glass of the habitat to protrude directly outwards from the central tower - but I tried to discern what I could about the culture from what few 'commercial' enterprises (or, well, stuff that looked commercial; I had no idea how the economy functioned here, obviously) we passed by. To my surprise, almost all of them seemed fairly mundane in premise. I saw several restaurants and cafes, a masseuse parlor, some kind of real estate agent, a clothing store... All stuff that wouldn't have been out of place in the normal world.

I didn't go inside, though, so these were only superficial impressions.

"The last one was the one I came from before, wasn't it? The hegemonic domain, I mean," I asked as we walked. "The one everyone calls the 'Magilum'. I think someone mentioned that at the guardhouse, too."

She nodded, along with a small wince. "Yep. That's right."

"How did it go from that to... whatever's going on there now?" I asked curiously.

"Phew, that's a story," she said, puffing out air for emphasis. "I don't know if I can sum it up properly. Still kinda a sore spot for a lotta people, too."

"Give me the cliff notes version, I suppose?"

She considered it for a moment before starting. "So, for a long time before the Magilum got created, there wasn't a hegemonic Domain at all," she explained. "There was a long time where these two big ones were kinda neck-and-neck - this was a really long time ago, mind you, like so long ago the details are kinda fuzzy - and it ended with this huge mess where half the people in the world were basically at war with the other. Like, we're talkin' sabotage and proxy battles in the fringe Domains, both sides going all out to try and put their Domain on top. In the end, both of them fell apart, and we basically had nothing but fringe places for thousands of years straight. 'cept for the Keep, I think the biggest ones left were only about 50,000 people. Total chaos."

I frowned slightly. Ptolema's tone made it sound dreadful, but I had a feeling that even a dystopic version of this reality would still be borderline paradisaical compared to the real world.

"During that time, a lot of Domain concepts that wouldn't normally attract that many people managed to get popular, including somethin' people called 'mortal forays'," she continued. "You can probably figure it out just from the name, but the idea was that the Domain would have a special rule where you weren't allowed to reset your body until it died naturally, and you'd kinda treat each reset as, like, it's own life, basically. Commit to new relationships, a new 'childhood', learning new skills..."

"So, like, roleplaying as a normal person?" I commented.

"Yeah! 'Roleplay' is the word a lot of people used back then, too," she affirmed, nodding. "And it was definitely like that at first-- It wasn't taken 100% seriously, more as sorta a lifestyle guideline, I guess." Her smile became a little flatter and sardonic. "You might not have figured, but people here can have a tough time knowing what to do with themselves sometimes, y'know?"

"I, uh, can only imagine." A man with a bull's head passed us by - again, I tried desperately not to stare - and I caught a few words of a conversation about some kind of game from two brightly-haired girls chatting while leaning against the glass.

"But as things went on, people got more and more serious about the whole thing," she continued. "Some started makin' whole communities based around specific themes where you weren't allowed to break character, like this one pretty big one where everyone was pretending to be soldiers in the Tricenturial War. That was actually pretty fun, even if it was kinda insensitive..." She scratched the side of her cheek. "Anyway, eventually it became popular to even go as far as suppressing your own memory so you could really live an ordinary life from start to finish. Well, at least as best as you can here."

I half-rose a finger to my mouth, almost interjecting with a remark about how extreme that sounded-- Willing choosing to subject oneself to the existential anxiety and all-encompassing fear of a normal lifespan, even only in an illusory fashion, sounded awful. All of the objectively bad parts of death without the circumstantially good part, which is to say not having to exist any more.

...but then I thought about it for a moment, and I considered that I only really had this attitude because I'd spent the last few days angsting about my own impending death. To people who truly existed forever, the limitation could well be novel, and provide context and a sense of weight that would otherwise be all-too-absent from their lives, like a sort of... immortal poverty tourism. The grass often appears greener on the other side, even when an objective viewer might say that it looks pretty fucking brown.

When I considered it that way, there was something almost melancholic about the concept.

"Once things had got to that point, a bunch of the 'movement' - or, uh, whatever the heck you'd call it - had got together with the idea of starting a really big mortal foray Domain, designed to appeal to the most people as possible." She gestured outwardly, as if to say 'like these ones!' "Y'know, so they would have enough matter to create stuff that was more, uh... What's the word I'm lookin' for, here? Like where you want people to be able to get really into something."

"Immersive?" I suggested.

"Mm, yeah! Immersive." She nodded several times. "The plan was that they'd have a premise that could incorporate multiple types of people - ones who wanted to go whole hog on mortal forays, ones who were into the idea but didn't wanna wipe their memories, and people who weren't into it at all but who didn't mind keeping a secret. The idea they came up with was that it'd be a colony ship."

"A colony ship," I repeated. "As in, like the ones in the Imperial Era?"

Claimed numbness aside, hearing this conceptually insane story while walking through this surreal environment filled with monster people was starting to break something in my brain again. I felt less and less like I was physically here and more like I was watching a drama.

Why were so many people animals or other weird stuff, anyway? Reading between the lines, people's use of the Power here was enough to alter their form to whatever they desired, but I had to imagine people like Zeno were one in a million. Being beautiful was one thing, but I found it hard to believe that 1 in every 20-odd people had a deep desire to turn themselves into some kind of strange creature.

Says the person who literally stole her childhood friend's body, an intrusive thought offered.

Ugh, don't say it so explicitly, I said to myself. It makes me uncomfortable.

"Sorta, but more advanced," she explained. "The backstory was that it was an inter-dimensional ship that escaped the Remaining World, looking for a new habitable plane or something. The details all seemed kinda far-fetched to me, but I guess somebody must have put some thought into it, since there was a whole wing of scholars doing mortal forays who bought it." She smiled wistfully. "It was supposed to combine an explanation for the limited space with an excuse to have a really high technology level - so life could still be comfy for people if they wanted - as well as giving everybody a big purpose to work towards together."

"Was there an actual purpose, though?" I asked. "Like, where the ship would actually get there and the story would be finished?"

"I think that's how it was gonna be originally," she said. "...but it ended up being really, really popular. Way more than anyone ever expected." Her eyes turned wistful. "There was sorta a magic to it, I guess, once enough people joined. Because there were so many there, so many livin' real lives with real consequences, the culture felt like it was really alive, y'know? It's hard to put into words, but there was a sorta dynamism to everythin' that happened."

"I see," I said, biting my lip. "Why 'Magilum', though?"

"Huh?"

"The name, I mean," I clarified. "I've sort of been wondering."

"Ohh." She wrinkled her brow. "I think it's the name of a ship from mythology? Somebody explained it to me at some point, but it kinda washed over me."

I blinked. "I thought you said you had a photographic memory now."

"Well, yeah," she said. "But only if I'm payin' attention, y'know?" She gave an innocent, goofy smile.

I hummed furtively. What a nostalgic feeling. Now I'm wondering if this Ptolema is really like this, or if she's just doing a bit. "So, what happened in the end? How did it all go wrong?"

"Well, the Domain got super big in the end. Like, even bigger than the Crossroads-- There's probably about 900,000 people living here if you don't count Tertiaries, and I think the number there was closer to 1.2 million." She glanced downward. "Because the premise on the Domain relied on people keepin' secrets, it became harder and harder to manage, especially as it got more and more popular to blank your memories and fully immerse yourself. The guys in charge had to put more and more restrictions on people who weren't into mortal forays, and they started gettin' really mad about it."

"I'm guessing the secret got out."

"Yup," she nodded. "I don't actually know the nitty-gritty of what happened, 'cause around that time I was taking a break to work in the Keep. But somehow, all the people who thought it was real learned the truth, and it all turned into a total mess. Think like 600,000 people having an existential crisis at once. I heard there was even some cannibalism!" She spoke the last sentence like it was a quaint piece of scandalous trivia, like someone had spiked the juice at a party.

"That... certainly sounds like something," I said. I subtly maneuvered us closer to the glass shielding, so I could stare out of it and feel a little less hyperstimulated. Without the visuals, the sound of ambient conversation was enough to make this feel like any other urban environment. I was even starting to find the eternal sunset sky sort of soothing.

"Anyway, to make a long story short, the hardcore mortal forayers - most of them never getting their old memories back, since they hadn't reset - ended up taking over the Domain, then kicked everybody else and their prop out. Then they apparently got into a big purity fight about what they wanted to do with the place, with some of 'em wanting to go back to the way things were, while others started to think of anything advanced as weird and scary," she explained. "They wanted to live like humans were 'supposed to' instead of... well, like this, and kinda came to associate everything about immortality with lies and stuff being meaningless. And I guess the ones who took that to its logical conclusion ended up in charge just from havin' the most grit."

"So that's why it looks like a ringworld with pieces missing," I belatedly realized. "I was thinking of the Lluateci, but colony ships in the old world would have to use centrifugal force, too. They must have just stripped out the trimmings to make it look sort of like a mundane landscape, and then the holes would be from people who left with their prop..."

Ptolema shrugged. "You'd know better than me. I never got a chance to go back and see what it looks like nowadays." She played with a strand of her hair, her eyes growing a little tired. "Anyway, they did another purge of anybody who wasn't a true believer, and that was that. A lotta people came together after the fact to build the Crossroads, which I guess is kinda the polar opposite of the Magilum."

"You mean, insofar as it's just, well, people doing whatever they want?" I caught another very strange-looking individual in the corner of my eye, wrapped in a deep cloak with light emanating from within. God, half of them look like they could be monsters in an echo game.

"Yeah, more or less," Ptolema replied. "...well, there's some more complicated history to this place too, but that's another story." She inclined her head. "You'll wanna be sorta careful bringing this stuff up, though, or talkin' about the history of things here in general. A lotta people can be weirdly sensitive about it. Hard to get a clean slate when you don't die, y'know?"

I nodded, falling silent for a few moments.

Processing Ptolema's story, it provoked a mixed response in me. On the one hand, it was kind of fascinating to hear the kind of inclinations and trends that a society of immortals would have, especially one which was truly post-scarcity, not just theoretically so in the manner of the Remaining World. Almost all human endeavor was oriented around the fear of death. People largely sought out power and wealth to ensure their own security, made decisions based around their finite lives. Even most art was obsessed with the topic. I felt like I was only starting to scratch the surface of what would emerge in the absence of that pressure.

I should have asked about what Kamrusepa was doing here earlier when we'd been on the topic of our classmates. I'd have to do that later, when I could muster my nerve properly.

On the other hand, though, there was something about the scenario Ptolema was describing that - even though it involved a large amount of people, on a timescale I'd probably find unimaginable - that sounded petty, compared to real world events. Like, when you boiled the story down, a bunch of people playing pretend had just got upset that their delusion was broken, then booted a bunch of other people from their community. No one actually lost anything. Yet Ptolema was making it sound like generational trauma.

It reminded me of something. But I couldn't put my finger on it yet.

"So..." I eventually resumed. "What exactly do people do here? Or, well, what's popular? I still don't feel like I have much sense of the local... customs." A man with no head at all brushed by me, and I bit my lip sharply.

Ptolema laughed. "You'd be better off asking what people don't do! I moved here from the Keep a good few hundred years ago now, and some of the stuff I see folks gettin' up to for fun still makes my head spin." She looked to me and leaned in, lowering her voice a little bit. "Between you and me, Su, I feel like this whole place might be kinda a bad idea. Like I was saying, without anybody dying, people need some kinda structure to tell 'em what to do every day. Without that, they go kinda bonkers."

I frowned in puzzlement. "But you live here."

"Only 'cause all the friends I had left after that big falling out I mentioned do," she claimed reticently. "And it's not quite so bad in the Valley. People still do regular jobs there. Make stuff. Try to capture what it was like livin' in the real world. But up here..." She shook her head disapprovingly. "I don't even know where to start."

I glanced around. "It seems like people do a lot of interesting things with their, uh, morphological freedom."

She snorted. "The stuff on display here is nothing, Su." She tapped her head. "The thing about this world that you gotta think about compared to what you remember is that there's so much time that everything gets taken to its logical conclusion, y'know? And like, people don't got any reason to worry about their bodies or pain or whether they're safe or not at all. If you let it, it changes the whole way you think about being... well, just being generally."

"You mean, the lack of permanency makes people think of their bodies as less them, and more just a thing they control?" I ventured. "Like an interface?"

"That's more technical than I would have put it, but basically, yeah," she said with a nod. "Like, if there's some physical thing you can imagine, then chances are, there are people doing it."

I blinked. There were a lot of things I could think of.

"Can you give me an example?" I asked. "Maybe something popular?"

She considered this for a moment, then pointed upwards out the glass. "Look out there. You see that floating ring?"

I squinted, removing my glasses. I could, indeed, see a grey-colored ring very, very far in the distance.

"Yeah," I confirmed. "I see it."

"That's the viewing arena for a sport they have here called Kataff," she explained.

"Oh!" I spoke, my eyes widening with recognition. "That was in one of the books back at guardhouse, actually."

She frowned. "You already know about it?"

"Well, no," I clarified. "I just saw the name, but not much else..." I looked at her, curious." What is it?"

"Okay, so," she began. "You start with two teams of ten. The game is played out in the void in a 1000-by-1000 kilometer 3D arena, with only one shared goal in the center, and the players capped at a speed of 20 times the speed of sound." She stopped our walk for a moment, focusing on me and gesticulating with her hands as she explained. "Every players gotta hold their right arm out at a 90 degree angle - like this - and the basic idea is that, within these 10 minute segments they call 'quarrels', your team's gotta use nothin' but their arms and sheer speed to cut the heads off as many of the other team as possible and dump them in the goal. If you get 'decapped', you're out as long as your head is in play, but if one of your teammates gets it back - that's called a 'recap' - and holds it for 30 seconds, it's off the field and you're tagged back in. You can also come back if they manage to score, but only to run interference. You can't score if you're headless unless you're playing dullahan rules." She breathed in sharply. "Whoever scores the most in the quarrel gets the point. Games are usually 15 quarrels."

I stared at her for a moment, at a loss for words.

"...is it... called 'kataff' because you 'kat aff' heads, then...?" I eventually asked, this being somehow the only question which came to mind.

"No, it's Turagic." (From Turaggoth, on the Orphaned Continent.)

"Oh." I blinked. "What does it mean?"

"To decapitate somebody, I think," she explained.

I looked into the middle distance.

"But yeah, that's just an example that a lotta people are into," Ptolema went on, resuming her walk. "The more niche stuff can be way more out there. And that's just in the Crossroads."

I almost asked for more specifics, then bit my tongue, deciding against it. I had enough of a perverted imagination that having this conversation with Ptolema of all people felt somewhat precarious already.

"Anyway!" Ptolema said, smiling brightly. "Obviously there's plenty of normal stuff too, so don't worry about that right now. You wanna go or see any kind of thing in particular, now that we're here? Or if it's a little much, we could grab something to eat real quick, then go back to the Valley if you're feelin' overwhelmed." The smile grew more hesitant. "I, uh, didn't wanna make your day any more complicated, but there are probably gonna be people who come askin' around for you eventually, since the guy at the guardhouse never actually processed you. So we'll probably need to deal with that sooner or later."

"N-No, I don't mind looking around a little more. Though I don't feel like my understanding of this place is good enough to suggest anything in particular." I furrowed my brow. "Actually, I'd sort of still like an answer to what I asked earlier--"

"Oh, I've got an idea!" Ptolema declared forcefully. "There's a shop I go to all the time just around the corner-- I know the owner. Let's go visit! It'll give you a better idea of the kinda stuff people do around here."

I made a flat expression as Ptolema grabbed my hand and dragged me back to the other side of the street.

We skirted the bustle of the crowds and, a few more buildings down, came to it. By the standards of the buildings here, it was pretty humble and ordinary - just a straightforward white stone facade with a black silk overhang around the door, fenced in by larger structures to the point that it was almost like it was being physically squished. The sign, displayed fairly subtly on a chrome plaque, read 'Nora's Text Procurements.'

But once inside, it became quickly clear that it was some sort of book shop. The air had that musty parchment smell I was all-too-familiar with, the tall wooden shelves stuffed with tomes loomed on both sides on the approach to the front desk. The whole place was kind of cramped and aesthetically disorganized, and most of the furniture was old wood, giving it that cozy charm one often got from small and independent places.

The selection, though - as I'd come to expect from this place - was more than a little strange, at least from what I could tell from the spines. It wasn't just modern books, or even just books at all. I saw tomes that looked to have been bound in extremely archaic ways - thick string, wax - ones in strange languages I barely recognized or outright didn't, and some that appeared to just be collections of paper places in a folder.

The genre labeling on the shelves were strange too. It wasn't stuff like 'mystery' or 'thriller', but historical periods, 'private letters', 'journals', and 'unreleased drafts'.

Wait a minute, I thought. Is this a book store for stalkers?

Before I could ponder this question in much depth, we'd approached the counter - although it looked more like a coffee table that someone had draped an expensive-looking grey shawl over - and, presumably, the owner. She was a pale woman - a mix of Saoic and Inotian, maybe? - with long and wispy white-blonde hair that stuck up in a couple cowlicks in the middle of her scalp, and dark red eyes that definitely didn't look natural. Behind her was an assemblage of wall scrolls, again in all sorts of different languages, and a brown-black cat that seemed to be grooming itself on the floor.

"Welcome to-- Oh, it's you, Ema," she said, looking up from the blank-covered book she was presently reading upon our arrival.

"Afternoon, Nora!" Ptolema said cheerfully, raising the hand wasn't occupied with dragging me in here.

"Are you here for your order?" the woman asked, sounding tired. "Sorry, I haven't had a chance to go looking for it yet, so it's probably not gonna be done 'till for another couple weeks. I'm still stuck helping out that sinophile guy with his stupid shit, and I've been dealing with a lot of friend drama, so I've been kinda exhausted."

"Nah, I wasn't expecting it today," Ptolema told her, wearing a relaxed smile. "I'm just showin' a friend around the City, and we happened to pass by, so I figured I'd introduce you." She thrust me forward with the back of her palm, like she was my mom and showing me off to one of her friends. "Nora, this is Utsushikome. Utsushikome, Nora."

"Uh, hi," I said, holding up a hand awkwardly.

"Hey," she said, doing the same, but with a more skeptical expression. "You've seriously never been to the City before? Immigrants are one thing, but I didn't think there were any people left who hadn't at least visited." She narrowed her eyes. "This isn't like a cutesy bit or something, is it?"

"Uh, no, I haven't--"

"Oh, it's way crazier than her just not havin' been to the City!" Ptolema cut in. "When I say she's a friend, I mean a friend from the Reflection. She's a dreamer! Like, a long-term one! She doesn't remember anything." She grinned enthusiastically. "The Waywatch dumped her on my doorstep this morning after they found her wanderin' around the Manse! I even had to explain to her what a 'Domain' and a 'Primary' was!"

The woman frowned incredulously. "No shit?" She gave me a hard look. "Is that true?"

Something about this lady was a little intense, and I found myself sweating a bit as she stared me down. "...uh, yeah, more or less." I glanced at Ptolema. "I think I'd figured out what a Domain was before you spelled it out, though."

"Huh." Nora leaned back in her chair, looking me up and down with an almost stunned expression. "Well, you sound like you're telling the truth. And I guess you'd have to be pretty committed to the bit if Ema remembers you from the real world, but here."

"Su's a terrible liar anyway," Ptolema said mirthfully. "Always has been."

"I'm not a terrible liar," I said defensively.

Nora looked at me for another few moments analytically. "Still in your default clothes and everything, too." She puffed a little air through her nose. "Well, crap. Welcome to purgatory, I guess."

Ptolema frowned a bit. "Hey, don't call it that! I'm still tryin' to ease her into things around here." She looked at me with concern. "Don't listen to her, Su. Nora's just got a negative way of thinking about stuff."

"I mean, it is purgatory," Nora insisted, sitting back up again now that she'd apparently accepted the fact that I existed. "No matter how people try to frame it, it's a world where we can't ever die, attain eternal peace within the essence of God's love or whatever, or otherwise change enough to really cease to exist. That's purgatory, definitionally. An afterlife that's neither heaven nor hell."

"I mean, she's sort of right, Ptolema," I commented. "I didn't want to say it so bluntly, but this place does seem sort of... purgatorial."

"Ugh, no!" She looked at Nora angrily. "You've already corrupted her! Now she's gonna get depressed!"

"Seems more like she corrupted herself," she said, setting her book aside. "That's kinda the curse of being bad at magical thinking in a place like this." She looked up at me. "Seriously, though, I probably shouldn't be flippant. If you really just came to your senses today with nothing but the memories of your old life, I can't imagine what's going through your head right now, Utsus... sorry, what was your name again?"

"Utsushikome," I told her. "Of Fusai."

"Eleanora of Halkysses," she said, sticking out a hand casually, a small smile forming on her tired face. "Pleasure to make your acquaintance."

So she's a Primary too, then. I took it, and we shook. "Likewise."

"You're from Oreskios, right?" she asked, as she withdrew. "I recognize your accent."

"That's right," I said, slightly impressed that she made the deduction. Foreigners couldn't usually tell the influence apart from regular Kutuyan.

"I'm from Illkyrios," she told me, and smirked. "Guess we have the privilege of being from the same colonial family."

I laughed nervously. "That's, uh, one way to put it." Ptolema glanced between us with a brightening smile, seeming happy that we were getting along.

"So, Utsushikome," she began casually. "What do you think of your freshly-rediscovered state of being?"

I thought about the question for a few moments, holding my hands together at my waist. "I'm, uh, not really sure yet," I told her honestly. "I don't think I've fully managed to internalize it. Right now it's sort of a mix between relief and existential horror, I suppose?"

She pursed her lips in a sort of 'fair enough' expression, nodding a couple of times. "Sounds about right." She sighed. "Let's narrow it down a little, then. What do you think of the City?"

I glanced back towards the window. "It's... interesting," I said, then hesitated for a moment. "It's sort of disorienting, but it seems like there's a lot to do, so there's that. I was sort of worried everything would be too spread out when Ptolema explained the population numbers here. And it certainly seems, uh, cosmopolitan."

"Still getting used to all the catgirls, huh?" She asked slyly.

I bit my lip. "I met a man who'd transformed himself into a talking panther at the guardhouse, but I'm not sure I've actually seen any catgirls yet."

"You must have been born under a lucky star," she said dryly. "Usually you can't go ten feet around in this fucking Domain without tripping over one or two of them." She sighed. "If only there were more regular ones around. I've got a couple more upstairs, but Turd here is the only one brave enough to wander around and outside the shop."

I blinked. "Your cat's name is 'Turd'?"

"Yeah," she said. "What of it? He's a sweetheart."

I bit my lip, and she chuckled at me softly.

"So, uh, what exactly do you sell here?" I asked. "The books here seem... strange."

Nora raised an eyebrow, turning to my side. "You didn't even tell her that before you dragged her in here, Ema?"

"Er, nope," she said cautiously. "Like I said, the idea just kinda came to me when we were passing by."

"Mmm," Nora said skeptically, then turned back to me. "To be honest, I feel like there's more important things you should be learning right now than how my business works, but since you asked... I guess to put it in terms you'd understand, I'm a rare text hunter," she explained. "People request certain books, letters, or documents from the real world that they know of but can't find, physical or computerized, and I go into observer-mode and make a copy for them."

"Oh," I said. "That's..."

I trailed off, my mind processing the implications of this. Half of it was fitting this into the picture of what I already knew about this world. It made sense - obviously there would be no business model for normal books from the real world - or the Reflection, or whatever - because anyone could just visit a shop at the right point in time and make a copy. Hell, you could apparently copy people, so objects were likely a matter of triviality. The only things that would have a market would be freshly written stuff from this world, or... something like this, where the labor was in the act of finding. It was an interesting niche, one that made sense within the logic of this reality that I'd be told so far.

But the other half of it was saying oh, so it is a book store for stalkers, then.

I mean, it was logical, wasn't it? If observing the Remaining and old world was such a popular pastime here that there was a bunch of specific terminology for it, then obviously prying into the lives of people there was considered completely socially acceptable. And if it was fine to do it directly, why not indirectly? Why not hire someone to go hunt down a copy of your old favorite historical celebrity's diary, or your childhood crush's--

My face flushed.

"That's what?" Nora prompted me.

"Oh, uh, just thinking about the idea a little," I said, my face flushing. "Aren't there, uh... ethical concerns around this sort of thing? Going through people's private stuff and just... selling it? When they haven't really consented?"

"...well, I don't actually sell it," she corrected, a tinge of embarrassment on her cheeks. "There's not really an economy here. I get a few benefits for running a verified service for the Domain, but I mostly just do it for fun."

"Going through people's private stuff for fun, then." The words came out more judgemental than I meant, and my face flushed even further. Ptolema looked at me worriedly.

Nora's expression grew a little more serious. "I get where you're coming from, obviously. I mean... I can't remember at this point, but I'm sure I felt the same way whenever I first got here a billion years ago or whatever." Her cat finished licking itself and wandered over to her, and she glanced down and idly petted him on the head. "But you're going to have to understand that, with the whole of history laid out in front of us but unable to be interacted with in any way, it's hard to still think of it as... well, as a real place, and not just as the universe's biggest reality show."

I frowned in confusion, not recognizing the term. "Reality show...?"

"Uh, like a social drama, I mean," she clarified. "Obviously I don't mean that literally. Like, the fact that I call it the real world instead of the Reflection should make it clear where my interpretation lies in terms of the metaphysics." The cat scuttered off, and she looked back up at me. "But it's hard to feel like it matters whether we look or not. We're somewhere so completely apart from those lives."

I hesitated for a moment, getting stuck in my own head again.

Nora rubbed her brow. "Mm, shit. Sorry, I shouldn't be trying to lecture somebody in your position like this." She laughed sardonically. "You're right. It is a creepy job. And you're within your rights to make that judgement, if it feels like you came right here from April 1409 yesterday."

"1608, actually," I corrected her, a certain bleakness in my tone. "Apparently I was doing something called 'autospective dreaming' and was watching my own life and thoughts play out for 200 years."

Her eyes widened a bit. "Oh, shit," she blurted out. "You're from right before the world got blown up!"

I blinked, and Ptolema's eyes widened too, her whole body tensing so sharply it was like she'd been struck by lightning. She looked at me sharply, then at Nora.

"Wait," Nora said anxiously, looking between us. "You haven't told her?"