The Simulacrum
~Chapter 164~ Part 3

"Seriously, what's wrong with me?"

"Come on, Leo. Don't be so hard on yourself," Elly said while trying to calm me down by gently rubbing my back, but it only helped a little.

"I'm serious. If this keeps going on, I swear to god I'll strangle myself one of these days!"

"Self-harm is bad!" she declared, and this time she hit my back, so I wisely shut up and only continued to gripe in my head.

Luckily enough, Melinda chose this moment to come in, pushing a fancy service trolley.

"Master Leonard, please don't make milady angry."

"I'm not angry, just…" the princess started, but then she suddenly jumped off her bed and exclaimed, "Cookies! You're the best!"

"You're welcome, milady, but only eat in moderation. It's late."

"I know, I know," my girlfriend grinned and picked up a fresh pastry from the tray.

Meanwhile, I remained sitting on the edge of the bed. The chamber-maid was right; it was pretty late already, and normally I wouldn't have bothered Elly at this hour, but a long chain of events led me to this point and I couldn't do much about it.

Let's rewind the clock by about an hour or so. After I met with Fidèle Shamash, I immediately took a trip to the Abyss to try to find future-me, or failing that, to find out more about my newly spreading reputation amongst the Abyssals. Needless to say, the first half of that plan was entirely fruitless, though it made sense in retrospect. Future-me, by definition, knew exactly where I would be looking for him in the present, so he just had to make sure he wasn't there, and there was no way to outmanoeuvre him, because you can't play mind games with yourself. It was one of those 'by definition' things, so as much as it annoyed me to do so, I gave up on seeking him out and moved on to the second half of the plan.

Except that bit turned out to be just as aggravating, since the first place I hit up while looking for intel was the pub in the main shopping street of Eanna (which was the name of the town surrounding Castle Inanna, by the way). It was already late, so there were fewer patrons, yet the ones present not only immediately recognised me, but the bartender just straight up told me that my 'friend', Antonio, already cleared my tab and gave me a note he left behind.

I know this is going to be absolutely, incredibly, in-con-ceivably shocking, but said note was bloody useless as well! It just told me to relax and talk to Elly! The first half was meaningless, because who had time to do that, and the second half was pointless, because why wouldn't I want to talk to my girlfriend? Seriously now, was I trying to piss myself off on purpose? Was I enacting some kind of psycho-social experiment on myself? Was my goal to make me strangle myself and cause a time paradox?

…

No, wait. It would only cause one of those if future-me strangled me, not the other way around. My bad, but my point still stands.

Putting my gripes with my future version aside, I still managed to get some info out of the locals. I had to order and drink half a glass of cheap wine to get them in the mood (they drank the rest of the bottle), and that just reinforced my earlier opinion on alcoholic drinks just not being for me. More importantly, they confirmed what the head of House Shamash told me.

Nobody knew the origins of the rumours, yet they were ubiquitous even in the heart of Crowy's seat of power. He allegedly tried to stem them once, owing to the fact that he vocally hated my guts (meaning the sentiment was mutual), but it only drew more ears to the existence of such rumours, so it backfired on him. Wasn't there a name for when that happened? The Streisand Effect, was it?

So yeah, I was the beneficiary (or victim, depending on the point of view) of that effect, and now most of the Abyss was aware of the deeds of the 'Peacemaker'. Because I obviously needed more titles. The worst part was that I could only blame myself for this one, and I was planning to do just that as soon as I could meet him again. With optional strangling in tow, depending on his reasoning.

I mean, I had some ideas. Based on the combination of the notebook's clues and what we discussed with future-me before, our main cast (read: Josh and his original entourage) had to come down to the Abyss at one point or another. That required some groundwork, and giving Leonard S. Dunning an inflated reputation would invariably help them when mounting some kind of rescue mission or whatever.

"Master Leonard?"

My extended musings were interrupted when Melinda addressed me from the door.

"Yes?"

"Please do not keep Milady up for too long. It's a weekday, and both of you will have school tomorrow."

"I know, I know."

She gave me a long, deadpan stare, and then she curtsied and left Elly's room, leaving the food trolley behind.

"Here, try some," my princess insisted the moment she returned to my side and placed the tray of chocolate chip cookies onto the bed next to me.

"Maybe later. I'm not hungry."

Despite my polite refusal, she kept insisting.

"Come on, just one! Melinda made them for us, you know?"

"I do, but…" She kept staring at me intently, so I surrendered and picked up a cookie. It was crumbly, sweet, and still lukewarm. I wasn't lying when I said I wasn't hungry, yet I still finished it in just a few quick bites. "It was good. Happy?"

"Not sure yet, give me a second…"

I wasn't sure what she meant at first, but then she suddenly leaned in and kissed me on the mouth. Not only that, but it was an unusually aggressive one, doing the tongue-stuff and all, and when we finally parted, she let out a satisfied him paired with a goofy grin.

"Much better!"

"Compared to what?" I blurted out, and she pointed at my face.

"Compared to when you came home! Your mouth tasted weird."

Oh. She was probably still tasting the wine I had then. I had no experience with the beverage, so I had no idea if the taste was objectively weird or not, but it must've been uncanny for her either way.

"And now I taste like chocolate chip cookies."

"Yes. And it's much better," she echoed herself and sat down at the other side of the tray and picked up another pastry. "Where were we before Melinda interrupted us?" she mused, then her brows descended into a frown and she used her cookie to point at me. "Right! No self-strangling! It's weird!"

"I got it, I got it. It was just a figure of speech."

"Good." Thus placated, my girlfriend bit her cookie in half and fell silent for a couple of long seconds. "Going back on what we talked about before that, I think you don't need to tell Judy about this Fidèle woman. Or at least you shouldn't talk about how pretty she is."

"But it's kind of an important data point," I emphasized with a frown of my own. "You know that physical attractiveness is directly tied to narrative importance in the Simulacrum. Or at the very least it's a clear and recognizable pattern."

"Yes, true, but I don't think that you should be the one to tell her about it," she argued back. "Let me tell her. That way, she won't be as stressed about it. She still takes the anti-harem countermeasures seriously, you know?"

"A fair point," I granted her, remembering that she was even concerned about Savir because she was (according to her, at least) a MILF, followed by a shallow sigh. "I have a feeling we'll have a lot of things to worry about in the near future anyway, so let's not unnecessarily add to her mental workload."

"Will we?"

Elly's innocent-sounding question made me raise a brow.

"Of course. We'll have to cobble together a finale with future-me, but before that, we'll have to resolve Ammy's subplot, and Lord Ambrose already started that one, so I have a feeling that it's going to be one thing after another for a while."

"Ah, that reminds me!" She suddenly jumped to her feet out of the blue and turned on her heel to point a finger at me. "Don't go anywhere! I'll be right back!"

"What are you…?"

I didn't have the chance to finish the question, because she stormed out of her room without looking back. That was odd, but Elly was kind of impulsive like that, so I was used to it. More importantly, since I was reminded of him, I quickly cast a Far Glance in Lord Ambrose's direction, but despite my expectations, he wasn't up to anything yet. Ottawa was about five hours behind us in terms of time zones, but by the looks of it, it hadn't been long since his plane landed and he was busy settling down in some kind of hotel room.

To be honest, I was kind of expecting that he'd try to immediately kick down the local School's doors, but maybe he was just tired after the flight. Curiously enough, the environment around him looked… how should I put this? Plain? Not in terms of décor (in fact, his hotel room was rather fancy), but in general appearance. The colours were oddly muted and the lighting felt flat, as if I was looking at a badly colour-corrected footage of an old sitcom filmed on a cheap sound stage.

I was just about to move my point of view around a bit more and try to take a look outside when my attention was drawn back to Elly's room.

"Leo! Help!"

I reflexively jumped to my feet, thinking that it was an emergency, but my girlfriend was just stuck in the doorway while trying to carry in some kind of large, boxy machine with a wooden body.

"What's that?"

"A record player," she answered without a hint of hesitation, and once I grabbed hold of a corner of it, we managed to turn it sideways and bring it into the room.

"Okay, I bite: Why do you have an old-school record player?" She was giving me an odd look, and considering that she was the heiress of a record label, it was definitely a silly question to ask. "Wait, let me rephrase that: what do you need with this right now?"

"You'll see!" she declared with a confident smirk but didn't elaborate, and even after we placed the bulky machine onto her desk, she only asked, "Were you Far Seeing?"

"What gave you that idea?"

"You had your eyes closed," she responded in a tone that was only missing a dismissive 'Duh?', but she had a point.

"I just checked on Ambrose," I explained as I watched her set up the record player. "He's yet to do anything."

"Is that surprising?" she asked without looking up. I think she was looking for an electric outlet behind her desk. "He only left the island today."

"Yes, but with his personality, I expected that there would be something happening around him by this point."

My princess shook her head.

"You're just too used to cutting through red tape, but things like securing an audience with an arch-mage usually take time."

"If you say so," I muttered, and seeing that she had nothing to add to that, I let my curiosity get the better of me. "Let's just ignore him. Can you tell me what this is about?"

She didn't respond right away. First, she propped up the lid covering the turning mechanism at the top of the machine, and only when she was sure that it was working did she face me with one of those slightly smug yet endlessly adorable smirks of hers.

"Do you remember what we talked about this morning?"

"… You have to be a bit more precise."

"After the squirrel," she clarified, and while that did jog my memory, she also immediately followed it up with, "I had this idea, you know? If being the Narrative means that things get more dramatic and interesting whenever you focus on them, then could we turn that around?"

"How do you 'turn around' something like that?"

I was genuinely stumped by both her choice of words and her enthusiasm, and she tapped on the record player in response.

"We'll hypnotize you!"

"… Excuse me?"

"Erm… actually, it's a bit more involved than that, but…" She pulled out one of her drawers and, after rummaging around a bit, produced an old-timed black vinyl record and placed it onto the turntable. "This is an ambient soundtrack. We'll use it to help you relax, and then we'll try some self-suggestion techniques!"

"Okay, but that still doesn't explain why it had to be a gramophone record," I blurted out, though to be fair, this was probably the least weird part of this whole situation.

"It's because they have a more tactile and complex soundscape, so it should help you calm down and relax!"

Before I could even question whether my girlfriend was a vinyl record snob, the first track started playing and I finally got an explanation for why this machine was so big: it had its speakers built into the main body, and the sound coming out of them was a slow instrumental song that sounded like it was underscored by the waves of the ocean.

"Come on, let's give it a try!"

Elly grabbed my hand and pulled me over to the bed. She put the half-empty cookie tray onto her nightstand, then guided me to lie down and she sat cross-legged at my head. I played along, but to be honest, I had no idea where this was going.

"Rest your head here, and… Okay, so I've read this in a book, and I never tried it before, but it should go something like this." She put her hand on my forehead. "Close your eyes, and listen to the music."

I did as I was told, and the princess continued to rub my head.

"Don't use Far Sight, okay? Just relax, and empty your mind."

"Is this like meditation?" I asked without opening my eyes, and I had a feeling that she reflexively nodded.

"Kind of. The book said it's more like self-hypnosis, or self-suggestion." Her hand stopped, so I opened one eye. She poked my forehead and I closed it again. "Pay attention. The idea is to make you not think and worry about any developments, just like how you purposefully avoided the Spring Tournament of the Draconic Federation. If we're right, then it proceeded smoothly and nothing interesting happened during it because you actively put it out of your mind, which means that the same could be applied elsewhere. You know? Like those other sub-plot things you and Judy always talk about."

"I get the theory, but how am I supposed to do that?"

"It's simple! Or… maybe not that simple, but…" I could feel Elly fidget for a while, but then she put her hand on my face to cover my eyes and resolutely declared, "It's all about your state of mind! Let's get you relaxed first!"

That was easier said than done. I mean, I was lying on my girlfriend's bed, with her crossed legs under my head and her hand on my eyes. My sex drive might've been lower than usual, but this kind of situation was still a bit distracting, no small part thanks to all the eighteen-plus rated memories it evoked. Yet, that was just the tip of the iceberg.

Trying to ignore my troubles and worries was kind of like playing The Game. The one where you lost if you thought about The Game. It was impossible not to think about all the plot-malarkey related to future-me and Ammy and Ambrose and Josh and so on, because I needed to think about them in order to know what not to think about, and…

"No, no, no! You're doing it wrong!" Elly interrupted me by poking my chin with her free hand.

"How can you tell?"

"Of course I can! I can read your expressions like an open book, you know? Just how long do you think we've been dating at this point?" I reflexively wanted to point out that it's been a little over half a year, which actually wasn't that much in the grand scheme of things, but I felt that doing so would've been counter-productive. "Let's try to move on to the next step, and come back to the relaxing part later. You need to come up with a mantra."

"A what now? This is getting more complicated."

"No. I mean, a little, but that's not important." Elly cupped both of my cheeks in her hands and took a deep breath. "The first step is to relax, listen to the music, and shut out everything else. Then repeat something like 'All of my troubles are meaningless' or 'There are no such things as insurmountable obstacles'."

"… Was the book that you read some kind of self-help pamphlet?" She didn't respond, but I could practically feel her scowl on my skin, so I hastily amended, "I'll try, give me a second."

Inhaling a deep breath, I tried to empty my mind as much as I could and repeated 'The side-plots are unimportant. I don't need to think about them', over and over again.

"How long do we need to do this?" I asked after a few minutes, just as the track changed.

"Until you fully internalize the self-suggestion, and then we'll repeat it daily to reinforce it."

I still wasn't convinced, but since Elly was into this, I decided to play along and continued to meditate. In fact, I even went as far as to use the mana-circulation meditation technique I learned from Naoren. I never had much of a use for it, ever since I merged with other-me and I no longer had an instinctive, volatile antipathy towards certain people, but this felt like a good opportunity to dust it off.

Since I didn't have my Magiformer on, I had only a trace amount of Mana in my system (I blame my partial merging with Polemos making me a fraction Celestial for that), and without Cal's help the circulation's effects were much less pronounced, but it still helped me clear my mind. I combined that with Elly's self-suggestion idea, and before I knew it, I settled down into a shallow, meditative trance.

It only lasted until the vinyl record in the background reached its end, but I was still shocked to see how half an hour just disappeared like that, and when I opened my eyes, I found Elly affectionately gazing at my face. That was a nice note on which to end our session.

"How do you feel?"

It took me a few long seconds to formulate an answer, and I ultimately settled on the pithy (but not inaccurate), "Lighter."

"That's good!" She said, but then a long beat later she also added, "… I think!"

"What now?"

"We'll keep practicing, and then we'll see if it has any effects on those side-plot things! We could do it during lunch breaks, or…" She glanced at the turntable and shook her head. "Wait, no. We can't bring this to school, but I'll think of something!"

"Whatever you say, princess."

My girlfriend let out a confident hum, and while I adored her attitude, I didn't share her enthusiasm. I mean, sure. My mind felt clearer and my worries about the immediate future felt less pressing, but there was no way something as corny as 'self-hypnosis' could have any effects on the scenario, right? So, let's just ignore that, and view it as just another nice recreational way to spend some quality time with my girlfriend. That way, nobody will be disappointed.