The Simulacrum
~Chapter 166~ Part 2

"Ack!"

In retrospect, landing on my butt on a non-floor after falling through a hole in reality was one of the less dignified things I'd ever done. Not the weirdest though, which… spoke volumes about my life.

Anyhow, we somehow skipped the whole 'wading through the spaceless void between spaces' step, and I was now sitting in the middle of a large, fairly girly room of shifting dimensions and colours that I instantly recognized as the Domain of The Girl.

As if on cue, the owner of the room (or rather the humanoid avatar of the true body, but let's not split hairs over this one, especially when I still wasn't one hundred percent clear on it) materialized in front of me. She was petite and cutesy, as usual, dressed in a frilly pink dress and wearing her shiny blonde hair in a pair of prominent pigtails. More importantly, she was staring at me with a mixture of a frown and a pout.

"There. Now you can't complain about time," she brashly declared and then folded her arms.

"If you say so…" I grumbled, and while sitting on the floor like this was a bit awkward, I didn't feel like getting up yet. While I didn't have a stomach at the moment— "Wait."

"For what?" The Girl blurted out, but I didn't pay attention to her and patted down my whole body.

Yep. I was fully corporeal this time. Normally when I had these out-of-body experiences, they, by definition, only involved my disembodied point of view. Even the last time I talked with The Girl in her Domain, I only had a vague and intangible form, so this was a first.

"Oookay, so since I came here in person this time, does that mean I'm outside the Simulacrum right now?"

My entirely reasonable question made her look at me funny, but then she hurriedly redoubled her efforts to glare at me, only to then just as quickly give up and slouch her shoulders.

"Aw. I can't stay mad at you when you're asking cute questions like this," she cooed and leaned over to tousle my hair.

"I'm serious though. How did you even pull my body in here?" She stopped rubbing the top of my head and cocked her own to the side, as if not quite understanding what I was talking about. Maybe she really didn't. "I mean, last time I came here… normally?"

The more I tried to explain my problem, the less I could blame her for not getting it, because I wasn't sure I got it either.

"You speak as if there's a difference," she said off-handedly and folded her arms again. A blink of an eye later, a pair of chairs materialized out of nowhere, and she gestured for me to get up and sit there instead. "On second thought, I'm still a little mad at you, so take a seat and let me scold you properly."

"Before that, can I ask one more question?" I rose to my feet, she sat down, and then I waited for her to nod before speaking up again. "How much is time dilated here?" She was once again looking at me funny, so I tried to clarify my question. "I mean, you said we would have 'time' to talk here, so I figured something like that was going on. Like, one hour here is one second outside, or in the Simulacrum, or…" This time she cocked her head to the other side, prompting a groan out of me. "You know what I mean."

"No, not really," she admitted and pointed at the empty chair. She only spoke up again once I took a seat. "I understand that you're more used to linear causality, but that doesn't apply to us."

"But… this whole conversation is taking place in 'linear causality'," I told her in the company of the biggest air-quotes of my life. "I sat on the floor, then I got up and now I'm sitting on this chair. That's a sequence of events that happened in time."

"That's how you perceived them, yes, but no actual 'time' passed," she air-quoted me back, much to my mild annoyance. "I swear, I already told you this, so listen closely: we can experience linear causality, but we aren't bound to linear causality like the humans are. We are now inside my Domain, and we're experiencing an 'instance', which you're interpreting as a series of events congruent with linear time moving forward one 'present' at a time, but in reality, it's just one big block of 'present'. Do you get it?"

"… No?"

"Ugh… Seriously, why didn't the Crowned Coalescence give you a proper explanation of these things?" She grumbled while kicking the air, her usually chirpy voice once again sounding like the war cry of an especially irate kestrel, so I decided to cut my losses and move on for now.

"Okay, how about we just say that we're in an instant of time, decouple from the outside world, and call it a day?"

"From your perspective, maybe, but…" The Girl hesitated for a while, but then shrugged and uttered a disinterested, "Whatever, it's close enough."

"And you Emergents are constantly in this 'block of present'."

"Yes," she nodded along with a delighted smile, happy that I finally got something right.

"Then why did you contact me right now, and not before?"

"I told you, I was busy with the meeting, and then you went ahead and started poking holes in the Simulacrum's ************** structure, so I had no choice but to stop you."

That was… a complicated term right there. Something about tethering concepts together, and underlying principles. Let's just say she was saying something like 'internal framework' and move on.

"No, I mean… if you perceive what's happening as a 'block of present', then you would've already known that I would do that, so you could've stopped me before it happened."

"No, no, no! Ugh, I thought you got it, but you still…" The Girl held her head in her hand and let out a long groan that reminded me of a parrot trying to imitate a fax machine. Her vocal range was weird, but considering what she was, I was surprised it wasn't weirder. "Listen, I know for sure I've already told you about this, so pay attention this time: retro-causality is a no-no. You can't exist before you're born, and you can't know something before you've learned about it. Everything works like that. For example, we couldn't have met before the first time we met, because then that wouldn't have been the first time we met.  The universe is a real stickler when it comes to this."

Her explanation ticked a memory in my head, and I realized that it was quite similar to the way future-me described the way Emergents perceived time, using a book as an analogy, and… was this where he learned about that? But wait…. The Girl insisted that the Emergents were 'outside of time', but then why did her warning about retro-causality sound suspiciously like she was talking about avoiding time-paradoxes?

…

One question at a time.

"What I'm getting from this is that you are experiencing time as a single, fixed block, but you can't take information from a 'later' part of the block back to an earlier part of the 'block'."

"That's it."

"So this 'block of present' is unchanging." She nodded. "What about Free Actors then? Don't they exist specifically to change up the scenario and make it unpredictable?"

"Oh, that's something unique to the Simulacrum," she responded in an upbeat, sing-song voice. "That kind of thing really helps to stimulate the Submerged Ones, you see. It's like a mystery-box! You can't know what's inside it until you open it, and the Free Actor's there to make sure the end result wouldn't be predictable."

So far, this was mostly in line with the knowledge I acquired when merging with other-me, though that was from a very in-universe perspective, not from the block-of-present, sequential view of an Emergent.

"Meaning, the Simulacrum adapts to the Free Actor by tailoring the scenario to their decisions," I guessed, and she repeatedly nodded. "Like when Josh picked Angie."

"Who?" she blurted out in confusion, but then she hastily raised her palms "Ah, sorry. I'm not great at keeping track of things within the scenario. I'm more of a technical gal, taking care of the background stuff. You should ask *************** about the lore and the Free Actor once all of this blows over."

That name in the middle was once again spoken in that mind-piercing, 'torrent of sounds, images, and concepts injected directly into the frontal lobe' kind of way used when referring to the other Emergents, and it didn't take long for me to sift through the more recognizable elements and figure out that she was talking about The Man.

More importantly, there was something in what she said that piqued my interest.

"Aren't there two of them?"

A lot of my earlier visits in the not-dark not-room were hazy and hard to recall, but I was pretty sure that one (or maybe more) of them mentioned two Free Actors. That was one of the more confusing bits that my other-me-based knowledge was unable to parse.

"Right. From the outside, I guess you do look like a second Free Actor, huh?" she asked back as if I was supposed to be in on the joke. "Anyhow, from a technical standpoint, all I can say is that there's always a Free Actor in every scenario for the reason I just explained."

That made a couple of the puzzle pieces in my head snap into place. Let's look at it step-by-step, merging what I learned here with what I heard from future-me:

Emergents viewed the world as one big block of time, with 'instances' like this being played out as if we were in linear time. However, the instances themselves couldn't be arbitrarily chosen; they had to be in sequence, to avoid retro-causality. I presumed that Submerged Ones perceived the world similarly, but if they were already operating in the 'time as a block' framework, then it meant the point where they emerged would be fixed. The rules were slightly different in the Simulacrum, as it was like a big Domain that was its own 'block of time', and the Free Actor's actions could change the scenario, which would then lead to that 'block of time' diverging. That created the kind of stimuli Submerged Ones needed to emerge, all the while the Simulacrum also provided them a template on how to define themselves as humans (or at least human-adjacent).

It was all rather logical, but there were still a few things I wasn't entirely clear on. However, before I could interrogate The Girl any further, she suddenly frowned at me.

"Hey! I'm onto you now, mister! You completely derailed the conversation to avoid getting scolded, haven't you?"

"I get that a lot, but…"

"No buts!" she huffed and puffed, and it caused the shape and curves of the cutesy room and its furniture to tremble and subtly shift, slowly turning into a Tom Burton movie set. "You were lucky that the Predator Moon was busy elsewhere and I was the only one paying attention to the Simulacrum at the time! What were you even trying to do, making holes like that?"

"I wasn't trying to make holes, they just… happened because the place was all floompy."

"… Excuse me? I'm not familiar with that terminology."

I exhaled hard and gave her a quick description of my recent experiences, and she looked both surprised and intrigued by my words.

"Oooh? That makes a lot of sense, actually." She pinched her chin and nodded three times. "That part of the Simulacrum, where you were playing around, was off-screen."

"… Don't tell me that's actual terminology used by you guys."

Her smirk said 'maybe it is, maybe it isn't', and moved on without giving me a straightforward answer.

"It's a peculiar thing. Normally there shouldn't have been anything there, but I guess your influence is spreading and making even those parts of the Simulacrum more vivid. That's good… but also bad."

She fell silent for quite a while, so I had to prompt her with a slightly impatient, "Care to elaborate?"

"Sure! You see, the fact that all of the Simulacrum is gaining definition, whether there's a Free Actor there to directly observe it or not, means that the Crowned Coalescence's plan is working and your presence is having an effect, but it also means that it's only a question of time before the others notice all the extra complexity happening and start asking questions."

"And that would be bad."

"Probably, yeah." She folded her arms, and I couldn't help but notice how the room around us was slowly returning to its previous girly state. At last, The Girl looked me in the eye again. "You're getting close to the finale of the scenario, right?"

"More or less, yes," I answered a touch hesitantly.

"Then you should go and work on that! The sooner it's finished, the less likely it is for someone else to get suspicious and for things to go completely out of hand."

"Sure, but… What does 'sooner' even mean in the context of someone outside linear time, anyway?"

"Stop harping on that!" she burst out, sounding like a murder of crows about to commit murder, and she opened a portal under me. Weirdly enough, I didn't fall in right away and remained sitting on top of a chair seemingly floating over a hole in space. "Go and do something about the scenario instead!"

"Whoa, slow down. You said we're outside of time, or at least the Simulacrum's time, so shouldn't we take this opportunity to discuss everything in detail, no matter how long it takes? There's no reason to—"

"Don't drag your feet! Just do it, and once we're in the clear, we can talk all we want!"

Before I could get another word in, the chair suddenly disappeared from under me and I fell into the portal.

Once again, there was no 'not-black lack of space', and I just suddenly found myself landing on my butt, again, right next to a flabbergasted Lord Ambrose.

"Ow. Goddamit," I cursed under my breath, followed by a much louder one when the girl poked her head out of the still-present portal. "Bloody hell!"

"Listen!" She called out to me, completely ignoring my exclamation, and she even wagged her finger at me. "I forgot to scold you properly this time, but next time, you won't be so lucky! Got it?"

Before I could get a word in, she ducked back into the hole in the air, and then it disappeared with a pop, causing a series of familiar ripples to echo through the surrounding space.

"W-W-What kind of preposterous magic was that?!" Ambrose burst out as soon as he gathered his wits.

I put a finger in front of my mouth. While I replaced the door before I left, I had no idea how long it would last, and the last thing I needed right now was for him to give away our location and make my efforts meaningless. But speaking of leaving and returning…

"How long was I away?"

My sincere question only made him even more confused.

"Away? You just fell into that… that hole following that… that planet, and then you fell right out of it! What was that? Did you open a hole into space? Was it an illusion? Or…"

"It would take too long to explain," I grumbled a touch dismissively as I groggily rose to my feet.

I wasn't too happy with this intermezzo. Sure, I learned some things, but not nearly enough, and the whole 'time from the perspective of an Emergent' topic was still confusing the hell out of me despite multiple attempts at getting to the bottom of it. The way I was kicked out of her domain and essentially told to do my job also didn't sit well with me. In fact, didn't something similar happen last time as well? Maybe I really shouldn't try to rely on The Girl to gain more information about the Emergents and the nature of the Simulacrum.

But then again, I wasn't exactly strapped for choices, even if her half-baked attitude was starting to get on my nerves. One of these days, I should try to get her to sit down on my terms and properly question her. Probably not today though.

"Fine, keep your secrets," Lord Ambrose fumed and then jerked his head towards the door. "What do we do now? Should we finish what I started, or cut our losses?"

That was a moot question if I'd ever heard one.

"We can't exactly leave empty-handed after going through all this trouble, can we?"

"Ahhh." Ambrose startled me with an enormous, relieved sigh. "For a moment I was afraid you'd want to leave. I mean, I wouldn't blame you, and I can't exactly argue with you after you came all the way over here to help me, but it would've been a shame to not get to the bottom of this!"

"Sure, sure…"

As enthusiastic as the arch-mage way, I was feeling a fair bit more lethargic about this whole ordeal, but as they said, in for a penny, in for a pound. On the bright side, at least my time spent in The Girl's Domain made my stomach calm down a bit. It wasn't much of a silver lining considering I was sure I was going to upset it again today, but it was at least something.

Now, I just had to figure out how to do this ASAP, and then get home and do some brainstorming with Judy. Also, to eat some biscuits, wash them down with tea, then come up with a plan on how to find The Girl again and squeeze some proper answers out of her. But before any of that, let's go and nab a Grimoire Key, shall we?

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