The Simulacrum - Chapter 68

Part 1

“The C-menu? Really?” Josh grumbled aloud by my side as we walked across the unnecessarily spacious cafeteria of the school with our shiny metal food-trays in hand. The place was as unnecessarily elegant as always, though because of the changing season making even the least developed placeholder reconsider their options in face of possible hypothermia, it looked even busier than usual.

“What? It has fried cheese today. I like it,” I defended my preferences, only for my friend to honest to goodness scoff at me like I just said something unexpectedly low-brow.

“Then you should’ve bought the deluxe French platter. It has lobster bisque, chicken marengo, mozzarella sticks with tomato sauce, and two macarons! Way superior both in terms of quantity and quality.”

“But not in price,” I noted. “It also sounds a tad too heavy for me. I’m fine with my non-deluxe cheese and fries, thank you very much.”

“Your loss,” Josh shrugged. “If I had your money, I would’ve already tried out half the deluxe menu by now.”

“You already have,” I pointed out while deliberately glancing at the tray in his hands carrying a large bowl of some kind of curry dish with roasted meat in it. “And on my money, no less.”

“Don’t get bogged down by the small details,” my friend responded while suspiciously averting his eyes, and while I would have liked to press the issue, we were already right next to the table the girls reserved for us, so I ultimately decided to drop the topic altogether and silently took a seat next to my sister instead.

Josh settled between Ammy and Angie, while my two girlfriends were occupying a different side and immersed in a discussion I didn’t want to disturb.

“About time, you slowpokes,” the Celestial girl grumbled before we even sat down. “My lunch almost got cold while waiting for you two.”

“You could’ve started eating without us, you know?” Josh pointed out and got promptly dismissed by his childhood friend.

“That would’ve been just rude,” she proclaimed with a huff, but her mood immediately turned around when she got a whiff of Josh’s dish. “So, what did you get this time?”

“Kaeng phet pet yang,” my friend stated while proudly puffing out his chest for some reason. “It’s a Thai dish with premium ingredients.”

“Leo bought it for you again, didn’t he?” the class rep asked while she picked up her utensils, and my friend answered with a grin and an unabashed ‘Yep!’.

“In my defense, it is better to feed this glutton what he wants rather than to listen to his grumbling all through lunchtime.”

“Hey! I prefer the term, ‘foodie’,” Josh objected to my completely fair and objective choice of words, but we all ignored him and dug into our dishes instead. Well, most of us.

“Chief?”

I glanced over to the side where my girlfriends were sitting, and they were both giving me curious looks.

“What, is there something on my face?”

“You should know what we want to know,” my dear assistant noted, and Elly piled on me with a series of intense nods. I locked gazes with the both of them for a few seconds, but alas, it was impossible to do more than that, and so I soon let out a long sigh and slouched my shoulders.

“No, I didn’t actually write ‘millionaire philanthropist record magnate’ into the ‘your desired career path’ field. I might be silly from time to time, but I’m not an idiot.”

At this point Angie let out a self-conscious chuckle, but no one seemed to pay attention to her, so I decided not to bring attention to it either.

“So? What did you write then?” Elly pressed on with eyes all but sparkling with curiosity.

“I didn’t write anything. I completed the questionnaire on the green booklet, just to see what it would say.”

For some context, there was going to be a job expo at the local university in a few days, so the school administration decided to follow along and make it career orientation week for us, meaning a couple of the lessons were dedicated to the teachers (read: Mrs. Applebottom) handing out a bunch of brochures, questionnaires, and other tests apparently designed to help us narrow down our future occupations.

This was apparently really important, since it is common knowledge that whatever career path a high-schooler with zero work experience picks from a fancy pamphlet is going to be the one they are guaranteed work in for the rest of their lives, with absolutely no chance that outside factors, such as job availability or other obstructions would play a role whatsoever. Insert massive sarcasm quotes here.

For the rest of the week, we would have guest speakers from universities and employers from around the island, as well as the option to visit the actual expo. I personally considered this to be a monumental waste of time, but my girlfriends apparently found it inexplicably amusing, so I had no choice but to go along with them.

“The long one?” Judy asked, and I nodded, so she immediately followed it up with, “What was your result?”

“Movie-director,” I answered flatly between two fries.

“Wow. That’s significantly less wacky than I expected,” Angie commented while sneakily trying to poach a slice of meat from Josh’s bowl, and for once, I could totally agree with her. Not on the food-snatching part, but the other one.

“I know, right? I thought it would give me something zany, like the captain of a crab-fishing ship, or professional tricycle repairman, but instead I got something stock like that.”

“I think directors are cool,” Elly told me, probably just to cheer me up.

“Thanks, though I probably won’t become one. What about the rest of you?”

“I just wrote down ‘inherit the family business’,” the princess answered, and she glanced at Judy, apparently waiting for her to follow up on her.

“I did the short test,” she stated a tad dourly. “It told me my best career choice would be scanned document typist.”

“What is that?” the class rep spoke up for the first time since we sat down, obviously intrigued by the odd result.

“It is a person who takes old documents and receipts that were digitally scanned, and re-types them so that they can be searched by computers,” Judy explained with about as much excitement as such a description deserved.

“That sounds really dull,” Ammy noted, and my girlfriend nodded in full agreement.

I, on the other hand, felt really cheated. The long questionnaire didn’t have anything weird like that! I should have done the short one instead! Thinking so, I angrily bit into my fried cheese, nearly burning my tongue in the process.

“Ugh, hot!”

“Ah, here,” Snowy came to the rescue with a glass of cold water, and I accepted it without any hesitation.

“Thanks,” I told her, only to quickly realize that she, like the class rep before, didn’t engage in our discussion at all. “So, sis? What did you write?”

“We didn’t have any consultation,” she answered, and only then did I remember that she was one year younger than the rest of us. Well, at least on paper, but let’s leave those hairs unsplit for now.

“A fair point, so let me rephrase the question: if you had to, what would’ve you written?”

This time she contemplated for a long while, but in the end she shook her head all the same with an apologetic, “I… really don’t know. This is all new to me, so I never really thought about it.”

On second thought, she had a point. Before I adopted her, she was pretty much enslaved by her brother and had no agency over her future. Combine that with how Abyssals were supposed to be locked away from mundane human society, and I really couldn’t blame her for not having any plans for her future.

“In that case,” I began after taking another sip from the glass in front of me, “What do you enjoy doing the most?”

“I… like doing housework?” she answered more than a smidge uncertainly, and Josh immediately jumped onto the bait.

“That’s right! You could become a maid at Elly’s place!” he declared, but my draconic girlfriend immediately poured some cold water onto his enthusiasm.

“That won’t do. When we get married, Neige is going to be my sister-in-law, so we obviously cannot have her working as a maid! If anything, she would get some maids of her own!”

“It’s also more of a… um… hobby, I suppose?” Snowy added in a mousy voice, so Josh had no choice but to give up with a disappointed look on his face.

“Admit it, you just want to keep seeing her in a maid outfit,” Angie teased him while chewing on a piece of meat she stole without any of us noticing. I had to give it to her, if ‘food pilferer’ was a job, she could become world-class in no time.

“Like hell I would admit that in front of Leo,” Josh fumed in return, much to his childhood friend’s amusement.

“Saying it like that is practically the same as admitting it anyway,” Judy sent out a verbal jab, made all the more impactful by the dignified way she was slicing her steak while she said so. By the way, she was apparently learning etiquette from the princess as part of her ‘bridal training’. They seemed to be having fun, so I once again refrained from raining on their parade, and instead I directed a questioning look at my nervously sweating friend.

“Don’t listen to them, I’m completely innocent! No impure thoughts at all!”

Seeing him flustered like that was pretty amusing, so I allowed myself a small chuckle at his expense before addressing my sister again.

“Aside from housework, is there something else you like to do?”

“I like drawing,” she stated, which immediately caused another stir in the group.

“That’s right! I’ve seen Lili’s sketches once, and they are amazing!” Josh exclaimed with undue excitement, and to my surprise, Ammy seemed to echo her sentiment.

“I agree. Her artwork is really outstanding.”

“I just had a lot of practice while drawing Sigils,” my sister muttered as she humbly accepted all the praise.

“I don’t want to be a wet blanket, but how do you actually make a living with drawing artwork nowadays?” my assistant asked, and her question immediately put a damper on everyone’s enthusiasm.

“She can become a painter,” Angie proposed.

“I don’t think that’s a well-paid job,” Josh countered, only for the Celestial girl to poke him in the shoulder in response.

“I’m not talking about that kind of painter, but the artist kind! You know? The people who paint portraits and landscapes and throw random colored paints onto a canvas, and then other people put their work into galleries and stuff.”

I wanted to point out that her last example felt a little off, but Josh beat me to the punch.

“Is that even a viable option? I mean, I would think that the stereotype of the ‘starving artist’ exists for a reason.”

“You are thinking of high-art,” I told my friend while taking another bite out of my slightly less piping hot food. “There are many other practical fields where drawing and painting skills are important.”

“That’s what I’m saying,” Angie agreed with me right away. “For example, once Leo becomes a famous movie director, Neige can draw his concept art and storyboards!”

“I won’t, but that’s just one field where artists can find employment these days,” I noted, and I would have continued to eat if not for the princess throwing a trick question at me.

“What about the future?” I gave my girlfriend a questioning look, and so she clarified, “What I meant to say was, what do you think would be a lucrative job for an artist in the future?”

I had an inkling of why she was asking, but I really couldn’t see any harm in it, so after I gave it some thought, I ultimately settled on the answer, “A graphics designer, I suppose.”

It wasn’t just a stab in the dark either, as it was based on the current trends I could see in the Simulacrum around us. With the technology level steadily rising, it would inevitably lead to the internet getting ever more wide-spread. However, though we already had a couple of ‘staples’ of the information era, like social media platforms and intrusive advertising, practically all of the sites I have frequented had really rudimentary designs. Sure, a lot of that was probably due to the coding side having to catch up to the demand, but one still needed actual artwork and designs to go with that, and it was a market that was sure to boom in the future.

“What does that entail?” came the next question from the princess.

“Making logos, advertisements, creating designs for web pages and user interfaces, those kinds of things,” I rattled off whatever came to mind. “For example, she could be working with your company to design your homepage or work on the individual cover arts.”

“And you say this is going to be viable in the future?”

“Erm… sure?” I responded a tad uncertainly.

“That’s good enough for me,” Elly declared with a serious expression before she faced my sister. “What exactly do you need? Painting tools? Modeling kits? A studio? Maybe one of those fancy new electronic drawing boards?”

“Do you mean a graphics tablet?” Snowy ventured a guess, and the princess nodded right away.

“Yeah, that! Just tell me what you need, and I will get it for you! Do you also need a team to work with? I can get you a few assistants too if you want…”

“Hold your horses, princess,” I chided my overbearing girlfriend a little. “Don’t you think you are putting the cart before the horse?”

“Not at all,” she stood her ground with a confident smirk. “Since you are not willing to exploit the narra— I mean, that thing you are not willing to exploit, I will do it myself.”

“I get it, but that doesn’t mean you should overdo it like this,” I noted as I let my brows descend a bit into a frown.

“I’m not overdoing it! It’s a business investment, and you have to be decisive about those!” Elly argued back. “Not to mention, shouldn’t it be Neige’s decision?”

“Yes, but as her big brother, I feel like I should give my own perspective on this,” I told her, but since she didn’t budge an inch, I decided not to get bogged down in this and relented with a not at all peevish, “Fine, fine. Go ahead and discuss the details between yourselves, just don’t come crying to me later.”

“Let’s switch places,” my other girlfriend proposed on the spot. Snowy gave me an uncertain peek, then directed one to Judy, but at the end of the day she obediently picked up her tray and the two of them switched their seats without any complications.

“Are you sure this is going to be all right?” Judy inquired the moment her butt touched the chair, earning her an ambivalent shrug from my end.

“You know, Dormouse, I really don’t want to tempt fate by asking ‘What’s the worst that could happen?’, but in this case, I honestly can’t see how this could backfire. Let’s just leave the princess to her devices for a while.”

“If you say so,” my dear assistant mirrored my shrug, and for the next minute or so we focused on our meals, ignoring both the business-discussion on our left and the rambunctious childhood friends getting into an argument about why Josh picked ‘professional restaurant critic’ for his preferred career path. This lasted exactly until Judy asked, “Do you have any plans for the afternoon?”

“A couple of things,” I responded before downing the last piece of fried cheese on my plate. “I will have to take Elly to the base to make the contract, then I will have to arrange a working space for the sentai duo. I will probably need to get some of their equipment from their previous workshop, and for that, I will have to see Lord Grandpa, so that will take up some time too. Oh, right, and I will also need to see the nurse.”

“I don’t believe you want a second opinion on your hand,” Judy guessed with unerring accuracy.

“Nope, I just want to get an exemption from PE classes for a while.”

“What was that about exemption?” Josh cut in with a skeptical brow raised high.

“I’m still not in top shape, so I’m going to get Peabody to let me ditch the afternoon PE class,” I told him without any reservations, and my friend’s shoulders immediately slouched in disappointment.

“Oh, maaan… I was actually looking forward to PE today! The teacher promised that we could play baseball again, and I really wanted to use the opportunity to beat you while you were down…”

“That’s tough, buddy,” I responded in a flat voice. “For the record, how much did that thing you are eating right now cost again?”

“Come on, that’s below you,” he attempted to dismiss my comment with a smile, but when I kept up the stern façade, he quickly added, “I was obviously joking, so please don’t threaten my future as a critic.”

“How is that…? You know what? Never mind.” Like that, I disengaged from the conversation and returned to Judy’s topic. “So, just to answer your initial question, I have a couple of things lined up. Why?”

“Mom wanted to invite you over for dinner,” she said, her expression telling me she wasn’t a fan of the idea. “She most likely wants to show you our holiday decorations, but if you are this busy, I suppose you can’t.”

“I could try to squeeze it into my timetable,” I offered with a smirk, and my dear assistant instantly shook her head.

“No need, I will tell mom you couldn’t make it.”

“I don’t know… You are making me awfully curious about these holiday decorations of yours.”

“They are really not that interesting,” she denied, but I wasn’t going to let it go that easily.

“But you helped to make them, so I feel that it’s my boyfriendly duty to inspect them in great detail and—”

I got that far before Judy delivered one of her pointed yet somehow entirely harmless kicks at my shin.

“Keep this up, and I swear I will really, undoubtedly, one hundred percent certainly start to hate you.”

“I might be mistaken, but I could distinctly remember something about you and me and being in love and stuff, so I think that ship has already sailed,” I pointed out, only for her to counter me with:

“I can still do it. I will just have to compartmentalize my feelings so that I can both love you at times and hate you at others,” she explained while wrapping the bony end of the lone remaining chicken drumstick into a napkin for some reason.

“So you want to reinvent yourself and become a modern tsundere?”

That comment immediately made my girlfriend freeze in absolute shock. Once she overcame that, she looked me in the eye and told me, dead seriously, “I apologize. I very nearly made a terrible mistake. I don’t know what I was thinking.”

“No harm, no foul,” I responded with a chuckle. “By the way, what are you doing?”

“You mean this,” she stated while picking up the chicken leg, and after I nodded to confirm her words, she gestured for me to follow along.

First, she glanced around the dining hall, and once it seemed like nobody was paying attention to us, she casually put the drumstick under the table. Not a moment later, the upper-body of a little girl appeared out of the shadows, kind of like a famous movie shark breaking the water surface, and with a meaty chomp she bit onto the food offered to her and disappeared with a muffled ‘Twangyuu!’

And just like that, the rest of my lunch break was spent digesting whether a grinning little girl arising from a shadow and biting onto something was cute, or absolutely terrifying. I would have asked Josh for a second opinion, but when he tried following in my assistant’s footsteps, he got bitten again, so I felt like he wasn’t entirely unbiased.

Part 2

It was roughly around ten minutes before the end of the lunch break that I made my way over to the nurse’s office. I wasn’t exactly in a hurry, as I planned to discuss a number of things with the portly man aside from my PE-exemption, and since said class was just about to start, I technically had a whole hour to waste.

I didn’t exactly have a spring in my steps, but I still made it over to the familiar door with quite some time to spare.

Thinking back on it, this place actually held quite a bit of significance for me. Josh took me here the first day I awoke in this world, we had our first moment with Elly here, and I even had a memory involving Judy when she collapsed due to existential crisis-induced insomnia. All things considered, this place was part of our history now. If only it wasn’t inhabited by an annoying nurse with his dumb jokes and silly speech gimmick.

“O-ho-ho!”

Yeah, precisely that! Just hearing his laughter through the door made me feel like I had an army of ants crawling all over my back. On the bright side, at least now I knew for sure that he was in there But then again, I already knew that thanks to Far Sight, so no, it wasn’t a bright side at all after all.

I raised my hand to the doorknob, ready to enter, but then my hand stopped midway as I thought of something else. I glanced around the corridor, and while there were no other students present, I noticed a single security camera at the far end. I didn’t know whether that could see me, or if it even recorded stuff or was only watched over by one of those clichéd, overweight security guards balancing a box of donuts on their paunch, but I wasn’t going to take an unnecessary risk, so I turned to my left and hastily walked into the nearby toilet. I got into one of the stalls, and then once I was sure I was in the clear, I promptly Phased into the infirmary.

The inside of the room was the same as always; clean, slightly cramped, and faintly smelling of disinfectant. I appeared right next to one of the two empty beds set aside near the back of the room, while the only other person in the room was sitting by his desk and browsing through a series of charts and tables full of numbers. I quietly tiptoed closer to the nurse, but he was still entirely oblivious to my presence. That was amusing in its own way, but not very productive, so I decided to draw his attention with a chipper greeting.

“Good day, sir. What are you studying so intently?”

“O-ho-HOOOOOOOOUUUuuuu?!” The portly nurse’s distinctive chuckle trailed into a weird, surprised sound as he desperately turned one hundred and eighty degrees on his swivel chair, yet once our eyes met, all the tension visibly drained from his shoulders, and he soon let out a relieved, “Oh, it’s you, Leonard.”

“In the flesh,” I answered with a cheeky grin, only to then forcefully snap my facial muscles into a neutral expression and ominously add, “Or am I?”

“You… are not really here?” Peabody inquired, his voice sounding just a touch bewildered, but his confused state didn’t stop him from methodically retrieving a cloth handkerchief from his pocket and carefully unfolding it.

“Who knows? I might be here, or I might be just outside the door. Heck, I might even be in that storeroom over there!” I exclaimed as I pointed at the open door at the back end of the room. By this point the portly nurse seemed quite befuddled already, but it didn’t mean I could add more oil to the fire, so I declared, “Wait here, I’ll go and check!”

Saying so, I casually walked over to the storeroom in question, theatrically looked around, and after a long beat I stepped inside, closed the door behind me… and then promptly Phased next to the nurse intently staring at the closed door, just outside of his peripheral vision.

“Nope, I’m not in there,” I spoke up, eliciting another uncharacteristically high-pitched sound from the rotund man in front of me.

“Please stop doing that! My heart is not as young as it used to be!” Peabody complained as his hands mechanically wiped his high forehead with the aforementioned hanky, only to soon stop and ask, “But wait… now you are here, but before that, you weren’t, yet you were here before you went there to see if you are there, but you weren’t, and instead you were here again… So am I here?”

“It’s better if you don’t think about such things,” I supplied a flippant answer before I sat down onto a nearby chair. The older man still looked quite rattled, so I couldn’t help but follow it up with, “Am I really that scary?”

My question made the nurse stop wiping his face and, after a long moment of consideration, his lips parted into a broad smile as he told me, “O-ho-ho, no, of course not. I have spent my youth being dragged all around the most dangerous corners of the world by my good friend Amadeus. There are few things that scare me.” He paused here for few seconds to massage the left side of his chest while adding, “Being startled is another thing entirely though. As I’ve said, the old ticker is not like it used to be.”

“I’ll keep that in mind, but I’m not making promises.”

“O-ho-ho!” I don’t know why he laughed at that. Nor did I want to know. Anyhow, once he finished with that, he put his handkerchief away and directed his full attention onto me. “I’m sure you aren’t here just to make a courtesy call. Can I help you?”

“Yeah, you actually can.” My answer only made his suspiciously amicable smile widen a notch, so after clearing my throat, I hastily told him, “I’m here for a certification so that I wouldn’t have to attend PE for a while.”

“O-ho-ho? Are you sick? Or maybe injured?” Peabody mused while picking up a stethoscope. He didn’t try to use it though, only put it around his neck before leaning closer to take a better look at me. What the heck was that about?

More importantly, I now had to consider how much I would tell him. My first instinct told me to keep my hand a secret, but then I remembered that he was actually pretty steadfast when it came to nurse-patient-confidentiality, so in the end I went with a curt, “My hand got injured during the incident a few days ago.”

“Did it? O-ho-ho, let me take a look!”

Saying so, he unceremoniously took out a small metal case from his coat’s breast pocket. It housed a softly glowing monocle, which he put over his right eye before leaning even closer to take a good look at my hand for nearly half a minute.

“Oh? Quite a nasty mana burn you got there, young man. What exactly were you—? No, I shouldn’t pry.” Saying so, he put his monocle away. In retrospect, it was apparently some kind of magical diagnostic device, which sounded quite useful in theory. Note to self: ask Labcoat guy if he knows how it works, and in case of a negative answer, use my Phantom Limb to take a peek at the enchantment when I wasn’t recovering anymore. But back to the present. “In my professional opinion, treating your hand would require the aid of a specialist. I can put you in contact with an acquaintance of mine.”

“No need, I already have a healer lined up.”

Even though I just turned him down, the nurse let out an amused, “O-ho-ho”, followed by, “There can be no harm in seeking a second opinion. It will cost you nothing, and my Hippocratic oath wouldn’t let me sleep at night if I let you be.”

“Do what you want then, but can I get that exemption certificate first?”

“Certainly!” The moment he said that he turned on his chair and took a piece of paper from one of the trays on his desk. He began to write something, but only a few seconds passed before he spoke up again without his pen stopping at all. “If I may ask, how is Friedrich doing?”

“Fairly well. They get on each other’s nerves with his android all the time, and he is getting bored with military rations, but otherwise he is fine.”

“O-ho-ho, I’m glad to hear that,” Peabody continued to speak while writing. “I would appreciate if you wouldn’t be too hard on him. He is the type who follows only what interests him, so it might be difficult to keep him focused on work he is not passionate about.”

“We’ll see. So long as he is not trying to make more silly-looking robots, we probably won’t have any conflicts in the future.” The portly nurse let out one last hearty chuckle before he signed the paper in front of him and handed it over to me. I glanced over the content, and it was just a template document with my personal details and the last bracket saying it gave me an ‘indefinite’ exemption from PE activities. A bit broad, but I could work with it. “Thanks.”

I was about to stand back up and leave, but I was stopped by Peabody calling after me.

“Just a moment more of your time, if you don’t mind?”

“Depends.”

The hint of suspicion in my voice didn’t seem to bother him at all, and instead he let out another of his grating chuckles before telling me, “Are you aware of the Assembly investigators on the island?”

“You mean the ones led by that Saahira woman?”

“So you are aware. O-ho-ho, how naïve of me to think otherwise! I just wanted to warn you that they wanted to meet the famous Chimera slayer of the island, so Amadeus may invite you over rather sooner than later.”

Considering I wanted to meet Lord Grandpa anyway, this piece of news wasn’t necessarily an unwelcome one, but it didn’t make its source any less baffling.

“You are unusually forthcoming today,” I noted, my words accentuated by a suspicious look I patented off Josh’s face, but the portly nurse didn’t take the slightest offense.

“O-ho-ho, I’m only doing my best to repay my debt.” It was at this point when I went from suspicious to uncomprehending, though not for long, as he soon provided an explanation. “If not for your intervention, Friedrich would have been held responsible for breaking into Amadeus’s office at the very least. While it may not compare to taking a Key of all things, he certainly wouldn’t have avoided harsh punishment, and who knows what would have happened to Galatea. While your methods are somewhat…” He paused here while searching for the right word, finally settling on, “Unorthodox, to say the least, offering the two of them a helping hand even after the misunderstanding between the two of you was very admirable of you.”

So, if I understood him right, he felt indebted to me because I… rescued his nephew? I mean, I suppose he technically wasn’t wrong per se, but his interpretation was generous to the point it started to sound like a willful misinterpretation of both the events and my motives. Now, I admit, I was never too shy to accept unwarranted praise, but this occasion still didn’t sit well with me.

“There was no ‘misunderstanding’. Also, whatever you think I did, it was entirely for my own reasons, not because I’m some kind of good Samaritan who helps out mad scientists and their trigger happy androids on a whim.”

“O-ho-ho, I see, I see,” Peabody chuckled with his hand in front of his mouth, making even his jowls shake in apparent amusement. “Don’t worry Leonard, I understand you.”

“You do?”

My blurted-out words were laced with undisguised skepticism, but the nurse only gave me a confident nod in return.

“Of course! Remember, I’m aware of your condition.”

At first I wondered what my injured hand had to do with anything, but then I recalled that the man in front of me was the only person outside my closest circle who was aware of the fact that I had a very minor case of amnesia, and then everything clicked together.

“Are you talking about my lost memories?” I asked, just to be sure, and he gave me yet another confident nod.

“O-ho-ho! What else? I can’t imagine how hard it must have been for you, getting involved with one incident after the other while you had so much to deal with already.”

“Erm… technically you are not wrong in saying that, but…”

“That’s why I want you to know that I understand why you act the way you do, building a strong image to compensate for the past you have lost.”

“The only thing I’ve lost is the thread of this conversation,” I grumbled. “What are we talking about again?”

“Worry not, your secrets stay safe with me,” the stocky nurse declared while completely and utterly ignoring my question. “If you ever need to let your guard down and talk openly to someone, or just ask for advice, remember that I’m here. I’m the school counselor, you know?”

“Yes, I do, but to be frank, I’m not sure I want to ask for advice from someone who wanted to cure my amnesia with a mallet,” I pointed out, but I only received yet another increasingly grating chuckle for my trouble.

“It was but a folly of youth!”

“It happened two months ago!”

The old man only kept chuckling at my objection, so I concluded that this entire conversation was heading nowhere fast and that it was time to cut my losses. If he wanted to believe that I was some kind of dogged nice guy trying to act tough to hide my insecurities, who was I to refute him? Thinking as such, I let out a pent-up, exasperated breath and simply headed for the door, only to stop when it opened just as I was about to reach for the door handle.

I stepped out of the way and found myself face to face with the sour face of a certain Armband Guy. Pascal, as the normies called him, looked a little tired and just a tad miffed, yet the moment he laid his eyes on me, his expression took a one-eighty turn to relieved.

“Good. I was afraid I would miss you,” he told me with the utmost seriousness before completely ignoring my body language telling him that I was just about to leave and he closed the door behind himself. In fact, he might have mistaken my non-verbal message, as he soon began to explain himself in earnest. “The Lord sent me to find you, but you weren’t with the rest of your class. I asked Bernstein where you were, and he told me you left to visit the infirmary. Therefore, we met.”

“Yes, we did,” I agreed to… something. Honestly, after the last conversation, I was still finding my proverbial sea-legs and just went along with the flow for the moment.

“Indeed,” Armband Guy also agreed, following which he cleared his throat and stated, “As you might already be aware, the delegation from the Assembly has arrived to the island, and they are staying for at least a few weeks. The leader of the delegation, Arch-Mage Saahira, expressed interest in meeting with you, therefore the Lord requests that you visit him today, after school hours.” At first it looked like that was the end of it, but then his brows furrowed all of the sudden and he hastily added, “Also, I was told to keep giving you full courtesies, so I’m obliged to also say, ‘Or in case doing so would be unreasonable on such short notice, please do so at your earliest convenience’.”

“O-ho-ho! Speak of the devil!” Peabody exclaimed in the background, and he even slapped his own thigh for emphasis, an act that earned him a disapproving look from the guy in front of me.

“I wanted to talk with him anyway, so tell him I’ll visit him after classes are out.”

“The Lord would be much obliged,” Pascal stated with the amount of enthusiasm in his voice infinitely approaching zero. “Also, the Lord told me to politely ask you to be so kind and use the main entrance this time.”

“Sure, sure,” I agreed just to get things over with. “Is that all?”

“For the moment, yes,” Armband Guy told me, so I gestured for him to get out of the way. Instead he opened the door to let me out. Normally that would have earned him a snappy word or two, but then again, maybe he just wanted to be polite, so I swallowed my words and exited the nurse’s office with a polite smile forcefully stretched onto my face.

“Thanks for the voucher, doc,” I said my farewell while waving the piece of paper I received, and Peabody let out one last ‘O-ho-ho,’ before I left and proceeded on my way towards the indoor gym as planned. What I didn’t plan on, however…

“Goodbye, Mr. Peabody. Have a nice day.”

… was that Armband Guy would start walking beside me without a word. I sent the guy an annoyed glance, but he didn’t get the message even after we passed the corner, so in the end I had to voice it.

“Why are you following me?”

“I’m not following you, Dunning. I’m merely going the same way.”

“U-huh,” I grunted, not even bothering to hide my wariness. However, it wasn’t until we were in spitting distance to the gym where the class was, by the sound of it, already playing basketball, that Pascal finally spat whatever was on his mind out.

“Can I ask you a quick question?”

“You already are.”

My snappy response fell on unreceptive ears, and he was too busy glancing around the hallways to see if there was anyone around. Considering we were already in the middle of the afternoon classes, the answer was obviously no. Still, the way he acted immediately made a couple of alarm bells ring out in the back of my mind. Once he was sure no one was listening, he actually leaned closer to me, only then did he ask his question.

“Last evening, a number of important documents have gone missing from the experimental workshop on the third basement floor. Did you have anything to do with that?”

That… was refreshingly direct. Also, a little bit confusing.

“No. I was…” I wanted to say ‘sleeping’, but as a matter of fact, I wasn’t. Speaking of which, yes, my crash after the incident with Labcoat Guy and Rinne and the Knights et all seemed to be a one-time thing, and now I was back to my old, sleepless self. But that was beside the point. More importantly, I decided to answer him, “… preoccupied with something else. Were those documents important?”

“Not in a particular sense, but they were something the Lord specifically wanted to keep under lock. Were you really not the one who took them?”

“As I said, I wasn’t,” I told him a touch impatiently. “While I admit I would have considered myself as the first suspect as well after the recent events, at the moment I have no reason to further antagonize Lord Grandpa yet.”

“Yet?”

“Ignore that part. Anyhow, if they are not that important, try looking around the place first. Considering the cock-up from a few days ago and how everyone was running around like headless chickens down there, it might have been just misplaced during the commotion.”

“It’s… a possibility,” he granted me before raising his left hand and taking a peek at his fancy wristwatch. “It is almost time. I must go now.”

“Yeah, you must do that,” I agreed with him quite vehemently. “You should not let me hold you up. In fact, the sooner you leave, the better. For you, I mean. That way you will be less late from wherever you are going.”

Armband Guy let out a throaty sound that I naturally interpreted as agreement and turned on his heel, only to freeze for a moment and then turn back.

“Did you forget something?” I asked with just a hint of industrial-grade exasperation, and he gave me an unabashed nod in return.

“In case you are in possession of the documents anyway, or you may acquire them in the future by any means, I recommend you don’t read them. Or if you do… don’t think any less of Amelia because of them.”

And with that final note, he turned around again and walked away with even, unhurried steps. I, on the other hand, could only blink in surprise before raising a hand to my temple to massage it while simultaneously muttering, “Another plot hook. Lovely. Any more of those, and I will start to feel like a goddamn plot-carp during plot-fishing season.”

Part 3

How come elevator music is always so boring? I know, I know; not exactly an astoundingly meaningful question shining a ray of intellectual light through the impermeable fog enshrouding the true nature of reality or such, but that doesn’t automatically make it any less valid. I mean, soft jazz wasn’t exactly my favorite genre to begin with, but I was pretty sure it had better tracks than the auditory equivalent of watching paint dry coming from the ceiling of this elevator. No, wait, I take that back. I would rather watch paint dry than listen to this thing quietly seeping out of the speakers above me.

Maybe it was so that people would want to vacate the premises as soon as possible, and thus speed things up for the passengers who wanted to get on? Or maybe it was one of those old-timey things, like how when escalators were first invented, people were so afraid of them they had people whose entire job was to hand out free drinks as rewards for the people who dared to take a ride? Maybe it was supposed to relax people back then, or failing that, make them so bored they would fall asleep and thus wouldn’t be terrified of the dreadful metal box ferrying them between floors.

This train of thought of mine was regrettably fated to never reach my thought station, as a soft ping alerted me to the fact that I have reached my destination. The elevator door slid aside with a quiet whirring noise, revealing the by now familiar long corridor leading to Lord Grandpa’s office. This time around all the side-doors were all closed shut and the whole place was eerily quiet, but it didn’t really change the ambiance of the area too much. More importantly, at the other end of the hallway I could already see a familiar face, so I made my way over to him without any further ado.

“Good afternoon, Mr. Dunning,” the bearded artificer of possibly Scottish heritage greeted me with a tight-lipped smile that didn’t quite reach his eyes, and I returned the gesture with an outstretched hand in tow.

“Just Leonard will do,” I told him. He took my hand and shook it without any reservations. “Can I call you Gowan?”

“Certainly,” he confirmed as he let go of my hand. “Are you here to visit the Lord as well?”

“That’s the plan. Is there a problem?”

“No, he just already has a guest inside. I’m also here to meet him; we need to discuss some things about the symposium.”

“Speaking of which, is there any news on when it will be held?” I asked as a form of small-talk, as it was only polite to follow up on a topic already offered.

“It’s actually the very topic I have to discuss with Lord Endymonion. Due to the lockdown the School imposed on the island, a lot of the guest speakers had to rescind their plans to attend. I hoped we could hold the symposium this week, with only the attendees already present, but the Lord also has to keep the Assembly delegation in mind before allowing such a gathering. It’s not easy.”

“I can imagine,” I noncommittally agreed with him, which he seemed to appreciate quite a bit, so I also added, “I’m still interested in attending the event, so if you have the date set in stone, please notify me.”

“Is that so? Marvelous!” The bearded enchanter followed up his exclamation with a belly-rumbling chuckle and he seemed to be equal parts relieved and excited by the prospect. “One of our key speakers couldn’t make it to the island in time, so we would be much obliged if you could fill in the gap.”

“I’m… not much of a public speaker,” I tried to excuse myself in the face of the sudden proposal, but my conversational partner’s smile only widened in response.

“Don’t worry, none of us are. So long as you can demonstrate your craft, everything else is secondary.” Gowan paused here for several seconds, glancing between the closed door in front of us and me until at last he reached some kind of resolution and he gestured for me to lean closer. “But speaking of the craft, can I ask for your opinion on something?”

I responded with an uncertain “Depends,” which he took for agreement, and he soon fished out a small object from his thick apron’s pocket.

“I’m ashamed to say, but I can’t seem to get this one to work.”

While saying so, he presented me with a trapezohedron-shaped piece of metal small enough so that he could completely wrap his thick fingers around it. Even a cursory glance told me that the item in question was enchanted, yet it was also peculiar in that the usual colorless light of magic was only flickering around it. It was like one of those old neon tube lights that really wanted to burn on, but just couldn’t quite manage to do so. While I observed it, he held the item between his thumb and index finger and began to explain what it was about.

“It’s an experimental modification I did on the common Trithemius-pattern etching array. Honestly speaking, it’s but a passion project of mine, so I didn’t dare to use School resources for my experiments, but even after years of work and numerous iterations, I just can’t seem to get the array to work. All sixteen of the cardinal points are bound, and it can interface with the carving arm just fine, but it just doesn’t seem to function at all.”

For the time being I nodded along, pretending that I had the slightest clue about what he was talking about. He also tried to hand it over to me, but I refrained from, doing so for the time being.

“I see, but before getting into the details, could you tell me what exactly is this?”

“It’s… an engraving head,” the artificer told me, apparently really surprised by my question.

“For engraving enchantment arrays?” My question earned me an increasingly skeptical nod, and since it didn’t feel particularly dangerous, I gingerly took the item from his hand. It was heavier than I thought it would be, but otherwise it was fairly unremarkable. “So you use something like this? The shape feels a little unwieldy for precision work.”

“Errrm… Normally an engraving head is set into the inscription device on the enchanter table,” he explained, looking even more uncomfortable than before. “Could it be that you don’t use one?”

“I can’t say I do,” I responded absent-mindedly as I observed the pointy metal whatchamacallit in my hand. “But now that you mention it, I think I have seen one of these enchanting tables you speak of.”

That was, of course, through Far Sight, but that was an irrelevant detail entirely beside the point. Anyhow, it seemed that there was something wrong with this particular piece, but I couldn’t tell anything more than that from observing it from the outside. However, before I would dive in, there was one thing I had to make clear.

“For the record, I’m only going to take a look and see if I can find anything weird. I’m still recovering, so I’m not doing any manipulation work.”

“I… didn’t expect that you would,” the amicable artificer told me with a reassuring smile, though his smaller gestures still betrayed the fact that he was suddenly very skeptical about my abilities.

I didn’t let it get to me. Instead, I raised the enchanted item in question to my eye-level, and after fixing my gaze onto it, I used one of the phantom limbs to dive into it. For a moment I wondered what would have happened if I used both, but then I already found myself inside the non-Euclidian representation of the enchantment. That was surprising, as typically this took subjective ages, yet this time I made it in before I even knew it.

I quickly found the enchantment by looking around (in a certain sense of the word), and it was… weird, but not in the usual way. At the moment my disembodied point of view was inside what felt like a large sphere. Not a spherical cavern, but more like walking on a globe turned inside out, where I walked on the inner surface. It was kind of as if I was staring at the reflections on one of those large, mirror-shined bearing-balls, except from the inside. As for what was ‘reflected’, there were a series of glowing nodes around me, all interconnected by various tendrils of solid light. I tried to take a closer look, but when I moved, it felt like the whole scenery shifted around me. Distant nodes started out huge, grew smaller as I got closer, then at one point they seemed to ‘snap’ into boring old Euclidian geometry and grew in apparent size until I practically bumped into them.

I spent a while familiarizing myself with the place, but once I overcame the initial confusion, the whole thing kind of came together, and as I began to poke around with my ethereal extra limbs, the enchantment began to make sense to me. In fact, it made a lot of sense. Normally at this stage I would have been running around and trying my best to find a grip on something so that I could begin to unravel whatever enchantment was in front of me, but this one… this one was like an open book. I have practically figured it all out already, and I barely even warmed up.

In fact, I have probably wasted more time on adapting to the environment and trying to figure out why this particular enchantment was so easy to understand than actually ‘reading’ it, and I soon had a working theory as to why. Simply put, so far I have been operating on three kinds of enchantments: they were either non-modular constructions I had to take apart and rebuild from the ground up anyway, like the Magiformers or the communication artifacts, they were really obtuse pieces full of redundant and broken parts I had to sift through, or they were incredibly complex stuff that dealt with souls. In other words, so far I have been working on the magical equivalent of ticking mechanical watches and sports-cars running at top speed on a highway, while now I was looking at something more akin to a mystical angle-grinder.

Anyhow, once I figured out that instead of the enchantment being weird, it was my expectations that screwed with my senses, examining the internal workings of the thing in front of me became borderline relaxing. I spent some time tracing the various connections while moving from one node to the next, I ascertained what each of the nodes did, what the tendrils were doing, and then based on that I came up with an educated guess as to why this thing wasn’t working as intended.

I could have probably spent some more time messing around, but I didn’t want to make Gowan wait for too long. Though there was a certain amount of time-dilation involved whenever I did this, it was somewhat unreliable, so I resolved myself to leave and promptly exited the weird space of spherical geometry that housed the nodes. It was at this point that I realized that I could have probably used my phantom limb on the curved space itself to access the enchantment as a whole, but there was no sense crying over spilled milk, so I wrote this up as yet another learning experience.

Once I was ‘out’, I blinked my tired eyes and let out a long, slightly stale breath before handing the trapezohedron back to the artificer in the company of the words, “I think I found the issue.”

“Already?” he blurted out as he took the item, all the while looking at me like I just grew another arm. Well, another visible one, I mean.

“You just have to know where to look,” I responded with a modest smile, but for some reason it still didn’t seem to inspire much confidence in him, so I promptly elaborated on the point. “You tweaked the part that is responsible for tracking the exact shape and physical location of the item being worked on, right?”

“Yes, yes I have,” he confirmed my words, his eyes suddenly alight with a sense of pleasant surprise.

“You see, this Tri-whatever array has DRM protection, and you kind of triggered it.”

“Dee… Ar-Eem?” he repeated after me, putting a lot of unnecessary emphasis on each syllable.

“It’s an acronym that stands for ‘digital rights management’… or in this case, maybe ‘magical rights management’ would be more accurate? Let’s call it MRM then.” My answer apparently didn’t make any sense to him, so tried my best to explain the problem to him. “Listen, the entirety of the array uses a nested system, where each subsystem locks together, and the interlocking parts form an independent array around the functional parts. If the entire thing is reproduced perfectly, then the interlocking part also works, which then allows the core array to work. However, when you change any of the subsystems, like the one responsible for scanning the object, or the one that projects the blueprint to be engraved, it also causes changes to the interlocking parts. This breaks the MRM array, which creates a feedback loop in the central control array, and then poof, you have a bricked enchantment.”

“So, what you are trying to say is that the Trithemius-array is… resisting modifications?”

“It would be more accurate to say that it was purposefully designed to break down if someone tried to tamper with it,” I corrected him, and I only just realized that the artificer was about as dejected as if I just took his puppy away.

“Are you sure about this?”

“Yeah, it’s pretty obvious when you look at the way the various elements of the array come together. It’s kind of like a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle. Pretty ingenious, if you ask me.”

“If that’s true, then… Wouldn’t that mean that I have wasted my years trying to modify it?”

“From a pessimistic point of view, I suppose it would,” I told him, but then softened the blow by adding, “On the other hand, now that you know about the sub-array, it shouldn’t be too hard to crack it.”

“Crack?” Gowan muttered in an apparent daze, and seeing that there were signs of him slipping into a thousand-yard-stare, I decided to soften things a bit further.

“You know what? Let’s make a deal. One of these days, when I have some free time, you give me a tour of your facilities and show me how you work with enchantments, and in return, I will help you circumvent the protection on this array of yours.”

“That sounds… reasonable,” he granted me, finally looking slightly less rattled, but then he raised the subject of our conversation to his eye level and gave it a long, hard stare while he absent-mindedly stroked his beard. In the end he shook his head and pocketed the trapezohedron, after which he looked me in the eye and asked, “If I may ask, what kind of technique did you use to inspect the enchantment array? I didn’t see you cast a spell, so—”

All of a sudden, the friendly artificer’s eyes opened wide as saucers, but he didn’t say anything else, so I had no other choice but to prompt him with a cautious “So… what?”

“Do you, perchance, possess the Oculus of Trismegistus?”

I instinctively blurted out a confused, “The what of whom?”, but then my brain quickly caught up with my mouth, and I hastily amended, “I mean, whatever that is, I can guarantee I don’t have it. Absolutely. Scout’s honor. ”

My conversational partner was visibly stumped for a second, but then I could practically see the cartoon iridescent bulb light up over his head and he leaned closer to tell me, “I understand you. Let’s pretend I never asked that question,” in a conspiratorial whisper.

“I would very much like to do that,” I acquiesced, at which point the artificer let out a long sigh that hovered somewhere between relieved and excited.

“As for your request, I would be honored to show you our department’s enchanting apparatus. I’m certain we can learn much from each other.”

“Oh, I’m sure of it…”

At this point there was a long lull in the conversation, and I had a sneaking premonition that I might have just created yet another misunderstanding, but considering how things have turned out, I was sure that if I tried to correct this man’s misconceptions, they would only lead to even more annoying shenanigans. For now, I took solace in the knowledge that I managed to secure an opportunity to visit the workshops. Or rather, a visit with someone who could actually explain what each and every magitech doodad could do. Just getting to the workshops with Phasing wasn’t that big of a deal, but getting an eager tour guide was a different matter entirely.

In the meantime Gowan looked like he wanted to say something else, but before he could do so, we were alerted by a creaking sound as the door in front of us opened a crack.

Not a moment later, I found myself looking at a new face. The young girl on the other side of the door blinked in surprise, then stared at me with wide-open eyes. I returned the gesture and spent a second looking her over from head to toe. At first glance, she looked to be a middle-schooler, give or take a year, but she was surprisingly tall for her age. She wore a long, loose blue dress richly embroidered around the hems, plus some kind of thin shawl of the same color around her neck. Her long, wavy brown hair was loosely tied in the back, and she had a light chestnut complexion with a pretty face only marred by a somewhat prominent hook nose.

Overall, she was quite attractive, though certainly not ‘Josh’s love interest’ attractive. I would have also been quite surprised by her appearing from the old mage’s office, except I wasn’t because I cheated and took a look with Far Sight well before I came down here. In fact, the only really interesting thing about her was the thick thread of magical light coming out from the top of her head and vanishing at (and most likely, through) the ceiling, but that was a detail for another time.

“Oh… Oh my gosh! Sorry, I didn’t know you were waiting out here!” she exclaimed with a high-pitched, girlish voice, following which she took a large step back and opened the door wide. “Come in!”

It took nearly inhuman effort, but I successfully stopped my facial muscles from twitching, and instead I sent a glance at the artificer at my side. Gowan was a little slow on the uptake, but at last our eyes met, and he hurriedly gestured towards the entrance.

“You can go first. I have time.”

I curtly thanked him for the courtesy and walked inside, and the girl unexpectedly followed right after me and closed the door behind her.

“Hello, old man,” I greeted the Arch-Mage sitting behind his desk. He wasn’t exactly a spring chicken to begin with, but right now he looked about a decade older than the last time I saw him in the flesh. Or maybe it was just the contrast with the outwardly youthful girl in the room?

Speaking of which, she was unabashedly staring at me, even going as far as to lean left and right to get a better look, and before the old coot could greet me back, she cut in with an amazed, “Wow, you are soooo tall!”

“I get that a lot.”

My flat response didn’t hinder her enthusiasm at all; if anything, she looked even more interested than before.

“Could it be…? Are you the famous Chimera slayer of the island?!” My poker-face was getting strained, but I still managed to give her a decently nonchalant nod, and the girl beside me practically squeed in response. “Really? Oh my gosh, I’m totally a fan of yours!”

“No autographs,” I stated emphatically before stepping up to the desk in the middle of the room and putting a folded-up piece of paper in front of Lord Grandpa. “The only person who is going to sign anything this time around is him.”

“I presume this is the requisition form I sent over to you with Pascal,” the owner of the room mused, his voice sounding so exhausted I could almost imagine him keeling over at any moment. He unfolded the page and skimmed through its contents, only to stop midway and glance at me with one eyebrow raised high. “You require the fish tank?”

“It apparently has sentimental value.”

Whether it was because of my answer or the cheeky grin that accompanied it, but I received a not at all subtle eye-roll for my trouble. The Arch-Mage might have even followed it up with some choice words, if not for the soft yet pointed cough coming from my side. By the time I looked over, the originator of the sound was back to ‘normal’ and giving me an adoring smile that made me more uncomfortable than a southern baptist at a gay parade.

“Ah, yes. Please excuse my tardiness. I am afraid I forgot to introduce you two,” the old coot said to us in a disturbingly off-key grandfatherly voice. “Leonard Dunning, this is… Errr…”

“I’m Sahi, nice to meet you!” she introduced herself in a hurry.

“Yes, that is her name,” Lord Grandpa emphasized the point with a serious expression. “She is the granddaughter of a… distant relative.”

For a moment I could see sparks flying between the two, but I naturally ignored them and tapped my finger on the desk to get the old man’s attention.

“That’s nice and all, but I’m still waiting for your signature.”

“Certainly, but I have to examine the items in detail first, so… the two of you should go over there and talk while I do so.”

“Oh, you sneaky bastard,” I muttered under my breath too softly for him to hear, but when the old guy still sent a questioning glance my way, I amended a more audible “Nothing, let’s go,” to the end of it, and gestured for the ‘granddaughter’ to follow after me.

She did so without further prompting, and it didn’t take more than a few steps for her to start talking again.

“Hey? Hey? Did you really kill a Chimera with your bare hands?”

My first instinct was to deny her words, but then a different, much stronger impulse slowly bent my lips into a small smile. I just got an idea. An awful idea. A wonderful, awfully fun idea.

“I don’t want to brag or anything, but yes, I did,” I told her with a voice so humble it would put mother Theresa to shame.

“Wow, really?!”

“I had to work with what I had on hand… which was my hand!”

That earned me a throaty chuckle which told me that ‘Sahi’ here was either trying really hard to appear affable or had a naturally terrible sense of humor. Either way, in for a penny, in for a pound; now that I started spinning this tale, I would see just how far I could take it.

“Do you want me to tell the whole story?”

“Do I ever!?” the brown girl exclaimed with unbridled interest, so I didn’t leave her waiting.

“So, you see, this Abyssal guy kidnapped my friend and took him to the school, so we mounted a rescue operation with my friends.”

“Shouldn’t it be the local Arch-Mage’s job to deal with things like that?” she innocently asked, even going as far as to slightly tilt her head to the side and put a finger on her chin. She was a pro at being cute, it seemed, but it took more than that to get to me at this point.

“I guess he was busy at the time, but you will see later. So, as I was saying, we came to the school, only to find that the whole place was crawling with Fauns! Have you ever seen one?” She shook her head, so I raised my hands high and told her, “They are thiiiis big, and they all have animal heads and they are aaaall muscle from head to toe! There was about thirty of them!”

“Thirty?” Lord Grandpa muttered in surprise, meaning he was eavesdropping on us instead of doing his job, but I paid him no attention and continued my story instead.

“And then it went from bad to worse when the Chimera showed up! It was even bigger than the Fauns, and it had six hands and eight eyes and a row of venomous fangs in his enormous maw!”

“Oh my gosh, really?!”

“Really!”

“Really really?!”

“Really really really!”

“Wooow! What then? What happened?”

“You see, I told my friends to hold back the Fauns while I squared off against the Chimera. We traded blows for a while, and we were equally matched, but it became obvious that it was unlikely I would win in a contest of endurance. You see, Chimeras can not only regenerate their wounds, but they can also change their shape to adapt to their opponent!”

“That’s totally terrifying!” she exclaimed with both hands in front of her agape mouth locked open in apparent horror.

“I know, right!? So, since we were evenly matched in strength, I decided to outwit the creature. For you see, the most dangerous weapon is not the sword or the gun, but,” I paused here for a long beat, then I tapped the side of my head and finished with, “… the human mind!”

“Woooooooooooah! Then what? How did you outwit it?”

“You see, I had no weapon strong enough to kill the creature, but I still had a way to deal with it. First and foremost, I expertly lured it up to the roof of the school building. Then, I exploited the secret yet fatal weakness of all Chimeras.”

“They have such a weakness? Really?”

Considering how her ears perked up, I was now certain I had my audience hook, line, and sinker. Now I had to reel her in.

“Yes. You see, their weakness is… whistling!” This was the perfect moment for another beat, so I waited just long enough to get her to second guess me before I doubled down with, “But not just any whistling! It has to be a special, magic-infused kind of whistling! It completely drives them mad and they start flailing about like they are drunk!”

“Really? I totally didn’t know that!”

“Not many people do, but that’s where being an information broker pays dividends. You can never know when a little secret can save your life!” I waited for a moment to see if she had anything to add, but since she stayed quiet, I took it as my cue to continue. “Here comes the good part: I lured the beast near to the edge of the roof, and then had one of my friends whistle. It disoriented the creature for a while, allowing me to tackle it through the railing and so we both fell down.”

“Ohmigosh! How do you survive!?”

“You see, while I had no weapon, the earth itself can become a great weapon if you hit someone with it hard enough! Since the Chimera was still confused, I made it so that it would land first, both cushioning my fall and allowing me to deliver a vicious elbow drop on its neck, breaking it and making it so that the creature could no longer heal itself.”

“It couldn’t?”

“No. Little known fact, but the Chimera’s other fatal weakness is its spine. If you break it, its brain cannot communicate with anything downstream, and thus can’t heal there either. By breaking the neck, the Chimera is done for. Of course, breaking its neck is easier said than done, but then that’s why us Chimera Slayers are so rare.”

“Oh wow! You are so knowledgeable about Chimeras!”

“Of course! They are nearly invincible creatures of legend! No one could accidentally defeat one by just randomly falling off a building! That would be just silly!” The girl in front of me showed her agreement by repeatedly nodding her head. “However, once I stood back up, I realized that I fell right next to the Abyssal Lord who kidnapped my friend! And he even opened a gate to the Abyss, and Fauns were streaming out of it one after the other! There were at least a hundred of them!”

“A hundred!? No way!”

“Yes way! There was no end to them! For a moment I thought we were doomed, but then, all of a sudden, the Arch-Mage Lord Amadeus Endymonion appeared at the scene!”

“He did?!”/”I did?!” the two people in the room beside me echoed the same sentiment, and I responded with a huge nod and my smile slowly growing even wider, even against my best efforts to keep it in check.

“Indeed! He arrived wearing his combat-robes and his large magical staff, and he even had one of those really stylish, wide-brimmed pointy hats too!”

“No waaaaaay! No way no way no waaaaay!” the girl in front of me repeated over and over while shaking her head, probably doing her best to hide her laughter until she could suppress it.

“But wait! There’s more!” I declared while holding up a finger. “He didn’t come alone! He led a full contingent of homunculi! They were each about as tall as a Faun, and somehow even more muscular, and while they could not cast any magic, each one of them could bench-press a small car!”

“Next! What happened next?!”

“A battle of epic proportions!” I proclaimed. “The Arch-Mage dueled the dreadful Lord of the Abyss, while I, my friends, and the homunculi fought against the Faun! In the end, Lord Endymonion channeled a mighty spell, its beam splitting the darkness and forcing the Abyssal Lord into the gate! After that, the leaderless Faun were all routed in short order, with most of them running back into the gate, and only a few of them escaping into the night. True story.”

“Wow. Just wow.” There was a couple of seconds long beat after that, then, “Your story if very different from the one that I’ve heard.”

It was at this point that I took out my most affable smile and told her, “Naturally. The ‘official’ explanation is always a lot drier than reality, but such is how these things tend to work. I figured that I could tell you what really happened. I mean, you are related to the Arch-Mage, aren’t you, Sahi?”

“Yes, I totally am!” the robed girl declared with maybe a bit too much gusto.

“Sahi, my dear,” Lord Grandpa called out to us, and it sounded like he had to squeeze each word through his clenched teeth one by one. “Is it not about time you visited your grandmother upstairs? We have some business to conduct with the young mister Dunning, and I fear it may terribly bore you.”

“Aw shucks,” she grumbled aloud, all the while gesturing like it took a ton of effort to convince her. “Fine, I go.”

She didn’t need any more prodding, and she immediately turned on her heel and walked up to the door. It opened automatically when she got closer, no doubt thanks to Lord Grandpa’s intervention, but instead of going through, she turned around one last time and addressed me again.

“Thanks for the story, Leonard! It was totally amazing and stuff! Next time we meet, let me treat you to a drink!”

I gave her a shrug that could be interpreted in many ways, and hers was apparently really amusing, as she let out one last giggle before she turned around and finally left for good. As the double doors quietly swung shut behind her, I couldn’t help but let out an exhausted groan.

“Hey, old man?” I addressed the man still sitting behind his desk while ignoring the daggers he was staring at me. “Are all of the Arch-Mages scheming, annoying nuisances, or only the two of you?”

“What do you–?” he began, only to halt his words when mine finally registered with him, and then he instead stated, “You knew.”

“You mean that she was actually Arch-Mage Saahira, the leader of the Assembly investigators and your sitcom arch-nemesis? Because if that’s what you mean, then all I can say is duh.”

My completely innocent expression only made him look even worse as he let out a lung-rattling groan.

“But if you knew, then why did you tell her that tall tale?”

“What? Are you saying that I should have told her that you tried to make a deal with an Abyssal, got screwed over, they opened a portal on your home turf just to flex, and that you were so late to react that a hodgepodge group of teenagers had to come to the rescue and chase him home? Or that your way of thanks for services rendered was to create a silly conspiracy involving a mad scientist, a crazy monster huntress, and an undead Chimera? Or about how your defenses were so easy to circumvent that said mad scientist could waltz in and possibly take your precious Grimoire Key?”

“I understand your point, there is no need to belabor it,” the old coot cut in while holding his head with one hand, his elbow resting against his desk.

“What, and let you live it down? You must be dreaming,” I scoffed, but since the conversation wasn’t going anything like this, I decided to let him off the hook (for now) and asked, “More importantly, does the requisition form check out?”

“It certainly is not more important, but yes, it is unquestionably accurate. I will see to it that the listed items would be delivered to the specified location by tomorrow evening.”

“I’m glad to hear that. I will contact you if I need anything else. Goodbye.”

I flashed the man a toothy smile and was about to leave as well, but I was stopped by a new question.

“How did you know it was Saahira?” He looked like he wanted to say more, so gestured for him to continue, at which point Lord Grandpa stated, “No one, not even the other senior members of the Assembly knew that she succeeded with her experiments and transferred her consciousness to a new body. What gave her identity away?”

I gave the old man a long, vigilant look, but since he seemed entirely serious, I could no longer help but let out the hearty chuckle that has been tickling my throat for a while.

“What do you mean ‘transferred her consciousness’? She is just remote-controlling a body from upstairs!”

“She… she is?”

“Yeah. Obviously.”

“And how do you know that?”

“I have my ways.”

I shrugged with a mocking smirk on my lips, which he mostly ignored in favor of asking one of those really clichéd stock questions.

“Leonard Dunning… Just who exactly are you?”

Luckily enough, since this was a question I have expected to pop up sometime in the future, I have prepared several fitting, snappy one-liners for the occasion. I just had to pick the right one… which proved to be harder than expected.

“I’m… just your friendly neighborhood information-broker?”

That… wasn’t nearly as impressive as I hoped it would be, so in a last-ditch effort, I also added, “Oh, and also an alleged master-illusionist. Can’t forget that.”

And with that, I hastily snapped my finger and immediately Phased out of the room. Now, I admit that doing this was pretty much my default exit strategy at this point, but as they say, if it’s not broken, don’t fix it.

…

Note to self: come up with better one-liners. Preferably before everyone gets used to my disappearing act.