The Simulacrum - Chapter 73~ Part 1

“Here, let me show you again. First, you point one foot where you want to go, and then use the other like this to push against the ice, and presto! You’re skating!”

To demonstrate, I kicked off with my right leg, propelling myself towards my girlfriends, changing my direction at the last moment so that I drew a full circle around them before coming to a halt in the front. It was pretty elegantly done if I say so myself, and while I wasn’t expecting applause, the ‘Boo!’ I received from the princess still hurt a little.

“You said you didn’t know how to skate!” my Draconic girlfriend accused me with the customary pointedly pointing finger in tow. Her other hand, incidentally, was clasping my dear assistant’s gloved fingers as they were doing their best to maintain their balance on the ice. Normally I would’ve told her to keep it down, but the ice skating rink wasn’t exactly crowded, and I doubted the placeholders minded her.

Speaking of which, our anniversary group date proceeded swimmingly right until we reached the crown jewel of the occasion. Thanks to my preparations, the Knights remained passive (and sufficiently bamboozled) for the time being, the weather was surprisingly nice, the aquarium was a lot of fun, and we even got similar attires consisting of color-coded pants and jackets, complete with matching gloves and beanies. Elly was red, Judy was blue, and I was, naturally, black. They were the princess’s idea, and she prepared them specifically for this occasion. Everything proceeded swimmingly, and we were all having a great time… right until we got onto the ice, that is.

“I swear, I never put on skates until today,” I told them, but my excuses fell on deaf ears.

“Then how can you do that?”

Judy’s question made me raise a confused brow, so she indicated my feet, and I only just realized that I was skating backwards while matching their (admittedly pretty slow) tempo as they clumsily circled the rink.

“It’s… actually really intuitive?” I told her in return. “It’s kind of like riding a bike.”

“People can’t ride a bike on their first try,” my other girlfriend pushed on with a pout on her lips.

“They can’t? I mean, you know my condition, right? I didn’t even know I had a bike until Josh told me about it a while back, but when I tried riding it for the first time, I had no problem whatsoever.”

My girlfriends gave me nearly identical critical looks, and they were soon followed by Judy asking, “Chief, are you sure the ‘S.’ in your middle name doesn’t stand for ‘Sue’?” I probably looked quite confused at the moment, because she soon amended, “As in, Gary Sue.”

It still took me a second to get her reference, but then I immediately rolled my eyes with extreme prejudice and told her, “The proper term is ‘Gary Stu’, and no, it isn’t. Also, please stop contributing to the pop-cultural dilution of the trope and focus on your balance instead.”

As if on cue, my dear assistant immediately slipped and, because they were holding hands for safety, she was about to pull the princess down as well. Fortunately for them, they were in the company of an uncrowned master of the delicate art of girl-catching, so I promptly closed the distance and grabbed hold of their free hands, and with a small tug, I managed to right them both before they could tumble.

“Easy there. Are you guys all right?”

“Yes. I just lost my footing for a moment,” Judy stated in a sheepish yet at the same time still deadpan voice.

“Let’s take this slow. How about we go a couple of circles around the rink and you practice your gliding?”

Both of the girls nodded pretty much in unison, but when I tried to let go of them, I found that they were holding onto my hands like their lives depended on it.

“Chief, I think it would be better if you taught us how to do it,” my dearest assistant proposed, and my other girlfriend showed her agreement with a series of hearty nods. At first I wanted to turn them down, figuring we must’ve looked pretty darn silly at the moment… but then again, we only had placeholders around us, and I was holding hands with two pretty girls, so why did I even care?

“Sure, that’s why we’re here. Let’s make sure you got the basics down pat, and then once you feel confident, we can horse around a bit. We have the time.”

Saying so, I began to gently guide them along the railing surrounding the circular rink, making sure we wouldn’t bump into any of the placeholders idling on the ice while I instructed them. Well, okay, ‘instructed’ might’ve been a little misleading, as I was about as clear on the technique as I was about quantum mechanics, but I figured as long as I led by example and made sure they wouldn’t fall over, things would work out.

Unfortunately, skating really didn’t agree with my girlfriends, as it took us a whole loop around the spacious, ice-covered indoor field before they stopped nearly toppling over every two steps. Or rather, glides, but that was beside the point. Honestly, I had no idea why they had so much trouble with this. I mean, Judy wasn’t particularly athletic, but she wasn’t exactly a klutz either, and considering the princess was both a tennis champion and she also practiced martial arts, I’d have figured she’d have a better sense of balance. But then again, she was also occasionally really clumsy in a cute way, and now Judy was also following suit, even letting out adorable little noises when she was about to lose her footing. I couldn’t help but wonder; was this that thing people on the internet called ‘moe’?

Anyhow, it took some time and lots of patience (mostly on their part, as I was having a lot of fun just by watching their reactions), but before long, they finally learned the ropes, and during the last round they didn’t even need my help to keep them on their feet anymore.

“You’re doing great, girls. How about you do a few practice loops around the rink on your own?”

My girlfriends weren’t exactly confident at first, but after some more encouragement, they let go of my hands. I was prepared for some hijinks and primed my trusty girl-catching reflexes, just to be safe, but they thankfully remained steady. Well, okay, the word ‘steady’ might’ve been overselling things a little, but at least they no longer looked like they were three seconds away from some canned audience laughter and wah-wah music.

I watched over them, casually skating around them until they finished their first unassisted round trip around the edge of the ice, and once I was sure they could safely glide on their own, I told them, “Allrighty! You two should keep practicing. I’ll be right back.”

“Where are you going?” Judy inquired as she came to a stop, and the princess followed suit. Not that she had much of a choice in the matter, mind you, considering they were still holding each other’s hands. I was fairly sure they didn’t need to anymore, but maybe it gave them a sense of security?

In any case, I came to a halt in front of them and said, “I don’t know about you, but I’m a little chilly, so I figured I’d go and get something warm to drink. I’m pretty sure I saw a food court on our way in.”

“You can’t do that,” my dear assistant declared right away.

“Why? I’m pretty sure you can take drinks into the rink. I’ve seen other people with—”

“No, not that,” Judy cut me off in a hurry and conspicuously glanced around. “If you leave now, the moment you’re out of sight, a group of men is going to come over and start hitting on us. Well, maybe not on me, but they’ll certainly hit on Elly.”

“Really?” my Draconic girlfriend blurted out in surprise and she started glancing around as well.

“Certainly,” Judy affirmed with unnecessary gravitas. “It’s a cliché.”

For a moment I wasn’t sure if she was serious or not, but since she remained steadfast, I had no choice but to exhale a long sigh and tell her, “You know, Dormouse, just because it’s a common trope, it doesn’t mean it’s guaranteed to happen. Also, what do you mean they wouldn’t hit on you? Why wouldn’t they?”

“Because she’s the more attractive one,” Judy stated like it was obvious.

“Oh come on! Haven’t we already established that you’re cute? How many times do I have to reinforce it for you to believe me?”

“Yes, listen to Leo,” Elly backed me up right away. “You’re also pretty!”

I wanted to raise a brow at that unabashed ‘also’ thrown in there, but Judy beat me to the punch by stating, “According to my own boyfriend, my only two attractive features are my brain and my voice.”

“No, those are the things that I, personally, find the most attractive about you. Emphasis on the word ‘most’. It doesn’t mean you don’t have others.”

“That’s right!” Elly once again agreed with me. “You should be more confident about your looks!” This time it was my turn to agree with her, but before I could do anything more than a nod, she turned to me and asked, “Hey, Leo? What are my most attractive features?”

I sent my Draconic girlfriend a sideways glance, but considering she looked completely serious, I quickly told her, “This kind of came out of nowhere, but if I had to pick two, I’d go with your eyes and your personality.”

“By personality, do you mean her breasts?” my other girlfriend leveled the question at me, and to her, I gave a full roll of the eyes instead.

“No, I meant what I said. Not that I don’t like them, but they are lower on the priority list.” Elly let out an embarrassed giggle in response to my answer, and I decided to cut this topic short by firmly telling Judy, “Also, yes, the same applies to you. I’m quite in favor of your secondary sexual characteristics as well, but I should really get going, because if we keep standing around here discussing what makes you guys pretty any longer, one of us is going to catch a cold.”

As if to punctuate my argument, the intangible gods of timing struck again, and Judy let out a cute little sneeze.

“Point taken,” she grumbled as she sniffled, and then added, “On the off-chance that someone does hit on Elly while you’re gone, what should we do?”

“First tell them they have a terrible taste for not hitting on you as well, then make fun of them until I come back to heroically swoop in and chase them away.”

My off-handed and not at all serious answer earned me a serious nod, and before I knew it, my girlfriends started slowly gliding along while still holding onto each other. I’m not going to lie, they looked absurdly adorable while trying to clumsily put my teachings to use, but it wasn’t like I couldn’t watch them being cute together at literally any time I wanted to, so I bid a short farewell and skated my way over to the rail by the closest exit. Once I came to a halt, I opened the gate and carefully stepped onto the padded walkway leading to the shoe lockers by the kiosk where we borrowed our skates. If my memory served me right, there had to be something like a snack bar around it, so I ventured forth in search of it while making sure to take careful steps on the green felt carpet under my feet. The last thing I needed was accidentally damaging it with the blades and having to work out the reparations with the management.

Once I was inside the lobby again, I considered taking my skates off, but since the placeholders idling around didn’t bother, I figured I wouldn’t need to do so either. I made my way over to the other side, and following the signs, I soon found the snack bar I glimpsed when we entered the building.

It was a small joint, not even big enough to be called a fast-food restaurant, and it had all the warm drinks, hot dogs, burgers, and other assorted snacks one could ask for. They also had a slushy machine, which was pretty baffling, though Rinne would’ve probably appreciated it. It wasn’t exactly rush hour, but there were a couple of placeholders inside, with three people manning the counter; one of them taking orders, another flipping patties and frying fries in the back, while the third one was delivering the food to the customers, working in tandem like a well-oiled machine. The smell was also pretty tantalizing, so even though I ate with the girls at the aquarium, I decided to pick up some food as well if I was here already.

There wasn’t a line but rather a single placeholder spending way too much time on deciding what condiments he wanted, but I still waited out my turn, and it wasn’t until I was right in front of the counter that my brows slowly knit themselves into a troubled frown when I noticed that the guy on the other side was someone I was already familiar with.

“Good afternoon sir, can I take your—” It was at this point that the lanky, buck-teethed guy looked me in the eye and suddenly exclaimed, “Oh no! It’s him!”

“Who?” the large guy by the stove called out in alarm, and when he turned around, his face suddenly went pale. “Ah shit, it’s the bully!”

“Wha’? Whaaaa’?!” came the shrill voice of the small guy barely visible behind the counter, and I couldn’t decide whether I was more amused or exasperated by meeting the Goldfish Poop Gang under such circumstances.

Surprisingly, but not unexpectedly, they weren’t wearing their retro black school uniforms, sporting grey shirts and red aprons with the shop’s logo on the front, with matching red baseball caps instead. I had no idea how the big guy of the trio managed to fit his pompadour under it, but he obviously managed to do it somehow. Speaking of him, the leader at the back soon regained his wits and pointed the spatula in his hand at me.

“You! What are you doing here?! Are you here to ruin our part-time job this time?!”

“Yer’ terrible!” the small guy whined, still barely visible on the other side of the counter.

“No, I’m here as a customer,” I told him, after which I casually pointed at the stove behind him and added, “By the way, that patty’s going to get burnt.”

“Wha…? Oh, crap!”

Tony (or at least I think that was the guy’s name) turned on his heel and hastily began flipping the meat on the stovetop. In the meantime, I glanced at the guy by the register and told him, “I’d like two cups of hot chocolate, a cheeseburger, and… eh, I feel like experimenting today, so give me a cup of mulled wine.”

“Erm… Sure,” the tall Goldfish Poop Gang member (Jones, I think) nodded, but then he paused and hastily added, “Alcoholic or non-alcoholic?”

“The latter, obviously,” I scoffed back. “I’m a minor on paper, and a law-abiding citizen.”

“Uuum… sure, got it.”

I waited for them to say or do something, but once I gave them my order, all three of them refused to make eye contact with me, with the big guy, in particular, pretending that flipping burgers was the most concentration-intensive thing on the planet. As such, it fell on my shoulders to establish small-talk. I mean, these were some of the first, non-placeholder people I encountered on the day I first woke up on the island, but I never got around to mark them for Far Sight, so I was actually really curious about how they developed in the time since I last saw them.

“So, how’s it going?” I asked with my most amicable of smiles, yet all three of them shuddered in response.

“S-Sir, if you don’t want to order anything else, p-please step aside and d-don’t hold up the line,” the tall guy told me, or at least I presumed he was talking to me, as he still refused to look my way.

One skeptically raised brow later I let out a small huff, theatrically glanced at my left, then at my right, and then asked, “What line? There’s nobody else here.” The trio remained adamantly silent, so I placed my hand onto the counter and tried again. “So, since neither of us has anything better to do while I wait for my food and drinks, let me reiterate: how come you are working? Is bullying people for their lunch money no longer profitable?”

I intended that as a joke, yet after a long moment, the tall guy let out a grunt in the affirmative.

“Yeah. We… don’t do that anymore.”

“You don’t?” I asked back, and this time it was the short one who answered me.

“It wuld be bette’ to say we can’t.”

“Really? What happened?”

My innocent question must have cut deeper than I could’ve ever imagined, as the leader of the bunch angrily turned off the stove and turned to me with an indignant, “You! You happened!”

For a moment I could only blink at the guy, but since that apparently didn’t communicate my confusion clearly enough, I blurted out a flat, “What?”

“Yeah, you heard that right!” Tony huffed and puffed as he walked up to the counter and all but growled at me. “It’s your fault! Ever since you started bullying us, nobody could take us seriously anymore! I mean, what kind of delinquent gets bullied by a normie?! It made us look pathetic!”

I very nearly pointed out that they really didn’t need much help, if any, for that to happen, but I was beaten to the punch by the tall guy.

“What the boss means is that to be good at being an… um… a delinquent, I suppose, you need to be confident. You need to have a kind of… Um…”

“Swagga’,” the short guy interjected, and his gangmate gave him an appreciative nod in return.

“Yes, that’s it. Thanks Black Pepper. So, as I was saying, without our old swagger, no one took us seriously anymore.”

“And because they didn’t take us seriously, we couldn’t take their lunch money, and it’s your fault!” the big guy continued to huff, much to my exasperation, so I decided to once again channel my inner Judy.

“Oh, no. I’ve accidentally made you unable to steal from people and now you became productive members of society. Oh, the humanity. How am I going to live with myself now?”

“Aw, boss! He’s doin’ it ag’in!” the small guy exclaimed in borderline horror, to my further exasperation.

“What’s wrong with you, man!? Why do you have to bully us all the time?! What have we ever done to you to deserve this?!” The big guy moaned, his melodramatic acting putting even community theater productions of Hamlet to shame, and incidentally resulting in my furthest exasperation.

“Stop trying to guilt-trip me, it’s not going to work.” The three of them fell silent, so I let out a shallow sigh and asked, “So, since you couldn’t steal other students’ money, you had to take a part-time job?”

“Y-Yeah,” Tony confirmed with a nod. “The place belongs to Jones’s uncle, so even if you call for the management, you can’t get us fired! Don’t even try!”

“Please don’t,” the tall one added in a considerably more pleading tone.

“Ple’se?” echoed the third guy, and by this point I couldn’t stop myself from groaning even if tried.

“I’m not going to get you fired. I just want my foodstuff, and then I’ll get back to my girlfriends.”

“Oh. Really?” I gave him a nod, and Tony’s eyes lit up with a mixture of relief and desperation.  “You heard him boys! Quick, get on with it!” the big guy bellowed and he immediately turned the stove back on and started flipping patties like his life depended on it. Similarly, the other two started running around like headless chickens while preparing my drinks, and before I knew it, I had a nice bundle on the counter consisting of a neatly wrapped burger, two topped paper cups with straws sticking out of them, and a different cup filled with a dark red liquid that smelled quite sweet.

“Can you give me something I could use to carry the hot chocolate?”

Before the sentence even left my mouth, the tall guy already put the cups into a paper bag that was apparently designed specifically for this and handed it over to me. I took out my wallet, and after a moment of hesitation, I picked out a fifty Jen bill and handed it over to them.

“Here. You can keep the change.”

The three of them froze up the moment I said that and directed a series of uncertain glances at the note in the tall one’s hand.

“Is… Is it fake money?” Tony blurted out, and for a moment I didn’t know how to react to that.

“No, of course not!”

“Then… ar’ ya launderin’ money?” the short one proposed.

“No, it’s just normal money. Consider it a tip.”

“Um… Thanks?” the tall guy muttered, and for once, I flashed him a smile as I picked up my order.

“You’re welcome. Just remember: earning money with honest work is always better than stealing from others.”

The three of them nodded in unison, though they still looked more than a little skeptical about the banknote on their hands. I didn’t really care though, as my curiosity was already sated, and I had more important things to pay attention to, such as my girlfriends.

I carefully made my way back to the skating rink while considering whether the Goldfish Poop Gang’s current situation was due to the Simulacrum organically evolving, or because of some freak butterfly effect caused by my interference with them. Or maybe a combination of the two? I considered asking the girls about it, as I figured it could probably serve as a light topic while we played around, but then once I reached the ice, I froze in my tracks (no pun intended) when I found them in the crowd.

At the moment, Judy and Elly were by the railings practically at the opposite end of the field, and they were pretty much boxed in by three guys. I couldn’t make out their features, as they had their backs to me, but one of them was wearing a studded leather jacket, while another was eschewing a protective headgear in favor of showing off his silly reverse-Mohawk hairstyle. In other words, they were probably roughnecks, hoodlums, or at the very least ne’er-do-wells.

It was at this point that Judy noticed me and raised her hand over her head. When I didn’t start moving right away, she repeated the gesture, except this time with twenty percent more urgency. Needless to say, there was no force on this planet that could’ve stopped the mother of all sighs escaping my mouth, after which I stepped onto the ice and headed towards my girlfriends while wondering whether Judy ever got tired of being right all the time…