The Simulacrum - Chapter 77~ Part 2

The last lesson of the day ended with the same unceremonious finality as it tended to do every day. The rain outside eased into a light drizzle sometime after lunch, and while things were relatively peaceful (Angie’s sustained complaining about a certain TV series notwithstanding), I was feeling unusually under the weather.

“Chief? Are you spacing out?”

See, that’s what I’m talking about. I didn’t even notice Judy coming over to my desk until she spoke up. If it was the class rep with her inexplicable ninja powers, that would be one thing, but missing my girlfriend was something else entirely. Anyhow, I shook these stray thoughts out of my head and stood up.

“Don’t mind me.” I theatrically stretched my back to punctuate my point, and feeling the blood rush in my ears finally perked me a little.

“Do we have any plans for today?” the princess asked next. She already packed her bag and was waiting for me to pick up the pace, so I did just that.

“Nothing I can think of,” I told her and flung my bag over my shoulder. “I have to continue training with Cal to get my hand better, but I can get that done during the night.”

“The weather isn’t suitable for strolling, and we’re going to be gathering in the Dracis mansion tomorrow, so by process of elimination, we should hang out at the Chief’s place.”

“Movie night?” I asked, and she nodded right away. “Any recommendations?”

“Not yet, but I’ll look something up by the time we get home.”

“I have an idea. Why don’t we go to your house today?” Elly proposed out of the blue, and Judy practically froze up for a moment. My other girlfriend didn’t notice, as she added, “I don’t think I’ve ever met your dad, and I’ve only seen your mom from a distance. I think I should introduce myself.”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” my dear assistant answered in an even more deadpan tone than usual, and when the princess sent her a ‘Why?’ kind of look only missing the little red question marks circling around her head, she soon admitted, “My parents don’t know I’m going out with Leo yet. I’m still waiting for the right opportunity to tell them.”

“They don’t know? And what about me?”

While Elly was asking that, I gestured to get going, and we made our way out of the classroom. Ammy was still inside, leaving for last as usual, while the childhood friend duo was out the door the moment the bell rang and I figured they’d be downstairs and looking for Snowy. Ever since the Knight girl showed up, they’ve been ‘picking her up’ at the end of every day. I figured we’d meet them at the shoe lockers as usual.

Speaking of which, it took Judy until we nearly got there to awkwardly explain that her father was a little overprotective, so telling him that her daughter was in a polyamorous relationship at this point probably wasn’t the best idea. I once asked her at which point would it cease to be a bad idea, but she sulked for an entire morning after that, so I decided to ignore that bugbear for now.

But that was neither here nor there. More importantly, I could already see Josh, Angie, and Snowy in the entrance hall, so we quickly made our way over to the lockers as well. It was such a routine by this point that it took me until I was putting my indoor shoes back in to notice something peculiar.

“… Judy? Come here for a sec.”

“Is there a problem?” my dear assistant inquired the moment she made her way around the row of lockers.

“Maybe. I just want you to see this before I touch it. Just to avoid shenanigans.”

“Did someone say ‘shenanigans’?” Angie butted in by poking her head around the same lockers, followed by the rest of the peanut gallery.

I decided to pay no attention to them and pointed at the piece of white paper sitting at the bottom of my shoebox, and the ever-so-nosy Celestial immediately let out an excited ‘Oooh?’.

“What’s that?” Elly asked the moment she arrived, and she all but pushed me aside trying to get a better look.

“No matter how I look at it, that looks like a love letter,” Josh noted on the side, and his childhood pal vehemently agreed with a series of nods. “How many does this make? I think it’s the third.”

“If you mean a piece of paper in my shoe locker, sure, but I didn’t get a single love letter so far.”

“You didn’t?” came the sudden question from the class rep, who appeared in my blind spot like usual.

“They were both letters of challenge from Elly,” I explained, and the gawkers all nodded in acknowledgment, more or less in unison.

“So? What do you think it is this time?” Josh asked an innocent yet dangerous question, and Angie responded without a moment of thinking.

“My money is still on a love letter.” Sensing the skeptical glances surrounding her, she immediately doubled down. “What? Leo’s pretty popular! All the girls in the tennis club think he’s cool! It’s about time he gets a love letter!”

“No way!” Elly protested with a troubled frown. “There’s no way they wouldn’t know that we’re already dating, right, Judy?”

My other girlfriend remained conspicuously silent at first, but then she faced me and stated, “Please remind me to write you a secret letter one of these days. I don’t like being the only odd one out.”

“… Your priorities sound a little off,” I noted, earning me a disinterested shrug.

“It’s practically guaranteed that it’s a letter from the new girl, probably angry at you for spoiling Elly in public. There’s no point getting worked up over something silly like that.”

“Boo! At least play along for a bit!”

Angie’s protests fell on deaf ears, and I figured I should just get this over with before she actually managed to get my girlfriend worked up anyway, so I picked up the paper and unfolded it.

“What does it say?” Snowy inquired on the side, and after skimming its contents, a tired sigh forced its way past my teeth.

“It’s three for three,” I said and lowered my hand so that the rest of the group could also take a look at it.

“Meet me on the roof… things to resolve… don’t be a knave…” Ammy muttered as she read the lines, and when she reached the end of it, she looked over to the princess. She wasn’t the only one either, and I couldn’t exactly blame them. The style was eerily similar to the first letter she wrote me ages ago.

“Welp, I guess I’ll have to take care of this,” I said to no one in particular and pocketed the letter.

“Should we wait for you?” the princess inquired with a serious look in her eyes that couldn’t quite hide her ongoing confusion about why everyone was still looking at her with difficult expressions.

“No, you guys should leave before the weather turns for the worse again. I’ll catch up with you once I figure out what our stalker wants from me.”

“Stay safe,” Judy wished me well… Or was it a warning? Either way, I told her I wasn’t going to pick a fight just yet, and I waited until they pulled up their umbrellas and left the building before I pocketed my hands and began climbing the stairs.

Simply put, I couldn’t put my finger on this Penny girl. Her whole character made little sense to me. From a narrative standpoint, I mean. Her enrolling wasn’t entirely unexpected; as much as we got lost in the supernatural zaniness of the Simulacrum, at its core, the main ‘setting’ of our narrative was a high school, so her coming here was highly probable. Hell, I even expected a Knight to transfer before we even learned of her existence, so things conveniently falling in place so that she could come here to complicate our lives was not outside my predictions by any means.

What really bothered me was the fact that she felt like a watered-down version of the Princess.

A new transfer student with an agenda? Check.

Clumsy hostility towards others? Check.

High-pitched cutesy noises whenever she was embarrassed? Check.

Dropping letters into my shoebox calling me to the roof? Check.

So, here comes the million Jen question: was I overthinking this, or was the Simulacrum already reusing character archetypes? Objectively speaking, it really shouldn’t. Even if the world was procedurally generated, which wasn’t entirely out of the question, theoretically ‘plot relevant’ people tended to be at least nominally unique, and honestly? My brief and slightly terrifying forays into the bedrock system underlying the supernatural stratum of the world told me that the Simulacrum was insanely, mind-numbingly, comprehension-shatteringly complex. As in, we were talking about ‘down to the molecules’ level of complexity. Considering that, why would it, or whoever designed it, ever need to resort to such shortcuts?

The issue was further muddied by the fact that something like that wasn’t even really out of the ordinary as far as the world’s modus operandi was concerned. We had all that complexity, and yet there were so many obviously immersion-breaking things that had to be smoothed over by perception filtering, such as the unnatural cleanness of everything, or the Placeholders and everything related to them.

Actually… hold that thought for a minute. The explanation of the former, my ninja maid jokes notwithstanding, was still waiting to be found, but for the latter, Judy recently had a hypothesis: it wasn’t that Placeholders couldn’t be properly ‘simulated’, but that they purposefully weren’t to reduce the number of variables in the Narrative itself. Her idea made sense even to my nominally Narrative-agnostic sensibilities, and I had to admit that it would be a viable solution for minimizing the butterfly effect. After all, if 99.9% of the people on the island were little more than automatons going through the motions, it meant that they wouldn’t cause any unforeseen deviations that could derail ‘scenes’ or ‘scenarios’ that were set up by the Narrative.

Of course, we also knew that by pulling a Placeholder into the ‘plot’, it could result in them rapidly developing into a full-fledged person, but that just further illustrated that this most likely wasn’t a question of ‘couldn’t’ but rather a ‘designed not to’ situation. However, if I turned that on its head, wouldn’t it mean that the Knight girl wasn’t unexpectedly similar to Elly because of some kind of limitation in the simulation, but because she was supposed to be like that from the beginning?

Let’s take a step back and try to look at this from a meta-perspective. The Draconians and the Knights are set up to be unconditional enemies. My current goal was to get rid of this animosity, and I’ve been provided a convenient way to do it by using Cal. However, if we presumed that there was an ‘original script’ where I wouldn’t get into a relationship with Elly and instead she would enter into Josh’s entourage, the presence of the sword and it acting like a ‘get out of jail free’ card would suddenly fall into a different light.

In short, it was entirely possible that Cal was convenient for resolving the conflict because it was designed as a plot McGuffin for that purpose from the very beginning. Let’s say in a hypothetical scenario, Josh picked Elly and got into her ‘scenario’. Knights attack, Penny transfers, et cetera. Bloodshed would be inevitable, but frankly speaking, the ‘plot’ seemed to be on the light-hearted side of things; so far the only person who ever got injured in our group was me, and mainly because I was more or less directly butting heads with whatever plot or subplot the world was throwing my way. So, how could Josh resolve the situation without bloodshed and while staying on the rails of the plot? The answer was obviously our favorite bootleg Excalibur and them making their wielder into the ill-defined ‘King of Knights’.

This would naturally mean that I more or less totally stole his role in this particular plot, but there’s more: one of my biggest headaches was the fact that, even if I could claim to be the new ‘King’, I would still have to strong-arm the rest of the Knights into abandoning their centuries-old feud with the Draconians, but what if I was overthinking this? If I presumed that Cal exists to set up the possibility, it’s entirely possible that there are other ‘plot points’ already established by the Narrative to enable the protagonist (in this case, me, I suppose) to succeed in brokering peace.

So… what if this Penny wasn’t similar to Elly because ‘oh, look, the Simulacrum is so kooky’, but because she was deliberately set up to be so? My five cents would be that they were supposed to interact in school, without the princess being aware of her being a Knight, and then realize that they are not so different, potentially leading to a friendship to pave the road of peace between the two factions. It’s a cliché, but a pretty good one, if you ask me. Too bad it’s a non-starter at this point, as the princess obviously knows she’s a Knight, while Penny hates her guts for being close to her big brother or what have you. Add in some potential brocon tendencies, and it’s like a powder keg waiting for the spark to ignite it.

That said, at the moment this was still just a hare-brained idea of mine, but it would certainly explain why the personalities and behavior of these two were so similar. Ah, speaking of similar…

“Oh, come on! Open already!”

I came to a halt at the last bend of the stairwell leading to the rooftop access, and what a surprise! I found a certain redhead vehemently trying to pry the locked door leading to the roof open. Oh, and now she even kicked it.

The word déja vu surfaced in my mind, but I quickly chased it away and cleared my throat instead. The moment I did so, the girl at the top of the stairs shuddered and then hurriedly turned around. Considering the situation, I primed my vaunted girl-catching reflexes, just in case, and when our eyes met, she immediately averted her gaze with a slightly flushed face.

“Brother, you’re here… I’m afraid that door to the roof is locked,” she muttered, but then she soon remembered why we were here in the first place and she faced me again with a fiery scowl. “Never mind, we can talk here too!”

“We sure can,” I agreed, and for a second or two I hesitated whether I should walk up to her or not, but considering that we could communicate just fine from this distance, I figured I’d best stay out of arm’s reach for the time being.

But more importantly, the Knight girl remained silent on the top of the stairs and continued to glare at me for a while, and when I didn’t respond, she suddenly blurted out, “Brother, I can’t approve of your conduct!”

“… I’m sorry, but could you be a bit more particular?”

“I’m talking about the lengths you go to maintain your cover,” she told me in a hiss. “I can’t bear to look at you pretending to be lovers with that idiotic girl anymore!”

“First off, she’s a little silly at times, but certainly not ‘idiotic’. More importantly though, I’m not pretending.”

“No, you don’t—” she began, only for her vehement words to come to a sudden stop as she narrowed her eyes. “What are you talking about?”

“We are actually dating,” I clarified with an earnest look. “As in, for real.”

“W-W-Whaaaat?!” Her uncomprehending cry echoed for several seconds in the empty stairwell, and once she recollected her wits, she pointed an accusatory finger at me that once again reminded me of a certain lovely dragon-girl in her early, somewhat over-the-top phase. “I don’t believe you! You cannot date a wyrmblood!”

“I’m doing it anyway,” I answered in a neutral tone, but it only seemed to make her even more agitated.

“Come back to your senses, Leo! Even if she somehow ensnared you—”

“She didn’t. We just love each other,” I told her frankly, but I once again only managed to enrage her even further.

“D-Doesn’t matter! Even if she seduced you, the moment she learns you are one of us, she will turn on you! Don’t you understand!?”

“She already knows though.”

“… She does?”

“Yep.”

Hearing that gave her a long pause, but she quickly doubled down by declaring, “T-Then once her family learns of it, you are done for! Turn back before it’s too late and you doom yourself!”

“They also know,” I pointed out, and then added, “and they are fine with it.”

“N-No way! That’s impossible! You must be under some kind of…” Her eyes suddenly opened wide and she redoubled the intensity of her finger-pointing as she declared, “It must be that Abyssal Seducer who messed with your mind! There’s no way the brother I know would say something like that! It must be that tart’s fault!”

I had a feeling this conversation was going nowhere fast, but I pretty much expected this from the very beginning. Still, I had to at least try and resolve some of the misunderstandings.

“No, Snowy didn’t do anything of the sort, and she’s definitely not a ‘tart’. I adopted her because she had a rough family background and she had nowhere to go, so I’d appreciate it if you didn’t insult my sister like that.”

“But she’s not your sister! I’m your sister!”

“Speaking of which, there’s one more thing we should—”

“And as your true sister, I can’t let this go on anymore!”

My plan was to tell her about my amnesia at this point and use it as an opportunity to explain the circumstances to her, but the angry redhead didn’t allow me the chance, as she stomped her way down the stairs and grabbed hold of my hand. Her grip was actually strong enough where it was a bit uncomfortable.

“You’re coming with me now! There is something obviously wrong with you, and we have to talk to the rest of the Brotherhood before they declare you a traitor!”

“The situation is not that black and white,” I tried to object, but I couldn’t really get a word in as she began to drag me along, so I had no choice but to forcefully yank my hand out of her grasp. “Cut it out, will you, and listen to me for a moment!”

She, naturally, didn’t do that, but instead she turned on her heel to face me again with a shocked look on her face.

“You… You’re really refusing to cooperate…” she muttered as if it was a huge shock to her.

“How about you listen to my side of the story first?” I proposed, but she instantly shook her head before I even got a chance to elaborate.

“No! No way! I can’t let you justify yourself! I can’t let you become a traitor!” Yelling so, she once again pointed at me and suddenly declared, “As the Unicorn Knight, I have ascertained that you and I are now in irreconcilable opposition! By the laws of the Brotherhood, I request a fair duel of Arbitration to resolve these differences!”

“Hey, whoa, hold on! Why the hell are you immediately jumping to…?!” Before I could finish my sentence, I noticed that she started glowing. More alarmingly, so did I, and after a couple of seconds, the colorless magical light faded away, leaving a heavy, throbbing sensation in my chest. That probably wasn’t good.

“Don’t worry, brother! I will make you see the light and abandon these foolish delusions!”

Proclaiming so, the Knight girl let out a loud huff and, without any further ado, she dashed down the stairs, leaving me alone and quite flabbergasted by the sudden turn of events. I expected that this whole ‘Arbitration’ thing would show up sooner or later. I mean, we lived in a battle harem kind of setting, so if a system of honorable duels like that was established, it would’ve been weirder if it didn’t get used at some point. However, I honestly wasn’t expecting it to happen before I even revealed myself as the owner of Cal. More alarmingly, just the challenge itself induced some kind of reaction in my body, and while it wasn’t exactly painful, it was still uncomfortable, kind of like a light heartburn.

Anyhow, there was no point crying over spilled milk. On the bright side, my challenger marked herself for Far Sight just now, so at least now I could keep an eye on her. It wasn’t much of a silver lining, but better than nothing.

More importantly, this sudden and frankly unexpected development required a quick response, so I reached into my breast pocket and quickly dialed my assistant on the phone.

“Chief? Did something happen?”

“Yeah. I was blind-sided by a plot-hook.”

“That sounds troublesome,” my deadpan girlfriend stated on the other side, and I let out a sigh in agreement.

“It is. Emergency meeting at my place. Bring Elly, I’ll get Cal. I’m afraid movie night is canceled today…”