The Simulacrum - Chapter 81~ Part 4

My room was, unexpectedly, quite lively when I arrived home. The lights were still on despite how late it was, and both Judy and Elly were in front of the PC. They were watching funny animal videos by the looks of it, the universal language of wasting time. Go figure.

“Hi girls, I’m back.”

My girlfriends glanced away from the screen in unison and Judy sprung to her feet not a moment later.

“Welcome home, Chief. Do you know what time it is?”

“I little past eleven, I think?”

“It’s eleven-thirty-seven, to be precise,” she stated, and the moment she got into arm’s reach, she began patting me down, starting from my head.

“Dormouse? What exactly are you doing?”

“Just checking if you still have all of your bits attached at their proper places.”

In the meantime, the princess also came closer and scrutinized my face.

“You look much better than the first time you came home. How do you feel?”

“Same as before. Seriously, girls. I swear it just looked bad from the outside; I’m perfectly fine.”

“You’re still a little pale,” Elly said as she clasped my cheeks in her hands, reaching over my busy assistant. “Your skin is cool too. Are you sure you’re fine?”

“Yes, I am,” I stressed and gently removed her hands. I also pushed Judy back a little, because the way she was patting my chest was getting a little too suggestive for my liking.

“Your complexion says otherwise, but considering the last two times something like this happened, maybe it’s not that bad?” Elly pondered with a finger on her lips.

“He did look really bad at the end of the duel,” Judy stated a tad grudgingly, and the princess acknowledged her with a big nod.

“If you say so, then I suppose it must be true. You did scream out in surprise after all.”

“Wait, can we rewind that a bit? What was that about screaming out?” I interrupted before the conversation could move on, and my two girlfriends gave me polar opposite reactions.

“Yes, she did,” Elly told me with a grin and she pantomimed putting on a pair of glasses. “She was sitting over there, and all of a sudden she let out an ‘Eeep!’ and almost dropped the artifact.”

“I did no such thing, and I certainly didn’t drop the glasses,” Judy responded quite emphatically, but I was already caught up in the scene in my head.

“Hold your horses! She let out an ‘Eeeep’?” Elly nodded. “As in, and actual, surprised, high-pitched ‘Eeeep’?” She nodded again, and I couldn’t help but click my tongue in frustration. “Damn, I totally missed a rare event! You didn’t happen to have a photo of it? Or maybe even a video?”

“Chief, stop making fun of me, or I’ll hate you,” my sulkier girlfriend told me on no uncertain terms, and I conceded without much resistance.

“It’s a shame, but fine. So, did anything noteworthy happen since the last time I was home?”

“Joshua took Angeline home, Amelia is sleeping in Neige’s room with Ichiko, and you missed some drama,” my dear assistant explained, immediately perking my interest.

“Drama? What kind of drama?”

“The mostly benign kind,” she stated with a shrug. “Amelia came out of the closet.”

“Don’t say that! Leo’s going to misunderstand!” Elly cut in by literally clamping a hand onto the other girl’s mouth.

“What was that again? Coming out of the closet?”

“It was a misunderstanding! A wrong choice of words! You really, really don’t need to worry about it!” the princess insisted with suspicious vehemence, but she looked really desperate, so I decided to humor her.

“Fine, I won’t pry. So, what exactly happened?”

“One thing led to another, and Amelia confessed that she’s not like other girls,” Judy told me through the fingers still on her face.

“He’s still going to misunderstand if you say it like that,” Elly grumbled and removed her, in retrospect meaningless, hand.

“Wait, are you telling me the class rep told everyone she’s a homunculus?”

“Precisely,” my dear assistant nodded and sent my other girlfriend a ‘See, I knew he’d get it’ kind of look.

“Really? Well, that’s surprising. I thought that mystery was going to hang over our heads for a while longer. Or at the very least until a suitably dramatic moment presented itself.” I mused. “So? Have we finally learned why being a homunculus is such a big deal?”

“Not at all.”

“Seriously? Still nothing?” Judy looked just as annoyed by this as I was, so I turned to the princess and inquired, “Elly? What do you think about Ammy being a homunculus?”

“It’s… errr… It’s unexpected?” she blurted out after some thinking. “I don’t know much about homunculi, but it doesn’t feel that strange to me. I mean, Ammy is still Ammy, right? It doesn’t really change who she is, but… she felt the need to keep it a secret, so it must be important. I think. I’m not sure…”

I waited for her to collect her thoughts, but she didn’t say anything else. Instead, it was Judy who dryly stated, “Chief, I’m afraid she’s too contaminated by us to provide an unbiased perspective.”

“I can hear as much,” I uttered and gently patted the confounded princess on the back to reassure her. “So, what exactly happened? Why did the class rep go out of her way to confess?”

“I’m not sure,” Elly answered with a frown. “At first Josh was talking about what happened in the park, but then we somehow ended up discussing secrets, and she just followed it up from there.”

“Was it contrived?” I asked Judy, and after some thinking, she shrugged.

“Hard to tell. I suspect some narrative influence, but it didn’t feel too forced.”

I nodded along. It was entirely possible that Ammy being a homunculus was somehow related to the plot of this world, and it being known was a plot-point or plot-device or plot-whatever. Since I unwittingly interrupted the event between Josh and Sahi, where it was supposed to be revealed ‘naturally’, maybe our nefarious Narrative fudged things to make it common knowledge anyway. I’d call that sloppy, but to be honest, with its track record, it wasn’t even especially noteworthy as far as contrivances were concerned.

“You also missed Josh’s rousing speech after the reveal,” Judy noted on the side, drawing my wandering attention back to her.

“He likes to deliver those every once in a while, doesn’t he?”

“It was sweet,” Elly added with a smile. “She told Ammy that it doesn’t matter, and that we’re all the same, and that we all live, love, and laugh the same way.”

“… Did he seriously say ‘live, love, laugh’?” I asked a tad incredulously, and the princess nodded at once.

“That was the gist of it,” Judy said, and I couldn’t help but sigh.

“I know that I shouldn’t throw the first stone, considering I’ve said something similar in a conversation not too long ago, but there should be a limit to how clichéd he could be, protagonist or not.”

“Something similar?”

“Broadly speaking,’ I admitted to Judy a touch sheepishly. “My speech had high-caliber amour piercing bullets in it though.”

“Of course it did. I expected nothing less from you, Chief.”

“Thank you, I’m doing my best,” I answered with fake modesty.

“We told you what happened here. Now it’s your turn,” the princess insisted and pulled me towards the bed. Judy followed suit, and all three of us sat down.

Once everyone was comfortable, I took a deep breath and summed up the events leading up to the present, from the duel and the meeting until the discussions I had with Fred and the four Knights. The girls listened to me intently, and even though they obviously had a lot to comment upon, they waited until I finished telling my tale before they voiced them.

“So your secret plan was to capture all the Knights and gather them at one place,” Judy noted while typing without even looking at her phone screen. “I’ve expected that much, but trying to completely dismantle The Knightly Brotherhood of the Most Heroic Bloodlines and to integrate them into a brand new organization was beyond my predictions. I thought you’d be fine with just taking their things and locking them up.”

“That’s just a recipe for them escaping and coming back to haunt us at an inopportune moment,” I reasoned. “This way they would no longer pose a threat to Elly and, by proxy, us, and we can even get some use out of them. They stay alive and well, we get some peace and some new pieces to move around on the board. Win-win.”

“I’m not entirely sure how I feel about all this,” the princess spoke up with a troubled expression. “I understand why you did it, and how, but… I can’t imagine how we could work with the accursed Knights. It sounds impossible to me.”

“Don’t worry, I’ll make sure it works out.” For emphasis, I put my hand around her waist and pulled her closer while I used my other hand to gesture. “Imagine this: a world where there are no more pesky antagonistic Knights trying to attack you. You’d no longer have to keep moving from place to place, or you could travel in the open without having to be constantly on guard. You could do anything you want, or become anything you want. You could even fulfill your wildest dreams!”

It took her a couple of seconds to digest that, but then my draconic girlfriend’s face lit up with recognition.

“You mean… I could sing? On the stage?”

“Sure you can! Maybe not right away, but once we collected all of the rogue Knights skulking around the place, there’ll be no reason to limit yourself to just background vocals.”

Elly’s eyes opened wide, and then she threw herself at me (at least as much as sitting next to each other allowed her) and caught me in a bear-hug, accompanied by an excited squee.

“So you’ve dismantled an ancient organization just to make her happy,” Judy noted on the side. “When are you going to do something like that to me?”

“Well, Dormouse, if you have any shadowy group of baddies trying to make your life difficult, just say the word, and I’ll take care of them.”

My dear assistant gave me an odd look and said, “I don’t think I have anything like that at the moment, but if I did, you’ll be the first to know.”

She gave me a clumsy wink, probably to signify that she was only teasing me. Not that I couldn’t recognize it already. More importantly, she soon moved on and patted my other girlfriend on the shoulder to congratulate her. In the meantime, I pondered on the next topic, and while it wasn’t very serious (or plausible), I figured it couldn’t hurt to bounce the idea off the girls, just to avoid any blind spots.

“Putting the Knight situation aside for a moment, I’ve had this silly notion occur to me not too long ago, and I wonder what you guys think about it.” Once I said that, they both perked up, though the princess still couldn’t wipe the blissful smile off her face. “Here it goes: so, we’re all clear on what resources I have at the moment, right?”

“You have us, the Fauns, then I suppose you have the family, and now you have the accursed Knights,” Elly counted off using her fingers for emphasis.

“There’s also the base itself, Robatto, and the Kage clan,” Judy added.

“Oh, right, I completely forgot about the ninjas.”

“That’s how ninjas are,” Judy told my other girlfriend with a knowing nod. “They are dangerous because they hide so well you forget they even exist.”

“On a more serious note,” I cut in, “I’m wondering if taking all of these organizations under a single umbrella might cause the Narrative to go haywire, especially if Fred’s telling the truth and we’ll also get a Research Society division in our base too.”

“It’s hard to tell, but I wouldn’t be surprised,” Judy commented with the tiniest of thoughtful frowns on her face. “What exactly do you have in mind?”

“… So, this might sound silly, but could I get designated as a villain?”

I expected a contemplative silence, but instead, the princess let out a “Pffft!” as she barely managed to stifle a laugh.

“That is silly!” she exclaimed, still on the verge of a chortle. “You can’t be a bad guy!”

“Why?”

“Because you’re a good guy,” she insisted, but my other girlfriend raised a hand to get a word in.

“While I agree that the Chief is too nice for his own good, his fears might not be unfounded.”

“That’s crazy-talk,” Elly dismissed her outright, but she pressed on.

“No, it isn’t. Think about it. Who were our antagonists so far?”

“Antagonist? Isn’t that the same as a villain?”

“More or less,” I answered in my assistant’s stead. “A villain is someone who does bad things that hurt others, so the heroes try to stop them. An antagonist is someone who’s opposing the protagonists, but they aren’t necessarily villainous.”

“So they are both bad guys, but they are different levels of bad?” the princess posited, and Judy shook her head.

“Not necessarily. An antagonist might oppose the protagonist for a good reason. For example, let’s say there’s a movie where the hero is framed for murder and he becomes a fugitive. Here, the policeman pursuing him would be an antagonist, but he wouldn’t be a villain. That’s the person who framed the hero and committed the initial murder.”

“I think I get it, but… wouldn’t that make Leo even less of a villain? He never did anything bad,” Elly responded, and my assistant once again shook her head.

“That’s why I asked who our antagonists were.” This time she didn’t wait for her to answer and started listing them off. “First we had Noire, Neige, and the Fauns. Then we had the Chimera, Rinne, Robatto, and Lord Amadeus as the greater scope antagonist. Finally, we had the four Entitled Knights of The Knightly Brotherhood of the Most Heroic Bloodlines, as well as Lord Saahira for Josh’s subplot with Amelia. Did you notice the pattern?”

“Aren’t they all Leo’s allies or subordinates now?” she guessed, and hit the nail on the head on the first try.

“Except for Crowy, for obvious reasons,” I pointed out, just to be sure.

“That’s correct,” Judy acknowledged with a nod. “Think about this from an outside perspective: for the past couple of months, the Chief has been amassing his own force consisting of nothing but previous antagonists.”

“But that still doesn’t make him a villain,” Elly insisted, and my dear assistant actually nodded this time.

“That’s true, but there’s a trope called ‘Designated Villain’. It’s when someone has all the trappings of a villain even if they don’t do anything bad, and so everyone considers them a villain by default. Now, look at what the Chief did through that lens: he recruits obvious evil people, like Abyssals and Fauns and ninjas—”

“Ninjas aren’t necessarily evil,” Elly pointed out in a hurry.

“Is that really the part that you object to?” I asked, but my question was swept under the rug when Judy answered her.

“We are talking about basic stereotypes here. For most people, the Abyssals and Fauns with their demonic looks and the ninjas, being the generic martial arts movie baddies, would automatically scream eeeeevil.” Ah, there it was again! That drawn-out, deadpan delivery! Dammit, why wasn’t I recording this?

“Oh, I see now,” the princess nodded with an enlightened glint in her eyes. “The accursed Knights are evil too, and now they are serving Leo as well.”

I was tempted to point out that knights as a concept had neutral to good connotations most of the time, and forcefully partnering them up with a family related to dragons, which generally had evil connotations, would be the villainous deed, but I didn’t want to hurt the princess’s feelings.

“The Chief also has an underground base with a mad scientist, and the designated ‘big good’ of the island is afraid of him. He has all the markings to become a supervillain.”

“On a more grounded note,” I spoke up before Judy could get carried away, “I was actually considering if I had something of a villainous, or at least antagonistic, role in the original Plot.”

“That’s a given,” Judy declared like it was blindingly obvious. “You’re an Entitled Knight hidden in plain sight. You were most likely supposed to be a surprise villain in the Elly route if you didn’t lose your memories.”

“Most likely, but there are a few other questionable details, like where all my money came from.”

Using this opportunity, I told them about the recent revelations regarding the missing source of my extravagant allowance. For a chance, my girlfriends both considered the implications in silence.

“Have you tried looking into the bank account?” Elly asked first.

“I asked dad-in-law to try and track it down, but it was unsuccessful.”

“In that case, let’s look at this from another perspective,” Judy proposed. “Let’s consider who can give you that much money each month out of all the known supernatural factions.”

“I suppose the Magi could, but Lord Grandpa would’ve brought that up already during the negotiations,” I mused. “The Draconians are out too.”

“I’m not so sure about that,” Elly interjected. “Dad already told you that the Feilongs keep the Eastern Draconians under their influence by protecting them from the accursed Knights? Maybe they were the ones paying you?”

“Are you proposing that the Chief was a double agent? That’s… not out of the question. Nice one.”

“Thanks,” Elly answered with a demure smile, not expecting a compliment.

“Maybe, but back to the original topic,” I spoke up, and waited for them to quiet down before I continued. “The Research Society seems to be one of those perpetually impoverished groups who blow all their money on equipment and experiments, so they are probably out of the picture. The Abyssals are… tricky, considering they are mostly locked up in the Abyss. I also can’t think of a reason why they’d want to finance me.”

“What about the Celestials?” Judy proposed, and it made me feel uncomfortable for a moment.

“That’s also not out of the question, but I wish it was. The same double-agent angle applies to them as it did to the Chinese Draconians, but at this point, I’m too deeply embedded into the Celestial Information Network, and if they showed up to get their money’s worth one day, it would greatly complicate things.”

“You’re in what now?” Elly blurted out in surprise.

“The Chief used his amazing hacking skills to break into their online database, and we’ve been using their information network ever since.”

“Really?” she exclaimed with sparkling eyes, and I had to let her down a little.

“It’s technically true, but Judy made it sound much more interesting than it really was. I just guessed a password, and now they think I’m the system administrator.”

“Really? But… The Celestial agents are baddies, right?”

Judy and I shared an uncertain glance upon hearing the unexpected question, and she soon nodded.

“In a certain sense of the word, they might be. Why?”

“I’m asking because… if you’re one of their leaders, doesn’t that mean you have another group of baddies?”

For a moment it looked like Judy would protest, but then she looked at me and said, “Sorry, Chief. At this point, your descent into Designated Villainy is inevitable.”

“I really thought I was just joking with the idea, but the more we discuss it, the more realistically possible it seems,” I concluded with an involuntary front. “What should I do now?”

“Since you’re already wearing black all the time, I recommend investing in some Spikes of Villainy,” Judy proposed, earning her an even more prominent frown from yours truly. “I’m serious. Villains and spikes go together like peanut butter and jelly.”

“Or peas and carrots,” Elly added, though her expression said she completely lost the thread of the conversation and was just going with the flow.

I looked over my girlfriends, and with some effort wiped the frown off my face and let out a long sigh.

“I can’t help but feel that it’s getting really late and your brains are not functioning at one hundred percent capacity anymore. How about we continue this discussion after a good night’s sleep?”

“I’m not opposed to the idea,” Judy said, punctuating her sentence with a small smile. Elly followed suit not a moment later.

“I’m sleepy too. I’ll go wash up and get my pajamas. I’ll be right back.”

“Same here,” my dear assistant added, and the two of them soon left the room, leaving me all alone.

Honestly speaking, I really wasn’t expecting to get so much support for the ‘I’m turning into a super villain’ hypothesis, but my silly supposition somehow morphed into a distinct possibility under the span of a few minutes, and we didn’t even discuss my Bel persona during all this.

… Damn. At this rate, I’ll have to start coming up with some kind of contingency plan for the narrative suddenly switching gears and redesigning the entire Plot around me. Kind of like that one roleplaying session where Josh accidentally killed the main villain with a critical fumble, and Angie had to rewrite the rest of the plot so that it was his pet monkey that was the mastermind behind everything. But wait, isn’t making secret plans also something that the villains do? Should I plan or not?

“Dammit, my brain isn’t operating at full capacity either. I should probably take my own advice,” I grumbled as I also stood up and walked over to the PC. This was a long day, I needed a break from thinking about villainous stuff, and the funny cat videos were right there. I make no excuses.