The Simulacrum - Chapter 87~ Part 4

“Don’t make a scene,” Judy warned me sternly, then a brief pause later she rose to her tiptoes and gave me a peck on my cheek.

“… I’m not going to lie, I think I’m getting mixed messages here.”

“It’s for good luck,” my other girlfriend declared, and pecked me on the other side.

“Well, I admit I feel lucky, but I don’t know how that applies to the current situation.”

The girls ignored my gripes, and this time Ammy came to the front to tell me, “Grandfather is under a lot of stress lately.”

We locked eyes for a long moment, and I uttered a dour, “I’ll keep that in mind,” in response, acknowledging the unspoken implication of ‘don’t heckle my old man, or you’ll have to deal with me’ in her words.

“We’ll see you back home,” my dear assistant added while she simultaneously reached out to fix my collar. Elly followed her example, and began straightening my uniform as well. I had no idea why; I was only going to meet Lord Grandpa. It’s not like that was a special occasion worth fussing over.

By the by, the ‘we’ in that previous sentence referred to the entire gang standing behind them, just outside the classroom. They’d made plans to train and work out the brackets of our internal tournament today, and since I was going to the base to get some enchanting done anyway, it made sense to meet up in my house first.

As for why I wasn’t going with them, it was thanks to an invitation by Lord Grandpa, delivered by Armband Guy during lunch break. On a side-note, the guy looked unusually haggard, which I naturally blamed on the tournament too. It was a safe bet, and it proved that besides being predictable, annoying, and superfluous, tournaments were also a health hazard.

My grumbles aside, Josh unsubtly poked the clock on his his Magiformer in the background, which in this case probably indicated that time was a-wasting and they should get going. I more or less agreed with his sentiment, and bid everyone goodbyes before we went our separate ways.

After a few steps, I threw my bag over my shoulder and let my thoughts wander again as I made my way over to the underground School. I already checked with Far Sight, and I knew Lord Grandpa was in his study instead of the principal’s office, and while I was tempted to just Phase over and get this over with, I had to preserve my mental resources. I still had to move the guys to the base later, work on Penny’s Uniformer (among other things), and potentially even take another dive into the space between spaces to see if I could glean more info about the Simulacrum. Since all of these were running on my mental fortitude, it was best to play things safe and preserve it at every opportunity.

Anyhow, walking around was good for the blood flow, getting oxygen to the brain and things like that, so decided to use it to collect my thoughts and summarize the results of all the thinking I’d done during school hours.

So, before anything else, let’s try and look at my current bugbear as objectively as I could. First off, what exactly was a tournament arc to begin with? In short, it’s a plot-device, or arguably a ‘plot-scaffold’, where a whole arc is built around a big competition. It wasn’t necessarily a martial arts battle tournament like the one (pardon, ones, plural) brewing at the moment. It could be a game, or even something less obvious, like a cooking competition.

To qualify as a tournament arc, a couple of things had to be present. First off, it had to be a clear competition with winners and losers. Next, it had to involve either individuals or small groups, like sports teams, directly competing against each other. In other words, a hundred people running a marathon wasn’t one, even if technically everyone was competing with everyone else. Finally, it had to be the main focus for its duration, with high stakes for the main characters.

Next, let’s see what tournament arcs do in the context of storytelling. In short, they can exist for three reasons: either as the framework that enables the hero and the villain to face each other on more or less fair terms, as a convenient way for the writer to introduce, establish, or justify the power-ups of characters, or as filler content where characters and their individual abilities can be thrown at each other for flashy fights to keep the audience engaged while not really progressing the plot. In our case, I had a feeling the coming tournament was a mixture of all three, with Naoren’s brother serving as Josh’s rival, the battles serving as a way to introduce a bunch of new Draconian and third party combatants, and as for the flashy padding aspect, the less said, the better.

Now that we’re clear on that, let’s focus on the important questions, such as why we’re having the big tournament in the first place. For now, let’s ignore on our own internal one, as it seemed to exist just to sate everyone’s curiosity about the power-rankings in our fledgling little organization.

“Hi, Leo!”

My thinking was forcefully interrupted just as I left through the back entrance of the school building by the voice of a certain brown girl. It took me a second to figure out where it came from, but then I gave a lazy wave in her general direction. By the looks of it, she was in the process of dragging Armband Guy around, as usual, and the two waved back at once. Well, Sahi did. Pascal just limply nodded at me. Anyhow, they were on the other side of the courtyard, and seemed busy, so after acknowledging each other’s presence like that, we continued on our merry ways.

So, where was I before this intermezzo? Right, potential reasons for a tournament arc.

The first and most obvious answer was the one I operated under since the topic first came up: it was artificially created just to have a tournament arc, for the already mentioned reasons. I figured it was likely the work of the four enigmatic entities I ran into in null-space, and after I wrote it off as such, I completely forgot to inspect the whole kerfuffle from a Watsonian perspective. The fact that it took Elly to remind me hurt my pride as a semi-professional trope saboteur, but then again, while she was certainly a little silly from time to time, she certainly wasn’t dumb, and being corrected by a smart person felt much less irksome.

Anyhow, Watsonian interpretation. Here we go.

First and foremost, let’s take a look at the organizers. The Chinese Draconians holding it made internal sense based on what we knew about their modus operandi. Now, whether they were holding it because they were competitive and loved dueling, or their love for duels and competitiveness had been established beforehand to justify the tournament, was a different question entirely, but I was slowly starting to lean towards the first option.

As my discussions with Sebastian and Brang had indicated, the Simulacrum either had a long history, or it had a very extensive simulated background. My current core hypothesis was focusing on the first possibility; in my opinion, the Simulacrum wasn’t constructed just for Josh’s battle harem plot, but it was an already present ‘world’ where plots could be injected. In order to keep something of this size consistent, I figured retroactively changing the personalities and priorities of an entire branch of dragon-people would’ve been counter-intuitive.

But then again, we somehow ended up kicking the whole world into the information age in the span of a few weeks by total accident, so what did I even know about consistency?

That was a long tangent, but back to the tournament: the one who organized it was the grand elder of the Feilongs. I’d already had a strong inkling that he was a baddie based on the tropes associated with his archetype. Now, there was still room for some subversion, but based on his behavior during the banquet, I sincerely doubted he would turn out to be a nice, misunderstood guy. For now, let’s ignore all the Doylist explanations for the event, and focus on why he would propose it.

The first thing that came to mind was some kind of power play between him and Naoren. Based on the snippets I’d caught, the internal politics of the Feilong clan seemed to be delicate at the moment, most likely some variation of the classic ‘conservative elders vs. young innovative leader’ trope. Not important. The key thing in this whole situation was that the elder in particular focused on organizing the event, going as far as to use his own elixirs as rewards, meaning he wanted to claim full credit.

Speaking of rewards, said elixirs were apparently a sought-after product of Chinese alchemy, and they were universally useful for all supernatural folks, either as a life-saving medicine, or as a source of power they could use to power up. It was correspondingly precious as well, and if Elly was to be believed, it was more desirable than the money Abram threw in as a gratis.

What this told me was that he wanted to attract as many participants as possible. Why? What was his end-goal?

“Good afternoon. Please come in.”

I was suddenly jolted out of my train of thought by the voice of the arch-mage, and I stared blankly at the open door in front of me. By the looks of it, I was so lost in my thoughts, I completely zoned out and came here on autopilot.

Shelving my musings on the upcoming arc for the moment, I took a deep breath to center myself and gave the old man sitting behind his mahogany desk a thin-lipped smile.

“Afternoon. I’ve heard you were looking for me.”

“I hoped I would not have to, but I am afraid I ran out of options.” He waited for the doors to automatically close behind me before letting out a long sigh and downing a glass of carbonated water. “Please, sit.”

“I’d prefer to stand, if you don’t mind,” I responded with a casual shrug, all the while making sure that my slowly mounting irritation wouldn’t show on my face too much.

“In that case, suit yourself.”

“I’ll do just that,” I declared with a smile and theatrically glanced around. “By the way, I love the thing you did to the place. Very functionalist.”

I wasn’t just heckling the guy; the new design of the place felt much better than before. Gone were the fancy cabinets and towers of documents, replaced by simple white furniture. Even the carpet and the ceiling tiles were replaced, with only the big desk in the middle and the grand portraits of the previous arch-mages remaining as they were.

“Certain changes were necessary,” he told me plainly, and I nodded along while my phantom limbs sneakily explored the new additions to the complex enchantment array covering the entire room, inside out.

“Oh, is that what I think it is?” I uttered in surprise and flashed a smile. “You packed not one, not two, but three separate illusion-breakers into your security suite? I’m almost flattered.”

“The fact that you could discover so much with but a simple glance is simultaneously astounding and terrifying.”

The deadpan response of the old man drew a small chuckle out of me and eased some of my tension.

“And that, I take as a compliment.” For a moment I was tempted to Phase behind the old man, just to freak him out, but then I recalled the look the class rep gave me not too long ago, and thought better of it. Instead, I casually walked over to his desk and asked, “So? Why did you ask for me? Is it about that enchantment embargo Ammy was talking about?”

Lord Grandpa gave me an odd look, but then he firmly shook his head.

“It is not something you should concern yourself with for the time being. I do not believe there is a single member of the Assembly who would be foolish enough to propose such sanctions at the moment.”

“But they would in the future.”

“Possibly. It is certainly hard to say, but so long as the winged ones are backing you, you should rest calm.”

After mulling his words over for a second, I let my brows descend into a frown.

“So you’re saying I don’t have to worry about it ‘for now’, because I have the Dracis on my side. That implies that in the future, I might not have them anymore.”

“Alliances in the world of mystics can be fickle things,” he told me with a stiff smile that didn’t touch his eyes.

“Do you know something?”

“Nothing that you absolutely need to know about.”

I paused a bit longer this time, my initial frown slowly morphing into a glare, and added, “Are you seriously trying to yank my chains, old man? I think I made myself very clear on the topic of shady conduct…”

“That certainly was not my intention,” the old coot told me in a hurry and raised his palms in surrender. “It is just my own opinion based on my decades of experience.”

My flat stare continued for a while longer, but he didn’t say anything else, so I took a step back and said, “Fine, let’s just sweep this under the rug for now, and let’s return to the initial question: why did you call me here?”

The old arch-mage visibly steeled himself, readjusted his tie, and plainly told me, “I have two things to discuss with you. The first one is in regards of Lord Saahira.”

“What of her?”

“I would like to request your help in convincing her of a certain matter.”

“Stop beating around the bush, and tell me.”

Lord Grandpa exhaled hard, linked his fingers on the desk, and uttered, “She wishes to participate in the upcoming series of martial bouts.”

My eyes blinked on their own, but then it was my turn to sigh and mutter, “Of course she does. I’ve heard the School got two participation spots in the main group, so what’s the problem?”

“The issue is the fact that the sudden demise of Lord Saahira is still under investigation. If she were to appear as Sahi, and publicly use her signature spells, it would raise quite a few eyebrows in the Assembly.”

“And that’s a problem because…?”

“Because we are still in the process of verifying the authenticity of her last will and testament, which would allow her to smoothly inherit her own wealth and possessions, including all of her materials and equipment required to continue her research.”

“Oh, gotcha. So if Sahi shows off her magic hands in public, it would cause issues.”

“At the very least, it could result in a second investigation into her background.”

“And despite knowing this, she still wants to participate?”

“I am convinced regaining her youth has reawakened her old habits. She had never been the most level headed or reasonable of people.”

That was kind of rich coming from this guy, but I ignored the snide comment trying to claw its way up my throat and said, “I’ll talk with her, but that’s all I promise. I don’t really like getting involved in other people’s business unless I absolutely have to.”

The old man gave me a classic ‘Is this guy serious?’ glance, but quickly suppressed it and cleared his throat instead.

“Please do. Now, let me address the main reason why I requested your presence.”

“Please do,” I echoed him on purpose, but he ignored me and instead tapped on his desktop before addressing me with a solemn voice.

“Tell me, Leonard. How much do you know about the Conduit of the Grimoire?”