The Flower That Bloomed Nowhere

Inner Sanctum Underground | 9:33 AM | ∞ Day

The world is dead.

And yet, I'm still here.

Hah. Hahaha.

It was such a strange feeling. A day ago, I'd been reckoning with my own death. And now it turned out I'd outlived civilization itself. Everyone I'd ever met, every place I'd ever visited, even my own real self...

All gone, without so much as whiff of ceremony.

And yet here I stood. Extant.

After we left Nora's shop, Ptolema complained that she couldn't put off eating lunch any later, so we went to find an eatery. In truth, I didn't really understand, since the neutral state people reset their bodies to here seemed to also have satiated physical desires, and so presumably one could go without eating indefinitely. But I didn't feel like I had in me to make a fuss and hadn't even begun mastering the technique myself, so off we went.

The place we arrived at after a few minutes was more of a public cafeteria than a restaurant - the sign didn't even have a name, just displaying a generic, low-detail graphic of a bowl of food, like it was some kind of reverse public toilet. There were no human staff and barely any customers; the counter was staffed by golems unlike any I'd ever seen before, with bodies made up of flowing color within fine glass, their heads glowing with fire like lanterns. I'd thought they were another type of weird human until Ptolema informed me otherwise.

Still, like everything else, the chamber was relatively grand, almost like a great hall from some lord's castle. Tall pillars stood between wide, silver tables, and the ceiling reached five times my height. And while one wall was covered in more windows overlooking the expanse of the eternal sunset sky, the opposite one was covered in an extremely complex-looking fresco of a grand festival in the shadow of a mountain, revelers performing all sorts of activities with innumerable complex poses and expressions. I had to imagine it would have taken someone over a year to paint.

The more time I spent here, the more something about all these spaces felt, though beautiful and miraculous, a little sad, too. All this time consumed decorating a room that was clearly barely in use. Even if people here had infinite lives, I couldn't shake the sense of some important social expectation being disrespected. Skill and careful effort were supposed to be rewarded with people caring, if not quite proportionately than at least in approximation of it. Without that, it was like leaving flowers at a grave. The social pretenses of the act only emphasized its nature as one of solitude.

Strangely, despite the fact that the assemblers could manifest food of any type, it was all hand (or vaguely hand-esque mechanical tendril, whatever) prepared by the golems, and only about 60 items were available from the buffet, all falling into the realm of Saoic cuisine, though closer to to the sort of thing you'd get in Daixue than what I was used to at home - dumplings, pork prepared like 10 different ways, that sort of thing. I could understand it in the case of something like the bakery; there was an inherent appeal to having food prepared for you by a human instead of a machine, no matter how capable that machine was. A human could surprise you, and that had value.

Hell, half of what remained of the Remaining World's own economy had been based around that premise.

But if it was being made by a machine anyway, what exactly was the purpose of limiting one's options? When I asked Ptolema about it, the answer she offered was merely:

"I dunno. Just gives it some variety, I guess?" She rolled her shoulders. "I mean, people who just wanna eat whatever they want wouldn't bother goin' anywhere in the first place."

Indeed, 'variety' seemed to be the governing principle here rather than strict quality. I was surprised upon moving to serve myself that many of the items were actually subdivided by the manner of their cooking and the quality of their ingredients, given labels such as 'cuisine' 'amateur' and 'mass-manufactured' like these were styles rather than explanations for decreasing flavor and health standard. Some items even went further - there were egg rolls specifically advertised as having been frozen and thawed.

"If you think that's weird, some places actually serve rotten food," Ptolema told me cheerfully. "Even stuff with gross stuff mixed in, like maggots."

"Is... that right," I replied, wearing a puzzled smile.

"Yep!" she affirmed. "You can just reset afterwards anyway, so people do it just for the flavor." She scratched her head. "Not me, though. I don't really get that sort of thing."

I suppose it wasn't impossible to comprehend the perspective. Like almost anybody, I got urges to indulge in junk food every so often despite having much tastier and healthier options available, so the idea of choosing inferior meals deliberately for a somewhat intangible purpose (some days I swore I craved the stomach aches I got from eating shitty fried chicken) was hardly alien to me, even if I'd never seen the concept embraced so directly. Maybe if your thinking became sufficiently liberal and there was no danger, that thinking could even extend to eating stuff that was overtly foul.

Suffice it to say, though, I wasn't yet operating on the Dilmun mindset, so I went for the 'cuisine' labelled stuff, filling my plate with ginger-fried crab and noodles. Though even if it didn't match the quality of what the assembler produced, it was still among the best-tasting foods I'd served myself from a metal trough in my life, so I couldn't complain. Ptolema got some rice and a bunch of the middle-tier dumplings, which she explained as liking more because they were saltier.

We took a seat at one of the windowside tables - all the customers seemed to be in that area, though even then the closest group to us was another pair three tables down - and set to eating. Ptolema remarked that she was happy Nora and I had seemed to get along so well, though also puffed her cheeks as she confessed to feeling a little awkward and left out through most of the conversation.

It made me smile. After all these years, I'd sort of forgotten she'd once had that insecure side to her. It was cute.

It wasn't just her. Everyone I'd known when we were younger had changed so much. Yu, Iwa, all of the class I'd still kept to varying degrees in loose touch with. Even Nikka and Yohani, when I'd looked them up out of curiosity a while ago, had seemed wildly different; the former was a grandmother, now, with a massive family, and the latter had become a politician in Itan, which incidentally had grown into a metropolis of almost seven million people. I'd heard he'd been implicated in a corruption scandal; that quiet, kind boy who'd once been the only person to show care for me at my lowest point, now apparently no different from the adults who'd surrounded us in those days.

Time had a way of polishing people. Sometimes what it revealed - or perhaps left behind - were gemstones that shined radiantly, while for others it was just hard stone. But either way, it smoothed things out. Removed fragility, uncertainties. Turned children into adults.

Except for people like me.

...well, that was how it felt, at least. But hadn't I once believed Neferuaten's words, back in the mask chamber? That maturity is nothing but an affect of circumstance?

I'd spent so many years trying desperately to be a person like Shiko, Fang and Neferuaten has seemed, and to some extent even people like who Ptolema had become. To see myself as something other than a scared, broken child.

But what good had it done them? They'd all just fucking died, apparently, for no good reason. If growing into a proper adult didn't make you any more special, any less vulnerable, had it ever either meant anything? What had I even been chasing? What had I even been sulking about for so long?

It just all felt so stupid, now. All of it. Meaningless.

"D'ya not like the crab, Su?" Ptolema asked, with a mouthful of minced pork. "You look like you're brooding."

"The crab's fine," I told her, picking up a chunk with my chopsticks and sticking it into my mouth. "I'm not brooding. I'm just thinking about things."

"You're totally brooding," she insisted. "You're starin' at that bowl like it printed your nudes in a newspaper. You've not even made eye contact for, like, five minutes."

"How is food here supposed to work, anyway?" I asked, changing the subject. "If all the matter in this world - or prop, whatever - belongs unchangeably to someone, doesn't that mean that this does, too? What exactly happens when my body tries to digest material that's under the metaphysics control of another person?"

"Oh, that's easy," Ptolema said casually. "You can't change the total amount of prop you have - 'cept temporarily, through contracts - but you can trade prop, so long as the amount that gets traded is the same on both sides. A lot of the time it even happens automatically." She pointed at my bowl. "That food'll have been made out of the Domain's collective pool, which people pledge to it when they become citizens, and as you eat it, you're tradin' some of your free prop to the pool to make up for it."

I furrowed my brow. "That's... somehow both surprisingly esoteric and intuitive at the same time."

"Yeah, it's really convenient!" She gave a cheerful nod. "And when you poop it out--"

"That part was implicit," I cut her off flatly.

"Oh."

I sighed to myself, looking out the window. My eyes glazed over a bit as I became lost in my thoughts again.

The more I saw of this place, the more I found little things about it that unsettled me. The panther had called it a 'kinder world', but the way Nora had described it felt closer to the truth. It was a world of uncanny stillness, not exactly cold, but... artificial, in a way that felt impossible to shake off. As much as the inhabitants were apparently convinced this was the true reality.

On our way to the cafeteria, the comparison my mind had been struggling to place after hearing the story of the Magilum had suddenly occurred to me. The whole thing had reminded me of something that, as an introvert I'd been intimately familiar with my entire life, and especially recently since becoming a shut-in: logic sea drama. That sense of pettiness, of constructed meaning. People fussing over pretend stakes in pretend spaces.

Literally, in the case of the story, since it was about what boiled down to roleplay. All of it was just...

Childish.

And yet...

"So," Ptolema spoke up suddenly, cutting off my train of thought. "Now that I've shown you around a bit, what do you think you're gonna do next?"

I blinked, finishing slurping down the noodles in my mouth. "I'm... not really sure," I answered. "I'm getting kind of tired, to be honest. I know it's probably only about four, but I didn't really sleep at all when I was at the guardhouse." I set my chopsticks down for a moment, rubbing the corner of one of my eyes. "You said I could stay at your place for a bit, right? I didn't get the wrong idea?"

"No, you can!" She affirmed quickly. "It's a bit of a mess, but I squeeze a bed for you in the front room. Or, uh, make a whole new one, though I'd kinda prefer not to mess with the actual building." She muttered something about it having taken her a long time to 'get it right' that I could only half make out.

"Just a bed is fine," I told her wearily. "I could even manage the sofa if you don't want to mess with anything. Either way, I appreciate it a lot. Again, I'm sorry to put you through all this trouble."

"L-Like I said, it's fine!" she said, her cheerful smile growing a little more complex. "...that's not exactly what I meant, though."

"Oh." I bit my lip. "What did you mean?"

"Well, what do you wanna do in the... long term, I guess?" She looked away uneasily. "Now that you're, y'know. Here."

"Ah. Right." I sipped from my glass of water, staring into my bowl again. "I keep letting myself forget that this place is my entire life now, regardless of how I end up thinking about it."

She frowned. "S-Sorry, I don't mean to weird you out... you don't have to think about somethin' like that if you're not ready for it."

"No, it's okay," I said, with a shrug. "I don't know. You said that the people who run this place are probably going to come looking for me sooner or later, right?"

"Yeah," she affirmed.

"Do you think they'll let me live here? Is there, like, a process?"

"Oh, they'll definitely let you live here if you wanna," Ptolema said with a dismissive gesture. "Like I said before, the Crossroads was set up to take any kinda person. The only thing they'll do is make you read a bunch of dumb paperwork and give them like 25% of your prop. Or 75% if you wanna become a full citizen with your own plots of land in the Valley and City to do whatever with."

"Seems fair," I said. "I don't have any ambitions of living in my own personal fortress or skyscraper, so I'm not sure what I'd do with 150 thousand tons of raw material anyway."

Actually, living in my own fortress could be kind of cool, I mused. But I could just make a smaller fortress.

"Do you actually wanna live here, though?" she asked. "In the Crossroads?"

"Well, it's not like the alternatives I've heard about so far seem super compelling," I told her. "Even if they hadn't already banned me for not understanding what their gimmick was, the Magilum seems like an absolute nightmare. And though I feel like I have a lot of questions about it, I'm not really in a place with academia right now where I'd want to live somewhere like the Keep. Are there any other notable ones?"

I wasn't sure why I was asking, since it wasn't going to change my answer either way.

"Uh, I guess there's the Blank Canvas," she explained. "Although I don't think you'd like it. It's less an organized Domain and more just-- Well, the name explains itself, really. It's just somewhere people can build whatever they want with the prop within the same physical space, so they can easily visit each other without any fuss. There's barely even any rules." She furrowed her brow. "I'll be honest, a lot of pretty creepy people live there. It's like half folk who got kicked out of the Crossroads."

"What do people actually get punished for, here? Besides the 'spying' they accused me of," I asked curiously. "I mean, if you can't hurt anyone or steal anything, how can crime even exist?"

"Just, y'know, makin' trouble," Ptolema stated vaguely. "Harassing people, mostly. Lots of weird ways you can do that. Or just being anti-social a lot-- Shouting where you're supposed to be quiet, making really gross stuff with your matter and sticking it in public, that sort of thing."

I squinted. Not doing much to subvert the logic sea comparison, huh.

"The only one 'sides that with more than 100,000 people bought in is the Prism, but that's not the kinda place you live, just visit," she continued. "And there's a bunch of pseudo-fringe ones that are still pretty big, but they come and go a lot, so I don't keep up with them super well."

I nodded absently. I looked down at my food, which was starting to cool from our on-and-off conversation, and shoved another chunk of crab in my mouth.

"You said Ran lives in a fringe Domain, right?" I asked, after a moment. My tone was pointedly casual.

"Eh? Oh, yeah," Ptolema said. "That's right."

"Do you know which one?"

"Not really," Ptolema replied, pursing her lips. "She talks about it a little bit, but it's some kinda close-knit one with just a 50 or so people with similar interests. There's gotta be a thousand like that." She perked up, leaning forward slightly. "Why, are you wantin' to get in touch with her? I bet she'd be really happy to see you, now that I think about it! We still talk about you sometimes whenever she visits!"

My face was still, but my mouth fell open just slightly. My eyes were fixed on the corner of the table. I felt a tingling sensation in my chest, and heat rose to my cheeks.

Slowly, the cheer in Ptolema's face gave way to confusion, then anxiety. "O-Oh," she stammered. "S-Sorry, I wasn't thinking. This is... I mean, it's probably painful for you, right...?" She clenched her lower lip under her thumb, looking to the side. "You two were always so close, but if the Ran you know right now is the one from 1608... and you can't make an echo of her 'cause of her privacy field. So you must feel like... well..."

Ptolema trailed off, and I remained silent for another few moments, my breathing feeling heavy.

"...Su?" she asked, now looking genuinely quite worried.

"S-Sorry," I said, removing my glasses for a moment and looking down at them as I rubbed the lenses. "No, that's... not quite it."

"Oh." She frowned. "Then..."

"You don't need to worry about it," I said, placing them back on my face. "But yeah, is there a way I could get in contact with her?"

"Without knowing the Domain, probably not super easily," she told me. "But like I said, she's around for a bit every couple years or so. The last time was a bit before new years the year before last, I wanna say?"

"So she should be here in a few months...?" I asked, guessing based on the season I remembered it being in the Valley.

"Well, it's not super regular or anythin' like that," Ptolema said. "So honestly, she could show up whenever."

I nodded a few times. "I'll just..." I trailed myself for a moment, staring into the middle distance, then blinked sharply, clearing my throat. "I'll just have to keep an eye out, then."

We finished up our meals, though I'd mostly lost interest in mine by the end and failed to down all the remaining noodles. Ptolema agreed we could head back to her cabin soon, but wanted to take me to a couple more places, on the basis that we 'hadn't even got to any of the really cool stuff' in the City. Initially she wanted to take me to some sort of sports arena where there was apparently an ongoing event, but after signalling my disinterest so aggressively it could probably be seen from (the equivalent of) space, she settled on instead taking me shopping. We followed the path to the periphery of what was probably the 'downtown' area, where towers protruded from the central structure en masse.

If it had been relatively busy in the streets so far, here it was truly bustling, and though some of the subdued quality remained, I saw a lot more people who seemed actively busy, flying quickly between different structures or actively doing what looked like work on those crystalline devices I'd seen earlier. The ratio of strange physical bodies intensified further, too, probably to more in the realm of 10-15% of people - among other things, I saw a 12 foot tall giant, a humanoid made of liquid, and a swirling mass of tentacles and tendrils. How did people converse with these things?

Speaking of those crystalline devices, she apparently wanted to get me one, explaining that they were vital for functioning as part of society in the Crossroads much the same as a logic engine was in the real world.

"They use light to do their computing and communicating, since it moves at a static speed here, like in the old world," she explained. "Though the tech here is... well, most of the staples were developed way before anyone even remembers at this point, but it's on a pretty stupid level compared to even the stuff they had back then."

"If people here have had literally millions of years to work on it, then yeah, I'd kind of expect as much," I said flatly.

"Yeah," she nodded. "So I don't really get exactly how they work. Usually only a dozen people know how any given thing works period. I remember that they rely on negative matter, but..." She hummed to herself. "Eh, it doesn't matter, I guess. Anyway, the proper term for them is 'resonators', but there's a bunch of different shorthand terms. Some people still just call them logic engines, or sometimes 'geodes' because of how they look, or..."

"What can they do?" I interrupted.

"Basically anything you can imagine needing from the 'lil mechanical widget," she explained. "Information, entertainment, communication... they can even help you a little bit with matter shaping, like a lower-power assembler." She looked to me. "That's the main reason I wanted to pick you up one, since you'll have a tough time doin' day-to-day stuff here otherwise. And 'cause I don't want you to get lost and have no way to get in touch with you."

"Oh... I see. That's thoughtful." I hesitated, looking down at my shoes. "...you really do care about making sure I settle in alright, don't you?"

"Well, yeah!" She laughed a little. "You're my friend, Su, no matter how long it's been. 'course I wanna make sure you'll be okay."

I laughed too, and Ptolema grinned widely. Quietly, I found myself feeling strangely guilty.

Was Ptolema really my friend? I felt like all I'd ever done back when we were young was passively-aggressively look down on her, and to some extent I felt like I was continuing that dynamic even in the present moment. I'd made no effort to stay in contact with her after our class fell apart. On some level, I'd assumed she hadn't cared about me, either.

But this Ptolema... clearly did see me that way.

'You can never truly know another person.' I'd always repeated that idea to myself. And indeed, I still believed it was true. People were complex. You could never truly presume what motivated them, or the reality of their actual feelings.

...but, when I thought about it... the way I actually responded to that reality ultimately just boiled down to empty misanthropy. 'I can't trust anyone. Therefore, I can't presume anyone cares in a meaningful way.'

But the reverse was also true. Just as people could hold ill-intent you didn't see, they could surprise you with positive intent, too.

Well, duh, some part of me said. You're only just realizing this now? After you're already dead?

We went into one of the towers, a floating platform carrying us to the third floor, and entered a small 'shop' for the resonators, which were apparently handcrafted. The man running the store - a bearded gentleman who seemed to have chosen to look elderly, with an arm that was made out of crystal - seemed pleased to have any customer, and spent some time explaining to me all the subtle variations in capabilities of the devices, which went largely over my head. Ultimately, I ended up choosing one entirely on the basis of aesthetics, picking a hexagonal one in my favorite colors - purple and a kind of aquamarine-ish blue. Ptolema commented on how predictable it was, though not mean-spiritedly.

After that, we finally headed back. There was no reason to retrace our steps - a section of the tower was exposed to the void, so we simply took off into the air and returned to the Valley. This time I paid better attention to the landscape in its totality; mountains giving way to hills giving way to fields, with rivers meeting in the center to form a lake. At the far end, the beginnings of an ocean extending several miles off a sandy coast, with a convincing illusion of it extending further, only failing at this extreme height and distance.

It was nice.

There were things about this place that unsettled me... but in the end, that wasn't really consequential, because it wasn't like there was an alternative. Again I'd been going to die - by international incident if not by illness, apparently - and then suddenly I wasn't. There was no other word for that then a miracle. It would be stupid not to feel grateful.

And though I was still kind of in too much of a state of shock to judge, if I was honest with myself? Maybe a reality like this was what I'd always wanted.

In the real world, I'd wasted all the time I'd been given. I'd been unable to reach an answer as to how I could find happiness, and had stopped even trying. Kicking the can into an uncertain future, until suddenly there had been no future left.

But here - assuming everything I'd been told was the truth - the future was infinite. No failure state existed. It wasn't just a second chance, but an eternity of second chances. Chances that came whether you wanted them or not, but still.

So, maybe... even if the real me had found it impossible, and had probably died with her heart filled with fear and regret... I could figure things out. With infinity on ones side, surely everything was possible eventually. Maybe I could become a different person, or even find a way to twist my mind with effort or contrivance to bring back the original Utsushikome after all. Sure, that same eternity would eventually undo anything I accomplished, but maybe that was fine. Maybe it didn't even matter whether I succeeded or not, so long as I could keep kicking the can. Even just the thought of that possibility was enough to make me feel relaxed.

Gods. Was that where I was as a person, at this point? Where having awakened in what was essentially paradise, the best I could imagine was perpetuating the status quo?

What the fuck.

Still, the point was, I could be comfortable here. I could bring my family and friends - either from the 'present' or, like this Ptolema here, the past where my development wasn't so arrested - and build some sort of life with them. Or I could not do that, and have a largely clean slate.

And... If Ran were here... then maybe...

I hesitated, flinching slightly.

All of this is dependent on the idea that there isn't a catch, my inner cynic observed. But isn't that a little too simple?

Haven't you already seen something which calls that into question?

"Ptolema," I spoke up, as we descended back to the grass outside her cabin.

"Yeah?" she asked, craning her neck as she looked back on me.

"You're sure I'm a Primary, right?"

She blinked. "Oh, yeah, 100%. After you've been here long enough, you can get a sense of, like, the shape of someone's 11-dimensional body, and it's easy to tell the different types apart." She sucked in her lip, frowning to herself. "It's kinda hard to put it into words... I guess Primaries are sorta heavy, Secondaries are sorta light, and Tertiaries don't have one at all. Just a 10-dimensional one."

I furrowed my brow, looking out over the countryside. The 'sun' was starting to set, but it was still pretty light. "I see."

"Why d'ya ask?" slowing down as we approached the wooden steps leading up to her porch.

"Well, you mentioned that Tertiaries are contracted matter for a finite time," I elaborated. "And I was wondering if that had a... physical representation? Like an hourglass, or something?"

She blinked. "Uh. Not that I know of...?" She scratched the side of her cheek. "I guess I've never really thought to ask one of 'em how they know, but when I contract somebody's prop, when it's gonna end is just kinda a feeling. So I'd assume it was the same way."

"R-Right." I hesitated, clasping my hands together.

She looked at me inquisitively. "What's up, Su? You're acting funny all of a sudden."

"Oh, it's just." I bit my lip. Why are you being so evasive? Just say it. "Well, ever since I got here, there's been this hourglass that's sort of... attached, to me. I mean, I suppose technically I'm carrying it around, but there's just this feeling that it's tethered to me in some metaphysical way. I could even see it when I was out in the stage."

Ptolema was giving me a funny look. "...huh. Like. Just a regular hourglass?"

"Well, no, not just a regular one," I explained, shifting uneasily. "The sands keep flowing in the same direction no matter how I move it. And when I was looking at it, I couldn't shake the sense that something bad was going to happen when it ran out."

She considered this information for a few moments, crossing her arms. "I mean, it could just be something you made with your prop? You have kinda a connection to stuff that is, so maybe you're just not used to it? That wouldn't explain bein' able to see it in the Stage, though." She looked to me. "Could I see it?"

"Uh, sure," I said.

I stepped forward, reaching into my pocket, and produced the hourglass, the ominous aura of which instantly struck me once more from the instant I touched it. The cold felt sharp against my fingertips, so I lowered it into my palm, which I displayed to Ptolema. She stared downwards at it, frowning.

"Maybe it's something rarer?" I suggested. "Have you ever seen anything like it before?"

"Uh, Su..." she spoke hesitantly.

"What is it?" I asked, a little anxious.

"You're--" She glanced to the side, making a nervous smile. "This ain't some weird bit you're doing, right? I'm not good with this kinda thing."

"What do you mean?" I asked, confused.

"I mean... you're not holding anything."

I blinked.

I looked down at my palm. The hourglass was, indisputably, there. I could feel the dark stone against my skin, see the sunlight reflecting on the glass of the chamber as one of the tiny grains slowly passed though its midsection.

I looked up at her, squinting. "You can't see it?"

Rather than answering the question, Ptolema - looking rather uneasy - instead reached towards my palm. She pushed three of her fingers downward, and while one brushed against my skin, the other two clearly made contact with the hourglass, pushing it slightly and causing it roll a little towards my wrist.

"See?" she said, her brow knotted worriedly. "There's nothin' there."

I looked at her for a few moments, my face slowly falling with confusion. "Ptolema, you just touched it. I saw your fingers stop on it."

"N-No I didn't," she said, now looking outright spooked. "I just touched your palm."

I blinked a few times, getting a little unsettled myself. "This is really weird."

"I mean, you're tellin' me," she said, with a nervous laugh.

"Maybe it's-- Maybe it's some kind of illusion?" I suggested, pushing my lips together tightly as I stared at the object. "Maybe it's affecting your perception? Or my perception."

"Uh, m-maybe," Ptolema spoke anxiously. "The Power still can't screw with the brain here, though."

"I'm definitely holding an hourglass," I insisted to her. "Or at least that's what my senses are telling me. I can see it. Feel it."

"I believe you!" Ptolema exclaimed, holding up both hands. "I believe you. I-- I mean, I guess you're right. It's gotta be some weird illusion." She lowered her arms, holding them together guardedly. "I dunno why somebody would do somethin' like that, though."

I frowned deeply, feeling genuinely pretty thrown off. Just as I'd started to feel like I'd begun to firmly understand the rules of my new reality, suddenly something comes along to throw a spanner in the works.

However, a moment later, an idea came to me.

"...there's an easy way to test this sort of thing," I said. "I'll set the hourglass on the ground, then get a pebble or something, then try to balance the pebble on top of it. If the pebble stays, that means what you're seeing is an illusion and what I'm seeing is real. And if the pebble falls - or won't stay on top of it in defiance of physics, or something - then that means what you're seeing is real."

"...okay," Ptolema said slowly. "That sounds like it would work. You're bein' kind of intense about this, though."

"In fact, there's no need to even use a pebble," I said, as I struggled to spot one in the muddy terrain. "I can just get a clump of grass. It should be easier to balance a few blades on the head anyway."

As Ptolema looked at me like I was a crazy person, I leaned down and plucked a few stands of grass from her front lawn. I set the hourglass down on the first of the wooden steps, then placed the blade of grass on top of it.

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𒀭/𒊹

I stared at the hourglass. Ptolema was walking up the steps.

"Uh, Su?" she asked after me, frowning. "Everything okay?"

"P-Ptolema," I asked mutely. "Did you..." I didn't even know what sensory label to use. See that? Hear that? Experience that? "Did you... feel that?"

She frowned in apparent bafflement. "Feel... what?"

I looked up at her from where I was squatted, the sun getting in my eyes. "What happened just now. When I tried to put the-- When I tried to set the grass on on top of the hourglass."

She stared. "What hourglass?"

I blinked. "...the one we were just talking about a moment ago."

She paused for several moments, an expression of anxious hesitation quickly returning to her face. "Su, the last thing you said to me was when you were askin' about Tertiaries." She held a hand to her mouth. "Are you...okay? You just bent down there outta nowhere, and now you look really pale."

I stared back up at her. My mouth opened, but no words escaped my lips.

𒀭

I didn't raise the subject again after that. Perhaps it wasn't wholly rational, but there was a sense of danger in the air, like I'd been pushing my finger hard into something both fragile and heavy.

I was feeling increasingly exhausted - we'd done a lot of walking around over the course of the day, all things considered - and went to bed a couple of hours later, Ptolema agreeing to stay out of the front room until morning and deciding to go outside to spend some time with the pigs. There was only enough room to squeeze in a single bed, but it was still plenty comfortable, so I had no complaints.

Unfortunately, I ended up not being able to get much sleep. I spent most of the evening and early night seeing what I could do with my newly-acquired resonator in-between trying to get my brain to shut down. Ptolema hadn't been kidding; it was far more advanced than a logic engine, even a full sized one. It had both an optical interface and a neural one like logic engines, and offered access to a library of entertainment vaster than I'd ever seen in my life; literally millions of dramas, both produced in Dilmun and in human history proper. I had little doubt that if I'd wished it, I could have found the shows I'd been watching back in Deshur and picked up right where I'd left off.

...though, the fact that they would have cut off suddenly a few years into the future made that idea a little too depressing.

I was curious what sort of art would be produced in a culture like this, but couldn't get myself in the right mindset to properly focus and watch it, my mind continuously going back to what had happened, unable to shake the sense of foreboding.

A while after even Ptolema herself had gone to bed and begun snoring loudly, I decided to head outside. I thought about leaving a note, but ultimately didn't bother - if she happened to wake up and notice my absence, well, she'd just given me something for that express sort of scenario, so it was no problem. I crept out the front door and back down the steps. The Valley at night here had a very different atmosphere, with so little artificial light that the entire landscape looked like it had been covered by a thick, black cloth. I'd never lived in the countryside except for Deshur, which had been so flat that the lights from nearby towns stuck out even at great remove, and of course both it and the Mimikos always had lights on the horizon somewhere on account of their shapes. So this was a bit of an alienating sight.

The 'stars' here were different, too, obviously meant more to mimic the view that Earth was supposed to have had than the Mimikos. I could see the streak of the Milky Way overhead, along with countless twinkling lights surrounding it.

Again, it was beautiful, but made me feel out of place. A stranger in a strange land. I exhaled, shaking my head.

I'd come out here for a reason. I muttered the words of the Form-Levitating Arcana once again, and ascended. Up and up, until the Milky Way bent and began to look like a glowing, upside-down road. Up through the darkness, back to the orange void of eternal day, my eyes wincing as they adjusted.

And up further. Until everything I'd seen thus far was beneath me. The Valley, the City, and a different place in the opposite direction that apparently existed but hadn't been explained to me, resembling a floating, sandy island.

Then, finally, I stopped.

This should be enough, I thought. I cleared my throat.

"I, uh," I began. "I need help."

It happened faster than I'd expected. They flickered into reality strangely, like a signal coming into the right frequency, or something that had always been present but was impossibly stretched out suddenly condensing to a single point about 10 feet in front of me. I couldn't help but lurch backwards, startled, my body and hair twisting into strange positions with the total absence of gravity.

The figure which had appeared... looked mostly like a man. Probably Ysaran, with medium-to-dark tan skin and a mop of disheveled, deep brown hair, with enough stubble on his long, serious face to almost call a beard. He was dressed somewhat strangely, in coarse and brown-threaded trousers and a matching jacket, both of which hung loosely over his levitating body.

And his eyes... his eyes...

They shouldn't have struck me as much as they did - not after all the sorts of impossible people I'd seen today - yet somehow, they did. Because they weren't like eyes at all.

I wanted to say the sclera was black, but that wasn't it. No, it was more like there was no sclera at all, but an open window into a black void, within which - at an impossible distance - sat an orb of dimly-burning, cloudy red matter, with flares of orange occasionally crossing its surface.

A brown dwarf. A dying star.

I felt a tingle in my spine. Somehow, he was... familiar.

He lowered his head.

DIRECTOR: Welcome back, Miss Fusai. We have been expecting you.

My eyes went wide. "Y-You... you have?"

DIRECTOR: Indeed. I beg your pardon if I have startled you. It has been some time since I have taken this form, and I was not given leave to assess your present... mental condition.

His voice. It's like I'm not hearing it at all. It's like using a logic engine, but only one-sided. Like the words are just being imposed on me whether I want them to or not.

I stared at him, my body shaking slightly with trepidation. Like I was an insect being stared at by an entomologist, a higher being that could annihilate me with a thought.

DIRECTOR: Now, if I may. On behalf of Our Lady, I would like to cordially extend an invitation to the loge. It would please Her if you would attend at your earliest convenience, as She is already quite displeased as to the delay regarding the matter.

I swallowed. "Your... lady?"

DIRECTOR: Our Lady. She is the mistress and creator of this place, and She would like very much to speak with you. Please, take this.

Without thinking, I grasped the white card as he thrust it towards my chest. The surface was ice cold, just like the hourglass.

DIRECTOR: I am certain that you have many questions, but rest assured, they shall all be answered upon your arrival, as per the terms of the agreement. You may access the loge via the stage at your leisure. You will know what to do.

With that, just as quickly as he had appeared, he vanished, an audible crackle in the air as his form returned to nothingness.

For a moment, I was stunned into silence, floating motionless in the void. Then I looked down, sharply, at the card left in my hands.

The message it bore was extremely to the point.

Utsushikome of Fusai

The time has come to repay the debt for your request.

Please rest assured.

This is justice, and this is kindness.