The Simulacrum

"I could really use some help right now!" Lord Ambrose, looking unusually dishevelled, croaked in a strained voice as he jumped cover behind a thick marble pillar. Right away, a chunk of rock hit the spot where he stood a second ago, followed by something that sounded like the low, thrumming howl of a dying washing machine. "Any second now!"

"I've heard you loud and— Wha…?"

I tried to make a dramatic entrance, as usual, but as soon as I Phased in, I was hit by the mother of all vertigos.

"Ah, it's you!" Ambrose burst out with a relieved grin. "I knew you would—!"

He abruptly fell silent when I stumbled over to the column and put a hand on it for support. Everything around me was… vibrating? Squirming? No, neither of those words could adequately describe the sight. The air itself was heavy, and moving around felt like I was swimming through thick molasses, yet the way everything around me twisted and undulated was somehow even more disturbing than that.

Objects in my peripheral vision would shift and change whenever I wasn't directly looking at them, as if they had no definitive form. Was this how an acid trip felt like, I wondered. For a moment I thought it was some kind of illusion or magical doohickery, but there was no sign of the characteristic colourless light accompanying such phenomena. But more importantly…

"Whoa? Why is the column so rubbery? And sticky?"

"Leonard! Pull yourself together!"

Despite his own sorry appearance, the arch-mage sounded genuinely worried about me. Speaking of which, looking at him in particular didn't make my vision go topsy-turvy, so I focused on him to calm my nerves. As I said, he wasn't in great shape. His usual black robe was torn in a few places, and the left side of his grand beard was signed and blackened, but that was the worst of it. I couldn't see any visible injuries on him at a glance, which wasn't much of a silver lining, but I took anything I could get in this situation.

"Are you sick? What happened?"

Ambrose was getting more frantic by the second, so I exhaled sharply and shook my head.

"I'm fine. The better question is, why's everything so… floompy around here?"

"Floompy?" he repeated after me.

"Yes, like…" I was cut short by the ground under our feet shaking, followed by a series of angry yells that, based on my little exposure to the language, I identified as French. "Let's get back to that in a moment. Come closer."

To his credit, Ambrose didn't hesitate, and I quickly wrapped a pair of phantom limbs around him. Just in time, because just a second later a large, vaguely humanoid thing made of grey stone and sporting a bright green orb for an eye on its flat square head peered around the column.

My first instinct was to Phase back home right away, but a different thought quickly overrode that. I had no idea what was going on here or what Ambrose had done, and if I took him back to Timaeus, I would've had no way to come back here anymore without an anchor. All that considered, I figured it was better to just take him to a safer spot and question him first before making any hasty decisions.

Fortunately, my natural Phasing range was pretty wide by this point. Unfortunately, all the spaces around me felt weird and icky. Even unfortunatelier, with a stone cyclops thing staring at me, I didn't exactly have the luxury to slowly and methodically consider my options, so I picked the first relatively isolated spot within my sphere of Phasing and we were both plunged into darkness. It only lasted for a second before a motion sensor on the ceiling detected us and turned up the lights, revealing a surprisingly spacious public restroom with multiple stalls and a single, large mirror covering the far wall with the sinks on it.

Good riddance, because I was on the verge of throwing up.

"Guh… Bloody hell in a handbasket, what is—!?" I started while holding my roiling stomach, onto to fall silent when I realized it wasn't the only thing doing so. The walls and the floor, the stalls… no, maybe space itself was rippling like I was watching the scenery through a lake surface after someone threw a stone in it. "Oh… oh shit…"

Needless to say, that didn't help my nausea one bit, and I felt lucky that I didn't take the goldfish poop gang up on their offer. Otherwise, I would've had much more than just a can of Coke to throw up into the nearest toilet bowl. That definitely wasn't on my bingo card for the day, but my innards refused to listen to reason, and after one last dry heave, I managed to collect myself and got up.

"Leonard? Are you all right?"

I was so preoccupied with my sudden motion-sickness that I nearly forgot that Ambrose was still with me. The old guy was looking at me with clear concern which, considering his own dishevelled appearance, made me feel just a tad self-conscious.

"Yeah, just… Teleporting blindly in unfamiliar territory is a bitch," I answered with the first excuse that came to mind and flushed the toilet. I drew in a long, ammonia and pine-scented breath through my nose and steeled my nerves. "Where are we, anyway?"

"The School of Restoration in Ottawa," he responded automatically, followed by a critical squint. "Hold on. How come you don't know that already?"

"Give me a break, old man," I answered a tad more grumpily than planned, then swallowed hard and tried again. "It was difficult enough to pinpoint your coordinates in a hurry; I didn't stop by on the way to sightsee and ask for directions."

"That… makes sense, yes." By this point, much of the tension drained from his posture and he let out a shallow groan. "Honestly, when I asked you to back me up back in Timaeus, this wasn't exactly what I had in mind, but you won't hear me complaining."

"You better not. I'm almost regretting coming here already, I don't want to hear any sass." I raised a finger and gulped hard, forcing down the bile that was crawling up my throat. "A little. I'm regretting it a little already, and…"

"… And what?"

"Before anything else…" I pointed at the toilet next to me. "Was this toilet seat always blue?"

"… Probably? I wasn't exactly paying attention to the interior décor of the—"

Ignoring the arch-mage's grumbling, I squinted hard at said toiled seat. I could've sworn that it was plain white just a few seconds ago, but then when I turned to Ambrose and back, it changed colour. I looked away, and back, but it was still blue. Then, I closed my eyes and tried my best to recall the original seat, and when I opened them again… it was white again!

"What the hell?"

"Are you sure you're all right? Is this some kind of side-effect of your abilities?"

"No, it's something different, and no, I'm not alright, but not in the way you think. Give me a second."

Ambrose was clearly miffed by the way I brushed him off, but then he eventually turned away from me and stepped up to one of the sinks to get his dishevelled hair and beard into something resembling presentable condition. As for me, I didn't even want to look in the mirror at the moment, because I was sure I wouldn't like what I would see there, so I focused on the current predicament instead. Namely, just what the heck was wrong with this place?

I'd never seen anything this uncanny or weird when I Far Glanced at Ambrose to check on his progress. In fact, I'd never seen anything this crazy outside of the space-between-spaces where I did most of my enchanting and stuff, and while those audible sights and tangible colours were even more bizarre at face value, they never gave me vertigo like this.

Though again, whenever I interacted with that stratum of the Simulacrum, I was doing so from a disembodied point of view, so maybe the lack of a digestive track at the time had something to do with it. Which brought up the next question: was the Simulacrum here somehow broken, or…

"Ah. I think I got it…" I whispered, drawing Ambrose's attention back to me.

"Hm?"

"Don't mind me, just thinking aloud."

With that, I turned my back on him and faced the white toilet seat again. If my hunch was right then I wasn't just seeing things. It was, as a matter of fact, blue for a moment there, and it changed in response to my observing it. Not in the 'woo-woo understanding of quantum mechanics' sense of the word, but in the 'internal logic of the Simulacrum' sense of it.

Critias, the Elysium, and the Abyss had been clearly and solidly defined at the time I first woke up here, because that's where the current scenario was supposed to play out. Even so, they still had a lot of vagueries and blind spots, such as the placeholders' behaviour or everything being brand sparkling new and clean like the set of an old sitcom.

Conversely, if that was how an important location looked like, then what about a place where none of our alleged main cast was supposed to go, ever? If my conjecture was right, exactly like this! And no, I didn't mean 'like a fancy public restroom', but a vague place. Just like how my perception, expectations, and interactions shaped Critias and the placeholders over time, my being here was actively solidifying everything around me on a fundamental level.

That was the theory, at the very least, but it sounded about right, and bits and pieces of other-me in me more-or-less confirmed my speculation. Now that I cleared up this mystery (or at the very least I was no longer freaking out about the floompiness of the world around me), and my stomach was also behaving itself, it was time to temporarily put the whole topic aside and focus on my other worries linked to the arch-mage in front of me.

"Okay, I'm done." The arch-mage turned to me as soon as I said that and we locked gazes. He looked a bit more dependable, and now that I knew what was going on, I hoped so did I. "Now, can you please explain to me why were you being chased around by…" I paused and, after some hesitation, I guessed, "Golems?"

"Golems," he confirmed.

Stifling a satisfied grunt, I continued with, "Right. What did I miss?"

"Listen, Leonard!" Ambrose burst out, itching to finally start talking. "Lord Marzanna totally lost it! She's completely hysterical! Battier than guano farm! A complete bughouse! And utter—!"

"Yes, yes, I've got it. Get to the point, please."

"I was about to get there!" the man fumed and crossed his arms. "The old bint told me that she's busy and we can't talk for another two weeks!"

"Yes, I've heard that."

"Now, I admit that I might've gotten a tiny bit worked up over that, and so I grabbed one of her aides and interrogated him." That must've happened either very recently, or between two Far Glances. "He told me that they've done something to the Grimoire Key, or they were planning to do something with it, or something. His vocabulary wasn't very precise, and he kept speaking French, but that's not important! Seeing that something was afoot, I took it upon myself to get to the bottom of this!"

"Did you kick down their front door?" I guessed, but the arch-mage looked at me like I just hurled an insult at him.

"Who do you take me for?! I couldn't do something like that when dealing with some kind of shady conspiracy! I mean sure, if Marzanna was just being an obstinate cow like usual, then I would've no problem doing that, but with a conspiracy on the table? I needed to find the evidence first, before they could get rid of it, so I climbed into the ventilation system, and…"

"Whoa, whoa, WHOA! Hold your horses!" I stopped him with my palm raised. "You climbed into the air ducts? Seriously?"

"What? Do you have something to say, punk?!" he snapped back at me with a glare. "Just because I'm not some globe-teleporting whippersnapper, it doesn't mean I can't do that much! Do you have any idea how many missions I've completed in the field, armed with a cracked staff and a half-eaten ham sandwich?! Why, I tell you, back in my days—!"

"Hold your horses, please. I didn't mean it that way," I cut in, this time with both palms raised in surrender. "I just didn't think this place had air ducts wide enough for a man to fit through. Sounds like a major security risk."

"Right you are! That's why, back in the Tower of Invocation, I had all of them fitted with laser grids and explosive charges to deter any would-be infiltrators, spies, and enemy agents! They told me it was a fool's errand and a gross misuse of funding, but do you see anyone infiltrating my Tower? None! Who's laughing now, huh?" He suddenly paused and rubbed his singed beard. "Never mind. Where were we?"

"The part where you Joe Leland-ed your way into this place through the air conditioning system," I prompted him, and he immediately crossed his arms again with a huff.

"That, I did! And you're not going to believe what I've uncovered!" He fell silent, clearly angling for me to ask, but when I didn't, he spilled the beans in a heartbeat anyway. "The reason why Marzanna refused to hand over the Grimoire Key was because it's in an unstable state! They must've done some kind of experiment on it for some wicked purpose, and they knew that we would realize it as soon as Amadeus's kid got her hands on it, so since I was here, and they realized they could stall no longer, they decided to destroy the evidence!" He fell silent for another long beat, just long enough for a classic 'Dun-dun-dunnn!' stinger, and then he threw his hands open. "Don't you get it?! They are planning to destroy the Grimoire Key!"

"I get it, but you should tone it down. They're still looking for you, remember?" My hand was already rubbing my forehead before I knew it, and I glanced up when something else occurred to me. "Which reminds me… how did they find you?"

"The ventilation passage collapsed under me." His laconic answer was followed by an irritated huff and a considerably more incensed, "Not only the security, but even the structural integrity of the construction is the bottom of the barrel here! If this happened under my jurisdiction, I would've died of shame and—!"

I hurriedly reached out and covered the man's mouth, much to his chagrin.

"I told you to keep it down," I hissed at him, and we both listened intently. I was pretty sure I heard something from the outside, and before long, there was more distinctly French cursing (or at least I figured it wasn't freeform poetry) coming from the other side of the restroom's door. "Well, shit."

I considered my options. The only person, by a certain definition of the word, who had seen me here so far was one of those high-spec golems, meaning I still had plausible deniability at the moment. So, what were my options?

Plan A: Phase home and wash my hands of this whole affair. Counter-point: I still had no mark here, meaning I couldn't come back to finish the job later, making this into a diplomatic incident without any gains.

Plan B: Phase to the other side of the door, mark someone, and then Phase home. Counterpoint: Phasing here made me nauseous for some reason, probably having to do with the half-baked nature of the environment, which could leave me vulnerable. Also, trying to Phase behind some shmuck and do a 'Nothing personal, kid' move on them only to then immediately throw up again would've been mortifying. Plus potentially draw things out long enough for someone to recognize me, but mostly just mortifying.

Plan C: Do Plan B, but first put on a disguise. Counterpoint: The nausea, and also, I would've needed a mask or helmet to hide my identity, and throwing up in one of those wasn't my idea of fun.

Plad D: Phase to a different room, along with Ambrose. Counterpoint: still the nausea.

Okay, let's just take Phasing completely off the table for now. It might've sounded weak, but after just recovering from that bitch of a vertigo, I wanted to be a bit more conservative about teleporting around than usual, lest my stomach would decide that its feelings were more important than a life-or-death situation.

As such, I looked for an alternative method, and I not only had one up my sleeve, but it hit two birds with one stone.

If this section of the Simulacrum was less 'defined' than Critias and its related environments, would it mean that modifying it would be easier than doing the same on the island? Well, someone was already on the other side of the door, and there was no better time to find it out than the present, so I stepped up to the entrance and enacted my hastily conceived Plan E by plunging a phantom limb into it.

A moment later my vision was swimming with fractals of various doors, gates, and other related entryways expanding in every which direction. So, was there a difference? It was easier to get it to happen, for one. No 'being compressed into a singularity and then squeezed through the eye of an imaginary needle' malarkey here, at the very least. Next, I browsed the infinitely self-symmetrical tides of doors until I found one that served my purpose. It wasn't just locked, but it was more of a… fake door, I guess? The kind that only existed for aesthetics, but had no lock or even hinges and was completely fixed into the wall. I didn't stop there, but also looked for a version of this false door that was a bit sturdier, settling on a thick steel one that could probably take a few hits even if the local Magi tried to knock it down.

Using two phantom limbs, I dragged it over the image of the original and… there was a sound.

No, wait. That was subtly wrong, because 'sounds' didn't exist here, but I sure as hell perceived it as such when a spot near the original position of the fake door unravelled with a high-pitched tearing noise.

"Oh, shit!" the words escaped my not-mouth before I knew it, causing familiar waves and ripples, which… created more tears on the fabric of space, or fractals, or the Simulacrum, or who the hell knew at this point!

There was nothing on the other side of the tears, but even if there was, I had no time to peek through them, because every fibre of my being told me that this was really, really freaking bad and I had to fix it post haste.

I grabbed the edges of the tears using all my phantom limbs and hastily realigned them, and after some tension-filled subjective aeons of finagling, I was relieved to see that the tears slowly knitted together and mended themselves. I would've let out a relieved sigh and might've even wondered how I was grabbing the fabric of space just now, but I had no time for idle thoughts, as there were still a couple of more tears to fix.

After what felt like metaphorical ages, I managed to track down every single hole in this fractalized sub-reality of the Simulacrum and stitch them up, and only when I was sure that I didn't miss any did I let my guard down.

Holy crap, that was close! I mean, I had no idea how close, and to what exactly, but I was pretty damn sure it wasn't good. I was like an elephant in a soufflé shop; one careless step and everything would just collapse into themselves. I had to be very, very careful while out here, outside of the solidity of the scenario, and… what was I doing before all this?

Right, the door. I returned to the half-finished job, and with gingerly movements, as if handling a jewelled egg, I veeery carefully laid the new door on top of the old one. Once the two snapped together and I was sure there were no more tears, I withdrew my phantom limb and returned to 'reality'. Just in time to see someone angrily yanking on the doorknob before eventually giving up and moving on with yet another very French tirade.

"What did you just do?" Ambrose whispered, looking completely flabbergasted.

While I knew that it didn't raise any eyebrows back home (besides the apparent impossibility of it all, but I digress), I wasn't sure how using my temporary mini-retcons looked from the outside at this particular place, so I wracked my brain to come up with a quick response.

"Just a practical application of illusion magic." The arch-mage was still looking at me funny, so I added, "All magic is essentially making the world look the other way while you do what you want. Or so I've been told, at least. I just take that concept one step further."

"I don't really understand, but…"

He stepped closer and touched the fixed door-shaped object in the wall, looking more confounded by the second.

"Listen, I'm sure this is interesting, but we don't have time for this. Let's get to the bottom of this whole Grimoire Key business and get home before something else—"

"What are you doing!?"

The sudden appearance of a third voice made Ambrose reel back and reflexively start chanting a spell, only to freeze in place a moment later, mouth agape.

"Oh, for the love of…" I groaned with a hand on my forehead and turned to our newcomer.

The Girl's upper body, looking the same as always (read: a blonde teenager in pink and a brightly glowing planetoid, more or less at the same time), was peeking out of a flat portal-like thing hanging in the air, and she had her hands on her hips while glaring at me.

"I told you that ************** is doing a **************, didn't I? Why are you drawing attention to yourself?" she scolded me in a voice that sounded like a thousand angry magpies, further startling the third person in the room.

"Leonard? Who… What is she?"

"Please, give me a second. This is unrelated business," I told him before turning back to The Girl with a scowl. "And you also said you would contact me and explain things properly so that I would know what not to do!"

"Yes, but I also told you that I had a meeting to attend!"

"That was two months ago!"

"In your time-frame!"

"Yes, and in 'my time-frame', I'm currently in the middle of something!"

She was just about to retort, but then she fell silent and looked me over.

"Right. If it's important, I shouldn't hold you up like this."

"Good. So, when are you going to…?"

Before I could finish that sentence, she closed in on me without a warning and grabbed me by the lapels. I couldn't even let out a 'Hey!', nor could Ambrose lift a finger as I was abruptly pulled in and I fell head-first into her floating portal to have an untimely discussion. No pun intended.