Part 1

"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.

Part 2

"Ack!"

In retrospect, landing on my butt on a non-floor after falling through a hole in reality was one of the less dignified things I'd ever done. Not the weirdest though, which… spoke volumes about my life.

Anyhow, we somehow skipped the whole 'wading through the spaceless void between spaces' step, and I was now sitting in the middle of a large, fairly girly room of shifting dimensions and colours that I instantly recognized as the Domain of The Girl.

As if on cue, the owner of the room (or rather the humanoid avatar of the true body, but let's not split hairs over this one, especially when I still wasn't one hundred percent clear on it) materialized in front of me. She was petite and cutesy, as usual, dressed in a frilly pink dress and wearing her shiny blonde hair in a pair of prominent pigtails. More importantly, she was staring at me with a mixture of a frown and a pout.

"There. Now you can't complain about time," she brashly declared and then folded her arms.

"If you say so…" I grumbled, and while sitting on the floor like this was a bit awkward, I didn't feel like getting up yet. While I didn't have a stomach at the moment— "Wait."

"For what?" The Girl blurted out, but I didn't pay attention to her and patted down my whole body.

Yep. I was fully corporeal this time. Normally when I had these out-of-body experiences, they, by definition, only involved my disembodied point of view. Even the last time I talked with The Girl in her Domain, I only had a vague and intangible form, so this was a first.

"Oookay, so since I came here in person this time, does that mean I'm outside the Simulacrum right now?"

My entirely reasonable question made her look at me funny, but then she hurriedly redoubled her efforts to glare at me, only to then just as quickly give up and slouch her shoulders.

"Aw. I can't stay mad at you when you're asking cute questions like this," she cooed and leaned over to tousle my hair.

"I'm serious though. How did you even pull my body in here?" She stopped rubbing the top of my head and cocked her own to the side, as if not quite understanding what I was talking about. Maybe she really didn't. "I mean, last time I came here… normally?"

The more I tried to explain my problem, the less I could blame her for not getting it, because I wasn't sure I got it either.

"You speak as if there's a difference," she said off-handedly and folded her arms again. A blink of an eye later, a pair of chairs materialized out of nowhere, and she gestured for me to get up and sit there instead. "On second thought, I'm still a little mad at you, so take a seat and let me scold you properly."

This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

"Before that, can I ask one more question?" I rose to my feet, she sat down, and then I waited for her to nod before speaking up again. "How much is time dilated here?" She was once again looking at me funny, so I tried to clarify my question. "I mean, you said we would have 'time' to talk here, so I figured something like that was going on. Like, one hour here is one second outside, or in the Simulacrum, or…" This time she cocked her head to the other side, prompting a groan out of me. "You know what I mean."

"No, not really," she admitted and pointed at the empty chair. She only spoke up again once I took a seat. "I understand that you're more used to linear causality, but that doesn't apply to us."

"But… this whole conversation is taking place in 'linear causality'," I told her in the company of the biggest air-quotes of my life. "I sat on the floor, then I got up and now I'm sitting on this chair. That's a sequence of events that happened in time."

"That's how you perceived them, yes, but no actual 'time' passed," she air-quoted me back, much to my mild annoyance. "I swear, I already told you this, so listen closely: we can experience linear causality, but we aren't bound to linear causality like the humans are. We are now inside my Domain, and we're experiencing an 'instance', which you're interpreting as a series of events congruent with linear time moving forward one 'present' at a time, but in reality, it's just one big block of 'present'. Do you get it?"

"… No?"

"Ugh… Seriously, why didn't the Crowned Coalescence give you a proper explanation of these things?" She grumbled while kicking the air, her usually chirpy voice once again sounding like the war cry of an especially irate kestrel, so I decided to cut my losses and move on for now.

"Okay, how about we just say that we're in an instant of time, decouple from the outside world, and call it a day?"

"From your perspective, maybe, but…" The Girl hesitated for a while, but then shrugged and uttered a disinterested, "Whatever, it's close enough."

"And you Emergents are constantly in this 'block of present'."

"Yes," she nodded along with a delighted smile, happy that I finally got something right.

"Then why did you contact me right now, and not before?"

"I told you, I was busy with the meeting, and then you went ahead and started poking holes in the Simulacrum's ************** structure, so I had no choice but to stop you."

That was… a complicated term right there. Something about tethering concepts together, and underlying principles. Let's just say she was saying something like 'internal framework' and move on.

"No, I mean… if you perceive what's happening as a 'block of present', then you would've already known that I would do that, so you could've stopped me before it happened."

"No, no, no! Ugh, I thought you got it, but you still…" The Girl held her head in her hand and let out a long groan that reminded me of a parrot trying to imitate a fax machine. Her vocal range was weird, but considering what she was, I was surprised it wasn't weirder. "Listen, I know for sure I've already told you about this, so pay attention this time: retro-causality is a no-no. You can't exist before you're born, and you can't know something before you've learned about it. Everything works like that. For example, we couldn't have met before the first time we met, because then that wouldn't have been the first time we met. The universe is a real stickler when it comes to this."

Her explanation ticked a memory in my head, and I realized that it was quite similar to the way future-me described the way Emergents perceived time, using a book as an analogy, and… was this where he learned about that? But wait…. The Girl insisted that the Emergents were 'outside of time', but then why did her warning about retro-causality sound suspiciously like she was talking about avoiding time-paradoxes?

…

One question at a time.

"What I'm getting from this is that you are experiencing time as a single, fixed block, but you can't take information from a 'later' part of the block back to an earlier part of the 'block'."

"That's it."

"So this 'block of present' is unchanging." She nodded. "What about Free Actors then? Don't they exist specifically to change up the scenario and make it unpredictable?"

"Oh, that's something unique to the Simulacrum," she responded in an upbeat, sing-song voice. "That kind of thing really helps to stimulate the Submerged Ones, you see. It's like a mystery-box! You can't know what's inside it until you open it, and the Free Actor's there to make sure the end result wouldn't be predictable."

So far, this was mostly in line with the knowledge I acquired when merging with other-me, though that was from a very in-universe perspective, not from the block-of-present, sequential view of an Emergent.

"Meaning, the Simulacrum adapts to the Free Actor by tailoring the scenario to their decisions," I guessed, and she repeatedly nodded. "Like when Josh picked Angie."

"Who?" she blurted out in confusion, but then she hastily raised her palms "Ah, sorry. I'm not great at keeping track of things within the scenario. I'm more of a technical gal, taking care of the background stuff. You should ask *************** about the lore and the Free Actor once all of this blows over."

That name in the middle was once again spoken in that mind-piercing, 'torrent of sounds, images, and concepts injected directly into the frontal lobe' kind of way used when referring to the other Emergents, and it didn't take long for me to sift through the more recognizable elements and figure out that she was talking about The Man.

More importantly, there was something in what she said that piqued my interest.

"Aren't there two of them?"

A lot of my earlier visits in the not-dark not-room were hazy and hard to recall, but I was pretty sure that one (or maybe more) of them mentioned two Free Actors. That was one of the more confusing bits that my other-me-based knowledge was unable to parse.

"Right. From the outside, I guess you do look like a second Free Actor, huh?" she asked back as if I was supposed to be in on the joke. "Anyhow, from a technical standpoint, all I can say is that there's always a Free Actor in every scenario for the reason I just explained."

That made a couple of the puzzle pieces in my head snap into place. Let's look at it step-by-step, merging what I learned here with what I heard from future-me:

Emergents viewed the world as one big block of time, with 'instances' like this being played out as if we were in linear time. However, the instances themselves couldn't be arbitrarily chosen; they had to be in sequence, to avoid retro-causality. I presumed that Submerged Ones perceived the world similarly, but if they were already operating in the 'time as a block' framework, then it meant the point where they emerged would be fixed. The rules were slightly different in the Simulacrum, as it was like a big Domain that was its own 'block of time', and the Free Actor's actions could change the scenario, which would then lead to that 'block of time' diverging. That created the kind of stimuli Submerged Ones needed to emerge, all the while the Simulacrum also provided them a template on how to define themselves as humans (or at least human-adjacent).

It was all rather logical, but there were still a few things I wasn't entirely clear on. However, before I could interrogate The Girl any further, she suddenly frowned at me.

"Hey! I'm onto you now, mister! You completely derailed the conversation to avoid getting scolded, haven't you?"

"I get that a lot, but…"

"No buts!" she huffed and puffed, and it caused the shape and curves of the cutesy room and its furniture to tremble and subtly shift, slowly turning into a Tom Burton movie set. "You were lucky that the Predator Moon was busy elsewhere and I was the only one paying attention to the Simulacrum at the time! What were you even trying to do, making holes like that?"

"I wasn't trying to make holes, they just… happened because the place was all floompy."

"… Excuse me? I'm not familiar with that terminology."

I exhaled hard and gave her a quick description of my recent experiences, and she looked both surprised and intrigued by my words.

"Oooh? That makes a lot of sense, actually." She pinched her chin and nodded three times. "That part of the Simulacrum, where you were playing around, was off-screen."

"… Don't tell me that's actual terminology used by you guys."

Her smirk said 'maybe it is, maybe it isn't', and moved on without giving me a straightforward answer.

"It's a peculiar thing. Normally there shouldn't have been anything there, but I guess your influence is spreading and making even those parts of the Simulacrum more vivid. That's good… but also bad."

She fell silent for quite a while, so I had to prompt her with a slightly impatient, "Care to elaborate?"

"Sure! You see, the fact that all of the Simulacrum is gaining definition, whether there's a Free Actor there to directly observe it or not, means that the Crowned Coalescence's plan is working and your presence is having an effect, but it also means that it's only a question of time before the others notice all the extra complexity happening and start asking questions."

"And that would be bad."

"Probably, yeah." She folded her arms, and I couldn't help but notice how the room around us was slowly returning to its previous girly state. At last, The Girl looked me in the eye again. "You're getting close to the finale of the scenario, right?"

"More or less, yes," I answered a touch hesitantly.

"Then you should go and work on that! The sooner it's finished, the less likely it is for someone else to get suspicious and for things to go completely out of hand."

"Sure, but… What does 'sooner' even mean in the context of someone outside linear time, anyway?"

"Stop harping on that!" she burst out, sounding like a murder of crows about to commit murder, and she opened a portal under me. Weirdly enough, I didn't fall in right away and remained sitting on top of a chair seemingly floating over a hole in space. "Go and do something about the scenario instead!"

"Whoa, slow down. You said we're outside of time, or at least the Simulacrum's time, so shouldn't we take this opportunity to discuss everything in detail, no matter how long it takes? There's no reason to—"

"Don't drag your feet! Just do it, and once we're in the clear, we can talk all we want!"

Before I could get another word in, the chair suddenly disappeared from under me and I fell into the portal.

Once again, there was no 'not-black lack of space', and I just suddenly found myself landing on my butt, again, right next to a flabbergasted Lord Ambrose.

"Ow. Goddamit," I cursed under my breath, followed by a much louder one when the girl poked her head out of the still-present portal. "Bloody hell!"

"Listen!" She called out to me, completely ignoring my exclamation, and she even wagged her finger at me. "I forgot to scold you properly this time, but next time, you won't be so lucky! Got it?"

Before I could get a word in, she ducked back into the hole in the air, and then it disappeared with a pop, causing a series of familiar ripples to echo through the surrounding space.

"W-W-What kind of preposterous magic was that?!" Ambrose burst out as soon as he gathered his wits.

I put a finger in front of my mouth. While I replaced the door before I left, I had no idea how long it would last, and the last thing I needed right now was for him to give away our location and make my efforts meaningless. But speaking of leaving and returning…

"How long was I away?"

My sincere question only made him even more confused.

"Away? You just fell into that… that hole following that… that planet, and then you fell right out of it! What was that? Did you open a hole into space? Was it an illusion? Or…"

"It would take too long to explain," I grumbled a touch dismissively as I groggily rose to my feet.

I wasn't too happy with this intermezzo. Sure, I learned some things, but not nearly enough, and the whole 'time from the perspective of an Emergent' topic was still confusing the hell out of me despite multiple attempts at getting to the bottom of it. The way I was kicked out of her domain and essentially told to do my job also didn't sit well with me. In fact, didn't something similar happen last time as well? Maybe I really shouldn't try to rely on The Girl to gain more information about the Emergents and the nature of the Simulacrum.

But then again, I wasn't exactly strapped for choices, even if her half-baked attitude was starting to get on my nerves. One of these days, I should try to get her to sit down on my terms and properly question her. Probably not today though.

"Fine, keep your secrets," Lord Ambrose fumed and then jerked his head towards the door. "What do we do now? Should we finish what I started, or cut our losses?"

That was a moot question if I'd ever heard one.

"We can't exactly leave empty-handed after going through all this trouble, can we?"

"Ahhh." Ambrose startled me with an enormous, relieved sigh. "For a moment I was afraid you'd want to leave. I mean, I wouldn't blame you, and I can't exactly argue with you after you came all the way over here to help me, but it would've been a shame to not get to the bottom of this!"

"Sure, sure…"

As enthusiastic as the arch-mage way, I was feeling a fair bit more lethargic about this whole ordeal, but as they said, in for a penny, in for a pound. On the bright side, at least my time spent in The Girl's Domain made my stomach calm down a bit. It wasn't much of a silver lining considering I was sure I was going to upset it again today, but it was at least something.

Now, I just had to figure out how to do this ASAP, and then get home and do some brainstorming with Judy. Also, to eat some biscuits, wash them down with tea, then come up with a plan on how to find The Girl again and squeeze some proper answers out of her. But before any of that, let's go and nab a Grimoire Key, shall we?

Part 3

"There's nobody around outside," I whispered to Ambrose, and he remained expressionless as he waited for my next words. He didn't even ask how I knew, and for the better, because I didn't want to reveal my Far Sight to him.

Meanwhile, I continued to move my point of view around the place, looking for any movement or surveillance, but I found none. The corridor outside was also still a bit vaguely defined, but considering that the restroom was getting more solid by the second, I figured that would change with time. A few frantic Magi came by twice since I changed the door, and only the second group tried to come in. They gave up pretty much immediately after finding out that the door was stuck and they ran off somewhere else, so at least it wasn't a completely wasted effort.

More importantly, there were three problems I had to face now.

Number one, I had to limit my Phasing to the bare minimum. It was still my ticket out of this place when push came to shove, but short-distance teleporting wasn't great for my stomach. Or the spatial integrity of this place, which might've been a bigger deal objectively, but my guts still took priority in my eyes. That meant no blinking around like I did in the Abyss, which made exploration and stealth a bit trickier than usual.

Secondly, based on my observations so far, this School was also following the example set by the one back at Critias and was built underground. The maximum distance I could cast my point of view wasn't huge, so I could only see a couple of hallways, some storage rooms, as well as the large hall from whence we came. The latter was a bit surprising, as it seemed to be just a really fancy neo-roman style atrium with a bunch of columns and classical marble sculptures lining the walls. The Critias School of Conjuration also had a few large spaces like this, but none felt this, for lack of better words, pointless.

Due to the limited area I could cover, I couldn't quite grasp the layout of the facility, and Lord Ambrose wasn't much help either. Neither of us had any idea where to look for a Grimoire Key, but my hunch was that we just had to search for the most magically fortified spot we could find, and it was probably there. It was also most likely where the local arch-mage's office was, with her inside, but I figured I'd cross that bridge once I got there.

For now, we had to deal with the third and last of the immediate problems.

"It's not budging at all," the arch-mage by my side hissed as he tried to work the doorknob. "How does this even work? You said it's an illusion. No matter how good it is, once you know it's not real, it should be easy to dispel or even just ignore, but why doesn't this go away?"

I partially shared Ambrose's frustration, but I tried not to show it in my tone when I responded.

"I told you, didn't I? The best illusion magic doesn't trick the mind, it tricks the world, and if the world believes it, then it's as good as real."

That was my canned explanation for whenever I did something impossible and used my alleged illusion magic to obscure it, but it didn't quite work this time.

"What kind of hogwash is that?! If you could do something like that with illusion spells, it wouldn't be an aetheric school of magic!"

He huffed and puffed and then closed his eyes before grabbing the doorknob again. He muttered something about how 'illusions aren't real', then he simultaneously turned the handle and lurched forward, slamming into the door with his shoulder…

"Sunova—!"

… Only to effectively bounce off, lose his balance, and fall squarely on his butt.

"Cut that out. You're going to reveal our position."

"You said that there was nobody outside!"

"That doesn't mean they won't hear you bursting through a door like that." I stifled a groan. "Also, this door opens inwards, so it wouldn't have opened either way."

"I… I knew that! I was just testing the illusion!" the man continued to fume while straightening his robes. "Could you please undo it so we can move on?"

It was a question that made me fall into a pensive silence.

So, the third problem was that my 'temporary retcon' (as I called it, despite only being retcon-adjacent at best) turned out to be rather permanent this time around. It was likely due to the undefined state of this part of the world, but as of this moment, the fake door in front of us was treated as the entrance's 'natural state' by the Simulacrum, so I couldn't open it either.

Or rather, I only knew of one way to do it, and since I couldn't see any other option, I quietly resolved myself and gingerly extended a phantom limb. The same scene played out from before, with the infinitely expanding fractals of doors everywhere, but this time I made sure to be very, very careful as I picked a normal door and veeery carefully overlaid it on the first one.

I'm not exaggerating or anything. I really was as careful as possible, trying not to accidentally… well, do whatever I did not too long ago. I still wasn't entirely clear on what happened, because The Girl didn't explain jack about it other than 'You made holes!', which wasn't helpful. I didn't want a repeat that, or to see her show up and start nagging me again, so I made sure to be as gentle and painstaking as humanly possible, slowly moving the replacement door to its destination before overlaying it on the original.

At last, the two snapped together. I held my breath (metaphorically speaking) and stayed vigilant of any 'holes', but there was no crisis or side-effect this time around, so I withdrew my phantom limbs and relaxed my shoulders. Then, I waited, just in case The Girl decided to show up again anyway, but there was no floaty portal in sight. Good riddance.

"Okay, let's move out," I whispered while grasping the doorknob, my eyes on Ambrose. "Keep quiet, and stay close to me, just to be safe."

"Oh? Are you going to put us under an invisibility illusion?" he asked back, and I couldn't decide if he was sounding more curious or dismissive of the idea.

"No, I just need you to be close in case we need to retreat," I answered curtly and pulled the door open.

"What if we get discovered?"

"We improvise," I told him offhandedly, but Ambrose not only didn't take offense at my tone, he let out a pleased hum in return.

"Improvise, huh? I like that."

We stepped out into the well-lit hallway, and I'm not going to lie, I started to feel a bit woozy again when I looked at the subtly shifting walls. The floor under my feet feeling unstable, like I could fall through it at any moment, also didn't help, but I steeled my nerves and gestured for Ambrose to follow me.

"Just to be sure, do you really have no idea which way the arch-mage's office could be?"

"I told you, I don't have an earthy clue," he admitted, morosely, his eyes scanning the far end of the corridor. "But even if I knew, I don't know where we are right now, so it wouldn't help. Don't you have some spell to find it?"

"No. Do you?"

"Don't be ridiculous." He crossed his arms and looked at me like I just asked something offensive. "The School of Invocation is not dealing with frivolous things like tracking spells! Leave those silly things to the aetheric schools."

In other words, he was a dead weight. Lovely.

On the bright side, while he wasn't exactly helpful right now, I could at least rely on him in a fight. I would've preferred if we could avoid any battles, but it was best to expect the worst, so I gestured for him to tone it down. "I'll lead the way. Prepare some offensive spells in advance, just in case."

"Right, not a bad idea," he murmured and hunched over. "I was caught flat-footed the last time, and without a catalyst, I didn't have the time to hit them before they sicced those stoneheads on me."

"I was meaning to ask…" We sneaked down the hallway and, after scanning our environment with Far Sight, I glanced over my shoulder. "Isn't this a School of Restoration? Why do they have golems?"

"How should I know?" Ambrose hissed back at me, followed by a less irate and more speculative, "This is a rich School. They probably bought them from the Tower of Conjuration, or something."

Based on what I gathered from the arch-mages on Critias, the Magi had six branches of magic, known as the lowercase 'schools'. The heart of the Assembly was in Glasgow, Scotland, and it had six 'Towers', each corresponding to a branch of magic. I had no idea whether these towers were literal, metaphorical, or some archaic terminology left over from a time when they were literal, but that was beside the point. Each Tower managed its own upper-case 'Schools', which were Magi research- and educational institutions.

While they were all technically under the umbrella of the Assembly, the Schools were mostly autonomous for the most part, and so they differed greatly in scope and design. The Critias School of Conjuration was on the larger side, while most other Schools were a bit more modest, and some didn't even have an arch-mage leading them. While on paper they were all equal, some of them were more equal than the rest.

It was kind of like universities, now that I thought about it. While they all handed out degrees and they were all equally accredited and accepted on paper, there was a huge difference between the prestige and the resources of Oxford and a no-name college from the countryside. If so, based on the décor and the size of this place, we were probably somewhere in the ballpark of… um… Cambridge? Yale? Note to self: look into universities to make better analogies.

"Okay, so we have golems," I moved the conversation along while listening to the sound of some distant footsteps. Once I was sure they weren't getting closer, I looked at Ambrose again. "What else should I expect?"

"What kind of question is that? This is a School of Restoration, so you should be wary of restoration spells." I raised a brow, with the implied question of 'What? Are they going to heal me to death?', but he was dead serious, so I didn't voice it. He soon continued in a grave tone, telling me, "Just to be clear, make sure you don't let them touch you. It's dangerous even to someone like you or I."

"Noted."

I had many other questions in mind, but then everything in my vision suddenly flashed in negative colours before settling into a familiar violet hue.

"Oh. They brought down a Purple Zone," I noted a touch absently.

Ambrose, on the other hand, let out a string of stifled curses, ending with an emphatic, "Shit! We're in deep trouble now! They not only cut us off from the outside world, but if they managed to pull us into a Restricted Zone, it means they know our general location!"

"That's a pickle."

"It's not a 'pickle', it's a disaster! We need to start moving, before they—!"

As if on cue, the floor under our feet shook, accompanied by the deep rumbling of something big falling apart.

"That didn't sound good," I noted, and just as Ambrose was about to yell at me, he was cut off by the ground shaking again and a large crack showing up on a nearby wall.

"They're trying to bring the whole place down on our heads! We have to move, now!"

Before I could get a word in, he abandoned the previous spell he was preparing and started chanting a new one. The ground under his feet began to undulate (more than it normally did, at any rate) and he was suddenly speeding away from me, riding a wave of transformed floor tiles. It wasn't the first time I'd seen him do that, but it was still such a peculiar form of mobility, it made me do a double-take. My shock only lasted for a heartbeat though before a second realization hit me.

"Wait! I told you not to move too far from me!"

"Then hurry up, before they—!"

He couldn't finish the sentence, because he was interrupted for the third time in a row by the purple-tinted wall completely breaking and a vaguely humanoid dark grey creature emerging from the hole. It was slightly bigger than Petra, the class rep's usual summon, and this one had smooth, angular features with enormously oversized arms and shoulders, plus a featureless face with only a single, brightly glowing red eye. Its head was both tiny and round, so it was different from the one I saw in the hall upon my arrival, but about as big. Then it started to move with a roar, even though it didn't have a mouth.

Now, the first question that came to mind was 'Why would a golem roar?', but then I remembered that both the Chimeras and the Colossi I'd encountered were prone to do the same. Maybe it was an occupational habit? I wouldn't know, because I wasn't a bloody humongous monster, but it sounded plausible. More importantly, while I had a hunch that Cal would've been hyped to fight it, discretion was the better part of valour right now, and I had other things to consider. Such as…

"I told you to slow down!"

… catching up to the retreating arch-mage. To his credit, at least he activated the two laser-drone-spell-thingies he prepared in advance, but while that was a commendable initiative, they had little effect on the stone creature pursuing us. It was surprisingly nimble, despite its size and weird proportions, but it couldn't gather full steam due to the hallway being a bit too narrow for its bulk. Still, that only slowed it down, but didn't stop it.

Besides, this whole situation made me feel all kinds of conflicting emotions of the depressed variety, mainly because I was feeling… nostalgia probably wasn't the right word, but something adjacent. Reminiscence? Sentimentality, maybe? Whatever the case, goddammit. Other people were nostalgic for stuff like their first day in school, or their first kiss. Maybe a special holiday or something, not being chased around by big honking monsters!

"Hey, can I bother you for a moment?"

I nearly stumbled at the sudden, casual words sounding right next to me, and when I glanced over, it took me inhuman effort not to throw my hand into the air.

Great! Perfect! Now I was also getting randomly interrupted in the middle of it all too! Just what I needed! Argh!

I glared at The Girl, only her head and shoulders visible, and she nonchalantly stared back while her floating portal casually tailed me even as I was trying my best to catch up to Ambrose. He just rounded a corner ahead and I didn't want to lose track of him, but I also had to pay attention of the golem behind me, all the while The Girl was expectantly staring at me, as if none of this was her business. In other words, this was rapidly shaping up to be another one of those situations.

"No! Didn't I tell you I was in the middle of something?" I yelled at her, only to fall silent when I also rounded the same corner and my danger sense screamed at me. "Whoa!"

It took some mental effort to stop myself from Phasing out of the way, so I just rolled under the incoming projectile. By the time I was back on my feet, I was startled to see that we somehow ended up in the same hall as before, except this was the purple-tinted fake version.

"Look out, Leonard! This one has a rocket punch!"

"I noticed, thank you!" I barked back at the arch-mage, but he didn't get the sarcasm at all.

"Don't even mention it!" he responded, all chipper like we were playing catch in the park.

His words were followed by a series of loud booms. He picked up some debris at some point, compressed them into javelins, and he was now firing them out of some vague magical construct. His target was the one-armed golem standing in the middle of the hall, similar to the one chasing us but with slightly different proportions, and while the first two missiles only did glancing hits, the last one embedded itself into the creature's shoulder, nearly breaking it off.

While that was impressive, the problem was that there wasn't just one golem in the hall, but before I could start counting…

"Listen, I see that you're having fun, but this is important!" The Girl continued to bother me, completely disregarding the precarious situation unfolding around us.

"If it's so important, then why didn't you think of it before you kicked me out?" I growled at her, and her large eyes blinked in confusion.

"Are you still holding a grudge over that? It happened so long ago!"

"No, it happened—!" I started, only to immediately replace the end of the sentence with a groan. "Right. Different concept of time."

"Shit! How many of these things did that shrew buy?! Leonard, I need backup right nooooahhh?" Ambrose was so shocked by The Girl's reappearance that he nearly fell off his floor-wave-magic-or-whatever, so I gestured at him to drive the point home.

"See? You're distracting us."

"But this is really, really important!" she continued to argue, sounding less birdsong-y by the second.

Meanwhile, the golem that broke the wall caught up with me and raised its oversized arms over its head to do a ground-pound on top of mine. I was half-tempted to push the top-heavy bastard, just to find out if it would topple over, but seeing that Ambrose was getting surrounded, it was more important to back him up.

I backed out of the way and into the hall and then broke into a sprint towards the closest golem. It may or may not have been the first one we encountered, based on the shape of its head, but since it was in the way, I swept my phantom limb at it. I figured that since it was a magical construct, unlike the more bio-weapon Chimeras and the weird, spongy Colossi, doing that would be enough to disrupt the spells or enchantments keeping it together.

Instead, I was startled when I was dragged into the fractal-space, and had to frantically pull out before it could fully manifest. If I had to venture a guess, the golems themselves weren't one hundred percent 'solid' either, like the rest of this place. That made them easier to temporary-retcon, and I almost accidentally did just that. My second attempt was more successful, as I aimed at its extremities instead of its body, and once I scrambled its magical circuits, one of its arms popped off like it was an oversized action figure.

I only managed to disrupt that part of it, as the rest of its body moved to intercept me, but it still gave me the opportunity to slip by it and close the gap with Ambrose. He was already in the process of forming more spell-constructs even as the rest of the golems continued to encircle us.

"Which part of 'keep close to me' was hard to understand?" I hissed at him with undisguised exasperation, but it was like water rolling off the back of a duck. Instead, he pointed up, towards the ceiling.

"It was a tactical choice. Here, they can't collapse the area on us and box us in, and we have a better line of sight for long-ranged combat. Also, you're next to me again, so it's all the same."

"No, it's not all the—!"

"Okay, so let's try it this way." My words were cut off by a voice coming right next to my ear, and when I looked over, I found The Girl's portal. Except it was tiny, about as wide as three or four fingers, and she was nowhere to be seen. Her voice was as clear as ever though. "I won't distract anyone like this, right? So, listen, I had to look into the ****************** of the Simulacrum after the thing you did last time, and I found some weird discrepancies. It's as if a large portion was completely **************. Was it you, or was it the Crowned Coalescence? Or maybe the…?"

"Could you please not discuss this in the open? Or at least use terminology I can understand?" I snapped at her. By the looks of it, Ambrose was too busy focusing on the other end of the hall to listen in on us, but it was better to be safe than sorry.

"But this is important! It's like what you did the last time! You know, when the Predator Moon found you, but it looks much more covert-like. I'm pretty sure I would've noticed if you did something big like this again, so what gives? Hello? Are you listening?"

"Are you listening, Leonard?!" The Girl's voice was overlapping with the arch-mage's and it made me blink in mild disorientation. He was pointing at one of the many doorways leading in here, or rather, the people rushing through it. "Shit! It's the School's combat response squad!"

Let me be honest for a moment: I had a fairly stereotypical image of the Magi in my head. In my defence, they were pretty consistent so far. Academic types wearing robes and fancy suits, with the occasional staff or magitech tools. Sophisticated people with an air of scholarly elegance hiding dangerous power underneath. That kind of stuff.

What I never in my wildest dreams would've expected was a group of seven or eight Magi wearing gym clothes, all of them at least as tall as me and about as well-built as Sir Duncan, and instead of magic wands or staves, they were wielding knuckle dusters and heavy gauntlets. If someone gave them a few gold necklaces and some sunglasses, they would've passed for generic thugs any day of the week.

"They aren't a good match for you," Ambrose declared one-sidedly and let out a growl. "I'll keep them busy. Can you take care of the golems by yourself?"

"Slow down. I told you to…" 'stay close to me, no matter what!' is what I would've said if Ambrose hadn't just launched himself out of our encirclement without even waiting for my answer, leaving me alone in the middle of half a dozen golems.

Or… well… not entirely alone…

"Um… Am I disturbing you?" a new voice entered the fray, and while it was hard to recognize him with all the background noise, I was pretty sure it was The Boy. "Are you talking to someone?"

"N-No? I mean, yes, but…" Sputtering, The Girl whispered, "Act natural! Act natural!"

"Who are you talking to?" the voice on the other side of the hole kept inquiring, sounding less suspicious and more weirded out by The Girl's reaction.

"A friend! Just a friend? Right, friend?"

So, just to summarize, Ambrose was clashing with the muscle-bound Magi at the other end of the hall, the golems were visibly preparing to rush at me all at once, I was still a bit nauseous, had to be mindful of Phasing and using my phantom limbs, and on top of all this…

"Is this a prank?"

"No! I'm really talking to someone! Come on, say something!"

That.

"Jesus Tapdancing Christ… What did I get myself into this time…?"

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