Long ago

"I don't know."

"What do you mean, you don't know?"

Though I described the commitment to bougie novelty the street embodied just a little earlier, the place we'd ended up in could have been anywhere. It was like every other café in the world. Plain, clean decor with a slight artsy bent, coffee just a little bit better than what you could make in your house, generic breakfast food that all had eggs and ham as the central ingredients. Despite my memory, I wouldn't trust myself to be able to pick it out from a list at this point.

We'd chosen it on one metric alone - that it was very quiet. We sat at the back, in a closed-off area bereft of any windows, and spoke in quiet voices.

"I-- I mean, I don't know how it happened," I said. My voice was trembling. Actually, my whole body was. My guts were screaming at me for putting myself in this situation, like I was stepping off the edge of a building.

She didn't say anything to me in response, simply staring with icy, contemptful expectation. Her posture was stiff in a way that managed to make her a little frightening despite the significant difference in our height. Like she was ready to pounce and tear out my throat.

"I'm serious!" I insisted, in response to her silence.

"That's bullcrap," she replied, her tone soft, but obviously still seething with anger. "Is that how this is? You're just going to tell me you woke up this way one day, by magic?"

"N-No..." I said, not meeting her eyes. "I'm sorry, I don't know how to explain this..."

"What did you do to her," she repeated.

"I didn't--"

"One mocha, and one black tea," the waiter said - more with disinterest than friendliness - approaching with the two cups on a serving tray. It'd been fast, as you'd expect for somewhere this deserted, but it still managed to take me off guard.

"Oh," I said, "Um, the mocha is mine..."

He laid the cup down, and the other in front of Ran, who said nothing.

"Enjoy your drinks," he said, turning to leave.

After she'd confronted me on the street, I'd broken down into a blabbering, incoherent mess, trying to dismiss what she was saying as crazy in a way that was credible but failing so spectacularly that it amounted to something like an admission of guilt. After that, she'd pushed me again for answers. When I'd refused - or rather, gone silent - she'd threatened to go to my house, or to the watch, and tell them everything.

Some part of me had been aware this would never have worked. That if a stranger burst in and told you that your daughter was actually some kind of body-snatching imposter, they'd be the one more likely to end up in prison, or at least some sort of locked room. But in the moment, it really had felt like a serious threat. So I'd mumbled something about not being able to say anything out here and that she needed to keep her voice down, and after a terse exchange, this was what we'd ended up doing.

It felt phenomenally awkward. My chest felt like it was going to explode with both fear and embarrassment.

I looked down at my cup for a few moments, my previous train of thought frayed now that the pressure had been diffused just a little bit. I lifted it up and took a sip.

"'s good," I said stiffly.

Ran didn't seem interested in touching her own, once again staring, her face and brow lowered just enough to convey her obvious and total contempt.

"You... Want me to pay for this...?" I asked, my voice weak. "This was my idea, so... I don't mind--"

"Answer the question," she said bluntly.

I hesitated, scratching the back of my head as my face slowly flushed.

"I-- I didn't do anything... I mean, I don't know what happened to her." I eventually said. I let me hair fall in a way that covered my peripheral vision, so I didn't have to see her even in the corner of my eye as I tried to speak. "They didn't tell me anything."

"'They'?" She asked, her expression deepening into something closer to a scowl. "Who the fuck is 'they'?"

My posture drew inward, and I tried to stay calm, regulating my breathing. My eyes wandered over to the distant windows. The rain had started pouring down now, so heavy that it washed over the windows in waves, making it look as though we were underwater, or that the outside world had ceased to exist.

"I r-really don't know if I can talk about this..." I said, hesitant. "I know you probably think this is something really suspicious, and that I'm a monster or a spy or something... But it's really not anything like that." I was doing my best to make myself come across as earnest and vulnerable, in spite of the circumstances. "If you wait a few weeks, I promise things will be back to normal... I'll be back to normal, I mean. I understand why you're worried, but--"

"'Worried'? Fuck you," she said, pulling back her upper lip to pour as much venom onto the second word as possible. "Stop acting like this is some everyday situation I shouldn't be worked up over. This is insane. Do you have any idea how much of the last weeks I've spent wondering if I'm losing my mind? If I'm wandering into the middle of a creepy conspiracy, just trying to help my friend?"

Her friend. Something about her putting it that way made it feel uneasy. I really didn't have any memories of being particularly close with her, so the fact that she'd been the one to notice felt really strange.

But the words also stung me with guilt. Grounded what had happened in a sense of reality that I'd previously been abstracting away.

"Even if I tell you, you're not going to believe me," I said. "It'll just make me sound nuts."

"Stop making excuses," she said, losing patience. "Who are you? Explain yourself."

I bit my lip.

"Do you know Itan...?"

She frowned. "Is that a person?"

"No, uh... The island," I said, feeling like I had to push every word explaining the situation out of my throat. "It's part of Omiwa, but it's really far up the coast."

"What the hell does that have to do with this?" she asked flatly.

"That's where I'm from," I said weakly, but then hesitated. "I mean-- Not me, but..." I rubbed my eyes. "I'm sorry. This really is complicated."

She was silent again, waiting.

"This really will sound insane," I said, and shook my head, taking a deep breath. "Okay, so, a month or so ago... Maybe 2 months, now... That was where I lived."

"Where you'd lived," she said, as if I'd just confessed to murder.

"Please let me get through this," I said weakly. "I'd just started tertiary school a year or so ago, and had been having some issues staying afloat. I don't... I don't have a family, and the government over there are Meritists. They arranged a place for me to live and a little stipend of luxury credit for me after I left foster care, but it wasn't enough to live on, so I had to find work, and it wasn't--"

"I don't care about your personal life," she said coldly. "Just get to the point."

I swallowed the air.

"One day, I got a letter. It offered me a whole bunch of stuff... My own house, shares in a bunch of local businesses that'd get me a stream of luxury credit.. If I agreed to go along with something for a couple weeks. That was what it said-- A couple of weeks." Under the table, I was having trouble keeping my legs still. "I thought it was some strange prank at first, but when we met, they seemed really serious. They said it would be best if it was someone who knew her."

"Knew who?"

"Oh..." I shifted reluctantly in my seat, my voice getting even quieter. "U-Utsushikome, I mean. I'd known her when we were kids... But we hadn't spoken in years." I cleared my throat. I felt so anxious about what was happening that I was shivering. "Anyway. They told me that her grandfather was dying, and there was something he'd been trying to do for years and years, but it was too late for it t-to work out. But they wanted to-- I dunno, do the next best thing, give him some peace--"

"This is fucking gibberish," Ran interjected. "I don't give a shit about any of this. All I care about is why you're in her body. That is what's going on, isn't it? Unless you're some freaky shape-shifter or clone or something." She rubbed her eyes. "God."

I winced. I'd been hoping that if I gave enough of a vague outline of the situation, she'd be able to fill in the rest herself, and I'd be spared saying it outright, which felt like it would dull the weight of the admission. But in the end, I'd shaved off so much of the truth that all that remained was a nub. I might as well not have said anything at all.

What was I even trying to admit? What was I doing in this situation? Why had I let this happen?

What had I wanted...?

I tried to look at her.

A little while ago, I talked about how easy it is to break ones ability to bond with other human beings. How if you smash a puzzle piece into another when it isn't meant to fit out of vanity, it can ruin the entire jigsaw forever, leaving you without a hope of salvation. I think it was in this moment that I committed to that absolutely. I had already sinned in a way that was unforgiveable, but had not yet closed the door on salvation on some capacity. I had betrayed everything else, but I hadn't yet betrayed myself.

I think my fatal flaw, in the end, was that I was unable to distinguish between that which I truly valued, and the shadow that it cast in my mind. I couldn't face what I really was, and so destroyed that truth and replaced it with a story, one that was close to the truth but a little less painful for me to touch. I allowed myself to believe that if I played that part in that story to the end, a transmutive miracle would take place, and it would become reality both within and without my heart. That if I gathered enough sand in my hands and held it before the light of the sun long enough, it might just turn into real gold.

But this was, and remains, madness. There are no miracles. And no matter how much of something empty you collect, it will never attain value.

Research Tower | 7:34 AM | Third Day

"What do you mean, 'that's exactly right'?" I asked, my tone suspicious.

"That this has happened before," he clarified calmly. "You saw it, didn't you? What was in the pantry in the order's headquarters. That should have been more than enough of a hint, assuming you've been paying any amount of attention."

Ran looked to me. "What's he talking about?"

"Oh, uh." I hesitated, wrinkling my lip. "You heard about the broken-down pantry, right? Where all the food was rotten--"

"Yeah, Su," she said, her tone flat. "Everybody did. We had to move where we were having dinner because of all that, remember?"

"Oh, right. Sorry, moment of stupidity." I scratched my head. "Right, well... On the wall, near the back, there were a bunch of scratchings in groups of five. Like, y'know, someone was keeping a tally."

"How many markings were there?" She asked, an eyebrow raised.

"A lot," I said. "Maybe thousands."

Balthazar chuckled. "I don't have your gift for precise figures, Utsushikome, but my guess would be about three and a half thousand. At least, last I checked." He sighed, leaning back where he was sitting. "In any case, its exactly as you think."

"What do you mean 'exactly as I think'?" I asked, starting to become repetitive. I didn't process the fact that he should have had no way of knowing about my reputation for remembering numbers until a few moments later.

"It's a little irritating how self-conscious you are," he said, smiling. "Even when you're on top of things, you get too embarrassed and refuse to say anything." He took another sip of water. "Obviously, I'm saying it's the amount of times that this has happened already. That place is a bit of a blind spot for the phenomena, so to speak, so it was possible for a record to be kept."

I blinked.

"Why don't you tell us what you're suggesting in plain terms," Ran said, her eyes narrow. "Save us all some time we could be spending not leaving ourselves open to a murderer, or possibly vengeful god."

"It's difficult to speak more plainly when I'm being completely literal, Ran," he said, with a shrug. "What I'm saying is that the sequence of events which has taken place over the course of this weekend - starting from morning of your group's arrival in the sanctuary, up until the end of today - has happened, over and over again, an extremely large number of times."

This claim was spoken so confidently while being so out there that it seemed to stagger even Ran's usual deadpan approach to interrogation. She raised her eyebrows for a second, looking baffled.

"...to be clear," she said, after a moment, "do you mean that similar events have taken place here before? Or are you literally saying that time is supernaturally going backwards."

"I wouldn't have the pretense to call it supernatural," he replied. "I am of a scientific mindset, of course. All physical phenomena which appear magical are only perceived as such due to a lack of understanding on the part of the observer. Nor do I believe it's really simple enough to say that 'time is going backwards'-- What's taking place here defies such a simplistic outlook on causality, and makes assumptions about the nature of reality here that I am, at this point, uncertain of." He sighed, looking over to the window. "But I suppose I'm overthinking your question, so: Yes. That's more or less what I'm saying."

"That's completely insane," Ran said flatly.

"Yes," he said, nodding with casual amusement. "That's what I thought at first, too."

"So you're claiming we've had this exact conversation before?" Ran asked, peering at him. "On this night, in all of the previous go-arounds?"

"No, that's not quite right," he said, with a soft shake of his head. "Though the initial arrangement is the same every time, once the table is set up, God plays dice. It progresses differently, with only a few common elements. The special status of the pantry alone is enough to suggest that, as is the fact that we're having this conversation at all."

"Oh," Ran said. "So it's like that, huh."

"Yes," he replied, with a small nod. "That's how it is."

She clicked her tongue, sounding more irritated than anything. "What did you mean a second ago, when you were talking about the 'nature of reality'?"

He thought about this for a moment, swirling around the water in his glass. "What characterizes this situation - what makes it uniquely difficult to evaluate objectively - is that it's a closed circle. This sanctuary exists within a bubble shut out from the rest of the world, and I mean that in senses that go beyond the strictly literal."

"Do you know something about what this place is? How it works?" Ran asked. "We've been getting a lot of vague answers."

"No, I'm afraid not," Balthazar replied, shaking his head. "To be truthful, I actually don't know very much at all about what's going on. All I've been afforded is the chance to make surface-level observations... However, in a sense, that ambiguity is precisely what I'm talking about." He gestured towards the window, towards the rest of the sanctuary. "Think about it. Right now, there's no way to verify that a 'rest of the world' even exists. We cannot interact with it in any capacity, and the same is true in reverse. All that anchors us to it are the concepts of 'we are from that place' and 'it is possible to return to it', which exist purely within the realm of our own minds."

Ran rubbed her brow. "The last thing I wanted for this conversation was for it to get into philosophy." She crossed her arms half-way. "Doesn't this fall apart when you consider that the logic bridges were connecting us to the real world just fine, until a few hours ago?"

"A logic bridge is a device that feeds information to the brain," he said. "Nothing more than that. There's no assurance that what it's showing you is based on reality beyond your article of faith in how the system works."

"That's stupid," Ran retorted. "If you just start saying things are fake with nothing to back it up, you can use that kind of logic to justify anything. Maybe this whole thing is just a dream."

"Maybe it is," he replied, with an insufferably gentle chuckle. "An absurd situation demands absurd explanations. All I'm saying is that this is a place in which nothing can be trusted and anything can occur. With that frame in mind, there are far more explanations for what's happening than literal time travel." He sipped from his glass. "Not that any of that is particularly pertinent to us, right now."

After having been silent for a little while, lost in my thoughts, I finally spoke up again. "If... If this is true--"

"It's almost certainly not true, Su," Ran interjected as I spoke up, glancing at me. "This guy is probably fucking with us. Look at him, he's having a great time."

Balthazar smiled in response.

"N-Nevertheless," I said, looking to him. "If this is true, how are you able to tell us any of this? If time really is looping, and the rest of us have forgotten that, then why do you remember?"

At this, he looked away from me, a strangely bitter laugh escaping from his lips as he looked towards the floor. "That's a deeply cruel question, coming from you, Utsushikome."

I frowned. "I guess if you are being for real, then the reason you're acting so personal with me is because of something that happened in a previous 'loop'. And you telling me you 'kept your promise' was something to do with that, too. Is that what you expect me to guess?"

I half expected him to laugh even more at this, but instead, the words didn't seem to reach him at all. His face was still, unchanging. "To answer it, I've spent a lot of time dwelling on the subject for the past couple of days, and I think it's because I'm being punished."

"Punished?" I asked. "For what?"

"I'm not sure, exactly. I think it's because I believed it was possible for people to be saved by love, and that led me to overstep myself." He looked up at me. "But regardless, considering the fact we're having this conversation at all, I'm not the only one who remembers. In spite of you making such an effort not to."

His gaze interrogated me closely. It was a personal expression, and intensely bittersweet, like it angry and sorrowful at the same time. But rather than sympathy, all I felt was a deep discomfort at the bottom of my gut.

"Anyway, I'm afraid I've buried the lede a bit," he said, his tone becoming more aloof again. "Because none of this actually matters to you. You don't need to worry about it all."

"Really," Ran said. "Why do you say that? If we're stuck repeating the same three days over and over, that seems pretty serious."

"Because this is the last time it will happen," he said. "It's already been predetermined. There won't be any more recurrences, any more 'loops'."

She snorted. "That's convenient."

"Only from your subjective perspective. You are, as a matter of fact, standing on the shoulders of a thousand Rans having a much more ominous version of this conversation." He sighed tiredly. "I don't expect you to believe me. It surprised me that you went out of your way to ask me to begin with-- I suppose nothing ever goes quite as planned, even when you think you're writing the epilogue to a story."

"If what you've been telling us is true, how do you know this is the last one?" Ran asked. "If you don't know anything about how it works, did the gods come down and tell you themselves?"

"I just know," he said.

"Your story doesn't add up at all," she said, her eyes narrow.

"No, I suppose not."

"Can you prove any of this? If you've met us countless times before, you should know a lot of shit about us, right? Easy enough to demonstrate."

"It would be, I suppose," he conceded. "But to be honest, I don't really feel like it. I feel like I've been taken advantage of enough that I deserve to relax, instead of getting caught up in things - though I'm sure you'll call that 'convenient', too." He clasped his hands together, his body slumping a bit. "I'm getting a little tired of this, so I think we ought to wrap it up. Why don't you ask me a couple more questions, and then get back to your group? The old man should be back soon."

I twitched a bit. Even if it did explain the premonitions I'd been having along with some other things, I didn't really believe his story-- It was so absurd it would have been hard to. But I still felt irritated at being given an ultimatum. He obviously knew something about what was happening, and I got the feeling we were probing at the brink of it.

"If this has happened so many times before," I said, "then you should know who's behind the killings, right? What's really going on."

"Ah, I thought you might bring that up." He sighed. "On that count, though, I'm afraid I'm going to have to disappoint you again. Because - in spite of my best efforts - I have no idea who, or what, is behind the murders. The most I can tell you is that their modus operandi is not consistent, or at least, not reliably consistent. And that Ophelia and the old man are almost certainly not involved. "

"Why them?" I asked.

"It's too complicated to explain," he said dismissively. "That said... There is one thing I can tell you, which is something you should really be wondering about already. In fact, I bet the question has been on the tip of your tongue the whole time."

He raised the glass one last time, draining it, and gasped as he set it back down.

"When I said this is a closed circle, I meant it in every sense," he explained. "In absolutely every instance, for every marking made on that wall... By the time this is over, there isn't a single person here left alive."