Inner Sanctum Underground | 9:33 AM | ∞ Day

Ptolema cleared her throat loudly. "D-Don't give Su the wrong idea, Nora. You mean blown up metaphorically, right? Like, in a cultural way! Because it's right before all that stuff happened a little after that!"

"What do you mean, 'got blown up', exactly?" I asked Nora, ignoring the interjection.

"Blown up with the latest sports craze!" Ptolema cut in desperately, then seemed to instantly regret it, attempting to pivot. "Practically unrecognizable after all the... political... reforms! After the war ends!"

"...uh, well, it blows up," Nora informed me, giving Ptolema an uncomfortable side-eye. "Not in the sense that it literally explodes, but. It ceases to exist."

"How... does that happen?" I asked carefully.

"Something to do with the war ended up damaging the Tower of Asphodel," she explained. Her tone made it sound like she was more bothered by the awkwardness of the situation she'd created than the gravity of the topic she was discussing, though her shift into the past tense came across as for my benefit, like it would make it more digestible than being delivered as some sort of prophecy. "Supposedly the leaders of the Parties still had some administrative control over it that was passed down from the Ironworkers, and they ended up fiddling with it to try and get one over on their enemies after things got really bad-- Stop them being able create new children, that kind of thing. Either they screwed up or things were dire enough that somebody decided to burn it all down out of spite and, well..."

"And this happens sometime this ye-- In 1608?" I asked, trying to wrap my mind around it.

"Not in 1608 exactly," she corrected me. "It's a couple, maybe a few years later. It's hard to know precisely-- The last few years in the Remaining World specifically are the only ones that are concealed to us from observation, though nobody knows exactly why. It's not like the effect relating to the privacy of Primaries, more like there's just a fog over everything. Like a corrupt recording." She smiled sardonically. "It's kind of fucked, really. I can go back in time and solve all these ancients mysteries if I want - see the first time humans make fire, the first structure, the first coherent alphabet - but I can only a rough impression about how to real me died."

The shop fell silent for a moment. Ptolema, who at this point must have realized the futility in her silly attempt to cover up the situation, was now just glancing between us, her face locked in the expression of someone watching a road accident from the other side of the street.

"Honestly, I'm kind of surprised you were able to observe even that far without any problems. You must have got pretty lucky," Nora went on, then stiffened a bit. "Sorry, I'm sure this is a little disturbing for you to hear out of the blue like this. I should have thought for a second before running my mouth."

"I--" I paused. "Does... anyone survive?"

"Not that we know of," she answered. "From what we can tell, all nine planes were completely destroyed." She glanced to the side. "Though, the fact that we created the Remaining World in the first place serves to illustrate how tenacious we can be - or, well, how tenacious humans can be, depending on whether you can still count us. So obviously people do speculate that maybe some survived, even if we can't find them. That was even the premise for the last hegemonic Domain, if you've heard about it."

"Y-Yeah," I said rigidly. "Ptolema was telling me about it just before we came here."

Come to think of it, I had thought it was sort of strange that they'd design a setting around a ship that had escaped the Remaining World without there having been something to escape from.

...although, thinking about it, that wasn't actually logical, was it?

After all, Ptolema had already told me that it was possible to view the entire history of the universe from here, and that implicitly included the future. And nothing lasted forever, the Mimikos certainly being no exception. From the very start, my implicit question ought to have been, 'how did it all end?'

Still, that it had been so sudden and soon... at the very least, this explained why Ptolema had been so evasive about why I would have suddenly come to my senses.

"Are you... okay, Su?" Ptolema asked warily, as if cued by my thought.

"I'm okay," I reassured her, my voice wavering just a little. "To be honest, I'm surprised you were trying so hard not to talk about it.

She laughed nervously. "Uh, well, I guess I kinda did it without thinking at first, then felt like I had to stick to my guns when you kept askin' about it..." she scratched the back of her head. "And it just seemed like you'd been through enough today, I guess. I mean, it's one thing to be told you can't go back to what you think your life is, but to hear... well, uh..."

"That there is no future, even if I could go back?" I suggested.

"Well, yeah," she said awkwardly.

Why wasn't I responding more strongly to this revelation?

Even if I'd already been forced to accept it no longer had anything to do with me, I should have been disturbed. This meant that everything I'd ever known - all the places, all the people - were not just gone in some vague, relative sense, but explicitly annihilated in a manner that was immediate to my own life. All my impressions of the future were void. Deshur's settlement period would never be finished. Hibasu and Korin would never reach their teens. Rekhetre would probably never have time to settle into another long-term relationship after I'd fucked up her life. And the real Ptolema - not the one I was talking to, but the businesswoman who'd had to grow up and become someone rather serious - was dead, along with everyone else.

It was tragic in a way that defied conception, both for me personally and for civilization itself. If it really had happened - and a considerable part of me, if you'll forgive the repetition, was still skeptical that any of this was happening - then it represented an arguably even greater tragedy for humanity than the collapse, because at least some people had survived that.

And yet, I found myself feeling almost kind of indifferent about it. Maybe it was because I'd become enough a cynic about the direction of politics and society in the Mimikos that I couldn't be that surprised, or perhaps I was simply such a solipsist that the knowledge I'd been going to die in the not-too-distant-future left me unable to care about that one way or the other. But my mind was processing it like it would a piece of trivia. 'Oh, that's interesting. What a quaint development.'

If anything, it felt funny how unceremonious it was. Oh, everything you've ever known died suddenly and meaninglessly. Oh, cool. That sucks. Too bad.

I snorted.

Ptolema furrowed her brow at me. "Su?"

"Oh." I blinked. "Sorry, I just. I dunno. It's funny to find out like this, I guess." I looked between her and Nora. "You're certain this really happens? It's not just an assumption built out of that 'corruption' you mentioned making the Remaining World hard to observe?"

"No, there's enough fragments we can see to get a sense of things," Nora asserted. "Like I said, it's not like when we try to observe stuff censored by the rules. I could just show you, actually, if you don't think you'd be traumatized."

"You can do that?" I asked. "Share your 'observations' with someone else?"

She frowned. "Ema didn't show you how it worked when she was explaining what happened to you?"

"No."

"Hey, it's only been like half a day since she turned up on my doorstep!" Ptolema protested. "Quit gettin' on my case about explaining stuff!"

"I wasn't trying to get on your case, I was just surprised," Nora told her flatly, before looking back towards me. "It's pretty straightforward. It's actually the only weird thing we can do here that's completely novel - it doesn't involve the Power at all." She clasped her hands together in front of her on the table. "There's a bit of a trick to it, though. If you want to do it without going all the way out to the Stage and being stuck on your own, you have to sort of slide your mind partly into its higher-dimensional state without going all the way. Disassociate yourself from your surroundings." Her eyes unfocused a bit. "Try relaxing your eyes and imagining the three of us here in an empty void. Tune everything else out as best you can, including your own body."

"Okay," I said, and tried to do what she instructed, letting my vision lull and doing my best to filter away the sounds of foot traffic from outside. (It was a little funny she didn't seem concerned with the idea of someone else wandering in during all this - she must not have got a lot of customers.) I retreated into my own head in the way I did whenever I was trying really hard to work something out.

"Just kind of ease into it until everything feels a little distant," Nora went on, then fell silent for a few moments. "...feel like you've got it?"

"Yeah," I said quietly, probably wearing a really stupid expression as my eyes started to cross slightly. "I think so."

"Okay," she said. "Now think about me, and try to think that you want to see what I'm seeing. Rather, don't think the words, but... well, think the idea, so to speak."

"Mm." I half-focused on Nora, and imagined myself looking through her eyes, and...

It was sort of like using a logic bridge, but a little bit different - less like the concepts were being broadcast directly into my mind, and more like I was seeing through a sort of invisible, intangible window through an extra pair of eyes I didn't know I had. Right now, I was 'seeing' the Mimikos from overhead, in a similar sort of view to the one from the Empyrean Bastion, but at an even greater distance, like I was looking down at a pot of stew from a few feet's remove.

"You see it, right?" Nora asked.

"Y-Yes," I said, wanting to turn to look at her but worried about breaking the effect. "This is really strange."

She shifted in a way that I was pretty sure was a shrug. "You get used to it."

"Right," I said hesitantly, squinting at the 'image' as my mind reckoned with its existence, not yet intuitively understanding this would make no difference. "I feel like this is sort of a case of asking about the drapes on a flying castle, but how is this possible, exactly? I know we're supposed to be in the Timeless Realm and so connected to literally everything in the universe, but where did we even get the sensory capacity to absorb information like this?"

"Nobody knows," Nora said. "It's just how--"

"--how it's always been here," I finished for her, put off. "Right. Of course."

"Afraid that's kind of the pattern here," she said, with dry humor. "Though, a lot of people might disagree with me on this particular count, actually. Because it's so separate and unexplainable in context with the real world compared to the stuff we do with prop, there's a lot of Sisypheans who ascribe special kinds of meaning to our observation ability."

"I'm sorry, 'Sisypheans'?" I asked, my tone a little exhausted. "I assume that's in reference to the mythology?"

"That's right," she said. "Or just 'sisyphean task', I guess. It's kind of a catch-all term for people who try to ascribe some sort of meaning or purpose to us all being here, or who invent one themselves if they're more self-aware about it. The alternative is 'Hedonist', meaning people who just don't care and just spend eternity screwing around. I think they both started off as insults."

"Huh," I said, scratching the side of my head. "Which one are you, then?"

I saw her smirk in the corner of my eye. "What do you think?" She raised a hand to her mouth and yawned. "But yeah, it's a pretty big deal. Most religions here revolve around our ability to observe the real world in some way. The Keep is like that too, even if they couch things in rationalism these days."

"You have... religions, here?" I asked, puzzled. "Even though there's no death?"

"Sure do," Nora said. "You'll be surprised by how weird it all gets. Usually they're derived from some mix of that, the Manse, and the Lady. Usually."

I shook my head. "...I want to ask, but if I keep picking at details for all this stuff, we might get completely sidetracked." I oriented my focus back to the image of the Mimikos. "So, for future reference, how would I do something like this by myself? Without piggybacking like this, I mean."

"Basically the same way. Loosen your thoughts, focus on what you want to see, and it'll happen ...though, if you're completely new at this, it might be hard to finely-control your perception, or navigate your 'sight' to anything outside of the Mimikos, since you don't have a frame of reference to conceptualize it yet." She leaned forward a little, resting her chin against the side of her hand. "If you don't know, you can get back to the Stage using the same method. Though you have to disassociate a lot further, so a lot of people need to go out into empty space to do it, where there's no distracting stimuli." She shrugged. "Or they just kill themselves. That works too."

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

I couldn't help but glance at Ptolema. She made a guilty expression, her face flushing slightly.

"Anyway," Nora went on. "Are you ready for me to show you?"

I nodded. "Sure. Go for it."

I genuinely didn't know what to expect. What would it even look like for the Tower of Asphodel to break? It wasn't a physical object in the conventional sense - I remembered the way it had been explained to me as a child was that it was more like a seam in reality, a thing you could approach but that distorted space by its very presence, the principles of reality twisting around it like a snake eating its own tail.

"Lemme see, too," Ptolema cut in. "I don't want you showing Su anything that'll freak her out."

"It's okay, Ptolema."

"Like heck it is," she objected with a frown. "You're always the type of person to act like your feelings are no big deal 'till it all gets too much at once. If she tries to show you a bunch of people gettin' disintegrated or something, I gotta make sure to put a stop to it."

"Oh, shit," Nora said flatly. "I was totally going to do that, too."

"Don't make fun of me!" Ptolema yelled. "I'm one of your best customers! You said so yourself!"

I smiled a little to myself. Even though we'd only just met I was finding myself surprised how much I was enjoying the addition of Nora's company. She reminded me of Ran, a little bit.

"Alright," Nora said. "Here we go."

The image of the Mimikos, previously having been frozen and still, began to subtly move, the clouds and the ocean shifting very subtly - presumably this was in real time or only somewhat accelerated. The view Nora was showing me descended somewhat, shifting around to view the Mimikos from different angles, almost like she was a magician who was trying to demonstrate her tools before enacting the trick. Occasionally, streaks of strange color and multi-faceted artifacts would start to conceal the image, like whatever camera we were viewing this from had been swept into a magical snowstorm, and other times the display would seem to 'skip' altogether, the clouds on the surface of the bowl suddenly shifting between positions.

"That's--"

"The distortion, yeah," Nora interrupted. "Though it's a lot more omnipresent in places where the data can't be simplified. By being this far out, we can sort of compensate for it by drawing the image from a bunch of different positions and moving around in time a bit." She folded her arms. "It also becomes a little clearer right before the end, after whatever screw-up happened has already started to occur. I've heard it said that it's probably something to do with the way the Tower's failing resulted in particles under its sway to appear dimensionally unfolded backwards through time due to their properties reverting to the post-collapse mean or something-- I don't know, I'm clueless about physics."

"Right," I said, nodding distantly. "Okay, I think I've got enough of a sense of this now. Can you skip to when it happens?"

"Sure," Nora said.

She panned our view further down and a little sideways, with the end result being that we were viewing the Mimikos from probably only a few thousands kilometers into the air, with the Tower of Asphodel clearly visible looming in the background. Though it hadn't been discernible earlier, this close, it was starting to become obvious that some of the stuff going on at the surface was, well, abnormal. There was a lot of ambiguous debris clouding the atmosphere above the gravitational boundary, and there were some small segments of the surface that appeared to have visible fires, particularly around central Ysara. Of course, a 'small' fire visible from space would actually be hundreds of miles wide, and concerningly, they seemed centered around urban areas. Nad-Ilad and Ikkaryon especially were quite a bright shade of red.

I didn't have much time to reflect on this specifically, though, because something soon began to happen. The Tower of Asphodel briefly distorted - seeming to bend and fold in on itself for a fleeting moment before returning sharply to normal - and then slowly... thinned, progressively narrowing from a distant but tangible streak of grey to a monodimensional line, a point of perfect division across the northern sky.

And that... that streak broke apart into many streaks, unfolding in every direction like a fissure growing in response to pressure, dividing reality into roughly equal, oblong segments.

I recalled that the Ironworkers, when designing the Mimikos, had subtly divided it into discrete 'zones' for the purposes of managing the plane's lack of a constant speed of light at higher scales. So as to prevent reality essentially being rendered visually incomprehensible at best and temporally distorted at worst, the fault lines - where the speed would shift - became the sites of invisible boundaries where corrective measures would occur to keep things in alignment. Particles would be slowed or sped up as needed, and humans would in some circumstances be fed visual data directly from the Tower of Asphodel instead of processing it conventionally. Like everything to do with how the Remaining World had been built, it was a little overcomplicated and awkward, but more or less worked.

But I had to guess that what I was witnessing here were those same zones starting to unravel. They started to desynchronize, time moving at different speeds in each, then began to fragment, breaking into smaller zones which in turn were overcome by unnatural lighting conditions - stark and colorless infrared, vivid hypersaturation, unnatural total darkness

Then they started to disappear altogether, not just leaving a void in space, but a cavity of reality altogether, a place where the image simply ceased to exist. These failures seemed to cascade, and soon the bowl of the Mimikos was no longer a bowl at all, but a mass of discordant pieces that resembled landmasses less and less, the matter within them becoming spiraling and unbound, stretching and bending in impossible ways, ultimately giving way to stark monotone color...

...and then expiring themselves. The image vanished piece by piece, until nothing whatsoever remained.

The room was quiet for a little bit after that. Eventually, Nora cleared her throat. "Well. There you have it." She let out an awkward snort. "Pretty spectacular as apocalypses go, at least."

I shook my head slightly. "I don't know what to say."

"Yeah, it's... well, it's a lot to think about," Nora said, the 'window' I'd been sharing with her closing and fading away. "Since the last day I remember is 200 years before all this happened, it's hard for me to think of it as having really happened. The war, Deshur, all those giant city-sized buildings they built in the metropolitan areas... Even what happens with me and my family-- It all just feels like watching some sci-fi flick. An alternative version of my life that somebody made up." She looked at me with a small frown. "But if you remember it as if you were there, right up until a few years before it happened... well, I can't imagine what it's like."

I nodded, glancing downward.

She chuckled stiffly. "It's kind of strange. I've been here for so long, I've sort of forgotten how to say 'sorry for your loss' properly." She looked at me. "I am, though. Even if that feels kind of... insufficient, considering the scale of it."

"Me too, Su," Ptolema spoke up. "It's sucks that you're havin' to deal with so much of this crap at once."

"Really, it's alright," I said, the words coming out so aloofly I wouldn't have been surprised if they thought I was in shock again. "It's not like I've really lost anything new anyway. I've just brainwashed myself into thinking I have, more or less. It feels creepy to get attention and sympathy like this over something that's apparently just a delusion."

"Don't say it like that," Ptolema objected. "If you feel like it's that way, then it's that way, y'know? How it feels is what matters."

"It's not like there's a lot of competition for sympathy around here, either," Nora said. "Worst thing that happens most of the time is people falling out or getting kicked out of Domains." She glanced to the side, frowning to herself for some reason.

"Honestly," I said, pushing my glasses up for a moment to rub my eyes, "if anything, I feel sort of relieved."

Nora blinked, looking back up. "Relieved?"

"Yeah," I said. "It feels like something that happened in a fever dream, now, but about a week ago I was diagnosed with a form of associative-collapse dementia. They gave me maybe a couple decades to live at most, and I spent the whole week tearing myself to pieces about how I'd wasted my life, scared out of my mind, trying to decide what to do with those last few years that could give them any sort of meaning whatsoever." I smiled slightly, almost laughing a little under my breath. "But now it turns out it didn't even matter. I probably died at the same time as everybody else, well before I'd even started showing symptoms."

Some part of my mind was yelling at me for blurting out something so personal and strange, but I just didn't care at the moment. The events of the day had melted my filter half-way to nothingness.

"...I'm not sure I follow you," Nora said, her eyes narrowed a bit. "It would make sense for you to be pleased that you're not the one who's going to die after all, but... why would it matter how it happened in the real world?"

"I dunno," I said, with a stiff shrug. "It's... kind of hard to put it into words."

Even in my own mind, I wasn't sure that I could. Maybe it was just that it meant everything had always been nothing. My life, everyone's life, the entire Remaining World... had just been a fleeting reprieve. A short stay of execution for human civilization before it inevitably exterminated itself. And that living a long and happy life had never been on the table to begin with.

That didn't feel quite right, though. Still, somehow, the knowledge felt almost nice.

Like a clean slate.

"So we're the only people left in the entire universe, then," I said. "The last remnant of the human race."

"If you want to think about it that way," Nora said, "though, again, I'd say it's sort of subjective whether or not we still count as human." Her cat wandered back over for a moment, brushing against her side, but then leaped towards the stairs behind before she had a chance to turn and pet him. She looked disappointed. "...a lot of belief systems here do orient around that in one way or another, though-- Us as custodians for the legacy of mankind, or however you'd put it. I guess what I do is a part of that too."

"It's that way for Primaries, at least," Ptolema commented. "Secondaries are a lot less sentimental about that stuff. Some of them even get really jerked off about it."

"Can't really blame them," Nora said. "I'd be pissed off if my culture was permanently at the mercy of a bunch of old assholes who can't ever finish growing up or even get over their old shit." She clicked her tongue, looking back at me. "You're really not that bothered about the world having ended? About everyone you know having died?"

"Not really," I said, my eyes drifting towards the ceiling for some reason. "I'm sort of surprised how much I'm not, actually." I scratched the side of my head. "Though one of the first things they did tell me when I got here was that I could bring any of the people I cared about here, if I wanted."

"Sort of a half truth," Nora commented flatly. "Making copies doesn't change the fact that they died. Most people would say it's not technically the same person."

"Ship of Theseus," I muttered, almost inaudibly quiet.

Nora raised an eyebrow. "What was that?"

"Nothing," I said. "Just a stupid inside joke."

Maybe it would upset me more, once I'd thought about it, but again I found myself wondering if I was a bigger solipsist than I'd imagined. Without the notion of my access to them being lost forever, it felt hard to find significance in the idea of the people I cared about - I won't say 'close to', for reasons I'm sure you don't need me to explain - having died. Especially since I was apparently just a copy myself.

A person is just the material properties of their body and mind. If that could be replicated flawlessly, did continuity actually mean anything? I never thought I'd have to reckon with the question outside of the realm of fiction, but I suppose it felt like it wasn't ultimately that important.

She gave me a funny look for a moment, then shrugged. "Well, you should also know that stuff can be a little more complicated than one would think. There's a lot of rules about Echoes in pretty much all the Domains. Here in the Crossroads, for example, they're only allowed to become residents if they have more than 2,000 tons of prop contracted to them, 1,000 if they're their sponsors first, or 10,000 if they don't have a sponsor at all. And people are only allowed to sponsor a maximum of 4."

Wow, I thought to myself. People really don't change no matter where you go, huh.

"The Keep is more liberal about it and there are some Domains designed for Echoes that are a lot better, but there's still usually some shit to complicate things no matter where you go," she went on. "Most of the time it comes down to them not having enough prop to contribute, though sometimes it can be... more complicated."

I nodded, "Ptolema mentioned there's some politics surrounding it."

Nora snorted. "Is that what she said? 'Politics'?"

"L-Look, I'm not good at talkin' about serious stuff," Ptolema said, holding one arm against the other defensively.

Nora shook her head. "Well, that aside, the point is that it's not as easy to reunite with everyone you've ever cared about as you might think. Outside of those hard rules, there are also softer taboos and more fundamental problems. Like, say you make your old best friend an Echo. What happens when they get lonely for someone they used to know?" She looked out one of the shop's windows. "Things can get sourer and more complicated than you expect."

"I... guess that makes sense," I said, frowning with disquiet. "I suppose I was wondering why people were acting like there were so few around. When Ptolema explained the rules, I'd figured there'd be a lot more."

"There's probably even less than you think," she said, inclining her head back towards me. "Most Primaries do it once, and then don't try again for a really long time. It's... easier, in some ways, to live according to the terms of this place than try to recreate your old life." She hesitated, flinching slightly as she considered something. "That's not to say you shouldn't do it, especially since you just got here. It does work out sometimes, so... do whatever you need to do, basically."

"Yeah," I said, biting my lip and giving a small nod. "Thanks for your advice, and for showing me that stuff. You've cleared up some of my last big questions."

"No problem!" she said, with some renewed enthusiasm. "Like I said, it's been neat to meet someone 'new' after all this time." She smirked. "You might not understand this, yet, but novel experiences here are like precious baubles. You could probably get people to contract you prop in exchange for a conversation if you really wanted."

I laughed. "I, uh, don't know if I'd want any more attention than I'm already getting, to be honest."

"Yeah, I figured," she said, smiling. She glanced to Ptolema. "Speaking of questions, have you told her about the Advisors, Ema?"

Ptolema blinked. "Eh? ...oh." She scratched the side of her head. "Uh, no. I kind of forgot they existed, to be honest."

"That figures," Nora remarked with amusement, then looked back towards me. "If you ever have any other big questions about how things work here and can't squeeze an answer out of Ema, there's another property of this world that could help you. Most people don't use it any more because they've already known the answers for as long as they remember, but if you go out into the void - at least 10 kilometers away from any prop - and announce that you need help, whatever power created this place will send an Advisor to help you out."

I gaped a bit. "An... advisor? You mean, a person?"

"Well, they look like people," she began ominously, "but I think they're more like agents of the rules of this world, put in place by whatever brought it about. I think they were probably supposed to help everyone adapt when time here began gods-know-how-long ago. They won't explain anything existential, but they can tell you what you can do with your prop and how to use it, how to create and administrate Domains... everything you'd want." She wrinkled her nose. "Even regarding the Manse."

"That's... useful to know, but I feel like what you said just raises another hundred questions for me itself."

"Bet you can't guess the answer to all of them," she intoned slyly.

I flattened my brow. "It's just how it's always been?"

"Bingo," she said dryly.

"Great." I sighed. "By the way, what is the 'Manse', anyway?"

For the first time in the conversation, Nora's expression soured significantly, her lips curling into a weary frown. "I thought Ema said the Waywatch found you there."

"They did," I said. "But I only saw the outside. There was a guard at the door, making sure nobody went inside. Why is it like that? And floating on a weird island in the middle of nowhere?"

Nora was silent for a moment, her lips tightening as she peered at me. "The Manse is a joke whoever made this world played on us. It shows up in every Domain at the default position."

"What do you mean, a joke?" I asked.

"I mean it's for delusional idiots," she answered darkly. "And if you have any sense, you'll stay well away from it."