"So he is not outside, but he's not inside either," mumbled a familiar yet heavily distorted voice a couple of parsecs past the edge of my hearing. Maybe it was precisely because he sounded like he was auto-tuned by a walrus, but it piqued my interest enough to 'wake me up', in a manner of speaking. I focused my attention on the source of the voice, and my consciousness slowly reached out towards it until I was all of a sudden inside an alien yet very familiar not-dark not-room, just in time to experience the full brunt of The Man abruptly exclaiming, "Then where is he!?"

"We don't know. That's the problem," came the chiding answer in the voice of The Woman, currently nothing more than a distant twinkle of crimson waters barely beyond my sight, and if she had eyes, I was sure she would've rolled them very derisively.

"Maybe it's another one of his pranks," The Boy proposed, though his own tone made it sound like even he thought it was unlikely.

"And he completely disappeared for that?" The Man argued back, his words all but dripping with incredulity. "I couldn't do that even if I tried, let alone do it for a 'prank'!"

"Yes, but that's you," The Girl chimed in with a disinterested voice while masquerading as a glowing dune of sand (or was it the other way around?), and The Woman... nodded? Undulated? Gestured, let's go with gestured. In an up and down motion that was like nodding, except completely different.

"He was always an odd one, but also quite ingenious when it came to causing trouble," she noted with a tinge of nostalgia coloring her words. It was purple. I don't know how, I don't know why, but apparently nostalgia was purple. Or maybe a bit closer to violet, now that I think about it.

I would've probably spent about half an eternity pondering what color emotions were, but I was cut short by The Boy timidly raising his voice.

"But... Isn't that bad?"

"What are you talking about?" The Man growled, and for a moment I could clearly see the face of a mustachioed middle-aged man's frowning face overlapping with a bolt of thunder illuminating the pitch blackness of the night on the dark side of a barren moon. It only lasted for a split second, and then both melted away until I was once again only vaguely aware of the direction the voices were coming from.

"I mean… If he isn't in here, but not out there either, doesn't that mean he's missing?"

The word 'missing' immediately made the tension in the room freeze over by about four octaves.

"No way. He must be just hiding," The Man said a tad nervously, as if he was trying to convince himself, but The Boy pressed on.

"But what if he's not? What if the ********** look into his disappearance and..."

Whoa there! Slow down! What was that again? **********? I repeated the... well, it wasn't really a word per se, but I repeated it in my head again a few times to get a 'feel' for it anyway. It was something like a concept, that had another concept in it like a giant, metaphysical Matryoshka doll, and if I had to transliterate it, it was something along the lines of 'a/the thing/things that have emerged from/in the process of emerging from the state of not emerging/vacuum'. It also had an extra qualifier attached to it, so after some more finagling, I decided on the rough term of 'Venerated Emergents'. It wasn’t entirely accurate, but at least it was classy.

So, with that new bit of revelation in mind, let's listen to The Boy's words again.

"But what if he's not? What if the Venerated Emergents look into his disappearance and it turns out we were the last ones to see him?"

"Oh, don't be such a worrywart," The Girl spoke up with a fittingly girlish giggle reminiscent of underwater birdsong. "Even if the Venerated Ones send someone to inquire about his whereabouts, we honestly don't know where he is, and we don't know anything about his disappearance. We'll be fine."

"But we do know something about his disappearance," The Boy pointed out a tad impatiently. "He disappeared after he hit the trap we set up. If they look into it, they might think we are responsible! No, I'll go even further! They might think we made him disappear…"

Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

There was a very long, thin, and slightly elastic silence in the not-dark not-room, ultimately broken by The Woman breaking out into barely stifled laughter.

"You cannot be serious! Us? Accidentally killing him? That guy!?"

"Yeah," The Man jumped on the bandwagon with some gusto. "He's four generations ahead of us! Five, for you! Sure, he might not be a Venerated One yet, but even if we ganged up on him at once, I would be surprised if we could even inconvenience him!"

"Yes! That's why we set a trap for him, remember?" The Girl followed it up with an indignant huff, as if the mere mention of the idea was absurd.

"I know, but… I'm just worried," The Boy relented after being thoroughly brow-beaten by his companions.

"There's no need to even think about something as impossible as that. How about we just focus on what's right in front of us instead, and just keep a lookout for any traces of him?" The Woman proposed, and the rest agreed in silence. "So, did we have any further anomalies?"

"Nothing major," The Man responded just a touch dourly. "Things are proceeding in an unexpected direction, but nothing the Simulacrum can't handle."

"It's the second Free Actor, isn't it?" came the obviously rhetorical question from The Woman, and The Man grunted in confirmation.

"He's been causing a lot of deviations," The Boy noted while doing something that caused the lack of air in the not-dark not-room to oscillate. "He caused divergences in most main scenarios, and some of which made no sense at all at first glance. At first I thought it was caused by him, but when I looked into his attributes, it turns out he has three times as many traits and conditional triggers as any other Main Actor."

"Well, it couldn't be helped," The Man scoffed. "He was supposed to be a fixed point present in all the main scenarios, and he was only supposed to have access to the abilities and traits that were relevant to the scenario in question. He wasn't ever meant to be a Free Actor, so I never put any restraints on him. Hell, he isn't even a ********** ************!"

Okay, time out again. That was another weird four-dimensional thought rendered in two-and-a-quarter dimensions, so let me try to unpack it. The first half of it was about being under something, but not literally. Kind of like being below the surface? I don't know what kind of surface, but that was the best I could figure out. As for the second half, it had something to do with cradles, or pens, or at least some kind of enclosed space where small, fragile beings were held safe. So if I put them together, it was something like 'the one/many that are submerged outside a curvature tensor of—'

…

Wait, where did that bit about tensors or whatnot come from? That wasn't in my original interpretation. Dammit, this is confusing, so let's just go with 'Submerged Ones' for the time being.

"For reference, how powerful is he?" The Woman inquired, and The Man did the closest thing a moon circling around a gas giant could do for a shrug.

"I have no idea. I'm fairly sure he wasn't supposed to be able to teleport the way he does, but with the number of different abilities he has, even I can't say for sure some weird combination of traits couldn't have resulted in that."

"Are you sure you didn't also make him a Free Actor?" The Girl teased him with an irreverent tinkle in her voice. "You put a lot of effort into him, so maybe you accidentally did that too!"

"I don't do anything by accident," The Man retorted with an angry snort.

"No, I have a feeling it was his doing after all," The Woman noted with a smiling voice. "While his approach is less overt than usual, picking an already overloaded Actor with a pre-set role and letting them loose to mess with us still bears his signature."

"But… we didn't detect any tampering…" The Boy muttered, only to be dismissed off-hand.

"It just means he covered his tracks well."

"Not to mention, even if he tampered with the second Free Actor, it's hard to investigate it until the Simulacrum ran its course," The Girl added with a know-it-all nod and… wait, since when did she have a head again? Oh, and now she is gone, replaced by a vortex of ominously glowing winds ceaselessly blowing over endless deserts. Damn, this conversation was getting harder to follow by the second. Not that it lasted much longer…

"Indeed. Until then, we have to ensure that everything works as intended, so how about we get back to work?"

"But we just finished a routine check…" The Boy, suddenly filling my entire vision with rainbow-colored orbital rings peeking through thick red clouds, whined, only to be 'grabbed', in a certain sense of the world, by The Woman.

"Don't slack off; we can rest all we want once this is done."

And with that, the pair of them slowly sublimated out of my plane of existence, soon followed by the other two, leaving me all alone. Since I had no reason to linger, I also slowly retracted my consciousness. Somewhere, deep down, I was aware that once I woke up, I would not remember much of what I just witnessed. It couldn't be helped, considering the circumstances, but I figured I might as well try and etch something into my mind. There was nothing to lose, so as soon as I returned to the place I never left, I once again folded in on myself and repeated a single word in my mind, hoping that it would stick.

"Simulacrum."

And with that, I have slowly fallen into an even deeper dream, one that lasted longer than the last, yet at the same time not even for a second. I only hoped that when I woke up, this time things would be slightly less hectic. Somehow I doubted it, but whether I was right or wrong was a story for another time.