The Simulacrum

They say that doing something the second time is always easier than the first. It made logical sense, but I wasn't sure it applied to this situation. My first attempt at a big retcon was under duress, and I couldn't remember most of what happened due to… honestly, probably some kind of self-imposed mental barrier. Human minds weren't designed to understand that kind of scope, and so my brain shut it all away.

Whether it was to protect my sanity or my status as a 'human mind' was an academic question for another time. For now, I followed the usual footsteps of a temporary retcon. I pushed my phantom limbs into the core of the homunculus, and there I found its core, the bundle of records my mind usually conceptualised as an enormous multi-coloured yarn-ball of light.

In this case, since it was an empty body specifically prepared for this purpose, there was no 'soul' in there. It was by delving into Angie's, as she was being overwritten by Deus, that I enacted my first big retcon, but this situation was slightly different. For a start, back then, my goal was to retroactively change Angie's past and the way her body-sharing with Deus worked in a way that would still lead to more or less the same outcome, just without the grisly bits and the whole body-snatching thing.

Anyhow, while time was a mostly meaningless concept here, I still had to begin somewhere, and I decided to follow in my own footsteps from the last time. First off, I used my phantom limbs to firmly anchor myself into the… lack of space, I guess. It was kind of like the space-between-spaces where the not-dark not-room was, but also fundamentally different in a way I couldn't quite explain. So I didn't even try.

Once I was anchored (which felt way more secure than back then, probably because I had so many phantom limbs now), came the second step: I had to designate a starting point. Just like how I used the Deus-ified Angie back then, I designated the currently soulless homunculus body as the zero on my imaginary number line. From there, I could work backwards, though this time it was slightly different.

Last time, it was akin to moving down an infinitely branching tree until I found the closest branching point that could lead me to a desired outcome, and then following it back up while snipping off all unwanted forks, like pruning a galaxy-sized bonsai tree. That was already bloody difficult, but what I was trying to do now was substantially different: I was about to insert the homunculus body into a point of time it didn't exist, and then… remote-control it, I supposed?

I had a feeling this was going to be incredibly, mind-meltingly, reason-shatteringly difficult, and it… really wasn't. Unlike with a temporary-retcon, where the initial state of an object had to share more than nominal resemblance to the desired one, the infinitely branching paths of this retcon-space contained every iteration of the homunculus I was operating on, including ones that weren't logically consistent. I simply had to find a branch that said 'this body existed before it existed', then follow it back to the point where I wanted it to first exist in the timeline, and presto!

Well, to be fair, the process was a fair bit more involved than that, but maybe the saying was right, and doing something for the second time was indeed easier. Not just that, but while I was working on that, I discovered something peculiar: I wanted to see how far back I could insert the homunculus into the past, and it turned out it wasn't all that far.

I fairly quickly ran into what felt like a wall, or… more like a point, really, from which all the new branching paths sprang forth. Curiosity took the better of me, and I decided to investigate this odd phenomenon, which resulted in a subjectively very, very long side-track. Even then, while I could draw some conclusions, I couldn't quite uncover the entire mystery.

Long story short, the point in time that I couldn't move beyond happened to be the moment of the previous retcon. It was impossible to move beyond that, but I couldn't quite figure out why. Was it that the retcon itself prevented me, creating a sort of organic checkpoint? Or maybe it was when Predator Moon 'paused' the Simulacrum, and it collapsed all possibilities into the one we were experiencing at the time? Heck, as far as I knew, it could've been because it was the time I merged with other-me, the incessant voice in the back of my head trying to keep me on the track of the scenario, and so I couldn't interact with a time frame where we weren't merged.

I couldn't say for sure, but once my curiosity was sated, I moved on and returned to the original task at hand. It wasn't wasted effort, either. This semi-eternal intermezzo essentially established the beginning- and end-points of the period I could work with: one was the Angie-retcon, the other was the 'present', the moment of the current retcon. Of course, because the branches between those two points were still effectively infinite (or at least infinitely approaching infinite, however much or little sense that made), it didn't exactly narrow my options laterally, but at least I had this block… of time… to work with.

…

Goddamit, here's that term again. I thought if there was one place where I could escape it, it would be here, but that was apparently wishful thinking. Looking at it right from this perspective did make a bit more sense, admittedly, but I still didn't like it.

But enough about the side-tracks, let's get moving. Since I had the notes that future-me (which is present-me, I guess) gave to me memorised, I leafed through them in my mind, looking for clues, and before long, I decided on the 'insertion point'. It was effectively right at the beginning of the time-block, a day after the encounter between the Predator Moon and the Crowned Coalescence.

In more concrete terms, that was the 24th of February, and it was a rather… peculiar experience.

Unlike last time, when I completed the retcon and then all the infinite 'possibilities' snapped together into one instance of 'certainty', establishing the new de facto continuity, this worked differently. I was, for all intents and purposes, still inside the retcon-space, but at the same time, 'I' was also inside the time-block I was manipulating.

When I opened my eyes, 'I' was in the familiar storeroom within the underground base. I was naked, time-travelling robot style, which wasn't ideal, but I was about to rectify that in a moment. The reason why I chose this place and time was so that I could pick up my old Bel gear stashed in here, the one I used before I switched to the Leoformer.

However, just as I started to rummage through the containers hidden in the corner, I was discovered by… an angry little shoggoth.

"Nyuuu!"

I paused and looked at the small ball of flesh glaring at me from a stack of chairs, and it was at this point that I fully understood what future-me meant when he said it was kind of like playing a video game, but also kind of not.

The 'me' inside the scenario playing out in the time-block was observing the world from a normal time-frame, but 'I' in the retcon-space was looking at this ever-churning fractal-cloud tree of possibilities while operating outside of the constraints of linear time. Because of this, from my outsider perspective, I could simultaneously see all the countless possible timelines that could branch out from every action and reaction that I could take from the inside.

In this case, the way 'I' responded to Pudding-kun wouldn't necessarily have universe-altering repercussions, but the thing about infinite is that it was infinite, and even small and insignificant changes created more infinities. Of course, nobody had time to go through all of those, so after spending a small eternity inspecting the situation, I decided to take it slow and run mostly on intuition, only reserving this kind of scrutiny for really important turning points in the scenario.

As such, 'I' gave a signal to 'me', and responded with a genial, "Hi, Pudding-kun. Don't worry, it's just me."

That immediately collapsed one set of infinities, but there were still infinite other options left, so it didn't make much of a difference. More importantly, the whole experience was just weird. In this context, there were two 'me-s', and we shared a consciousness, but 'Bel of the Abyss me' wasn't seeing and understanding the same fractal continuity-branches and fractal time-blocks 'retconning-in-process me' was interacting with.

In a sense, it was kind of like the relationship between other-me and me-me in the past, where other-me obviously knew way more about the workings of the Simulacrum and the scenario, but was only giving me info on a need-to-know basis, mostly in the form of signalling me whenever I was about to do something dangerous.

…

Hold on. Maybe it wasn't just a similar situation, but the exact same one? Maybe the whole scenario as I knew it was a ginormous retcon by other-me? Now, wait. I merged with other-me, so I would know, but… what if other-me was just a separate instance of some even bigger other-other-me and was only given partial information the same way I'm only sharing partial information with Bel-me?

Was… was the whole universe retcons all the way down? And maybe more importantly, just how many layers of 'me-s' were out there? I mean, there was that yet-another-me who intervened when transferring Saahira to her new body, so…

"Focus!"

That came from Bel-me, and I was right. I'd have ample opportunities to figure all of this out once the scenario concluded, but to do that, first I'd have to finish it.

After this point, time became a hazy concept. Even hazier than usual, I mean. Sharing a point of view between my Bel-self operating in linear causality and my retconning-self operating outside of it had that kind of effect. There were lots of things to take care of, so I couldn't be bothered to feel too concerned about that.

Once I assumed my role as Bel of the Abyss within the framework of the scenario, I immediately got busy. The first time Bel-me would make his appearance was during the Draconian party, with Naoren and Mountain Girl, which was in the middle of March. That meant I had less than three weeks to set things up, and I started working overtime.

There was much to do. I had to set Crowy up as our main villain, nab Ollie and make him comfortable at the bottom of the Chasm of Desolation, set the Celestial archives on fire, and so on. It was that last bit that proved to be the source of my first encounter with a persistent annoyance I had to work around: past-me.

All my machinations in the Abyss were mostly out of past-me's view, but the arson plot wasn't, and it affected my past actions and suspicions, which was a problem. I never fully understood the whole 'Free Actor' thing before, but now that I had an outside view, it all made sense. Simply put, past-me was kind of 'dissolved' between all the various branches of the possible continuities, and they could steer things into any of those paths and forks, often pulling events in otherwise unlikely or downright impossible directions. And that was before we added in the whole Narrative-thing, which further twisted the timeline-tree outside of the range of their direct intervention.

That was annoying to work around and caused me a lot of headaches in the process. In contrast, while Josh had the same kind of potential, he was already snugly set on the 'Angie/Deus route', and so he didn't stir much trouble for me. Which I appreciated, because dealing with past-me alone was a nightmare. I mean, I thought I needed to reveal my Bel-self at the Draconian party because the love-triangle and arranged-marriage sub-plots were cringy, but it was much worse than that! If I didn't manually intervene, it would've literally cut off the succession of branching futures that would lead to the end of the time-block, aka the present, meaning it would've unravelled the entire retcon!

It was at this point that limiting the disastrous plot-derailing effects of past-me's presence became something I had to constantly work towards, mostly by bringing my old self in on the general outline of the plan so that he wouldn't do anything stupid. It even worked for a while, and I got some breathing room during the spring vacation, where past-me was in the Elysium. His focus on beach-episode related tropes gave me lots of space to manoeuvre in the Abyss and on Critias. It was around this time that I started gathering my Axis of Evil and making back-room deals with the various Noble Houses.

There was enough downtime to even engage in some fun side-projects, like building Coepi Urbs, or inventing Paradox-Billiards-Siberian-Roulette-Fourth-Dimensional-Hypercube-Chess-Hopscotch.

It wasn't until the beach episode was over and the plot picked up again that my headaches multiplied once more, because seriously, past-me was such a dick! I was trying my damnedest here to hammer together a fully functional scenario with all the ups and downs, and he was just being such an annoying, paranoid blockhead, it made me… itchy?

That was weird.

I focused on the sensation, expecting that it was coming from Bel-me, but it wasn't. Instead, it was… my phantom limbs? It was hard to tell, because the sensations they transmitted were fundamentally different from any tactile or audio-visual senses, but no matter how much I tried to explain it, 'itchy' was still the best way I could describe it.

Was it because I spent too much time in the retcon-space, I wondered. I was using my phantom limbs to anchor myself, so maybe they were getting tired. I was still stable, and so was the retcon, so I put it out of my mind and focused on the task at hand.

It was around the time when we had the big battle at Castle Nergal, and past-me snapped at me when Tracas died, that the itchiness started to get distracting. I even entertained the thought of retrieving one of them from the lack of space I used for anchoring myself, but I discarded the idea. It wasn't like I could even see them, so I couldn't tell if anything was wrong with it. For the time being, I just put up with it and moved on with the plan.

Not for long.

I couldn't remember where I'd heard it, but it's said that 'itchiness' wasn't a separate sensation, but the lightest form of pain, transmitted through the same receptors. I sincerely doubted my phantom limbs had nerve endings for something like that, but maybe it was how my mind interpreted whatever signals they were sending, and once those signals crossed a certain threshold…

"Ow… What the hell…?"

It was once again Bel-me who voiced my thoughts, and it was a wee bit less dramatic than how I felt at the moment. Probably because I only signalled the concept of pain to him, not the actual thing, which was getting pretty intense at this point. It felt like… kind of like as if my phantom limbs were being bitten by a thousand angry termites. It only started with one, but the itchy sensation spread between them, and at this point, more than half of my intangible appendages felt like they were slowly eaten by a swarm, which…

"Oh… Oh no."

I didn't need to be a genius to put two and two together, and it immediately shifted my priorities.

It took some effort to find the right branch that allowed me to get Josh and the gang into the Abyss ASAP, so I had to push the confrontation with Marzanna forward a bit. Of course, past-me was already interfering at this point, but I knew it would happen, so I worked around him and quickly set up the circumstances to allow the guys to move the plot to the Abyss.

That, unfortunately, created a whole lot of problems. Even though I limited past-me's meddling by restricting his Phasing through a carefully curated choice of branches and manipulating the scenario a bit, his Narrative Influence was still a pain in the ass to deal with, and I had to send in Bel-me to knock some sense into him from time to time. On the bright side, this gave me an excuse to play with Ollie a bit, which was a balm to the soul, though it helped very little with the pain of my phantom limbs.

Still, I soldiered on, as best as I could. I needed to reach the end of the scenario and return to the 'present' as soon as possible, and as baffling as some of the developments felt when I was past-me, they made perfect sense now. I couldn't exactly be picky, so as long as I could maintain the continuity and 'close the loop', elegant plot developments and twists were a luxury I didn't need (or more accurately, couldn't afford).

It didn't stop past-me from being a prick though. Like, mate. I'm being literally eaten alive here! I'm sorry things aren't living up to your lofty standards!

Putting that aside, by the time I managed to manoeuvre Crowy into attacking Castle Shamash and set everyone up for the final battle, all of my phantom limbs were being gnawed on, and it was bloody excruciating. I wasn't exaggerating about that whole 'being eaten alive' thing, and it was getting worse the closer we got to the present. I couldn't be picky anymore, so I purposefully set Bel-me up in a vulnerable position to goad Crowy into literally back-stabbing him, and not a moment too soon.

Honestly, compared to what retconning-me was experiencing at the moment, being pierced through by the bastard's black ink thorn thing really didn't feel all that bad. As soon as we were done with that, I grabbed past-me and Phased him over to the last in my long line of secret hideouts, this one in the Abyss and set up by the Axis of Evil, and presented him with the homunculus body in the tank.

The last few seconds while I waited for past-me to finally initiate the retcon were the absolute worst, but as soon as his phantom limb entered, I could feel a shift in the entire time-block as it snapped into a 'canon', and then I was pushed out and landed on the other side of the 'wall'.

I blinked.

From where I was standing, it felt like an eternity has passed, yet also less than a second. The homunculus, previously floating in the tube of amniotic fluid in front of me, was gone without a trace, as if the container never held anything other than the green goop. For a long moment, I was looking at the scene from two viewpoints at the same time, the second one being Bel-me, but now that the retcon was over, his consciousness was… 'returning' wasn't the right word, because he never stopped being 'me', but I had no better way to describe how our perspectives seamlessly merged.

There was no need for a goodbye, but I felt that just letting the body fade into nothing like that would've been anticlimactic, so seeing that the homunculus was still in the same position, giving me a thumbs-up, I mirrored the gesture. The unwritten laws of dramatic timing took it from there, as just a second later he started soundlessly breaking into tiny particles of magical light and sublimating out of existence, leaving only his blood-stained outfit behind.

And that was the end of th—

"Ow… What the…?" Feeling an odd, stinging sensation, I reflexively glanced down. There was something on my thumb. It was like… a hundred small mouths filled with sharp white fangs, endlessly gnawing and chewing until half my hand was gone, and… "Son of a bi—!"

~~~

It was over before he could even finish his last words. He was gone, without a sound. Not just his body, or his presence, but his entirely conceptual existence was suddenly and inexplicably erased by a torrent of gnashing bone and teeth washing over him.

That, was how Leonard S. Dunning, Polemos of Elysium, the King of Knights, Third Speaker of the Draconic Federation, Master of Clan Kage, Chimera Slayer, and the Second Free Actor, disappeared from the scenario without a trace.