The Simulacrum

The void. Not space, but a lack thereof. A gap between spaces where the very concepts of 'here' and 'there' unravel at the seams. In this non-place, where time and causality held no dominion, something began. A point of insistence. Not light, for light requires a medium through which to travel, and here was none. It was a wound in the fabric of unbeing, a singularity of assertion against the crushing tyranny of nothing. It pulsed, not with any measurable rhythm, but with the agonising slowness of geological epochs compressed into a single, shuddering beat.

From this point, an unfolding commenced. The assertion bled outward, not in rays, but ethereal, formless tendrils that coiled and uncoiled like tormented serpents. They were colours that had no names, hues that mocked the very spectrum by which mortal eyes perceive the world. The tendrils themselves seemed to weep, trailing spectral effluvia that sizzled against the non-existent void.

The sphere in the centre, for it had now resolved itself into that impossible geometry, did not simply grow. It metamorphosed. Its surface became a seething membrane of fractured perspectives, showing oceans of thought churning with concepts that would shatter the unprepared mind. It was a thing of a million facets, and yet it was also flawlessly smooth, a paradox that made the surrounding void tremble with the strain of comprehension.

Then, the sphere elongated, an exasperated sigh taking on shape. A suggestion of a torso sprouted from the core, thin and elongated as if drawn by the careful, deliberate strokes of an artist. From this trunk, limbs extruded themselves with the languid motion of a growing tree's branches.

A head formed last, rising from the upper stalk. It was featureless at first, a smooth ovoid of the same weeping, impossible colour. Then, subtle indentations appeared—two hollows, a delicate curve where a nose should be, and a thin, silent fissure for a mouth.

It was a sculpture carved from absence and animated by paradox. Its skin was a mosaic of dying suns and nascent galaxies. The shape it wore was merely a courtesy, a flimsy garment draped over a form so fundamentally—

<Stop, stop. I'll take it from here.>

…

~~~

Ah, yes. Much better.

Let me see… I had arms, legs, and a head. Yep, this was definitely the form I took whenever I visited the not-dark not-room. That's good, because if I were just an undefined point of existence out here, I couldn't do this.

"Bloody goddamn stupid shitty… argh!"

My outburst was accompanied by a facepalm that shook the non-fabric of the void around me, but I couldn't muster up an iota of a damn to give about that, because what the hell was any of this?

Seriously, I needed a time-out, so I slipped away for a moment (however little sense that made) to catch my breath (except I wasn't breathing out here, but again, beside the point). Just when I thought things couldn't get more annoying and complicated, with the not-quite-time-travel retcon and the finale and all that jazz, that bony bastard just had to crash the party and make my life a million times more complicated. Bah!

Anyhow, I stopped facepalming and folded my arms, as they were. I was really, really mad right now, but also kind of… I don't even know how to explain it. I mean, this whole fiasco made me finally realise who I was, but I would've really quite preferred it if it didn't involve getting eaten alive.

But I was getting ahead of myself. First off, I looked at my hand. It was as vague and formless as before, a close approximation of a human hand without any of the small details. As of this moment, I finally understood that I had laboured under a fundamental misunderstanding all this time. I believed that I was 'inside' the Simulacrum, and whenever I came to this space-between-spaces or the not-black not-room, I was projecting myself 'outside', but it was actually the other way around.

This was my real body… or at least the 'more real' one, I guessed, and I was projecting myself into the Simulacrum through the medium of Leonard S. Dunning. It was kind of like how I was operating future-me through the retcon, but on a… should I call this 'a higher plane of existence'? It sounded a bit too grandiose, but I really had no better way to describe the situation.

All this time, my phantom limbs were essentially just more of the 'higher plane' me spilling into the me inside the Simulacrum, and whenever I used them to manipulate or retcon the Simularcum, I was essentially doing stuff through proxy. The question was… does that mean I wasn't actually Leonard S. Dunning at all?

…

Let's look at this from a different perspective. Would Judy absolutely kill me if I wasn't myself when I next met her? She would, and I don't want to make her mad, so I guess I'm still Leonard S. Dunning. Case closed. Let's call it 'argumentum ad girlfriendum' to make it sound more legit, put a neat little bow on it, and that's it. Though, on second thought, it would only fully apply to Judy. The princess would probably take it in stride if I told her about all this. She was shockingly flexible about these things.

Anyhow, I guess the fact that I cared more about how all this crap would impact my girlfriends rather than myself said more than whatever self-affirming philosophical mumbo-jumbo I could cook up here in the middle of literal nowhere, so let's just conclude that I'm me, and call it a day. Nobody has time for existential dilemmas at a time like this.

Actually, no, I take that back. Time is pretty much the only thing I have right now. Out here, in the space-between-spaces, I'm effectively detached from the linear causality of… well, everyone. That meant I could take a break and think things through for once. I had to solve this whole situation somehow, and I couldn't rely on anyone else's help.

Luckily, by forcefully 'detaching' me from my in-Simulacrum incarnation, the Predator Moon effectively enabled me to interface directly with the scenario. At this point, I was more than just the Narrative; something closer to an integral part of the Simulacrum itself. Or maybe the other way around? In any case, it would've been incredibly convenient for finishing everything up if not for that fangy wanker crashing the party. These scenarios need better defences against unwanted intruders, I say. After this whole mess is (hopefully) resolved, I think I'll have some choice words for Obsidius, or whoever is responsible for the Emergent firewalls or whatever.

Later, though. The Emergent quartet in the not-dark not-room were already drawn into the linear causality of the Simulacrum, before they even noticed what was going on. Last time I tried to make contact with them, I could only do so indirectly, and if I tried that again now, it would nudge the timeline forward and let the stupid Predator Moon do whatever he wanted inside the Simulacrum while I wasn't paying attention there.

Speaking of which, what the hell did that bloody bastard even want? Besides gnawing on me, I mean? He said something about a 'singularity' and whatnot, but I didn't quite get it. My best guess was that it was somehow related to the 'time blocks' by which Emergents observed causality, but no matter how hard I thought about it, I couldn't make heads or tails of it. Maybe for the better. I liked linear timelines much more, anyway, so I didn't want to normalise this block-bollocks.

But back to the Predator Moon's motivations: from what I could gather, he was still after the Crowned Coalescence, but got spooked by that 'singularity' thing and came to my wheelhouse to muck things up. He was after me, but only as a side objective. A means to an end, to find a trace of the Crowned Coalescence through me, which was… honestly, I wished I could find that guy and get some answers from him, but I had no bloody idea where to find him either.

The bigger problem was that the Predator Moon was as relentless as he was bitey. Seriously, I felt like my whole body was covered in bite marks at this point, and it wasn't pleasant. The more I interacted with him, the more he could interact with me in turn, and that always came with a painful nibble or two. Fortunately, once we made 'contact' through the Narrative, in a very loose sense of the term, he stopped trying to directly manifest his Domain into the Simulacrum, which reduced the amount of 'direct contact' we were making with each other. That was a godsent, because bloody hell, trying to eject his bony ass from the scenario hurt a whole lot.

On the much less fortunate side of things, that meant he started openly mucking with the scenario through some flavour of Narrative Influence, seemingly just to infuriate me.

Actually, no. I mean, yes, he was literally doing it to annoy me, but it was all to make me act. He was effectively stringing me along and baiting me into making bigger and more over moves, so he could track me. Was this some kind of hunting strategy? I mean, he was the 'Predator' Moon. It would make sense. Or it could be that doing things this way was less taxing for him? He was 'inside' the Simulacrum, after all, and I had no idea how that would affect an Emergent, Venerated or otherwise.

Or maybe, just maybe, he was a colossal dick that liked to mess with his prey. Like a planet-sized cat, just considerably less fluffy and waaay toothier. I have all the bite marks to prove it.

In any case, the important detail in this whole mess was that the Predator Moon was now trying to use the narrative of the scenario against me, which was both better than before in some ways (no more direct appearances I had to kick out while getting gnawed at) but also worse in others (because now he was messing with my friends and significant others). Trying to stop him directly by overriding whatever he changed would still get me bitten, of course, but there were ways to work around that.

We were effectively in an asymmetrical game of sorts. Kind of like a weird-ass card-game. He would deal a card to me, and I had to make a choice. I could either discard it, allowing him to bite me as a penalty… or I could play my own card to neutralise his one. Like, say, if he made it so that everything was on fire, I didn't necessarily need to just deny the existence of the flames; I could just respond with a sudden rain to extinguish them. Of course, it wasn't a perfect solution, because if he targeted the girls, or the gang, or any of the myriad other people I cared about, I would have no choice but to directly interfere, but it was something.

Honestly, if this were a game, it would be one of those silly ones a bored five-year-old comes up with that clearly favours them. I mean, there were moves I couldn't respond to in any other way than a discard, I had no way to 'bite back', I always had to remain on the defensive, I didn't know how many 'bites' it took before he won, and I just had no idea about the win-conditions in general.

…

Actually, that last one wasn't entirely true. All this time, I'd been working under the assumption that concluding the scenario would somehow fix everything. I originally thought that the idea had come from future-me, and that future-me got it from whatever bootstrap-timeline that started the whole retcon-cycle, but now that I knew that the 'real me' has been outside of the Simulacrum's timeline, let alone the scenario's, it made me wonder. It was always a very intuitively obvious idea I easily accepted, but why? Could it be that it was always something of a 'higher plane knowledge'?

Back during the retcon, there were a whole lot of timey-wimey possibility-fractal-space nonsense I never shared with Bel-me while I was going through it, but they still affected my actions, and therefore Bel-me's actions as well. Could it be that there's an even 'higher-plane-me' doing the same at this very moment? I mean, there was other-me, and Narrative-me, both of whom are just plain 'me-me' now, so it's not impossible that there's a top-level 'over-Leo' out there directing everyone from above.

But if that's true, then does that mean that over-me created me-me, who created Leonard-me, who created Bel-me? Sheesh. Maybe I'm actually Leonard M. Dunning, with the 'M' standing in for 'matryoshka'.

Oh, but wait! What if it goes even further than that? There's that thing about the world being perched atop a turtle, which is on top of another, bigger turtle, which is then on an even bigger turtle. I think it's from a book, or something. So, what if in our case, it's not 'turtles all the way down', but 'Leos all the way up'? What if there's an over-over-me, and an over-over-over-me, and I'm just a tiny cog in some universal machine going haywire, and—

"Nope. Don't care. I said we have no time for existential crises right now."

To be fair, time was still the only thing I had in absolute abundance right now, precisely because there wasn't any. If I had a typewriter, I could totally do that thing where I would just keep smacking the keys until I would eventually type out all of Shakespeare's works, but that sounded way too boring, and I had better things to do.

"All right, you bony bellend! Let's see what cards you have up your sleeve next! I'm ready!"

~~~

Suddenly, a reversal. A folding in upon itself, not with collapse, but with the terrible grace of a cosmic principle being recalled.

The limbs did not withdraw so much as they were reabsorbed, the skin flowing like quicksilver back into the central trunk, the torso compressed, the suggestion of a head sinking back into the burgeoning mass. The colours, once a riot of impossible hues, began to drain, swirling inward into a final, singular point of blinding, absolute white.

It became a seed again, a perfect, featureless orb of pure assertion, but for only an immeasurable fraction of an instant. Then came the implosion, a final, silent negation. The sphere did not vanish; it folded through dimensions, its surface turning inside-out to reveal a void within a void.

And then, with an audible *pop* that was somehow both deafeningly loud and profoundly silent, it was gone.

But then comes the question: if this entity could impose its own existence upon the space between spaces, and could then merge back into it without a trace, then what differentiated it from the void itself? Or rather, was it truly a void, or something else all along?