The Simulacrum

"Okay, I'm back. I took care of the most pressing matters, and—"

"Raaaa!"

Before I could finish saying my piece, a sudden battle-cry interrupted me. While I didn't quite have the advantage that my vaguely precognitive sixth sense provided me in the Simulacrum, I was far from defenceless, and with a swoop and a twirl, I snatched the small body hurtling towards me out of the air.

"Hi, Benjamin," I greeted the little menace, secretly smug in my satisfaction that my vaunted girl-catching reflexes worked perfectly fine for teeny-tiny eldritch abominations as well.

"You wretch! I'll destroy you! I'll devour you, and spit you out, and then devour you again!"

I held him up with my hands under his armpits, and he kept kicking, clawing, and snapping at me, though with little effect. Although…

"Oh? What's that? You have pointy teeth now? Good for you, Benjamin."

He froze for a second, then let out a stifled cry as if I just seared him with a red-hot iron and redoubled his effort to bite me.

"I hate you! I'll kill you! I'll hunt you and eat you and—"

It was at this point that I realised that the other Emergents were all looking at me funny, so I put Benjamin down, then placed a hand on top of his head to keep him at arm's reach while I talked to them.

"Sorry, I got distracted for a moment. I just wanted to say I took care of the most pressing matters. Is everything in order over here?"

The group shared a quick glance between each other, and Carmine stepped up.

"We repaired the damage," she said, pointing at the lack of hole in the lack of walls, but then her brows descended, and she added, "While doing so, we discovered something… troubling."

"More troubling than this?" I asked as I vigorously rubbed Benjamin's head, and he groaned and thrashed like I was whipping him.

"P-Putting the Venerated Benjamin's current state aside," Fulgor interjected, the turbulent storm-clouds of his pock-marked surface shifting as he adjusted his collar. "It appears we are… trapped here."

That surprised me enough that I momentarily stopped tormen— coughteasing Benjamin and tilted my head to the side. Actually, now that I looked a bit closely, the not-dark not-room seemed a little different than usual. It was much not-darker than before, yet it was also considerably less not-roomy.

"You tried to leave?" I asked, not in an accusative way or anything, but Obsidius in the back still shuddered, and he hurriedly waved his hands.

"W-We just tried to look for the Crowned Coalescence again, and we couldn't."

"That's odd…" I mused as I crouched down to follow Benjamin and stop him from ducking under my hand. "Give me a second, let me check something…"

I closed my eyes and jerked my head left and right a few times. I was still trying to figure out how all the other compartmentalised-me-s worked, but picturing my head as a big hourglass and shaking it to get the sands flowing felt like an appropriate mental image to invite some info, and before long…

"Oh, I think I got, it" I muttered as I stood back up, along with the diminutive menace. "Everyone is kind of stuck inside me right now."

Carmine raised a brow, along with an incredulous, "Excuse me?"

"I mean, inside my Domain. You aren't quite incorporated, but more like… synced up? Something like that. I'm still wrestling with the terminology."

"Since when?" Obsidius inquired, and Oriole let out a chirping giggle in response.

"Since about the Venerated Benjamin first encountered the Crowned Coalescence in the Simulacrum," she said, as if it were self-evident.

"And how do you know about this?" Carmine asked next, eyes narrowed into thin crimson slits, and the twin-tailed girl began to sidle over to my side with an awkward grin.

"I-I told you I can explain everything!"

"Then why haven't you?" Fulgor spoke up next, looking just as distrustful as Carmine, and I was also kind of curious.

I mean, a newly integrated part of me just let me know that effectively everyone had been synced up with me for quite a while, without them even noticing. In the timeline sense. Or time-block, or whatever. Now I just had to wait for another part of me to tell me what that actually meant, and…

"Oh, wait," I blurted out. "I just remembered something."

As in, I just integrated another part of me, and that part could remember seeing the pre-Benjamin Predator Moon and the Crowned Coalescence clashing in the void, which in retrospect was my unrealised Domain, which meant…

"Oriole? Can you please hold onto him for a while?" Saying you, I manoeuvred Benajmin over to her side, much to her apparent horror. "I need to check something real quick."

"W-What? How am I supposed to—?" Her voice already sounded like a flock of startled sparrows, but then it turned into a high-pitched screech of a parrot when I pushed him in ger direction. "Eeek! O-Obsidious! Help!"

"C-Coming!"

Like that, the epic struggle unfolded between a moon covered in bones and teeth, a planet constantly raining molten glass, and a different planet with its orbital rings trembling like a cymbal. A colossal celestial battle of unfathomable proportions…

"H-Hold him down!"

"I'm trying!"

"I'll never forgive you! I'll hunt you all!"

"Put him in a full nelson! A full nelson!"

"H-H-How do you do that!"

"I don't know, but we need to figure it out quickly, or we're doomed!"

… and at the same time, it also looked like three kids from a weird period drama having a small scuffle.

Anyhow, putting them aside for a moment, I reached out of the rather-bright quite-room and into my Domain, and started searching. Simply put, I had seen the Predator Moon and the Crowned Coalescence duke it out in the past with my own… maybe not eyes, but let's not split hairs over this. The point was that since I had a memory of that, it meant they were inside my Domain. So, if Benjamin was 'synced up' with me, it meant that, by definition, the other guy had to be synced up as well.

Sure, he was good at hiding, and I was still new to this whole 'being an Emergent' stuff, but it was kind of like riding a bicycle, and once I got used to the process of searching my Domain, I quickly honed in on something anomalous. I grasped it, and while it didn't quite struggle, it seemed more annoyed by my envelopment than anything. Tugging on it, I dragged the anomaly towards the quite-bright rather-room, and then there was a crackle and a pop, and…

"Ack!"

A humanoid shape, made out of dark red star-matter and adorned by a crown made of star-lit space, landed sprawled out on the floor with a rather undignified yelp.

There was a long beat of silence hanging in the air upon his arrival, broken when he groggily sat up and muttered, "Oh, come on. You ruined my dramatic entrance," in a booming, sizzling voice that fit his appearance quite a bit.

Actually… no. If I squinted hard enough to look at his 'true' astronomical form, the red star was there, and the crown of black shards reflecting some unseen starry sky was also present, but the 'Coalescence' part was missing, the second sun replaced by a large accretion disk around his equator.

My observations were cut short when Carmine lightly cleared her throat, and the star-man hastily rose to his feet. His features were humanoid, but also vaguely alien, with limbs that were not quite proportional and a head with only the vaguest hint of facial features.

"Ah, hi ***********," he said in a happy-go-lucky tone that didn't befit his resounding voice at all, and he even waved at her with a three-fingered hand. Suddenly freezing mid-motion, he let his hand down and took a closer look at her. "Oh, my apologies. It's Carmine now, right? Wow. That's a really pretty name. It suits you really well."

"Is that really the first thing you're going to say in this situation?" she asked back, eyes once again set in a displeased squint, and it was clear he was stumped for an answer.

'Luckily' for him, it was at this moment that the white-haired menace managed to break out of the other youthful Emergents' clumsy hold, and he threw himself at the newcomer.

"You! How dare you show your face in front of me, ******************!? This is all your fault! Everything is your fault!"

"Whoa, hold on," the Crowned Coalescence showed his palms and backed away. "I don't know who you are, but…" His words trailed off as his vague features shifted, and even his crown quivered with shock as he finally recognised the kid stomping his feet in front of him. "No way. No waaay! Ha! Hahaha!" He pointed a finger at Benjamin's face and burst into uncontrollable laughter that shook the non-walls of the mostly-bright arguably-room. "HAHAHA! You… You got turned into a…! Is that… a Benjamin? Am I getting this right? A BENJAMIN! Hahahaha! This is the funniest shit I've seen since that time the—"

Whatever anecdote he wanted to share was cut short when Benjamin unceremoniously chomped down on his outstretched finger. There was a moment of silence, followed by an ear-piercing scream.

"Yaaaagh! Stop that! Let go!"

"Nfrrr!" Benjamin responded defiantly, his pointy teeth still clamped down around the star-man's fiery digit.

"A little help, please! Somebody! Oriole?!"

"Ah, right!" the girl next to me chirped, finally jolted out of her shock by being addressed directly like that, and she lunged at the white-haired kid. "Obsidius! Help!"

"A-Again!?"

Despite his protest, he also joined Oriole's efforts to pry Benjamin off the Crowned Coalescence.

Meanwhile, I unsubtly sidled over to Carmine and Fulgor's side and whispered, "Is… that how he always acts?"

It was obvious that I meant the crowned man, and while Fulgor only averted his gaze and pretended he couldn't hear me over the commotion, the woman exhaled a long sigh and said, "Not always."

Translation: this kind of behaviour wasn't entirely unusual, which meant… honestly, I didn't even know.

I, for one, certainly wasn't expecting him to be like that. To be fair, I had only met him once, during the first retcon-incident, where he blew his cover to kick the Predator Moon out of the Simulacrum and bought me enough time to finish the scenario, for the most part. In fact, because I hadn't known what I knew now, I was putting all of my chips on him serving as the cavalry at the end, swooping in and resolving everything.

Looking at him right now, he was still kind of imposing. From a purely Emergent perspective, he had a big Domain, and even though it was a bit torn and tattered by his skirmishes with pre-re-Definition Benjamin, it still dwarfed the four Emergents I was familiar with, but…

…

Wait, let's rewind that a bit. 'Familiar' was the word, was it? Maybe that was the thing that had been bothering me ever since he showed up here. He felt oddly 'familiar', but in a rather peculiar way. I knew that at least some parts of me were actively colluding with him, including other-me, who now felt like a drop in the ocean, so feeling some passing familiarity with him based on that wasn't unthinkable, but… no. That wasn't it.

If anything, it was closer to what I often felt when I looked at Carmine. A kind of ephemeral intimacy, closer to a gut-feeling than anything else. What was the connection here?

"V-Venerable Benjamin, please stop this!" Obsidius pleaded while pulling on his legs. "This isn't helping anyone!"

"Sthp cllingh mh thth!" Benjamin snapped back, his teeth still clamped on the finger of the Crowned Coalescence.

"Yes, Benjamin… pff… Listen to reason, Benjamin… pffff… hehe…"

Seeing him laugh, the white kid bit down harder, causing the star-man to hiss and flail again.

"Ow! Sorry, sorry! I couldn't help it!"

Fulgor exhaled a shallow sigh and muttered, "Nothing's getting done at this rate. Someone should do something."

I turned my head to face him, and I found both him and Carmine giving me meaningful looks.

"Oh, fine. Give me a moment." I walked over and tapped Benjamin on the shoulder. "Hey?"

His eyes snapped to me, and he gave me a venomous glare, along with an equally hateful, "Whth?" made slightly comical by the fiery finger still sticking out of his mouth.

"Don't give me that look," I chided him, along with a poke on the forehead. "We both know that you brought this upon yourself, so let's drop the pretences." He only continued to scowl at me, so I tried a different angle. "How about this? For a start, I let you keep the shark-teeth. If you cooperate and let us hear out this guy, I'm open to other concessions, too. Deal?"

He continued to glare at me, but eventually spat out the finger in his mouth and crossed his arms with a displeased, "Hmpf!" but at least he was no longer trying to bite anyone.

"You see? Was it that hard?" I asked, much to the Crowned Coalescence's amusement.

"Right, little Benjamin! You better behave yourself and eat your greens and go to bed on time, or you'll…"

"Excuse me?" I interrupted him with a frown. "I'm trying to defuse the situation here."

"Ah, sorry, sorry. I just couldn't help myself!" The Crowned Coalescene argued with his palms showing. "Can you really blame me? I mean, look at him! I never in a million years expected you to Define him into something so… so…"

Benjamin was about to blow a fuse again, so I once again interjected, this time with a flat, "Are you going to stop, or do I have to Define you into a spindly dude with a Snidely Whiplash moustache?"

That made him pause, and he even took half a step back.

"Now, let's not be hasty. All I'm saying is that little Benjamin here is…"

"With a comically tall top hat that's also two sizes too small? I can already kind of picture it, actually…"

The Crowned Coalescence held my gaze for a few seconds (despite having no visible eyes; it might've been a Venerated Emergent thing), and ultimately surrendered with a groan.

"Ah, fine, fine. I give up. I'll be good."

"Wow…" Fulgor let out a soft whistle in the back. "That's a first."

The sound drew the Crowned Coalescence's attention, but it landed on the woman standing next to the stormy planetoid first, and he exhaled a long, melodramatic sigh.

"Can you believe this, Carmine? He gets out of his cocoon, and the first thing he does is to bully me." He paused and glanced at Benjamin, then back at the woman. "Okay, so maybe it's the second thing, but still! After all that I've done for him!"

Carmine's expression remained stony throughout the entire mini-monologue, and as soon as he finished, she simply asked, "What have you done, exactly?"

"Well… you see, that's a long story."

Suddenly, Oriole let out a giggle, and when I glanced at her, she hastily covered her mouth.

"Ah, sorry. I didn't mean to interrupt. It's just funny that you say the same thing."

Confused, I blurted out, "What thing?"

"You know? 'It's a long story'?" Oriole insisted. "You say that a lot."

"No, I don't."

"Yes, you do," said the Crowned Coalescence, coming to her support.

"And how would you know that?" Carmine asked, eyes once again slowly narrowing into a disapproving squint.

"It's because I've been watching everything. Obviously," he said with a shrug, and then looked at me with a shift in his tone that kind of implied a shit-eating grin. "E-ve-ry-thing."

…

"I'm currently also imagining one of those really, really long Christmas elf shoes, with the nose curling aaall the way back."

"A very narrow and uncomfortable one!" Benjamin of all people joined in, his mouth set into a vicious grin.

"Wait, let's not be hasty!" The burning star-man showed his palms again and even took a whole step back. "How about we just… sit down and discuss things like reasonable adults? That sounds nice. Let's do that, what say you?"

"That's the first reasonable thing you said today," Carmine quipped, causing the Venerated Emergent to let his hands down and face her.

"Oh, come on, Carmine. Don't be like that. Are you still mad at me about that time when we—"

"Not in front of the others!" she hissed back at him, and seeing that the situation was rapidly deteriorating, Fulgor forcefully cleared his throat.

"Let's take it easy, everyone. I'll get a table and some seats, okay?"

As soon as he finished saying that, his outlines blurred, as if melding into the reasonably-bright relatively-room, and then our indistinct surroundings were replaced with a rather plain dining room kind of environment, with a large oval table surrounded by simple dining chairs. All the Emergents gathered around it, and I soon joined them with just a hint of trepidation.

It was nice to meet the Crowned Coalescence, and I imagined I'd finally get to ask the questions that had been bothering me for ages… yet at the same time, I had a sinking feeling that getting actual answers to those questions would be as simple as squeezing water from stone.