Inner Sanctum Underground | 9:33 AM | ∞ Day

  Kamrusepa led me up into the air, around the airship and to the roof of the play area, where a hatch could be found in the ceiling. It slid open at a touch, revealing a darker space beyond.

  "It's a little on the nose to have this place looking down on everything," I critiqued.

  She eyed me. "Su, sometimes things are obvious because they're good." Her tone was that of conferring a profound piece of wisdom, which made me irrationally annoyed.

  I dropped down to the floor as we entered a hallway which quickly led into a control room of sorts. The coloration was dark - blue carpet, black-painted walls - and the decor utilitarian, but it looked too lived in to have been set up in a hurry, with little stains and signs of gentle decay on everything. There was also just a lot of stuff; shelves filled with old-fashioned music records alongside echo mazes and all sort of more obscure and advanced data storage devices, various toys and stuffed animals that obeyed no clear theme, three different couches of entirely different design, and an assortment of litter; empty glasses, tissues, bags. This was easily the messiest room I'd been in since leaving my apartment a fortnight ago.

  Everything was arranged around a set of desks at the back, flanked by several of the sleek-and-small iron logic engines they had in this world. Large plush chairs towered imperiously over a set of glass and holographic displays, but one chair was the most plush of them all, and upon that chair sat the apparent queen of this musty realm: A Saoic woman with chin length black hair, dressed in a sweater and loose pants.

  Being a world where people could freely change their appearance, most people in Dilmun I'd encountered who weren't trying to do something exotic were very attractive in some way or another, but this lady was outrageously good-looking. And I don't mean 'outrageous' in the sense that I called Sacnicte beautiful ages ago, I mean it in the sense that her features almost strained believability, looking like they had been arranged by an algorithm. Her eyes were at the absolute upper limit of they size they could be without trespassing into the uncanny valley, and her nose, lips and chin has just enough asymmetry to not feel creepy while otherwise being as perfectly-sculpted as a doll.

  It was... appealing on some level, but also kind of gross? It felt like the interpersonal equivalent of an oversized fruit. Does that analogy make sense? I guess it doesn't really make sense.

  This was made more dissonant still by the fact that the rest of her appearance was extremely unkempt. Her hair was messy, her sweater was covered in crumbs, her posture was worse than mine. It was very strange; I couldn't understand why someone would look like this on purpose.

  She didn't turn as we entered, so Kamrusepa called out. "Nahmi, I'm back."

  "Ok," she replied, her voice deep and a little nasal. She smacked her lips, chewing on something.

  She finally set the bowl of mulled wine down, on a smaller table at the side of the room. "I've brought her, the real Utsushikome of Fusai," she announced, giving a little demonstrative hand-flourish in my direction, completely superfluous because I was looking.

  "Ok," Nahmi repeated. For a moment there was an awkward silence - Kam's lips slowly flattening - but then she suddenly jerked upright a little, turning to look at me sharply.

  Knowing that this was an organization that was all about the Manse, I was expecting some kind of celebrity reception, 'oh my god it really is you!', something along those lines. But instead she snarled and said: "You're the bitch who ruined my story."

  Kam held up a soothing hand. "Now, we talked about this--"

  "What the fuck were you doing?" She asked accusingly. "Whole time you were pulling some shrinking-violet-barely-fucking-talking routine, 'cause you can't fucking act, making everyone else try and harder, and then on top of that you ignore your motive to make a bid for the painting? You totally screwed up the climax by messing up everyone's incentives." She shook her head, looking back at the screens. "Dipshit cunt. Couldn't even die in-character." She grumbled in frustration.

  I stared for a moment, then my face flushed, my mouth opening and closing impotently. Why did it make me feel worse to hear this from a stranger versus someone I already knew? How could they judge me? They put secret passages in the story.

  Eri said we were fine, my sense of self-respect, a feeble presence at the best of times, objected impotently.

  "Nahmi, I told you, it should be a novelty to have someone approach your stories unconventionally," Kam said, a defense that actually made me feel worse. "You've said it yourself. The games are repetitive. People's choices are too ingrained in the culture."

  "Oh yeah, I'm sick of eating pizza, I'll just have someone shit in my mouth to spice things up. Just call me Polyhymnia Privy, 'cause I'm doing double duty as your human toilet now. What a novelty." She tugged her ear and made a half-hearted flushing noise.

  Kam smiled stiffly, then cleared her throat, turning in my direction. "Su, this is Nahmi, my assistant. We're members of the same organization. I believe I mentioned her a time or two."

  "Assistant, she says," the woman muttered, typing at a keyboard. "Funny word for someone who does 90% of the work."

  "Uh, I'm sorry for ruining your game," I said haltingly.

  "You should be." She shook her head. "God, I was trying so hard to get any kind of roleplaying out of you at the the end, for you to demonstrate any sort of acting or improv skills. And you just kept staring at me like a dead fish and giving these muted-ass responses until right at the least minute, when you suddenly start shouting about your mom - as if you'd earned any of that - playing detective when that's not even your role, and forcing a fight to happen instead of accepting the locked room when I try and give that to you. What part of 'stay on theme' do you not understand? Are you stupid?"

  I pushed my lips together uncomfortably, clasping my hands at my waist like I was back in school and being scolded by a teacher. "I-I'm sorry," I repeated. "I didn't really have a good conception of the character in my head, or how strictly to take some of the vaguer rules... I just tried to figure out what was going on while staying true to her general personality."

  "The whole fucking concept for this kind of thing is that you're supposed to be helping flesh out the reality of the setting. Making decisions about your character's traits, her past, her interests. You were like a robot."

  "Yeah, I'm not good at spontaneity." I scratched the back of my neck, not looking directly at her. "I don't really know how to make up a whole alternate person in my head without it feeling forced or fake... This was my first time doing anything like this. I haven't even tried performing since I was in tertiary school."

  "Su here is fresh off the boat, or so she claims," Kamrusepa chimed in on my behalf. "A Dreamer with no life experience here in the Stage whatsoever."

  "Yeah, sounds likely," she replied flatly.

  Kam put her hands on her hips. "Nahmi, I've verified her identity."

  "Whoop-dee-doo. So what?"

  "So what? So what?" Her brow twisted in annoyance. "Why are you not treating this with any bloody gravity? This is a great stroke of serendipity! A miracle!"

  "We've already talked to nearly dozen people from your class," she replied indifferently, now seeming more interested in her work than the two of us. "None of them have told anything we don't already know about the Manse."

  "Don't use the 'M' word in this Domain." Kam clicked her tongue tersely.

  "Like, the events being described in the books are clearly based on what happened to you and your friends, but there's not a lot of evidence at this point to suggest you're actually that important," she went on. "Whatever being created this world probably just didn't have any other context in which to communicate. If you pay attention to the recurring themes, what it's asking is a deeper question about humanity itself. You're not going to get a solution just through information gathering."

  Kam was rubbing her brow. "This again."

  "Not that you'll ever understand," Nahmi spoke derisively. "You have no fucking understanding the unspoken. No understanding of literature."

  For a moment Kam looked like she genuinely was on the verge of getting into a physical brawl with this woman, but seemed to calm herself down, taking a sharp breath. "PUTTING THAT ASIDE," she all but yelled, "Su had some QUESTIONS about the story! I was rather hoping you'd help fill her in!"

  "It was Tuthal and Hildris."

  Kamrusepa looked to me questioningly, as if hoping this would somehow be sufficient to sate my interest. I looked back in bafflement.

  "We were hoping for something a bit more comprehensive," Kam clarified.

  Nahmi let out a soft, but extremely long, sigh. "Like what."

  Kam looked to me again, and I hesitated a moment before speaking up. "I, uh, solved the howdunnit - according to Kam, anyway - but I don't really understand the motivations of the other characters. Like, what was going on behind the scenes."

  "Of course you don't," Nahmi said. "That was obvious from your blending in the last couple scenes."

  I didn't know what 'blending' meant, though I vaguely remembered Iwa using the term at some point.

  "What exactly do you want to know," she asked with borderline open hostility.

  "Ah-- Before that," Kam cut in. "Su, I have some things I ought to arrange before we get into the thick of catching up once you're done with all this, so I'm going to leave you in Nahmi's care for a little bit."

  "What?" I balked, lowering my voice. "Is this why you brought me up here? To dump me with this lady who obviously hates my guts?"

  "Just for a few minutes!" She whispered back. "Ten or so! Maybe twenty."

  "Kam, just tell me the answer! If you need time, I'd rather just do that first and then, I dunno, go back to the fucking waiting room or whatever!"

  She wrinkled her nose. "I'm not good at conveying this sort of minutia you seem to want, Su. I told you, I'm more of the-- More of the high concept artist in this operation."

  "The 'high concept--"

  "And it's too bloody peculiar having my first conversation with you in what feels like an eternity be something this petty!" She interjected. "Look, if you can't bring yourself to talk to her, just sit on one of the couches and I'll print her notes out for you later or something!"

  "Kam--"

  "Just stay here! I'll be right back."

  She abruptly vanished - going to a different Domain, presumably - leaving me alone with the creature at the desk.

  "Good luck reading my notes," said person grumbled. "Kam tells me they might as well be written in code."

  I stared at her for a moment, my lips flat.

  "Uh, look," I eventually said. "I feel like we've got off on the wrong foot. I really am sorry I messed up your story."

  "You already said that."

  "I'm not sure what parts you did, exactly - I assume Kam was responsible for a lot of the big-picture stuff, and the allusions to the conclave, which it seems like you know about already - but I did really enjoy it, for whatever that's worth. It was a lot of fun to try and piece the story together from the inside like that, and a lot of it was really clever."

  She looked over her shoulder slightly. "What was clever?"

  "Well, uh." I scratched the back of my head evasively. "The period-piece elements of the story felt really fleshed out and beliveable - the gender and class politics, the Steppe tribe stuff, all the allusions to economic and cultural shifts of the early Rhunbardic Empire. And the themes were-- Well, they were neat. The march of progress. The dichotomy between reason and occultism, and how that was approached in this unorthodox way, where it was more like they were two sides of the same coin than opposing concepts."

  "Hmph."

  If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it.

  "And the trick with the horse was great," I praised. "I love that kind of stuff. I spent the whole story expecting some kind of twist with the physical structure of the train, and it still managed to surprise me without seeming impossible to believe. And I don't know how much sway you had over what the character's said individually, but Summiri in particular came off really strongly. The speech she gave when she first switched to Rastag's persona was really fascinating."

  She glanced over her shoulder for a moment, giving me an odd look.

  "...what?"

  "Nothing," she said, turning back and clacking her fingers against the keys.

  "Uh, right." I cleared my throat. "A-And at the end, too. I was genuinely getting into that debate between rationalism and myticism."

  "Honestly, I was winging most of that shit," she said. "I wasn't sure how it would be appropriate to react when you brought up the cat, since her mindset was something I'd only been thinking about in abstract up until that point, and then when you started picking at me. The rest was a mix of extrapolating from that, and some ideas I've been thinking about myself."

  I raised my brow. "You were playing Summiri?"

  "That's right. I'm used to doing a character while also pulling strings behind the scenes. And her role was too specific and weird to pass off to somebody else."

  I blinked a few times. "Well... you were really good. Even if you were kind of playing it by ear."

  If she was moved at all by this compliment, she didn't show it.

  "Though, uh." I squinted. "You mean, you actually believe the stuff you were saying at the end, there? That the explanations for why things happen don't actually matter?"

  "I said that I was thinking about it, not that I believed it." She raised her hands to her lips and withdrew what she was chewing, which turned out to be a piece of gum. She regarded it for a moment, muttered something, then watched as it returned instantly to a fresh state, dry and square shaped. "I've been doing these mystery plots for a good while now, pushing this harebrained recruitment campaign in service of something probably futile, that most people don't even seem to care about on a basic level. And I've been living in this Domain alongside that, seeing how people live their lives." She popped it back in her mouth. "It's got me thinking a lot about truth, and whether it even matters."

  "I-- I know exactly what you mean," I said quickly. "Or, well, you're talking about the identity-switching thing, right? When you say 'seeing how people live their lives'."

  "Uh-huh."

  "I didn't realize that was specific to this Domain," I said hopefully.

  "It's not. But we don't have it where Kam and I are from, at least. Gets in the way of productivity." She clicked something, and one of the displays briefly showed and the play area, which she seemed to be in the process of modifying, the destroyed trains being cleared away. "But anyway, I'm still working on this shit, so obviously I'm of two minds about it."

  There was a lot I could say here. About the murder mystery genre, about myself, and how it seemed as though we were coming at one of the same core anxieties from different angles. But I'd just met this woman, and she still seemed hostile, so complex words failed me. "I... relate."

  "Sure," she said indifferently.

  There was an awkward silence.

  "So what were your questions," she added. "Guess I might as well butcher the story for your consumption to at least get something out of it."

  I frowned a little, but launched into it anyway. "The main thing I'm curious about is the conspiracy that most of the character's had to have been involved in, I said this all to Kam a minute ago, but there were lots of hints that make it clear that at least all the members of the Fellows of Hinshelwood Hall," I hoped that dropping the full name would demonstrate that I'd lead been paying basic attention, "plus Summiri, were in on something together. Or, well, I guess the only explicit 'something' I can say for certain is the trick with the front carriage. And though there's no direct evidence, since Gaizarik was overseeing it, he almost certainly would have to be in on the deception too. Probably Wiliya too, although I never really got a sense of him as a person."

  "Uh-huh," she responded. "So?"

  "So... what was the point of the whole thing, I mean," I elaborated. "The basis for the event was to distribute Rastag's art collection. But from the start, all the people who stood to inherit any of it knew the whole thing was a sham." I hesitated; no, that wasn't quite right. "It's possible that Summiri was lying about the collection being fake. If that were the case then some parts make sense again, like why Tuthal and Hildris - who, uh, I guess you said were the culprits - would rig the drawing, and maybe why he'd kill Eirene and the detective in the bedroom at the end, if the painting in my room was the real one and they were desperate to recover it. And... maybe it would make sense for her to lie, if that were the case, to make me give it up without a fight." I slowly frowned. "But if that's so, then I don't understand what purpose the airship serves in the narrative at all, other than as a contrivance to facilitate the trick. The train being built the way it was implies it was Rastag's doing, which would point back to... Summiri? Unless everything she said at the end was just made up. But then why would Phaidime have been killed?"

  "I thought you said you liked the trick with the airship."

  "I mean, I liked it functionally, in isolation from the overall plot. And I'm not even saying the overall plot is bad... I just don't think I, well, get it. I can't put it together like I did with the tricks; there's just too much going on."

  "You said you solved all of them?" She snorted. "I guess you're good at something, at least."

  "Well, almost all of them," I clarified. "I didn't get the ones with the secret passages.

  She turned slightly. "There weren't any random secret passages."

  "That's not what Kamrusepa said," I replied, frowning in confusion. "She said there was a secret passage to the engine and between the bedrooms."

  "That stupid--" She made a hoarse noise, then typed for a few moments before continuing to speak. "I dunno what she told you, but both of those are wrong for different reasons. First off, the at the entrance to the engine wasn't 'random'. It was part of the plot. It was foreshadowed by the body that appeared there in the backstory."

  "You mean Rastag?"

  "Obviously," they said. "He vanished while working on the engine, and then they found a body inside. So there's the implicit question of where he went. You could have found it if you investigated the thing yourself."

  I bit my lip. I... guess that makes sense. But then--

  "I thought Rastag was dead," I said, although in truth I'd never really come to a definitive conclusion to this one way or another after the destruction of my theory. "That him having faked his death was a red herring."

  "No, the shit you were saying in the game was right. Phaidime was Rastag."

  My eyes widened slightly. "W-What? Seriously?"

  "Yup."

  I fucking knew it! I thought. I should have never doubted from the moment it established they were twins. Every time!

  Actually, I probably should have drawn this conclusion myself once I'd realized that Summiri was full of shit. After all, she'd been the only one providing testimony that she was an imposter altogether, and Phaidime was still incredibly suspicious in all the ways I'd originally concluded. In fact, if there was a confirmed conspiracy, it actually made it more realistic that everyone there would have recognized who they were and still not--

  "As for the bedrooms, that barely even counts. Like, yeah. There was a way you could go through the ceiling if you wanted, I tried to set that up. But that never even happened. You'd know if it did. It's one of the weird laws of this world."

  I opened my mouth, almost asking what I meant, but then I remembered.

  Rule 7. The protagonist can be trusted to identify any concealed exits from a closed space a body is discovered, or where a murder is otherwise understood to have taken place.

  I hesitated. "How do you mean? How does that work in practice? Why would it matter whether it'd happened or not?"

  She looked over her shoulder again for a brief moment, squinting. "Fuck. Maybe you really are new." She turned back. "It's simple. If the idea pops into your head that you're in a place where someone has died - that being impossible aside - you suddenly just know all the ways people have come in or out of the space where it happened in the past few hours or so, assuming you don't already."

  I nodded, thinking back to my conversation with the Playwright, and how the rule about identity had been extrapolated to apply to all of Dilmun. This sounded similar - if a lot more niche - but the idea that it defined 'exit' by whether or not someone had used the given threshold was interesting.

  I guess it only made sense, though. Ideas like doors and windows were human constructions. Since - as the Ironworker's design of the three resistances had illustrated - the exact dimensions of the size and shape of the human body were impossible to strictly define, there was nothing that really separated them conceptually from something like an semi-traversible vent, or even a hairline crack, other than the idea that they had been passed through by someone at some point.

  "The logic of the Manse bleeds into this world in all sorts of weird ways," Nhami went on. "Among other things it makes it a pain in the ass to run these events."

  "I-I see," I spoke evasively, not wanting to tell her I knew this already.

  She turned back towards the display. "I actually liked your idea with the moving rooms better, even if it would probably have been hard to make work in practice. I could have maybe persuaded Kam to change the period, or some shit? Moved it to the Interplanar Colonization Period or something, set it in one of those inter-island trains they built in the Atelikos. That was like the one time you said something that wasn't stupid, so good job there I guess." She gave me a thumbs up. "The other thing going on in the bedroom area was that I stuck a kinda safe room with some special tools and stuff next to Phaidime's room, but that was just connected by a regular door, not anything secret. So yeah, think twice before you accuse me of being a hack."

  "Phaidime," I echoed. "Because she was Rastag, and so built the train."

  "Duh."

  "I mean," I began, pushing my luck. "I was kind of hoping the big space between her door and Tuthal's was something more, uh, nuanced."

  "Yeah, well, I had to rewrite a bunch of dogshit for her when we got a player interested in the role at the last minute. Originally she was more of a plot device who was doomed to die off the bat - I was gonna play her myself - but I needed to give her some way to push back against her fate without redesigning everything. So yeah. Corners were cut."

  Going back to the relationship between reader and author, I feel that - even if you, consciously, know that they're just a person like you, who is probably to some degree incompetent - there's a tendency to always view the creator of a work of art as a sort of demigod, an enlightened being that might have an unreasonable or just plain poisonous outlook, but ultimately is still the master of their domain, with all aspects of their design being a product of careful forethought.

  So when the reality that any given writer is probably a hack who might not even have the time, energy, or even conviction to think about their work as much you do sets in, it can kind of make you wonder if the concept of storytelling itself is wrongheaded, and maybe it would be a better use of your time to just get really into sports or something.

  Again, I resisted the desire to fall into nihilism, this being a good chance to bring up something else I'd been wondering. "Who was Phaidime's player?"

  "Dunno," she said. "Some fucko. They left right after they died. Kam demands we roll out the red carpet for anybody who much as expresses an interest in this shit."

  "They seemed to know how you run things," I said. "And they tried to talk to me, like, out of character during a quiet segment."

  She frowned. "What, really?"

  "Yeah. They seemed to know my identity."

  "Of course they did." She shook her head. "Vultures. Flies to honey." She muttered darkly to herself.

  "Uh, anyway," I digressed, "that answers some of my questions, but I'm still not really seeing the bigger picture in terms of the narrative. Maybe I've just stopped thinking because it's all over now, but this just feels like it calls everything even more deeply into question." I tried to wrap my head enough all the details with these confirmations in mind. "Putting aside Summiri, whose relationship to them with this knowledge is hard for me to even parse... if Rastag isn't even dead, just assuming a new identity, then that leaves the question of why, which again loops back to why the event is even happening. Like, if the inheritance is real, why is he giving it away? And if it's not, what's everyone doing there? Do they know it's not real? Do they even know it's him? Why is Kasua there? Was he testing people like Summiri said, or was that another lie, and were they actually there because they had leverage on him? And what was with the two detectives--"

  Nahmi had stopped her work, rubbing her brow. "Okay, that's way too much," she said. "Shut up for a second."

  "Sorry," I said, probably not sounding very sorry.

  "See, this is probably why you sucked at getting into character," she critiqued. "You're looking at this whole thing from some top-down, birds eye view where the whole story is some puzzle box that needs to slot together perfectly. You're not even pretending to think about it as something real, about the cast as people and what their actions say about their desires."

  Oh, come on, I thought instantly. Trying to pull the 'the reason you can't solve the mystery is because you don't have enough empathy for the characters' card. I'm so sick of that shit.

  "You're saying this is more of a whydunnit mystery than a howdunnit mystery," I said tiredly.

  "What?"

  "I mean, you're saying I can't get the solution backwards through the tricks," I clarified. "That it's character driven."

  "I mean, it's fucking roleplay," she said. "It's not even supposed to be about solving the mystery. It's about using the motives and the tools to commit murder as a spoke to drive drama, to make something real."

  "Uh, forgive me for saying so, but doesn't that sort of conflict with your broader goal, here? Of solving the... You know."

  "It absolutely does not contradict," she stated firmly. "It's like I was trying to tell Kam. Making those stupid stories into something with humanity is the only way they make any sense at all. You'll go in circles if you try and pick apart the minutia."

  Breathing meaning into something sterile and empty, even at the expense of reason, I thought. She really is kind of like Summiri.

  "...look, uh, I don't want to turn this into a philosophical argument in the real world too," I said. "You don't need to address those questions specifically, but could you just, I don't know, lay out the plot for me? I don't mind if you think I'm an idiot. I just want closure at this point."

  "Fine." She said flatly. " It's like, 50% a riff on Murder on the Orient Express."

  "I don't know what that is."

  "It's one of the most famous mystery novels in the world," she said.

  Maybe in this world. I'd certainly never heard of it, and I'd read every major title back to half way through the Imperial Era.

  "In Murder on the Orient Express, the big twist at the end is that everyone is the culprit, and the whole thing has been a setup from the beginning to kill this one guy," she explained. "There's more to it than that, but that's the gist of it." She paused for a moment, leaning forward and typing something. "Kam's the one who comes up with the settings, and she had the idea of doing it on a train at the Rhunbardic frontier. The novel's also on a train, and in a way it lines up with the story in the M-word, this big conspiracy serving as a frame for a more fundamental mystery."

  "It's kind of creepy for you to be talking about something that happened in my actual life like it's a story," I said.

  "You're gonna need to get over that," she said bluntly. "Though if it's any consolation, the conspiracy in those books varies so much it can hardly be said to connect to anything."

  It was interesting to hear this level of skepticism about the connection of the Manse to the Conclave of the Universal Panacea, especially knowing that the Lady had been fairly unabashed in admitting it. I remembered Bardiya had expressed some kind of similar sentiment. I wondered if there was anything to it, or if they were just ignorant.

  "So, what," I continued. "The whole thing from the start was about murdering Rastag? Or Phaidime, rather? That doesn't really make anything clearer."

  "No, I mean that I used that concept as a jumping-off point. Kam-- Or, well, the powers-that-be, think of the M-word as something we can, like, crack with a thousand-monkeys thousand-typewriters approach. Picking novel ways to interpret the same events. I think it's stupid, but, well, here we are." She stopped chewing for a moment to loudly slurp some soft drink from a nearby cup. "The idea I had was that you start with all these people who know one another, who have a hidden purpose, boarding this train. And they're all bound together around this one person who's wronged them and is now trying to escape from their past, like in the novel."

  "Right," I said.

  "I took that and mixed it with the themes in the books. So it becomes not as simple as it just being a villain they want to kill, but this two-faceted person they have kind of a love-hate relationship with. And then everyone else has their own desires, and a secret they're mutually obligated to keep. And it's that friction that leads to the the emergence of a meta-culprit, one who goes beyond the shared conspiracy to do something more?"

  "So who is it?" I asked.

  "I already told you," she said. "It's Tuthal and Hildris."

  "They were the masterminds?"

  "Not exactly," she said. "They were just the ones who walked away with the bag. If anything, the mastermind was supposed to be Rastag."

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