There was something magical about a warm cup of tea in the middle of a snowy winter night, with the only sound in the room coming from the spoon slowly stirring my drink as I gazed out the window. Three in the morning was always my customary 'thinking time', when I could submerse myself into my own thoughts for a while. There wasn't much else to do, and since everyone was fast asleep, I didn't feel the pressure to use Far Sight either, meaning I could focus on the here and now without any disruptions.

Taking a sip, I leaned back in my chair and silently exhaled. I hoped that getting Roland directly involved with my more clandestine operations would help clear things up, but it had the opposite effect instead, and I was feeling more lost than before we began. I mean, I knew that Bel was a big deal. While the character started out as a single-use stop-gap disguise, I was the one who built up his reputation over time, and since my goal was to create a fake villain for the Simulacrum to latch onto, I did my best to make him the most powerful, most mysterious, most flamboyant eminence in the shadows archetype possible.

The problem was, I might've gone too far.

As much as I loathed admitting it, Roland was right. Bel already took on a life of his own, and worse yet, if anyone ever suspected that I was anything more than a begrudging trade partner to him, it could crack not only my own reputation but the foundation of the entire Draconic Federation as well. Not that I cared much about the former, but the latter had many people's work poured into it already (plus the peace it enforced was a pre-requisite for Elly's dream to come true), so the last thing I wanted was to undermine it.

But how do you get rid of an implacable, teleporting, potentially time-traveling super Abyssal not-demon-king? And more importantly, when? After all, Bel was a useful tool, so it would be foolish to discard him too soon.

Even so, let's say the identity outlived its usefulness, and we fully established that I'm not Bel for the onlookers. Now what? How do I take this chess piece off the board?

The simplest and most straightforward way was to have Leonard Dunning kill Bel in a big, stupidly dramatic climactic battle. With pyrotechnics and trailer music and the whole nine yards.

Two issues with that: for a start, I needed to play Bel, because I was the only one who could pull off all the Phasing shenanigans (for obvious reasons), so who was going to play me? Secondly, it had to be a battle in front of witnesses, as me defeating Bel 'off screen' would just raise a whole bunch of flags. Also, I wasn't entirely sure I wanted to add 'Bel Annihilator' to my list of unwanted titles.

Another option was to have Josh do the deed. He was the protagonist, and with him being on the Celestial route (if Judy's insistence was to be believed) due to settling on Angie, a classic not-angel vs. not-demon final confrontation was pretty much writing itself. There was only one issue: even after all that training and the many combat encounters he got himself into, Josh still wasn't exactly at a high enough power level to take on Bel. Now, there was always a chance for a literal Deus Ex Machina to show up and give him an eleventh-hour power-up, but considering I would be the one who'll have to orchestrate the final climactic battle, unpredictable elements like that were the last thing I wanted.

That left one last option: get a suitably powerful third party to deal with Bel. That sounded nice on paper, but the number of such individuals became alarmingly low, considering my tussle with Xiao raising Bel's stock well above 'average dragon' territory, which was bloody damn high. My first idea was to get Sebastian involved, but considering how adamantly Roland was against involving any more conspirators, I had to refrain from proposing it. That, unfortunately, left me with the question of where I could find an OP supernatural opponent for Bel short of making one myself.

I kid, of course. That would've just put us back into square one unless I somehow prepared a whole scripted encounter ending in mutual annihilation, but after how big of a pain in the neck the tournament arc ended up being, I really, really wasn't in the mood to set up yet another big scene like that. Maybe if the opportunity presented itself on a silver platter, I'd think about it.

I coincidentally reached that conclusion just around the same time my cup ran dry, so I shelved both for the time being. I figured we would discuss this with the girls during our stay at the resort again, so there was no reason to wrack my head over it on my lonesome. It was a research trip after all (at least on paper), and many things concerning Bel fell under the 'Narrative counter-manipulation' umbrella, so what better time to discuss it than while soaking in a hot bath?

That said, it was still late (or early, depending on perspective), and I had little else to do. I'd already finished setting up my temporary substitutes on the Hub after Roland left, I already packed all the essential and non-essential things for tomorrow, and while looking at funny cat videos or studying was always an option, I was in a rare introspective mood at the moment. It was best to capitalize on those on the spot, so after putting my 'I <3 Tea' mug away, I sank back into my seat again.

Actually, we might as well start with the mug, I figured. Or rather, its current state.

So far I only managed to do it once, and the experience left me reeling for days, but by this point, we could say for certain that I had, by means even I didn't fully understand, permanently retconned the text on my mug. Not only that, but it wasn't the only time I did something outrageous, and more importantly, couldn't exactly recall how I did it. There were even two different flavors of it, just to make things more annoying!

First, the whole retconning business. I still wasn't entirely clear on how exactly it worked, though I was partial towards the 'made it so that it always said 'I <3Tea', and that's why everyone remembers it so' explanation. Whether or not that was the case, it still left two serious questions in the air: how exactly did I do it, and why was I unaffected? I mean, I could remember the actual event and what I did, but if someone asked me what I did, all I could say was that I wiggled my phantom limbs around and snapped a thing together with a thing, and then it just worked. Actually, now that I thought about it, most of my abilities worked like that, didn't they?

Nonetheless, it was still more reasonable than the second occasion. Well, technically the first, at least chronologically, but let's not split hairs. As for the event itself, it was during the process of moving Saahira's soul to her new body, and it was arguably the more disturbing situation. At the time of the operation, I had a perfect understanding of what I was doing and how to do it, yet right now I had no bloody idea about any of that.

This actually tied into another issue I've tried to ignore to the best of my ability: during enchanting, there was a small but loud corner of my mind that seemed to understand everything much clearer than I ever did, and it tended to warn me whenever I was about to break something plot-significant. This, by extension, meant it must've had insider information about what does or doesn't constitute a 'plot device', which in turn meant a part of me knew the plot. Yet, I didn't.

Okay, let's take a step back, and sum everything up. I was an amnesiac, with nary a hint of memories before the first of September. I had abilities that routinely broke the magical laws of manadynamics or what have you, I had intangible phantom limbs that could casually interact with the magical stratum of reality to break spells or tweak enchantments, the same appendages could be used to directly rewrite the fabric and history of the world, even if on an insignificantly small scale, I could push myself out of the Simulacrum and occasionally eavesdrop on a bunch of weird star-people who are apparently looking for a missing star-person, and I had a kind of inner voice that seemed to know way more about this world than I did.

The first blinding obvious observation was that I was some kind of anomaly in the system. Unlike everyone else, who was working by the rules, I could directly interact with the deeper layers of the Simulacrum. The astral weirdoes were looking for a missing outside context entity, and I had a part of my mind that seemed to be operating on a higher level than the rest of me. The obvious conclusion was that somehow this external star-being ended up attached to me, which knocked me out of my role as Leonard Dunning, certified idiot friend, and through the process, I gained all kinds of similarly outside-context abilities.

It was a simple, neat, and dare I say, obvious theory that explained practically all of the strange things about me. And I hated it, precisely because it was too simple, neat, and obvious. If there was one thing I've learned during my tenure as a professional plot-aggravator, is that if something was obvious and self-explanatory, there was a good ninety-nine percent chance that it was wrong and the truth was a hundred times more complicated and annoying to deal with.

Of course, I didn't base that just on my professional gut feeling. In fact, there were at least two other things that made me question this hypothesis: the suspiciously knowledgeable (and yet obnoxiously secretive, the git) part of my mind was just that; a part of me. More of a stray bundle of thoughts and feelings than a separate entity, and it instinctively felt like me. As in, when I operated on Saahira's soul, at the end of the day, it was still me who did it. I wasn't controlled, nor did a different consciousness take over. It was just me, super-focused, and while I was doing my thing, everything made perfect sense, yet the moment I... well, saying 'woke up' feels weird, but I had no better words for it, so waking up it is. Anyhow, when I did that, it's what happened. I was me before, I was me during it, and I was me after it, just…

Okay, so this was apparently harder to explain than I thought, so let's leave it for later. The important part was that I knew in my heart of hearts that I didn't have some kind of cheeky outer god personality locked up somewhere in my head next to all the mental notes I keep forgetting about.

Then there's the second issue: I had ventured into the not-dark not-room a couple of times, both consciously and unconsciously, and one thing I'd learned for sure was that those stellar bozos were actively looking for this missing astronomical gentleman, yet they never noticed that I was right in front of their noses on at least a couple of occasions. Not only that, but they were also monitoring what was going on inside the Simulacrum and were aware of my plot-progression-breaking exploits, yet they never suspected me. That told me they were either extremely sloppy, or they had already done the equivalent of a background check on me, and yet didn't find anything suspicious.

So, where did that leave us?

Pretty much back at square one, I'm afraid. One thing was for sure though: whatever the source of my extraordinary powers was, it definitely wasn't as simple as 'Oh, you're just a great old one dreaming that you're a human. Like when the philosopher dreams that he's a butterfly that dreams that it's a philosopher, but with more tentacles. You know, F'tang and stuff.'

Though, to be perfectly honest, I would've almost preferred that answer. At least it was an answer, however weird, and it would've saved me a lot of time spent on existential ponderings, but my inner perfectionist didn't let me settle on that so easily. Oh, but speaking of which, I glanced at the clock again, and my brows descended upon my eyes on their own.

"Is time slowing down?"

It was a rhetorical question, of course, but the fact that it was still only five minutes past four in the morning was borderline aggravating. We agreed to meet up at the Dracis mansion at nine, where the coach that mom-in-law ordered would pick us up and ferry the whole group over to the hot springs resort in one go. In other words, I still had nearly five hours to burn through.

Should I just give up and sacrifice my free time on the altar of the almighty funny cat video marathon, I pondered? While that was one way to go about it, there was another thing I'd been putting off for a while, and now that I remembered it, the idea kept worming its way back into my thoughts, and no matter how hard I tried to convince myself it was a bad idea, it still dragged me out of my chair and up the stairs.

Here's the thing: I had close to a dozen marks for both Far Sight and Phasing in the Abyss. It was the result of all the diligent effort I put into sneaking up on guards, servants, and people sleeping in their rooms during my regular trips to hinder, sabotage, or just annoy Crowey. It was so that even in the case he left the Abyss, I would still have a way to get in, plus it helped with my intelligence-gathering efforts as well, and it wasn't dangerous at all. That's why there was no reason to tell Judy about it.

Here's the issue: In the Elysium, the Celestials' similarly situated parallel space province, I had exactly one mark, and it was on Jaakobah. That meant that, if he were to leave Elysium for any reason, I had no means to go there until he returned. If he returned.

While there wasn't much to see around the place so far, the possibility of losing access to it still didn't sit well with me, and planting copies of Pudding-kun was regrettably also out of the question, as they had some range limitations. As in, the copy I took into the Abyss turned into a pile of limp flesh the moment I arrived and only recovered after I returned to the base. Considering how the Elysium was pretty much the same thing, but with better PR, I had a feeling that the same would happen all over again if I tried to bring Pudding-kun along, which meant the only means I had was to go in and manually mark a couple of Celestials for future use.

Of course, that sounded simpler than it was in practice, and I'd been putting it off because I had no idea how to go about it. Going as Bel was one option, but I was afraid that if someone saw me in the costume, it might cause a second round of political turmoil that could hasten whatever inevitable Celestial-related plot that predictably dastardly Narrative was going to throw our way. That meant I had to go without my trusty disguise, which carried its own sloth of bugbears, but I was pretty sure that the girls wouldn't let me out of their sight long enough for me to do this during the next couple of days, and if Jaakobah was sent out on a mission during that time, I would probably grow to regret not acting now.

After I successfully convinced myself with that, I glanced at the clock again and opened my closet. First goal: find some clothes fitting for sneaking, snooping, and occasionally creeping around. If there was one thing I was sure of in this regard, it was that I absolutely couldn't wear anything black, especially not a black coat. Considering that Celestials appeared to be really partial towards white, gold, and light pastel blue, I searched my entire wardrobe for those colors, yet the best match I could find were a loose white hoodie and a pair of gray trousers.

"Eh, close enough."

The hood would help hide my hair, but it was still far from a decent disguise, so after changing, I rummaged through my drawers until I found a light white scarf with a penguin logo on one end. It was one of the souvenirs I won at the stall in the amusement park during our first group date with the girls, and it looked perfect for the job. It took a few tries, but I managed to successfully wrap it around my face, kind of like a thick bandana, and after pulling the hood over it, only my eyes could be seen.

After getting used to all the sophisticated features of the Bel disguise, I still felt practically naked, but it was the best I could do on my own on a short notice, so it had to do. Not to mention, I put even less effort into my disguise when I was infiltrating Crowey's place, and I never got caught, so this much might've been even a bit of an overkill. Still, it was better to be safe than sorry.

With that, I changed into one of my backup sneakers I kept in my room for situations like this, muted my phone and placed it onto the nightstand, and after one last glance at the clock, I limbered up by arms and whispered, "I have plenty of time. I'll just go in, look around a bit, mark a few people, and then be back before sunrise. Easy-peasy."

And just like that, I disappeared from the room, not even suspecting that this made me Elysium's first uninvited guest in over a millennium.