"I'm busted," I whispered as I fell onto my bed with a thud, eliciting a giggle from Elly.

"I'm tired too, but it was fun!" she declared with a triumphant grin. It was no surprise though, as she was the ultimate champion of the first Dunning Family Super Mareo Pary Tournament (the name was Penny's idea, I refuse to take any responsibility). As for me… well, I ended dead last.

Put simply, I was woefully unprepared for any of this. First off, nobody told me this was one of those motion-control consoles that required a lot of wiggling and shaking and jumping around. Secondly, it also had a dice-game element, where a lot of things were decided by rolls. Uncannily enough, my rolls were all pretty good, but each time there was a new game mode, by the time I got a feel for the controls, it was over and it was someone else's turn. Not only that, but I completely forgot that Penny and Elly were cut from the same cloth, which meant they had the same competitive streak, and it didn't take long for their scores to leave the rest of us in the dust.

"I agree," my other girlfriend noted, following up on the princess's last words. "Everyone had fun, and that's the most important part." She casually opened my wardrobe, as if she were at home, and after rummaging around for a bit, she took out two towels before adding, "Next time, I won't let you win though."

Oh, right. She also had a bit of a competitive streak, didn't she? In fact, she came out third, because the game also had a couple of trivia challenges, and she nailed all of those, allowing her to catch up to the hot-blooded duo. But putting the games aside, I turned a questioning glance at the towels in her hands, and she gave me a shrug in return.

"We jumped around, so I want to take a shower."

"Me too," Elly followed up on her at once and wiped her forehead for emphasis. "I don't want to smell sweaty when we're in bed together."

"… I thought we agreed there would be no lewding while my sisters and Tajana are in the house."

"Chief, we still need to sleep," Judy noted in an extra-deadpan voice and turned to my draconic girlfriend. "Are you coming?"

"Sure!"

With that, the two of them left the room together. To shower. As if it was only natural.

…

And Judy had the audacity to wonder why there were rumours about the physicality of their relationship among the Dracis mansion's staff. Unbelievable.

They weren't entirely wrong though, and while I didn't take the game super-seriously, I also worked up a bit of a sweat during the motion control challenges. It was probably prudent to take a shower after the girls finished, I concluded and sat up on the bed. Since I had a bit of downtime, I figured I should make a Far Sight roll call, but just as I closed my eyes, I had a new idea. While it was in the heat of the moment, I promised Judy that I would put more effort into dismantling the Simulacrum to ease her worries.

Honestly, I had to admit that I was slacking off on that front lately. I saddled Fred with a lot of the experimentation and developing the protocols and equipment required, but with the recent projects taking up his time, his side was also stalled, and as for my end… Well, let's just say that staying on top of all the Celestial malarkey of the Elysium was taking up too much of my headspace to do any tests on my end.

I no longer had that as an excuse though, and while I could've certainly left it for later, preferably after the girls were already asleep, I had a feeling that I was developing a bad habit of procrastination, and it was high time I acted contrary to it. The only question was, what should I do?

For one thing, I now had a whole bunch of phantom limbs. I gained them during the Polemos-cocoon incident, and so far, I haven't had an opportunity to put them to good use. For example, let's look at the ret-conning ability I had. There was a self-imposed prohibition on it, both because it was a scary power that could have unpredictable and devastating consequences, and also because it quite literally knocked me off my feet whenever I tried to use it. There was also the 'temporary' version of the same ability, where I, for lack of better words, 'fractaled' an object and temporarily replaced it with an alternate version of itself.

While the effects were subtly different, the method was similar: use my phantom limbs to enter the 'fractal space', anchor myself with another phantom limb, and then overlap the alternate version of the object with the 'real' one. Now, it didn't require a genius to deduce that more phantom limbs equalled more anchoring, and thus it might have opened new opportunities. Maybe I could use them to dig myself in even deeper and find a safe way to retcon items, or even catch the tail of the elusive Narrative while it was busy tweaking things backstage. The possibilities were mouth-watering.

Yet, while I was itching to give it a try, I had to restrain myself. This was definitely better to be attempted with Judy around, both to serve as an outside observer and to tuck me in, in case I miscalculated and knocked myself out in the process.

If not that, then what other options did I have? To answer my own question, I raised one of my ethereal appendages. I kept calling it the 'stubby one', but after the last round of changes, it was hard to tell it apart from the rest. Fortunately, just like how I could tell my left hand apart from the right one without having to actively look at them, I have developed an instinctive sense for my tentacular extensions.

This one was special though. Unlike the rest, it was the only one that allowed me to enter into the space between spaces, where the not-black not-room was occasionally found. I said occasionally, because for the last couple of times I tried to enter there, I couldn't find it. Nevertheless, since I had nothing better to do while I waited for the girls to come out of the shower, I figured I might as well give it a go.

As such, I took a deep breath, and slowly plunged the phantom limb into my own head. At once, I was assaulted by a familiar sense of vertigo, and before long, I found my consciousness floating somewhere outside what is colloquially referred to as 'space' and 'time'. It took me a week-long blink of an eye to get my bearings, but as expected, I couldn't detect anything nearby. No chatty corner of my mind, no star people, and no binary stars crested by a crown of black tendrils. Everything was so mundane (at least by this non-place's standards), it was almost disappointing.

I didn't let it deter me though, and with a wilful effort, I forcefully twisted the lack of space around me, this strange void's version of looking around. At first, there was nothing, yet there was a small discrepancy in my senses, and the more I focused on it, the more obvious it became. I pulled it to me, and the feeling gained physical form in the shape of a small crack in the non-space, its multiple edges trailing into two-dimensional spirals, and its middle filled with a myriad of sparkling lights, like the stars of the night sky.

Curious, I approached the strange fissure. Or had it approach me. Semantics, really. Peering through it, I felt like I was in a maze, but not a very difficult one. More like the kind one would find at the end of a children's magazine. Once I realized what it was, it was trivial to reach the end of it, and there…

"—ling you that there has been nothing like it since then," the unmistakable voice of The Man spoke, yet his usual overbearing tone was nowhere to be found. His countenance was strained, as if something large cast a shadow on his barren surface, and…

"And you are telling me this ripple was caused by him."

I was suddenly jolted by a new, never-before heard voice entering my ears. Metaphorically speaking, of course.

Observing my environment, I beheld the not-dark not-room, though its shape was unfamiliar. It was as if the walls were twisted and the floor and ceiling were given a swirling checkered patterned makeover, right out of a Tom Burton movie. In the middle, as much as such a term could be applied to the place, were the four familiar figures of The Man, The Woman, The Boy, and The Girl. Yet, recognizable as they were, they all looked strange. Drained of colour. The ruby oceans of The Woman were but a pale, flat pink, while the rainbow-coloured orbital rings of The Boy were still and dull.

"I assure you, sir ************, the situation is under control, and he is—"

"Silence. I'm not done yet," the new voice spoke again, and everyone shuddered at once.

The Woman called the newcomer by name, but as usual, it wasn't a 'name'. It was many things, and it evoked many images. A small planet, or maybe a moon, drifting in pitch-black darkness. Bleak skies, with only the pinpricks of the stars shedding any light on the surface, covered in a thick blanket of… bones. The moment I made that observation, the sight in front of my eyes snapped together, as if the whole of the solitary planet was condensed into the shape of a human.

A thin man without any clothes on his impossibly wiry frame. He had no skin, and he looked like some kind of art project made entirely of bleached animal bones, teeth, and fangs fashioned into the crude facsimile of a human. He had no eyes, and his face, just like the rest of his body, was but a constantly roiling, shifting, subsuming and emerging jigsaw of bones.

In his hands, with three, uncannily long fingers, there was a strange sphere of light, and as I focused on it, its shape rapidly changed into a bundle of pages stapled together and filled to the brim with tiny, undecipherable letters. The… creature of fangs and bones, for lack of better words, seemed to be browsing these pages for half an eternity before raising his head.

"Is this all the proof you have?"

"******, you have to understand," The Woman spoke up again, sounding distinctly nervous.

This time she used a different term to address the strange being, and I was slightly more familiar with this one. Or so I have felt. It was something I have encountered in the past, and after rolling it around on my tongue, so to speak, to get a feel for it, the words 'Venerated Emergent' came to mind.

"I am very understanding," he answered, his voice dry and raspy, like a man who hasn't had a drink in three days. "But this isn't proof." He paused, and turned his head to each of the other people in the not-room one by one. "The Simulacrum is a privilege, not a right. You have abused the right given to you for your personal use, and in the process, *********** was lost."

Once again, the subject wasn't a word, but an image of a huge, solitary red star. It was strangely familiar, yet before I could take a closer 'feel' to it, The Boy exclaimed in panic, interrupting me.

"H-He isn't lost! He's in there! He has to be!"

"Right!" the girl chimed in, though the birdsong accompanying her voice was strained and twisted as if it was played back on a stretched-out audio tape. "I told you, we had no means to hurt him, so he has to be hiding on purpose!"

"Either that," The Man cut in, hesitant to speak up. "Either that, or there was something else we were also unaware of."

"You are trying to blame an unknown third party," the bone-being's dry, emotionless voice stated, and the papers in his hands evaporated. He moved his limbs to cross them in front of his chest, yet at the same time, they remained frozen in place as if he had found arms. "Where is the evidence?"

"We… don't have any," The Man admitted, and the bone-man let out a low, grinding noise. Was it a sigh, I wondered?

"The Simulacrum has to be shut down," he stated, but then after a beat, his head turned again and he added, "However, it has progressed too far, and thus it would be unfair to the *************."

Once again, the word was familiar. It meant something along the lines of 'Submerged Ones'. Whatever that really meant was still up for grabs, but it was something.

"Yes!" The Woman jumped at the opportunity as if it was a last-second lifeline. "If you look at the metrics, you can see that, despite the complications, our results are actually not th—"

Whatever she wanted to say died in her throat as, without warning, the bone-man's arm lashed out. But not at her. Even though we were far apart, his three-fingered hand suddenly covered my vision, as if he directly grabbed onto my head.

"Uninvited visitor," he stated in a low voice, and I was too slow to react. "Rat."

His hand squeezed down on me all of a sudden, and there was… it wasn't pain. It was something else. It was worse. It was as if a piece of me was being ripped out, and it made me scream in shock and agony. My voice shook the not-black not-room, and scattered The Woman, The Man, The Boy, and The Girl. The bone creature, the pale white man, The Predator Moon, was also startled, and his grip weakened on me. At that moment, the non-space around us shook again, and I felt like I was suddenly wrapped in a hundred thin ropes and forcefully dragged out of the not-dark not-room, into the void of space between spaces, and then flung back into my body before I even had the opportunity to process what happens.

With a jerk, my whole body tensed up, and if not for my gritted teeth, I would have probably let out an undignified scream. I clenched my fists, to stop my hands from shaking, and took several deep breaths. My heart was in my throat, and it took me several seconds to register that I was still sitting on my bed, safe and sound.

At last, I forced my mouth open, if only to gulp in an even deeper breath and then slowly exhale it again. I was still trembling. Not just my flesh and bone limbs, but my ethereal ones as well, and as I carefully raised the 'stubby one', for the first time in months, I felt a panic claw at my mind, sinking its talons into my every thought as my flight-of-fight response was in full effect.

I couldn't help but stare at the phantom limb, even though I couldn't see it with my eyes, and whisper, "Is that… a fucking teeth mark…?"