Carmen looked down at the stack of papers in front of her, frowning slightly. Raphael had managed to get a mostly complete listing from people, although Carmen suspected that she had gotten help from Thiala. The two had bonded quite a bit over the past few days, and while Raphael was not the most well-liked kid, no one really had a problem with Thiala. So, after obtaining this list, she had sorted through each entry, marking down notable character traits and impressions she found.

She was less than pleased with the results. It wasn’t that they were useless, far from it; she had gotten a very clear result. She just didn’t like the implication it contained. She looked through her findings once more, confirming her thoughts once again.

None if it sounded like her. Not a word. It painted the picture of someone honest to the point of naivety, someone willing to forgive and forget even when they really shouldn’t. It sounded exactly like Lucas.

And that just raised more questions. Obviously, at some point Lucas had been in control. But…when? Carmen racked her brain, trying to find the moment her personality took over, and there just wasn’t one.

Not one that made sense, anyway. Her memories told her that she had taken control after Alex had attempted to brainwash Lucas, and she had stayed in control. She dismissed this notion immediately. Had that truly been the case, things wouldn’t be as they are now. Alex would still be maniacally happy to serve her for one, and the kids who decided to pick a fight with her certainly wouldn’t be under the impression that she had forgiven them. Raphael wouldn’t be buddy-buddy with her and would never have turned down Elenoa’s offer to change her back.

So, that made the timeline pretty clear, at least up until a certain point. Lucas had been the main personality until at least some time after the fight with the kids. At some indeterminate time after that, the two had swapped. Had someone tried to brainwash her again? That seemed unlikely, but given what was happening now, she couldn’t discount it completely.

Her next move was to check her Skills. The Mask was showing that the Fae Mask was currently in use, but much to her frustration, she couldn’t take it off. So, she most likely wasn’t the main personality, meaning that Lucas had to be out there in some capacity.

Lucas was missing, and everyone was treating Carmen as if she was Lucas. Carmen had to have had some contact with people, if Alex’s reaction to her command was any judge. Had Alex never met this personality before, Carmen saw there to be no reason that command would misfire the way it did. Well, aside from attempting to answer without the other mental effects, but she was reasonably confident that attempted removal wouldn’t result in that by itself. She had tried several times, and not felt anything at all.

That meant that Lucas and Carmen had co-existed in some fashion, be it by swapping back and forth or usage of the Avatar Skill. Thinking of that, Carmen tried creating an avatar, only to find that she was at capacity for avatars. There was only one body in Tunem’s dimension, meaning that even if Parallel Processing was active, there was still an extra avatar out there somewhere.

Wait, what was that? Carmen thought back along that train of thought. Something was there that was trying to evade her train of thought. Something she had thought of in passing but was now being denied to her. She strained her thoughts, grabbing a blank sheet of paper and letting her hand draw whatever shapes came to mind as she grappled with this thought. Eventually, she looked down. The paper was a mess, but sure enough, she was able to find the occasional letter amidst the sea of random shapes.

“PRLEL PRCSING” they read, when put together. Carmen smirked triumphantly. If she couldn’t consciously think of whatever it was, she could find other ways to work around it. It took less than a minute to figure out that the letters were spelling out “Parallel Processing”, and that was the break she needed. She wielded her new knowledge as a tool in her mental battle to find the thought, and that proved to be the tipping point. Soon, she was able to bring up the details of Parallel Processing.

She vaguely remembered getting it when her and Lucas, no, her and Lilith agreed that they would accept Carmen as more than just an alternate personality. She quickly wrote down the description of the Skill and her recollection of how she obtained it, lest she forget again.

That confirmed it. Lilith was out there, somewhere. She was out there, and Carmen was here in her place, with no one the wiser.

This is bad. Carmen thought, pacing anxiously in front of her desk. She had taken to spending her free time inside Vithi’s lair, where she felt the influence of whatever was messing with her thoughts was weakest. They’ve somehow disconnected me and Lilith, meaning that I can’t help her in any way. They’ve got an instant win condition, should they manage to fully brainwash her. I’d be fighting an uphill battle to get her back to her normal state of mind, with all the debuffs Parallel Processing gives a Parallel going against the main consciousness. I guess it all depends on how complete the brainwashing is. If there’s some part of her that’s still resisting when I get to her, I’ve got a chance.

But to get to her, I’m going to need help. I have to find her first, and I don’t have the first idea of where to start. Then, I’m going to have to break her out, which’ll require manpower.

She puzzled on this for a while more, before coming to a conclusion. My first allies will be Vithi and Alex, she decided, Vithi because she’s the one granting access to this space, where I feel the influence of whatever’s messing with us is weakest. Alex because I’ve got that master-servant bond going on and can probably work with her the easiest. Unfortunately, I’ll need to find someplace really private I can talk with her, since I don’t think I can take her here. But I’ll need some good evidence if I want either to believe me.

So, she sat back down, and began drafting a document they could read. She wasn’t confident they would retain their memories of what was contained in the document, so she added in a cover page of sorts as a precaution.

The cover page told the reader that they would likely not retain memory of what they were about to read. Instead, should they agree with any point found within, they were to write the question number on a separate document, as well as giving the question count for the whole thing, so they had a rough idea of how much of it they agreed with. It wasn’t perfect, but she hoped it would be enough to get them to at least listen to what she had to say.

Vithi looked down at the paper in front of her. Carmen had left her to this a while ago, asking that she simply followed the instructions, and things would make slightly more sense afterwards. The first page were the aforementioned instructions. Whenever she found herself agreeing with something listed as a “point”, she was to write the question number on a different paper. She was not to take her focus off from a paper until she had either written the mark or decided not to make one for that page. Once she reached the last page, she was to read it and then find Carmen.

The questions themselves varied in content, not that she could remember that. The first series of questions posed “hypothetical” situations that clearly referred to Carmen and those around her and asked if she would agree that certain actions showed inconsistent behavior. Vithi found that she had agreed with roughly two-thirds of the points written, something that was making her remarkably uncomfortable.

The second (and last) series of questions was a bit more free-form, asking vague questions like “Does (insert event here) sound oddly familiar to you?”, asking if she thought a certain personality trait fit Carmen, or even if she just recognized a name.

Her answers to this section made her even more uncomfortable. Although she didn’t agree with a lot, every single question she agreed with she remembered after putting it down, and she didn’t remember any she disagreed with. Looking at the survey as a whole made her lend some more credence to Carmen’s idea that something was messing with them. She may have only agreed with roughly half the points contained therein, but that was way too many if she took into account that she couldn’t remember most of them.

So, she decided to go meet up with Carmen, see where this would lead. Anything was better than just sitting around letting this magic have its way with her. Well, perhaps not anything, but the list of things that would be better was a lot larger than the one she would get from doing nothing.

A couple days later, Carmen spotted an opportunity to get Alex away from everyone else without drawing much attention, and she took it. A quick mental message to Vithi got her to move to meet up with the two, who were headed to the woods again. Kali was currently engaged in her duties as a member of the Council, so Carmen was confident they could at get at least an hour or two by themselves, and that should be more than enough. Once she was satisfied that they were far enough away to not be seen, she motioned for Alex to stop.

“Alright, so, what’s going on?” Alex asked curiously. She hadn’t been given many details, as Carmen was afraid of things leaking somehow. Carmen gave her a quick rundown of the “test” she had thrown together, and Vithi arrived not long after, holding a clipboard, a bunch of papers, and a pen.

She frowned as she worked through the test, obviously getting more and more uncomfortable as she progressed. Finally, she set it down and looked at the others. “You’ve got my attention. What’s going on?”

Carmen nodded, satisfied. “So, I can’t talk about what was on those questions you forgot about. Well, I can but you’ll just forget about it anyway so it’s pointless. I’m decently sure someone is messing with all of our memories, making us forget things. Any objections to that?”

Alex and Vithi looked at each other, then Vithi shook her head. “If I wasn’t sure after my test, I definitely am now. That, at least, isn’t something I can really dispute anymore.”

Alex nodded in agreement. “If Vithi had the same experience as me, the only other logical conclusion is that you’re messing with us for some reason, and I can’t think of a one that would make you do that.”

Carmen frowned. She happened to disagree, but that wasn’t important right now. “You’re going to have to trust me when I say that I’ve pieced together some evidence and have drawn a conclusion, simply because you won’t be able to remember any evidence I give.” She took a deep breath before continuing. “I’m positive that someone very important to the three of us has been taken away, and someone’s made it so we can’t remember her at all. To make matters worse, the longer she’s gone the more dangerous things get for us here. So, we need to find her and bring her back ASAP.”

Vithi raised an eyebrow. “I don’t see how her being gone makes things more dangerous for us.”

“Trust me on this.” Carmen said. “They get to her, they get to me. They get to me, they get to both of you.”

Alex nodded. “I…suppose that makes sense, and I know you wouldn’t lie to us, so if your deductions are correct, then at least you and I are in danger. Not quite sure about Vithi, though, wouldn’t your contract prevent anything harmful from happening to her as a result of her oath or whatever to you?”

Carmen paused. “I can’t be sure, but I don’t think so. The contract was pretty vague, just that I wouldn’t treat her any different because of the contract. If I change my behavior for some other reason, it probably wouldn’t take effect. So, if whoever took her brainwashes her, the three of us are just done for.”

“Why would - ” Vithi began, but Carmen cut her off.

“I’m not sure how much I can say without tripping memory loss, so I won’t say any more.” Carmen said. “What’s more important is finding her and getting her back. So, here’s my tentative plan.” She looked to Alex. “I’ll need you to get any books on divination you can from your dad. Pure spellbooks are preferred, but theory works too if we can’t get those. I’m hoping to be able to shortcut my way to the more powerful divination spells, which I’ll use to try and find her. I’ll…probably need to borrow mana from you two when I want to try them, since I’m guessing I won’t have nearly enough for the type of spells that’ll actually be effective.”

“And as for you,” she said, turning to face Vithi, “I need you to sift through your lair for anything potentially useful for finding people. I also want you to read through my notes and keep a log of what you can remember, it’ll be good to know what they want us to know. I’ll also need you to keep letting me store things in your lair, I don’t want to leak anything if at all possible.” She paused briefly. “So, I guess, try to be secretive? I’m not 100% sure what the source of this is, yet, but whenever I’m around Kali it seems much less pressing, so she’s on the list of suspects for sure. I don’t know why she would need to do this, but I can’t rule it out. Anyway, I think that’s everything. Let me know whenever either of you two make any progress, and we’ll meet back up, alright?”

Somewhat reluctantly, the other two agreed. They were pretty sure they wouldn’t be able to make any further progress even if they asked questions, given their memory loss in the test. So, for the time being they decided to go along with what Carmen wanted, so long as it didn’t become unhealthy.

When Carmen went to sleep that night, she found herself in the most lucid dream she had had since she received The King in Yellow. Fortunately for her, instead of a featureless white void she found herself in a rather comfortable living room, sitting in a plush armchair.

The first thing she noticed was that the block on her memory was gone, as if it was never there. She clearly remembered Lilith, Siph, and events as they really happened in the past few months.

The second thing she noticed was the pitch-black void covering half of the room. It seemed to want to cross into her side of the room, greedily reaching out tendrils of itself only to find them blocked by an unseen force.

The third thing she noticed was Kali sitting in a chair across from her, smiling faintly.

“So.” Carmen said flatly. “It was you. You have five seconds to tell me where Lilith and my mother are, or else I’ll - ”

“You’ll what? You can’t really do anything to me, so there’s no point threatening me.” Kali said, cutting her off. “They’re perfectly safe at my place. Both her and Siph knew everything beforehand and signed off on all of it.” She crossed her legs and leaned forward, the pressure in the room suddenly increasing tenfold. Even the void to their side seemed to slow its attempts to encroach into the remainder of the room. “Although I personally disagree, some might call me god. I need Lilith to help me fix the incomprehensible mess that is the magic system I’ve made, and I needed to take a few months to prepare her for what’s to come, and I needed Siph for protection and moral support. So, to make sure the world wasn’t up in arms searching for her while she was away, I’ve left you behind and taken everyone’s memories.”

Carmen rolled her eyes. “Let me guess, you want me to stop my investigation because it’s messing with your plans, right?”

Kali laughed and sat back in her chair, the pressure dissipating. “Absolutely not!” She said, smiling broadly, “In fact, I want you to keep up your sleuthing for as long as possible! The more you grow and the better your relationship with everyone, the better! But, before I actually get to why I’m here, let’s chat a little more. I’m removing your memory of this dream when you wake up anyway, so it can't hurt to take a minute, alright?”

“Yeah, whatever.” Carmen said. “Why isn’t Lilith here, and what’s this black thing?”

Kali shrugged. “Alright, fine, I guess we can have small talk after you wake up. I’ll stick to you like glue until you chat with me.”

Carmen raised an eyebrow. “Is that a threat?”

“Nope! It’s a promise. So, if you don’t want me eating into your investigation time, let’s chat now. It’s not like we’re strapped for time or anything.”

Carmen sighed. “Alright. Fine, what do you want to talk about.”

Kali smirked. “Lilith.”

“Really? I just asked about her and you got mad!

“Look, I could just skip straight to the point, but you want to know about Lilith, and I want to update you on her, so just give it a moment, alright? I promise I’ll answer any questions at the end, so just save them until then, alright?”

“Fine.”

“Good. So, I need Lilith to be an enforcer in this new system to make sure no one abuses their power and the transition goes smoothly. I think you’ll be pleased to know that aside from the few month head-start, I’m training her to be more assertive. I think it’ll be nice for her to make her own decisions. How about you?”

Carmen frowned. “I’ll admit that does sound nice on paper, but…that feels sort of sketchy. Like you’re brainwashing her or something.”

Kali shrugged. “If this is brainwashing, then so is parents teaching their kids how to act. It’s like a school for manners or something. In all honesty, I’m guessing it’ll end up being more of an act than an actual personality shift, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t hoping that some of it trickles into her day-to-day life. For what she is, she’s far too obedient. She needs to learn to think for herself and not just do whatever she feel others would want.”

Carmen folded her arms. “I’ll need to know your methods before I can agree with anything you’re doing.”

“Well, earlier today I told her that she wasn’t allowed to go and do what I needed her to do unless she finished eating a leisurely breakfast.”

Carmen raised an eyebrow. “And how’d that work out?”

“She threw my words back in my face and tried to force me to let her go. It fit the letter of what I was saying, if not the spirit, so I let it slide this once.”

“That still tells me nothing about your overall teaching style. You could still be doing some shady stuff to her. And if I find out you have been treating her poorly, I will come after you, self-proclaimed “god” or not.”

Kali rolled her eyes. “I told you I don’t agree with that sentiment.”

“Yes, but the fact remains that you brought it up. No one just randomly brings that up in conversation.”

“Not random. I know how you and Lilith think. So long as I mentioned what I was doing with Lilith you would have brought it up anyway. Been through this before, you know? Anyway, would love to let you two talk, but she’s kind of…indisposed at the moment.”

Carmen tensed. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

Kali waved towards the void. “That’s a manifestation of what I’m doing to keep you two separated in the system’s eyes. If this wasn’t there, you’d be undergoing the same changes she is, which is…less than ideal for what I’m going for right now. Similar to what happened when you became a Perfect Chimera, Lilith’s soul is currently being reforged to allow it to contain more power than should otherwise be possible. The system really wants to bring her Parallel with her in this, but I’m putting that off until the big changes to the world actually go live. She’s just unconscious while it happens for her own safety. It’s not exactly a pleasant experience, you know. She’ll be back in action by morning.”

“Speaking of Parallels,” Kali said, grinning, “I brought you here to talk about them. You see, the Skill is named Parallel Processing, but I’m not seeing a lot of processing.”

Fighterman481

Hey all, it's me again! Thanks for all your patience with my last 'update', I really appreciate the feedback I've been given and will be keeping it in mind going forward!

In other news the results of the poll from a couple of weeks ago are in, and here are the results:

16 people wanted to see a rough ratio of 75% Lilith chapters to 25% Carmen chapters, 14 wanted an evenish spread, and one person wanted to see 75% Carmen to 25% Lilith. So, it looks like people either want to see more Lilith or have the two perspectives be roughly even in terms of quantity. So, I've decided to work a pretty rough system of "we'll have Carmen chapters when I feel like it but never have more than 3 Lilith chapters in a row unless something big is going on". Sorry, one person who wanted to see more Carmen, the people have spoken.

I think that's it for non-chapter things, so into actual commentary:

As I was writing, I realized that it honestly doesn't make much sense for Kali to be unhappy with Carmen's detective work. It's all stuff that would either improve her magical knowledge or improve her relationship with others, which will end up helping Lilith out when the big merge occurs. Furthermore, even if Carmen does find something incriminating somehow, she wouldn't be able to do anything about it. There's no way she'd be able to get to where Lilith is, and no way for her to mobilize people who could help with that. So, Kali's content to indulge Carmen and play the role of a villain who doesn't know exactly what's going on with the investigation and doesn't have a good way to stop it.

That aside, I honestly wasn't sure how much I wanted Alex and Vithi to believe Carmen about this whole thing. Because, on the one hand, it all sounds really outlandish, but on the other there's something going on and I think that's something most people would be concerned about. So, I've decided for a "skeptical agreement" for now, with Vithi being the more skeptical of the two.

And I think that's all I have to say about this chapter for now. Next week we'll be back to Lilith as we explore what exactly Kali did to her and what the consequences of that will be!