Chapter 122: ~Chapter 43~ Part 1

I could already see it in my mind's eye. I could literally see it. I mean, not literally 'literally', but literally in the 'figuratively' sense… Language drift is messed up, isn't it? Anyways, the important part is that I could totally picture it both literally and figuratively, dictionaries be damned!

Somewhere, in a very public and well-lit parking lot, Labcoat Guy appears out of thin air flanked by a small army of ridiculous robots randomly waving their limbs around. On the other side of the parking lot, Josh, Elly, Angie, Snowy and Ammy dash into the frame only to immediately come to an awkward halt as the camera frantically zooms in on their surprised faces.

Then Josh, as the hero ought to do, exclaims something along the lines of, 'It's Doctor Robatto! We must stop him for great justice!'

When he hears that, Labcoat Guy lets out a shrill laugh and says, 'Kihihi! Look at that! Five overbearing and overly emotional teenagers! Your do-gooder antics end here!'

Then Josh would reply, 'Die monster, you do not belong in this world!', to which Labcoat Guy answers, 'What is a man, but a miserable pile of SCIENCE! But enough! Have at you!', and then he transforms into a giant bat and… wait, wait… wrong franchise.

It's Josh who then transforms. Or maybe Angie? I mean, if someone put a gun to my head and demanded to tell them who was the one amongst our little group who'd be the most likely to engage in the typical sentai brand of limb-flailing-fu and related tomfooleries, I would've named her in a heartbeat. She'd probably also have a huge grin on her face while doing it too.

But back to the scene that I could totally picture: at Josh's command, they would all strike a weird but strangely dynamic pose, pull out their cheap off-brand morpher, the camera would frantically zoom in and out as if the cinematographer was attacked by a swarm of angry bees and couldn't decide what to do, and then, finally, at last, in the very end, ultimately…

"Okay, time out! Time the bloody hell out!" I yelled out while holding my hands in the internationally accepted 'T' position, visibly startling the gang as they were still in the middle of discussing the finer details of their shiny new totally-not-copyrighted toys.

"What do you mean by 'time out'?" Ammy responded without missing a beat, her brows already in the process of descending into a frown of the most critical variety.

"It means I can't deal with this right now, so..." While I talked, I walked over to the briefcase on the bench with firm steps and picked it up before anyone (read: a certain class representative) could get in my way. "For the moment, I'm going to confiscate these for a safety inspection. Please put yours back into the case."

"Oh? Okay." Elly complied without even the merest hint of objection. It was probably because of her prompt agreement that the others followed suit as well and obediently placed their magic gadgets back into the case. Everyone, except for the class rep, of course, and she didn't bother to hide her misgivings about the prospect.

"Why? Do you think I would hand these out if I thought they were dangerous?"

"No, of course not. I'm only doing this because everyone's safety is paramount."

"Since when do you care about safety?" my dear assistant threw a sulky jab at me, and I responded by flashing a toothy grin in her general direction.

"I always cared about safety! What do you think the 'S' in my middle name stands for?"

"Wait, you have a middle name?" Josh blurted out in surprise.

"Well, maybe not legally, but in spirit. Leonard S. Dunning sounds pretty good, doesn't it?"

"Does the 'S' stand for 'seducer'?" Judy wrestled my attention back to her with an outrageous proposition.

"No! It's 'safety'!" I retorted just a dash indignantly before facing Amelia again. "Since I'm all about safety now, it's only natural that I should double-check these artifacts or what have you. Better to be safe than sorry, don't you agree?"

"And how exactly are you going to do this 'safety inspection'?" she pressed on with her inquiry without letting go of the thingie in her hand, though the glance that accompanied said question was much less hostile than I originally expected.

"Trade secret," I answered her while forcing out a wink, for which I really wasn't in the mood, but I had to do it because the situation demanded so. She was obviously less than thrilled by that, so I quickly amended, "Trust me, I know what I'm doing."

Of course, I really didn't, and I was just doing my best to create some breathing space for myself at the moment, but she didn't need to know that. Or maybe she already did, as she looked quite skeptical, but in the end she let go of her 'Transmorpher' with a small, noncommittal grunt and a warning of, "Don't break them."

"Thanks," I said with a smile I deemed reasonably genuine, especially considering the circumstances, and I immediately snapped the lid shut and turned on my heel. "All right, I'm now going to study these for a while, let's say… over there! I'll be right back, so you can eat your lunch; no need to wait for me."

After saying that, I gestured for Judy to follow me and we hastily made our way over to the other end of the roof.

"Chief, what are you doing?" my assistant inquired once we were out of earshot.

"Isn't it obvious?" I responded with an equal measure of relief and exasperation. "This is our ground zero. If these things really do what Ammy described and in the way she described it, then the moment I allow them to transform into brightly colored bodysuits, we are irrevocably going to be locked into a sentai universe with no way out. We can't have that."

"So you're stalling," she stated emphatically, and I confirmed her deduction with a nod.

"Yes. Even if it's just a few minutes, we need to figure out how to defuse this situation. Any ideas?"

"Depends. First, let's pinpoint the problem before we start looking for a solution."

"The problem?" I repeated after her with my brows set to one hundred percent incredulity. "The problem is that these things don't make any sense in context," I blurted out while shaking the container in my hand, but since the items inside were secured, it didn't make any noise.

"Please elaborate," my dear assistant prompted me, and after taking a deep breath, I did just that.

"Okay, let's start from the beginning. We've already established that we are on the cusp of a genre shift, right?"

"Yes, like the time when Eleanor and Neige fought."

"No!" I exclaimed while pointing at her, which apparently startled her a little, so I quickly tone it back with an apologetic (and probably quite awkward) smile and continued, in a more subdued voice. "Sorry. What I meant to say was that we didn't genre shift back then. This world was always on the shounen battle harem spectrum, it just wasn't readily apparent because we were also fooled by the masquerade into thinking this was a mundane school life harem dramedy or whatever setting. We've seen the clues, but because we didn't have the full context yet, we didn't realize that they were clues at the time."

"You were also in denial."

"… Yes, I was in denial. Thank you for always reminding me of my foibles," I told her very politely, and I swear my words weren't dripping with sarcasm at all.

"You're welcome."

"Yeah, anyhow, the point is that this time around I wasn't in denial. The reason why we're on the precipice of a genuine genre shift is because all the sentai elements came out of bloody nowhere and they are taking over. There were no clues, no hints, nor any of the staples of the genre present before Labcoat Guy showed up out of the blue with his stupid spiky hair and inane cackling."

"To be fair, our group does possess five suitable teenagers with elemental affinities who fit right into the mold."

"Elemental affinities?" the question slipped out of my mouth before I could catch it.

"Yes," Judy nodded as she glanced over to the rest of our group chatting around the lunchboxes and she began to stealthily point at them one by one. "Eleanor is fire because she is related to dragons, so she's red. Neige has ice magic, so she's blue. Amelia has her golem, which is earth, so she's green. Angeline can fly, so she is air, which means she is white."

"What does that make Josh?" I asked, mostly out of bile fascination.

"He is the heart of the team, so he is obviously the pink one. Obviously." After stressing that, she glanced back to me, and I swear to god she looked straight up smug for a moment. "You have to admit it Chief, it fits."

"Yeah, and by the same logic, we could receive magical rings from the goddess of the planet at any moment and then be sent on a wild goose chase to stop some mustache-twirling rich guy from polluting the environment for shits and giggles. Face it; these elemental tropes are too common to be called clues for the world being intended to be a sentai from the beginning. Hell, I'm pretty sure that full elemental coverage is just as common in battle harem narratives."

"Point taken," Judy relented at last, but only to turn around and say, "Do you think that this time it's the narrative forcing the genre shift?"

"Precisely," I told her with a firm nod, and for a few seconds, she looked at me as if I told her I was the second coming of Elvis and I needed to borrow her vuvuzela to fix my spaceship.

"You actually mean that," she stated after looking me in the eye for a second, and I nodded again.

"Of course. Things like these," I paused here and shook the briefcase in my hand again for emphasis, "don't just randomly come to be. Someone or something had to consciously design our current scenario to push us towards sentai."

"Hold on, I need to process this," Judy stopped me in my tracks and she theatrically crossed her arms in front of her chest. "All this time you pushed back against me whenever I advocated the narrative hypothesis, and now you are just accepting it as if it was obvious all along. What gives?"

"Because it was obvious. The tropes, the genre conventions, the prophecies being possible routes, they all point at there being a pre-planned narrative in the works. It is also obvious that said narrative is now, for some reason, trying to twist the genre of the world. It has to be an outside force, because the only possible Watsonian explanation I have for all of this is that it could still be part of Lord Grandpa's secret master plan, but I sincerely doubt that he would even know what sentai is, let alone put all of this together based on it."

"So you accept the existence of the narrative influence now?"

I had no idea why my assistant looked so expectant, but I had to let her down by shaking my head.

"No, not that. It is one thing to accept the existence of a grand conductor that creates and forces various events on us, but an intangible force that's constantly influencing all of our actions and thoughts is another thing entirely. That said, we are getting grossly off-topic. We should focus on how to screw the literal plot devices for now."

"Oh. I see what you did there," Judy stated while giving me a thumbs up, though I wasn't entirely certain how serious she was because her face stayed even more expressionless than usual.

"Thank you. So, any ideas?"

"Let's get the obvious one out of the way first: do we really have to avoid this genre shift?"

"I think we've already discussed this in detail, but to reiterate: yes. We really want to avoid ending up in a sentai, as it would negatively affect both our day-to-day lives and our long-term research."

"And these transforming artifacts would directly lead to that."

"Precisely."

"So leaving them alone is not an option." She paused for a long moment, and then at last she proposed, "I am against property damage on principle, but you could always just break them. They are magical artifacts, so your anti-magic skills could theoretically work on them."

"Yes, theoretically…" I repeated after her, albeit a little uncertainly. "There's regrettably a serious problem with that idea."

"Is there?"

"Yeah. Let's disregard the genre-shifting implications of these morphing thingies for a moment, and look at what they are: they are magical armor. Silly and made of spandex, but armor all the same."

"Ah," Judy let out a grunt as she recognized what I was getting at. "I suppose breaking them wouldn't be a good idea when the people using them could be in danger at any moment."

"To be fair, they wouldn't be in a lot of danger either way, but yeah, robbing them of their armor would be kind of dick move, especially under the current circumstances."

You are reading story The Simulacrum at novel35.com

"So we are back to square one."

"Indeed."

I must have sounded quite disheartened, as Judy fell silent alongside me, and for a couple of seconds neither of us said anything.

No matter how I looked at it, I had to get rid of these things, but getting rid of them could potentially increase the threat of injury Josh and company would face, including my sister and girlfriend. No matter which option I would choose, I would have to make a major compromise.

…

Okay, let's approach this from another direction. Breaking the morphers and not breaking them are both bad, but which is the lesser of two evils? If I don't break them, then the cat's going to be out of the bag for good, and no matter how hard I would try to avert it, it's guaranteed we would get dragged more and more deeply into sentai shenanigans. Breaking them would indirectly harm my friends, and could result in the class rep getting really angry with me, but it would at least temporarily alleviate the threat of sentai, and I could actually take some counter-measures to keep them safe by using my surveillance on Labcoat Guy.

In short, if we looked at this objectively, disabling them was definitely the better option.

"Okay, breaking it is," I whispered while exhaling a long breath. "It should buy us some time, and then we'll use it to get rid of the problem at its roots by taking down Labcoat Guy, so that they wouldn't be needed anyway. Any objections?"

"None on my part," my dear assistant agreed with me, which made me feel a little less unsure about my decision. There was only one tiny detail that we neglected to test so far.

"Can I even break these?"

Judy didn't respond to my mutters, and after an exceedingly long instant of hesitation, I put down the case and opened it. I looked over the five oversized wristwatches and decided to pick up the green one that belonged to Ammy. To my surprise, it was a bit more substantial than I expected, and while it looked like it was made of cheap plastic, the actual material felt really solid; some kind of ceramic or glass, I reckoned. Now that I had it in my hand, I took note of a few smaller details, such as that instead of a dial, the front of the 'watch' had an etched insignia of the school on it. As in, Blue Cherry High's, not the magi institute's. It was probably some sort of disguise, I ventured, but I didn't dwell too long on it.

I raised the morpher to my eye level to see if there was any trace of the characteristic magical glow on them that only I could see. When I squinted really hard, I could actually see a faint corona of blue-ish light around the edges, but nothing as overly visible as, say, the needlessly bright spear in Sebastian's office. Still, magic is magic, so I wrapped my hand around it and tried squeezing it.

"How is it?" Judy inquired while doing a horrible job of trying to hide her interest.

"Nothing," I admitted after giving it a few more squeezes. A short while later, a time period which I spent by poking the thing in my hand and thinking in tandem, I proposed, "Maybe the actual enchantments are on the inside? If I can't touch them, I cannot dispel them."

"Can you take them apart?" my assistant inquired while standing on her tippy toes to take a closer look at what I was doing.

"I don't see any screw holes or assembly marks…"

"So it's a no then," she stated as she finally let her heels touch the ground again.

"Well… I cannot take it apart, but that doesn't mean I cannot get inside," I told her maybe a smidgen mischievously. It took her only a second to figure out what I was hinting at.

"Your phantom limb," she stated as if it was entirely self-evident. Well, maybe it was in retrospect, but I still expected at least a tiny bit of enthusiasm.

"Yes, my phantom limb," I followed up by poking her nose with it, but since she couldn't see or feel it, my actions naturally had no effect.

This extra, invisible limb of mine was definitely my most underutilized supernatural ability, but for a good reason. It was necessary for Phasing with others in tow, and it could also be used to dispel all sorts of magical odds and ends, it didn't really have much use outside of those circumstances. If it could pick up things or even just mark people, it would've made my life infinitely easier, but instead I didn't even dare to let it carelessly touch anything or anyone lest I would have the misfortune to once again make acquaintance with the mother of all headaches.

Anyhow, after I had my fun poking her, I sharply exhaled and once more focused on the thing in my hand. My phantom limb, still as jointless and tentacular as ever (though I wasn't sure if the latter was a real word), was carefully poised over the morpher.

Frankly, I had my fair share of misgivings about utilizing it, as the memories of the last time I tried to directly use it on an object and its aftereffects were burned into my mind in vivid detail, but I hoped a quick poke was probably not going to hurt too much. That said, I figured it was better to err on the side of caution when it came to this particular ability of mine, so I decided to sit down on the nearest bench before doing anything else.

"Listen, Judy," I addressed my covertly fidgeting girlfriend while tapping the spot beside me for her to sit down. "Hopefully this won't become a repeat of the last time I tried to reach inside an object, but please still be on the lookout in case I'd have a seizure. If it looks like something went wrong, yank the stupid thing out of my hand. I mean, I'm sure that nothing bad will happen, because I will be really cautious, but just in case, okay?"

"You are already jinxing it," my dearest assistant grumbled as she sat down beside me, but she didn't actually make a serious objection, which I decided to interpret as her silent approval of my plan.

"Nah, I'm just being super prudent and careful right now. Please remember to praise me later."

My girlfriend rolled her eyes, and with that as the signal, I held out the device on the top of my palm again, poised my invisible extra limb right on top of it, and after holding my breath in for a moment, I used its tip to stab down and into it.

I really hoped I would experience nothing more than the characteristic tinkling sound of the magic breaking. That was my best-case scenario, and I've apparently missed it by a country mile. On that note, I also missed my worst-case scenario by about the same margin. That was supposed to be reassuring, and it might've been, if not for the sight in front of me.

How should I even describe this? The sensation was similar to when I had 'interacted' with my mug, except subtly different. It was like I was disembodied and floating inside a vast space, yet at the same time it felt suffocatingly tiny. What would be a good analogy to illustrate the sensation? Let's say… it was as if the last time I was inside an enormous ocean, with all of its weight pushing me down, while this time I was inside a single teaspoon's worth of water. It felt considerably more manageable. Somewhat restrictive, even.

I tried to look around, and maybe I even managed to do so, but I had no way to tell because there was no left or right or up or down in the space I beheld. Not just that, but I also felt that the mere concept of 'spatial directions' was an alien notion here. Strangely enough, even though if someone asked me what I'd do if I suddenly found myself disembodied in a space without any frames of reference, my first pick would've been a complete freakout, yet I was oddly calm. This… felt right somehow. I wondered if this was what being asleep felt like.

Putting such philosophical questions aside, I had to wonder what exactly was going on. However, even before the notion of being curious could really take root in my thoughts, I was shocked and surprised to realize that I knew the exact answer to that question.

I was, for lack of better words, linked up with the morpher, or rather the enchantment inside it. Wait, no. Even that wasn't entirely correct. What I was interfacing with was the underlying structure that supported the phenomenon that manifested as an 'enchantment' on the surface. I had no bloody idea how that worked or what exactly it meant, but the whole thing felt so intuitive that I decided to question it later, when I was in a slightly less bizarre situation.

Oh, but speaking of intuitive, I somehow also knew that this imaginary space was something of an… interface? Menu? No, nothing as crude as some kind of transparent panel with buttons. It was more organic. For example, let's say you imagine a person. Now, imagine that person, but with their head twice the original size. You didn't have to open up some menu and pull a slider or write in some large numbers into the 'head size' field. It just happens naturally, because that's how imagination works. This place felt kind of like that; the inside of my head, except somehow more tangible and less prone to stray thoughts messing things up.

So, for example, I imagined the morpher that was supposed to be in my palm, and 'pop', it was suddenly floating in front of me… except not really, because I was somehow looking at it from all possible angles at the same time, so… would it have been more accurate to say it was inside of me? This was all kinds of screwy, but at the same time it all felt entirely self-evident, which only made it all the weirder.

Anyways, since I already had it in front… inside… whatever! The point is, since the morpher was here, I immediately began to digest it. Digest? I wanted to say analyze, though that made it sound fancier than what was actually going on. Semantics aside, it took me an indeterminate amount of time, which was neither especially short nor particularly long, to completely understand the structure of the device, except I didn't understand it at all. Except I did, on an intuitive level.

Okay, I think it's analogy-o-clock again, because there was no way in hell I could properly explain this. So, my current familiarity with the device was akin to moving a part of my body, such as picking up something with my hand. You don't control every single individual muscle, nor are you even consciously aware of most of them, yet you still have full control over your movements and can pick things up without a second thought. It's like… your conscious mind makes the decision to move, and your motor cortex takes care of all the minutia involved with the action. It wasn't a perfect analogy, but it was close enough.

But back to the morpher, which I knew as well as the back, front, and everything in-between of my hand. Because of this, I already knew that Ammy's description of the thing was mostly correct. It used a fairly complex procedure to remove anything designated as 'clothes' from the person using it and to replace them with the suit stored in its… well, I wanted to say 'memory', but that wasn't the right word, but I didn't know what the right word was, so memory it is.

Where was I? Ah, right, the transformation. As I thought about it, the image of the device twisted and suddenly I found myself face to face with the full bodysuit stretched out on an anatomically correct but invisible mannequin. It looked just as campy as I feared, and let that suffice for a description for now.

I spent only a short while observing the suit, but I had to note that the class rep was apparently even better developed in the chest department than I thought. What was the measurement unit for these things? D-cup, I think? I had to admit, the skintight suit put quite a bit of an emphasis on her assets. Not only that, but when I proceeded to further observe her measurements, the fabric actually seemed to tuck in even closer to her skin, which was both hilariously random and a major revelation at the same time.

If I could tweak the appearance of the outfit just by paying a little too much attention to Ammy's secondary sexual characteristics, then what was stopping me from changing the design of the outfit? Or even switch it out for something else entirely!

If I had a mouth at the moment, I would've been grinning like a well-fed kitten as I tried to change the outfit, and I found it actually fairly simple to do so. Well, at least as simple as rearranging the complex molecular structure of a macro-object, but that was for something for my motor-cortex-analog to worry about. For a trial run, I imagined the class rep as I saw her just a couple of minutes ago, and in a matter of seconds, the garish green jumpsuit metamorphosed into our school's standard female uniform. The whole process was so simple and straightforward that I was almost disappointed, but not really, because getting rid of the sentai suit filled me with such bliss there was no place for any other emotion.

With the trial run over, I considered what the final form of her armor should be, but then I paused and thought things through. Did the transformation actually have to 'transform' anything? What if I left it as their school uniform? That way, they could wear it all day long without anyone being the wiser, and even during battle, they wouldn't look nearly as silly.

I looked into the idea, and by that I meant I rapidly deepened my understanding of the suit and the morpher by… well, I'll be damned if I knew, but it almost didn't feel like learning but recalling something I already knew, and once I considered the feasibility of my idea in light of what I knew at the moment, I couldn't help but be a little disappointed.

First off, these things apparently ran on the user's mana reserves, which could be substituted by tapping into their barrier. Quite a clever design, I had to admit, but it had a few downsides: while it allowed the user to fight without their 'natural' transformation, and doing so consumed much less of the equivalent of magical stamina. In exchange, their specs were considerably lower than when they were fully transformed, but due to the combination of natural barriers and the passive and active defenses the suits themselves provided, the users would still end up incredibly tough. In other words, using the suits exchanged offense for defense, but since the members of our group have already outgunned what Labcoat Guy threw at them, I figured this was supposed to even the playing field a little.

Unfortunately for me, it was also readily apparent that there was no way to make the outfits permanent, since they imposed a constant magical drain on the user. Whatever laws magic had in this universe, it was still operating under some variation of the law of conservation of energy, and although changing the design of these outfits was bafflingly easy, there were things that I couldn't change.

…

Or could I? I mean, as I mentioned before, I wasn't really operating on the 'enchantment' itself, but more on the underlying reality that housed the magic… I think? It's complicated. Anyhow, what exactly was stopping me from changing the principal effects so that the suits would have an infinite battery? Or to make take away all their negatives and make the users invincible?

Although it was intended as a rhetorical question, something in me instinctively shrunk back by the mere mention of the idea. It was weird, so I tried to focus on the source of my doubts. It wasn't exactly a fully formed thought or idea, more like a series of disjointed, fragmented flashes of insight. I spent a few minutes assembling them, and while I had a hard time contextualizing most of them, I managed to 'recall' something from them.

There was a kind of gut reflex embedded in those thought fragments, something similar to a fight or flight response. It told me that I should be wary and that I was only able to act freely as I could because I was tampering with the insides of a… gland? Sack? It was probably supposed to be 'a container'. Maybe it referred to the morpher device?

It also told me that I should not, under any circumstances, try to muck with the underlying principles of the… somethingsomething. It was not really a word, but more of an abstract idea, like the sound of the color blue. It was something that they created, and I didn't want them to know learn of my existence.

I naturally had no idea what any of that meant, but if fragments of my own psyche and memories were telling me to stop messing with things I didn't understand, I had no choice but to oblige. I mean, if I couldn't even trust myself, then who could I trust?

With that, I gave up on trying to create a magical perpetuum mobile and instead I focused on other, more practical things. For example, I decided that I would stick to the school uniform, as it was not only unassuming, but it was a big 'screw you' in the face of the genre shift as well. However, if I was already at it, I decided I might as well let my creativity free to frolic on the blank canvas of the class rep's outfit first. … It was a mistake.

After the third failed experiment resulting in a maid outfit of all things, I decided that my creativity needed to be locked up in a dark corner for the time being so that it would learn discipline, and so I returned the outfit to its school uniform roots. I contemplated tweaking it a little further, but in the end all I added were a few TRON-style glowy lines around the sleeves and the lapels, mainly so that it could be quickly told apart from the regular uniform at a glance.

I've also, maybe against my better judgment, tweaked the actual enchantments a little. Not too much, just to give the wearer even more of an edge, only stopping whenever I was warned by a sense of apprehension that I was pushing things too far. Oh, right, and before I forget to mention it, I've also erased two tracking spells and a sound recording charm thing. Lord Grandpa was nothing if not consistent.

Overall, when I finished, I was quite satisfied with my handiwork… though if someone asked what I did or how I did it, I could only shrug my shoulders and make weird, confused noises.

With that said, I proceeded to withdraw my phantom limb, and when I did so, I immediately found myself on the rooftop. Unlike when I was phasing, the transition was instantaneous, and while it didn't cause any nausea, the sudden change in my range of senses still left me disoriented for a couple of seconds.

"Chief? Is everything all right?"

I glanced over at the worried girl at my side and told her, "No problem, I'm just a little dizzy at the moment. How long was I in?"

"In?" she repeated after me while curiously tilting her head to the side. "If by that you meant to ask how long you were staring at the artifact in your hand without even blinking, it was a little over three minutes."

"Really? It felt a lot longer," I muttered while I loosened up my neck. "Though it does explain why my eyes sting."

"So? Did you manage to break it?" Judy inquired in a whisper after checking that the others were still out of hearing range, and I couldn't help but grin in response.

"No, I did one better. I hacked it."

"How?"

"With my l33t hacking skills." My irreverent answer (or the fact that I actually spelled out the numbers in 'l33t') seemed to confuse her, so I sheepishly added, "Also, with my phantom limb. It turns out it is unexpectedly handy."

This time Judy outright rolled her eyes in exasperation, but I didn't sweat it. I just successfully counter-attacked the genre shift, simultaneously figured out a way to interact with a deeper layer of this world, and I didn't even get a migraine in the process. I think I deserved a dad joke or two.

You can find story with these keywords: The Simulacrum, Read The Simulacrum, The Simulacrum novel, The Simulacrum book, The Simulacrum story, The Simulacrum full, The Simulacrum Latest Chapter