The Flower That Bloomed Nowhere, 065-082

Well, it’s not February anymore. I guess ‘starting a liveblog, running out of steam, and bringing it back months or years later’ is kind of my thing at this point. Sorry to the Umineko fans especially…

But it’s time for Flower.

Back in June, I read whole bunch of Flower during a long car journey. Then I put it down, hoping to update this liveblog before I read any more. In the end I did neither, and the events of the story gradually faded from memory, until it would be hard to pick up where I left off anyway.

So this time we’re covering a lot of book. Long enough that this has to split into multiple articles. First up we have the Power of the Gods arc (066-073), the Justice and Kindness arc (074-082).

Broadly speaking these chapters see Su and the gang running around in a situation of complete chaos, desperately trying to figure out what the fuck is going on as bodies continue to hit the floor. At one point two members of the Order throw nuclear explosions at each other. But it’s actually all for show!

I read these chapters during May, and then, having bitten off way more than I could chew, I completely lost steam on the liveblog and did not come back to it until December. ADHD kind of blows. I’m going to reread this section of the novel to refresh my memory, and comment on anything that stands out, but this is not exactly a blind liveblog anymore—I have read the story up to Chapter 118, and now I’m rereading in order to restart the liveblog.

I’ll hold off just a little on the big reveals, though.

Contents

The Vijana mystery

First up: chapter 65. Su’s group go back to the secret armoury where she and Kam found the body, hoping to confirm their story and also pick up some guns for self-defence. The Order members present are Anna and Linos.

Yantho—he of the ruined roast—goes down to check out the body (whose name was Vijana, not sure if I mentioned; I can’t find what that might be a reference to). As he does so, Su asks about what’s going on with him and Sacnicte. It turns out that Yantho has a progressive disease which can be treated by the Order’s expertise. Yantho and Sacnicte are not siblings, but their families were very close; they were sponsors of the Order who fell on hard times, and the Order took sympathy, treating Yantho’s disease and giving Sacnicte a position as a sort of vague gesture to reciprocity.

Linos tries to lie about this. This will be a running theme. We basically can’t trust a word that he says.

Information that might be relevant later:

• Vijana’s death scene was tampered with; someone created a bunch of water to clean up and moved her body down the hole. Suggesting it was a murder, not a suicide, perhaps.
• Kam, Ran and Theo know how to shoot, and maybe Ezekiel is pretending to be a bad shot or something. In the event that someone gets shot later, this is probably relevant. Fang refuses to take a gun, saying they’re a lousy shot.

Su checks out her room, looking for info on her amnesia. She finds a strangely bound book that appears to be an odd version of Gilgamesh. I have, since I backburnered this liveblog, gotten around to reading a translation of the Epic of Gilgamesh, specifically Herbert Mason’s Gilgamesh: A Verse Narrative (which takes some liberties, not an exact 1:1 correspondence with the text). In Mason’s hands, it’s a very moving story—Gilgamesh’s grief over Enkidu in particularly is rendered very starkly and powerfully.

The segment excerpted here, in which Gilgamesh and Enkidu decide to go to the ‘temple of Elgamah’ to consult queen Ninsun, is much shorter in Mason’s version. As Gilgamesh and Enkidu are preparing to battle Humbabah, we get this:

Now Gilgamesh was certain with his friend
Beside him. They went to Ninsun, his mother,
Who would advise them how to guard their steps.

The next two pages discuss what Ninsun says to Gilgamesh (including accepting Enkidu as a member of the family—LGBT win!), but no mention is made of where she hangs out. However, there are multiple versions of the Epic, and I’m not sure what liberties Mason is taking. In any case, we shouldn’t assume this corresponds too closely to any version of the Epic, since Ran notes it is much, much longer.

Moving pieces around

Next, chapter 66. We get an outline of the plan. Anna DMs the AIs to say that she’s going to give them control over the exit, with Su and others tuning in; they head to the security centre to set up their transposition window. Sacnicte rejoins the party. I am going to try to move a little quicker now, since there’s a lot of standing about and having discussions.

As far as gathering data for solving the mysteries, we introduce, or perhaps re-introduce, the security monitoring system which tracks where in the facility everyone is.

Beyond that, it reported Balthazar and Durvasa as within the ‘Research Tower Bioenclosure’, Bardiya as being in the ‘Guest Bioenclosure’, no one as being in the ‘Arboretum Bioenclosure’, and finally Hamilcar as being in the ‘Sanctuary Underground’. Thinking about it, this was the first time I’d had the official names for them laid out.

The system is based on checkpoints between the enclosures, registering people on arrival based on blood-iron and a scan using the Power. Essentially updating the location whenever someone passes through a checkpoint. This leaves some loopholes:

• if someone was able to enter the facility through an unregistered entrance, they might not be known to the system (though maybe they’d show up as ‘unknown person’ if they pass a checkpoint)
• if there is some way to bypass a checkpoint, you could be registered in a different location than you actually are.

The second possibility is dismissed as being implausible—you’d need loads of eris to actually teleport. But maybe there’s some kind of secret tunnneellllll that has no checkpoint in it. Zeno insists that anyone trying to tunnel through the bedrock would kick off the alarms.

We are also told that sufficiently mashed up dead bodies aren’t registered by the system. Durvasa, for example, is registered in a different location than where his body was found.

We are additionally given a monitor of the number of living people within each location:

Inner Sanctum Bioenclosure: 17 human biological signatures.
Guest Bioenclosure: 0 human biological signatures.
Arboretum Bioenclosure: 0 human biological signatures.
Research Tower Bioenclosure: 1 human biological signature.
Sanctuary Underground: 1 human biological signature.\

I’m really starting to regret not drawing a map when the layout of this place was described. Actually, it seems like things have changed a bit on that front—since I read it, Lurina has apparently added some official maps to the earlier chapters. So let’s see what we can gather.

Firstly, here’s a fanmade map of the whole bioenclosure. Lurina had some comments about the layout, and I’ve tried to modify it a bit in light of those comments:

Secondly, here’s an official map showing the western side of the abbey during the murder of Bardiya.

There is a much more substantial official map of the abbey that has been posted in draft form on Discord, but so far as I can tell, it hasn’t been added to the part of the story I’ve read yet, so I feel dicey about posting it. In any case, these maps suffice to refresh my memory of how Apsu is laid out. (3D model forthcoming? We shall see.)

So, everyone is in the Inner Sanctum, except Bal, who’s still in the Research Tower, and Hamilcar, who’s hanging out downstairs for mysterious reasons. As for the other 17, Su notes that the main cast herd numbers 14, leaving 3 unaccounted for—possibly Samium, Lilith and Mehit, unless Zeno’s body counts, or Durvasa isn’t really dead, or…

We revisit Bardiya’s murder and get some new info. There’s no evidence on the security camera that anyone attacked from outside the window, so Theo is back in hot water. Still not sure what my theory is here. I’m mainly reasoning off narrative logic. ‘The obvious culprit dunnit’ is generally speaking not the spirit of things—the final reveal should bring some surprising twist, so you can either admire the ingenuity of the detective, or pat yourself on the back for seeing through the author’s games. However, there is still the question of ‘whydunnit’, and this is hardly the ultimate murder. If Theo did opportunistically off Bardiya, knowing he’d be the obvious suspect, what did he have to gain?

Anyway, Theo gets the sussy baka bondage. I’m not sorry for writing that.

Book club time

Now, we’re in chapter 67; everyone has to twiddle their thumbs a bit while Anna does her computer shit. So Su reads a book—the Gilgamesh she picked up earlier. She finds it’s a long, meandering embellishment on the original epic, with lots of random shit like property disputes and having guests for dinner. Su brings up the never-ending stories urban legend that Ran raised earlier.

We can speculate a bit about the significance of this fictional book. Life is, in contrast to an epic such as Gilgamesh, or really pretty much any story we care to tell that isn’t terribly avant-garde, full of banal shit such as this. Moments of great emotional significance are few and far between; we spend most of our allotted time existing just getting along with things. Eating, sleeping, cooking, cleaning, entertaining ourselves in various ways. An infinitely long life would be full of infinite banal shit. Hence this ‘Gilgamesh with the boring bits’ book. Not quite sure where to take that.

Su, still on that copium, thinks maybe reading this book was a gift from Samium, the key to doing the ego-death shit she wants.

‘What do I do if Samium is dead?’ is the question on her mind. After all, this is the purpose that brought her this far.

Anything you want. Like what you’d tell an athlete who’d just learned they’d never walk again when they asked what they could do next. Like the life-advice you’d hear from a friend after losing the love of their life. Like what the last survivor of a dead world would hear from the open sky, when they asked it what they should do now.

Su has organised her life around a single narrative. She refuses to even imagine the possibility of living, despite being enmeshed in all these relationships, despite clearly caring about many other things.

Later in the chapter, we get another book report from Ran. Another outline that is surprisingly fleshed out, and honestly sounds rather good…

Where we are and aren’t

Su spends the rest of the chapter going over what she has learned. She decides to go and ask a bunch of questions of people—Anna in particular (who is not entirely loving being age regwessied.)

Anna (or whoever this is, if it’s not Anna) gives us some more weird metaphysics: there were two clones of Apsu, being maintained in sync, kind of like if you had two RAIDed hard drives (look, Anna makes a computing metaphor too). As a defense mechanism, the synchronisation can be broken. Our POV characters desynced from the version at the bottom of the ocean, and no longer ‘exist in two places at once’; now there is only the version that exists in ‘nowhere’, or alternatively, ‘the land of the dead’.

What the fuck? In chapter 68, Anna elaborates:

“As I said, it’s a colorful way of framing the situation. I don’t recall who put it as such originally,” she explained. “To be more technical, we are presently residing in a demi-plane at the uppermost level of the Tower of Asphodel, where the few lingering connections the old world maintained by the Ironworkers remain. Most notably the Tower’s facilities for observing the outside world, and the pneuma held in stasis for inductions. It’s a crossroads between constructed reality and organic reality - or at least, what’s left of it.”

Demi-plane, classic D&D word, love to see it.

Anna clarifies that this is less ‘two copies in sync’ and more ‘two spaces that have been turned into one overlapping space’ until the moment of separation. At that point, the material is ‘copied’ into both locations. The copies of people on the ‘ocean floor’ side have no True Iron or pneuma or whatever so they just fall down dead. However, only registered guests are sent to the demi-plane—meaning this is a true closed-circle murder mystery, unless we can find some reason to think an additional person could be lurking out on the demiplane.

The reason for doing all this shit is that the demi-plane is so fucky with matter that the only way to get stuff there is to build it somewhere else then project it in using this method. Somehow it has taken on a stable existence here. At this point, Anna starts being really cagey, despite Su doing her level best to get the story out of her. She remarks that the goals of the Order changed over time, as they made unexpected discoveries—and rather than a sanctuary for the Order, this might be something more like a bird sanctuary, to keep something (or someone?).

Presumably something to do with the sapient entropy business.

Anna’s narrative of the reason Su’s grandfather fell out with the rest is that they all gave up on his grand ambitious megaproject and focused on trying to simply cure dementia.

I admit, at this point it’s a little tricky to keep separate stuff that comes later in the story and stuff that is revealed in this chapter. But certain parallels certainly suggest themselves, of Kinzo keeping Beatrice in a gilded cage. Forgive me if I get a bit ahead of myself. But we have this interesting exchange:

“Tell me, Utsushikome of Fusai,” she said, not withdrawing her gaze. “How much do you remember of the old world?”

I blinked in confusion, and stuttered as I attempted to reply. “I-I’m sorry…?”

“I know what █ █ █ █ █ had intended for you,” she said. “None of his obsessions have escaped me over the years. So you recall some of it, surely.”

So, the mind that was intended to be implanted was originally planned to be one from the old world. Which is to say, it wasn’t simply that Su’s granddad intended to personally body hop into her, it’s that he intended to pull someone else from the old world into the present and write them onto a convenient body. Su has the wit to lie and go along with the story, and manages to sell it.

Sussing out

Speeding forwards so this doesn’t turn into a scene-by-scene summary, chapter 69 sees everyone go look at the painting that inspired the Gilgamesh mural in the girls’ teleporter room. The subject of Fang’s weird arrival comes up. Neferuaten arranged for their delayed arrival, and bribed them to go along with it. They took this in stride in their usual easygoing way. All the pomp and circumstance with the aetherbridge was apparently for show.

Besides that the painting was by someone called Uli, we don’t learn much that’s new here. But it does give a chance for Su and Kam to talk in private about what the hell is going on with the boys’ group. We have the following peculiarities:

• Theo seemed anx on the first day
• Seth and Ezekiel allegedly got into a fight over Seth breaking a promise
• Seth dueled Bardiya and gave Ezekiel a sneaky thumbs up

It can be reasonably concluded that the boys are conspiring and know more than they’re letting on. Su goes to try and suss it out. She asks Linos about the entropy business, pushing him to explain it to the boys as well—naturally greeted with incredulity.

Linos explains that the purpose of the project was to attempt to communicate with the entropy-mind. Problematic, due to the lack of shared experience. So they decided to, he implies, somehow download this eldritch mind into a human body and make them experience the way we live.

JUICY.

Also strikingly remiscent of a certain Golden Witch, huh.

The scheme cooked up by the Order was to carry out the Induction on an unborn child gestated in some kind of exowomb, and thereby avoid the messy implications of connecting an already-sapient person’s mind up to the mysterious entropy god. (A very funny line has Linos chide Seth on using the ‘G-word’ as unscientific.) Then, to raise this child in the Sanctuary and study to see if their connection to Entropy manifested.

Linos claims—and let’s bear in mind this is Linos the perpetual liar—that the child simply never became conscious, and lived ten years on life support. This frankly sounds dubious. Just the sort of thing you’d say to try and give up some of the truth but also draw a line on it.

Su doesn’t get the chance to further interrogate the boys, because at this point Mehit screams and it’s time for an action scene.

More Su/Ran

Chapter 70 also takes us back to flashback land! Nothing has really happened for a while, but we’re getting some major exposition.

We learn a little about how Su’s condition is usually treated, which is to say, a ‘fake it til you make it’ approach…

“They told me to think of my memories of– Well, the ones I’m supposed to have, as real, and to regard the others as something like intrusive thoughts. And to just try and live normally.” I paused for a moment. “And if I do that, things should work out.”

It’s the moment when Ran learns that there is no real treatment for Su’s condition—and crucially when Su asks her to stay.

Perhaps I was still looking for a sort of false atonement, unable to accept that my cowardice had barred me from attaining what I really needed. Or maybe what I desired was instead a sort of catharsis-by-proxy, where I could feel the anguish of facing the truth through her, even though I’d closed myself off to anything resembling it from within.

But those are over-intellectualized explanations, whereas on the inside, I was - and still am, really - a child. And my desires were simple. Childlike.

I didn’t want to be alone.

“…could you stay?” I asked. “For a little longer?”

Oh boy. So this is where the shift started. These flashbacks are so tasty.

Golem combat time

We get a break from the twiddling of thumbs and monumentous exposition with the combat golem interlude. These are kind of awesome in fact. Five legged segments with weapon platforms on top… and fake baby armour.

Finally, lining the sides of each segment were grey-colored, anatomically correct models of human infants, their limbs splayed outwards so that they covered as much surface area as possible. This was how golems defended against arcanists - the dummies were convincing enough to trigger the anatomical test and fool the Power.

I love that Lurina has somehow found a narratively logical way to make ‘baby armour’ tactically meta. That’s so beautifully sicko.

These creatures are called ‘Tui She’. I can’t find a clear reference for that. Alongside these are the ‘Serpopards’, inspired by an Egyptian mythological monster—scaled cats with snakes for heads, which are some kind of cyborg. We’ll be seeing these in battle soon, so look forward to that. But for now, the mask trick works to fool their targeting.

So to make a long story short, in Chapter 71 everyone goes out to try and save Mehit. Seth is the one who makes the call, and Ptolema and Ophelia follow suit, if you’re keeping track. Kam is convinced it’s a terrible idea to leave the place of safety.

The narration does a good job of establishing tension. The cause turns out to be the golems. A Tui She has been taken out, and two Serpopards remain, apparently not very effective without a control unit. The gang attack them all together, but one of them survives, and Su has to grab it and beat it against a wall. They find Mehit alive but injured, and Ptolema is the only one who knows how to do non-Powered first aid. Lilith is also there, completely frozen up. (I’m skimming over this scene a bit because this article is already very long, but it’s a cool scene—and a welcome change of pace.)

On the way back, they get chased by Beaky! Everyone can see Beaky, it’s not just Su.

It looked humanoid, but its proportions were wrong. It was tall, its hairless face looked long and strange, and its long arms were visible under a dark coat that looked like a pair of broad black wings.

Su has a particularly bad reaction to seeing Beaky. Strange! But they get away—miraculously, nobody dies and everyone is gathered back in the secure area. Before they can do much to treat Mehit, a phone call comes in.

What does this tell us about Beaky? Obviously it wants to present itself as a freaky supernatural monster. But could it be just, like, a guy in a funny bird suit? It’s dark, and hard to see. So far, by Su’s count, now we know that Mehit and Lilith are alive, our main characters cover at least 16 of the 17 life signs in the inner sanctum. No. 17 could be Zeno, in the box. Or it could be Beaky. (Or someone could have entered the inner sanctum of course.) We know that Zeno’s puppet bodies don’t count for the life sign count, right? Could Beaky be a similar puppet body, operated either by Zeno themself or someone else?

We shall see.

The Serpent strikes

In chapter 72, the killer (or their agent) phones into the room again. It’s a bunch of threats and bluster, suggesting a ‘Serpent’ is next to attack. It may or may not be a prerecorded message. I don’t really have a ton to say about this one actually!

Moving on, then, in chapter 73 the Power shuts off in the lower floor too. Something which is ‘off-script’, and takes the gang by surprise. Unfortunately this is really bad news for Mehit.

Theo volunteers to go out and try to get Ptolema’s surgical tools from the conference room, as a way to try to win back some trust. The gang agrees to the plan. Su thinks she sees something Beaky-adjacent coming in from the left and takes a shot at it, but nobody else sees it. Significant? Not sure.

Anyway, ironically, the Power comes back right after. So much is obscured from us right now. Did someone orchestrate this whole thing to give Theo a chance to make a big bold gesture of risking his life? The conclusion is, in any case, that someone cast a Power-nullifying spell, spending a whole pile of eris to do so.

While everyone is distracted by all this, it turns out Sacnicte has been killed!!

As they’re trying to figure out what got Sacnicte, Yantho has a bit of a fit, then he’s killed too. Sacnicte were killed by some kind of neurotoxin, with the only wound being two small punctures. Yantho just… died, mysteriously, although he bears the same wounds.

The narrative shifts into a summary form; Playwright drops by to assure us that ANY SCENE NOT REPRESENTED CONVENTIONALLY WILL NOT OMIT ANY PIVOTAL CLUES in this théâtre symboliste presentation (not really anything to do with Symbolism as a movement really, Playwright is just being her pretentious self).

What that means is that we get the account of each character. It’s written as if they are each being interviewed, just without the connective tissue between.

• Seth and Ptolema claim to have gone straight downstairs to help Mehit while everyone else was fucking around with the phone call, and that’s when they found out the Power had been shut off. Ptolema asked Ophelia to fetch her tools.
• Ophelia went upstairs and bumped into Yantho, turning him around. She was near the logic bridge and Linos during Theo’s excursion. She passed Sacnicte on the way.
• Zeno was the last person to speak to Sacnicte alive, witnessed by Seth. They did not pick up the phone in the security centre. They say they had no opportunity to interact up close with Yantho.
• Su, Ran and Kam’s story is pretty much what we got in Su’s POV account: Yantho was freaking out and then suddenly died.
• Theo didn’t see anything while running to get the tools. He thought he saw Yantho look run to the security centre looking alarmed. Fang thought he looked alarmed first, then ran.
• Ezekiel says he stayed put, but doesn’t miss the opportunity to sneeringly call everyone autistic.

Of this, who might plausibly be lying?

Some eagle-eyed people in the comments notice that Yantho didn’t get red text when he died. Meaning that either Yantho isn’t dead, or he doesn’t count as human for some reason.

Crackpot theory time

We know that Zeno is able to puppeteer at least one additional body. Yantho’s story about a progressive disease could be a cover for him being something other than he appears—another flesh puppet, whether controlled by Zeno or someone else. This would also lead to the possibility that there is one additional person in the Inner Sanctum zone.

If so, could this connection have been hijacked by the culprit in order to make Yantho kill Sacnicte?

The only problem with this theory is the location monitor. I don’t think Su would be allowed to conveniently fail to notice that Yantho doesn’t show up on the list of people in the Inner Sanctum.

Su considers the various possibilities (including, gamely, that her own group could have done it). Basically it comes down to Zeno or Ophelia, possibly acting in concert with others, or Yantho doing a murder-suicide.

Linos brings up a very Battler-coded dsuggestion that some kind of poison gas device could have been used. The Playwright drops in to tell us no, definitely not, don’t even consider it.

PLAYWRIGHT: I mean, come now. This is tiresome. What’s the point of even bothering to speculate if you’re just going to end up fixating on contrived, desperate nonsense? It’s like trying to watch a sport where they change the rules every few minutes. There’s no structure– You might as well just pick an answer you like first then work backwards. Oh, don’t like Balthazar? He has a sorta murdery energy to you? Maybe he secretly trained a pet rat to carry out assassinations from the other side of the facility!

Maybe Balthazar did train a pet rat, I didn’t even think of that.

Anyway, the new rule 3a says:

3a) A MURDER CANNOT BE COMMITTED USING A DEVICE NOT ESTABLISHED BEFOREHAND

So that rules out some kind of sneaky snake drone-golem flying in while the door is open… probably. (It’s not entirely clear, though. Golems in general are established to exist, and we have Su glimpsing something or other, so maybe…)

The group concludes that Ophelia seems like the most obvious murderer, but it hardly seems in character for her.

There is one other big question I have here—if, indeed, the murderer was able to kill off Yantho while he was surrounded by people by some stealthy means, why didn’t they use this same technique to kill everyone else?

After much deliberating and bandying-about, Su remembers Lilith exists.

Su gets really drunk

The flashback chapters are often some of my faves, even if they’re ratcheting up the tension of not knowing what Lilith might have dun. Both because we get to explore the wider world beyond the claustrophobic Sanctuary, and because it’s where the juiciest character drama is. I don’t think I’m very good at solving mysteries, but I do like to read about mentally ill lesbians doing ill-advised and self-destructive things.

Speaking of!

Su takes some time establishing the scene—the sprawling university district, the memorial to the collapse (described as “when the universe itself had decided to turn the physics of the Milky Way inside out in the most spectacular act of indifferent natural violence ever visited on human civilization”, so yeah, p definitely false vacuum collapse), the different societies’ ways of dealing with the grief of the Collapse.

She’s getting drunk, despite a very relatable aversion to that. (For many years I avoided drinking completely, also fearing a loss of agency, that my evil nature would come out and I would say or do something awful. I grew out of it, but I’ve barely tried any drugs still.) Ran finds her drunk on a truly dangerous amount of brandy.

Soon enough we find out why (flashback in a flashback!): they’ve pretty much given up on any possibility of her assimilating back to self-iding as Utushikome and discharged her. Can sorta relate, it really blows to get discharged without any useful treatment. Except of course in this case the treatment is supposed to basically kill her so uh. You know.

“I also don’t want you to feel that this has made you a failure,” he went on, continuing the speech he’d probably planned. “Despite beginning with personal traits suggestive of a durable ego, you still managed to modestly raise your dissociation levels across the board, and even bring a handful of memories and traits to almost a state of full incorporation. Even if it doesn’t feel that way, you are Utsushikome of Fusai. Without a doubt.”

I love that they’re trying to make her dissociate more.

Su takes it about as well as you’d expect. Back in the… higher level of flashback, Ran helps her get home, clearly biting down all her own complicated feelings:

“I don’t hate you, Utsu,” she said quietly, the emotion fading from her voice. “And I haven’t done anything much for you, either.”

And then we get an absolutely brutal scene. My god. I will take the liberty of quoting it in full.

“You’re so kind,” I said, turning to look at her.

In that moment, I really don’t know what possessed me. Even though my memory was strong enough to unfortunately preserve most of what happened that night, I can’t remember what was in my thoughts right there and then. What made me feel like it was a reasonable course of action in the context, and what made me want to do it at all.

I leaned in her direction, holding out my hand towards her face, and moving my head forward.

She must’ve known what was happening at once. Her hand shot into the air, stopping mine in its tracks. Grasping it by the wrist.

For a moment we just sat there like that, frozen in our positions. And in that awful instant, I suddenly, if briefly, felt completely sober. I stared at her, my eyes wide.

Then, slowly, she pushed me away, lowering my hand back into my lap.

“This isn’t who you are, Su,” she said. There was an indecipherable heaviness to the words.

I nodded mutely.

“You liked a boy back at the academy, remember? Takekochi. Or whatever.”

Ouuuugghgghghghghgh. As the kids say, these days.

In the present, Su has a theory that Lilith was an accomplice somehow. She goes to check the logs…

Lilith dun it!!! Some of it anyway

Su checks the logs and determines there are two fewer people alive in the Inner Sanctum zone, and also that Anna hasn’t passed the checkpoint in the basement so wouldn’t register as ‘underground’ on the system. Red herring? I’m not sure.

There’s a system which checks which spells were cast and when; Su gets Linos in to identify the Phantasm-Projecting Arcana, which can be used to turn things intangible and move them around. So that’s novel. However, moving something through the walls would trigger the alarms. It would only work on something the size of a human hand, and it doesn’t work properly on living things. Possible murder weapon?

Su establishes that someone called Lilith from underground shortly before Mehit’s scream: implication, Lilith was instructed to shoot Mehit. After some pressure from Zeno—and some very odd expressions—Lilith abruptly confesses to everything Su suspected. Hamilcar (she claims) instructed her to shoot her mother.

Why? On behalf of the entropy goddess:

“No,” Lilith replied, her tone still completely level. “She who was given form and then defiled. She who exists outside of time, yet gives it shape. She from whom all things of substance originate, and to whom all shall return. Our mother–” she paused. “And executioner.”

Sure, Linos, the experiment failed, right.

So, we have a straight-up confession here. Does that mean we know for an absolute fact that Lilith dunnit? That would be an obvious conclusion, but note Zeno threatening to fuck with her head with the Power, we’re pointedly reminded that Zeno invented neuromancy, and then, the moment Lilith begins her confession:

The girl kept opening her mouth and closing it again, like she was trying to speak but nothing was coming out. Her eyes appeared to boggle even wider than before, like there was a pressure coming from the inside of her head, threatening to split it open. Something about the pose started to resemble a person frozen just as they were about to throw up… But then, after a few moments, she suddenly stopped, her expression turning placid. Slowly, she raised her head.

Doesn’t that read like someone getting their mind steadily taken over to you? The flat affect is, I think being taken as part of her overall creepiness, in terms of like ‘oh yeah she’s a freaky autist’ (c.f. Maria Umineko)—but it could also be a sign that whoever takes her over isn’t able to fully ‘act’ here.

Maybe it’s not Zeno, though. Maybe Lilith is another assimilation failure—this could be what the other characters are alluding to. Or, unlike Su, she’s ended up in ‘plural mode’, and this is what happens when her old-world mind fronts?

I might not have the exact explanation, but something seems really off about this whole sudden confession. It’s too convenient, as if a calculated ploy to point the finger at Hamilcar and set up for the confrontation that will come in the next few chapters. Admittedly, this does not explain the phone call, or the precise details admitted by Lilith in her confession. Also, this scene takes place upstairs where the Power is suppressed. And if Zeno had used the Power on Lilith, it leaves open the question of how they hid the motions and such—but maybe the body which used the power is the ‘in the box’ body, I’m still not entirely clear on how that works! Overall, though, I think we can probably rule out Zeno using the Power to mind control Lilith. Perhaps there is some other means.

Even if it is Lilith ‘for real’, this still feels ploy-shaped. Suddenly nobody is talking about who murdered Sacnicte or Yantho, they’re all raring to go off and fight Hamilcar.

In any case, Lilith or whoever is controlling her is able to sell it.

Su spares some thought to the case of Lilith, and how something had clearly gone wrong with her induction, and how it must have affected Mehit, to feel that her daughter had been in some sense taken away from her by the Arcanist society. It reminds me, inevitably, of how certain types of parent view an autistic or trans child—that their child has ‘died’, and been replaced with another person. Some blame it on some external factor, such as vaccines. Lucky they banned the internet so Mehit can’t straight to Mumsnet.

Ophelia suggests Hamilcar might have brainwashed an impressionable Lilith right after her induction. Su naturally considers assimilation failure, similar to her own. But in this case, not just some rando schoolfriend, but a mind from the old world, with all the experiences to match…

Notably, it is Linos, that shifty motherfucker, who really gets the ball rolling on going to fuck up Hamilcar. Kam is the one to take the bait, and argue against staying put until Anna is done.

Posse

I kind of think of Hamilcar like a stereotypical Warhammer techpriest, you know? Maybe you’ve seen this video, which became a bit of a meme…

Some ‘where everyone is’ notes: they split into two teams to take him out. Ran stays back to provide divination cover and be the voice on the radio, along with the suspect members of the team. Zeno is the main dps, with Seth, Fang, Su and Kam as support. Ezekiel is useless in a fight so he has to stay home. Anna is still working on rewiring the system.

As they top up their eris, Seth and Zeno go at it. Zeno is really ‘little shit’-maxxing…

“There’s no such thing as bad luck, little boy. Any ‘gambling’ in life is merely a result of having failed to properly comprehend the world, or having comprehended it but not acted on that comprehension for some ultimately vapid, sentimental reason. It’s art students all the way down– People putting self-indulgence over maneuvering within reality to their logical advantage, then acting like they’ve somehow been fucked over when it ends suboptimally.”

Oh, you’re so big and rational, Mx Zeno. The dig at ‘art students’ is especially funny. Imagine carrying a STEM-supremacy chip on your shoulder for hundreds of years…

At this point Ran raises an interesting wrinkle about Zeno’s whole deal: the Power-suppressing field shouldn’t be letting them walk around puppeteering a body like this.

We get some useful info at this point:

“I guess it’s not impossible,” she replied. “But I checked the security console. It’s registered ‘Zeno’ as having gone underground, but the registry of human lifeforms in the bioenclosures hasn’t changed at all. That means that body probably isn’t anything close to a person on the inside, including the nervous system.”

I had a bit of trouble parsing this when I looked at it closely. Presumably meaning the door scanners (which track individuals) registered Zeno going underground, but the ‘number of lifeforms’ counter didn’t decrement, at least when Zeno passed down (it presumably changed for everyone else).

It’s hard to tell how much of this stuff with the lifeform counters is like, proper Clues that we’re supposed to use to logically deduce something about the nature of Zeno, and how much is just Lurina being very meticulous in covering all her bases. That’s the fun of it, I suppose. The question when we’re given an obvious conclusion (that Zeno’s real body is in the box) is, how will the author twist it? What subtle slip is taking place here?

Well, let’s think like an attacker—flip the chessboard, as Kyrie would say. Suppose you are Zeno, you are aware of this discrepancy‚ and you want to take advantage of it to hide your movements. You might, for example, walk a puppet body through a door to make the system think you’re in another location, while leaving a second puppet body behind to act in secret. In fact, if you can move multiple puppet bodies around, you have considerable leeway. Though it’s not clear what the system would do if it perceives a ‘Zeno’ walking in from a room they weren’t previously recorded, or entering a room twice. (Perhaps it will underflow and you’ll end up with 255 Zenos in the previous room.)

What this means is that the location tracker is next to useless as long as anyone it’s tracking can be puppeteered by Zeno. So far, we know that Zeno can control at least two of their own specially prepared bodies. It’s less clear if Zeno could puppeteer, say, someone else’s dead body. If they can, that means that nearly anyone who we haven’t laid eyes on recently could secretly be Zeno—a level of epistemic corrosion that is hard to sustain.

So let’s rein it in a bit. Zeno is so painfully arrogant that it’s hard to believe they could convincingly play most characters… unless of course the whole persona is just a front to throw off precisely that sort of suspicion, and Zeno is far more devious than they seem. Moreover, preparing someone to be a puppet surely requires use of the Power, so the person would have to be underground, or wired up well in advance of the lockdown. Right now, though, my main candidate for ‘Zeno puppet’ is still Lilith—there was plenty of time for her to get Zenoified offscreen and it would explain her actions here.

That said, we have very little sense of a motive for Zeno to do any of that. Surely there would be easier ways to lead everyone out to confront Hamilcar?

Meanwhile, Fang has apparently figured out the time loop thing, and also throws out some other surprises: the audience at the Conclave scene earlier was fake (so there was no inside/outside communication at that point). Implication: the Order is up to yet more shenanigans—unless, of course, it ties in to the broader metafictional timeloop simulation stuff, the Playwright and Director and so forth. Fang sees the two as connected of course, but Fang doesn’t have the benefit that we, the audience do in having read the prologue. Which is to say: whoever is orchestrating the time loop is presumably some additional party, not simply the Order.

The chapter ends as they arrive in the room with the keepsakes, and find a portrait that resembles Su.

So, presumably this is Su’s grandfather’s long-lost daughter from the old world—the person who he wished to overwrite onto the original Utsushikome before getting cold feet, and who Su agreed to imitate (on what was supposed to be a temporary basis) as a final favour to him. I didn’t work that out here the first time I read this, whereas this time I’m aware of stuff that happens a bit later. But like, I think at this point in the story we probably have enough information to deduce that. We’re familiar with the concept of people bringing over memories from the old world, and it would make much more sense of Su’s grandfather’s whole project than some bid for immortality.

It’s also extremely Kinzo-coded.

Fetish box

Zeno goes off on another one as we visit the ‘fetish’ chamber. It’s not an incorrect word but I won’t miss an opportunity to snicker like a 13-year-old. Fetishes in the boxes, please…

We learn of the existence of something called a ‘scant’, a sort of marker that proves something hasn’t been replicated by the Power. It makes about as much sense as NFTs.

Anyway, after some bandying-about, they run into Hamilcar’s box, and thus we get a big exposition from Su on the Great Interplanar War. To cut her story much shorter: the Ironworkers allowed life to evolve in one of their artificial universes, and accidentally led to some kind of weird symbiotic intelligence to develop in tandem with the humans there, though Su is sorta vague on the details. Hamilcar had a lower-planes egg case called a ‘Utllach’. This word apparently only exists in exactly one place on the internet, that being chapter 80 of The Flower That Bloomed Nowhere, so no mythological reference here!

Nobody seems quite sure what to make of it, though. There is a funny Kam/Su exchange:

“Mm– I see what you’re getting at.” She nodded. “Well, I suppose I don’t feel visceral fear quite as often as some. There were gunfights in my neighborhood all the time growing up, at least until we moved out into the country. You have to develop a certain fortitude.”

“Oh,” I said, hesitantly. “That… Makes sense.”

She raised an eyebrow. “You really are rather bad at hiding your class guilt, Su.”

Things get a bit action-y in the second half of the chapter. Tactics: the elevator is at the bottom of the shaft (it appears to be a Dark Souls type of lift architecture) so they have to drop under levitation magic.

Su quietly observes that arcanists are liberated from much of biology. They don’t have to eat, walk, or shit. They have additional senses that are more perceptive than the regular ones. Only a need to be anchored in something, I suppose, keeps them in standardish human bodyminds.

Su doesn’t go into it but presumably the scope for altered states of consciousness from arcanism would be absolutely mental. We’re talking Culture type of thing here: metabolise whatever drug you want, whenever you want, or push yourself into brain states that no existing chemical can reach. Submit to literally unimaginable sensory stimuli. We can only imagine what sort of art would be made by and for arcanists, designed to play on the arcanists’ unique senses.

Where’s Masamune Shirow when you need him?

Meanwhile in the tunnel, Su ends up making one of her suicide jokes (rather, antijokes) to contain the anxiety. I genuinely love this character trait. It doesn’t land well… wrong crowd!

And then we hit the megastructure.

Blame!

Su opens chapter 81 with a vivid description of her grandfather’s huge machine. It’s like everything we’ve seen so far in the story has taken place inside a cork, and now we’re seeing the bottle.

Zeno takes the opportunity to launch into a grandiose speech, as the others start doubting whether this is really all that big a deal. Rather ludicrously, they use the words ‘tone policing’. What a character.

Anyway, what they want to do is to not just extend life but abolish the possibility of death—that is, to completely transform the state of the universe and resolve ‘the tension between reality and the human mind’ in favour of the latter.

The device is named the Apega, after “another device, itself named after a person.” Consulting our oracle, we find our way to the Apega of Nabis. An automaton designed in the shape of King Nabis of Sparta’s wife, Apega, if you tried to embrace it (as a drunk person might), it would close spiked arms around you and hold you in place so the king could extort money from you. Of the actual woman Apega who the device is named after, she’s described by Polybius as a greedy tyrant like her husband with a thing for ‘humiliating women belonging to the families of male citizens’. But I am not quite sure I can trust what Mr Polybius has to say about like, any women, I’ll admit.

In any case, an embrace with a hidden spiky death grip—a rather striking metaphor for a device that aimed to imprison the consciousness of entropy in a mortal body!

Seth is tasked with gathering up data from the experiment while everyone else goes to boss battle Hamilcar. I’m sure this will be significant, although it’s wrapped in a lot of Zeno acting like a prick as usual.

The actual battle… well, Hamilcar takes the opportunity to soliloquise, talking about how the mind is shaped by the course taken in life, the idea that rather than life, what he wanted was a return to innocence. Then Zeno kicks things off and we start to let off the fireworks.

Suppose Hamilcar and Zeno are secretly in cahoots—that this is all a big drama show for the kids’ expense. That this is all in order to… what? Present themselves for judgement? Cover for faked deaths?

A final flashback

We wrap up the arc with another flashback—this time, right after Su’s suicide attempt. The vibes are awkward.

Su talks about the aftermath—how Utsu’s family reacted to their daughter’s apparent suicide attempt. Big oofs are felt. And Ran confronts Su about it.

Significant here is, well, Ran’s changing heart more than Su’s. Su feels as she always does: that she is a monster, violating someone by wearing their body. Ran, meanwhile, has now spent a long time getting to know our Su, and isn’t in such a hurry to see her die.

Ran asks the other question: why Su went along with this whole thing in the first place. Su was given a fairly clear explanation of what they intended, confirming what we’ve surmised about the old-world daughter thing. Ran is… not exactly forgiving Su, but she’s reached a point of considering her a victim as well.

One thing I wonder is—it’s such a brutal and elaborate ploy, to actually overwrite someone’s personality onto Utsushikome just to fool her grandfather for his last few months. It’s as if Samium was like “oh, damn, we just have this incredible brain overwriting machine lying around now, would be a shame not to use it really”. Sure, I suppose they couldn’t exactly tell Utsu ‘hey we were going to murder you and put someone else’s mind in your body, can you pretend we did’…

Anyway, now it’s time for the yuri pain. They talk about their relationship to Utsu. Ran:

“Utsushikome, I mean,” I said. “You were the only one who noticed something was strange, when this all started. And you’ve done so much.” I looked away, suddenly feeling nervous. “But… To be honest, I can’t remember her having spent much time with you at all, before then. Or anything that could make you feel that way…”

Contrary to my expectations, Ran just laughed. It was low, but not bitter. “Is that right?” She inclined her head towards me. “Nothing at all, huh.”

Oof.

We revisit the beach scene, confirming the respective rules of Su and Utsu.

The chapter ends on a terribly enigmatic note:

There was once a person who felt they lacked everything. Power, wealth, love. Everything they saw in others slipped away from them.

And so, they planned to summon a demon.

The demon presumably being the entropy mind, but… hmm! Very hmm indeed!

The next arc is titled Split Body. But at nearly 9000 words of commentary on this arc so far, we’ll have to save that for another day.

I’m sorry it’s been so long, friends.

Next time we’ve got some exciting reveals, and some strangely inconsequential nuclear fireworks! Stay tuned!