The Simulacrum

Chapter 35

It was a beautiful Sunday morning. The picturesque blue sky was dotted with a herd of fluffy white clouds, there was absolutely no wind, and most importantly, the temperature sneakily climbed up by about ten degrees Celsius. It still wasn't exactly warm per se, but it was just balmy enough for a great outing with my girlfriends. Or wait I think an outing was supposed to be the platonic version of a date, so this technically wasn't an outing anymore but I've been using the word to refer to hanging out with Judy and/or Elly so much that the two words meant roughly the same at this point. Language drift in motion, huh?

"Chief, would you care to explain what's going on?"

I decided to put the capriciousness of our ever-changing vocabulary aside and faced my dearest assistant. It was probably due to the special occasion, but she looked a bit prettier than usual. She was not only wearing a surprisingly stylish ensemble, but she also had her hair done up (though it wasn't that different from her usual hairdo, to be honest) and she even had a hint of makeup on her face. We were currently in my living room, and while I had a distinct hunch about the subject of her question, I decided to play dumb for the moment.

"What exactly do you mean?" I asked with a mostly innocent expression, which elicited a small groan from her, following which she extended her index finger and she swept her arm horizontally.

"I'm asking about them," she stated with an extra-deadpan expression. "Why are they here?"

"Oh, you mean the rest of the gang?" I mused as I glanced over at Josh, Angie, and the class rep awkwardly fidgeting on my couch. Well, at least Josh and Angie were. Ammy was mostly just giving me a silent, disapproving frown. Anyways, I flashed a smile at Judy and told her, "I invited them."

"Yes, I could figure that much out on my own," she grumbled. "I wanted you to tell me why you did that."

"I want to know too!" Elly chimed in from the side. Just like Judy, she also made preparations for today's date, so she was not only wearing an expensive set of a one-piece dress, white leggings, and a pair of knee boots, but her hair was once again in the familiar drills from the time we first met. Maybe it was because of that hairstyle, but she seemed to regain some of her recently tarnished outward dignity, as she appeared like a true noble lady elegantly holding a porcelain cup in her hand. Then, of course, she immediately shattered the image by hunching over her drink as she began to loudly blow on it.

"If it's too hot, I can use magic to cool it a little," Snowy offered with a modest smile.

"No need!" the princess declared, but then she continued to blow on her drink with renewed vigor.

"Are you sure? You are going to burn your tongue" I told her on the side, but she only shook her head.

"Nonsense! I am a descendant of dragons! We don't burn our tongues!" she huffed and, probably to prove the point, she took a sip from her cup, only to twitch and follow it up with a string of "Owowowowow!"

I failed to stifle my laughter at the sight, which naturally earned me a wounded glare from Elly, but instead of addressing me, she looked away, extended her cup, and muttered a sulky "Pwease" towards Snowy, who immediately proceeded to wave her hands around the cup with a brilliant smile, apparently tremendously enjoying herself.

Before I knew it, the corners of my lips rose even further, but before it could turn into an actual smile, I was shaken out of the moment by a certain, somewhat upset girl standing on her tiptoes and grabbing my ear to get my attention.

"Chief," Judy forcefully addressed me after she got me to face her again. "Stop trying to use her antics to sweep my question under the rug."

"I wasn't," I protested, but she didn't seem to care.

"Tell me why you invited everyone to our date," my assistant insisted with a visible frown, so I decided it was about time I stopped teasing her.

"Fine, fine," I mumbled as I gently removed her hand from my ear, then I leaned closer and whispered, "I'm just trying to get ahead of the tropes for a change."

"Which trope?" she inquired, and her previous frown was immediately displaced by an intrigued expression.

"The date-stalking," I answered, still in a whisper. "It's likely that, since they know about our date, they would stalk us like the last time, so I figured I might as well invite them along. I'll pay for the tickets and snacks, and once we are at the date spots, we will break into two groups. This way we can have our date in peace, and they will have more fun too." I paused here to let her digest my words, then I added, "Also, after the date, I was planning to show everyone the secret base, introduce Brang and company, and then do some preliminary combat tests to figure out everyone's strengths and weaknesses, and it's simpler to do if everyone is already with us."

"That is unusually well thought out by your standards," she muttered, then a moment later she reached out and grabbed my ear again. "Who are you, and what did you do to my Chief?"

"It's 'our' chief! I mean, our Leo!" Elly interrupted between two elegant sips from her newly cooled cup of tea.

Judy gave her a withering glance, by her standards, then she looked back at me with the closest thing of the famous 'puppy eyes' I have ever seen on her and said, "Chieeeef. Eleanor ruined our skit. I'm devastated right now."

"Here, here," I playfully consoled her by patting her shoulder. "We have the whole day ahead of us; there will be a lot of opportunities to do them."

"But the first skit of the day is the most important of them all. Also, she'll ruin the rest too. She has absolutely no sense of comedic timing."

"Hey!" Elly immediately protested while placing her cup onto the table. "I have a sense of humor!"

"Prove it," my assistant challenged her with a determined expression, which immediately threw my other girlfriend off-balance.

"Ve-Very well!" the princess declared after stumbling over her words a few times, then she fell silent for few seconds while her eyes scanned the room. At last, her gaze landed on her tea, at which point her face immediately lit up. She faced me, cleared her throat, and said, "So, I have a question! Why did the tea call the police?"

For a moment I had no idea what to say, but Elly was looking at me so expectantly I couldn't help but repeat after her, "I don't know. Why did the tea call the police?"

"Because it was mugged!" Elly exclaimed with a bombastic grin, which only met with dead silence. Well, almost, as I could hear Angie suppress a giggle in the back, but I didn't turn around to check.

"Was that a dad joke just now?" I asked, fully expecting her to get disheartened, but instead she just gave me a giant nod.

"Yes, I learned it from dad. How did you know?"

Judy looked at my other girlfriend like she couldn't decide how to react, and eventually she looked back to me and told me, with an entirely inappropriate amount of gravitas, "This is much worse than I expected. I have to borrow Eleanor for a moment and fix this before her complete lack of comedy would tear our relationship asunder."

"Um You do that?" I agreed quite uncertainly, at which point Judy grabbed hold of the completely confused dragon girl and dragged her into the kitchen before she even realized what was going on.

Once my girlfriends vacated the area, the atmosphere in the room became strangely tense, and as I glanced around, I noticed Josh waving a hand over his head to get my attention. Correction: I actually noticed it a long time ago, I was just ignoring him. Regrettably, that didn't seem to be an option anymore, so I faced my friend and asked, "Yes, Josh? Is there a problem?"

"Of course there's a problem!" he declared with a look in his eyes that was rapidly shifting between disgruntled, skeptical, and embarrassed. "Now that you're done flirting with your girlfriends, would you please address the elephant in the room?"

"I'm curious about your explanation too," Ammy joined is as she once again began to menacingly adjust her glasses in my direction.

"You have to be more specific than that," I told them without a shred of shame, though I once again had a very good idea what they were referring to.

"It's Lili! What else could we be talking about?!" Josh burst out while gesturing towards the girl standing by the coffee table with a gentle (if somewhat embarrassed) smile on her lips.

"Oh, riiiiight!" I exclaimed in turn as I theatrically slapped my forehead. "Thank you for reminding me. With all the commotion, this has almost slipped my mind. Do you remember how the class rep's grandpa dumped the responsibility of figuring out how to get a new identity for Snowy?" I spoke as I walked over to the Abyssal girl in question, all the while struggling to keep myself from breaking into laughter, and then once I was beside her, I presented her as, "Well, it's done. Allow me to introduce you to Neige Liliam Inanna-Dunning!"

There was a very long moment of silence in the living room after I finished her introduction, which was thankfully soon broken by Angie tentatively asking, "You married her?"

"What? No, of course not!" I denied it on the spot while giving the Celestial girl a stern look. "I adopted her! Well, technically my parents adopted her, but that's only on paper. In practice, I'm her unofficial caregiver."

"Wait, hold on!" Ammy cut in before the obviously confused Josh could get a word in. "You actually adopted her into your family?"

"Yes, that's what I just said," I answered her with a nod.

"How come this is the first time I've heard of this?" came an unexpected question from the direction of the kitchen, where a certain blonde girl just stuck her head through the door, but before I could answer her, she was dragged back inside by my assistant. It was weird, but then again, at this point weird was becoming the new normal in my household, so I decided to ignore them for the time being and I faced the incredulous trio on the couch again.

"Sooo" Josh spoke up after he finally overcame his shock, and asked, "Does that mean that Lili is your?"

"My legal stepsister, yes," I answered with a grin while simultaneously tussling the hair of my newly minted little sister. Snowy let out an embarrassed noise, but to her credit, she stood tall and endured my overbearing big-brotherly head pats like a champ.

"You still didn't explain how you arranged to adopt her into your family," Ammy reiterated her previous question, but I only shrugged my shoulders at her insistent interrogation.

"It wasn't that big a deal. Snowy knew a guy who knew a guy, and then I and the guy and the guy's guys met with the guy and then we persuaded the guy to call a guy he knew to speed things up, and so Snowy is now my sis and her new ID card and other assorted papers should arrive in the mail within a week or so."

The trio on the couch was still giving me skeptical looks, but at least Ammy was satisfied with my answer, or at least she didn't want to pursue the topic anymore. To be perfectly honest though, my explanation, meticulously detailed as it was, didn't exactly reflect the events in their entirety.

For a start, while it was true that I had Brang lead me to the document forger, who turned out to be a fairly mundane middle-aged placeholder who worked at a government office, I didn't actually let the two of them meet. Since it was damn time I started reflecting on Judy's constant stream of complaints about my impulsive behavior, I decided to put some extra thought into my affairs, and I figured that if this guy was someone who already worked with the Abyssals, they might make contact with him in the future as well, so I decided to plant some misdirection in his head while I was there.

Since Brang was way too conspicuous with his, size, limping, spear, and fancy new armor, I decided to have him follow after me while using his cloaking ability (more on that later) and I only took the wolfish Faun with me to the meeting, and I even went ahead and disguised myself by using a wig and a fake mustache I picked up in a costume shop on the way.

Once my preparations were complete, I introduced myself as an agent of the Nergals, another Abyssal family, and then I wove a long tale of conspiracy, where foisting Snowy onto a certain Leonard Dunning was but step forty-two in a grand and elaborate plan to ruin the Inannas and take over their mana-well, and I told it with an appropriate amount of mustache-twirling. The document-forger had very little presence and was quite mechanical in his actions, even by placeholder standards, but I figured it was better to be safe than sorry, so I kept up the fake supernatural Mafioso act till the end. By the way, no matter what Brang says, I definitely wasn't having so much fun I forgot the time, nor did I ramble. That Faun is a compulsive liar, I tell you.

Where was I? Ah, yes, the forger. So, after greasing the cogs of the system by a few wads of cash plus some highly descriptive threats, the man called his coworkers, and in just a few hours we managed to get our hands on a temporary ID. I was tempted to joke about how the illegal channels worked more efficiently than the actual government, but then I was informed that Snowy's records were sneaked back into the central system and that we would be receiving her new proper ID from them, so I wisely shut up.

Speaking of not talking, my friend on the couch wasn't following my example, as he once again waved his hand high over his head to get my attention, so I gestured for him to speak up.

"Okay guys," he began as he glanced at the two girls at his sides, then said, "Please tell me if I'm wrong, but isn't Lili wearing a maid uniform?"

"Uuum Yes, she does?" Angie agreed.

"Then why is it that none of you seem to find it strange?! I mean, it's strange, right?!" Josh burst out, his eyes moving back and forth between Angie and Ammy, as if searching for validation.

"Ooooh?" I said very slowly as I dramatically cracked my knuckles. "What did you say, punk? Did you just call my sister weird?"

"What? No!" Josh denied vehemently while waving his hands like an idiot. "It's the maid clothes! I mean, isn't it weird to dress up like a maid if you are not one?"

"So you are saying that my sister's hobby is weird?" I growled while trying to crack my knuckles again, though they didn't make much noise this time.

"No, not at all!" Josh denied once again, but before I could continue my act, it was interrupted by Snowy suddenly clinging onto my arm.

"Don't fight!" she called out, stunning me for a moment, but then I let out a small sigh and once again placed my hand on the top of her head.

"We are not fighting, you dummy," I chided her while roughly ruffling her hair. "I'm just bantering with Josh."

"Are you sure?" Snowy asked with round, wide-open eyes.

"Of course. I was obviously just joking, right guys?" I asked as I sent a glance at the trio, and while Josh giving me a weird look was expected, the actual words coming from Ammy really surprised me.

"In fact, you looked like a violently overprotective brother for a moment."

"Really?" I asked back by reflex, at which point it was Angie's turn to repeatedly nod at me.

"Yeah, totally! It was kinda cool how it looked like you were just about to beat up Josh!"

"What's cool about that!?" my friend protested, but his childhood friend completely ignored him in favor of giving me a sparkly-eyed gaze.

"Now I wanna have a big brother too! Can you adopt me?" she asked with an impish smile that was contrasted with her deadly serious eyes.

I let out an awkward cough and ultimately I told her, "No. You have perfectly fine adoptive parents already, don't you?"

"Wait, hold on!" Josh suddenly interrupted us. "You knew Angie was adopted?"

"Well, duh," I answered, accompanied by a dismissive shrug. "She looks nothing like her mom and dad."

"Are you seriously telling me I was the only one who didn't notice?!" Josh exclaimed with just a hint of despair. On the other hand, the Celestial girl only gave me a sideways look.

"Leo, I don't think you've ever met my parents," she told me while furrowing her brows.

I was just about to give her a suitable excuse, but then a new deadpan voice joined the fray.

"You shouldn't point out the Chief's blunders like that," Judy declared while she came out of the kitchen, followed by a strangely unfocused princess. If we were in a cartoon, I was sure she would've had those weird, swirly eyes with large question marks over her head. While I observed her, Judy came up to me and continued, with complete seriousness, "That's my job." Saying so, she turned towards me and told me, with the same stern expression, "Chief, you never actually met with Angeline's parents."

" No, I haven't."

My girlfriend gave me a flat look (well, flatter than usual, at the least), and said, "No, Chief. This is the point where you're supposed to come up with a harebrained excuse so that we can have a back and forth skit and distract everyone from your slip of the tongue, and then Eleanor would join in to show off the results of our comedic training. It's common sense."

"Well, excuse me for not being able to read your mind," I huffed. "How was I supposed to know you made this elaborate plan?"

"People in a relationship are supposed to be on the same wavelength. You should know these things just by looking at me."

"Well, I'm looking at you right now, and I still don't see it. Are you sure you have your wavelengths tuned right?"

"Of course," Judy nodded so hard it looked like a small bow. "It's part of my morning routine. I brush my teeth, I comb my hair, charge my internal batteries, and then I tune my built-in radio to your wavelength."

"Wait, are you using FM or AM?"

"AM, obviously."

"Well, that's your problem!" I exclaimed while gesturing with my hands. "I'm using FM. That's why we have a hard time communicating!"

"Oh, I see," Judy nodded twice, for emphasis, then puckered her lips a few times. I was just about to ask what she was doing, but then she stopped, and instead she made some kind of wholly unconvincing whirring sounds and said, "Judy-bot's whistling update has been delayed, so Judy-bot set her broadcast to FM manually. Can you receive my feelings now?"

"As a matter of fact, I do," I told her with a smile, then I quickly leaned down, embraced her, and then straightened myself, lifting her into the air in the process, following which I whispered to her, "Are you back at that Judy-bot thing again? I thought we agreed that was a dead horse already; stop beating it."

"You have no appreciation for the classics," she whispered back while her feet were still comically dangling a couple of centimeters above the floor, then she added aloud, "Beep-boop. Judy-bot's internal batteries are being recharged by the power of love. Judy-bot is pleased."

I was just about to respond with something about whether the power of love was a renewable energy source, but then we were interrupted by Ammy raising her voice all of a sudden.

"What are you talking about?! Wavelengths? Batteries? What is going on? What even is this?"

Before either of us could say anything, the class rep's words seemed to have triggered something in Elly, as she suddenly shook off her stupor and exclaimed, "The Aristocrats!"

There were a good five seconds worth of flabbergasted silence in the room, ultimately broken by my assistant letting out a defeated groan and muttering, "Still needs work. Lots of it"

"Where should we go next?" I asked, and even though it was pretty much just a rhetorical question, neither of my girlfriends sitting by my side offered up any ideas. While waiting for them, I took another sip from my large disposable drinking cup filled with cherry coke (I felt experimental, and it wasn't terrible), but since they remained silent, I decided to ask, "How about the haunted house?"

"I wholeheartedly agree with your suggestion and consider it absolutely essential that we follow it post haste," Judy immediately agreed between two bites from her crepe.

"You two are the worst," my other girlfriend fumed aloud while nibbling on her own thin pastry filled with all kinds of teeth-murdering goodness.

"Come on, princess. It was just a joke," I told her while putting my free arm around her shoulder. "We both know you are scared of that place, so we're just teasing you."

"I'm not!" Elly denied with an offended huff and shook me off, but then Judy caught her in a pincer maneuver.

"So you punched off the head of an animatronic because you weren't scared."

"No! I mean, yes, I might've overreacted a little, but it wasn't because I was scared!"

"Then prove it," Judy delivered her expected challenge, which made the princess immediately puff out her chest.

"All right! I will..." she began by jumping to her feet and striking some kind of pose while pointing at my assistant, her image further accentuated by a fearless grin (made only slightly goofy by the crepe in her other hand and the chocolate sauce on the corner of her lips), but then her expression froze up. At first it changed into a thoughtful frown, then her eyes opened wide, following which she once again pointed her accusative finger at Judy and exclaimed, "Wait just a moment! I know what you are doing! You are trying to provoke me into making a fool out of myself in front of Leo so you could make fun of me! I'm onto you now!"

Judy clicked her tongue and turned to me.

"Chief, she is evolving," she told me with such a meaningful voice I had a feeling it was some kind of reference.

"Into what?" I asked while trying to figure out the allusion. Was it that dinosaur movie?

"Into something... unteasable," Judy concluded while giving me an expectant look.

Nope, that wasn't from the park with the featherless dinosaurs. Since I still had no idea what she was referencing (if she was doing so at all), I decided on a safe answer and jovially told her, "Nah, she is still pretty far from that. Right, honey?"

"H-H-Honey!?"

Elly was just about to sit back down, but upon hearing my words she still managed to almost fall over with a luminescent blush on her face (metaphorically speaking, of course, as she didn't actually glow... I think), so I turned back to Judy and gestured with a 'You see?'

"Chief used Unabashed Flirting," my assistant declared in a robotic voice. "It was super effective."

"Ooooh, so it was that kind of reference!" I spoke with a knowing nod. She looked at me like she had no idea what I was talking about, so I continued, "It's that show about those games about those card games about those monsters where a bunch of kids run around the countryside and throw balls at small critters, and then they fight each other by going into a computer where those balls unfold into creatures and then they put them into attack positions and destroy their opponent's life points."

Judy gave me a long, flat look, then declared, "Chief used Intentionally Mashed Up Pop Culture Reference. It wasn't very effective."

"Ouch," I hissed while grimacing. "Tough crowd tonight."

Judy was just about to respond, but then the princess finally burst out of her stupor and exclaimed, "This is too soon!"

"What is?" Judy inquired while giving her a skeptical glance.

"The names! It's too soon!" Elly continued with gusto. "We have to start out slow. First, it should be just first name basis, then nicknames, and only after that can we move onto the really intimate pet names! You can't just jump to the heavy hitters when we are not engaged yet! It goes against tradition!"

"Your family traditions are weird as usual," I muttered with a slow shake of my head and decided to move on from the pointless discussion by muttering, "Nicknames aside, we still didn't decide on our next stop." I paused on purpose here, and I very conspicuously stared at the huge roller-coaster at our left, then I pointed at it and asked, "How about?"

"No!" my girlfriends declared in perfect unison, and I once again couldn't help but wonder at how they were so different yet somehow still on the same wavelength at the strangest of times.

By the way, I'm pretty sure it was abundantly clear by this point, but we were currently sitting on one of the benches surrounding the familiar sprinkler fountain inside the equally familiar amusement park where Judy and I had our first date by any other name. This time the place was slightly less packed, probably due to the changing seasons, but we still had dozens, if not hundreds of placeholders loitering around us, and unlike the last time, most of them were at the point where they could almost convince me they were regular people having a great time. If only they didn't act so even when they were picking up trash or waiting in lines, the illusion would've been well, not perfect, but better.

Not that it really bothered us. Judy and I were already used to the placeholders' behaviors, while Elly and the gang still had some kind of perception filtering going on that let them seamlessly ignore the weird, wacky, and sometimes outright uncanny conduct of the people around them. Speaking of the rest of the group, as per my earlier plans, we actually took them along with the excuse of 'unwinding after the recent stressful events', and right now they were also somewhere in the amusement park, with 'somewhere' being the keyword.

We broke into two groups almost immediately after we walked through the gates, and while Josh was less than thrilled by the idea at first, the last time I saw them, he was being happily dragged along by Angie and Snowy, while Ammy was following after them like an exasperated mother hen. In other words, everything was right in the world once again.

Maybe it was because I was already thinking about my brand new little sister, but as I absent-mindedly swept my gaze across the road, I immediately noticed a pair of snow-white twin-tails bobbing in and out of the crowd. She wasn't wearing her maid costume anymore but one of the coats I bought her not too long ago, yet she still stuck out of her environment like a sore thumb. On a closer look, she seemed to be searching for something. I figured it was most likely us, so I raised my hand over my head and waved in her direction. It took her several seconds to notice me, but then she immediately perked up and dashed over to us.

It was only when she was already in plain view that I noticed that she had something unexpected in her hands, so once she got within arm's reach, I grinned at her and asked, "Hey, sis. Are you having fun?"

She hesitated for a moment, as if she didn't expect the question (or maybe she thought it was a tricky one), but ultimately she gave me an ear-to-ear grin and a huge nod.

"Yes! I love this place!" she answered in a chirping voice. "Look what I just got!"

Saying so, she presented the large penguin plushie in her hands. It was smaller than the polar bear I bought her a few days ago, but this one was a brand-name product depicting one of the mascots of the amusement park. It had the usual coloration of a young emperor penguin, except wearing a fancy little top hat and a monocle. It was pretty gosh darn cute, though the merrily grinning girl holding it gave it a run for its money.

"Wow, it's a nice one. Did you buy it?" I asked her while inspecting her spoils. I gave her a bit of pocket money, and I expected it was more than enough to buy it, but Snowy shook her head.

"No. Josh won it for me."

"Won?" I repeated after her.

"There is this stand," she began her explanation while simultaneously hugging the plushie to her chest with one arm and pointing behind her with the other. "You can win all kinds of souvenirs by shooting toy guns at yellow rubber duckies, and if you hit all of them, you get tickets that you can exchange for them."

"And Josh got this?" I asked, and Snowy nodded. "Just for you?" She nodded again.

"How did Amelia and Angeline react?" my assistant inquired while sneakily taking out her phone.

"What do you mean?" Snowy asked back with a pair of truly innocent eyes.

"Were they unhappy that only you got a gift?" Judy continued to grill her while typing.

"Maybe a little" Snowy muttered awkwardly under her breath, but then a moment later she glanced up at me with an expression that said she just remembered something vitally important. "I almost forgot! I came to find you because Josh wanted me to ask you for a loan."

"A loan?" I repeated after her, baffled and more than a little uncertain that I heard her right.

"Yes," Snowy confirmed with an earnest nod. "He used up most of his pocket money to win my gift, and now he's trying to win the other mascots for Ammy and Angie, so he told me to ask you for a loan."

"Reeeeally?" I muttered while rubbing my chin.

"Pretty please?" my adopted sister suddenly struck me with the dreaded puppy eyes before I could say a word.

"Ah, fine, fine!" I exclaimed while reaching for my wallet and I picked out a few banknotes of fairly high denominations and handed them to her with a frank smile. "Here you go. Tell Josh that whatever remains of this is yours and we will take care of his side of the bill later."

"That's a lot of money," Snowy whispered while she gingerly took the notes. "Can I really keep the change?"

"Sure," I told her with a smile. "Consider it extra pocket money. Go buy yourself some snacks and enjoy yourself."

"You can buy a lot of snacks with that," Judy noted on the side. "You are spoiling her already."

"Hey, a big brother has to be magnanimous with his little sister," I answered with a toothy grin.

"She's been your sister for less than a day," Elly grumbled at my other side with her cheeks puffed up like a hamster's.

"My point still stands," I stated. "Little sisters are made to be spoiled."

"Boo!" my princess exclaimed with an exaggerated pout. "Girlfriends need to be spoiled too!"

"Huh? You want to be spoiled?"

"Yes!" she stated without a shred of reservation, stunning us into silence for a second or five.

"At least she' s honest," I mumbled awkwardly to the side before clearing my throat and facing the princess again. "Very well, your highness. How do you wish to be spoiled today?"

Elly responded by giving me one of those absurdly cute smug little smirks of hers (she must've somehow realized I found them attractive, as she was doing them more frequently over time), and she declared, "You should win me a plushy too! And then you should take us to the lovers' tunnel!"

The first request was pretty much what I expected, but the second one prompted me to send a questioning glance towards Judy, as I was under the impression that it was on our schedule from the beginning. However, before I could voice my thoughts, Snowy of all people cut in by inquiring, "You also want to ride it at the same time?"

"Yes, that was the plan," I answered in Elly's stead, and the Abyssal girl immediately shook her head.

"You can't," she told us while hugging her plushie with both arms. "We've already been there, and only two people can ride the gondola at the same time."

"What!?" the princess raised her voice in a completely unwarranted, mortified cry. "How can this be!? This ruins everything!"

"Don't be so overdramatic," I chided her while gesturing for her to calm down.

"I'm not being overdramatic! The tunnel is the most important part of this date, right, Judy?"

To my surprise, my assistant unreservedly agreed with her with a solemn nod and a slightly less solemn 'Mm!'.

"Oh please," I grunted in dismissal. "In the worst-case scenario, I can just take two rides with you in turns."

"But that ruins the whole point!" Elly exclaimed while getting more and more worked up, crescendoing in a determined, "This just won't do!"

Before I could interject, she once again jumped to her feet and simultaneously pointed an overbearing finger at the increasingly more confused Snowy, and called out, "Sister-in-law!"

The Abyssal girl blinked in surprise a few times before she sheepishly pointed at herself and asked, "Me?" in an awkward voice.

"Of course I mean you!" the princess huffed before stepping up to her. "Guide me to the lovers' tunnel! I am going to have some stern words with the management!"

Snowy's mouth was left hanging open for a moment before she sent me a helpless glance.

I let out a small sigh in turn and, seeing how motivated my girlfriend was at the moment, I responded by telling them, "Go ahead, but don't overdo it. Throw us a text message when you finished and then we'll meet you at the tunnel later."

Elly let out a satisfied grunt, and before I could say as much as supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, she dragged Snowy along and they disappeared into the crowd. Eventually I let my shoulders slouch in resignation and looked at the only girl left at my side, still immersed in the process of typing on her phone.

"So, what did you find that requires so many notes?"

Judy finally peeked up at me and then, after a long moment of thinking, she put her phone aside.

"I'm simply documenting your changing relationship with Neige," she told me frankly, earning her a curiously raised brow in the process.

"What needs documenting about that?"

My assistant lightly cleared her throat, then she began by saying, "Have you noticed how quickly everyone adapted to your adoption of her? Eleanor, for example, already considers her your sister."

"Well, I'd say it's because she is," I answered flatly, wondering just what she was trying to hint at.

"Legally, yes. However, a week ago you not only had no relations, she even almost killed you." The way she said the last part made me wonder if she still had a smidgen of a grudge, but before I could ask, she continued by saying, "Considering that, I find the way they immediately accepted her new role unnatural."

"Let me guess: Narrative influence, right?" Judy nodded, apparently not picking up the sarcasm in my words at all, so I raised my hand to rub my temple while adding, "You know, at this point I'm starting to find your tendency of seeing shadows of narrative meddling everywhere a little worrying."

Judy apparently didn't find my concerns warranted either, as she gave me a disapproving look and stated, "Chief, I'm being serious."

"So am I," I countered. "Considering our current situation, with all the supernatural shenanigans, I think me adopting Snowy hardly counts as a big deal they should be freaked out about."

"That brings us to the second point," Judy spoke up, completely glossing over my rebuttal. "I don't think you've adequately explained yet why you decided to adopt Neige."

"I am pretty sure I've already told you how it happened" I responded a little uncertainly.

"Yes, and your attempt at misdirection was a commendable step in the right direction. However, that wasn't what I asked about. You've yet to tell me why you adopted her into your family in particular."

We locked gazes for a short while, and since she was entirely serious, I had no choice but to give her a straight answer.

"Before I start my explanation, are you familiar with the imouto-archetype?" Judy gave me a nod, which wasn't surprising considering she probably had the whole trope website memorized already, but I explained things anyway, just to be on the safe side. "To put it bluntly, I did it in another attempt to get ahead of the tropes. As you're probably well aware, the precocious little sister is one of the more prevalent archetypes in battle harem narratives. However, Josh doesn't have a sister, nor do any of the girls. Furthermore, the 'male friend', in this particular case referring to yours truly in the flesh, having an eligible little sister as a potential love interest for the protagonist is also a common trope. Are you following me so far?"

"I think I do," Judy answered with a firm nod. "So you directly invoked the trope to substitute Neige for your nonexistent little sister."

"Technically we can't say for sure that I don't have one, considering my amnesia and all. That said, I decided that if I had the choice between Snowy and some as-of-yet unknown girl I don't even remember, I'd pick the former, and doing so also serves as a side-experiment to see how the world reacts to this kind of substitution. This way Snowy gets a reliable big brother, I get a cute little sister while potentially avoiding an awkward meeting with a possible unknown variable in the future, and we may even get some insight into the inner workings of the world. Everyone wins."

"I see," my assistant whispered while digesting my words. "That's actually fairly clever."

"Thanks," I responded with a smile, which was then immediately wiped off my face by her next sentence.

"So you didn't adopt her just so that you could sneakily add her to your harem while not technically violating your promise to us."

"No, of course not. How many times do I have to tell you I don't want a harem?" I grumbled with no small amount of pent-up exasperation. "Not to mention, Snowy obviously likes Josh already."

"Eleanor did so as well," my dear, if currently a little annoying, assistant pointed out. "At least before you seduced her."

"I didn't seduce her and more than I seduced you," I pointed out in turn. "Things just developed out of my control over time."

"Let's hope thing won't 'develop out of control' this time then," Judy quipped as she stood up and pocketed her phone.

"Where are you going?"

"Toilet," she responded curtly, then added, "Don't go anywhere."

"I wasn't planning to."

The moment she got her answer, she immediately turned on her heel and stormed off. Maybe she really needed to go to the toilet?

Anyways, since I had nothing better to do at the moment, I decided to keep trying to make my Far Sight 'roll call' into a routine. Since Judy was going to the washroom, I obviously didn't peek on her, so this time I started with my other girlfriend.

So, in order of observations: Elly was in the middle of heatedly making her case for why the three of us should be allowed to ride a certain gondola at once to a park employee, Snowy was by a nearby stand in the company of Josh's group, with the man himself still in the process of collecting tickets for his entourage, Sebastian was in the middle of assembling something that looked like some kind of an ancient Egyptian puzzle made of gold with a creepy smile on his face, while Brang and company were busily preparing the secret base for our planned afternoon activities. In short, nothing seemed to require my immediate attention.

Like that, I excited Far Sight and let out a deep breath, only for it to get trapped in my throat halfway through. I was glad I had already finished my drink, or I might've even done a spit-take when my eyes unexpectedly landed on a certain woman in a familiar pantsuit, with a long object wrapped in purple cloth slung over her shoulder and, of all things, a large ice cream cone in her right hand. Needless to say, she was obviously the maybe-knight-or-maybe-not visitor to the island one of the Arch-mage's leads pointed me towards. Worst of all, she was actually staring right back at me with an inscrutable expression. No, scratch that! The worst part was that she started walking up to me! Like, what the hell?!

She weaved between the oblivious placeholders with ease, and in a matter of seconds I found myself face to face with her. She was actually a fairly lithe, petite woman, probably no taller than the princess. Her jet black hair was short like on the pictures, bordering on a boyish pixie-cut, and if I had any doubts about her identity, the vivid red streak in it would've made it abundantly clear it was the same person. In fact, I kind of had to rely on that hairdo (and the purple object on her back) to identify her, as the images the Arch-mage provided us with didn't capture her face well. She was fairly attractive, as expected, except for the fact that she had prominent dark circles under her eyes, giving her a slightly gaunt appearance. Speaking of eyes, her features were definitely East Asian, an impression that was further reinforced a moment later when she spoke to me with a thick accent full of rolling 'r's and strange intonations.

"Are you the Chimera Slayer?" she put me on the spot right away with an expectant question, without even bothering with introductions.

"Some people call me that, yes," I answered, obviously and justifiably on guard.

"We knew it!" the woman suddenly exclaimed with a wide and slightly disconcerting smile as she sidled closer to me. "We didn't expect to meet you here, but discovering a kindred spirit is always a pleasant surprise, no matter the circumstances!"

"A kindred spirit?" I repeated after her with an expression I hoped was only slightly flabbergasted.

"Are we not?" she asked me what felt like, from her perspective, a rhetorical question.

"Excuse me," I raised a hand with the palm in her direction, both as a way to make her pause and to keep her at a distance. "Who are you again?"

"We're" she began, and to my shock and alarm, the corners of her lips kept drifting further and further apart until her previously amicable expression turned into a full-blown slasher smile. "We are a hunter of the dark underbelly of this world, like you are."

"I'm really not though, and why are you using royal plu?" I attempted to protest, but I was cut off as she leaned even closer, completely disregarding my outstretched palm.

Somehow her grin widened even further in the process, and she told me, in an excited voice, "We should go on a hunt together! Come! Let us paint the streets of this sleepy city with the blood and offals of the monsters that prowl in the night! The slaughter fufu It will be legendary!"

For a good five seconds I could only stare at the unhinged woman with a mixture of bafflement and apprehension, but fortunately I managed to collect my wits in time and I ultimately told her, "I'm sorry. Your offer most definitely sounds tantalizing and not at all disturbing as hell, but I'm a little busy right now."

The broad grin on my abhorrent admirer withered in the blink of an eye, but it wasn't because she picked up on my extremely subtle sarcasm.

"Busy with what? Aren't we hunters, you and we?" she asked with an expression that reminded me of a confused kitten wondering where the laser pointer disappeared to, but then the cute image was immediately shattered by her slasher-smile returning with a vengeance as she enthusiastically exclaimed, "We are the killers of the creatures that lurk in the shadows! Always ready for the hunt, eager for the sound of steel meeting bone, thirsty for the intoxicating stench of blood! What in the world could keep you from our ultimate calling?"

"Ultimate what?" I replied in an uncomfortable tone, my brain still stuck in an uncomprehending loop and unable to formulate a response to her overly passionate tirade, so to gather some breathing room I continued with an equally awkward, "Anyways, to answer your question about what I'm doing... we are in an amusement park. People usually come here to relax, you know?"

"What foolishness is this?" the eerie woman suddenly responded with a stern expression. "The hunt never ends, and so a hunter never rests. It's common sense."

" Then why are you in an amusement park, eating ice cream?" I asked the question that was on my mind since I first laid my eyes on her in person.

She stopped and gave me a look that said I just asked the stupidest thing she had ever heard in her entire life then she casually took a few licks from her ice cream before she turned her attention back to me.

"Nonsense," she declared while doing a sweeping motion with her free hand (probably for dramatics) and continued with, "We are preparing for the hunt even as we speak."

"By eating ice cream," I stated by channeling my inner Judy, and she shook her head with a straight face in response. "Okay, so you are not eating ice cream. Then what are you doing?"

"We're using the cold yin energy in this food to temper our body," she stated softly yet matter-of-factly as if she was explaining something to a child. "What other reason could there be?"

"Erm people usually eat those on hot days to cool down," I answered on autopilot. I mean, just what the hell was going on with this conversation? Can you even call this 'thing' we were doing that? I don't think we had two sentences between the two of us that logically followed each other.

"That just proves that most people are foolish," she stated the obvious, at least from her point of view, then she continued to lecture me by explaining, "When it's hot outside, it's the best time to drink boiling sencha to temper your body with yang energy. It's self-evident."

" Don't you get heatstroke like that?"

"Heatstrokes are for the weak," she stated with what I presumed to be pride, then all of a sudden she turned to the side and let out a high-pitched sneeze, no doubt due to the meddling of the invisible gods of comedic irony.

"What about catching a cold from eating ice cream in the autumn?" I asked with fake civility, though she didn't seem to catch on to it.

"Nonsense," she emphasized with a scowl and another sweeping motion of her arm. "A true hunter never catches a cold. Colds are also for the weak."

"Whatever you say," I said in a low voice while sneakily rolling my eyes.

"We didn't say whatever, and whatever we said, it definitely wasn't whatever you think," she protested, I think? Anyways, before I could attempt to disentangle her weird speech patterns, she did another of those sweeping motions with her hand. "We grow tired of this discussion of yin and yang, so we'll no longer think about it. Instead, tell us if you are ready for the hunt yet."

"Okay, first off," I raised my voice, getting a little tired of the conversation at this point. "Before I even entertain this proposal, I have a few questions for you."

She once again gave me a demeaning look, but then after a few seconds she said, "Ask," as if she was patronizing me.

"All right," I uttered with a relieved sigh, hoping that we could finally get somewhere. "First off, you still didn't tell me who you are."

That earned me yet another 'Is this guy dense or what?' look from her, which would've normally annoyed the hell out of me, but I was hoping to finally get a straight answer, so I didn't let it show on my face.

"We told you already. We're a hunter of the dark underbelly of this world."

"I didn't ask what you were, but who you were," I pointed out with my patience steadily nearing its limit, but she only gave me a confused look in return.

I really had no idea what her deal was. By the looks of her, she was definitely important in the grand narrative scheme of things, and using our homebrew classification system, just her hairdo would've landed her in the 'side character' category at the very least, yet her repetitive, obnoxious behavior put even some placeholders to shame. Also, I was still confused about the whole royal plural thing she we doing.

"A name. I'm asking for your name," I spelled out at last, yet she was still as confused as ever.

"We only met," she stated with a frown, and I gave her a nod in return.

"Precisely. Normally people introduce themselves when they meet for the first time," I pointed out, only to receive a scoff in return.

"Foolishness. We are not normal people, you and us; we are hunters!"

At this point I was ready to give up on this line of inquiry and decided to just mark her and figure out her name later through Far Sight. More importantly, I had to figure out if she was with the Knights of the Obnoxiously Lengthy Name, or a brand new flavor of supernatural zaniness.

"Fine, we are hunters then," I told her, receiving a nod in return. "Next question: what are we hunting?"

"The creature of the underworld," she stated like it was obvious. "It prowls the dark corners of this island even as we speak. We'll slaughter it and bathe in its blood."

"Literally?"

"Yes," she answered with a nod.

"Ooookay," I spoke as I inched away from her, but she followed right after while keeping the same, uncomfortable distance, so I gave up and threw my next question at her. "Is this 'creature of the underworld' another Chimera?"

"I hope so," she responded as the previous slasher smile once again gradually crept onto her face. "I want to see the skills that felled a grand beast of the netherworld with my own eyes! I want to see you cut its skin, rend its flesh and spill its crimson blood all over us! Blood, gushing like a geyser! Like this fountain! Like a"

"I get it, I get it! Geez!" I interrupted her with my hands raised before she could get even more worked up, then I probed her, "Okay, so you're hunting a monster that may or may not be another Chimera." She nodded, so I breached my main topic by asking, "That means you are not after the Draconians."

The weird woman in front of me gave me another odd look and told me, "What business do we have with the half-bloods of the mountain deities?"

Now it was my turn to give her a long and slightly confused look, but since she didn't reach, I answered with a tentative, "I suppose none?"

"That's correct!" the disturbing huntress declared between two licks of her ice cream. I waited for her to finish eating it before I asked my next question, but then her eyes suddenly lit up and she exclaimed, "We cannot bear this any longer!" with a flushed face. "We can no longer restrain the boiling blood in our veins! Come, Chimera Slayer! Let's go on a hunt, right now!"

"As I said, I already have a prior engagement," I answered her request with my best poker face, which was hard to keep up considering the circumstances. She was once again giving me that 'What is wrong with this guy?' look, and since I had a feeling she wasn't going to accept my protest, I decided to approach the problem from a different angle and told her, "Not to mention, I um I normally only hunt alone, and I don't want to do it with someone I don't even know yet."

Whatever objection she had in mind at first, she swallowed it back down as she gave me a profound look (which made her slasher-smile even creepier, to be honest), and after a little while she replied with, "Yes Yes! We see. You are certainly right. We are both hunters, kindred in spirit, yet we don't know each other yet. How could we acknowledge the other so easily?" She paused for a moment and even cocked her head to the side as if listening to something in the distance, then her eyes turned mirthful as she told me, "We know! We should hold a friendly competition!"

" Competition?" I repeated after her, once again whiplashed by the weird and mysterious way this woman's thoughts operated.

"Yes!" she suddenly declared. "There are two of us, but only one prey. There is no better way to show our pride as hunters than to compete and see who can fell the mighty beast first! After that, there will be no choice but to acknowledge each other! We will be comrades in the hunt forever! There is no better way!"

"I'm fairly sure there are better ways to do that. A lot of them, actually," I tried to interject, but I might as well have been talking to a wall.

"Ah! Our blood is boiling again! Our blade thirsts! Fufu! We never felt so excited in our life! The massacre will be amazing!"

"I'm glad you are excited," I muttered, still recovering from the whiplash. "Just don't slaughter anyone else on the way, okay?"

The moment I said that, she immediately stopped creepily chortling to herself and she gave me a look as if I threw a bucket of cold water on her.

"That's a hard promise to make," she muttered with a strainer expression, then she asked back, "Could you promise the same?" in a slightly provocative tone.

"Yes, I can most certainly promise that," I told her flatly, though the effort was once again lost on her.

"You do?" She looked surprised, like not slaughtering people getting in her way was the weird thing to do. Still, after a moment, she gave me a big nod. "We don't have a choice then, do we? Very well! This will be a fair hunt. So long as you only spill the blood, tear the sinews, and spread the guts of the prey, we will also restrain ourselves."

"That's very reassuring," I answered woodenly, but then I realized that this was a great opportunity to mark her, so I quickly forced an amicable smile onto my face, stood up, and extended a hand towards her. "Let's have a nice hunt, shall we?"

She looked at my outstretched hand like she was seeing a white raven for the first time, then she awkwardly switched the pastry cone over to her other hand and she finally shook mine. Her gloved hand was really cold, maybe because she was holding her ice cream in it until just a second ago, but her grip was firm.

"Agreed. Let the competition begin!" she declared with gusto, accompanied by another sudden sweep of her arm except she forgot that she had a cone in it.

The result was as comical as it was unique, as I don't think I have ever seen ice cream fly for a good twenty meters on a ballistic trajectory and then hit a random placeholder on the back of his head before. As for the self-proclaimed huntress, she slowly raised the empty cone to her eye level and let out a soft 'Oh.'

"Well, that was unexpected," I told her in a jovial voice, but then my amusement was quickly erased when I couldn't retract my hand. I glanced down and found her holding onto me like a vice.

"We've lost our tempering material," she stated with her eyes still glued to her empty cone.

"I noticed," told her as I tried to remove my hand, to little avail. "Why don't you buy another one?"

"We can't," she stated emphatically before taking a large bite out of the aforementioned cone. "We must preserve our funds."

"Okay, then don't buy one."

She gave me a nod and continued to eat the empty cone without any apparent intention of letting me go. Realizing the situation I was in at the moment, I quickly cleared my throat and told her, "How about I buy you a replacement to commemorate our meeting?"

She gave me a suspicious glance at first, but after a short while she finally let me go, only to then hold her gloved hand out. I stifled a small sigh and, recognizing that I had to make a small sacrifice to get rid of her, lest Judy would show up, misunderstand the situation, and then once again start pestering me about anti-harem countermeasures, and so I took out my walled and handed her a few banknotes. The moment I did so, the creepy huntress's eyes lit up with something approaching delight, after which she pocketed the money and gave me a small bow.

"We thank you, Chimera Slayer! With this, we can certainly finish tempering our body!"

"I'm glad to"

I had to bite back the rest of my sentence, as she abruptly turned on her heel and dived back into the crowd and headed towards the fancy Italian sweets shop on the other side of the amusement park's central square, and not a moment too soon, as my dearest assistant showed up not a minute after I finally got her out of my hair.

"I'm back," she announced, only to then immediately stop on her tracks and give me a suspicious look-over. "Did something happen while I was away?"

I had no idea how she deduced that (maybe women's intuition was real?), but I had nothing to hide, so I promptly told her, "Believe it or not, I ran into one of our leads."

My comment immediately made her previous expression melt away into a concerned one.

"The mad scientists, the presumed chimera or the presumed knight?"

"The last one," I answered, followed by a tired groan. "She just showed up out of the blue a moment after you left. Speaking of which, let's get moving before she decides to come back."

My assistant glanced around, and then she stepped closer to me.

"Where is she now?"

"She's in the shop where we bought crpes in the morning," I told her as we began walking towards Elly and the others.

Judy's previously guarded eyes immediately flipped over into skeptical mode and she inquired, "What is she doing there?"

"Probably eating ice cream," I told her honestly, and since her eyes were still urging me to explain myself, I gave her an abridged description of my meeting with the weird woman.

" And then you bought her a sundae," she repeated after me when I reached the end of my tale.

"Yes," I confirmed.

Judy looked me in the eye for a few seconds with a complicated expression (which, once again, was by her standards, so for anyone else she probably looked like her nose was a tad itchy), but at the end of the day, she followed my example by letting out a shallow sigh of her own.

"Did you at least probe her for information?"

"As much as I could. I mean, she was kinda nutty, but I think she wasn't a knight, and I learned a... few things about her."

"What's her name?" Judy hit me at a sore spot right away.

"I have absolutely no idea," I admitted a tad wearily, earning me another sideways glance.

"Chief You just had a chance meeting with a VIP, and you didn't even ask for her name."

"I did, she just refused to give me a straight answer," I retorted. "It doesn't matter though. I already marked her, so I will find out her name sooner or" My words slowly trailed off into silence as I noticed something, and instead an involuntary "Bloody hell," slipped out through my lips.

"What? What happened?" Judy stopped and reflexively glanced around in alarm, so I quickly gestured for her to calm down while I tried using my Far Sight again, and nope, still no reaction.

"So As it turns out, I require skin contact to mark someone for Far Sight," I told her with a self-deprecating sigh. "On the bright side, at least we learned something new, huh?"

" We should go back and mark her while we have the chance," Judy told me, and I immediately shook my head.

"No chance. I'm happy I managed to get rid of her in the first place." My dear assistant wasn't happy about my dismissal, so I quickly grabbed her by the waist and led her along with the words, "Come on, Dormouse. Let's focus on our date. I'm sure there's going to be many contrived chances for me to mark her properly; let's not let her ruin our day."

Unfortunately, my words alone weren't enough to completely placate her, so in the end I had to spend about half an hour trying to win a silly owl plushie just to get back into her good graces on top of the thirty or so minutes I spent getting the one I promised to Elly before. Needless to say, for nearly ruining my date, I've unofficially added miss creepy huntress onto my list of personal persona non grata. For the curious: she was right under Crowey and just a notch above Lord Grandpa. As for the rest of the names on that list, that is a tale for another time.

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