The Simulacrum

I thought, maybe naively, that since our scenario was over, it meant the days of strange, unpredictable, or downright mind-boggling occurrences and developments were well and truly behind us. I was very clearly wrong.

"Kyahaha! You dare approach me? Foolish fool! Can't you see Pudding has hands now?"

Case in point, there was now a redhead child in a blue patient gown, in the middle of my office, currently posturing and squaring off against my Elysian magitech roomba like it was high noon in a wild west town. Oh, and if that wasn't weird enough, she was also being cheered on by a bunch of mini-shoggoths scattered all around the room. I would be the first to admit that I've seen some silly stuff in my time, but that was a rare sentence even by my standards.

"Have at you! Rawr!"

Anyhow, after my first encounter with her, we quickly moved locations to my office in the base. It was mostly used by Roland these days, but since he was prepping to move to the Abyss with Tajana, it was empty and private enough to let me collect my thoughts a bit. As for the patient gown, that was from Mr Plague Doctor's lab. He still had a bunch of them from the time when we were still undergoing full checkups in the soul-scanning device, and while it obviously wasn't her size, it was still better than having her run around naked.

We weren't the only ones in the room. Benjamin was still here, back in his 'default' outfit after his tux got stained by her amniotic fluids or what have you, as well as Apollo, still wearing his ushanka. The latter made good on his promise and brought Carmine over, and she was the only one doing anything even remotely useful, closely studying the new kid with a deep frown on her face. As for the other two…

"Haha! Little Benny got beaten up by a girl!"

"Silence, you ingrate. I was not 'beat up', I simply opted not to fight back."

"Yeaaah, suuure. Little Benny got too scared to fight the little girl!"

"I said, silence! Sol was right there, so there was no way for me to devour that thing."

"Aw. Poor wittle Benjamim had pewfowmance awnxiety because the big scawy Sol was watching! How adowable!"

Yeah, it was easier to squeeze water from stone than to make these two do anything constructive, so I didn't even try. Lacking better options, I tapped Carmine on the shoulder to get her attention. She was so focused, she nearly jumped in surprise, but then she glanced over her shoulder with the same from from before.

"Oh. Yes, Sol?"

I jerked my head towards the girl in the baby-blue medical gown.

"Do we have any idea what she is?"

"I have some ideas, but I want to observe her further before I could…"

She couldn’t finish that, because Pudding (let's just go with that name for now, no suffixes) pattered over to our side in a rush. Her bare feet came to a screeching halt on the hardwood floor, and she proudly presented the little magitech cleaning robot to me, its brush arms flailing in apparent panic.

"Look, Papa! I won! Pudding defeated the usurper!"

Sighing, I took the hovering roomba from her and put it onto my desk, where it promptly entered standby mode. When I turned back, I saw that she was looking at me with eyes full of anticipation, as if expecting praise for a job well done. Of course, we had more important things to consider, so I…

"Hehe! That tickles!"

Ack! My headpatting instincts activated on their own! More importantly, I cleared my throat and addressed her directly.

"Listen… erm… Pudding?"

"Yes, Papa?"

"How about we sit down while we wait?"

Hearing that, Apollo was just about to grab the chair behind my desk (the first potentially useful thing he tried to do since we encountered her in the storage room), but he was beaten to the punch by… well…

"O-kay!" Pudding exclaimed with a happy-go-lucky grin, and before I could get another word in, one of the Pudding-kuns literally rolled over to her side. There was a snap and a puff of white smoke, at which point it turned into a small padded stool. Not missing a beat, she promptly sat down on it, eyes still glued to me.

Which brought us to the first issue I had with this whole situation. We casually called all the little fleshy balls 'Pudding-kun' because they were essentially a hive-mind of some sorts. The mini-shoggoths weren't true individuals, but parts of a single entity. It's why, after marking one for Far Sight, every single one of them was marked at the same time. In a sense, they were a singular being that just happened to be at a whole bunch of different places at once, even by the logic of my own ability.

However, the same could not be said about the little girl in front of me. Unlike the rest, she was not marked, and couldn't be marked, which meant…

"Is she really an Emergent?" I whispered over to Carmine, and after a long beat, she nodded.

"It seems to be so, yes, but… It's also a bit peculiar."

I blurted out an ever-so-slightly exasperated, "Tell me about it…"

Carmine must've taken my careless words at face value, and she launched into an explanation.

"I'm basing this on a preliminary analysis by Oriole and Obsidius, and I'll have to continue observing her Definition within the Simulacrum to be entirely certain, but from what I've gathered so far, she seems to—"

"Wait, hold on," I stopped her with a raised palm. "The girls should arrive at any moment now. Let's hold onto the infodump until they're here, so we won't need to repeat ourselves."

She let out a quiet hum, which I assumed was for agreement, but then she squinted at me and said, "You could've brought them over to expedite the discussion."

"True, but they're already on the way here, so it would've been awkward to pick them up mid-way."

"I don't know about that, but if you say so…"

We concluded the topic with that, so my attention returned to the little girl on the stool made of another version of herself (there goes another rare sentence), and when our eyes met, she kicked her feet and waved at me.

"Papa? Pudding is bored."

Exhaling hard to rein in my hear-patting reflex, I told her, "Just put up with it a little longer," and… she was now pouting. Where did she even learn that? She was just born an hour ago! This time, I stifled a groan and decided to breach a subject I was rather confused about, if only to keep her occupied. "Hey, Pudding? Why are you calling me 'Papa'?"

"Because Papa is Papa," she told me like it was a self-evident truth.

"But why?"

"Because you are Papa, and Papa is Papa," she repeated, somehow looking more confused by the inquiry than I felt by her answer.

"It makes a certain kind of sense," Carmine noted on my side, looking a touch intrigued. "She formed within your Domain, which could be construed as something akin to biological birth, which could, on the surface level, justify the usage of familial terminology."

Squinting, I posited, "But everyone Emerges from the Simulacrum, so would that make me everyone's father?" in return. I patiently waited for her to respond, but when she didn't, I had to prompt her with an ever so slightly impatient, "Would it?"

It was at this point that she must've realised that I wasn't asking a rhetorical question. She looked downright perplexed for a second or five, then she finally squeezed out a not particularly dependable, "Don't ask me. Didn't we just discuss the other day how the concept of familial relations is uncharted territory for me?"

It was at this moment that Apollo sauntered over and tried to put his arms around our shoulders with a casual, "Hey, guys? I just realized something!"

I reflexively ducked out of the way, but Carmine was too slow and got caught. She looked up at the man with a suspicious, "What?" and Apollo waved the arm meant for me at the girl on the stool, as if it was his intention from the beginning.

"Think about it! If she's the kid's kid, and the kid's our kid, that makes her our grand-kid! You're a granny now!"

That made Carmine suffer a blue screen of death, and she completely froze up with eyes wide open. I would've chimed in, but then I noticed that Benjamin also came over. That wasn't the odd part, but that he was purposefully keeping me between himself and the girl on the stool. After some quick consideration, I took half a step to the side to make sure, and… Yep. He followed me like my shadow.

"What are we waiting for?" he asked out of the blue, so I gestured towards the door of my office.

"For the girls to get here. They should be here any minute now."

"No, that's not what I was referring to, and you know it," he fumed, arms crossed, and leaned a bit to the side so he could glare at the while remaining in cover. "Why aren't we getting rid of it yet?"

"She's a she, not an it, I think, and—"

I was just about to tell him that we weren't getting rid of anyone until we sufficiently cleared up this situation, but then Pudding noticed that I was talking to Benjamin and jumped off the stool.

"Hey! Get away from Papa!"

"Silence, pest! I'm talking to Sol here, and—"

Before he could finish whatever he wanted to say, Pudding rushed at us from the right, and he dodged to the left, making sure to keep me between them.

"Yaah!"

"Graah!"

And then the two of them started running in circles around me, like actual children. That was mildly annoying, but I also had to admit that Benjamin was showing commendable restraint in not lashing out at her with all of his Venerated Emergent reality-warpery. Heck, if I didn't know better, I would've easily believed that he was genuinely scared of her. That would've been just plain silly, so he must've been playing it up for… some reason. Right?

It was amid this chaos that the door of the office finally opened with an upbeat, "Hi, everyone! Sorry, we got held up in traffic, and by they way, why are all the Pudding-kuns piled up in front of the—?" the princess inquired the moment she stuck her head inside, only to first descend into a stunned silence, followed by a stifled squee when she rushed inside with so much enthusiasm, she appeared as if she was trying to tackle the little girl still chasing Benjamin around me.

She came to a sudden halt right next to me, somehow already squatting, and beamed at the startled 'kids'.

"Hi! Who are you?"

Despite her first surprise, the girl responded with an upbeat, "Hi! Pudding is Pudding!"

"Ah! Such a cutie!" Elly stifled another squee and looked up at me, eyes sparkling. "Leo! Where do you keep finding these cute kids?!"

"Excuse me? Judy didn't tell you?" I asked back with a brow raised, and she shook her head. By this point, my dear assistant also entered the office, so I looked over and raised my brow even higher, along with a flat, "… Dormouse?"

"I thought her reaction would be more amusing this way," she admitted without need for further interrogation, and… she wasn't entirely wrong, so I couldn't openly scold her.

In the meantime, Benjamin shuffled over to hide behind Elly instead, and my Draconic girlfriend let out a hiccup-like noise and grabbed him.

"Ah, Benny! Sorry, I didn't mean to ignore you!"

He hissed out an irate, "Unhand me!" at her, but didn't try to get out of her hug.

"You did great back there in the park! I mean, I didn't see it myself, but the children said you were very imposing and scary! Good job!"

"I did not participate in your farce for the sake of your approval."

"Aw, don't be shy! When people praise you for a job well done, you need to accept it with your head held high!"

"Speaking of which, how are the kids?"

My question was aimed at Judy, and she casually told me, "They're fine. I let Amelia deliver the introductory info-dump to them."

"… Which reminds me... Why didn't you tell me you roped her into your magical girl plot?"

"Our magical girl plot," she corrected me with her usual deadpan delivery, then a beat later admitted, "And I didn't tell you because I thought your reaction would be more amusing this way."

I eyed my lovely, if currently slightly difficult, assistant for a while, but despite the deep well of my experience as a professional Judy-interpreter, I couldn't be sure whether she was serious or not. In the end, I just settled on a subdued, "You're developing bad habits," before lightly clapping my hands. "Let's discuss that later. Pudding? Would you please sit back down?"

"Yes, Papa!" she responded at once, and that made my still crouching princess spring up with a whole flock of illusory question marks circling her head.

"Papa? What's that about?"

"We're about to find out. Hopefully." I faced the girl on top of the stool again and made a gesture in her direction. "So, just to make sure we're on the same page, this is Pudding. As in, a… I'm not entirely sure what she is in-universe, but I guess it's safe to say she's part of the Pudding-kun collective, and also an Emergent. Right?"

It took Carmine a few seconds to realise I was asking her, and she nodded along.

"Yes, Sol is correct. She is definitely one of us."

"In other words, a Submerged One picked Pudding-kun as the template to Define themselves," my dear assistant tried to summarise, but Carmine quickly interrupted her.

"I'm afraid her situation is somewhat more complicated than that."

"Before we get into that, though," I interjected and gestured at the little redhead again. "Let's hear what she has to say for herself first." Pudding tilted her head attentively, so I decided to stop dancing around the elephant in the room and started going down my mental checklist of questions I had assembled while waiting for the girls. "Were you the one who narrated us before?"

Pudding's brows scrunched up into a troubled frown, and she asked, "What's 'narrated'?"

"… Okay, let's try this again." I inhaled deeply, and re-phrased the question to, "Were you the one following Benjamin around?"

"The bad ************?" she blurted out, and my senses were assaulted by a rather crude torrent of images and sensations filled with teeth and claws warped nearly beyond recognition. Seeing the others' reaction, I wasn't the only one baffled by this, yet while the girls seemed more puzzled than anything, Apollo and Carmine were rather… amused? Maybe that was the Emergent equivalent of mispronouncing a word, or baby-talk?

Whatever the case might have been, it was obvious whom she was referring to, so I confirmed it by telling her, "Yes. Benjamin." She was looking at me funny, so I tried again, "The Predator Moon?"

Her eyes opened wide and she nodded repeatedly, then pointed at the (allegedly) esteemed Venerated Emergent and exclaimed, "Yes! The bad Predator Moon who bit Papa!"

"So you were stalking him," I concluded, but she reacted with confusion again. "You observed him."

"Yes!"

"Why?"

My question made her pause, but then she started waving her arms around and explained, "He bit Papa! Everything was full of ************* and ************, and it was scary, but then it went away, but then he came back, and Pudding knew he would want to bite Papa and the others again, so Pudding made Pudding so that Pudding can beat up the bad Predator Moon and save Papa and the others!"

She sounded proud of herself in a cute, precocious kind of way, and she kept grinning at us during the silence left in the wake of her explanation. It took me a few seconds to figure out what she could be talking about, but once I had a solid enough hunch, I gave translating her a try.

"So, if I get this right, you remember when Benjamin tried to eat the Simulacrum."

She nodded, but then she squinted and shook her head.

"Pudding doesn't know what a Simulacrum is."

"… You remember when he tried to eat the world," I tried again, and after some hesitation, she tentatively nodded. "Okay, so after that, you've seen Benjamin, and you got scared of him."

"Pudding isn't afraid! Pudding will beat him up!" she denied vehemently and glared at Benjamin, who only responded with a haughty huff that made Elly rub his head in disapproval.

"Yes, sure, but back then, you couldn't, right?" She pondered my question and ultimately nodded once again. "Because of that, you… merged a bunch of yourselves together?" If I sounded uncertain on that point, it was because I still wasn't one hundred percent sure on how the whole 'hive mind' thing worked, but she agreed, so I decided to just accept it at face value and say, "And then Pudding, the girl I'm talking to, was born."

"Yes. Because Papa woke me up before Pudding got big," she said, arms spread, but then she brought her palms closer together with, "so Pudding is still small," and a pout. It was only for a moment though, and then she glared at the Venerated Emergent unsubtly hiding behind Elly and declared, "But Pudding is still bigger than the bad Predator Moon, so Pudding will still beat him up!"

"You're not greater than me!" Benjamin objected with a voice dripping with wounded pride, but the girl didn't relent.

"But Pudding is! Pudding is this much taller!" she argued while holding out her hand, her thumb and forefinger just a tiiiny bit apart.

"Nonsense! Just because your Definition is infinitesimally longer than mine in the vertical dimension, it doesn't mean you are superior to me!"

"Just because Pudding doesn't speak well yet it doesn't mean Pudding doesn't understand big words!" she argued back with her cheeks puffed up, balancing at the edge of her stool like she was ready to pounce at him. "You can't confuse Pudding like that!"

"So you Defined yourself because you wanted to protect everyone," I concluded, and it made the princess let out an impressed, 'Aw!'

The subject of the discussion, however, was once again confused and tilted her head.

"Define? What's that?"

"Hah. Just after you claimed you understand complicated vernacular," Benjamin commented on the side, sounding just a bit smug, much to Pudding's chagrin.

It looked like they were just about to descend into another argument, so I raised a palm to stall them and turned to Carmine.

"Does this make her the first successful Emergence since the Simulacrum's under 'new management'?" I inquired from her, my words accompanied by a pair of air-quotes, but to my shock, she promptly shook her head.

"No, I'm afraid not. If anything, she's a completely different development."

"Oooh! The plot thickens!" Apollo exclaimed while rubbing his palms together, and then he pulled over my office chair to sit down. "Proceed!"

Carmine emphatically rolled her eyes first, then pointed at the literal child Emergent.

"I asked Oriole to check, and we have made three startling discoveries. First, her Domain is still within Sol's, as expected. Second, her Domain appears to be rather peculiar."

"Domains can be 'peculiar'?" Judy asked the question on my own mind right away, making Carmine awkwardly clear her throat.

"It's an extraordinary situation, and I don't have a better way to describe it. Her Domain is, in rudimentary terms, acting like a negative imprint around the Venerated Benjamin's."

"Oh? So, the reason why she's so cute is that she copied Benny?" the princess guessed, and I felt that she was kind of missing the point, but Judy still found her input valuable.

"It would certainly explain why she seems to possess the same intangible charm as him," she noted, and again, I was fairly sure the 'shape' of one's Domain had no relation to the 'cuteness' of one's Definition. I didn't want to argue, so I let it slide, and after jotting down a few words, she addressed our newest Emergent with a quiet, "Pudding?"

"Yes!"

"Why did you model yourself after the Venerated Benjamin in particular?" Pudding was once again confused, so my dear assistant pointed at me and reiterated. "Why didn't you try to copy the Chief?"

"Because Papa is different," she explained as if it were self-evident.

"I think…" Carmine spoke up again, then hesitated for a moment before trying for a second time, this time a bit more confidently. "I think it isn't solely due to, erm, 'Pudding's' animosity towards the Venerated Benjamin, but rather because he was the one among us who had spent the most time inside the Simulacrum as of late."

"What about us?" Elly cut in, waving one hand over her head and pointing at herself with the other.

"No, I mean, a fully established Venerated Emergent. If my hypothesis is correct, which brings us to our third discovery, then the Definitions she could've most readily imitated were that of the Venerated Benjamin, and… him."

That last bit was referring to Apollo, and since he came up, he leaned forward in the chair and said, "Come on, Carmine! Stop keeping us in suspense! Tell us what the deal is with our grandkid already?"

Carmine exhaled hard, a pair of fingers massaging her temple.

"I believe that 'Pudding' here has been around for a long time, and she's a sort of… 'Gestalt Emergent'."

"A what?" Elly blurted out, and my other girlfriend immediately responded to her with, "A gestalt is a unified collection of distinct elements whose properties cannot be derived from the sum of its constituting parts."

"I-I know what the word means, I just don't know what it means here!" the princess pouted back, and I had to agree with her. A normal Emergent was already a weird cosmic consciousness embedded into space-time, so what the heck was a 'Gestalt Emergent' even?

If Judy's definition was correct, then it meant that it was some kind of 'the whole is greater than the sum of its elements' situation, which already described the Pudding-kun hive mind, but that didn't explain how that would translate to an Emergent.

I couldn't figure it out, so I had to wait for Carmine to reveal the solution, and she did just that by uttering two words: "Seed Amalgams."

When we still didn't get it, she further elaborated, "Emergents in a 'relationship' have been placing their Seed Amalgams inside the Simulacrum for… let's just refer to linear time for ease of common understanding and call it 'ages'. There's never been a confirmed occurrence of a Seed Amalgam serving as a nucleation site of a new Emergent, but if I'm correct, then the reason why it never happened was due to all of them congregating and forming an inert gestalt Domain deep inside the Simulacrum itself, which was recently stirred by Sol's Emergence."

So there was a hive-mind (or maybe a mind-hive, though I wasn't entirely clear on the difference) of proto-Emergents that decided to manifest in the Simulacrum as a hive-mind of mini-shoggoths. That was already weird, even by Emergent standards, and it's not even counting the part where they somehow bundled even tighter together to create an anti-Benjamin.

Seriously, this whole thing was bloody confusing, and if I were confused…

"Uuu…"

As expected. Pudding looked like steam would start coming out of her ear at any moment now, so I asked, "Did you understand any of what we just talked about?"

She blinked at me at first, then happily declared, "Pudding doesn't understand it at all!"

"Don't be proud of your ignorance!" Benjamin snapped at him, but she just smiled at him smugly in return.

"Pudding isn't ignorant. Pudding is only aware of Pudding's boundaries."

Benjamin huffed dismissively, and that was the end of that, especially since Apollo let out a jaunty whistle and got up from the office chair.

"Hoo-lee crap! Just wait until the guys outside hear about this!" He paused to make finger-guns at Carmine. "Oh, and your friends, too! They were looking for their own Seed Amalgam, right?" He pointed those finger-guns at Pudding next, and exclaimed, "Well, we found it!"

"I don't think this is what they had in mind," Carmine griped, and while Brook and Aurora absolutely had to be informed about this, I had something more important in mind.

"We can do that later, but first, we have to figure out what to do with Pudding," I highlighted, and Elly immediately nodded along.

"Yes! We need to get her proper clothes!"

"Elly? I don't think that's what the Chief was referring to," Judy interjected, ever the voice of reason. Or so I thought, until she said, "Pudding? You've seen everything the Pudding-kuns have seen, right?"

The little girl nodded along with a soft, "Mm!" and then a bit more enthusiastic, "Pudding is Pudding!"

"Yes, I understand. Does that mean you remember all the anime shows you watched with Ichiko?" she continued with her suspiciously specific questions.

"Of course! Pudding has a good memory!"

"Did you like them?"

"Yes! They were fun and flashy!"

My dear assistant's lips twitched ever-so-slightly and delivered the pivotal question.

"Would you like to be a magical girl, like the ones in the show?"

The little redhead's eyes opened wide as saucers, and she jumped off the stool in her excitement, her little balled-up fists shaking up and down in front of her. In fact, she was so excited that her seat de-transformed and joined the cluster of mini-shoggoths bouncing around her at the rhythm of her fists.

"Pudding can? Can I? Can I really?"

Welp. Leave it to Judy to turn the oddest of developments to her advantage. Except… If she's really planning to swoop in and make our newfound Emergent into her play's dark magical girl archetype, like she joked about, then wouldn't it mean she would have to work together with the 'Ivory Prince' over there?

…

I'm no oracle, but I can absolutely see some shenanigans and facepalms in my near future.

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