Content Warning: Discussion of stalking


Chapter Four: Intermission

Meltryllis was adrift in Chaldea's dreams.

Perhaps that description was too human, too dependent on poetic imagery that it overlooked the reality of the situation. A gripping enough opening line to seize a weaker mind, sure, but it lacked firm details.

Chaldea's simulator spat Meltryllis out into a new location, tossing her body against a rocky shore. The breakwater she landed on was coated in frozen seafoam. The crashing waves belonged to an ocean, a fact she understood on a primal level. The fragment of her existence borrowed from Saraswati felt no connection to the water. Someone else inside her did.

Her metal prosthetics shaved ice off the rocks as she untwisted her legs and pulled herself upright. An ache pulsed along her spine and she reached through her jacket to trace it with her hand. The programmed approximations of muscles twitched in reaction to the pressure, even in the limited amount of force she could apply, and her skin burned hot through the layers of cloth.

Her hands moved in the same slow way they did back in Chaldea, hindered by a nameless neurological condition unknown to human science. She scowled as she pulled back her quivering fingers and rested them against the ground. She didn't sense much from them, despite feeling the heat from her injury seconds before. Her nerves should have made her pain a hollow echo. Instead, it felt impossibly vivid.

That raised the question of why a programmer would include such a feature in the first place. It was obvious the simulator's designer was a sadist, although to what end was unclear.

Rubber squeaked against stone further down the shore, interrupting her thoughts. She jerked her head up toward the footsteps, closing her eyes in the forced wince that followed.

"Stay calm!" The voice that called out lacked the bravery the words implied. It was too harsh to be Sanson, not grating enough to be Robin, and certainly not the right range to be her mother. "I'm here to help!"

With an announcement like that, either the speaker wasn't a threat or was a complete idiot. Meltryllis slowly opened her eyes and watched a man slip across the rubble as he made his way towards her. Somehow he never wrinkled his crisp uniform despite flailing his arms erratically. There was a strange, forgettable quality to him, as if he was designed to be boring in every imaginable way. It all added up to one thing: he was a NPC.

She smirked. A NPC was exactly the tool she needed right now. She stood up as gracefully as she could manage, the sharp ends of her prosthetics digging into the rocks like ice picks and the programmed breeze tossing through her hair.

"Only a fool would want to help me, but lucky for you I'm willing to entertain absurdity." She locked eyes with the NPC below; she had seen him before, back in the cafe with the bread pudding. How did Sanson address him? "Your name is Arend, is it not?"

"A-a-actually my name is Arnaldur." The NPC's voice wavered in the grandeur of her shadow. He pulled at his shirt to read his plastic name tag. "Arnaldur Bekanson."

The simulator must have been repurposing old data. She was certain Arnaldur was the exact same NPC from earlier, recast with a new name and uniform. That was fine; computers recycled junk data all of the time.

There had been a fourth entity she sensed in the cafe during her mother's phone call. A NPC wouldn't have triggered that reaction, given that they didn't register as a presence in the same way humans or other servants did. Even if Arnaldur trended more simple-minded, he should understand his place was defending the system from this mysterious corrupted data.

And really, he only needed to exist long enough for her to locate her critic.

"I'm an Alter Ego, a superior program to a NPC such as yourself." She verbally sidestepped the Senpai title her mother would have used and physically stepped down from rocks. Her bruised back and ego were hidden behind a stoic expression as her feet rang brightly against the ice. "I'm here to defend this system. You should be honoured. What location file is the simulator using?"

He blinked, his dark eyes becoming unfocused. "Reykjavik, Iceland," he answered without hesitation. His continence immediately shifted again and his expression grew confused. "No location data was inputted via the external console. I'm not sure why the loaded location changed to this one."

The city name meant nothing to her. At least he took orders well.

"You have an active link to the systems," she assessed, folding her arms across her chest. "Tell me how to access it."

"I-I-I'm actually not sure how I'm maintaining access. The connection here is weak. You wouldn't be able to tap in." He hung his head low, his eyes narrowing as he looked along the dark shore. "I guess I could trace it back for you and take you to the proper access point. But why do you want it?"

She uncrossed her arms, allowing her jacket sleeves to billow wide and the ambient light to reflect off of her bladed legs. They shone as sharply as her smile. "There's an infection in this system. You're going to help locate it and I'm going to destroy it."

He nodded slowly in reply.

As she drank in his uncertainty, a stray thought crossed her mind: she hadn't seen her draft since the location shifted to this Reykjavik place. She had left it in the dining room of the last cafe when her mother called. It hadn't reappeared since. It was missing in the same way her critic was.

It was a physical object she brought in, though. It should reappear in the deactivated simulator once she dealt with the corruption and the systems were knocked offline again. Come to think of that, she could pin down Robin the same way.

Then she and her critic could deal with his creepy stalker ass and move on to more important business, like her finalizing the draft and securing her space at the Servant Summer Festival.

"Stop wasting time," she demanded of the still silent NPC. "Take me to the access point."