The Hundred Reigns 248: The Workshop of Horrors (7) (Patreon)

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Duchar’s archive had turned into an improvised picture salon in the last few days. 

The very first thing Simon had done after the miasmic pictobox’s test was to bring it back to Coil Futuristics. Jym had immediately dismissed the ‘errors’ as the result of using fossilized memories tainting the final result and pushed them to focus on a purely mechanical alternative, but neither Magda nor Simon had been convinced. Magical errors and interferences couldn’t explain why taking multiple pictures of the same person always resulted in them showing up as a living puppet. 

Simon had thus decided to run more tests with Duchar, considering his expertise on miasma. They had spent nights taking pictures of various things and subjects, especially Cassandra. She might find success as a model should she decide to abandon witchery. 

A few patterns began to emerge over the week. First of all, the visual distortions only appeared when using cursed sheets to take the pictures; manalith variants showed no anomalies, even after being tainted with miasma after the fact. Whatever was happening was intimately linked to the process itself. 

Second, results were somewhat inconsistent. Cassandra served as a model for them when using either the Brand of Envy or a confiscated Changeling Crestone provided by Shabram to appear fully human. Pictures of the former showed her as a normal woman, whereas those of the latter revealed her demonic tail and horns.

Finally, Simon always appeared in Overlord armor in pictures taken with the color pictobox, even when he wasn’t wearing it. 

He somehow found that part the most disturbing of all. 

“I think I have found the source of the discrepancies,” Duchar declared after analyzing dozens of pictures. He grabbed one of the original ones and pointed at the puppet man’s visage. “There is an outline, hardly visible to the naked eye.”

Simon had to buff his Perception to spot that detail. He indeed noticed a small, nearly imperceptible layer around their wooden face, especially near the spots where the ears should have been. “A false skin?” 

“I would assume. We see this on both Your Majesty’s pictures of those puppets and that of my daughter when using the Changeling Crestone, which makes me believe a similar phenomenon is at work in both cases.” Duchar stroked his beard. “The Changeling Class works by covering the wearer in a human-shaped Class outfit… a mana shell that acts as a disguise and uses Perks to protect them from divination attempts.”

“It is not true shapeshifting, but an advanced form of disguise,” Simon guessed. “Like wearing a second skin that can be torn apart with sufficient damage.”

“Indeed, whereas the Brand of Envy allows its user to achieve true polymorphy. It is not a disguise, but a physical transformation, hence why those pictures remain unaltered.” Duchar stroked his chin. “My theory is that Your Majesty’s invention taps into a spectrum of light our human senses cannot perceive, and which pierces through certain forms of magical disguises. The fact it ignores anti-divination measures suggests it is a purely natural process.“

“But why does Your Majesty appear armored in the pictures then?” Cassandra pointed out the obvious. 

“You cannot put your human outfit on.” The words rang in Simon’s head and sent a shiver down his spine. Wearing the Overlord armor is my natural state now… 

“It must pick up on my Overlord’s miasmic energies,” Simon suggested, mostly because he didn’t want to consider other alternatives. Neither Duchar nor Cassandra contested his statement—perhaps sensing it wasn’t something he wanted to discuss. “Can we confirm whether the people in the pictures are puppets by other means? Considering they passed our divination tests?”

“A dissection should suffice.”

Simon sighed. “Do we really need to kill them, Duchar?”

“Your Majesty, if they are indeed puppets, then they were never alive in the first place. A vivisection would be a misnomer.” Duchar studied the pictobox. “I also wonder what would happen if we switched out the manalith crystal with a miasmic one, and then printed the pictures on a manalith sheet. Such a fascinating invention.”

“My miasmic crystal is already used to sustain my Dungeon, though a Zodiac Fiend’s core could do. I know where to obtain a few.” However, that would bring much attention to himself and Simon had no idea what results this hypothetical device would yield. “Continue testing the prototypes for now. I must ponder our current findings for now.”

He wasn’t sure what to make of this discovery. Was Bert slowly replacing some of Lampwick’s citizens with automaton spies and duplicates? Valravn could create fetches, and his servant was a Puppeteer. The connection was obvious. 

However, the Weaver gave off so much a strong miasma signature that Simon could detect his true nature before he even unlocked his Dark Visionary powers. The other suspected infiltrators didn’t give themselves away so easily. 

He had to investigate further. 

—-----------

Tracking down the wooden man from the first picture didn’t take that long. He was a regular at the teashop and apparently a respected scientist—true name Hyde Stevenson—participating in the Planetary Exposition, so Simon had no issues following him to his house on the city’s outskirts under a Fiendmask. Breaking in at night undetected was only slightly more difficult. 

Within an hour, the man ended up bound to a chair in his own salon, his wife asleep on the sofa due to one of Simon’s spells. A pictobox shot confirmed she looked utterly normal in the picture, unlike her husband. 

“Nothing perverted about this,” Simon told his terrified captive under the cover of a Nightveil. “This is just for research purposes.”

The man had stopped screaming by now, having realized Simon’s wards prevented his yells from reaching anyone outside. “What do you want… if it’s money, I’ll, I’ll pay any price!” 

“I want the truth. Nothing will happen to you if you cooperate.” Simon sat in front of his captive and stared into his eyes. “Answer me truthfully: are you a puppet?”

“What?” The man blinked a few times in horror. “Is this… is this what it is about? My support for the mayo—”

“Answer the question.”

“No, no! No, I’m my own man!”

“I meant it literally. Are you an automaton? A doppelganger? Are you even aware of what you are?” The man’s look of confusion bothered Simon, who decided to use magic. “Heart’s Desire.”

He dived into the man’s soul until a picture formed in his mind: that of him and his wife raising a family in their old age, content and happy. A humble wish by all accounts, simple and without any hidden perversion. 

However, the mental image came out strangely. The man and his family appeared… flatter, for lack of a better word, and lacking in details. Their clothes were all the same color, the faces so blank… It all seemed so superficial. So lacking in imagination. 

Simon knew not everyone had grandiose dreams of the future, yet his instinct told him this vision lacked the emotional depth even a simpleton could conjure.

No way around this then. Hyde’s confusion turned to fear when Simon summoned a blade from his Inventory. I must confirm it. 

“I’ll be quick,” Simon swore. “If this is a mistake, I swear you’ll forget everything in the morning, the pain included.”

“W-wait, stop—”

The question turned into an agonizing wail as Simon chopped off the man’s hand with one swift stroke. 

It bothered him that he felt nothing about this. Simon had slain and tormented so many people that such butchery hardly elicited an emotional response anymore. He told himself it would be better than outright killing the man, that he would heal his wounds and wipe away his memory soon, but all those justifications sounded hollow in his mind. The truth was that he had a goal and didn’t care much so long as he achieved it.

The wound didn’t draw blood. 

No fluids erupted from the stumped arm nor the hand Simon held within his palm. The blow did cause a few splinters to fall onto the ground, alongside small shreds of leathery tissue. 

Simon stared at the hand in quiet silence. A piece of wood occupied the spot where the bone should be, with multiple layers of skin gently surrounding it like a butcher’s ham. He couldn’t see any veins or blood vessels of any kind. 

The man in front of him was a fake, though his pain was very real from the look on his face.

“How do you explain this?” Simon asked sharply upon showing him his own hand. “Is this a prosthesis?”

“No… I…” The man gulped. “I… I don’t understand…”

Either he was a better actor than all of House Malphas put together, or he sounded sincerely confused. A true spy would have probably given a hint of their true nature by now, and Heart’s Desire had shown nothing unusual. Either this creature possessed advanced anti-telepathic derenses… or it didn’t know it was a fake. 

“Do you have childhood memories?” Simon inquired. “What do you remember when you were eight? Nine?”

“I… I worked in Coal Street all my youth, in the mines…” The thing shook and trembled, sweat rising to the surface of its fake skin. “I… I don’t…” Its face reddened. “Don’t understand…”

Simon’s eyes widened as he spotted a glow coming from Stevenson’s chest. A light that heated up the puppet’s body and caused it to shed whatever humidity gave its skin a lively appearance. A wail escaped the thing’s mouth as its lips began to melt away like wax. 

Simon immediately realized he had triggered a self-destruction mechanism similar to the one used by the Golden Champion during their battle, and reacted swiftly. “Hellfrost!” 

Simon trapped the melting body in a cocoon of miasmic ice, smothering the flames and halting the reaction. The false Stevenson was already disfigured by then, its half-molten face revealing pieces of charred wood underneath. Only its severed hand was left intact. 

Whoever was behind this didn’t want to leave any evidence behind. 

“I’m sorry,” Simon apologized as he stored the hand in his Inventory. “I can’t leave things like this.”

He wiped his intrusion from his sleeping wife’s memory, grabbed the frozen Stevenson, and teleported back to his lair with him. As far as everyone would be concerned, the inventor would simply disappear without explanation. 

Dissection it was then. 

—-------------

Afterwards, Simon tracked down the porcelain woman—a biologist by the name of Elizabeth Shelley—and abducted her after knocking her unconscious in order to avoid triggering the self-destruct mechanism. He delivered her to Duchar for a vivisection that confirmed that she was an automaton with a manalith core. 

“It would seem that false memories were mechanically engraved onto the manalith through a method surprisingly similar to my own mind-copying helmet,” Duchar concluded. “I cannot yet tell whether they were copied from a model or invented wholesale.”

“So we can’t confirm if they were always puppets from the start, or replaced existing people.” Simon crossed his arms. “Are these creatures aware of what they are?”

“I do not think so. In fact, I have found evidence that the self-destruct mechanism will trigger should the automaton discover an inconsistency in its memories. Probably an intentional failsafe against discovery.” Duchar stroked his beard. “A similar mechanism activates when the body suffers extensive damage or if the manalith core is pried open, although I managed to disable it.”

In short, whoever was behind this mess was willing to kill their own creations to cover their tracks. Simon had his suspicions about the responsible party, and the fact that both Shelley and Stevenson were scientists was unlikely to be a coincidence.

Simon spent the next three days taking pictures around Lampwick to confirm his theory. The disappearance of two high-profile scientists made headlines, but the lack of witnesses and Anathemic Secrecy’s anti-divination protections ensured the investigation would go nowhere. 

He eventually returned to Coil Futuristics more worried than he left it. To his surprise, he found both Magda and Jym waiting for him on the ground floor, which he took as a bad sign. Jym Colt never left his lab at this hour.

“You are late,” Jym said the moment Simon stepped inside. He sounded as if his apprentice had just committed murder. “Very, very late.”

“Where were you?” Magda snapped at Simon. Unlike her husband, she looked clearly torn between anger and concern. Her eyes were blackened from a lack of sleep, and she held a newspaper in her hands. “We were worried sick.”

“I’m sorry, I had a very urgent matter to deal with.” Simon frowned upon spotting a broken window. “What happened?”

“Someone tried to break in last night and triggered the alarm,” Magda explained. “They ran away before the watch arrived.”

“The Finktons,” Coil said with conviction. “Bert is trying to intimidate us.”

“All of our usurers and debtors called in their loans all at once yesterday, and then…” Magda handed Simon the newspaper. “This.”

Simon frowned as he read the headlines. “‘A recent study by our University’s foremost magical researchers shows that pictoboxes expose their subjects to dangerous magical radiation’?

“It is pure rubbish,” Coil insisted. “I thoroughly tested the commercialized version for safe use.”

“Bert funded the study and purchased space on every newspaper in Muse to run the story, according to Diamante.” Magda crossed her arms, her expression darkening. “Now we’re facing lawsuits by ‘concerned citizens’ accusing us of worsening their health and peddling an unsafe product. Diamante says he’ll cover the legal bills and get us the best lawyers, but… it’s a lot all at once.”

Lawsuits and smear campaigns to denigrate the pictobox due to their unexpected success were a logical escalation from Bert, yet Simon knew things would only get worse. “There’s more to this,” he warned the Coil couple. “Your lives are in danger.” 

“What?” Magda blinked in horror. “No… not even Bert would stoop that low…”

“Whoever is behind this will.” Simon presented them with pictures of four living automatons walking the city’s streets, then identified each of them in turn. “Oscar Grey, Abraham Harker, Griffin Wells, and Mary Lavenza.”

Jym Coil immediately spotted the common thread. “They are all participants in the Planetary Exposition.”

“After extensive testing, I’ve concluded these visual anomalies are evidence of magical disguise rather than errors in the printing process,” Simon explained. “I think someone replaced all these people with automatons.”

The Coils were smart people. When faced with an outlandish hypothesis, they checked the evidence rather than dismiss it outright. Coil studied the pictures while Magda connected the dots. “Shelley and Stevenson both went missing too.”

“Based on available evidence, the likeliest hypothesis is that a powerful individual or organization seeks to replace all Planetary Exposition candidates,” Coil said. 

“But why?!” Magda protested. 

“Free access to the Crafter’s Tower,” Coil guessed. Simon had reached a similar conclusion. “The success of a single agent at the Planetary Exposition is statistically unlikely. The only outcome that guarantees an infiltrator is selected as the next apprentice is if all candidates have been subverted. Those that cannot be bought or recruited are either neutralized or replaced.”

Magda paled like chalk. “Or eliminated.”

“Highly probable,” Coil confirmed with a blank expression. He studied Simon for a moment. “A hostile foreign intelligence service? The Overlord? Bert?”

“Probably Bert,” Simon replied. This conspiracy completely fit the Cobweb’s pattern of infiltrating powerful key organizations and replacing key figures like a glove. Moreover, some of the puppets had children, which suggested the replacement of existing people rather than these inventors’ identities having been created from nothing. “None of the victims are associated with his company.”

It was only a matter of time before things turned violent. Bert had been content to try to intimidate and ruin Coil Futuristics for now, but he would likely resort to murder the moment he learned their color pictobox models could expose his conspiracy. He would have to destroy the technology and eliminate all witnesses.

Simon would have to take care of Bert beforehand. Permanently. 

“We need to bring this to authorities,” Magda decided immediately. “Someone is bound to listen, even if Bert has friends on the inside.”

“Bert will send assassins after you the moment this comes out, and the replaced inventors will accuse you of calumny,” Simon countered. “Moreover, my color pictobox uses miasma. We’ll give credence to the false study.”

“We can’t do nothing and wait for them to come to us, Simon.”

“We won’t,” Simon reassured her. He fully intended to take down Bert after ensuring nothing would happen to these two. “For now, we need to move you to a safer place until we figure out a strategy.”

Coil gave his apprentice that unblinking, intense stare. “Our lives are in danger.”

“Yes, hence why—”

“Not yours,” Coil cut in. “You will have a stand at the Exposition. You are on the target list, yet you are unconcerned.”

Simon hesitated to tell the truth, before deciding the two had earned some honesty from his part. “I have a secret combat Class from my time in Magvolia,” he admitted. “I can handle myself.”

Neither of them looked surprised, which confirmed they had suspected the truth for a while. “We could go to my parents’ farm,” Magda suggested after a short moment. “My parents would be overjoyed, and we’ll be well-protected there.”

“I cannot leave my lab,” Coil insisted. “Too important.”

“Somebody already tried to break into our house, Jym!” Magda snapped at her husband. “You can continue your research at my parents’ farm!”

“I cannot afford any delay. Moving the equipment would take too much time. I must finish the project.”

“Forget the project, Jym, we’re talking about our lives!”

“I must finish the project!” The outburst took Magda aback. Her husband never raised his voice. “This is too important. I cannot be late.” 

Magda scowled in anger, only for it to fade away into doubt. Simon didn’t need to use Heart’s Desire to guess what thought had crossed her mind; a terrible possibility he had himself considered upon realizing Jym Coil’s past was shrouded in mystery. For all they knew, he might not even have one. 

“Simon…” Magda gathered her breath. “Could you… take a picture of us? With your machine?”

Coil stared at his wife without a word for a moment, with Magda avoiding his gaze. He didn’t seem hurt by the implications of her statement, nor even aghast at the possibility she raised. Instead, he looked… resigned, for lack of a better term. 

“Do it,” Coil ordered his apprentice.

“Are you sure?” Simon asked as he picked the color pictobox from his bag. “If the picture comes out wrong—”

“We must confirm all hypotheses, no matter how improbable… or difficult.” Coil looked down at the floor. “This is the price of truth.”

He was braver than most in his resolve. 

Simon gathered his breath and took the picture. 

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