The Simulacrum

Book 2 Extra 3: Contingency Plans

It was around five in the afternoon when the young scientist, still wearing his multicolored collar-armor-cum-shoulder-guard over his usual white lab coat, stormed into the commons room of the hidden Research Society workshop. It was a small, yet surprisingly cozy room, with a well-lit interior, several comfortable-looking navy-blue beanbag chairs arranged around a simple wooden coffee table, a water cooler in the corner, an honest to goodness antique cuckoo-clock on the wall, and even a sizable aquarium with a fair number of colorful tropic fishes minding their own business inside.

Then the man slammed the door hard, scattering the fishes and making the old man reading a book on one of the beanbag chairs nearly jump to his feet in fright. Peabody glanced around in a mild panic, but once he noticed his nephew, he let out a small breath of relief and slowly retook his seat.

"Please, Friedrich you're going to give me a heart attack one of these days."

Labcoat Guy completely disregarded his complaints and instead he walked over and more or less fell into one of the seats with a small puffing sound upon his landing. The school nurse kept eyeing the younger man for a while, but at last, he closed his book, put it aside, and then subsequently he addressed his conspicuously silent nephew.

"O-ho-ho. I reckon things didn't go as planned?"

"It's the opposite," Labcoat Guy answered with a long face, and for a moment the bags under his sunken eyes seemed even darker than usual. "We set the stage, got them cornered, I said my lines, and then there was a fight everything went as it should."

"Then what's the problem?" Peabody inquired with understandable incomprehension.

"The problem," Labcoat Guy stressed the word while he simultaneously tried to massage his temples, which was made more difficult than necessary by his bulky upper-chest armor. "The problem is that they're taking everything we do in stride! There was no hesitation or surprise or anything! It's like those kids are treating this as if it was a game!"

"O-ho-ho? Really?"

"Yes, really!" the younger man burst out in a fit of frustration. "We're supposed to scare them, but they don't care at all! I even brought out one of the Gigants to give them a fright, without making it grow, of course, but do you know what the Abyssal girl said?" He waited for a beat, but since his uncle didn't speak up, he continued by exclaiming, "She said it was cute! CUTE! What is wrong with these kids!?"

"O-ho-ho! Children today are adaptable for sure!"

"This goes way beyond mere adaptability!" Labcoat Guy countered, fuming, and so Peabody narrowed his eyes and thought about his words for a moment.

"They aren't common children, that's for sure. They met a Chimera and yet lived to tell the tale, didn't they? Surviving such an encounter I would be more surprised if it didn't steel their nerves."

"Again, this goes waaaaaay beyond that!" Labcoat Guy denied with a scowl, only to fall silent right afterward as his brows slowly knit together into a thoughtful frown.

"Uncle? Can I be honest with you for a moment?"

"O-ho-ho. Are you implying you are not honest with me otherwise?"

"Not now, uncle. I'm not in the mood for word-play," he griped, then after a long sigh he quietly stated, "I think we are being had."

"You mean we are deceived? By the children?"

"No, of course not them!" Labcoat Guy exploded again. "I'm talking about the Arch-Mage!" Peabody once again looked upon his nephew with a profound sense of incomprehension, so he let out a tired sigh and explained, "I've felt that this deal was too good to be true from the beginning, but since you vouched for the Arch-mage's sincerity, I still signed it in good faith. After all, we were only supposed to scare a few kids! How hard could that be?"

"Oh-ho-ho! Harder than it seems!" the old man declared with a jovial smile, much to his nephew's chagrin.

"Stop messing around, I'm serious! I was suspicious about this deal from the very beginning! The Arch-mage gave us the funds and raw materials to keep our research running for years, and he only asks that in exchange? Does that make any sense to you?"

"Amadeus is a smart man. A genius, even," the nurse stated after some hesitation. "This wouldn't be the first time I couldn't follow his thought processes. Like that one time, back in the academy, when we had to"

"I've heard the story, uncle," Peabody was interrupted by his huffing conversational partner. "You had to make a focus apparatus for a decoder array, and he made you run a bunch of errands that didn't make sense at the time, but then he assembled a revolutionary new apparatus based on the Horten-Swarz effect. You tell me this same story every time I tell you the Arch-mage is up to something fishy!"

"Oh-ho-ho? Fishy, you say? Such as?" the portly nurse asked with a curiously raised brow.

"Do you want me to go by bullet points?" Labcoat Guy asked back with thinly veiled sarcasm, only to get momentarily stunned when the old man gave him a nod. Seeing that, he threw his hands into the air and exclaimed, "Where should I even begin?! How about the part where he withheld crucial information about the kids? Like how one of the boys was an expert illusionist and the other one was an Abyssal? Or the way he's treating us as lackeys instead of business partners? Or how he's refusing to meet me as of late by citing 'security concerns'? Or how the kids are completely unfazed by the ambushes? No, I'll go even further! I'd bet my doctorate that they're no longer feel under pressure because they know when I would ambush them ahead of time! Just like today; they almost looked impatient, and the moment I pulled them into the Restricted Space, they immediately jumped at the Sprockets as if they were waiting for me!"

"That sounds unusual indeed. Are you sure?"

"Yes, I'm sure," the man, who apparently had a real doctorate, stated with a metric ton of emphasis. "They had to know that Galatea and I were coming; there's no other way to explain their behavior."

"Are you implying that Amadeus told them when you were going to ambush them?" the old nurse asked a question that sounded entirely rhetorical.

"That's precisely what I'm implying," Labcoat Guy stated quite authoritatively. "He must have told them. It makes sense too; why else would he want us to tell him about our plans a full day ahead of time? He put that clause into the contract so that he could use it against us. He's playing both sides!"

"I still don't see why Amadeus would do something like that," the nurse stated with his bushy eyebrows scrunched up so hard they were on the verge of forming a unibrow.

"Me neither, but it's the only thing that makes sense," the man in the labcoat countered as he leaned forward in his seat. "How else can you explain how they knew about our plans? It's just the three of us here, so no one could leak our information from the inside. That means it has to be him."

"Oh-ho-ho. Aren't you forgetting about Pascal?"

"Please, uncle," Labcoat Guy answered in a dismissive voice as he shook his head. "We both know that he's the Arc-mage's personal lapdog. Do you think he would do anything the old man didn't personally approve?"

"You might be correct, but that doesn't mean someone we know had to leak information," Peabody pressed on with his counter-argument. "Maybe it's a spy who's doing it? Or a third party? For example, how about that one time someone sneaked into the workshop?"

Labcoat Guy's face instantly twisted in a grimace at the mere mention of the incident, and he really did look like he just bit into the world's sourest lemon.

"Don't worry, uncle! I learned from the failure! Galatea and I have upgraded our security system to the bleeding edge of mystic engineering! Next time those pesky Celestials will think twice before they would try infiltrating the workshop!"

"Oh-ho-ho? So it was a Celestial spy after all"

"Well, err I'm not entirely sure," Labcoat Guy admitted as he awkwardly scratched the back of his head. "Galatea's sensor logs are inconclusive, but I don't think there's anyone else who could or would sneak in here." He paused for a moment, but then he forcefully shook his head and sat up straight before declaring. "It doesn't matter! Even if they managed to sneak in once back then, they couldn't possibly leak our later plans! Only the Arch-mage knew about those!"

"You really want to believe that Amadeus is plotting against us," Peabody muttered under his breath, followed by a tired sigh.

"It's not about belief! Once you take all the facts and eliminate the impossible, the only answer remaining must be the truth. There can be no leak on the inside, no infiltrator can sneak in anymore, and we have swept the whole workshop for bugs. Unless there ' some kind of invisible, intangible, undetectable fairy spying on us, the only remaining solution is that the Arch-mage is leaking our plans to the kids."

"Maybe but why would he do that?"

"How should I know?! Maybe it's some kind of ploy to get rid of us without him dirtying his hands, or maybe it's some kind of convoluted ruse to make the kids indebted to him? Who the hell knows at this point?"

After his latest outburst, the two men fell silent for several long seconds. Then, out of the blue, Labcoat Guy abruptly let out a lung-shattering groan that made the fishes in the aquarium scatter again.

"Argh! I knew I shouldn't have signed that binding contract!" he hissed between clenched teeth and grabbed his head. "I should have known! There's no such thing as a free lunch! Now we are totally and irrevocably screwed!"

"Now, now. Calm down, Friedrich."

"I'm perfectly calm!" Labcoat guy exclaimed before he hunched forward and cradled his head in his arms, but then he abruptly looked up and snapped at the nurse. "And why are you so calm anyway!? We're trapped between a rock and a hard place! If we follow the contract, we're going to get stabbed in the back! If we breach the contract on our side, we'll lose all the resources and give the School an excuse to go after us! We're more screwed than a show-board in a hardware store!"

"Oh-ho-ho! That's a pickle."

Labcoat Guy was just about to give a no doubt very witty retort in response, but then both of their attention was drawn to the door of the common room as the last member of their oddball trio entered without any fanfare. This time she wasn't wearing her sentai villain outfit, but a simple white T-shirt with an obscure anime mascot and the words 'Fumoffu!' on the front, blue sweat-pants, and a pair of brown bunny slippers. With her outfit and her long, purplish hair down, she would've looked like a sloppy yet still inexplicably attractive elder sister type, if not for the two glowing ear-pieces on her head.

"Finally!" the younger man exclaimed with a palpable sense of relief the moment he laid his eyes upon her. "I thought you'd never get here! Quick, help me get out of this thing!"

The android glanced over at the mad scientist frantically tugging at his metal collar-pauldron-thing, but instead of following instructions, she casually walked over to the fish tank and, under the scrutinizing eyes of the men, she picked up a small tube of fish-feed and began to sprinkle it on the top of the water.

"Galateaaaaa?" Labcoat Guy spoke the word through clenched teeth, and while the android turned her head to face him, her hands continued to feed the fishes with mechanical motions. "What exactly are you doing?"

"I'm providing nutrition to the fishes in the aquarium," she stated without the barest hint of reservation, then after a second-long break she pointed at the clock on the wall and added, "Master ordered me to take care of them, and it's feeding time."

Labcoat Guy opened and closed his mouth a few times, obviously at a loss for words. In the end, he simply buried his face in his palm, following which his uncle let out an unsubtle belly laugh at his expense.

"Oh-ho-ho! I see, I see Your daughter is still going through her rebellious phase."

"She's not my daughter!"

"Master is not my father."

Labcoat Guy and the Fembot denied the old man's words at once, yet it only made him laugh even harder. At last, Peabody rose from his seat and picked up the book he previously put aside before stretching his back and turning to the still seated man.

"Oh-ho-ho! Don't worry too much, Friedrich. I've known Amadeus for decades. He might be incomprehensible from time to time, but he never stabbed anyone in the back."

"If you say so" Labcoat Guy noncommittally grumbled under his nose, but it seemed to be enough for the nurse, as he stretched his back again and, after flashing a smile at the fembot still feeding the fishes, he left the room with leisurely steps.

Once he was out the door, the man on the beanbag chair let out a long sigh before fixing his eyes on the android again.

"Are you finished yet?"

"According to my calculations, I am seventy-eight percent done. Seventy-nine," she responded ever so monotonously.

"Hurry up," he grumbled as he tugged at the armored collar, but then he closed his eyes for a moment before calling out to her again. "Galatea?"

"Eighty-one percent."

"I'm not asking about that!" Labcoat Guy snapped, then he glanced at the closed door again before he continued with, "How is the contingency plan progressing?"

For once, the android stopped her feeding motions and she turned her full attention to the man.

"I'm still analyzing the sensor logs of the security system. So far I have found two vulnerabilities and one possible backdoor access."

"Good. Keep up the good work."

Such compliment might have been fairly rare, as the android appeared genuinely puzzled for a moment. In the end, she simply nodded in the affirmative and returned to her task without a word. In the meantime, the man leaned back into the folds of the chair and let out a small sigh.

"I want to trust uncle's judgment," he said in an absent-minded tone. "However, just in case he is wrong and we would have to bail" All of a sudden, his exhausted expression morphed into a sly, devilish smirk, and he quietly added, "Ki-hi-hi If we have to bail, we are definitely not going to leave empty-handed!"