Emulation
He awoke with a start.
The first thing he could ascertain was that he was lying on his back on the ground. His senses slowly woke up one by one, his sense of touch being the first to tell him that, whatever he was lying on, it was not a hard floor. Soil, maybe? His brain was still too foggy, his thoughts trying to form a coherent idea of the situation.
His eyesight started to clear, but before he could get his bearings and figure out where he was, a face entered his vision from above, blocking out anything else.
It was the face of an old, pale-skinned man. The wrinkles criss-crossing his weathered features, and the gray-white of his hair and beard put him somewhere in his sixties, possibly seventies. The details of his face quickly faded away however because his most striking features were his eyes, colored an unnatural shade of vivid red. It brought to his mind blood somehow, almost like he could smell and taste its coppery taste just by looking at those bright red mirrors.
The old man was smiling, but it was just as unnatural as his eyes. Too sharp sets of too white teeth showed, forming an unnatural, hideous smile splitting his face in two and stretching his old skin like a poorly fitting mask threatening to tear.
He couldn’t help but feel the irrational, primal fear of a prey on the verge of being devoured.
But he knew him. His confusion turned to crystal clear clarity. “You are…the one they call Zelretch,” he rasped, his voice hoarse from not having spoken in a long time, feeling foreign and not his own.
“The One and Only!” Zelretch said in fluent Japanese, tinted with a faint German accent. The old man threw back his head and barked something that would have been a laugh in anyone else. The motion opened his whole mouth for the world to see, the stark white of his sharp teeth contrasting with the blood red of his tongue. “Guten Tag, Shirou Emiya! I apologize for the abrupt nature of my visit, but I couldn’t wait to finally meet you.” The tone of his voice appeared to be jovial, but it was as off as the rest of him. The words he said somehow sounded out of sync with the movements of his lips. “Seeing as you already know me, I assume you know my reputation?”
His head was clear enough now, partly due to all the instincts and adrenaline in his body screaming he stood up and got away from the vampire as fast as he could. He doubted he would escape him though, not with the way he was hovering over his supine position. He scrambled his mind for any information he could remember on the man. “You are…a magus and a vampire, a Dead Apostle Ancestor. You wield the Second Magic, the Kaleidoscope, allowing you to observe and visit any parallel realities and timelines you desire. And…” he cleared his poor throat, still dry from unuse. “You are also a trickster and a troll, torturing your apprentices and sending anyone to other worlds for your own amusement.”
Zelretch’s smile, if possible, got even wider. “Excellent! Then I can dispense with formalities and get right to it: you interest me, so I have decided to send you to one of the many worlds in the infinite Kaleidoscope.”
The old vampire stood up as if spring-loaded, as if his joints were subtly out of place, his black short cape dancing on his shoulders at the sudden movements. His victim, the boy he had called Shirou Emiya, could now better see his surroundings, but it was with disappointment: he laid in a jet black space, too dark to tell if it even had walls or a ceiling, or if it even was a room at all. It was so dark and the darkness so heavy, he felt he could even touch it if he tried to. Since Zelretch was wearing black clothes, the only thing the boy could see in the dark were the white gloves, the golden aiguillettes, and the waxy and corpselike face of his captor floating in the darkness, with his eyes, those terrifying luminous red pinpoints. He still sported his manic grin.
He slowly and awkwardly stood up on his trembling legs, both having gone numb from being unused for so long; pins and needles tingled up from his toes to his thighs. Facing the old man, he asked. “W-what? W-why? Why would you do this? I have a life to get back to, friends and family who would miss me!”
The swirling red darkness inside his eyelids lit up some infinitesimal, telltale fraction, as if in amusement. “Why else would I do this? I am bored, supremely, positively, completely bored. You have no idea how you can really feel the centuries pass by once you become immortal. I could kill myself, if I didn’t know it wouldn’t take. So if I can alleviate my boredom by using my phenomenal cosmic powers to do so, who’s there to stop me? Sending people who amuse me to other realities to see what happens is greatly entertaining. What if? How would they react? You have no idea how excited I still am even after thousands of these scenarios.”
He is mad, simply mad, he thought. Shirou took a breath. “Is that all? That is the only reason?”
Zelretch’s smile dimmed ever so slightly, but the mask held on. He was suddenly in front of him, so fast he felt the moving air on him. He towered over Shirou like an insectile statue, motionless, even his breathing imperceptible. With the darkness, it felt like it was half a million years ago again and he was just another piece of meat on the African savannah, a split-second from having his throat torn out by humanity’s only predator.
“Yes, that is the only reason,” he answered, perhaps with a touch of impatience. “I do not need to lie about my motives to you, boy. Do you expect this to be some secret test of character? No, it’s for my entertainment and my entertainment alone.” His cheerfulness came back. “Now, about the world I will send you to—”
“Thank you, that will be enough of that.”
There was no time to react or express surprise. In a split second, there was the sickening crunch of solid matter hitting bone, and in the next instant, Zelretch the Troll laid on the ground, unmoving, half his face gone and his skull indented by the impact.
His assailant was standing over him. Gone was the red-haired Japanese teenager. In his place stood an old man, possibly septuagenarian. Dressed all in black, with gray white hair and beard, a short cape draped over his shoulders and held by golden aiguillettes, and white gloved hands holding an ornate cane with a ruby embedded in its pommel, he looked the very picture of the ancient sage wizard, exuding confidence, strength, and dignity. He also looked exactly like the man on the ground.
Kischur Zelretch Schweinorg, the Second Magician, Operator of the Kaleidoscope, and Wizard Marshall of the Clock Tower, had just used his cane to bash his other self’s head in.
But curiously, the wound didn’t show bone, blood, or brain. Instead, the face of the impostor swam in and out of focus, the hole in this head revealing a second “skin” beneath, a layer consisting of shining stones and gray minerals of all things. As an user of Jewelcraft, Zelretch could recognize some of them on sight: brightly shining carbonaceous chondrite, gray merrillite, meteoritic iron, silvery-white iridium, crystalline alabandite, chrome-like allabogdanite, golden brezinaite, dark green wadsleyite, the gray metallic luster of kamacite, white krottite... Elements that were rare on earth, and were usually found on meteorites.
The false face of the creature swam in and out of focus, like a television with bad reception, showing that behind the illusion was something that looked neither like a human head, skull, or anything else on Earth, but was closer to a particularly disturbing polyhedron made of rocks and minerals, with no mouth or nose yet clearly breathing. Even now, prone on the ground, its chest rose and fell, albeit with the irregularity of a fatally wounded animal, quickening as its demise approached.
It was clearly not animal, not human, or even phantasmal. It was something else, not of this earth. Something alien.
Zelretch looked down at his collapsed double with an unimpressed look. He spoke to it in perfectly fluent British English, with a faint hint of a German accent. “You know, I didn’t expect much, but this was thoroughly disappointing. You couldn’t even suss out a fairly simple metamorphosis spell. And it was a real pain in the ass to track you down, and to track down and find your victims to send them back home. So I was expecting a bit more action to work out my frustra—I mean to compensate,” his shoulders slumped, like he was truly sad to have been deprived of a fight. “But you’re just an automaton, aren’t you? And not even a good one, at that. What kind of motivation is ‘boredom’? And ‘Guten tag’, really? I am thousands of years older than modern standard German, and a prominent member of a British organisation, why would I ever say that? My accent is not even real; it’s an affectation, the whim of an old man.” As if to prove his point, Zelretch completely dropped the accent when he spoke the last sentence.
The alien construct was dephasing even faster now, and the hole in its head was emitting faint motes of light. Almost casually, the Old Man of Jewels crushed the head of the man with an identical face underfoot. The rest of the body turned into alien minerals, before dissolving into particles of spiritrons and Grain. The Magician bent over and picked something up from the space dust on the ground. It looked like broken rainbow-colored glass, changing shade and shape depending on the angle it was viewed.
“Well,” he said, holding it between his index and his thumb in front of one eye. “All this time, I was really after your creator, not you.”
He threw the piece of glass into the dark, and suddenly he was no longer in a void.
He was now on solid ground, beneath an open night sky full of twinkling stars. The soil beneath his feet consisted of extremely fine white dust, like well-ground flour. It covered everything as far as his eyes could see, for miles and miles of barren and lifeless waste lands, and for a moment he thought he was in a desert. But the dust was clearly not sand or snow, or even salt.
It took him a moment to realize he was on the surface of the moon.
How fitting, he thought wryly to himself.
He could have easily turned around and seen the whole of planet Earth, in its blue majesty, behind him. But he was far more preoccupied by what was before him.
In the void of space, the stars began to wink out, one by one. Not because the universe had come to an end, but because something was blocking them, a thing of an immeasurable size moving between the stars. It moved and flowed across his vision, every motion snuffing out more light. There was no shape to see, no outline that could be drawn of this thing, so dark and enormous it was, a yawning abyss the human mind could only fail to grasp. The only other noticeable characteristic about it were the three red stars shining within it, three terrifying luminous red pinpoints that could be thought of as its “eyes” on its “face”, if such concepts could even apply to it.
And perhaps they did, for those three red stars stared down at the Magician, with clear intent, burning with what could only be described as eternal hatred.
But that is all it could do, it wasn’t really there after all. All Zelretch had done was expand the shard it had used as a window to peer into their universe, possibly hoping to use it as a door. But with its plan foiled, it was now powerless behind its looking glass.
Kischur Zelretch Schweinorg faced his enemy with no fear or worry in his heart, a lazy smirk of defiance on his face creasing the deep wrinkles of a lifetime of warm smiles. His crimson eyes were shining with vitality, such as one might see in someone maybe fifty years his junior.
He was in his element, and he relished every second of it.
“Greetings, o Outer God. Seeing as you already know me, I can dispense with formalities and get right to it: on behalf of the Human Order, I want to tell you that you are unwelcome here and you can get the fuck out.”
If possible, the red hatred of the three stars burned even brighter.
As he finished speaking, Zelretch was staring at some point just to his left and a thousand light-years away, like he was distracted. Even now, facing one threat, however ineffectual, his mind was running a hundred parallel threads simultaneously, a hundred perceptual realities each every bit as real as the one he was in, to look for anything that might require his attention or threaten mankind.
Zelretch cocked his head like he was listening to the most beautiful music ever composed. He smiled.
He could never get bored of this.
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Author's notes
Originally Posted by Rafflesiac
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