Jon Ureña's Blog, page 73

Roleplaying through "Re:Zero" with the GPT-3 story generator (Part 18)

This part covers the beginning of the seventh volume of the original Re:Zero novels.

This part kicks off the third arc of the original novels. Two of the major things that happen, hunting the White Whale and later on a major upset, either cannot happen at all or will happen in a different way. We'll see how that goes.

I thought this was going to be a dry entry, mostly because of the meeting, and that dealing with so many characters was going to tax my nerves, but in the end I loved writing it. I was going to leave it after the meeting, but then I came up with a few dialogues for the following scene and I figured that I could just add it to the same entry.

GPT-3 is a cutting-edge language processing algorithm used in the premium version of the online site AI Dungeon.

-Link for part 1
-Link for part 2
-Link for part 3
-Link for part 4
-Link for part 5
-Link for part 6
-Link for part 7
-Link for part 8
-Link for part 9
-Link for part 10
-Link for part 11
-Link for part 12
-Link for part 13
-Link for part 14
-Link for part 15
-Link for part 16
-Link for part 17

You know where to find Old Man Wilhelm. At this hour of the day, Crusch's bodyguard is swinging his sword for practice near the pond where you used to enjoy floating while drunk. Wilhelm is wearing his royal guard uniform, and he performs his swings with the seriousness of someone who expects needing to cut some fool down any day. Recently, at least in the confusing way that two days repeated many, many times can be considered 'recently', you have been that fool, although Wilhelm at least had contained himself to injuring you with a wooden sword.
You know damn well that the old man's senses have picked up you walking towards him from quite a distance away, but you still approach him from an angle where you'll appear fully in his field of view, as Wilhelm doesn't turn while training.
"Sir Wilhelm", you say with the most serious tone you can come up with. "I don't wish to interrupt your training, but we must speak of something of the utmost importance."
By how he glanced at you, you suppose that he was attempting to correlate your sudden demeanour to how idiotically he's known you to act, and maybe to figure out if you were joking around.
"Mr. Natsuki. What is it?"
"I was introduced to you by my actions. I interrupted the royal summons and stepped into the line of royal candidates in order to harass the council members, whether or not those decrepit bastards deserved it. I ran my mouth and ended up getting beaten up by someone for whom beating me up to a pulp was as taxing as eating breakfast."
"You have put it succinctly. I see you have a point to get at."
"Although my fooling around ended up with the royal candidate my side backs exiling me from their camp, I was never booted by my lord himself, lord Roswaal, and I remain privy to information that most outside of his circle don't have access to."
"I see."
You take a pause.
"I need to talk to you about Petelgeuse Romanee-Conti."
Wilhelm, as you expected, furrows his brows. He knows the name, and he's not fond of it.
"I see... and what would you like to speak about? My personal thoughts on him? My views on him are nothing of pleasant nature. I have no love for a man that would throw away his human nature for power, influence, and the favor of a dead witch who almost destroyed the world."
It's uncharted territory from now on. You've never known the old man to be surprised by anything, so you don't know how he will react when you reveal information you shouldn't have.
"You were assigned to assassinate him around a decade ago, weren't you, Wilhelm? There was a peasant uprising, and Petelgeuse managed to destroy half of the rebel's camp with some particularly nasty magic."
Wilhelm stops mid-swing. He sheathes his sword and turns to you. His usual serious, collected expression doesn't betray his thoughts.
"Lord Roswaal's web of connections is more impressive than I would have thought. That was a highly classified operation. But yes, I see there's no point in hiding it anymore. The late king sent a unit of some of his best men to stop the madman."
"And you succeeded?"
"I expected you to know that. We did, although it was a far messier operation than anyone would have expected. He was able to wield some hellish magic we had never witnessed before."
"By succeed, you mean that Petelgeuse is dead?"
"I'd say the measure of success of an assassination would require that outcome."
"Like, you killed him very hard...?"
Wilhelm narrows his eyes and takes a couple of seconds to respond.
"The state of his corpse after our success would suggest so. What are you getting at, Mr. Natsuki?"
"You know the cultist bastards are going to attempt to murder Emilia, but we've gotten data that the situation is far worse than that. We have reliable information that a significant operation of the Witch's Cult is going to hit Roswaal's mansion as soon as tomorrow, with the hope of achieving their final goal of resurrecting Satella in Emilia's body. The man leading that operation is none other than Petelgeuse Romanee-Conti."
"You might imagine that I find that hard to believe. How accurate does Roswaal's camp consider that information?"
"A hundred percent."
Wilhelm shakes his head slightly, and then he glances over the pond.
"The notion of the Witch's Cult assaulting lord Roswaal's mansion is alarming enough, yet I have yet to know a man who can pursue his goals while lacking all of his limbs and his head."
Wilhelm is your kind of guy, although you'd have probably attempted to blow up the Archbishop's corpse as well.
"Wilhelm, is it possible that Petelgeuse Romanee-Conti is a title, not the name of a single individual?"
"Interesting, but not likely. While the Witch's Cult organization is secretive, and many men have lost their lives to glean what we do know, we've gathered that they are divided into branches. Petelgeuse was the head of a branch they call Sloth. It's unlikely that the branch dissolved, but if what you imply is that his successor would take the original Petelgeuse's entire name, maybe as a way to pay homage to the madman's legacy, all I can say is that we haven't known any other cultist to act that way. If anything we know them to behave in the opposite manner: they fight for individuation, and the higher-ups even have to fear losing their seat to up-and-comers."
Your stomach churns. A single branch. So there are potentially many others, that presumably have similarly superpowered madmen leading them.
"Wilhelm, did the Petelgeuse you killed have a bowl cut of dark green hair, and look like an emaciated man, cadaveric even, in his thirties?"
Wilhelm blinks and he furrows his brow for a moment.
"He was a bearded old man with grey hair. If your information is correct, there must truly be some other cultist calling himself Petelgeuse, given how unlikely it is that they happen to have the same name."
"This bowl cut Petelgeuse is known to use an ability, an authority he calls it, named Unseen Hands. Apparently he can use a bunch of invisible, very strong hands with which he can grab people, twist their limbs off, crush their brains in, that sort of thing."
Wilhelm's eyes go wide and his mouth hangs open.
That's it, old man, you think. I have finally disarmed you.
Wilhelm lowers his head as he frowns.
"I'll locate the duchess and we'll organize a meeting in the war room. We'll send one of our staff to pick you up when we are ready."
As he was about to pass you by, he takes one last look at you.
"Thank you. For the information."

Once you've occupied your assigned armchair in the so called war room, you look at every person present: Ferris, who pretends not to be annoyed; Crusch, seated in the armchair opposite you, who looks so unapproachable and so unlike a mother in her military outfit that you want to turn away and cry; and Wilhelm, standing a few steps to your right, who is looking at you intensely as if wanting to talk as soon as possible.
"Mr. Natsuki," Crusch begins, "sir Wilhelm explained to me in general terms that your camp has a serious problem in its hands."
You notice, of course, that she assigned the problem to Roswaal's people and not to everyone here. C'mon, Crush, after I've lived with you for so long?
"That's right. The Witch's Cult is a damnable pest."
Crusch smiles softly, and you can tell that she's containing herself because of the formal setting.
"Couldn't have put it better myself. I'm surprised, though, that the official representative of Roswaal's camp isn't present. Wouldn't you and miss Rem have approached us together in these circumstances?"
"Before I dared interrupt Wilhelm's training, I asked Rem to locate and bring over someone who should attend this meeting as well."
"Ah... Intriguing. Should we wait until they come, then?"
"No, I think we should put everything on the table as soon as possible. To summarize the situation, we have reliable information that several units led by a certain Petelgeuse Romanee-Conti, Archbishop of Sloth, are going to assault Roswaal's mansion and murder everybody in it, particularly Emilia, because she will likely die in the process of them performing their deranged ritual in order to reincarnate their beloved Satella, who doesn't give a shit about them, by the way. That ghost has lost her mind and got stuck in a way worse loop than any I've gone through. It's pitiful, really. In addition, the cultists are also going to assault the village closest to the mansion and murder everyone in it, because as we all know, they're complete cowards who'd rather kill defenseless people than fight fair."
"Do we know how many units?", Wilhelm asks.
"I believe the exact words we must rely on are 'enough, hidden in the forest', the forest being the one that surrounds most of the mansion's grounds. We also know the location of Petelgeuse's unit in particular: they are using a cave opened in a cliff wall somewhat deep into the forest. It takes a bit of walking to reach it, but we can get there."
"That is good," Wilhelm says, lowering his voice and seeming to think. "Very good."
"Sir Wilhelm, have you heard the term Fingers being used by any of the cultists?"
The old man quickly looks at you, and a glint of respect flashes in his eyes. It makes you proud; apparently you seek the admiration of the guy who has little qualms about causing you serious internal bleeding. At least you'd prefer he didn't think of you as a complete idiot.
"Indeed, by Petelgeuse himself. We attempted to figure out the exact meaning, but I didn't receive any news on that front. We thought it was likely the Witch's Cult term for each unit's leader. However, we have never known other branches to refer to them that way. Maybe Sloth uses that term exclusively." You were about to comment on his words when you realized that he was considering whether to continue. "Mr. Natsuki, did Roswaal figure out what category of magic does this so called Unseen Hands belong to? It was a mystery without an answer, one I'm eager to solve."
"I don't think it's magic at all. Petelgeuse... It seems that the madman believed it to be a blessing granted to him by Satella herself. Whether or not that's true..."
Crusch opened her mouth to speak, but someone knocked on the door and announced that Rem had arrived. Your heartbeat quickens. When the door opens, the demon servant enters. She's holding her hands behind her back as she offers you a smile. It seems that everything went fine.
After Rem, Anastasia Hoshin enters the war room. She's wearing her fur coat and fur hat, both white as snow. She's accompanied by the tiny, orange half-beast Mimi, who holds a staff taller than herself.
"My, what a stuffy atmosphere", the royal candidate says in her easygoing way. "This military bent. I'd say I'm mostly used to meetings around round tables."
Without a place to sit, Anastasia and her bodyguard stand close to Ferris, whose face suggests she'd rather be doing her nails or something, and Rem stands by your side.
"You are one of the last people I would have expected to meet today, miss Hoshin", Crusch says with some wariness.
"Well, I made the acquaintance of miss Rem only recently. Lovely girl, very polite manners. I had thought Roswaal's camp would remain unapproachable, hidden in what I imagine to be a wonderland of magic. Best library of magical books in the kingdom, I heard? Things seem to be changing, and both you and I have reasons to approach the matter of this Witch's Cult attack as partners, or at least not as opponents."
Crusch stares at you while trying a smile.
"Mr. Natsuki, you are a man full of surprises. You haven't, however, thought of adding baroness Barielle to our peculiar affairs, right?"
You suddenly want to cross your legs, although you contain yourself by shifting on the armchair.
"I'd prefer to walk on my feet rather than eat them."
Anastasia Hoshin chuckles against her palm, although Crusch doesn't seem to have gotten it.
"Miss Hoshin, are you planning on adding military force against the Witch's Cult?", Crusch asks with disbelief. "I fail to see what benefit you would gain from it."
"I could say that the perspective of wiping out an entire branch of the infamous Witch's Cult, a terrible bunch who have launched terror attacks in my very own native country, would be enough incentive. Would look fantastic for my prospects as a royal candidate, would it not? However, you know me well enough to know that it wouldn't be enough. No, it turns out that Roswaal was seeking to make alliances, and he had juicy trades to offer."
Early on, as you and Rem were arguing about what possibly could you offer Crusch, or whoever else, as incentives for mobilizing some of their forces to defend one of their political opponents, Rem opened up about her main purpose in the capital. After you had told her you loved her, it seems that Rem was eager to reveal any possible secret that you would want to know, whether it belonged to her or anyone else. Clown extraordinaire Roswaal had chosen Rem, of all people, as his emissary for securing alliances that could defend his domain from the inevitable ire that having presented a silver-haired half-elf at the royal summons would provoke. You love Rem as much as any person can love a demon, which turns out is a fuckton, but let's face it, Rem's at her best when she needs to flail through a bunch of enemies, or sacrifice her own life for those, or the single person, she cares about. She's not a negotiator nor does she care about those matters. It's just another in the long series of examples that suggest that the clown bastard has no clue about what he's doing. The guy is probably an incompetent rich boy who inherited his mansion from his father, who maybe was also an idiot and got the mansion from his own father.
"Mining rights", Anastasia says with a smile.
"Are you telling me that lord Roswaal is finally opening that treasure-trove? He's going to allow others to extract from the reserves of magic crystals in his domain?"
"And we are opening them for you as well if you so wish, miss Karsten", Rem says.
Crusch nods as she rubs her chin.
"It seems that the mysterious lord Roswaal has put backing the half-elf candidate above pretty much any other concern."
"You've spoken with the guilds yourself", Anastasia says, "Many suggest we are on the verge of an industrial revolution with crystal-powered machines at the center of it all. If he wanted, Roswaal could have cornered the market thanks to his family's ancestral position. He could make a tremendous fortune. And yet, for some reason, the half-elf is more important."
Yeah, because the guy is a fucking clown, you think.
Crusch turns to you as you were picking lint off your shirt.
"Mr. Natsuki, was your plan then was for me to lend you my military retinue, as well as some of Hoshin's apparently, in order to crush the cultists when they attack some time tomorrow? And you wanted to convince me by granting me mining rights?"
"Yes...?"
"It would have been a hard sell for me even then, given that I'm very wary about marching my forces into an opponent's domain. That doesn't look good at all. However, I assume that Rem's position as emissary will smooth out any possible diplomatic issues?"
"Of course, miss Karsten", Rem says with a pleasant smile.
"Still, Mr. Natsuki, why did you assume that I have my army ready? I don't recall ever mentioning anything in that regard."
"The traffic going in and out of your mansion's grounds and other nearby buildings of yours. You know, hauling metal to blacksmiths, returning weapons and armor, that kinda thing. It doesn't look like the movement for an army that is standing down."
Crusch takes a couple of seconds to disguise her surprise, and then she looks you over as if she had never met you before.
"Mr. Natsuki, with all due respects, who are you?"
You don't like her looking at you like that. It's me, Crusch, you want to tell her. You gave birth to me, I fed from your beautiful breasts for a few years longer than it was reasonable. But Emilia's face flashes in your mind for a moment, from back in the clearing, when she had also asked you who you were as if you had been lying to her all along. Your mood sours.
"Ah... I understand that I was introduced to you lot as the idiot who insulted the council from the crowd, who then stepped forward into the line of royal candidates to piss on your parade, steal the spotlight, that kind of thing. And I did, of course. Plenty of silly shit leaked out of my mouth. I'm young, a bit of a hothead, and a bunch of idiots were insulting someone I'm very fond of. They were also insulting her for reasons she has no control over. I wanted to deflect their attention to someone who can take the abuse. I'm used to pain, and I even derive pleasure from it to a certain extent. My point is that maybe I was never as dumb as I look, and there are advantages in people seeing you that way."
Ferris stifles a laugh, and Wilhelm has closed his eyes and is looking down with a soft smile in his otherwise hard face.
You want to sigh. Seems like the bluff worked. Sorry to all present, you wish you could admit, but in reality you are as dumb as they come. You'll treat Satella extra nice the next time you are forced to pay attention to her unearned love.
You turn to Mimi, who is looking at some debris stuck in her soles.
"What do you say, Mimi? Can we count on the Iron Fang?"
The mostly orange half-beast's big eyes beam, and her ears twitch.
"I met you before, mister? I don't remember!"
"Ah... You are famous for your love of explosions. That tiny girl from the Iron Fang who explodes people, they said."
Mimi giggles, and then throws her hands in the air.
"Yeah! I love it! I shout my booms at the bad guys and they explode. Big splashes on the walls! Then everybody is happy with Mimi."
"Yes, that's right."
You feel a cold sweat on the back of the neck, and you make a note to interact with this creature as little as possible.
"Not to deflate our tiny Mimi," Anastasia says, "but you'll give orders to the Iron Fang's captain, Ricardo Welkin. Quite the character! I look forward to what he'll have to say about your command once that branch of the cult is done and gone."
I'm going to command a mercenary band, you think. Even Crusch's soldiers. You don't have any qualifications. Are these people nuts? Don't they realize who they are lending their power to?
As if sensing your nervousness, you feel Rem's fingers touching yours. Can't puss out at this point, you think. Worst case scenario, you die horribly.
You clear your throat.
"We need to act really quick. The average trip to Roswaal's domains from the capital takes around a day and a half, if you aren't pushing the dragons. Is that right? So we'll either need to move through the slow route or through Flugel Road, the one with the big tree, right?"
"We aren't working with your average ground dragons", Anastasia says, checking something on a map that Ferris is holding for her. "We'll pick tough, fast beasts."
You lower your head as the events you experienced travelling that night through Flugel Road run through your mind. At least those merchants and travellers are alive. Hell, Otto Suwen will be drinking himself into oblivion next to that campfire whether you run into them or not.
"We'll take Flugel Road", Crusch says, and Ferris withdraws the map.
You shiver. You hope that nobody was paying too much attention to you.
"Shit, we better be sure we run ahead of that mist then, or we are whale food."
You suddenly feel most of the eyes on you as if you had just farted, or mentioned Satella in public for that matter. You hear someone's soles creaking as they shift their weight.
"... We'd be tremendously unlucky if this night, of all, the White Whale decided to make an appearance right on our route", Crusch says.
"If I've learned anything, and I haven't learned that much from all I've gone through to be honest, is that the only thing you can be sure of is that life will insist on shitting on you. And unfortunately the White Whale, that god-tier, people-erasing monster, will appear for sure on Flugel Road. Mist will cover a few kilometers, people who enter the mist end up disappearing from others' memories, all that kind of garbage."
Anastasia chuckles nervously, and then she looks at you from above as if you brought up a nasty topic during Christmas dinner.
"Nobody knows when the White Whale appears. That's part of its thing, isn't it? If we did, we could attempt to hunt it properly, which could end up freeing us from such a horrible obstacle for trade."
"And, most importantly," says Crusch, hardening her voice. "avenging the many, many people, citizens of our kingdom or otherwise, that this horrid beast has eaten, erasing them from the world."
"Of course, of course! Hundreds of thousands of lives have been affected for hundreds of years."
"So, Mr. Natsuki," Crusch says, turning her frown towards you, "what is this about the whale appearing for sure on Flugel Road tonight? Why would you be so certain?"
You want to swallow your stale saliva. You hope that nobody that the various gazes fixed on you belong to realizes how much heat is escaping your body. You hadn't predicted this, and you need to make up a lie on the spot. Or you could just run away while shouting incoherently and later on throw yourself off that roof to start all over again.
"It's kind of a new thing. Lord Roswaal somehow managed to figure out the exact dates when the whale was going to appear, and as far as he told us, it has been successful a hundred percent of the times."
"Really?", Crusch says with a neutral tone.
"Must be due to his enormous library of magical books. The guy is one shady fucker. You never know what he knows, and he keeps surprising you with the wildest shit. So that's what he told us, that in this night we shouldn't travel through that area because of the damn whale."
"That's beyond interesting. I wonder if the cultists knew this as well and used it as a cover, because the traffic towards Roswaal's domains would have either slowed down or completely stopped after certain hours of the night. Miss Rem, lord Roswaal told you as well, right? You must have spoken with him more recently, given that Mr. Natsuki has been technically exiled from his camp."
You look up at Rem, who stands by your side, while a bead of hot sweat slides down your temple. I'm sorry, Rem.
The demon servant takes a few seconds to respond.
"That's right." She says calmly. "I was the one who informed Subaru about it."
You want to cry. This girl would deceive the entire world as long as it helped you in any minimal way, or even if you just asked her to. Next time we are alone I'm going to eat you out so hard, you think.
As you were about to verbally support your personal demon, the atmosphere shifts, and it seems as if some dark energy is burning to your right. Everybody's heads turn to Wilhelm, who is staring at both you and Rem as if you've just threatened to murder his parents.
"Wilhelm, w-what's up?", you say with a thin voice.
"Does lord Roswaal's information include the exact time of when the demonic beast is going to appear?"
Rem looks at you, but you've just bitten your lower lip. She gazes back at Wilhelm with a calm expression.
"I'm afraid that the prophetic information that our great spirit librarian has learned only includes both the general area and the general time. Nothing as precise as the specific time, nor the particular stretch of a road."
You close your eyes tight. If Beatrice finds out, she's going to flip out.
"I see. It's not good enough for tonight, given the nefarious operation we need to neutralize. However, I'm sure that lord Roswaal is aware of my need to destroy that demonic beast. Despite us being opponents in the technical sense, it seems to me a human flaw to deprive me of such opportunities."
"That clown just keeps disappointing everybody, I hear you...", you say with a shaky voice.
This is bad. Maybe when all this is over you'll need to travel around the kingdom, venture into any mist you find, get eaten by the whale, and then report back to Wilhelm just to keep your story straight.
"Anyway, Wilhelm, what is your beef with that whale?", you dare ask.
Crusch lets out a noise through her mouth.
"Wilhelm, you don't hav-", Crusch begins to say.
"The White Whale, that witch-created curse that has plagued both our kingdom and our neighbors for hundreds of years, slayed my wife, Thearesia van Astrea, former Sword Saint."
All of you stare at Wilhelm for a few seconds as the man, despite not moving a muscle nor changing his usual serious expression, burns from inside out.
"I see how you'd be pissed", you say, lowering your voice.
"Ever since I've only lived to annihilate that demonic beast."
"So... you figure that you are going to stick around Flugel Road tonight and see where the mist pops up."
Wilhelm lowers his head, and then sighs almost imperceptibly.
"That wouldn't do. There's a very short window of opportunity from the moment the White Whale manifests high in the air from whatever Hell it calls its home, and once the creature descends, it doesn't take it much time to spew mist from the myriad of mouths that open along its foul body until the entire area becomes the whale's hunting ground. Once the mist has set in, anyone who ventures into it will be lucky to escape with his life."
"That's unfo-", you begin to say.
"I'm afraid I'm going to live through another night in which I do nothing but further my shame."
"I get you. I know plenty about that. Sorry to hear that, Wilhelm."
Wilhelm lowers his head and everybody waits in complete silence until he raises it again.
"Excuse my outburst." Wilhelm says with a deep voice that only those who've known him for a while know that it betrays his usual stoicism. "Tomorrow we will erase from this world the stain that an entire branch of the Witch's Cult represents. That is enough."

Thankfully you aren't in charge of the logistics machinery. Anastasia and her scary bodyguard departed to wherever the Iron Fang hang out these days, in order to mobilize them so they would join up with Crusch's people along Flugel Road. After you took a few minutes in the privacy of your assigned bedroom to kneel before Rem and thank her properly for her support, you've been wandering around the yard and looking at the numerous carriages, troops, haulers and ground dragon handlers that move around. Crusch's mansion staff are helping, and you've caught Crusch a couple of times as she supervised everything.
You haven't seen Rem for a while. You were standing near the pond where you've gotten beaten up to a pulp numerous times, when Ferris of all people walks up towards you. She's wearing a travelling robe with her hood down, but underneath she's wearing black tights that accentuate her bubbly cat-girl butt. She reminds you of one of those girl bikers you'd see from time to time having stopped on a traffic light, and upon noticing how her ass rested on the seat, you'd wonder how far her legs could bend. As you think this, you remember that you haven't even brushed your teeth since you met in private with your Rem.
Anyway, this broad is staring at you as if she intends to reproach you something you have no control over.
"Doing good, cat girl?", you ask.
"I hope you know what you are doing, Mr. Natsuki."
"You don't trust me, Ferris?"
"Hard to trust the commanding ability of someone who has cried so much over a few broken bones."
"H-Hey, that Wilhelm is a demon. You would have cried too!"
She looks to the side, as if looking for Crusch amongst the increasing crowd near the gate.
"These are good people. You have your camp and I have mine, but these people have families and dreams. The lady is good person, a fair duchess, and the future ruler of this kingdom, not to mention my best friend since we were children. If you think about giving up in the middle of it, or you fuck up bad because you were never ready for this, I'll have you know that healing someone implies messing with their magic gate. After I touch a person for the first time, whenever I touch them again it's barely an effort to increase the temperature of their blood until it boils. That'd be a justification to cry from pain."
"What the fuck!? What about your Hippocratic Oath!?"
"I never belonged to any order", she says as she turns away. She walks towards the crowd with her hands in the pockets of her robe, and after a few steps she looks over her shoulder. "Quit staring. It's creepy."
Some minutes later you were feeling so useless that you began to wander around the busy haulers as if you were actually contributing. You notice a figure standing near a line of ground dragons that are waiting as in an auction, and in less than a second you feel that the person is one of the coolest in the world. It's none other than the most awesome duchess, who now is wearing a shiny breastplate, pauldrons and gauntlets over her military uniform. A fancy, expensive looking sword hangs from her belt, and a red cape waves in the slight wind. She has also collected her green hair in a ponytail. She's like a fantasy world action hero.
As you approach her, you feel undeserving of doing so.
"You look as if you are going to defeat the Demon King."
Crusch looks over to you and smiles.
"Hopefully this Archbishop of yours won't give us headaches that bad." She puts her hands on her hip and gazes at the formation of troops preparing themselves near the open gates. "We'll head out in no time."
"Listen, Crusch... There's a chance that this all will work and I will never wake up again in one of your beds. I want you to know that you are the best mother I could ever wish for."
The duchess makes a surprised noise. She arches an eyebrow and offers you a smile of disbelief.
"Of all the things that could have come out of your mouth... I guess I did serve that role to a certain extent. I didn't prepare your breakfast, nor your meal, nor clean your clothes, nor make your bed, but my staff did. And I let you stay for free."
"You are also running to become the mother of this entire kingdom."
She looks up at the sky as if thinking about it.
"I'd prefer my subjects to be more independent than that, but I get what you mean. By the way, I didn't want to bring it up in the war room, but your words about your public outburst at the royal summons don't properly explain what happened there, nor the change I see in you from the broken man I found that day in the rain. Was the person that stands before me now underneath all along?"
"My dear duchess, it took gulping down tons of the best wine, and losing my head like a hundred fifty times, for me to finally snap the fuck out of it. But now I know what needs to be done. I don't want to get stuck in a loop anymore."
After she thinks about it, she looks satisfied with whatever conclusion she's reached. She offers you a hand and you are eager to shake it.
"You have been an unruly, unpredictable child, but as your mother, I'll fight the world for you."
Your breath thickens, and you feel tingles all over. You hope your hand that holds Crusch's hasn't begun to sweat.
"Yeah, I've been a bad boy, Crusch. You can say that again..."
Crusch tilts her head as her lips separate slowly. You take your hand back.
"Ah... Well, I hope we meet again, duchess. If we don't, I'll keep you in my thoughts."
"But I'm coming with you! I'm all dressed up and everything."
You avert your gaze.
"This is beyond awkward, then."
Crusch laughs. She puts a hand on your shoulder and then walks away. Her cape hits you in the face.
As you were walking up and down the line of ground dragons and staring them down to the extent that they were probably questioning what the fuck you were doing, someone hugs you from the side. You can tell it's Rem by her smell.
"How's my lovely man doing?", she asks with a sweet voice. "Here, for your breath."
She stuffs a couple of mints in your damn mouth. Then she grabs your arm and as she rests her head on your shoulder she makes you walk towards the first ground dragon of the line.
"Have you decided on one? You can pick whichever."
"I don't know shit about ground dragons. They look terrifying."
"Oh come on. I'm not asking you to fondle them", she says playfully. "Just choose whichever feels right."
As you were walking down the line, a ground dragon leans forward and licks the side of your face. The long tongue is so rough that for a moment you feel as if your cheek has been flayed. You stare at the dragon, that has black scales except for its brown chest and belly. Its bright orange eyes look at you with a fondness you've done nothing to earn.
"Yeah, this one", you say. "Any stranger that licks me without my consent is good enough for me."
"What will you name her?"
"A female? And she licks me first? She must be crazy then. I love it! You are henceforth named Patrasche."
"How come?"
"No clue."

Roleplaying through "Re:Zero" with the GPT-3 story generator (Part 17)

This part, like the previous one, covers a small portion of the sixth volume of the original Re:Zero series, but this part finishes covering that volume.

This entry continues the protagonist's downward spiral as he's attempting to integrate his horrifying past failures, as well as all the hurt that's going around. I thought this was going to become a hard one to write, but I ended up having a tremendous amount of fun, and in the end it's one of my favorite parts of this strange AI-fueled roleplaying/retelling thing.

GPT-3 is a cutting-edge language processing algorithm used in the premium version of the online site AI Dungeon.

-Link for part 1
-Link for part 2
-Link for part 3
-Link for part 4
-Link for part 5
-Link for part 6
-Link for part 7
-Link for part 8
-Link for part 9
-Link for part 10
-Link for part 11
-Link for part 12
-Link for part 13
-Link for part 14
-Link for part 15
-Link for part 16

You know at what moment of that first morning Rem comes. And you've learned that for the two days you can avoid meeting her, even when someone from Crusch's camp attempts to send a message for you because the demon servant keeps asking. If you wanted, you could keep repeating these two days indefinitely and never have to face her again.
How could you face Rem, someone who truly matters to you? You feel locked inside yourself, detached from the course of your emotions as if the nerves that kept you connected to some vital core had been severed. You aren't a person anymore. How could you face Rem, when you failed, when you have failed every day of your life? How could you feel like you deserve to be looked at by someone who loves you, who gave her life for you? She should forget you. In truth, she should have never met you. She should find someone else who could measure up to her.
And yet, you are sick of asphyxiating that part of yourself. Even if you don't deserve Rem for a second, you want little else than to grab her in your arms and keep her tightly attached to you forever.
You've been standing outside of Crusch's mansion, next to the path to the front gate, for so long, and looking so shady and nervous, that Ferris has attempted to interrogate you twice about what the hell you were doing. And then, Rem appears. She asks the guard to open the gate, and begins to walk up towards the entrance. She has locked her gaze on you from the moment she saw you. She's her usual pretty faced, blue-haired maid self, wielding a sweet smile that in truth hides how little she cares for her own self, how eager she is to find meaning in sacrificing her existence for someone she cares about.
"Wha-?"
Her voice quivers in surprise when she finds that she is suddenly pulled into a tight embrace by you. She's taken aback by this sudden act of aggression, but soon she returns your hug.
You feel excited and joyous like a little kid in Christmas. For a second you fear hugging her too tightly, but then again she's far stronger than you.
"You are needed and wanted," you say, almost breathless, "and there's nobody who can occupy your space. I'm glad you exist."
She stares at you with her mouth open, her eyes moistening. You smooch her all over, which makes her shiver. She makes a show of touching you lightly in the back as if to tell you that's enough, but without any effort.
"N-N-Natsuki Subaru, did you wake up that warm? Not that I'm complaining", Rem says.
"I couldn't wait anymore to see you."
"Oh." Rem's face turns very red. "... For some special reason?"
You nod. Then you take her head in your hands and kiss her deeply. Her tongue reacts to yours before the rest of her body does. Her eyes widen, and she plunges her hands into your hair. After a moment you break the kiss, leaving her mouth slightly open and her head tilted upwards.
"Rem, let's make love right here, now, in front of Crusch's mansion. I'll kiss and lick all over that beautiful body of yours, I'll eat you out until you come in my mouth, and then I'll get into that pussy of yours and shoot so far inside of you that it will come out of your mouth and into my own."
Rem's face is so red you can barely tell her original skin color. She's trembling, breathing heavy, her eyes are sparkling, and from her wavering lips escapes something like 'ooouoooouoh'.
"Hey!", a female voice shouts from the door. Must be Ferris. "Don't sully our lady's yard with your animalistic impulses!"
You move your head to the side so the cat girl can hear you properly.
"I'll sully anywhere I damn well please. You can stay and look, Ferris, while you play with yourself. And Crusch can oversee our performance while she sips on her wine."
Crusch's voice sounds from right beside Ferris.
"I don't drink wine this early in the morning. Besides, you do have a bedroom assigned. Go inside, then. The neighbors shouldn't pry into affairs like these."
You grab Rem's warm hand and guide her inside. As Ferris and the duchess move aside, you thank the lady of the house.
"H-Hey!", Ferris complains.
Crusch shakes her head slightly, with an amused smile on her lips.
"I'll tell the staff not to approach that area of the mansion for a while."
"You are the queen of this kingdom, as far as I'm concerned", you say.
Ferris is hunched over, clenching her fists at her sides and glaring at you with indignation as her fur bristles.
"But lady, this is too much!"
Crusch shrugs, and then she moves towards another room.
"It's nice to see people in a good mood these days."
"Alright, cat girl, I expect you to pay attention", you state as you lead Rem to your bedroom.
Once you've entered and closed the door behind you both, you move to the space in front of the foot of the bed and turn to Rem. The demon servant is hunched over, her eyes are glazed, she's grinning and breathing hard through her mouth. You open your mouth to speak and step forward only for Rem to leap onto you, which makes you lose the air in your lungs, and you land on your back in the bed with the demon servant over you. One of the bed's legs has broken. Rem rips your shirt apart while her warm tongue invades your mouth. You wrap your arms around her, pulling her into you, then you try to tear her maid outfit off, but find that the demon servant's clothing has magically sealed itself back together. Must be part of the bullshit that makes it so she can hide a gigantic flail in some pocket. You groan and continue to kiss Rem, as she begins to fondle you with passionate desperation and rubs her crotch against your painful erection. You grab her ass under the skirt of her maid outfit. You find out that you can lower her panties. She doesn't take her tongue out of your mouth as she maneuvers quickly so she gets a leg out of her underwear. When her pussy hair presses against the head of your dick, you feel as if you are going to come right then and there.
Along with the sound of Rem breathing hard, you realize that the weird mouth noises escape from yourself.
Someone knocks on a wall close to your room.
"Hey!", the irate tone of the resident cat-girl reaches you muffled. "At least keep it down!"
Rem separates her mouth from yours as she sits on your crotch, drenching it with her juices. You keep her in place holding her tight ass. In Rem's eyes flashes a hunger, a need to possess you whole, and in her open mouth, from her glistening Oni fangs hang growing drops of something like saliva.
Your dick gets even harder.
"Oh, man... Fuck yeah, Rem! Suck me dry! Turn my veins inside out!"
Rem embraces you tight and licks your neck up and down with most of the surface of her warm tongue. You tremble.
"Tell me what you want and I'll do it", you think it's what she murmurs.
She embraces you harder, she slides your dick inside of her drenched pussy, and almost at the same time her jaw tightens around your throat and her fangs punch through. After the initial shiver of pain, you taste your own blood and you feel that whatever amount of it hasn't gone down to your dick is surging to the holes in your neck due to Rem's rhythmic sucking. Along with the feeling of her vaginal muscles milking you, a whiteness overwhelms your vision. You drive the tip of your nails into Rem's ass cheeks. This must be heaven. The angels are coming.
Your throat hurts more and more as Rem's jaw closes tighter, like a vice. Something creaks for a few seconds, and then, with a sharp pain, it cracks. Blood rushes down your throat and into your lungs. The area behind your nose burns, and you cough and cough. Rem sucks deeper, and then everything goes white and you cum so hard inside of Rem that you feel as if your entire self has burst through your dick. When you finish you can only see white, and you can't feel anything under your waist.
"Oh no! No, no, no!", Rem's voice comes as if you were submerged in water.
Her weight shifts over you. You feel her palms and her fingers touching your throat and pushing against areas that produce a burning pain. Something warm is dripping on your face. Her weight leaves the bed and you hear her fast steps towards the door, then the door opening. Rem's distant voice calls out for Ferris.
Your body is tingling all over. Your lungs are full of blood, and you don't try to breathe anymore. You move your fingers in the blinding whiteness as if your beloved Rem had remained in the room, to calm her and tell her, if you could still speak, to stay with you in the happiest moment of your life.

After Satella pushes you out of her warm oven, you return to the same bed, where you were lying on your back almost in the same position you had been around three or four minutes ago. The moonlight bathes you from the half-closed window, and the mansion is quiet. Hell, you actually fucking died.
You breathe deeply while your body keeps tingling. You need Rem's everything in and on and around you. You just lay there as the echoes of what you've just experienced swirl in you. Before you know it, your erection is pulsating, and you feel as if the skin of your dick is going to rip open. As you slide your right hand under the sheets, you figure that technically in this lifetime you haven't taken care of yourself in a while.

You are staring at how the few clouds drift in the wide open sky, and you enjoy the lightness that both the alcohol and the water provide for you. As you take another gulp of wine, forcing it to pass through your mostly horizontal digestive system, someone's head appears upside down in your field of view. It's Wilhelm's old, white-haired and mustachioed face.
"What's up, man?", you say.
He takes a couple of seconds to open his mouth.
"The lady asked me to speak to you. She fears that we are witnessing a mental break of some sort."
"Oh, c'mon."
Wilhelm looks you over. He arches an eyebrow, which wrinkles half of his forehead.
"Mr. Natsuki, you have stolen one of the most valuable wine bottles in the duchess' personal wine cellar, and while fully dressed you are lying up to your chest in filthy pond water. A duck keeps biting the soles of your shoes. I hope that verbalizing your current actions and situation contributes to bringing you back to your senses."
"This is fine. Sir Wilhelm, what would you say is the quickest and most painless way to kill oneself?"
Wilhelm narrows his eyes, and his voice gets stern.
"That's a... troubling line of questioning, Mr. Natsuki."
"Some time ago I found a public building a few streets from here. They built the fence that surrounds it with a fancy design on top added to its anti-tresspass measures. It makes it so when you jump from the roof as if you were falling onto a bed, with your arms at your sides, it's easy to pass your head through a part of the fence's design, which locks your head in place as if going on rails. Then the anti-tresspass measure, sharp metallic stuff, along with the wonderful power of gravity, slices your head clean off. And turns out your consciousness survives for some seconds! You can play at how far you land, or if you even hit someone. But you gotta do it right, you know? You don't want to end up a vegetable, that'd fuck everything up."

You rest on your elbow while with your free hand you slide your fingers over the toned abdomen, beaded with sweat, of the demon servant lying next to you in bed. She's been out for a couple of minutes. You listen to her soft breathing until she comes to her senses.
"I think I passed out, I..." When she notices you are lying next to her, the recent memories must have come in a flood, because she smiles warmly and then she hugs you tight, pressing her sweet demon breasts against your torso.
"Subaru, that was my first time, you know that?"
"Hmm."
Technically yes. And she has never failed once to say a variation of the same fact.
"Everywhere and everywhen you touched me, Subaru," she says with a soft, warm voice, "you knew how to make me shiver and twist from pleasure to pleasure. I had no idea my body could produce such happiness. How is it possible that anyone else has this control over me?"
"It's rarely like that, though. Don't go thinking that all the other men out there would perform that well."
"You don't have to worry about that." She stares into your eyes as if she dared not to blink while doing so. "You're so kind to me. You make me feel safe. You make me feel happy. It's like... I don't know... It's like we're one person rather than two."
Pretty generic stuff, but it still makes a fire burn in your heart. You understand what you never had before. When you are with Rem, the rest of the world doesn't matter. You might as well travel to the uncharted wilderness on the hunt for some fantasy world monster or some similar garbage; as long as Rem is right next to you, you are always home. It's like a turtle, you have transformed into a turtle.
Rem is making purring sounds while she smears your own liquids on your thigh with her wet pussy hair.
"It makes me so happy...", she keeps saying. "But in turn I felt clumsy when touching you. I wasn't quite sure what to do."
"Doesn't matter, Rem. I came really hard as usual, and now we are cuddling in bed. I have all I need in this world, or in any other."
"As usual...?", she asks.
"Ah... From the many times I've thought about cuddling this way with you, ever since we met in the mansion."
Your clumsy lie satisfies her, because she caresses your chest and you feel her warm breath in your ear. She licks it as in a trance.
One of the things you love the most about Rem's contact it's that it erases your brain. It prevents you from having to think, having to remember. Alcohol helps too. And yet some images you don't want to see now intrude in your thoughts, as if your brain is insisting that you pay attention to them.
"Rem... Do you know what I used to dread the most in my previous world?"
"You can tell me anything and I'll do it", Rem whispers.
"It was something as insignificant as a clock. In particular the clock that hung back at my parent's place, in my room, on the wall opposite to my bed. One of those classical round clocks, the cheap ones probably made in China. Every morning I used to wake up at seven in the morning. I was supposed to take a shower, dress myself, grab my backpack and leave for school. But every morning, every morning of my entire life as it felt back then, I sat on the floor near my bed and stared at the hands of the clock move from seven and a half forwards, second by second, minute by minute, as it approached eight, the moment I needed to be in class. My heart beat so loud, I felt it in my throat. Got dizzy at times. Every day I thought, is today going to be it? Would I find the strength that morning to leave the house, walk for fifteen minutes to my high school, and face the retribution and shame and the mockery that awaited me because I had failed at life for so long? The churning in my stomach, the nausea, the pain... It killed me. But I let it pass. I witnessed the hands move until I only had around ten minutes to grab my stuff and run like a madman to the school grounds. I could still make it if I had the strength. But every day I witnessed the hands move past eight. Then came relief. I could no longer appear in class after a long absence. Coming late on your first day back? That's ridiculous. So it couldn't be helped! Then I dressed myself and walked slowly down the steps with my head down. I sat down to eat breakfast in front of my parents, who did their best effort to pretend they weren't disappointed. I guess they expected me to come back to my senses and live like a normal human being. They weren't in my head... They didn't know how impossible that was for me. I couldn't face it. There was a whole world out there I wasn't born to face. These days I've thought of that clock a whole lot."
You hadn't realized that Rem was no longer lying with her mouth on your ear. She was resting on an elbow while looking at you with understanding eyes. You feel your heart beat louder, and you swallow to clear your throat.
"That's... a whole lot", Rem says.
"I'm sorry. I didn't mean to confuse you."
Your heart pounds louder and louder against your ribcage. Sweat drips down your back as Rem looks at you with those glistening eyes.
"After I ate breakfast, I hurried up to my room, locked myself up, and then read manga, listened to music, watched videos. I can't think of any day when I didn't entertain myself the same way. There was no end to those days, they seemed as if they were going to continue for the rest of my life. But they would have continued up to a point when I wouldn't be prepared to deal with what life would throw at me. And if these two days had continued, each of those times, the least troublesome thing that would have happened is that I would have ended up siring a classroom full of children. A few, really. It's so comfortable lying like this with you, Rem. I don't have to go to school, I don't have to work. I can enjoy myself during the same two days forever. What do the few seconds of excruciating pain at the end of the period matter, when I realize again, and again, that I have failed one more time to reach the mansion and do what I was not born to do?"
Your breathing gets dense, and something burns behind your eyes. Rem looks at you as if she's trying to understand but she doesn't know how to, and when you avert your gaze, she rests her forehead on yours. Her light blue hair smells good.
"Why do I need to keep thinking about that? What am I to do? I am useless. I can't make anyone understand. Nobody wants to listen to me. It was a mistake for me to come here... Or to even have existed at all."
"I am glad that you exist, Subaru."
You sniffle, and make your best effort to prevent your voice from breaking.
"When I close my eyes I keep seeing her... face. The shock, the regret, the disappointment of having given her trust to someone who had never deserved it. For her entire life she had closed herself off to a world that would never accept her, but she had opened up to me. She had believed that I was the one who would stay by her side, even if nobody else would in this whole wide world. She believed I was worth it, but I-..."
Your voice breaks into sobbing, and although you force your throat to close, you keep letting sounds out while your chest convulses. You cross your forearm over your eyes.
"There's nothing out there but pain", you say as you fight to keep your breath in. "Everything hurts, everything bleeds, all the time. But her pain... That's my fault."

You wait for Rem in front of Crusch's mansion's gate. You never found out where she comes from that morning, but it doesn't matter when you know that she arrives when you expect her to. As she approaches you, wearing the same maid outfit and the same warm smile you've stared at so many times, this time she doesn't cross the mansion's ground's threshold.
"Good morning, Natsuki Subaru!", Rem says. "You have a curious fire in your eyes. I gather the treatment is going well?"
You grab her hand, which surprises her and makes it harder for her to hold your gaze.
"Rem, we are going to take a walk and speak about something important. I'm sorry this comes out of nowhere for you."
She doesn't answer. You start to drag her along with you, and she follows. You both march in silence for a while, but after almost ten minutes of this, Rem speaks with some concern.
"Subaru, were you thinking of some particular place? I don't have issues talking with you in private anywhere."
"Gotta be the right place."
"Was it some place you've been in before? You'll probably have a hard time finding it, given that you can't read directions..."
"It needs to be some place new. I'll know it when I see it."
Maybe thirty five minutes after you left Crusch's place, you both follow some stairs up to an elevated plaza near the ruins of some old important looking building made out of stone, maybe belonging to a past civilization. It offers a beautiful view of the surrounding streets of Lugunica, including a panorama of the nearby mountain, which is also half covered in streets. You had thought that maybe there would be some citizens walking their dogs on this quiet plaza, but you recall that you now live in a world where if you attempted to put a leash on a dog, he or she would yell at you, beat you up and then call the authorities.
You turn to Rem and take a deep breath of the morning's fresh air.
"This looks pretty good."
"Sure! What was it that you wanted to talk to me about?"
You step forward and put your hands on her shoulders. She looks up at you and blushes.
"Rem, I've called myself useless for my entire life. And you know what? It was true."
"It was...?"
"Yes. But then I thought... I helped someone recover their medallion, a medallion so important that they'd have to be retarded not to guard it with their lives. I befriended some of the coolest people in this fantasy world. I found out that a puppy was a demon. I broke into the royal summons and insulted a bunch of idiots. I met an awesome duchess. I got hit by an old man to the extent that I needed to be cured of serious internal bleeding. I froze to death in a rocky corridor. I called a magical flying cat a cunt a bunch of times. I got my brains crushed in by an invisible hand. I lost my oral virginity to a slave."
"What was that? What did you say...?"
"I sucked on a terrifying baroness' toes. I almost got blown up by a tiny cat girl who loves hamburgers. I avoided getting eaten by a flying whale. I stabbed an Archbishop in the heart, which technically killed him. I died in an Apocalypse. I drank through a whole wine cellar's worth of wine several times. I made love to the loveliest girl in the world like a hundred times."
"What!? Who is that!?"
"My point is that I've developed into, like, a cool dude, you know?"
Rem snaps out of her confusion. As she nods a few times, she grins and pumps her fists.
"Yes! The best!"
You grab Rem by her waist and lower your head to kiss her lips. Her eyes go all sparkly.
"Rem, I love you. Let's get married some day."
Her mouth produces an adorable noise.
"Aaah!?"
"I want to have your... I mean, you'll have my babies. Wait, can we even procreate to begin with?"
"We'll have half-demons!"
"Great! I've thought about everything. You’ll abandon your job as a servant, and with my pay as someone who doesn’t have any skills nor wants to work really, we’ll rent some small cabin to pass our days, where you’ll spend your fertile years barefoot and pregnant, pumping out half-demon babies like an assembly line, in a succession of getting your abdomen hideously deformed and then your vagina distended to such an excruciatingly painful, horrifying extent that it proves without a doubt that the nature that spat us out despises us and wants us to suffer. We’ll have so many children that they’ll literally need to sleep standing up, and everyone who knows us will think we are deranged and will work behind our backs for the authorities to take away our progeny and distribute them to numerous orphanages."
"Yes!"
As hot tears run down your cheeks, you hug Rem tightly.
"Oh, Rem... Don't ever leave me, nor slip into a magically induced coma forever."
"Never!"
You don't know for how long you both kiss while you feel on top of the world. After you both separate, you remain tethered by a viscous catenary of saliva to each other's lips.
"Rem! Let's just fu-... Nevermind, we gotta get back to Crusch's place."

Some observations on this deranged part. In the original novels, Rem is described as an Oni, which roughly translates as demon. It's a Japanese thing. As far back as the second part of this thing I'm writing, the artificial intelligence started explaining that she had fangs. As far as I recall she doesn't in the original Re:Zero. That sounded cool, so I made it canon. If it weren't for the AI, the above scene wouldn't have happened, so I have to thank the cold, unfeeling corresponding neural network for giving me that opportunity.

Most of the general idea of the protagonist's regrets about his high school years comes from the fantastic fourth arc of the original novels, which corresponds to the second season of the anime adaptation. I'd like to have come up with that, given how well it ties to the protagonist's current situation, stuck in an "Endless Eight"-like (that's an obscure reference) loop of his own choice.

Initially I had intended the protagonist to go from his failure at the mansion to what's going to begin happening in the following part. However, it didn't feel psychologically right for him. A main deal for Re:Zero has always been that despite him having the power to return back in time, he remains a guy who has to deal with the emotional and mental consequences of failing and dying so many times, and of being unable to fully communicate to others (if at all) the pains he's going through and what's to come. Close to absolute isolation. So many things have already gone a different way in this strange retelling that the protagonist's "Dark Night of the Soul" moment is completely different. In the original it's a huge deal for his development, and happens in a virtually identical setting as that last scene above (which was part of the point), and it ran in the eighteenth episode of the first season. Also, no "I love Emilia". No way I'm doing that.

Roleplaying through "Re:Zero" with the GPT-3 story generator (Part 16)

This part, like the previous one, covers a small portion of the sixth volume of the original Re:Zero series, although this is all material that doesn't appear in the original; the story has diverted quite a bit already in this strange AI-fueled roleplaying/retelling thing.

By the end of the previous part, the protagonist had experienced his biggest failure yet. He had never struggled as hard before, but everything came crashing down as if nothing he did mattered at all. Now he'll need to deal with the mental consequences of his continuous failures and the hurt he keeps causing to others, deliberately or not. I had intended for this part and the following to belong in the same entry, but I think they would grow past eight thousand words together.

GPT-3 is a cutting-edge language processing algorithm used in the premium version of the online site AI Dungeon.

-Link for part 1
-Link for part 2
-Link for part 3
-Link for part 4
-Link for part 5
-Link for part 6
-Link for part 7
-Link for part 8
-Link for part 9
-Link for part 10
-Link for part 11
-Link for part 12
-Link for part 13
-Link for part 14
-Link for part 15

You are immersed in an opaque blackness. You try to test if closing your eyes changes anything, but you can't find your eyelids. You try to move, but nothing happens, and it's not that you can't move: you can't feel your body at all. It should suck, but along with not being burdened with commanding a mecha made of a skeleton and muscles, you also seem to lack emotions like fear or pain. And the warmth that overwhelms you feels like returning to your early days of being embraced by an unconditionally loving mother. As warm as a womb. You want to stay here forever. You want to sink into the blackness and let the world turn without you.
There's a presence some distance in front of you. You feel it to be a female presence, yet you don't know how you know it. As you are thinking about her, trying to find details in the uniform blackness, two smoky hands form from nowhere. They extend towards your sides, followed by slender arms. While you feel as if you are floating closer to the source of the arms, they close around you. The tips of its smoky hands touch a back that you lack. As the presence embraces you, you distinguish the silhouette of a head with long hair, and on its upper half two hazy purple lights glow like distant lighthouses through the mist.
Despite the love that this presence exudes, you don't understand. You feel as if you are peering into a vast darkness that you will never comprehend. The child-like face of Beatrice comes to your mind, and you want to apologize. If you could feel fear at this moment, you would have discharged the contents of your bowels into the void.
You hear something. Some words emerge from the presence as in a constant prayer.
"I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I-"
"Do you hear me?", you say, or think.
The flood of her words keeps breaking all over you.
"Is this really you, Satella...? The Witch of Envy?"
"I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I lo-"
"This is all you say, I guess. All that remains of you. How much time has it been since apparently you engulfed half of the world in shadows? Four hundred years? What sanity can remain of a ghost after so much time in this darkness? Or of any living person, for that matter?"
"I love you I love you I-"
"How long do you think will it take for me to go insane? I mean if I just stick around here with you, in your loving, ghostly arms, you mass murderer."
"I love you I lov-"
"Are you something to worship? People might as well worship the sun. Heard they did that for a while."
"I love you-"
"Enough! No more! Please, just leave me be. I don't want your love. You know how much trouble you've caused? You know the lives and futures of people that you destroyed, so many stories that will never get told because of... what? And what about Emilia? Everybody who remotely resembles you will keep being hated for hundreds and hundreds of years because you ruined everything!"
"I love you I love you I love-"
As the voice continues, you try to block it out. You want to listen, but at the same time you just can't stand it. Why? Why is Satella doing this to you? But most importantly, why do you feel this unconditional love towards her despite everything you know, despite this unearned love she keeps bathing you in?
You feel that she's holding back, that she needs to embrace you further, to press your consciousness into her and integrate you, dissolve you in her. She wants everything of you, she loves everything of you. Everything you've felt, thought, she needs it inside of herself. And four hundred years ago she wouldn't have stopped if it weren't because, like the story books said, the heroes of the day put her to an end.
"You are an echo in the dark. And yet, you gave me a gift. I wonder if you even know you did. Nevertheless, I will put it to good use. You want to spread your love. I might have some of mine to spread as well."
"I love you I love you I love you I l-"
"So thank you, Witch of Envy."
A sudden silence overwhelms you. The presence has gone quiet. Although the properties of the bath of love haven't changed, if you still had a body you would feel a chill running through it.
"Natsuki Subaru", the presence says with a soft, bell-like voice.
"Ah... Yes, I am Subaru. Please tell me your name."
You wait in silence for what your consciousness interprets as a few seconds, and then...
"I love you I love you I love you I love you I l-"
"We circle back to that, huh?"
"I love you I love you I love you I love you I lo-"
"Are you a NPC? Is this fantasy world also a videogame?"
As her words keep washing over you, you feel a pull back that you recognize. As her still extended arms distance themselves from you, you feel a sudden panic that you shouldn't have been able to experience. You want to remain here. You don't want to endure pain, nor regret, nor disappointment, and there's little else waiting for you outside of this dark. But as the presence merges back into the blackness, it seems you have no choice.
"See you soon, Satella. Keep the oven warm. Not like in a sexual way."
It's like the feeling of falling while you sleep. Something solid awaits you on the other side.

You grasp at something. Sheets. You are covered by soft, warm cloth, and your head rests on a pillow. Coming like a wave splashing on the shore, you feel everything else. Pain from the bruises of some training you can't remember. Further bruises and maybe some half-broken bone from that worse beating that the captain of the Knights of Lugunica gave you because you ran your mouth. Without much effort, you can locate every part of your body. You are alive. It makes you sick.
Before you know it, you are sitting on the edge of your bed, feeling every nighttime noise from outside, as well as the moonlight that comes through the window, as intrusions. You are back at Crusch's. The last hours of your life haven't happened, and yet that's not true, is it? You retain everything in your mind. You remember pushing a dagger through Petelgeuse's ribcage. You remember your leg crumbling into bits. You remember...
Barely dressed and barefoot, you step into the darkened corridor. After you stand in place for a few seconds, your mind blank, you head to Crusch's bedroom. You open the door and in the little moonlight that pours in you distinguish the duchess sleeping comfortably in her four-poster bed.
"Hey, Crusch. You awake?", you say.
After you repeat it for the third time, Crusch wakes up confused. She rubs her eyes and lights a lamp.
"Mr. Natsuki, what hour... This is a troublesome way to approach a lady, barging in when she is sleeping", she says with a calm voice, but somewhat weirded out.
She's resting on an elbow as her long, soft green hair falls on the pillow. Her right breast is bulging in the cleavage of her nightgown. She looks so gorgeous you just want to go over, get in her sheets and cuddle with her all night. She has that sort of motherly vibe going on with her, despite that she must be twenty two tops. God, I wish she were my mother, you think. You'd do little else than accumulate shame every night.
"I need to apologize to you, Crusch. You've been hosting me here, you picked me up when I was all wounded, and still I chose to hurt you."
Crusch narrows her eyes slightly, and moves her sheets aside so she sits on the edge of her bed.
"What are you talking about, Subaru? Hurt me how?"
"I sold you out for a fast carriage. I told Hoshin everything you were doing."
"Fast carriage? I haven't... You haven't even left this house since you wandered outside in the rain."
"It's something that happened in another life."
She lowers her head, and then stands up and walks slowly towards you.
"It's alright. No harm done. I trust you, Subaru."
She puts a hand on your shoulder and stares into your eyes.
"Bad night, huh?"
"Bad everything. You look great, though."
She tilts her head and raises one side of her lips.
"Was that why you opened the door to a lady's bedroom in the middle of the night? Were you attempting to court me?", she says with soft but playful tone.
"I've gotten somewhat used to attempting nightmare level endeavours, and yet I wouldn't try courting you, duchess. It would be absurd to attempt something with a zero percent success chance. Even I'm not as dumb as that. There must be a line of landed nobles out there who are waiting for your hand, and you are for sure going to choose one amongst them."
"Well, I'm not opposed to getting to know you better. You're showing the right attitude for a change."
She looks at you in a slightly different way than she usually does, but it isn't any kind of look that makes you uncomfortable.
"That'll run through my mind in future lives, I'm sure."
She doesn't know how to answer to that except smiling and slowly shaking her head. She begins to turn towards her bed.
"The nobility are for marriage, Subaru. Love... That is something else. Now, go to bed, you big weirdo."
As she makes her way back to her sheets and she slowly bends over to arrange them, you wish to tell her that you'd rather stay for a bit longer and talk to her. Then again, you do love when Crusch walks away from you. That militarily raised, firm ass.
After you close her bedroom door, you head straight to her wine cellar while touching the walls to guide yourself in the dark. You ransack the wine bottles until you find the one that seems like the most expensive, although you can't quite tell because you can't read for shit. You move through the halls until you reach the shaded patio at the edge of the manor. You sit in the same chair you sat that one time, during this same night, when Crusch spoke to you about the Witch's Cult's purpose. A night that never happened. You hear the wind blow, as well as a couple of owls hooting. When you concentrate more, you distinguish some dragon carriages moving slowly through streets illuminated by magical streetlights.
You pop open the bottle and you drink it all in four or five gulps. You wait for a while, feeling yourself getting light-headed and woozy, occasionally containing some burps in case you end up vomiting the contents of your stomach. Then you move the chair backwards a bit. When you hit the bottle against the table, the bottle crashes loudly, breaking in half. You observe the sharp edges of the half you are holding. As you slide a finger through them, it leaves a cut. You take a deep breath, aim the sharp edges towards yourself, and plunge the bottle into your carotid artery.
The shock of pain, as well as the warm blood that pours down your throat and that makes you cough, makes you want to cry out, but you clench your teeth. The carotid is pumping through the bottle, which pours from the neck onto your lap. It won't take much longer.
You don't even blink as you lose vision. You just continue holding the bottle in place, despite it being slippery from blood. Suddenly someone grabs you from the side and attempts at the same time to make you stand up from the chair, as well as remove the bottle from the mangled wound in your throat.
"What are you doing!? Why did you do this!?"
You don't want to look at Crusch's face. You would probably see it double and blurry anyway. You rest a hand on her forearm to calm her.
"Don't worry". You are surprised that your vocal cords still work, although your voice sounds as if you've smoked for decades. "I meant to do it."
"I can tell you meant to do it. I can't believe... I should have paid attention. This isn't... Oh no. Ferr-!"
In a swift movement you turn the duchess around, then you hold her head against your clavicle while pressing down on her mouth with your bloodied palm. She lets out a muffled yelp. The open wound is pumping blood all over her nightgown. You have to cough a few times before you can speak again.
"Sorry for bothering you, Crusch. I didn't meant for you to find me until it was done."
Crusch struggles to free herself, but she's in an awkward pose to gain some leverage. However, she's stronger than you, and you are getting weaker by the second.
"Just stay with me a while longer", you ask with a thin voice. "The pain never gets better, you know? You just learn that it doesn't matter."
You must have lost grip on your consciousness for a moment, because next thing you know, Crusch is standing up in front of you, somewhat hunched over, and she's tearing a piece of her nightgown. Her face, her beautiful hair, her cleavage, her nightgown are splattered and stained in blood. What a waste. She makes a ball with the torn piece of cloth, she puts it forcefully in your open hand, and guides your hand to the mangled wound so you press the cloth against it. Then she lowers her face to your level. She's attempting to remain determined above the horror she must be feeling, and tears are jumping from the corners of her eyes.
You've done this to her, you think. You weren't careful, didn't wander away to do it alone. You've hurt someone else.
"Press it", she says with a shaky voice. "Keep pressing it. That's it. Wait right here for a moment, I'll go grab Ferris. Don't go to sleep."
Before you know it she's ran out of the patio. You shake your bloodied hand until the ball of cloth gets unstuck and flies out. Ah, what a mess. You grab the bottle with your shaky hand and then you stab yourself again, this time in the other side of your throat, and then in the previous one, and then in the other for good measure. You twist the bottle, tearing apart muscles, tendons and whatever there is inside.
You've lost plenty of blood already and you can't tell exactly where the pain is coming from. Beyond the burning sensation behind your nose, that along with your mouth keep leaking blood, you feel colder and colder. You support yourself on the table to stand up, and then you stagger to the railing.
You had wanted to at least take a good look of the nighttime view, but no luck. Everything is blurry, just hazy points of light here and there. You attempt to lean on the metal that you can barely feel, but then the view swings and you feel weightless. Something stops you suddenly, a pain that reverberates through your back. You know better than to move your limbs at this point. Every breath spits blood that drips down all over your nose and mouth.
The noises you hear get further and further away. Everything would be so peaceful if it wasn't for the pain that you feel right now.
Two figures are leaning on the railing above. You can distinguish enough to see the duchess; it doesn't take her even a second for her to run back towards the interior of the mansion again. Ferris, however, stares at you with a mixture of horror and anger in her cat-girl face, as if you've imposed on her a terrible task.
Your arm weights ten, twenty times more than it should, but you manage to wave her goodbye.

You focus on the presence's hazy purple lights that you imagine this mindless ghost is staring at you through. Her loving embrace is like being picked up from an injury to reassure you that everything is going to be alright. Her words keep pouring incessantly out of her mouth.
"Tell me something else, Satella", you say, or think. "You managed to say my name. I want you to tell me anything else than those three words over and over. Do me a solid here. I need to know you are really there."
"I love you I love you I love you I-"
"Try something else", you plead. "If you are really there, tell me something about yourself, I don't care what it is."
"I love you I love you I lov-"
"We are going to spend a lot of time together, witch. You better get interesting quick."

In your next life you come out of your bedroom at around eleven in the morning. You feel like avoiding Crusch, although she might get weird if you did, but she seems to have left the mansion. As you wander into the kitchen area you see that Ferris has just returned from some client. She's left her bag on a table and, while she eats an apple, is leaning over to observe the view of the yard through the window, abstracted. She's wearing a red and black dress that hugs her slender frame and her small tits, and her waist keeps moving slightly.
"Heya, Ferris", you say, which makes her turn around a bit startled.
"Our wounded guest. What's up?"
"If I were to pet you all over, would that be considered sexual harrassment in this fantasy world?"
She almost chokes on a piece of apple. She leaves the fruit on the table, and then, despite her bewilderment, she attempts a smirk and strikes a 'look how hot I am' pose.
"I'm not the kind of girl that gives herself that easily. Besides, it would probably be considered sexual assault, not harassment, and it wouldn't do you any good, being a guest of someone as important as the lady and all. Could get really serious."
"Where I come from, most of the cats love getting scratched and caressed. They get all purry and usually come back for more."
"Then I'm ashamed that some out there have lowered themselves to such standards. That kind of deal won't work in Lugunica. We are more civilized."
"It's that bubbly cat-girl tush of yours, Ferris. I know I made a bit deal out of it, but truth is, I wouldn't mind even if you had male parts."
A noise escapes from Ferris mouth, and then she throws her hands in the air. She walks away while shaking her head.
"I can't deal with this right now!", she says.

You don't know the street you are walking through, except that it generally falls on the downtown area. Quite a few fancy restaurants. Noble-like couples taking walks, sometimes with their children. The dragon carriages have gotten more expensive. The more downtown you get, the fewer demi-humans you see.
You wonder when you are going to attempt to return to Crusch's place this time; you can hardly orient yourself, as you can't read any sign, and you don't feel as if you can approach anybody. Everyone you see feels as if they belong to a movie playing on a screen. It would make as much sense to communicate with Lugunica's denizens as with the actors in the movie.
A parked dragon carriage attracts your gaze, as well as that of most people passing by. What isn't black is gilded, displaying curved, ribbon-like motifs you can't even describe, to an extent that it seems like it could be displayed in some museum. As you walk around towards it, standing on the other side of the carriage is none other than the baroness Priscilla Barielle, who is wearing a black party dress that shows plenty of her impossibly hot figure. Her orange hair, done up in a hairstyle that must have required a few servants, glistens in the sun. She's absent-mindedly fanning herself as she seems to wait for someone.
Before you know it you've appeared in her line of view, and caught her eye.
"What's up, your highness?", you say.
"Is this what people do now, approach those way above their station while greeting them without the appropriate respect?", she says with a sharp tone.
"You mean like calling you 'your highness'?"
"It would be acceptable if that was your form of address, but don't think I haven't caught the inappropriate tone."
"I was just being a bit casual with a past playmate."
She lowers her fan and slowly narrows her eyes while glaring at you.
"You must believe that I'm a girl you can just hit on. You better convince me that I'm mistaken."
You can't help but smile, even though that will probably fuel her murderous instincts.
"We met before even in this life. Back at the royal summons. Recall the guy who stepped into the line of candidates and started insulting those decrepit fools of the council, as you put it...?"
Her brow softens a bit, and she looks you over.
"Now I recall. It did entertain me, which granted you a little space in my memory. You should be grateful for that."
"I'm surprised your highness would deign to keep the memory of a commoner, no matter his deeds."
"Anyone can gain points with me as long as they entertain me. I'm good like that. Now, did you approach me as a social occasion?"
"Well, I thought your highness might be bored. But now that I have your attention... How is Mimi doing? Fingers still good?"
A smile grows on her mouth, and as she keeps it fixed in place, she walks around you while eyeing you over as if studying you. When she stops, she walks a step towards you. Although you are a bit taller than her, in her presence you feel as if she can crush you like a can whenever she pleases, which is likely true.
"You belong to lord Roswaal's camp. I remember correctly, right? What did Roswaal intend with this message?"
"You would never know what that clown intended if he had actually sent me. But that's not the case, though. I'm just interested in whether Mimi is still around, doing good. Maybe an old flame sort of thing, you know?"
"Except that nobody outside of my household knows about the slave girl's existence. Perhaps I should work through my staff to see who has been spilling to the enemy."
You show your palms, although you are surprised by how little you care about the implications of Priscilla's icy words.
"Don't go around torturing people or burying them in some corner of your yard because I just asked for the well-being one of your girls. She's just cool and all, she did me a solid during a hard time. It's a human interest kind of thing. I suppose that you do the same from time to time."
Priscilla snorts, which somehow looks hot when she does it.
"That girl is not a person. She's part of what happens when one army wins over another. Nevermind that, don't attempt to distract me from your clumsy attempt at espionage."
"I'd like to think that nobody is so stupid to approach someone as terrifying as Priscilla Barielle and reveal that there are traitors amongst her staff, who are supposed to be working for the person revealing the information no less. You need to look on the bright side of life, Priscilla. I told you, you seemed bored and I thought you would want to reminisce about good times, whether they happened in this lifetime or not."
Facing Priscilla is so far, in capital at least, the only instance during which your heart races like when you look down from that roof to the quick, safe death waiting for you below. It's intoxicating. You maintain a composed, detached exterior that perhaps only you know hides a racing heart and cold sweat.
Priscilla chuckles, which is more of an evil sound than a pleasant one. Then she stares at you unblinkingly with warm eyes and rubs the cloth of your shirt as if valuing its quality.
"You are an amusing, odd little man. Maybe I should send a messenger to lord Roswaal and negotiate a price for you to join my household, along with that Mimi of yours."
You shiver. Most of the blood in your body flows down to your crotch, and your pants get dangerously tight. However, you doubt Priscilla's intentions are as savory as quote unquote forcing you to eat her out like four times a day.
"That's something to consider, for sure. It's been good seeing you again, Priscilla. Would never get tired of it. Now, I will excuse myself and flee as fast as humanly possible."

Roleplaying through "Re:Zero" with the GPT-3 story generator (Part 15)

This part, like the previous one, covers a small portion of the sixth volume of the original Re:Zero series, although the events have diverted very significantly from the original; In the original version, by this point Emilia was already dead.

This part was the hardest to write, by far, of all fifteen I've done so far for this strange AI-fueled roleplaying/retelling of one of my favorite fictional series. There was little room for absurd humor, which is what I gravitate towards in the first place, and I couldn't get the flow to feel right. Still, it's done and gone. In the last couple of days I've accumulated many notes for the next part and the following, and I'm eager to start working on them.

GPT-3 is a cutting-edge language processing algorithm used in the premium version of the online site AI Dungeon.

-Link for part 1
-Link for part 2
-Link for part 3
-Link for part 4
-Link for part 5
-Link for part 6
-Link for part 7
-Link for part 8
-Link for part 9
-Link for part 10
-Link for part 11
-Link for part 12
-Link for part 13
-Link for part 14

You are following Emilia through the forest that surrounds most of the mansion's grounds. Even so early in the morning, the thick tree tops, of trees that are significantly close together, keep you three in shadows. You assume that Puck is sticking around and that he hasn't left to annoy someone else he knows; when you were making your way out of the mansion, Puck was perched on Emilia's shoulder, but he must have vanished in the last couple of minutes.
"If I may ask, Emilia, what are these crystals for?", you ask.
Emilia is holding near her waist a bluish magical crystal about the size of her fist. When back at the girl's study she decided that you were going to leave through the forest, she made you promise that you were going to hold on to another identical crystal.
"It prevents certain monsters from attacking you", she says with the tone of someone who isn't entirely sure about forgiving you.
You look around nervously. A couple of chipmunks are running around on a trunk.
"Given what I went through to reach the mansion, I'd like to think that no forest beast can scare me at this point. But then again, everything tends to be going worse and worse."
To feel some degree of safety, you touch the grip of the dagger you hanged from your belt. It belongs to Emilia; Roswaal had given it to her for self-defense, although she refused to use it.
Emilia is moving so fast that you are struggling to follow her, and getting left behind at a fast rate. Your breath is quickening.
"You used to do this, right? Being an elf and all that. It's all about the forest with you lot. Curse the people who cut them trees down, all those nasty humans with their rock houses and metallic weapons..."
"My kind aren't savages. At least half of my heritage isn't."
"Nevermind the idle chatting... Where on Earth are we going?"
She doesn't answer. You don't want to press her. If you understand her current indifferent demeanour, and you aren't sure you do, maybe she regrets her outbursts at her study, the amount of tears she shed.
After a few minutes more of following her agile strides, your feet are hurting and you don't know how much longer you can keep this up. All you can do is hope that she stops soon.
"Follow me and stay close... We are here."
Suddenly you see it just above the tops of the trees. First you think it's the ruins of a castle, but it seems to be a cliff wall of uniform rock. From the border of the forest you see that in front of the cliff wall there's a clearing about the size of half a football field, that extends in both directions.
"What is it?", you say.
"There's a cave nearby. Back when Roswaal asked me to live here I tended to explore the surroundings to feel safer, or merely to be alone. So I found a natural cave that serves as a retreat."
Emilia steps into the clearing, and you follow her.
"Guess Roswaal and company couldn't stop themselves from bothering you when you first came here?", you ask.
"Any company can become a bit of a bother from time to time. But then Ram found out about the cave as well, so it stopped seeming like a magical shelter anymore."
While you're having this conversation, you see the cave opened in the cliff wall. The mouth is like the maw of a beast.
"I used to be afraid of the dark", says Emilia. "But after a while I learned to love when I had the place all to myself."
You feel a chill running through you, and before you know it you've grabbed Emilia's wrist. She turns as if to reproach you in the same manner she did in the study, but when notices your expression, her shoulders shrink.
"I can't hear anything at all", you whisper. "No birds, no insects."
"I didn't notice... Bit of an eerie place, isn't it?"
"We should get out of here."
You turn your back on the cave's entrance and walk towards the forest as the leaves crunch under your feet, only to suddenly, as if a veil had slipped, you stare at a row of black-robed figures that stand against the background of trees. These figures hold sharp, cross-shaped daggers.
"W-who are you? What do you want?", Emilia says.
You experience such a revulsion that you need to swallow to avoid throwing up.
"I already tried that back then. This is them, Emilia."
Emilia gasps, and drops the magical crystal to free her hands.
"What the hell are you doing here of all places, you...!"
Someone behind you lets out a wild expression of delight. You both half turn towards the cave's entrance, where you see him. Unlike the other cultists, this man has his hood down, showing a bowl cut of green hair and a pale face that would have suited a corpse that's been dead for a couple of days. He's grinning, and when your gazes connect, he claps and takes a few steps towards you.
"All this time, all this effort, and yet I had failed to find a devoted servant like you!", Petelgeuse says. "Because of my sloth, you've been forced to find your way down to me! I apologize with all my heart."
His black robe rustles as he takes another step forward. You feel a cold sweat break out on the back of your neck. Out of the corner of your eye, the line of cultists seem as if they are closing in, although you haven't seen them move. Emilia is holding her palms upwards near her waist, alternating between looking at the cultists and at the strange man who welcomed you.
"Petelgeuse...", you mutter.
He slaps his forehead, and then he performs something resembling a curtsy.
"Where are my manners? My name is Petelgeuse Romanee-Conti, Archbishop of Sloth for this humble institution. I sense you possess a blessing as well! Are you Pride by any chance?"
Your heart jumps on your chest. You want to reach towards Emilia, but she'll be safer with her hands free. You wonder if she's waiting for an opening.
"You asked whether I am Pride. What does that entail?", you ask with a nervous voice.
Petelgeuse grins warmly, which wrinkles the lower half of his face.
"It can get confusing, does it not? She gives us Her blessings and yet it is up to us to understand, to figure out, to extract meaning and the exact purpose, so we can serve Her better. You have the blessing, and the seat of Pride is empty."
"By blessing... You mean the Witch Factor, right?"
"Indeed! Indeed! You seem to hold a reasonable knowledge about our beliefs, although I sense a touch of fear in your voice. Nonetheless, you seem to have grasped the concept of Her powers that allow us to bring the world into a new era. Yet I gather that you haven't been anointed to occupy the seat of Pride? I trust then that She guided your steps to us so we could accelerate the ritual, yet, despite your diligent efforts, this does complicate our goals!"
"What the hell are you talking about, Petelgeuse?", you say with a raspy voice.
"We were to snatch her inside lord Roswaal's mansion then bring her into the lord's inner sanctum, where the source of power is located. Don't get me wrong! I am overjoyed that I came across such a diligent disciple, that even without having received direct summons from Sloth would offer his services behind the scenes. In comparison, we've been wasting our time, and therefore delaying the final moment in which She can return to us! You humble me with your devotion!"
You take a pause and frantically try to make sense of all that was said. You are getting dizzy.
"You knew how to enter the inner sanctum... And the ritual, it consists on feeding the crystal's magic into Emilia so the spirit of the witch wakes up in Emilia's body?"
You are muttering nervously, expecting a response from the madman.
"That's part of the ritual, indeed! How and when we would manage to kidnap the half-demon was the most unpredictable part of the ritual. Likely that's why you've been sent by Her to do this, so there would be no way we would be failing! We are blessed in Her eternal love!"
"Sorry to contradict you, but..."
When you look over your shoulder at Emilia expecting to find support in her defiance, you realize she's staring at you with a face drained of color, wide eyed and mouth trembling. When your gazes meet, she shakes her head slightly.
"It can't be...", she mutters with a breaking voice, "You couldn't have possibly..."
You feel your heart tightening. You turn towards her and open your arms.
"Emilia, you are getting it wrong. I have nothing t-"
"A Witch Factor? You knew the Archbishop's name, and that there's a crystal of power in the inner sanctum... Who are you?"
"I'm your pal, Emilia, someone who wants you to be happy and not burdened with any of this getting killed nonsense", you say with a wavering voice, stepping towards her. "I have been given a power by Satella herself, it seems, but that doesn't mean-"
From Petelgeuse's mouth bursts out a shrill laugh that makes the hair in your arms stand up.
"Oh, how the truth slips out! The Witch of Envy herself has given him the gift of our so desired meeting! And this half-demon had no clue that one of our believers in Her love had been guiding her path so her worthless self could eventually be filled by our beloved witch!"
"You aren't making this easier, Petelgeuse!", you snap.
You turn towards Emilia again. Something in the girl has broken. Her cheeks are covered in tears. Her eyes have glazed over and she seems to be looking beyond you, beyond the cliff wall, to the horizon. She lets her arms fall to her side, and her legs go so wobbly that she collapses to her knees.
Petelgeuse's voice goes lucid for a moment.
"Immobilize her."
A few of the cultists of the line that had been waiting a few meters behind Emilia lunge forward, grab Emilia's arms, and while twisting them to her back, they push her face against the grass and dirt. One of the cultists, his face blackened inside his or her hood, pulls Emilia's right arm upwards towards her shoulders, until you hear a loud crack. Emilia emits muffled, teary cries against the dirt.
"A diligent work, and yet I fear you might break her neck before we can bring her to the inner sanctum!", Petelgeuse yells. "Restrain your disdain of the half-demon until we can fill her vessel."
Emilia's cries become louder. She's not attempting to move, and her sobs have turned into those of a child.
Why didn't she shoot her ice magic at Petelgeuse, or any of the cultists or at you for that matter, given that she believed that you had betrayed her from the very first day you met? Her face as she processed the betrayal had looked as if her entire self had shattered, and that there was no point to keep living any longer. You want to vomit.
You need to do something. But what could you do? For all you know, Petelgeuse's Unseen Hands are waiting a few centimeters from you, and it would only take one of them closing itself around your head to crush your brains in again. It would be a quick death, almost a magnanimous one, but that would mean that Emilia would end up dying. In that case, until her last breath she would believe that the only human being from beyond Roswaal's mansion that she had given her trust to had used her goodwill to sacrifice her.
"I wondered when one of the most outrageous personifications of sloth, the half-demon's great spirit, would make his appearance!", Petelgeuse says. "Have you gotten tired of wasting your immeasurably long life allowing the world's affairs to slip through your fingers?"
You turn your head towards where the Archbishop is glaring. A small figure, that of a smaller than average housecat, is hovering three meters in the air over the clearing, maybe a few strides behind the cultists that are pushing Emilia's face against the dirt. Although you can't tell the look on his cat face, Puck has crossed his arms.
"I am Puck of the Apocalypse", Puck says in a surprisingly loud voice. "Remember my name after you die."
The air to both sides of the little cat swirls in a bluish vortex, from which bursts forth something like a gust of wind. As they widened towards the line of cultists, they transformed into avalanches of ice. Every cultist to the right and to the left of the immobilized Emilia, except for the cultists that were holding her down, were swept off their feet and lifted violently towards the cliff wall. You distinguish their black-robed figures getting covered in frost and hardening, and when both icy tongues hit the cliff wall, the cultists caught inside shatter into pieces.
To your surprise, Petelgeuse laughs with delight.
"All that effort to prove me wrong! I know your kind very well, great spirit. All the perishable creatures have long been nothing more than distractions in your eternal slumber, insignificant motes of dust to amuse yourself. You have all that time, and yet you waste it all!", the leader of the cultists says as if it were a established fact. "My name is Petelgeuse, and I am the Archbishop of Sloth. As long as I am here, this half-demon you pretend to care about will serve as a vessel for our witch."
Petelgeuse himself couldn't have put it clearer. As the cultists that were holding Emilia down show some degree of self-preservation and turn towards the great spirit, you approach the Archbishop calmly.
"Hey, Petelgeuse... Listen to me for a second."
"My fellow believer in Her love! I'll hear any words you wish to tell me, but not now. We need to deal with that slothful spirit."
"Yeah, but listen anyway."
As you grab the grip of Emilia's dagger with both hands, you lunge forwards while aiming at the center-left side of Petelgeuse's black robe. You feel the blade punching through his robe and his ribcage. When you let go and step back, the Archbishop stands there looking down at the handle protruding from his chest. The black cloth around the dagger is getting wetter. As Petelgeuse lifts his head towards you, a churning shadow swells from his shoulders.
"You double-crossed me!? You deceived the half-demon and brought her to me to usurp the seat of Sloth!?"
"There's no double-crossing going on, because I didn't deceive Emilia to begin with. I was never on your side, you creepy son of a bitch. I've wanted to kill from the first time I heard your deranged voice."
The shadow's churning becomes darker and more violent as the air goes cold. You distinguish the hints of fingers and articulations that look like elbows, silhouettes that emerge for a moment from the shadowy mass only to fall into it again.
"You were granted a blessing by Satella herself! That much is undeniable. And yet you have chosen to deceive a fellow believer in love in order to work against Her wishes?"
You are scared, your pulse is trembling, and yet you feel as lucid as can be. You are free of the rage that had clouded your thoughts, that had reddened your vision, the last time you faced this madman back at that clown bastard's inner sanctum. You aren't sure of what that means, but the spreading wetness around the dagger embedded in Petelgeuse's chest suggests some degree of progress.
"Yeah, Satella might have given me a power, but these days I'm guessing that it happened by chance. Someone ends up getting shat on by a bird, right? You just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Witch Factor or not, I'm not on the side of gigantic pieces of garbage such as the group you belong to. I don't think you have any clue about what Satella wants, if she still wants anything at all. As far as it seems, she doles out endless love as mindlessly as water goes through a waterfall. She doesn't give a shit about you."
Petelgeuse's cadaveric face distorts in a grimace of rage. He wrenches the dagger from his chest and stands, swaying.
"A receiver of Her blessing that nonetheless blasphemes against our witch. No greater evil could exist in this world or any other."
"Oh, just shut your fucking mouth."
"Authority of Sloth," he yells in a crazed voice, "Unseen Hands!"
The shadow that had been churning behind the Archbishop explodes in half a dozen long arms that end in black hands with long fingers. You stare at them for a second, but when two of them trace an arc in the air towards you, you merely jump out of the way. Although they are strong, their main power is in remaining invisible.
"What!?", Petelgeuse yells in disbelief. "Not even other Archbishops should be able to see the hands! Why can you see them, when you are nothing but a traitor to the witch's designs!?"
Beatrice. It must be her doing. Her magic tricks weren't for show after all. You avoid the long sweeping motion of the arms a couple more times, and then you try you focus on locating Emilia and figuring out how Puck dealt with the remainder of Petelgeuse's pawns. You almost trip on the frozen, half-cracked remains of a cultist. Puck floats towards you with a angry expression in his otherwise mostly adorable cat face.
A shiver convinces you to stop.
"Kill me if you want, Puck, but I didn't betray Emilia."
"I know this is a misunderstanding, you dolt, but she's not listening to me. Get her out of the way. I'll deal with the Archbishop."
Emilia is lying on her left side. The long silver hair, now smeared with watery dirt, is hiding her face, and her broken right arm hangs over her back. For a moment you are sure that she must have died, but then you feel that her losing all will to fight is even worse. As you hear Puck's magic spells cracking behind you, you crouch next to Emilia and attempt to sit her up. Her face is half-caked with mud, and the waist area of her dress is glued to her crotch: she has pissed herself. You slide an arm under her left shoulder to help her stand to her feet, although her entire body feels limp. How could you carry her out like this?
"Listen to me, Emilia."
You look into her eyes, now hidden behind the messy fringe of her hair. Her gaze is fixed on the grass, and she seems absent as if brain-damaged. Did you truly did this just by making her believe that you had deceived her from the moment you met her?
"You need to snap the fuck out of it, Emilia. We don't have pissing ourselves time to spare."
Your words have no effect on her. Emilia looks just as absent as before. No, not absent anymore. She looks as if in tremendous pain.
As you look around to see where it would be safe to carry the girl towards, you see that Puck is hovering some distance away from the Archbishop, whose legs up to his thighs are trapped in what looks like an ice crystal. You probably pierced his heart, but why isn't Puck blasting that creep away like he did with the rest of his crew?
"Are you the only group of cultists that were going to attack the mansion?", Puck asks with a steely tone.
Petelgeuse spits blood, but he grins.
"Would we leave filling the half-demon's vessel to the diligence of a single group? When this body has ceased to run, my remaining Fingers will find you, murder you and drag the princess to her role in the ritual."
"How many other units?"
"Enough, hidden in this forest."
"Very well. That's enough, I guess."
Why isn't Puck reacting to the black, shadowy hands that are extending to his sides, clearly moving towards converging on him? Your mouth lets out a noise as you realize that even a great spirit cannot see the Archbishop's authority. You leap forward and yell.
"His Witch Factor is a bunch of very strong, long arms that can hit very hard or even tear you apart, but they are invisible! Get back, you ineffective cunt!"
Petelgeuse accelerates the arms' movements so they clap against each other catching the small figure of Puck in the center like a mosquito, and at that moment you hear the noise of something bursting. When the hands separate, the space they had occupied is empty as if nothing had been there. You almost fall to your knees. Did the arms truly crush Puck?
Petelgeuse groans as he attempts to break away from the ice crystal that has restrained his legs. After realizing he can't, much less in a body that is dying by the second, he coordinates his shadowy arms so they swing towards you from all sides.
You run back towards Emilia. She's kneeling, even though you had left her lying on the ground before. She lifts her head, and through the mud-caked silver-hair you distinguish a teary eye that glares at you. Emilia lifts her left arm extending her palm towards you. Before you know it, you glimpse a bright flash, and you hear a sound of something cutting through the air fast as your left leg from the knee down crumbles away in bits of ice. You fall face first on the grass.
For less of a second, which feels like a long time, you think that maybe it was just an accident. Emilia's purple eyes widen, and she lifts her left palm towards you once more.
A long, shadowy arm that was aiming at the space you had occupied before your leg crumbled under you sweeps Emilia as if she were a deer hit by a truck. Her body twirls as it flies towards the cliff wall, and when it hits with a horrible thud, it falls limp to the grass.
Without even thinking about it, you half run, half crawl away from the other shadowy arms that attempt to grab you. You don't feel any pain in your maimed leg; it's as if the wound has been immediately cauterized. Emilia has hit a part of the wall out of reach from Petelgeuse's Unseen Hands. When you finally get to her limp body, you want to deny what you are seeing, but your body, which has gone completely cold, already knows. You drop to your knees. You attempt to move Emilia's head, return it to its proper position, but it feels as if it's just connected to her spine by the muscles. In Emilia's half-caked face, her purple eyes are frozen wide open.
You look over your shoulder even if just to glare at Petelgeuse, while you clench your teeth and you taste the bile surging from your gut.
Petelgeuse is leaking blood from his mouth, and he looks as if he's wheezing. He would have fallen to the ground if the ice crystal wasn't restraining him.
"Oh, no!", he laments with a teary voice. "No, no, no, no, no! The half-demon, I killed her! I didn't meant it! Now she won't do, she can't serve as a vessel for Her! She was the most suitable by far, as if chosen from birth, to host our witch, but now I've ruined it! How could I have been so slothful!"
You would have expected a rage to fill you like hot magma from a volcano, but only tears come to your eyes. You want to repeat Emilia's name and ask her for forgiveness. This world was over before for you, you knew it, and yet... You will keep going, and you will have to see Emilia's face, that expression in which the extent of your betrayal set in, for the rest of your many, many lives to come.
As Petelgeuse's now mostly shrunken shadowy arms flail ineffectively, you maneuver to sit against the cliff wall and move Emilia's corpse so part of her torso and her head rest on you. You caress her dirty hair. As your eyes burn and hot tears keep falling on her face, you hug her tight and close your eyes.
Maybe ten minutes later you hear the last complaints coming from the madman's mouth, who then falls silent. The few times you open your eyes, you merely register the sun's location having jumped in the sky towards sunset. And it was around that time, with half of the sky turning pink, when you hear an increasing rumbling, first a noise in the distance, then so loud that the ground under you trembles. Some compelling force is toppling trees in the forest that surrounds you. As the first stars show up in the darkened sky, you see it: a towering, dozens of meters tall mountain of fur, a silhouette of a legendary monster. Its figure grows until his front paws crush some trees in the border of the forest, and then you look up to where the creature's face must be located. You can't see any feature in the silhouette beyond two enormous feline ears and two glowing golden eyes that seem to be staring at you.
You don't feel any fear. None of this matters.
"We failed." A voice you know says in your head. "I failed."
The air around you seems to vibrate as the creature's growl gets louder and louder, and you close your eyes while the sound shakes your mind. And then, it stops. You open your eyes.
"Finally your body matches how big of a cunt you are", you say with a hollow voice.
Puck doesn't speak for a few seconds.
"Did she say anything, right at the end?"
"Emilia didn't speak beyond the point when she believed with absolute certainty that I had betrayed her. To end like that... There was no convincing her then, I understand that. We could never understand each other properly, and this blessing, or curse, that I have been given and that I use to help, to help everybody, didn't help me at all."
An unnatural chill licks your exposed skin. It feels like a tough winter has fallen in seconds.
"You aren't afraid of dying," Puck says with some surprise. "You are going to die. There are no ifs or buts. In a few minutes you'll be gone."
"You know as well as I do that we can't live past this point."
Puck lowers his gargantuan head, and then his glowing eyes stare back at you again.
"As per my contract, I will now destroy this world."
"Of course. A deal is a deal. Go nuts."
As if emboldened by your words, the chill turns into the worst freezing wind you have ever felt, that freezes your tears in their course and makes your teeth clack together. You don't move a muscle even though it breaks your heart to see Emilia's features, and her open eyes, frosting as if she were in a freezer.
"It was true, that thing about me having a blessing possibly given by Satella herself", you say with effort, as your teeth chatter. "If Satella did choose me in particular, it might be true that she intended to use me to bring her back into this world."
"None of that matters now."
"It does, because I will use this blessing for what I want, and nothing else: to save everyone I care about. The Witch's Cult and Satella can eat shit."
"Are you losing it, this close to death? Emilia is already gone. Nothing matters anymore."
You can't feel your remaining limbs, and every breath is filling your lungs with piercing cold.
"My friend, I was given the blessing to return back in time whenever I die. The universe will rewind and I will wake up in Crusch's mansion a couple of days ago. Rem will be alive, Emilia will be alive. And so they will as many times as it needs to happen until I get past this. Just in case it makes you feel any better."
You don't know how much time passes in silence. You can barely see anything but white, and you can't feel your eyes anymore.
"Is that true?", Puck asks. "Can Emilia be saved, even in a world I will never witness?"
You want to say yes, but you can't form the words. You want to nod, but the order doesn't reach your neck. You feel the pull into the black and the world disappears.

Some observations about this part: Petelgeuse is the hardest character to write for me. Not only his motivation in the original is somewhat hard to grasp, but he's unpredictable as they come. Plenty of the flavor of the original comes from the fantastic voice acting and the many ad-libbed lines. I had to tone him down quite a few notches so the whole thing wouldn't go off the rails. His strange nature is also not fully understood by this point, and you only get it after events that happen near the end of this arc, which further complicates things.

If you've read or seen the adaptation of the original, you know that Satella either punishes the protagonist or kills people around him if he tells people about the power he was granted. I chose not to use that for the retelling, because it annoys me: I hate conflict based on people not being able to say things. In the original, the protagonist goes to meet with Emilia and has the idea to tell her that he can travel back in time. Satella gets mad and crushes Emilia's heart, killing her immediately. Therefore, most of the events that happen in this part of the retelling don't happen at all in the original, or in a different form.

Roleplaying through "Re:Zero" with the GPT-3 story generator (Part 14)

This part, like the previous one, covers a small portion of the sixth volume of the original Re:Zero series.

The protagonist's confrontation with Emilia is one of the biggest moments in this arc of the original series, as well as of the first season of the anime adaptation, particularly how it ends and what comes after that. Given that in this strange AI-fueled roleplaying/retelling thing I'm doing the protagonist can freely tell whomever he damn pleases that he can travel back in time, Satella won't kill others to shut him up. That necessarily changes this following moment, as well as what comes out of it. Plenty of deviations already, chaos theory stuff. It's been as long as fourteen parts after all, and I'm having fun, which is what counts.

GPT-3 is a cutting-edge language processing algorithm used in the premium version of the online site AI Dungeon.

-Link for part 1
-Link for part 2
-Link for part 3
-Link for part 4
-Link for part 5
-Link for part 6
-Link for part 7
-Link for part 8
-Link for part 9
-Link for part 10
-Link for part 11
-Link for part 12
-Link for part 13

As you walk through one of the long corridors of Roswaal's mansion, a realization sinks in that this is it: you are going to face the one person whose teary face and reproachful words have been running through your mind in the different lives you've gone through. Your heart pumps loudly, and before you realize it your hands have converged to shield your testicles. It was an empty threat, you tell yourself. You can take dying horribly, but not that.
You head towards Emilia's bedroom, except that you only found out back then about her bedroom because you planned on catching a glance of something you shouldn't. Along the way it seems you have forgotten which of the myriad of doors belongs to her. You knock on different doors shily, until a small figure flies out of one of the paintings.
"Hey, moron. What the hell are you doing?", Puck asks.
"Shh! Keep your voice down. Emilia's in one of these rooms, I'm trying to find out which."
"I know where Emilia is, you idiot. In her study, which is none of these rooms."
He gives you detailed directions, and you think you've understood him.
"Anyway, Puck, has the princess figured out that I'm here?"
"Hah, I doubt that. We both know you're not an interesting subject for her. And I had no intention of telling."
"Well, good."
"You need to be careful not to trouble her more. Not only she's dealing with the annoying official stuff of attempting to sit on the throne, but she has barely slept since she left the capital."
"Understandable, with all the future assassination attempts."
"Don't know if you are trying to be funny, asswipe, but thing is, turns out that getting betrayed fucks with your mind."
You lower your head.
"I'll need to have a good talk with her."
"I won't intercede."
"Don't need to, after all. You are her protector, but I'm too powerless to hurt her in any way."
Puck shoots you a look.
"That's not true."
He flies away and vanishes.
You take a deep breath and let your feet carry you through the directions that Puck had given you. You stand in front of the door as you feel your legs getting woozy. You knock.
"You can get in, Ram", says the tired sounding, clear voice of the half-elf.
It's been a long time since you heard her. You open the door and see her sitting on a chair behind a big desk as she's writing something. She lifts her head and her purplish eyes stare at you. First comes surprise, which makes her drop her pen. Second, she turns her face to the side and makes a grimace. Then, she stands up and goes around the desk as anger flares in her eyes.
"Why are you here?", she asks as she approaches you. Her voice sounds enraged, but you can sense fear in it.
You look at her and realize how much she has changed, but also how much she remains the same. You can't answer right away as a lump forms in your throat and your eyes start to water. You feel like a little boy again, seeing his mother for the first time after spending months away from home.
"I was clear as can be", Emilia says. "You aren't that hard of understanding that there was any possible chance for you to have misunderstood, right?"
The lump finally slides down your throat, and you manage to get a few words out of your mouth.
"I heard you well. That my face was dumb, that I shouldn't return to the mansion, and that if we were to cross paths paths again, you'd tear my balls off. Not that I want to remind you of that."
"I was mad, of course I was. You stole something important from me. Not as tangible as the medallion, but that hurts a lot more."
You aren't sure what she's referring to, but you hold her teary gaze without blinking.
"I am sorry, Emilia."
Emilia's eyes narrow, but she soon sighs. She raises one hand to her face, rubbing it a bit.
"Sorry doesn't mean anything coming from some people, because they'll hurt you again the same way only to attempt to placate you with the same words."
"I really am sorry, Emilia. I understand if you can't forgive me, but I want you to know that I made a huge mistake. I was a fool, and I hurt you."
She turns away and closes her eyes tight, which causes a tear to roll down her cheek.
"Spare me."
"I've learned at the capital, through a generous amount of bruising and internal bleeding, that I should learn my limits and not get into fights I can't win. I'm still learning, of course. Will keep learning through several lifetimes. But the fact is, I've come back mainly because of a hurt that's coming, far worse than the one this idiot caused you. I want to prevent it, at all costs."
You finish with a sigh, and wait for her to react. She sniffles and rubs her eyes.
"Puck said he had learned that the Witch's Cult is going to attack as soon as in a few hours. You mean he got that from you?"
"Ah... Yes, but it's the truth. We'll focus on keeping you safe. You can also throw a few ice spells here and there, I'm not saying that you are unable to help yourself..."
Emilia steps forward and faces you, studying your expression with her wet eyes.
"You needed a story to come back, after all. You must have heard in the capital that the Witch's Cult would make their moves now that I've shown myself to the world, and there it was. Your ticket for me to kneel before you, hug your legs and plead for you to protect me."
"I'm know that I'm not the most trustworthy person, with the amount of weird stuff that comes out of my mouth, but..."
"Shut it."
She closes her eyes again and stands still for a few seconds, then she paces around without looking at you.
"I've thought back at the day I met you. I had believed you were involved in stealing my medallion, remember? What a fool I was, thinking you were capable of something like that."
"You mean because of principles, not ability, I'm guessing..."
She's staring at the ground and not listening to you.
"I was so wary of you, but then again why wouldn't I? I am so exhausted of trying to hide who I am, the race I was born as, even this silver hair. There I was dealing with someone who would repudiate me, like everybody else does, because of things that have always been beyond my control." She clenches her hands. "But you didn't..."
You approach her and try to think about something more comforting to tell her.
"I still can't believe how most people in this kingdom want to hate you for just the half-elf thing, and because Satella did this or that. I'm sorry there are so many dickheads around."
Her gaze stops on the door as she stands still for a moment. She seems to have frozen over again, until she shakes her head.
"Still, when you chose to help me, I had to keep my guard up. You probably were in it to manipulate me along the way and then throw me in the dirt, doing away with my medallion and therefore my only chance in this life. Why wouldn't you? Why would you care about damaging a half-demon?"
You swallow as you feel a pang in your heart. This girl doesn't have a clue.
Emilia turns towards you and steps forward. She makes an effort of looking you in the eyes, although new tears follow the wet courses of the previous ones.
"After we got back the medallion from that thief teenager from the slums, we went for a meal. Afterwards, we would have parted ways. You had never met me before but you offered me your help, and when I got back what I needed, we did something as normal as merely sharing a meal in public, even though everybody in the room was likely casting reproachful glances at me and you. They wouldn't expect anything from me, but they would condemn you for the companies you chose to keep."
You want to shut your eyes and contradict her. She is wrong, of course. You had appeared in this world as suddenly as can be, and you had no clue that there was anything to fear, anything to hate from half-elves. You had realized due to her somewhat pointy ears and that this world could be more or less described as a generic fantasy that she had to be an elf of some kind, but then again Satella meant nothing to you. What if you had been born here? What if your parents and grandparents and so on had descended from survivors of an apocalyptic event that destroyed half of the world, and that was caused by someone of the same heritage and who probably looked pretty similar to this teary girl you are facing? Would you have hated Emilia as well? Was the appropriate, or even sane thing to do, to hate her and her kind?
"Emilia, maybe I'm so dumb that I didn't take any of that into account. I have a record of doing dumb things, as you well know."
She shakes her head, maybe not knowing how to respond.
"Fact is", you begin to say, "that I truly came because you are in danger. I didn't make it up, I'm not such a scumbag to come out with a plan like that... I want you to live, I want you to survive and possibly sit on the throne and marry a nobleman and all that kind of fantasy world crap. And we need to act soon, because it seems to me that neither your senior servant nor your spirit of the Apocalypse are competent enough to prevent the assault even if they have the foreknowledge. Ram is a complete asshole as well."
"Ram is just-"
"Nevermind that. Roswaal gave you specific instructions to counter the Witch's Cult, right? Or at least for you to avoid them?"
"Y-Yes. Puck said that the inner sanctum wasn't safe? But Roswaal said..."
You shake your head. You were going to grab Emilia's shoulders, but you contain yourself.
"Roswaal isn't here. Roswaal won't be here when the killing starts. You people seem to respect that guy, I get that. He has a big mansion and money and stuff. But I mean, he goes around painted like a fantasy world clown. At one point you would think, shit, this guy is probably deranged and he's only going to cause trouble for us? It's the whole thing that the company you keep reflects on you, or something like that."
"... So, you're saying we are fools for trusting lord Roswaal?"
"I'm saying... Actually I don't know what the hell I'm saying. But I think you need to stop worrying about me and start thinking more about yourself... I mean, you're beautiful, intelligent and have a great future ahead of you. I'm sure there's some young guy out there who would love to ride off into the sunset with you."
She frowns, seemingly confused.
"What does that have to do with anything now?"
"I mean, Emilia, that we need to go somewhere else. Not follow Roswaal's orders, because they won't work."
"Like hell. You don't know that for sure!"
"Fuck yes I do."
"Roswaal told me it's a magically sealed entryway, that only those with a specific spell, one he taught me, could enter it. Otherwise the passageway is invisible even to identifying spells."
"I keep saying that Roswaal is a damn clown. He clearly has no clue what he's doing! That Petelgeuse shithead managed... Will manage to sneak in beyond Ram's defenses and beeline towards the hidden passageway. They will enter it, reach the generic magic crystal thing at the bottom, and end your half-elf life! You are too cute to be killed like that. Hell, this is a gigantic mansion. Why wouldn't Roswaal hire security of some kind? That Priscilla broad has the one-armed man and a bunch of other guards that dig graves for her. Aren't there also like small cat-girls who sling explosions around?"
"It was Ram and Frederica up to this point, and we were doing good."
"Even so! The clown's a betting man. Couldn't he, like, I dunno... Buy a bunch of Rottweilers or something?"
She sighs.
"You are not being helpful at all."
"I'm trying damn it! But you're too set in your ways, you won't even listen to me. Either that or you're taking what I say and twisting it to make it into something I didn't even mean!"
"Well you have to admit, that's sort of what you're doing with me."
"I am not!"
You groan and cover your face with your palms. Nobody listens to you, nobody wants to hear a single thing you are saying. Maybe the world's destiny is set. Didn't Beatrice said something to that effect? And Satella gave you this power as a curse so you had to see the world coming to an end and spend the rest of eternity attempting to prevent it in vain. What the hell did I do to you, Satella, you think. What could I have possibly done that was so fucking bad you had to curse me like this? Do you get some twisted pleasure out of watching me fail over and over again? It's enough to make anyone suicidal, really.
Emilia waits for a few seconds, and then speaks with a wavering voice.
"To be honest, I'm getting more scared than I already was. I probably should head down to Roswaal's office and hide."
"No, you won't."
Before you know it, you've grabbed her arm, feeling her slender flesh under your palm and fingers. Emilia's eyes go wide, then she stares at you reproachfully.
"What do you think you are doing?"
"I wasn't sure at first, but that's it, I guess. I'm not going to let you follow Roswaal's orders, because I know how that ends. We are going somewhere else, and I'll drag you if necessary."
As Emilia's face twists into anger and new tears fall from her eyes, she pushes your chest and attempts to free herself. You strengthen your grip.
"Who the hell do you think you are, Subaru!?", she yells as she clenches her teeth. "Why do you think you can do this to me?"
You don't say a word and just keep looking at her. There's no use in opening your mouth, because you know she wouldn't listen anyway. The best way to deal with her in this situation is showing, not telling.
Emilia tries to free herself again, but you keep a tight grip on her arm, before she eventually gets tired and out of breath. Her breathing increases and ragged sounds leave her throat. Then she extends her free hand in front of both of you, with her palm upwards. You feel a chill going through you. It feels as if the moisture of the air is gathering over her palm and congealing. There's suddenly a half a meter long, sharp-looking shard of ice hovering over her hand. It turns to target your chest.
"I will skewer your heart", she says with a thin, angry voice. "It would only be fair."
For some reason you reach to touch the shard of ice. The cold spreads through you and you feel a numbness in your fingers. It's a strange feeling, one that you've never felt before. You look at the shard of ice Emilia made, which is still pointed at your chest. Her eyes narrow.
Calm in a way that you hadn't felt for hours, you free her arm and take a few steps back while still facing her. She keeps staring at you, disturbed and afraid, as you kneel in front.
"Go ahead, then."
Emilia frowns. She opens her mouth, but she fails to produce words.
"I did tell you, and everybody else, in front of those decrepit fools of the council", you say camly. "Someone who will defend her even if it costs him his life. If she dies, I'll take my own life. Those were my words, and although they came in a rush along with other wild lies about me travelling through multiple dimensions and battling gods or whatever, I stand for what I said regarding giving my life to you. If you truly believe I should be killed, or even if you just want to kill me, do so. I won't stop you."
"I... I don't want to kill you."
"You sure? I think you do. Think about it, girl. I almost ruined one of your only chances to rule this kingdom, to go from a despised nobody belonging to a cursed race to the queen above all. I'm a complete shithead who came that close to ruining your life. Remember the pain I caused you, the grief, the sadness. You haven't been able to sleep properly either. Rolling in bed because someone who should have had your back turned out to be an idiot unworthy of your trust. Isn't that how it goes? Go ahead and murder me. It will satisfy you."
"I..."
"Murder me, Emilia. Dying feels so good, you know. After the pain, the nerve-killing, mind-destroying pain, everything goes dark and you bathe in an endless love. I will visit it again and again, over and over."
"I won't murder you, you bastard."
The ice shard falls to the ground, breaks in half and then dissolves in the air. Emilia lets out a pained noise. She retreats backwards until her back hits her desk, and then she trembles and covers her face.
You sigh and stand up.
"In that case, we should quit wasting your time."
"I... I'm sorry", she says, still trembling with her face covered.
You move towards her. You want to embrace this girl, but not to soothe her. Everything feels unreal, like you aren't even here. What does this world, the one attached to this life of yours that needs to end, matter to you? Why do you keep pressing on?
"Don't hide. Look at me, you half-elf girl."
She obeys, but she's still trembling. Her gaze keeps shifting from your eyes.
"We'll figure out something else", you say, "helped partially by that cat familiar of yours that has performed his duty flawlessly so far."
"I... I don't... understand...", she says, her voice trembling along with the rest of her body.
"I'm going to help you ascend to become a goddess."
"What are you talking about...?"
You grab her shoulders, which causes her to yelp.
"I'll help you turn into a goddess. A real goddess. Not one of those fake deities that people pray to. You will be the silver-haired, half-elf queen, whose cunt of a familiar can entomb the world in frost."
"You're insane!"
Emilia tries to pull away, but you're stronger. You move her chin so she looks directly into your eyes.
"Even though this world will end for me," you say, "you need to survive. This life will cease, but I will have done that much. It won't be a waste."
"Stop it..." She whimpers.
"But if you don't want to survive, I'll respect that decision as well. I'll personally end your life myself."
She stares into your eyes, and she must see something there that tells her you're being serious. She swallows. Her face is reddened from crying.
"Subaru, why do you feel this need...", she says, lowering her voice. "Even saying that you will die for me. What have I done?"
You loosen your grip on her shoulders. For a few seconds you lower your head, and then the buzzing feeling in your mind turns down a bit.
"I used to live somewhere else, Emilia. I mean like very far away from here. In middle school, back then when... I needed to act out, I suppose. I wasn't anyone in particular, I didn't have the talents I should have had. But I could make them laugh, couldn't I? They liked it, some of them. But over time, they stopped caring, one after the other. I couldn't... On my way back from school I used to see this stray cat, orange and striped with black. He used to sit on top of a brick wall and look at people. I didn't get too close because he hissed, swiped at people's heads if they passed by, shit like that. I didn't see that cat for a while, and even forgot about him. But last time I saw him he was like a street away from his usual spot. He was standing in the middle of the single-lane road that mostly housewives and schoolchildren used to walk through. The cat's eyes were half-shut by something like hardened mucus, and he kept bubbling through his nose as he wheezed. I approached him, but he didn't move. He stood there purring as I pet his head. He just stood there without rubbing his jaw against my hand or anything like the other cats. Then I walked away. I stopped and looked back, and this cat was staring at me through his half-shut eyes. Since then I've thought at few times... I could have taken him, brought him home, asked my parents to pay for a veterinarian or something. But I didn't. That day back then I came home, and the following day I went to school, and then I came back home. I kept living my normal life as if a few days before I couldn't have changed the course of another's life. Well, Emilia, you met that cat, you let him follow you for a while, and when he rubbed against your hand, you brought him home and gave him a new life. Is it a wonder that he would remain loyal to you forever?"
Emilia stares through you for a few seconds as she trembles. Then she lowers her head, hiding her features with her long silver hair. You listen to her sob until you've had enough. You hug her tight and kiss her dumb head.
"Puck probably knows other hiding spots around these parts. That cunt needs to prove himself useful, after all."
You glimpse movement at the corner of your eye. With Emilia's silver-hair pressed against your cheek, you see that Puck is hovering a couple of meters from you both. He's put his paws on his hip and is looking at you with a cat expression you can't describe.
"Let's leave it at that for now and get out of here", Puck says.
"Yeah, yeah", you reply.

Roleplaying through "Re:Zero" with the GPT-3 story generator (Part 13)

This part, like the previous one, covers a small portion of the sixth volume of the original Re:Zero series, although virtually everything in it is new material, given that the actions so far in this weird roleplaying/retelling thing have changed certain significant events of the original.

GPT-3 is a cutting-edge language processing algorithm used in the premium version of the online site AI Dungeon.

-Link for part 1
-Link for part 2
-Link for part 3
-Link for part 4
-Link for part 5
-Link for part 6
-Link for part 7
-Link for part 8
-Link for part 9
-Link for part 10
-Link for part 11
-Link for part 12

Otto must have noticed that you were rendered useless, because he asks and follows the directions given to him by people in a couple of towns your carriage passes by. Although the young merchant attempted some small talk a few minutes after leaving the mist, at the beginning you could barely force yourself to say yes or no, and after a while your mouth went so dry, and your mind so numb, that you couldn't muster to even acknowledge the merchant's existence.
It is over, isn't it? How could you continue when Rem is gone? Weren't you struggling to save everyone? If Rem has left this world, then your efforts have failed, and you remain in a world you need to abandon. As the certainty locks in your brain, you look around at the sights, the countryside and the towns with its busy inhabitants, as if they belonged to a faded movie. Is this how terminally ill people resting in their hospital beds feel about their surroundings? You now exist in a reality, a life, that will end for you, and will have to end soon. You think that even if Satella herself reappeared and swallowed half of the world again, you wouldn't care.
A small sound, just a little too childish for the setting, tears you from your thoughts. It comes again, and you find it to be rather familiar. Looking around, your eyes scan the carriage and land on the merchant's bag, which has a weird bulge in it. The sound comes once more, and you recognize it to be coming from a meow.
"Hey..." Otto mutters, touching the bag, "What is inside it?"
Otto pries the bag open and looks inside, to find a cat. It stares at you and mews again.
"Why is there a cat in my bag?"
The bag seems rather cramped for the feline, who is squished by the various bottles and jars inside.
"What's this? A stowaway?", Otto asks to nobody in particular.
"Ah...", you begin to say with a broken voice. "I guess it was time for you to do something, huh? Even if it just involves appearing in weird places when you aren't needed."
Otto, first surprised that you even talked, raises his face towards you while maybe thinking that you have finally lost it, because you were addressing the feline.
"I'm not crazy, I'm just talking to a cat", you say.
Otto then raises an eyebrow and smirks, relieved, as if you have said something funny.
In any case, the cat seems to have heard you and opens its mouth.
"Guess you intend to pay us a visit", Puck says as he flies out of the bag and floats near your face.
Otto is so surprised that he makes the carriage swerve, and it takes you mumbling that it is okay for the merchant to compose himself.
"Lord Roswaal is an eccentric man," you say, "as you knew. This is one of his eccentricities: allowing a talking, lowlife cat to live in his mansion."
"Someone is jealous", Puck says, bitter. "Because I'm a cat, I don't have to do anything boring, like politics."
"Nor the most boring part: protecting the only person on Earth who depends on you."
"Hey, we can joke around and all that..."
"No, we can't."
"... But don't you diss my service to Emilia. You know that anybody who threatens her will need to deal with me."
"I know that's the worst lie I've heard in my life."
Puck crosses his arms and flies in a couple of circles around you as if he intended to find something wrong, and then comes back to his original place. He frowns, half confused.
"What's the deal? I supposed you were going to act apologetic to have the most minimal chance to rejoin us. Threaten lives, insult Emilia, all that is fine," Puck says, "but question my dedication to her? No."
You shake your head and breathe deeply. You want to die.
"I know it's no use talking to you about anything. You people don't understand a thing. No amount of contradicting what I know to be true is going to change the future. I guess I know how that Cassandra felt."
"Don't know no Cassandra", Puck says.
"I know, you don't know shit."
"I know shit!"
You groan. You even attempt to slap Puck away, but he avoids your hand and it only seems to amuse him.
It takes some seconds for your throat to loosen up.
"I can't believe I'm just sitting here, talking to a magical flying cat, when Rem just died."
"It seems that a lot of things have happened in the capital since Emilia exiled you from paradise. Was that Rem part of Crusch's camp?"
You want to yell. The White Whale's magic, or whatever it is, also works on a spirit that refers to himself as 'of the Apocalypse', someone who according to Beatrice was genuinely able to entomb the world in frost if Emilia died?
"I'm just tired of all this. It's been hell since the day I got this stupid power. It was hell even before that, actually..."
"Oh? If you believe you have it rough, perhaps you should tell that to someone who cares."
You groan.
"Puck, do you ever scout Emilia's surroundings for threats? You know, to actually figure out if someone or many people are rushing to murder her?"
"I do, yes, although I can only jump to the location of people that I've met before."
"That does make sense..."
"What about you?" Puck says, flying onto the floor. "You have become entangled in two camps belonging to royal candidates. What have you learned?"
"I wasn't involved with any of them, not really. But are you actually scouting for information right now?"
"Why not? You decided to come back although you were told to never show your dumb face again, didn't you?"
Otto keeps glancing at you while arching his eyebrows. He's getting the picture.
"Puck, are you genuinely invested in saving Emilia's life?", you ask seriously.
"Don't I keep repeating that? Like I said, our contract states that if she dies, I die."
"So you have no reason to protect her just because you like her?"
Puck shakes a finger, as if denying you a 'gotcha'.
"Emilia is a sweet kid. She's had it rough, she'll always have trouble handling or connecting with her emotions."
Otto is captivated by your conversation with Puck.
You close your eyes and lower your head. You want to just let it all out, just start crying and mumbling Rem's name and later just plunge a knife into your own throat, but what would Rem think if she understood what you were going through, and you just left this world without learning anything new that could save all of your lives in your next one?
"Puck... I must inform you that I consider you the second biggest cunt I've ever met."
"What?", Puck says, elongating the a. "Someone has taken my place?"
"Yeah. Someone else went from cunt to super-cunt."
"Although I am intrigued, I'm not sure I like your tone. I'm a powerful spirit, you know."
"Do you even know what a cunt is? Is that a word that someone invented in this fantasy world?"
"Of course. It's a female dog, a foolish or despicable person, or a hindrance."
"The last one is correct. Cunts are hindrances."
You continue to glare at Puck, who stares back with equal intensity. Puck breaks first, looking away and letting out a little chuckle.
"I haven't intervened in your crush for our princess. No need. She's way above your station. Even if she were a regular half-elf, she would be leagues above you. You understand that much, right? Besides, I didn't have to do shit. You stepped into the line of royal candidates and fucked everything up for yourself."
"Glad I could entertain you."
"You could still entertain me. Tell me about this cunt that went from being a regular one to a super-cunt."
"... Maybe later. Puck, where on Earth is that clown bastard?"
Puck lets out a sigh, turning his head in the general direction of Roswaal's domains.
"He's messing around in Sanctuary. Weren't you informed about that?"
"And what about the Witch's Cult?", you demand to know as your voice grows more and more annoyed, if possible.
Puck leaps back into the air and furrows his brow.
"What's with these jumping topics? What about the Witch's Cult? You are worried because Emilia attended the royal summons and that paints a target on her?"
"That is exactly the case!"
"Well, they haven't been doing anything out of the ordinary for decades. The cult is either dead or dying out. I'd bet on the latter. I've seen them in action for a long time. They used to be big shits, but these days most of the cultists are stoned on sleep potions and only awake when a caravan comes by with tribute or something. If it comes to their ears that Emilia is the famous Witch of Frost, the silver-haired half-elf that matches their idol, it'll take quite a bit of time for them to organize an offensive. And even if they do, you don't have to worry!" Puck strikes a pose and points to himself with one of his cat paws. "Emilia has me as her protector. I see that you are concerned, and that's good... You do care for Emi, even though you are stupid and can't do anything right. No worries! The Witch's Cult attacks but I go pow, pow, pow! Ice shards! They get icy and then I explode them into bits. It's quite the spectacle."
You stare in silence at the little cunt for so long that Puck deflates and gets uncomfortable.
"I guess we are both completely useless", you say drily.
"Hey, kid, bow your head or something, really. Aren't you coming back because you want to be let in again? I might start taking offence."
"I'm not bowing. And don't call me kid."
"What should I call you? Mr. Knight?"
This cat is so damn smug, and it smells like rotten eggs...
"How about you address me as lord and savior?"
"Heard you taught the children at the village that... Kind of explains your actions."
"Because that's why I'm coming back. To save Emilia, and everybody else."
Puck scoffs and rolls his eyes as he starts jumping around.
"That's what you think. You're coming back because you're a damn fool who wants to save his great love!"
You clench your fists and roar.
"I come back, you useless cunt, because tomorrow Petelgeuse Romanee-Conti of the Witch's Cult is going to murder Emilia in that clown bastard's inner sanctum!"
Puck narrows his cat eyes and puts on a serious tone you've never heard.
"Is this something you've learned at the capital? Is this a new development?"
"Let's say I have, yeah. I'm telling you with a hundred percent certainty. Listen, Puck, stop wasting your time with me and protect Emilia right this second. I think Roswaal has ordered her to go into the inner sanctum to hide in case the Witch's Cult comes, but somehow they know how to get in. I think I'm going to reach the mansion around sunrise and the attack won't have started by then, but in any case... Protect Emilia at all costs having in mind that if we don't prevent it, she will die tomorrow."
Puck crouches, lowers his head and shuts his eyes. After a brief moment, he opens his eyes again and stands up.
"It feels like you've gone through shit since we left Lugunica, even though very little time has passed... I'll trust your information for now. We'll kill every invader we find."
With this, Puck leaps away into the night and vanishes.
You find yourself clenching your fist over your thigh, and your heartbeat accelerates. This is progress, you think. But then you remember that it doesn't truly matter that you warned Puck of an attack: you aren't going to remain in a world that no longer contains Rem. This power that, if what Petelgeuse suggested is true, was given to you by Satella herself, allows you to overcome your powerlessness and uselessness as a human being in a single way: that of collecting as much information about the future as possible so next time you can act accordingly. Now you know that Puck isn't as idiotic as his face and entire demeanour suggest; he simply was predisposed not to know how soon and hard the Witch's Cult was going to hit.
When you return to reality from your thoughts, Otto looks as if he had been waiting for you to come to your senses.
"So... Your lord is not actually a betting man, I gather?", Otto says. "Nor is he your lord any longer?"
You stare at him blankly, your face having lost most of its colour after your encounter with Puck.
"Wait, who was the one to tell you about the Glorious Races thing...?"
Otto gives you a sympathetic smile.
"You did. Don't worry, though. I'm surprised I haven't forgotten my own name after running into the whale. Roswaal's people must lead interesting lives if they are used to magical, flying cats."
"It's alright, I suppose. Sorry about lying, man."
"If we had died I would have been mad and I would have beat you up in the afterlife, but all's well that ends well. The other merchants are going to flip when I tell them we outran the White Whale. That said," he clears his throat, "I am a merchant through and through, and there's the matter of payment..."
"Ah... You'll get paid, of course."
You remember then that Rem was the one handling her lord's money. When you look over the wooden separation to the half destroyed back of the carriage, you only see your luggage. Any trace of Rem's stuff has disappeared. A pang of pain almost makes you double over. When you recover, you realize that your luggage looks bigger than it used to. You jump over the separation and pry loose your bags, and you find travelling material that you know it wasn't in your luggage before, but in Rem's, and stuffed along with some clothes of yours you find Rem's pouch full of money. Rem had disappeared not only from the world, not only from everyone else's memories, but reality had also been rewritten so everything she possessed and she had affected had been assigned to someone else. This was the power of those ancient witches. And if that Witch of Gluttony's enchantment, or whatever, had worked on you, you wouldn't have a clue, and you would have pushed forward condemning Rem to oblivion forever.
You vault over the separation onto the driver's seat while holding the pouch. Otto eyes it curiously, and after considering it for a moment, you hand the entire pouch to the man.
"Ah!?"
Otto orders the ground dragons to stop, and as he rests the pouch on his lap, he opens it and inspects its contents. His eyes glisten.
"M-Mr. Subaru, this is a small fortune. You are not seriously suggesting that I should keep all of it, right?"
"I'm going to my former lord's mansion to repent to my princess. That's the end of the road for me. I lied to you, convinced you to go through hell. Keep the damn thing."
While he orders the ground dragons to move again, he nods a few times as he tries to prevent himself from tearing up.

Close to sunrise, your carriage ventures through the road surrounded by forest that leads to the village closest to Roswaal's place. A few villagers are already moving around, hauling material or merely speaking with each other.
"You can leave me here if you want. I'll walk my way up", you say.
"No way! I'll drive you to Roswaal's gate. I won't waste this opportunity to glance at the famous lord's mansion from up close."
As the half-destroyed dragon carriage follows the ascending road, you keep reminding yourself that you aren't dreaming or hallucinating. You feel the pull of your mind towards going over the edge. This life will likely also end in extreme pain, but that is your lot in life now. You have to soldier through.
Parked in front of the mansion's gate, with Roswaal's expensive palace in the background, Otto praises the view while you grab your luggage and disembark. You sigh and offer your hand to the guy who had helped you twice.
"Hope your people take you in again, Mr. Subaru. And thank you again for changing my fortune."
"See you in another life, buddy."
You walk the long path lined with statues, hedges and magical streetlights towards the mansion's entrance. There's no hint of movement, but you are pretty sure the Witch's Cult is not going to hit for a few hours. You feel your heartbeat on your neck, and you fight to clear your mind of the invading images from the trip you just survived. When you reach the tall main doors, you take a deep breath and ring the bell. It barely takes twenty seconds for someone to come.
"An unwelcome guest arrives", Ram says with a deadpan expression.
"So nice to see you well, Ram."
"Always nice to see me. I heard from the lady of the house that you weren't to return due to your outrageous, shameful actions. Did I hear that incorrectly?"
"No, they were as outrageous and shameful as they can be. Still, could you let me in?"
She sighs and moves aside. When you enter, you feel a warmth filling you up. You look around at the familiar sights you had missed.
"Did Puck inform you that I was on the way?", you ask.
"That he did. He also seemed to trust in your information regarding an impending attack, even though we've only known you to be unreliable and useless."
"Has Emilia found out...?"
"That's your bridge to cross. Until she humiliates you and exiles you again, I'll treat you as our guest. Do you want me to serve you breakfast, Mr. Natsuki?"
"What would I do without you, Ram?"
"Starve and die, Mr. Natsuki."
As you were following her confident steps, you stop and call out to her. She stops and looks over her shoulder.
"Ram... Didn't you expect me to come accompanied?"
"Who would have wanted to accompany you?"
You swallow.
"Your little sister."
She turns and stares at you as if you are playing a bad joke on her, or you've lost your mind. A few seconds after, she speaks.
"Why are you...? Dry those tears, Mr. Natsuki. It's unsightly."

After the somewhat uncomfortable breakfast with a side of Ram's disrespect, you head to locate Beatrice's magical library. You keep sneaking around, because you aren't prepared to run into Emilia yet. This time it takes you opening five doors until your intuition kicks in and you locate the one in which Beatrice has set her Passage spell. The familiar musty aroma of all books, as well of the sight of the various filled bookshelves, make you want to pass the time in peace. No chance, though. Beatrice is sitting in her usual chair, and when she realizes it's you, the faint ghost of a surprise flashes on her face before she offers you her usual mask of indifference.
"You've come to interrupt me again, I wonder...?"
A smile comes to your lips.
"Yeah. Couldn't stay in the capital and leave you alone."
"I heard you made the silly girl mad."
"I've made plenty of people mad, other people have made me mad... It's a carousel of annoyance. But yes, I've returned! I'm the human equivalent of herpes."
"I am not acquainted with that reference, I suppose."
"It's an ancient curse where I come from."
Beatrice makes an expression that you can't quite identify, but it catches you a little off guard.
"Well, I suppose it can't be helped", she says.
You walk over to her, go down on one knee and grab her small hand. She gets surprised, but she doesn't retract her hand.
"Beatrice, I'd love to stick around and just shoot the shit with you, but I require your knowledge on various matters. Why... Why are you wrinkling your nose?"
"You smell like her", she says, somewhat perplexed.
"Like Rem...?"
"Ram, I suppose...? No, I meant like the witch."
So even a hundreds of years old spirit isn't immune to the Witch of Gluttony's dark arts. You shake your head.
"You mean Satella?"
Beatrice nods slowly, but then she looks back up at you. She's still confused about something.
"When anyone these days mentions a witch, unless they are using it incorrectly or despectively to refer to a magician, they always mean Satella, the Witch of Envy, I suppose. It didn't use to be that way... Back before the good world ended."
Beatrice looks back up at the vaulted ceiling, her mind drifting far away.
"There was a time when I did not have to worry about the Earth being engulfed by shadows, I suppose. The past and present blend together at times... But the future is an inevitability no matter what."
"How old are you exactly, Beatrice?"
"Is it proper to question a female about her age, I wonder...?"
"I'm sorry, I didn't mean to trample over your extremely old values and customs."
Beatrice almost pouts.
"Why did you want that information, I wonder...?"
"I'm not sure. Beatrice, what does it mean? I've been told before that I smell like Satella. What's the deal with that?"
Beatrice's eyes narrow.
"It means Satella has affected you. She has left a part of her essence inside of you, touched you with her power, I suppose."
"Isn't she, like, super dead?"
"To put it simply for you, I suppose, they were too powerful to die entirely. Their restless spirits remain at Mother's..."
"Huh?"
She seems annoyed.
"Even Satella's spirit is very powerful is what I meant to say, I suppose!"
"Why would she want anything to do with me?"
"Why would anyone want anything to do with you, I wonder...?" Beatrice turns to you with a cutesy frown. "You're too insecure, I suppose."
"If she's so powerful, then why doesn't she just destroy this world again?"
"Is this really a conversation that needs to be had, I wonder...? Satella does what she does. Not even the other witches could understand her, and were afraid of her when she became the Witch of Envy. But never mind that, I suppose."
"Beatrice, does Satella have the power to return back in time?"
Beatrice's eyes narrow.
"No, I don't believe she does, I suppose."
"Why not?"
"Because she doesn't want to, I suppose. It would be too... inconvenient for her."
You frown. You don't know what to think about that.
"There's no easy way of putting this out there... I can return back in time, Beatrice. I've done so twice. In fact, you were the one who led me to my death that very first time. Not that I'm mad about that."
Beatrice arches her eyebrows.
"What kind of nonsense is coming out of your mouth, I wonder...?"
"I've gotten some of that as well. I've died, and then when I return to the past, I get glimpses of a darkness, of the thick black between life and coming back to life again, and there's someone there."
"This person, do they have a name?"
"Unless their name is 'I love you', I wouldn't be sure."
Beatrice opens her eyes wide and separates her lips. When she recovers, she nods slightly.
"You said you only remember about that darkness in between when you come back?"
"That's right."
"You weren't present, lucid, at the moment of meeting her, I wonder...?"
"Thankfully I wasn't. I think I might have shat myself if that were the case."
Beatrice gets down from her chair and turns towards the depths of the library.
"Follow me, I suppose."
You stand surprised for a few seconds, and then you catch up to her. You both head out of the main room, then walk up a set of stairs to the second floor. Before you enter the room you know you are going to see a series of corpses, mostly of what you would generally describe as half-beast villagers, lying on tables. They are preserved as if they died a day before, but they might as well have gathered dust there for a thousand years.
"You aren't planning to kill me, right...?", you ask nervously. "This smelling like Satella isn't like a death sentence or something."
"Don't be silly, I suppose. Now push off one of the corpses, whichever you prefer."
"Huh!?"
"Are you going to make me repeat myself, I wonder...?"
There's no arguing with the librarian, so you shrug and choose the smallish corpse of a half-koala. It thuds as it hits the ground.
"I hope this isn't a sacrilege."
"Shut up, I suppose. Now lie in his place."
"What for?"
"Are you really asking me that?"
"Ah... You want to show off your magic tricks, don't you?"
Beatrice sighs.
"Is there a more irritating man in this world, I wonder...? Do as I said or don't bother me, I suppose!"
You stare at the girl with a deadpan expression. Finally, you start to undress, but Beatrice lets out a noise of surprise.
"You misheard me, I suppose!"
"Oh."
When you lie fully dressed on the table, she approaches the side of your torso. She closes her eyes and extends one palm over your heart. A dark, purplish light emerges from the tips of her fingers and converge in a churning ball a few centimeters under her palm.
You grow nervous, but after a few seconds you don't feel anything in particular. Although you believe that she's preparing something, suddenly the purplish light goes out, and Beatrice turns away from the table.
"That's all, I suppose."
You sit up.
"Are you sure that did anything?"
"Do I need to suffer you questioning my methods, I wonder...? There's indeed a witch's scent embedded in you. My magic served to... How to put it into terms you would understand, I wonder? It calibrated the essence, so you are attuned to it."
"Yeah, sure."
Beatrice frowns.
"How disrespectful, I suppose."
"Is it like a bad thing to have a witch's essence inside?"
"How would having Satella's essence inside be a good thing, I wonder...? The witch's essence is usually associated with the Witch's Cult. Their higher-ups call it a Witch Factor. They are blessings, I suppose, that grant them power."
"So I was given the blessing to go back in time whenever I die?"
"That's what you said, I suppose."
You massage your chin for a moment.
"Well, I don't know why."
"Should I know, I wonder...? If what you are saying is true, then the next time you die you will face the presence while fully lucid. Will you avoid soiling yourself, I wonder?"
"That's a nasty expression, Beatrice. You shouldn't repeat it."
"I'm much older than you, I suppose!"
You follow her back down to the library, and after she seats in her chair and grabs her antique book, she seems to expect you to have left already.
"Beatrice... If anyone attacked this mansion, would you help?", you ask cautiously.
"If I deemed it necessary, I suppose."
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"It means if your actions are rash or unwise, then I won't help, I suppose. But if it seems like you're doing something right and proper, then I will help."
Beatrice gives you a creepy smile as she says this. You have a feeling she was trying to say something else though. You need to be more careful with your words... And more patient.
"Well I'll be off now, then. I've put off my main goal here too long. It was nice seeing you again, Beatrice."
Beatrice says nothing more as you leave the library. You take one last lingering look back at the bookshelves and at the small figure sitting on the chair, knowing that it's the last time you are going to see them in this life.

Roleplaying through "Re:Zero" with the GPT-3 story generator (Part 12)

This part, like the previous one, covers a small portion of the sixth volume of the original Re:Zero series. The part deals, of course, with a couple of our dear protagonists meeting White "White Whale" Whaleson in the mist.



From the perspective of this weird AI-fueled roleplaying/retelling I'm doing, this scene, which I love in general, is just one that for the most part I had to "get through". It plays out so perfectly in the original novel that I couldn't think of doing anything differently. However, I already know the following parts are going to deviate from the original. For starters, I didn't think that the version of the protagonist in this retelling wouldn't have catched up to the fact that people disappearing from memories is the White Whale's fault. So there's no fighting Otto, getting pushed off the carriage to die, etc., like in the original.

The artificial intelligence didn't do that much. It kept trying to produce assaults from fantasy creatures on the caravan, or otherwise have the main characters jump out of the carriage to look around in the mist. Didn't fit.

GPT-3 is a cutting-edge language processing algorithm used in the premium version of the online site AI Dungeon.

-Link for part 1
-Link for part 2
-Link for part 3
-Link for part 4
-Link for part 5
-Link for part 6
-Link for part 7
-Link for part 8
-Link for part 9
-Link for part 10
-Link for part 11

The group of carriages approaches the cloudy wall of mist, the approximate center of which covered the path off ahead as far as you could see. It took one of the carriage drivers that had agreed to help just a minute for him to announce that this was a terrible mistake, and to turn back to safety. Your hands are trembling, and you must admit that your underwear is probably stained with the piss drips you can't contain. The brave carriage drivers are advancing through the all-encompassing mist at a relatively low speed. You feel your face get moist from the condensation.
Around five minutes later you get the idea that you are afraid of a meteorological phenomenon. Hell, maybe the whole White Whale thing was a hallucination of the bunch of lunatics that chose to follow you.
You lean towards your carriage driver, who happens to be a cute demon servant called Rem.
"No, but really. Why would a whale fly? Did nature break along the way in your fantasy world?"
"It is our world, not just mine. Don't know why you keep adding fantasy in front of it... But the infamous White Whale is not a product of nature."
"It ain't?"
Rem shakes her head as she scans the misty surroundings.
"Beatrice told me some time ago that it's the product of a very powerful and nasty witch of old, from before the last Apocalypse."
"Beatrice being...?"
Rem shoots you a confused look.
"Our child-like librarian...?"
You chuckle nervously.
"Sorry, I guess that when I'm terrified for my life, I forget people I shouldn't be able to forget."
"She might not be too fond of you anyway. You're the guy who keeps bursting into her library."
"But why would Satella create a flying whale? Was she sympathetic with the whales' envy of birds?"
Rem shrinks her shoulders for a moment when she hears the Witch of Envy's name.
"It wasn't Satella. Beatrice mentioned that the Witch of Gluttony, one of the various very powerful witches that lived back then, was responsible."
"That makes even less sense, and should open a whole new line of questioning, but... Man, this fantasy world used to be even more terrifying before the last reset."
"There you go again with the fantasy stuff."
Your group of carriages continues, and you focus on listening to the ground dragons breathing and the carriages' wheels creaking. You turn to the back of the carriage to see if Otto hasn't had a heart attack. Rem is driving the carriage that Anastasia procured for you both, but you had figured that you could use a backup driver in case Rem needed to flail someone, and the young merchant Otto, despite his perennial drunkness, was the only one you trusted out of this group of lunatics.
"... Are we there yet?", he asks sheepishly.
"No, we've still got a while."
You cross your arms in silence. The touch of the mist on your face is refreshing and comfortable, even with the threat that some gigantic, mythical whale might decide to swallow you at any moment.
At some point, Rem starts moving around on her seat. You follow her gaze. The two ground dragons of your carriage are shaking their heads and looking around warily.
"Rem, what's wrong?", you ask.
"They are scared", Rem says, lowering her voice.
You lean towards your side of the carriage to see if you can spot any of the carriages following you. You see the faint glow of the magical crystals from the carriage that follows from that side, and the hint of the bestial creatures that pull it.
"Nothing out of the ordinary so far", you say.
"I can't hear the ground dragon's noisy breathing anymore...", Rem says.
"Help!", you hear as faint cry from one of the carriages behind you. It's immediately followed by a more serious cry for help from another carriage. Soon, the sounds of struggling and people yelling for help are joined by crunching and horrible shrieks of pain.
Rem perks up and orders the ground dragons to run faster. You hear the sound of fabric rustling, as Rem prepares to launch herself out of the carriage.
"Rem, wait!", you say, grabbing her arm.
Rem calls out to Otto.
"You, merchant, grab the reins. I'm needed back."
Otto, terrified by the shouting that escapes from the wall of mist you are leaving behind, climbs over the separation to the driver's seat and grabs on to the reins. That seems to give him confidence. Rem stands on the back of the carriage, with her own back to you both.
You glimpse movement coming up from your right, but you realize it's another carriage catching up. Its driver's seat appears. You recognize the blonde caravan guard that had believed that the White Whale might have been a human for some reason.
"You guys alright?", the caravan guard asks. "We heard a terrible commotion a moment ago."
"We're fine and dandy, but some people aren't", you reply.
You hear horrible whimpers, and then a loud thump as something or someone hits the ground with a heavy thud. The caravan guard shoots a look over his shoulder, scared, but in a couple of seconds he recomposes himself and looks forward as if he hadn't heard anything.
You spend around a minute feeling your heartbeats on your neck, and when Rem puts a hand on your shoulder, you almost shriek.
"I apologize, Rem. I should just be overjoyed that you decide to touch me."
"I was a worry-wart. It seems that this mist is just that, not a cover for something terrible."
You look over your shoulder at Rem, who smiles at you calmly.
"What about that crunching and shrieking from before, Rem?", you ask dumbfounded. "Or did I just made it up in my mind?"
Rem looks confused.
"I didn't hear anything. Did you, Otto?"
The young merchant shakes his head.
"It was probably just an animal", Rem says.
"It was people, and more concisely the other merchants and travellers who chose to follow us through the mist. It sounded like a few carriages were involved", you say nervously.
"What are you on about, bodyguard?", Otto says, alternating between glancing at the ground dragons and at you. "There's no one out here in this mist aside from us. Nobody else would be so crazy as to agree to follow you like I did."
You shake your head, confused and scared.
"Rem, I... I think we should turn back", you say.
"We can't turn back, friend!", Otto says incredulously. "You should follow only your initial direction once you venture into the mist."
You look back at Rem to find some support.
"Rem, do you seriously didn't hear anything? Can you figure out if you see the hint of any carriage from the end of your own?"
Rem shakes her head slightly, and narrows her brow.
"What other carriages? Did you see anybody else travelling through the mist as we were passing by?"
You stare at her with your mouth open.
"What about that old man with the purple eye, and Liliana, and the others for whom we didn't even get a name?"
You wait for an answer as you feel the cold shoulder of your coat touching against your neck, which contributes to your shivers. Rem first rubs your shoulders for a moment, and then gives you a quick hug pressing her cheek against yours, maybe to calm you. You are glad to feel her contact, except that you shouldn't feel glad about anything right now.
"This is, like, really bad", you mutter.
"Don't worry, mister bodyguard", Otto says, offering you a smile. "We'll get out of the mist in no time. We'll get through another night!"
"Otto, how did you get your bruises? That black eye, and your swollen lip?"
"Oh, that?"
Otto touches his eye, and smiles even wider.
"It's not a big deal. This big guy hit me."
"Who did?"
"Some black-hooded man. I was on my way to go to the restroom, like, you know, pee, but I had had a bit too much to drink..."
You remember the carriage that had catched up to yours on your right. You turn to look across that side of your carriage, but you only see a dense wall of mist in the dark.
"Rem...", you say with a thin voice, "the only reasonable explanation is that every other carriage and their occupants have been erased, right?"
She holds your hand with her left one, and strokes your hair with her right.
"If we had travelled with other people and they had been erased, you wouldn't remember either. We need to keep it together for just a while longer, Subaru." Rem lets go of your hand, and looks straight at you. "We're going to be fine. We just have to ride it out."
You turn to look out of your side of the carriage, and you face an opaque white wall instead of the shreds of mist that had been floating before. Before you can think about what you are seeing, a lid larger than your ground dragons opens up, revealing a gigantic red iris, which immediately focuses on you and narrows.
"Wh...", you murmur as you feel a force slamming the shell of your carriage, sending it off course. Otto somehow manages to order the ground dragons to return to the road, as the young merchant shrieks in terror.
"That can't be natural!", you cry.
Although don't want to see it again, you look to your right to figure out if the eye is still there, but it has disappeared. However, you feel the weight of something immense shifting the mist, and even dragging all of you towards it.
"We're not going to make it, are we, Subaru...?", you hear Rem say as your carriage trembles and some part of the shell is torn apart.
You attempt to grasp at Rem, but she's moved back. You maneuver to jump over the separation, if only because being close to her would make you feel safer.
"That's... That's the White Whale, I'm guessing."
Rem is staring at the darkened mist beyond the back of the carriage.
"I can't imagine it being anything else. Subaru, you need to be ready."
The mist is churning and shifting.
"What in the world could I possibly do?", you say with a shaky voice.
"Whatever you need to do to stay alive, yourself alone", Rem says, with fear in her eyes.
You grasp at her arm.
"Don't tell me you are thinking something crazy, Rem!"
"No, I'm-"
Something like a serrated wall of flesh emerges from the mist at the back of the carriage, and in a sudden movement, half of the back of the carriage's roof is gone as if something had taken a chunk out of it. You grab the wooden separation to avoid falling. Rem does fall to her knees, but she stands up almost immediately.
"This is the end!", Otto cries.
As you were blinking away the tears and trying to prevent your teeth from clacking together, Rem grabs onto your shoulders and forces you to look her in the eye from up close.
"Rem, what...?"
"Subaru, listen to me for a moment."
Rem's face is so close to yours that you can feel her breath on your face as she speaks.
"It's just you and me here now. There's no other person in the entire world. You will survive, do you hear me?"
"I can't..."
"I had only kept living to repent for what I had thought that one time, my sister... This was my punishment. I was never needed nor wanted, and I only occupied space that should have been given to others. It would have been better if I had never existed. But, you... When I'm with you, I'm home."
A warmth rushes to your eyes, and you swallow to clear your throat.
"Rem...!"
"Live on."
Rem embraces you and kisses you in the mouth. It's so sudden and forward, it takes you a moment to realize that you're being kissed. Rem's tongue separates from yours.
"I'm sorry... I can't spend years and years with you, but... At least I can do this much."
Rem jumps towards the back of the carriage. You hear a clink of chains, and before you know it, Rem's holding to her flail's handle with one hand, and to the enormous spiked ball with the other. Beyond her, the serrated wall of teeth and white flesh disturbs the shreds of mist, which disappear into the black of its gargantuan mouth.
As you were lunging towards Rem, she springs several meters in the air while launching the spiked ball towards the white flesh. Taken aback, the gigantic mass of the White Whale slows down, and the mist surrounds you again as if you had never seen either of them.
You don't know how many seconds you've stood there with your mouth open and tears jumping from your eyes. When you recover, you turn to Otto, who is working the reins to demand the ground dragons to go faster.
"Otto! Rem has jumped off the carriage!"
Otto doesn't answer. He only shakes his head.
You jump over the separation and onto the free side of the driver's seat.
"Turn back immediately!", you order him angrily.
"I will do no such thing! I heard her loud and clear. That wonderful lady who loves you is saving both our lives. Don't waste it!"
Otto spurs the ground dragons to go faster. You realize what he's saying is right, and you frown from the pain.
"I can't just..."
Otto's intense expression goes blurry. Your chest has filled with something dense that makes it harder for you to breathe.
You can only hear the ground dragons as the carriage races away. Some time after, Otto points to the mist ahead of you both.
"It's clearing up! We made it!", he says with a triumphant voice.
When you look again, you see the opening of the mist. Beyond, the moonlight falls on the vast fields.
"I can't believe it! We came across the White Whale and survived!", Otto yells and cheers. "I thought I was the unluckiest man in the world, but not only I survived a legendary monster, I'm also going to get paid three times all my oil's market value!"
You snap at him with a teary voice.
"What the fuck is wrong with you, dickhead?"
Otto looks at you with a frown.
"What?"
"You're cheering your lucky stars when we just left her to die!"
Otto stares at you dumbfounded.
"What are you talking about? It's just us both. Did we actually pass someone in the mist?"
You look at him with a mixture of horror and disgust. The numbness turns to anger as you realize what had happened, and your hand clenches into a fist. However, your anger slowly melts into pain. You sink in your seat. You can't look up, but you feel Otto glancing at you.
"You are right", Otto says with an understanding tone. "How could I cheer when that monster has taken the lives of so many over hundreds of years? It's so disrespectful. I apologize, and I will do so over and over. I'm ashamed."
Some minutes later, as you leave behind the dangerous fields for some more populated areas, Otto insists on asking you for the directions to Roswaal's village. You tear from yourself the words that he should just head in the general direction of the lord's domain.

Some observations regarding GPT-3's behavior for this one.
-It was GPT-3's decision again to forget who Beatrice was. I think it's become sort of a running joke thing.
-Rem's ominious phrase '"I can't hear the ground dragon's noisy breathing anymore..."' is verbatim from GPT-3.
-With some minor editing, the following came from GPT-3: '"Help!", you hear as faint cry from one of the carriages behind you. It's immediately followed by a more serious cry for help from another carriage. Soon, the sounds of struggling and people yelling for help are joined by crunching and horrible shrieks of pain.'"
-The sentences 'You hear horrible whimpers, and then a loud thump as something or someone hits the ground with a heavy thud.' came verbatim from the AI.
-Otto's alternate origin story for his bruises, '"Some black-hooded man. I was on my way to go to the restroom, like, you know, pee, but I had had a bit too much to drink..."', mostly came from GPT-3.
-Otto's reaction, 'Otto doesn't answer. He only shakes his head.', at the protagonist's insistence is verbatim from GPT-3.
-The sentences 'Otto spurs the ground dragons to go faster. You realize what he's saying is right, and you frown from the pain.' came verbatim from GPT-3.
-The protagonist's precise reproach, '"You're cheering your lucky stars when we just left her to die!"', was verbatim from GPT-3.

Incidentally, this link is a short YouTube video of the moment in the anime adaptation of the novel series when Rem decides how to handle the whale.

Roleplaying through "Re:Zero" with the GPT-3 story generator (Part 11)

This part, like the previous one, covers a small portion of the sixth volume of the original Re:Zero series. I ended up preferring the short format to post these up. I want to keep pumping out scenes and letting them hang clean so as I push forward I can reread some parts and feel that I don't have that much to touch when I finally get to HTML the latest raw. Not much of anything happens in this one, but I kept giggling through it even when rereading it, which is good enough for me.

GPT-3 worked its magic. I had to prompt them travellers being gathered around the campfire, and I knew that Otto would pop up, but the remaining characters are all due to GPT-3's magic. Plenty of great dialogue came verbatim from good ol' AI too.

GPT-3 is a cutting-edge language processing algorithm used in the premium version of the online site AI Dungeon.

-Link for part 1
-Link for part 2
-Link for part 3
-Link for part 4
-Link for part 5
-Link for part 6
-Link for part 7
-Link for part 8
-Link for part 9
-Link for part 10

The two suspiciously aerodynamic ground dragons that came with Anastasia's chosen carriage are making you fly through the open countryside in the dark, which is only breached in isles by the glowing, magical crystals that this fantasy world uses as nighttime illumination. You guess that these crystals that apparently are gathered from mines in some areas are the convenient substitutes for electricity in most concerns that would otherwise require the lightning stuff. Funny how the universe balances its dimensions. In any case, ground dragons also have a blessing or some shit that creates a bubble of spacetime that makes it so the extreme air that going so far produces doesn't blow the drivers out of the driver's seat, which would have made these noble creatures obsolete. This fantasy world's Darwinism had made it so ground dragons were better at everything than dumb horses, except at crushing unsuspecting children's skulls with a back kick just because the damn child wanted to pet a horsey. Good riddance as far as you are concerned.
Screaming the whole ride, you try to forget the pain in your ass by focusing on a certain aching part of your brain, but it's not helping. You barely give a shit what's happening anymore; you just want to get off this fucking thing.
"Rem, I can't tell much about anything, but this isn't the same route we followed last time, I don't think!"
"It isn't! This is a dangerous route that you don't want to be caught in if you are riding a slower carriage, because many monsters can run about that fast!"
"Are there any other dangers to worry about along this route, apart from being torn apart by monsters if you stop!?"
"None! People call it Flugel Road, because of a large tree that this Flugel sage planted some hundreds of years in the past and it grew so big!"
"A dumb name!"
At one point, Rem decides to slow down the ground dragons. It seems that she has noticed in the distance a couple of figures standing near the path, and that are signaling for the carriage. Rem lets go of the reins with one hand to slide it into whatever part of her maid costume could possible hide her enormous flail, as she eyes suspiciously those approaching figures. You sit straighter, although you could hardly do more.
It's two men wearing outfits that would generally belong to travelling merchants. They don't behave threateningly.
"Good night! We are flagging down passing carriages in order to share information with each other. The road is a bit more perilous than usual tonight, I'm afraid."
"Just our fucking luck", you say.
"If you both will come, you can park your carriage a bit further down this open field and join us."
You are surprised that Rem agrees so readily. She maneuvers the carriage so it approaches a large group of carriages gathered as in a camp. Numerous figures are mostly sitting around a campfire, and some of their ground dragons are curled up and sleeping. You both disembark and walk towards the gathering.
You whisper in Rem's likely delicious ear.
"Are you sure we can waste our time?"
"We need to know if there are dangers ahead that could cost us more than the minutes we'll waste here."
That sounds reasonable, you think. That's why Rem is in charge, as well as for most other reasons.
After a quick look at the area, you realize a lot of carriages belong to merchants, although there are some travellers. There's also a family obviously of travellers, with the mother and two young children huddled on one side while the father speaks to a merchant.
You approach the campfire, but you don't get too close. Some of these people must be desperate if this area is as bad as it sounds, particularly at night. Apart from a couple of caravan guards who look like discount soldiers, most of the people at this camp do not wear any armors, just traveling clothes.
Rem speaks to the camp at large.
"We're coming from Lugunica, straight to lord Roswaal's domain. We heard there were problems on the road. What exactly happened?"
"Who are you?" a woman asks.
"My name is Rem, and this is my bodyguard, Natsuki Subaru. We both serve lord Roswaal."
You nod nervously. Don't test my supposed profession, you ask in your mind.
"I'm Liliana", the woman who spoke first says. "We're travelling to the Alania territory. We have important documents to deliver. I wanted to use a knight or a royal courier, but they wouldn't take this road."
Nobody asked you, lady, you think.
"You people mentioned the road being more perilous than usual tonight. What's going on?", Rem asks.
Some of the people gathered look at each other, seemingly unwilling to speak up. A young man who is taking a swig at a bottle does.
"There's mist up ahead, that's the problem. There goes another chance to get rid of this damn oil."
You perk up, and point at the probably drunk young man.
"Holy shit, it's you! This is a small fantasy world."
"Huh!?", Otto says, spilling some alcohol.
Otto looks you over, but he doesn't recognize you.
"No, you are not as drunk as you think you are, probably. You don't know me directly, but I've met you before in two previous lives."
"Huh... the third time's the charm, then", he says with a frown, slumping back.
"But in any case, what's the issue with the mist exactly?"
Most of the people present frown, and some chuckle as if they are being polite after hearing a terrible joke. Even Rem is looking at you confused.
"Hey, don't give me that 'you don't know that?' look, Rem", you complain. "If anybody would, you should know that I don't know anything."
Rem's face goes all serious, and she speaks in a thin voice.
"Most of the time the mist is just mist. But the problem is that some of the times the mist isn't just mist."
"It's a figure of speech, it isn't...", you say, but then you stop short.
The people gathered look at you expectantly.
"What do you mean exactly?", you ask.
An old man wearing a robe marked with a purple eye speaks up.
"The White Whale, what else!? Are you retarded!?"
You tilt your head.
"The White Whale... is that like a whale in some ocean?"
"Terrific monster, actually", says a caravan guard in his twenties. "It's not evil, it's just a force of nature."
"A force of nature with a taste for human flesh and human souls", the purple-eyed old man says.
"Shut up, old man!"
"Make me shut up, Tholter! I'm not afraid of you!"
Another caravan guard with blonde hair and wearing plate mail armor slaps his pal, Tholter, in the back of the head.
"Stop fighting, both of you! We don't have time for this."
The blonde man turns to you.
"Sorry about this... this is just a stressful thing for all of us, especially since there's a chance we might not make it through."
"Why would a whale be a problem for ground carriages, no matter how capitalized its name is?", you ask.
The caravan guard laughs.
"Oh, you are not joking! Where are you from? You must have been born yesterday!"
"Pretty much!"
"The White Whale flies. It's a whale that flies and appears out of nowhere in the mist and then people go missing. Go missing in a special way."
You gulp.
"Like how?"
"They disappear from the world without a trace. Even from people's memories! You only know they are gone because, for example, units of soldiers suddenly return with fewer numbers, but you don't know who is missing!" The blonde caravan guard crosses his arms and smiles smugly at you. "And that's not even the worst thing about the mist or the White Whale."
You shudder at the thought that such a creature could ever exist.
"What is then?"
"It's not human. Well, not entirely human. It's like an animal, with no soul or emotions. Nothing can stop it or reason with it."
"Well, I don't know why you expected it to be human. It clearly says in its name that it is a whale, whether flying or not. But it sounds absolutely horrifying. Are you sure you didn't dream this up in one of your drunken revelries?"
"I did not!"
You sigh.
"Sorry, I don't really know you that well and you don't know me either. But if what you're saying is true, then this danger is very real and we're in a lot of trouble."
"We are well aware that the danger is real, you are the one who doesn't have a clue", the purple-eyed old man says angrily.
"I guess you'll have to sleep here until the mist dissipates", Otto says. "No matter, lord Roswaal's domains will be there when you reach them."
"But people that the domain contains won't, which is the problem", you say with a nervous voice. "This is bad, isn't it? I don't know how it wouldn't be. So if there's mist, there's a flying whale that erases people?"
"Didn't that blue-haired maid you protect say that most of the time the mist is just mist?", the old man says. "You need to clean your ears! It might be just mist, or it might hide the White Whale. Why risk it?"
"I need to know when there's a flying whale!", you complain.
"Then walk into the mist, idiot, and find out for yourself."
"No! I'm not going to do that!"
"He's got a point", some other man further away from the campfire says. "If I was a flying whale that erased people, I'd probably stay away from the place where I revealed my secret identity."
"We already established that the monster is not human", the blonde caravan guard says.
The woman, Liliana, intervenes.
"Okay, so we were wrong. There is no flying whale. That doesn't change the fact that there is still some sort of mist that turns everything into ice and it comes from the mountains."
"Nobody cares about some other mist!", you say. "The flying whale is much more interesting."
"Maybe. But if this mist absorbs heat and causes frost, who knows what that White Whale is capable of?"
"It erases people", the blonde caravan guard says. "I can tell you that much."
Gears are turning in your head, but they are just grinding any coherent thought.
"The thing is", Rem says calmly. "We need help."
Everyone's gaze turns to the beautiful blue-haired maid, who is really cute, and she's holding a pouch that bulges as if it contains plenty of coins.
"Lord Roswaal is a rich and powerful man, and he gave me a significant amount of money to accomplish the tasks he ordered me to fulfill. Returning to his mansion as soon as possible is one of the most important of those tasks."
"So what!? Are you showing off!?", the purple-eyed old man says.
"Idiot! She's making a point!", someone else answers.
"Indeed I am. Look, we knew that if we ran into trouble on our way back, with the money Lord Roswaal gave me, we can easily solve it."
"That's true", Liliana says. "You can throw the coins at the White Whale to distract it."
"So you're saying...", Otto says, "that you want to give us money to guide you through the mist?"
"It's more than guiding through the mist. We need to move people", Rem says.
You stare at Rem confused. Do we need to move people?
"No, thank you", Otto says, and burps. "I don't want to be erased. I have oil to complain about."
"I see. Then, allow me to make the proposal another way. I will pay you... let's say, triple the amount the market pays for that oil, all of it, if you bring us to his mansion. We'd also need to use your carriage, and those of whoever else comes with us, for transporting humans."
The purple-eyed old man laughs, and he looks around as if he had never heard a funnier joke in his life.
"I'm serious", Rem says, and moves forward the bag of coins. It chinks as she gently shakes it. "We have no need for this money, and lord Roswaal is rich. I want to give it to you for the help."
"Why would a whale fly, though?", you wonder out loud after some thought. "What kind of incoherent fantasy world is this?"
Rem shoots you a look that is at the same time reproachful and understanding.
"Let's move past questioning facts of reality, for now at least."
"I... I'm sorry, Rem", you whisper.
Rem nods and moves her gaze back to the group.
"You said you need to transport humans, right?", Otto asks dubitatively. "I think that's what I heard? Why would you need to transport humans urgently?"
"I'm not sure if you're aware of this, but my lord Roswaal is fond of hosting these celebrations known as the Glorious Races. It's common knowledge I assume. Anyway, he's got this... this thing he's trying to court a lady with, and it involves these races."
"Aha! Now I get it! He's betting on the races!"
Rem nods.
"Thing is, it involves having to transport out of their village all the villagers at the foot of the hill that leads to the lord's mansion. And it needs to be done as soon as possible, literally, because otherwise the villagers won't get to see the lord win his bets."
"Lord Roswaal is even more eccentric than I thought...", Otto says.
"So we need humans, people like you", Rem concludes. "I know it's terrible to do this to you, in a night like this, but we need to pick the people most useful for our purposes."
After a bit of silence, the purple-eyed old man speaks.
"I'm in."
The declaration makes you jump a bit, as you hadn't expected or even thought that anyone would actually agree.
"Hm? You disagree with my carriage accompanying you fancy lord pawns to the manor?"
"No, I'm fine with it", you say after taking a deep breath.
"Then it's settled. You, young man, come with us."
Otto turns towards the old man, and lets out a weird noise.
"Me!?"
"I thought you agreed to come with us? I don't like to force people, but-"
Otto accidentally swings his alcohol, which splashes all over Liliana.
"I never agreed to anything!"
"You... You bastard!"
The old man leaps onto Otto, and starts punching him in the face. The young, drunk Otto tries to defend himself, but the purpled-eyed old man seems to have a lot of energy to fight back. All you do is stand back and watch the scene unfold. Even Rem is watching the pair brawl.
"Well...", you say. "Is there anyone else willing to join? It's like, the whole pouch thing for the lot of ya."

Some observations regarding GPT-3's behavior here.

-The sentences 'Screaming the whole ride, you try to forget the pain in your ass by focusing on a certain aching part of your brain, but it's not helping. You barely give a shit what's happening anymore; you just want to get off this fucking thing.' came verbatim from GTP-3. Thank you AI for imitating my narrative style.
-Most of the description of the camp, 'After a quick look at the area, you realize a lot of carriages belong to merchants, although there are some travellers. There's also a family obviously of travellers, with the mother and two young children huddled on one side while the father speaks to a merchant. You approach the campfire, but you don't get too close. Some of these people must be desperate if this area is as bad as it sounds, particularly at night. Apart from a couple of caravan guards who look like discount soldiers, most of the people at this camp do not wear any armors, just traveling clothes', came from GPT-3, although not verbatim. GPT-3 insisted on having professional soldiers in the camp, which in such a dangerous area would have made sense.
-Otto's dumbfounded, but generally uncaring response, '"Huh... the third time's the charm, then", he says with a frown, slumping back.' is verbatim from GPT-3.
-Except for Otto, all other characters (the caravan guards, Liliana and the purpled-eyed old man) are characters that GPT-3 came up with. I just retouched a bit their general descriptions, and mentioned them properly where necessary. GPT-3 also provided the general 'feel' of that nasty old man, which I used to my advantage.
-The following exchange, '"Terrific monster, actually", says a caravan guard in his twenties. "It's not evil, it's just a force of nature." "A force of nature with a taste for human flesh and human souls", the purple-eyed old man says. "Shut up, old man!" "Make me shut up, Tholter! I'm not afraid of you!"' came verbatim from GPT-3 except for the character descriptions. The whole thing about it being a force of nature must have come from an introduction I wrote in the hidden backstory about the whale being so impossible to kill that every kingdom considered it a natural disaster. Somehow the AI put two and two together.
-Maybe my favorite exchange is that of the blonde caravan guard for whom I did have to prompt that whole deal about the mist erasing people, but then GPT-3 came up with ' The blonde caravan guard crosses his arms and smiles smugly at you. "And that's not even the worst thing about the mist or the White Whale. It's not human. Well, not entirely human. It's like an animal, with no soul or emotions. Nothing can stop it or reason with it."' After saying the memories erasing mist thing, he adds that the worst part is that a whale is not a human? What an idiot! Such an absurd moment set up plenty of the tone for the rest of the scene, as far as me writing the rest is concerned.
-The phrase '"Then walk into the mist, idiot, and find out for yourself."' came verbatim from GPT-3.
-GPT-3 also came up entirely with '"If I was a flying whale that erased people, I'd probably stay away from the place where I revealed my secret identity."' Think about that, an AI saying 'If I was a flying whale that erased people', after having integrated the words of the backstory and this scene in its neural network.
-Liliana's idiotic attempt at changing the conversation, '"Okay, so we were wrong. There is no flying whale. That doesn't change the fact that there is still some sort of mist that turns everything into ice and it comes from the mountains."', was verbatim GPT-3, as well as her follow up.
-The following lie coming from Rem, '"I'm not sure if you're aware of this, but my lord Roswaal is fond of hosting these celebrations known as the Glorious Races. It's common knowledge I assume. Anyway, he's got this... this thing he's trying to court a lady with, and it involves these races."', is verbatim from GPT-3. What I was most impressed about it is not only that it decided for me whether or not the characters were going to say the truth regarding the Witch's Cult attack to these people, but that GPT-3 made Rem sound as if she was making it up!
-Rem calling the group in front of her 'humans' nonchalantly is great, and it came from GPT-3. Obviously, Rem is not a human, although she mostly looks like one.
-GPT-3 was the one who made the old man join Rem's plan first. It worked perfectly as far as I'm concerned.
-The whole leaping on Otto for a bit of punching was made by GPT-3, but the AI had decided that Liliana was the one doing it, likely because of Otto splashed her with his alcohol. I think the absurdity of the old man's action works better.
-Pretty sure that GPT-3 not having produced virtually anything of value in the previous part was simply a bug in the website that works as an intermediary to communicate with GPT-3's cloud servers. I'm guessing that session wasn't working with the neural network that has handled all other parts.

Roleplaying through "Re:Zero" with the GPT-3 story generator (Part 10)

This part, like the previous one, covers a small portion of the sixth volume of the original Re:Zero series. My real problem writing this part was that, for some reason, GPT-3 produced very little of value; the first time in ten sessions I've gone through that GPT-3 vastly underperforms. I don't know why, but I think I'll insist the AI to produce more during the next portion to cover. What comes next is hard from the perspective of doing something new for this strange AI-fueled roleplaying/fanfiction I decided to use my free time on: logistically, until the characters reach Roswaal's mansion again, most of the stuff needs to happen like in the original. But we'll see when we get there.

GPT-3 is a cutting-edge language processing algorithm used in the premium version of the online site AI Dungeon.

-Link for part 1
-Link for part 2
-Link for part 3
-Link for part 4
-Link for part 5
-Link for part 6
-Link for part 7
-Link for part 8
-Link for part 9

As you push yourself to keep walking through the streets, you feel a hand on your shoulder. It's Rem. She pulls you close and holds you tightly.
"What... what was that all about?" she asks.
You only sigh.
The girl keeps looking at you with concern in her face. Then, she hugs you again.
"It's just bad, Rem", you say. "Normally I think something dumb would have come rushing out of my mouth, which I'd end up regretting some day along with the growing mountain of shame. The fact is that we didn't get Crusch, and we better forget there's such a thing as a Priscilla Barielle in this world or mine."
Rem nods silently at your words, then squeezes your hand.
"Well then," she says, "let's take a little walk to clear our heads, okay?"
"Uh-huh."
You let Rem guide you through streets that she knows to at least a bigger extent than you do. Even though there's plenty to see and listen, you can't concentrate on anything. There's a coldness stuck in your body that threatens to make your spine tremble every few seconds, and your back hurts where you took the fall against the carpeted floor. Where was Rem going? Did she have a plan in mind? You see that she's leading you, half-dragging you, through some market-like area full of colourful stands and noisy vendors.
"You are a fan of ice cream, right? I think there was a stand around here...", Rem says with a smile.
Your stop for a second, and Rem's hand slips off your arm. Before you know it, you've wandered away in a daze. Ice cream? Nothing good has happened recently when ice cream is involved. But more importantly, why would Rem think about procuring you ice cream when there's a massacre to prevent? Ah, she doesn't believe you, you had forgotten. She had humored you because she likes you, and now that you've had your fun, and maybe even realized the foolishness of pursuing that fun, you'll comply sheepishly with what Rem wants, which is merely to be with you. Yet, it is too late, is it not? This night won't take that long to fall, and you can't go out at night with the carriage. That means that you have failed, again.
Your sixth sense informs you that someone is staring at you with purpose. You've already raised your head and looked around before you thought about doing so. Regular citizens, human and demi-human alike, are just browsing wares or arguing with vendors. You notice, however, a tiny figure wearing a white robe lined with orange, and who is holding a staff taller than the figure. It's a half-beast, maybe half-cat, half-person, as tall as a child and with the appropriately adorable face. She's standing near a candy stand, eyeing the children whose parents buy them sweets, and she, because it's clearly a girl, keeps looking towards the candy apples on display. No parents around.
Some desires used to be so easy to satisfy, weren't they? No massacres to prevent, no politicians to negotiate with... Merely stuffing your damn mouth with sugar that would rot your teeth.
You sigh and dig in your trousers for the spare change that Rem had given you. When you ask the vendor for a candy apple and you give him the coin, he looks taken aback.
"I'll have to give you too much in change! Are you nuts?"
"Sorry, I can't read the price."
The vendor's expression doubts between sympathy and annoyance.
"Whatever", you say. "Keep the change."
You turn to the little half-beast, who was eyeing you now with her huge eyes, and hand her the candy apple. She smiles widely.
"Ah, you are a good guy! Thank yee!"
"Sure."
As you were walking away, you see Rem approaching you quickly with a concerned look. She glances at the little half-beast and then at you again.
"Subaru, what's going on?"
You realize that you just gave candy to a child you have no relation with. You get nervous and raise your hands in apology.
"It's not what it looks like!"
"That insignia on her robe... She's from the Iron Fang! And according to the rank, a lieutenant."
"Huh!?"
The tiny beast-child keeps munching on her candy apple happily as if you were never there.
"These people are from Kararagi", Rem says. "A mercenary band usually contracted by very powerful people."
"One very powerful person, usually", says a pleasant female voice near you.
You turn to see a woman maybe in her mid twenties, who wears a fur coat and a fur hat, both white and fluffy. Somehow she has the looks of the woman you would have expected to see behind the counter at a family business that had already been passed down through generations. She's no Priscilla, is what you mean. You recognize her, and point at her.
"You are Anastasia something, from that royal summons thing."
"Well, that's more or less correct. And you appeared at the summons as well. A surprise appearance! You had many interesting things to say, that's for sure."
She raises her palm to her mouth and snickers, which doesn't make you feel good.
"It's a parade of royal candidates these days", you say painfully.
"Yes, it is an important time for this kingdom, and for Kararagi as well. We need stability for both."
"Can't say I care about this Kararagi place..."
Anastasia glances at Rem as if she was calculating something, and then turns to you again.
"Natsuki Subaru, isn't that right?"
"As far as I remember. What is it to you?"
"My, are we in a mood? You both came out of that woman Priscilla's den not too long ago, didn't ya?"
"So?"
"I've heard rumors about what goes on there. Horrible things, unspeakable things. Is it true a girl was made to eat her own feet by the royal candidate herself?"
"I wouldn't be surprised that she forced others to do pretty much anything involving feet."
"And it seems she has left a mark on you. What a plan! You belong to Emilia's camp, right? Were you expecting to get a deal from Priscilla on something?"
"No. We just went there for some information."
"Ah, information gathering. How like a spy you are!"
Rem takes a step forward. She's put her serious, 'don't fuck with us' face.
"Miss Hoshin, what is this about? Clearly meeting us hasn't been a coincidence."
She giggles.
"Oh, I do apologize. I'm just having a bit of fun, you know. I hadn't had the opportunity to meet you both in person, particularly sir Natsuki. Such a colourful man!"
You glance at the half-beast lieutenant, who has approached the woman that this tiny girl was clearly contracted to protect.
"Is it a custom in whatever country you come from to use children as bodyguards?"
"My, Kararagi doesn't have much of a nobility system. As for children, you should know that not all of us are born with the luxury of not being adults the moment we're out of our mothers! But that's irrelevant in the case of our tiny Mimi. She's a young adult for her species, and a tough one to boot!"
You feel the heat escape your face, and you take a step back. As your heartbeat pulses on your neck, you end up crouching and pushing your face against your palms.
"Another Mimi!? What are the odds...!? It's too soon!"
"Miss Rem, is your friend okay?", Anastasia says with concern.
Rem seems to have realized that she better do something, because she crouches by your side, she rubs your back and then helps you back on your feet.
"Don't like my name?", says the half-beast lieutenant in a cheerful, carefree voice. "Was another Mimi mean to you?"
You swallow.
"She gave me the best time of my life during the worst time of my life."
This Mimi who isn't that other Mimi tilts her head, and then keeps munching on her apple.
You shake your head. Why are we bothering with this garbage?
"Well, Anastasia Hoshin, I guess it was something meeting you. I'm either team Emilia or team Crusch anyway. Good luck."
"Mr. Natsuki, it wasn't a coincidence for us to meet. I was meaning to steal a bit of your time for a chat. An informal one of course."
"What could you possibly have to speak with me?", you say, tired.
"My, you had delved into the viper's hole around an hour ago, but you seem wary of chatting with silly old me?"
"I guess I must prefer Priscilla's horrifying, naked honesty."
"Ah, the baroness can be very scary at times. But to answer your question, I wanted to chat for a bit and see if anything interesting comes up."
You grit your teeth and don't particularly care if it shows. What a waste.
"We don't have fuck around time, Anastasia. We have urgent matters to deal with."
"I know, I know. Bothersome royal candidates and their advisors, either getting or holding on to their power."
"Far more important than that."
"... You look down, mouth drawn into a frown. I don't know who you are or what you've been through. But I can see it. Behind the quiet frown and slow movements, you're in pain."
You openly glare at this Hoshin broad. You grab Rem's hand and attempt to walk past Anastasia, but this Mimi mercenary steps towards blocking your path as if playing around.
"You are in need of resources", Anastasia says with a firmer tone. "And I am, as I said, a very powerful person, and a royal candidate to boot. Am I not? Why don't you try me?"
That wakes you up. Your voice turns cold as you hiss your next sentence.
"That's the problem with you lot. You're so eager to get power that you offer deals without considering if they're not worth the maggots it'd take to swallow."
Anastasia chuckles slightly.
"Let's talk, just for a bit. There's a good, quiet restaurant nearby. Just the two of us. Very calm, yes?"
Rem holds on to your arm and scoots closer.
"You won't meet with Mr. Natsuki alone. I'm his bodyguard, after all. Same as Mimi for you."
Anastasia seems like she hadn't expected Rem to interrupt you or even be present, but she redraws her smile soon enough.
"Of course. The more, the merrier."
You raise an eyebrow.
"...Fine. You two come too."
The four of you head down the road, into a modest restaurant the size of a somewhat larger than normal bar. Anastasia was guiding you to an empty table in the middle when Rem tugs on your arm and whispers to your ear.
"Everyone else here belongs to the Iron Fang."
As you look around, you realize the obvious. The other seats occupied have people wearing white robes that are lined with orange. Most of those people belong to different species of half-beast as well. The bartender looks at you seemingly confused, or troubled.
You take a seat and put your hands on the table. The bartender comes immediately, and shortly after he's brought a few drinks. Mimi, however, excused herself, climbed to a stool in front of the bar counter and ordered a hamburger.
"Well, Mr. Natsuki. I'm sure you've become a bit versed in negotiations, given that you reside with the duchess, and that you've approached miss Barielle."
"I've learned that you can't ask for things without offering anything in return."
Anastasia chuckles against her hand.
"First lesson, sure! Why don't we state what we want, and then we see if we can work with each other?"
You open your mouth to speak, but you feel that the effort isn't worth it. It's too late, isn't it? You keep repeating it in your head. This is a bad dream. Maybe you should just throw yourself in front of a dragon carriage. Will you wake up in that bed at Crusch's place if you off yourself?
"Mr. Natsuki."
You turn your head and see Anastasia staring at you, eyebrow raised.
"Yes?"
"What is it that the duchess is seeking?"
"Huh?"
"What is it that she wants? That's what I want. That's my request. You are her guest, and you don't belong to her camp. Now, what do you want?"
"Probably an entire army, and a way to get somewhere really fucking fast."
You sigh and put your hand on your forehead. The reality of the situation hits you, and it's not a comfortable feeling. You're not in a happy place right now.
Anastasia's face suggests she hadn't expected an answer of that kind.
"Don't tell me it's starting."
It's getting harder to breath. Your back hurts.
"I guess you are used to speaking like you do, the same way I'm used to mine. But people like you, who seem demand a trade for every word you intend to utter... You make me sick."
"Subaru...", Rem says with a soft voice.
"Starting what, god damn it? Will you be clear?"
Mimi comes back while munching on a hamburger. She hasn't bothered to ask for a plate, nor to wait until she reached the table. She glances at you with bright eyes as she stuffs her mouth.
"The best hamburgers are the cheap ones with lots of onions!"
"You are talking with your mouth full, Mimi. They don't like it here", Anastasia says.
"Hoshin, for the love of God...", you groan.
"The Witch's Cult. What is starting is the Witch's Cult being on the move. It was clear, wasn't it? After lord Roswaal presented a silver-haired half-elf. And you belonging to that camp, your words suggest that them being on the move has crossed over to them rushing to their target. Is that right?"
You nod slowly, unwilling to speak.
"I'm sensing you know more than that", Anastasia adds.
You shake your head. Your hand trembles as you put it back on your forehead. What is happening to you? You feel as if you need to hide in some dark corner.
Anastasia takes something out of her purse. It looks like an official document of some kind.
"I could give you the fastest carriage that can be rented at this moment in the capital. The market is still recovering from the royal summons. Does that sound good?"
You blink, but can't avoid a bead of sweat from irritating one of your eyes.
"In exchange of information about what Crusch wants, you offer me a fast dragon carriage?"
"A super fast one. Straight to Roswaal's domain, right? Probably could get there by tomorrow morning, if you rush through the night."
"It's clear you understand that the cult is rushing to attack. You knew something like this was going to happen. And yet you want to trade for our chance to get there in time and save lives?"
"... Mr. Natsuki, I am, above everything else you could say about me, a businesswoman. My company has expanded more than any other in this generation, as I'm sure you know..."
"I don't know shit."
"... And now we are moving into this kingdom. Kararagi got a bit small, you could say. It's a fact of all life that if you want something, you need to give something in return. Animals know this as well. And even parents who provide for their children have their own selfish reasons, don't they?"
"Spare me your philosophies. You damned schemers... I feel sick. I could vomit for real. I need a bucket."
"You just came from Priscilla's. Can't say I'm surprised! Didn't lady Emilia alert you about her, or lord Roswaal for that matter?"
You hide half of your face on your palm, resting on that elbow. You are sweating profusely.
Anastasia looks you over for a bit.
"However, I was expecting someone different. You hardly seem like the boy who stepped in between the royal candidates at the palace and boasted about impossible feats. Did I chase your twin by mistake?"
Anastasia's last words were filled with sarcasm. You slowly turn your head to look at her, as she gives you a goofy smile.
"I could just reach over and snatch your permit from under your hand", you say gravely.
"Subaru, calm down", Rem says.
You realize you had stopped in the middle of raising from your seat. Mimi had crossed her staff over the table towards your face, while with her free hand she munched on the remains of her hamburger.
"I could explode you, you know", she says like a child playing. The skin around her lips is stained with some ketchup, and a couple of bread crumbs are stuck. "Your bits would get all over the walls and make everybody all dirty."
You sit down slowly while staring at the half-beast girl.
"After I bought you a candy apple?"
Mimi retracts her staff, and for a moment she looks apologetic.
"Sorree! Lady comes first!"
Anastasia opens her mouth, but closes it immediately. She sighs deeply and turns her attention to the menu instead, as if to clear her head.
"One either gives now or gives later, Mr. Natsuki. You know why some can give later even though they receive plenty now?"
"Not really, but I'm sure you'll tell me in your own words as usual."
"It's those that are given to, that are indebted. One should never be in an overly-indebted state, but most are anyway. All stuck in endless cycles. Yet the person who gives expects being able to receive in turn some day, right? That's the whole trade part. There's a good reason I wouldn't give you anything in advance."
"Get to the fucking point."
"With your display at the royal palace you showed everyone that matters in this kingdom that you are a jester, and nothing more. You happen to be in a position, due to your temporary relationship with a royal candidate, in which you can be of use to someone. At least you have eyes, you have ears. You've seen the movement at Crusch's camp. The stuff they load, where they go, the kinds of people involved."
You want to reply, but your throat is closed.
"Emilia, she's not long for this world if things continue as they are", Anastasia continues. "But even before that, she already booted you from her side. She did, right? And why wouldn't she? How you choose to act reflects on those who choose to support you. Supporting a fool makes you a fool. At least you can be a useful fool."
"Miss Hoshin...", Rem says coldly, "You think you know him, but you don't. And you don't understand what you saw either."
"Oh, but I do. What I saw, Mr. Natsuki, was a man who needs to be set free. You were never meant to be a soldier or servant. You've tasted freedom before, you know it is vastly superior over anything else."
"You have all the damn time in the world, huh?", you say with a raspy voice.
"Regardless, you don't. So what are you going to choose? It comes back to one's choices always. I built my empire through small choices. You seem used to choosing poorly from what I know of you."
If you owe to someone, it's to those who had taken you in initially, for sure. Those you might be able to come back to if you repent. Doesn't matter whether you like others. At the end of the day, someone procures your food and your shelter, whether or not you need to work for it, and Crusch is Emilia's opponent.
"Crusch has an army ready. Don't know if it's hers personally, as a duchess. The traffic brings metals to blacksmiths, often returns weapons and armor. They are mobilizing for something, maybe to fight the Witch's Cult, or maybe for some other display that will help her candidacy. Do you figure that these eyes and ears would have noticed anything else?"
Anastasia smiles, and after a few seconds she nods. She slides the permit over the table to you.
"That's really it?", you say, exhausted.
You look the permit over, but then you realize, as you've had to do over and over, that you can't read. Nobody had bothered to teach you. You pass the permit to Rem, who seems content with it.
"And for the Iron Fang?", you ask.
"Oh, they're already mobilized."
"I mean lending the band to me. What would you want?"
Anastasia narrows her eyes, and bends a side of her mouth upwards.
"Far more than what you can offer me now, for sure. Maybe some other time."
It makes you want to lash out, beg, plead, and do anything for what you need. You take a deep breath, close your eyes, and exhale slowly.
"Well, thank you for this carriage anyway."
Anastasia closes her eyes and smiles. After she grabs her purse, both she and her half-beast mercenary stand up. Mimi turns towards the back of the restaurant and raises her staff.
"Let's go!", she announces with a short jump.
Every other client, all of them wearing the mercenary band's insignia, stands up, turns and leaves the restaurant without looking at you. Anastasia and her bodyguard follow them after minor pleasantries towards you both.
With the mercenaries gone, the bartender sits down and sighs.
Rem puts a hand on your shoulder as she gets to her feet.
"We should be leaving."
"Are you okay with this, Rem, riding through the night?"
She nods.
"If that's what you want, or needs to be done."

Roleplaying through "Re:Zero" with the GPT-3 story generator (Part 9)

This part covers a terrifyingly small part of the sixth volume of the original Re:Zero series, merely a paragraph in a summary. In the original the meeting was relatively straightforward, but I always felt that there was much more to squeeze of the depths of Priscilla Barielle, and this is the result. In the original, after this scene Priscilla disappears from the narrative, and as of volume fourteen (the latest one translated), she hasn't appeared again.

I cannot overstate how revolutionary the cutting-edge artificial intelligence called GPT-3 is for fiction writing, as far as I'm concerned. One of the things I always hated the most about writing fiction is having to switch voices between characters, being in the zone for one only to break it to do the other, and it doesn't work well if you attempt to change it during rewrites, because the dialogue should flow depending almost entirely on the verbal punches that the characters throw at each other. For that, GPT-3, which is able to produce from zero completely readable and logical sentences like a person would write them (and often, much better than most people would), is like playing tennis with a partner instead of against a wall. In addition, one of my joys with fiction is just going wild. I hate clichés, I hate conversations or scenes just going the predictable way, but it's very hard when you are writing just by yourself having a character say or do something either outrageous or just unexpected in general, because you have to figure out how another character could react to that interestingly without them going "wow", or "huh?", or not knowing at all how to reply, or walking away and leaving, which would likely happen in real life, and is a significant part of why people don't say interesting things.

I took a walk this afternoon and I realized that one of the things that excite me the most about this strange AI-fueled roleplaying/fanfiction of one of my favorite fictional series (which ticks most of my boxes: time travel, a protagonist who hates himself and is generally useless, navigating through a new world, getting tangled with different, opposing factions of colorful characters, psychological depth, despair, pain, doom, etc.) is that over the many parts (nine already), GPT-3 has introduced such changes that many of the things that happened in the original series cannot happen now, or will have to be finessed into its original thread. The biggest example I can think now is that the White Whale cannot be killed: it required the protagonist having a cellphone, but it got stolen in the first part. There are many other possible references to stuff that GPT-3 made up by itself in previous parts.

I must say, this confrontation below is likely my favorite dialogue in these nine parts so far.

GPT-3 is a cutting-edge language processing algorithm used in the premium version of the online site AI Dungeon.

-Link for part 1
-Link for part 2
-Link for part 3
-Link for part 4
-Link for part 5
-Link for part 6
-Link for part 7
-Link for part 8

Rem and you walk briskly away from the restaurant, and when it disappeared out of sight, you let go of the breath you had held.
"Well, that was a fucking waste of time, wasn't it."
"No! I think they might just come around! Maybe it's just a lot to take in, or maybe they've got other groups to help as well, or something..."
"Or maybe I'm a fucking liar and just wanted a free lunch. That seemed to work, at least."
The two of you laugh awkwardly, but you close your mouth quickly, as you feel pain surging through your throat.
"If Crusch comes around, it will be too late. We are working on a tight schedule. Good food, though."
You two walk aimlessly for a while, listening to the racket of downtown Lugunica at this hour. Your guilt repeats to you that you don't have any second to spare, and yet you feel as if you are slowly sinking into mud that will soon cover your head.
"Uh... Do you have any ideas regarding who could help us against the cult?"
You take a deep breath. Looking around, you realize that the two of you are standing by a park. You look to Rem pleadingly, who gives a quick nod in response.
"Let's sit over there."
As soon as you sit you realize that you survive because you keep burning. If you let yourself rest, the stuff you've seen and felt is going to rip your skin open.
"What can we do, Rem?"
"We could ask for soldiers. I don't think we'd need many. I could turn them into an army that could wipe out the cult in a few days."
"Again, we don't have that time."
Rem nods, not looking at you. After a bit of silence, she sighs softly, before smiling at you. It's a small, fragile thing, but it's enough to coax another smile out of you.
Rem leans slowly against your shoulder until she rests on it, and her light blue hair caresses your cheek.
"To be honest, I'm just happy we can be like this, just the two of us."
You nod silently, entwining your fingers with hers, and you swallow your saliva to widen your throat.
"Ah... I've never been so happy being disappointed."
She grins, her teeth whiter than fallen snow.
"I know what you mean."
You shrug, taking a deep breath. You try to laugh, but your throat is too tight for any sound to escape.
You know that Rem doesn't believe you, not in the way one believes someone else's reasons. She seems to have deluded herself into believing that she might be in love with you, which means that she'll readily go along with whatever nonsense comes out of your mouth. And you are so lucky for it that it would take a lifetime to let it sink in. Doesn't matter what Rem believes, though, as she would know the moment you two approached the village. But by this time we should have already been on the road.
You need a strong person. A superpowered person. You can't put together an army for this, you don't think. Not on this timetable. You browse through your memory, the people you've met, the details they gave up about this fantasy world you don't belong in.
When that woman pops into your mind, you go cold.
For a moment, Rem tries to prevent you from standing up. You offer her your hand for her to follow.
"Rem, oh God... I'm going to meet with the biggest cunt I've ever known besides Puck."


Priscilla Barielle's mansion's grounds looked as if king Midas had visited a museum, turned a good bunch of works of art into gold, and then had placed them without any sense for composition all over her yard. Even the front of the enormous mansion displayed unnecesary frescoes that didn't quite match with each other. Everything gave the sense of tasteless excess, and yet it did fit a woman who seemed to believe she was untouchable and she was entitled to whatever she wanted. Priscilla's apparent right hand, who had a single hand himself, this Aldebaran guy, had been alerted to your and Rem's presence right out of the mansion's gate. Past Aldebaran, working in the yard and moving behind the mansion's windows you get glimpses of the staff, who wear very revealing clothes, and most of whom seem to be attractive young women.
When Aldebaran looked at you, somehow his helmeted face displayed concern towards your idea of meeting with his master.
"She's currently in a good mood... But that doesn't predict the future regarding our lady."
"Well, I don't want to predict the future. I know what's going to happen."
Aldebaran shrugs, but lets you inside regardless. The gate closes behind you as you enter the mansion's courtyard, and both you and Rem follow the guy through the path lined with statues towards the entrance.
"I might have spoken too rashly", you say dubitatively, "I do know plenty of stuff about the immediate future, but this Priscilla lady of yours is like a black hole of a blank in regards to how she will react. Do you think she might be open to listening to someone's petition?"
"I do not know what exactly her plans are for the immediate future, but I do know she's currently in the best state of mind. It would be best for you to come with me so I can present you. If her mood has already gone sour, though, she might order me to kill you."
"I see", you answer with some level of seriousness. "And is this sort of thing regular?"
You notice that there are several guards watching your conversation. As your gaze slips from the armed guards, you see that Rem, silent, is looking at you with doubt and concern. Meeting Priscilla isn't the brightest idea you've ever had.
"If you're smart, things will turn out for the best", Aldebaran says.
"I might be fucked then", you mutter.
Aldebaran and his armed buddies wave you inside the building. The foyer of the mansion is as large as your entire house. You see a grand staircase and many paintings hanging from the walls. Some of them are beautiful landscape paintings, but others depict gruesome scenes of war, with men impaled on spikes and painted in gory detail.
"Please wait here".
Aldebaran heads towards whatever room Priscilla is currently in. As he turns a corner and disappears, you imagine the guy notifying Priscilla, whose voluptuous body in your imagination is naked for some reason, and when she remembers you, she uses the words 'lowly scum'.
Rem touches your arm.
"This Priscilla doesn't sound too good. I heard lady Emilia mention her a few times before, and even the Witch of Frost herself wanted nothing to do with her."
When you dare look up again, Aldebaran is back, and he gestures with his helmeted head for you to follow. He notices that Rem is doing so as well, and the guy turns.
"Sorry, miss Rem. My lady requested for the boy to be brought over to her alone."
Rem gasps, and looks at you with concern.
"I'll probably survive, Rem", you say with a nervous smile.
With a last nod, Rem watches you turn the corner.
You follow that large man in silence. The atmosphere is so tense you're almost expecting him to attack you out of nowhere. At the end of a hallway he stops in front of a large oak door, almost resembling that of a bank's vault door.
"This is it", he says.
With those words, he pushes the door open and gestures for you to enter. You do so, and find yourself in a vast room with every inch of the walls covered in frescoes, and all over are mismatching, yet very expensive looking, statues and antiques that you imagine Priscilla saw casually at different moments and she pretty much pointed to them and say to someone, 'I want that'.
The lady herself is relaxing in something like a recliner chair near the middle of the room. She's wearing a revealing dress with her tanned skin exposed up to slightly above her nipples, and her long orange hair falls over her shoulders while glistening under the chandeliers' lights. It's no exageration that she's by far the hottest woman you've ever seen, and you need to contain your crotch from twitching. Priscilla is reading a book she holds with one hand, while a mostly naked, very attractive herself servant is massaging some oils on Priscilla's neck and shoulders.
You approach Priscilla as carefully as you can, while standing straight so it projects confidence.
Priscilla barely looks over the pages of her book.
"My dog told me that you wanted something of me", Priscilla said in a slightly amused tone. "Did he hear you right?"
"Your dog seems to keep his ears clean. I do need help from you, lady Priscilla."
Priscilla puts the book on her lap, and looks directly at you.
"Well then, I'll listen", she says, with a mocking tone.
You expected far more resistence, if not straight rejection. You clear your throat to prepare your self-confidence for such a powerful woman's attention, and you say:
"I have... Well, we have gathered that the Witch's Cult, that group of madmen that have caused such destruction for a very long time in this fantasy world, is going to attack a target with a certainty of a hundred percent. However, we are pressed for time, and we can't form an army, or train one, or whatever. We need the help of someone superpowered who can go one on one with the cultists and hopefully save people and stuff."
"Is that all?" Priscilla says with a smile.
"Yes, I mean no! We can pay you very well for your service, probably."
"I have everything I want", Priscilla says, and the servant girl continues massaging her shoulders. "Except maybe a new dress. This one is a bit shabby, don't you agree?" she says looking at the servant.
The servant nods. Her eyes are glazed.
"Now, I don't believe that for a second", you say. "I doubt you would be content even if you owned the entire world."
"You there", she says, pointing at you with her book. "What's your name?"
Don't look at her tits, you repeat to yourself.
"My name is N-Natsuki Subaru", you stutter.
"Natsuki Subaru, I have everything I want", she says. "I can say that with a hundred percent certainty. Right now I have all I want: a decent book to read, one of my girls driving her fingers into my flesh, and a little man that amuses me. Now, in five minutes I might lack something I want. Maybe you want to stay around until then?"
"God, you are so hot. But I did see you fight those thugs in the alleyway, and how you dispatched them without any trouble. I think I heard someone or even you yourself suggest that you have like superpowers or something. I thought of you against these rotten cultists and I thought, hell, this lady could crush their bones under her heel. That's a phrase that I liked."
You are quiet for a few seconds and then she says,
"Do you want to touch?"
"Well, yes... But that is not my original plan for this meeting."
"Alright," she says and then turns to her servant girl. "Mimi, get him hard."
The girl, who has olive skin and you imagine might have come, or have been dragged from, a neighboring kingdom, moves as in a dreamlike state from her lady's chair to your side, and before you know it she has crouched slightly and is sliding her soft hand into your underwear. As soon as you feel the contact, you grab her wrist without much force.
"That's hardly necessary, although I do appreciate it", you say nervously.
You feel your face turn red as the smaller woman starts to pull at your dick. The royal candidate sits there and watches you with a small smile. She looks quite amused.
"Alright, that should do. Now, one hand on her head."
"What?"
"Just do it."
Confused, you place your right hand on the servant's, or slave's, soft black hair. As your heart beats loudly in your chest, you try to remember your initial purpose.
"Lady Priscilla, while I'm grateful already, there are more pressing concerns regarding this Witch's Cult thing. They are truly going to attack, and we either need to procure your generous services, or just go somewhere else and try whoever else."
You say to her, as the servant girl continues to do her work. A bead of sweat rolls down your temple as your legs weaken.
"I did make clear that I would need some alluring reward. A good reason, if you will. Truly you didn't come to ask for help without offering anything valuable in exchange, right? Even a cockroach would understand that."
"I'm not a cockroach, my lady. I am a human being."
"Indeed you are. However, I am not convinced that you are a man."
You stand there speechless as the noblewoman hums in thought. Her servant lowers your pants and your underwear, and her warm mouth takes you in. Her head begins to bob up and down. You look down in time to see her nape of her neck before looking back up to the noblewoman who smiles with satisfaction.
"This one is good, correct?"
You want to stop this, but not really. Somehow you would have thought that getting blown by a slave wouldn't have been your first time. Fantasy world things, you guess. You swallow and try to bring saliva back to your mouth.
"Ah... This sweet girl isn't, like... Well, I'm not sure what I meant to say. Listen, the target that the cultists are about to attack is Roswaal's mansion. You know, that clown guy who is famous around here."
"Hmm, I see. Movement by the Witch's Cult. So that's why they were recruiting so many people with minor magic abilities. Indeed, if they cause havoc, it will be a great loss. But, in any case, the decrepit old fools at the council will send in their military to stop the cultists."
"As far as I've been told, uh... by the time the council gets its shit together and mobilizes the army, the cult has already scattered. And I know for a fact that nobody else is going to prevent Roswaal's mansion from being hit, and everybody in it killed, if we don't do anything that doesn't rely on those mummies."
"I saw you talk back to those ugly old men, back at the royal summons, didn't I?"
"My mind is going blank at the moment and I'm not sure of much, but I guess I did."
"It was you, yes", she paints a rapacious smile on her perfect face. "Now, they did deserve getting insulted, didn't they, those ugly weasels."
"Well, I wasn't polite, but I guess you're right."
"They are all fools, aren't they? The whole council is nothing but a bunch of fools. Oh yes, I know about your little conversation, it's not like I can forget about something like that. They will get their due retribution one day, and so will the rest of this miserable kingdom."
You aren't sure of what's coming out of your mouth and you don't particularly care.
"Uh... Is that why you are going for the throne, retribution or something."
"Revenge? Oh no, revenge is far too common for the highborn. No, I am doing this out of boredom and because it's necessary to secure my own future."
"Um..."
You're not sure how to react to all of this. Last time you heard a royal say something like that to you was... well, never. At least not to your face. And here she is, saying such things with a completely serious expression. Did you interact with royals back on Earth? You can't remember. It's warm.
Priscilla is resting her cheek on her fist, and stares at her servant's bobbing head while she herself moves her pretty bare foot around as if following a melody.
There was something you intended to do regarding the Witch's Cult, you think. Something bad was going on. Everything is going white.
"I'm sure you've killed many people, lady Priscilla", you say with a dry voice. "Just continue doing what you've been doing, but directed at people who truly deserve it."
You hear her chuckle. Now that the white haze has cleared up a bit, you see her shaking her head at you.
"How amusing. It's certainly uncommon to see a lowly commoner saying such things."
"I don't... I'm not..."
"Why are you even bothering with that cult? You should just be grateful to have what you are having right now."
"Your girl is good, but... That clown and his porn, and the cultists who are going to kill people at that mansion, all that."
"Why would I care one bit about those things, Natsuki Subaru?"
The white haze covering everything has dissipated. You realize you have fallen forwards. As you attempt for your shaky arms to bring you back to your feet, the blurry figure of the servant flows back to her lady, and begins to massage Priscilla's neck. You manage to pull your underwear and pants up.
"A bit lower this time, Mimi", she says with an amused voice.
You are kneeling some meters in front of the lady of the mansion, who glances at you questioningly.
"I want my questions to receive their answers, boy. The caring part, and the why of it, is what I don't get."
"You mean, ah... That you don't care if Roswaal's mansion gets attacked, and if his people die."
"That's one way of putting it. I doubt anything will happen to me, if it really is a cultist attack."
"But doesn't concern for life bother you?"
You feel as dumb as any common rock, and yet the words have escaped your mouth.
"...Should it?"
Priscilla shrugs at you, as you realize this isn't getting you anywhere. Still, you have to try.
"Yes. If... If someone did that to you or your servants or your loyal dog Aldewhatever, and nobody cared, you wouldn't like it."
Priscilla smiles at your remark.
"What would you know about what I like or don't like, Natsuki Subaru? What makes you believe you have that window into my mind?"
"Uh... no, I just-"
"You are an interesting one. You know what you just said? It was wrong. Again."
"What?"
"I don't need to care for others, because I am not defined by others. If they die, then I'll just get new ones."
You are a little bit horrified by how pragmatic she is about her servants' lives. You would have to be an idiot to be surprised by it, but if recent events have shown anything is that you are mostly retarded.
"That's harsh on Mimi and her warm mouth."
"Hahaa, she won't be getting any favors when she's older."
You shake your head a bit to clear your thoughts.
"So you don't care about Roswaal's people dying, alright, we've established that..."
"But I'm not defined by my employees. I am defined by myself. I am Priscilla, the strongest and most beautiful girl in the world."
"Yeah, right..."
"... And you, Natsuki Subaru? Who are you? What defines you?"
What indeed?
"That I struggle against all odds to succeed. And if I don't succeed, I fail."
"I guess your commoner brain doesn't allow you to know that applies to virtually every living creature?"
"You are superpowered, Priscilla. Starting with being super hot, which is maybe the most powerful superpower in any dimension, and I know about other dimensions, as I keep saying. But I have a superpower of my own, as that Petelgeuse shit said before I died."
Priscilla closes her eyes and her shoulders tremble as she chuckles against her palm. You don't like that it makes you happier.
"I revive. I revive from death. So I fail, I try again, and again, and again, until I succeed", you say.
"So persistant... You are a riot."
You could swear you're having a heart attack after hearing those words. Priscilla just gave you a compliment!
Priscilla leans back, which allows her servant to work deeper into the lady's flesh.
"I do have to think about strategy from time to time, Natsuki Subaru. The words 'Roswaal's mansion is going to get attacked by the Witch's Cult' flow into my ears, and I think, well, if everybody there dies, that includes the imbecile, right?"
"Who's the imbecile in this setting?"
"Why, the half-demon that Roswaal presented. Surely the word imbecile comes to mind when you look at that silver-haired witch?"
"Ah... The words balls and tear are the ones that come first these days."
"Curse your foul mouth."
You lean forward, licking your lips as you take in all the information.
"Okay, so you don't like Emilia. That makes sense, Emilia being another royal candidate and all that..."
A small laugh escapes her lips as she stares at your face with an intent gaze as if studying every line and wrinkle.
"First of all, I don't care about Emilia, except her magic talent. Which is average. If I wanted to kill her, she'd already be dead by now. She's a hindrance, not a target. Killing her would be an unnecessary act of violence."
"Then what is your gripe with Emilia?"
"I have several. But let's start with the most important one. She's a wannabe hero, isn't she?"
"I mostly remember her hiding when danger comes, so I wouldn't know about that."
"Then you're saying she's a coward, correct?"
You feel anger swelling inside of you as you think of several retorts, but stop yourself. Then you unstop yourself.
"Listen, we are all many things. You are like super attractive, and stuck up, and possibly evil. I am dumb and useless and a time traveller. Emilia is kind, and hopeful, and believes in promises, and many other things that don't have to do with hiding whenever people threaten those she should care about."
"So you are denying that she is a coward that runs away?"
You grit your teeth. The room lapses into silence as the two of you stare each other down.
"I just realized that I might be the one running away. I am here, after all, instead of at the mansion."
Priscilla looks at you. She doesn't make any more hasty quips or ask any more questions. Instead, she sits there, waiting. She wants you to talk. You remain quiet and unmoving.
"Lady Priscilla, there are people out there in this fantasy world that I care about. I have a sweet demon servant waiting for me somewhere in your mansion. Her sister, who remains at Roswaal's, will face the storm head on when the cultists attack. There's a little girl who is actually like hundreds of years old and who once sucked my hand. There's Emilia, whom I care about very much and want to see happy although she threatened me with castration. Roswaal is somewhere as well, but I don't fancy clowns that much. My point is that I do care about other people, lady Priscilla. You might have a superpower, and you might possess the best tits I have ever seen, and a wonderful servant, but you are even less of a human being than I am."
"Does that make you feel better? Seeing me as some soulless demonic succubus who is out to devour everyone?"
"Yes."
Priscilla smiles.
"Now that's honesty."
She stands up from her chair resolutely and she approaches your kneeling self. She bends over to touch your chest, ruffling your shirt slightly.
"Wow, you are skinny. Look at these ribs. It's like having a horse chest-up. You should eat more, or at least take more care of yourself."
"I do appreciate your terrifying concern."
Priscilla smiles, then a glint like that of a predator flashes in her eyes.
"You know I don't care, not about anybody else but me in this entire world. So what can you offer me that would remotely convince me to lend your pathetic self my immensely valuable support?"
"Nothing."
Your reply baffled her, causing her to stare at you.
"What do you mean? Aren't you supposed to try to convince me or something?"
"No, because I don't have anything to offer you, which is why I said 'nothing', meaning that there is nothing I can say or do to convince you to help me that would be of value to you."
Priscilla chuckles. She crosses her arms.
"And yet this very fine day the thought popped in your mind, 'I know this gorgeous and powerful noble who is for sure going to provide me with as much attention as I need'."
"That did enter my mind."
Priscilla strokes your face. The thought that you might currently be one of the luckiest men alive crosses your mind.
"There are people like me, and then there are people like you. You are born with nothing, and you run like a chicken through this wretched life without accomplishing anything, and you will never be able to accomplish a thing, because that's reserved to people like me. Do you understand that?"
You understand that she has a point, and you intend on changing that.
"Yes, I understand that."
Priscilla smiles. "Good. Yet you do have something you keep, maybe without knowing, very dear and close to your heart, a little treasure chest that you guard with your life. You don't think about it, most of the time at least, and yet if the chest were to be opened by others for them to peer inside, your meaningless life would no longer be worth the sustained effort of your body to keep your heart beating. Do you understand that as well?"
"Yes," you lie.
Priscilla smiles. "I thought you might."
Then, with her free hand, she slaps you hard across the face.
You look up towards her with your mouth open, hanging your hand midway from your knee to your pained cheek. Priscilla keeps smiling, and her eyes are warm.
"Natsuki Subaru, how do you feel about sucking?"
"How do I feel about sucking?" you ask, bewildered.
"Correct. Natsuki Subaru, how do you feel about sucking?"
You bite your lower lip, as you try to grasp the question within the context of its proposal.
"I... I suppose it's alright, I suppose."
"That's all that matters," Priscilla says, narrowing her eyes. "Now, answer me this: how do you feel about me?"
You fear connecting the dots, but mainly being wrong about the answers you would prefer.
"If someone like me, one of a kind in this entire world, now or ever, were to offer you her flesh to suckle on, what would your lowly scum self feel about that?"
You blush.
"Well, uh... I suppose it would depend on the person."
"Oh?" Priscilla tilts her head. "And what if that person was me?"
She gestures to herself as if to prove a point. You hope your eyes don't show the strange mixture of fear and confusion that's overtaken you for a while.
"Then in that case, if that's the condition for you to lend your power to us, I'll gladly suck pretty much every centimeter of your tanned skin. Hell, if you had a dick I'd probably suck it at this point, might as well."
Priscilla simply smiles.
"I suppose we've come to an agreement, then," she says.
"What?"
She takes two steps back, and then she raises her right foot to hang it in the air relatively close to your face. Her dress slides inwards, revealing the length of her delicious-looking thigh.
"Suck on it. Suckle on my toes as if you were a babe desperately milking the sustenance out of the only person in this lonely world that wants to keep you alive."
You stare at her foot, and you slowly lean in to kiss the top of her foot. The smell of her skin is all consuming as your lips press against it. You want to cry, but you know you have goals to achieve first.
"Good," she says. "Now suck, or something worse will happen than just you dying."
You open your mouth and stick your tongue out, licking the top of her foot. She smiles as you begin to suck on her big toe. You look up at her as you do this, and she stares back with a blank look on her face. Something about that look scares you more than it turning sadistic. Her face looks bored and dead, as if she were staring at a pebble rather than a young man sucking on her foot.
A cold sensation runs through your spine. You feel as if something has failed. You have failed.
She retracts her foot and lowers it to the ground. As you were about to stand up by yourself, Priscilla closes one hand around your neck and raises you as far as her arm length goes. Warmth concentrates on your face, and your throat muscles fail to resist the grip. Priscilla glares at you with eyes as dead as a mannequin's. Then she speaks to you in a monotone voice.
"Your chest is open."
Priscilla flings you effortlessly across the room in the direction of the large oak door. Hitting the carpet steals the air from your lungs, and you roll until you hit wood. As you cough, you quickly attempt to raise yourself to your feet, feeling that Priscilla must be rushing to close the distance and impale you with her claws. However, she's standing where she was a moment ago, barely bothering to glance at you.
The oak door opens, and Aldebaran lowers his gaze at you.
"I was thinking, this bro has spent too much time inside. Caught you in one of her moods, I'm afraid."
You cough as you attempt to breathe.
"Aldebaran, shoo the rats from my house", Priscilla says with a sharp voice.
"Sure thing, miss. C'mon, bro."
You stand up and quickly limp outside the room as Aldebaran closes the door behind you. You walk away and lean against the wall, breathing heavily and coughing, but Aldebaran shakes his head and gestures for you to keep walking.
"You better leave her place quick before she gets angry. I don't want to kill you, and neither me nor the guards want to waste our afternoon digging in some empty corner."
The corridors pass in a blur. You feel as cold as if you had just been rescued from icy waters. When Rem sees you, she runs towards you and places a hand on your chest, but Aldebaran urges you both again to leave the mansion. When you breathe the fresh air of Lugunica, Priscilla's dog still accompanies you both to the gates, and once he's closed it, he speaks through the bars.
"Don't know what your purpose was, but... Our lady is very peculiar. And there's the whole thing of competition between royal candidates to account for. Hope it wasn't a complete waste, though."
You can barely look at Aldebaran's helmeted face. You talk with a dry voice.
"Al, can I ask you something somewhat personal?"
"Sure thing. I will still be your bro."
"Why... Why serve Priscilla?"
"She saved my life. I was on a battlefield, and... You know."
You look up at the early afternoon sun.
"Well, that's nice of her. That means you're under her debt, right?"
"Hmm... Yeah."
"Yet you do realize she is a monster, right?"
"Oh, that."
You face your palm.
"Yes, that."
Aldebaran shrugs.
"Bro, Priscilla gets all she wants, like in the whole wide world. And she wants the throne. What does that tell you?"
"Well..."
You feel a rush of warmth pooling behind your eyes. You turn away from the gate.
"Time to us to fuck off."

Some observations regarding GPT-3's behavior:

-Rem's first words in this, 'No! I think they might just come around! Maybe it's just a lot to take in, or maybe they've got other groups to help as well, or something...', are verbatim from GPT-3. I love that the artificial intelligence understood the frustration, and that the possible future success might rely on either Crusch sleeping on it, or them being too busy with other concerns. How does an AI know that?
-The idea for both of them to sit at a park was GPT-3's idea, and it ended up being a sweet moment.
-Rem's line 'We could ask for soldiers. I don't think we'd need many. I could turn them into an army that could wipe out the cult in a few days.' is verbatim from GPT-3. I like the characterization of sweet Rem being so hardcore to believe she can train an army to take out the cult in days.
-Most of Rem's small actions of support, such as this, 'Rem nods, not looking at you. After a bit of silence, she sighs softly, before smiling at you. It's a small, fragile thing, but it's enough to coax another smile out of you', were GPT-3's thing.
-The sentences 'Aldebaran and his armed buddies wave you inside the building. The foyer of the mansion is as large as your entire house. You see a grand staircase and many paintings hanging from the walls. Some of them are beautiful landscape paintings, but others depict gruesome scenes of war, with men impaled on spikes and painted in gory detail' are verbatim from GPT-3. It relies a bit on the hidden worldbuilding I wrote for it.
-A tremendous amount of Priscilla's best lines are verbatim from GPT-3. Here are the most prominent ones:
> '"I have everything I want", Priscilla says, and the servant girl continues massaging her shoulders. "Except maybe a new dress. This one is a bit shabby, don't you agree?" she says looking at the servant.'
> '"Alright," she says and then turns to her servant girl. "Mimi, get him hard."'
> '"They are all fools, aren't they? The whole council is nothing but a bunch of fools. Oh yes, I know about your little conversation, it's not like I can forget about something like that. They will get their due retribution one day, and so will the rest of this miserable kingdom."'
> '"Revenge? Oh no, revenge is far too common for the highborn. No, I am doing this out of boredom and because it's necessary to secure my own future."'
> '"How amusing. It's certainly uncommon to see a lowly commoner saying such things."'
> '"I don't need to care for others, because I am not defined by others. If they die, then I'll just get new ones."'
> '"Hahaa, she won't be getting any favors when she's older."'
> '"But I'm not defined by my employees. I am defined by myself. I am Priscilla, the strongest and most beautiful girl in the world."'
> '"First of all, I don't care about Emilia, except her magic talent. Which is average. If I wanted to kill her, she'd already be dead by now. She's a hindrance, not a target. Killing her would be an unnecessary act of violence."'
> '"Does that make you feel better? Seeing me as some soulless demonic succubus who is out to devour everyone?"'
> '"Wow, you are skinny. Look at these ribs. It's like having a horse chest-up. You should eat more, or at least take more care of yourself."'
> '"Good," she says. "Now suck, or something worse will happen than just you dying."'
-Obviously, with such tremendous improv from the artificial intelligence, it was very easy to follow Priscilla's voice for the rest of the scene. Such contribution is invaluable (and uncanny).
-I only prompted the line 'God, you are so hot.', and GPT-3 had the brilliant idea of making Priscilla order her servant to jerk off the protagonist, and later on to blow him. Such a subthread running through the scene during a negotiation elevated for me this scene into brilliance. It's like that scene in "On the Waterfront" when Marlon Brandon plays around with his love interest's glove, but instead with a blowjob. In the original scene from the Re:Zero novel series, there was no servant present during Subaru and Priscilla's meeting, but I felt it added an interesting angle to it. GPT-3 took it and ran with it. So thank you, artificial intelligence, for contributing to this scene by lending me your naked desires.
-The protagonist's following admission of his failings, including all the lines I'm quoting, are verbatim from GPT: '"Nothing." Your reply baffled her, causing her to stare at you. "What do you mean? Aren't you supposed to try to convince me or something?" "No, because I don't have anything to offer you, which is why I said 'nothing', meaning that there is nothing I can say or do to convince you to help me that would be of value to you."'
-The protagonist's dumbfounded reply to Priscilla's question about sucking, '"I... I suppose it's alright, I suppose."', is verbatim GPT-3.
-Every single line of the following description of the protagonist's humiliation (and I mean every single one), is verbatim GPT-3: 'You stare at her foot, and you slowly lean in to kiss the top of her foot. The smell of her skin is all consuming as your lips press against it. You want to cry, but you know you have goals to achieve first. "Good," she says. "Now suck, or something worse will happen than just you dying." You open your mouth and stick your tongue out, licking the top of her foot. She smiles as you begin to suck on her big toe. You look up at her as you do this, and she stares back with a blank look on her face. Something about that look scares you more than it turning sadistic. Her face looks bored and dead, as if she were staring at a pebble rather than a young man sucking on her foot.' How did the artificial intelligence know that Priscilla was supposed to get irate and lose all possible respect for the protagonist at that point, which happens in the original? No idea.
-I prompted the protagonist to ask Aldebaran why would someone like him serve Priscilla. His reasons were entirely made up by GPT-3, I merely had to edit it minimally.