2001 The Children of Bottle/Chapter 4: Joy ANGER Sorrow Fun

Synopsis
Through Fil's perspective, a series of days go by. The immortals who gathered at the castle don't question Elmer any further during this time, instead turning their attention to exploring the forest and castle grounds.

Fil reminisces on how much Elmer has taught her since arriving in the forest, recounting various holiday traditions he's shown to her that have both made her happy and made the villagers fear him. She notes that they specifically celebrate Christmas without fail every year, and recalls Elmer telling her about how Santa Claus spreads happiness to everyone in the world, though he says that it's not really possible for Santa to do that in one night and that he'll do it instead. Fil recounts further that Elmer has always put a lot of effort into celebrating Christmas; when she asks why, he tells her that it's because she smiles the least out of anyone in the village. Fil tries to smile upon hearing this, but Elmer tells her not to fake it. As their most recent Christmas approaches, Elmer tells Fil that the four people who have come to the castle this year are her present, and that she should make friends with them.

The current season is New Year's, and Elmer has started preparing and enacting multiple celebrations. In particular, everyone is participating in an asian festival where they have to make food from seven different herbs, for which Elmer and Sylvie are currently boiling water. Meanwhile, Nile either sleeps all day or plays with the horses in the stable, Czes spends most of his time in the library, and Maiza generally spends a lot of time asking Fil herself a lot of questions, most of which she doesn't know the answer to. Thinking of them, Fil realizes she's having fun, but is unable to smile due to struggling with the atmosphere in the village.

She denotes February as the time that "the trader" is meant to come, and further understands that after the trader leaves, the villagers will offer her last remaining vessel in the village as a sacrifice to Elmer. She resolves to give Elmer a real smile when all of her vessel in one place, and waits for February to come.

When February comes, "the trader" comes to the village in a snow sledge shaped like a truck. When it stops in front of the castle, Maiza, Czes, and Sylvie try to take a look inside, but the only thing they can see of the driver is that he's wearing a fully covering black mask. Without explanation, Elmer tells the driver to take them all with him, explaining after the sledge speeds off again that the trader will return in a couple of hours. He then returns inside, leaving the other immortals who had left to meet the trader confused.

The trader enters the village, and Fil observes the villagers trading with him, noting that the trader never leaves his vehicle and the villagers all perform the trades themselves based on the posted rates in its back. Fil notes that unlike her, the trader is generally accepted in the village because most people ignore him until he comes around, and that it had been the same for her until Dez Nibiru became the village headman. As Fil continues to watch the trading, Elmer approaches a vessel in the castle to let her know that he and Maiza will be riding outside the village with the trader to the place she was born. Elmer offers to tell her about it, and an uneasy Fil expresses a desire to go with them.

Fil's vessel in the village then spots Dez looking at her, but he doesn't approach her. Despite that this unsettles her, she tries to brush it off, but continues thinking about the fact that he'd smiled at her. Unlike Elmer's smile, though, this one had seemed cold.

A short while later, Maiza, Elmer, and one of Fil's vessels are riding with the trader's cargo outside the village. After Fil falls asleep, Elmer strikes up a conversation with Maiza, asking why Nile wears a mask and explaining that he hadn't wanted to ask before then. Maiza explains that Nile calls his mask "insurance", saying that if someone were to try and devour him that the mask might make it harder to do so. He further explains that Nile might trust the rest of them just fine, but that trust wouldn't stop any of them from devouring him on accident, as if in their sleep. When Elmer calls him a worrywart, Maiza theorizes that the mask probably has further meaning than that.

He explains to Elmer that Nile had spent most of his life on particularly fierce battlefields, and theorizes that this might have something to do with his use of a mask. As he's explaining, Elmer cuts in and tells Maiza that his smile seems a lot more cheerful than it was the last time they'd seen eachother. Elmer says that Czes's smile might look like that someday too if he opens up more, an avenue of conversation Maiza tries to pursue, but Elmer shuts it down quickly.

Changing the subject, Elmer asks how the demon has been doing lately, and Maiza is surprised to learn that Elmer knew he'd be with Maiza. Then, Elmer changes the subject again, asking Maiza if anyone else is still practicing Alchemy. Maiza explains that Czes was until recently, but he, Sylvie, and Nile had all given it up early on. He theorizes that if anyone was still practicing alchemy, it would probably be Huey. Elmer notes that he misses Huey and several of the other alchemists from before, and Maiza suggests that Elmer could visit him whenever he wanted. However, Elmer says that he needs Maiza's help with something if he's ever going to leave the village. Maiza attempts to ask about this, but cuts himself off as he notices the truck going through a gate and a short tunnel into an unfamiliar desolate area.

The group arrives at a warehouse area populated by modern security personnel and equipment. When one of the guards sees the group, Maiza expresses concern, but Elmer tells him to keep his knife put away. Shortly thereafter, a man holding a black mask as if he'd just removed it addresses Maiza, turning around and introducing himself as Bilt Quates.

At this time, Fil wakes up, remembering this location as the place she always came to die. She further recognizes Bilt as the person who keeps killing her and bringing her back to life. Though she's never asked him about this before, she muses that she might be able to ask now. However, she notes that Maiza has a grave look on his face and pleads in her head for him to smile, fearing something bad might happen.

Explaining the situation as they walk further into the modern warehouse, Elmer confirms that Bilt is a descendant of Szilard, and that although their faces look similar Bilt is a better person and isn't happy about the kind of work that he has to do as part of the Quates line. Maiza rebukes Elmer for calling this village experiment "work", but Elmer only tells Maiza to calm down, since he's scaring Fil. Maiza composes himself, giving Bilt an opportunity to speak.

Bilt explains that his grandfather had been both a descendant of and an assistant to Szilard Quates. When Szilard was unsatisfied with only having immortality, he'd turned to researching homunculi. However, since this research would have been too intensive to undertake alone, Bilt's grandfather and several others were tasked with a wide avenue of research into this process. Eventually, Bilt's grandfather succeeded in making an immortal homunculus, though it lacked the knowledge of a "perfect homunculus". Shortly after creating a female homunculus using this method, Szilard had dropped all contact.

At this time, Bilt's grandfather decided to use the connections of the Quates family and owned land to continue developing research at this location, the village. Experimenting with the failed version of the liquor of immortality, the researchers eventually began to understand that the foundation for immortality came from a foreign colony---either of another universe or a heretofore unknown element---overtaking the cells of the drinker and regenerating perpetually. From this, they questioned whether or not they could make this foreign colony possess the minds of vessels, rather than just bodies. In service of this research, they created two distinct types of vessels; a group of male bodies that lived and grew like humans, and a group of female bodies that didn't grow at all, but died out very fast. To compensate for the short lifespan of the female homunculi, there were constantly five bodies kept alive at once.

Elmer summarizes simply that when Fil's bodies would begin to naturally decay, she was meant to return with that body to the laboratory, where her consciousness would be transferred to a different body and she would be sent back out into the world again. After he explains this, a door near the group opens, revealing a row of large tanks. While most were empty, some contained both a strange liquid and an empty Fil vessel. Bilt explains that when a Fil clone dies, the remaining matter is recycled into the active tanks, then introduces the "catalyst" to introduce Fil's consciousness into a vessel---a bottle of what appears to be ordinary water.

Bilt explains that when an empty vessel ingests this water, even if it's only a drop, that vessel will become Fil. Because of this, the water could be called something like the true form of the vessels. While it can't think or experience consciousness on its own, when applied to a human brain, it fills in the experiences and memory with its own unique consciousness, syncing up with any past or present vessels that have been occupied by this consciousness. Bilt muses that any being capable of this must be fairly intelligent, but Elmer counters that it doesn't really matter what Fil was before being here in these bodies, since she's herself right now.

After a while of processing this information, Maiza asks what Elmer needed him for. Elmer says that Bilt is getting old and wants to end the experiment entirely, and while he could just let the villagers free and be done with it, he wants to save Fil. Bilt explains that his father and grandfather had been obsessed with using these homunculi to accumulate knowledge. To this end, they'd begun a terrible experiment in order to create a real homunculus: they "bought" a large number of people and moved them to this village when Bilt was still a child. When Maiza asks why they'd gone to the trouble, Elmer butts in to say that the village was probably a simulation, since they hadn't wanted to immediately introduce the homunculus into the real world, nor did they want anyone in the outside world catching wind of the liquor of immortality.

Bilt continues that he'd been too afraid to put an end to the experiment, since he was the last remaining person to take the blame for the experiment. Then Elmer had come to him, shedding light on the circumstances in the village. Unaware that Fil was being treated poorly by the villagers, Bilt felt extreme guilt, and decided that at the very end of things he at least wanted Fil to be happy.

He further explains that the laboratory had originally been located inside the large castle, but when the village experiment was conceptualized they barred the castle off from the village area by injecting the surrounding trees with the incomplete immortality formula and relocated their laboratory to be farther away. From then on, the alchemists observed the villagers periodically as traders, and the villagers would take care of outsiders on their own. Sometimes a child in the village would stow away on one of the alchemists' trucks, but they were generally so stunned by what they found that they didn't ever return to the village, and even if they did, they were barred off from it by the researchers.

Maiza contemplates this for a moment before telling Bilt that he should also make amends with the villagers if he wanted to make amends with Fil. Bilt counters that he understands, but Fil will have no one to go to, whereas the villagers still have living families they'll have a chance to meet once they're released. Elmer butts in that he'd promised Fil he'd take her out to see the world, and Maiza, understanding where the conversation is going, confirms that they want him to extend Fil's lives.

Elmer compliments him for understanding so quickly, and Maiza immediately elaborates that he absolutely won't make the liquor of immortality again. Elmer agrees to this, and says that they can all probably find a way anyway. Just then, Fil pipes up, telling Bilt he should smile because she's fine. Contemplating this, Maiza falls silent for a while before asking Bilt to show him the existing research materials.

Some time later into Maiza's research, Elmer pipes up that he'd come to this location because he'd heard that people in this area had ties to Szilard, and had hoped that Szilard might return to it someday so Elmer could talk him out of his continued slaughter of immortals. However, since Szilard is dead, he says there's no reason to linger on it. Maiza then asks if the information he had gotten about Elmer being here had been leaked by Elmer himself, which Elmer confirms to be true. However, he'd expected Maiza to come alone, so he was genuinely startled when four people entered the village and hadn't been able to welcome them properly.

Maiza asks if Elmer had only summoned him for his potential to help with research, which Elmer affirms, noting that Maiza could summon the demon again if it came down to it. Maiza asks if Elmer hasn't been practicing alchemy at all over the years, and Elmer says he'd only been invested in alchemy for the gold, so he could make a lot of it and then redistribute it to the poor. However, he reflects that when he'd had that ambition he didn't understand anything about the economy or that the price would drop, so he dropped that ambition and his practice of alchemy alongside it.

Bilt returns then, and Elmer asks him about the male homunculus he'd mentioned. Bilt says the male homunculus had managed to completely integrate himself into the village, so the two of them had probably already met him without realizing. Before Bilt had decided he wanted to end the experiment, the homunculus had destroyed his next body in development, taken the catalyst water, and left. Bilt guesses he'd be around 50 now, and that he's intending to live the rest of his life in the village. Bilt shows a photo of the homunculus to Maiza and Elmer, who feel as though they recognize the man. Elmer takes some nearby eraser shavings and puts them over the face of the homunculus to resemble a mustache, at which point Fil peeks at the photograph and recognizes the man as Dez.

Fil, looking at this image, uses her vessel in the village to run to Dez's house. Though she worries the villagers will abuse her later for her odd behavior, she's determined to make sure Dez is really a homunculus as well. In three separate places, Nile, Sylvie, and Czes all ask after her wellbeing, but she's too focused on finding Dez to answer any of them. She reaches the door of the headman's house and begins to pound on it, and Feldt comes to the door rather than his father. She asks him where his father is, and he tells her Dez has gone to draw water from the well, so she runs off to find him. Elmer warns the vessel in the laboratory not to grill Dez about his history, and she answers that she won't, but continues to run anyway.

At the well, Dez stands completely still and silent, only moving to turn around when Fil approaches and gets his attention. Dez asks her if she found out about or remembered their shared history, and confirms to himself that she must have gone to the laboratory with the trader, holding up a nondescript bottle. When Fil draws attention to it, he confirms that this is the bottle full of his catalyst water, asking Fil what she thinks will happen if the villagers were to drink this water as opposed to an empty vessel.

Dez answers his own question by explaining that he'd tested it on the previous village headman---his father-in-law---and it had resulted in a battle of wills between the consciousness of the water and the existing person. He likens this process as similar to the process of devouring that the immortals in the castle have, and Fil briefly wonders how he knows about this before concluding that Feldt, who was told this information by Sylvie, must have explained it to him. Dez carries on saying that the people of the village are weakminded, and that he probably wouldn't struggle to take them over at all.

He explains that he's tired of living in this village, and that he might have been content to live in the forest had the immortals not arrived and opened up the idea of a large world outside of its borders. However, he felt unsure thinking about going out into the world with only one life, so he planned to infect the entire village with his catalyst water, giving him a large amount of power and safety for taking on the real world. As he explains his plans, Fil speaks up, saying she won't let him steal the minds of the villagers.

Dez prepares to dump the bottle in the well anyway, but Fil leaps at him, only for Dez to deeply cut Fil's arm. For a moment, Fil is incapacitated, but she quickly continues to try and impede Dez, tackling into him with her full body and causing him to slip on the frozen ground beside the well. When the villagers came to investigate after hearing the uproar their struggle caused, they found Fil sitting over the corpse of Dez, which had a knife in its neck.

Fil sits atop his corpse, motionless, feeling no regret for saving the villagers even though she hated them. As she ruminates on the anger she's feeling, the villagers that have gathered cry out in shock and horror, verbally abusing Fil for having murdered their headman. As Fil spirals deeper into her emotions, Czes comforts the vessel outside of the castle, noting that she'd started to look scared of something. Fil attempts to gather herself and explain the situation to him, but before she can, a villager with a large club appears behind Czes and knocks both him and Fil unconscious.

In the vessel by the well, Fil hears Feldt cry out for his father, his grief turning into anger and betrayal as he begins screaming at Fil. Before Fil can explain herself, she's knocked out by a villager throwing a large rock, and she focuses instead on the vessel of hers with Maiza and Elmer, who are now in the truck again. There, she's being comforted by Elmer and Maiza, since she'd started crying. Elmer apologizes for making her cry, but she manages to get out that someone took Czes, which causes the speed of the truck to double.

Czes wakes up bound in the presence of several villagers in a large room with a fireplace to his back. He notes that there are two other figures bound together with him, who he realizes are the Fil who was with him and the last Fil still in the village, but before he can put together what happened, the villagers notice he's awake and one of them kicks him harshly. The villager accuses him of attempting to poison the well and murdering the headman, giving a kick to one of the Fils as he does so. Czes earns himself another kick by telling the villager to stop.

Czes tries to act like a little kid and ask why they'd kidnapped him if they only knew about the poison after they'd brought him here, but the villager who kicked him shuts down his act by telling Czes he knows about Czes's long life. Czes turns serious, then, and asked why he was kidnapped. The villager explained that Czes had seemed like the weakest of the immortals, so they planned to hold him as a hostage and lure out the rest of them. Confused, since he can't actually die, Czes asks why they'd use him as a hostage, but the villager responds that they could always just do something like take him to the forge and mix him with molten metal.

The villager points out that Czes can still feel pain, and Czes has a vivid memory of his torture at the hands of The Rail Tracer seventy years ago. Seeming more frantic, Czes asks who put the hostage plan together, expecting the answer to be Dez---however, the name that comes from the villager is Feldt. According to the villager, Feldt had been putting together the plan for several days, and Czes rebukes himself for his own foolishness. Disappointed, he comments that he thought he'd be used to the way betrayal hurt. He looks at the faces of the villagers and notes that they seem afraid, so he can't muster up any fear within himself towards them, likening them to the face of Lebreau Fermet Viralesque, who had once tried to kill him once out of fear.

Making this comparison, Czes begins to laugh hysterically, saying that Fermet and the people of this village are all the same. He stands up using only his knees and announces out loud that Elmer was right about how lucky he was, then leaps directly backward into the fireplace behind him. The villagers watch as the rope binding Czes burns off of him. Still burning himself, Czes waits until he's sure he's free, then stands up again, already beginning to regenerate.

Czes harshly instructs the villagers to move, but they stand frozen in place as he walks over to the two unconscious Fils on the floor and frees them. He repeats the command once again, telling them he needs to find Elmer and smile for him. After announcing this, Czes flings his burning jacket towards the villagers, causing them to panic wildly, before helping the two Fils to their feet and bringing them outside amidst the chaos.

Reaching the front door, Czes encounters a crowd of villagers who regard him with immediate hostility. Czes stands back for a second to think about what they should do, but he and the Fils hear a horse whinny. Fil suddenly remembers that when she'd told Elmer and Fil Czes had been kidnapped, her two other vessels with Sylvie and Nile had involuntarily done the same thing, and one of her vessels had immediately been brought to the village on horseback.

Nile plowed through the town on his horse, evading gunshots and trampling villagers, making his way towards the main house. Nile drops down in front of the door and Czes cries out in delight, but Nile only expresses anger towards the villagers for kidnapping Czes and attempting to burn him alive, an impression he'd gotten from Czes's not fully regenerated state. Before Czes can correct him, Nile leaps into the crowd of villagers, beginning to attack all of them. One villager manages to stab Nile with a hoe, but Nile forcibly yanks it from his stomach and begins to use the hoe as a weapon in battle.

Setting his sights on the man who'd stabbed him with it, Nile raises the weapon, telling the man that, Unlike Elmer, he doesn't know how to keep his anger under check. Czes cries out for Nile to stop, but a different noise causes Nile to interrupt his downward swing: the honking of a car horn. Nile looks up to see the car barreling down the road, and as the villagers flee, he stands still and raises a hand. Since he doesn't move, the truck impacts him fully. Maiza exits the car to check on him, only for Nile to rebuke him for hitting him with the car. As Maiza tries to apologize and Nile becomes angrier, Elmer cries out to everyone to get into the truck.

Nile promises to revisit this transgression later, but hops into the truck, saying they can massacre the villagers after they escape. As the villagers begin to fire at the truck, Maiza hops back into the drivers' seat and drives out of there.

Ten minutes later, the car has run out of gas, leaving the four immortals and the four present Fils to walk on their own through the snow. For now, they intended to return to the castle and pick up Sylvie, then figure out their plans from there, though one of the Fils stops just before they reach the castle and declares that she's going back to the village. Elmer asks what she means, and that Fil explains that she'd killed the headman, and thus felt like she needed to pay the price. Nile protests that they won't listen to anything she says if she goes, but Fil says whatever they do to her is alright if it makes the villagers feel a little better about Dez's death.

Nile hoises one of the Fils up, lecturing her angrily about how even if she feels alright with being tortured or killed by the villagers, he himself will not accept that and will not allow it to happen. He escalates that if any of them bleed at their hands at all, he'll slaughter every one of the villagers. Elmer cuts in, telling Nile he can't slaughter the villagers, since it will probably make them unhappy, but also agrees that Fil isn't going to go back to the village. Nile argues that even if Fil didn't return, he'd be able to kill the villagers and be happy about it, but Elmer counters that none of them present would be happy if they mercilessly slaughtered then villagers.

When Nile doesn't argue, Elmer says that the villagers would die thinking they were right to abuse Fil if Nile returned to slaughter them, and says they should instead focus on making the villagers change their minds and regret what they did to Fil. Nile agrees that he'd like for them to feel regret, but doesn't believe this is possible, which Maiza seconds. Nile laments that there isn't an option that will lead them to a satisfying conclusion, but Elmer insists that he's not going to give up, even though Nile calls him ridiculous for it. Nile tells Elmer that many men on the battlefield who thought like that died in front of him, to which Elmer says that it's because battlefields require people to put everything they have into killing the enemy rather than surviving. He further says that he's here for that reason; since he can't die, he plans to carry out his ideas wholeheartedly.

Elmer says that if it got the world a happy ending, he'd sell everyone out to a devil. Maiza points out the contradiction in this but understands that Elmer really would go that far if he had to.

After this conversation, the group briefly returns to bickering, which is stopped when Elmer tells the four present Fil vessels that they'll all be able to figure something out when they reach the castle. However, none of the vessels move, and all of them inform the group that something has just dragged Sylvie down through the secret passage in the library. Immediately, Nile and Elmer take off into a sprint towards the castle. Nile asks Elmer if he knows what the monster in the castle is, but Elmer says the fact that he doesn't know is why he's running so fast.

Cultural References

 * Elmer's holiday celebrations in this chapter reference real celebrations of holidays.
 * Krampus is a symbol of Christmas in some European countries who scares naughty children.
 * A namahage is a Japanese figure associated with the New Year.
 * Elmer takes Fil trick-or-treating, a Halloween practice common in english-speaking contries.
 * The celebration of the summer solstice is probably a reference to Midsummer, a common festival in Europe.
 * Elmer celebrates Easter with Fil by painting eggs, a common practice during the holiday.
 * During the New Year celebration in January of 2001, Elmer is celebrating the Festival of Seven Herbs, a Japanese tradition in which, on January 7th, participants make and consume a soup with seven herbs: Japanese parsley, shepherd's purse, cudweed, chickweed, nipplewort, turnip, and radish.

Characters in Order of Appearance

 * Fil
 * Elmer C. Albatross
 * Sylvie Lumiere
 * Czeslaw Meyer
 * Maiza Avaro
 * Bilt Quates
 * Dez Nibiru
 * Nile
 * Feldt Nibiru