Gilgamesh was the very picture of confusion. He would never have guessed that the reason Vittoria was so worried was because she thought he wanted to take the skeletal remains from her.
He was not even aware of the fact that she was sporting those remains on her back until just now. Right now the only thing he wanted was to know why.
Why the hell would someone be walking around with a skeleton on their back?
Taking his confusion for an act, Vittoria stepped back while her eyes scanned the room. "You can't fool me anymore. At first I thought you just wanted information from me about the Demon Kings, but now I know that you covet the remains!"
Gilgamesh faltered slightly, raising a hand and waving it dismissively, "N-No, I don't wan-"
"I know your type! You offer friendly smiles and speak kind words, all while hiding your real motives! Well you shan't have the remains! Not as long as I still breathe!"
Vittoria twisted the sword and angled her arm, her deathly eyes hard-focused on Gilgamesh and any move he would make. As she assumed her stance, her arms pushed the rims of the coat further apart, and only made the skeleton on her back easier to see.
Gilgamesh raised both his hands and took a step back. "I promise you, Vittoria, I have no interest in the remains."
Though he wondered why anyone would be interested in them, Gilgamesh starved his curiosity and continued by explaining exactly why he had asked Vittoria to come to his home.
"I want to spar with you, and perhaps get a better feel of how it feels to fight someone of this world. I knew that someone whose style somewhat matched my own would be the perfect person for me to offer some pointers to."
"In exchange, I would learn a valuable lesson about the real world and the kind of power that exists in it."
Vittoria froze for a moment before her sword arm drooped; her face expressed her intrigue. "Why do you speak as though you are not of this world?"
Gilgamesh lowered his own hands, and went back to his chair. "That's because I'm not."
Vittoria looked deep into Gilgamesh's eyes, even taking a few steps closer to get a better look. In the end, she sighed and put her sword away, then offered a curt apology.
Sitting down again, she picked up her tea and continued to drink silently. Her face reddened a bit due to the tea's warmth, surprising Gilgamesh; he thought her body was void of blood.
"Hard to believe someone would choose to come to the Fractured Sphere-- or one of its fragments, at least. Which Sphere are you from?" Vittoria asked as she savored the flavor of her tea, shutting her eyes and taking a breath.
"I'm not from another world. Not exactly." Gilgamesh got his bearings, finished his tea, then proceeded to explain everything that he knew to Vittoria.
She seemed to be quite knowledgeable, so he assumed she wouldn't be completely lost by his explanation. What he did not expect was that she would understand it fully- even more than fully, perhaps- and even help him grasp some concepts.
"Technically, the Beginningless Library was just a subset of All-Matter, limited to the mindspace of that God of Creation. Everything she could possibly fathom would exist in her mindspace, and it would exist within All-Matter. That's how Lesser Ideas work." Vittoria explained, extending her cup for Gilgamesh to give her a refill.
She seemed to quite like the herbal tea that Mariam had brought for him; Gilgamesh did not really care much for tea.
"I agree with the theory that something snuck its way into her mindspace and latched onto you. It helped you achieve your goal, and you helped it hitch a ride into our world. A symbiotic relationship between you and whatever 'it' is."
With narrowed eyes, Vittoria eyed Gilgamesh a bit strangely before putting her tea down. After taking a moment to consider something, she leaned forward, interlacing her fingers and sighing.
"The thing that made your ascension possible is likely something we have never fathomed. Once it integrated with your soul and you became something the 'Mother of Scriptures' could not understand, you were forced out of her mindspace."
"What I cannot fully grasp," Vittoria took a breath as the atmosphere became just a bit more tense, "is why."
"You aren't like the Demon Kings, who wrestled with Ideas within All-Matter's womb, and denied the fate of being Thematic Beings. If you were, I would be able to tell. Yet, you aren't a Thematic Being either."
Gilgamesh was taken aback. He had now learnt something about the Demon Kings that, possibly, no one else knew.
"How did you read my mind? Did you rely on 'it' to do that as well?" Vittoria suddenly recalled the impossible thing she had witnessed, and Gilgamesh nodded.
She bit down on soft fingernails as she thought of a few things, then sat back in her chair and stared at the ceiling, her legs jumping as she shook them repeatedly.
Gilgamesh did not know what was one her mind, but he chose to wait and let her think things through instead of asking about it. As they sat in silence for a short while, he realized that the teapot was empty.
At the same time that he realized this, Vittoria spoke, "How much do you know about the Demon Kings? About the Ideas and All-Matter-- about everything?"
"How much do you really know?"
Gilgamesh scoffed, "Next to nothing apart from what I've been told."
Vittoria stared deep into Gilgamesh eyes. He knew that she knew he was being truthful; that look was the same look she had given him before she put her sword away earlier.
Vittoria grunted and gathered handfuls of hair into her hands, tugging at the strands and ripping a few loose. "Damn it, damn it, damn it-"
She growled, "Fine then."
Tossing her hair back, and scattering the loose strands that had been pulled out, Vittoria grabbed up her teacup and took a big mouthful.
"True Ideas are the Ideas that were not imagined. We know of them because we can fathom them, but there are still many that we cannot yet fathom."
"We do not know how the True Ideas came to be. However it happened, they appeared in All-Matter- a place that can only house Ideas in their purest forms- and then proceeded to imagine the world we live in. In other words, we live in a world of their creation through imagination."
"The same way you can imagine something that only exists in your head, and it becomes a Lesser Idea in All-Matter, the True Ideas imagine beings, concepts, laws and places, hence they all exist in our world."
Vittoria straightened up, looking a lot more relaxed now. Gilgamesh was fully invested, and did not dare to miss any details.
"Our world once had a name, but it has long been forgotten. Not even the first Demon King knew what it was. What she did know, however, was that the-"
"Wait," Gilgamesh raised a hand, "the first Demon King was a 'she,' you said?"
Vittoria nodded.
"Wouldn't she be a Demon Queen then?" Gilgamesh blinked.
Vittoria shook her head, "Doesn't work that way."
"As I said, she did not know the name of this world where we exist, but she did know a lot about it otherwise. She knew that, within this world, countless Spheres exist in the Void. Each of those Spheres house places much like this Silver Sky World, and the cosmos."
"She called them Lifefields, but we call them universes now. The Lifefields are all separated from one another, but they all make up a single Sphere. To better understand this, the world that the God of Creation built her library on would be considered one Lifefield, and the world you are now on is a separate Lifefield."
"All of the Lifefields together make up a single Sphere, and all the Spheres make up this nameless world we inhabit-- for lack of a better word."
Gilgamesh nodded, "It's like an Omniverse, then."
Vittoria chuckled, "Not at all. Some Sphere's are larger and more complicated than others, A Sphere that contains what we would call an Omniverse is not a rare sight. There are even Spheres that contain Transient-Verses. These are all things that exist within the countless Spheres."
If Vittoria listened close, she would have been able to hear Gilgamesh's common sense get crushed by her words.
"The First Demon King also knew that, more than anything, the Ideas crave to find a place here as they have in All-Matter. They want to exist here, where their power can be properly exercised. Here, where they can have real influence, but can only ever see in their combined imaginations."
Frowning, Gilgamesh posed a question. "But why?"
"She did not know why, I'm afraid." Vittoria sighed.
"If she didn't know that, then why did she resist the Ideas in the first place, and refuse to become a Thematic Being?" Gilgamesh asked while rubbing his chin.
"She was sure enough about something. If she weren't, she'd never leave her Sphere to come here and take up arms against an entire race-- and Heaven."
"Back then, there were far more Thematic Beings in the Fractured Sphere than there are now, but she massacred almost all of them."
"How do you know all these things?" When Vittoria paused, Gilgamesh took his chance to ask.
Vittoria did not answer. Instead, she reached for the cloth wrapped around her torso and began to untie it.