#thankfully i managed to get both Reines and Faker this time

[kara-knuckles]

I think the Patchwork London Singularity is based not only on MC's memories, but also on Mnemosyne's feelings and experiences. And while Reines nicely explains the culprit's whydunit from detective novel perspective, I believe there is another angle you can see Mnemosyne's actions from. Namely, stages of grief.

Let's start with our location, Patchwork London. At its core, it is similar to the fourth Singularity, and we all know that in Japanese words "four" and "death" are homophones. Mnemosyne's grief for Da Vinci's passing is a big part of her character.

Our first stop is at the museum where people search for someone they don't remember. The loss of memory is so strong that even the person they look for doesn't remember they are actually a person. This corresponds to denial: as long as you don't acknowledge something it's like it never existed. And just how Nursery was one of the books in the library, Mnemosyne was only a program before gaining awareness.

The second patchwork is about a masquerade. This one has a strong identity motif (masks, different facets of Tower of London history, Salieri in two different ways, we meet Gray at the end…), but in the stages of grief theory this translates into bargaining: masks make everything interchangeable, so it is easy to replace things and find compromises. M and Shakespeare wanted Salieri's music to be heard, so they turned an automaton into the closest thing to Salieri they could. And a similar thing happened to Da Vinci: even if the original died, the new one continued her work.

The third patchwork is the ideal world of steam. As Babbage explains, he and this world of his dream are mutually exclusive, which is very depressing. I think it symbolizes Mnemosyne's awakening after Da Vinci's death and the realisation that she can never be together with her creator.

The last area is fake Rhongomyniad, and, as the place of the final confrontation with the culprit, it easily corresponds to anger. Fittingly, the tower itself represents Mnemosyne's motive: just how the Lion King was collecting righteous people because she believed only they deserved to continue existing, Mnemosyne's plan was to manipulate the MC's memories so that they would only have the good ones.

Finally, there is Rail Zeppelin outside of the Singularity. It shelters the part of Mnemosyne that accepts Da Vinci's passing, which was discarded because she wasn't ready for it. It actually tries to do its intended job, which is why it summons Faker to act as an observer for the part of the Master that ended up on the train.

And the theme of acceptance neatly ties into Faker's arc. As she tells us in the beginning, she doesn't accept Ionioi Hetairoi, and is unwilling to see Iskandar. However, thanks to her experiences from this and the previous summonings, she finds her closure, which culminates in her summoning the Hetairoi herself and fighting alongside Iskandar with muffled You Are My King playing in the distance.