Fate/Descending Flames [Fate/Grand Order AU]

[X]Get to work on Noa's replacement armor
--[X]Something more useful (Will take up most of the day)

---

Well, you did tell Noa you'd make some replacement armor for her, so you may as well get started as early as possible. You feel a bit bad skipping your exercises a second day in a row, but it's not like you haven't been exercising your combat skills at all. Just not in the ways your Uncle assigned to you.

You get started with the basic preparatory work -- heating up the forge, getting materials ready, and so on. While you do so, you start planning out the project in your head. It'll need to accommodate the mechanisms for her helmet of course, and have retractible gauntlets in case she needs to fight the lion again. As for how it retracts... well, it doesn't necessarily need to be inside the armor. Noa often creates explosions at her elbows with prana burst to put more force behind her attacks, so maybe if it pulls back into a cylinder or funnel shape at the elbow that could focus that energy more tightly.

But that's just the shape of the armor and some basic mechanisms. You feel like you should do more than that. The armor you're replacing may not be a Noble Phantasm itself, but it's significant enough to apparently be a part of Noa's Saint Graph. You can't replace it with just anything. And besides, if you're making equipment for your group, you should probably aim for something that will strengthen them, instead of just allowing them to retain their current combat ability.

The problem is that you can't just stick a mystic code in the chestplate and call it a day. Prana burst will expose it to a lot of raw mana, and it's pretty likely that will mess up any finer spellwork. Anything worked into the armor needs to play nice with that, and Noa's version of the skill seems inherently aggressive. As much as you would like to, say, install a force-field or healing device in there, things like her Noble Phantasm are so conceptually opposed to that that it would break down in short order. With most people this sort of thing wouldn't be a consideration, but Noa is apparently part-dragon; there's a very large amount of mana involved.

...Part dragon. Now there's a thought.

You go over to your 'special materials' cabinet and start deactivating the bounded fields. The fields aren't there for security of course; they're mostly to preserve what's inside until it's time to be used. Phantasmal species can't survive properly in the world of man anymore... or at least, not full-blooded ones. Not without being or having something special, or burning through quite a bit of mana. But what traces of them do remain make exceptional materials for mystic codes, and that's what this cabinet contains.

The cabinet is nearly empty of course. Your Uncle doesn't usually allow you to make codes with materials you didn't gather yourself. But when you built your bike, your Uncle had relaxed that rule a little, and allowed you to take a few materials from his workshop.

It was the first and thus far only time he had allowed that, so you perhaps went a bit overboard. While your bike's engine does contain a number of such exotic materials, you weren't able to use anywhere near their full potential; while the end result was powerful, it wasn't really an efficient use of the materials. These days, you could make something like your bike solely with modern materials... though it would burn through your mana at a massive pace.

The important thing though is that your Uncle provided you extras for some of the materials in case you needed to make repairs, and that's what you're retrieving now. It's not a piece of a true phantasmal beast of course. Only one such material went into your bike, and your Uncle didn't give you a replacement. The materials you're retrieving now are instead a long hair, a broad shard of bone, and a massive flat tooth. All three came from a very ancient horse/

There existed, a long time ago, a lineage of horses with draconic blood. Even your Uncle was unclear on how that happened, but while he wasn't able to trace that lineage to its roots, he was still able to trace it rather far. The line died out with the horse of Alexander the Great, but your Uncle was still able to follow it to ancient Persia. And by doing so, he found the grave of one of the earliest steeds of that line, its bones and hair still intact after thousands of years.

You'd used a piece of that horse's skull for the engine core's casing, used pieces of a molar for connecters, and had woven a tail-hair into some of the wires. And now you'll use them again. These may not be the scales and bones of a real dragon, but they're the closest it's possible to get now that the age of gods is over. And you think you'll do a much better job this time than you did with your bike.

You don't actually start forging the armor in the two hours before your guests awake. Quite simply, you don't have the time for that. But you do take the time to plan out the project to every last detail and, once you've done that, prepare the non-metal materials. Mostly this consists of carving the bones. They're much harder than steel of course, but you have a mystic code made specifically for carving very tough things. You split the tooth in half, carve out a much smaller shard of the skull, and then connect them together. The end result is a triangle of bone pointed downward, with what look like fangs jutting down on either side. This will be the centerpiece of the armor's breastplate, the tip of the slope in the chest area that will deflect blows away from Noa's center of mass.

You also cut the tail-hair into the relevant sizes, pour out the oil, hook the forge up to your workshop's circuits, and so on and so forth. You may not be able to properly start just yet, but you find a way to occupy the time until your guest's wake up.

Ritsuka once again takes some time to properly wake up, though having coffee prepared helps. Once she does, you brief each other on what happened last night with your respective groups.

Ritsuka's group went to Leo last night, as you already knew, and met up with 'someone interesting' that Marisbury forbade them from talking about. Marisbury didn't give the order himself it would seem, but da Vinci had been using mental techniques to wake up and fall asleep as needed, conveying orders between the two worlds. As for the others...

"White Saber abandoned his fight with those RRB guys not too long after Ruler died," Ritsuka says. "Well, relatively speaking. Their fight was pretty slow-paced, since they mostly used guerilla tactics against him from what her cameras can see."

"The Caster they rescued the other night used some sort of book to fly over the divide between Sagittarius and Capricorn, but Da Vinci didn't catch where she went after that," Mash notes. "Mister Animusphere wants us to try to recruit her tonight."

"Technically," Ritsuka pipes in, giving you a look you can't quite interpret. "She was made a 'recruitment priority' along with the guy in Leo and the people under Ophiucus that Helena's still in touch with."

So Helena did get some of their waking world contact information while she was down there. You'd wondered about that.

"Which means who we go for is our prerogative," Ritsuka continues. "If we go after someone we feel is more important and talk with her later... well, it wouldn't be our fault if someone else recruited her while we were doing that, right? And if that someone is a close ally who we're already trying to recruit anyway, that wouldn't be a big problem."

You get what she's saying, of course; it would be kind of hard to miss it.

[ ]"Yeah... if something like that happened tonight, it wouldn't be a problem at all, would it." (Commit to tracking down the Caster tonight)
[ ]"I suppose something like that could happen. I'll let you know if it does." (Encourage Ritsuka to go after someone else, but don't commit to tracking her down just yet)
[ ]"A pity I have too much on my hands for that to happen, though." (Encourage Ritsuka to try recruiting the Caster for Chaldea)
[ ]Write-in

The conversation wraps up quickly after that, though.

"Our check-in call is about three hours from now," Mash tells you. "You're welcome to sit in if you'd like, though they'll probably ask you to leave partway through again."

You consider that. Once you start work on the armor, ideally you wouldn't stop until you were actually finished. Planning it out to have a break after the first three hours would be tricky... but very do-able, if you start with the smaller pieces of the armor and only get started on the breastplate afterward.

You could also just not start on it until after the meeting, but you wouldn't be able to finish it tonight if you did. Though of course, finishing it all in one day would be rather difficult to begin with for something like this, so maybe it wouldn't be a great loss.

[ ]You'll attend the meeting.
[ ]The rest of your day will be dedicated a hundred percent to the armor.

If you do attend, prior to the meeting you'll:
(Options that take less than three hours will allow a vote after)

[ ]Get the gauntlets made.
[ ]Strengthen one of your bike's mystic codes (Write in which one)
[ ]Talk with the parrot.
[ ]Talk with Ritsuka and Mash
[ ]Do some of your morning exercises.
[ ]Do some of your reading.
[ ]Borrow your Uncle's computer to look up any suspicious deaths that happened last night.
[ ]Write-in

---

A/N: Look up Bucephalus' lineage. It's an actual thing (Though it being dragons, specifically, is original. I think. I could be misremembering).

Anyway, I wasn't originally going to have the armor Cal made be so... grandiose. But when I tried to work it out, there weren't many fancy things Cal could do with armor that would also survive Mordred's prana burst and NP. Ultimately, this was what I came up with.

As for the bike's engine... When Cal says it was inefficient, he means it. He used a number of very rare materials to make what's essentially a very powerful mana battery. The casing doesn't let any mana get in or out through any means other than the connectors, and the core itself can hold more mana than Cal could ever put into it. The problem though is that the casing doesn't let any mana get in or out through any means other than the connectors, and the core itself can hold more mana than Cal could ever put into it.

See, the core can only charge by absorbing ambient mana, and due to how Cal built it, it can't be charged any other way without disassembling critical parts that would be very difficult to reassemble again. The engine has a massive storage capacity for mana, and it barely even uses five percent of it at best. It charges much faster on the reverse side of the world due to the higher prana levels of course, but all of the codes in it are tuned to operate at a much lower level and re-tuning them takes time... which is, of course, why Cal has the option to upgrade his bike's systems as a one-day task instead of having to overhaul the entire thing outright. Though the battery would still be at risk of draining itself if he went with the maximum right away

Regarding the Caster... yes, it's a distinct possibility that you won't be able to find her tonight, or that you won't be able to convince her to join you (She didn't join up with the group that rescued her after all). The only thing you'd be committing to with the first option is making the attempt. The second option, meanwhile, is if you want something else to take priority tonight, or to consult with the other three in the city before committing to anything, or to delay making the decision for any number of other reasons.

Lastly, due to the massively long shifts I'll be having due to memorial day weekend, next update will probably be Tuesday. Sorry folks.

[X]"Yeah... if something like that happened tonight, it wouldn't be a problem at all, would it." (Commit to tracking down the Caster tonight)
[X]The rest of your day will be dedicated a hundred percent to the armor.

---

You sigh. Participating in the meeting would be useful -- sharing information and coordinating with allies is always helpful, even if there's things they won't talk about in front of you -- but most of that you can do in the dream later with Da Vinci's communicator. "Thank you, but I will have to pass on that today," you say. "I have a project I'm hoping to complete before nightfall, and it will take me most of the day."

"I'm sorry to hear that," Mash says.

"Just so you know, we'll probably be asked to start heading back to hq soon," Ritsuka says. "Da Vinci's already passed a copy of the data to Ser-- er, to Twice, so they'll probably ask us to do some extra scans for stuff we missed and then tell us to head back."

"Who's Twice?" you ask.

"Oh, right," Ritsuka says. "He wasn't on the call yesterday, was he... am I not supposed to talk about him?"

Mash looks thoughtful. "Possibly...?"

You shrug. "It's fine. Please don't worry yourself about it." You pause as you turn to leave the kitchen, then grab the bag of food for Shaptasuka. He's still asleep, but you probably won't be coming back out to feed him before nightfall.

His cage is currently on the kitchen counter... actually, looking at it, he isn't asleep. He's just pretending. You'd known that he was clever, but he'd even fooled you for a moment there. "So you're with us then, Shapta?"

"I'm seven," the parrot says quietly, one eye cracking open. "Praise me today?"

"I'll be busy in my workshop from now until I go to sleep," you say. "I won't have time to talk to you, let alone praise you like you keep yammering on about."

Shapta hops slightly on his perch in order to face you, both eyes only slightly open. Maybe he's more sleepy than you thought? "But I'm a pretty bird."

You shake your head. "I have more important things today, Shapta," you say.

"I'm seven."

"I know," you reply, rolling your eyes. "I'll bring you dinner tonight, but I'm too busy until then. Sorry, Shapta."

"I'm seven, I'll remember," Shapta says, eyes drooping shut. "Sagittarius. Capricorn. I'll remember."

And then he's legitimately asleep this time.

Setting that odd interlude aside, you put the food in Shapta'suka's cage for later and head out for your workshop.

*****

Armor is not, by itself, technically complex. When you get down to it, it's just sheets of metal shaped to be worn and deflect blows. Once you'd actually done the preparatory work, making an ordinary suit of armor wouldn't take you much longer than making a set of spoons.

Making a mystic code is more complicated, especially the type of mystic code you make. All of your own codes are designed to link to your artificial circuits. As such, you need to create an entire new set of circuits and put it inside the code. This lets the code itself act as an extension of your own body, both on a physical and conceptual level.

That alone is enough to complicate things. But Noa doesn't have your artificial circuits, and probably doesn't even have circuits at all. So you'll need to find a different way to connect it to her instead, on a conceptual level. And the obvious connection there is, of course, 'dragons.'

So to start with, the armor needs to be much more intricate in design than just a sheet of metal to deflect blows. You need to make the whole thing as much like a dragon as possible, not just the pieces from your cabinet.

There's only so much you can do without making the project take weeks though. So you settle for the general shape. From the outside, the armor is covered with the shapes of hundreds of scales. From the inside, sinew and flesh. The tail-hairs are there too. You'd needed more than the single hair you'd thought at first, but all three turns out to be enough, woven in and out of the metal in a design that mimics the layout of a dragon's veins. They stop at the elbows, however. When the gauntlets retract, the veins in her upper arm will line up with those in the armor, and the blades you placed in there will bridge the two.

You had only intended to work until it was time to sleep, but as the hours stretch on you find yourself loathe to stop. You had made a decision, this morning, to make as much progress on this armor today as possible. You'd hoped to have it entirely finished by the time you spoke with Noa next, even though it would be nearly impossible. Perhaps it is because you are torn between those two decisions, or perhaps because of your determination, that the dreaming world begins to bleed into the edges of your vision. By the time you finish, you are no longer in your workshop. Or at least, not your workshop in the waking world.

"So this is the armor for Noa, then?" Sengo asks. He'd joined you several hours ago, but this was the first time either of you spoke. You'd simply exchanged glances, and he began working the bellows for you on his forge. Which had helped immensely, as it turned out.

"Yes," you reply. "Thank you for your help, Sengo. I would not have been able to finish this tonight without you. It went very quickly." And its true. While he couldn't help you actually forge the metal, and didn't know anything about making armor to begin with, his techniques with a forge and bellows were leagues beyond your own or even your Uncle's. But you suppose that's to be expected from a Heroic Spirit who ascended through sheer skill in the craft.

"It was no trouble at all, Cal," Sengo replies. "Where did this forge come from, though?"

"My workshop," you say. "I didn't realize I could bring it here, at least not like this. It should only be items that I'm physically touching, and not everything was. The transition was seamless." Which probably means you managed to fall asleep mid-swing of the hammer. At least the forge going with you means you probably fell onto the floor instead of white-hot metal. You'll deal with that when you wake up.

"Feel free to use it, if you think it will be helpful," you add. You're fairly certain that he'd ask you something like that eventually anyway. "Before that though, let's wake up the others."

*****

"So this is the armor, huh?" Noa says. "Well, I like the design... Reminds me of Percy's, except less creepy."

It did come out looking rather well, in your opinion. The shoulders had needed to be similar in shape to the original out of necessity, to fit the mechanisms for her helmet. But the rest... The colors of the armor are inverted, now being primarily red with silver highlights. The Aries-esque shape on the chest-piece has been replaced with the bone-white symbol formed from the draconic bones, and the red sections are indistinguishable from scales without looking very closely.

"Percival?" you ask. "Well, I appreciate the compliment. I've never done a project quite like this before."

"It seems awfully tight though," Noa says as she looks down the neck. "I'll barely fit in this."

"That's the idea," you say. "I made it skintight."

"You what?" Noa says, dropping the armor with a clatter. "You were able to get it that accurate just by-- by--"

"Magus," you point out.

"That's creepy."

"Again: Magus."

"...I've met Merlin, so I can't disagree."

"The armor is a mystic code designed to enhance your draconic traits," you explain."You can activate it by retracting the gauntlets with your prana burst skill. There's a pair of blades in each gauntlet that will dig into your skin just enough to connect the artificial circulatory system with your real one. After that, all you need to do is cycle your prana through the chest-piece and back to yourself."

"Prana burst skill...? Wait, how do you know about the dragon thing?"

"Mordred Pendragon,"You point out, electing not to mention the whole skill sheet thing. "It's not that big a secret in magical circles. Or at least, it was mentioned in my Uncle's study materials."

"I... See," Noa says hesitantly. "I'll just... try it on then. And these blades...?"

"Just below the palm, against the wrist," you say. "You'll need to reinforce them with prana first, otherwise they'll slide off your skin and end up in a compartment at the back."

"Got it."

While she goes back to her room to change, you call up Da Vinci on the communicator.

"Ritsuka and the others are on the way to Leo today," she tells you once you exchange greetings. "Saber, Berserker, and Shielder went into the building in Ophiucus again, but Rider's gone too. And unlike the others, I didn't catch where they went."

Well that's ominous. "You'll call me when they make a move?"

"Of course."

"Thank you," you say. "Anything happen last night that I wouldn't know about?"

"That I can tell you?" Da Vinci says rhetorically. "Well, some kind of strange phenomenon appeared off and on over Aquarius for a while. My cameras weren't in a position to catch it, but whatever it was changed the light. It was like night-time." She tsks. "Unfortunately I didn't spot it until I went through the recordings later, so I wasn't able to get more data than that. But judging by the fluctuations, I think it moved to Scorpio before vanishing."

"I see. And is there anything you can tell me about Caster?"

"If you mean the one who's in Capricorn..." Da Vinci muses. "She's blonde, very fancy clothes, likely French nobility from the design and symbols -- Capetian Dynasty, to be more specific."

"That's 987 to... about 1300 AD, right?" you ask, thinking back to your studies.

"1328," Da Vinci corrects.

"Right. Once she got to Capricorn, where did she go?"

"Didn't catch it, unfortunately," Da Vinci replies. "I only saw it from the cameras in Sagittarius I was using to watch White Saber's fight. She used some sort of spellbook to carry herself over the boundary with wind magic, but then she was out of my range."

"But she's still here in this district?"

"If she left, it wasn't by the bridges."

"Thank you for your assistance, Da Vinci," you say. "Please let me know if anything comes up."

"I'll do what I can."

"What's this about a Caster?" Noa asks as you hang up.

"Someone who fled into Capricorn last night," you explain. "She's a spellcaster of some kind, so I was hoping to recruit her." You pause. "The White Faction have all retreated into their little fortress for the moment, so we can't do much to act against them right now."

"Suppose you have a point," Noa admits.

The two of you -- as well as Avenger, once he returns from eating -- try to come up with a few ideas for how you'll go about searching. Ultimately, you decide to start your search

[ ]In the upper floors and bedrooms of the palace.
[ ]In the palace's grander rooms.
[ ]In the tunnels and basements.
[ ]In the palace's satellite buildings.
[ ]You'll split up to cover more ground (Write in who goes where)
[ ]Write-in