0th Law
The Promethean Rose
- Location
- 5 Minutes into the Future
- Pronouns
- They/Them
Easiest way to get comedy from this cast of characters is to have either Illya troll people, or loosen Shirou's filter a bit and let him do the trolling instead.
A Certain Silent Neuromancer (Recursive Fate Revelation Online Fanfic)
- Thread starter plotvitalnpc
- Start date
- Crossover
plotvitalnpc
Once more walking the path of the catgirl.
Well specifically, FRO Abridged would be me trying to write everyone as their abridged counterparts and failing and quite probably getting infracted for committing an impression of Abridged Asuna to text.
So really it's for the best that I just stick to writing this fic normally.
Z000
If this is trash, then find me in the dumpster
- Location
- Viet Nam
i don't really like Abridged all that much, like it fun and all but the people who shill it as the best thing since the invention of the toilet should really shut up, we are buying toast, how did the conversation swerve to that
plotvitalnpc
Once more walking the path of the catgirl.
Good thing you didn't say since the invention of sliced bread, because sliced bread is on the top 200 list of like, the worst things since sliced bread (inclusive). The sandwich loaf has nothing going for it but convenience and standardization, losing out even as a material for making sandwiches to superior bread forms that you may potentially slice yourself.
Z000
If this is trash, then find me in the dumpster
- Location
- Viet Nam
look i know the proper phrase of that is 'since sliced bread' but it not the most important thing ever, you take away the toilet, make every one poop in a bush and every will clamor for a proper bowl
SAOA is freaking annoying
we get it, it funny and remove alot of the stupid of SAO but can you freaking shut the fuck up and stop shoving it into my face you tone deaf [insert swear]
that have been my experience with all the Abridged stuff, Dragon Ball, Yugioh, Code Geas, whatever
people won't just take lukewarm meh as an answer when ask if i like it or not, so now they get a punch
plotvitalnpc
Once more walking the path of the catgirl.
Well yes, that was why I dunked on the concept of sliced bread.
Chapter 13, Part 3: Second Confession (Before FRO 15:1)
New
plotvitalnpc
Once more walking the path of the catgirl.
Even having called ahead and been invited in, there was something that felt off to Argo about dropping by A-nyaa's place for a chat. It'd always been the other way around before, and ultimately the only time she'd actually visited the onsen complex had been for the inaugural party quest.
But then, their relationship before the party had been all kinds of messy and tangled, and they hadn't really had time to sort much out whenever they'd met up since, so maybe dropping by here was the right thing to do. Maybe it was even the trick to minimizing the chance of an A-nyaa-brand tirade about some or another annoyance….
Argo knocked three times on the door before pulling her hand back, rubbing the back of her neck awkwardly as she stood in the white and brown hallway built in the likeness of traditional Japanese architecture, dimly lit moreso by spell-lights than by any of the twilight that remained outside. She'd seen a few guests on her way here, as expected of the evening after the raid, but even back in the receptions area she'd been waved through by an NPC, and she hadn't seen hide or hair of Neko, Jinan, or Tabi on the way here. In a very real sense, she'd let herself into their house and walked all the way into the midst of an area that wasn't part of the business end by her lonesome.
She supposed that at this time in the evening, in this size of a building, three extra folks could end up mighty well hidden just by chance, but it still felt pretty sneaky to her, meeting up with A-nyaa without anyone else even necessarily knowing.
The door slid open in front of Argo with a sound of rolling bearings and just a little wood on wood contact, the orange-red light of the evening spilling out to greet her across the revealed floors and walls and the slightest fringe of A-nyaa's outline, a ring of red around a catgirl-shaped silhouette.
As Argo's eyes adjusted to the shift in lighting, the silhouette resolved until it took the form of a really cute girl in a mid-length purple yukata overlaid with a sakura pattern, triangular ears slightly offset from the peak of their arc of motion as their owner softly bit her bottom lip and met Argo's gaze.
Compared to the yukata Argo had seen A-nyaa in before, the lengthy, visually indistinct standard pattern they'd gotten in for the whole ryokan vibe of this place, it was a completely different vibe, and Argo had to remind herself not to stare too much. Shifting her hand into a wave, she smiled at her host and forced a quick "S'up." out of her lungs.
It was lame, but she'd been nervous about showing up like this for a few reasons even beforehand.
A-nyaa nodded at her, stepping out of the way of the door while keeping one hand on its edge, and gestured toward a low, round table in the center of the room where a bowl of fruit and two cups of steaming liquid – doubtless one of the various stand-ins for tea [Cardinal] had devised – sat, bathed in the same twilight as everything else.
Argo nodded and stepped in, glancing around the space as she approached the closer end of the table, where a cushion waited to receive her. The walls were lined with a series of cabinets that made the room feel like it was moreso meant for storage than sitting, but the table clearly disagreed on the matter, as did the general lack of a need for that much cabinet space in the game, implying that it was meant more to give the vibe of a small, enclosed conversational space than anything. The only nonhuman life in the room, Argo noted with a wrinkle of her nose, was a small, potted cactus on one corner of the desk, a pink flower at its peak. Given the relative ease of plantcare compared to reality, a cactus whose primary favorable trait was being forgiving of poor care probably could have been replaced with a less prickly houseplant to deliver the same beauty without much fuss, but that could easily be chalked up to personal preference.
The door closed softly behind her as she sat down and took in the table spread in more detail. The tea, contrary to her expectation, actually smelled like the player-developed barley tea substitute, while a closer look at the fruit in the bowl let her discount the possibility of having any pretty quickly – the [Noyu Fruit] had been procedurally generated on the [Thirteenth Floor] and had a controversial set of properties. A skin that peeled away under finger pressure similar to a mikan hid the dark secret of a stonefruit with a texture more similar to an avocado and the flavor of pears and pepper. Being what was essentially a single serving pudding it had a fair number of advocates, but Argo didn't care for the flavor combination or the squishy sensation of peeling the skin.
She abandoned those thoughts as A-nyaa's bare lower calves slid into her field of view to the right side of the room as the girl shimmied her way between the cabinets and the table, passing turning to face the window-doors as she reached the other side and closing an opaque wooden sliding door in front of them, dimming the light in the room considerably but not making it any less red with the twilight before she turned back toward the table and sat down slowly to start fidgeting in place, clearly chewing on her bottom lip.
By Argo's estimation, there were two possibilities underlying this nervousness – the first was that A-nyaa, who made no secret of her crush, was just embarrassed to invite Argo into close, private proximity, the second that she already had a good idea of why Argo was here.
A-nyaa's hands laid flat on the table. Argo picked up the cup set before her and took a sip.
She could tell it was going to be rough to start this conversation. After a few seconds she settled on "Thanks for having me." and punctuated it by smiling across the table.
A-nyaa's eyes went wide as her body language as a whole turned to face straight forward, shoulders tensing before her hands came up to form the first signs. "You're welcome. Actually, it's nice to have you." the girl insisted, though by her face it was clear that she was a bit too nervous for it to ever be 100% accurate.
Argo set her cup down and raised one hand to wave that nervousness off with just her fingers, clenching in and out like the claws of a cat. "No need to pretend I wasn't some kind of a bother, calling about dropping by on such short notice. I'm sure you all had some sort of strategy meeting planned after taking your first look at [14F], after all."
"Two hours really isn't enough time to gather enough information to make a real strategy." A-nyaa denied, smiling softly with her eyes half closed. "At least, not as just one party. I'm sure things will change when the [Fuumanin] and [DDA] get around to sharing their findings with you, or when you're done processing them into a report if that's already happened, but for now it's just nice to know it's not another traversal puzzle."
Argo nodded. The ninth and twelfth floors definitely hadn't been crowd pleasers. "I'll probably be ready to start marketing this floor's 'newspaper' before noon tomorrow. Shame that same day wasn't possible, but 5PM's a pretty rough time to clear the raid."
A-nyaa shrugged at her. "It happened when it happened. A whole dungeon dedicated to turning you around, with no map or compass, that's just mean. There weren't enough people competent at dowsing to get through it fast." she summarized, hands moving slowly. It seemed like she was getting more comfortable with the conversation, though ironically as she went her expression shifted a bit.
"Yeah, that dungeon sounded like ass when I heard about it." Argo agreed, resting her head in one hand and grinning. "Sounds like the boss wasn't all that, though."
"Realistically, even after the switchup the gimmick was cheap in the Don Quixote sense, not the sense that it was unfair." A-nyaa declared, rolling her eyes as her hands moved quickly and smoothly. "Compared to the mega annoyance of the dungeon, Oniguma was a mini-annoyance that couldn't even manage to be threatening with Shirou there."
Argo had mostly heard the opposite opinion about that, but if A-nyaa was going to put it that way, she'd trust that was how it was from her perspective. Well, in any case, she didn't come here to gossip back and forth about the way their days had gone or chatting about the patch notes, fun as some – possibly even including themselves – might have found that. Her posture shifted, back straightening out and hand dropping back to her knee. "Diabel messaged me about what you told him yesterday." she confessed, voice firm and expression neutral – not happy, but not accusatory.
A-nyaa's expression fell flat, then sunk back into a frown. A moment later, the girl's right hand was clutched onto her left forearm and she was looking away. Much to Argo's regret, there went those carefully nurtured good vibes right down the drain, but alas, this meeting'd had a purpose to begin with.
Her lips felt dry as she spoke up again, and she was tempted to stop and drink more of the tea in front of her, but in actuality it was probably just in her head. "Mind control, A-nyaa." she sighed. "I would have liked to know about it for my own safety, at least."
That kind of information wasn't exactly something she'd be slinging merrily around for 100 col. She did basically agree with the idea that spreading the bad news would probably have encouraged red players to pick up that skillset and make merry havoc for all of them. If there was a difference between what A-nyaa's group had done and what she would have done, it was just that Argo would have let the major guild heads in on the info right away, then kept an eye out for any signs that it was actually going on in the wild to update them on.
To put it in words, she just felt let down to know she hadn't been trusted with the information – that, and concerned about the possibility there'd been a deeper reason to hide it. In the grand scheme of things, [Neko Cafe Nyan*Nyan] wasn't exactly above suspicion of being involved in all of this, even if she'd rather not suspect them of it.
In front of her A-nyaa's posture shifted gradually, back curling down and right arm slowly sliding up the left, wrinkling the cloth of her yukata in a way the game couldn't store persistently. She'd probably put the outfit on specifically because Argo'd messaged that she was coming over, trying to set the mood for a conversation. The drinks and the fruit too – she'd wanted to talk with Argo and be a good host. After all, if her feelings were the same as back at the party, then her crush was knowingly visiting her room. That was certainly a special occasion or a milestone.
Argo felt bad about ruining that for her, but there was plenty of reason she couldn't let this conversation pass by as just a friendly chat and some lighthearted, low-risk flirting.
A-nyaa glanced cautiously back at her for a second, before her eyes dropped to the table once more.
"It's that hard to talk about it, huh?" Argo asked, folding her hands in front of her stomach as though it would steady the butterflies running havoc in her core at all. Naturally, she'd come here with her circuits open – after making them as many times as she had, something like the pain of operating them barely even registered. "If you'd rather not, I can-"
As she spoke, Argo shifted her posture just a bit, getting ready to stand up to go if need be.
"Talking doesn't come naturally to me," A-nyaa interrupted, hands breaking away from their resting places to rush through a flurry of signs. "so not saying something and not wanting to say it aren't necessarily the same thing. For what it may be worth, it wasn't a matter of not trusting you to be responsible about the knowledge or anything like that, and I do want to explain it properly to you, so please – give me a moment to prepare myself."
Argo, having stopped where she'd been in the process of standing up once A-nyaa spoke up, returned to her original posture. "Okay." she replied, heart pounding. "I'll wait for you."
The way A-nyaa was approaching this made it sound like a big deal – or more like, a Big Deal, the sort you had to place special emphasis on, the kind that wasn't just an everyday variety of 'super important', the kind that only came up a few times in someone's life. If A-nyaa were, for example, working with Kayaba or whoever else was keeping them here if not him, this might be the moment where she fessed up about it. Argo swallowed hard, watching the other girl intently.
It took what felt like ages for A-nyaa's hands to start moving again. "I've mentioned before that Sword Art Online meant a lot to me at first because with both of my legs working and an auto-translation system for my sign language, it was an effective escape from the reality of my day to day life, where I can't walk freely and only a few people can understand what I'm trying to say. It was, until the official launch, a place where I was just about on par with everyone else." she reiterated, before cocking her head to the side. "And I also told you that learning to make circuits from you meant a lot to me, because it meant I could do something meaningful again. That's all true, but it isn't the full truth."
Argo nodded along. Even putting aside the fact that A-nyaa hadn't exactly been open about her crush back when she'd first given that explanation, it couldn't fully explain her apparent appetite for the lore, nor that of her sister, nor the general absurdity of her guild. Being honest, the notion that someone like A-nyaa would get seeded in as a collaborator and end up in her orbit didn't make a whole lot of sense in its own right, but there was a mountain of circumstantial evidence that she might have been.
"It's true that Fulldive VR has given me back two things I've been missing for years." the catgirl continued, ears standing up straight as she smiled softly. "And it's true that I'm going to lose those things again when we get out of here. However, the critical thing is, I've already gained something I wanted more, something I've been missing for longer, and something I'll be able to keep even after the [Hundredth Floor]."
Argo opened her mouth for a moment before putting noise to the question that raised. "What did you gain, and from who?"
Depending on the answer, that could say a lot about A-nyaa's motivations, her loyalties, and how much she could be relied upon.
A-nyaa's face lit up in a bigger smile, her sign language softening even as her eyes kept a melancholy look to them. "Magic circuits, from you…and Shirou, of course." she answered, ending the sentence by briefly pointing at Argo's chest. "Something I was born without, and the very thing I lost my voice and leg chasing after a faint echo of. It might not seem plausible to you, and truthfully it'd be for the best in practical terms if you didn't believe me and eventually forgot about this, but magecraft itself is a real practice that's just being simulated in this game, exactly like we were all told at the beginning. I just happened to know about that since I was a child, unlike most, so rather than having learned about [Mental Interference] one day and deciding not to tell you, I've known about it since long before this ever happened, and I only made up my mind to make an exception and explain all of it to you yesterday, after my sister and I had to let Neko and Tabi in on the secret."
Whut.
Argo covered her face, brow furrowed. Was she supposed to take that seriously? Was it a joke at her expense? A-nyaa wasn't giving off any of the tells of a liar, but at the same time, the thing she'd just said was absurd to the point of being unbelievable. Urban fantasy was un-fucking-believable as genres went, at least so far as cases where the fantasy part was a secret, precisely because of how hard enforcing any sort of masquerade would invariably be. In general, if somebody had seriously posed the question of whether we were all living in one without knowing about it to Argo, she'd have told them to get more sleep and lay off the light novels.
The thing was, it was such an obviously unbelievable lie that it looped back around to being a serious question of whether it was meant to be a lie or not. A collaborator involved in keeping them all in this world would know not to give a stupid excuse like that. If it wasn't meant to be convincing, though, the girl could've just refused to answer instead of coming up with a stupid deflection. If A-nyaa were an AI like Diabel's theory on Shirou….what possible benefit would there be to making an AI that tells people magic is real? Wouldn't that be an obvious giveaway to them not being real? It could maybe make sense as a program glitch connected to the fact that the NPCs were all written to treat it as real, but that'd actually raise the question of why an AI that could pass as human was sharing that much material with the auto-generated questbots with five dialogue options.
Argo cocked her head to the side, peeling her palm away, and curling the fingers inward, gently planted a fist against her own mouth and chin. Was A-nyaa, who'd complained to her about Shirou for like twenty minutes straight a few weeks ago, and who'd seemed to instantly dislike him when they met, really the kind of person you'd plant if you were making the effort? Aside from that, if A-nyaa was a collaborator and this was for some reason their party line, wouldn't that also imply that Neko had to be part of the whole conspiracy, since they were apparently real life friends? Did that make sense?
As that thought passed through her mind, Argo realized she'd been lost in her thoughts for more than a minute and coughed into her fist. "You care to, uh, elaborate on that? Because honestly, it sounds pretty crazy when you say something like that really exists, but it's somehow a secret even though we've all got smartphones with us."
A-nyaa gave her a knowing smile and nodded. "A key thing to realize is that the context we're using magecraft in here is pretty forced and artificial. Nobody's going around and having magecraft duels in the streets or using it to provide goods and services in public places, and if they were going to do that they'd create a bounded field that keeps that information in the field and people who aren't aware of magecraft out of it beforehand. That being said, by and large all overt magecraft occurs deep inside well-secured, private facilities for research purposes. You're not going to be taking a video of it happening on your smartphone. Fights between mages basically come down to quiet sieges of workshops out of the public eye nine times out of ten, and they're hardly common even in proportional terms – putting aside that there are only a few thousand mages out there."
Okay, so she doubled down on it, aaand now Argo had a headache.. The explanation didn't seem to have any immediate, obvious holes in it, either. Argo would need to poke at it more to test for gaps in the story. So far everything that'd been said could have been rehearsed. Even if there was no clear reason to make up a story like this, that wasn't the same as there actually being none – and if it turned out it was all true, she wouldn't be satisfied with just the amount of information she'd already been spoonfed.
"That only raises further questions. Namely, why?" Argo commented after a few seconds, frowning across the table at the other girl. "You say mages basically don't go out and cast spells or whatever, and you say they do all their work in confined environments basically as a sort of research, but what for? Why dedicate time to something you don't get any use from, and why hide it if you can do all of this stuff?"
A-nyaa nodded softly, her smile shifting down into a frown as she let her shoulders slump and her head hang. "You could say that humanity evolved beyond needing the help a magus can offer a while ago." she signed, staring down toward the center of the table. "Or you could say that the help a magus can offer fell beyond the point humanity had a need for a while ago. The reality of the matter is that those both happened, mostly overlapping, mostly in that order, and at the same time magus society turned inward on itself in the name of self-preservation, with the traditional rule that uninvolved people mustn't be needlessly exposed to magecraft taking the forefront as an ironclad law then. With that, and with magus populations having seriously declined since the middle ages, there's hardly enough magecraft going around that you'd trip over it by surprise."
What was with that pose? Was she broken up about this, or was she just using it to hide her expression?
"Okay, but that's kind of just restating the point." Argo challenged, tapping her finger on the table. That wasn't entirely correct, since the matter of magecraft declining hadn't really been mentioned before then, but she needed to keep the heat on to continue to test the boundaries of this narrative. "How did civilization outgrow magecraft, and why is it declining? Why is the magus population going down? What's the actual goal if not to get practical use out of any of it?"
The catgirl's gaze drifted back up to meet hers, and then Argo was the recipient of a sad smile. "Because that's how it works. Magecraft is essentially a misuse of the effort humanity has invested in comprehending the world we live in, a way of breaking the rules that have been recognized and skipping to results, so it's natural that as humanity became more conscious of the rules it was facing and grew to depend on an ordered reality more heavily, magecraft became more difficult, less effective, and less diverse." the girl signed slowly, pausing and putting a finger to the side of her mouth for just a second before continuing, not leaving Argo time to interject.
What Argo took away from it, all the same, was that magic and science were directly opposed forces, like was the case in all kinds of shoddy worldbuilding.
"Runes, kabbalah, shinto, wuxing, Time Cube, witchcraft, Hasshaku-sama, the Cthulhu Mythos, alchemy." A-nyaa signed, listing off a pretty mixed set of proper nouns. "None of those are valid descriptions of the basis of modern reality, and some of them never described real phenomena at all. The reason they can be used as the basis for works of magecraft isn't that they're true, but rather that they're believed in. The faith people place in their ability to explain the way the world works turns them into [Mysteries] – or, I suppose, to use the technically correct term [Mystics] – things which accumulate [Mystery] and which challenge the validity of the legitimate reality we're living in. That's how magecraft can be performed, using Mystics which defy the proper order of reality to dictate a more convenient path to a valid goal and spending prana to pay the cost of walking it. It's only natural that an age of progress and freely accessible information would cause those to go into decline – more than ever, people who know the truth well enough can prove it, and superstition is in decline."
Argo snorted loudly, holding up a hand. "Now, wait just a second A-nyaa. Isn't it a little hasty to say the world's leaving superstition behind? I mean, you've been on the internet, right? Watched the news? There's cults and conspiracy theories by the thousands – if anything, there might be more superstitions kicking around than ever, because people can find a bogus answer to any question they like whenever they like. I mean, just think about those Pyramid Power freaks! Flat Earthers, too!"
"That isn't the same thing as superstition not being in decline!" the girl challenged, ears twitching and brow furrowing as she leaned toward Argo and signed with all conceivable haste and vigor. "Compared to previous centuries, where a typical belief system was accepted almost without question by the greater part of the population of an entire region or demographic, and thus a nontrivial portion of humanity, and persisted for centuries at a time with very little significant change to its contents, the mystics underpinning the thaumaturgical foundations of the modern age are undoubtedly flimsier. A belief upheld by mere thousandths of the world's population for just a decade at a time, which suffers constant revisions and regular rises and falls in believers? You can't even compare that to the power and reliability witchcraft had in the middle ages – and Wicca? Wiccanism is a joke! The only foundation that's still about as healthy as ever is Abrahamic religion, and the Catholic Church – the most centralized organization of its users these days – doesn't even acknowledge its spellcasters as using magecraft!"
The girl glowered at Argo, almost like she'd been offended by the suggestion – almost like how she'd been upset after the misunderstanding with Shirou just a few floors back.
Argo leaned back, putting up both hands as a stop sign. "Woah, woah, A-nyaa, don't bite my head off! I was just asking about something that didn't make a lot of sense to me!"
A-nyaa's eyes widened at that, and the girl had the sense to look sheepish as she pushed back across the table and sat back down normally to scratch her cheek awkwardly. She really had just jumped into it there, less like she was frustrated about getting called on a lie and more like a typical teen taking a challenge to something they were emotionally invested in as an attack on themself as an individual.
"So magecraft uses people's ignorance as a power source to change the world, huh?" Argo asked in a voice of faux-understanding, barely resisting the urge to laugh off the awkwardness as being inclined to make the mood here worse. "Uh, but hold up, why does it work that way to begin with? That makes it sound like we're living in consensus reality? But, uh, big groups of people have been wrong about reality before, y'know? To the point that you just said they still are, uh…"
Argo rubbed the back of her head, keeping her eyes fixed on A-nyaa's as even while tilting her face down to invite her to fill in the gap.
A-nyaa perked up at that, waving her hands excitedly in the air and letting out a gasp of relief before starting to sign again. "Consensus doesn't really factor into it, except for where mystery and mystics are concerned. This will get into ancient history a bit, so it's hard to say it matters to normal life – and in truth, I sort of think my sister wasted a lot of time by spotlighting this part to our guild – but there was an Age of Gods where the world wasn't defined by an all-encompassing order, where the authority to shape the world was parceled out from the will of the world to gods and spirits representing mere fragments of the world's soul. At the time, the world was dominated by the individual fiat of those higher lifeforms who governed the principles of reality, and humanity's only opportunity to survive, let alone wield power, was to propitiate them." she explained, smiling broadly all the way. "But over time, the gods started to lose ground, while humanity began to grasp the nature of the principles the gods were wielding, rose up in a sort of rebellion, and succeeded in outlasting the gods themselves, ultimately opening their eyes to a world where nobody had that sort of individual power – a world more suitable to hordes of weaklings like us."
There was a lot Argo could have said about that, because the idea was a massive stretch to just accept like that and there were so many parts of it she'd like to follow up on, but she settled for something simple in the moment. "How? I mean, they were gods, right? Can you rebel against a the climate?"
Some would say humanity was in the midst of a failing rebellion against the climate now, but by Argo's estimation even with all of their modern technology it was a pretty pitiful showing of war against an impersonal force. Could a bunch of bronze age people really hope to achieve anything squaring off against a thinking force of nature?
A-nyaa blinked, gazing up at the ceiling as the tips of her ears wiggled, her face slowly shifting into a melancholy smile under the twilight sun. "I doubt my sister even remembers this story anymore after living with our father for so long, but the legend our grandfather taught was that as humanity grasped the underlying principles behind the phenomena the gods held authority over, and with that wisdom they learned to usurp the power the gods held even when the gods hadn't offered it to them, building a safe and reliable lifestyle for themselves through the earliest form of magecraft. From the world's perspective, that made the gods failures as managers, not worth keeping around if they couldn't even monopolize the power they were given and not worth the cost of making a proper replacement or wiping out humanity, so the world pulled the plug on them and let them die to close the taps on the power we were stealing, leaving things to decay into a lower energy state under passive management. In time, that also killed off the conditions needed for the greatest living Mystics, [Phantasmal Beasts] like dragons, to survive. That left us with the perfect conditions for civilization to expand."
Firstly, huh? Secondly, humanity dodged a genocide? Thirdly… "I get that the gods getting got meant there wasn't a lot of risk of getting smote, I guess, which might be better for us, but wouldn't it've been a massive stumbling block to suddenly lose something folks were depending on that much? I mean, if there were still dragons for a while, how were folks supposed to protect from that if the old magecraft went kaput? Things still kind of suck today in places, but I can't even imagine how bad it must have been back then."
"The old magecraft didn't go away. Actually, it still exists today – people invest a lot of effort in preserving the remaining fragments of the old gods in a usable form in places. That carried humanity through the worst times of trouble." A-nyaa corrected, waggling her finger for a moment after signing that. "You're not wrong, though, that it was an austere time for people who'd been accustomed to the power of miracles, seeing them go into decline by so much. That was why, using those surviving pieces of godly might, one of the humans of old grasped wisdom not even the gods had possessed and forged the Imaginary Elements into the world, as the story goes. By creating the element we now call Ether, which used to refer to the influence of the gods, humanity provided a fitting substitute for the power that was only dwindling in the world and would continue to do so – one that couldn't disappear for as long as human imagination remained out of sync with reality. That, the wisdom stolen from the gods could be manifested through magecraft built on the back of superstition to do things like cure infections in an age long before industrial medicine became feasible."
"And that story is true?" Argo asked, giving the other girl a pointed look with her eyebrow raised. "I mean, it's something your grandpa said when you were little, right? If it is, why would your dad get Jinan to forget about it?"
Well, maybe it just happened naturally. What kid would ever bother with remembering such a clinical, unexciting Just So story? If her parents had told her something like that as a bedtime story when she was young, Argo would have gone on strike and demanded a better one before she went to bed.
A-nyaa hung her shoulders, her sign faltering just a bit as her posture shifted. "It might not be true. It's an eccentric's accounting of the story, all in all – it could have been a fable meant to warn about the sunk costs fallacy, or the ambitions of tyrants, or any number of other things. It might even just have been a fabrication meant to entertain children. That said, while my grandfather was an unfocused man who often didn't behave much like a magus, his ability was top notch, and our family thrived under his lead – by contrast, our father is painfully orthodox, but as mages go his talent is….disappointing, which is the reason for a number of things. Between the two of them, I trust our grandfather, but the one thing that's absolutely certain is that until the modern era, humans have always sought the protection and aid of those who held secret wisdom to change their fates."
"Which used to be the job of mages. Aaand now I think I understand part of why magecraft dies if it stops being secret – if mages need to know it's all fake to exploit it, folks learning more about magecraft means accepting that all the superstition is a lie, which means it stops working." Argo summarized, massaging her forehead. "But now, to go back to a question I think you missed, what are they doing now that's so important they need a masquerade and we normies should let them have it?"
A-nyaa nodded, slowly mobilizing her hands toward the task of properly explaining the raison d'etre of the funky wizard society. "Some mages are trying to acquire [True Magic], a power that goes beyond the current limits of humanity and of magecraft the same way the power of the gods used to. To that end, they need to do research that pushes up against the outermost limits of magecraft and the world. It used to be easier to become a magician, because even if humanity hadn't grasped the wisdom behind them yet, things like lightning were already part of the physical world, but in the modern day True Magic concerns concepts that don't exist in the world we've claimed yet. In that sense, science won't even have the chance to discover them if mages and magicians don't pave the way to the underlying [Sorcery] and bring it into the world for people to poke at."
That was actually a pretty noble sounding goal, but Argo didn't miss the fact that A-nyaa said 'some' there. "Okay, but what about most mages?"
A-nyaa shrugged. "Most mages would see that as shortsighted compared to the prospect of becoming one with the Spiral of the Origin, which is the core of all existence, and obtaining unlimited knowledge of all things. There's no hard evidence that doing that works or that it's meaningfully different from dying, but what religion doesn't ask for a leap of faith? That said, outside of both of those orthodox groups of mages, there's also spellcasters, who don't do research and do treat magecraft as a tool to profit, but their work is mostly centered around cleaning up messes made when people break the rules. The rules….could do with being reformed to be less permissive, as well. The road to hell and all."
Yeah, okay. Argo was going to mentally add 'people with god complexes' and 'the violently insane' to that account of the demographics of magus society, on account of the fact that mages were ultimately humans, but her curiosity was momentarily satisfied. Or rather, her headache was way worse now. She wanted to follow up on so much of this, her curiosity being very much piqued, but she'd probably have a stroke if she went much further for the time being. If nothing else, the details of this were too in-depth and A-nyaa's response to having them question for her to completely reject the possibility that it might be true – if nothing else, she'd accept for now that the catgirl believed it to be true.
Picking her teacup back up and taking a long sip to give herself another moment to think, Argo eventually set it back down with a sigh. "Okay, not 'gonna push you on that any more for now – but we're gonna talk about this again later 'cause goddamn if you haven't made me curious to know more, okay? Alright, good, now to be perfectly clear, you're not, saaay, working for Kayaba or whoever as a collaborator, are you? The secrets you've been keeping don't have anything to do with that?" she eventually answered, not waiting for a visual or verbal response to the first part before tacking on the second question – if they kept talking about the topic of magecraft and its alleged reality right now, there'd be no end to it, but at the same time Argo wouldn't accept this being the last time they talked about it.
A-nyaa briefly scowled at her in a 'The fuck did you say?' sort of way before her eyes widened and, a moment later, her brow furrowed as just one eye narrowed, her lips pursing, all forming together into a pretty classic look of confusion. "What? No!" she signed, mouth slowly dropping open. "I thought you were going to ask if I was mind controlling you into liking me or trusting me or something and that was why I never told you about Mental Interference, or something of the sort!"
Well, that reaction was worth a thousand words in terms of judging where A-nyaa stood, provided she wasn't just a really good emotional actress in a way that'd never been apparent before. Argo rolled her eyes at the girl's failure to predict one of the most important questions anybody could possibly ask here, waving her hand back and forth in the air. "If you were mind controlling me I wouldn't be asking you questions like this – if you had that kinda control over me, you'd be dating your sockpuppet version of me right now instead of talking about it over tea. I think that much should be obvious, at least. Is that seriously the conversation you were preparing for here?"
That train of thought really shed some light on the girl's priorities, though.
A-nyaa nodded vigorously at her. "Yeah." she declared, hands moving slowly. "Getting asked if I was working with a criminal by both mundane and magecraft standards wasn't really something I thought might happen today."
"So to be clear," Argo asked, just wanting to be 100% certain on this point. "You don't work for them."
"I'm opposed to them on every level." A-nyaa shot back, pouting all the while. "I guess I understand the suspicion, but what I don't understand is this; what did you think a hypothetical collaborator would be helping them with?"
"Um." Argo began. "Well, sending in collaborators to make sure people didn't die in the death game didn't make a whole lot of sense, so the main theory with the people I've talked to about this kinda stuff was that it was, like, to make sure people engaged with the plot or something."
It was admittedly a pretty weak reason, but some people were genuinely that egotistical, and there was no strong reason to think this whole shebang wasn't being run by one of them – all told, Argo wouldn't dismiss the idea out of hand, because being stupid didn't mean it wasn't plausible.
A-nyaa continued to give her a confused, mildly frustrated look. "That's something we need to do to survive, though. As an aside, and we mentioned this to Diabel last night, but if the conspirators did want people mind controlled for some or another reason, why would they rely on in-game use of the [Thaumaturgy System] instead of just adding in console commands to do it so nobody could resist?"
Okay, yeah, those were both fair points – well, there was one issue to call out there. "Rather than being sent to mind control people, they could just send in someone who happened to know it was possible and just have them not ruin the surprise." she pointed out, frowning. But no…put another way, sending in or activating collaborators would basically be the same thing as admitting that the plan wasn't working, and those collaborators would be tasked from the start with making the plan work. If she followed the logic that way, there wasn't a lot that could explain the decision to throw in GMPCs, except maybe if the sheer number of deaths in the first month triggered a panic about people dying…in the death game. That would imply that it wasn't meant to kill anyone, which seemed wrong, or that they weren't supposed to die yet, which also seemed a little complexity poisoned.
But then, if there weren't collaborators involved, that wouldn't explain the handful of insanely cracked players kicking around.
"Huh." she grunted, blinking a few times as it dawned on her that A-nyaa's claims were seriously worth at least considering. "Fuck. Is magecraft actually real?"
A-nyaa gave her a pointed look before picking up her teacup, putting it to her lips, and tilting her head back just a bit to drink the entire thing slowly without ever breaking eye contact.
Was that, perhaps, a look of 'I literally just told you that?'
The cup settled back onto the table a few seconds later, and A-nyaa promptly jumped straight back into signing. "Well, in any case, I need to ask you to please, please not share any of this with the people you've been having those talks with or anyone else. Recklessly spreading knowledge of magecraft is very illegal, and even if it pales in comparison to what's already been done this much is still risky when we eventually get out of the game."
"If that's the case, why invite me in here totally prepared to blow the secret?" Argo asked, frowning at the girl. "Seems like you were taking a big risk on that."
"If I didn't clear up the question of why I was keeping Mental Interference secret from you, that would have been a problem." the catgirl responded, briefly pausing to stretch her wrists before continuing, cheeks flushing red rapidly. "And also, my sister dunked on a relative of ours who seems to be keeping magecraft secret from his wife, and I guess that made it feel pretty shitty to be, well…"
A relative, meaning – perhaps – Grimlock? Argo filed that away in her memory before the rest of her mind caught up with the implications and she started blushing back. W-well, it was true that she'd definitely have been pretty peeved if they'd gotten into a committed relationship and even after that, A-nyaa took ages to bring her in on the secret. "Oh, um, thanks." she muttered.
They both sat there, seemingly waiting for their faces to cool off, until a question came to Argo's mind. "So, um, is this a case of like…'I can only talk to you about the whole secret' thing, or what?"
A-nyaa snapped out of her embarrassment at that, waving her hand 'no' before signing back to her carefully. "If it's the other members of my guild, I can probably explain why I did it to Jinan just fine. She was the one who wanted to tell the others first anyways. Aside from that, Shirou and Illya are both involved in magecraft, and I very much don't get the impression that either of them would mind. Aside from that, uh…don't?"
Come to think of it, if the devs were going to go to all the trouble of making it possible to have no circuits while making up the Thaumaturgy System, why would they have made a spell to circumvent it? And, accepting magecraft as a real thing, if it was something that really was just possible, why would they distribute a spell to circumvent it through a player and not through the NPCs? "So does that make me, like, an official mage's apprentice or something?"
"Well, in theory. A magus is allowed to train unrelated apprentices in moderation, for certain purposes like furthering their own magecraft or as a bodyguard, or things like that." came the response, before a frown joined the rest of the signs. "But the context muddies the matter enough that it's pretty likely the people in charge of the cleanup won't see things that way. Things will be messy enough when all's said and done without the edge cases. Memory erasure tends to cause problems when used on extended periods of time, after all. In the first case, I'm not sure the Mage's Association would even recognize people like us – with no natural circuits whatsoever, which is supposed to be the norm – as legitimate mages under normal circumstances. They barely even acknowledge getting a transplant as an acceptable solution, and it's not like you can contribute to improving and passing down the family's crest if all your circuits are temporary."
That actually answered a question Argo'd had floating around her head about just what, exactly, a crest was actually meant to be for – but at the same time it raised the massive, burning question of what Shirou had been doing running around with a spell that apparently wasn't even supposed to exist in his noggin, ready to be handed out freely. "So it's bizarre that Shirou knew how to do something like then, yeah? I mean, if it's definitely not in line with anybody's normal research, something really fucky must've gone down for him to learn – 'specially since he's got real circuits anyways"
"Until I learned it from you, I would have said that if anybody in the world knew something like that was possible, it should have been me. Learning magecraft from anonymous strangers on the internet at all, let alone that sort of exotic secret technique, was completely unheard of before this shit went down." A-nyaa signed back, making the expression of someone who'd bitten into a good looking apple only to find that it was actually insanely sour. "The time and resources our grandfather invested in trying to make me happy on that front are hardly trivial for any ordinary magus family. Anybody with more ability to figure it out than us shouldn't have had a reason to do it in the first place. Honestly, the fact that he apparently learned it before learning that he had real circuits is the only part that makes even a little sense about it."
Still meant someone else cared enough to make it for him, but Argo didn't bother to mention it. "When you say you're not sure they'd accept that excuse, are we talking seventy-thirty, fifty-fifty, or what?"
A-nyaa shrugged back at her.
Argo sighed at the show of uncertainty. "Got it."
Well, the overall prognosis was sounding pretty pessimistic in any case, and what better response to that was there than a sigh of resignment? "And I guess there's no other way to get around that cleanup either, huh?"
Though it was meant as a rhetorical question, Argo noted with some interest as her co-conversant's gaze flicked away from her and a blush started to spread across her entire face again.
"There isn't, is there?" Argo asked, giving A-nyaa her full attention.
The catgirl shook her head vigorously, but the blush only intensified, practically reddening her entire face.
Argo planted one hand on her hip. "There is, isn't there?"
After all, A-nyaa had mentioned how Grimlock seemed to be holding off on telling his wife about it, which implied he was allowed to do i-
Argo's face flushed red hot as A-nyaa nodded reluctantly, presumably leaving the both of them looking like radishes clustered around this table.
It was allowed if you were 'with' someone, huh? She supposed that made sense, what with how hard it would be to keep it as a secret.
"...That's probably another example of an edge case they might not consider, huh?" Argo asked with a nervous chuckle, rubbing the back of her neck.
A-nyaa nodded again, lips curled down into a frown.
With that sobering thought crashing through her guts, Argo decided to tease A-nyaa just a little to lighten the mood for the both of them. "But you'd protect me if we were going out and it came to that, right, A-nyaa-chan?" she asked, doing her best to sound like she was having fun instead of, say, shitting bricks right now.
A-nyaa's response to those words, though, was an unexpected one; after her eyes momentarily went wide at the question posed, the catgirl turned to face Argo and nodded. "Of course, Argo-chan." she signed back, not a hint of irony visible in her expression. "Though saying it that way, making it contingent, it'd be like I was blackmailing you, so…."
Argo felt the tips of her ears turn red and heat up. S-so that was where A-nyaa's cool side had been hiding, huh? The brief temptation rose in her guts to quip about feeling loved, but well, that was the thing, wasn't it? A-nyaa had actually been kinda hot just then, and there was a definite known reason for her to act that way….
Argo's face was burning up. Her reflexive defenses went up, seeking to turn the embarrassment on its head. "Dang it, A-nyaa! I was trying to get you to crack a smile, not take it all seriously like that! Who the heck was worried about blackmail anyways? Way to take me out of the moment!"
Like that, she spat out every retort that came to her mind, which admittedly said more about her ability to come up with them in the moment than anything, and watched as A-nyaa's face turned beet red in return and the girl let her hands drop out of position for signing to instead occupy herself with peeling one of the fruits on the table.
Aah, it wasn't a lot of retorts, but maybe it was too many?
Argo coughed into the back of her hand. "Would you like me to go now?"
A-nyaa paused for a second, pointer finger halfway through ripping the first strip of the fruit's skin off, and shook her head tentatively.
Argo chuckled, remaining seated at the side of the table. "Um, to be clear, I do appreciate that that was your first response to the question, but it was a little embarrassing for me too." she clarified, going maybe a little too far in being open about her feelings for the sake of letting A-nyaa relax.
The catgirl nodded in acknowledgement, but didn't deviate from her course of action at all.
Well, Argo supposed that meant they were just hanging out for now. At least until saying goodbye felt a little less like she was running away.
She couldn't stay forever, of course. She had other things to do, and while there was a big part of her leaning toward believing A-nyaa, that didn't mean she could slack on her usual standards of verification. Wild claims required wild evidence, and if she totally accepted a challenge to everything she knew about the world over the course of a single conversation, she'd completely deserve to lose all her cred as anything resembling a journalist.
--------
Surprise! More conversation about the factual nature of magecraft!
But then, their relationship before the party had been all kinds of messy and tangled, and they hadn't really had time to sort much out whenever they'd met up since, so maybe dropping by here was the right thing to do. Maybe it was even the trick to minimizing the chance of an A-nyaa-brand tirade about some or another annoyance….
Argo knocked three times on the door before pulling her hand back, rubbing the back of her neck awkwardly as she stood in the white and brown hallway built in the likeness of traditional Japanese architecture, dimly lit moreso by spell-lights than by any of the twilight that remained outside. She'd seen a few guests on her way here, as expected of the evening after the raid, but even back in the receptions area she'd been waved through by an NPC, and she hadn't seen hide or hair of Neko, Jinan, or Tabi on the way here. In a very real sense, she'd let herself into their house and walked all the way into the midst of an area that wasn't part of the business end by her lonesome.
She supposed that at this time in the evening, in this size of a building, three extra folks could end up mighty well hidden just by chance, but it still felt pretty sneaky to her, meeting up with A-nyaa without anyone else even necessarily knowing.
The door slid open in front of Argo with a sound of rolling bearings and just a little wood on wood contact, the orange-red light of the evening spilling out to greet her across the revealed floors and walls and the slightest fringe of A-nyaa's outline, a ring of red around a catgirl-shaped silhouette.
As Argo's eyes adjusted to the shift in lighting, the silhouette resolved until it took the form of a really cute girl in a mid-length purple yukata overlaid with a sakura pattern, triangular ears slightly offset from the peak of their arc of motion as their owner softly bit her bottom lip and met Argo's gaze.
Compared to the yukata Argo had seen A-nyaa in before, the lengthy, visually indistinct standard pattern they'd gotten in for the whole ryokan vibe of this place, it was a completely different vibe, and Argo had to remind herself not to stare too much. Shifting her hand into a wave, she smiled at her host and forced a quick "S'up." out of her lungs.
It was lame, but she'd been nervous about showing up like this for a few reasons even beforehand.
A-nyaa nodded at her, stepping out of the way of the door while keeping one hand on its edge, and gestured toward a low, round table in the center of the room where a bowl of fruit and two cups of steaming liquid – doubtless one of the various stand-ins for tea [Cardinal] had devised – sat, bathed in the same twilight as everything else.
Argo nodded and stepped in, glancing around the space as she approached the closer end of the table, where a cushion waited to receive her. The walls were lined with a series of cabinets that made the room feel like it was moreso meant for storage than sitting, but the table clearly disagreed on the matter, as did the general lack of a need for that much cabinet space in the game, implying that it was meant more to give the vibe of a small, enclosed conversational space than anything. The only nonhuman life in the room, Argo noted with a wrinkle of her nose, was a small, potted cactus on one corner of the desk, a pink flower at its peak. Given the relative ease of plantcare compared to reality, a cactus whose primary favorable trait was being forgiving of poor care probably could have been replaced with a less prickly houseplant to deliver the same beauty without much fuss, but that could easily be chalked up to personal preference.
The door closed softly behind her as she sat down and took in the table spread in more detail. The tea, contrary to her expectation, actually smelled like the player-developed barley tea substitute, while a closer look at the fruit in the bowl let her discount the possibility of having any pretty quickly – the [Noyu Fruit] had been procedurally generated on the [Thirteenth Floor] and had a controversial set of properties. A skin that peeled away under finger pressure similar to a mikan hid the dark secret of a stonefruit with a texture more similar to an avocado and the flavor of pears and pepper. Being what was essentially a single serving pudding it had a fair number of advocates, but Argo didn't care for the flavor combination or the squishy sensation of peeling the skin.
She abandoned those thoughts as A-nyaa's bare lower calves slid into her field of view to the right side of the room as the girl shimmied her way between the cabinets and the table, passing turning to face the window-doors as she reached the other side and closing an opaque wooden sliding door in front of them, dimming the light in the room considerably but not making it any less red with the twilight before she turned back toward the table and sat down slowly to start fidgeting in place, clearly chewing on her bottom lip.
By Argo's estimation, there were two possibilities underlying this nervousness – the first was that A-nyaa, who made no secret of her crush, was just embarrassed to invite Argo into close, private proximity, the second that she already had a good idea of why Argo was here.
A-nyaa's hands laid flat on the table. Argo picked up the cup set before her and took a sip.
She could tell it was going to be rough to start this conversation. After a few seconds she settled on "Thanks for having me." and punctuated it by smiling across the table.
A-nyaa's eyes went wide as her body language as a whole turned to face straight forward, shoulders tensing before her hands came up to form the first signs. "You're welcome. Actually, it's nice to have you." the girl insisted, though by her face it was clear that she was a bit too nervous for it to ever be 100% accurate.
Argo set her cup down and raised one hand to wave that nervousness off with just her fingers, clenching in and out like the claws of a cat. "No need to pretend I wasn't some kind of a bother, calling about dropping by on such short notice. I'm sure you all had some sort of strategy meeting planned after taking your first look at [14F], after all."
"Two hours really isn't enough time to gather enough information to make a real strategy." A-nyaa denied, smiling softly with her eyes half closed. "At least, not as just one party. I'm sure things will change when the [Fuumanin] and [DDA] get around to sharing their findings with you, or when you're done processing them into a report if that's already happened, but for now it's just nice to know it's not another traversal puzzle."
Argo nodded. The ninth and twelfth floors definitely hadn't been crowd pleasers. "I'll probably be ready to start marketing this floor's 'newspaper' before noon tomorrow. Shame that same day wasn't possible, but 5PM's a pretty rough time to clear the raid."
A-nyaa shrugged at her. "It happened when it happened. A whole dungeon dedicated to turning you around, with no map or compass, that's just mean. There weren't enough people competent at dowsing to get through it fast." she summarized, hands moving slowly. It seemed like she was getting more comfortable with the conversation, though ironically as she went her expression shifted a bit.
"Yeah, that dungeon sounded like ass when I heard about it." Argo agreed, resting her head in one hand and grinning. "Sounds like the boss wasn't all that, though."
"Realistically, even after the switchup the gimmick was cheap in the Don Quixote sense, not the sense that it was unfair." A-nyaa declared, rolling her eyes as her hands moved quickly and smoothly. "Compared to the mega annoyance of the dungeon, Oniguma was a mini-annoyance that couldn't even manage to be threatening with Shirou there."
Argo had mostly heard the opposite opinion about that, but if A-nyaa was going to put it that way, she'd trust that was how it was from her perspective. Well, in any case, she didn't come here to gossip back and forth about the way their days had gone or chatting about the patch notes, fun as some – possibly even including themselves – might have found that. Her posture shifted, back straightening out and hand dropping back to her knee. "Diabel messaged me about what you told him yesterday." she confessed, voice firm and expression neutral – not happy, but not accusatory.
A-nyaa's expression fell flat, then sunk back into a frown. A moment later, the girl's right hand was clutched onto her left forearm and she was looking away. Much to Argo's regret, there went those carefully nurtured good vibes right down the drain, but alas, this meeting'd had a purpose to begin with.
Her lips felt dry as she spoke up again, and she was tempted to stop and drink more of the tea in front of her, but in actuality it was probably just in her head. "Mind control, A-nyaa." she sighed. "I would have liked to know about it for my own safety, at least."
That kind of information wasn't exactly something she'd be slinging merrily around for 100 col. She did basically agree with the idea that spreading the bad news would probably have encouraged red players to pick up that skillset and make merry havoc for all of them. If there was a difference between what A-nyaa's group had done and what she would have done, it was just that Argo would have let the major guild heads in on the info right away, then kept an eye out for any signs that it was actually going on in the wild to update them on.
To put it in words, she just felt let down to know she hadn't been trusted with the information – that, and concerned about the possibility there'd been a deeper reason to hide it. In the grand scheme of things, [Neko Cafe Nyan*Nyan] wasn't exactly above suspicion of being involved in all of this, even if she'd rather not suspect them of it.
In front of her A-nyaa's posture shifted gradually, back curling down and right arm slowly sliding up the left, wrinkling the cloth of her yukata in a way the game couldn't store persistently. She'd probably put the outfit on specifically because Argo'd messaged that she was coming over, trying to set the mood for a conversation. The drinks and the fruit too – she'd wanted to talk with Argo and be a good host. After all, if her feelings were the same as back at the party, then her crush was knowingly visiting her room. That was certainly a special occasion or a milestone.
Argo felt bad about ruining that for her, but there was plenty of reason she couldn't let this conversation pass by as just a friendly chat and some lighthearted, low-risk flirting.
A-nyaa glanced cautiously back at her for a second, before her eyes dropped to the table once more.
"It's that hard to talk about it, huh?" Argo asked, folding her hands in front of her stomach as though it would steady the butterflies running havoc in her core at all. Naturally, she'd come here with her circuits open – after making them as many times as she had, something like the pain of operating them barely even registered. "If you'd rather not, I can-"
As she spoke, Argo shifted her posture just a bit, getting ready to stand up to go if need be.
"Talking doesn't come naturally to me," A-nyaa interrupted, hands breaking away from their resting places to rush through a flurry of signs. "so not saying something and not wanting to say it aren't necessarily the same thing. For what it may be worth, it wasn't a matter of not trusting you to be responsible about the knowledge or anything like that, and I do want to explain it properly to you, so please – give me a moment to prepare myself."
Argo, having stopped where she'd been in the process of standing up once A-nyaa spoke up, returned to her original posture. "Okay." she replied, heart pounding. "I'll wait for you."
The way A-nyaa was approaching this made it sound like a big deal – or more like, a Big Deal, the sort you had to place special emphasis on, the kind that wasn't just an everyday variety of 'super important', the kind that only came up a few times in someone's life. If A-nyaa were, for example, working with Kayaba or whoever else was keeping them here if not him, this might be the moment where she fessed up about it. Argo swallowed hard, watching the other girl intently.
It took what felt like ages for A-nyaa's hands to start moving again. "I've mentioned before that Sword Art Online meant a lot to me at first because with both of my legs working and an auto-translation system for my sign language, it was an effective escape from the reality of my day to day life, where I can't walk freely and only a few people can understand what I'm trying to say. It was, until the official launch, a place where I was just about on par with everyone else." she reiterated, before cocking her head to the side. "And I also told you that learning to make circuits from you meant a lot to me, because it meant I could do something meaningful again. That's all true, but it isn't the full truth."
Argo nodded along. Even putting aside the fact that A-nyaa hadn't exactly been open about her crush back when she'd first given that explanation, it couldn't fully explain her apparent appetite for the lore, nor that of her sister, nor the general absurdity of her guild. Being honest, the notion that someone like A-nyaa would get seeded in as a collaborator and end up in her orbit didn't make a whole lot of sense in its own right, but there was a mountain of circumstantial evidence that she might have been.
"It's true that Fulldive VR has given me back two things I've been missing for years." the catgirl continued, ears standing up straight as she smiled softly. "And it's true that I'm going to lose those things again when we get out of here. However, the critical thing is, I've already gained something I wanted more, something I've been missing for longer, and something I'll be able to keep even after the [Hundredth Floor]."
Argo opened her mouth for a moment before putting noise to the question that raised. "What did you gain, and from who?"
Depending on the answer, that could say a lot about A-nyaa's motivations, her loyalties, and how much she could be relied upon.
A-nyaa's face lit up in a bigger smile, her sign language softening even as her eyes kept a melancholy look to them. "Magic circuits, from you…and Shirou, of course." she answered, ending the sentence by briefly pointing at Argo's chest. "Something I was born without, and the very thing I lost my voice and leg chasing after a faint echo of. It might not seem plausible to you, and truthfully it'd be for the best in practical terms if you didn't believe me and eventually forgot about this, but magecraft itself is a real practice that's just being simulated in this game, exactly like we were all told at the beginning. I just happened to know about that since I was a child, unlike most, so rather than having learned about [Mental Interference] one day and deciding not to tell you, I've known about it since long before this ever happened, and I only made up my mind to make an exception and explain all of it to you yesterday, after my sister and I had to let Neko and Tabi in on the secret."
Whut.
Argo covered her face, brow furrowed. Was she supposed to take that seriously? Was it a joke at her expense? A-nyaa wasn't giving off any of the tells of a liar, but at the same time, the thing she'd just said was absurd to the point of being unbelievable. Urban fantasy was un-fucking-believable as genres went, at least so far as cases where the fantasy part was a secret, precisely because of how hard enforcing any sort of masquerade would invariably be. In general, if somebody had seriously posed the question of whether we were all living in one without knowing about it to Argo, she'd have told them to get more sleep and lay off the light novels.
The thing was, it was such an obviously unbelievable lie that it looped back around to being a serious question of whether it was meant to be a lie or not. A collaborator involved in keeping them all in this world would know not to give a stupid excuse like that. If it wasn't meant to be convincing, though, the girl could've just refused to answer instead of coming up with a stupid deflection. If A-nyaa were an AI like Diabel's theory on Shirou….what possible benefit would there be to making an AI that tells people magic is real? Wouldn't that be an obvious giveaway to them not being real? It could maybe make sense as a program glitch connected to the fact that the NPCs were all written to treat it as real, but that'd actually raise the question of why an AI that could pass as human was sharing that much material with the auto-generated questbots with five dialogue options.
Argo cocked her head to the side, peeling her palm away, and curling the fingers inward, gently planted a fist against her own mouth and chin. Was A-nyaa, who'd complained to her about Shirou for like twenty minutes straight a few weeks ago, and who'd seemed to instantly dislike him when they met, really the kind of person you'd plant if you were making the effort? Aside from that, if A-nyaa was a collaborator and this was for some reason their party line, wouldn't that also imply that Neko had to be part of the whole conspiracy, since they were apparently real life friends? Did that make sense?
As that thought passed through her mind, Argo realized she'd been lost in her thoughts for more than a minute and coughed into her fist. "You care to, uh, elaborate on that? Because honestly, it sounds pretty crazy when you say something like that really exists, but it's somehow a secret even though we've all got smartphones with us."
A-nyaa gave her a knowing smile and nodded. "A key thing to realize is that the context we're using magecraft in here is pretty forced and artificial. Nobody's going around and having magecraft duels in the streets or using it to provide goods and services in public places, and if they were going to do that they'd create a bounded field that keeps that information in the field and people who aren't aware of magecraft out of it beforehand. That being said, by and large all overt magecraft occurs deep inside well-secured, private facilities for research purposes. You're not going to be taking a video of it happening on your smartphone. Fights between mages basically come down to quiet sieges of workshops out of the public eye nine times out of ten, and they're hardly common even in proportional terms – putting aside that there are only a few thousand mages out there."
Okay, so she doubled down on it, aaand now Argo had a headache.. The explanation didn't seem to have any immediate, obvious holes in it, either. Argo would need to poke at it more to test for gaps in the story. So far everything that'd been said could have been rehearsed. Even if there was no clear reason to make up a story like this, that wasn't the same as there actually being none – and if it turned out it was all true, she wouldn't be satisfied with just the amount of information she'd already been spoonfed.
"That only raises further questions. Namely, why?" Argo commented after a few seconds, frowning across the table at the other girl. "You say mages basically don't go out and cast spells or whatever, and you say they do all their work in confined environments basically as a sort of research, but what for? Why dedicate time to something you don't get any use from, and why hide it if you can do all of this stuff?"
A-nyaa nodded softly, her smile shifting down into a frown as she let her shoulders slump and her head hang. "You could say that humanity evolved beyond needing the help a magus can offer a while ago." she signed, staring down toward the center of the table. "Or you could say that the help a magus can offer fell beyond the point humanity had a need for a while ago. The reality of the matter is that those both happened, mostly overlapping, mostly in that order, and at the same time magus society turned inward on itself in the name of self-preservation, with the traditional rule that uninvolved people mustn't be needlessly exposed to magecraft taking the forefront as an ironclad law then. With that, and with magus populations having seriously declined since the middle ages, there's hardly enough magecraft going around that you'd trip over it by surprise."
What was with that pose? Was she broken up about this, or was she just using it to hide her expression?
"Okay, but that's kind of just restating the point." Argo challenged, tapping her finger on the table. That wasn't entirely correct, since the matter of magecraft declining hadn't really been mentioned before then, but she needed to keep the heat on to continue to test the boundaries of this narrative. "How did civilization outgrow magecraft, and why is it declining? Why is the magus population going down? What's the actual goal if not to get practical use out of any of it?"
The catgirl's gaze drifted back up to meet hers, and then Argo was the recipient of a sad smile. "Because that's how it works. Magecraft is essentially a misuse of the effort humanity has invested in comprehending the world we live in, a way of breaking the rules that have been recognized and skipping to results, so it's natural that as humanity became more conscious of the rules it was facing and grew to depend on an ordered reality more heavily, magecraft became more difficult, less effective, and less diverse." the girl signed slowly, pausing and putting a finger to the side of her mouth for just a second before continuing, not leaving Argo time to interject.
What Argo took away from it, all the same, was that magic and science were directly opposed forces, like was the case in all kinds of shoddy worldbuilding.
"Runes, kabbalah, shinto, wuxing, Time Cube, witchcraft, Hasshaku-sama, the Cthulhu Mythos, alchemy." A-nyaa signed, listing off a pretty mixed set of proper nouns. "None of those are valid descriptions of the basis of modern reality, and some of them never described real phenomena at all. The reason they can be used as the basis for works of magecraft isn't that they're true, but rather that they're believed in. The faith people place in their ability to explain the way the world works turns them into [Mysteries] – or, I suppose, to use the technically correct term [Mystics] – things which accumulate [Mystery] and which challenge the validity of the legitimate reality we're living in. That's how magecraft can be performed, using Mystics which defy the proper order of reality to dictate a more convenient path to a valid goal and spending prana to pay the cost of walking it. It's only natural that an age of progress and freely accessible information would cause those to go into decline – more than ever, people who know the truth well enough can prove it, and superstition is in decline."
Argo snorted loudly, holding up a hand. "Now, wait just a second A-nyaa. Isn't it a little hasty to say the world's leaving superstition behind? I mean, you've been on the internet, right? Watched the news? There's cults and conspiracy theories by the thousands – if anything, there might be more superstitions kicking around than ever, because people can find a bogus answer to any question they like whenever they like. I mean, just think about those Pyramid Power freaks! Flat Earthers, too!"
"That isn't the same thing as superstition not being in decline!" the girl challenged, ears twitching and brow furrowing as she leaned toward Argo and signed with all conceivable haste and vigor. "Compared to previous centuries, where a typical belief system was accepted almost without question by the greater part of the population of an entire region or demographic, and thus a nontrivial portion of humanity, and persisted for centuries at a time with very little significant change to its contents, the mystics underpinning the thaumaturgical foundations of the modern age are undoubtedly flimsier. A belief upheld by mere thousandths of the world's population for just a decade at a time, which suffers constant revisions and regular rises and falls in believers? You can't even compare that to the power and reliability witchcraft had in the middle ages – and Wicca? Wiccanism is a joke! The only foundation that's still about as healthy as ever is Abrahamic religion, and the Catholic Church – the most centralized organization of its users these days – doesn't even acknowledge its spellcasters as using magecraft!"
The girl glowered at Argo, almost like she'd been offended by the suggestion – almost like how she'd been upset after the misunderstanding with Shirou just a few floors back.
Argo leaned back, putting up both hands as a stop sign. "Woah, woah, A-nyaa, don't bite my head off! I was just asking about something that didn't make a lot of sense to me!"
A-nyaa's eyes widened at that, and the girl had the sense to look sheepish as she pushed back across the table and sat back down normally to scratch her cheek awkwardly. She really had just jumped into it there, less like she was frustrated about getting called on a lie and more like a typical teen taking a challenge to something they were emotionally invested in as an attack on themself as an individual.
"So magecraft uses people's ignorance as a power source to change the world, huh?" Argo asked in a voice of faux-understanding, barely resisting the urge to laugh off the awkwardness as being inclined to make the mood here worse. "Uh, but hold up, why does it work that way to begin with? That makes it sound like we're living in consensus reality? But, uh, big groups of people have been wrong about reality before, y'know? To the point that you just said they still are, uh…"
Argo rubbed the back of her head, keeping her eyes fixed on A-nyaa's as even while tilting her face down to invite her to fill in the gap.
A-nyaa perked up at that, waving her hands excitedly in the air and letting out a gasp of relief before starting to sign again. "Consensus doesn't really factor into it, except for where mystery and mystics are concerned. This will get into ancient history a bit, so it's hard to say it matters to normal life – and in truth, I sort of think my sister wasted a lot of time by spotlighting this part to our guild – but there was an Age of Gods where the world wasn't defined by an all-encompassing order, where the authority to shape the world was parceled out from the will of the world to gods and spirits representing mere fragments of the world's soul. At the time, the world was dominated by the individual fiat of those higher lifeforms who governed the principles of reality, and humanity's only opportunity to survive, let alone wield power, was to propitiate them." she explained, smiling broadly all the way. "But over time, the gods started to lose ground, while humanity began to grasp the nature of the principles the gods were wielding, rose up in a sort of rebellion, and succeeded in outlasting the gods themselves, ultimately opening their eyes to a world where nobody had that sort of individual power – a world more suitable to hordes of weaklings like us."
There was a lot Argo could have said about that, because the idea was a massive stretch to just accept like that and there were so many parts of it she'd like to follow up on, but she settled for something simple in the moment. "How? I mean, they were gods, right? Can you rebel against a the climate?"
Some would say humanity was in the midst of a failing rebellion against the climate now, but by Argo's estimation even with all of their modern technology it was a pretty pitiful showing of war against an impersonal force. Could a bunch of bronze age people really hope to achieve anything squaring off against a thinking force of nature?
A-nyaa blinked, gazing up at the ceiling as the tips of her ears wiggled, her face slowly shifting into a melancholy smile under the twilight sun. "I doubt my sister even remembers this story anymore after living with our father for so long, but the legend our grandfather taught was that as humanity grasped the underlying principles behind the phenomena the gods held authority over, and with that wisdom they learned to usurp the power the gods held even when the gods hadn't offered it to them, building a safe and reliable lifestyle for themselves through the earliest form of magecraft. From the world's perspective, that made the gods failures as managers, not worth keeping around if they couldn't even monopolize the power they were given and not worth the cost of making a proper replacement or wiping out humanity, so the world pulled the plug on them and let them die to close the taps on the power we were stealing, leaving things to decay into a lower energy state under passive management. In time, that also killed off the conditions needed for the greatest living Mystics, [Phantasmal Beasts] like dragons, to survive. That left us with the perfect conditions for civilization to expand."
Firstly, huh? Secondly, humanity dodged a genocide? Thirdly… "I get that the gods getting got meant there wasn't a lot of risk of getting smote, I guess, which might be better for us, but wouldn't it've been a massive stumbling block to suddenly lose something folks were depending on that much? I mean, if there were still dragons for a while, how were folks supposed to protect from that if the old magecraft went kaput? Things still kind of suck today in places, but I can't even imagine how bad it must have been back then."
"The old magecraft didn't go away. Actually, it still exists today – people invest a lot of effort in preserving the remaining fragments of the old gods in a usable form in places. That carried humanity through the worst times of trouble." A-nyaa corrected, waggling her finger for a moment after signing that. "You're not wrong, though, that it was an austere time for people who'd been accustomed to the power of miracles, seeing them go into decline by so much. That was why, using those surviving pieces of godly might, one of the humans of old grasped wisdom not even the gods had possessed and forged the Imaginary Elements into the world, as the story goes. By creating the element we now call Ether, which used to refer to the influence of the gods, humanity provided a fitting substitute for the power that was only dwindling in the world and would continue to do so – one that couldn't disappear for as long as human imagination remained out of sync with reality. That, the wisdom stolen from the gods could be manifested through magecraft built on the back of superstition to do things like cure infections in an age long before industrial medicine became feasible."
"And that story is true?" Argo asked, giving the other girl a pointed look with her eyebrow raised. "I mean, it's something your grandpa said when you were little, right? If it is, why would your dad get Jinan to forget about it?"
Well, maybe it just happened naturally. What kid would ever bother with remembering such a clinical, unexciting Just So story? If her parents had told her something like that as a bedtime story when she was young, Argo would have gone on strike and demanded a better one before she went to bed.
A-nyaa hung her shoulders, her sign faltering just a bit as her posture shifted. "It might not be true. It's an eccentric's accounting of the story, all in all – it could have been a fable meant to warn about the sunk costs fallacy, or the ambitions of tyrants, or any number of other things. It might even just have been a fabrication meant to entertain children. That said, while my grandfather was an unfocused man who often didn't behave much like a magus, his ability was top notch, and our family thrived under his lead – by contrast, our father is painfully orthodox, but as mages go his talent is….disappointing, which is the reason for a number of things. Between the two of them, I trust our grandfather, but the one thing that's absolutely certain is that until the modern era, humans have always sought the protection and aid of those who held secret wisdom to change their fates."
"Which used to be the job of mages. Aaand now I think I understand part of why magecraft dies if it stops being secret – if mages need to know it's all fake to exploit it, folks learning more about magecraft means accepting that all the superstition is a lie, which means it stops working." Argo summarized, massaging her forehead. "But now, to go back to a question I think you missed, what are they doing now that's so important they need a masquerade and we normies should let them have it?"
A-nyaa nodded, slowly mobilizing her hands toward the task of properly explaining the raison d'etre of the funky wizard society. "Some mages are trying to acquire [True Magic], a power that goes beyond the current limits of humanity and of magecraft the same way the power of the gods used to. To that end, they need to do research that pushes up against the outermost limits of magecraft and the world. It used to be easier to become a magician, because even if humanity hadn't grasped the wisdom behind them yet, things like lightning were already part of the physical world, but in the modern day True Magic concerns concepts that don't exist in the world we've claimed yet. In that sense, science won't even have the chance to discover them if mages and magicians don't pave the way to the underlying [Sorcery] and bring it into the world for people to poke at."
That was actually a pretty noble sounding goal, but Argo didn't miss the fact that A-nyaa said 'some' there. "Okay, but what about most mages?"
A-nyaa shrugged. "Most mages would see that as shortsighted compared to the prospect of becoming one with the Spiral of the Origin, which is the core of all existence, and obtaining unlimited knowledge of all things. There's no hard evidence that doing that works or that it's meaningfully different from dying, but what religion doesn't ask for a leap of faith? That said, outside of both of those orthodox groups of mages, there's also spellcasters, who don't do research and do treat magecraft as a tool to profit, but their work is mostly centered around cleaning up messes made when people break the rules. The rules….could do with being reformed to be less permissive, as well. The road to hell and all."
Yeah, okay. Argo was going to mentally add 'people with god complexes' and 'the violently insane' to that account of the demographics of magus society, on account of the fact that mages were ultimately humans, but her curiosity was momentarily satisfied. Or rather, her headache was way worse now. She wanted to follow up on so much of this, her curiosity being very much piqued, but she'd probably have a stroke if she went much further for the time being. If nothing else, the details of this were too in-depth and A-nyaa's response to having them question for her to completely reject the possibility that it might be true – if nothing else, she'd accept for now that the catgirl believed it to be true.
Picking her teacup back up and taking a long sip to give herself another moment to think, Argo eventually set it back down with a sigh. "Okay, not 'gonna push you on that any more for now – but we're gonna talk about this again later 'cause goddamn if you haven't made me curious to know more, okay? Alright, good, now to be perfectly clear, you're not, saaay, working for Kayaba or whoever as a collaborator, are you? The secrets you've been keeping don't have anything to do with that?" she eventually answered, not waiting for a visual or verbal response to the first part before tacking on the second question – if they kept talking about the topic of magecraft and its alleged reality right now, there'd be no end to it, but at the same time Argo wouldn't accept this being the last time they talked about it.
A-nyaa briefly scowled at her in a 'The fuck did you say?' sort of way before her eyes widened and, a moment later, her brow furrowed as just one eye narrowed, her lips pursing, all forming together into a pretty classic look of confusion. "What? No!" she signed, mouth slowly dropping open. "I thought you were going to ask if I was mind controlling you into liking me or trusting me or something and that was why I never told you about Mental Interference, or something of the sort!"
Well, that reaction was worth a thousand words in terms of judging where A-nyaa stood, provided she wasn't just a really good emotional actress in a way that'd never been apparent before. Argo rolled her eyes at the girl's failure to predict one of the most important questions anybody could possibly ask here, waving her hand back and forth in the air. "If you were mind controlling me I wouldn't be asking you questions like this – if you had that kinda control over me, you'd be dating your sockpuppet version of me right now instead of talking about it over tea. I think that much should be obvious, at least. Is that seriously the conversation you were preparing for here?"
That train of thought really shed some light on the girl's priorities, though.
A-nyaa nodded vigorously at her. "Yeah." she declared, hands moving slowly. "Getting asked if I was working with a criminal by both mundane and magecraft standards wasn't really something I thought might happen today."
"So to be clear," Argo asked, just wanting to be 100% certain on this point. "You don't work for them."
"I'm opposed to them on every level." A-nyaa shot back, pouting all the while. "I guess I understand the suspicion, but what I don't understand is this; what did you think a hypothetical collaborator would be helping them with?"
"Um." Argo began. "Well, sending in collaborators to make sure people didn't die in the death game didn't make a whole lot of sense, so the main theory with the people I've talked to about this kinda stuff was that it was, like, to make sure people engaged with the plot or something."
It was admittedly a pretty weak reason, but some people were genuinely that egotistical, and there was no strong reason to think this whole shebang wasn't being run by one of them – all told, Argo wouldn't dismiss the idea out of hand, because being stupid didn't mean it wasn't plausible.
A-nyaa continued to give her a confused, mildly frustrated look. "That's something we need to do to survive, though. As an aside, and we mentioned this to Diabel last night, but if the conspirators did want people mind controlled for some or another reason, why would they rely on in-game use of the [Thaumaturgy System] instead of just adding in console commands to do it so nobody could resist?"
Okay, yeah, those were both fair points – well, there was one issue to call out there. "Rather than being sent to mind control people, they could just send in someone who happened to know it was possible and just have them not ruin the surprise." she pointed out, frowning. But no…put another way, sending in or activating collaborators would basically be the same thing as admitting that the plan wasn't working, and those collaborators would be tasked from the start with making the plan work. If she followed the logic that way, there wasn't a lot that could explain the decision to throw in GMPCs, except maybe if the sheer number of deaths in the first month triggered a panic about people dying…in the death game. That would imply that it wasn't meant to kill anyone, which seemed wrong, or that they weren't supposed to die yet, which also seemed a little complexity poisoned.
But then, if there weren't collaborators involved, that wouldn't explain the handful of insanely cracked players kicking around.
"Huh." she grunted, blinking a few times as it dawned on her that A-nyaa's claims were seriously worth at least considering. "Fuck. Is magecraft actually real?"
A-nyaa gave her a pointed look before picking up her teacup, putting it to her lips, and tilting her head back just a bit to drink the entire thing slowly without ever breaking eye contact.
Was that, perhaps, a look of 'I literally just told you that?'
The cup settled back onto the table a few seconds later, and A-nyaa promptly jumped straight back into signing. "Well, in any case, I need to ask you to please, please not share any of this with the people you've been having those talks with or anyone else. Recklessly spreading knowledge of magecraft is very illegal, and even if it pales in comparison to what's already been done this much is still risky when we eventually get out of the game."
"If that's the case, why invite me in here totally prepared to blow the secret?" Argo asked, frowning at the girl. "Seems like you were taking a big risk on that."
"If I didn't clear up the question of why I was keeping Mental Interference secret from you, that would have been a problem." the catgirl responded, briefly pausing to stretch her wrists before continuing, cheeks flushing red rapidly. "And also, my sister dunked on a relative of ours who seems to be keeping magecraft secret from his wife, and I guess that made it feel pretty shitty to be, well…"
A relative, meaning – perhaps – Grimlock? Argo filed that away in her memory before the rest of her mind caught up with the implications and she started blushing back. W-well, it was true that she'd definitely have been pretty peeved if they'd gotten into a committed relationship and even after that, A-nyaa took ages to bring her in on the secret. "Oh, um, thanks." she muttered.
They both sat there, seemingly waiting for their faces to cool off, until a question came to Argo's mind. "So, um, is this a case of like…'I can only talk to you about the whole secret' thing, or what?"
A-nyaa snapped out of her embarrassment at that, waving her hand 'no' before signing back to her carefully. "If it's the other members of my guild, I can probably explain why I did it to Jinan just fine. She was the one who wanted to tell the others first anyways. Aside from that, Shirou and Illya are both involved in magecraft, and I very much don't get the impression that either of them would mind. Aside from that, uh…don't?"
Come to think of it, if the devs were going to go to all the trouble of making it possible to have no circuits while making up the Thaumaturgy System, why would they have made a spell to circumvent it? And, accepting magecraft as a real thing, if it was something that really was just possible, why would they distribute a spell to circumvent it through a player and not through the NPCs? "So does that make me, like, an official mage's apprentice or something?"
"Well, in theory. A magus is allowed to train unrelated apprentices in moderation, for certain purposes like furthering their own magecraft or as a bodyguard, or things like that." came the response, before a frown joined the rest of the signs. "But the context muddies the matter enough that it's pretty likely the people in charge of the cleanup won't see things that way. Things will be messy enough when all's said and done without the edge cases. Memory erasure tends to cause problems when used on extended periods of time, after all. In the first case, I'm not sure the Mage's Association would even recognize people like us – with no natural circuits whatsoever, which is supposed to be the norm – as legitimate mages under normal circumstances. They barely even acknowledge getting a transplant as an acceptable solution, and it's not like you can contribute to improving and passing down the family's crest if all your circuits are temporary."
That actually answered a question Argo'd had floating around her head about just what, exactly, a crest was actually meant to be for – but at the same time it raised the massive, burning question of what Shirou had been doing running around with a spell that apparently wasn't even supposed to exist in his noggin, ready to be handed out freely. "So it's bizarre that Shirou knew how to do something like then, yeah? I mean, if it's definitely not in line with anybody's normal research, something really fucky must've gone down for him to learn – 'specially since he's got real circuits anyways"
"Until I learned it from you, I would have said that if anybody in the world knew something like that was possible, it should have been me. Learning magecraft from anonymous strangers on the internet at all, let alone that sort of exotic secret technique, was completely unheard of before this shit went down." A-nyaa signed back, making the expression of someone who'd bitten into a good looking apple only to find that it was actually insanely sour. "The time and resources our grandfather invested in trying to make me happy on that front are hardly trivial for any ordinary magus family. Anybody with more ability to figure it out than us shouldn't have had a reason to do it in the first place. Honestly, the fact that he apparently learned it before learning that he had real circuits is the only part that makes even a little sense about it."
Still meant someone else cared enough to make it for him, but Argo didn't bother to mention it. "When you say you're not sure they'd accept that excuse, are we talking seventy-thirty, fifty-fifty, or what?"
A-nyaa shrugged back at her.
Argo sighed at the show of uncertainty. "Got it."
Well, the overall prognosis was sounding pretty pessimistic in any case, and what better response to that was there than a sigh of resignment? "And I guess there's no other way to get around that cleanup either, huh?"
Though it was meant as a rhetorical question, Argo noted with some interest as her co-conversant's gaze flicked away from her and a blush started to spread across her entire face again.
"There isn't, is there?" Argo asked, giving A-nyaa her full attention.
The catgirl shook her head vigorously, but the blush only intensified, practically reddening her entire face.
Argo planted one hand on her hip. "There is, isn't there?"
After all, A-nyaa had mentioned how Grimlock seemed to be holding off on telling his wife about it, which implied he was allowed to do i-
Argo's face flushed red hot as A-nyaa nodded reluctantly, presumably leaving the both of them looking like radishes clustered around this table.
It was allowed if you were 'with' someone, huh? She supposed that made sense, what with how hard it would be to keep it as a secret.
"...That's probably another example of an edge case they might not consider, huh?" Argo asked with a nervous chuckle, rubbing the back of her neck.
A-nyaa nodded again, lips curled down into a frown.
With that sobering thought crashing through her guts, Argo decided to tease A-nyaa just a little to lighten the mood for the both of them. "But you'd protect me if we were going out and it came to that, right, A-nyaa-chan?" she asked, doing her best to sound like she was having fun instead of, say, shitting bricks right now.
A-nyaa's response to those words, though, was an unexpected one; after her eyes momentarily went wide at the question posed, the catgirl turned to face Argo and nodded. "Of course, Argo-chan." she signed back, not a hint of irony visible in her expression. "Though saying it that way, making it contingent, it'd be like I was blackmailing you, so…."
Argo felt the tips of her ears turn red and heat up. S-so that was where A-nyaa's cool side had been hiding, huh? The brief temptation rose in her guts to quip about feeling loved, but well, that was the thing, wasn't it? A-nyaa had actually been kinda hot just then, and there was a definite known reason for her to act that way….
Argo's face was burning up. Her reflexive defenses went up, seeking to turn the embarrassment on its head. "Dang it, A-nyaa! I was trying to get you to crack a smile, not take it all seriously like that! Who the heck was worried about blackmail anyways? Way to take me out of the moment!"
Like that, she spat out every retort that came to her mind, which admittedly said more about her ability to come up with them in the moment than anything, and watched as A-nyaa's face turned beet red in return and the girl let her hands drop out of position for signing to instead occupy herself with peeling one of the fruits on the table.
Aah, it wasn't a lot of retorts, but maybe it was too many?
Argo coughed into the back of her hand. "Would you like me to go now?"
A-nyaa paused for a second, pointer finger halfway through ripping the first strip of the fruit's skin off, and shook her head tentatively.
Argo chuckled, remaining seated at the side of the table. "Um, to be clear, I do appreciate that that was your first response to the question, but it was a little embarrassing for me too." she clarified, going maybe a little too far in being open about her feelings for the sake of letting A-nyaa relax.
The catgirl nodded in acknowledgement, but didn't deviate from her course of action at all.
Well, Argo supposed that meant they were just hanging out for now. At least until saying goodbye felt a little less like she was running away.
She couldn't stay forever, of course. She had other things to do, and while there was a big part of her leaning toward believing A-nyaa, that didn't mean she could slack on her usual standards of verification. Wild claims required wild evidence, and if she totally accepted a challenge to everything she knew about the world over the course of a single conversation, she'd completely deserve to lose all her cred as anything resembling a journalist.
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Surprise! More conversation about the factual nature of magecraft!
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0th Law
The Promethean Rose
- Location
- 5 Minutes into the Future
- Pronouns
- They/Them
Not sure what this sentence is saying. Did you mean to write "But you'd protect me if we were going out" instead?
plotvitalnpc
Once more walking the path of the catgirl.
Nice to see another attempt to explain that magecraft is real. It is interesting to consider which pieces they think of crucial to know, which are less important, what important pieces they don't know, and how quickly they jump to the subject of protecting their friends as well as highlighting Shirou and Illya as likely safe people to talk to. Will be interesting if Argo talks to Shirou about this because his whole situation is funky and we don't really know how well informed Illya is because on one hand she comes from a major European magus family but on the other hand she is supposed to serve in the Holy Grail War and then die. There isn't any need for her to know anything beyond that.
0th Law
The Promethean Rose
- Location
- 5 Minutes into the Future
- Pronouns
- They/Them
Einzbern isn't a family, not really. Rather, Einzbern is a factory, one that has continued to run long after those who created it died or left, carrying on the dreams and ideals of those who left them behind. Illyasviel, on top of being implanted with the memories of Justeaze, is less like a pawn or a sacrificial lamb and more like the last shot of the Einzbern at, essentially, the salvation of humanity. It's also implied, iirc, that Illyasviel could fix herself if she so desired.
- Location
- United States
I think I actually liked this Confession a lot better than the internal Neko Cafe one. Haruka leading the explanation was way more directed and clear than Emi's, felt more 'hey this is a real thing that I can sanely back up and cohesively explain, even if the content sounds insane,' where Emi's gave me rambly 'this is totally real, believe me, I'm not making stuff up and throwing as much as I can at you to make you miss things' vibes. They were both telling the truth, sure, but Haruka says the things she needs to say to communicate clearly, and Emi just felt like gaslighting even though both basically said the same things.
It helps that Argo is a smart girl who knows her girl and can take things seriously and read between the lines, asking the right questions, which is very much not Tomoe who really should step down as the 'Mature Adult Leader' once the rest really grow into their own because she's only kinda okay at it.
It helps that Argo is a smart girl who knows her girl and can take things seriously and read between the lines, asking the right questions, which is very much not Tomoe who really should step down as the 'Mature Adult Leader' once the rest really grow into their own because she's only kinda okay at it.
Z000
If this is trash, then find me in the dumpster
- Location
- Viet Nam
i guess next chapter is Argo talk to Shirou and get the even more layman explanation from a guy who just practice magic compare to the explanation from a heir of a magecraft family and the girl who alway chasing after magic but can't do it
A yes the "we need to get married to rule lawyers the Masquerade"
I think its less that Tomoe is only ok at it and more that Tomoe has had a relatively limited amount of normal experiences as an adult and everything about this situation is unkind to someone not comfortable enough with the role to take what you know and really build something off it.
It also helps that it being a 1 on 1 means that Haruka can tailor the explanation to Argo whereas the last discussion meandered around given that it had two leads who weren't in sync and they couldn't get the whole "sorry, what we know about things reallly isn't going to help much when it comes to developing your magecraft" out of the way early on and then shift to the info dump. Haruka's talk reflects what they learned from the earlier discussion and is much tighter as a result.
plotvitalnpc
Once more walking the path of the catgirl.
Upsides to this approach: saves on rent and groceries, potentially improves psychological wellbeing and quality of life estimation.
0th Law
The Promethean Rose
- Location
- 5 Minutes into the Future
- Pronouns
- They/Them
Downside: the divorce proceedings are even more of a nightmare than they are in a non-magical marriage.
plotvitalnpc
Once more walking the path of the catgirl.
Well, gay marriage isn't legal in Japan so any breakup would involve severances other than divorce proceedings.
0th Law
The Promethean Rose
- Location
- 5 Minutes into the Future
- Pronouns
- They/Them
Not with that attitude. After all, when one party is capable of hypnosis...
Argo: *Becomes a Type-Moon fan*
Type-Moon Fans: May we introduce you to our holy gospel. "DON'T WORRY ABOUT IT!"
A tale as old as fanfiction
Z000
If this is trash, then find me in the dumpster
- Location
- Viet Nam
or as i like to say " do not trust the translation/some one else, they are wrong because they are not an expert"
cause seriously, how many people took Rin word to be true when she a rich girl from out in the boonie in the magic world
Sort of I think.
If she achieved mastery of Heaven's Feel, she should be able to just ditch her failing meatbag and exist as a manifested soul until she resleeves into a new homunculus(which she has all the skills and knowledge to create) or decides to just abandon humanity and be a manifest with all the associated costs and complications.
But like its a learned skill, she'd probably have to spend quite a bit of time figuring it out.
As for fixing her own body while she's still in it, that seems like the sort of thing that you only get one shot at, and having to hope that she doesn't black out or break her magecraft midway through.
There's also the simpler explanation that the group one was a result of someone's stress overflowing and blurting it out so they were wound up and agitated while explaining it as opposed to Haruka here having had time to think through how she's going to do it and consider what worked from the last conversation, what didn't and what are the actually important topics to cover though she didn't really cover the why you need to keep this secret part well enough if you ask me which will probably lead to Argo getting a nasty shock if she does talk to Shirou.
0th Law
The Promethean Rose
- Location
- 5 Minutes into the Future
- Pronouns
- They/Them
She's a homunculus. Not just any homunculus, but an Einzbern homunculus. Like an incarnated faerie or elemental or even Servant, she's a primarily spiritual existence, with her body being a mere expression of her soul. She is sustained indefinitely on the mana of the environment, and will even regenerate while she is connected to the land, albeit slowly. (That's why Dark Sakura, as someone who corrupts the land around her, is Illya's greatest natural enemy).