You remove your hand from the brick wall, and with one more utterance of
"Trace on," you bring out Hrunting. "A few nights ago, I went over to Asunaro to see if I could find the source of their infestation, and I kept getting pointed back to Mitakihara. If those large rooms down in the basement are where she keeps her workshop, this'll tell us;" And Hrunting does tell you. The jagged sword points straight down.
Bingo. "There's our proof."
"So, what do we do now?" Rin asks. "We've got more than enough proof, but what do we do with it? We'd be crazy to just go barging into a witch's lair without even the slightest idea of what we're doing."
"I've got a few ideas," you say, before switching channels to something a little more private.
"Sorry to disturb you," you say to Homura.
"But Rin and I are about to head into the witch's lair to do some investigating, and we could use some backup. Can you get in touch with Sakura or Shizuki and see about getting Rider or Saber over here?"
"Why not call up Kirika and ask for Berserker? I think she should be on break right about now."
"She might be on break now, but she won't be on break forever, and if we get into some shit when her break's over I won't be able to count on her being able to command Berserker effectively while she's working. Rider or Saber would be better."
"I'll see who I can get to help you."
While you wait for backup to arrive, you turn to Rin, and with another murmur of
"Trace on," you call on the Sword of Paracelsus, handing it to Rin as you say "Take this. We know this witch is doing some experiments with Grief, and this has proven to be quite effective against Grief in the past. I trust I don't need to tell you how to use it?"
Rin shakes her head. "Oh man, this is so~o cool!" she squeals. "How come you never did stuff like this for me back when you were my servant?"
"Let's just say that my sudden bout of maturity has brought with it somewhat of an enhanced repertoire;"
And speaking of an enhanced repertoire... "All right, let's get this show on the road." You spread your arms, and like Tomoe to her muskets or Mikuni to her drones, you bring forth a mass of spears, each one embedding into the earth. "Here's one I heard from Lancer; something her sisters can do, apparently." You've never given it a try before, but there's no time like the present.
"Ragnarök Lífþrasir!" A sudden burst of gold and blue surrounds the church grounds, fading as you recall the spears.
Rin stares at the light show, asking "So, what was that? Something about Lancer's sisters? I assume you're talking about
your Lancer, and
not McRemitz's, right?"
You nod. "I temporarily made a Bounded Field to purge the area of evil entities," you say. "I doubt I could have generated one with enough power to kill our resident witch, so I settled for wiping out whatever familiars she had lying in wait for us once we entered."
"Then you mean-?"
"Yes. As soon as backup arrives, we're going in."
Speak of backup, and it shall appear. Lightning on a cloudless day would have been a sight to see; emerald lightning doubly so. Too bad you're used to Rider's theatricality by now, or you might have actually been impressed. "You're late," you say; in jest, of course. You know no other servant on your faction could have arrived as quickly.
"Ha ha, very funny," Rider says, punching you in the arm as his chariot vanishes. He looks down at Rin, before asking "So... What's the plan? The Little Lady said I was to help you two in some kind of no-knock raid?"
"This is where the witch who's been making fake Grief Seeds lives," you say. "We're going in to either knock her block off, or put a stop to whatever she's got going on if her block isn't around to be knocked." Rider nods, and before you break the door down you say "Here's the plan. I'll take point and protect Rin. Rin, you make sure I don't stumble into any curses and keep your eyes peeled for anything that could be used to identify what our witch can do. Rider, you'll stay in spirit form and provide backup. Make sure nothing hits us from behind, and be ready to get us out if things go south." Even though you have plenty of ideas for how to handle the situation if things go south, you'll still be glad to have Rider there as backup and as your getaway driver. You look to each of your allies, and ask them "Ready?"
"Ready," Rin and Rider say in unison.
Rider vanishes into spirit form, and you and Rin breach whatever sanctity this facsimile of an ancient church has left. "All right," you say, your eyes scanning the pews and the altar inside the church. "There should be a way into the basement from... Somewhere in here." You touch your hand to the wall, pulsing your magical energy as you search for a way into the belly of the beast. Your senses lock on to a wall in a room nearby, where a door that isn't there waits to be opened. "There," you say, as you lead your team to, and through, the hidden door, passing from the aged but pleasing-on-the-eyes church into something distinctly
neither.
Down the spiraling stone steps your party descends, your only source of light coming from the faint glimmer of red which always seems to be just around the corner. "This reminds me of something," you say to Rin.
"Me too," Rin replies. "Hey, on three, do you want to share what it reminds you of?"
"Sure. One, two, three-"
"That time we went down into the Matou basement," Rin says. "If you swapped the red glow out for a green one, it'd be just like back then."
"Yeah," you say, having gotten the same feeling of walking into something which mortal eyes daren't see as you did back then. "That's what I was thinking, too." A thirty meter trek down a stone staircase takes a respectable length of time, and about halfway down on your trek you turn to Rin. "Still no traps?" you ask her, as your eyes wander in the darkened staircase.
"Still nothing," Rin repeats back to you. "Maybe the witch thought she didn't need any, since she wasn't expecting anyone to come in for a visit that she didn't want coming in?"
"Or maybe that's just what she wants us to think."
"Well, only way way to find out for sure." Rin unclenches her hand, releasing her flighty little emerald familiar, which darts ahead of you down the final stretch of stair. You continue walking down, until you meet up with the emerald at the bottom, returning to Rin's outstretched hand to perform its waggle dance for her. "Okay, so up ahead is where all the nasty traps are located," she says. "I'm pretty sure I should be able to disable them, though, so just hold tight."
The staircase opens up into a wide hallway, easily as wide as your bedroom. The hallway is not the source of the red glow; just like the staircase, that faint red light always seems to be coming from somewhere just out of sight. You ready Kanshou and Bakuya in your hands in just case anything stronger than a familiar survived down here, and you advance slowly, one step at a time, always moving in time with Rin's footsteps as she disables the traps sensed by her familiar one by one. You aren't going to try guessing what any of them were; they're probably better left unimagined.
"I wonder what she needed such a deep stair case for?" Rin asks, as her head turns this way and that, eyes scanning for something,
anything she can make sense of. "I mean, it's not like this place has a super-high ceiling or anything; couldn't she have made this place a little closer to the surface?"
In your mind's eye, you can already see the answer taking shape, but you say nothing. Pressing your hand to the side of the hallway and pulsing your magical energy once again, you say "Up ahead is a smaller staircase, along with the first of the large rooms I was sensing earlier." Rin rolls her eyes at the prospect of
another staircase, but the reality is much more forgiving, yielding a small flight no more arduous than the one to the upstairs apartment of Homura's building.
No door separates the hallway from the staircase which flank it on either side, but a tall pair of double-wide doors does greet you at the bottom. Rin's familiar stops, bouncing back and forth as she disables the magical array inscribed on the doors, taking point from you for just a moment to push them open.
You've finally found the source of the red glow.
The doors open up into an expansive room, covered wall-to-wall in all manner of dusty tomes, most of which are so old, their spines so cracked, leather covers flaking, that you can hardly make out their titles. Hanging in the empty space between two bookshelves, you find a worn scrap of parchment framed in wood and glass.
It's a map of a tiny village, marked with the name "Marien flus" in the center of which is a building recognisable as the church hiding this underground workshop. Pipes of all diameters line the ceiling, dropping down over a table into an impressive-looking set of beakers and tubes, each ones filled with a black liquid in various stages of
blackness, for lack of a better word. "Don't touch those," you say to Rin, her hand stopping as she reaches out. "That's-"
"Pure, distilled corruption, right?" Rin asks, to your nodding head. "I figured as much."
Something else sits on the table beside the distillation equipment; a set of iron tongs, and a long wooden box. The box is open, and upon further investigation you find "It's a mould..." the box is lined with clay, six moulds in a very familiar, melted-cookie shape. "This is where she makes her fake Grief Seeds," you say.
On the opposite end of the room from the distillation equipment is another long table, upon which is seated a series of glowing magic circles in the shape of a cube. Their red glow bathes the entire room in its hues, casting long shadows in the outline of you and Rin on the far wall. You approach with caution, Rin's emerald familiar floating in front of you serving as your only indication that approach is safe. As you near the table, you see something sitting inside the cube of circles; a metal shard, jagged, black and bathed in the same red glow as the rest of the room. You can just make out the faint outline of a rune or two among the crimson glow. "What the..."
"Archer, over here!" Rin calls out to you, drawing your attention to another set of double-wide doors at the other end of the room. By the time you've made it across the workshop, Rin has already disabled the array and forced the door open. "...
I think we've just seen something we weren't supposed to," she says, her voice trembling in a way you haven't heard in years.
The room which those doors open into is tall, with a thick convex ceiling made of smooth black obsidian inscribed with silver filigree, attached to which are a great many metal pipes.
No. That's not obsidian. On the floor is a massive, eight-pointed array whose purpose you can only guess. At each point on the array sits a cylindrical glass tank, each one filled to the brim with the thick black liquid being piped into them directly from the gargantuan Grief Seed forming the room's ceiling. The pipes littering the ceiling of the previous room all lead back to this one, dropping down to pick up Grief straight from the source. "Is that...?"
"Yes," you say to Rin, your voice strained as your eyes take in the sight. "That is
Walpurgisnacht's Grief Seed."
"It's gigantic... I think I understand why our witch had to build her basement so far down now."
"Well, Homura did say it was too big to move. We're probably only seeing a small fraction of the whole thing."
What do you do now? Do you destroy the pipes and all the equipment and try to get the Grief Seed out of here? How would you even do that? Just this small ceiling's worth is bigger than you are. What would even happen if you destroyed all the equipment? Would the Grief sink even further into the ground? What if it reaches Mitakihara's water table? What if it reaches Mitakihara's leylines?
What if it already has?
You hear the echoing sounds of footsteps against the stone stairs before you see her, and you see her before you hear her voice asking "Phillipes Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, is that you?" She stresses each part of the name as though it were its own sentence, before quickly adding "Oh, I'm sorry, you prefer to be called 'Paracelsus', don't you? I'd recognise that sword anywhere."
Do you
[ ] Play along; she apparently knew Paracelsus, so maybe if you play along you can get some information
[ ] Don't play along; once you and Rin take her out, you can finish your investigation without interruption
[ ] Other (write-in)
