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Fate/Descending Flames [Fate/Grand Order AU]

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[X]Plan Let's Split Up Gang
[X]You'll split up to cover more ground (Write in who goes where)
-[X]In the palace's satellite buildings.
--[X]Cal and Avenger.
-[X]In the upper floors and bedrooms of the palace.
--[X]Noa and Sengo.
 
[X]Plan Let's Split Up Gang
[X]You'll split up to cover more ground (Write in who goes where)
-[X]In the palace's satellite buildings.
--[X]Cal and Avenger.
-[X]In the upper floors and bedrooms of the palace.
--[X]Noa and Sengo.
 
Unless I'm miscounting, I'm pretty sure that leaves the vote tied. So I'm going to want a tiebreaker here, some time in the next... let's say hour? If I don't get one, I'll probably go with splitting up by dint of it being a write-in rather than a default option.
 
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Adhoc vote count started by ChildishChimera on May 30, 2018 at 9:49 PM, finished with 353 posts and 10 votes.
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F1: Bloody Trail
  • Threadmarks
    • [X]You'll split up to cover more ground (Write in who goes where)
    -[X]In the palace's satellite buildings.
    --[X]Cal and Avenger.
    -[X]In the upper floors and bedrooms of the palace.
    --[X]Noa and Sengo.


    You and Avenger get on your bike and set off, leaping out the windows near your hideout to head toward the outbuildings. You can see Sagittarius in the distance, the narrow alleys and massive cathedral looming as you draw closer. There are a number of buildings near the wall that divides the two districts... a thought occurs to you, and you call up Da Vinci again.

    "Can you tell me exactly where the Caster crossed over?" you ask, the bounded field on your bike cutting out the noise that would normally prevent your voice from reaching the communicator.. "Just distance in meters from the corner near Capricorn's entrance would work."

    Da Vinci grumbles a bit at being bothered, but she provides the information you asked for. You adjust your course, aiming for the building closest to the point along the wall Da Vinci indicated. It's still a few minutes out though; the districts here are on the big side, especially when you don't have a straight shot.

    You're nearly there when the sky changes.

    You pull over immediately, but everything's back to normal by the time you stop. You glance at Avenger. "Did you see that too?"

    "The sky turning blue?" Avenger asks. "Yeah, I saw it."

    "Da Vinci said something was messing with the sky over Aquarius earlier," you muse. "She said it was making it darker, though..."

    "Probably the same thing," Avenger grumbles. "Aquarius is pretty close to here."

    You look over your shoulder, where the water-filled towers of the Aquarius district occupy part of the horizon. "Yeah. We should probably get indoors. Better safe than sorry." And with that, you drive off toward your destination as quickly as possible."

    *****

    "Well I think it's safe to say someone came through here," you say. "Someone with a lot of blood on their shoes."

    The signs had been pretty obvious once you'd found the door closest to the point Caster had entered. The bloody footprints were kind of a tip-off.

    "A lot of blood?" Avenger asks. "What makes you say that? ."

    "It wasn't fresh blood at the time, I can tell from the way it's smeared," you explain. "With the way it spread out from her foot before sticking, and the amount, it had to have been a really thick layer of it to look like this."

    "I see. And that tells us what exactly?"

    "Well either she's a really good healer, or it wasn't hers," you say. You shake your head. "But that's not important at the moment though," you admit. "The important thing is that we can try to track her."

    The trail starts to thin out a couple hundred feet through the building, but there are still enough traces to work with. Unfortunately, it seems like this Caster had no idea where she was going.

    "Uh, doesn't the trail go this way?"

    "That goes back to the room with the incinerator again," you reply. "She went in there three times... we must have picked the wrong trail to follow when we left last time. The third one goes through the hallway on the north end."

    "Great."

    Eventually she found her way to the tunnels though, and started heading for the central building. Your search picks up speed after that, since you just need to drive down the tunnel and stop at every branch to check for traces. The visible signs of her passage disappear entirely after a while, but magic helps with that. Blood is a very magically active substance, so even the tiniest amounts of it are child's play to find with a simple spell. Combined with her much more straightforward path through the tunnels, it barely takes you five minutes to follow the trail to its conclusion.

    Unfortunately, it's not quite the conclusion you'd been hoping for.

    "Seems like she stepped in the canal, went for a few steps, then realized she had blood on her shoes and cleaned it with magic," you say with a sigh. "At least we know she's in the palace, now."

    You're on the ground floor of the palace currently, in a relatively small parlor. Her stepping in water had dissolved enough of the dried blood for her to start leaving bloody footprints again. But it seems that also let her finally notice the blood on her shoes; she sat down in one of the chairs, and after that... nothing. Even your little 'luminol' spell isn't turning up any traces from this point on.

    "Ugh, what a waste of time..."

    "It rules out a lot of places here though," you point out. "Also, if she did use magic here, I might be able to get something from that."

    You adjust your detection spell a bit, broadening it to highlight more than just blood. You're immediately hit with a lot of noise due to your mana-rich environment, but you manage to shut it out after a little while.

    After that, it takes you a minute to realize what you're seeing. "She didn't burn the blood away or clean it off..." you muse. "It looks more like she used some sort of mana intake ritual here. Did she convert the blood into prana and absorb it somehow?"

    "Please don't tell me she's a vampire," Avenger grumbles.

    "She wouldn't need a ritual like this one in that case," you say. "She'd just use a spell to pull it off herself, then absorb it through some other means in that case."

    Avenger grunts in response. For your part, you sigh.

    "Seems like this is a dead end," you say. "Now what?"

    "Hey, you're the boss, not me."

    "Hm... She probably wouldn't have wandered for too long after this," you realize. "With the trail we've been following and the distance between her steps, it would have taken her hours to get to this room. Even if she's not there now, she would have gone to sleep somewhere close by."

    [ ]Keep searching this area with Avenger until you find something.
    [ ]She probably moved on after taking her nap. Search elsewhere on the lower levels.
    [ ]Meet back up with Noa and Sengo, and
    --[ ]search the area near where the trail went cold.
    --[ ]search the other parts of the lower floors.
    --[ ]Split up to search both.
    [ ]Write-in
     
  • Threadmarks
    • [X]She probably moved on after taking her nap. Search elsewhere on the lower levels.

    If she doesn't appear to be in too much of a hurry do we want to Noa and Sengo to change their search to the lower areas of the Central Building just in case?

    But she can fly so if she does somehow slip past us she might not necessarily hit the Central Building in order.    ​
     
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    F1: Champagne
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    • [X]She probably moved on after taking her nap. Search elsewhere on the lower levels.


    "So we find where she slept and pick up the trail then," Avenger grumbles. "This is going to take forever."

    You consider that. "You have a point," you say, to Avenger's mild surprise. "She probably suspected the blood could be used to track her, hence removing it so thoroughly... In that case she would have put some distance between herself and where she cleaned it off. She's probably not near here any more."

    "So she could be anywhere, then."

    "No, she's almost certainly still in the palace," you reply. "I'm starting to think that Sengo was right about this: she wants to stay somewhere opulent. And even if that isn't the case, it's easier to hide in the palace than the outbuildings. And if she went upstairs, then Noa and Sengo will find her."

    "So we just start wandering around on the other side of the palace?"

    You hold back a sigh. "Looks that way."

    "Great."

    *****

    It takes you a few hours, but you actually do manage to find Caster. It was pure luck, ultimately; you were trying random doors, and one wouldn't open.

    "It's locked as part of a Bounded Field," you say after a few analytical spells. "One designed to shut out any outside interference, and rather thoroughly as well. I think being unable to open the door might just be a side effect of that rather than anything intentional." You try the door again. "It prevents sound, mana, force, and even air from leaving or entering the room, while cycling mana through an outer layer to conceal that fact. I can't open the door because the force of me pulling on the handle vanishes once it reaches the edge of the field."

    "So we can't get in, and she can't hear us if we knock," Avenger says. "She's some sort of ultra shut-in then? Should we be worried about barging in and finding her eating chips in her underwear?"

    "I kind of doubt it," you say. "It sent some sort of signal inside when I pulled on the handle... though that doesn't necessarily mean she knows we're here. She could just assume that whoever was trying to get in thought it was locked and moved on, or maybe the signal just left a message she could look at later." You shake your head. "Well, sad to say it, but we aren't going to accomplish anything by giving her privacy. Toqué, toqué."

    It's a spell your Uncle taught you for etiquette reasons, designed to announce your presence to a Magus' workshop by 'poking' their bounded field. It's actually more complicated than it sounds, since it needs to be 'loud' on a metaphysical level, but also needs to not disturb anything inside the workshop and to be obviously non-hostile. For all that it's complicated though, it doesn't take much prana.

    You wait a few moments. After a little while, the door cracks open. And when it does, your eyes widen in surprise. "Noa?"

    "Excuse me?" the woman says in a voice that's obviously not Noa's. She has a French accent for starters... and now that you're looking, she's wearing glasses and styles her hair with braids on either side instead of tied up haphazardly in the back. The face you're seeing through the crack in the door does bear an incredibly strong resemblance to Noa's, however... and is definitely a Servant, as well.

    True Name: Unknown
    Class: Caster
    Key Words: Marie de Champagne, could have been a Lancer

    Strength: D
    Agility: C
    Endurance: E
    Mana: A
    Luck: B
    NP: ???

    Class Skills:

    Territory Creation: B
    Rather than a 'Workshop,' Caster creates a 'Library,' which excels at maintaining an orderly environment for one's work. However, it is completely unable to assist Caster or her allies in dealing with hostile parties that have already entered.

    "Ah, apologies," you say quickly, reverting to a more formal attitude. "I mistook you for a friend of mine." You give her a respectful bow. "My name is Cal se Maha-Indra, and this is Avenger. I apologize for interrupting your work, but there are things we wish to discuss."

    'se Maha-Indra' isn't your actual surname, of course -- you don't actually have one of those. It just means someone from your village, much like how 'Da Vinci' just means 'from the town of Vinci.' But Western Magi place a great deal of importance on family names. You didn't use it with Marisbury, but he'd been coming to you, in your own house. A rather different situation from showing up at someone else's workshop unannounced.

    "...I am Marie de Champagne, former Countess and Regent of that province," she replies after a moment. Her voice has shifted to something regal-sounding; you get the impression it's a facade she's used to putting on, presumably in a noble court. "What are these 'things' you wish to speak of?"

    You check the grail database again, only to find no change. She's told you her name, and you do recognize it from a brief mention in your studies, but the sheet hasn't been filled in. Is she lying about her identity? Or is it something else?

    "An alliance," you say. "Surely you've encountered those white-clad soldiers?"

    "The ones who tried to kill us, yes," Caster says before you can continue. "I do not recall seeing either of you there..." You hear something that sounds an awful lot like someone writing something down with a pen. As well as her muttering the names you introduced yourself and Avenger with under her breath. "Pardon me if I don't take you at your word. How do I know this is not some trick? You don't seem like the most trustworthy of people."

    "Oh come on, would this face lie to you?" Avenger says sarcastically. "Don't these tattoos just scream 'trustworthy person?'"

    "We fought the White Faction just yesterday," you say. "Right in front of the palace here." A thought occurs to you. "Surely you must have seen some of it, or at least the aftermath? You would have crossed over into Capricorn around that time."

    Her eyes widen. "How did you know that?"

    "We have an ally with cameras pointed at most of the districts," you say. "They spotted you flying over and told us about it."

    "And so you came to find me," Marie concludes. "I did catch a glimpse of some people fleeing Ruler's lion on some sort of vehicle, but I couldn't see them very--" She cuts herself off as you move your bike over to where she can see it through the crack in the door. "Ah. So it was you then."

    "We killed Ruler, but the lion was too much for us so we ran," you admit.

    "He's dead?" Marie says in shock. "Well that is good news at least. That vile man..." She trails off, face dark.

    "We still share a common enemy," you point out.

    "Indeed," she says, the scribbling of her pen resuming somewhere behind the door. She starts mumbling things to herself under her breath, the scribbling picking up to a feverish pace.

    "So..." you start to say. "Would you be willing to work with us?"

    "Hm?" Marie looks up from whatever she's writing on. The scribbling comes to a halt. "Ah, sorry. Still don't trust you. A strange man, knocking on a young maiden's door in the middle of the night? There are all sorts of dreadful things you might really want with me."

    "It's not night," Avenger says.

    "It kind of is though," you point out. "She'd have to go to sleep to end up here."

    "The sky isn't dark though, is it?"

    "Nay, I would say it is night," Marie says. You can hear the sound of a book snapping shut. "Just as I would say that you have given me no reason to trust you. If you truly are as virtuous as you claim, then surely there is something, some token, that could prove such to a fair damsel such as myself?"

    "Damsel?" Avenger asks. "You're a Heroic Spirit!"

    "With Ruler dead, they're going to bring the hammer down on this place sooner or later," you point out. "We have a common cause, and we'll need each other's help to get through this. Shouldn't that be enough to allow some kind of trust, at least until this crisis is over? Only a madman would start backstabbing people right now."

    Marie sighs. "...You're very unromantic, you know that?"

    "Romantic?" Avenger gives Marie a disbelieving look. "Lady, if this your idea of flirting--"

    "I mean in more general terms!" Marie snaps. "There's no drama, no build-up! Every story needs a beginning, a middle, and an end! You can't just show up out of nowhere, propose an alliance, and have it go swimmingly! You'll either need to do something dramatic to prove yourself, or be secretly preparing a trap or a test. There isn't a decent story here otherwise!"

    "Are you fucking serious!?" Avenger laughs. He seems more entertained than annoyed, at least.

    You think you're starting to understand her angle here, though. "Isn't a strange wizard showing up to recruit someone for a quest rather traditional, though?" you ask.

    "Young boys with aspirations of knighthood, not noblewomen who don't have weapons for some fucking reason," she says. "I'm a Countess, not a fighter."

    So in other words, that' wouldn't be the 'correct' approach. This is starting to look like it'll be a real pain.

    [ ]"So what, we need to slay a Monster for you?" (Play her game, do something impressive and bring back a trophy)
    [ ]Leave for now, and come back with Mordred and Sengo.
    [ ]You think you know what the deal is with her identity... (Write-in)
    [ ]This is utterly ridiculous, and she should know it.
    [ ]Her opinions on narrative conventions are outdated, and you're going to make sure she knows it.
    [ ]You're beginning to rethink whether this person is worth the trouble.
    [ ]Write-in



    A/N: Bleh, still not happy with how narrow the vote options are here... Well anyway, meet Marie! Like most of the early arc Servants, her identity (Such as it is) is kind of a gimme.

    Marie was in the original Descending Flames RP as well, and worked alongside Sengo and Laozi in what I called "Team Zero Synergy" (Since all of their NPs were either mutually exclusive in their effects or actively working against each other). She's been re-tooled a bit since then though, and has also returned to her roots as a Saberface-- while she was in the original RP, her original debut was an RP for an all-Saberface Holy Grail War. In fact, Marie was originally supposed to be the quest's obligatory Saberface character before I decided to drop Mordred in there late in the planning process.

    Of course, as a character I've written in two works before this one, it's only natural that ninety percent of her first appearance here was me flailing around trying to get her voice right.

    And speaking of Mordred, I am going back to retcon correct her Charisma skill and no one can stop me. It fits better with her personality, and having the wrong one listed is never going to stop bugging me if I don't.
     
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    • There are only two valid options here, if something else wins, I quit.
     
    Xalgeon said:
    There are only two valid options here, if something else wins, I quit.
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    Hey, write-ins are a thing too, you know!:p
    Lykantos said:
    Wait, so this isn't the Marie from FGO?
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    Marie Antoinnette was Queen of France in the 1700s, Marie de Champagne was Countess of a French Province in the 1100s. So yes, different people. Sadly, if Marie de Champagne had a proper surname (rather than just the French for "of/from Champagne") I wasn't able to find it.

    Edit: I've gone and edited her introduction to be a bit more clear on that count, though. While "Marie of France" followed by her specific titles is technically the proper way for her to name herself here, I can see how it would be a bit confusing.
     
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    [X]Her opinions on narrative conventions are outdated, and you're going to make sure she knows it.
    Xalgeon said:
    Shatter her narrative or leave.
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    She reminds me of Raksha, from Exalted. There are two main ways to deal with them, break their narrative, or play it better than they can. The first is satisfying, but the second is more fun. Besides, repeating stories it's a huge part of fate
     
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