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And now that the shameless plugging is out of the way... Chapter CXXX: Artificial Human
"There wasn't any other choice," Marie said. "It had to be this way."
"It's fine, Director," I said evenly.
"After all, there isn't a method currently available to us to let you safely traverse that fog," she went on. She sounded like she was trying to convince herself as much as she was me. "It was too dangerous. The only thing it would have accomplished was to put your life at risk."
Right then, it was just pissing me off. "It's fine, Director."
"Sometimes, calculated risks are necessary for the success of the Grand Order," she continued heedlessly. "But this would have just been needless. There was no tangible gain to be achieved, so this was only the natural decision."
I felt her eyes on my head.
"You understand, don't you?"
I did — and I absolutely hated it. It wasn't that any of it was wrong. The only known threat out in the fog — aside from the homunculi, automata, and Helter Skelter (that really was a terrible name) — was a singular Assassin who preferred ambush tactics and didn't stick around after they failed. The twins had three Servants with them, one of whom was a Knight of the Round Table, and even if she was only half the Servant Lancelot and King Arthur had been, she would still be incredibly powerful. The other two were another Knight of the Round Table (even if Mash didn't know it yet) and a guy who could replicate Noble Phantasms, which he had used last Singularity to kill Herakles thrice over.
And if things got dicey, they could summon aid from any of the several other Servants who had stayed behind at Chaldea.
They were in good hands. The best I could feasibly have given them, if I had to stay behind no matter what.
Meanwhile, I couldn't step foot outside in the fog without exposing myself to a poison that could and would kill me in under an hour, unlike the twins, who seemed completely immune to it. If I went, I would be a liability. If I lasted long enough to make it all the way to Frankenstein's apartment, it was a decent bet I wouldn't last long enough to make it all the way back here, where Caster could heal me.
I'd escaped permanent damage the first time, but the second time, I might not be so fortunate. Even if the team didn't get lost on the way back while they were lugging around my unconscious body, there was a very real possibility that I'd die before Caster could heal me — choking on my own blood as the fog ate away at my lungs. Not just Marie, that would devastate the twins, too, having to carry that burden going forward.
Just so that I could be there when they did a wellness check on a guy who might have overslept or something? I'd danced on some tightropes in the past, but there was taking a risk like that because you didn't have any other choice, and then there was stubbornly charging into something you knew had a decent chance of killing you just so that you could feel useful.
And yet…
"I do."
…I hated the fact that I couldn't do anything except sit here and wait for them to come back. I couldn't even send one of my ravens with them — I'd felt Huginn and Muninn's interiors start to disintegrate the instant I let them out into the fog — and it burned in my gut that I was so completely useless and impotent.
Once again, I was helpless to do anything meaningful at all. This time, at least, there was a better support apparatus to help Ritsuka, and he wasn't on his own by any stretch of the imagination. Truthfully, the only thing at all comparable about the Prison Tower fiasco and the situation now was my own inability to contribute, but that didn't help my stomach twisting itself into frustrated knots or the nervous energy that was sending my swarm into a frenzy of activity — all safely out of sight, of course, so the only one who had any inkling about what was going through my head was the one who knew me best.
I looked up at Marie. Nervous fear was written into every line of her face.
Please don't hate me, that expression begged.
And I couldn't. I didn't like all of her decisions. Some of them even pressed buttons that I'd been trying to even out over the last few years, to apparently little success. But I knew her better than I ever had most of the superiors I'd had to work under as a Ward, and that made it all the easier to understand where those decisions came from — and harder to blame her for them.
Some of the fight drained out of me. It left behind a sour weariness, hollow and empty in my gut, and that was only made worse by the knowledge that even if I'd thrown all of those concerns out the window and gone anyway, I would have been too busy trying to stay upright and breathing to actually contribute.
"I wouldn't worry about your friends," said Caster. "Sir Mordred may be somewhat…rough around the edges, but she is a formidable warrior and surprisingly reliable, given her reputation. She will see them to Frankenstein's mansion safely."
I cast a glance his way. And then there was him. Abraham, huh. I wondered if the twins actually bought that or were just going along with it for the sake of being polite.
"The twins are competent in their own right," I said, and the bitter taste they left behind had less to do with the words themselves and more to do with what they were: surrender. An admission of defeat. "They can handle themselves."
"They're Masters of Chaldea, after all," Marie added half-heartedly.
So why did it feel so much like I was abandoning them? Or maybe like I was being left behind?
Because it wasn't in me to sit around and let others do the fighting for me.
Fortunately, there was a very convenient distraction sitting on the table in the study, just off to the side of the parlor I'd woken up in, and it had a big, red dot slowly moving along it. I gestured down at the diorama of London, so realistic that I half-expected there to be little people moving about inside the buildings.
"Explain this to me again."
It was probably painfully transparent, but Caster did me the favor of indulging me.
"A clever little bit of ingenuity, if I'm allowed to toot my own horn," he said. "Regretfully, without more complete access to the city's ley lines, I'm somewhat limited in the degree of detail I can accomplish — the buildings and general infrastructure are complete, but life signs are a bit harder to detect, and therefore it wasn't so easy to use this map to pinpoint the perpetrators' location."
If only things could have been so convenient. All we would have had to do was look for where the Servants were sitting and go there, and we could have been done with this whole Singularity in a day or less.
But if it had been that easy, Caster would probably have done it himself already. At the very least, I imagine he would have pinned down the Assassin and taken care of that problem, if only he could have.
"And the red dot is Mordred and the others," I said the obvious.
"A specially designed beacon, meant for the purposes of working with this map," Caster confirmed with a nod. "It is not impossible for it to have been stolen or lost, I'll grant you, but Sir Mordred is not so careless to have discarded it. If she loses it in the course of battle, well, that would be a different conversation altogether, so perhaps it would have been better to give it to one of your compatriots."
"An oversight I'm sure you will rectify upon their return," said Jekyll. "It would be more effective to simply fashion such a beacon for every one of them, would it not? In the case that the worst comes to pass and they were all separated, I mean to say."
Caster stroked thoughtfully at his beard. "As you say, Doctor. I confess, when I created the thing in the first place, I didn't anticipate needing more than the one. You Chaldeans arriving when you did was quite unexpected."
"You didn't think to have redundancies?" Marie asked sharply.
Caster sighed deeply. "Alas, I'm but a humble alchemist, Madam Director. Matters of strategy are for those better suited for battle than the bookshelf. Were you to ask a question regarding the intricacies of the material transmutation of one substance into another — say, the ever popular lead into gold — then I could lecture intelligently upon the subject for days. Ask me about the proper formations for a battle against an entrenched enemy in their stronghold…"
He shrugged helplessly.
"…You have a point," Marie admitted grudgingly.
Fortunately, while it would have been useful if he were also an accomplished strategist and tactician, we already had enough of those on our team that it wasn't crippling that he was so clueless.
"We can fix that later," I said, because it really was something we should probably address as soon as the others got back. "For now, tell me more about this Frankenstein you're sending them to check up on."
Caster turned to Jekyll. "Doctor?"
"Yes, well…" Jekyll cleared his throat. "Victor is a collaborator of mine, a valued member of the information network we established in the wake of this damnable fog. He is a Swiss scholar who emigrated here some time ago, a true magus, in every sense of the word. Whether he meant to join the Mage's Association, I fear I could not possibly speak to, although I've no doubt he had the talent necessary. I'm given to understand that his grandfather served as the model for some novel or another, although the facts of the matter are somewhat…muddied, shall we say."
"Tch," Marie scoffed, muttering under her breath. "Another fictional character who turns out to have been real, huh… Is that a distortion of this Singularity or a matter of proper history?"
Frankly, I was wondering the same thing. I didn't know what I was going to do if one of Jekyll's other collaborators turned out to be a couple from the countryside named Mister Darcy and Elizabeth Bennett, or worse, their great grandson. At this point, the smart bet might actually be to put money on D'Artagnan showing up in one of these Singularities.
"On matters more personal, I'm afraid I can tell you little and nothing," Jekyll said. "Not merely as a matter of respect for his privacy, but also from the fact that I myself cannot lay much claim on it. Victor and I…our relationship is quite cordial. Before this crisis, we had little reason to interact beyond the niceties."
"Wait," Marie interjected, "you said this Victor Frankenstein is a proper magus, right? Even good enough to have earned a spot in the Association?"
"From my understanding, yes," answered Jekyll. "Although I confess that I myself am a poor judge of a mage's talent — or, indeed, the lack thereof."
Marie chewed on her bottom lip, brow furrowing. "Which means his workshop will be properly defended, as any true magus would."
I straightened, even as Caster's eyebrows rose towards his hairline. "Oh," he muttered, "yes, that is something of a concern, isn't it?"
My lips drew tight. "And we have no way of contacting the others to let them know."
Marie grimaced, pained. "No. Not as long as the fog is interfering with our communications."
If they had taken Jeanne Alter with them… But the decision had been to split the teams up the way we did for balance more than anything else. With Mordred on their team, they had strong close range offense, good ranged offense in Emiya, and strong defense in Mash, which balanced well with leaving Jeanne Alter and Arash here with me and Caster. It wasn't a perfectly even split, but it didn't leave either side with a glaring weakness.
Except for our inability to communicate between the teams. The better option next time — and god, I hated that I knew there was going to be a next time — would be to send Arash instead of Emiya. Not only for the communications, but also to give me eyes and ears on the situation, even if I couldn't be there to help directly.
"What's done is done."
I thought about sending Arash out anyway…but no, there wouldn't be much sense in that. I wasn't worried so much about weakening our position here, because frankly, with the sorts of firepower I could bring to bear in an emergency, it wasn't much of a concern, but rather that I'd be sending him out blind without anything more than a vague direction to head in. With all of my swarm relegated to their sequestered indoor corners, I couldn't even tell if the other group had left my range yet, let alone how far along they were.
We'd been here less than a day, and I already fucking hated this Singularity.
"I wouldn't worry overmuch in any case," said Caster. "While I've no doubt that Victor is a talented magus, it is a rare breed indeed that can do grievous harm to two Knight class Servants — and that peculiar girl, that Shielder, I'm certain she's the type to never let any harm befall her Masters, isn't she?"
Sometimes to her own detriment. "She is."
Caster nodded. "Then I believe the worst they will have to deal with is a little scare and nothing more. I'm sure it'll make an entertaining story when they return."
He was probably right. Hell, Mordred being the type of person she seemed to be, she would probably just bust down the front door if she had to and completely ignore whatever tricks and traps Frankenstein had laid out. I could remember Alexandria doing something like that as well, only she'd done it as a show of power and dominance and not because she was invulnerable and just didn't care.
In some ways, that would make Mordred easier to deal with. More straightforward. For all that the legends tended to paint her as something of a schemer, she actually seemed a lot more blunt than I might have expected.
"Are we expecting them to run into anything else?"
Both men frowned. "Aside from the Helter Skelter and the automata…"
"The only other threat whose identity we can speak of intelligently is Assassin," said Jekyll. "That is to say, the one we suspect is this Jack the Ripper character from the newspapers. It is, I confess, not impossible — indeed, not even improbable — that the culprit behind this fog has further allies complicit in his atrocities, but as we have yet to encounter them in any capacity, we could not say with any degree of certainty who they are or whether they might be likely to attack Mordred and your comrades directly."
A long-winded way of saying he didn't know. I guess the people of the Victorian era really had spoken just like they did in the books. Dickens hadn't lied to me.
Either way, the others were all beyond our reach, for now. We could brainstorm ideas for where to go after they got back, but it would be better to wait until they had gotten back before we started making any further plans. Especially if they brought back important information that changed our plans up on us, made them unworkable.
"Then the only thing we can do for now is wait." I turned to the hologram of Marie. "Director —"
"We'll keep an eye on their vitals from here," she said, anticipating me. "If anything changes or they get into a major fight, I'll contact you and let you know what's happening."
Even if I wouldn't be able to do anything about it from here.
"Thank you."
A moment later, the image flickered out and vanished. Caster regarded the space where her image had just been with naked interest, stroking thoughtfully at his beard.
"Mankind has come quite a ways, indeed," he remarked. "To think, not only a method and means of inserting compatible candidates into aberrant space-times like this one, but also of communicating with them from across eras. Even the greatest minds of my era would never have dreamed such a thing would be possible a scant few hundred years into the future. To have the capacity to summon Heroic Spirits to act as familiars in the resolution of these Singularities, as you call them, frankly, you're stacking miracles on top of miracles."
"I'm sure the Director would be quite happy to receive a compliment like that from an esteemed mage like yourself," I said slyly.
Caster laughed, self-deprecating. "Oh, I don't know about that," he demurred. "Truthfully, I don't think I'm all that remarkable. Had history forgotten me as completely as I expected it to, why, I don't believe I would have become a Heroic Spirit at all."
So he was still going to play at that game, was he? It looked like he was going to hold that secret as tightly as he could for a while longer yet. Subtlety probably wouldn't pry it out of his fingers.
"Nonsense, Abraham!" Jekyll exclaimed. "Why, the sorts of things I've seen you accomplish just in the few short days we've been working together seem all the more remarkable to me, to think that they were feats you accomplished centuries ago! Why, I am humbled, truly, to say I ever met you!"
"I think you're giving me too much credit," Caster said with an awkward smile. "But thank you for having said so, Doctor Jekyll, even if none of it is anything special."
"Master," a new voice said, and in from the kitchen walked a pale-haired woman in a maid outfit. She carried a metal tray in dainty, alabaster fingers. "I've finished preparing your tea."
"Ah," said Caster. He accepted a cup of fine china from the tray, and next to those cups, her skin looked all the more like delicate porcelain. "Thank you, Renée, that was excellently timed."
"Of course," the maid, Renée, said.
She made a circuit through the room, and Jekyll and I each took our own cup of tea from the tray in turn, offering our thanks (and receiving a completely blank look in return). Her expression was flat and lifeless all throughout, not a hint of a smile or any kind of expression at all. I couldn't even tell whether she hated being a glorified maid or not, because even her tone of voice was level, even, and completely without emotion.
It was my first time seeing an honest-to-god homunculus. I still wasn't quite sure what to make of her.
When she was done, she asked, still in that completely flat voice, "Should I set about preparing dinner next?"
"That would be lovely, thank you," said Caster.
Renée the homunculus gave him a short, respectful bow, mechanically precise, then turned and left the room. I watched her go until she left my field of view and disguised it by taking a long sip of the tea she'd brought us. Earl Grey with bergamot and orange peels, lightly sweetened, and the flavors exploded on my tongue like a warm caress. The familiar scent of it wafted into my nostrils, echoing what I'd smelled when I woke up earlier.
It reminded me of Mom.
Jekyll smiled around his own cup. "Nothing of note, he says, as a perfectly sculpted homunculus arrives with tea brewed to absolute perfection. There is a difference, my friend, between humility and willful blindness to one's own accomplishments."
Caster coughed awkwardly into his hand. "And I suppose it would do me no favors to admit that she was my first such creation, would it?"
Jekyll shook his head disbelievingly.
Caster sighed, looking down into his cup as he swirled his tea about. "I confess, I never had much use for homunculi when I was alive. The nature of my studies was solitary," he admitted. "I never even took an apprentice. My wife was always more than capable a hand, if I ever needed any assistance, and creating a life for the sole purpose of serving as an aid seemed…excessive."
He glanced over at the threshold, through which Renée had disappeared. Vague sounds of kitchen work echoed softly over it, of pots and pans being arranged on the stove.
"Of course, I seem to have become a bit of a hypocrite," he lamented. "Perhaps I'm simply making up for a missed opportunity, seeing as I never had any children myself." As an aside, he said, "The realities of marrying a woman nearly a decade your senior. My wife was nearing fifty by the time we pledged ourselves to one another."
For a man who had already gone to such efforts to obscure his true identity, he was doing a poor job of hiding the finer details. I felt like Marie would have had him pinned down just with the few bits and pieces he'd already given me, or at least would have had enough to go on to figure out who he was with just a little bit of research.
If he was going to dangle it in front of me like that, then he really had no reason to complain if I took his bait.
"Abraham," I began calmly, "your true name isn't Abraham at all, is it?"
His hand froze, cup of tea halfway to his mouth, and he blinked at me incredulously. "Oh my."
"Is it not?" asked Jekyll, bewildered. "Abraham, is this true?"
"You're a sharp one, indeed," said Caster. He set his cup down on its saucer with a gentle clink. "If you would do me the favor of indulging me, what makes you so sure of that?"
My lips pursed. "Call it a hunch."
And he had just validated it.
"A hunch, you say." He sighed. "I suppose that's good. If it was something more substantial than that, I'm afraid I may have had to resort to silencing you."
A beat passed in tense silence. My fingers curled tighter around the porcelain cup, and I reached down along the thread to Arash, preparing for the worst.
"I'm joking, of course," he said. "Goodness me, but you are wound quite tightly, aren't you? No, no, my dear, I've never killed a man before in my life, let alone in cold blood, and I have no intention of starting now simply because I'm technically dead. I'm quite the philanthropist, you see, as gauche as it may be to say it so frankly, and you might be able to go so far as to call me a pacifist."
Jekyll laughed an awkward, fake laugh. "A poor jest, Abraham — ah, I suppose that isn't truly your name, is it?"
"You may as well continue using it," said Caster. "The question implicit in your previous statement, dear girl — I have no intention of sharing my true name at this junction. I'll have to ask you to forgive my caution, for I know not enough of the enemy's capabilities and would prefer they were able to confirm as few of mine as feasibly possible. That I am an alchemist is plain, and so there is little reason to hide it, but in the wake of my death, my name and my contribution to the furtherance of the field became a little too famous."
A famous alchemist whose name had spread after the fact, whose name had become so attached to the field, in fact, that he had become all but synonymous with it. There were only a handful of those about, and the clothing…looked about right for that period. I wasn't well-versed in all of the people who fit the bill, but his name had at least come up often enough during the broader spectrum of my magecraft lessons with Marie for me to recognize him in particular.
It was a bit funny, though. I would have expected Paracelsus von Hohenheim to look a little younger.
"Fine," I said. I forced my hands to relax, loosening my grip on my teacup. "I won't push."
Especially since I had already figured it out. Just the confirmation that his name wasn't really Abraham would have been more than enough of a clue.
Caster smiled gratefully. "Thank you."
A knock came from the threshold, and Arash peeked his head in. "Hey. Things are pretty quiet outside, so I figured I'd poke my head in and see how things are going."
He'd probably felt me take our bond in a tight grip a moment ago and come to investigate. It's fine, I told him, projecting my thoughts down the thread connecting us. Just a misunderstanding.
And a joke in very poor taste.
"Ah," said Caster, clicking his tongue, "forgive me. If I had known you would be joining us, I would have asked Renée to pour another cup."
"Oh — no, don't bother her on my account," said Arash. He slipped into the room casually and came to join us at the diorama, subtly placing himself between me and Caster. As though nothing was wrong, he reached out with a finger to trace a path through the streets, but his finger was too big and the streets too small by scale to fit. "It looks like they're making good progress. But…that's dinner I smell, right? They're going to be late for that."
"I'm sure Rika would prefer Emiya's cooking anyway."
Arash laughed, smiling. "I'm sure she would!"
"A shame," said Jekyll. "Renée is quite the excellent chef. If her tea is brewed to your liking, then her cooking will no doubt land quite comfortably on your palate."
I had to wonder if he would be quite so confident in that if he had the chance to taste anything Emiya had made. It bore repeating that I had yet to eat better than when I ate something Emiya cooked, and when literal emperors agreed with you, it was a hard bar to pass.
"At least our friends don't seem to be running into much trouble," said Caster. "Their pace is consistent enough that I don't believe they're encountering anything more bothersome than a few automata here and there. You are right, Arash, that they won't be returning to us in time for this evening's repast, however. Poor Renée will be quite disappointed."
Would she? I wondered about that. Maybe, being her creator, he could see more into her and her personality than I could, but I had yet to see much of one. Although her movements were smooth and perfectly human, not at all janky and stilted, her mannerisms were eerily robotic.
"I imagine so," said Jekyll. "She appeared positively delighted to have company after the dreadfully stifling past few days. I'm sure, however, that there will be plenty of opportunity for her to display her prowess in the coming days. Unfortunate as it is, there does not look to be a speedy resolution to our current situation forthcoming."
Or maybe Jekyll could see it, too. I just had to take their word for it, I guess, since I'd known her myself less than an hour.
I looked back down at the diorama, tracing the path the group had taken from here out to their current location and the mansion near Soho that was their destination.
"Abraham," I said, "is this the most direct path they're taking?"
Caster peered down at the diorama, looking at it from above the tip of his nose. "Why, yes, it is indeed. I suppose I didn't pay it much attention before, considering Sir Mordred was often out on patrols instead of performing a specific errand, but that is quite the direct route to be taking through an impenetrable fog. Her intuition seems quite developed."
As good a way of putting it as any, I guess. That might prove useful later on in navigating this place, especially since it also seemed like I wouldn't be able to use my bugs for the same purpose.
I pushed away the flash of annoyance that curdled in my gut.
Would it prove just as useful in finding the hiding places of the Servants behind this whole mess? Somehow, I thought things would already have been resolved by now if that was the case, so maybe it was a matter of not getting lost when she knew the destination. Not quite as useful, but it would still be something that could come in handy for moving through the mist that was choking the city.
A way around it would be to limit ourselves to investigating during the morning hours, when the mist cleared out, but a different sort of problem might arise from that.
"Do you think whoever is behind all of this would change their pattern if we started going out in the mornings and staying in after the fog rolled in?" I asked Caster.
"Hmm." Caster hummed thoughtfully. "That is not so easy a question to answer. Firstly, we cannot know for certain exactly how much the enemy knows about our own movements. For example, is there some sort of sensory component attached to the fog? Are they using it to gather information? Are they aware, therefore, of where we ourselves are located?"
And if they were, was it enough for them that we — some of us, at least — weren't able to leave when the fog was out without risking our lives, and that was why they hadn't tried a direct attack, or was Assassin their attack dog, meant to distract us while the true masterminds worked?
But if they weren't, if they couldn't use the mist like some kind of sonar or something, then that would mean Assassin was their scout, and the automata, homunculi, and (ugh) 'Helter Skelter' were patrol groups. Not there merely to keep us occupied, but also to give the mastermind a way to keep track of what was going on outside his workshop.
I guess that came down to another question: if Caster could come up with this map of the city using less than ideal access to the ley lines, then were the enemy's Servants as good as he was, or were they far less capable? Could they create something similar with higher fidelity and greater resolution, able to track every living person in the city, or not?
"Secondly," Caster went on, "would there be something stopping them from changing up their pattern, some limitation in whatever method they might be using to generate this fog, or is the fact they let it dissipate in the mornings a sign of something else? Much as I hesitate to ascribe good will to people willing to hold an entire city hostage, regardless of how many victims it creates, we should at least acknowledge the possibility that leaving the mornings free is a means of giving the populace a chance to procure supplies, provisions, or fulfill needs that can't be met indoors."
Yeah, that was a problem, too, wasn't it? I could easily see it being a problem with their fog generator, that they couldn't leave it going indefinitely. Whether it needed time to cool off or recharge, that would still leave us with the same window every day, even if they kept it running for as long as they safely could.
I didn't think it was out of the kindness of their hearts. That one, I discounted immediately.
"So the only answer you can give is 'I don't know,' huh," Arash thought aloud.
Caster shrugged helplessly.
"It would be worth it to try anyway," I said. "Whether they do something in response will tell us just as much as what they do in response. If there's some reason why they can't keep the fog going constantly, then they might try and send their own forces after us — and that means we might not even have to try looking that hard to find them."
And if leaving the mornings free was a deliberate choice…I wasn't quite sure what that would mean, right now. Since Astrology was a legitimate form of magic, it was entirely possible that the time of day was important somehow in their goals, and forcing them to change up their patterns would disrupt them in some way.
"As long as you take care to limit your exposure," Caster said somewhat sternly. "Don't think that just because I'm capable of reversing the damage you don't need to worry about what it's doing to you. That sort of recklessness is just as dangerous as any action from the enemy."
My cheek twitched. So even Caster was going to be like that, was he?
"I'd worry more about Ritsuka and the others," said Arash. "They're the ones who are going to be taking the biggest risks, aren't they? With Assassin out there and everything."
Caster grimaced. "As ridiculous as it sounds, Sir Mordred should help them stay out of trouble."
Jekyll lifted his cup to his mouth to hide his smile and his quiet chuckle.
"Master," Renée's voice called softly. "Dinner is ready."
Caster glanced at the clock, and his eyebrows rose. "Dear me," he said, "six o'clock already? My, but the past few hours have flown by!"
Jekyll looked down at the diorama. "And the others shall reach Victor's mansion anon. Most excellent. Shall we adjourn for dinner, so that we might be prepared to hear from him as soon as they've sorted the whole business out?"
My stomach clenched, gurgling silently. Come to think of it, I hadn't eaten since breakfast, had I?
"A good idea."
Caster clapped his hands together, smiling broadly. "Then no need to tarry any longer, is there? Come, come. I promise you, Renée's cooking won't disappoint!"
As it turned out, he wasn't wrong. Dinner was had in a small dining room on the other side of the parlor, a room I could already tell from the first time I set foot in it would become very crowded with Ritsuka, Rika, Mash, and presumably Mordred joining us, and once we all sat down, Renée served us up a hearty stew.
I wasn't sure I could say it was as good as anything Emiya could make, but for a homunculus who emoted about as much as a rock, it was better than I would have expected. Certainly better than anything I could make, which wasn't that high a bar to clear, I suppose, so I wasn't sure that said much of anything at all.
But I had barely finished and relaxed a little in my chair to let it settle in my belly before my communicator beeped, and knowing there weren't many reasons for Marie to contact me before the twins got back, I answered it immediately.
The instant I did — projecting her solemn face up over the dinner table — she wasted no time in telling me, "There's been an altercation at Frankenstein's."
I straightened in my seat. The food in my belly squirmed uncomfortably. "An altercation?"
Were Frankenstein's defenses really strong enough to give Emiya, Mash, and Mordred trouble? Or was the reason Frankenstein had gone silent because the enemy had gotten to him first?
"What about Victor?" Jekyll asked urgently. "Does he still live?"
Marie grimaced. "Victor Frankenstein was already dead by the time the team arrived at his mansion," she said with great weight. "They engaged and dispatched his killer, a Caster class Servant calling himself Mephistopheles."
Like the demon in Faust? Something like that appeared here in London? Or… No, if they'd faced an actual demon, Marie wouldn't have been anywhere near this calm.
Jekyll let out a sound akin to a deflating balloon. "So he's dead, then."
"I'm sorry," Marie said, perfunctory. If he heard her at all, Jekyll gave no sign.
"And Sir Mordred and the others?" asked Caster.
"All uninjured. Mephistopheles was vanquished without issue." Marie turned her attention back to me. "There's more. After defeating Mephistopheles, the team decided to investigate Frankenstein's mansion for clues about why he was targeted and any information he might have gathered, and they found a note, listing the conspirators behind the fog as P, B, and M. Frankenstein believed these people to all be Servants."
P, B, and M? That was it? He couldn't have given us more to work with than that, like actual names?
"Only the initials?" murmured Caster, stroking his beard as his brow furrowed in thought. "I suppose it's more to go off of than we had before, but… Perhaps the 'M' referred to this Mephistopheles character?"
Maybe. We still didn't know enough to be absolutely sure, but I wasn't ready to assume that one of the perpetrators would throw himself in the line of fire and get killed less than a day after we arrived. Villains with plots grander than getting high tended to be more careful than that, unless they were confident they'd already won or could take down whoever came to stop them.
"They also found something else," Marie continued. "An inheritance left behind by the original Victor Frankenstein, his grandfather, locked away in a coffin, hidden in a backroom off of the library."
A coffin? As in, an actual, made-for-burial coffin? What, like out of some B-movie from the 1930s?
"You don't mean —"
"Yes," Marie said before I could even finish talking, "just like in the novel, a complete, functioning artificial human."
Frankenstein's monster.
— o.0.O.O.0.o —
I wanted to get a certain length into things and cover a certain something before the end of the chapter, but things went on for long enough that I could only stretch it so far. I at least managed to get more than one reference to the chapter title into the chapter, so even if I didn't get quite as much in as I wanted, I still got enough to justify it.
So this chapter should make it obvious what I meant when I said London would probably wind up fairly short, at least compared to Septem and Okeanos. Not that there won't be ways for us to get a look in on what the twins are doing, but that Taylor can't really go onto the frontlines right now, and that's going to cut down on the length of this part of the story.
This story and this chapter brought to you by my wonderful supporters, whose kindness and generosity have made it possible to devote so much of my time and attention to writing, especially Eric, s22132, AbyssalApsu, and Alias 2v10. You guys are absolute legends. To show my gratitude, they had the chance to read this and upcoming chapters before the public release. You can find out more HERE.
And now that the shameless plugging is out of the way... Chapter CXXXI: The Modern Prometheus
I'd been expecting… Well. Something straight out of the novel. A patchwork man, inhumanly tall and gangly, with mismatched limbs and surgical scars all over his body. Not quite the lumbering, green-skinned, square-headed figure from the older movies and pop culture derivatives, complete with bolts jutting out of his neck and a forehead you could run advertisements on, but something anyone could see and recognize as Frankenstein's monster. Unmistakable.
What arrived in tow with the twins and Mash…
"Remarkable. She's simply remarkable," Jekyll muttered as he circled her. "To think, a creation such as this was possible! To imagine that Victor's grandfather accomplished such a feat itself beggars belief, but that she might be so well preserved that she retains her youth decades later…"
…looked nothing like that. In fact, she was so far in the opposite direction that I really shouldn't have been surprised, because this sort of thing had been happening so frequently that it probably would have been more surprising if she did match the mental image I'd had. If it weren't for the metal horn jutting out of her forehead and the…I think those were electrical transformers protruding from behind her ears, then she would look like an ordinary teenage girl.
The superhuman strength, at least, I could confirm, because those transformers had to be heavy. Not impossibly heavy, but a normal person would eventually have wound up slouching from the strain of holding them up.
"Moreover, she's perfectly proportioned," said Jekyll. "No sign of malformations or incongruency. Indeed, she seems to be a single cohesive unit — with the unaided eye, why, I can't discern so much as a single blemish…"
He reached out, hand moving towards —
My arm shot out before I could think anything of it, like a reflex, and I took a firm hold of his wrist. He blinked and turned his head towards me.
"Doctor," I said with affected calm, "maybe you'd like to take a moment and think about what exactly you were about to touch."
His brow furrowed, and then he looked first to his hand and his outstretched fingers, and then to the embarrassed and uncomfortable young woman whose chest he'd been about to grope. By the chagrin on his face as he pulled his hand back — and I let it go — he realized the mistake he'd been in the middle of making.
"Ah," he said. "Yes. How…uncouth of me. Forgive me, madam, I meant no offense."
She made a grunting sound, something completely without words or syllables.
"She said it's fine," said Mordred. "As long as you understand and don't try again. That's what I got out of that, at least."
"He tries that on me, and I'm flash-frying him," Jeanne Alter promised.
"I think Doctor Jekyll has learned his lesson," said Ritsuka.
Jekyll nodded. "Most certainly!"
"You can understand her?" I asked Mordred.
Mordred made a face. "Kinda. 'S hard to explain. More like I understand her meaning than the actual words, ya know?"
"You can't understand her either, Senpai?" asked Ritsuka.
Was I supposed to?
"It seems the one thing the good Doctor Frankenstein neglected to install when he reconstructed her was a functional voice box," Emiya said. "She can vocalize, but syllables and sentences don't seem like something she can quite manage."
"Uhn," the girl grunted, but nothing more articulate than that.
"Quite the oversight," said Jekyll. "Perhaps the good doctor…was not so fond of the idea of his creation talking back."
Her head dropped, and her bangs flopped down over her eyes as her lips drew into a tight line. Not a happy memory, then. Not one she liked thinking of.
I never would have thought I'd be saying this about Frankenstein's monster, but…I could relate.
"Does our new friend here have a name?" Arash asked, not unkindly.
She looked up at me, met my eyes with something pitiable and fragile on her face, something I couldn't quite describe with words. What passed between us might be called understanding, but I wasn't sure I could rightly go that far. I felt almost like…like I was looking at a reflection, two years out of date, and yet, she didn't look anything like that at all.
She was trapped in her own head. Unable to properly communicate, but able to grasp at least most of what we were saying. She didn't have words, she couldn't sign properly, let alone in ASL, and I doubted she could write even her own name. She was, for all intents and purposes, mute and illiterate.
But something of her meaning was still conveyed. The longing, the attachment, the bitterness, and yet the desire for affection. Yeah. The monster in the novel had never chosen a name for himself, but if he had, if he had never completely shed his yearning for his creator's affection…
"Fran," I said confidently, "right?"
Surprise stretched across her face, followed shortly and swiftly by delight and something akin to happiness. She nodded firmly and eagerly. "Uhn!"
Ritsuka blinked. "Whoa."
"Holy shit, how did you do that?" Rika exclaimed.
"That's…the name she chose when we found her," Mash said with numb disbelief. "Miss Taylor, how did you know?"
How, indeed.
"I think I understand what you meant, Sir Mordred," I said. I dodged the question, because I wasn't sure I had a good answer myself. "She can't talk, but that doesn't mean she can't express herself in other ways."
Mordred nodded. "Yeah."
It would make communicating with her a little more difficult, though. Most people didn't truly understand what it was like to be unable to use words like that, to be completely incapable of talking in any real sense, but I could remember all too vividly the isolation of it, the people talking about you and around you but rarely ever to you and almost never with you.
Very few people really understood what it meant to be alone in a crowded room.
"An interesting specimen, nonetheless," said Caster, stroking his beard. "Not a homunculus, by her coloration and general demeanor, and yet not a Heroic Spirit either. Doctor Jekyll was quite correct to be so astounded — Doctor Frankenstein must have been quite the genius to achieve something so remarkable."
"No, seriously!" Rika insisted. "How? First Cinnabon, then Onii-chan, and now Senpai, too!"
I turned to Ritsuka. "The Director said you found her in a room off of the library, hidden away in a coffin?"
Ritsuka nodded. "Yeah. After we took care of the Caster who killed Doctor Frankenstein, we found her while we were looking through the rest of the mansion. The only other important thing we could find was the note he left behind. Everything else was just…"
He shrugged. Like he didn't quite know how to describe it.
"Various forms of magecraft paraphernalia, Miss Taylor," Mash supplied. "Sir Mordred investigated his workshop, since her Magic Resistance is so high, but —"
"Didn't find shit," Mordred said bluntly.
Mash sighed. "Yes. That."
I suppose it would have been too easy for us to find the answers to every single one of our mysteries less than twenty-four hours after we arrived here. I wasn't sure I would have trusted it if they did find something in his workshop that listed out all of the perpetrators and every single one of their plans. It was more likely it would have been a plant than the genuine solution.
"The note?"
Ritsuka reached into his pocket, rummaged about a bit, and then produced a folded up scrap of paper. When he handed it over to me, I unfolded it and read through the short, hastily scrawled message on it:
I've learned of a certain plot. Its name is 'Project Demonic Fog.' Though its present state is still unknown, the three leaders of the project are 'P', 'B,' and 'M', can cast spells beyond human wisdom. Probably Heroic Spirits.
Out of some vain hope that there would be more, I checked the other side, but I'd already known that it was going to be blank, so I tried not to be too disappointed.
I passed the scrap off to Caster, who read it himself and eventually passed it over to Jekyll. He scanned it quickly, then sighed.
"So Victor truly has been killed, has he?" he asked, crestfallen. "There was no mistake?"
"I'm sorry," Ritsuka answered solemnly. I couldn't help wondering just how personal their confirmation of his death had been.
Jekyll shook his head and handed the piece of paper back to Ritsuka. "I had best inform the rest of the network," he said ruefully. "I'm certain they will all want to hear of this development, though I can't say that we'll be able to find a replacement at all, let alone with speed. Please excuse me."
He left the parlor and disappeared further into the apartment. I kept track of him as he went, until he eventually wound up in a small study with an antique radio, although for this era, it was probably state of the art. It was situated atop a desk, and he sat down in a chair in front of it to start the task of contacting the other agents in his network.
Fran made an inquisitive sound in the back of her throat.
"I don't know," said Mash. "Doctor Jekyll said that they weren't very close, but he does seem pretty sad that Doctor Frankenstein is dead. Maybe he cared more than he was willing to admit."
"People grieve in their own ways," I agreed. A bitter part of me had to acknowledge that sometimes, that included falling apart.
"Come on!" Rika complained. "Are none of you going to answer me? How are you guys doing that?"
I didn't say anything, for a lot of different reasons. Not only because I couldn't really explain it myself, but because the one theory I did have — that the shared experience of being voiceless made it easier for me to catch nuance the others might not — didn't just touch on things I didn't want to talk about, but also ran headlong into Ritsuka and Mash being able to do it, too, and died an ignoble death.
Ritsuka, with the sort of smugness all big brothers took with their younger siblings, told Rika, "I guess it's just something you either have…or you don't."
"Senpai!" said Mash, scandalized.
"Hey!" Rika squawked.
And Fran lifted a hand to her mouth to stifle a breathy sound that might have been her version of a giggle. It was overshadowed by Mordred's loud, boisterous laughter.
"Ha! Good one!"
"Not you, too!" Rika whined. "Stop teaming up on me! I don't know how to start my own club, or how to play Blackjack, and don't even get me started on the hookers!"
"W-what?" Mash gasped. "B-blackjack? H-hookers?"
"What's that got to do with anything?" asked Mordred, confused.
Ritsuka sighed. "It's from a tv show."
Naturally. At least she was in a good enough mood to make jokes. It meant that whatever she'd seen at Frankenstein's mansion wasn't bad enough to be all that traumatizing, and while the twins couldn't be called innocent by any stretch of the imagination at this point…some part of me wanted them to retain whatever little bit of it they had left.
Unfortunately, we were on the job. This wasn't the time to relax just yet.
"Let's talk about P, B, and M," I said, and the mood instantly sobered again. "The Director said that the Caster you fought introduced himself as Mephistopheles. Did he give you any other clues about what was going on?"
The twins and Mash traded looks, frowning at one another.
"Not really," said Ritsuka. "Honestly, he was kind of…"
"Screwy," Rika finished for him. "And not like literally screwy, like he had bolts in his head or something —" Fran's hand made it halfway up to her head before she froze and let it drop again. "— but screwy like he had a few bolts loose."
"He had a twisted personality," Mash said. "At the end, he said something about…how lucky I was, that I had more chances to turn on my Master. And I would never!"
The very idea of it seemed to horrify her.
"Nah, you got him pegged, Shieldy," said Mordred. Shieldy? What was up with that nickname? "That guy wasn't right. He might be the kind of guy to stab his Master in the back, but you ain't got that sort of thing in you."
"Man, and I missed it!" Jeanne Alter complained. "Damn, that fucker sounds like a riot!"
"You're forgetting something," Emiya interrupted. "He said he was there to recruit Frankenstein, remember? And Frankenstein refused, right up until the very end."
"And it got him killed," said Arash.
"So it seems."
Although it begged the question of how he'd found out as much as he had, and why he hadn't written out the culprits' full names. P, B, and M? If he knew that much, then didn't he know their full names already?
Or maybe he'd been writing the note for himself, with the intent of sharing his findings through the radio later. In that case, I guess it made more sense not to write out the full name if he didn't need it. It was just incredibly inconvenient for us that he hadn't.
"P, B, and M, hm?" Caster said thoughtfully. "I'm afraid that doesn't narrow the field quite as much as we would like."
Especially, I thought, since Paracelsus was standing in the room with us. On the list of famous magi who might qualify for the Caster class, there wasn't exactly a huge list of names under 'P.' B and M weren't exactly all that much better, with the exception of the big names, like Merlin and Morgan le Fey, but neither of those had the prime candidate less than ten feet away from me.
Caster's lips pursed. "Unless we're not assuming that this Mephistopheles character wasn't the 'M' mentioned in the note? I confess, the only major suspect I would have is Morgan le Fey."
Mordred snorted. "Nah, I already checked. I told you, remember? If that bitch was here, she'd have parked her ass in the palace and stayed there. Didn't see hide nor hair of her when I went to look."
Emiya huffed out a short chuckle. "No family reunion here, I suppose."
Mordred grinned a sharp grin. "Thank God for that!"
It made me wonder exactly how far and what sort of relationship Emiya had had with King Arthur. That she'd been his Servant, if I remembered right, was something we'd already gotten confirmed, and that he'd been in love with her, well, his reaction in Septem pointed that way. But had she reciprocated? Had they fallen in bed together? How intense and passionate had their relationship been?
With Mordred right there might not be the best of times to go asking that, though. Even if the myths hadn't been entirely right, and we'd gotten plenty of evidence that not everything lined up over the past several months, there hadn't been any sign that Mordred's part in things was any different than how the legends said it was. Her relationship with King Arthur was, at the very least, complicated.
Caster shrugged and shook his head. "Then, I must admit, I don't have much in the way of other suspects."
Ritsuka grimaced and shared a look with his sister. "That's about where we are, too," he said. "We couldn't really think of too many people who could fit those initials."
It occurred to me, suddenly. "Medea."
Ritsuka and Rika shared another look.
"Medea of Colchis?" asked Caster, surprised. "I suppose, but… Why on Earth would someone like her be here?"
"You could say the same of Faust's demon," I pointed out.
"Touché," Caster allowed with a slight dip of his head.
"Would we really see her again so soon?" asked Ritsuka. "On the enemy's side again, too?"
Caster blinked. "You mean to say you've faced her before?"
"Yes," answered Mash. "During the last Singularity, Okeanos…both her younger self and older self were present, although those were extenuating circumstances."
"You don't say," Caster murmured thoughtfully.
It wasn't necessarily a bad point. If we looked at it in broad strokes, the Singularities we'd solved so far had Servants that largely followed the theme of each Singularity. Aside from Fuyuki, which was a deviation of an actual Grail War, Orléans had Heroic Spirits with either strong ties to France or to dragons, Septem had been sprawling and diverse — much like the Roman Empire had been — with Heroic Spirits connected either to the place they'd been summoned or the Empire itself, and Okeanos had featured both pirates and Heroic Spirits from seafaring legends. Both our side and the enemy's had tended to follow that pattern.
The trouble was, the mythology of Britain was largely dominated by King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table — as evidenced by the one standing not too far away, leaning on the wall next to fireplace with her arms crossed. If we were willing to go so far as trusting Mordred, then Morgan le Fey wasn't here, and I couldn't think of any reason why Merlin himself would be all that interested in coating the whole city in fog.
"We might not even be looking at a magus at all," said Emiya. "The Caster class isn't solely a place for them, after all."
Ah.
"Shakespeare."
Ritsuka hummed. "So we might be looking for an author or something instead."
Mordred snorted. "You think some guy with a pen made that fog out there?"
In one, smooth motion, I unsheathed my Last Resort, and everyone jolted in surprise — even more so when I tossed it over to Mordred, who caught it deftly.
"Huh," she said, examining it and rolling it around in her hand. "The hell is this, exactly?"
"The original knife was made by an inventor I happened to know, back before Chaldea," I told her, and that was all I was giving her about that part. "After we summoned Shakespeare, I gave it to him and asked him to use his Enchant skill to make it stronger. What you're holding now is the end result."
She scrutinized the blade with a frown, like she was looking for what made it so special. Unless she decided to turn it on, I didn't think she was going to find it.
"She used it to kill a dragon back in Orléans!" Rika blurted out.
Caster goggled at me openly, and Mordred arched an eyebrow at me. "No shit?"
"It was technically just a wyvern," Mash corrected, "b-but yes. Miss Taylor, u-um, stabbed it through the eye."
"Damn," said Mordred, and she actually sounded impressed. "That's pretty hardcore, not gonna lie. Wouldn't've expected it outta someone as squishy-looking as you."
She tossed my Last Resort back, and using the tiny ant I'd secreted into one of the nanothorn ports, I snatched it out of the air just as deftly and easily as Mordred had, disguised the ant crawling up the knife and into my sleeve with a twirl of the blade to reverse my grip on it, then slid it back into its sheath. I could've just used my phantom limb, but it might have looked less impressive, especially if she could sense it.
"Alright," she went on. "So maybe we're looking for a famous author guy instead. We got any ideas for that, too?"
Ritsuka sighed. "Unfortunately —"
"— not really?" said Rika. "I mean, we're two kids from Tokyo, you know? English literature wasn't the biggest thing we were learning back in high school."
"I know a little bit," Ritsuka amended. "But, um, the classics were never really my favorites, so I can't really say." He gestured over towards me. "Senpai's mother was a literature professor, though, so she might have some idea." He added, "Maybe Mash, too?"
"I'm flattered that you think so, Senpai," said Mash, "but…"
Yeah.
"John Milton," I listed, "the Brontë sisters, Mary Shelley, Lord Byron, Thomas Paine, Edgar Allen Poe, Alexander Pope, J.M. Barrie, Thomas Malory, Herman Melville —"
"Okay!" said Rika. "Okay, we get it! There's a lot of famous authors!"
My mouth twisted into a frown. Strictly speaking, one or two of those had been more philosophers than novelists, but they'd had enough of an impact on Western thought and society that I was willing to include their less fictional writing as being close enough. J.M. Barrie might have been too close to the modern day, though, but I was never entirely certain where exactly the cutoff point was supposed to be.
"A difficult position to be in," Caster noted. He tossed me another dubious glance, like he wasn't sure what to make of me anymore. "If we look for magi, we don't have a large enough list to speak much of, but if we look outside of those scant few famous mages, we suddenly find ourselves with more options than we can feasibly investigate."
"And it might not even be an English writer," Arash added. "I'm sure there were several foreign writers who had a lot to say about British colonialism, too, who might have a reason to want to choke London like this."
"If we broaden things that far, we'll be talking about half the world," said Emiya. He sighed and carded a hand through his hair, rubbed at his scalp. "India alone would have us here talking possibilities for days."
Mahatma Gandhi could have been on that list, too, in fact. He was famous enough, but I wasn't sure if he was too modern to count.
"There was one other clue," I reminded them. "'Can cast spells beyond human wisdom.' If Doctor Frankenstein was as true and talented a mage as Jekyll is convinced he was, then at the very least, our perpetrators can make it look like they're incredibly talented magi."
"And that just puts us back at square one," Ritsuka lamented.
"Yes, it does," Mash agreed ruefully.
Jeanne Alter sneered. "So that whole spiel just now was a complete waste of time?"
"No," I said. "It means that if P, B, or M is a writer, they probably wrote fantasy. Something that was impressive enough to make Frankenstein think what he did."
Unfortunately, while that did eliminate people like the Brontë sisters, and Mary Shelley was just unlikely, considering the subject of her work was here in the parlor with us, it didn't narrow the list down to something as convenient as a single name. Milton, Melville, and Malory were still in the M section, for example, and all three of them would pose a problem if they were involved.
I didn't really want to have to go toe to toe with Moby Dick. Or…toe to flipper. Whatever.
Admittedly, I was a little relieved that there wasn't a "T" in the list, because that would have meant Tolkien could be a suspect, and the idea of what the One Ring might do if it was even halfway real was actually kind of frightening. Fortunately, I think we would have seen Sauron's tower and burning eye first, even through this fog.
"I guess that means it's still a mystery, for now," Ritsuka said tiredly. "Until we find out more, we'll just be going around in circles."
"Uhn…" Fran murmured lowly, disappointed.
"It won't be forever," I assured her. "Eventually, we'll find whoever is behind all of this and put a stop to them. Doctor Frankenstein won't have died in vain, and those responsible for his death won't get away with it."
This didn't seem to satisfy her, exactly, but the grim line of her mouth said that she was looking forward to it. Whatever her relationship to her creator and his family, it seemed she at least liked them enough to mourn their deaths.
"For now," said Caster, "the hour grows late, and I dare say we shan't be sending out any more expeditions — not when this will be Assassin's most opportune time, where they are most advantaged. We here have already eaten, but I'm sure the rest of you must be famished."
As though to answer him, Mash's stomach growled, and her cheeks bloomed with pink. "S-sorry! It's just, we really haven't eaten since this morning, and while a Demi-Servant like me doesn't need food as much as a normal human, I-I still get hungry."
"Uhn!" Fran grunted, bobbing her head.
"Oh yeah," said Ritsuka. "I guess you probably haven't eaten in a really long time either, have you?"
Fran shook her head.
"Maybe not even ever," I added. Her creator probably hadn't been particularly attentive about that sort of thing, not if he locked her up in a coffin for several decades.
Rika grinned. "Oh, man, have we got a treat for you!" She turned to Emiya. "We need some gourmet food! Stat! Can't you see the poor girl is skin and bones?"
Emiya sighed. "Yes, of course, I'll see to it right away. I suppose I should have known better than to keep you waiting this long as it is. Any requests?"
Rika nodded sagely. "That's a good question!" To Caster, she asked. "Whaddya got to eat 'round these parts?"
And for some reason, she saw fit to put on an exaggerated Texan accent.
"Well…" Caster stroked his beard. "Doctor Jekyll's pantry should be close to fully stocked, although I'm afraid I'm not so familiar with its contents that I could tell you what that means. Various forms of meat and poultry, one would assume, in at least enough supply to last a few days, as well as assorted grains and other such things."
Emiya shook his head. "I'll figure something out as I go. I'm sure he'll have something that I can make, even if it's drowning in salt."
I could feel my blood pressure spike, and I wasn't even going to be eating it. Maybe I should warn Marie and the technicians to watch out for coronary distress and large increases in cholesterol, considering how much lard the English tended to cook with in this era.
He waved a hand and vanished into spirit form, disappearing from the group. We'd all gotten used to it enough that no one batted an eye at his leaving.
"Aren't…you an alchemist?" asked Ritsuka.
"Yes, of course," said Caster immediately. "But I'm afraid it was my wife who was always more talented in the culinary aspects of domestic life. My meals always tended to be a bit more…basic."
I paused, listening to the conversation with half an ear as I gathered a larger swarm in Jekyll's study, because I'd just heard something important.
"Huh," said Rika. "I thought alchemy began in the kitchen."
Caster broke out into laughter. "My dear girl, whoever gave you that idea? No, no, alchemy has its origins in the metallurgical practices of the ancient Egyptians, and that study eventually made its way into Europe, where magi married it with the principles of Western magecraft. Strictly speaking, the alchemy of the modern day, at least that which the orthodox magi of the Clock Tower practice, little resembles what it was originally."
"Fullmetal Alchemist lied to me?" Rika despaired dramatically.
Caster blinked at her, confused. "I…suppose it must have," he allowed cautiously.
She moaned. "Next you're going to tell me that homunculi aren't actually made from the Philos —"
"SHIT!" came Emiya's voice, followed immediately by the sound of a metal pot clattering to the floor, and the twins and Mash both startled, looking in the direction of the kitchen. Caster's face pinched into an expression of embarrassed regret.
"Ah," he said ruefully. "Yes. Perhaps I should have warned her."
A moment later, Emiya reappeared across the threshold, ducking under a cast iron pan that came dangerously close to hitting Jeanne Alter, who squawked and jumped out of the way.
"What the fuck?"
"Watch where you're throwing that, you madwoman!" Emiya barked back over his shoulder. "You're going to hurt someone!"
Renée stalked in after him, hefting another large pan that she wielded like a sword. Her expression was just as cold and emotionless as it had been before, but there was an air about her that I would have called furious.
"Master," she reported flatly, "this thief was attempting to steal food from the pantry."
Mordred busted out into laughter.
"Hey!" said Rika. "He's not a thief! He's a house-husband! He earns his keep!"
"That's the part of this you're objecting to?" Emiya demanded incredulously. "She actually hit me with the first one, you know! I can show you the damn bruise!"
"It didn't actually hurt all that much, did it?" Arash asked, curious.
"It's the principle of the thing!"
"Forgive me, Renée, I should have told you," said Caster. "This man is another one of our guests, a Servant in their service, and it seems that he is the designated cook amongst them. He was just going to make a meal for his comrades who haven't eaten yet, and I'm afraid, in my carelessness, I forgot to tell you. My sincerest apologies, my dear."
Renée froze, turning from Emiya to regard Caster, and for several long seconds, she just stared. Her expression was too opaque to make out what she must have been thinking. And then, with just the barest hint of confusion, she asked, "I have to let him use the kitchen?"
"For now," Caster answered, smiling gently. "Perhaps tomorrow, you might cook them all a breakfast that convinces them of your singular talent, but for tonight, well, I wouldn't want to ask you to make another meal after you spent so much time and effort preparing the last one so recently."
For several seconds more, Renée was silent again, and I thought I saw a tiny tremble in the fist clutching the pan like it was a weapon. At length, she asked, "Do I have to?"
Caster nodded. "Just for tonight."
She closed her ruby red eyes for a moment. "Very well," she said. Stiffly, she relaxed into a less combative posture, clutching the handle of her pan in her hands as she folded them in front of her. "If that's what you order, Master, then I shall allow him into the kitchen."
She turned her frigid stare back over to Emiya.
"For tonight."
Still stiff as a board, she spun on her heel and left the room, and the instant she was out of sight, Emiya heaved a heavy sigh. Mordred, still laughing, doubled over, wheezing and clutching her gut with both arms.
"You could have warned me you had a homunculus hanging around doing the dishes," Emiya rebuked Caster.
"Yes, I should have," said Caster. "I suppose I owe my apologies to you, as well. I would, of course, be only too happy to introduce you all now. However…" He sighed. "Dear Renée seems to be in quite the mood, so I'm afraid they'll have to wait for later."
"Hold on," said Rika, "that was a homunculus?"
Caster's brow furrowed. "Yes. I…suppose you've never seen one before?"
Rika slumped, grimacing, and wiped both hands down the sides of her face.
"Fullmetal Alchemist lied to me," she moaned. "Again!"
"Did it?" said Caster, still confused. "I'm sorry, my dear, but I'm afraid who or whatever this Fullmetal Alchemist is must have been quite misleading about the true nature of alchemy."
In his study, Jekyll stood from his chair, disentangling himself from his radio.
"Don't mind her," said Ritsuka. "She's just suffering the consequences of shaping her understanding of magic from anime and manga."
"Hey!" Rika said indignantly.
"Don't worry so much, Master," Emiya told her reassuringly. "Most first generation magi never get the chance to correct that mistake. You're doing just fine."
"That doesn't make me feel much better," she groused.
He huffed a low chuckle. "Fine, fine, I know just how to cheer you up." He cast a glance at Caster. "Provided that woman doesn't try to throw me out again."
"I would expect her to watch you closely," said Caster, "but despite her own feelings on the matter, she'll listen to me and she won't bar you access — tonight, at least. Although she might not look it at first glance, she can be…quite territorial."
Emiya huffed out another laugh. "Somehow, that feels familiar." He grinned. "Well. It's not the first time someone has tried to boot me out of the kitchen. I don't intend to let her succeed."
"If she tries to throw another pan at you, next time, do us all a favor and block it with that huge head of yours," Jeanne Alter drawled.
"Next time," he promised, "I'll do something even more impressive."
On that note, he disappeared again, back to the kitchen, presumably. Off to the side, Mordred's laughter finally died down into weak giggles.
"Oh, man," she said, still grinning broadly. Tears glittered in the outer corners of her eyes. "That was great. A big, strong Archer class Servant, chased around the house by a little homunculus! Wielding a pan!" She swiped the tears away with her thumbs one at a time. "Damn. I needed that."
Mash sighed. "At least no one got seriously hurt."
"Except for his pride," Ritsuka added dryly.
"Come in, Doctor Jekyll," I said without looking.
Everyone startled, turning to look at an equally stunned Jekyll, who stood in the threshold with his hand raised to knock and announce his presence. Awkwardly, his arm fell back to his side, but he was too busy blinking at me to notice it at all.
"Doctor Jekyll!" said Mash.
"Never going to get used to that," Ritsuka murmured.
"Nope," his sister agreed quietly.
"Ah, yes, I…" Jekyll began uncertainly. "Please…pardon my intrusion."
He walked into the room haltingly and hesitantly, less sure of himself than he'd been before. My lips thinned. That absolute proprioception was incredibly useful, and throwing people off guard with it could give me the upper hand in negotiations on occasion, but I forgot sometimes how easily it could freak out even my allies.
Arash, as he was wont to do, helped smooth things out. "Everything's going well with your information network, I assume?"
"Yes, I…" Jekyll cleared his throat. "They were saddened, of course, to hear the news of what happened to poor Victor, but fortunately, the enemy hasn't yet seen fit to seek any of them out. The circumstances of that may yet change, of course, especially as we attempt to uncover the source of this foul plot, but for now, poor Victor seems to have been the only one to suffer for his part in this investigation."
"Mephistopeles said he was there to recruit him," Ritsuka told him.
"Truly?" said Jekyll. "It may be that none of the others will find themselves garnering such attention then, because if any of my collaborators have a single iota the talent for magery Victor possessed, they have not seen fit to inform me. In fact, perhaps that is all for the good. So long as it remains secret — even from me — then the others might yet remain unmolested."
Mordred scoffed. "Tch. That means it's gonna be up to us to do the heavy lifting, huh?"
"What?" said Jeanne Alter. "Scared of a little hard work?"
"Ha! Hell no!" said Mordred, grinning again. "In fact, I like it this way better! Less people getting in my way!"
Jeanne Alter sneered. "That's too bad. I think I'm actually starting to like you."
"Doctor Jekyll," I said, interrupting whatever that was before it could take off, "was there something else from your network that we needed to know about?"
Jekyll hesitated again, uncertain. "There…was, in fact. A trifling matter, I would say, only, as we have no other leads as of the current moment, I considered the possibility that it might provide us another avenue of investigation. Even if it bears no fruit at all, we would still be providing aid to the people of the city, helpless as they are against such threats."
"Aid?" asked Ritsuka.
Jekyll nodded. "There has been…an incident, shall we say," he said. "Or rather, a series of incidents, all of them noteworthy not for their location or indeed the people affected, but because they seem to share a common cause. A theme, if you will, a rhyme or rhythm, a singular perpetrator utilizing a pattern of behavior."
"A MO," I summarized.
Jekyll didn't recognize the term. "MO?"
"Modus operandi," Mash explained dutifully. "It's a term used by some police forces for things like the method and means criminals use to commit crimes."
"Ah — an apt description." Jekyll nodded. "In this case, the modus operandi of our perpetrator is to slip indoors and assault the people inside. For what reason, I could not possibly fathom, but according to the collaborator who brought this to my attention, there have been no major injuries nor any fatalities, and the culprit is said to be a large…book."
My brow furrowed. People were being attacked by a book?
"Book?" the twins echoed.
"Uhn?" Fran grunted, sounding just as confused.
"My reaction was much the same, I assure you," said Jekyll. "I received confirmation, however, thrice over, and in no uncertain terms. The one behind these dastardly assaults is a book, described to me as roughly the size of a small child."
Caster stroked his beard thoughtfully, frowning. "Perhaps a grimoire of some kind? I struggle to imagine where it might have come from, however. Unless some poor unfortunate came across it by accident and activated the owner's defensive enchantments."
Unfortunately, I didn't have any better ideas. It wasn't the most out there thing I'd ever dealt with, but on the list of possible familiars a mage might choose, Marie had never put a book, of all things.
"Where is this happening?" I asked.
"The only cases yet discovered are in the Soho area," said Jekyll. I glanced over at the clock on the mantle, which read nearly half past nine. Jekyll saw my look and nodded. "Yes, I came to that conclusion as well. To make the journey to Soho, investigate these matters fully, and return to the apartment would be the work of several hours, and it is already quite late enough as it is."
And while it wouldn't be the first time I stayed up late and went out adventuring into the early hours of the morning…I wouldn't be the one going out, since the fog was still a problem. The twins and Mash would be, and even if I was a bit generous and said it only took them four hours to go and take care of this thing, they still wouldn't be back here and getting to sleep until three or four o'clock.
I needed them well-rested so we could go out in the morning while the fog was thin or nonexistent. Nobody would be working at their best after a long day and just a few hours of sleep.
"These cases are not urgent, however," said Jekyll, "so I considered it the wiser course to leave it off until the morrow, after we all have had a chance to rest our eyes."
"I think we can all agree to that," said Ritsuka, looking around at the rest of our group for objections. "Right?"
"Yes," I answered. "No reason to rush off this late at night if it isn't life or death."
"Thank goodness!" Rika cried.
"What?" snapped Mordred. She pushed herself away from the wall. "Screw that! If you lot aren't going to get off your asses and go, then I'll just do it by myself!"
She looked ready to storm off and do just that.
"No need for that, Sir Mordred," Caster chided, and this made her stop long enough for him to continue, "it's not about willingness to act, it's about the realities of the situation. Our Assassin is still out there, remember, and the dark of night is the most advantageous time to strike."
"So?" Mordred blustered. "I'll just kill 'em myself, next time they show up!"
"But it has been a long day," Caster said reasonably. "Why, only a few short hours ago, weren't they rushing here to see their dying friend healed? Much has happened for them in so little a time, and to push them out the door again on another quest would be to invite Assassin to take advantage, wouldn't it?"
"Tch."
Mordred swung back the other way like a pendulum. "Yeah, I guess so."
"And you are not an endless font of energy yourself," said Caster, peering at her knowingly. "Without a proper Master, you, too, must spend time to rest and restore your energy, so that you are ready when the time comes to confront the enemy. Your eagerness does you credit, but tearing off after every lead the instant it presents itself can cause problems of its own."
"Alright," said Mordred, annoyed, "alright, already! I get it! Geez! We can go out tomorrow! You happy now?"
Caster smiled. "Yes, in fact."
"Then it's settled," I said. I turned to Jekyll. "We'll start looking into this mysterious book of yours tomorrow morning. For now —"
Emiya's voice echoed from the dining room.
"Dinner!"
— o.0.O.O.0.o —
The real trouble this chapter gave me was the ending. No one wanted to just shut up and wrap things up, and while I could have just pushed that final bit of conversation into the next chapter... Yeah, Taylor wouldn't have let it go. Her insisting made that impossible, so things wound up stretched out a bit.
I know Renée wound up a bit of a surprise for everyone when she was introduced, and she hasn't had that much screentime yet, but initial thoughts? The editor likes her and thought that scene was adorable, but I'd like to hear your opinions on her, too.
This story and this chapter brought to you by my wonderful supporters, whose kindness and generosity have made it possible to devote so much of my time and attention to writing, especially Eric, s22132, AbyssalApsu, and Alias 2v10. You guys are absolute legends. To show my gratitude, they had the chance to read this and upcoming chapters before the public release. You can find out more HERE.
And now that the shameless plugging is out of the way... Chapter CXXXII: Knight of Treachery
We went to bed almost immediately after the twins, Fran, and Mash finished eating. Conveniently, Jekyll's building was three stories tall and otherwise unoccupied, so what might ordinarily have been a much tighter squeeze was instead more than enough room to accommodate all of us. Most of the Servants didn't need sleep, of course, but Mash insisted on being nearby the twins, Fran didn't want to be on her own, and Mordred — who had no Master and spent the most time active and fighting — needed time to rest and recover some of her energy, so somehow or another, we all wound up sprawled out across the parlor of the second floor apartment.
It was frankly a little ridiculous looking. Looking at all of us, you might have thought it was one, gigantic sleepover party. If you ignored the obvious incongruencies, like Fran's transformers and Mash's armor.
Somehow or another, it all worked out, and despite how prime a target we represented together, no Assassin snuck in during the night and no other Servant materialized to attack us. I was beginning to think that maybe there really wasn't a sensory aspect to the fog, that the enemy didn't have any idea we were all here and together. Either that, or they weren't confident enough in their success to try it.
Either of those options was good. Given that waves of automata, homunculi, and Helter Skelter didn't show up to even probe our defenses, I was more inclined to believe it was the former.
We were woken the next morning by Arash and a sour-faced Emiya to the smell of breakfast, and when we went down, it was to discover that Renée had cooked the entire thing — explaining perfectly Emiya's less than stellar mood.
What seemed to offend him more was that she was actually really good at it.
A spread of a typical English breakfast awaited us in the dining room, with bowls of porridge set out for us, garnished with strawberries and blueberries and seasoned with cinnamon, and strips of bacon, slabs of fish drizzled in a buttery sauce, and all of this finished off with a slice of toasted bread. There was more than enough for each of us, and there was honestly so much to it that I could almost feel the weight I was going to gain just from eating it once.
Damn if it wasn't good, though. Even Rika had to stop after the first few bites, stare down at her food with horror, and whisper — like the very idea of admitting it out loud was an offense to whatever god she might have believed in — "It's so good…!"
That more than anything else seemed to upset Emiya the most. I guess he'd gotten used to being our personal chef so much that the idea he could be replaced had never entered his mind.
Renée, on the other hand… If there was a way to describe the air about her, despite her perpetually stoic expression, it was like the cat that ate the canary. Smug was the word for it. Self-satisfied. And I guess she had every right to be.
Once we'd eaten, we wound up with about half an hour to digest our food and check in with Marie and Romani, and right around eight o'clock, we got the news from Arash: the fog was starting to clear out, the way it did every morning. If we were going to go out and investigate the case of the mysterious magical book assaulting random citizens, then there was no better time than now, while we could beat the fog and didn't have to worry about it killing me.
We would only have about four hours before we had to rush me back here. If we couldn't make it in time, then we would just have to find the nearest (hopefully unoccupied) apartment to claim for the day and maybe send Mordred back here with whatever we managed to find while we were out. If things proved urgent enough, the twins and Mash could venture out without me and continue the investigation while I waited.
Fuck, planning around this fog was a pain in the ass. This Singularity was quickly making its way up the list for the one I hated most.
With our time so limited — or mine, at least — we had to get ready quickly. Fortunately, the twins had long since picked up the skill to dress and ready with speed, courtesy of our previous deployments and long practice. If the Ritsuka and Rika of Fuyuki could see how far they had come in just a few months, they might have fainted of disbelief.
We also made sure to mark the apartment on our maps, so that we wouldn't get lost — and so, in case the fog did pick back up before we could make it back on our own, everyone would still be able to find the place.
"Just to confirm," I said to Jekyll as we did our last few checks. "We shouldn't expect to find the automata and homunculi involved in whatever's going on with this book. They don't go inside, they strictly stay out in the mist."
"That is correct," said Jekyll. "Our analysis and observation of their behavior thus far has shown that they avoid entering any of the residences in the city. Indeed, they seem utterly unconcerned with what goes on inside of any building, even this one where we ourselves now sit. They patrol the streets and do little else of note."
"It's not in their programming," Mordred said with a grimace, like it left a bad taste in her mouth. "They just do what their creator made them for and that's it. Like puppets on strings."
She seemed to despise the very idea.
"An…apt comparison, Sir Mordred," said Caster.
"It means they don't go inside and hurt anyone, though," said Ritsuka. "So there is that, at least. It makes things a little easier if the only ones we have to worry about protecting are ourselves."
Indeed. The fewer bystanders we had to be concerned about, the easier it would be to investigate — both the Singularity and these incidents with the magic book. If we were particularly fortunate, none of the book's victims would have any major problems either and the whole thing could be taken care of quickly and easily. That way, we could have enough time to look into what was going on with the Singularity itself.
"There is, of course, no way for us to currently determine if or in what way this magical tome is connected to Project Demonic Fog," said Jekyll. "It may be that it is entirely unrelated, a third party in this situation with motives, methods, and end goals that exist to us equally as enigmatic as the perpetrators behind the fog itself. If it is at all possible to ascertain that with any degree of certitude, it would be most helpful."
"Tch," Mordred scoffed. "What, like there's gonna be someone else hanging around the place causing a mess? Nah, mark my words. This has something to do with that Assassin that's popping up all over the place."
Entirely possible. We'd find out for ourselves once we got down to things and had a chance to investigate.
"But this book hasn't been killing anyone, has it?" Ritsuka wondered aloud. "Right, Doctor Jekyll?"
"Thus far, the victims have only been rendered unconscious," Jekyll answered. "Although they have yet to recover, there have not been any signs that any damage of the more permanent variety has been inflicted, and so I can only say that you are correct, Ritsuka, none of the victims have yet died."
"Small mercies," said Arash. "Things are bad enough right now as it is, and they're only going to get worse. The fewer bodies at the end of this all, the better."
"That don't mean nothing," Mordred said stubbornly. "That Assassin, they'd do something just like this to lure us in for an ambush."
If the magical book was related in any way to that Assassin and they were both part of the conspiracy behind this place…yes, that was also entirely possible. Especially if one of the conspirators really was a famous author, then the book might be his Noble Phantasm. But —
"If it's a trap, then we'll spring it," I said. Hopefully, without the fog to make things harder, with enough forewarning we wouldn't get caught with our pants down. "We'll find out for sure either way once we get there and start looking around. Is there anything else we need to know, Doctor Jekyll?"
He shook his head. "At the moment, nothing of consequence. You know all that I have to tell you, and I can arm you with nothing more at this time than my hope for your safe return."
"Heh." Mordred grinned. "Like we'll need it!"
"Considering the amount of firepower we'll be walking around with," Emiya said, leaving that thought to hang meaningfully.
"That book won't know what hit it!" Rika said confidently.
"Not unless it's a manga," Ritsuka added slyly, and his sister did the mature thing and stuck her tongue out at him.
When we were all suited up and ready to go — including Mordred, who donned a suit of armor that actually did a pretty good job of disguising the fact she was a woman — our group stepped outside and into the dim morning light. The sky above was cloudy and overcast, and the sun struggled to pierce through the thick cloud cover. The street looked as though a film had been cast over the entire city, leaving the entire place cool and dark as though the sun hadn't even risen yet.
That cloud cover was probably the remnants of the fog, bled off from when it let up like this in the mornings. Or maybe it was just London's infamous gloom. I didn't really care about the difference when the result was the same.
It was better than having the entire street covered in mist, at least. I could see further out than three feet in front of my face, for one thing, and the streetlamps actually accomplished their intended purpose, for another. For how long was the question.
Four hours, give or take. That was how much time we had, and if we wanted to keep everyone together as much as possible, that was when we had to be back here at Jekyll's apartment.
"Took your sweet-ass time," Jeanne Alter drawled by way of greeting. "We getting out of here or what?"
"While the roads are clear, yes," I said. "We'll need you to stay here, though."
She whipped her head around to look at me so fast I thought I heard her neck crack. "What? The fuck I am!"
I'd expected a reaction like that.
"We need a line of communication with Jekyll and Abraham in case we can't beat the fog back here," I explained my reasoning. "And someone to do the fighting if they get attacked while we're away."
"So?" she said. She gestured at Arash and Emiya. "Just leave one of those two asswipes here!"
The two of them traded a look. Emiya arched an eyebrow at Arash, who shrugged.
"You're the only one we all have a contract with, Jeanne Alter," said Ritsuka, getting to it before I could. Like he'd predicted her response so well that he already had it all prepared. "You're the only one we can all contact, if we need to. It has to be you."
"Tch." Jeanne Alter's lip curled.
"It'll be different in the afternoons," I told her. "Then, Emiya will be staying behind and you'll be going out with everyone."
"Hold on," said Emiya, "when was this decided?"
My brow furrowed. Shouldn't the reasoning have been obvious? All of the most immediate problems we'd be facing with logistics had been essentially spelled out to us last night, in big, bold lettering.
"Oh," said Mash, "because Miss Taylor can't go outside in the fog, and with it interrupting communications, the only way for us to stay in contact is to use Emiya and Arash as go-betweens."
"Exactly."
Emiya sighed. "Well. I guess I can't argue with that logic. Not unless my Master gives me a countermanding order."
He slid a glance at Rika, who smiled back at him.
"I expect a hot meal ready and waiting for me every night when I come home," she said sweetly.
Emiya's shoulders sagged, defeated, and he shrugged, shaking his head, as though to say, 'what can you do?'
"See?" Ritsuka said to Jeanne Alter. "It's just for the mornings. And I'm sure there'll be plenty of things for you to set on fire in the afternoons."
"Tch." Jeanne Alter scoffed again, rolling her eyes. "Don't try to sweet talk me, because it won't work. I'll stay here and guard this shitty apartment, but only because there probably won't be anything interesting going on anyway. Burning a stupid magical book would just be boring. It probably won't even scream."
She jerked her thumb at the door, where Fran lingered, looking out at us with a furrowed brow.
"What about her? I hope you're not expecting me to babysit."
"Uh," Fran grunted, low and hesitant, now that attention had been brought to her presence. "Uh-uh…uhn…"
"What, you're lonely?" said Mordred. "Just sit tight and wait. We'll be right back."
Fran grimaced.
"She's worried," I translated. I didn't add the more personal part — that she worried we might not come back, that something bad might happen to the only people who had yet shown her kindness — out of courtesy.
"Uhn…"
"We're coming right back after we investigate this magical book thing," Ritsuka reassured her. "And with Arash, Emiya, Mash, and Mordred all here, there's nothing that can hurt us, so we'll all be back before you know it."
"Damn straight!" Mordred agreed.
Fran didn't seem entirely convinced, but when we turned to leave, she made no move to stop us or join us, she just stayed in the doorway, watching us go. Like she was afraid to let us leave her sight, or we'd vanish into smoke.
Fortunately for everyone involved, nothing of the sort happened. The fog didn't suddenly surge back into existence, which put more weight on the idea that the makers couldn't sense anything through it, and once we'd safely made it a whole block away from the apartment, I let Huginn out of my bag so he could take to the air and keep an eye out for any incoming fog. In the background, I started to gather a meager swarm, as large of one as I dared, with how quickly the situation could turn against us.
Mordred, of course, led the way, since she knew best where we needed to go. She took point out in front and we all fell into step behind her.
"I feel kind of bad leaving Fran behind like that," Mash confessed once we were out of earshot.
"I know what you mean," Ritsuka said. "Doctor Jekyll, Abraham, Renée, and Jeanne Alter are all there, but none of them can understand her, and none of them are…well…"
"Particularly personable?" Arash offered.
Ritsuka shrugged, grimacing.
"Homunculi aren't well-known for their people skills," Emiya drawled.
"You're just jealous because she's actually a pretty good cook," said Rika. "Don't worry, you're still my house-husband. Your place in my heart is secure."
He shook his head. "Of course."
"Even if she managed some kind of black magic and made porridge taste good!"
A complicated expression crossed Emiya's face, like he wasn't quite sure what he should say to that or how seriously he should take her. It wouldn't surprise me to find porridge on his breakfast menu at some point in the future in some kind of attempt to prove he could do the same thing just as well as Renée could.
"We should only be gone for a few hours," I said, and didn't add the caveat, as long as we can beat the fog back to the apartment. "She'll be fine."
"Still," Mash mumbled.
"Bah! She's a big girl, stop your worrying!" said Mordred. "Focus on the task ahead! We've gotta find a goddamned magical book! What kind of nonsense is that? Ain't nothing I've ever seen before, I'll tell you that!"
Mash's brow furrowed. "Come to think of it, there were a lot of monsters in the Arthurian romances, weren't there? Did you ever fight any of them, Sir Mordred?"
Mordred's face broke out into a grin. "Loads! Aw, man, you don't have any idea, do you, Shieldy? Even with that guy riding sidesaddle, huh? The Knights of the Round Table fought all sorts of nasty critters hanging about in those days! Dragons and giants, too!"
"And lions and tigers and bears?" Rika asked. The reference, of course, flew right over Mordred's head, and she completely ignored Ritsuka's quiet groan.
"All sorts!" Mordred confirmed, still grinning. "Thick woods, steep mountains, deep caves — places like that, where mankind never goes? Prime place for monsters and phantasmals to sit their asses down and claw out a space. And on occasion, they'll come down to some village or town or something and make a mess."
"Leaving you to handle mopping them up," Emiya concluded.
"Not like we can leave it to regular townsfolk or simple guardsmen, right?" Mordred agreed. "Ordinary humans are just food to stuff like that. If a griffon or a dragon is terrorizing the countryside, who else are you gonna send but one of the Knights of the Round Table? Man, we fought all sorts of crazy shit like that!" Her grin broadened. "You ever meet that lunkhead, Gawain, make sure to ask him about the Green Knight. The look on his face is priceless!"
"Green Knight?" asked Rika. "What, did he paint himself green or something? Walk around with branches in his hair?"
Mash grimaced. "Yes, Senpai," she said reluctantly, "but also…not really…"
"Remind me later and I'll tell you the story," I said to Rika. She gave me a cheeky salute.
"Roger, roger!"
And now another Prequels meme. As long as she didn't start complaining about how coarse and rough sand was, I could deal with it.
God, she really was rubbing off on me, wasn't she?
"Like I said," Mordred said. "All sorts of crazy shit lives out in the deep woods and forests, and we killed a whole bunch of 'em, back in the day. Oh." Her grin disappeared and her brow furrowed. "And them. Those crazy bastards. The Picts."
"The Picts?" Ritsuka echoed.
"Yeah," Mordred said grimly.
"I've read that we really don't know much about them, even in our time," said Mash. "Just about the only thing we're sure of is that they were a tribe in Scotland, once."
A complicated look crossed Mordred's face. "They weren't…really a…tribe or anything like that, but… How should I put this…" She worked her jaw back and forth. "To be a tribe, you kinda hafta be human, first, you know? And they were…more like…"
"Faeries?" I offered. Mordred shook her head.
"Faeries still make sense," she admitted grudgingly. "They're twisty as fuck and all sorts of bad news, but you still kinda know what you're working with if you know anything about them. The Picts were like…something out of a crazy story. Your era has those movie things, right? With flying disks and little green men and stuff like that?"
All of us turned to her incredulously, because I wasn't the only one who thought the implication was ridiculous.
"You're saying the Picts were aliens?" Emiya asked, unable to keep the disbelief out of his voice.
Mordred's face cleared and she nodded. "Yeah! Aliens! That's a good way to describe them!"
"What, really?" said Rika. "Like, honest-to-goodness aliens? Take me to your leader, Earthlings, and all?"
Mordred snorted. "They weren't nowhere near that nice and polite, but yeah. Like they really didn't just fucking belong."
I…wasn't sure how to take that. Ritsuka and Mash didn't look like they were any better off, and Rika still looked faintly surprised, like she was still processing it and hadn't quite come to grips with it yet. For once, I didn't blame her. I'd been introduced to a lot of stuff that had changed how I saw the world since I woke up in Chaldea, but the idea that aliens — or something like them, at least — had been on Earth 1500 years before Scion showed up was still unusual.
Fortunately for me, a convenient distraction decided at that moment to stomp its way through the outer edges of my swarm.
"Heads up," I said sharply as I turned towards the group lumbering our direction. "More of those automata are on the way."
Everyone refocused, the Picts forgotten for the moment. Mash's shield materialized immediately. "Master! Orders?"
"How close?" Ritsuka asked me.
"Far enough away that we could go around them, if we wanted to."
Although we didn't really know whether they had some kind of sensors built into them either, did we? It wouldn't surprise me if they did, as a method of navigating the fog, especially since they didn't seem to have traditional sensory organs as it was anyway.
"No," Ritsuka said immediately. "This is the only time anyone has to go outside and find food, right? We can't let those things hurt them just because it would be easier for us."
Not to mention it would take us longer to take a detour around them than it would to just bowl through them anyway. It wound up being better for everyone if we just kept going and took them out on our way to Soho.
"Then we'll take them out," I agreed.
We kept going, continuing the same direction and taking the same route we had been before, and as the group of automata came further into my range and touched denser regions of my anemic swarm, I sent Huginn further out to get a more human look at the things. As it turned out, it wasn't just automata in the group, because interspersed among them were also masses of twisting flesh shaped into vaguely humanoid silhouettes, with large, muscular arms, hulking torsos, and no neck to speak of. They had three, beady little protrusions on what was probably supposed to be the head that might have been eyes, if I was being particularly generous.
And at the back, lumbering after the rest with hissing hydraulics, was what I could only describe as a robot. Bulky, clunky, nowhere near as elegant as most of Dragon's works, but undeniably mechanical. Each of them carried what looked like a large meat cleaver.
Fuck. If the twisted meaty things were the grotesque homunculi, then those were the things everyone was calling Helter Skelter, weren't they? Ugh, I wished we had a better name for them.
"They have more of those robots and homunculi with them, too," I warned everyone.
"Any sign of that Assassin?" Emiya asked.
I spread out my swarm, feeling out the area as best I could, and up above, Huginn cast his gaze about, looking down with a literal bird's eye view, but no. There were no other mysterious figures skulking about in the area, either following the patrol group we were about to run into or trailing us to wait for a moment of ambush.
"None."
"Tch." Mordred scoffed. "Watch that bastard show up halfway through the fight outta fucking nowhere. Slippery sonuvabitch."
"Someone should keep an eye out, just in case," Ritsuka suggested.
"Arash?"
Arash nodded. "I'll handle it."
Emiya chuckled lowly. "I guess it does make more sense for me to handle the electronic maintenance, so to speak."
"Because you're a house-husband?" asked Rika. Emiya's cheek twitched.
"Something like that," he answered vaguely.
It wasn't much longer before we could hear the incoming group, and whatever senses or sensors they had, they seemed to detect us, too, because they sped up almost as soon as the first clunks reached our ears and came right towards us. The slap of meaty feet, the clink of fine porcelain, and the clang of bulky metal clattered across the street, and moments later, they came around a curve in the road and into sight.
There were twelve, total. Four of each, like their group had been specifically designed just for that number.
"There they are!" said Ritsuka.
"Go!" I barked.
"You don't fucking —" Mordred launched herself forwards in a flash of red lightning — "give me orders!"
Her sword sliced clean through the first automata, cleaving it from shoulder to hip, and it fell to the ground in two pieces, inert.
The others followed in her wake. Mash set herself in front of us Masters, shield held out defensively, and Emiya leapt towards the group himself, his familiar twin blades forming in his hands. He came down on one of the homunculi, slicing neatly through its flesh with a pair of ugly cuts, but all that seemed to do was make it angry, because it swayed back from the blow and lashed out with a pair of hands that were more spirals of merged tendrils than actual fingers.
But the fact I had such an easy time following them meant that they weren't anywhere near as fast or as strong as a Servant, and Emiya dodged out of the way, severing one of the arms at what would have been the elbow and then diving in for another powerful cut at the torso. Nearby, Mordred darted in and dismantled another of the automata. Even if it saw her coming, it was too slow to get out of the way, and it went down just as easily as the first.
Ironically, it was some of the first enemies in our way since Fuyuki that I would actually have been able to meaningfully damage, and there wasn't much room for me to actually try. The homunculi were hardier than the automata, but once Emiya figured out what worked on the first one, it was much faster and easier for him to take down the next.
Mordred? Mordred had it even easier. I guess it only made sense, considering her stats, but she ripped through everything in her way with ease.
Not much room wasn't the same as no room, though. I wasn't entirely sure how much my Gandr would do against something that wasn't biological, but it wasn't the only thing in my arsenal, so while Mordred and Emiya tore through the automata and homunculi like paper, I helped along the edges, using my prosthetic's phantom limb to yank them into more advantageous positions. If either of them noticed that their targets were suddenly off balance and unable to even think of dodging or pulled further into the path of their swords, they gave no indication.
For how little it was, it felt good. Meaningful. Next time, I would have to test it and see if the homunculi were as vulnerable to my bugs as people were, but without any obvious orifices to shove a swarm into, probably not.
The last to go down were the robots. The Helter Skelter. They were slower than either the homunculi or the automata, but they made up for it by being hardier. Their outer plating was less like an exoskeleton holding all of their internals together and more like armor, and while it dented and crumpled under Mordred's strength, Emiya had much less success. While she whaled away at one with her sword and Emiya tried to whittle away at another with his pair, I secreted a platoon of insects into the third and fourth, looking for vulnerabilities.
There weren't any. None that I could damage that easily, at any rate, because the wiring and the mechanisms were all metal, and none of my bugs had the jaw strength to bite through something like that on their own. If I got enough in there, I could gum up the joints…but with how conservative I had to be about my swarm, it might be a bit of a waste trying to slow down something that was already fairly slow and easy to hit.
Instead, I had Huginn sweep low, open his beak, and fire off a sizzling round from his mana cannon. I got a front row seat — two of them, in fact, because my bugs let me judge the impact — to exactly how effective it was.
'Not very,' was the answer. The metal heated up significantly where it hit, but it would take something like two dozen shots for the temperature to reach high enough to start warping the material. The plating was simply too thick.
Unfortunately, my shot also got its attention, and it broke off from lumbering towards Emiya — who was still trying to find a good weak spot on his — and Mordred — who had finished off the first one and was working through her second — to head towards us.
"I think you got its attention, Senpai!" Rika said.
"Mash!" said Ritsuka.
"Right!"
Mash leapt towards it, and they met in the middle with a clang as she brought the full weight of her shield down upon its body. It was only half as effective as one of Mordred's blows, however, and she succeeded in leaving only a large dent behind in its armor. It struck out at her in retaliation, swinging around a large cleaver that looked half its size, and Mash weathered the blow with the front of her shield.
For however sturdy they were, at least the Helter Skelter didn't seem anywhere near as physically strong, even with as much weight as they were carrying around. Mash didn't even flinch.
Huginn swooped back in and fired off another shot, distracting it, and it turned its head towards him long enough for Mash to take advantage of its inattention and land another blow with her shield. She targeted one of the joints, attempting to wedge the edge of her shield in between the head and the torso, probably trying to separate them. Even if the central processor was in the torso instead of the head, the head was where the cameras serving as its eyes were set. It was a good strategy.
Unfortunately, the gaps in the Helter Skelter's body were relatively tiny. Whoever had built them had designed them with overlapping plates, and while that made their movements stiff and stilted, it gave them enough protection that targeting the weak spots was hard for something that wasn't thin and sharp, like a blade.
Fortunately, I happened to have the solution to that problem.
I took off from the group, racing towards where Mash and the Helter Skelter were, and my free hand reached down to grasp the hilt of my Last Resort as I pulled it from its sheath.
"Senpai!" Rika cried after me. "Not again!"
"Mash!" Ritsuka called. "Protect her!"
"Yes, Master!"
Mash backed away from attacking and took a more defensive posture, and the Helter Skelter, primitive as it was, took that as a cue to go on the attack. It didn't seem to even notice me as it lifted its enormous arm again and took another swing at Mash, who blocked it again with her shield effortlessly.
Even if she hadn't had its attention, I had enough bugs inside of its body to know exactly how it was moving and how it was going to move. I could feel the mechanisms, the hydraulics compressing and decompressing, the gears grinding and churning. If my bugs had let me dodge around other capes just by having them sit on top of my enemy's limbs, then this was the equivalent of having bugs inside their muscles.
The Helter Skelter noticed me at the last second. It broke off attacking Mash to turn to me, but it was child's play to duck and weave around its clumsy attempt at a chop, and I slid behind it, flipped my grip on my knife, and plunged the tip in the small space between the head and chest. On a human, it would have been straight through the jugular vein. A flick of a switch turned on the nanothorns, and with a low hiss, they ate through the metal and the mechanisms like they were butter.
The Helter Skelter flailed. It swung its arm and cleaver around in an attempt to knock me off, but I saw it coming a mile away and jerked my knife free to avoid it, carving a smooth, nasty gash through it and severing several of the mechanisms controlling that same arm simultaneously. The flailing arm locked up, and the shoulder loosened, leaving it to fall limply and uselessly towards the ground. It swayed like a giant pendulum.
"Now, Mash!" I said as I backed away.
Mash didn't miss her cue, and with a rising shout, she slammed the edge of her shield into the gash I'd created. The Helter Skelter teetered over and then fell backwards onto the stone street with a thunderous thud. Mash followed it, putting all her weight and strength behind her shield until the groaning metal gave way and its head popped off and rolled away.
The body still moved. The remaining arm waved about impotently, smacking the ground and doing nothing except scuffing the stonework. The legs wagged about, like it was trying and failing to climb back to its feet.
Another pass of my Last Resort severed the mechanisms controlling the other shoulder, and that fell impotently onto the road, too, leaving me free and clear to kneel down, shove my knife deep into the internals, and keep going until I hit the vital processor at the center of its chest. The instant the nanothorns chewed threw that, the whole thing locked up and stopped moving.
Whoever had made these things wasn't as elegant as Dragon and hadn't packed anywhere near as much hardware into them. They weren't even on the same level as her lowest tech suits. But I could at least give them credit for having figured out that it was better to place the central control unit for a robot in its chest instead of its head. The head was just too obvious a target.
Humans were like that. We tended to think of things that looked anything like us as being like us. We saw faces in random rock formations and patterns in the snow. Putting the central control of a robot in its head was the thing that made the most sense to people, so putting it in the chest, which could be better protected and wasn't as obvious, was the smarter choice.
With the Helter Skelter defeated and disabled, I stood and stepped back, using the bugs still inside it to keep searching through the internals. Looking for other weak points. This thing had to run on some kind of engine or battery or something, so if that was easier to target than its "brain," it would be easier to take down in the future.
'Easier.' As though that hadn't been easy enough as it was. The automata were a bit too fast and nimble to try that on, and the homunculi were a bit too dangerous until I could figure out how to distract them with my bugs, but the Helter Skelter? I could probably have taken it out on my own. Mash just removed any difficulty there had been to it.
Any sign of the Assassin? I asked Arash.
None, he answered. If they're hanging around somewhere, they're doing too good a job staying hidden. It doesn't look like they're going to ambush us.
Or maybe they were just cautious of taking on four Servants at once, especially without a clear shot at any of the Masters. Given that I couldn't find anyone out of the ordinary with my swarm, however? I was willing to bet they weren't even here.
At that moment, the final Helter Skelter went down with a weighty thud, shaking the stonework beneath my feet, and Mash reported, "E-enemy combatants defeated, Master!"
"Good job, Mash!" Ritsuka called over to her.
She smiled. "Thank you, Senpai!"
"Good job?" Mordred echoed. She whirled about, snarling. "You fucking call that a good job?"
Mash blinked, bewildered. "I-I'm sorry?"
Mordred swung her sword around, pointing the tip at Mash, and I stepped back cautiously, watching the scene unfold as my mind raced through where this could be going.
There'd been talk during my lessons about how Servants couldn't truly escape the destiny of the Heroic Spirits that they were formed from, but… Did that mean that Mordred would be so trapped by her own legend that she couldn't help turning on her allies?
"That," said Mordred, voice barely more than a growl, "that just makes it worse! You two, you're similar enough that it pisses me the fuck off, but even with that bastard inside of you, this is the best you've got?"
Ritsuka, opposite to me, came closer, as though to bolster Mash with his presence. Rika wasn't far behind him, and she was watching the whole thing like I was, eyes wide and smile completely gone. Behind Mordred, Emiya was tensed up, too, fingers curled tight around his pair of swords.
"Is something wrong?" Ritsuka asked carefully.
"Yeah," said Mordred. "That was pathetic. Pathetic! Even with just that shield, that bastard would've taken those things out like it was nothing, and Mash couldn't even handle one on her own! You telling me you don't see anything wrong with that?"
"I'm sorry," Mash said miserably. "The Servant who entrusted these powers to me, he didn't teach me anything about how to use them or even tell me his true name."
Mordred waved that off with a scoff. "Of course he didn't! Handing you the answers just stunts your growth! But you said you've already gone through four of these Singularities, right? You should be stronger than this by now!"
"Hey, she's fought plenty of super strong stuff!" Rika said indignantly. "Like giant tentacle monsters! Especially the giant tentacle monsters! She's plenty strong!"
"Plenty strong ain't gonna cut it!" said Mordred. "You don't even know how to properly use that Noble Phantasm yet, do you? You can't just react to shit that comes your way, you have to be one step ahead of both yourself and your enemy at all times!"
A flash of red lightning. A blur of motion and sound as the street cracked and splintered. Mordred vanished from her spot, suddenly in front of Mash, sword swinging, and Mash only barely reacted in time to parry the blow and send that sword off course.
Paradoxically, Mordred grinned. "Nice! That's a little more like it, Shieldy!"
"What are you doing?" Ritsuka demanded. "Mordred!"
"Stay right there, Ritsuka!" barked Mordred. "You, too, all of the rest of you! This is between me and Mash, so don't you dare interfere!"
My eyes narrowed. Arash?
Yeah? he replied.
You said it's something she has to figure out on her own, right? I asked him.
…Yeah, he answered, almost reluctantly. The way she said it was a little blunt, but Mordred's point isn't wrong. Mash won't reach her full potential if the answers are just handed to her.
But it looked like I wasn't the only one who was impatient about the issue. It was just that the person forcing the issue happened to be someone who knew Galahad better than I did, and was therefore more qualified to handle it than me.
More qualified. Mordred, the knight who betrayed King Arthur and Camelot and set it all on the path to destruction. As weird as it sounded, it was the truth.
"Sir Mordred…" Mash muttered, brow furrowed and mouth set in a grim line.
Keep a close eye on things, I decided. We'll only intervene if it looks like she's in real danger.
Got it, Arash confirmed.
Fuck, if it didn't make me feel like a complete bitch, though.
"Come on," said Mordred. "Put up that shield, Mash. I'm gonna batter it to pieces until you learn exactly how you should be using it!"
She grinned. A savage thing of hunger and teeth, like a lion about to pounce on a gazelle and rip it apart.
"By the time I'm done with you, even that bastard will have to look at you and nod his goddamn head in approval!"
— o.0.O.O.0.o —
This chapter underwent a name change as I got closer to the end, once it became clear that we weren't going to make it as far as I originally thought we were. That fight scene wound up taking up a lot more space than I thought it would, but on the plus side, Taylor got to alleviate some of her frustration about being on the sidelines. A happy accident?
I consulted Master Oogway, and he has informed me that there are no accidents.
I'm not sure I should be name-dropping you-know-who just yet, because not everyone knows the secret and that secret was a big hullabaloo in canon, so I thought about editing it out for the general release. However, playing the pronoun game until, what, Camelot? That felt like it would get really old really fast.
This story and this chapter brought to you by my wonderful supporters, whose kindness and generosity have made it possible to devote so much of my time and attention to writing, especially Eric, s22132, AbyssalApsu, and Alias 2v10. You guys are absolute legends. To show my gratitude, they had the chance to read this and upcoming chapters before the public release. You can find out more HERE.
And now that the shameless plugging is out of the way... Chapter CXXXIII: Fairy Tale Ending
I didn't really like the idea of just letting Mordred whale on Mash until she was satisfied that she'd accomplished whatever her actual goal was. Forgetting the matter of trust — and it wasn't an insignificant issue, even if Mordred hadn't really given us a reason to mistrust her before this — it felt a little too much like bullying. Like I was standing back and letting Mordred pick on Mash because Mash didn't measure up to the Heroic Spirit living rent free inside her body, and sitting on the sidelines refusing to do something was a thousand times worse than sitting on the sidelines unable to do anything.
There were a few things that made it easier, though. Bearable. One, the fact that we were halfway through clearing these Singularities and Mash still didn't have much more than a basic grasp of the Heroic Spirit inside of her. From her words, Mordred seemed intent on addressing that. Two, neither one of them was taking this one-hundred percent seriously. The fact that I could still follow the action spoke to that more than anything else.
It wasn't to say that Mash wasn't trying her best and Mordred wasn't pushing her. Both of those things were happening. But they weren't moving as fast as I knew Mordred at least could and no one was going for killing blows with any real intent to harm.
If I forgot about how this had started and what Mordred had said beforehand, then it would have looked like a sparring match. Or maybe a lesson.
The only trouble with that was that I didn't know what would mean the lesson was over. Was Mordred just waiting for something only she could see, or was she waiting for Mash to land a clean hit? First blood, as it were?
Beside me, Arash remained calm and stoic. He hadn't yet seen anything that would require him to jump into the fight. In the back, watching just as intently, Emiya clutched to his twin swords, eyes wide open and unblinking. I didn't know if he had come to the same conclusion on his own, or if Rika had given him silent orders not to intervene, but the fact that she wasn't screaming at him to get off his ass and do something said that, at the very least, he'd given her a speech about why this needed to happen.
They broke apart, and the fight entered a brief lull. Mordred grinned, still raring to go, and Mash stood opposite her, chest heaving.
"Come on!" Mordred jeered. "You can do better than that! That asshole has just been sitting around doing nothing, hasn't he? Get him up and put him to work already!"
Mash said nothing, staring back with brow furrowed and mouth drawn into a tight line.
"Or maybe…" Mordred's eyes wandered over to Ritsuka. "Ya need a bit of motivation, huh?"
Red lightning crackled over her limbs, and beside me, Arash tensed, getting ready to intervene — Mordred appeared to teleport, crossing the distance in what looked like a single step, sword raised to deliver an overhand chop. Ritsuka gasped, throwing himself out of the way just a fraction of a second too slow.
"What —" Emiya barked, jerking into motion himself.
"Master!"
But Mash beat everyone there, body aglow with power as she put everything she had into a tackle that slammed into Mordred head on. Mordred was thrown away, tumbling down the road with a clatter and bending the post of the streetlight that stopped her almost a full ninety degrees.
Emiya descended on her immediately.
"— the hell are you doing?"
He pinned her, foot pressing down on her breastplate, and he rested the edges of his blades threateningly against her throat.
"You lunatic!"
Rika and I were the only ones who didn't panic. Maybe because we'd both seen this tactic before, way back when, when Cúchulainn used his Noble Phantasm to force Mash into using hers, as incomplete as it was. Targeting Ritsuka was the only thing that had worked back then — and frustratingly, it seemed to be the only thing that still worked now.
"Master!"
The instant Mordred was out of the way, Mash turned back to Ritsuka, worried, doing her best to keep both him and Mordred within her field of view.
"Are you okay, Senpai?"
"That," Ritsuka groused as he picked himself back up, "wasn't any more fun the second time than it was the first."
"Second?" Arash and Emiya echoed simultaneously.
Over on the ground, Mordred burst out laughing. "Knew that would do the trick! Geez, Mash, you sure made me work for that one, didn't you?"
Emiya's brow furrowed, and he looked between the two of them for a second or two as he put the pieces together. Then he shook his head, heaved out a disgusted sigh, and pushed himself back and off of Mordred's body. Mordred climbed to her feet as though nothing had happened. She rolled her shoulders.
"Back in Fuyuki, the Caster we teamed up with, Cúchulainn, he tried something similar, to similar effect," I explained for the benefit of Emiya and Arash.
"Fuck," Mordred said sourly. "You mean I wasn't the first to have an idea like that? Man, that blows. Some other fucker stole my idea!"
"At least you didn't use your Noble Phantasm," Rika said blithely. "I still have flashbacks to Cu's giant, burning manwood."
I grimaced and Ritsuka groaned. "If you were going to try and help, couldn't you have done it during the fight, in an actually helpful way?" he asked her.
"I mean, this was a shounen power up sequence," Rika reasoned. Like it was obvious. "I didn't want to distract anyone and interrupt the power of narrative mumbo-jumbo. And hey!" She gestured at Mash. "It worked, didn't it?"
Putting aside the questionable phrasing, it actually had. Not just as some internal thing, like Mash had unlocked a font of knowledge and skill she hadn't had before, but externally, because she actually had more armor on, now. At her wrists and knees, and her chestplate actually covered her stomach now instead of leaving a glaring spot open. Some of the holes had been filled in.
It still wasn't a full set, not like Mordred's. It didn't cover anywhere near as much of her body as I thought it should. But it was more than she'd had five minutes ago, and that was…something.
Had Mordred known this was going to happen?
"Oh." Mash looked down at herself, twisting and turning so she could check her back, too. "I…suppose it did, didn't it?"
Beep-beep!
"What the hell is going on?" Marie demanded immediately. "Mordred! Just what did you think you were doing to Mash!"
"Oof! Don't glare at me like that!" Mordred said, head ducked and grinning sheepishly. "Yeah, I know, I went a little overboard! Geez! I'm sorry, okay? I just didn't have any better ideas!"
"Not attacking Mash would have been a better one!" Marie rebuked her. "Or targeting Ritsuka either!"
"Hey, hey, it was a mock fight!" Mordred said defensively. "No one was ever in any real danger, and Mash knew it, too! Right, Mash?"
Mash sighed. "For the most part." And then, she added sternly, "B-but going after Senpai, I really thought you meant it! You scared me!"
"Ah, geez," said Mordred. "I wasn't gonna actually hurt him that bad. Just a broken bone or two, you know?"
"That's not good either!" Marie and Mash said together in stereo.
"Alright!" said Mordred. "Alright! I'm sorry! Stop yelling at me, will you?"
"Director," I said diplomatically, and Marie's attention turned my way. "Considering the circumstances, I think we can overlook this incident." I turned to Mordred and pinned her with a hard stare. "On the understanding that it doesn't happen a second time."
Mordred scoffed. "What, like I'm gonna make a promise like that? As long as Shieldy here doesn't backslide or start moping, I won't need to kick her ass into gear again. Got that, Mash?" she added in Mash's direction.
"O-of course!" Mash agreed immediately.
Marie scowled thunderously, but since it was me who said so, she deferred to my judgment. "Fine. Just this once, I'm going to overlook it." Her glare could have frozen a steak. "But if it happens again, don't hesitate to reprimand her however you have to! We're not so desperate for allies that we can afford to make allowances for an unreliable one!"
"Oof!" Mordred said, clutching her gut with one hand. "Man, you sure don't pull your punches, do you, Director Lady? If you were here in person, I might have to actually challenge you to a duel!"
"L-let's avoid those!" Romani said from behind Marie. He leaned over her so he could get his face into view, something that Marie didn't look particularly happy about. "After all, we're all allies here, aren't we? A-and it's not like that, uh, mock fight didn't have any results! It's actually pretty incredible, when you look at it!"
"It is?" Mash and Ritsuka both said.
"What kinda gains are we looking at here, Doc?" asked Rika.
"For starters, the quality of her Saint Graph has doubled," Romani answered, and everyone with the exception of Mordred looked at him with surprise. That little mock fight had done that much for her?
"Really?" asked Mash. "I suppose I do feel a lot stronger than I did before."
"Mash went Super Saiyan!" Rika announced — to groans from Emiya and her brother and a curious look from Arash, who was just as clueless as I was.
Mash tilted her head quizzically. "Super Saiyan?"
"Yeah." Romani nodded. "Her magical energy output has increased, too, and her parameters have all been adjusted upwards. Not a full rank-up across the board, but pretty close, and two of her skills have increased in potency as well. Man, Da Vinci is going to have a total field day with this data!"
If we could expect increases like that with any consistency, then I would have been happy to have everyone go around having mock fights all over the place. That was a big change for such a little fight.
"Wow," said Ritsuka. "So it actually did work that well, huh? I guess Mordred knows what she's doing, after all."
Mordred huffed. "Of course I do! I'm a Knight of the Round Table, you know!"
"But I still don't know the true name or real Noble Phantasm of the Heroic Spirit inside of me," said Mash.
"Course not," said Mordred as though it should have been obvious. "And even if you did, that bastard isn't one to just hand his full power over. You've still got a long way to go before he'll be convinced you earned it, you're just a lot closer now than you were before."
Because she stood up to Mordred and protected Ritsuka? I…wasn't sure how any of that connected to Mash proving herself to the guy riding around in her head, but then, I didn't know what sort of metric he was judging her by to begin with.
"I…suppose this fiasco wasn't a total waste of everyone's time and energy," Marie admitted grudgingly. She might have been more comfortable getting her teeth pulled. "Still!"
"I got it the first time," Mordred said, sounding more annoyed now. "You keep harping on it, and you're gonna piss me off."
Unfortunately, this seemed like a situation unique to Mash, and a one-off at that. And the more time we spent doing that, the less time we had to get to Soho, investigate the magical book, and get back to Jekyll's apartment.
"Was there anything else you needed, Director?" I asked her.
She frowned, but seemed to take the hint. "Not at this time. Continue your investigation. And remember, even if we can't contact you through the fog, we can still monitor your movements and your condition without any trouble. We'll know if anything happens!"
"Right!" Mash and Ritsuka nodded.
Rika snapped off a salute. "Roger that, Boss Lady!"
The connection cut and the hologram winked out.
"So?" said Mordred as soon as Marie was gone. "How are you feeling, Mash? That little tiff knock something loose, or is that asshole still being stingy? That's what all of that shit they were just peddling means, right?"
Mash sighed. "Yes, it did help. It's…hard to describe, but… It's almost like…" She smiled. "A shackle on my heart was removed. Thank you, Sir Mordred."
"Ah, shut up!" said Mordred. "It was just pissing me right the fuck off, that was all, you calling yourself a Demi-Servant and going around like that! 'S long as you're good now, let's just move on, yeah?"
"Yeah," I said before anyone else could cut in and drag things out longer. Emiya in particular looked like there was something on his tongue that he was trying his hardest not to say. "We have a little over three hours to reach Soho, find out what's going on with this magic book, and get back to Jekyll's apartment. Sir Mordred, since you know the way best…"
She waved it off. "Yeah, yeah, I know. Let's go see what all of the hubbub about this magical book is about, so we can get back to fixing this whole mess."
And so we did. With Mordred in front, we made our way towards Soho, walking through the streets of London.
It was tempting to pull what we had in Orléans and have our Servants pick us up and carry us, or maybe call up Aífe and have her take us there in her chariot, but the latter was out immediately because of the lack of room. It might have been possible with Mordred in spirit form, but she couldn't exactly give us directions like that without a contract, and fitting five of us into that one chariot would be a tight squeeze.
The instant this whole magic book thing was resolved and we had a minute to relax a little bit, I was going to push the issue of at least a temporary contract with Mordred and Caster. It had screwed us over one too many times before.
As for the former, that had its own problems. For one, it didn't seem anywhere near as straight a shot here as it did there. City streets could follow some fairly neat lines, but they could also be labyrinthine when you weren't familiar with them, and the only one here who had any real idea where we were going was Mordred. For another, those twisty turns would also make it supremely uncomfortable to take them at speed, and no one wanted us Masters losing our breakfast from the turbulence.
At least this wasn't like Orléans or Septem. Walking was still "the long way," but it wasn't hours, days, or weeks of walking, and that made it easier and less of a problem.
We did run into another patrol group on our way there, but they were taken care of just as easily as we did the first group and dispatched quickly. They weren't even all that much of a speed bump on the metaphorical road, and they were more annoying to have to step over their remains than they were actually fighting them.
There was the question of if they reported in or if the enemy would notice their absence, but I wasn't sure they had the intelligence for the former or that they were important enough for the latter. To have made this many in just a few days — provided they hadn't had weeks or months to set up the preparations and only set them in motion recently — they had to have some method of mass production, whatever it was.
I suppose that was fitting for the Industrial Revolution. Annoying, but fitting.
Our arrival in the Soho area happened without any fanfare to a section of the city that looked much like the rest of it. If it wasn't for the people I could see huddled in their apartments with my bugs, the whole place would have seemed abandoned, like a ghost town.
"Well, here we are," said Mordred. "This is Soho. Where do we wanna look first?"
A good question.
"Did you find anything strange on your way to Frankenstein's mansion yesterday?" I asked.
Emiya huffed. "If only it were that easy."
"We took a different route to the mansion, and there wasn't anything strange until we got there and fought Mephistopheles," Ritsuka answered. "Plus, we don't know when exactly this magical tome appeared, right? So we might have been on our way back when it started attacking people."
Both of those were good points. It would have been only too convenient if we could have crossed out the route they took to Frankenstein's mansion as already having been investigated, but without knowing the exact time and place of the first case — or even the first reported case — that was unfortunately too much to ask for.
My bugs would make looking around a little easier, but if this magical book returned to being an ordinary book when it wasn't attacking people, then I probably wouldn't be able to tell it apart from any other book. The only thing that might give it away would be its size.
A small child? Most books weren't anywhere near that big. But "most" wasn't "none." I'd keep an eye out as best I could as we went forward.
"Well, Doctor Jekyll said that he heard about this thing from one of his collaborators, right?" Rika suggested. "Maybe we should check in with him, then. Or her. They're supposed to be in an antique bookstore somewhere around here, aren't they?"
"No nickname for Jekyll?" Emiya teased.
"It's so hard!" she complained melodramatically. "I can't come up with any good ones! Two-Face is just mean, and Glasses is too generic! It needs to be zippy and witty and nothing I think of works!"
"A whole new take on first world problems," Ritsuka joked. Rika stuck her tongue out at him.
It was as good a suggestion as any. Without a "scene of the crime" to check out and a trail to otherwise follow, the next best thing, as my investigative training with the Wards told me, was to talk to the witnesses or informants who originally reached out. In this case, Jekyll's collaborator. I wasn't going to hold my breath, but he should at least be able to tell us a little more about what was going on.
"A good idea, Rika," I said, and Rika's face broke out into a smile at the compliment. "Let's talk to this collaborator and see what he has to say about this magical book."
So we set off to find this antique bookstore, and as we walked, I explored as much of the surrounding buildings as I could without spooking anyone inside them. A lot of them were mostly vacant, it turned out, because they were apartments sat atop businesses, so the bottom floor was a bakery or a tailor or a restaurant or a bar — a pub, as the British called it.
These people, I think, were the best off out of everyone in the city. They had better access to food, and although it would hurt their business in the long run, the long run shouldn't matter with us there to fix the Singularity.
I came across several victims in the area, or what I assumed were victims. They were still and unresponsive, but when I had a few bugs cautiously investigate, I couldn't find any obvious wounds or injuries. It was like they'd simply fallen asleep and wouldn't wake up. Like something out of a fairy tale.
She will prick her finger on the spindle of a spinning wheel and fall into a sleep like death. Only it wasn't Sleeping Beauty, but something else entirely.
A thought occurred to me, and I paused in my stride only a moment before continuing on. Arash glanced at me, but no one else seemed to notice.
Charles Perrault wrote the original fairy tale we knew as Sleeping Beauty, one of many he penned. He didn't come up with it, because there had been several traditions using the same basic framework, but his combined version, the one the Brothers Grimm later used — much like Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen — was the one best remembered and the version Disney based the movie on. I wasn't sure that was enough on its own, but…
P, B, and M. And I'd said before that one of our mystery culprits could very well be an author famous for writing fantasy. Charles Perrault would definitely qualify. A Noble Phantasm that enacted scenes from the fairy tales he wrote would be all too fitting for this situation.
Something wrong? Arash asked me suddenly.
My lips drew tight. A hunch. I might know who the Heroic Spirit behind this magic book is.
He glanced at me out of the corner of his eye again. Oh?
Keep your eyes peeled for fairy tale creatures, I told him. If I'm right, then the book is just a tool for summoning them, and the man controlling it might not be anywhere near here.
The question then would be whether he was actually controlling it at all or if his Noble Phantasm's whimsical nature would give it some degree of independence. One way or the other, it was likely we'd have to find out firsthand.
And the others? Arash asked.
If he knows we're onto him, we might spook him, I reasoned. If we can secure the bookstore, then we can discuss it there.
He gave a small, almost imperceptible nod.
Our second day, and we might already be confronting one of the three masterminds behind this thing. Ever since we met Aífe in Septem, things had started moving much faster than they had in Orléans, but this would be even faster than usual.
It didn't take too long to reach the bookstore, and from the outside, it looked about as abandoned as the rest of the city did. The windows were shuttered and the door was shut, but that didn't stop me from seeing into the rooms within using my swarm. Also like much of Soho, the place was mostly vacant, and there were only two people inside. One was an elderly man sleeping peacefully in the apartment on the second floor, and down on the ground floor —
My brow furrowed. A kid? Locked up in a bookstore?
As Huginn alighted along the rooftop across the street, Mordred wasted no time in pushing the door open and charging inside like she owned the place.
"Yo!" she shouted into the dark building. "We're looking for someone working with a guy named Doc Jekyll! Anyone in here know anything about that?"
"Finally."
The kid I'd noticed a minute ago hopped down off of a chair that was too tall for him, tucking a book that must have been half his size under one scrawny arm. He looked maybe ten years old, if that.
"You idiots sure took your time getting here, didn't you? I was getting sick of waiting around for you to show up. I was so bored I even read an absolutely atrocious novel series, and let me tell you, the author deserved to be tarred and feathered. That plot was a crime against humanity."
But the voice that came out of his mouth was the smoothest baritone I'd ever heard. He could have read the phonebook and had women swooning.
"Holy cow," said Rika, eyes wide. "He's pouring honey in my ears, but all my eyes see is jailbait!"
"What?" said Mordred, confused. "Hey, brat, you're not the only one here, are you? Don't tell me that you're the collaborator!"
"In point of fact, I am not," said the boy. This was one of the rare times I was going to agree with Rika, because the incongruity of such a deep voice coming out of an actual child was off-putting. "The only one here, that is. The elderly shopowner is asleep in the apartment above us — one of the victims of the magical tome that I'm sure Jekyll must have told you about."
"Oh," said Mash kindly. "Is he your grandfather? Don't worry, we'll find out how to save him."
"There's no relation," the boy denied immediately. "He was just kind enough to give me a place to stay while I worked. I've no more attachment to him than that debt of gratitude. That's all."
"Don't tell me," Emiya said. "You're the collaborator, aren't you?"
"That's right," said the boy. "I'm one of Jekyll's collaborators, and I was the one who alerted him to the situation occurring here in Soho. Considering the circumstances, you sorry lot must be the rescue squad he sent. What a motley crew you are."
He adjusted his thickly rimmed glasses with one tiny finger, and it only served to make him look even younger.
"Although I suppose four Knight classes make for quite the cavalry," he allowed, and it took some effort to keep the grimace off of my face. Was that pun intentional? "I was expecting that Caster to come along, though. Someone like him would have an easier time seeing through the circumstances, such as they are."
He didn't really have the presence of one, but…
"You're a Servant, too."
A ripple of surprise washed over the rest of the group. The only one who didn't look at all surprised was Arash.
"Wait, really?" said Rika.
"That's right," the boy said again. He smirked at me. "You have a sharp intuition, don't you, Miss?"
"But I can't sense him at all!" Mash protested. "Even though he's right in front of me, I can't tell that he's a Servant!"
"Hey," Mordred said, eyeing him suspiciously. "You're not another Assassin, are you?"
An Assassin that revealed himself to us when I was the only one who even knew he was there?
"Don't be absurd," said the boy. "Technically, I'm a Caster, but I'm not one of those mage types that throws around magic spells. The reason why you can't sense my presence is because I have no combat aptitude at all. I'm just an author. The only thing I'm good for is writing a book."
So I was right. Shakespeare set the precedent, but there was nothing to say that other authors couldn't be Caster class Servants, too. I wasn't sure it really fit, considering they didn't seem to have much if any magical aptitude, but I wasn't sure what other class they would fit into either. Shakespeare had been quite clear that the last place he wanted to be was the battlefield.
"Just like Shakespeare," Ritsuka murmured.
"So there are other authors summoned in the Caster class," Mash said thoughtfully. "Um, if it's not too rude of me to ask, could you tell us your true name?"
"It's not like it puts me at a disadvantage to tell you," the boy said sensibly. "If you got it in your head to kill me, the only thing I could do is run away. It's the same reason why I haven't tried to deal with this magical tome myself. So — yes. My name is Andersen. Hans Christian Andersen. If you want to know anything else, I suggest reading one of my books."
Mash gasped. "Oh! H-Hans Christian Andersen, one of the most famous fairy tale authors in the world! You wrote stories like The Little Mermaid and The Little Match Girl!"
"So you've heard of me, after all," the boy — Andersen — said with a nod. "If you're going to ask for an autograph, I'll save you the time and tell you to come back later."
"Oh," said Mash, "um, n-no, I wasn't… I mean, I've read a fair few fairy tales, yes, b-but I wouldn't say they were my favorite thing to read…"
Andersen didn't seem particularly bothered by this. "Just as well. We have business to deal with, don't we?"
We did.
"The magical tome?" I suggested.
"Right," said Ritsuka. "We were hoping you could tell us more about what's going on?"
"What more is there to say?" said Andersen. "It's a magical tome that has taken to attacking the people of Soho and putting them into an enchanted sleep. Already, a large portion of Soho's citizenry has fallen victim, and it's only been active since late yesterday. It moved fast."
"Half the people of Soho in only a single night?" said Arash. "That is fast. Although…you said it hasn't killed anyone yet, right?"
"No," the boy answered. "That would defeat the purpose, wouldn't it? Of course it hasn't killed anyone yet. That might change if those people don't wake up in time, but the goal isn't murder in the first place, although, in a way, it wouldn't be wrong to say it's seeking out sustenance."
"Sustenance?" Rika parroted, looking grossed out. "What, like it feeds on dreams?"
"El-Melloi II said that eating people's souls is a way for Servants and other spiritual beings to gain energy," Ritsuka said. "Is it trying to build up energy for something?"
"You're on the right track, but you've stopped at the wrong station," said Andersen. "Tell me, why do you think it's a book in the first place? What reason would it have for appearing like that?"
My brow furrowed. "You're saying that it's hiding its true form."
As a matter of conserving power, or so that it could better blend in? As much as a magical book could blend in, at any rate.
"I'm saying that it doesn't have a true form," Andersen countered. "Of course not. The book itself is a Reality Marble. That's why, even if that book was right here in front of you, nothing you did would affect it at all."
"A Reality Marble?" Mash gasped.
Was that even possible?
"Wait, aren't those supposed to be, like, super rare?" said Rika. "As in, there's only a handful of mages who ever figured it out?"
I looked at Emiya. He grimaced and shook his head. "I can't speak about any but my own. I only know the basics of how they work in general and how Unlimited Blade Works functions in specific."
"You're still thinking of it the wrong way," said Andersen. "I didn't say that the book has a Reality Marble, I said that it is one. Its entire existence is predicated upon the world that exists inside of it."
"Stop dicking around!" Mordred finally snapped. "What the fuck does this all mean and why does it matter?"
"You mean you can't figure it out on your own?" Andersen jeered. "Come, now. I've given you all the clues you need, you troglodyte. Surely you can at least put them all together by yourself, can't you?"
"Why, you…!" Mordred snarled, and she made to lunge at Andersen, but Mash put herself between them and held her back.
"Out of the way, Shieldy!" said Mordred. "Forget about that stupid book, I'm gonna wring his little neck, first!"
"W-wait!" Mash said. "Sir Mordred, please, stop! I-I know it might be frustrating, but he's our ally!"
A frustrating one, but an ally nonetheless. I couldn't say I appreciated his being so roundabout with this stuff, but…
"I don't care!" said Mordred.
A book that was a Reality Marble. A Reality Marble was an inner world based upon the owner's world view. This book appeared seemingly at random, and it had gone around putting people to sleep because it needed them for some reason. Something related to magical energy, but not, specifically, for the purposes of eating their souls. It wasn't trying to murder anyone.
The part I kept getting stuck on was the fact it was a Reality Marble. How? Why? Normally — inasmuch as you could apply that term to them — a Reality Marble was a reflection of the wielder. Their inner self, taken to its furthest extremes, to the point where they built an entire world around it. The manifestation of the core of their being, supplanting reality itself.
Reflection. Inner self. Supplanting. A Reality Marble that was an existence unto itself, invulnerable because it was choosing the form of a book.
Was…that even possible?
"It's a Servant," I said.
Everyone stopped and turned to look at me. Andersen grinned.
"Like I said," he replied. "You have a sharp intuition, don't you, Miss?"
"Hold on," said Rika, "I feel like you just said something really ridiculous! Hot Pops would probably be losing his shit right now!"
"Because these circumstances are ridiculous," said Anderson. "But — you're only half right. The reason it appears as a book, the reason it's invulnerable in that state, the reason why it's putting the people to sleep — they're all the same. The book, as it is, is just a clump of magical energy. It cannot manifest a physical form — a body — without a Master to serve as its reflection. Once it has found someone to be its Master, it will become a fully fledged Servant, and it will be vulnerable."
It was a good thing Marie wasn't on the line right now. This was already trying my patience and stretching my disbelief, and I didn't need her here right now sputtering about how impossible that was.
"Why didn't you just say all that in the first place?" Mordred complained.
"Do you start reading a book at the end?" Andersen shot back. "Beginning with the conclusion is the work of an amateur!"
"Fuck you!" Mordred snapped back.
Arash, thankfully, got things back on track. "Do you have any idea where this book is now?"
"None," said Andersen. "It was here, in this very bookstore, for a time, but it slipped away in the middle of the night. If you'd gotten here sooner, you could have dealt with it then."
"Maybe," Ritsuka allowed, "but maybe not, too. If we had come last night, we might have been too tired to fight it at our best."
"Tch." Mordred scoffed and looked away.
"I would suggest, however, checking further west," said Andersen. "No doubt, by now, it's already exhausted all of its options in this area of Soho and moved on. If you're lucky, you might catch it in the act."
As much as he could, as small and young-looking as he was, he looked down his nose at us.
"Do try not to miss it, this time. It would be a waste for you to come all the way here for nothing."
— o.0.O.O.0.o —
So once again, a scene of this chapter ballooned a little bit and kept me from going quite as far as I wanted to, but I'm going to leave the title as-is this time. It fits well enough with what happens.
It really is ridiculous, when you think about it, that Mash's Saint Graph advances just from a little spar with Mordred. But, it's one of those things I don't have much of a better way of dealing with in London. You-know-who showing up at the end of the Singularity might have worked as a good moment ahead of Camelot, but since that moment might not come as I piece together the rest of this arc, it's hard to rely on it.
To be clear, I have it tentatively slotted. But only tentatively. The catalyst that allows it to happen in canon might be avoided, depending on whether or not I can sell the idea when we get to it.
This story and this chapter brought to you by my wonderful supporters, whose kindness and generosity have made it possible to devote so much of my time and attention to writing, especially Eric, s22132, AbyssalApsu, and Alias 2v10. You guys are absolute legends. To show my gratitude, they had the chance to read this and upcoming chapters before the public release. You can find out more HERE.
And now that the shameless plugging is out of the way... Chapter CXXXIV: Queen's Gambit
We left the bookstore without as much as we'd been hoping to come away with. Not, having said that, that I'd been expecting to have all of the answers handed to us quite so quickly or easily, but it would have been convenient if Andersen had been able to give us more concrete directions or a more specific place to start looking than "further west."
That much, at least, felt familiar. "Convenient" and I generally weren't on speaking terms.
"So I'm not the only one who noticed that he didn't actually tell us how to beat the book thing, right?" Rika asked once the door had closed behind us.
So she'd caught that, too, had she?
"No, you're not."
"Maybe he didn't actually know," Ritsuka suggested.
"Betcha he didn't," Mordred agreed sourly.
"The only way to beat something that doesn't have a natural form is to give it one, huh," Emiya drawled. "For an author, that's a surprisingly insightful conclusion about something the average magus would struggle with."
"It really isn't a natural conclusion to come to, is it?" said Mash. She sighed.
"Fou," the little gremlin commiserated. It pawed at her cheek like it was comforting her.
Yet another moment that made me wonder exactly how intelligent it was.
I checked my communicator for the local time to find we only had about two and a half hours left before the fog started to roll back in. We'd already used up almost half of our allotted time, and the rest of it was only going to continue to tick away.
"We might as well start looking," I said. "We only have an hour and a half before we need to start thinking about finding a place to stay or making our way back to Jekyll's."
Mordred scoffed, but she went along with the rest of us as we started west, towards the further end of Soho, the only lead we had right now on where to find this mysterious Reality Marble book. I still thought Marie would flip out once we got to that part of the report — or, depending on how closely she was monitoring things, might be already — and I could imagine Da Vinci complaining about how that wasn't how things were supposed to work.
The last two years had been a lot of that for me, and even the last four had featured a lot of stuff that upended everything I thought I knew about the world, but even I could admit that we were running into more of it now than ever before.
Back in the bookstore, Andersen waited until we'd gone halfway up the block before vanishing. I was pretty sure I knew exactly where he had gone.
If he wanted to follow us, then fine. But if he thought he was being sneaky about it, he was in for a rude surprise later on.
"So the only way for this book to gain a physical form we can actually damage is for it to find a Master," Arash thought aloud. "Do you think he wanted us to help it find one, or has it already found one?"
"He didn't talk about it like it had," said Mash. "But he didn't offer any suggestions for whether we should help it or not."
"Seems kinda mean, if you ask me," said Rika. "I dunno if a book can have feelings, but I'd be pretty upset if a bunch of jerks showed up and helped me find a friend just so they could do me in."
It really depended on its temperament. Andersen had said it wasn't malicious, but the fact that it was causing as much damage as it was without intending to hurt anyone was a problem of its own. Something that hurt people because it didn't recognize good from bad was just as dangerous as someone who could and did it anyway, and while that didn't mean it was deserving of death, it didn't mean we would necessarily have the option to attempt reforming it.
"We might not have a choice," I pointed out. "You're right, we don't know if this thing can have feelings, but if it's belligerent, then we'll have to deal with it like a threat."
"Maybe Andersen meant for one of us to become its Master," Ritsuka put forth. "Two birds with one stone, right?"
I wondered about that. If that was his plan, I wasn't sure why he hadn't come out and said it. Then again, he'd been painfully obtuse about revealing the facts of what it was and how it worked to begin with, so maybe he'd intended for us to figure it out ourselves in the first place.
I hated what it might say about other authors summoned as Servants that both of the two we'd encountered so far were some degree of insufferable. Never meet your heroes, right? Even if I'd already had enough experience with that sort of thing that it shouldn't have been surprising, I couldn't help being disappointed.
"Maybe," I allowed. "It depends on how much it's willing to cooperate. We might not even be able to communicate with it."
"A talking book really would be a new one, even for me," Emiya said with a slight smirk.
"Can't say I've ever encountered that sort of thing before either," Arash agreed.
"You guys wouldn'ta lasted five minutes in Britain," Mordred commented.
Emiya arched an eyebrow and made a show of looking around. "Technically…"
"Shaddup," said Mordred, annoyed. "You know exactly what I mean!"
If what she had said earlier was anything to go by, I wasn't sure she was entirely wrong. It wasn't like I didn't have my own experience with "aliens," but I still hadn't quite figured out what she meant about the Picts being aliens, too. Literally, metaphorically? Was it an analogy or comparison? They were like aliens, but not actually aliens? I wasn't sure I wanted an answer.
If it turned out the Association had a fleet of flying saucers they were hiding in the basement…I didn't want to know that either. Maybe because I'd had enough "it's actually aliens" to last a lifetime, and things hadn't exactly panned out for the better the last time that one was thrown my way.
"Whatever the case, we have to find it first before we can do anything about it," I said. "I'll be keeping an eye out for it, but if it can take spirit form the way a regular Servant can, then I might not be able to find it using my usual methods."
"Ah," said Ritsuka grimly. "That makes it a lot harder to find it in a place like this, doesn't it?"
"It does."
It would have been so much easier if it was just a regular magic book that had been animated by some spell or another. The fact that it was a Servant — incomplete or not — made things even less clear cut.
Maybe one of these days we'd actually meet a Servant in a situation that fit within the neat lines Marie had originally laid out for me when she was catching me up on how this all worked.
"Usual methods?" Mordred asked.
"Senpai controls bugs," said Rika. She made a strange gesture with her hands, waggling her fingers, that I thought was supposed to represent a bug skittering across the ground.
Mordred looked morbidly fascinated. "Oh yeah? Izzat how you knew Jekyll was there the other night? You were watching him through some kind of bug?"
"When did I ever say I stopped?" I replied mysteriously.
The morbid fascination tipped over into mild disgust. "So even now, you're…"
She made a gesture of her own with one hand, one I couldn't quite make heads or tails of, but I still got the gist of what she was asking.
"Always."
Lisa would have been proud.
"Damn," said Mordred, sounding grudgingly impressed. "Dunno how useful that would be in a fight —"
"Trust me," Rika said with a haunted look, "you don't want to."
"— but I bet it makes scouting out a place super easy, huh?"
"Not always," I said. "But in a place with a large enough population of bugs, you could say I see everything."
"And suddenly, I have never been more glad that Chaldea is in Antarctica," Rika said.
"I don't know," said Ritsuka darkly. "Would Professor Lev have gotten away with the Sabotage if Senpai had been able to see him doing it?"
Whether he meant them to or not, his words cast a pall over the conversation, and any lightheartedness fled. Even the little gremlin riding on Mash's shoulder seemed to express some sort of grim acknowledgement of what he'd said.
"Fou…"
The only one unaffected was Mordred, who, having no idea what we were talking about, obviously didn't understand anyone's reaction to it.
"So does that mean you can see everyone else around here?" she asked. "All the folks in their houses and what-not?"
"Yes," I answered. "So far, I count one-hundred-thirteen victims of this magical book. All unconscious, no obvious wounds, except the ones they got when they suddenly fell asleep in the middle of their parlor."
Mordred let out a low whistle.
"The further away from the bookstore we get, however, the fewer I'm finding," I added. "So either the book is getting more selective —"
"— or it's found a Master," Ritsuka concluded.
I nodded. It probably wasn't the only other explanation, but I didn't have much better in the way of alternatives. I found it more likely that the first explanation was the better one, that the book was narrowing its criteria, getting pickier about the people it tried to attach itself to, but that was supposing that it had enough conscious thought to attempt something like that. Among the things Andersen had told us, he had never specified whether the book was more like an artificial intelligence — a program running on a code that could narrow its search parameters as it went — or an animal, driven by a base instinct to find a Master.
If it was getting more selective, however, then either it was narrowing down its parameters for finding a Master or it was getting weaker the longer it went without one. One of those was better news for us than the other.
The deeper into Soho we went, the more accurate my statement became. What was first nearly every home afflicted by unconscious, comatose inhabitants became every other home, and then every few homes, and then at last there was a single trail for us to follow, a string of apartment buildings scattered along a line where at least one unresponsive victim was laid out.
Eventually, however, even that stopped, and I was left with a cold trail. I let the group go on until we reached it by foot, but even by then, there was no next victim in line, no new person who had been put to sleep and left to dream until they died. We'd hit a dead end.
"Senpai?" Ritsuka said curiously.
"Is something wrong, Miss Taylor?" asked Mash.
"That's it," I said simply. "We're at the end of the trail. There are no more victims past here."
I lifted one hand and pointed to the last apartment and unerringly towards the elderly man asleep within. Everyone followed the direction of my fingertip and looked at the building, an unassuming thing that looked just like the ones next to it, like they had all been built as a single, contiguous unit that stretched from one street to the next.
Discreetly, Huginn landed on a nearby rooftop.
"No more, as in, no more at all?" Rika asked.
What kind of question was that?
"Yes."
Mordred squinted, first at the building, and then at me. "You sure about that?"
"I'm sure."
Within my range, at least. But too much farther, and we would be leaving Soho. If the trail continued at all, it went further out into the western end of London and way farther than we could afford going with the time we had left. We still had to worry about making it back to Jekyll's apartment before the fog rolled in, after all.
Much as I hated it, we couldn't afford to keep chasing a lead that led us all over the city. At the very least, I had to head back and make sure I didn't get caught in the toxic fog.
"Well, that's great," said Rika. "What do we do now? I didn't bring any Scooby Snacks, and Fou isn't exactly a hunting dog, is he? Sorry, Fou. No offense."
"Fou kyu-fou-fou."
"Should we go inside and investigate?" suggested Ritsuka. "Unless you've already found some clues, Senpai."
Frustratingly, I hadn't. Just like all the rest, there weren't any signs of a struggle or a fight, and the only sign that anything was even wrong was the fact that the old man was sprawled out across a rug instead of his bed, snoring away.
A better mage might have been able to follow the traces of magical energy to track down our mysterious book, but that was never a skill I had mastered as thoroughly as I would have liked.
"I wouldn't bother him if you don't have to," a new voice said, and my heart skipped a beat. "Mister Fredrickson is a really cranky old man, and he hates meeting new people."
We all whirled about to find a little girl standing on the side of the road just a handful of feet away from our group, maybe eight years old at the oldest. She smiled at us innocently, rocking back and forth on her heels to the sound of her wooden sandals clacking on the stone.
When the hell did she…?
"Merlin's beard!" Rika breathed, one hand pressed to her heart.
"Sorry," the little girl said. "Was I not supposed to say anything?"
"No, you just surprised us," said Ritsuka, although his eyebrows hadn't quite managed to settle back down yet.
That was putting it mildly. Had I just not noticed her because I didn't have as dense a swarm on the streets as I normally would have? But where could she have come from that she made it all this way without me picking up on her?
The little girl raised the wide sleeve of her robe — her kimono, if I was remembering the term right — up to her mouth to stifle a giggle.
"Sorry about that," she apologized. "I didn't mean to scare anyone. It's just that you all looked lost."
"We're not lost," grunted Mordred. "We just…hadn't figured out where to go next."
The girl tilted her head with a little smile. "Isn't that what being lost means?"
Surreptitiously, I spread my swarm out a little more, searching for where she might have come from, but everyone was accounted for. All of the people I'd found earlier were exactly where they had been ten minutes ago. It was as though she had simply appeared from thin air.
My brow furrowed. Jack the Ripper? Did he have some sort of shapeshifting skill on account of how he could be "anyone," or was there another Assassin walking around who was masquerading as a little girl? With Presence Concealment hiding her presence, it would make perfect sense as an explanation for why she could stand right in front of us and no one could feel that she was a Servant.
Or maybe I was being paranoid. But on the off chance I wasn't…
Arash, I said cautiously, keep an eye on her.
His head twitched minutely, like he barely stopped himself from looking in my direction. You don't think…
I don't know, I admitted. But I don't know how else she snuck up on us.
Because the only thing I could think of was a Servant using spirit form.
His lips tightened briefly, and a moment later, he was all smiles. "We know where we are, Miss, but we're just not quite sure where we're supposed to go now. We're looking for something and we're having trouble finding it."
The girl titled her head again. "Looking for something? It's dangerous out here in the fog, you know."
Mordred scoffed. "Nothing we can't handle." She glanced in my direction. "Most of us, anyway."
I ignored the dig entirely. "We're trying to find a very special book."
"Wouldn't you look for a book in a bookstore?" the girl asked. "Or maybe on a bookshelf? Or even in a library?"
If it wasn't for the completely guileless expression on her face, I might have thought she was mocking me. Maybe she still was, but in that case, she was one hell of an actor.
"It's a magical book!" said Rika. She made gestures with her hands and arms, like she was pantomiming a large box. "About yea big or so! I dunno if it has legs or not —"
"Andersen didn't say, did he?" Ritsuka thought aloud. "Does that mean it flies somehow?"
"— but it's been running around causing trouble, and we're here to stop it!"
"A giant book that can run around?" said the girl. "I've never seen anything like that before. Are you sure that's real?"
The twins shared a look. "Apparently, it's been going around and putting people to sleep," said Ritsuka. "That's why we have to find it. If all of those people sleep for too long, then they'll never wake up."
"That sounds terrible," said the girl, although she didn't sound all that upset. If she really was a regular little girl, then maybe she didn't believe us. "I don't think I can help you, but Papa might know something."
Papa?
"Papa?" the twins parroted, unknowingly echoing my own thoughts.
"Oh," said Mash, "are you here with your father?"
The girl nodded happily. "Papa says he's here on business, so he can't always play with me, but Papa is really smart and knows lots of stuff. He might be able to help you find this magical book you're looking for!"
Trap, my instincts all but roared at me. But just as loudly, they also shouted, opportunity. If this girl was anything other than what she looked like, then whoever or whatever her "Papa" was, he was very likely P, B, or M. She would lead us into a trap, but a trap that also put us within striking distance of one of this Singularity's masterminds.
Without any other leads, this was too good a chance to pass up. The magical book could wait — or maybe it wouldn't, because it had been captured by her "Papa," and that would be an incredible stroke of luck. Two birds with one stone.
"Where is your papa?" I asked.
I doubted we'd be that lucky, but in lieu of better options right now, I was going to jump on this one. The only real alternative seemed to be wandering aimlessly until we found something.
She lifted a hand and pointed. "Over there." In the exact opposite direction she'd come from. More and more, it seemed she was probably a Servant of some kind. "He's busy right now, so I came out on my own because I was bored."
I made a show of glancing in the direction she pointed the way everyone else did. If I was remembering right, the only thing down in that direction was Buckingham Palace and the surrounding greenery.
So unless her so-called father had picked out an apartment along the way, he'd set himself up in the palace. Out of ego? Or maybe because it was easily defensible and sturdier than a good portion of the other options.
It also didn't follow the magical tome's trail, but considering we didn't have more of a trail to follow, that might not wind up mattering.
"Do you think he'll have time to talk to us?" asked Ritsuka.
"Oh, loads of time," said the girl. "He can't do his business out in the fog, can he? That would just be silly."
"I guess you do need a clear head to get anything done," Rika said sensibly, and I bit back a grimace at the pun.
"Then we might as well see what he can tell us."
"What?" Mordred demanded.
"Got any better ideas?" Emiya asked pointedly. "It's our only other lead for now, isn't it?"
"Tch." Mordred scoffed. "This guy had better have something good to say, or I'm kicking your ass."
Noted, I didn't say. There was no point in dignifying that with a response. "Alright," I said instead, speaking to the girl, "let's go see your papa."
The girl smiled at me. "Okay!"
And then she very nearly skipped away, heading off in the direction she'd pointed. We followed after her, and as we walked, Ritsuka edged closer to me.
"You sure about this one, Senpai?" he asked lowly. "The Restoration would've been over ten years ago at this point, so it's not impossible she and her father really did come here, but…"
It took me an extra second to remember he was talking about the event that had been mentioned back in Fuyuki, the one that ended Japan's isolationism, and I was a bit embarrassed to admit that whether or not it was possible in terms of the proper timeline hadn't even been on my radar of things that made a kimono-wearing Japanese girl in London suspicious. Now that he brought it up, however, I had to agree: even if it wasn't impossible so soon after Japan opened up trade with the West, it might have been more unlikely than not.
"It's entirely possible that she is what she says she is," was my answer, but the way I said it conveyed my own skepticism, and that seemed to be enough for Ritsuka. He nodded, frowning, and drifted back closer to his sister and Mash.
The girl led us on southward through Soho, navigating the streets so deftly that she could have been mistaken for a native, or at least taking the twists and turns so confidently that someone who had never been there couldn't tell the difference. Where she was leading us to, I still wasn't quite sure, and I became less sure the further we went.
A quick check of my map while she wasn't looking confirmed my suspicion — if she was leading us to Buckingham Palace, then she was taking a very roundabout route. Did she want us to approach from the front, to make it look the most impressive? While that wasn't impossible, it didn't quite feel right either.
Had her "Papa" actually picked out an apartment instead of squatting in the palace? That was…less predictable, but there was a kind of safety, a security in not doing what everyone would expect you to, and that meant he might be cleverer than I originally gave him credit for.
Eventually, we left Soho and stepped into St James's, the district that sat northward and slightly to the east of Buckingham. The girl took a sharp turn and led us down another straight road for a while, and then, without any warning whatsoever, made another sharp turn down another road. When we came up behind her and rounded the corner, suddenly, there in the distance, there were trees and greenery. An island of vegetation amidst the brick and stone.
"Not much farther now!" the girl sing-songed over her shoulder. "Papa is right up ahead!"
"About goddamn time," Mordred grumbled.
I stretched out into my swarm, searching around the place for a man waiting in ambush for us to pass by, but there didn't seem to be anyone like that, even though every instinct was screaming that there should be. There were no more victims around either, and there hadn't been any new ones on the way down. The people in this area of the city were all healthy, awake, and going about their days, as much as they could without leaving the house.
Some of them, as much as they could without leaving their beds, but I tried not to pay too close attention to the marital bed. Who was doing the horizontal tango with who wasn't at all relevant to our investigation.
There were less productive ways of dealing with boredom, I guess.
Anything? asked Arash.
No, I replied. You?
Not seeing anything out of place on the rooftops, he said. Whatever's going on here, they're doing an excellent job of being subtle.
Just what we needed. The smart ones were always the biggest pain in the ass to deal with.
"So what's your papa like anyway?" Rika asked.
"Hmm," the little girl hummed. "That's a toughie. Papa is really fun when he's really fun, but he's also really scary when he's really scary. But he's a really good person, deep, deep down inside!"
"He doesn't hit you, does he?" asked Mash, worried.
The little girl laughed. "Don't be silly! Papa's fists are for self-defense!"
Rika struggled for a moment, but crumbled after only a few seconds. "So would you say that they're for —"
"Rika, no," her brother tried. In vain.
"— Kung Fu fighting?"
Ritsuka sighed, and I very much wanted to as well. The little girl, on the other hand, just looked back at Rika, utterly clueless.
"Of course they are," she said. "Papa is an expert at that sort of thing."
Ritsuka blinked and looked back at her. "He is?"
"Yup!"
I filed that little tidbit away. It might have been gotten in a bit of a backwards way, but that was actually fairly useful information. So if this mysterious "Papa" really was one of the culprits behind this whole Singularity, P, B, or M, then that meant he was someone who had some martial arts training. Perhaps an author who had gone to war at some point before writing his works down, maybe one whose writing had been inspired by his experiences on the battlefield.
If I could ask without tipping the girl off, I would have had Da Vinci on the line right then and there to have her cross reference famous authors who also happened to have military service in their backgrounds. Right then, however, it would probably spook the girl, and if she really was a Servant, then tracking her would become just shy of impossible the instant she took spirit form.
If she was an Assassin? All the more so.
Still, no suspect materialized as we walked, either literally or figuratively. If her papa was hiding somewhere, or even if he was going about a normal life in her absence, then I couldn't find him at all. There wasn't anyone suspicious in my range.
In a way, that itself was suspicious. It was entirely possible that "Papa" didn't actually exist and she'd just invented him as a means of luring us out here and towards her trap. It was also entirely possible that this really was our mysterious Jack the Ripper using a shapeshifting skill to hide in plain sight, although the choice of a young Japanese girl in a bright pink kimono made that one feel less likely.
We didn't make any more turns, and instead, the girl led us straight towards that stretch of greenery, that small oasis of vegetation, too small to properly be called a park, but large enough and secluded enough for a person to hide in quite easily. A wrought iron fence that looked like it came straight out of a regency novel stretched around the whole thing.
"Just up ahead!" the girl assured us.
She continued up to a pathway that led into the foliage, an entrance through the fence marked by twisting metal arches, paused long enough to look back at us with a smile, and then went inside.
My lips pursed, and I stopped a few feet from where she'd gone in at, staring at the trees and the grass that lay beyond. She couldn't have made it more obvious how much of a trap this was if she'd tried.
"Senpai?" asked Ritsuka. There was something guarded in his expression, something worried and alert, despite how willing he seemed to go along with everything.
So I wasn't the only one who knew we were walking into a trap.
"Is something wrong, Miss Taylor?" asked Mash.
A quick check showed we still had a little over two hours before the fog was supposed to roll back in. It should be plenty of time to spring this and make it back, but we'd have to be careful to make sure we had enough time to make the trek to Jekyll's safely.
"No," I said eventually. "It's nothing."
There was something I was missing. I knew that even as we followed the girl into that tiny little forest. But what it was, I couldn't put my finger on it. Maybe it was the absence of a bounded field, or at least one I could detect, because if there was a place for her and her papa to set up an ambush, this was it.
And yet, there wasn't one. There wasn't even any sign of one.
Up above, Huginn circled, looking down. But even with a literal bird's eye view, I couldn't find anything that looked off or wrong, with the sole exception of the fact that —
Wait. There was someone else out here. A man, it looked like, coming from the opposite direction of us and entering this little park from that end. Was her papa real after all?
"Is this where we're meeting your papa?" I asked the girl.
"Of course!" the girl said. "The best place to have a tea party is out in the park, isn't it? I wanted to have it in a bigger park, but Papa says that bigger place near the castle is too conspicuous."
"He does, does he?"
So if he really existed, her papa was definitely one of the smart ones.
"Obviously, he doesn't know how to have a proper tea party," Rika joked with complete seriousness.
"Right?" the little girl agreed. "But it's okay, because the important part of any tea party is the guests. And all of you make such wonderful guests indeed!"
I cast around, looking for any clues, but just like it had been before, nothing seemed unusual. The little park was the same stretch of greenery, shrouded by tall trees with expansive canopies, the same path we were walking through them, and in front of us, at what had to be the very center of the park, a large, lopsided table with chairs set out for everyone. A spread of various snacks and finger foods was arrayed across the surface of its white cloth.
That part was the only part that seemed strange. A table out in the middle of the park? Hers, presumably? Was this a trap meant specifically for us, or had she intended to get whoever she could reel in?
"You can meet my friend, too!" the girl said. "I invited her to join us, so she should be here soon!"
Arash glanced at me. Do we think her friend…?
I don't know, was the only answer I could give. Could we count on something that convenient? When we couldn't even be sure that this girl wasn't a Servant herself?
None of this smelled right, and I could point out all of the things about this that were raising red flags, but what the truth was behind it all, that part remained frustratingly elusive. That she was still going through with this when we had four Servants on our side had to be one of the most confusing parts.
Assassins were supposed to be the weakest class, at least in terms of fighting other Servants, and we had two Archers and a Saber, all of whom excelled in close range combat. You had to have a really good trick up your sleeve to expect to come out of a fight against them the winner by yourself.
"I can't wait!" said Rika.
The girl led us to the table and the chairs around it, and she daintily took a seat at one of them, seemingly at random, imploring us to join her. The twins shared a look, then looked at me, and when none of us had a good reason not to play along, we all took a chair of our own and sat down with her.
The high-backed plush armchair I chose wound up surprisingly comfortable and not at all rickety, despite its appearance.
"Papa will be here soon," said the girl. "While we wait, why don't we all have some tea and snacks?"
Without waiting on us, she took the nearest teapot — of which there were several, spouting puffs of steam — and poured herself some tea into a teacup that looked like it had come from an entirely different set of fine china from the teapot. In fact, looking around, I wasn't sure there was a single matching set anywhere on the table.
She also grabbed a slice of some kind of thin, spongy cake, sprinkled with powdered sugar, and started eating it with a fork. As though we really were just sitting down in a garden having a tea party in Victorian England.
In a sense, I guess we were.
The twins seemed less eager to join in, a little nervous, but after a second, they picked their own cups and poured their own tea, because unlike me, they apparently didn't have to worry about being poisoned, thanks to their contract with Mash. I poured a cup for myself just to be polite, but didn't drink any of it, because I didn't have that convenience.
"Really?" Mordred complained. She was the only one still standing. "We're gonna do this now?"
"It's the best lead we've got, isn't it?" said Arash.
"A pretty sorry state of affairs on its own," Emiya added, looking down at his own teacup. "But the only other place for us to go is back to Jekyll's to see if he has any new information for us."
We were probably going to have to go and check out what had happened to the Mage's Association, too, at least at some point, but I was happy enough to put that off for now. The less cause we gave them to stick their noses into things, the better.
"Tch."
She didn't look happy about it, but Mordred eventually did sit down, grudgingly, and moodily poor herself a cup of tea. And then she let it sit there and didn't touch it, like she had just done it in the first place to observe propriety and proper manners.
"Oh," said Mash suddenly, looking down at her teacup in surprise. "This is actually really good."
"It is," said Rika. "It tastes just like my favorite brand of milk tea, but — hey, I never put any milk in it!"
"Mine's oolong," Ritsuka said. His brow furrowed. Troubled. "Exactly the way I usually make it, too."
"Of course it is," the little girl said. "Why wouldn't it be, when you're the one who poured it?"
That… Was that supposed to make some kind of sense?
Arash? I asked, since I wasn't stupid enough to risk trying my own. His Robust Health skill should be enough protection for him.
"Chai," he said thoughtfully, "with fruity undertones and a hint of honey. But tea wasn't around back when I was alive, at least not where I was, so I'm not that familiar with it as a drink."
"I should hope you like it, at least," said the girl. "If not, why did you pour it at all?"
"Why, indeed," Arash said with a lopsided smile.
If she really had poisoned the tea and was disappointed that it wasn't working, the girl gave no sign. The smile on her face was so firmly affixed that it was actually kind of creepy because of who it reminded me of.
I was suddenly glad that I hadn't dared to try the tea myself.
"Sorry we're late!" a new voice announced, and my spine went ramrod straight as another person I hadn't seen coming appeared from out of the foliage, trotting up towards the table. "We had some important business to take care of!"
"You're just in time!" the girl said brightly. "Come, come, say hello to everyone else! We're all just waiting on Papa, now!"
The new person was a small girl, around the same age as the kimono girl, robed in a raggedy black cloak with tattered ends. A shock of white hair fell haphazardly around her face and cheeks, framing green eyes sharp as knives and doing a very bad job of hiding several thin, ugly scars that stretched across her face.
There was, ironically, something about her appearance that immediately put me on edge. Not a presence or an air about her so much as an instinctive sense of something writhing just under the surface of that childish face.
"We hope you're not mad," the new girl said contritely. "We were supposed to be here sooner, weren't we?"
"Oh, we're all mad, here," our host said pleasantly. "This whole world is mad, you see, and so are we. Quite mad. But we're not angry, no, so come on, take a seat, Jackie. There's more than enough room."
She smiled, cherubic, and poured some more tea in a cup at the seat next to hers.
"Welcome to Alice's tea party!"
— o.0.O.O.0.o —
Not completely happy with how this one turned out. When I went through it line by line, word by word, paragraph by paragraph, it read fine and made sense, but something about the overall direction bothered me.
I'm still not sure what it is. I just can't put my finger on it.
Nonetheless, I didn't want to make this a one for one recreation of London with nothing but our new Caster to differentiate it, so I'm not handling Nursery Rhyme as simply as, "Oh, there she is! Call her Nursery Rhyme and then kill her!" the way things go in canon. How things are actually going to go, well, that's for later.
Let me know what you guys think. Am I worried over nothing?
This story and this chapter brought to you by my wonderful supporters, whose kindness and generosity have made it possible to devote so much of my time and attention to writing, especially Eric, s22132, AbyssalApsu, and Alias 2v10. You guys are absolute legends. To show my gratitude, they had the chance to read this and upcoming chapters before the public release. You can find out more HERE.
And now that the shameless plugging is out of the way... Chapter CXXXV: Itsy Bitsy Spider
The name of the new girl sent alarm bells ringing in the back of my head — but I'd barely had a moment to even start thinking of what it might have meant before it was derailed as a wave of something washed over that entire little tea party, sweeping out across the grass and the trees in a ripple so faint that it was more conspicuous in its gentle, wispy touch than it could have been if it was a hurricane. It touched each and every one of us, and yet left no mark behind, inflicted no wounds, and had no obvious effect that was immediately noticeable.
The little girl smiled innocently the entire while, passing that cup of tea over to the newcomer, and she gave no indication at all that she'd even done anything, let alone what it was.
"Thank you!" the newcomer said brightly. She accepted her teacup and the saucer it was set on, picked it up, and took a sip. Her delight stretched the scars on her face. "We really like it!"
"I'm glad you do," the little girl said politely. "I poured it extra special, just for you."
My companions seemed less sure of what to think of this, eyeing the newcomer uncertainly — and in the case of the surliest, with open suspicion — but none took an aggressive posture. Guarded, at best, cautious, but not openly hostile. If any of them had noticed what the little girl had done with that wave of whatever-it-was, they didn't show a hint of that either.
Some kind of bounded field? But if that was what it was, then what did it do? My bugs, my swarm, the raven puppet still flying overhead, none of those seemed to have been affected by it, and my control over them was just as strong as it had ever been. It had to be something subtler, something that gave her an advantage in a way that wasn't immediately obvious.
Maybe it activated on a contingency, or maybe it was just supposed to prevent the people at the table from fighting.
"Now," said the little girl, "we're only missing one more person. Then, our tea party will be complete!"
"One more person?" the redhead of our group asked.
"Papa, of course!" was the answer. Silly, was the unspoken word that followed. "He should be here soon, and then we can all have fun together!"
"Yay!" the newcomer cheered. "What kind of fun? Are we cutting anyone open? Are we going to go and find Mama?"
"Cutting anyone open?" squeaked the armored girl across from me. "W-what?"
"Fou," said the monster sitting on her shoulder.
"I don't think I'd call that fun," the boy next to her mumbled into his teacup.
"Whose Mama?" the redhead asked. "Who is Mama, actually, now that I think of it?"
"We don't know," said the newcomer, and again with the plural pronouns. "That's why we have to go and find her."
Multiple personalities? No, that didn't quite track, did it? The plural didn't fit. Schizophrenia? Possible. More likely. If her life was as violent as her scars suggested, then it made sense, too, because mental illness had been poorly understood in this era, and her treatment would have made the situation worse. It explained the sociopathic suggestion of cutting someone open, too.
She reminded me of someone in that regard, but I couldn't quite put my finger on who. It sat on the tip of my tongue, and I couldn't get it off.
"Creep," muttered the blonde in armor, arms folded. "What kinda nutjob makes a game of cutting someone open?"
My brow furrowed. It still wouldn't come. I couldn't think of it. The memory was important to me, for all of the worst reasons, but it was still important. There was no way I could have forgotten it. Not when the experience had been seared into my brain. It was unforgettable.
So why couldn't I remember the damn name?
"Yeah, I'm taking a hard pass," said the redhead. "I like my insides to be my insides, and if there's one rule I've made sure to always keep in mind, it's that the funny gal is the first to go."
"That would require you to actually be funny," the boy said wryly.
The redhead sulked. "Yeah, well, who even asked you, anyway…"
My heart shuddered. It felt familiar, this sensation. This sense of knowing something, knowing that I knew it, but being unable to actually prove it. Familiar, and also terrifying. Why did I feel so certain that if I picked up a book or looked at a computer screen, the words written on them would be illegible to me?
A voice intruded on my thoughts. Master? Is everything okay?
My head turned to meet the worried gaze of the dark-haired, bronze-skinned man who was sitting next to me, and I realized, suddenly, that I couldn't remember his name either. When I cast my gaze around the table, the dread twisting at my gut grew and pulled tighter, because I couldn't remember any of their names. Not the surly man with the tan and white hair, not the redhead, not the brunette, not the girl in dark armor, and not the blonde in silvery armor. If I reached for their names, my mental grasp slipped off of them like water over a stone.
It hit me like a bolt of lightning, and my gut squirmed.
"You," I said to the little girl, "what did you do?"
The blonde in armor stilled, and then her arms unfolded as she leaned forward a little, suddenly intensely interested.
The little girl blinked at me innocently. "Me? Why, I'm not sure what you mean."
"Yeah," said the redhead. "What's with the sudden hostility, lady?"
The albino with a tan straightened now, too, and next to me, the dark-haired guy's eyes narrowed as his brow drew down.
"Yes, you do," I said, and around us, the grass buzzed as the entirety of my swarm expressed the fury slowly boiling in my chest. "I'm not going to ask you again."
The newcomer with the scars looked around, curious, like she was trying to find the source of the noise. The little girl in her kimono, however, just smiled at me.
"You catch on pretty fast, Miss," she said. "I thought at least one of you would fade away completely before anyone figured it out."
The girl in armor with the monster sitting on her shoulder gasped. "F-fade away?"
"Hey, now," said the blonde. "What're you saying, here? What'd you do to these guys?"
"I'm not going to tell you," the little girl said. "Why should I? Servants like you don't play my games."
The tan albino scowled and took on an aggressive posture, hands curling around invisible swords. "I don't remember any of us saying you had a choice in the matter."
She wasn't at all intimidated. "Too bad! If you're not playing with me, then you don't get any guesses!"
The blonde slammed her hands down on the table hard enough to rattle all of the cups and spill tea all over the white tablecloth, snarling, "Why, you little…!"
The boy with blue eyes took in a sharp breath. "My name. I can't remember it."
"Pssh, what?" the redhead laughed. "Are you serious? That's silly! Who just forgets their name like…"
Her brow furrowed. "W-wait. Isn't it… But…" She shot up out of her seat, head turning this way and that as though she'd dropped something and couldn't find it. "I can't remember mine either!"
The newcomer giggled and rocked in her seat, absolutely delighted. "We've never played this game before," she said, "but it's a lot of fun!"
"Senpai!" said the armored girl. "Y-you mean to say, you really can't remember your name?"
"Nope!" answered the little girl. Her cheer was utterly incongruent to the situation. "Here in the Nameless Forest, that's the first thing that goes! And then you lose your sense of self, and last, you lose your whole being! But there is a way to beat it, you know."
She smiled a big, bright smile, so big that it threatened to split her face in half.
"All you have to do is remember your name!"
As though it was that simple. I could already see a possible way around it, if we had nametags on our clothing or our names written down on our hands or a piece of paper, but that required us preparing ahead of time for this thing. I had to assume it wasn't as easy as just having any of our companions call our names, or else it would have been hilariously simple to beat it.
But there was an even more obvious option.
Or, I thought, since this Nameless Forest is yours, all we have to do is kill you, right?
There was a certainty behind that thought. A weight, like it was a fact, not just me guessing. It was backed up by another certainty, one whose origin I couldn't place but felt just as firm: whatever this girl was, the one thing she wasn't was an ordinary little girl.
An image flashed briefly across my mind, as though to lend more weight to the idea, of a young girl with blond hair and green eyes, dressed in a black gown and veil that glittered as though they were inlaid with thousands of tiny emeralds.
My swarm gathered together, clumping up and buzzing as they formed into groups like battle lines. Through a million faceted eyes, I stared at the little girl in her fancy pink robe, ignoring the newcomer, who watched the entire thing, fascinated, and the boy and girl who, like me, had forgotten their names and my name and climbed up their chairs to avoid my army.
"I've got a better idea," I said as I went to work. Like a reflex, my spiders had set to weaving thin lines of gossamer strand and sneaking up to place them in strategic areas while everyone listened to the flies and gnats and wasps that were so much more obvious. "Either you undo this yourself, or you'll be forced to undo it. I'm not picky about which."
Paradoxically, the girl wasn't threatened at all. She just smiled again, completely unperturbed.
"Oh," she said. "We're going to play this game, now? I know how to play that one! I'm really good at it, too!"
She clapped her hands together, and power gathered, swirling about her body.
"And as if in uffish thought he stood —"
Shit.
"Stop her!" I shouted, even as my gathered swarm surged. I wasn't even sure who would obey me, if any of them even would. I just knew that whatever she was about to do was bad and we couldn't let her finish it.
"— the Jabberwock, with eyes of flame, came whiffling through the tulgey wood —"
The table was suddenly upended, exploding upwards, and the abruptness of it had me falling backwards and over my chair — the other two much the same as me — even as I sent in my bugs to bite and sting and do whatever they could. The dark-eyed man in his teal armor stumbled back, the arrow he'd notched on a bow he pulled out of nowhere flying up and into the sky, off course, while the tan albino stumbled and rolled.
The blonde, the one who'd thrown the table up to begin with, manifested a large broadsword and cut the table in half, kicking off the ground towards the little girl.
"— and burbled as it came!"
My bugs stung and bit and buzzed and swarmed, and none of it did anything at all to the girl, who continued on like nothing was happening. They couldn't even find purchase in her flesh. The blonde, who was the only one who would reach the girl in time, angled her arm back and aimed the point of her sword for the girl's throat. Her thrust was lightning fast, heralded by sparks of actual red lightning.
It skidded off, gouging out a chunk of flesh as it went, and purple blood flew through the air, sizzling as it splattered onto the grass. More of it dribbled down the thick, massive arm that had appeared in front of the girl to protect her, running down over the base of the jagged, branch-like spikes that jutted back over the forearm.
Standing over the little girl was a giant. Its fists were the size of small boulders and its body bulged with muscle. The head was vaguely human-shaped, but it was almost entirely smooth except for the jagged, lipless gash that formed its mouth and the round sockets that glowed with yellow light. A lopsided crown of spikes jutted away from its skull, and a pair of even more lopsided wings — far too small for actual flight — with more spikes for feathers protruded from its back, stiff and unmoving.
The presence slammed into me a bare second later, an alien weight that felt like nothing I could remember. My heart beat a rapid tattoo inside my chest. A cold sweat broke out on my forehead, and every part of me screamed that this thing was wrong, that it didn't belong, that it was something that shouldn't ever exist.
"What the fuck?" the blonde exclaimed.
The massive creature was so large that it looked like it would lumber about inelegantly, but its fist lashed out with such speed that she didn't react in time to avoid it, and her armor screeched as that enormous hand caught her right across the chest. The force of the blow flung her back and away, and the other armored girl let out a shout as she was nearly bowled over.
"And if we're going to play that game," said the little girl, "then I just had to invite my friend to play with us! Isn't that right, Jabberwocky?"
Shit, I thought again and beat a hasty retreat from them both as my swarm came up to form a smokescreen. One of those massive fists swung around again, and every single bug that came into contact with its skin disintegrated like so much steam.
The tan albino came in with a pair of falchions, one black and one white, sweeping them down across the monster's chest. The wounds they carved were shallow and completely ineffective, and he barely had time to bring his swords up in a guard before the thing's retaliatory blow shattered them like cheap glass.
A flurry of arrows landed in its chest, but a contemptuous swipe of its arm broke the shafts like kindling, and the wounds were already disappearing even by then.
Strong, sturdy, and it even had regenerative powers. The combination twigged onto something, but the memory slipped through my fingers like sand through a sieve, and whatever connection my brain had been trying to make fell away, unrealized. Another thing the little girl's trick had taken from me, and I was getting really fucking tired of that really fucking quickly.
I reached out, fumbling for the thread I could feel, the thing the dark-haired archer must have used a minute ago to contact me, and I pushed every bit of my singular thought down it: Call my name!
Halfway through preparing another barrage of arrows, he stopped, eyes flitting over in my direction. Whatever he thought of my Hail Mary play, he didn't let on, and without arguing or hesitating, he opened his mouth and said, "Taylor Hebert!"
And like a film had been removed from my brain, everything cleared. The memory I'd been grasping for a moment ago — of Herakles, storming through everything we'd thrown at him, of Lung, fleshing bubbling as his wounds healed and his body grew, of a great golden man shrugging off everything thrown his way — clicked back into place. The familiarity of that feeling, of slowly losing myself and forgetting the names of my friends, twisted up my stomach, becoming something black and furious.
Fucker, I thought viciously. If I could have set that girl on fire with my eyes alone, I would have done it right then and there.
I wasn't sure it was going to work, and I was never so happy that I'd been wrong. This whole thing had already gone to shit, and it would have been even worse if we'd had to try and fight while we couldn't even remember our teammates and what they could do.
Emiya, having caught on, abandoned his attempt to reengage the Jabberwocky long enough to shout, "Fujimaru Rika! Fu —"
But before he could get any farther than that, the Jabberwocky zipped across the distance, and he only barely managed to dodge well enough to avoid a direct hit. Even the glancing blow, however, clipping his ribs with force that would have pulverized mine, was enough to send him sprawling and rolling across the ground.
"No fair!" the little girl said, pouting. "That's cheating! Servants aren't allowed to help if they don't play the game, too!"
"Hey!" Rika protested. "You're the one who didn't tell us the rules until you'd already forced us into playing your stupid game!"
Arash drew back on his bow and took aim at the undefended girl — a Servant, she had to be, if she was pulling monsters like this out of thin air — but the Jabberwocky seemed to teleport to return to her side, blocking them all again. Those that didn't break on the spiky protrusions jutting out from its wrist didn't seem to even hurt it, let alone impede its movement.
"Senpai!" said Mash, huddled defensively in front of the twins. "Master!"
"O-oh!" said Rika. "Right! U-um, Fujimaru Ritsuka!"
And Ritsuka startled as everything rushed back to him. Good. That meant we were all back to normal, so we didn't have to worry about losing anyone to the Nameless Forest anymore.
Mordred suddenly flew across the distance, sparks of red lightning crackling across her body. "I've had enough…of your fucking games!"
She swung down with thunderous force, and the Jabberwocky caught her sword in one of its massive hands, wrapping its thick fingers around the blade and completely ignoring the edge cutting into its flesh. Sizzling blood dribbled down its arm and to the ground, and it left behind blackened, charred patches of grass where it landed.
"That's okay," said the little girl. "Jabberwocky likes this game better anyway, don't you, Jabberwocky?"
The monster didn't answer.
"If she doesn't want to play, go ahead and kill her."
The burning eyes glowed, and the Jabberwocky pulled Mordred forward by her sword. Off balance, she wasn't able to dodge when it reached out with its other hand and wrapped its thumb and index finger around her neck, lifting her up off the ground. She dangled, gurgling for breath and kicking her legs about in a desperate attempt to find leverage that wasn't there.
"Mo-chan!" Rika cried.
Arash! I ordered. He predicted me and fired another brace of arrows, aiming for the gaps between the Jabberwocky's joints to try and force it to drop her, but it ignored them the same as it had every other attack we'd thrown its way.
In hindsight, the comparison to Lung wasn't quite so apt as the others. At least you could actually hurt Lung if you wounded him badly enough. Even if it wouldn't keep him down for long, it would still slow him for at least a few seconds.
Shit. What other options did we have to break her free? Arash couldn't hurt the Jabberwocky badly enough to force it to let her go, Mash didn't have the raw strength necessary to do it either — not if it was completely unfazed by Mordred's — and even if we called in backup, I wasn't sure we had anything with enough power behind it without resorting to Noble Phantasms.
Did this thing even have a heart or a brain for us to target?
"Go, Emiya!" Rika shouted.
And he appeared in the air above them, holding another pair of his favored swords.
"Trace, Overedge."
They doubled in size, and the spines fractured and split, forming feathery spikes along the back edge. Emiya brought them down in a single chop, aiming for the sole obvious weak point on the monster's arm: its wrist.
I snapped off a single spell right before they hit. Momentary Reinforcement!
The blades bit into the Jabberwocky's flesh, slicing cleanly through the red skin and whatever served as muscles and tendons underneath. Even with my extra spell to give his blow more strength, however, the mutated swords made it only about halfway through before something gave, and the blades cracked and shattered like so much glass.
But it was enough. The fingers wrapped around Mordred's neck loosened, and she wrenched herself free, kicking at its elbow to force the rest of its grip away. The instant she was back on her feet, her own sword lit up with a crimson light, and she yanked the blade down the hand holding it viciously. Two fingers and a thumb went flying, severed — but even this much, the Jabberwocky seemed utterly unconcerned by. It swiped at Mordred as though to grab her again, and when she ducked, it nearly got her just by the ponytail.
Already, its nearly severed wrist was almost fully healed and its fingers had half regrown. Herakles himself would have been jealous of how quickly it regenerated from damage.
Raw strength on a cutting edge wasn't enough. Even what I assumed was Mordred charging up a miniature use of her Noble Phantasm didn't give it a second's pause. So if raw brute force wouldn't bring this thing down and my bugs didn't do anything to it at all, there was still one more thing to try before we called up one of the others to blast it with a Noble Phantasm and try taking it out with overwhelming force.
Arash, I began, pushing down the thread connecting us. My hand went for my knife, my Last Resort, which was ironically becoming less and less of a last resort these days. Maybe a swarm of nanomachines could cut through that tough hide better than the edge of a single blade.
Wait, I thought, where did the other one, Jackie, go?
Something disturbed the ground behind me in my shadow, and I didn't wait, didn't even take a moment to think about it, I just threw myself out of the way. As I rolled over my shoulder, I caught a glimpse — first with my eyes and then with my bugs — of a large knife that was really closer to a short sword stabbing through the area that would have been one of my kidneys.
I landed in a crouch, one hand still curled around the hilt of my own knife. I wasn't sure how much good it was going to wind up doing me.
"Oh," said Jackie. Her smile stretched her face, pulling at her scars. "It looks like you know how to play this game, too, don't you, lady? Maybe you'll make a good Mommy, after all."
Behind me, the Jabberwocky swung wildly at Mordred, who was forced to dodge, and then flung the remains of the table we'd been sitting at into Emiya with enough force to knock him back. Mash was still standing defensively in front of the twins, holding up her shield to protect them while the others engaged the monster directly.
It was Arash who descended upon Jackie with force, wielding one of his arrows like a dagger again, pointed tip gleaming. Jackie dodged back nimbly, taking quick, light swipes at him as she went, and Arash blocked them all as he let her retreat, face hard and stern.
It was obvious now that she was a Servant of some kind. To disappear like that, there were only so many ways it could be done with so little preparation, and going into spirit form as a way to escape notice so cleanly was the only one I could think of for someone apparently so young. That she could slip even from the notice of our Servants at so close a range meant that there was only one class of Servant she could possibly be.
Assassin.
Jackie giggled. "You want to play, too, Mister? That's not nice. You need to wait your turn!"
Her eyes gleamed.
"We won't take long. Promise."
And with all of the other clues, it wasn't hard to figure out which Heroic Spirit she was. Frankly, running around and calling herself "Jackie" was basically advertising it, and if it hadn't been for the Nameless Forest messing with my head, I was sure I would have figured it out the instant I heard her name.
"Jack the Ripper."
Although how and why such a famous serial killer was a little girl who hadn't even hit puberty yet, I didn't know, and I wasn't sure I wanted to. It was just another bit of weirdness that didn't make sense amongst a pile of it that had been stacking up over the course of the last few months.
"That's us!" Jackie chirped. "We are the fire, the rain, the power… So please, won't you just die?"
Her body lit up with a dark, fizzling miasma, a seething energy that radiated off of her and filled the air like a grudge. The edges of her knife — knives, it turned out, because she'd drawn another one from underneath the tattered hem of her cloak — shone like freshly polished steel. I didn't wait any longer to pull out my knife and toss it to Arash, who dropped his arrow and snatched it out of the air, then settled into a defensive stance.
"Maria," Jackie began lowly, "the Ripper!"
She zipped across the distance, making straight for Arash, and led with her right hand and the knife she held therein. Arash readied himself to block and make a counter blow, his thumb moving towards the switch that would activate the nanothorns.
But at the last second, Jackie juked to the side, landing lightly on one foot, and Arash must have realized what I did, because he flung himself between us —
And Jackie juked back the other way, leaving him off balance and out of place.
I tried to move, to dodge, to do something, anything, to stop her, but everything moved too slow. My bugs wouldn't be fast enough to form a screen, my body felt sluggish and slow, and by the time the impulse to dodge made it down to my legs, I knew I would already be dead.
Jackie came towards me, rushing, nothing more than a blur of black and a mass of accumulated hatred. Instinct told me it wouldn't take more than a glancing hit, not for a curse that potent.
"Fou!"
A pair of tiny feet slammed into my side like a freight train, and by the time I registered the blow, I was already flying out of the way. My body tumbled across the grass, my vision flipping and rotating between the greenery, the tree canopy, the sky, and the ground, but through my bugs, I could watch as Jackie's knife made contact, catching the little gremlin midair.
Blood splattered, splashing a red smear across the grass, and Fou went flying, too, looking like nothing so much as a particularly furry baseball as he soared off into the bushes and disappeared from view.
The idea that the thing could be killed so easily was somehow strangely disappointing.
I came to a stop, but the world still spun and my head felt like I'd been stuffed into a washing machine. If I tried to stand up like that, I would probably have pitched over sideways.
That was fine. I didn't need to be standing or use my own body to act.
"Fou! Miss Taylor!" Mash shouted. Jackie swerved around and made to come directly after me, the miasma dissipating from around her body, but Mash came in from the side and swung that massive shield around.
Jackie disengaged, hopping backwards, and eyed both her and Arash. I could almost see her weighing her chances and trying to decide whether she liked her odds of winning enough to stay and try.
After a moment, she smiled. "Oh well. We'll play with you guys again some other time! Bye-bye!"
She gave us all a cheeky wave, and then vanished into spirit form. Arash leapt towards her, my dagger flashing — but Jackie was already gone, and I felt the skin of my prosthetic arm prickle, like a sudden gust of wind had blown past me. Arash and Mash both looked around, eyes searching the trees and the park around us for any sign, but there was none.
Slowly, with my head still a little dizzy, I picked myself up, waiting for her to come back and try again, but she didn't. It seemed like she really had just left, just like that.
It gave us room to turn our focus back to the battle against the Jabberwocky, which hadn't taken a turn in our favor during our fight with Jackie. Emiya and Mordred were still doing their best to whittle away at it, and Emiya had even taken to targeting the little girl specifically, but all that managed to do was to keep the Jabberwocky from moving away from her. It didn't change the fact that the damn thing was still shrugging off everything they could throw at it, including having its head cut off, because Mordred had managed that while we were distracted.
It hadn't worked. Its head had just grown back. I had to assume that meant bringing in Aífe and having her use Gáe Bolg to target its heart and other vital organs would be similarly useless, so it might be that the only way to kill it was to destroy the whole thing at once. Siegfried and Balmung would do the trick.
The only trouble with that was that there were a bunch of buildings with a lot of people inside them not that far away, the reason, I was assuming, or at least one of them, why Emiya hadn't resorted to his own more destructive tactics. The other was probably because we were all right there and would be caught in the blast.
The little girl peered over at us, head swiveling back and forth, one hand shading her eyes. She made a vague sound of disappointment, like she didn't even notice the brace of arrows from Arash that her monstrosity blocked from hitting her.
"Jackie left?" she asked. "That's too bad. I was looking forward to playing with her some more, too!"
"You keep using that word," Rika complained, "but you have a really weird definition for it!"
"Playing is playing," the little girl said sensibly, like she was stating the obvious. "It's okay. Jabberwocky has plenty of energy left, so we can keep playing for a long, long time! And if you feel like you're being left out…" She smiled. "I have other friends you can play with, too!"
A chill went down my spine. Other friends? If she had the Jabberwocky and Alice's tea party, then would the next thing she pulled out be the Bandersnatch? Would it be just as impossible to kill as the Jabberwocky seemed to be?
From the looks on their faces, the others were wondering much the same thing. Even Emiya, who had confidently faced down Herakles, seemed uncertain about the prospect of facing more monsters out of fairy tales.
"What the hell?" Mordred said. "There's more of the fuckers?"
My brow twitched. My alarm, the one I'd set to let us know we had to drop what we were doing and head back to Jekyll's. I shut it off without saying anything, but…
There was no way. Had we really spent an entire hour and a half out here with her?
"Let's see," the little girl said thoughtfully. The Jabberwocky loomed over her stoically, burning eyes staring out unblinkingly. "Who else should I bring out to join the fun? There are oh so many friends who would like to meet all of you, I'm sure, and it's so hard to pick between them."
"None!" Rika rushed to say. "I-I vote none! I'm fine with just Jabberwocky! There's more than enough of him to go around!"
"Too much, in fact," Emiya murmured.
"But you Masters are being left out," the little girl said. "That's not fair at all. Maybe a few Trump Soldiers will be enough to keep you company for a while!"
"Alice!" a new voice barked, and I startled as something moved in the underbrush, a person that had been close enough to watch the whole thing and who had somehow managed to avoid disturbing my swarm as he came closer. "Stop playing around with them! Finish it already!"
The little girl, Alice, heaved a sigh. "Oh well. If Papa says so, then I guess it's time to finish you all off. Jabberwocky —"
"I wouldn't, if I were you," I said.
However it was he'd managed to disappear from my notice between entering the park and speaking, the fact that he'd spoken had broken whatever spell he'd been using, which meant I could see him now with my swarm. It was only too easy to surround him with everything that was already in the trees and grass near him, to bring Huginn down and through the leaves, unnoticed, and perch him where I could see the mysterious "Papa" with eyes that were easier to parse with sharper vision.
Funnily enough, he actually could have passed for her father, down to the long, straight black hair and the Japanese robe he wore like a coat over his business suit.
Alice tilted her head curiously. "You wouldn't?"
I pointed unerringly towards the mysterious man, and as I did, I pulled up my more visible swarm, a writhing mass of flies and mosquitoes and wasps, and had them all fly about, gathering like a cloud around the patch of forest where her "Papa" had been hiding.
The man stilled, eyes darting about, and then visibly calmed himself, taking deep, slow breaths, and for an instant, I almost lost track of him again. It was like he very nearly blended into the scenery.
But Huginn was there, and Huginn did not blink. Whatever spell he was using did not make him invisible.
"Unless you don't care what happens to your Papa, that is."
— o.0.O.O.0.o —
I didn't get to work in the chapter title as much as I originally intended, but I think this came out pretty good either way. There was one part I wasn't entirely sure on, but the editor really liked it, so I kept it in as it was. I'm sure you'll figure out what I'm talking about as you go.
Last chapter, I was kind of uncertain about the direction I was taking things in. For all that I'm going with it still, it still feels awkward that the team walks straight into that trap knowing it's a trap, but I couldn't find anything technically wrong about the string of decisions that led to it and I still can't. I think I managed to stick the landing, though. Next chapter might wind up the make-or-break part of this subplot, so we'll see how it goes.
This story and this chapter brought to you by my wonderful supporters, whose kindness and generosity have made it possible to devote so much of my time and attention to writing, especially Eric, s22132, AbyssalApsu, and Alias 2v10. You guys are absolute legends. To show my gratitude, they had the chance to read this and upcoming chapters before the public release. You can find out more HERE.
And now that the shameless plugging is out of the way... Chapter CXXXVI: A Tale for Someone
It was familiar in all of the worst ways, like a bad habit I thought I'd kicked, only to find it wasn't that easy to escape. The fact of the matter was, however, that we didn't have a plethora of options. Could we have eventually worn the Jabberwocky down? Maybe. Probably, even. No one had taken any serious injuries yet, and we had four Servants on our side. If it came down to a battle of attrition, then even without a method of killing the thing safely, we could probably just wear it down.
But that became less certain if Alice brought out more monstrosities who couldn't be killed simply by cutting off their heads or gouging out their hearts. Too, we didn't have infinite time to be spending on this, and even if no Assassin materialized to try and kill me on the way back, I wasn't going to cut and run and leave the twins to try and handle this on their own. I wasn't going to pull Arash away from the fight to escort me back to Jekyll's either.
It helped that Alice wasn't an innocent bystander caught up in things by bad luck, and also that there was a lot more at stake here than a few thousand bank notes in a vault. It was much easier to soothe my conscience with the knowledge that this was very much an enemy, and this little girl wasn't at all a little girl.
"You're breaking the rules of the game," Alice said petulantly.
"I'm not playing," was my cold answer.
Alice tilted her head, frowning, and her hands moved —
"Bring out any more of your 'friends,' and I'll drop every bug I have on your 'Papa,'" I warned her. "You need him if you want to stay in this era, don't you?"
She might also be in league with the people behind this Singularity. Her 'Papa' might be P, B, or M, and with the paltry amount of magical energy he was letting off — to sustain her, no doubt — it was entirely possible that they weren't the initials of the Servants, but the Masters who commanded them.
Or the pawns of one of the Demon Gods.
"Meanie," said Alice. "Do you treat all of your books so roughly?"
My brow furrowed. Did she just imply…
"…you're a book?" asked Ritsuka.
"You've gotta be shittin' me," said Mordred. "Don't tell me, this tiny bitch is that magical tome we've been looking for!"
"You were looking for me?" asked Alice.
"They're right?" Rika exclaimed, eyes wide.
"You were too late," a familiar voice said, and Andersen materialized at the back of the group, well and far enough away to run if the Jabberwocky went after him. "That would certainly explain why the trail went cold — it looks like it went and found a Master already. Although what it says about the owner's mind that a grown man produced a little girl, well…"
Thank you for putting that thought in my head, I didn't say, and the part that I had to admit I found somewhat concerning was that he might have been right.
Or maybe she had been formed in the image of his daughter. I could see the family resemblance, after a fashion. That was slightly less creepy than the alternative.
"Just what are you trying to insinuate, there?" 'Papa' snapped from his hiding spot.
"Nothing more than the obvious," Andersen replied.
"Rude!" Alice said.
"You're right, it is," I interrupted, jumping on the point. "We should all be having this conversation face to face, shouldn't we, 'Papa?'"
I punctuated this with a buzz from all of the bugs surrounding him in the grass and the trees and an aggressive caw from Huginn. Her 'Papa' flinched, lip curling, and then adopted a thunderous scowl, head swiveling as shrewd eyes searched for a way out. A warning shot from Huginn's mana cannon near his feet disabused him of that line of thought.
"That was me being polite."
"Trust me," said Rika, "you don't want to know what impolite looks like with Senpai!"
"I think I might have some idea," 'Papa' muttered.
Nonetheless, he gathered himself and as much of his dignity as he could, and then he strode out of his hiding spot among the trees and over to join Alice, close enough that the Jabberwocky wouldn't have to move much to protect him. He eyed me the entire time, looking away only to glance at the parts of my swarm still buzzing about to keep attention away from the more clandestine things the less noticeable ones were up to.
If he tried to escape, he was going to find all of the exits a figurative minefield of spiderwebs to trip him up. All but the one we would be using to get out of here.
"Fuck me," said Mordred. "He's just a regular guy."
"And he's Japanese," Ritsuka noted.
"Huh," said Rika, nonplussed. "Go figure."
"If you think that changes the situation at hand, you're naive," he said. "Sharing a nationality doesn't automatically make us comrades, and if you think your age means I'm going to treat you any more lightly than I would any other enemy, then I'll gladly walk over your corpses without a second thought."
He meant it, too. There was no indecision or hesitation in his body language. Most people were just posturing when they said something like that, putting on a strong face to unnerve their enemies, and very few actually meant it. I'd had too much experience with those who actually did to be so easily fooled by a little bravado.
This guy wasn't bluffing.
Could he be an Association magus, one caught outside of the Clock Tower when the entrance was destroyed? If he was, that only made him all the more dangerous.
"If you think it's going to be that easy," Emiya began lowly.
"It's not," said Arash.
"You're not in much of a position to be making threats like that anyway," I told him. "What I said a minute ago stands — if Alice tries to summon more of her 'friends,' then I'm going to drop everything in this clearing on you, no questions asked."
"And then Jabberwocky turns you into a pulp!" Alice said brightly.
Not if I brought Siegfried in at the exact same moment. That split second where he was protecting me would be a split second where Alice was vulnerable, and that was more than enough time and space for Arash or Emiya or even Mordred to cut her down, too.
"Hold on," said Ritsuka, holding up his hands. "Before we all start promising all of the ways we're going to violently kill each other, maybe we should know what it is we're fighting about in the first place."
"What kind of stupid question is that?" said Mordred. "He's here for the Holy Grail, ain't he? One of those conspirators or whatever."
The man's head turned to her. "What?"
"No," said Mash, "Senpai has a point. We don't need to fight if the only thing we're fighting over is the fact that we're fighting."
"I'm sure that made sense in your head," the man muttered, more to himself than anyone else, it seemed.
At that moment, a familiar ball of fluff chose to strut casually out of the foliage, pause only long enough to spit out a glob of red blood, and then keep walking as though nothing was wrong.
"Fou!" Mash cried.
"What the hell," I heard Emiya whisper. "Did that thing just walk off getting hit by a Noble Phantasm?"
'Papa' seemed to agree with him, eyeing the little furball with a disturbed look on his face.
"That thing?" Mordred asked him. "Why? Haven't you seen it do something like that before?"
No. No, we hadn't. And yet, somehow, I couldn't bring myself to be surprised. Just a minute ago, even, I thought it would be disappointing if it died to something like that. The idea that it came out the other side apparently uninjured felt more like it was expected.
The little gremlin trotted up to Mash and let her pick him up. "You're okay!" she said happily.
"Fou-kyu fou-fou," it said. As though, it was no big deal.
The interruption, at least, allowed a break in the tension, and as much as all of the ways Alice had violated us pissed me right the fuck off, after that moment to break my train of thought, I could admit that Mash and Ritsuka had something of a point. I didn't think they were necessarily right, but the fact we didn't even know 'Papa's' name meant that there was a chance they weren't wrong.
But this would get really messy if it turned out he actually was one of those Association magi who didn't mind the idea of vivisecting people while they were still alive to find out how they ticked.
"Now that we're not all at each other's throats," I began, "let's take a minute to clarify a few things, Papa. Your name would be a good start."
"Yes," Andersen agreed. "So that I never have to hear that word leave her lips again."
The mystery man raised an eyebrow coolly. "And why should I be the one to introduce myself first? From my perspective, the whole lot of you are the strangers here."
I had to give him at least some credit for his nerve. It took guts to ask our names after his…Servant? Familiar? Noble Phantasm? Whatever she was — took them away from us not that long ago.
Wait. Alice. Jabberwocky. Alice's tea party. Trump Soldiers. Fuck me, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. How had I missed that earlier? Did that make him Lewis Carroll? In that getup? The guy was known to have been pretty eccentric, but I hadn't thought that eccentric.
"You already got them a few minutes ago," I told him calmly. "Unless you expect me to believe you weren't paying attention when we shouted them out."
"So I did," he said, "Taylor."
If he was expecting a reaction out of me, I didn't give him one. I'd played head games with people plenty more skilled at it than he was.
When he got nothing out of me, he turned to the twins one at a time, "Which would make the girl Rika and the boy Ritsuka."
Noticeably, he didn't address any of the Servants. I didn't know if that said something about what he thought of them, or if he didn't want to single out the one name he definitely heard — Emiya's — because it would make it all the more obvious he didn't know the others.
"Pleased to meet you," Ritsuka said politely. "And you are?"
A sour look crossed the man's face, and for a long moment, he didn't answer. After several lingering seconds, however, he eventually said, "Tohsaka. Nagato."
Notably, not P, B, or M, and also notably, not the name of any famous author I'd ever heard of before. By the looks on the twins' faces, not the name of any famous Japanese author either.
Emiya, however, very obviously had, by the complicated expression on his face. "Let me guess," he said, sounding like he was dreading the answer. "You wouldn't happen to be the Second Owner of a little town called Fuyuki, would you?"
The others turned to him with surprise. Tohsaka's was filled with a healthy dose of suspicion. "You know of me?"
"After a fashion," was Emiya's cryptic answer.
"Wait a minute," said Rika. "Second Owner of Fuyuki…as in that swanky mansion we spent the night in back in Singularity F?"
I was honestly a bit surprised she remembered that. The twins had both been incredibly green back then, and I hadn't been sure how much of what Marie and I had told them during that fiasco had stuck and how much had gone in one ear and out the other.
The answer was, at least enough for her to remember where we'd stayed the night while we were there. And if this guy really was the Second Owner of Fuyuki — presumably from this time period — then he was almost certainly the Master of this relationship, as I'd suspected.
"Wait," Tohsaka demanded hotly, "you bastards stayed in my house?"
"Says the man squatting in a vacant apartment in London," Andersen pointed out.
"It was…a bit of an emergency situation," Ritsuka said apologetically.
"I'm sorry we intruded," said Mash, bowing slightly.
"That doesn't make it better!" Tohsaka spat.
"Emiya and I weren't there at the time, if it helps," Arash offered.
"Like hell it does!"
"I swear," Emiya murmured, so quiet that I wasn't sure anyone else heard him, "it runs in the family, doesn't it?"
And of course, if I asked what he meant by that, he wouldn't give me anything but the vaguest of answers, would he? This was what everyone else felt like whenever they asked me about my past, wasn't it?
"Hang on," said Mordred. "What's this about staying in his house, now? When was this?"
I checked the time, and it was rapidly running out. We needed to high tail it back to Jekyll's immediately, and we didn't have time to stand around and explain all of the nuances of everything we'd spent the last four months doing. That would, naturally and from the beginning, include everything that happened in Fuyuki and why we were there.
"There's no time," I said briskly. "We need to make our way back to base before the fog rolls in. We can talk about this on the way." I looked pointedly at Tohsaka. "Unless you want to take us back to wherever you've been staying and discuss it there."
His lips drew into a thin line, and that was how I knew my gambit was successful. If his workshop or whatever he had that passed for one was well-defended enough to give him the advantage in a fight against all of us, he would have had Alice lead us there instead of this park. The fact he didn't want to jump on the chance to have us on his home turf meant neither he nor Alice would be any better off there than they were here.
"Fine," he said. "We'll go back to your base, and you can explain on the way why I had a bunch of rats scurrying about my house."
A quick glance at Alice with my Master's Clairvoyance confirmed what I'd come to suspect: despite having no apparent presence as a Servant, she was indeed a Caster, and her true name most certainly wasn't Alice.
So however being a book worked, she wasn't Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.
"I mean, I know we were there uninvited," Rika said petulantly, "but I don't think it's fair to call us rats."
No, but I'd heard a lot worse.
"Then let's go," I said, pretending Rika hadn't spoken. "Saber, you can lead the way. Ritsuka, you're in charge of explaining."
And if they try anything on the way back to Jekyll's, I told Arash privately, then don't hesitate to deal with them.
His lips pulled into a grim line. Got it.
"Saber?" Mordred complained. "What's with the formality all of a sudden? I mean, felt a little weird having you call me Sir Mordred, but at least with Shieldy, it kinda made sense."
Tohsaka's cheek twitched, the only sign he recognized her name, and I had to fight down a response — the agitated spiders skittering in the trees went unnoticed by everyone else — because she'd just defeated the point of trying to hide her identity in the first place.
"Sir Mordred, then," I allowed. "If you would?"
"Fine, fine," she groused. "Feels like a waste of fucking time to go back this soon, but I don't need the tongue-lashing Boss Lady'll give me if I let you die out here, so I guess we're going back."
She turned halfway, then stopped and eyed the Jabberwocky. "Yer not bringing that thing along, are ya?"
Alice blinked and looked up at the massive creature standing sentinel over her. She smiled and waved at it. "Bye-bye, Jabberwocky! We'll play again later, okay?"
The Jabberwocky didn't acknowledge her at all, or even react to her words. Just, suddenly, it started to fade away, disappearing not into glittering dust like a Servant would, but dissolving away into nothingness like a smudge being erased from an artist's canvas. When it was gone, Alice skipped over to Tohsaka and smiled up at him like a real little girl would at her father.
"Ready to go, Papa!" she chirped.
Knowing what she was now, it just seemed creepy.
With all of that settled, we set off, and if I tagged both Alice and Tohsaka with a few bugs to keep an eye on them, no one else seemed to notice. If they noticed Arash taking up the rear of the group, I wasn't sure, but all it would have done was hammer home the lack of trust between us. I was okay with that. The surveillance you didn't notice was always more important than the surveillance you saw outright.
The guy had plenty of hair for me to hide a few bugs in. I thought it might even have been longer than mine.
"So," Ritsuka began as we walked. "We're part of an organization called Chaldea, and our job here is to come fix things when someone changes history and creates a Singularity…"
He'd gotten better at explaining things. Tohsaka obviously had some questions, and he wasn't quite prepared to accept everything on its face, but Ritsuka took it all in stride and answered all of his concerns smoothly and as completely as he could. It turned out that — after going through four Singularities and sitting through weeks of lectures from El-Melloi II — he could answer them very smoothly and completely.
Of course, Tohsaka wasn't exactly happy about any of those answers either.
"You have to be kidding me," he said sourly. "I knew there was something wrong with this place after the Clock Tower got ransacked, but the idea that some guy is out there messing around with history and dropping Holy Grails all over the place sounds like something out of a bad joke." His mouth twisted. "And now you're telling me it's 1888? Like the past hundred years never happened?"
Hundred years?
"What year did you think it was, exactly?"
Beep-beep!
"And now there's this," Tohsaka griped as I answered my communicator. I ignored him as a courtesy, because I still didn't trust him, but if he was telling the truth, he was getting a hell of a culture shock.
"Director?"
"Nagato of House Tohsaka," Marie said formally, addressing him instead of me. She was in her serious director mode. "Second Owner of Fuyuki City and manager of the spiritual grounds therein."
"You're this director of theirs, I assume?" Tohsaka said in lieu of answering.
"I am," Marie replied. "Olga Marie Animusphere, current head of the Animusphere and Director of the Chaldea Security Organization."
Tohsaka's eyes narrowed. "You're a Lord of the Clock Tower, then."
"I am." She addressed me, next. "Taylor, turn on the visual component."
"Yes, Director."
With a little bit of fiddling, the hologram flickered to life, and Tohsaka flinched to find himself suddenly face to face with Marie. After he'd had a moment to be startled, however, he actually looked at her and his brow drew down.
"You're young," he said as a statement of fact.
"My father, the previous head and director of our organization, was assassinated by the same people behind this assault on the proper course of human history," Marie said, and she didn't even wince. She'd probably been prepared to hear exactly that from him. Maybe she'd even rehearsed this in her head before she called. "As a result, I had to take over for him far earlier than anticipated. You will find, however, that my youth has no bearing on the importance of my position, my organization, or my authority in these matters."
Tohsaka smiled thinly. It didn't reach his eyes. "So it seems. What did you want to discuss, Director Animusphere?"
"Firstly, to confirm," Marie began. "For you, prior to the formation of this Singularity, the year was 1795 AD, correct?"
"Correct."
Marie's lips pressed together. From behind and to her side, Romani leaned into the frame and murmured, "That means that he would have been pulled into the London Singularity over one-hundred years out of place. We might have been looking at the wrong axis when we measured the Singularity's deviation."
"Yes," Marie said tersely, "thank you, Vice Director Archaman. I wasn't aware of that."
Romani was not so clueless that he didn't catch her tone, and he wisely chose to back away and out of frame again instead of annoying her even more.
"So I'm not supposed to be here either," Tohsaka noted. "Does that mean, what, that I'll be 'corrected' once this is over, just like everything else in this place?"
"Papa will go away?" asked Alice. There was something in her voice that made my spine stiffen.
"Provided the Singularity is resolved and the Holy Grail removed, the Counter Force will return you to your proper place in history as though nothing at all happened," Marie answered. "That includes your memories of these events and the circumstances involved. For you and all of the people in this Singularity, nothing will have changed. Your life will go on as it was meant to, for all intents and purposes, undisturbed."
"I see."
What he thought of that, I wasn't sure. His face gave nothing away. Neither did Alice's face, although I was sure she must have had some sort of opinion on the matter. Would she fight the issue in order to remain with her 'Papa,' no matter what it cost us or anyone else, or if he ordered her to work with us, would she obey without argument? There was no way to tell yet.
"Pursuant to that matter," Marie went on, "I would like to negotiate the assistance of you and your Servant in resolving this Singularity. Although the circumstances won't allow me to compensate you personally for your services, your family may be rewarded on your behalf after the Grand Order has been completed."
"Because any money you paid me directly would simply vanish when everything was returned to its proper place," Tohsaka murmured to himself. Louder, he said, "You're unexpectedly straightforward, Director Animusphere. You didn't even make the attempt to trick me into accepting money I would never receive."
"Of course not," Marie said, as though the very idea was ridiculous. "I am not some penniless magus selling her blood to whoever wants it. Attempting to deceive you in an effort to avoid paying a debt owed is beneath me."
"So it is," Tohsaka agreed.
"Hang on," said Rika. "When you say he's gonna be compensated for working with us, do you mean he's gonna get the same kind of pay as us Masters do?"
"Yes," was the answer Marie gave her. "Although he would technically be an independent contractor, he would also be working as a temporary Master of Chaldea. It's only right that he's paid on the same scale as any other Master would be."
Ritsuka's eyebrows rose, and Rika let out a low whistle. "Damn. He could make a lot of bread with that much dough."
Emiya groaned softly, and Marie's cheek twitched, but she managed to keep her expression calm and professional. Tohsaka, on the other hand, just looked confused.
"Bread? Dough?"
"Ignore that," I told him. "While the Director is willing to sign you on as a provisional Master for the duration of the Singularity, I have a few reservations."
"You do?" Marie, Tohsaka, and Mash all said at once.
"Yes," I said. "In particular, there's the problem of that other Servant that showed up to your tea party. Alice seemed to know who it was. She even called…" My brow furrowed. "Called…"
Called…who by name? For that matter, what had Alice called by name, and what was that name? There was another Servant there at the tea party, I could remember that much, but the details were gone. Voice, age, hair color, every identifying feature I could think of. Not out of reach, the way my name had been in the Nameless Forest, but just gone, like someone had taken a scalpel and carefully excised each and every detail with the precision of a surgeon.
I could even remember coming to a conclusion about the Servant's identity, using the name Alice had called them as a springboard. The logic behind it was still there. But every part that had involved something about the Servant in question had been removed from my memory.
"…I can't remember their name."
Mash, Ritsuka, and Rika all gasped. "Neither can I," Mash said.
"Nothing," Ritsuka agreed.
"Me, three," said Rika. "I know I heard it and I know I knew it, but someone poured a little too much brain bleach in my ear or something, because poof, it's gone!"
"I hate to add to the alarm," Emiya said gravely, "but I've been affected, as well."
"Same," Arash chimed in.
Marie rounded on Alice. "You…!"
"'S not her, this time," Mordred interrupted. "I said yesterday that there was an Assassin going around who erased memories and stuff, didn't I? My guess, that's who we met at that tea party. Once they left, everything we knew and learned about 'em got erased. We were just too distracted to notice right away."
The Assassin she'd mentioned yesterday…so Jack the Ripper, then. The fact I could still puzzle it out was a good sign, because it meant my thought patterns hadn't been manipulated. A Stranger instead of a Master. Thinking it and coming to that conclusion didn't magically restore the bits of my memories I was missing, though, so whatever skill or Noble Phantasm erased information about them was more like a delete button than a spell of forgetfulness or hypnosis to repress the memories.
"Director," I said, "was any data recorded by Chaldea during that fight?"
"Of course." She turned away from the screen and looked down at her terminal, typing away rapidly. "It's…"
Her brow crinkled.
"Gone. The data on the other Servant you encountered earlier is gone. Parameters, skills, Noble Phantasms, even basic things like height, weight, and sex, they're all missing."
"It even works on Chaldea," Ritsuka murmured, sounding impressed.
"That's cheating!" Rika complained.
Alice giggled. "Of course it is. Assassins never play by the rules, never ever."
"This isn't a game!" Marie snapped.
Alice just smiled, unperturbed.
"Of course it isn't," said Tohsaka. "But this answers your question, doesn't it? The one you were trying to ask. After all, there's no reason to erase our memories of them if we were in league with this Assassin of yours, is there?"
Except there was no way to prove that his memories of Jack the Ripper had been erased, and even if they had, it didn't mean that they weren't working with him. It would be an effective way to gain our trust if it just so happened that he and Alice had both had their memories of the mysterious Assassin erased the same way we had. I even had a way around any confusion it might cause — a simple passphrase would be enough for them to identify each other as allies.
"I guess not," I said mildly. "After all, it takes a special kind of person to team up with a serial killer like Jack the Ripper."
Tohsaka reacted — not by stiffening or freezing, like he might have if he'd been found out in a lie, but with confusion and annoyance.
"A serial killer?" he echoed. "Hey, Alice, just who did you invite along to that tea party, anyway?"
"A friend I met on the street," Alice answered simply. "Jackie was very, very lonely."
As though that was reason enough to make friends with a serial killer famous for the murders of several women who also happened to be psychotic enough to treat the whole thing as a game with the police. Someone like that would have fit right in with the Nine.
I guess it made sense that Tohsaka wouldn't know anything about the Ripper murders, though. If he really was from a hundred years ago — by the count of this era we were currently in — then he was a hundred years too early to have heard about them. He was likely long dead by the time they happened.
Although with magi, you never really knew, did you?
"I suppose it's only natural that loneliness attracts loneliness," Andersen said.
Tohsaka pinched the bridge of his nose, grimacing. "Most normal girls bring in stray cats or dogs," he muttered. "This one? Brings in homicidal murderers she meets on the streets."
Calling a murderer homicidal was technically redundant, but I let it slide without comment.
"I have a few more questions aside from that," I said.
"What is this, a formal inquiry?" Tohsaka said under his breath.
"It's a job interview," I replied, and he grimaced when he realized I'd heard him. "Before you were dragged into this Singularity, I'm assuming you were in London yourself. Why?"
"I was meeting an associate from the Clock Tower," Tohsaka answered simply. "I'm not sure you could call him my teacher, since the only thing he likes to do is hand me busywork every now and again, but I paid his tab once upon a time —" For some reason, Alice found this quite funny. "— and he decided to repay me by teaching me magecraft."
"Wait a second," said Marie, "you're telling me that you got a sponsor from the Association just for helping him pay a bill? Just like that?"
"Sorry to disappoint you, but whatever was going through his mind, I haven't the first idea," said Tohsaka. "Frankly, I'm not sure he didn't just decide it on a whim as a way to pass the time."
"Wow," said Rika. "That's some crazy luck. A complete rando decided to teach you magic just because you saved him a couple bucks? In what world? Aside from this one, I mean."
"It does sound pretty incredible," Mash agreed. She had barely stopped petting Fou since things calmed down, like she had to reassure herself the thing was still alive.
"Quite the career change," said Andersen, "going from a martial artist to a mage. Too bad you're only mediocre at both."
Tohsaka's cheek twitched, but he managed not to rise to the bait, no matter how much he very obviously wanted to.
"I have a feeling I already know the answer," Emiya began reluctantly, "but do you happen to know this man's name?"
Tohsaka made a sound in the back of his throat. "He called himself Zelretch."
My head whipped around so fast my neck cracked, and Marie startled, too, choking out, "Th-the Wizard Mashal?"
A True Magician? One of the handful of guys who could do stuff that wasn't supposed to be possible with magecraft, no matter how long or hard you studied or how much effort you put in?
Most importantly, the one guy Marie told me I should do my absolute best to avoid meeting?
Emiya just sighed. "Yes, that's the answer I thought I was going to get."
"Who?" the twins asked. Mordred looked like she had the same question.
"Y-you…!" Marie sputtered, but she couldn't seem to form the words beyond that.
"A very scary man," Emiya said dryly. "I'm sure that El-Melloi will be only too happy to tell you all about him if you ask after this is over. For now, I think the most important thing you need to know is that he's a very important and very powerful member of the Association."
"Could he be here, too?" asked Ritsuka.
Marie's face paled, and she looked like the very idea terrified her. For as frightened of the man as she seemed, however, I had to admit that the idea of having that kind of power on our side was appealing.
"If he is, then he stood me up," Tohsaka said flatly. "I waited for six hours at the Association, and the only reason I wasn't caught up in that mess was because I left before the place could come down around my ears."
As long as he wasn't one of those magi who would vivisect me — or Mash — of course. Sort of, "as long as he's on my side, I want him here, but he's the last person I want to fight." Funnily enough, I'd been on both sides of that particular concern.
"It's more likely he's just not here, then," I said, and Marie sagged against her console, relieved. "We probably would have met him by now if he was."
Because I couldn't imagine he wouldn't have come looking to investigate our Rayshift, or failing that, that he wouldn't have gone to handle whatever had happened at the Association. At the very least, we weren't being cautious about hiding our fighting, so with all of the magical energy being thrown around, he likely would have come looking for that.
Tohsaka grunted. "So you're saying I waited for nothing."
"It looks that way."
"Then it seems like my only real options are to stay out of things and hope you all resolve them or help you fix them myself," he said. He grimaced. "If I'm being honest, this whole mess sounds like more trouble than it's worth, but it's not like sitting around and waiting is going to do me any good. If he's not here, then I have no reason to stay either, so the sooner I can get back to my own time, the sooner I can get back to my own life. Right?"
I guess it was as good a reason as any to join up with us. It wasn't impossible that he was out for the Grail or working with the masterminds behind all of this, but if he was a first generation magus the way he claimed, then he might not even truly understand all that much about the Grail and how it functioned, let alone what he might be able to do with it. There was the question of how much he would even care if he did.
If he was taking orders from P, B, or M, well, that wasn't easy to answer either. If he didn't have anything he wanted the Grail for and he really had just been pulled along accidentally, then why he'd follow their orders was another question I didn't have an answer to.
For now, I suppose we could extend a little bit of trust to him. Andersen and his Human Observation skill hadn't thrown up any red flags yet, after all, and he'd been willing enough to come along to see the whole 'magical tome' thing through to the end.
"There's just one more question you need to answer," I told Tohsaka.
"And that is?" he asked.
"Your Servant's true name. It isn't Alice."
"That's right," Marie agreed. "As a show of good faith, it's only right that you share the true identity of your Servant. It's against Chaldea's policy for Masters to hide their Servants from each other."
Did it count when half of us were technically hiding Galahad's identity from Mash?
"First time I'm hearing that one," said Rika.
"It's not like it's ever come up before," her brother pointed out. "We've never even had a reason to try."
"Point."
Tohsaka looked down at Alice, at the Servant wearing the face of what I was becoming more and more convinced was his daughter. She just smiled back up at him.
"If we're going to be working together, then I suppose it doesn't make much sense to keep it from you, does it?" he thought aloud. "Fine. Alice, go ahead and introduce yourself — properly, this time."
"If Papa says so," Alice agreed. She inclined her torso into a short bow. "Hello. Pleased to meet you, everyone. I'm a Tale for Someone."
She beamed.
"My true name is Nursery Rhyme. Please take good care of me, okay?"
— o.0.O.O.0.o —
I had the idea pretty early on that I wanted to introduce an unaffiliated Master into London, since the Mage's Association being right there made it so easy to do. I wasn't sure if it was going to be an OC or not until it was time to bring him in, but considering the guy has no screentime in any canon materials and has little more than still shot cameos in the various anime, in a way, he's more OC than not.
So, what do you think? Did I stick the landing? Do you think this is going to work out as more interesting than Nursery Rhyme's canon stuff in London, or is it too contrived?
The twins were huddled worriedly around the unconscious body of Mash with Fou while the Berserker Cu Chulainn fought Aife. Not for the first time, Taylor wished that she had something substantial she could do to contribute to the fight, because it really wasn't looking that great for them. Cu had torn through the other Servants they'd brought with, and her bugs weren't really helping much. Cu Chulainn was just ignoring Arash's arrows, and they couldn't just use Stella at the moment, with Aife in the field of fire. To make matters worse, Aife was losing. Losing slowly, but losing all the same.
Aife, Taylor sent. I'm sorry. I'm going to need you to hold him down for a moment. If you can manage to get a Noble Phantasm off into him at the same time, that would be better. She turned to Arash. I'm sorry. Get ready to use Stella as soon as Aife pins Cu down for a moment.
Aife disengaged slightly, pulling her spear back for a throw. Cu grinned wider, recognizing the moment for what it was, and readied his own spear, stepping forward to put Aife back within stabbing distance.
"'Gae Bolg!" Prototype!" Twin red spears twisted through space to pierce the other's heart. Cu twisted slightly, the inferior version missing by just enough to not cause catastrophic damage.
Taylor took a deep breath, and bet everything on her last two Command Seals. "Aife! Hold him in place! Arash! Hit him as hard as you can!"
Aife grinned, and pulled Cu close, pinning his arms to his sides and spinning to face Arash, who held an arrow that could probably be better referred to as a ballista bolt at full draw with ease.
"STELLA!" A bolt of brilliant white seared Taylor's vision, and her bugs in that direction vanished. She sent bugs to cover her sudden blindness in the area, and blinked several times to clear her vision. And Cu began laughing. Taylor's heart sank.
"Man, that nearly did me in! If it weren't for Battle Continuation and Protection from Arrows, I'd definitely be dead there!" Cu said, still laughing. As her eyes finally recovered, she saw Cu Chulainn ignoring a giant hole in his chest and leaning on his spear. "If you had any more Servants, or even a Phantasmal Beast or two, you might have been able to win. You did well, Chaldea, but sometimes, your power just isn't enough." He sighed then, the hole in his torso slowly closing up. "I don't actually want to kill you. Killing weaklings isn't really a challenge. Unfortunately, I can't afford to leave you to come back with another army, so you'll have to go."
No. No! Taylor thought. After we've come all this way? "Do you expect us to just roll over and accept it?" she whispered. "Do you think, that after coming this far, I would just let you win?" Taylor pulled Last Resort from its sheath and brought every bug she had into the ruined room in a chittering tide. Fou hissed at the swarm as it split around the shell-shocked siblings.
"Good, you do have some fight left after all!" Cu said, his grin returning once more. He ignored the bugs chewing on him to no effect, and dashed towards Taylor. A dash that was so much slower than the blisteringly quick fights from earlier that it seemed like he was moving in slow motion. He was still easily faster than her, but she'd fought faster. She dodged the first strike and brought the swarm up around him in a loud buzzing curtain. She slashed at him, and jerked back to avoid his counterattack. They fought and danced like this for some time, Taylor making good use of her prosthetic to attack from unexpected angles and prevent Cu Chulainn from getting a lock on her location.
"In another time," Cu began. "You might have been a challenge for me. I respect that. Unfortunately, your time is up. Gae!"
Taylor shoved as many bugs between her and Gae Bolg as possible, landing a couple of flies on the tip of the spear to maximize her chances, dodging backwards as quickly as she could.
"Bolg!" And the spear broke time. In each timeline, Taylor dodged the spearhead just enough to have it pierce her lung rather than her heart, and the barbed spear tore a brutal hole in her torso. The bugs between Cu and Taylor died, as the spear tore through their locations in alternate realities that no longer existed. Taylor coughed up some blood, and time and space collapsed back to a single existence. Cu stared at the girl hanging on his spear. "Huh."
Taylor reached forward and dragged herself closer along the spear, lifted her knife, and stabbed Cu in the eye. "L-last… resort." The knife exploded, and Taylor fell to the ground, slowly bleeding out.
The last thing she heard was Cu's voice, just as feeble as her own. "I was wrong. You definitely could have been a challenge, if you'd lived in my time." A chuckle. "You certainly beat me here and now. So long, brave Chaldean. Rest easy, knowing that your work here is complete."
***---***---***
Taylor opened her eyes in the middle of a summoning circle in Chaldea, standing next to her corpse, and was immediately glomped by the twins, Mash, and Olga. "Alright, I get it, you missed me. How long have I been out, and what happened between my death and summoning?"
Taylor Hebert (Caster):
Taylor Hebert, once known as Skitter, Weaver, and Khepri, joined the Chaldea organization, generating this Spirit Origin as a potential option to summon. She made her way through 5 Singularities nearly unscathed before finally kicking the bucket so hard in the American Singularity that she took the last enemy Heroic Spirit with her. This Class ignores a large portion of her life as a Cape and focuses more on her budding abilities as a Magi.
Stats:
STR: D
AGI: C+
END: B+
MP: C
LCK: B
NP: B+
Class Skills:
Item Construction: E (Taylor is a skilled weaver, and used this skill to make highly durable suits for her former allies. She also used it to lay traps for and tie up enemies. This skill is as low as it is because she can basically only use it for clothing and adjacent items as a Heroic Spirit.)
Territory Creation: EX (Effective rank D/C) (This is a reflection of her ability to control bugs, and so she carries her territory with her. As this ability lies outside of the scope of territory, it is technically an EX skill, but is truthfully more of a D or C rank ability.)
Personal Skills:
Battle Continuation: C (Despite the record her scars would tell you, Taylor has suffered grievous injuries multiple times. Rather than allow her opponents time to achieve victory or escape, she would fight through the pain and injury to try and eke out a victory.)
Claivoyance: B (Another aspect of her territory, she can use her bug's senses. As such, she is very aware of things within her range.)
Prosthesis: D (Taylor never recovered the arm lost during Gold Morning, and got this replacement. A bit stronger and more durable than her fleshy arm, it also gives off odd reactions to magic and Servants, enhancing her sensitivity to such phenomena.)
Noble Phantasm:
Last Resort: B+
Taylor's knife, that went through the end of the world with her, restored by DaVinci, and enhanced by Shakespeare. Its effectiveness is increased if Taylor is the last one available to fight. As a Nanothorn, it ignores damage resistance effects, but its small size makes this matter less.
First, if anyone has a better title, I'd be glad to hear it.
Honestly, this didn't turn out quite as nicely as I was hoping, but it's here now, and I hope you enjoy it! I saw that the SB thread didn't have hardly any omakes, while the SV thread has several, so I posted it there first. A common comment on these threads is hope for Taylor to fight (and win, somehow,) against a Heroic Spirit, or for Taylor to be summoned as one. I thought for a while on how that might happen, and remembered the fight against Berserker Cu, and how it felt for me to try to run him to the ground, over, and over, and over again, and thought that that might work well for it.
On Rika and Ritsuka: I know they probably wouldn't be as passive as they are in this omake, but I don't really have a good grasp of how they might actually react, and I didn't want to write about them, I wanted to write Taylor being ridiculous!
On Cu Chulainn's power level: During this entire fight, he's basically dead. If he had time to recover, he could probably survive, but he's only standing because of Battle Continuation. So he's not as fast or strong as he would be otherwise, basically he's only 2-3 times faster than Taylor at this point, which feels within her abilities to fight against for a blinded opponent. Cu, notably, does not have Instinct or Eye of the Mind, nor any blindfighting feats that I am aware of, so between the stretchy prosthetic and the curtain swarm, Taylor can probably pull out a win.
Ritsuka lay on his mattress, staring up at the ceiling, unable to sleep.
It had seemed like a blessing when they'd seen structures on the horizon- their battle with Cu Chulainn Alter was looming on the horizon and they wanted to be at their best for it- but things had just gotten stranger and stranger as the place came into view.
For one, it was modern. not Tokyo or New York by any stretch, but it was a city of steel and glass, of high rises and suburban homes that distinctly did not belong in the late 1700s. sure, this was a Singularity and things were weird. They'd seen western frontier towns that shouldn't exist for the better part of a century. They'd seen an early Hollywood that shouldn't exist for longer, and Alcatraz was newer still. They were headed to Washington D.C., to the White House. But these places were all well-established, or at the least were deeply conceptual to the American image. He'd never even heard of Brockton Bay, and neither had anyone else.
But Miss Taylor had.
She'd gone quiet on the other end of the communicator when they'd asked about this place, and her only response to the repeated question had been a simple 'Yes'.
The second bit of confusion was the fact that the city was not simply empty or abandoned - Brockton Bay was a ruin. Almost like Fuyuki City, but worse somehow.
Skyscrapers collapsed, houses made into matchsticks. Streets were littered with rubble or else shattered entirely. A patina of mud and dust covered everything below a certain point, and splotches of rusty brown were spattered at odd and unsettling places. As they moved deeper into the city they found an entire lake had taken over the center of what had clearly been downtown. And over it all, the stink of brine and the patter of drizzling rain.
It didn't even look like monsters had done this- they could hear groans and roars and howls in the distance, but nothing came close enough for Arash to pick out.
Miss Taylor had mentioned some great natural disaster back when she was in high school, but this? What storm could do this?
But her knowledge of the place proved true as Arash, by her instruction, led them through street after devastated street, strewn with debris but always there was a path just wide and stable enough for them to get through. On and on this went until, near the shoreline, Arash had them dismount and enter a storm drain.
It had been impossible to see; they'd never have found their way without Arash to lead them, and Ritsuka dared not touch the walls, because even if they were always clean when he brushed up against them he could hear buzzing and chittering in the dark.
Finally they ascended a ladder whose hatch opened on its own to find…a house.
Well, not a house, but the space certainly looked the part. Mudroom, kitchen, pantry, living spaces, what looked almost like overpacked dorm rooms. It all looked…cozy. Everything was well-used and worn, but also treated, cared for, cleaned and maintained. Chaldea might have had more modern amenities but it always felt a bit sterile, even the private rooms that had a bit more personality felt a bit too clean. This place? Felt like people actually lived their lives here.
Which was made even more bizarre by the Sheer Amount of Bugs
It wasn't like they covered the floor or the walls or anything, but whenever one's eyes wandered they would find eyes staring back at them. Moths fluttered at the edges of vision, dancing if one turned to them, and vanishing between eyeblinks. Black lines on the floor consolidated into columns of ants, shaping themselves into sigils and runes before disappearing. Spiders of all shapes and sizes could be seen lurking in each corner and every shadow.
They'd opened a cupboard looking for pots and pans and found the entire space filled to the brim with wasp nest. This was made all the more disturbing by the fact the infamously-irate insects…did not attack. They looked at the party curiously, then as one flew into a buzz, forming an arrow that pointed to the next cabinet over. Lo and behold, there were the pans they were looking for.
They'd closed the cabinet door as politely and gently as possible and had stayed as far from that half of the kitchen as physically possible.
Mash claimed she had found a crack in the wall, and the entire interior up to the ceiling was beehive. Ritsuka would not be surprised if they had replaced (or maybe built) the entire foundation and support structure.
What was almost stranger? everything was stocked. All the appliances worked. the fridge was cold, and it was fully-stocked; not especially freshly or diversely, but as if someone had just gotten back from shopping. The stove worked, and ran clean and hot. There were dishes in the cabinet, and they were dust free and spotless.
Miss Taylor had contacted them one last time, telling them to take what they needed. Sleep, use whatever supplies they could find, and then leave and not look back.
That…unsettled Ritsuka.
It wasn't like they hadn't been in this position before; they'd done almost the exact same thing back in Fuyuki, at the Second Owner's house. But in a way, this was stranger. Sure, they'd intruded there, but they hadn't known the owner of that mansion; this place clearly belonged to Miss Taylor, and even if she'd given them permission it was a different matter entirely to let yourself into a friend's(?) house when your friend wasn't home. There's a certain emptiness there, some element or presence missing.
It felt…intrusive, almost. Miss Taylor was always extremely private even after all this time and all they'd been through, and even though he had burning questions on who she was, where she came from and what she was like, finding out this way felt wrong.
That feeling had only intensified the further upstairs they'd gone. Even if none of the traps went off, even if none of the bugs attacked…they clearly had permission to enter, that didn't alleviate the discomfort.
Mary Fields clearly hadn't been too bothered by the situation, as she'd set about the kitchen as if it was her own and mostly been amused at the bugs that actively avoided work surface she touched, but the others clearly felt the same, like they were camping out in a mausoleum. The tension lingered as they ate, washed, and bedded down under the watchful gaze of an uncounted mass of chitin.
And so here he lay, on the comfiest mattress he'd lain in since joining Chaldea, unable to sleep, probably misplaced guilt mixed with discomfort at the thousands of eyes he knew lingered in the dark
"Mommy?"
The others sat up slightly. Jackie had been sent along with them in case Queen Mebd was sticking close to Cu Alter (it wasn't as if she couldn't be called to the other fronts. That's why they had a Master at each spearpoint), but she'd bonded with Senpai the strongest and clearly missed her fiercely. When all of them had decided to leave the top floor, Jackie had lain down and refused to move.
Now, she stood in the threshold of the pseudo-dorm, still in the dress she'd found in her size, blearily rubbing at one eye.
"I can't sleep. Could you sing for me? Please?"
Ritsuka and the others looked at her quizzically, not sure who exactly she was referring to, but as they looked at one another a sound began to echo from the walls.
There had been no instruments in any room or closet he'd seen, but a harp or something like it was clearly, if softly, being played somewhere.
And then, the singing began.
It came from everywhere, and from nowhere. From the walls and the corners, the cracks and the floorboards. it suffused the air itself, but it did not rattle the windows or trouble the water on the bedside table.
It was as if the house itself was singing to them.
It was an odd and eerie sound, sibilant and buzzing, but the words were clear, and it made the chorus and the wordless tones resonate in his very bones. It was not Senpai's voice, or at least not one he'd heard outside of training and nightmares. It had more age to it, more…it felt more akin to sitting around a campfire in the woods than the cozy…semi-suburban setting they found themselves in, but it just seemed right.
Ritsuka felt a wetness on his cheeks, and he realized he was crying. He did not know why.
…no, he did know
He wept because he realized now the missing piece, and why it WAS missing.
He had always admired Miss Hebert for her fearlessness, for her talent, for her skill and experience.
Laying here now, seeing sides of her he'd never considered, listening to what he'd never considered of her, Ritsuka realized he'd never given thought to what price she'd paid for those qualities. How she's learned them, the place she came from.
And that which she had left behind.
He was only vaguely aware as the lullabies continued, and of one of the Servants carrying Jackie out of the room and back upstairs,
But on the very edge of his periphery, he swore he could just make out a shadowy figure seated next to Miss Fields, a pair of golden eyes watching over him, as the house sang him to sleep
...so i read the above omake
and by stroke of coincidence i remembered 'We Will Go Home' existed and decided to listen to it again.
as soon as the second verse started i knew i had to write something
i've got So Many shorts and omakes, some i've had on the back burner for over a year
but i got this done...same day.
wonder of wonders...
hope you guys enjoyed. just a little diversion; can go into more detail but trying to streamline so i don't get bogged down in details
only thing i will point out is that yes, these are not Servants that would normally be attached to Ritsuka outside of Mash. the idea that struck me was that...since the American Singularity was meant to be a country-wide war, and losing physical ground meant coming closer to losing the Singularity, it would make the most sense for mutliple Masters to split up with small teams of Servants, with aligned Servants (Emiya for Rika, Arash for Taylor, etc) split into other Master's units, so that each fighting force is solid, but if they ended up encountering Cu Alter they could immediately call in more help and overwhelm him.
would that work? i don't know. but it made sense in my head, so it went in the omake.
honestly...if Ritsuka is the one headed to Washington (since it makes more sense to me here to have Taylor direct the actual war) it should probably be Emiya here with him instead of Arash and it's Jackie that leads them here but...ehhh, it's already done
anyway, hope you guys liked it. let me know what you thought- good, bad, odd- but i am now in need of sleep, so good night
