Chapter CXLII: Lost History
James D. Fawkes
Court Scribe
- Location
- Avalon (Isle of Mists)
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Chapter CXLII: Lost History
By the time lunch rolled around, Mordred hadn't returned yet, and the fog began to roll in once again. When I gently asked Jackie if she had anything to do with it, she had just given me a clueless shake of her head and said, "Since it hurts Mommy, we won't use our mist ever again unless Mommy says it's okay."
Like it was that simple. Frankly, it was a little off-putting how she could be so innocent and guileless, and yet still somehow she was Jack the Ripper. The incongruence was almost dizzying.
It meant, of course, that our original guess was right, and the fog had nothing to do with Jackie and everything to do with our masterminds. Whether Flamel's reluctant suggestion that it had something to do with this Angrboða thing that was supposedly important to their plans held any water, that part we still didn't have any idea about. I wouldn't be surprised, but I wasn't going to hedge any bets until we had a better grasp of things, and that might not happen until we were face to face with the thing.
If and when we ran into Paracelsus again, I'd have to see if he was feeling chatty enough to reveal that for us. If he was willing to give his name away the instant he met any of us in person, then I put decent odds on getting at least something out of him if we just tried.
We all sat down to a hearty lunch, cooked by Emiya. He and Renée had apparently worked out a system, whereby she got to make breakfast, he got to make lunch, and they worked on dinner together. I suspected Flamel had intervened somewhere in there to convince her to relinquish that much, because I noticed her standing just outside the dining room while we ate, eavesdropping, and although I made sure to keep the bugs out of the kitchen and the pantry as much as possible as a matter of courtesy and hygiene, the singular specimen I had tagged her with remained since I first put it there.
I doubted she would have shown any expression, but I think I was getting enough of a grasp on her personality that I could imagine she must be stewing in envy for having her role taken, even if it was only once a day.
Fran, of course, had been with us for long enough to have picked up at least a few table manners, but Jackie was almost completely uninterested at first, like she knew what food was but didn't see the point. When she saw Nursery Rhyme and me both enjoying our meal, however, curiosity got the better of her, and she decided to try it — and then she couldn't stop.
"It's really good!" she declared. "We like it a lot!"
"My house-husband is the best!" Rika agreed.
"Mmhm!" said Jackie.
Unfortunately, as one might expect of a girl who looked like she'd grown up on the street, Jackie had no idea how to properly use the utensils that had been set out at her place at the table, she was just shoveling it all into her mouth as quickly as she possibly could. When I thought about what Mom would have said, the word slipped out of my mouth before I could even think about it.
"Manners, Jackie."
It wasn't just Jackie, it was the whole table that stopped to turn and stare at me, with the exception of Fran and Arash. I tried not to pay them and their stares any mind as I set my own silverware down and reached over to correct her, because now that I said something, I had to commit to the motherly act.
In for a penny, in for a pound. Ironically, this was probably the most appropriate place to use that expression, and yet, Jekyll might not even recognize it if I said it out loud.
"Eat slowly," I told her as I adjusted her grip on her fork. "Make sure you chew it all properly. That way, you can enjoy it for longer. Savor it."
"Okay…" Jackie said a little bashfully. She didn't start eating again right away, and when I went back to my own meal, she watched me intently through her bangs, and then slowly copied how I was eating.
"That just happened, right?" Rika muttered to her brother.
"I…think so, yeah," he replied, equally as quiet. "Unless you and I are sharing the same dream — ow!"
"Nope," said Rika, having just pinched his arm, "you're awake."
At this point, I thought, he really should have expected that.
We all ate our fill and hung about in near silence for several long minutes afterwards, just letting our food digest, before we went back to doing our own things. Jekyll returned to his study and his radio to contact his network again, and Tohsaka did his best to avoid us, because it seemed he was still sour about our disagreement from a few hours ago. Jeanne Alter and Arash decided to go outside to stand watch, the latter out of duty and the former because at least it might mean some action if a patrol group stumbled across us.
Andersen, fortunately, looked like he had decided that discretion was the better part of valor. I still wasn't particularly happy about him or any of the things he'd said earlier, so I was actually kind of grateful that he was giving me so much space. He might not have been a paragon of common sense or courtesy, but I appreciated the fact that he had at least some.
As the afternoon wore on, there was still no sign of Mordred returning. Her tracker was still showing on the map, putting her somewhere in the general vicinity of Whitechapel, but when I peered through her eyes, all I saw was the foggy streets of London.
"She'll be back," Ritsuka repeated. "She just has a bit of a temper, you know? She needs to work it off."
"As long as she doesn't decide to use Mash as a punching bag again," Rika said.
"I-I really don't think it's going to be that bad, Senpai," Mash tried, but she didn't sound all that convincing.
Most of the afternoon, we spent finetuning our plans for tomorrow morning, but it was mostly just rehashing what we'd already decided we were going to do, since all of our plans had been made last night and they hadn't really changed. The only things we had to account for now were the presence of Jackie and Flamel and their coming with us, and that was a simple enough thing that we didn't really need to make any adjustments to accommodate their coming along.
Finally, Mordred returned, but by the time she finally came back in through the front door, it was nearing dinner time, and the smell of cooking food permeated the apartment as the faint clatter of pots and pans echoed in the background. The clock on the mantle ticked away, nearly silent by comparison.
"Mo-chan!" Rika greeted her brightly.
"Sir Mordred," said Mash, "I'm glad you're okay."
"Always so polite with you," Mordred groused. "What, like a couple of tin cans and a few gangly puppets were gonna hurt me? Come on! I'd die of shame!"
"Welcome back," I said calmly. She looked over at me, her face twisted into a sour expression, ready and willing to get right back into things where we left off, and I glanced at her only long enough to meet her eyes impassively. Whatever she got out of that, it was enough to drain the fight right out of her.
"Yeah," she said at length. "Guess so."
"Did you find anything else out while you were on patrol?" Ritsuka asked her.
"Nothing new," she replied. "Just a patrol group or two sniffing around, nothing I couldn't handle."
I thought about bringing up the fact that we were trying to avoid destroying too many of those so we could use them to try and map out the enemy's movements, patterns, and locations, but in the interest of keeping the peace, I decided to keep my tongue. Until Flamel had enough trackers for us to make use of — and with me the only one able to safely place them without drawing their attention to us and defeating the point — it wasn't worth starting a fight over it.
"Our plans haven't changed," I told her. "Tomorrow morning, while the fog is gone, we're going to investigate the Clock Tower and see if there's anything there for us to find. Jackie, Flamel, and Andersen will be coming with us."
Mordred didn't exactly look happy to hear this, but she didn't try to start a fight about it either. "Right."
And that was all the more she said about it. Maybe for her, it really was that simple.
Not much later, it was time for dinner, and those of us who either wanted or needed to eat sat down at the dining room table that was quickly becoming crowded. Jackie chose the seat next to mine again, and she seemed to like her second meal just as much as she had her first. What really seemed to delight her, however, was me correcting her whenever she started getting messy or sloppy, like the simple act of me showing her proper manners was the best thing ever.
To her, maybe it was. I still hadn't quite figured out how to ask her exactly how a girl her age became an infamous serial killer, or why she used plural pronouns when referring to herself. Dissociative Identity Disorder? I only knew enough about that to know what it was called and the very basics of what could cause it, but even what little I knew didn't feel like it really fit.
After dinner, we made sure everyone was on the same page about what was happening tomorrow, including Andersen, Tohsaka, Flamel, and even Jackie. How much she understood or cared, I wasn't sure either, but she seemed frighteningly sharp, despite her childish appearance and mannerisms, so it was entirely possible that she understood everything and only cared insofar as caring would please me.
In that way, she reminded me a little bit of Alec. Less of a sociopath than him, but frighteningly willing to attach herself to me just because I was showing her some basic kindness and simultaneously apathetic about everything else.
I suppose I shouldn't have expected much else from Jack the Ripper.
We went to bed early so that we could be up early, and that was about where we ran into our first major snag with Jackie, because she wanted to sleep in the same bed as me. That wasn't itself an issue, but…
"No knives in bed," I told her.
Her eyes narrowed on me almost mutinously. In the background, the twins watched the spectacle with a kind of bewildered curiosity, and even Mash couldn't help staring.
Pulling on memories of sleepovers in my childhood, where Mom had never had to say something quite that ridiculous, I let myself bend just a little bit.
"You can bring one knife to bed," I allowed, "but it has to stay sheathed and under your pillow so that you don't hurt yourself."
"It's not her who needs to be worried about getting hurt," Tohsaka muttered. I ignored him.
"One knife," I said, staying firm. "The rest have to go into spirit form. Unless you want to stay up on guard duty with Arash and Jeanne Alter."
Jackie pouted, but under this threat in particular, she caved. "Fine…"
And instead of keeping one behind, all of her knives dematerialized, followed by her cloak, leaving her in… Well, frankly, I felt kind of uncomfortable describing that as clothing, because a pair of panties, stockings, and a waistcoat were more like things you wore with the rest of your clothes, not as your clothes.
Mash squeaked, face turning red.
"Holy cow," said Rika as her brother turned away, his ears burning. "That's what she was wearing under that cloak? Who dressed her?"
"Uhn," Fran grunted.
Who, indeed?
For the sake of everyone's sanity, I took off my uniform's shirt and draped it over her like a nightgown. It fit her like one, too, so large that she was veritably swimming in it, but it only took Jackie giving it a tentative sniff before she was snuggling up in it with a smile, muttering to herself, "Mommy's scent…"
I didn't feel like unpacking that just then, so I decided to pretend I hadn't heard her. The picture that what little I knew was painting about her life wasn't a pretty one.
Jackie was only too happy to wrap herself up in my shirt and bury herself into my chest when we all lied down, and as ridiculous as it would have sounded to me just a few weeks ago, I had to imagine we really did look just like mother and child. Another thing that I could wait until later to unpack, when I had more time and space to think about it.
We slept quietly and peacefully. Jackie didn't wake me up even once during the night, and the next morning, I found her exactly where she'd settled in, with one of my arms thrown almost protectively over her small shoulders. When I looked down at her, her face was calm and peaceful, marred only by the vivid scars cutting across her cheeks.
Another moment where it seemed impossible that this was the infamous Jack the Ripper. And yet, less than a day ago, she'd been trying to carve me open with one of those knives, and less than two days ago, she'd nearly succeeded. I didn't need the reminder that appearances could be very deceiving.
As though she sensed me looking, Jackie blinked open her eyes and looked up at me with a smile, "Good morning, Mommy."
Pure, innocent, guileless. That was probably the most dangerous part about her.
"Good morning, Jackie," I replied. I wasn't sure if the smile I gave her in return was quite so genuine or quite so open, but at least some part of it was real. It made her happy either way.
Slowly, the others woke up around us, and when everyone was awake and lucid enough, we climbed out of bed and got ready for the day, which meant taking my shirt back from Jackie. I told her she should put the cloak back on, too, to better hide her knives from the enemy, and privately, I made a note to ask Da Vinci if it would be possible to get her something more substantial to wear.
I didn't understand all of the technical bits about how spiritrons worked, but the fact that they could be manifested into something substantial enough to touch in the form of Servants and their gear meant that Da Vinci should be able to do something. Even if it was just a pair of shorts, that would be enough to make me more comfortable about Jackie's clothes.
Breakfast was just as good as it was yesterday. Renée seemed almost proud to hear us enjoy it, not necessarily in her expression or her posture, but in the air she carried about her and the way she stayed in the dining room to watch us eat. When Flamel complimented her on an excellent job, I could have sworn I saw her lips curl up just the slightest on either end. Her "thank you, Master," had an undertone of warmth, when I strained my ears to listen for it.
Maybe she wasn't as cold and frigid as she seemed to be.
With our food eaten and the sky outside slowly brightening enough to pierce the cloudy gloom, there was no time to waste, and those of us who were going to the Clock Tower made the preparations we needed. Months of practice made us quick and ready to go in just a few minutes.
"Ah, yes, I almost forgot," Flamel said as we were just about to leave. "One moment, my friends, one moment."
He went back into the adjacent study, and returned a few seconds later with a matchbox containing a handful of trinkets, each no larger than a pea. Small enough, in other words, for my bugs to carry one without any issue.
"The trackers you requested," Flamel said by way of explanation. "Only a dozen or so, I'm afraid, but they should function as required, so if you can affix them to the enemy patrols…"
"They'll do just fine," I told him as I accepted the box. I made sure it was closed before slipping it into my equipment pouch. I turned next to Jekyll. "Keep an ear out, Doctor Jekyll. Jeanne Alter will be here to protect you, Fran, and Renée, so you just need to make sure to stay in touch with your network."
"Yay," Jeanne Alter droned, "how fun…"
"I shall leave myself in your hands, Miss," Jekyll said to her politely. Jeanne Alter only rolled her eyes.
"Whatever…"
"Uhn…" Fran mumbled miserably.
I knew she wanted to come along, but there was no point. It would be risking her life for no reason, because she wasn't a Servant and didn't really have a place fighting them.
"We should be back before lunch," I went on. "We'll contact you and let you know if anything changes."
Jekyll nodded. "I appreciate your thoughtfulness. I shall endeavor to stay apprised of any developments within the city."
"Make sure you tell us right away if alligators pop up out of the sewers!" Rika said.
Jekyll was appropriately bewildered. "A…alligators?"
"Ignore her," I said. "The only place where alligators live in the sewers is New York City."
That didn't seem to help him at all, and to be fair, it hadn't been intended to. My target was much shorter and had red hair.
"Wait, that's true?" Rika burst out. "I thought that was just a conspiracy theory! An urban legend!"
Andersen chuckled. I ignored them both.
"Come on. The sooner we get out there, the safer we'll be coming back."
"Senpai!"
We set off. The Clock Tower — the British Museum — was quite a ways away, although not, in the grand scheme of things, the farthest distance we'd yet traveled from Jekyll's apartment. We'd technically gone at least as far following Nursery Rhyme south of Soho, only this time, we had a bit of an advantage in that we could go in as straight a line as possible. Not a perfectly straight line, no matter how convenient that would be, but straighter than the alternative, which would save us some time and energy.
We already had the place marked out on our maps, so it wasn't strictly necessary, but Mordred, as was usual, took the lead, and once we were far enough away from the apartment not to lead any of the patrols back by accident, I let Huginn out and sent him up into the sky to give me a bird's eye view of things.
"The headquarters of the Association is near Regent Park," Mash said. "Senpai… We'll have to be careful. There's no telling if other magi made it out when the entrance was destroyed. We might be accosted."
"Director Marie did say we could use lethal force," Ritsuka said quietly.
"Just hit 'em with the back of your shield, Cinnabon," said Rika. "See if they think messing with us is a good idea then!"
"Papa," said Nursery Rhyme, "does that mean I have to hit them with the back of my sleeve?"
"Don't you start on that now, too…" Tohsaka mumbled.
Jackie looked up at me. "Mommy?"
"Nonlethal, if you can help it," I told her, answering her unasked question. "But whatever it takes, if you can't. If it's us or them, then it should always be us."
She beamed, as though she'd just been told she could have her favorite treat after dinner if she behaved. "Okay!"
"Hearing that more often doesn't make me like it any better," Ritsuka said under his breath.
Me, neither. But I'd heard enough horror stories about what magi could do to you when they thought of you as a slab of interesting meat to understand that there wasn't always a neat, safe, PG-13 way of dealing with people like that. I'd also heard enough of those stories — and dealt with enough troublesome capes in my career — to know that you couldn't always deal with them as simply as knocking them down with a hard blow or two to something soft and vulnerable.
Good thing I had several silk lines prepared in my equipment pouch.
"That won't be necessary," Flamel said. "Should we encounter any problematic elements, then it will be a simple enough task to neutralize them. There's no need to resort to more…final solutions."
Considering how easily he'd chased Jackie around that tiny apartment parlor, maybe he was right.
The trek to the British Museum wound up taking us about an hour, all told, through winding streets and many turns, and there were several times we had to take a detour to avoid one or more patrol groups. It cut into our time a little, but it also gave me the opportunity to use my swarm and place a tracker in each group — I chose the Helter Skelter, because with all of the nooks and crannies inside their thick, metal carapaces, they were the ones where the tracker was easiest to hide, and there weren't enough in the matchbox to put more than one to each group right now.
Later on, we could follow their movements and see if they would lead us back to their creator. I wasn't ready to get my hopes up just yet, but it would make things a whole lot easier if we didn't have to scour the whole city for these guys.
When at last we made it to the entrance gate —
"Holy cow," said Rika, "it really is nothing but rubble!"
— it was to find both the gate itself and the building beyond smashed to pieces. The wrought iron bars had been twisted and mangled to the point that some of them had snapped clean off, leaving the entrance wide open for us to go in ourselves, and the palatial Romanesque columns had been reduced to nothing more than chunks of rock.
It was like someone had taken a wrecking ball to the whole place and hadn't stopped until nothing was left standing, not even a single brick. No mural, no fresco, not even the wooden doors had been left intact. Everything was in so many pieces that even the magi of the Association would have had to put in serious work for months just to fix it all.
"Looks just like it did the last time I was here," Mordred said grimly. "Rubble, ruin, and not a single thing else. Damn, those guys were thorough." She glanced over at Tohsaka. "You might be the only survivor to make it outta that mess, just 'cause you weren't there when it all went down."
Tohsaka grimaced, staring intently at the ruin. I imagined he must have been thinking the same, and how lucky it was that he'd decided to leave when his mentor was late instead of staying and getting caught up in all of it.
Beep-beep!
Marie's face appeared midair.
"Director."
But she wasn't looking at me, she was looking at the ruins of the British Museum. Her face was an inscrutable mask, but the tension in her muscles, the narrowing of her eyes, and the thin line of her mouth told me that her thoughts were troubled. By which part of this, I didn't know for sure, because her feelings on the Association were complicated, but it couldn't be easy having to face the reality that something you had taken for granted, something that felt like it would remain forever, no matter what happened, had been utterly destroyed.
"…We're not picking up any life signs," she said at length, her voice grave.
"It seems like whoever did this was exceptionally thorough," Romani added from somewhere out of frame. "Obviously, our scanners can't quite reach through some of the bounded fields protecting the deeper sections of the Clock Tower, but…"
"No," said Marie, "if they went this far, then it's likely they managed to get down there, too." She closed her eyes for a brief moment. "But it looks like they didn't manage to breach Spirit Tomb Albion. If they had access to that place as well, then things would have been a lot worse off."
"Spirit Tomb Albion?" the twins parroted.
"The Association's most closely guarded secret," Marie answered them. She glanced their way long enough to lance them with a glare. "And that's all you're getting about it! Since the enemy doesn't have access to it, you don't need to know any more than that! Got it?"
Rika saluted. "Roger, roger!"
"It may not be for lack of trying," said Emiya, stepping closer to examine the mangled remains of the front gate. "Frankenstein was convinced these guys are Servants because they do stuff that modern magi wouldn't be able to, but that doesn't mean they have the skill or finesse to dismantle all of the Clock Tower's protections. Whoever came through this gate, for example, used sheer brute force, not alchemy or magecraft."
"Hm." Flamel stepped over to join him, running his fingertips over the damage gently. "You have something of a point there. No traces of magical energy applied to the metal, so whoever did this knocked it down with raw power. Perhaps Paracelsus and his compatriots have another Servant working for them."
I looked down at Jackie. "Jackie? Do you know anything?"
Jackie shook her head. "The only Servant we knew about was Robin, and he was there with us yesterday morning."
"Robin?" I asked.
"The guy with the cloak and crossbow," Arash said. "I'm not sure he had the strength for something like this. Or the temperament. He did everything he could to avoid a straight fight."
There was only one Heroic Spirit I could think of with a name like that, but without a better look at him, I wasn't sure I could confidently say Robin Hood had attacked us yesterday. I wasn't sure why he would go along with this scheme either, but if an altruist like Paracelsus could be twisted by who or whatever was really behind Project Demonic Fog, I guess a hero like Robin Hood could be, too.
"Is he still around?" asked Ritsuka.
Arash just shook his head.
"Let's keep going," I said. "The Clock Tower is an underground facility, right? We need to find the entrance."
"Right," said Marie.
As a group, we started across the courtyard. Right down the center, there was a pathway that had been set out for tourists and visitors of the museum, and we used that, but on either side, there were patches of what must once have been well-managed lawns. They were now marred by what looked like a set of enormous footprints, resembling the Helter Skelter, only bigger and much, much heavier.
Had our mystery Servant made a larger model? Maybe. All things considered, it was entirely possible that the costs of making the bigger one had made mass-producing it too expensive in terms of resources, so there was only the one we had to worry about, maybe two. I didn't think there would be more than three at the maximum.
Whatever the case, they didn't look to be here now. Forget my swarm, with footprints that size, there was no way they were hiding amongst the rubble without any of us seeing them.
There were steps leading up to where the front entrance would have been, but we couldn't go up more than the first two before having to navigate around the debris — shattered slabs of whatever stone the building had been made from, some nothing more than tiny pebbles and some twice as large as a person.
"It'll be a ways inside," Marie told us. "There's supposed to be a bounded field protecting the entrance from those who aren't magi, but with how badly damaged everything is, that might have been destroyed, too."
"Which means we'll have to excavate it, won't we?" Mash asked.
Rika let out a miserable groan.
"Looks like a job for you Knight Classes," said Andersen. "Time for you to put that ridiculous strength of yours to good use."
"You planning on sitting this one out, pipsqueak?" asked Mordred.
"Unfortunately, this body of mine is ill-suited for physical labor," Andersen replied, although he didn't sound all that sorry. "And even if I wanted to, my strength is too low to meaningfully contribute. The most I could do is pick up a few pebbles."
Mordred grunted rather than admit he had a point.
"It won't be necessary," said Flamel. "It'll be the work of but a moment to clear the way, once we know where to look."
Remembering how he'd transformed the apartment's parlor, yeah, if he could do something like that here, it really wouldn't take all that much effort. There was just one thing we had to worry about.
"Should we expect any other defenses on the way in?" I asked Marie.
"Around the main entrance, no," she answered. "But the dorm rooms and workshops will no doubt be personalized according to the original inhabitants, so if the facility is intact enough, you'll have to be careful not to trigger any of their bounded fields."
"Mm."
As I probably should have expected. This was the Clock Tower, after all, home of some of the most talented magi in the Western world, at least a few of whom happened to also be old school aristocrats. It was only natural that they would prize their security more than even the average magus.
As long as the entrance was clear, we could hopefully avoid trouble with the rest. Frustratingly, however, I was having trouble finding it with the handful of bugs I had out looking for it. The fact that my bugs weren't technically familiars in the way magi traditionally understood them might have something to do with that. For that matter, the Clock Tower didn't seem to have been spared exposure to the fog, because I wasn't finding much in the way of living bugs under our feet either.
We started picking our way across the wreckage, finding whatever footing we could, because none of it was even and very little of it was sturdy. The floor itself, at least, didn't seem to have been directly damaged, instead having fallen victim to the columns and bricks as they came down. There were a few cracks here and there that I spotted with my meager swarm, but it was impossible to tell one way or the other whether they'd been made when the rest of the building collapsed or if the larger Helter Skelter had made them when it came through.
Lisa would have been so incredibly useful just then.
"Where should we start?" Mash asked, looking around uncertainly. "Director, there's no way we could clear out this entire area and still have enough time to investigate before the fog comes back."
"No need," Marie said. "Based upon Chaldea's records of the Clock Tower, the entrance should be —"
"Magical energy reaction detected!" Romani suddenly shouted. Marie whirled about to face him.
"What?"
"It's coming from —"
"Master!" Mash shouted.
She threw herself in front of the group right in time for the floor to explode some twenty feet away, throwing up bits and pieces of the destroyed building into the air. I raised my arms protectively in front of my face more on reflex than anything else, but I needn't have bothered, because whatever came close enough to actually hit us pinged off of Mash's shield harmlessly.
"Mommy?" Jackie asked.
"I'm okay, Jackie," I reassured her.
"Us, too," Ritsuka added.
There was no time to check on anyone else. At that exact moment, the hole that had been opened up in the floor spewed out a veritable deluge of —
"Books?" Rika asked incredulously. "But I didn't bring my library card!"
"Alice," Tohsaka barked, "are any of these —"
"Books are books and Servants are Servants," Nursery Rhyme replied simply. And without a hint of irony, too.
The books swirled about not unlike my swarm, spilling out of the hole and twisting up into the air into a cloud of flapping leather and fluttering paper. They gathered together in something like an undulating battle line, bouncing up and down and hovering almost defensively over the hole they'd come out of, almost like something out of an old Hitchcock movie.
But, importantly, none of them seemed to be a Servant, nor even particularly intelligent. There didn't even seem to be a mind behind them.
"I'm not detecting a Saint Graph!" Mash reported. "Senpai! These are just —"
"Grimoires," Marie said, eyes narrowed. "Research journals left behind by magi. But why are they… Could it be, they were animated by the fog?"
"Who cares?" said Mordred. "They're in our way, ain't they? That means that what we gotta do is real simple!"
A brace of arrows leapt through the air and unerringly struck half a dozen of the books. Leather cracked and split, pages ripped and tore, and scraps of paper and parchment floated almost gently to the ground. Mordred's head whipped around towards Arash.
"Hey!" she squawked indignantly.
But the books shifted. They all aligned, flipping open like wings spreading so that the broad side of each page faced us. The font of power that rose like a tide told me exactly what was about to happen.
Fuck.
"Destroy them!" I ordered.
Next — Chapter CXLIII: Grand Ritual
And now that the shameless plugging is out of the way...
Chapter CXLII: Lost History
By the time lunch rolled around, Mordred hadn't returned yet, and the fog began to roll in once again. When I gently asked Jackie if she had anything to do with it, she had just given me a clueless shake of her head and said, "Since it hurts Mommy, we won't use our mist ever again unless Mommy says it's okay."
Like it was that simple. Frankly, it was a little off-putting how she could be so innocent and guileless, and yet still somehow she was Jack the Ripper. The incongruence was almost dizzying.
It meant, of course, that our original guess was right, and the fog had nothing to do with Jackie and everything to do with our masterminds. Whether Flamel's reluctant suggestion that it had something to do with this Angrboða thing that was supposedly important to their plans held any water, that part we still didn't have any idea about. I wouldn't be surprised, but I wasn't going to hedge any bets until we had a better grasp of things, and that might not happen until we were face to face with the thing.
If and when we ran into Paracelsus again, I'd have to see if he was feeling chatty enough to reveal that for us. If he was willing to give his name away the instant he met any of us in person, then I put decent odds on getting at least something out of him if we just tried.
We all sat down to a hearty lunch, cooked by Emiya. He and Renée had apparently worked out a system, whereby she got to make breakfast, he got to make lunch, and they worked on dinner together. I suspected Flamel had intervened somewhere in there to convince her to relinquish that much, because I noticed her standing just outside the dining room while we ate, eavesdropping, and although I made sure to keep the bugs out of the kitchen and the pantry as much as possible as a matter of courtesy and hygiene, the singular specimen I had tagged her with remained since I first put it there.
I doubted she would have shown any expression, but I think I was getting enough of a grasp on her personality that I could imagine she must be stewing in envy for having her role taken, even if it was only once a day.
Fran, of course, had been with us for long enough to have picked up at least a few table manners, but Jackie was almost completely uninterested at first, like she knew what food was but didn't see the point. When she saw Nursery Rhyme and me both enjoying our meal, however, curiosity got the better of her, and she decided to try it — and then she couldn't stop.
"It's really good!" she declared. "We like it a lot!"
"My house-husband is the best!" Rika agreed.
"Mmhm!" said Jackie.
Unfortunately, as one might expect of a girl who looked like she'd grown up on the street, Jackie had no idea how to properly use the utensils that had been set out at her place at the table, she was just shoveling it all into her mouth as quickly as she possibly could. When I thought about what Mom would have said, the word slipped out of my mouth before I could even think about it.
"Manners, Jackie."
It wasn't just Jackie, it was the whole table that stopped to turn and stare at me, with the exception of Fran and Arash. I tried not to pay them and their stares any mind as I set my own silverware down and reached over to correct her, because now that I said something, I had to commit to the motherly act.
In for a penny, in for a pound. Ironically, this was probably the most appropriate place to use that expression, and yet, Jekyll might not even recognize it if I said it out loud.
"Eat slowly," I told her as I adjusted her grip on her fork. "Make sure you chew it all properly. That way, you can enjoy it for longer. Savor it."
"Okay…" Jackie said a little bashfully. She didn't start eating again right away, and when I went back to my own meal, she watched me intently through her bangs, and then slowly copied how I was eating.
"That just happened, right?" Rika muttered to her brother.
"I…think so, yeah," he replied, equally as quiet. "Unless you and I are sharing the same dream — ow!"
"Nope," said Rika, having just pinched his arm, "you're awake."
At this point, I thought, he really should have expected that.
We all ate our fill and hung about in near silence for several long minutes afterwards, just letting our food digest, before we went back to doing our own things. Jekyll returned to his study and his radio to contact his network again, and Tohsaka did his best to avoid us, because it seemed he was still sour about our disagreement from a few hours ago. Jeanne Alter and Arash decided to go outside to stand watch, the latter out of duty and the former because at least it might mean some action if a patrol group stumbled across us.
Andersen, fortunately, looked like he had decided that discretion was the better part of valor. I still wasn't particularly happy about him or any of the things he'd said earlier, so I was actually kind of grateful that he was giving me so much space. He might not have been a paragon of common sense or courtesy, but I appreciated the fact that he had at least some.
As the afternoon wore on, there was still no sign of Mordred returning. Her tracker was still showing on the map, putting her somewhere in the general vicinity of Whitechapel, but when I peered through her eyes, all I saw was the foggy streets of London.
"She'll be back," Ritsuka repeated. "She just has a bit of a temper, you know? She needs to work it off."
"As long as she doesn't decide to use Mash as a punching bag again," Rika said.
"I-I really don't think it's going to be that bad, Senpai," Mash tried, but she didn't sound all that convincing.
Most of the afternoon, we spent finetuning our plans for tomorrow morning, but it was mostly just rehashing what we'd already decided we were going to do, since all of our plans had been made last night and they hadn't really changed. The only things we had to account for now were the presence of Jackie and Flamel and their coming with us, and that was a simple enough thing that we didn't really need to make any adjustments to accommodate their coming along.
Finally, Mordred returned, but by the time she finally came back in through the front door, it was nearing dinner time, and the smell of cooking food permeated the apartment as the faint clatter of pots and pans echoed in the background. The clock on the mantle ticked away, nearly silent by comparison.
"Mo-chan!" Rika greeted her brightly.
"Sir Mordred," said Mash, "I'm glad you're okay."
"Always so polite with you," Mordred groused. "What, like a couple of tin cans and a few gangly puppets were gonna hurt me? Come on! I'd die of shame!"
"Welcome back," I said calmly. She looked over at me, her face twisted into a sour expression, ready and willing to get right back into things where we left off, and I glanced at her only long enough to meet her eyes impassively. Whatever she got out of that, it was enough to drain the fight right out of her.
"Yeah," she said at length. "Guess so."
"Did you find anything else out while you were on patrol?" Ritsuka asked her.
"Nothing new," she replied. "Just a patrol group or two sniffing around, nothing I couldn't handle."
I thought about bringing up the fact that we were trying to avoid destroying too many of those so we could use them to try and map out the enemy's movements, patterns, and locations, but in the interest of keeping the peace, I decided to keep my tongue. Until Flamel had enough trackers for us to make use of — and with me the only one able to safely place them without drawing their attention to us and defeating the point — it wasn't worth starting a fight over it.
"Our plans haven't changed," I told her. "Tomorrow morning, while the fog is gone, we're going to investigate the Clock Tower and see if there's anything there for us to find. Jackie, Flamel, and Andersen will be coming with us."
Mordred didn't exactly look happy to hear this, but she didn't try to start a fight about it either. "Right."
And that was all the more she said about it. Maybe for her, it really was that simple.
Not much later, it was time for dinner, and those of us who either wanted or needed to eat sat down at the dining room table that was quickly becoming crowded. Jackie chose the seat next to mine again, and she seemed to like her second meal just as much as she had her first. What really seemed to delight her, however, was me correcting her whenever she started getting messy or sloppy, like the simple act of me showing her proper manners was the best thing ever.
To her, maybe it was. I still hadn't quite figured out how to ask her exactly how a girl her age became an infamous serial killer, or why she used plural pronouns when referring to herself. Dissociative Identity Disorder? I only knew enough about that to know what it was called and the very basics of what could cause it, but even what little I knew didn't feel like it really fit.
After dinner, we made sure everyone was on the same page about what was happening tomorrow, including Andersen, Tohsaka, Flamel, and even Jackie. How much she understood or cared, I wasn't sure either, but she seemed frighteningly sharp, despite her childish appearance and mannerisms, so it was entirely possible that she understood everything and only cared insofar as caring would please me.
In that way, she reminded me a little bit of Alec. Less of a sociopath than him, but frighteningly willing to attach herself to me just because I was showing her some basic kindness and simultaneously apathetic about everything else.
I suppose I shouldn't have expected much else from Jack the Ripper.
We went to bed early so that we could be up early, and that was about where we ran into our first major snag with Jackie, because she wanted to sleep in the same bed as me. That wasn't itself an issue, but…
"No knives in bed," I told her.
Her eyes narrowed on me almost mutinously. In the background, the twins watched the spectacle with a kind of bewildered curiosity, and even Mash couldn't help staring.
Pulling on memories of sleepovers in my childhood, where Mom had never had to say something quite that ridiculous, I let myself bend just a little bit.
"You can bring one knife to bed," I allowed, "but it has to stay sheathed and under your pillow so that you don't hurt yourself."
"It's not her who needs to be worried about getting hurt," Tohsaka muttered. I ignored him.
"One knife," I said, staying firm. "The rest have to go into spirit form. Unless you want to stay up on guard duty with Arash and Jeanne Alter."
Jackie pouted, but under this threat in particular, she caved. "Fine…"
And instead of keeping one behind, all of her knives dematerialized, followed by her cloak, leaving her in… Well, frankly, I felt kind of uncomfortable describing that as clothing, because a pair of panties, stockings, and a waistcoat were more like things you wore with the rest of your clothes, not as your clothes.
Mash squeaked, face turning red.
"Holy cow," said Rika as her brother turned away, his ears burning. "That's what she was wearing under that cloak? Who dressed her?"
"Uhn," Fran grunted.
Who, indeed?
For the sake of everyone's sanity, I took off my uniform's shirt and draped it over her like a nightgown. It fit her like one, too, so large that she was veritably swimming in it, but it only took Jackie giving it a tentative sniff before she was snuggling up in it with a smile, muttering to herself, "Mommy's scent…"
I didn't feel like unpacking that just then, so I decided to pretend I hadn't heard her. The picture that what little I knew was painting about her life wasn't a pretty one.
Jackie was only too happy to wrap herself up in my shirt and bury herself into my chest when we all lied down, and as ridiculous as it would have sounded to me just a few weeks ago, I had to imagine we really did look just like mother and child. Another thing that I could wait until later to unpack, when I had more time and space to think about it.
We slept quietly and peacefully. Jackie didn't wake me up even once during the night, and the next morning, I found her exactly where she'd settled in, with one of my arms thrown almost protectively over her small shoulders. When I looked down at her, her face was calm and peaceful, marred only by the vivid scars cutting across her cheeks.
Another moment where it seemed impossible that this was the infamous Jack the Ripper. And yet, less than a day ago, she'd been trying to carve me open with one of those knives, and less than two days ago, she'd nearly succeeded. I didn't need the reminder that appearances could be very deceiving.
As though she sensed me looking, Jackie blinked open her eyes and looked up at me with a smile, "Good morning, Mommy."
Pure, innocent, guileless. That was probably the most dangerous part about her.
"Good morning, Jackie," I replied. I wasn't sure if the smile I gave her in return was quite so genuine or quite so open, but at least some part of it was real. It made her happy either way.
Slowly, the others woke up around us, and when everyone was awake and lucid enough, we climbed out of bed and got ready for the day, which meant taking my shirt back from Jackie. I told her she should put the cloak back on, too, to better hide her knives from the enemy, and privately, I made a note to ask Da Vinci if it would be possible to get her something more substantial to wear.
I didn't understand all of the technical bits about how spiritrons worked, but the fact that they could be manifested into something substantial enough to touch in the form of Servants and their gear meant that Da Vinci should be able to do something. Even if it was just a pair of shorts, that would be enough to make me more comfortable about Jackie's clothes.
Breakfast was just as good as it was yesterday. Renée seemed almost proud to hear us enjoy it, not necessarily in her expression or her posture, but in the air she carried about her and the way she stayed in the dining room to watch us eat. When Flamel complimented her on an excellent job, I could have sworn I saw her lips curl up just the slightest on either end. Her "thank you, Master," had an undertone of warmth, when I strained my ears to listen for it.
Maybe she wasn't as cold and frigid as she seemed to be.
With our food eaten and the sky outside slowly brightening enough to pierce the cloudy gloom, there was no time to waste, and those of us who were going to the Clock Tower made the preparations we needed. Months of practice made us quick and ready to go in just a few minutes.
"Ah, yes, I almost forgot," Flamel said as we were just about to leave. "One moment, my friends, one moment."
He went back into the adjacent study, and returned a few seconds later with a matchbox containing a handful of trinkets, each no larger than a pea. Small enough, in other words, for my bugs to carry one without any issue.
"The trackers you requested," Flamel said by way of explanation. "Only a dozen or so, I'm afraid, but they should function as required, so if you can affix them to the enemy patrols…"
"They'll do just fine," I told him as I accepted the box. I made sure it was closed before slipping it into my equipment pouch. I turned next to Jekyll. "Keep an ear out, Doctor Jekyll. Jeanne Alter will be here to protect you, Fran, and Renée, so you just need to make sure to stay in touch with your network."
"Yay," Jeanne Alter droned, "how fun…"
"I shall leave myself in your hands, Miss," Jekyll said to her politely. Jeanne Alter only rolled her eyes.
"Whatever…"
"Uhn…" Fran mumbled miserably.
I knew she wanted to come along, but there was no point. It would be risking her life for no reason, because she wasn't a Servant and didn't really have a place fighting them.
"We should be back before lunch," I went on. "We'll contact you and let you know if anything changes."
Jekyll nodded. "I appreciate your thoughtfulness. I shall endeavor to stay apprised of any developments within the city."
"Make sure you tell us right away if alligators pop up out of the sewers!" Rika said.
Jekyll was appropriately bewildered. "A…alligators?"
"Ignore her," I said. "The only place where alligators live in the sewers is New York City."
That didn't seem to help him at all, and to be fair, it hadn't been intended to. My target was much shorter and had red hair.
"Wait, that's true?" Rika burst out. "I thought that was just a conspiracy theory! An urban legend!"
Andersen chuckled. I ignored them both.
"Come on. The sooner we get out there, the safer we'll be coming back."
"Senpai!"
We set off. The Clock Tower — the British Museum — was quite a ways away, although not, in the grand scheme of things, the farthest distance we'd yet traveled from Jekyll's apartment. We'd technically gone at least as far following Nursery Rhyme south of Soho, only this time, we had a bit of an advantage in that we could go in as straight a line as possible. Not a perfectly straight line, no matter how convenient that would be, but straighter than the alternative, which would save us some time and energy.
We already had the place marked out on our maps, so it wasn't strictly necessary, but Mordred, as was usual, took the lead, and once we were far enough away from the apartment not to lead any of the patrols back by accident, I let Huginn out and sent him up into the sky to give me a bird's eye view of things.
"The headquarters of the Association is near Regent Park," Mash said. "Senpai… We'll have to be careful. There's no telling if other magi made it out when the entrance was destroyed. We might be accosted."
"Director Marie did say we could use lethal force," Ritsuka said quietly.
"Just hit 'em with the back of your shield, Cinnabon," said Rika. "See if they think messing with us is a good idea then!"
"Papa," said Nursery Rhyme, "does that mean I have to hit them with the back of my sleeve?"
"Don't you start on that now, too…" Tohsaka mumbled.
Jackie looked up at me. "Mommy?"
"Nonlethal, if you can help it," I told her, answering her unasked question. "But whatever it takes, if you can't. If it's us or them, then it should always be us."
She beamed, as though she'd just been told she could have her favorite treat after dinner if she behaved. "Okay!"
"Hearing that more often doesn't make me like it any better," Ritsuka said under his breath.
Me, neither. But I'd heard enough horror stories about what magi could do to you when they thought of you as a slab of interesting meat to understand that there wasn't always a neat, safe, PG-13 way of dealing with people like that. I'd also heard enough of those stories — and dealt with enough troublesome capes in my career — to know that you couldn't always deal with them as simply as knocking them down with a hard blow or two to something soft and vulnerable.
Good thing I had several silk lines prepared in my equipment pouch.
"That won't be necessary," Flamel said. "Should we encounter any problematic elements, then it will be a simple enough task to neutralize them. There's no need to resort to more…final solutions."
Considering how easily he'd chased Jackie around that tiny apartment parlor, maybe he was right.
The trek to the British Museum wound up taking us about an hour, all told, through winding streets and many turns, and there were several times we had to take a detour to avoid one or more patrol groups. It cut into our time a little, but it also gave me the opportunity to use my swarm and place a tracker in each group — I chose the Helter Skelter, because with all of the nooks and crannies inside their thick, metal carapaces, they were the ones where the tracker was easiest to hide, and there weren't enough in the matchbox to put more than one to each group right now.
Later on, we could follow their movements and see if they would lead us back to their creator. I wasn't ready to get my hopes up just yet, but it would make things a whole lot easier if we didn't have to scour the whole city for these guys.
When at last we made it to the entrance gate —
"Holy cow," said Rika, "it really is nothing but rubble!"
— it was to find both the gate itself and the building beyond smashed to pieces. The wrought iron bars had been twisted and mangled to the point that some of them had snapped clean off, leaving the entrance wide open for us to go in ourselves, and the palatial Romanesque columns had been reduced to nothing more than chunks of rock.
It was like someone had taken a wrecking ball to the whole place and hadn't stopped until nothing was left standing, not even a single brick. No mural, no fresco, not even the wooden doors had been left intact. Everything was in so many pieces that even the magi of the Association would have had to put in serious work for months just to fix it all.
"Looks just like it did the last time I was here," Mordred said grimly. "Rubble, ruin, and not a single thing else. Damn, those guys were thorough." She glanced over at Tohsaka. "You might be the only survivor to make it outta that mess, just 'cause you weren't there when it all went down."
Tohsaka grimaced, staring intently at the ruin. I imagined he must have been thinking the same, and how lucky it was that he'd decided to leave when his mentor was late instead of staying and getting caught up in all of it.
Beep-beep!
Marie's face appeared midair.
"Director."
But she wasn't looking at me, she was looking at the ruins of the British Museum. Her face was an inscrutable mask, but the tension in her muscles, the narrowing of her eyes, and the thin line of her mouth told me that her thoughts were troubled. By which part of this, I didn't know for sure, because her feelings on the Association were complicated, but it couldn't be easy having to face the reality that something you had taken for granted, something that felt like it would remain forever, no matter what happened, had been utterly destroyed.
"…We're not picking up any life signs," she said at length, her voice grave.
"It seems like whoever did this was exceptionally thorough," Romani added from somewhere out of frame. "Obviously, our scanners can't quite reach through some of the bounded fields protecting the deeper sections of the Clock Tower, but…"
"No," said Marie, "if they went this far, then it's likely they managed to get down there, too." She closed her eyes for a brief moment. "But it looks like they didn't manage to breach Spirit Tomb Albion. If they had access to that place as well, then things would have been a lot worse off."
"Spirit Tomb Albion?" the twins parroted.
"The Association's most closely guarded secret," Marie answered them. She glanced their way long enough to lance them with a glare. "And that's all you're getting about it! Since the enemy doesn't have access to it, you don't need to know any more than that! Got it?"
Rika saluted. "Roger, roger!"
"It may not be for lack of trying," said Emiya, stepping closer to examine the mangled remains of the front gate. "Frankenstein was convinced these guys are Servants because they do stuff that modern magi wouldn't be able to, but that doesn't mean they have the skill or finesse to dismantle all of the Clock Tower's protections. Whoever came through this gate, for example, used sheer brute force, not alchemy or magecraft."
"Hm." Flamel stepped over to join him, running his fingertips over the damage gently. "You have something of a point there. No traces of magical energy applied to the metal, so whoever did this knocked it down with raw power. Perhaps Paracelsus and his compatriots have another Servant working for them."
I looked down at Jackie. "Jackie? Do you know anything?"
Jackie shook her head. "The only Servant we knew about was Robin, and he was there with us yesterday morning."
"Robin?" I asked.
"The guy with the cloak and crossbow," Arash said. "I'm not sure he had the strength for something like this. Or the temperament. He did everything he could to avoid a straight fight."
There was only one Heroic Spirit I could think of with a name like that, but without a better look at him, I wasn't sure I could confidently say Robin Hood had attacked us yesterday. I wasn't sure why he would go along with this scheme either, but if an altruist like Paracelsus could be twisted by who or whatever was really behind Project Demonic Fog, I guess a hero like Robin Hood could be, too.
"Is he still around?" asked Ritsuka.
Arash just shook his head.
"Let's keep going," I said. "The Clock Tower is an underground facility, right? We need to find the entrance."
"Right," said Marie.
As a group, we started across the courtyard. Right down the center, there was a pathway that had been set out for tourists and visitors of the museum, and we used that, but on either side, there were patches of what must once have been well-managed lawns. They were now marred by what looked like a set of enormous footprints, resembling the Helter Skelter, only bigger and much, much heavier.
Had our mystery Servant made a larger model? Maybe. All things considered, it was entirely possible that the costs of making the bigger one had made mass-producing it too expensive in terms of resources, so there was only the one we had to worry about, maybe two. I didn't think there would be more than three at the maximum.
Whatever the case, they didn't look to be here now. Forget my swarm, with footprints that size, there was no way they were hiding amongst the rubble without any of us seeing them.
There were steps leading up to where the front entrance would have been, but we couldn't go up more than the first two before having to navigate around the debris — shattered slabs of whatever stone the building had been made from, some nothing more than tiny pebbles and some twice as large as a person.
"It'll be a ways inside," Marie told us. "There's supposed to be a bounded field protecting the entrance from those who aren't magi, but with how badly damaged everything is, that might have been destroyed, too."
"Which means we'll have to excavate it, won't we?" Mash asked.
Rika let out a miserable groan.
"Looks like a job for you Knight Classes," said Andersen. "Time for you to put that ridiculous strength of yours to good use."
"You planning on sitting this one out, pipsqueak?" asked Mordred.
"Unfortunately, this body of mine is ill-suited for physical labor," Andersen replied, although he didn't sound all that sorry. "And even if I wanted to, my strength is too low to meaningfully contribute. The most I could do is pick up a few pebbles."
Mordred grunted rather than admit he had a point.
"It won't be necessary," said Flamel. "It'll be the work of but a moment to clear the way, once we know where to look."
Remembering how he'd transformed the apartment's parlor, yeah, if he could do something like that here, it really wouldn't take all that much effort. There was just one thing we had to worry about.
"Should we expect any other defenses on the way in?" I asked Marie.
"Around the main entrance, no," she answered. "But the dorm rooms and workshops will no doubt be personalized according to the original inhabitants, so if the facility is intact enough, you'll have to be careful not to trigger any of their bounded fields."
"Mm."
As I probably should have expected. This was the Clock Tower, after all, home of some of the most talented magi in the Western world, at least a few of whom happened to also be old school aristocrats. It was only natural that they would prize their security more than even the average magus.
As long as the entrance was clear, we could hopefully avoid trouble with the rest. Frustratingly, however, I was having trouble finding it with the handful of bugs I had out looking for it. The fact that my bugs weren't technically familiars in the way magi traditionally understood them might have something to do with that. For that matter, the Clock Tower didn't seem to have been spared exposure to the fog, because I wasn't finding much in the way of living bugs under our feet either.
We started picking our way across the wreckage, finding whatever footing we could, because none of it was even and very little of it was sturdy. The floor itself, at least, didn't seem to have been directly damaged, instead having fallen victim to the columns and bricks as they came down. There were a few cracks here and there that I spotted with my meager swarm, but it was impossible to tell one way or the other whether they'd been made when the rest of the building collapsed or if the larger Helter Skelter had made them when it came through.
Lisa would have been so incredibly useful just then.
"Where should we start?" Mash asked, looking around uncertainly. "Director, there's no way we could clear out this entire area and still have enough time to investigate before the fog comes back."
"No need," Marie said. "Based upon Chaldea's records of the Clock Tower, the entrance should be —"
"Magical energy reaction detected!" Romani suddenly shouted. Marie whirled about to face him.
"What?"
"It's coming from —"
"Master!" Mash shouted.
She threw herself in front of the group right in time for the floor to explode some twenty feet away, throwing up bits and pieces of the destroyed building into the air. I raised my arms protectively in front of my face more on reflex than anything else, but I needn't have bothered, because whatever came close enough to actually hit us pinged off of Mash's shield harmlessly.
"Mommy?" Jackie asked.
"I'm okay, Jackie," I reassured her.
"Us, too," Ritsuka added.
There was no time to check on anyone else. At that exact moment, the hole that had been opened up in the floor spewed out a veritable deluge of —
"Books?" Rika asked incredulously. "But I didn't bring my library card!"
"Alice," Tohsaka barked, "are any of these —"
"Books are books and Servants are Servants," Nursery Rhyme replied simply. And without a hint of irony, too.
The books swirled about not unlike my swarm, spilling out of the hole and twisting up into the air into a cloud of flapping leather and fluttering paper. They gathered together in something like an undulating battle line, bouncing up and down and hovering almost defensively over the hole they'd come out of, almost like something out of an old Hitchcock movie.
But, importantly, none of them seemed to be a Servant, nor even particularly intelligent. There didn't even seem to be a mind behind them.
"I'm not detecting a Saint Graph!" Mash reported. "Senpai! These are just —"
"Grimoires," Marie said, eyes narrowed. "Research journals left behind by magi. But why are they… Could it be, they were animated by the fog?"
"Who cares?" said Mordred. "They're in our way, ain't they? That means that what we gotta do is real simple!"
A brace of arrows leapt through the air and unerringly struck half a dozen of the books. Leather cracked and split, pages ripped and tore, and scraps of paper and parchment floated almost gently to the ground. Mordred's head whipped around towards Arash.
"Hey!" she squawked indignantly.
But the books shifted. They all aligned, flipping open like wings spreading so that the broad side of each page faced us. The font of power that rose like a tide told me exactly what was about to happen.
Fuck.
"Destroy them!" I ordered.
— o.0.O.O.0.o —
I love the idea that everyone is just completely flabbergasted every time Taylor is just the slightest bit motherly toward Jackie, and meanwhile, Taylor is internally scrambling for examples of what that even means. She just keeps coming back to her memories of her own mother, which has to be all kinds of bittersweet.
She's also kinda noticing that her enemies tend to monologue. At some point, I think Rika needs to comment about it, referencing The Incredibles, because bad guys in Nasu are particularly guilty of that sin.
Wound up splitting this chapter up. It was getting a bit too big, and I was going to be way too far behind finishing it if I tried to keep everything in.
She's also kinda noticing that her enemies tend to monologue. At some point, I think Rika needs to comment about it, referencing The Incredibles, because bad guys in Nasu are particularly guilty of that sin.
Wound up splitting this chapter up. It was getting a bit too big, and I was going to be way too far behind finishing it if I tried to keep everything in.
