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And now that the shameless plugging is out of the way... Chapter CLXV: Auld Lang Syne
Renée's was not the only present the twins and Nero had picked up while they were in London with Mash, and over the course of the day, they went about delivering each one to all of the people they had found something for.
Romani was surprised but very pleased to receive a first edition copy of A Study in Scarlet, although it was not — to my private relief, because I didn't want to imagine how they might have pulled it off — autographed. Apparently, they had found it in the bookstore where we met Andersen and figured Romani would like it.
I had to admit, I was just the tiniest bit jealous. Mom would have been over the moon to get something like that, and just imagining her reaction was enough to make my heart ache.
To his exasperation, Marcus received a cast iron skillet, as though to tease him that he would never truly escape his duty in the kitchen. Sylvia, by contrast, was given a woolen shawl, for lack of any better ideas what to get her, it seemed. Meuniere was delivered a box of chocolates from downtown London, which he took with a complicated expression on his face. Was he trying to lose weight? I had no idea.
To Da Vinci, they gave one of Victor Frankenstein's research journals, apparently recovered from his mansion — or what was left of it. What, if any, use she might get out of it, only Da Vinci could know, but she seemed delighted all the same.
Every one of the other technicians received something, too, but they were often simple souvenirs, owing to the fact that none of us knew the rest of the staff as well as we maybe should have. Despite that, they all seemed happy to get something, because of course, us Masters weren't the only ones feeling the stuffiness of being stuck in one place day after day.
If it was possible for them to join us for a day out at the beach in Okeanos, I would have suggested it. Unfortunately, all of the people who were Rayshift compatible were either already Masters or still frozen in suspended animation inside their Klein Coffins. The technicians didn't have the luxury of getting out of the facility even through a loophole like that.
Of course, Rika was impulsive, but she wasn't stupid, because the last person to receive a present was Marie, who opened the box given to her with some degree of trepidation and uncertainty, only to discover a selection of gourmet teas — straight from Queen Victoria's personal collection, as Rika told it. She wove a harrowing tale of dodging past the security measures of the palace and picking locks to find the right room with the right set of teas, only for her brother to chime in and tell us that all of the doors had been unlocked and there were no security measures to bypass. Naturally, since there wasn't anyone there to guard it.
Marie found it hard to be angry after that. She tried to be because she felt like she was supposed to be, but she had already delivered her scolding and made her point, so she went easy on them and just reminded them that they needed to ask permission next time instead of going off on their own, no matter what Da Vinci said.
Not to be outdone, Da Vinci called me to her workshop around lunchtime that day to pick up Jackie's bathing suit. I had no idea why I'd been expecting a boring, normal, standard issue one-piece, but what she produced was a tasteful, fairly conservative two-piece, with green and white stripes and cute little frills on the top and bottom. I wasn't even sure I could properly call it a bikini, because it really didn't look like what I imagined when I thought of one.
The costume change for her normal clothes, however, was going to take a little bit longer. I couldn't say I wasn't impatient, because it felt strange to have Jackie walk around in that tattered cloak all the time, but I couldn't exactly let her take it off either.
After all of that, however, things started to go back to normal, or as normal as they ever got at Chaldea. It was a bit weird to have Jackie following me around almost everywhere I went, but somehow or another, she slotted herself into things almost as though she had been there all along. She cheered me on during my morning workouts, ate breakfast every day with relish, took showers with me to clean off the grime and wash her hair, watched silently during my runic lessons with Aífe, and joined in with Mash's swimming lessons in the afternoons.
Even Mordred fit in fairly easily, too. She was a little antsy, of course, because she was waiting for the simulator to be fully fixed so that Servants could cut loose against each other without putting anyone or anything in danger, but she found other ways of occupying her time while she waited, such as those racing games she played with El-Melloi II.
Like that, another five days passed, and before I knew it, it was New Year's Eve. The last day of 2015 had officially arrived, and I had to admit, I was a little proud of how much we'd managed to accomplish already. Five of the eight Singularities had been resolved. Not without problems, not without setbacks, not without close calls, but we'd made it this far and everyone we'd started this with was not only alive and kicking, but still in one piece (if we discounted Marie's few months of an extreme…out of body experience). Six months ago, I might not have believed that was possible, certainly not with what I'd had to work with.
But we'd still done it. We were halfway through our Grand Order and no one had died since the Sabotage.
It turned out that I wasn't the only one in relatively good spirits that day, because the twins seemed keen on celebrating the new year, too.
"I thought…New Year's…was a…big deal…in America, too," Rika told me as she caught her breath after her morning workout. Aífe had apparently decided to push them twice as hard to make up for having a week off after we got back from London, with the additional excuse of working off the cake and all of the good food they'd had over Christmas.
I took a sip of water to cover up the chance to gather my thoughts, and I guess she had something of a point. I had plenty of memories — all of them from before Mom died and Dad fell apart — of going out to see fireworks and then coming home late at night and staying up to watch the ball drop. Often, Emma was there with me, and we had dinner with the Barnes family before we all went out together.
As a girl, I hadn't really understood what we were celebrating, I guess. Just that people went around shouting, "Happy New Year!" at each other and blowing noisemakers like they were trumpets. I still wasn't sure I understood what the big deal was.
"I guess it is," I decided on, "I just never really thought about what everyone was celebrating."
"In Japan," Ritsuka told me haltingly, although he was coping better than his sister, "it's about…new beginnings. Starting…starting over. Leaving everything…everything from the last year behind."
Huh. I guess…that was kind of what it was about in America, too, wasn't it? How many times had I heard the phrase, "New year, new me?" Or all of the stink raised about New Year's resolutions? How so-and-so was going to lose weight, or eat better, or exercise more, or spend more time with family?
At least as many times as I had heard about those same resolutions being broken, I thought with mild amusement.
"Maybe it's not so different, then," I said, and took another sip of water. It never tasted so sweet as after a good workout. "Although I wouldn't say it's the most important holiday in the country either."
"That might have something to do with how much more prominent religion is in the West," Mash said thoughtfully. "It only makes sense that holidays like Christmas and Easter would be more important than New Year's in places where Christianity has a stronger foothold, doesn't it?"
"Yeah, I guess it does."
"Come on, Ritsuka, Rika!" Nero called out as she passed by on her way through another lap. Somehow or another, she'd found a pair of bloomers, a light sweatshirt, and a sweatband and had taken to doing the morning runs with the twins. "Surely that isn't all you have, is it? Mm-mm!"
Rika let out a long, loud, tortured groan.
I left them behind with a chuckle and went to get my shower. After I was washed, dressed, and fed, however, it was time for my own lessons with Aífe in the art of runic magecraft, and it was there that I received some less than welcome news.
"You're plateauing," Aífe told me bluntly.
"What?"
You could do that with a language? A skill, sure, because there was always a limit on how good you could get at anything, but at a language, which was a decent chunk of how runic magecraft worked?
Aífe's lips pursed and she shook her head. "Perhaps that wasn't quite the correct word to use. You are still improving, but your pace has slowed, likely because there is little space for you to safely practice these combinations within the facility itself. The lack of opportunity to experience the results of your efforts has resulted in an inevitable stagnation." She let out a frustrated sigh. "And without my tutelary aspects, the only path forward for you is time and practice."
A sour feeling curdled in my gut. Time and practice could mean months or years, time that we didn't have. "There's nothing we can do?"
She regarded me thoughtfully for a moment with narrowed eyes, and at length, said, "Perhaps in the simulator, there would be space enough for you to practice different combinations and arrays without risking actual damage to yourself or your surroundings, but without the ability of us Servants to accompany you, I wouldn't be able to offer instruction."
So no matter what, how much help she could give me was incredibly limited. The simulator, at least, was a problem that could be fixed, was in the process of being fixed, and one that several people were anxiously waiting on. It looked like I was now going to be one of them, more so than I had been before.
"I'll talk to Da Vinci," I promised her.
After we got as much done as we could, I got lunch with Jackie and the twins, then sent Jackie off with Arash and went to do just that.
It turned out that Da Vinci had been wanting to talk with me, too.
"Oh," she said when I arrived at her workshop. "Well, that's convenient, isn't it? It looks like there's no need for me to send for you now, is there?"
"You wanted to talk to me?" I asked her. "About what?"
Jackie's costume change, or had she made more puppets for me?
"This one also requires the Director's presence, so we'll have to wait for her to arrive," said Da Vinci with a shake of her head. "In the meantime, what was it you wanted to ask me about?"
And just what did we need Marie here to talk about? I had to wonder.
"The simulator, actually," I said, letting it lie for now. I was going to find out soon enough anyway. "I know you've been working on it as much as you can on the side, considering all of the things you have on your plate, but it's starting to become more of an issue now that we have as many Servants around the place as we do."
Da Vinci nodded sagely. "Ah. Yes, it's becoming something of a sticking point, isn't it? With so many famous warriors in one place, it was only natural that they might want to test themselves against one another. If I might be honest," she said lowly, like she was sharing a secret, "I'm frankly surprised that Queen Aífe hasn't yet paid me a visit demanding that I finish fixing it as soon as possible."
I didn't mention that Aífe had taken up reading romance novels as a way to pass the time, and that was probably why she wasn't being so insistent about it. No need to mention it if she didn't want everyone to know. I'd promised her, after all.
"I think the arm wrestling tournament from last week proves that she's not the only one looking forward to it," I said instead.
"Oh, certainly," Da Vinci agreed with a shake of her head. "Unfortunately, there have been so many projects vying for my attention that I haven't been able to give the simulator as much focus as everyone seems to want, so progress has been somewhat slow-going. As important as morale is, there are some projects that are simply more important than others. One happens to be something for which Jackie's new clothes will serve as a bit of a proof of concept," she added. "I think, if that one happens to work out as I hope it will, then everyone will agree it was time well spent."
Something that everyone would be excited about, and giving Jackie a change of clothes was the proof of concept? I tried to imagine what that might be, but nothing particularly incredible came to mind, so I had no idea what she could mean.
But, although Da Vinci had made some questionable decisions before, I trusted her enough to give her the benefit of the doubt. Whatever she was cooking up might not wind up being quite as incredible as she was making it sound, but it would definitely be something we all agreed was worth the time and effort she spent on it, that much I was certain of.
"What does that mean for the simulator, then?" I asked.
She hummed. "Mm, I'm not sure exactly when I'll have it all fixed up and ready for Servants to have fun, but if I had to put an estimate on it…the middle of January, sometime? Before the end of the month, for sure, but a stricter timeline is hard to talk about."
I could see plenty of people getting a bit impatient about that, but another couple of weeks wasn't that much time, all things considered. There had to be some way or another we could let the Servants blow off steam without needing the space for them to safely go all out and start throwing around Noble Phantasms. Maybe an actual wrestling tournament? It was going to need some thought.
Marie chose that moment to arrive, and Da Vinci looked past me to greet her with a respectful, "Director."
"Da Vinci." Marie's eyes flickered to me for a brief moment, then back to Da Vinci. "You finished with the physical, then?"
Physical?
"I have," said Da Vinci. "Between myself and Romani, we know enough about the human body and its functioning to gather more than enough data, and I've gone through all of it myself — double and triple checked it, even, just so that I could be absolutely sure I didn't overlook anything."
"And?"
"What's this about?" I asked them both.
Da Vinci glanced at me, and by way of answering, answered Marie. "And I'm as certain as I can be that the idea itself has merit. It would be possible to extract the Philosopher's Stone from Miss Flamel and use the Elixir made from it to resuscitate…if not all of the currently cryogenically preserved Masters, then at least several key members of Team A."
My heart skipped a beat in my chest. Extracting the Stone from Renée? Was that what Marie had wanted to talk about last week, only to cut herself off and say we would talk about it later?
"Wodime? Akuta? Pharmrsolone? Peperoncino?" Marie asked bluntly.
"All stable enough that we could likely maintain their physical well-being long enough during the thawing process to administer the Elixir to heal their wounds," said Da Vinci. "The idea has merit, Director, as I told you it likely would when you first asked. The stone is not so awkwardly placed inside of Miss Flamel's body that we would have to worry about damaging it when we removed it. However…"
Marie closed her eyes and let out a breath through her nostrils. "Let me guess. Extracting the Stone itself might be enough to kill her."
My shoulders hitched.
"It's too completely integrated into her body to expect the surgery to go without any complications," Da Vinci confirmed. "I'm certain that I could remove it without killing her outright, and it should be well within my capabilities as a magus to preserve her life as long as possible while we make use of the Stone…but I'm not sure that I could reintegrate it without causing longer term problems or endangering her life."
Marie nodded. "I thought so."
"And that's why we won't take the risk," I said, staring at her face, "right?"
Marie's brow scrunched up, and her mouth twisted into a scowl. "What do you take me for? It might not have been directly stated, but we agreed by taking her in that we would look after her! I'm not going to break that promise, implicit or not, just because it's inconvenient, no matter how inconvenient it actually is!"
She sounded indignant and offended at the very idea, and the tension in my shoulders eased. Yeah. For a second there… But no. Even if she was a magus, first and foremost, Marie was a decent person. The young woman who had nearly destroyed herself from the guilt of what had been done to Mash, who still suffered the scars and shouldered a burden that didn't belong to her, who had chosen to save me instead of letting me bleed out on her office chair, that young woman wouldn't have been so callous and cruel as to kill another person simply because her life happened to be inconvenient.
"Of course not, Director," I agreed easily.
"If only Nicolas Flamel had agreed to come back, as well," Da Vinci lamented. "Well. Not that he didn't have a very valid argument against it."
"That's why we're going to scrub every mention of the Philosopher's Stone from the records," Marie said seriously, and then she backtracked. "No, actually, don't. Only alter the records that list Renée Flamel as having the Stone inside of her. Then change the later records to imply that it was stolen by Makiri Zolgen and destroyed when Angrboða was. Make it look like it's gone and we never had it."
"It may not protect her for very long, once it's time for the accounting," Da Vinci warned, "but of course, Director. I'll give it the same treatment I did the part about the King of Mages owing Taylor a favor. As far as our data is concerned, it never happened."
And as long as no one ever had reason to suspect otherwise, there should hopefully be no need to worry about any of the technicians — or Ritsuka and Rika, for that matter — being questioned about it. The Association would have no reason to suspect anything, let alone something like this, or that we would have ever let Renée keep the Stone for herself instead of using it for the betterment of the mission.
"Good!" Marie said.
It wasn't flawless. Like Da Vinci said, it probably wouldn't hold up long under scrutiny, but if it came to that, there had to be somewhere we could hide Renée until everything blew over. Hair dye and a pair of contact lenses could disguise her as a regular technician, if we had to, and we could say that the homunculus, Renée Flamel, had died, then smuggle her out using a dead technician's name before anyone realized what had happened.
"She's in good health, otherwise?" I asked.
"Better than most of the people in this facility," said Da Vinci, "which…in hindsight, perhaps isn't saying much, considering there's only about twenty living humans here. I can at least say that all of her bodily functions are working perfectly — that Philosopher's Stone is certainly the real thing, that's for sure. Just as her father said, she should expect to have a normal human lifespan, although I wouldn't be surprised if she winds up living to a hundred or more."
"Not unusual, for a magus of particular talent," Marie added. "As long as she does nothing else to draw attention to herself, we might actually be able to keep her hidden from those vultures at the Association."
"With any luck," Da Vinci agreed.
With any luck. Personally, I thought we were going to need a contingency plan, but there was plenty of time to come up with ideas for how to keep everything that we wanted under wraps from the Association and the UN under wraps.
Inevitably, some of it would still come out, but at that point, it was a matter of damage control, not secrecy. We'd have to deal with those problems as they came.
As I left Da Vinci's workshop, with the assurances that neither would the Philosopher's Stone inside Renée be taken from her nor would finally fixing the simulator for Servants take longer than a few more weeks, I had to wonder if Romani knew. No, he probably did. Romani was a lot of things, but he wasn't stupid, and Marie was no stranger to keeping secrets, but this wasn't something I expected she would have kept from him.
The entire reason why he wasn't there for that conversation was probably because he had spoken out against the very idea when Marie must have originally brought it up. After what happened to Mash, I couldn't see him condoning it, even if it had been possible to remove the Stone from Renée safely.
There was a bit of a sting to go along with the fact that no one had decided to consult me about the issue before now…but then again, in hindsight, the Stone and its removal was clearly what Marie had been about to bring up last week, and she'd let it drop because, as she said, there wasn't a point in talking about it, about our options, if we didn't even know whether or not it was possible.
I owed her the benefit of enough doubts to let that one go.
With all of that settled for the moment, I headed back to my room and asked Arash to meet me at the pool with Jackie.
It was…cute, watching her learn with Mash, watching Mash help her and gently correct her on the things that Mash herself had already learned in our previous lessons. With Mash's coloration, it was almost like watching a teenager teach her younger sister how to swim, or maybe her younger cousin, and it was a splash of normalcy — no pun intended — when so little of Mash's life had been in any way normal.
Not even the little gremlin blowing on that whistle of his as though crying foul could taint that.
How much of it would remain with Jackie when she went back to the Throne…I didn't know. I wasn't sure I wanted to know. Whatever the answer wound up being, I doubted I would find out for myself, and so it didn't really matter. I'd already decided that I was going to try and make as many happy memories for Jackie as I could so that at least some of them could provide some small comfort to that little girl who would never truly be saved, and I wasn't planning on going back on that.
I'd done plenty of things worthy of recrimination, but…that, I think, was something Mom would have been proud of me for.
After the swimming lesson was over and done with, Jackie and I went back to my room to get cleaned up, and I decided to give Jackie a bit more spoiling by drawing a hot bath for her while we took a quick shower to wash away the chlorine from the pool. By the time she tentatively climbed in and sank down to the bottom, with foamy bubbles floating around like little islands in the steaming sea, the only thing missing was a big, yellow rubber duck.
Another thing to talk to Da Vinci about making. Or to see if someone else was holding onto one who…didn't need it anymore. Hadn't I seen Fou playing with one at some point? I couldn't remember for sure.
It took a few minutes, but eventually, Jackie learned to relax and just enjoy the heat. I wasn't sure that it had the same sort of soothing effect on Servants, whether they could get stiff muscles that soaking could ease and loosen, but I guess it must do something for them, or else Aífe wouldn't have had such a good time at the baths in Rome.
"We've never had a bath before," Jackie told me later as I was drying her off.
"You haven't?" I asked her as though I was in any way surprised.
"Mm-mm." She gave a shake of her head, and little droplets of water splattered over my arms from her not-quite-dry hair. "We never had a mommy or a home, and the rain was too cold to wash off in."
For a moment, sitting there, toweling her dry, I froze and tried to imagine it, how terrible it must have been to spend the entirety of her very short life on the streets of an uncaring, poverty-stricken London. What it must have been like to be a child in a world that pretended she didn't exist and sneered down at her in the rare moments it had to acknowledge she was anything more than a lump of discarded rags. Even the images I conjured up from my experience in the aftermath of Leviathan couldn't possibly have done it justice.
"Well, now you have both," I told her, "and if you want to have a bath every day, you can have a bath every day."
"Mm!" Jackie hummed warmly.
By the time we were both dried and dressed, the dinner hours had officially begun, so we left my room together and made the trek down to the cafeteria, only to discover as we walked in that another, new set of decorations had been plastered to the wall and around the room.
They were not, at least, as extensive as the Christmas decorations had been. No strings of lights above the counter where Emiya served up his food or lines of popcorn hung about, nor was there a tree in the corner with baubles and bulbs hanging from it or festive tablecloths slung over every table. Instead, it was an incredibly simple, if not also incredibly gaudy, sign that hung on either of the far walls that said, "HAPPY NEW YEAR" in bright blue and gold lettering and a digital clock affixed above Emiya's counter — counting down, I realized a second later, to the end of the year.
"Marie's going to throw a fit," I murmured to myself.
"Mommy?" Jackie asked me curiously.
I gave her a smile and reassured her, "It's nothing, Jackie."
There weren't as many people there as there had been for the Christmas party. In fact, at a quick eyeball of the attendees, it was actually just the people who would have been eating at that hour anyway. It was just the presence of some of the Servants — and more would undoubtedly be joining in the next couple of hours, I was willing to bet on that — that made it look like there were more people there than actually were.
The conversations, however, were more lively than usual. It hadn't even been a full week since the Christmas party, but I guess when there were so few universal holidays to celebrate, it made sense to enjoy the ones you could when you could.
Arash waved at us from a table, a large bowl of…some dish I didn't recognize sitting in front of him, and Jackie raised a hand to wave back at him.
Emiya greeted us with a smile as we approached the counter. "Evening, ladies. Up for trying the house special tonight?"
Jackie tilted her head, confused. "House special?"
"Toshikoshi soba," said Emiya. "The traditional Japanese New Year's meal. I thought my Master and Ritsuka might appreciate a little taste of home."
Of course. I really should have expected that.
"What's in it?" I asked.
"Fried shrimp — tempura — buckwheat noodles, soy sauce, and spring onions, plus," he added, "a secret spice mixture of my own creation." He shrugged. "If that's not to your liking, then Renée cooked something a little more Western to suit your tastebuds. I'm not going to force my own traditions on everyone simply because my Master is homesick."
I pursed my lips and thought for a second, then turned to Jackie. "What do you think, Jackie?"
"We want to try it," she told me.
I turned back to Emiya. "Then I guess we'll try it."
He smiled.
"Two bowls of toshikoshi soba, coming right up!"
And he brought out two large bowls that looked just like Arash's, filling them first with noodles and a broth, then soy sauce, a reddish brown paste that had to be his spice mixture, chopped spring onions, and topped it with crispy fried shrimp. He set them on the usual stacked trays, then finished it off with two pairs of chopsticks and handed the trays off to me.
There were no forks or spoons anywhere in sight.
"Enjoy!"
"Thanks."
Back to the usual table we went, and when we sat down, Arash greeted us with a simple, "Happy New Year."
"Happy New Year!" Jackie replied.
"Any good?" I asked him.
He glanced down at his bowl, where only the dregs of the broth remained, and shrugged. "It's different. Can't say I'm used to it, but I can see why it would be such a popular seasonal dish." He offered us a smile, like telling a secret. "If I'm being honest, figuring out the chopsticks was the hardest part."
"Really?" said Jackie, all childish innocence.
A breath huffed out of my nostrils, not quite a laugh and not harsh enough for a snort, and I reached down to take her hand. "Here," I told her, "let me show you."
Lucky for me that I'd eaten enough Thai and Chinese in my life to know how to use them. Not in Brockton, at least not in my teenage years — most of those restaurants were solidly in ABB territory, where Dad would never have let me set foot — but in Chicago, there'd been plenty of nights with the Wards where we'd eaten takeout like that.
As she always had, Jackie took my instruction and corrections like gospel, carefully practicing as I showed her the proper way to use chopsticks, how to grip them, how to use them to grip food, the positioning that let you make the most of your finger strength. I had no idea if it was really the "proper" way of using them, and frankly, I didn't really care all that much.
I was just getting to my own and about to take my first bite when the door whooshed open to admit a quartet of familiar faces.
"Happy New Year!" Rika exclaimed as she stepped inside. And then she stopped, tilted her head back, and sniffed theatrically. "Hey, is that toshikoshi soba I smell?"
"Good nose!" Emiya called over from his counter.
Rika gasped and rushed over, a gigantic smile on her face. Ritsuka and Mash followed her more sedately, smiling at her antics.
A few minutes later, they sat down with us, steaming bowls standing proudly on their plates, and with a pair of "Itadakimasu!" from the twins, broke their chopsticks apart and dug in.
"So good!" Rika moaned immediately. Not for the first time, as though she was having a completely different experience than the rest of us. "It's been so long since I had toshikoshi soba!"
"Exactly one year," her brother remarked, and then went back to his food.
Rika didn't let it faze her. "You can't ruin this for me! Emiya's toshikoshi soba on New Year's Eve…this is paradise!"
"I don't know if I'd go that far, Senpai," said Mash, smiling, "but it is good, isn't it? Like all of Emiya's cooking."
"I cannot say I have ever had something like this before, but it is excellent!" Nero proclaimed.
"I don't know how she's going to survive without that guy," Ritsuka said.
Rika groaned, then slammed a fist against the table. The cups and bowls all rattled. "No! I won't let myself get down! Not today, not with this food!"
Ritsuka and Mash chuckled, and even I couldn't stop myself from smiling a little.
"What do you think, Miss Taylor?" Mash asked me.
What did I think?
"It's good," I settled on. "A bit different, but good."
I wasn't stupid enough to think that most Chinese restaurants in America had anything on an authentic Chinese meal made with traditionally sourced ingredients, but it wasn't so different as to be completely unfamiliar.
Ritsuka looked to Jackie next. "Do you like it, Jackie?"
"Mm!" She nodded her head, slurping up the rest of the noodles in her chopsticks, then chewing and swallowing before she responded. "The only food we've had like it before is Mister Emiya's, but we like it! It's good!"
"An endorsement if ever I've heard one," said Arash with a smile.
As we ate, more people filtered in and out of the cafeteria. Marie and Romani eventually came in, too, and Marie's eyes narrowed at the decorations and she grumbled a little, but ultimately she let it pass.
"As long as it's just for tonight," she muttered as she sat down to join us. Unlike Jackie, Arash, and me, she'd elected for something a little more European. "I can overlook it, just because this is probably why he asked to make a trip to the Septem Singularity earlier today."
"He did?" Mash asked, surprised.
Marie nodded and took a somewhat needlessly savage bite of the slab of cod on her plate. "He said he wanted to make fresh seafood tonight, and unlike some people," she paused to give Rika and Nero a pointed glare, "he actually asked permission!"
"He went to Rome?" Nero gasped. "And he did not think to take me and my best buddy along with him?"
"He stuck to the French coast," said Marie. "He never went anywhere near Rome itself. And he just went there for supplies! He wasn't there to enjoy the scenery!"
Nero looked ready to keep up the argument, so I defused the situation by pointing out, "Your food is getting cold."
Nero gasped again and dug back into her meal with renewed enthusiasm. I had to wonder if Rika had taught her how to use chopsticks or if she was using her absolutely ridiculous Imperial Privilege ability to make up for it — what an utterly and absurdly mundane thing to use such a powerful skill for.
"Well, I'm glad we established that bringing back supplies from these Singularities was even possible," Romani said. He'd chosen to eat the same dish as the rest of us, and was surprisingly adept at using chopsticks. "It makes keeping our stores topped up much less of a concern, and also lets us have fresh food every now and again, too."
He slurped up some noodles, and nearly choked, dropping his mouth open so he could fan it with his other hand. "Owowow! Hawt, hawt!"
What a child he could be sometimes.
As the evening wore on and the big, digital timer slowly crept closer and closer to zero, more and more people made their way into the cafeteria to grab a meal and socialize. El-Melloi II wound up in some sort of in-depth discussion with Sylvia and a few of the other technicians who I knew were magi. Mordred and Jeanne Alter somehow became embroiled in an eating competition and wound up downing several bowls of Emiya's noodles. Somehow or another, we eventually had most of the people still in the facility crowded into the cafeteria.
For a given value of the word 'crowded,' at least. The people we'd lost that day months ago left behind gaping holes, patches of emptiness sitting in-between the islands of activity.
Somewhere along the way, the dinner hours ended and Renée wheeled out a massive cake big enough for everyone to have at least one slice. Like the maid she had dressed as in London, she cut an even slice for everyone and delivered them and a fork to each person, accepting every "thanks" demurely and politely.
She even went so far as to brew cups of tea to wash it down with. Jekyll would have been absolutely delighted.
As midnight drew near, Emiya brought out a stand with a massive TV sat atop it, complete with a DVD player on the shelf below, and while he set it up right beneath the timer, someone started passing around noisemakers, enough for the whole group. Jackie and I both accepted one, and when Jackie looked at it like it was some sort of alien creature, I nudged her, held mine up to my lips, and blew to demonstrate.
I wasn't the only one who thought it was incredibly cute to watch her blow her own with wonder on her face. The sound that squealed out of Rika's mouth could have been mistaken for a mouse dying. And if Jeanne Alter watched us out of the corner of her eye so she could see how it was done? No one else said anything about it, so I didn't either.
Finally, the timer ticked down to fifteen minutes, then ten, and Emiya began to play whatever it was he'd set up. The TV flickered on, and then we all got a spectacular view of Times Square, crowded with cheering people. The camera panned around, taking wide shots of the whole area, and then changed, flickering through closeups of different groups of people as they smiled and waved, dressed in coats and beanies to keep warm. Up in the corner, the date — December 31, 2012 — stood out like a beacon.
"Archival footage I found down in the library," Emiya muttered to us as he took a seat. "Thought it might help set the mood."
It did. The timer crept slowly towards zero, and the closer it got, the quieter the room became until the only sounds came from the TV, and then the people on the screen stopped, too, looking upwards as the camera swiveled towards the jumbotron.
One minute, then thirty seconds, then fifteen, then —
"Nine," the people on the screen chanted, "eight! Seven! Six!"
The numbers on the jumbotron flickered and contorted in time with their chanting.
"Five! Four! Three! Two! One!"
A deep, resonant buzz resounded, and as the people on the screen shouted and cheered, the whole room around me erupted into noise.
"Happy New Year!" the people on the TV screamed, but it was overshadowed by the people in the cafeteria who all shouted, "Happy New Year!"
Rika and Ritsuka blew loudly on their noisemakers, and so did so many of the others. Emiya was one of the few who refrained, just smiling to himself, but Arash got fully into it and blew on his noisemaker just as loudly as the twins did, and so did Jackie, gulping down breath after breath so that she could blow her noisemaker again and again.
"Happy New Year!" the people on the TV kept cheering, and as though they refused to be outdone, the technicians cheered even louder. Nero, who got entirely too swept up in the moment, was the loudest.
I took the opportunity to pull Jackie into my side for a quick hug, and I was rewarded with her looking up at me just in time to blow her noisemaker right in my face.
Marie was one of the few people not really participating. She stared at the screen with a complicated expression on her face, like she didn't know how to feel about it all, like she didn't know whether she was allowed to celebrate with the rest of us or had to be the stern director she had gone to so much effort to present herself as.
I leaned over to her, reached out, and gave her hand a gentle squeeze. "Happy New Year, Marie," I told her quietly.
The mournful, bittersweet melody of Auld Lang Syne hummed in the background.
— o.0.O.O.0.o —
Too many holidays all bundled up one right after the other.
Now we start to move forward a little bit more, and next chapter, we keep jumping. There's going to be a lot of those to account for the fact that America isn't going to start until, like, March in-story. The twins and Taylor have a lot of downtime to look forward to, which will...probably mean some more vacation shenanigans and stuff and at least one more training session in the simulator.
For now, though, some setup (it will be very obvious what that is) and some fluff (because everyone seems to love Jackie and Taylor being a Totally Normal Family).
