- Location
- Some City
You says this like it's a bad thing
in what universe is that a bad thing?
granted, that's a fair bit more work for you, but you're not going to see me complaining about having more chapters to read
Hereafter [Worm x Fate/Grand Order]
- Thread starter James D. Fawkes
- Start date
- Crossover
You says this like it's a bad thing
in what universe is that a bad thing?
granted, that's a fair bit more work for you, but you're not going to see me complaining about having more chapters to read
- Location
- Oregon, USA
Really, it's less 'more chapters' and more 'the other chapters are going to be pushed back', since there's so much story left to cover the addition or removal of a few in the middle won't really affect the overall length.
James D. Fawkes
Court Scribe
- Location
- Avalon (Isle of Mists)
It's more that I originally had the twins doing most of the plot stuff for this Singularity, so there would be fewer chapters since there was less for Taylor to do. For all that I kinda wanted to do that, however, once I got down to the writing, it just didn't work out that way. Ritsuka and Rika get to go out and handle things without Taylor, but if I wanted to have them do almost everything without her, then they would be doing things almost constantly without much of a break. The Singularity would have been solved within a day or two of in-story time, and that just didn't work for me.
Instead, we have the workaround. Whenever the fog is out, the twins go off and do stuff on their own, but when the fog is absent, Taylor goes out with them. The twins get to have some of that independence and handle a few things without her direct help, but she isn't totally helpless the entire time.
SolipsistSerpent
Endlessly Devouring
Also, it's good to have Taylor doing plot stuff again after the last story-arc. It's okay for characters to take turns but it's better not to have two turns in a row.
Chapter CXXXVII: A Measure of Trust
James D. Fawkes
Court Scribe
- Location
- Avalon (Isle of Mists)
This story and this chapter brought to you by my wonderful supporters, whose kindness and generosity have made it possible to devote so much of my time and attention to writing, especially Eric, s22132, AbyssalApsu, and Alias 2v10. You guys are absolute legends. To show my gratitude, they had the chance to read this and upcoming chapters before the public release. You can find out more HERE.
And now that the shameless plugging is out of the way...
Chapter CXXXVII: A Measure of Trust
Jekyll's parlor wasn't at all designed to host so many people at once, but somehow or another, we managed to squeeze our way in. Us three main Masters wound up squished together on the sofa where I'd woken up, with Mash in a chair next to it, Tohsaka in another chair on the opposite side, Jekyll in yet another chair, and everyone else essentially forced to stand, which left Mordred to lean against the nearby wall, arms folded across her chest. With what I'd seen of her personality so far, I didn't put it past her to think it made her look cool.
Even Fran had come to join us, despite how little she would be able to contribute to the whole conversation. I guess she just wanted to be involved, to see justice done to the men and the conspiracy that had killed Frankenstein. I couldn't fault her for that.
Andersen, at least, had conveniently marched off into the adjacent study and claimed it as his own, ignoring anything Jekyll said against it. Things would progress much more smoothly without a biting comment from him every now and again, and the less I had to think about why such a famous author had manifested in a form that looked barely old enough for middle school, the more comfortable I was.
Once everyone had settled in, Renée arrived with a tray containing a steaming teapot and enough teacups for everyone, announced that lunch would be ready in half an hour, and then left, all with the same stoic, unaffected expression on her face. I thought I might have detected an undercurrent of excitement, however. At the chance to feed so many people at once? I could only guess.
The tale of the mysterious magical tome didn't take all that long to tell, and the story of our following Nursery Rhyme and the confrontation that came afterwards didn't take that much longer. It wasn't as though the circumstances required all that much explanation, so the basic essentials of what had happened and why we'd done what we'd done were all that was necessary to cover what we'd accomplished and how it was we'd made an ally of Tohsaka.
"I see," Jekyll said when it was all over. I took the chance to sip at my tea and soothe my throat a little. "Then it would appear the case of the mysterious magical tome has been resolved, hasn't it, if…not in quite the manner I expected when I made the request that you investigate it. I suppose I ought to be grateful, in the very least, that no one was truly harmed by it. All's well that ends well, I believe the phrase is?"
"Something like that," Ritsuka agreed.
"It would have been perhaps more ideal if no fight erupted in the first place," said Caster, stroking his beard thoughtfully, "but I suppose the essential point is that indeed no permanent harm was done."
"Not for lack of trying," Mordred said bitterly.
"If it's an apology you're looking for, then you can have one," said Tohsaka. "If I'd known exactly who you all were, then I wouldn't have attacked you like that. But I'm not going to apologize for attempting to deal with what I assumed at the time was a group of enemies. I'm sure someone like the esteemed Sir Mordred can understand a concept like a preemptive strike."
Mordred's lips curled.
"You're lucky." But it was Jeanne Alter who drawled out those words. "If I was the one there, you would've been a f…" She faltered over the word, glancing once more at Nursery Rhyme, who looked back at her innocently. "…fudging crisp."
Rika smothered a giggle behind her teacup. Jeanne Alter tried to maintain her facade of disdain, but her censoring herself had robbed her of any momentum and she just wound up looking like she was trying too hard.
"If you were there," Nursery Rhyme said brightly, "maybe Mister Bandersnatch could have come out to play, too!"
Jeanne Alter shifted, and half the room tensed in response. "Yeah? That right?"
"Bad assumptions were made and people almost got hurt," Ritsuka said firmly, before things could kick off, "but the important part is that we're all here, we're all okay, and we're all allies now, right?"
Deliberately, I avoided glancing at Tohsaka. "Right," I agreed. "So there's no point in jumping down each other's throats about the mistakes we made."
The tension didn't quite drain out of the room, but the metaphorical knives were put away and everyone settled back down. A fight had been averted, at least for now.
Good job, Ritsuka, I thought. He was getting better at handling clashing personalities, and that was going to be only more important going forward. Especially if they kept going back out in the afternoons while I was stuck here in the apartment because of the fog.
"Plus, you know," said Rika, "this room's kinda cramped. If you guys start a fight, this whole place is going up. I like being un-exploded, you know?"
And considering that the mist was back in full force, that would be bad for at least me, Tohsaka, and Jekyll, even if everyone else would be varying shades of fine. There wasn't anyone in this room who wasn't aware of that.
Jeanne Alter snorted.
"Thank you for thinking of my home," Jekyll said politely.
"No prob," replied Rika. "We gotta live here, too, you know. At least for now. Going apartment hunting in this city would be a nightmare."
Ritsuka sighed.
"The next thing we need to worry about is how we're going to continue our investigation," I said, bulldozing past the joke. "We might have an extra Master now — temporary or not — but it doesn't mean much if we don't have anything or anywhere else to look. Jekyll, has there been any developments with your network that we need to know about?"
"Unfortunately, I'm afraid the answer to that is no," said Jekyll. "Things have been quiet since you left. Reports have been coming in, of course, that the victims of the magical tome have been awakening — something I can only assume might be laid at the feet of Mister Tohsaka and the lady Nursery Rhyme —"
"Alice," Nursery Rhyme interrupted with unusual firmness. "My name is Alice."
Jekyll blinked and glanced at her, but took it in stride. "Something for which I assume we might thank Mister Tohsaka and Miss Alice. Beyond that, however, there have been no new reports of any phenomena which might be called unusual. All I can speak to is the expected patrols of our masterminds' favored foot soldiers, and of course, they pose no threat to the populace as long as the good people of the city lock doors and avoid the streets."
"More of these homunculi, Helter Skelter, and automata, I'm assuming," Tohsaka said.
"Indeed," Caster confirmed. "It continues to be a small mercy that they don't enter homes and assault the people inside. That much, at least, we can be thankful for."
"Ungh," Fran grunted. "Un, un, ungh."
"No," I answered her. "We didn't find any more clues about P, B, or M."
Her lips drew tight, but her body sagged, disappointed, and she glared down at the floor. I sympathized, but I hadn't really expected any better. The magical tome having some kind of connection to them was a longshot to begin with, and the instant Andersen had explained what it was and how it worked, I'd already ruled out the possibility.
It would have been too convenient to find the answer less than a whole day after we got here.
"What do we actually know about these masterminds?" Tohsaka asked.
When I glanced at him, his lips thinned and the skin around the corners of his eyes tightened. Yeah, I didn't exactly trust him either, but that was fine. It wouldn't be the first, second, or last time I found myself in a situation where I needed to team up with someone I didn't fully trust. Most of my career had shaken out like that, one way or the other. It was old hat by now.
The only thing I needed to trust was that our interests aligned. For that, I just needed to look to the little girl sitting next to him.
"We've already told you what we know," I said to him. "Right now, we really don't have anything to go on, aside from the note Frankenstein left for us to find."
Tohsaka grunted. "So just that they're probably Servants. Not even a hint about their classes either, huh?"
"No," said Ritsuka. "We're assuming there's at least one Caster for, well, I think it's pretty obvious why?"
"Not sure where else you're getting a fog machine that can cover the whole city," his sister added wryly.
"It could be a Noble Phantasm," Mash added uncertainly, "but, well…"
"Who and how would be the obvious question," said Emiya. "It's not impossible that the mist has something to do with Jack the Ripper. A Noble Phantasm like that would make sense for someone like him."
"Just one problem with that," said Mordred. "You think that guy would stop in the mornings or stick to a schedule all polite-like the way things have been so far?"
I wanted to have an argument for that, but frustratingly, the memories of his fighting style and personality were also among the things I'd lost in the aftermath of the end of the fight. The only thing I could remember clearly was the use of a Noble Phantasm, because Fou had taken the hit for me for some inexplicable reason, even if what it was and how it worked were cleanly excised, and while there was a general rule in Chaldea's primer about how the average Servant had only a single Noble Phantasm…
Yeah. I didn't even need to look at Emiya to see someone in the room who broke that rule. If I started looking back at the previous Singularities, that rule got even more laughably wrong. While it wasn't a bad rule of thumb, I'd run into too many exceptions to assume it applied to Jack the Ripper, too.
"It's not impossible," Caster said. "After all, the legend of Jack the Ripper is one of an unrepentant madman who was surprisingly meticulous in his killings. It isn't out of the realm of possibility that he might have a Noble Phantasm of this sort and the temperament required to use it in the manner we've seen so far, particularly if it's being treated as a game with the populace."
"But it's unlikely," I said. "And it doesn't fit with the evidence we have so far. Whatever Project Demonic Fog is, I think we can safely assume that Jack the Ripper doesn't feature in it as a central figure, let alone the lynchpin to its success."
Ritsuka sighed. "Hence the fog machine. Yeah. I'm not an expert, but I can't think of anyone else who might have fog as a Noble Phantasm."
Neither could I.
"And that's why you think there's a Caster of some kind involved," Tohsaka noted. "I'd ask what it is you're assuming they want to use this fog for in the first place…but I'm going to guess you don't have any ideas about that either."
When none of us had an answer that would satisfy him, he let out a deep sigh.
"Great."
Nursery Rhyme awkwardly patted his thigh as though to offer him comfort, but it didn't seem to help.
It was to this general atmosphere that Renée returned a minute or so later, and in the same monotone voice I'd gotten used to from her, she announced, "Lunch is ready, Master."
"Very good. Thank you, Renée," said Caster. He drained the rest of his tea, then to us, he said, "I think it would do us all some good to fill our bellies with food, and once we have had our fill, we can return to such dour topics. Wouldn't you all agree?"
My stomach rumbled quietly in my gut, and next to me, I heard both of the twins' answering grumble, as though their own were agreeing with mine. With the mist outside keeping me confined to the apartment and nothing pressing to otherwise occupy our attention, there was no reason not to cut the conversation short for the moment and put some food in our bellies.
"That's fine," I said. "Maybe a little time and a meal will help give us a different perspective on things."
"An excellent idea!" said Jekyll, smiling broadly. He stood. "Come, come! Mister Tohsaka, I can't say as I have the foggiest idea what sort of food to which you might be accustomed — having never been to the Orient myself, you understand — but I'm certain Renée's cooking will be quite the treat!"
Tohsaka climbed to his feet, too. "Well, when you put it like that, I suppose it's only polite to take you up on such a generous offer."
"My good man," said Caster, "if you trust me on nothing else, let it be this: you won't regret it."
We all filtered out of the parlor and into the even more crowded dining room, which felt much more cramped than it had the night before, when it was just me, Caster, Jekyll, and Arash, or even this morning, when we'd had the twins, Mash, Emiya, and Fran there, too. Despite the vanishing space in the room itself, however, there were exactly as many spots as we needed for each of us to sit down and eat.
"No Andersen?" I asked.
"Mister Andersen has elected not to partake," Renée answered me stoically. "He requested that he not be disturbed."
"His loss," said Mordred. "Pipsqueak can go hungry, for all I care."
I wondered why, but didn't give it too much thought. Maybe he just liked taking advantage of the fact that he didn't need to eat as a Servant. Who knew?
Lunch was a warm and hearty soup, great for coming in from the chilly streets of London, where the constant fog blocking the sun had sapped away any real warmth that might have been left in the city. It was not bad enough to freeze, but the heat of the soup settling in my belly was a comfort all the same.
It didn't hurt that it tasted good, too. Renée really was a good cook. Different than the kind of meals Emiya preferred to make, but no less quality for that.
"It's not fair!" Rika complained. "My house-husband is supposed to be the best there is, and yet…!"
"A new challenger approaches, huh?" her brother teased. She groaned, but at no point did she stop eating.
"The soup is wonderful, Miss Renée," Mash said politely to the homunculus in her maid outfit.
"Thank you," Renée replied, completely deadpan, but there was a satisfied air about her as we ate. If she smiled, it wasn't while I was looking.
There were miniature cakes that went along with the meal, wedges of sweet bread with some kind of fruit spread sandwiched between the upper and lower layers, and it was kind of strange to eat them, because I was pretty sure I had read about them somewhere in one of the classics. Trippy, that was a good word, but then, my whole life the last few months had been meeting one figure from myth and legend after another. Eating a snack that could have come from the pages of Pride and Prejudice was a little pedestrian by comparison.
We sat around for a little while after we were done eating, satisfied, and let our food settle. Mash continued to nibble on a second of those miniature cake wedges, and Mordred looked like she would have leaned back and put her feet up on the table if she wasn't sure that it would get her yelled at.
At length, Tohsaka heaved out a sigh. "Alright," he admitted. "It was a little different from what I'm used to eating, but it was just as good as you promised it would be."
"Thank you, Mister Tohsaka," said Renée, still monotone. "I'm grateful for your kind words."
Tohsaka didn't seem quite sure how to take that, whether she was serious or not, and considering I'd said before that she emoted about as much as a rock, I couldn't blame him for the confusion.
"An excellent meal, Renée," Caster told her. "Thank you for all of your hard work."
"Truly," added Jekyll.
"I am glad that I can be of service to you, Master," said Renée.
Turning back to the rest of us, Caster continued, "Now that we've all had some time to digest — both our food and what we discussed earlier — shall we continue where we left off?"
"Yes." I sat up a little straighter, and so too did the twins and Mash. "Let's."
Even Mordred stopped slouching in her chair.
"I believe we left off on the matter regarding avenues of investigation, yes?" said Caster.
"Namely, the lack thereof," Emiya added.
Caster smiled grimly.
"Quite."
"You mentioned attempting to track the Caster through the magical energy spread throughout the city?" I suggested.
"One that bore little fruit, I'm afraid," said Caster regretfully. "As I explained before, the mist has made it too diffuse to attempt tracking it back to an origin point. I fear if I attempted to follow it all the way, I would find myself walking in circles."
"So if we were to get rid of the mist, it might be possible to find the Caster behind it," Mash concluded, and then she let out a sigh. "Unfortunately, the only way to do one is to do the other, so doing either one winds up being impossible, doesn't it?"
A real chicken and the egg problem. We needed to find the Caster to get rid of the mist, but we needed to get rid of the mist to find the Caster. In the process of doing one, the other would be accomplished as a matter of course, which really meant that we needed to find a different way of doing one or the other first.
"Is there another way we could track this Caster down?" asked Ritsuka.
Caster stroked his beard thoughtfully. "There might be," he allowed, "but the question of managing it is another matter."
My brow furrowed and I leaned forward a little. "If you have any ideas…"
"An idea, yes, but it might be a little bit of a stretch," Caster admitted. "You see, so far, I've been content to let Sir Mordred do what she will with the Helter Skelter and such and raised no concern about her treatment of them —"
"Didn't hear you complaining when I offered to go out and thin their numbers a little," Mordred grunted.
"— but depending on their composition and the methods of their construction, I might be able to find traces of their creator upon them and use that to locate a…source, if you will, for where it is they're all coming from. They would have to be relatively intact, however," he added swiftly. "As you might imagine, bringing one of them in whole and undamaged is a bit of a tall order."
Especially with Jekyll in the apartment, I saw immediately. He was an ordinary human, after all. If Mordred dragged one of those Helter Skelter or automata into the apartment, still fully functional and everything, then it might very well do a lot of damage not only to the apartment itself, but also to Jekyll.
"I mean, they weren't giving us much of a choice," said Rika. "Kinda hard to be nice to a bunch of robots trying to kill all humans when you happen to be one of those humans."
"Now you're going to ask me not to kill murderous robots?" Jeanne Alter drawled, disgusted.
"Technically, murder is defined as one human being killing another," Ritsuka said, "so robots can't actually be murderous, can they?"
Rika turned to her brother, horrified, and demanded, "Why were you the one who thought of that first? It should have been me!"
Jeanne Alter and most of the rest of the room were just varying shades of confused, so Rika said to Ritsuka, "Put I, Robot on the list, Onii-chan."
"Before or after Terminator?"
"After. Duh. You have to watch the classic before you dig into the junk food."
I focused on the more important part.
"I'm not sure it would be a good idea to try bringing them back here anyway," I said. "If you could use them to track down their creator, Abraham, that would be useful, but we don't have any idea how closely he can monitor them. If any of them have a tracker of some kind built into them, then we'd be leading him and his allies right back to us."
"If they don't already know exactly where we are," Emiya pointed out.
I acknowledged it with an incline of my head. True, it was entirely possible that P, B, and M already knew where we were and who we were, down to our names and the address of Jekyll's apartment, and I'd had a thought about that before, but…
"If they do know, they don't seem to be doing anything about it, do they?"
They weren't attacking us where we sat, they weren't keeping tabs on us — at least visibly — and there didn't seem to be any ambushes lying in wait for us to come and go. All things considered, when I asked the question whether they were aware of where we were and biding their time or completely unaware, the latter answer seemed more likely.
But it still paid to act as if they knew where we were at all times. There were some dangers to preparing to face an enemy who was less competent than you assumed they were, but if you were expecting to fight a Thinker, it was better to find out you were wrong later than to wind up dancing to their tune.
"Miss Taylor makes a good point," said Mash. "We've had to fight those automata and Helter Skelter several times now, but it doesn't seem like they're looking for us in particular."
"If they were, wouldn't they be waiting for us right outside the apartment?" asked Ritsuka.
Caster leaned back in his chair, stroking his beard thoughtfully. "And while I've been monitoring you, it doesn't seem as though they've been paying any special attention to the areas where you've already felled some of their number. Hm. Perhaps they truly have no idea where we are, nor do their puppets even have the intelligence to search for us competently."
Alternatively, none of what we were doing was more than a minor inconvenience for them. I would have thought we would face a reprisal of some kind for taking out that Caster, Mephistopheles, when Ritsuka and the others went to investigate Frankenstein's silence, but unless Jack the Ripper had been sent after us as retribution, P, B, and M seemed completely unconcerned to have lost a Servant from their roster.
"Ungh," Fran said throatily.
"That is a question," I allowed. "But if they attacked the Clock Tower, they might have gotten the information on Frankenstein there."
Assuming that the attack on the Association had more than just the purpose of keeping them from interfering. I knew that if I'd been in their shoes, it would have been a good chance to look for information on persons of interest to keep an eye on.
"Sorry to interrupt," said Tohsaka, "but you can actually understand what she's saying?"
"Right?" Rika nodded vigorously. "See, I'm not the only one who can't understand her! I'm not the weird one, here!"
"That last part's up for debate," Ritsuka said.
Rika stuck her tongue out at him.
"It's hard to explain, Mister Tohsaka," Mash told him politely. "It's not…understanding a language of words so much as it is…understanding her intent. I'm sorry, but I really can't explain it any better than that."
"It's still a shit explanation," said Jeanne Alter. Mash winced.
"I don't see anyone else offering a better one," Mordred chimed in. "It's something that can't be explained. Nothing more complicated to it than that."
And I wasn't about to start explaining that my own stint of aphasia brought on by letting a biokinetic play around with my brain during an apocalyptic battle for the fate of mankind made it easier to understand what Fran was trying to say. That was a can of worms I would prefer to open up never.
"Tohsaka," I said, changing the subject, "you were there at the Association not long before it was attacked, weren't you? Aside from your missing mentor, was there anything else that stood out to you as unusual about that day?"
Tohsaka grimaced. "I…can't say that there was, not at the time, at least, but…"
But that didn't mean there wasn't something there that he hadn't paid any mind at the time. The human senses took in a mountain-load of information in any given moment, I remembered hearing somewhere, and everything that didn't jump up and down and scream in your face got filtered out as a matter of course.
I turned to Mordred next. "Sir Mordred? While you were out patrolling, did you look to see what happened at the Clock Tower?"
"Huh?" Mordred blinked at me. "Uh, yeah. Yeah, Jekyll and I checked in on that shithole the other day. Abraham asked us to look into it. Whole place was demolished, couldn't get in or out. If anyone's left down there, they're stuck down there."
"I thought it might provide us some clues," said Caster, "so I asked Mordred and Doctor Jekyll to investigate while I constructed my little replica of the city. Unfortunately, they could tell me little that the newspaper had not already informed me of."
"I see."
It may wind up being a dead end, but…I didn't see too much in the way of options. For the moment, aside from wandering about the city and looking for clues, we seemed to have run out of avenues of investigation, or at least ones that were obvious. We couldn't rely on Jack the Ripper to show up at some convenient moment where we could capture and interrogate him, and P, B, and M didn't look to have any interest in us specifically. There was no telling when or even if they would attempt to pressure another of Jekyll's informants, so if we waited for that, we could wind up waiting for days or weeks for something that wasn't going to happen.
Right now, there were two routes we could go to try and find out more about the enemy and what they were doing. Luckily, we could do both at the same time, and we didn't even have to split up the group to do them.
"One of the things we're going to have to do is take a closer look at the Clock Tower for clues about what the masterminds did there and what else they might have wanted to accomplish while they were destroying it," I said.
Some part of me hated the necessity. The longer I could stay out of the sights of the Association and any of its members who might view me as a curiosity to be dissected, the better. Unfortunately, it was one of the only leads we had.
"Do you believe there might have been more beneath the surface than our eyes perceived?" asked Jekyll.
"I don't know," I admitted. "But it's a possibility we can't overlook."
"Especially if that's how they found out where Frankenstein lived," Ritsuka added.
"Uhn!" Fran agreed.
Jeanne Alter chuckled, grinning nastily, "Oh, no way I'm missing out on this one. Especially if any of those pretentious English p…" She glanced at Nursery Rhyme, and her grin twisted into a grimace. "…pansies tries anything fishy."
Nursery Rhyme just smiled at her innocently. At this point, I wasn't sure that she wasn't doing it on purpose to mess with Jeanne Alter.
"So I get to do some archeology in the British Museum?" asked Rika. "You're not going to make me put on a tank top and a pair of short-shorts, are you?"
"A tank top and short-shorts?" Mash repeated, as confused as I was. Emiya and Ritsuka seemed to get what she was talking about, but everyone else seemed clueless.
"No." Don't be ridiculous, I managed not to say.
"Oh, good," said Rika, breathing an exaggerated sigh of relief. "I mean, don't get me wrong, I'm cute as the dickens, but I ain't got nothing on Lara Croft."
Ritsuka's grimace said that he didn't like the mental image she'd just given him.
"So we're going to look through the wreckage of the Clock Tower and see if we can find any clues," he said, trying to distract himself. "Are we…going to enter the Clock Tower itself? The Association's headquarters?"
"We'll see," I answered. "It'll depend on how difficult it is for us to make it down there, how long it might take to clear a path inside, even with our Servants there to do the heavy lifting. We may have to rely on the Director to lead us through once we get inside."
I watched Tohsaka the entire time, looking for any signs of panic or distress, any indication that he knew what we would find down there and didn't want us searching for it. Nothing. The grimace on his face was of someone who knew there was a tedious or distasteful task ahead and knew there was no avoiding it.
He didn't even try to dissuade us from it, convince us it was too dangerous or to try something else. It still wasn't proof that he was absolutely trustworthy or that he wasn't hiding anything, but for now, it seemed like I was worrying over nothing.
Maybe I really was being overly paranoid.
"In any case," I went on, "it's not the only lead we can pursue. Abraham, I know you came up with a handful of those trackers for us to hold onto while we were out. If you can, I'm going to need at least a few more. A few dozen, if you can manage it."
He blinked at me. "It…shouldn't be that much trouble to accomplish, no," he allowed, "but… What is it, exactly, that you plan on using them for?"
"Right now, we don't know much about the enemy's patrol groups except that they exist," I explained patiently. For the benefit of the entire team, not just him. "If they have predetermined routes, if another group is sent out to replace one that we eliminate, if their routes rotate or change hourly or daily — knowing all of these things would let us avoid them and make it faster and easier to get around the city. But if they return to their master and his home base, where the fog machine might be —"
"We could track them back to it!" Ritsuka concluded suddenly.
And then attack it while they were least expecting us. If we wanted to be even more cautious, we could set up a temporary base right next door, and during the grace period in the mornings, I could explore the enemy base with my bugs without P, B, or M being any the wiser. Hell, maybe I could even sabotage their fog machine without any of us having to go anywhere near it.
"Exactly."
Forgetting my little stint with the fog when we arrived, this could wind up being the easiest and safest Singularity we ever cleared. The fastest, too, behind Fuyuki.
"Clever," Emiya said approvingly.
"Damn," said Jeanne Alter. "We could fu…" She glanced at Nursery Rhyme again. "…fudge them up before they even knew what hit 'em."
"You keep talking about fudge and I'm gonna want some," Rika remarked.
"I'm not the one who brought a kid back to this place," Jeanne Alter muttered mutinously.
"Brilliant!" said Jekyll, beaming. "An excellent plan!"
"It's certainly feasible," Caster agreed. "I'm afraid that making enough trackers for you to accomplish it won't be quickly done, but… A day or so? If not tomorrow, then the day after, depending on exactly how many you would like me to make."
I was honestly hoping it would have been a little faster. Having said that, it wasn't like we were necessarily going to manage to tag every single patrol group in a single morning to begin with.
"We don't have to do it all at once," I reasoned. "Depending on what results we get with the first group, we might not even have to do it more than once."
"And in the meantime, we just sit around and wait to see if they'll lead us to their masters?" Mordred asked skeptically.
"In the meantime, we'll investigate every lead we can find," I countered. "And if we don't have any leads, then yes, we sit around and wait. From this point on, the fewer patrol groups we engage and destroy, the better."
"Which means less fighting," said Mash.
"Goddamn." Jeanne Alter clicked her tongue and folded her arms. "There goes all the fun."
"You said it," Mordred agreed.
"Then I guess we just have to hope that Doctor Jekyll's network can find more leads for us to follow," said Ritsuka.
Jekyll nodded. "One would hope. At the moment, however, I'm afraid that there has yet to be any new information passed amongst us. The magical tome — excuse me, Miss Alice — was the last lead on any further strange happenings within the city itself. The rest has been little more than reports of the movements of these patrol groups. In other words, nothing which we have not already learned."
"If your informants could note down any patterns they might see in these patrols," Tohsaka began meaningfully.
Jekyll inclined his head. "I shall endeavor to see it done."
"So what about the Museum?" asked Rika. "Are we waiting, or…?"
It might have been safer to do the one plan first and then check the Clock Tower to see what we could find…but when following the path of the patrol groups could take several days to set up and record their patterns — if there even were any — it just didn't make sense to wait. Doubly so, if it meant we might miss clues or if there was a trail that only got colder the longer we waited.
"We'll wait until tomorrow morning," I said, "when it's safe for Tohsaka and me to come with you. Whatever Abraham has done by then, we'll work with along the way."
Tohsaka grimaced. "Well. I suppose I'd better earn my keep, shouldn't I? Even if I'm only a temporary Master of Chaldea, I guess this is just part of the territory."
"That suits my purposes just fine, as well," said Andersen, striding into the room as though he'd been waiting for that exact moment. He hadn't, I knew, but his sense of timing was impeccable. "Sorry to inconvenience you, but since our destination is the same and our goals align, I'm going to have to ask the lot of you a favor."
He adjusted his glasses with a single thin finger, pressing the bridge further up his nose. The lenses glinted in the light.
"Take me with you to the Clock Tower. There's a certain theory I need to confirm, and it may just hold the secret to the nature of this Demonic Fog."
Next — Chapter CXXXVIII: Murderer on the Misty Morn
And now that the shameless plugging is out of the way...
Chapter CXXXVII: A Measure of Trust
Jekyll's parlor wasn't at all designed to host so many people at once, but somehow or another, we managed to squeeze our way in. Us three main Masters wound up squished together on the sofa where I'd woken up, with Mash in a chair next to it, Tohsaka in another chair on the opposite side, Jekyll in yet another chair, and everyone else essentially forced to stand, which left Mordred to lean against the nearby wall, arms folded across her chest. With what I'd seen of her personality so far, I didn't put it past her to think it made her look cool.
Even Fran had come to join us, despite how little she would be able to contribute to the whole conversation. I guess she just wanted to be involved, to see justice done to the men and the conspiracy that had killed Frankenstein. I couldn't fault her for that.
Andersen, at least, had conveniently marched off into the adjacent study and claimed it as his own, ignoring anything Jekyll said against it. Things would progress much more smoothly without a biting comment from him every now and again, and the less I had to think about why such a famous author had manifested in a form that looked barely old enough for middle school, the more comfortable I was.
Once everyone had settled in, Renée arrived with a tray containing a steaming teapot and enough teacups for everyone, announced that lunch would be ready in half an hour, and then left, all with the same stoic, unaffected expression on her face. I thought I might have detected an undercurrent of excitement, however. At the chance to feed so many people at once? I could only guess.
The tale of the mysterious magical tome didn't take all that long to tell, and the story of our following Nursery Rhyme and the confrontation that came afterwards didn't take that much longer. It wasn't as though the circumstances required all that much explanation, so the basic essentials of what had happened and why we'd done what we'd done were all that was necessary to cover what we'd accomplished and how it was we'd made an ally of Tohsaka.
"I see," Jekyll said when it was all over. I took the chance to sip at my tea and soothe my throat a little. "Then it would appear the case of the mysterious magical tome has been resolved, hasn't it, if…not in quite the manner I expected when I made the request that you investigate it. I suppose I ought to be grateful, in the very least, that no one was truly harmed by it. All's well that ends well, I believe the phrase is?"
"Something like that," Ritsuka agreed.
"It would have been perhaps more ideal if no fight erupted in the first place," said Caster, stroking his beard thoughtfully, "but I suppose the essential point is that indeed no permanent harm was done."
"Not for lack of trying," Mordred said bitterly.
"If it's an apology you're looking for, then you can have one," said Tohsaka. "If I'd known exactly who you all were, then I wouldn't have attacked you like that. But I'm not going to apologize for attempting to deal with what I assumed at the time was a group of enemies. I'm sure someone like the esteemed Sir Mordred can understand a concept like a preemptive strike."
Mordred's lips curled.
"You're lucky." But it was Jeanne Alter who drawled out those words. "If I was the one there, you would've been a f…" She faltered over the word, glancing once more at Nursery Rhyme, who looked back at her innocently. "…fudging crisp."
Rika smothered a giggle behind her teacup. Jeanne Alter tried to maintain her facade of disdain, but her censoring herself had robbed her of any momentum and she just wound up looking like she was trying too hard.
"If you were there," Nursery Rhyme said brightly, "maybe Mister Bandersnatch could have come out to play, too!"
Jeanne Alter shifted, and half the room tensed in response. "Yeah? That right?"
"Bad assumptions were made and people almost got hurt," Ritsuka said firmly, before things could kick off, "but the important part is that we're all here, we're all okay, and we're all allies now, right?"
Deliberately, I avoided glancing at Tohsaka. "Right," I agreed. "So there's no point in jumping down each other's throats about the mistakes we made."
The tension didn't quite drain out of the room, but the metaphorical knives were put away and everyone settled back down. A fight had been averted, at least for now.
Good job, Ritsuka, I thought. He was getting better at handling clashing personalities, and that was going to be only more important going forward. Especially if they kept going back out in the afternoons while I was stuck here in the apartment because of the fog.
"Plus, you know," said Rika, "this room's kinda cramped. If you guys start a fight, this whole place is going up. I like being un-exploded, you know?"
And considering that the mist was back in full force, that would be bad for at least me, Tohsaka, and Jekyll, even if everyone else would be varying shades of fine. There wasn't anyone in this room who wasn't aware of that.
Jeanne Alter snorted.
"Thank you for thinking of my home," Jekyll said politely.
"No prob," replied Rika. "We gotta live here, too, you know. At least for now. Going apartment hunting in this city would be a nightmare."
Ritsuka sighed.
"The next thing we need to worry about is how we're going to continue our investigation," I said, bulldozing past the joke. "We might have an extra Master now — temporary or not — but it doesn't mean much if we don't have anything or anywhere else to look. Jekyll, has there been any developments with your network that we need to know about?"
"Unfortunately, I'm afraid the answer to that is no," said Jekyll. "Things have been quiet since you left. Reports have been coming in, of course, that the victims of the magical tome have been awakening — something I can only assume might be laid at the feet of Mister Tohsaka and the lady Nursery Rhyme —"
"Alice," Nursery Rhyme interrupted with unusual firmness. "My name is Alice."
Jekyll blinked and glanced at her, but took it in stride. "Something for which I assume we might thank Mister Tohsaka and Miss Alice. Beyond that, however, there have been no new reports of any phenomena which might be called unusual. All I can speak to is the expected patrols of our masterminds' favored foot soldiers, and of course, they pose no threat to the populace as long as the good people of the city lock doors and avoid the streets."
"More of these homunculi, Helter Skelter, and automata, I'm assuming," Tohsaka said.
"Indeed," Caster confirmed. "It continues to be a small mercy that they don't enter homes and assault the people inside. That much, at least, we can be thankful for."
"Ungh," Fran grunted. "Un, un, ungh."
"No," I answered her. "We didn't find any more clues about P, B, or M."
Her lips drew tight, but her body sagged, disappointed, and she glared down at the floor. I sympathized, but I hadn't really expected any better. The magical tome having some kind of connection to them was a longshot to begin with, and the instant Andersen had explained what it was and how it worked, I'd already ruled out the possibility.
It would have been too convenient to find the answer less than a whole day after we got here.
"What do we actually know about these masterminds?" Tohsaka asked.
When I glanced at him, his lips thinned and the skin around the corners of his eyes tightened. Yeah, I didn't exactly trust him either, but that was fine. It wouldn't be the first, second, or last time I found myself in a situation where I needed to team up with someone I didn't fully trust. Most of my career had shaken out like that, one way or the other. It was old hat by now.
The only thing I needed to trust was that our interests aligned. For that, I just needed to look to the little girl sitting next to him.
"We've already told you what we know," I said to him. "Right now, we really don't have anything to go on, aside from the note Frankenstein left for us to find."
Tohsaka grunted. "So just that they're probably Servants. Not even a hint about their classes either, huh?"
"No," said Ritsuka. "We're assuming there's at least one Caster for, well, I think it's pretty obvious why?"
"Not sure where else you're getting a fog machine that can cover the whole city," his sister added wryly.
"It could be a Noble Phantasm," Mash added uncertainly, "but, well…"
"Who and how would be the obvious question," said Emiya. "It's not impossible that the mist has something to do with Jack the Ripper. A Noble Phantasm like that would make sense for someone like him."
"Just one problem with that," said Mordred. "You think that guy would stop in the mornings or stick to a schedule all polite-like the way things have been so far?"
I wanted to have an argument for that, but frustratingly, the memories of his fighting style and personality were also among the things I'd lost in the aftermath of the end of the fight. The only thing I could remember clearly was the use of a Noble Phantasm, because Fou had taken the hit for me for some inexplicable reason, even if what it was and how it worked were cleanly excised, and while there was a general rule in Chaldea's primer about how the average Servant had only a single Noble Phantasm…
Yeah. I didn't even need to look at Emiya to see someone in the room who broke that rule. If I started looking back at the previous Singularities, that rule got even more laughably wrong. While it wasn't a bad rule of thumb, I'd run into too many exceptions to assume it applied to Jack the Ripper, too.
"It's not impossible," Caster said. "After all, the legend of Jack the Ripper is one of an unrepentant madman who was surprisingly meticulous in his killings. It isn't out of the realm of possibility that he might have a Noble Phantasm of this sort and the temperament required to use it in the manner we've seen so far, particularly if it's being treated as a game with the populace."
"But it's unlikely," I said. "And it doesn't fit with the evidence we have so far. Whatever Project Demonic Fog is, I think we can safely assume that Jack the Ripper doesn't feature in it as a central figure, let alone the lynchpin to its success."
Ritsuka sighed. "Hence the fog machine. Yeah. I'm not an expert, but I can't think of anyone else who might have fog as a Noble Phantasm."
Neither could I.
"And that's why you think there's a Caster of some kind involved," Tohsaka noted. "I'd ask what it is you're assuming they want to use this fog for in the first place…but I'm going to guess you don't have any ideas about that either."
When none of us had an answer that would satisfy him, he let out a deep sigh.
"Great."
Nursery Rhyme awkwardly patted his thigh as though to offer him comfort, but it didn't seem to help.
It was to this general atmosphere that Renée returned a minute or so later, and in the same monotone voice I'd gotten used to from her, she announced, "Lunch is ready, Master."
"Very good. Thank you, Renée," said Caster. He drained the rest of his tea, then to us, he said, "I think it would do us all some good to fill our bellies with food, and once we have had our fill, we can return to such dour topics. Wouldn't you all agree?"
My stomach rumbled quietly in my gut, and next to me, I heard both of the twins' answering grumble, as though their own were agreeing with mine. With the mist outside keeping me confined to the apartment and nothing pressing to otherwise occupy our attention, there was no reason not to cut the conversation short for the moment and put some food in our bellies.
"That's fine," I said. "Maybe a little time and a meal will help give us a different perspective on things."
"An excellent idea!" said Jekyll, smiling broadly. He stood. "Come, come! Mister Tohsaka, I can't say as I have the foggiest idea what sort of food to which you might be accustomed — having never been to the Orient myself, you understand — but I'm certain Renée's cooking will be quite the treat!"
Tohsaka climbed to his feet, too. "Well, when you put it like that, I suppose it's only polite to take you up on such a generous offer."
"My good man," said Caster, "if you trust me on nothing else, let it be this: you won't regret it."
We all filtered out of the parlor and into the even more crowded dining room, which felt much more cramped than it had the night before, when it was just me, Caster, Jekyll, and Arash, or even this morning, when we'd had the twins, Mash, Emiya, and Fran there, too. Despite the vanishing space in the room itself, however, there were exactly as many spots as we needed for each of us to sit down and eat.
"No Andersen?" I asked.
"Mister Andersen has elected not to partake," Renée answered me stoically. "He requested that he not be disturbed."
"His loss," said Mordred. "Pipsqueak can go hungry, for all I care."
I wondered why, but didn't give it too much thought. Maybe he just liked taking advantage of the fact that he didn't need to eat as a Servant. Who knew?
Lunch was a warm and hearty soup, great for coming in from the chilly streets of London, where the constant fog blocking the sun had sapped away any real warmth that might have been left in the city. It was not bad enough to freeze, but the heat of the soup settling in my belly was a comfort all the same.
It didn't hurt that it tasted good, too. Renée really was a good cook. Different than the kind of meals Emiya preferred to make, but no less quality for that.
"It's not fair!" Rika complained. "My house-husband is supposed to be the best there is, and yet…!"
"A new challenger approaches, huh?" her brother teased. She groaned, but at no point did she stop eating.
"The soup is wonderful, Miss Renée," Mash said politely to the homunculus in her maid outfit.
"Thank you," Renée replied, completely deadpan, but there was a satisfied air about her as we ate. If she smiled, it wasn't while I was looking.
There were miniature cakes that went along with the meal, wedges of sweet bread with some kind of fruit spread sandwiched between the upper and lower layers, and it was kind of strange to eat them, because I was pretty sure I had read about them somewhere in one of the classics. Trippy, that was a good word, but then, my whole life the last few months had been meeting one figure from myth and legend after another. Eating a snack that could have come from the pages of Pride and Prejudice was a little pedestrian by comparison.
We sat around for a little while after we were done eating, satisfied, and let our food settle. Mash continued to nibble on a second of those miniature cake wedges, and Mordred looked like she would have leaned back and put her feet up on the table if she wasn't sure that it would get her yelled at.
At length, Tohsaka heaved out a sigh. "Alright," he admitted. "It was a little different from what I'm used to eating, but it was just as good as you promised it would be."
"Thank you, Mister Tohsaka," said Renée, still monotone. "I'm grateful for your kind words."
Tohsaka didn't seem quite sure how to take that, whether she was serious or not, and considering I'd said before that she emoted about as much as a rock, I couldn't blame him for the confusion.
"An excellent meal, Renée," Caster told her. "Thank you for all of your hard work."
"Truly," added Jekyll.
"I am glad that I can be of service to you, Master," said Renée.
Turning back to the rest of us, Caster continued, "Now that we've all had some time to digest — both our food and what we discussed earlier — shall we continue where we left off?"
"Yes." I sat up a little straighter, and so too did the twins and Mash. "Let's."
Even Mordred stopped slouching in her chair.
"I believe we left off on the matter regarding avenues of investigation, yes?" said Caster.
"Namely, the lack thereof," Emiya added.
Caster smiled grimly.
"Quite."
"You mentioned attempting to track the Caster through the magical energy spread throughout the city?" I suggested.
"One that bore little fruit, I'm afraid," said Caster regretfully. "As I explained before, the mist has made it too diffuse to attempt tracking it back to an origin point. I fear if I attempted to follow it all the way, I would find myself walking in circles."
"So if we were to get rid of the mist, it might be possible to find the Caster behind it," Mash concluded, and then she let out a sigh. "Unfortunately, the only way to do one is to do the other, so doing either one winds up being impossible, doesn't it?"
A real chicken and the egg problem. We needed to find the Caster to get rid of the mist, but we needed to get rid of the mist to find the Caster. In the process of doing one, the other would be accomplished as a matter of course, which really meant that we needed to find a different way of doing one or the other first.
"Is there another way we could track this Caster down?" asked Ritsuka.
Caster stroked his beard thoughtfully. "There might be," he allowed, "but the question of managing it is another matter."
My brow furrowed and I leaned forward a little. "If you have any ideas…"
"An idea, yes, but it might be a little bit of a stretch," Caster admitted. "You see, so far, I've been content to let Sir Mordred do what she will with the Helter Skelter and such and raised no concern about her treatment of them —"
"Didn't hear you complaining when I offered to go out and thin their numbers a little," Mordred grunted.
"— but depending on their composition and the methods of their construction, I might be able to find traces of their creator upon them and use that to locate a…source, if you will, for where it is they're all coming from. They would have to be relatively intact, however," he added swiftly. "As you might imagine, bringing one of them in whole and undamaged is a bit of a tall order."
Especially with Jekyll in the apartment, I saw immediately. He was an ordinary human, after all. If Mordred dragged one of those Helter Skelter or automata into the apartment, still fully functional and everything, then it might very well do a lot of damage not only to the apartment itself, but also to Jekyll.
"I mean, they weren't giving us much of a choice," said Rika. "Kinda hard to be nice to a bunch of robots trying to kill all humans when you happen to be one of those humans."
"Now you're going to ask me not to kill murderous robots?" Jeanne Alter drawled, disgusted.
"Technically, murder is defined as one human being killing another," Ritsuka said, "so robots can't actually be murderous, can they?"
Rika turned to her brother, horrified, and demanded, "Why were you the one who thought of that first? It should have been me!"
Jeanne Alter and most of the rest of the room were just varying shades of confused, so Rika said to Ritsuka, "Put I, Robot on the list, Onii-chan."
"Before or after Terminator?"
"After. Duh. You have to watch the classic before you dig into the junk food."
I focused on the more important part.
"I'm not sure it would be a good idea to try bringing them back here anyway," I said. "If you could use them to track down their creator, Abraham, that would be useful, but we don't have any idea how closely he can monitor them. If any of them have a tracker of some kind built into them, then we'd be leading him and his allies right back to us."
"If they don't already know exactly where we are," Emiya pointed out.
I acknowledged it with an incline of my head. True, it was entirely possible that P, B, and M already knew where we were and who we were, down to our names and the address of Jekyll's apartment, and I'd had a thought about that before, but…
"If they do know, they don't seem to be doing anything about it, do they?"
They weren't attacking us where we sat, they weren't keeping tabs on us — at least visibly — and there didn't seem to be any ambushes lying in wait for us to come and go. All things considered, when I asked the question whether they were aware of where we were and biding their time or completely unaware, the latter answer seemed more likely.
But it still paid to act as if they knew where we were at all times. There were some dangers to preparing to face an enemy who was less competent than you assumed they were, but if you were expecting to fight a Thinker, it was better to find out you were wrong later than to wind up dancing to their tune.
"Miss Taylor makes a good point," said Mash. "We've had to fight those automata and Helter Skelter several times now, but it doesn't seem like they're looking for us in particular."
"If they were, wouldn't they be waiting for us right outside the apartment?" asked Ritsuka.
Caster leaned back in his chair, stroking his beard thoughtfully. "And while I've been monitoring you, it doesn't seem as though they've been paying any special attention to the areas where you've already felled some of their number. Hm. Perhaps they truly have no idea where we are, nor do their puppets even have the intelligence to search for us competently."
Alternatively, none of what we were doing was more than a minor inconvenience for them. I would have thought we would face a reprisal of some kind for taking out that Caster, Mephistopheles, when Ritsuka and the others went to investigate Frankenstein's silence, but unless Jack the Ripper had been sent after us as retribution, P, B, and M seemed completely unconcerned to have lost a Servant from their roster.
"Ungh," Fran said throatily.
"That is a question," I allowed. "But if they attacked the Clock Tower, they might have gotten the information on Frankenstein there."
Assuming that the attack on the Association had more than just the purpose of keeping them from interfering. I knew that if I'd been in their shoes, it would have been a good chance to look for information on persons of interest to keep an eye on.
"Sorry to interrupt," said Tohsaka, "but you can actually understand what she's saying?"
"Right?" Rika nodded vigorously. "See, I'm not the only one who can't understand her! I'm not the weird one, here!"
"That last part's up for debate," Ritsuka said.
Rika stuck her tongue out at him.
"It's hard to explain, Mister Tohsaka," Mash told him politely. "It's not…understanding a language of words so much as it is…understanding her intent. I'm sorry, but I really can't explain it any better than that."
"It's still a shit explanation," said Jeanne Alter. Mash winced.
"I don't see anyone else offering a better one," Mordred chimed in. "It's something that can't be explained. Nothing more complicated to it than that."
And I wasn't about to start explaining that my own stint of aphasia brought on by letting a biokinetic play around with my brain during an apocalyptic battle for the fate of mankind made it easier to understand what Fran was trying to say. That was a can of worms I would prefer to open up never.
"Tohsaka," I said, changing the subject, "you were there at the Association not long before it was attacked, weren't you? Aside from your missing mentor, was there anything else that stood out to you as unusual about that day?"
Tohsaka grimaced. "I…can't say that there was, not at the time, at least, but…"
But that didn't mean there wasn't something there that he hadn't paid any mind at the time. The human senses took in a mountain-load of information in any given moment, I remembered hearing somewhere, and everything that didn't jump up and down and scream in your face got filtered out as a matter of course.
I turned to Mordred next. "Sir Mordred? While you were out patrolling, did you look to see what happened at the Clock Tower?"
"Huh?" Mordred blinked at me. "Uh, yeah. Yeah, Jekyll and I checked in on that shithole the other day. Abraham asked us to look into it. Whole place was demolished, couldn't get in or out. If anyone's left down there, they're stuck down there."
"I thought it might provide us some clues," said Caster, "so I asked Mordred and Doctor Jekyll to investigate while I constructed my little replica of the city. Unfortunately, they could tell me little that the newspaper had not already informed me of."
"I see."
It may wind up being a dead end, but…I didn't see too much in the way of options. For the moment, aside from wandering about the city and looking for clues, we seemed to have run out of avenues of investigation, or at least ones that were obvious. We couldn't rely on Jack the Ripper to show up at some convenient moment where we could capture and interrogate him, and P, B, and M didn't look to have any interest in us specifically. There was no telling when or even if they would attempt to pressure another of Jekyll's informants, so if we waited for that, we could wind up waiting for days or weeks for something that wasn't going to happen.
Right now, there were two routes we could go to try and find out more about the enemy and what they were doing. Luckily, we could do both at the same time, and we didn't even have to split up the group to do them.
"One of the things we're going to have to do is take a closer look at the Clock Tower for clues about what the masterminds did there and what else they might have wanted to accomplish while they were destroying it," I said.
Some part of me hated the necessity. The longer I could stay out of the sights of the Association and any of its members who might view me as a curiosity to be dissected, the better. Unfortunately, it was one of the only leads we had.
"Do you believe there might have been more beneath the surface than our eyes perceived?" asked Jekyll.
"I don't know," I admitted. "But it's a possibility we can't overlook."
"Especially if that's how they found out where Frankenstein lived," Ritsuka added.
"Uhn!" Fran agreed.
Jeanne Alter chuckled, grinning nastily, "Oh, no way I'm missing out on this one. Especially if any of those pretentious English p…" She glanced at Nursery Rhyme, and her grin twisted into a grimace. "…pansies tries anything fishy."
Nursery Rhyme just smiled at her innocently. At this point, I wasn't sure that she wasn't doing it on purpose to mess with Jeanne Alter.
"So I get to do some archeology in the British Museum?" asked Rika. "You're not going to make me put on a tank top and a pair of short-shorts, are you?"
"A tank top and short-shorts?" Mash repeated, as confused as I was. Emiya and Ritsuka seemed to get what she was talking about, but everyone else seemed clueless.
"No." Don't be ridiculous, I managed not to say.
"Oh, good," said Rika, breathing an exaggerated sigh of relief. "I mean, don't get me wrong, I'm cute as the dickens, but I ain't got nothing on Lara Croft."
Ritsuka's grimace said that he didn't like the mental image she'd just given him.
"So we're going to look through the wreckage of the Clock Tower and see if we can find any clues," he said, trying to distract himself. "Are we…going to enter the Clock Tower itself? The Association's headquarters?"
"We'll see," I answered. "It'll depend on how difficult it is for us to make it down there, how long it might take to clear a path inside, even with our Servants there to do the heavy lifting. We may have to rely on the Director to lead us through once we get inside."
I watched Tohsaka the entire time, looking for any signs of panic or distress, any indication that he knew what we would find down there and didn't want us searching for it. Nothing. The grimace on his face was of someone who knew there was a tedious or distasteful task ahead and knew there was no avoiding it.
He didn't even try to dissuade us from it, convince us it was too dangerous or to try something else. It still wasn't proof that he was absolutely trustworthy or that he wasn't hiding anything, but for now, it seemed like I was worrying over nothing.
Maybe I really was being overly paranoid.
"In any case," I went on, "it's not the only lead we can pursue. Abraham, I know you came up with a handful of those trackers for us to hold onto while we were out. If you can, I'm going to need at least a few more. A few dozen, if you can manage it."
He blinked at me. "It…shouldn't be that much trouble to accomplish, no," he allowed, "but… What is it, exactly, that you plan on using them for?"
"Right now, we don't know much about the enemy's patrol groups except that they exist," I explained patiently. For the benefit of the entire team, not just him. "If they have predetermined routes, if another group is sent out to replace one that we eliminate, if their routes rotate or change hourly or daily — knowing all of these things would let us avoid them and make it faster and easier to get around the city. But if they return to their master and his home base, where the fog machine might be —"
"We could track them back to it!" Ritsuka concluded suddenly.
And then attack it while they were least expecting us. If we wanted to be even more cautious, we could set up a temporary base right next door, and during the grace period in the mornings, I could explore the enemy base with my bugs without P, B, or M being any the wiser. Hell, maybe I could even sabotage their fog machine without any of us having to go anywhere near it.
"Exactly."
Forgetting my little stint with the fog when we arrived, this could wind up being the easiest and safest Singularity we ever cleared. The fastest, too, behind Fuyuki.
"Clever," Emiya said approvingly.
"Damn," said Jeanne Alter. "We could fu…" She glanced at Nursery Rhyme again. "…fudge them up before they even knew what hit 'em."
"You keep talking about fudge and I'm gonna want some," Rika remarked.
"I'm not the one who brought a kid back to this place," Jeanne Alter muttered mutinously.
"Brilliant!" said Jekyll, beaming. "An excellent plan!"
"It's certainly feasible," Caster agreed. "I'm afraid that making enough trackers for you to accomplish it won't be quickly done, but… A day or so? If not tomorrow, then the day after, depending on exactly how many you would like me to make."
I was honestly hoping it would have been a little faster. Having said that, it wasn't like we were necessarily going to manage to tag every single patrol group in a single morning to begin with.
"We don't have to do it all at once," I reasoned. "Depending on what results we get with the first group, we might not even have to do it more than once."
"And in the meantime, we just sit around and wait to see if they'll lead us to their masters?" Mordred asked skeptically.
"In the meantime, we'll investigate every lead we can find," I countered. "And if we don't have any leads, then yes, we sit around and wait. From this point on, the fewer patrol groups we engage and destroy, the better."
"Which means less fighting," said Mash.
"Goddamn." Jeanne Alter clicked her tongue and folded her arms. "There goes all the fun."
"You said it," Mordred agreed.
"Then I guess we just have to hope that Doctor Jekyll's network can find more leads for us to follow," said Ritsuka.
Jekyll nodded. "One would hope. At the moment, however, I'm afraid that there has yet to be any new information passed amongst us. The magical tome — excuse me, Miss Alice — was the last lead on any further strange happenings within the city itself. The rest has been little more than reports of the movements of these patrol groups. In other words, nothing which we have not already learned."
"If your informants could note down any patterns they might see in these patrols," Tohsaka began meaningfully.
Jekyll inclined his head. "I shall endeavor to see it done."
"So what about the Museum?" asked Rika. "Are we waiting, or…?"
It might have been safer to do the one plan first and then check the Clock Tower to see what we could find…but when following the path of the patrol groups could take several days to set up and record their patterns — if there even were any — it just didn't make sense to wait. Doubly so, if it meant we might miss clues or if there was a trail that only got colder the longer we waited.
"We'll wait until tomorrow morning," I said, "when it's safe for Tohsaka and me to come with you. Whatever Abraham has done by then, we'll work with along the way."
Tohsaka grimaced. "Well. I suppose I'd better earn my keep, shouldn't I? Even if I'm only a temporary Master of Chaldea, I guess this is just part of the territory."
"That suits my purposes just fine, as well," said Andersen, striding into the room as though he'd been waiting for that exact moment. He hadn't, I knew, but his sense of timing was impeccable. "Sorry to inconvenience you, but since our destination is the same and our goals align, I'm going to have to ask the lot of you a favor."
He adjusted his glasses with a single thin finger, pressing the bridge further up his nose. The lenses glinted in the light.
"Take me with you to the Clock Tower. There's a certain theory I need to confirm, and it may just hold the secret to the nature of this Demonic Fog."
— o.0.O.O.0.o —
Lots and lots of dialogue and the team planning out where they're going to go next. I thought I was going to have to rename the chapter and cover the next big story beat that I have lined up, but this wound up covering everything necessary and still being a respectable size, so I can leave that for a little bit later.
There was one part near the end, in the very last few paragraphs, where I wanted to add something...but between one day and the next, I forgot what it was I wanted to add and who was going to be doing the speaking, so it can't be helped. Oh well.
There was one part near the end, in the very last few paragraphs, where I wanted to add something...but between one day and the next, I forgot what it was I wanted to add and who was going to be doing the speaking, so it can't be helped. Oh well.
Stahor
BookWorm
- Location
- Russia, Moscow
You get archeology uniform too, don't you worry.
As I understand it Nursery Rhyme/Alice doesn't really have a personal sort of goal to begin with. She either mirrors her first Master or her current. Beyond that is moment to moment whim, but less malign and more not really grasping what harm means to people.
It is really funny watching the potty mouths get suppressed by her presence though.
floppy_seal99
D-O-G-A-R-S DOGARS!
- Location
- snooping as usual
more for the rest of us then, bismillah
wait no
let's get Taylor into that archaeology uniform
She has the legs for it, and I'd assume the backside.
If for no other reason than to make Olga blush.
- Location
- Some City
This
I know this is kind of a story of Taylor saving the world and along the way finding a way to take a step back and retire...but that still requires her doing the first part and saving the world. She still needs to do that, and the twins very much still need her there to be able to do that. having her be sidelined and essentially be den mother wasn't really going to work out well for either of them. that and it's just not fun to have it be told to you that all this crazy stuff is going on during the arc...but our PoV character is stuck sitting in the parlor playing radio operator, and so that's all we as the audience see
(and to Solipsist' point, Taylor got sidelined during the interim arc. doesn't do great favors to have her entirely sidelined this arc either.)
I know you probably have most of it written at this point, but an option that also exists would be to have the Masters work in shifts. The twins are already going to be matched up with Mash and should probably stick together, but for the sake of the twins' health it might work better to have them out and about during the day hunting down what they can, and Taylor (and Tohsaka) go out in the morning to follow up on whatever leads they've managed to dig up. granted that does risk one team of Masters being ambushed...but that was already a possibility, since the Twins WERE going out by themselves.
(also the option exists to have the twins themselves split up and go opposite directions, but that at least has the argument of spreading the Servants a bit too thin. two groups? that's manageable. three? that might be pushing it)
Honestly might be for the best.
i might be a bit unfair to Andersen, but i found it kind of grating that he kind of just took advantage of everybody canonically to spend most of the Singularity lazing around not really doing much.
Sure, Stheno kind of does fuck off by herself, but at least she wasn't mooching off the group trying to actually do something
Good on Taylor and the others for actually calling him out here; hope he contributes a bit more
Point for character growth
here's to Rika getting some spotlight of her own
they do also have the option of tracking down some notable landmarks and looking for Ley Line Terminals (for significance and because they suspect a Caster, respectively). might not net them anything, but they are leads that exist
To be fair, they don't need to go fully non-lethal.
they just need ONE intact enough for Abraham to work on.
they can trash the rest
(and it's not like Abraham couldn't tag along for that run)
Do really enjoy these little moments where Taylor just doesn't get the joke
because it should be really obvious, but Taylor both wasn't in that world and not in that particular cultural sphere to get these things, so those references just go right over her head.
(and yet she's still more up-to-date on modern tech than most any magus has a right to be)
(...*makes notes for Caster!Taylor)
Truly love this! because it's a perfectly valid strategy that Taylor would one-hundred percent think of.
and it works out whether it gives them a lead on the conspirators or not.
either they track them back to the primary factory and they can confront their primary enemies
and if that doesn't work they still have a real-time map of the routes the patorls use so they can see the enemy coming and choose whether to engage or just slip by (or create a distraction of their own)
kind of why i'm holding out hope for Jackie
because she can be directed by whoever holds her Command Seals/giving her instructions
she usually ends up in the hands of people who want to use her for terrible ends, but if she gets picked up with someone with a better moral code they can steer her in better directions
though that still depends on if that's the direction the author wants to take this
Thanks for the chapter!
already can't wait for next week!
Nursery Rhyme just mirrors her master anyway, so I don't think there'd be that much difference here between her and Jackie. Rather than having their own drives, they just align with their Master's, their goals are just immediate personal emotional fulfillments.
Chapter CXXXVIII: Murderer on the Misty Morn
James D. Fawkes
Court Scribe
- Location
- Avalon (Isle of Mists)
This story and this chapter brought to you by my wonderful supporters, whose kindness and generosity have made it possible to devote so much of my time and attention to writing, especially Eric, s22132, AbyssalApsu, and Alias 2v10. You guys are absolute legends. To show my gratitude, they had the chance to read this and upcoming chapters before the public release. You can find out more HERE.
And now that the shameless plugging is out of the way...
Chapter CXXXVIII: Murderer on the Misty Morn
After lunch, we left the dining room and went about to find ways to occupy the afternoon. Ritsuka decided that he and Mash should go out on patrol with Mordred once his food had time to settle, and Rika — somewhat reluctantly — decided to go with them.
"Who's gonna look out for you if I'm not there?" was the painfully transparent excuse she used. I guess she was still feeling that helplessness from the Château d'If fiasco, and while he'd proven that he could take care of himself and didn't need me holding his hand, I could relate to that.
I still hated being stuck in the apartment while the others went out. But I had a ready and convenient method around that limitation, so I told the both of them, "Take Jeanne Alter with you."
Neither of them had any trouble with that and agreed readily. Jeanne Alter, of course —
"Thank God," she said with exaggerated relief. "If I had to stick around this fu-fudging place with the twerp while you guys went out and did the fun stuff, I was gonna light something on fire."
— was only too happy to go with them. Having to censor herself around Nursery Rhyme — who I was becoming more and more certain was playing up the innocent little girl act as a prank on Jeanne Alter for just that reason — was very obviously taxing her nerves, and she wanted to be able to speak however she liked just as much as she wanted to get out and stretch her legs.
Mordred, of course, was just fine with it. She seemed to have found something of a kindred spirit in Jeanne Alter, which made sense, because they were both rowdy, foul-mouthed, and violent. I didn't want to be anywhere near them if and when they ever got into a serious argument. I wasn't sure the building they were in would survive the ensuing chaos.
It probably wouldn't be a good idea to bring Mordred back to Chaldea with us. Not without the simulator up and running for Servants, where they could work out any issues safely and securely without threatening to bring the roof down around us.
While we were on the subject, however, I made sure to bring up the idea of forming a contract with Mordred as I'd promised myself I would once all of the excitement was over from our earlier investigation. I half expected her to balk at the very notion, like her rebellious nature made the thought of ever taking orders from a Master utterly repulsive, but she surprised me.
"Sure."
"Just like that?" I couldn't stop myself from asking.
"Yeah. Why not?" she replied, completely nonchalant. There was no hesitation at all. "Ain't like I got a reason to say no. You guys are pretty chill, and you know how to handle yourselves in a fight — that shit with that dagger of yours was fucking epic, by the way — so I don't gotta worry about you getting your asses mowed down because you did something stupid. And having a Master means I don't gotta worry so much about using too much energy and disappearing. Takes a load off my mind, you know?"
"I think I do, yeah."
So just like that, we formed a temporary contract with Mordred. I wasn't sure it would end up becoming permanent, but funnily enough, she'd convinced me that she wouldn't have any objections to it when the time came for us to head back to Chaldea. Aside from my concerns about her rowdy nature causing problems later on, I found I didn't have many objections to it either. Not when it gave us yet another strong Servant, one that could give Siegfried a run for his money in a lot of ways.
I was sure Aífe could keep her in line, if it came down to it. She was already mothering Jeanne Alter. What was one more rough, rebellious teenager?
By the tight grimace on Caster's face, however, he wouldn't be quite so willing to accept even a temporary contract from us, and I was starting to wonder why it was he trusted us so little. Maybe he just had enough of an independent streak that he didn't like the idea of taking orders from a Master, especially when I had to assume he had access to as much energy as he needed via the ley line we were sitting on top of in Jekyll's apartment.
Or maybe it was something more sinister. Paracelsus started with a 'P,' after all, and what better way to keep track of your enemy's movements and plans than to be there as they made them? He'd even given us a false name that had no connection to either his real one or any of the initials in the note Frankenstein had left.
Thinking back to it, he hadn't done anything overtly suspicious when we found that out. Hadn't been surprised, hadn't panicked, hadn't reacted particularly strongly at all, even to the information that Mephistopheles had been killed. He'd just taken all of the information in stride — and then been helpless in suggesting other identities for P, B, and M.
It was nothing to act on, not yet, but it was plenty of reason to keep a closer eye on him from then on. And make sure, importantly, that I was never alone in the room with him.
Hopefully, I would wind up being wrong and find out I was just being paranoid. Until I found out one way or the other, however, the only thing I could do was be extra cautious around him.
About an hour after we finished lunch, the twins set out with Mordred, Mash, and Jeanne Alter and stepped into the foggy streets. That left me with Arash still on the roof as overwatch, Emiya there with me to act as a relay in case the twins ran into something, Fran just as unable to do anything with the mist still in play as I was, Jekyll, Caster, and Tohsaka and Nursery Rhyme.
I also had a map I could use to follow their course through the city, Jeanne Alter's senses to borrow, and a Director to inform of the situation and our plans going forward.
Marie wasn't particularly happy to find out we were going to be exploring the Clock Tower as much as we could for clues, but as much as it bothered her, we didn't have a plethora of places to look or very many leads to follow.
"The frustrating thing is that I know we don't have any better options," she groused.
"Yeah," I agreed. "P, B, and M haven't left us much of a trail to follow."
She chewed on her lip for a moment. At length, she said, "My orders from before still stand. The safety of the team and the success of the mission are far more important than the life of any single individual inside the Singularity, no matter who it might be."
And we had full permission to do whatever it took to keep everyone on the team safe from anyone in the Association who might take interest. Yeah. The fact we had been given carte blanche to use lethal force if we had to was something that still surprised me. I wasn't sure it wouldn't come back to bite us when this was all over and the UN and the Association started pulling up our records of what happened in each Singularity.
But that was a concern for later, the future. We had to get to the point where it was something we actually had to legitimately worry about. After all, if we didn't fix this and all the other Singularities, there wouldn't be a UN or Mage's Association to rake us over the coals for killing a Clock Tower Lord in self-defense, would there?
On the other hand, depending on how thorough P, B, and M had been when they attacked the Clock Tower and how extensive the damage was to the whole place, there might not be anyone else we had to worry about. It wasn't impossible that more people had escaped the way Tohsaka had, just by being off site when everything went down, but we hadn't run into anyone like that yet and we might not ever.
I suppose we would find out soon enough, one way or the other.
"Just be careful," Marie bade me. "Even if there aren't any magi to get in the way, the attack on the Clock Tower could have let any number of dangerous things loose. There's no telling what you might encounter when you go to investigate."
"Of course, Director."
And then, the connection cut, and the only thing left for me to do was monitor the team's progress through their patrol. Fortunately, they weren't going too far afield. It looked like they were making a circuit around the apartment, looking out for anything suspicious and taking out any patrol groups that got closer than we wanted. When I peeked in on them through Jeanne Alter's eyes, things didn't look very exciting. It was mostly just fog, fog, and more fog. Again.
That fog was really starting to piss me off. Drake's ship being what it was and resources being as important as they were at sea, keeping a swarm of any meaningful size had been something I hadn't dared to risk, but at least then I'd been able to contribute a little bit more in other ways. Being stuck inside the apartment and being unable to see anything outside of it was stifling.
Tohsaka expressed interest in the map, and Caster was only too happy to explain it. The chatter gave me something else to distract myself with while I watched and waited, and while it wasn't much, it was better than being stuck in the silence, unable to do anything except listen to Mordred and Jeanne Alter swear and Rika crack jokes.
The sooner we took care of whatever was making the fog, the better. A part of me was even hoping that the Singularity would still persist afterward, that it wouldn't be so easy to fix this whole mess, if only so that I could see some more action before everything was over.
The twins and their group returned late in the afternoon, although the only way to really tell exactly how long they'd been out was the clock on the mantle in the parlor. The report they gave on what had happened while they were out and what they'd seen was essentially as I'd expected it to be, with all the long stretches of aimless walking that entailed, and while they'd come across another patrol group or two, those were easily taken care of.
Also as expected. Jeanne Alter and Mordred were both strong Servants with high stats and good performance. A bunch of puppets, homunculi, and robots weren't going to be much of a threat.
No sign of Jack the Ripper, though. Maybe he was just being cautious and hadn't wanted to take his chances on the group as they were. Taking on a single Servant and Master pair was one thing for an Assassin, but taking on three might have been a little too much for him to risk.
Whatever the case, he hadn't shown up, which meant they hadn't had a chance to deal with him or try taking him out, so that was a concern we'd have to keep in the back of our minds for later. Of course it couldn't have been as convenient as getting rid of him so quickly and easily.
For dinner, Emiya — with Caster's help — convinced Renée to surrender the kitchen again, and he made us a spread of somewhat more Eastern and Mediterranean dishes, as though he was trying to counterbalance her decidedly English fare for breakfast and lunch. We ate well and enjoyed it, as we usually did, and after spending a few hours to refine and rehash our plans for investigating the demolished British Museum in the morning, we arranged ourselves as we had the night before in the apartment above Jekyll's, only with the added presence of Tohsaka and Nursery Rhyme to make things an even tighter squeeze, and went to sleep so we could get up and beat the mist tomorrow.
Of course, the next morning —
"What the hell?"
— that all ran headlong into a thick fog choking the streets outside our windows. It was just as bad as it had ever been, so thick that I couldn't even see the front steps from the second floor window, and the sun above was blotted out, leaving behind only the faint suggestion of its presence. My throat burned with remembered pain just looking at it.
"Hey, Senpai," said Rika a little nervously, "this counts as them changing up their patterns, right?"
It did. And there was nothing for me to do about it. If I walked outside in that, I already knew exactly what would happen to me, and I wasn't eager to be coughing up my lungs again. The only way I was leaving the apartment today was if I had a death wish or if I was lucky enough that they'd flipped things around and the afternoon would be blessedly clear.
I didn't think I was going to be lucky.
Tohsaka clicked his tongue. A grimace pulled tight at his lips. "We can't go and investigate the Clock Tower today."
No, we couldn't. Not unless we were willing to split our team in half and let the twins go on their own with the others while he and I stayed here, and while there was merit in the idea, it seemed to me that forcing us to either abandon our plans or modify them like that was the goal of this whole thing in the first place.
P, B, and M wanted us to send the twins out to the Clock Tower without me or Tohsaka there to support them. Whether that was because they wanted to take advantage of the split to attack the twins or to attack us here in the apartment, or even both at the same time, that part we couldn't know until they acted upon it.
"So it seems."
Divide and conquer. It was one of the oldest strategies in the book.
On the other hand, uncertainty and indecision were dangerous and deadly tools, too, weren't they? Sun Tzu said something about that, if I remembered right. About the power of misdirection and misinformation, convincing your enemies to doubt their own decisions so that they made the wrong one.
That one was also a familiar playbook. It had been a while since I was the one on the receiving end. I didn't like it now any better than I had before.
"Are they trying to stop us from investigating the museum?" Ritsuka wondered aloud.
"But how did they know?" Mash asked him. "Are they watching the apartment after all? Are we being spied on?"
"Fou…" the little gremlin murmured.
How, indeed. There were only so many possibilities. Could they sneak a "bug" around me into the apartment? While we were all out yesterday? Maybe. Probably, even, if they picked the right place to hide it. My bugs could find a lot of things and gave me an incredibly complete picture of the world around me, but they weren't infallible. Much as I tried to give the impression otherwise, I was perfectly capable of missing things.
But the idea that they could get around both me and Caster was harder to believe. With an Assassin, maybe, but the only one we knew they had was Jack the Ripper, and he was at Alice's tea party yesterday. There was a window, so it wasn't impossible…
Occam's Razor, however, gave me a different answer.
But then, why heal me, Caster? I asked him silently. The answers I came up with to that one felt flimsy, because he could just as easily have claimed there wasn't anything he could do to save me. If he really was the "P" in P, B, and M, then he could have been rid of both an enemy Master and an enemy Servant in Arash in one fell swoop, and the twins might not have ever realized it.
I needed to see how he reacted. What he thought we should do about the problem. How strong his opinion on it was. If he suggested that we split the team and send the twins to investigate — if he was insistent upon it, in fact — then that was probably the last thing we should do.
Beep-beep!
When I answered it, Marie's voice crackled out of my communicator. "We've analyzed the fog outside," she said without preamble. "It sounds ridiculous, but it's even more toxic than the normal fog you've been dealing with so far."
"Never going to get used to that," Tohsaka muttered to himself.
"Even more toxic?" asked Ritsuka.
"Yes," Marie answered, dead serious. "Ritsuka, Rika, Mash, and of course, Servants should still be just fine and experience mild discomfort at the very worst, but, of course, that means —"
"Tohsaka and I absolutely can't go outside," I finished for her.
"Right. Even a few minutes of constant exposure will be enough to…"
To kill us, she didn't say, but I heard her all the same. I'd already suspected that was the case, but the confirmation gave more weight to the idea that this was definitely a strike at us. Either they really did want to separate us, or there really was something at the Clock Tower they didn't want us to see.
Maybe it was both. The worst kind of trap was the one where you played into the enemy's hands no matter what you did.
"Damn," said Emiya, lips pulled tight. "And even if I projected a gas mask…?"
"Unless it was designed specifically to deal with a situation like this, it wouldn't help," Marie told him, shooting the idea down instantly. "If it's a completely ordinary gas mask, it wouldn't do anything at all."
Emiya grimaced. "Well, there goes that idea."
"Da Vinci is working on a solution," was the ray of hope she offered us. "But she's not finished with it yet, so it might be another day or more until it's ready to send to you."
"I see." Good news, I wasn't going to be stuck inside for the rest of the Singularity every time the fog rolled in. Bad news, it was still going to be another day or two before I had a way of safely stepping outside into that fog. "Was there anything else, Director?"
There was a pause. At length, Marie said, "Not at this time. I shouldn't need to tell you, whatever caused this change in the enemy's patterns, you need to be extremely careful."
"We know," said Ritsuka. "Thank you, Director."
"Good." And the connection cut.
"So what now?" Rika asked into the silence that followed. "I mean, this is usually the part where someone says, 'let's split up, gang,' but I'm all out of Scooby Snacks and Fou's too small to pass for a Great Dane anyway."
"Fou!" the thing protested. Like she hadn't made a similar joke just a day ago.
"We should continue this downstairs with Abraham and Doctor Jekyll," I said instead of addressing any of that. "Maybe Doctor Jekyll's network has more information for us to work with."
"A good idea," said Ritsuka. Someone's stomach gurgled, and he added, "We should probably eat breakfast while we have the chance, too."
"We should," I agreed.
So we climbed down the stairs and to Jekyll's apartment on the floor below, where Jeanne Alter waited for us, sprawled out on the couch in the parlor. She looked like nothing so much as a particularly lazy housecat.
"'Sup," she greeted us. "You guys see that fu-freaky mist, too?"
Nursery Rhyme giggled.
"We did," I confirmed. "Abraham and Doctor Jekyll?"
I asked more for the benefit of the twins and everyone else.
"In the dining room," said Jeanne Alter, "waiting for breakfast."
"You can eat with us, too," Ritsuka told her. She waved him off.
"Gimme a holler when it's ready. I'm too cozy to get up right now."
I wasn't in the mood to fight with her about it right then, and perhaps sensing that, no one else raised a stink about it either. Let her laze about for now. She'd have plenty of chances to earn her keep in the days ahead.
"At least we weren't the only ones who noticed," Tohsaka said as we made our way towards the dining room.
"I'm not sure how you could miss it," Rika remarked. "It's gonna hit you in the face the second you open a window."
The only reason I had missed it before we got up in the morning was because the fog from last night had probably never dispersed. My swarm had never gone out since we came in for lunch yesterday, so there wasn't anything for me to notice until we got up.
I doubted the enemy knew any of that, because the only people who knew my limits were back at Chaldea, but it was frustrating nonetheless. They'd managed to sneak past me entirely by accident.
"Good morning," Jekyll and Caster greeted us as we came in. They were already seated around the oblong table in the dining room, sipping cups of tea.
"Uhn," Fran echoed, hunched over her own teacup.
"Good morning," I replied, and the others echoed me to varying degrees and in varying ways.
"Renée is in the kitchen cooking as we speak," said Caster. "Breakfast should be ready shortly, so why don't you all take a seat?"
I wasn't much in the mood for breakfast either, but all the same, there still wasn't anything I could do about it, so there was no reason to go about skipping a meal. If Caster really was a spy, best not to give him any reason to suspect I even suspected him either, so I had to act like nothing was wrong.
I picked the same seat in the middle of the table that I'd been using since we got here and sat down. The twins and Mash took that as their cue and found seats of their own, and Tohsaka was last, picking a seat to my left. On the opposite side of him, Nursery Rhyme hopped up into her own chair and promptly went about swinging her legs about like the child she appeared to be.
Emiya stayed standing, arms folded, behind Rika.
I took the chance to pour a cup of tea for myself. Tohsaka and Nursery Rhyme were the only other ones to follow suit.
"I take it you're already aware of the fog?" asked Caster, jumping right into things.
"Yes."
"We saw it when we woke up this morning," Ritsuka explained.
"Thick enough that Senpai probably can't cut it even with her super knife," Rika added.
"An unfortunate development," said Jekyll. "Shall I assume this will cause an unavoidable delay in your investigation?"
"Yes." I watched Caster carefully out of the corner of my eye. "One way or another, it seems that P, B, and M don't want us looking into whatever happened at the Clock Tower."
Caster stroked his beard thoughtfully, frowning. If he really was a spy, he had one of the best poker faces I'd ever seen, because he gave nothing away. "You think they intended that from the beginning?"
"Do you think they didn't?"
Caster sighed. "Regretfully, I don't have any better ideas, and yours has merit. The question of how and when they learned of our intentions to look into their attack on the Clock Tower linger, of course, but…"
Notably, he didn't suggest there was a spy. I wasn't sure anyone else was thinking it either, even if it was the most obvious explanation to me.
"Perhaps we are overthinking it," said Jekyll. "It need not be a direct action intended to stymie our specific efforts today, but instead a general tactic employed by the adversary now that one of their Servants has encountered your presence here directly. You fought with Jack the Ripper himself yesterday, did you not?"
"So Jack told them about us, and they decided they couldn't afford to let us do whatever we wanted in the mornings," Ritsuka translated.
That…was actually entirely possible. Ritsuka, Rika, and Mash had already run into and killed one of their Servants, that Caster, Mephistopheles, but Jack the Ripper was the one who fought us and escaped. It may have been that P, B, and M didn't have any idea we were even here until that moment and had originally assumed Mordred was the one who killed him and wrecked their patrol groups single-handedly.
I wasn't going to bet on it, though. I couldn't afford to.
"Holy shit," Rika said with something like awe. "We really are meddling kids!"
Only if you decided to really stretch the definition of "kids." Ritsuka, Rika, and Mash might have been underage, but everyone else in the group was legally or physically an adult.
Renée appeared at that moment, announcing that, "Breakfast is ready, Master."
"Let us table this discussion, for now," said Caster. "Since it appears no one will be going anywhere this morning, there's no rush to have everything figured out right this instant. We should enjoy breakfast first."
No one had any objections to that, and while I still wasn't really in the mood to eat — and this could very easily be a ploy to buy himself some time — I reluctantly agreed. While Ritsuka went to get Jeanne Alter, Renée went back into the kitchen and returned shortly thereafter with another spread of English breakfast that we all dug into, a little more subdued than the day before.
It was still good, of course, but it seemed mine weren't the only thoughts that were heavy with the implications of what was going on.
"Another excellent repast, Renée," Doctor Jekyll said politely when we were finished.
"Uhn," Fran agreed.
"Thank you, Doctor Jekyll, Miss Fran," Renée replied in that same monotone. I wasn't sure whether I imagined the slightest curl at the edges of her lips.
"Onii-chan," Rika announced, troubled, "I think I'm having an existential crisis."
Ritsuka sighed. "It's okay to like people's food other than Emiya's, Rika."
"Blasphemy!" she insisted.
"Against your tastebuds?" I suggested.
Rika's mouth opened, snapped shut, and then, sulkily, she crossed her arms and told me, "It's no fun when you ruin the joke like that."
"Or maybe you just need new material," Ritsuka said dryly.
She stuck her tongue out at him.
Caster cleared his throat pointedly. "Regarding the issue at hand, namely this fog —"
But Andersen chose that moment to appear in the doorway, solemn-faced and grim. "Jekyll," he said without preamble, "one of the other collaborators just made contact. They said they needed to speak with you urgently."
Jekyll stood from the table, folding his napkin more out of ingrained habit than anything else, it seemed, and said, "Please excuse me, my friends, while I see to this matter. I shall return anon."
"Maybe your collaborator will have some idea about what's going on," Tohsaka suggested slyly.
Jekyll offered a smile. "We can only hope."
He dropped his napkin on the table next to his plate, skirted his way around the table, and left for the office where he kept his radio. I kept tabs on him the entire way with my swarm, positioning enough bugs in the room to listen in on the entire conversation, or at least Jekyll's half of it.
"Aren't you all a sorry lot," said Andersen.
"You didn't see the fog?" asked Ritsuka.
"What kind of question is that?" Andersen replied. "Of course I did. I would have to be blind to miss it."
"It means we can't afford to risk investigating the Clock Tower just yet," Mash explained. "I'm sorry, Mister Andresen, but that also means we can't take you with us right now."
Andersen arched an eyebrow. "And? Are you going to continue stating the exceedingly obvious, or will the merely obvious do?"
"Damn, you're a mouthy little fu-freak, aren't you?" Jeanne Alter drawled, stumbling mid-sentence again.
How long was Nursery Rhyme going to keep that going?
"We can take you, Mister Andersen," the girl in question offered innocently. "I have a lot of friends who can go with us! You'll be extra safe! Promise!"
"No," Andersen rejected her immediately. "I prefer books that can be read, not ones that talk back to me. I would stay as far away from you as possible, but unfortunately, here, at least, that's only as far as the other side of this apartment."
"Harsh," Rika remarked.
"There's no need for that," Tohsaka agreed, and he actually sounded angry. "Didn't your parents ever teach you proper manners?"
In his office, Jekyll sat down in his chair and affixed a set of old-fashioned headphones around his ears, then leaned forward and spoke into the just as old-fashioned microphone. The voice coming out the other end was too tinny and muffled to make out the words, but the tone of voice was at least clear enough for me to make out how frantic the guy was.
"You're getting too attached," Andersen rebuked him. "You haven't forgotten that she's not really your daughter, have you? She's just a book. There's such a thing as loving something like her too much."
"You little…!" Tohsaka snarled.
Mordred chose that moment to materialize in the dining room with us.
"Yo!" she greeted us all. "You guys looked out the window yet? That mist is crazy!"
"Yeah," Ritsuka answered her. "It looks like we won't be able to go out today and investigate the Clock Tower."
Tohsaka, taking advantage of the distraction, forced himself to calm down and ease back into his seat.
"What?" Mordred complained. "Why? It's just a little fog!"
"Not all of us are so fortunate that we can survive that little fog," Tohsaka reminded her coolly.
"Tch." Mordred scoffed. "So? Just stay here then, pansies. The rest of us can handle it just fine without you holding us back!"
"I'm not going without Papa," Nursery Rhyme said firmly.
Mordred waved it off. "Wasn't asking you, pipsqueak."
"Uhn," Fran grunted. "Uh-uhn."
"Of course you're staying here, too," Mordred replied. "You ain't got a single lick of magic resistance, and the less people we have to protect down there, the easier it'll be to get in and find what we need."
"Sir Mordred might be saying it a little bit…indelicately," Caster began, trying to cool tempers before they could get too hot, "but it is a viable option, is it not? Four Servants is already quite the intimidating force — sorry, Mister Andersen, I should say five."
"Leave me out of it," Andersen said bluntly. "I can't even throw a proper punch, so don't even bother accounting for me when you start tallying up your combat strength. I'll just be staying out of the way while everyone else does all of the fighting."
"Am I the only one who knows you're not supposed to split the party?" Rika asked rhetorically.
"Can we afford to miss the chance, though?" Mash wondered. "If P, B, and M really are trying to hide something in the Clock Tower, then the longer we wait, the longer they have to find someplace else to hide it."
"You might be right," Ritsuka agreed.
"I'm not sure it's a risk we want to take," Emiya said gravely. "Considering some of the things I know for sure are hidden down there, it would be a better idea to go in at full strength."
"Scared of a few specimens in jars?" Jeanne Alter mocked him.
"I'm more worried about the ones that might have gotten loose," he shot back.
I jolted up suddenly in my chair, spine snapping straight. Fuck. Of all the ways to get confirmation that this was definitely a trap of some kind.
"Senpai?" asked Ritsuka.
"Is everything all right?" asked Caster.
"Ritsuka, Rika, Mash," I began. My head turned jerkily, eyes jumping from person to person as I took a mental accounting of everyone in our group. "Take Sir Mordred, Jeanne Alter, and Emiya and get ready to go. The rest of us will be staying here."
Jekyll was already leaping out of his chair, barely taking the time to rip his headphones off of his head before he rushed out of his office and back this way.
The question was, a trap for who? The people who were going, drawn away by the emergency, or the people who were staying, who couldn't or wouldn't leave the apartment while the fog was still choking the streets? If I was the one planning things, it would have been both. Like I said before, divide and conquer. Take out both groups while they were separated and unable to go to each other's aid.
Whether they had the forces for it was another question, but it was better to assume that they did. At least one more for each of P, B, and M.
"What happened?" Ritsuka asked immediately, all business.
A breathless Jekyll stumbled into the room before I could give him an answer, face ashen and expression grim. His glasses were slightly askew.
"My friends, I bear the most terrible of news," he announced hurriedly. "One of my collaborators has just informed me — Jack the Ripper has appeared once again, only he is not targeting the poor unfortunate women of the streets, but Scotland Yard itself! He is assaulting it as we speak and sparing no one!"
Eyebrows rose, eyes went wide, and mouths dropped open. Even Caster looked taken aback, like he hadn't expected this at all. A sign of a change of plans he hadn't been notified about, or proof that he wasn't a spy after all? There was no way to be sure just yet.
"Well," said Emiya, summing up the situation, "shit."
Next — Chapter CXXXIX: Paracelsus
And now that the shameless plugging is out of the way...
Chapter CXXXVIII: Murderer on the Misty Morn
After lunch, we left the dining room and went about to find ways to occupy the afternoon. Ritsuka decided that he and Mash should go out on patrol with Mordred once his food had time to settle, and Rika — somewhat reluctantly — decided to go with them.
"Who's gonna look out for you if I'm not there?" was the painfully transparent excuse she used. I guess she was still feeling that helplessness from the Château d'If fiasco, and while he'd proven that he could take care of himself and didn't need me holding his hand, I could relate to that.
I still hated being stuck in the apartment while the others went out. But I had a ready and convenient method around that limitation, so I told the both of them, "Take Jeanne Alter with you."
Neither of them had any trouble with that and agreed readily. Jeanne Alter, of course —
"Thank God," she said with exaggerated relief. "If I had to stick around this fu-fudging place with the twerp while you guys went out and did the fun stuff, I was gonna light something on fire."
— was only too happy to go with them. Having to censor herself around Nursery Rhyme — who I was becoming more and more certain was playing up the innocent little girl act as a prank on Jeanne Alter for just that reason — was very obviously taxing her nerves, and she wanted to be able to speak however she liked just as much as she wanted to get out and stretch her legs.
Mordred, of course, was just fine with it. She seemed to have found something of a kindred spirit in Jeanne Alter, which made sense, because they were both rowdy, foul-mouthed, and violent. I didn't want to be anywhere near them if and when they ever got into a serious argument. I wasn't sure the building they were in would survive the ensuing chaos.
It probably wouldn't be a good idea to bring Mordred back to Chaldea with us. Not without the simulator up and running for Servants, where they could work out any issues safely and securely without threatening to bring the roof down around us.
While we were on the subject, however, I made sure to bring up the idea of forming a contract with Mordred as I'd promised myself I would once all of the excitement was over from our earlier investigation. I half expected her to balk at the very notion, like her rebellious nature made the thought of ever taking orders from a Master utterly repulsive, but she surprised me.
"Sure."
"Just like that?" I couldn't stop myself from asking.
"Yeah. Why not?" she replied, completely nonchalant. There was no hesitation at all. "Ain't like I got a reason to say no. You guys are pretty chill, and you know how to handle yourselves in a fight — that shit with that dagger of yours was fucking epic, by the way — so I don't gotta worry about you getting your asses mowed down because you did something stupid. And having a Master means I don't gotta worry so much about using too much energy and disappearing. Takes a load off my mind, you know?"
"I think I do, yeah."
So just like that, we formed a temporary contract with Mordred. I wasn't sure it would end up becoming permanent, but funnily enough, she'd convinced me that she wouldn't have any objections to it when the time came for us to head back to Chaldea. Aside from my concerns about her rowdy nature causing problems later on, I found I didn't have many objections to it either. Not when it gave us yet another strong Servant, one that could give Siegfried a run for his money in a lot of ways.
I was sure Aífe could keep her in line, if it came down to it. She was already mothering Jeanne Alter. What was one more rough, rebellious teenager?
By the tight grimace on Caster's face, however, he wouldn't be quite so willing to accept even a temporary contract from us, and I was starting to wonder why it was he trusted us so little. Maybe he just had enough of an independent streak that he didn't like the idea of taking orders from a Master, especially when I had to assume he had access to as much energy as he needed via the ley line we were sitting on top of in Jekyll's apartment.
Or maybe it was something more sinister. Paracelsus started with a 'P,' after all, and what better way to keep track of your enemy's movements and plans than to be there as they made them? He'd even given us a false name that had no connection to either his real one or any of the initials in the note Frankenstein had left.
Thinking back to it, he hadn't done anything overtly suspicious when we found that out. Hadn't been surprised, hadn't panicked, hadn't reacted particularly strongly at all, even to the information that Mephistopheles had been killed. He'd just taken all of the information in stride — and then been helpless in suggesting other identities for P, B, and M.
It was nothing to act on, not yet, but it was plenty of reason to keep a closer eye on him from then on. And make sure, importantly, that I was never alone in the room with him.
Hopefully, I would wind up being wrong and find out I was just being paranoid. Until I found out one way or the other, however, the only thing I could do was be extra cautious around him.
About an hour after we finished lunch, the twins set out with Mordred, Mash, and Jeanne Alter and stepped into the foggy streets. That left me with Arash still on the roof as overwatch, Emiya there with me to act as a relay in case the twins ran into something, Fran just as unable to do anything with the mist still in play as I was, Jekyll, Caster, and Tohsaka and Nursery Rhyme.
I also had a map I could use to follow their course through the city, Jeanne Alter's senses to borrow, and a Director to inform of the situation and our plans going forward.
Marie wasn't particularly happy to find out we were going to be exploring the Clock Tower as much as we could for clues, but as much as it bothered her, we didn't have a plethora of places to look or very many leads to follow.
"The frustrating thing is that I know we don't have any better options," she groused.
"Yeah," I agreed. "P, B, and M haven't left us much of a trail to follow."
She chewed on her lip for a moment. At length, she said, "My orders from before still stand. The safety of the team and the success of the mission are far more important than the life of any single individual inside the Singularity, no matter who it might be."
And we had full permission to do whatever it took to keep everyone on the team safe from anyone in the Association who might take interest. Yeah. The fact we had been given carte blanche to use lethal force if we had to was something that still surprised me. I wasn't sure it wouldn't come back to bite us when this was all over and the UN and the Association started pulling up our records of what happened in each Singularity.
But that was a concern for later, the future. We had to get to the point where it was something we actually had to legitimately worry about. After all, if we didn't fix this and all the other Singularities, there wouldn't be a UN or Mage's Association to rake us over the coals for killing a Clock Tower Lord in self-defense, would there?
On the other hand, depending on how thorough P, B, and M had been when they attacked the Clock Tower and how extensive the damage was to the whole place, there might not be anyone else we had to worry about. It wasn't impossible that more people had escaped the way Tohsaka had, just by being off site when everything went down, but we hadn't run into anyone like that yet and we might not ever.
I suppose we would find out soon enough, one way or the other.
"Just be careful," Marie bade me. "Even if there aren't any magi to get in the way, the attack on the Clock Tower could have let any number of dangerous things loose. There's no telling what you might encounter when you go to investigate."
"Of course, Director."
And then, the connection cut, and the only thing left for me to do was monitor the team's progress through their patrol. Fortunately, they weren't going too far afield. It looked like they were making a circuit around the apartment, looking out for anything suspicious and taking out any patrol groups that got closer than we wanted. When I peeked in on them through Jeanne Alter's eyes, things didn't look very exciting. It was mostly just fog, fog, and more fog. Again.
That fog was really starting to piss me off. Drake's ship being what it was and resources being as important as they were at sea, keeping a swarm of any meaningful size had been something I hadn't dared to risk, but at least then I'd been able to contribute a little bit more in other ways. Being stuck inside the apartment and being unable to see anything outside of it was stifling.
Tohsaka expressed interest in the map, and Caster was only too happy to explain it. The chatter gave me something else to distract myself with while I watched and waited, and while it wasn't much, it was better than being stuck in the silence, unable to do anything except listen to Mordred and Jeanne Alter swear and Rika crack jokes.
The sooner we took care of whatever was making the fog, the better. A part of me was even hoping that the Singularity would still persist afterward, that it wouldn't be so easy to fix this whole mess, if only so that I could see some more action before everything was over.
The twins and their group returned late in the afternoon, although the only way to really tell exactly how long they'd been out was the clock on the mantle in the parlor. The report they gave on what had happened while they were out and what they'd seen was essentially as I'd expected it to be, with all the long stretches of aimless walking that entailed, and while they'd come across another patrol group or two, those were easily taken care of.
Also as expected. Jeanne Alter and Mordred were both strong Servants with high stats and good performance. A bunch of puppets, homunculi, and robots weren't going to be much of a threat.
No sign of Jack the Ripper, though. Maybe he was just being cautious and hadn't wanted to take his chances on the group as they were. Taking on a single Servant and Master pair was one thing for an Assassin, but taking on three might have been a little too much for him to risk.
Whatever the case, he hadn't shown up, which meant they hadn't had a chance to deal with him or try taking him out, so that was a concern we'd have to keep in the back of our minds for later. Of course it couldn't have been as convenient as getting rid of him so quickly and easily.
For dinner, Emiya — with Caster's help — convinced Renée to surrender the kitchen again, and he made us a spread of somewhat more Eastern and Mediterranean dishes, as though he was trying to counterbalance her decidedly English fare for breakfast and lunch. We ate well and enjoyed it, as we usually did, and after spending a few hours to refine and rehash our plans for investigating the demolished British Museum in the morning, we arranged ourselves as we had the night before in the apartment above Jekyll's, only with the added presence of Tohsaka and Nursery Rhyme to make things an even tighter squeeze, and went to sleep so we could get up and beat the mist tomorrow.
Of course, the next morning —
"What the hell?"
— that all ran headlong into a thick fog choking the streets outside our windows. It was just as bad as it had ever been, so thick that I couldn't even see the front steps from the second floor window, and the sun above was blotted out, leaving behind only the faint suggestion of its presence. My throat burned with remembered pain just looking at it.
"Hey, Senpai," said Rika a little nervously, "this counts as them changing up their patterns, right?"
It did. And there was nothing for me to do about it. If I walked outside in that, I already knew exactly what would happen to me, and I wasn't eager to be coughing up my lungs again. The only way I was leaving the apartment today was if I had a death wish or if I was lucky enough that they'd flipped things around and the afternoon would be blessedly clear.
I didn't think I was going to be lucky.
Tohsaka clicked his tongue. A grimace pulled tight at his lips. "We can't go and investigate the Clock Tower today."
No, we couldn't. Not unless we were willing to split our team in half and let the twins go on their own with the others while he and I stayed here, and while there was merit in the idea, it seemed to me that forcing us to either abandon our plans or modify them like that was the goal of this whole thing in the first place.
P, B, and M wanted us to send the twins out to the Clock Tower without me or Tohsaka there to support them. Whether that was because they wanted to take advantage of the split to attack the twins or to attack us here in the apartment, or even both at the same time, that part we couldn't know until they acted upon it.
"So it seems."
Divide and conquer. It was one of the oldest strategies in the book.
On the other hand, uncertainty and indecision were dangerous and deadly tools, too, weren't they? Sun Tzu said something about that, if I remembered right. About the power of misdirection and misinformation, convincing your enemies to doubt their own decisions so that they made the wrong one.
That one was also a familiar playbook. It had been a while since I was the one on the receiving end. I didn't like it now any better than I had before.
"Are they trying to stop us from investigating the museum?" Ritsuka wondered aloud.
"But how did they know?" Mash asked him. "Are they watching the apartment after all? Are we being spied on?"
"Fou…" the little gremlin murmured.
How, indeed. There were only so many possibilities. Could they sneak a "bug" around me into the apartment? While we were all out yesterday? Maybe. Probably, even, if they picked the right place to hide it. My bugs could find a lot of things and gave me an incredibly complete picture of the world around me, but they weren't infallible. Much as I tried to give the impression otherwise, I was perfectly capable of missing things.
But the idea that they could get around both me and Caster was harder to believe. With an Assassin, maybe, but the only one we knew they had was Jack the Ripper, and he was at Alice's tea party yesterday. There was a window, so it wasn't impossible…
Occam's Razor, however, gave me a different answer.
But then, why heal me, Caster? I asked him silently. The answers I came up with to that one felt flimsy, because he could just as easily have claimed there wasn't anything he could do to save me. If he really was the "P" in P, B, and M, then he could have been rid of both an enemy Master and an enemy Servant in Arash in one fell swoop, and the twins might not have ever realized it.
I needed to see how he reacted. What he thought we should do about the problem. How strong his opinion on it was. If he suggested that we split the team and send the twins to investigate — if he was insistent upon it, in fact — then that was probably the last thing we should do.
Beep-beep!
When I answered it, Marie's voice crackled out of my communicator. "We've analyzed the fog outside," she said without preamble. "It sounds ridiculous, but it's even more toxic than the normal fog you've been dealing with so far."
"Never going to get used to that," Tohsaka muttered to himself.
"Even more toxic?" asked Ritsuka.
"Yes," Marie answered, dead serious. "Ritsuka, Rika, Mash, and of course, Servants should still be just fine and experience mild discomfort at the very worst, but, of course, that means —"
"Tohsaka and I absolutely can't go outside," I finished for her.
"Right. Even a few minutes of constant exposure will be enough to…"
To kill us, she didn't say, but I heard her all the same. I'd already suspected that was the case, but the confirmation gave more weight to the idea that this was definitely a strike at us. Either they really did want to separate us, or there really was something at the Clock Tower they didn't want us to see.
Maybe it was both. The worst kind of trap was the one where you played into the enemy's hands no matter what you did.
"Damn," said Emiya, lips pulled tight. "And even if I projected a gas mask…?"
"Unless it was designed specifically to deal with a situation like this, it wouldn't help," Marie told him, shooting the idea down instantly. "If it's a completely ordinary gas mask, it wouldn't do anything at all."
Emiya grimaced. "Well, there goes that idea."
"Da Vinci is working on a solution," was the ray of hope she offered us. "But she's not finished with it yet, so it might be another day or more until it's ready to send to you."
"I see." Good news, I wasn't going to be stuck inside for the rest of the Singularity every time the fog rolled in. Bad news, it was still going to be another day or two before I had a way of safely stepping outside into that fog. "Was there anything else, Director?"
There was a pause. At length, Marie said, "Not at this time. I shouldn't need to tell you, whatever caused this change in the enemy's patterns, you need to be extremely careful."
"We know," said Ritsuka. "Thank you, Director."
"Good." And the connection cut.
"So what now?" Rika asked into the silence that followed. "I mean, this is usually the part where someone says, 'let's split up, gang,' but I'm all out of Scooby Snacks and Fou's too small to pass for a Great Dane anyway."
"Fou!" the thing protested. Like she hadn't made a similar joke just a day ago.
"We should continue this downstairs with Abraham and Doctor Jekyll," I said instead of addressing any of that. "Maybe Doctor Jekyll's network has more information for us to work with."
"A good idea," said Ritsuka. Someone's stomach gurgled, and he added, "We should probably eat breakfast while we have the chance, too."
"We should," I agreed.
So we climbed down the stairs and to Jekyll's apartment on the floor below, where Jeanne Alter waited for us, sprawled out on the couch in the parlor. She looked like nothing so much as a particularly lazy housecat.
"'Sup," she greeted us. "You guys see that fu-freaky mist, too?"
Nursery Rhyme giggled.
"We did," I confirmed. "Abraham and Doctor Jekyll?"
I asked more for the benefit of the twins and everyone else.
"In the dining room," said Jeanne Alter, "waiting for breakfast."
"You can eat with us, too," Ritsuka told her. She waved him off.
"Gimme a holler when it's ready. I'm too cozy to get up right now."
I wasn't in the mood to fight with her about it right then, and perhaps sensing that, no one else raised a stink about it either. Let her laze about for now. She'd have plenty of chances to earn her keep in the days ahead.
"At least we weren't the only ones who noticed," Tohsaka said as we made our way towards the dining room.
"I'm not sure how you could miss it," Rika remarked. "It's gonna hit you in the face the second you open a window."
The only reason I had missed it before we got up in the morning was because the fog from last night had probably never dispersed. My swarm had never gone out since we came in for lunch yesterday, so there wasn't anything for me to notice until we got up.
I doubted the enemy knew any of that, because the only people who knew my limits were back at Chaldea, but it was frustrating nonetheless. They'd managed to sneak past me entirely by accident.
"Good morning," Jekyll and Caster greeted us as we came in. They were already seated around the oblong table in the dining room, sipping cups of tea.
"Uhn," Fran echoed, hunched over her own teacup.
"Good morning," I replied, and the others echoed me to varying degrees and in varying ways.
"Renée is in the kitchen cooking as we speak," said Caster. "Breakfast should be ready shortly, so why don't you all take a seat?"
I wasn't much in the mood for breakfast either, but all the same, there still wasn't anything I could do about it, so there was no reason to go about skipping a meal. If Caster really was a spy, best not to give him any reason to suspect I even suspected him either, so I had to act like nothing was wrong.
I picked the same seat in the middle of the table that I'd been using since we got here and sat down. The twins and Mash took that as their cue and found seats of their own, and Tohsaka was last, picking a seat to my left. On the opposite side of him, Nursery Rhyme hopped up into her own chair and promptly went about swinging her legs about like the child she appeared to be.
Emiya stayed standing, arms folded, behind Rika.
I took the chance to pour a cup of tea for myself. Tohsaka and Nursery Rhyme were the only other ones to follow suit.
"I take it you're already aware of the fog?" asked Caster, jumping right into things.
"Yes."
"We saw it when we woke up this morning," Ritsuka explained.
"Thick enough that Senpai probably can't cut it even with her super knife," Rika added.
"An unfortunate development," said Jekyll. "Shall I assume this will cause an unavoidable delay in your investigation?"
"Yes." I watched Caster carefully out of the corner of my eye. "One way or another, it seems that P, B, and M don't want us looking into whatever happened at the Clock Tower."
Caster stroked his beard thoughtfully, frowning. If he really was a spy, he had one of the best poker faces I'd ever seen, because he gave nothing away. "You think they intended that from the beginning?"
"Do you think they didn't?"
Caster sighed. "Regretfully, I don't have any better ideas, and yours has merit. The question of how and when they learned of our intentions to look into their attack on the Clock Tower linger, of course, but…"
Notably, he didn't suggest there was a spy. I wasn't sure anyone else was thinking it either, even if it was the most obvious explanation to me.
"Perhaps we are overthinking it," said Jekyll. "It need not be a direct action intended to stymie our specific efforts today, but instead a general tactic employed by the adversary now that one of their Servants has encountered your presence here directly. You fought with Jack the Ripper himself yesterday, did you not?"
"So Jack told them about us, and they decided they couldn't afford to let us do whatever we wanted in the mornings," Ritsuka translated.
That…was actually entirely possible. Ritsuka, Rika, and Mash had already run into and killed one of their Servants, that Caster, Mephistopheles, but Jack the Ripper was the one who fought us and escaped. It may have been that P, B, and M didn't have any idea we were even here until that moment and had originally assumed Mordred was the one who killed him and wrecked their patrol groups single-handedly.
I wasn't going to bet on it, though. I couldn't afford to.
"Holy shit," Rika said with something like awe. "We really are meddling kids!"
Only if you decided to really stretch the definition of "kids." Ritsuka, Rika, and Mash might have been underage, but everyone else in the group was legally or physically an adult.
Renée appeared at that moment, announcing that, "Breakfast is ready, Master."
"Let us table this discussion, for now," said Caster. "Since it appears no one will be going anywhere this morning, there's no rush to have everything figured out right this instant. We should enjoy breakfast first."
No one had any objections to that, and while I still wasn't really in the mood to eat — and this could very easily be a ploy to buy himself some time — I reluctantly agreed. While Ritsuka went to get Jeanne Alter, Renée went back into the kitchen and returned shortly thereafter with another spread of English breakfast that we all dug into, a little more subdued than the day before.
It was still good, of course, but it seemed mine weren't the only thoughts that were heavy with the implications of what was going on.
"Another excellent repast, Renée," Doctor Jekyll said politely when we were finished.
"Uhn," Fran agreed.
"Thank you, Doctor Jekyll, Miss Fran," Renée replied in that same monotone. I wasn't sure whether I imagined the slightest curl at the edges of her lips.
"Onii-chan," Rika announced, troubled, "I think I'm having an existential crisis."
Ritsuka sighed. "It's okay to like people's food other than Emiya's, Rika."
"Blasphemy!" she insisted.
"Against your tastebuds?" I suggested.
Rika's mouth opened, snapped shut, and then, sulkily, she crossed her arms and told me, "It's no fun when you ruin the joke like that."
"Or maybe you just need new material," Ritsuka said dryly.
She stuck her tongue out at him.
Caster cleared his throat pointedly. "Regarding the issue at hand, namely this fog —"
But Andersen chose that moment to appear in the doorway, solemn-faced and grim. "Jekyll," he said without preamble, "one of the other collaborators just made contact. They said they needed to speak with you urgently."
Jekyll stood from the table, folding his napkin more out of ingrained habit than anything else, it seemed, and said, "Please excuse me, my friends, while I see to this matter. I shall return anon."
"Maybe your collaborator will have some idea about what's going on," Tohsaka suggested slyly.
Jekyll offered a smile. "We can only hope."
He dropped his napkin on the table next to his plate, skirted his way around the table, and left for the office where he kept his radio. I kept tabs on him the entire way with my swarm, positioning enough bugs in the room to listen in on the entire conversation, or at least Jekyll's half of it.
"Aren't you all a sorry lot," said Andersen.
"You didn't see the fog?" asked Ritsuka.
"What kind of question is that?" Andersen replied. "Of course I did. I would have to be blind to miss it."
"It means we can't afford to risk investigating the Clock Tower just yet," Mash explained. "I'm sorry, Mister Andresen, but that also means we can't take you with us right now."
Andersen arched an eyebrow. "And? Are you going to continue stating the exceedingly obvious, or will the merely obvious do?"
"Damn, you're a mouthy little fu-freak, aren't you?" Jeanne Alter drawled, stumbling mid-sentence again.
How long was Nursery Rhyme going to keep that going?
"We can take you, Mister Andersen," the girl in question offered innocently. "I have a lot of friends who can go with us! You'll be extra safe! Promise!"
"No," Andersen rejected her immediately. "I prefer books that can be read, not ones that talk back to me. I would stay as far away from you as possible, but unfortunately, here, at least, that's only as far as the other side of this apartment."
"Harsh," Rika remarked.
"There's no need for that," Tohsaka agreed, and he actually sounded angry. "Didn't your parents ever teach you proper manners?"
In his office, Jekyll sat down in his chair and affixed a set of old-fashioned headphones around his ears, then leaned forward and spoke into the just as old-fashioned microphone. The voice coming out the other end was too tinny and muffled to make out the words, but the tone of voice was at least clear enough for me to make out how frantic the guy was.
"You're getting too attached," Andersen rebuked him. "You haven't forgotten that she's not really your daughter, have you? She's just a book. There's such a thing as loving something like her too much."
"You little…!" Tohsaka snarled.
Mordred chose that moment to materialize in the dining room with us.
"Yo!" she greeted us all. "You guys looked out the window yet? That mist is crazy!"
"Yeah," Ritsuka answered her. "It looks like we won't be able to go out today and investigate the Clock Tower."
Tohsaka, taking advantage of the distraction, forced himself to calm down and ease back into his seat.
"What?" Mordred complained. "Why? It's just a little fog!"
"Not all of us are so fortunate that we can survive that little fog," Tohsaka reminded her coolly.
"Tch." Mordred scoffed. "So? Just stay here then, pansies. The rest of us can handle it just fine without you holding us back!"
"I'm not going without Papa," Nursery Rhyme said firmly.
Mordred waved it off. "Wasn't asking you, pipsqueak."
"Uhn," Fran grunted. "Uh-uhn."
"Of course you're staying here, too," Mordred replied. "You ain't got a single lick of magic resistance, and the less people we have to protect down there, the easier it'll be to get in and find what we need."
"Sir Mordred might be saying it a little bit…indelicately," Caster began, trying to cool tempers before they could get too hot, "but it is a viable option, is it not? Four Servants is already quite the intimidating force — sorry, Mister Andersen, I should say five."
"Leave me out of it," Andersen said bluntly. "I can't even throw a proper punch, so don't even bother accounting for me when you start tallying up your combat strength. I'll just be staying out of the way while everyone else does all of the fighting."
"Am I the only one who knows you're not supposed to split the party?" Rika asked rhetorically.
"Can we afford to miss the chance, though?" Mash wondered. "If P, B, and M really are trying to hide something in the Clock Tower, then the longer we wait, the longer they have to find someplace else to hide it."
"You might be right," Ritsuka agreed.
"I'm not sure it's a risk we want to take," Emiya said gravely. "Considering some of the things I know for sure are hidden down there, it would be a better idea to go in at full strength."
"Scared of a few specimens in jars?" Jeanne Alter mocked him.
"I'm more worried about the ones that might have gotten loose," he shot back.
I jolted up suddenly in my chair, spine snapping straight. Fuck. Of all the ways to get confirmation that this was definitely a trap of some kind.
"Senpai?" asked Ritsuka.
"Is everything all right?" asked Caster.
"Ritsuka, Rika, Mash," I began. My head turned jerkily, eyes jumping from person to person as I took a mental accounting of everyone in our group. "Take Sir Mordred, Jeanne Alter, and Emiya and get ready to go. The rest of us will be staying here."
Jekyll was already leaping out of his chair, barely taking the time to rip his headphones off of his head before he rushed out of his office and back this way.
The question was, a trap for who? The people who were going, drawn away by the emergency, or the people who were staying, who couldn't or wouldn't leave the apartment while the fog was still choking the streets? If I was the one planning things, it would have been both. Like I said before, divide and conquer. Take out both groups while they were separated and unable to go to each other's aid.
Whether they had the forces for it was another question, but it was better to assume that they did. At least one more for each of P, B, and M.
"What happened?" Ritsuka asked immediately, all business.
A breathless Jekyll stumbled into the room before I could give him an answer, face ashen and expression grim. His glasses were slightly askew.
"My friends, I bear the most terrible of news," he announced hurriedly. "One of my collaborators has just informed me — Jack the Ripper has appeared once again, only he is not targeting the poor unfortunate women of the streets, but Scotland Yard itself! He is assaulting it as we speak and sparing no one!"
Eyebrows rose, eyes went wide, and mouths dropped open. Even Caster looked taken aback, like he hadn't expected this at all. A sign of a change of plans he hadn't been notified about, or proof that he wasn't a spy after all? There was no way to be sure just yet.
"Well," said Emiya, summing up the situation, "shit."
— o.0.O.O.0.o —
I thought for sure I was going to get a little bit further than I did, but the section at the top wound up about twice or thrice as big as I was expecting it to be, so things stretched a little. Gave me a little more time to think about the fight that's going to happen next chapter, which is a convenient bonus.
Also, Taylor is quite paranoid, isn't she? Not that she doesn't have good reason to be. You guys can thank the editor for part of that, because he convinced me that she would be a bit more suspicious of things than I originally had her be. I think it really made the chapter better.
Also, Taylor is quite paranoid, isn't she? Not that she doesn't have good reason to be. You guys can thank the editor for part of that, because he convinced me that she would be a bit more suspicious of things than I originally had her be. I think it really made the chapter better.
Jackie: "Ok, you are my mommy now."
Ritsuka: "Errors have been made..."
Different mechanics Aisha can freely activate her power or stop deactivating it rather but it has workarounds such as not doing anything to electronics so she can be easily countered by cameras and only suppresses information while it's active. Jack's power though only triggers after the encounter is over but it fully erases the information afterwards including electronics and records so there isn't much you can do about it though really the scariest thing about it is that iirc she only has that skill at D so imagine what A+++ or EX would be like if it's even possible given how it kind of goes against the whole needs to be known to be a servant thing.
- Location
- Argentina
Ditto, to be fair this is magical and she doesn't have a Lisa around.
When they are getting Sherlock Holmes?
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deathofrats0808
Don’t think of it as dying; just as leaving early
- Location
- Earth
Rank B.
James D. Fawkes
Court Scribe
- Location
- Avalon (Isle of Mists)
A lot of the tricks you would use to counter Aisha's powers don't work with Jack. Because of the way Information Erasure works, any description you write down of her appearance, any pictures you take of her, any video or audio recordings made, and the very memory of what she looks like will disappear after the fight ends. There aren't a lot of good counters for something like that.
Personally, I think it was a mistake to make it so absolute. Aisha's powers are way more balanced in that regard. On the other hand, at least you can remember Jack exists once she's out of sight.
Personally, I think it was a mistake to make it so absolute. Aisha's powers are way more balanced in that regard. On the other hand, at least you can remember Jack exists once she's out of sight.
Axel
Tenno Wax
- Location
- Italy
- Pronouns
- He
It is not absolute; in the land of magical nuke-swords and similar aisha's is better for example.
It is simply a matter of different focus
Misread that as Murderer and the Misty Mom.
Immediately thought "Jackie adoption chapter is live."
Raiseth
I Find Your Lack of Memes Disturbing
- Location
- Russia
Actually, Aisha's power works similarly. With passage of time, all records of Aisha's existence are being erased, up to and including written records and tinkertech.
Don't ask me how it works without magic, I'm not a multidimensional supercomputer on steroids.
James D. Fawkes
Court Scribe
- Location
- Avalon (Isle of Mists)
I think it should be obvious that next chapter is when the issue of Jack comes to a head, just by the way this one left off.
Shenanigans! I call shenanigans!