I have a theory that Khepri is going to be summoned as a servant, not Taylor fused with Queen Administrator, but the Egyptian god Khepri. Of course, Khepri is going to be a Taylorface, like how Ishtar looks like Rin. Not sure what class she would be, maybe rider for the sun boat of Ra?
Hereafter [Worm x Fate/Grand Order]
- Thread starter James D. Fawkes
- Start date
- Crossover
Raiseth
I Find Your Lack of Memes Disturbing
- Location
- Russia
She's riding a futuristic airship called [ENGINE OF ESCALATION] in the best tradition of Worm fandom and FGO, obviously.
FunkyEntropy
Occasionally insightful, possibly grumpy
- Location
- Los Angeles
Honestly this is a great idea and exactly how FGO would actually handle that sort of thing.
Raiseth
I Find Your Lack of Memes Disturbing
- Location
- Russia
More seriously, Ishtar and Ereshkigal are Rinfaces because they, in fact, are possessing Rin Tohsaka.
So for Khepri to be a Taylorface she would have to be a Pseudo Servant in Taylor's body, which has also an added effect of affecting her with Taylor's mannerisms and personaliry.
So for Khepri to be a Taylorface she would have to be a Pseudo Servant in Taylor's body, which has also an added effect of affecting her with Taylor's mannerisms and personaliry.
Chapter CLXXVII: The Black Rose
New
James D. Fawkes
Court Scribe
- Location
- Avalon (Isle of Mists)
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Chapter CLXXVII: The Black Rose
We did not immediately set off to go and meet with Accord, and it had nothing at all to do with how little I was looking forward to dealing with his particular neuroses again. Instead, Arash and I went over to the shoreline, and with the colony of crabs that called the bay home to help me see what was down there and where to send Arash to look, we started investigating the seafloor at the bottom of the bay.
Meanwhile, the others set about laying the dead militiamen to rest by digging out a trench where they could bury the bodies. It was a poor grave, and we couldn't even give them the dignity of a memorial that listed all of their names, in no small part because we simply didn't know any of them, but the twins felt that it was a better use of their time than just waiting around for Arash and me to scour the bay for any hint of where and how the Grail might have come to be there.
The celtic warriors, on the other hand, had disappeared. Like a puff of smoke or a waft of steam, their corpses had vanished, leaving behind only splotches of blood on the sand and dirt that were in no way big enough to account for how much of it they should have lost from their wounds. Even the ones killed by Lancer's eye laser were gone, too. But for those drying stains, they could have been nothing more than mirages that we had all seen.
If we had needed confirmation that they had been created or summoned somehow by another Servant, that would have been more than enough to convince me. The bloodstains were the only part that didn't make sense, but I didn't have any other explanation for that, so I wrote it off for the time being.
Unfortunately, the search wasn't going very well. There were plenty of things that were sitting on the bottom of the bay, from discarded soda cans and plastic bottles to planks of rotting wood and torn sails, but none of them provided any sort of explanation for how and why this era's Grail had wound up down there instead of in the hands of whoever it was that had kicked this Singularity off.
"The King of Mages certainly wouldn't have simply dropped it down there," said Da Vinci. I resisted the urge to shift my feet; the circle of runes Aífe had carved into the sand to stabilize our connection was exceptionally fragile for it, and I didn't want to disrupt them. I wasn't confident I could recreate the sequence by myself if I had to. "Merely throwing such a powerful magical artifact into an era isn't enough to cause a Singularity. Someone or something making a wish upon it that alters the proper course of events has to occur first, and that obviously can't happen if the Grail is sitting at the bottom of a bay."
"I'm not sure why else it would be down there."
I wasn't finding much in the way of other clues, and Arash's silence told me that he was having about as much luck. Even assuming that Rider had taken a straight line to and from the Grail, the water had already all but erased his tracks, and nothing else of interest remained alongside them. The only things that I was really finding were the scattered bits of shipwrecks from the unfortunates who had sunk over the decades, and that told me nothing.
Then again, if it had been in the hands of a Servant, then any other evidence would have vanished when they did, wouldn't it? There wouldn't be anything else for us to find to begin with.
"Mm," Da Vinci hummed. "If there was a struggle with the Grail before the Singularity's deviations truly began to take hold, then it might have been lost in the fighting."
"Could it have been intentional?" Marie's voice asked. "An act of sabotage?"
"How do you mean, Director?" Da Vinci said curiously.
Marie was silent for a moment. "We know that this Singularity in particular is targeted. At Taylor, specifically. If the original culprit who possessed the Grail was conspiring with the King of Mages, then could they have thrown the Grail into the bay in the hopes that it would be that much harder for us to find and retrieve it?"
Oh. That…would actually be kind of devious. Maybe not feasible, depending on what the Grail might have been used for, but if the goal was simply to create a Singularity and let it run itself into the ground, then theoretically, Solomon's conspirator could just set up all of the dominoes and then toss the Grail into the ocean. It would be much harder to find, in that case, and that would definitely have stymied any efforts on our part. Without the echo we had tracked to the bay, we could have run around for weeks or months without having any idea where it was.
But…
"I don't think that's the case," I said.
…if it was that simple, it could have been done before, too.
"You don't?" said Marie.
"Even Flauros didn't just throw the Grail into the Mediterranean, back in Septem," I reasoned. "It would have been the easiest way to screw us over — summon Romulus and all those other Servants, and while everyone was fighting, lock the Grail in a chest, weigh it down with concrete, then sail out into the Atlantic and drop it over the side. He chose to hold onto it instead."
"Because it's the pairing," Da Vinci explained. "A deviation is normally corrected without issue by the Counter Force, and a Grail is just a wish-granting device on its own. One or the other isn't enough to cause a Singularity. Both acting in concert is what makes one form, and so both are necessary for one to form at all. Were we to remove the aberrant forces in this era, then the Singularity should eventually be corrected without further intervention. Of course," she added, "as long as a Grail is present, then it is also possible for it to cause further deviations should it land in another's hands before the Singularity is resolved, and that is one of the reasons we've had you do both in every deployment so far."
Marie made a noise of understanding high in her throat. "Then the King of Mages would want to ensure that the deviations that occur continue according to his plan. Leaving the Grail unattended anywhere outside of his or his proxy's control would risk failure."
"Exactly," said Da Vinci. "If the Grail is simply abandoned at the earliest convenience, then he would lose any chance of correcting for the meddling of outside forces — us, in this case, or any Servants summoned by the Counter Force."
A familiar presence brushed up against my thoughts. "Hold on."
Did you find anything? I asked Arash. He had left my range somewhere in the middle of the conversation, but the last I had seen of him with my crabs, he was heading directly across the bay.
Nothing, he replied. I went all the way across to the peninsula, and there weren't any clues that I could see about why the Grail might have been down here.
I clicked my tongue. Come back, then. There's no point in spending the next month scouring the bay.
Roger, he said, and then his presence retreated.
"And yet," I said aloud, "for whatever reason, the Grail was down in the bay, and two different groups came here to retrieve it."
"Yes," Da Vinci agreed, "that is certainly strange, isn't it? Unfortunately, at this time, I don't have any concrete theories about why."
"If he is who he claims he is," Romani chimed in, and he put particular emphasis on that uncertainty, "then he's not sloppy enough for this to be a mistake. This was intentional, even if we don't know why."
I was inclined to agree. Solomon and his agents had been thorough enough that they had nearly managed to end the Grand Order before it could even really start, and it was only dumb luck and a bunch of factors they couldn't possibly have accounted for that put us in a good enough position to get as far as we had. If Solomon was willing to let the Grail lie at the bottom of the Cape Cod Bay, then either he had a reason for letting it stay there or it being there didn't inconvenience his plans enough for him to care.
Either of those was bad news for us.
"Whatever the reason is, I don't think we're going to find our answers here," I said. "The focal point echo was a dead end. If it was anything at all, then that Rider rode away with it."
Da Vinci hummed. "On that point, I do believe you're right."
"You're going to Boston, then?" asked Marie.
I nodded, even though they couldn't see it. "It's the only lead we have that we can follow, right now."
By default, that made it the best, no matter how sorry a state of things that was.
"I don't need to tell you to be careful," said Marie.
"Of course."
"Taylor," Romani said suddenly, "don't forget that this isn't your Earth Bet, okay? Whatever and whoever you meet, they're not going to be exactly the same people you remember."
A flash of annoyance curdled in my gut like sour milk. "I know."
I hadn't forgotten, and whether that satisfied him or he just sensed that I didn't want to continue that line of conversation, he let it drop there, and with a simple, "Good luck," the connection dropped. I took an extra second to peer out over the bay, at the steely gray waters that churned and sloshed gently, but they had no more answers for me than they'd had before, so I turned away, stepped out of the circle of Aífe's runes, and went over to join the others.
They had not had to dig a pit for the bodies entirely by hand, of course, because they had managed just fine with a combination of Emiya's projections and Aífe's rune magic, but they had moved the bodies the old fashioned way, and somewhere along the way, the grave had become something more like a kiln. I remembered suddenly that they had cremated the bodies of the policemen and the fake Jack the Ripper at Scotland Yard in London, and in light of that, the grim, determined set of the twins' faces made a whole lot more sense.
"Senpai," was how Ritsuka greeted me, apparently the first to see me walking over.
"Cremating them, then?" I asked.
His lips drew into an even tighter line. "It's…easier and faster than trying to bury them, although…not as respectful of their culture."
I remembered something vague about how Christians could not enter Heaven if their bodies were destroyed beyond recognition, but not where I'd heard it from or if it only belonged to a specific denomination. It was moot, too, if these people were from 1783 properly and would simply get corrected once this was all over.
"There's something else, too," said Emiya. He tossed me one of the muskets, and I caught it a little clumsily. When I looked it over, I couldn't find anything out of place or anything, but I wasn't exactly an expert on firearms, so I had no idea what I was looking for in the first place. It looked like a regular old musket to me.
"Is there something wrong with it?"
He clicked his tongue. "Or something a little too right with it, maybe. It's been modified. The exterior might look like a standard long rifle, but the interior has been adjusted to fire a modified slug instead of a musket ball. To give you a little bit of context, the Minié ball wasn't thought up until the 1840s, which would already put this thing about 60 years ahead of its time, even if you don't count the percussion lock that wasn't invented until the 1820s, but…"
I looked at him. "But what?"
He sighed. "Somehow or another, the rifling has been converted into a magnetic coil." He gestured to the lock. "When the hammer hits the lock, it causes a pin to complete a temporary circuit, sending an electric charge up the barrel."
My brow furrowed. "This is a coil gun?"
"Right?" Rika agreed. "What kind of sci-fi bullshit is that?"
That's not sci-fi bullshit.
"That's tinkertech."
Emiya's eyebrows rose. "You mean the sort of thing that can only be made by people whose powers let them make technology decades or centuries ahead of the modern era?" His eyes trailed down to the rifle in my hands. "It would certainly explain the parts that don't make any sense. Like the battery that delivers the charge, because I couldn't make heads or tails of that. Or how gunpowder can be used as a lubricant."
"Wait, what?" said Rika. "Gunpowder as a lube?"
He shrugged. "It makes even less sense to me, Master. Something in the design of the coil turns the gunpowder into a kind of insulator, preventing heat transfer between the slug and the barrel. That's why there was still smoke: the gunpowder absorbed the heat from the barrel and the slug so that neither was warped when it fired."
Strange and nonsensical in parts, but somehow forming a cohesive, functional whole — a hallmark of Tinkertech. If I'd needed more convincing, that would have done it.
I tossed it back to him, and he snatched it out of the air easily. "Da Vinci will want to take a look at that once we find a good Ley Line Terminal to set up a magic circle. I don't think she'll find anything revolutionary about it —" Rika snickered to herself. "— but she should find it interesting how the Tinker enhanced a rifle from the…" And I just got the joke. "…the Revolutionary War."
Emiya didn't protest; he slung the rifle over his back, slipping into the leather strap fastened to the end of the barrel and the stock. He fidgeted a little, looking almost comical wearing his strange mishmash of modern, futuristic, and old-fashioned gear, complete with a muzzle-loaded rifle peeking up from next to one ear.
He smirked at me. "It's almost nostalgic."
I didn't bother asking why. I was more focused on the rifle — who could have enhanced it, and why? There were only a few Tinkers in the world who could do anything like mass production, but just about any good Tinker could do a job like this with enough time and a well-stocked lab. Coil, after all, had supplied a small private army with tinkertech rifles that fired lasers, so the idea that someone else could do something similar wasn't at all strange.
The stranger part was the people who had them. I could see the logic behind using those rifles as a base — it would require less training for the soldiers who used them — but the bigger mystery was still the soldiers themselves, and why they were the ones chosen to wield them. Convenience, or desperation?
There were still too many questions we didn't have the answers to just yet.
I went to check the time, but whatever had caused the fluctuations was apparently messing with the local time, too, because it kept flickering between numbers with no rhyme or reason. The sun, at least, didn't lie, because I might not have been an expert on how to tell time by it, but I at least knew enough to tell whether it was before or after noon.
"Let's finish this up and get moving," I told everyone. "We're about fifty miles south of Boston, so it's going to take us at least an hour to get there on the bikes."
Rika groaned.
"Not Aífe's chariot?" asked Ritsuka.
It would be faster, but… "Better to keep as low a profile as we can for now. We still don't know for sure who's on our side, so the less we advertise our presence and our Servants, the better."
"I'm not sure that isn't a losing battle," said Emiya, gesturing down at himself. He had something of a point, but at least in his case, that was easily fixed.
"Put on a mask before we enter town, and everyone will think you're a cape," I told him, which seemed to throw him off quite a bit. He opened his mouth to argue the point, but after a moment of silence, shut it again.
We went back to the pyre we'd been building, and with the whole group working on it now, it was much faster than it had been before. It only took another twenty minutes or so to have all of the militiamen piled up together in that sad little pit, and as I carved a rune into the dirt that cleaned my hands when it burned, Emiya projected a large, crude sword that looked like nothing much more than a hunk of crude, molten iron. The only other thing really remarkable about it was the glowing knotwork pattern stretching from the hilt to the tip of the blade.
He stabbed this blade into the pile of bodies and solemnly intoned, "Laevatein," and then immediately leapt back as the sword ignited and burned the corpses so rapidly that they were already blackening between one blink and the next.
I glanced at him, and he took this as an invitation to explain: "It's a crude recreation barely worthy of the name, but it's the sword Surtr used to wipe most of Scandinavia clean. The real deal is no joke, but just about the only thing this one is good for is cleaning up a battlefield."
I was done being surprised by the sorts of things he could make with his Reality Marble, so I let it pass without comment. There were probably a few other areas where something like that would be useful, but this wasn't the time or the place to be discussing that with him.
The bodies burned away quickly. The flames of Laevatein ate the flesh, bone, and cloth with a voracious hunger, reducing the pile stacked in the pit to a thin layer of ash in a matter of just a minute or two, and then they died away, as though they had no interest at all in the grass or the trees or anything else around us.
It was only in their wake that I realized how hot they must have been, because even standing something like twenty or thirty feet away, patches of sweat cooled on my brow, my neck, and under my arms the instant they were gone.
Next to me, the twins and Mash all clasped their hands together as though in prayer and briefly bowed their heads. Even Arash muttered a quick benediction. I watched them awkwardly, unsure if I should bother or how I would have shown these militiamen that sort of respect. The moment passed before I could find an answer.
"Ready to go?" I asked them instead.
"Yeah," said Ritsuka. Even Rika's nod was more subdued than usual.
I pulled up the map of the area on my communicator and zoomed in to show them. "We're here," I said, pointing to the dot that showed our location, and then I panned back west. "We'll have to backtrack a little, but there should be a road for us to follow a little ways from where we landed. We'll follow that north —" I panned up this time "— and up to Boston. It should take us about an hour to reach the city."
"Where we'll stop to get something to eat," said Rika, "right?"
With what money, I wanted to ask, because even if I'd still had my money from way back when, I wasn't sure it would have been accepted, but I settled instead for, "We'll figure something out when we get there."
That was enough to mollify her for the moment, so we began the hike back to our landing zone, back through the path of broken trees and sliced branches we'd taken through the woods to reach the fighting. It was, naturally, much less frantic and much less frenzied than it had been on the way out, and I got smacked in the face by leaves and twigs a whole lot less, too.
It didn't take too long at all for us to get back to where we'd first landed when we Rayshifted in, although the only way to tell that it was even the same spot was the path we cut through the woods leaving it. Going the other way, however, took us much longer, because that convenient path didn't exist, so we had to pick our way through, stepping over tree roots and between shrubs and bushes, ducking under low-hanging branches, and just generally dealing with the hazards that came with nature unchecked.
Fortunately, we weren't in the Amazon, so the foliage wasn't so thick as to be virtually impassable and the canopy of the trees reaching up above us wasn't so oppressive as to completely smother almost all of the light coming through the leaves. It was all easily manageable, more annoying than an actual struggle. The real nuisance was going to be the chill of a New England autumn, a familiar nip in the air that grew more pronounced the further from the beach we got. Some of the trees had even begun to change color, with patches of leaves that had shifted from bright green to yellow, orange, or red.
I wasn't sure how much the twins knew about that sort of thing, but it was actually a useful bit of information. Unless the fluctuations were having effects that were that drastic, it told me that we had actually landed sometime in late September, maybe early October, and if that was true, then both the Nine and Coil would be long gone by the time we made it up to Brockton. Leviathan's attack was already a matter of history, and so too would Behemoth's attack on New Delhi. We were in the grace period between attacks, because the next one wasn't until November.
A thought occurred to me, and the realization hit me so hard that I actually stopped for a moment as the implications washed over me, reeling.
"Something wrong, Master?" asked Arash, who was walking behind me.
I hesitated for only a second, and then kept walking. "No," I told him. "Nothing."
But if all of that had happened, then the Teeth and the Fallen should have attacked Brockton, too. Cherish — the newest Butcher — should be locked up and shipped out to sea, stuck at the bottom of the ocean with nothing to do but think about her fate. Alec… Alec should be dead, but more…immediately relevant to our situation, Accord should be, too. Victims of Behemoth's attack in New Delhi, one way or the other.
And yet we were going to see Accord, to get his help contacting whoever it was that was keeping everything together inside this Singularity. Accord, who was supposed to have been killed by a rogue Yangban cape in July.
Something wasn't right here, and I didn't know what. It was autumn here in this Singularity, and yet the deviation to the world as I knew it had occurred at least a month or two back, and I had no idea what all of the implications of that were. Not now. Not yet. And by the time I did, it might already have come back to bite me.
We really needed to talk to Accord now. We should probably stop by the nearest internet cafe, too, or failing that, I needed to swipe a smartphone at the earliest chance I got. However we could get caught up on recent events, we needed to do that as quickly as we could.
The trip through the forest to the other side took the better part of an hour, just from how slowly we had to make our way through it, but eventually, we came out the other side to a small, two-lane road that cut straight through and went north to south. The yellow lines down the middle were bright and fresh and well-maintained, and telephone poles stretched up and down the one side. Black power lines dangled above our heads as we stepped onto the asphalt, and unlit streetlights extended out like arms reaching out across the road to shelter nighttime travelers. A paved sidewalk went along the opposite side.
"Celty said north, right?" asked Rika. Ritsuka grunted, grimacing.
Celty?
"Right."
I reached down and behind me for the small tube attached there in its harness, and it slipped out with a little bit of effort. For a moment, as the twins and Mash did the same with their own, I could only stare down at it. How had Da Vinci said it worked, again? A twist and a little bit of magical energy —
There was a loud click, and parts suddenly began manifesting in thin air, building themselves from the tube out. An engine block, the piping, the skeletal frame of a sleek, futuristic motorcycle, and then the seat formed underneath me, forcing my knees and feet apart. Seconds later, the exterior willed itself into existence, and a smooth, black chassis sat between my legs, complete and ready to go. Perfectly balanced, too, which was not a feature Da Vinci had bothered to explain to us.
I just hoped it looked a whole lot more intentional than it was.
"Oh man, these things are so cool!" Rika squealed. Hers looked a lot bigger by comparison, but she was also much shorter and quite a bit smaller than me, so I guess that made sense.
"They really are," Ritsuka agreed, sounding like he hated to admit it.
Come to think of it, Da Vinci hadn't given us a max speed for these things, had she? I wondered if she'd improved them from the original design, made them faster. I doubted, of course, that we would be racing along at the sorts of speeds Aífe's chariot could get up to, but it would be convenient even if they were just in the same ballpark.
A twist of the tube — now a pair of handlebars — revved the engine, and a pane beneath the windshield suddenly lit up with a display that showed things like the battery life and the speedometer in bright, easily read white numbers. There was even a map that had apparently synced up to my communicator with a pre-planned route for us to take. And when I put a foot up on the pedal, a helmet formed magically over my head, just as sleek and futuristic as the bike itself.
Now you're just showing off, I thought at Da Vinci.
Seeing me, Rika copied it, and a helmet of her own formed, the visor opaque and sturdy. I could still hear her voice when she said, "So cool!"
I turned to Emiya. "Think you can keep up?"
He smirked. "I'm sure I'll manage." He thumbed the strap crossing over his chest. "Someone has to carry this thing, after all."
I was tempted to offer to do it myself, but if it got him unwanted attention, it was easier for him to slip away than any of us. Better he keep ahold of it then.
As Mash got saddled into her own bike — vanishing her shield and most of her armor and tucking Fou in as safely as she could manage in front of her — Arash and Aífe both transitioned into spirit form, and soon enough, we were all ready to go.
"We'll take this road straight into downtown Boston," I told them. "Try and get the lay of the land on our way to the Black Rose to talk to the guy who can get us a meeting with Accord. And see about getting something to eat," I added to appease Rika.
"Got it!" the twins and Mash all said together.
I lifted my other foot onto the other pedal, and with a lurch and a spurt of sudden speed, we took off, our bikes little more than a gentle, motorized hum as we started up the road. Under the helmet that covered my head, the sounds of the world around us became background noise, something distant and far away.
It became obvious within the first hundred feet that Da Vinci had once again outdone herself. I wasn't exactly an expert at what it was like to ride motorcycles, but the experience on those lightcycle ripoffs was smoother than it had any right to be. Out of an abundance of caution, I started out slow, and the twins and Mash all followed my lead, but as I picked up speed, the ride stayed just as comfortable and just as smooth as it had started out.
It was almost like we were gliding down the road, and it occurred to me that — having taken apart my flight pack and studied the antigravity functions well enough to incorporate them into our mystic codes — it was entirely possible that her next innovation for these things would be just that. In the next Singularity, we might just be riding hoverbikes around the place, like something out of Star Wars.
Considering the sorts of tinkertech I'd seen over the course of my career as a cape, especially the latter portions of it, that wasn't anything truly extraordinary, but the twins would probably be a lot more impressed. Just the thought of Rika freaking out over how cool they were was enough to bring a faint smile to my face, in spite of everything.
By and large, the journey up to Boston wound up being boring and unnoteworthy, because the bulk of it went straight through woodland and suburbia more than anything else, and there was nothing for us to see except trees and cookie cutter houses. Eventually, the road we were using turned into a highway, and our pace was forced to slow to accommodate traffic. Some part of me even expected to be stopped by the local police, just because our bikes stood out that much. They must have looked like tinkertech, and by the definition most people used, I guess they technically were.
But nothing. No one accosted us. Not the police, not another Servant, not even the local Protectorate. The trip was completely uneventful.
After the better part of an hour, we entered the city of Boston itself. The shorter, smaller residential buildings and businesses fell behind us as the towering skyline of the Boston cityscape loomed ahead. Houses and humble apartment complexes gave way to parking garages, office buildings, corporate headquarters, and the marble of centuries old courthouses and government buildings. The uniformity of siding and shingles transformed into a hodgepodge mess of brick and mortar standing beside glass and concrete, a meeting between the Boston of decades long gone and the Boston of the modern era.
The layout was completely different and the buildings entirely unfamiliar, but in some ways, it felt like coming home. I guess I really was a city girl at heart.
It was around there when the highway narrowed into something cozier and less expansive, although not any less crowded or busy. People on the streets paused to look at us, pointing our way — at our bikes, more specifically — and pulling out their phones so they could catch a picture or record a video of our passing. Several paid special attention to Mash in her eye-catching outfit, and didn't seem to notice how uncomfortable it made her, how her posture became rigid and she shrank away from their gazes.
I wasn't sure the twins noticed either, but that might have been because they were getting attention of their own and didn't seem to know how to handle it. Maybe I should have prepared them better for the idea that capes were local celebrities, even the ones no one knew about — especially the ones no one knew about.
There was nothing I could do about it just then. What, was I supposed to get up, take off my helmet, and start yelling? Or maybe I should have brought down a Biblical swarm to scare them all off and risk blowing our cover and getting more attention than a few idiots with their phones? As cathartic as it might have been and as much as the others might have appreciated it, those weren't options.
If, however, some of the more egregious ones that were taking zoomed-in shots of Mash's backside found themselves being harassed by a fly or two or chased around by a wasp, well, that was just bad luck for them, wasn't it?
It was somewhere approaching noon by the time we pulled up to a narrow, ten story building, a base built from white stone or concrete supporting red brick the rest of the way up. The facade was a dark, emerald green, clashing with the bright, firetruck red of the door, and spaced with tall, narrow windows that showed a dark, cozy interior. Two sets of signs hung over the storefront, black backing with soft, metallic gold letters. The set on the left said "Spirits and Ale" above "Róisín Dubh," and the set on the right said "Steaks and Seafood" above "The Black Rose," where the 'o' had been replaced by a blooming rose. A sign next to the door proclaimed, 'Live Irish music 7 nights a week.'
One final sign jutted out over the sidewalk, claiming:
I dismounted my bike, and the instant I cut the thread of magical energy I'd been feeding it the entire time, the whole thing evaporated and left me with nothing more than the tube I'd started with. Even the helmet was gone.
"Well, we're definitely in the right place," Rika said as she and the others dismounted, too. "And look! Steaks and seafood! Hey, we can eat and talk to that bartender guy at the same time! Two birds with one stone!"
Fou hopped down right before Mash's bike disappeared. A pity it hadn't fallen off somewhere along the way and gotten lost in the wilderness.
"How are we going to pay for it, though?" Ritsuka murmured. "We don't have any money, do we?"
That brought Rika up short, and she turned to me, "Uh, do you think this Accord guy would be willing to front us some dough? I didn't bring my credit card."
"Not without asking for a favor."
And owing Accord a favor wasn't the best of ideas. I was going to have to think of a way to get him to help us that didn't involve putting us in his debt.
Rika, oblivious to my thoughts, turned back to her brother, "Hey, Onii-chan, did you trim your toenails last night?"
Ritsuka balked, looking back at her incredulously. "No. Why?"
"Well, we gotta make money somehow, don't we?" she reasoned. "And if there's one thing the internet has taught me over the last few years, it's that feet pics sell like hot cakes!" She glanced at Mash and a large grin broke out over her face. "And hey, maybe if we record you and Mash painting each other's toenails, we can go viral! We'd be raking in the dough!"
But Mash wasn't paying any attention. She was instead staring intently at the pub, her brow furrowed and her eyes narrowed, and her voice was hard and guarded when she said, "Master, there's a Servant nearby. No, they're inside here, I'm sure."
Ritsuka's head whipped around towards her. "A Servant?"
"I can feel it, too," said Emiya as he rounded the corner. The twins both jumped, startled, but I had seen him manifest in the alleyway behind the Black Rose, in the shadows where no one was looking, so I'd been expecting him. "No doubt about it." He cocked a lopsided smile. "Makes sense, though, doesn't it? If this guy is in league with Celtchar and Medb, then it's only natural there's a Servant around keeping an eye on him."
That was one theory. It wasn't the only possibility, though.
"Wait," said Rika, looking at him askance, "when did you get changed?"
"This?" Emiya looked down at himself theatrically, at the unbuttoned black shirt, the white undershirt, and the blue jeans he had donned instead of his usual getup. A pair of sunglasses hanging from his collar completed the look, transforming him from Servant to tourist. "Thought it would make it easier to blend in. It means I don't have to put on a ridiculous mask, too."
He had even disguised the rifle, packing it away in a long, metal tube that he had slung over his shoulder. Anyone who gave it some thought would probably realize — if not exactly, then in general — what was in it, but on a passing glance, it wouldn't raise any eyebrows.
"Ugh," said Rika. "And now I feel like the one standing out. We should've asked Da Vinci-chan to make us a casual setting for our mystic codes, just for occasions like this."
"You can bring it up with her later," I told her.
"Don't think I won't!"
Privately, I agreed that she had a point. Fitting in had been a concern I'd had in just about every Singularity since Orléans, but this one was arguably the one where it would have been most important.
"We need to meet with this guy either way, right?" asked Ritsuka.
"Unless you want to go running around on a wild goose chase after the other guy," said Emiya.
It really was the only lead we had, at the moment.
"Just be on your guard," I said for the benefit of everyone. "And don't make any threatening movements towards the bartender."
Rika snapped a salute. "Roger that, Senpai! This is your show!"
Maddeningly, I could only hope she was wrong about how much. This was already more familiar than I wanted it to be.
We stepped in through the front door and were greeted immediately by a middle-aged man standing at a podium in a black polo shirt. Ironically, his nameplate said 'Greg.' He looked us all over, stopping on Mash to do a double take, and after a few seconds of awkward silence, he asked, "Do you have a reservation?"
I didn't bother to bullshit him or bargain, I just said straight up, "Celtchar sent us."
His eyes went wide and his face turned several shades paler, and stammering, he told us, "Y-yes, o-of course, r-right this way. You'll be w-wanting to talk to Archer — can't miss him, just…just go straight on back to the bar."
I wasn't the only one who caught the name and gave the man a second look that had him ready to faint. Archer, huh. As names went, it wasn't impossible, but what were the odds? Too low for my liking.
Greg said nothing as we walked past him and into the pub itself, only sighing once we were all inside and no longer his concern (he jumped a little when the little gremlin strutted past, offering him only a short nod and a brief, "Fou," as it followed us in). The handful of patrons enjoying their lunch paid us no mind, and we walked back along the shiny, wooden divider that separated the dining area to the bar. A row of chairs stretched from one end to the other, and the entire back wall was lined with bottles of various spirits and vintages, separated only by a series of black and white photos of men whose faces I didn't recognize. Famous sons of Ireland, if I was guessing, just because that would be on brand for an Irish pub in America.
The entire place seemed to be built from a rich, dark wood, and the soft, yellow lighting gave it the feel of an old Irish pub going back a hundred years or more, which was probably the whole point. There were, however, touches of modernity: the large, flatscreen TVs that were mounted along the walls, depicting some soccer game or another, and the glowing, red EXIT sign, and the fire alarm affixed to the one wall.
And the man standing behind the bar, polishing a tall glass with a white cloth, fit right in, wedged neatly between both worlds. Older, maybe sixties, with his gray hair elegantly swept and styled across his head like a Victorian gentleman and a thick mustache above his upper lip, he dressed in a dark gray dress shirt under a sleek black vest and a green apron, the sleeves rolled up to his elbows. A silky blue tie was tucked neatly beneath the apron and the vest, and blue eyes like chips of ice looked us up and down behind a pair of wireframe glasses. Sizing us up.
I didn't miss the way his eyes lingered on Emiya and Mash, the brief moment where they narrowed on the metal tube hiding the rifle we'd confiscated. He was far more than just a simple bartender.
"Good afternoon," he greeted us in a smooth, cultured English accent. "How can I help you good people today?"
And he was, without a doubt, a Servant.
Next — Chapter CLXXVIII: Bargaining Chip
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Chapter CLXXVII: The Black Rose
We did not immediately set off to go and meet with Accord, and it had nothing at all to do with how little I was looking forward to dealing with his particular neuroses again. Instead, Arash and I went over to the shoreline, and with the colony of crabs that called the bay home to help me see what was down there and where to send Arash to look, we started investigating the seafloor at the bottom of the bay.
Meanwhile, the others set about laying the dead militiamen to rest by digging out a trench where they could bury the bodies. It was a poor grave, and we couldn't even give them the dignity of a memorial that listed all of their names, in no small part because we simply didn't know any of them, but the twins felt that it was a better use of their time than just waiting around for Arash and me to scour the bay for any hint of where and how the Grail might have come to be there.
The celtic warriors, on the other hand, had disappeared. Like a puff of smoke or a waft of steam, their corpses had vanished, leaving behind only splotches of blood on the sand and dirt that were in no way big enough to account for how much of it they should have lost from their wounds. Even the ones killed by Lancer's eye laser were gone, too. But for those drying stains, they could have been nothing more than mirages that we had all seen.
If we had needed confirmation that they had been created or summoned somehow by another Servant, that would have been more than enough to convince me. The bloodstains were the only part that didn't make sense, but I didn't have any other explanation for that, so I wrote it off for the time being.
Unfortunately, the search wasn't going very well. There were plenty of things that were sitting on the bottom of the bay, from discarded soda cans and plastic bottles to planks of rotting wood and torn sails, but none of them provided any sort of explanation for how and why this era's Grail had wound up down there instead of in the hands of whoever it was that had kicked this Singularity off.
"The King of Mages certainly wouldn't have simply dropped it down there," said Da Vinci. I resisted the urge to shift my feet; the circle of runes Aífe had carved into the sand to stabilize our connection was exceptionally fragile for it, and I didn't want to disrupt them. I wasn't confident I could recreate the sequence by myself if I had to. "Merely throwing such a powerful magical artifact into an era isn't enough to cause a Singularity. Someone or something making a wish upon it that alters the proper course of events has to occur first, and that obviously can't happen if the Grail is sitting at the bottom of a bay."
"I'm not sure why else it would be down there."
I wasn't finding much in the way of other clues, and Arash's silence told me that he was having about as much luck. Even assuming that Rider had taken a straight line to and from the Grail, the water had already all but erased his tracks, and nothing else of interest remained alongside them. The only things that I was really finding were the scattered bits of shipwrecks from the unfortunates who had sunk over the decades, and that told me nothing.
Then again, if it had been in the hands of a Servant, then any other evidence would have vanished when they did, wouldn't it? There wouldn't be anything else for us to find to begin with.
"Mm," Da Vinci hummed. "If there was a struggle with the Grail before the Singularity's deviations truly began to take hold, then it might have been lost in the fighting."
"Could it have been intentional?" Marie's voice asked. "An act of sabotage?"
"How do you mean, Director?" Da Vinci said curiously.
Marie was silent for a moment. "We know that this Singularity in particular is targeted. At Taylor, specifically. If the original culprit who possessed the Grail was conspiring with the King of Mages, then could they have thrown the Grail into the bay in the hopes that it would be that much harder for us to find and retrieve it?"
Oh. That…would actually be kind of devious. Maybe not feasible, depending on what the Grail might have been used for, but if the goal was simply to create a Singularity and let it run itself into the ground, then theoretically, Solomon's conspirator could just set up all of the dominoes and then toss the Grail into the ocean. It would be much harder to find, in that case, and that would definitely have stymied any efforts on our part. Without the echo we had tracked to the bay, we could have run around for weeks or months without having any idea where it was.
But…
"I don't think that's the case," I said.
…if it was that simple, it could have been done before, too.
"You don't?" said Marie.
"Even Flauros didn't just throw the Grail into the Mediterranean, back in Septem," I reasoned. "It would have been the easiest way to screw us over — summon Romulus and all those other Servants, and while everyone was fighting, lock the Grail in a chest, weigh it down with concrete, then sail out into the Atlantic and drop it over the side. He chose to hold onto it instead."
"Because it's the pairing," Da Vinci explained. "A deviation is normally corrected without issue by the Counter Force, and a Grail is just a wish-granting device on its own. One or the other isn't enough to cause a Singularity. Both acting in concert is what makes one form, and so both are necessary for one to form at all. Were we to remove the aberrant forces in this era, then the Singularity should eventually be corrected without further intervention. Of course," she added, "as long as a Grail is present, then it is also possible for it to cause further deviations should it land in another's hands before the Singularity is resolved, and that is one of the reasons we've had you do both in every deployment so far."
Marie made a noise of understanding high in her throat. "Then the King of Mages would want to ensure that the deviations that occur continue according to his plan. Leaving the Grail unattended anywhere outside of his or his proxy's control would risk failure."
"Exactly," said Da Vinci. "If the Grail is simply abandoned at the earliest convenience, then he would lose any chance of correcting for the meddling of outside forces — us, in this case, or any Servants summoned by the Counter Force."
A familiar presence brushed up against my thoughts. "Hold on."
Did you find anything? I asked Arash. He had left my range somewhere in the middle of the conversation, but the last I had seen of him with my crabs, he was heading directly across the bay.
Nothing, he replied. I went all the way across to the peninsula, and there weren't any clues that I could see about why the Grail might have been down here.
I clicked my tongue. Come back, then. There's no point in spending the next month scouring the bay.
Roger, he said, and then his presence retreated.
"And yet," I said aloud, "for whatever reason, the Grail was down in the bay, and two different groups came here to retrieve it."
"Yes," Da Vinci agreed, "that is certainly strange, isn't it? Unfortunately, at this time, I don't have any concrete theories about why."
"If he is who he claims he is," Romani chimed in, and he put particular emphasis on that uncertainty, "then he's not sloppy enough for this to be a mistake. This was intentional, even if we don't know why."
I was inclined to agree. Solomon and his agents had been thorough enough that they had nearly managed to end the Grand Order before it could even really start, and it was only dumb luck and a bunch of factors they couldn't possibly have accounted for that put us in a good enough position to get as far as we had. If Solomon was willing to let the Grail lie at the bottom of the Cape Cod Bay, then either he had a reason for letting it stay there or it being there didn't inconvenience his plans enough for him to care.
Either of those was bad news for us.
"Whatever the reason is, I don't think we're going to find our answers here," I said. "The focal point echo was a dead end. If it was anything at all, then that Rider rode away with it."
Da Vinci hummed. "On that point, I do believe you're right."
"You're going to Boston, then?" asked Marie.
I nodded, even though they couldn't see it. "It's the only lead we have that we can follow, right now."
By default, that made it the best, no matter how sorry a state of things that was.
"I don't need to tell you to be careful," said Marie.
"Of course."
"Taylor," Romani said suddenly, "don't forget that this isn't your Earth Bet, okay? Whatever and whoever you meet, they're not going to be exactly the same people you remember."
A flash of annoyance curdled in my gut like sour milk. "I know."
I hadn't forgotten, and whether that satisfied him or he just sensed that I didn't want to continue that line of conversation, he let it drop there, and with a simple, "Good luck," the connection dropped. I took an extra second to peer out over the bay, at the steely gray waters that churned and sloshed gently, but they had no more answers for me than they'd had before, so I turned away, stepped out of the circle of Aífe's runes, and went over to join the others.
They had not had to dig a pit for the bodies entirely by hand, of course, because they had managed just fine with a combination of Emiya's projections and Aífe's rune magic, but they had moved the bodies the old fashioned way, and somewhere along the way, the grave had become something more like a kiln. I remembered suddenly that they had cremated the bodies of the policemen and the fake Jack the Ripper at Scotland Yard in London, and in light of that, the grim, determined set of the twins' faces made a whole lot more sense.
"Senpai," was how Ritsuka greeted me, apparently the first to see me walking over.
"Cremating them, then?" I asked.
His lips drew into an even tighter line. "It's…easier and faster than trying to bury them, although…not as respectful of their culture."
I remembered something vague about how Christians could not enter Heaven if their bodies were destroyed beyond recognition, but not where I'd heard it from or if it only belonged to a specific denomination. It was moot, too, if these people were from 1783 properly and would simply get corrected once this was all over.
"There's something else, too," said Emiya. He tossed me one of the muskets, and I caught it a little clumsily. When I looked it over, I couldn't find anything out of place or anything, but I wasn't exactly an expert on firearms, so I had no idea what I was looking for in the first place. It looked like a regular old musket to me.
"Is there something wrong with it?"
He clicked his tongue. "Or something a little too right with it, maybe. It's been modified. The exterior might look like a standard long rifle, but the interior has been adjusted to fire a modified slug instead of a musket ball. To give you a little bit of context, the Minié ball wasn't thought up until the 1840s, which would already put this thing about 60 years ahead of its time, even if you don't count the percussion lock that wasn't invented until the 1820s, but…"
I looked at him. "But what?"
He sighed. "Somehow or another, the rifling has been converted into a magnetic coil." He gestured to the lock. "When the hammer hits the lock, it causes a pin to complete a temporary circuit, sending an electric charge up the barrel."
My brow furrowed. "This is a coil gun?"
"Right?" Rika agreed. "What kind of sci-fi bullshit is that?"
That's not sci-fi bullshit.
"That's tinkertech."
Emiya's eyebrows rose. "You mean the sort of thing that can only be made by people whose powers let them make technology decades or centuries ahead of the modern era?" His eyes trailed down to the rifle in my hands. "It would certainly explain the parts that don't make any sense. Like the battery that delivers the charge, because I couldn't make heads or tails of that. Or how gunpowder can be used as a lubricant."
"Wait, what?" said Rika. "Gunpowder as a lube?"
He shrugged. "It makes even less sense to me, Master. Something in the design of the coil turns the gunpowder into a kind of insulator, preventing heat transfer between the slug and the barrel. That's why there was still smoke: the gunpowder absorbed the heat from the barrel and the slug so that neither was warped when it fired."
Strange and nonsensical in parts, but somehow forming a cohesive, functional whole — a hallmark of Tinkertech. If I'd needed more convincing, that would have done it.
I tossed it back to him, and he snatched it out of the air easily. "Da Vinci will want to take a look at that once we find a good Ley Line Terminal to set up a magic circle. I don't think she'll find anything revolutionary about it —" Rika snickered to herself. "— but she should find it interesting how the Tinker enhanced a rifle from the…" And I just got the joke. "…the Revolutionary War."
Emiya didn't protest; he slung the rifle over his back, slipping into the leather strap fastened to the end of the barrel and the stock. He fidgeted a little, looking almost comical wearing his strange mishmash of modern, futuristic, and old-fashioned gear, complete with a muzzle-loaded rifle peeking up from next to one ear.
He smirked at me. "It's almost nostalgic."
I didn't bother asking why. I was more focused on the rifle — who could have enhanced it, and why? There were only a few Tinkers in the world who could do anything like mass production, but just about any good Tinker could do a job like this with enough time and a well-stocked lab. Coil, after all, had supplied a small private army with tinkertech rifles that fired lasers, so the idea that someone else could do something similar wasn't at all strange.
The stranger part was the people who had them. I could see the logic behind using those rifles as a base — it would require less training for the soldiers who used them — but the bigger mystery was still the soldiers themselves, and why they were the ones chosen to wield them. Convenience, or desperation?
There were still too many questions we didn't have the answers to just yet.
I went to check the time, but whatever had caused the fluctuations was apparently messing with the local time, too, because it kept flickering between numbers with no rhyme or reason. The sun, at least, didn't lie, because I might not have been an expert on how to tell time by it, but I at least knew enough to tell whether it was before or after noon.
"Let's finish this up and get moving," I told everyone. "We're about fifty miles south of Boston, so it's going to take us at least an hour to get there on the bikes."
Rika groaned.
"Not Aífe's chariot?" asked Ritsuka.
It would be faster, but… "Better to keep as low a profile as we can for now. We still don't know for sure who's on our side, so the less we advertise our presence and our Servants, the better."
"I'm not sure that isn't a losing battle," said Emiya, gesturing down at himself. He had something of a point, but at least in his case, that was easily fixed.
"Put on a mask before we enter town, and everyone will think you're a cape," I told him, which seemed to throw him off quite a bit. He opened his mouth to argue the point, but after a moment of silence, shut it again.
We went back to the pyre we'd been building, and with the whole group working on it now, it was much faster than it had been before. It only took another twenty minutes or so to have all of the militiamen piled up together in that sad little pit, and as I carved a rune into the dirt that cleaned my hands when it burned, Emiya projected a large, crude sword that looked like nothing much more than a hunk of crude, molten iron. The only other thing really remarkable about it was the glowing knotwork pattern stretching from the hilt to the tip of the blade.
He stabbed this blade into the pile of bodies and solemnly intoned, "Laevatein," and then immediately leapt back as the sword ignited and burned the corpses so rapidly that they were already blackening between one blink and the next.
I glanced at him, and he took this as an invitation to explain: "It's a crude recreation barely worthy of the name, but it's the sword Surtr used to wipe most of Scandinavia clean. The real deal is no joke, but just about the only thing this one is good for is cleaning up a battlefield."
I was done being surprised by the sorts of things he could make with his Reality Marble, so I let it pass without comment. There were probably a few other areas where something like that would be useful, but this wasn't the time or the place to be discussing that with him.
The bodies burned away quickly. The flames of Laevatein ate the flesh, bone, and cloth with a voracious hunger, reducing the pile stacked in the pit to a thin layer of ash in a matter of just a minute or two, and then they died away, as though they had no interest at all in the grass or the trees or anything else around us.
It was only in their wake that I realized how hot they must have been, because even standing something like twenty or thirty feet away, patches of sweat cooled on my brow, my neck, and under my arms the instant they were gone.
Next to me, the twins and Mash all clasped their hands together as though in prayer and briefly bowed their heads. Even Arash muttered a quick benediction. I watched them awkwardly, unsure if I should bother or how I would have shown these militiamen that sort of respect. The moment passed before I could find an answer.
"Ready to go?" I asked them instead.
"Yeah," said Ritsuka. Even Rika's nod was more subdued than usual.
I pulled up the map of the area on my communicator and zoomed in to show them. "We're here," I said, pointing to the dot that showed our location, and then I panned back west. "We'll have to backtrack a little, but there should be a road for us to follow a little ways from where we landed. We'll follow that north —" I panned up this time "— and up to Boston. It should take us about an hour to reach the city."
"Where we'll stop to get something to eat," said Rika, "right?"
With what money, I wanted to ask, because even if I'd still had my money from way back when, I wasn't sure it would have been accepted, but I settled instead for, "We'll figure something out when we get there."
That was enough to mollify her for the moment, so we began the hike back to our landing zone, back through the path of broken trees and sliced branches we'd taken through the woods to reach the fighting. It was, naturally, much less frantic and much less frenzied than it had been on the way out, and I got smacked in the face by leaves and twigs a whole lot less, too.
It didn't take too long at all for us to get back to where we'd first landed when we Rayshifted in, although the only way to tell that it was even the same spot was the path we cut through the woods leaving it. Going the other way, however, took us much longer, because that convenient path didn't exist, so we had to pick our way through, stepping over tree roots and between shrubs and bushes, ducking under low-hanging branches, and just generally dealing with the hazards that came with nature unchecked.
Fortunately, we weren't in the Amazon, so the foliage wasn't so thick as to be virtually impassable and the canopy of the trees reaching up above us wasn't so oppressive as to completely smother almost all of the light coming through the leaves. It was all easily manageable, more annoying than an actual struggle. The real nuisance was going to be the chill of a New England autumn, a familiar nip in the air that grew more pronounced the further from the beach we got. Some of the trees had even begun to change color, with patches of leaves that had shifted from bright green to yellow, orange, or red.
I wasn't sure how much the twins knew about that sort of thing, but it was actually a useful bit of information. Unless the fluctuations were having effects that were that drastic, it told me that we had actually landed sometime in late September, maybe early October, and if that was true, then both the Nine and Coil would be long gone by the time we made it up to Brockton. Leviathan's attack was already a matter of history, and so too would Behemoth's attack on New Delhi. We were in the grace period between attacks, because the next one wasn't until November.
A thought occurred to me, and the realization hit me so hard that I actually stopped for a moment as the implications washed over me, reeling.
"Something wrong, Master?" asked Arash, who was walking behind me.
I hesitated for only a second, and then kept walking. "No," I told him. "Nothing."
But if all of that had happened, then the Teeth and the Fallen should have attacked Brockton, too. Cherish — the newest Butcher — should be locked up and shipped out to sea, stuck at the bottom of the ocean with nothing to do but think about her fate. Alec… Alec should be dead, but more…immediately relevant to our situation, Accord should be, too. Victims of Behemoth's attack in New Delhi, one way or the other.
And yet we were going to see Accord, to get his help contacting whoever it was that was keeping everything together inside this Singularity. Accord, who was supposed to have been killed by a rogue Yangban cape in July.
Something wasn't right here, and I didn't know what. It was autumn here in this Singularity, and yet the deviation to the world as I knew it had occurred at least a month or two back, and I had no idea what all of the implications of that were. Not now. Not yet. And by the time I did, it might already have come back to bite me.
We really needed to talk to Accord now. We should probably stop by the nearest internet cafe, too, or failing that, I needed to swipe a smartphone at the earliest chance I got. However we could get caught up on recent events, we needed to do that as quickly as we could.
The trip through the forest to the other side took the better part of an hour, just from how slowly we had to make our way through it, but eventually, we came out the other side to a small, two-lane road that cut straight through and went north to south. The yellow lines down the middle were bright and fresh and well-maintained, and telephone poles stretched up and down the one side. Black power lines dangled above our heads as we stepped onto the asphalt, and unlit streetlights extended out like arms reaching out across the road to shelter nighttime travelers. A paved sidewalk went along the opposite side.
"Celty said north, right?" asked Rika. Ritsuka grunted, grimacing.
Celty?
"Right."
I reached down and behind me for the small tube attached there in its harness, and it slipped out with a little bit of effort. For a moment, as the twins and Mash did the same with their own, I could only stare down at it. How had Da Vinci said it worked, again? A twist and a little bit of magical energy —
There was a loud click, and parts suddenly began manifesting in thin air, building themselves from the tube out. An engine block, the piping, the skeletal frame of a sleek, futuristic motorcycle, and then the seat formed underneath me, forcing my knees and feet apart. Seconds later, the exterior willed itself into existence, and a smooth, black chassis sat between my legs, complete and ready to go. Perfectly balanced, too, which was not a feature Da Vinci had bothered to explain to us.
I just hoped it looked a whole lot more intentional than it was.
"Oh man, these things are so cool!" Rika squealed. Hers looked a lot bigger by comparison, but she was also much shorter and quite a bit smaller than me, so I guess that made sense.
"They really are," Ritsuka agreed, sounding like he hated to admit it.
Come to think of it, Da Vinci hadn't given us a max speed for these things, had she? I wondered if she'd improved them from the original design, made them faster. I doubted, of course, that we would be racing along at the sorts of speeds Aífe's chariot could get up to, but it would be convenient even if they were just in the same ballpark.
A twist of the tube — now a pair of handlebars — revved the engine, and a pane beneath the windshield suddenly lit up with a display that showed things like the battery life and the speedometer in bright, easily read white numbers. There was even a map that had apparently synced up to my communicator with a pre-planned route for us to take. And when I put a foot up on the pedal, a helmet formed magically over my head, just as sleek and futuristic as the bike itself.
Now you're just showing off, I thought at Da Vinci.
Seeing me, Rika copied it, and a helmet of her own formed, the visor opaque and sturdy. I could still hear her voice when she said, "So cool!"
I turned to Emiya. "Think you can keep up?"
He smirked. "I'm sure I'll manage." He thumbed the strap crossing over his chest. "Someone has to carry this thing, after all."
I was tempted to offer to do it myself, but if it got him unwanted attention, it was easier for him to slip away than any of us. Better he keep ahold of it then.
As Mash got saddled into her own bike — vanishing her shield and most of her armor and tucking Fou in as safely as she could manage in front of her — Arash and Aífe both transitioned into spirit form, and soon enough, we were all ready to go.
"We'll take this road straight into downtown Boston," I told them. "Try and get the lay of the land on our way to the Black Rose to talk to the guy who can get us a meeting with Accord. And see about getting something to eat," I added to appease Rika.
"Got it!" the twins and Mash all said together.
I lifted my other foot onto the other pedal, and with a lurch and a spurt of sudden speed, we took off, our bikes little more than a gentle, motorized hum as we started up the road. Under the helmet that covered my head, the sounds of the world around us became background noise, something distant and far away.
It became obvious within the first hundred feet that Da Vinci had once again outdone herself. I wasn't exactly an expert at what it was like to ride motorcycles, but the experience on those lightcycle ripoffs was smoother than it had any right to be. Out of an abundance of caution, I started out slow, and the twins and Mash all followed my lead, but as I picked up speed, the ride stayed just as comfortable and just as smooth as it had started out.
It was almost like we were gliding down the road, and it occurred to me that — having taken apart my flight pack and studied the antigravity functions well enough to incorporate them into our mystic codes — it was entirely possible that her next innovation for these things would be just that. In the next Singularity, we might just be riding hoverbikes around the place, like something out of Star Wars.
Considering the sorts of tinkertech I'd seen over the course of my career as a cape, especially the latter portions of it, that wasn't anything truly extraordinary, but the twins would probably be a lot more impressed. Just the thought of Rika freaking out over how cool they were was enough to bring a faint smile to my face, in spite of everything.
By and large, the journey up to Boston wound up being boring and unnoteworthy, because the bulk of it went straight through woodland and suburbia more than anything else, and there was nothing for us to see except trees and cookie cutter houses. Eventually, the road we were using turned into a highway, and our pace was forced to slow to accommodate traffic. Some part of me even expected to be stopped by the local police, just because our bikes stood out that much. They must have looked like tinkertech, and by the definition most people used, I guess they technically were.
But nothing. No one accosted us. Not the police, not another Servant, not even the local Protectorate. The trip was completely uneventful.
After the better part of an hour, we entered the city of Boston itself. The shorter, smaller residential buildings and businesses fell behind us as the towering skyline of the Boston cityscape loomed ahead. Houses and humble apartment complexes gave way to parking garages, office buildings, corporate headquarters, and the marble of centuries old courthouses and government buildings. The uniformity of siding and shingles transformed into a hodgepodge mess of brick and mortar standing beside glass and concrete, a meeting between the Boston of decades long gone and the Boston of the modern era.
The layout was completely different and the buildings entirely unfamiliar, but in some ways, it felt like coming home. I guess I really was a city girl at heart.
It was around there when the highway narrowed into something cozier and less expansive, although not any less crowded or busy. People on the streets paused to look at us, pointing our way — at our bikes, more specifically — and pulling out their phones so they could catch a picture or record a video of our passing. Several paid special attention to Mash in her eye-catching outfit, and didn't seem to notice how uncomfortable it made her, how her posture became rigid and she shrank away from their gazes.
I wasn't sure the twins noticed either, but that might have been because they were getting attention of their own and didn't seem to know how to handle it. Maybe I should have prepared them better for the idea that capes were local celebrities, even the ones no one knew about — especially the ones no one knew about.
There was nothing I could do about it just then. What, was I supposed to get up, take off my helmet, and start yelling? Or maybe I should have brought down a Biblical swarm to scare them all off and risk blowing our cover and getting more attention than a few idiots with their phones? As cathartic as it might have been and as much as the others might have appreciated it, those weren't options.
If, however, some of the more egregious ones that were taking zoomed-in shots of Mash's backside found themselves being harassed by a fly or two or chased around by a wasp, well, that was just bad luck for them, wasn't it?
It was somewhere approaching noon by the time we pulled up to a narrow, ten story building, a base built from white stone or concrete supporting red brick the rest of the way up. The facade was a dark, emerald green, clashing with the bright, firetruck red of the door, and spaced with tall, narrow windows that showed a dark, cozy interior. Two sets of signs hung over the storefront, black backing with soft, metallic gold letters. The set on the left said "Spirits and Ale" above "Róisín Dubh," and the set on the right said "Steaks and Seafood" above "The Black Rose," where the 'o' had been replaced by a blooming rose. A sign next to the door proclaimed, 'Live Irish music 7 nights a week.'
One final sign jutted out over the sidewalk, claiming:
THE BLACK ROSE
RÓISÍN DUBH
PROUDLY SERVING
GUINNESS
SINCE 1976
RÓISÍN DUBH
PROUDLY SERVING
GUINNESS
SINCE 1976
I dismounted my bike, and the instant I cut the thread of magical energy I'd been feeding it the entire time, the whole thing evaporated and left me with nothing more than the tube I'd started with. Even the helmet was gone.
"Well, we're definitely in the right place," Rika said as she and the others dismounted, too. "And look! Steaks and seafood! Hey, we can eat and talk to that bartender guy at the same time! Two birds with one stone!"
Fou hopped down right before Mash's bike disappeared. A pity it hadn't fallen off somewhere along the way and gotten lost in the wilderness.
"How are we going to pay for it, though?" Ritsuka murmured. "We don't have any money, do we?"
That brought Rika up short, and she turned to me, "Uh, do you think this Accord guy would be willing to front us some dough? I didn't bring my credit card."
"Not without asking for a favor."
And owing Accord a favor wasn't the best of ideas. I was going to have to think of a way to get him to help us that didn't involve putting us in his debt.
Rika, oblivious to my thoughts, turned back to her brother, "Hey, Onii-chan, did you trim your toenails last night?"
Ritsuka balked, looking back at her incredulously. "No. Why?"
"Well, we gotta make money somehow, don't we?" she reasoned. "And if there's one thing the internet has taught me over the last few years, it's that feet pics sell like hot cakes!" She glanced at Mash and a large grin broke out over her face. "And hey, maybe if we record you and Mash painting each other's toenails, we can go viral! We'd be raking in the dough!"
But Mash wasn't paying any attention. She was instead staring intently at the pub, her brow furrowed and her eyes narrowed, and her voice was hard and guarded when she said, "Master, there's a Servant nearby. No, they're inside here, I'm sure."
Ritsuka's head whipped around towards her. "A Servant?"
"I can feel it, too," said Emiya as he rounded the corner. The twins both jumped, startled, but I had seen him manifest in the alleyway behind the Black Rose, in the shadows where no one was looking, so I'd been expecting him. "No doubt about it." He cocked a lopsided smile. "Makes sense, though, doesn't it? If this guy is in league with Celtchar and Medb, then it's only natural there's a Servant around keeping an eye on him."
That was one theory. It wasn't the only possibility, though.
"Wait," said Rika, looking at him askance, "when did you get changed?"
"This?" Emiya looked down at himself theatrically, at the unbuttoned black shirt, the white undershirt, and the blue jeans he had donned instead of his usual getup. A pair of sunglasses hanging from his collar completed the look, transforming him from Servant to tourist. "Thought it would make it easier to blend in. It means I don't have to put on a ridiculous mask, too."
He had even disguised the rifle, packing it away in a long, metal tube that he had slung over his shoulder. Anyone who gave it some thought would probably realize — if not exactly, then in general — what was in it, but on a passing glance, it wouldn't raise any eyebrows.
"Ugh," said Rika. "And now I feel like the one standing out. We should've asked Da Vinci-chan to make us a casual setting for our mystic codes, just for occasions like this."
"You can bring it up with her later," I told her.
"Don't think I won't!"
Privately, I agreed that she had a point. Fitting in had been a concern I'd had in just about every Singularity since Orléans, but this one was arguably the one where it would have been most important.
"We need to meet with this guy either way, right?" asked Ritsuka.
"Unless you want to go running around on a wild goose chase after the other guy," said Emiya.
It really was the only lead we had, at the moment.
"Just be on your guard," I said for the benefit of everyone. "And don't make any threatening movements towards the bartender."
Rika snapped a salute. "Roger that, Senpai! This is your show!"
Maddeningly, I could only hope she was wrong about how much. This was already more familiar than I wanted it to be.
We stepped in through the front door and were greeted immediately by a middle-aged man standing at a podium in a black polo shirt. Ironically, his nameplate said 'Greg.' He looked us all over, stopping on Mash to do a double take, and after a few seconds of awkward silence, he asked, "Do you have a reservation?"
I didn't bother to bullshit him or bargain, I just said straight up, "Celtchar sent us."
His eyes went wide and his face turned several shades paler, and stammering, he told us, "Y-yes, o-of course, r-right this way. You'll be w-wanting to talk to Archer — can't miss him, just…just go straight on back to the bar."
I wasn't the only one who caught the name and gave the man a second look that had him ready to faint. Archer, huh. As names went, it wasn't impossible, but what were the odds? Too low for my liking.
Greg said nothing as we walked past him and into the pub itself, only sighing once we were all inside and no longer his concern (he jumped a little when the little gremlin strutted past, offering him only a short nod and a brief, "Fou," as it followed us in). The handful of patrons enjoying their lunch paid us no mind, and we walked back along the shiny, wooden divider that separated the dining area to the bar. A row of chairs stretched from one end to the other, and the entire back wall was lined with bottles of various spirits and vintages, separated only by a series of black and white photos of men whose faces I didn't recognize. Famous sons of Ireland, if I was guessing, just because that would be on brand for an Irish pub in America.
The entire place seemed to be built from a rich, dark wood, and the soft, yellow lighting gave it the feel of an old Irish pub going back a hundred years or more, which was probably the whole point. There were, however, touches of modernity: the large, flatscreen TVs that were mounted along the walls, depicting some soccer game or another, and the glowing, red EXIT sign, and the fire alarm affixed to the one wall.
And the man standing behind the bar, polishing a tall glass with a white cloth, fit right in, wedged neatly between both worlds. Older, maybe sixties, with his gray hair elegantly swept and styled across his head like a Victorian gentleman and a thick mustache above his upper lip, he dressed in a dark gray dress shirt under a sleek black vest and a green apron, the sleeves rolled up to his elbows. A silky blue tie was tucked neatly beneath the apron and the vest, and blue eyes like chips of ice looked us up and down behind a pair of wireframe glasses. Sizing us up.
I didn't miss the way his eyes lingered on Emiya and Mash, the brief moment where they narrowed on the metal tube hiding the rifle we'd confiscated. He was far more than just a simple bartender.
"Good afternoon," he greeted us in a smooth, cultured English accent. "How can I help you good people today?"
And he was, without a doubt, a Servant.
— o.0.O.O.0.o —
...is a real place, but has no connection with either myself or this story. I worried a little bit about it, seeing as it is...technically being used as a front for a crimelord here, but when that crimelord is essentially the de facto government in-story, well...
In any case, there was actually a pretty big traversal section in this chapter, but during the editing pass, it was decided to cut it down to reduce bloat a little. I originally wrote it to give everyone a sense of the scale the team would be operating at during this Singularity, but there was nothing essential in the text that was trimmed, so I'm only a little disappointed we got rid of it in the end.
Also, surprise! Bet you weren't expecting to see that person so early, if at all, but there's a reason why, trust me.
Also also, that sword Emiya uses, that was also how they cremated the dead policemen in Scotland Yard back during London. Taylor didn't get to see it back then, so I felt like showing it off a little now.
In any case, there was actually a pretty big traversal section in this chapter, but during the editing pass, it was decided to cut it down to reduce bloat a little. I originally wrote it to give everyone a sense of the scale the team would be operating at during this Singularity, but there was nothing essential in the text that was trimmed, so I'm only a little disappointed we got rid of it in the end.
Also, surprise! Bet you weren't expecting to see that person so early, if at all, but there's a reason why, trust me.
Also also, that sword Emiya uses, that was also how they cremated the dead policemen in Scotland Yard back during London. Taylor didn't get to see it back then, so I felt like showing it off a little now.
Taylor and Olga gonna go crazy when they figure out it's Moriartt, if it is him.
It's a fitting Singularity for him to show up at.
Axel
Tenno Wax
- Location
- Italy
- Pronouns
- He
Accord, Moriarty and Medb together.....well, it was a good singularity, now it is time to torch it down to the bedrock however and pick up the the grail from the ash
Also, Rika is going together with them?? Did Taylor brief the twins about Accord? Rika popping a joke or something might cost them their lives
Also, Rika is going together with them?? Did Taylor brief the twins about Accord? Rika popping a joke or something might cost them their lives
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Moriarty before his story and small character development is kinda scary
Full Evil Genius
Full Evil Genius
Jim Starluck
CO, ICS Vanguard
- Location
- Cincinnati, OH
Fits right in with Accord, then.
Side note: why do I have the feeling that Da Vinci snuck a light-trail-generating feature into the bikes?
Finagle007
[Verified Great Old One]
- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
Hold it. How the hell is Emiya able to Trace Laevatein? That thing's a Divine Construct forged by the planet, on par with something like Rhongomyniad. Emiya can only Trace even hollow copies of Divine Constructs under very special circumstances, such as:
- Being in the Moon Cell lets him Trace a hollow copy of Excalibur while UBW is active.
- Having a Grail backing him up, as Shirou was able to Trace a hollow Ig-Alima with Miyu's support.
- Having the original Divine Construct inside him, as with Avalon in the Fate route.
- The Lostbelt Excalibur made by Muramasa uses Shirou's body and UBW as a component, so obviously he can Trace it since it's literally him, forged by his own hands.
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James D. Fawkes
Court Scribe
- Location
- Avalon (Isle of Mists)
It's a shadow of a shadow of a shadow, hence Emiya's comment about how pathetic and useless it is. But in light of this, maybe I should have made a lore page specifically to cover the finer details.
Chapter CLXXVII: The Black Rose (cut traversal section)
New
James D. Fawkes
Court Scribe
- Location
- Avalon (Isle of Mists)
Someone asked over on SB, so it comes here, too.
The first and largest leg of the trip went through mostly woodland, and so even Huginn and Muninn watching us from up above saw much of nothing. The road was largely empty of other drivers, giving us a clear shot straight towards Boston. We rode through patches of civilization, a small township or two of mostly residential buildings that were hardly large or populous enough to be worthy of the name, and eventually started through what felt like a large, natural park or nature preserve. For several long minutes, there was a long stretch where there were no signs of any other people nearby, and the only things that said otherwise were the road itself and a bike shop we passed about halfway through.
When we came out the other side, however, that changed almost immediately, and it wasn't long at all before we hit a highway with plenty of other cars. That naturally slowed us down and forced us to take the road at a far less breakneck pace, and it was only as we were idling at a stop sign that I realized that the twins would never have passed an American driving test and therefore had no license to speak of if we got pulled over.
It was a strange, surreal thought. Here we were, racing against the clock to reverse the end of the world and save all of mankind, and one of the things we were going to have to worry about was the utterly mundane concern of a traffic stop and how to get out of being arrested for driving without a license.
I didn't think the local police would be particularly impressed if we claimed we had immunity because we were agents of the UN. If I tried to have Marie talk to them, they might confiscate our communicators as unlicensed tinkertech or something, and they would definitely do that when they found my knife.
Fortunately, that concern never materialized into an actual problem. Whether it was because of the almost nakedly tinkertech look of our bikes or some other factor, we weren't accosted at all, although I wouldn't have been surprised if some of the other drivers were giving us strange looks or recording us to post on the internet later. I could already imagine the PHO thread speculating that we were a new hero team, not helped by our matching uniforms and Mash's skintight leotard.
It wasn't too much longer before we started seeing shopping centers, gyms, municipal buildings and other such things, and then we passed by Plymouth, site of the famous Mayflower landing, the first, true colonial settlement established by British pilgrims in 1620. In any other situation, it might have been interesting to stop by and visit, see the historic sights, but it came and went without even a second glance.
After Gold Morning, was there even anything left? So much had been lost, and I'd never really thought about all of the little things that were now gone in the wake of Scion, all of the pieces of history that had simply been destroyed or erased.
Plymouth wasn't the end of civilization between where we'd started and Boston, our destination, but the further away we got, the sparser it became. Once we got through the suburbs around Plymouth, we were back in the forest again, framed on either side by copious woodland and green trees whose leaves were slowly changing to the bright colors of autumn, and the only one who could see any of the houses or side streets was me with my bugs and the pair of ravens still flying overhead.
Some part of me expected interruption. We stood out, and I knew it, so some part of me was waiting for someone to show up — the Protectorate, or whatever was left of it now, or the PRT, or maybe the Teeth or the Ambassadors. The closer we got to Boston, the stranger it felt that no one bothered us or came to greet us. Things had to be bad for Accord to be necessary enough to be relied upon to keep society running, and that meant people should be more trigger happy, more prone to caution and preemptive action, and yet no one accosted us.
Eventually, we entered another section of suburbs, and instead of giving way to more forest, they began to grow denser and more tightly packed. The trees and shrubbery were replaced by single family homes, the kind that used to be on the cover of home and garden magazines and the goal of middle class America, with their neat lawns, white picket fences, and perfectly paved driveways. Leafy canopies became overpasses. Traffic thickened almost like molasses.
By necessity, our pace slowed, and the next two miles seemed to take as long to cross as the last twenty. Then, however, we crossed what the map on my bike called the Neponset River, and as we cruised along towards the city proper, the Massachusetts Bay opened up to our right, a yawning sheet of steely gray water that meandered towards the horizon. It was broken up only by the thin, long shapes of the islands that sat further out in the water.
Our route — and the highway we were traveling along — curved gently further inland, and the shorter, smaller residential buildings and businesses fell behind us as the towering skyline of the Boston cityscape loomed ahead. Houses and humble apartment complexes gave way to parking garages, office buildings, corporate headquarters, and the marble of centuries old courthouses and government buildings. The uniformity of siding and shingles transformed into a hodgepodge mess of brick and mortar standing beside glass and concrete, a meeting between the Boston of decades long gone and the Boston of the modern era.
It just wound up trimmed, because it was decent as worldbuilding but it didn't accomplish enough to warrant keeping it.
The first and largest leg of the trip went through mostly woodland, and so even Huginn and Muninn watching us from up above saw much of nothing. The road was largely empty of other drivers, giving us a clear shot straight towards Boston. We rode through patches of civilization, a small township or two of mostly residential buildings that were hardly large or populous enough to be worthy of the name, and eventually started through what felt like a large, natural park or nature preserve. For several long minutes, there was a long stretch where there were no signs of any other people nearby, and the only things that said otherwise were the road itself and a bike shop we passed about halfway through.
When we came out the other side, however, that changed almost immediately, and it wasn't long at all before we hit a highway with plenty of other cars. That naturally slowed us down and forced us to take the road at a far less breakneck pace, and it was only as we were idling at a stop sign that I realized that the twins would never have passed an American driving test and therefore had no license to speak of if we got pulled over.
It was a strange, surreal thought. Here we were, racing against the clock to reverse the end of the world and save all of mankind, and one of the things we were going to have to worry about was the utterly mundane concern of a traffic stop and how to get out of being arrested for driving without a license.
I didn't think the local police would be particularly impressed if we claimed we had immunity because we were agents of the UN. If I tried to have Marie talk to them, they might confiscate our communicators as unlicensed tinkertech or something, and they would definitely do that when they found my knife.
Fortunately, that concern never materialized into an actual problem. Whether it was because of the almost nakedly tinkertech look of our bikes or some other factor, we weren't accosted at all, although I wouldn't have been surprised if some of the other drivers were giving us strange looks or recording us to post on the internet later. I could already imagine the PHO thread speculating that we were a new hero team, not helped by our matching uniforms and Mash's skintight leotard.
It wasn't too much longer before we started seeing shopping centers, gyms, municipal buildings and other such things, and then we passed by Plymouth, site of the famous Mayflower landing, the first, true colonial settlement established by British pilgrims in 1620. In any other situation, it might have been interesting to stop by and visit, see the historic sights, but it came and went without even a second glance.
After Gold Morning, was there even anything left? So much had been lost, and I'd never really thought about all of the little things that were now gone in the wake of Scion, all of the pieces of history that had simply been destroyed or erased.
Plymouth wasn't the end of civilization between where we'd started and Boston, our destination, but the further away we got, the sparser it became. Once we got through the suburbs around Plymouth, we were back in the forest again, framed on either side by copious woodland and green trees whose leaves were slowly changing to the bright colors of autumn, and the only one who could see any of the houses or side streets was me with my bugs and the pair of ravens still flying overhead.
Some part of me expected interruption. We stood out, and I knew it, so some part of me was waiting for someone to show up — the Protectorate, or whatever was left of it now, or the PRT, or maybe the Teeth or the Ambassadors. The closer we got to Boston, the stranger it felt that no one bothered us or came to greet us. Things had to be bad for Accord to be necessary enough to be relied upon to keep society running, and that meant people should be more trigger happy, more prone to caution and preemptive action, and yet no one accosted us.
Eventually, we entered another section of suburbs, and instead of giving way to more forest, they began to grow denser and more tightly packed. The trees and shrubbery were replaced by single family homes, the kind that used to be on the cover of home and garden magazines and the goal of middle class America, with their neat lawns, white picket fences, and perfectly paved driveways. Leafy canopies became overpasses. Traffic thickened almost like molasses.
By necessity, our pace slowed, and the next two miles seemed to take as long to cross as the last twenty. Then, however, we crossed what the map on my bike called the Neponset River, and as we cruised along towards the city proper, the Massachusetts Bay opened up to our right, a yawning sheet of steely gray water that meandered towards the horizon. It was broken up only by the thin, long shapes of the islands that sat further out in the water.
Our route — and the highway we were traveling along — curved gently further inland, and the shorter, smaller residential buildings and businesses fell behind us as the towering skyline of the Boston cityscape loomed ahead. Houses and humble apartment complexes gave way to parking garages, office buildings, corporate headquarters, and the marble of centuries old courthouses and government buildings. The uniformity of siding and shingles transformed into a hodgepodge mess of brick and mortar standing beside glass and concrete, a meeting between the Boston of decades long gone and the Boston of the modern era.
It just wound up trimmed, because it was decent as worldbuilding but it didn't accomplish enough to warrant keeping it.
Only Taylor and a servant (probably Arash) should be in the room with him though. They don't have to bring her.
Dmol8
The Undead Unhinged Lunatic of the Web
- Location
- Belgrade,Serbia
- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
Interestingly enough this is a really thorny and complicated topic in Christianity with different Denominations having very different opinions on it. The basics of the problem has more to do with people being cremated not believing in the resurrection of the dead than with their bodies being burned to ash.
Basically getting a funeral pyre? Bad. Getting a cremation? Ask your priest if you're or your loved ones are allowed to. Being cremated on a battlefield after a battle? Usually fine, but there are Denominations that see this as going against Dogma in some way/form.
In the case of the people living in the Thirteen Colonies? So long as they are not Catholics it was fine if frowned upon, and on a battlefield it depended on which Denomination of Catholic one belonged to. The Roman Catholic Church isn't called that just because it is centered in Rome people.
I'm really curious if Emiya actually looked up the rules for battlefield cremation while he was alive in this story. After all he is a (lapsed) Christian. Probably of a Catholic Denomination.
- Location
- Argentina
So does Taylor know this song?
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6ikO6LMxF4
Schoolhouse Rock Shot Around the World.
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6ikO6LMxF4
Schoolhouse Rock Shot Around the World.
Stahor
BookWorm
- Location
- Russia, Moscow
What Twins probably would want, is to load storage media with Earth Bet exclusive movies, etc. Famed Michael Bay Star Wars movie and so on.