Chapter CXII: The Wages of Guilt

Breakfast turned out to be just as much of a disappointment as I think we were all expecting it to be. Marcus, who it seemed had either been nominated or volunteered to take over the job while Emiya wasn’t available, undoubtedly tried his best, and he wasn’t half bad, all things considered, especially since his normal position at Chaldea was in the engineering department. He was a decent enough cook, no doubt elevated by some of the recipes Emiya seemed to have left behind.

What he wasn’t, however, was Emiya. Not an entirely fair comparison to make, since Emiya was consistently blowing the socks off of everyone who ever got a bite of his food, but one that was unavoidable when we had all gotten used to eating like kings. Even when he hadn’t had much at all to work with, somehow, Emiya made it work and made it work well.

I’d said it before, but we were screwed once we lost Emiya, and that prediction looked to be coming true, ameliorated only by the fact that we didn’t intend to be without him for much longer. That knowledge probably helped Rika stomach her breakfast a bit better, but the miserable look on her face the entire time told me that she was all too aware that we still had lunch, dinner, and then at least another breakfast to go before we went down to the Summoning Chamber to bring him back.

It was damning with faint praise, perhaps, but at least it was better than soggy cereal.

The rest of the day was largely uneventful. Most of it was spent getting Bellamy and Hippolyta settled in, finding them rooms and introducing them to the other Servants that they hadn’t had the chance to meet yet, then an informal tour of the main parts of the facility, like the library, the gymnasium, and the simulator.

The simulator in particular seemed to fascinate them the most. They asked a lot of questions about what it could do and what its limits were, and as the one who had the most experience using it, it fell to me to answer those questions, although even I only knew so much. They were both disappointed to find out that it still needed a little bit of fixing before it could accommodate Servants.

I could see that becoming a common issue as we contracted more Servants. Chaldea as a facility was fairly utilitarian in its layout, so even though we had an expansive library and such, the sterile white of the walls and floors and the suffocating nature of being unable to leave the building would probably drive more than one of them into the simulator just for the chance to visit places they weren’t able to otherwise.

I couldn’t say I didn’t understand the desire, though. I’d spent two years here, so I was used to just how bland and impersonal most of the place was, but even I found myself wanting to stretch my legs and take a run through a park or the city streets, the way I had when I was younger, instead of a track or on a treadmill.

Hippolyta, at least, also liked the gym. I made a mental note to check with Da Vinci about whether or not the machines were rated to handle a Servant’s performance, because it could be a little problematic if Hippolyta accidentally broke one of them when she pushed it harder than it was capable of dealing with.

Aífe would probably be delighted to finally have a training partner, though. She might have found it fulfilling to put the twins through their paces every day, but eventually, she was going to want to stretch her own metaphorical legs, and Hippolyta seemed like she was on a similar wavelength. I’d had the thought before, but they were either going to get along very well or not at all.

After lunch, I begged off the rest of the welcoming committee and went to check in with Marie, who it turned out was still in the Command Room going over the data from the Okeanos Singularity. She looked much better than she had when we first came back — much less like she was standing on a precipice and holding onto the edge by her fingertips — a huge relief compared to how bad it could have been.

There was still a tension in her shoulders that eased when I walked into the room and her eyes swung over to scan my face. I wondered how long it was going to take before those fears stopped haunting her and hated that the answer might be ‘never.’

There were times when I thought Lev had died too quickly.

“Director,” I greeted her respectfully.

“Taylor,” was her somewhat less formal response. She glanced back at her console, filled with charts and meters and percentages for things that I didn’t completely understand. “Was there something you needed?”

“Ritsuka and Rika had an idea,” I told her, “and I thought we should run it by you before making any promises about whether or not it’s going to happen.”

Her brow furrowed, confused. “An idea?”

“They wanted to have a movie night,” I explained, “as a sort of…bonding exercise with the Servants. I thought it a workable enough idea on its own, but we’d need to find a place with enough room to accommodate all of us and get your permission to set everything up.”

“Hey, that actually sounds like a great idea,” Romani chimed in. “What movie were they thinking about showing?”

“Titanic.”

Immediately, he grimaced, no doubt thinking about the Singularity we’d all just come back from, maybe even having that same thought about how it would have been bad luck to watch it before we left for Okeanos. One side of my mouth curled upward, and I said, “It seemed appropriate.”

“I…can see how that might fit,” he allowed grudgingly, “it just seems a little…a-ah, gauche, I guess?”

“Are you sure you even know what that word means?” Marie asked him dryly.

“I couldn’t think of a better one, okay?” he lamented.

“Perhaps the first thing I should have asked,” I began, “is whether we even have the movie on hand.”

“Of course we do,” Marie replied immediately. “The library stores more than just books. We should have a record of just about every movie that’s ever been made.”

“Wait, really?” asked Romani, surprised. “We actually store movies down in the library?”

Marie huffed. “Of course! You’re the Head of Medical, aren’t you? You should know at least as well as I do the importance of the Masters’ mental well-being in the success of the Grand Order! That includes safe means and methods of recreation in their downtime!”

“W-well, yeah, but, um,” Roman fumbled, “it just…didn’t seem like…something you cared about all that much, Director…?”

Marie rolled her eyes. “Don’t be an idiot,” she scolded. “The Masters’ performance is a direct reflection on my competence as a Director. Of course I care that they’re all in the best condition possible!”

“Do we have a place we could show it, then?” I asked. “One big enough for a group of at least ten?”

Marie’s lips pursed, and she crossed her arms as one hand rose to her chin, her thinking pose. For a handful of seconds, she didn’t say anything as she went through a mental list of viable rooms that fit the criteria.

“The auditorium might work,” she said at length, slowly and cautiously, “but that might be too big for such a small group, so… Maybe…”

She sighed. “I’ll talk to Da Vinci,” she promised, and she sounded like she hated the idea that she even needed to. “I’m sure it should be feasible to use the same room where we conduct Master orientation, especially now that we’re…n-not using it for that purpose anymore.”

Because there were no new Masters in need of orientation, she didn’t say, but I heard it all the same. In a different world, one where the sabotage hadn’t happened but there were still Singularities in need of repair, it was probably where we would have conducted our briefings before and after each Singularity, but with only three Masters, the space was simply unnecessary. It was easier to just do them in the Command Room instead.

I was about to leave it at that and turn to leave when I remembered something from Okeanos, a mental note that I’d jotted down.

“Oh, Romani,” I said.

He blinked over at me. “Yeah?”

“Mash needs to learn how to swim.”

He gave me a bewildered, incredulous look. “She doesn’t —”

And then, he caught himself, and he grimaced. “Right. Of course she doesn’t know how to swim. It wasn’t something that Marisbury considered important.”

“She doesn’t —” Marie choked. “And we sent her into a Singularity where she spent most of the time in a deviant ocean? One where we couldn’t even have calculated something like the strength of the underwater currents?”

“Come to think of it, this shouldn’t be a surprise,” said Romani. “Mash told us she didn’t know how to swim during the briefing the day before we Rayshifted them into the Okeanos Singularity, Director.”

“I didn’t think she meant she didn’t know how to swim at all!” Marie said hotly. “But just…i-if she meant that she didn’t even know the basics…!”

Romani sighed and leaned back in his chair. “It wasn’t like we had much choice, Director. Mash’s shield is an integral part of a number of functions we use to do things like contact the team and send supplies. We literally can’t afford to keep her inside the facility during Rayshifts.”

“I’m well aware of that!” Marie snapped. “But still! The idea that we sent her into a situation where her life may very well have depended on a simple skill like swimming and she didn’t know how…!”

She looked like she wanted to hit something, but in lieu of doing something so undignified, she leaned over her console, hunching, her fingers gripping the edge so tightly that her knuckles were an even starker white against her already pale complexion. Her hair hung down, hiding her face, but I could well imagine how she would be biting her bottom lip until it almost bled.

“I knew he had done plenty of deplorable things to her,” I heard Marie murmur, although I was sure I wasn’t meant to, “but just how is it that…even now, I’m still…”

From her other side, where she couldn’t see him, Romani favored her with a sad, pitying look, the sort of resigned look of someone who knew just what Marie was doing to herself right now and knew that there wasn’t anything he could say to make it better.

Was there even anything? I didn’t have the whole picture, not even close, but just from what I did know, it was readily apparent that Marisbury had treated Mash more like an experiment — a lab rat — than a person, with all of the ugly parts something like that would entail. I still needed to get the finer details out of the two of them, but I was a little leery of pressing too hard, because Marie had been absolutely inconsolable when she found out exactly what her father had done to Mash.

One of the hardest parts of growing up was realizing your parents weren’t perfect angels who always made the right choice and knew better than you did. Realizing that your father made Victor Frankenstein look reasonable and well-adjusted had to be even harder.

“For now,” Romani said, “I’ll sign off on it, Taylor. Officially, if I have to. Even if we didn’t have much choice before, I think you’re right to say that it’s something we need to fix for the future. There’s no telling when it might become an issue again, so it’s better to get it out of the way now, while we still have the time.” He frowned. “You know where the pool is, right? Not that too many people use it, since we’re in the Antarctic and all…”

I nodded. “I know. I’ll get her started on it tomorrow, while the twins are busy with their lessons.”

Romani sighed. “That should be fine. That way, they’ll all be distracted until Da Vinci is ready to try bringing Emiya back.”

A nifty side benefit.

“Treading water is the absolute minimum!” Marie barked suddenly. She was still hunched over her console. “I expect her to at least be proficient at the breaststroke and the backstroke by the time we’re ready to deploy you into the next Singularity, even if it won’t be necessary there!”

It wasn’t like I was some kind of Olympic swimmer myself, but —

“Of course, Director.”

It was one of those things you had to have a minimum level of proficiency in as part of the Wards. You didn’t have to be a professional lifeguard, but you at least had to know how to swim and how to rescue someone who was drowning. I’d never had to really use any of it myself, but I remembered enough that I thought I could teach Mash at least that much.

With all of that taken care of, I bade Marie and Romani goodbye and left the Command Room, and I found there wasn’t much else for me to do today. When I checked in with Arash to see how things were going with our new arrivals, the twins were still giving Bellamy and Hippolyta a tour of what they knew of the facility, but looked to have covered most of the essentials and were showing them around the dorms.

I wondered where they were going to wind up picking their rooms. Chaldea had enough space for around five-hundred people, last I checked, which had left a lot of rooms empty even when we had our full staff and a complete roster of Master candidates. Aífe, Emiya, Arash, and most of the other Servants had all picked out rooms that were within a relative spitting distance of us Masters, but El-Melloi II had chosen something a little more isolated — far enough for his own privacy, at a guess, and maybe enough for a workshop so that he wasn’t disturbed in the middle of a project.

Come to think of it, beyond the spells he’d used to help us out in Septem and the basics he was teaching the twins, I didn’t remember him ever saying what field he specialized in. Master’s Clairvoyance hadn’t helped either, because most of his skills and his Noble Phantasm were geared towards a backline support role and didn’t have much application to magecraft at all.

And now that I thought about it, he probably wouldn’t tell me even if I asked. I was still keeping my powers and how exactly they worked from him, after all, and as far as I knew, Marie hadn’t given him clearance to know. That was another thing I was going to have to bring up with her, how much I could tell the others about who I was and where I came from. Did those secrecy rules she had drilled into me still apply when one of our Servants was from an alternate timeline himself and wasn’t particularly shy about the details of it? Two, even, if it turned out this wasn’t Emiya’s native timeline either.

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

Even if they didn’t, I wasn’t sure how much I was comfortable sharing. How much I was willing to explain when “aliens” was part of it and there was so much context that they would need just to understand where I’d started.

By the time I made it back, the group had split up and gone their separate ways. Ritsuka and Rika, with their duties as tour guides done, had slipped away to flop onto their beds and relax, and I couldn’t blame them. Aífe and Jeanne Alter had gone off to do something — what, I didn’t know, but Aífe was undoubtedly still keeping her eye on Jeanne Alter to make sure she didn’t get up to anything mischievous — while Hippolyta and Sam had each picked out a room of their own.

I caught up to Mash before she could go off to do whatever it was she was going to do with the rest of her afternoon.

“Oh,” she said when she saw me. “Miss Taylor. You’re back. Was there something you needed?”

“I talked to Romani and the Director,” I told her without preamble. “Starting tomorrow, I’m going to be teaching you how to swim.”

She blinked at me, confused. “You are?”

“It’s an oversight we should have taken care of before Okeanos, if we’d known it was an issue we needed to address,” I said. “Even if we’ve resolved the Okeanos Singularity, however, that’s no guarantee that being able to swim won’t be relevant in a later Singularity. The Director’s left it up to me to see to it that we shore up that hole in your skill set.”

“I see.” She nodded, like that made complete sense to her. “If Director Animusphere says so, then it must be important.”

It probably did. Mash was not as single-minded about her duty as a member of Chaldea as I had been about stopping the apocalypse during my Wards days, but she was just as dedicated as Marie and I. With my conversation with Romani and Marie still fresh in my mind, I couldn’t help wondering how much of that was actually Mash’s choice.

“Fou,” the little gremlin purred suspiciously, but I ignored it. Mash appeased him by offering scratches under his chin.

“Are we starting right away?” Mash asked. “I…don’t think I have a swimsuit, Miss Taylor.”

“Chaldea has a stock of them, just in case someone should need one.” And failing that, I was sure Da Vinci could make one for her without too much trouble. Now, whether it would be at all appropriate for a learning environment instead of relaxing at a beach, that was a different question entirely. “But no. We have the rest of the day off, so go ahead and enjoy it. We’ll start tomorrow instead, while Ritsuka and Rika are having their next lesson with El-Melloi II.”

I wouldn’t put it past Da Vinci to make her a really flattering bikini…that Mash probably wouldn’t be all that embarrassed about wearing, considering what she went around in as a Servant. That was already about as skimpy as a one-piece swimsuit anyway.

“Okay!” And then, she bent into a short bow, and I could only watch awkwardly as she said, “Please take good care of me, Miss Taylor.”

“Of course,” I replied for lack of anything better to say.

Just where was Mash picking up all of these Japanese mannerisms? Had Romani introduced her to anime at some point as some kind of “fuck you” to Marisbury?

“You know where the pool is?”

“I’ve never used it, but yes,” said Mash. “Are we meeting up there?”

“Yeah. We’ll find you a swimsuit that fits and then get you started.”

“I’ll see you then, Miss Taylor.”

And then she went off to enjoy the rest of her afternoon — doing what, I could only guess. Reading, maybe. I couldn’t remember Mash ever showing an interest in video games, although I didn’t put it past Rika to get her hooked on them, and while the fact we had movies probably also meant we had tv shows, I couldn’t remember Mash ever being particularly interested in them either.

It was a startling reminder about just how little I knew about Mash. Two years I’d spent in this place, working fairly closely with her for most of it, and I wasn’t even sure what her hobbies were. I’d been content not to know, focused as I was on the things in front of me and the mission that had been handed to me.

Maybe these swimming lessons would give me a chance to rectify that a little.

I considered, for a moment, heading towards the library to do some research on England in preparation for the next Singularity, but I didn’t remember Romani or Da Vinci ever saying what era it was going to take place in. It might not have been a problem for a country like America, with a scant two-hundred or so years of history, but the history of Britain spanned two-thousand years just in the common era, and getting any depth on a span of time that long was the sort of thing that took years of study.

For another moment, I considered going back and checking with Romani and Marie to see if they had narrowed down a tentative date for when the next Singularity was going to take place, but after a few seconds of thought, I decided against it. As much as I might want to get a head start on things so I could be prepared for our next outing, things were going to be plenty busy enough in the coming days and we had all just gotten back from an intense fight against two near immortal Servants and another one of those monstrous Demon Gods.

Just this once, I think, I could afford to give myself a break. There was an unfinished novel calling my name, and that was as good a way of spending the rest of my afternoon as any.

So that was what I did. I went back to my room, pulled out my half-finished novel, reclined on my bed, and picked up where I’d left off what had been for me almost two weeks ago.

The next time I saw the twins and Mash was when dinner rolled around, and any semblance of a good mood Rika might have managed to build up in the hours since her little tour with Hippolyta and Bellamy in tow soured immediately almost the instant she stepped into the cafeteria. Marcus might have been trying his best, but it was yet another meal without Emiya, and no matter how hard Marcus tried, that wouldn’t change.

Even Mash and Ritsuka couldn’t cheer her up, and all things considered, that was saying something. I couldn’t think of anything to lift her mood either. The only thing that would make her happy was having Emiya back, because it wasn’t just his food that she was missing, was it? She wanted her “house husband” back.

The only thing I could do was give her a slight nudge and a look of confidence, trying to assure her without words that she had nothing to worry about and Emiya would be back before she knew it — back, snarking, and perfectly happy to keep being her Servant.

The small but genuine smile she gave me in return told me my message had been received.

Climbing into bed later that night was a relief. It seemed the pattern would keep holding that the thing I wound up missing most during our deployments was just a good, quality mattress to sleep on, because a cot in a cramped cabin aboard a rocking ship was just nowhere near a modern, mass-produced bed.

And also indoor plumbing. The ways and places that people relieved themselves before every house had a toilet didn’t bear mentioning.

The next morning, I woke up refreshed and feeling better than I had for most of my time on the Golden Hind, and after a morning workout — where I was joined by Aífe, who was putting the twins through a lighter routine to ease them back into things — and a plain breakfast, I had the rest of the morning to myself.

I thought about going back to my book again, but then I remembered Marie’s reaction the day before to finding out Mash didn’t know how to swim at all and her even worse reaction around the time I first joined to finding out what her father had done to Mash, and what needed to be done about that seemed suddenly quite clear to me.

That was why, instead of going to my room, I made my way to Marie’s office, where she would undoubtedly be filing some of the paperwork for our recent Rayshift and all of the resources we’d spent doing it. Sure enough, when her door whooshed open, I found her at her desk, pouring over a sheaf of paper, with a pile of more organized into two foot-high stacks nearby.

When she looked up and found me in her doorway, her brow furrowed. “Taylor,” she said by way of greeting. “Is there something wrong?”

“I talked with Mash yesterday afternoon,” I told her, “and she agreed easily enough. I’m going to start her swimming lessons later today, while the twins are with El-Melloi II.” And then I added, “I think you should be there, too.”

Marie startled. “What?”

“You should help me teach Mash how to swim,” I said plainly and bluntly.

Marie flinched, her already pale face turning even whiter.

“Th-that’s not…” she began. “I-I couldn’t possibly…th-there’s too much for me to do! I’m the Director!”

I wasn’t going to let her use that as an excuse.

“Two years ago, you took hours out of your day to help a crippled girl learn to walk and talk again,” I reminded her mercilessly. “For six whole months, you supervised her recovery, despite also having other responsibilities that you needed to see to, and for almost eighteen months more, you took more time out of your day to teach her everything she needed to know to have a place in your organization — not just a place, but a coveted spot on your vanguard team.”

“Th-that was different!” Marie insisted. “A-and back then, we still had a full staff!”

“Maybe,” I allowed, “but that’s not why you don’t want to do it, is it?”

She flinched again, head dropping, and her bottom lip found its way between her teeth, as sure a sign as any that I’d hit the nail on the head. I stepped closer, made my way up to her desk, and leaned in a little.

“I haven’t forgotten what you were like when you found out what your father did to Mash,” I murmured softly. Her head jerked up to look at me. “Back then, all that time you spent watching over me was as much a way of distracting yourself from having to think about it as anything else.”

Her hands curled into fists. Even though she didn’t say anything, that was an answer in its own way.

“I could tell you as much as I want that you’re not at fault,” I went on, “that Mash doesn’t blame you for any of it, and I just have to watch the way she talks to you to know it, but that isn’t going to stop you from feeling guilty about it, is it?”

“Th-the things my father did to her,” Marie said, voice quivering, “and I had no idea…”

And one of these days, I was going to get the full, unvarnished truth about what exactly those things were. My imagination conjured up images of the monstrosities Bonesaw had created back when the Nine visited Brockton Bay, but that didn’t quite fit for obvious reasons, chief among them that Mash wasn’t some cobbled together mass of twisted flesh.

“So you’re just going to run away from it whenever someone reminds you?”

“I can’t change any of it!” she burst out. She bit her lip so hard that it turned white, and her head fell again. “I can’t change any of it, and there’s nothing I could possibly do to make it better. M-Mash…has every right to hate me, and the fact that she doesn’t…”

“So you’re just going to torture yourself?” I asked. “Take all of that blame and turn it into guilt to make up for the fact that Mash doesn’t hate you even a little bit? Like it’s some kind of penance for your father’s sins?”

“Somebody has to, don’t they?” she demanded. “And as his daughter… As the one who inherited both his Magic Crest and his position as Director of Chaldea, it has to be me!”

I wanted to call it twisted. To point out that, as I understood the sequence of events, Romani was here and taking care of Mash for longer than she was Director, and he, as a grown man and a medical professional, hadn’t been able to stop whatever Marisbury had done to her, so even if Marie had known and tried to intervene, she wouldn’t have been able to stop her father. That if, in that case, Romani couldn’t be blamed for what Marisbury had done, then Marie couldn’t either.

But guilt didn’t work on logic like that. It made excuses and invented reasons to be right, to justify its existence, and I wasn’t Doctor Yamada. I couldn’t coach Marie into forgiving herself.

“Then do something about it.”

Her head jerked up again, and I met her gaze firmly.

“If you feel like you have to share some of the blame for what happened to Mash,” I went on, “then actually do something to try and make things right. Your father only gave Mash the things she needed to be a member of Chaldea, right? The stuff she would need to do her job. So give her what she needs to be a person.”

Marie’s eyes turned down, towards her desk. “I… I don’t…”

I reached out and took one of her balled up fists, laying my hand over hers, and softer, I said, “I can teach her how to swim. I have the training for it. So you…you can teach her how to enjoy it.”

“I…” Her voice trembled. “I don’t know if I can. I-I’m not… I-I’ve heard what everyone says about me, b-behind my back. About how…how h-hard I am on everyone. How mean. B-but I don’t…”

I don’t know how to be anything else, she couldn’t finish saying, but I heard it anyway.

“Have you ever tried?” I asked gently.

The furrow of her brow was more of an answer than anything she could have said aloud. I pulled my hand away from hers.

“I’m not going to force you right now,” I told her. “Take a few days, if you have to. But once she’s got the basics down, I’m not going to let you run away from this.”

Slowly, I turned and walked away. I gave her ample time to call out to me, to stop me, to say anything else at all, but she let me leave without so much as another word. I couldn’t see if she looked up to watch me go, and I didn’t want to make myself look less confident by looking back to check, but the door whooshed shut behind me in an otherwise empty silence.

For a moment longer, I stayed and listened, but of course, even if she started sobbing or something, the room was soundproofed, so I wouldn’t have heard anything through that door anyway.

The only thing I could do just then was leave and go about the rest of my day, so I did.

Lunch was much the same as breakfast had been: not bad, better than what we’d been eating back when we had the full kitchen staff, in fact, but missing the spark that was Emiya’s cooking. Rika’s opinion very obviously fell along the same lines, because again, she didn’t look like she was enjoying it much herself.

The anticipation hung in the air, heavy but unspoken. Emiya would come back, and all would be right in the world, or at least the kitchen and the cafeteria. It was just a matter of a few more hours and Da Vinci letting us all know, and then we could go back to feasting like royalty.

Rika wasn’t the only one looking forward to it.

The hour and a half afterwards, I spent reading some more of my novel while I waited for my food to digest, and then, right around the time the twins would be heading off for their next lesson in the fundamentals of magecraft with El-Melloi II, I stuck my bookmark between the pages to save my place, set my book aside, and made my way towards the pool. The adjacent locker rooms first, more specifically, because I happened to be one of the people who had been issued a standard swimsuit by Chaldea.

After all, I had been dropped off here with — quite literally — nothing to my name but the clothes on my back. Marie had offered to get me something more personalized, but quite frankly, I didn’t care enough to bother. It meant something to me that she had offered, but it wasn’t like I had an hourglass figure or a bust worth showing off, so a standard, solid color one-piece was fine.

Of course, the one thing I hadn’t been able to compromise on — literally hadn’t had the luxury to compromise on it — was the swimming goggles with my prescription fitted into the lenses. It was by no means the biggest thing Marie had done for me, nor even the most expensive, but the fact that she cared enough for something that would have been so minor by comparison spoke more to her character than anything she might have said or done in her position as Director.

I made sure to grab a swimsuit that looked like it would fit Mash while I was there. It wasn’t like her standard outfit as a Servant didn’t already give me a fairly decent idea of her proportions, so it wasn’t hard.

I also grabbed a pair of towels on my way out and padded down the hallway in my bare feet, trying to ignore the shivers that shuddered up and down my spine, because the room might have been fairly warm and humid, but the floors were still chilly.

A voice up ahead told me that Mash was already there and waiting, so as I rounded the corner and came out into the room with Chaldea’s Olympic-sized swimming pool, I held out the extra swimsuit.

“Mash —”

Only whatever I’d been about to say died on my tongue, because Marie, dressed in a dark, frilly one-piece decorated with an artistic rendering of the celestial spheres, already stood there with her. When they heard my voice, they both turned to me.

“Oh,” said Mash. “Hello, Miss Taylor.”

“…Mash,” I greeted her. I looked towards Marie. “Director.”

She didn’t answer the question I didn’t actually ask, she just acted like there was nothing at all unusual or strange happening. As though I hadn’t all but threatened to drag her down here if she didn’t muster the courage to come down here of her own volition.

“Well?” said Marie, a little impatiently. “Now that we’re all here, let’s get started already!”

I had to fight down a smile. I wasn’t sure how successful I was.

“Of course, Director.”