Chapter CXXIX: Sword and Sorcery

I had no idea how long I was out for. It could have been hours, it could have been days, and in some atrophied part of me that didn't often see the light of day, I could admit that I wasn't sure I was going to wake up at all. Coughing up blood like that usually wasn't a good sign, and in a world without Panacea or another healer of similar talent, there weren't a lot of ways to fix it. Not if less than an hour of exposure was enough to do that much damage.

I didn't dream. I didn't revisit old memories. My life certainly didn't flash before my eyes. I was out completely and utterly, and I had no sense of my own self, let alone what was happening outside of my own head. I couldn't even feel the phantom skitter of my swarm.

Eventually, however, awareness started to return to me. For a time longer, I floated on a cloud, neither awake nor fully asleep, drifting along painlessly and thoughtlessly through a gentle doze. The world passed me by in a wordless, motionless hum, and I had only the vaguest impression of warmth to my one side and something pressing up and down along my body.

How long I spent like that, I had no idea either. It could have been minutes, it could have been hours, it could have been days. On the distant edge of my mind, my swarm buzzed, going about the usual business of bugs inside of homes, and the hum of their activity formed a kind of comforting cocoon of stability around me.

Some time later, a smell prickled at my nose, a familiar smooth smell that another long-buried part of me associated with a happier time, with love and comfort and tender kisses on the crown of my head, and the lone pair of tears that carved a trail down my temples and into my hair served as the jolt to pull me back to consciousness. I took in a sharp, halting breath — and that, free of the urge to cough up my internal organs, finished the job.

"She's waking up!" someone said.

The pressure I'd been feeling across my back and thighs solidified into fabric and cushioning, and I reached out blindly with my hands — one smacked into the back of what must have been some kind of furniture and the other flailed in the open air. The unexpected lack triggered a panicked reflex, and one of my legs kicked out, sliding down and landing with a heavy thunk on a wooden floor.

A couch. I was laid across a couch.

"Easy, now," a gentle, wizened voice said as a strong hand leveraged itself behind my back to help me up. "No need to rush, my dear girl, no need to rush."

My eyes blinked open, and I looked up into the bearded face of a man who had to be somewhere in his fifties or sixties, with silvery hair down to his shoulders and a kind smile gracing his mustached lips.

Some part of me burned at being treated like an invalid, but I had no idea where I was or who this man was, so I let him help me sit up, and in the process, I discovered I was in a living room of some kind. A…parlor, I think was the term the British used. Behind the stranger was a roaring fireplace, complete with the most stereotypical red rug patterned in gold, a mantle clock (of course), and wallpaper so Victorian that it was almost physically painful to look at. To the left, a chair and a footstool, the cushions made with a jade green fabric.

And to the right —

"Senpai!"

— the twins and Mash, looking so relieved that Rika seemed to be on the verge of tears.

"You're okay!" they all said.

"You gave everyone quite the scare," the older man said. "Luckily, your friends were able to bring you to me before any permanent damage was done. I was able to fix you up without any trouble."

I looked at him, trying not to make it obvious as I took in the entirety of his appearance. "You?"

He didn't dress like a Victorian Englishman. The burgundy robe — or perhaps it was a cloak — fastened at his right shoulder, the squat, felt hat of the same color that looked like some kind of cross between a beret and a chef's toque, the tunic that fell below his knees, the old-fashioned breeches and leather shoes, it all looked like it belonged more at a Renaissance fair than a Victorian parlor.

That meant he was almost certainly a Servant. Based upon the outfit alone, I was willing to bet Caster, although something else wasn't impossible. The lack of a visible weapon didn't mean he wasn't a Saber or a Lancer.

Beep-beep!

"Taylor!" Marie said almost as soon as I answered. Her eyes raked me up and down, looking, no doubt, for the slightest sign that anything was still wrong, despite the fact that she had sensors to read out my vitals that could tell her that better than my appearance ever could.

I didn't begrudge her it, though. Seeing something for yourself was always more reassuring than looking at dry readouts on a screen or sheet of paper. Considering how much I'd had to deal with it myself on her behalf the last couple months, I knew better than most just how helpless she must have felt watching my vitals plummet while unable to do anything about it.

"Director."

"Thank goodness!" said Romani, pushing his way into the frame. "That was dangerously close, you know! When your vital signs started to drop, I was afraid…" He caught himself and cleared his throat. "I-I mean, there was some concern about your health once the fog proved to be more poisonous than we expected. None of us were expecting for you to be affected that quickly, a-and we couldn't reach you to warn you about what was happening."

While he monopolized attention, no one else seemed to notice Marie's face contort as she bit her lip and closed her eyes, head hanging. She must have been gripping her workstation with white-knuckled hands.

This time, her fears weren't unfounded, and this time, I was the cause of her distress. I wanted to offer her some kind of comfort or reassurance, but not only was I not entirely sure what I could do, now wasn't the time or place, and I couldn't reach through the hologram and give her hand a squeeze to let her know I was still here.

"Yes," said the stranger, "that mist is quite insidious, isn't it? Unfortunately, there hasn't been much we could do about it in the short time that we've had to work on the issue."

"Ah…" Romani coughed into his hand awkwardly. "Th-that's right, there's also that to worry about, isn't there? U-um… Lord…Caster…?"

The stranger laughed gently and smiled. "No need for such formalities. To answer the question I believe you were attempting to ask, yes, I am a Servant of the Caster class. I'm an alchemist by trade."

"A-and the other one?" Marie asked. She still hadn't lifted her head back up.

"Other one?" I cut in.

"Ah," said Caster. "Yes, I suppose you were unconscious, weren't you?"

"We ran into another Servant on the way here," Ritsuka explained. "She's the one who led us to this apartment. It just, well, also happened to be the same one we needed to go to, because it sits directly on top of that Ley Line Terminal Director Marie told us to find."

"W-we were pretty lucky!" Rika sniffled. "Th-this guy was already here, so we…"

She trailed off. A familiar hand landed on my shoulder.

"We didn't need to go looking for a doctor," Arash told me. "Caster here was able to heal you on his own."

Convenient, that we'd run into a Caster who could heal people and deal with the damage the fog had done to me. Or was that another instance of the Counter Force arranging circumstances so that events went a certain way in furtherance of its end goal?

I hated that the answer was probably "yes," even if it all tended to work out in my favor.

How long was I out? I asked Arash.

Not long, he answered. Only a few hours. Caster did quick work.

A short glance at the clock on the mantle confirmed it; if it was still accurate, then it was a little after four in the afternoon.

"I see." I turned back to Caster. "Thank you for your help."

"It was no trouble at all," he demurred. His lips pulled down into a frown. "It was the least I could do, quite frankly, considering how little I've been able to do for the townsfolk here in London. I've been quite spectacularly useless since my summoning, if I'm being completely honest. It was good to finally have something good I could accomplish."

A new face appeared suddenly at the threshold leading to the next room over, a mop of blond hair pulled into a messy ponytail. "Hey! I thought I heard that lady is awake?"

"Sir Mordred!" Mash yelped.

My head jerked over towards the new person sharply. Mordred? As in the infamous traitor who led to the fall of Camelot and the death of King Arthur? That Mordred?

Caster sighed. "And here's the 'other one' you were asking about."

"Mo-chan!" Rika greeted one of mythology's most notorious villains.

Mordred smirked.

"Yo."

And in walked another King Arthur doppelganger, from her height straight to her body type, only she was dressed even more ridiculously than Emperor Nero. Hell, she wasn't even really wearing a shirt, just a strip of cloth over her breasts and a pair of detached sleeves that covered most of her arms, and the less that was said of the cutout skirt and the chaps she wore on her legs, the better.

I think it said something about my experiences so far that I wasn't much fazed by it, after the initial moment of surprise. It really couldn't compare, after all, to the bondage gear Spartacus had worn, and it was actually more conservative than Altera's…I honestly didn't have any words for whatever it was Altera had worn.

I could at least compliment her physique. She didn't have quite as much tone as Aífe, but the ridiculousness of her outfit showed off a lean, muscled body that was very obviously used to combat.

Also, she was female. And I suppose that made sense, considering King Arthur was a woman, but that just brought up the question of how Morgan had gone about making a "son" for King Arthur without King Arthur having the necessary parts. I wasn't sure I wanted an actual answer to that, though, all things considered, because I was fairly sure it would just give me a headache.

"What's up?" she greeted me. "Guess you're all better now, huh? You looked like shit when I first saw you."

"She found us while we were carrying you here," Ritsuka told me. "At first, she threatened to fight us when she thought we were trying to attack this place —"

"Hey, you lot looked suspicious!" Mordred protested. "Ain't just anybody who'd be running about in the mist like that!"

"— but once she saw Arash carrying you, she helped us fight off another wave of those…we're calling them automata, right?"

"That's the name Da Vinci gave them," Romani confirmed.

"She helped us fight off another wave of those automata and led us back here, so Caster could heal you," Ritsuka finished. "On the way, she introduced herself as Sir Mordred, a Knight of the Round Table."

"Also a Saber class Servant," Mordred added proudly, grinning.

"I see." I turned my head to look over at the threshold. "And the third?"

There was a pause, and everyone else looked over there, too, and then a few moments later, a breathy sigh sounded from the next room and a man who actually looked like he belonged in this time period — wearing a vest, an overcoat, and a nice shirt, complete with a cravat fastened at the base of his neck — walked in, smiling apologetically.

"Damn," muttered Mordred, "been a while since I've seen someone do shit like that."

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"My apologies for hiding myself away," the man said. "It wasn't my intention to deceive you, simply to avoid overcrowding you in your convalescence."

"He was here, too," Rika said unnecessarily. "This place is his apartment, so I guess he's our landlord for now."

"Your host, more appropriately. It is only proper that I might offer my home to you in your quest to restore this city to its proper state." He pressed a hand to his chest. "I am Doctor Henry Jekyll, scholar and scientist. I have some talent with chemicals and elixirs, though I'm afraid I've little skill in actual magery, and I'm not a Heroic Spirit as these two fine people are."

Mordred snorted. "Fine people, he says."

My brow furrowed. "Jekyll?"

As in Jekyll and Hyde? That Henry Jekyll? The character from Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, by Robert Louis Stevenson?

"Yeah," Romani said. "We noticed that, too, when Mash and the others made contact after being given permission to use the apartment to access the Ley Line Terminal. There doesn't appear to be any relation to the character of the same name from the novel. For now, it seems that it's just a strange coincidence."

I wasn't sure about that, but… He didn't have the presence of a Servant, and when I tried to examine him with my Master's Clairvoyance, I came away with nothing.

"At least he's not making us pay rent," said Rika. "Which is great, because I didn't exactly bring any money with me."

"Your companions were kind enough to inform me of the circumstances of your presence here," Jekyll said. "That is why, as I said, it seemed only proper to offer you my home for the duration, since your purposes align with those of Sir Mordred and our mutual friend."

"You may as well refer to me as Abraham," said Caster. "There seems little point indeed in hiding behind my class title. It is, I confess, a little gauche as well."

"Abraham," said Mash, surprised, "as in, the father of Isaac from the Bible?"

"Huh," said Rika. "You don't look like an Abe to me."

"I'm afraid I'm not quite that old, my dear," Caster said good-naturedly. "Truthfully, I'm not even sure history remembers me properly, so it may not do you much good to look up my story. I wound up famous for the parts of my life that people really had no business knowing."

So that was how he was going to play it, was he? Fine. I could let it go for now.

I closed my eyes and leaned back on the couch, using that as cover to reach out along the thread connecting me to Jeanne Alter. Through her eyes, I saw the world outside and the thick fog that still permeated everything, covering the streets and blotting out the midday sun. She must have been standing guard, but I wasn't sure how much good it would do, considering she didn't seem any better able to see in that fog than I had been.

"Emiya and Jeanne Alter are keeping watch?" I asked Rika.

It was Arash who answered me. "As much as they're able to with the fog being so thick."

"Barring an Assassin, the bounded field I set up should warn us of an incoming enemy with plenty of time to spare," Caster said confidently. And then, he sighed. "Unfortunately, Sir Mordred and I can say for certain that there is at least one Assassin wandering the streets, so it's not entirely out of the realm of possibility."

Mordred scowled. "Yeah. Slippery bastard. They killed a woman in the street a few days ago and then managed to escape us when we ran after them." She clicked her tongue. "Can't even remember what they looked like is the frustrating part. Some kind of skill or something that makes you forget everything about 'em after the battle is over."

"Wait, really?" asked Rika. "That's cheating!"

"You can't remember anything about them at all?" Ritsuka asked.

"Not a thing," Mordred replied.

That was…inconvenient. So this mysterious Assassin could walk up to us without anyone realizing who they were and stab any one of us in the back? Maybe I really would have to introduce Master-Stranger Protocols to the team. That didn't sound as bad as Nice Guy or as absolute as Imp's powers were, but I could definitely think of half a dozen ways to abuse something like that. We might just have to have a policy of automatically assuming anyone new we met in the city was an enemy.

That was going to do a number on everyone's nerves.

"It means that our elusive Assassin is something of an enigma," Caster said. "Indeed, they could be anyone and anywhere, and we would not know we had encountered them until after the fact, and by then, all memory of their appearance would be gone."

Unfortunately, I couldn't think of any other way around an ability like that right now. Not without knowing if it could erase more than just a person's memories. Because if it erased all records, including electronics and written reports, then even writing their appearance down on my arm wouldn't work.

"Let's work back up to that," I began. "You said this Assassin killed a woman in the streets a few days ago."

Caster nodded. "Yes."

"Meaning you've been here at least that long."

"That's correct."

"So how long has this fog been around then?"

Caster grimaced. Mordred muttered, "Too fucking long already."

"Today will be the fourth day," said Jekyll. "For the past three nights, the fog has descended upon the city in the afternoon and persisted until the next morning. The newspaper stopped reporting after the first day."

"Newspaper?" the twins and Mash all echoed.

"Yes," said Jekyll. "I have it here."

He went back into the other room for a moment and picked something up off of his desk, and when he returned, he was carrying a folded paper that he handed over to me. The twins and Mash crowded around, leaning over so that they could read it, too.

On the front page, I was greeted at the top with an artist's rendering of the British Museum in ruins, the Grecian columns lying in rubble and the edifice crumbling to the ground. The headline grabbed attention by demanding an answer to the question of who could possibly have destroyed such a cultural landmark, and the article itself spouted some xenophobic rhetoric that was all but useless in determining the actual culprit.

There were other articles on the first page, however, including one warning about the dangers of the fog and bidding the people of London to stay indoors if they had weak constitutions, and further in, there was another headline, smaller than the main one at the top but still much larger than the surrounding text:

TRAGEDY IN WHITECHAPEL

I didn't read the whole article, but what I skimmed of it confirmed what the headline basically already told me: the Ripper murders were already in full swing. Whether or not the fog would stop him or just accelerate them by using them as a catalyst to summon himself as a Servant, we wouldn't be able to answer just yet. Not for sure.

But I had a feeling that we already knew. After all, our mysterious Assassin had been caught in the act of murdering a woman on the streets, hadn't he? And he had a skill or a Noble Phantasm that made people forget what he looked like after he escaped from battle, to the point where, as far as we could tell, his defining feature right now was that he had no defining features.

At least it seemed we'd had the luck to avoid him when we first got here. If the others had had to fight him while I was slowly being poisoned by the fog, then things could have turned out really bad.

"Wait," said Rika, "Whitechapel? Onii-chan, isn't that where you said that Jack the Ripper guy was going around killing people?"

"Yeah," Ritsuka replied. "I guess…he really has already started killing, hasn't he?"

"Well, I do have some good news for you guys," said Romani. "If that newspaper is accurate, I don't think you'll have to worry about the Mage's Association sticking their noses into things. The entrance to the Clock Tower is located in the British Museum, and if it's been destroyed, then they might just be stuck inside for the entirety of your deployment."

"A bit of a double-edged sword," said Caster. "True, it removes the possibility that a magus of a particularly unscrupulous nature might interfere in our purpose here, but it also affords the culprit a degree of freedom of action that they might not otherwise have had, were the Association able to intervene."

I was more inclined to agree with Romani, that this was good news. The longer I could put off dealing with the Association and its politics — especially where my very existence was concerned — the better.

"It's not impossible that a few magi might have had offsite workshops and avoided being trapped," Marie said, and although her expression was painfully fragile, she'd regained enough of her composure to speak clearly. "All the more so if they're less orthodox and practice magecraft that the Association itself might frown upon. If you do happen to meet a magus, the absolute last thing you should do is trust him."

"A good point," Caster agreed. "For now, however, all merely theoretical. It might perhaps behoove us all to discuss something with more immediate ramifications…?"

"Yes," said Jekyll. "The mist."

Marie's face settled into a hard mask. "What do you know?"

"About the source and the culprit, not as much as we would prefer," Jekyll answered. "They have proven elusive and difficult to locate, despite our best efforts."

Mordred scoffed. "Bunch of scared little pansies, hiding behind the fog so we can't stop 'em from doing whatever they like."

Jekyll nodded at Caster. "Abraham, however, should be able to provide you with somewhat greater detail."

"Yes," said Caster. "Firstly, allow me to clarify: the mist itself does not persist indefinitely. It subsides for several hours in the morning, allowing the citizenry of the city to leave their homes long enough to procure sustenance and refill their larders. If this continues for long enough, that will be essential to maintaining their health and well-being, because after noon, the mist begins to return, and shortly thereafter, it extends to cover the majority of the city, forcing everyone indoors to avoid certain death."

"As Miss…?" Jekyll tilted his head my way.

"Taylor."

"As Miss Taylor has discovered," said Jekyll, "the mist itself is a virulent toxin. It is difficult to say how many have also learned this lesson in so personal a manner, but a rough estimate would calculate that several thousand unfortunate souls have already departed this mortal coil, with particular concentration occurring in the less affluent sections of the city. Those, in other words, who lack the housing necessary to take shelter from the fog and those whose homes are not secure enough to prevent it from encroaching."

"The poor died first," I concluded grimly. As it always was.

Jekyll smiled. It didn't meet his eyes. "Quite."

"The problem lies in the density of magical energy in the fog itself," Caster continued. "It means that ordinary methods of protection — face masks and such the like — offer little to no protection whatsoever. Magi might be able to resist for longer, and perhaps those with sturdier constitutions might weather the damage better, but eventually, they too will succumb. I said that the brief window in the mornings offers a bit of a reprieve, but if this goes on too long, then the city itself will slowly suffocate, and London as a whole will be lost."

"London, covered in a toxic fog," Mash muttered. "Something like this is supposed to happen next century, in the 1950s, but it's also happening now, almost seventy years early."

"Which means this is almost certainly the result of whoever is using the Grail," said Ritsuka.

Almost certainly. How they were using it, well, that part wasn't necessarily immediately obvious. It was tempting to jump straight to the fog, but it was possible that the fog was a Noble Phantasm of some kind or some sort of large scale magecraft meant to obscure what the Grail was actually being used for. I was leaning a little more towards that, since someone had gone to such an effort to keep the Mage's Association uninvolved.

"That is most likely," Caster agreed. "Fortunately, this has only been going on for about three days now. We've all arrived here early enough that it is still possible to prevent a greater tragedy than the lives already lost."

"The fog, however, is not the only trouble which we have already encountered," said Jekyll. "The autonomous constructs, Abraham?"

Caster grimaced. "Ah. Yes, there are those, as well. I believe you referred to them as automata earlier…?"

"The mechanical puppets, you mean," I said.

"I'm afraid that is only one type of autonomous construct wandering the fog," Caster told us. "There are also…I believe the term for them in the future is 'robots.' We've taken to calling them Helter Skelter —"

I kept my face schooled, because I was sure, whatever the reason they'd chosen that name, it had nothing to do with that particular serial killer.

"— and they have been found fighting alongside both these automata you've encountered and a collection of grotesque homunculi, according to Sir Mordred."

"They ain't that tough," Mordred added with a grunt. "More of a pain in the ass than anything else. They go down quick enough when I put my sword through them, same as anything else."

If we were assuming that meant she didn't have to use her Noble Phantasm to defeat them, then — a quick look at her stats told me — it shouldn't be that hard for any of our Servants to take them down, too. She might have a bit of a skewed perspective on it, though. The only one of our Servants who could match her blow for blow in raw strength was Siegfried, and all her other stats were at least above average, too.

"So they're probably meant as a distraction," I said. "Something to bog people down and get their attention if they can survive in the mist long enough to be a problem."

"And while they're distracted," Ritsuka continued my thought, "the Assassin can come up from behind and pick them off." He looked over at me. "We're…assuming this Assassin is Jack the Ripper, right?"

So he'd picked up on that after all.

"We are," I confirmed. "But that doesn't mean it's a guarantee."

I was willing to bet it was, though. Again, the fact that a woman had been targeted by this Assassin and killed for seemingly no reason, coupled with just how perfect a catalyst the current circumstances were, made it feel exceedingly obvious. It was only the fact that it was so obvious that made me suspect it could be anyone else at all.

"Tch." Mordred sneered. "That explains why the bastard likes hanging around me so much. One of these days, I'll catch him before he can slip away."

"You've fought him before?" asked Ritsuka. "Multiple times?"

Mordred grunted. "More often than I'd like. Seems like he's got it in for me. Dunno why he hates me so much, but if he'd just stick around long enough instead of cutting and running the instant I start fighting back, maybe I'll ask."

If this was Mordred's usual wear, then I would've been tempted to say Jack was after her because she was…well, female. Servants could selectively materialize their gear, however, so I was decently sure that Mordred went out on patrol in full armor. Unless Jack had some kind of skill that let him determine a person's sex even when they were hiding it, I doubted Mordred's equipment had anything to do with it.

"The…homunculi and Helter Skelter are new," said Romani, "but the rest of that matches with our data on this end, too."

"Is that all the more information you have?" asked Marie.

"I'm afraid so," said Caster ruefully.

"The rest, I fear, are merely obvious conclusions based upon what has already been said," Jekyll added. "The city has not been abandoned, but neither the government nor Scotland Yard seems equipped to handle the situation, not even to shore up the city's food supply. They will like as not be of little aid in the coming days."

Mordred grinned. "Meaning we gotta handle it without them. Fine by me. They woulda just gotten in the way anyway."

"That goes without saying," Marie said. "Ordinary humans have no business getting involved in fights between Servants. Having the authorities wandering around would have just been a hindrance."

"Although convenient in other ways," said Romani. "As it stands, uh, unless Doctor Jekyll happens to have enough food in stock to feed everyone…"

Jekyll grimaced and eyed the four of us. "If…it was only one or two extra mouths…"

Romani sighed. "Yeah. So it looks like we're going to have to dig into our food supplies to make sure the four of you can eat properly on this one. After all, I don't think supermarkets existed in that time period, so it's not as easy as popping down to the corner store every morning, is it?"

Caster stroked his beard thoughtfully. "And any food left out in their stalls when this all started has most certainly rotted by now. Yes, I suppose you will inevitably have to supply food for your comrades from your own stores."

"That brings up an important point," I said. "We've been assuming so far that we'll be working together, since we all seem to have the same goal, but I'd like to get some confirmation. Abraham, Doctor Jekyll, Sir Mordred, can we trust that you'll help us to retrieve the Holy Grail and correct this Singularity so that proper history can be restored?"

"But of course," said Caster.

Mordred grinned toothily. "If you can keep up with me, then I guess I ain't got any problems with lending you lot a hand."

"With the situation so dire, I fear it would be folly to deny any assistance," said Jekyll, "and so I will provide any help that I can towards achieving your goal, even if I can't promise it will be particularly substantial."

Romani sighed, relieved. "And our lucky streak continues."

"Lucky?" Marie hissed at him, but not quietly enough to avoid the microphone picking it up. "You think one of our Masters almost dying within the first hour is lucky?"

"No, no, of course not!" Romani said, holding up his hands. "I'm just saying, for every Singularity so far, they've found allies pretty quickly, and I'm glad London is the same! That's all I meant!"

Marie didn't seem placated, and her brow remained furrowed and her eyes furious, but she let it drop and subsided.

"So what now?" asked Rika. "We've got Mo-chan, Abe, and Two-face…" She grimaced and turned to Doctor Jekyll. "Sorry, that one's too mean, I'll come up with a better one."

Jekyll blinked at her, confused. "I…suppose it's no trouble?"

"Anyway," said Rika, "we've got the team together, so what do we do next?"

I frowned, and to Caster and Jekyll, asked, "You weren't able to find any clues about the fog's origin point? None at all?"

"None," Caster confirmed. "Sir Mordred and I went to the river yesterday to collect samples for testing, but the fog is so saturated with mana that it's leaked into the water, and the mana is so diffuse that determining a point of origin is nigh on impossible."

"Which means we're going to have to go out and look for clues the hard way, right?" Ritsuka concluded, resigned.

"I'm afraid so," said Caster ruefully. "As things stand, the only way it seems we might gather the intelligence necessary to determine the culprit's hiding place is to manually search the most likely spots in the city where he might have positioned himself."

"The whole city?" Rika asked, horrified.

Depending on whether or not we found him in the most obvious spots? It might wind up being closer to that than not.

"If we have to."

Rika looked at me with exaggerated despair, like I'd just told her that Santa Claus wasn't real.

"On the subject of gathering intelligence and searching for clues, I have a request for you, Mister Ristuka, Miss Rika, Miss Mash," said Jekyll. "First, to confirm, the three of you were unaffected by the mist, yes? That is, none of you experienced the effects of prolonged exposure that your companion here suffered?"

"None," said Ritsuka.

"We're fine, Doctor Jekyll," said Mash.

"Somehow, their contract with Mash has granted Ritsuka and Rika some kind of poison resistance ability," Romani informed him. "I'm sure there's a limit, but they should be fine to go out in the mist for at least short periods."

Jekyll nodded. "Then if I might impose upon you, I would like you to accompany Mordred on a small errand. I have cultivated a small intelligence network over the last few days, you see, and one of my collaborators has been out of contact since this morning. If the four of you could see to it to ensure his continued good health, I would be incredibly grateful."

The twins shared a look, then the both of them looked briefly at me, but I didn't give them any sign that they should say no, so they turned back to Jekyll and nodded.

"Sure, we can go check on this guy for you," said Rika. "And hey, maybe he'll have something for us to look into, so we don't have to search the whole goddamn city!"

"Who are we going to check up on?" Ritsuka asked.

"I'm grateful," Jekyll told them with a smile. "He's a bit of an eccentric, but Victor Frankenstein is a good man and a valuable friend. Ensuring that no ill has befallen him would be a godsend."