Interlude S (CT): From the Sidelines
Sylvia was a classically trained magus, with all of the pitfalls that implied. She knew the basics of magecraft, had been taught all of the fundamentals expected of her as a magus of the modern era, and her talent had been exceptional enough to first get her a placement in the Clock Tower’s halls of academia, and then later at the Chaldea Security Organization itself.
As a magus, however, “above average” was considered the bare minimum at the Clock Tower, and by the time she had joined Chaldea, all of the important, groundbreaking work had already been done. There was no SHEBA for her to contribute to, no CHALDEAS which might need her expertise to complete, no LAPLACE for her to help calibrate. She was merely one middling magus among several who had thought she might make a name for herself in a place where she would be as a giant among hunched and hobbled masses.
Chaldea was only too happy to disabuse her of the notion.
Looking back on it now, she was embarrassingly arrogant about it all. She had thought she would come in from the Clock Tower, where she was just another fish in an enormous pool of talent and genius, and be a shark among minnows. She had come in to be a Master candidate, trusting that her skills would place her in their vaunted vanguard and earn her the prestige of being so important a member of the team.
And then her test results came back and showed she was completely incompatible with the Rayshift technology. At that point, it didn’t matter whether she had the capacity to be a top tier Master or not, irrespective of the FATE System’s notoriously finicky nature, because being a Master candidate at all meant having enough compatibility with Rayshifting to actually deploy when the time came. Sylvia hadn’t even bothered to check her grading, because there was no point. Even if it had told her she was a top tier Master candidate, it would have just been an insult to injury, salt in the wound.
She could have left, after that. But she didn’t have anywhere else to go anymore, not after she left the Clock Tower so full of the certainty that she would make it at Chaldea, so she settled for an ordinary position on the staff. It was a humbling experience, and in hindsight, maybe the one she needed the most at the time.
Sylvia might not have been early enough to contribute to any of the big projects, but she was, however, early enough to be on the staff when Marisbury was still around. She had the chance to watch his hand-picked candidates fill out the roster for Team A, and also the chance to watch his daughter, Olga Marie Animusphere, apply for the same position Sylvia herself had…and flunk out just as badly.
It was hard not to feel some sympathy for the girl — nearly a decade younger than Sylvia was — not when she knew exactly what Olga Marie was going through. She had heard on the grapevine in the Clock Tower how her father had even abandoned her training in order to focus on an apprentice who showed more promise and talent, the selfsame Kirschtaria Wodime who came to be the leader of Chaldea’s Team A.
Sylvia could only imagine how much that must have stung.
Of course, it was hard to hold onto that sympathy when Marisbury died suddenly and Olga was all but thrust into the position of filling his shoes, a job she turned out to be very bad at — and something for which she made everyone under her who ever even shared the same air as her suffer. Any sympathy Sylvia had for all of the misfortune that had befallen Olga Marie Animusphere died a swift death the first time she was berated for not being up to standard by even the slightest bit.
What did it matter if she was two minutes late on a deadline, or a day behind on this particular piece of a project? It wasn’t like Sylvia’s work was all that important. She was another cog in a machine, as easily replaced as anyone except for people like Romani Archaman, Kirschtaria Wodime, or Lev Lainur. She wasn’t even on the main Command Room staff, she was just a substitute who got stuck with the graveyard shift.
It wasn’t like Olga had much room to talk either. Everyone could see she struggled under the weight of being Director, and some of the decisions she made were nonsensical or obvious attempts to fill shoes way too large for her. The influx of other Master candidates was just one example amongst many, because you only had to look at the profiles and compatibility results on all of them to see that there was no way any of them measured up to people like Wodime or even Kadoc, who was the most lackluster member of Team A.
Everyone could also see just how much she leaned on Lev Lainur to keep herself afloat, and that was its own kind of pathetic. It didn’t take long at all for people to start muttering about how the only reason Olga Marie Animusphere even got the position of Director was because her father was Marisbury Animusphere, the previous one. Sylvia’s own patience had been worn too thin to even think about coming to Olga’s defense, to the point where she let herself join in and whisper her own grievances to her colleagues.
“Although I guess that didn’t last forever, did it?” Sylvia muttered to herself.
“What was that?” said Duston. “You say something, Sylvia?”
“Hm? Oh. Nothing,” she told him. “Just thinking out loud.”
“Not like there’s much else for us to do right now, I guess,” he allowed. “The readings on the next Singularity are still fluctuating too wildly to make any sense of, which means we just get to sit here and pretend we understand what we’re looking at.”
“Mm.”
Sylvia took a chance and looked at the large, glass windows that overlooked the Rayshift Chamber, and in the reflection, the Director’s terminal remained empty. Both that flake, Romani, and Olga Marie were still consulting with Da Vinci.
It had felt obvious, comparing the two, why Marisbury had all but tossed his heir aside. Marisbury had been possessed of a keen intellect and a firm hand, and both had let him steer Chaldea with confidence and competence. Olga had floundered every step of the way, and every month that passed, she seemed less and less in control of either herself or the situation.
There had even been a stretch where she had spent what seemed like weeks at a time locked up in her quarters. Why, Sylvia didn’t know, but on the rare moments she had shown her face, Olga was gaunt, haunted, and seemed frightened of her own shadow. She’d had trouble looking anyone in the eye and avoided Mash like the plague for no apparent reason.
Some of the others — the ones who had been at Chaldea since Marisbury first took it over — seemed to have some idea, but none of them had thought to share it. Sylvia had guessed that it had something to do with how Mash had been made, because the fact Mash was a designer baby made specifically for the Demi-Servant program wasn’t a secret, but Sylvia wasn’t privy to the details.
Olga was a magus regardless. Whatever those details were, they shouldn’t have bothered her one bit. A real magus dedicated to the craft wouldn’t have even flinched.
“Marisbury certainly didn’t,” Sylvia said under her breath. This time, Duston didn’t seem to hear her.
Just when that looked like it was over, Olga started disappearing again for days at a time, and even Professor Lev hadn’t known where to or why. Sylvia thought it was suspicious that Romani and even that Da Vinci were disappearing at the same time, but what they all could have been vanishing to do together, Sylvia had no idea.
The fact that it lasted for the better part of six months was all the more suspicious, and all the more frustrating. Here they all were, all of these technicians, operators, Master candidates, and even the janitorial staff, they were all doing their jobs, and yet the Director couldn’t even be bothered to be responsible enough to show up and lead them every day?
Maybe Marisbury had been right to leave Olga behind and pursue a more talented magus to be his apprentice. That was the general sentiment everyone had been feeling at the time.
Of course, Sylvia hadn’t thought much of it when Olga introduced her own, final addition to Team A to everyone — either of the decision itself or of the Master candidate they were being shown — except to derisively snort at the transparent attempt to actually contribute something of substance to Chaldea and its functioning. Taylor Hebert, a laughably common, ludicrously mundane name, so painfully much so that there was no way she was from a proper magus family.
And she was an American to boot.
Was that what those six months were for? Preparing that new “Master candidate” to act the way she was expected to? How ridiculous.
The only thing at all noteworthy about her aside from how completely forgettable she was as both a human being and a Master candidate was how sparse her personnel file was. Granted, Sylvia’s clearance wasn’t the highest, but the parts of it that weren’t completely redacted were so vague and useless that Sylvia had immediately written it all off at the time as a pathetic attempt at hiding Hebert’s origins so no one could criticize them.
Well, that, and the fact that her potential as a Master was ludicrously high. Higher than several members of Team A, in fact, and her Rayshift compatibility was up there with Kadoc’s.
But, Sylvia had thought, if Olga Marie was banking on those qualities to make up for an otherwise lackluster and mediocre Master candidate, then the stresses of being Director had obviously gone to her head and made her delusional. She wasn’t the only one who thought so among the staff, and several of the other mages had shared similar opinions.
Even the fact that something about her made the normally unflappable Beryl Gut nervous wasn’t really more than a curiosity.
The rest of Team A hadn’t apparently thought much of her either. Kadoc had been resentful to have her on the team — rightfully so, Sylvia thought at the time — and Pepe had been friendly enough to the girl. Wodime had even been professional enough to acknowledge her and welcome her onto the team.
But the indifference of Akuta, Daybit, and Ophelia spoke volumes, because if Taylor Hebert was really good enough to be among them, then she should have gotten more than silence or polite professionalism.
Mash didn’t count. Mash was friendly with everyone.
And then she started doing stuff like facing down Medusa by herself and saving the Director in Singularity F and carving out a wyvern’s brain in Orléans, and suddenly, Sylvia began to realize that Director Olga Marie might have known something that she hadn’t shared with the rest of the staff, something she hadn’t even shared with Lev Lainur. Something so secret and so important that Olga Marie was the only one in the whole organization, the whole facility, who knew what it was, aside from Hebert herself.
Even now. Even after everything. It was startling and almost scary how little they actually knew about Hebert and her past, what she had accomplished that had convinced Olga Marie to make Hebert into her ace Master.
“Do you think it’s true?” Sylvia asked Duston.
Duston turned to her, arching an eyebrow. “Hm? Do I think what’s true?”
“Hebert,” Sylvia clarified. “Do you think she actually killed a god?”
Duston’s mouth twisted, pulling and slackening as he thought about what to say. He wasn’t unattractive, Sylvia thought idly in the back of her mind, but then, she’d been stuck for almost six months with him and only a handful of other men, so that might have something to do with it when she wouldn’t have given him a second glance a year ago.
“I don’t know,” he eventually decided upon. “It certainly seems very fantastical, but… Well, you mage types would know better about that sort of thing than I do.”
Yes, she did, which was what made it sound all the more ludicrous. The Age of Gods was long over. Even into the modern era, there were certain ways to seek out the aid and influence of the Divine Spirits who remained of the ancient deities, but they were far and few between, and at least as hard as summoning a Heroic Spirit. A living god, complete with a divine corpus, in the modern era? Unheard of.
But if such a thing could exist, then…Sylvia didn’t know. Logically, the mystery behind its existence would be weaker by virtue of manifesting in the Age of Man, where the world was ruled by the laws of physics and not the Authorities of gods. It would be easier to kill, weaker, not nearly as dominating as it would have been in the ancient past.
Modern man was also weaker, however. Where once there might have been demigods like Heracles who possessed the power to fight back against an actual god, now there was no such thing. The act of fighting and killing a god would be all the more impossible.
Then again, the briefing had said Hebert hadn’t actually done the deed, she’d just led the fight. Maybe that was the secret. It was a lot less incredible if she had commanded a Servant with a legend of godslaying, although that also begged the question of where the Servant had come from in the first place. Some variant of Holy Grail War? There were rumors that lesser rituals were being performed around the world, although by the time Sylvia had joined Chaldea, she hadn’t heard anything conclusive.
“The enemy certainly seems to think it’s true,” she said.
A dark look crossed Duston’s face. “All things considered, I’m not sure we want to trust what Sol…what the King of Mages says. Not when we’re the only ones standing in the way of his plans.”
“Then what was the point of the briefing the Director gave us?”
Duston’s lips pursed. “I guess there has to be some truth to it, then,” he admitted. “And in that case…I think it’s better we have something like that on our side than not, right? Don’t get me wrong,” he added, “the Fujimarus are doing their best, but…”
Yeah. Without Hebert, there was no telling what battles they might have lost instead of winning. If she hadn’t noticed the game Nursery Rhyme was playing, would the others even have figured it out before the Nameless Forest got one or both of them killed? It wasn’t that there were countless examples of that sort of thing happening, but there had been enough moments where things might have gone completely differently if someone as cunning and experienced as Hebert had proven to be wasn’t there to tip things in Chaldea’s favor.
Even in Fuyuki alone… Sylvia liked Romani Archaman well enough as a human being, and he’d done a decent job as Director for the month or two where he’d been forced into the position, but everyone had been able to see how much it wore on him. How thin he’d been spreading himself to try and keep up with the responsibility of managing what was left of the organization. How essential Da Vinci had become to keeping both him and the rest of them from falling apart at the seams.
The man already swore by that Magi☆Mari nonsense. Sylvia shuddered to imagine how much he might have come to rely on that “wisdom” in order to carry himself forward if he’d been forced to shoulder the burden of command on his own for another six months.
“I almost wish they hadn’t told us,” said Octavia from Sylvia’s other side. She hadn’t even realized anyone else had even been listening. “It was fine enough when we could just write her off as being more experienced from whatever happened in her mysterious past. What are we supposed to tell the Association when this is all over?”
“I imagine we’ll all be forced to sign a Geas Scroll or something along those lines,” Sylvia said. “You heard the Director. She’s sure that the Association will force her to resign in the aftermath, which means we can’t expect her name to offer us any kind of protection. There’s no way she’ll let her ace Master get Sealed that easily, though.”
“No,” Octavia agreed. “She’ll definitely find a way to protect Hebert, and now we’ve got a practitioner of Primordial Runes in the facility. If she wants to keep us from talking, she definitely has options.”
“That’s right,” said Duston, “you’re a mage, too, aren’t you, Octavia?”
Octavia tucked a long strand of hair behind her ear, embarrassed. “For what that’s worth. Most of the magi who joined Chaldea were just second sons and heirs to minor families. You might not understand it, Duston, but before the first Singularity was detected and the final Master candidates chosen, Chaldea was considered just another observatory. No one cared and no one put much stock in Lord Animusphere’s vision.”
Thinking of Team A, Sylvia added, “With a few notable exceptions, of course.”
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.
Octavia shrugged, a half-hearted lift of one shoulder. “No one came here for the prestige of it, is what I mean. CHALDEAS, SHEBA, LAPLACE, those were all pet projects, and the only reason they were finished in the first place is because Lord Animusphere had so much money to invest in them that people like…Lev Lainur showed up to help make them real.”
Money could fill in where passion and drive failed, Sylvia thought wryly.
“Point is,” said Sylvia, “Hebert was right that there’s going to be a lot of questions when this is all over, and the Association won’t care that Lev Lainur pulled the wool over everyone’s eyes, including Marisbury’s, or that this whole thing is a plan spanning over two millennia. They’ll blame Olga Marie for what happened, so her position as Director is probably one of the first things that’ll go, and then they’ll strip this place bare trying to figure out how it could happen under everyone’s noses.”
“And we’ll all be brought in for questioning,” Duston concluded, scowling. “And without the Director there to shield us…”
None of them were going to get out of this unscathed.
It wasn’t the first time Sylvia had thought about it, and it chilled her insides every time. The Association tended to be overly pragmatic about a lot of things, but like any major organization, it also had internal politics. Olga Marie might lose just about everything when this was all over, but she was still a Lord, and she would still be afforded the protections of her own position.
The rest of them? No-names and heirs to minor families. It was entirely possible that they would all just disappear once the “official” inquiries were finished. The Fujimaru twins had talked about going back to their lives in Tokyo, returning to school, graduating, going to college…
Maybe, maybe, it would be enough. The combination of the UN having eyes on everything, the obvious assumption that Mash and Hebert, as the remaining members of Team A, had carried the team through everything, and just the lack of anything otherwise interesting about them. Maybe the Association would question them and let them go, with the standard caveats about maintaining the secrets of magecraft.
But Sylvia wouldn’t have bet on it.
“Almost makes you wonder if it’s even worth it, huh?” she asked with a mirthless smile.
Duston’s scowl deepened. “Just doesn’t seem right. If we make it through this, those kids will be responsible for saving the world — eight different times, if you count each Singularity separately — and that’s the thanks they’ll get?”
“Maybe we should keep that Jack the Ripper around,” said Octavia. “I can’t imagine she’ll be all that happy if the Association tries to take her mommy from her.”
And maybe someone should take one of the Grails they had recovered and use it to make sure nothing bad happened to any of them.
Well. As long as they could…edit the records to keep the more outlandish parts a secret, there was a chance they could all squeak past the Association’s interrogators, and if that had occurred to Sylvia, then Da Vinci had probably already thought of it and was working behind the scenes to put it into action. Sylvia had never thought much of her — and the fact it was a her in the first place was one of the reasons why, because the logic behind that decision had never made a lick of sense — but she had proven incredibly reliable in the last few months, regardless of her almost whimsical personality.
“There’s probably some sort of plan,” was what she said aloud. “But if it’ll be enough to satisfy the Association, well, that part, I’m not so sure on. And if it includes any of us instead of just the Director’s favorite Master —”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Octavia cut across her, uncharacteristically snappy. “You’ve been here at least as long as I have, Sylvia, so there’s no way you’ve missed it. How the Director’s changed since Hebert came along. Whatever else she might think of us, we’re the Director’s people, and she takes care of her people, doesn’t she?”
Sylvia’s mouth clicked shut. Octavia wasn’t wrong. The Director had changed since Hebert came onto the scene, and she’d changed even more after Hebert saved her life in Fuyuki. Not completely for the better, but then, Sylvia couldn’t exactly blame the woman for being a little off-kilter after having her entire world ripped down around her ears.
As pathetic as her dependency on Lev had been, she had depended on him. And then he’d not only tried to destroy her family’s legacy, he’d killed her and nearly condemned her to a fate worse than death.
Even for a magus, that sort of thing wasn’t easy to just walk off. Marisbury might have been able to, but then again, he’d supposedly committed suicide, so what did Sylvia really know about his mental fortitude, in the end?
“For that alone, none of the rest would matter to me,” Duston said. “The Olga Marie who first took the job as Director here was spiraling, and if something hadn’t happened to change that, she might not have even made it all the way to Fuyuki. But…I don’t know if…if bringing Hebert up to speed and preparing her to be a member of Team A helped distract her enough to get her head on straight or if that was just the project she needed to feel like she could handle the job. Either way, Hebert was a good enough influence that the Director we know now is… Well, not a completely different person, but much better for it.”
It wasn’t that Sylvia disagreed, but… She sighed. “I just wish the Director was a little less of a hard-ass about it.”
Octavia giggled, and Duston’s huff was deliberately intended to disguise the chuckle he got out of it.
“She’s…what, twenty-one? Maybe twenty-two?” said Duston. “Honestly, I’ve seen the type before. They come in, spitting fire and pissing brimstone, because they’re young and feel like they’re in way over their head, so they have to be extra hard and extra strict so that people don’t treat them like the kids they are.”
“Aren’t you just in your thirties, old man?” Meuniere asked from Duston’s other side, because apparently, none of them was being as quiet as they thought they were.
“Pretty sure I’m still the oldest person on the staff,” Duston replied with a grunt. “And isn’t that just an indictment of this whole thing? I’m more than young enough to find a girl and settle down someday, but somehow I’m the most senior person still alive in this place aside from maybe the Doctor.”
“It isn’t the years, it’s the mileage,” Sylvia quipped. It earned her another giggle from Octavia.
“If that’s the case, then I think Hebert is probably the oldest one here,” Meuniere said wryly. “Man, some part of me wants to take a peek at her unredacted personnel file, and then I think about all of the secrets I’m going to be sworn to once this is all over, and I wonder if it’s worth it to see the rest.”
“If even Lev didn’t get to see the whole thing, I don’t think any of us has a chance,” Sylvia drawled. She shook her head. “I don’t know what rock the Director dug her out from under, but I think it’s pretty obvious there was a whole circus under there with her.”
“Didn’t you read the whole briefing?” asked Octavia.
Sylva arched an eyebrow her way. “Did I miss something? I thought the whole thing about killing a god was pretty clear on its own.”
Octavia looked around, like she was worried an Enforcer was stalking the Command Room and looking for the slightest reason to Seal them all, then leaned closer, as though sharing a secret, and whispered, “I’m pretty sure Hebert isn’t from…around here.”
“Around here?” said Duston, bemused. Sylvia leaned closer, interested.
“The wording that was used to describe how Hebert wound up in Chaldea without anyone noticing her arrival,” Octavia clarified. “Chaldea is one of the most secure facilities on the planet. There aren’t many ways to bypass its security, or even to reach it, but if you have a method of crossing great distances without having to travel the intervening space between them…”
“You think the Wizard Marshal is involved?” Meuniere yelped, voice an octave higher than normal.
Octavia hissed, glancing around again, but no one materialized to drag them all off for interrogation. “Listen,” she whispered, “even Da Vinci herself is still working out how to safely traverse the Sea of Imaginary Numbers, and she’s nowhere near a breakthrough. At least the Operation of Parallel Worlds is something we know is possible.”
That…put a different sort of spin on things, didn’t it? The Wizard Marshal wasn’t particularly known for being meddlesome, but there were times when he put his thumb on the scale. Sylvia struggled to think of particular examples — except, really, the stories about the Wizard Marshal often had more to do with how much of a wreck his students turned out to be whenever he picked up an apprentice.
It said something that he was still the singular holder of the Second True Magic.
“You think he brought her here?” Sylvia asked incredulously.
“He approved of it, at least,” Octavia answered confidently. “If he did anything directly… Well, Tohsaka didn’t know for sure in London either, did he?”
“He works his work in mysterious ways,” Duston muttered wryly. “It’s been a hot minute since I heard that sort of thing.”
We’re not the Church, Sylvia wanted to say, but she got his point. At the end of the day, all they were doing was tossing around a theory based upon what little evidence they had. If Zelretch himself had gotten involved in Hebert’s placement in Chaldea, then the only one who might have had any evidence at all was the Director herself, and she had already gone to great lengths to hide it.
And if Zelretch wasn’t involved, but the Operation of Parallel Worlds still was, somehow…then it was all the more important that the Association never found out. They’d snatch Hebert up in a heartbeat to find out how she had crossed the boundaries between parallel worlds without the Wizard Marshal to do the deed. There was no way the Director didn’t already know that, and if she knew about it, there was no way she wasn’t already trying to figure out a way around it.
Octavia was right about one thing, at least. Whether or not the Director considered all of them her people, she obviously thought as much about Hebert, and she was holding onto Hebert jealously. She wouldn’t let her prize Master go easily, and if there was one thing she was likely to put up the hardest fight for against the Association, it was Hebert.
Especially after Fuyuki.
Maybe it was better that all they had were theories. After all, if they never knew for sure, then they could never tell the Association, and being as none of them was anything special as a magus, the Lords of the Clock Tower were just as likely to dismiss their theories as uneducated rumor mongering as they were to actually take them seriously.
“If the Wizard Marshal actually is involved,” said Sylvia, and it was a big if, “wouldn’t his word solve this whole problem in the first place?”
Octavia, who evidently hadn’t considered that angle, grimaced and had to allow, “Maybe. But no one knows why he does anything, so there’s nothing to say he’d do anything about it either way.”
And that put them squarely back in the ‘works his works in mysterious ways’ nonsense, which was about as helpful as it sounded.
Duston sighed. “However it is she got here, I’m glad she’s here. I don’t even want to think how much more of a mess the Director would be without her influence.”
“Or what it would be like to have the Doc as our full-time director,” Meuniere added.
Ugh. “Could you imagine?” Sylvia agreed. “Romani is a nice enough guy, but he’s a total flake. Do you remember what he was like when he was Acting Director? At any given moment, he was five minutes away from collapsing.”
“There’s a joke in there somewhere about the burden of command,” Duston said wryly. “At least he seems to be handling it better when he doesn’t have to do it all alone.”
“So is the Director, now that you mention it,” Octavia remarked. “Although I think Da Vinci is still the one holding this whole place together.”
“I guess you’re the one who would know better than most of us,” said Meuniere. “What, with you being her official assistant and all.”
Octavia shook her head. “Her gofer, you mean. Some days, I’m not sure how much she actually needs me and how much she just wants someone to talk to down in her workshop.”
“Aside from Romani?” teased Sylvia.
But Octavia just grimaced and rolled her eyes. “I don’t know how that rumor started, but it’s definitely not true. Trust me — not a single longing glance between them, in either direction. They’re so platonic that I’m honestly kind of jealous. Plus,” she went on, “when would either of them have the time? I’m decently sure that Da Vinci doesn’t sleep, and Doctor Roman is still catching up on his from back when he was dosing himself with stimulants.”
“It’s called a quickie for a reason,” Syliva quipped. Octavia looked disgusted.
“Isn’t Romani married anyway?” asked Meuniere. “He doesn’t show it off, but I know he still wears the ring on his finger. You can see the lump through his gloves.”
“If he is, then she’s dead,” Duston said, and the humor died swiftly. “No one still here has been giving him googly eyes, so either she died in the Sabotage or she was outside the facility and got caught in the Incineration.”
“I don’t know about that,” said Sylvia. “You’ve been here the longest out of all of us, Duston. Has he ever taken leave and left base? He’s stayed at the facility for the entirety of my tenure. I’ve heard of waiting and long-distance relationships, but spending the better part of a decade away from each other without even a conjugal visit is asking a bit much, isn’t it?”
“So she probably was on base for the Sabotage,” Meuniere concluded somberly. He hid his face by turning back to his console. “Which means even fixing everything and defeating the King of Mages won’t bring her back.”
Just like everyone else who had died. A shiver swept down Sylvia’s spine, and she was suddenly keenly aware of the fact that she was only sitting where she was because the person her position had originally belonged to had been blown into tiny chunks of charred meat.
And so were the rest of them. The only reason any of them were in the Command Room and vital for the functioning of Chaldea and its systems was because their predecessors were all gone, and gone for good. The only reason they were there was because of either sheer, dumb luck or because they hadn’t been important enough to take out with everyone else.
Sylvia had never been so glad to be mediocre.
A quick look at the clock showed that Sylvia’s shift was technically over, and she used that as an excuse to leave the conversation. She stood abruptly, logging out of her terminal, and then stretched to work out the kinks.
“Anyway,” she announced, affecting nonchalance, “my shift’s over, so I’m going to take this chance to relax. None of us is ever going to get the chance to try out the real deal, so I’m going to go to the simulator and enjoy a nice, hot bath in Rome.”
Meuniere sighed. “Lucky! I’m still on duty for another four hours.”
“It might not be quite the same as actually bathing in the Emperor’s palace,” said Duston, “but at least that means you don’t have to think about how many orgies took place there before you.”
“I don’t know,” said Sylvia, smirking, “don’t you think it might be kind of hot to screw around together in the middle of Nero’s palace? In her bath, among all those rose petals?”
Duston made a face. “No offense to present company, but I’ve seen way too much to ever think of hooking up with a mage now. I don’t see it ending well for me.”
Sylvia shrugged, unbothered. “Oh well.”
Not like she’d been all that serious in any case. She had no doubts that Da Vinci would respect their privacy if any of them did decide to shack up and do the horizontal tango, either in their rooms or in the simulator, but she also wasn’t under any illusions that the simulator wouldn’t keep a record of who did what while they were inside it.
Office romances were also a terrible idea. Having to work with the guy you were dating was hard enough; harder still was having to work with your ex, and it wasn’t like they could be transferred to a different division or quit at this point.
It was just… Well. The last six months had been hectic and busy. She hadn’t had a chance to do anything with anyone and barely had a moment to herself that wasn’t eating or sleeping. A tryst in the simulator, where everything felt real but nothing had any lasting consequences, that would be a great way to scratch the itch and release some pent up stress.
Maybe she could program an…aid into her little excursion. The simulator could do…NPCs was the term, right? No muss, no fuss, no aftercare.
Making good on her promise, Sylvia left the Command Room behind, stopping in the cafeteria only long enough to grab a quick lunch — Emiya and that homunculus, Renée, their cooking was as good as it always was, even when it was just a ham sandwich. With a full belly, she made a beeline through the halls and corridors of Chaldea and to the almost theater-like room that played host to Chaldea’s state of the art simulator, complete with immersive VR technology.
Sometimes, Sylvia wondered about how much money must have been thrown into all of these things. Any single project under Chaldea’s umbrella would have been enough to bankrupt a small country, but the amount of money needed to fund all of them together was so staggering that Sylvia couldn’t even imagine a rough estimate.
No wonder Marsibury had needed a wish from the Fuyuki Grail War to make it happen. The entire Aristocratic Faction in the Clock Tower could have pooled their collective resources and still not have had enough to fund the Chaldea that she saw every day.
The door to the simulator room whooshed open to permit Sylvia entry, and she made it one step inside before she realized she wasn’t alone and froze.
“Hebert?”
Olga Marie’s ace Master stopped whatever she was doing and looked up from the simulator console, face framed by a curtain of wavy black hair. Paradoxically, the glasses always made her look fiercer, maybe something to do with the way they put a stark border around the shape of her eyes.
“Sylvia,” was Hebert’s greeting, curt but polite, like two coworkers meeting each other unexpectedly in the streets. It was, in hindsight, an apt enough comparison.
“Sorry,” said Sylvia. “I didn’t realize you were going to be running another simulation with the Fujimarus this afternoon.”
Which meant her dreams of bathing in Rome’s famous baths were going to have to wait. Damn it.
“Oh,” said Hebert, and she gave a little shake of her head. “No, nothing like that. Jackie just wanted to take another bath in Rome.” She gestured to the little girl by her side, who Sylvia only then realized was even there. “It’s not quite the same as actually going there, but I figured it was close enough.”
“Oh.”
For a moment, the silence stretched, and Sylvia’s tongue felt like it was glued to the roof of her mouth. It seemed an almost Herculean effort to get it unglued and ask, “Do you mind if I come along?”
For another moment, Hebert regarded her strangely, head tilted just a little, like she was mulling the question over. Sylvia considered that she may have wanted to have that bath in private, with just Jackie, like some sort of strange mother-daughter bonding thing, as though that wasn’t Jack the Ripper she was pampering.
Sylvia had to guess that, compared to a god who had apparently been prophesied to end the world, a serial killer in the form of a prepubescent girl probably didn’t seem all that intimidating.
At length, Hebert gave her a small smile. “Sure. Why not?”