The Hotel Eterna was bustling. Ever since the reclamation of the fallen capital, they were full up with guests nearly every night, whether it was locals needing temporary lodgings while their own property was made ready, foreign travelers on business, or tourists hoping to meet the woman credited as the Hero of Eurulm. It was enough to drive a manager to her wit's end, particularly as the Eterna was a hotel de luxe, with all the additional necessities of varied and impeccable service that required.
Fortunately, the Eterna's chief of staff didn't have to worry about inconveniences like sleep getting in the way of doing her job. Kaede was a Servan, a Japanese doll turned into a fiend by the Blue Blood, but retaining her own intellect and sense of self. She and the staff of shikigami she commanded were every bit as responsible if not moreso for the Eterna's excellence as its manager, Camilla Alucard.
Still, for all that Kaede was still pushed to the limit of her attention most days, which was why she greeted the woman who walked up to the front desk in the same fashion as she would any guest.
"Welcome to the Hotel Eterna. How may I be of service?"
"Hi, Kaede. I need to talk with Dr. Camilla. Can you arrange something?"
"I'm so sorry, Lady Ruenheid!" If she'd been able to, the doll would have flushed with embarrassment. Even though she wore an ordinary walking dress instead of the uniform-like knight's clothes she'd worn for most of her previous stay, the blonde was too important a face in Kaede's memory to be overlooked. "I'll give her the message, and if you would wait at the bar I'll bring you word of what arrangements she'll use to contact you."
It wasn't like the first time Ruenheid had stayed at the Hotel Eterna. Then, during the fight against the Moon Queen, it had been a motley group who came together: humans, half-demons, Servans, and even true demons, representing a variety of factions. But those desperate days had passed, and it could be dangerous for Ruenheid, who had abandoned the Curia to become a knight for the rival Lourdes Order, to be seen meeting with Camilla, who was not only one of the Curia's top researchers but the Eurulm district supervisor. Ruenheid knew this well, which was why she hadn't visited the Hotel Eterna since the Order had supported Camilla in expunging the fiends from the city.
But now Ruenheid shook her head.
"I'm sorry, but this can't wait. I need to see her now, tonight."
"It's that urgent?"
"Yes, it is."
Kaede dipped her head.
"I understand. Take the elevator up to the rooftop, and I'll have the shikigami mark it as out of order. You should be able to speak with Dr. Camilla uninterrupted."
"Thank you, Kaede. I really appreciate it."
"No, I'm always happy to help any of you, and I know that if you say that it's urgent, then Dr. Camilla will want to speak with you."
Ruenheid glanced down, a faint pink decorating her cheeks, a reminder to Kaede of how uncomfortable the girl could get with direct expressions of affection.
"It's…it's nothing you should be so grateful for. I was only doing my duty."
The urge to tease Ruenheid a little bubbled up within Kaede, but she suppressed it. If she had urgent business to conduct, this wouldn't be the time, especially since a scene might draw the attention of any of the Curia's agents that might be lurking around the Eterna's lobby. She therefore said nothing while Ruenheid walked off towards the elevator, then sent mental commands to two of her shikigami, sending one after Ruenheid and calling the second to cover the front desk while she went to talk to Camilla.
~X X X~
Ruenheid paced back and forth on the rooftops, the heels of her walking-boots clicking off the flagstones. The delay was hard enough for a woman who didn't have a lot of patience at the best of times, but the rooftop wasn't doing her any favors as a meeting place. It was, after all, a church, with its altar facing east to anticipate the sunrise and the serried ranks of pews.
Given why she was there, she really didn't need any reminders of the spiritual and the unknown.
Nor did it help that the sunrise that wouldn't come and the flowering tubs of lavender beside each pew were reminders that her dearest friends weren't there.
Her teeth worried at her lower lip even as her seething emotions worried at her heart. When she heard the ding of the elevator bell, she spun around like she would have in a fiend-haunted alley, she was so on edge. She'd just had time to relax her posture when the door slid open.
Then she rocked back on her heels when she saw that the only passenger was a shikigami.
A moment later, the mystery was exposed, when a shimmer swirled through the air, and a rich velvet cloak was pulled away to reveal the familiar figure of Dr. Camilla, manager of the Hotel Eterna, district supervisor for the Curia, and the researcher celebrated as the Hero of Eurulm for first enabling the successful evacuation of the city's population from fiendish hordes, then for planning and personally leading the recapture of the city years later. The cloak was the body of the Servan Hexer, animated magic props that could bring a number of stage tricks to supernatural life, including its cloak of invisibility.
"This way, any prying eyes think it's only a shikigami who boarded, to start on repairing the supposedly broken elevator," she explained. Scowling, she added, "I hate this political nonsense. The Lourdes Order was instrumental in helping stop the Moon Queen and in freeing Eurulm from the fiends."
She stepped out of the elevator, and the shikigami pressed the button to close the door behind her, leaving Camilla and Ruenheid alone on the roof.
"I still can't understand how you can stay with the Curia," Rue said. "After learning all the things they've done in the name of their own power, I would have left them at once even if I hadn't done it already over Lilia."
"You know why, Ruenheid. The Curia needs to be fixed, so that its resources can be used for the good they were meant to achieve. There are too many honest people, from knights to the priesthood to researchers, to just abandon, besides. Not everyone has your courage to refuse the wrong path if they're told it's for the good of the world."
Rue felt her face flush.
"You sound just like Aluche, saying things like that."
"Aluche knew you better than anyone. Of course she'd have seen and understood."
"It's not true; I'm not that noble. I didn't think anything through or stand up to authority. I just couldn't stand it when something so unjust was right in front of me. You're the one with real courage, to have the patience to hold your temper and work to fix things from within. That's what I meant when I said I couldn't understand how you could do it."
"Heh," Camilla gave a single wry chuckle. "I suppose we'll have to disagree about which is the greater act of courage." She adjusted her monocle slightly. But apart from that, Kaede said that whatever you needed couldn't wait even a few days. What's wrong, Ruenheid?"
"It's Veruschka."
"I see."
"She was sent on a mission two days ago. There's a fiend, a massive dragon that Lady Loergwlith saw was going to consume a wellspring of the Blue Blood and become a monstrosity that could destroy a city all on its own if it wasn't stopped. I wanted to go with her, but Lady Loergwlith said that a human who even neared the place risked becoming a fiend at once. Apparently this was the remains of hundreds of fiends slaughtered in the war between the Moon Queen and the Nightlord, their Blue Blood congealed and caught in the water instead of being captured at the time by the survivors."
Camilla nodded.
"I've heard of such places, and Loer is right. By its nature, the Blue Blood seeks a new host. The water vapor in the air around that wellspring is probably permeated with it, enough to corrupt any human who breathes it in. I think Eleanor still has ways to get in contact with Christophorus, so if you give me the location, I'll give it to her to pass on to Arnice, so that the area can be purged of the Blue Blood. But that isn't the problem you're here about, is it, but just the background?"
"That's right. Muveil is the only other knight of the Order who could have helped, but she's off on a mission of her own. Veruschka volunteered at once, though, knowing that stopping the dragon before it enhanced itself was the only chance to avert a massive loss of life."
"Yes, she would never hesitate about such a thing," Camilla said, nodding. Then a moment later she seemed to have inherited Loergwlith's ability to see the future, for she said, "What's happened to her?"
"How did you know?"
Camilla gave her a sharp look, top-full with "why is this person asking me such stupid questions?"
"Why else would you be telling me about all of this unless something had gone wrong?"
She had a point. It wasn't like Ruenheid was there just to chat.
"It's not that it has gone wrong. It's that it will."
"Loergwlith had another vision?"
Rue nodded.
"The day after Veruschka left. She saw that, even if Veruschka wins the battle, the strain on her body will be too much. She'll have to fight too hard, for too long, and that plus the environment saturated with the Blue Blood and the dragon's own spilled Blood will overwhelm her." Ruenheid hugged herself, crossing her arms over her torso. "Our researchers…based on the description Lady Loergwlith gave them, they don't think there's anything they can do to save her."
"Damn it," Camilla cursed under her breath.
"But we don't have the Curia's depth of research on artificial half-demons. And we don't have you."
"Is there even anything I can do? Did Loer see that?"
Ruenheid wondered about the causal familiarity between them, that Camilla used a nickname that to her knowledge no one else did.
"She didn't say so, but she was the one who sent me to get you. Veruschka will be back tomorrow if she makes it at all, so Lady Loergwlith also sent a couple of our younger knights to meet her halfway and bring her back to save time and as much of the strain of travel as possible."
"Then she doesn't know," Camilla sighed, exhaling sharply. "She's just hoping that there's something I can do."
"Is there?"
"How should I know? I don't know the extent of the damage, or the level of corruption from the Blue Blood. If the latter is the problem, there might be a way to draw some of it off, even if not so cleanly as Aluche did that once. But the instability of her cells is a different issue, and there's a point where no matter what I try, what anyone tries, they just won't repair." She looked aside and muttered, "God damn you, Loer, if you make me watch a friend die under my hands."
Rue shivered at the intensity on Camilla's face, and wondered what lay behind it.
"Veruschka's my friend, too!" she cried. "She's been my comrade right from when she came to the Lourdes Order. You and I both watched how Aluche brought her out of her shell, taught her to feel, to be happy and sad and joyful and worried and have hope. To live! Did you know that I was the one who went east and found her before? She was dying then, too, the last survivor on a battlefield, and I got her back so that the Order's scientists could save her then. But there's nothing I can do now!" She was clenching her fists so tightly that only her gloves kept her nails from biting into her palms and drawing blood. "At least you have a chance!"
"I know. Of course, I'll help in any way that I can. She'll have to be brought to my laboratory here in the hotel, though. I have specialized equipment and reference works in the maintenance room here specifically appropriate for half-demons. So we'll have to make arrangements so that no time is lost."
"Wouldn't it be easier for you to come to our headquarters?"
"Easier, certainly, but you don't have the apparatus that I do. Even though Veruschka was created using processes much more crude than the ones I used for Muveil and Aluche, it's still the best tools available for the job. If you want me to do this, then her life has to come first, ahead of all other issues."
"Of course! I just didn't want you to be caught helping us and put in danger from the Curia."
Camilla's smile was bitter.
"It's true; getting caught aiding and abetting the Lourdes Order wouldn't make me any friends. I suppose I could characterize it as hands-on research of the Order's half-demon and in the technology her original country of origin used to make her. But it's too late to worry about that now; I'm already involved.
She touched the side of her monocle as if adjusting it to get a closer look at Ruenheid.
"Besides, it's not like you'd do anything different in my shoes."
"Of course I wouldn't!"
The exclamation burst out of her without thought, so that it took a couple of seconds for Rue to realize the implications of what she was saying.
"Oh! I'm sorry; I never meant to imply that you wouldn't take those risks for your friends."
Camilla smiled at her.
"That's all right, then." She paused, frowning while in thought. "I'll have to talk with Kaede about how we're going to arrange this operation. We'll send a shikigami to let you know as soon as we have a plan in place. And see if you can get any more details from Loer. The more I know about the specifics of the problem, the less time I'll have to waste on diagnosis and the faster I can get on to treatment."
"All right; I'll ask for any details she can give."
"And don't worry about pressing her, if it feels weird to be questioning the head of your order. Just tell her that I asked and she'll understand; she knows how I am about precision from our school days."
Ruenheid's eyebrows shot up.
"Wait…Dr. Camilla, you and Lady Loergwlith were at school together?"
"That's right. We attended Espheria Academy, just like you did. In fact, it's where we met."
"I had no idea."
"It's not common knowledge, especially because the Curia doesn't know that Loergwlith is the head of the Lourdes Order. If they knew, it would put me in quite a precarious position."
Rue had a feeling that declaration went well beyond understatement.
"You'd better get going, Camilla said, redirecting away from the topic. "And make a scene with the shikigami on the way out. Remember, you've been stuck up here by a broken elevator. I'll slip down later under Hexer's cover."
"All right, Doctor."
Rue walked towards the elevator, passing Camilla.
Then she stopped.
"Dr. Camilla, I…" she began to say, then broke off. How could she say that? She was a knight of the Lourdes Order, dedicated to fighting the evils of the Night. She'd left the Curia for the Order specifically because the Curia's methods had been impure and corrupt, their willingness to sacrifice human life—Liliana's life!—disgusting. Even just thinking it felt like a betrayal of the justice she stood for.
"Was there something else, Ruenheid?"
"No, nothing."
"All right, then."
Aluche wouldn't hesitate, Rue thought. She'd speak right up.
"No, wait." She turned back to see Camilla watching her, calm and expectant, like she could tell of the struggle going on in Ruenheid's heart, even if not the topic.
I suppose it's obvious to anyone who knows me.
She took a deep breath, then plunged in.
"Do you think…it might be better to allow the Blue Blood to take Veruschka?" Aware of how that must sound, she rushed to explain. "I mean, not everyone who becomes a demon is a monster. Al was still herself right to the end—still is herself, or else the Moon Queen's Eternal Night would start spreading again and take us all! And Captain Muveil, too. Yes, she's changed somewhat, but she's still herself, and a fellow knight of the Order. Arnice, too. She was a half-demon who became a demon. She became the Nightlord, and yet she's still a friend whom we trust. For that matter, Christophorus is a pureblood demon, and we still trust her. Veruschka has as strong a will as anyone I know; she had to have it in order to survive the horrors of her life. There's no way that she'd lose herself to the darkness!"
Camilla gave her a long, measuring look. There was no hint of a smile on her face, but none of the flinty hardness she showed when she was angry.
"I thought of that, when I examined her before," she said, and her voice was gentle.
Too gentle. It made Rue's heart stick in her throat.
"After all," Camilla continued, "the healing properties of the Blue Blood can be amazing under the right circumstances. Though I suspect that it's more of an extension of its general transformative properties and healing is only one way of applying that."
"Well, then, why wouldn't it work?"
"For the same reason that her body is dying now: she isn't compatible with the Blue Blood."
"I don't understand."
"I'm not surprised, as we don't entirely understand the mechanism ourselves. It may be something biological, or it may dependent on supernatural factors literally related to the soul, which would explain why it seems to be a concern confined to humans. But regardless of the reason, the Blue Blood is an inherently corrupting force. Most people who are touched by it transform into mindless demons, but more than that their existences become unstable. Their bodies literally break down and rot away, and they die. You saw it yourself in the records you found concerning the half-demon experiments in Beatria Laboratory, didn't you? Why do you think it was so important for Aluche to get Vallderossa's poison out of you? She wanted to protect you from losing who you are and becoming a creature of the Night, yes, but it was also necessary to save your life.
"Muveil told me how, when she was with Vallderossa, other knights that they captured would give in to her and become demons, too, but they'd rarely last even a hundred days before their bodies broke down."
"But then, Veruschka—"
"She should never have been able to become a half-demon in the first place. The ones who created her used drugs and surgery to forcibly suppress her emotions. Demons are creatures of emotion first and foremost; those feelings are how the Blue Blood takes root in you. Only by artificially suppressing them could the experimenters make Veruschka stabilize as a half-demon. I have a feeling that that's why they built her in such a way as to optimize her performance at the expense of physical stability, because they recognized that whatever they did, it wouldn't be permanent anyway."
"But that's inhuman!"
Camilla shrugged, the gesture not of indifference but that of a woman who had come to expect the corruption of the power-hungry as a given fact.
"What would you expect of people who take children from orphanages as experimental fodder?" she asked. "They saw Veruschka as nothing more than a tool, a weapon. By their logic, they were only increasing her performance in the field, in exchange for a shorter effective life." Her eyes flashed amber fire with her anger and contempt. "Even the Curia's early experiments, judging by what we found in the ruins of Beatria Laboratory, were equally short-sighted and didn't take compatibility into account, so we can't hold our heads any higher."
"You can," Ruenheid shot back. "You made sure that Captain Muveil could survive the procedure before you began. She told me about how you ran extensive tests on her after she volunteered to become a half-demon, and now I understand why. It was Vallderossa who broke her will so that she became a full demon, not you."
It was plain from Camilla's expression that she didn't fully accept what Rue was saying, that she was still carrying guilt over having proceeded to transform Muveil before the process was fully developed. It came to Ruenheid in a flash that that guilt must have played a part in why the doctor had taken the absurd chance of replacing her own heart with an artificial one so she could give hers to Aluche. To use her research in creating half-demons to save a life instead of, as she saw it, to ruin one.
But that was all subjective. As to the objective facts Ruenheid had cited, she couldn't argue.
"It wasn't, or at least shouldn't have been, anything special, just basic experimental ethics." She scowled and added, "But apparently I'm in the minority in believing that. In any event, the ones who made Veruschka certainly didn't."
"There's…you're saying there's no hope for her, then?"
"Not through that method," Camilla said. "Becoming a demon would heal her damaged body, but it would just exchange one deathly countdown for a surer, more inevitable one. It was a kind thought, Ruenheid, just not an option that leads anywhere."
Rue hung her head.
"I should have known that it wouldn't be that easy." The ache as her momentary spark of hope died burned. She'd lost too many friends already. Yes, Aluche and Liliana weren't lost, per se, as the simple fact Ruenheid was awake to feel the pain of their absence was proof—the kind of hard, empirical proof someone like Camilla would look to find—that they were not dead. But they were still missing from her life and everyone else's, and over the scale of time demons lived there was no guarantee that even if they continued to thrive they would ever return in Rue's lifetime. And now Veruschka threatened to become the third companion to be lost, her dream for the future shattered.
She gave a harsh, bitter laugh.
"Listen to me, Doctor. I just called the idea of becoming a demon 'easy'! Pretty words for a knight of the Lourdes Order."
"It's a strange journey we've been on ever since the Moon Queen first forced herself into our lives. Simplistic assumptions about what's 'good' and 'evil' don't stand up to reality. Demons are people, if different from humans in many ways, and they can be good or bad or both, complex or simple."
"Even so…"
"You want your friend and comrade to live."
Ruenheid shook her head, curls bouncing against her collarbones.
"No, it's more than that. It's that, ever since we fought the Moon Queen, Veruschka wants to live. Before that, she always thought of herself the way the people who made her did, as a tool to battle the Night. Nothing that Lady Loergwlith or I or any of our other comrades could say could change that. You know how she was."
"Yes, I do."
"But Al changed all that." She smiled again, remembering not just the recent past but years ago, as children in Eurulm, then as students in the academy. "She was always like that. So honest and blunt about everything, never hesitating to say exactly what she felt no matter how embarrassing. She taught Veruschka how to enjoy life again, and to find value in her own existence. And now…"
She couldn't finish the sentence. The words died on her tongue, and she shook her head again, in pure frustration. She wasn't Aluche, and that kind of honestly was too much for her.
Camilla reached out, took her hand, and squeezed. Rue was so surprised by the sudden gesture that she barely caught a yelp before it left her lips.
"Ruenheid, don't lose hope."
"Eh?"
"What would Aluche tell you? Just because this one route is closed doesn't mean that there aren't others. Everyone, including Veruschka herself, will do everything we can to preserve her life."
Rue laughed once, realizing the truth of it.
"You're right. Al would just look her in the eye and say, yeah, of course you're going to live. I mean, Lilia thought there wasn't any chance left for her, because she was already in the Moon Queen's hands before we even knew it, but Al wasn't having any of that. She'd just say, 'well, if you can't save your life by becoming a demon, then you'll just have to live as a half-demon,' or something like that, right?"
"That definitely sounds like her." The impression drew a grin from Camilla.
Ruenheid straightened her shoulders.
"Well, then, if Al's going to be busy holding off the Moon Queen's Eternal Night, then it's left to me to fill in for her here. So you'd better do your best, Dr. Camilla, so that Veruschka can be awake to hear me tell her that she has no business doing something as selfish as dying."
It was a sign of the respect and friendship that Camilla held for Aluche, Veruschka, and Ruenheid alike that she covered her chuckle by coughing into her hand. And after all, in a city eternally lit by an azure moon none of its human residents could see, who could say what was or wasn't possible?
~X X X~
A/N: The "Dungeon" entry in the Character Materials section of the in-game Collection gives information about how Vallderossa's victims would succumb to decay and death not long after becoming demons, in case anyone was curious. I actually really like the surprising complexity of the NoA lore...