Sorry, the chapter is taking longer to write than I thought. More of I don't have as much free time as I used to have.
That being said, I did decide to write this section. Thanks to a variety of reviews, I realized that I probably should have written this up and posted it long before now.
Also, I just broke my record for longest writing project yet! I have never made it to a hundred pages or 50,000 words before (Previous was around 25,000 in NaNoWriMo. And I think the quality here is better than that one...).
Huzzah!
Now back to laboring on the next chapter in my reduced free time. (Please be patient.)
Interlude: Appointment of the Third Acting Director of Chaldea
(Three days prior and three hours after the explosion. Location: Central Briefing Room.)
(Recording taken by TRIMEGISTUS and registered to Chaldea's official meeting logs.)
Roman rushed through the door to the briefing room overlooking CHALDEAS. Once you could have admired the large model shaped after the manner of Earth, but right now, all you could see was the rubble and stones from the walls and ceiling.
Not that you would see anything good now if the rubble wasn't blocking the window. CHALDEAS' once-blue glow was not its formerly worrying grey but now a fiery red.
Roman didn't know what that meant but it couldn't be anything good.
Nothing overly red was good in nature.
Just take a look at traffic lights! Red meant bad to go!
Taking a seat in the rear most row of the green chairs, Roman took the opportunity to look over everyone here.
Over in the corner were the cooks and janitors, the unmagical staff who were just here to do the day-to-day work that no magus would lower themselves to do. As per their usual conduct for an all staff meeting, they sat in a cluster, separate from everyone else, especially from the magi.
In the rows ahead of him, the survivors sat.
Most of them were magus, researchers and workers who helped Chaldea find, analyze and neutralize threats to humanity.
Roman knew them all. He was the Medical department, the only one currently left alive.
Poor Kylia. She hadn't deserved to be blown to bits like that.
The thought of the explosion reminded Roman about the various injured personnel. Most of the Masters were still alive thanks to the medical technology in the Spiritron Chassis Coffins. But they could only barely keep them alive and even that was in a state that Roman wouldn't hesitate to label as a state worse than death if any of them were awake.
As horrible as magus culture was, it had discovered many ways to keep a person alive in spite of how violated or damaged their body and soul became.
In addition to the wholescale loss of their Masters, including Ritsuka who had collapsed for an unknown reason after Roman had ran down to get the back-up basement generators on line.
He worried about what could have happened while he was gone. Ritsuka wasn't suffering from CO2 poisoning but instead his soul had somehow stopped paying attention to his body. Mash, right next to him and who had been literally crushed by the stone slab above her and had lost far too much blood, was also suffering from a similar condition.
It was like the soul was trapped in a familiar and Roman didn't know how to successfully treat that without knowing more about the familiar containing the soul. If the soul was trapped or lost, trying to free it might kill both the body and soul as it had to poor Tyler of the Masters department eight years ago. Best to leave them alone and on IVs for now until they could learn more about what was going on.
Less inexplicable were his two newest patients, Shirou Emiya and Bobby Ingles. Bobby had injured himself in a run of bad luck while straining to move some heavy stone from off of a body before he accidently dropped the stone onto his own foot, crushing it. He had then stumbled into an unstable pile of rocks and they fell on top of his body.
Fortunately, Bobby wasn't alone so they had quickly gotten him to the infirmary. Bobby's injuries were stable now but it would be a day or two before even magecraft could get him back up on his foot.
Shirou, on the other hand, had somehow hauled a body out from the mess of the main generator room, cutting a hole through the door in the process, before collapsing in the hallways from his rather severe wounds, including a bleeding head wound from some shrapnel that had deflected off of the skull. Roman figured that the ongoing diagnostic would reveal a need for surgery to get Shirou stable and fully recovered.
He would have preferred to be supervising the robot now, but Chaldea needed to reorganize itself in order to maximize their chances at rescuing the injured. They were in the golden 72 hours of rescue but without any form of leadership, they wouldn't know if they were missing someone until too late.
For the one thing, the losses among the various departments were simply staggering. They varied from the security department, the Masters, and the technology departments, which were either all dead, on the verge of it, or had a few survivors such as Shirou Emiya, Leonardo Da Vinci, and Edward, all the way up to the Sustaining Human Resources department, otherwise called the cooks and janitors, who had only lost their department head, Christian Steward, to the bombs.
Roman scanned over the various individuals. Everyone, except for the injured in his infirmary, was here. Even the cooks and janitors plus Caleb and Aidan were here.
But the time to start the meeting finally arrived.
So any minute now, someone would stand up and take the lead.
Any minute now.
Maybe now?
No one stood up.
One question was running through everyone's minds, who should start the meeting off? Who should step up and take command?
Silence prevailed as people looked around, wondering who should step forward and take control.
At last, Da Vinci's white unclothed, genderless anatomy model spoke up.
"Is this everyone?" she asked.
"Um," Roman cleared his throat, as the people in front of him turned around to face him. Swallowing his sudden stage fright, Roman pressed on. "Bobby Ingles and Shirou Emiya are in the infirmary. Both are asleep, but this is everyone else. At least everyone who isn't dead or almost dead…" he trailed off at the reminder of all the lives that had been lost or were lingering on the verge of death.
"Well then," Da Vinci's model clucked her tongue, which was rather odd as Roman didn't know that anatomical models had a tongue and he had been through medical school! "Let's start. Our first order of business is who should be our Acting Director. As we all know, Director Olga Marie Animusphere is dead as well as every other department head with the sole exception being Romani Archaman of the medical department."
People nodded, sorrow and grief on many of the faces. Several of the magus kept their faces impassive or just didn't care.
Roman didn't like the current magus lifestyle and attitudes. To be a magus meant you had to risk your own life and death. But it shouldn't mean that you had to sacrifice your own humanity to do so!
"As such," Da Vinci continued. "I propose that Roman be designated as Acting Director as he is the only Department Head left."
"What!" Roman squawked. "Me! What are you thinking in having me lead Chaldea, Da Vinci! You would be better suited!"
The magi sitting in front of Roman shuffled around but Roman could see nods among them.
"It is the rules," Ullr Longomontonous, the ancient hide-bound Danish magus, said in his accented English. "In the event of emergency, the duties of leadership goes down through the various department heads."
"Precisely," Da Vinci said. "Besides, if I were to spend my time on leading, there wouldn't be any time left for me to do my studies and duties. I am too valuable to waste as Acting Director."
"And I am not?" Roman muttered to himself but even as he said it, he knew it wasn't true. They needed Da Vinci. The Servant was unparalleled in many fields and was more than capable in holding the slack from the loss of the technicians and other employees.
Out of the corner of his eye, Roman could see the non-magical employees were silent but not disagreeing.
Roman looked around for anyone with the common sense to protest against his appointment. He doesn't want to be the Acting Director. He would be horrible at it! But, if Ullr said it was the rules, then it had to be true. Ullr wouldn't lie about that. The old man loved the rules and had been with Chaldea as long as Marisbury had, even if Ullr was demoted by Marie from his previous leadership position.
And unfortunately, the old man was too old. Arthritis was setting in and the man was often seen asleep in what meetings he did remember to attend. But the man was still decent at working in the archives, if he didn't fall asleep in the middle of his duties or forgot things he already knew.
Which he did often. It was why he was still alive as he had forgotten about the momentous occasion and had fallen asleep in his armchair instead of heading to watch the Rayshift.
And as much as Roman disliked it, the truth was that he, Roman, was only person here who had attended the meetings for the department heads.
All right, so he had skipped a few and Olga had kicked him out from some of the others but he had attended meeting that no one else had. He probably knew the most about the details of the First Order out of everyone here.
On top of that, he was the head of the medical division.
Even if the medical division was only himself after his nurse Kylia died in the central control room.
Reluctantly, Roman stood up and made his way to the front of the room.
He couldn't do this. He hasn't led anybody since-
Roman cut the thought off. This wasn't the time to reminisce. He had to lead Chaldea while trying to save the badly wounded.
There was no one else, as unfortunate as that was.
And right now, either duty was a back-breaking full-time job.
He really wanted to run out the door, back to his room and spend the day watching Magical Mari, fall asleep with the video on and wake up to find this was all a bad dream.
Yeah, even he didn't think that would happen.
Roman finally finished the walk, climbing the few steps to the elevated stage directly in front of the window and turned to face the near empty room. Hard to believe these were all he had left to work with. Out of the 80 or so workers and 48 masters that had been here earlier this morning, these 17 were all that he had left right now.
"Well, then" Roman swallowed. "As you know, we are the only surviving members of Chaldea. Somehow, someone has placed bombs in the main generator room and central control room, both the command center part and on the central room and detonated them when they would affect the largest number of people."
"As a result, we lost most of our colleagues. Worse than that, we lost most of our leadership, engineers, and technicians."
"Um, I don't really know what to do next. So I guess the first thing we should do is contact the Association and the United Nations," he confessed, dropping back onto his medical training. If you had insufficient facilities, then you reported it up the line until someone could arrange for the appropriate facilities to become available. "We need help, preferably a medical team and a detective or investigative team or something similar."
"But that is something that the Director," Roman's voice faded as he realized that he, not Marisbury or Marie Olga, was the Director now. "who is now me, should do."
Roman shifted his weight as he scrambled to get his thoughts in order. What did Chaldea need now?
Well, they needed to finish securing the wounded and the bodies. And then they needed to make progress on the First Order.
What had already happened was bad enough, they didn't need for humanity to die along with them.
"So while I take care of that, I need you guys to finish finding the survivors and the bodies. Use the triage system to determine who is what," he advised. "After finding the last, um…"
Roman did some quick calculations, They had located 16 of the Masters in the central control room, 32 Masters who were not located yet, and most of the engineers and technicians were unaccounted for so that should be about another 30 or so. Add in the people from the central control room…
"The last 40 or so missing persons, please head to the control room and start fixing it up. We need that room operational before we can return to working on the First Order," Roman finished. "Without the interfaces in the control room, we can't use LAPLACE, SHEBA, or CHALDEAS or even the full ability of TRIMEGISTUS. Getting that operational should be our first concern after the rescue efforts."
Speaking of CHALDEAS, it should not be red like that. If he remembers correctly, it shouldn't even be able to glow red. That was not one of the settings it had.
"Which brings me to the one of our newest and most worrying issue. CHALDEAS is glowing red," he informed the room, causing some of them to shift in surprise. "I don't know what that means but—"
"Actually," Da Vinci interjected. "If CHALDEAS is glowing red, that means that there is an error. It is a mode meant for the developers to help them find if they made a mistake in analyzing or building it. All that means is that somehow it received some instruction that does not compute."
Roman and every magus in the room blinked.
"So CHALDEAS is glitching right now?" Lyudmilla asked the question that was on everyone's mind.
Da Vinci's familiar shrugged. "Without an interface to TRIMEGISTUS, I can't tell. I have some hypotheses but without knowing what the instruction is or what the data is, I have no way to tell which is correct."
And Roman knew that Da Vinci hated being wrong. She wouldn't speak up unless pressed until she was confident in her answers.
"Right," Roman said. "As you can see, we need to get the control room operational so we can know what is going on. So Da Vinci, is there a reason you are speaking to us through a familiar right now?"
The model twirled, which would have looked better if it wasn't a genderless, naked, and featureless pure white anatomy model from her lab, before saying. "I am just clearing away debris from the control rooms. I already have found the last of the Masters but…"
She paused, obviously not having good news to share despite having found about half of the missing people already.
"But what?" Roman asked, dreading the answer.
"I also managed to find what is left of our poor Director. Her body was crushed to a pulp by debris after being shredded and blasted away when a bomb exploded beneath her feet," the Caster Servant somberly reported.
Shock ran through the room. The bomb had exploded right beneath her feet. That was—This was-
"In addition, Lev Lainur also was standing on top of a different bomb when it went off. I haven't been able to find as much of him as I did of poor Olga," Da Vinci concluded.
Oh dear. This wasn't a secret defense mechanism that Marisbury had installed in case of mutiny or attack. If two bombs were targeted at the first and second in command of Chaldea, then…
This was premeditated murder.
Roman swallowed. He hadn't considered who could have done this but now he had to.
Otherwise he might be next.
He was too young to die!
Roman reined in his panic. He was the Director of Chaldea now. All of this was something to keep in mind, an item on a list.
Right, just another item on the long list of issues he now had to deal with.
He could dump this on the rescuers when they arrived.
"A-A moment of silence for the confirmed loss of our Director and our friend Lev," Roman managed to choke out. It hadn't struck him until now that his old friend was dead. But he couldn't stop now. Humanity would be going extinct next year unless they fixed the Singularity.
The magus and civilians alike bowed their head in recognition of the loss of their leaders.
Roman took the time to gather himself. He was the leader. He couldn't afford to break down now. That could happen after someone came in to replace him as a director.
When he was ready to speak again, he wiped his eyes before clearing his throat, causing what heads weren't already up to rise.
"Thanks for your respect." He somberly thanked the room.
"I will call our superiors and sponsors. Meanwhile, I want the rest of you to head over to the control room. Clean it up, fix it up and see if you can find what is wrong," he instructed the room before turning to Da Vinci's familiar. "Da Vinci, given that none of us know how to get around the main generator room, once you finish moving the last of the debris, would you please head down to the Main generator room and take care of the room?"
"Alright," the anatomical familiar said. "The wonderful Da Vinci will clean up the debris, find the bodies and survivors, and then start fixing the generators. It will be a cinch."
"Thank you, Da Vinci," Roman gratefully said. "I appreciate it."
Turning back to the rest of the room, he asked "Are there any questions?"
"What about Emiya?" Lyudmilla Baran shouted out.
Roman blinked. That was not a question he had been expecting.
"Emiya is unconscious in the infirmary," he answered before pausing in confusion. "Didn't I mention that already?"
"So you have no intention of doing anything about the murderer then?" she asked, ferocity in her words.
"What about them?" Roman asked in confusion. What was Lyudmilla getting at? Did she know something about the attack?
"It was Emiya that did this!" she shouted out, jumping to her feet in a display of her usual overly eager passion. "He is an Emiya, the son of the Magus Killer!"
Several Magus reacted with surprise to that. Romani blinked trying to recall why that title sound familiar…
"The Magus Killer was a spellcaster-" derision dripped from her mouth towards the affront on the modern view of what a magus should be. Roman didn't really understand it as a spellcaster was just as good as a magus in his opinion. "-whose favored tactics involved using guns, modern weapons, and bombs to kill us! Just like what happened here!"
All of a sudden, Roman understood what she was getting at.
She thinks she had found the murderer.
Shirou Emiya was an employee of Chaldea, employed for his expertise in fixing machines. He also took long periods of time off to do his own research and have adventures around the world.
He was also a spellcaster, just like his father had been.
"If anyone could have infiltrated Chaldea, planted bombs and then set them off at the worst possible moment, who else than the son of Magus Killer himself!" Lyudmilla cried. "Just like how his father murdered my aunt!"
She whirled around the room trying to make eye contact with as many people as possible. "Emiya is to blame for this! He was trained by the Magus Killer! He attacked us!"
"Hey now!" Tom Nawakowski shouted, his hair sticking out like he hadn't had time to brush it. He had been on the nightshift last night so he probably had been sleeping until the explosion happened. "There is no proof for it being Shirou Emiya! It is suspicious, sure, but we can't act on it until we know for sure!"
He stood up, speaking to the whole audience, not just Lyudmilla. "I am just as upset about this as you are. Like all of you, I lost friends and coworkers to this horrible attack, but until we have some proof as to who did it, we can't point our fingers at anyone. We are just as likely to hit the innocent as we are to accuse the guilty."
"Besides," Edward, no last name since he had been disinherited from his magus family for his interest in modern technology. "This has all the makings of a typical Clock Tower plot. If someone wanted to be promoted, then wiping out all their superiors and rivals would create at least one opening. The next thing they would do is frame someone else so that proof has to actually be airtight as any evidence we discover is probably fabricated."
Roman blinked. He was not a detective. All of this conjecture and theory was starting to give him a headache.
"In that case, this was probably done by a clocktower magus," Lyra Hooke said, a rare look of interest in her eyes. "We have a few on staff and a large number of the Masters are from there. They also had some free reign and most of them are new enough that they might have chosen to advance themselves by taking out the competition."
"Exactly!" Lyudmilla exclaimed, a fire in her eyes as she agreed with the objections. Roman realized in growing horror that this was turning into politics. She was agreeing for the sole intent of throwing off her enemies. "He or she wanted to be promoted so they hired Emiya to do it! We have to interrogate the killer to learn who paid him to betray us!"
"Unless he was geas bound to not reveal it," Leonardo's familiar said, thoughtfully. "But in that case, I can probably work around it. There is no contract that I can't outmaneuver anyhow. But what if Emiya being the culprit is what the bomber wants us to think? What if by having us focus on Emiya, we end up giving the real bomber the time he needs to plant more bombs?"
"Of course, there is also the option that the bomber was hypnotized by an external force and ended up killing themselves as well as their target," she continued. "In which case, our culprit would make a clean get-a-way as their tool is dead and we would not be able to investigate who hypnotized him or her."
"But if that was the case, wouldn't only the main generator room or the command center have been bombed?" John Erwing asked, leaning forward to eagerly hear the Caster's reply.
"Not if…"
Roman pinched his nose as every magus in the room, the non-magical staff too intimidated to speak up, set to arguing about who could have planted the bombs, who would be framed or who wanted us to think that they think that we think that they think…
He wasn't that bright. He was just Romani Archaman, a regular guy now. He wasn't a genius like most of the people here.
He was just a doctor, one that knew too much and was now responsible for dealing with this mess.
Which means that he couldn't sneak out the door and go to his hiding spot - only it was Ritsuka's room now, great. If he wants to take a nice break now, then he would need to find a new spot.
Maybe Ritsuka would be amendable if he gave some cake-
No, he couldn't slack off now. He was responsible for Chaldea.
But he would not be able to lead anyone if the magus were too busy arguing and fighting each other. He needed to cut this off now before they started attacking each other in the halls.
And they might actually do that. They were scared of being killed like the majority of Chaldea's workers had just been. And scared people might attack anyone that they felt was threatening them.
"Enough!" he yelled, quieting the surprised people who had never seen him act like this before.
"Enough," he repeated as he started to pacing across the raised section of the room. "Right now, there are only the 18 of us, more if either Bobby and Shirou pull though or if I can save one of the Masters. We are Chaldea. We act to preserve the future of mankind."
He pauses and stares each person in the eye before moving onto the next. "We are in the middle of a First Order. Everyone, the Association, the UN, ATLAS, the Sea of Estray, and the Clock Tower along with everyone else is united to seek the future survival of humanity."
"We have to be united. If we start fighting each other, then we jeopardize the First Order. I don't want that on my conscience. Do you?"
He paused, letting the silence speak for itself.
Several people were looking down at the ground, ashamed of how they had been acting.
Lyudmilla spoke up, hesitantly like she was confused. "But what about the bomber? Shouldn't we stop the bomber before we get back to saving mankind?"
Tom spoke up, "We have to first identify the bomber. Otherwise, we'll just hurt ourselves even more."
"Besides," Leonardo said, pretending as if she hadn't been a part of the earlier argument. "If we move prematurely, we might end up having the bomber start a fight in the halls. That could damage Chaldea even more and set the recovery efforts back even further. We don't have long before humanity goes extinct."
"Alright. Focus on me please," Roman said, drawing attention back to himself. "As Acting Director, I institute this command as necessary to the fulfilling of the First Order. You are not to fight anyone save in self-defense. You are to always be working with someone else. Except for the Sustaining Human Resources department." He nodded over to Karen Cook, the head cook and second-in-command of the SHR department, who was now the head of it since her boss was dead. "You are to keep on doing your duties, making food, and cleaning Chaldea."
"Um, just a question," Nadja spoke up, scratching her arm. "How are we supposed to fix the Control Room? Because I don't have any talent in making stuff."
Roman stopped. Oh yeah, the engineers, technicians, and the mechanically inclined were all dead.
"I can fix it and we do have manuals for the machines," Da Vinci piped up. "They should be able to let anyone who is smarter than a monkey diagnose the machines and fix the problems. You just have to follow the instructions."
"Unless you're a genius like me," the female Servant smugly declared. "I'll just fix them up to better than they were before. No one can surpass my ultimate genius!"
Roman brightened. "Manuals! Leonardo can you go over the manuals and write them so that even the janitors can use them?"
Leonardo's familiar smiled. "Yes, I can do that. If I just set up a hologram with the manuals displayed and a voice-to-text program, I can do it with my impeccable genius without taking wasting any further time and it should keep me from getting too bored. Good job, Roman! You are proving to be the right choice for Acting Director already."
"Alright," Roman excitedly turned to the others. "Sorry, Karen, I'll need to borrow your employees to supplement the magus in fixing the machines."
"Now hold on!" Edward protested. "I have some projects that I have been working on! I can't stop and leave them alone!"
"As if a family-less worker could work on anything meaningful," Lyra sneered. "My experiments require the utmost attention and focus with one of them about to reach the conclusion in three days. I can't be spared to fix petty machinery, Romani!"
Roman quaked under the protesting workers' stare, but stood firm. "We are in a crisis while dealing with a First Order. Only the most important of tasks and resources are to spared from dealing with this."
"Your experiments and your projects," he said as he turned to Lyra and Edward in turn, "are secondary to the First Order. If we fail here, all of us will go extinct. Which means that whatever you make and whatever you discover will be lost forever. If you must, clean up after yourselves but I hope that you will do so quickly because we need you, your hands, and your knowledge."
"But," he grinned. "If we succeed, then humanity will be saved! Let's do it people!"
"Yaaay!" He cheered.
Only Lyudmilla joined in before she faded under everyone else's scrutiny.
Leaving Roman to cheer alone in a room filled with blank looks, Ullr's quiet snores, and Lyra and Edward's scowls.
After a few seconds, Roman caught onto the lack of enthusiasm. His cheer grew quieter before he let it die into an awkward silence before he coughed.
"Alright then," he said, embarrassed. "Karen, you'll come with me to the communications room. We'll contact the Association and the UN from there. Your cooks should get back to making the meals but everyone else should get the manuals and get to work in clearing the debris and fixing the Control Room. Da Vinci, please get to work on the manuals as soon as possible but we will probably need the main generators examined and any potential damage from them neutralized. Can you get onto that?"
Roman hopped down the steps from the platform at the front of the room and paused. "Oh, and before I forget, Karen, you're now the head of the SHR department and Da Vinci, you're now in charge of the Technology Development Division. Any further leadership positions will be assigned later."
"If there is nothing else," Romani paused waiting for anyone to speak up. No one did. "Then we'll conclude the meeting. Everyone who didn't get an earlier assignment from me should go to the control room and start fixing it up. Use your communicators to get the manuals…"
Roman sighed as he realized that the technician's manuals were locked to anyone who wasn't a leader or a technician.
"And I'll get permission for each of you to access the technician manuals in addition to the user manuals. Until then, just be patient and do what you can. Karen, please come with me."
As the head cook joined him at the door, people getting to their feet behind them, he muttered to her, "We have to discuss how to best use your people. We don't need as many cooks now as before so..."
(End Recording. File saved to the official Chaldean meeting logs, subject to review and approval of the director.)
And no, Roman does not know about the security recordings. Those recordings were part of operational security and as such were not spoken of needlessly.
Finally, our murderer might have known about the recordings. Take that as you will.
And as for the magus, well, they are primarily intellectuals. They have confidence in their thoughts and ideas. Entertainment for them includes great debates where they share their ideas and smash others' faulty arguments.
As for them acting hypocritically, that is unfortunately human.