Still sitting on the couches, Tamamo, Kiyohime, Jeanne, and Jalter are all watching me type rapidly on a rune keyboard that I'm using to reply to the giant mass of emails in my work email account. Tamamo is holding a cup of lukewarm oolong tea that Matthew brought me when she saw that I was working, since the couches don't have cupholders and there are no tables in sight - if the room had been switched back to being a lecture hall, then it would be a different story, but right now we don't have that luxury.
"Master is very diligent..." Jeanne murmurs, watching me work like this is the most intriguing thing she's ever seen.
"I don't get it, what the hell are you even doing?" Jalter grumbles. She gestures at the main hologram panel that displays my email like a computer monitor.
"Work," I mutter quickly, my eyes proofreading my keys as I type out another email reply swiftly before sending it off and moving onto the next email. I'm leaving emails that have attachments that I need to print out when I get home untouched so that I know to go through them later in my office.
"Ah, this is the business that you were talking about earlier?" Jeanne asks, remembering my mention of my business stuff.
"Yeah. There's always work, so just because I'm away from home doesn't mean I get to slack off."
"You should take a break, Master, you've been at this for the past hour already," Tamamo mumbles worriedly, offering my cup of oolong tea back to me. "At least, please finish your tea..."
So I take the cup of oolong tea from her, down everything in one go, and set it down on my lap so that Tamamo doesn't have to hold it for me anymore.
"It's only been an hour, and you're telling me to take a break?" I give Tamamo a slight smirk. "But thanks for your concern. I'll be fine, though."
"Just how long are you gonna be at that, though?" Jalter continues to grumble as she lifts her right leg up over the opposite knee.
"Why, what's it to you? Are you bored?"
"Tch, yeah! There's nothing to do, we're just waiting for Da Vinci and the others to set up that portal back to your place!" Jalter sighs exasperatedly.
"We already talked about this; if you wanna stay here 'cause you hate me that much, you're more than welcome to," I reply back calmly, still concentrating on my work as I tap the next email to look at, this time an email from one of my agents in Malaysia who sends me shipments from the Southeast Asian region concerning details of a new shipment that'll get sent out within the week. Today is Sunday, April 30th, as we've spent two days in the Singularity - usually the weekends mean a break from work, since shipping companies like the one I run usually don't work on weekends, partly because the trucking companies that deliver containers and such don't work weekends and lots of utilities and services that the ports offer are also unavailable during the weekends, so it's like, why even bother working on weekends.
"It's not that, you idiot," Jalter growls.
"...Jalter, please, he is our Master," Jeanne berates her alter ego lightly. Ever since Jalter reluctantly agreed to join us, Jeanne's silently taken it upon herself to keep an eye on Jalter, as if Jalter's supposed to be her rebellious younger sister or something; at least, that's the feeling I get whenever I see the two of them interact. If Jalter wasn't a dragon-summoning mass murderer, their interaction is actually fairly cute, with Jalter constantly trying to shrug Jeanne off her. I suspect that if she had her way, Jalter would leap at the chance to just off Jeanne just so that she won't ever have to deal with Jeanne's preaching sometimes. And they've only barely known each other for a day so far.
Jalter sneers grumpily in response, refusing to make eye contact with Jeanne.
"What is it, Jalter?" Salter asks quietly, having left her seat next to Jalter briefly to fetch herself a cup of oolong tea for herself and a handful of chocolate French macarons. She sits back down next to her with her loot and proceeds to dig in. "Why the long face?"
"Tch. What's it to you?" Jalter scowls back at Salter.
"More than you think. For one, seeing you agitated brings me a small comfort," Salter explains briefly, unwrapping a macaron, since they're individually packaged, and biting into it. Mind you, none of the Servants are currently wearing their armor at the moment, or at the very least, they've magically shed the heavier parts of their armor.
"I'll fucking burn you," Jalter snaps back, with flames hissing into view from her left hand.
"'Ay, you two, play nice," I snap at them, my hands still thudding silently against the magical keys of my rune keyboard.
"Indeed. Listen to your new Master, Jalter," Salter gives Jalter quite the smug little grin. "He defeated you, did he not?"
"Hmph! If he's your Master too, that must mean he defeated you too, sometime before this," Jalter fires back, turning away from Salter and crossing her arms to lean against the back of the couch.
"No, that's inaccurate. I didn't beat her, Lily, Matthew, and Artoria did," I correct Jalter, still focusing on my work while I talk. Years of reading and typing out emails while talking to people on the phone is to blame for my ability to multi-task in this particular regard. "I just helped out a little."
"Being humble will get you nowhere, Master," Salter remarks before she fills her mouth with macaron again.
"And neither will twisting the truth."
"But you are twisting the truth."
"I don't think I am. Compared to the amount of work that Lily and Artoria put in to fight you back then, whatever I did to help wasn't nearly as impactful."
"Ah, so you say that saving Lily's life was not impactful?"
"I never said that nothing I did was impactful, I only said my efforts weren't nearly as impactful. Let's just put it this way, I wasn't the one who dealt you the final attack to beat you, mkay?"
Salter snorts quietly, shrugging. "Do you see this, Jalter? This is your Master, a Master who refuses to recognize the importance of his actions."
"Again, inaccurate. It's not that, I just don't see the point in bragging about it."
"Oh, Master, you don't have to be so reserved ~ you should be more outspoken, more brazen, more forceful ~ !" Tamamo sings, her bushy tail wagging back and forth.
"Nay, Master, I prefer you as you are now. Quiet and reserved, yet powerful and strong when the situation calls for it - that is how it should be," Kiyohime coos, her soft, hiss-like voice snaking into my other ear on the opposite side of Tamamo. "Permit not this impolite fox to sway your behavior in the other direction."
"Oi, Kiyo-chan, you don't actually plan on getting in the way of me and Master...?" Tamamo, dropping the pitch of her voice without warning, narrows her eyes past me at Kiyohime, who returns the gaze with a sharp, beady-eyed glare of her own.
"And who are you to stop me?" Kiyohime replies in what can only be described as a whisper. "I have come to the conclusion that Master is perfectly suited to be my husband as well."
"No, that's just your Madness Enhancement talking! And besides, I came to him first! He summoned me first! He didn't even summon you!" Tamamo sulks indignantly before she leans over and hugs my left arm. "Master, Master, you - you won't possibly let that snake woman come and steal you away from me, would you?"
Why are we talking about this again?
"I'm not exactly in a position to be a bachelor," I sigh a little, sending another email off, this time to one of the trucking companies I work with in the Chicago area. "And I'm still in the middle of work, so I'd like to ask you two to calm it down a little, at least until I'm done with this."
"A-And how long is your work going to take? You're always working, it seems like!" Tamamo exclaims. "Are...are humans these days always so busy...?"
That last comment from Tamamo makes me smirk darkly. "Welcome to the modern world, Tamamo," I turn to her and give her a polite, professional smile, "where they say time is money. And from my personal experience, they're absolutely right."
And with that, I open another email, though I notice I'm almost done with the ones that need my immediate attention.
"Waaaaahhh! Master's a workaholiiiiiiiic!" Tamamo cries out, sounding utterly devastated by this revelation. "Kiyo-chan, we've gotta save him! He's gonna work himself to death!"
"Workaholic? Nay, I see that he knows what it means to be committed to his work. Now, if only he could show such commitment to the woman of his choice..." Kiyohime giggles softly, enticingly. "...which would be me, of course. Ufufufu ~ "
"Again, don't try to steal him away from meeeee! ! !"
Simply scoffing back at Tamamo, Kiyohime scoots in closer and rests her head against the side of my right shoulder, while Tamamo, unwilling to give up any ground on this battlefield, squeezes my left arm even deeper into her chest. I didn't ask for this...
Speaking of which, weren't Kiyohime and Tamamo supposed to be friends? But I guess when it comes to their Master, their friendship hardly lasts...so this is the kind of situation that's developing? Ah, I think I can feel the regrets start to seep in...
"Hey, Master," Jalter calls over to me. I get the feeling she's only trying to start up a conversation because she can't stand all this flirting by Tamamo and Kiyohime.
"Mhm."
"How the hell did you even survive my Noble Phantasm back then? In the throne room of the castle?" Jalter asks suspiciously. "You're supposed to be a normal human, right? Normal people can't survive that."
"I told you, I survived 'cause I didn't feel like your flames were all that strong," I shrug. "My sense of how strong different types of fire are is a bit...different."
"Yeah, yeah, okay, you felt like my flames were strong enough, whatever. But you got stabbed, didn't you? You had a hole in your shirt when you came back. How did you heal that fast? Normal Masters don't just get hurt like that and then just walk it off like it's nothing!"
"Oh, you're talking about that." I shrug again. "I dunno...getting stabbed like that gets kinda dull after a while."
"After a...while? What do you - "
"That's not the first time I've had a spear or a knife go through me like that." I hit the enter button to send my final email and close the holograms around me to look back up at Jalter. "Wasn't the first time, and I doubt it'll be the last."
"But how you did you even heal that fast? Servants can't even heal like that unless they know healing magic!"
"Well, I have a bit of healing magic of my own. It's more magical surgery techniques, but it's still regenerative magic. If I apply my flames to them, then it speeds up the process. That's all there is to it, really."
"But - " Jalter groans aloud, shaking her head and facepalming. "Salter, I think you're right, there's a lot this guy's hiding..."
"I'm not hiding anything," I shrug a third time in a row.
"Then tell me why you didn't die!" Jalter starts raising her voice, but she's done that many times already.
"Jalter, your voice, please..." Jeanne reminds her quietly. She's starting to sound like a timid mother who's trying to rein in her boisterous child.
"I guess maybe you underestimated humans a little too much. They're a bit stronger than you think," I retort, folding my arms slowly back at Jalter. "But I guess that just goes without saying, considering the fact that you attempted ethnic genocide against your own people."
Jalter starts grinding her teeth. I'm getting under her skin, and the inner sadist in me is starting to smile, though I don't let that show.
"Fine, I see how you're playing this," Jalter folds her arms back at me, as if that's her form of retaliation. "Then what kind of magic are you using to produce your power? Those flames, I mean!"
"Um...I would actually like to know about that as well," Jeanne slowly raises her hand like a model student in class. "We had seen you use explosion magic in battle several times, but...nothing to the extent of what you used in the battle against her. Have you been using that kind of magic all your life?"
Tamamo gasps. "Master knows how to use flames!? But why is this the first time I'm hearing about this!? Master, please explain yourself!" Caster gives me quite the passionate pout. "I could teach you a thing or two about using flames!"
"Flames, you say...? Even better, even better..." Kiyohime adds on, raising her fan up to her lips to cover them. "I see that our compatibility is continuing to grow. Good, good, ufufufu..."
"Hey, back off, Kiyo-chan, I told you already that he's mine!" Tamamo makes sure to snap back at her friend.
It's a bit hard for me to keep up with these two, admittedly. Not that I want to tell them to shut up, either.
"My magic's always taken the form of fire ever since I started learning it and using it," I explain. I unfold my arms to extend out my fingerless-gloved left hand a bit and set it ablaze with a potent amount of fire that crackles and snaps like a campfire. At the sight of this, the Servants around me, to varying degrees, all marvel at it. "Makes sense, I've always liked the look and aesthetic of fire and how destructive it can be, so I'm glad it turned out this way. But I don't really use it in its form like this if I can help it - for me, personally, because I use a system of magic that allows even normal human beings to wield powers like this, it's very mana-inefficient, and it burns me out a lot faster than if I were to fight normally, no pun intended."
"Burns you out? But Master, you fought for two days straight - " Tamamo blurts out, but I cut her off swiftly.
"And you say that like it's an accomplishment," I smirk a little.
" - while supplying fourteen Servants in the process!" Tamamo talks right back over me, not giving a shit. "It's like you don't burn out!"
"Hey, that's not true, I was close to after I was done with Jalter and the evil Gilles," I frown a little too. "I didn't beat Jalter, she could'a easily come over and chopped my head off. Well, no, actually, Jeanne was still there, so I guess she could've bought me some time..."
I glance back at the Jeanne duo, particularly at Jalter, who, having been staring back at me, naturally notices that I'm giving her my gaze.
"...what do you want? Just spit it out if you've got something to say," Jalter hisses back. It's not quite as nice as Kiyohime's hisses, but I guess I'll take what I can get.
Something is off about Jalter. As I brought up during my fight with her back in Orleans, Jalter's flames didn't feel...authentic. When her flames engulfed me, I expected them to hurt a lot more, but they didn't. As I'd mentioned to her, to put it in perspective, her flames hurt as much as a kid throwing a tantrum and flailing his or her fists around and punching you with them, when I was expecting them to hit me like a ton of bricks. For someone like Jalter with enough power to use a Noble Phantasm like that, why did her flames do so little? In fact, the stake that stabbed me through the lung did more damage to me than the flames themselves did, when in reality I get the feeling that Jalter intended for the other way around to be the case. The conclusion that I formed was that there's something about Jalter that isn't authentic, namely her feelings and her memories that she would need to attach to her power to give it the strength that it needed to kill me - either that, or she simply has none of it. But the latter's not true either; she definitely does have those feelings, but I guess they aren't strong enough, and the only reason that I think might explain this is because Jalter herself might not be a true "Servant". And I have the evil Gilles' reactions to support this hypothesis, too.
"I wanna ask, but...are you a real Servant?" I ask Jalter.
At this, Jalter first balks, and then she leaps up to her feet and draws her black sword swiftly and points it at me. At this, both Kiyohime and Tamamo also pounce off the couch on either side of me and toss out their items before me to shield me, Tamamo with one of her big magic mirrors and Kiyohime with her sturdy war fan.
I wish they didn't do that, because Jalter's sword is actually very lovely to look at. Despite not being adept with most melee weapons like swords or spears due to my preference for guns, firearms, and ranged weapons, I can appreciate the beauty of any weapon, melee or ranged.
"What do you mean, am I real?" Jalter seethes. "We even made a contract. What further proof do you need to know that I am real?"
Looks like that question triggered her quite a bit.
"I'd like to take your word for it, true, but..." I calmly take off my glasses to breathe on the lenses to wipe them with the bottom of my shirt. "...I think I brought this up earlier when we fought, but you claim to be the alternative form of Jeanne d'Arc. For example, your friend Salter - "
"She's not my friend!"
Salter snickers on the couch behind Jalter, eating her final macaron.
"Okay, my bad then, Salter over there, for example, is the alternative form of Artoria Pendragon," I correct myself with a lazy wave of my hand. "Hence why we call her Salter, or 'Saber Alter' for short, and why we call you 'Jalter', or 'Jeanne Alter' for short. The alter form of a Servant, from what little I've studied and researched, is supposed to embody the dark side of that Servant. Their darker qualities, if you will. You certainly appear to harbor Jeanne's dark side. But do you really?"
Jalter keeps her sword steady, aimed at my neck through Tamamo's mirror.
"You dare call my hatred for France fake?" Jalter boils.
"Not that, that's real, I can already tell," I wave my hand again a little. "But take it one step further, I wanna know if your reasons for your hatred are real."
"My reasons...?"
"Jeanne asked you if you remember your family," I nod over at Jeanne, who's also stood up with Tamamo and Kiyohime and Jalter when the latter pulled her sword on me. "But you didn't give a decisive answer. Or, in other words, you didn't say yes. Which means we can only assume that you don't remember."
Jalter's hand on her sword is trembling, also causing her sword to shake.
"So then let's ask Salter over here." I lean a little to my right to get a better look at Salter. "Salter, you have all the memories that your other self has, right? The normal Artoria Pendragon."
Salter nods. "Aye, that is correct. Everything that she knows in her life - as her Alter form, I possess knowledge of myself."
"So if Salter knows, why don't you know?" I question Jalter. "Servants don't lose their memories of their real lives at all, even if they get summoned in whatever alternate versions of themselves, or at least that's what I know, unless I've been intentionally misled. But you don't?"
"AND SO WHAT IF I DON'T?!"
Jalter finally explodes like a bomb whose fuse has been lit, with a very short fuse at that. Her gigantic roar slams the walls of the lounge, which, as a lecture hall, has been designed to have very good acoustics so that voices can travel easily without the use of a microphone, so Jalter roaring like this is even louder than it really is. Naturally, everyone else in the room who'd been chatting away get silenced, and all attention is drawn to Jalter like she's got a taunt skill or something.
"Nothing," I say simply, wiping away a speck or two of spit off my face that Jalter's flung at me when she yelled. "I just wanted to know."
At first, Jalter simply stares at me in pure and utter disbelief, like she was expecting me to say something more impactful. But once the realization sinks in that I only drove her to the edge like this simply for the knowledge of it all, Jalter turns, hurls her sword at the side wall near the refreshments table, causing her sword to spike into the wall and blow out a massive chunk of it in a fireball of an explosion, and stomps out of the hall and leaves.
"Olga's gonna charge me for that," I sigh heavily, inspecting the damage that Jalter's done to the wall as several concerned Servants hurry over to us. "Goddamn it."
"Master, what was the problem? Why did Mademoiselle Jalter do that?" Gilles (the sane one) asks quickly, naturally alarmed by this display of outward anger by Jalter.
"And I thought I could act like a bitch sometimes..." Elizabeth remarks, snorting at the crater in the wall that Jalter's sword, still embedded in the wall itself, mind you, has gouged out.
"But that is a given, no?" Kiyohime smiles over at Elizabeth.
"I didn't need YOU to tell me that, you annoying Japanese squirrel!"
"It's fine, I was the one who made her do that," I shake my head to reassure the Servants who've come over to investigate.
"But was that wise, Master?" Salter asks. Having finished all her macarons, she now sips on her oolong tea to wash them all down. "Pushing her that far. You may have noticed, but she is quite the sensitive little girl."
"It was gonna happen sooner or later. I'd rather have that kind of conversation now, when we can afford to have it, rather than later when it might come up at a really inconvenient time, like, in the middle of a battle, for example," I roll my eyes a little. "And besides, don't lie, you liked seeing her get pissed off, didn't you?"
"Ah, it seems you know me a bit better, then," Salter gives me a wry, evil little smile.
"Well, it was obvious just watching you talk to her."
"Master, um, about this, er, predicament..."
I turn to Jeanne, who's spoken up again in her quiet, delicate voice.
"I think that...your suspicions about Jalter not being a true Servant in the traditional sense like the rest of us are correct," Jeanne elaborates.
"So you agree, then?" I ask.
"Yes. Although Jalter may be very angry if she comes to know that I share your sentiment about this matter..."
"I'll keep her in check. I was the one who keeps bugging her about this, so I'll take it upon myself to make sure she doesn't do anything to you."
"Er, you...you don't need to go that far, but..." Jeanne clears her throat quickly. "The truth is that...I have no such hatred for my country, for France. Yes, my death may have ultimately been a result of the machinations of my own countrymen, but at the time of my death, I did not resent my country or my people for how my death came about. So as a Servant, I still harbor no such intentions."
Tamamo gazes at Jeanne with narrowed eyes, I notice. But as soon as Tamamo notices me gazing at her for a moment, she snaps out of it and puts on a more cheerful facade. Interesting.
"Hm. So because you don't have any desire to destroy your own country, Jalter shouldn't have had any to begin with...?" I speculate.
"It is more accurate to say that Jalter should not even exist," Salter inputs. "If Jeanne d'Arc is speaking the truth, that she in fact harbors no such desire to lay waste to her own country, then an alternate Jeanne d'Arc who does harbor those intentions cannot exist to begin with. For an alternate form of a Servant to exist, the original Servant must already harbor some degree of the traits that appear dominant in the alternate form, traits that the original Servant is actively trying to suppress or keep locked away in the depths of their minds or hearts."
"Like multiplying something with zero," I ponder. "No matter what you do, you still get zero..."
Jeanne winces when I mention multiplying. Does she not like math?
Er, well, as a poor farm girl in medieval France, I suppose it makes sense...she probably never had any knowledge of mathematics. Though I'm surprised she even knows what it is, then.
"I am able to testify on behalf of Mademoiselle Jeanne that she in fact loved her country and would never wish to see it destroyed, especially not by her own hand," Gilles says, though his voice sounds very somber when he says this. "And also, the other me...I think that what may have happened was that when he got his hands on the Holy Grail of that Singularity, he used it to attempt to create a Jeanne d'Arc that fit with his likings. A Jeanne d'Arc that would share his sentiments about the country of France. But because the real Jeanne d'Arc possesses none of the things that he wanted, he perhaps chose the next best option and simply created a Servant based on Jeanne d'Arc that did conform to his desires. That is, I believe, what caused Jeanne d'Arc Alter to come into being."
"Right now, Jalter believes that she is the alternative version of me," Jeanne sighs quietly. "She believes that with all of her heart. I have tried to tell her that that is not accurate, but...I haven't been able to convince myself to tell her this."
So in other words, Jalter's having an existential crisis about herself and how she isn't what she thought she was. While I'd like to laugh, I won't. Now's not the time to be an asshole.
"I'll try to handle this at some point," I nod to everyone. "In the meantime, lemme go check on how that portal's coming along..."
