31/ Teleport in the Air

~Interlude~

The sun had yet to peek over Tolosa's eastern border, a spine of verdant mountains when Lancer returned to his Master's side. During their brief acquaintance, Lancer found his Master loved watching this interval — when the darkness he ruled retreated into the Pacific — an hour's hike north of the student village, on top of this volcanic plug. The Sister towered over a pit of graduated students' architecture projects that Lancer walked through. Miscellaneous, grotesque installations brought forth into this world as an academic means and systematically abandoned here because they had no marketable end. A labyrinth of avant-garde mausoleums, enhousing nothing, commemorating nothing. For Lancer, a waste of time, space, and effort. Yet, this cemetery was his Master's newfound kingdom.

After climbing the sandy hill, Lancer spied his Master lying on his side, black cape dangling over the edge and right elbow against a plywood table with "Eat, Sleep, BP, Repeat," scrawled in permanent marker. For a moment, just for a moment, Lancer couldn't smell the monster on him, only the pristine home.

"Lancer."

That was only an illusion. A momentarily blocked nose from the pollen of a new day, for as Lancer's Master spoke, he hoisted the meat sack he had been emptying, and tossed the corpse over his shoulder. The body never landed. As if its depths hid a swarm of piranhas, the dark cape eviscerated the body in seconds leaving nothing but a gentle bloody mist.

"Ensconce oneself, and bestow unto mine self good tidings."

Without looking back, Lancer's Master gestured at a swing hanging from chains wrapped around a particularly thick tree branch of the tree. The table or the swing, which amusement did the students install first? Either way, such a flimsy piece of wood couldn't support Lancer's bulk. The ground then. Facing away from each other, the vampire laid on top of a cheap homemade beer pong table, his Servant on the ground trying his best not to rest his back on a table leg lest it snap.

"The final trimming has taken root without resistance." As luck would have it, there had been no sign of the meddler. The madwoman burned his trees with self-interested flames and a troubled face droning on about how problematic everything was. The sheer disregard. He tried to reason with her, beg her, but his lamentations fell on deaf ears. They always did. "There will be enough magical energy injected into the leyline to begin the ritual tonight."

His Master had nothing to offer but a sharp intake of breath at the realization of Lancer's greatest wish. For Lancer's Master, tearing down what he called The Great Tree Known as Time was nothing but a tool to establish the promised land and corral Servants. He cared not of this surface world nor what was outside it like the other participants. Only what could be within. The promise of natural apotheosis had lured him from the hole in the ground where he had been squatting to the prison outside of this vibrantly mediocre American town. A men's colony, filled with petty criminals struggling to create a life for themselves in its walls was the perfect sanctum to summon Lancer.

"Being that their ugliness is your reason per which to supplant (根こそぎ, nekosogi, pull up [out] by the roots, lit. 'root/branch shave') the ways they be?"

Dry grass that begged for late-winter rains prickled Lancer's palm as it dug into the dirt. The small hole looked like the efforts of a domesticated dog offering a bone to its future self. In Lancer's case, the offering buried was a frozen burger patty — vegan. Before he returned, Lancer broke into a supermarket to find an offering. The frozen, plastic-wrapped burritos had been his first choice before he noticed the veggie burgers beside them. That was monstrously efficient, Lancer thought; the anthroposphere of this era was destitute of respect for mystery's absoluteness. Still, Lancer shook his head at his Master's attempt to rationalize his motivation.

"Ugliness is something I can forgive," Lancer snarled, canines on full display. "Ugliness is unjust rules forced upon fellow men, locking them into following a certain path, not to prosper, but merely survive. In their pettiness, each sentinel, prisoner, bureaucrat merely acts his part and in doing so carelessly prunes each other's choices so that tomorrow will be the same as today to preserve the [ruby=tree]system[/ruby]. But what of the voices read but unheard? The exploited, through no fault of their own who find themselves forgotten and without a voice."

"You rail not towards the endless stagnation, science, the mode of advancement of which of the Common Sense of Man has manifest unto this world, but the very average fixtures determined by the shared unconscious of all 'humans alive within the current era' across all valid adjacent realities (並行世界, hekou-sekai, 'timelines within a Greater History of Man'). Ergo. . . would I not be as the ultimate embodiment of your hate towards this World?"

The truth in those words was the very contradiction Lancer faced since his summoning. While he may not be a proper Heroic Spirit, heroism still flowed through his veins. He was not the type to contract with a blood-sucking demon, much less one who only saw Lancer as a tool for ascension.

"You smell like my wet nurse." For one whose hands shall never build anything, that was enough. "What of myself? I cannot accept that you chose to summon me with full knowledge of my identity."

A sharp inhale like a reverse sigh. "In an antecedent age, ebullience was found in partaking of a game with a lady (美人, bijin, 'beautiful person') who was as a friend. Trifling at its core. A sable marble (マーブル, 'It can mean 'marble (大理石, dairiseki)' as in 'a marble floor' or 'a marble pillar' It can also mean 'marble' as in a small glass ball'), centuple, save the sole bone (白いこと, shiroi-koto, lit. 'white entity') held, within a receptacle (ビン, bin, 'a jar'). The victor? Determined per the objective of isolating the white. Unto a duo of hypothetical exemplars exist by which to achieve victory over the lady who is as an opponent. The prelude, the magnum opus (偉業, Igyou, 'Great Work') known as transmutation of sable to bone, and its epilogue, picking nothing but the bone. In these matches, the blood-soaked fae (紅の精霊, kurenai no seirei, lit. 'crimson faerie') recorded by which I called my opponent snatched bone endlessly (無限, mugen, lit. 'void limit') extant. On account of my inability to replicate, I lost and thus besieged with investive query. By what interfacial request, thaumaturgical (魔術的, majutsu-teki, lit. 'pertaining unto the demonic techniques') or otherwise was with such phenomenon incurrence unto so absolutely materialized (実体化, kittaika, lit. 'manifestation to material')? Be as absent an answer the beauteous one of rouge poured globe (マーブル) unto ground through by which I premised upon myself that naught but parametric accounting was required to enforce such interfacial reaction. Ergo, extant disparity was not unto our means of natural substantiation (現界, genkai, lit 'present border') but per which permissed planetary and textural cognition."

The anecdote washed over Lancer. Try as he might, he could find no fault in his Master's rationale for fighting in the Holy Grail War; for his own reason sprouted from a similar story. En. His Master's word. But there was one point where they differed. Where the loreful Master saw a springboard to a reverence that lasted millennia, the feral Servant was left with a simple question.

"What's wrong with choosing a black marble?"

"Bone is by which the victor is determined."

"I understand the objective, but to choose white is to discard the black. To develop a method to always choose the white is to eternally discard the black."

"Marbled corpora makes nothing per but numbered Forms (形態, keitai, lit. "form-state"), wisped. Why challenge simple analogy?"

The black marbles exist so the white marble can be chosen again and again and again. All the suffering, all the laughter, all the marbles never picked are carved onto his Saint Graph, yet appear nowhere else, not even within the so-called omnipotent Grail.

Branches sway in the wind for they are destined to break, returning constituents to the soil to grow cities, empires, worlds. Speculate upon but do not mourn the lost, for the wave returns to the gentle ocean.

"If I don't, who else will?"

Waves aren't people and the ocean lost her ability to smile long ago.

As dawn broke, Master and Servant bade the Sister farewell and retreated back to their cauldron, ready to supplant the world with the utopia bubbling within. One sought to affirm his real of the world, the other, in rejection of the sin his sacrifice conceived.

~Interlude Out~