"Is she still going to go ahead with the public ceremony?" a mournful sounding Lloyd asked as he slowly paced down the hall of the temporary imperial residence. They were on their way to the room at the end of this relatively long hallway, their escorts leaving them at the start of the hall.
"It seems her highness is adamant about not cancelling the Memorial Day events. She truly believes that the people need the catharsis of mourning, as well as a show of solidarity and strength, especially now." Cecille answered him, similarly morose.
"I certainly miss the good old days when our monarchs selfishly plotted their own survival," Lloyd dryly joked. Cecille silently gave him a scolding glance, relieved enough that no one had been around to hear his crass jest.
Following the demise of Lelouch, Lloyd and Cecille continued their joint research work on behalf of Britannia. Their official rolls were a strange paradox, as their titles outwardly became more clandestine, while their actual work remained little changed, if not more outwardly visible. Officially they were attachés for the Britannia military's imperial arms division. This was essentially the arm under which the former En Vogue operated and would have been the arm that created the specialty Knightmare Frames used by the Knights of the Rounds. However, Cecille and Lloyd's work now focused more on the "consultation" with foreign allied partners in their own scientific development programs. That was a fancy way of saying they were developing Knightmare Frames for the Black Knights mostly, a few other Britannia allies to a lesser extent.
Given the multitude of arms treaties and penalties Britannia was under, the Black Knights were really the only entity that they really could peddle their talents to. But the UFN is not a nation unto itself, and the duo were still at least tangentially attached to the Demon King in the public's mind, so there wasn't exactly a lot of options for them outside Britannia.
Nowadays they spent much of their time working out of the Galveston facility, Cecille still helping support Lloyd's off-the-walls scientific curiosity, while tempering his worst habits and instincts. If not for a late season tropical storm they would've arrived in the capital a day earlier, but their responsibilities with the lab delayed them. That had annoyed Lloyd to no end, as he was supremely curious about the report Nina sent them.
"I wonder if they've made any progress on their analysis," Cecille pondered aloud. "It didn't sound like they had very much to go on."
"Not very much indeed. Though I suppose that if they were able to make progress on their own, they wouldn't have called us here to begin with."
"I did hear that they've confirmed two other bases have been attacked. They're fairly small out of the way places, so a lot of the details are still being kept out of the news. Even so, anxiety is certainly going to grow now that there've been two more attacks."
"Well, that would certainly make sense. If you don't count Prince Schneizel's surprise assault on the capital, it's been a very long time since Britannia's faced an enemy that has gotten away with so many attacks on the homeland. I'll be very interested in finding out what it is they've been holding back from us."
"You think they know that much? I suppose they wouldn't be secretive with us if they didn't have fairly critical information."
"I have a feeling this is going to be quite the messy project my dear Cecille."
There was a single guard at the door. He silently opened the door to let Lloyd and Cecille in. This was clearly one of the secure rooms, the door much thicker than it initially seemed. There were no windows either, making the room feel very claustrophobic. The room was relatively large, enough for two chandeliers which provided most of the lighting.
By its offset the room held a long table to the left, smaller than you'd be accustomed to seeing in a conference room, but still large enough to seat eight. Many of the frills of a typical war room were absent like the large digital displays, or computer monitors inlaid into the table. There was a digital projector pointed at a blank wall, but who was to say where it was connected from.
Seated at the table already was the young empress and her older sister. The elder sister seemed angry, which wasn't saying much because she often seemed angry. There were precious few moments you could see a genuine happy smile on her face; when she used to look at her blood sister, and now when she looked at her child. For the empress too every once in a while, and in private far more than public. But she felt a certain weight and gravitas came with being forced to retain the mantle of First Princess while in the presence of the empress.
She wouldn't likely describe her own expression as angry, but rather stern. She was a military woman after all; the successor to the legendary Marianne the Flash. She hardly took the pride in that title that she once did, however. In any event, that part of her life past her now, she couldn't quite untether herself from those movements, those engrained muscle memories of how to move, how to look, how to speak, when on official duty rather than private repose. It wouldn't at all be beyond the realm of possibility that she had actually been far more relaxed and casual a moment ago before she heard the door opening. Who was to say how tense or pleasant the chatter was before now?
Zero was also seated at the table. His helmet still on, Suzaku's expression was impossible to read. More likely than not he was only here now for convincing Lloyd and Cecille of the matter, not that it was one they'd need much convincing on. He'd have probably liked to wait outside while the sisters were together, but given the nature of the conversation to follow, that likely wasn't a real option.
The last person in the room was Nina. Lloyd and Cecille had always found her to be an odd duck, from differing perspectives on the matter mind you. Cecille often thought of her as being too hard to read. It was difficult to tell what she was thinking, and her expressions sometimes didn't match what she was saying. Was she lying to others, to herself, was she even aware? It was all a difficult thing for Cecile to grasp when she looked at Nina.
Lloyd on the other hand thought her to be too much like him and Rakshata, just with worse brakes. Back when he recruited her, he had been dazzled by her inquisitiveness and brilliance. He truly thought her a scientific genius. But with his own genius, he could also see how destructive her potential was. Barriers and roadblocks he would carefully negotiate, she would barrel on through. It was a reckless abandon in the pursuit of an end goal he both admired and dread. But he wasn't the sort to lecture people on stuff like that.
"It's an honor to be here, your majesty. It's good to see you again too, Princess Cornelia. It's been a while. How's little Anne doing these days?" Lloyd greeted happily enough. He at least kept the boisterousness to a minimum.
"She's fine," she answered him a bit curtly. She was never particularly fond of Lloyd. He always did rub her the wrong way, so the fact that she hadn't been more derisive was at least something.
"I had thought Prince Schneizel would be here as well," Lloyd stated as he and Cecille took a seat.
"Prince Schneizel has gone to meet with a delegation from Kurdistan," Suzaku answered, removing his helmet now that everyone seemed to be present. "They were supposed to be meeting with the Empress to discuss an economic development plan the UFN was brokering with regional states. Now they're offering logistical and intelligence support to deal with our problem."
"Hard at work as ever I see. Then are we to begin without him?"
"Yes," Nunnally answered. "Nina, please show them."
Nina stood up and shuffled closer to Lloyd and Cecile. She placed the tablet she'd been holding on the table in front of them. As she swiped through a series of files and images, she and Suzaku went about carefully explaining to the two the technical side of the story of what they knew from the night a couple days ago.
At the end of it, Lloyd had an incredulous look on his face. It was something akin to the look on his face from when he first saw the Float system employed. Back then he had known that Rakshata had just edged him out to implementing a design theory they'd both once worked on. His reaction fit with Nina's own theory to Suzaku and Nunnally after that night; this was done by a technology that wasn't impossible, just not currently plausible.
"Have you consulted with Rakshata about this?" Lloyd asked.
"We had a brief talk with her earlier this morning," Cornelia answered him. "She asked the same about you."
Lloyd and Cecile's expressions darkened a little as they mulled it over in their heads. "That's not a good thing, is it?" Cecille asked rhetorically. She sighed and took a look back at the tablet, hoping to discern something she might have missed.
"I'm sure Nina can tell you that from the perspective of the necessary energy source, we don't have a means of miniaturizing a suitable powerplant to embed it on a Knightmare and power such a weapon. That alone makes such a weapon highly impractical right now. Rakshata was the only person I could think of who would be even close to something like this. Perhaps there are one or two others, but I would assume she already told you about those."
"She did say there aren't more than maybe three people making progress in this area of design. She said two of them work for the Black Knights, and the other would probably be here in Britannia." Cornelia explained, seemingly exasperated at not getting a more positive answer. "She agreed with Nina that it was probably at least another decade before we had a viable test prototype, let alone one capable of being deployed as a battle-ready weapon,"
"That's on the money. If you're asking when a machine capable of using some sort of plasma weapon in concert with a stealth system that can evade our current detection capabilities while also employing a perfect atmospheric holographic projection… well, that potential is much further away than that I'm afraid."
"Then what was this?" Nunnally asked in a pleading voice.
"I'm afraid I can't answer that for you just yet, your majesty." Lloyd answered somberly. Odd as it seemed, he did have a bit of consideration for appropriateness when speaking with the empress. "Everything I know at the moment says that this should not be possible."
"Even if we assume this was a test run of a prototype, having multiple units operational for such a long period of time would be unthinkable," Cecille added. "It just doesn't make sense."
"Is it possible that the nighttime obscured some detail about the units?" Lloyd questioned.
With a slightly hesitant hand, Nina swiped the screen to another image file. This one was of the attack on the air base the day before. Lloyd's eyes narrowed in curiosity. He went from viewing this as a peculiarity to something of a challenge to his intellect. "Well now, this looks to be quite the bold comedy. Even I know it's not in very good taste though…"
"There's another, though I don't believe you'd know her well." Suzaku added.
"Well, talk of ghosts aside, this certainly isn't a mere holographic projection. Even the most ambitious hopes in place today wouldn't show such a crisp and lifelike image on an object moving about that much. You can see the reactive and variable lighting of the scales, and you aren't seeing any disruption by wind or smoke. This could only be a Knightmare with the skin of a dragon."
"Any theories?" Suzaku prodded.
"There's some folks in the EU we could talk to. The EU has been working on organic forms for their Knightmares since the wars with Britannia. They had several trials models near the end of the conflict." Cecille theorized.
"Ah, you mean the Alexander series," Cornelia mused. "They were called the fruitless flowers. Their ability to shift between various modes to traverse landscapes made them far more maneuverable in a complex or urban theater, which made them a challenge for traditional Knightmares in the forested areas where the EU would draw our fighters into battles. But the units were too fragile. They broke down easily and frequently, and the energy consumption was so extreme that they were deemed unsuitable for a Float system. Virtually nothing of the Alexander series ended up being used in future Knightmare development."
"This design doesn't make much sense, however. If you were to appropriate a mythical beast like a dragon, making it fly would be so difficult that it would be impractical. As exotic as it is for a theme, there's enough examples of ground-based dragons in mythology to work with. You would be able to avoid the difficulty of a Float-enabled Knightmare whose wings have to conform to the design of flapping wings. I don't even understand the point behind it. It's almost like someone just wanted to show off they could make something like this," Cecile grumbled aloud, half thinking out loud, half just to herself.
"I need you three to work with Rakshata to figure out what this enemy is, and who created it. Sister Cornelia and big brother Schneizel have convinced me that a one-week delay to the Memorial Day events would be for the best," Nunnally conceded.
"It should go without saying, but you are to keep all details confidential," Cornelia sternly directed.
"I am having a workshop prepared for you to work from here on-site. Please let me know if there is anything at all you will need," Nunnally added. "Too many people have died already. I want to put a stop to this as soon as possible. There is a team working to identify and locate individuals who may be involved in this plot. I want you to also offer them any technical assistance they need."
"As you wish, your majesty," Lloyd and Cecille solemnly accepted, bowing their heads to her.
"So then, where do we begin?" Nunnally prodded.
"Well, it would be helpful if we could talk to any witnesses to the attack from yesterday. We could use as many details as possible; sights, sounds, smells, that sort of thing," Cecille cautiously laid out. It had dawned on her as she spoke that she hadn't heard about the number of casualties.
"We'll need any units that were damaged most importantly," Lloyd mused, his head tilted upwards in contemplation. "As well as someplace to test our theories."
"Testing?" Cornelia skeptically questioned.
With a stern look he answered her, "If we hope to prove anything, we'll have to give it a try."
"I hope you aren't using this as an excuse to satisfy your curiosities."
"No, it's fine. But you'll need to receive my sister's approval before any experiments." Nunally stipulated.
"Understood, your highness."
"We should get going now," Cornelia said wearily as she stood up. "Schneizel won't be thrilled to have us so late."
"Suzaku, please stay a little while longer to help catch them up."
"Of course, Nunnally."
They all rose and waited for Nunnally and Cornelia to exit the room before sitting back down. It was a royal custom that Nunnally had sought to do away with. It made her feel very uncomfortable, as if the people in the room were hoping to plot something behind her back. Yet she had come to accept it for the symbolic gesture it was.
"I didn't want to bring this up with her majesty in the room," Suzaku began. "But we believe that enemy is someone who knows us fairly well."
"Is that so?" Lloyd pondered a moment. "Any reason in particular? I can say that I don't think a Euphemia impersonator would be that far out of the ordinary."
"So, you've heard," Suzaku stated sternly. He didn't know if to be relieved he didn't have to recount that event again, or furious that it had leaked in the first place. But it did at least seem that Lloyd's source was somewhat limited.
"I hadn't thought much of it until just now. But, if you're so tense about the subject while her majesty's in the room, and more importantly the princess, then I imagine there must be some truth to that nasty rumor. As I said, however, an impersonator to Princess Euphemia isn't terribly significant. I'm sure there are hundreds of young women who can put on makeup or dye their hair to emulate the appearance of someone as famed as her."
"I believe the same thing," Suzaku partly lied. "Princess Euphemia was very well known, and there are countless pictures of her that people might use to dress any number of women to be a striking similarity, particularly when looking at them in the dimness of night while confronting a terrible scene like the castle's burning. That alone wouldn't be enough to draw attention.
"But the person I encountered at the base was not someone in the guise of Princess Euphemia."
"You saw another person?" Cecile asked, this being the first she'd heard of it.
"Yes. Do you remember Shirley Fenette?"
"Shirley Fenette?" Cecile paused. "I think I do recall… are you saying that's who you saw?"
"Yes."
"She was the daughter of a diplomat, a low-level noble. She would certainly be more famous than a regular civilian, but I doubt she is particularly well known. As a strategy to throw off the opponent I can see why they might have someone impersonate Princess Euphemia, but what does it serve to impersonate Shirley Fenette?" Cecile questioned, a bit taken aback by the oddity of the idea.
"She seemed to know who I was, even though I had my helmet on. And she seemed to have known all about Lelouch's time as Zero, as well as what happened between him, Euphemia, and Shirley."
"I see," Cecile sighed. "Even knowing this was an impostor, for them to choose someone who few would have reason to know or connect with, you would then have to assume they would know enough about that person and their relationships to guess information reasonably close to the truth. Suzaku Kururugi is supposed to be dead, so no one should have any reason to think you're Zero."
"Only us, her majesty, and about a handful others should have any idea that Kururugi is alive and has been Zero for the last half decade," Lloyd explained. "Are you suggesting that one of those people is behind this?"
"No, I'm not saying that," Suzaku quickly defended. "There's nothing to be gained from that. As contrite as Nunnally is, she'd hand the throne over to Cornelia the moment she asked, and Cornelia knows that too. I can't see any reason for you all, or Rakshata, or Kallen, to do this either. But the person who's responsible has to know me and Lelouch well enough to think that using Shirley's face would hold any meaning."
"So, there's another project you want our help with, isn't there?" Lloyd guessed.
"I want you two to handle the facial recognition search. Given the fact we're trying to keep this information secret, we can't allow normal teams to be involved in this. It would set off all kinds of rumors if we let it slip out that we're actually looking for someone with the face of a late princess, and I doubt it would take them long to pick up the details on Shirley too."
"I suppose there isn't really much other choice, is there," Lloyd shrugged.
"We could attempt to refine the algorithm to approximate relative height," Cecille added in. "That will certainly slow the process down a great deal, but it should help to eliminate any clear fakes, and hopefully help to disprove the rumors."
"Will you be joining us then, Nina?" Lloyd asked, looking to prod her out of her silence. She'd always been hard to fully read – a mousy girl that seemed scared of her own shadow, yet able to make such determined and unrelenting decisions if need be. He was at least certain that she would be very upset hearing someone was using Euphemia's face and name.
"Her majesty has asked me to coordinate the research departments here in Britannia with our allies so that the information we receive can be processed effectively."
"Weeding out the useless data, eh? That's reassuring," Lloyd was a little disappointed. He was hoping to work with her, but he had to admit that her role was one they would likely sorely need. It was better someone with her talents do it to alleviate the burden on their side when it came time to analyze all that data.
"Nina will be relying on you and your team giving her as precise direction as you can so that you don't end up wasting time." Suzaku explained. It was more to reiterate the obvious, since he knew Lloyd's penchant to get drawn into his own world of research and fantasy.
"Out of curiosity, what will your plans be?" Lloyd questioned.
"I would like to remain by Nunnally's side, but I have things I have to do. I'll be heading to Newport to finish reestablishing the Black Knight's base of operations there. Then tomorrow I have to travel to Tokyo to meet with Kaguya."
"Barely into her second term and this is what she has to deal with. I feel a bit sorry for her," Cecille sighed.
"It's gonna be a little hard keeping her temper in check. I imagine she's gonna rake anyone she thinks suspicious over the coals." Lloyd offered a dry chuckle.
"I probably won't be back in Britannia until the Memorial service,"
"Meeting with world leaders to sniff out the attacker?" Cecille asked.
"And to secure support against whoever this enemy really is."
"I hope we'll have good news for you when you return," Nina offered with a small bow of her head.
"I'll look forward to it. We have to do all we can to prevent this enemy from burning Britannia ever again."