They congregated around the object of their despair and ire. It was a fervidly warped scene. Here they were, at the sight of one of the greatest memorials in the capital, the Lake of Avalon. It was an artificial lake made from one of the blast craters in the assault on Pendragon to oust Lelouch. A half mile from the north end of the lake was the old parliament building. It was briefly used by Lelouch as the hall from which governmental meetings were held. After the fall of the Lelouch government, the site instead became a museum and commemorative site, second to the national memorial site.
Euphemia's presence there was an affront to many. She was as much responsible for the deaths being memorialized there as anyone else. Someone like her, so brazenly showing up there, sitting on the "Empty Throne," was incendiary.
Typically the guards with the solemn duty of protecting the location every hour of every day held their guns against their shoulders, facing outwards to shield against outside threats. But she made it inside, and now they pointed their guns at her. But they were not so certain about using those guns. If the stories they'd heard from the frontline defense guys was true, them firing at her was like deciding to poke a beehive with a stick.
But Euphemia seemed oblivious to it. Or perhaps she was playing at being passive aggressive. She only sat there on the throne, her legs crossed, slightly slouched to the side, with her head propped up by her left hand. She merely looked out at the crowd, a small smile across her lips, as if she were entertained by a crowd of admirers gathered for her. It seemed she was challenging someone to try and remove her from that seat.
Eventually, one person dared.
A woman, around her early thirties, pushed her way past the guards and sprinted up the steps toward Euphemia. The raven-haired woman confronted Euphemia's chilling coldness with red-hot fury brimming from her stare. Euphemia sat there, still, as if she were ignorant of the woman's presence, as if she were a statue in that seat. The woman seemed unsure what she really wanted to say. It was a couple seconds of tense standoff that felt like minutes.
"You shouldn't be in that chair." The woman spoke, standing tall and as every bit as defiant as Euphemia herself seemed.
Euphemia's eyes drifted towards the woman and focused on her. Her expression did not change, and her voice sounded rather soft and polite. "I admit it is not a very comfortable seat, being made of stone. But the view is very charming. To see the twinkle on the water in the afternoon sun is remarkable. I like it."
"No one cares what you like!" the woman fearlessly snapped back. "A whore like you should have stayed dead! Why do you get to live when my son died!?"
There was tension as those who heard the woman's screamed insult wondered what Euphemia would do against such an affront. But Euphemia didn't seem to even flinch, instead answering, "Regrettably for you, I am no whore, and your son was unfortunate enough to not have the powers that I do. Most regrettable of all is that any conflict was in place such that your son's life was in mortal danger to begin with. If the governance of this world had been in better hands, then perhaps your boy's death would have never have occurred as it did."
"Don't act like your family wasn't the one that caused all of it!"
"Are you upset with me, or with my family? Contrary to your intonation, we are not one in the same. Perhaps you're a bit misguided in your anger? I know, it's easier to blame everyone. But you don't, do you? No… I don't get the feeling that you loathe Nunnally the way you seem to loathe me."
"The empress is a saint compared to the likes of you!"
"It's disheartening that she would earn such devotion, she who willingly sent thousands to their death at the trigger of a weapon of mass destruction, while I earn vitriol for being forced to kill merely a dozen while under the influence of an unintentional power. You are a Britannian who hates me for killing a dozen people, while you were surely one who cheered as my father slaughtered thousands, millions, in his wars of conquest around the world."
"You want us to pity you, you monster! Go to hell! Get outta here!"
Euphemia uncrossed her legs and stood up. She took a few steps from the throne, down to the woman who had stepped up to challenge her. The woman should have had at least a decade on Euphemia, but they were about the same height. World weariness showed on the woman's face.
"I've come all this way to set the world right," Euphemia said, placing her hand along the woman's cheek. "I decided, despite how unfairly folks like you have treated me, I would dedicate myself to being what was needed in this world. That I would be the savior you ultimately wished me to be. Even though I cannot return your son to you, perhaps you might understand my desire. And once you understand that desire, perhaps you will share it with me. Well? Do you think so?"
Euphemia pulled her hand away. The woman's expression had softened, but she seemed frozen as Euphemia backed away. She returned up the couple steps and sat herself down in the throne again, re-crossing her legs and resuming the position they'd found her in.
The woman unsteadily took a few steps back. She turned and sprinted towards the crowd, pass the line of guards. For their attempt at being imposing, the guards seemed entirely unwilling to do anything that might provoke a fight. What would they have done if something happened to the woman? A few of them seemed to realize the potency of the powder keg they were sitting on and thought to do something about it. They had begun to, quietly as they could, evacuate the crowd. The last thing they wanted was some other person filled with rage and regret charging up there and confronting the Black-Dragon Witch and getting them all roasted alive.
Suddenly, the woman who originally charged up there and confronted Euphemia turned around again. She ran at one of the guards and grabbed his weapon away. She scampered past the guards, terrifying them to think she was about to make the suicidal attempt to shoot Euphemia. But she stopped. Holding the gun a bit awkwardly, evidencing her lack of experience in holding a rifle, she turned and aimed it at the guards and the crowd.
"H-hey, calm down," one of the guards urged in a trembling voice. "Just slowly put…"
"Be quiet!" the woman screamed. "I don't need to hear anything from you except an apology!"
"An… apology?" the guard asked, not understanding what the meaning was.
"You all… you all… need to apologize, right now!" she screamed at the top of her lungs, her voice reverberating off the stone and marble of the building.
"Okay, okay, sure. Just… let us know what we did wrong, and we'll apologize to you."
"Not to me, to our goddess!" she demanded, sowing more confusion.
"What do you mean?"
"It's because of people like you, our goddess was robbed of the love we should have shown her! She deserves our love, but we've been made to view her as an enemy. Ah, my goddess, I was so blind. Please, I beg your merciful forgiveness. I wish to repent for such a terrible sin to have placed on you. Please allow me to get rid of those who fail to also seek your forgiveness."
Euphemia didn't answer. She continued to sit where she was. The woman passed the barrel from side to side, as if using it to scan for a target.
"Ma'am, please, put the gun down," one of the guards said, as the attempt to evacuate the crowd accelerated. He waved for the other guards beside him to lower their guns. For now, the biggest worry was that reinforcements might arrive and aggravate the issue before the crowd was able to flee. Or that Euphemia would see what they were doing and decide she preferred a captive audience, or a burning one, and have her dragons descend on them to make it happen.
"Would you like to be the first here? Do you wanna join me? Our lady's grace; let's share in her love."
"O-okay. Right, let's just do that, alright? So, go ahead and put the gun down, and come this way, and we can talk all about it."
Suddenly, a series of gun shots rang out; a burst of about a half-dozen rounds unloading in a fraction of a second. "That's no good. Our lady goddess doesn't like to be lied to. Please answer quickly; do you repent your sins? Please understand, our goddess' love is endless, but those who would deny it are not needed."
The guard who tried to talk the woman down laid on the ground. Of her spray of bullets, two struck him in the head. He was dead, blood running out of the holes through his head and running down the steps in a slow, thin, red, stream. The other guards were horrified, convinced the woman had completely lost her mind.
The sound of gunshots had sent the crowd into a panic. The terror that their lives were about to be ended sent them to stampede, a wonder as much hadn't happened sooner given the terror of Euphemia's infamy. In a haunting reminiscence of the past, the woman almost seemed to be a mirror of Euphemia on the day of her death. Gleefully, absent any sense of rationality, making pronouncements that none cared to hear above the frightened screams of the masses, she sprayed bullets at everything in front of her. A moment's hesitation proved fatal, several of the guards falling to her hail of gunfire during the indecision on whether to shoot to kill or try to detain her.
She emptied one gun and grabbed up another from one of the guards she downed. Then she proceeded to spray more bullets everywhere. Finally, after an eternal minute of endless gunfire, she was shot, and killed. She laid splayed out on the marble steps, a strange grin of surreal pleasure that was a thing of nightmares to behold on balance with everything else that occurred in the last several minutes. All told, she killed six guards, and around forty civilians from the crowd. It was nothing like the carnage of a true battlefield, but for a single person to do so much, it was noting short of a massacre fitting for the Massacre Princess.
Yet, it was absent her personal touch. She hadn't aimed the gun, or fired a shot. Her only words were to deny the idea of being blamed and hated. Bullets whizzed about and blood soaked into the ground as it had on that site at a nation's rediscovery. Surely, she would be blamed for this massacre as well. Yet, if truth be told, had she perpetrated any crime herself? Lelouch's power to command someone to act was not one she was said to hold. And even if it were, she hadn't told the woman to shoot or kill anyone. Surely, she did something, but what was it?
"Is that how your power worked?" Leila asked C.C. It had been a couple hours since the incident. The area around the site was abandoned except for the corpses of the slain, and perhaps their ghosts, and a couple lone officials with the grim task of surveying the remnants of carnage. The fear of what might come next after the woman was killed sent the rest of the guards and the crowd retreating as quickly as they could. Gathering the dead wasn't a priority in that situation.
"No, its not quite the same," C.C. answered. "It seems hers is more dispersed and generally stronger."
"Stronger too?"
C.C. was freed from her prison by Euphemia Alter. Considering her options, she decided to seek out one of the last people with any sort of power of Geass in the world, and someone who held no loyalties to Britannia. From there it was a quick trip to the airport and a little mischief to get herself on a flight from Britannia to France. Then, a taxi ride out to the area where Leila was most likely to be, and the rest was… a pain.
She hadn't thought it would be easy to get Leila to agree to help her out, but it was worse than pulling teeth. C.C.'s own impatience getting the better of her, and a touch of arrogance, she had a devil of a time trying to convince Leila to lend her support. The two never had much of a relationship to begin with; the affording of the potential contract by chance when Leila was young being the only interaction the two had for a very long time. It wasn't like it was with others she'd contracted with, let alone Lelouch.
But Leila did agree in the end. It was about ending the nightmare Europa was suffering. That evening the news broke about the UFN decision. The world waited on baited breath to hear what the decision would be. They hadn't wrapped their heads around the implications very well, but it was obvious enough without being a master of political science that it all basically came down to which bad idea was the least terrible of the two. Few if any had confidence an international agreement could hold Marrybell down, and fewer doubted that telling her now would lead to anything other than a renewed assault on Europa. It was obvious enough that the minor chance offered at letting her join the UFN would be the chosen path.
The news that there were conditions didn't really settle in with many individuals. The news of the decision itself was what reverberated. And the news stirred Leila and her family. A way to stop the Alters had to be found, or the Alters would soon be in control of this world.
Finally winning their cooperation, C.C. laid out what aspects of a plan she had in place. The next day they arrived in Britannia's capital and found themselves on the front steps of another tragedy.
"Yeah. Care, affection, love, desperation, obsession; that is usually the arc of that sort of power," C.C explained. "Exposure over time increases the affect. You start out merely caring about the person, nothing more than perhaps a tepid friendship. That turns into affection, like a puppy love between children. That turns into something that resembles genuine love. It can't really be called love, since their thinking is being manipulated by the power of Geass, but I would say it comes close. After that comes desperation, where the person feels like they must do more to affirm the other's affection. They begin to think in a one-sided way that nothing they do is enough to show that they love the person.
"Finally, that leads to obsession. Their wanting to monopolize the target of their warped love goes overboard. They're consumed with thoughts that every other person is trying to take their love away or is a threat in some way. They quickly turn to wanting to isolate completely the target of their love or becoming completely enslaved to that person's every word to the most extreme degree. Every slight by another towards the target of their love warrants death. Every failure to protect that target is justification to isolate them even more, lock them away like a treasured keepsake if need be.
"Altogether it takes time. It's a step-by-step process that occurs over multiple encounters – at least that was the case with me. I've rarely seen Geass like mine. I've seen it take longer, or shorter. But I've never seen it happen over a single encounter, after a few moments, with such a disparate gap. It's an incredibly stronger power."
"If it's so powerful, why was that woman the only one affected? She could have done the same to any of the guards, or all of them." Akito questioned.
"It could only be deliberate." Leila suggested.
"In other words, you're saying she was playing a game." Akito remarked.
"Most likely," C.C. said dully. "Who knows how long she was there before people started showing up. She probably thought it would be funny to see what would happen. When she came to me, she made it clear that she believed her power could work over a wide area or in a fairly passive manner. Even if it were a relatively normal Geass like mine was, eye contact alone isn't enough. It would only have a temporary affect if I didn't speak with them. We should assume that her power has two levels; a passive and an active."
"I see. So she can passively make eye contact, and that makes the person want to idolize her. If she actively engages the person, they immediately become fully infatuated. Our problem then is that we don't know how powerful that passive ability is right now. Did she use it at all? Are the folks that were there just more zombies of her will waiting to turn?"
"If you had trained that guard unit, what would your assessment have been of their performance?" C.C. asked.
"Huh? Do you mean in terms of following a set protocol?"
"Yes."
"I would think you could make such a judgment yourself. Aren't you more familiar with Britannia military regulations and training than I am?"
"But I'm not a military expert like you. So?"
Leila was still easily annoyed by C.C's quips, but she let this one pass. "I think it was probably nerves, but there were a number of serious lapses. It took too long to begin evacuations. As soon as they realized there was a threat, the evacuation of civilians should've begun immediately. Even if there was worry about an attack from her or a dragon, waiting wouldn't help the situation. It's a mistake a novice would make.
"Then, when the woman grabbed the gun and began threatening them, the other guards made the mistake of lowering their own. It's true that you want to de-escalate the situation, but you have an unstable individual with a weapon aimed at civilians. It would be different if she were suicidal, but in that situation they should have kept their weapons aimed at her as a deterrent. Even if all that did was buy them some time, that should have been the priority so they could get the civilians out of there.
"Because they didn't do that, they were unprepared to answer when she opened fire. Civilian or not, once she shot one of the guards, stopping her should have been the priority. At that range, if they had kept their guns up, they should have been able to shoot her in the arm or leg – a shot that could disable her without killing her. Even if not during the first burst of gunfire, when she stopped to grab another gun, they should have been able to stop her. It was all a failure, top to bottom. I think they let the enemy get to them."
"I think you're right, but my reasoning is a little different. I think that was the result of her passive power. It was the infatuation. They were enthralled by her presence, and that made them lax. They weren't fully ensnared by her yet, so they didn't jump to that woman's extreme, but it led to them forgetting all they knew about handling situations like that. Can you guess the biggest threat of a power like that?"
"Your zombie simile would be very accurate. They're sympathizers. They'll defend her, talk about what a wonderful person she is. They'll spread the idea that she wasn't responsible for anything because she hadn't fired a gun or gave any orders to. They'll try to convince others that she's not some inhuman monster."
"And even if that doesn't work, the suggestion alone makes them more vulnerable if she ever comes into their presence."
"And worst-case scenario, they start turning homicidal like that woman today, starting a massacre every time someone says no to idolizing and worshipping Euphemia."
"One turning everyone into loyal zombies, another burning people for her own enjoyment, and a third killing anyone involved in a dispute of any kind. Between the three of them the world would be the definition of hell."
"Drowning in their twisted visions of what it means to love others."
"I'll go see Nunnally, and then we'll get to work," C.C. sighed. "I'll meet up with you guys later."
"Sure. Just don't take too long, or we'll leave you behind."
C.C. waved them off and went along to go see her empress.