One of the first things Kallen found herself marveling at in her new job was how much she didn't really understand the empress she was now serving. That was mostly okay before, she reasoned, since it wasn't her empress. Nunnnally ruled Britannia. Japan had been Britannia's property for nearly two decades before winning its independence. In emerging from that sorry state, it lost its old monarchy and was now a federal republic. For her entire life Kallen never knew what it was really like to serve a monarch, to have a monarch to look to in anything but disdain.
Since arriving in Britannia to help Lloyd and Rakshata with their investigation, she found herself ending up in Nunnally's company more often than she expected she would. It was a strange feeling, always as though Nunnally was inviting friends over to her home, rather than advisors in for an audience with a ruler. Kallen didn't really know if one or the other was ideal, just that it was different than what she expected.
Now being in her company virtually all the time, as her knight, Kallen found that Nunnally's attitude, behavior, temperament, were more nuanced than she'd given her credit. To some extent she had still seen Nunnally as only naïve and emotional, not thinking too much about the things she said or did. But to see Nunnally reading documents, ruminating over information, calling for someone or another to fetch her more information before she buried her nose in it again. Altogether it reminded her a bit of serving Lelouch. She didn't consider Nunnally the genius strategist and commander Lelouch was, but she definitely shared a bit with her illustrious brother.
When Nunnally awoke suddenly from her unintended nap, she was equal parts embarrassed and upset. She didn't think it right to have allowed herself to have fallen asleep, wishing Kallen and Angela hadn't seen her do something so "shameful" as that. Kallen reacted without thinking, lightly scolding Nunnally that passing out in a chair from exhaustion for barely an hour and a half was different from sleep, and the challenges they faced wouldn't be solved by her working herself to death carelessly.
Kallen expected Nunnally would be upset to hear that C.C. came and went while she was out. But the look of relief and acceptance was surprising. "I'm just happy she's not angry with us. I'm sure I'll see her again soon," Nunnally said with a contented sigh. It was nice to see her smile like that, as if a heavy weight were lifted now that she knew her friend was still her friend.
After perking herself up, Nunnally got to work drafting an address she wanted to give to her nation about what happened at the Empty Throne. It was an extension of the written comments the last part of the earlier meeting with her military command was spent crafting. Kallen had to ask Angela to be sure, wondering if Nunnally usually wrote all her own speeches.
"I wouldn't say she writes them all herself, but she certainly does edit any given to her rather heavily."
"Her Memorial Day speech must've been edited," Kallen pondered aloud.
"Yes, that's correct. She spent quite a while on that one," Angela affirmed.
As other advisers and speech writers came in to review and comment on her draft, Kallen took the opportunity to slip out and go off to find Lloyd. Thankfully he was in the lab, Cecile and Rakshata in there as well. It looked like they hadn't had much sleep either, all three of them eating from a tray of microwaved food. Cecile almost looked like she felt guilty to be found eating, and it almost made Kallen laugh thinking that it was just like her.
"Ah, Ms. Kouzuki, to what do we owe the pleasure?" Lloyd asked in his usual way.
"I wanted to ask about something," Kallen said, cutting to the chase. "What's True Magic?"
His focus tightened the way it always did when someone brought up something of interest. "True Magic? You don't mean "real magic" do you?"
"N-no," Kallen had to think for a moment whether there was a difference. "I'm pretty sure anyway."
"Did C.C. leave you with that little morsel?" Rakshata asked.
"Yes," Kallen admitted.
Lloyd put down his tray and spun his chair around a couple times as it rolled over to a computer keyboard. "Just the other day we began looking into Fifth Magic."
"Fifth Magic? I don't understand," Kallen half stated, half questioned. The words made sense enough, just not when taken together and attempted to be placed in any sort of context.
"According to the legends we've dug up, there are two breeds of magic; True Magic and magecraft. True Magic mostly died out with the end of the Age of Gods in Mesopotamia. The closest anyone came to replicating that power is called magecraft; skills and techniques that approximate True Magic. But True Magic is considered something more incredible, something magecraft can't replicate. Understanding of these powers faded over time with most never being properly recorded, or so it seems."
"I'm still a little lost," Kallen admitted.
"Okay," Cecile said with a small grin and a nod. Kallen could remember that reaction from the days of Cecile as a guest lecturer at her university. It was her customary affect when entering teacher mode.
"There can essentially be said to be three forms of power – True Magic, magecraft, and science. Each one takes a natural phenomenon and attempts to recreate that natural phenomenon by some other means.
"If we look at a bomb, for example, it is an attempt to recreate the natural phenomenon of the fission, fusion, combustion of gasses and other matter that are the basis of how the sun behaves. In effect, every form of explosive is an attempt to replicate, at some level, the processes of the sun. Science takes various materials and resources found in the natural world to create a combination of mechanical, chemical, and electrical reactions in a specific combination and order to achieve the desired effect. Time and research are spent on how to properly arrive at this combination and process in order to create the end result.
"Magecraft seems to simplify the process by eliminating much of the resource precision. The imperative is placed, instead, on the ability of the individual to gather and control magical energy, the research of a process, and the quality of the medium they use to achieve the effect. You can achieve the basic effect using something as basic as a rock, or a simple inscription, but the quality and scale of a truly massive explosion would require something more; a rare gem, or a large and intricate seal, or the sheer force of greater magical energy infusion.
"True Magic would seem to simplify this even further. The ones capable of True Magic have far fewer restrictions on the magical energy they can harness or use, and no restrictions on the medium. In fact, if we go by the tales, medium is of no consequence at all. It is a simple, singular, step from mental concept to executed effect. If they can imagine the basics of what they hope to happen, they can apply their magical energy to make it happen."
"So you're saying that if a person were capable of True Magic they could just think they'd like to see an explosion and there would just be an explosion?" Kallen questioned, understandably doubtful and concerned about such an idea.
"So long as they have the magical energy available to them, yes; more or less. A mage capable of True Magic would be an omniscient being as close to a god as one might conceive," Cecile answered.
"But we don't even know how to detect magical energy, or measure it, much less use it," Kallen noted in frustration.
"It's only a matter of time," Lloyd chimed in chipperly. "We know that Geass exists, and we know that C.C. can sense the presence of other users of Geass. We also know that there is a power that at least one of these Alters has that C.C. can pick up on, even if it's not as familiar to her as Geass. The same way humanity once had no concept of how to detect or use radiation, if we simply work at a viable source we'll figure it out."
Kallen puzzled over it a second. Thinking out loud she noted, "If True Magic really died out all those centuries ago, it would be rare to ever come across it at all, much less in any potent form. If C.C. ever did happen to pick up on a faint trace of it, she would probably assume it was just a far off Geass user, not something else entirely, because she wasn't used to interacting with anything other than Geass. So does that mean Geass is a type of magic?"
"Not likely," Rakshata said airily. "Although I'm sure the power at the center of Geass can be called magic, it's more likely an ancient but natural phenomenon. When you start to dig through all the legends around the world, there are numerous tales of powers based on the eyes or sight; the legend of Medusa to name a famous one. These tales were old even in the Age of the Gods, so it is likely that these ocular abilities were contemporaneous with magic rather than being a derivative of it.
"I was hoping C.C. would come back so I could pick her brain on a theory of my own," Rakshata sighed.
"What kind of theory?"
"I believe there may be a way to pass down a specific Geass from one person to another. You see, given the apparent randomness of the form that a Geass will take for an individual, it seems peculiar that in some legends the same ocular abilities reoccur. As broad as Geass is, it stands to reason that Geass itself is the basis from which all ocular abilities subsequently spawn. At the very least it would suggest that Geass' lack of specialization afforded it greater advantage and survivability over other ocular abilities.
"Nevertheless, specialization is naturally needed in some niches. The power to see into the future, for example, is not one that can be so casually disregarded as to be forgotten and abandoned. Its very power suggests it should be among the rarer of abilities. Yet it appears throughout folklore and legend in different places and in different ages, to different individuals, specifically as a manifestation of an ocular ability, as opposed to something on the order of divination which itself might fall more in line with magical ability. Mere random occurrence can't suggest that so many happened upon this particular ocular power without Geass being so commonly spread among the general population as to increase the likelihood of its manifestation. And due to the arc of development of a Geass, the manifestation of a Code strips away the power itself in favor of conditional immortality. It would be one thing if one could attain that immortality without losing the Geass, but that is not possible. It would make the most sense, based on all these factors, that there would exist some means by which to preserve specific abilities across generations, even if the more senior holder of the power has died or through some other cause lost it."
"You can see," Lloyd cut in, "That this quite quickly becomes a very tangled mess of ideas."
"Yes," Kallen sighed. "So, getting back to Fifth Magic, why were you starting there? I'm assuming there was a one through four you're not looking at."
"Fifth Magic is one of the few forms of True Magic for which any sort of detailed knowledge survives. Specifically, it is said to be a power to "cause the manifestation of the soul." The exact meaning is lost, but given the area of discussion, we can probably assume that's a literal phrase." Cecile explained.
"Manifestation of the soul? You mean like bringing a soul to life?" Kallen asked, eyes wide. That seemed far too close to what they were dealing with to be coincidence.
"Not quite," Rakshata replied, pouring a little cold water on the budding enthusiasm. "The concept of manifestation of the soul comes from the Kabballah and refers to a person gaining enlightenment through the abandonment of the moral body that is the source of human suffering. Bringing a person back to life from the dead would be an inversion of that process and would be more akin to the corruption of a deity. In other words, you'd have to assume those girls died, attained enlightenment, and then suffered the corruption of some evil god who forced them back to our realm here on earth."
"Ah, right," Lloyd said, focusing back on the computer a moment. He pulled up a folder with several image files. One of the images appeared to be a scan of some very old document. "I believe we asked you before, but are you familiar with King Arthur?"
"Only a little," Kallen said scratching her head as she pondered just what she could recall. "Fictional kind of England, I remember the whole thing of how he became king being really confusing; that he got the sword from a rock, or from a fairy in a lake, or something like that, even though he was the king's son… it didn't make a lot of sense to me, and I wasn't particularly interested."
"King Arthur is said to have held three particular mystical weapons," Cecile explained. "Caliburn is the Sword of Choosing, the sword referred to in the stories of the sword in the stone. It was enchanted and placed into a large stone, and it was said that only the true heir to the throne would be able to remove the sword. This way, no pretender to the throne could ascend, and no one would fight for the throne knowing their rule would be seen as illegitimate.
"Excalibur is often confused with Caliburn, but it was the sword Arthur obtained later from the Lady of the Lake. The Lady of the Lake was a title given to a number of fairies who… well, I better not stray too far into folklore right now. In any event, Excalibur had a number of titles, including Holy Sword and Sword of Evil's Bane.
"The last of the mystical weapons Arthur obtained was Rhongomyniad. Known as the Holy Lance, and the Light at the Ends of the World, it was supposedly given to Arthur around the same time as Excalibur. But Arthur never used it. It's true power was supposedly sealed, only to be released to protect the very existence of the world itself; too powerful to be fully released against common foes on the battlefield.
"Like many legends of its day, Arthurian legend is rich with its own tale of battling dragons, which is part of the reason we've focused on Arthurian legend."
"You mentioned an enchantment. Is that magecraft or True Magic?"
"Good of you to pick up on that," Lloyd said with a fresh grin. "King Arthur, and his father Uthr, is said to have been advised by a wizard named Merlin. The mythology says he was the spawn of a fairy or a demon, and a human, which allowed him to control fantastic powers. He was said to be able to see the past and future, cast fantastic spells, and other things. He was the one that enchanted the stone where Caliburn was placed. They say he was the last great magician."
"One of Britannia's greatest mythological figures was a half-demon magician?"
"Well, if the legends are to be believed, the tense is wrong." Lloyd said a little aloofly.
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"According to the legends," Cecile recounted with a sullen tone. "One of the reasons for King Arthur's death was that Merlin was trapped shortly before Arthur's fateful battle. Merlin was immortal, you see, so he couldn't be killed. But if you did "kill" him, he was basically incapacitated for a while. He was taken away from Camelot and taken to Avalon, an eternal garden on the reverse side of the world, where he was locked away in a tower."
"An immortal wielding magic? That sounds…"
"Indeed, Nina thought so too, which is why she brought the Merlin legends to our attention," Lloyd sighed heavily.
"But what's the reverse side of the world?"
"In a number of mythologies in Europa, and other places around the world," Cecile explained, "The world consists of multiple layers. The world we live in, the realm where humans exist, is the "front" side of the world. It's where logic and reason are in control. The reverse side of the world is a parallel plane of existence where logic and reason are far less powerful, where magic would in theory be far more effluent. The other side of the world is where True Magic exists today, and where all sorts of mythical and supernatural creatures now live, having been chased out from our world; creatures like dragons."
This time Kallen didn't need to say a word. If it weren't all such fantastical gibberish and hogwash she would have been jumping up and down in excitement that they cracked the case. But the truth was, it lined up almost too perfectly. So perfectly, in fact, that she had a very hard time trusting it was really reality. It was hard to even put into words what it all meant. They'd been searching for the mastermind behind all of this with the Alters. Was the idea now that some long-ago supposed to be dead kingmaker was for some reason unleashing his power against Britannia from some place that could hardly even be described?
"So how do we find Merlin?" Kallen heard herself ask aloud.
"Good question," Rakshata chuckled. "Some legends say he's actually descended from King Solomon and has 77 Demons employed to protect his current place. Others claim the Gates of Avalon have 13 seals barring anyone from our world from accessing it."
"If the closet thing we have to our own Merlin were around, we would certainly ask her," Lloyd mocked. "For now, we can't do much of anything I'm afraid. We'll keep looking into any details we can and pray that she's on the same trail we are."