Chapter 7 - Before the Storm
Meeting Zelretch
It was upon introducing the kids to their new caretaker that Irisviel realized an important problem. The kids spoke Japanese, while Magdalena spoke English. But thanks to the Einzbern Memory Transplant Device a basic grasp of English was implanted into them. It was the standard way she educated anyone in her employ bound by Geis, although she eventually planned on making the device more mainstream.
Her main worry was that any unscrupulous individual could easily use the machine to brainwash others, so more safety features were required. She sent them ahead to the United States, and opted to visit the Clock Tower since she was in the area anyways.
The past few times she had visited, she had been unable to reach Zelretch. She'd been wanting a chat with him for years. Part of her wondered if he was avoiding her, since he never responded with a 'No' to her requests for a meeting. He never responded with anything at all.
It seemed her persistence had paid off though as Zelretch sent a magical familiar asking her to come in the evening. Stepping through the halls of the Clock Tower, she was nervous. The place always gave her bad vibes. Too much backstabbing, racism, and discrimination in general. A lot of her mystic codes were heavily reliant on Runes and modern technology, and the Clock Tower looked down on them greatly despite their usefulness. The sneers she'd gotten while patenting her music codes made her want to stab the entire review committee.
But she was mostly nervous at meeting Zelretch. There was little concrete knowledge to be found about him. He was a Dead Apostle Ancestor, defeater of Crimson Moon, and wielder of the Second Magic. He'd helped set up the Fuyuki Holy Grail Ritual, and he'd created the Kaleidosticks. He'd also been known to drive some of his apprentices insane.
Beyond that, she knew little of what he was really like. Was he cruel? Was he kind? Would he be supportive? Antagonistic? Disbelieving? Stepping into his office, she saw him sitting at a large desk, reading a novel whose name she couldn't decipher. He closed it slowly and gestured towards the chair across from him. While she was taking a seat, he spoke up.
"Welcome, Irisviel von Einzbern. The last of the Einzbern homunculi. You've been quite busy tampering with the timeline I see. Not that it's a bad thing." He got straight to the point.
"Yes. I don't want to die, and the only way to get out of that is if mankind survives what's coming." She defended.
"Indeed. Some might say it's better for us to die. All things come to an end after all. But it is your right to struggle for life, so I don't think you've done anything wrong in that sense. Although if you're trying to save mankind you're doing a terrible job of it." He criticized her.
Irisviel reeled back as if struck. "I've been doing the best I can. Technology is decades ahead of its time, countless diseases are cured, almost no one in the world is starving due to lack of food anymore, wars have decreased greatly due to my efforts, and we're even starting to expand into space. If that's not a good job then what is?"
"Do you really think it's as simple as that? That if we go out to space we'll be saved? Space is even more terrifying than Earth. And what I really mean by how terrible you are is that you shoulder this burden alone. Still, the odds of mankind safely departing this solar system are so infinitesimally small that perhaps idiocy like yours is required to have a chance." He mused.
Taking a deep breath to quell her anger, she spoke up. "Who would believe me? The people who already know the world is ending have their own ideas in mind for dealing with it. The rest think I'm delusional."
"The simple answer is you need to work on your social skills. The long answer is that it's a lesson I doubt you'll truly grasp till after the Grail War." He stated.
"If you can see the future, why don't you help me?" She asked.
"Because I'm weakened beyond what you could possibly imagine. My magic doesn't really let me see the future. There is so much at play that you aren't seeing. Your naivety will haunt you." He answered.
"Then let me help you? Maybe I can find a way to heal whatever problem you've got." She suggested.
"I suppose it would be unfair to not even give you a chance. Fine, let us have an equivalent exchange. I'll join your cause, so to speak, if you can find a cure to vampirism as well as weakened magic circuits. I'll allow you to analyze my condition once every few months, that's all the time I can really spare right now." He proposed.
She had a feeling neither of those conditions could be cured as simply as the ones she'd done up to this point. But at worst if she couldn't help him, she didn't gain his support. She didn't have that to start with, so she wasn't losing anything agreeing to this offer. "I can work with that. I'll find a way to fix you up. Why don't we start with that first examination right now?"
At his nod, she took scans of his body and soul, and then headed out. It was pretty brutal. The curse of vampirism altered the soul, but it was intertwined so deeply that the entire soul might fall apart if she simply killed the curse. Plus, to cure damaged magic circuits wasn't as simple as removing the damaged parts.
She left with a spring in her step. The challenge ahead of her was daunting, but Zelretch's help would be entirely worth it. Still, improve her social skills? Sure she spent most of her time in the lab but she wasn't that bad. Was she? Maybe it was worth looking into allies later on. Those words about the Grail War seemed really ominous.
End of Roa
A couple of years passed, and it was now 1992. She'd tried taking Zelretch's advice and attempted to make allies. The Clock Tower was pretty hostile, Atlas was silent as always, and Wandering Sea unreachable. She actually found the most support through the Holy Church, thanks to Kirei and Claudia. She cooperated and helped fund the church at times with exorcisms.
Kirei and Claudia had welcomed a lovely baby girl, Caren, into the world and they named Irisviel her godmother. Her first gift to the baby had been killing off Caren's masochistic constitution. Caren's body was born with a peculiar ability. If she was near someone possessed by a daemon, her body would mimic its effects. But her body would show what the victim would look like once they were in the final stages of daemon possession. While it was true it was a very useful ability to have for hunting daemons, it was painful. Her goddaughter deserved better, and even Kirei and Claudia agreed to Caren's surgery.
Irisviel was currently in France, in a small remote village. It was where Elesia, the seventeenth incarnation of the Dead Apostle Ancestor named Michael Roa Valdamjong, resided. The vampire had mastered a special form of magecraft that let him reincarnate into new vessels upon his death.
From what Irisveil knew, around Elesia's sixteenth birthday Roa would begin to manifest inside of Elesia. It would spark a terrible chain of events where she slaughtered her town, was arrested by the church, and eventually rebranded herself as Ciel - seventh member of the Burial Agency. The Burial Agency is an organization affiliated with the Church that hunts demons, but they do not care about how faithful its members are. They only care about ability.
She knew for a fact Roa could be killed permanently via the Mystic Eyes of Death Perception, so she'd had mercenaries periodically spy on Elesia. Roa was weakest when he initially manifested, so the moment her mercenaries told her Elesia had turned sixteen she flew over and waited.
It only took a week or so, but signs that Elesia was possessed began to appear, and she snuck into her bedroom in the middle of the night and stabbed Roa's point of death. He would reincarnate no more. Elesia would forget she had ever even been possessed. And Roa would simply disappear from the world silently, never to plague anyone else again.
Final Preparations
Another couple of years passed relatively peacefully. Thanks to her cooperation with the church, she'd managed to acquire plenty of vampire samples to research. After she explained to the church that her goal was to find a cure, and since she didn't mind sharing her research, they were quite willing to help.
Still progress was slow on that front, even with all the research she'd found, all her cures still resulted in the dissipation of the soul or some other form of death. Healing magical circuits was a much more fruitful research, but the problem was that her cures only worked on humans. Not Dead Apostles. The curse of restoration possessed by True Ancestors and Dead Apostles worked via temporal regression, restoring the individual's body to its original state from when they were turned. The problem with this, is that Zelretch's circuits were already damaged at the moment he was turned into a Dead Apostle. So any attempts to cure the damage were reversed by this 'healing' mechanism. She expected curing vampirism to take a few more years.
The most memorable encounter she'd had in the last couple of years was with one Francesca Prelati. They were truly one of the most frustrating individuals she'd ever met in her life. One afternoon, she'd caught someone spying on her residence. Following the trail, she tracked down Prelati. Figuring it'd be better to end the potential threat before it got a chance to grow, she tried killing them. But even the Mystic Eyes of Death Perception could not kill them permanently. They kept reviving somehow and she could not get any explanation from them on why they'd tried spying on her. They eventually ran away, and attempts at tracking them down failed. It was a total loss. She understood why so many people had killed Prelati in the past. They were just that damn irritating.
The impact of the incident was so large on her psyche that she'd revised her reality marble concept. Her initial goal was to create a reality marble based on Avalon, the scabbard of King Arthur. She wanted an absolute defense, a safe territory, and potentially a way to give her allies a safe place to reside. She revised her idea to incorporate the ability to imprison those opponents she could otherwise not defeat. It's not like she'd completed her reality marble already, so there was room for revision.
Early on when she'd started learning magecraft, she'd been afraid of learning her Origin. One's origin is sort of like the fundamental force that drives their existence. A person born with the origin of Taboo may be naturally attracted to the forbidden. Someone with the origin of Consumption may become a glutton or be predatory in nature. It's merely how you are born, but not necessarily how you must live.
But once someone becomes awakened to their origin, it becomes very difficult to stray from taking actions related to it. Someone who was merely gluttonous may find it impossible to hold themselves back from consuming more meals. Merely learning your origin is not the same as becoming awakened to it. After she cleared that misconception up, she performed the simple ritual that let her determine her origin.
Her origin was Karma. What does that imply about her personality? Did it mean that she believed that good begets good, and evil begets evil? That she had a naturally reciprocative personality? Karma was a complicated concept, and she wasn't sure about all its implications. But she did have ideas on how to use it. In preparation for if she ever encountered Prelati again, part of the foundation of her reality marble was what she dubbed a Karmic Cage.
The worse one's Karma was, by her own interpretation, the harder it was to break out. The sins one committed in the past formed the chains that imprisoned them in her reality marble. The best part was that it was based on her interpretation of Karma. So those who may not consider themselves evil, but were evil from her perspective, still counted. She wouldn't put it past Prelati to think he wasn't evil at all. Next time she encountered Prelati, she was ready for him.
In other news, her household was more boisterous than ever. It may have been a mistake to freely share knowledge of magecraft with the children (they had to promise to only practice under supervision from an experienced magus). The house managed to suffer major structural damage on a weekly basis, even despite the fact that she tried to improve the house's construction through magecraft with every repair.
Sakura had developed a terrifying talent for Imaginary Numbers magecraft, and created lots of little familiars similar yet weaker to the ones her dark counterpart from another timeline was capable of. Kohaku had an amazing knack for mixing technology and magecraft, and many intelligent robots created by her roamed the house as servants.
Hisui is a budding ninja. She liked to pretend to be a ninja-maid who targeted her siblings with poison cooking. Akiha is a talented martial artist, while Shiki was a weapons expert. Gray was still just a little bit too young to learn magecraft yet, but if her siblings were her role models her future looked terrifying indeed.
Irisviel had never told them to become good at combat. She never told them to learn magecraft either. But they all had demanded to learn anyway, so she'd given them some tutoring from time to time. Magdalena had her hands full doing it alone, but thankfully a helper had appeared.
Kariya Matou had tracked Irisviel down, wanting to find out more about how Sakura was doing in her new household. Irisviel had countered his questions with one statement. "If you worry so much about how she's being raised, why don't you help raise her yourself?" From that point forward, Kariya had taken on the fatherly role in the Einzbern household, in contrast to Magdalena's motherly one. Without being tortured by his grandfather, he was a much less metally unhinged individual. In fact, he even seemed to be moving on from his old love for Aoi Tohsaka, finding romance in Magdalena. She was happy for the pair.
Still, these peaceful days came to an end when the command seals appeared on her hand. The time for preparation was over. It was time to participate in the Holy Grail War.
[ Arc 1: Prelude to War - Finished]
