(Training Grounds)
"So now even Servants are going to school," Blackbeard shrugged while drinking lazily from a bottle. He and Chloe were watching Anne and Mary try to convince Elizabeth to attempt a shanty, which the latter felt was not sufficiently idol-genre.
"Education is pretty important nowadays," the other Archer replied. "And though I do have both the original Chloe's Skills and her skills, so to speak, it does feel like I did learn something."
"We do benefit from practice," the pirate pointed out after pondering this question. "Archers pretty much always hit, how are we improving on that?"
"Makes it easier to go up against people with evasion, speed or other defensive bonuses, I guess?" Chloe guessed. "It's rather hard to train up Skills, but then again Archers' accuracy should scale higher than most (Evasion)-type defenses."
"I do wonder about this sort of thing, the boundary between a skill and a Skill," da Vinci added. In fact, she had been scheduled to meet Chloe after a brief bit of testing her own inventions, but apparently chance decided otherwise."Of course scans will give fuller data, but my assistants are of the opinion that we can't really answer this neatly since humanity hasn't answered the question of its own intelligence and sentience."
"Do homunculi actually subscribe to such philosophical exercises?" Blackbeard asked Chloe, who made a 'don't ask me' gesture with her hands.
"These things aren't genetic, I'm kind of not like them. In fact, Illya wasn't either, though you'd hardly guess given the way they speak about her."
"I wasn't implying anything of the sort," da Vinci corrected the grizzled pirate. "They don't debate things like the purpose of life or self-actualization, because they largely subscribe to the same answer. It's a done deal for them, but humanity is what drives the World's reality."
"Somehow this never came up," Chloe realized. She couldn't help but wonder if it was because they assumed she followed their own thoughts on the matter, had independently developed her own, or perhaps was just too much of a child ?
"I would be surprised if it did," da Vinci chuckled. "Since apparently the answer they reached is: It is nothing. There is no meaning, no purpose. The World System, what they treat as the closest thing a supreme force, is mindless."
"That makes little sense," Chloe objected. "You don't do all... this, that, whatever the word is, if it has no meaning."
"Ahaha." Blackbeard's laughter was not one born or mirth or mocking, but rather of hearing something interesting. "On the contrary, it makes plenty of sense. What da Vinci explained is that for them, there's no axiomatic purpose to existence external to themselves. One might say that pirates live freely in a similar way but that would be, of course..."
"An oversimplification," da Vinci took the obvious cue. "Just looking at the various Servants here, there's no real way Chaldea could ever agree on what some hidden World meaning is, if it actually exists."
"It probably doesn't," the pirate continued easily.
"It doesn't, woof." Tamamo Cat added in passing.
"Still feels like a mismatch with my, er, Illya's mother here. And Illya herself, actually." Chloe said, not really seeing it. "Oh, I suppose you'd say they pursued what they wanted simply because they wanted to."
Blackbeard and da Vinci exchanged looks as if wondering if something besides elementary math had gotten into the young Servant recently.
l
(My Room)
"This isn't unexpected, but great ! We have two data points now," Gudako said cheerfully while reading a report that had just come in from Rider's Workshop. "Hmm, hmm, Tohsaka's earlier theory about mortal bases making for a more flexible Spirit Origin seems to be holding up well. Um, and it seems like a significant difference compared to the 'standard Servant, but younger' case."
"What I don't quite understand is how the two of them do that without some sort of (Self-Modification) skill. Kojirou I guess you could intuit that, blade-wise his legend that angle of 'obsession leading to breakthrough'. But Chloe, Kaleidosticks - more complicated. Should we liken it to character development during a series? But we couldn't get anything on her or the original Chloe... what's wrong?" Gudao stopped his line of thought abruptly.
Gudako had paused and re-read the end bit of the report with a serious expression. "da Vinci thinks that Chloe is acting a lot more, er, mature than the records of the Fifth War portray her as. We already knew knowledge was bleeding through from the original Chloe's side, but Rider suspects her personality might be changing - not good. Since we know the original was a whole person, unlike with our Saber's legend half..."
"We don't have any way to contact an original Chloe," Gudao muttered to himself. "As far as we can tell, a lot of Chaldeas like us met her, but they summoned the young homunculus-base Chloe, like us. Maybe because Tohsaka usually summons the young one?"
"Ruby might know about this Install functionality, or she might not, since Tohsaka didn't have anything like these Class Card things. And getting anything straight from them is practically impossible."
"Unfortunately, real knowledge of how the Grail System assembles Servants like her is..."
Gudako turned over several possibilities in her mind. "It probably wouldn't work to try and pass her the Matou magecraft, since she basically is both Chloes at once already. And Scathach said she could pick up some runes, but mostly by using Projection since the effects of runes are emergent from the formation."
"Well Sasaku is locked out of her own magecrafts and Skills when in a transformed state, and Chloe is basically fixed in her transformed-Installed state." Gudao was not the first to notice that Servants with odder origins tended to have a rather complex set of identifiers compared to the norm.
"In this case, the exceptional flexibility of her Spirit Origin might be working against us, since we can't just fix her in place as she is while looking for a solution. If she turns into 'original Chloe in a young homunuculus body'..." she trailed off.
"I'm loath to suggest relying on this, but maybe since Ruler seems to think that Tamamo Cat can give answers to anything, even if they can't always be understood?" He couldn't help but smile wryly. Both Masters had their reservations about Berserkers, going back to even Illyasviel's understanding with her own, Lu Bu, in the previous War, and also her understanding about him.
"Maybe if Cat like Chloe enough, she's hard to figure out like a... cat. Wait, cat's aren't that hard to figure out though." Putting together the experiences of many thousands of homunculi with their local cats had left them collectively less mystified about the small beasts than when they had first encountered them.
However, singular entities like Fou, let alone a Servant whose variant of (Madness Enhancement) was literally: 'a wild cat that one cannot tell what it wants to do, nor what sort of mess it will make' were vastly different.
"The domestic cat is pretty close to the wild one in many ways, and besides it's not like we need someone with (Animal Communication) since Tamamo Cat can speak just fine. I wonder if it's just that, even in this form, Chloe's strength as a lifeform is that much weaker than a Heroic Spirit, even though the limiter of this Class Card mechanism." As far as Gudao recalled there was no, even speculative, way to deal with that limitation.
"We have that problem in general, when working with Matou's phantasmals." The two Masters had of course been keeping up to date on Matthew's progress, by Doru's evaluations. But the situation there was not headed towards a crisis, thankfully.
"Come back for a moment, didn't that Nameless Servant from the Mooncell seem to be familiar with the original Chloe? He even mentioned having worked with her, right?"
"Oh right, I forgot about him. Since we can't communicate with that group. And I think they don't have a Ruby there either so it's a real shot in the dark to even send a message over."
Gudao nodded. "We can only hope they send someone down during the next Event or Singularity. At least we can be sure both sides will be paying attention to those."
"Is their detection capability much better than ours?"
"Seems like it."
l
(Cafeteria)
"I just don't see it," Daedra commented to Exel while they sipped tea which, for today, came with some herbal notes. "Cats don't have introspective thoughts about their existence in the first place."
"But it's not a mental exercise for the animals," the homunculus explained to her human colleague. "One could hardly be certain that any given human does introspection either. But we know a lot more about cats than humans relatively speaking."
"Do we really, though?"
Exel paused, realizing that a bit of miscommunication had just occurred. "We as in those linked to the System."
"Ah." Daedra turned her head to look at a member of Chaldea's cat population wandered past the nearby door, out in the corridor. Though they were not shy about liking food, for some reason the animals didn't enter the cafeteria, a place with the most food-density as it were. And she said as much.
"Oh, this place is off-limits to them. Just so they don't pick up some Servant's food and die horribly," Exel informed her of this bombshell tidbit casually.
"... they just know it's forbidden?" was the incredulous reply.
"Nothing as complex as that, I think. More like that's a place they don't want to go. Umm, it should be like a couple feet past the doorway, seems like; if you pick up a cat and try to bring it in, they'll panic and probably scratch you trying to get away."
"You don't have the odd curious cat that goes in anyway?" the human asked.
"There's no need to be curious, they already know it's a bad place to be. No one questions their own knowledge without some serious introspection, and cats aren't likely to think about how or why they know some areas are terrible for cats without ever having gone in. Even though they seem to think we're cats as well but have no such issues. Maybe it's only a 'small cat' problem, who knows for sure?"
"So, despite being pretty sure cats don't think about many of these things, you teach children by pointing at them?" Daedra returned to their initial topic.
"It's just an illustration, by the time they are able to question it, they are learning on a much higher level to not need such gimmicks. But also to appreciate them." The thought seemed to amuse Exel somewhat. "Though I must say, human culture has made quite a thing about cats recently."
"You hardly seem to behave cat-like," Daedra observed.
"You're thinking at the' directly observable outcome' level," Exel shrugged. "The exercise starts from the pretend axiomatic supergoal of cats to explain their behavior, and leads to thinking how it explains our own, very different ones."
"Remind me again what these really important goals of cat kind are?"
"Well, we usually put it as survive and propagate. Plants too, but understandably they're usually less interesting without the ability to meow cutely at you for food."
"So, all this -" the human waved her hand about, "is about survival?"
"It's what national survival looks like, indeed. Cats have less to fear from humans than we do, after all. And unlike them, we can do better than just trying to keep alive until the next mating season."
"Aren't you judging humanity a bit too harshly because of your House's history?"
"It's possible," Excel admitted easily. "Even if we were spot on in our evaluation, any actual response is far from deterministic. But no one plans for something as critical as survival assuming that their greatest threats... aren't. We have little interest in conflict, but a castle isn't asked to consent to be sieged.""
"I'm a human and a magus," Daedra pointed out with some irony. "Where does that place me?"
"You are an individual, and since neither category is a singular entity, it really depends on your decisions, where you want to place yourself, doesn't it?"
l
(Control Room)
"Guess it's that time again," da Vinci commented as several of them looked at the scan readout of the latest detection event. "We should move to heightened readiness. Upgrade that detection to Singularity-level and send a message to the Masters via the System to get to Briefing."
"London this time, I wonder what Artoria will think of that," the homunculus who relayed the message thought aloud. "Should we just call it the London Singularity for now?"
(Briefing Room, later on)
"An interesting choice of time period, if such things are chosen, anyway," the dark blue Saber commented neutrally. "One might say that much like the fall of Camelot was a critical milestone in the decline of Mystery, the Industrial Revolution period did a lot to spread the outcomes of human intellect and science - not all good for all concerned, of course."
"We have an interesting secondary objective before us," Gudao said calmly. "In this era, the Clock Tower should already be rather well-established in London. We happen to have a Servant who is pretty good at handling large amounts of information, so this is the perfect time to clear out their library, so to speak. Even though the World will correct any disruption we might inadvertently cause, once the data is in Chaldea, we will be able to keep a firm grasp on it."
Gudako nodded. "For our formation, I'll propose: Jeanne, Sasaku and da Vinci, Artoria, Georgios and Scathach."
"That seems rather unbalanced," Georgios noted soberly. "You usually want at least three conventional 'front liners' as you describe it."
"Though I am curious to see what the Mages Association might be up to, I think Caster is a better fit, so I'll bow out," da Vinci reverse-volunteered herself.
"What about me?" Chloe spoke up, prompting the two Masters to quickly exchange a look.
"I was thinking to ask Marie," Gudako replied after a moment.
Though frowning, the Archer seemed to understand that there was something else going on, and accepted this without complaint.
"Chloe: you, Blackbeard and Elizabeth will be our backup trio for this 'Industrial Revolution' Singularity." Gudao concluded. "The readings suggest that this has either had some time to develop, or its designated ruler is able to grow in power rapidly, so we should be prepared for a 'hot' arrival."