?, India, 2043

"Hello" I answered the call, only to immediately wince when I heard to voice on the other end.

"What in the name of Hades are you thinking child?!"

"Look, Caster…" I sighed, regretting that I hadn't checked who was actually calling, so to speak.

"Don't you Caster me, child! Forty-eight invitations! Forty-eight! That was what we established as our maximum capacity for the system! So why am I just finding out now you went off and created thousands upon thousands of them a couple weeks ago?!"

"I had to make more than the forty-eight. If there were only forty-eight invitations in total, then the heads of the organizations would hoard them and there wouldn't be any real competition for the spots. Hell, they've all basically gone and done that as is… There's still only going to be forty-eight that actually get in."

"Are you aware that all the invitations beyond the original forty-eight don't even work, because their access codes aren't even in the system?!"

"We can just put them in the system. No biggie. We got months to get them in. Don't stress over it."

"Except nothing with this system is, or has ever been, simple! I don't even know what codes I need to implement, because you never even ran the new invitations by me! Then I need to run tests to make sure it all works, again, and did you even think about the fact that now with more than forty-eight invitations, we don't have a way to guarantee your VIPs get in?!"

"…Uh… You're right, actually… I didn't think about that last bit…"

"Of course I'm right, child! Don't need you of all people to tell me that! So now what do you want me to do?! Implement a priority system?! Change it all so that there's only forty-six open slots, and two reserved ones?!"

"…That would be nice, not gonna lie."

"…"

"…You can fix this, right?"

"Of course I can! Who do you think I am?! …I swear child, you are going to be the death of me, again!"

"Excellent! Knew I could count on you, Caster" I couldn't help but laugh slightly.

"Anything else I should know about? Should I begin preparing for Dead Apostles as well?"

"I haven't messed with any of that! I only placed invitations at the Clock Tower, Atlas, Spiral Manor, the Vatican and AIM! That bit hasn't changed, I swear! I don't want knock-off vampires infesting this shit any more than you do!"

"Right… and that Xian thing you were working on?"

"Consort Yu was… not interested" I sighed. "Disappointing, but ultimately not surprising."

"I'm surprised she even let you live…"

"She's not unreasonable, Caster" I laughed. "She may despise humanity, but she's not unreasonable; not once she realized what I was really offering her, at any rate. A monster just like the rest of us, at the end of the day… Though when I think about it, maybe it's a good thing she declined. She's more Elemental than anything, and I don't even want to try to imagine the difficulties getting an Elemental here to-"

"Oh, but you're perfectly fine with pawning off such a headache to me?!"

"Eh, well…" I scratched at the back of my head. "I know how much you like challenges."

"…Tell me what you're up to right now, before I really lose it…"

"Just running some tests on the warp gates. As you suspected, the ones in India are still bugged. Work as intended if you're trying to warp to the border of the sub-continent, but unless you control all of India, it won't let you warp within it, even if you control all the territory between the two points."

"You know how much simpler this would all be if we, and by we, I mean you, just scrapped the warp gates idea altogether?"

"Yeah, and we'd all die from old age before this war even finished" I sighed. "You know how big the world is; can't just march armies across it in reasonable amounts of time! That, and could you imagine any master besides me being able to manage the logistics of moving armies without the warp gates existing? Like, without the warp gates, if you don't summon a Heroic Spirit with military logistic experience, you're basically fucked! Everything would become so localized and, well… boring, and that's in the best-case scenario!"

"That's all well and good, but when do you expect me to have time to fix the warp gates, deal with this invitation mess you created, and deal with, oh, I don't know... literally everything else you want done?!"

"It's just the warp gates for India, and even then, only for local warping while the entire sub-continent isn't under singular control. Can't be that big an issue; have Perdix and Icarus deal with it."

"I will not have the two of them make a disaster of my warp gates!"

"Please, Perdix did at least twenty percent of the work in designing the warp gates originally. Besides, your last round of adjustments only fixed half the issues with them, hence why I'm standing here right now. Fresh pair of eyes and a different way of looking at the problem might just be what the India gates need. Gives Perdix something more interesting to do, and it'd be a good test to see how far Icarus has come in the past few months."

"…"

"It'd also get them out of your hair for a bit" I added with a grin, not that Caster could see it.

"Agh, fine, fine! I'll tell them to take a look at it… Suppose they have been pestering me to give them something more... related to the war... to do anyways."

"Excellent! Beyond that though, nothing to report. Everything else is working fine, not detecting any interference, all that jazz. Looks like it's all coming together quite nicely."

"Provided you don't keep making changes to the plans every few weeks, then yes, it's all coming together."

"Oh, um… change of topic, but did the latest batch of probes manage to punch past the storm veil?"

"No, they didn't, as all three of us told you they wouldn't. We don't have good enough control over them yet to manage short hops through the void like that."

"Yeah, figures… Ah well, those two can get back to working on new probes once the warp gates are fixed."


A/N

More on the smaller side of posts, but after the last post being a big dump, perhaps all of you will be able to find it in your hearts to forgive me xD