"So you snuck in a special pre-concert preview eh?" Blackbeard seemed rather upset that his fellow pirates had gotten the better of him. Of course, the fact that it inevitably caused a lot of trouble which would annoy the Masters when they got back and heard about it just came with the territory.
"Mhm, it was really worth the minimal effort to convince her to start singing impromptu." Mary seemed quietly delighted in their exploits, in her own understated way.
"Totally different from the Halloween Event at her castle," Anne added for good measure. "But you weren't there either..."
"Now you're just rubbing it in," he frowned in an exaggerated manner. Pulling out a few glasses, he tossed two to the pair Servant before picking out a bottle from his store. Using his own glass to open it, a task accomplished with surprisingly no mess, he poured out a generous portion and passed the bottle over. "Think we can invite that Romani next time? He's really deep into modern idol culture."
"No. A human would probably have problems handling her solo," Mary warned him.
"True, that. Oh well. I heard the Masters are still working on that Nero Claudius you met... hmm, at least I got to see some of -her- stuff back in Italy."
"She adapted well to the situation at Csetje," Anne agreed. "I'd say something about modern culture, but given that's two Servants from pretty far back, is it still modern?"
"Semantics..." Blackbeard blinked, distracted. "Wait, did I just see a cat girl walk in?"
"Don't poke your eyes out with that sharp eyesight, wan." The ever-unpredictable Tamamo Cat had shown up and jumped into Elizabeth's ongoing evaluation with Scathach without a thought.
"I'm told she ripped and tore her way out of Camilla's deadly Noble Phantasm," Mary said in a hushed voice. "Those paws must be very powerful."
"Well, she's the earnest and honest sort," Martha said in a complimentary tone. The Ruler, who had come following the Berserker, had apparently been the one tasked with keeping an eye on her. Though in fact Cat had already been left to 'play' in the kitchen somewhat unsupervised when the Masters were suddenly called away to the Event. Which spoke volumes about how well they thought of her already. "And I see you're drinking as usual. Nah, I can tell you're being responsible about it."
"Hey Martha, have you watched any magical girl shows recently?" Anne asked the saint suddenly, but in a serious manner. Nevertheless, the question prompted some raised eyebrows, not least from Blackbeard who wasn't certain that the question was particularly relevant to the questioned.
"Why?" was the rather laconic response.
"Well," Blackbeard recovered quickly. "Come to think of it, you have a staff and a mascot... do you transform too?"
"I do not transform."
"You can't be serious." Scathach, in the middle of pushing a disruptive Tamamo Cat out, had overheard them. "Please leave the Training Grounds if you're going to just drink and chat about tv shows."
"Caster, why not join our little watching club?" Anne switched targets. "Perhaps pick up a new magecraft? That's never boring, right?"
"I have a wand. And a staff. You expect to pick up actual magecraft from that?" was the scornful reply.
"Aha, this is about Zelretch's Kaleidosticks, isn't it?" Martha realized suddenly. "Since they do use Magic as you call it nowadays."
"I assume so, since the Masters seemed rather serious when giving me this task," Blackbeard answered with a matching seriousness.
"Mhm, and not a subject matter expert like, say, Chloe." Martha's new angle aside, Scathach let her continuing skepticism show.
"Well, she's a..." the pirate glanced at Mary. "Literal child so -"
"I'm going to beat you up." The shortest member of the group pulled out her weapon. Which was, as one might remember, permitted or at least not forbidden, since they were in the Training Grounds.
"Not right now. Like I was saying, the Masters aren't just looking to educate themselves on human creative output. Oh and, Scathach, it's at least partially responsible for getting Euyale to improve her Archer skills, you know? Give me some credit here."
"Because she watched a magical girl that used a bow?" Martha asked.
"Because Asterios did. You could call it peer pressure, if from below; she she didn't want to be a disappointment. 'As long as I hit, right?' is what she ended up going with. Well she does hit, so perhaps there's something to it..."
"So what exactly is on your group's reading list, as it were?" Unsurprisingly, Scathach went straight to details after changing her mind.
Blackbeard's hunch on linking it to training, or at least motivation, had paid off. "Well, let me see, there's Capture Card, Lyrical, Magica, SailorS, Prisma Phantasm and especially the sequel Kaleid Liner."
"Why especially?"
"It ran in-between the previous Grail War and the Incineration. Chloe pointed out that a number of elements from Prisma paralleled her own experiences back in her original branch, so the sequel is potentially telling. Oh, also Chloe pre-Archer form had Class Cards allowing the use of Skills and even some Noble Phantasms from other Heroic Spirits, but we have no comparable system. Ahem: I assume Caster here would greatly appreciate 'borrowing' her other self's (Gae Bolg) without awkward workarounds." The Archer quickly slipped into a briefing of the project's prospects.
"Wasn't Ruby there for Chloe's mortal career?" Martha recalled. "What did she have to say about it?"
"Not the same Ruby apparently? Oh she's definitely hiding something, but we additionally have Sasaku's guess that she isn't even the same Ruby from the previous War to start with. So that's an interesting conundrum. And if she isn't allowed to access that information from the other-other Ruby..." Blackbeard shook his head and left it at that.
Apparently the branch-hopping nature of the Kaleidosticks remained enigmatic to the best minds Chaldea could put to cracking it, so the pirate was willing to take it from da Vinci that the while affair was 'complex'.
"So you're suggesting Zelretch both put information out there for everyone in anime and manga form, but made sure we couldn't investigate in the most obvious ways." Mary concluded. "And they give us pirates flak for the treasure map trope."
"The first part is understandably necessary regardless," Scathach corrected her. "Since even as a Magician, creating a new thaumaturgy would both easier and give a stronger result if the basis firmly 'takes hold' in human perception. Though I would have thought he would just look for a branch that naturally had transforming girl Heroic Spirits - perhaps they are not naturally emergent to begin with?"
"That's the rub, isn't it?" Martha shrugged. "If he did fabricate it wholesale, there's nothing natural about it, but a competent creation that looks like it to us. How could we know otherwise?"
Blackbeard made an impressed sound of approval. "Whoa, to create new cultural phenomena, truly a magician of culture."
"Deplorable by human standards, woof." Having apparently satisfied herself that the discussion was no longer of interest, Cat quickly bounded out of the Training Grounds before even the fast-reacting Scathach could react. Whatever her reasons for staying to listen earlier, they would not be shared. If there even were reasons.
"Anyway, since Chaldea and the Four Houses run so much on the Jeweled Swords from the same Magician, it's understandable that the Kaleidosticks are of great interest to the Masters. And da Vinci." Blackbeard didn't have time to waste on missing a beat due to the unexpected-as-usual Cat's input as she output herself from the Training Grounds.
"If Emiya Shirou were here, he'd know how to crack the mystery," Gudao commented, having passed said Cat being once again unwatched without minding her. Apparently the Event had not lasted much longer after the backup group had stood down.
"Here's the short of what's immediately relevant: after a Kaleidostick contract, Chloe was able to be summoned as a Servant on her own, and again with her memories of the Fifth War. No record on the throne. And Sasaku returns, conveniently with the wand and contract. No Throne record there either. And if it is a different Ruby that makes things even more suspicious, not less. Tohsaka Rin, you wouldn't know her, and that's a complicated story."
"Don't forget Edelfelt," Blackbeard reminded him.
"I hadn't, but the family we know... well like Rin, Luvia might have locked it away. It's too late to ask, now. Scathach, I wanted to ask you something about your territory: the Land of Shadows."
"What about it?" her eyes narrowed slightly upon being reminded of her gatekeeping past.
"It's separate from the World, or close enough, and has a lot of ghosts and such, right?"
"Right on those counts," she allowed.
"Normal human, or even magi - human or homunculus - cannot survive long in the Land of Shadows. But they wouldn't have to 'evolve' as far as you did to be able to, is that right?"
"I'm not sure what you mean by that."
"Ah, now something new has come up," Gudao started with a line like da Vinci finding something fascinating to study.
"Even without the Incineration, some sort of disaster or decline takes place in many branches that leads to Earth becoming classically uninhabitable by humans. One of the groups we've had contact with is from the moon, if you'd believe it. A future where Earth perishes because the flow of mana ends. They can perform such subtle simulations that the World considers them to be real. Which is to say: they are real."
"Interesting, so they embraced the digital world," Blackbeard muttered to no one in particular.
"The reverse is also possible, where an overflow of ether is what happens instead: instead of a drought, flood. The interesting thing is that in those branches, there exist lifeforms, called liners, who are able to survive in it. Not retreating into computers. Now, by our estimates, Chaldea should be able to survive either case, actually da Vinci thinks they are, if anything less hostile than the Incineration. But... we're reliant on the blade generators: Jeweled Swords. But they are at heart a jury-rigged solution. Contrast: the Kaleidosticks, far more advanced even if they don't look all that serious outwardly."
He paused. "Servants can live in an environment flooded with ether, but without Chaldea's setup, even if they had the knowledge, they couldn't possibly continue in a manaless desert. But with a Kaleidostick... yeah, there's no way to prove that it isn't just really suggestive naming, but combine Servants - ghost liners - and the Kaleidosticks' ability to create new entities - magical girls - are guesses about what a 'kaleid liner' might be all that insane? "
"But magical girls aren't recorded anywhere," Scathach retorted.
"You're forgetting that not only are besides the two differently named Kaleidosticks Chloe knows of, they are also able to communicate with their variant selves across branches. All that sort of multiplicity should suffice as a 'cloud storage' thing humans are using nowadays. But there's also one potential link to the process running in the (parallel-future) moon. da Vinci is looking into that for us, by the way."
"This should be good..." Mary mumbled. After Anne's rather teasing way of mentioning magical girls in relation to her partner, it seemed odd to think that it went far deeper than transforming entities in stories.
"They can make new Servants, not necessarily Heroic Spirits though, by... creating new records somehow - he didn't explain the details, no time. While we can't access Mooncell records, let alone examine their System, since it's possible for them to even show up here, that means they've figured out something critical. Look, I know we have a lot going on; da Vinci with her research and we Masters are of course busy going resource runs whenever there isn't something larger like an Event. But since Blackbeard seems to have taken this side-project to heart, why don't you take it like an exercise in theoretical research? Who knows, you might somehow 'remember' something from your time on the Throne."
(Gudao's My Room)
"Do you think it will work?" the fire-haired Master asked her fellow. She had heard him returning through the connection, currently left open, between their rooms.
"Hmm, well Blackbeard definitely took to it more than I had expected," Gudao replied in a casual manner that belied his surprise.
"Huh? We read the same reports, you know."
"Seems like he's been taking some initiative, in a good way, and gotten a number of the other Servants interested. Since I confirmed that it was a thing we were doing, it might actually go surprisingly far. Mhm, I'll take it."
After various discussions both within Chaldea as well as with the various support Servants they had encountered elsewhere, the Masters had started to form a longer-term plan for not just Chaldea but the Four Houses that was arguably more ambitious than mere survival, but more fleshed out and thus actually attainable.
"I wonder if part of the reason he went for the magical girl angle is because it was safer," Gudao mused. "He supposedly picked the Tohsaka family not for the potential upside, as it were, but to avoid creating problems if he picked a family that might get greedy."
"No one would possibly be able to marshal an army of magical girls to break the World System?" Gudako grinned, though it was hardly ridiculous given how many Servants were present who were, on the surface at least, school-age or thereabouts.
"Maybe, but he was also ready to recall Ruby the moment Sasaku tried analyzing her. From inside a Realm, mind you - though I believe our Grand Aria is tougher, especially with the Separation Order up."
"The Fifth War's Realm was really just one Caster and whatever she jury-rigged in about a week. It was definitely weaker, and wouldn't be able to survive the Incineration." Gudako agreed with him, the two having of course learned history before becoming adults.
"... that reminds me. Artoria volunteered something interesting: seems like our Fou is much like a familar which her court mage, Merlin, had. You know, the Magus of Flowers who's trapped in Avalon."
"Another place that's able to survive the Incineration? That adds another name to our list of people working behind the scenes against the mastermind, doesn't it?"
"Indeed. It's to be expected, really. Between the Mooncell, Avalon, Zelretch being wherever, and the original Chloe and two Gilgameshes being on the Throne of Heroes, Chaldea is less exceptional than we imagined in being a place that can survive the Incineration. Imagine, that's six people or groups we can put a name to." Gudao counted them off.
"Remember there's also all those variants of us. If the Mooncell is like us, it too will have many variants," Gudako effectively multiplied her partner's tally some unknowable number of times over.
"That's true: we've even gotten support from other Chaldeas and had a little communication with them. That makes me wonder though, what if it's actually Zelretch himself who has an army of magical girls in some pocket dimension?"
"If so, it would be nice of them to fly over, in rainbow formation, to the mastermind and bash their face in with Kaleidosticks," Gudako demurred. "It would also be beyond awkward if there were like seven different Chloes, or actually I guess it would be Illyas."
"The World would freak out if seven Illyas were all in one place shooting off massive amounts of magical attacks. Then again, the mastermind did break the World so perhaps that's kind of moot."
l
Notes:
You might have noticed that anything that becomes large enough ends up being called a 'system' by the Masters (and most homunculi we meet). Absent context, System would mean 'the local Grand Aria System' of which there are four: Chaldea, Einzbern Estate, Fuyuki, Hawaii - this is the basis of a lot of their magecraft and also their homes, pretty much.
There's also the Grail System which is what handles the Holy Grail and things like summoning and maintaining Servant contracts (like in FGO's Chaldea).
The World System is what it sounds like, because they think of all of reality as being like a Realm or Grand Aria System of the World. Thus it has to do with things like the Theoretical Pruning Phenomenon and branches, as well as 'why reality is real' and the World's corrective forces.
Void Space is more like an absence in their thought, so it isn't a System.
The Mooncell has a System (at least assumed to be something like a version of Grand Aria System) but isn't one itself similar to how Chaldea is a Security Organization that has a System.