(Undisclosed Location)
"Well, it seems that Flauros aka 'Lev Lainur' managed to escape Chaldea," the Heroic Spirit Chloe sighed in disappointment. "More positively, I don't think any of the Demon Gods have caught on to our interventions yet."
"Speaking of interventions, I doubt that Flauros would have noticed had you spent a few minutes talking with Shirou rather than a few seconds and a note," a floating Ruby couldn't resist commenting. "Isn't it a rare chance meet up in your sort of long-distance relationship?"
"Quiet, you." Chloe good-naturedly swatted aside the modern version of her colleague. "To think this is what you use your sentience for; thank goodness I got recorded with the prototype."
"That outcome is unfortunate, since ex-ante I gave Dark Sakuras the best chance to be able to wring useful information out of one of them," Zelretch commented from some indeterminate distance away - space was odd 'here'. "In any case, the fraction of cleanly resolved Singularities improves, and a hardly any more Chaldeas have been eliminated; clearly they now have their footing."
"On the other hand, the energy value of Human History would suffice for an overwhelming amount of Singularity constructions," the Wise King Gilgamesh frowned at one of the younger Kaleidosticks, wondering which one of his own wands might have been their origin. "It seems our guess that the Demon Gods are not multiplied by branch number is correct."
"Ahem. It might be that they're not creating Singularities in order to destroy Human History, but are actually employing them as a means to gather energy. In short, it's like a spark plug; the objective isn't to burn gas for the sake of it, it's to power something else." Gilgamesh's frown deepened, if anything, when the transmission from the 'Digital Sakura' as he called her came in.
"By the way, Abs Caster, I had nothing to do with that Nursery Rhyme, so I'd appreciate you not blaming that on me," BB added. "After all, our Hakunon is based off a human in the regular Earth."
"Can we stay focused?" a rather disgruntled figure broke in. "This turn of events will definitely lead to a serious focus on targeting Masters associated with a Chaldea."
"Really? But Flauros was taken down by someone he brought about," Chloe disagreed. "Though now that I think of it, it would explain why they don't tend to their own Singularities from the start, since there are way more than seventy-two at a time."
"You could have had a bit more faith in me when I told you there were never any copies of said seventy-two," a pretending-to-be-upset Magus of Flowers spoke up from a magic circle in his tower. "Sure they can go back and forth in time, but each individual only supports a single strand of consciousness, thus there's never two of the same one at any point in the Present."
"It's just being prudent; if that's the case then great - we heavily outnumber them," a young homunculus woman concluded quietly from next to her husband. "There's multiple Chaldeas for every single one, even if we end up losing ninety percent of Chaldeas from the initial number, that leaves us with tens of thousands to each one."
"There's no way we could even apply a thousand Chaldean strike groups to a single Demon God," Chloe tried to keep the discussion grounded. "And to maintain that, we'll need to defeat them before 2020 ends, provided we're still on course for the usual Quantum Timelock?"
"If the Timelock doesn't occur, it'll be because we've failed and the World System has been broken," Zelretch confirmed. "But twelve months, provided of course that the Singularity situation is under control, will be plenty to identify where their center of gravity is."
"And then the assault... unfortunately it will not be easy to reach their position given that most Chaldeas will be out of effective Rayshift range," the man mused.
"There are a few ways we might be able to get around that," his wife said confidently. "But currently the dispersion of Chaldeas helps ensure that Singularities do not have space to grow to dangerous proportions without being corrected."
"Going to jump back in to save the humans?" Gilgamesh asked her, though it seemed he was directing it at her husband instead. "You two never change."
"We're not Heroic Spirits like you, so it will take some fine execution to pull this off," he answered for the pair.
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(Chaldea, Fifth Hall)
Their narrative tour continued. The many homunculi moving about their home Hall simply nodded knowingly upon spotting the human and did not interrupt their progress.
"Well this one is a bit of a throwback," Siegfried introduced the next piece, depicting what looked like a traditional forge. "The more modern rendition is 'The Builder', but this 'The Smith' was the very first form of the type."
While the angle pictured obscured the specific workpiece that smith Emiya was fashioning, the weapons standing upright on racks behind him strongly suggested that it was a spearhead of a similar type. Interestingly, while the weapons on display were wood-hafted, the heads were definitely dull black in coloration rather than the expected metallic lustre of steel.
"Did he actually make weapons?" Anaz asked curiously. "Those guns?"
"Those he did, though it's more that he helped us gain the use of Our Lady's... er, Sasaku's spears from the Armory. They're deceptively high level, originating from a Servant. If you're wondering why I picked the Fifth Hall's set, it's because these few are the newest ones."
"Newest as in?" She had been wondering for some time about how the pieces were created.
"This one was finished only a little before the Incineration occurred, replacing one that had been brought in, if I recall correctly. The first one was sent back to the Einzbern Estate."
The pair continued walking. "Ah these have been fairly consistent in depiction, but the names changed somewhat. So the new and old ones of this type look the same and are both now 'The Teacher'." The depiction showed Matou Sakura sitting on what looked at first glance to be cracked stone tiling surrounded by a rather implausible number of nearly identical dark green snakes while she fed a couple of them pieces of bread as though they were pigeons at a park.
However unlike the woman that Anaz had met before, this one had very flat red eyes rather than sparkling purple ones and the one in the painting wore a sleeveless white dress that revealed a number of blank lines, looking like cracks, running down her arms.
"Huh, did she always look like that?" the human asked, realizing that the 'cracks' on the flooring seemed to match the lines on the person sitting on it. And for some reason, the artist had made sure to show that the sky and upper foliage was brightly lit, while the main scene was by contrast oddly, not just heavily, shadowed.
"You... wouldn't really know her. I don't, most of us don't actually, but she's always come out like that."
"So... not artistic convention?" Anaz queried him on the unusual wording.
"These pieces are usually spontaneous in composition. But it does come out from our collective, so in a sense you can say it's a convention but with a different transmission," Siegfried shrugged.
'The Gemcutter' showed Tohsaka in the process of apparently cutting a handle out of a massive diamond or other clear crystal. These were followed by several less direct pieces: depicting a group of cats apparently sleeping with their ears pointed in various directions, goats sitting and eating what looked like a weed-infested garden patch and other even odder ones, before Anaz realized one particular individual who hadn't shown up in a personal image.
"Is there one of Illyasviel?"
"No."
She raised an eyebrow at this apparently unabashed answer. "Doesn't that strike you as a little odd?"
"It would if we attempted to bring about a complete and consistent cosmology and narrative by construction." He indicated a piece which showed a large number of cats curled up next to one another surrounding a rather fluffy and slightly glowing Fou. "Unless you can inform me otherwise, it seems to me that your family has long, and correctly, believed that human perception essentially overpowers historical realities when it comes to matters like Throne of Heroes records, and thus potentially even Heroic Spirit-level entities. A fictional character, or abstract concept can lead to a sentient Heroic Spirit-level without a prior consciousness."
"Is that wrong, though?"
"It doesn't apply to us, because the World seems to value human perception. If The Founder actually returns, it won't be because of our perception or possession of a mythologized version of her, but actually if humans do. Which they won't, since they have little reason to think she is even a real individual given how little there is to state about her. And her writings could simply be a compilation of any number of various traditions; I believe you've seen that possibility with some ancient human records."
"I noticed that in her, all of two, appearances Sasaku is shown wearing the uniform she was summoned in."
"Mhm. She didn't look like that for most of the War she first appeared in, though. But does in the one picture we have of her. However, that specific detail in her depictions is less likely to matter than the fact that she was summoned this time around with Ruby. Again, if anything it would more generally be linked to human perceptions about 'magical girls'."
"So what does it all mean, then?" Anaz wondered. "I can't see what this is leading up to."
"It's not leading up to anything," Siegfried corrected her. "The Masters figured that you were conjuring up for yourself various suspicions about our particular culture-type, to put it loosely. While it doesn't matter to us much that the other humans think we created The Founder as some ubermensch figure to justify our present value system diverging from the presumably traditional one of the original Einzbern... or that they are under the self-induced misconception that Our Lady is our own made up patron goddess to provide spiritual affirmation of our continuing existence. I can tell you've largely heard those, and know better."
"Of course, given that I'd met Illyasviel herself, and even before the Masters, Emiya had directly informed me about his Caster Servant whose vaguely defined magecraft system was built upon by the Four Houses."
Siegfried simply nodded acceptance. "Putting aside the Kaleidostick, we don't understand and are probably not ourselves the method by while Chloe and now apparently Emiya have made a reappearance. The Rulers seem baffled by the news of Emiya, especially given that he didn't become an agent of the Counter Force. But they're hiding things, or more genously having them hidden from them."
"Would the Grail lie even to its Rulers?"
"That's hard to say. From her time as a Caster and early on as a Ruler, Sasaku followed the same idea magi have of souls returning to the Root and being recycled, so to speak. But that doesn't actually hold if you can access the past when they were alive anyway. Also, it seems that there are actually various afterlifes according to the other Rulers."
"Wait, doesn't that mean their particular god can't just grab anyone he wants?"
"Yes, that's the awkward bit for people like them. He certainly exists and is presumably quite powerful, but the various Systems of the World actually do limit him, so even if he really wanted to punish certain individuals, if they ended up in their own god's afterlife, it's at least non-trivial to get at them. Again, though, timeline access as via Rayshifting is evidence against against any really 'hard' chronological progression if you're outside - in say the Throne of Heroes or Throne of Gods. In theory, there's never any information lost, even across a Quantum Timelock, as any pruned branch has all its information recorded up until the pruning, and while it won't exist as an ongoing concern afterwards, the records are maintained. It's possible that some Servants don't so much show up 'before their prime', as simply being in that state before their branch was pruned."
"So, like an Artoria Pendragon who just drew the Sword, but then she was pruned while other versions of her went on to become the King of Knights?"
"Sometimes true prophecies are a signalling tool of the World. Come to think of it, Merlin is a very high level individual since he seems capable of being a Grand Servant."
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Notes:
Siegfried was referring to the bit (in the past, ie: between Another Aria and Grand Aria) where Illyasviel presumably changed from the standard magus goal of attaining the Root to building the homunculus nation. Her actual initial objective in AA though was revenge against the Einzbern for her parents, but this changed at some point during the Founding Conflict; since she specifically chose not to mention these things even to her children (Gudako, Siegfried) they know only the outcome and not the underlying thought.
They tend to assume it was because she wanted to protect her only living relative (Shirou) though the obvious inconsistency with this line of speculation is that he was the one with Kojirou's contract, so if anything Shirou was protecting her. Similarly because they know that Sakura is pretty terrifying, moreso in the later period of her life.