(Masters' My Room)
A few hours later, after they both read da Vinci's pre-report assessment, the two Masters agreed that, since Okita's health issues seemed to be manifested as a Personal Skill that wasn't transmittable, which additionally matched up with a Sasaku database search and the other Rulers' (True Name Discernment) checks, there was no danger to Chaldea. As a result, Gudao sent a message through the System to end the earlier cordoning effort.
Of course, there was the usual return to Free Quest rotations for resource harvesting to think about. And while they had been deployed to London, everything else in Chaldea was continuing to develop or in the case of otherwise unobtainable materials stockpiles, run down.
"Hey Gudao, ever thought about what it would be like to get married?" Gudako asked her partner suddenly.
"Huh? And just who would I possibly marry?" he asked rhetorically.
"Well, I'm pretty sure your only peer in Chaldea is me, so... me."
"What even would be the reason?" His annoyance at the continuing interruption showed. "Last I remember, neither of us can have children. Or Siegfried, or the Founder for that matter." This zero percent statistic was probably the main reason the whole line of inquiry was closed after the Emiya and Tohsaka cases.
"Uh, marriage is about more than just children, you know."
"Yes, but I was speaking to the reason to get into it." Gudao paused for a moment to take a short breath. "We're not humans, to be daydreaming about romance, what's going on here?"
"I was wondering if it was one of those things that 'have to be experienced', you know, like Blade manufacture."
"Gudako, the people who make the generators go insane and they don't exactly get better afterwards. You hadn't forgotten that fact, right?"
"Now that you've mentioned it... that wasn't a great analogy."
"It's also technically a Four Houses secret, since just the thought we had such a capability would be very destabilizing, to say the least," he chuckled darkly. "So again, what prompted this line of thinking, anyway?"
"Oh right. Marie wanted to help Jeanne get some reading and writing in and they then decided to look for some benchmark work, and well..." Gudako stopped upon a sudden realization that the Servants were, indeed, very much young women even if the more regular humans and even World might see them quite differently.
"What sort of work are we talking about here?"
"Shoujo manga."
Gudao raised an eyebrow, "Please tell me it wasn't Anaz's material somehow."
"Can do; da Vinci's request."
"I guess that Rider actually fits the target audience demographic... In any case, we're the two designated to lead Chaldea's Grand Orders, if it was that transformative I'd say that equals 'seriously troublesome'. If I know it, you must too; the ordering of elements in the System is highly non-trivial, let alone the need for each of us to be internally ordered."
"That's a rather odd misapprehension," Gudako frowned in surprise rather than disappointment. "The System doesn't require us to be unchanging any more than it does us to be identical. The lower-level ordering you're thinking of is too high. What's the easiest way to put it... it's not having an active conception of being separated from the World Order that is the Grand Ordering: World Separation. More fundamental than that; we are able to reject it."
It was Gudao's turn to frown, though in a puzzlement that he hadn't experienced for some time. "That's really odd, seems far too passive for such a high-powered Spell."
"Because there's no casting, leading, or maintaining a Spell involved. It's the same reason how come we can maintain the Separation against the, well not crushing, it's the reverse of that... reverse-crushing of Void Space so efficiently. The reason it is a Grand Ordering is precisely because it is so fundamental; since the Realm emanates from us, it thus fundamentally is able to reject the World. And so we are just 'choosing' to separate or not, there's nothing structural that changes."
"Hmm... ah of course. The System is, after all, neither conscious nor sentient, so it can't actually perform any Act of Will as required for active spellcasting under our system. How did we get onto this tangent anyway? Ah whatever, you're on the next Quest rotation, right?"
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(A bit before, Chaldea Servants' Lounge)
"Well, I didn't get into that sort of relationship when I was alive... Marie, you're back to before your own marriage?" Jeanne asked out of curiosity while the two were in one of the lounges after she had returned from handling one of da Vinci's requests with her Skill.
"I think so... pretty much, it's as if the World thought I was at my best just before that. Wonder if it's due to modern perceptions of that sort of royal marriage. Well, given how the royal line of those people up north fared..." she sighed, "I was either simply too early or too late, as it were."
"What do you mean by too early?" Artoria wondered aloud. "I don't think that your or your husband's line are a big thing nowadays."
"On the contrary, House Habsburg still exists. You're right that it's not as in my early days, but really that sort of aristocratic line doesn't just disappear unless it's directly made to."
"I suppose so," the Saber sighed, thinking about the end of her own line, so to speak. It was an odd irony that Merlin's intervention for her King self to have an heir resulted not only in no heir, but contributed to the end of the kingdom. "If that court magus had spoken up, we could have come up with something better. But then, maybe I'm still too human and just can't understand his motivations."
"Since Merlin is a non-human?" Chloe joined in abruptly as the group caught her attention from the door. It generally seemed that unless one deliberately went to their Room, any gathering in the open was considered open - not least because most Servants could hear and understand multiple conversations in a single room at once.
"It's not about human or not," Marie corrected her, remembering that Chloe was originally a young homunculus girl. "He's an incubus, yes, but the root is that he was already steeped in their culture by the time of his active career with Camelot."
"We were just talking about how love seems to be one of those odd exceptions that proves the general rule of Heroic Spirits not changing. Though really, only Kojirou could speak to that and it's a rather sensitive subject for him," Jeanne explained in order to give the newcomer some context on their discussion.
"Oh it certainly is, and quite deep-rooted in human perception, that idea; precisely why it does work as you say. Even though it's been a while..." Chloe trailed off, as though searching her memory for something. "There's also some Heroic Spirits whose marital status is part of their legend-record, so they sort of bypass the whole 'until death' thing. Probably awkward to explain to the taxman I guess."
"...I see," Jeanne took a moment to process this. "Wouldn't that lead to inconsistencies though? Like it couldn't be possible to summon your future husband if his record has him already married to you, so how would the event ever occur?"
"It has to occur at least once, logically, but the World doesn't even have to have the event recorded; perhaps instead the fact he's married in-record is the record of the event from some perspective. If the World, Throne, Alaya etc keep a large number of variant records, say individually indexed, you might never find out the true extent of them out there. Maybe all-but-one are your husband, maybe exactly all, maybe only one, maybe exactly zero. For anyone not automatically manifested in say the Throne, there might be any number of passive records lying around, to get them all you'd need-" Chloe explained in a straightforward manner.
"By the way: did you marry Emiya before or after you died, Illya?"
"What an odd question, when did I get married... at... my... age?" Chloe turned to see a thoughtful Gudako eyeing her.
"Ruby, you knew this all along, didn't you?" Sasaku quietly attempted to interrogate her wand from behind the Master. But the Kaleidostick refused to answer at all.
"Can you explain that?" Artoria asked, her interest piqued by the reminder about the connection between the young Illya she had met while Kiritsugu's Saber and Chaldea's Archer.
"Chloe, do you want to, or actually uh can you?" Gudako asked while taking a seat next to her. But Chloe, who had turned red with some combination of confusion and perhaps embarrassment, just shook her head.
"Just to be clear, I wouldn't pry, but it's about the other Chloe's history and she's kind of too important to be such an unknown. Well basically, our best guess is that somewhere an 'Illya' got in a relationship with one of the Emiya Shirous who was already a Counter Guardian serving Alaya. Now, we thought she was a human initially, but there's no reason she couldn't be a Justeaze-type, or even an Illya-type but one who grew up fully unlike my mother. "
"Mhm. Well ok, I guess she looked like Irisviel, so that detail seems to check out. And that explains why her Archer Card stuck with our Chloe to this extent?" Artoria asked.
"If she was part of Zelretch's Kaleidostick project, she might be a magical girl initially but still end up as an Archer Heroic Spirit because she achieved or learned Servant-level skills while a mortal. Wielding what I assume was a prototype Kaleidostick, a transitional Mystic Code between a Jeweled Sword and Ruby. And unless I miss my guess, and I think Chloe basically confirmed it for us, we've actually met the particular Emiya who taught her. Maybe combined with a bunch of others who were also Counter Guardians."
"Wait... you can't mean that Mooncell Servant who looked like a male version of Chloe?" Jeanne recalled first meeting him at Elizabeth's Event.
"Heh, think it would be more accurate to say that our Chloe looks like a younger version of his Chloe, who looks like a female version of him. But yes, that's the one I suspect most." Gudako agreed. "The way he behaved around our Chloe is similar to how the other Chloe did around our Emiya Shirou back in London. I guess they knew from the beginning and didn't want to get into the weeds."
"I find it hard to believe you didn't know about this," Chloe pointed to Ruby who was floating passively using Gudako's head as cover. "If you're her Skill, how come Sasaku didn't know this?"
"One: I never worked with Chloe, and two: her reputation is pretty frightening," Ruby replied by means of explanation. "No one goes to the lengths she did without very good reason, most likely insanity - just look Kiyohime forcing herself to get summoned several times until the Masters gave up on unsummoning her."
"Now that you mentioned her," Marie sounded surprised at the reminder of the dragon Servant's continued Chaldean residency. "She really just hides away in her room all the time?"
"And thank goodness the Masters convinced her," Jeanne informed her fellow. "She will flip out on the smallest 'lie' and that of course means getting violent. It's not by chance that we're still at 0 fatal 'Kiyohime incidents' but rather careful thinking by... huh, wonder how come she just had that odd laptop in Inventory. It can somehow communicate through the Separation Order?"
"I'm not sure that she isn't somehow just talking to a chatbot of some description based off that fact," Gudako shrugged. "Despite being so advanced, even Ruby can't easily reach out to alternate versions of herself in other Chaldeas so... yeah."
"Well sorry I can't pull it off," the Kaleidostick grumbled. "It would probably work if I had a serious magical girl to work with."
"Oh come on Ruby," Sasaku sighed. "Not the time or place."
"You've said things like that a few times," Marie noted. "But the Rulers can see she's tagged as a magical girl?"
"Sure she is, but so is Chloe. The other one, that is. My abilities scale with how well the contractor actually holds to the standards of a magical girl. For example, friendship is totally fine and even a little young innocent romance, great ! But by the time you're hopping branches and smashing up cities for Alaya because you're yandere for a man it doesn't work like that anymore."
"... ah, you were referring to Chloe," Sasaku realized after a moment. Well, in hindsight it was obvious since they knew by now the sorts of 'tasks' which Counter Guardians were frequently saddled with.
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Notes:
Making a single blade isn't the issue, it's putting them together to form a Jeweled Sword (Blade Generator) that does someone in. This is because the generators are a sort of metastable degenerate matter where most of the actual matter is in some 'other' branch (or maybe the "Mana Plane" Kaleidosticks access if I'm reading that correctly) and creating this particular outcome means having to twist your cognition/will in ways that irreparably damage you. This'll probably come up later, but Chaldea doesn't have anyone who can do this currently. Iri and Matthew's crystal daggers aren't Jeweled Swords, just very good (manufactured) gems functioning as Azoth Sword-type wands.
Thus far, Chaldea has only twice made contact with the Heroic Spirit Chloe (who does look like a tanned Irisviel in some aspects): first at Fuyuki Proto-Singularity (this was offscreen, before the start of the story) and second: Emiya Shirou spoke briefly with her at the Industrial Revolution (London) Singularity.