“Ilya.. Ilya!”

You groan, letting out bubbles under the water, and sink a little lower. Last we checked on our heroine, she was dethawing from being thrown bodily into a snowbank by her overly enthusiastic servant... and although the bath feels incredibly good, you still feel frozen to the core. You can’t really blame Cocona, actually you’re kinda starting to like her, but having a mock battle in this kind of weather was the worst idea ever. Mokona never got thrown into a snowbank by his girls - no, that’s the wrong comparison, you’re not an animal companion.

You are now Ilya.

Sella just opened the bathroom door, and is shouting for you. You were too dazed to properly pay attention earlier, but shouldn’t she be dealing with the mess downstairs? Sure she should. It’s entirely too nice in here to even consider getting up yet.

“Go ‘way”, you tell her, then sink entirely under the water to make sure you won’t be able to hear her response.

To your frost-addled mind, this seems like the perfect idea. You vaguely remember trying this before, without success, but any other course of action would involve less heat and is therefore an unreasonable request.

Ten seconds later, sensing Sella’s shadow looming over you, you’re starting to doubt this course of action. You’re good at holding your breath, though; you can probably stay under for at least a minute before you’ll be forced out of paradise.

You sense her sigh, more than you hear it.

[ ] Give in to the inevitable, maybe she won’t make you get out yet.
[ ] Stay under for as long as possible.

Might as well raise up...slowly...just enough that you can hear and talk, but no more than that. Because WAY TO COLD!!!!

>nat 1
...dangit.

>code stuff
Referencing real places and a modern dating system. Would seem to support the theory Cocona's from the future, unless those organizations just happen to exist in multiple universes. (Which isn't impossible).

...actually, that might mean reporting errors to her programmers is technically possible. Although said programers might be a little young right now, and their projects not even started.

>perspective swap
Oh. Wasn't expecting that. We're going to have to suffer the consequences of booting Cocona with all that inhuman poor interaction stuff directly.

>what do
Give in, slowly and resigned. (And shape up quick once you see her expression and realize something is really wrong).

The water is nice, but you can kind of sense Sella fidgeting above you. She wouldn’t interrupt your bath in the first place if it wasn’t important, and she wouldn’t be fidgeting if she wasn’t feeling impatient, and.. and you didn’t breathe in properly before diving, so you’re already starting to feel a slight burn. No helping it.

You shift slightly, pushing your face above the surface of the water. The blurry figure of Sella slowly resolves itself. She does look agitated.

When was the last time you saw Sella looking visibly agitated?

You shift to business mode, forcing the drowsiness away as best you can, then sit up properly - whatever this is, it’s more important than comfort. Anyway, the room is almost as warm as the water.

Sella’s mouth opens and shuts. She looks lost for words, uncertain how to explain it to you. You cock your head.. then, faintly, you hear the sound of combat from downstairs. Alarmed, you look to Sella. She appears to have noticed the same thing.

“Ilya..”

“I get it,” you say. You climb out of the bath, hurrying to get dressed. “You weren’t expecting a fight, but now we’ve got one. I assume Leysritt and Cocona are downstairs defending. Sella, report - what’s going on?”

“Ah.. yes, Mistress!” she says. It appears giving her an order got her over her daze, or maybe it’s the increasingly loud sound of combat. You almost tear your shirt in your hurry to get it over your head; then, after a moment’s hesitation, put on your shielding amulet. The prana drain will be annoying, but less than Cocona ought to have taken.

“It’s.. after you went inside, Cocona offered to help with the cleanup. I told her she didn’t have to, and asked her to join you, but then.. she collapsed again, almost fainting on her feet. I thought she might have overused her abilities, she told me it was some remnant of the damage she took getting here, and I was going to carry her to her bedroom, but…”

She trails off.

“Well? How does that lead to fighting?” you ask, a sinking feeling in your stomach. If Cocona isn’t helping.. no, Leysritt is strong. She can handle herself against anything short of a phantasmal beast, or another Servant, and neither are plausible options right now.

You can hear the fight getting closer, though. Leysritt is retreating. Worst case, she might be fighting Cocona, though you can’t think of a reason why that might be the case.

Sella shakes her head, frantically. “It’s got to have something to do with.. just after Cocona fell asleep, there was a burst of rainbow light, and a floating white diamond appeared next to her. Not an actual diamond, something diamond-shaped.. I’m sorry, I can’t explain it better. It was a like a hole in the world - no shadows, no texture, nothing. So I shouted for Leysritt, and ran here with Cocona the moment she got there. Cocona’s just outside, but she’s still asleep.” She hesitates a second. “I couldn’t feel any prana, no sense of magic of any kind, but the thing was slowly expanding. Felt like it was unfolding, somehow.”

She stops, apparently satisfied she’s told you what she knows. You notice you’re confused. Rainbow light, like a kaleidoscope, that sounds like the second magic.. but the rest doesn’t, and this isn’t like Zelretch’s modus operandi at all. Someone else? But who would be able to create magic that doesn’t feel like magic?

Non-mages?

You discard that idea immediately. Whatever their other abilities, scientific methods are always clearly recognizable as following the laws of the world, and Sella’s description didn’t sound that way at all. Which leaves the unknown. Dangerous, dangerous… you’d like to send Sella out to help Leysritt immediately, but that would be foolish. Either Leysritt is managing, and it sounds like she is, or getting into the fight piecemeal would be the worst thing you can do. She’s not trained, she doesn’t even have a weapon.

Twenty seconds later you pull on your jacket, finally fully dressed. Wet, but there’s no helping that; if you have to, you’ll burn some prana to stay warm. You do take a second to shake your hair, hoping to get at least some of the water out.

You glance at Sella, who is practically hopping with eagerness. You nod at her. “Okay, let’s go help Leysritt out.”

Battle of the Bathroom, round 1 Infel 2013/10/12(Sat)15:46 No. 544021 ID: 563dc1
File 138161800533.png - (28.37KB , 563x166 , b2_1.png )

The situation outside your bathroom takes a second to comprehend. Going west to east there’s a wall, two bedrooms, one Cocona (on the floor), one bathroom, and the stairs. In front of the stairs is Leysritt, ricocheting off the walls like a demented pinball as the thing she is fighting tries to kill her, alternating between guns and.. micro-missiles...

“Flying.. that looks mechanical,” you mutter to yourself in confusion. You’re being attacked by way of science after all? But you can feel it using magic, even if it feels different to human prana. More like a phantasmal beast, actually.

“Don’t just stand there, help!” Leysritt shouts, and you snap out of it. Right. Whatever it is, you’ve got to do something. Analysis can wait until it’s dead.

Now, how to arrange that.

You gesture for Sella to stay back, considering the situation. Your abilities are somewhat limited; in theory Wishcraft can do anything, but in practice it takes twice as much power as it would for anyone else. You have that much power, but it’s still limiting. You certainly can’t throw around fireballs - you might set a curtain on fire, but little else. The thing you’re fighting.. it looks like a mecha for one of your stories, except for the lack of arms or feet; it only has nubs, which it occasionally uses to shoot at Leysritt. She’s dodging well, but she can’t keep that up forever.

Support? Should you try boosting Leysritt somehow?

Electricity? You wouldn’t be able to make a lightning strike worthy of the name, and you’d be screwed if it isn’t especially vulnerable. It’s times like this you envy the Edelfeldts and their evocation gems.

-----

Leysritt:
HP: 43
SP: 28 (68)

Ilya:
HP: 45
SP: 120 (800)

Sella:
HP: 25

ABR:
HP: 258
SP: N/A

Nenesha 2013/10/12(Sat)15:59 No. 544025 ID: 563dc1
File 138161878934.jpg - (17.05KB , 165x220 , icon_abr.jpg )

Hopefully you remember how this works from last time. Either way, this is a time to think quickly. I've included an zoomed-in picture of the thing you're fighting - it's called an ABR.

Some stats for ya:

Leysritt
Polearm: 2d8+10
Power strike: 5SP. Doubles damage at the cost of accuracy.
Speed boost: 5-20SP. SP cost added to damage, also improves accuracy and dodge.

HP max: 60
SP max: 50 (150)

Ilya
Punch: 1d2
Wishcraft: 2*(whatever it’d cost for someone else) SP
HP max: 45
SP max: 120 (800)

Sella
Punch: 1d3
No abilities of use during combat
HP max: 25
SP max: 80 (300)

ABR
Micro-missiles: 2d6, explosive, homing.
Gatling gun: 1d10, piercing.
HP max: 260

The long and short of it is, Wishcraft can do anything Ilya can imagine. She does need to be able to imagine it, however. She will not be throwing around 40-SP Cocona-style fireballs, as those require millisecond-to-millisecond tuning of nuclear fusion to prevent them blowing up in her face.

There is one mage who could do something similar; it's called the Fifth Magic. She's not around.

All right. Basic assessment: this thing has way more hp than you can reasonably expect to burn through fighting fair. Luckily, we don't have to fight fair.

Cocona is down, and Sella is basically a non-comm. She should focus on keeping herself and Cocona out of the line of fire. ...maybe if she stays close enough, Cocona's automated defenses will cover both of them? (If we can assume her armor works while she's unconscious).

No matter how hardened that thing is, is has internal systems. Computers that need to run it, flight systems that provide mobility, etc. Your checkmate should be to disable these systems from the inside. A lightning bolt might be hard for you to pull off, and the thing might have shielding. But, with the right wish, you can bypass it. Fry it from the inside out.

My guess is though, that spell will take a little time and space to set up. I'd suggest starting off by buffing Leysritt. Give her the speed and endurance to run interference, so she can keep this thing busy without getting killed, and buy you time for the killing blow.

Round 2 Infel 2013/10/13(Sun)15:16 No. 544161 ID: e1000c
File 138170257264.png - (49.27KB , 564x200 , b2_2.png )

rolled 10 = 10

---

Long seconds pass as you consider your approach. Leysritt has been fighting it for some time; you can see how battered she looks, while her enemy is practically untouched. Brute force is out, then, unless you can help her get at its weak points. Presuming this thing has weak points, that is. Finesse… dubious, it is unlikely to react like a human to your repertoire of low-powered spells. That doesn’t actually leave much; your combat training was based on the assumption that you’d be supporting a Servant, not fighting on your own or with Leysritt. Worse still, most of your options would require you to touch the target. A dangerous tactic at the best of times. Boosting Leysritt directly is dangerous, only possible because of your shared nature, and impossible in the midst of combat. It’s still your best option, not that you have a lot of choice.

First, you need to separate them. You could try blowing the robot backwards with a blast of air, but if that fails…

You glance at the ceiling. Yes, that will do. Brute force, applied with finesse, and a lot less force than you’d need to do it the other way.

“Leysritt!” you shout. “On my mark, disengage and join me. One… two…”

The flow of the battle shifts, letting you know she’s heard your instructions, before it fades from your perception as you prepare to use your magecraft. Wishcraft. It’s the ultimate arrogance, differing from a Reality Marble more by degree than quality; using your prana as an intermediary, wishcraft allows you to overwrite reality with your own perceptions. As such it requires you to understand the true reality of a situation while simultaneously deluding yourself into believing it’s different, more to your liking. Missing the desired mental state even slightly would cause a failure or a true backfire, but you’ve done this often enough that there’s no reason to worry, and part of the ability gives you near-perfect clairvoyance of the thing you are trying to affect.

As such, doing it while talking makes little difference, and as you shout “Mark!” the ceiling comes down in near-perfect synchronization with your imagination. Leysritt takes a flying dive, dropping beneath a final jet of light from the robot before the falling timber and bricks push it to the ground. Peripherally, you see it burning a neat hole through the ceiling on the other side of the corridor.

You frown, sensing a stronger than expected drain on your reserves. In your haste, you pictured how the ceiling would come down, rather than just imagining cuts to the support beams; that may have guaranteed it’d work correctly, but it also made this more of brute-force affair than intended.

To your left, Leysritt is leaning against the wall, gasping for breath. In front of you, the corridor is filled with rubble; there’s no way that took it down, but with any luck you’ll have a little time to properly prepare for battle. You haven’t tried this before, but perhaps you can also use wishcraft to check how much time you have. Even without trying to do anything, the secondary effect…

Ilya recommends:
[ ] Spend a round ‘listening’, try to see what the ABR is doing. Or what it’s made of.
[ ] Immediately start preparing.

Ilya:
HP: 45
SP: 105 (780)

ABR:
HP: 256
SP: N/A

Well, looks like glass windows are no longer the most expensive item on the repair list.

It's a pity Cocona is out of commission- even ignoring her power as a servant, she did seem to poses a knowledge of machines that might be useful now. Unfortunately, helping her to recover from whatever mental injury has her currently incapacitated is not something you know how to do, and not something you will likely have the time to figure out.

>what do
You don't know how much time you have, and if you haven't experimented with short term precog right before, we really cannot afford to mess around now, useful as an actual time estimate might be.

For the moment, focus on buffing Leysritt. She's been hard pressed, and you need her to be able to hold this thing up and survive. She needs her physical endurance reinforced, defenses against the kinetic impact of bullets, and explosive fire of the missiles. She has her own abilities to bolster speed and the strength of her blows, so that should be a secondary concern.

Once you're sure she can hold up to a renewed round of combat, and provide the cover and distraction you need, turn to the problem of studying your enemy. Hopefully it won't have broken free, yet. You don't have time to understand entirely how it works, but you need some crude understanding to decide how best to destroy or disable it.

> precog
It's not that. More along the lines of clairvoyance; directly reading the state of reality. It'd work. It'd take a round.

>>544172
Which would give us an accurate assessment of how many round it would take the ABR to free itself, and possibly some understanding of it's function, construction, and/or weaknesses?

The turn count doesn't buy us much, but the results of a scan might be useful.

For comparison, how long would it take to setup buffs, as proposed? (Assuming they're feasible, and ignoring tripping the danger Ilya warned of).

I suppose if we can safely assume it's pinned for multiple rounds, scanning first would be advantageous, since Ilya could then tailor the buffs based on actual knowledge of the threat, rather than assumption.

> Which would give us an accurate assessment of how many round it would take the ABR to free itself, and possibly some understanding of it's function, construction, and/or weaknesses?
You don't know. It might be perfect accuracy, it might be very vague; you've never tried this before. Doing it is a risk.

> Buff time
More is better, especially for safety.

Hrrrm...I think we should attempt to focus on buffing.
I'd LIKE to say more scanning for killing blow strategy, but the problem is the scanner itself is unreliably useful...Plus it's a Cocona-era mech, so smart money says that Ilya wouldn't be able to make sense of it even if she DID look inside, what with probably being filled with uber-exotic materials and incomprehensibly advanced technology. As a result...
Don't bother scanning. All hands to BUFFING!!!
Perferably toughness/defense, or END if I wanna be technical about it.

So the trade off is a successful scan allows us to tailor our buffs off knowledge, and time the casting to finish just as we run out of time.

However, with an unsuccessful scan, or if the ABR is breaking free in a very small number of turns, we're wasting time for little advantage.

...I guess if the buffing is a multi-turn procedure, sacrificing one cycle for increased efficiency is worth it. It's like error checking in computing.

Do the scan.

I think you're ignoring the fact that our opponent is currently pinned in a known location, can wishcraft add to its impediments, by (for instance) encasing it in concrete or steel?

Why destroy anything or engage in anything more indirect than disabling this device?

rolled 8, 1 = 9

---

When the racket of falling wood carpentry ceases, the robot appears quite thoroughly buried. You breathe a sigh of relief; your gambit was a complete success. No matter how tough it is, being pinned like this should at least keep it down for a few minutes.

So you hope, but you’d be better off if you can take advantage of your wishcraft to figure that out directly.

“Sella, take care of Leysritt’s wounds,” you hear yourself say.

If you are to do this, you’ll need to minimise distractions. You close your eyes, reaching out towards the rubble with one hand; it’s not that the location of your hands particularly matters, but it’ll provide a point of reference.

For wishcraft, imagination is key. Building a mental picture of your environment, just slightly distorted, and forcing it to become reality. You can feel the differences, as if you’re pushing against resistance. Now, if you give in instead of forcing it…

You’re standing in the middle of the corridor.

Beneath you, a carpet. Beneath that, asp… no, oak planks. In front of you, rubble - shattered wood, cracked bricks.

It’s working, and a part of you - the part that isn’t maintaining a delicate mental balance - is overjoyed at your accomplishment.

First die - how well this works, on your first attempt. Second die - how bad your timing is.

rolled 2 = 2

---

Shattered wood, cracked bricks. Cracked wood, at times; the main support beams came down in one piece, by and large. There are some electrical wires, too, and you find to your surprise that you can tell which ones are still electrified, despite the lack of a circuit.

What you can’t do is discover anything about your assailant. Oh, it’s easy to find; it’s a fairly large robot, you’d need to be blind not to spot it. The only problem is that you can’t see inside it. Where you were expecting metal, wiring, electronics, it looks like nothing so much as a hole in the world. You can still see its exact shape, though; it’s displacing air, if nothing else. So much for finding a weak spot, but you should at least be able to tell how stuck it is.

“..lya”

Tracing the flow of the wreckage, you find that it’s surrounded on all sides by heavy support beams. It’s moving, but only slightly; shifting rhythmically back and forth. It doesn’t appear to be making any headway, and after a few seconds it ceases to move and starts whining.

“Ilya! Get down!”

You open your eyes, startled, to see Leysritt throwing herself at you. At the same time the whine shifts to a higher pitch and an actinic glow fills the hallway, emanating from the rubble. There’s barely enough time to relax your muscles before she slams into you at full speed, forcing you out of the way of some kind of energy beam barely a tenth of a second before it hits.

THANK YOU LEYSRITT!!!
Sooo Robot is hole in world. Strange, very very strange...
Ok, I think we should either Wishcraft heal Leysritt, or Wishcraft form a Reflective Box around the robot.

Infel 2013/10/16(Wed)15:34 No. 544430 ID: 94e610
File 138196286981.png - (146.09KB , 1128x398 , b2_3.png )

You hit the floor rolling, your clothes smoking.

Leysritt is worse off; hers are actually on fire, and it takes a few frantic seconds to put them out, but other than the affront to her dignity she seems basically fine. Belatedly, you realise you’d seen the glow even before it fired, but you’d been concentrating so hard you didn’t properly notice. That… that was…

There’s a circular hole in the rubble, and a trench carved all the way down the corridor. You can’t see the robot itself from this angle, and you don’t think you want to, but there’s no way it’s going to stay down for long. You’re not sure why it only chose to do this now, but you don’t think you can deal with this.

Thank God Sella followed your instructions, even if it means she’s now on the other side of the corridor. At least she wasn’t in the direct line of fire. She looks pale, though; scared, both for you and for herself. That attack was easily on the level of a Servant, and it was produced by a mere robot, something that can be mass-produced. You couldn’t even - you still don’t feel any magic from it, just a sense of unnaturalness.

Eventually, as your ears stop ringing, you hear the robot moving rhythmically, accompanied by the sound of cracking timber. Leysritt grabs your arm, and you look up at her; she says something, looking grave, but you can’t make out the words.

You think you get the gist of it, though. “Retreat.” Sure, but how?

Ilya:
HP: 43
SP: 108 (778)

Leysritt:
HP: 41
SP: 28 ( 63)

ABR:
HP: 231
SP: N/A

>>544429
You cannot heal using Wishcraft, not in timescales useful in combat; nor can you do anything that would directly counter a blast like that.

Practice WishCraft LATER WHEN IT'S SAFE!
Ok...We needs out of here. If you can walk/run, this might be fairly simple. WishCraft a section of the wall to right in front of the robot, then have Stella, and yourself retreat through that wall, with Leysritt grabbing Cocona and following after you two.
After that...Maybe use WishCraft to send a message to anyone else in the castle that there is an angry robot-thing and (area where Hallway is at.) should be avoided until it is dealt with.

So... as feared. Scanning how long it would remain trapped was a waste of time, since it only stayed down a single round.

...you couldn't see inside the machine. But you saw outside it, and the movement of electric current. Could you pick up what the machine was using for sensors? External active sensors might have left an energy signature visible to you.

>You’re not sure why it only chose to do this now
Targeting constraints. It had to pause and charge momentarily (the whining) to fire off that beam attack, and the path was fixed. It would have been hard to reliably hit Leysritt when she was engaging it at close range (short of a lucky shot), whereas you and the rubble were stationary.

...at least that attack seems to have burn off 25 hp. Although there's no way allowing it to burn off it's own health reserves is a viable strategy- we'll miss a dodge roll, Leysritt will exhaust her SP, or the castle will collapse on us before the ABR burns out. (And that's assuming this thing can't heal itself, which the Ar Tonelico spoilers say it may be able to).

>it looks like nothing so much as a hole in the world
That suggests then, that it's some sort of projection or intrusion in the world? Perhaps that is the solution. If the hole can be collapsed or filled, the entity will cease to exist or be banished.

Potentially an instant win, but since you don't understand what mechanism summoned this machine, the difficulty, danger, or time required to use wishcraft to attempt a banishment is unknown.

>retreat
To the chamber you brought Cocona to practice in, before? That was supposed to be nuke-proof, right? That might hold up under this thing's assault, for a bit. Unless those wards are only designed to contain internal energies, and not withstand external. (Although those same wards would block your attempts to banish it, if it's on the other side. Problematic- you'd have to hit it when it broke in, or open the door when ready).

The problem is retreating under fire doesn't work very well. Ideally, you need something to distract or hold back your foe to create an opening for retreat. You didn't have time to buff Leysritt- her staying as a rear guard would be suicide. The rubble won't it for long either with a large hole in it.

Best option is to use wishcraft to create an additional delay or obstacle as your group falls back. Another collapse between you, if nothing else. Or something to confuse or blind it's sensors, if you picked up any of that.

>>544434
I'm not sure summoning a wall across the hall is something Ilya can do in a useful timescale. ...and are there other people in the castle to be concerned with?

>>544436
Only the four of you.

Can we wish it were somewhere else? Like, say, oh, suddenly appearing near one of our (future) opponents? Seriously, fighting bullshit foes that may not actually exist is problematic to start with.

Hypothesis time: Is this particular nonexistent-foe a manifestation tied to Cocona's safeguards? If so we may be able to influence Cocona to end the encounter.

>>544449
Oh, you can wish for just about anything. It may not work.

When you don't know where those enemies are, and the ABR is pretty hard to affect in any way whatsoever? That would be a good way to burn up MP.

To say nothing of the fact that teleportation tends to be an expensive ability in most systems, anyways. (After all, a character who can reliably throw 'teleport away' spells at enemies in combat situations has a pretty hard to break defense!). I'd be surprised if Ilya could pull one off within acceptable time or energy limits, even ignoring the problem of divining future enemies to target, or the difficulty in targeting the ARB.

Remember how Ilya described how her attempts to throw a fireball or lightning might go. That's kind of the 'scale' of magic we need to think of- not quite up to what you'd think of in terms of a traditional battle-mage.

(And if we want to lean on out of character spoilers- the ARB is supposed to have a way to absorb song magic. It's not clear if wish magic would do the same thing, but...)

If you're familiar with Dresden Files, the things Ilya can pull off are roughly on that same scale. Better in some ways, worse in others; she's a Dresden-level prodigy (well, construct), but she's hardly a Servant.

Cocona can pull off stronger spells without really trying, and she's not of the Caster class - bit of an oddity, really; it could easily be argued that she should be.

Servant Caster could, if properly powered, wipe out a city with a single spell - or water every plant in a city with a single spell, quite likely.

rolled 2, 9 = 11

---

Leysritt points at the floor, speaking urgently. You still can’t make out what she’s saying - destroy the floor? Beneath the robot? That’s dangerous, it might not fall down with the rubble. It could fly, right?

You point at the rubble, trying to look quizzical. She shakes her head, looking startled, then points at your ears. Right, you’re a little deaf. You shake your head; she gives a worried glance over to the heap of rubble, where the sounds of tearing timber are starting to sound like it’s getting lose.

Have to get out of here… this is really stressing you out. It isn’t what you were expecting from the grail war at all, on a lot of levels; direct combat isn’t your forte, let alone against something like this. Whatever it is, it’s cheating! Magic of that level shouldn’t even be possible in the modern world, there’s nothing to feed it. Is this even real? It’s like something out of a manga, more than the real world. If you fail here, you’ll die? Really die? The grail war sounded like great fun when your tutors explained it, and it’d give you a chance to find out why dad left you, but you never really considered what it meant if you’d fail. That failure meant death. Because you wouldn’t fail, right? Let alone in a fight this unfair, and never mind that the grail war is by definition unfair. No, no, no…

Leysritt grabs your arm, and you almost literally jump, nearly slamming into the wall before she manages to get a proper hold. She grabs you by both shoulders, shouts something at you. You attempt to tear yourself loose, but she holds on without really trying; you’d never quite realised how strong she was before. How scary she could be, too. Your heart is beating frantically, telling you to run, but there’s nowhere to run to… and anyway, this is Leysritt… you’re not really scared of her, so why do you still feel like running? This isn’t like you.

She grabs you in a tight hug. You stiffen, trembling, then slowly relax.

There’s an audible crash from the direction of the robot, and the sounds of its struggles stop for a second, then turn into a rapid series of brittle-sounding snaps and painful scraping sounds. No more than ten seconds have passed since it shot at you, at most, but it’s already getting loose.

Leysritt releases you, then points at the floor again, drawing a circle around you, Cocona and Sella. She’s still on about that? What could she… oh. Oh! If there isn’t an exit, you should just make one. Now why didn’t you think of that?

You nod at her to show her you understand, and she nods back, then draws a similar line on the ceiling in front of the robot. Right, make a bit of a barricade at the same time. That won’t last long, but it’s something.

You close your eyes in concentration. You’ll need to hurry; it’ll be free any moment now. Peripherally, you note Leysritt falling back to take care of Cocona.

It’s basically the same trick as earlier, but two of them at once, while you’re on an adrenalin high, and rushed. It’d be no surprise if you don’t get it perfect.

You focus mostly on letting the four of you down carefully, and it bears dividends; the fractures bend unnaturally, forming an almost staircase-like structure all the way down to the ground floor. Sella yelps as the floor falls away under her, but has no trouble picking her way down; Leysritt, who is carrying Cocona, looks like she might as well be walking on flat ground.

If only your impromptu barricade worked as well, you’d be in good shape.

You cast a worried glance backwards, to where a large section of the ceiling has come down but remained relatively intact. It still forms a barrier, but one with major gaps which the robot could potentially shove through if it’s strong enough. Of course even a perfect barrier wouldn’t have survived one of those blasts, so perhaps you shouldn’t feel so bothered about it.

Then, as you’re making your own way down, you realise Leysritt has stopped.

“..lya. Ilya! Can you hear me now?” she asks.

“Yes!” I reply, relieved that my hearing seems to be recovering. “That is, mostly. You’ll still have to shout, I guess.”

“You’ll be all right, then. Ah, but… I think we have a problem. Come, tell me what you see.”

What you see? Well, all right. You step down into the kitchen, joining Leysritt and Sella at the doorstep to look out at -

You’re having trouble interpreting what your eyes tell you. No, your eyes aren’t really telling you anything, but something in the scene bypasses the eyes, forcing its way directly into the brain.

It should be the entrance hall. It still is, in a sense, but it’s broken beyond repair. Not in the sense that the building is damaged, in the sense that the room - the space is broken.

The room has stretched, walls distorting to accommodate a far larger volume that should by rights fit, but that’s the least of it. The floor is tiled, and you should be able to count your way to the opposite wall - forty-three tiles, at some point in your childhood you made a close study of them. If you tried the same today, though, you wouldn’t even reach the halfway point. The tiles seem to grow smaller, letting more fit but still somehow arranged in straight lines, while the floor as a whole bends sharply downwards. There’s a hole, in the middle of the hall; utter blackness, shot through with sickly green. A thin beam of light pierces the centre of the hole, stretching to the matching hole in the ceiling.

You tear your eyes away, and they catch on the thing that is floating right next to the door. A pure white pyramid, lacking texture of any kind, and rotating slowly - but somehow the light seems to bend so every side of it is facing you, if light is even involved. As you stare at it it seems to expand, the central face taking over and pushing the others to the edge of your vision. There’s a black spot at its very centre, moving closer… no, a tunnel. It’s rushing towards you…

You stumble backwards until Sella catches you, breaking eye contact by the brute-force means of putting the wall between you and the pyramid, but you can’t forget what you’ve seen. Every time you think about it, the blackness comes a little closer; it takes an effort of will to push it out of your mind. If you look, you think you’d be able to see it straight through the wall, so you don’t look.

You don’t know what this is, except that it’s not of this world. And still there’s isn’t the slightest tingle of magic, not even a sense that it’s disrupting the natural ley-line flows that pass through this area. You don’t understand what’s going on.

Above you, there’s a crash. Oh, so now the robot is breaking free…

“Ilya,” Leysritt says, sounding worried. “You know a lot more about magecraft than I do. What is going on? Is this still part of the Grail War? And what do we do?”

Hell if you know.
Ilya recommends:
[ ] Going outside would be suicide, so go where that robot came from; it’ll never expect that. If you can figure out how.
[ ] Desperately try to wake Cocona.

Ilya:
HP: 43
SP: 76 (736)

>never really thought about the fact that the grail war meant death if you failed
>never really considered failing
>even though every remember of your family ever has tried, failed, and died
...I, uh, geeze did they have you coddled and conditioned for this. Remind me not to let you make important decisions anymore. That is some seriously dangerous naivete. I suppose you're only a child, and your upbringing is partially to blame, but you're going to have some fast growing up to do to stay alive.

>complete tear in euclidean geometry
Well that isn't good. Could you tell if the damage was stable / localized, or if the effect was spreading? One is considerably more dangerous than the other.

>Is this still part of the Grail War?
...indirectly, I think? Cocona talked a lot about advanced machines, she sort of is one is some ways. And it showed up right as she collapsed, and that thing is on the power level of a servant. It has to be connected, but I'm not sure how.

>options
>running outside suicide
And I assume you don't believe you can make it to the safe room from before? And/or that it will stand up?

>pass through the rift
...well, that sounds sort of suicidally dangerous, and maybe impossible. It's an option, though.

>wake Cocona
Can we? It's only been minutes since her collapse in Ilya's frame of reference. According to this post >>539395 we spent at least an hour in Conona's inner world. Unless Conona got that wrong and there's some kind of machine cycle time advantage, she's still talking to Fiver. Maybe hasn't even got to her yet.

So... really not an option.

If Ilya needs her own reason: she doesn't really understand Cocona's inner workings, or what's wrong with her, or how to correct it. And trying to interfere with that process could be too dangerous. If she damages Cocona, that's it, for all of them.

>third option
...is closing or repairing or undoing or inverting the rift an option? That might well take the machine back with it.

Best course of action I can think of is to try and study the thing. See if you can find any useful way to interact with it, mage-wise. Yes, passage through it is one option, but there are others as well. See what levers you can find, and then try throwing one. Kind of desperate, here.

Or possibly, if the rift is so dangerous, you could to use it indirectly. Trick the machine into entering it, or use some combination of magecraft and combat to propel the thing into the distortion, and hope it is destroyed or lost.

>can't wake Cocona up
>unless time has been passing differently
Wait.

Can we make it pass differently? Ilya doesn't need to understand Cocona's problem to help her recover- we just need to fast forward to the point where Conona has recovered on her own. To create a localized time distortion around her- so she recovers in minutes instead of hour(s).

A local temporal manipulation might actually be safer than trying to toy with the gaping hole in space-time, really. And if that really is a hole in space time, temporal manipulation might be easier than it would normally be.

> safe room
Might work. Might not work. It's only slightly safer than diving headlong into the rift, if you think the ABR might come after them.

>>544757

We don't know for sure that Cocona can fully recover without outside help or if fast-forwarding her will leave us with a gibbering, insane wreck that's useless due to her... psychological issues. Worse is also plausible.
I think we're better off powering her up and pushing her awake if we want to get her to do something, or at most no further in the future than a few hours: She has those Infel Phira power issues, which might kill her by magical drain, remember?

I'm tempted to suggest trying to use the wards of the safe-room offensively by attacking this weird shit with those questionably-indestructible walls. Sadly, I don't imagine they'll oblige us by being adequately maneuverable, self-propelled and effective for the task.
We need more magic juice and we need more offensive capability. Tell me, is there any good reason the three ladies here have been hanging around in this stone shack sized for more than ten times as many people as live in it? Or was that instead generally vanity and the rooms are all empty of anything *useful* for this sort of crisis?
Seriously, the main reason people have places to live is not to shelter themselves. Instead, it is to keep all their stuff in. (With the right stuff you don't need a house for shelter, stuff that can work as a substitute includes a car, RV, tent, prefab shelter kit, etc.) What *stuff* can we use here?

>>544758
...it probably will. And then we're left with the same problem of trying to wake Cocona or find a way to fight that thing, without the (extremely dangerous) possible resource of the rift to consider.

>>544771
>We don't know for sure that Cocona can fully recover without outside help
Technically true, although the internal phase did seem to strongly suggest it was just a matter of time, and we even cobbled together a new boot sequence.

Of course, if she does need outside help, that's a big problem considering Ilya wouldn't know how to give it, even outside combat circumstances.

>if fast-forwarding her will leave us with a gibbering, insane wreck
...I really don't see any reason why that would happen. I mean, she's already dealing with hopping back and forth several reference frames (external, several internals, and the remote control room) and time doesn't pass at the same rate between all of those.

>Infel Phira power issues
Possibly a concern. Although if her recovery were going to take more time than the big battery in the sky would allow, she's dead anyways. Fast forwarding to that point would make no difference. Ilya would just discover it faster, from her perspective.

...then there's the fact that I'm not sure an acceleration here would matter there.

>we're better off powering her up and pushing her awake
Forgive the silly question, but uh, how? I think you need some kind of mechanism. Just wishing her awake and strong seems like it would be harder than wishing something to happen that might get us the outcome we want. And just dumping power into something isn't the best solution for healing or repair.

I don't know the specifics of the setting (system) well enough to suggest anything very good/specific in terms of solutions to Cocona's issues. It seems like a tightly-interlocked mess of conflicting fragilities and worries which has no clear path outwards. I couldn't make a useful decision without being able to either eliminate or prioritize *some* of these worries:
--Severe psychological trauma, which could (would?) destroy her sanity when she's done repairing her memory access, so we can't fast forward her a month and expect everything to be peachy even if nothing else goes wrong from trying that.
--Uncertain internal power situation from her manifestation which may be counting down to her running out of energy permanently and ceasing to exist. We don't know what the end state of her attempting to solve it will be, and this may kill her directly if we fast forward her too far in the future.
--Hard-counter safeguards which will stop Cocona from attempting the murder necessary for her to actually win in this contest if they work, and which remain hazardous even if they don't. These might also stop her from harming things which seem to be sentient, and this attack-bot might qualify. Fast forwarding her into the future subjectively gives these more time to cause problems either from correct or buggy function, possibly unsurmountable ones.
--She's a little (teenage?) girl from a highly-developed society, so it's unlikely that she would have any serious combat training and ability. It would be even more alarming if she does (what psycho trains little girls as murderers, and what conditioning baggage does that leave?), and worrisome either way whether she has a killer instinct or not.
--I don't know if we can identify whether this drone and the anomaly are tied to Cocona's manifestation or not, and whether interacting with either will affect Cocona. It seems likely that the abnormal, future-tech, autonomous, assault robot has something to do with the weird cyborg girl from a syfy future place. Will destroying it kill Cocona? Is it caused by one of her safeguards somehow and will defeating or escaping one just make her empty out what's left of her energy reserves making more? Is it some bizarre side-effect from whatever magical glitch brought her here in the first place and if so will trying to break it break the spell that manifests her here?

If we were going to attempt to fast-forward her I'd suggest no further than eight hours in the future, but I can't think of any options for aiding her recovery I like because we don't have nearly enough information about any of this to do anything that isn't potentially stepping on a landmine. The least hazardous thing seems to be straight up healing Cocona with magic, dumping some extra juice in her to make sure she's not running empty, and then waking her up. I don't even like that one because of the weird way things happen inside Cocona's head while she's unconscious.
This is why I think it's better to try to solve this without waking up Cocona, but for all I know the robot and the spatial anomaly are exterior manifestations of her nightmares while she's sleeping. I'm totally fucking clueless about the ultimate nature of the bot and weirdass rift whatever.

>Severe psychological trauma, which could (would?) destroy her sanity
Trauma that's much more significant to Cocona-prime than C-4, though. Now that Fev's accepted what she is, bad memories from Cocona's past won't hold as much sting. Especially as we're currently running Fev's emotion emulator rather than Cocona's raw emotion. We have more distance and detachment.

And I think the timescale on repairing the damage necessary to wake again is a lot less than the timescale it would take Fiver to find Three and start doing anything about untangling memories.

I just want to say I love this quest even if I don't vote in it.

>>545564
Good, good, you're in exactly the right frame of mind for this. :P

Well, anyway. Cocona's from Ar Tonelico, there's a lot of information to find if you want to do light reading, and on the basis that you're supposed to know everything she does (amnesia aside!) I'd be willing to discuss some of it, but.. this is what the discussion thread is for.

Suffice to say, she does have combat training. Yes, this is fucked up. It's a reflection on their society, which has gone through a lot of apocalypses recently.

Hrrm...I don't know about the space-rip thing...But maybe that thing is here for Cocona somehow? It might be like...One of those...Robot-things she mentioned earlier, and it's here to make sure she's safe?

“It almost has to be connected to the war, right?” you say, feeling rather unsure. “At least, there aren’t very many other options I can think of. This thing is out of this world.”

There’s a sound of crashing wood from above, making you jump.

“We’d better get out of here. That barricade isn’t going to hold for much longer,” Leysritt says, looking worriedly upwards.

You hesitate. This rift, or whatever… you’ll call it the rift. It’s a potential resource, making you loathe to immediately leave, but Leysritt is right. You doubt there’s anything you can do before the robot attacks you again, much less safely. If you had reason to think you could do anything at all, maybe… no, no time.

“You’re right. I might be able to do something with the rift, given time, but we don’t have any. Let’s go, there might be something useful in one of the storerooms.” If your cowardly human kin didn’t take it all with them when they left, you leave unspoken.

It leaves an ashen taste in your mouth, as one of the things youmight have been able to do is shut it down, potentially taking the robot with it, but you lead the way, expertly picking a path through a maze of tiny “servant’s corridors” to the personal quarters of the rest of your so-called extended family. One small blessing, the robot is entirely too big to fit through these.

The next few minutes are filled with frantic searching, although you do manage to grab Leysritt for long enough to stop her bleeding and fix the worst of the damage. One advantage of being a battle-oriented homunculus, she heals very easily.

As a family of mages, by most accounts the Einzberns ought to have had a lot of magical paraphernalia, most of which would be useless in battles lasting less than a month. Your hopes of finding a magical superweapon is thwarted, however, by two distinctly unusual features of your family: One, the family specialty Wishcraft makes most of you think of traditional magecraft as pointless; why spend years doing research, if you can get the same effect by just throwing more power at the problem. Sure. Maybe in a different situation.

Two, you are the family’s magical superweapon. Up until quite recently you felt confident that you could, indeed, power through any non-servant enemy with brute force.

Every so often you hear distant crashes, from where the robot is still doing something. In the distance, yes, but somehow that fails to reassure you.

Ten minutes after first escaping the robot, the three of you - plus one unconscious servant - are holed up in a small bedroom that is, as far as you can tell, about as deep inside the castle as you can get without losing your options. You could have dug down and gone into the heavy-duty workroom, of course, but that’d mostly amount to trapping yourself; it may be heavily warded, but the wards are all directed inwards. You doubt it’d stand up to even a single one of those giga-death beams.

There’s a small collection of trinkets on the floor.

“That’s it, then,” Leysritt says, sounding somewhat defeated. “No real weapons here, nothing of better quality than my halberd. Useless.”

“I wouldn’t say that. There’s a decent collection of automatic shields, way too many poison detectors, some… hmm, I wonder what this is. Looks like some kind of self-sustaining illusion bracelet?”

Sella pokes carefully at one of the rings. You can’t really tell what that’s supposed to be, but she’s your teacher, after all. You guess she hasn’t taught you everything she knows yet.

You’re sitting leaned against the bed, trying to recuperate from casting three high-power spells in short order and doing your best to appear unaffected, listening to the two of them going over what you’ve found.

“Anything we can use? Do you think that illusion would work against the robot?”

“Ah… no. This looks like it’ll only affect the wearer, and it’d trap you if you used it. You probably wouldn’t even be able to tell that the world you’re in isn’t real, I can see some circuits here meant to affect your reasoning. Nasty piece of work. These shields, though… two of these shielding amulets can be precharged, so you could use them without affecting your combat skills, and you could use both at once if you wanted. It’s not much, it certainly won’t let you take a direct hit, but it should cut down on the scrapes and cuts.”

“Anything else? Any conventional weapons?”

Sella shakes her head. “Nothing of any conceivable use, I’d say. Lots of poison, but that thing isn’t going to be affected. If we had an hour I could cook up some kind of acid, but I still wouldn’t bet on it being affected.”

“All right. Damn, I was hoping for a grenade or three.”

Your eyes shoot open, and you give Leysritt an astonished look. She blushes lightly, defending herself. “It works, that’s all I care about. Your father demonstrated that well enough… oh, sorry.”

You frown, then sigh. The infamous magus-killer had indeed demonstrated that, you’ve heard the stories too many times. If he hadn’t abandoned you, you might have respected his ability. He still lives in the area the grail war is supposed to take place, last you heard. You’re going to give him one chance to explain - one - and then you’re going to have Cocona burn him to a crisp; that’s the only thing you really care about in this war. The Holy Grail can go screw itself, you’d really prefer if it’s never completed, but you suppose you’ll have to try for appearances’ sake.

That all requires you to survive today.

“Let’s take stock,” you find yourself saying. “We’ve got two questionably-useful shielding bracelets, Leysritt and me, to go up against some kind of robot from the future. Sella can’t fight, Cocona’s unconscious, and we’ve already demonstrated that neither hitting it with a halberd nor dropping the roof on it already does very much, while it probably has more tricks up its sleeve. That about right?”

Leysritt nods. You put your head in your hands.

“Well, what the hell do we do? I’m open to suggestions, here.”

The three of you sit quietly for a minute. Deep in thought, you’d like to say, but your mind is blank. You’ve never had to deal with a situation like this before.

[ ] Write-in
[ ] Hope Sella or Leysritt has a bright idea

...
In short, the rest of the family grabbed the good stuff and ran. And you're not really set-up to do the -nuking- thing yourself...
Which means the family ancestral home is soon to be toast, if that..Robot...
Wait...
Cocona talked about Robots quite a bit. That thing's like a Phantasmal Beast...Maybe it'd obey her or something? Or even just looking for her...
How hard would it be to wishcraft an illusion image of Cocona in front of that thing? Might give more insight to WHAT exactly it is and does...

>If your cowardly human kin didn’t take it all with them when they left
How long ago was that, anyways? They all bailed when it started to get close to when the war would start up?

>illusion bracelet
Hmm. If that functioned outwards, I'd have suggested trying to make yourself appear as Cocona. If the robot is connected to where-ever or when-ever she was summoned from, that might have gotten a response from it.

It's not a disguise though- it's a personal holodeck device. For putting your own mind in an illusion. One theoretical application I can think of- you could plug yourself into Cocona. Dive into that inner world she was describing, and possibly pull her out, or help her recover. She did say people could use machines to 'dive' inside a Reyvatiel's mind, right?

Drawback is you'd have to understand how the bracelet works enough to repurpose it, and you don't know anything about setting up an interface with Cocona. Also, you'd go from being an asset to another liability until you managed to escape (assuming you figure out how to exit the illusion).

>...or
There's also still my idea for a temporal manipulation. Make Cocona wake up faster than she would have otherwise. Although I don't know how much juice that would take, and we're pretty much ignorant of the risks involved. (Ten minutes in... Fev is still talking to Fiver, I think. Assuming same passage of time, ect).

>overall
If you have the a small amount of time and space to maneuver, you should seriously consider means by which you might be able to help your servant recover. If this thing is connected to her or her world (she talks of powerful machines frequently, right? And she partially is one?) she may have knowledge that is invaluable. It may respond to her control, as a phantasmal beast. And, if nothing else, your servant has far greater firepower than you or Leysritt. Having her active increases your odds of survival significantly.

> How long ago was that, anyways?
About a week ago. They left because we were planning to move the castle to Japan, where the actual battlefield is.

>move the whole castle to Japan
...dang. Well, that's an improvement on catching a plane. Teleport your whole base off operations and fortifications in directly!

Following the prompting:
Check Cocona's energy level, note how close to empty she is and add/transfer more as necessary.
Let's give the cyborg lady up to eight hours in accelerated time, in one hour increments. If she still hasn't woken up yet at that point we need to try something else.