Chevaleresse

J23 stab

"Alright, here we go! I got my lizard back, I got my weapons back, now it's time ta ruin the days of some criminal scum." She walked forward a few steps, leading her wyvern until she was sure there was enough room, and then swung up onto her place on his back. L22, remount

Hiroki wasn't entirely sure what to do after Ghost left. She felt a bit better, if only because she'd actually resolved to do something. The terrible swirling feeling of guilt and fear was gone for the moment, though the idea of the upcoming battles made her nervous. Mostly, though, she was tired. Her mech did most of the work of fighting, but it was mentally exhausting, and the stress of the battlefield wasn't exactly relaxing and energizing. The barracks was rather crowded at the moment, so the girl simply sought out a storeroom. The cloak that she still carried with her was turned into a makeshift blanket to lay on top of as she curled up in a corner, trying to catch a bit of rest before the next fight.

Something about the hand on her shoulder put the final crack in Mitsurugi's rapidly disintegrating facade of control. She didn't shy away from it, though she did seem somewhat surprised at its presence in the short moment before she broke down into. . . well, the woman would never describe it as such, but bawling. Somewhat quiet bawling, but bawling nonetheless, the tears starting to flow continuously and messily. It grated at a part of her to lose control in front of someone at all, much less someone she had only recently met, but a greater part of her simply appreciated the release. Of finally being able to speak with someone that seemed to understand. After a solid minute or three of this, she finally managed to wrest control of her voice enough to say "I'm sorry . . . it's just so difficult . . . everything and everyone just reminds me of my failure. . ." The goddess broke down into another series of sobs.

"My name is Lucine Nadine Einzbern Yggdmillenia. Did you name yourself Contagion because you have the gas and stuff, or did it kinda just work out that way?" Her eyes drift over Nader's guns. While they might not be as advanced as the guns from her time, and certainly not as the ones in this time, it was still hard for the little gun nut to resist the occasional stare at the Horsekiller. It was a little crazy that the man had what amounted to an anti-tank rifle mounted on his arm, but the kind of crazy that she almost wanted to try emulating, rather than the variety that resulted in one backing away slowly. "I mostly wanted to bring them to show you. I think you would like the um, Smith & Wesson .500. It's a fifty-caliber revolver with a muzzle velocity of six hundred and thirty three meters per second. That's, um, I think two thousand one hundred feet per second?"

"Yep! I can definitely see how this is going to be useful going forward. . . Actually, I wonder if I could modify Opal with this stuff. . ." If a featureless winged box was capable of looking afraid, Opal did so, freezing in midair in a manner that seemed to defy physics even more than the imitation Kaleidostick already did. "You seem like you know a lot about this stuff, are you an engineer in your world or something?"

Lucine nodded absently, focused on her work - though she did come up with a reply after a few moments, punctuated with the click of two parts meeting one another again. "Oh, I didn't realize you were from that time period. It makes sense, though. I wish I had my gun magazines with me. The, um, printed kind, not the kind that holds bullets. I don't actually have a lot of those." A few more moments, and the PDW was back together - probably in slightly better shape than it had been, actually; Nadine had taken the time to quickly wipe down each piece as she took it out of the gun during the disassembly. She rubbed at her eyes a bit, being careful not to get any grease in them; she could really go for a snack and a nap right about now. "I don't recognize these, though. . ." Lucine puts the PDW back, and studies what remains of the plasma pistol, asking Contagion what he found from disassembly.

"Red Sonja. . . ? Is that a hero from Doctor Doom's world?" She looked at the card with some confusion, before swapping Scathach back in for her Install and Sonja in for her Include. "The abilities seem useful, though." She briefly considered Googling the name, but elected to move in the direction of the armory instead, Opal in tow as always. Her eyes went wide when she actually got into the room, nearly bumping into Nader. The reaction was akin to what you might expect from someone her age being told that yes, they DO get to take the giant fluffy unicorn. She almost reverently took another PDW off the wall, settled down on the floor. . . and immediately began disassembling it, looking to study the advances in tech and design. The plasma pistol would come in a moment.

"That's. . . new . . ." Lucine looks rather confused - if not exactly upset - by the developments with her gun. For the sake of completeness, she trades the places of the cards, Including Scathach and Installing the unknown card.

Kusuke shrugged. "Probably could. How about this; we'll go talk to this L33t guy, and if everything works out alright, you can come with. Sound like a decent plan?" He tried to maintain a cheery tone, while hiding the still-seething ball of irritation and the fact that he was propped up by an unhealthy amount of caffeine.

Lucine took a few moments to catch her breath; she was panting as if she'd just run a marathon. She blinked at the card in confusion. "No, definitely not. . . Can I use your computer? She has to be related to Cu Chulainn somehow, right?" The girl wanders toward one of the devices in question, noticeably tired. She waited for Vitor to give the go-ahead before firing up the machine, and punching in a quick Google search for "cu chulainn." A short skim of his Wikipedia page highlights a likely suspect: Scathach, Queen of the Land of Shadows, and Cu Chulainn's teacher. Lucine waved at Vitor, gesturing at the screen, and then snatched Opal out of the air, pressing some unknown spot on it to pop out what appeared to be two playing cards. One had an image of a blonde woman in red with a somewhat comically oversized sword, and a man that would be comically oversized if he wasn't terrifying, appearing to be a mad beast. She slotted both of her new cards into the device, and then split it into the two guns once again, sliding the ejected ones into a pocket after doing so. Lucine Installs Scathach's card, and Includes the unknown card from DOOM, attempting to figure out the properties of the latter. "I feel. . . a little smarter, kinda? Like I know more stuff. What about you, Opal?"

"You have an actual lab here? That's awesome." It was smaller than the one she was used to back at home, but stocked with some rarer ingredients; most of the exotic stuff was either used up or something she wasn't allowed access to. "It's not that hard of a ritual, so I shouldn't need anything that special. I need to expand the circle a little, though. . ." Lucine fairly quickly got to work, sketching out myriad lines both inside and outside the circle and then filling in said lines with mercury. "Um, the catalyst just needs to be near the circle, so just put it down next to it or something." After waiting for Vitor to fulfill her request, Lucine attempts to summon a Cu Chulainn Class Card.

"Thanks. I always felt more comfortable with wind tomes, anyway." She tried to ignore his comment about where he found it. Not that she had a massive moral issue with fighting these people, but killing wasn't exactly something she was comfortable with. Instead, she focused on the fact that they were all alive for the moment, and that she had a new tome to study.

A moment or three after entering the safehouse, Lucine flashed again, and returned to her normal clothing, with Opal merging back together into an annoying flying box instead of an annoying pair of guns. And speaking of guns, the girl's attention lingered on the armory for a few moments, her hands twitching with the desire to examine (and probably disassemble) the futuristic firearms, before she finally tore her attention away and sought out Vitor. "Hey, do you have any mercury I could use to draw a magic circle with? Or blood. I wanted to set up that summoning ritual. I want to use your shard, too, but I don't need that until I make the circle." Assuming the man provided what she requested, she would find an open spot away from everyone else, and very carefully pour out the liquid in question; if Vitor watched, he would note that the ritual was actually a relatively simple one; though if he knew of Servants and their summoning, he would note that it was notably more complex than the standard.

Shinobu nodded and returned the bow in that order. "I'm definitely up for working together to get out of this hellhole. As hellholes go it's pretty terrible, honestly." Shinobu herself wasn't sure if that was supposed to be a joke or not. "There's gotta be some kind of way back home, right?"

Lucine squeaks in startlement and fear at the snake's attack. "C-Can we please hurry up to your safehouse!?" Her eyes darted from the ground, to watching far out away from them, and up towards the sky a bit, and back again, not sure whether she should be watching for snipers, murderous terrorists, or equally murderous wildlife. Though at least her God Hand might protect her from the latter. . . Maybe.

"Does this mean I can talk about the Evas without getting, shot or something?" Kyou spoke bluntly, with a slight hitch midsentence - she was going to say "thrown out an airlock," but they weren't in space any more. That was going to take some amount of getting used to. "It'll be kind of hard to hide them now, I think." Satomi's question raised some others in Kyou's head, but she didn't particularly want to ask them aloud. Why did they get banned in the first place? . . . And why are they alive? Robots don't bleed like that, and they don't have bones and muscles.

Ayaka blushed slightly at Yuki's implication, but pushed onward. "I just wanted to say that I'm happy to be performing here with the rest of the group, and I'm excited to see everyone that comes to our show! I hope everyone listening has a nice day!"

F12, Fire

"Oh. That makes sense. I could probably summon Cu Chulainn, yeah." She was somewhat startled by Aquila's outburst, and then further distracted by the kitten, but it seemed that the discussion of magic was still more interesting to her. "It's Herakles and Nero, by the way. I wanted Siegfried, so I was excited when I saw it was a Saber. It's almost like she was taunting me. . . I wanted to see if I could combine them and make something really durable." Nadine's disappointment was evident on her face. "Anyway, I bet Opal would be fine with it if you wanted to take a look later. Maybe while I'm setting up the ritual?" "I most certainly would not be! What makes you think I would?" "See? She's excited for it."

"Um, technically I'm only six. But I was born with the mind and body of a six year old, so really I'm closer to twelve. That's what Father says, anyway." She shrugged, the first part of her speech sounding, well, like she was just repeating something she heard a parent say. "I can only get one part of one aspect of a Heroic Spirit to actually do anything at a time, though," she said, switching back to a topic that clearly interested her more. "And I'm still working on actually summoning the spirit I want." She crossed her arms for a moment, thinking. It looked rather odd with the massive guns she was still holding, one of which she held out toward Vitor after a moment. "Um, can you tell which Heroic Spirits Opal is using right now with your magic?"

"You must be nicer than the mages around in my time. . . Father always said to be careful around them. That they might try to take me away if they found out." Lucine didn't seem to acknowledge the fact that she didn't exactly blend into a crowd to start, with bright cyan hair and red eyes. "That's part of why I have Opal with me, even if she's sorta terrible." The weapon got halfway through making an offended noise, before it became that sort of verbal shrug that one tended to hear in sitcoms. "Um, now that you know that, I can tell you about the Cards. I can set up a ritual to put a copy of a Heroic Spirit into a card, and then use that with Opal. I also figured out how to make Mystic Codes using them." A note of pride entered her voice at that.

Mitsurugi gradually choked off her sobs in order to attempt to manage a response to Navin. "Thank you, Mhasalkar." She swallowed. "I. . . know that my expectations of myself were not reasonable. A being that could conquer the Hakurei miko and the gap youkai. . . it is foolish to think that I had a chance." She sniffled again, clearly fighting back another burst of tears. "But my existence is to protect my followers. They are synonymous. Most of my being is devoted to saving those who supply me with faith, but I could not." Her voice rattled at the end of the sentence. It seemed as if she was about to speak again. . . but she didn't. The goddess was clearly fighting to hold the shattered pieces of her composure together, and this took enough effort that she had no energy left over to try and speak, for fear of it breaking again; all this was written across her face.

"I'm just thinking. . . We don't really have any reasons to DIStrust you, but I can't say I fully trust you either. Money's great and all, but trusting anyone who gives you money isn't exactly genius." Kusuke's tone wasn't hostile, more thoughtful, and his expression matched. Well, there was a hint of irritation left in it, but that was mostly because the last twenty-four hours was basically a sustained assault on his sensibilities and his sanity. "I dunno, you have any ideas to fix that?"

"Oh. I'm not, um, how do I explain. . ." The girl didn't seem overly shaken up at the news of the destruction of the Einzberns. "My father was an outcast from the Einzberns. I was never part of their family. I'm a Yggdmillenia, I just inherited the name." "A Yggdmillenia homunculus, that is. Technically you didn't inherit anything." Opal, still in hand cannon form, piped up from Lucine's hands, only to be slapped against Nadine's leg. "Opal, you know that we're not supposed to talk about that to strangers. . .!" The girl looked somewhat helplessly back at the rest of the party.