Chevaleresse

The man does a double-take at Dackly's appearance, but quickly smooths his expression and mannerisms over. "Hm? I was just heading back to the barracks to get some rest, but I suppose I could help you out. What exactly is it that you're doing?" "A good practice," Mitsurugi said, nodding her head slightly. "If only all humans were so grateful." Thanks were, in essence, what she lived on, after all. Thanks, requests for more help, that sort of thing. She glanced at Empi momentarily - what would these people think if she claimed her true nature? They seemed to already be devoted to another god, and she had no idea of this other being's disposition towards sharing worship.

"Aw, really? But I wanted to be cool. . . Everyone always focuses on the mysterious one, you know? And you can be cool and cute at the same time!" Still unsure of how to react, Ayaka elected to return the other girl's hug, albeit not particularly tightly. "I do like the dresses that the super cute idols wear, though! Maybe we should go dress shopping sometime." She drew back, eyeing Yuki up and down. "I remember a couple dresses back home that would have fit you perfectly, I bet we could find something like them somewhere else!"

E13

"Huh, I hadn't really thought of it that way." She nodded. "I agree, though. Stella just said we had to try our best too, right? So we'll be just fine!" She thought for a moment. "At least, as long as I stop falling over onstage. . . That was so embarrassing! And people took pictures and stuff too. How can I be a cool, smooth, and mysterious idol if I fall on my face in front of people?" Ayaka slouched down a bit, pouting.

Ayaka's blush continued to deepen with each stroke of Yuki's hand. As odd and unexpected as the touch was, she had to admit that it was kind of nice. . . Oh, she was being asked a question. "Uh-um, it was really cool." She neglected to mention that she had been scared out of her mind, despite the fact that she'd bawled her eyes out in front of the very person she was speaking to for that exact reason. "I don't think I changed in my, um, chest or anything like that" - which she would have appreciated, being flatter than the average board - "but I really liked the dress I had. The color matched my hair really nicely and, um, it was well-made." Not mentioning her possibly unhealthy obsession with lace and the fact that the dress was covered in it. "I also want to know what else I could do with that magic wand. I sorta just swung it at that weird woman until she went away."

Hiroki had mostly been wandering aimlessly. She didn't know anyone here, of course, so she'd just tried to find the place that had the fewest people going in and out at all times. It seemed, however, that one person had followed her in - the artistic type from before. She honestly still thought he was a bit creepy, but he didn't seem actively malicious, so talking to him couldn't hurt. "I, um, just tried to get to the castle as quickly as possible, if that's what you meant."

"Indeed I am. Have you heard of, I believe it is called Japan in English? I hail from there." Or, at least, I did, she added silently. Now wasn't the time to burden another with her sorrows. Fortunately or unfortunately, her face was not the most expressive, so any sign of the change on it was subtle. "It's good to meet you, Navin."

Ayaka blushed slightly when Yuki abruptly walked up and stared at her. She squeaked a bit when the other girl started to play with her hair. "Y-you really think so? I work really hard to keep it conditioned and stuff, b-but the hair color is natural. I have a special brand that I use and stuff, it's kind of expensive. I was actually wondering if I could get an advertising contract or something with them once I got famous. . ." She wasn't really entirely sure how to react to the attention, so the girl mostly just stayed where she was and continued to just sort of blather on about hair conditioner.

Saber & Nadia Masaru raised his eyebrows once again. "Mmm, is that so? Well then, I'm sure I can guess, but. . . All you have to do is ask." Unless he was totally off base, it wasn't hard to guess what Nadia wanted. . . But she'd surprised him before. Who knew what was actually going on in her head. . . ? Archer & James He looked at Merlin flatly for a moment before responding. "First of all, it's hard to enjoy yourself when you've just had to stop a suicide attempt, screwed up in the process of stopping said attempt, and put yourself at a disadvantage for the giant death battle between superpowered legends." The flat expression transformed into more of a glare as he continued. "And now the person who attempted is telling me to lighten up. Second, I'm not going to turn into one of those idiots. That would defeat the whole point of this war." He irritably swiped a card from the pile.

Mitsurugi gave a similarly polite bow to the Indian man. "There is no need to thank me. It was a sound decision, I was simply doing my part to facilitate it." The goddess thought for a moment. "It occurs to me that we have not yet been introduced, and it would be rude of me to continue to refer to you as 'westerner.' My name is Saigai Mitsurugi." "Belenus is in the library, or in his room. Fastest way to the library is to cut through the war room, but I don't know that Lord Silef will appreciate it. And thank you, I believe I will." The man headed over to Magnum's grill, noticeably speeding up a bit - either he was eager to get away from Edmond, or just excited at the prospect of booze and non-rationed food. Dackly would note one man with what looked like singed hands and no apparent injuries coming down from the walls. Additionally, he's not wearing as much armor as the archers or other swordsmen seem to be wearing on his arms.

War Room "There's nothing to be drawn from that forest except the obvious. And if the proposal is to strike at their supply lines, you may as well try to find a route to the caravans bringing in food - if they have any. The bastards could just be conjuring it on massive scales for all I know." She nodded at LOTUS and Lexiel's comments. "There might be bane weapons in the armory. You'll need my presence to gain access; it's sealed, and keyed to the Asterlux bloodline." Finally, she turned to Ghost. "A magic user that doesn't know how leylines function? They're lines of raw power that mages can tap into. This fortress was built atop a confluence of them." Seeing Silef finish, Nobunaga piped up. "I can help you find the exact locations of the other Servants. Normally, this would be with the exception of Assassin, but trying to use her Presence Concealment while summoning this many minions is pointless, and she knows that as well as I do. I don't believe her rank in it is particularly high, either. I can't get you their exact locations, but once we're close I can track them down easily. Being a Servant is incredibly convenient sometimes, you know?"

Ayaka shook her head. "Not really. My mom can sing though! We would always sing along to our favorite songs together and stuff. She never like, gave me lessons or anything though, 'cause she never took any herself." One more repetition of the move and Ayaka realized that the repeated spinning was starting to make her dizzy, so she wobbled her way to one wall to take a break.

Already rated :v

Archer & James James resisted the urge to sigh again. At least she wasn't killing herself. "Do you have any. . . nines?" He might have been able to enjoy the game, but this was far too tense of a situation for any games - let alone ones intended for little kids. Was this just some elaborate way to belittle him? Saber & Nadia "With your permission, Nadia." Assuming she did nothing to stop him, he reached toward her, gently, as if she were made of glass. The man had tremendous strength, after all, even by Servant standards, and she'd dealt with far more than her fair share of pain. He started with the ones on her back, something he truly wondered about - it must have been some extreme desperation if those were self-inflicted. He slowly worked his way down toward her legs, leaving her chest for last. Masaru. . . honestly wasn't sure what to think of the experience. It was intimate, that was for sure. Possibly moreso than most of the experiences he'd had with women; he'd never settled down before his death, after all.

The courtyard of the keep bustles with activity regardless of the time of day; the enemy does not sleep, so neither can they. Soldiers scurry up and down the walls, sometimes wounded but rarely fatally, while others enter or leave the barracks. It echoes with the twanging of bowstrings and the occasional bursts of flames, frost, or lightning, launched from the fingertips of both sides of the conflict. Characters may freely move between this and other non-Castle social threads.

The Asterlux barracks are decorated sparsely with the house's banner (a silver bow nocked with an arrow of light on a field of green) and designed to accomodate as many soldiers in as small of an area as realistically possible, giving each a small chest to keep his personal effects and gear in. The attached mess hall is similar, being quite basic and intended to get men in and out as quickly as possible. Characters may move freely between this and other non-Castle social threads.

The armory and smithy of the Asterlux house were well-stocked at one point, but beginning to show the wear from a long conflict. Still, there are plenty of tools for maintaining weapons and creating new ones, even if stock is limited, and several weapons waiting for use still line the storage rooms. Another, locked room is marked as the storage space for the ranking nobles of the house. Characters may move freely between this and other social threads that are not the Castle threads.

War Room "The mine is important, but I doubt we will be able to retake it easily. Their primary encampment rests directly atop the place. Furthermore, while it is not completely exhausted, its productivity has been going down for decades. The leylines should be detectable by the mages here already. Tapping them may prove useful, particularly if there are strong ritual casters among your number. As far as turning the war. . . We might have a chance with those Servants dead. Might. It would at least buy us time so we could wait for reinforcements to arrive. Your group has already shown the ability to put dents in their force, at least temporarily; the only reason I was able to lead that sortie was that their force was thinned out by your actions. Did you fight another battle before pressing towards this keep?" Silef glanced to the side at one of her guards. "Let the rest of the group know they're free to move about the keep." Courtyard Dackly accrues more than her fair share of strange looks when she pulls out her pipe. Strange looks that start to look an awful lot like murder when the drop hits her, flooding her with that same paranoid feeling from before - was Gozer, too, plotting against her? Perhaps she should destroy him while she had the chance. . . Rand shook his head at Edmond. "Honestly, you should just visit Lord Belenus's library. I'm sure he has an atlas for you." The man looked distinctly irritable at the withering barrage of questions. "Lord Silef owns the castle, Belenus is a relative and her court mage - or what passes for one. Don't curse the names of the gods; other than that, no one will expect anything of you, particularly because you are a foreigner." He glanced at Solomon - a glance that accidentally became somewhat of a glare. "Ask the man yourself. I'm a sorcerer, not a wizard." Magnum's display quickly draws a crowd. As it turns out, soldiers love booze and free food even more than college students; a stream of them started to flow out of the barracks despite the time of night and the fact that war still raged just outside the walls (though it seemed these ones were off-duty, as none came down from the walls without being replaced by another man.) Mitsurugi looked at Empi with a slight shift of her head. "War is necessary sometimes. Especially if you are a guardian goddess." Characters may move from this thread into other non-Castle threads, or back into this one. If a character is not in the War Room, please reply in the appropriate thread.

"Really? I mean, I guess I practiced my special moves alone mostly, but didn't you take dance classes and stuff?" She moved through a set of upper body stretches, though she didn't spend as much time on them as the lower ones. After she finished those, Ayaka started to run through her signature Appeal over and over - focusing on the spin that she'd so badly fumbled previously. She only ran through the first portion of the move a few times. Between repetitions, she'd go back to the projector and fiddle with it some more; she couldn't seem to get the thing to go off at just the right point, and it really didn't do for it to look like flowers were exploding from underneath her skirt.

6/10 Looks nice enough, but isn't particularly appealing to me.

Silef slammed her fist on the table, leaning forward as she did so. The flags scattered across the table jumped, with some toppling over - one of the guards with her scuttled forward to replace them. "Mind your tongue, angel, or I'll mind it for you. You may be a divine servant, but I am the same, and as head of this house I will be afforded the respect I have the right to." She took some of her weight back off of the table. "The construct is correct. These Servants are far more powerful than anything I have ever seen or heard of, bar ancient dragons and the gods themselves. Do not deign to insult my intelligence or that of my advisors without experiencing for yourself what it is we face."

War Room "To end the War, we must destroy the Grail. To do that, we'll need to take out the enemy Servants; if we try to assault the grail directly, all of them will likely defend it at once. Given the further aberrations I've noticed with the other Servants, this is not a realistic tactical option." She nodded at Silef, allowing the noblewoman to answer Laver's second question. "The war was originally of mundane causes. The Asterlux heartlands, while hilly, are fertile and rich in moonsilver. Shienar has coveted them for decades. They invented some trumped up incident as an excuse for a full-scale invasion; I was away when the war first broke out, and I honestly do not know what their supposed justification is. At some point, it ceased to be a war of acquisition and became one of extermination. If you ever leave this place, you won't see a village that isn't a burned-out husk or farmlands that aren't fallow and overgrown for miles." The noblewoman shook her head. "I don't know how or why those Servants joined their side." "I do. They obviously can't breach this fortress under their own power, otherwise they would have done so already. And it happens to sit at one of the largest leyline intersections in the region. Even the lowest grade of Caster would be able to tap into it and fuel all of the Servants' existences indefinitely. They may even be able to seize the neighboring confluences, and proceed from there. I don't think I need to inform you of why this is a bad thing." "As for the capabilities of my rivals, I am not entirely certain. Their parameters have shifted and grown massively from whatever process blackened them. However, I can give you what I have observed. Saber is some sort of dark holy woman, fighting in the name of blasphemy and decrying the gods. Or, well, just one God as she says. With her around, the strikes of the other Servants and their minions seem to destroy ongoing magical effects, though not enough to shatter this ward - for the time being, at least. She also seems to hold some power over dragonkind. Lancer is some sort of legendary Western king, wielding a holy spear. She seems to empower the other Servants with the ability to break guards and stun their foes. That spear is unfathomably powerful - you can't allow it to be fully invoked when you engage her. You have already met Assassin. Some kind of murderous witch, as far as I can tell. Her Noble Phantasm has to be that mist, but I haven't seen her fully invoke it. She's the main source of the enemy numbers, so destroying her should lessen the number of foes you have to face. Berserker is a monstrous, spiked beast, wielding a cursed spear. Those spikes have to be magical in some way, since with him around, attacking damages the attacker. His attacks do not seem very complex, but they are fast, and he has a surplus of brute power - and isn't a raving lunatic as you'd expect. Caster seems to be another ancient king - older than Lancer. I haven't seen him fight in person yet, but I have seen some officers wielding artifacts that far surpass what a Caster should be capable of manufacturing, at least at that speed. He is deep in the enemy lines; I recommend fighting him last. Rider, as I've said before, is already dead. I killed him before the rift happened. He was Chinese, I think, rode a great red horse and was a kind of demigod. That was his downfall. In the normal progression of a Grail War, this is how things typically go. The Servants would fight until one remained, and the victor claimed the grail. Personally, I thought it was a scam from the start. And I had been expecting a sturdier container for the grail, maybe even a homunculus of some sort. It's a powerful magical artifact after all, that sort of thing isn't usually held down by silly constraints like a set physical form." She gestured at the noblewoman after she finished. "To answer your final question, Shienar is a larger land than our own. I believe that many of their officers are mercenaries; they aren't particularly known for their well-trained troops or their strong magical ties. They do, however, hold a number of forests and iron mines, so they can easily afford to outfit their troops. The lord of the house must have stayed behind, as there haven't been any sightings of him - if there was anyone to expect to wield magical artifacts or anything of the sort, it would be him. The surrounding area is hilly, and turns craggy to the north; that is where an old moonsilver mine rests, and the enemy appears to have made camp atop it." Courtyard Dackly manages to snipe a couple of the skeletons through the arrowslit. It takes one of the officers beginning to turn to stone from the toes up to prompt a sudden barrage of fireballs in her general direction; she ducks out of the way without too much effort, but flame blows through the arrowslit somewhat threateningly. Atton finds that the relatively low power and small size of his pistol combined with the distance from himself to the target means that all of his shots are glancing hits at best; much as Dackly had seen the arc of a fireball streaking toward her face, he elects to duck as he sees electricity crackle between the fingers of one of his targets. Rand looks at Solomon with more than a bit of confusion. "The noble houses Shienar and Asterlux. I thought that was obvious, even for a foreigner. And Shienar claims that we provoked the war by moving troops too close to their borders. Nevermind that it was an escort in case those bastards decided to jump the young Lord Relos on his way to this very fortress. May Lumabella grant his soul eternal peace." He holds his hand over his heart for a moment, looking down almost as if in prayer, before continuing. "The note about Belenus's books was more for your safety than theirs. They've been known to explode if they get too far from the library. And yes, I am of House Amyrlin. We are close cousins of House Asterlux - our lands are more removed from Shienar, but not by much, and mostly consist of simple farm folk and rolling plains. In the absence of the Asterlux themselves, I have become one of Lord Silef's principal commanders."

Archer & James He sighed. Of course this was going to go this way; apparently this stupid game was important enough to this woman that she had it as a damned Skill. It was still better than the alternative, though. . . "No." His reply was flat. "So you're not cheating, but there's weird tingling and flashes of light whenever you move." Another flat sentence, with no followup. Saber & Nadia Masaru simply nodded. Technically a spirit or no, it was difficult to think straight with a woman pressed up against him like this. Especially when he was accustomed to taking initiative himself. However, there was another reason for his silence. That scar. . . I remember now. Or, I think I do. I remember pain. The sound of that blade slashing through his flesh like it was wet paper. The straight line of agony drawn across it. Stumbling backward, trying to fend that infernal woman backward only to have that weapon drive straight through him again, and then darkness. He shouldn't be scarred; dying tended to impede the process of scarring somewhat. Unless he'd somehow lived on afterward with no memory of it - but then, as a Servant, he should be able to access those memories. Perhaps it was some part of the sublimation process. Some part of his mind vaguely wished that he'd spent more time formally studying magic. Most of it, however, was occupied by thoughts of his Master.

"That's, um, probably a good idea." Her brow furrowed somewhat as she spoke. "Um, what do you mean, molest me? Kagari is a, um, a little weird" - she thought back to the woman whipping out her breast in public for Black Idol to sign, a memory that called a faint blush that still managed to stand out against her relatively pale complexion "- but molestation?" Though even that wouldn't even be all that strange from a certain point of view, given that one of them had undressed and crawled in bed with the other. It was an entirely different context, of course, but that vague thought allowed Hiroki's blush to live on.

(This is a thread to contain all interactions inside the group's home castle during the period that Clash of Fate runs, due to relative inactivity.)