11:00pm, The Alghul Villa
Aisha stared at the man sitting across from her, scrutinizing him with sharp, dubious eyes. He gazed back at her without a single glimmer of concern. Several moments passed like this before Caster, who had been leaning on the bar, stood up and walked around the counter, taking a seat beside his new Master and turning the seat to face her with one leg crossed over the other. She turned her chair as well, though not to the same extent. Her scowl solidified at his sudden attempt to control the situation.
"Oh?" A smirk danced across his wry lips, "You don't mind, do you? You can't expect me to just stand there forever after all."
She looked away from him and took a long sip of her wine, perhaps the only positive thing to have come from her servant so far.
"You are very right, Caster. I... apologize for my behavior."
This was a lie of course, but she needed to get the conversation on track.
"Oh, it's fine, dear. Sensible people tend not to be very fond of me."
Aisha found herself unnerved by the illogical yet hyper-intelligent nature of the creature now sitting next to her. He knew well that his little act earned the ire of his Master and yet he maintained the ruse. He seemed to openly invite her hostility with some kind of glee.
'What an insolent creature!'
-is what she would've liked to say, but she could assume that this familiar was a powerful entity, and she knew that she needed to learn to work with him if she wanted to have any hope of victory. Even now, it was already a war of minds: two cunning individuals attempting to manipulate the other. Though angry, she couldn't help but feel some excitement at the idea of earning the service of Caster by slowly pulling him under her thumb.
Patience would be key.
She pushed her anger down and allowed her face to fade to as much of a neutral, business-like expression as she could muster, attempting to make clear that the past moments were now behind them- not that she had forgiven him in any capacity.
"I am Aisha Alghul, head of the Alghul mage family, and your Master. As you have already seen," her words strained somewhat as she recalled her embarrassment, "I specialize in necromancy. I am also the one responsible for organizing the war you are now taking part in."
His smile grew as his eyes narrowed, "You organized this war?"
"Is that so hard to believe? Is it because I'm a woman that you doubt my capabilities?"
He laughed, "Of course not, of course not. On the contrary, the best mages of my time were powerful witches-"
Aisha cringed internally. 'Witch', in her line of work, was usually an insult. An insult often applied to her by various sorts of people who she called fools.
"-It's just interesting to have a Master with such a deep understanding of the war's machinations."
Caster turned to the window, and his expression shifted somewhat. With his free hand, he gestured to the fourth wall, "Do you see the lights out there, Aisha?"
She looked out the window-wall and saw what Caster was referring to. The city lights below were flickering sporadically. Her brow furrowed.
"You did that, you know."
Aisha turned back to Caster with a certain level of awe, understanding Caster's deeper meaning, though she couldn't tell whether he had intended for her to pick up on it or if he had implied it for his own amusement.
Her head turned with both curiosity and concern, "What do you know that I don't?"
He clicked his tongue, "You do know who I am don't you?"
"You..." She thought for a moment. There was an obvious answer, though she didn't want to speak it for fear that her guess was correct. "...are Dionysus. The God of wine and celebration."
"Ah, so it was that obvious, was it?"
Their little game was going to have to wait, Aisha wasn't going to let Caster slip his way out of her questions-
"What is that you aren't telling me, Dionysus?"
It felt strange to say those words in that context, to speak to a god, not just casually, but with admonishment was a strange experience even for someone who could be considered a kind of modern nobility.
Caster refilled his wine glass, though he had only taken a sip, and gestured to refill Aisha's, an offer she refused with her steely gaze. Distractions wouldn't be tolerated. Not while she still had her questions.
Shrugging, Dionysus stood and walked over to the glass wall. Aisha followed, allowing him to control the conversation in exchange for answers in a kind of unspoken agreement.
"You see... -ahem- Master, the leylines have been here since long before even my time. Of course I knew of them, I am a local after all."
"So you know their purpose?"
"That I do." He turned to her, giving her his full attention, "You called me a god earlier, did you not, Aisha?"
"I did. Am I wrong?"
She was naturally confused, the divinity of Dionysus was common knowledge, though she did have a theory forming in the back of her mind...
He pursed his lips, shifting them as if mulling the taste of the words building on his tongue. "Not exactly, but you are aware that my mother was human, aren't you?"
A sense of self-satisfaction came on her as her spur-of-the-moment theory bore fruit, "Yes, the mortal woman Semele. She was killed by Zeus while pregnant with you, his son. You had to finish your incubation in his thigh, if I'm not mistaken."
A look of revulsion crossed his handsome features, "'Incubation', eh? Must you have chosen such a disgusting word?" He shook his head before continuing, "-But you are right, I was only part god, mostly god, sure, but not all god, you understand."
He gestured to the flickering city below them. "These circles steal divinity and funnel it to a single entity, empowering them to the level of true godhood. I had hoped to use it for my own purposes, but that didn't turn out to be necessary. The gods gave me a seat on Olympus of their own accord, and I became the divine figure you know me as."
"So, why are you here then?"
For the first time since his summoning, Caster's smirk fell from his face. "In life, I achieved Divinity, yes, but that is not who I am."
"Of course I need more details than that."
He considered his next words carefully, and spoke slowly. "When I achieved godhood, I left this world along with my humanity. Put simply, I 'died'... albeit in an obtuse sense of the word. Because of that, the version of me inscribed on the Throne is the version of myself from just prior to becoming a god... I am Dionysus the man, not Dionysus the god. "
Aisha Alghul absorbed the information for a moment, and then a second moment...
-And laughed.
She laughed and laughed at the fool she had summoned, the utter failure, this pathetic excuse for a god. For the first time since the summoning, the Master and her Servant switched roles, with Aisha smiling at her fool of a partner and Caster glaring with murderous intent. Mages were notoriously ambitious creatures, and often spent their lives in pursuit of a single goal just to die in failure and obscurity. So, for Aisha, there could be no greater humiliation than to achieve one's goal only to have it taken from him due to some slight, stupid miscalculation. Naturally, her humor could only exist because she assumed that she was too smart for something like that to happen to her. In the meanwhile, Caster stared out over the horizon as he grimly waited for his Master to pull herself together.
"Sorry, sorry," Aisha said as she still worked to hold back her laughter, "-But that means that the war will still grant the winner with divinity, yes?"
He seemed to mentally debate whether to respond at all given her previous outburst, but ultimately relented, "I see no reason why it wouldn't."
"Good," Her smile faded as another thought occurred to her, "-Though... does that mean it won't work if the summoned Servants don't possess enough divinity?"
"Well, yes, but you shouldn't have to worry about that. Every Servant should be at least a demigod, so we'll have plenty to work with, especially considering myself as the baseline."
She laughed to herself. Everything was going more-or-less to plan. Was there any feeling more satisfying than that?
"With luck, there ought to be enough divinity for both of us."
A toothy grin emerged from the sullen Caster, and he held out his wine glass. "I suppose I can drink to that."
They toasted, clinking their glasses and exchanging friendly smiles knowing full well that they were lying to one another. She would wait until the final moments and sacrifice Caster to herself, and he fully intended to do the same to her. The anticipation was- in a word- intoxicating.
And so she drank her toast- and nearly choked from the shock. She knew the taste of this wine, enough to know she had consumed something completely different. Naturally, she immediately assumed poison... until her senses caught up with her. The taste felt so much richer, tastes of grapes and cranberries tickling her tongue in their bitter-sweetness. The liquid was smoother and left her feeling refreshed just from the way it slid down the back of her throat. And the taste once more, that rich flavor, lingered in her mouth like a welcomed guest, as if she had never swallowed it in the first place.
She looked up at him with pleasant surprise, though he couldn't see her. No, he was busy pouring the wine down the back of his throat as if it was some kind of competition, his Adam's apple perpendicular to her nose. He lowered the now empty glass with a satisfied sigh, and opened his arms like a champion receiving a medal, a wide grin still plastered on his face.
She couldn't help but chuckle, not necessarily at him, but at her own being caught off guard in such a positive way; the ridiculousness of the situation she now found herself in. "You have good taste, Caster. I'll allow you at least that much."
Chuckling back, he adjusted his posture to something more formal, "With that out of the way... I suppose it's about time we talk strategy then?"
"I thought you'd never ask, but first-" She held out her hand.
He shook it firmly, and for several moments they simply stood there, basking in the malevolent intent of the other.
"I do believe the pact is now sealed, Master."
Once again, Caster added extra emphasis to 'Master', as if the word was unfamiliar on his lips, and, in fairness, it probably was.
"Let's get to work."
"Let's."
With the pact sealed and a song in her heart, she led Caster down to her workshop, where he was supposed to have been in the first place. She never would've imagined when they met that she could've been so giddy, and just about anyone other than Aisha Alghul would have remained miserable alongside anyone they hated as much as she hated him. And it was true, in fact, that she hated him even more than when they had first been introduced. The reason for her strange gaiety and increased hatred were one-in-the-same: Aisha had never respected anyone.
Those that opposed her were fools, and those under her were inferior: that was how Aisha's world worked up until now. It was also true that she did consider Dionysus a fool, but he was a cunning and openly untrustworthy fool, a rare type of fool aware of his own foolishness. Not only that, but he had a presence, not just the charismatic presence of a confident, even arrogant individual, but a literal, likely magical presence- as if power in its purest form radiated off of him. It was not so much that Dionysus was someone that Aisha respected, but that he was someone who Aisha had no choice but to respect for the power he had at his command. A grim ecstasy rose from her chest as she remembered how she had mocked him before, the kind of joy derived from harming someone else while knowing full well that she couldn't get away with it. She would pay for that eventually, of that she was well aware, but for the moment all was well. The war was naught but putty in their conjoined hands, and so she only needed to worry about how to deal with Caster along the way.
Failure wasn't an option; it never was.
....