10:38am, South of Piraeus Port
Aaron looked from one side to the other, and, after making sure that there was no one around, turned his eyes to the blindingly blue sea before him, the sounds of crashing waves and crying seagulls only further parching his thirst for adventure.
"Alright, Rider! Let's get that boat out, huh?"
Before him, a square of deep brown wood with gold inlay, the deck of Rider's ship, appeared, but it was nowhere near the complete form. Instead, a hatch swung open, nearly catching him under the jaw.
"Huh? What's this about?"
Rider replied telepathically, 'Thine luggage, mine Master.'
"Oh. Okay..."
He lifted up his suitcase and munitions crate, throwing them haphazardly into the manifested hold, apparently forgetting the grenades inside, not that it became important- thankfully.
"Okay," He clapped his hands together, "Let's go! Get me that boat!"
'With respect, mine 'boat' is not what thoust require here.'
"And why not?"
'That Noble Phantasm was designed to transport an entire army, and to do so with efficiency. Thyself, however, are but a man, and so may be better aided by a personal transport, rather than an entire caravan.'
"I take that to mean you have another way of getting there?"
He heard a chuckle in his mind, 'Aye.'
As Aaron looked up into the sky in some subconscious attempt to communicate better with the invisible Rider, he heard a sound like the crashing of a wave beside him. There, when he looked, was perhaps the most beautiful and stylish moped he'd ever seen. It was uniquely aerodynamic, with ridges that pushed the air along, perhaps to compensate for the wider base.
It was only then that the thought occurred to him-
"Wait- is this a moped and a jet-ski?"
What was a chuckle burst into full laughter, 'Tis mine steed, Master, called by Enbarr. She moves like wind across both land and sea, and has graciously agreed to be transformed for this adventure. Treat her well, lest ye be forced to swim the rest of the way.'
He greedily climbed aboard the bike. Its seat -saddle?- was soft and pleasant, almost like a water bed. He couldn't stop the boyish glee that rose inside him as he revved the engine.
'Where art we off to, mine Master? I do hope it be nearby. Thou art aware of the importance of remaining near the Grail, aye?'
"We're headed due South. It's a bit far, but we won't be there long enough to jeopardize you- probably."
'Then fly like the wind, lest we lack the mana to return here.'
"You don't have to tell me twice."
As he said this, golden light danced around his head before solidifying into goggles. With all the preparations complete, he shot the engine, flying out across the ocean, and doing everything in his power not to send himself flying off the powerful vehicle as it lurched ahead.
"Whooo-hooh!"
It was an amazing feeling. The wind in his hair, the salty mist that danced across his skin and caressed his face. The feeling of lonesomeness, of taking on the world alone as he skipped across the waves of a seemingly endless and empty plain. He had never felt so alive, so much so that he almost forgot his objective.
...
11:26am, The Northern Beaches of Serifos
Aaron pulled Enbarr ashore by the handles, slightly lamenting his wet pant legs, but more focused on his surroundings. He could vaguely remember his time here before, but, although he had maintained consistent contact with her for years, he hadn't actually visited her since he was an early teen, maybe thirteen or fourteen. In other words, it had been well over a decade since he'd last set foot here, and while the rolling auburn hills, green and yellow squares of crops and grass, and ticky-tacky white-stone houses had as much rustic appeal as they ever did, the whole landscape blended together in a way that hazed his memory of where to go next.
'So, Master Sylphus, who is it that we may find hither? I assume he may be of use to us?'
"Her name's Cassandra. She's a Diviner: an oracle of sorts. We've worked together in the past, but I haven't seen her in a while."
'Aye. And where might we find this Cassandra?'
"Working on it."
'Mayhaps I should scout ahead? How doth she present herself?'
He struggled to remember, seizing on the dream-like memories as they appeared,
"Let's see... it's been like fifteen years, so I'm not sure, but I remember her bein' mid thirties, maybe? So, maybe hitting fifty about now. She had shorter, auburn hair, and a massive rack. Dresses like a gypsy."
'Aye... doth thoust remember her eyes? Or any other feature?'
"Nope. That's it."
'...Thee would forget her face, but remember her bosom?'
He blushed, "L-look, alright? I was like thirteen and living alone on an island with my dad. Women were kinda in short supply, so-."
He could feel a grimace in his mind's eye.
"Come on, man! Don't act like you weren't the same when- hold on. Shut up, I see somebody."
Just past the beach, a man in working clothes marched on, dripping with sweat, and carrying a rod with a bucket on both ends across his shoulders. Normally, Aaron preferred to keep his head down, but desperate times...
"Excuse me!"
He noticed Aaron for the first time, "Ho! Are you lost, son?"
"Uh- yes, actually. I'm looking for my aunt Cassandra; she's supposed to live around here. Do you know where I can find her?"
In his head, 'Hoh? This Cassandra is thine aunt?'
He replied, 'No. It's a lie, dumbass.'
'No need to be rude.'
The man seemed surprised, "Oh! I guess I shouldn't be too surprised, but are you sure you're not confused, son? Cassandra hasn't lived here for a few years now. Her older sister, Yolanda, lives there these days, but that wouldn't be your maw now, would it?"
He stopped to think. He and Cassandra communicated regularly, sometimes by email, sometimes by familiar, but he never got any sense that she had changed locations. No, more than that, he'd sent people her way very recently and had heard no complaints. It wasn't adding up, but, although he could've kept thinking about that, he still needed to reply.
"Oh-no. Sorry, I don't see my aunts very often, so I must've gotten them confused. Where's Yolanda?"
He pointed to a distant hill, where a small white dot was barely visible past the brush, "She's up on that hill; you can't miss her."
He thanked the man for his trouble, and, with nowhere else to go, he revved Enbarr's engine and sped up the road towards the building.
'Master, tell me there be a second scheme we could fall back on?'
"We'll see. Something's fishy."
He arrived at the building without incident, and found that, indeed, it was exactly as he'd remembered it now that his memory had been jogged. With suspicions and theories dancing across his mind, he nonetheless marched forward and knocked on the wooden door.
It took some moments, but he would eventually hear a, "Coming!" in a voice he thought was vaguely familiar.
When the door finally opened, there, where he'd imagined an older version of 'Cassandra', he instead found another woman. She was older, much older, and, while the Cassandra he knew should've been hovering around her mid-life, the one in front of him had long-passed that stage. She was no younger than sixty, likely closer to seventy, and she looked the part. With thinning grey hair that was desperately combed into a boyish cut, and a tight-fitting dress which flaunted her breasts, the look would've suited a woman half her age much better, and didn't suit her at all, but there was no denying this was surely somebody else.
"Is this Yolanda?"
She leaned forward, tilting up her cigarette with her teeth, "This is she. How can I help you, dear?"
But something in her movements gave him pause. Something in her face made him think. They were sisters, of course they would look alike, but as his man's eyes inevitably drifted to her chest, which had aged past arousing no less than a decade ago, certain memories began to bounce around in his brain, and other thoughts which lead to others and so on...
"Wait- Cassandra?"
She laughed, and the cigarette almost fell out of her mouth, "Hah! Yes! This is she as well, and you are... Aaron, is that right?"
He nodded, but could still feel the blood rush to his cheeks slightly, "Uh-yeah. Glad you recognized me."
"Oh! Not as glad as I am! God, that name makes me feel young again! Please, come in, come in!"
She led him inside to a spacious, square room covered head-to-toe with carpets of various sizes and patterns. What windows would normally light the space had been covered, and the room was instead lit by candles and lanterns strung from the rafters. Adding to the ethereal feel was the consistent, potent smell of incense. While it did complete the room in a certain sense, he knew better: the purpose of the perfume was to cover the scent of cannabis.
"Jeez, when was the last time I saw you? You were with your father I remember, and you were... how old? Hold on- don't tell me!" She closed her eyes with fierce concentration, "Let's see... When did you watch porn for the first time? It was probably around then."
He grit his teeth with embarrassment, "Why is that the first place your mind goes?"
She covered her chest with a girlish wink, "What? You think I didn't notice? God, how I miss the lingering stares of young men... now even those geezers won't look my way." She sighed wistfully, "Anyway, what brings you here? I'm guessing it's your father, right?"
The question caught him off guard, "Why the Hell would I be asking about him?"
She shrugged, "Most come here looking for something or other. Isn't it normal for a young man to- what is it, again?- save their father from the underworld?"
"Are you seriously high at eleven in the morning?"
Cassandra sighed, "Unfortunately, no. What are you looking for, then? Want to know your true love?"
By this point, his body was well-wound, and it took all his effort not to explode at the strange woman in front of him, but somehow he managed,
"No...but I am looking for a girl. She's gone missing."
A smug grin crossed her sun-spotted cheeks, "So, it is a girl-"
"Enough!" He sighed, "This is serious. Are you gonna help me or not?"
She crossed her arms and pouted like a young girl, "Oh, come on. Let an old woman have her fun," She turned around to face a far door, "Renae! We have a customer!"
Peering out from deeper inside the bungalow was a younger girl, perhaps mid-teens, with deep ebony skin, full lips, and braided hair. After looking him up and down, she finally removed herself fully from the door, revealing a long, dark, tattered shawl around her body, one that seemed familiar to him.
As the new girl sat on her knees in the center of the room, Cassandra introduced her, "Aaron, this is Renae, my apprentice. She'll be reading your future today."
"Hold on, how come you never told me you had an apprentice?"
"Is it really relevant?" She held out her palm, "Just pay up."
"Now wait just a minute! First of all, I'm not gonna let some amateur handle this! Second of all, you owe me! A little fortune like this is the least I should get!"
Her lips went terse, "I do owe you, which is why you'll be getting a discount. Otherwise, I can promise you that Renae is perfectly capable of reading your fortune. She's also the only one here that can, so take it or leave it, boy."
He took a step back, shocked, "Wait, how come you can't?"
She sighed, "We're coworkers, so I suppose you should know by now," and pointed at her apprentice, "The power of prophecy doesn't come easily. That shawl around her neck is a relic, a shawl that swaddled the infant Apollo and Artemis. To see the future, you need to attune to it, but that isn't possible for any old Dick or Jane."
She counted off on her fingers, "She must be a 'she', she must have high quality circuits, she must be capable of attuning with Divination mystics, and she must be a virgin. Otherwise, no dice, and it's harder to find someone like that every year- and not only because of the sexual revolution."
He understood. It seemed like every mage family under the sun was dealing with some crisis of circuitry. The quality seemed to be diminishing over time, and no one was quite sure why. Although that didn't quite explain why she herself couldn't read the prophecy, it was surprising to know she was a virgin with the way she acted...
Then it clicked.
"Renae... how old is she?"
Cassandra's expression remained morbid, "You catch on quickly. Seeing the future is like diving headfirst into the ocean- sometimes you get water up your nose. It's even worse if you're not compatible, but sometimes you still make mistakes. As for her, she's sixteen physically, but thirteen mentally."
"And you?"
She rested a palm on her cheek, "Don't you know it's rude to ask a woman her age? Let me put it this way: I hit menopause before I turned forty, had a teensy bit of a crisis about it, and did some things I shouldn't have, thinking I could get away with it."
She turned back to him, "Maybe now you understand why this service is too valuable to be free- even for an old friend like you, Mr. Sylphus."
A wave of guilt washed over him, and he tried to ignore it, "Whatever." He took out his wallet and handed her his credit card.
"Oh? Not even going to ask the price?"
He began to approach the apprentice, "I don't want to know."
"Suit yourself."
He sat down on the carpet in front of her, trying to match her position, "So... what do I-"
Renae spoke for the first time: her voice was mellow, but still rung like a songbird's, "Not yet."
She turned her attention to Cassandra, as did he. She was fumbling around at a table off to the side. He noticed her drop her cigarette in an ashtray, and then remove a lighter from between her breasts and a rolled up joint from inside the desk. She lit it as she walked over, and placed it in the apprentice's mouth.
"Is that really a good idea?"
"It's for her nerves. We don't want her getting water up her nose, right?"
He shut up, and Renae took a long drag, longer than was certainly healthy, before Cassandra removed it from her lips and let the girl blow out a plume of smoke. She walked away, and left Aaron alone with the now half-high teenager.
She laid her hands in her lap with the palms up, and spoke for the second time, "Give me your hands."
He did so, and sat awkwardly as she felt around his wrists and palms, before he heard the door creak behind him.
"Hey! Where are you going!?"
Cassandra called back with a cheeky smile, "I'll be back! You're in good hands, just do as she says!" And closed the door.
They were now truly alone.
"Okay." She began, it was also at this point that he noted her accent. Perhaps Middle Eastern? Maybe African? It hardly mattered, and she continued, "Ask me your question, and imagine in your mind what it is you want to see."
It sounded like hullabaloo, but he wasn't about to kick this gift horse in the mouth, "Her name is Heping, she's an Asian girl. I want to know where she'll be tonight around midnight."
"Very well."
She closed her eyes, and he followed her lead.
He imagined the girl in her head, but these thoughts soon began to wander. He saw her shock when Berserker appeared, he saw Archer holding him by the neck, and he began to think on the war council tonight: how would he keep Archer preoccupied? How could he keep from compromising himself? How far could they go without endangering the battle against Berserker the night after? How long would he survive? Would he survive?
She grunted, and gripped his hands.
His eyes flashed open, and he saw Renae beginning to bend forward, gritting her teeth with beads of sweat starting to form on her forehead. He tried to pull his hands away, but she only gripped him harder.
It didn't take any great intelligence to see what was happening.
"Cassandra!"
She gripped his hands harder, and her body was visibly shaking.
"Hey!" He scrambled to remember her name, "Renae! Calm down!"
But it was too late. The grey shawl began to float, as if by an invisible wind, and her eyes flew open, shining from within with an eldritch green light. She screamed out in pain, and smoke filled the room, as if the grey of the fabric were unfolding into the room around him.
The pressure on his hands disappeared, as did the ground underneath him, and he floated through an abyss of grey, joined only by the sound of rushing water around him. He felt pushed along an invisible current, until gravity took hold, and pulled him into a patch of soft dirt and grass. Looking around, he saw a figure he recognized, a pig, standing on a stone wall, and then a girl and a boy he didn't recognize crowding around a bird.
Before he could investigate the image further, the ground underneath shook and broke, dumping him onto a stone pathway that cut into his shoulders. Staring up at a pitch-black sky, he caught what seemed to be a small, cobblestone church in the corner of his eye, but as soon as he noticed it, it exploded into a blaze of falling, flaming debris, an angel of war flying where the cross once stood. He shot to his feet, stumbling away and yet unable to remove his eyes, when one piece of flaming rubble landed at his feet... and began to crawl towards him. The shock sent him onto the ground, but he still desperately flung himself backwards, away from the burnt abomination. The smoke swirled around it, and where the burned figure once was, there was her. Heping, bloodied, bruised and half-dead, reaching towards him with pleading eyes.
He screamed, but no sound came, and as his fingers clawed into the dirt, they found something solid. Pulling it out and into view, he found a black claw which began to spark with blue electricity. He wanted to get rid of it, to throw it away, but he couldn't, it seared into his hand with a terrible burn. He let out another soundless scream of agony as the flying bolts tore away at reality around him, reducing it to cinders until only a single, shadowed shape remained, one with a lean, muscular build and piercing blue eyes.
'You've strayed far from home, little one. Wake up.'
Cold water soaked him to the bone, and as he blinked once, and then twice, he found himself back in the bungalow. Above him was Cassandra, holding a dripping bucket. Below him was a wet carpet: a field of half-melted ice. And in front of him, was a shaking, sobbing, mess of a girl whose clothes clung too tightly, and who seemed just a bit taller and more mature than before.
He tried to gather his senses, but found a hand on his shoulder instead, "Why don't you wait outside, dear. I'll take it from here."
Soaking to the core, he shuffled over to the door, shivering all the way, trying to arrange his thoughts into something coherent, and trying to wrangle the emotions inside him. He was trying to help, sure, but it wasn't enough to merely try. He'd hurt someone else, too: involved people who didn't need to be.
He bit his lip and hoped it was worth it: that whatever part of him that pushed him to do these things would be satisfied with the consequences of his actions.
....