[h3][img]http://i.imgur.com/52Kspeh.png?1[/img] [color=0072bc]Izumi Airi — Church Interior[/color][/h3]
[@Moonlit Sonata]
[@Beloss]
[@Holy Grail]
[@DrowsyPangolin]
[@Cu Chulainn]
[@Yukitamas]

[hr]
[color=0072bc]"Damn, it got crowded in here real quick..."[/color]

A girl in a dirtied, white hoodie slowly lifted herself from the pew, still obviously dizzy. She had been [i]trying[/i] to sleep off this hangover feeling or whatever the hell, but people just kept coming in the door and talking and shit. Kicking a few boxes away, she eventually assumes something of a sitting position, not quite ready to stand yet. Her body had been through probably the worst ordeal she could remember - having all of its magical energy drained after having never used it before, and then burning through all three command spells in the space of about five minutes. In other words, she had spent the morning doing a bunch of shit that a person like her should never have had the right to do.

But, she was still here. She'd never had the right to do half the shit she's done, but as long as she remained in the world after the fact, it was all just as good.

It seemed like she had avoided death, this time. Both she and Yuko had wildly underestimated the amount of magical energy required to keep a Servant materialized, or at least that particular one. She just didn't have what it took, plain and simple. It was only by sacrificing all three Command Spells to be used as raw energy, that some magical loser like her could keep someone like the Emperor in this world. And even that...how long would it last? She needed to find him a proper Master, ASAP. If she tried to do this on her own, she'd die and Berserker would disappear. That was the worst possible outcome.

Correcting that fate would be her first goal. For now, though, it was worth looking over the other people that had assembled...the other contestants in the War.

 
Lesse...

[i]Holy shit,[/i] Ruler's outfit. The dude wears sunglasses indoors. [i]Sunglasses. Indoors.[/i] There is simply no excuse for that. He was hiding his eyes, but even with that in mind, he certainly seemed to be keeping his poise, despite the overwhelming number of patrons. [color=0072bc][i]So this is the guy...[/i][/color] Her first impression of him was that she wanted to vomit just looking at the sheer amount of fucking jewelry hanging off his clothes. It was hard for her to put her faith in an image like that, to say the least. Ugh.

 
Other than him...

Some dude with a wicked beard who seemed really goddamn full of himself. Master looks like that woman with the messy hair. She seemed polite, but there was a bit of shrewdness there. Not any more than would be reasonable, given the situation, though. Jesus shit, that dude is tall. What did he say his name was? Roast'em? Airi wasn't the best with foreign names, but it seemed important.

 
Some [s]really hot[/s] white-haired dude...oh, hey, he's wearing a hoodie, too! Hoodie bros! She was kinda half-conscious at the time, but Airi remembered that he was here when she had been brought here by Boxzerker, whom by the looks of it had kinda fucked off to go do his own thing, which was fine with her. She could still sense him, so he was doing fine, wherever he was. For now.

 
Some guy that...wait, what? Airi's eyes narrowed at the thing that she didn't, at the time, understand to be a puppet of sorts. But something was...[i]off[/i] about it's Intent. Everyone had small movements and things here and there - even something as simple as breathing was sometimes accompanied by conscious thought. But this person-shaped thing was completely devoid of even that. Something with no will of its own. Her stomach churned, as her mind played back her encounter with The Dead, back in Tokyo. It was almost the same...not quite the same, but...

Her memory of that time was tinged red. She remembered throwing up. She remembered, a dead thing, shambling towards her, and something, [i]something[/i] told her to kill it. No, 'told her to' doesn't even begin to describe that [color=ed1c24]impulse[/color]. Just looking at that...that [i]lump of flesh[/i], was making her more and more nauseous. Maybe if she just pretended it wasn't there...it was backing away towards the door anyway, so averting her gaze was easy. The last thing she wanted was to go crazy like that again.

 
...Aaand some sickly-looking, dark-haired guy who had just walked in. Damn, he looks like he's been through hell. He's yelling at the tall dude about something...

Something about his eyes...they had a familiar sheen to them.

All in all, two Masters, two Servants, and one Weird-Ass Thing. And one Ruler.

[color=0072bc]"Your Servant died?"[/color] Airi turned to [b]Nakae[/b], following Ruler's own words. Her arm was rested on the back of the pew, her body turned sideways to give him another glance. One of her disheveled twintails, unfurling from lack of care, fell over the back of the wooden seat, wavering slightly as the very faint blue glow in her eyes was masked by the church's ambient light. [color=0072bc]"Hey, wait a minute...that gaudy dude mentioned someone was about to lose their servant when I got brought here...did you come here from the graveyard?"[/color]

If that was the case, her Berserker, the Emperor, should have headed towards him...she had definitely missed something, despite overhearing most everything that had gone on in the church during her ongoing recovery. Had her Servant tried to intervene, and failed? Was he injured? He shouldn't be, everything seemed fine with their link for the time being, but if he had been involved in something like that...

 
[color=0072bc]"Oh, wait, [i]shit[/i]!"[/color] Her head snapped back to the disgustingly gilded image of [b]Ruler[/b]'s form, pointing a languished finger at him in her fading exhaustion. [color=0072bc]"You never answered about what happened with Stirner! The monster! The, the fuckin', I dunno, third-party thing!"[/color] The girl was breathing a bit heavier than usual, and her body felt like a rock at the bottom of the ocean. But still. The other Masters and Servants in the room weren't even in her peripheral vision at this point. [color=0072bc]"That was why he brought me here, wasn't it!? The hell'd you go distracting him and dodging his question for!?"[/color]

Her memories were foggy. She didn't remember the exact context, but she knew that her Servant, in loose terms of being 'hers', had started grilling Ruler on some important thing, before the guy just randomly decided to send him on a sidequest or something. She didn't fully understand his intentions, apparent or hidden, due to the fact that she had been barely conscious at the time, and unable to react. But all the words were coming back to her, now, including her own words that had been left unsaid, now taking to the forefront of her mind.

[color=0072bc]"So, so, okay, just hold up a moment. What I was told - not by an expert, but, this is just what I thought was happening here - that a Grail War is a fight involving Masters and Servants."[/color] Airi leaned forward in the pew, trying to force strength into her legs for the eventual moment where she would need to stand again. The fact that she was speaking in the presence of many, many people more distinguished than she didn't seem to occur to her in the slightest. [color=0072bc]"Whatever the shit happened to Stirner was [i]not[/i] one of those two things. The hell's going on?"[/color]