“
Senpai.”
“Hmm? What is it, Mashu?”
“How did we even—”
“Don’t,” interrupted the Master of Chaldea. “Don’t finish that question. Only damnation awaits there.”
They stood at the entrance of the cozy café, greeted by upbeat music and laughter. For a moment they thought they had stepped into a party they were not invited to, but it was just that there was a lot of people in there. Half of them were customers, most of them wearing smiles on their faces as they ate, chatted, and drunk away in this little island of idleness separated from the rest of the world—and was that Iskandar by the corner engaged in some sort of drinking contest with…Jaguarman?
The other half was, well, maids. Maids playing instruments at the back; maids darting around carrying trays of food and mugs of beer; maids carrying empty dishes for washing at the back. Maids, maids, maids everywhere.
“So?” The Master turned to his trusty left hand. “Little sister, what’s the deal here?”
The Assassin-class Servant,
Barbatos, sighed to herself.
“Mah, not like I expected you to figure it out on your own, shitty
onii-chan. So?” The horned girl clad in white and purple turned to her own left side, where two young maids stood in stark contrast to the flurry of activity in front of them.
“What he said. What’s the deal, little girls?”
“Seriously, what are we doing?” darkly muttered the green one in twintails, eyes hidden by hair bangs and fists clenched in repressed frustration.
“Ahaha, don’t think too hard about it, Chikagi-
chan,” replied the orange one with the
ahoge. “If the customer wants to work in our place, the better for us, right?”
“That kind of no-good mentality will make you into a useless person!”
“Mah, mah, for once the Triten girl’s got a point,” interjected Barbatos. “Leave the maids do their thing. Everybody’s pleased, so it’s all good, right? In the end, you two are the ones racking in the benefits.”
“Now you’re just asking for the other shoe to drop!”
“Meh. If anything, I’m more worried about the True Ancestor playing ‘aaahn~’ with some glasses kid over there,” said the former demon god while vaguely pointing at a stunning blonde foreigner sharing a parfait with a teenager wearing a blue school uniform.
“True what?”
“Don’t think too hard about it, Mashu. I know I’m not.”
“Finer words you’ve never said, little sister.”
“It’s all your fault, shitty Mas—
onii-chan!” roared the Servant girl until a certain Command Spell kicked in. “You’re turning me into the kind of person who can just accept shit like this with a straight face!”
“Now we’re truly family.”
“For fuck’s sake, the other seventy-one
owe me for this.”
Chaldea shenanigans aside, Barbatos returned her attention to the scene in front of them.
“And speaking of my hopeless ‘siblings’…”
One of the maids finally reached them, greeting the new customers with a perfect bow.
“Good evening and welcome to Ahnenerbe. Table for three—”
The polite, standard script came to a halt when maid met Assassin. The perfect maid smile remained in place, but the Master and Mashu both realized more and more maids’ eyes and ears were set on them.
“Barbatos.”
The Master and Mashu took a step back. For a fraction of a moment,
every single maid had been staring at them. Coldly, ominously, like beasts sizing up a threat.
Only for a moment, though. There was a business to run.
Barbatos took a bit long to reply.
“I…guess I can’t call you Paimon anymore, huh.”
“Are you here to take me back? Or are you here to slay me?” The maid spoke instantly, as if her words were an extension of Assassin’s.
Rolling her eyes and shifting her weight to her right foot, Barbatos laughed in derision.
“There’s nowhere to go ‘back’ to, so calm your tits. This a café, right? So we’re here to have a snack. Right, shitty Master?”
“I don’t have any money,” he quickly said. Mashu nodded to his right.
“You guys suck so hard. Looks like I’m paying, then. As for the slaying thing, you have yet to give me a reason to, former sibling of mine.”
A minute later, the three from Chaldea had taken a single table. While the Master and Mashu merely took in the sights and tried to make sense of the strange cat-like thing smoking by the bar, Barbatos watched like a hawk, her serious expression at odds with the atmosphere of the place.
“They really are a single mind,” she finally murmured.
“Hmm?”
“Those maids,” she continued upon her Master’s cue. “Even when there’s no way they could have noticed the other’s presence, they don’t crash into each other. They know where everybody else is at any given moment. It’s the reason they’re so perfectly efficient.”
The young man in the Chaldea uniform studied the maids more closely, admiring their deft steps as they darted to and fro; how one moved aside for the one walking behind her; how one handed a stack of plates to the one walking past without nary an exchange of glances; how none of the maids had to walk to the bar to report the customers’ orders.
“So, they’re really a demon pillar…” murmured Mashu with some trepidation.
“Nah, nah, Paimon is dead,” refuted the other Servant. “But, just like me, it found both a reason and a means to live again in a different form. That hive mind…is no longer Demon God Paimon, just like I’m no longer Demon God Barbatos.”
“But those maids, they were originally normal people, right?” pointed out the Master.
“They still are,” countered Barbatos. “It’s not like they’re charmed, or that their minds are being controlled. They are still whoever they used to be, it’s just that now they’re
something else as well.”
“Something better,” a new voice added. “Something that gives us meaning. Scoot aside, Barbatos.”
“You’re…the singing girl,” noted Mashu. Indeed, the one who had been singing melodiously along with the maid band was not pushing Barbatos to the side, so she could sit with the Chaldea group.
“Is she even a girl?” murmured the Master for only Mashu to hear. “I get Astolfo vibes from her.”
Mashu’s exclamation was duly ignored by the other three.
“Who are you to give me orders? Last I checked I was the one in charge at the Control Tower,” complained Barbatos even as she acquiesced and moved aside for the newcomer.
“Well we’re not at the Time Temple, are we?”
“Cheeky trap.”
“Drop slut.”
“Mashu, I have a new little sister!”
“Um, good for you,
senpai,” said the Demi-Servant in a dubious tone.
“What’s his deal, Barbatos?” A disgusted-looking girl (?) then inquired, dainty finger pointing at the smiling young man.
“Our mighty vanquisher is a complete moron.”
A maid wearing a perfect smile delivered cups of coffee for everyone: latte macchiato for Mashu, cappuccino for the Master, and identical shots of expresso for the former demon pillars, which were promptly swallowed in simultaneous gulps.
“Fair enough,” declared the apparent master of the maids. “No point in feeling bothered by something like that. If anything, you’re the one who looks stressed, Barbatos. Maybe you should have ordered tea.”
“Then switch places with me!” Assassin’s loud cry was pretty much a plea.
“But, Barbatos, we have something so special—”
“Shut the fuck up, shitty Master!”
When a new maid placed a cup of tea nobody ordered next to the horned girl slumped on the table, the others could only smile awkwardly as the soulful groan that escaped her thick lips. Eventually, the tea was drank, and Barbatos accepted her fate bound to the Master of Chaldea for the thousandth time.
“Nice gig you’ve got going here, um…”
“Call me Pam.” The small girl (?) rested her elbow on the table in a rather mannish way. The angelic singing figure from earlier had transformed into a something resembling a young kid pretending to be a gang leader. “And this is just a one-night thing. A spur of the moment, if you may. Got my own place in London, though. Right in the shadow of the Clock Tower, kinda for the thrill of it. And there’s fun competition there.”
As it was, the Mages' Association knew her only as that quirky weirdo with a maid café in Westminster that runs her business with scientific precision and holds an unexplainable breadth of magical knowledge but zero magical ability themselves.
“Hmm,” murmured Assassin while briefly acknowledging the new smiling maid quickly removing their expresso cups from the table. The maid’s smile, while perfect, was quickly becoming unsettling when mirrored by some many different women at the same time.
“Well, you were always good at managing things.”
“Not as good as you. That’s why you oversaw the Fourth Singularity and not me.”
“Ugh, don’t even remind me,” begged Barbatos with a grimace and a dismissive gesture. “But it’s not like you have to give out many orders here. I mean, you’re all a single mind.”
Pam shrugged.
“It is an unusual paradigm, yes, having no allies or subordinates and handling all duties myself. But you can’t tell me it doesn’t work.”
“Whatever makes you happy,” said Barbatos. After frowning for a moment—which elicited a raised eyebrow from her Master—Barbatos sharply glanced at the girl (?) to her side, her usual serious expression turned into a chilly smile.
“Are you happy, Pam?”
The smaller girl grinned fully and brilliantly. Any signs of a demonic origin could not be seen in a that pure, childlike smile fully of bliss.
“I am human,” she said, as if that explained everything.
Barbatos’ smile dropped. She briefly shot a grateful glance at the Master and Mashu for their silence, even if they could not hide the somewhat unsettled looks on their faces.
“Fine. As long as you stick to
roleplaying a human, we have no reason to get in your way.”
The Servant dropped her hand on the crown of Pam’s head, for which she got a childish pout, like the kid who didn’t want to be treated as a kid by his big sister. Any attempts at complaining came to a prompt end upon sight of Barbatos’ face. In an instant, they had ceased to be “manager and customer” and “former fellow pillars catching up”.
They were predator and prey.
“Live your game of pretend human and die in satisfaction at the end of your pretension,” said the Assassin in a firm tone.
“But never forget that I’m also here, and that humans are what I hunt.”
This is strange, through the Master of Chaldea. The tension between Barbatos and Pam was palpable, but the maids continued the pretense, seemingly uncaring of what happened at the table to not disturb the easygoing mood permeating the rest of the café. Was this merely a manager’s pride to maintain order in her business, or did she just not care for Barbatos’ threat?
The deer-on-headlights look on little Pam quick dissolved into a catty grin.
“Duly noted.”
Barbatos nodded, and all traces of a menacing mood faced into oblivion.
“Good. That’s why I always liked you.”
“Oh, now
that’s bullshit.”
Indeed, no matter how much one Katsuragi Chikagi would like to deny it, it was just the usual thing at Ahnenerbe.
Originally Posted by SleepMode
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