August 21st, 1963.
Failure tasted like Irish whiskey, and it was a flavour Jacqueline knew well.
She sat alone in the deep back of a recliner, her legs tucked up onto the seat, knees up to her chest; a worn copy of Camus’ L’Etranger acted as both a coaster for her glass and a rest for her hand even as it balanced precariously on one arm of the chair. It was late enough into the night that reading made her drowsy and unfocused, but she had to wait until the call came from overseas, and nothing helped better than the drink.
A hotel in America was far away from home, but it was as welcome as anywhere could be now. Every time she glanced at the telephone hanging on the wall, its cord dangling like a loose rope, her heart was struck with palpitations she couldn’t rationalise away: when it rang, that was the end for her, sooner or later.
Her great-uncle, that optimiste par excellence, would have told her to pray and seek absolution before God and in doing so ease her clouded mind and fallen spirit. But the world Jacqueline was born into was a dilapidated one, pragmatic and self-assuredly wiser for it and above all assured of the inevitability of death and the intangibility of the past. It was the malaise of her generation, which unlike their American counterparts were not energised by the infinite possibility of the future but left anxious and enervated.
All that was meaningless anyway, she thought. The world she existed in was one which heeded neither the will of God nor the spirit of the cosmos. What she was was a mage, and all those who she knew and pretended to care about were mages, too. Now she had failed them, the pretending would stop, and she would be a pariah among outcasts.
All that, and it was such a simple thing that did her in: she was late.
Like some young university graduate unapologetically late for a big city interview, she was cast down and cast out. All she had to do was investigate and intervene, but events passed by her. She was too late to intervene and even had she tried to investigate, nearly all those who had taken part in this continental farce were dead. By some standards, she’d succeeded - but not those of the Mages Association. She had left a dangerous ritual of untold potential play out, or so it looked to those on high, and a once-in-a-century chance vanished into the ether.
The atom bomb had changed everything. The old world was disappearing day by day into the far distance, left behind by the rampaging advance of modern technology. Now the fabric of reality was subject to the experimentations and examinations of scientists and engineers, and along with it the fate and future of humanity, well outside the direction of mages and their ilk. Some had voiced their concerns already in 1919 when one man’s theory unravelled the mysteries of the workings of the universe, along with the potentiality of its beginning and end. But mages, in their old seats of power so long held, never imagined the tinkerers below them would put those ideas into practise. The pawn had become the queen.
Jacqueline, in a perfect world, was supposed to have been the bridge between. The memo telegrammed to her was still on the nightstand by her chair, fading in the lamplight, all but a relic now as it spoke of communion between the Mages Association and the United Nations, issued by some Director-General of some soon-to-be-defunct agency.
That line of hope broke one night in the spring of 1963 and like a childhood memory could be recalled but never recreated.
The call finally came at a few minutes after 4 am. Europe had woken up, Jacqueline mused, as her fingers brushed against the telephone receiver. A splinter of instinct in the back of her mind told her to let it go, toss it all aside, and escape.
But there was no escape, that was what everything she had known and lived had told her. She picked up the phone and heard an English accent apologise before telling her a UN man would be waiting for her a few blocks down from her hotel, across the river. He would drive her to the airport and then that would be that. The caller left the impression that the future was open, but Jacqueline of course knew it wasn’t, it never was. No God would sweep her up and away or inspire pity in the hearts of those she betrayed.
Sometimes there comes a moment when you are speaking to someone and you feel, deep down in your heart, that of all the words there are to say, you chose the worst ones. Jacqueline felt that deeply, an understanding welling in her heart that only a few small choices she made had damned her. No fate or circumstance had conspired to lead her here: she was responsible for it all.
She sighed, let the last half ounce of whiskey burn her throat, and dropped Camus into her suitcase before heading for the door. The hotel staff would be so happy to have had such a neat and tidy guest, she imagined as she left. Besides the empty glass, it was as if she was never there.
A couple hours remained before sunrise, and the city streets were as dark as they could get. In the shadowy hue of her dress she would have been hard to spot if she made the snap decision to run off into the warm summer darkness, but she knew better from mages. There was only one way out, and that wasn’t her road. She crossed an old stone bridge instead, devoid of traffic, melting away into the river below. The rising crowns of the trees on the opposite shore gave an almost wild quality to the place, as though nature was just waiting to burst through like floodwaters and retake the city, concrete and steel be damned.
All was still, save for one figure across the road, under the glimmering orange of a streetlamp. Another wanderer, Jacqueline thought, hopefully less aware of their doom than she was. They seemed to be staring out at the water, wistful as a poet trying to find the perfect phrase, as though the answer was carried on the flow of the water and the cool north wind.
“You’re late,” they called out. The river was never the object of their interest. Jacqueline craned her neck around, wondering where the other person they must’ve been shouting to was headed.
The dawn-seeking speaker was a woman, about as tall as Jacqueline herself, her hair reddish under the light. Her stern eyes stared hard at Jacqueline, the pressure of that gaze weighty even with the road between them. This wasn’t the UN man; she had no car, and her attire looked almost bestial, of furs and feathers, not the staid three-piece of a continental bureaucrat.
She stepped onto the road, her pace as slow as it was inevitable. Like death, Jacqueline pictured her: never rushing, never needing to. Her heart felt tight like a hand within her was gripping it, crushing it, holding her life in pale fingertips.The unknown figure walked on.
“I expected you closer to midnight,” she intoned, her voice casual. It was a far cry from the speaker on the phone and their faux-apology, their feigned pity for Jacqueline’s own failure. “Something kept you? It’s not a problem, though… what’s a few more hours after how long we’ve waited for this, anyway?”
Jacqueline made a subtle glance towards the shore where her intended meeting was, searching for a moment to break and run, but the woman gave her no such option. She was so close now, ten feet, nine - and in the shadow of the lamplight her arm concealed something sharp and pointed. Now Jacqueline could only imagine this enigmatic character as personified death, her doom made whole and real before her - an effect of the late night, the alcohol, or something more? It was a mysterious hour at which she walked these dark streets, and under the ire of mages anything could be possible, and above all dangerous.
“I don’t know you,” Jacqueline replied, standing her ground now. A kaleidoscope of colours danced in her irises like little stars in constellations. Carefully, slowly, as slow as the corporeal Death before her, she raised her hand to her face.
The woman sighed, not masking her disappointment as Jacqueline would expect of a mage. “You have to remember, then. That was part of our deal: none of this works if you forget.”
“If you’ve come to kill me, then get it over with. Selfish as it may be for someone in my position, but I’d rather it quick and painless than… whatever it is they have planned back in Belgium.”
The figure stopped for a few moments, her brow knitted. “Selfish? Mm, you really might not remember, after all…”
“What am I supposed to remember?” Jacqueline’s fingers brushed her eyelids, and the colours that gathered on the canvas of her eyes came to life in the air around her. She would not go gentle into that good night, that velvet glove of the Mages Association and their bureaucratic jurisprudence. It was time to force the issue at hand, whatever this experiment or delusion might be.
Mere feet away, the pale woman came into clear view: her skin was pallid and her hair was the same, pale with an underlying darkness. Her eyes, too, were an unnatural yellow, but what stood out most of all was how her whole body seemed an intricate illustration, etched with tattoos of diverse colours, interrupted only by her clothing which in itself seemed alive on her flesh. Feathers woven into fabric rustled in the wind as though she could take flight at any moment, contributing to a whole portrait of her which seemed so far beyond human. Something about her very existence told Jacqueline that her presence here was wrong, impossible. Yet she reached out and with cold fingers touched Jacqueline’s warm, living hand.
Still the woman smiled, as though everything was right. “That’s it… the eyes. They’re all that matter. I should have known that you’d forget everything - you don’t even know it yet by now. Everything’s going as we hoped, madame.”
Curiosity overtook Jacqueline in that last moment and she stepped back, pressing against the railing of the bridge, her balance failing but her eyes never leaving the strange sight before her. A spark of familiarity awoke in her, and she opened her mouth to demand an answer, her eyes glittering ever brighter with the energy of her magic - but then all colour disappeared.
The moon vanished from the sky, and reality was gradually replaced by an all-consuming darkness that emanated from the figure’s outstretched hand. All Jacqueline could hear now as lightless shadows overtook her body was the woman’s calm, whispered voice.
“Yes, it’ll be painless and quick. I’ll handle everything from here… thank you.”
It's been ten years to the day since I started writing a story called The Manhattan Project II, which a few people read and liked. For a long time during that, I teased that I would follow up with a side-story, or sequel, or prequel, but none of that materialised.
A lot of things have changed between 2015, when I finished that story, and now. As a person I'm completely different from who I was back then; this forum is different, in ways I probably won't even know since I've been gone for so long. And Type-Moon is different, too, having undergone probably the greatest transformation in that span of time. The kind of stories Type-Moon is telling, and the way they're telling them, is completely different from 2015, and after a lot of thought, that's part of why I decided to start writing this new project based on The Manhattan Project. To me, Type-Moon now feels like a space much more open to new, original stories, all using the same framework but with different characters, different writers, and different settings. Most importantly, though, it's the tenth anniversary of my old story, and I wanted to show my respects not only to it, but also to a community which shaped my life so profoundly.
For this story, you won't have had to read the original Manhattan Project II in order to understand what's going on or enjoy it. It uses the same characters (and some new), but they're all presented as fresh new people in very different circumstances, the reasons for which will soon become apparent. This is because I don't want to make people read 820,000 words, that'd be insane. To this day I'm shocked (but glad!) people managed to keep up with that unwieldy behemoth, especially when it hit its lows.
Manhattan Project also had its old, soon-abandoned quirk of being something of a choose-your-own-adventure type of story. Back then, we were all writing those kinds of stories because we wanted to imitate Fate/stay night and its style badly. It was cool and engaging. I think that was a pretty good idea, ultimately, and so I'm going to be bringing it back for this story. Because I want to set your expectations (and my deadlines) properly, I'll outline that below.
After every chapter except the next one which will properly introduce the story, I'll post a map, indicating day or night. On the map I'll have several locations highlighted with icons, and in some cases the icons will have a character's portrait beside them, indicating who's there. If you've played Fate/Hollow ataraxia, you'll recognise this as a blatant copy. Yes, it is. You get to choose where the next chapter is set, alternating between daytime (typically downtime activities, or intrigue) and nighttime (almost invariably violence and secret deeds). In a way, this can let you choose who the protagonist is, who the story centres on, if you keep seeking out their scenes. The freedom is completely yours. I'll strive to have a chapter written every 1-2 weeks depending on my real-life schedule, so choose quickly!
If you enjoy a story with character drama, intrigue, triumph, turns of fortune, introspection, and high-stakes fights between heroes of history of myth, then I think you'll enjoy this story. Please give it a read, leave a comment, and I hope I will play my part as storyteller well so that you may applaud come the end.
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