Tsukihime Fan Fiction / Fate/Stay Night Fan Fiction ❯ Death and Justice ❯ II ( Chapter 2 )

[ Y - Young Adult: Not suitable for readers under 16 ]

II

The explosion was something like two trains crashing into one another as thunder sounded overhead.  The sudden crack of noise was startling while the low rumble shook the entire ship as if the vessel had run aground.
People shouted in surprise and fear, flinched and startled, grabbed railings and widened feet to keep still as the floor rocked.  With the fire alarm blaring, the boom of something loud and powerful, the huge vessel rocking like a much smaller ship, passengers looked around in a panic and crew moved to their stations for further instructions.  Some made it to the very front of the ship where smoke began to rise and shouted that something had hit them.
On the bridge, the captain of the ship listened as the crew up front radioed in the situation.  “We hit something?  We’ve taken this route a dozen times already, that can’t be right.”
The crewman on the other side of the radio sounded as frazzled as the white noise his communication made.  “A torpedo?  The damage looks really bad.”  Though usually quiet, tensions with North Korea sometimes brought wartime attacks to mind.
“This far south?”  The captain shook his head, glanced at the other people on the bridge.  Besides the helmsman holding the ship steady and the person handling long-range radio duties, they were looking at him expectantly.  “Give me a no-bullshit assessment.  Is it salvageable?”
“I don’t think so, sir.  From what I can tell, we’ve got a hole as big as my pregnant wife.  There’s gotta be a swimming pool down in the lower hull already.”
The captain sighed.  “Then we’ll evacuate the ship.”  He turned to the other members of the bridge.  “Radio in distress and head straight for Shimonoseki.”
One of the deck officers piped in, looking around nervously.  “Sir, shouldn’t we head back for Ulsan?  We’re still slightly closer to it—”
The captain met the deck officer with a hard stare.  Had so much not been going on, the alarm still blaring, someone might have noticed the glazed look in the captain’s eyes.  “No, we get the passengers to their destination.  That is all.”
Reluctantly, the officers all made to do their duty, either accompanying the captain to alert crew elsewhere, or heading down to the escape craft to prep for the coming journey.


Kiritsugu set up on the catwalk surrounding the rear exhaust stack where he had a clear view of the entire aft deck and the access to the escape craft.  He attached the rifle’s bipod as quickly as possible, though he kept all of his attention on the weapon—no use in sniping if his tools malfunctioned on him.  Once secure, he set up low on the walkway and loaded a magazine, flicking the safety off.
Through the scope, he watched as people moved about the deck in confusion, no clear direction, some hurrying to their cabins to check up on the others with them, their luggage, or out of the impulse to seek familiar ground.  Crew members seemed equally at a loss, with only two or three moving back and forth along the bow deck, checking on the damage from the explosion.
Feedback from the hand radio he had taken sounded off, followed by muffled speech.  Kiritsugu could not make out exactly what was being said, having turned down the volume, but he knew the order to abandon ship must have gone out.  He had made sure to have met the captain long before the vessel had left port, had planted contingent hypnotic suggestions in the man dependent on the situation.  Kiritsugu could now operate on a certain level of certainty of what would unfold before him.
Though he was ready to catch people as they moved toward the rear of the ship, with the announcement, he took a moment to peer up toward the port side of the deck, checking for anomalous reactions—
There, to one side of the hull, partially concealed by a protective awning, four figures.  Three were carrying large boxes in their hands, one followed slightly behind.


The three Dead Apostles swept past Kiri as he waited on the deck above, halfway between the dining hall and where Kiri had killed the men.  They wove past panicked passengers and anxious crewmembers, carrying large metal cases the size of a large toolbox, avoiding confused stares by looking purposeful.
Nobody but Kiri would notice the scent of blood on them.
It was not something one could detect easily to begin with.  The sea air always lent a slightly salty tinge to the air, thick enough to deter all but the strongest of smells.  Kiri could only make it out as they passed him, strong on their clothing despite showing no outward signs of staining.  It had either dried up or they had put clothing on over it.
Still, it reeked of the business they had on the ship.
All three paused momentarily to peer out toward the front of the ship where smoke was freely flowing from whatever had hit them.  They glanced at one another, then made for the dining hall—where Kiri thought they would complete their job if given the chance.
“Too bad for you that I’m ready now,” Kiri said, mostly to himself.  After pulling the bodies of the ones he had butchered earlier into an empty room, he had liberated the longest screwdriver he could find from a nearby janitor’s closet.  Now, he was both into his rhythm and armed.  The way he preferred it.
Casually, he strode up after the three men as they turned the corner toward the dining hall.  Here, along one side of the cruiser, passengers could view the outside and smell the air, though they could be protected from weather by a glass awning attached to the hull.
Kiri flung the military knife he had taken up toward the awning, rebounding it over the heads of the Apostles as he stepped his pace up.  The one closest to Kiri, died before his eyes had even fully journeyed upward to react to the sound—Kiri drove the screwdriver into the top of his head and tripped his legs at the same time, wrenching the impromptu weapon from the man’s body as violently as possible.
Even before the first victim had fallen completely, Kiri moved onto the second, who was spinning inhumanly fast toward Kiri’s assault, the sound of the knife already discarded.  The predictability that Kiri counted on, though, brought him down—with the Apostle carrying the iron container under the right arm, it was only natural for the man to turn in that direction, letting the weight carry him around with centrifugal force.  Kiri moved up to his left, circling into the Apostle’s blind spot and jabbing the screwdriver into his head from behind the right ear.
At the same time, the Dead Apostle at the front of the line was also turning, though he carried two of the containers and Kiri could not know which way he would move.  However, the added weight slowed him fractionally—once again, just enough.  The knife Kiri had thrown had hit the awning, rebounded onto the deck, and by the way he had thrown it, rebounded from the floor with just enough energy.  It bounded back up right at chest height between the two remaining Apostles, and as Kiri jabbed the screwdriver into the second Apostle, he caught the knife with his left hand and thrust it into the chest of the last target.  The man gurgled and dropped the iron cases.
One second.
“Much better,” Kiri said, laughing aloud for a moment.  A single second was certainly better than three, and even in a location he was not able to perform his acrobatic feats.
Though Kiri had impaled the last one, he was aware that vampires reversed time on wounds to undo the damage wrought.  So the assassin first dragged the man over to the railing of the ship and flung him overboard.  He then calmly repeated the process of disposing the bodies with the two he had bored holes into, though he felt certain they would be less apt to recovering.  Once finished, he regarded the metal pods they had dropped.  “Thanks for the handicap.  Couldn’t have done it without you.”
It did not take a genius to construct what they were going to be doing with the cases.  The dining hall would have been full of sleeping people, and these vampires were carrying large containers.  They were undead creatures who fed on blood—it was not likely that petty theft ranked high on their priorities.
Remembering the man that still remained in the dining hall, Kiri nodded to himself.  “Still at least one to go.”  He frowned, though, as he regarded the screwdriver he had used: it was bent under the strain of being used too violently.  “Should have gone back to my room.  Too late now, though.”
Already, he could hear and feel movement from below—people scurrying about the ship, responding to the announcement of evacuation made a moment ago.  Kiri wondered what he would find in the dining hall, if the drugged drinks would have knocked people out already, or if the noise and commotion would defeat anything they had already imbibed.
He rather hoped for the latter.  “Disorder gives me the upper hand, at least in this kind of situation.  And people are predictable in mayhem like this.”


Kiritsugu watched from the infra-red sight he had mounted atop the regular scope.  Dead Apostles, like magi, were prone to emitting greater body heat due to the fact that their very existence was dependent upon the presence of odic energy and magical circuits.  The dead that reached a plateau beyond animalistic thought and feeling were special in that way, like finding the one kid in a middle school baseball team with the potential of going all the way to professional athlete.  While those that could use what might outright be called “magic” were rarer, all existed on the same premise that their magical force kept them going when they should have otherwise been erased from existence.
Three of the figures he had seen were warmer than the average human, the sign of magi or beings that overused the magical force in their bodies.  One had not.
The one that had massacred the others.
“The hell…?”
Kiritsugu could not begin to figure out what had happened—the low resolution from his night vision combined with the distance he viewed from obfuscated most of the action.  All he knew was this unknown person, a young man, had absolutely destroyed three vampires and done so without magic.
“So, the goddess of fortune smiles upon us,” Kiritsugu muttered, though he himself was not even sure whether he was being sarcastic or not.  An unknown quantity was a dangerous unpredictability, and Kiritsugu hated being uninformed, especially of something capable of swiftly murdering supernatural beings.
On the other hand, he grudgingly accepted that fewer targets were beneficial to his mission.
At least one of the killed had been on Kiritsugu’s target list as far as he could make out through the scope.  If all three were indeed working for the same group, that was three less he had to destroy before giving his position away.  Too, Kiritsugu felt that this mysterious someone would not have taken up arms against the Apostles unless he had already encountered others, and the fact that he was still alive implied that any other encounters would not.  Once again, fewer for him to deal with, or for Maiya to handle if any got by.
Kiritsugu tracked the unknown fighter until he disappeared from where Kiritsugu could see from his position.  Sighing, the magus killer returned his sights onto the deck below him, where crew members had begun to pull out the emergency craft.


When the explosion rocked the ship and caused the walls of the conference room to shudder, the Apostle left to finish the first capsule’s blood pool tossed the last body aside.  Closing the device, he hauled it up over his shoulder and took off.  Though this was not part of the plan, the calculations he and the others had made said this location would be enough.  Cautious of the situation, he decided to circle around to the staircase on the starboard side of the ship, ascending them as the order to evacuate went out over the speakers.
Once on the main deck, he went straight for the edge and tossed the metal container overboard, not even bothering to watch it go—panicked passengers and crewmembers were starting to come out of the woodwork.  People were starting to climb out of the lower decks or peek heads out of doorways to find where they were being directed to exit.
The vampire peered to the back of the ship, saw some of his others already amidst the gathering crowd.  Apparently, the general consensus was to escape and complete their task another day.


The dining hall was annoyingly silent when Kiri pushed open the doors.  Though he had hoped for a crowd of confused people, the fact remained that he did not expect such a thing—the drugged drinks were certainly strong enough that Kiri had picked up the scent without supernatural aid.  If there was that much, the guests present were probably doomed.
People were laid out in their seats, the occasional few on the floor.  Kiri could see the frog-like auctioneer near the podium, sprawled out on the cold floor as if inebriated.
“Somewhere along your lives, you forgot the wisdom of not trusting what strangers hand you to drink,” Kiri said.  A careful examination of the room found nobody still conscious, but when Kiri turned his attention to the kitchen, he could see that golden hue of unnatural life just beyond.  “Still here, hmm?”  He had to figure out a way to get a drop on this one—the aura was stronger, implying a longer-lived or more powerful demon awaited.
The assassin moved over to the auction table, to the one thing that he had thought of bidding on.  It resembled a simple gray bar of metal, though one end was hollow.  Tapping the switch to one side, a sharp blade extended from the hollow, lending the weapon the look of an unsheathed aikuchi-mounted tanto.  He flicked the blade in and out once more, nodded in approval, and discarded the bent screwdriver he had used previously.
The doors to the kitchen opened, and that Dead Apostle he had seen earlier in this room—the one wearing a casual suit but with the shirt untucked—stepped into view.  “Who the hell are you?” the man asked.
“So much for getting the drop on him,” Kiri shrugging to himself.  There was too great a distance between them to do as he had to the first vampires he had victimized, surprising them even as they were aware of his presence.  This room was also not ideal for his style of combat, as the ceiling was much higher than the corridors to the rest of the ship.
“I said—” the Apostle began.
Kiri charged in toward the vampire, grabbing one of the tablecloths as he passed, causing a din as plates and silverware clattered and crashed in his wake.  He lifted the white material the moment he passed within a half-dozen meters of the Apostle, a curtain between them.  The cloth then went quickly from vertical to horizontal, like an open umbrella pulled violently closed.  It shot forward, directly at the target, a bed sheet ghost bent on terrorizing the enemy.  Kiri had thrown the military dagger from before.
The Apostle knocked the sheet aside with the back of his hand.  He had seen through the diversion, waited for Kiri to move laterally or leap in for an overhead strike while his attention should have been on the cloth, propelled forward by a thrown knife.  A Dead Apostle could easy see and avoid danger, could dodge a bullet even after it was fired, so one knife was no threat to him, no matter how it was concealed—
A knife embedded itself into the vampire’s throat from below.
With the energy from his run and the smooth surface of the floor beneath him, Kiri fell to his shins, his knees bent, arching backward like the most extreme limbo contestant.  His momentum slid him down at the feet of his opponent, his action momentarily obscured by the flying tablecloth and the vampire’s attention to the sides and above—an action that would have been defeated had the Apostle focused downward on the projectile like a normal human might have.
Blood spat out onto the floor and into the fringes of Kiri’s hair as the knife pierced the vampire’s jugular.
Kiri continued his slide between the legs of his target, his arms reaching out to hook the man at the ankles.  Bunching all of his strength into the motion, Kiri sprang from his knees upward, lifting his arms above his head as he did so, flinging the Apostle so his heels flew into the air and his head flew into the floor.
Reflex had the man flinching away from the floor, a slight angle of adjustment that brought the hilt of the knife into the floor first.
Without waiting to see the Apostle’s condition, Kiri knelt onto the man’s back, grabbed the hilt of the knife, and brought it back up and around.  The motion completely severed the head from the body even smoother than the knives Kiri kept with his other tools of the trade.
“Huh.”  He kicked the head away from the body, though his attention went to the knife, now coated in lifeless red.  “Whoever was maintaining this antique sure knew their job.  That is really sharp.”  Hurriedly, he went for the tablecloth he’d thrown, started wiping the blood away before it had any chance to oxidize the metal.
The thought of pursuing the others that had taken off crossed his mind, but he decided it was better to look for escape.  Even now he could feel his balance off as the ship took on water and tilted unnaturally to one side.  His slide had carried him faster than it would have had the ship been level.
Too, the fact that the explosion and the ship sinking was not apparently part of these demons’ plans.  Something else entirely was happening, and Kiri felt that it might be someone else also out for blood.  “Two predators in the same space gets messy.  And this really is my week off…”
He looked around the room, at all the unconscious people.  It was not like it mattered to him, personally, what happened to everyone—people died every day, he knew that fact very well.  But he also did not care for needless death, and these people were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.  So he made his way over to the kitchens, empty from the evacuation order, and found one of the crew radios.  “If anyone is listening, there are a bunch of people still in the dining hall, and they all look out of it.  You might get people down here to help wake them up and carry them out.”
Still, he did not want to be found out and interrogated over the entire situation, so he took off from there, out of the kitchen and dining room until he found a sufficient population of people making ready to leave the ship.


Kiritsugu had four targets in sight, hidden amidst the growing crowd of people.  As escape boats were inflated and leveled out over the same diving station where he had met Maiya, people crowded about the exit in an attempt to be the first off; the tilt from the vessel taking on water was noticeable now, and it had people excited and worried.
Unfortunately, Kiritsugu would be adding to that anxiety.
Dead Apostles could dodge bullets.  A gun fired from close range could be avoided by an Apostle of sufficient age and power, their eyes perfect enough to see a bullet in motion or a muzzle flash from a great distance away, their reflexes great enough to avoid the bullet even after it has been fired.
Kiritsugu knew this well, and so he always made sure to shoot when their backs were turned.  After all, no matter how great their hearing, nothing could make a person hear faster than the speed of sound—and the 7.62 NATO round moved at double that speed.  
He lined up his targets and pulled the trigger.
The first shot was perfect in every way: the bullet smashed into the back of the first Apostle’s head and right into his brain.  
The second shot was still efficient, striking Kiritsugu’s second target along the upper back at the spine.  Kiritsugu tapped the trigger twice more on that target, then shifted as fast as he could to the next vampire.
The fifth shot was on target, though just barely.  The third Apostle, a woman, took it to her shoulder as she turned, the hit blasting a mist of red into the air but not bringing her down.  Clamping his teeth together, Kiritsugu used the confined space his targets occupied to his advantage, shooting at extreme angles relative to the vampire’s position while she jostled with the crowd.  He unloaded another seven rounds and the woman went down—he was certain at least four of the shots hit.
By the time he could turn to the last target, the man had disappeared from the area.  Now, the crowd was in a furor, the panic of three people suddenly dropping and gunfire ringing out through the night brought shouting and screaming.  Some people hit the deck, others ran for cover, and most pushed harder toward the diving station to make escape—pushing some at the forefront right into the water.  Shouts from crew were distinct as they attempted to discern who was attacking and from where.
Kiritsugu continued to scan the crowd, particularly the ones moving toward him rather than away.  The last Dead Apostle was still out there, and as he swept over the deck, errant heat signatures lingered through the air like a vapor trail, even greater than the average undead.
“Dammit—”
“Indeed,” came a voice from behind him.
This, however, was not unexpected.  Kiritsugu did not need to turn to know his enemy now stood behind him, watching his every move, ready to strike him the moment he attempted to turn and attack.
So he did not attack.
“Time alter—double accel!”
Discarding the rifle completely, Kiritsugu leapt up over the catwalk railings and plummeted down, all as the Dead Apostle lagged just enough that Kiritsugu avoided being struck down by the vampire.  He released the spell as he fell, before the second part of his escape made ready—
Before settling down, he had secured a harness wire to the railing, a safety net like the ones given to stunt men operating on the top of skyscrapers or mountain cliffs.
Kiritsugu bit down on the pain of his spell returning his body to the normal flow of time, growled against the feeling of blood bursting in his body and his bones cracking from the strain.  He swung around to the access ladder that had brought him up to the smoke stack to begin with, detached the cord, and started climbing down.
The lead Kiritsugu had on the vampire was too great—and the vampire knew it.  “Magecraft?  Modern weaponry?  Don’t think even we haven’t heard of the infamous Emiya, mage killer.”  The Apostle ran over to get within sight as Kiritsugu descended the ladder.  “But my magic has had decades to be refined, unlike a human’s.”  He raised a hand.  “Caeli clavis!”
A gout of wind flew from his hand and struck the ladder from above; tiny jets sliced the bars clean into pieces, and the lower portion of the ladder fell away from the hull, no longer secured.  Kiritsugu fell backwards, though before he hit the deck, he twisted around and leapt from the ladder back toward the other exhaust stacks and out of sight, the only herald to his landing the distant crashing noise as his body hit laminated decking.
“Don’t think you can get away,” the Apostle said, leaping down from the catwalk and landing where Kiritsugu would have been had he just let himself fall.  “I see your little speed trick, and can avoid it now.  You don’t live as long as we do by falling for the same thing twice.”  He strode on in the direction Kiritsugu had gone, now something of a downhill slope as the front of the ship was pulled deeper into the sea.
From where he waited, Kiritsugu allowed himself a grim smile.
The vampire brought his own magecraft to bear.  Reinforcing his already superhuman senses of sight and sound such that he could see the faintest of scuff marks on the deck and hear everything in the immediate vicinity with greater detail than the sharpest of owls—
“Time alter—triple stagnate.”
But no magically enhanced senses could detect what resembled a corpse more than a living being.
The Dead Apostle passed right by where Kiritsugu crouched in the shadow of the ship’s hull where no moonlight could reach, and Kiritsugu raised the Contender in the vampire’s wake.


On the escape rafts, one of twenty or so within sight of each other, the crew and passengers of the doomed ship moved in the general direction of Japan, waiting for rescue from any of the other ships out to sea in the area.  Three had already radioed in prior to the ship sinking that they were on the way, and so everyone waited as patiently as frazzled nerves and seasick stomachs could handle.
Aboard one raft, Kiri Nanaya admired his new weapon, chuckling to himself here and there as he replayed the night’s events through his mind’s eye.
Aboard another, Kiritsugu Emiya slept, waiting for his body to recover from his overuse of Innate Time Control.
Aboard the last raft to escape the cruise liner, a Dead Apostle nursed the physical wound of a bullet to his back, but cursed as he tried to reestablish prana flow within his body.


They whispered, of course, once rescued.
The events of that night were strange and sudden.  Fire alarms, explosions, terrorists apparently striking specific targets down.  Passengers spoke with their rescuers, with each other, conjuring up reasons why their ship had been targeted—ransoming the wealthy on board, targeting business or political rivals, random extremist violence.  It was hard for any to comprehend why them, however, as terrorism in Asia was not as rampant as it was in Europe and Africa.
Crewmembers directed their rescuers to Shimonoseki, the original destination of their vessel, despite still being marginally closer to Korea.  Their captain insisted.
Upon arrival, one ship at a time, it was already getting late once more as weary rescuers and rescuees disembarked on Japanese soil, the first leg of their adventure over.  Local police, alerted to the situation, now escorted them to be debriefed by international security forces and the JSDF despite their exhausted dispositions.
One figure broke off from the pack, escaping from the masses of people and eyes of watchful police into the shadows of the unused warehouse wharf across from the busy docks.
The man shook, both in pain and anger.  The blood had long since stopped flowing, his wound had closed, and his body had repaired itself.  But no matter what he did, more than half of his Magical Circuits would not function, his body burning up every time he tried.  It was the pain of being mortal again, the pain of knowing power was within his grasp, but being bolted down in place, unable to reach that power without doing something unnatural.
His sire would make it, though, would be able to reverse this damage.  He understood that though his circuits were damaged beyond repair, that if their task had been successful, he could learn steps to reverse or circumvent this problem, forge new pathways through his immortal body.  The current could jump locations if a second loop could be forged—
The Apostle could do nothing.  As before, on the ship, his ears could still hear only as fast as any other.  The sound of a supersonic bullet being fired from hundreds of meters away only reached his ears after the cartilage had been blown completely away.  Nor could processes fired off inside his head begin to recognize “sound” by that time, as his brain was no longer a singular mass held within his skull.
That single gunshot rang out across the wharf milliseconds after the Apostle’s body began to fall, his head now resembling a hemisphere of a watermelon, the insides half-scooped out.
From the top of a warehouse to the east, a teenage girl, hardly as tall as the rifle she toted, crawled back from the edge of a building and headed for the ladder at the other end of the building.
The body of the Apostle would not survive the morning.


The capsule sank into the depths, dragged along by the iron weight it was made from.
It was not so simple, to construct such a device.  A basic weight, huge and blocky, would sink as straight down as it could and embed itself once it reached the bottom.  Nor would a lighter weight suffice, which could be crushed by the pressure deep beneath the sea, or wander too far from target.
This capsule was perfect—sinking without being crushed, drifting with the currents and not halting in one exact spot.
The Sea of Japan was serene, its tidal motion faint and the motion underwater minimal.  The capsule moved perhaps two or three meters a day at most, rolling and sliding along the seabed like an underwater tumbleweed.
Until finally, one day, it would reach its destination.
When it was close enough, it stopped being carried by the current, halted being pulled by mere natural force.  It shuddered at the edge of the range, then when it slid close enough, started moving as if dragged by an invisible hand.  The capsule moved the same distance it had traveled in two weeks over the span of thirty seconds until it halted against a concrete box the size of a coffin.  
Years of pressure and wear had cracked the concrete surface, though no living thing surrounded its immediate vicinity, as if its very presence was poisonous.  A lonely existence.
The capsule smashed against the edge of the concrete, withdrew, and smashed again, the invisible force striking the iron as it were the steel to the concrete’s flint.  It repeated the process again, again, again, and again, repeated against the same side of the capsule until it had collapsed in.
Blood from within moved out of the capsule, flowed into the cracks and crevices of the concrete’s structure.
Around one end of the concrete box, a woven pattern of light burnt into existence.  The glow lit the darkness of the sea with a red color like dinoflaggelates that permeated spring beaches in some places of the world.  It resembled a circle with odd designs and devices about its rings.  From the circle, veins shot out in every direction, encompassing the top of the container like a crown of thorns.
The light to one side then faded until it appeared nothing more than a discolored mark along the concrete’s face.


To be continued.


AN: So, I don’t know a ton about guns.  Can you tell?  All my experience is with hunting rifles and shotguns.  And Nerf guns.  Can you imagine how awesome a dad Kiritsugu would’ve been had he lived to see the advent of the modern Nerf weaponry out there?  “Shirou, Illya, time to wake up!” POP POP POP!  And then Shirou pulls out a Nerf sword for defense.

[S]Had Kiri lived to pass on stuff to Shiki, it’d be more like, “Shiki, life is beautiful, when you have kids you’ll understand that.”  Nine months later: he suddenly has like eight kids all at once with his harem.[/S]

I didn’t do the Kyokushi move directly because, well, same reason I didn’t have Shirou do Nine Lives in Escaping Fate, I guess.  We’ve seen it, so, time to do something similar but different?

I initially thought of putting this on a train, simply because the logistics would be easier.  However, as I started to write it, I realized that Kiri was about a hair’s breadth from Baccano! and Rail Tracer territory, so I scrapped that.  I have not been on a cruise liner of this size before, though, so if descriptions sound off…sorry?

Next bit will be a while.  I need to turn attention back to Fate/Far Side for now.

Converting /tmp/phpz5Mcw1 to /dev/stdout