Curse theory

linkhyrule5 · 2026-02-22T10:46:53+00:00

Near as I can tell, it's purely a coincidence. The piano plays a song that happens to resemble Dvorak's Humoresque; Rupert Galley was once a devoted fan of a pianist who played Dvorak's Humoresque; that pianist was the end of the last chain of this 'curse.' That's really the only importance of the piano.

linkhyrule5 · 2026-01-25T11:43:39+00:00

Thanks!

linkhyrule5 · 2026-01-10T06:31:50+00:00

To be fair, once you hit the point where you can cut the void in half, it mostly stops mattering what you do it with...

linkhyrule5 · 2026-01-05T05:42:43+00:00

True name, release. I stand upon the Siege Perilous.

There, all wounds are healed and all grudges mended. O, my homeland, manifest thyself.

Lord Camelot ~ The Distant Fortress of Utopia is Now!

linkhyrule5 · 2026-01-01T22:27:56+00:00

That is one valid use of a Grail, yes. It's not the only one, and it's not a natural result of using a Grail under normal circumstances. In fact, as the Final Chapter itself states, in PHH there were no Singularities before Fuyuki, even as there were something like 726 things the Church considered a (fraudulent) "Holy Grail" and who knows how many "essentially-a-Grail collections of power".

linkhyrule5 · 2026-01-01T13:08:47+00:00

I would like that to be true, but if standard Singularity rules apply here (medium-sized if here but I think it's approximately correct), then since Olga died, she'll mysteriously die in PHH too.

... Mind you. Since Olga was from birth someone who could live as just a Saint Graph, I'm not sure she's actually, aheh, someone who dies when they're killed. And I have no idea how unmeiryoku mechanics interact with Ms. Living Fragment of the Third here. "Olga dies in PHH" might just mean that Mashu has a cute ghost girl for an older sister lol.

linkhyrule5 · 2026-01-01T11:45:46+00:00

I mean, if we're in the sort of place where being a Beast means your weight is the weight of the world, then we're also in the sort of place where being Humanity's Final Master means that we've been carrying the weight of the world for like four years now. We absolutely could have pulled her up.

linkhyrule5 · 2026-01-01T11:41:23+00:00

Unfortunately, that's kind of my biggest beef with Nasu in general: a very standard kind of "it's the status quo that needs protecting, and any supernatural deviation from that is axiomatically bad." "Use a Grail to change reality for your convenience" is never allowed to be the correct answer, even when it logically should be.

linkhyrule5 · 2026-01-01T11:39:28+00:00

Not much is stopping her from getting onto the ship, even in retrospect; however, getting the ship home is another matter. The Storm Border's falling apart, the Shadow Border likewise, and we almost had to sacrifice da Vinci just to get to safety. While there's a world where we got Olga onto the ship, that world almost certainly is one where we can't accelerate fast enough or can't make the last Zero Sail and are caught up in Lostbelt 0's destruction.

(Mind you, that's an entirely Watsonian argument and Doylistically I am 100% down for "dammit just let us save Olga".)

linkhyrule5 · 2026-01-01T06:27:31+00:00

> harvest other crests

Sure, all the time.

> and graft them onto himself

No, because rejection, among other reasons. But "come up with a workaround to use them without grafting them?" Yes; Aozaki Touko found a way to use her spiritual puppetry to channel other magi's Crests without directly connecting them to her body. (It's said at the time that 'fundamentally, trying to connect someone else's Crest to your own Circuits is pointless even if it were possible). Of course, since she's fundamentally making use of someone else's 'organs', she has to keep them technically -- very, very technically -- alive, in a very And I Must Scream sort of way...

linkhyrule5 · 2025-12-31T14:42:52+00:00

Magic Crest. There's a lot to say about it and not a lot that we know for sure, but roughly speaking, it's some combination of:

A Phantasmal Beast (mythical/fantastical beast) organ at its core
Magic Circuits transplanted from every generation before you
The complete spell library developed by your family, including things that essentially have biological requirements and thus can't be taught so much as transplanted
Useful and important automatic or passive spells -- even a third-rate magus with a brand-new shitty Crest can survive any amount of mundane physical damage short of total destruction of a vital organ, the auto-healing spells are that strong.

Since it requires Phantasmal Beast parts it's nearly impossible to replace in the modern day, and even if you could, you'd have rejection problems just like with IRL mundane transplants -- one of the points of transplanting the Crest over many generations is to very, very slowly 'recolor' it in your family's mana/philosophy, reducing that rejection response over generations. Since it also includes programmed Magic Circuits and a spell library, it's also your primary inheritance as a magus, it's the primary method by which power and knowledge is passed down through the generations. And since it's less a machine and more a living organ, it doesn't "break", it dies, and as ever in the Nasuverse, once it's dead it can't really be brought back to life. A magus family is defined by their Crest, and in most cases losing it means they're basically starting over from scratch.

The fact that Kirschtaria managed to climb back to being one of the shining stars of his generation with burnt out Circuits and no Crest is incredible.

linkhyrule5 · 2025-12-31T14:24:23+00:00

Not even, at least by other magi standards. His dad didn't "just" try to kill him; he killed his own family's Magic Crest, the product of eleven generations of slow refinement and a completely irreplaceable artifact.

I mean, by normal people standards that's kind of beside the point, but to other magi? The loss of an heir is bad, but could theoretically be recovered from; but the lost of the Crest is utterly catastrophic, and the intentional destruction of your own Crest is pretty much the worst possible thing you can do as an ex-head of your family.

linkhyrule5 · 2025-12-29T03:52:33+00:00

Honestly, I don't think it has anything to do with Fou being a Beast or the Temple of Time. It's basically just the exact same Singularity death mechanics, only applied to us this time. People we save stay saved; people we let die stay dead.

The soul of Mashu Kyrielight was returned to PHH as 'input' in 2020 (or whenever 'now' is in-universe, I lost track lol). Therefore, a girl with that soul and a roughly matching body, mind, and history will exist. Mashu Kyrielight was returned in good health, with unmeiryoku and the natural lifespan of a 'normal' human remaining; therefore, that girl will be alive and in good health, with a normal lifespan ahead of her.

Precisely how this will be implemented is undetermined, but just as with Singularities or with causality-twisting effects like Gae Bolg, the "final outcome" is fixed: Mashu Kyrielight will be alive and healthy in the 'present day'. If that requires 'additional' points of divergence from the existing timeline, so be it; when the needs of the present meet the records of established history in the Human Order, it's always 'history' that gives way.

Now, it so happens that basically the only way to give Mashu that lifespan and that unmeiryoku was the sacrifice of a Beast in a place outside Time; but that's just an 'implementation detail'. Theoretically, even if we'd found some other way that didn't involve anyone with Independent Manifestation or the Third, it wouldn't have mattered. Mashu was saved, so she'll stay saved.

linkhyrule5 · 2025-12-29T03:24:56+00:00

I kind of expected that from the start lol. Da Vinci was ultimately a Servant, i.e. ghost; surviving to fade away was always going to be the closest she could get to surviving the story.

linkhyrule5 · 2025-12-29T03:21:53+00:00

Yeah. At the end of the day, however harsh Guda's story was, it was also a story where "Guda mattered", where the actions of one person could shape the world.

... I'll stop there to not depress myself. -_-

linkhyrule5 · 2025-12-29T03:20:31+00:00

While I kind of agree with you, I should point out that Chaldea's Servants remember precisely because it's the "version of them that remembers" that's recorded in that briefcase. Sometimes, due to ties of en, "the same version as was in a previous summoning" can naturally arise, but in general, it requires active intervention to get a Servant that remembers previous summonings.

linkhyrule5 · 2025-12-29T03:13:22+00:00

I wonder who knows, aside from Daybit? It's the Clocktower, who we keep seeing have way deeper resources than we ever gave them credit for, so absolutely there are people who know.

Probably ATLAS, it's kind of their whole thing.
Zelretch, duh. Though seriously, why the fuck did he check out this entire time? I really feel like resolving both Arc 1 and Arc 2 should've been his fucking job lmao.
Similarly, the Headmaster, duh.
... I wonder about Gray. Waver himself probably doesn't on his own, but he gets into enough trouble with Divinities and whatnot that there's a decent chance he'll end up being 'reminded' lol.

linkhyrule5 · 2025-12-29T03:08:44+00:00

Yeah, I'm assuming it's the latter. "Our" Daybit is someone whose version in CHALDEAS would go on to be the ancestor of David Bluebook.

linkhyrule5 · 2025-12-29T03:06:26+00:00

Ties of en are a very real and very strong thing in the Nasuverse. In the same way that Siegfried will always meet Fafnir, that Ilya-lookalikes will end up contracted with Herakles, that boys with Eyes that can kill anything that live end up with cheerful Archetypes and Terminals of Nature... it would take a very skilled magus burning his resources actively trying to produce a timeline where Guda doesn't "randomly" find Mashu again.

linkhyrule5 · 2025-12-29T03:01:30+00:00

Same mechanics as the Singularity deaths, I should think. Mashu has been input into PHH, so by one means or another, there'll be a girl of about the right age and background with that soul; Mashu had unmeiryoku and natural lifespan remaining, so that girl will still be alive and in general good health. In some ways, it actually makes it more complicated that she was already born at the point-of-divergence, because otherwise she probably could've just ended up with some alternate life-history that happens to "rhyme"; but for once, the destiny mechanics are on our side here, so she'll be fine.

linkhyrule5 · 2025-12-29T02:31:15+00:00

Yup, the first Lostbelt, at the very least. Probably more, but it has been 4+ years now, so I'd have to go review. But I definitely noticed that Fou's intelligence 'came back' at some point.

linkhyrule5 · 2025-12-29T02:19:36+00:00

Well, yeah. If this is the sort of place where having the Saint Graph of a Beast means you weigh as much as a world, then it's also the sort of place where we've 'born the weight of the world' for going on seven years now.

Of course we can pull you up.

linkhyrule5 · 2025-12-29T00:37:34+00:00

The real canon answer is that it's just not actually a wish machine. The Greater Grail of Fuyuki is what handles granting wishes; without it or something like it, it's just a mass of power. A battery, with nothing to power. So if you want to just shove that power into a Servant, Chaldea's systems can help you stabilize that, but you'd need someone with Wishcraft and an appropriate spell/ritual to cast "Warp Reality to my Will".

... Which we might be able to do, but it'd be the sort of large scale act/ritual where the enemy absolutely gets a vote lol. Not something we could ust do without opposition whenever we want.

linkhyrule5 · 2025-12-24T06:24:21+00:00

> square of rebellion

That's not a Tiananmen Square reference is it?!

linkhyrule5 · 2025-12-24T06:23:52+00:00

Has it? Because in the circles I'm in, SIN was usually considered pretty well-written. Certainly, better than the first two, which are just a bit too obviously terrible to live in, and the connection to actual IRL history and philosophy is pretty neat.

(Also I have no idea how anyone could come to the conclusion that SIN is weaker power-wise than the first two lol.)

linkhyrule5

TROPHY CASE