Editing Toaru Majutsu no Index:AgneseSS Chapter4 (section)

===Part 1===

Agnese Sanctis had a question.

She gently crossed her arms while leaning back against the wall of a hideout built inside a huge metal container.

“It’s strange,” she said while looking up at the ceiling.

She was thinking back on something she had noticed before. The other two nuns must have noticed something similar because Lucia’s eyebrows shot up and Angelene dropped the cheese and cod snack sticks she was stuffing her face with, earning her a fairly serious slap to the food-filled cheek from Lucia.

“Bfoh foh mgoh!?”

“What in the world are those snacks!? What? They’re made a cheese beloved by nobility!?”

Unfortunately, the question worrying them was not the mystery of those cheese snacks.

The nun who boosted her height with thick-soled sandals gave a snort before getting down to business.

“Spain, France, and Germany. We’ve dealt with a few different cases now, but I have my doubts each of them could have been pulled off by a single individual. Yes, we did find a personal reason and objective behind each one, but ''the overall scale felt unnaturally large.''”

“Fghblkefybh?”

Angelene’s response ended up sounding like a password from the 8-bit era before you could save your game. She was apparently willing to hold a serious conversation with her mouth full as long as she could avoid Lucia’s punishments.

Agnese uncrossed her arms and placed her index finger on her chin.

“Hmm, it’s kind of like using a nuclear missile to attack a local convenience store. If you have that much power, it feels like you should be able to find a cleverer use for it.”

After all, what would have happened if they had not solved those cases?

In Barcelona, Spain, that clean freak of a priest would have completely lost control and members of the Anglican Church might have even executed innocent citizens when they were meant to preserve order on the magic side.

In Calais, France, they had only barely avoided a war between England and France.

In Frankfurt, Germany, the curse would never have been stopped and it would have required more sacrifices indefinitely.

It was all so ridiculously overblown, like people attempting to leave serious scars on society based on no more than a childish dream.

“''Isn’t that just how magicians are?''” asked Lucia while folding up an unneeded flyer to create a paper fan for punishing Angelene.

“…”

“When they encounter the cruel side of life, they try to overturn everything for their own personal reasons. When forced to choose between themselves and others, they do not hesitate to choose themselves and let the world burn around them. Isn’t that why the Apostle Peter refused to let magicians fly?”

It can be deduced from the way she phrased that, but it would be best to state it outright.

Technically speaking, Agnese, Lucia, and Angelene were ''not'' magicians.

Using mystical powers did not make one a magician.

For example, Agnese did not have a magic name and she did not belong to a magic cabal. They were no more than nuns who followed the religion of Christianity and they viewed magic as tricks and vulnerabilities that took advantage of Christianity’s teachings.

In other words, they did not fully understand what a real magician truly was.

So if they were told that was simply how magicians were, they could only accept it.

On the other hand, something else felt off to them since they could wield “a small subset of miracles” as nuns.

“I think each of these cases was the work of a single individual,” bluntly stated Agnese.

“Agreed.”

“But someone else gave them the opportunity to do it. Just like someone dropping a gun in front of a person who wants to rob a bank or sending a pile of cash to a person who wants to take revenge. Could that be why the scale of each case seems too large for a single person’s crimes? And those people may have been entirely unaware how dangerous the thing they had ‘found’ was.”

Someone who granted wishes or who lent miracles to the weak might sound divine, but Agnese was not about to praise this Person X.

There was a Person X out there.

Her intuition told her that was almost certain.

And if Person X had given those three people what they needed, it painted a horrific picture. One of downright malice. For example, if you sent a pile of cash to someone who wanted to rob a bank, there would be no crime in the first place. It might look like Person X was being sympathetic and cooperating in a friendly way, but all they had done was find some small embers burning within someone and dump oil on them to trigger the worst kind of explosion.

That made them far worse than the actual criminals.

If Person X was allowed to go free, more large-scale cases were bound to occur.

“And you want to change your vague suspicions into solid evidence?” asked Lucia while swinging her oversized paper fan through the air to check on its center of gravity.

“That’s right.”

“B-but none of the people we caught said anything about someone else helping them.”

Angelene was right.

The Anglican Church was a world expert in anti-magic combat and witch hunting. Their interrogation and torture techniques had been polished over the course of a very long history. It seemed unlikely an individual could grit their teeth and keep a secret like that.

And yet no information had turned up.

That could only mean one thing.

“They were guided toward their crimes, but I have my doubts that they ever actually met or knew of Person X. Could they have been following the trail laid out for them without even noticing?”

But then who exactly had done it?

That brought them back to the original question, meaning that line of reasoning was a dead end.

Agnese sounded disgusted with it all.

“If sitting around thinking won’t give us an answer, then we just need more information to work with. But there’s no rule saying we have to gather up all the clues ourselves. We don’t have to give up just because we’ve reached a dead end. I’m willing to use anything available to us. Even if that means buying the information we lack.”

“Peh heh heh. You mean visiting an information broker?”

Angelene mocked the very idea, so Lucia slapped her on the face with a horizontal swing of her fan.

It was punishment time.

“Bwah!? B-but are information brokers even a thing? Aren’t they even rarer than a professional hitman???”

“It depends on what kind you’re talking about,” said Agnese.

For example, newspaper reporters and freelance tabloid writers would be the most above-board version of a job where you earned money by gathering information. There was also a form of journalism that used the threat of publishing scandalous information to blackmail the people involved, but that was a separate issue.

Also, no country or sufficiently-large organization would not have its own intelligence agency or department. Not to mention how search engines, online stores, social media, video sites, and most any IT company were doing everything they could to gather personal information from their users. Any of the corporate executives with a penchant for breaking taboos by dabbling in insider trading was sure to be on the lookout for any talk of a merger or buyout of related companies.

Meanwhile, criminal organizations also needed information. They needed it for their “business concerns” such as scams, abductions, and loan sharking, but they also needed it to defend themselves against traitors and criminal investigations, so they could use as much information as they could get (as long as there was no speculation or bias mixed in).

However…

“Normally, the people who use that information want to keep it to themselves. If someone in a criminal organization shared their information with another gang or the police, they’d be viewed as a traitor. So it is unusual to find an information broker who ''gathers information from around the world and sells it to anyone for the same price'' like a convenience store or drugstore.”

That meant Agnese was talking about relying on an information broker that belonged to a specific organization or world power. Specifically, one that sided with the UK, greedily gathered information for the UK, and revealed that information only to people working for the UK.

Lucia frowned.

“And we’ll find that here?”

“Yes, we will.” Agnese placed her hand on the door of the metal container and pushed it open. “Zurich, capital of the Swiss canton of Zurich. And what is Switzerland best known for? Its banks.”

Switzerland was a strange country.

First of all, it did not have a single unified language. Each of its 26 cantons used the language it preferred, so some parts of the country used German and others used French. The canton of Zurich used German, for example.

Second, the rest of the world recognized it as a permanently neutral country. There were plenty of self-proclaimed pacifist countries, but Switzerland had ''actual treaties'' spelling out that they had abandoned their right to go to war in exchange for the rest of the world agreeing to help eliminate the threat if Switzerland was ever invaded.

That made Switzerland useful as a place to arbitrate a conflict between two other countries. For example, does the word Geneva ring a bell? That is a city in Switzerland.

And third, the most well-known aspect of Switzerland – at least in entertainment – is not its history, its military neutrality, or its politics.

“When you think of Switzerland, you think of secret banks.” Agnese boldly made a highly biased statement. “People tend to shine the spotlight on the Cayman Islands these days, but when you want to hide your money, a spotlight is the last thing you want. Meanwhile, the Swiss brand remains steady and unchanged. There’s no unnecessary interest or investments, so the wealthy who just want to safely and indefinitely protect their assets prefer it here.”

“Th-then,” nervously cut in stooped and freckled Angelene. “Are you saying the Anglican Church has a vault full of documents here? Hm? But why would old English documents be kept in Switzerland?”

“It would be more accurate to call them British documents gathered by the Swiss. The Anglican Church probably sees it as a valuable opportunity to obtain an objective outsider’s view of themselves.” Agnese shrugged. “There is no single national religion in Switzerland, so the dominant culture differs between cantons. Some cantons side with the Roman Catholic Church and its 2 billion followers and others make it hard for the Catholics to get any headway. That makes this a useful frontline base for the Anglicans.”

Agnese raised a finger.

“By the way, comics and movies often talk about ‘Swiss banks’, but that isn’t a single large group. The national banking system allows people to open accounts with only a name and PIN and the bankers are traditionally very tightlipped, so ‘Swiss banks’ refers generally to all of the many banks in the country.”

You could choose whatever bank you wanted there, so there would be banks hostile to the Anglicans and those that were friendly to them. The Anglicans had found a bank that worked for them and used the safe deposit boxes for art and antiques to instead store dangerous documents and items, such as grimoires, old maps, cursed charms, star charts, and spiritual items.

“There are curses and grudges that only activate once they arrive on British land, after all. And there are things they don’t want returned to the UK, like someone’s adipocered head or the UK-made execution tools they exported. I think there was even a gross coat made from the hide of 1000 rats during the plague.”

“Ew.”

“When they can’t let other countries have something but can’t store it in the UK either, it ends up here.”

Agnese’s group approached a large marble building. It looked a lot like a white cathedral and that was no coincidence. A former church had been bought and converted into a bank.

Lucia looked disgusted by it.

“Curse those greedy capitalists. This is no way to treat god’s house.”

“I believe it’s called reusing old buildings. Once everyone moves out, it would just fall into ruin otherwise.”

The bank president was a courteous old man in a black morning coat nice enough to attend an evening party. If someone had claimed he was in fact a clockwork doll, they would have believed it.

“Thank you for your visit, Miss Sanctis and company. I am President Helm Himmel. It is a pleasure to meet you.”

(Ah ha ha. That’s as fake a name as Suzuki Saburou.)

Smiling Agnese refrained from speaking that thought out loud.

“What brings you here today?”

He had to already know the answer, but the bank had to ask regardless.

Agnese rattled off her answer without even checking the memo.

“Religious Organization Account #3X5-8X1-9X2-0X1-7X4. The safe deposit box. I have our key here.”

“Understood, Miss Sanctis. This way please.”

“Of course. And if you don’t mind ''have our access to the box go unrecorded ‘by mistake’.''”

These safe deposit boxes generally had two keyholes.

The customer kept one key and the bank the other. The customer and a bank representative would use their two keys together to ensure neither side could open it on their own. That security measure made it harder for the customer to use the box for illegal purposes (such as a stalker hiding their collection or multiple people sharing the key to make a delivery of dangerous herbs) and prevented anyone at the bank from swiping gold bars from a box.

But the president only smiled and let the pearl key slip from his white-gloved hand to land silently in Agnese’s palm.

“''Your access to the box? Whatever do you mean?''”

“''I mean nothing at all, of course.''”

With that, their secret was safe.

At the same time, the bank was essentially saying they were entirely ignorant of any possible criminal activity carried out using their safe deposit box.

They left the president and walked back behind the general counter.

Once they were alone, Lucia looked like she was afflicted with a headache and toothache at the same time.

“What is wrong with this world?”

“The president is an ordinary person. If he saw what was stored in there, the shock might just destroy his mind beyond the level of infantile regression.”

Safe deposit boxes came in many forms.

The most common were rows of metal drawers, each one with a number and two keyholes. They were about the size of a study desk’s drawer. Those were generally used for documents like wills and land deeds.

There were larger ones for jewels and gold bars and those could be as large as the janitorial closet at a school. The ones for art and antiques were like 3m cubes and resembled air cargo containers. Although the actual storage space could be smaller than it looked when they included equipment to regulate the temperature and humidity.

But Agnese’s group was on their way to something much larger.

It was located deep in the bank.

They walked down a corridor protected by metal bars and opened one of the silver vaults there.

The door led to a steep staircase.

[[Image:AgneseSS_4.jpg|thumb]]

Once on a basement floor not included on the building’s plans, they found a thick round door just like to a bank vault.

Agnese tossed one of the keys to Lucia.

“It’s the usual system.”

“You mean count down from three and turn the keys at the same time?” asked Lucia with a hint of exasperation.

Remote-controlled robot probes could be used to explore outer space or the deep sea these days, so a machine could easily perform a task as simple as turning a key, but it was all about the aesthetics. With Monaco, the Cayman Islands, the Cook Islands, sketchy online banks, and virtual currencies, there were plenty of tax havens that offered secret banks, yet the rich continued to choose Switzerland because they valued the tradition and stability there. People like that did not look for new services that carried a lot of risk and were not yet perfected. Because they had already made more money than they could ever spend.

With a deep clunk, the round door slowly opened toward them.

Inside, there were metal bars, a passageway, stairs, and an atrium lined neatly with…what looked like as many metal drawers as there were stars in the sky.

“Th-this is it?”

Angelene gulped and was briefly hesitant to enter.

She felt like she would be crossing some forbidden line if she did so.

“This is the Anglican Church’s remote database? This is the ‘information broker’ we’re using?”

“It apparently has around 28,000 in all. In that sense, it isn’t even close to matching ''her''.”

Anyone with any knowledge of magic would know exactly what Agnese was so casually referencing.

The girl who had memorized 103,000 grimoires had become something of a legend.

She was known as the Index Librorum Prohibitorum.

“Well, she was just one of many prototypes and the only one that happened to be successful. Which is why you can still find these failed Indexes that didn’t quite make the cut scattered around the world.”