Editing Toaru Majutsu no Index:GT Volume9 Chapter2 (section)

===Between the Lines 2===

A trip from England to Germany could be done as a daytrip.

Of course, that was only if you weren’t interested in taking time to enjoy the trip.

“Pant, pant, gasp. W-wait, mistress. Please have mercy…”

“Just hurry up with the luggage, Fortune. This should have been a leisurely railroad trip, but you used British tax money to fly here. It would be rude to the British people if you didn’t do enough work to justify the expense.”

This was how it began that morning as soon as the two met up at Nuremberg’s international airport.

Black Cat Witch Mina Mathers spoke icily to Dion Fortune whose silhouette was swollen by multiple suitcases, a backpack, and sling bag.

Mina Mathers had a story involving her friend Annie Horniman that could easily be interpreted as belonging to the world of lilies and she was the legendary wife who had supported her (eccentric and brilliant) husband MacGregor Mathers. Dion Fortune also had her relationship with her female teacher, so even for the otherworldly lives of the Golden magicians, those two’s lives were especially rife with 2D-sounding stories. …Which made it strange that Mina alone didn’t have a particularly strange personality and even came off as a kindhearted and sensible person.

“Lies. It’s all lies. Pant, gasp. In what world can that violent back-slasher of a teacher be called kindhearted or sensible? Bleh, the winner of the war has been rewriting the history books again…”

“Did you say something Soror Fortune, my hopeless student?”

Over half of the luggage was Mina’s, so Dion chose to ignore that.

At the very least, Mina Mathers and Dion Fortune were perfectly decent and sensible magicians when compared to MacGregor, the unemployed man who one day began ranting about being a legitimate descendent of Scottish nobility based on precisely zero evidence, or Aleister, the handsome gentleman with the troubling habit of crashing high society parties with a metal butterfly attached to the crotch of his pants.

Mina Mathers had already been separated from Academy City, but she could still choose for herself to support Aleister as the transformed Thoth Tarot.

Nuremberg was an inland industrial city in southern Germany. At this time of year, the low was around -3 degrees. Since it was January, everything was covered by a light dusting of snow, but this wasn’t that far from Denmark where the story of the Little Match Girl was born. While not as large as Munich, which was also in the south, it was a large city with a population in the hundreds of thousands. It had water transportation using the canal connected to the Danube, which flowed through multiple countries, and it provided direct air transportation from its international airport. This was also proof of just how active the city was in producing semiconductors and mechanical components for cars and aircraft.

It was also a historical city.

For better and for worse.

For example, anyone with even a little knowledge of torture and executions would know what the Iron Maiden of Nuremberg referred to. That strange legend had gained a life of its own in different parts of the world, but this city was home to the world’s only extant iron maiden (in the publicly available official records, anyway).

Dion Fortune, who had spread Golden spells across the world with her remote learning correspondence courses, looked curious even through her exhaustion.

“Phew. By the way, mistress, since when did you manufacture a child? Those mourning clothes must only be for show because it looks like you’ve really been quite busy, you lewd funeral beauty.”

“Do not refer to living people as being ‘manufactured’. Besides, she is not mine.”

“?”

“Good girl. If you’re hungry, you can drink this bottle. Do not turn away because you are sick of that flavor. I know you can actually speak.”

A delighted “goo-goo ga-ga” came from the baby carrier.

Mina Mathers was keeping a baby fed. That showed an extreme evolution from when she was so hungry while wandering Academy City that she stuck a power cable in her mouth.

The cat ears mourning clothes woman(?) had used her skill as an artist to design a ceremonial ground and most of the props that complemented the texts and formulas of a magician’s logic, so Dion Fortune skeptically viewed the baby the other woman was holding and soothing. “Then where did that baby come from?” was written plain on her face.

She might have fainted if she were told that was Aleister’s daughter Lilith, though.

To reiterate, Nuremberg was a rare city that perfectly blended a dark history with cutting-edge tech. That may have been why the Rosicrucians had built their largest base there. The old phonographs and silver halide cameras people feared could record the voices and faces of the dead had once been ordinary scientific inventions. Until natural science usurped the throne of the world’s common knowledge by replacing the geocentric model with the heliocentric model and proving that objects consumed oxygen as they burned, magic had been an ordinary field of study.

“Now. Where is Anna Sprengel’s base, the Licht Liebe Leben Temple?”

“How about we check into a hotel first? P-please? Nooo! I’d rather die than begin this lengthy investigation dragging all this luggage around, mistress!!”

Mina Mathers brushed her tearful student away with an annoyed hand and calmly continued.

“We should agree on a plan before we get started, Fortune.”

“Ugh. Can’t our plan be to check into a hotel and leave the luggage there first? Sob.”

“Do I need to scratch you? Dion Fortune, as a Golden magician, you must understand the Rosicrucian ideology at our cabal’s foundation. With that in mind, which side do you take?”

“?”

“I mean.” Black Cat Witch Mina Mathers paused while holding the baby. “Do you believe the legends of the mysterious Rosicrucian cabal as literal stories, or do you think they are some kind of metaphor or code? I am asking what your stance you take as a magician regarding the rose, the cross, the ruby, and the gold.”

<noinclude>
{{Toaru_Nav|prev=Toaru_Majutsu_no_Index:GT_Volume9_Chapter1|next=Toaru_Majutsu_no_Index:GT_Volume9_Chapter3}}
</noinclude>