Editing Toaru Majutsu no Index:GT Volume9 Chapter3 (section)

===Between the Lines 3===

Nuremberg, Bavaria, Germany.

“Mistress, can’t we stop for lunch? It’s well past noon… And how do you plan a trip to Germany without including a chance to eat a Hamburg or a Frankfurt!?”

“What do you think we are here to do? And are you planning to tear up a map and eat it? Here, Lilith, your bottle.”

Dion Fortune complained about her empty stomach, but Mina Mathers only gave her an icy look while soothing the baby in the baby carrier.

The black cat witch was here to track down Anna Sprengel’s footprints, but she had known the answer before the investigation even began.

“If you look to the accepted knowledge in modern Western magic, the answer is obvious. Miss Sprengel was a nonexistent magician. At the time of the Golden cabal’s founding, Westcott wanted to give the new cabal greater history and legitimacy, so he invented the fictional magician so he could create the legend of receiving permission from a secret cabal. It was all a one-man show put on through the medium of letters.”

“And when they searched Europe in the usual way, they never could find the First Temple, right?”

“Felkin and others wanted to see the Secret Chiefs so bad they threw money around to wander all across Europe before finally traveling as far as New Zealand.”

“Why do men love endless adventures so much? Not that I like the idea of giving up before even attempting a search and concluding the legendary First Temple doesn’t physically exist and only existed in the hearts of everyone involved in the Golden cabal.”

“It’s just like how it’s far easier to write off paranormal phenomena as neurological or psychological illusions than to try to prove them as something physical. Just goes to show that people have always fallen back on the same excuses when presented with a challenging problem. But at the time, most members thought there was no point in searching out the physical address when they could simply astral project themselves to another phase and receive messages from the Secret Chiefs and their priestess there. Just like thinking remote work is good enough as long as you’re connected with your coworkers by a fiber optic network. All the while, they had no idea who that vague, faceless shadow really was.”

That was their starting point.

And with that in mind…

“Useless student. In that case, ''what is this''?”

“That’s a really good question, mistress.”

There was no building there.

Only stone blocks lined up on the ground in an L-shape. It was a portion of a building’s foundation. The supposedly nonexistent Licht Liebe Leben Temple had left behind physical evidence, just like any historical ruins.

“Mistress, what does this mean? I just want to drink a local beer already. One of those first-rate dark beers the Germans pride themselves in and are legendary for being cheaper than water.”

“We are not here to drink. Aren’t you supposed to be investigating at the British people’s expense?”

“Ehh? Why should you care about British finances?”

“Because Mina Mathers was originally a magician in London, my foolish student.”

The First Temple really did exist.

Or some remnant of it did.

What purpose was hidden behind this contradiction?

“Ugh. The Anna Sprengel in the secret letters was basically ''Westcott talking with his own sockpuppet, right?'' We aren’t going to discover that coroner was parading around Germany in women’s clothing, are we?”

“I honestly think that would be the funniest possible explanation, but I doubt it.”

Mina Mathers crouched down for a closer inspection of the L-shaped foundation.

Testing the carbon isotopes in the materials would provide their accurate age.

Just because they looked old didn’t mean they couldn’t be quite new.

And there were things that only showed up in a very detailed deception.

“Most likely, there was a magician called Anna who specialized in Rosicrucian magic. Anna isn’t exactly a rare name, after all.”

“Bweh? But if she was using a fake name, surely she could have come up with something better than Anna.”

“You would think that, wouldn’t you, Dion Fortune? Or should I say-”

“Cough, cough! How about we stay on topic, mistress? There’s no reason to bring that up!!”

“Violet Firth. It seems like a perfectly cute name to me.”

“Why would you go ahead and say my real name when I made it so obvious I didn’t want you too!?”

The girl who normally went by her super cool screenname was blushing, tearful, and upset. She must not have liked her name for some reason.

But ultimately, this may not have been a rare occurrence in the world of magicians where powerful individuals determined their own value.

If you worried too much what others would think of you and tried to correct yourself to their liking, you would never excel as a magician.

(If you want to go there, my husband was basically unemployed and claimed to be Scottish nobility. He got so obsessed with it he named his own bloodline and invented all sorts of other details to go along with it. He was living proof that if you have the passion, you can continue your teenage cringe well into adulthood.)

“Sigh…”

“Mistress, that was a heavy sigh. Is something wrong?”

“Oh, I was just thinking how tiring it is to be the only sensible person around.”

“Mercilessly delivering kitty claw attacks the instant you lose your temper is your idea of ‘sensible’?”

“I do not punch and I do not use the kitchen knives. That puts me well on the side of sensible.”

“I notice you didn’t mention palette knives. You’re always swinging those metal weapons around.”

“What makes you think you can criticize your own teacher, my hopeless student? Some gentle punishment is in order to swiftly correct such an unfortunately mistaken soror.”

“You’re proving my point! How is this ‘gentle’!? Ow, owww!?”

Mina Mathers immediately began some corporal punishment by shoving a metal spatula against Dion Fortune’s navel and rubbing it over her clothes, but the concept of a healthy educational environment was still a work in progress from the late 19th century to the early 20th century.

“Hee hee. This is only a wife finally reaching the end of her patience and making an adorable scratching attack with only her wrist. Meow, meow☆”

“Stop trying to pass your violence off as adorable! I was the primary victim and my back looked like a tiger had clawed it! Big cats are not the same as housecats! Your student nearly died!!”

The (according to the teacher) nonsensible student’s testimony was thrown out.

Before scraping off a sample, Mina Mathers made an accurate sketch rather than snapping a photo with her phone. All while she soothed Lilith in the baby carrier.

“But if we don’t know what Anna this Anna is, that means she is not a major magician. And not many people would have listened to what a no-name magician said. Even if this mystery Anna had proper Rosicrucian knowledge, she wouldn’t have had a way to pass it on.”

“That would explain why everyone looked down on her, decided to do things their own way, took shortcuts, and skipped pages in the thick grimoires.”

What happened afterwards went without saying.

What would happen if someone got bored after the first few pages of reading a flight manual more than 8cm thick, shut the book, and climbed into the cockpit? It didn’t take much thought to imagine the tragedy that would unfold.

The Rosicrucian cabal was also known as the unseen university.

All that knowledge was lined up in the way calculated to best foster learning, so you could not just cherry pick which parts interested you. But the hobbyists had grabbed only the most impactful and exciting terms and started using the magic without knowing what the incantations and symbols would actually do. They didn’t want to study, but they did want a degree and an academic history. The desire was understandable, but granting it would not make anyone happy. In some cases, it could even put lives at risk.

She must have despaired.

Both at the ignorant masses who refused to learn things in the proper order and at herself for being too unimportant to guide them properly.

The accuracy of her knowledge was not the issue.

No one trusted in her enough to think what she was saying was accurate.

So they looked down on her, so they failed spectacularly, so they suffered meaningless deaths and mental destruction. Again and again. When none of it would have happened if they had just listened.

And….

“She wanted a name for herself. The problem wasn’t her foolish students. Her own lack of fame had ultimately led to all the deaths and destroyed minds. If she were only someone important, she thought she could correctly guide the students who arrived in search of wisdom.”

“…”

“At the same time in England, Westcott wanted a fictional legend behind the creation of the Golden cabal, so he began his faked exchange of letters. It must have come as a shock to him when he sent a letter to an arbitrary address to help create his fictional persona and then received a real reply from someone claiming to be Anna Sprengel.”

“Yeah, that’d scare you.”

“To say the least. His face would also have been burning with embarrassment.”

In modern times, it would be like the ideal wife he had imagined in his head, or the girl he had created on the character creation screen, suddenly coming to life.

Had he felt fear, or joy? Westcott had not discussed the truth of the letters with anyone until the day he died. Not even with the other Golden magicians.

“Was it automatic writing or sleepwalking? Had another Golden magician peeked at his letter and responded as a joke? Or had the ceremonial act of writing fictional letters so many times ''created'' Miss Sprengel in distant Germany? As a magician and a coroner, he must have come up with several possible explanations.”

“Yeah, it was smart of him not to go to the church to confess or go running to a mental hospital.”

“Confessing involvement in magic to an Anglican priest would never end well and you can guess the quality of 19th century mental healthcare. He was one of the few sensible members of the eccentric Golden cabal. He cared about keeping up appearances. If he had confided with anyone, the talk of magic cabals and writing letters to himself would have made them think the man had never left his teenage fantasies behind.”

That explained why the foundation of the First Temple remained in Nuremberg.

Miss Sprengel was a role Anna had borrowed to put real weight behind her name.

Traveling all the way to Nuremberg and fabricating these ruins would have been a simple enough task to that end. She had created a surprise for any Golden magician who might travel all the way from England to southern Germany to check.

Dion Fortune sounded disgusted by it all.

“So you’re suggesting Anna read through Westcott’s letters and then altered a part of Nuremberg just to match his fictional story? That seems like a lot.”

“She must have wanted to be thorough. Westcott, Mathers, and the others believed in and respected this Miss Sprengel who appeared out of nowhere, but for Anna, the rise of the world’s largest cabal in London ''was no more than advertisement for her'' as a magician said to have played a role in its founding. The end of the 19th century was before World War One, so the center of the world at the time was the UK, not America. London would have been the best possible location for that kind of advertisement.”

However, this puzzle had proved too difficult and the Golden magicians who traveled Europe to meet the Secret Chiefs and their priestess never did find the trick set up in Nuremberg.

“Miss Sprengel was a complete lie,” whispered Mina Mathers. No matter what they found, that remained unchanged. “Even if she was named Anna, she was no more than a half-baked magician who could never hope to defeat Kingsford. But it is true she worried over her problems and poured her heart and soul into preserving and expanding the Rosicrucian cabal. And ultimately, that led to the creation of the Golden cabal in distant England. Most likely, Kingsford recognized Miss Sprengel as a true magician who had accomplished something she could not. No matter how it might have happened.”

Anna Kingsford was real.

Anna Sprengel was also real.

With those two facts established, Black Cat Witch Mina Mathers muttered under her breath.

“Then who exactly is the Christian Rosencreutz both of those legendary women believed in and dedicated themselves to?”

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