ARCHER ♤ an unknown hero. ♤ (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
swordedpast) wrote2013-09-12 02:15 pm
swordedpast) wrote2013-09-12 02:15 pm
memory log.
Starter memory
♠ Making his contract with the world in order to save people he couldn't otherwise have saved
Summary: At the scene of some natural disaster, he is surrounded by perhaps a hundred or so strangers he will not be able to rescue in time without additional power and feels desperately compelled to save them for reasons not clear in this memory alone. In that moment of desperation, he senses the spirit of the world, and he pledges his soul to its service after his death in exchange for the power to save the people around him. He believes this means he'll continue to protect the world and save many more people after his death.
Effects: Because of this memory, he immediately, even before having a name, defines himself as someone whose existence hinges on saving people and protecting the world. It's a remote and detached sort of goal, though, because he doesn't know just why he was so determined to save people in his past. He just knows that his purpose in existence is to protect the world...and he immediately finds out that the world has been destroyed. It's only the enthusiastic kindness and optimism that his new teammates, who name him White Swan, show him that gives him the strength to keep going when that happens, so he immediately grows attached to them. This sets up the conflict that will persist for some time: he is torn between being Swan, the protective and watchful figure who earns his worth by taking care of his team, and the nameless spirit from his past who earned his worth by saving people and protecting the world.
First regain
♠ Cooking
Skill. Regained on the first day, in the game of the queen's speech.
Summary: Swan can now cook. Very well, actually.
Game Notes: In this game, Swan confessed to his teammates that he felt that they "saved" him a few hours earlier by providing kindness and hope for him to latch onto even after finding he'd failed at his original purpose. His attachment to his team grows.
Effects: Being able to cook for Takshaka subconsciously reminds Swan that he's the kind of person who likes to be domestic, and it gives him yet another way to help take care of his team.
Second regain
♠ Having a horrible sex dream about Rin at the start of the Holy Grail War thanks to Rider's meddling
Regained on the second day, in the princess's roll call game.
(The name is distorted for now.)
Summary: He dreams of a sexually insatiable Rin Tohsaka (who he knows as Schooler of Epona) in a school classroom, with occasionally creepy eyes. When he wakes up, he is physically ill and emotionally mortified.
Game Notes: Yet again, Swan does silly things with his team, because they can convince him to do anything at this point.
Effects: Swan now knows that he knew Epona's "Schooler" (or, as he calls her, "Miss Harmless"). He also becomes more uncomfortable with himself, having had what he believes to be a glimpse into his own unfiltered, perverted subconscious.
Third regain
♠ Escorting Shirou home from Rin's house, then lecturing him about what heroes really are
Regained on the third day, in the Selkies' game of choice.
Summary: He invisibly escorts a young man, who despite being oddly familiar evokes a deep antipathy in him, through town from a Western-style mansion to a sprawling Japanese house. Before leaving at the end, he pauses to lecture the boy about some sort of fight they're both involved in between "heroic spirits" that involves something called the "Holy Grail," in which he declares that these heroic spirits are actually very unpleasant existences with no wills of their own that only clean up after messes. Full scene here.
Game Notes: Nothing too significant, but Swan does decide that he has to wash out Sparrow's mouth with soap after she swears loudly as part of the game.
Effects: Although Swan doesn't really understand most of what goes on in this memory, he does get a strong sense from it that the person he was before, the nameless spirit who protected the world, was not so much a person as a tool. The memory itself is largely insignificant, though, and he's able to push his feelings about it away fairly easily in favor of thinking about his team and how great they are instead.
Fourth regain
♠ Ilya's death
Regained on the fourth day, in Wilder the Trickster's story game.
Summary: A series of snapshots, over the course of a few weeks, of a giddy, childish young girl with red eyes and long white hair. In the first few, she stumbles or grows suddenly weak during shopping trips or walks through the park. Then she's fumbling at meals at home, then confessing that she can't even taste them. Finally he's arguing with her as she lies in bed, insisting that he's going to save her while she repeats that she's really enjoyed these past few months. In the last part of the memory, he's dully trying to argue about something with a pair of strangely-clad maids. One of them cuts him off: "It's the family's wish that Ilyasviel's body be returned to them."
Game Notes: Swan decides he likes Liter of Ometotchtli because he came up with a cool story about friends having meals together.
Effects: This memory really blows Swan away and makes him question himself despite the support of his team. In fact, it makes him doubt his ability to protect all the people on Takshaka, since he couldn't save one girl in his past. He finds himself becoming a bit more distant and bitter, and also more savagely determined to protect Takshaka where he couldn't protect this Ilya.
Fifth regain
♠ Watching over Rin while she slept outside the church, then talking with her about regrets
Regained on the fifth day, in Nene's secret battle game.
(The names are distorted for now.)
Summary: In a graveyard outside a church, he notices that a teenage girl (yet again, Schooler of Epona) has fallen asleep standing up at his side, so he places his coat over her shoulders to keep her warm. In her sleep, she mutters about being angry. After a while, she wakes up, and the two of them have a discussion in which he refers glancingly to a battle to come. Before they head into combat, the girl asks him about his regrets. He tells her that she is a person who will never need to regret anything, but dodges the issue about his own regrets, mentioning that he is actually long since dead.
Game Notes: Swan exhibits a ruthless side in this game for the first time, reasoning that uncomfortable or upsetting things must sometimes be done to achieve important goals, and helping his team is important enough to warrant it. The results are somewhat embarrassing, but they win, so it's all good.
Effects: Although this memory confirms to Swan that in his world he's a long-dead spirit, as he suspected from previous ones, it's actually refreshingly positive after his last one. In a time when he himself has little faith, he's exposed to Schooler's faith in him and his old self's faith in her, and he finds comfort in it. He also learns that his "Miss Harmless" had some prior significant magical relationship with him.
Sixth regain
♠ "Girls shouldn't fight, Saber."
Regained on the eighth day, in the Princess's codebreaking game.
(The names "Shirou Emiya" and "Rin Tohsaka" are distorted for now.)
Summary: He brings tea to a table where two teenage girls (one of them once again being Schooler from Epona) are sitting and discusses a recent battle with them. It seems he's dissatisfied with the fact that the other girl, Saber, has been fighting in something called the Holy Grail War as his Servant, and he struggles to vocalize just why. In the end, he winds up telling her that it's because she's a girl, and girls shouldn't fight; he'll fight in her place. She is deeply unimpressed, being utterly insulted by this as a Servant and as a warrior. Schooler interrupts their argument, and the memory ends.
Game Notes: This was the first game since Nyssa's trauma game, so Swan was very wary of it, but nothing bad happened.
Effects: How stupid he looks in this memory, and how poorly his teammates react when they see it, tell two things to Swan. One is that he was an idiot in his past life, and the other is that his tendency to try to rush ahead with fighting actions might actually not be a good idea. He doesn't quite get yet that it's a bad idea to try to keep others from fighting in the first place, though; even if he thinks his previous self's reasoning ("girls shouldn't fight"? Really?) was stupid, he still thinks his teammates shouldn't fight because they are kind and gentle people. He stubbornly plans on fighting for them if necessary--but only once he's gotten the skills for it. Amidst all of this, he almost fails to notice something odd about this memory: in it, he's a Master in the Holy Grail War. Wasn't he a Servant in the other ones?
Seventh regain
♠ Being stabbed in the heart by Lancer and then waking up still alive with the mysterious pendant at his side.
Regained on the fourteenth day, in the Queen's setting expansion event.
Summary: He remembers running through the hallways of an empty school at night, trying to escape something. It's in vain, as a fierce spear-wielding man in blue finds him anyway, tells him he's going to die, and drives a lance through his heart, leaving him dying on the floor. As he lies there dying, he hears other voices that he can't quite concentrate on in his hazy pain, and then suddenly he's being healed. When he wakes up some time later, he proceeds to get a mop and bucket and clean up the blood. Then he picks up a red jeweled pendant that was left on the scene for some reason and, without thinking any more about it, heads out of the school.
Game Notes: Swan is more than a little irritated with himself for not getting to do much to help during the chaos that preceded this memory, as he was being chased by demonic chickens.
Effects: By this point, this memory just helps further inure Swan to physical pain. For some reason it seems natural to him to become hardened to that. It also reminds him that even before he became a spirit, he lived a harsh life--and, more importantly, that he was saved when he should have died even before the destruction of his world. But isn't he supposed to be the one doing the saving of other people? He doesn't get it.
Eighth regain
♠ Practicing magecraft while preparing for some kind of mission with a young woman, who increasingly tries to draw his attention away from those preparations to discuss something else, only to give up and tell him that she's leaving him because he cares more about being a hero than about her. She leaves the room without him ever once calling her by name in the conversation.
Regained on the fifteenth day, in the Rotten's shipping game.
Summary: This is a headcanon memory, so it's pretty much what it says on the tin. Because of the context of the game, Swan is, surprisingly enough, able to recognize this memory as him being dumped. Ouch. But why would anyone leave him for being a hero, though? Isn't it a good thing?
Game Notes: He was really indignant about the indecent nature of the Rotten's game, especially since he was already suspicious of her, but at least it confirms for him that some Echoes are merely devilishly mischievous, not outright evil like Nyssa. He would never admit it, but he actually kind of likes the Rotten. She's almost like an obnoxious big sister...
Effects: He becomes a little bit more cynical. Maybe being a hero isn't such a shiny happy path. He doesn't dare admit it openly, though. That would be tantamount to betraying Takshaka.
Ninth regain
♠ Seeing Saber reveal Excalibur in battle.
Regained on the sixteenth day, in Nyssa's targeting trauma game.
Summary: He stands at the edge of a raging battle between two women on a rooftop--one flying on a winged horse, one (the girl called Saber in earlier memories) waiting on the roof with an invisible sword in her hand. As the woman atop the pegasus descends, Saber tears away the illusion of invisibility from her sword and reveals it as a holy golden blade, with which she then launches an enormous magical attack, calling out the name of the sword as she does so: "Excalibur!" Watching from the sidelines, he recognizes this as the sword of Arthur, king of knights, despite the one wielding it being a teenage girl. Somehow, it's impossible not to recognize, and the golden light of the sword fills him with hope and awe. The attack destroys the pegasus rider, and then Saber collapses...
Game Notes: Once again, Swan is faced with pain and suffering dealt to his team, and this time he can't even make much of an attempt to sacrifice himself to save them. (He tries to act as a physical shield for them when the ceiling comes down at the end of the game, but it doesn't work very well.) What's worse, Schooler of Epona, who he knows now is precious to him in her own way, dies painfully in this game too.
Effects: Being treated to a memory of the golden light of heroism right after a traumatic experience has some pretty obvious effects. It reaffirms for him after his recent qualms that following the path of the hero is the right thing to do, even if it's painful sometimes. He will surely be rewarded in the end.
Tenth regain
♠ Magecraft: basic projection (of hollow, nonfunctional items)
Regained on the seventeenth day, in the Dream Traveler's Train Tracker game.
Summary: Swan can now make hollow copies of objects. How weird.
Game Notes: He was suspicious at first, but this game was genuinely harmless despite its often-bloody subject matter. His hostility towards the Echoes in general thaws a little bit. For now.
Effects: He's not sure how this ties in to being a hero, but surely it'll be of some use eventually, right? Swan continues to search for ways to put his skills to use serving his team.
Eleventh regain
♠ Doing lots of reckless, stubborn things in the days after Kiritsugu's death
Regained on the nineteenth day, in Wilder the Trickster's chaos paintball game.
Summary: This memory is a montage. Swan recalls being young, maybe twelve or thirteen years old, and filled with an unnameable grief and distress that he didn't know how to express. Over the course of a few months, he does a number of pointlessly stubborn and sometimes dangerous things as a result, such as staying at his school all afternoon trying to jump over a hurdle that's way too high for him. Each individual instance of stupid stubbornness blends together in his mind; no one is significant, but put them all together and he's obviously in the process of coping (poorly) with some great loss.
Game Notes: Nothing terrible happened, but those unexpected status effects were really a pain. Definitely don't trust Echoes. At least not ones with "Trickster" in their names.
Effects: This memory further confirms for Swan that the right way to cope with pain and grief is to be a stubborn jerk.
Twelfth regain
♠ Fighting Lancer in the schoolyard, only to be interrupted by Shirou's arrival
Regained on the twenty-first day, in the Empress's fashion design game, but it got lost in the nestbed and wasn't taken until several days later.
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Summary: Swan recalls standing on the rooftop of a school after searching the building, invisible at the side of Schooler of Epona, as they investigate some kind of magic. It's apparently a spell that will at some point activate to devour the souls of everyone in the school in order to provide power for a "Servant," which is the kind of spirit that Swan himself is. When he tentatively implies that Schooler should do the same thing to give him power, she firmly rejects the notion--which makes him surprisingly pleased with and proud of her. Before they can do anything about the spell, though, another Servant appears: a spear-wielding man in blue, the very same one who stabbed him through the heart in an earlier memory, who attempts to kill Schooler. Swan engages him in combat in the yard of the school, and the two of them fight with powers quite beyond human levels. The spear-wielder is about to use some kind of deadly ultimate attack on Swan when they both notice that a human bystander is watching. It turns out to be the "Shirou Emiya" boy that Swan recalls from some of his other memories. The battle ends as the man in blue runs off to kill the witness.
Game Notes: Swan was basically useless here. Fashion? What's that? Just wear a cape.
Effects: Besides increasing his affection for Schooler and highlighting to him that he's not quite human, this memory establishes something very important to Swan, in conjunction with the earlier one about being stabbed in the heart by this same spear-wielding man. That is to say, he is two different people in his memories, because some weird time-travel stuff is going on, and one of them is this "Shirou Emiya."
Thirteenth regain
♠ Wandering through the fire at the end of the Fourth Holy Grail War.
Regained on the twenty-fourth day, in Jo the Ghost's eating game.
Summary: Swan remembers being very young, perhaps about seven, and wandering through a blazing fire that enveloped several city blocks. He is alone and beginning to suffer from the pains of smoke inhalation, but he keeps on walking, desperately hoping for someone to save him. People all around him cry out and beg him for help, but he ignores them and keeps moving, seeking help for himself instead.
Game Notes: This is the first game out of several that Takshaka has won, and they did it while paired up with Epona. Swan passed out in the middle of the game from eating something particularly heavy and disgusting, and he's already feeling guilty about that when he gets this memory...
Effects: The need to save people intensifies and is now accompanied by a more clear-cut sense of guilt than before. This memory is so fundamental to Swan's sense of self (or, more accurately speaking, lack thereof) that receiving it feels more like coming home than like acquiring something new, and he knows it immediately. He assumes there's no more change, because of that, but that's not true; in fact, he also becomes more inured to pain and suffering, his sensitive side singed by those fires.
Fourteenth regain
♠ Being tutored in magecraft by Rin
Regained on the twenty-fifth day, in the Dream Traveler's zombie apocalypse game.
Summary: Swan recalls being in a bedroom with, as usual, Schooler of Epona as she lectures him about the proper way to learn magecraft. She makes him attempt to use this "magecraft" to strengthen various items, scolds him when he fails and only breaks them, and tells him that he's utterly without talent. Still, she's obviously trying to help him learn.
Game Notes: This was a particularly traumatic game, as it involved a great deal of choosing between difficult options of different people to save. In the end, Takshaka was able to save a large number of dream-people, but not everyone, and all but one of them died to do it. The experience leaves Swan deeply confused: he knows he doesn't want to see people in pain, but what meaning does "saving" them have if they're just dream figments, and his real teammates suffer as a result?
Effects: Not much to say about the memory itself; he already knows that he knew Schooler. This does reaffirm for him that she's a genius with magic, though.
Fifteenth regain
♠ Rin summoning him, then using a command spell to order him to obey her
Regained on the twenty-sixth day, in the Board's game of Battleship.
Summary: Swan remembers manifesting out of nothing and promptly crashing through a roof into the living room of a Western-style mansion, where a young woman--Schooler of Epona--runs to see him. It turns out she has summoned him as her Servant in something he instinctively knows is called the Holy Grail War, but her summoning was inept and so his memory is briefly a bit muddled. He talks dismissively and sarcastically to her, discounting her pride and power as a magus, until she finally snaps and uses something called a command seal to order him to obey her every will. It doesn't work perfectly, but he does find himself feeling more inclined to obey her...
Game Notes: Nothing particularly significant happened here, save that Swan was a bit dismayed to have to fight against Epona.
Effects: Swan is really rather surprised by how jaded and sarcastic he is in this memory. He still feels a disconnect between himself and the person he is in some of his later memories; what could have happened to make him like that? Other than that, he just determines to keep this memory away from Schooler.
Sixteenth regain
♠ Servant nature: spirit form
Regained on the twenty-seventh day, in the Rotten's failed guro game.
Summary: Swan can now, with a thought, turn himself invisible and intangible.
Game Notes: This game featured horror and death being narrowly averted by the teams working together. Swan feels betrayed by the fact that it was the Rotten who set it up--someone who he'd considered a suspicious but largely harmless pervert and even been weirdly fond of. But he is touched when he finds out that the other teams trusted Takshaka enough to follow their plan.
Effects: This skill is just another reminder that Swan isn't human anymore, but he has hopes that it could be useful.
Seventeenth regain
♠ Lecturing Shirou and Saber in the shed about the futility of heroism
Regained on the thirty-fourth day, in Sepsis's written exam game.
(The name "Archer" is distorted here.)
Summary: Swan recalls walking into a shed at night to see the boy called Shirou Emiya discussing with the Servant called Saber an injury he sustained to his body by overextending himself with magic. They treat him with wariness as if he were an enemy, but Swan merely explains to him how this injury happened, noting that he hurt himself in a similar way when he was first starting out, and reassures him that he'll heal in a few days. Shirou stops him before he leaves, though, demanding clarification about some earlier incident, and Swan proceeds to lecture him about the futility of fighting for an ideal. Then he leaves. Full scene here, from a little less than halfway down the page.
Game Notes: The game was somewhat creepy and disturbing, but harmless. It's Takshaka's first win in quite some time, though, and Swan is relieved that he was finally able to help his team win again.
Effects: Swan is deeply alienated by the jaded, bitter person he is in this memory, but at the same time he feels the ring of truth in what he says--especially since he now knows that due to some kind of weird time paradox, he's also the person being lectured here. In short, he's disgusted by both Shirou Emiya the idealistic boy and the cynical person he remembers being in this memory.
♠ Making his contract with the world in order to save people he couldn't otherwise have saved
Summary: At the scene of some natural disaster, he is surrounded by perhaps a hundred or so strangers he will not be able to rescue in time without additional power and feels desperately compelled to save them for reasons not clear in this memory alone. In that moment of desperation, he senses the spirit of the world, and he pledges his soul to its service after his death in exchange for the power to save the people around him. He believes this means he'll continue to protect the world and save many more people after his death.
Effects: Because of this memory, he immediately, even before having a name, defines himself as someone whose existence hinges on saving people and protecting the world. It's a remote and detached sort of goal, though, because he doesn't know just why he was so determined to save people in his past. He just knows that his purpose in existence is to protect the world...and he immediately finds out that the world has been destroyed. It's only the enthusiastic kindness and optimism that his new teammates, who name him White Swan, show him that gives him the strength to keep going when that happens, so he immediately grows attached to them. This sets up the conflict that will persist for some time: he is torn between being Swan, the protective and watchful figure who earns his worth by taking care of his team, and the nameless spirit from his past who earned his worth by saving people and protecting the world.
First regain
♠ Cooking
Skill. Regained on the first day, in the game of the queen's speech.
Summary: Swan can now cook. Very well, actually.
Game Notes: In this game, Swan confessed to his teammates that he felt that they "saved" him a few hours earlier by providing kindness and hope for him to latch onto even after finding he'd failed at his original purpose. His attachment to his team grows.
Effects: Being able to cook for Takshaka subconsciously reminds Swan that he's the kind of person who likes to be domestic, and it gives him yet another way to help take care of his team.
Second regain
♠ Having a horrible sex dream about Rin at the start of the Holy Grail War thanks to Rider's meddling
Regained on the second day, in the princess's roll call game.
(The name is distorted for now.)
Summary: He dreams of a sexually insatiable Rin Tohsaka (who he knows as Schooler of Epona) in a school classroom, with occasionally creepy eyes. When he wakes up, he is physically ill and emotionally mortified.
Game Notes: Yet again, Swan does silly things with his team, because they can convince him to do anything at this point.
Effects: Swan now knows that he knew Epona's "Schooler" (or, as he calls her, "Miss Harmless"). He also becomes more uncomfortable with himself, having had what he believes to be a glimpse into his own unfiltered, perverted subconscious.
Third regain
♠ Escorting Shirou home from Rin's house, then lecturing him about what heroes really are
Regained on the third day, in the Selkies' game of choice.
Summary: He invisibly escorts a young man, who despite being oddly familiar evokes a deep antipathy in him, through town from a Western-style mansion to a sprawling Japanese house. Before leaving at the end, he pauses to lecture the boy about some sort of fight they're both involved in between "heroic spirits" that involves something called the "Holy Grail," in which he declares that these heroic spirits are actually very unpleasant existences with no wills of their own that only clean up after messes. Full scene here.
Game Notes: Nothing too significant, but Swan does decide that he has to wash out Sparrow's mouth with soap after she swears loudly as part of the game.
Effects: Although Swan doesn't really understand most of what goes on in this memory, he does get a strong sense from it that the person he was before, the nameless spirit who protected the world, was not so much a person as a tool. The memory itself is largely insignificant, though, and he's able to push his feelings about it away fairly easily in favor of thinking about his team and how great they are instead.
Fourth regain
♠ Ilya's death
Regained on the fourth day, in Wilder the Trickster's story game.
Summary: A series of snapshots, over the course of a few weeks, of a giddy, childish young girl with red eyes and long white hair. In the first few, she stumbles or grows suddenly weak during shopping trips or walks through the park. Then she's fumbling at meals at home, then confessing that she can't even taste them. Finally he's arguing with her as she lies in bed, insisting that he's going to save her while she repeats that she's really enjoyed these past few months. In the last part of the memory, he's dully trying to argue about something with a pair of strangely-clad maids. One of them cuts him off: "It's the family's wish that Ilyasviel's body be returned to them."
Game Notes: Swan decides he likes Liter of Ometotchtli because he came up with a cool story about friends having meals together.
Effects: This memory really blows Swan away and makes him question himself despite the support of his team. In fact, it makes him doubt his ability to protect all the people on Takshaka, since he couldn't save one girl in his past. He finds himself becoming a bit more distant and bitter, and also more savagely determined to protect Takshaka where he couldn't protect this Ilya.
Fifth regain
♠ Watching over Rin while she slept outside the church, then talking with her about regrets
Regained on the fifth day, in Nene's secret battle game.
(The names are distorted for now.)
Summary: In a graveyard outside a church, he notices that a teenage girl (yet again, Schooler of Epona) has fallen asleep standing up at his side, so he places his coat over her shoulders to keep her warm. In her sleep, she mutters about being angry. After a while, she wakes up, and the two of them have a discussion in which he refers glancingly to a battle to come. Before they head into combat, the girl asks him about his regrets. He tells her that she is a person who will never need to regret anything, but dodges the issue about his own regrets, mentioning that he is actually long since dead.
Game Notes: Swan exhibits a ruthless side in this game for the first time, reasoning that uncomfortable or upsetting things must sometimes be done to achieve important goals, and helping his team is important enough to warrant it. The results are somewhat embarrassing, but they win, so it's all good.
Effects: Although this memory confirms to Swan that in his world he's a long-dead spirit, as he suspected from previous ones, it's actually refreshingly positive after his last one. In a time when he himself has little faith, he's exposed to Schooler's faith in him and his old self's faith in her, and he finds comfort in it. He also learns that his "Miss Harmless" had some prior significant magical relationship with him.
Sixth regain
♠ "Girls shouldn't fight, Saber."
Regained on the eighth day, in the Princess's codebreaking game.
(The names "Shirou Emiya" and "Rin Tohsaka" are distorted for now.)
Summary: He brings tea to a table where two teenage girls (one of them once again being Schooler from Epona) are sitting and discusses a recent battle with them. It seems he's dissatisfied with the fact that the other girl, Saber, has been fighting in something called the Holy Grail War as his Servant, and he struggles to vocalize just why. In the end, he winds up telling her that it's because she's a girl, and girls shouldn't fight; he'll fight in her place. She is deeply unimpressed, being utterly insulted by this as a Servant and as a warrior. Schooler interrupts their argument, and the memory ends.
Game Notes: This was the first game since Nyssa's trauma game, so Swan was very wary of it, but nothing bad happened.
Effects: How stupid he looks in this memory, and how poorly his teammates react when they see it, tell two things to Swan. One is that he was an idiot in his past life, and the other is that his tendency to try to rush ahead with fighting actions might actually not be a good idea. He doesn't quite get yet that it's a bad idea to try to keep others from fighting in the first place, though; even if he thinks his previous self's reasoning ("girls shouldn't fight"? Really?) was stupid, he still thinks his teammates shouldn't fight because they are kind and gentle people. He stubbornly plans on fighting for them if necessary--but only once he's gotten the skills for it. Amidst all of this, he almost fails to notice something odd about this memory: in it, he's a Master in the Holy Grail War. Wasn't he a Servant in the other ones?
Seventh regain
♠ Being stabbed in the heart by Lancer and then waking up still alive with the mysterious pendant at his side.
Regained on the fourteenth day, in the Queen's setting expansion event.
Summary: He remembers running through the hallways of an empty school at night, trying to escape something. It's in vain, as a fierce spear-wielding man in blue finds him anyway, tells him he's going to die, and drives a lance through his heart, leaving him dying on the floor. As he lies there dying, he hears other voices that he can't quite concentrate on in his hazy pain, and then suddenly he's being healed. When he wakes up some time later, he proceeds to get a mop and bucket and clean up the blood. Then he picks up a red jeweled pendant that was left on the scene for some reason and, without thinking any more about it, heads out of the school.
Game Notes: Swan is more than a little irritated with himself for not getting to do much to help during the chaos that preceded this memory, as he was being chased by demonic chickens.
Effects: By this point, this memory just helps further inure Swan to physical pain. For some reason it seems natural to him to become hardened to that. It also reminds him that even before he became a spirit, he lived a harsh life--and, more importantly, that he was saved when he should have died even before the destruction of his world. But isn't he supposed to be the one doing the saving of other people? He doesn't get it.
Eighth regain
♠ Practicing magecraft while preparing for some kind of mission with a young woman, who increasingly tries to draw his attention away from those preparations to discuss something else, only to give up and tell him that she's leaving him because he cares more about being a hero than about her. She leaves the room without him ever once calling her by name in the conversation.
Regained on the fifteenth day, in the Rotten's shipping game.
Summary: This is a headcanon memory, so it's pretty much what it says on the tin. Because of the context of the game, Swan is, surprisingly enough, able to recognize this memory as him being dumped. Ouch. But why would anyone leave him for being a hero, though? Isn't it a good thing?
Game Notes: He was really indignant about the indecent nature of the Rotten's game, especially since he was already suspicious of her, but at least it confirms for him that some Echoes are merely devilishly mischievous, not outright evil like Nyssa. He would never admit it, but he actually kind of likes the Rotten. She's almost like an obnoxious big sister...
Effects: He becomes a little bit more cynical. Maybe being a hero isn't such a shiny happy path. He doesn't dare admit it openly, though. That would be tantamount to betraying Takshaka.
Ninth regain
♠ Seeing Saber reveal Excalibur in battle.
Regained on the sixteenth day, in Nyssa's targeting trauma game.
Summary: He stands at the edge of a raging battle between two women on a rooftop--one flying on a winged horse, one (the girl called Saber in earlier memories) waiting on the roof with an invisible sword in her hand. As the woman atop the pegasus descends, Saber tears away the illusion of invisibility from her sword and reveals it as a holy golden blade, with which she then launches an enormous magical attack, calling out the name of the sword as she does so: "Excalibur!" Watching from the sidelines, he recognizes this as the sword of Arthur, king of knights, despite the one wielding it being a teenage girl. Somehow, it's impossible not to recognize, and the golden light of the sword fills him with hope and awe. The attack destroys the pegasus rider, and then Saber collapses...
Game Notes: Once again, Swan is faced with pain and suffering dealt to his team, and this time he can't even make much of an attempt to sacrifice himself to save them. (He tries to act as a physical shield for them when the ceiling comes down at the end of the game, but it doesn't work very well.) What's worse, Schooler of Epona, who he knows now is precious to him in her own way, dies painfully in this game too.
Effects: Being treated to a memory of the golden light of heroism right after a traumatic experience has some pretty obvious effects. It reaffirms for him after his recent qualms that following the path of the hero is the right thing to do, even if it's painful sometimes. He will surely be rewarded in the end.
Tenth regain
♠ Magecraft: basic projection (of hollow, nonfunctional items)
Regained on the seventeenth day, in the Dream Traveler's Train Tracker game.
Summary: Swan can now make hollow copies of objects. How weird.
Game Notes: He was suspicious at first, but this game was genuinely harmless despite its often-bloody subject matter. His hostility towards the Echoes in general thaws a little bit. For now.
Effects: He's not sure how this ties in to being a hero, but surely it'll be of some use eventually, right? Swan continues to search for ways to put his skills to use serving his team.
Eleventh regain
♠ Doing lots of reckless, stubborn things in the days after Kiritsugu's death
Regained on the nineteenth day, in Wilder the Trickster's chaos paintball game.
Summary: This memory is a montage. Swan recalls being young, maybe twelve or thirteen years old, and filled with an unnameable grief and distress that he didn't know how to express. Over the course of a few months, he does a number of pointlessly stubborn and sometimes dangerous things as a result, such as staying at his school all afternoon trying to jump over a hurdle that's way too high for him. Each individual instance of stupid stubbornness blends together in his mind; no one is significant, but put them all together and he's obviously in the process of coping (poorly) with some great loss.
Game Notes: Nothing terrible happened, but those unexpected status effects were really a pain. Definitely don't trust Echoes. At least not ones with "Trickster" in their names.
Effects: This memory further confirms for Swan that the right way to cope with pain and grief is to be a stubborn jerk.
Twelfth regain
♠ Fighting Lancer in the schoolyard, only to be interrupted by Shirou's arrival
Regained on the twenty-first day, in the Empress's fashion design game, but it got lost in the nestbed and wasn't taken until several days later.
Summary: Swan recalls standing on the rooftop of a school after searching the building, invisible at the side of Schooler of Epona, as they investigate some kind of magic. It's apparently a spell that will at some point activate to devour the souls of everyone in the school in order to provide power for a "Servant," which is the kind of spirit that Swan himself is. When he tentatively implies that Schooler should do the same thing to give him power, she firmly rejects the notion--which makes him surprisingly pleased with and proud of her. Before they can do anything about the spell, though, another Servant appears: a spear-wielding man in blue, the very same one who stabbed him through the heart in an earlier memory, who attempts to kill Schooler. Swan engages him in combat in the yard of the school, and the two of them fight with powers quite beyond human levels. The spear-wielder is about to use some kind of deadly ultimate attack on Swan when they both notice that a human bystander is watching. It turns out to be the "Shirou Emiya" boy that Swan recalls from some of his other memories. The battle ends as the man in blue runs off to kill the witness.
Game Notes: Swan was basically useless here. Fashion? What's that? Just wear a cape.
Effects: Besides increasing his affection for Schooler and highlighting to him that he's not quite human, this memory establishes something very important to Swan, in conjunction with the earlier one about being stabbed in the heart by this same spear-wielding man. That is to say, he is two different people in his memories, because some weird time-travel stuff is going on, and one of them is this "Shirou Emiya."
Thirteenth regain
♠ Wandering through the fire at the end of the Fourth Holy Grail War.
Regained on the twenty-fourth day, in Jo the Ghost's eating game.
Summary: Swan remembers being very young, perhaps about seven, and wandering through a blazing fire that enveloped several city blocks. He is alone and beginning to suffer from the pains of smoke inhalation, but he keeps on walking, desperately hoping for someone to save him. People all around him cry out and beg him for help, but he ignores them and keeps moving, seeking help for himself instead.
Game Notes: This is the first game out of several that Takshaka has won, and they did it while paired up with Epona. Swan passed out in the middle of the game from eating something particularly heavy and disgusting, and he's already feeling guilty about that when he gets this memory...
Effects: The need to save people intensifies and is now accompanied by a more clear-cut sense of guilt than before. This memory is so fundamental to Swan's sense of self (or, more accurately speaking, lack thereof) that receiving it feels more like coming home than like acquiring something new, and he knows it immediately. He assumes there's no more change, because of that, but that's not true; in fact, he also becomes more inured to pain and suffering, his sensitive side singed by those fires.
Fourteenth regain
♠ Being tutored in magecraft by Rin
Regained on the twenty-fifth day, in the Dream Traveler's zombie apocalypse game.
Summary: Swan recalls being in a bedroom with, as usual, Schooler of Epona as she lectures him about the proper way to learn magecraft. She makes him attempt to use this "magecraft" to strengthen various items, scolds him when he fails and only breaks them, and tells him that he's utterly without talent. Still, she's obviously trying to help him learn.
Game Notes: This was a particularly traumatic game, as it involved a great deal of choosing between difficult options of different people to save. In the end, Takshaka was able to save a large number of dream-people, but not everyone, and all but one of them died to do it. The experience leaves Swan deeply confused: he knows he doesn't want to see people in pain, but what meaning does "saving" them have if they're just dream figments, and his real teammates suffer as a result?
Effects: Not much to say about the memory itself; he already knows that he knew Schooler. This does reaffirm for him that she's a genius with magic, though.
Fifteenth regain
♠ Rin summoning him, then using a command spell to order him to obey her
Regained on the twenty-sixth day, in the Board's game of Battleship.
Summary: Swan remembers manifesting out of nothing and promptly crashing through a roof into the living room of a Western-style mansion, where a young woman--Schooler of Epona--runs to see him. It turns out she has summoned him as her Servant in something he instinctively knows is called the Holy Grail War, but her summoning was inept and so his memory is briefly a bit muddled. He talks dismissively and sarcastically to her, discounting her pride and power as a magus, until she finally snaps and uses something called a command seal to order him to obey her every will. It doesn't work perfectly, but he does find himself feeling more inclined to obey her...
Game Notes: Nothing particularly significant happened here, save that Swan was a bit dismayed to have to fight against Epona.
Effects: Swan is really rather surprised by how jaded and sarcastic he is in this memory. He still feels a disconnect between himself and the person he is in some of his later memories; what could have happened to make him like that? Other than that, he just determines to keep this memory away from Schooler.
Sixteenth regain
♠ Servant nature: spirit form
Regained on the twenty-seventh day, in the Rotten's failed guro game.
Summary: Swan can now, with a thought, turn himself invisible and intangible.
Game Notes: This game featured horror and death being narrowly averted by the teams working together. Swan feels betrayed by the fact that it was the Rotten who set it up--someone who he'd considered a suspicious but largely harmless pervert and even been weirdly fond of. But he is touched when he finds out that the other teams trusted Takshaka enough to follow their plan.
Effects: This skill is just another reminder that Swan isn't human anymore, but he has hopes that it could be useful.
Seventeenth regain
♠ Lecturing Shirou and Saber in the shed about the futility of heroism
Regained on the thirty-fourth day, in Sepsis's written exam game.
(The name "Archer" is distorted here.)
Summary: Swan recalls walking into a shed at night to see the boy called Shirou Emiya discussing with the Servant called Saber an injury he sustained to his body by overextending himself with magic. They treat him with wariness as if he were an enemy, but Swan merely explains to him how this injury happened, noting that he hurt himself in a similar way when he was first starting out, and reassures him that he'll heal in a few days. Shirou stops him before he leaves, though, demanding clarification about some earlier incident, and Swan proceeds to lecture him about the futility of fighting for an ideal. Then he leaves. Full scene here, from a little less than halfway down the page.
Game Notes: The game was somewhat creepy and disturbing, but harmless. It's Takshaka's first win in quite some time, though, and Swan is relieved that he was finally able to help his team win again.
Effects: Swan is deeply alienated by the jaded, bitter person he is in this memory, but at the same time he feels the ring of truth in what he says--especially since he now knows that due to some kind of weird time paradox, he's also the person being lectured here. In short, he's disgusted by both Shirou Emiya the idealistic boy and the cynical person he remembers being in this memory.