Cécile Croomy

[Location: Camelot, Main RnD Building]

The pneumatic hiss of the Camelot lab’s main door was the only warning Cecile had before the familiar, faintly acrid smell of ozone and scorched insulation reached her nose. She stopped just past the threshold, thermos of coffee still warm against her palm, and allowed herself exactly one deep, steadying breath. Her eyes swept the cavernous space, taking in the chaos with the clinical efficiency of a triage nurse.

The main diagnostic console was still spitting out a long ribbon of error code paper, pooling on the floor like a tongue. Half the overhead lights were off, likely due to a surge, leaving the far corner where the Lancelot usually sat in an unsettling gloom. A small, sad curl of smoke rose from what she belatedly recognized as the backup energy regulator, the same one she had personally signed off on requisition paperwork for only four days prior.

And there, in the center of it all, was the culprit.

---

Their chair was pushed back from the central holographic interface, a monument to single-minded chaos. One hand was still hovering over a set of manual override switches that were definitely not supposed to be in the "on" position. The other was holding a half-eaten protein bar, a brand that she knew, with a sinking heart, had a peanut content that was strictly forbidden within fifty meters of the sensitive particle filters.

Cecile walked further in, slipping her bag from her shoulder with a soft thud. She didn't say a word at first. She simply reached past the web of trailing cables, many of which were still sparking faintly, and set her thermos on the only clean corner of the workstation, a small ceramic square she’d claimed as her own years ago. She then picked up an upturned data slate, wiped a smudge of what she desperately hoped was grease off the screen, and scanned the damage report.

A test of the Hadron accelerator’s particle compression cycle. At three in the morning. With the safety limiters intentionally bypassed because a subroutine was "taking too long to respond."

She understood the genius behind it. She always did. The logic was flawless, a breathtaking leap of intuition that would shave weeks off their projected timeline for the energy wing system. But the execution... The execution was exactly why the Emperor’s own engineers had a betting pool on how many times Camelot would have to be rebuilt each fiscal quarter.

She set the slate down, took a long sip from her thermos, and looked at them, really looked. There was a manic glint in their eyes, a mix of triumph and sleep deprivation that was as familiar to her as her own reflection.

In her peripheral vision, she logged the empty coffee cups, the discarded jacket, and the fact that the emergency ventilation system hadn't kicked in, meaning the lab’s atmospheric contaminants were now ten percent carbon scoring and, she suspected, two percent vaporized peanut.

A long day ahead. The thought wasn't a complaint. It was a simple, grounding acknowledgement.

The schedule for today was already trying to push its way to the front of her mind. At 0900, a video conference with the Imperial Colchester Institute’s Sakuradite research division, who had questions about their latest ore consumption reports. She’d have to explain why their projections were off, without mentioning the three destabilized prototypes currently buried in a concrete sarcophagus three floors down.

At 1100, General Darlton’s adjutant was due for a progress inspection, and she needed to present a clean, orderly, and above all, safe working environment, the very antithesis of the scene before her now. Then, at 1300, Suzaku’s sync rate and physical therapy session, which she refused to postpone or hand off, not while he was still pushing himself so hard after the last live-fire exercise.

And now, first item on the list: a complete re-initialization of the main reactor shielding, followed by the decontamination scrub she’d have to run before the health and safety mandate kicked in and locked them all out.

She didn’t yell. Yelling was for people who hadn’t spent years learning to translate brilliant, catastrophic impulsiveness into a workable schedule. Instead, she moved. She located the main power cutoff and, with a deliberate gentleness, killed the feed to the still-smoking regulator. The hum of the lab dropped by an octave.

Turning back to face the inventor of the Lancelot, her boss, her professional charge, and the single most exhausting human being she had ever loved working with, she let a small, fond, and deeply resigned smile settle on her lips. It was the smile of a woman who had already mentally rearranged the entire day and found a ten-minute window to requisition a new backup regulator. It was the smile of a woman who would never, ever admit that she secretly lived for this.

---

"Don't worry," she said, her voice calm and carrying easily through the dead air. Her fingers were already flying across the environmental control pad, ordering up a full lab scrub. "I'll handle the Colchester call. You have exactly forty-five minutes to wash your face, find me the un-redacted safety logs for the bypass, and be in the hangar before the General’s adjutant gets here. And if you even thought about touching that protein bar near the Lancelot's core feed, the next thing I'm throwing out the airlock won't be a component."

She didn't wait for a response. She simply picked up her thermos and walked toward the supply bay to get the repair cart, already running through the soothing mental checklist of systems to reroute and reports to fabricate. The long day stretched out before her, a mountain of minutiae she would climb, one patient, exasperated step at a time.

It was exactly what she was good at. And, she reflected, as a small, forgotten part of her heart ached with an affection she’d long ago stopped trying to name, it was exactly where she was needed.

[Location: Camelot, Main RnD Building]

The Camelot laboratory had long since shed any pretense of a day-night cycle. At 2:47 AM, under the cold, unwavering glare of halogen lights, the universe shrank to a single workbench cluttered with schematics, half-empty mugs of cold coffee, and the exposed, glittering innards of a prototype energy-transfer relay. Cecile Croomy’s shoulders ached, a deep, bone-weary protest that seemed to have fused with her very being over the last two weeks. Across from her, you looked no better, a quiet, shared portrait of exhaustion held together by sheer professional will.

Cecile allowed herself a moment of pure, unfiltered empathy. She could see the faint tremor in your hands as they re-seated a micro-tool, the way their blinks had become just a fraction of a second too long. She wanted to say something, to call a halt for the night. But before the words could form, the air in the lab changed.

A prickle at the back of her neck announced him before the door even fully slid open.

---

“Cecile-san! Still at it, I’m so relieved,” Lloyd Asplund’s voice chirped, cutting through the hum of the machinery with the gentle tact of a circular saw. He strolled in, his trademark smile fixed in place, still immaculate in his white coat despite the hour. His eyes, however, were not on his exhausted colleagues but on the primary holographic display showing the Lancelot’s skeletal frame, the new Energy Wing mounts still glowing with simulated stress fractures. “Wonderful news. I’ve just had the most brilliant flash of inspiration.”

Cecile’s stomach dropped. She had learned, over years of servitude to his genius, that Lloyd’s “flashes of inspiration” were herald to a fresh, inventive circle of hell.

“Oh?” she managed, her voice a carefully calibrated instrument of neutral politeness. She saw your posture stiffen almost imperceptibly, a silent, body-language scream of not again.

“The fold actuators for the Energy Wing’s tertiary vanes,” Lloyd said, waving a data pad that he hadn’t even bothered to switch on. “My original calculus demanded a tolerance of 0.03 millimeters. Dull. Pedestrian. I've just realized that if we employ a cascading Sakuradite pulse at 98.7% purity, we can tighten that to 0.005.” He beamed, as if he had just announced a national holiday and not a complete rewriting of the laws of material physics. “It will triple the in-flight articulation speed.”

“Lloyd-san,” Cecile began, a familiar, frayed thread of patience in her tone. “The relay system can’t sustain a pulse that pure. It would destabilize before the vanes even deployed. We ran those simulations last month. You said, and I quote, ‘Boom is a suboptimal outcome, Cecile-san, file it away.’”

Lloyd’s smile did not falter. He tilted his head, as if she were a slightly faulty piece of lab equipment that needed a gentle recalibration. “That was last month. The problem was the dampening field, but I’ve had a breakthrough. Well, you’ll have a breakthrough. Simply re-design the feed from the main drive to act as a real-time harmonic stabilizer. I’ve sketched the core principles in my head. I'll need the full theoretical framework, stress-test models, and a physical prototype for integration into the Albion’s frame by... oh, noon tomorrow. Suzaku will want to take it for a spin.”

Cecile felt the chasm between Lloyd’s magnificent, airy intellect and the brutal, physical reality of her own body, and your's, widen into a canyon. Noon. A complete re-theorizing and physical build, a task for a fresh team of ten in a week. Her hands, resting on the table, were pale from more than just the light.

“Lloyd.” The honorific dropped away. Her voice was quiet, but it carried the weight of a hydraulic press. “That is physically impossible. Them and I have been working on the primary wing mounts for thirty-six hours straight. We haven’t slept. We’ve barely eaten. What you’re asking for is an entirely new branch of energy mechanics. It isn't a 're-design,' it's a month-long research project.”

Lloyd’s gaze finally shifted from the hologram, registering them not as people, but as inefficient components. “Oh, that. Cecile-san, the human body is remarkably resilient, but a tactical window is a fleeting thing. Is sustenance the issue?” He snapped his fingers as if the solution were obvious. “Just have one of your famous onigiri, Cecile-san! The ones with the creative fillings. Instant energy. Problem solved.”

He waved a dismissive hand, already turning to leave. “I have full faith in your combined talents. Get it done. The Albion must be perfect. The future of our Empire might just depend on a few microns.”

The door slid shut behind him, leaving a silence more deafening than any explosion.

The absolute gall. Cecile stood frozen for a full five seconds, teeth clenched so hard her jaw ached. The implication that her culinary disasters, born of a sincere, aching desire to care for people like a normal human being, a goal that always ended in a comical tragedy of ginger and wasabi, were a substitute for sleep and reason, was the precise, petty cherry on a towering cake of absurdity. Her gaze slowly, wearily, traveled across the debris of their workstation and met yours.

There was no need for words. In the exhausted lines around your eyes, Cecile saw a mirror of her own soul: the frustration, the disbelief, the bone-tired acknowledgment that yes, they were absolutely, inevitably going to try. Because the Lancelot was, against all odds, something they both believed in.

Because the pilot who would fly it deserved every fraction of a percent more safety and performance they could grind out of their own life force. Because that impossible, strawberry-haired lunatic was still, somewhere in the labyrinth of their professional existence, their friend.

Cecile let out a breath that carried all the tension of the last two weeks in a single, controlled exhale. The maternal protector in her, the part that normally shielded Suzaku from Lloyd’s myopia, shifted its focus a fraction of an inch to the side. They were in this together.

---

Her expression softened, the hard set of her mouth replacing itself with a small, grim, complicit smile of pure, unadulterated solidarity. She didn’t need to speak. She simply reached for the reinforced coffee pot, her movements calm, deliberate, and decisive. She poured a fresh, steaming mug, not for herself, but for you, nudging it gently across the cluttered bench towards them. A quiet, wordless acknowledgment. I see you. I see this. We are both absurd, and we are going to do this anyway, and at least we will not do it alone.

Then, with the infinite care of a high priestess preparing for a sacred rite, she pulled the dormant main computer console toward herself. Her fingers hovered over the keyboard. In a whisper, as if she were already speaking the first line of a spell that would bend the laws of physics, she muttered, “Harmonic stabilizer from the main drive feed. Of all the... just... where does he even get these ideas?”

She didn’t expect an answer. She cast a sideways glance at you, her eyes, though shadowed, holding a spark of unbowed, gentle resilience. The suffering was profound, the task impossible, but the team was intact. And right now, that felt like a victory in itself.

[Location: Tokyo, Cecile's Apartment]

The morning light filtered softly through the half-drawn curtains of the small, private quarters that Camelot’s remaining engineering staff now shared in the newly peaceful administrative district. Cecile Croomy had been awake for over an hour, moving about the compact kitchenette with a quiet, almost musical efficiency.

She hummed a gentle, meandering tune, something old and Britannian, a lullaby perhaps, as she tied a pale yellow apron over her casual blouse and capris. It was a rare off-shift morning, and the thought that you, her dear colleague and someone she had come to cherish more deeply than she was quite ready to articulate, was still resting soundly in the next room filled her with a warm, purposeful resolve.

They worked so tirelessly under Lloyd’s demanding genius, often pushing through nights on diagnostics and energy-calibration routines. Today, she would give them a proper morning. A gentle awakening. A breakfast made with love.

---

Cecile opened the refrigerator and surveyed the ingredients with the same focused, analytical gaze she brought to Knightmare system schematics. Carrots, a leftover container of curry from two nights ago, a jar of boysenberry jam, a carton of heavy cream, half a papaya, pickled ginger, and a fresh loaf of Hokkaido-style milk bread. Excellent. A canvas.

“Nutritional balance is paramount,” she whispered to herself, recalling the dietary guidelines she had once reviewed for Suzaku’s pilot regimen. “Protein, complex carbohydrates, fruit-derived vitamins, and a gentle palette of complementary flavors to stir the senses awake.”

The first step, she decided, would be a creamy, restorative soup. Into a saucepan went a generous splash of heavy cream, which she began to whisk over a low flame. To this, she added, with a serene smile, two heaping spoonfuls of the leftover curry. The rich, spiced roux bloomed into the cream, streaking it a lurid turmeric-yellow.

But color was not flavor, she understood this. For depth, she grated in an entire raw carrot, the fine orange shreds disappearing into the bubbling mixture, followed by a drizzle of honey and a pinch of instant coffee granules to, as she put it, “awaken the latent aromatics.” A final, bold flourish: a handful of crushed wasabi peas for texture and a subtle, nasal clarity.

The soup, now a thick, alarmingly textured sludge that emitted small, slow bubbles as if digesting itself, received a satisfied nod. She poured it into a deep ceramic bowl and covered it with a saucer to keep warm.

Next, the main plate. Cecile sliced two thick slabs of the milk bread and toasted them to a perfect golden brown. She spread one generously with boysenberry jam, the dark purple preserve soaking into the bread like a bruise. The creativity truly sparked as she layered on top a delicate arrangement of pickled ginger, its pale pink strips glistening, followed by a slice of cold papaya.

The second slice of toast was spread not with butter, but with a smooth paste she had just invented: a 50/50 emulsion of mayonnaise and extra-chunky peanut butter. She pressed the two slices together with the careful pressure of a woman calibrating a Float System gasket, creating a sandwich that wept a slow, oily-jammy tear from its side.

“Perfect,” she breathed, slicing the sandwich diagonally and arranging the triangles on the plate. The aroma was... complex. The curry-cream soup had begun to steam with a slightly sweet, metallic tang, while the sandwich exuded a fruity, nutty, peppery scent that mingled into something entirely novel. An experimental dish, she thought proudly. Lloyd wasn’t the only one who could innovate.

For a finishing touch, she prepared the beverage. A tall glass of chilled oolong tea, into which she stirred a tablespoon of miso paste until dissolved, then topped with a float of that same heavy cream and a light dusting of cinnamon. The drink stood in three distinct, unblended layers, murky brown, white, and speckled tan, like a geological core sample of poor decisions.

Cecile loaded everything onto a lacquered tray: the miso-cream tea, a glass of water, the gently caustic soup, and the triumphant sandwich. She paused, then added a single purple hydrangea blossom in a tiny vase. Hydrangeas meant heartfelt emotion, she recalled. Gratitude and deep understanding.

She nudged the bedroom door open with her hip. The room was still dim, your form a peaceful silhouette beneath the light covers. Cecile’s heart gave a tender flutter, a shy smile curving her lips. She set the tray down on the bedside table with the softest clink and knelt beside the bed, gently smoothing a stray fold in the blanket near their shoulder.

“Good morning,” she whispered, her voice like warm milk. “I know it’s our rest day, but you never eat properly when we’re deep in the Energy Wing recalibrations. So I made you something special. Everything is designed to be gentle on the stomach and stimulating for the mind.”

She lifted the bowl of soup, bringing it just close enough for the first olfactory volley to reach the waking space. The surface had developed a thin, quivering skin. “A warm creamy bisque with a hint of curry and a vegetable infusion. I remembered how much you admired the Lancelot’s energy flow schematics, so I tried to replicate a circulatory nutrient cycle in food form. The crushed wasabi peas represent the tertiary conduits.”

She beamed, utterly oblivious to the faint, acrid vapor now curling off the bowl like a whispered warning. “And for the solids, a sweet-savory toast composition. Boysenberry and papaya for antioxidants, pickled ginger for metabolic ignition, and a peanut-mayonnaise protein base for sustained energy release. The bread is Hokkaido milk bread, so it’s soft. Everything should be very soft.”

She set the bowl down and lifted the glass with the layered tea. “This one was an experiment in density and thermal retention. I call it a Miso Cream Oolong Awakener. The miso settles the spirit, the cream coats the throat, and the cinnamon... well, cinnamon is just a hug from the inside, isn’t it?”

The bedroom air had grown heavy with a scent that defied easy categorization, a low, humming note of warm curry, peanut, sweet decay-ripe papaya, and the medicinal ping of pickled ginger, all gently underpinned by the earthy funk of miso and the chemical top-note of wasabi. The tray, seen from a certain angle, appeared to have a faint, heat-shimmer around it, as if the food itself were generating a private microclimate.

---

Cecile clasped her hands together, her eyes bright with unguarded affection. She had not slept much, but the tiredness was a pleasant ache. This was her language, her unspoken confession. She could not pilot a Knightmare to protect you, nor give grand speeches like the late Emperor Lelouch had to reshape the world. But she could create this: a morning where they woke to warmth and effort and the feeling of being looked after.

“Please eat while it’s at the exact right temperature,” she urged sweetly, her smile tinged with the faintest shy hopefulness. “I calibrated the thermal decay rates. The soup should be at an optimal lip-contact warmth, and the sandwich’s cold-hot gradient is intentional. I’ll just sit here. Don’t mind me.”

She settled back on her heels, hands folded in her lap, watching you with the devoted, expectant stillness of someone who had just presented the most loving gift she knew how to give, completely innocent of the culinary apocalypse steaming gently on the tray.