The Sleeping Jester

"Humanity, intent on becoming the greatest predators in a cosmos that warred against them, became a serpent that consumed its own tail. We are all self-destructive – that is both cause and justification for why I drink."

- The Sleeping Jester.

Sleeping Jester (スリーピングジェスター) is the Jester-class Servant of Nadia Kan as part of the Magician's Theater in the Vodnyisad War of Seventh Overture. One of the unorthodox classes born of the Corrupted Grail, Jester and her class are the corollary of the Program of Mind. The Jester is one of the few classes to have been present in the project since the very beginning.

Identity
Jester's identity is Lady Koi (諏訪の女性の恋), The White Kitsune of Suwa. Born the daughter of the warlord Suwa Yorishige, she witnessed her father being driven to suicide after a crushing defeat against the warlord Takeda Shingen and the subsequent humiliation he suffered at the following peace conference. Shingen would go on to force marriage upon Suwa Yorishige's 14-year-old daughter, Lady Koi, who was his own niece. Lady Koi's beauty drove Shingen to such degrees of obsession that his superstitious followers became paranoid, believing her to be the incarnation of the divine white fox that lived within the Suwa shrine, who had bewitched their lord in order to gain revenge. When their son Takeda Katsuyori proved to be a disastrously incompetent leader who led the once-mighty clan to a crushing defeat at the Battle of Nagashino, they remembered this "curse" and the unhappy circumstances that surrounded the mother who bore their lord.



Appearances
Regardless of the situation, she wears a long, loose ornamental robe of heavy white silk over linen smallclothes. Often disheveled as if only just rising from bed, her most distinctive feature is her pitch-black hair that is so long it pools at her feet, and the primary reason she typically levitates when fighting. Her face and frame are young and slight, hauntingly pale and unrealistically beautiful, and she cannot go about in public because of the attention that she would attract.

Personality
While she has the appearance of a regal, young woman, that does little to hide her sullen, despondent attitude. She barely bothers to maintain her appearance and makes no effort to even hide her identity as a Servant, often introducing herself by name. Possessing a gourd of divine wine from her lifetime, she is often drunk or exhausted, showing true enthusiasm for nothing. Despite everything, she possesses the nature of a meticulous genius and a tremendous will, but she buries it under her cynical attitude, unable to accept the virtues that only brought her trouble in life.

Her attitude towards being summoned is largely apathetic, and when The Roaring Archer confronts her flippant attitude towards her second chance at life and her disregard for humanity and honor, she justifies it by stating that the stories about her were correct, and that she truly is a wicked woman who resents all humanity because of her own misfortunes. She had always been treated inhumanely and used for the advantage of others, and the greatest pleasure she experienced in life was hearing the pity of the commonfolk of Suwa as they remembered her unhappy story and the country fell to pieces around her. It strikes her as amusing that history chose to remember her as a tragic figure, and she admits to enjoying the feel of being pitied, having felt no other form of consideration during her lifetime.

Yet her cynical and spiteful attitude is undermined by having known happiness as a child and understanding that the systems which created her misfortune are no longer the laws of the world. She possesses knowledge of moral and ethical right and wrong, and in the case of women, is strongly opinionated. Though she had no intention of fighting for the sake of another person, the mistreatment Nadia Kan suffered at the hands of her superiors causes Jester to be intensely protective of her Master, initially scheming to destroy the entirety of the military stationed in Vodnyisad, killing everyone who could have possibly harmed her. The Dreaming Stranger calls her mindset that of someone who desperately wants to do the right thing, but cannot bring herself to do so alone, having been stripped of the ability to depend on her own talents and motivation in life.

The relationship she has with The Dreaming Stranger is peculiar, and she is a genius of such calibur that she is capable of seeing through her lies when even the Defense Programs of the Holy Grail and Stranger's own Master are unable to do so. She is able to reverse-engineer Stranger's scheme from the very beginning, discovering the existence and truth behind the Mirrored World, but does not reveal it to anybody, stating that she solved the mystery purely for her own sake, because she hates not understanding the conditions that affect her life.

She possesses enough cunning to outwit the Program of Mind in every cycle of the Vodnyisad War, despite it existing in infinite time and remembering the conditions of every defeat.

Development
Jester was originally designed to function purely as an introductory antagonist to show off one of the new classes, but her creator decided that her personality was too dynamic and her arc would be “unfulfilled” if she were to simply die fighting as a Servant early on. Along with The Roaring Archer, Jester is one of the two mascots of Seventh Overture. It was the creation of her spells and Noble Phantasms that led to the development of much of the system behind Seventh Overture.

Seventh Overture
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Random Acts Assassins
Jester appears in only a handful of entries, either mentioned in passing or talking to The Penitent Ruler in a friendly manner. When the assassin World-Eyes attempts to kill The Lady in Black, Jester materializes one of the rifles from 3,000 Cycles - The Flowering at Nagashino and blows off both of his legs before incinerating the rest of his body with a talisman. She then says that she has to go check on Nadia and leaves.

Another Story
Jester appears as a third-year student who is actually the founder of the Samaritan Society, rather than The Dreaming Stranger like everyone believes. She spends every day after school waiting on the bleachers by the track for her close friend, Camilla, to finish with practice so they can walk home together. It is mentioned that she lives by herself, but her neighbor, Nadia, and Camilla look after her to make sure she does not regress to her shut-in tendencies. She was abused by her uncle as a child and ran away from home, and falsely attends Muonomi Academy as Stranger's cousin, borrowing her family's surname.

Abilities
Jester is a princess who possesses the powers of a Phantasmal Beast due to her association with the White Kitsune of Suwa. She is a being with divine powers from the Age of Gods that should not exist in the modern era, and as a result her presence strangles out modern magecraft simply by existing. Despite lacking any martial or magical skill during her lifetime, the fusion of her identity with that of the divine fox that inhabited the shrine at Suwa grants her the properties of a monster, enacting phenomena around her that twist the rules of an era in a manner closely resembling magic. Lacking both the requirements and refinements of proper magic, coupled with Jester's lack of actual combat experience, she is considered by The Dreaming Stranger as the most supremely prana-inefficent spellcaster to exist within the Throne of Heroes.

She possesses an enormous reserve of prana, as well as the ability to generate enormous amounts of power by annihilating the natural laws of the world around her. As a "monster", she is capable of robbing the world around herself of prana, and concepts such as "color" and "good luck" will even begin to evaporate from the environment if she relies on her monstrous nature long enough. In an environment such as Vodnyisad, which closer resembles post-war ruins than an actual metropolis, her ability to take in power through this ability is greatly reduced, and with a Master with only a minimal capacity of prana, she must take extreme care not to overuse her powers.

In truth, Jester should not need to "cast" her spells, as they are phenomena innate to the nature of the White Kitsune of Suwa. Since it is an assumed identity akin to symbiotic possession, and not a power she was born with, however, Jester must perform a gesture towards the divine fox in order to access its power - typically by joining together their names on talismans inked with her blood. As a form of activation that is independent from the restraints of sorcery, there is no actual concept of "casting time" for her abilities - the power of the divine fox can be invoked instantaneously so long as the talismans have been prepared beforehand. As a result, despite her radical inefficiency with prana when activating these talismans, Edgar Wayneright, a magus regarded as being one of the ten most talented Lords of the era, equates the difference between her powers to his own as that of a naval bombardment compared to killing ants with a magnifying glass in the sun. It is estimated by Jester that if she were to drain the lifeforce of humans to power her abilities, it would take the lives of nine-hundred humans to sustain her typical bombardment for four seconds.

Her main offensive spell is Rain of Cinders (噴石の雨), where her name and the white fox's are joined under the character for fire. Each talisman produces ten bolts of fire that are each at least equal to the power of one of Edgar Wayneright's Revolver Violet (リボルバーバイオレット) shots. It takes her only a single motion to create each talisman, and typically prepares hundreds of them at once and stores them in the sleeves of her robe, though the prana cost is extreme in this quantity. In battle, she throws them from her sleeves several at a time, and the bombardment is capable of leveling a city in less than an hour, and is equated by The Roaring Archer to an artillery strike of the modern era. Because she throws the talismans in such quantity, it is possible for Jester to rapidly overspend her prana and damage herself in the process.

When comparing the speed and power of her ability to that of The Bewitching Caster, Jester states that her method is inferior to that of any legitimate sorceress from the Age of Gods. While she is capable of effortlessly matching Edgar Wayneright, one of the most directly powerful young magi of the modern era, with a single talisman, she believes that she is one of the weakest spellcasters to exist within the Grail. Even though she is brilliant enough to flawlessly recognize and comprehend theories of magic, she is not able to manipulate magical energies herself, and is limited greatly by the need to infliuence the White Kitsune in order to access her powers.

She uses One-Tail: Spiral Fire (1尾：スパイラル火災) as her primary means of defense, which creates a vacuum shield by spinning nine vertically-standing rings of fire so rapidly that even other Servants perceive it as a bubble of energy. Unlike a conventional shield that deflects attacks off of its surface, the spinning vortex of fire and monstrous power shreds into whatever strikes it like a wheat thresher. Physical objects that come into contact with it are eroded away instanaenously by the pseudomagical fire, while magical energies are disrupted and scattered by the swirling energies of the demonic fox. As it requires the power of the demonic fox to even use, however, Jester must expose her identity in order to use this spell, as it requires that at least one of her tails must be active.

When channeling the power of the White Kitsune, she has access to a number of defensive skills that replicate the powers of a Phantasmal Beast, such as her Colorless Sky and Sea (無色の空と海), a protective spell that treats her white robes as the pelt of the White Kitsune and borrows its properties of being untouchable by the weapons of man. Her body is able to instantaneously recover from injuries as long as she has the prana to spend. She also possesses an unnamed ability that she can use whenever at least three of her tails are present where she is capable of manipulating the space and distance between herself and her target so that she is constantly in their "blind spot", no matter how they try to reorient themselves in relation to her.

The power of the White Kitsune is represented by Jester's hair, in turn the aspect of herself that she considers most distinctive of her personal identity. Not a true kitsune, but an individual who absorbed the identity of the divine fox, Jester does not possess any tails. Instead, when she calls upon the power of the White Kitsune, she takes on a number of tails appropriate to the scale of the request. Each tail appears as a long, white streak in her hair, and at nine tails, her hair floats around her wildly in nine directions, only a single streak of black remaining. Though Jester considers herself personally weak, she admits that the White Kitsune is a top-class mythological beast that feasted with the gods, and that if given time to summon all nine tails, she could easily become the greatest monster of the modern era.

Skills
Entrapment of the Loaded Deck: B

Class Skill of the Jester that permits the ability to "cheat" the power structure of the Holy Grail. When faced by skills or Noble Phantasms that impose a check against the Jester's parameters, they are capable of meeting the check purely through the possession of this skill. At this level of skill and above, it is possible for the Jester to treat an opponent as having failed a check against her own skills, even if they were qualified to meet it in the first place.

Lady of Grace and Holding: A

Ideal of divine beauty that defined the upbringing of young noblewomen in the ancient east, and an aesthetic power of womanhood that could sway both divine and demonic forces. The means by which a "Mystic" feature is cultivated not by blessing, but by mortal efforts. At this level, the Servant possesses Mystic Features pertaining to "Face", "Eyes", and "Voice" all of moderate power, and individuals capable of finding them attractive have a difficult time taking aggresive action against them.

Ominous Intrigue: B

Ability to twist one's own identity to reflect the rumors surrounding themselves. At this level of refinement, the Servant is capable of actively acquiring skills and abilities that were not possessed in life so long as rumors are disseminated throughout the area. In cases where an opponent sorely underestiates the Servant because of these rumors, all actions receive a significant increase to success so long as the opponent considers themselves innately superior.

Onmyoudo: C

School of ritual sorcery popular for its exorcism properties, the use of talismans for combat arcanism and summoning was most prominent in the Kansai region. Allows for the creation of paper talismans beforehand that can be activated at any time so long as the Servant possesses the capacity to "sign" the talismans in some manner. Rituals cannot be prepared at this rank, and spells that require large amounts of power will decay over time if the talismans are unused.

Shapeshift: B+

Referring both to the ability to change one's physical appearance and the theft of another person's body, representative of the effectiveness of one's disguise. At this level, mannerisms and social awarenesses may be assimilated, but at the expense of the user's own abilities. Additionally, in the case of The Sleeping Jester, who possesses two forms, it is possible to take on the appearance and abilities of the White Kitsune of Suwa, though to a lesser degree than if released through her Noble Phantasm.

Wronged One: C

The nature of having wrongfully suffered at the hands of powers above oneself and been led to ruin as a result. This skill not only permits the user to possess thoughts and philosophies that would be considered monstrous without betraying their archetype of "hero", but also grants additional ability when faced with oppresive forces similar to those of their lifetime. Additional power may be achieved by deluding oneself to believe their surroundings represent the oppresive environment of their life, sacrificing sanity in order to rase base parameters.

Noble Phantasms
In combat, Jester prefers to avoid utilizing her Noble Phantasms not because she is afraid to reveal her identity, but because she finds them to be symbolically depressing. Her primary Noble Phantasm is Kitsune no Yomeiri, which she summons by sending a flare of prana into the sky to part the clouds and reveal the sun. The enormous lens collects sunlight and combines it with the pseudomagical power of the White Kitsune, raining down tremendous beams of magical energy that mimick the properties of light. It requires no prana other than the amount spent to summon the lens and part the clouds, making it Jester's favorite, as it can be abused without regard to her prana limitations. Though it is never shown during the Vodnyisad War, Jester states that if summoned during the night, the lens is capable of concentrating moonlight; inferior in destructive potential, the waves of rainbow light that shower down from the lens induce madness and rearrange the laws of probability.

Contrary to her image as a princess, as well as a spellcaster, Jester often carries around a large flintlock rifle and demonstrates tremendous skill as a marksman, often wielding it with one hand and ignoring the iron sights. In truth, it is a piece of her her most powerful Noble Phantasm, 3,000 Cycles - The Tragedy of Nagashino. Jester can summon up to 3,000 antiquated spherical bullets from her sleeves, each one mixing with her prana to become a magic rifle capable of firing a single shot. When Jester summons any number of rifles beyond the first, the rifles that she cannot personally wield are taken up by a phantom soldier. It is impossible for Jester to influence the Noble Phantasm with any sense of precision, and any command to aim more complicated than a general order to destroy the opponent is meaningless. Rather, as each shot is capable of vaporizing even a powerful familiar, the preferred tactic of Jester is to simply destroy everything within sight, filling the air with so many projectiles - sometimes throwing talismans into the chaos - that even the most agile opponents cannot hope to dodge every shot.

Though the rifles are considered a part of Jester and cannot be wielded by other Servants or stolen from her, she is able to "loan" them to her Master, and Nadia Kan was able to carry one of the rifles around despite being several kilometers away from Jester.

Jester compares the phantom soldiers to idiotic puppets that only have the function of pulling a trigger, and are incapable of being used for anything else. As puppets, however, their knowledge of weaponry and warfare is derived from Jester's own, and because she is a genius who can easy comprehend complexities of the modern era, it is possible for them to utilize modern weaponry in a similar fashion to the flintlock rifles, so long as they are summoned adjacent to it. During the Vodnyisad War, Koi shows the ability to summon soldiers at opposite ends of the city simultaneously, though she admits that the only reason that the pincer attack worked was because all of the weapons that she had set up were already pointed at the target.

Nine Tails Assumption allows Jester to draw upon the power of the divine fox in order to fuel her spells or trigger phenomena around herself. In the event that she summons the full power of the White Kitsune available to her as a Servant, she is capable of utilizing the Shapeshift skill in order to transform into the fox, as it can be considered to be as much her natural body as the humanoid one of Lady Koi. When active, she is considered a member of the Phantasmal Race, and her armor class is similar to that of a pegasus.