Sometimes they are five. Sometimes they are three.
We do not merely destroy our enemies;
we change them.
WELCOME TO THE END OF TIME.
The Regency has its spies and its cloaks and daggers. You may have even brushed shoulders with one and not have known it. There is a place for such tactics. You are not in that place any longer.

On missions like these, the Regency prefers to keep its base close, in a intradimensional time pocket. You're apart from Gallipoli, no longer technically on Earth or in the 1910s. There are multiple segments to this complex base of Regency operations, but you can only really see two places...
THE BRIG
This is your holding cell, a constantly shifting room of indesctructable grey squares. It folds and bends to hold you and your seven companions as you await... something.
There are no guards in this place. There are no bars to look through, or sounds to listen for. You are simply in the box, left to your own devices.
Occasionally, holes will open in the ceiling, and packaged, processed rations will fall from them before immediately closing. This is the only way to measure time. There are always exactly eight bags, each with the name of one captive written on the side in their native language.
Holes will occasionally open in the walls, and they always bring with them a searingly bright light. Sleeping and sitting is difficult on the ever-shifting floors, and when you try, it always seems like a pinhole of light opens right on your eyes. Even leaning on the walls has mixed results.
DON'T GO TOWARDS THE LIGHT
The windows of light that open always stay very small, making it difficult to look through, and always pour radiantly bright, hot light. If you're feeling particularly self-punishing, you might be able to peek at an odd angle and see something of the world outside without being completely flashblinded. The world outside the Brig looks rather like the interior of a Dyson sphere. In the center, a great, bright, hot energy radiates out like a sun, and it reflects off the exterior globe the pocket dimension functions within, illuminating everything from every angle. The Brig floats around it in a slow orbit, as do many other similar looking box-rooms made of similar material, connected by constantly moving tubes and chutes. Some boxes have more chutes going toward them than others. No chutes connect to the Brig, unless someone is about to disappear into the floor...
Getting this view will be difficult, but not impossible; it will just take characters willing to blind themselves with an overabundance of light multiple times until they get the correct angle, allowing them to see outside for roughly a half second before the room shifts to redirect the light back into their eyes.
not so solitary confinement
Occasionally, the cube will split into smaller segments, throwing characters together with others at random in close confinement. This is unpredictable and fast, splitting you off from the whole for what feels like hours at a time, often with only one companion as the cube shifts and squirms around you.
technical malfunction
The power nullification is still in full effect. No magic or special abilities rule this place. Your only master are the walls, undulating with no discernible pattern, always moving.
The Regency has also attempted to break the BCE's translation capabilities, but due to the fact that COST-jailbroken BCEs work on a different system than Regency ones, this is an intermittent problem that occurs sporadically. (ie, have the translation capabilities blink in and out at your discretion.)
THE OTHER PLACE
And then, suddenly, the floor drops out from underneath you. The shifting walls make a hole perfectly your shape and size, and sucks you through. The hole closes neatly, immediately, and you slide along in a world of boxes pressing close to your skin as you are moved from one holding area to another.
When you emerge, you do so in total darkness. Power nullification is still in effect, but even if you can naturally see in the dark, it doesn't matter. All you can see is an endless blackness, and walking doesn't help. You can keep walking for however long; there is nothing to walk to. The floor is perfectly level, but you'll never reach a wall.
Finally, there's light in the distance. A spotlight from nowhere shines down on a person with the head of a jackal. Looking closer, you'll find it's some kind of highly technical mask. They are wearing armor that obscures their exact shape-- no skin shows, no hint of identity or personality, just the cold eyes of the mask. They turn to you, and speak in a voice clear and soothing, almost gentle.
"I am Kebechet. I have been looking forward to speaking with you."
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Kebechet turns to walk away, steps echoing through the dim light.
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"... I can be my own kind of king." It's strange that Midnighter's words, which he'd resisted before, come back to him now. "And I'll choose for myself. That's my only answer to you."
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If Noctis tries to move, his feet will bump against... something. It gives slightly, rolling on the ground, the size and shape of a prone body, but the light is too dim to identify it who lays at his feet.
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The step forward to punctuate his words cuts him off, the physical barrier taking him aback as he slides his foot back just as quickly.
"... I made a fucking choice; what do you want?"
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The light around them fades dimmer, until Kebechet can barely be seen at all. "Perhaps you only learn by the methods of my contemporaries, as they advised me. Regrettable-- it is a harsh road. But you have chosen it."
And Kebechet is gone, leaving Noctis in the dark with a body at his feet. What little light there is grows just enough to outline it in dim shadow: a fallen king, his father's body.
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He's right.
Noctis's knees shudder with a tortured moment of realization, of recognition, and he's not sure whether or not he makes a sound (he does). But in the next second he's sinking to the ground, reaching hurriedly for that body in denial of his own horror to clasp at the back of his neck and support his head off of the ground. This is an image he'd been spared until now. He hadn't witnessed his father's corpse and he barely sees him even now, vision blurring with tears as he drags him closer when a very real part of him wants to push him away.
"Dad... Fuck, don't do this--" He doesn't know who that aborted plea is even directed to, too focused on trying to steady suddenly uneven breathing. It's delayed shock settling in now, hard and fast.
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Soon, trapped in bare darkness, Noctis will find him cramped in a coffin with his father.
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Guilt weighs on him as their surroundings do, forcing him to shift in order to accommodate a far more symbolic prison than any he's occupied yet.
"What--" He swallows hard to cut off a sharp gasp, red-ringed eyes glassy as one hand reluctantly pulls away from his father just to feel out the lid of that coffin from the inside. "Hey!" His next strike is far more violent, one that bruises knuckles instead of forcing anything else to give way.
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He fumbles blindly in the dark for his father's hands, suddenly, feeling the fingers of one first and then the other in a last desperate hope. The ring, if he just can get ahold of the ring, if he has it...
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The heat begins to climb as he pushes Noctis away.
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"Dad...? Dad, hey!"
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"This isn't real, this isn't real..." he repeats to himself, a thoughtless, necessary mantra to stave off the horror of what he's just witnessed. Something he couldn't fight, a man he couldn't help. Any chance of reversing a memory that claws at his insides burns up along with a large amount of what little oxygen still remains for him to breathe and each inhale strains newly ashy lungs further.
His heart's hammering in his chest when his eyes lower to the only source of light in his cramped box, one radiating heat and energy, and his options melt away. The ring of his ancestors sears his skin when he grabs for it, stuttering out his pain as he forces it down over a finger that turns immediately red and raw at every point of contact. A new pressure blooms in his rib cage and at the base of his skull.
Then everything goes dark.
The sudden pain that overtakes him is unlike anything he's ever felt before, ripping him apart from the inside with shining white fingers that calcify and decay everything they touch while voices whisper his unworthiness in his ear. He recognizes his father's. Still the fire sinks and spreads as it consumes him, a failed king, the Chosen by mistake and not by proper destiny, and the last twinges of fear that he feels cement that idea in his mind.
The torture only stops when he has no nerves left to experience it with and his eyes open slowly then, reformed and undamaged. Soot streaks his bare skin, remnants of his father's ashes and his own alike, the last remainders of a long and proud line and the evidence of the tracks it's left on his own life. Light reflects in blue as he again focuses on that ring, silent and exhausted. The dread within him grows with each passing second -- minute? hour? -- until he realizes just how much he wants to be away from it. It's becoming fucking unbearable and his next strike upward is far stronger even if his words are quieter.
"Hey! Please... I'm calm, I can talk again. I can't stay in here... We can talk about what you want."
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"I am sorry." It sounds genuine. "But you had to see it. The risk. All that could be lost."
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The touch to his face has him tensing, yes, but not pushing Kebechet away. Not yet.
"Is this... how you sway people? This is the best way for you?"
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"The risks of my actions and inactions?"
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That was a courtesy to make me less ignorant? I'm listening, just... Let me go." He draws the blanket around himself tighter, gaze remaining averted.
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"And what are you trying to make people understand by torturing them? That's not imparting information, it's just... You want to recruit people, right? Is that the point of this?"
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"I know it... I always have... but there are more reasons behind putting people through this; this isn't just your quest to enlighten people. You said you're a detective, not an informer."
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And then it's gone. Calm again, Kebechet continues.
"I wish to make you understand what your negligence and sloppiness will lead to. For you, and for your citizens. You ally yourself with the same ideologies that killed your father, wrecked your country and disemboweled your fiancee. You reject peace and prosperity in favor of some idealistic bid for individuation."
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