I
I love traveling by train. It gives me some time to gather my thoughts, to concentrate on the challenges that lie ahead. Milady instructed me to pay close attention to her monologue as I was to receive the final part of my instructions that would mark my graduation. I am sure the head of the mineralogy department would disagree. What I gathered from her pragmatic and somehow still incredibly vague speech was that the tournament in which we are to participate, for which she abducted me from the safe haven of academia, will be fought out with heroic servants and that this was the reason she "borrowed" the obsidian mirror from the faculty's museum. We will reside in the estate of her family and prepare for this "Holy Grail War", that is to say, help me accumulate prana to facilitate the summoning.
Rin looked over her student with the scrutinizing gaze of a teacher. Her didactic stare caused him to monologue again, no doubt, as he always did when she was trying to impress a matter of import onto his flaky, unfocussed mind.
"Listen to me, Fabricio. Your mind should be focused on the present and not on co-narrating my explanations. I will not repeat anything just because you are lacking concentration."
"Yes, Milady."
"Very well. I have ordered the servants to set up the scrying devices. Shirou will await us and we can then start to strategize according to the reports we find upon our arrival."
She tugged at the collar of her shirt, toying with the cloth as if she was looking for something that eluded her time and again.
"Are there any questions?"
"No, Milady."
"I can see that you have one."
"Aren't these battles supposed to be much rarer?"
"They are."
"Are we investigating what caused this event or simply trying to win?"
"That's what we have to figure out. I figured that there might be something wrong with the Leyline."
"Do you mean we came here without any objectives whatsoever?"
"Surviving is an objective."
"I suppose..."
She canted her head at the lacklustre response. Her pupil turned away.
"I suppose that's that, then."
Rin mumbled and went back to her book, irritated by the lack of response and/or enthusiasm from the side of Fabricio, whose deep, swamp-coloured eyes were tracing the passage of each tree and hill outside of the train's windows. He still looked like a child in the College's uniform, too young for war, unsuited for combat. Why he had been chosen instead of her daughter, she would never understand. But then again, the grail rarely seemed to operate based on logic as much as it seemed to operate on dramatic potential and the apathetic geomancer possessed an astonishing degree of that.