A/N: Don't expect this update speed to keep.

As requested by gabe. .1997, I would like to note that this is indeed the Heaven's Feel route Illya. Though, as you'll soon notice, that won't matter for a while.

Heaven's/Feel Alchemist - Ch001

Heaven's Feel 01

Illyasviel von Einzbern wakes up with the sun in her eyes. She doesn't appreciate it very much, and rolls over to go back to sleep. This results in a face full of sand.

Curious, she sits up and looks around. It takes only a moment for her to figure out that she is in a desert. Her eyes narrow, more out of contemplation than to keep the sun out of them.

"Why am I in a desert?" Illya thinks to herself. "How did I get here? And where exactly is here?"

Further contemplation is interrupted by her stomach groaning. She gives it an annoyed glance. She is distracted from her hunger with the sudden realization that she is wearing a cute purple dress.

"I own a dress?" she puzzles. "Well, if it's a loan I don't think I'll be able to return it."

Her stomach growls again. She decides that she should eat first. Thinking could come after she's certain she won't pass out.

She looks around for something to eat. Her eyes are drawn to a decent sized rock. A lizard is hiding in its shadow, avoiding the sun's rays.

Their gazes meet. There is a tingling sensation as the magic circuits in her eyes are flooded with prana, activating her Mystic Eyes of Binding on the poor creature. Now paralyzed, the lizard can do nothing as the girl walks over and crushes its head under her boot.

The wind blows by and pushes several locks of white hair into her face. She brushes them aside, mentally filing away the fact that her hair is white. Eat first, think after.

Not really knowing how to cook, she decides that burning it will have to do. One fire spell later and Illya has a half charcoal lizard. She makes a note to get better at cooking.

"This... won't provide much nourishment," she comments aloud. "I can use Reinforcement to enhance its 'purpose of existence.' Since the purpose of food is to provide nourishment, I should be able to work with this."

Unfortunately, Illya uses too much prana for the Reinforcement. This causes her meal to break and fall into pebble sized pieces. Her stomach rumbles in displeasure.

The girl sits down on the rock to think. She immediately jumps back up with a cute yelp when she realizes how hot it is. She gives it a stern glare.

The small homunculus looks around again to see if there is any indicator as to where she is. Again she finds nothing aside from the rock half as big as she is. She lets out a huff of annoyance.

"What do I know?" she thinks to herself, giving up on food for now. "My name is Illyasviel von Einzbern. I am an Justeaze model Einzbern homuculus. I know Einzbern Alchemy. I know Magecraft.

I know the third True Magic, Heaven's Feel, but haven't implemented it yet. Until I do, I still need this body. I'll try to keep it afterwards, see if I can't do anything with it.

I have Mystic Eyes of Binding. I have the image of a black-haired man, another Justeaze model Einzbern homunculus, and a boy with red hair imprinted in my memory."

Illya paces as she thinks, the action helping to direct her thoughts. She combs over her memories, drawing an increasingly alarming amount of blanks. Just what had happened to her?

"I remember preparing leave so I could fight in the Holy Grail War, but I can't remember where I was leaving from or to. I remember Old Man Acht's face, that he's a jerk, and him putting the Einzbern Alchemy in my head. I remember the white void and the Gate."

She really wishes she didn't. That white creature, that Truth is creepy. She supposes all truths can be creepy, but she notes that this one is especially so.

"I remember... being pulled through."

Which was really scary. She remembers screaming for someone to save her, but who was it? She can't remember.

Her stomach growls again.

"I am hungry."

She walks around the rock in hopes of finding another lizard, but doesn't see any.

"What do I not know?" she continues. "I don't know where I am. I don't know how I got here. I don't know how long I've been activated. I don't know which direction will lead back to civilization."

The sun is starting to get rather high in the sky. Realizing inaction will bring her death more surely than action, she picks a direction and starts walking. The desert can't be so large that she can't walk to the edge in a day or two, right?

Illyasviel von Einzbern notes that it's been five days. Five days in the blistering heat and water-stealing sand. If she didn't know a spell for gathering water from what miniscule amount there is in the air, she would have died. After five days in the desert trying to stay alive, dying now would feel like losing to the desert.

"I don't like to lose," she added to her mental list of things she knows.

Maybe worse is that not a single person in her family bothered to make sunscreen in the thousands of years of Einzbern Alchemy research. Non-transmutation spells don't work, so Illya couldn't block out the sun and was sunburnt by the first nightfall. She has her theories on why, but it doesn't really matter when she doesn't have the tool to test it.

The white-haired girl ended up spending the entire first night crafting a spell to transmute the light to a lesser intensity just as it's about to land on her. It uses a miniscule amount of Prana, but that's still enough to tire the average magus if left active for hours on end. Fortunately, she is anything but average.

Today she found some ruins. There are some broken carvings that look like they were some kind of formalcraft circles. More importantly, there is shade, shelter, and water. There are plenty of little reptiles for her to practice reinforcing into proper meals because of this.

One nourishing meal and proper hydrating later, Illya realizes that she's excited. She was originally planning to stay the night and keep going in the morning, but she's interested in the ruins. There's a lot more rock here than she ever remembers seeing. Trees, as well.

She thinks it is a little odd that she remembers what trees are even though she can't remember ever seeing one.

"Perhaps there is something interesting hidden here," she hums a nameless tune with a small smile on her face.

She giggles happily as she thinks about her face. She finally got to see her face because of the pool of water. She hadn't realized it, but she had been uncertain about whether she was actually an Einzbern homunculus. Until she had seen her own ruby red eyes and facial structure, she had been worried about whether what she knew about herself was true. It was a surprising relief to find she had all the markers of being an Einzbern homunculus.

"Hm... there really isn't anything left to do tonight, is there?"

Illya thinks about it for a few minutes. She needs to find a major leyline before she could perform the original Heaven's Feel and immortalize her soul. Since that's nowhere to be found, there really isn't anything to do but sleep.

A few more minutes of thinking on her current state forces her to realize that she would like someone to talk to.

"I have the Dress of Heaven. Maybe I should try it on, just to make sure it still works. What if how I got to this desert caused it to malfunction?" she ponders.

Taking a chance, Illya attempts to materialize the Dress in the manner inscribed upon her mind. She immediately succeeds, replacing her purple dress with a regal white gown that ends shortly below her crotch, four empty gold rings holding the Dress together down the middle.

She would be worried about where her purple dress went to if she didn't know how the Dress worked.

The fifth of the rings, the part of the mystic code that make it unusable by non-homunculi, is embedded in the front of the seven pointed crown atop her head. The final two are crafted into the shoulders, hidden by the top-most layer of the Dress. The sleeves of the Dress are long, and would brush against the ground if her hands were to go any lower than her hips. Hanging from her neck, the red sash with alchemic symbols of sewn gold reaches her ankles at both ends, drawing the eye next to her white thigh-high boots with thick one-inch platform heels.

The young girl nods happily to herself in satisfaction at her divine appearance.

"I don't really need it now that I can use the Third Magic, but I guess I should keep it. If nothing else, it'll help guide the Third Magic," Illya proposes the idea to her reflection in the water. She frowns. Something isn't adding up.

"I can use the Third Magic, but was it because I saw the Truth or because I won the Holy Grail War?" she thinks to herself, "If I won, how am I still alive? I should have become unable to funtion as a human after absorbing all the servants since I'm the Lesser Grail."

She considers using spiritual transmutation to force the return of her memories, but discards the idea as dangerous. Without some idea of what she's trying to retrieve, there's just too many holes in the equation for it to possibly work. Even if she could get it to work, who knows what it would do to her?

The red-eyed girl also considers using her family's Wishcraft sorcery trait to regain her memories. Wishcraft is a strange ability that uses extreme amounts of prana to brute force the desired results, completely bypassing the normal required processes. However, she's currently alone in a desert. Even with food, water, and shelter, she can't affort to use so much prana. What if a monster is drawn in by the prana she emits and attacks her while she's weak?

In the end, it isn't possible right now. Illya's first idea is shelved until she can get an idea of what she's trying to remember. The second is similarly shelved until she can find a safe place to try it. Since it's impossible to know when the former will happen, she decides to get started on the latter.

"Ugh! Annoying!" the little girl puffs out her cheeks and pouts.

Illyasviel von Einzbern taps the wall daintily, using alchemy to change the number of days she'd spent in the ruins to four. She won't be staying much longer. She's stockpiled enough food for her trip and made some basic canteens from the metals in the sand.

She sighs at the thought of going back out into the hot sun. The ruins were much more preferable. Her clothes got worn out less here than out in the unsheltered desert.

Not that it's really an issue when her alchemy skills are good enough to repair it.

Well, there really wasn't anything left for her here in the ruins anyways. She already explored everywhere she could, and she couldn't read any of the alchemic circles due to them being in a language she doesn't know. The rest of the time was spent analyzing the magecraft she can use and scouting with bird-shaped familiars made from her hair.

It turns out that most magecraft simply won't work. The only processes she can perform are transmutations and other alchemy-based spells. That's fortunate for her since much of the Einzbern magecraft is entirely in alchemy. Whether it be material transmutations or spiritual transmutations, making potions or making homunculi, the Einzberns have done almost everything.

It's why she could use her bird familiars to scout for her and figure out her desired route. They're alchemy-based. By filling her hair with Prana and writing some instructions into it, she basically makes remote control drones. The drone then sends images by turning some of its Prana into the spiritual equivalent of radio waves. With the hair still on her head being used as the receiver, she can then translate those waves back into images in her mind. She can then turn it the other way and send new instructions to the bird-shaped hair familiar.

Her Mystic Eyes of Binding are another story. They still function because they're different enough from actual spells, even though they're mental interference rather than alchemy related. From what she can figure out, it's because they were forged in a manner similar to a Magic Crest. They either count as a part of her body and are therefore natural abilities, or as a mystic code like the Dress of Heaven, which also works normally.

Heaven's Feel, the Third True Magic, isn't something she can use right now and has to be left for later.

Technical details of her thaumaturgy aside, it amused her to find out she knew three different languages. She found out while swearing at the ruins she couldn't read. English was the first to come out and is some sort of trade language. Japanese came out next. It's fun to speak and has some strange feelings of affection attached to it. German feels most natural, though that is only to be expected from a family that is based in *******.

"There it is again," Illya pouts.

It was odd for her to find out that there are some things she just knows. Like the names of the languages she can speak. They just seem like common knowledge. However, when she actually stops to think about it, the connecting information that would make it simple logic is missing!

Really, the gaps in her memories are rough and jarring. It's annoying, like an itch or hiccup that won't go away. She wants to get it fixed as soon as possible.

So Illya set a goal. There are three people etched in her memory, as well as that mysterious person she was calling out to for help. All of them feel important to her, like they were close before she forgot everything about them. She plans to find them in hopes that they can fix it, or at least help her remember something.

Now the only question is where to go. Given the direction of sunrise and sunset, she figures she's been walking west. Her familiars have detected a country in that direction.

However, her familiars have also found a country the way she came from. She could have been there in two or three days if she had gone east instead of west. Now she's in the middle of the two and has to decide where to go.

"Since there's no way of knowing which way is right, I'll just keep going the way I've been going," Illya thinks aloud. It's getting to be a habit. She should probably stop. Someone might look at her funny when she gets to civilization.

"Plus, I like the clothing in the west more."

Like so, her future is decided.

Next: Heaven's Feel 02