Clock Tower, Department of Spiritual Evocation, Downtown London

June 26th, 1994

"How could he do that!?" Waver Velvet hissed into the hallway. "He put me up on the stage to be torn apart as an example! What kind of teacher does something like that!? And over questioning all this crap about pedigree and breeding at that! You'd think I'd put some doodles about Spiritrons scrawled in crayon for the way he treated my paper! I had a bibliography longer than his entire list of accomplishments in life! How dare he just discard it out of hand like that! He must have been jealous of me, jealous of my power, my potential, my genius! Well I'll show him, I'll show them all!"

Despite the grandiosity of his statements, the young magus was struggling very hard not to cry as he stormed down the hallway, clutching books in hand. It wasn't surprising considering the circumstances, but for someone claiming that everyone was simply jealous of him, Waver certainly didn't seem to have much of an ego left.

…Or much situational awareness, as the still seething 19-year-old slammed straight into a mail worker without even realizing, and promptly fell flat on his ass with a yelp.

"Oops, my bad!" The overalled man quickly apologized.

On the floor, Waver blinked and shook his head, thoughts of revenge quickly replaced with a rush of embarrassment as he realized that his babbling had been well within earshot of this man and who knew who else.

"Oh! I... err... ahh..." He stammered, "You uhh... you didn't hear any of that right?" He pleaded.

The delivery man chuckled and waved it off.

"Trust me kid, work in this building long enough and you hear that kind of thing all the time. I don't think there is a magus in the entire Clock Tower that doesn't have the occasional rant like that. Think of it as a rite of passage into becoming a proper member of the community."

"Oh... that's, uhh..." Waver's embarrassment switched to confusion, and he looked down at the unfamiliar weight on his chest to find one of the delivery man's packages had fallen on top of him in the collision.

"Oh... sorry about that sir, let me just-"

Pulling himself to his feet, Waver went to offer the man his package back, only to be waved off again.

"Nah, don't worry about it kid, I've got 'round 50 packages that need to be delivered today and you've just cut it down to 49. Tell you what, get that thing to Lord El-Melloi by 4:30 and we'll forget this thing ever happened... actually I'll probably forget either way, but don't tell him that."

The man chuckled again and began to walk off, leaving Waver to look at the strange little package in confusion.

"El-Melloi... hang on, he's one of the ones preparing for the Great Grail War, isn't he?" Waver mused.

Looking over it, this package seemed to be a time-sensitive object being delivered to someone in the stages of preparing for the ritual-cum-invasion that had been the mind of every Association member from here to Fuyuki for the last 5 months. The regular Holy Grail War was already a powerful ritual in and of itself, where 7 elite magi summoned incredibly powerful Servants- the greatest of all familiars- to battle it out until only one remained. The victor then claimed the titular Holy Grail, an incredibly powerful magical artifact that, once charged by the destruction of 6 summoned Servants, could grant virtually any wish imaginable.

But that was just a regular Grail War, a podunk little thing that usually happened in Japan without a clear winner every few decades. This was different. A Grail War alone was a once-in-a-life-time occurrence, but this was a Great Grail War, something that had never happened before.

The popular theory went that it was due to tampering that had been done by the rogue family known as the Yggdmillennia when they contracted the help of the Wehrmacht to steal the Grail, dragging it halfway across the world to their base in Romania, where it had rested ever since behind the secure barrier of the Iron Curtain. Perhaps it was the taint of whatever foul magic the Germans had uncovered under the would-be Hedge Mage Himmler, perhaps it was the disruption triggered by moving the Grail, perhaps it was some nefarious experiment the Yggdmillennia had performed on the thing in the time since... or perhaps it was simply the Grail itself sensing the incredible tensions surrounding it.

It was certainly auspicious: the Yggdmillennia had been a thorn in the side of the Association even before their hijacking of a 1st class magic artifact belonging to the Great Families. A thorn that had been impossible to remove after their stunt with the Grail, thanks to them managing to ingratiate themselves with the Soviet Union as the effective shadow rulers of the Romanian Socialist Republic. Even the most brazen in the Association were unwilling to risk thermonuclear war over a band of adopted mongrel upstarts... At least, up until the Soviet Union had collapsed three years ago. Without their nuclear backing, the Yggdmillennia had become vulnerable, and with their puppet nation crumbling into a pile of disorganized squabbling states... Well, the iron was hot, and the Association had limited time to strike.

Preparations for stamping out the Yggdmillennia Family had started quite literally the day the Union had collapsed, but even for the Association something on this scale took time. These rogue magi were powerful even now, and nothing less than a full on shadow war, something that would entail hundreds of Enforcers storming Romania en-masse, would be enough to put them down for good.

Three years in the making... and right when everything was set into motion, the Einzbern family came forward to reveal that the Grail had become active again. If unchecked, the Yggdmillennia would use its power to summon seven Servants to their aid. Nominally, to fight to the death for the Grail, but with how large and organized the Yggdmillennia were, they could just as easily use the Servants as a new trump card to strengthen their position and leave the Grail to sit on it and spin.

There had only been one option, a secret mode of operation that had been built into the Greater Grail for just such occasions. With the Matou family's circuits extinct, activating the contingency in the Grail had itself been no small undertaking, but for the Founding Families, little was impossible. They triggered a contingency known as the Greater Grail War. Now, instead of merely supporting the summoning of 7 Servants, the Grail would soon choose 14 Masters to preside over a massive battle, 7 Servants to a side, in teams of Red and Black. The Yggdmillennia would have their Servants, yes, but the coming Association task force would have 7 of their own to counter them, and ensure that the rogue family was destroyed once and for all.

There was really only one thing that even came close to being as major of an event in the Association as the War really. And that was... the Dr. Masters debacle.

It was an ongoing thing, a much more recent thorn in the side of the Association in the form of some magic-less mundane scientist who had somehow stumbled upon the work of the long-extinct Frankenstein family and been turned on to the existence of magic. Normally this wouldn't be too terrible of an issue, but Dr. Masters had quickly proved to be both stubborn, tenacious, and very driven in his 5 years of operation within the magical community… as much as someone opposed to said community's very foundation can be said to operate within it, anyways.

He had initially come to the Association's attention after he broke into an old library of a minor family and made off with a few old tomes about ritual magic. On its own it would have hardly been noteworthy, but Masters had not stopped there: he spent the intervening 5 years traveling the world, snatching virtually every bit of documentation on anything magecraft related he could find. He took anything he could get, be it from a minor magus family's library, an ancient ruin, some forgotten end of a national archive, or places even stranger than that. The man had apparently been sighted snooping around old research facilities belonging to Nikolai Tesla, American rocket launch sites, and reportedly wowed his colleagues with a number of arcane electro-mechanical test rigs he had constructed that almost managed to replicate infant-level magecraft occasionally.

Indeed, Masters' most recent escapade had been particularly insulting, making his way into London itself to steal some sort of powerful artifact that he had discovered beneath the floor of the ancient Frankenstein family manor, and skipping town before the Enforcers could track him down and rip him in two for this most audacious of his transgressions.

The Association despised Masters and everything he stood for, and had ensured that there was at least one Enforcer out hunting the man's head at all times for the past 3 years. Really it was only because of his constant traveling and habitual low profile that the scientist still drew breath now. And when you considered what exactly Masters was doing, it became easy to see why this was necessary.

The man was utterly determined to reveal the existence of magecraft to the world at large via an ironclad scientific case that he seemed to hope would be utterly undeniable once his work was complete. In the eyes of the Association, this was a virtually existential threat: were Masters to succeed, the Mystery behind a vast majority of magecraft would practically evaporate overnight, and the Association would be all but destroyed.

Personally, Waver was conflicted. Sure, if Masters managed to succeed in his goal he probably would cause the Mystery of most spells to evaporate overnight. But on the other hand, when Waver looked at what Masters' apparent thoughts on magecraft actually were... he found a lot of similarities. Apparently, a conventional scientific mindset found many of the same issues in magus methodology that Waver himself did, and both found the pushback they received in turn equally odious. There was kinship there, in a way.

Scurrying off to his private quarters, Waver quickly tore open his ill-gotten package with only a mild bit of concern about what might befall the deliveryman who had given it to him so carelessly. Sure enough, inside was just what he had expected, a catalyst artifact for a Servant summoning ritual. It was a small patch of torn cloth that looked positively ancient, and even just being near it was enough to feel the magical potential held within. It was stored inside a large glass-paneled wooden box for safe keeping.

Looking back and forth from his paper (and the angry scrawlings in red pen all over it) to the summoning catalyst, an idea began to form in Waver's head. He had already made a name for himself in his short time at Clock Tower as something of a radical, and one who was having trouble getting people to take his ideas at all seriously... as a third-generation magus, anything he presented would be practically discarded out of hand, he wasn't respected, and as such nothing he said could ever really hope to have any effect...

But what if he forced the Association to respect him?

The Great Grail War was likely going to be the most important event in Waver's lifetime, if he could join it, prove himself a capable magus within it, and make a name for himself there... well, the Association would have to respect him then right? And with the clout he gained from playing a part in the Great Grail War, he could push for reforms with how the Association conducted itself, push for an end to discrimination of pedigree and an actual adherence to somewhat sane teaching techniques instead of burying everything in family vaults and treating the Clock Tower like an overgrown daycare!

With a grin, Waver unlatched the display box of the catalyst artifact. Yeah, he thought, that's probably the best idea I've ever had!