Disclaimer: No, I still don't own any of the franchises mentioned here. Stop asking me already, sheesh!

Chapter One: Douche in the Golden Shell

"And thus, the ritual known as The Holy Grail War, as established by the three founding families, has been occurring ever since. A more glorious competition to decide ownership of the Holy Grail could never possibly have yak, yak, blah, blah, dribble fucking dribble. Pretentious dickbags."

Slamming the massive leather tome entitled The Holy Grail War: From Yesterday to Today shut and causing a cloud of dust to waft lazily into the air as she did so, Ciara Glaisyer then proceeded to toss the book aside. It flew the length of her bedroom before smacking into a wall, sliding down the green damask wallpaper and landing on the carpeting with a sound not unlike that of a human wail.

She folded her arms behind her head and threw herself backwards onto her four-poster bed, bouncing several times before coming to a halt. "Bloody melodramatic authors," she muttered with a roll of her eyes. "Glorious competition…," Ciara said derisively, kicking her feet against the backboard. "Anyone or anything that promises to grant a wish always has some sort of ulterior motive. One that involves the moron with the wish getting buggered with a stainless steel dil-Irony, I hate irony…"

Letting out a hiss more of annoyance than pain, she looked down at her right hand, upon which she could see the faint online of what at first glance appeared to be a bruise. As she continued to stare at it, however, the marking, previously no more distinct than a splash of ink, began to form into a distinct pattern and darkened from grey to bright crimson. In a matter of moments, Ciara, much to her exasperation, found herself the not-particularly-proud owner of a command seal.

"Argh, fuck me…" She squinted down at the command seal emblazoned across the back of her hand. It was quite striking, in an eerie sort of way, looking not unlike a segmented Venetian half-masque with a protuberance of feathers sprouting from the edge and what appeared to be a diamond-shaped tear beneath the 'eye'. "Looks like something an overdramatic Muggle student would get on a dare after going on a bender," she concluded disparagingly.

Snorting, Ciara fumbled for her wand on the bedside table, came up three inches short, and resigned herself to rolling over in order to accommodate her lack of reach, somehow dragging off the duvet as she did so. Fingers closing around the handle, she idly pointed her wand in the general direction of the book she had tossed aside earlier. The Holy Grail War: From Yesterday to Today floated into her outstretched left hand, and, with another flick of her wand, Ciara flipped it open to page 394.

"Masters chosen at random; no shit, Sherlock…Many worlds theory; disturbing to think of me with a dick…Received Command Seal, yes, yes I did, unfortunately…Servants are assigned according to either compatibility or incompatibility with Master's personality…Oho, nice sense of Schadenfreude there, I'll admit …Some Servants might present a danger to the Master/general public…Cool…A sexual danger…" Ciara paused for a moment. "How the hell do rapists become Heroic Spirits? Was rape considered heroic back in the day? Damn…Once in the possession of Command Seal, Master must utilise all three of them in order to lose their status as a contender. Fantastic, now how else do I escape from this clusterfuck?" Eyes beginning to ache from their constant darting about from her speed-reading, Ciara skipped several paragraphs in favour of perusing the bottom of the page.

"Let's see," she continued, "Due to incidents of mass surrender in prior wars, forfeiture is no longer an option…I see."

Delicately closing her copy of The Holy Grail War: From Yesterday to Today, Ciara slipped off her bed, placed the book on the floor, and, with an utterly beatific expression playing across her face, proceeded to blast the tome with a spell that reduced it, and a portion of the carpeting and stone floor beneath it into a smouldering pile of ash.

She'd pointed her wand down through the gaping hole in the floor in order to further destroy any possibly remaining evidence of the book when Ciara found her compulsion for excessive destruction interrupted by a repetitive tapping. A quick glance to her left revealed the source of the sound to be a mottled black and tawny eagle owl with a scroll of parchment clutched in its talons, beating its beak against the window pane and glowering balefully at her through narrowed orange eyes.

She groaned. "Oh, God, it's my parents."

With the air of a person who's dealt with several lifetimes of horror, Ciara threw open the window, only to drop to her knees with her arms folded protectively above her head when the owl, angered by her lack of speed in admitting him indoors, flew at her face with a disdainful shriek.

When the furious bird, after several seconds of circling above her like a vulture awaiting its prey's death rattle decided to quit screwing with her frazzled nerves and dive bombed her, Ciara found herself saved by the timely appearance of her oversized half-kneazle Maine Coon, Tealeaf, whom promptly launched all twenty-six pounds of himself at the owl, knocking it clean out of the air. While the two were engaged in a cartoonish dust cloud death battle of claws versus talons, Ciara took the opportunity to grab and unfurl the parchment, which had been abandoned off to the side by the owl that was coming to resemble a down pillow that had been tossed into a grain thresher.

Rolling her eyes upon noticing the familiar crest stamped at the bottom of the letter in a rust-coloured liquid that looked suspiciously like blood, Ciara gritted her teeth and prepared for the worst. Then, she began to read despite the commotion of the pugnacious yowls and tinkle of broken china emanating in the background.

Dear Ciara,

If you've received this letter, then I thank both God in heaven and the faithful nature of our owl, Alfred, for managing to bypass your no-doubt excessive protective wards and whatever mad Muggle contraptions that I'm sure you've surrounded your home with. Speaking of which, I sincerely hope that you've abandoned your pipe dream of creating a line of magical trick sex toys. I will admit, the dildo that screams in angry German before spouting legs and running away seems …interesting, to say the least, but I doubt that the Ministry of Magic will allow you to patent it. And the pseudo-vagina that disparages the user's penis size and lack of a real sex life right before becoming full of razor-blade fangs? Not going to happen. The Misuse of Muggle Artefacts Office will be, as you young people say, all over your arse. Not to mention the Improper Use of Magic Office. It would be an orgy of lawsuits. Ugh, that was awkward to write.

Ahem. Anyway, as I was saying previously, for the sake of all that is holy, turn your focus to nobler, or at least saner, pursuits. I am begging you Ciara. Begging. Forget this bizarre vendetta against onanism of yours and turn your eye onto a more traditional line of work. Really, you dream of combining magic and Muggle inventions to 'usher in a glorious new era of blue balls' after having achieved ten O.W.L.s and receiving straight O's on your N.E.W.T.s? What does that even MEAN?! You were the brightest witch of your year, for God's sake! And yet, with all of your potential, you squander your time and energy on screaming rubber phalluses?! Well, not anymore, Ciara! NOT ANYMORE! From here on, there will be no more of this madness! I swear on the graves of our ancestors, our ancestors who would be rolling in their aforementioned graves if they weren't either dust or ghosts, that if you don't start on another path, I will cut you off from your trust fund and your inheritance faster than a mohel does a foreskin! Oh yes, I went there!

And another thing, I-Oh, Wilhelm, calm down. Really, if you're so agitated, go sit in the tub, light some candles, and wait for a bit while I ready the-Oh dear, now look what I've written. Oh, well, all children have to deal with their parent's sex life sometimes.

Hello Ciara, it's mum! My apologies for that little insight into your father's and I's adventures, but really, you should be glad that the two of us are still in love! And we're extremely in love. Obscenely, even. Oh, how we are…

But back to the point at hand. Your father was supposed to congratulate you on being selected as a participant in The Holy Grail War, but, as you can see, he got a bit…derailed. As to how we knew you were nominated before you did, well, word spreads quickly, dear. That's shorthand for 'we covertly entered you in without your knowledge to bring honour to the family name and so had first-hand access to the selection processes.' Surprise! As to how we did so, well, let's just say that money talks and leave it at that. Anyway, I'm certain that you'll make us proud. After all, you're quite the brilliant witch, even if you do spend more of your free time transfiguring your fingers into cutlery in order to simplify the spaghetti-eating process and using Permanent Sticking charms to glue your actual cutlery to the ceiling in order to confuse potential burglars.

-Love, your mum and dad

P.S. When are you going to get married? I want grandchildren! Eighteen is prime baby-having time!

Ciara cleared her throat. "Well, that both filled me with a great deal of morbid curiosity and obliterated the last lingering thread of any sexual urges I might have had. Good times. And don't diss the screaming rubber penises, I'm making progress," she said, frowning at the letter as though it were her father. Setting the letter on the bedside table, she sat down on the bed beside Tealeaf, who promptly curled up in her lap, a distinct note of triumph in his rumbling purr. Ciara scratched him beneath his chin. "Welp, looks like I have a summoning circle to draw," she said. "Eventually."

In response, Tealeaf jerked his head at the mess of blood and ruffled feathers splattered across the floor, as if to say 'I've got you covered.' Ciara grinned ruefully as her fluffy companion rolled onto his back, legs beating against the air in a facsimile of walking.

"Not to diminish your work, but I think it needs to be a bit neater," she apologised. "Huh, I could just transfigure my fingers into quills and draw it like that," Ciara added thoughtfully.

Levelling her with an unamused look, Tealeaf merely leapt off of the bed, hacked up a wad of damp feathers, and strutted out of the room with his raccoon-like tail held high, only to return several minutes later with a stoppered vial of chicken blood clutched in his mouth. Dropping the vial onto the floor, he batted it towards her, mewling expectedly.

Ciara groaned. "All right, all right, we'll do it your way."

Tealeaf tugged the stopper out of the vial with his teeth with a soft pop and gave her the satisfied smile that can only be performed by a feline who has once again gotten their master to do their bidding.

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Stepping back to admire her newly completed summoning circle, Ciara allowed herself a bit of gratification at a job…Well, at least done if not well done.

"Damn, this thing was a bitch to do," she muttered, wiping her bloodied hands against a washrag. "Fucking squiggly lines…Should've gone the quill-finger route, but Tealeaf is so damn persuasive. The six-pointed star is a nice aversion to the whole occult vibe this shit lets out, though-I was honestly expecting it to have to be a pentagram or something else appropriately 'dark'."

Fumbling for her now blood-stained copy of The Holy Grail War: From Yesterday to Today, Ciara turned to page 803 and read aloud: "After the completion of the summoning circle, you must recite the following chant." She blinked. "Chant, really?" Ciara demanded incredulously. "I thought this was supposed to be a war, not a poetry slam." Then she shrugged. "Meh, whatever, this whole day has been full of increasingly convoluted surprises. Time to see if I did this shit right or just need to replace the carpeting."

Clearing her throat, she began to recite the invocation.

"Ye first, O silver, O iron…What the hell does that even mean?"

"O stone of the foundation, O Archduke of the Contract."

"Hear me in the name of our great teacher, the Archmage Merlin."

"Let the descending winds be as a wall…Wind is fucking insubstantial. Worst. Wall. Ever."

"Let the gates in all directions be shut, rising above the crown, and let the three-forked roads to the Kingdom revolve."

"Shut. Shut. Shut. Shut. Shut…What exactly are we shutting here?"

"Five perfections for each repetition…Huh, I suppose that means that I just buggered up that last bit. Eh, who cares?"

"And now, let the filled sigils be annihilated in my stead…Yeah, the hell with you, sigils."

"Set."

"Let thy body rest under my dominion; let my fate rest in thy blade…Yeah, that isn't going to screw me over in the end, trusting some wank-off from the past with my fate."

"If thou submittest to the call of the Holy Grail War and if thou wilt obey this mind, this reason, then thou shalt respond. And if you don't want to, that's cool too."

"I make my oath here…With great trepidation."

"I am that person who is to become the virtue of all Heaven…That actually sounds rather nice."

"I am that person who is covered with the evil of all hell…Eh, isn't that a direct contradiction of what I just…ugh, never mind. Hyperbole."

"Thou seven heavens, clad in a trinity of words…Pretty sure that's not grammatically correct, but hey, who I am to question whoever wrote this? Maybe it's a bad translation from the original language or something."

"Come past thy restraining rings, and be thou the hands that protect the balance…Seriously, if you don't want to come past thy restraining rings or protect the balance, I'm fine with that. I wouldn't want to impose. Besides, the balance has been pretty fucked for a while anyway ever since the dinosaurs got hit by that meteor and humans started wearing pants instead of free-balling."

Despite the sudden onset of malevolent cold that began to engulf her as her magical core began to writhe and throb inside of her, sending odd tendrils of prana spasming through her every nerve, Ciara's voice remained a bored deadpan. When sparks began to crackle along the edges of the summoning circle, she felt a slight tug of interest. When the summoning circle began to glow with a phosphorescent light that cast odd flickering shadows along the walls, she began to wonder if perhaps she should have a shield charm at the ready. The entirety of the pattern scrawled across the carpet suddenly floating up to the ceiling threw her for a loop, if only because she couldn't quite gouge what exactly the point of it was aside from looking pretty wicked. Of course, the theatrics weren't over. They never were so quickly.

"Aaaaaand, here comes the archetypical 'violent gust of wind despite the window being closed," Ciara noted. "Yep," she said, nodding her head sagely as the sudden onslaught of the localised whirlwind proceeded to upend her bedroom, shattering all of the fragile items in the vicinity into fragments before overturning the heavier objects. "Can't delve into the arcane without it."

Ciara frowned when the supernatural wind only managed to push her four-poster several inches to the left. "Is that really all you've got, aether?" She demanded, disappointed at the lack of credible destruction. "I can blow up a dormitory with a misaimed Blasting Curse and you can barely even move a bed?"

Stepping aside when the bed in question was hurled in her direction as though as a rejoinder to what the supernatural maelstrom perceived to be her insulting its pride as a force of destruction, Ciara nodded, looking pleased. "Now that's more like it. If property damage isn't enough to require at least eight hours of clean-up, you're doing it wrong."

While Ciara took in the scene with newfound reverence for the spectacle known as a summoning ritual, the ritual itself, as if attempting to verify its talent for bitching visual effects in addition to its destructive capabilities, proceeded to perform the pièce de résistance in the form of a red mist filling the room, hanging thickly in the air like a bloodied shroud. Finally, there was a blinding flash of light followed by a sound like a thousand peals of thunder rolled into one massive sonic shockwave; peering into the mirror slumped against the wall behind her, Ciara saw a jagged bolt of lightning reflected in its cracked surface. Shoving her wildly thrashing hair away from her face, she turned back to face the summoning circle, anxious to see the entirety of the thing through.

She managed to clear her line of vision just in time to see a cyclone of golden light spinning in the centre of the summoning circle. There was the xylophone glissando of breaking glass as the howling winds increased in speed, blowing out the window. Tendrils of smoked curled into the air as the sparks dancing along the circle's edge burst into flame that went out almost instantaneously.

The Servant appeared in a final flash of light.

He was a tall man, with the sort of pretty boy features that seemed to have been formed with the express purpose of being twisted into a glare of the utmost hauteur, and the highly polished golden armour encasing him looked to be worth enough to feed several families for the rest of their lives. Combined with his arrogant demeanour, which was enhanced by his tightly folded arms and gravity-defying blonde hair, the Servant she had summoned could only be summarised as…

"A complete and utter douchebag," Ciara muttered, pinching the bridge of her nose in exasperation. "A massive, throbbing varicose dick vein. Of all of the Servants I could have summoned, I get the one who's such an enormous douchebag that I can sense the pH levels of all of the twat's within a five-mile radius being thrown out of balance. And he has a face like an Auror sketch of a rapist. Brilliant."

Her rant was interrupted by the distinctive clanking of steel, and before she could react, Ciara found herself face to face with her irate servant. Due to the close proximity, she could see that his was a restrained fury, the undoubtedly burning inferno of his rage betrayed only by the corrosive light in his crimson eyes. Red eyes for the bad guy, eh? How passé. Pretty eerie, though. Looks sort of like that bloke who sat behind me in Alchemy class, the one who liked turning beer into piss. What a waste of perfectly good-

"Woman," her Servant began in a coldly furious tone, effectively cutting off her internal rambling, "I've tolerated your first few insults upon my person to go unpunished only for a select few reasons, a fact for which you should feel greatly honoured." His eyes swept over her as he spoke, leaving Ciara with the urge to cast several Scourgify's upon herself before scrubbing herself with steel wool and surgical spirit while sobbing in the tub. "However," he continued, "You're rapidly testing my patience. Speak one more slight upon the King of Heroes, mongrel, and I assure you that my previous latitude towards your insolence will be replaced with the utmost-

Unable to take any more of his rape face boring holes into her, or his flowery speech, for that matter, Ciara slid her wand out of her sleeve and pointed it at her Servant's face, taking a moment to snigger inwardly at the way his eyes crossed before shouting "Confringo!"

The curse exploded in his face, the rapid increase of the local temperature resulting in a massive fireball that flew around the room, bouncing from floor to ceiling to wall, blowing the mirror, her wardrobe, her bed, and the entirety of the ceiling to pieces and burning a section of the western wall to ash before rebounding back at her. Ciara managed to prevent herself from being turned into a black imprint on the wall behind her with a timely "Finite Incantatem", although not before she wound up with a few minor burns on her wand hand.

Before she could tend to herself, Ciara once again found herself nose to nose with her Servant, who was not only completely unharmed save for being covered in a fine layer of soot, but who, judging by the violent twitching of his right eye, had his rage pushed past critical mass and delving into a realm of unbridled wrath unknown to man. He could barely even form coherent words, instead uttering a guttural series of disjointed snarls that sounded vaguely like "Impudent wench…Dare…Interrupt and then have the gall to attack…Disrespect your king…"

It was, Ciara thought, rather funny to see the previously dignified man reduced to a spluttering pile of incoherent rage. Scratch that; it was hilarious. True, she'd probably pay for it sooner rather than later, but watching him have what appeared to be a standing seizure induced by pure indignation was too good to pass up. "Wish I hadn't blown up my camera just now," she sighed.

Teeth bared in a smile that looked more like the contortion of teeth that a lion might give a wounded gazelle, her Servant pulled out what appeared to be a sword fashioned in the shape of a key. Holding it vertically in the air, he turned it as though unlocking some colossal door invisible to the human eye. As the parts around the sword's grip began to rotate of their own accord, emitting an odd glow momentarily before settling back into place, upon which a large, labyrinth-like, red pattern suddenly appeared in the sky revealed by the destroyed ceiling, Ciara began to wonder if he hadn't in fact opened some sort of door. When the labyrinth receded into a small orb from which a myriad of weapons ranging from swords to battle-axes to what appeared to be a jimmy bar soared out from the orb in order to levitate behind him, all aimed at her and veritably thrumming with the anticipation of stabbing through her flesh at 110 miles per hour, Ciara realised that she'd been right. So, he has access to an endless armoury, eh? She thought. The more you know…

"Well," she said with a shrug, "I'm right and truly fucked."

"Indeed. Gate of Babylon."

With a snap of his fingers, the weapons behind him proceeded to rain themselves down at her in a literal maelstrom of death. As they made their descent, whistling through the air, the Servant's rictus-like smirk and twitching eye reflected in their varnished steel edges, Ciara could only form the thought: Totally fucking worth it.

Author's Note: Ah, nothing like putting characters through the ringer the first chapter in. Also, Gilgamesh is totally a dick, but an awesome dick, and therefore this attempted murder is completely justified. I don't even know if I'm being sarcastic or genuine right now. All I know is Ciara has either a death wish or brass bollocks so big that they have their own gravitational pull. Possibly both.