There is something that should be clarified before proceeding further into this affair. The Clock Tower, despite its myriad of secrets and sordid affairs, is in the end, a University. It prides itself on being the primary center for aspiring intellectuals to advance their arts, a position it attained through years of ruthlessly eliminating competitors, establishing a monopoly on mystic codes and historical records, and supplying prospective members with an endless supply of eager, willing students to serve as fodder for experiments, private armies, and coffee runs, requiring only a handful of lectures in return from people who would love nothing more than to brag to their lessers about how amazing they are. The system has worked beautifully for thousands of years, producing excellent magi at an astounding rate with only a few bad apples like Waver Velvet managing to get through and spoil everyone's day.

Tohsaka Rin, despite her foreign ways and inability to properly rebuff anyone's advances even after years of practice, knows these facts well. She can vividly recall her father speaking of how absolutely marvellous the Clock Tower is, between his angry rants about why Matou Zouken is a senile old coot, and extensive tales of Justabchiet von Einzbern's embarrassing fetish for building and subsequently fawning over white haired, red eyed homunculus maids. Even now she gets a warm feeling in the pit of her stomach when recalling her father's stories of that magical place. It could be said that studying in the Clock Tower has been one of her dreams ever since she was a little girl just learning the wonders of making things explode with Reinforcement.

Tohsaka Rin, despite her kind-hearted nature and general lack of a magus' ruthlessness, also knows that fantasy never lives up to reality, except when it actually does.

"…and so you must always remember to keep at least a quart of apple cider on hand at all times when venturing below the ground level," Caren finished up her explanation. "Old Gazamy isn't necessarily malicious, but he gives you magi enough trouble that it was decided a few decades ago (by unanimous vote of all the Clan Heads and several incensed juniors) that he should be locked up in the deepest dungeons of the Tower's dankest basements for a good century or so, or at least until all the stains come out. No one's heard from him for a while so you should be fine, but it's better to err on the side of caution, especially if you're planning on multiple trips."

"Apple cider?"

"Preferably aged; he likes it when it's all dusty. Oh, and if you don't want to end up at his mercy, just do the opposite of everything I told you."

Rin furiously scribbled over a portion of her notes and wrote a correction in the nearby margin, feeling rather cheated about the whole thing. Despite her annoyance she couldn't help but feel satisfied at finding something even tangentially resembling a kindred spirit in the Clock Tower, even if that person's lessons were the most disturbing things she'd ever seen.

"Who else do you have?" Caren asked, peering over the edge of the bench she was perched on and getting a good view of her only student's notes, as well as her assets. "Actually, just let me see your schedule."

After taking a look at the almost incomprehensible page of tables and figures, and a longer one at her student's body, the woman grinned, laughing at a joke only she could understand. "Archibald, Barthomeloi, Aozaki… this is quite good. Your family must be quite powerful to get you such advanced classes in your first year. You only need a one-on-one with Zelretch to round it all off, and half the faculty will be after your head."

"Next semester," Rin said, snapping up the schedule and stuffing it in her bag while mentally thanking her father for bothering to leave a letter of recommendation before consigning himself to another existence. "Where's Auditorium C?"

There are certain prerequisites one needs to fulfill in order to say that they are successful magi. In the first place, success implies life, so one cannot be dead, though vampires are given a free pass. One must also be respected, intelligent, accomplished, esteemed, and a bit of a dick. Lord Kayneth Archibald El-Melloi is all of those things and more, so it's no surprise to anyone that he is one of the most successful Lords in the modern Clock Tower environment. His mother was quoted as saying "I knew he'd go far" after seeing a five year old Kayneth carefully arrange for his playmate to fall into a pit of acidic ooze, only releasing the boy after a he had signed a contract of eternal servitude to the Archibald family. Additionally, Kayneth's father was quoted on Kayneth's fifteenth birthday as saying "That boy needs to get laid, pronto".

Yes, Kayneth Archibald El-Melloi is many things. He is a successful magus. He is an esteemed lecturer of the Clock Tower. He is, according a certain resentful lecturer, a rat bastard. Kayneth is well groomed, well respected, and couldn't possibly be having less sex if his life depended on it.

Yes, if there is a single downside to being Kayneth (and there always is), it's that his wife absolutely hates his guts and can't stand the sight of him, something that for many would be a plus, but is in this case not desirable in the least. She is, according to Kayneth, a frigid bitch who wouldn't know a man if he blackmailed her parents into making her marry him. He is, according to her, a desperate whiner that can't go five minutes without complaining about anything and everything, and wouldn't know atmosphere if it brutally assaulted him in an alley one morning, only to be stuck in a line-up for him to pick out days later. Kayneth's wife spends most of her day wandering around London, visiting friends, and bragging about how her husband has never once seen her naked. Kayneth spends most of his days plotting various kinds of petty revenge against her and his significantly more successful student, who, while also hating his wife, is known to get daily offers from his nubile and ambitious young students and thus has no reason to be constantly seething with barely repressed anger and lust.

The morning of Tohsaka Rin's first day in class, she arrived in Kayneth Archibald El-Melloi's lecture hall a single minute late, and immediately saw that her teacher, who had been in the middle of explaining a critical piece of information to the class when she slammed open the door with all the force of a clueless idiot, was absolutely seething with barely repressed anger and lust.

"I-"

"Sit down," Kayneth growled, his beard bristling. "And shut up. Also, see me after class."

Ignoring the tittering of the hundred or so students in the lecture hall, Rin took a seat right at the back of the class, put on her ugliest pair of glasses, and started taking notes.

An hour later, after one student had been explosively ejected from the hall and several others had beat hasty retreats, Kayneth finally finished his lecture. He was still angry and seething, but the exercise had calmed him down significantly enough for the braver students to ask a few questions.

"Professor, what exactly is the relationship between the phantom mass of the intermediary Projection and the final magnitude of its composite quasi-product?" A transfer student from Atlas, only a few years older than Rin, voiced her query. "Professor Edelfelt was suggesting that it is inversely proportional, and you didn't mention it, but I did an experiment earlier and I believe the difference stabilizes as a factor of about 358…"

"Shut up. You're staying after class too, Eltnam, for being an insufferable smart-ass. Everyone else, get out." Kayneth slammed his fist on the podium hard enough to fracture it, and there was a mad rush as students raced each other to the door. Half of them wouldn't return the next day. "They get stupider every year," the professor growled, sinking to his seat and running a hand through his pale blond hair, which had been dislodged from its elegant perm by his passionate speech.

After spending a minute sighing into his mostly empty cup of coffee, the lecturer summoned his two detainees up to the front of the class. Rin tried to keep from shuffling or looking nervous, but her poker face wasn't nearly as good as the other girl's. "Professor Archibald," she began. "I would like you to know that I-"

"You're not going to offer yourself to me, are you?" the professor asked.

"I- what?"

Kayneth made a few wiggly waggly motions in the air with a finger. "You know," he said. "Sexual favours. That low class idiot keeps going on about how Asians are always 'DTF' or whatever that means. You wouldn't be the first, you know. I'm a very popular man, so you must understand that I'm quite tired of all these vulgar requests. I'll ask you to refrain from them while in my presence."

"Of course," Rin said pleasantly, while her back teeth were busy trying to grind themselves down to gums. "You can be sure that I'm most assuredly not going to proposition you, sir. I'd rather die than even consider such a thing."

"Good. You're free to go. Don't be late again." Kayneth nodded, and then glanced at the other girl, very obviously eying her up. "Eltnam, see me in my office later so we can discuss your ideas. I think with the right leverage, I could get you published, depending on how flexible you are."

"I am extremely flexible, Professor Archibald," the transfer student said, her poker face unmoved while Rin looked like she was having a mini seizure. "But I just remembered that I made plans with a friend of mine today, and if I renege on them my circuits will try to eat me alive."

"Right, right." Kayneth, looking a bit disappointed by today's catch, let off both of the girls, who immediately left the room as fast as was possible while looking like they weren't trying to leave the room as fast as possible. Once the doors slammed shut, Rin let out the breath she'd been holding, and started looking around for a wall to punch.

Instead, she came face to face with the transfer student, now sporting a mischievous smile. "Greetings," the girl said. "We should be friends."