Chapter CXXXVI: A Tale for Someone

It was familiar in all of the worst ways, like a bad habit I thought I’d kicked, only to find it wasn’t that easy to escape. The fact of the matter was, however, that we didn’t have a plethora of options. Could we have eventually worn the Jabberwocky down? Maybe. Probably, even. No one had taken any serious injuries yet, and we had four Servants on our side. If it came down to a battle of attrition, then even without a method of killing the thing safely, we could probably just wear it down.

But that became less certain if Alice brought out more monstrosities who couldn’t be killed simply by cutting off their heads or gouging out their hearts. Too, we didn’t have infinite time to be spending on this, and even if no Assassin materialized to try and kill me on the way back, I wasn’t going to cut and run and leave the twins to try and handle this on their own. I wasn’t going to pull Arash away from the fight to escort me back to Jekyll’s either.

It helped that Alice wasn’t an innocent bystander caught up in things by bad luck, and also that there was a lot more at stake here than a few thousand bank notes in a vault. It was much easier to soothe my conscience with the knowledge that this was very much an enemy, and this little girl wasn’t at all a little girl.

“You’re breaking the rules of the game,” Alice said petulantly.

“I’m not playing,” was my cold answer.

Alice tilted her head, frowning, and her hands moved —

“Bring out any more of your ‘friends,’ and I’ll drop every bug I have on your ‘Papa,’” I warned her. “You need him if you want to stay in this era, don’t you?”

She might also be in league with the people behind this Singularity. Her ‘Papa’ might be P, B, or M, and with the paltry amount of magical energy he was letting off — to sustain her, no doubt — it was entirely possible that they weren’t the initials of the Servants, but the Masters who commanded them.

Or the pawns of one of the Demon Gods.

“Meanie,” said Alice. “Do you treat all of your books so roughly?”

My brow furrowed. Did she just imply…

“…you’re a book?” asked Ritsuka.

“You’ve gotta be shittin’ me,” said Mordred. “Don’t tell me, this tiny bitch is that magical tome we’ve been looking for!”

“You were looking for me?” asked Alice.

“They’re right?” Rika exclaimed, eyes wide.

“You were too late,” a familiar voice said, and Andersen materialized at the back of the group, well and far enough away to run if the Jabberwocky went after him. “That would certainly explain why the trail went cold — it looks like it went and found a Master already. Although what it says about the owner’s mind that a grown man produced a little girl, well…”

Thank you for putting that thought in my head, I didn’t say, and the part that I had to admit I found somewhat concerning was that he might have been right.

Or maybe she had been formed in the image of his daughter. I could see the family resemblance, after a fashion. That was slightly less creepy than the alternative.

“Just what are you trying to insinuate, there?” ‘Papa’ snapped from his hiding spot.

“Nothing more than the obvious,” Andersen replied.

“Rude!” Alice said.

“You’re right, it is,” I interrupted, jumping on the point. “We should all be having this conversation face to face, shouldn’t we, ‘Papa?’”

I punctuated this with a buzz from all of the bugs surrounding him in the grass and the trees and an aggressive caw from Huginn. Her ‘Papa’ flinched, lip curling, and then adopted a thunderous scowl, head swiveling as shrewd eyes searched for a way out. A warning shot from Huginn’s mana cannon near his feet disabused him of that line of thought.

“That was me being polite.”

“Trust me,” said Rika, “you don’t want to know what impolite looks like with Senpai!”

“I think I might have some idea,” ‘Papa’ muttered.

Nonetheless, he gathered himself and as much of his dignity as he could, and then he strode out of his hiding spot among the trees and over to join Alice, close enough that the Jabberwocky wouldn’t have to move much to protect him. He eyed me the entire time, looking away only to glance at the parts of my swarm still buzzing about to keep attention away from the more clandestine things the less noticeable ones were up to.

If he tried to escape, he was going to find all of the exits a figurative minefield of spiderwebs to trip him up. All but the one we would be using to get out of here.

“Fuck me,” said Mordred. “He’s just a regular guy.”

“And he’s Japanese,” Ritsuka noted.

“Huh,” said Rika, nonplussed. “Go figure.”

“If you think that changes the situation at hand, you’re naive,” he said. “Sharing a nationality doesn’t automatically make us comrades, and if you think your age means I’m going to treat you any more lightly than I would any other enemy, then I’ll gladly walk over your corpses without a second thought.”

He meant it, too. There was no indecision or hesitation in his body language. Most people were just posturing when they said something like that, putting on a strong face to unnerve their enemies, and very few actually meant it. I’d had too much experience with those who actually did to be so easily fooled by a little bravado.

This guy wasn’t bluffing.

Could he be an Association magus, one caught outside of the Clock Tower when the entrance was destroyed? If he was, that only made him all the more dangerous.

“If you think it’s going to be that easy,” Emiya began lowly.

“It’s not,” said Arash.

“You’re not in much of a position to be making threats like that anyway,” I told him. “What I said a minute ago stands — if Alice tries to summon more of her ‘friends,’ then I’m going to drop everything in this clearing on you, no questions asked.”

“And then Jabberwocky turns you into a pulp!” Alice said brightly.

Not if I brought Siegfried in at the exact same moment. That split second where he was protecting me would be a split second where Alice was vulnerable, and that was more than enough time and space for Arash or Emiya or even Mordred to cut her down, too.

“Hold on,” said Ritsuka, holding up his hands. “Before we all start promising all of the ways we’re going to violently kill each other, maybe we should know what it is we’re fighting about in the first place.”

“What kind of stupid question is that?” said Mordred. “He’s here for the Holy Grail, ain’t he? One of those conspirators or whatever.”

The man’s head turned to her. “What?”

“No,” said Mash, “Senpai has a point. We don’t need to fight if the only thing we’re fighting over is the fact that we’re fighting.”

“I’m sure that made sense in your head,” the man muttered, more to himself than anyone else, it seemed.

At that moment, a familiar ball of fluff chose to strut casually out of the foliage, pause only long enough to spit out a glob of red blood, and then keep walking as though nothing was wrong.

“Fou!” Mash cried.

“What the hell,” I heard Emiya whisper. “Did that thing just walk off getting hit by a Noble Phantasm?”

‘Papa’ seemed to agree with him, eyeing the little furball with a disturbed look on his face.

“That thing?” Mordred asked him. “Why? Haven’t you seen it do something like that before?”

No. No, we hadn’t. And yet, somehow, I couldn’t bring myself to be surprised. Just a minute ago, even, I thought it would be disappointing if it died to something like that. The idea that it came out the other side apparently uninjured felt more like it was expected.

The little gremlin trotted up to Mash and let her pick him up. “You’re okay!” she said happily.

“Fou-kyu fou-fou,” it said. As though, it was no big deal.

The interruption, at least, allowed a break in the tension, and as much as all of the ways Alice had violated us pissed me right the fuck off, after that moment to break my train of thought, I could admit that Mash and Ritsuka had something of a point. I didn’t think they were necessarily right, but the fact we didn’t even know ‘Papa’s’ name meant that there was a chance they weren’t wrong.

But this would get really messy if it turned out he actually was one of those Association magi who didn’t mind the idea of vivisecting people while they were still alive to find out how they ticked.

“Now that we’re not all at each other’s throats,” I began, “let’s take a minute to clarify a few things, Papa. Your name would be a good start.”

“Yes,” Andersen agreed. “So that I never have to hear that word leave her lips again.”

The mystery man raised an eyebrow coolly. “And why should I be the one to introduce myself first? From my perspective, the whole lot of you are the strangers here.”

I had to give him at least some credit for his nerve. It took guts to ask our names after his…Servant? Familiar? Noble Phantasm? Whatever she was — took them away from us not that long ago.

Wait. Alice. Jabberwocky. Alice’s tea party. Trump Soldiers. Fuck me, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. How had I missed that earlier? Did that make him Lewis Carroll? In that getup? The guy was known to have been pretty eccentric, but I hadn’t thought that eccentric.

“You already got them a few minutes ago,” I told him calmly. “Unless you expect me to believe you weren’t paying attention when we shouted them out.”

“So I did,” he said, “Taylor.”

If he was expecting a reaction out of me, I didn’t give him one. I’d played head games with people plenty more skilled at it than he was.

When he got nothing out of me, he turned to the twins one at a time, “Which would make the girl Rika and the boy Ritsuka.”

Noticeably, he didn’t address any of the Servants. I didn’t know if that said something about what he thought of them, or if he didn’t want to single out the one name he definitely heard — Emiya’s — because it would make it all the more obvious he didn’t know the others.

“Pleased to meet you,” Ritsuka said politely. “And you are?”

A sour look crossed the man’s face, and for a long moment, he didn’t answer. After several lingering seconds, however, he eventually said, “Tohsaka. Nagato.”

Notably, not P, B, or M, and also notably, not the name of any famous author I’d ever heard of before. By the looks on the twins’ faces, not the name of any famous Japanese author either.

Emiya, however, very obviously had, by the complicated expression on his face. “Let me guess,” he said, sounding like he was dreading the answer. “You wouldn’t happen to be the Second Owner of a little town called Fuyuki, would you?”

The others turned to him with surprise. Tohsaka’s was filled with a healthy dose of suspicion. “You know of me?”

“After a fashion,” was Emiya’s cryptic answer.

“Wait a minute,” said Rika. “Second Owner of Fuyuki…as in that swanky mansion we spent the night in back in Singularity F?”

I was honestly a bit surprised she remembered that. The twins had both been incredibly green back then, and I hadn’t been sure how much of what Marie and I had told them during that fiasco had stuck and how much had gone in one ear and out the other.

The answer was, at least enough for her to remember where we’d stayed the night while we were there. And if this guy really was the Second Owner of Fuyuki — presumably from this time period — then he was almost certainly the Master of this relationship, as I’d suspected.

“Wait,” Tohsaka demanded hotly, “you bastards stayed in my house?”

“Says the man squatting in a vacant apartment in London,” Andersen pointed out.

“It was…a bit of an emergency situation,” Ritsuka said apologetically.

“I’m sorry we intruded,” said Mash, bowing slightly.

“That doesn’t make it better!” Tohsaka spat.

“Emiya and I weren’t there at the time, if it helps,” Arash offered.

“Like hell it does!”

“I swear,” Emiya murmured, so quiet that I wasn’t sure anyone else heard him, “it runs in the family, doesn’t it?”

And of course, if I asked what he meant by that, he wouldn’t give me anything but the vaguest of answers, would he? This was what everyone else felt like whenever they asked me about my past, wasn’t it?

“Hang on,” said Mordred. “What’s this about staying in his house, now? When was this?”

I checked the time, and it was rapidly running out. We needed to high tail it back to Jekyll’s immediately, and we didn’t have time to stand around and explain all of the nuances of everything we’d spent the last four months doing. That would, naturally and from the beginning, include everything that happened in Fuyuki and why we were there.

“There’s no time,” I said briskly. “We need to make our way back to base before the fog rolls in. We can talk about this on the way.” I looked pointedly at Tohsaka. “Unless you want to take us back to wherever you’ve been staying and discuss it there.”

His lips drew into a thin line, and that was how I knew my gambit was successful. If his workshop or whatever he had that passed for one was well-defended enough to give him the advantage in a fight against all of us, he would have had Alice lead us there instead of this park. The fact he didn’t want to jump on the chance to have us on his home turf meant neither he nor Alice would be any better off there than they were here.

“Fine,” he said. “We’ll go back to your base, and you can explain on the way why I had a bunch of rats scurrying about my house.”

A quick glance at Alice with my Master’s Clairvoyance confirmed what I’d come to suspect: despite having no apparent presence as a Servant, she was indeed a Caster, and her true name most certainly wasn’t Alice.

So however being a book worked, she wasn’t Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

“I mean, I know we were there uninvited,” Rika said petulantly, “but I don’t think it’s fair to call us rats.”

No, but I’d heard a lot worse.

“Then let’s go,” I said, pretending Rika hadn’t spoken. “Saber, you can lead the way. Ritsuka, you’re in charge of explaining.”

And if they try anything on the way back to Jekyll’s, I told Arash privately, then don’t hesitate to deal with them.

His lips pulled into a grim line. Got it.

“Saber?” Mordred complained. “What’s with the formality all of a sudden? I mean, felt a little weird having you call me Sir Mordred, but at least with Shieldy, it kinda made sense.”

Tohsaka’s cheek twitched, the only sign he recognized her name, and I had to fight down a response — the agitated spiders skittering in the trees went unnoticed by everyone else — because she’d just defeated the point of trying to hide her identity in the first place.

“Sir Mordred, then,” I allowed. “If you would?”

“Fine, fine,” she groused. “Feels like a waste of fucking time to go back this soon, but I don’t need the tongue-lashing Boss Lady’ll give me if I let you die out here, so I guess we’re going back.”

She turned halfway, then stopped and eyed the Jabberwocky. “Yer not bringing that thing along, are ya?”

Alice blinked and looked up at the massive creature standing sentinel over her. She smiled and waved at it. “Bye-bye, Jabberwocky! We’ll play again later, okay?”

The Jabberwocky didn’t acknowledge her at all, or even react to her words. Just, suddenly, it started to fade away, disappearing not into glittering dust like a Servant would, but dissolving away into nothingness like a smudge being erased from an artist’s canvas. When it was gone, Alice skipped over to Tohsaka and smiled up at him like a real little girl would at her father.

“Ready to go, Papa!” she chirped.

Knowing what she was now, it just seemed creepy.

With all of that settled, we set off, and if I tagged both Alice and Tohsaka with a few bugs to keep an eye on them, no one else seemed to notice. If they noticed Arash taking up the rear of the group, I wasn’t sure, but all it would have done was hammer home the lack of trust between us. I was okay with that. The surveillance you didn’t notice was always more important than the surveillance you saw outright.

The guy had plenty of hair for me to hide a few bugs in. I thought it might even have been longer than mine.

“So,” Ritsuka began as we walked. “We’re part of an organization called Chaldea, and our job here is to come fix things when someone changes history and creates a Singularity…”

He’d gotten better at explaining things. Tohsaka obviously had some questions, and he wasn’t quite prepared to accept everything on its face, but Ritsuka took it all in stride and answered all of his concerns smoothly and as completely as he could. It turned out that — after going through four Singularities and sitting through weeks of lectures from El-Melloi II — he could answer them very smoothly and completely.

Of course, Tohsaka wasn’t exactly happy about any of those answers either.

“You have to be kidding me,” he said sourly. “I knew there was something wrong with this place after the Clock Tower got ransacked, but the idea that some guy is out there messing around with history and dropping Holy Grails all over the place sounds like something out of a bad joke.” His mouth twisted. “And now you’re telling me it’s 1888? Like the past hundred years never happened?”

Hundred years?

“What year did you think it was, exactly?”

Beep-beep!

“And now there’s this,” Tohsaka griped as I answered my communicator. I ignored him as a courtesy, because I still didn’t trust him, but if he was telling the truth, he was getting a hell of a culture shock.

“Director?”

“Nagato of House Tohsaka,” Marie said formally, addressing him instead of me. She was in her serious director mode. “Second Owner of Fuyuki City and manager of the spiritual grounds therein.”

“You’re this director of theirs, I assume?” Tohsaka said in lieu of answering.

“I am,” Marie replied. “Olga Marie Animusphere, current head of the Animusphere and Director of the Chaldea Security Organization.”

Tohsaka’s eyes narrowed. “You’re a Lord of the Clock Tower, then.”

“I am.” She addressed me, next. “Taylor, turn on the visual component.”

“Yes, Director.”

With a little bit of fiddling, the hologram flickered to life, and Tohsaka flinched to find himself suddenly face to face with Marie. After he’d had a moment to be startled, however, he actually looked at her and his brow drew down.

“You’re young,” he said as a statement of fact.

“My father, the previous head and director of our organization, was assassinated by the same people behind this assault on the proper course of human history,” Marie said, and she didn’t even wince. She’d probably been prepared to hear exactly that from him. Maybe she’d even rehearsed this in her head before she called. “As a result, I had to take over for him far earlier than anticipated. You will find, however, that my youth has no bearing on the importance of my position, my organization, or my authority in these matters.”

Tohsaka smiled thinly. It didn’t reach his eyes. “So it seems. What did you want to discuss, Director Animusphere?”

“Firstly, to confirm,” Marie began. “For you, prior to the formation of this Singularity, the year was 1795 AD, correct?”

“Correct.”

Marie’s lips pressed together. From behind and to her side, Romani leaned into the frame and murmured, “That means that he would have been pulled into the London Singularity over one-hundred years out of place. We might have been looking at the wrong axis when we measured the Singularity’s deviation.”

“Yes,” Marie said tersely, “thank you, Vice Director Archaman. I wasn’t aware of that.”

Romani was not so clueless that he didn’t catch her tone, and he wisely chose to back away and out of frame again instead of annoying her even more.

“So I’m not supposed to be here either,” Tohsaka noted. “Does that mean, what, that I’ll be ‘corrected’ once this is over, just like everything else in this place?”

“Papa will go away?” asked Alice. There was something in her voice that made my spine stiffen.

“Provided the Singularity is resolved and the Holy Grail removed, the Counter Force will return you to your proper place in history as though nothing at all happened,” Marie answered. “That includes your memories of these events and the circumstances involved. For you and all of the people in this Singularity, nothing will have changed. Your life will go on as it was meant to, for all intents and purposes, undisturbed.”

“I see.”

What he thought of that, I wasn’t sure. His face gave nothing away. Neither did Alice’s face, although I was sure she must have had some sort of opinion on the matter. Would she fight the issue in order to remain with her ‘Papa,’ no matter what it cost us or anyone else, or if he ordered her to work with us, would she obey without argument? There was no way to tell yet.

“Pursuant to that matter,” Marie went on, “I would like to negotiate the assistance of you and your Servant in resolving this Singularity. Although the circumstances won’t allow me to compensate you personally for your services, your family may be rewarded on your behalf after the Grand Order has been completed.”

“Because any money you paid me directly would simply vanish when everything was returned to its proper place,” Tohsaka murmured to himself. Louder, he said, “You’re unexpectedly straightforward, Director Animusphere. You didn’t even make the attempt to trick me into accepting money I would never receive.”

“Of course not,” Marie said, as though the very idea was ridiculous. “I am not some penniless magus selling her blood to whoever wants it. Attempting to deceive you in an effort to avoid paying a debt owed is beneath me.”

“So it is,” Tohsaka agreed.

“Hang on,” said Rika. “When you say he’s gonna be compensated for working with us, do you mean he’s gonna get the same kind of pay as us Masters do?”

“Yes,” was the answer Marie gave her. “Although he would technically be an independent contractor, he would also be working as a temporary Master of Chaldea. It’s only right that he’s paid on the same scale as any other Master would be.”

Ritsuka’s eyebrows rose, and Rika let out a low whistle. “Damn. He could make a lot of bread with that much dough.”

Emiya groaned softly, and Marie’s cheek twitched, but she managed to keep her expression calm and professional. Tohsaka, on the other hand, just looked confused.

“Bread? Dough?”

“Ignore that,” I told him. “While the Director is willing to sign you on as a provisional Master for the duration of the Singularity, I have a few reservations.”

“You do?” Marie, Tohsaka, and Mash all said at once.

“Yes,” I said. “In particular, there’s the problem of that other Servant that showed up to your tea party. Alice seemed to know who it was. She even called…” My brow furrowed. “Called…”

Called…who by name? For that matter, what had Alice called by name, and what was that name? There was another Servant there at the tea party, I could remember that much, but the details were gone. Voice, age, hair color, every identifying feature I could think of. Not out of reach, the way my name had been in the Nameless Forest, but just gone, like someone had taken a scalpel and carefully excised each and every detail with the precision of a surgeon.

I could even remember coming to a conclusion about the Servant’s identity, using the name Alice had called them as a springboard. The logic behind it was still there. But every part that had involved something about the Servant in question had been removed from my memory.

“…I can’t remember their name.”

Mash, Ritsuka, and Rika all gasped. “Neither can I,” Mash said.

“Nothing,” Ritsuka agreed.

“Me, three,” said Rika. “I know I heard it and I know I knew it, but someone poured a little too much brain bleach in my ear or something, because poof, it’s gone!”

“I hate to add to the alarm,” Emiya said gravely, “but I’ve been affected, as well.”

“Same,” Arash chimed in.

Marie rounded on Alice. “You…!”

“‘S not her, this time,” Mordred interrupted. “I said yesterday that there was an Assassin going around who erased memories and stuff, didn’t I? My guess, that’s who we met at that tea party. Once they left, everything we knew and learned about ‘em got erased. We were just too distracted to notice right away.”

The Assassin she’d mentioned yesterday…so Jack the Ripper, then. The fact I could still puzzle it out was a good sign, because it meant my thought patterns hadn’t been manipulated. A Stranger instead of a Master. Thinking it and coming to that conclusion didn’t magically restore the bits of my memories I was missing, though, so whatever skill or Noble Phantasm erased information about them was more like a delete button than a spell of forgetfulness or hypnosis to repress the memories.

“Director,” I said, “was any data recorded by Chaldea during that fight?”

“Of course.” She turned away from the screen and looked down at her terminal, typing away rapidly. “It’s…”

Her brow crinkled.

“Gone. The data on the other Servant you encountered earlier is gone. Parameters, skills, Noble Phantasms, even basic things like height, weight, and sex, they’re all missing.”

“It even works on Chaldea,” Ritsuka murmured, sounding impressed.

“That’s cheating!” Rika complained.

Alice giggled. “Of course it is. Assassins never play by the rules, never ever.”

“This isn’t a game!” Marie snapped.

Alice just smiled, unperturbed.

“Of course it isn’t,” said Tohsaka. “But this answers your question, doesn’t it? The one you were trying to ask. After all, there’s no reason to erase our memories of them if we were in league with this Assassin of yours, is there?”

Except there was no way to prove that his memories of Jack the Ripper had been erased, and even if they had, it didn’t mean that they weren’t working with him. It would be an effective way to gain our trust if it just so happened that he and Alice had both had their memories of the mysterious Assassin erased the same way we had. I even had a way around any confusion it might cause — a simple passphrase would be enough for them to identify each other as allies.

“I guess not,” I said mildly. “After all, it takes a special kind of person to team up with a serial killer like Jack the Ripper.”

Tohsaka reacted — not by stiffening or freezing, like he might have if he’d been found out in a lie, but with confusion and annoyance.

“A serial killer?” he echoed. “Hey, Alice, just who did you invite along to that tea party, anyway?”

“A friend I met on the street,” Alice answered simply. “Jackie was very, very lonely.”

As though that was reason enough to make friends with a serial killer famous for the murders of several women who also happened to be psychotic enough to treat the whole thing as a game with the police. Someone like that would have fit right in with the Nine.

I guess it made sense that Tohsaka wouldn’t know anything about the Ripper murders, though. If he really was from a hundred years ago — by the count of this era we were currently in — then he was a hundred years too early to have heard about them. He was likely long dead by the time they happened.

Although with magi, you never really knew, did you?

“I suppose it’s only natural that loneliness attracts loneliness,” Andersen said.

Tohsaka pinched the bridge of his nose, grimacing. “Most normal girls bring in stray cats or dogs,” he muttered. “This one? Brings in homicidal murderers she meets on the streets.”

Calling a murderer homicidal was technically redundant, but I let it slide without comment.

“I have a few more questions aside from that,” I said.

“What is this, a formal inquiry?” Tohsaka said under his breath.

“It’s a job interview,” I replied, and he grimaced when he realized I’d heard him. “Before you were dragged into this Singularity, I’m assuming you were in London yourself. Why?”

“I was meeting an associate from the Clock Tower,” Tohsaka answered simply. “I’m not sure you could call him my teacher, since the only thing he likes to do is hand me busywork every now and again, but I paid his tab once upon a time —” For some reason, Alice found this quite funny. “— and he decided to repay me by teaching me magecraft.”

“Wait a second,” said Marie, “you’re telling me that you got a sponsor from the Association just for helping him pay a bill? Just like that?”

“Sorry to disappoint you, but whatever was going through his mind, I haven’t the first idea,” said Tohsaka. “Frankly, I’m not sure he didn’t just decide it on a whim as a way to pass the time.”

“Wow,” said Rika. “That’s some crazy luck. A complete rando decided to teach you magic just because you saved him a couple bucks? In what world? Aside from this one, I mean.”

“It does sound pretty incredible,” Mash agreed. She had barely stopped petting Fou since things calmed down, like she had to reassure herself the thing was still alive.

“Quite the career change,” said Andersen, “going from a martial artist to a mage. Too bad you’re only mediocre at both.”

Tohsaka’s cheek twitched, but he managed not to rise to the bait, no matter how much he very obviously wanted to.

“I have a feeling I already know the answer,” Emiya began reluctantly, “but do you happen to know this man’s name?”

Tohsaka made a sound in the back of his throat. “He called himself Zelretch.”

My head whipped around so fast my neck cracked, and Marie startled, too, choking out, “Th-the Wizard Mashal?”

A True Magician? One of the handful of guys who could do stuff that wasn’t supposed to be possible with magecraft, no matter how long or hard you studied or how much effort you put in?

Most importantly, the one guy Marie told me I should do my absolute best to avoid meeting?

Emiya just sighed. “Yes, that’s the answer I thought I was going to get.”

“Who?” the twins asked. Mordred looked like she had the same question.

“Y-you…!” Marie sputtered, but she couldn’t seem to form the words beyond that.

“A very scary man,” Emiya said dryly. “I’m sure that El-Melloi will be only too happy to tell you all about him if you ask after this is over. For now, I think the most important thing you need to know is that he’s a very important and very powerful member of the Association.”

“Could he be here, too?” asked Ritsuka.

Marie’s face paled, and she looked like the very idea terrified her. For as frightened of the man as she seemed, however, I had to admit that the idea of having that kind of power on our side was appealing.

“If he is, then he stood me up,” Tohsaka said flatly. “I waited for six hours at the Association, and the only reason I wasn’t caught up in that mess was because I left before the place could come down around my ears.”

As long as he wasn’t one of those magi who would vivisect me — or Mash — of course. Sort of, “as long as he’s on my side, I want him here, but he’s the last person I want to fight.” Funnily enough, I’d been on both sides of that particular concern.

“It’s more likely he’s just not here, then,” I said, and Marie sagged against her console, relieved. “We probably would have met him by now if he was.”

Because I couldn’t imagine he wouldn’t have come looking to investigate our Rayshift, or failing that, that he wouldn’t have gone to handle whatever had happened at the Association. At the very least, we weren’t being cautious about hiding our fighting, so with all of the magical energy being thrown around, he likely would have come looking for that.

Tohsaka grunted. “So you’re saying I waited for nothing.”

“It looks that way.”

“Then it seems like my only real options are to stay out of things and hope you all resolve them or help you fix them myself,” he said. He grimaced. “If I’m being honest, this whole mess sounds like more trouble than it’s worth, but it’s not like sitting around and waiting is going to do me any good. If he’s not here, then I have no reason to stay either, so the sooner I can get back to my own time, the sooner I can get back to my own life. Right?”

I guess it was as good a reason as any to join up with us. It wasn’t impossible that he was out for the Grail or working with the masterminds behind all of this, but if he was a first generation magus the way he claimed, then he might not even truly understand all that much about the Grail and how it functioned, let alone what he might be able to do with it. There was the question of how much he would even care if he did.

If he was taking orders from P, B, or M, well, that wasn’t easy to answer either. If he didn’t have anything he wanted the Grail for and he really had just been pulled along accidentally, then why he’d follow their orders was another question I didn’t have an answer to.

For now, I suppose we could extend a little bit of trust to him. Andersen and his Human Observation skill hadn’t thrown up any red flags yet, after all, and he’d been willing enough to come along to see the whole ‘magical tome’ thing through to the end.

“There’s just one more question you need to answer,” I told Tohsaka.

“And that is?” he asked.

“Your Servant’s true name. It isn’t Alice.”

“That’s right,” Marie agreed. “As a show of good faith, it’s only right that you share the true identity of your Servant. It’s against Chaldea’s policy for Masters to hide their Servants from each other.”

Did it count when half of us were technically hiding Galahad’s identity from Mash?

“First time I’m hearing that one,” said Rika.

“It’s not like it’s ever come up before,” her brother pointed out. “We’ve never even had a reason to try.”

“Point.”

Tohsaka looked down at Alice, at the Servant wearing the face of what I was becoming more and more convinced was his daughter. She just smiled back up at him.

“If we’re going to be working together, then I suppose it doesn’t make much sense to keep it from you, does it?” he thought aloud. “Fine. Alice, go ahead and introduce yourself — properly, this time.”

“If Papa says so,” Alice agreed. She inclined her torso into a short bow. “Hello. Pleased to meet you, everyone. I’m a Tale for Someone.”

She beamed.

“My true name is Nursery Rhyme. Please take good care of me, okay?”