o. o. o.

"Oh?" Kirei Kotomine mused curiously as Rin prepared to leave. "You are eating at another person's place tonight? But I had planned to make something special for your first day at secondary school."

The girl shivered. Not because the priest was such a sketchy person… not completely at least. It was mainly because his idea of a "special meal" normally involved food so spicy and hot that it could literally set a person's mouth on fire. She had seen other adults attempt to eat his cooking before and they ended up either crying on the floor, drinking well over a quart of some form of fluid, or pass out due to the pain.

"Sorry to disappoint you," She started in a voice that clearly didn't believe it. "But I happened to make some friends today and I was invited over tonight. It would be in poor taste to not show up when they no doubt have already made preparations for my arrival."

"I see." The unnerving man nodded in agreement. "Indeed it would be most unbecoming of you. Very well. I shall expect your return within a reasonable hour so we can continue your studies."

The girl nodded before heading out the door. Before she left though, she paused. "Hey Kirei, I know you've probably told me this before, but other than the Matou, there haven't any other magi in the area for years other than for the wars right?"

"Hm?" The man raised an eyebrow. "Well I may have missed one or two magi that have passed through the city by chance, but no there haven't been any other families residing here other than them since the War. Why?"

Rin's response was crisp, casual, and well practiced. "Well, I was watching this upperclassman who graduated spar with a shinai earlier and it was definitely cursed. Everyone could tell that something was wrong with the thing. I was wondering if it was something left behind by some old family or along those lines."

Kirei looked at the girl with interest. "A cursed shinai? No, that doesn't ring any bells though it is rather embarrassing that something of that nature managed to get past my watch and into the hands of a civilian. You'll have to show me the weapon and its owner to make sure that its properly disposed of and no permanent effects are on the girl."

"How very generous of you." The girl snorted in a tone that clearly did not support that belief.

"It is my job. What kind of member of the Church would I be if I didn't fulfill my duty to execute any abominations that reside in my district?" The man casually shrugged. "Now you best be off. It is just as rude to be late for a meeting than it is to not come at all you know."

Rin glared at the priest before turning away without a word and closing the door behind her. She truly hated that man.

Inside the Tohsaka residence, the hated man smirked briefly before turning back to the kitchen where all the ingredients he prepared lay. It was a shame. He had indeed gone through all this trouble to make a special dinner for her… though he guessed she ran because not many people did enjoy his particular taste in food.

The girl obviously didn't want him to see her friend or interfere with her personal life. That was fine. It was not his place to do so. He was not her father or her loved one. He was merely her guardian… and the one who killed her father… and staged the events that led to her mother's permanent mental damage…

Oh well, might as well get started. The ingredients will only go bad if left alone.

o. o. o.

"This is the place." Rin mused as she walked up to the Japanese style home on the other side of the district from where she lived. "I'm surprised that he lives in such a big property."

She stopped a few feet away from the main gates and expanded her senses. Now that she was focusing on the area in front of her, she could definitely tell that there were several bounded fields here, all of which were extremely hard to point out even when she was paying attention. There didn't seem to be any that affected the physical world or performed any enhancement enchantments. They seemed to be fairly standard actually.

She could sense a field that kept magical energy inside, she could feel another that prevented loud noises and drastic changes on the inside to be detected from the outside. A familiar barrier field, a spying barrier field… and one that she could barely determine as some kind of alarm. Really the place was less of a workshop and more of a home to some magus that really likes their privacy.

That was some high end magic considering the girl's skills were already exceptional for those several years older than her. She doubted the boy Shirou had made them all, which means she had another question to ask him. After the upperclassman leaves of course.

The female magus shook her head before walking up to the front door and ringing the doorbell…

… And blinking in confusion as she found herself being carried at a high speed through the house she had just been standing in front of without having the slightest idea of how she got stuck in such a position.

"About time you got here!" Taiga shouted as she bolted with the girl under one deceivingly strong arm. "Shirou finished dinner over ten minutes ago and I'm starving and we had to wait for you!"

"Huh?" The girl intelligently responded as she was set down in front of the table full of food.

"If you incur the wrath of Fuji-nee, you alone are responsible for the chaos that ensues." Shirou stated in a matter of fact tone as he began to eat calmly. Despite his demeanor, Rin could tell that he was tensed up to move in a moment's notice… for good reason. "You better hurry. The food will be eaten by her long before it gets cold."

Rin stared at the young magus completely lost until a blur made itself known in front of her face… followed by several more. Turing she instantly determined the source of the anomaly to by the eldest person in the room, eating at a literally inhuman rate.

Eyes widening in panic since she herself was rather hungry, Rin quickly grabbed her bowl and began to take as much food from the plates in front of her as she could, not really paying attention to what it was other then things she knew she would eat and things she wouldn't. The moment her plate was full she began to eat so that she would have a chance at having seconds.

"Hm?" She blinked, pausing as the taste of the food registered to her. "It's… really good." She commented more to herself than anyone else.

"Of course it's good!" Taiga replied between bites. "Shirou-kun's been cooking for years! He's better than most restaurants. Cheaper too."

"Keep praising my skill Fuji-nee and I'll have to be fair to everyone and start charging you." The boy commented as he ate at a moderate pace unlike the females in the room.

The next hour went by relatively calmly. Shirou never let down his guard and remained polite while Taiga literally became the life of the party, telling stories, embarrassing Shirou and asking the Tohsaka questions.

"… Now that I think about it…" Taiga mused curiously as Shirou was finishing up doing the dishes, "I'm fairly certain that I remember my old man told me at one point or another not to mess with a couple of families in town. Well, there were always a few families that a person shouldn't mess with in any city, but he told me that there were two that were really put off limits for some reason." She crossed her arms and put on a thoughtful expression. "I think one of them was yours Rin-chan. And the other was… Mabishi… Maken… Makiri…" She shook her head. "Ah! What was it?"

"Hmm." Rin hummed with her eyes wide open and made eye contact with the elder, allowing her prana to send some subliminal messages to her target's brain. She had enjoyed the woman's ability to make things lively, but she would be a nuisance from this point onward should she stay awake. "I don't know sempai. Maybe you should sleep on it."

"Yeah…" Taiga swayed in her spot before curling up like a cat. "A nap does sound like a good… idea…"

"For your sake," A serious Shirou growled from the kitchen, causing Rin to turn to see the boy surrounded by two floating swords aimed right at her. "She better have only been put under a sleeping hypnosis."

Swords? She mentally mused in surprise, not expecting a magus her age to have this sort of ability. "Calm down. I'm not like some of the other violent idiots who try and kill any and every civilian around whenever something happens. It's obvious that she has no idea what the hell is going on or she would have reacted to my jewel like you did." She brushed her hair casually. "You should be more worried about yourself though. All alone on someone else's property practicing thaumaturgy. You should be grateful I didn't bring anyone else along for backup. I believe you should be thanking me for my generosity."

The boy clicked his teeth in anger. "Generosity? You probably didn't bring anyone along because I would have told them about how you almost lost that sapphire pumped with enough prana to waste the school to some air headed upperclassmen, let alone the fact that you brought something THAT dangerous to school. Are you an idiot?"

Rin's eyebrow twitched. "I'm trying to be nice and you call me an idiot? I'll have you know that I am a prodigy with fourty natural magic circuits, a magic crest with thirty more AND I'm an average one!"

Shirou flinched. An average one was rare. Hell, a person with two affinities was rare, but having all of the basic five enabled the girl to have access to an extremely large portion of magic known to modern magi. Throw in the fact that the girl had senventy magic circuits and he had almost a literal bomb in girl's clothing in his home. Still, he wouldn't give up. He was stubborn like that, and it wasn't as if he didn't have anything to brag about either. "So what? I'm an incarnation!"

This time it was Rin's turn to flinch. An incarnation was a person who despite all odds had matching elements and origins. It was a person who had such an in tuned alignment to this single concept or substance that they were considered a living human representation of it. If the odds of being an average one was like winning the lottery, being an incarnation was like striking gold and oil in your averaged sized back yard.

Part of the rarity had to do with the fact that most magi's elemental alignments were set to the standard five that made up an average one's elements. What an incarnation was fully capable of was still fairly unknown since they were so rare and each one had a different alignment, but it was generally accepted that whatever they were capable of specific fields and spells of thaumaturgy that was impossible for the rest of the world to achieve. "What? No way! You're lying!" She shouted, calling the boy's bluff.

The boy was about to respond before he saw Taiga roll around on the floor in a happy cat like daze, mumbling to herself. He sighed, the tenseness of the situation leaving him now that he knew that Rin didn't really do anything other to the eldest one there other than make her sleep. "How about we just call this a tie? You don't believe me, I have swords pointed at you, and I'm fairly certain that neither one of us wants to fight."

Rin glared at the boy for several moments before sighing and relaxing. "Sure. I just came over to see what the heck another magus my age was doing here in the city alone anyways."

Shirou let out a breath of relief and dispelled his weapons. He had completely been faking things the entire time. He could only make two swords at once and he still was trying to figure out how to fire them. At the moment the best he could do was project them above his head and point them at his opponents… but he obviously wasn't going to tell the girl that. He shook his head and sat down, dispelling his projections in the process. "So what do you want to ask me?"

Rin mentally let out her own sigh. The boy obviously was trained differently than she was. Aiming swords at her… even if they were projections, he was easily trained to be more of a combat type of magus like the enforcers. She could probably last a while against him and she probably could outsmart him with her wider range of spells, but she wasn't trained for fighting. The odds were in his favor.

Suddenly the girl realized that going alone to this boy's home, most likely his workshop, alone was a very dumb thing to do. Thankfully though, the owner was also alone and happened to be an honestly nice person… a rarity among modern magi. "What is your family doing here?" She started, keeping her cool demeanor constant. "You are obviously trespassing on my territory. What are you studying here?"

Shirou shrugged. "Dad and I were just living here. He wanted a peaceful life and I was simply happy to be with him. The only magic we studied here was what I could do since Dad simply wanted to relax."

"You keep on mentioning your dad." Rin commented. "What about your mom?"

"He's my adopted father." Shirou replied. "My real parents died in the Fuyuki fire and Dad rescued me from it. He adopted me while I was in the hospital, told me he was a magus, and then I bugged him to teach me until he did."

"I see…" Rin mused. The boy did have a rather depressing story being orphaned twice, but she's heard of worse stories in the magic world. "So you don't have his magic crest then."

"I do… sort of." The boy interrupted, lifting up his shirt and channeling prana into the three circuits there to the girl's shock. "A lot of things happened to the original crest. Dad only received a fifth of his dad's, and something happened to him so that only these three were left intact from that. Since there were so few circuits and because we knew some people, I was able to live and recover from the transplant." He dropped his shirt. "Other than that, I was naturally born with twenty seven high quality circuits."

"You… but… wh…" The girl stammered, not believing that this boy in front of her was lucky, stupid, and bizarre enough to actually implant a crest, regardless of its pathetic size, into himself when he wasn't a blood relative of the clan he received it from. She held her hand in front of her face and glared at the boy. "You're not making this easy for me you know."

"Says the random magus that I just met today and was invited to my home without my permission by the crazy civilian girl that I have no control over." The boy deadpanned.

"Hmmm" Rin mused. "I guess you make a passable point there."

"Passable?" Shirou raised an eyebrow.

"So why were you in England?" She continued, ingoring the boy's irritation. "Were there other clan members there? Are they members of the Clocktower? What departments are they from?"

The boy shook his head, backing away from Rin as she began to bombard him with questions. "Calm down! No, they're just some friends of Dad's that occasionally come by to help me train! I went over to stay with them to continue my training since they can't come over that much! Yes they are a part of the Association. One's a somewhat respected member of the Department of Mineralogy and the other just graduated with honors from the Department of Spiritual Evocation."

The girl's eyes shined as she realized that she just might have found her ticket into getting sponsored without having to deal with all the annoying tests and interviews that Asians normally had to deal with… even if her family had a relationship with the Second sorcerer himself. "Do you think you or one of them could get me sponsored?" She asked in a hopeful tone.

The boy shivered as he continued to retreat warily. "I don't know! You'd have to ask them! Please can I have some personal space now!?"

Rin paused before she realized that she was crawling up to the boy like a hungry animal, no doubt lost in her desire to get as much information as she could about possible sponsors. Blushing and coughing, the girl distanced herself from the boy and straightened herself again. "Regardless… you are trespassing on my family's territory without permission. Even if you are being trained by members of the Clocktower, you'd have to be punished for your crimes." She gave him a sly look. "That is unless you pay your dues by assisting me in some way."

"Dad was right. Girls grow up too quickly and women are evil." Shirou grumbled under his breath. "What do you want?" He sighed.

The girl smiled sweetly. Shirou didn't buy it for a moment. "A study buddy." She said simply, causing the boy to fall flat on his face.

"What?" He was not sure he heard the girl correctly.

Rin dropped the smile and crossed her arms. "You heard me." She sighed in her commanding tone again. "I need someone my own age to compare myself to and study with. It will help with my skills and research. There aren't any other magi in the area other than myself so it gets rather lonely, dull, and stale doing everything alone. I need a fresh and constant input other than myself around in order to progress my skills at a faster rate." She gave him a skeptical look. "I don't know why you would object to this. You'd benefit from this too since you're all alone here. Plus, if I do report you like I'm supposed to, and you do turn out to be an Incarnation, I'm fairly certain you'd get a Sealing Designation just because your condition is so rare…"

Shirou paled instantly. He knew Rin wasn't bluffing about the Designation. Waver had done some research when he was in England and had told him as much, which is how he knew he was an Incarnation in the first place. As much as he hated to admit it, he was pretty much at this scheming girl's beck and call now. Damn his short temper.

"You really weren't joking about being an Incarnation." The girl mused as she analyzed Shirou's reaction before grinning evilly. "I guess this means your life is in my hands now."

"What else do you want?" The boy wept. "Make you lunch every day? Clean your clothes? Do your homework?"

The Tohsaka chuckled haughtily and waved her hand dismissively. "Of course not! That would be unbecoming of one such as myself! In fact, I would like you to do the opposite when we're in public. I don't want anyone to know that we know one another or that we are on such good terms."

"Good terms?" Shirou repeated disbelieving what he had just heard.

"Of course!" She smiled pleasantly. "After all, what friend would I be to sell out another friend to be dissected?" She savored the boy's gulp of fear. "I have a feeling that this is going to be the beginning of a very long and beautiful relationship Emiya-kun…"

Shirou was almost about to vocally disagree…

… And then Taiga got up to go to the bathroom, killing any hope for him to continue the conversation and save himself.

o. o. o.