Chapter Text
Disclaimer: We do not own the characters nor the setting of Fate Grand Order and associated Nasu-verse materials.
Co-author with Erimies
Premise: Ritsuka Fujimaru is a naturally occurring holy grail in human form. Nobody realizes this until the world goes to hell in a hand’s basket.
Chapter 1: Lament of a Repressed Virgin
‘I am alone on a rock hewn out of my own body’
- Winterson -
If Ritsuka Fujimaru has to put down a date for when her life veers off the regular course and into the territory of the comically and fantastically deranged, it would be June 1st, 2015. The last day of high school.
The door to the PE class equipment shed swings open with a bang and out comes a half-naked, wild-eyed dark-haired boy.
“D Cup Titties!” he shrieks at the top of his lungs with a dazed, mad look about his face. His open shirt slings off his right shoulder, three buttons missing. He jumps high, his head nearly hitting the threshold, then he screams again, spittles flying everywhere.
“EEEEEXXCIITEEDDD!!!”
And then he runs, full speed and unheeded, away from the shed and to the main building, making bull-chugging sounds as he goes. Halfway to the main building, one shoe goes flying off of his feet and smashes into a glass window nearby, eliciting yet more panicked screams from whoever is on the other side of the smashed window.
Back in the now wide-open PE equipment shed, Ritsuka Fujimaru looks in the direction of the fleeing boy with dejected despair.
‘There goes my last chance to get laid before college,’ she thinks as she straightens her rumpled shirt and mussed hair. Well, perhaps getting laid is a bit too ambitious. Ritsuka is nineteen and has never been kissed, though not for lack of trying.
She heaves a great big sigh, pushes her disappointment down, grabs her school bag, and, after a brief check with her hand mirror, braces herself and walks out the shed. When she arrives in the main building where her class is, she is greeted with a susurrus of sniggers and whispers.
“Riri’s at it again. Doesn’t she know when to give up?”
“Who is it this time? Yamada from class C? I hear he’s not all that up there. Well, it has to be a crazy one to still go for the Untouchable right?”
“Zap goes Thousand Volt Riri. She scrambles your brain with her static charged skin! Kehehehehe”
Ritsuka soldiers on, walking through the shroud of mean-spirited teasing with the stoicism of a soldier coming back from the battlefield. Well, that is a lie. Ritsuka is in fact fighting to keep a furious flush from spreading across her cheeks and frustrated tears from flooding to her eyes. Although she can’t quite help the slight quiver of her lips as she passes by the nurse's office where a school guard and the nurse is trying to tie a foaming-at-the-mouth Yamada to a chair and give him a tranquilizer dose.
It does sting, she’s not going to lie.
She scrambles off in the direction of her class. The last period is in all but name. It is the last day of high school, with the end of year results delivered the week before and their university entrance examination finished just the two days prior. The entire school is in a cheerful, euphoric spell, with hundreds of hormonal teenagers freed from the crushing pressure of examination floating about their hallways, saying tearful goodbyes to their friends, or sneaking love letters into the crush’s shoeboxes and hoping to get lucky. Even the teachers are taking it easy, chilling in their lounge and allowing the kids to go without their eagle-eyed supervision for once.
Stepping into her class, Ritsuka ignores the teasing looks she gets from her classmates and goes to her table, where she gathers her books into her knapsack, then sits down prim and proper and takes a book, Anais Nin’s Delta of Venus - the Vintage 2000 edition with illustrations, to read while waiting for the last hour of her teenage era to pass her by.
“Strike one hundred and seven!” A girl crows into her ears before plopping herself into the seat right in front of her table. Haki Kishinami grins mischievously.
“Yamada huh? Well, he’s not too bright but he does go nicely on the eye, doesn’t he?”
She thinks Yamada has a very nice behind, but she is not about to hurl herself to the flame of the high school gossip mill, not any more than she already is anyway. Ritsuka sighs morosely, snaps her book shut.
“Are you here to gloat?” she says, not with agitation but with resignation. Between the two of them, Ritsuka is the more visually striking girl. The red hair and hazel eyes inherited from some distant French ancestor net her not a small number of looks, and she knows the fit of her body is good, with slender legs, a petite frame, soft, plump breasts, and derriere sculpted from hours spent on the race tracks. For the longest time, Ritsuka’s parents thought her problem might be cured by the expediency of her acting more ladylike and leaving Physical Education class well and truly alone.
If you don’t go zippity-zappity-zoop off for a while, they said, you might not zap the next boy who wants to hold your hand with your zippy skin. Except that didn’t quite work and when she did try it, summoning every ounce of her patience and desire to hug another person without hearing them go youucchhh like a scalded cat, all she got was disappointment and frustration.
Haki’s brown hair and eyes combo are positively plain next to her. But Haki’s skin doesn’t zap boys who want to hold her hands, or kiss her lips, or do to her the exciting things Ritsuka can only read from books. So on White Days, Haki’s shoe locker floods with return letters and promised dates, while Ritsuka’s shoe locker floods with her worn white slippers and maybe a scrap or two of crumpled-up papers written on a dare.
It’s not fair, she thinks for the umpteenth time of her life. All she wants is to be kissed by a nice boy before she goes to college and becomes a responsible, career-climbing, money-making boring adult. It’s nothing more than what her schoolmates are already enjoying. A little youthful passion. Sweet and filthy and reckless. Surely that’s not too much to ask for unless the gods up there are the boring crotchety old people’s kind of god who hates sex and women who want sex.
“Oh, come on! I’m just trying to cheer you up!” Haki is still grinning. Patting Ritsuka consolingly on the shoulder, she says brightly.
“I’m sure you will find someone. Aren’t you going to college in Tokyo? There’s a lot of guys in Tokyo. Even you can find someone, I’m sure! Maybe a guy who has rubber soles for feet!”
Haki laughs at her own joke then, light and free and bereft of the burden of someone who has never had to refrain from holding the hands of her own parents or shy away from breezy summer clothes. Haki has never been shepherded from one befuddled doctor to the next, trying to look for a non-existent solution to a problem no one has ever heard of.
Your daughter’s biomagnetic field is extraordinary. I have never… What? A solution? Well…
She’s giving off enough charge to power batteries. I’ve never seen any case like that. I need to write to my colleagues. In the meantime, she should refrain from skin contact. Pants. Stockings. Long-sleeved shirts. Maybe a warning to parents of children around her. You understand the potential problems? Yes. Yes, just give me a moment.
Yes, Haki never has to worry about such things. But Haki is her friend, and she is only trying to help.
“Come on, Riri!! It will be better, I promise! So what if one hundred and seven didn’t work out? I’m sure one hundred and eight will be the magic number! And he will be a tall, swole guy who sweeps you off your feet! Out there in the sea ♪ in Tokyo city ♪ is your future, Riri!! ♪ So sing we in Swahili!! ♪”
A surprised laugh blows its way through her closed lips, resulting in an unladylike giggle-snort.
“You don’t even know what Swahili is!”
“Well, it rhymed and it made you laugh, didn’t it? Mission completed! As far as I’m concerned!”
Now Ritsuka allows a smile to stretch across her face, even as she pats Haki on her shoulder, careful not to touch her exposed skin. Yes, so what if one hundred and seven didn’t work out? Out there is a whole wide world. She is sure there is someone out there for her.
She walks home the moment school ends, leaving behind friends in the throes of tear-filled goodbyes and laugh-filled promises and newly made couples and exes. It’s not a nice feeling to watch something she very much can’t participate in. Humans are tactile creatures. A truly unbelievable sum of human connection is communicated through the touch of naked skin, a foundation which she is denied.
There is no use lamenting on it, of course. It’s been a known thing for her for as long as she can remember. Best not dwell on it. As Haki says, it’s better to look forward to the future, where there just may be something out there for even Ritsuka ‘Untouchable’ Fujimaru.
It’s not fair, but she has learned very early on, that life is not measured in fairness. Nothing more to do but soldier on.
She is thinking of this, and of the college of her choice whose examination test she is sure she has passed, when she makes the third crossroad turn from her house. A man crosses over from the other side of the intersection, sees her, points, and gapes.
“My word, you are gushing everywhere, girl!”
Ritsuka sputters in shock and embarrassment.
“Excuse me??!!”
Gushing??!! Who uses such a word? Ritsuka has only ever seen such words used in a particular type of literature which she secretly consumes in prodigious amounts, the mention of which is enough to make Ritsuka flush all the way to her ears. Gushing?!!! She? That sounds positively indecent (amazing!)! If only she could actually…. But no! Coming from a complete stranger, that is the height of rudeness! And an adult man at that! What the hell??!!
Now her embarrassment is transforming into the beginning of indignant anger. The sheer absurdity of being told that she was gushing by a complete stranger on top of the disappointment of the day and having to leave in a hurry as her agemates prepare for a glorious last high school night to remember. She sputters, pointing an accusatory finger at the strange man while her other hand goes into the side pocket of her knapsack where her trusty Mace bottle sits snuggled against the canvas fabric.
“The hell!??”
In the brief moment of her surprise, the stranger has crossed the street and is now standing in front of Ritsuka, very much to her alarm. Up close, he is clearly a foreigner, with light hair and light eyes that are now boring into her with disconcerting intensity.
“I mean what I said. I can feel you all the way across the block like a floodlight, gushing everywhere. I know this whole country is supposed to be a backward dumpster with less mana output than the Clock Tower garden shed, so you must feel right proud of yourself for having more mana than the average first-year student at the Association, but that’s still no reason to throw proper etiquette to the bin and broadcasts your magus pride for all and sundry to see. What were you trying to do anyway, flashing everyone like that? Or is that how the no-name families around here play their petty politics against each other? Was that what it was? Did your parents make you do this? Still, what an uncivilized and improper way to go about it! I would have the name of your clan!”
…what?
Ritsuka’s budding anger evaporates like so much morning dew under the summer sun in the face of the man’s incomprehensible diatribe. She gapes openly at him, her accusatory finger going a little limp at the bizarre foreigner.
What in the… what???!!
“Well? Have you come to your senses and realized the buffoonery you were committing?”
Ritsuka’s mind blanks out for a second, which apparently proves too much for the stranger because he harrumphs impatiently before stepping even closer.
“By Root! Surely you can comprehend this much? I know this boorish boonie of an Island only ever produces a handful of potentiating bloodlines and most of those are absolutely pitifully weak at that, but surely even the Neophyte children of this hovel of a place know the basis of the Moonlit world? In the name of Akasha, I ask you from whose blood you come, girl?”
Ritsuka takes a step back, slowly, while still staring at the man with bug eyes. She looks around them, sees nothing but empty streets and a quickly darkening skyline. She puts a hand to her forehead, checking her temperature. Nope. She isn’t in fact running a fever and conjuring up this entire surreal encounter.
Finally, the stranger seems to have noticed her confusion for what it is. He squints at her through his brass monocle. And who the heck still wears a monocle outside of cosplay enthusiasts and nostalgic weirdos these days??!!
“Hang on a minute,” he says slowly, checking her face. “You haven’t the foggiest what I’m talking about. You are… “
It’s the stranger’s turn to stare at Ritsuka with bug eyes now. He seems to recognize something because the next thing he does is reach into the inner breast of his bottle-green frock coat (and who the heck wears 19th-century frock coat in 20th century Japan in the middle of summer??! That’s another weirdo point on Ritsuka’s weirdo-o-meter!) and takes out a blue clip file. He checks whatever is on the clip file, checks her face again. His face lights up in recognition.
“You are Ritsuka Fujimaru! I have been looking for you everywhere since this morning! Why are you not at Tsukuba Shuei high school? Are you perhaps… what is the plebeian expression… aha!... playing truant?”
Oh no, Ritsuka thinks with a sinking feeling, I have a stalker! Now the surreality turns spiky. The absurdity gains the edge of danger. He knows her name, her school. What else does he know?
“It’s…” Ritsuka takes another step back, slowly as not to spook the clearly deranged man. “... the last day of school…”
“Oh is it?” The stranger responds, seemingly unfazed. “Well, that doesn’t matter. What matters now is… Ritsuka Fujimaru!” He makes a sweeping, flamboyant gesture with one hand. He steps closer, his face twisting in excitement. “I am here to offer you the chance of a lifetime!”
Yeah, I heard Darth Vader say something of the same vein, thinks Ritsuka in her head as she steps back, again, while frantically looking for possible escape routes. Her hand clutches the Mace bottle behind her back. In the face of this brazen stalker, it feels indescribably small.
“Oh, you are huh?”
“Yes, I am,” the stranger replies, stepping into her space once more. “Ritsuka Fujimaru, you donated your blood in Tsukuba City Blood Drive a week ago, is that correct?”
“Yess?” she hedges, buying time. They step, she backward, him forward, locked in awkward tandem.
“Then you should know, because I am here to deliver the result which has been read from your own blood, that you have been chosen by Chaldea, on the merit of your exemplary aptitude to be a master.”
Ritsuka’s alarm spikes. She can’t begin to understand what the stranger is saying, but every single bit of that sentence is hitting all of her warning bells. Now it becomes sinister. She has never heard of this Chaldea, but an organization (that can take the blood meant for donation and read things from it) is a far bigger kind of threat than a lone man following a teenage girl on her way home from school. She has read about human trafficking, about women falling into modern slavery through nothing more than mere misfortune. Surely not? This is 20th century Japan… not…
She doesn’t even hide the fact that she’s basically running backward now. The only reason why Ritsuka has not turned on her heels and bolt is because the stranger doesn’t seem the type that she can take her eyes off safely. No, best she watches him with two wide eyes than turn her back and not see what he might do. But even that doesn’t seem to deter him in the least bit. If anything, his eyes seem to turn thoughtful now, and he is looking at her once more, like he is seeing something else in the place of a panicking nineteen years old.
“But you don’t know, do you? What you are… What’s in your blood.”
“Yeah? What am I?”
He smiles now. “Ritsuka Fujimaru, you are a mage.”
Ritsuka screeches to a halt. So does the man. She looks at him, then looks around them. She looks at the skies. There are no flying pigs up there, albeit the sun is setting quickly and night is probably only minutes away now. She looks at the empty streets, then she touches herself on the forehead, feeling for a certain scar.
“You are not Harry Potter,” says the man in intermingled amusement and exasperation.
“Could have fooled me,” Ritsuka quips back while pointing at the stranger’s frock coat and top hat combo. He even has the hair. If she squints really hard and huffs the hopium some more he might start to look like Severus Snape went on a year-long bender after Lily Evans, got into weeds, switched from black to green, traded in the bitterness for flamboyance by the pound, and became not as much of a bitter human grease stain as he did in canon.
Yeah…
“I see now why the Security Organization has sent me, Lev Uvall, to induct you into the World of Magi. Most fortuitous is our meeting, Ritsuka Fujimaru. If I might deduce, you seem to come from no bloodline at all. Yet you are giving off… fascinating! A first-generation magus with that level of output, with probably no knowledge of how to contain it. I wonder if you even have any magic circuits worth their name in your body at all. Why then, some among our world would not count you a proper magus at all! But clearly, you have potential, for if not then the searching algorithm of SHEBA to flag you as a promising candidate for the…”
Ritsuka maces the now-named Lev Uvall in the face, turns her back on the sputtering man, and legs it as hard as she can.
She manages to clear two intersections in the space of minutes. She hears no footsteps behind her, and so for a moment, her heart soars in relief. But a mere second later, as she turns the third intersection, the man is there in her path, and, aside from his now red-rimmed watery eyes, looking none the worse for wear despite taking a faceful of pepper mist at point-blank range. Once more, Ritsuka skids to a halt. Shock, disbelief, and ratcheting panic war in her thundering ribcage. Acting on instinct, she brandishes her Mace bottle, which seems comically inadequate in the face of this deranged psycho.
“Stay back!” She yells at the top of her lung, hoping that someone will hear her and come to investigate. “I… I have a weapon! And I will use it!”
The Mace bottle, nozzle facing forward, shakes in her death clutch.
In response, Lev Uvall regards her with a look of intermingled chagrin and annoyance. He twirls one hand while strolling towards her leisurely.
“Alright, I apologize. I should have handled that with more grace. But miss, there’s really no need to…”
“I said stay back!”
He falters for a second, looking at her with a put-upon expression like he is dealing with a child in the midst of an epic temper tantrum. Ritsuka’s heart thunders. Rage and trepidation well in her throat. Her eyes dart around, looking for someone, anyone. She has been making noises. But the streets remain inexplicably empty. Just what is going on?! Her skin pricks at the eerie stillness of everything. These streets she has walked for a thousand times, now seem so alien to her.
“Won’t you please just listen?” says Lev Lainur. “We are in my bounded field. You can make as much noise as you want. No one will come.”
What the… what? Ritsuka’s fingers go white around her Mace bottle. He’s not making any sense… but he is making sense. Something pricks behind her eyes. Something scraps from within her skull, trying to come through.
He pauses then, looks at her face, grimaces.
“Right, that won’t do anything to calm you down, will it? Well, they didn’t call me the indoor chairman for my ability to smooth-talk unreasonably panic-prone young potentiates. Let us try this again, shall we? I promise I will not take one step further without your approval. Would that calm you down?”
“My ma tells me not to talk to crazies!” Ritsuka snaps back, which prompts an amused smile to spread across the stranger’s face.
“Crazy am I? Well, I suppose that’s not nearly the worst thing I have been called. Right, well. I’ll just get on with it, then. I can only hope I get through to you this time.”
He takes off his top hat, bows, gestures at himself.
“I am professor Lev, sub-director of the Organization for the Preservation of the Human Order Finis Chaldea.”
He stresses the last two words, clearly the name of some fantasy cult, with what is clearly pride.
“You are Ritsuka Fujimaru. You are nineteen. You go to Tsukuba Shuei High School. The eldest child of two, you don’t have the best relationship with your parents, but that’s neither your nor their fault. The reason why I am here is because last week you gave your blood to your city’s annual blood drive. Your blood type is O minus by the way. Quite useful. O minus blood. But more than that. This time, we were looking for more than just mere plasma donors. You see, there’s more to this world than you realize.”
He snaps his fingers and… Ritsuka’s hands go lax for a moment before tightening reflexively again. That was… No. It’s a sleight of hand. He’s playing tricks on her.
“Magic is real. We used to have it. We don’t anymore. What we have now is thaumaturgy, or the reenactment of the god’s mysteries by ways of human methods. It is a study built upon the foundation of… and… I have lost you.”
He scowls at the incomprehension spreading across her features.
“Fine. We shall use the ignoramus mass’s nomenclature. You have magic… “
Lev Lainur shudders as if the act of uttering the word magic in this context revulses him. A thought lights up in Ritsuka’s head at the sight. He fancies himself some sort of scientist, as paradoxical as that sounds in relation to something that walks like magic and quacks like magic. If she can use that against him… she might untangle herself from this insane encounter.
“The point is. Not everyone does. You have to be born with it. There are bloodlines founded around entire specializations of magic… ulp…”
He shudders again, and does not quite notice her shifting to the left, positioning herself so her back is to the setting sun.
“What I’m saying is. You have it. And if my guess is right, you are the first person in your family to manifest… mmaa… thaumaturgical potential. That is to say, our test shows you have quite the aptitude for CHALDEA master program. So if you would just please…”
“So what you are saying is that I’m a witch and you are here to recruit me for your wannabe Hogwarts slash Abracadabra BDSM club. Is that what it is?”
She cuts him in the middle. Just as she anticipates, a grimace twists Lev Lainur’s reddening face at the words ‘witch’, ‘Hogwarts’, and ‘Abracadabra’. He visibly puffs himself up, gripping the lapel of his coat as if bracing against an insult.
“I beg your pardon! You are not a witch. Chaldea is not some trumped-up, cheap replica of the Association dreamed up in the mind of a normie knowing nothing of our millennia-old craft! And we absolutely do not have anything under that ridiculous…”
Ritsuka maces him in the face, again, then she throws the bottle and her entire school knapsack into his face for good measure before bolting out of there.
Her house is just another intersection away. This time of the day, there will be people there for sure. Either mom or dad or her little brother and their dog Pochi. She can make it, she is sure. Except she doesn’t. Ritsuka manages to leap three steps away before a cold hand grasps her wrist in a vice-like grip. Lev Lainur’s red, teary face gazes at her with exasperation.
“Miss, really. There is no need to be such a boor.”
Now she screams, in anger and disbelief and the wild hope that someone will come regardless of the stranger’s assurance that no one will. In response, he twists her arm into a wristlock, until her body is bent and twisted and Ritsuka is looking up at him from an upside-down view, her eyes watering from the pain. Then on the back of her neck is another hand gripping tight.
Now she panics. She attempts to kick her legs, shrieks. Let me go, you perverted stalker! But there’s nobody on the streets except for her and the eerily, infuriatingly calm professor Lev Uvall. He makes a noise at the back of his throat.
“Won’t you please just listen for a minute? I’m not asking for much, am I?”
You are asking me to stay quiet as you drag me off to do whatever, she thinks derisively as her teenage imagination summons forth all manners of ghastly scenarios that might happen. At the same time, a quiet, more observational part of her mind is sitting up and watching the whole thing with a sort of keen awe. The stranger is touching her, has been touching her for more than a minute now, naked palms against the clammy skin of her wrist and neck, and he has not dropped unconscious at her feet (like Tachibana from class B when he tried to hold her hand during Mid-Year Festival) or growing dazed and frantic and running away while screaming gibberish (like Yamada earlier today). But that derision must have shown because Lev Uvall peers with one eyebrow raised at her pink face, still upside down and glaring at him under her bent armpit, and harrumphs.
“Fine, ye of little faith.”
Then the next second a thing happens that, when Ritsuka thinks back on this years into the future, is the first stone that tumbles and slides and brings about the collapse of her old world.
She can’t quite describe in great detail what happens or how it happens, because she remembers only a queer sensation going through her entire body, shivering and shaking like a charged current going through her skin, like she has put one finger on a switched-on Van de Graaf ball. Lev Uvall twists her hand. Ritsuka feels a distinct sensation like a champagne bottle being popped open, except she is the bottle, and then an invisible tickling something is coming… gushing… from the tips of her finger.
Ritsuka’s hand, the one being held in Lev Uvall’s iron grip, goes up in rainbow-colored flame.
All the thoughts in her mind go to a screeching halt at the impossible sight.
Her hand is on fire. The fire is rainbow-colored.
“Do I have your attention now?” says Lev Uvall in a bored, droning voice.
Ritsuka has no answer for him, momentarily stunned as she is. The fire is coming from her, from inside of her. She instinctively and inexplicably knows this for a truth. The fire has always been within her, beneath her skin, in her guts, behind her eyeballs. Lev Uvall has coaxed it out somehow, in the few short minutes he has her in his grip. It is a thing… it is the thing. Her zippity zappity zoop, as her parents would call it, is overflowing from every pore on her skin but chiefly, through the fingers in her burning hand. The thing that overcharges and scrambles the brain of every single person thus far in her life who attempted to touch the barbed prison cage that is her skin.
“Mana,” says Lev Uvall like he is giving a lecture to a particularly dim child. “... is the Greater Magical energy of the world. It is the breath of the planet, moving through and filling everything around us. Od, on the other hand, is the magical energy created from within a magus’s body, the breath of our soul, so to say. Using either Od or manipulating Mana, a magus can express his or her magecraft upon the world. Of course, to even utilize a spell formula would require years of study for a neophyte like you, but something as simple as the Gandr.” He moves her now, unbends and untwists her, and then twirls her around. His body is behind her and his hands holding her hand and the back of her neck like a Bunraku puppeteer manipulating a stage doll.
The fire on her hand condenses into a rainbow ball, pulsating like a jewel. With a flick, Lev Uvall flings that ball from her hand like she flung the aluminum bottle at his face minutes prior. It collides against the far wall of a nondescript public building with an eardrum-blasting Krakaboom and a roiling, boiling cloud of smoke. When the debris clears, a hole the size of a small Suzuki model can be seen in the plastered concrete. The thick wall is nearly punched through. Once more, unbelievably, not a soul appears to scream at the property damage.
Lev Uvall frowns at the size of the crater.
“That’s a lot of firepower for a little girl.”
Distantly, Ritsuka hears herself gasp, breathes, shuddering and quivering. Lev Uvall is unperturbed. He examines her hands, peers into her eyes. He pulls her limb, unresisting body this way and that.
“You have a lot of potentials. I see why SHEBA flagged you for candidacy, for all that you have no bloodline to speak of. In Chaldea, bloodlines don’t matter. Sometimes that’s a bad thing, but this time, it’s probably a good thing for you. You have no control whatsoever. I guess that’s why you were gushing everywhere. Because you don’t even rightly know what you have in you, or how to control it in the first place.”
Now he has a look like an idea just springs forth from his mind.
“Might be that you don’t have what it takes to control it either. First-generation you are. It would not be strange. Why, my close friend Ms. Aozaki…. But never you mind.”
Abruptly, he lets go. Ritsuka drops like a doll with its strings cut. She sits on the ground, looking wide-eyed at the crater in the wall, then at Lev Uvall. Her mouth opens, then closes, then opens. Not a single word comes forth.
“Go to Chaldea,” he says, casting a look at the streets and in the horizon where squats the city’s People’ Committee right next to the one shrine on a low hill. He takes something from his breast pocket, writes on it. He hands it to her.
“Even I can tell I have worn out someone’s patience with my presence.”
You don’t say, quips Ritsuka in her head.
“After all that, I should hope you realize I am no fraud. I won’t press you now, except to tell you that you have been exceedingly lucky. Had you been born anywhere else but this magically barren land of inferior magus houses, you would have either found your grisly end at the maw of some hungry phantasmal beast or worse, become a prized specimen in some other magus’s workshop. As it is, Chaldea is the best choice for you. But I shan’t tax you further.”
The card in Ritsuka’s trembling hand reads.
Finis Chaldea
Organization for the Preservation of the Human Order
Sanctioned Operation of the United Nations and The Mage Association
Beneath are two phone numbers, a fax number, a website, an email address, and a physical address… in Antarctica…
Ritsuka stares at the card for a long time. When she looks up, Lev Uvall is gone, the skies have gone dark, and she can finally hear the panicked cries of her neighbors.
It’s not every day Ritsuka is told the thing that made her skin into her own personal prison is the breath of her soul made manifest… by a shady-looking guy in a ridiculous frock coat, top hat, and high heeled boots combo even. So one might forgive her for being out of sorts in the aftermath of such earth-shattering revelation.
The breath of her soul made manifest… Huh… Is that why every single person - with the exception of the rando who told her so - who touches parts of her naked self is either rendered catatonic or brain scrambled into a horny, raging berserker? Why does that even happen, if the thing that thrums beneath her skin and comes out to make rainbow flames and pulsating, wall-blasting jewels that put the Kamehameha to shame is her soul’s breath as he put it? Because to Ritsuka’s ears, that just sounds like Lev Uvall is saying her soul is too spicy for most people. Or is that her soul’s breath that is spicy? Does that mean her soul likes spicy food? What is even spicy soul food? Or is it something like soul’s indigestion and the resultant soul’s acid reflux and it’s the reflux that makes the light show and melts people’s brain and motor functions? Is that how it goes?
This whole thing is whack, she thinks. Nothing makes sense. And she has more questions than answers.
So Ritsuka goes home to her waiting family, puts on her Pikachu pajama, and goes to sleep at 7 PM on a Friday night. She wakes at 7 AM sharp on the clock, slams her Yugioh alarm clock on the head. She gets up and goes to wash her face and brush her teeth, then goes down the stairs to the kitchen to fix herself and the family some food. It’s Saturday after the last day of high school. Her little brother - who is only a year and seven days younger than her because mom and dad realized very quickly that their firstborn had issues and the doctors had doubts she would survive - is out cold after a night out with his pals, celebrating the start of summer and the end of homework for the next three months and some. Her dad would be sleeping in. It’s summer. He works for a traveling company so summer and the month leading up to it are high octane office crunchtime for him. He needs all the sleep he can get. As for mother, she makes breakfast five days a week. Ritsuka can fill in for the two days where she gets to sleep til a little later than 7:30.
She flips eggs and toasts bread and uncans some beans. Pochi the Golden Retriever crawls through the doggy flap and puts his wet snout against her hand, sniffing and licking the frying oil on her fingers. She gives Pochi a sausage, for which he rewards her with happy, excited yips and a frantic wagging of his tail, and tells him to go get the newspapers.
Her family comes yawning down the stairs at 8 AM. They eat breakfast together. Ma asks her how was her sleep. Dad mentions a commotion at the post office building two blocks over. Something scandalous is making its way through the neighborhood grapevines. He switches the TV on as he munches a slightly charred, lopsided sunny-side-up. On the 50 inch Toshiba are people crowding around a wall with a crater the size of a Suzuki dug into it. A row of fluorescent traffic cones and flashing police tapes surround the wall as people in Hazmat suits walk about with gizmos in hand.
Ah, thinks Ritsuka as her stomach drops. I did not, in fact, got drunk off of Peach Soda and dreamed up a bizarre episode.
They suspect some sort of terrorist attack, her da says around his mouthful of beans. He sprays her little brother by accident, eliciting a chain of ewws and yucks.
Ma asks her if she’s alright. She’s looking a little peaked, ma says. Is it the end of high school? Or is it about the Yamada boy?
“Riri,” comes her name from her mother’s mouth, sweet and insistent and concerned. Mama Fujimaru holds her arm. Ritsuka feels her reassuring warmth through the linen cloth. But the moment is lost when mom turns to the other side, sees the shenanigans going on between her father and little brother.
“Dear! Eat your food! Ritsuka! Stop egging your dad on! Literally!”
Yes. Her brother, who is only a year and 7 days younger than her, is also named Ritsuka. Ritsuka on the double. It is as it sounds.
But come think of it, do the circumstances of her birth have anything to do with - Ritsuka swallows her last piece of toast - the spiciness of her soul?
Her brother helps her clean up once the meal is done, chatting absentmindedly with her father about his plan for Summer. He mentions Honolulu, excitement barely concealed under a layer of feigned indifference.
The beach. Wouldn’t that be a nice place to go? Thinks Ritsuka as she conjures up images of brightly colored swimsuits, sparkling green water, and warm white sand into which she will bury her tired feet. She thinks of herself in that water, naked as the day she was born, and the water hugging her shape. A cool embrace against her sun-warmed skin.
9 AM she leaves the house under the guise of walking the dog to circle around the site two blocks from her family abode that has been cordoned off and ringed with uniform people. She mills about the perimeter, staring at the crater in the wall. The crater that she made with her zippity zap. The crater Lev Uvall made her make.
The memories of yesterday feel like soggy bread in the pit of her stomach.
Seeming to sense her distress, Pochi whines and noses her palm. Then he stands up on two hind legs. He is a big, furry guy, Pochi. And Ritsuka is not an especially tall girl. Average, she is, in the heights department. So when he stands up he can almost look her in the eyes. Pochi whines, then wuffs, his big tongue lolling out. He gives her a big, sloppy lick in the face, which draws a pearl of laughter from her.
“Pochi!”
She goes out to lunch with Haki, as they agreed to the day prior, at Tom Tom Tsukuba Coffee House on Koyadai, Haki spending most of lunch chatting happily about her plans for summer.
Hers also involve a beach and swimsuits… and Daichi from Class C, whose letter in her locker on White Day is Haki’s favorite.
Ritsuka sneaks strips of baked chicken breast to Pochi under the cafe table, the dog huffing in doggy joy and she fantasizes, once more, of the sea. Bikinis are nice. Hawaiian shirts are also nice, in a silly beach bum kind of way. She can see herself doing that, enjoying being a beach bum, dozing on a lounge chair under the shade of an umbrella, getting tan lines on her immaculate, untouched skin. Ritsuka is partial to fun designs like stripy neon orange or mottled yellow and ocherous tropical flowers. The only thing she has in her closet is a rubber diving suit.
Lev Uvall’s skin, she remembers, has been warm and smooth. He has the hands of a man who rarely needs to get physical with his body. He has no calluses that she can recall, for that he was able to subdue her with insulting ease. How many minutes was that? Five minutes? Ten? And not a sign that suggests he was in any way affected by Ritsuka’s spicy soul.
He spoke of magi as a community. A hidden world within this one. Does that mean that there are people like him out there?
Of course, there are, she admonishes herself. There are enough for them to form something called Chaldea and they command enough power to be acknowledged by the United Nations of all things. Well, that is, if she can take the card and the information on it at face value. And isn’t that the kicker of it all? At face value, with assumed honesty and credibility.
Ritsuka goes home after lunch with Haki at 1PM. Surrendering Pochi to his white and red doggy house in the front yard, she goes to her room on the second floor, opens the drawer to her table, and takes out the card. She reads it again. The information hasn’t changed overnight.
I must be insane, she ponders to herself, to even think of…
I must be insane. No sane person would believe such shady, unprovable claims.
What then, do you call the crater in the wall from two blocks away? That’s real enough. Certainly real enough for police and people in Hazmat suits to crawl the area. Real enough that her entire neighborhood is abuzz with rumors and wild speculations.
She takes her phone and punches in the number. The dial rings only once before she hangs up, her heart thundering in her chest.
What the hell is she doing? Is she so starved for the touch of a stranger’s hand that she would…
Ritsuka thinks then of her early childhood memories. Mama Fujimaru used to swaddle her toddler in linen. Even so, she often needed gloves to safely handle her daughter. Ritsuka, at six years old, going to school for the first time in a toddler suit, socks, and kiddy gloves. Ritsuka, on that same day, being sent back home because another kid didn’t know and touched her on her toddler's cheek and that kid was out of commission for the day. The harm wouldn’t last, thank the gods. But it’s a hard sell for elementary school teachers to have to phone home to unsuspecting parents and explain to them how their toddlers could be electrified to unconsciousness from the surface static charge of their classmates.
It’s a hard sell, all in all. But maybe it doesn’t need to be. The breath of her soul, he said, chastising her for not knowing how to control a part of herself. Does that mean then that she can learn control?
The bastard gave enough to get her hooked, but not nearly enough for her to be satisfied. But that’s how it goes with shady characters wanting something, isn’t it?
Some doors once opened, Ritsuka thinks, cannot be closed. This feels like one such door.
She puts away the card at the bottom of her drawer and closes it, then stops and thinks for a minute. She takes it out again, snaps it with her phone camera before putting it away once more. Then she puts the photo on her Drive account, her Facebook (set to seen by her only), and her Instagram.
Just in case, she tells herself. Because yesterday she watched a concrete wall being blown apart by what she would usually dismiss as a trick of the light or fancy CGI, and in the same day a man who looked like he walked off the wrong Harry Potter satire set made a slice of the world his own reality without her or anybody else the wiser. So who knows what else can happen now?
Then she goes and spends some time with her family.
Three days pass. Ritsuka watches the door and the neighborhood anxiously. She expects the shadow of the man with the top hat, or a mail in the box coming all the way from Antarctica. She does get a mail in the box. Her acceptance letter to The University of Tokyo’s Integrated Health Sciences Department. Mama and Papa and Baby Brother Fujimaru throw her a party that night. They gather around the home entertainment set, with buckets of KFC in their laps and a chilling cake in the fridge and they set to watching Takeshi Watanabe’s masterpiece Neko Samurai.
The disgraced samurai Madarame is giving a bath to the beautiful Tamanojo with the pristine white fur while singing the song of the Samurai Cat when Ritsuka’s phone pings.
“As the successor to the One-Eye Flowing Sword Style with unparalleled technique. Who… I wonder? Who!? Gave me the name Spotted Deeeeeemmooooonnnnnn?” Papa Fujimaru brandishes a drumstick dramatically like a Samurai brandishing an extremely diminutive Katana. Her ma, her brother, and Ritsuka sing the background chorus of the meowing Tamanojo and laugh to the tunes of the song.
“Nyah! Nyah! Nyah!”
Papa Fujimaru laughs uproariously and falls into the coach, sending buckets and chicken bits bouncing into the air from the force of his collision. Mama Fujimaru leans into him, chortling all the while. She hits a coke battle, sending the content spilling on the marble floor.
“I’ll go grab a rag,” Ritsuka extricates herself from her comfy, chicken encrusted sofa nest. In the hallway, she checks her phone. There on the screen is the alert bar for an incoming email from a sender titled Finis Chaldea.
This is the moment Ritsuka’s ordinary world ends, she will remember this. This is the moment she stands on the precipice of her old, ordinary life as the eldest daughter of a regular family in Tsukuba, and stares into the horizon where the other world marches inexorably towards her, marches to crash into the life of a regular young girl on the threshold to becoming an adult in mundane Japan. A doorway looms on the screen of her phone.
They know where she lives. They know who she is. They know things about her that she doesn’t even know. She can look away but that will not stop the marching of that strange, pulsating jeweled world. It will not stop the inevitable collision.
That night, when Papa Fujimaru slumps towards his bedroom, drunk, and her brother slumps towards his room, ears plugged in with the new BTS’s song, Ritsuka goes to clean up with her mom. Mama Fujimaru is droning on, the beer and the happiness coaxing out the chatterbox in her.
They go to Ritsuka’s bedroom, sitting on the chairs on the balcony under a pink moon, her ma gets teary-eyed as she recounts the memories of Ritsuka going through elementary school, through secondary school, and then through junior high school, struggling and excelling at the same time.
“My lovely girl is all grown up now. The next time I turn around might be she will be wearing the graduation gown, and then I blink and she will be in a wedding dress.”
“Hey ma,” Ritsuka hesitates, a feeling like live frogs jumping in the pit of her stomach. “Tell me of my birth, won’t you?”
Mama Fujimaru laughs fondly. It is an old story, but now Ritsuka is looking at it with newborn eyes.
“Oh, you were such a small baby. So small. And so cold. I was terrified. I cried all the time back then when I had you. You were so small and so cold and I didn’t know what else I could do to make you drink more or make you warm. The doctors told me not to get my hopes up. They said you have some condition. I can’t remember the name. They said I needed to think of myself now. But what a cruel thing to say to a new mother.”
Mama Fujimaru is crying now. Big dollops of hot tears come streaming down her face. She clutches Ritsuka’s arm like a woman drifting at sea clutches onto floating flotsam.
“Your pa was devastated. He drank you see. Then when he was done being drunk he tried to console me. Said there would always be another, and another. We were young. We were in good health. There’s no reason why we can’t. But there are things you just don’t say to a mother. He doesn’t cut himself open to bring you into the world. So how would he know? But I don’t blame him. He’s a simple man. He’s my simple man.”
It used to be that every time Ritsuka hears this tale, she would be struck with a profound sense of sorrow and helplessness. The story of her birth and near-death. The story of her origin. The miracle baby whom nobody expected to live past her fifth month.
“So one night when he was drunk and out cold, I put on my coat and I took you - you were the size of a kitten, so small you were - and I walked the streets. I didn’t know where I was going. I just didn’t want to be in there with your father asleep and reeking of wine and sadness. I walked and I walked, and then I happened upon the shrine. You know the old one that burned down ten years ago…”
“The old Sakatsuki shrine…” murmurs Ritsuka.
“That one, yes. One of those old shrines run by families so old they might be able to trace their lineage back to nobility. One of them. On that same day, I heard, a child of the Sakatsuki was gone too. I can’t remember how I heard, just that I heard. And they said the Sakatsuki held their children special. The young ones. They said children are the threshold between gods and men, and in them, the boundary of our world is made blurry. They loved their children you see. So I thought… I probably thought… back then. I walked blindly and I arrived at their door and I knew they lost a child that day.”
Ritsuka looks at the moon above, thinking, committing things to her memories. New details that come to life now that her world is suddenly different. Some veil has been lifted.
“I took you into their shrine, before the altar of the Sakatsuki Kami I prayed for you. I said, give me this child, gods, for I am not ready to let her go. Grant me this wish, gods.”
“You made a wish upon the stars,” says Ritsuka.
“I did,” mama Fujimaru laughs through her tears. She hugs her daughter, shaking. “And the gods granted my wish. You live. You grow up before my eyes. My beautiful, lovely daughter whom the gods granted me. Your pa doesn’t believe me. He said my mind was made flimsy by grief, but that we all got lucky. It might be so, but I know you are here now, and that you are my wish.”
Child of God, thinks Ritsuka. A miracle granted to a grieving mother. Or maybe it’s just the aimless wishing of an utterly mundane mother with love for her children.
She sits with her mother for a while more, lets her cry her heart out. The intermingled joy and sadness. Then she takes mama Fujimaru to her bed when the tears have dried and exhaustion has set in.
Then she goes back to her room and boots up her laptop. On the Chrome interface, she clicks the email from Finis Chaldea open, reads the offer of paid internship in Antarctica they made, and goes about drafting a reply.
Dear Finis Chaldea,
Thank you for your….
End Chapter 1
1. Expect copious mana transfer in future chapters.
2. The Sakatsuki belongs to Fate / Kaleid liner Prisma Illiya
3. Lev Uvall belongs to the novella Clock Tower 2015 by Nasu.