Fate: Hammer Time

Chapter 32: More Tutoring

When Magi wanted to communicate with each other, they usually had various means at their disposal.

There was the postal service of course, for delivering letters, or alternatively, if a Magus wanted a faster and more secure way of communication, there were crystal balls, scrying bowls, and magical mirrors.

Recently though, a new form of communication had been introduced to the Clocktower.

The phone.

Though eschewed by most traditional Magi, the phone had been readily accepted by some of the more open-minded types, and it should come as absolutely no surprise that Waver Velvet had one installed right in his office.

It was an ancient thing, one of those old machines that required you to hold the earpiece and mouthpiece separately. By all rights, it shouldn't have been able to contact any of the more modern networks that most people use these days. The same went for all other phones in the Clocktower.

In their typical fashion of making things ridiculously more complicated than they had to be however, the 'technicians' employed by the Magus Association just decided to throw some Magecraft at the problem. Through that Magecraft, the phones could get onto any network they wanted, from old phone cell lines to the most modern of Wi-Fi-networks, without requiring any landlines, connections, or anything else.

It was a much too complicated solution for a problem that they could have solved easily with a bit of technological know-how, but it worked, and that was all that counted in the end.

Not that Waver used the phone all that much. Generally, all the people he wanted to contact either lived in the Clocktower, which meant he could simply visit them, or had no phone at all, forcing him to use magical means to contact them anyway.

Today however, he was making a call to someone who was guaranteed to have a phone.

After a long conversation that was as much small talk as it was business, Waver put the old phone back on its hook with an uncharacteristically large smile on his face. It was a smile that his friends would be surprised to see, his enemies would be greatly unnerved by, and that his Archibald leash-holders would immediately want to wipe away, if only out of spite.

He knew that it wasn't very smart to show his emotions so openly, even if he was alone in his office, but he couldn't help himself. Fighting the smile was futile, so he allowed himself the momentary show of happiness.

It wasn't every day after all that he could talk freely to an old friend.

Bishop Dilo and he went back years, to a point well before Waver had even concocted the idea of participating in the Fourth Grail War.

He'd been fifteen years old at the time, and he'd just been thrown out of the hotel room by Kayneth, who had taken his students on a 'field trip' to Lile, a city in France. As Waver had nowhere else to go, he'd wandered around the city, until he'd run into bishop Dilo, who had been giving a small sermon in the city at the time. The old man had seen that Waver had been lost, in more ways than one, and he'd reached out towards the small teen, to offer whatever guidance he could.

Somehow though, that small conversation between a kind man of the cloth and a troubled teen had changed into a fight with several local criminals, a scuffle with a corrupt police officer, a high-speed chase through town in a truck holding three pet goats, and several other unexpected happenings that had turned the entire city on its head.

Safe to say, neither Waver nor Dilo were welcome in Lile anymore.

The old bishop had just laughed however when they'd been thrown out of the city, and had exchanged contact information with Waver. Ever since then, the bishop had been the closest thing Waver had to a father figure.