Illya coughed, waving away the smoke, having to blink rapidly to adjust her eyes. She really, really hoped Rin hadn’t just vaporized her castle. Just because she begrudgingly allowed it to be used as the location for the Tohsaka heir’s experiment with recreating Zelretch’s Jewel Sword, didn’t mean she wanted it to be blown up by Rin’s errant spells! Just because the castle wouldn’t be used anymore after she died, because there wouldn’t be any more Holy Grail Wars, that didn’t mean that Rin could blast holes in it with the energy from parallel worlds!
She rubbed at her ears, the ringing in them gradually subsiding to allow her to hear the sounds of people speaking in the background, their voices swelling into an indistinct buzz. She squinted, taking in her surroundings; of course, it wasn’t the castle. Of course, Rin had catapulted her somewhere else instead. When she got back to Fuyuki, she was going to make sure Rin knew she was displeased by this turn of events. Oh, and she could definitely come up with a real good tirade, almost on the level of the rage-induced rants she could give about her father--
Her heart constricted in her chest, and the white-haired homunculus faltered, now suddenly aware that something was wrong. This seemed like an ordinary Japanese city, but...wasn’t that skyline just a little familiar? And that bridge, in the distance--this was...no, it looked different, it felt different, but--it was Fuyuki, wasn’t it?
Suddenly, her biggest concern wasn’t that Rin had sent her away from the castle. It was that Rin may have sent her to another world. Of course, she’d have gone to the Fuyuki of that world, they must have overlapped enough, but--this wasn’t anywhere near where the castle should be in this world. She was standing on a sidewalk in the residential district, close to where she thought the Emiya residence would be if it was her Fuyuki. Was it because of her connection to her brother that she’d be brought here? No one had noticed her appearance, likely the Second Magic masking it, but something had to have brought her here, an anchor of some kind, a reason for her to go here as opposed to anywhere else, because Rin hadn’t had any intentions to send her anywhere on purpose.
Her heart thudded off-beat in her chest, the Lesser Grail’s protesting their removal from their proper dimension. There was something else that was strange about this place, like an unpleasant itch she couldn’t find. She cast her gaze across the street and froze; no...no, her eyes weren’t playing tricks on her. Leaving the house just up the street was a girl who could’ve been her twin. They looked practically identical, save for the clothes they wore. She let out a strangled noise; that was her anchor, then--the draw of a similar existence would have been easy for the Second Magic to connect the dots. “--Hey,” she tried, her voice rasping in her throat, “--h-hey, you!” She didn’t feel comfortable yelling her own name, because it might not even be this version of her’s actual name.
