Mother of Learning 2 - Outside World

by nobody103

  But that was all background activity – the real focus of his efforts was tracking the Ibasans and the Cult of the Dragon Below, mapping the structure of their organization. Originally he wanted to be cautious, spending most of the restart just observing everything, identifying their members and locations they met and did business in, but… well, he saw his chance and he took it. While the Ibasans were mostly full blown mages and lived deep underground in heavily warded bases crawling with guards, only periodically visiting the surface, most of their allies in the city were far more modestly protected. Zorian followed around cultists and simple mercenaries that worked with the Ibasans, tracking them down to their homes and reading their thoughts as they skulked around. The wards on their houses, if they even had them, were hilariously easy to avoid or break, allowing Zorian to root through their stuff for additional clues and connections with other members of their conspiracy.

  He had found out some interesting things. For instance, not all of the Ibasan agents in the city were aware of what they were getting themselves into. The various merchants that smuggled food and other supplies to the invaders seemed entirely ignorant of whom they were really supporting. It was just business to them. Apparently there were numerous secret bases and operations happening in deep reaches of Cyoria's Dungeon, and most of them were fairly inoffensive – illegal harvesting operations for dangerous substances, secret research facilities by various trading groups, even a government black site of some sort. The merchants thought they were simply supplying one of these many shadowy factions and never pried much into the identity of their customers. A couple of mercenaries knew that the invaders planned to do some kind of terrorist strike during the summer festival, but didn't care about the details so long as they got paid – they didn't seem to be aware of the true scale of the invasion.

  Then there was the Cult of the Dragon Below, who honestly baffled him. The cult had a very complex, confusing structure, with lots of different ranks and categories of membership, and every rank seemed to have been fed a different story. On top of that, some members seemed to be in it purely for the benefits and had never bought into the Cult's belief system in the first place. They were in it for the money – apparently, being a member of the Cult of Dragon could be pretty profitable if you played your cards right. They knew that the cult planned to release a primordial at the summer festival to ravage the city and everything around it, of course, but didn't believe the primordial in question even existed, so no harm in going along with it, right?

  Right.

  There was still no evidence that Red Robe was in any way operating among the invasion forces, nor that he had shared even a speck of knowledge with them before running off to do something else, so Zorian decided to be a little more aggressive and start actually practicing his memory reading on acceptable targets. To that end, he identified a small cultist gathering – organized by a trio of magic-wielding members who appeared to be of a slightly higher rank than the usual dregs Zorian encountered thus far – and prepared to subdue them for questioning.

  Eight armed cultists, three of whom were magic wielders. His old self would have called him crazy for trying to tackle them all on his lonesome, even from ambush, but they never really stood a chance – he trapped the house they were to meet in before they even got there, having found out about their chosen meeting place several days in advance, and took them down one by one as they came. Mostly by telepathically compelling them into falling asleep, much like the aranea had tried to do to him such a long time ago when he'd first encountered them. The last arrival was a mage who had a mind shield spell formula on a ring and fought his attempt off. Zorian was forced to deal with him via slamming him into a wall a couple of times with some judicious application of the 'force blast' spell.

  Once they were all down and tied up, Zorian took a deep breath and concentrated on diving into the memories of his first victim.

  Before he got instruction from the Yellow Cavern Guardians, Zorian sort of expected that probing someone's memories would be like one sometimes sees in adventure novels and the like – a walk through some psychedelic mindscape, where the intruder has to navigate deeply symbolical mazes and fight mental representations of the victim's psyche and what not. The reality was nothing like that. Or at least the way aranea did it was nothing like that, and the Yellow Cavern Guardians had seemed more than a little amused when Zorian had described the idea to them. Instead, memory probes simply consisted of a powerful telepathic probe that punched through the surface layers of the victim's mind and then started branching throughout their inner self in search of whatever the psychic was after.

  It was by its very nature a dangerous procedure – unlike lighter, surface manipulations, deep scans like the one he was about to do could permanently ruin a mind. An amateur like Zorian was all but guaranteed to cause irreparable damage on his first try, unless they had spent years doing careful exercises which Zorian had no time for. Thus, he was not terribly surprised when that first man ended up as a mindless husk five minute later. The convulsions and foaming at the mouth that preceded it were very disturbing, however, and almost made him give up on the whole thing right then and there. He didn't even manage to read anything out of his memories, so his death had been for nothing.

  A few minutes later, after he'd had some time to calm down and drown out the little voice in his head telling him he was a monster for killing a defenseless man like that, he continued with victim number two. He decided not to stay so long inside the minds of the rest of them.

  Number two, three, four, five and six survived his probes. They could even wake up some day. Well, they could have, if the time loop wasn't so close to its end. The sixth attempt actually yielded some results, too – he didn't find much in the man's memories before he had to withdraw, but he did add a few more names to his list to investigate, so at least some good came out of it. The last two suffered only light damage due to his probe. They knew nothing useful that could help him.

  Zorian left the house feeling hollow, wondering whether he was really justified in doing this.

  He came home to find Kirielle in tears and the entire household in an uproar. Rea and Sauh Sashal had been found dead in their home, brutally murdered by what appeared to be a monster missed by the many extermination squads operating in the city by now.

  Of their daughter, there was no trace.

  Chapter 40

  Shifting Tracks

  Zorian woke up very early in the morning, roused from his slumber by the faint, incoherent mumbling of Kirielle sleeping beside him. For a moment he wondered why Kirielle was sleeping in his bed instead of being in her own room, but then he snapped out of the confused half-dream state he was in and memories of the previous evening came rushing in to him.

  Rea and her husband were dead, their daughter missing. An event that had completely blindsided Zorian, who had never heard of anything like that happening in the previous restarts. Was this something that usually happened and he just never heard of it, or did the many changes in the wake of aranean destruction somehow cause this? That fact that Rea and Sauh had been killed by a wandering monster seemed to suggest the latter, but Zorian had a hunch there was nothing random about that monster attack. The cranium rats had been monitoring the Sashal household for a reason, after all, and the invaders were ever so fond of slaving dungeon denizens to their will and using them as their attack dogs.

  Kirielle, of course, neither knew nor cared about Zorian's musings on the matter. Unlike him, who was not terribly close to the Sashal family and for whom their deaths would in no way be permanent, Kirielle had gotten very close to Nochka and was devastated to hear about the attack. Not even pointing out that she may still be alive could get her to stop crying. After all, the police said her parents were killed by a dungeon denizen, and those weren't exactly known for kidnapping people and keeping them alive for ransom.

  In the end, Kirielle only calmed down and went to sleep when Imaya gave her some 'homemade calming tea
' that kicked in suspiciously quickly. Probably a mild opiate. He should have asked for a cup of that himself, in all likelihood – he had already been rather unnerved by his experience of reading the cultists' memories, and was thus ill-equipped to deal with this brand new crisis.

  Moving slowly, Zorian carefully extricated himself out of his bed and vacated the room, trying not to wake up Kirielle. He was pretty sure he failed in that regard, as her mental signature abruptly got more active about halfway through his retreat from the room, but since she never said anything and kept her eyes closed, he figured she didn't want to talk to him yet. Or maybe she just wanted to go back to sleep. It was pretty early…

  He found everyone else already awake and seated around the table when he entered the kitchen – Imaya, Kael and even Kana.

  "Couldn't sleep either, huh?" Kael asked rhetorically.

  "Kirielle snuck into my bed in the middle of the night," said Zorian with a sigh. "She's hard to bunk with even in normal circumstances, and considering the recent events…"

  "Poor thing," Imaya said. "She was hit the hardest by this, I think. It's a disgrace that something like that could happen in the middle of the city, and after it was already known that monsters were getting unusually aggressive too!"

  Imaya spent the next ten minutes or so blaming the city for poor handling of the monster crisis – a subject that she never showed all that much of an interest in before now. It didn't take an empath to figure out that Kirielle wasn't the only one greatly affected by the killings. She had probably formed a friendship with Rea during the many times she had brought Nochka to meet with Kirielle.

  Kael and Kana, on the other hand, seemed far less affected. Kael had virtually no interaction with either Nochka or Rea, and had never even met Sauh, so that was understandable. Kana had sometimes joined Nochka and Kirielle in their games, but hadn't been nowhere near as close to Nochka as Kirielle had. She was also very young and probably didn't quite understand what was happening.

  Eventually Imaya ran out of steam and fell silent, though Zorian could still feel a lot of frustration coming off her. An uneasy atmosphere descended on the table.

  "Oh yes," Imaya said suddenly. "I forgot to tell you yesterday, but the police want to talk to you about… Rea and her family."

  "Me?" asked Zorian in surprise. "What would I know about that?"

  "You did speak to Rea and her husband relatively recently," pointed out Kael. "They probably want to see if they told you something of importance. Most likely they want to talk to everyone who knew the victim."

  "I see," Zorian said, idly drumming his fingers on the table. "Are they going to drop by at some point or should I go visit the police station?"

  "Detective Ikzeteri said he was going to be at the Sashal residence at noon today, and that you should meet him there if possible," Imaya said.

  Zorian frowned. Ikzeteri? That sounded familiar, where did he… oh, his old divination teacher had that last name too, didn't he? And he was a detective, too…

  "This detective Ikzeteri… he wouldn't be named Haslush, would he?" asked Zorian.

  "I think that was his name, yes," Imaya said, frowning. "I have to say I don't really remember his introduction all that well. I was too shocked to really pay attention. Why, do you know him?"

  "I've heard of him," said Zorian. "It's not really important, I was just curious. I'll go give him a visit later."

  At that point Kirielle trudged into the kitchen, apparently having decided not to go back to sleep after all, and they all wordlessly decided to shelve the topic of the Sashal family for the moment.

  ✦ ✧ ✦

  The Sashal family home didn't look like a scene of death. That was the first thing Zorian noticed when he approached the house. He had expected to see some kind of damage on the building – broken windows, the door torn off its hinges, maybe a damaged wall section – but the house looked entirely intact. If it weren't for the trio of policemen hanging around the entrance and giving him severe looks as he approached, he would have never guessed the occupants had been killed.

  Didn't look much like a monster attack to him. The chance of this being an actual random event kept getting lower and lower.

  "I'm here to speak to detective Ikzeteri," he said to the tall, mustachioed, stern-looking policeman that looked like he was the leader of the group in front of him. "He told me I should look for him here. Is he present?"

  "He's inside," the man nodded. "But I'm afraid I can't let you go look for him yourself. If you are willing to wait a little, I will notify him you're here."

  "I'm fine with that," said Zorian, though internally he wasn't happy. He had wanted to take a look inside the place to see if he could spot any clues. He doubted the police would be willing to tell him any details about the killings, after all.

  Inconvenient. He could just wait until they left the place alone and sneak in then, but that might take several days – most of the clues would have gone cold by then, assuming they hadn't been confiscated by the police as evidence. Besides, there wasn't all that much time left before the end of the restart, so his window of opportunity to conduct an investigation was very small.

  Damn it, he so didn't need this right now…

  "Wait here, then," the mustachioed policeman said. "What is your name, boy?"

  Zorian gave him his name, and the man promptly disappeared through the door to fetch Haslush. After five minutes of waiting in uncomfortable silence while the other two policemen gave him suspicious looks, however, he could tell it would take a while for the man to return.

  Zorian shuffled in place uncomfortably, probably looking mightily suspicious to the two policeman scrutinizing his every move. He knew it wasn't entirely rational, but he was profoundly unnerved about being so close to law enforcement. Logically speaking, they had no reason to suspect him of anything and this entire talk was likely just a formality. He'd had bad dealings with the police back in Cirin, though, and he was also dealing with Haslush – his old teacher could be scarily perceptive at times. Zorian wouldn't put it past the man to notice something strange about him and bring him in for more detailed questioning, which would be a gigantic waste of time at best, and at worst would necessitate an early end to the restart via suicide.

  He'd prefer to avoid the latter possibility at all costs. Kirielle was already devastated about losing a friend, so having her brother suddenly blow himself up in the police station all of a sudden would be terrible. True, Zorian wouldn't be there to see her anguish, and the restart would end a few days later, but just imagining the possibility made him ill.

  Maybe he should read Haslush's mind? Haslush was probably trained in detecting and resisting mental intrusion, being a mage working for law enforcement and all, but Zorian's particular brand of mind magic was very non-standard. He didn't use any obvious chants and gestures, so maybe he could get away with it. It would probably answer a lot of questions and would allow him to avoid any obvious blunders while talking to him…

  …but no, that was too much of a risk. Besides, he had a much better target for something like that standing just beside him – he doubted those mundane policemen were trained in dealing with mind magic, beyond maybe being given a few pointers. A secret is only as strong as its weakest links.

  He proceeded to worm his way into the two policeman's thoughts. He found out that they were really not as interested in him as he had been imagining, but they also weren't thinking about the Sashal family either – one of them was hungry and thinking of the dinner his wife was making him back home, and the other was fantasizing about some female administrative employee back in the station. Well, that was okay – he would talk to them and lead their thoughts back to the situation at hand.

  "So, I don't want to get you gentlemen in trouble or anything, but is there anything you can tell me about what happened here? Sauh and Rea had been friends of mine and I was shocked to hear what happened to them… is there anything you can tell me about all this?"

  Zorian di
dn't really expect them to say much – he fully expected them to give him the silent treatment until Haslush got outside, but simply mentioning the topic was usually enough to get a person to start thinking about it. He didn't expect to be hit by a veritable wave of distrust and derisiveness coming from his link to one of the policemen, though.

  [And he looked like such a normal-looking kid, too,] the man thought to himself. [I'd never have guessed he was hanging around a bunch of thieving cat shifters. Just shows you can never trust outward appearances when it comes to magic bullshit…]

  Rea was a cat shifter? Huh. That made a lot of sense, actually – explained some things. What he didn't understand at all was that the policeman seemed to think this made Rea and her family bad people – so much so that Zorian was apparently bad just for associating with them.

  Apparently he had physically reacted to this revelation, because the other policeman noticed it and spoke up to forestall any possible unpleasantness. He didn't seem to see Zorian's reaction as any evidence of mind reading, chalking up his reaction to him being able to sense the change in his partner's bearing and facial expression.

  "We're just here to look tough and discourage curious neighbors from snooping around, kid," the other policeman said. "We don't know anything more about this than you do, in all likelihood – some sort of dungeon creature made its way into the house and killed the couple inside. For anything more you'll have to wait for officer Kalan to come back with the detective."

  The first policeman lightly shook his head before catching himself and stopping. [The creature that killed them simply sauntered in through an unlocked door instead of breaking in and attacked absolutely no one else in this entire crowded neighborhood. If that was an actual monster incursion, I will eat my own shoes,] the man thought to himself. [The kitties probably stuck their noses in some shady business, like usual, and got offed for it when someone took offense. Gods know they got their paws on everything these days…]