Mother of Learning 2 - Outside World
Page 31
"Ha," Zorian snorted. "It's far too late for that, I'm afraid."
"Oh?" Kyron asked, a mixture of warning and curiosity in his voice.
"Yes," Zorian confirmed. He consulted his watch to see what time it was. It was 2 hours and 39 minutes after midnight. "I'm afraid this loop is just about to end."
Kyron stared at him blankly for a few seconds before opening his mouth to say something. Before he could utter a single word, though, everything went black and Zorian woke up back in Cirin, ready to start this month anew.
Chapter 41
Myriad Clashing Motives
The start of the newest loop differed little from the previous one – he got on the train to Cyoria with Kirielle in tow, entertained her with feats of magic as well as disguised (and more than a little embellished) accounts of his own adventures to stave off boredom, and even talked with Ibery for a bit. Just for a bit, though – she wasn't terribly interested in him this time, since he'd finished telling stories to Kirielle by the time they stopped at Korsa, and didn't demonstrate any amazing spellcasting skills while she was in the compartment.
"Here we are," said Zorian, stepping off the train and helping Kirielle finagle her luggage through the train wagon door. It was kind of cute how she insisted she would carry her luggage on her own, but he knew from previous restarts that this resolution wouldn't last very long. Well, whatever, he'd let her live in denial for now. "Welcome to Cyoria, dearest sister."
"I'm your only sister," she shot back, curious eyes looking around the massive train station she found herself in.
"You know I'm telling the truth, then," Zorian said blandly.
Kirielle ignored him in favor of studying the colorful storefronts, the huge clock hanging from the train station ceiling, and the flowing masses of people milling around the place. Truth be told, she handled the sight a lot better than Zorian had when he disembarked in Cyoria for the first time ever.
"Big," she concluded eventually.
"Cyoria is a big city and an important transport hub," said Zorian simply. "They get lots of traffic."
"Do you mind if we look around for a bit?" Kirielle asked.
"You mean browse some stores for interesting trinkets?" Zorian guessed. She pouted at him. "Sure, we can do that. I'm only buying you one souvenir, though, and nothing too ridiculous."
"What qualifies as 'too ridiculous'?" she asked, eyeing the storefronts speculatively.
"Use your common sense," Zorian deadpanned. Like hell was he getting into a definition game with her.
"And if I'm not sure about something?" she prompted.
"Ask," he immediately fired back.
He could probably buy anything she set her eyes on, especially considering he was about to get a massive cash infusion in a few days, but he didn't think it a good idea to encourage her excesses like that. Kirielle had never been very keen on restraint to begin with and he shuddered to think what would happen if he decided to pander to her whims too much.
For the next hour and a half, Zorian simply followed Kirielle around as she flitted from one store to another like a drunken butterfly, following no pattern he could discern. Then again, he didn't really invest much thought into figuring it out – he mostly spent his time practicing his mind sense, trying to process the information he was getting about the crowds around them. Large, closely-packed crowds like the ones at Cyoria's main train station still tended to ruin his mind sense, reducing the feedback into an incomprehensible, blurry blob of emotions and strange signals. He was getting better at picking out specific minds out of that background fog, though. He practiced the procedure by constantly keeping track of Kirielle's mind, turning her into a sort of a telepathic anchor, and then trying to pick out the minds of random people from the crowd to get a better feel for them. It was slow, annoying work, but he was getting sick of having his empathy and mind sense effectively shut down every time he encountered a crowd.
She picked a snow globe in the end. Admittedly, it was a very nice snow globe – the little house and the trees inside it were incredibly detailed and well done, almost as if someone had literally shrunk a house and its immediate environs and placed them in a glass sphere. Clearly some fairly sophisticated magic had been used to produce the thing, even if the end product was completely non-magical to his senses, and the globe was priced accordingly… but it was better than Zorian had feared so he bought it without complaint. Idly, he wondered if his alteration skills were good enough to produce a globe like that…
With Kirielle's trinket-hunting done, they set off towards the main plaza and its fountain, just like they had in the previous restart. Unlike the previous restart, Zorian took them through the park right from the start – there was really no need for them to meet the cranium rat swarm. Quite the contrary, it was an unnecessary and unacceptable risk, as Kirielle's mind was completely unshielded and there was always a possibility that the rats could figure something important or attention-grabbing from Kirielle's stray thoughts.
As it turned out, that had been a pretty important change. Having never seen the cranium rats, Kirielle obviously couldn't tell Rea about them, so the topic simply never came up. And apparently he greatly underestimated how much he'd disturbed Rea in their previous first meeting, because keeping quiet about the terrifying mind-reading powers of the rats made Rea a lot less on guard around him this time around… as well as much more insistent about them staying for a while. Hmph.
He let Rea and Kirielle 'convince him' to delay their departure. As far as he could tell, this was the best moment to find something out from Rea's mind, before she had time to grow suspicious of him, and he had every intention of using it to the hilt.
"A student of Cyoria's Royal Academy? Pretty prestigious place to study at for a boy hailing from a small rural town, if you don't mind me saying," Rea remarked. "Not that there is anything wrong with being from a small rural town – we're from one ourselves, after all – but doesn't Cyoria's Royal Academy accept only the, ah…"
"Only the very talented or the very well-connected?" guessed Zorian. It was what most people who weren't personally involved with the institution thought, after all. Seeing Rea nod in agreement, he continued. "Not really. The admission process is a combination of how well you do on the entrance exams, whether you receive a recommendation from a member of the academy staff or someone else suitably famous, and whether denying you admission would offend someone particularly powerful and influential. Basically, so long as you can pay the admission fee and do well enough in the entrance exams, you are guaranteed to get in."
"Is that how you got in?" Rea asked curiously.
"I was in the top 50 based on exam results," said Zorian proudly. He was 48th, but he wasn't going to mention that.
"Brother is plenty talented," Kirielle said suddenly. "But, um, they probably also accepted him because of our brother Daimen. At least that's what mother said happened."
"What?" asked Zorian flatly.
"Umm…" Kirielle stammered. "Please don't be mad because mother told me not to tell you this because you would get mad at me but mother said you and Fortov were only accepted so easily because Daimen got so big and successful..."
"Daimen had nothing to do with it," Zorian said, grinding his teeth in annoyance. "I achieved good enough results that my admission had never been in question! Mother is, like usual, ascribing everything good in the world on Daimen and lumping me with that lout Fortov in order to-"
"I believe you, mister Kazinski," Rea interrupted him. "Calm down. There is no reason to jump down your little sister's throat like that."
"Right, sorry," Zorian said, with a little bit more bitterness than he intended.
There was a short, awkward silence for a few seconds. Great. Real smooth there, Zorian.
Damn it, why did he let this get under his skin like that?
"So, I'm assuming your brother is that Daimen Kazinski?" Rea asked finally. "The famous one?"
"Yes," Zorian sighed. "The famous one."
"Things," Kirielle shrugged uncomfortably, saying nothing else on the topic. Probably trying not to upset him further by continuing the discussion.
"Daimen is an 'adventuring archeologist'," Zorian said, doing his best to suppress his annoyance with the whole thing. "He leads expeditions to dangerous areas in search of lost artifacts and ruins. Or even rare plants and magical creatures, even though that should technically be outside the purview of archeology. He has been very successful in this, so he gets lot of attention from people."
There. It was an incomplete explanation, yes, but not really misleading or anything. Hopefully it would suffice.
"I haven't heard anything about him for more than a year now," Rea remarked.
"He's in Koth," Zorian said. "Apparently he found something very important in the jungle, but he's been very secretive about it. I'm sure you'll hear all about it when he finally deigns to unveil it to the world."
Thankfully, the topic of conversation shifted away from Daimen at that point. Zorian decided to take advantage of the somewhat personal nature of Rea's questions to ask about their personal details. Her story was functionally identical to what she told him in the previous restart, but her surface thoughts were far more easier to read this time, what with her not being primed to defend her secrets from a swarm of thought-sharing, mind-reading rats.
Her surface thoughts told him an interesting story. For one thing, Sauh was not a cat shifter. Only Rea and Nochka were. Rea had been a criminal, but then she met Sauh and decided to leave that life behind to be with him. How… romantic. Except that neither Rea's former associates not the rest of the townsfolk were willing to let Rea forget what her past was, so the family packed up their things and left to somewhere where nobody knew who they were and where they could start anew. Where Nochka could grow up without her mother's past sabotaging her at every turn.
Damn, he was really starting to get mad about what the Cult of Dragon Below had in store for them… he didn't think he could just coldly watch as Nochka's parents are murdered and she herself kidnapped. Though, thinking about it now, it wasn't such a problem in this particular restart – his memory reading was nowhere near good enough yet to get much out of high-ranking cultists, even if he could track them down by following Nochka's movements. And who said he was even capable of preventing her kidnapping in the first place? It wasn't like he had a fool-proof plan to stop it, after all – if the kidnapping proceeded under some different schedule than the one in the previous restart, he'd basically have to monitor the Sashal family day and night to intercept it.
He decided to put his original plan on hold for now and see how things developed. Who knows, maybe the last restart was a fluke and kidnapping Nochka wasn't something the cultists routinely did in every loop. He would have to put some kind of tracker on her just in case, though…
By the time they were done talking, the rain had already started falling outside. Rea tried to argue that they should wait for a while until it lessens, but Zorian knew that wasn't happening for quite a while and refused. He enveloped himself and Kirielle in a weather shield to block the rain and bid the Sashal family goodbye.
He considered it a proof of his growing skill and mana reserves that his shield held strong for the entire length of their journey, letting them arrive at Imaya's place completely dry and unwinded.
✦ ✧ ✦
The next few days were fairly routine – he went to Knyazov Dveri to get himself plenty of crystalized mana, sold said crystals in various stores in Cyoria for large amounts of cash, accepted Taiven's offer of joining her team in running monster-killing missions and tested whether his stored notebooks had survived the restart (they had).
With the start of classes on Monday, however, Zorian decided to go out of his comfort zone a little and initiate contact with one of his classmates. Specifically, Raynie. He was currently investigating shifters, after all, and she was supposed to be a wolf shifter herself. Maybe she knew some crucial information? It didn't hurt to ask.
There was one big, obvious problem with his idea, however – Raynie got a lot of love confessions and date invitations from her many love-stricken fans, and would probably assume his attempt to talk to her was just more of the same. And she was not interested in love and dating, she made that very clear over the years. How could he ensure his attempt to talk to her wouldn't be misunderstood?
He agonized for an entire day over which method of approach he should use, before deciding he was being stupid. So what if she got the wrong idea when he asked to talk to her? Though she categorically rejected every man who tried to court her, her rejections have always been polite and non-violent to his knowledge… except for that one time she punched a guy in the face, but everyone who was there agreed that guy got a little more grabby than was proper. Bottom line was, he could just approach her directly before class and ask for a talk, and the worst that could happen was that she could tell him to get lost without hearing him out. Hardly the end of the world, and with the time loop in place he would have a chance to try again in the next restart with a different approach.
The worst didn't happen, though. When Zorian asked to talk to her after class, Raynie simply gave a little sigh and spared a lingering glance at the ceiling, as if asking the gods what she had done to deserve this, before agreeing to his request.
The class came and went, and the classroom gradually emptied of people until only Zorian, Raynie and Kiana were left. Why was Kiana there? Hell if Zorian knew, but her presence was clearly not unintended by Raynie so he opted not to say anything. Did Kiana know about her friend being a shifter? If not, then breaching the topic in front of her was probably not something Raynie would appreciate.
How annoying.
"Sorry about this," Raynie said. "I know you probably wanted this to be private, but Kiana insisted on staying behind too, and, well…"
She shrugged helplessly. She sounded honestly apologetic about it, and if he were incapable of sensing people's emotions, he would have probably believed her too. He gave Kiana a glance, and she quickly straightened her posture and fixed a small scowl on her face. Probably trying to look intimidating or something. Her real emotions were a mix of boredom and impatience, though – she probably considered the entire thing a massive chore.
Zorian almost cracked a smile at the whole setup. The funny thing was that if he was going to ask anyone out, it would probably be Kiana, not Raynie. He'd kind of had his eyes on her before he'd gotten stuck in this whole time loop business, in an idle, daydreaming sort of way. If he remembered correctly, Zach caught him staring at her once, in that fateful first restart. A part of him wanted to ask Kiana out right now, just to see how the two of them would react to such a development.
But no, that would only be amusing for a short while and he would have to live with all the created drama for the rest of the month. Besides, his reasons for liking Kiana were extremely shallow and based entirely around her looks – he felt she was just as beautiful as Raynie, and preferred her black hair to Raynie's red. That was it, really. For all he knew, her personality could be absolutely atrocious.
"If you're okay with her presence, then so am I," Zorian said. "That said, do you mind if I erect a privacy bubble around us? Neolu and company are hanging by the door, trying to eavesdrop, and I think we'd all be happier if they did not hear this."
"Ugh," Raynie grunted, rising from her seat and marching off towards the door. "There is no need for that. I'll be back in a moment."
Through his mind sense, Zorian could feel the four mental signatures of their eavesdroppers flee before Raynie's approach. They were already halfway down the corridor by the time she opened the door, and in less than a minute Raynie was back in her seat.
"Well then," she began, "now that the spy brigade is gone, we can finally get this over with. What did you want to talk to me about, Mister Kazinski?"
"Does Kiana know a
bout shifters?" Zorian asked.
Evidently she did, if her shocked reaction was of any indication.
"What?" Raynie stammered. "How do you know about that?"
"I asked a scholar named Vani to tell me about shifters and-"
"Vani from Knyazov Dveri?" Raynie asked, interrupting him. "Aren't you supposed to be from Cirin?"
"I am," Zorian confirmed. "That doesn't mean I am forbidden from visiting Knyazov Dveri on occasion. I have friends there."
"Of course you have," Raynie sighed. "Look… Zorian. I kept this a secret for a reason."
Zorian nodded in agreement. "That's why I asked whether Kiana knows."
"I know," Kiana piped in, crossing her arms in front of her. "And I'll be charitable and assume you'll keep it a secret, just as I have, despite being friends with that blabbermouth Benisek. So what exactly do you want from Raynie anyway?"
"I made acquaintances with a couple of cat shifters, and I wanted to hear an opinion of another shifter about some things related to that," said Zorian. "I figured I'd ask Raynie first and see if she was willing to answer some questions."
There was a brief silence as both girls digested this.
"I… uh… this is way too heavy of a topic for a free period," Raynie decided. "Our next class is about to start soon."
"Well, yes," agreed Zorian. "It doesn't have to be now. I just want to know if you're even willing to help me out."
"I might as well," Raynie said dismissively. "My main concern about shifter-talk had always been about not wanting people to know I was one to begin with, and the cat is apparently already out of the bag. Besides, if you're hanging out with the likes of cat shifters, you're going to need some advice. No offense to your new acquaintances, but cat shifters tend to be unsavory characters."
"I did hear some rumors about that," Zorian admitted. "So how is this going to work, then?"
"I don't know," Raynie admitted. "I'm going to have to think about it. You've ambushed me out of nowhere with this. I'll get back to you when I figure out a time and place."