In hindsight, the problem should have been obvious, but Jair had been living for relative centuries as an already-initiated Mageblade. Having the class felt like a core part of his identity. To realize it was missing felt almost as wrong as seeing Maelstrom lying on the ground rejecting his touch.
“What did you do?” Firdon demanded. He tried to pick up Maelstrom, but hissed in pain and dropped it as quickly as Jair had. “Inspect.”
Jair ignored the man. He felt empty in a way he couldn’t describe. He glanced down at his hand, where the partially-imprinted spell pattern for Absorb would be lingering.
“We need to go back. This loop is a dead end.”
“Right now?”
"We could stay a bit longer if you think it’ll help Maelstrom to stabilize, but it doesn't seem to have been damaged by the wait. Just unhappy with me."
"I don't know if I want to."
Firdon's increasingly aggressive movement of the vault floor and walls shoved them out, wrapping each of their legs in solid stone to prevent them doing any sort of escape. Maelstrom was brought along for the ride on its own stone platform, while Firdon himself ranted at them for being disruptive, disrespectful, disobedient, and how this was definitely going to get them in more trouble than they knew what to do with.
"You saying you want to wait around and find out what happens when Larenok hears about all this?" Jair shouted to Ran over the sound of grinding stone. "If it were me, I'd have reverted already."
"I..." Ran looked between Jair and Maelstrom, then Firdon. "Why can't you transition it in now, if we're already in trouble?"
"Class mismatch. That's why its soul is so unhappy with me. We're bound, but also incompatible. That's why we need to revert ASAP. I need to clear my imprints and work on cementing my manabody. Right now, I don't meet the qualifications for Mageblade even if I could convince someone to give it to me early."
"What about my initiation ceremony? Can you jump in then?"
"The pre-testing, remember? We'd need to go further back if I were to have a chance." And there was no chance he'd end up with Maelstrom at that ceremony either. He wasn't sure the odds of having the same sword handed to him at a completely different initiation, but had traveled time enough to know something like that would be astronomically unlikely to just happen to line up properly. "Just revert us, we can solve the rest of it after."
Ran nodded. It took a few minutes in all the chaos, then his eyes flashed gold. They fell through the timeline, landing in the instant Ran unlocked the Mageblade class and his soulspell began to take shape.
Jair spent the requisite minutes pulling himself together, forced the screaming soul of Maelstrom to stay together and orbit the flickering and fractured golden star of his soulspell where it belonged, and shored up his manabody. He spent extra time and attention on that one, since the inefficient fluffiness and unsubstance of its natural form were no longer mere annoyances but active barriers to reclaiming his rightful status.
When he looked up, Ran stood among the other new initiates with measured calm, betraying none of the impatience Jair knew he must be feeling.
The ceremony dragged on until finally it came to an end. After that the socializing went on for a bit longer, but eventually they were free to run across the campus to their apartments.
"New complications,” Jair explained to Ran’s questioning glance, once they were safely out of the public. “I can't imprint any spells until we get this thing unlocked. I'll need a Mageblade class initiator, and a way to safely transport Maelstrom until we can get that taken care of. For initiator, Aethron would be my first choice, but he's... eccentric, to say the least. I’m not confident that we could find him soon enough to be useful in this situation.”
“We could bribe Headmaster Larenok,” Ran suggested. “If he doesn’t secretly do initiations on the side between ceremonies, then I guarantee it’s not for any lack of willingness.”
“I don’t want him to see Maelstrom. He’s been a problem reliably enough in the past, having him aware of its power is a guarantee for trouble. Why else would he go to all the trouble of setting the Hyperion on us?”
Ran hissed softly between his teeth. “Yeah. But who, then?”
Jair brought out one of their giant pieces of paper and pinned it up on the wall. Losing their apartment deposit was the least of their concerns right now. He took out a thick pen.
MAGEBLADE INITIATOR
He wrote it across the middle of the page, then added SECURITY SPECIALIST and STONE MAGE above it.
“In order to pull this off, we’re also going to need a way to bring people in.”
Jair knew from experience that to convince Larenok to permit someone on site would be a long and difficult process, even if he had a legitimate sounding reason to do so. Someone whose pedigree was uncertain and purpose suspicious?
The man may be corrupt, but he was far from powerless. The fact that despite years of searching through Larenok’s existence Jair had never found anything substantial enough to hold over the man was testament to Larenok’s obsessive paranoia in covering his tail. He was also the only one with an absolute authority token for the transit platform, so no amount of sneaking around impressing other teachers would suffice.
He added ENTRY METHOD to the right of the list.
“The tunnel we used for the dragon?” Ran suggested.
“That only went as far as the wall through the compressed sand inside. The only time it broke through to the outside was when Firdon smashed it open, and something tells me he’ll be less open to doing so in these circumstances.”
Ran pointed to STONE MAGE. “We’re already going to have someone with the right capabilities on the team, right?”
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“Attacking the outer walls would trigger just as many alarms as trying to tunnel in through the cliff, but we can leave it as an option.” Jair drew a thin line connecting STONE MAGE to ENTRY METHOD with TUNNEL?, then added another line connecting that to SECURITY SPECIALIST.
“Can we hire someone to fly them in?”
Jair smiled and nodded. “Good suggestion.” He added AIR TRANSPORT? to their growing diagram under ENTRY METHOD. “I can think of a few other alternatives too.”
“Like what? Underground and air… what else is there? Knocking at the back gates?”
“Transit platform comes to mind.”
“Our student authorization wouldn’t let us bring anyone else in. Even my dad needs special dispensations to enter.”
“Oh, I know. Larenok is the only one with unlimited authorization.”
“How does that help? You said already you don’t want to involve him.”
Jair smiled merrily. “We may need Larenok’s authorization token, but that doesn’t mean we need Larenok himself.”
STEAL AUTHORIZATION TOKEN
“Is that possible?”
“We’ll figure something out.”
"Are you saying you never tried this before? Shouldn't it have been a solution to the dragon problem too?"
"You underestimate the dragon if you think that. You don't realize how important all the constructs I set up through the leading week were to our success. Its attack on Astralla was its most weakened and slowed state. Before I learned to do that much, it could level the entire school before anyone had a chance to do more than scream and run around uselessly.”
Jair's mind dredged up those very first loops, the academy on fire, hundreds dead, the sheer numbness of it. Watching the disaster time and again, sometimes caught up in it and killed along with them, sometimes surviving to weep over the ashes.
…No, that wasn’t helpful. He pushed the memory back down into the darkest depths of nope and refocused on the moment at hand.
“Besides, it’s not like bringing people into the academy was ever strictly necessary. Astralla Institute is the most accessible place with clear environmental control, an available mana grid, and the fewest unnecessary casualties. I know you get bothered by that kind of thing, I’d hate to see you blame yourself for the destruction of half of Vaes City.”
“The dragon is that big of a threat? It seemed kind of wimpy to me. Sure, scary, but not really serious.”
“We can do a loop or two without any of my preparations, so you can gain full appreciation for the difficulty of the task I undertook to save your ungrateful hide.”
Ran smacked him.
Jair grinned. “See? Ungrateful!”
“But you say you want us to steal Larenok’s transit token, how have you never done that before?”
“Oh, I have. The problem here will be doing it covertly enough that we can escape without any trace or notice. Most of my past infiltrations were more focused on the ‘get in get out’ than the ‘avoid notice.’”
“So what’s the best way to get it away from him?”
“Well, the paranoid jerk never lets it out of his sight, so we need to either overpower him or catch him off guard. Ideally, both, but the 'overpower' part does come with the drawback of making our involvement obvious."
"We're already going to be bringing in a security expert, is there any reason they can't forge authorization?"
"Token constructs are a bit more complicated than that. The exotic materials necessary for their creation and attunement are hard to come by under normal circumstances. There's not much you can do to replicate something that specific without the blueprints."
"You couldn't reverse engineer it?"
"Probably could, with enough time. Astralla Institute was never worth the effort."
"Never worth the effort?"
"Your dragon problem had a tight timeline with no possibility of outside help. Any other problem could be solved elsewhere more easily. Apart from the uprising thing, but that one was a special case."
They spent the next several hours discussing more options, Jair listing off some of the people he'd encountered over the years who they could try to recruit, Ran asking questions and making suggestions by turns.
At the end of it, they had a fine mess of a chart, lists of people, objectives, locations to visit, and potential recruitment options scrawled out across five huge sheets of paper all pinned up to their walls.
"Is it safe to leave this all hanging out in the open like this?" Ran asked uneasily when Jair made no move to conceal or destroy their diagrams.
"No one will come in here until after we get away, and we won't need them any more after that. For now, they're not going to be a problem."
"Get away... you mean leave the Institute for good?"
Jair nodded. "If you were anyone else, or not a looper like me, then I'd say you should stay and get proper training. But we don't have to worry about that any more. You can learn on the job, make mistakes, learn better, and I'll be there to watch your back the whole time. Which reminds me. If you ever die, revert immediately. You do not want to have your soulspell break because you lingered around after being mortally wounded. If you sense anything that's even remotely impacting your soul, revert. Those two things are the only significant threats to you as you are now, and you can't afford to mess around."
Ran gathered up the rest of the paper that Jair had left strewn across the table, stacking it back neatly on the desk. "I understand that. But this isn't just a school, it's also a place to make connections."
"Connections? Pah. We don't need those any more. With your wealth and my knowledge, we can make the world our playground before the decade is out. I'm telling you, this is going to be fun."
"Yep. I'm sure it will."
"I'm hurt by your lack of faith."
Ran sighed, shaking his head as he flopped down on their sofa, one hand behind his head, one leg draped over the back. "You realize that the past several days have been a nonstop hurricane of ridiculous, right?"
"Naturally. What else would you expect?"
"I'm still trying to properly come to grips with the fact that you're a time traveler, let alone that I myself have gone back months. It still feels like a dream sometimes, like I'm going to wake up any second and find that none of this was real."
"Yeah... that feeling will pass. Ride it out for now."
Ran tilted his head back, staring upside-down at the diagrams with their criss-crossing lines spread across the back wall.
Jair leaned forward on his elbows on the dining room table, chin resting on his hands, watching without speaking.
"Timeline on this all is pretty chaotic," Ran said at last. "What do we do until then?"
"Hold steady, play the role of normal students, and don't raise any unnecessary alarms."
"Sounds relaxing."
“The calm before the storm,” Jair agreed. “And a perfect time to get your imprints settled. If I’m going to be out of the picture for weeks or months, better to make sure you’re ready to handle things.”
“Those take months to become usable. It won’t be relevant for a long time. Especially if we keep reverting every few days.”
“First, reverting is no excuse for inaction. You need to establish habits of preparation regardless of whether you’ll be reverting it away or retaining it. And, second, as a time traveler you have the unique opportunity to hypercharge your spell pathing.”
“Why do I get the feeling you’re about to say ‘behave with idiotic recklessness, because you can undo it and try again even more recklessly?’”
“Now you’re getting it!” Jair grinned as he crossed to the desk and began pulling out the protractor, goniometer, and other measuring tools. “So, which spells are we going to be prepping for you?”
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