"You!" Headmaster Larenok regarded Jair with an expression he normally only saw on the face of someone trying to murder him. Though, to be fair, Larenok seemed pretty close to that point. The headmaster ranted in truly impressive form.
Jair wasn’t sure he’d ever missed the power to reverse time so much as right now.
"Who do you think you are, you ungrateful lowborn bog-brat? You dare try to rob this Institute, after everything you've been given! I always knew you were trouble. I knew you weren't worthy. This just proves it."
The stolen bundle of unimprinted soulswords lay across Larenok’s desk, including the base form of Maelstrom. Jair reached toward them, but a block of stone snapped up from the floor and threw his hand back, hitting hard enough that it almost broke his wrist. It would definitely leave a bruise.
It was their first loop of both Jair and Ran using sandsharks to evacuate the other two, and things hadn’t gone quite to plan.
Jair glared at Firdon and rubbed his arm, pointing at the bundle. "That sword is mine. It says so in my soul."
"You expect me to believe that one of the swords spoke to your soul and told you to stage a break in?"
"Yes. It's been singing to me in my dreams." Jair raised his other hand longingly toward the swords, as though involuntarily, but snatched it back before Firdon could smack it too.
He looked at Larenok, Firdon, the swords, then down the floor in a quick unsteady series of wide-eyed glances, playing up his nervousness.
Just a student. Just a student. Just an innocent student led astray.
They weren’t buying it.
"You brought in foreign agents from multiple different continents a week in advance. There is no way you're going to play this off as anything but the premeditated violent attack on the Institute that it is. Treason against the state of Veor and its king. And a personal affront to everything you've been given."
Jair couldn’t keep quiet any longer. "I wasn't given anything, certainly not by you or this Institute. Everything I have I've earned."
"The fact you're even allowed to imagine that is only an admission of your ignorance and privilege. No one like you has any right to expect anything from us."
And there it was. Elitism, rearing its ugly head.
Jair really hated this place.
"If you'll just let me touch the sword, I will prove it." His voice came out tight and snappish, his innocent façade unsustainable. Remaining seated and continuing to converse instead of throwing himself at the man with deadly intent took nearly all his self-control. Larenok had been an obstacle for too long.
Maybe Ran’s little slip had the right idea. Maybe next time Jair should kill him. At least that would solve one problem.
He pushed away the thought. He’d long ago promised himself that he wouldn't become a complete heartless monster. With the ability he controlled, apart from vampires and the occasional rare monster, no one but the very most powerful people would have any chance to stop him.
If Jair ever truly set his mind to destruction, he could burn the whole planet before anyone could stop him. With that kind of potential, self-control was essential.
Granted, at the moment he wasn't capable of doing much of anything, without his sword, spells, or allies. If he'd had control of his reversion at the moment, he would definitely not be enduring this particular event.
"What are you doing with my friends?" Jair asked, hotly.
"We will be interrogating each of you," Larenok replied with a note of grim satisfaction.
Interesting. He hadn't jumped on the word friends, which verified that they had in fact discovered someone more than just Lorsit, most likely Yast, given how he was the one they always caught. Probably Ran as well, assuming the two had stayed together. The team had been forcefully split in half when Firdon scooped Jair and Lorsit’s shark out before they could escape deep enough, leaving Ran and Yast’s shark to their own devices.
"Where is Yast? Unless you have an interpreter, he needs me." A bit of a calculated risk, but since this reversion was doomed anyway, there was no point in playing it safe.
As long as Jair didn't get himself killed, anything was on the table.
"Oh?” Larenok sneered. “You’re his interpreter? I suppose I should've seen it. Weird foreign kids stick together, don't they."
"I was born in Veor," Jair snapped. Though it pained him to claim allegiance with this particular continent, he would not deny his family roots. He still planned to head back south in coming years and figure out how to rescue them before they could be disappeared and/or assassinated. Right now, they were safest at a distance, but once it got close to the more important events he would need to take active care.
His family were another casualty that he had never yet been able to reliably safeguard. Most of what he tried only resulted in drawing his enemies’ attention to them sooner.
His parents’ deaths were less concrete than Ran’s, becoming collateral damage as a result of Jair's actions against Sekir, games among the nobility, or even the larger vampire threat.
Straight assassinations, he’d lose both. If he focused on controlling his adversaries’ perceptions and presented himself as the correct degree of manipulable, he could forgo the murder and his parents would end up as hostages instead. In those situations, he could usually save one or the other of his parents if he conceded ground. Short of bowing out of the entire affair and leaving Veor to its inevitable demise, he could never save both.
Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
Jair’s sister's disappearance was another matter entirely, always taking place within the same three-month window of time, but never while he was present. He tried hundreds of ways to find out who or what was responsible, but that mystery remained impenetrable.
Problems for another time.
He blinked his attention back to the present. What was happening here at the moment?
Oh yes. Larenok was going off on a rant about how the sandbogs didn't count, because they were so weird and rural they may as well belong to a different country entirely, blah blah blah.
Jair didn't see any reason to listen to the man at the moment. His elitist rants didn't deserve the attention.
He started inching his hand toward the soulswords atop the desk, but Firdon was having none of it. Another stone snapped up from the floor, this time splitting as it reached Jair’s wrist and clicking shut over it in a makeshift shackle.
This required a bit more material from the floor, causing Larenok to pause in his tirade and give Firdon a sideways glower, but Firdon remained fully focused on Jair and paid no attention.
Jair had to respect Firdon for that at least. He may be an obstacle, but at least he was dedicated to doing his job.
Which was only to be expected. Firdon tended to be a neutral entity. Dangerous if in opposition, but potentially valuable as an ally in the right circumstances.
“...and that’s assuming you don’t do anything to get yourself executed!” Larenok finished.
“I want to talk to Yast.”
“No. You’ll talk to me.”
Jair crossed his arms. “Oh? Will I?”
It may be petty, but sometimes petty satisfaction was the best you could get out of a situation. In the case of Larenok, this was nearly always the case.
The interrogation went nowhere after that. Jair refused to answer anything until they let him see Yast, and Larenok grew so incensed that there was little point in continuing.
He'd hoped they would move him to whatever holding they kept the others in, but instead they returned him to his apartment alone. Hyperion guards stood ready at the front and back entrances, and blocked the windows to prevent him sneaking out that way.
This really was a stupid situation. All he needed was his sword, and they could be rid of this place for good, but it continued to prove a more complicated task every time.
But, he had to stay alive, and somewhere that Ran could get back to him so they could revert together. He didn't want to see what would happen if he died.
The last time he’d died, in a loop Ran reverted solo, he had no memory of it. But what had happened to the version of him living that timeline? Was he a continuous self, wiped back to the last save state as it were, or was a new copy generated and the old left to whatever fate awaited those who passed beyond this mortal life?
Those were answers Jair did not want the experience of learning. From what he had experienced of soul dissolution, it was excruciatingly painful on a level beyond what could be described.
Physical, emotional, and mental anguishes were insufficient comparisons. Repairing that soul-level damage had been the work of years, agonizing, prolonged, and unforgettable. Absolutely not an experience he ever wanted to repeat.
So, how to adjust this set of circumstances to better succeed next time?
Yast’s problem was one of distance. He couldn't get away far enough and fast enough for them to avoid being linked with the situation.
There was no good way to record a person's afterdrift signature. In the first place, most afterdrift bore such absolute resemblance to any other there was like trying to pick out a particular grain of sand from all the other sand. A human’s afterdrift would stand out among elves, just as Yast’s stood out among the human populace of the Institute and Astralla City, but beyond that it was pointless without someone to compare the sample to.
There were times Jair wished he had the ability to go forward in time, not just backwards. Times when the only thing to do was exist through a period of time that had to take place.
It annoyed him, living and reliving the same pointlessly dull sequences of events over and over.
Pacing his apartment and waiting for Ran to arrive so they could revert was already proving to be one of those times, and this was the first time he was living it.
He wasn’t used to having a truly useless dead end of a loop to live through. If he had further things to do, information to uncover, he would do them. If he didn’t have anything productive to do, he’d revert immediately without wasting time.
Being imprisoned in a doomed timeline was painful. He was too restless to sleep, but there was nothing he could work on from here apart from thinking through the timing and coordination.
Perhaps running things through the academy and trying to escape together was the wrong move. Once Yast got things open, Lorsit could complete the rest on his own. They’d need one or the other of them to evacuate him, and given the time constraints it would have to be Ran.
That left Jair and Yast, neither of whom really needed to be present at the end. He wanted to be, wanted to get his hands on Maelstrom as quickly as possible, and wanted to see how driving out into the deep desert with Yast might change things.
But was there any rule that said they had to depart from the Institute on their trip into the desert?
No. Having Yast run through the maze with Lorsit, while Jair drove a shark over to pick him up after, upon reflection, was incredibly inefficient use of time and resources. Better to simply… transit Yast with him to pick up the shark, set out from the city directly, and trust Ran to catch up later.
Jair grimaced. While that would be the ideal as far as timing went, it would be a bad idea to separate the two of them so significantly before they knew for sure that Ran could get away without being caught. If Ran ended up imprisoned or his movement otherwise restrained, especially if he ended up headed for Crelys, he’d either start needing to revert without Jair, or risk waiting in what could become a trap.
Okay, so there were good reasons to stick with the inefficient plan for now, since ‘keep obtaining new information from all angles’ was more important at the moment than maximizing their escape route.
Once they solved the physical escape in the immediate aftermath of the heist, solved it with enough confidence that they could be sure of meeting up again afterwards somewhere far away, then they could work on overcoming the question of what specific limitations were on their trace of Yast.
He still wanted to try a few loops of himself and Yast getting captured in various cities, time out the arrival, and see if they could draw out the interpreter, which would also work best if Ran and Lorsit were able to get away cleanly. The more closely Jair could replicate the initial scenario where he’d sensed Sekir’s presence, the more likely they were to figure it out.
There was plenty to try, as soon as Ran could loop them out of this pointless waiting around.
----------------------------------------