Домагой Курмаич - Mother of Learning

Finally, Zach and Zorian sat down one day to discuss their findings and what they meant regarding the identity of Red Robe.

"So," Zach began, "we’ve confirmed that Veyers is either Red Robe or connected to him in some fashion. His body is clearly just a meat puppet that never held a soul to begin with, just like the bodies of your aranean friends beneath the city. Either he was somehow connected to Red Robe and the man decided to use soulkill on him, or he is Red Robe and this is what happens to a controller’s body when they leave the time loop. Is that about right?"

"It is," Zorian confirmed. "Additionally, the fact Red Robe saw fit to delete your memories of Veyers reinforces his importance. We haven’t been able to find anyone else whose entire presence had been scoured from your mind, so whatever link he has to Red Robe isn’t small."

"He also has a reason to be bitter at the city and a link to the Invasion, however tenuous," Zach added. "Yeah, he could totally be Red Robe. Even his height and build matches what I remember of him when he attacked me at the start of that one restart…"

"Sadly, that is not real proof of anything," Zorian said, shaking his head. "At the level of skill we are working at, that sort of thing is trivially easy to fake. All it takes is a quick transformation spell and you could radically change your height and build."

"Well, he did attack me at the very start of the restart when he was undoubtedly in a hurry and didn’t have much time to make detailed preparations. Maybe it slipped his mind? You have a better memory than I do and you saw him up close… how does the Red Robe in your mind compare to Veyers?"

Zorian considered it carefully. After a while he decided that Zach was right – Veyers did have the appropriate height and build to be the Red Robe in his memories.

"It is as you say," Zorian said slowly. "He does kind of fit under that robe. But really, in order to get to the bottom of this, we need to find out what happens when a controller leaves the time loop. This should tell us whether Veyers is just a soulkilled victim or the very mastermind we are looking for."

"And how are we supposed to do that ?" Zach complained. "That stupid Guardian of the Threshold thing refuses to entertain hypotheticals like that. We already asked it what happens in this scenario, remember? It simply insisted that no such thing could transpire. Besides, we still don’t know what method Red Robe used to leave. If he’s a later addition to the time loop like you assume he is, he couldn’t have used the normal method to do so. He would have run into the problem of his original already having a soul, which should have led to the Guardian refusing to cooperate. Depending on what method Red Robe used to leave the time loop, the answer to the question of what would happen to his body might radically change…"

"Not necessarily," Zorian said. "One thing that always stuck with me about Red Robe is that he honestly seemed concerned about the possibility of there being a large number of other time travelers involved in the time loop. That means that he knew of a very easy and reliable way of inducing people in the time loop and thought it was entirely plausible that someone was using it on a mass scale."

"He did seem quite certain that there were a lot of other time travelers lurking around," Zach said, frowning. "My memory of that time is not the best, but that did appear to be the main thing he sought answers about when he probed my mind that night…"

"Right," Zorian said. "And this method couldn’t have been the same as what I went through, because what happened to me is highly dangerous to the marker donor and probably doesn’t give consistent results. It also couldn’t have been something that is hard to set up, or else Red Robe wouldn’t have accepted it happening so readily and on such a large scale…"

"So what is it then?" Zach asked impatiently. "I’m guessing you have some sort of answer, or else you wouldn’t be mentioning it. Don’t try to re-enact those cheap detective novels with me, please. I always found the long reveals in those books to be really annoying…"

"Fine, I’ll be blunt," Zorian sighed. Killjoy. "I think Red Robe was simply using a modified temporary marker to persist in the time loop. Sure, they’re supposed to last only six months, but that’s probably just an extra restriction rather than something inherent in the marker itself. And my own marker demonstrates quite clearly that these markers can be damaged. Perhaps selectively damaged, allowing people to remove some of the functions."

"There have to be some protections against that," Zach frowned. "I doubt that the makers of the system would just allow people to tinker with their work like that."

"Possibly," Zorian conceded. "Not having seen any temporary marker yet, I can offer little except baseless speculation. But still, this seems to me like the most likely and straightforward way for Red Robe to enter the time loop."

Zach considered his words for a while before giving it a careless shrug and focusing his attention back to Zorian.

"Well… alright," Zach shrugged. "Let’s assume you’re right. So what? How does that relate to what we were talking about?"

"Well, the temporary markers are supposed to be temporary ," Zorian said. "There is probably a clear course of action meant to be done when they run out and the person they were supporting… disappears. And this course of action will probably be performed even if the person disappears prematurely through some other method."

"Oh!" Zach said, slapping himself in the forehead. "Of course! So if Red Robe entered the time loop through a selectively damaged temporary marker, all we have to do to find out what would happen after he leaves… is place a temporary marker on someone and see what happens after it runs out."

"Exactly," Zorian nodded.

A brief silence descended on the scene.

"You know," Zach began after a while, "I’m pretty sure we already know the answer to that question. It probably just recreates a person from its usual template, as if they were never a temporary looper to begin with. I have no proof of this, but it intuitively makes sense to me."

"You are probably correct," Zorian nodded. "I also have no proof, but it is consistent with the intent of the time loop as the training simulation to set things up in that fashion."

"Which would mean that Veyers isn’t Red Robe," Zach continued with that line of thought. "Red Robe should have ended up as a normal person with no memory of his time looping self, not a soulless corpse."

"If he really did enter the time loop via a modified temporary marker, that is probably the case," Zorian nodded.

"Hmm," Zach hummed thoughtfully, tapping his fingers against his chin. "So let’s assume for a moment that Veyers is just a broken link. I still think he’s the most likely candidate for Red Robe, but whatever – your theory does sound rather plausible. Who is Veyers linked to? Jornak? Is he Red Robe?"

"He could be, I guess," Zorian said uncertainly. "I mean, I see no real evidence for that, and the man is not very impressive…"

"We weren’t very impressive before the time loop happened to us, either," Zach pointed out.

"True," Zorian said. "I’m not saying it’s impossible for Jornak to be Red Robe, just that I see no real evidence for the idea."

"Did Veyers have any other friends and associates other than Jornak?" Zach asked.

"I think he did, but Jornak did not know who these people were," Zorian said. "Veyers didn’t like to talk about his personal life and Jornak didn’t pry into it too much. The fact that Veyers chose to take shelter in Jornak’s place might be artificially skewing our perception of how close they were – they weren’t really that close. Jornak was actually quite surprised when Veyers came knocking on his door with a plea to let him stay for a while, and even contemplated refusing."