Домагой Курмаич - Mother of Learning

"Trogmar, no!" Briam suddenly yelled.

It was useless. Trogmar, his fire drake familiar, had been completely infuriated by Veyers for some time already. Now that Veyers had lost control over his powers and started burning things, the fire drake decided it was done passively waiting for this threat to come to him and his master.

With a fearsome battle screech, the fire drake ripped itself away from Briam’s desperate attempts to hold him back and leapt over the tables. It crashed into Veyers’s table, scattering books in all directions, and hissed menacingly at the orange-eyed boy.

Swearing loudly, Veyers hurriedly pushed himself from his desk, fell on his ass in his hurry to evade the fire drake, and then erupted into a short-ranged fireball centered on himself.

Undaunted, the fire drake took the flames head-on and added his own fire breath to the blaze.

The entire class started screaming and scrambled to get out of the classroom and away from the burning battlefield.

Well, Zach and Zorian remained calm and collected. They each picked one end of the classroom and subtly protected their classmates from harm by channeling the flames away from them through invisible force fields and chilling spells. Aside from them, only Briam and Ilsa did not try to escape the place. Briam was desperately trying to rein his familiar in and drag him off from the fight, while Ilsa did her best to keep the fire contained and tried to restrain Veyers and the fire drake in order to stop the fight.

Ilsa would have normally realized that Zach and Zorian had something to do with the surprising tendency of the flames to swerve away from the students or lose power before they reached them, but Zorian was using some light mind magic to draw her attention away from that. It wasn’t particularly difficult, since there was a big, eye-catching battle in progress, and that attracted most of her attention anyway.

Of course, the fact Veyers and Briam’s fire drake were throwing fire everywhere and that everyone was making a huge racket in their attempt to vacate the classroom meant this was a perfect opportunity for Zorian to covertly disable Veyers’s pendant and invade his mind.

He shared a silent look with Zach, who simply nodded at him. In the next moment, they both struck. Zach wrapped the pendant in an illusion that made it appear inert no matter what was happening while Zorian pierced the mental barrier it created and started reading Veyers’s mind and subverting his will.

Eventually, Ilsa managed to separate the two combatants, aided in no small part by Zorian mentally forcing them both to back down. Briam immediately dragged off his familiar away from Veyers, calming the fire drake down and inspecting him to see if he got hurt in the fight. As for Veyers, he simply collapsed unconscious all of a sudden. Zorian found it easier to memory search people when they were not mentally struggling against him all the time, and he had already gotten everything he could have out of his surface thoughts alone.

He was just about to convince Ilsa to let him and Zach carry Veyers off to a hospital or something when she suddenly spoke up.

"You two… have you been here all this time?" she asked, glancing towards Zach and Zorian.

"Yes," Zach confirmed. "We know some basic spells, so we stayed to see if we could help somehow."

"A bit reckless, but commendable," Ilsa said. "Unfortunately, no good deed goes unpunished in this world. I need some uninvolved witnesses when I speak to the headmaster about this, and since you were here from start to finish, you fit the bill perfectly. You’ll be coming with me after I clean up the classroom."

Zach and Zorian shared a look before lightly shrugging at each other. This was perfect, really – they got to stay close to Veyers for quite a while, giving Zorian plenty of time to rummage through his memories, and they didn’t even have to make up some contrived excuse to do so.

"Okay," Zorian agreed easily.

Ilsa nodded at them, pleased they had no intention of trying to weasel out of it. She conjured a disc of force and levitated Veyers on top of it, before turning towards Briam.

Zach took the chance when her back was turned and telekinetically crushed Veyers’s mind shield pendant into scrap. It gave off one final ear-piercing screech and a flash of light, invisible and inaudible through the illusion Zach placed on it earlier, and then went completely inert.

"Briam, you and your familiar are coming along as well," she told him.

"This… Teacher, I don’t know what came into him! I–" stammered Briam, clutching the fire drake in his arms tighter to his chest. Trogmar had largely calmed down at this point, increasingly aware that his master was not happy with what he had done.

"I understand," Ilsa sighed. "I don’t think you will receive a serious punishment… especially since Veyers is the other involved party. You really need to keep a better grip on your fire drake, however. Veyers started things, but this isn’t a good look for you, either."

"Yes," he nodded quickly.

"Let’s go, then," Ilsa said, gesturing towards the door.

She strode off towards the Headmaster’s office, followed by Zach and Zorian, Briam and his fire drake, and unconscious Veyers on a floating ectoplasmic disc. She found Akoja and a number of other students waiting outside the classroom door, curious to see the resolution of the incident, and promptly recruited some of them as additional witnesses before telling the rest the class was canceled for the day and that they were free to go.

Zorian handed off his body to the mind of a distant simulacrum before focusing all of his attention on the memories locked inside Veyers’s head…

"So… were you the one who pushed Briam’s drake into doing that?" Zach asked him later.

"No, that was completely spontaneous," Zorian said, shaking his head. "I had nothing to do with it."

The questioning had lasted for hours, and Veyers had managed to wake up by the end of it. Without any memories of mental tampering, of course. He then yelled out all sorts of threats to everyone in the room and stormed off angrily, thus marking the end of that particular meeting.

Zach and Zorian decided to retreat to Noveda Mansion to discuss what happened.

"What did you get out of Veyers, then?" Zach asked. "You don’t look very excited, so I’m guessing very little."

"Sort of," Zorian admitted. "As you might expect, he doesn’t know who Red Robe is. He doesn’t even remember what happened when he and his lawyer friend were evacuated at the beginning of the restart – that part of his memories was thoroughly erased, and I can’t find out anything about it."

"Of course," Zach scoffed. "If he knew Red Robe’s plans or identity, no way would Red Robe send him to class like this. What was even the point of that, I wonder? This was way too petty to be a legitimate part of Red Robe’s master plan."

"I don’t think this is something Red Robe thought up," Zorian said. "From what I could glean in Veyers’s mind, our former classmate has had this on his mind for quite a while. Long before this month began."

"Wait, so this is his idea?" Zach said incredulously.

"If you could remember Veyers, you’d know this is exactly the sort of thing he would do," Zorian said. "He thought his expulsion was unfair and decided to do something about it. I doubt he saw the situation developing as it did, but he definitely came to class with the goal of making a stand against the academy and drawing attention to his case."

"So this had nothing to do with Red Robe?" Zach asked, frowning.

"No, this was just Veyers being Veyers," Zorian answered. "In fact, I suspect this was the reason Red Robe wiped out your memories of Veyers when he took a sledgehammer to your mind."