Throne of Time [Magical Academy, Time Loop, Mystery]

Suria let herself relax for a little while as she watched the krashorb matches along with the other two loopers, who did their best to explain the details of the sport to her. She was interested less in the actual matches than the magic behind making the orbs move autonomously. Unfortunately, she wasn’t anywhere near strong enough to create the necessary glyphs, so she tucked the information away - maybe she could learn something more from this on a much later loop.

For that entire time she had to restrain herself from asking anything about the previous loop, even though she was sure it had been the two of them. Jeilin and Dsjaho-an hadn’t said anything like they had the previous time, which bothered her until she decided to just bring it up directly.

”I overheard you two discussing this in the previous loop, didn’t I?” she asked them.

”We actually wanted to ask you about that,” Dsjaho-an said with a frown. ”Did you do anything unusual that might have affected the results? Talked to anyone, bet on a match, anything?”

”Not really. That was my first time ever attending, so I just watched.”

”We’re trying to use krashorb as an experiment,” Jeilin explained with a conciliatory smile. ”Our core question was how random anything can be within the loop. It’s difficult to tell, with so many people potentially altering events, but krashorb seems like a straightforward contest.”

”In theory it should always be the same,” Dsjaho-an insisted. ”If nothing interferes, people should always make the same decisions.”

”But that’s not what we saw! Based on today, it seems like some of these matches are basically a coin flip.”

”Even a coin flip should be deterministic, if nothing interferes.”

It seemed like the two of them felt very passionately about this, in addition to their enthusiasm for the sport, so Suria didn’t wade into the argument. From her perspective, she wasn’t sure she agreed with Dsjaho-an - a coin flip could be affected by so many tiny variables, it would take almost nothing to make the event play out differently.

”How consistent are other events?” Suria asked.

”You can’t underestimate the consequences of small actions,” Jeilin told her with a shake of his head. ”That’s why it’s hard to do a proper experiment. But in my experience, some things are way more consistent than others. The administrators deliver exactly the same speech every time, professors might change their lessons a little, a few things are easily altered.”

”Some people are just unreliable,” Dsjaho-an said, inclining his head to the side. ”Like that one.”

Suria followed his indication and noticed a woman watching the matches who Suria hadn’t noticed before, though that was a surprise, because the woman wore a bright pink dress and had brilliant gold hair. She was eagerly watching the matches and clapping her hands.

”There’s no telling what she’ll do,” Dsjaho-an continued. ”It’s like she decides on the spur of the moment.”

”My roommate last cycle was the same way,” Suria said.

While they spoke, the woman in pink suddenly hopped up and ran off to talk to someone. She left behind a pink handbag, which seemed a risk in such a busy area. Suria instinctively went to get it, even though she heard Dsjaho-an muttering about it being pointless. Admittedly, Suria wasn’t eager to talk to someone so bright and cheerful, so she might regret the attempted good deed.

When she picked up the bag, she discovered that it was sealed with a metal plate that looked sort of like a runic formation, though without an inscription. It seemed like it was designed to accept mana, which might make it a sort of trick lock. Suria was more interested in that than the contents, but decided it would look suspicious to meddle with the bag, so she instead looked for the owner.

At first it seemed like the woman in pink had disappeared entirely, making Suria begin to regret her decision to get involved. Just when she decided to just take it back to the others, she spotted the woman in pink running around looking a little panicked.

”Has anyone seen my bag? It’s pink, it’s about this big, it-”

”Here you go,” Suria said, walking up and handing it to her.

”Oh, thank goodness!” The woman immediately clutched the bag and ran a finger over the pseudo-runes in a specific pattern, which made it click open. She looked inside, gave a sigh of relief, then visibly froze and looked at Suria. ”Wait, did you see that?”

”I did, sorry,” Suria said before she could think better of it. Honesty came too naturally, especially when a noblewoman might accuse her of theft. ”If it’s something important, you might not want to keep it here.”

The woman looked at her suspiciously, then rushed off, doing something complex with the locked plate. Perhaps changing its combination, though if that was how she treated her bag, it didn’t seem like it could possibly be very secure. Suria wandered back to the other loopers, mildly baffled by the experience.

”Her name is Xuhriha Alhras,” Jeilin told her. ”One time when she was really annoying me, I bribed one of the administrators to look her up. This is her first year at Darkmoon. She’s a noblewoman from the Court of Vedraz, apparently an old house, but there wasn’t much information about them. Probably not a very strong lineage, because her family bribed her way through the evaluation.”

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”I’m not sure what that means,” Suria admitted. ”Does everyone have to do an interview?”

”It depends on how you enter,” Dsjaho-an explained. ”For example, I come from a noble house that could simply demand entrance, but out of respect for the university I still do a magical demonstration. Most of the others are the same.”

”I doubt I could refuse,” Jeilin told her, ”but there’s no point. Even if my family wanted to pay the extra fee, not showing your abilities is usually frowned upon.”

”There are a few failures from mage families that just want to get a formal degree even if they don’t have any talent.”

”So you think she’s one of that type?” Suria asked as she looked after Xuhriha, who was carving a pink path through the field.

”Hard to say,” Jeilin said with a shrug. ”When I checked in, her performance in classes was wildly inconsistent. But those results aren’t a very good judge, because the loop doesn’t get to the first major set of exams.”

”I wouldn’t worry about her.” Dsjaho-an gestured back to the matches. ”People trapped outside the loop are easy to manipulate, even when they’re a little unpredictable. We need to focus our efforts on figuring out how the process works, and the serious obstacles like the thrones.”

Before the conversation could continue, there was an electric crash and suddenly a broken orb went flying from the field. Some gasped or laughed, and based on the reactions of the teams, that hadn’t been expected. The other loopers looked taken off guard as well.

”That’s a first,” Dsjaho-an muttered.

”Statistically improbable event?” Jeilin suggested. ”Doesn’t matter, let’s investigate. We’ll talk to the teams... Suria, can we ask you to track down the orb and see if anything’s wrong with it?”

With anyone else, Suria might have tried to negotiate for a favor, but she hoped she was on good terms with these two, so she just nodded and headed away from the field. She had seen the orb streak away to the east but there wasn’t much sign of it now, so she hoped it hadn’t gone into the lake. Since there were buildings there, she headed in the general direction in the hopes that someone might know more.

The Sequential Library was closest, but it appeared to be closed for the evening and she was sure that the orb would have just bounced off the solid obsidian. Next was the Cerulean Sanctum, which Suria had yet to explore: it still looked more elegant than any of the other campus buildings, with all its subtle curves rising from the water. All she really knew about it was that Conjuring classes took place there, and considering that one of hers might be in the Conjuring department, she should investigate anyway.

As she got closer, Suria first heard the sounds of voices talking over one another, then saw that one of the large blue windows had been shattered. That was probably her answer, then. Suria sped up a little to go retrieve the orb and saw that there was a group of women standing around the damaged window, and they brought her to a halt.

All of them looked to be noblewomen her age, wearing elaborate dresses instead of school robes. The one that surprised Suria most of all was Maut-mai: her former roommate was wearing a daring dress with a plunging back that bared her flawless skin. She wore even more jewelry than before, all of it in sapphires this time. Despite that, the others matched or exceeded her in the wealth of their outfits, leaving Suria highly uncomfortable as she approached in her only intact robes.

”Are you responsible for this?” one of the women demanded when she saw Suria.

”It isn’t mine,” Suria explained, ”one of the teams just had an accident. Sorr-”

”If you aren’t house-trained, you shouldn’t be in the house,” someone else said haughtily. ”You’re lucky we don’t press charges for breaking into proper society like this. Take your ball and go home.”

Flushing even though the insults weren’t technically directed at her, Suria lowered her head and went to pick up the orb. It had been damaged by the impact, but maybe the others could determine something from it. Just as Suria started to pick it up, she felt a surge of mana and the orb jerked, pushing her off her feet and sending her tumbling into the dirt beside the path.

”Please try not to break anything else,” someone said with a sneer, and all the noblewomen laughed.

Suria had been insulted before, but this one felt like a knife in her heart: the speaker was Maut-mai.

She gripped the orb, surrounding it with her own mana so it couldn’t be manipulated again, and felt her fingers straining with the tension. Even if she didn’t know this version of Maut-mai, she still felt betrayed. This woman had been her roommate, had helped her when she was disoriented, had even shared some about herself.

Except it hadn’t been this woman; it had been another Maut-mai lost to time. Suria saw absolutely no trace of the person she had known in the haughty gaze that turned on her. As she stared, the noblewomen made jokes about her being slow-witted and Maut-mai laughed along with them, but Suria could barely hear their words over the blood rushing through her ears.

Retreating with the orb, she ground her teeth and tried to ignore it. She still felt hurt and wanted to lash out, to think that Maut-mai had been a cruel bully all along. The other woman had actually wanted to join the Water Society at first; it had only been Suria’s accidental intervention that had put her on a different path.

When she returned to the field of arches, Suria gave the orb back to the other loopers, but she was in no mood to talk about their results. It seemed like Dsjaho-an was going to press until Jeilin made a subtle gesture to him, apparently seeing her mood. Suria managed to be minimally polite and stormed back to her room, still turning the event over in her mind.

She was still furious all the way back, but as she lay on her bed and stared at the ceiling, Suria’s anger began to cool. It was true that Maut-mai apparently had this capacity for malice inside of her, but when they had been together, the other woman hadn’t been cruel to other people. She had actually been positive and encouraging about krashorb, nothing like this version of her.

The hurt part of Suria still wanted to dismiss Maut-mai, to think of her as a mindless fool who could be easily manipulated by the people around her. Yet she couldn’t forget about the other Maut-mai who had been so vulnerable and could have existed just as easily.

Considering things more compassionately, Suria remembered how uncertain Maut-mai had been. Even in the early stages of the loop she had been moving around, potentially going in multiple directions. Clearly she was at a crossroads in her life, capable of becoming very different people. When she had roomed with Suria she had become one woman, and when she joined the Water Society she absorbed their cruelty and became a different one.

It was strange to think that if Suria had met Maut-mai like this, she would have thought the other woman was just another arrogant noble and never imagined another possibility. Was the same true for all the other laughing noblewomen? Suria assumed that some people were consistently kind and some consistently vile, but she had to admit that both of those might be more accidents of fate than she would have imagined.

What should she do with Maut-mai in the next loop? Suria told herself that she was just looking for solutions, but she spent most of her time thinking about fate and coming to no conclusions.