57. Unwanted

Chapter 057
Unwanted

Zorian stared intently at the two sheets of paper in front of him, methodically going through every single line of text and marking down the matches and differences between the two documents. Zach sat beside him, watching him work with a thoughtful frown, not saying anything.

Despite the oppressive silence and serious mood, the two papers were simple lists of names. Classmates, teachers, public officials… each of them had listed anyone they considered even remotely important on their own sheet of paper, with no input from the other whatsoever. It was Zorian’s hope that by comparing the two lists with each other, they could see if there were any other obvious holes in Zach’s memory. Or Zorian’s memory, for that matter – it was unlikely, but Zorian didn’t entirely discount the idea that his own mind had been tampered with too.

“Is this really necessary?” Zach asked him. “Maybe I just forgot the guy?”

Zorian looked up from the two papers to give Zach an incredulous look.

“Hey, I’m just saying!” Zach protested. “I mean, it has been a pretty long time since I’ve been stuck in this time loop, and he was expelled before the time loop even began. I’d have to specifically seek him out, and what reason did I have to do that? We apparently didn’t even like each other, if I understood you correctly.”

“Please,” Zorian scoffed. There was no doubt in Zorian’s mind that Zach’s curious inability to remember anything about Veyers Boranova was artificial in nature. “I can understand you putting the jerk completely out of your mind. Hell, I pretty much did that myself. But to completely forget that he existed at all and everything about him?”

Yet that was precisely what happened, if Zach was to be believed. Zorian could only conclude someone had scrubbed Zach’s mind clean of everything related to the Boranova heir.

He wasn’t sure why Zach was so unwilling to accept that conclusion, though he did have his suspicions…

Zorian returned to his task of matching names for a while, eventually stumbling onto a name on Zach’s list that he was unfamiliar with. That was not very surprising, though – Zach’s list was way longer than Zorian’s, as the other boy was far more social than he was.

“Who is this Ilinim Kam guy?” he asked Zach.

“He was a student in one of the other groups during our first two years in the academy,” Zach said. “We used to hang out together sometimes. You weren’t very friendly back then, so that’s probably why you don’t remember him. I don’t think you ever mingled with the other groups, did you?”

“No,” Zorian admitted. “I was always very busy back then. I barely interacted with my own classmates, nevermind people I had no reason to talk to. Still, I did take a brief look at the other groups, back when I was investigating our classmates for potential Red Robe candidates. I don’t remember ever seeing any Ilinim Kam.”

“Well, I did say he was a student,” Zach pointed out. “He failed the certification exam and dropped out of the academy.”

Well, that would explain it. He had completely ignored people who failed to advance into the third year, thinking them irrelevant. That’s how he’d missed Veyers too, actually.

“We’re going to have to make a list of people like that and see if it holds any more surprises for us,” Zorian noted. Scanning the names below Ilinim, he noticed quite a few names from other student groups. “That said, I can’t help but notice that you know quite a few students outside our class…”

“I know what you’re getting at,” Zach interrupted him. “You’re going to point out how I can list half of our year mates on demand but can’t remember a guy that went to our class.”

“And?” Zorian prodded. “Your response to that?”

“You’re right. There is definitely something abnormal about me forgetting this Veyers guy like that. You happy now?” Zach said resignedly.

“Yes,” Zorian nodded. “Now tell me who this Anixa Pravoski girl is…”

For the next hour and a half, they slowly went through the two lists of names, searching for any peculiarities. The good news was that Zach didn’t have any other glaring holes in his memories, as far as Zorian could tell. Only Veyers seemed to be a total blank.

“So… do you think Veyers is Red Robe?” Zach asked cautiously.

“That’s the question, isn’t it?” Zorian said, taking off his glasses and inspecting them for dirt. It was mostly a way to waste some time while he thought about what he wanted to say.

“Yes it is,” said Zach slowly, as if talking to an idiot. “So why don’t you try answering it.”

Ugh. So impatient.

“It’s possible,” Zorian said. “But I don’t know. I’m kind of bothered by some things about this.”

“Like what?” Zach asked curiously.

“Like the fact Veyers apparently wiped only himself out of your memory,” Zorian said. “That is so… amateurish. I would expect more from Red Robe. I mean, if it was me doing something like this, I would have blanked out your recollection of another four or five random students to muddy the trail a bit.”

Zach gave him an unamused look.

“You know, Zorian, sometimes I can’t help but wonder if you’re actually Red Robe,” he said.

“You saw both of us in the same room, though,” Zorian pointed out, completely unconcerned by Zach’s words.

“I already know Red Robe can make simulacrums, so that proves nothing,” Zach said, folding his hands over his chest.

Zorian made a mental note to ask Zach to teach him how to cast the simulacrum spell, since it was unlikely that Zach had never learned the spell in all the decades he had spent in the time loop and Zorian really wanted the spell. They had more pressing issues at the moment, however, so he reluctantly set the idea aside for the moment.

“The second thing that bothers me is that it’s hard to swallow that someone like Veyers could be the relatively discreet and patient Red Robe,” Zorian said, dragging the conversation back to the topic of Veyers. “I mean, he lost his temper at a disciplinary hearing, for gods’ sake! He is even more impulsive than you are!”

“Hey…” Zach protested.

“Then again, neither of us are very similar to the person we used to be before the time loop, are we?” admitted Zorian.

“There are plenty of similarities,” Zach said, shaking his head in disagreement. “But I do think that him having a short fuse before the time loop proves little. You were also rather unpleasant to interact with before the time loop, and look at you now…”

This was probably payback for Zorian’s earlier comment about Zach’s impulsiveness. He supposed he did kind of deserve that…

“I had reasons for behaving like I did,” Zorian noted.

“Who says Veyers didn’t?” Zach asked. “I’m sure he felt his behavior was totally justified, too.”

That was true, Zorian conceded. In fact, it could be that the nature of the time loop removed most of Veyers’ problems and allowed him to calm down. Much like it did for Zorian himself.

“I suppose you’re right,” said Zorian after a pause. He shook his head to clear his thoughts a little. “I think that, in the end, it doesn’t really matter whether Veyers is Red Robe or not. The fact you have no memory of him means he’s someone Red Robe didn’t want you to interact with, which makes him automatically important. We have to check him out.”

“Oh, no argument about that,” Zach nodded. “Though this makes me wonder… if Veyers really is Red Robe, what will we find when we track him down?”

“Depending on what method Red Robe used to leave the time loop, we would expect his counterpart in this world to be either a soulless corpse like the aranea or an unaware person no different from the rest of the people around us,” Zorian said.

“Why a soulless corpse?” Zach asked, baffled.

“Well, I’ve been thinking of the ways Red Robe could have tricked the Guardian into letting him out of the time loop reality, and I realized he might have just asked for his soul to be shoved into his real world body,” explained Zorian. “For a necromancer like him, it might be fairly trivial to just eject his old soul out of the body and continue as normal from there.”

“Would the Guardian agree to do that, though?” Zach asked. “Can it even do that? It did claim it would have to switch souls if the body in the real world already has one.”

“I can’t give you an answer to any of that, obviously,” Zorian huffed. “I don’t know enough about either necromancy or the Guardian’s capabilities to say if it’s possible. It’s just an idea I’ve been considering, that’s all.”

For a while, they kept throwing various possibilities at each other. It was all just wild speculation, however, so they gave up on that discussion as pointless soon enough. They would have to wait until they found Veyers before they could properly consider the issue.

A brief silence descended between them, each of them lost in their own thoughts.

“Are you sure you don’t want me to take a look at your mind?” asked Zorian after a while.

“What?” Zach asked with incomprehension, jolted out of his musings by Zorian’s question. A second later, when he finally processed the question, his face contorted into an annoyed glare. “No. Absolutely not. I’m sorry, but I already had my brain scrambled by one mind mage and I don’t want to be at the mercy of another. Besides, what would be the point? I may not be an expert on mind magic like you, but even I know there is no way to restore magically erased memories. I’d be letting you rummage through my mind for nothing.”

“Well, it’s true that a properly blanked out memory is irrecoverable,” Zorian admitted easily. “But why assume Red Robe executed the mind wipe flawlessly? I saw his mind magic in action at one point, when he tried to use it against me, and he wasn’t all that good with it. There is a good chance he missed something.”

“You have a very skewed image of what constitutes as ‘good’ when it comes to mind magic,” Zach told him. “It’s not Red Robe that’s bad, it’s you who is terrifyingly good at it. And the answer is still no.”

“What if I tell you that you could still be under the magic’s influence?” Zorian asked.

Zach gave him a surprised look.

“What the hell do you mean by that!?” Zach asked him with a raised voice.

“It’s hard to believe you never encountered anyone mentioning Veyers in one of the previous restarts,” Zorian pointed out with a sigh. “He’s not often mentioned, but people do talk about him on occasion. At some point over the decades, you really should have noticed there was a guy everyone in our class knew of, yet you have no memories of.”

“Well… I was only rarely in class after some point…” Zach tried.

“Zach, you’ve been strangely evasive about Veyers this entire time,” Zorian told him bluntly. “Hell, not long ago you again floated the idea you may have just forgotten the guy. As if it hadn’t been abundantly obvious by then that the guy had been purposely deleted out of your memories. I would have expected you to be excited about discovering something so important, but instead you seemed really keen to dismiss the whole thing.”

“Zorian, you’re overcomplicating things again,” Zach complained. “Please speak plainly.”

“Fine. You’re probably under some kind of compulsion not to focus on the topic of Veyers,” Zorian said. “And possibly forget about it after a while, if it was ever forcibly pointed out to you. We’ll have to see if you still remember this conversation tomorrow.”

“Don’t even joke about that last part, Zorian,” Zach warned him.

“It’s what I’d have done in Red Robe’s place,” Zorian said, shrugging. “But I have a feeling you don’t have to worry about that. If Red Robe didn’t bother masking his memory wipe better, it’s likely that he didn’t bother with something so relatively sophisticated. The compulsion to dismiss the topic itself might have been enough, anyway. I mean, if it hadn’t been for me being so pushy and insistent about the hole in your memory when it comes to Veyers, you’d have likely dismissed it and eventually put it out of your mind.”

Zach hissed something under his breath that Zorian didn’t quite catch but which he was pretty sure were insults and swear words directed at Red Robe. Something about his canine ancestry and fondness for male genitals. Regardless, Zach spent the next several minutes pacing around the area and muttering to himself.

He looked dangerously unstable, if Zorian was to be perfectly honest. And it wasn’t the first time Zach had done something like that, either. It occurred to Zorian that all those decades Zach spent in the time loop, with only limited ability to interact with other people, must have been harder on his fellow time traveler than he had supposed.

How much worse, then, would he have ended up if the time loop worked as intended and he stayed inside for hundreds of years or however long it was supposed to last? Maybe the Ghost Serpent was onto something…

Finally, Zach stopped his pacing, ran his hand through his hair in a frustrated manner, and turned to Zorian.

“I can’t believe I’m doing this,” he said. “I really can’t, but I don’t seem to have a choice. Zorian?”

“Yes?” Zorian asked, curiously. Was Zach finally going to let him take a look at his mind? Probably, he couldn’t imagine what else-

“I want you to bring me to Xvim again,” Zach said, a sour expression on his face. “I’m going to need those mind magic lessons after all.”

“Oh,” Zorian said, blinking in surprise. He didn’t expect that. “Yeah. Sure.”

He wasn’t sure whether to be amused or annoyed by this outcome. It wasn’t what he had been trying to do by broaching the topic, but at least it was bound to bring plenty of amusement to him in the days to come.

The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

– break –

The next three days proved to be rather frustrating. On the bright side, Zach did not forget about Veyers after a while, so any compulsion he might be laboring under did not extend that far. Unfortunately, that’s where the good news ended. Their search for Veyers had gone nowhere. They knew the boy’s name, what he looked like and where his home was, but they still couldn’t find him. In the end Zach and Zorian blanketed the entire city with divinations, and they still couldn’t track him down. Either Veyers was under some heavy anti-divination wards, or he was not anywhere near the city of Cyoria.

To make matters worse, nobody seemed to know anything about the guy, not even the various authorities. Zorian knew from questioning academy officials (and reading their minds when they refused to give him an answer) that Veyers had never interacted with the academy again after his expulsion, even though he was supposed to come and sign some documents to finalize things. The academy sent a message to Veyers’ House to complain about that, but received no response whatsoever. The police, for their part, received no report that the boy was dead or missing, despite the fact Veyers hadn’t been seen in weeks.

They even tried contacting Noble House Boranova directly to see if they could arrange for a meeting. Sadly, their representatives told them to get lost. Not in those words, admittedly, they were actually rather polite, but they had still made it clear they didn’t want to talk to them.

All in all, investigating Veyers was proving to be a lot harder than Zorian initially thought it would be. At this point in time, however, Zorian didn’t find that either surprising or particularly disappointing. When was anything about this time loop simple?

Though it was a long-shot, Zorian decided to ask their classmates about Veyers to see if they knew something. At the very least, Benisek was bound to have heard some rumors about the disgraced Boranova heir, even if there was no telling how accurate any of them were.

“You’re on time for once, I see,” Akoja told him as he approached the classroom. She marked his arrival on the attendance sheet she was holding in her hands. “A positive sign. What’s the occasion?”

Zorian thought about pointing out he was actually incredibly early, but decided not to. Let her have it her way this once.

“I actually wanted to talk to you,” he said.

“Me!?” she asked incredulously, giving him a wide-eyed look. “Err, I mean, sure… what did you want to talk about?”

“Veyers Boranova,” Zorian said.

“Him?” she asked in distaste. He felt a twinge of disappointment coming off her. “You really know how to pick a topic, Zorian.”

“Sorry,” he said, genuinely a little remorseful. He probably gave her a bit of false hope he would ask her out or something, if the feelings he got from her were of any indication. Not what he had intended. “I just thought you might know something about him, since you’re the class representative and all.”

“To be honest, I did my best to put him out of my mind,” she said. “I can’t tell you how glad I was when I heard he got expelled.”

“Well, about that… do you know what exactly he did on that hearing to get expelled?” Zorian asked.

“No. Nobody does,” Akoja said, shaking her head. “I heard people saying he attacked one of the judges, but that’s probably rubbish. That’s a little too much, even for Veyers.”