«Hello, Tinami,» he greeted, causing her to jerk in shock at being addressed.
«Um…» she fumbled. «Zorian, right?»
«That’s me,» confirmed Zorian. «Care for a dance?»
«Oh. Oh! But didn’t you already come with a girlfriend? Won’t she mind?» Tinami asked.
Zorian pointed towards the spot where Taiven was dancing with her partner. «Also, Taiven is just a friend, not a girlfriend.»
«Ah,» she said, fidgeting uncomfortably. Zorian wordlessly offered his hand to her. «Um, okay then…» she said, grabbing Zorian’s offered hand with surprising forcefulness and dutifully following him onto the dance floor.
In the next 30 minutes, Zorian tried to engage Tinami in conversation with only mild success, and he suspected it was only because of these highly specific circumstances she was willing to open up even a little to him. She really was a very shy girl, and he somehow doubted she was secretly the third time traveler pretending. Her awkwardness seemed quite real, and surely a time traveler as old as Zach would have grown out of that by now?
«So as a hobby, you raise… spiders?» asked Zorian curiously.
«Tarantulas,» she corrected insistently. «But, um, I kind of like spiders of all sorts. I know it’s weird, but…»
«Nonsense,» countered Zorian good-naturally. What could possibly be weird about a shy, delicate-looking girl breeding big, hairy arachnids the size of a human hand? «Spiders are really quite amazing creatures. Though I prefer jumping spiders myself — those two giant eyes at the front somehow make them more human-like and relatable for me.»
Tinami gave him an incredulous look before frowning. «You’re making fun of me,» she accused.
«Nope,» Zorian countered with an easy smile. «In fact, there is a particularly large colony of jumping spiders that I visit on a regular basis. It’s amazing what you can learn by observing the natural world.»
Tinami narrowed her eyes at him and launched into a series of increasingly esoteric questions about spiders. Since Zorian had spent a great deal of time investigating various spider species as part of his research into aranea, he actually knew how to answer most of her questions. He then tried to turn the tables on her by asking her about magical varieties of larger, more monstrous varieties of spiders, gambling that her interest mainly extended to the smaller, ‘cuddlier’ breeds. He gambled wrong. Not only did she know more about spider monsters than he did, she also knew a great deal about monster species that only looked like a spider (such as various kinds of spider demons), and about monsters with spider-derived traits.
He wondered what would happen if he introduced her to the aranea, and decided he would definitely do so in one of the restarts. It was bound to be amusing, if nothing else.
«I see it didn’t take you long to find a new girl once your lovely date for the evening left you,» Zach said behind him, causing him to jerk in surprise. He glared at the boy in response, wondering why he didn’t sense him coming — he usually always… oh, right, he’d shut off his mind for the evening so the combined feelings of the throng wouldn’t overwhelm him. The fact he managed to keep it closed with no conscious effort while being absorbed into his conversation with Tinami was an encouraging sign for his developing mental abilities.
«Why are you here, Zach?» Zorian sighed.
«I’m the host,» Zach said. «It’s my job to check up on the guests and see if they’re having any issues with the service and what not. Though in this case I just wondered if you wanted to see the fireworks or not.»
Oh yes, Zorian definitely wanted to see the fireworks and immediately said so. Thus, he and Tinami joined a sizeable group of people in the garden where they would have an unobstructed view of the sky. Zorian paid more attention to Zach than to the sky, though. If the matriarch’s plan went along as planned, Zach was bound to have an interesting reaction.
Zorian had shied away from acting against the invaders, and not just because he was too weak to contribute much. The fact was that trying to sabotage the invasion was bound to get the attention of the third time traveler leading it, and Zorian didn’t want to advertise his existence. So instead, he limited himself to gathering information about the invaders and waiting until he was strong enough to survive hostile attention. The aranea had no intention of doing the same, however — the invasion forces seemed to spend most of the month leading up to the invasion wiping out the aranea as a coherent force, and the matriarch had no intention of sitting on critical information for the sake of deception. Fortunately, there was no way for the invasion leaders to connect the aranea to Zorian, and the matriarch agreed with him that he shouldn’t get involved, arguing that he was far too useful as a scout and memory carrier to risk revealing himself recklessly.
So three days ago, he and the matriarch sat down to discuss a plan of action. Zorian had observed the progress of the invasion from various points in the city during the last few restarts, and he was convinced that the best and easiest way of derailing the invasion was to prevent the initial artillery barrage that preceded the invasion proper. This was especially true because he knew exactly where they were firing from — triangulating the location of their firing positions was absolutely trivial when you were tracking a brightly shining projectile moving relatively slowly across the sky. Unfortunately, he never managed to get close to one of those firing points to see what kind of defenses they had, since he was killed both times he attempted the feat. The matriarch agreed that assaulting those positions before they could fire was likely to be the best way to strike a critical blow to the invaders, and the plan was put in motion.
The fireworks started… and not a single artillery spell accompanied them. The look of increasing bafflement on Zach’s face was priceless.
«What’s wrong, Zach?» Zorian asked innocently. «You act like you’ve never seen fireworks before.»
«Err, no, I mean I did, it’s just… never mind,» Zach sighed.
Zorian shrugged and turned to Tinami, offering her a hand. «What do you think of going back inside for another dance?»
«Um, yes!» she agreed enthusiastically. «Let’s!»
Slowly, the people got tired of exploding lights in the sky and streamed back inside, leaving a frowning Zach staring alone at the sky.
Zorian’s good mood was short lived. While the invaders were indeed hard-hit by the lack of their initial bombardment, the invasion wasn’t called off, and they appeared to have made Zach’s mansion one of their primary targets, probably because that’s where Zach was and they were specifically targeting him. Perhaps if the students had witnessed the artillery spells hitting the city, Zach could have used that to assume control and organize some kind of proper defense, but as it was the attack caught them all completely unprepared. Not even Zach, with all his mighty magic, could stop the flood of invaders gaining entry into the mansion, after which several groups of students were isolated from the main group containing Zach. Zorian was in one of those.
He, Tinami, Taiven, Briam and four other students he didn’t know had ended up barricading themselves in one of few untouched rooms in the mansion, desperately trying to keep the invading forces at bay. The four unknown students were almost entirely useless, but the other three were worth their weight in gold. Briam had summoned his trusty fire drake to his side the moment he realized they were under attack, Taiven knew how to cast some kind of incredibly destructive fire vortex that actually made the invaders reluctant to continue their attack for 10 whole minutes, and Tinami… well, she was clearly no stranger to fighting and behaved completely differently in a combat situation than she did in normal interaction. She didn’t know any fire spells, but she did know how to fire some kind of purple beams that caused even the biggest of war trolls to collapse on the ground screaming. The beams did no obvious damage, so he assumed they were simply pain spells, but that was useful enough on its own — Tinami didn’t spam those beams mindlessly, instead concentrating on causing pileups, breaking up charges and interrupting enemy spellcasters.