The Unskillful Thaumaturge

XXXV

Lillian strolled casually across campus, pulling her hood over her head as it began to rain lightly. She was stepping half on, half off the path, almost ritualistically, her right foot sinking through the thin crust of snow that remained over the grass, a reminder that winter was still lurking in the stormy clouds. She shook the snow off her foot and continued walking, past the math building and toward the blue-and-gold thaumaturgy building. She continued down the path, not stopping when the grass ended, contemplating what Rolf had told her.

They had to tell Morgan and Chris.

Her adoptive parents would have to find out about her connection to the Thaumatogenesis.

And she had no idea how they would react.

Morgan and Chris had always been very honest and straightforward parents. Lillian was sure that if they'd known about her connection to the Thaumatogenesis, they would have told her. At least, she was glad the news wouldn't be coming from her- she didn't want to sound like she had been hiding anything. She felt somewhat guilty for withholding that knowledge from them when they had always been so open and honest with her. She supposed they had a legal right to know as her guardians, anyway; who was she to stop them from finding out?

And yet she still felt as if that information should be private, hers alone to tell. As she ascended the stairs towards her Intro Thaum classroom, she continued to wonder how they would react. They had probably always had it in the back of their minds- after all, they had adopted a baby in Eugene several days after the Thaumatogenesis- but what would happen when they found out their suspicions had been true all along?

❧☙

Rory pulled several suitcases' worth of luggage into the room, hauling a duffel bag over his shoulder. He grunted and deposited the luggage before moving as if to walk out the door.

"Is that Ashley's?"

"You bet it is," Rory muttered.

"Why does she need so much stuff?"

"Ask her," Rory responded, leaving through the door. Dakota glanced at the luggage for a few seconds before his curiosity overcame him and he rose, walking to the center of the room and examined the duffel bag. Frowning, he picked it up; it wasn't quite as heavy as he expected. He shook it, and it didn't make a sound. Cautiously, he unzipped the bag a few inches and stuck his hand in. He felt nothing but soft fabric. Worming in up to his arm, he blindly searched through the clothes. When he found nothing interesting, he withdrew his hand and zipped up the bag in disgust.

She must really want all those clothes.

"I bet she's moving completely and she's just dumping all her stuff here beforehand."

What's Rory going to do, then?

At that moment, Rory himself walked in, dragging a bed behind him piled with even more luggage. "Rory is going to stay here and attend to business that Ashley should have been attending to in Roseburg."

"Which is?"

"She really wasn't doing anything, so I don't have much to do either. I can probably just double the security near here- locate all nearby Sphinxes, that kind of thing. Put up warning signs at the sight boundaries. Add more signs that will tell you the way back if you get lost."

"We wouldn't get lost," Dakota responded, puzzled. "Neither would you."

"Yeah, but Lillian might. And what if you fell? How would you know how much to go back up?"

"Yeah, I guess..." Dakota trailed off. Rory left the bed in the center of the room and returned moments later with a couch.

"Did you have that right outside the door?"

"The bed and the couch wouldn't fit through the door at the same time, and Ashley doesn't want them on top of each other." Rory walked out the door, not looking at Dakota as he talked.

Guess she is moving in full.

"Did she decide on whether to obliterate?" Dakota called.

Rory didn't respond.

❧☙

One officer, Timothy May to be exact, shifted in his seat. "So you wanted to ask us about the Thaumatogenesis?"

"That's right," Galena responded. "We're starting to get somewhere in the investigation, so we wanted to ask you again about what you remember."

"Really not that much," Cynthia Anderson replied, tucking a few strands of hair behind her ear. "We were at the police station, and we got an urgent call. Then we headed straight over to Dorena and investigated."

"Who from?" Rolf pressed.

"What?"

"Who was the call from?"

"Oh," May realized. "It was from the landowner, the same person who had the security camera and all that. The explosion woke him up."

"And so the three of us went over and asked him about the event, and he told us there had been a loud noise and a bright light, probably an explosion. We went into the woods to investigate further, and then we saw the obelisk," Anderson continued.

"We asked him if he knew about it and he said that it had always been there, whoever owned the land before him had probably built it but he wasn't sure," said May.

"Is that really what he said?" Evan wondered aloud.

"Yes," Anderson interrupted. "Anyway, we went towards the obelisk and around it was an area where it looked like fifteen trees had been pulverized. There were branches and leaves and bits of wood all over the ground, and right in the middle of it all was that obelisk, and that basket. And I went over and looked into the basket and found the baby, and by that time I was thoroughly confused. She wasn't crying or anything, in fact, she was asleep. Thumb in her mouth. And we started going around with our flashlights trying to figure out what was happening."

"I saw the security camera in a tree and went back to ask the landowner if it was his, and if he had the footage. He showed me where I could get the recording, and I confiscated that."

"And while you were at the house, J and I were at the obelisk trying to figure out what exactly was going on."

"J?" Erica interrupted curiously.

"Jeremiah Raleigh," she amended. "He always wanted us to call him J." She stared at a knot in the wood of the table for a few seconds without speaking any further.

"What happened next?" Derek asked.

"Well, it was a big shock to both me and J when he moved the vegetation out of the way."

"Oh, that's right," Galena muttered.

"And we were both completely incredulous at this, so I tried it. I moved the rest of the branches and wood and stuff. It was crazy to think that-" at this, Anderson tapped the side of her head- "we could be moving things just with our minds, and of course at the same time all kinds of people on the other side of the world were also finding out, and-"

She stopped as Erica began making a rolling motion with her arm. "Yeah, yeah, like how we all felt when we woke up the next morning."

"Essentially, yes," she replied somewhat peevishly. "And beyond that, you know, people everywhere were calling the news, and people were completely overwhelmed..." she trailed off. "You know all that already, of course. We didn't know at all what to make of the footage, and the child was put up for adoption, and you took over the investigation. Beyond that, there's nothing else."

"Did you- did you notice anything?"

"No, we were distracted by doing thaumaturgy," Anderson sarcastically replied.

"You didn't find anything else?"

"No! That was supposed to be your job!" May exclaimed.

"We're working on it."