Chương 210: 198. Natural disasters and other personality traits

"Evil?" Ophelia asked.

"What do you mean?"

"You know, like a bad person—""I understand what you're asking about. But I'm asking what exactly you mean by 'evil.'" Peter stayed silent, his mouth half-open as thoughts raced through his head, while Ophelia sat motionless, letting him choose his words.

"So…" Peter finally spoke again.

"When you said you got some clarity about your sacrifice, did you mean human sacrifice?"

"Yes," Ophelia answered, earning a flinch from Peter.

"You want to know if you're going to have to kill someone as a rite of passage. And if you're becoming a servant to some dark lord?"

"Yeeeah, that's kinda it," he answered sheepishly. Ophelia chuckled at his admission, seeing the familiar feelings reflected on the young man's face.

"Did Sam tell you how I came to be his apprentice?" she asked, and Peter shook his head.

"I had to sacrifice someone in a ritual or be devoured by a messenger of an ancient god." Peter inhaled sharply.

"Oh, God."

"Yeah. Took me a lot of time to come to terms with it. But I'll tell you what Sam told me. The good and bad you are used to were taught to you, learned over a long time spent in a given environment. The thing is, you are now in a different environment, with a different code and different morals. Even if you commit evil by the standards of your old world, no punishment will come in the new one. But…" Ophelia paused for a second.

"On that, I don't really agree with him. I don't think he understands that there will be a punishment—the suffering inflicted on you by your own conscience." Peter nodded along absentmindedly before freezing, catching on to the implication.

"Good. You're quick on the uptake." Ophelia smiled lightly, seeing the realization dawn on the boy.

"Yes, he doesn't get to experience that kind of self-inflicted punishment. Don't get me wrong, he knows there are different ways of seeing the world. Hell, I doubt he would be a good teacher if he didn't."

"And is he?" Peter cut in.

"A good teacher, I mean."

"Very. But he can forget about… human parts of the curriculum. He might explain them, throw you a good metaphor, but he would never describe your conscience as a punishment, but rather as an obstacle to overcome."

"So he doesn't have one?" Ophelia paused for a second. Her mouth remained open, tongue pressing against the upper teeth, the first sounds of a firm 'no' ready to leave her mouth. Yet she stopped herself, as the image of Sam in the singularity, almost wide-eyed, looking at dying Luna with a surprising mixture of emotions clear on his face, surfaced in her mind.

"Well, he does have some remains of it… I think," she finally said.

"It's just that most of it isn't something he feels, but just a set of rules he follows. Evil would lead to an undesired outcome in the long run, so he doesn't do it. Add to that respect for his heritage and a sense of pride and honor, and you have a rather weird moral code."

"You didn't really answer my question."

"Yeah, I don't think there is an answer. If what I described to you is evil in your mind, then he is evil. If not, then he's not." Ophelia shrugged.

"I tend to see him in a similar category to a natural disaster that falls only on houses belonging to people I generally don't mind seeing die."

"That's a rather… strange way of describing a person."

"He is a rather strange person." Ophelia chuckled. She looked toward the window, leaving Peter with his thoughts. The city seemed to go into night mode, or whatever passed for nighttime in the underground ravine. New, strange sounds came to the fore—the groaning of the roots holding up many of the buildings, the sounds of the earth and stone lightly shifting against one another with the movements of all the creatures still up, and an unfamiliar, deep song of local night critters.

The lack of a normal chorus of nocturnal animals made it feel strange, as if it didn't fit the night-like ambiance.

"How about you?" Peter finally picked the conversation back up, breaking Ophelia out of her stupor.

"What about me?"

"Are you like him?" Ophelia shook her head.

"No. Or at least I don't think I'm there yet. But I did kill quite a few people." She dropped the information in a casual voice.

"Don't look at me like that. I didn't do it for fun or just for power… technically."

"So what, the god wanted you to serve them?" Ophelia shook her head.

"No, just a few people who had it coming… Most of them, at least. The kills weren't on Sam or a god. They were on me. But his influence, for better or for worse, did change me." Peter once again went silent, trying to process the new information as everything he was hearing led him to one rather unpleasant conclusion.

"So will I have to change and kill too?"

"Change? Yes." Ophelia gave a firm answer.

"Kill? I'm not sure, honestly. I don't think being a killer is a requirement, but the world might require it of you. And don't get me wrong. Sam might not be a psychopath, but that doesn't make him the forgiving kind. He won't tell you to kill, but that doesn't mean he won't put you in front of a choice that requires you to. He won't hurt you if you don't follow him, but receiving his teachings is an offer of power. So the question is, how much are you willing to change for it?"

Ophelia said, her eyes going slightly vacant as her pupils lost focus.

"I changed quite a bit," she added to herself in a whisper. Stolen story; please report.

"I don't want power," Peter answered immediately.

"Suuure. So after seeing all you saw, if Sam came out of that room and told you this"—she pointed to the cup of tea—"cured you of whatever was wrong with your soul, and that you were free to go and just not tell anyone about what you saw. You're telling me you would just get up and do so? That you wouldn't try to learn more?"

"Well… I would, sure. It's hard not to. But I wouldn't kill for it."

"How about risking death?"

"No."

"How about risking injury?"

"Umm." This time, Peter hesitated.

"What kind of injury?" he asked, and Ophelia smiled. Peter rolled his eyes at her amusement.

"I got used to pain. I won't mind an injury."

"Sure. How about hurting someone?"

"I don't want to hurt anyone."

"Even a bad guy? If breaking the leg of a murderer chasing his victim could allow you to learn to levitate off the ground, you wouldn't do it?"

"I would. But we're talking about a murderer." Ophelia's smile widened.

"You see? So you are willing to hurt yourself and others for that power. Just under specific conditions… a set of rules, you might even say? Rules that change with you after you, for example, experience so much pain that hurting yourself doesn't impress you any more?" she proposed in a suggestive voice. Peter opened his mouth in protest, but then closed it, still clearly uncomfortable with the way she put it. Ophelia shrugged, letting her face fall back to a neutral expression before getting up to get some sleep.

"Look, I'm not sure what he is, and the trick I learned over the past months is to simply not think about it too much. He's not cruel without purpose. But he also isn't kind without a purpose… with very few exceptions." She then pointed to the window where a few strange deer-like creatures scurried to their homes.

"In this world, it's a good thing to have a monster in your corner, and Sam is a big and scary one. You just have to ask yourself if that monster's presence doesn't go against that code we all have. I got used to it. Grew to enjoy it even. Whether you can is up to you." Ophelia gave the young man a short smile and then walked out to her own room, leaving Peter with his own thoughts. Elias looked at the report lying on his desk, his eyes supposedly on the words written there, yet his mind clearly elsewhere.

Dwayne calmly looked away, swirling his coffee in the mug, while Marvin squirmed in the chair.

"This isn't much," Elias finally said, pushing the report away from himself, his eyes lifting to Marvin.

"You didn't give us much to work with in the first place," Marvin protested.

"If we tapped his phone—""Baaad idea," Dwayne spoke up from the side. Marvin turned to him, clearly annoyed.

"I don't know what resources you had in your office, but I guarantee you, we know what we're doing and have more options than you even know exist." Dwayne shrugged at the outburst.

"I don't doubt it, but if he can magically find out, as your boss suggested"—he looked to Elias and smiled as the older man didn't interrupt him before continuing—"then I can guarantee you, the more successful you are, the nastier the fallout might be. And from what I understand, you already burned one bridge with the magic community," he said.

"That we did," Elias answered without hesitation, and then sighed deeply before picking the file back up.

"Well, we did get somewhere," he finally added, his eyes stopping on one name in the file.

"Ophelia. Hmm. So who do you think that is to him?" Marvin exhaled before speaking up.

"Well, we're not entirely sure aside from the fact that she moved closer and has been seen with him on multiple occasions."

"So what, a friend? Colleague? Lover?" Elias asked. Marvin just spread his arms in a shrug, but before Elias could inform him of his annoyance, the man spoke up.

"Well, I'm not entirely sure, but there is something interesting in the girl's story. From what we got, around a year ago, she was just a normal student, with nothing much standing out. Her documentation at the university also showed no irregularities. But then, after a trip to Norway, she just dropped off the radar. Not only that, but a few other classmates also reported trouble, while one of the students was reported missing." Elias looked at Marvin with clear interest.

"Why wasn't that in the report?"

"Because it's nothing certain, and without clearances, we can't access any case files. We just have the police reports about the guy—Tom was his name, I believe—getting drunk in the forest and then going missing. His father died some time afterward—suicide." Now Elias frowned.

"Okay, so is it something? Is it nothing? Dropping out due to trauma isn't that unnatural. Maybe Tom and her were lovers."

"That's the issue," Marvin said with more and more irritation.

"We don't have anything concrete, just circumstances. The others from that trip just said the two didn't like each other, but I'm not sure we can trust college kids and their gossip. Ophelia's family is also an issue. Father's a megachurch pastor. The mother's a… well, I'm not sure, actually. Scammer? She lives off her husband's money. We reached out to her, and she actually said her daughter was a witch and a devil's child who surely ran away to worship demons.

But once again, her information is not trustworthy considering her background. Same thing with the kid who went missing. He disappears, and then his father can't take the grief and kills himself. But guess what. A few more people also disappeared or got killed at a similar time. A few goons, all possibly tied to said father. Once again, nothing concrete, just a lot of hearsay and probabilities. Probabilities we need more clearances to check." Marvin ended his short speech, looking into Elias's eyes.

The SID director smiled at the man.

"You see. You don't need all the technological bullshit. You're doing great."

"If I had access to the travel logs, I might even tie our mage to Norway. Maybe they have something in common there," Marvin suggested.

"Hmm." Elias thought about that proposal.

"Fine," he finally relented.

"Hold up on the travel data, but I'll get you access to everything related to the missing kid and his family. Also, follow up with the mother and father angle. See if there is anything devil-related there. Let's assume Norway was our breakthrough point and go from there. Try to find an in with the girl. I'll try to ask our other mage contact about them. Maybe he'll recognize the names." Marvin was about to agree, but a message caught his attention.

He looked at the screen and knitted his brows in clear worry, only to relax a second later.

"You might have to delegate that to someone else. I think our mage is coming back," he finally informed Elias.

"You didn't look very happy about it."

"No." Marvin shook his head, putting on an awkward smile.

"Just with all that talk of divination and secrecy, I kinda thought he would send me a transcript of your conversation or something."

"Heh." Elias gave a short laugh, though it hid a sliver of nervousness.

"Well, what was it?"

"He's asking about tunnels and dig sites near the recent crime scene."

"Get it, then. I'll delegate the task. And you"—he turned to Dwayne—"please help us with the pitch we'll use. We need to hook him properly, somehow."

"I'm already working on something, don't worry," Dwayne agreed.