Past Life Hero, Chapter 30

Max reflected that even with all the strange social situations he'd been in over two lifetimes, this was still definitely one of the most notable. He was currently sitting on his bed, facing the ghost girl, Lavinia, as she sat in his chair.

He had not moved his desk chair to where it currently rested on the floor facing him. Instead, Lavinia had frowned for a solid fifteen seconds, gestured and the chair had moved itself.

Max eyed Lavinia and said, "So I know that of all the spirit types out there, you've got to be a spectral spirit.  I think." His voice trailed off and he said, "What exactly are you anyway? I thought that ghosts couldn't be talked to like this. Like ghost-ghosts were either mindless or basically just recordings.  But you were a Summoner, right?"

"Well that's a rude question," said Lavinia.

"I'm sorry. I guess.”  He met the apparition’s eyes.  “But it's also a good one."

"Well, I suppose it is." Lavinia gave him a lopsided smile. "Okay fine. There's no real easy way to explain this without telling you my life story I guess. So here goes.

"I was once a student at this Summoner Academy approximately three hundred years ago. Actually a bit more than that, I think. Maybe? I've stopped keeping very good track of time. When I first came here, my world had already stabilized after the inter-dimensional attack by monsters through portals.

“Every Besieged World, which is the official name for them, gets the opportunities at different intervals for more Chosen to receive a new Path and get training at a Quartet. Sometimes it's fifty years, sometimes it's a hundred years. It depends on the world.  I am not an expert. But on my world it was every fifty years. So I grew up in my home world with portals being a constant threat. I was very excited to receive a Path. My Calling came after I’d killed a monster half by chance.  And when I first came to Summoner Academy on this quartet, I was thrilled."

She paused.  "However, like many other students, my motivation fell sharply after I heard how weak Summoners were over and over and over…and over again. Constantly.  But unlike them, I couldn't just accept it.  They got depressed, I got angry.  Because at the end of the day, the powers that Summoners have, whether we're movers or screamers or solids, it seemed like abilities that theoretically should actually be crushing on a battlefield if somebody could use them properly.

“It never made sense to me why with our basic abilities, Summoners were so weak. For instance, Necromancers are considered one of the most powerful and feared Paths in the entire universe. And from my perspective, what Summoners could do was better than Necromancers’ power set. After all, Necromancers need dead bodies as raw materials, they need to enslave souls, or they need to capture Revenants. Meanwhile, us Summoners could basically just make friends with spirits and show up to a battlefield with an army in tow that we can manifest out of nowhere.  Depending on our spirits we have contracts with, it might not even cost us focus or stamina.  Using our abilities can be free!"

Lavinia crossed her arms and said, "It was frustrating that whenever I brought the subject up, other students would just say I should just accept it. ‘It is how it is.’ Nobody even questioned it!  Well, I've never been the type of girl who can just accept nonsense like that.

"So I started researching.  Research for years. I got into places I probably shouldn't have and found books I probably shouldn't have read. But you know what I found out?" Max mutely shook his head and Lavinia continued, "Summoners were not always weak. In fact, a long time ago, we were considered one of the strongest paths. The bottleneck for us has always been contracting with spirits.  In the past, it was far easier.  But when I tried to show anybody my research, when I tried to show some people what I'd found, all of my materials disappeared." She gritted her teeth and snarled at the memory.

"See, that was one of my mistakes at the time. I thought that all of the Summoner professors would be on my side. It would make sense that a professor at the academy would be interested in the history of our Path, right?  Especially if we have so much more potential.

“What I didn't understand at the time was that some professors really enjoy staying in the Quadrant and effectively being immortal all while staying safe and enjoying creature comforts. And those creature comforts come at a price, you see. And that price for some is servitude within the status quo."

She snarled in disgust and said, "One of the greatest disappointments in my life was finding out that even in the Quartets, these holy training places with ancient academies, money still motivates people to fuck over their fellows.

"So, I had two choices at that point. I could try to meekly toe the line, get done with my education, and go back to my world.  If I did that, I would be treated somewhat decently just for passing Summoner Academy, for graduating from an academy in one of the Quartets.  If I did that, I could maybe learn to be a Whip Sorceress on my world.  That was one option.  Or–" she said, and tapped her finger in midair, "I could try to rediscover more of the past and keep meddling in things that I probably shouldn't have. You can probably guess which path I took."

Max nodded and said, "So what did you do?"

"Well, I began doing secret research. I pretended to give up, but I started searching for how to reclaim some of that power that Summoners wielded in the past.” She grimaced. “It didn’t work out well.  See, instead of actually getting to accomplish anything, I began getting murdered over and over and over again. And in the Quartet, if you die or are murdered before you can get any more growth, it takes longer to come back to life, to regenerate.”

“Wow.”  Max knew about the penalty for dying too many times, which he understood to probably exist to discourage students from taking dying too lightly.  But it also meant the weak could be more easily bullied.  Like what Regal had tried to do to him, forcing him to commit suicide if he’d won their first duel.  Thinking of Regal gave Max a flash of intense anger and he shoved it to the side for the time being. He focused on Lavinia’s story.

She nodded.  “‘Wow’ indeed. There was a silent and brutal campaign waged against me. I tried to appeal to authority in the Summoner Academy and even in the greater Quartet. It didn’t help.  The helpful, honest professors, the ones who cared…whenever they tried to help or even seemed to take me seriously, only a day or two later, they would seem terrified.  Somebody else got to them. Eventually, I was all alone. Students even knew to stay away from me."

Lavinia took a deep breath that she couldn't possibly actually need and said, "The last straw for me was when I created a machine to try reaching higher level spirits than anybody else at the time. I was getting so close to completing the device when one day, after being called away on business that I could not refuse, I came back to my entire workshop destroyed.  Everything was ruined, stolen, gone." She shook her head.

"What's more, I had been gone from class for so much over six years, and all my allies had been scared into silence or inaction, so I had no real hope of even graduating.  I was looking at the very real possibility that in less than a year, I was going to be forced out of the Quartet, back to my real body without the status of a Quartet academy graduate back home, and with unfinished business here. On top of that, I stewed about it and realized that there wasn't really much waiting for me on my world. I didn't really have anybody in particular waiting for me. My family had fallen to misfortune. So…it was just me. Even the few people in this Quartet from my world stayed far away from me.  I was socially poisoned.  And more importantly, I've always had a stubborn streak that just wouldn't go away.  I couldn't stand the fact that these bastards were going to win!  The fact I didn’t know who they were made it worse!

"Did you ever figure out who it was that was conspiring to kill you over and over?" asked Max.

"More or less," said Lavinia, "but only afterwards. Just pay attention. I'll get to that."

"Fair enough.”.

She made an unnecessary cough.  "So, over the next few months, before my seven years were up in the Summoner Academy, I figured out something kind of groundbreaking. Something new.  Not very humble to put it this way, but I think it’s appropriate.”  She seemed expectant, but Max didn’t say anything.  With a flash of disappointment, the ghost asked, ”Do you know what happens if you are here for seven years and don’t graduate?”

“Sort of.  Not really.  I just know we go home.”

“At the end of our seven years, our soul and everything that we are other than most of the physical is basically cut loose from this place and then delivered back to our original bodies. Our original bodies are more or less held in limbo before during this time. So, I theorized that if I could block my soul from leaving the quartet, I could disengage myself from the Quartet’s system and wouldn’t be forced to go back to my home world.  I believed that I would effectively end up staying here for another seven years.  If it worked, I could be like the professors–staying here and never aging."

She gestured at herself and said, "As you can see, it sort of worked and sort of didn't. My spell preparations and execution succeeded in keeping me in the Quartet. But instead of getting a new body, I became a spirit. I'm more than a ghost. But I also have my soul.  My existence is pretty strange, one of a kind.  But to be honest, that isn’t as uncommon as you’d think with spirits.  Anyway, I’m still here, but…much less so.  I’m definitely not in a state to make any meaningful change in the physical world anymore."

"You just moved that chair," said Max.

"Yeah, and that took full concentration and most of my power to do.  Although I’ll admit it’s convenient sometimes that this is a Summoner Academy. If people here see something move by itself once in a while, or hear weird noises, most won’t care.  I’m not the only spirit floating around this place after all, not hardly.

“But I made myself this way in the first place because of unfinished business.  As a spirit, in order to do more, I need to either be a mortal myself or be contracted to one. There are some perks, though.  I don’t need to sleep for one, although rest can be nice.  Most spirits like rest. Anyway, since I am a ghost now or not-ghost, whatever barriers that stopped me when I was living don’t faze me anymore. I have been floating around, filling in the gaps I had in my knowledge when I was alive.  But after that was done, I wasn’t sure what to do next.  I’ve been bored out my mind for decades, centuries, with one more thing to do. Just searching for– Never mind.  Anyway, in all this time, I have learned a lot."

She leaned her head back and looked at the ceiling. "Don't get me wrong. This has definitely been an interesting existence. But sometimes I have to admit I wish I'd just gone back to Albion."

"Albion?" asked Max, surprised.

"I'm from Albion.

“I've heard of Albion before."

"Really?" asked Lavinia, an eyebrow raised. "Did you meet another Summoner student from there or something?"

"Not really," said Max, thinking fast. "More like I've read about it, I guess. Or I know about it. But I'm curious about something then. If you are from Albion–"

"Wait a second," said Lavinia. "It might not be the same Albion. After all, there are thousands or even millions of worlds out there. I’m talking about the world with…” She scrunched up her face.  “Uh, the Emberwyle continent.”

Now that’s a name I have not heard in a long time, thought Max.  Images of a rocky and inhospitable place that several stubborn civilizations still called “home” ran through his mind.  “I think that’s the one,” he said.  He took a gamble.  "I'm talking about the Albion where Chasa de Milo, the Hero, made a name for himself some time ago."

"The Hero," said Lavinia. She gave a half smile.  "Haven’t heard that name in a long time.  I guess you are thinking of the same world. Trasa de Melio, the legendary Hero of Albion. He died three hundred years ago. Oh, wait. Five hundred years ago, I guess. That's right. I've been floating around for two hundred years. So yes, he died about five hundred years ago, even though time between the Quartet and the real world can be a little iffy."

"Really?" asked Max. "The hero of Albion has been dead for five hundred years?"

"Yes, around that, I think.”  She paused.  “Don’t hold me to it. Why?"

Max just shook his head and said, "I didn't... I guess I didn't know that part."

So I reincarnated almost five hundred years after being murdered.  On a different world.  And apparently, Albion has, if it still exists, possibly has been enduring these…monster portals, and had been a ‘Besieged World” for over three hundred years now. Wow.

Lavinia didn’t know it, but now Max had a better idea of why he’d been able to see and interact with Lavinia without even opening his third eye. There were a lot of spirits in Summoner Academy, but as he understood it, the odds of just running into one like this, much less such a unique one, was low.  It was even less likely to be able to communicate so easily.  But on top of whatever other metaphysical resonances they might share, Lavinia was originally from the same world as Max.

If he hadn’t already been sitting he would have needed to take a seat.