The Cost of Negligence

A pair of moans was the first thing John heard when Moira opened the door, and so began the dashing of part of his hope. With his experience with Wentworth still heavy on his mind, he now faced another horrible, erotic sight: two Academy juniors, a blonde, sharp-chinned fellow and a chubby brunette with glasses that reminded John of Lily.

Harry Ulman
Level 3 Student
HP: 30/35
A student at Ashcroft Academy, he didn't have much direction in life until recently, where he decided he'd do anything to keep having sex.
Status Effect: Greater Fae Dust x4 (14/14/13/13 minutes remaining), Slavishly horny (twenty hearts)

Lisa Vasquez
Level 6 Mathematician
HP: 31/50
A scholarship student at Ashcroft Academy with dreams of becoming a physicist, but lately she'll be happy as long as she can keep having sex.
Status Effect: Greater Fae Dust x3 (10/9/9 minutes remaining), Slavishly horny (20 hearts), Menstruating (2 days remaining)

Harry's pants were nowhere to be seen, either on him or in the hall. His jacket was spotted with blotches of spunk from one gender or another, and his face glistened and his hair was matted with sexual fluids and sweat in equal measure. His every thrust seemed to hurt him as he winced; he moaned and continued bashing his cock into his victim anyways, holding her wrists to keep her against him while she was bent over. His "victim", meanwhile, bore a similar face of vexing ecstasy with pain. Blood, from her period and from lacerations, trickled down her thighs in a mixed river of her cum and those of six men she met in the last half-hour or so, and her fat udders jolted to and fro violently with every vicious pound Harry gave her. She moaned as she came again, and Harry joined her, flushing yet more rival seed out of her menstruating pocket.

They were there, on the side of the hall and occasionally leaning on the wall for support as they fucked. Moira stared in horror, and swallowed hard as she contemplated how to diffuse the situation.

John had an entirely different worry. Greater fae dust? What? He pulled his inventory up again: the vacuum flask of tainted fairy dust was still there, and with its small percentile mark. It remained unchanged... But Fairy did. In fact, this is the first time she's refilled it as a greater... He didn't check the item description before using it on Sarah, or even pouring half its contents into the vat. Who ever checks a magical item's details once they've used it as long as he had? It even had the same name, for Christ's sake! Fairy transforming hadn't come with any new alarms about her effect, nor had it changed the item name. He pulled up the item description anyways: it wasn't like the interface to lie to him-

Vacuum flask of tainted fairy dust: demonic fairy excretions of all types are locked in this mundane vacuum flask. Causes **** sexual pleasure and arousal on contact. Target permanently gains +1 LIB once per minute with every dose. No effect on tainted fey.

A handful of words. Even if John had gotten glimpses of it, he might not have noticed the small change. A handful of words, and his meager nuisance had become...

He looked again at the ****, injurious fucking taking place in the hall. The dosage required must have been lowered as well, because there should have been little opportunity for even a full dose to make it to a single student. He looked again at the status effects and then called his phone out of his inventory to check the time. Lunch was nearly over. So if she's been getting +3 libido every minute... and he's been getting... +4... They moaned, in agony and rapture, as both recovered from their orgasms and kept going. A slew of text warnings rained down with Moira's name, and buried the small trail of them from both Vanessa and Tricia.

A crashing noise from behind them, and John and Moira both snapped their attention to the far end of the hall where Newberg, the young philosophy teacher, had just stumbled down the stairs with her clothes barely hanging onto her body. Her voice cracked as she tried to run away from the staircase, down which came a trio of boys with their hard cocks bouncing in the open air.

"No! Please, no more-!"

Moira was already rushing there when John followed, quickcasting his serpent's lunges as soon as he was in range. The strikes appeared behind two of the boys, rendering them **** with subdual damage. The teacher fell as she barely cleared the stairwell door, and the remaining student-turned-**** lunged down upon her to wrestle with her knees until John managed the last lunge to send him sprawling onto the teacher. Newberg simply laid there, prone and sobbing, unable to realize her attacker was ****.

No...

"Mrs. Newberg! It's alright, he can't hurt you," Moira pleaded with her, pulling the body off as she did.

This can't be happening...

Slowly, a wide-eyed John continued towards the scene, scanning the boys first. Each, in turn, had their four doses of dust. The teacher had none, yet cum and blood stained her thighs. Guilt mounted upon guilt, and John was left looking at his hands with wide, terrified eyes.

I did this...? His hands balled into fists. Who reads their old magical items? Something in him wanted to squirm away, to hide under a rock named "honest mistake", but there was no justifying it. He let himself go again... and now, the cost was...

Moira watched him from the corner of her eye as he fell to his knees and held his head, shaking it while muttering.

"We have to stop this..." They were the only intelligible words she caught from the despairing mage.

"We will, John," she whispered. With a kiss and a prayer, the teacher's wounds vanished, and the traumatized woman fainted away for a spell. When she woke, this memory would still torment her... at least, until the Order came to correct this. I pray we can...

John's breaths became labored as he rose again, and the knot in his chest threatened to burst. "None of this... was meant to..." His voice cracked as he marched down the stairs, and he didn't bother finishing his denial.

Moira understood it, just as she understood that the Order would not go easy on him for so gross an **** of common people. Her own guilt was brewing as she followed the mage down.

Five hours later...

"Bye, Mrs. Newberg!" The teacher nearly jumped from Tommy Banks' well-wishing, though she couldn't quite place why. She waved back at the young man who caused her such terror earlier in the day, and both continued on their way in a hall packed with students. Indeed, no one in the hall could remember why Mrs. Newberg was so nervous these days.

Confused sighs and exhaustion ran rampant through the Academy; a full fifth of them could barely recall the classes of the day, though they were each sure they attended them, and the other four-fifths could recall nothing out of the ordinary. Several of them had typed apologies for the prank calls and texts they had sent to people. The videos and pictures they had texted suddenly vanished from the phones of others, and the owners of those phones, confused and aroused, were being tracked by certain robed men and women even as the night drew closer.

In an inexplicable coincidence, every teacher had simultaneously assigned a "movie day" for the class. The entire student body was somehow subjected to Forrest Gump's first hour three or four times, depending on their schedules, and it would be a gaff that caused some stir among parents who thought the Academy was treating this Friday as a very expensive joke. Disciplinary hearings would be had by the principals for their faculty, but no one would be fired or even receive a warning. The entire incident would be a humorous memory, shared by the various couples that had all secretly fallen in love with one another on the same, idle, silly day.

It was as close to a cover as the Order could manage. The pairings had been too intense, and even with most of the damage reversed there still remained too powerful a memory for most of the direct victims. The relationships would be sexual, distracting, possibly life-ruining, but mundane. Some teachers would look more fondly on their students than they should; others would feel uneasy, but never understand why. Some would quit the profession, finding it too stressful. The damage was minimal, but the cost was extravagant: no less than nine mages were teleported to Springfield to help with the memory wiping for the greatest breach in this municipality's history. Local mages, some distinctly too rogue for the Order's taste, were called in to heal the wounded. John Newman, presented by Moira to her father as a healer, looked aged and ragged to the foreign mages who occasionally peeked into the makeshift triage that he worked. None questioned him further.

John did his best to heal the wounded, impartially and sullenly. Every moaning, overeager teen pricked his heart; every crying, trembling victim thereof ran it through. His basic heal spell and impressive mana reserves made him a fine candidate for the job, given that the Gorbachev couldn't risk being identified by this sudden influx of self-interested mages. As such, John had to confront the price of his negligence every minute, ushering a student towards the end of the triage for memory editing.

John healed many, many of his fellow students.

Moira had stayed and watched the Academy for a few minutes. The operation there had ended, but she stayed until she felt sure that John was not going to meet her outside. She had not gotten to visit him throughout the process; it was on her to cleanse the victims of the demonic taint, and on him to more efficiently close their wounds. She managed only a glimpse of him as he walked into the bathroom once the task was done. His gaze seemed sunken. He didn't cry, but his misery was palpable. She felt he had been punished enough. Surely, he would never dare do this again; she'd make him promise it regardless, once she had him alone.

But now her thoughts returned to the present: the meeting here in the Throne Room, the most inner-sanctum Springfield had for the Order. The opulent throne, the symbol of her Order, sat on the raised dais, glittering with pearls, sapphires and gold. It sat empty and, symbolically, eternally occupied. The walls, coated in alternating displays of old family tapestries, torch sconces, and shields, all glittered to her trained eyes with the magical wards woven into the coats of arms and carved into the backs of heaters, and the small army of elementals that might leap from their sconces should any evil attempt to breach this place. The round table, and its ornate chairs, made from wood enchanted to last a thousand years, was covered in books of hand-written inks and machine-studded braille, each belonging to one member or another of her father's retinue.

Lord Brighton stood in his "plain" business attire: a $3,000 suit that served as his most plain clothes for outings such as the one he just had to command. It was the cheapest clothes she had ever seen him wear. Also present and sitting at the far side of the table were three of the contracted mages, whose reports of probing the minds of the students revealed no suspicious characters entering, attending, or leaving the Academy. Sitting opposite of them: Cornelius Stolt and Lorelei Varnik, the gray-bearded Sage and blind Seer of the Brighton court, respectively. Cornelius huffed as he probed his books, trying to find some connection between the Outsiders and mass sexual rituals. His corpulent body made itself known as he sat stooped over his books, and his toolbelt of calipers, tweezers and other such implements glittered in the light of the room. Lorelei, a rail of a woman, was dressed in blue velvet wrapped about her in a layered dress, with silver thread embroidered in simple lines and squares. A blue silk blindfold of the same material covered her eyes, and she smiled and nodded towards the mages as they made their reports, discreetly letting her fingers tease the bumps of the book before her.

Between the two leading members of the Brighton coterie, on the edge of the table, laid the offending object, trapped in an anti-magic circle: the Eye of the Beholder, as John had identified it for Moira. Even now Cornelius struggled with it; Moira had kept that name to herself. She still felt hesitation at bringing up the rogue mage at all in this climate.

"In short, you've nothing to show except... mashed potatoes?" Lord Brighton's tone was far from whimsical.

"Y-Yes, my Lord," stuttered the older of the three, one Patrick Viker from somewhere in New Jersey, if memory served Moira. "The Academy kitchen employees had already washed the remnants down the drain, and none of them had seen anyone enter or leave, either. We've the samples from the trash, and-"

"And I've already studied the filth you dragged into this mansion," Cornelius spat suddenly. "Yes, mashed potatoes laced with a demonic essence of a potency to rival that of most recorded lust demons... Pah!" His cheeks jiggled as he made the noise. "Such a presence would not go ignored by our Warden, now would it?"

Lorelei smiled, but said nothing. Moira raised an eyebrow at the old sage.

Cornelius caught those familiar gestures, and stroked his beard as he reconsidered his position. "O-Of course... that goes on the presumption that... the demon arrived at the school physically." The three mages blinked at their senior. Cornelius cleared his throat. "Yes, of course, that would be patently absurd! The stuff must have been imported, then, in some form of warded container... and likely, along with this device," he muttered and, with an expandable steel wand, gently tapped on the inert talisman, "was meant to take part in some form of ritual."

Lord Brighton exhaled audibly, and the sage remained silent. "Have you three anything more to report?" Lord Brighton's words inspired hesitant shakes of three heads, and with a silent wave of his hand the three were dismissed.

Moira waited for the trio to leave before speaking up. "What of the Outsider taint of this ward? You've warned me before of those who would dare such materials-"

"Warned, yes," Lorelei almost whispered, "but that is not proof enough."

Lord Brighton paced the room as he pressed her. "Have you glimpsed a clue then, Lady Varnik? Some hundreds of young adults nearly had their lives changed or ruined forever, if not for our intervention. Some may still."

Lorelei gave her enigmatic smile once again. "You believe that should provide clarity."

"That should provide something! As it stands now, the Order has been humiliated: the Academy hosting our Warden came under a direct and perverse attack, one we failed to foresee or prevent."

"Such is what makes it difficult to scry, my Lord. Such interests that cross over the Academy, and cross again with the resident mages... but I know this sigil is not from within the Academy."

The present heads turned to the teary eye of the device. Cornelius spoke their suspicions aloud. "The Cabal, then."

"If the Cabal, then some foolish upstart therein," the Lord huffed. "Their elders would know better than to insult us like this... and this demands an answer."

"Yes... if the Cabal was responsible for the demonic essence." Moira grew tense as the Seer arrived at the heart of the matter.

The Sage coughed to clear his throat. "Yes... well, that would be quite the coincidence for them to install so obvious a device... in the same day as this mass attack, wouldn't it?"

Lord Brighton stroked his mustache as he stared off and beyond the wall before him. "Hardly impossible. Is that not so, Moira?" The Warden **** herself to relax as her father addressed her. "That John Newman boy... a young mage, but he is a summoner, as well. In fact, you even told us he can summon a demon as a ****. Is this creature capable of spreading such... influence?"

Moira opened her mouth to reply, but Lorelei cut her off. "It is, my Lord... as you know from the details of the Warden's report."

Moira swallowed hard. That's right... I did mention the effects of the little fiend's Thermos full of whatever that was... Moira had almost been caught in a lie; the Seer did nothing to indicate a desire to save face for the Warden.

Lord Brighton's mustache twitched with appreciation of it, regardless. "Tell me, Seer: the Warden has told us that John, like the Warden, had infiltrated a barrier when the crisis began to unfold." Moira hated it when her father described her by her title; it was how she knew she was already in trouble. "You cannot tell the origin of the essence... but what of Newman? Can you eliminate him as a suspect... as the Warden has apparently done? Can you vouch that he is not now a member of the Cabal... and as surely as the Warden seems to believe?"

Her father had all but demanded that the Sage prove Moira a liar, or at least a fool. But whatever the truth, Moira knew in her heart: John couldn't have been a Cabal member. No Cabal member would've acted as he did... right? Moira remained stone-faced, and awaited her punishment, whatever it was... and, if Lorelei answered as she had to, the **** sentence for the mage she dared to try and protect. Please, Lorelei... I know it's... I know it's not the right thing to do. But I could see it in him: he was devastated. He never intended this... surely not at the risk of the **** penalty, but especially not to hurt so many people. You know that execution will be what father will demand, so please... The Seer could not read Moira's mind, of course; but the Warden offered this prayer all the same.

The Seer spoke in a frank voice. "My Lord, I can only confirm that the Newman boy has no taint of the Outsider in him... and that he had spent many hours in that barrier; far more hours than the now-infamous side dish could have taken to mix. It stretches the imagination to find that he was responsible... and more, I can promise that no demon was in the Academy today to remotely perform the deed on his behalf." Lord Brighton's mustache swayed, as if he were washing his mouth with the answer. Lorelei continued. "As to the Cabal, well... the boy has only encountered the Cabal once, and the Cabal was one member less as a result. His membership would be rather tenuous, then, if built on wounding the Cabal."

The reminder of that battle, that now bound the Brightons to educate the mage, finally broke the man's suspicion. He gave a quiet sigh of defeat, and gave as warm a smile as he could provide to his daughter. "Of course... in my old age, it becomes more difficult to accept the wisdom of my retinue... or of my Warden, though my daughter she may be."

Moira nodded, unsure of how the Sage had come to this conclusion, and the meeting proceeded from there in a low buzz that Moira could barely follow: the call for reinforcements and resources, the hunt for the Cabal in Springfield, and the more active warding of the Academy. Not once was the witch at the Academy spoken of; not once did Moira dare bring her up, for fear that John would re-enter the conversation.

All the while, Moira wondered why the Seer misled the head of their home.