The Infirmary

"This is a rare oversight on your part," a soft-spoken voice you know you have heard before is saying to someone that is not you, "Both your parts, actually. The two of you are normally so meticulous in having the proper paperwork in place."

That is the first thing you hear as consciousness returns to you, your eyes slowly opening to see that you are on a bed in the school's infirmary. You look under the thin white sheet to see you are still dressed in the clothes you passed out in and, looking out the nearby window, the dull red light filtering in indicates it is now dawn. That must mean you were only asleep for a few hours, as if this were the dawn of a later day in the week you would probably be in a more dedicated medical facility... or at least in a medical gown.

You see the outline of the teacher and the administrator standing on the other side of the privacy curtain

"I apologize, Headmaster Hallgrave," you hear Professor Zizana say to the owner of the softer voice, "I had presumed that Professor Aspecta had submitted the permission slip after I had handed it to her to undersign but she placed it in my mailbox instead, so I can only hand it in now."

"Well it is properly filled out, and you did manage to oversee the situation to prevent any... difficulties," you hear Hallgrave respond with a sigh, "so I can let it drop this time. I will ask that you submit a report on what exactly went wrong and if we will need to further investigate Harmony and Victor's actions in this mess."

"I understand and you will have it by the end of the day."

You hear a half-hearted grunt as the outline of Hallgrave nods and then turns to leave. Once he is gone, Zizana turns towards the curtain and pulls it open, noting your conscious state with a nod of her head. "Awake, I see," she says, "there is a pitcher of water and a glass on the table to your left if you need it."

"What... happened?" you croak as you slowly become aware of how dry your throat is, grabbing the pitcher to fill the glass and take a long drink of the cool water.

"After an extended magical duel, fighting off lust magics, and then the expenditure of excessive fluids at the end, you understandably passed out from fatigue once the excitement wore off. You are lucky Harker is a fast one. She managed to make it to you before you hit your head."

"I felt that," you reply once you finish your cup and then clarify, "the lust magics. That... wasn't supposed to happen."

"No," Zizana replies, stepping closer to the bedside and pulling the curtain closed, "under normal circumstances you would not have been able to leave the circle until you bedded her but there would have been no forceful compulsion. But in this case, there was a slight... error in understanding. You are also quite lucky your other friend, Belmond, noticed it in time for us to act."

The elf looks at you in an appraising manner and adds, "Such an interesting cabal you're gathering around yourself."

Deciding to ignore that comment for now, you instead ask, "So what was the 'error'?"

"Do you remember the words Victor spoke to explain the price Harmony was willing to pay if she lost the duel?"

Your brow furrows for a moment as you try to think. "I think the words he used," you finally answer, your words slow, "were 'intimate conjugation'?"

"Correct," Zizana replies with a nod, "Kyrie is one who tends to try and add a level of grandeur to his actions, so I thought he was merely being overly dramatic in his word choice. Yet that word choice was, in truth, reflecting the translation of the less common runes they were using for their part of the ceremony."

You bite your lower lip, the exact wording Harmony was trying to seduce you with coming back to you. "So does what the rune they said was 'intimate conjugation' actually mean 'get pregnant'?"

"Literally, it speaks of 'claiming the womb'," Zizana explains, "but given that in its original dialect, it was a euphemism for sex in general, they may not have realized--"

She stops suddenly, shaking her head. "But that kind of explanation is for Runic Studies. The short of it is, Kyrie claims he only created the rune as Ashcroft explicitly directed him to and Ashcroft has not been in an emotional state conductive to answering such questions, so we are giving her time to recover. So for now, I must ask if you believe there is any reason they might want to conspire to purposefully cause Ashcroft to become pregnant or if it truly was an accident."

A frown crosses your lips as you think back on that terrified look on Harmony's face before she ran away... and that dream of hers you walked in on... and that psionic encounter.

But is this information you should be sharing? Maybe she just has some weird fetishes that are unreleated to the situation and telling this to a teacher would just be yet another needless embarrassment she probably does not deserve.

Then again, if this IS some kind of a weird conspiracy to get your baby batter, maybe you should have someone in charge looking into it.