Ragna grunted and leaned back in his chair, closing his burning eyes with a grunt and several muttered curses. Put simply, the paperwork had been, as expected, extremely boring and extremely frustrating, but somehow he was the only one that was actually fatigued by it; Shoukatsuryou and Houtou, despite their own poorly-hidden exhaustion, were still making steady progress. "It's been an hour, girls," he said aloud, gradually allowing himself to sit forward again. "You wanna take a break and listen to me tell some stories or what?"
Shoukatsuryou immediately put down the sheaf of papers she had in her hand and yawned a little bit, then shook her head and nodded. Her smile lit up her face, and Ragna was again reminded of Saya so much that his heart almost began to hurt. "Of course, Lord Ragna!"
Houtou's response was quieter, as all she did was put down her papers and look up at Ragna, but her eyes seemed to twinkle in anticipation as she blushed.
Ragna sighed, then ran a hand through his hair and put his elbows onto his desk, hiding his mouth behind clasped hands. Better skip all the shit about Ars Magus and Armaguses and shit for now. That'll just confuse the hell out of them. "I guess I'll explain what I mentioned earlier, then. You see, back in… Heaven, we had a problem with a monster called the Black Beast. It just sprung up out of nowhere one day and started to just destroy everything it saw. It got rid of a lot of big cities and countries before it suddenly stopped for a year. While it was stopped, six people stood up and helped us get ready to fight the Beast when it woke back up. The preparations worked, and we beat the Beast, but by then we were basically all fucked. And the worst part is that the Beast spread seithr all over the goddamn place."
Shoukatsuryou frowned at the slight profanity, then cocked her head as her expression went from distaste to confusion. "What's… seithr?"
Ragna waved his right hand around in the air a few times. It seemed like an idle action, but mentioning seithr made him think of his arm. "It's an odorless invisible… gas, I think. It's like the air around you, but when you breathe in a lot of it, it's really bad for your body. But, yeah, like I was saying, the Beast just put that shit all over the place. We had to start building cities in the mountains and the highlands to get away from it. Eventually we were able to start using it as… fuel, I guess you could say, for things like..." He let out another sigh. This was going to sound ridiculous, but it was the only example he could think of. "... moving flying boats, or really big plows, or stuff like that."
Houtou gasped slightly and stared at Ragna like she'd been starstruck. "They have flying ships in Heaven?"
Shoukatsuryou was giving him the stink-eye, but Ragna nodded anyway, knowing that he sounded like a complete moron. "Yeah. Otherwise you have to walk through the highlands or even the lowlands, and there's lots of seithr there. Most people would get sick in a couple of hours and probably die not long after that. I've done it a few times, and it really sucks."
"But why couldn't you use any of the flying ships?" Houtou asked. "If that's the safe way to do it, why would you walk through the mountains?"
Of course you'd ask that, Ragna thought, stifling a curse. "I… kind of had a bad reputation around a lot of the cities. Did some shit that pissed off the Library. If I'd tried to get on a ship I would have had soldiers hunting me down as soon as they realized who I was."
This time, both Shoukatsuryou and Houtou gave him identical confused looks. "The Library?"
Ragna fell quiet for a few moments. When he started talking again, his face darkened, and for a moment Shoukatsuryou and Houtou recognized the narrow-eyed scowl as the face he put on when he was in the middle of a fight. Yet, something about this seemed much darker than the general irritation he felt with the Turbans. "The government for all of Heaven, basically—a bunch of egotistical, stuffed-up assholes. Their real name is the Novis Orbis Librarium—we call it the NOL or the Library for short. After the Black Beast was killed, the Library took over." His eyes became slightly unfocused, as if he were staring hatefully at something beyond the castle walls. "Suffice it to say that they did some bad shit to me and mine back in the day, and were getting up to some really terrible shit before I came here. So… I paid them back a little bit."
The dark tone in his voice was enough to make the room feel uncomfortably cold despite the sunlight coming in and bouncing off of the walls. Both Shoukatsuryou and Houtou drew back slightly from Ragna as his white eyebrows drew closer together and his gloves creaked ominously; his hands were clenched so tightly that the knuckles were about to pop. Then, as if he was waking up from a dream, Ragna blinked once or twice, and actually refocused his eyes on the girls and not the wall behind them.
"Sorry," he said. Somehow, his voice sounded flatter, less lively than it normally did. He reached out to the papers he'd been looking over before the break. "I think that's enough for now. I kind of killed the mood."
"No, Lord Ragna, it's alright," Shoukatsuryou said softly. If it hurt you that badly, I want to know what they did. "Please, continue."
Ragna lifted his head up from analyzing the papers and looked directly at Shoukatsuryou. His eyes narrowed just a little bit, and the corners of his mouth pulled downward even more. "Shuri. Drop it."
Shoukatsuryou felt her lip tremble a little bit, but she didn't have it in her to press him again. Houtou had lowered her head and didn't appear to be paying attention at all. "Very well, Lord Ragna," she replied. "Let me know when you've finished with that set of trade agreements."
Ragna nodded, then directed his attention down to the papers again. Houtou looked over to Shoukatsuryou, and saw that the young blonde's eyes were watering as if she wanted to cry. Quietly, she reached out and rubbed the back of Shoukatsuryou's hand gently; when Shoukatsuryou looked up at Houtou, she saw that Houtou was smiling very softly. Despite how she felt at the moment, Shoukatsuryou returned the smile and the nod, then turned her attention back to the papers that she'd put down.
For now, I'll just leave it alone, Shoukatsuryou thought, grabbing the papers and shuffling them against her thigh. But someday… I hope Lord Ragna will explain it. She recalled the dark, hateful look on his face after he'd mentioned that "Novus Orbus Librarium", and studied his stern face intently as he muttered something under his breath and rubbed at his eyes.
What did they do to him that gives him a reason to hate them so much?