Since everything around was within Eva’s domain, she had control over it all. A simple thought restored the destroyed portions of the buildings back to their working state. Shattered glass was whisked away, turned into the sand of her beach. Which then formed back into smooth panes of glass to fill the vacant holes where windows had once been. Brickwork mended itself much the same way. Even the mildly damaged ovens inside the pizza place had all been fixed up.
Her fixing everything didn’t make the people come back, however. Zoe had said that most of the city had been evacuated entirely when the obelisk lit up with only a handful holding out and weathering the metaphorical storm.
“What’s going to happen to Brakket?”
“The academy or the city?” Zoe asked as she walked a step behind Eva.
They weren’t really walking anywhere in particular. There was nowhere to go aside from around the sandy dunes that made up her domain. Eva had considered turning it all into asphalt and cement to match the street and the sidewalk, but found she liked knowing exactly where her domain ended. Had she still had Arachne’s legs and hands, she probably would have done so in an instant. Sand was coarse and rough. It had a strange property where it managed to get in all the nooks and crannies of anything it touched which tended to cause an unpleasant sensation everywhere.
So long as she kept her current limbs solid, sand didn’t bother her much anymore.
“Both,” Eva eventually said.
“Not sure about either in the long term. For now, Anderson made a deal with Nod Complex. They will house and instruct Brakket’s displaced students for the remainder of the year. The remainder of the tournament will be held out in the Nevada desert near their school.”
“That’s still continuing? Don’t you need to be down there to commentate or whatever your job was?”
Zoe gave a wan smile behind Eva’s back. “I’ve been replaced. With Nod being the new hosts, they wanted one of their own people doing the commentating. Likely for the same reason Anderson wanted the tournament and mundane news networks around Brakket in the first place; publicity and money.
“As for the tournament itself, it is still going, though enthusiasm for it has drastically dropped off since the ‘terrorist attack’ on Brakket Academy.”
Eva blinked. Stopping her aimless wandering, she turned to face Zoe. “The what?”
“Brakket Academy’s official position and statements on the New Year’s events are that they were attacks carried out by degenerates and isolationists, designed to drive a wedge between mundane and magical communities. Everything in the sky was an illusion and the monsters were just that, monsters. Released to inspire terror.”
Scratching at her head, Eva lifted an eyebrow. “He knows what actually happened?”
“Wayne and I told him mostly everything.”
“Huh. If I were Anderson and I wanted good publicity, I would have claimed that Brakket Academy, its students and professors, defused a potentially world ending threat.”
Eva sank down into a seat that appeared beneath her, gesturing for Zoe to join her in her own seat. Teacups and a pot of tea molded themselves out of sand on a table between them. A good host offered refreshments, right? And she was technically a host.
Zoe seemed to mull over her thoughts while partaking of the tea, not responding to Eva right away. Eventually, she set her teacup down on the table and folded her hands in her lap. “I think it was a bigger picture situation. Brakket Academy may have received some praise and prestige, but it would have introduced the concept of literal apocalypses into the minds of mundanes who had only just become fully aware of the magical world.”
“He was concerned about panic.”
“Indeed. We spoke afterwards. While I believe it is unlikely, an extreme he mentioned was that mundanes would attempt to completely eradicate magic through killing or destroying magical people, creatures, and items in the hopes that if there was no magic, there wouldn’t be any world-ending situations.”
“A flawed reasoning,” Eva said immediately. “As soon as mundanes tried any offensive action against mages, everyone would go into hiding. It would be quite literally impossible to kill everyone. That’s not even going into the fact that other planes of existence exist and they would have no access to them. The whole spat between Void and Life would have happened regardless of whether mortals knew of their existence or not.”
“You know that and I know that, but frightened people are far harder to convince. Already people are using the incident here to stir up fear mongering and to rally support for actions against mages; mandatory registration, a cataloging of all known magical creatures, restricted sales of wands and other foci, and so on and so forth. That’s not even mentioning more violent actions. There haven’t been any large incidents yet, but…” She shook her head with a long sigh. “I have a feeling that it is only a matter of time.”
