Welcome to Gaia! ::

Verin grinned. "Oh, there's more to my story all right. I had to keep myself busy while I wasn't in school after all...I taught myself all the magic I know. I came upon new spells by experimenting, but the experiments were often costly. I've got the scars to prove it. I trained alone, and at the time I didn't know Orthae had been excelling in White Magic. I had run-ins with creatures that would put all the ones around Ria to shame. I occasionally tried combining spells to see the effect. A lot backfired, some were successful. I returned home every now and then." Verin looked away toward the machine that was still fixing their food. In a sort of disembodied voice, he kept going. "One day, when I was at home...I found one of my father's old spellbooks. It was covered in dust and cobwebs, and the pages were yellow with age. It was filled with ancient doomsday spells that could cause some serious damage and some that could even bring about an actual apocalypse. I was writing them down...but I only managed to copy three before mom walked in and took the book from me. I hid the paper before she saw it, and I spent the next year perfecting the spells. I found out that two of them would drain almost all of my energy to cast, required an incantation, and were incredibly powerful. I tried the third one one day, but I found out the hard way that when I was only two-thirds of the way through the incantation and I had already drained most of my energy like with the first two. I stopped the incantation; I knew that if I finished it, the energy drainage would kill me. The ancient spells are famous, and feared by many, the names may sound familiar to you..." Verin looked back at the girls. "I learned how to use Meteor..." Orthae's eyes widened, recognizing one of the many forbidden spells. "...Flare..." Orthae had a bit of a worried look on his face; he had never known his brother was capable of such terrible power. "...and Giga Flare. They're three of the most ancient black magic spells, some of the first ever created..." Orthae coughed. "Verin, are you serious? You learned those spells? You know as well as I do that father told us they were forbidden and never to be performed since the history of their making!" Verin looked over at his brother, his arms crossed on the table. "Relax. They're my last resort options. I swore to myself that I would never use them unless the need arose. And so far...it hasn't."

Sakura and Raine listened to Verin's story intently. Sakura had never really heard of the spells he was talking about, however something to her that they were more dangerous than he was leading them to believe. She planned to later perhaps do some research on these dangerous spells, just to see what kinds of destruction they could have. Raine motioned for the others to look and pointed out that they're food was on its way. She smiled, it had sure taken them long enough to make they're entire meal up. Long enough that both Sakura's and Raine's stomachs were grumbling and begging for food.

Shiori looked up again as she found herself in the dining hall now. "We're not going to the training hall?" she asked, tilting her head back so she could see Arashi's face. She blinked curiously a couple times until she caught the scent of food and turned to look around. "It... smells good," she said, sounding slightly surprised as her head tilted slightly, looking at the machine where they placed their orders. She hadn't eaten in quite a while, since she'd walked the distance to get here and had run out of the supplies she'd brought for the trip. She'd actually been too eager to explore the campus to think to get something to eat. So, she couldn't really complain this was where they ended up either, though she was still curious as to why he'd changed his mind.