I'm surprised he can cast something this delicate, Emma mused, as she watched a thousand golden strings rise from the floor, winding around her again and again until they reached and sank into her helmet, one at a time. Wouldn't his bad luck get in the way?
[When he was a young and very foolish apprentice, Marcus visited Ireland and shared a very distasteful joke with one of the aes sídhe in disguise. Not bad enough to warrant death or worse, but he was looking at fifty years of servitude before his aunt called in a big favour back home. Long story short, Overmind bought out his contract, so that instead of fifty years of hard labour in the wilderness, Marcus was indentured for a hundred and fifty years in Scholomance. As part of that, she modified his curse so instead of causing genuine harm, it now only inconveniences him in petty ways. Not great, but still far better than the early grave he was staring at before. Despite the longer duration, his duties in the tower are mostly clerical work, and include built-in blocks of time off so he can still advance his own abilities. More like a military contract, with restricted rights only whilst on duty, compared to the prison sentence it was before.
Marcus has done well for himself in the decades since; his insider knowledge even helped him pass the first two sets of trials despite being fairly weak for a Magus of his age. That said, I doubt Marcus will ever become a Master; he simply doesn't have the temperament for it, in the end.]
Huh. He's had a rough time of it, hasn't he?
[He'll have a far worse time if he keeps poking at the System's mental wards. Tell him he's ten strings away from me sharing his browser history with his mother.]
Emma repeated her ancestor's warning aloud, making Marcus go very pale indeed as his casting sputtered to a halt.
"My deepest apologies, Lady Anathema," Marcus bowed fully at the waist. "Upon my name and my magic, it will not happen again."
[Good.]
"Mom never mentioned any of this to me," Emma pointed out, not particularly judgemental but wanting to make that clear for her examiner.
"Of course not, that's all old news anyway," Marcus shrugged. "Anyway, Elizabeth joined the Empire's internal affairs division after acclimating to magical society. Her power helped crack several longstanding conspiracies, seeing her promoted all the way to head of department in a mere twenty years, an unprecedented rise in a magical society that was both long-lived and generally entrenched in their ways. It was during one of the department's recruitment drives, disguised as a corporate event for mortal eyes that she met Noah-"
"I have no interest in listening to the details of my parents 'getting to know' each other."
Emma's tone didn't change in the slightest, but something in her warning made Marcus flinch all the same as he hastily cleared his throat.
"Right, sorry, moving on then. After you were born, the Knight family relocated to the countryside, feeling it was a better environment to raise children than the bustle of city life. You had an uneventful time in primary school, attending an all-girls school between the age of five and eleven; and it's towards the end of this period that the first blocked memory resides. I'll attempt to unlock it for you now; a word of warning though, whilst it shouldn't be painful, reviewing memories this way can be a bit disorienting the first few times."
"I'll deal with it," Emma replied firmly, now very curious as to what was so important, as to warrant memory modification on her preteen self.
"Alright, here we go," Marcus confirmed, pinching two fingers together and picking a single string, one seemingly selected at random that he gave just a faint little tug.
A wave of drowsiness swept through Emma, who was already fast asleep by the time her helmet collapsed against the headpiece of her armchair.