For a few moments, Veileena Cal was silent. The disparate proposals did little to sway her(though seeing that rude knight do her bidding would undeniably be satisfying). Only the fact that they knew exactly what the item in question was managed to shake her. After a few moments of silence, she stepped out from behind Haelstadt once more, folding her arms and averting her eyes, a frown on her face.

"Hmph," she huffed, "Harassing me over this... I guess you have good reason..."

Fanilly was silent. Was the young Noble girl relenting in her refusal to disclose what she had been doing?

"... I hired the mercenaries to retrieve the shard because those [i]idiots[/i] at the Mage College couldn't look past their books to realize how stupid they were being!" Veileena declared, her gaze raising back up, her pigtails bouncing as she looked upwards. "Hiding something like that because they thought it was too dangerous? Fine, but why would they think that it was a good idea not to let anyone know in case it was stolen?! A Shard of Angroron isn't something you just shut up about!"

She trembled for a few moments in frustration.

"... There's something bad going on. I've been using some contacts to try and figure out what," she continued, seemingly having calmed herself.

It wasn't exactly as if Fanilly wasn't aware of Veileena's public desires to discover what happened to her older sister. She had promised large sums of money to anyone who could help her discover the truth, though as of yet no-one had been able to find any information to resolve the matter. So hearing that Veileena had been paying people for information wasn't exactly surprising.

"Someone has been steadily weakening some of the magical defenses around the College, especially in the prohibited areas in the lower levels," she continued, "I'm sure Sir Tiral knows what areas I'm talking about, unless he's much more of an idiot then he looks."

Veileena jerked her head towards the mage knight.

"I'd already been worried about what this meant," Veileena added, "And it isn't as if I wasn't trying to research what could be going on. So when one of my contacts said he'd found someone looking for a black shard near the Mage College, what do you think I thought? I'm not some idiot villain looking to take something evil for my own."

She let out another huff.

"But before I could try and arrange a meeting with the College to tell them this, there was an attempted assassination on Princess Eliabelle and the shard disappeared that same night. So I hired the Shark to cut off the thieves and try and get it back, but when something is that evil I didn't want to take any chances, so I went myself to try and catch them if they had already fled."

Veileena paused for a moment.

"And [i]then[/i] these stupid bandits attacked me! My plan this whole time was to take that shard and keep anyone else from getting at it, but of course these [i]idiots[/i] show up. ... And now I can't imagine any of you will believe me, will you? No, of course not, the daughter of that bastard and all..."

She huffed again.

Fanilly took a deep breath. She wasn't sure what to make of this. The idea that Veileena, someone who had made it quite obvious that she was on the lookout for any kind of unusual information, had learned of something going on at the college wasn't entirely unlikely... but why hadn't the college told anyone about this? Was it because of the nature of the item that had been stolen? Did they fear that they would be presumed to have ill will for keeping it around? From what she understood, the shards of Angroron could not be destroyed by anything less then the divine.