[Can’t Opt Out]

“You are a very comfortable bed,” Emilia noted, long after she had fallen out of her short nap, waking to find herself still cocooned in Hyr’s arms. Shamelessly, she’d chosen to stay there, warm and safe—Hyr really was too fucking comfortable.

The huff of a laugh ruffled her hair, which Hyr had begun to braid for her again at some point. Really, she should just sit down properly in front of the syn and let them have their way with her. With her hair. Definitely just with her hair.

“Am I?” they asked, something almost… teasing in their voice.

“Has no one told you before?”

“I do not make a habit of letting people use me as a bed.”

Well, wasn’t that interesting. Part of Emilia wanted to ask why she was being allowed the privilege, but that just seemed like too much—like asking for answers neither of them was ready to give or hear. Instead, she snuggled further into them while muttering that they really should have been training.

“Conrad has told me my mind needs a break,” the syn replied, returning to their idle braiding, nimble fingers gliding through her hair until Emilia was sure she was about to fall back asleep.

Unfortunately, as much as she fucking exhausted, she couldn’t succumb to sleep—they had to leave soon—and instead she contented herself to reading through the logs of what had been said between Sil and Conrad during her nap. The gist of it: they were both rather pissed at her dead ex… and Elijah, Sil actually asking Conrad why he hadn’t just killed Elijah when he’d first arrived.

Yeah, as much as the men weren’t outright saying they had already known each other, they clearly had—not surprising, given Sil had just as easily fallen into using his CierSuit and while he hadn’t been as outright about being a member of that secretive military unit as Conrad, they’d both been a part of it.

Strange, to come across two people who had been a member of that unit. Also, it explained that strange situation she’d come out of Sil’s Virtuosi Rig to, where she’d discovered her friend had gotten Conrad new food. Honestly, if Sil hadn’t been so intent on bullying her over how much time she’s spent within the Virtuosi System, she probably would have guessed they’d known each other back then.

“Hey, Conrad?” she called quietly, knowing the man was nearby simply from the feel of the energy tethering them together.

The Free Colonier hummed, and when Emilia looked over, he was lounging on a couch and reading a book. An actual fucking paperback book. Where had he even gotten that?

“How many people were there in your unit?” she asked, refusing to be distracted by the book. She could ask about that later. Right now, she wanted to figure out just how unlikely it was that she’d run into Conrad in the raid and then brought him here to meet up with a former teammate. Probably about as likely as her, V and Hetexia ending up in that raid together.

“Not a lot. A couple dozen, but we were only about fifteen by the end.”

“About?”

“About,” Conrad confirmed, shrugging and lifting his book back up as he squished further into the couch. The book in question appeared to be a romance novel from Byshire and featured a very cheesy looking cover with three only vaguely human looking figures entwined on a bed. Fascinating. Emilia wouldn’t have thought the guy would be into romance, let alone whatever that was.

“Their unit… is complicated,” Hyr commented, earning them a laugh from Conrad, along with a muttered, “You have no idea,” from Sil, who was standing in the doorway, supervising Beth, Pria and Payton.

While Payton hadn’t figured out his CierSuit with the telling quickness of Conrad or Sil, it was clear the man had more experience with willbrands than either of the girls. Rather than Sil continuing to try and teach them how to use their CierSuits, Payton had taken over. Having been mostly asleep and in a different room, Emilia wasn’t completely sure how that had happened, but she could guess the intention was to allow the three of them to bond a bit, not that either of Pria or Beth had shown anything but kindness and acceptance to Payton.

To any of her new friends, really.

It was… nice, for everyone to be so accepted. The worst that had happened was Sil had effectively kicked Samina out of his room when the girls had gone to organize their bags, which wasn’t exactly unexpected—her childhood friend could be a lot!

Emilia was just letting her eyes close again, intent to enjoy the warmth of the person under her as long as possible, when a message she had been waiting for skittered through her Censor.

[V:Fuck, Emilia. I’m sorry. I fell asleep.]

Normally, Emilia preferred messages to calling or meeting in virtual rooms, her distracted mind constantly getting caught up in thoughts or conversations with other people while she attempted to talk to someone through her mind. In this case, however, there was no way she couldn’t not call her friend and make sure he was really okay.

Scrambling up, she pressed her forehead to Hyr’s. “I’ll be back,” she promised, only realizing once she was scurrying out the door that doing that—both the forehead press and the promising to basically climb back into their lap when she came back—was probably weird. Given the look Sil was giving her when she glanced back, he definitely thought it was weird, his eyes flipping between her and Hyr before settling on Conrad who looked… concerned? Was that concern?

Emilia didn’t get a chance to contemplate it more, the door sliding shut and leaving in her in the blandly white hallway as her Censor angrily called V. Okay, calls couldn’t be angry per se, but the guy definitely knew her well enough to know that when she called it wasn’t something he could ignore.

[Call Connected with V] flashed over her vision, sending a strange wave of emotion through her. When she’d created the new hack for her Censor, Emilia had purposefully changed V’s name, letting his real name disappear into the back of her mind because until they physically met up, V was V. Who he would be after that… Well, that was something to think about another day, especially since Conrad’s searching on the blackaether had revealed that he generally went by V with everyone these days. Her former teammate might not even want to be called his birth name anymore, for all she knew.

“Emilia,” he said, the man’s soft voice floating through her mind as she leaned against the cool wall and let her eyes fall closed.

“V, you’re okay.”

There was a moment of hesitation where Emilia wondered if he either wasn’t okay—and seriously, they’d been back in the real world for almost ten hours, clearly her friend hadn’t been okay when he got back if he’d slept the whole time—or if he was just contemplating asking her not to call him V. Forget about him potentially not wanting her to use his birth name; something told her was the latter—that when they were in person, he would demand to hear her call his name… preferably while fucking. Calling him by his name while he was between her legs…

“Yeah, I’m okay. I just hadn’t properly slept in a while and passed out. Even your messages didn’t wake me.” Laughter flittered through the call, sad and still tinged with sleep. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to worry you,” he added, sounding not entirely convinced that she actually had been worried about him.

“I was very worried about you,” she assured him, rambling for a bit about all the plans she’d made up in her moments of panic about how to find him. Contacting The Black Knot, the government, Hail—she assumed V had a recorded address of some sort with them, in order to have physical rewards sent to him.

“I do,” V agreed, “but it isn’t my apartment. I just go pick up stuff there.”

“Hard man to find,” she noted, like they both hadn’t been avoiding being found for the last decade. He’d just done a much better job of it than she had, somehow. Probably, it had something to do with him being sensible enough to not accidentally rank in the top heroes—she’d looked at those records as well, searching for him. Only the top ten or so heroes were ever publicly named, their pictures and general locations lined up on promotional material for the next season. That had been part of how Helix had found her and why she’d let him spirit her off to Norvel. Honestly, since then, she’d assumed almost everyone knew where she was, but had just figured she’d run off if they randomly showed up on her doorstep.

They would have been right, at the time. Not so much the last few years—she just would have been annoyed at the invasion—and definitely not true now—she’d be more likely to pull them into her dorm room to catch up now.

There was another hesitation on V’s end before an address popped up in their messages.

“We’re still meeting up in a few months, yeah?” V asked, uncertainty lacing his voice. Clearly, he was just as conflicted about all this as she was.

“Yeah,” she agreed. It was still the right thing to do; no matter how badly her breakup with Elijah had gone, Emilia still didn’t want to be the type of person to immediately jump into a relationship with someone else. Plus, there was just so much going on inside her—feeling for different people, grief and guilt and the situation with the knotter distributor and Caro’s soul and the aethernet and Ri and—

There was just too much, and while V would definitely make for good stress relief, in the end, he would just make things more complicated, especially if Elijah got wind of it and Emilia really didn’t want to have to deal with more of his nonsense. Plus, she was a little petty. At the moment, Elijah was clearly in the wrong. The worst she’d done was make a bad joke. If she immediately started dating someone else, she’d lose her edge, and she really didn’t want to lose to his stupid face.

“Hey, do you know if the aethernet in raids is connected to the real-world one? I thought Helix was keeping it as a simulation,” she asked, after telling V about what he had missed after his heroic exit from the raid. Out of all the things on her list of things that needed doing, there were a few that V might be able to help with—that he might be interested in helping her with.

“I’m not sure. I mean, I noticed the aether in that raid felt weird, but you think it was actually connected to the real one? I know you guys theorized it might be possible, but didn’t think it was worth the time.”

“That, and we kinda figured it would be dangerous. Essentially, a real connection would cause raids—or the original training system—to leave micro tears, which could all add up.”

“The syn didn’t know?”

“Hyr doesn’t have enough experience with raids,” she replied, filing away the fact that V apparently believed in the synat’s abilities. “They said it felt the same as the real aether, but didn’t even think any synat had raided enough to know if it had always been that way. Maybe Wyren would know? I know they raid quite a bit.” Unfortunately, Wyren was one of the friends she had yet to hear back from about her raid rewards, so asking them would be… awkward, to say the least.

V made a considering noise before falling silent. They each let the silence stretch between them, just existing in the same space together. Emilia had no idea what V was doing—for all she knew he was dozing in the lingering quiet—but she was looking up the address he had given her.

It was located just outside Rosalia, in a relatively nice district that was populated mostly by younger workers in the city who had cushy enough jobs to afford living so close, yet not in the high rises that spread through the capital. While she couldn’t look inside V’s building—not without hacking the security system, anyways, and she had a feeling her friend had his own Censor connected to it and would notice—she could look around, make note of the general vibe of the area: nice, calm, well maintained. Chapters fırst released on novel·fıre·net

Also, extremely generic. Clearly, it was the sort of place people lived short term. Not a forever home, just the place you live for a time. How long had V lived there for, surrounded by tired-looking professionals who smiled at their neighbours before disappearing into their homes?

“I won first place,” Emilia told V, once she was done sneaking looks at the place he lived. “No idea how. I don’t think it was because of any of the things we did in the raid to fix the world.”

“Probably something weird. It’s often something weird with that company, especially with their big prize raids. Once, the player who fished the most won—and there was only one place to fish in the far reaches of the world. I think I heard they really only caught like three fish, after they accidentally ended up out there and were starving. Another time, it was the best dressed who won—the voting panel was of locals of the raid, too. I don’t know. I’m not convinced that company even wants people to win half their raids?”

“Weird,” she replied, unsure what to make of that. While the company that managed Ship’o Stars ran a number of raids every night, looking for people to bring on board to keep the ship’s raids interesting and competitive, it was definitely odd that they were running at least some of their raids without any obvious desire for someone to be able to win.

Definitely, when combined with the strange situation with the aethernet and mind manipulations, it was even stranger, more ominous.

“I can look into it, if you want?” V offered, sounding very much like he expected his offer to be rejected.

“With the aethernet being connected to the raids?” Emilia clarified—the reason she won the raid would be a very odd, if interesting, thing for him to so awkwardly offer his help with—waiting for V to confirm before asking how he planned to do that. Not only would contacting anyone potentially break his disappearing act, but Helix wouldn’t be available to talk to for another few days, and even then, he would have to contact people he knew at Hail to find out what they knew about aether potentially being connected to the raids—Emilia refused to believe her friend would have allowed such a thing to happen knowingly—not to mention whatever had happened with the heartcores.

Speaking of which, she needed to let The Black Knot know about all that as well, in case any of the other heroes had returned with their minds fucked up.

Fuck, there was just so much to do. As much as she wanted to turn around and go curl back into Hyr’s lap, she knew she’d regret it if she did. Her little snugglefest would just have to sustain her.

“Emilia?”

Emilia almost screamed, not from surprise that Professor A had popped up beside her but because fuck, another thing on her to-do list that she’d forgotten about: letting the school know they were all going to be skipping school for the next week.

Fuck.