[Can’t Opt Out]

Usually, when Emilia lost herself in concentration around people who weren’t used to it, and even the occasional person who was—teachers and other terrible, impatient adults, mostly—she could feel the annoyance and irritation rolling off them. Accepting that she was a ball of chaos and spontaneity, all rolled into someone who could also focus and lose themself so completely in a task, took most people a bit.

Not Olivier. Olivier, for as much as he was often frustrated by her in class and the moments where she was directing her offhand, often sexual comments at him, was patient as he stood behind her, the pair of them waiting for her xphern to load up a map of the ship. Emilia wasn’t sure whether her xphern or the ship was the problem, but it was taking a moment—far longer than it would have taken for her to convert the map into something that could be used with her Censor. Doing so had felt wrong—profane. So, waiting they were.

It wasn’t wasted time, of course! She was also looking through the huge map layered onto the wall outside the steward’s office, where they had just come from learning that, for one, having her lock changed would be a massive nuisance and impossible until tomorrow. At the very least, the crew could disable the lock, so no one could break in in the meantime. They’d also learned that Olivier needed Movree to sign a whole lot of paperwork to gain access to his room. There was also paperwork that needed to be filled out—again, by Movree—to explain why he wasn’t returning to the ship. If he didn’t fill out the latter—and Emilia had doubts whether he would even fill out the paperwork to get his stuff back, physical as said paperwork was—he would be banned from all vessels owned by the airship’s parent company. Now, wouldn’t that be a shame?

What was left was the reality that she had nowhere to sleep—the ship was apparently extremely popular and fully booked—but they had hours to go before bedtime anyways. Not wanting to worry about her sleeping arrangements—and really, she could always find someone to hook up with on the condition they let her sleep over—it was time to amuse herself on the ship!

No swimsuit, she couldn’t go to the pools or saunas or anything. No change of clothes, she couldn’t go to any of the gyms—and there were a lot. Full up on food as well, that still left a lot to do—the ship had plenty of amenities spread throughout, hence the map.

Honestly, when she’d asked if Olivier wanted to join her as they left the steward’s office, she’d expected him to refuse. They’d spent so much time together already, and she wouldn’t have held his excusing himself, sick of listening to her ramble on about this or that, against him—not that Emilia was complaining! She really liked spending time with Olivier, even if she wanted him to fill the conversation more. He asked her questions, leading her this way or that, much to his occasional horror when the conversation verged into treacherous places.

Still, at least he was talking, and when she asked him questions, there was a 50-50 chance he would answer or redirect, which was a significant improvement from their first days of knowing one another, where he would glare and walk away!

“Do you want to go somewhere specific? Or wander?”

“Which would you prefer?”

Oh yeah, there was also secret option number three: reverse the question onto her. Sometimes she let him get away with it, sometimes not.

Now was one of those times when she wasn’t going to let him out of answering.

“No, you,” she replied, turning to glare up at him. Hands planted on her hips, legs set wide, she stared up into his eyes. She was very intimidating. He didn’t seem affected. “Oh, come on. You must have a preference! Do you like plans or spontaneity.”

“What do you prefer?” The hint of a smile danced in the lines around Olivier’s eyes. Fucker.

“I like both, depending on my mood and the people around me.”

“Same. Therefore, you may choose.”

“You know what happens when people let me choose?”

“What?”

“Chaos. We end up with a strict schedule or bouncing around between things so fast no one can appreciate anything. We get distracted and jump off cliffs, or end up out of our mind on drugs of questionable origin, giggling at stars that only exist in our eyes—or worse, hunting lavender codes.”

“What?”

“The Galenger Hangover is great for cliff diving. Granted, it occasionally gets salluns swarming in the water, and those things have a killer bite, but—”

“Not that,” Olivier cut in, eyes sharp—there was a bit of that annoyance she was so used to.

“Oh… did you not know hashul berry gives you hallucinations? They’re quite nice,” she replied, shooting him an innocent smile as her posture relaxed, her weight shifting back and forth because she wasn’t an idiot. He wanted to know about the whole hunting lavender codes thing, and she was just bratty enough to not give him the answer—not without a bit of extra prompting, anyways.

“Emilia.”

Ah~ if Olivier wanted her to behave, he was definitely going to need to stop saying her name like that, the sound of it echoing through her—the threat of punishment if she didn’t behave wrapping around her and squeezing until what he wanted was popping out of her. Of course, part of the reason she behaved the moment he said her name like that was simply that to continue pushing was to risk disappointment; as long as there was a question of whether he actually would punish her, Emilia was happy, but if she learned he wouldn’t actually do anything? That would be a total disappointment, and realistically, she didn’t think any punishment the man bestowed upon her would be worth it at the moment—maybe one day, though! Emilia had hopes—sexual hopes. Emilia didn’t think Olivier was liable to punish her sexually at the moment; rather, if he strangled her, it would be the I want to kill you sort of strangled, rather than the let me give you an extra dose of endorphins during sex sort.

Unfortunate.

“There may have also been drugs involved in the hunting of lavender codes,” she admitted, explaining that they’d gotten hold of some drugs from Mitine Dyn. “Allegedly, the Sever and Glorious Trio use them to commune with the aether, or something like that,” she told him after a brief segue in which her xphern finally downloaded the map, and they had a standoff about who would choose the route, finally deciding on a compromise where Olivier would pick a general direction and Emilia would choose their destination. Latest content publıshed on NoveI★Fire.net

“And did you commune with the aether?” he asked, serious. Well, if he believed in bringing the will of the aether down on oneself, maybe he believed a bit in an ability to communicate with it was well?

Humming, Emilia slipped her arm through the lawyer’s once more, making the most of the man’s current lack of complaint over physical connection. “Fuck if I know. Maybe? We definitely saw something. All I know is Simeon and I became oddly obsessed with finding some lavender code. I guess it isn’t exactly accurate to say we were hunting lavender codes. Really, we just wanted to find one.”

“Did you find them?”

“No. We were picked up by some clones shortly after we got north of the Turneus.”

“Were you nearby?” Olivier asked, frowning as they loaded into an elevator that would take them to the third-highest floor.

“Uh… no. We were home.”

“Don’t you live at the southern end of The Penns?”

“Yup.”

“That is… far.”

“Mhm~” Emilia agreed.

The southern end of The Penns curled slightly west into the Jibur Bay, so far south it seemed as though one need only reach out to touch the Grey Sands, on the other side of the bay. The capital of Baalphoria was located at the northern edge of the bay, where The Penns transitioned into the mainland. Further north, there was Piketown, which sat at the eastern tip of the Turneus mountain range, the mountain north of the city—Mount Pike—being the last mountain of the range before the Turneus became a small chain of islands and eventually The Penns.

The Turneus stretched further to the northeast, acting as something of a barrier between the less populated regions of northern Baalphoria and the metropolitan areas of the south. Fortunately, for as huge and potentially dangerous as the fault line the Turneus lay on was, it saw little seismic activity. There was some speculation that something had been done to solidify most of the fault lines on the continent millennia earlier, but there was no proof of that, only a general lack of earthquakes on most of them.

The point was that getting so far north—it was about 600 kilometres up The Penns, then another few hundred to Piketown—while high on random drugs from the Free Colonies had been a feat. It had also been potentially dangerous—it was rather cold north of Turneus, and they had definitely not been dressed for their adventure.

“Considering it took us a full day to come down from those drugs, we might have made it to the border before we came out of it,” Emilia noted, thinking back to the absolute desperation she and Simeon had experienced in those moments.

It had been bad enough when they were travelling, searching for some mysterious lavender code in northern Baalphoria—neither of them had felt like they needed to go past the Rind mountain range and into any of the northern Free Colonies—but once they’d been captured? Told they couldn’t go further?

Emilia cringed, thinking of the damage the pair of them had done to the clones and the office they had taken them to during their multiple escape attempts. Even now, half a decade on, Emilia could still feel the ache of that desperation, though—a memory within her body, forever urging her to go north and find whoever it was.

Except, they didn’t exist.

“You had someone look?” Olivier asked as they wandered the huge art gallery, populated by an ever-changing lineup from the various Free Colonies the ship passed through.

Most were for sale, and occasionally, one of them would stop to more closely examine a piece, as though a Baalphorian daring to display art from the Free Colonies in their home or office weren’t tantamount to being a traitor to the Baalphorian way of life. Emilia didn’t care—she had tons of things from the Free Colonies she’d visited with her father strew through all the places she called home—but the idea of Olivier buying something…

It wasn’t that he wouldn’t like it—given the look on his face, he definitely loved a few. His mother, though? The woman would probably have a heart attack… Maybe she should encourage him to get something? A few somethings? Just to raise the odds of the woman coming to an early demise?

“Yeah. I mean, it’s stupid that lavender codes are monitored by the government from birth, but that should have made them easy to find? But, there was no record of a lavender code that far north.”

It hadn’t exactly been surprising. Most parents, unfortunately, gave up lavender code children. There was too much stigma attached to them, parents either worried for their own reputation or hoping to protect their child from a life of hatred not realizing they were putting them into an orphanage they would never be adopted from—orphanages filled with adults who would barely bother to hide their disgust even in front of government employees ostensibly brought in to make sure they weren’t abusing the children in their care. All of those orphanages were south of the Turneus, and there had been no lavender code adults working north of it.

No random lavender code for her and Simeon to find.

Yet, both of them still itched to go look again. Maybe one day they would, but now… now there was a feeling that the timing was wrong. It were as though, for those hours when they had been high and focused and seeing lines of fates etched into the world, they could have found whoever was calling to them, and things would have worked out. Then that moment had passed. Now, if they found the lavender code…

“You believe in things like that?” Olivier’s voice was low, his eyes glued to her in the soft light of the sunset, filtering in through protective glass so it wouldn’t damage the artwork.

“I… don’t know. I know I sometimes feel things—pulls and pushes—and those feelings haven’t led me astray. Maybe it’s just instinct I can’t understand, maybe it’s something more. Does it matter?”

The man looked like he wanted to say something—give her a yes or a no. Then, his eyes were flicking away, catching on a piece down the way.

That one—that was the one she was going to get for him. Even his mother wouldn’t be rude enough to demand he trash a gift from the Secretary General’s daughter.