[Can’t Opt Out]

Forget every other thing Emilia wanted to do once she had access to the Virtuosi System for even a few seconds! The moment she had one nearby she was going to be designing a beautiful, intricate recon skill because this, quite frankly, was terrible and dangerous and how had The Black Knot never asked her to make them something better than the shit recon skills they had?

Probably because recon skills were notoriously difficult to program, her and Halen having both attempted to design skills for use in the prank war and always coming up more than a little short in their efforts. All skills were a little challenging to program, so many bits of information and contingency plans going into them, that there was a reason so few people out there could create good skills. Recon skills just required so much fucking work—especially considering how few people could manage to use such complicated, aetherstore-intensive and processing-intensive skills—so Emilia knew why she’d never bothered actually following through on plans to make one. Still, she was a constant troublemaker! She really should have anticipated that someday she’d end up staring at a suspicious door in the ceiling of an underground tunnel, wishing she could reach her awareness through the aether and figure out what was on the other side without having to actually look.

Fuck.

Unfortunately, she needed to look. Unfortunately, the moment she’d contemplated pushing the door up and sticking her head out, Emilia had been struck with the inescapable image of herself being suddenly decapitated by whoever was on the other side—or worse, one of the long-lasting traps some Free Coloniers were known to set. Thɪs chapter is updated by NoveI★Fire.net

In Baalphoria, technology-based traps were more common, and while some could trigger skills, those were relatively uncommon. More often, there would just be a normal, weapon-based booby trap waiting to spring on someone. In many Free Colonies, their traps were a mix of weapon- and aether-based traps that were a little terrifying. Those aether-based traps were the basis of the slow-release skills Emilia and Halen had used when vandalizing Coral’s original school. The result? The school would probably be unusable for at least a few more decades—possibly longer, given a few of the skills had been set to continuously absorb aether straight from the aether, rather than rely on the user’s aetherstores for sustained activation, as skills usually did.

Those sorts of slow-release skills, as well as the Free Colony traps that had inspired them, were dangerous—the sort of dangerous that had left both her and Halen promising The Black Knot that they would never release any slow-release skill publicly, never write research on it or even let anyone officially know they were the ones behind the state of Coral’s original school. While part of the reason the government had decided not to charge them with vandalism had been to keep the existence of microsparking under wraps, the danger they would be in, were anyone to figure out they were the people behind those slow-release skills, was also palpable.

Some things just weren’t meant for this world, and while Emilia had no doubt that eventually someone who wasn’t her would have figured out how to take the theories that Free Coloniers used to engrave aether-based traps onto things—the same traps that were used in Seer’ik’tine to make the flood walkways an amusing hazard—and apply the same principles to skills, Emilia did wonder if she should regret actually doing so. It was one thing for technology to be capable of activating skills, limited in scope and power as those skills were. It was another to be capable of etching a skill into semi-permanent existence over a school’s floors and wall, the bottom of its pool, all its lunch trays—she and Halen really had enjoyed fucking with everything they could think of when they’d trashed the school.

Perhaps, in the time when she was designing ways to leave skills marked across the world, she should have been creating recon skills—much more useful, even if recon skills also suffered from being potentially dangerous, should the wrong person be suddenly capable of looking too easily within an otherwise closed room. Unfortunately, Emilia hadn’t spent that time doing such things. As such, she was left to pull up a collection of defensive skills, releasing the ones she’d been wearing as he ran through the underground and wrapping more specific ones around herself while leaving others prepped to activate as needed.

Well, at the very least her class’s drive to learn and push had left them all with training to rival soldiers and law enforcement. If she were one of Olivier’s normal students… Yeah, they probably wouldn’t have even had the sense to worry that they might lose their head. Actually, they might have just run through the underground tunnel without activating even the most basic of defensive skills—assuming they even knew any.

Seriously, while Emilia understood that raising children to have combat skills wasn’t exactly ideal—too much of a reminder that war could come along at any time—it still felt like Baalphorians should have a little more training. The basics, at least, especially since most Free Colonies included more than a little more combat training in their own childhood education. If war came along, they were going to be the only nation with a mostly useless population.

Bracing herself, Emilia opened a hole in the door—she was definitely not going to be forgetting {Hidey Hole} had such uses again! Taking a moment to listen for sounds—and smell that delicious, mouthwatering aroma—and hoping that any potential trap would be sprung by the door opening or the skill use, rather than her head popping out of said hole, Emilia jumped, catching the ledge her skill had left and lifted herself up.

Head through the hole, nothing immediately assaulted her, and nothing seemed too amiss; rather, the door just seemed to lead into a storage room for a bakery, ingredients lining the rickety looking shelves that filled the room. There were two doors, on opposite sides of the room, and through one, Emilia could make out the faint sound of Lüshanian—someone asking for that sweet she’d been craving since realizing Lüshan was likely on their list of stops. Even when she pitched her hearing up, searching for sounds coming from the other door, there was nothing—not even little creatures scurrying around, and there were definitely something living somewhere in this place, given the droppings she could make out under the shelves.

Unless she had to, Emilia wouldn’t be trying to make her way out of this place through the bakery. There could be a restroom between the door and the exit, which she could use as a reason she’d been back here, but who knew how observant whoever was running the joint was. Someone they’d never seen before popping out of a hallway that only led to a storage room with an entrance to an underground tunnel would definitely be suspicious, and it wasn’t like she didn’t stand out as both a tourist and a silverstrain. Going that way was a last resort only. Through the ominously silent door it was.

As {Hidey Hole} sealed up behind her, Emilia left a target on it, in case she had to race back and drop through it. Sending another look around the room as she moved, making sure she hadn’t missed anything—like, say, paraphernalia for some criminal organization or another—Emilia pressed her hand to the door. This one was definitely booby trapped, and while it was nothing compared to the most intricate Free Colony booby traps she’d felt, it was rather impressive. Still, it wasn’t exactly polite to judge traps based on the intricate designs she’d seen Yujao pull out of his mind, but the Dionese man was a genius when it came to aether-based traps. When she’d seen her friend last, he’d been learning how to etch onto more delicate material, so he could set traps onto his clothing. It wasn’t a common skill, and when they chatted, sharing gossip and details of their lives, he talked about what he was learning was possible and what sorts of things he wanted to prove were possible, despite no one ever doing them before.

One day, Emilia had no doubt that her flighty, terrifying friend would be dressed in the most beautiful of outfits, traps and tricks written through every layer of the complicated Dionese robes he favoured. Unless someone knew him, all those little details and dangers would simply look to be designs—flowers and animals, glittering trails of stars and rivers. The man would be gorgeous and even more deadly than he already was.

Emilia was quite looking forward to it, especially since despite her difficultly with learning even how to use her core in emergencies, Yujao was always willing to explain things to her. Given her regret at having been part of creating a way to turn virtually any skill into a slow-release version—as long as the person activating the skill had big enough aetherstores to create the universal aether siphon and the ability to use the normal version of the skill, anyways—Emilia wasn’t sure if she’d ever be able to do anything with her knowledge of Yujao’s adventures in aether-enhanced clothing, but she still wanted to learn.

There were very few things in this world that she didn’t want to learn. Everything had a use, and at the moment, another of the things Yujao had taught her had its use: the ability to break apart aether-based traps. Pulling this specific core ability into a skill version had, in the end, been impossible without, well, linking it to a recon-esque skill… which she hadn’t been able to figure out. Instead, the only way she’d been able to create something that could simulate Yujao’s ability to fracture aether-based traps was by using her core. Fortunately, while Censors didn’t like core usage, they would allow it under the right circumstances. So, instead of a skill to rip apart aether-based traps, she had a function.

Censors were a strange thing—aware and yet empty all at once. They could be programmed to have a personality, although most people left theirs a bit more generic. Emilia’s had a bit of snark, a bit of judgment, and a whole lot of love for doing good in the world and keeping people safe. Where someone else’s Censor might have told them to turn back, rather than attempt to find Olivier, Emilia’s had been analyzing the situation and offering her suggestions along the way. Now, rather than demand she turn back and not risk using what wisps of energy she could clumsily drag from her core to shatter apart the trap, it instead pulled up the function without her even asking.

Slowly, the two of them worked together. Where her Censor’s job was to analyze the shifts of the aether to see where her energy needed to go to break the trap—Yujao and most other Free Coloniers as powerful as he was just used their cores to analyze the aether—Emilia’s job was to follow the path her Censor laid out. It worked, although it was slower going that Yujao or Hurinren would have been. Emilia didn’t think she could be faulted for that. It wasn’t like her Censor's let her practice using this function more than a few times, and its ability to even read the aether when it was a door away was relatively limited; hence, ideally, this would be done with a recon-esque skill.

In additional, her Censor wouldn’t even let her use this particular ability if there were someone else around who could do the same thing, further limiting her ability to use the ability because almost every time she’d come across aether-based traps that needed disarming she’d been with Free Coloniers that her Censor knew could do it faster and safer than she could!

Fucking Censors. One day, Emilia wanted to figure out a way to program it to let her use her core. While she understood that core cracking was a bigger risk when cores were actively being used—it was still a risk with skills, but also virtually unheard of—which could both kill the person who’d cracked their core and cause huge explosions, it was relatively rare outside of war. Baalphoria had pushed aside core usage in favour of the Censors, skills, and aetherstores they’d been using for at least seven thousand years, however—allegedly, anyways. Occasionally, Emilia wondered if that was actually true. History was too broken apart by information loses to be sure, but sometimes…

Sometimes, it felt as though skills and Censors were too stagnant for how long they had allegedly existed. Sure, in war, skills were often more powerful than core abilities. There were a handful of low-dev Free Coloniers who would far outclass even the most powerful of Baalphorian soldiers, but when it was average soldier versus average soldier? Often, Baalphorian skills came out on top.

The thing was, in day to day life? In the periods of existence where war wasn’t the main focus? At those times, Free Coloniers usurped Baalphorians when it came to what they could do with their respective abilities. Where Baalphorians relied on technology to do things like clean or move themselves quickly through the world—seriously, Emilia had no idea why so few people seemingly knew how to slide well—Free Coloniers had core abilities. The fact that skills generally took less time to master than core abilities as well?

No, something didn’t seem to match up, especially when so much of Baalphoria’s identity was tied in with an undeserved superiority complex. How did a nation come to view themselves as better when it was only in the last few decades that she and Halen and Vrin before them had been putting out skills for everyday life—skills few Baalphorians even used? Emilia had no idea, but if she thought about it too much, something seemed wrong—off in a way that seemed insidious. As much as programming skills was difficult, few people capable of creating truly beautiful skills, there were a few older skills—such as {A Private Moment}—that proved that at points in Baalphoria’s history, someone had been just as good—if not an even better—skill designer than she and Halen were. The question was what had happened to them—what had stopped them from pushing skills forward with more than a handful of skills.

In the end, it felt as though innovation should have happened; certainly, research out of the Ridge Rind proved that there had long been people capable of pushing skills and Censors forward. Maybe part of it was a belief that the nation wasn’t ready for certain skills yet, just as it wasn’t now ready for microsparking or slow-release skills.

Something still felt wrong, and somehow Emilia knew—knew—that one day, some sliver of the truth would come out, and it wouldn’t be good. No, the reasons wouldn’t be good at all.