[Can’t Opt Out]

Halen had things to do. At the top of the list should have been figuring out if any of the information Yujao and Hurinren had been able to find, splicing together whispers of the Inner Court and ancient history with words from the Blood Rain General and Nivel Hyrat, was accurate.

What the pair of Dionese men had been able to find was somewhat vague, but promising. From what he understood, when Hurinren had gone to his teacher, the old man had only the vaguest recollection of something from his childhood that might have been relevant. Unfortunately, as much as most non-devs had wonderful memories, extending far back into their first year of life more often than not, the man was old—well into his three hundreds old. So, while he knew that there was something about an entrance to the Falmíer lingering in his earliest memories, that was about all he could give Hurinren, and there wasn’t much more they could do with that information because the place where the Blood Rain General had grown up hadn’t existed in centuries, all of the people who had filled his first memories gone to time and war and gang wars.

“Most likely, it was something overheard while living with his brother,” Yujao had explained via one of the numerous xphern messages he had sent Halen. “From what I know, his brother lived in the back rooms of the drinking establishment he worked at. The Blood Rain General likely heard countless rumours and drinking songs there. He has no idea which he would have heard this rumour in. Rumours fade too fast for anything current to be any help, and some of those drinking songs are very specific to the territory they’re sung on, so while I can’t say I ever heard anything about Falmíer specifically in any song from where I grew up, that’s not so say it couldn’t have been a song. I can ask some contacts who live in the area to ask around about old drinking songs from when it was under control of the di’rusen, but it's been centuries, and I doubt they will find anything.”

This had all been relayed through Yujao by Hurinren, who as far as Halen could tell did speak fluent Baalphorian but seemed very against doing so unless absolutely necessary. At the time, Yujao had been waiting for whatever documents Hurinren requested from the library to arrive, the man being oddly cagey about how he was going to take what Emilia had learned from Nivel Hyrat to make use of what his teacher had told him.

Nivel Hyrat, who had spent some amount of his youth in Falmíer, had really only known two things: he believed the tunnels still existed, but were rarely used, and he had heard whispers of them being used by teenagers and young adults who were separated from their friends and lovers by Lüshan’s schooling system.

How Hurinren had gone from that rumour to requesting an index of love songs, Halen wasn’t quite sure. It both made sense and seemed like quite a leap, and if the non-dev were less terrifying, he might have asked. He was not going to ask.

Regardless, a number of cross-references between various indexes on the songs found in Dion before and during the last Colonial War, looking for references to love and tunnels—something that unfortunately ended in a lot of lewd songs coming up and then being transmitted to him to blush over—and Lüshan, and especially focusing on lovers who were forbidden to meet, and the Dionese men had found a song that may have been related to whatever the Blood Rain General had heard in his youth.

The song they had found did include tunnels and loves separated by a war, but it hadn’t originated anywhere near where the old non-dev had spent his first few years of life, nor did it explicitly mention Lüshan or Falmíer, but according to Yujao, that wasn’t exactly uncommon. While songs in their exact form tended to stick to the territory of specific gangs, it was apparently common for civilians to overhear a song and then take it back wherever they were from. The words and tune would change, as no one wanted to offend the local gang by bringing in songs from another gang’s territory, but the general vibe of the story would remain the same.

There was, of course, no way to know if the song the Dionese men had found actually was based on anything related to the Falmíer tunnel system, but it could be. Still, back in the Inner Court, Yujao and Hurinren were continuing to look through song indexes for anything else that could be related, and Halen knew Yujao had asked some of his contacts to ask around about similar songs. Halen didn’t know what sort of contacts Yujao had, but the boy had always been terrifying and had grown up in a rough area of the capital, so it wouldn’t surprise him if these contacts were criminals.

All that amounted to their group having a place to start in their search for an entrance to the Falmíer tunnel system. Unfortunately, he couldn’t personally take part in that at the moment because Mikhail was an idiot!

“You’re lucky Baylor didn’t kill you,” he deadpanned at his kinda-sorta friend. They weren’t really friends, but they sort of were. It was annoying and complicated. It would also be easier if Mikhail’s head weren’t filled with clouds, words and thoughts spilling out of his mouth and ears to surround everyone in the vicinity and drive them mad!

“Why would he have done that? And why did Coral knock me off the aetherstream? You know my butt hurts now? And look at my pants!” Mikhail turned and pointed at his ass—his very dirty ass, the weather in Falmíer currently a drizzle of misery.

Halen almost pointed out that far more than Mikhail’s butt was covered in dirt. He didn’t. Mikhail was annoying and had somehow gotten dirty after falling off the aetherstream—not during the fall, but after the fall—and had seemingly forgotten cleaning skills existed. Let him be filthy. He should be glad he wasn’t a corpse covered in blood and gore.

“You were rude to Valor for no reason.”

“Was I?” Mikhail’s head tilted in thought, his lower lip sticking out in a pout. It might have been cute if the man weren’t a walking wall of muscle. Fortunately, it was more a natural muscle than what some of their other school friends—a word Halen used loosely—had taken to forcing upon their body, but when combined with his height and shorn blonde hair, there was no way Mikhail could ever look cute and innocent. Maybe if he grew his hair out or dressed a little differently—not that anyone would ever suggest either to him. The man’s too innocent stupidity was already an accidental weapon against anyone who tried to hold him accountable. If he actually looked the part of empty-headed, confused animal, it would be even harder!

The worst thing about Mikhail was that it was so hard to remain mad at him because, in the end, he really wasn’t trying to say or do stupid things! Even now, Halen knew that if he asked Coral what Mikhail's as feeling, all she’d get was the standard level of confusion that seemed to near constantly be rolling off him. His questioning of whether he had said something rude or not wasn’t some attempt at brushing aside responsibility. Really, he just didn’t realize that the way he had called Valor weird for staring off into the distance as they travelled the aetherstream—not to mention the tone he’d used—was rude. Somehow, despite this being a constant occurrence—him saying or doing something that upset the people around him—Mikhail rarely retained the why of it. For that reason, this wasn’t the first time Mikhail had said something rude about Valor—usually Baylor just wasn’t within earshot.

Having heard stories of Mikhail when he was younger, he had apparently always been this way. It didn’t matter how many times he was told something, half the time, things just seemed to slip through his brain. Sometimes he retained what he was told. It wasn’t often. The guy’s main redeeming quality was that he was fully aware of how things just didn’t seem to connect within his brain, meaning he rarely brushed aside criticism and didn’t take anyone’s annoyance with him to heart; rather, he just accepted that he deserved it. Halen wanted to say it was nice that he still tried asking why whatever he’d done had upset someone; unfortunately, the perpetual need to repeat the same points over and over again wore on everyone’s patience.

Codeth had told him, soon after he transferred schools, that their entire class had been a little surprised when Mikhail’s D-Level tests hadn’t also reported some form of Dyadism.

“We all assumed something was a little off, you know? Emmie talked to Doctor Vickers once—we must have been ten or something—about all the kids in our cohort who are a little off, wanting to know what sorts of things we could do to help them. Simeon and Atticus were her main concern, but she asked about Mikhail as well.” Snorting, Codeth had said that given what information Emilia had returned with, he wouldn’t be surprised if Doctor Vickers was also surprised when Mikhail’s D-Levels had come back at 23D with no known irregular deviations or Dyadism. “I think most of us just assume the test missed something—or maybe that he has some obscure or entirely new irregular deviation? Like, based on his Categories, he definitely favours physical stuff, but none of the more mental Categories are so bad that it would make, well, him.”

The fact that Mikhail had shared the entirety of his D-Level results with every one of his classmates had been shocking, most people holding their D-Levels close and only letting little bits of information free—which Perfect Categories they had, mostly. Although their class had always been more open about their exact D-Levels, most people would only ever share their general D-Level—things like around 60 or just under 100. Sharing all of it had been shocking, and for a while, Halen had just assumed Mikhail hadn’t realized he shouldn’t share them.

That wasn’t the case; rather, Mikhail was just as frustrated with his inability to understand the emotions of people around him or keep his thoughts inside his head as the rest of them. Sharing his D-Levels had been a request for someone like Emilia to look at them and find something the official test and Doctor Vickers had missed. Amazingly, it seemed like she had actually found something—not that the little blip she had found was very helpful. Whatever she had found, however, neither she nor Mikhail had ever specifically said what it was.

Still, apparently it had settled him a little, and as Codeth explained it, what little frustration had existed within Mikhail whenever he struggled to understand something for too long had relaxed. Sometimes, though, Halen would catch Mikhail looking at himself in the mirror, almost as though he were analyzing what he saw in his almost too big blue eyes and pouty lower lip, in the thick blonde eyebrows that were so often pulled together in confusion. Sometimes, Halen wondered if those things were marks of whatever Emilia had found—subtle physical indicators that no one would ever think wrong but would certainly think unique.

As someone whose Grey Sander heritage was splattered over his skin, inescapable if he wanted to just be a normal Baalphorian, Halen wondered what it would be like to have something off inside your head while nothing was obviously different about your physical appearance. As much as Emilia received looks of hatred and judgment from people because of her silverstrain, it was obvious and saved her from befriending too many terrible people. For Simeon and Coral, their Dyadism didn’t reflect in their physical appearance, but it was easy to see in their mannerisms if you knew what to look for: the way Simeon rarely met anyone’s eyes, the way Coral curled away from new people and immediately honed in on threats and people who couldn’t be trusted. The clones were the clones, always obvious in what they were, and having spent so many years around a variety of black knots, Halen knew they had a feeling about them as well. It was nothing physical, but there nonetheless.

For Mikhail, there was nothing, and Halen had even seen their teachers grow frustrated with his inability to properly connect with his Censor or the Virtuosi System. It didn’t matter that he had struggled to connect with his Censor from the moment it was installed, nor that both Emilia and he himself had tried figuring out what the problem was only to come back with the fact that something was keeping Mikhail’s brain from connecting with his Censor properly and there didn’t seem to be any long-term fix. Still, their teachers had constantly tried claiming he was faking it, wasn’t working hard enough, shouldn’t be in their class despite it containing all the people who were most suited to work around his issues, even if they were still constantly exasperated by him. Fortunately, he and Emilia had eventually figured out a way to get skills working for him, although it generally took them hours of work to get them going. Functions, however, required so much tinkering that they only bothered with the most important ones, and even once they got working, it wasn’t uncommon for Mikhail’s brain to stop communicating with them after a few weeks.

It was rather baffling, and despite multiple searches and requests for information from various medical organizations, they’d only ever found anything similar in Ex-300 communities, where those who couldn’t communicate with their Censors properly seemed to just accept it, then figured out how to live without it. Mostly, he and Emilia had just learned that despite the issues with health and crime and general poverty, many Ex-300 communities were extremely supportive of those who were a little different.

Perhaps worse than his issues with his Censor, however, was that sometimes Mikhail could go hours without causing the people around him to cringe and give heavy sighs. For those hours, he would seem to be normal, and Halen had seen him flirting with girls, things going well until suddenly, they weren’t. People wouldn’t flirt with Emilia unless they were okay with her being different; for Mikhail, his differences suddenly appeared and often those he was talking to didn’t know how to handle it, so, they’d run off. It happened often enough that Halen sometimes wondered how Mikhail could keep going—could keep trying to find someone who would accept him for how he would always be because none of them were stupid enough to think that Mikhail would ever be anything other than himself. As the years had passed, he’d gotten a little better about some things—learned to hold his tongue when saying sexual things; learned to ask someone more sensible when there was fire involved—but they all knew he would always be a little too blunt and innocent, a little too reckless without ever intending to be reckless. Thıs text ıs hosted at ɴovelfire.net

There was hope, but it was a sweep across the reality that was Mikhail. So yeah, Halen commended him for not giving up and accepting that making new friends or finding love outside the people he had grown up alongside would be hard. It was inspiring, in a way. It was also rather heartbreaking.

“Look,” Halen sighed, reaching out to grab Mikhail and drag him into the damp forest, “everyone is tense, the triplets especially. Maybe just… don’t say anything about them? Baylor really might snap and kill you because he’s already so on edge.”

“So… what I said wasn’t the problem?”

“Oh, fuck no,” Halen laughed. “What you said was definitely the problem, but any other time, Baylor probably wouldn’t kill you for it. At the moment, he might. Don’t make me have to explain to the Baalphorian government that your body is splattered over a random spot in Lüshan.”

“That would make finding the pieces and returning them to my parents difficult,” Mikhail noted, no fear or amusement in his voice. No, poor Mikhail was completely serious in thinking that finding his bones and flesh, so they could be returned to Baalphoria for destruction, was the most important part of what Halen had said.

“Come on, Mikhail. Let’s go look for an entrance that inspired a song of love and devotion,” Halen said, pulling out his xphern to look over Yujao’s messages again, as though he hadn’t already memorized every fucking word.

“We’re looking for a vagina? Up here?”

Codeth, who they had come to stand beside, choked and muttered something about how Halen was definitely looking to enter a certain person’s vagina. Mikhail, fortunately, didn’t seemed to realize Codeth was talking about Emilia. He also took not saying sexual things about people very seriously.

Halen left them to argue about whether sex jokes were ever appropriate or not. He had a non-vaginal entrance to find… which would hopefully lead to Emilia and, well…