[Can’t Opt Out]

“Alright, alright~ I’m here! I’m here! No need to worry I won’t make it!”

Arabella groaned even as her youngest brother cracked the smallest of smiles at his older brother’s antics. Why had she invited Sterling again? Oh yes, something about cheering Elijah up—getting him out of the mood his time with the clones had brought down on him in hopes of lessening its hold over his knots. Unfortunately, while she loved both of her brothers—as well as their much younger sister, although the teenager just sort of existed in the periphery of their minds, due to their age difference—they were both tiresome.

Turning to look at her middle brother, Arabella’s vision cut to black as the RaidZone descended upon them, a collection of notifications going off in her mind announcing this or that. Then, as the world reformed, more notifications came through as Elijah brought them into his team. Then, more and more people were added.

Apparently, for as much as they had been receiving strained looks from a number of the heroes waiting for the raid to begin, they were still aware that her brother was good at raiding—he’d even managed to rank in the Top Heroes of the Season a few times. Nothing too impressive—nothing like the one time his now-ex had ranked in the top ten. Arabella didn’t think they’d been dating back then. If anything, she thought the only reason Emilia Daniels had ranked so high was she her then ongoing feud with Elijah.

Oh, how things could change.

Thinking back on it now, Arabella supposed it shouldn’t have been too surprising that the silverstrain was skilled enough to rip a hole in Elijah’s dorm room. Regardless of how often Elijah had complained that her ex didn’t share his primary interest—raiding, both real and virtual—from what Arabella had heard, the girl was skilled when she wanted to be. Odd that, considering how often her brother had commented on the things she couldn’t do, seemingly because of a relatively high D-Level. While raids were set up so even those with relatively high D-Levels could push their RaidLevel lower than their actual D-Level, the skill the girl had shown in her brother’s dorm had, in no way, reflected what someone who wasn’t a sub-100 should be capable of. Yet, there were many things Emilia Daniels supposedly couldn’t do that were indicative of an ex-100—or perhaps a Dyad.

Regardless of what was seemingly interfering with the silverstrain’s ability to use slidelines or a number of other skills, their mother hadn’t liked the fact that she couldn’t—no, she hadn’t liked that at all. Samantha Richmond would never tell her children they couldn’t be with someone who was an ex-100 or a Dyad, but the implication was there. They were to marry a sub-100 with nothing too difficult hidden within their genetics. If they could marry someone who was a sub-30, even better! No Sub-50s, though—no voting power there. If anything, being associated with anyone from the Sub-50s would be a stain on their family. No one liked the snobs of the Sub-50s, and the Richmonds weren’t snobs, they were just… discerning.

Yet another thing Arabella would quite like to be done with. Why hadn’t she just gone the way of Sterling and fucked off to the Free Colonies again? If not for the fact that Elijah may very well die, were he to be taken away from his precious raids, Arabella might have suggested they all just leave—go start new lives somewhere else. Sterling was always talking about the friends he had made wandering the continent. Surely, he must have friends they could stay with for a few months, while they figured things out?

“So, little bro~” Sterling cooed, having come up and swung his arm over Elijah’s shoulder, his smile wide and disarming to anyone who didn’t actually know him. “What exactly did you do to end up on the clones’ bad side? Impressive that, I must say. Usually only hear about them leaving such visible prints on people who have royally pissed them off—or who are complete twats.”

Where had Sterling been living recently, to pick up that slang? Usually, he spent a season or two in each place he settled in—unless he royally pissed someone off so badly he had to leave abruptly, often abandoning his possessions in his haste to get out.

“Been with a ship of Atrium traders—well, more pirates, I suppose,” he told her, before she could ask—her asking about his current slang was too constant a thing for her to actually need to ask anymore. “Bit of a mix, that bunch, but…” Sterling shuddered, muttering something about how a few of them had leaned a bit too heavily into ideas of violent piracy, rather than just raiding vessels used by Chinsata scavengers or other people dealing in illegal goods. “Fun enough to hit a civilian ship once in a while, but only for a little fun! Rob the rich, drop the goods into the slums of this or that nation,” he added, laughing and smiling like he hadn’t just admitted to being involved with criminals—again!

Arabella gaped at her brother, horrified. Sterling just smiled back, unrepentant, looking for all the world like nothing could ever harm him, which, perhaps it couldn’t. Long ago, Arabella had come to suspect that her brother had made some sort of connection with someone important—someone who could get him out of whatever trouble he ended up in. Perhaps, if he were arrested for piracy, whoever he had befriended—or found dirt on, who really knew—would come to his rescue? Certainly, even their mother wouldn’t have the pull to get him out of something so serious!

“Oh, come off it,” Sterling sighed before she could even begin to yell at him. “Journalistic integrity, elder sister. I just watched it all go down. Sure, a few nations have laws about prioritizing reporting crimes over all else, but those places already don’t like me. I didn’t actually take part in any of the piracy, just watched, recorded. I’ll have a book out about my adventures soon.”

“Is it an adventure if all you do is watch?” Elijah asked, nervous energy thrumming through him, his weight shifting about as they waited for the raid’s invaders to spawn.

“Do you not think your experience watching that beautiful silverstrain you let get away rip a perfect hole in your wall was an adventure?” their brother asked, a cold edge running through his normally jovial voice. “I supposed that would mean it wasn’t an adventure watching that piece of shit Victor attack an innocent girl either? Did it only become an adventure once you were taken away by the clones? Tell me again, how did that come about?”

A dozen flinches worked their way through Elijah as Sterling’s words landed, always the ever seeking journalist, even when it was his baby brother on the receiving end of the questions and rebukes.

“I’ll say it again, Eli: the clones don’t pull people in for questioning and leave marks like that”—Sterling reached out, brushing a thumb over the mottled skin of Elijah’s jaw, earning him another flinch—“on someone for just watching crimes go down. So don’t tell me that was it—that you were just an observer and nothing more. What are we missing? What don’t we know?”

Arabella’s eyes shifted around the area, worried about who might be listening, only to realize her middle brother had erected a privacy barrier around them. It was good; she also hadn’t noticed him activating it. Given the startled double takes they were occasionally getting, she didn’t think many people around them had noticed it coming down either.

“I can’t… I mean…” Elijah tried to say, his eyes flickering about oddly.

Their baby brother had always been a terrible liar, but this was something else. This was—

“We went to go ask Beth to contact The Black Knot. Victor’s parents wanted to… convince her to ask them to let him go.”

Despite the fact that she worked in politics, it was Sterling who had always been better at catching people in lies and half-truths for their word choice, for the tones they used, for the slightest of stumbles over their words. Still, even she could tell that Victor’s parents hadn’t been planning to convince Beth of anything.

“Let me see,” Sterling demanded. “Let me see this convincing that you were a part of.”

Elijah’s cheeks reddened, but he still sent off a fractured recording of… basically nothing. Yup, just as she had suspected: someone had messed with Elijah’s ability to talk about the full lead up to his time in the clones’ custody. Given he wasn’t confused, he could see what happened, at least. The clones didn’t erase memories unless they deemed it absolutely necessary, although that seemed to be happening more often. Arabella had heard murmurings of Hail’s raid platform being able to see even memories that were otherwise locked behind skills like {A Private Moment} and other, Black Knot manipulations. While she didn’t want to believe it was true, she wasn’t stupid enough to think that wasn’t the case—Hail had been increasingly pressing its fingers into the government this last decade, and oversight on the company was… abysmal. It was fucking abysmal, and the government just seemed content to let them do what they would.

It was weird, and concerning, and there was a reason she didn’t much like virtual raids in particular. There were actually a number of reasons, but the invasion of privacy on the minds of heroes was definitely high on the list.

Regardless of her opinions on raids and Hail, the question became why Elijah’s memories were locked up. What he could give them was more the initial interactions with Victor’s parents, in which they had been obvious that they would be willing to do almost anything to convince Beth—although they never deemed to say her name, instead preferring to use slurs to refer to him. Since nothing they said was an overt threat, no one’s Censor had warned The Black Knot about the potential threat they posed to the girl—or, if they had warned The Black Knot, the organization had been unable to intervene because if what Elijah was showing them had been used in court… No, there was no way anyone would be charged with intention to harm from all this, even if the implication was clear. It would just be too easy to argue Victor’s parents had intended to beg and bribe Beth to ask The Black Knot to let their son go, even if anyone who saw the video would know they definitely intended to threaten her with bodily harm.

So, what had happened between the group of them making their way to Beth’s room, the elevator behind them opening before the blackness of a locked memory overtook the scene, and Elijah’s next solid memory of sitting in an interview room with three clones glaring him down? Something that needed to be kept from Hail? Or something that needed to be kept from the world?

Thinking back to her earlier contemplations that Emilia Daniels potentially had a friend either with connections to The Black Knot or within the organization itself… combined with just how powerful the girl actually was, despite her supposedly high D-Level…

A hand smacked into Arabella’s head. “Fuck!” she yelped, smacking back at Sterling, although he was already out of reach, laughing and snapping off the wristband-shaped willbrand he tended to favour. He had a few more, she knew. Ones from the war. Ones from various willbrandsmiths of the Free Colonies. Ones he had stolen from the places he visited and the people he was perpetually pissing off as well.

“Better pay attention, elder sister, lest the monsters come and take a bite out of you!”

“They’re called invaders,” Elijah noted. While he had also readjusted his primarily willbrand—this one a reward from some Hail-sponsored event or another that their brother hated, claiming it was trash quality—shifting it off his upper arm to instead wrap around his wrist, he had yet to activate it.

Sterling scoffed, muttering something about how, as much as Hail and the government didn’t call them monsters, they might as well be. There was some truth in his words, Arabella knew. There had been entire governmental hearings over the subject of what to call the monsters of war, of whether to call the creatures that inhabited Hail’s real-world raids monsters or not. The former were public domain—or, what was left of them was, most of the transcripts scattered into the aether by the Flaming. The latter, however, were still tucked behind privacy laws of various sorts. Arabella had only seen them due to her boss being old and seemingly having no understanding of how to keep her underlings out of documents they shouldn’t have access to.

Watching the first of the invaders splatter out of the aether, their bodies pulling together into wriggling blobs of iridescent white, Arabella could understand both sides of the arguments against referring to these things as monsters: they were both nothing like the monsters of war—none she’d ever seen, anyways—and yet, there was something about them that was… familiar, in a way. The way they came out of the aether wasn’t quite right, but there was… something. It wasn’t something she could give words to, but even as someone who had rarely come face-to-face with the monsters of war, having worked more behind the scenes for most of it, she could see it—could see why so many veterans hated raids.

Even without decades of trauma behind her, Arabella still didn’t like it when the invader lurched towards her. It couldn’t do anything more than give her a few bumps and bruises, maybe a concussion if she was extremely unlucky, but that didn’t mean her body didn’t immediately flood with hormones, urging her to move—and move, she did, skills reaching out to take down the invader.

It was just… she was too late.