[Can’t Opt Out]

[Norrayn:You know what the worst thing about this situation is?]

[Emmie:no]

[Emmie:what?]

[Norrayn:That Professor de la Rue hadn’t gotten to the point of telling us about the Lüshanian justice system yet!]

[Norrayn:It would be really helpful to know what sort of charges I would get for killing someone at the moment.]

[Norrayn:The punishment might be worth it.]

[Emmie:classmates?]

[Norrayn:YES]

[Raalian:They are… rather stupid. The world might be better off without them. Maybe.]

[Norrayn:Probably.]

[Norrayn:No.]

[Norrayn:Actually.]

[Norrayn:Definitely.]

[Norrayn:The world would definitely be better without these idiots in it.]

[Emmie:what did they do now?]

The clips that filtered through to Emilia were… not great. Having been a child of chaos her whole life—one who was just as liable to accidentally escape her babysitters as she was to purposefully run off, every escape resulting in chaos and dirt and more than a little blood and injury—Emilia knew what it was like to go wild. Even as a child, however, she thought she had possessed more common sense than some of Olivier’s students.

During some of her more adventurous escapes, she had almost died. When she had found Hyrenie being chased by poachers and disappeared into the Cyrenix Desert for days, everyone growing increasingly concerned that she had been picked up by Chinsata scavengers—not that anyone had told her that at the time, not wanting to fill her brain with nightmares of the things that were done to silverstrains in some parts of the world—she had still had the sense to try and circle back around and find the city she’d run off from. It hadn’t worked, and she’d just ended up more lost. Still, even as a small child, Emilia had possessed sense enough to realize that she was in trouble and needed to get back to safety.

Her life was a long line of such situations, big and small, life-threatening and comparatively mundane. Usually, however, she knew when to stop whatever she was doing and reassess how stupid whatever she was doing was. Sometimes—such as right now—she was aware of the stupidity of her actions, but refused to do anything different, understanding that all the options sucked and she was probably fucked no matter what.

Olivier’s student weren’t quite fucked no matter what, but the ones who had run off the moment their teacher disappeared were starting to push the limit—the limit being the point at which Lüshan would be throwing them into prison for making a nuisance of themselves. Eventually, they would be released, but unlike Seer’ik’tine, where most visitors who caused problems were just ejected from the city-state, Lüshan was known to just drop people into prison without even charging them with anything.

A… let them sleep it off sort of mentality, if sleeping it off involved withering in prison for an unknown amount of time. In Emilia’s experience—both in the she’d been dropped into the prisons more than once and the she knew enough about the nation’s justice system sense—people were usually let out whenever one of three things happened.

The most common reason for being let out was that whatever mess the person had made had been cleaned up. Once, she and Cameron had gotten into a fight. The resulting damage hadn’t been a lot—a few broken vases and food splattered everywhere when they’d begun flinging it at one another. They had been put into little baby cells—dreary and boring, but at least they’d been warm and they’d had proper toilets and snacks—for a few hours. Once everything was clean, they’d been let out. The worst part had been having Cameron glare at her from the cell opposite hers the whole time.

The second most common reason was that whoever had put the person there either calmed down or died. Corruption was, unfortunately, a common theme in Lüshan, and the Drinarna—as well as the politicians they occasionally served, although Wander was currently the effective head of the government, having pulled the politicians under his will in the last few years—were known to just throw people who had annoyed them into prison. At times, it worked well. While Emilia would never really want to live in a nation where you could randomly be thrown into prison for looking at someone the wrong way, the Drinarna had been known to cut off terrorist attacks they had only heard rumours of with such methods. While her own charges showed that Baalphoria had some sketchy ass laws, other Baalphorian laws sometimes struggle to stop crimes from occurring even when the person’s Censor had alerted the OIC of some sort of plan growing within them.

There was a balancing act, when it came to monitoring people’s thoughts with their Censors, and the laws tended to fluctuate in how much the government could do with those thoughts. A thought was just a thought, after all. It could be fleeting—an exercise in if I were to do this thing, how would I do it—or it could have a grounding in reality—a real, solid plan to murder rising from their mind. It was often impossible to tell what intentions actually lay behind thoughts, and while the clones could try to dig through a person’s mind and find that intention, it wasn’t always so easy. Someone with abilities like Coral could help, but even those weren’t foolproof, especially when it came to people who had experience manipulating their emotions in order to counter her abilities.

So, there had been a few cases where terrorists had been pulled into Black Knot custody, only to be released when the laws demanded the government and its institutions not be the thought police. Of course, those terrorists would change their plans—up the security on their mind to lock its Censor from reporting more of its thoughts. Then, eventually, another plan would rise through their mind and fall through their fingers. Boom! Terrorist attack that could have been stopped, had the Baalphorian government the ability to detain anyone for however long they wanted.

Again, this wasn’t a world where Emilia wanted to live! Her mind was a hurricane of thoughts and contemplations. As someone who had definitely imagined how she would go about committing this crime or that over the years in some mixture of momentary seriousness—people could be highly annoying—and thought experiments, she certainly didn’t want the government being capable of locking her away for not having actually done anything wrong—she had legal problems enough as it was, thanks! Still, she could see the appeal of having the ability to lock people who might be a danger away until you could actually confirm they weren’t.

That said, mostly, the people locked away like this in Lüshan were just people who had annoyed someone. Again, that sort of thing had become less common under Wander! The man might have… kinda slowly taken over the government, but overall, he had good intentions! He was doing good, even if it was rather undemocratic. Regardless! Fewer people thrown into prison for just being pests! Fewer people thrown in for having an affair with the wrong person—or, in one truly terrible case from before she’d been born, refusing to have sex with someone. What sort of asshole throws someone into prison for refusing to fuck them!? Kinda-sorta dictator or not, at least Wander didn’t allow things like that to happen anymore; unfortunately, quite a few politicians and Drinarna officers didn’t much appreciate the way he had clamped down on their ability to arbitrarily punish people—something that, now that she’d thought about it, might have led to so much corruption within the Drinarna? If they couldn’t have power in the organization, perhaps that was why they had sought it with criminals? Something to perhaps ask about, if she ran into any more of those officers and wasn’t, you know, worried they would kill her.

That all aside, the third and least common way people were released from their sudden, semi-illegal stays in Lüshanian prisons: coups. What better way to cause chaos than to let all the people the government had pissed off by holding them indefinitely out? Generally, all the former prisoners who caused chaos during a coup would later be killed by whoever won—they were just too unpredictable—unless they had officially been part of the coup, as a number of those detained for being pests would always be people with ideas of overthrowing the government. Still, chaos! Letting random people with dangerous abilities free!

All that was to say that a bunch of Olivier’s students were going to be finding themselves within Falmíer's prisons soon, if they didn’t get their shit together. As for whether Norrayn would end up in them herself, should she snap and kill the few she was currently trying to convince to come into the embassy…

It was a bit of a toss up, honestly. Someone might pop her into prison until she could be deported, at which point that Baalphorian government would likely try to charge her with murder. Whether such charges would succeed was also a question, precedent generally stating the government couldn’t charge a Baalphorian citizen with a murder committed outside of the nation; rather, the nation where the crime had occurred had to deal with them. That said, according to one of Olivier’s lectures, there were some exceptions for the murder of other Baalphorian citizens.

The fact that Norrayn was also yelling at her drunk classmates—yes, they’d run off to get wasted on the local alcohol—from inside the embassy further complicated things. Embassies removed the person from the laws of the nation they were within, but if the crime was committed outside the embassy while they were within it, it might very well be caught in some liminal space where too many potentially contradictory laws applied, and as a result, none existed. There was no way that Lüshan would go into the embassy to drag Norrayn out—doing so would be illegal—butthe people she was theoretically killing being not just Baalphorians but Baalphorians making a nuisance of themselves combined with the Drinarna currently dealing with the growing realization that something was occurring both within the city and their organization as a whole…

Well, there was a good chance they wouldn’t bother investigating the murders, and Norrayn could just wipe the bodies from existence. The few clones in the city, annoyed as they were with having to track down the students who had fucked off when their teacher had literally been kidnapped, probably wouldn’t bother looking into it either.

Emilia’s mind skimmed over the other reality that, if the Lüshanian government decided they did want to charge her or just stick her into the abyss of the prisons without actual charges, Norrayn could actually just stay in the embassy for the rest of her life. The Baalphorian government generally didn’t like forcibly ejecting citizens from their embassies, even if they’d committed a crime against another Baalphorian and they wanted the person back in Baalphoria. It was a whole thing, which mostly ended with the fact that the government couldn’t put such citizens into a position where they would be killed or illegally detained according to Baalphorian law. As Lüshan was very much known for detaining people in a way that was illegal in Baalphoria, Norrayn—should she choose to kill her classmates—could live the rest of her life in the embassy, should she so wish.

“So… you’re saying if I crack and kill them,” Norrayn asked into their group relay—which included Emilia, Norrayn, Raalian, and a few of the clones who were looking for their runaway classmates—“that I could end up stuck here for the rest of my life?”

“Yes,” Emilia replied, thinking about how stir-crazy she would go if she were destined for such a thing and trying not to think of Candence, who may yet end up confined to the embassy for the rest of her life. Hopefully it wouldn’t come to that, and Wander would be able to either find a safe place within Lüshan for her—although, her mumbling about the questionable state of Lüshan’s legal system may have talked her out of that being a possibility, as the child would definitely have the potential to become dangerous and possibly be dropped into the abyss of the prison as a result—or he’d be able to authorize Emilia or the clones to take her out of the nation.

“I have a more important question!” Raalian added. Somehow, he had become responsible for ordering his classmates' food; as such, he was currently learning how to use a xphern, and his contributions to the conversation had been sparse and… distracted. “Are you actually going to go into law one day? After your gap decade is actually over—or, after you get to actually have one, if you’re found guilty, I guess? Assuming you get out and have a proper gap decade? But then, I guess that would leave you behind in life and without your friends? Not that all compulsory schooling friends end up at the same university, but…”

Over the last few weeks, Olivier’s classmates had learned enough of why she was auditing his class to know that she had some sort of charges lingering over her head. Emilia was pretty sure a few had figured out what the exact charges were—the case was mumbled about in the news often enough, even if her name could never be brought up—but everyone knew she was facing losing some amount of her gap year if she was found guilty.

Emilia… hadn’t really let herself think about what would happen if she was found guilty and actually stayed in Baalphoria to serve out whatever sentence she received. Instead, there were passing thoughts of leaving Baalphoria behind—of taking her Dyad friends and the triplets with her, at the very least. If she stayed, though?

Then, Emilia had no idea. The future felt like a chasm, dark and unknown and threatening in a way she couldn’t describe. Perhaps it was because she knew that, no matter how her case went, whoever came out the other side would be someone different—someone changed by the world and having to grow up a little too fast yet again? Maybe.

Yeah… that was what she was going to go with—that was why her mind refused to think too far into the future; to even consider what life might be like in ten years time.

Yeah, it had nothing to do either the slash of toxic red that cut through her mind any time she let herself think too hard about what she might like as a career—as a way to make enough to enjoy her life while doing something with her life. Definitely not that. Nope.