[Can’t Opt Out]

The status of being a heartbreaker sat somewhere strange within Emilia’s idea of herself. A trail of boys and girls lay behind her, but they weren’t generally bodies she left there on purpose. In general, it was more an unfortunate meeting of circumstances.

There was her, generally kind and friendly, able to pick up acquaintances wherever she went. It was unfortunate, but sometimes people took that friendliness the wrong way, especially when they didn’t know of her through other people or rumours. She was nice, and too often, the people she was nice to would assume she was interested, as though someone couldn’t just be nice for the sake of it.

In a strange turn of events, this had ended in her often hooking up with people who saw her for a silverstrain before an actual person—not that she would sleep with anyone who so completely dehumanized her! There was just this energy that surrounded certain people, however—this implication that while she was nice enough as a person, they were more interested in finding out what it was like to fuck a silverstrain, rather than interested in fucking her specifically. Not everyone who had that sort of energy got between her legs, and for the most part, the triplets were currently keeping her busy enough between them. Sometimes, however, she wanted something different. Given she was surrounded by dozens of clones who had practically every kink spread between them—allegedly, anyways; she hadn’t actually engaged with most of those kinks, just heard whispers of them—there was little need for her to seek out anyone else.

Sometimes, however, it wasn’t just a different sort of sex she craved, but a different sort of body.

Someone thinner or thicker than a clone’s body was. A different face smiling down at her, breathing into her neck. Different hair cascading down around them or splayed out over the sheets. Calluses dragging over her skin. A voice she’d never heard, calling out her name.

Well, the point was, sometimes, she wanted someone to take to bed, and sometimes, she was just being friendly and didn’t want to have sex with a person! Too many people assumed silverstrains would have sex with anyone, and while Emilia liked all sorts of bodies, she wasn’t so much of a sex fiend that she would fuck anything that moved!

So, trail of broken hearts behind her—seriously, the fasted way for someone to find themself on a list of people she would never have sex with was for them to leave any sort of implication behind that they wanted to have more than sex with her.

Emilia heart was currently full up, thanks! There were boys there, and while there was space for more… Well, it wasn’t something easily explained, but she had often felt like the gaping emptiness within her was meant for someone specific—possibly multiple someones. They were shaped and formed and meant to be filled by someone or someones, and that someone—or those someones—hadn’t yet tried to fill it—or them!

Ignoring the confusion of singulars and multiples and the contraction of those spots—they had no time for contemplations on how certain people might fit into them at the moment, nor even how she was increasingly convinced on the multiple people front, thank you—Emilia let her eyes trail down to the girl still attached to her arm, sad as she now was. Usually, when Emilia broke someone’s heart accidentally, it wasn’t quite like this.

In Baalphoria, Censors could brush one another upon meeting, sending over a few details. There would be nothing important inside them, like names or where the person lived or went to school or anything; instead, there the mildest of details of the person, the most notable of which was whether the people involved in the exchange could legally have sex or engage in a relationship—at least, it was the most important in her case, young looking as she was. Usually, after a short interaction with her, people weren’t so dense as to not realize she was in her mid-to-late twenties these days, even without that brush of information.

In Baalphoria—and, even more so, in the Penns—it didn’t take that much for people to realize she had to be in the latter half of her compulsory schooling. Now graduated, it wouldn’t take more than someone coming across her out in the wild while school was in session for them to realize she was older than she appeared. In the Penns, most sub-30s looked at least a little younger than they actually were—not as much as she did, generally, but it was common enough that few residents generally assumed they knew how old someone was by looks alone.

Instead, they used context clues: how the person talked and what they talked about; who they were with and how they all interacted with one another; what the person was wearing; how much makeup the person had on.

It wasn’t always perfect, but it was enough that few people ever assumed she was as young as she appeared, even when they hadn’t confirmed her age. It helped that she was a little taller now, and while she would always been a few inches shorter than the average height of female Baalphorians, she’d met a few people over the last few months of being an almost full-grown adult who were similar in age and height.

Still, the reality was that when she was out in more normal Baalphorian society, without at least a brief interaction, a lot of people still seemed to assume she was a teenager—she’d even gotten comments from people, telling her she should dress her age and stop trying to act older than she was. Usually, it was around this point that Grenner or another clone—or occasionally Malcolm—would pop up to tell them she was actually in her late-twenties. The worst thing was that with Hail slowly entering the public consciousness, there had been an uptick in people using hacks, and you know what people could do with hacks!? Alter the age their Censor told strangers upon meeting! So now! Instead of things getting better for her, they were getting worse! More and more people weren’t even believing her Censor when it told them how old she was!

Choosing to believe that he would eventually get it, Emilia sent a snide message off to Halen complaining about this terrible turn of events: the fact that Hail was inadvertently fucking with her ability convince people of her age; the fact that she had attracted a teenage black knot stalker who may or may not also be a cannibal; the fact that said stalker now appeared to have a broken heart; and the fact that a confusion over her age had caused said broken heart.

Really, though, she should have realized that under the current circumstances, her clothing and makeup—messy as it likely now was—and knowledge of the world wouldn’t be enough to indicate to anyone how old she was. A little part of her was surprised that Vern and Jerrial hadn’t been able to guess at her age, as they had seen her kill that woman who had been after them, and she really thought she’d told them enough about her life that they would have put it all together? Evidently not. Then again, with how long Jerrial had seemingly been a captive of Fräthk, and having no idea as to what sort of life Vern had lived, perhaps it wasn’t so odd that they wouldn’t be able to judge her existence against anything normal, and having been forced to spend so much time with Cameron over the years, Emilia knew their cultures weren’t so different that it was just that cultural divide alone causing the confusion.

Clemence could be forgiven for not realizing how old she was, though—they hadn’t known each other long, after all, and while she had been given a few details about everything that had happened in the last few hours… No, it really wasn’t enough to have indicated her age, and seriously! She felt bad!

Slowly making their way down the stairwell—apparently, the first few levels were mostly used for storage of drugs and such things, and they would need to move to another, more hidden stairwell to get any lower—Emilia couldn’t pull her thoughts away from the sad teenager.

Honestly, caring about the girl’s feeling was ridiculous, even for her! This girl was a black knot! Fräthk’s child! Clemence had effectively inserted herself as Emilia’s official stalker the second they met, and in no world should Emilia had been feeling bad for having accidentally broken her heart! That wasn’t even accounting for the fact that Jerrial was convinced the girl was a serial killer, snuffing out any girl who caught and lost her attention!

Yet, Emilia still felt bad. The teenager was just so sad and dejected, and while the weirdly intense, cannibalistic energy she had possessed when they first met had been uncomfortable, it had at least been her. This sadness didn’t suit the girl, who was, in the end, just a prisoner of her genetics. Growing up the child of a criminal—although Jerrial had been pretty sure she rarely saw Fräthk and had little connection to the organization—it was to be expected that the girl would be a little messed up. Even without the black knot, she would have no doubt been strange. With it? Well, all she needed was someone to guide her into being a better person, and you know what!?

Fuck the Laprise, Baxter, and Hyrat families! Clearly, being friends with so many black knots had messed with her mind! Here was the perfect opportunity to push her teenage stalker away before the kid grew properly attached to her, and what was she doing? Not the sensible thing, that was for sure!

A normal person would have tried to run from this girl the moment they realized what was happening. A sensible person would take this opportunity to gently nudge her into realizing that nothing could ever happen between them, and then hope the girl didn’t decide to kill her, as she may well be doing to all the rest of her failed relationships. Those things made much more sense, but no, what was she doing? Contemplating how to make the girl feel better.

Perhaps she could nudge her into a hope that, one day soon, she would meet someone better? Or try to tell her that she hadn’t been a good choice to begin with? Emilia didn’t really want to name any of the boys she loved—it wouldn’t do for Clemence to snap upon meeting them, and she didn’t think learning that she loved other black knots would help anything—and informing the girl that she wasn’t even sure she could be into another woman also seemed like a profoundly terrible idea—Clemence could take it as a sign that their relationship was destined to fail, even if they’d been closer in age, after all. Then, boom! The teenager could try to kill her!

Emilia would rather avoid a slightly psychotic black knot teenager trying to kill her, thanks. Realistically, where they were going, there might be tons of people who would be all too happy to try and kill them; they didn’t need another person added to the list.

When Emilia finally opened her mouth, of course, that thought was still lingering in her mind. There had been many times in her life when her mouth got away from her, spitting out words and intentions before her brain and Censor had fully computed them. A few times, she’d attempted to code something to slow her mouth down—something to force her to think about what she was about to say before actually saying it. Those functions had been… limited in their success. Where Mikhail’s brain struggled to latch onto such functions, her own was just too fast, even her Censor struggling to keep up with it sometimes.

So, by the time the suggestion that they could be friends had already slid off her tongue, her Censor was belatedly telling her it was a terrible suggestion. Emilia couldn’t really argue with its opinion that she was an idiot; so, a quick succession of caveats had followed. At the very lest, she hadn’t said anything along the lines of they could be friends instead of being something more—that would have been terrible.

No, what she’d said, thank all the aether, was, “You’re holding on to me pretty tightly. Does that mean you want to be friends? I could always use more friends.”

Fuck, how terrible it would have been to imply they could be friends instead of girlfriends—also presumptuous. Teenagers were weird, their minds spinning in strange directions, and while Emilia was almost positive the girl had been eyeing her up as a romantic interest—and possibly an entrée, unfortunately—she wasn’t going to imply she knew that.

Still, she quickly added more suggestions.

Maybe Clemence would like her other friends.

She had a few friends around Clemence’s age, who she would perhaps get on with—Emilia sent a quiet apology to the teenagers she was possibly going to be sicking this girl on after she made that suggestion.

When those suggestions didn’t work, Emilia also added as conversationally as she could that she had a few friends she was semi-romantically involved with, adding that those relationships were complicated by a lot of things, but they had started off as friends and eventually grown into something more. Then, of course, she had to quickly add that she leaned into polyamory and would be heartbroken if any of her friends died, and was she just making this worse?

Given the increasingly horrified looks Jerrial and Vern were giving her, when she cast a glance back at them, they seemed to think she was, in fact, making things worse. Mostly, she was just left thankful that while the pair of men had seen her use some of her skills, no one in their group—save perhaps Rayleen because who knew with that woman—had any idea just how powerful she was.

Chances were, if Clemence decided to kill her, it wouldn’t be a successful attempt—not just due to her being a teenager who, if Emilia had to guess, was not a low-dev, but the situation as a whole. Emilia had so many defensive skills loaded up for easy access that it was giving her a mild headache. She may have also had some monitoring functions aimed at Clemence, just to be safe. So, no, Emilia wasn’t particularly worried the girl could hurt her, if she tried.

Still… it wasn’t just her in danger, and even as Clemence turned a slightly less sad smile up at her, telling her she would like to be Emilia’s friend, as well as meet some of her other friends, Emilia sent off a warning message to all her friends in the area, along with a picture of the teenager.

Best that they be prepared, in case they met the girl and she decided to try and get rid of them. Something told Emilia, insane as it was, that Clemence wouldn’t attack her friends—she did actually seem genuine as she asked questions about which friends Emilia thought she’d like the most—but it wouldn’t do to not let them know that the girl might be a risk.

After all, teenagers were, by definition, rather erratic and unpredictable. Right now, the girl might be perfectly happy imagining meeting all her friends, but who knew if that would change, especially considering that black knot of hers.