[Can’t Opt Out]

In Emilia’s mind, there were pros and cons to having a mentor, pros and cons to forging your own path, regardless of the people there to guide you. In her experience, between teachers in compulsory schooling to learning under the Hyrat clones, between dissecting Halen and Vrin’s skills and functions to reverse engineering the Blood Rain General’s core abilities, all teachers were different, their expectations myriad.

Sometimes, it was an age thing—after all, the things that made children better at learning some things vanished into the abyss as they grew, while their little brains could never hope to learn other things.

As children, there had been so much encouragement to learn and experiment. While some things, such as learning how to hold a pen properly, had to be learned early, as did learning to create the precise shapes of words—and no, it didn’t matter that writing on paper was all but obsolete in Baalphoria, such things were still required—there was so much more that was all learning through exploration. They were encouraged to rip into things, ask questions, seek and learn and let themselves be free before the expectations of the world tore into them. One day, they would need to learn the line between a proper, grammatically correct sentence and one that is purposefully flouting the rules to create songs and poetry and love letters. There came a point, where a line was drawn—a point at which they finally needed to learn the proper way of things before they could push limits further and explore—but in those small bodies and minds, almost every moment of their lives had been one of fascination.

Looking up at the clouds and finding works of art, lollibobs and smiling cats or trees growing from the starlit night, obscured by scatterings of bushy clouds. Trying to count all the stars because how dare adults tell them such a thing was impossible? Dancing in the rain and making complicated recipes from leaves and sticks and dirt for imaginary food that their parents would diligently pretend to eat. Drawing on anything they could get their hands on and creating insane stories to accompany them before rushing into the woods to play and explore, BJ poking at plants and taking samples, Simeon slipping away into muddy tunnels—virtually the only time he willingly got dirty. Pretending to find buried treasure and pretending they could escape to sea—leave all their wonderful and shitty parents behind because it was always them against the world, and where one of them went, the rest would follow.

Then, they had grown up. The world was still a beautiful place, but they knew more about it and knew how much horror there was as well—at least, in their small minds and growing bodies, gangly and awkward and not quite right, they had assumed they knew the worst of the world. Where secrets had lain before, now there were truths. There was BJ, alone at home because his parents didn’t want him; instead, they wanted someone quiet and well-behaved and perfect in a way that BJ, perfect as he was, would never be. Simeon, with his girl name and girl parts and girl dresses and parents who just wanted him to be a girl, be a girl, be quiet but not too quiet, wear dresses and speak and never shift his hands through the air again or pull headphones over his ears because the world was just too loud all the time. So much of their pain came from the adults who were supposed to love them, and yet couldn’t love them right, Codeth’s mother barely around while his grandfather was some painful mix of kind and cynical, while Mikhail’s mother always watched him without care, her little boy having no place in her heart, no matter how much she tried to carve out a home for him.

They had seen, by that point, the way the older clones treated Baylor and Finn—clones who were wrong in their estimation, even when they were still so young and hadn’t yet grown into themselves and their quirks. Everyone knew what she had gone through in the orphanage—the hands that had been placed on her, always threatening to move further under her clothes; the punishments laid upon her for nothing and everything all at once. Everyone knew how small that place had made her and her siblings. More and more, they knew the things that would be required of all their black knot friends—understood more what the term even meant, even if to them, those children would always be their friends, just as strange and different as the rest of them.

Their view of the world expanded—spread over borders as she travelled with her father, returning with stories of the Grey Sands and the Inner Court, of her running through the Cyrenix Desert from traffickers and meeting royalty at diplomatic events in Seer’ik’tine. There was also that whole thing where she was sentenced to death in the Dread Coliseum for doing nothing more than stealing the little Norvellian prince’s clothing. He had deserved it, and even if he hadn’t, they were children, and how could an emperor really think death was the appropriate punishment for the joyous stupidity of youth?

So, their world changed—grew bigger and colder and impossibly more interesting. Yet, it is so easy to let that change overwhelm them, each new bit of information pushing down imagination and innovation and exploration until nothing remained but a boring adult who looked at the clouds and saw nothing but clouds hanging overhead—assuming they even looked up to begin with.

Emilia liked to think they had resisted becoming those boring adults, despite the guardrails that had surrounded them as they grew, each passing year bringing new restrictions while others floated away—not that they had always been great at obeying those restrictions.

Sometimes, though, those guidelines were important.

When they had been young preteens, the Hyrat clones had been forceful in their demands that they follow their directions perfectly. Lessons with them had been a purposeful memorization of proper form—of forcing a repetition into their muscles until even if their brains forgot, their bodies would remember. This was life and death. This was making sure that their bodies knew how to fall and roll and pop up so they could run for their lives—run to save their friends. This was learning what to watch for as they moved through the world until, even before their Censors were installed, it was a simple task to pick out all the things they needed to.

So much knowledge had been stuffed into their brains with those training days, and while now, it was all stuffed into their Censors and accessible with barely a thought, it was all an adding up of knowledge—an adding up of ways to look at the world around them until they didn’t have to be paying attention and yet could still say that yes, SecOps officer, they did see so-and-so go by not because they had actually seen them, but because their brains had processed the blip of their face, the flash of the oddly coloured shirt they were wearing as they ran by, escaping a parent who was upset that they had stolen a piece of cake—and yes, SecOps officer, they did have chocolate on their face as they ran by.

Some things had to be learned to perfection, then broken down into nothing and built back up through experimentation. Most of her combat teachers had eventually shifted to that—to making sure those learning from them wouldn’t become trapped by the forms that had been drilled into them. Improvisation was just as important as knowing the building blocks. People can make shit up, but the basis has to come from somewhere. Inspiration did not live within a vacuum; rather, it lived within a cacophony of noise and ideas, bouncing around until the right person thought of them at the right moment of time, pulling the pieces together to create something new because the world was not meant to be a boring, linear plane of existence.

No, the world was something to be explored and pushed against, those who were revolutionaries pushing until things broke, then either hiding what they had done or trying to fix it—or, occasionally, trying to see how much more they could break it.

That was how Emilia thought of learning and existing: as something that was a balance between simply going along with everything learned and consumed throughout a life well lived, and finding fresh growth within the tangle of information. Every bud grew from something, however, and Emilia couldn’t imagine how Rayleen had come to have any control over her abilities without any sort of mentor at all.

Jerrial, for as much as he had implied that his late mother was the only other Lowdouran he knew of, had been able to hear some amount of information about their abilities from her before her passing. From there, he had been able to use the techniques of people with similar abilities to help guide his way… presumably, anyways. The guy had been a bit cagey on how much control he actually had of his abilities, but given the man was somewhat subdued to begin with, Emilia couldn’t be sure how much was not wanting to brag, how much was actual intent to hide questionable control of his abilities. While he hadn’t said much about it, it was clear that he had been able to learn from the other people Fräthk had kidnapped, each of them offering a little dollop of their own experience learning to use their irregular deviation into his pool of knowledge, allowing him to at least get somewhere in his ability to be a Lowdouran.

Rayleen had said nothing to imply she had any similar experience. No, all she had said was that she had no mentor, an implication in all she said that she really meant it: she was entirely self-taught, at least, in her estimation.

Even without having been to Mitine Dyn or the Northern Tribes, however, Emilia could think of a handful of stories from each, related to the people within their borders who believed that the aether was a living thing with a will of its own. None of her stories were very clear, and they tended towards broken narratives, overheard on the streets or retold to her by Baylor, who happened across stories that people would only tell him as long as he was recording them with nothing but his memory so often that Emilia almost did believe the aether was guiding him to them… almost.

Fortunately, all that training with the Hyrat clones meant Baylor had a wonderful memory, even without his Censor recording. Unfortunately, his grasp of several languages wasn’t the best—enough to converse in, not enough to memorize the sometimes intricate grammatical structures of several context- and relation-based languages. As a result, some of his stories couldn’t exactly be relied on to be accurate.

Still, she had them, and even with their questionable state… No, Emilia thought that even with those shattered stories, she could make a good attempt to try and listen to the will of the aether, if she were so inclined.

Really… she had no idea why she wasn’t inclined, now that she was thinking about it. Part of it was likely the lack of such beliefs in most of the nations she visited, part the lack of a more proper mentor. If she believed herself to have some sort of innate ability to connect to the aether, though? Well, some Dyads had an extra connection to the aether, and they certainly couldn’t shut down their abilities, only fail in their attempts to ignore it, each pushing of their abilities aside a tear into their soul. Once they had a specific label for their variety of Dyadism, virtually all Dyads she knew of sought out mentors on Memory- and AetherealBoards—sought out ways to ease the strain of their Dyadism on their mind and body. Even before those designations were given, she and her friends had gathered information on Dyadism in general, knowing there was no way Simeon in particular couldn’t be a Dyad of some sort—that was how important mentors were, even if they weren’t perfect. Going about learning how to handle Dyadism through simple trial and error… yes, they would have tried, for Simeon and her brother, yet, they definitely would have missed things—would have let those insidious, hard-to-see details fall to the side because they lacked the experience to know this or that needed to be accounted for.

So how, with someone like Fräthk before her—relying on her—had Rayleen seemingly never had any mentor, even in the vaguest sense of the word? A mentor, removed through time and existing only within a story. A mentor, not quite the same, but similar enough. A mentor who could at least point her towards ideas on how to learn.

Either she was exceptionally unlucky, was lying, or something else was going on—something like her purposefully avoiding learning from someone else. Emilia had a feeling she wasn’t going to like the reason behind Rayleen’s lack of a mentor, no matter what the reason turned out to be.