[Can’t Opt Out]

Clemence was both a wonderful and terrible person for Emilia to accidentally find herself trapped in a conversation about the reality of the aether with. The girl was clearly intelligence—a good thing, as Emilia had often found that the more intricate theories behind the aether were lost on people. That said, she wasn’t getting that in-depth as they moved down the last dozen of the normal levels of the holding cells. This was more a surface level scrapping of information into Clemence’s mind—as well as Jerrial and Vern, both of whom were listening, if with less intensity than Clemence.

Occasionally, Jerrial would ask a question. Occasionally, Vern would make a snide remark; three times this had resulted in an argument with Clemence. Currently, Vern was glaring at Rayleen’s back because as much as the woman had only made a single comment on what Emilia was saying—something that put the woman and Vern back into their previously constant antagonism towards one another—she did appear to actually listening as well.

As she’d told them before beginning her lecture, Emilia loved talking about the aether. The problem, however, was that for as intelligent as Clemence was, she knew little about the aether. Even if they’d been in Baalphoria, at sixteen, most teenagers would likely have known little, their education into such things only beginning as their Censor installation dates closed in on them. As it turned out, however, Baalphorian teenagers would know far more than any of the Lüshanian teenagers did, and as a result, an entire level had been spent listening to Jerrial explain how education about the aether and core abilities worked in Lüshan.

Emilia now had much more appreciation for the Baalphorian education system, even if it left something to be desired, especially when it came to skills and the aether. The thing, Emilia now knew, was that in Lüshan at least—and you can bet that, when she had a safe moment to pull her xphern out, she was going to be messaging every Free Colonier she knew to ask about their own nation’s education system—most citizens learned about core abilities from their family. There were some professions, like the Drinarna, where students were given extra education on core abilities, but for the most part, there was no formal education on how to use cores, and certainly, there was little to no information given on how the aether worked.

“That seems… odd?” Emilia had asked while Jerrial explained all this, both Vern and Clemence confirming that this was their experience as well.

As someone who was training to enter a medicine profession, Clemence knew that she would eventually learn more about the meridian system, core injuries, and such. If she chose to go into a specialty, or showed that she was adept at using her core in medicine, she might be given more information in order to do so, but it wasn’t a given.

“I think more specialized classes are given to people who are training to become researchers or doctors?” the teenager had offered, trying to soothe Emilia’s horror. It had not helped, and for the following level she had devolved into a rant about how keeping information secret—which effectively seemed to be what the Lüshanian school system did with information about the aether and cores—limited innovation. In fact, the more she learned about the highly specialized educations that Lüshanians received, the more irate she became!

“My Dyad friend isn’t the sort of person who most people would ever think to give information on willbranding to—I mean, willbranding isn’t very popular at the moment, especially not in Baalphoria, so pretty much no one is actively given it. Still, he’s great at it—someone who could reinvigorate the industry, if he’s given the opportunity. If the Baalphorian government limited the spread of such information, no one would ever know how good he is at it!” she had grumbled at one point, thinking of Simeon and how small he would have been forced to be, had he been born somewhere like Lüshan.

Simeon would always be what he was: an odd, perfect EEC Dyad. Under Lüshan’s policy of setting people onto their course of life early in their teens… No, there was a good chance Simeon would have been forced into the most unobtrusive of programs—would have been forced to do something the government thought he would be capable of doing, rather than something Simeon actually wanted to do. Emilia could appreciate how quickly the government got its citizens moving into the careers they would spend the rest of their life in, but she doubted it had many exceptions for anyone different—something that had likely led to people like Fräthk being able to grab up so many people with irregular deviations.

There had been more ranting after that—mostly about how there was a balance between giving people who were different the adaptations they needed and allowing those adaptations to isolate them—everyone a mixture of silent and agreeing with her, before she’d managed to return to the original topic of conversation: the aether.

Really, due to how little any of them seemed to know about the aether—although who knew with Rayleen—Emilia didn’t think her audience understood much of what she was saying. Mostly, it was a way to keep them all distracted from what was happening around them—from the increasingly desolate environment and the occasional person who inhabited the rooms, their life force a pained pulse through the levels because there was a reason they hadn’t gone with Olivier’s group, and usually, it was that they were sick and dying or had no hope left that leaving would offer them a better life.

Still, her audience—her new friends, she supposed—listened and laughed as she attempted to explain how the aether was both a vast and singular existence. The aether, as she explained it, seemed to be a fathomless existence. Personally, she thought it might have bounds—some place where a slow, near imperceptible fizzle out finally became nothingness. Thinking back to Olivier’s story from the night before, her mind flickered back to the things that had been said in the various documents he had shared with her. Due to {A Private Moment}, she couldn’t add the information to her lecture, but within her mind, Emilia’s still turned the ideas within the story over.

There had been mentions of other things—of the aether’s enemies. Things that seemingly had the ability to challenge the near endlessness of the aether and its power—her power, as the documents had put it. There had been some mentions of these enemies surrounding the aether as well, so perhaps, the aether wasn’t so endless; perhaps, instead, it cut off and become something else, or that nothingness slowly built into something different.

It was some mixture of interesting and terrifying, and really, due to {A Private Moment}, Emilia could only discuss it with Olivier. The man was smart, but he clearly knew little about the aether or skills. Maybe she could talk him into sharing the documents with Halen as well? Then, the pair of them could discuss it? Maybe they’d even include Olivier in whatever ramblings they had. Most likely, she’d have to give him a thousand lectures on the aether… which would need to be more coherent than whatever this babbling, bouncing about lecture was, but he was probably like her—like virtually all non-devs she’d ever met: someone who would gladly learn about anything and everything because you never knew when something might become useful.

The smallest speck of information could turn into a storm of inspiration, a thousand pieces coming together to create something new, something old, something that was a million years in the making.

“So…” Emilia continued on in her lecture, after explaining some of the details of how most humans could only handle a certain amount of aether before their body and mind gave up. There had also been some babbling about genetics—about how a collection of Categories, most importantly Expansion, Control, and Connection Categories, affected how much aether a person could manage at a single moment. This had devolved into Jerrial telling her that there were rumours that once, decades ago, Fräthk had captured a Dyad with Excess Expansion Levels. As it was generally assumed that Excess Expansion Levels made most pregnancies unviable, resulting in spontaneous abortions or the death of the baby shortly after birth, this had been interesting. Unfortunately, it was nothing but a rumour, and it was generally accepted that the Dyad in question had either died or managed to run off.

“Considering that Excess Expansion Levels are theoretically considered to be one of the most dangerous Excess Categories, allowing those with it to use far more aether than anyone else, as well as giving them a far greater range than is supposedly possible, they could have gotten away. After all, they could stand outside of anyone else’s attack range and use their abilities to pick off anyone coming for them,” Emilia had mused, adding that in several Free Colonies there were myths about people with Excess Expansion Levels and the power they could wield. These were all myths, however, and virtually no one claimed to have ever met someone with such abilities. “A few nations also say that the reason Dyads with Excess Expansion Levels never survive is that they are enemies of the aether,” she had added.

As expected, Clemence had immediately asked for more information. Really, Emilia didn’t think the girl was that interested in the subject. More, she thought it was that, just as the triplets would happily listen to her talk forever, knowing how happy having people to listen and discuss things with made her, even when they couldn’t always understand what she was going on about, Clemence was the same. The teenager, for all that she was intense, did seem to want Emilia to be happy. So, she asked questions when it felt appropriate. She listened and hummed in consideration, even when some of what she was being told wasn’t something she had the baseline knowledge to fully understand.

If they stayed together—if Emilia couldn’t figure out a way to get rid of her stalker—Emilia would have to get her a more basic understanding of a number of her special interests, if only so she’d feel less bad about using the girl to soothe her nerves. For all the decades of her life, she had always been the sort to babble when nervous or upset. When no one else was around, she would talk to herself, or when she was still small, to her imaginary friend, their small form always leaning in to listen to anything she said, their golden eyes glistening with interest.

Since having her Censor installed, it was rare that she didn’t have a single person to babble to—and to be fair! She did have a few people she could reach out to. Contacting Malcolm to finally confess was still on her mind—and really, she was going to need to do so when they reached the last of the normal levels of this place, as even she wasn’t stupid enough to go lower without telling someone where she was going. Alaric and Cyan, for as much as they were only Clemence’s age, would likely let her fill their relays with her nonsense as well. While her father was still out of reach, there was always the rest of her family, even if none of them would be able to understand her babbling.

Really, she didn’t have any real, solid reason for not contacting anyone and instead filling the silence with talk about how a bunch of research and anecdotes from the last however long suggested that aether from anywhere could be pulled upon with skills and core abilities—this was part of how she pulled the theoretical aether of the deceased from the aether, no matter how far away they were when they died. Still, she continued to talk, knowing that the only reason Vern in particular wasn’t begging her to shut up was that they only had a single level left to go.

A single level left of normalcy, and Emilia’s stomach turned. Each step for so long had been filled with more dread and suffering that she wasn’t ready to face. There was no choice—not at this point—but to face it. So, for these last few minutes, she would continue to talk and leave herself less room to worry. It was impossible for her to not worry, of course, her brain a constantly churning mess of a thousand thoughts that could never be silenced. Usually, she loved that about her mind—the unstoppable nature of it, the speed of her thoughts and the strange things that come out of them.

Currently, it was annoying. So, she babbled about how the aether was vast and endless, yet it also seemed like any single point of it could be accessed from anywhere, her mind stuttering for a moment because that might be… bad?

What she was telling the group was, just as she had said, based on random bits of research and anecdotes. There was stuff from the Ridge Rind, where they attempted to pull bits of damaged aether from half the nation away, the otherness of it what was used to prove it had actually come from a specific aether scar. Yet, of course the aether of a scar was different, so proving it hadn’t been possible to affect it in a non-standard way for that oddness alone was impossible. As there was currently no way to mark non-scarred aether, in order to prove it could actually be grasped from thousand of kilometres away, it remained research to be continued and expanded for decades to come.

There were anecdotes from the Blood Rain General, as well—stories of him being able to pull on the power of blood from far further than he should have, simply by reaching through the aether in desperation. This wasn’t something he had been able to do often, nor something he could replicate under less-than-life-threatening circumstances, but the man still swore he wasn’t crazy. Once, when captured, he had been moved to a room that was isolated from all but those who had abilities that could block his own. There was no blood for him to pull on, and yet he had. From hundreds of kilometres away, the blood of a friend, wounded in battle, had seeped through the aether to him. It shouldn’t have been possible, and yet.

And yet.

Emilia pulled the aether of people she had cared for from the universe. She had no proof it actually belonged to them when she forced it into bobbles for her chain, and yet, she thought it had.

The aether was vast, and yet, it seemed to exist as something that could be accessed without rules. Every point of the aether met up with every point of the realm on which they resided, allowing for those seeming anomalies. Perhaps it was an endless sky, normally existing in a specific configuration—a constellation of stars, etched over the world in the seeming permanence that everyone believed it did. Unchanging. An infinite number of points, permanently matching up with the human world. Two puzzles, their pieces aligned.

And yet, these drops of research and anecdotes said it wasn’t that simple, and that seemed bad—after all, if any part of the vast darkness that was the aether could be accessed, didn’t that mean the edges could be pulled upon? That the theoretical fizzle out of aether could accidentally be accessed, a skill or core ability failing because it hadn’t grasped aether with density enough to succeed?

Worse, did that mean that the thing that Olivier’s story said existed outside the aether could be brushed against? Could perhaps even be grasped itself—dragged into this world and used to do things the aether did not, could not, do?

Suddenly, as they reached the last of the normal floors, Vern finally giving in and asking if they could please, please, please, be done with discussing the aether, Emilia agreed all too happily. The finite evil that lay under their feet was definitely better than whatever those thoughts were potentially leading her towards.

Definitely, she would be asking Olivier to give Halen access to those documents. In no world was she going to be able to live holding these thoughts inside herself alone, thanks. So, Halen—other people as well, perhaps—but Halen. Definitely Halen.