[Can’t Opt Out]

Someone had once told him that people were a nuisance, long outliving their usefulness due to hope and tolerance and stupidity.

“It is best to stamp out the ones who are no longer profitable,” that cold and calculating voice of the woman who was his captor, his mother-figure, and his mentor all at once told a much younger version of himself. Above them, the sun had hung high, bearing down on the world with too much heat, the sand burning beneath his hands, his feet long damaged by the blistering heat. “There is something to be said for earning loyalty, and some people will insist that loyalty is worth more in the long run—do not believe them. Loyalty is but something that exists in the middle. It takes time to earn, too much soft weakness required to turn fear and absent eyes into adoration. There will come a time when that loyalty becomes fruitful, but all fruit will rot. How does one retain loyalty once they are faced with the reality that their loyal are no longer useful?”

“When you force people to bend to your will, you can simply slit their throats and be done with them. If everyone fears and loathes you, they may be harder to manage, but they are disposable. To have loyalty is to have responsibilities—to have people under you that you cannot escape, no matter how the years stretch, or if you betray one, the others will never trust you again.” The woman, her jaw a cut of glass and metal that he had seen slice through the veins of anyone stupid enough to allow her too close, had smiled then—a mangled thing of more metal, silver teeth glinting in the searing sun, her lips a rip of bloody red that could have been their natural shade or a lipstick born of the blood of her enemies and victims.

Her story had gone on from there, meandering and yet cutting deep, as was her way. Words of poetry fell from her tongue, cast in a language that he had barely yet spoken but could grasp the basics of. When his mentor had spoken like that, in the language of her home that he was most certainly not supposed to know—and he had tried so hard to never let her see his comprehension, lest she realize her ramblings of the past actually found a home within his mind—it was simply that she was falling back into her mind. Once, when he was still small and wondering why he had been sold to her, he had asked why she would sometimes speak to him in a language he did not know and she had no intention of actually teaching him.

“It is the language of the universe,” she had replied, her jaw not yet mutilated but still bearing scars enough to turn heads and leave whispers in her wake.

Kra siv Grinstara.

It wasn’t a name he had ever been able to fully grasp the translation of, something within it lost to time or a mistranslation—although, after decades of travel and gathering wisps of information, he had his theories. They were not theories he would give even thought to, lest the aether gather them into itself—herself, if the cruel woman he had only ever called mentor or occasionally Kra were to be believed in her ramblings.

The universe was not something to be spoken to, even if Kra had insisted on speaking her native Grey Sander as though her words would seep into it and find a home—would seep into it like ingredients in a recipe, everything churning together until it was a perfect meal for monsters.

Or, alternatively, until it flopped, something going wrong along the way. He was not the sort to cook real food—he had people for that—but he could appreciate the imagery. He was a flopped recipe himself, and he certainly spent enough time stirring all his own ingredients into the world, hoping to create a delicious meal of it.

Sometimes, he let himself linger on thoughts of his mentor and the life he had lived alongside her before he had flopped—had outlived his usefulness, only getting lost in the deserts of Mitine Dyn as he ran from Kra’s death sentence saving him from a knife across his throat. Kra had been an odd thing, raising him to have no loyalty towards her, and yet, she had taught him so much and so easily decided she was done with him.

In many ways, the things she had taught her were all representations of how not to treat the people who worked beneath him. There was, of course, a balance between his little ones seeing him as something too friendly—too easily taken advantage of—and something so frightening they would take the first chance to run.

Unless they were his enemy, people did not run away from him—no, they only ran to him.

Still, he couldn’t deny that sometimes the people who worked for him could become useless hunks of flesh and blood. Unlike his mentor, however, he did not believe them a lost cause, better off dead than a burden—or worse, a betrayer.

People, in his estimation, could—with few, brutal exceptions—become useful once more. It was simply a matter of their personality and skills being repurposed—recycled. Still, he couldn’t deny that there was that time between, when a question hung in the air of whether the person would actually manage to become useful again, or if they would continue to be useless.

Gëon was a firm believer in recycling, shifting those who owed their allegiance to him here and there as their minds wandered—and realistically, he’d often found that it was simple boredom that led his people to become useless wastes of space, rather than anything more serious. He was the sort of person who inspired loyalty, so it was rare for those who worked for him to betray him—although, it certainly happened, such betrayal currently stewing back in the city. Still, one did not inspire loyalty if they were also known for killing people who lost their usefulness or simply annoyed him.

Currently, the people in this cave were somewhere in between being useless and annoying, and he was, unfortunately, struggling not to just kill them all. It would be the perfect time to do so, he thought—after all, several of his smugglers had apparently been killed by some group descending through the cave system. Would anyone save his little shadow, sitting cross-legged against the wall, waiting for him to figure out what to do so they could get out of there, actually know if he were the one to kill the rest? His little shadow likely wouldn’t care—they knew none of these people and rarely cared for anyone they met while they moved through the world—but he did need to retain the child’s loyalty.

Were Gëon to lose their loyalty, things would become… troublesome.

So, he couldn’t kill these fools—he especially couldn’t kill them as there were still at least two wandering about the cave system. The worst thing was the fact that the smuggling group wasn’t even sure how many people had actually survived their senseless assault on the group who had decided to use the cave system, presumably to get into Falmíer. They thought two had survived, but apparently, the group they had assault were terrifying murderers.

Gëon wanted to point out that, from everything the smugglers had told him, they had been the ones to attack the group, seemingly without cause. While it was possible the group had been trying to work their way there—to this cave where their wares were stored before being smuggled through the cave system and then on to bigger things—Gëon doubted it. The man who was telling the tale of their attack on the group didn’t believe it. His little shadow, for as much as they were young and were barely listening, their eyes instead glued to the book he had gotten them for the day, didn’t believe it.

No one believed it, not even—

It was the smallest thing—this pitter of emotion, seeping through the cave’s walls. Even as powerful as he was, Gëon was surprised he felt it. The cave systems of the Lowdouran interfered with the transference of aether, resulting in only the most powerful of emotions being felt through them—and certainly, he had felt a burst of rage earlier. That had been what originally drew him here, before the smugglers had even returned with reports of a problem within the caves.

There was just too much happening in the city, with Fräthk finally—and stupidly, from what he’d been able to learn over the last few hours—making a move against him. The Drinarna were in chaos. The papers checkpoint had been forced to a near standstill. Perhaps most concerningly, the clones were in chaos, running through the city and trying to drag various Baalphorians back to the embassy. It had been fascinating to watch, as he shifted through the city, gleaning information as he went.

The Baalphorians the Hyrat clones were trying to herd back to the embassy had been rather uncooperative, the usually unflappable clones losing more and more of their patience as their efforts were rebuffed. Normally, he might have thought little of it—it would in no way be the first time tourists caused issues, their embassy’s guards forced to try and get them either to the embassy or out of Lüshan before the Drinarna had them dumped into a cell for a few days—yet, there had been that girl.

The silverstrain, who had known the Drinarna and been known back. The silverstrain, who was Baalphorian and had been perfectly prepared to cut down the officer threatening to rape her.

Piece of shit. Gëon could abide violence and threats, but there had been nothing but malevolent want in that Drinarna’s intentions towards the girl.

Rape her.

Kill her.

Maybe rape her again—see how long it takes for her body to cool down once death takes her.

Those were the thoughts filling that man’s head, and Gëon had been in a good mood since being given the pleasure of reducing him to a pile of blood and sinew. Then, he’d gotten to kill the rest of that scum—gotten to pull teeth from the mouth of their leader, rip her nails from their beds, forcing confessions off her tongue.

Then, of course, he’d left her a pile of meat as well. All of them, scum, trash, disgusting wastes of energy because they had all been perfectly happy to let that man assault the Baalphorian silverstrain—the silverstrain, who had been terrified of him, and yet, had still contained all the confidence of someone who would fight him if she had to and had been relatively confident she might win. More fascinating, however, had been her near instantaneous trust that he wouldn’t hurt her—and unless she gave him reason to, he wouldn’t. Gëon did not make a habit of attacking people for no reason, nor did he allow those who worked for him to do so.

Hence, why he was so annoyed with this current situation.

“Why did you attack them?” he asked again, pushing fragments of his abilities into the aether. It seeped through the universe, pressing into the smugglers, trying to force truth from them. Unfortunately, he couldn’t torture his own people to get answers out of them. Even more unfortunately, when they all returned to their babbling about how they had felt like they had to, he wasn’t even convinced they were lying. As much as they all seemed to realize attacking the group had been senseless, they were still convinced they had needed to attack them.

That was all… not good. There were no good reasons, as far as he was concerned, for attacking the group as they worked their way through the cave system. From what he’d been able to feel of the mystery group, since one of them had let their anger flood the world, Gëon’s abilities latching on to it like a leash, they weren’t following some set path in the cave system. They would find their way out soon, but it would be nowhere near this cavern.

In other words, even if they had been stupid enough to attempt to come to this end of the cave system to steal their wares—it would make much more sense to swipe the goods once his people had moved it through the cave system, hence why he had little belief they were a group of thieves attempting to steal his product—they had no map of the cave system, nor knowledge of the location of their storage area. Usually, his people were smarter than this—and really, retreating to kill the mystery group here, rather than risk fighting within the cave system would have been the better option, if the group had been coming to steal from them—and the fact that his people seemed so… out of it, was not good.

The question, he supposed, was why they were so out of it. As a collector of people with diverse abilities, Gëon knew there were a near infinite number of ways to manipulate minds out there. Technically, it was possible his smugglers had all suddenly been hit by profound boredom in their jobs and decided that using their brains was too much work. Possibly, if highly unlikely. It was possible some member of the group they had attacked had done something to them, but that was unlikely as well given everything he felt from the group indicated they were Baalphorian, as was the presence lingering a little ways into the cave system, listening and waiting.

It was somewhat difficult to tell from emotions alone where a person was from, especially through the distance and Lowdouran’s echoing obfuscation; however, combined with the clones’ behaviour and the silverstrain and the few Baalphorians who were apparently trying—and largely failing—to get through the papers checkpoint, Gëon was willing to believe the group traversing the cave system were also Baalphorian. The question there was why as well, but that could wait for later.

For the moment, their nationality was more important because Baalphorians locked so many of their abilities into their Censors, and the people who created skills and functions for those things had long disregarded anyone with more diverse abilities from their considerations. Granted, Gëon didn’t keep tabs on the nation, as he had little contact with them, but even if skills for such things now existed, he doubted the group would have used some skill to make his smugglers attack their group, to say nothing of them having some ability to erase his people’s memories as to why they had attacked. That might be something the Hyrat clones could do to Censor owners, but none of his people had such things.

So, what in the universe had made his people attack the group when all evidence, obvious even to someone with only a few brain cells, said the group wasn’t trying to interfere in their business? And perhaps more importantly, how was it that they still seemed to have so little ability to think through the error of their actions? They possessed the vaguest of confusion, but it was muted, as though they couldn’t truly grasp the error in their own thinking.

It was one thing for people to become useless through boredom or betrayal or simple revelation that no, actually, they were that stupid, but this… did this count as an injury? Some sort of mental trauma that would lead to him having to remove them from the field, as they could no longer be trusted?

Annoying—this was the sort of situation where loyalty was annoying. The best option might very well turn out to be killing them, before their brains could make them do other strange things. Unfortunately, that would make all his people nervous.

Annoying, but for the moment, he was going to need to put all of them on leave… and under guard, lest they do anything else so strange.

Just what he needed, in the middle of the chaos that was occurring within the city: more work.

As if the aether were fucking with him—and certainly, it wouldn’t be the first time—one of the two probably not dead smugglers burst out of the cave system. He’d known she was there, of course, her emotions frantic as she moved through the darkness. For a second, he simply added another person to the count of how many people he would need to find beds for, until their mental state could be evaluated, then he saw it: the gemstone, gripped tight in her hand.

The gemstone that he had thought lost, months ago now.

The gemstone that definitely shouldn’t have been in the cave system.