[Can’t Opt Out]

The alarm blared and Emilia continued on. So did Rayleen and Clemence. Jerrial’s steps faltered as they reached the hidden door to the stairwell that would lead them into the bowels of the building, putrid and stinking through all the layers of material and aether and air—through the still closed hidden door as well as what Emilia would eventually learn were long, winding stairwells with yet more doors, some hidden, some labelled with the horrors within. At the time, decades ago—although her present, dreaming mind was so far removed from the moment, through so much overuse of the Virtuosi System’s time skew during the war, and a thousand little instances of her memory being pulled apart and puzzled back together by dozens of different hands—Emilia thought that she would like to come back to this place one day. Such a maze, it must surely be hiding yet more secrets.

So, she thought, later, once Wander had a handle on the situation, she would come back. The place would be empty of living souls, and she would come back—dig through the grime and bones and the thousands of personal effects she would glimpse on their way down, down, down—and find every thing of value in the place. The Drinarna might look, but they would have bigger issues, she thought—they had Fräthk to take down, possibly the scary man, and whatever overall organization they worked for as well. That wasn’t even mentioning all the internal corruption or all the things that were yet to come. So, searching for proof of all the victims of this place would likely be low on their list of things to do. Plus! Things got missed all the time! She could come help—come find all the bits and pieces of the people who had been tortured in this place and let them rest.

That wasn’t really a Baalphorian belief, of course. Some Free Colonies thought the dead could not rest until their physical body was together as one once more. One western culture in particular thought that all amputated limbs had to be cremated, the ashes carried with the living person until the day their soul left them. Another cultural group from the same general region—and so many of their beliefs were sparks of inspiration away from one another that, despite there being no proof of it, most people thought the groups had at one point, long ago, been one—thought that amputation was an unacceptable conclusion.

“The human soul is bound to the body in a map of meaning and inspiration. It does not shrink with the container, but is severed. The loss of blood and skin in injury is bad enough, but to lose a limb is to slice away a piece of soul. That soul is gone, the person unwhole—corrupted. The wound of their soul allows evil in, and therefore, to lose a limb is to lose the person themself. Do not allow such corruption. Save the limb or kill the person before their soul can be hacked apart—before their broken body allows the evil that is always lingering in the peripheries to seep into their body.”

Doctor Vickers liked to collect medical texts from the Free Colonies. Due to how difficult such travel was, as well as how busy he always was, he rarely visited them himself, but through great effort—and a number of clones who spoke foreign languages sitting with him and babbling to him in this language or that over the years—he had read through many of the texts. Emilia brought him new ones whenever she happened across one during her own travels, and she knew the clones also brought him texts. The man enjoyed learning and reading, and as long as they were respectful of the often delicate books—as well as a few types of Free Colony technology, which were always a treat to play with—he allowed anyone to view his collection.

Baylor and BJ poked their heads into the collection often, as did she. She was pretty sure Halen had taken to reading the texts from the Grey Sands, while any time anyone came across information that related to willbrands they translated it for Simeon—there were a number of ways that willbrands could harm their users, while willbrands could also be used as conduits to aid people who had been injured, hence their occasional inclusion into medical texts. A few other topics, when happened across, they would translate and forward on to this person or that because little of what they found was information that couldn’t be shared between their friends and more sensible classmates, at the very least.

Knowledge was power. Knowledge could bring closure. Emilia didn’t think that, were she to ever run into someone who had known one of the victims of this place, that she would be telling them anything of what she saw, smelled, felt of this place, nor what she had tasted in the aether itself, and how was it that hatred had become something that could be tasted? That the feel of its rottenness was a brutal seep over her senses, a sour tang that was making her stomach turn yet again—this time, her Censor kept the anti-vomiting skill pulled firm around her body and instincts, lest she once again start heaving.

A single step into the dark maw behind the hidden door had her spine shuddering straight, her core giving a clench because it didn’t like it here. Her Censor listened to it—and odd that, the ability for her Censor to not only hear the instincts of her core, a thing it hated using, and yet give all the implication that it was primed to follow its directive to get out of there as soon as possible.

Emilia pressed down on that instinct to leave—to turn and run back to the light, up and up and up, through winding stairwells and levels filled with misery and death, up and up and up, through the city and the papers checkpoint and back to the sunlit world. Probably, the instinct was right and this wasn’t a place where anyone should be, but that was the thing: there were people here, and she had confidence and stupidity enough to keep going down into the depths of yet more misery, hoping to get even a single one of them out.

This wasn’t a place for humanity, even in the form of chipped bones and scattered belongings. A number of Free Colonies had beliefs that, if an object were loved enough, it could come to contain bits of a person’s soul. Emilia thought her bag was likely like that—this thing that had been given to her decades ago, the first mark of her new parents’ love. It was hers, just as she was its. Plus, she’d bled on it… a few times. So, it literally contained parts of her within it. Parts of Yujao as well, the embroidery of it fraying but there and filled with her friend’s affection for her.

How much of a person’s cracking soul must the belongings they clung to as death came for them hold? Probably more than a little, if one were inclined to believe such things.

So, yes, Emilia thought, if she could come back and clean out every fleck of humanity from this place and return it to whoever wished to have it—burn everything that remained back into the aether—she would.

Of course, she would never get the opportunity, the situation in Lüshan collapsing in on itself under the weight of all Wander would need to do to get things back in order. Every time Emilia’s feet would find themselves in Lüshan for decades to come—through the years between this day and the first time she found herself in Falmíer, after war had begun to rip through the world, through the war and into the future, when she would stand with Mikhail and mourn, kneel with Jerrial and assure him that none of this was his fault—there were always more important things to do.

There were small children to smile at, old friends to laugh and mourn with. There was food to be had and recipes to steal and memories to be made, and by the time the war fizzled out, it was too late, what remnants of humanity that lingered within these gore splattered halls and the dozen others the Drinarna would find over the following years buried under yet more blood and bodies.

That was all in the far future, of course. That was all a thousand discussions, mistakes, years from the now—the now, where Rayleen was stepping fearless into the pit of suffering Fräthk had made for themself, where Clemence kept her arm looped through Emilia’s no matter what, where Jerrial hesitated because Vern had stopped, a hand pressed to his mouth as the stink of the land below hit him.

With a gentle shove to his back, Emilia pushed Jerrial to keep going, muttering that Olivier’s group must have triggered the security system, and at this point, there were just going to have to trust they could take care of themselves and that, with the distraction of their escape, no one would think that they were down here as well. Still, they needed to move—he needed to move, find what he was looking for. Then, she turned, Clemence turning with her, towards Vern.

“Do you want to stay here?” she asked, fully intending to leave Clemence there with the man if he couldn’t make himself move a single step further.

The teenager wouldn’t like it, but if Emilia demanded she stay with him, she would. There would have to be a dozen more demands tacked on as well—the girl had to protect Vern, she couldn’t kill him or leave him or accidentally lose him—but leaving them there was better than bringing Vern with them if it was going to be too hard on him. It was going to be too hard on all of them as it was; they didn’t need to be left forcing him along, when he could easily stay there.

Vern’s eyes were hazy as he stared into hers, and for a moment, Emilia wondered if he also had some sort of irregular deviation. Not something powerful, perhaps not even something that Jerrial knew about—maybe not even something Vern himself knew of, perhaps. There was just something in that gaze that was a little bit other in that way that only people who weren’t quite right would ever have within them. Of course, there was a universe worth of ways that a person could be not quite right, so perhaps it wasn’t an irregular deviation—perhaps it was just some other, strange or mundane thing that was different about the man.

Emilia didn’t know, and whatever it was, it was likely something small—minuscule in the scope of last Lowdouran and black knots and non-devs and all the Dyads Olivier was likely travelling with and whatever Rayleen was; nothing compared to the power of the scary man or the corruption of the Drinarna or the reality that something might very well be lingering in the darkness that edged against the aether.

Thoughts of that had been hard to escape, in the moments between when they had seeped into her mind and now. Emilia had tried to push them aside, but they lingered there—a monster, waiting to snap out at her. The worst thing, perhaps, was that Emilia wanted to poke at it—wanted to sit herself down in a Virtuosi Rig and work and work and work until her Load Levels were scattering under the strain of just too fucking much, all so she could reach towards the lurking dark and see what was there.

Poke it.

Prod it.

Rip a piece of flesh from it and see what it was made of.

“Do not,” Rayleen called from the dark, startling both Emilia and Vern, who really had been considering whether to come with them or stay, she thought.

Realistically, at this point, Emilia thought Rayleen was telling her not to poke at the darkness—or to not do whatever vaguely defined but definitely deranged thing her energy was telling the woman she was considering. Vern, perhaps, took it as Rayleen telling him not to stay, and as much as he seemed to have as little confidence that the woman was actually reading the will of the aether as Emilia herself did, neither of them could deny that the woman was, more often than not, correct in whatever she told them.

So, he huffed and pushed himself past her and Clemence, hand still pressed to his nose, and it was funny, in a way. Neither Jerrial nor Vern, after their weeks of living on the street, smelled of flowers and sunshine… or whatever the Lüshanian equivalent was, there being no sunshine and little greenery within the subterranean cities. Regardless, the pair hadn’t noticed the smell of decay growing as they descended the normal levels, as far as she had been able to tell. Yet there, where yes, some putrid scent was rising from the depths, they did notice. Emilia didn’t think it was the scent, however, finally getting to them.

No, instead it was the evil of this place, corrupting the aether itself until just as a little while ago her own awareness of the aether had shifted the oddness of the aether into something her brain could actually understand, it was doing that now.

The only difference was that now, everyone could taste the wrongness in the air.