[Can’t Opt Out]

Many of the skills that had been created for their prank war or their accidentally acquired combat classes—or occasionally just pure inspiration and innovation—had been exceptionally useful of the years. There were just so many skills, some of them with dozens of potential use cases.

The messenger dragons Emilia had left for Olivier—dragons, plural, as she’d needed to leave quite a few littered throughout the area outside the holding cells, as who knew if the man would come out the front door or some other random location—were one of those skills that rarely saw use outside of their classroom wargames—the more accurate description for their combat classes—and the Inner Court.

The skill had originally been created so a few of them could betray the rest of their assigned group. The wargames that their class took part in were an odd thing, rising up from the fact that they were all experienced in combat both from their years studying with the clones and their prank war, as well as the fact that their teachers had grown increasingly concerned over the years about how far ahead they were in virtually all of their subjects. Most likely, the teacher who had first proposed the combat classes—a lovely man who had suffered a sudden stroke a few months into teaching them and been forced to retire—had been hoping to both give them something else to do, so he could find some way to keep them interested in their actual classes, while also redirecting their mischief into official combat classes, so they would stop pranking each other during school hours.

It hadn’t really worked, and instead, subsequent teachers had simply been left not knowing what to do with them—not that their teachers had ever really known what to do with their chaotic class. It had just gotten worse, was the thing. Where most teachers could fake their way through more educational classes, as well as redirect them to resources that were appropriate for their excelled learning, the combat classes were simply something else.

Most Baalphorians didn’t know how to fight—neither in hand-to-hand combat nor through skills—so, they really had no idea how to manage the combat classes their entire class had refused to give up. As a result, most of their teachers eventually just left them to it.

The end result was that they were not only as well-trained as most soldiers—even more well-trained in the use of most skills—but that they had gone through hundreds of scenarios over the years, many ripped straight from real-world situations. There had been some hacking involved there—some reading of illicitly obtained military documents on the various battles and drama that had filled Baalphoria’s units since the last informational loss of the last Colonial War. Both The Black Knot and the Blood Rain General had also supplied them with stories of plenty of ridiculous drama as well—truly, the things that happened during war and training could be absolutely bonkers. People thought soldiers were serious people, and to be fair, the more regular military soldiers did lean into severity and following all the rules, no matter how ridiculous they were.

People tended to join the military during times of peace for a handful of reasons, and while some certainly wanted to do good, Emilia had found that most had more selfish reasons.

A desire for more power.

Control issues.

Familial expectations.

There were, of course, also people who were sent to military school for being little shits—not something common in Baalphoria, but it was a thing in a number of other nations—or were outright sentenced to serve as part of some legal repercussion. All this seemed to result in the majority of regular military soldiers being sticks in the mud who took official regulations as seriously as one could, or alternatively, who had been broken by the system.

The thing was, all the documents and stories also showed that during real, well-blown war, other people inevitably ended up in the miliary was well. There were non-devs and people with all sorts of irregular deviations, as well as people with more of a mind for innovation who would never give their minds to the military during peacetimes, but neither would they keep it from the military during war either. These weren’t people who wanted to be at war; instead, they were there because there was no other option. While there were certainly units and commanders who refused to deal with these others, who often refused to bend to the normal rules and regulations of the military—they would be perfectly fine returning home rather than bend themselves to military stupidity—plenty of soldiers accepted that having an ill-behaved non-dev fighting in the war was better than having no non-dev at all.

The best drama always came out of those units with non-regular military members filling in their ranks. Some of it was fun. Some of it was serious.

Emilia especially liked the stories of their others getting fed up with military stupidity and overthrowing their terrible commanders. The ones where factions rose up within units, slowly sowing the seeds of dissent before they went on to betray the unit or even their nation itself were fascinating as well—granted, she wouldn’t really want to be living through such situations, but they were fun to play out.

All of them had found betraying each other in their wargames to be exceptionally enjoyable—these were classes, after all, and they were often teamed up with people they didn’t like, so why wouldn’t they want to betray people from the other side of the class? Plus, there was something to be said about not betraying your group but being able to sow paranoia within it all the same.

Reasons aside, this all meant that amongst their class, they had dozens of way to communicate with each other that didn’t involve the aethernet or any of the other, official alternative protocols. Unfortunately, they had never had the sense to create something that would have made communicating with one another over long distances possible, leaving them unable to contact each other while her friends were inside the aethernet- and xphern-blocking section of the cave system—although, with how much the rock above her was interfering with nearly everything, perhaps nothing had been able to get through, even in shorter distances?

A quick message to Halen while her group continued their quiet descent into Fräthk's torture chambers about what else hadn’t worked within the cave system revealed that the rock had indeed blocked virtually every form of communication. A few, extremely short-range communication protocols—which generally only worked when people were a half-dozen or so metres apart and had still suffered from interference due to the cave—had worked, and the recon skill that the clones could use had been capable of reaching the triplets’ max range, but they had tested a few of the longer-range communication protocols when they lost Levi and Lux, as well as when Samina left them, and each had quickly fizzled out.

So odd that the recon skill could reach further than the communication protocols—usually it was the other way around, communication packets so small and sent off in so many different forms that, usually, something of it would get through.

Regardless of all that, Emilia had been able to leave her little messenger dragons—which could technically take the shape of virtually anything, but she liked forming into dragons due to their connection to Dion’s ancient past—behind for Olivier.

So, that was one problem down: how to communicate with the lawyer when his Censor might still be offaether and unable to accept any alternative protocols—which, given he hadn’t contacted her, seemed to still be the case—and let him know where she was and where he should go. That left the problem, however, that she while the messenger dragons had ways of reporting back to her that they had been triggered—both by the correct person and by an unknown party—there was no way for her to track Olivier through the skill.

She had, therefore, been forced to improvise.

It hadn’t been pretty, and had involved Jerrial and Vern holding bags of ice that she had talked out of a nearby shop to her Censor while she coded. They’d gone through many bags of ice, her Censor burning hot enough to melt the ice within minutes as she forced a mild time skew to fill her mind.

With any luck, one day, there would exist a skill to cool your own Censor—there wasn’t one to cool another person’s Censor much either, but as there were no other Baalphorians with her, such a skill wouldn’t be useful at the moment. That one day, unfortunately, was not today and her Censor hated her and she hated everything, even nearly an hour later.

Still, she had managed to repurpose one of the other skills from their prank war in order to find a way to track Olivier.

The thing with all the skills they had created was that a lot of them were silly skills that would have never been needed anywhere but in a situation where annoying someone was the goal. That wasn’t bad! It was all experience, but no one could deny that a number of them were essentially only good for pranks.

Until she had repurposed it, for instance, Emilia hadn’t seen any other use for the aether bomb skill that splattered colourful aether-based glitter over the person—or occasionally place or thing—being pranked. It was good for aggravating people or forcing a room to be evacuated, and seriously, the way the aether was manipulated for the skill made the glitter nigh indestructible, only the natural flow of time able to erase evidence of its existence. Someone crueller might have made it last longer than the few weeks the glittery effect of the skill currently lasted, but none of them were quite so cruel. While the skill had been slightly repurposed for The Black Knot—sometimes it was helpful to forcibly mark a target in a very visible and impossible to remove way, rather than risk losing them—it wasn’t as though the skill had much use for anything else.

At least, that was what Emilia had thought until she had been left trying to figure out a way to both leave a message for Olivier as well as mark him, so she could find him later.

In Baalphoria, the clones and other law enforcement—as well as the occasional criminal organization or company—usually tracked people through their Censors. It was much easier to install a virus or stalking function into a Censor than track them with a skill. The problem with most tracking skills, like the one she currently had locked onto Cameron, was how much aether they took to sustain. This was, in the end, the result of a combination of sustaining a tether with the other people and forcing the skill smaller, so people were less likely to notice the skill attaching itself onto them and then lingering. Slightly less of a problem in Baalphoria, where the population had virtually no aether awareness, but definitely more of a concern in the Free Colonies, and especially on someone like Cameron. Even if she didn’t notice the skill herself, there was a good chance at least a few of the older, more experienced Drinarna she came into contact with would.

As a result of how small the skill’s anchor was, Emilia’s Censor had to keep a permanent tether to the part attached to Cameron. The moment she lost the connection, small as the anchor on Cameron was, reconnecting would be extremely difficult, if not impossible, especially from so far away.

The other risk with the more regular tracking skill was that if either party were hit with an attack that was too large—or if they were encompassed in a defensive skill that disrupted the aether—the connection might snap. Again, there was little to no chance of her being able to reconnect once the connection was gone—Cameron was currently far outside of Emilia’s maximum expansion range, after all. While she could send out a packet skill, which would essentially try and search out the linger remnants of the anchor, then return the information to her so she could send out the tether again, the distance made it finding the anchor unlikely, especially if the anchor moved too much—and if it moved after the packet skill returned the location, then it would be lost once again. This wasn’t even considering the fact that if Cameron’s side of the skill were wiped out by another skill or core ability, it was gone.

Poof.

Anchor lifted.

Back into the aether it went.

Definitely no reconnecting.

This all amounted to the fact that even if she’d left an anchor on her messenger dragon—something that was possible, but with having to leave so many lingering about, having that many tethers active definitely would have drained her aetherstores too quickly to be feasible—the moment Olivier found himself in any trouble, there was a good chance the anchor would be disrupted anyways. This was to say nothing of the fact that the messenger dragons had to be destroyed in order for her to know they’d been received—something that now seemed an oversight. Really, they needed to be reprogrammed to send out a packet of I’ve been activated without needing to be destroyed, they’d just been designed to be destroyed during the wargames in order to not leave behind evidence of betrayal, was all.

Regardless of clearly needing to reassess the skill in general, when it came to adding in a tracking ability, Emilia had programmed in an add-on to the messenger dragon skill—one that would leave a glittery mark on Olivier. It wasn’t exactly ideal, as the entire point of the aether-glitter was to leverage how heavy a mark it would leave on him. It was something she would be able to tether herself to the moment she got back confirmation of the messenger dragon’s destruction, along with the location of its demise. This would, unfortunately, also leave Olivier’s existence more obvious to anyone with a significant amount of aether awareness. Emilia was willing to accept that extra risk, all so she would be able to find him later.

Really, she had been hoping the messenger dragons wouldn’t be needed—had been hoping that the pair of them would instead meet inside the holding cells and get out together. That hadn’t happened, and she was glad she’d taken the time to leave all the conditional-release messenger dragons lingering about.

The only problem was that, somehow or other, her glittery aether-tracking skill had managed to attach itself onto two people? That was… unfortunate. Presumably, someone else had been nearby when the explosion of glitter went off. Oops, and also, potentially inconvenient. Still, she sent her responding skill spiralling outwards. It reached and reached and reached, her aetherstores shuddering with the effort of creating that initial tether outside of her maximum expansion range—mostly, this was only possible because she could aim for her own aether, pressed into the anchors, and she had huge aetherstores—before they managed to snap onto each of her glittery anchors.

At the very least, the messenger dragon had confirmed that Olivier had received her message and was one of the people who were hit with her new glitter anchor. Unfortunately, pressed for time as she had been—not to mention that whole burning Censor thing—she hadn’t bothered programming in a way to differentiate who each glitter anchor belonged to. Hopefully, whoever else had been hit would be staying with Olivier—if they didn’t, she was going to have to choose whom to go after, once they were out of this place.

That, of course, was assuming they would ever get out of this place. Considering they had yet to reach the place Jerrial needed to get to, that might be a while yet—if ever.