[Can’t Opt Out]

“Fascinating…” Cheska muttered, looking over the glitter that had exploded over Olivier and Xavier upon his destruction of Emilia’s messenger. “It feels so… weird.”

“Not dangerous, though?” Porsq asked, his finger swiping over the glitter that now covered a significant portion of Xavier’s face. Olivier’s chest had also been hit, and there was a distinctly Xavier-shaped outline on him now.

“I doubt it,” Olivier replied, not even bothering to try and get the stuff off.

While it had been his bodyguards being hit with this particular skill of Emilia’s during her first weeks infiltrating his classroom, he knew it was effectively impossible to remove. Tariq—the most senior of his bodyguards—had even sent a missive to some of the nation’s foremost skill designers. They were nothing compared to Emilia and Halen, Olivier was sure, but Tariq had gone through official channels and found the people who were Baalphoria’s so-called best skill designers. Vrin Devano—ostensibly the nation’s most well-know skill and function designer, although he was quickly being usurped by Halen—eccentric as he was, had not replied to any requests for comment. Perhaps due to his age, Halen himself had not been included on the list of people Tariq had contacted in his attempts to find a way to remove the glittery aether of Emilia’s prank, which had been used against a number of his more annoying bodyguards.

Tariq, as far as Olivier had ever been able to tell, like the majority of his mother’s chosen bodyguards as much as Olivier himself did—which was to say, neither of them liked or respected the majority of them. As a result, Olivier suspected Tariq had put a rather minimal amount of effort into finding a solution to the glitter aether problem. While the older man took Olivier’s safety seriously, he had also been with Olivier since he was small and knew perfectly well that he had always been an odd child with an overly protective mother. It hadn’t been until his D-Levels were tested that the woman had become so controlling of his every move. Tariq, kind man that he was under all his severity, tended to be one of the people who more easily let him escape his bodyguards to go live his own life.

The man was going to have a field day when he realized that he had let Olivier escape his watch, only for him to end up in this situation. Of all the times not to have someone trailing his every move—then again, Emilia clearly hadn’t thought them at much risk in the city either, as she had allowed her own Hyrat bodyguard to take several of Olivier’s more fearful students back to the ship. If Tariq had been with him, as he was supposed to be, Olivier likely would have left him at the ship anyways, in order to make sure his students didn’t cause too much of a fuss.

So, his bodyguard wouldn’t have been there anyways. Perhaps he would have come down to the city and gotten himself killed. Perhaps, in his attempts to locate him, Tariq would have contacted the embassy or the Baalphorian government—the latter of which Emilia’s message had told him not to do. Apparently, while Emilia had been holding back quite a bit of information from Malcolm Laprise in particular, she suspected that by the time her messenger creatures reached him, she would have finally fessed up to what had happened in the city since he was taken. It had been a group decision, it seemed, between Emilia and her friends—and even the Hyrat clones who were in the area—to keep some of the information from Malcolm, not wanting to put him in the middle of a potential political minefield. The biggest issue, it seemed, was her friends making their way into the city through a combination of less than legal and definitely legal means.

Regardless of his own thoughts on a bunch of young Baalphorians breaking into the city, he could see how knowing about such things before they became unstoppable would be a problem for Malcolm Laprise.

To stop them, or not to stop them—Olivier didn’t envy the man such a decision when it was clear from what Emilia had said of her neighbour and friend that he cared for her and would want her to have all the help she could get.

By now—assuming his destruction of the creature had indeed informed Emilia he had received it—the girl would have informed Malcolm Laprise—as well as other relevant parties—that he was alive and had escaped. Well… she would tell them that he had presumably escaped, anyways, as she had no way to actually know he wasn’t being moved from the building by Fräthk’s people. Still, her message had made it clear that if he happened to find a way to communicate with anyone, he should leave the logistics of dealing with their governments to her and her friends.

“Unless you have to, of course!” her message had read, a long trail of examples of reasons why he might have to let either the Baalphorian or Lüshanian governments know about the situation following. Some of them were… insane, and after everyone had stopped laughing at his and Xavier’s new glittering appearances—and luckily, the boy hadn’t been too put off by the small explosion that had followed the destruction of the letter—Olivier had shared a few with the group.

Renton, who had been pushing for them to get moving for a while, only grunted and told them to keep it down while a few of the adults laughed. Porsq and Izurial were both excited to meet Emilia, each of her examples of why he might need to have a conversation with their governments earning him more and more laughter. Even their still unnamed teenager seemed interested in meeting Emilia.

“Does she prank people a lot?” Porsq asked as they moved, his eyes once more turning to the glitter coating the pair of them and requiring Olivier to remind the boy to look ahead while he was walking.

“Yes,” Olivier replied, explaining the situation with the glitter bombs erupting onto his bodyguards to the boy and the few other people who were listening.

“No one could figure out how to remove it?” Cravena asked when he had finished explaining that despite how many people his head bodyguard had contacted, no one had been able to remove it from the bodyguards who were hit with it.

“It decayed slowly over the following weeks, but no, no one had any idea of how to remove it. I believe they tried a number of skills and techniques, and even brought in a lavender code one of the skill designers knew,” Olivier told her. Admittedly, as this had been during the period of time when the silverstrain had been most aggravating him, he hadn’t paid as much attention to the situation of removing the aether glitter as he might have otherwise. As a result, while he was able to tell Cravena that he thought the lavender code had been allowed to code around the poor bodyguard who had been assigned the duty of being tested in removal attempts, he wasn’t completely sure.

“Even a lavi’s code couldn’t remove it?” Cordk said, quiet and slightly heaving as they worked to move as quickly as possible while also carting around two small children, an old man, and a severely undernourished silverstrain. “If that’s true, your silverstrain has done something very impressive.”

“I want to try burning it off,” Cravena declared, glaring at the glitter, far too much interest lighting up her face.

Olivier was almost positive the woman wouldn’t attempt to burn the aether off them—almost. Still, he naturally found himself falling behind her a little more.

“Can’t you just take off your clothes?” their grumpy teenager asked.

Both they and Porsq had grown a little grumpier as they moved through the city, due to a lack of proper footwear. There were plans—not good plans, but still plans—to rob any shoe store they happened across. No one was ruling out shaking down anyone who looked about the right size for their shoes, either. They were desperate, and while running with their less mobile members would be hard no matter what, the fact that they couldn’t hand the kids to the teenagers and tell them to make a break for it without worrying for their feet was a problem.

This wasn’t the worst area of the city, but it was still a city—and they were navigating as many of the less frequented roads and alleys as they could. Garbage lay splattered over the ground, and a few times, Renton had been forced to carry the pair over areas with broken glass.

So, yeah, if they had to run, their increasingly shredded feet might be their downfall. Stealing was bad, but they weren’t about to not steal and then regret it later.

Readjusting Xavier in his arms, Olivier pulled down the collar of his shirt, revealing skin that was just as mottled with aether glitter as the rest of his chest. “It goes straight through clothes—possibly through skin and muscle as well. No one as willing to let themself be cut open to confirm it, but no amount of scrubbing lessened the intensity either, so it is likely lingering under the uppermost levels of skin, at the least.”

“Why do you think she hit you with it?” Cheska asked, her own breaths rather heaving as well, as she had been assigned to carry the girl child for a while. Really, Olivier thought that he would be better off carrying the girl, as she was bigger than Xavier. The boy had grown attached to him, somewhere along their travels, however. As a result, the little boy was never happy to be handed over to anyone else, and although he wouldn’t put up a complete fuss when others had to hold him temporarily, no one wanted to risk the increasingly moody child having a meltdown because his preferred adult wasn’t carrying him.

Both Cordk and Izurial thought it likely that naptime was coming—or potentially even gone—and that, as a result of the time and the stress of the situation, Xavier—who was generally quite even tempered, according to them—was growing increasingly moody. There were plans to have Porsq encourage him to sleep soon, but as it wasn’t something that could easily be shaken off or undone. As they were still waiting to see if anyone would be coming after them, they had decided to delay forced naptime plans for a bit, rather than risk having two dead-to-the-world children napping when they needed them to run and hide. There was also some hope that the boy might fall asleep on his own, as children his age were wont to do. So far, no luck, but while Xavier was clearly unhappy and seemingly wanted to sleep, he was also quiet, softly sucking on his fingers as he let himself be touted around.

He was absolutely adorable, and while Olivier was attached to other members of their group as well, he was glad that out of all the people who could have been hit with Emilia’s skill as well, it had been Xavier.

“I believe the skill is meant to mark me—and Xavier, on accident—in some other way. It may be a way to track me down? Or, us, I suppose.”

He had spent a little bit of time thinking about this, in the moments after the skill had first gone off. While Emilia could be impulsive, neither was she the sort of person to do something unnecessary in this tense of a situation. As such, there had to be a reason for her skill, and out of the things he could remember of Tariq’s only slightly halfhearted attempts to find a way to remove the aether glitter from the other bodyguards—really, Olivier thought the man a little gleeful that they were hit by it and forced to wear glitter over their skin for several weeks, even if Tariq would never admit such a thing—was the fact that the glitter had felt heavy through the aether.

At the time, there had even been some discussion of removing his bodyguards from the field until the glitter decayed—and thankfully, it had been clear that it was decaying, if slowly. The glitter’s presence could be felt more easily than most skills and people through the aether, however, meaning that if he were attacked by someone who wanted to do him harm—something Olivier generally thought highly unlikely, although his current circumstances may have him reevaluating that stance in the future—his bodyguards might be less effective.

How can a bodyguard rescue someone if they can be felt coming, after all?

“Huh… now that you’ve said it… there is something,” the teenager replied when Oliver explained all this. “It’s like… a long trail of aether, leading back the way we came—but also not? It’s not like it follows the path or anything. Just goes straight through the buildings back that way.”

The teenager motions vaguely in the direction of the holding cells—vaguely as in, if Olivier had to guess at where the building was, he would have indicated that way-ish. If the teenager could see something connecting him and Xavier, presumably, to Emilia, then surely, she must be in that exact direction?

“It also goes down,” the teenager added, which made sense, as most of their group who had thoughts on what Emilia and her new allies could be looking for assumed it to near the bottom of the holding cells—in that horrible place that existed below the level he had woken on, the levels no one had been willing to enter, despite knowing there were people being tortured and killed down there.

To the people here, those people who had existed beneath their feet were a lost cause. Apparently, Emilia’s new friend wasn’t so willing to accept that.

Hopefully, looking for someone down there wouldn’t get Emilia killed, even if the silverstrain going there was nice, in a perverse way. It was just nice to know that she was like him, in this.

Someone stupid.

Someone willing to risk themself for people she barely knew.

Someone good.

“That stuff will make you more easily felt by a number of Fräthk’s loyal,” Renton grumbled as they pulled to a stop, the next section they needed to get through a large, open space.

“So… they shouldn’t try to hide and hope no one will find them?” Porsq asked, nodding his head and muttering something that sounded like a snarky because it’s not like Fräthk doesn’t already have tons of people who can track us a thousand different ways under his breath.

They were both right, of course. All Free Coloniers were more likely to feel his and Xavier’s presence, due simply to the aether glitter. At the same time, Porsq, with his ability to feel out mental states and identify at least some people through his abilities, and Cheska, with her ability to feel thoughts, were just two people capable of locating people through means that had nothing to do with the aether emanating from the person.

Still, it was something to keep in mind, especially in Xavier’s case—after all, if things got bad, it wasn’t like he could just leave the child hidden and lead their attackers away.