[Can’t Opt Out]

Emilia had concerns. This wasn’t uncommon—as much as she tended to be a just go with the flow sort of person, she was still herself. Her mind moved a million words a minute, bouncing from topic to topic until time felt like an illusion, seconds ticking by through reality itself while hours passed within her mind. This wasn’t exactly uncommon for low-devs, and especially not for non-devs. The speed that their brains moved could make it seem as though far more time had passed while their thoughts swarmed around them—incessant and needling and impossible to calm—than actually had.

Of course, time was, in the end, only an illusion—an accident of perception, human minds only able to comprehend what fell before their senses the way they alone did. Put two people side by side and ask them to do the same task, and each will give you a different answer as to how long they thought it took them to complete.

Did time drag?

Did it speed by?

Did it seep through them, their mind drifting away as they completed their task until they had no ability to judge how much time had passed?

Well, if this—these milliseconds of Emilia’s mind cataloguing its personal brand of time management and distractibility and awareness of time passing—weren’t evidence enough that her mind moved too fast, too fluidly, sometimes, Emilia didn’t know what would be enough! It wasn’t something she would change about herself. If anything, out of all the things she liked about her mind and body—or was it mind or body, some linguistic twist within holding the implication that they were one and the same, that they were so separate they should never be considered one—the way her brain worked was near the top of the list.

Might even be at the tipptity top of the list, if she was honest.

Probably, she’d have to make a detailed list of all the things that made her her, to be sure. There were just so many things about a person that could be quantified into words—so many things their own awareness of self might gloss over because what a person was to the people around them could be just as important as what they were to themself.

Emilia loved her friends, and if she suddenly learned that the thing all her friends loved most about her was, say… the way she tapped her fingers against desks and chairs and her willbrands and every other thing under the sun when she was thinking, her habit of movement would obviously rise on her list of things she loved about herself. This tiny thing, which in the grand scheme of her awareness of who she was, barely existed. She knew that it was a part of her that existed—how could she not when she was contemplating its existence this very moment—but it wasn’t something she could actively claim was a good or essential part of her.

Really, if anything, she would be more inclined to say her penchant to fidget and tap lay further in the direction of neutral or even negative qualities she possessed—certainly, she’d had quite a few people tell her it was annoying.

Certainly, at that very moment, Vern was glaring at her hand as she tapped her nails over the stair she sat on, staring at their new captive and resolutely ignoring Clemence’s pouting, apologetic eyes.

Perhaps Emilia needed to back up a few minutes, in order to explain how they got to being in this situation!

It had all been going good—great, even! Emilia had landed in front of Arinesi—and Jerrial and Rayleen had now confirmed the woman who had been attacking them was, in fact, Arinesi. There had been a moment of shock—people didn’t generally fall through the ceiling without, well, damaging it so much it fell down along with them. Emilia hadn’t damaged the ceiling—not really. {Hidey Hole} would collapse back in on itself in whatever time she set it to.

This was, rather unfortunately, where the problems began.

{Hidey Hole} did have safety precautions in place. At the most basic of levels, there was a timer stating how fast to close the hole it created, as well as whether to collapse it in a single instance or on a running basis. When Emilia had used it to get away from Cameron, for instance, she had let it collapse behind her as she ran through the weirdly thick wall. Not wanting the Drinarna intern to chase her, this had been essential. On the other hand, when she had run off from the scary man, the space she had moved through had been so thin—only a few inches thick—that she’d just let it snap closed behind her in a single go. In comparison, that morning—and had it really only been that morning?—when Olivier had pointed out that she must have had a way to get back into her room, even without her key, Emilia had just left {Hidey Hole} open. Had she not manually canceled the skill, it would have stayed open near infinitely. As she wasn’t insane, Emilia had set it to close after half an hour, but technically the shifting of aether and atoms that made {Hidey Hole} work could be done on a permanent basis.

This all created the issue, however, of what to do if someone were inside the hole when it was time to close.

If she had tripped while running from Cameron. If the scary man had grabbed her while she was in the middle of falling through the hole. If someone happened across the hole between her and Olivier’s rooms right as it was about to close and decided to investigate it.

In most cases, no one wanted whoever was in the middle of the hole to get smushed, especially not the person who had activated it in the first place. Emilia wouldn’t have wanted to be smushed, all because she had tripped, nor bisected if the scary man had grabbed her and left her half in, half out of her escape hole. Hence, the main safety precaution in {Hidey Hole} made it so the person who had activated the skill couldn’t be smushed by it. Other people could easily be added to the list of people not to smush—obviously, sometimes there might be people you actually did want to smush.

For as much as Cameron chasing her had been annoying, Emilia hadn’t actually wanted to kill the girl. So, if the other girl had somehow managed to get into the hole before it began to close, it wouldn’t have killed her. Had Emilia been being chased by someone more dangerous than Cameron, however, perhaps she wouldn’t have only set it to snap around them by accident of them being within the skill’s jaws as they were meant to close. Instead, she might have let {Hidey Hole} linger open a little longer—might have lured the person into its darkness and then, snap! Smushed! Sorry whoever was chasing the poor, innocent silverstrain! You’re now part of the wall itself!

Was it a little ironic that Emilia had definitely designed {Hidey Hole} to have the potential use of killing people as she ran off, then promptly forgotten it could be used for anything other than sneaking in and out of both her friends’ homes and her own house? Yes. Emilia was not accepting comments on her inability to retain long ago thoughts at the moment, thank you. Call it a consequence of having a brain that moved too fast—a brain that constantly felt as though both no time and many long hours had passed every few minutes, as insane as that sounded. There were just so many thoughts burbling about in her brain—this long stream of passing and intense thoughts that became a potion of inspiration and confusion that could be pulled into threads of knowledge with effort, but it was just that: effort.

She was just one girl! In no world should she be expected to remember every thought and intention she’d ever had! Every note of information that ever passed through her brain! Instead, she had her Censor to manage a lot of what she thought and learned, but she also wasn’t the sort of terrible person who would expect it to remember everything. Just as she could forget, so could her Censor. AI it might be, but it was still powered by her brain and personality and if she couldn’t remember things, how could expect it to remember everything she forgot!?

Regardless of the reality that some people really did expect their Censors to remember everything for them—and really, how could a Censor remember something their owner had never had any remembrance of?—{Hidey Hole} could be used to run away from dangerous people.

Most people were smart enough not to walk into suddenly appearing holes, Emilia hoped, so it probably wouldn’t be the most effective of attacks. Still, you never knew—people could be highly stupid.

It was due to that stupidity that there was another safety precaution, optional as it was: the ability to stop the hole from closing around anyone. Due to the unknown nature of this place, Emilia hadn’t really wanted to risk her hole closing around some unknown person who suddenly decided to fall through it. Worse, when she’d been loading up the skill, she’d had a moment of imagining the person Jerrial was looking for happening across the hole! Maybe Jerrial’s friend would be at the bottom, looking up at Jerrial, lingering at the edge of the hole Emilia had created. Then! The woman Jerrial sought would jump! She would try to climb the few metres to her friend! Maybe, she’d almost be there, her fingers reaching for the friend she never expected to see again and—

SNAP!

SMUSHED!

DEAD!

Alternatively, perhaps she would come to the other side of the hole—the part on the down slope of the stairs—alerted that something was happening by all the noise Emilia and Arinesi were making. Jerrial would be on the other side, gaze pleading and excited. The woman would run and jump, and even though this instance of {Hidey Hole} hadn’t made the largest of holes, she would still fall in. Her fingers would brush against Jerrial’s—maybe he’d even manage to grab her hand—but it wouldn’t be enough to save her, and then the timer would go off and—

SNAP!

SMUSHED!

DEAD!

Jerrial, left above, holding a bloody hand, no one attached to it any longer.

It would be absolutely terrible if she accidentally killed someone! The risk with using the more intense safety precaution of don’t close on anyone was that someone bad could come along and use it.

That would have been the better thing to happen, Emilia thought. Arinesi likely wasn’t alone in this place, defending these bloody stairs from anyone who happened to sneak down—or more likely, acting as jailer to anyone who tried to escape this cruel place. It would have been so easy for some ally or coworker—would another person forced to keep these people here by the insanity that swam within its blood soaked walls be considered a coworker?—to come along. They could have slid down the hole and landed practically on top of her and Arinesi as they struggled—after summoning some restraints from the aether, Emilia had flooded the area around them with junk skills and tackled the woman, taking her down so she could get the restraints on her without having to worry about whatever abilities she had. Alternatively, while they rolled over the ground, kicking and punching one another—there may have also been some hair pulling on her part—someone could have instead scaled the walls of {Hidey Hole} and gone off to attack her friends… plus Rayleen.

No, Emilia wouldn’t leave Rayleen to die or anything, but she also wasn’t a friend.

Anyways, those option would have been sooooooo much better than what actually happened—and what had actually happened?

Clemence had happened. Apparently, when she had heard Emilia and Arinesi brawling, rage echoing through the stairwell when Arinesi screamed—Emilia had yanked her hair quite hard—Clemence had panicked and started running, ignoring Emilia’s demand that no one try to help her unless she explicitly requested help.

She didn’t need help, and all Clemence had done was fall on top of them!

Literally! Right. On. Top. Of. Them!

Emilia’s butt hurt from the girl landing on her. Clemence was lucky she hadn’t broken her legs in the fall—or worse!

The girl needed to look where she was going, especially as Emilia had even put up the last of {Hidey Hole}’s potential safety precautions: blaring lights that highlighted the fucking hole!

So, yeah, currently Emilia was a little testy with the teenager. It would pass, probably once her ass stopped complaining that a hundred-something pounds of person had assault it—and not in the good way—but it would pass.

In the meantime, she was just going to sit there, tapping her nails against the floor even if it was annoying Vern, and contemplate that things didn’t seem right.

This woman didn’t seem right.

This place didn’t seem right.

Nothing seemed right—and not just in the this place is run by a criminal who seems to lack brain cells way, nor even in the the Drinarna have been dropping the ball all over the place in this city way either.

No, instead, it was an itchy feeling—something crawling over her skin and soul until it wasn’t Rayleen snapping at Clemence not to touch whatever it was that she’d been about to touch, but Emilia. Emilia didn’t even know what the girl had been about to touch—didn’t even know what had tipped her off that she had been about to touch anything. Fuck, Emilia didn’t even know if the teenager had been about to reach a finger out to touch the real world, reach her core out to assess something, or even just brush her mind over a stray thought or feeling—it didn’t matter. Whatever Clemence had been about to touch wasn’t something that should be touched, and what sort of thought was that?

What sort of crazed instinct had led her to think such things—to believe the instinct in the pit of her soul, squirming with thoughts and intentions. Her mind spiralled back to Rayleen’s words, just as they had been about to enter this terrible place—back to the way she had told her this same thing: to not.

Don’t think about it, whatever it is.

Don’t think about the thing that lurks at the edges of the aether.

Don’t think about the thing that someone invited into this place—the thing that was now sweeping around them, subtle and crawling and not quite there, and yet there all the same.

So, yeah, Emilia had a sore ass and concerns and they needed to find the people—or whatever was left of them—that Jerrial and Clemence were looking for and get the fuck out of there.

They needed to get as far from that place as possible and very possibly never look back, lest the monster within this place give chase.