[Can’t Opt Out]

Now, Samina might be crazy, but she was beginning to think that the person who had taken Lux wasn’t related to the group who had attacked them. She might have been crazy, though—and certainly, she didn’t have nearly as much of a mind for pulling together threads of information as some of her friends and cousins did. It was something that made more than a few of them miserable to play strategy games against, their minds spanning so much information, their Load Levels allowing for a thousand thoughts to flutter through them at once.

Some of them could be terrifying, even in the most mundane and simple of games.

That said, she could pull at strings and connect them to some extent—and really, as with many things, the reality that her friends were monsters might make her feel as though she didn’t have the mind for strategy, but it was more of a comparative thing. In reality, it was likely she had more of a mind for picking up details and tugging bits of information than the average person. It was something that was hard to remember, however, when the people surrounding her were so quick minded, her own mind rarely needing to rise up and offer information or thoughts because chances were someone had already come to that conclusion and the smarter minds among them had already moved on to another collection of thoughts.

That self-doubt was something to work on, she supposed, and now, when she was alone and working to find her friend, seemed as good a time as any for some self-improvement! It was something to definitely work on because as much as she was currently far from Leerin’s own self-defeating lack of confidence and misery, Samina’s childhood friend and her childish behaviour was still on her mind, and in no world did she want to end up the sort of miserable person Leerin had become.

So, back to contemplating the person who had kidnapped Lux and connecting all the dots!

The main thing that had tipped her suspicions that the person wasn’t actually related to the group who had attacked them was that she wasn’t sure that the person was Lüshanian, and she had definitely heard a few people in their group of assailants speaking Lüshanian. More importantly, their words had been in accented Lüshanian. People could do a lot to cover up their accents—and there were small groups of people who were multilingual. People who could speak a foreign language well enough to have no discernible accent, however? Especially when it came to a language like Lüshanian, which had an oddly high number of vowel sounds in it, even compared to several languages found in nearby nations that either had a distant ancestor or borrowed words from one another?

Yes, well, there was a reason why clones who were likely to work in some Free Colonies eventually actually ended up being raised within them: if they needed to pretend to be a local one day, even the smallest accent would give them away. The same went with the Baxter family, although to a far more extreme extent.

Her own family had dozens of branch families, some lingering out in the Free Colonies. Mostly, their family maintained a wide portfolio of businesses—none of which were legally attached to the Baxter family, nor any other Black Knot family, of course. They even tried to keep the businesses themselves from interacting with one another too much—but not too much! There was a balance to be had between entwining the businesses they used as fronts to the point that it was suspicious, and keeping them from even touching to the point that the avoidance became suspicious.

It was all a game of appearances, and even thousands of years since their family had first begun pushing its branch members to erect businesses in the Free Colonies, so they could have more reach, few of those branches had ever tumbled. Those families were loyal to The Black Knot, despite generations of separation. The children still had Censors installed when the time came, even if most of those installations were done in secret. It was always a hard decision to decide if a branch family should give the appearance of having severed their Baalphorian roots—if they should instead seek to become as much a member of the Free Colony they had found themselves inhabiting as possible—or if they should maintain some amount of official connection to their long-ago home.

There were pros and cons to both, and she had seen some of the lists and considerations that had been made when it came to how to manage new branch families moving abroad. Samina knew she had barely scratched the surface when it came to the work that went into decisions she would one day be expected to make, as unlike the clones, and to a lesser extent the Laprises, she and her brother were expected to live their lives more normally and wouldn’t fully join The Black Knot until after their gap decade, or even their time in university, was over.

Still, she knew some.

Still, she had to slowly memorize the long histories of various Free Colonies so she could start keeping up on current events and understand all the context behind the current sociopolitical climate. There were thousands of little details that would go into decisions that would put her family members, distant as many were, into positions where they might die, the connections they had made within the nation they now called home dying alongside them.

Still, she had to know more because every Baxter member, even those who would never set foot in Baalphoria because their family had left a thousand years before and wars had wiped away the fact that they ever hadn’t belonged to the culture they now existed within, would one day rely on her and her brother to make decisions for them.

Whom to marry.

What to do with their life, their business, their friendships.

When to have kids.

When to trust a new acquaintance.

When to start a revolution.

It was already So. Fucking. Much. It would be a thing that would grow and grow—this knowledge inside her. It was barely anything, within the scheme of the world and all it contained—and yes, it was the world. Baalphoria—their continent as a whole, really—might have little contact with other continents—especially the one that existed far across the ocean—now, but once, there had been a little.

Many of the details of those times were gone, oral histories and rumours and random records existing just as much as the Baxter members stationed in those now unknown places. Some of her distant family members existed in theory alone—these people who had gone away, far outside the aethernet’s reach, on missions of some sort. Maybe one day, they would hear from them again—and to be fair, sometimes those people did manage to send missives through less traditional means… or more traditional, depending on the person’s point of view.

Physical letters piled up. Chips with data written onto them that only odd technology smuggled out of far off nations long ago could read. Memories slotted into the mind of a clone who had travelled far and returned with a message.

Other times, there had been nothing in centuries, and the information she and Levi would eventually be required to understand was odd and outdated, the branch family it was related to potentially long dead, but better it was than nothing.

So, yes, Samina had knowledge and apparently a lack of confidence to not think she wasn’t crazy for feeling that the person hauling Lux along was neither Lüshanian, nor were they supposed to be there. What an odd coincidence, for them to have been with that group who attacked them. Had they managed to sneak into the group before the chaos began? In that case, how disorganized had their group of assailants been? Or perhaps the group had members from multiple nations—not that she’d seen a single other person who didn’t appear to be a native Lüshanian. Slightly more concerningly, they could have simply taken the opportunity of the attack to grab Lux, sneaking in from the shadows to snatch her up.

But… why? Why grab any of them, let alone Lux? Yes, Lux was one of the weaker members of their group, but she was in no way the weakest either—and really, the same thing applied to that thought of weakness as it did to Samina’s own doubt in her ability to connect dots: it was something born of comparison. In no world was any member of their group, not even Janie, weak compared to the average person.

Regardless of all that, what was the point of taking any of them? Something like what had happened to Olivier de la Rue? Someone being grabbed because maybe they were valuable, maybe they could be used for something or other?

It was a stupid plan when it had been Olivier de la Rue—and really, Samina wanted to track down whoever had decided to grab the man, all so she could ask what they had been thinking. That was assuming they had been thinking at all.

There were reasons to grab a non-dev, reasons not to. The reasons no to tended to rank far higher than the reasons to do so, especially outside of war—unless the person doing the grabbing wanted to start a war, anyways, in which case, Samina would have thought a ransom message would have already come. So, was whoever had grabbed him stupid, or had they not realized who they were grabbing?

It didn’t really matter. What was done was done. Didn’t stop her from being curious, however, especially as she was bored just following the swearing of the person who had taken Lux—they were creative swear words, heavily accented with some flavour she couldn’t pinpoint, although their words tended to lean into the languages of nearby nations.

Oddly, all of the languages sounded accented when they came off the person’s tongue, as though none of them were their native language, and who—especially when they were alone, Lux still passed out in the kidnapper’s arms—didn’t default to the language of their youth when swearing?

So odd.

Unfortunately, their odd use of language was where most of her suspicions about them had come from, as she’d only been able to catch glimpses of them between cracks in the cavern walls, having taken a different route than Lux and her kidnapper at some point. There were just too many crossroads, and while her contacts had been able to see echoes of aether spilling over the rock at times—something she would be eternally grateful for, as they had allowed her to not completely lose Lux and her kidnapper, despite having taken an entirely different route at some point—she had still lost track of them eventually… for a time, anyways.

Oddly, this was the first part of the cave system that she’d do this specific thing. The tunnels they had travelled through had diverged many times, the triplets using their recon skill to map as much of the crossroads as they could. Samina had that map locked within her mind, useless as it currently was—Lux’s kidnapper had quickly gone down a route with no mapping. Still, she could see what they had come across and avoided during the initial portion of their journey, and while several of the tunnels had run alongside one another, they had rarely been capable of seeing into one another in more than the vaguest of senses.

Bugs and other creatures could access small tunnels between the human-sized tunnels, and while such animal-sized tunnels could technically allow for a few resource-intensive skills to be used to see to the other side, they were difficult to use—so difficult and generally pointless outside of espionage that no one had bothered doing such a thing.

When she had first realized she was on a route parallel to the one Lux’s kidnapper had taken, hearing their curses echoing through the tiny paths between their respective tunnels, Samina had assumed that, sooner or later, she would be forced to use one of those spying skills to attempt to see what was happening in the other tunnel.

Then, however, the tunnels had shifted. Unlike the previous tunnels that had run side-by-side, which had been closed in by rock what was effectively solid rock, the wall between her tunnel and the kidnapper’s chosen route was instead more of a broken thing. Veins of rock and gemstones laced upwards between the two tunnels, and while it was thick—not to mention beautiful—she had been forced to drop to her knees, lest the person she was following finally noticed her slinking along beside them.

They hadn’t, and Samina couldn’t decide if it was due to the person being distracted by potentially being lost—she had eventually figured out that was what they were swearing about—or because the stone of this place was so good at eating up skills and abilities. Having no idea where the person was from, or even what they really looked like, their entire figure cloaked in ragged black cloth, she had no clue what sort of abilities or aether awareness they might have.

So, as she followed them, she kept her presence as small as she could, letting her hands and knees scuff over the rocks, even her protective clothing beginning to pull apart under the assault of the tough ore under her. That didn’t stop her from thinking, however, that out of all the places to end up, this might have been the most convenient.

She could see Lux, and if needed, she could burst through with {Hidey Hole} and grab her friend. As the person had currently given no indication they either wanted to hurt Lux or diverge from their side of the parallel tunnels, Samina wasn’t inclined to tempt fate and see what sort of abilities the kidnapper was hiding within themself.

So, Samina followed, despite the dread growing within her because this was just too easy—because this felt like something fucking with her.