[Can’t Opt Out]

It came as no surprise to Sorvell that out of the members of their group, Darrian was the most, well, reasonable and human-like. BJ was relatively reasonable, but would very clearly be deferring to the triplets for decisions about their group, while Darrian seemed to have more confidence to go against their expectations. Codeth was reasonable and confident as well, but there was something about the young man that seemed a bit more… cold-hearted. It wasn’t as much cold disregard as Sorvell felt from the triplets or even some of the more intense members of their group—Simeon and Polianna in particular had seemed capable of shutting down their hearts to even the most serious of plights—but there was still a coldness that lingered within Codeth.

The ability to shut down your empathy and just do what was best for yourself and the people you cared about wasn’t necessary bad. It was, however, a dangerous ability, especially in people so young, Sorvell thought. Luckily, not every member of their group was so cold-hearted, and when Darrian stepped up beside him, asking Sorvell if his control of the junk skills holding their assailant back from attacking them again was precise enough to allow him to offer to clean the person—possibly a young girl, but it was impossible to be certain—up, Sorvell told him it was.

Sorvell’s ability to hold people still and render them incapable of using skills or core abilities had been something of an accident, born of his overwhelming ability to piss people off—that was how his brother put it, anyways. Sorvell had struggled to find a place for himself for decades. He had spent quite a bit of that time both finding himself in… precarious situations, and thinking about what sort of life he wanted for himself, never coming to any career that would suit him, never even managing to imagine his life with a partner or even just a few pets.

Granted, he may have been scared off ever owning a pet due to a certain silverstrain keeping a literal wild animal in her backyard. Was Hyrenie relatively well-behaved? Yes, but the creature was also huge and monstrous, capable of killing humans and eating their corpses if it suddenly decided such a thing suited it. So far, it hadn’t suited the creature, but something about the affection he had occasionally glimpsed Emilia showering on the thing had driven the idea that love for any pet blinded a person to the terror of it.

That could be a good thing, under the right circumstances—people should love the animals they chose to keep for themselves. Sorvell didn’t think it was a good thing when it came to near feral creatures bounding about their town like they owned it! As far as he knew, the prava had never eaten anyone’s pet, but honestly, Emilia and her army of worshipping clones were so terrifying that he doubted anyone would have dared say anything even if it had.

For a moment, as he watched Darrian kneel before the frail-looking teenager—they could have been in their early twenties, but he doubted it—and ask if he could use a skill to help clean her up, Sorvell’s mind flittered back to the triplets and that hug and nope. Not going there. Whatever those three did between themselves—and possibly Emilia, there having been rumours for a few years that she had found her way into the boys’ beds, which may actually be a single bed, and nope. Again, not thinking about that or the logistics or anything else. It was their business, even if it had been blasted right in front of him.

As he didn’t really want to be killed by the triplets for judging whatever the fuck was going on between them—and who knew if his mind was getting away from him or not, although there had certainly been vibes of something more going on with that hug—he was obviously going to need to readjust his view of the world.

Having travelled the nation, and occasionally the Free Colonies, as he searched for something that would make his life feel less flat and lifeless, Sorvell had seen all sorts of relationships, from the softly arranged marriages of Dion—such arrangements were currently more gentle pushes when they occurred, due to having largely fallen out of favour with all but the elite—to the harems of the zi’huta of Seer’ik’tine. In Seer’ik’tine, he had even seen siblings—and more true siblings—as part of the same harems. As far as he knew, they generally weren’t engaging in sex with one another, more with the same people, but if he could get his mind around that, he could get his mind around whatever it was the triplets were doing.

“Why?” the teenager asked, glaring at Darrian. “Just kill me and be done with it. No need to clean my body before you make it a corpse.”

“I’d prefer we not need to kill you,” Darrian replied, calm and still, not a ripple of frustration through his voice even as Baylor scoffed behind them.

Someone seemed to kick him, but despite the ease with which Sorvell was holding the teenager still, Sorvell didn’t dare look back. Interestingly, the teenager didn’t look back at the others either, and it took a moment of probing at the aether behind him to realize someone had erected a barrier of some sort, creating an illusionary world for the teenager, he presumed—maybe for Darrian as well? Ah, no. Within the stalking function, there had been the smallest bubble of annoyance when Baylor spoke—interesting how easily the boy could ignore the rest of their group, in favour of focusing on the teenager.

“Then you’re stupid,” the teenager spat back. “Hope you ain’t planning to stay here. You ain’t trust no one here. If you do, it’ll end bad.”

Darrian hummed, but reached tentatively into the aether to pull out water to clean the teenager with, Sorvell letting his junk skills drop, just the tiniest bit, to create a river for Darrian to push his water through. A map of the rivers of normal aether Sorvell created pushed its way into the boy’s head, his control of the aether slow and precise as the water pressed over the teenager’s face at first. Mud that Sorvell was almost positive wasn’t mud but feces and other disgusting grime—this was also something he was trying not to think too hard about, lest he gag—came away from their skin, leaving a brownish-red that wasn’t common this side of the continent behind.

Odd—those skin tones were much more common in the east, and occasionally in Nur’tha. There were likely a few diasporas spotted here and there—groups running from oppression over the long millennia of war who hadn’t assimilated into local culture, and as a result, continued to marry within their remaining cultural group—but Lüshan had never been welcoming to foreigners in more than a diplomatic and visitor sense—and even then, there was a reason only a few clones were in the city at the moment, the nation not exactly welcoming even to those it did accept within itself for short periods of time.

“You sound like you’re speaking from experience,” Darrian noted, his accent broken by vowels not quite coming out correctly as he moved on to trying to make the teenager’s hair less of a ball of mats.

Unlike Sorvell, who knew smatterings enough of a handful of languages to make himself seem near fluent in many of the continent’s languages with only a little help from his Censor in making sure the words he chose were correct, Darrian was clearly relying on his Censor to supply him with the words and then attempting to drag them off a tongue that had no idea how to form half the syllables.

Ironically, Sorvell’s own ability to fake his fluency in languages had led him into trouble a handful of times. The problem was that, if a person spoke a language well enough, people were liable to assume they had spent a not insignificant amount of time within the nation in question. The assumption that they also knew the culture followed. With all the time he had spent within the diplomatic wards of Seer’ik’tine, Sorvell knew this wasn’t always the case. Many people knew only the basics of Seerish culture, yet could speak the language fluently. They stuck to the diplomatic district, which allowed them more leeway in not knowing the culture, but the moment they stepped foot into the regular wards of the Seerish people, they were committing this faux pas or that left and right.

As it was the continent’s heart of diplomacy, the Seerish were quite used to this, and Sorvell had rarely seen anyone do something so egregious they couldn’t be forgiven—or, if they did something so atrocious it was something that would have been considered not okay in virtually all of their continent’s nations. Regardless, Sorvell was sure that similar things occurred in the smaller diplomatic districts of other nations. Diplomats, embassy staff, and all their family members who lived within the embassies were more likely to know the language better than the culture—after all, the continent put more value on being able to communicate, rather than getting along with people from other nations, and even that more value was minimal.

The result of thousands—possibly tens of thousands—of years of everyone claiming their culture was best and everyone else’s was shit. This painful divide, especially at the upper levels. The claiming the good parts of other culture’s traditions as ours while actively trying to erase those origins. The breakdown of relations over denials of beliefs and customs. Conflicts erupting over who owned a specific cultural norm. Cruel words, flung like gasoline over relations, willing war to burn bright over and over and over again.

Even as the lower levels, Sorvell had seen—had experienced—the hatred that could ignite so easily between people who were from different nations and cultures. That was part of how he had become so skilled at holding people still: through the sheer need to get away when someone suddenly flipped on him.

Sometimes, it was deserved. He gambled, a lot, and so many people were sore losers while he, rather unfortunately, was the sort of person to both accept defeat gracefully and rub his wins in his opponent’s face. So, yes, sometimes he was forced to tie his irate opponents up, scattering junk skills around them while he grabbed his winnings and got the fuck out of there.

Other times, it was simply that he was Baalphorian—and a Baalphorian from an affluent family, no less—and that so easily made him the subject of hatred. Yet more times, it was because his apparent fluency, which was almost always a fabrication of his skill with pronunciation—which granted was quite impressive, he just rarely had a reason to fully master a language—had led someone to believe he should know not to do something within the scope of the culture he was, at that moment, existing within.

Nine times out of ten, he had no idea something he was doing was against some cultural belief or another. Sometimes, he apologized—explained how he was faking his fluency. Sometimes, those apologies worked; many times, they did not and no one could convince him it wasn’t because the person had already been primed to hate him—or had been offended by a Baalphorian over this particular belief before, and therefore didn’t believe him when he claimed to have not known.

Really, it seemed like quite an oversight that Censors could aid someone in speaking many of their continent’s languages—although nowhere near to all of them—while possessing little to no information on how to get on in the culture from which the language was born. True, few Baalphorians ever visited even Seer’ik’tine, but still, it seemed like an odd thing to be missing.

Perhaps Emilia and Halen would be interested in creating something that could be used to inform Baalphorians about other cultures? Someone would need to fill the database, of course, but Emilia travelled a lot, and she had the ear and heart of so many clones, many of whom would know foreign cultures just as well as their own, and—

“I think that’s about all I can do for your hair,” Darrian said, and now there was frustration there because the mats… were terrible. While he had managed to work some of them out, they would either require a lot more work to remove or need to be cut off.

Given how the teenager seemed to have lost chunks of their hair—presumably, the weight of the mats had caused some to fall out, or they had become snared on something and been tugged out, which was objectively terrible—it might be better if they just lost the hair.

Apparently, Darrian’s kindness to the teenager who Sorvell really did hope they wouldn’t have to kill was contagious, and the next thing he knew, he was opening his mouth to ask if the teenager just wanted most of it cut off.

“What does it matter, when you’re going to kill me anyways?” the teenager asked, apparently not trusting that Darrian was telling the truth when he insisted they didn’t want to kill them.

Honestly, Sorvell couldn’t blame the kid. It was a common tactic to use kindness to gain someone’s trust—to gain trust enough that the person would spill their secrets—before slitting their throat. The teenager was smart to not trust them simply because they were being nice.

“Ooh! I’ll do it!” Baylor cheered, practically skipping forward and flipping a knife open—and where had he even pulled that out from!?

This time, the teenager’s eyes shot to Baylor as he stepped forward, spinning the blade in between his fingers. “Don’t worry. I’ll make sure you look real nice~”