[Can’t Opt Out]

“They are quite upset.”

Moriana skidded to a stop—or she tried to, anyways. Momentum, however, was a bitch. Her feet skidded, bare and calloused from her long decades of refusing to wear shoes no matter where she went—she’d even refused to wear shoes in Nur’tha and the Cyrenix Desert at times, resulting in rarely being assigned to either location during the war—over the rough pavement of Piketown. Something snagged—some bit of skin being pulled off. It hurt.

It hurt so fucking much.

Fucking and burning aether, cracking cores and error ridden code and—

“Ouch. Do you need a medic for that?”

Moriana hopped on her not-torn-apart foot, swearing and pulling her injured foot up, trying to see the damage. Blood oozed out of her—she’d torn right down to muscle and nerves. It wouldn’t stop her from walking on the thing—basically nothing would stop a Division 30 member, and really, if she let something as minor as this stop her, she’d never be able to show her face to Samina again!

That woman was a monster, after all—had been since the moment they had met, decades ago now.

Fearless. Kind in her own, strange, black knot way. The bitch had also lost both her legs in the war and just burnt the injuries closed, set her Censor to cut off her pain awareness and continued on!

Such a bad bitch!

Such an icon!

Such—

The aether shuddered, and Moriana had a feeling more people than she had intended had come to join her inside the raid. It wasn’t exactly something to complain about—especially not when her foot was now perfectly healed—but it would explain why this raid had become so odd. Not difficult. Just odd.

Mentally, Moriana started making a list of the people she knew to be within the raid. It didn’t go well as, up until her foot was healed, she’d had no idea those three were within the raid, and until Porsq had commented on Emilia’s ex and his siblings being upset, she’d had no idea he was there either!

So, instead, Moriana was left making a list of people she knew weren’t in the raid as she tested out her foot—as expected, it was perfectly healed, but it was good to be sure.

Wyren was asleep, and while Nyren could be within the raid, Moriana doubted it, as it hadn’t seemed that the Shadow of Jinkai hadn’t been able to feel her within the city earlier—although, sometimes the Shadow of Jinkai did keep things from her, so who knew. The triplets were off in Nur’tha, as were all the rest of their Nur’tha teammates. The Zentaris weren’t on solid group, nor were Helix or their Atrium members—and really, given few of those members bothered using their temporary Censors, who knew when they’d even learn what happened. Same went for James and a handful of their other Free Colonies members.

Aside from her, most of their members who lived in Norvel seemed to have stayed there for the moment—the fact that Lennon could become a target for those criminal and governmental agents who were now looking to force answers out of their unit meant they had to keep enough members who were aware of just how valuable she was nearby.

In Dion… Moriana wasn’t convinced Yujao had let anyone know what was happening. Yes, he had said he had, but Yujao lied. Sometime tomorrow, Hurinren would show up, confused and demanding to know where Yujao was. Some people would be surprised, their minds unable to comprehend that Yujao was always lying to Hurinren. Other people wouldn’t be shocked, nor would they be surprised that some people seemed unable to remember that Yujao was always a little shit.

Samina was on the ship with Emilia as well, while Levi was… somewhere. Off on a mission, maybe? Who knew—there was a chance even Levi didn’t know. There were a handful of other people—especially those Baalphorians who actually had homes within the nation—who wouldn’t be living in Piketown with them, but might show up for this or that event. As they were trying to not make it too obvious that they were actually plotting against Emilia’s ex, however, they couldn’t show up for this first raid without it becoming a little too suspicious.

They were just having fun, on this first night in the city, was all! Nothing suspicious happening here at all!

As for Olivier, he was currently refusing to live in the building he had bought for them, but Moriana was sure he would crack eventually. Plus, he was still back in the building with Sorvell—who as far as she could tell, hadn’t made it into the raid. The lawyer was, however, refusing to partake in their raid war. Meerik’za had suggested it was because the raid system really enjoyed messing with him, but Yujao had said it was because he didn’t want to get into a fight with Emilia’s ex. Moriana had been there—small and dangerous and too young to yet be part of the war effort but there nonetheless—when Olivier and Captain McIntyre got into a fight over… more or less nothing.

Now, Moriana knew through the eyes of the Shadow of Jinkai that Captain McIntyre—who had been elevated to colonel posthumously but that man deserved no respect, not even what Moriana continued to give him through force of habit—that something had actually been quite insidious about that man. Personally, while she had never liked the man—really, he was one of the few people who seemed perfectly happy to send her twenty-something-year-old self and the Shadow of Jinkai to the front—but she had never felt anything insidious about him either, nor had a number of their unit members who tended to be but judges of character.

The Shadow of Jinkai, however, was never wrong. Often, they didn’t know as much as they might have, had they received proper training, but neither were they ever wrong in whatever they knew and felt about the world.

The thing was more… had Olivier been able to sense it? The lawyer had always been more aether touched than most, especially for a Baalphorian.

“Maybe?” Porsq replied when Moriana asked, his head tilting in thought. Curls that he had recently dyed an iridescent red shone in the dimming light of the evening. With the pink tide lingering overhead, they seemed more red than they really were.

While the boy was a few years older than her, Porsq had actually had someone to take care of him during the war, and that man had patently refused to let his ward near the front until he was of age. As a result, while he had once said that Captain McIntyre made Emilia unhappy, catching her mental state even from thousands of kilometres away, he had never personally met the man.

As for Moriana, she had no one, the one person who cared for her stolen by circumstances long before the war broke out. Ironically enough, it had been through simple coincidence in the days after the war ended that she had been reunited with that man—brought back to him by the aether.

“I think we needed to be apart,” he had said at the time, his fingers brushing through her hair as she and the Shadow of Jinkai fell in and out of existence in order to bask in his affection once more. “I needed to be somewhere else, and you needed to be with Division 30. So, the aether pulled us apart.”

It had been later, thinking through what the man had said, that Moriana realized he had probably known where she was since she had first become her unit’s shadow—after all, her alter was iconic, images of them popping up throughout the continent from the moment their feet first touched the frontlines. It had helped, of course, that even then, the Shadow of Jinkai’s reputation preceded them.

“Are you just going to give me strange and cryptic answers and comments?” Moriana asked Porsq, bouncing on her toes and activating {Feetie Freedom}. It wasn’t exactly her favourite skill to use, although she appreciated the effort Emilia had put into coding it for her, decades earlier. It couldn’t protect against everything, but it protected against enough. At the same time, it protected against enough of the world that it felt almost like wearing shoes. Maybe, since Emilia was back, she could look at the skill again and try to make it better?

Moriana wanted to feel the tug of the earth and all the elements under her as she moved. The press of rocks into her soles. The slide of grass between her toes. Bugs crawling over her skin when she just stood and breathed, the sun and moonlight bearing down on her. Not having her feet torn up was nice. Not having to deal with weird bug bites was also nice.

Moriana still preferred life without shoes or {Feetie Freedom}.

“Maybe,” Porsq replied, staring off into the distance and if Moriana hadn’t known him for the majority of their lives—their real lives, lived in flesh-and-blood years; all of them had known one another for the majority of their lives, were they to count the eons they had spent within the training system—she might have thought him being serious.

Instead, she hit him with a sprinkle of water, pulled from the aether—or, she tried to, anyways. One moment, Porsq was standing in front of her, the next, he had sparked behind her.

“You aren’t gonna be one of those people who try to spark inside raids and then end up getting hurt because your timing is off, right?” she asked, turning to glare at her now smiling friend.

It wasn’t a big smile, just this small tug at the corner of his mouth that hadn’t been split apart so many long years ago. Multiple healers had offered to remove the scar that slashed white over his deep-brown skin from the left corner of his mouth to his ear, but he had refused.

“It’s a reminder not to trust everyone,” he had told one particular healer, in the latter years of the war, his home laying in ruins before them for reasons they still couldn’t understand. “Once, I trusted someone and wound up a prisoner. Another time, I trusted Olivier and Emmie and all those they held dear, and it was the best thing I ever did. Then, years later, I trusted someone else and this happened.” The boy had brushed his thumb over his dirty cheek, every one of them coated in as much grime and dust as they had been during that fateful day in Falmíer, decades earlier, that had brought them all together, even if it had taken a near decade for some of them to find each other once more.

The boy—there it was, that near universal boy or girl despite all of them now being men and women or something else entirely. A person. A being. Someone we all love and cherish.

Some of them, like Olivier, had always been adults within their minds. People who were strong and capable—although, that wasn’t all it was. There had been so many people, that first day so many of them had met, who had been strong and capable and dangerous, and yet, they were still children.

They were children then. They were children now.

Something, somewhere along the way, had frozen so many of them in time. The trauma of war, the strain of all they had been through even before that, adding up until what was a day? A year? Time itself?

They held millennia within themselves, and who could possibly expect humans with the powers of gods to ever be normal? Half of them had never been children in the first place, so perhaps they really were neither children nor adults but something entirely new that belonged to them alone.

They were clones and slaves, silverstrains and non-devs. They were the last descendants of myths, the inheritors of powers unseen in millennia. They were heroes and innovators and criminals.

They were rules and laws unto themselves.

“Your mind is all over the place,” Porsq noted a moment before a skill ripped out of him and the twenty invaders who had been endlessly spawning and dying and respawning on the nearby street, where Emilia’s ex and his siblings had been lingering, upset with her for outing them but distracted by the raid and the nigh unkillable invaders it had set upon them.

“Did you cheat?” she asked, switching from their native Lüshanian to Grey Sander because Moriana knew people were eavesdropping, and she didn’t really want them thinking any worse of Porsq than so much of the continent already did this boy who could reach into the minds of those around him and stir up whatever feeling and thoughts and intentions he wanted.

Lips quirking into the slightest more of a smile, Porsq replied that no, he hadn’t cheated. “I’m just not so stupid as to not be able to solve so simple a puzzle,” he added in Baalphorian because apparently, he had come down from the mountains to cause problems.

A dozen eyes turned on them including the cold ice of Emilia’s ex. While he was clearly upset with her, the guy had been trying his best to ignore her since she’d outed him for being his mother’s child.

“This is what Emmie was dating?” Porsq signed, unimpressed—and at least, if he was down there to openly cause problems, he had sense to not out Emilia by using her name. Some of the languages they used between themselves might mangle enough of their names to be nearly impossible to translate, but Moriana didn’t trust the OIC not to try, inadvertently outing Emilia in the process—and really, if it didn’t at least try, that would be just as suspicious.

“Apparently,” she signed back, leaning into her friend. “You wanna help me make them miserable?”

If Porsq was intent to cause problems, well… Moriana was completely fine with helping him. Then, of course, when his adoptive father came to yell at him, she’d let the Shadow of Jinkai spirit them away—leave Porsq to deal with the man’s ire. It would probably be deserved—Porsq already frightened enough people through reputation alone, and really didn’t need to be making a nuisance of himself within a raid.

A better, more sensible person might have told him to behave. Moriana, however, had never considered herself a good or sensible person. So, causing problems it was!

“Let’s go!” she laughed, sending a bolt of pure aether to strike down a random invader one Elijah Richmond’s friends had been one shot away from killing. The friend turned an alarming shade of red while Emilia’s ex glared at Moriana all the harder.

“Very upset indeed,” Porsq laughed. “I wonder how upset I can make him, without ever once touching him with my abilities.”