[Can’t Opt Out]

Mikhail microsparked to the spot Emilia had told him to—a relatively difficult task, given how winding the city of Falmíer was. It had taken a bit of back and forth to figure out where he was supposed to go to meet up with this mysterious person the Crown Prince of Crishar had sent to help them, but he found the spot eventually. Emilia had been trying to help with all her coordinating, but Mikhail felt like he would have ended up in this place anyways, had she not told him to try and meet up with the person—the person who wasn’t there.

“Uhm…” he breathed out, glancing around the dark alleyway and finding, well, no one.

Opening up his relays again, Mikhail began to send a message to Emilia. His friend would be disappointed to find out this person wasn’t actually there, which really, Mikhail didn’t know what to think of. Had the person lied to Emilia about where they were? About being in the city at all? Maybe, but that would be weird. Plus, they had known some specific details about this particular spot.

Down the path Mikhail had come from, the deep reds of an odd, glass sculpture glittered from within, a spinning light installed inside it and casting sparkling light over the street. Mikhail thought it strange but pretty. Maybe there were other pieces like it, but the person had told Emilia the exact shape of this one, and well… Maybe a glashial could create identical works? He thought that something more common for simpler objects, though? Like, it was fine to create hundreds of identical plates or bowls—assuming they weren’t too expensive, as expensive things needed to be more unique!—but the more complicated an item, the less likely it was to not be unique. They’d had a few classes, in their mix of schoolwork, that had focused on economics and business practices.

Mikhail didn’t really care for the subject, but all of their classes had been designed to suit the diverse interests of their class. The ones on business had mostly been for Halen and Simeon.

According to those classes, the less common something was, the more expensive it could be. Limited Edition held a lot of weight, as did producing things in small batches. Of course, they had also talked about artificially expensive products—but that more applied to raw materials. Ores might not be mined as much as they could be to keep the price artificially high, and why had he been thinking about this again?

“Your mind is fascinating,” a man’s voice called through the otherwise quiet alleyway, and when Mikhail looked around, he found a man leaning against the exact spot the person the Crown Prince of Crishar had sent them had told Emilia he would wait.

He hadn’t been there a moment earlier.

“Can you… read my mind?” Mikhail asked, eyes flicking around the area, looking for anywhere the man might have disappeared and then reappeared from. There was nowhere he could have so easily shifted in and out of, and while Mikhail wasn’t good at using recon skills, he had let one slip out of him while he looked around, confirming he was in the correct place.

The man hadn’t been there, and then, he was. In his recon logs, it was the same: nothing, then suddenly, there he was.

Maybe Mikhail could come up with a list of reasons the man hadn’t been there, and then suddenly was—his main thought was that person he had a core ability similar to microsparking, which had allowed him to move really fast and slip through the recon skill—but this was something better suited for Emilia or Halen. So, instead of worrying too much about it, he sent the data off to his friends, along with a confirmation to Emilia had he had met up with the Crisharian.

Immediately, he realized that the recon logs would have effectively confirmed for her that he had met with the man. Once, Mikhail would have internally cringed at the unnecessary repetition of information. Not now. Someone, when they had been children—and it annoyed Mikhail that he couldn't actually remember who it was—had told him that, with how fast so many of them thought and spoke, sometimes they missed things.

“It’s nice to have someone who will state things plainly,” the person had laughed, their voice melted by time and Mikhail’s already suspect memory. “Sure, sometimes the things you say might seem obvious, but sometimes, obvious things need to be stated. We know it's not because you think we’re stupid, or even that you’re assuming we don’t know. The thing is, one of us might not know it? And everyone else is so wrapped up in their heads, their minds ten thousand steps ahead of their mouths, and no one realizes someone isn’t keeping up?”

In the memory, a shoulder nudged his, and Mikhail wished he could remember who it was. He would thank them, if he remembered, for these few words that had helped him brush aside his negative feelings over being the one who was always saying things that didn’t need to be said.

In their relay, Emilia sent a reply—something about how, if the guy turned out to be trouble, to let her know and ditch him—and then, Mikhail was right in front of the man.

“Hello.”

The man’s mouth twitched, his eyes a glimmer of amusement. They were a pale blue against his brown skin. According to some information Mikhail’s Censor pulled up, the man’s skin was darker than most Crisharians’, but Mikhail had seen freckles like the ones that spread over the man’s nose and cheeks and the hands poking out from the long, ratty sleeves of his shirt, each tucked lazy and unconcerned into the pockets of his similarly ratty pants.

Mikhail wasn’t a genius, but he didn’t think it difficult to realize this man spent hours roaming in the searing sun of the southern Free Colony, freckles popping over his sun-darkened skin.

“Hello,” the man replied in Baalphorian, just as before. It sounded a little odd, but all Baalphorian spoken by non-native speakers did.

“I went to one of those classes on learning to speak Baalphorian when I was a preteen,” Halen had once said. Due to his Grey Sander heritage, he had often struggled to make friends with children who were proper Baalphorians. So, he had once tried to instead make friends with the children of rare immigrants and refugees. So, he had attended a class he didn’t need to, in order to meet such children. It hadn’t gone much better, mostly because diaspora tended to stick to their own specific groups, and Halen had still been considered an outsider.

Always an outsider, until he ended up at their school, and even with the prank war always keeping their sides of the class apart, Halen had fit with them.

They were, after all, all outsiders in their own way.

According to Halen, the class that he had attended seemed to purposefully be teaching students a form of Baalphorian that wasn’t quite right.

“It wasn’t so wrong that someone would point out that anyone who took it couldn’t speak Baalphorian at all or anything,” Halen had explained, fingers tapping over his Virtuosi Rig as they waited for their teacher to show up.

The man had never shown up—but they had all already suspected he would quit, after Emilia and Halen and Simeon had teamed up to make his life miserable. Mostly, they had just needed to wait long enough for someone to go ask about his whereabouts at the office, so they could start doing their own thing. Mikhail wasn’t positive, but he thought that after playing several rounds of kyra, in order to choose who got to pick their topics for the day, Baylor had begun telling them about the history of a small nation that sat in the middle of western Dion, surrounded by the sprawling nation on all sides.

“It’s more insidious than some outright wasting of people’s time and money, I guess? This lack of correcting pronunciation, or purposefully teaching students bits of information that aren’t correct, but also not super incorrect? Some of it was archaic Baalphorian? So, it was correct, but also not?”

When Baylor had popped up, asking for examples, his demeanour screaming that he hated that he was interested in anything Halen was saying but also wanted to know, Halen had offered more than a few examples, burned into his pre-Censor brain due to how terrible they were.

The teacher had taught students a few rarely used verb endings—the sort that were no longer used in more than a handful of rarely used words. Most verb endings had been altered several hundred years earlier—something Halen had muttered was likely the result of purists realizing a number of verb endings were shared with Grey Sander, that fact becoming more apparent as Baalphoria attempted to conquer the then Free Colony. The base forms of many verbs could still follow the rules for their archaic verb endings, however.

“Once,” Baylor had added on to what Halen was saying, his entire body vibrating because he loved myths and legends and languages, even if he didn’t know as many as Emilia or Levi, “all -syv verbs followed the same ending pattern. Now, only a handful of weird ones do—verbs that are basically never seen outside of a what ancient records exist, so no one bothered officially changing them to the new Baalphorian-ized endings, which aren’t nearly as standardized as those original ending. The new endings are actually really random? I imagine they make it harder to learn Baalphorian than before the verb endings were changed? Cause, exceptions to the rules used to be rare; now, the rules barely exist and rout memorization of verb endings is more of a thing?”

Mikhail wasn’t sure he understood everything that Baylor said, Halen and Emilia both adding their own commentary in, most of which ended in a sentiment of purists can go fuck themselves and questions about whether the language teacher was actively trying to cause their students problems. There had also been a brief discussion about the pros and cons of altering the verb endings of their sign language, which seemed to have the pro of more consistent rules make it easier to learn, and the con of more consistent rules make it easier for people we don’t want to learn it to learn it.

Other things the teacher had done were less insidious, but still wrong. While not telling students they needed to split paragraphs in certain situations wasn’t the end of the world, it was still another thing they were teaching wrong. Most of their writing lessons had dropped so many tiny details that whenever the students wrote, it was incomprehensible, while their reading skills tended to then fail them as they didn’t understand why some syllables of the same word were left disconnected from the rest of the word, when most Baalphorian words were fully connected. Did it affect their reading comprehension or ability to write with their Censor, once it was installed? Probably not—most decisions to leave syllables disconnected were stylistic or to add extra tone—but it was yet another thing that separated Free Coloniers trying to make Baalphoria a home from real Baalphorians.

The worst thing the teacher had done, however, was that they hadn’t told their students that using full names was expected between Baalphorians who hadn’t agreed to call each other more familiarly.

At this, Emilia had piped up, stating that in the diplomatic scene, it was generally expected that everyone would obey the cultural dorms of the nation they were currently within. “It’s more complicated than that, of course. Caveats for being inside embassies, or interacting only with people from your own nation or another nation than the one you’re currently visiting. It’s obviously a little different outside of the diplomatic scene, but daddy literally has to run courses on getting along for foreigners for his new employees, and names are a huge issue. It’s such a big thing that he always makes his employees sit through another lecture on name-use customs whenever they go somewhere new.”

Shrugging—something that had earned her a smack from Lux, who had been braiding her hair—Emilia had muttered about how Baalphorians were terrible at trying to force their culture on everyone, even in other nations, but the use of their full names was a particularly sticky thing. “I’m not saying all immigrants and refugees have to adopt every Baalphorian custom—fuck knows some of them are terrible—but to not tell students about the name thing seems like setting them up to fail? Or worse, to get themself killed by some purist for daring to not use their full name.”

Mikhail had no idea what the name-use customs of Crishar were, while he thought Lüshanian was actually odd in that people rarely gave strangers their last names—they had needed to wait another half hour before going to alert the school administrators that their teacher hadn’t shown, due to so many of their teachers coming in late in order to avoid their class. In the empty time, they had gone on discussing the various naming conventions and name-use customs of Free Colonies Emilia—and occasionally someone else—was familiar with.

Crishar, secretive as it was, wasn’t on the list.

“I don’t know how Crisharian name-use customs are, but in Baalphoria, we use full names unless we know someone well and are friendly with them. Here in Lüshan, they rarely even give their full name. What’s it like in Crishar?”

The man blinked his blue eyes at Mikhail, lips quirked in a smile that pulled at his entire face. “There are some annoyingly strict naming things where I’m wrong, but I’m good with first names, if you are? Some mixture of—” The man’s words cut off, his eyes flickering like he was looking for a word he couldn’t quite grasp. “Of…”

His hands waved, the smile falling from his face as he struggled, and were Mikhail someone else, perhaps he may have been able to guess what the man was trying to say.

He couldn’t guess. So, he was left standing there, wondering what the man was trying to say. Whatever it was, the man never seemed able to find the words, instead swearing in what was likely Crisharian—Mikhail hadn’t downloaded the translation files for the language before leaving Baalphoria, and his connection to the aethernet was spotty enough that he didn’t want to try, especially within his Censor already acting up. The words sounded vaguely similar to Chinsatan, however, a language that all of them kept loaded up in their Censors at all times, sketchy as the translation function for the rarely heard language was.

It was just, if they overheard someone speaking Chinsatan, they were likely criminals—scavengers who would snatch up anyone of value who crossed their path. Most of them were people of value—people who were strange and could catch a good price, if offered up to the right people.

Sighing, the man’s smile returned. “I’m Zavriel,” he said, reaching out his hand towards Mikhail, fingers pointed upwards.

“Mikhail,” he replied, reaching his own hand out to press against Zavriel’s, their palms meeting in a greeting Mikhail had heard about from Emilia but that neither of them had ever experienced—Emilia had learned how to properly greet Crisharians, in case she ever accidentally ended up in the nation.

The fact that no one questioned that, one day, she just might accidentally ended up there, said a lot about their expectations for how her life would go, Mikhail thought.

“Well,” Zavriel laughed, “shall we go see what all that fuss was?”

Head cocking, Mikhail asked, “What fuss?”