[Can’t Opt Out]

Things were weird. Miles had been thinking that for a while, unease growing within him as the odd meeting that his presence had been demanded at earlier that morning went on and on and on. It was an exceptionally boring meeting, and so far, he was sure he could have skipped it. As a result, he had taken to behaving as his beautiful little starlight daughter would: in addition to occasionally heckling whoever was speaking—something Vrin had also taken to joining him in, the two of them bouncing off on another, much to the ire of several people in the room—he had also begun making a list of things about the situation that were odd.

First on the list? The fact that he was pretty sure almost none of them needed to be there. Had it just been him who seemed superfluous, he would have assumed the demand that he attend the meeting nothing but a punishment—Zachariah Lumos’ mother, a high-ranking SecOps officer, was one of the people leading the meeting, after all.

The woman clearly didn’t like him. The feeling was mutual, and he had taken great joy in heckling her in particular, especially since she was so obvious in both her hatred for him and his family as well as her purism that it was comical.

For a while, he had let himself believe it was her alone that had forced him to attend the meeting. Surely, eventually, topics relevant to more of the attendees would come up? Ostensibly, it was a meeting on national security. This could explain why he himself and a number of other people were there.

Vrin was something of an oddity, but his association with Emilia was no secret to a handful of high-ranking government officials. So, much like Miles had come to assume he was a hostage to this annoying meeting for no reason other than that it was a punishment, he had come to assume the same of Vrin’s attendance. As the man also knew smatterings of Emilia’s sign language, the two of them had been able to communicate across the table. Had a few people noticed? Definitely. Neither of them cared because honestly? If the people running the meeting were intent on lecturing them like they were in a classroom, they would be passing notes as though they were in a classroom.

Disturbingly, Vrin had effectively been kidnapped from his office that morning—where he had apparently passed out working—by SecOps and been brought to the building. After they had signed for a bit, Cynthia Lumos eventually snapping at them to cut it out, lest she cut their hands off, they had switched to using one of the alternative communication protocols that the room wasn’t blocking. It had taken a bit to find one that worked, but they had eventually been able to open up a communication channel with a handful of people in the room.

Most of them, it turned out, didn’t want to be there, didn’t know why they were there, and had effectively been forced to attend. Several of them—Miles included—could have turned down the demand that he come, but his meetings for the day had been cancelled, so he’d come. He’d been thinking something important would be discussed.

Not so far.

Also, all the people who had cancelled their meetings with him were in the room, all but one of the four against their will. The one outlier was, ostensibly, supposed to be leading the meeting. Presumably, he actually had an agenda. Alas, SecOps and a few other government officials had overtaken the meeting, turning it into the unfortunate and boring and purism-filled lecture they were currently being forced to listen to.

Part of Miles wanted to just get up and leave. Another part wanted to see where this was going. The rest of their why the fuck am I here and what is happening? group were equally split, but everyone was curious as to what the point of all this was. So, they were staying. Had a handful of them loaded up all the defensive skills they could into their Censors, lest this be a setup to some assassination attempt or another?

Yes, yes they had. This was yet another point in the channelling his daughter mood he had going on.

Other things on his list of reasons why this situation was odd weren’t quite as interesting, but he was still curious about a few. Mostly, he was wondering why several people weren’t in attendance. Had they refused to come? Been excluded? If this was an assassination plot, were they being protected from it by being kept away?

In general, Miles thought that a bad plan—after all, if a terrorist suddenly blew up the building, anyone not there had better have a bloody good reason for it; if they didn’t, they would land on the suspects list. This, of course, opened up the possibility that whoever wasn’t there was potentially being set up to take the fall. Considering that their president wasn’t in attendance, but his second was, such a situation could lead to the presidency falling.

Imagine! Vice President Monroe survives terrorist attack! President Daymark was supposed to be in attendance, but sent his second in his stead! Conspiracy to take out numerous government officials, including his closest ally? But then! She manages to live and showers the world with theories that he was behind it! Down would the Daymark presidency go, Georgina Monroe rising to become the new president after her tragic near-death!

Georgina was, in fact, one of the people who were hostages of this meeting—in theory, anyways. Miles didn’t particularly believe it, something about the way the woman was behaving, as well as the place she had been seated, screaming that, if they were attacked or a bomb went off, she was meant to be in the safest location possible.

Miles had, at this point in his considerations of the situation, pulled up a few of the slightly insane defensive skills his daughter had designed over the years—they were liable to take out the building if they deployed, was the problem. A smarter man might have gotten up and left—the leaders of this meeting might be fine trying to hold him, but if he actually tried to leave, he doubted they would attempt to keep him there… probably. At the very least, if the leaders attempted to stop him, it would become a thing, and with Vrin in the room? Regardless of how little combat training the man had, no one wanted to see a non-dev in action, especially given they all knew the truth of the situation: with Emilia having as many Free Colony connections as she did, there would be no holding Vrin accountable for any undue damage he caused to the people attempting to hold them hostage.

No, instead the man would be ferried out of Baalphoria to live in another nation. One non-dev gone, likely followed quickly by his daughter herself.

His sweet little girl might be tolerating the charges against her for the moment, but he was sure that if she was actually found guilty, she wouldn’t suffer a day in prison or under house arrest. Instead, she would leave—go to Dion, most likely. There were a handful of other Free Colonies who would accept her for short periods of time, or perhaps even permanently. Zironia’s Pylenius had made it clear in a recent lecture that he had heard about the charges and thought them insane. Wander would offer Emilia sanctuary in Lüshan, as would her connections in Lu Ros and Seer’ik’tine—although, he wasn’t sure any of the latter three would be willing to offer her a more permanent protection, due to the reality that Baalphoria might retaliate.

There were other nations as well. While Miles was a little dubious of some of Nur’tha’s cultural practices—it had been quite a while since he had attended the syna Gru’s ascension ceremony and just thinking about it still made his balls try to crawl back inside his body in fear—the new syna had made a point of talking to him and making sure he knew that, should it become necessary, his daughter would be safe with them.

“I do not believe it will be necessary,” they had said, staring blankly off into the distance, their normally brown skin pallid as they recovered from the ceremony.

Nearby, a pyr had lingered, their body a bob through the world as they listened and watched and did… something. Miles didn’t know what they were doing, but they were doing something with their energy and it was odd, leaving his Censor to record the pyr as an entirely different person one moment to the next, despite their swaying in place the only movement they were making.

“However, if all other avenues fall away to time and plucks of fate, send her here.” The syna Gru had handed him a note then, a location within Nur’tha written out in shaking Baalphorian. “Be sure to get rid of that and not like your OIC lay eyes on it,” they had added, before wandering away, their steps tenser than they had been only hours earlier, when they had stepped onto that stage and let their clothes fall, despite the aching cold.

This had been long before Emilia killed Zachariah Lumos—had been before they had all begun to worry for his mental health, each attempt to make his mother take the risk he presented to himself and others seriously falling away as though they had never been spoken at all.

Really, for a woman who seemed to mourn her child now, the woman hadn’t given a shit about him back then—and really, it seemed as though she was setting him up to explode, setting Emilia up to take his life.

That same feeling permeated the air now, and that went on his list as well. That, as in, the oddity that this situation seemed to either be setting most of them up to die or setting at least a few of them up to be chased out of Baalphoria by ridiculous charges of conspiracy when they survived some attack or brutally forced their way out of the room.

It wasn’t the first time Miles had wondered if his daughter’s charges were meant to force her out of Baalphoria, although, he had so far been sweeping that thought away because… why? Sure, Emilia could be chaotic, but overall, she was an asset to the nation. Not only was she one of the nation’s premier coders, alongside Halen and Vrin, but she had connections everywhere—connections that Miles knew at least a few nations would prioritize over their relationship with Baalphoria.

Dion would let their relations with Baalphoria wither before turning Emilia back to them—or even away from their safety—while a handful of other Free Colonies they had vague or tenuous relations with would happily give her refuge. A non-dev who had relations to the Blood Rain General and his heir? Who had connections to royalty and diplomats from throughout the continent? The power Emilia had might be less defined than it was for many of her friends, but it was still there, just waiting for someone to reach out and make use of it. Miles hoped it would be his daughter seizing her power for herself. At the moment, it felt as though her charges were a push to force her to relinquish that power to someone else.

The question, then, was whether someone was trying to force his daughter and so many of her friends—both those within and without Baalphoria—to take their power away from Baalphoria, or whether they were trying to have them take it to someone specific.

Oh, there was also the possibility that he was crazy—that there was no conspiracy to disperse Baalphoria’s power or remove Emilia as a factor, and instead, Cynthia Lumos was just a grieving, guilt-ridden woman. That was also possible.

Miles was pulled from his thoughts as the building shook in a very familiar way.

Beside him, Wilfred looked up from her notebook, where she had also been channelling her inner teenager. While she had asked for the notebook to take notes—a bad lie, given they might be offaether, but they weren’t locked in an instance of {A Private Moment} and all of their recording functions were working perfectly, another oddity to the situation—she had actually been doodling.

After several hours of this torture, most of the notebook was filled with caricatures of the meeting’s leadership. A few nicer portraits also stretched over the pages, including one of Miles surrounded by his three children when they were eight or nine, pulled from his secretary’s memory. A few portraits of her own daughter were tucked into the notebook as well, portraying her weight struggles as her body shifted and morphed in too short periods of time. They weren’t something meant to highlight Polianna’s weight issues; rather, in every picture, the girl smiled, and they were simply her mother’s wish that her child could be happy, no matter what her body looked like.

The leaders of this embarrassment of a meeting looked to one another, Miles trying to catalogue their expressions for signs that they were expecting something to happen next—for signs that they had been expecting the room to blow up and were now confused that it hadn’t.

“I’ll go,” Wilfred said, flipping her notebook closed and handing it to Miles for safe keeping… or for ripping out pages to ball up and hurl at other meeting members. While the nice portraits would be coming with them, surely, he could hurl the caricatures?

“Go where?” Cynthia Lumos demanded, standing and all but stomping her foot, and really, Miles thought the fact that the SecOps officers weren’t going to investigate, or even sticking their heads out the door to find out what was happening was one big, fat, red flag.

“To find out what Emmie—well, it can’t be Emmie, cause she ain’t around,” Vrin said from across the table. He had flung his legs up on the table, socked feet wiggling as he listened—and occasionally hummed along—to music playing through his Censor. “Her skill, though. Shakes the building to get someone’s attention when nothin’ else will. Ya’ll chose a building that blocks aethernet access, so, I’m assumin’ one of her friends needs Miles’ attention and he ain’t answering his messages, so…”

“So someone decided to knock on the whole building,” Miles finished, shooing Wilfred off. For a moment, he thought the man standing guard at the door might not move, but there was a reason Wilfred was considered his successor: she was the sort of person capable of staring down tyrants and royalty and warlords without flinching, and if there was trouble? Well, the woman had gone through training with The Black Knot—one of the groups oddly not included in this terrible meeting—and anyone who got in her way would quickly regret it.

The guard, he noted, didn’t let Wilfred by until Cynthia Lumos gave him the go ahead, and really?

If they were going to be doing something so stretchy and odd, the least they could do was have the sense to communicate with another protocol instead of simply exchanging a look? Clearly, whatever was happening was either being run by idiots or they were supposed to know something strange was occurring—that, or perhaps, whoever had actually organized all this was setting this group up to fail spectacularly?

Miles almost wanted to see the situation play out—wanted to see everything laid out so he could see if any of his guesses were correct. Unfortunately, when Wilfred returned a few minutes later, her face red and her voice a vice as she demanded he—as well as Vrin—come with her immediately as there was an emergency, those plans went out of the window.

There was also a moment, when Cynthia Lumos attempted to stop them from leaving, where Wilfred seemed liable to push the woman out the window. Such things would cause more issues, however, and one deep breath later, his secretary was informing the SecOps bitch that an emergency that, if not properly contained, might devolve into a transnational conflict, trumped even the most important of meetings.

With that, Wilfred turned, and Miles and Vrin—and a number of other meeting hostages, intent to use this as an opportunity to escape—hurried out of the room. Georgina Monroe was not among their numbers. Down the hallway, Loren, Malcolm, and Finn were waiting for them, all wearing grim expressions, and well… he had known Emilia for almost the entirety of her life, and sometimes a parent just knows: whatever had happened, his agent of chaos child was involved.