[Can’t Opt Out]

Emilia, very awkwardly, had to mute her relay with her father because, oh boy, was he mad. Then, she had to mute her not-secret relay with Malcolm, who had been tasked with yelling at her in her father’s stead. He almost immediately sent off a message in their secret relay, telling her he was sorry but the man was pissed and right there, and black knot or not, Malcolm was rather afraid of him.

His solution? Transmit her father’s messages of ire and frustration to her, then send the man off to yell at his mother—Penelope Laprise, after all, had also known about the situation in Lüshan and taken no steps to intervene. Personally, both she and Malcolm—as well as Rafe, when they eventually moved their messages to their Laprise Boys + Emmie group relay—thought the woman had been testing her eldest son.

It wasn’t very nice, in Emilia’s opinion. Understandable? Perhaps—Emilia also had some concerns about the ability for The Black Knot to function when she and her friends were potentially in danger. Nice, though? Absolutely not, and the woman deserved the reaming out she was liable to get from Miles Starrberg, once he found her.

Emilia had a feeling he wouldn’t be finding her anytime soon, Malcolm having reported that after his earlier panic attack and conversation with his mother, she had vanished. Were she and her friends already safe and out of Falmíer, Emilia thought her father would hunt the woman across the nation, seeking to yell at her. As it was, they weren’t safe. So while he had popped in to Penelope’s office, trying and failing to find her, he hadn’t bothered wasting time searching her out; instead, he’d continued on to Seer’ik’tine, where Lan’za’s mother was attempting to contact Wander through diplomatic channels.

To be honest… Emilia wasn’t exactly sure what that meant. Would some Seerish diplomat risk leaving their own embassy to find Wander? They’d have to be a brave fucker to do so. Did they have some sort of alternative means of communication? Unknown. Had her father not been so irate, she might have asked. As it was… no. Unless she had something more important to ask, she would just be keeping their relay muted for a little bit. Her Censor would inform her if he said anything actually important—and really, while he hadn’t turned to yelling at her in any of their group relays, likely in order to keep what was happening from spreading to her mother or siblings, the man would tell her in one of them to read his private messages, should he actually need her to do so.

As it was, he was simply blowing up because he needed to express his anger and frustration and worry for her. Were she not in so precarious a position, Emilia might have messaged him back to explain her point of view on the situation and how it had come to this—mostly, she wanted it known that she had immediately contacted the clones and had no part in her friends ending up in the city. That would have to wait, however.

Emilia’s eyes and Censor slid over the strange contraption they had come to, which reminded her of something out of a horror movie. According to the random man she had captured and forced information out of—he’d been much less cooperative than Arinesi had been, and Emilia had been forced to channel her inner-Baylor in order to get any information out of him—both of the people they were looking for were beyond this room.

“There are people back there…” Rayleen had admitted when they had first found the room—which had rudely been back up two flights of stairs—and been faced with the reality that it had what effectively amounted to a murder machine guarding the rooms further in. “I cannot tell if they are the ones you seek, nor the state they are in.”

So… that sucked, especially since the aether in this room was weird, the aether the machine was built of even stranger.

“It feels a bit like the walls of the city and the caves above…” Jerrial had stated as he let his energy stretch over the machinery. “Not quite the same, but similar? I think… it’s been years, but they remind me of one of Fräthk’s loyal—Curtisal. Their abilities are similar to mine or a glashial’s—an ability that allows them to manipulate certain physical objects with more ease, and their energy naturally reenforcing the object as they do so in… unique ways.”

Emilia had been afraid of that. The moment she had let her Censor touch the machines of the room, she had suspected they were designed by someone with abilities similar of the rumai’se, who could manipulate metal. The weapons they built were effectively indestructible, at least until time itself wore away at them—and even then, they lasted millennia. Some willbrands could damage them, but only if they had their own special reinforcements, and if they didn’t? If they were nothing but a normal-ass willbrand?

Well, then the willbrand might very well shatter—or worse, explode, taking their owner and the entire area with them.

Not a lot could damage even a normal willbrand, but the weapons created by a rumai’se could. Aether- and core-energy-based attacks, on the other hand? They bounced off rumai’se weapons! Rumai’se abilities were also used to create private rooms, where the aethernet—and occasionally other types of communication protocols—no longer worked, and the more she thought about it, the more the Lowdouran and the rumai’se had in common?

Odd, considering they were manipulating completely different materials. Did they have the same underlying ability, which was simply attached to different materials? Or was it nothing but a coincidence that their abilities left the same sort of mark on anything they touched?

When—if—they got out of Lüshan, Emilia was going to need to convince Jerrial to let her experiment on him. Nicely, of course! The things she could try getting him to do, though? Especially if she managed to find some people who could help him learn to use his abilities better? If she could get enough people with similar abilities to experiment for her, maybe she could figure out how their abilities were altering material so it was impenetrable to so many abilities and technologies?

Imagine if she could find a way to emulate their abilities with skills? Or find a way to counter them—although, the latter would definitely be something to never be released to the public.

The last thing they needed were people running around with the ability to counter such impressive abilities when really, they rarely affected anyone who wasn’t being an ass—Dion’s deepest dungeons had been created by the rumai’se, in order to hold the most dangerous of criminals, while many of their privacy rooms were created by them, in order to make sure most spying abilities bounced off them.

Those were all future concerns, however, as fun as they were to muse about as her Censor catalogued as much of the machine as it could.

The thing was deranged and fascinating in equal measure. It was also caked with blood in certain spots, hidden traps tucked into the machine. Emilia couldn’t figure out what the traps were—the metal’s defences were deflecting her attempts to see within it—but she could often make out the openings to traps. Sometimes, she could guess at where the trigger was, but again, she couldn’t see inside the bloody thing to make sure.

It all amounted to a mess of being able to guess at where the machine would try to kill anyone who went through it, as well as where it would almost definitely kill anyone stupid enough to try—assuming the blood hadn’t been splattered through the thing at random, anyways.

Fuck.

Technically, Emilia might be able to brute force her way through it using one of her willbrands, but who knew. As similar as the machine felt to the abilities of Dion’s rumai’se, it wasn’t exactly the same. Maybe it was a difference of culture and style and the same limitations would apply. Her willbrand would scream into the void and she would slice through the machine like it was nothing special. They would walk through, find the people beyond the machine. Hopefully, they would be the correct people and their brains wouldn’t have been melted by this place. They’d get the fuck out of there and never look back— Well, that was a lie. Emilia still wanted to know this place’s secrets, and despite hating it down there, she still wanted to make sure no one was left behind to wither and die and that everything of importance was found and returned to loved ones or destroyed.

Intentions to come back collided with a desire to never set foot in this place again, and really, Emilia didn’t know what she would do, once they were out of there, especially with the situation playing out the way it was.

Wander not knowing anything about the situation hadn’t been something they had considered. Originally, she had been nervous to even consider sending Wander any messages, lest she accidentally put him in danger, should someone from the corrupt faction of the Drinarna see her messages. As it was possible someone within that faction had been the one to assign Cameron to watch her, and therefore knew she was somewhat involved in the situation, it wouldn’t have mattered how much she coded a message for Wander—if the wrong person saw him receiving a message from her, they might attack him.

Now, of course, she was wondering if she should just say fuck it and attempt to contact him—hope that his xphern hadn’t yet been blocked. Still, she wasn’t stupid, and with more and more adults coming into the picture, all with more experience handling situations like this, there was no way she would contact the leader of the Drinarna without asking for someone else’s opinion.

So, the one message she had sent back to her father during his still ongoing tirade had been to ask if she should try messaging him. The man had immediately told her no, his mood levelling out while he agreed that her contacting him would likely do no good, as well as agreeing that there was a good chance Wander didn’t know anything about what was happening—or, if he did, it was likely he knew nothing but the basics.

“From what I’ve heard, it doesn’t seem like your involvement is a complete secret from at least some of the Drinarna. I trust Wander, and I am choosing to believe that if he knew of any Baalphorian involvement in the situation he would have at least connected with the embassy there, if only to tell them to get Olivier’s students out of the city. None of the city’s clones have been contacted; therefore, I doubt he knows anything,” he had replied, and yeah, that made sense… mostly.

Emilia still thought there was a good chance the Lüshanian and Baalphorian governments would have come into conflict over how to handle Olivier being kidnapped, but as the situation worsened, it was odd that no one from the Lüshanian government had tried even contacting the clones.

Actually… it was also odd that no one had tried taking out the city’s aethernet hubs yet either? Sure, there weren’t a lot of Baalphorians involved in this whole affair, but both the corrupt Drinarna and some of the criminals knew. So, why not cut off their main means of communicating?

A quick message to the group relay she had going with the clones revealed they were also beginning to question a number of the things going on as well. It seemed that Olivier’s missing students had been causing so much trouble that they, quite honestly, hadn’t been focusing on the bigger things happening in the city—and really, they mostly assumed the aethernet hadn’t been taken down because the kids were a nuisance and needed to be brought under control. The aethernet going down would have made that far more difficult. Had it gone down, they wouldn’t have been able to track the brats, while they might have gone off to figure out what was happening, and left the students to be little shits.

Between all the messages she received as she continued waiting for the ten thousand different skills and functions she was running, analyzing the stupid murder machine—she really didn’t want the thing to kill her, should they decided to attempt going through it—to finish up, Emilia was able to figure out that, aside from Nivel, most of the clones hadn’t seen much of the conflict exploding through the city, possibly because they were on the other side.

They had seen bits of it—the occasional scuffle between criminals a little more out in the open than usual—but nothing too obvious. They had seen a few Drinarna acting oddly and had mostly assumed they were learning about the situation. The corrupt Drinarna would be worried they were about to be caught and killed—or thrown in prison and never released. The normal Drinarna would be worried about how many of their colleagues were corrupt and how far the situation might escalate—and really, none of them knew why some of the Drinarna were corrupt and what their end goal was. Did they want to overthrow the government? Were they just terrible, greedy people? Were they being blackmailed? Unknown. Unknown. Unknown. So, it was sensible to be worried! Now, however, they were all wondering if the Drinarna had been acting oddly because their xpherns were down and they knew nothing of what was happening.

When it came to the papers checkpoint, they’d already known virtually none of the Drinarna knew anything of what was happening, but a handful had. Everyone had assumed the information about the conflict brewing in the city was only being given to high-ranking Drinarna, and most of the papers checkpoint Drinarna were more… low ranking. If anything, it was treated as a dead-end job or a punishment. So, no one had worried too much about Coral’s continuous readings of few—but certainly not no—Drinarna knowing what was happening.

Now, of course, the whole group was now watching the people around them, to see if anyone was using their xpherns or had noticed them not working. As she had other things to deal with, Emilia was mostly leaving the reports of their findings alone. Later, she’d look through what they learned—or, perhaps someone would happily summarize them for her. For the moment, there were other people to deal with what they learned and make inferences from it.

Mostly, Emilia thought, as the last of the preliminary skills she wanted to run on the murder machine sputtered to a stop, they had collectively overlooked a lot of red flags and Halen was right: all of them were defaulting to looking at the world a little too simply. Things were more complicated than they seemed, and all of them were missing that fact, and that wasn’t good. At best, the situation was messier than it needed to be because they were letting obvious inferences slip through their minds. At worst, someone was going to die due to their inability to look beyond the surface and their assumptions.