[Can’t Opt Out]

“I think I got it,” Valor told the group, ignoring the way a dozen eyes turned his way. As someone who knew a middling amount of information about numerous topics, he had been assigned to see if he could disassemble any of the three xpherns that had been—very suspiciously—destroyed by several of the Drinarna in order to remove the pieces that contained their xphern exchange number, then see if he could reinstall that part into one of the xpherns that hadn’t been destroyed.

This was outside of his area of expertise, to say the least; he didn’t know nearly enough about xpherns to either disassemble them or know which parts he would need to transfer between devices or how to tell if they had been critically damaged. Neither, it turned out, did Halen. Halen, however, was somewhat distracted as his group moved through a residential area that was attached to the ceiling—and one squint later, Valor had realized there were numerous homes built into the ceiling, winding walkways connecting the various buildings.

While he had no particular fear of heights, Halen had sent him several photos of the view as they worked on moving through the area without being spotted, and the view was some mixture of mesmerizing and nauseating. Valor was, in the end, quite grateful to be moving through this part of the city, even if that moving was somewhat difficult to do while dealing with the xpherns.

Regardless, it seemed that there were few people out and about in either the area they were moving through or the ceiling city at the moment—and according to Vantril, this wasn’t exactly to be unexpected.

“At this point, I assume all xpherns are down, and that’s not really normal? Definitely not for this amount of time and without an emergency alert of some sort going out. Chances are anyone who’s noticed has decided to hunker down at home or inside a business. Most of the time, when the xphern transmission network goes down, it's because something is happening. Sometimes it's a test of the system, a few times some error has occurred, but usually, the Drini have shut it down for a reason. Information control, mostly. The network being down does make communicating impossible—I mean, obviously. That means no one can call for help, if they run into trouble, though? So, most people just stay where they are,” she had explained when Halen’s group had first mentioned the complete lack of people out and about, even in an area that had no criminals potentially running about and causing problems. There weren’t even any Drinarna wandering about, which was also rather normal, due to the general lack of danger up there. It was making it easy for them to move, but it was odd.

According to Lan’za—who was now authorized to send them more information about the situation back in Seer’ik’tine as her mother, Miles, and Malcolm attempted to learn more about the situation—someone had been sent to the Lüshanian embassy to gather information about standard procedure and what to expect, but for the moment, the two interns were their main connection to any information about what may or may not being happening within the Drinarna.

As they were still only interns, they could only give suggestions about what sort of response the higher ups were having to the xphern transmission network going down, assuming they hadn’t been the ones to take it down, but they had a pretty good guess what anyone who wasn’t really high up would be doing: nothing.

“It's a normal thing, for the network to go down without warning,” Bireth had explained, Vantril adding in a dozen examples, both from the last few months and stories from her parents and maternal grandparents, although she did reiterate the fact that—usually—outages didn’t last this long without more information being given out, but she had mostly assumed that, being an intern, she wouldn’t be given information until it needed to be given to the entire populace or became directly relevant to her.

As they had brought several of the Drinarna’s unworking xpherns with them, she and Bireth had opened a few up, checking to see if they had any messages on them about what was going on that simply hadn’t been relayed to them, however, the xpherns had contained no information about what was happening. Instead, it seemed that no one knew what was happening, and their training said to just sort of… keep going as though nothing was wrong.

“You said earlier that you thought the intern network went down before your supervisors’?” BJ had asked, his hand pressed to Valor’s back, in order to help guide him as they travelled and Valor worked on reassembling the xpherns using a mixture of advice from Halen and the Dionese soldier Yujao had kidnapped, who had been brought into the conversation when Halen had admitted he didn’t know enough about xpherns to guide Valor either. On his end, Valor thought Rafe was guiding Halen along in a similar manner to BJ leading him, leaving Simeon and Doctor Vickers to lead Halen’s team at the moment.

“Yes,” Bireth had replied, the pair of interns stating that, for one, as interns were more likely to gossip, their xphern exchange numbers were often blocked first, in cases of information control, which seemed to be the most common reason the network was ever partially or completely taken down.

There was something of an order to things. Depending on whether the incident was more public facing or not, civilian numbers might go down first, followed by intern numbers before cascading up through the ranks. Some Drinarna—especially those who ran departments—had special exchange numbers that wouldn’t be so easily caught up in blocks. They could still be blocked, but whoever was doing the blocking had to purposefully include them in the blocks, rather than cast a large net. If whoever was in charge of the city’s paper checkpoint today was to be blocked from accessing the xphern transmission network, blocking all officers who work at the papers checkpoint wouldn’t block their xphern; instead, blocking all papers checkpoint personnel plus the xphern used by whoever was on duty—said xphern rotated between whoever was in charge—was required.

“It’s more work to block everyone like that,” Taylor had relayed to the group from the Dionese girl, Meeho Kun’sai, who seemed to know quite a bit about the network. “It could be different here, but usually, those collective numbers are more easily accessible, for times when everyone needs to be blocked. They all have the same base exchange protocol, and once that protocol is blocked, all derivative numbers are blocked. For the special numbers, they are often kept more secret, in order to avoid them being blocked unless absolutely necessary. It largely seems to be an effort to avoid a takeover of the network taking down those special numbers.”

“So… if those xpherns have been blocked, we can assume whoever’s messing with the system knows what they’re doing and is pretty high up?” BJ had asked, eyes skipping over the dark alleyway they were headed down, which seemed exactly the same as every other alleyway in the area.

Really, this was the sort of city made to get lost in. Everything looked the same, a thousand crossroads leading off of each street, alleyway, side street. There were also so many levels, stairways leading into buildings before emerging onto new streets, and at this point, Valor was completely fine letting a combination of their Drinarna interns and Westrial lead them—as long as they were still headed in Emilia’s general direction, it was fine.

Shortly after this conversation, they had learned from Lan’za that Wander Fulbrun’s xphern was mostly likely down as well. While it was possible that he was simply busy and unable to answer his messages, the head of the embassy had attempted to get in contact with him, indicating there was a small emergency in Seer’ik’tine that needed his attention. The woman, in Lan’za opinion, was good at her job, and had managed to craft a rather insane and yet completely plausible story about how one of the people who lived at the embassy had noticed an issue with a fountain. A short investigation ensued, during which time something had triggered, resulting in the fountain now bubbling over with, well, an endless stream of glowing bubbles.

The head of the embassy, having heard that Emilia was in the city yesterday, was blaming her. Along with a demand that Wander Fulbrun, track down the silverstrain brat, as Secretary General Starrberg had informed her Olivier de la Rue’s class was is Falmíer at the moment, but neither were responding to any messages, this served to inform the man that Emilia and Olivier de la Rue were in the city. It seemed he wasn’t getting the messages, but if he did receive them—either now or if the network came back up—he would have a little information about the situation, and it had been given to him in a way that was, well, completely in line with Emilia’s personality.

If someone who was involved in the situation were to see the messages and grow suspicious that he was receiving messages about Emilia, the content might dissuade them from actually doing something about it—doing something being potentially killing the man, fearing he might realize there were Baalphorians involved in what was happening in his city before… who knew what. The man could be dead already, for all they knew. Until they knew this for certain, however, no one was going to risk the man’s life in too overt a manner.

In order to solidify their story, one of the clones stationed in Seer’ik’tine had activated a skill to actually cause the fountain in the Lüshanian embassy to start spouting bubbles. They would stop… eventually. In a few days, maybe. It was one of those annoying skills that either had to run its course or be taken out by a pure burst of power—a burst of power that few people were capable of, apparently.

Apparently, when Emilia had returned from Dion as a teenager and taught a number of them how to directly use their aether in a manner similar to how core users could release direct bursts of energy, she hadn’t been exaggerating how unlikely it was anyone else in Baalphoria could do such things. There were a number of things members of their class and friend group could do that few others could, of course, but in this case, Valor had honestly assumed that, due to the strain direct bursts of aether put on their aetherstores, clones weren’t taught such things until they were older. Aetherstores didn’t finish developing until a person was in their mid-fifties, sometimes even older, and scarring them beforehand could halt that development.

His brothers, as well as Halen—and how had they ended up with a Triplets + Emmie + Halen relay?—also seemed to have been under this assumption. As none of the clones in Seer’ik’tine could do such things—something that meant until someone from their group was in Seer’ik’tine, the fountain was likely to continue overflowing, unless they found a lavender code to code around it—this obviously wasn’t the case. Unfortunately for the embassy, the skill had been designed to annoy a certain Inner Court official, and direct core energy blasts did nothing but make the bubbles appear more quickly, leaving only someone who could use direct aether blasts to deactivate it.

Regardless, while Lan’za’s mother was still working on arranging for an alternative means of communication between herself and Wander, they continued to have no idea what the man knew or didn’t know or if he were alive. Combined with the embassy officials having bigger concerns than informing their group of whether there was a standard procedure for situations like this, this left them with the interns’ assumptions about what people high in the Drinarna’s chain of command were likely doing without access to the xphern network.

Mostly, they assumed that Wander Fulbrun would have gone to the department that handled the blockages to xphern exchange numbers to find out what was up. The pair had the vaguest of ideas where the department was located in relation to several over departments, and combined with Halen’s group only having the vaguest of ideas of where they were, this wasn’t exactly helpful. Like most government departments, this building would be up on the ceiling as well. It would be closer to the spire, however, and while the cave system hadn’t brought them out at the edge of the city, it hadn’t brought them out near the spire either, and combined with the winding pathways that, much like the lower city’s, seemed to have no rhyme or reason, Halen’s group was now considering alternative methods that would allow them to take a more direct path to the spire.

“It’s a really specialized department, from what I know?” Bireth had told them as they discussed what Wander Fulrbun might be doing in regards to dealing with the department responsible for managing the xphern network. “It’s one of the weird departments that currently isn’t really run by the Drini, because it's so specialized? The people who work there have clearance, but they come out of a mixture of communications and programming schools—sometimes other things as well. It wasn’t always like that, but there are a few departments like that at the moment.”

“Some people like that—the diversity,” Vantril had piped up, too loud from where she had stationed herself near Valor, watching as he puzzled the xphern that he had eventually managed to get working together with the piece of the destroyed xphern that contained its exchange number. “Others think it's introduced too much… hmm…”

The girl had pondered her words for a bit, but unlike previous times when it had been more a hesitation on her and Bireth’s side to give them too much information about the inner workings of their organization, this seemed more an inability to find the exact words she needed. It seemed that, perhaps due to a combination of getting to know them, learning what they were doing in the city, and learning they were both acquaintances with Wander Fulbrun—most of them had met him at least in passing over the years—who didn’t particularly want him to die and knew a number of other high-ranking diplomats who were highly unimpressed that they would be so stupid as to go to Lüshan without letting anyone know, the pair had decided to trust them.

In turn, their group had mostly decided to trust them as well, and while a few of them were keeping an eye on them for signs of betrayal, BJ had stopped renewing the skill that was blocking them from using their cores. Much as with Westrial, it was a somewhat uneasy trust, but Valor had a feeling that the moment a fight happened across them—it was bound to happen eventually—everyone would settle into a more stable trust.

There was nothing quite like saving someone’s life to solidify faith in one another.

Eventually, Vantril had managed to babble out the rest of her sentiment—and Valor thought she and Emilia would get along, for the simple fact that they both told rambling stories with a thousand segues and digressions. Effectively, there were parts of the Drinarna who worried that by allowing more people of different professions and training to touch parts of their organization, they would allow corruption in—apparently, the Drinarna used to train their specialists themselves, but during Wander Fulbrun’s purge several years back, so many of those specialists had turned out to be corrupt that he had been forced to fill the positions with people from other professions.

The department that dealt with the xphern exchange network was one such department: due to how much the Drinarna blocked the network, they had previously maintained a firm hold on it; however, this had led to numerous officers within it helping to cover up the trafficking ring that Wander had taken down. As a result, most of it had been purged, and many of the officers deemed probably not corrupt or very likely being blackmailed into helping had still been shuffled into other departments.

As the xphern he had reassembled lit up, the loading screen flickering before settling into a slightly off colour, Valor wondered if that had been how this new corruption had found its way into the Drinarna: those recruits from other training programs either bringing the corruption with them or perhaps being a weak link. Emilia had suggested in one of her earlier messages that, as the corruption from both back then and now was linked at least partially to this Fräthk, it might have been that Wander Fulbrun had failed to root it all out. At the same time, clearly, there had been pushback against some of the things Wander Fulbrun was doing as he attempted to bring the Drinarna under his control.

Somehow, Valor thought that there was just as much of a chance that the outside specialists were part of the corruption as there was that they weren’t—that, whenever someone found themself within the department that managed the xphern transmission network, there was just as much of a chance that they would find it abandoned or manned by specialists who had happily shut down the network for the city’s occupants as there was that they would all be dead, killed because whoever was behind this had no use for outsiders.