[Can’t Opt Out]

The gate Emilia hadn’t seen—hadn’t been able to see through any of her attempts to make out the form and shape of this murder machine—slammed closed behind her. Immediately, her body flooded with those hormones of panic, several functions activating to push their effects down, down, down because she needed to not panic.

Panicking would do her no—

A screech erupted out of her as oil poured over her, too fast and heavy for her Censor to activate a skill to keep it from landing on her completely. Honestly, Emilia was lucky it wasn’t something worse than lukewarm oil—molten metal, for instance, would have immediately coated her head and killed her within seconds and she was so totally completely fucked.

Time to turn around and—

And her Censor was now offaether.

And she couldn’t get the fucking oil off her.

It dripped, sliding down her hair and face—the part of her body she’d been unable to protect entirely from the oil—and dribbling over her shoulders. It was sticky and slimy and just generally disgusting.

Somewhere in the background, Clemence was yelling her name, but Emilia was more concerned with getting this shit off her. Her Censor whirred, cycling through skill after skill, attempting to remove the stuff from her. It wasn’t pretty, and eventually, she was forced to modify the defensive skill that had managed to deflect the oil from entirely coating her. It wasn’t meant to run so close to her skin, being the sort of defensive skill that destroyed everything that came close to it, rather than something that pushed things away from her, that destruction apparently the only thing that was effective against the oil.

Mostly, by the end of forcibly removing the shit from her, Emilia felt as though she’d had some sort of aggressive skin treatment, peeling away the top layer or two of her skin. Awesome. Just what she needed: to be red and blotchy.

While it seemed insane, Emilia was tempted to pull up the fabrication skill and make herself some skincare products, lest her skin redden and burn. Possibly, she would. Unfortunately, she had a bigger problem: her hair was still coated with the oil. The skill, she knew, could be modified to get closer to her hair; she didn’t much want to risk the consequences of that. The defensive skill in question, being all destroy everything that gets too close, was designed to not touch her hair or clothing or skin, mostly because it usually activated long before anything got that close to her.

Something, it seemed, was weird about the oil, and yes, the fact that it was seemingly what had taken her offaether rather than the murder machine itself—it was easy enough to check if the aethernet was available; it was, Emilia just couldn’t connect to it—was perhaps sign enough that the shit was weird.

Weird and repellant to most skills, and Emilia was not risking absolutely decimating her hair trying to remove it from each strand. Fortunately, it had been pulled up into all those braids and tucked close to her scalp, so at the very least, she wasn’t dealing with it running down loose strands and ending up everywhere. Still, it was gross, and while she probably had bigger things to worry about, she still took a few moments to strip her top and fabricate herself a new one, as well as a new cap—it was cute and purple, at least—to keep the oil from getting on anything else.

“Is that really your priority?” Vern asked, glaring at her from behind the gate, which wasn’t solid but a set of bars. Behind him, Rayleen was staring absently into space while Clemence blushed but definitely hadn’t removed her gaze while Emilia had removed her top—her shorts had been spared from all but a few drops of oil and it didn’t seem worth it to change them—which had been saturated with oil drops. Jerrial, Emilia noted, had politely looked away, his cheeks an impressively bright red considering the brown shade.

People, she thought, were always fascinating when it came to nudity—after all, she had turned away from everyone, despite her desire to get the shirt off! It wasn’t like she’d flashed her tits at—

Emilia’s gaze caught on a mirror a little ways away, and okay, maybe she had accidentally flashed everyone. Whatever. Life and death and disgusting-oil situations made consent for nudity rather moot, in her opinion.

“Yes,” she told Vern, fingers brushing over the back of her neck and coming away slick with remnants of the oil. While she couldn’t prove it, she was willing to bet that the physical presence of the oil over her Censor’s installation—it wasn’t like she could get it out of her pores with that destructive skill, after all—was why it was having issues connecting to the aether. It was also likely what had taken Olivier offaether and thank fuck she had used a non-aethernet-based method for tracking him.

Still…

Emilia’s xphern was already buzzing with panicked messages when the girl handed it to her through the bars of the gate—bars that Emilia knew she’d have to brute force her way through with one of her willbrands, if she decided to retreat. Currently, despite her initial thought upon being doused in aethernet-blocking oil that she needed to get the fuck out of there, Emilia wasn’t sure what she was going to do.

It was stupid, she knew, to try and go through this thing. At the same time…

At the same time, something about it called it her. It was so much like a playground—a potentially deadly playground, but a playground no less.

It was also extremely odd that there was aethernet-blocking oil booby trapped above the entrance. From what she could tell—and which her Censor tentatively confirmed for her—the oil had done nothing else. It hadn’t affected her ability to use skills that weren’t directly reliant on the aethernet, nor had it affected her core or meridians. That last bit, in regard to her meridians, both she and her Censor were a tad less confident in—while heads and necks, the main places she had been hit, did have meridians, they weren’t ones known for being powerful or anything. As a result, it was possible that, had the oil covered more of her, it might have affected her core or meridians. As it was, they were in seemingly working order.

“I had heard Fräthk was experimenting with such things,” Rayleen said when Emilia asked about it, and why had this never come up when they were talking about how Olivier was offaether? Or… had it? Everything felt like a blur within Emilia’s head, and usually, she was good at keeping track of these sorts of minute details. Currently, everything felt underwater, her brain using too many resources for too long, all without rest or food.

Fabricating food was always an option, of course. The idea still turned Emilia’s stomach, and while she’d summon food if necessary—the idea that the aether might be slightly more alive than she had previously thought made the idea of consuming anything made from it even more off-putting than she usually found it—neither did she want to do so at the moment.

Something told her that, if she were going to be going through this thing, she didn’t want to have anything lingering insider her stomach, and wasn’t that ominous? Also, why was she in here?

Why was she here at all! She should be back in Baalphoria with the triplets, enjoying their love until they inevitably left her.

“Let everyone know I’m okay?” she asked Halen through their xphern messages. The poor guy had been sending her panicked messages since the moment her connection to the aethernet cut off, effectively rendering her dead within both her relays and the stalking function. “Especially my daddy? I was just chatting with him, so he might actually notice that I’m suddenly dead this time.”

Really, had her father not been trapped in that strange, offaether meeting, Emilia thought it likely that he would have noticed her first death in the scary man’s backroom. Fortunately, he’d been busy and hadn’t noticed. Currently, he was probably panicking, and yeah, a second later, Halen was informing her that he had already been angrily messaging pretty much everyone, asking what had happened, as though he weren’t already aware none of them were with her.

Coral was also messaging her from Polianna’s xphern—apparently, she’d had to take it away from her girlfriend after she’d started taking her frustration out of Hurinren and Yujao, and Grenner was talking her through learning to use it—while Zavriel was messaging on Mikhail’s behalf.

“When we meet, I will see if I can remove it for you,” the Crisharian man told her, adding on an update that while they were getting closer to where Olivier was, they had run into a problem—namely, that there were now what Zavriel and Mikhail were assuming to be minions of Fräthk or another criminal lingering in the streets and making their way in the general direction of the holding cells because Mikhail was causing Zavriel’s abilities to be a bit finicky because of course he fucking was.

“I assume the alarm Olivier’s group set off is bringing them back? I can’t imagine it's good for business if a dozen or more of your kidnap victims escape,” she replied, handing her xphern back to Clemence after telling everyone to message in Lüshanian for a bit, so Clemence could relay any messages to her. While Emilia had never wanted to risk destroying her xphern by accident in this thing, as it was currently her own means of communicating with anyone—while they could always use Clemence's, not knowing who controlled its exchange protocol meant it could cease working anytime—it was now extra important to keep it working.

“That’ll only happen if the entire network is brought down,” Emilia replied in answer to Clemence's question about whether she was concerned about her own xphern, as well as those of her friends, being blocked as well. “They all have private exchange numbers… I think?”

It was possible that they didn’t all have private exchange numbers, unregistered with most governments, but she knew at least a few of them did. Polianna’s had a diplomatic exchange protocol, which were rarely registered, while her own had been given to her by the Blood Rain General and really, Hurinren wasn’t the only one who had overlooked their knowledge about the system, instead treating it as simply another means of keeping them all connected.

While her own knowledge of the xphern network was only passing—she’d been given her first xphern long ago, along with an explanation that it was special and couldn’t be blocked and that whenever she needed a new one, she needed to get it from her lo’lu and had mostly brushed aside that information as useless, having no idea that blocking xpherns was common, probably because hers had never been blocked—it still felt like something she should have at least considered.

Another thing to go on her list of things to do once she was out of this place: look into the various communication protocols of the Free Colonies and memorize their specific quirks and methods of operation. Something like this should never have happened. They should have realized long ago that the xphern network could go down, and therefore keep people like Wander from learning about the situation.

Given how long they were now assuming the local network to have been down for—at least in part—thanks to the Drinarna interns the triplets’ group had picked up, Emilia thought it unlikely that Wander and other government higher ups hadn’t realized something was happening… probably. Unfortunately, Emilia knew that some nations rarely used their xpherns or other communication devices, instead preferring face-to-face meetings. Lüshan sat somewhere between Dion, which tended to favour not using the devices more than necessary, and Baalphoria, where the strange in-person meeting her father had been trapped in was more of an oddity than holding such meetings within the Virtuosi System so they didn’t waste as much of everyone’s time.

“Halen,” Clemence said, mangling the pronunciation of Halen’s name into something that sounded more like Hauren, “says that your father is now annoying him with complaints about how stupid all of you are.”

“I can’t even argue with that,” Emilia laughed, humorous and stressed as her eyes and Censor skimmed over what she could now see of the murder machine. Turn back, or go forward.

In the corner she had previously been unable to see, the camera had turned to watch her, red light a blink, blink, blink of judgment and challenge. Was someone watching? Or was it simply a program of some sort, controlling it based on set parameters?

Who knew.

What Emilia did know, as a bomb of silver curls vanished back into the room beyond the machine, only caught by her Censor’s awareness, was that there were people back there, including a little silverstrain child, and those were her weakness.

Children.

Silverstrains.

People who likely didn’t deserve to be trapped in this place.

Maybe some did—maybe this machine was keeping monsters in as much as it was keeping victims trapped. That was the main reason she wasn’t slicing through this machine now: the reality that something back there might be confined for a reason, might need to remain trapped.

It was also possible, of course, that the machine was keeping something terrible out because that was the thing: here, in this horror of a machine that seemed to be threatening to kill her the first chance it got, Emilia felt both threatened and impossibly safe.

The thing that was lurking back in the stairwells, back in those inches before the gate split her off from her friends, wasn’t here—was locked out, just as she was locked in, perhaps. Maybe it wasn’t so simple. Maybe that thing simply didn’t bother existing in this space where no one but the soon-to-be dead dared step.

Emilia was used to looking into things too much, even if she was now realizing how much she was capable of missing. So, yeah, she could be thinking this machine a terrible guard, keeping that thing and anyone touched by it out.

She could, however, also be right, in which case the question become: was this Curtisal person protecting these people, and who the fuck was watching over them?