[Can’t Opt Out]

With any luck, the third time would be the charm.

So far, Emilia had climbed two sections of the rock walls that extended upwards from the subterranean river. The rock walls didn’t always extend upwards, of course, and they definitely didn’t always extend upwards so far—like, really far. The ceiling in each section she’d gone up so far had been high enough that Emilia had needed to climb several metres up the sheer, slippery rocks in order to activate a skill to reach itself further upwards, searching for a potential exit—really, it was quite annoying that the rivers were so far underground. Why couldn’t they be closer to the surface, not literal kilometres down?

Annoying—although this searching was significantly more annoying than the trek would be once she actually found an exit to head up to. Hopefully she’d actually find an exit. It would be far more annoying to need to start carving her way out of there with a skill like {Hidey Hole}; hence, Emilia was hoping to come across an old access point.

While maps of Falmíer were forbidden, Emilia had a number of incomplete ones. Combined with some messages from Vtraní, who had confirmed that there should be a number of passages for accessing the old sewer runoffs from the newer sewers and underground tunnels, as well as her knowledge that the little boy she was searching for was relatively close to her current position and Vtraní’s knowledge of where the women were waiting to hand him off to Prex, Emilia knew she was in the right general area.

Vtraní had been particularly helpful, Emilia messaging them as she rode the river, her connection to the xphern transmission network sketchy at times, but consistent enough to send people messages. Combined with their knowledge of the city and Fräthk’s use of the subterranean rivers—apparently they had previously used a younger Curtisal to create vessels to transport items and people down river, but due to increased security in Crishar in particular, the crime lord largely stuck to transporting contraband items these days, all of which was moved into other nations that weren’t Crishar.

Few nations would bother poking at another nation to stop allowing their criminals to use their nation’s land and waters as a brief stop point before it was moved into yet another nation. It would be one thing if the contraband was causing problems in Crishar itself; Fräthk—perhaps under the advisement of one of the more sensible people who worked for them, like Rayleen or Vtraní—didn’t distribute anything within Crishar itself. So, Crishar largely ignored what was happening.

Emilia wondered if the nations where the contraband—which seemed to vary from actually illegal products to legal products that Fräthk was just illegally obtaining and exporting—knew the origins or distribution route. Most nations would get pissy with Crishar if they knew the nation—which effectively meant their king, Meridian’s father—was ignoring his nation being used as a waypoint. Dealings with Crishar were a strange thing, however, complicated by those laws against saying anything negative about their royal family.

Mostly… Emilia wouldn’t be surprised if there was either conflict between Crishar and whatever nations were getting bombarded with Fräthk’s goods or if those nations couldn’t be bothered to try to make the king do anything. The nation was something of a nuisance. Hopefully, when Meridian took over, he would be a better leader, even if Emilia understood that changing the laws and culture that governed the Crisharian king would be difficult, if not impossible.

Really, Meridian would probably need to learn to work around those laws, if he wanted to change things.

Reaching upwards, Emilia hauled herself a little higher. The skill she was using pressed that little bit further upwards, finding nothing more than rock and more rock—still no ceiling, though. Up a bit more, then.

According to Vtraní, the access points tended to be right at the ceiling, the engineers having had little desire to excavate any further than necessary. This amounted to Emilia needing to climb upwards until her skill smacked into the ceiling and still found nothing. Previously, there would have been walkways and stairs built into the walls as well, but during her travels along the river, Emilia had come across a few of those walkways, fallen into the river.

All those centuries—millennia, possibly, Emilia having little knowledge of the actual timeline of the sewer runoff’s use—of disuse and lack of maintenance had led to rust winding its way through the brackets and bolts. Eventually, they’d fallen into the river itself. Emilia had stopped at exactly one of those spots, searching upwards and finding bits of metal still hanging from the walls, only sections of the walkway having fallen. The holes where those fallen walkways closer to the river had once been set were neither obvious nor invisible—the sort of indicators that, had Emilia cut her skill’s speed by ten, she might have been able to find in other sections of the wall.

As time was tight, Emilia was more inclined to climb and search for doors rather than evidence of walkways having once existed in the area. Assuming every other door was just as obvious as the one back when she’d checked around where that fallen walkway had been, near the start of her journey, said exit should be relatively easy to find, if it existed. Unfortunately, the river was powerful in this section—powerful enough that it wouldn’t surprise her if any fallen metal had simply been washed away. On top of that, in Vtraní’s overview of the access points, the Lüshanian had made it clear that not all access points were so extensive in their walkways; some access points were simply doors with small observation decks, meant to allow someone to check in on the river at places that commonly had backups and would therefore need maintenance, yet, also didn’t need maintenance enough to warrant the full construction of a walkway all the way down to the water.

Given the river was often several kilometres down in these sections where the ceiling stretched high above, that didn’t really surprise Emilia. When she’d asked Vtraní if they knew how the clearing of blockages had worked in places with only an observation deck, they hadn’t known.

Emilia imagined that either the maintenance workers had to traverse down the wall, rappelling their way to the water before being hauled up by others—or perhaps bringing themself back up with a core ability. The alternative—that they were forced to enter the river via the last, deep-access walkways, and then swim to the blockage before floating along to the next deep-access point so they could haul themselves out of the shit- and piss-filled water…

Well, Emilia had already been a little skeeved out by floating within a bubble of protection in a tunnel that had once been filled with human waste. It was all gone, of course, all remnants long-washed away… in theory, anyways. Having come across more than a few sections of the river that dipped deep into the earth with little suction… yeah, she wasn’t convinced that those sections weren’t filled with ancient shit and piss, trapped in little pockets for the rest of eternity.

The water wasn’t even touching her—even when climbing, she only knew the walls were slippery because of common sense and her Censor telling her so—yet it still grossed her out. The things a mind could do to bend reality and the imagination together into a monster of eww, gross.

Regardless, Emilia imagined being a sanitation worker sucked. In some Free Colonies as well as Baalphoria, such things were largely managed by robots, both those controlled by AIs and humans, but there were a handful of Free Colonies who generally eschewed the use of robots, even in jobs that were dangerous or disgusting.

If a human can do it, a human should do it, seemed to be the mentality. It was a mentality that she thought could apply to some things—certainly, she didn’t want non-human-like AIs putting their nose into anything creative, but fuck would it become complicated if someone ever released human-like AIs into the world. Then, shit would get messy. That wasn’t really the point that applying that mentality to every use of even robots controlled by humans was stupid.

Why put human lives at risk when a robot could be their hands, seemed a much better mentality.

Pulling herself higher once more, Emilia’s skill finally hit the ceiling. It expanded outwards, edging along the walls, searching, searching, and finding nothing.

That was annoying—or it would have been, had Emilia not been the sort to check everything… when she was actually bothering to check things, anyways. Let no one ever say she wasn’t both an overthinking, overanalyzer and someone inclined to move without putting a single thought into what she was doing.

For the moment, however, she was intent to not miss anything. As a result, her skill prodded along the ceiling, finding a section that wasn’t flat; instead, it opened up higher, vanishing from her awareness.

Up a little more it was, then, and fuck if she wasn’t glad she’d continued upwards.

There it was, tucked into that little cut out in the ceiling: an access point, little observation deck still holding on for dear life to the rock wall. Rust stretched across the rock around each of the screws that kept it bolted to the wall. Once she was closer, Emilia would be able to examine the state of it and the items littering it properly—she was almost positive that was a pulley system, complete with metal wire coiled around a holder that looked one good poke away from collapsing towards the river.

Something to look at once she was actually up there—way, way up there.

It took seconds to fall kilometres back to solid ground; it took forever to climb the same path. Fortunately, as much as Emilia had forced Halen to climb the Huss’tra with her the day before, neither of them using any skills to ease the strain of the climb up the sheer, glittering-black wall until the very end, Emilia did have ways of making climbing easier. Those skills took some of the fun out of it, was all.

The ability to use skills to fly was still considered something of an impossibility in Baalphoria—required too many resources, too much aether. Emilia was pretty sure that rather than being truly impossible, however, the requirements for being able to use such a skill fell instead into that strange category of skills that were semi-illegal. Equality was important, and skills that were only usable by low-devs were both illegal and not, and they _definitel_y wouldn’t be approved by D-Tect.

Plenty of skills existed in that liminal space, created by herself and Halen as well as by other hackers, many of them releasing their skills on the blackaether or simply asking for advice from other hackers about how they might alter a skill to make it less dubiously legal and illegal. Usually, there was no fix. Maybe one day there would be, and Emilia had read a few opinion pieces from the Ridge Rind, hackers, and other people involved in the skill-design community, discussing whether, should an even more advanced Censor come along that would allow the average Baalphorian to use a skill, those skills should be considered perfectly acceptable or not.

Should the most common Censor model be considered the baseline for that legal grey area? Or, should there be an implicit understanding that, as annoying as they were, Censor upgrades were free and if a person wanted to be able to use some newer skills, they would need to upgrade?

It was all very fascinating, especially as the skills Emilia used now fell into a place where she was pretty sure that, with a few more decades of Censor updates, most people would be able to use them—and that was assuming she was never able to improve the skills. As they currently were, ex-30s with the most common Censor model wouldn’t have a single hope of being able to use the skills without their Censors crashing out, unless they were an ELA Dyad, with Excess Load and Awareness Levels.

Emilia didn’t fly, but she came close, flinging herself through the world with barely any effort—catching herself with even less. For safety—and because it would be annoying to fall—her Censor had analyzed the makeup of the rock formation, altering a companion skill that effectively left her and the rock wall to behave like magnets when she wanted to catch herself for brief moments before lifting off again.

Five-hundred metres went by in a single fling, another, another. Eventually, Emilia pushed off the rock wall she had been moving straight up, instead shifting towards the area below the little area that contained the access point. Another fling. Another. Another. Then, a climb that would have taken many hours without skills, several hours with only skills to aid in an actual, hand-over-hand climb—and really, Emilia knew she and her friends were only able to climb that fast because when they went to climb the Strats and other places because they always had safety monitors to catch them if they fell while moving quickly—took barely more than a few minutes.

Landing beside the observation platform, Emilia eyed it up, dubious of its structural integrity. It seemed rather silly to purposefully knock to off the rock wall, though—it could get stuck somewhere or float all the way to Crishar and hurt someone!

So, instead, she shifted her grip and climbed around the flaking, rust-coated metal, before pulling a little platform out of the rock wall beside the door. It reminded her of the day before, when she’d pulled a place for her and Halen to sit out of the Huss’tra. Their feet had tangled together as their arms pressed close. It would be nice, to go back to that moment, even just for a single breath.

Somewhere nice and calm, without a child waiting to be saved.

Life wasn’t so easy; going back in time was impossible.

Emilia reached, etching her awareness around the doorway, checking for traps—it would be truly terrible to accidentally kill herself at this point!—before forcing it open. She had a little boy to get to, and a quick glance at her map of Olivier and Xavier’s locations, as well as at her xphern to check on Vtraní’s most recent updates on the situation as she stepped into the dark stairway, told her she was by far the closest person.

Time to be a hero, apparently.