[Can't Opt Out]

Arc F1.8 | Chapter 5: They’d Be Cute Together (but there’s no way that guy doesn’t want someone quiet and calm, right?)

Samina tried to place the language that the new man was all but yelling at Lux’s kidnapper in, but she couldn’t.Something from the west, she thought, hints of words that had been borrowed between a collection of Cooth languages floating through the man’s words. Still, her Censor couldn’t place the language. Samina, even with all her passing knowledge of languages from all her friends and the clones and hours of training in learning to identify people were from based on physical appearance, cultural tells, and language, giving her nothing to determine the pair were from.

Internally, as she listened to the new man reprimand Lux’s kidnapper—there was no way that tone was anything but an indicator of a brutal talking down to occurring—Samina instead went over the languages that the pair speaking, combining that with the random babbles and swearing of the kidnapper from her time trailing them.

A few nations were left, but not a lot. Unfortunately, Samina knew enough from Emilia’s mid-conversation tangents on the dialects of a few nations to know that some were virtually unintelligible to people who didn’t speak that specific dialect. Apparently, while the Seerish language of each caste tended to be —which seemed to mean they had different slang and slightly different accents—for members of any caste to converse with little difficulty, the highbrow and street dialects of Grey Sander weren’t something that could be understood by the other.

her friend had once rambled after returning from a summer-long trip to the south, which had included stints in the Grey Sands, Seer’ik’tine, and Lüshan.

Samina could remember Emilia being quite put out by her father’s refusal to let her visit Zironia when they’d been near the eastern edge of the Grey Sands and . Emilia was convinced the man was worried she’d start harassing the Free Colony’s non-dev lecturer and find herself banned from ever visiting again. Samina wasn’t convinced Pylenius wouldn’t do the same thing the Blood Rain General had once done: effectively demand the Baalphorian government allow him to have her as a student. Would Emilia love such a thing? Absolutely, but even back then, when she was barely twenty-two, Emilia had held too much power. It was a problem none of them knew what to do with, and Samina knew from overhearing conversations between her older relatives—not conversations she was meant to overhear, mind you—that even The Black Knot was worried about the amount of power Emilia had.

She was brilliant and either well-loved or despised by the people who had the opportunity to properly meet her—there was rarely an in between. Her friends spread throughout all classes of society, throughout every Free Colony where her feet had ever found purchase. Emilia existed within the hearts of non-devs and clones and a million more people, and one day, it might become a problem.

In the end, Samina doubted Emilia knew that by refusing to allow her to become friendly with yet another foreign non-dev, her father was trying to protect her. At the same time, Samina understood why Miles had never told his daughter such a thing—it was, after all, the same reason Samina had never shared what she knew with her friend either: Emilia was always making herself smaller. If the girl found out that her sparkle was causing numerous governments to tense whenever she stepped within their domain—if she learned that the Baalphorian government was increasingly nervous that so much of their influence over the continent was locked up with her…

Well, Samina wasn’t sure what her friend would do, wild cannon as Emilia could sometimes be. It was a bit of a toss up between her pulling her sparkles further within herself—something Samina didn’t want to see happen because as exhausting as Emilia could sometimes be, it was terrible seeing her friend make herself smaller for people like Leerin—or explode, her sunshine and starlight reaching throughout the world until why would anyone want to be her friend or ally or slice her away from the world like a virus of friendship and love?

Was it strange that Samina thought her friend liable to go one extreme or the other? That Emilia was as likely to erase herself as she was to finally let herself shine, simply to spite those who would dare suggest she was Yes and no. Emilia was, in the end, someone meant to be petty and to shine bright. At the same time, she was a traumatized child, under all that brilliance, and it was impossible to tell when a sharp word would make her flinch, her smile growing strained while she curled in on herself.

This all was, of course, beside the point that the communication issues between the elite of the Grey Sands and the poor caused issues, communication between the two sides strained as politicians and philosophers and every other sort of person involved in policymaking thought it beneath them to while the poor couldn’t afford the schooling required to learn how to .

Emilia, in all her glory, had decided that the solution to this was to learn both varieties herself—an impressive feat, given she wasn’t supposed to know even one dialect—before then learning that there were dozens of dialects, specific to various regions of the sprawling Grey Sands, and all mutually unintelligible. As she didn’t spend much time in the Grey Sands, Samina wasn’t sure how effective her friend had been at learning all of the dialects, but her goal eight years ago had been to learn every one of them. At the very least, Emilia knew the two most widely spoken dialects and now refused to speak in anything but the most common street dialect to any of her father’s political connections.

From what Samina knew, none of those political connections could currently claim they didn’t at least know enough of the street dialect to understand the basics of what was being said to them, and Emilia had at least been successful in teaching a few of her more powerful friends the street variety. While those young adults had no political positions to inherit the way some of Emilia’s other Free Colony friends did, it was generally expected that most would go into politics, law, and other powerful careers. Eventually, they would have power, and when they did, they wouldn’t be able to argue they didn’t understand

the Emilia of Samina’s memory yelled, irate and stomping through the woods towards the treehouse, Valor walking more calmly behind her and asking what sorts of things the poor of the Grey Sands wanted and setting her off into a long, rambling rant about it all.

Some of their friends could follow Emilia’s mind when it spun, shifting between topics like a leaf being dragged down a stream. Valor could follow her mind—could retain everything that was said and ask relevant questions. Taelor could tug her back into the flow of her original thought. Baylor could rile her up further. As all three had been travelling with them to the treehouse for one last, end-of-summer party, the conversation had been an impressive mess of sense and nothing of the sort.

In the end, Samina was almost positive she understood the conversation happening before her in a language she couldn’t understand more than she’d understood the shifting conversation of that day, falling through languages and signs and occasionally relays because Emilia had started forwarding them news articles. The girl’s passion was great—infectious at times—but fuck if it wasn’t exhausting. Really, Samina knew she needed to be better at telling her friend she wasn’t really interested in the topic, but that was the problem with having a black knot: she couldn’t bear to break her friend’s heart. Seeing Emilia’s smile falter, her eyes turn down as she whispered a soft,

No… Samina wouldn’t be able to stand such a thing. Plus, the triplets might kill her if she dared tell Emilia she was because the reality was, Emilia already kept so much tucked inside her—and fuck if that must be exhausting. Did Emilia become exhausted with herself? Was the noise of her mind too much even for her, at times? Was there out there who could tolerate the all of her without feeling as though she needed to be strangled into silence at least occasionally?

Hopefully there was—Emilia deserved someone able to listen to all of her rambles. Perhaps more importantly, someone who could understand and contribute to them—after all, it weren’t as though there weren’t a few people who could listen to her endlessly. The triplets would never ask her to shut up—although, Samina had seen them drag her away from a conversation with a distraction, so or not, they definitely had their ways of getting her to stop talking. Rafe had always been good at listening to her, but even when their friendship hadn’t been a line of tension, he had rarely been much of a contributor—the same went for Darrian, who seemed perfectly happy to allow Emilia to curl up in his lap and babble, his fingers working braids through her hair or drawing shapes into her skin.

They’d be cute together, Samina had always thought. There was something to be said for her friend hooking up with boys just as terrifying as she herself was; there was also something to be said for the calmness of someone like Darrian, tugging her into that calm. Who knew Darrian was into, though. While he handled their more chaotic friends well, that could be a friend-only thing. Overall, the guy seemed to enjoy his herding of Levi and Emilia, but if he simply wanted someone quiet to love… Yeah, it wouldn’t surprise Samina much.

Darrian seemed the sort to want to spend lazy days in bed, slowly fucking his quiet partner. Holding them in his lap while they existed together. Sipping drinks while they both read or watched something. Fingers tangling under the table. All calm and still, Darrian only being the herder of agents of chaos with his friends— after all, was meant to be an escape from regular life.

What kind of sadist would to have that sort of chaos in their life? Waiting for chaos to erupt within their home every day of their life? Someone without a single working brain cell, that’s who!

the new man yelled in… something. It was a language her Censor didn’t recognize, but it was close enough to Norvellian that it had been able to guess at a translation—strange that. Something to ask someone more versed in languages, she supposed.

the kidnapper growled—and oh fuck, family drama.

The new man—who was significantly shorter and more slender than the kidnapper—turned a glare onto the kidnapper— Well, Samina assumed he was glaring. The guy was dressed all in black, even his face covered, the fabric hugging his slim form—so slim he almost put Levi to shame. Perhaps because Levi was a bit taller than this man, her brother was more lanky, with long and barely any muscle to be seen despite how fit he was. This man was small, a gap between his thighs and a waist that Samina imagined Darrian’s hands could wrap around, his fingers almost meeting—he’d tested out Levi’s theory that the taller boy’s hands might be able to wrap entirely around his waist several years ago and almost succeeded.

the man hissed, Samina’s Censor filling in some of the translation gaps with what it assumed was being said. Who really knew if it was accurate, but the words for and and were so similar in their roots to words her Censor could translate, while the various curses and insults being thrown around were, oddly, from Jinkai and Ngen.

Seriously, who were these people to be speaking in languages even the OIC didn’t know—Samina had the largest of the available translation functions installed in her Censor, giving her access to information about every language the OIC knew even in passing. It would even tell her if someone was speaking Grey Sander, despite the OIC having no ability to actually translate the language. It still the language; therefore, it could tell her someone was speaking it.

These people, with their constant code-switching—they were back to primarily speaking in that unknown language—were strange. Maybe they were from the southern continent and attempting to speak in a more local language was causing issues? Both Jinkai and Ngen—as well as the Dunnery of Rwun, several of their words being pulled from Rwu’ese—were close to the often shifting border between and . That could explain things, but—

Against the wall where the kidnapper had set her down after coming to this spot and realizing this new man was waiting for him, Lux stirred. Neither of the men were watching her—had noticed her stirring—but Lux wasn’t exactly the sort of person to wake up quietly and not panic.

Unfortunately, when Samina reached a skill out, intent to wrap her friend in a silencing skill, the new man’s words caught in his throat, his weight shifted, and Samina was sure that, if she weren’t careful, he would know she was there.