[Can't Opt Out]

Arc F1.7 | Chapter 23: I’d Rather Not Lose My Mind In This Lonely Place

Each time Samina crawled through the strange places with the cave system, where the aether seemed to shimmer into near non-existence, it’s particles seeming too far apart, she would slow, just the tiniest bit, and let her eyes widen.As long as Lux and their kidnapper never left her awareness, Samina thought it fine to linger for those brief moments, seeking to find some sort of answer as to the aether felt so weird in this place.

Once, Emilia and Halen had wandered their way into a conversation about theories of the reality of the aether mid-class. Those two wandered and wondered their way into conversations and arguments, into more war and innovation, with so much ease it was often funny.

Those two, Samina often thought, could just as easily find themselves hate fucking as they could find themselves on opposite sides of a conflict that would end life itself. Their minds and spirits would dig through the debris of the world and knowledge itself, forging theories where there had long been silence, all previous thoughts left to moulder in piles of refuse—those broken dreams and passions of people who had come before and failed to find footing for their theories.

There were people who loved to learn, people who loved to create, people who preferred to be tugged along in the flow of life and the dreams of those higher up in the world. Every single member of their friend group would be tugged along by the passion of those among them who were monsters of creativity; yet, they too held a million thoughts and dreams within themselves, sparked to life by the passion that forever swirled around them.

Emilia always got philosophical when she was high of zphr—an impressive feat, given how prone she was to rambling about virtually anything while perfectly sober. She also tended to refer to the aether as a … then remembered none of it once she was sober again. It was an odd thing, considering zphr didn’t usually affect anyone’s memory? But then, Emilia’s mind had always been a strange thing—a box of mysteries, the girl seemingly able to dip her fingers into it and pluck out yet another fruit of inspiration, as though those ideas themselves had been born with her, and not the of the universe. Emilia—boundless and exasperating and liable to destroy the entire universe one day because surely, if she were vomiting knowledge into the world, she could consume it just as well? Open her mouth wide and let all the facts and fantasies she didn’t like fall into her stomach—some attempt to remake the world in her image.

…

…

…

There was a chance that spending so much time with only her own mind to keep her company had finally led Samina to go insane. Down the river her mind went, rowing towards the insanity that was her brother and Emilia and Halen—these shattered souls who seemed intent to kill themselves rather than let their passion and dreams die.

Samina wasn’t sure she enjoyed it—the niggling insanity that these few hours alone had dragged through her, and had it really only been a few hours? It felt days—long movements of solitude, and this was why solitary confinement drove people to the brink.

Note to self: ask Levi if he’d been spending time alone in the Virtuosi System because while Samina knew Emilia spent swathes of time within the time skew—and had enough sense to know Halen must as well, in order to match Emilia’s pace—she hadn’t generally thought her brother doing so. Granted, he’d always been on the psychotic end of the spectrum—the sort of person to wander about, slowly bleeding to death, and treat it like the most normal thing in the world.

Why waste time getting medical care when the world awaits? There are discoveries to be made and Levi’s mind was not made for patience; rather, he was a child of movement, always kicking Samina in their birth mother’s womb.

Stretching. Flinching. His little hand reaching for hers and finding her nose instead. Fingers in her mouth. Their feet tangled together. Levi was still so tactile, but Samina had never been such a thing—too much harassment in the womb, her fathers had always thought. They’d seen the ultrasounds—gone to those appointments as though they weren’t having children simply because it was expected of them. If the Laprise moms seemed to have found friendship, and perhaps even love, with one another despite the nature of their relationships having been some mixture of arranged and of their own convenient choosing, her and Levi’s fathers were colleagues and never more.

They had married and had their kids—left them in the hands of nannies and later their friends’ parents to manage and raise. Their fathers were good—cared for them in a way that was neither natural nor unnatural. Gave them space when needed. Never turned her away from their relays, when she had a question or needed advice. Slowly, they would raise them up through the ranks of their family. One day, she and Levi would take their place—find their own person to maybe love, maybe tolerate, and make little children to maybe love, maybe tolerate.

Such was the way—the flow of the lives they’d been born into; that each of their descendants would be born into. This was, perhaps, the main reason she didn’t just yell at Rafe to figure his shit out with Emilia, why she didn’t suggest Emilia and the triplets tell The Black Knot to fuck it and go off on their own: the obligation of it all.

Their family’s obligations were always a mess, so many of them skewing The Black Knot towards Emilia and what she wanted. If Rafe were to be with her, it would be worse—would result in Emilia one day birthing the next leader of the Laprise branch, Samina was sure. Andre would never do it, and while Malcolm and Finn may never be something so official as or , they effectively lived together—would likely one day live together more officially, whether as friends or something more. Finn would not do well with a child. Maybe Malcolm would have a child—would place his familial obligation, ten thousand years in the making, over his affection for Finn.

Samina thought Emilia would yell at him if he tried to sacrifice what happiness he could find with Finn for the obligation of their family—would offer her body up for his child, raise that baby largely by herself, all so he could be happy. That was just the sort of person she was: someone who would sacrifice herself for the happiness of others—not that Emilia wouldn’t be a good mother! An insane one, yes, but a good one nonetheless. They were decades—a century, even—away from any of their older relatives pushing for them to start creating the next generation, but it would come, and Samina knew her friend well enough to know what Emilia would become in the middle of such a hurricane of expectations and desires: a home for the next generation; a catalyst for yet more of their organization centring itself around her starlit eyes.

As for the triplets? In that case, Samina mostly just didn’t think it worth it to push the issue of them leaving The Black Knot, as it was bound to cause issues with the older clones. They would cause issues eventually, of course, but no one wanted to tempt their hands—not when they weren’t ready, their control in the organization nothing but tendrils of smoke, a fire that was just beginning to burn but wouldn’t become a full inferno who decades, centuries.

One day, things would explode. Samina didn’t think the triplets and Emilia being together was worth setting that explosion off.

Perhaps, however, Samina only thought this because she wasn’t in love. Were her heart wrapped around another’s, romantic and wonderful—in theory, anyways—perhaps she would feel different—would slam her hands down on Emilia’s shoulders and tell her to ask the triplets to stay. They would say yes, and it would be a mess, but they would stay and a flower of hope would bloom within all four of them.

Love was something she only had for her friends, however, and while she knew how complicated a thing it was, Samina wouldn’t risk the entire institution of The Black Knot crumbling for her friends… she thought, as she literally risked her life trying to get to Lux, knowing that Levi could also be dead because he was a dumbass!

They were stupid, clearly. Also, yes, her mind was melting because she was alone and while Lux and her kidnapper were right there, Samina still didn’t feel like the time to attack them had come. So, she instead kept slithering along behind them, slow and methodical as she worked through one of the small tunnels that ran alongside the main passage that Lux’s kidnapper was using, this one smaller than the first, but still there.

It was also so much more empty of than any other areas she crawled through, and Samina’s brain jumped back to where it had started, before going off into the land of someone who had been left to ruminant in darkness too long: Emilia and Halen wandering their way into a discussion of the aether actually was.

There were plenty of theories, of course—thank you, Baylor, who had spent nearly an hour that day regaling them with some of the myths that spawned those theories. As this wasn’t exactly something she personally had much passion for—neither the myths nor the history nor that actual theory and how the specific theory used as the basis for a skill and core ability could change the way it worked, which weird, but not something she really cared about—Samina would need to call up a recording of that class to actually recall more than the most interesting details of what had been said.

The most interesting thing that occurred that day? Their teacher had quit—up and left in the middle of Emilia, Halen, and Baylor actually having a for-once-reasonable discussion, rather than an insult-filled argument about this or that.

Truly, the things those three could up in screaming matches about was astounding. Once, they’d started to argue about the ideal place for the waistband of pants to sit on the hips. It was possible that each one of them had chosen a position based solely on what they were wearing that day and decided to die there, rather than admit they were wrong—the correct answer, in literally everyone else’s opinion, was that there was no correct place for it to sit because everyone’s style and body type was different.

Mostly, this had resulted in Baylor Halen wearing ridiculously low-cut bottoms for a few weeks—they’d then gone on a school break, and when they’d returned, both boys had . Emilia, while very enthusiastic about the waistband debate, and instead worn one-piece outfits and dresses for those few weeks, thereby both refusing to admit defeat and not having to actually buy clothes with the high waistline of the shorts she’d been wearing that day—they were apparently quite a struggle to get into, due to how big her butt was.

As for Baylor and Halen? Samina was pretty sure Baylor had been wearing ridiculously low-cut shorts that day due to some sort of dare from Emilia. This had resulted in him—and by extension his highly annoyed brothers, having been forced into wearing the same thing—flashing his happy trail at everyone for weeks. Unfortunately, was being generous, as the clones all had a moderate amount of hair, and really, it was more of a forest.

Halen, unfortunately, hadn’t been wearing his own pants that day. It was unclear whose pants they were, but he had clearly forgotten he wasn’t wearing his cut of choice—which tended to be on the higher side, from what Samina had seen. Thus, he had similarly found himself wearing low-cut bottoms—although not as low cut as the triplets’—for those few weeks. He’d at least worn longer shirts, attempting to cover the dark hair that had increasingly spread over his body every year. Then, it seemed the summer heat got to him, and suddenly, his stomach was showing whenever he had to reach upwards as well.

Regardless of those more insane arguments, their teacher had left—everyone agreed they were afraid of their class already, the sheer amount of brilliance they all possessed overshadowing their own, adult mind, and therefore scaring them off completely.

From what Samina could remember of their discussion, however, both Halen and Emilia—Baylor had little actual opinion, only random stories and theories he’d picked up fuck knew where—agreed that the aether seemed to be a membrane of power that pressed up against their reality, rather than another side of their reality or something that existed within it—those seemed to be two of the most popular theories in Baalphoria. According to everything they’d said, unless a person were near an aetherscar or something that was purposefully pulling in aether—such as the aetherstreams—that membrane always contain the same amount of power. It didn’t fluctuate. It was a layer of power, and even when someone actually managed to make a record of the aether before an aetherstream surged or a new, non-skill- or core-ability-related aetherscar formed, there was little of interest, whatever was affecting the aether not something that could be felt from this side.

The aether was an endless blanket of power, with pulls in the fabric that left aetherstreams flowing through their world but no effect—no lessening of power—elsewhere. Occasionally, something external from their world caused an aetherscar. Yes, sometimes, they were skills and core abilities causing them to erupt over their reality. Other times, something else—something unseen—appeared to cause them.

Or, the aether just had an error—errors happened everywhere in nature, so why shouldn’t they occur in the aether itself, magical and all powerful but still a part of nature? To some, the aether nature—was the fabric of reality, and if reality could err, so too could its creator, surely?

So, what was this emptiness? A different sort of error, pulling into the world by random chance?

Maybe. Maybe not.

Samina didn’t possess the knowledge base to make such leaps in logic, but she could record—could pull on her decades beside Emilia, her little mind spinning and creating and testing—and bring whatever she found back to her friend because regardless of anything else, this was something she didn’t think anyone had ever made note of before.

Maybe she was wrong, and she’d simply forgotten that no, this was completely normal and nothing special at all. Samina didn’t think it was.