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Arc 9 | Chapter 522: I’d Like A Hug, Please.

The worst thing about this situation was that Taelor couldn’t comfort his brothers properly—couldn’t take comfort from them in return. Aside from that moment of connection when they all landed in the city and the few moments where Valor had tucked himself behind Taelor, attempting to hide from Baylor or the situation as a whole—at which point Taelor’s persona as the severe clone meant he had to shake his baby brother off—there was no contact between them.Baylor could take comfort from Darrian, and to a lesser extent Westrial, who was turning out to be just as tactile as Baylor was—tactile, but clearly touch deprived. For as much as they were all a little wary of the homeless girl, Darrian had taken to letting her snuggle into his and Baylor’s increasingly common hugs. Taelor couldn’t imagine it was pleasant, the teenager having clearly been rarely allowed the opportunity to clean herself. Still, Darrian pulled her close and it was cute—kind of him.

Taelor was currently so deprived of contact and comfort that he would have taken hugs from the girl, had they been offered. They wouldn’t be, and instead, he was left to suffer in silence as they all worried for Emilia.

Well, it wasn’t a complete silence, multiple relays running wild as they chatted amongst themselves as they moved through the city. As much as they didn’t need to, both Drinarna interns had chosen to stay with them—something they were currently getting a little information from Seer’ik’tine about.

While the Lüshanian embassy was in no way in possession of someone who was an expert on Drinarna interns, the Drinarna officer who headed their security knew of Vantril, due her being a legacy. It had taken a little bit to get a confirmation of this information, due to the various residents of the Lüshanian embassy not only needing to be retrieved and brought up to speed on the situation, but also interrogated, in order to make sure they weren’t also part of the corrupt faction of the Drinarna—which actually seemed to be a multi-department issue… or there were numerous corrupt factions operating within the nation. That was also possible, and Taelor wasn’t sure which option was better: for a single faction to have dug its claws into numerous departments, or for numerous factions to have popped up.

There was a precedence for both cases having brought down nations and governments; neither was better suited for such things, although according to Baylor’s ramblings as he and the interns discussed this and that as they moved, it seemed that coups that involved more than two or three factions tended to be the most bloody, lasting huge swathes of time. The biggest risk, according to some of his brother’s stories, seemed to be that they—as in Wander Fulbrun’s faction of the Drinarna—wouldn’t realize how many factions there were, or that a new faction was forming within another.

Vantril had piped up, going off on her own ramble about some of the coups and conflicts that had occurred within Lüshan over the last few centuries.

It seemed that at various times the management of the cities had been more controlled, more diversified. From what she said, it seemed that usually, the Drinarna and the government as a whole preferred a more controlled approach. They elevated officers from the capital and other influential cities to positions of power within smaller cities, rather than promoting internally. This allowed them to retain more control, as they knew the officers and politicians directly, but tended to annoy locals—after all, people who didn’t understand their needs were being given control of them, while officers and politicians thought it unfair that, by virtue of being assigned to a smaller city early in their career, they were never given a chance to prove their worth.

—that was how many officers thought of it. Of course, many of the internships in more powerful cities went to legacies as well, thus keeping power contained to a relatively small pool of people.

Currently, due to the amount of corrupt officers and officials Wander had purged in the last decade, everything was something of a mess, and in everyone’s opinion, it was likely that there were several factions popping up within the chaos of the current system—the question was mostly how large and organized those factions were. There was a difference, after all, between a group of grumbly officers and a purposeful recruitment into a faction.

There would be those who wanted a return to the status quo, no matter the cost—the people who would have supported Wander’s queries into getting Virtuosi Rigs into the nation, as well as in designing something similar to the OIC for Lüshan.

There would be those who wanted a return to the status quo, but they wanted a return to that status quo. These were people who were stuck in their ways, and only a return to exactly how things had been would be acceptable to them—and realistically, a considerable amount of these people probably considered to be the normal they wanted to return to.

Then, of course, there would be the people who liked some part of the system that had changed in the last few years—those people who would fight to retain some of these changes; all of them. They may want more change, or be happy with a little bit—be happy with the part that had made their life better, while vehemently opposed to others.

There would be those seeking to cause more change—some for the supposed better of the nation, others for their own good.

So many reasons, so many motivations. These were the sorts of political factions that existed everywhere, but within the authoritative government of Lüshan, they rarely found much purchase, instead being snuffed out before they could grow too large.

Clearly, Wander’s purge had left a door open, and no one had noticed people slipping through it—or if they had, they had been unable to stop it.

Perhaps the biggest problem for their group was that, in general, it was difficult to understand people's reasons behind their actions. The fact that this was a different nation, though? With a difficult culture and history that they didn’t understand? This made it all the more difficult to guess at what the locals were thinking, and instead, as they worked through potential situations they might come across before they managed to get out of the city, they were having to rely on a more basic understanding of human psychology—something none of them were so well versed in that they weren’t left with generic ideas of how humans tended to make decisions.

Some of the Drinarna—and potentially other Lüshanians—were surely basing their decisions in as pure a rationality as they could manage, while others would be doing everything for emotional reasons, for ethics and religion and things only they could understand. There was a chance some people were being bribed and blackmailed—because truly, how could this many Drinarna be turning a blind eye to the kidnappings happening in the city?

It was strange, but neither of the interns had much of an idea of so many officers had become… whatever this was. They were on the newer side, was likely part of it. According to both Vantril and the officer back in Seer’ik’tine who, once cleared as likely being aligned with any faction that might seek to do their group harm, had confirmed that she was the child of a relatively close ally of Wander’s. While Vantril’s father wasn’t considered part of Wander’s inner circle, he was in the peripheries—one of those people who, depending on how many of those in the man’s inner circle turned out to actually be acting against him, might end up being elevated, especially if it turned out that his daughter had aided the Baalphorians who were trying to avoid Olivier de la Rue’s abduction becoming an international incident.

When Taelor asked the girl outright about this, she had blushed and admitted that while she knew her helping them gain her parents some favour—her mother worked under another member of Wander’s inner circle but was even more on the peripheries because while she might one day rise to take her boss’ place, that was likely decades off—it could also fuck them over.

she had replied to Sorvell’s query over whether they should trust her motives for helping them or not. Her voice had not wavered, and behind her, Bireth had stood confident in his own decision to help them—although he had also admitted that part of why he was sticking with them was because Vantril was.

The other part of why they were sticking with them? They were hoping to find some of the interns with irregular deviations who had vanished, or at least find out what happened to them and get justice for them.

Valor had sent a recording of their explanations off to Miles, so he could show it to the embassy’s Drinarna officer.

he had said into their relays,

It was morbid and terrible, but a reality of the situation, nonetheless, especially as Baylor became more and more antsy. It had already been bad, but Emilia yet again had taken a toll on all of them.

The three of them were a circle, their hands linked as they orbited Emilia. If she vanished, there would be no gravity to keep them together. They would lose their grip on one another and…

And it wouldn’t be good.

Currently, it didn’t matter that they knew Emilia was alive, her Censor simply offaether. She appeared dead, and the psychological implications of that were a heavy weight on each of them—on Halen as well, whom he had been messaging with various information about what they were learning from the interns and their conversations with Baylor.

Logic, they all knew, only went so far. It was why, alive or not, the very sight of Emilia’s Censor as was doing psychic damage to them. It was why, no matter how much they tried to analyze the reasons behind the current situation, even if they were able to find all the information they could, they might never be able to understand the whole of it.

People were, at their cores, irrational. No one was a creature of rationale alone, no matter how much they tried to convince themselves such. Even for the more hardened of black knots, who had brutal ethics and no one to love with the obsession and adoration that would lead them to burn the world down, there was no such thing as perfect rationality.

Rationally, Taelor knew Emilia was alive, Valor rarely letting his eyes leave their xphern and relaying every message received from Emilia’s new friend to them. It wasn’t rational for him to be doing this—he had his newly reassembled xphern to look through, after all. Instead, he had passed it off to Sorvell and Bireth to look through as they moved, their steps slower than they needed to be because of their looking through the xphern and trying to decipher the code most of the messages were being written it.

because, as they had suspected, the xphern’s exchange protocol was still connected to the xphern transmission network and at least one faction operating within the city was still able to communicate. They needed to figure out what they were saying, and they should be stopping to figure it out or leaving some of their members behind to do so. Some of them should be moving through the city, getting to Emilia and Olivier de la Rue and Mikhail as fast as they could, but none of them could make themselves move or stop and—

Codeth said into their group relay, abrupt and… what?

BJ asked, glancing back at their former classmate like he was crazy, although Taelor had already seen it coming.

As much as Mikhail’s relays were still working, the reality that his Censor was glitching meant that it could give out at any moment. With him no longer accompanying Coral’s group, Mikhail’s Censor failing would cause problems, as while he was with the Crisharian man Prince Meridian had sent them, none of them—apparently not even the prince himself—knew whether he was trustworthy. So, of course, Codeth would want to get to his friend, especially as while Polianna seemed moments from successfully demanding her way into the city, they had decided it was best for her and Coral to head to the embassy and work on evacuating everyone— as in both their overall group and those back in Seer’ik’tine.

None of them wanted to end up stuck in the city if it went into full lockdown, and while their group might be able to escape through the cave system, they were going to risk themselves trying to evacuate Olivier de la Rue’s students. They especially weren’t going to be bothered to help those students who were causing issues on the other side of the city, where it seemed that locals were finally starting to become concerned that the xphern network was still down—apparently the network going down for a few hours wasn’t entirely unheard of, but usually an emergency alert would have come out by this point.

With how tense things were becoming throughout the entire city, they needed to get to Emilia and Olivier de la Rue and get them and whatever locals they’d picked up out of the city. That was their priority. Olivier de la Rue’s students could live in the embassy for the rest of their lives, for all he cared. As for Mikhail…

Vantril cheered when Codeth informed their three Lüshanian members that he was going to be splitting off. They’d already explained that they had a movement skill that, while difficult to use in the cramped streets, they might end up using if they were attacked to get everyone to safety faster, if more chaotically. As a result, she already knew Codeth use the skill while holding her.

The intern sounded so sure of herself—not at all like someone who had been warned that microsparking without a proper connection might lead to her vomiting.

It would, however, be helpful for Codeth to have someone who knew the city with him, and with a moderate amount of reluctance, the girl was allowed to hop onto his back, and then, they were gone, Bireth whispering a soft demand that she not die before turning back to his and Sorvell’s attempts to decipher what was being said in the xphern chats—and there was being said.

Bireth, Taelor thought, was the only one among them acting at all rational, and that was concerning to say the least. They needed more of that logic and—

And maybe, Taelor could summon up a bit more common sense, his steps slowing until he could pluck the xphern out of Valor’s hands and sent a message off, not to Emilia, but to her new friend—the one with connections to the city’s criminals.