Arc F1.7 | Chapter 25: Snap. Swing. Climb.

“That looks so finicky.”

“Definitely not the sort of thing I’d be good at.”

“You know, at my school, pretty much all of our extracurriculars were like that—finicky and really specific, I mean.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. I think it had something to do with how much… precision a lot of medical specializations require?”

“So they were testing you in extracurriculars?”

“Yeah, I think so? I mean, there were courses that tested us as well, but I think the extracurriculars were more important for getting into a specialization?”

“Weird.”

“I don’t know, it doesn’t seem that weird to me.”

“No?”

“No. I heard from other captives similar things about their own schooling?”

“Really?”

“Yes. Not everyone was like me, taken when I was so early in my schooling.”

“What’s that look for?”

“What look?”

“That looks on your face, obviously. Do you need to use the bathroom?”

“What!? No!?”

“Really? Are you sure?”

“Yes, I’m sure!?”

“Are you really, really sure? I know Emilia was giving you guys food. Are you sure your stomach isn’t upset.”

“Does your stomach hurt?”

“No! It doesn’t!?”

“Then what’s with the look—cause seriously, you look constipated.”

“I’m not.”

“Are you sure?”

“It’s my body!? Why wouldn’t I be sure!?”

“You’d be surprised! People are often soooo out of touch with their body? There’s this entire specialization that’s dedicated to learning to connect to patients’ meridian systems so that the specialist can either force them to feel what’s happening in their body or even feel it for them.”

“That’s cool… never heard of anything like that before, though?”

Emilia hadn’t heard of anything like that before, either, possibly because Baalphorians couldn’t use or connect with their meridians in such a way. It seemed like the sort of skill that doctors and medics could use, though? Doctor Vickers had a skill that could connect to a person’s Censor and retrieve feedback from it on what its owner was feeling, but that wouldn’t be the most useful if someone didn’t have body awareness, would it?

Really, she’d never thought much about someone other than Levi, Dyads, and low-devs having a lack of connection to their body? Levi was just, well, Levi, while Dyads and low-devs often learned to disconnect from their awareness of the world—or used functions to help them disconnect—due to the amount of information their body took in.

Right now, Emilia wasn’t using [[Blissful Silence]] or any other function to numb out her awareness of the world. It would be helpful if she could tune out her companions and their chitchatting, but she didn’t want to risk killing the process at the moment—there was too much going on.

Slowly—tediously—her energy reached out, and fuck if she wasn’t terrible at this. Unfortunately, neither direct aether usage nor any of her skills had been working for this part of the playground. So, core it was. Her Censor wasn’t happy. Her core wasn’t happy. Her body wasn’t happy—but it wouldn’t be, after everything it had been through, and again, she currently wasn’t able to remove her awareness of anything, due to not wanting to risk killing the glitching process that was breaking several of her functions. Yes,

several.

First, [[Blissful Silence]] would go out. As she’d been stuck attempting this

playground game

for a while, Emilia had since learned that a few processes were being caught up in the glitch, their resource use winding higher and higher until, eventually, they triggered a fail-safe that would stop them from consuming more resources—and thus creating a death spiral within her Censor—but would cause the function to stop working as a result.

Mostly, the fact that [[Blissful Silence]] wasn’t working was weighing on her. It had been a while since Emilia had let the function fall completely silent when she wasn’t in a safe space, and to be honest, she had forgotten—or more

blocked out

—how terrible it was to be surrounded by so much awareness.

The tug of a braid that was a little too tight. The oil slicked against so much of her skin, gone but not really gone and burning slightly against her effectively chemical-peeled skin. Her belt buckle, digging into her stomach. The coolness of the slide she’d been brought to, nausea rolling through her stomach because she was hungry and really high up—ten metres up, the upper half of her body hanging down the slide, her feet straining against the bar she’d suspended herself from. The holes in her thighs hurt. Her knees jabbed into the hard metal of the slide, too pointy by half.

A nail was broken, her awareness of it a solid, unyielding thing. It didn’t matter that it

didn’t feel like anything

. Her brain knew it was there, pulling attention to the crack and snag of it. It snagged against nothing but air—against the aether itself and Emilia had forgotten what that felt like as well, what it felt like to exist with the aether. It pressed against her, heavy and weightless all at once. It was her—was within her, around her, pressing on her from within and without.

A bubble popped somewhere far away—on the other side of reality. Far off, back where the others were and she couldn’t see Rayleen but she knew the woman did something—stopped

the thing

from reaching her new friends. In the other direction, there were the bubbles—

nothing

roiled through the aether like

that thing

had in the stairway and when was the last time she had felt so much of the world, of existence, of the fabric of reality?

It hadn’t always been this way, she thought, but it once had. Specks of time. Little golden eyes, smiling at her and telling her she needed to not look—it was too soon to look.

A bigger purpose,

but what

bigger purpose

does a little orphaned girl have, always reaching for two others who weren’t there—weren’t there, so she’d found herself replacements who were perfect and in no way could ever be

replacements.

They were hers. She was theirs.

Someone else was hers as well, she knew—someone crafted for her alone, unlike the others.

The others, they were all meant to share one another, but this one was hers alone—a gift from the universe itself. They were all pieces of her, floating, unmoored. They needed to be moored, they—

Another of the marbles Emilia had been trying to get into the holes far at the bottom of the slide slotted into place. Great. Perfect. Only two more to go and she was already losing her mind, assuming she’d ever had it to begin with. Sometimes, she wondered if she’d been born with a mind already flayed open, something about it

off

in a way she couldn’t explain. There had been enough looks over the years, telling her that she was a little

off

. Whatever she’d been doing at those times, usually it was nothing compared to the things that swished around inside her head, but even Emilia had to admit: that last roll of thoughts had been odd.

Wild mind that she had, her version of [[Blissful Silence]] also helped keep those cascading thoughts a little more contained—not too contained! Emilia loved her mind! Random internal rambles about

bubbles

within the aether weren’t exactly conducive to what she was trying to do, however, and her brain had always been so hard to control.

At the very least, now that she’d gotten that marble down the slide, she could kill all those processes and work on the other two. Hopefully, getting them down the winding, booby-trapped path would be easier, as she’d been working really hard to memorize the shape of her core energy as she pulled it along.

It was still something of a struggle as she set to work on the other two, mostly because of that whole

gravity

thing. This wasn’t simply pushing a marble along; instead, it was both pulling it from side to side

and

holding it back from going full tilt down the track, which would inevitably lead it to shoot off the end of the slide. Originally, there had also been other holes—the ones that Emilia had discovered not only

didn’t

remove any of the spikes on the slide, which the goal holes did remove, but also sent more spikes shooting down from the upper side of the slide’s tube.

That was perhaps the only good thing about this

game

: her friends couldn’t really see her. Had they been able to, they would have seen her hanging by the tops of her feet into a tunnel that was filled with spikes. They weren’t spikes that would kill her—that sort of thing would require the spikes to be bigger and to shoot up while she was going down the slide. The spikes were instead small and sharp and would

definitely

hurt like a bitch if she ran over them. The spikes from the top of the tube seemed more aimed at forcing her to lay down, more than actually hurting her.

In other words, while she could have decided

fuck it

and accepted her ass being ripped up as she attempted to go down the spiky slide on her butt alone, the new spikes would force her to lay flat. Butt, legs, back, shoulders, head—everything would get torn up if she went down now.

Emilia had already triggered a few of those booby traps, which had left the spikes to come out in a small section of the upper side of the tube. Now, the whole thing was layered in a roof of spiked, so, there was no going down and laying down for short periods of time, or anything like that.

If she went down now, she’d be going down flat the whole time, only a third of the slide free of back-shredding spikes.

That was okay: Emilia had, after triggering the first booby trap, purposefully triggered all of them.

The thing was, once the booby traps were triggered, the marble just kept sitting there. It didn’t fall into a deep hole. It didn’t become a whole different booby trap that could be triggered by another rogue marble. No, the marble stayed there, acting a little wall that actually made getting her marbles to the bottom a bit easier, and after less than a minute—compared to the five minutes the triggering of the traps and then getting the first marble into its slot—the second marble found a home at the bottom of the slide—the small section her friends could see.

Mostly, she was concerned with how quickly that glitching process was breaking her Censor—five minutes might perpetually feel like

a while

within her mind, but it really wasn’t that long.

“Yes!”

“That’s great!”

“One more to go, right?”

“Dude, can you not count?”

“Emilia already said there were three triggers.”

“Well, yeah, but she’d been triggering traps as well? Couldn’t she need to disable those as well?”

“I don’t think so?”

“Why not?”

“I think there would have been more swearing if so.”

The group snickered to themselves, which was better than if they’d contemplated her stupidity again. Both were fair, but while Emilia wasn’t too convinced of her sanity at the moment, she didn’t really want people pointing it out either!

They were right about the drop puzzle being finicky, though. It was, however, the sort of finicky she generally enjoyed, and had she not been in such a rush or risking her feet slipping and tearing her breasts and stomach apart when she slid face first down the slide, this would have been fun. Mostly, at this point, the bigger risk was that the marble would go shooting off the end of the puzzle section, rather than end up in its home—something that had happened with the first of the three marbles she’d managed to get down that far, thanks to a too strong burst of energy.

A little bit of experience with using her energy didn’t mean she was good at using it. Some people, she knew, could pull tendrils of their energy out of themself—turn it into beautiful displays of power and control.

Emilia’s blobs of energy were just sad. They had no control, and she wasn’t sure how, but somehow, they weren’t winding out of her body and surging towards the marbles whenever she wanted to move them—and really, if she’d had more control, she would have just wrapped the marbles in her energy and guided it down. Needless to say, this was impossible for her. What her energy

was

doing, though, was weird. Instead of seeping out of her, it kinda… vomited out of her, all strange and golden—and who knew her core energy would be golden?

This alone was strange, and she was pretty sure that Rayleen had made a rude noise the first time she’d done it—rude, but fair. It was Emilia’s energy and even she was a little grossed out by it. Then, however! It got weirder! Instead of her energy nicely meandering down the slide, it seemingly popped out of existence! Then, it would reappear by the marble and just sort of… bapped it in the direction she’d wanted it to go. Sometimes, it was too strong—and there was definitely a ding in the slide from one of those hits, which had sent the marble flying and then ping-ponging its way down the spiky slide. Sometimes, it was too weak, the marble barely moving.

So, yeah, Emilia sucked at using her core, and when the third marble also managed to make its way into the goal hole and the last of the spikes spread over the bottom of the slide vanished, Emilia gave a little cheer. Luck was on her side, apparently.

Hopefully, when she went down the thing, nothing terrible would happen—no spike would shoot up to spear her, none of the spikes lingering on the ceiling would fall upon her.

To be safe, Emilia wrapped a bunch of defensive skills around herself, although she wasn’t sure how well they would work, considering how resistant some of this stuff was to any aether-based skills. It was highly annoying, and odd—Emilia hadn’t realized something

could

be this resistant to skills and direct aether use. It was a bit concerning, to be honest—after all, if someone decided to attack them with mechs made of this stuff, there would be virtually nothing any Baalphorian could do to defend against them.