“At what point do you think she’s gonna give up?”
Never—that was when she was going to give up.
“Is she the sort of person to give up?
No. Full stop. She was not, in fact, the sort of person to give up.
“I kinda get the sense that… no? She isn’t.”
That’s right! She was the sort of crazy person to try and try and try and never give up!
“That suits her.”
Yeah! Clemence was right: that sort of never-give-up mentality suited her!
“I mean… sure, but it’s also not a good trait.”
How rude! It so too was a good trait! If she weren’t a go, go, go, never-give-up sort of person, Emilia wasn’t even sure where she would be—nowhere good, that’s for sure! Would she also not be, well, stuck at a seeming dead end within this playground of deathly intentions? Yes, but also! She was not giving up on figuring out how to get out of this place! She had just hit a small snag, was all. There
had
to be a way through. It was simply that she hadn’t found it yet.
Had she collectively spent more time in this dead end than she had throughout the rest of the playground? Also yes. Unfortunately, turning back wasn’t an option unless she was going to release her willbrand and attempt to brute force her way in one direction or another—she was undecided if she’d go back to her friends or forward, towards the other side of the playground.
“It so too is a good trait!”
“How?”
“You know she’s only in there because she doesn’t give up, right?”
“Yeah, I can’t really argue with that. A more sane person would have given up before ever stepping foot in that place.”
A rude snort escaped Vern as he muttered that a sane person
probably wouldn’t have come down here to begin with
, starting off a conversation about what he meant by
down here.
Did he mean
into the dungeons?
Yes.
Did he mean
into the holding cells
—which according to Rayleen were actually the 17th holding cell? That might have been helpful to know before—thinking of the place as
the 17th
was easier than
the holding cells.
At the same time, Emilia hadn’t really needed to know that Fräthk had at least sixteen other buildings with at least holding cells, if not other dungeons, for his captives scattered throughout the city. The other option in Vern’s wording, of course, was that he thought her stupid for descending into Falmíer in the first place. Given that the last few times she’d visited Lüshan’s capital bad things had happened—fights with Cameron, letting herself get kidnapped by traffickers, and now this—Emilia did, in fact, think she wouldn’t be visiting for a long time.
Was it possible she’d change her mind, if only Wander were to ask if she wanted to help go through the dungeons of the various holding cells? Possibly. As much as she hated it down here, Emilia still wanted to make sure no one who hadn’t been infected by
that thing
were trapped down here—also, she wasn’t supposed to be thinking about
that thing.
Unfortunately, what she
should be doing
was getting out of there. Emilia couldn’t figure out
how
to do so, therefore, she went back to gently banging her head against the wall. It was helping, in a way. It was also giving her a bit of a headache. She would not be stopping any time soon.
“Should we be concerned that she keeps doing that?”
“I don’t think she’s hitting her head hard enough to give herself brain damage.”
“I think the fact that she’s doing that in the first place is a sign she already has brain damage.”
“You think?”
“There have been signs.”
“Vern! That’s so rude.”
“What? Can you really deny that something about that girl isn’t a bit off?”
“I think she’s just a low-dev.”
“And that makes a difference?”
For a long moment, Jerrial was silent before saying that he thought it did.
“All the low-devs I met while being held within the holding cells were… odd. I mean, almost everyone was, but the low-devs especially? It’s a bit hard to explain.”
“Do we even know she’s a low-dev?”
“It would be cool if she was! There are a few older students at my school—I guess former school now, cause I doubt there’s any way I can go back now—but everyone knew they were low-devs? Some of them bragged about it, but others…”
“Low-devs are pretty rare. Did Fräthk really manage to capture that many?”
“Yes. Sometimes, it wasn’t so official, but there were whispers that one of the kids was even a non-dev.”
“What!? Seriously? That’s…”
“Fuck… a kid who’s likely a non-dev?”
“What were they like? Did you ever meet them?”
“I met all of the kids in our building. The one I think Fräthk thought was a non-dev… he was sweet, but his story… it wasn’t nice.”
There was an awkward moment of silence, followed by a few hums of acknowledgement, and while Emilia knew her new friends were keeping things from her, she didn’t think it malicious; rather, whatever they were keeping from her, it was something bad—it was something bad, and instead of talking about it, they were keeping their conversations about it confined to notes on the xphern.
“It’s weird that non-devs are so valuable when, like, some of the irregular deviations other people have are so much more powerful?”
“I think it’s complicated? Non-devs are supposed to be more well-rounded? People with irregular deviations are more specialized—like, I can manipulate the earth, but my ability to use other core abilities isn’t great.”
“I think some of that is a lack of training.”
“Yeah, you’re probably right, but even if I learned how to use my core better… I think it would be a struggle to not rely on my Lowdouran abilities? They’re this deep part of me, always urging me to let them out? To not let them out could be a struggle, and in a fight with someone who knew how to counter my abilities, that could become a problem.”
“Can anyone counter your abilities?”
“I can,”
Emilia called, ceasing her banging and turning her head towards her friends, barely visible through the mess of metal death traps.
“Probably can, anyways. My friends were moving through the cave system, and the skill I used to fall through the stairwell—and get us into the building in general—worked on the cave system. Oddly, despite working on the cave system, it doesn’t work in here, even though I’d originally assumed that the way your abilities and the creator of the playground’s abilities affected the world might be similar.”
Tilting her head, Emilia let {Hidey Hole} press against the metal panel she’d been banging her head into, illustrating that while her friends had been able to use the skill in the cave system in order to shift atoms to the side temporarily, it wasn’t working down here.
“I think part of it is that the skill—{Hidey Hole}—has never been optimized for metal? I made adjustments to it when we were young so it would work on the earth—we all like to climb, and one of us likes to cave, so having a skill that could be used to create an emergency exit during a cave in, or if we climbed somewhere and needed to get through the rock formation, seemed like a good idea.”
Knocking her fist against the panel, Emilia explained that the playground was made of so many different sorts of metal that the skill was running into issues with figuring out
how
to shift atoms temporarily—that was, after all, why she assumed the skill worked on the cave system: it was a
temporary
shifting, rather than something permanent. Nothing—or so the stories went—could alter the Lowdouran’s creations, but if it wasn’t a true altering, it seemed like they could be affected—that was her current working theory, anyways. With her Censor struggling to map all the metals and set a course for them to be pushed aside for a short period of time before snapping back into perfect, unaltered existence, she couldn’t use it to get in or out of the playground.
That said…
In the background, the other three—Rayleen rarely contributed anything to the conversations—continued chatting, mostly trying to work through what she’d said. Annoyed with the situation as she was, Emilia hadn’t bothered bringing her explanation down to a level where people who knew little about skills or even core abilities could understand more than the basics of it.
Shifting, she looked at the map of the area’s internals that her Censor had been creating while she beat her head against various parts of it—there had actually been a point to that, thanks. As her recon skills couldn’t see inside the machine, due to it being so… weird, Emilia had instead been using the shifting sounds that came from within the machine to map out what
might
have been inside it. To say this had resulted in less-than-impressive results was an understatement—it wasn’t like she had much experience with knocking against materials in hopes of determining
what
lay inside them, after all.
Still, she and her friends had built a treehouse as children, and they’d later built an entire, up-to-code house. Emilia knew enough about architecture and design, as well as physics and a thousand other subjects, to make some guesses as to what was hollow, what filled with wires that likely led to whatever was controlling the playground, what completely solid.
Oddly, even the solid parts were composed of dozens of metals—not a true alloy either. Instead, it seemed to more be a case of various metals winding their way through the main metal each component was made of. It reminded her a lot of the inside of the spire, with its rivers of minerals and ores pouring down the inner structure in beautiful mosaics. The types of materials each were made of were quite different, however, their bonds and malleability different; hence, {Hidey Hole} accidentally worked on the cave system and didn’t work on
most
of the playground.
After a bit of searching, however, Emilia did manage to find a single place in her dead end where it did work: one of the panels that covered a seemingly hollow section.
Work
may have been a bit of an over exaggeration. In reality, despite
looking
like a singular piece of metal, the panel’s appearance was a lie; in reality, it was still composed of dozens of similarly coloured and textured metals, all weaving their way through the panel at seeming random. Through a little bit of tinkering with the skill, however, Emilia was able to move two of the different metals aside in a small section and peek inside.
It was dark, was Emilia’s first, very stupid thought—it was inside a machine, the only bit of light coming in through the small hole she’d managed to make. It was also a hole that her head was largely blocking, ergo, of course it was dark!
Being in here—down in this stupid city with its stupid conflict—had clearly rotted her brain.
A second later, a light was flickering out of her and Emilia was stumbling back because WHAT THE FUCK WAS THAT AND—
Emilia screamed when her elbow hit
something
and the panel she’d just been peaking into popped open, a mop of red hair tumbling out, and she’d been wrong! This place was a death trap with bodies stuffed into the walls! This was terrible! She didn’t want to end up trapped down here, stuffed into a wall and oh, oh, oh! How many other dead bodies had she passed? There had been blood of course, but she’d mostly been ignoring those fingerprints, compartmentalizing the spatters and smears because even she’d left some genetic material behind—and okay, she really hadn’t. Emilia knew the power of blood and wasn’t about to leave her blood behind, so it was now tucked into a little bottle in her shorts and—
And the body the mop of red hair in front of her belonged to had no blood inside it. That was… weird. Even when bodies were completely bled out,
some
blood still remained within them, dried up within organs and blood vessels. Without the use of a few highly specific core abilities or skills that she’d designed for her and Baylor’s exclusive use, actually removing every drop of blood from the human body was nigh impossible, so…
Emilia, after taking a few breaths and ceasing her screaming like the scared child she had suddenly felt like, realized she was, once again, an idiot.
The small body that had popped out of the panel was, quite obviously, a doll. With that much hair on such a small body—which, if she had to guess, must have been the size of a newborn, although it was proportioned more like a child, with long limbs and a slim body—it was obviously a doll. A really fucking creepy doll, but a doll nonetheless.
“Emilia,”
Rayleen called, freezing Emilia’s reach towards the doll, her fingers grazing its cool black skin, a shock of
something
reaching through her.
“Do not touch it without considering the consequences first.”
Well, as her fingers were already touching the thing, the suggestion that she not touch it was a little late.
“Uh… I already touched it?”
The sigh her admission was met with was truly impressive, especially from such a generally contained woman.
“Of course you did.”