[Can't Opt Out]

Arc F1.8 | Chapter 27: Rise! Rise?

—and since when had Coral been able to feel the emotions of inanimate objects!?“Are you alright, my love?” Polianna asked, her deep-blue eyes flashing towards Coral. Her girlfriend had pulled her blonde curls up and out of her face after letting them down while they were working their way through the papers checkpoint—something about how she looked some strange mixture of less threatening and more entitled with her hair down and bouncing about. Long hair was a nuisance during combat, however, and those of them who kept their hair long had a collection of clips and bands and skills to secure their hair back.

None of this was a concern for Coral, her own dark-brown curls—currently interwoven with a swirl of blondes and reds—were on the shorter side. If needed, she could pull her bangs back more securely, but for the moment, she was leaving her curly bob down, the longest of the strands brushing against her shoulders.

“Yeah…” Coral replied, knowing she didn’t sound sure of herself at all. “Just… this place is weird, you know? I could barely feel anything while we were outside it, other than when Darrie was completely pissed at Leerie, but now…”

Coral’s eyes flicked over the area, a relatively large street that acted as a main throughway for the city. Roads large and small erupted off the sides, while the main road would eventually lead them to the spire, an offshoot road closer to its towering form leading off to the Baalphorian embassy. While they were headed towards the embassy with the clones, intent to get Olivier de la Rue’s students out of the city now that they would have more people to manage them, they were also close to one of the locations a collection of the lawyer’s runaway students had ended up—they were the ones who were terrified. Not only did they have a collection of highly annoyed clones bearing down on them, but Malcolm had sent off yet another message to the group, informing the idiots that if they didn’t cooperate, bad things would happen to them.

Those bad things?

Well, for one, the clones would be forcibly disabling their Censors. For another, they’d be lucky if, upon their return to Baalphoria, they weren’t disappeared into short-term custody for the rest of Olivier de la Rue’s trip. As if that weren’t bad enough, Malcolm had threatened them with

Usually, Coral didn’t much enjoy using her ability to manipulate emotions on people. The cases where she did so were usually quite limited: mental health care and emergencies. Slip a thought into a mind so the person will accept they need help with a mental health crisis. Slip a thought into someone to make them run, freeze, be useful.

No one could quite decide if this situation constituted an emergency or not, but Coral would be more than happy to slip a few errant emotions into the idiots who had caused so much chaos in a city already being suffused with chaos enough that the cavern itself seemed to be shaking with it, if only within her own mind.

Above her, the stalactites remained unmoving, and yet, Coral could feel them shaking in… fear? anticipation? sadness?

Really, Coral couldn’t tell—it weren’t as though, until this moment, she’d been aware that inanimate objects have emotions. Probably something to do with the power of the Lowdouran, everything about their abilities strange and unknown.

According to Levi, the Lüshanian man he had teamed up with—the crime lord, Gëon—seemed to have some sort of Empathy-based Dyadism as well, or an irregular deviation that was similar enough to her own abilities. Part of her wanted to request Levi ask the man if he had ever felt emotions roiling off the glistening walls of the cavern that protected and consumed Falmíer. Another part of her knew that this wasn’t the sort of ability she should share with anyone she didn’t implicitly trust.

Already, a dozen of Halen’s functions had shifted to remove everything she currently thought and felt from being seen by the OIC. Unfortunately, this meant that her cataloguing function had reverted to using an alternative communication protocol, rather than the aethernet. In the end, however, some things just weren’t meant for the OIC’s eyes, and this seemed to be one of them. Unfortunately, this also meant that no one but those physically close to her could see what she was gleaning from the emotions of everyone within the buildings she passed by, none of them receiving any of the information on her sudden ability to the cavern itself—they would also need to be removed from the OIC’s reach if she started sending them such things. Of course, those who were still receiving information had a companion function that could forward her readings to everyone else; mostly, it was just an extra step that put a little more strain on Polianna’s mind as she forwarded the information along, a little bit of a delay in that forwarding.

It was for the best that Coral effectively shut down her connection to the aethernet, however, Polianna sending small updates on the of it to Halen in Grey Sander—although neither of Coral nor Polianna spoke the language well, they could send enough information to him in it, the OIC’s inability to translate Grey Sander implicitly protecting their exchanges. The bigger problem was that Coral’s Censor had needed to be all but completely cut off from the aethernet; she’d receive emergency messages and nothing else. So now, Polianna was alternating between verbally telling her what was being said on their relays and forwarding it via an alternative communication protocol, all while also managing their xphern—which had finally been returned to her, now that she was no longer telling everyone they were idiots—and glaring it with all the energy of someone who thought Emilia was the idiot now but didn’t think the other girl would care to be told such things.

Having heard all of the messages, Coral wasn’t sure her girlfriend thought Emilia doing something worthy of garnering her more ire. When she’d asked, Polianna had simply said, before refusing to explain anything further. Oddly, Coral thought Polianna both annoyed with Emilia and filled with respect for her? Eventually, she supposed she’d learn what her girlfriend was thinking; until then, there was no point bothering herself with it—it wasn’t like she could do anything for Emilia from here, after all.

For the moment, there wasn’t much else for them to do, other than hurry through the city and leave the clones to protect them. Of course, Coral still had her abilities stretched wide, searching for the smallest speck of something within the thoughts of those they passed. The thing was, pretty much everyone was tucked away inside houses and business and didn’t seem to even be risking a peek into the streets.

It might as well have been the middle of the night for how quiet it was. Someone who knew nothing about Lüshan might think that nothing strange—after all, what use were regular waking and sleeping hours when the sun never rose for a city surrounded by earthen darkness?

Lüshan didn’t have regular waking and sleeping hours, was the thing— as in it was a city that never slept. There were always people moving through the streets, and it was rare for businesses to shutter unless they weren’t doing well—one never knew when a customer might pop up.

For the city to appear asleep now… it was wrong in a way Coral, who had visited several times over the last few years with Polianna and Emilia, couldn’t explain—and the fact that it seemed and to so many of the souls they passed by made it all the more disturbing.

Miles replied when Coral had Polianna ask if lockdowns were so common that they would leave the residents calm as could be.

The readings she was getting were weird, and when Polianna handed her the xphern, she loaded up the message thread with Levi, asking what the people with him were getting from anyone hiding in the buildings they passed—if anything stood out to them as overly strange.

[Levi:]

[Levi:]

[Levi:]

[Levi:]

[Levi:]

[Levi:]

[Levi:]

Coral signed, eyes flicking over the area, her abilities stretching as far as they could, her Censor and brain burning with the strain, trying to search of sign of anxiety or annoyance or that wasn’t an empty, calm acceptance of the situation.

Polianna suggested—Levi’s group was now heading in the general direction that the child, Xavier, had been taken, which was taking them through a poor area that pressed up against this one. Despite her words, Coral could feel the recon-like skill sequence Emilia had suggested rolling out of her girlfriend, seeking out anything Coral missed.

Fighting down a smile—the way Polianna spoke, it were almost as though she weren’t also an old-money child from a long-affluent family—Coral poked her abilities into several people, tugging more specific emotions from them. It was a bit more difficult, given their emotions were overlaid with a different cultural foundation, but Coral was good at this—good at tugging and twisting upon emotions and funnelling them through her experiences and Halen’s functions to translate them into something sensical.

—not denial, never denial. Something else, something else, it’s always something else.

Coral blinked through those emotions, baffled. While she was no expert on Lüshanian politics or social classes, she thought them something between Baalphoria, Seer’ik’tine, and Dion’s.

In Baalphoria, the majority of the population existed within a vaguely defined social class. A handful of cultures existed, each on the smaller side—little quirks of difference between eastern and western, southern and northern Baalphoria. There was some prejudice against , and definitely a lot against Grey Sanders—although most Baalphorian and Grey Sanders didn’t consider the latter to be anyway—and residents of Ex-300 communities. Then, there were the few Sub-30 communities and the Sub-50s.

For the majority of the population, rising or falling in social class was neither a goal nor a risk. The only exception were the Sub-50s, always so obsessed with joining the Sub-30s. At the same time, as Halen’s family had shown, if a family’s D-Levels were low enough, they could move themselves into one of the more defined social classes of their nation, while it wasn’t uncommon for people who were born with a far higher D-Level or an serious irregular deviation to find themselves living within an Ex-300 community. In the end, though, shifting in such a way wasn’t something most people cared about; instead, it was an accident of fate.

In Seer’ik’tine, on the other hand, moving between the long-established castes was virtually impossible outside of marriage or joining a zi’huta harem. Due to how difficult it was, the government had tried to even out the quality of life for each of the castes, and while they hadn’t been completely effective—so much poverty and old-money in the lowest and highest castes did create an inherent inequality that was difficult to counter—it had been effective enough that Coral didn't think there had been any attempts at Seerish, caste-based revolution in many centuries. Combined with extremely diverse cultures within each of the castes, few had any interest in attempting to move to another caste.

This was the complete opposite of Dionese culture, where was always trying to move up the ranks of society. It was a difficult thing, according to Emilia, attempts to move up even a single rung of society often requiring several generations of work, while a single error by one family member could bring an entire extended family crashing downwards. Yet, culture dictated that shifting upwards was always the goal, and slow-to-change Dion had kept that goal for millennia innumerable.

Lüshanian culture, from what Coral understood, was some mixture of set and impossibly fluid. There were legacy families in all sorts of roles, whose children were usually the first assigned to the best schools, to powerful internships, to positions that would help them rise through the ranks. Some jobs were dead ends from the start, but most of those jobs had potential for upwards momentum, leading to a system similar to that found in Dion: through generations of hard work, a family could rise through the ranks.

Yet, from what Coral had seen of the few cities she’d been to, few people seemed to care much for such things. Part of it, she assumed, was the simple fact that Lüshanians generally enjoyed their work, most able to follow their childhood dreams unless it was in a highly sought after career or they were so terrible at their dream job that they’d been rejected from pursuing it.

So, what made this area so different that their thought processes reminded Coral of the cokrina of the Inner Court or the few Sub-50s she’d crossed paths with, every thread of their emotions leading back to a desire to rise, rise, rise?

Polianna suggested, her steps purposeful as she moved, calling attention to herself and looking for all the world like a snobby little soldier, her posture straight and perfect, gait lazy and arrogant all at once. It was a little more flamboyant than her usual stride, but it still reminded Coral of the first time she’d seen this beautiful, impossibly complicated girl and almost immediately thought,

Coral signed, licking her abilities over more and more people, each flick of her Empathy bringing back more bitter resentment, and fuck.

Polianna said, a burst of aether exploding out of her as the first attack barrelled down on them, her feet already moving, sending her surging forward, racing towards the source of the attack.