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Arc F1.9 | Chapter 10: Don’t Panic, Bag the Girl

Samina gave up. This was it—this was the end for her. There was nothing left to do, no single inch of the cavern she’d come to left to search—not without climbing into the darkness above, anyways.A solid block of stone caged her in, and she had no idea how she’d come to exist there. Some glitch in the universe, perhaps; then again, maybe it was an ancient trap, set by the creators of this terrible place millennia ago and just now sprung by her instincts.

That was the rub, wasn’t it? If she’d kept on running straight back the way she’d come, she wouldn’t be here. Instead, she’d let that strange pull drag her down another path. Now, she was stuck there, sunk to the ground because she was just done. It had been a long day, and really, Samina knew without really knowing that everyone else was likely having a harder time of it than she herself was.

While there was a small chance they had gotten into Falmíer and immediately figured everything out—found Olivier de la Rue, gotten Emilia and the rest of his students to safety—and were now back in the cave system, trying to find her and Lux—and Levi, assuming he hadn’t popped up like the stupid boy he was—she highly doubted it.

Things in life were rarely so simple.

Groaning, Samina knocked her head back against the rock wall. According to her map, it was the rock wall that wasn’t supposed to be there, but at this point, could any of her maps really be trusted? Even her Censor’s confidence in which way was south, which way up or down, was a jagged thing, twitching about as though she had suddenly found herself within a cavern that was toppling about—the stomach of a monstrous giant, perhaps.

Maybe there was an opening far above her? Samina had sent a few echoing skills upwards, seeking to etch out the shape of the ceiling. What information she’d gotten back had been confused—a muddle of shapes that were nothing like what she normally expected while climbing or caving. That wasn’t too surprising: everything about this cavern felt wrong, that empty-and-yet-stuffed-full feeling remaining. It didn’t matter what skills she used, what she touched or saw or if she just closed her eyes and let her awareness of the world slip out of her: everything felt

Samina didn’t particularly like being here for that reason alone. It was one thing to be lost—to be fighting down a bubble of panic, constantly threatening to explode out of her into a scream. It was another thing to feel as though she had fallen into a different world altogether.

If there were theories of the aether and the physical world existing as two layers of existence, wasn’t it possible another layer existed? Some alternative physical world that they normally had no ability to touch nor even fathom the existence of? Perhaps that was where she had fallen: into another world entirely.

Unfortunately, Samina thought the isolation and pushed-aside panic were fucking with her mind. Possibly, there could also be toxic fumes down here—she hadn’t bothered to check, just set her Censor long ago to cycling fresh air into the area around her mouth, summoned straight from the aether. In theory, her Censor would alert her if something too terrible came near her—some toxic fumes could burn the skin and whatnot, after all. Currently, she felt fine—aside from her brain thinking of weird things, of course—while her skin was vaguely itchy, but that was probably from all the dirt and sweat covering her.

Idly, Samina summoned up all the energy she had ever seen come from Emilia and Halen when they were intent to test a new skill. It wasn’t something that particularly interested her, but Samina was inclined to be the sort of person who wound up testing new skills, trying to break them with brutality against her brother or one of the triplets. So, while she didn’t always know the pair of them wanted such-and-such a thing done to their skills, she still knew what they made her and others do.

Samina also knew what they pair did themselves, having laid about, listening to Emilia ramble about what she was doing within her own mind during her own testing to their other friends at times—Valor, Rafe, and Darrian, mostly. None of those boys could ever tell her no—well, obviously Rafe had broken up with her, but that was a bit different.

Regardless, Samina cycled through a few of those tests now, poking and prodding at her skills because, in theory, if she were in a different world, they should behave weirdly, right?

Somehow, the skills she checked both were and won’t behaving normally, and it would have been less annoying had they all been completely useless. Even more annoying? They were all behaving weirdly in completely unique ways. One came back as failed, some energy in the error code implying that the aether didn’t exist—or perhaps wasn’t condensed enough for the skill? Another said her Censor had failed during the activation phase, although her Censor itself gave no impression that it had failed to activate anything recently. Dozens of other skills activated, but came back with warnings of one sort or another, most completely unique.

As a result of this inconsistency, Samina mostly felt as though she’d have been better off not testing any of her skills. In the end, sometimes, it was better to not know. What Samina knew? Not much more than what she had before: the aether here was weird and she had no idea how to get out.

Eventually, of course, she would force herself back to standing—she was mostly giving herself a moment to breathe and force that panic within her to chill out, which wasn’t actually happening at the moment—and search the room once more. Depending on how she felt, there was a chance she’d climb the walls a bit—see if somehow she’d blocked out having fallen six or seven feet. Such things were the sort of thing her brother would do—that guy had a terrible reputation for running off and returning with no idea what had happened when he was gone, something that often resulted in Darrian dragging him to see Doctor Vickers, lest Levi have forgotten about some injury or another.

Sometimes, Samina wasn’t entirely sure she believed her brother was as stupid and empty-headed as he seemed to be. It wasn’t uncommon, however, for Levi to trip over things, walk into walls, lose things he had been holding. Whether her brother would notice whatever strange thing he had done was often a giant question mark. As a result, it was somewhat difficult to figure her brother out. Perhaps his personality was all a lie, devised to fool fuck-knew-who. Perhaps he really was exactly as he always seemed.

The two of them were both close and not. Unlike the Laprise brothers, Samina did love her twin. At the same time, they weren’t exactly . Sometimes, they could get into trouble together, but where Levi had a reputation for being chaotic in a silly way, Samina’s own reputation had been cultivated to be one of violence. It was both a purposeful thing and not—somehow, Samina always seemed to be caught by adults just as she was about to beat up people who deserved it! Everyone else, including Levi, beat up people as well!

Purists! Sexists! Bullies!

Why was she the one who always got caught with her fists slamming into them!?

It was good, in some ways, as it meant people were afraid of her; sometimes, the residents of their town were even more afraid of her than the clones. They all had a role to play, and Samina…

Samina both knew exactly what her role in The Black Knot would be and was impossibly unsure of what sort of role she would play in the organization’s future… assuming she had a future.

Shaking thoughts that she was actually going to die in this terrible cave off—she could summon food and water and air from the aether near indefinitely, and there was no way her friends wouldn’t spend the rest of their lives scouring the stupid cave system, searching for her—Samina tugged out her xphern. The chances of it catching a connection to the xphern transmission network were as low as her Censor connecting to the aethernet: it just wasn’t going to happen.

Still, she tugged it out, setting her contacts to a setting where she could actually see the screen. While she knew how to use a xphern, they were in no way something she was overly familiar with, and for a long while, Samina just sat there, fingers shifting over the keys that layered over the back of the device, thumbs pressing the buttons set on either side of the front screen.

The first time she’d seen one, soon after Emilia had gotten herself lost in the Cyrenix Desert and her father had insisted that she needed to learn to use one, lest she find herself again, one of the triplets had commented that xpherns looked like gaming devices. To this day, Samina had no idea which triplet had stated it, but she’d never been very good at telling them apart unless they were being obvious about it—and even then, they practiced wearing one another’s personalities so often, that even going by what they were doing or how they were speaking wasn’t always enough to determine who was who.

Whichever triplet it had been, they hadn’t been wrong about xpherns seeming like game systems, which were some mixture of common and very uncommon in Baalphoria, due to pre-Censor tablets and Censors themselves containing tons of games on them. There were a few game systems, though, and most Baalphorians had played on them even if they usually ended up preferring using their Censors to game. With how long xpherns were, dozens of buttons edging their tops, backs, and sides, it wasn’t surprising to often see Free Coloniers playing games on them at times.

This particular xphern had a few games on it, and after confirming that the skill Emilia had designed for keeping xpherns charged still worked—something that hadn’t existed even as a thought before Emilia had come along, given how few Baalphorians used xpherns—Samina set to going through them. Eventually, she settled on a game that seemed to be a dating game of some sort, more text than action, but that was fine.

Samina, in the end, had more than enough real-world action at the moment, thanks, even if she was currently left to just sit there. Thoughts of Lux pushed at her mind, but there was nothing she could do for her friend, and really, at this point, Samina doubted that her friend was still where she had left her and that other man.

Maybe they were still there. It was as possible that Lux had managed to make a friend as it was that she’d immediately been captured by them.

It seemed more likely that Lux was gone—run or been carried off, and Samina was trying not to shred her mind, wondering if she should have stayed and confronted the mystery pair, rather than run. There had been some thoughts behind her decision to run; Samina now wondered if they had been good enough.

Maybe she should have stayed and tried to get Lux back. That other man had seemed terrifying—the sort of person Samina and Lux together wouldn’t have a chance of beating—but she could have tried and—

And Samina wasn’t thinking about that. No, instead, she was playing the game.

It being a text-based game meant that Samina was able to speed through it, her Censor buzzing as it took in the words and began to categorize each of her potential suitors. Was in a bit of a strange thing, for someone with a black knot to play a dating game? To moderately enjoy it, no less, despite how irregular her real-life relationships were. For her Censor to easily go along with her playing and help her figure out which person she should try to woo and then offer suggestions as to how?

Possibly; Samina was bored and didn’t much care.

By the time she finished her first run of the game, somewhat disappointed that her decisions had led her to an endgame with a bouncy, jock-type girl, Samina had mostly stopped thinking about her friends. Instead, she started the game over, intent to figure out what sort of responses would land her the cute, bookish girl.

Originally, she had assumed that, if she chose the choices for many of the points that would determine which character she wound up with, she’d end up with the cute, bookish girl. Wouldn’t someone like that want someone just as quiet as a partner? Apparently not; instead, she’d attracted the attention of the jock, which… no thanks.

There was enough bouncy energy in her life, and while Samina could appreciate that bounce sometimes—and certainly, if Emilia were into girls, Samina would be perfectly happy to be with her friend… then run away to decompress because Emilia was a lot—she didn’t really want that in a dating game. The jock girl in the game wasn’t nearly as much as Emilia either, and where other people might have thought that a good thing—a balancing of Emilia’s fiery, personality, perhaps—Samina didn’t like it.

If she were going to be with someone energetic, she would want the energy.

Samina shifted, feeling out the ground beside her for anything too sharp, before laying onto her back.

One more round of the game, in which she would hopefully bag the bookish girl—she very much didn’t want to accidentally end up with the entitled girl, even if the secrets she was hiding were intriguing, nor with the mysterious transfer student, who just wasn’t aesthetically her type.

Just one more round, then, she would get moving.