Usually, when Emilia lost herself in concentration around people who weren’t used to it, and even the occasional person who was—teachers and other terrible, impatient adults, mostly—she could feel the annoyance and irritation rolling off them. Accepting that she was a ball of chaos and spontaneity, all rolled into soone who could also focus and lose themself so completely in a task, took most people a bit.
Not Olivier. Olivier, for as much as he was often frustrated by her in class and the monts where she was directing her offhand, often sexual comnts at him, was patient as he stood behind her, the pair of them waiting for her xphern to load up a map of the ship. Emilia wasn’t sure whether her xphern or the ship was the problem, but it was taking a mont—far longer than it would have taken for her to convert the map into sothing that could be used with her Censor. Doing so had felt wrong—profane. So, waiting they were.
It wasn’t wasted ti, of course! She was also looking through the huge map layered onto the wall outside the steward’s office, where they had just co from learning that, for one, having her lock changed would be a massive nuisance and impossible until tomorrow. At the very least, the crew could disable the lock, so no one could break in in the anti. They’d also learned that Olivier needed Movree to sign a whole lot of paperwork to gain access to his room. There was also paperwork that needed to be filled out—again, by Movree—to explain why he wasn’t returning to the ship. If he didn’t fill out the latter—and Emilia had doubts whether he would even fill out the paperwork to get his stuff back, physical as said paperwork was—he would be banned from all vessels owned by the airship’s parent company. Now, wouldn’t that be a sha?
What was left was the reality that she had nowhere to sleep—the ship was apparently extrely popular and fully booked—but they had hours to go before bedti anyways. Not wanting to worry about her sleeping arrangents—and really, she could always find soone to hook up with on the condition they let her sleep over—it was ti to amuse herself on the ship!
No swimsuit, she couldn’t go to the pools or saunas or anything. No change of clothes, she couldn’t go to any of the gyms—and there were a lot. Full up on food as well, that still left a lot to do—the ship had plenty of anities spread throughout, hence the map.
Honestly, when she’d asked if Olivier wanted to join her as they left the steward’s office, she’d expected him to refuse. They’d spent so much ti together already, and she wouldn’t have held his excusing himself, sick of listening to her ramble on about this or that, against him—not that Emilia was complaining! She really liked spending ti with Olivier, even if she wanted him to fill the conversation more. He asked her questions, leading her this way or that, much to his occasional horror when the conversation verged into treacherous places.
Still, at least he was talking, and when she asked him questions, there was a 50-50 chance he would answer or redirect, which was a significant improvent from their first days of knowing one another, where he would glare and walk away!
“Do you want to go sowhere specific? Or wander?”
“Which would you prefer?”
Oh yeah, there was also secret option number three: reverse the question onto her. Sotis she let him get away with it, sotis not.
Now was one of those tis when she wasn’t going to let him out of answering.
“No, you,” she replied, turning to glare up at him. Hands planted on her hips, legs set wide, she stared up into his eyes. She was very intimidating. He didn’t seem affected. “Oh, co on. You must have a preference! Do you like plans or spontaneity.”
“What do you prefer?” The hint of a smile danced in the lines around Olivier’s eyes. Fucker.
“I like both, depending on my mood and the people around .”
“Sa. Therefore, you may choose.”
“You know what happens when people let choose?”
“What?”
“Chaos. We end up with a strict schedule or bouncing around between things so fast no one can appreciate anything. We get distracted and jump off cliffs, or end up out of our mind on drugs of questionable origin, giggling at stars that only exist in our eyes—or worse, hunting lavender codes.”
“What?”
“The Galenger Hangover is great for cliff diving. Granted, it occasionally gets salluns swarming in the water, and those things have a killer bite, but—”
“Not that,” Olivier cut in, eyes sharp—there was a bit of that annoyance she was so used to.
“Oh… did you not know hashul berry gives you hallucinations? They’re quite nice,” she replied, shooting him an innocent smile as her posture relaxed, her weight shifting back and forth because she wasn’t an idiot. He wanted to know about the whole hunting lavender codes thing, and she was just bratty enough to not give him the answer—not without a bit of extra prompting, anyways.
“Emilia.”
Ah~ if Olivier wanted her to behave, he was definitely going to need to stop saying her na like that, the sound of it echoing through her—the threat of punishnt if she didn’t behave wrapping around her and squeezing until what he wanted was popping out of her. Of course, part of the reason she behaved the mont he said her na like that was simply that to continue pushing was to risk disappointnt; as long as there was a question of whether he actually would punish her, Emilia was happy, but if she learned he wouldn’t actually do anything? That would be a total disappointnt, and realistically, she didn’t think any punishnt the man bestowed upon her would be worth it at the mont—maybe one day, though! Emilia had hopes—sexual hopes. Emilia didn’t think Olivier was liable to punish her sexually at the mont; rather, if he strangled her, it would be the I want to kill you sort of strangled, rather than the let give you an extra dose of endorphins during sex sort.
Unfortunate.
“There may have also been drugs involved in the hunting of lavender codes,” she admitted, explaining that they’d gotten hold of so drugs from Mitine Dyn. “Allegedly, the Sever and Glorious Trio use them to commune with the aether, or sothing like that,” she told him after a brief segue in which her xphern finally downloaded the map, and they had a standoff about who would choose the route, finally deciding on a compromise where Olivier would pick a general direction and Emilia would choose their destination.
“And did you commune with the aether?” he asked, serious. Well, if he believed in bringing the will of the aether down on oneself, maybe he believed a bit in an ability to communicate with it was well?
Humming, Emilia slipped her arm through the lawyer’s once more, making the most of the man’s current lack of complaint over physical connection. “Fuck if I know. Maybe? We definitely saw sothing. All I know is Sion and I beca oddly obsessed with finding so lavender code. I guess it isn’t exactly accurate to say we were hunting lavender codes. Really, we just wanted to find one.”
“Did you find them?”
“No. We were picked up by so clones shortly after we got north of the Turneus.”
“Were you nearby?” Olivier asked, frowning as they loaded into an elevator that would take them to the third-highest floor.
“Uh… no. We were ho.”
“Don’t you live at the southern end of The Penns?”
“Yup.”
“That is… far.”
“Mhm~” Emilia agreed.
The southern end of The Penns curled slightly west into the Jibur Bay, so far south it seed as though one need only reach out to touch the Grey Sands, on the other side of the bay. The capital of Baalphoria was located at the northern edge of the bay, where The Penns transitioned into the mainland. Further north, there was Piketown, which sat at the eastern tip of the Turneus mountain range, the mountain north of the city—Mount Pike—being the last mountain of the range before the Turneus beca a small chain of islands and eventually The Penns.
The Turneus stretched further to the northeast, acting as sothing of a barrier between the less populated regions of northern Baalphoria and the tropolitan areas of the south. Fortunately, for as huge and potentially dangerous as the fault line the Turneus lay on was, it saw little seismic activity. There was so speculation that sothing had been done to solidify most of the fault lines on the continent millennia earlier, but there was no proof of that, only a general lack of earthquakes on most of them.
The point was that getting so far north—it was about 600 kilotres up The Penns, then another few hundred to Piketown—while high on random drugs from the Free Colonies had been a feat. It had also been potentially dangerous—it was rather cold north of Turneus, and they had definitely not been dressed for their adventure.
“Considering it took us a full day to co down from those drugs, we might have made it to the border before we ca out of it,” Emilia noted, thinking back to the absolute desperation she and Sion had experienced in those monts.
It had been bad enough when they were travelling, searching for so mysterious lavender code in northern Baalphoria—neither of them had felt like they needed to go past the Rind mountain range and into any of the northern Free Colonies—but once they’d been captured? Told they couldn’t go further?
Emilia cringed, thinking of the damage the pair of them had done to the clones and the office they had taken them to during their multiple escape attempts. Even now, half a decade on, Emilia could still feel the ache of that desperation, though—a mory within her body, forever urging her to go north and find whoever it was.
Except, they didn’t exist.
“You had soone look?” Olivier asked as they wandered the huge art gallery, populated by an ever-changing lineup from the various Free Colonies the ship passed through.
Most were for sale, and occasionally, one of them would stop to more closely examine a piece, as though a Baalphorian daring to display art from the Free Colonies in their ho or office weren’t tantamount to being a traitor to the Baalphorian way of life. Emilia didn’t care—she had tons of things from the Free Colonies she’d visited with her father strew through all the places she called ho—but the idea of Olivier buying sothing…
It wasn’t that he wouldn’t like it—given the look on his face, he definitely loved a few. His mother, though? The woman would probably have a heart attack… Maybe she should encourage him to get sothing? A few sothings? Just to raise the odds of the woman coming to an early demise?
“Yeah. I an, it’s stupid that lavender codes are monitored by the governnt from birth, but that should have made them easy to find? But, there was no record of a lavender code that far north.”
It hadn’t exactly been surprising. Most parents, unfortunately, gave up lavender code children. There was too much stigma attached to them, parents either worried for their own reputation or hoping to protect their child from a life of hatred not realizing they were putting them into an orphanage they would never be adopted from—orphanages filled with adults who would barely bother to hide their disgust even in front of governnt employees ostensibly brought in to make sure they weren’t abusing the children in their care. All of those orphanages were south of the Turneus, and there had been no lavender code adults working north of it.
No random lavender code for her and Sion to find.
Yet, both of them still itched to go look again. Maybe one day they would, but now… now there was a feeling that the timing was wrong. It were as though, for those hours when they had been high and focused and seeing lines of fates etched into the world, they could have found whoever was calling to them, and things would have worked out. Then that mont had passed. Now, if they found the lavender code…
“You believe in things like that?” Olivier’s voice was low, his eyes glued to her in the soft light of the sunset, filtering in through protective glass so it wouldn’t damage the artwork.
“I… don’t know. I know I sotis feel things—pulls and pushes—and those feelings haven’t led astray. Maybe it’s just instinct I can’t understand, maybe it’s sothing more. Does it matter?”
The man looked like he wanted to say sothing—give her a yes or a no. Then, his eyes were flicking away, catching on a piece down the way.
That one—that was the one she was going to get for him. Even his mother wouldn’t be rude enough to demand he trash a gift from the Secretary General’s daughter.
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