“A little to the left.”
“Isn’t that the right?”
“What?”
“It’s her right, your left?”
“Wait… were we supposed to be giving directions from her perspective?”
“Yes? What sort of instructions have you been giving?”
“Not ones from Emilia’s perspective, clearly.”
“I thought it made more sense this way!”
“How?”—that one was two voices, overlaying one another; Vern and Jerrial’s voices joining together to ask Clence how she had co to decide that using her perspective was better than changing her instructions to suit Emilia’s current position.
Emilia was also curious about this—not in any real aningful way, as she was mostly ignoring their instructions. Instead, she had set one of her functions to manage what they were saying, and all that function required to work properly was for whoever was screaming instructions to give her consistent instructions.
Clence was consistently using her own perspective in her instructions.
Vern and Jerrial were consistently using Emilia’s current position in their instructions—although Vern’s instructions tended to co a few seconds late, resulting in the function needing to match his words up with where she had previously been located or looking.
As she was using the word instructions lightly—she was more taking them as suggestions she was mostly ignoring—it wasn’t generally anything actually useful to them… not in this particular location, anyways.
“Well, Emilia moves, and I don’t?”
“So?”
“So… like, doesn’t that an my directions are always accurate?”
“But she also has to compute them in her head?”
“I don’t super understand how the little computer in her head works, but shouldn’t it be able to do that for her?”
“Couldn’t it do it the other way as well, then?”
“What does that an?”
At another spot in the murder machine—which Emilia was increasingly inclined to think of as a murderous playground—Jerrial had been able to boost Clence onto his shoulders, allowing the girl a better view of the section Emilia had been working through. From that position, the teenager actually had been able to let her know where so shards of sothing similar to glass were located along the bar she was climbing through, hidden from her view.
It was not a good climb, and while Emilia had her Censor running, recording her trek… Yeah… she probably wasn’t going to be sharing these videos with anyone because seriously? She was an idiot, this particular section—which had been booby trapped, littered with sharp objects, and may have featured a pit of spikes under it. Considering that so of the bars had given out under her while she climbed, risking her plumting to her death if she didn’t grab another bar fast enough—and avoid grabbing one with one of those shards she couldn’t see attached—this recording would be staying safely tucked within her mind where no one could ever see how much of an idiot she was. It wasn’t a new thought, that she was an idiot, but the current amount of stupidity that was racing through her blood was definitely leading her to think herself stupider than usual.
As she had been running a few skills as they moved through both the upper levels of the holding cells, and this torture dungeon, Emilia didn’t think they had been poisoned by so gas or another.
The lack of confidence she had in that sentint was a little concerning, to say the least. Really, her only reason for not thinking she’d been poisoned was simply that no one else was acting any stranger than usual—although, they had let her co into this playground without much pushback? So, maybe they really were breathing sothing in that was making them all stupider?
That… wasn’t a good thought, and Emilia brushed it aside—or tried to. Her brain just wasn’t ant for brushing things aside, okay? And she was already using so much of her available brain power to continuously analyze the murder playground—in this case, she was solving the sliding puzzle it had given her—and to not think about the thing lingering beyond the playground. The last one was by far the hardest, using so much of her ntal space at the mont for the simple fact that it didn’t feel like the thing was in the playground with her. One would, therefore, think it okay to consider it, just a teeny, tiny bit?
According to Rayleen, in the only bit of instruction she had personally given Emilia when her mind had begun to wander towards thoughts of the thing, no, actually, it wasn’t safe to think about the thing even when it wasn’t nearby. Annoying. Aggravating. Dragging at her nerves and neurons and—
And the puzzle clicked into place and Emilia fell to her stomach, making herself as flat as possible as a blade exploded out of the centre of the puzzle, where there had very clearly been a hole. Not all such holes had shot things at her, but enough had.
“Fuck!”
“Shit. It doesn’t matter how many tis that happens—”
“—it’s always a jolt to the system.”
“At least Emilia is good at noticing where they co out?
The holes that contained projectiles were better than the hidden shards of not-glass—an analysis of one piece had revealed it wasn’t actually glass but so sort of material that was virtually devoid of aether, containing about as much aether per square inch as the air itself. This made them virtually impossible to feel, and while her Censor had gotten better at noticing their presence, instead using echolocation to map the area and line it up with a map of the playground’s aether density. It was a slotting together of two skills that hadn’t been ant to work together, and the echolocation skill was in no way optimized for, well, anything. Instead, it was a silly skill that she had created for Sion’s birthday back when they had been teenagers. Rather than being designed for actual use, it had been made for use inside a man-made cave that a bunch of them had set up for him. Basically, it was designed to indicate where the next hold in a pitch-black cave system was—in a highly controlled environnt, as again, they had made the cave themselves.
They had all gone through the cave, after he was done, so they could compare completion tis—although a few of them had tested the cave system and the skill beforehand. Regardless, Emilia wasn’t sure the skill had ever been used since then; it was therefore over ten years outdated and terrible. A baby-hacker-Emilia skill, and fuck did it show.
Had it saved her from slicing her hands and knees open a few tis? Yes, but also, her brain was burning, the skill having never needed to be optimized for use with other skills because the entire point of it had been for Sion to use only it to get through his birthday gift.
It had been a good gift, Emilia thought—so silly, youthful lark, which had taken so much ti and effort from all of them. They’d needed to rotate who was working on the cave, who hanging out with Sion. They hadn’t been subtle, and Sion had definitely known sothing was up. He had 100% known sothing was up when the giant tal tubes they eventually created the cave system within were delivered to the wrong address—an address right in the middle of town!
It had been a whole ss—the owner of the business they had been wrongly delivered to was annoyed and already hadn’t liked them, and had insisted on sending them back. Of course, delivered to his business or not, his na wasn’t on the invoice, so there was little he could do. At nineteen, however, there was little she—the person whose na was on the invoice could have either, and really! Why did the company even let her place the order if they then wouldn’t accept her authority over said order!?
In the end, it had beco one of those rare monts when Halen had tried to help, claiming they were for sothing he was working on, but that he had ordered them in her na in an attempt to annoy her. This had beco an accusation that she was trying to steal them from him, and beco another huge thing. Luckily, everyone—save the poor delivery people—knew that they were always ssing with one another, and the delivery people, being quite done with the crazy Penns town they had been assigned to that day, had let Halen’s mother sign for the delivery as long as she gave them an address in her na.
The cave system still existed in the Mhrina’s backyard, as none of them had been inclined to try having the pipes moved to where they had originally wanted them, at the treehouse, partially because while so of the adults knew they had a secret hideout sowhere, no one knew where it was. As the pipes had been delivered to the Mhrinas, moving them to the treehouse would have required hiring a local company and they were already receiving suspicious looks from a lot of people. Having the pipes delivered to the treehouse would have not only revealed its location, but also alerted their parents that they had built an entire house, with running water and multiple power sources, on soone else’s property.
Hence! The Mhrinas had the cave system, which Alaric and Cyan had since turned into a less-than-secret hideout of their own.
To this day, her father still asked her both where she had actually been intending to build the system—she refused to tell him—and how she had afforded it—Loren had given her the money, after she and the triplets had asked nicely. Loren, on his part, had simply said that next ti, she should order such things in his na, then have one of the triplets pretend to be him. While Loren was significantly older, and any fake identification the triplets used had to show that age, they had found that few people had the guts to question the clones.
Was any of this relevant to her current circumstances? No, but she needed a distraction that was good enough to keep her from panicking, and yet not so deep that she would lose track of herself as she crawled through the tunnel the playground had led her to—and well, she supposed the whole crawling thing made their man-made cave system a little relevant? Not that they had made any of the passages quite so squishy in that thing—they hadn’t wanted anyone to get stuck and die in it, after all!
Emilia… currently felt a little like she might get stuck and die, the passage so tight that she was sure her arms and legs would be scraped down to muscle by so of the screws and rivets her skin was catching on. tal caged her in on all sides, so sort of chanism or computer attached to the puzzle she’d just solved having opened a space barely big enough for her to fit—and Emilia was sure she would fit, just as she was sure nothing would actually try to kill her as she was crawling through it.
There was a reason she was increasingly thinking of this thing as a murderous playground, rather than a machine designed to murder: it seed to be more of a ga. It was a difficult and deranged ga, yes, but it was a ga nonetheless and gas were, in the end, designed to be beatable.
They had rules and goals. They had hard and easy parts.
Gas had to be winnable—not easily winnable, but winnable.
So, Emilia was pretty sure that this particular part wasn’t going to have a death trap; instead, it was a panic trap—a place where she was her own enemy, her mind at risk of spiralling into despair and claustrophobia until she was gasping and wheezing and unable to move. As long as she could remain calm—and thankfully, this was one of those things her Perfect Balance and Awareness Levels were great at, while her Censor could also force the breaths into rhythm if needed—she would be fine.
Out she would pop, deep, bloody scrapes over her body, but overall fine.
Then, she’d move on to the next part of the playground, the next, the next.
Eventually, she’d get to the other side and get to learn if this was a complete waste of ti or not. Was it all for nothing? Were the people they were looking for—and perhaps others—over there, or was she wandering into a den of people deford by their ti down here?
Emilia wanted to think that it wasn’t going to be a waste of ti—wanted to believe that the little gut instinct within her that had said she had to see herself through this place wasn’t wrong.
There was no way to know until she got through, and assuming she wasn’t crazy, this wasn’t a playground designed to be unbeatable.
Of course, she could be insane; alternatively—and perhaps more worryingly—whoever had designed this thing could be aiming to trick those who found themselves within it into thinking everything would be fair.
It could be a monster, playing nice, until suddenly, the box of squishy death around her could slam shut and turn her into human mush and Emilia really needed to stop thinking about this!
So, as she wiggled herself out of the tunnel and into the next section of the playground, a chorus of relieved sighs coming to her from beyond the playground’s barrier, Emilia pulled her mind to this new challenge.
Onwards. Unless she pulled her willbrand free and tried to cut herself to freedom, there was only onwards, the tunnel squeezing shut behind her, leaving nothing but a solid wall of tal… except—
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