There was a drip, far in the distance, the sound echoing gracelessly over… whatever the world was made of. tal, maybe—at least, that’s what Emilia would have assud if she were in her own world. Of all the material she had seen used in this world, a few had reminded her of certain types of tal, but nothing had seed to quite be tal, except in the library… maybe.
The lack of tal made sense, in her rattled brain—did she had a concussion? She was pretty sure she did—given talwork was dangerous. She’d almost lost a few fingers learning how to forge willbrands. The fact that she’d escaped that sumr with only a few scars across her body from flas and spitting tal and chemicals, from skills gone awry and shattering glass, was a miracle in its own right. How could the things in this world be made of tal if the locals couldn’t risk working with the material—couldn’t risk the blood those injuries would leak into the world?
⸂It is tal,⸃ a voice said, loud and cracking through her head and core, the feel of their energy coated aether sliding through her ridians. ⸂There are so older buildings that use tal. The library the man from the Valoren family destroyed was designed before the blood curse began.⸃
Had she been speaking aloud? She didn’t think so, but—
⸂You weren’t,⸃ the voice continued. It sounded familiar, but in a far away way—in a barely touched way. Maybe if she’d had her Censor, it could have placed it, just like it would have helped her place V’s voice. ⸂You have lost control of your aethervoice,⸃ the person continued.
Oh, that made sense. She’d only had that particular ability for a few days, and learning to speak to locals had been low on her list of priorities. It had been annoying, getting the ability to use her aethervoice so late in the ga. It would have been much more useful to have gotten it—
✮ ✮ ✮ One Week Earlier ✮ ✮ ✮
Breaking up fights was hard. Doubly hard when there were angsty, moody preteens involved. How much harder was it when you couldn’t actually speak to the children? Emilia had no idea, but it was proving to be next to impossible.
Not only could she not communicate with the little shits, but because of how young she had skewed her appearance, she might as well have been one of them! She was cute and tiny and was pretty sure that when she crossed her arms she just looked like a tantruming child. Emilia would have been okay with that, if it had served to distract Gale and the boy—Sawyer—from their fight, but they had chosen to ignore her.
Even worse, the pair were apparently old enough to have learned a little magic, and neither Emilia nor V—once he stopped laughing at her and ca to help—could get close enough to physically pull them apart without risking so minor burns.
All in all, it really sucked. Lesson learned: don’t help random children, ever.
“This is the last ti I deal with kids,” Emilia muttered under her breath, earning her an odd look from her friend. “What?”
V blinked at her. He was once again holding several of the smaller children, more in case Gale and Sawyer fucked up, and they had to bolt out of a collapsing cave, than to let their little legs rest. “Really?”
“Why are you saying it like that?”
“Like what?”
“Like you’re disappointed I don’t want to deal with kids again.”
“Ah…” A light blush dusted over V’s nose and he looked away, teeth digging into his lower lip.
Emilia was about to dart in front of him and demand an answer when the man himself darted away—darted into the middle of Gale and Sawyer’s fight. Sohow, the other visitor had managed to put the children he had been holding down before moving, although Emilia had no idea how. Given the wide, startled eyes of the children, they had no idea how, either.
“That’s enough,” V said, making several large, sweeping stop motions with his arms. He made another set of motions which weren’t quite the sa as either Emilia’s sign language or official Baalphorian sign language, but were close enough that she assud V knew at least one, if not both—not that it was the first ti she’d had such thoughts.
The children at least seed to mostly understand what he was signing, which essentially amounted to telling them both to chill, before asking Sawyer what his problem was.
The boy huffed, his chest pulling up and air actually escaping his mouth, even if the sound itself ca through the aether. ⸂She was saying we’re lost. We aren’t lost.⸃
⸂You shouldn’t be eavesdropping!⸃ Gale hissed, bloody red eyes boring into the younger boy.
⸂I wasn’t,⸃ he said, nose turning up as his eyes slid to another of the children.
They hadn’t had much ti to work out who knew who, or how everyone was related, but Emilia knew the girl, who appeared to be around the sa age as Sawyer, was friendly with Gale. Given the way Gale gaped at the other girl, her eyes beginning to brim with tears, Emilia could guess that she’d been privately telling her friend that she didn’t know which way to go. The other girl had apparently told Sawyer, and well…
⸂I’m sorry…⸃ the other girl whispered, her own eyes spilling over with tears. ⸂I just—⸃
⸂Don’t!⸃ Gale snapped, jaw flexing as she glared at her friend, all icy hatred that Emilia was glad she didn’t have to be on the receiving end of. Gale’s eyes shot back to Sawyer. ⸂Fine, if you know so much, you can lead.⸃
Gale turned, long legs taking her into the group of children and far from either Sawyer or her crying friend. She towered over the other children, but that didn’t seem to bother her. Several children approached her, giving her reassuring pats, the aether shifting with private conversations…
Blearily, Emilia added another question to her growing list about how communication in this world worked: if you could have private conversations, how did you avoid overlapping with another private conversation? Was their etiquette? Was it like making a call, where you’d get a busy signal if the person were otherwise occupied?
That was how Censors worked. A request would go out to the person you were trying to contact. If they were busy, you’d get a little notification and could try again later, or send a ssage. Emilia had always found most people were too busy to talk, preferring to send ssages for even the most urgent reasons.
Most people called for ergencies, though, hoping the person would pick up. It was a bit hit or miss, even when you tagged the call as urgent, the result of too many people using the tag for things that definitely weren’t ergencies. ssaging people was more reliable, in her opinion. Unless disabled, ssages floated through the corner of your vision, words lightly tapping at your senses. Red ssages of deadly importance burned your brain, and while people could also stupidly tag any ssage as urgent, sohow, that was less common through ssages than calls.
If she was sending an urgent ssage? Well, pretty much everyone knew it was really fucking important. For the people she had known the longest… well, the reactions she got out of those people with her urgent tagged ssages were always the best. She’d been more reasonable with her ssages the last decade. Ergencies were always tagged as urgent, but when she was younger? There had been a handful—or two—of monts where she had sent ssages about ergencies tagged as only slightly important. It seed to have traumatized people, who now viewed her urgent ssages as potentially world ending, which… fair.
She could handle herself, back then, was the thing. Why risk soone else’s safety when she could handle things herself? Today, she relied on her friends more—relied on them to show up and bail her out of the trouble she occasionally found herself in. Thankfully, it was usually the fun sort of trouble.
The Emilia of old would have marked ssages to people about this particular problem—being stuck in a potentially deadly labyrinth with a bunch of children—as only slightly important. Certainly not an ergency. The current Emilia wished they could contact soone. Whoever they contacted wouldn’t be particularly helpful, unless they were a local, but even having another visitor to bounce ideas off of would have helped.
“He says he’s been here before.”
V’s voice snapped Emilia out of wherever her brain had disappeared to—contemplating how stupid she was, was it?
“Sorry,” she mumbled, smiling weakly up at him. “Got distracted by… nothing particularly important. Sorry.”
The other visitor looked like he wanted to tell her it was fine, but he seed to think better of it and instead tilted his head at the boy. “He says we are in the labyrinth,” he explained, grimacing slightly.
“He’s been here before?”
“Yeah, apparently so of the older kids accidentally busted the shortcut entrance a few months back. That’s probably why none of the locals evacuated down here. Most of the kids are too young to know.”
“But he’s been here before?” Emilia asked, looking the boy over. He was young, dirty, constantly rubbing the sleeve of his too big shirt under a runny nose. She wouldn’t have been surprised to learn he was holess, or at least from a poor family. Then again, half the children were in similar or worse condition, and surely, they couldn’t all be holess?
V nodded, a little smile tugging at his lips, despite the shitty circumstances. “Apparently, he and a bunch of the other local kids co and play in here sotis. He says the labyrinth is fun and potentially lucrative, although not always. Throws harder challenges at them sotis, but he says it wants to be solved.”
“So… in other words, he’s not concerned about us being ‘lost’ and believes we’ll co out of this perfectly fine?” Emilia asked, smiling hopefully up at V.
The man grimaced down at her, because of course it wasn’t going to be that easy. “The kid said it was a better option than facing the blood curse, which is why he didn’t say anything before. He seems to think it would be that easy, if not for us.”
The boy had been one of the last to join them, and had joined them after they had started descending into the house. He probably hadn’t even realized there were visitors with the group until it was too late.
Emilia sighed, shaking her head. “The labyrinths are harder for visitors?” she said, thinking back to her conversation with Key, about how the labyrinths tended to focus its attention on whatever visitors were inside them, leaving locals to wander down boring paths.
“Yup,” V agreed, giving the child he had hoisted back into his arms a little boop on the nose. They giggled, the sound rocketing through the aethernet.
The other children he had been carrying had scattered through the area as they all waited for soone to decide what they were going to do. Sawyer was talking to a group of children, so of them shooting nacing looks at Gale, standing across the tunnel and surrounded by a similarly nacing group.
Apparently, their group had split into three factions: Sawyer’s, Gale’s, and a mixture of children who didn’t seem to care, liked neither of the older children, or hadn’t noticed the strained relations rising around them. While so of the last group were simply too young or unobservant, most were just too stressed by the situation to have noticed much. Tears stained their cheeks and sleeves as they huddled into older siblings, Emilia or V—or worse, leaned alone against the labyrinth walls. For most, any comfort was better than none, and the two of them had adopted a give any child who needs a hug a hug attitude.
The ones who wanted nothing to do with anyone, though? Those ones she was worried about. She had never seen anyone benefit from silent, lonely suffering, but all attempts to reach those children had been t by a mix of glares or empty stares.
“Does he think we should leave them?” Emilia asked, wondering just how out of it she had been to miss an entire conversation between V and the boy.
When she asked about it, however, V shook his head, telling her that their conversation had been private. “He basically info dumped ,” the man laughed. “And I don’t think he wants us to separate. As much as he thinks it will be harder and more dangerous with us, he also knows they aren’t getting the smaller kids out of here without us.”
“He could just leave them with us,” she pointed out. That would be pretty selfish, and so far, this world seed a rather selfless one to her. As much as so of the Enclave and Risen Guard’s actions had seed pretty selfish, they also seed to have an underlying selflessness attached to them as well. They wanted the world to be better—wanted to keep its residents safe—even if the way they went about it was a little fucked.
“I tried suggesting that,” V said, shrugging absently. “I think he understood, but based on the way he was glaring at , he didn’t particularly like the idea. He just sorta blinked at , looking way older than he is, before going off on how one of us should decide which way we go next.”
“Us? I thought he said we weren’t lost?”
“Sure,” V said, lips twitching. “We’re in the middle of a labyrinth that changes based on who chooses the direction, or who it wants to fuck with the most. It can go either way, but usually the challenge it creates is suitable for all party mbers.”
“So… one of us decides the direction, and we hope the labyrinth designs a challenge based on that person’s abilities?”
“Basically.” V’s smile was pained as the reality of the situation set it.
“,” Emilia sighed, thinking about how getting the children up a rock wall would be infinitely better than getting them to crawl through claustrophobic caves. Of course, there was no reason why the challenges this labyrinth threw at them would be even remotely similar to those of the first.
When she pointed this out to V, however, he simply grimaced. “I have so terrible skills from my blackaether raids,” he said quietly, as though anyone could possibly overhear him. “Better to not tempt fate.”
“Better to not tempt it indeed,” Emilia thought. She certainly had so annoying and terrible skills as well, but there were few she could think of that were as terrible as V’s expression was implying his own were. Sucking in a deep breath, she stepped forward to choose one of the three paths—one of three potentially deadly gas—to lead everyone down.
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