Emilia’s screamed
“Grenner!”
faded into the quiet heat of the northern district, several of the people making their way onto The Bridge glancing their way before continuing on. While Seer’ik’tine was about as international a city as could be found on the continent—although Norzen, the capital of Norvel came close, due to the international nature of the Dread Coliseum—the majority of people who lived and worked within the city-state were either local or related to the embassies.
In other words, virtually everyone at least knew of Emilia and her chaos; how could they not? While some of their coren’taz could fade into the background, most of them stood out in ways that couldn’t be easily erased. A silverstrain with long hair and a propensity for yelling and causing mayhem? Yeah, even if they didn’t know her by name, no one would believe such a person was anyone but the Baalphorian Secretary General’s wild child.
Actually, come to think of it, that sort of made her an easy person to impersonate, didn’t it? Combined with her ability to lock and erase her own memories as needed—not that anyone outside of her closest friends and the clones knew that—it wasn’t even like her Censor could be dug into to find the truth, and even that digging would require her permission…
“Could I, like, claim I didn’t kill 'ariah?” Emilia pondered, pulling up a skill to keep her voice from reaching anyone but Olivier, Halen and Lan’za.
Halen, rude as he so often was, snorted. “Maybe if you hadn’t confessed.”
“Who says I confessed?”
“The fact that Luxie isn’t the one who was charged says enough,” and well shit. Yeah, there was that.
“Okay, fine, fine. I confessed, but if I hadn’t~” Emilia turned a smile on Olivier.
Gone was the man who had been staring at her just moments earlier. Annoyance and concern for her intelligence had replaced the wide, frightened eyes that had watched as she seemingly melted down—something she had definitely been playing up; as much as sugar gave her a dopamine hit, her specific variety of ADHD latching onto sugar molecules and the hit more powerfully than most varieties, she hadn’t actually eaten enough sugar to do more than give her a little bit of a buzz. That said, the chaos of the moment and their travels was definitely piling up a bit inside her, and letting the tension out through running and babbling had helped release some of it.
Part of her felt a bit bad to have let that tension out in a manic burst aimed solely at Olivier; another part was bubbling with excitement because he had handled it soooo~ fucking well. A bit of panic, but that was to be expected, especially since he’d never experienced her like that before. Overall, he’d been gentle and reassuring. Better yet, he hadn’t said anything about knotting up her ADHD. While she’d done that before, it usually left her feeling odd—like she was herself and not all at once.
With so much about herself already fractured from labels she didn’t want and couldn’t get rid of, Emilia was perfectly happy not feeling even less like the person her brain thought her to be, thanks.
“I swear my thought process isn’t as crazy as you’re making it seem!” Emilia complained when Olivier continued glaring at her like her brain had given up on her. Halen was looking at her in a similar way, although far more amusement was laced through his eyes and the small tilt in his lips; probably, he’d known her so long to know that while she sounded crazy, and even if the reasoning turned out to be just as bonkers, it would at least kinda-sorta make sense. Olivier, not knowing her well—although Emilia really thought he should know her well enough through class and their annotation exchanges—meant he had less confidence. Clearly, she just needed to clarify the inner workings of her brain!
“Do you want me to explain myself?” she asked as Grenner, who had been lingering on a nearby street eating a snack and chatting to a Jinkaiden bodyguard who was waiting for his charge and the rest of their bodyguards to return from lunch, finally reached them.
“Explain your brain later,” Grenner, the clone who had long been assigned to stick close to her for over a decade and had ended up as her unofficial guard for the trip, teased. “Trust me,” he mock whispered at Olivier, “it can take a while.”
The rest of the class, who had fallen out of their conversation about the Twintides creation myth in order to watch the chaos of her entrance, had turned to watching the new clone warily. While most of them had become a little more comfortable with the clones, thanks to the triplets picking her up so often, Grenner was older and clearly different from the boys they’d come to know. Emilia doubted anyone even realized he was one of the clones who had assisted in arresting their three classmates, despite him having introduced himself by name to Norrayn.
“Oh, shush you~” Emilia laughed, giving the man a playful smack. “Can you take these boxes back to the ship?”
Grenner might be her unofficial bodyguard, but his job was less to keep her safe—realistically, anyone who could take her out would be able to take out even the most powerful clone pods, and Grenner was alone in his assignment—than to make sure if something happened to her there was someone around who was calm and collected and could contact her father so he could panic.
It was a job Grenner had had for a while, his naturally mellow personality and friendliness enough to put people at enough ease to not panic over his face while still fearing him and the terror he could bring down on them if they didn’t assist him in dealing with whatever nonsense she had gotten into. Plus, holding the position for so long meant he knew people. While any clone could wander up to the Blood Rain General and tell him she was missing, Grenner had met the man numerous times. Kouren knew Grenner—knew his personality and that he didn’t panic without serious cause. If Grenner ran up to him, asking if the old man had seen her, the Blood Rain General might actually panic in return… maybe—it was hard to figure out whether the Dionese war hero actually liked her or not sometimes. Certainly, he’d allowed her to train with Hurinren when it was uncommon for him to take more than one primary student at a time, but he was also the sort of person who never seemed to actually like people? Respect them, yes, but like?
“You can explain it to me later,” Olivier said as they began to move again—on to their next stop in their busy day of sightseeing.
As they would be heading in the same direction for a bit, Grenner had taken the box Olivier had taken from her and one of Halen’s and was now trailing behind the group, chatting with Lan’za longtime guard. The class kept shooting the pair of them odd looks, their soft whispers betraying that they’d had no idea either had been trailing them all day—well, Grenner had been on the ship with them, but clones were common on airships, acting as protection to Baalphorian travellers… or, more often, witnesses against them for their terrible behaviour towards Free Coloniers. As a result, no one had assumed he was there to keep an eye on her, and by extension, them as well. Emilia wasn’t sure they’d figured that last part out yet, and she wasn’t about to point it out.
“Yeah?” Emilia asked, hopeful. “I don’t think it’s actually helpful to my case given the whole confessed thing. More just curiosity on how laws and reputation come together when accusations are made.”
The lawyer slid a look her way, eyes steady and focused despite the feeling that he must be analyzing her words, trying to figure out how they would come together to form a question that, in a world where she hadn’t confessed to killing ‘ariah, it might have been relevant to her case. Of course, she could peek inside her logs from Olivier’s terrible, ancient stalking function, but—
But nothing!
Emilia bolted back to Halen, who had been lingering awkwardly near the back of the group as well, clearly unsure what to do. He could leave, but he was still holding the one box of books, having refused to give it up to Grenner for stars knew what reason. It almost felt like he was using the box as an excuse to stick around? The Emilia of an hour ago would have said there was no way that was possible, but now…
“Psst~” she hissed, skidding to a stop in front of her former classmate and noting the way his one arm had slid out from under the box, just in case he needed to catch her. “How are your skills in trickery? Wait, is it trickery? Manipulation? Feels like there’s a better word, but, hmm…”
The arm Halen had stuck out in case she went skidding past him pulled her back into movement, lingering a moment too long around her waist before dropping. “Your skill isn’t moving.”
“Huh? Oh, fuck!” Laughing, Emilia released the privacy skill she had activated before beginning to chat with Halen. It had indeed stayed exactly where she activated it, briefly causing a communication issue between Grenner and Lan’za bodyguard as the latter passed into it and her words fell away into silence.
“Who do you want me to manipulate?” Halen asked, taking over the privacy skill in what could have been kindness, control, or a lack of confidence in her—it was exceptionally hard to tell with the man on a good day, let alone when he was being so weird.
“Olivier.”
“Why?”
“So…”
A beat passed, two, three, before Halen finally made an impatient, prompting sound.
“So… you remember when I confessed that I’d once written a virus into a function I released?”
Emilia had told Halen about that after she’d proven much better at implanting viruses into his Censor than he into hers. While it had only taken a few tries for him to catch up, that single instance of her designing a function with a virus in it had been enough to give her an edge for a few weeks, after their prank war had turned to infiltrating one another’s Censor.
“Vaguely,” Halen so totally lied—if anything, his memory was better than her own. There was no way he didn’t remember every word of their conversation even without his Censor’s assistance.
“So, I did release a virus-less version, like, almost immediately. The thing is, a certain someone—”
“A certain lawyer.”
“—never updated the function.”
“Wait, so he’s walking around with a function that’s, what? Fifteen years outdated?”
Halen, to his credit, looked absolutely horrified, although under it, he was clearly impressed that her function had managed to hold up as long as it had. There were functions out there that no one had ever bothered to update or create a new version of, but eventually, they’d start to fail as Censor System updates were released, although hacked CSs tended to support things longer. Emilia had made a hobby of updating some of those outdated, failing functions, mostly those that were
super
specific, utilized by a small portion of the population—such as Dyads—who couldn’t afford to finance a new version themselves, but also relied on it to get through the day.
That was part of the reason so many of her functions held up so well: given how many functions she had designed and altered that were essential to people’s lives she didn’t want to find herself stuck updating all those functions every few years because the users’ lives would fall apart without them. Did it take longer to make her functions so future-proof? Fuck, yeah. It was worth it, all the same… until, of course, she came across someone who needed to update their function so she didn’t have the ability to be a creepy stalker!
“So, I’m guessing you want me to figure out a way to get the guy to update the function? I could just ask Axelle, you know. I think she mentioned once that she maintains her cousins’ Censors.”
“Then, it’s her fault he hasn’t updated it?”
Halen shrugged. “Maybe, but she’s pretty on top of everything, so probably not. I get the feeling that man is finicky. Maybe he just likes that version and doesn’t want to risk it changing in ways he doesn’t like—I assume you locked the version?”
“Yeah…” Emilia sighed.
Only an idiot released functions and skills that could be reinstalled as an older version, if the user updated and hated it. Generally, there was no reason
not
to update, other than being finicky or some error in the code that allowed the user to do something unintended or was outright dangerous to their Censor and mind. No one wanted to be unable to erase a flawed function from the aether. Some people even went as far as to lock old versions the moment a new version was released in order to force an update, but Emilia had never felt the need to go that far.
Now, however?
Now, she rather wished she could lock the function from Olivier’s use and erase the itch that had lingered under her skin for weeks, urging her to look
just one more time
and figure out what he was feeling as he walked through the sweltering heat of the city-state—what he felt whenever she felt his eyes on her yet again.
.
!
Arc 9 | Chapter 309: How are you with trickery?
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