The world of silver mist slipped free of Emilia, a hand snagged firmly around her arm—Olivier’s hand. A quick glance into the lawyer’s eyes, and ooh, he was pissed, those beautiful orbs of white-blue and bright-green boring into the Dionese man. The man didn’t look particularly worried—unsurprising, even if she had no idea of who he was and why he was so different from any other owner of his particular irregular deviation. He was clearly still Dionese, his accent and clothing betraying that he wasn’t some odd owner of those eyes who had grown up abroad. Growing up in Dion meant he was highly trained; dangerous enough that even Olivier, untrained as he likely was, wouldn’t be able to simply rely on his non-dev abilities to beat him.
Once again, her lotyung’s voice slithered through her head, hissing something about how there were
people out there who wanted her dead
and about how
the Inner Court if rife with corruption and chittering birds and beasts just waiting for an opportunity to take down a dynasty or two.
That man really needed to relax. Yujao had chilled him out a bit, over the last decade and a half. Hurinren needed to chill further. Emilia really didn’t know how someone as flighty as Yujao had ended up with her lotyung—opposites attract, she supposed. Couldn’t get much further apart than those two in personality, though. Then again, that dichotomy meant their kinks lined up perfectly, so…
Emilia frowned up at Olivier, contemplating how far apart they were in personality as well, wondering if whatever they liked in bed would line up as nicely as Hurinren and Yujao’s preferences—not that she generally had strong preferences, although there were definitely some things she enjoyed more than others. When it came to their personalities… Sure, she and her soon-to-be lawyer both liked learning and helping people, but the way they expressed their personalities was certainly night and day. Although, she had a feeling Olivier hid at least some of his personality behind his awkwardness—and probably his mother’s expectations as well. After all, in the restaurant, weeks earlier, Olivier had certainly seemed… dominant, if only for a moment. Dominant worked for her, definitely.
“Oh! It worked! Thank you!” she cheered, finally looking away from the tense standoff—on Olivier’s side, anyways—to her sparklingly clean clothes. “Don’t imagine you visit Baalphoria ever?” she asked, wondering if it would be better to speak in Baalphorian or Dionese with Olivier now a part of the conversation, if only by proximity
The Dionese man seemed to lack complete fluency in the language, and while Olivier’s Censor could translate, he was so just so tense that inadvertently excluding him might completely ruin the progress their relationship had made!
“‘re you planning ‘n stealing me do laundry?” the Dionese man asked, a wrinkle appearing between his brows, likely going over his words and wondering where he’d gone wrong.
“Nah~ more that I’d love to analyze that ability to try to make a skill— er, Censor version.”
“Can be done?”
Humming and hawing—and noting that virtually everyone’s eyes were still glued on her, many of them laden with curiosity because they also wanted to know. “Sure. I mean, it’s super difficult, but it can be done. Not many people convert core abilities into skills, which is a real shame! There are so many core abilities that do things way better than any Censor skill!” Smiling, and taking a quick inventory of the people around her and where they were most likely from—Dion, mostly—she gave her favourite example: a skill from the streets of the capital that Yujao had taught her early in their friendship.
Due to a complication of circumstances, she hadn’t been able to just drag Yujao into the training rooms of the local embassy to get scans of his body and the aether while he used the ability, which could be used to temporarily transform the user’s clothing into a nigh impenetrable barrier—very useful for those living on the deadly streets of Chion’s outer ring, where crime was an expected part of life. Instead, she’d been forced to design a skill specifically to analyze her friend while he used the ability. It was the sort of skill that could only be used outside of Baalphoria and anywhere else its laws touched, due to its invasive nature; while those who stepped into the training rooms understood their bodies might be analyzed, her skill could do it to anyone she passed on the street, and very few would even notice the slight shift of the aether around them.
Highly illegal.
So illegal, in fact, that she’d never even told The Black Knot about it. It was used for the rare circumstances where she couldn’t get someone into a training room and nothing else. While she had limited what the skill could do—it could really only read the effect abilities were having on the user’s body and the aether itself—Emilia knew she could easily make it do far more.
Pull apart the details of unregistered and private skills.
Read a person’s power—how big their aether cores were, how strong their cores.
Guess at their D-Levels and less visible irregular deviations.
See injuries and weak points.
There was so much it could do, and sure, maybe it could be used by medics and doctors to help people. Maybe it would save a few SecOp and Black Knot agents’ lives, giving them the ability to see just how dangerous the criminal in front of them was. It would definitely be turned into a weapon for war—used not just to analyze the next set of people the Baalphorian government set out to exterminate, but to pull apart their abilities and create counterskills. It was already a concern that, with the improvements to the training rooms that had occurred since the last Colonial War, the Hyrat clones might be asked to force captured enemies to use their abilities within the rooms, all so they could be analyzed.
It was considered such a big risk that numerous hackers had an agreement amongst themselves: death before supporting the Baalphorian government in such things. As a group, they tended to focus on the horror of the Hyrat clones effectively taking over the minds of captured enemies—after they had had a Censor forced into them, another moral atrocity that would truly turn her government down a road it could never come back from—and forcing them to use this ability or that—although how they’d get Censors to allow core abilities was still a problem. The reality was many of them were afraid the power to analyze both core abilities and skills would be turned back onto themselves: all of them had unregistered skills they didn’t want the government getting hold of.
The most dangerous of every hacker’s skills, including the {AS ver. 3.6} that she occasionally used to scan core abilities, were heavily encrypted. Even if a Hyrat clone pulled those skills straight out of their heads, no one could—or even would—break into it. At the cost of the skill being heavier, they would protect those skills—the skills that would break the world, that pushed the laws of their understanding of the aether and what they could do with it too far, that held so much potential inside them that they needed to be kept secret.
All the best hackers had skills like that, and it was horrific. It was the cost of pushing their minds and abilities to the limit, often only realizing too late that they had created a monster that should never have existed.
So, when Emilia told the crowd about the street thug defensive ability she had created a skill version of—which was currently only available to law enforcement and a small group of her friends—she left out the part where she, Yujao and Hurinren had snuck into one of the long-abandoned dungeons that hid beneath so much of Chion’s Palace of Strings—the truly terrible Baalphorian translation of its Dionese name, Meoshi zyi Shurong.
Instead, just like every other time she spoke of the skill’s origin, she pretended she’d visited the Baalphorian Embassy with her friends a few years after its actual creation, once everything with Yujao had settled, and she could actually bring him into the embassy’s training rooms to analyze several of his abilities.
The worst thing about the whole lying thing was that if someone looked closer, they’d be able to find the lie. Having that ability-inspired skill under her, it had been impossible for Emilia to not use it when needed: exactly once, several months after its creation, when a man had attempted to stab Ferron, another Hyrat clone in their year but less involved in their friend group. They’d been on a class trip, of course, visiting a small museum on the northern end of The Penns.
It was The Penns. It was supposed to be safe. So, there was less security for their group. So, they’d been allowed to wander far more than usual. At some point, a man had appeared, looking for revenge on any Hyrat clone they could find, even one who was barely seventeen. Emilia had stepped in front of Ferron, not even sure if the defensive skill would activate fast enough. It had, and instead of finding her intestines falling out of her, the blade had slid harmlessly over her clothed stomach. Then, the man was dead, some skill exploding out of Ferron on instinct alone as he pulled her back, already moving to hold her organs inside her.
After that, it had been a giant mess of politics, threats of legal charges, and The Black Knot defending Ferron. Luckily, there had been an OIC security system covering the entire museum, and the incident had been caught from multiple angles. It didn’t matter that she wasn’t injured, anyone watching would have assumed she had been—and even if they knew she hadn’t been, the man had clearly been preparing for another strike. The defensive skill had been brushed off as something she was testing and hadn’t really spoken to anyone about—and luckily, she had had the sense to say it was based off something she’d seen in Dion!
Still, when she’d officially given the skill over to law enforcement a few years later, she couldn’t shake the feeling that at least a few Black Knot agents suspected it wasn’t just a
final version
of that skill she’d been testing, so many years earlier, finally perfected with additional information from Yujao’s scans. They’d never said anything, but she thought they knew something was off with the story—they all knew her so well that lying to any of them was impossible. Plus! Hyrat clones were like fucking lie detectors to begin with! Some inherent part of their genetics giving them the ability to pull on the smallest details of a story, in the shift of a person’s face, the fluctuation of their voice, and figure out when they were lying their ass off.
They knew her so well that they would never ask about it, though. Emilia didn’t keep secrets, except she did: they were just secrets that needed to be kept, and no one who knew her would push for them.
The secrets she kept were the sort liable to shatter the world. Maybe the whole world, maybe just a group of friends, a community, a molecule of energy.
Olivier, however… Emilia didn’t think he knew her well enough to know that, when she was lying, there was an excellent reason!
Okay… so,
maybe
there was sometimes an exceedingly ridiculous reason! But generally the people who could tell when she was lying could also discern when it was
fun
lies and when it was
serious, and we’re never going to bring up the fact that Emilia is so totally lying her ass off lest we bring calamity down upon us
lies.
Human lie detector that he also was, Olivier also appeared to be the sort who could tell when she was lying, this dark gleam appearing in his eyes that said he definitely didn’t trust the story she was spinning. That was a shame—it really was a great story, the Free Coloniers asking questions about what other core abilities she’d created skill versions of, enamoured with her for the simple fact that she wasn’t trying to say skills were always better than cores, the way so many Baalphorians did.
Fortunately, a small, pleading look his way—and a message asking him to please not ask, not here, anyways—and he was backing off, leaving her to her stories of abilities she’d created skill versions of, which originated in virtually every Free Colony she’d ever visited. Then, she was switching and going into the frustration that most of the best, most interesting, core abilities were so complicated they couldn’t be converted into a skill version—yet.
“I think one day it’ll be possible,” she was telling a little boy who was fascinated by her description of an ability from Lüshan—where he and his mother were returning to after a shopping spree in Seer’ik’tine and Emilia
knew
they were going to Lüshan!—that appeared relatively simple but had proven oddly finicky and was currently impossible to convert. “What’s more difficult is just making it so core abilities can be used by a Free Colonier with a Censor.”
“Why would you do that?” the boy’s mother asked, translating for her son because Emilia’s Lüshan sucked, and the kid had a lisp—it was a troublesome combo, and she should probably spend a few hours refreshing her brain on the language before they landed.
“Power management, mostly—I’ve had a few Free Coloniers tell me how difficult it is to control the output of some skills, and that’s something Censors are great at—but also because it would allow Free Coloniers who decided to have Censors installed when they immigrated to Baalphoria to use their core abilities again? Censors are… pushy about never using our cores, unfortunately. That’s part of why it often takes a few generations for the children and grandchildren of immigrants to accept Censors: it's a giving away of their heritage that sucks. At the same time, not having a Censor keeps them outside of Baalphorian culture in a way that makes it more difficult for them to get jobs or attend school or make connections outside of other immigrants.”
A number of the Free Coloniers hummed in agreement, a few who appeared to be from further west muttering that when they’d left their home nations they’d originally considered immigrating to Baalphoria. Having to give up part of their heritage, or destine their descendants to be forced to choose, they had settled into other Free Colonies, despite other reasons not to—mostly, Baalphoria hadn’t been at war with anyone to the far west in generations, while many of the Free Colonies these people had settled in still had living veterans of more recent wars with their home nation, some even still serving in law enforcement.
Baalphoria’s general sense of purism and anti-core Censors versus the lingering hatred of now-finished wars.
There were still some older folks in Baalphoria who remembered the last Colonial War, which had largely been against Dion, but 250 years was a long time to hold a grudge, and even when Emilia had seen older Hyrat clones she knew had served interacting with the Blood Rain General, none of them seemed to hold any animosity towards one another.
Then again, judging not-clone, not-non-dev veterans who were still living based on those interactions probably wasn’t sensible; Emilia imagined more than a few of the ancient Baalphorians who had fought or lost loved ones in the war still hated Dion. Probably, they’d spawned descendants who were now active in purist movements as well.
As the group discussed their various opinions on the matter and how immigrants were treated in each of their homes, Emilia caught Olivier watching her. He’d gone back to speaking with the crew about cleaning up the mess and having Stewart removed from the ship. Still, he watched her, until—
Emilia turned to smile up at the Dionese man Olivier had shifted his gaze to glare at—why was the lawyer being so weird about the guy?
“Hello, again!” she cheered, smiling up at the Dionese man.
He smiled back at her, entirely ignoring Olivier’s glower. “Hello, again,” he repeated, and yeah, she definitely needed to learn his name, especially given those eyes of his could read the lie of her words even more than Olivier’s or any Hyrat clone’s ever could.
.
!
Arc 9 | Chapter 328: Conversations on Conversions
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