Sorvell was just going to, you know, ignore Miles’ messages. Was it the mature thing to do? Definitely not. Was he still going to do it? Definitely.
The thing was, he understood
why
Emilia’s father was upset with him. As the Secretary General, it was Miles’ job to manage Baalphoria’s relations with other nations, and for the last sixty years that had been increasingly difficult. He hadn’t known Emilia when she was just a child, but he had heard stories about her:
Miles Starrberg’s rambunctious little silverstrain.
That was the nicer way people put it. He would not be repeating the ruder things people had said, but needless to say, many of the people who had accused the man of doing something wrong by adopting
a child like that
had found themselves on the outs with the Penns’ upper echelons when the girl had immediately befriended so many of their youngest members.
The fact that she had immediately engrained herself into the hearts and souls of so many of the clones helped as well.
Having been off, exploring the nation as his gap decade stretched into multiple decades while he attempted to figure out what he wanted to do with his life, Sorvell hadn’t met Emilia until she was late into her teens. Yet, every time he returned home, he would hear more stories of her escapades from his father and brother, who was doctor to most of the kids that age at the time—still was, technically, even if he often heard those children, now his friends and teammates, complaining about having to go see random doctors because the great and mighty Doctor Vickers was off doing good somewhere else.
With all he’d heard of her, even before he’d known Emilia personally, Sorvell had wondered whether it was a good idea for her father to take her into the Free Colonies with him. Amazingly, there had been very few instances of her almost causing wars—there had been a thing in Norvel and then Dion, and later in Lüshan, but none of those had escalated into major diplomatic incidences. Actually, he was pretty sure the one incident with Crishar that had escalated hadn’t really been her fault either, although she’d definitely been blamed for it, and while Baalphorians were still encouraged to stay away from the small nation, they weren’t technically banned—really, they were discouraged from visiting for their own good, Crisharian technology doing… odd things to Censors and other Baalphorian tech, while their laws about royals were rather strict.
Instead, what Emilia had managed was more impressive than a single wild child starting a war: she had made friends and allies strong enough that they had eventually come together to become Division 30. Long before the unit formed into reality, their coren’taz had sent ripples through the world, and Miles’ job had become impossibly harder year by year. Not only was his child one of the children who was constantly causing minor diplomatic issues, but so were many of the children Emilia would happily die for. Sorvell didn’t envy the man for having to deal with managing their nonsense, and that was back when their power had been uneven—when they had been children destined for power, some destined for greatness in other ways, but not yet possessing much of anything so palpable.
Back then, Miles could largely send the troublemakers back to their home governments and parents—let them deal with reprimanding their kids, as long as whatever had happened wasn’t
too
terrible. From what Sorvell could tell, this was also the mentality most other nations had taken with Emilia and her coren’taz back then: punish lightly, then send them back home for their own nation to deal with as they saw fit. Mostly, he thought it had worked, although the problem children in question never seemed to learn their lesson, even if he knew some of their punishments had been relatively severe.
Now, though, there was no one to reprimand them, no one save themselves to hold them responsible. The whole of Division 30 behaved however they liked, and it was just fortunate that their unit had almost too many morals and ethics between them. Those morals and ethics, however, often contradicted the established laws of their home nations. Usually, they were pretty good about obeying the laws of wherever they were—or they’d at least manoeuvre around them well enough to avoid too many issues.
For all the faults they held between them, they knew how much power they now wielded, and none of them wanted to push the issue of how far their governments would let them cross the lines of the law. Division 30 was power, and while the military’s secret unit could very well compare in their might—who really knew what sort of power they had, mysterious as they were—having seen even the most powerful of the up-and-coming echo hunters in action… Sorvell didn’t think they were any match for even the members of their unit who hadn’t kept up on their training.
It was neither fair to think of them as weaker, nor that they couldn’t catch up with the right support. That was the problem, though: they didn’t have to support of people like Emilia, Halen and Simeon behind them.
That
was where the true problem lay: while there were people out there who could potentially match their members in strength and strategy, there were no other hackers or willbrandsmiths who had risen in the decades of war and peace to match those three, no one capable of helping those who could potentially match them design the weapons they would need to do so.
Well, there
might
have been one, aside from Helix, Alaric, and Seven’s stupid hacking persona, who didn’t count as they were already associated with Division 30. Allegedly there was some hacker working for the medic’s association—which was actually a loosely associated group of associations that dealt with matters pertaining to normal medics, war medics, doctors, and a whole lot more people who worked in the medical profession. Not being a medic himself, Sorvell had only heard whispers of the hacker. He had shared these whispers with Meerik’za, who was now attempted to convince the Baalphorian medics he’d worked with during the war to put him in contact with the person. It was unclear on how that was going, as Meerik’za was struggling to use his Censor, like, at all. It was actually rather concerning, and Rafe was supposedly coming to make sure it was actually Meerik’za who was the problem, rather than his Censor. In theory, Rafe was coming, anyways. It was just… the way Olivier had said
“Rafe will come when he has a moment”
had contained all the energy of someone who thought
a moment
might very well be in a few years.
Realistically, someone should probably go get Rafe. Unfortunately, no one seemed to know where he lived!? How did that even happen!? Apparently, he had briefly moved back into his childhood bedroom following the war, then almost immediately moved back out because things with his mother had been awkward—strained because Clarissa Laprise had handled her wife’s death during the war… oddly, to say the least. Sorvell couldn’t fault Rafe—and later Malcolm—for moving out within a few months of the war ending. If anything, he actually faulted Andre for still living in that place, although he had been similarly odd since his mother’s death, which had required him to take over as head of The Black Knot far sooner than any of them had expected. Now, the youngest Laprise brother was… Sorvell didn’t want to think the word
odd
again, but he was! Andre used to be the most well-balanced of the Laprise boys. Somewhere along the line, Malcolm had become that person, while Rafe was still the workaholic they had always known he’d become. It was disturbing and totally beside the point that no one seemed to know where to find Rafe!
It was possible that Miles did, but Sorvell wasn’t opening up that conversation. The man was right in that he
may
have accidentally encouraged all of their Free Colony teammates to just spark straight into Baalphoria, skipping over official documentations and, you know, that whole permission thing. It couldn’t have taken Miles long to sort that all out, though! Just a little blip in the grand scheme of the whole CRIMINALS HUNTING THEM ALL thing!
Seriously, Miles should be thanking him for getting so many of their unit members together. It was going to make protecting themselves and everyone associated with them so much easier. Was it also, perhaps, going to end with a bunch of dead criminals littering the city’s streets? Sorvell had no comment on that. Nope. He totally hadn’t been informed by the Shadow of Jinkai that they were going off to kill a couple people with bad intentions. That had never happened.
The impending criminal death count aside, Sorvell didn’t understand why Miles was trying to stick him with letting Emilia know that releasing that video of herself ripping a whole in her ex’s wall had accidentally brought suspicions down on her, while also releasing a tidal wave of people who knew who she was and had spent the last decade impatiently respecting her need for a little space. Sorvell, however, wasn’t the one who had raised the girl to be so… was it confident? Arrogant? Just in possession of a general lack of forethought? Sorvell had no idea. The point was, Miles had raised her to be all those things—or, he hadn’t helped turn her into someone who put more thought into her actions, at the very least.
That was the biggest problem with all this: Emilia, and so many of her coren’taz, had always been so untouchable. When they were children, they had been protected by both privacy and diplomatic laws. When they had been young adults, their part in various incidents had often been covered up, as though the aether itself were pulling a veil over their identities. Then, as part of Division 30, few members of The Alliance had been willing to risk pissing them off by saying more than their members would have liked—or, they hadn’t said things about
other nation’s
members, anyways. So many of their unit members had been outed by their home governments, although Baalphoria had never been on that list.
For all its many faults, Baalphoria did tend to take privacy quite seriously, even for its adults. It wasn’t the government who cared, of course—not at the moment, anyways. Rather, it was the OIC System, which hoarded everyone's secrets, leaking them out only when necessary—and sometimes not even then.
All that privacy, accidental and legal and purposeful, had probably contributed to the lackadaisical way so many children of the coren’taz and the Penns now lived their lives. Why would any of them worry about their privacy when so little had ever come back to roll over them? Even with how much so many of them didn’t want to be associated with Division 30—although, aside from apparently Leerin, Sorvell didn’t think any of them were stupid enough to think that secret wouldn’t break over them eventually—few of them were
that
careful with what they did and said.
They sparked like Division 30 members in echo attacks, and although a small portion of the continent had taken their unit’s advice and played spark tag so they could adjust to the physiological effects of sparking, sparking with ease was generally considered a hallmark of high-ranking soldiers.
They spent time with public Division 30 members, although they tended to lean into doing so in private settings. Still, he knew he’d been seen out with Codeth before, and while Sorvell knew he wasn’t exactly famous, he wasn’t unknown either—and considering his father and brother
were
known for their close association with
his
unit, Sorvell thought he should actually be offended no one had put together that he was a member yet!
Yet
.
Yet.
Yet.
“What are you thinking about?” one of Meerik’za’s harem members asked, and seriously, how many had the man brought with him and how many had Sorvell actually met before!? With his long lashes casting shadows over his reddish cheeks, the man was pretty, if also a bit on the young side—although not as young as the syn Emilia was doing
something
with. He also had a thick Lu Rosian accent, which made Sorvell wonder if conversing in Lurona would be the better option. Had they met before? Sorvell’s Censor didn’t think so, but the guy hadn’t introduced himself either, so…
“Probably how he’s pissed off the secretary general and has now been tasked with delivering terrible news to Emilia,” another harem member said dryly. This one Sorvell knew—had known for almost forty years, since the first time he had personally been dragged into Emilia’s nonsense. The Lüshanian man glanced his way, a hint of amusement in his eyes as he asked if anyone wanted to go with him to help Moriana.
A few hands raised, including Meerik'za’s.
“Meerik’za, there’s no way you can go with your Censor like… that,” Sorvell said, mildly alarmed that the Seerish man would even consider going when he couldn’t even get it to consistently send or receive messages for him.
“It’ll be fine,” the man claimed, popping the Censor he had taken off for Axelle to look at—the woman wasn’t a hacker, although she knew enough to guess that
something
was up with the Censor System, and it wasn’t
just
user error; her tone had left little question that she thought the user was at least some of the issue—back onto his neck, a shudder racketing through him as the brief pain of connection hit him.
Once, temporary Censors had taken a few minutes to connect to the user’s mind, the process more than a little painful. A couple decades ago, Sorvell would have managed to grab Meerik’za before he vanished, a few others following in his wake. Now, the temporary Censor connected near immediately, and even with his own spark landing him in front of Meerik’za, Sorvell didn’t manage to grab the man.
Fuck.
Arc X.1 | Chapter 390: Interlude | Project Piketown Infiltration 10
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