Arc F1.10 | Chapter 1: So Not Prepared For War (Civil or Otherwise)

Baylor moved through the streets, his steps increasingly fast and haphazard, and for the life of him, Valor couldn’t tell if his brother was acting the part of increasingly erratic person or if he was actively devolving.

It was always difficult to tell with Baylor, only Emilia ever really able to tell with absolute certainty where Baylor’s current mental state actually lay. The girl they loved was like magic when it came to them—to all clones, to some extent. Emilia ability to read the three of them was, more often than not, perfect—at least, it was when the emotions they felt didn’t revolve around her.

“Baylie, slow down,” Darrian called, his hand grasped in Baylor’s as they were all dragged along, Darrian and Westrial quite literally, while the rest of them had been left to hurry along since those three had reappeared after having some sort of secret conversation.

“Should we be worried about whatever that was?” Taelor had asked Darrian in a new relay they had created as it became increasingly clear that Baylor’s affection had fully wrapped around both Darrian and Westrial. In the past, Darrian had often been left responsible for managing Levi, Emilia, and Baylor, but their brother had always been a bit of an outlier, more controlled by Emilia and her own desire to not cause too many problems when Darrian had been left to babysit them than anything else.

Now, with their newfound friendship grounded in true friendship, rather than the vague lines of intersecting affection for the same person, Darrian was more seriously responsible for controlling Baylor—something they all knew was something of a chronically lost cause. Case in point: Baylor ignoring them and going after the lavender code.

Still, they all tried to control him, the same way they all attempted to control Levi and Emilia. It both worked and didn’t; all they could do was try.

“Oddly… both yes and no?” Darrian had replied to Taelor’s message. Although their former classmate had refused to elaborate on either why he had been devolving into a panic attack or what Baylor had said to him, Darrian had explained that Baylor was being a bit weird, but in a good way. At the same time, he’d made it clear that whatever Baylor had said or done while they were gone wasn’t something he had expected from their middle brother.

Mostly, he and Taelor had decided to trust Darrian—he was by far one of the most responsible members of their friend group and generally didn’t let himself get dragged into anything without knowing the full details and accepting the risks and rewards. Plus, even if they were instead in a reality where Darrian’s opinion on things being fine couldn’t be trusted, there was little chance either he or Taelor would be getting anything out of him.

Darrian was a block of ice when it came to being pressed for information. Emilia’s CS would protect his mind from attempts at pulling the truth from him, while Baylor would be very unhappy if they dared try to force truths from him in a more visceral manner, and neither of them wanted to risk finding out who their middle brother would choose, were they to attempt such a thing. Considering whatever had occurred between Baylor, Darrian, and Westrial was likely relatively minor—Darrian would have told them, were it actually important—Valor was willing to bet their brother would be choosing Darrian—and Westrial, assuming they had spoken in Lüshanian—over them.

Probably he wouldn’t kill them… probably.

“This way,” Baylor said, rather than acknowledge Darrian’s attempts to get him to slow down. Behind them, BJ complained about moving so fast—the streets were too twisting in this area to microspark and they were instead being forced to run, and there was that, at least: they’d been able to move more quickly through the city, as after the fight with the lavender code, Westrial had admitted to having some sort of irregular deviation that was effectively a recon skill, although it was limited to both living and dead people.

The girl hadn’t said much more about it, other than that it could be used for combat as well, but she’d prefer not to use it against people, if possible, although she would, if that was the best way to keep the rest of them safe. Something between a sparkle and a cringe had crossed over her face when she’d admitted that, had she used it when she fought Baylor, she might have been able to win.

“I don’t like using it and…”

“And it made you a target for Fräthk’s group?” Bireth had finished.

At the time, they’d still been sitting in the building next to the one Baylor had destroyed during his fight with the lavender code. Darrian had finally joined them, slipping in from the hallway once their little triplets-only hug was done; immediately, Darrian had been hauling Baylor into a hug of their own. A million little whispers had slid between them, and it didn’t surprise Valor in the least that Darrian had so immediately been able to return the obsessive love that Baylor was now showering him with—Valor’s brother had also bombarded Darrian and Westrial with questions about if they were okay, the implication clear: Baylor had lost himself to anger because his friends had been put in danger.

None of them were saying it, but really, had Sorvell not been so fast in removing the pair from the line of fire, Darrian and Westrial might have died—and had the lavender code been coding?

A shudder raced through Valor just thinking about that reality. They were so underprepared for all of this, and really, Valor had seen the training that the Drinarna were put through—the Baalphorian military as well—during their joint training with The Black Knot and SecOps.

Against an army of criminals, composed of lavender codes and Dyads? People with irregular deviations that could set anything alight? Reach into the minds of everyone around them and make them do this or that? Children who could pull shadows around themself and their allies and slide through even the chaos of the cave system with little difficulty? People with abilities that had yet to be fully revealed?

To say that law enforcement would be fucked was an understatement—a sentiment that Bireth had agreed with, during their brief moments free of Westrial’s always lingering hearing.

“I don’t know what sort of ability she has, but… no, there aren’t really any Drini in the city who could even do as much as she did with so little effort. I mean, there are a few people throughout Lüshan who have recon abilities, but it’s this really hard-to-master specialty—something only low-devs can ever use well, unless the person has an irregular deviation. Sometimes, Dyads with Excess Awareness will have abilities like that and be recruited into the Drini—and, I think Westrial might have been forced into the Drini, assuming she doesn’t have a hereditary ban, had she not ended up on the streets—although, sometimes, such people are allowed to have another profession, but are specially trained for contracting with the Drini, in cases where recon abilities are needed, but…”

The Drinarna intern had trailed off for a few seconds, his lips a grim line, before he admitted what Valor already knew: recon abilities and skills were a double-edged sword. They allowed for more information to be gleaned about not only enemies, but about allies and innocents as well. The ability to reach one’s awareness out and pluck information from the aether and the real world alike was a boon in times of conflict; it was also a skill that created assassins and saboteurs—that allowed for stalking and spying.

“At the moment,” Bireth had eventually continued, “training in recon abilities is limited to legacy families.” His long fingers had tapped over the xphern that he and Valor were using to communicate with everyone who only had a xphern, while they were also using the program supplied by Curtisal to translate the messages being sent between Fräthk’s people, Valor then sending those messages off to everyone through two relays: one that contained all of the messages and another that was only those messages that seemed the most important.

“Is that because someone thinks there are factions rising in the Drinarna?” Sorvell had asked, his own expression grim because while the Vickers brothers weren’t exactly close, Sorvell’s brother had been separated from Halen’s group for a while now. Originally, he had been responding to messages, but for a while, the man hadn’t been replying to anyone. According to Halen’s stalking function, he was alive and conscious and moving, which made his lack of input on anything rather strange. Sorvell was, understandably, some mixture of worried and annoyed.

Shifting, Bireth had admitted that he wasn’t sure—while he was friends with Vantril, herself a legacy, it wasn’t like either of them had ever been given much information on such things. “From what I understand, it isn’t anything new—like, there’s been a pretty stringent lockout for non-legacies in several specializations for longer than Chief Officer Fulbrun has held the position.”

In the end, they had decided this meant one of a few things was likely true: the legacy families were trying to hold on to power by relegating specialization to their children alone; whoever was in power before Wander had already known about factions rising and had set out to either control or appease them through allowing or denying them such power; or, at some point in the past, one or some mixture of these things had been true, but while no longer true, control of specializations remained with legacy families, either due to an oversight or a continuing of the status quo.

It wasn’t the most interesting of things to potentially know, but with a little hacking by Curtisal—who had a shocking amount of access to the city’s various databases, although not to the xphern transmission network, which, for safety reasons, apparently wasn’t supposed to be connected to any nation’s more standard information networks—they were able to learn how few people in Falmíer had any specialization. In fact, there were a number of specializations that Valor would argue were quite important for multiple people to have that no one in the city had; instead, were Falmíer to need someone with a specialization in smoke control, they would need to come in from another city.

Given that a portion of the city was currently leaking horrific black smoke into the air, the decontamination systems failing to cleanse much of it, Valor would say this wasn’t ideal. It wasn’t the worst—according to Bireth, fires were rare, many of the buildings built of flame-retardant material. It still wasn’t ideal, especially as Hurinren was horrified—apparently, controlling smoke was actually a relatively easy ability to master, all Dionese soldiers taught how to do so early in their training.

In Hurinren’s opinion, there shouldn’t even be a need for it to be a specialization.

All this was to say that the situation in Falmíer—and perhaps Lüshan as a whole, depending on how far the conflict spread—was potentially worse than they had thought. In Baalphoria, on the occasions that a criminal group tried to start something too big, The Black Knot had enough clones to put them down quickly. They were the monsters of the continent for a reason, haunting the nightmares of civilians and criminals alike due to how unstoppable they were.

One clone could die; it would make little difference to their numbers—and in times of war, their production sped up. Ten or so clones were currently born a year; during war, it wasn’t uncommon for that number to increase tenfold—potentially more, if the conflict stretched long enough. Emilia, with her huge heart and unending love for them, might not think a single one of them disposable, but that was what they clones were: things to be thrown to combat, to live or die as the aether and their own abilities allowed.

Were war to break out in Baalphoria, civil or not, they would be prepared. Lüshan did not seem prepared—if anything, it seemed as though the system the Drinarna had allowed to exist had set them up to fail, and they needed to get out of this city before it collapsed into a full-blown civil war.

“There!” Baylor called, skidding to a stop at the edge of a building, and Valor recognized it from a video Emilia had sent them.

There, far below them, was the entrance to the holding cells. Across his Censor, the video Emilia had set him overlaid with the entrance that now existed. It was both the same and impossibly difference.

Their new ally, Vtraní, was slotted into Emilia’s video as they exited the building. Everything was soft and relaxed, and had Emilia sent the video without context, Valor would have assumed her simply sending him an image of someone… who was some mixture of strange and attractive. Having briefly messaged with them, Valor now knew that Vtraní was indeed a strange person.

In contrast, the current state of the holding cell’s entrance was one of chaos. People—Fräthk’s loyal, presumably—shifted in and out of the building, calling to one another this or that. Eyes sweeping the street and what could be seen of the entryway to the building, Valor tried to figure out who was in charge. As far as he could tell, no one was; instead, the yelling of instructions to do this or that was creating a cacophony of nothingness. No one followed instructions. No one moved to even message the people who were out searching when they heard the name of yet another person who had been confirmed missing by those searching the holding cells.

Considering how long ago Olivier’s group had triggered the alarm—although, the man was adamant that someone who split from their group had triggered it—the amount of disorganization was embarrassing. This, Valor supposed, was why several people kept putting thoughts about how incompetent Fräthk and their people were into the group relays: truly, it almost seemed to take skill to manage things this badly, and—

And Valor’s eyes caught on a person, nervously shifting near the doorway. Every so often, they tried to slip into the holding cells, only to be forced back when someone bigger and scarier went in or out. With their hood up, it was impossible to truly see what the person looked like, but…

But Valor had a theory, and when he slipped closer to Baylor, practically bouncing in anticipation of getting down there and finally getting to Emilia, only Darrian’s arm around his waist holding him back, to tell his brother his theory, Baylor grinned.

“Oh… that would explain a few things, wouldn’t it?” his brother laughed, unoffended by the little test even as Sorvell cursed and Bireth stepped up beside them, peering downwards and rattling off the names of a few criminals he recognized from briefings—those criminals that Drinarna interns were given information about, along with instructions not to tangle with them.

“You want to stay behind?” Westrial asked, a teasing note to her voice as she glared downwards, something in the energy of her shifting—suggesting that this time, she might not hold back, despite her distaste for using this mysterious ability of hers, perhaps due to her animosity for Fräthk and their people.

“No,” Bireth replied, rolling up his sleeves and revealing the willbrand the young man had told them he had but hadn’t been inclined to tell them anything about. “I’m not going to leave foreigners to deal with our city’s problems alone, all because our supervisors told us to stay away from some of these criminals.”