Arc F1.9 | Chapter 38: gonna start me a xphern revitalization fund (if we survive this, maybe)

Being a legacy was supposed to mean something. According to different people, it meant different things, of course.

The other legacies—and often the parents and grandparents who had worked their way through Drinarna training and come out in a position where their children could claim themselves as legacies—saw it as something they were entitled to.

Some saw it as a right—the right to be a Drinarna something given to them at birth. It didn’t matter how hard they did or didn’t work: they were entitled to exist above everyone else, both civilians and those Drinarna who were not legacies.

Others saw it as an obligation—something they had to live up to, lest they let their parents and grandparents and peers down. They had been given this opportunity because those who came before them had proven something about their family line.

They were ethical. They were true, powerful, efficient, motivated.

They were something, and whether that something originated within their genetics or their upbringing, that something was worth trying to cultivate into a weapon for the Drinarna to use.

These two views collided, not just during their days of training, when the different factions of legacies would find themselves constantly arguing, but between the whole of the Drinarna and civilians.

It didn’t matter that non-legacy Drinarna were recruited for a mixture of their abilities and ethics, nor that some legacies were entirely moral people, intent to do good in their nation. The fact that many more legacies were cruel bastards, lording over everyone they could, had soured the opinion of legacies within the general population of Lüshan.

In the end, much of what she’d been learning about the corruption of the city didn’t surprise Vantril much. Handing children with irregular deviations that might put them at risk of being targeted by criminals over to random Drinarna working the streets was as likely to see them killed as leaving them to the streets. Teenagers who ran from cruel homes because their parents thought them wrong for being trans were as liable to end up in crueller orphanages as they were to simply be returned to their homes because such circumstances weren’t that bad. This was to say nothing of adults who suddenly found themselves the targets of criminals.

There had been something wrong in the Drinarna for a long time, and while she hadn’t realized how terrible it was, neither did it surprise her to know it was infinitely worse than she’d thought it might be.

It made her worry all the more for those interns who had vanished, and she abruptly realized that she’d never asked Cheska or Izurial if they’d seen them or anything about them?

That seemed like an oversight—not that she could blame herself for it! There was just so much going on, and while she’d told Codeth that she didn’t have much of an interest in having a Censor permanently installed, Vantril had to admit that some of the things they could do seemed… interesting. Numerous times on their journey, her new friend had looked up information on the aethernet, done complicated calculations as easy as that with it, and made comments about how he was keeping track of everything he needed to ask someone else about later.

There was a literal to-do list in his head. Not only that, but it was shared with his friends! Of course, xpherns had similar programs on them, but the way Censors seemed to work so much more seamlessly…

It wasn’t a secret that xpherns were somewhat antiquated, the technology they ran on something that had been around for centuries with little change. New programs came out regularly, of course, as did games and themes for them. The fact that unless someone had a custom xphern commissioned, they all looked boring, with boring colours and a simple design, kinda showed that no one really cared about them.

Clearly, as Censors and all they could do showed, this was stupid! There was so much they could have been doing with them!

Unfortunately, Vantril had no ability to do anything more than the most standard of things on her xphern, but surely, she could find someone who did know? Someone who was interested in such things? Of course, she knew enough about business to know that doing anything commercial cost a ton of money; so, she’d need investors as well, right?

Where did someone find investors for a dead industry? It was probably hard, no matter what. With a civil war slowly breaking out in Lüshan—Vantril wasn’t stupid enough to think that what was happening in Falmíer wouldn’t expand into other cities, given what she’d been hearing of what Codeth’s friends were learning far above them—however, finding an investor might be even harder.

Also, who would want to invest time and money and effort into something like that when their nation was at war?

These were all the things Vantril had been thinking about, in an attempt to distract herself, before they were attacked. Their journey, since finding Cheska and Izurial, had been… a bit tense. For one thing, other than Cheska, none of them were too happy about heading towards the fight that was taking place a district or two over. Cheska insisted it must be another captive fighting, and both Vantril and Izurial had agreed with Codeth’s assessment of the girl: if they didn’t agree to go with her, Cheska would vanish when their backs were turned.

So, they were headed towards the fighting. Things had still been awkward.

Cheska was nice enough, chatting and bouncing along as they moved. While she was keeping her abilities active, making sure no one snuck up on them, Codeth was also stopping occasionally, sending out a bunch of skills to check their surroundings before microsparking to catch up. The Baalphorian had been increasingly quiet for a while now, a result of everything that was happening. Having travelled with him for a bit, she could tell that something was going on, but he didn’t want to tell their new companions about it. What he had told them? The group up in the Stands had run into a bone puller that no one seemed to have known was operating in Lüshan, let alone working for the government.

Currently, it seemed like the group was having an awkward time of it, and while they’d moved on from staring down the bone puller as they tried to figure out if they could trust one another, it was still tense because bone pullers were terrifying. Definitely not what Vantril would consider fun.

“I think the bit about our one friend… basically falling apart in the corner is actually worse,” Codeth had said at one point, a grimace passing over his face. He’d gone on to explain a bit of the situation with his friend, Janie, to Izurial, who seemed to have a strangely accurate understanding of the world.

The silverstrain also hated her with a passion that was palpable through the aether itself. Vantril didn’t need Perfect or Excess Empathy to feel the ire rolling off the man, and it was awkward. Of course, she’d take the tense and angry silverstrain over the bone puller. Still, unpleasant.

So, yeah, a lot of their journey since picking the pair up had been filled with awkward silence, Vantril left to meander through her thoughts. Mostly, she had decided that Izurial either knew enough about the Drinarna and other captives’ experiences with them to know that their organization was a mess of entitlement and morality, or that he had experienced the cruelty of some officers himself.

Given that, from what she understood, he had been a captive for decades—possibly since he was a child, if she was reading his age correctly—it wasn’t hard to imagine that he knew how horrible some of their number were from experience itself.

Vantril was trying not to think about just how much cruelty the silverstrain had experienced at the hands of people she might have interacted with—with friends of her parents and grandparents. It was a horrible thing, to realize that people she had sat at the dinner table with, listening to them tell stories of their time working the streets and doing good for the city, might actually have been corrupt officers. They might have been no such thing. They might have turned the other way when they saw their friends using their power to enable criminals. They might have been responsible for handing a small Izurial off to Fräthk—might have taken bribes from the criminal in the form of the silverstrains’ body, might have helped Izurial had he ever managed to escape, only to immediately return him back to the misery of his existence.

So, even when the thought that she hadn’t asked if either of the former captives—and Vantril was going to be doing everything in her power to make sure they retained their status as former captives—about the missing Drinarna interns, she couldn’t bring herself to ask. Those interns could just as easily have been killed by Fräthk for poking their noses into missing people with irregular deviations as there was that they could be captives now; yet, there was also the possibility that they had decided to work for the criminal.

What Izurial would do, were she to ask about the missing interns, only to realize they had willingly gone to work for Fräthk and had partaken in his torture…

No, she couldn’t ask. While she’d known a few of those missing interns relatively well, none of them had been her friends. They could have been horrible people, resentful at the way they were treated by their terrible supervisors, and decided, fuck it. There had been times when even Vantril had looked at her supervisor and thought what the fuck?

Had she not been a legacy—had she not known she would rise through the ranks quickly and escape the drudgery of the streets and the internal politics of the Drinarna who worked them—Vantril might have run off as well. Of course, such things weren’t easy in Lüshan, with its strict schooling that effectively guaranteed that, once a person was in on a career path, there was no getting off.

A few, low-level careers could be stepped into at any point. Being a service worker, for instance, took little training. At the same time, such jobs were often taken by people who were on a business track. They worked the till, the store, acted the customer service person, all so they’d get experience. Then, one day, they’d put their education in running a business to use and maybe inherit a business, and if that wasn’t in their future, they’d either buy a business from someone on the verge of retiring or start their own. It was hard to imagine someone without an education in business securing the funds from banks to do such a thing.

This was actually a good point, when it came to her meandering thoughts about investors in her xphern revitalization business. Would she need a foreign investor? Codeth had spoken a bit about how he and all his friends were from the Penns, which from what she knew was a rich and affluent area. It was hard to imagine these veritable children having the funds to give her anything for her business—plus, as Baalphorians, surely they wouldn’t even care about xpherns, even if a number of them were currently relying on them to keep in contact.

These were more of the thoughts Vantril had, before they were attacked by a person who wasn’t there and then suddenly was.

“What—” Cheska breathed out, her eyes blowing wide, and that was answer enough to Vantril’s first assumption about the person being there suddenly: the girl hadn’t felt them coming. “Do you… do you see them, too?” the girl asked, and that didn’t seem good, right? For Cheska to be unsure of whether the person was actually there or not?

Weird—also not super relevant when they were being attacked.

The person, their entire body covered in a black material that seemed off in a way Vantril couldn’t explain, bolted towards them. They’d slid out of an alleyway, only feet in front of them; hence, it wasn’t a long bolt.

It was long enough, Vantril’s willbrand shattering into existence. It wasn’t exactly meant for close combat, but she was able to ram the tip of the gun into the person’s shoulder. Unfortunately, the delay on pulling aether into it for a shot was too much, and by the time the shot was exploding out of her willbrand, the person had already moved out of range.

Then… they turned and started to run off!?

What the fuck?

“How confident are you in fighting them?” Codeth asked, his own willbrand, which he’d explained during their first moments alone together, after leaving his friends, vibrated against his throat. The tight necklace, composed of dozens of interlocking black rings, was fully prepped to be released, echoes of black aether pounding out of it like smoke and casting the boy’s bright-blue eyes darker.

Codeth really was quite attractive, especially when he was serious.

Vantril wasn’t sure Codeth being serious was a good thing, though.

“Enough to try. Them running off is weird.”

“Agreed,” Codeth said, a dozen skills slamming out of him and cutting off their attacker’s nearest escape routes. “Don’t worry. I’ll keep you safe.”

“I would hope so,” she replied, firing off another shot from her willbrand and surging forward, already cataloguing the strange way the person moved to avoid her shot, the way they aborted their escape attempt as though it were the easiest thing in the world.

“Their mind…” Cheska whispered in the background, her nose buried into Izurial’s chest as he backed them into the location Codeth demanded they move to so that he could protect them better, “it isn’t there… They’re just… empty. They… are they even human?”