[Can’t Opt Out]

“You did great!” Emilia cheered as she pulled herself up onto the landing near the doorway.

Rin had collapsed against the wall, her breathing still haggard as she gazed down at her bleeding palms, wounds slowly squeezing closed under the pressure of the system. ⸂I fell twice.⸃

“The first time I climbed, I fell almost 100 feet before a monitor caught me. I thought I was going to die. Then they found out who my dad was, and they figured they were going to die for almost letting me die!” Emilia laughed, thinking back to the horrified look on the monitor’s face when he’d gotten her name—her real one, not the Emilia Daniels she used these days.

⸂Your father is powerful?⸃ the other girl asked, flopping over to lean on Emilia’s shoulder.

She wanted to coo, but she was certain Rin would not appreciate it.

“Yes— Well, he used to be? I guess he still is, more or less. It’s just… less direct?”

Rin nodded like she understood, mumbling about how the Risen Guard leader had retired, but still held a significant amount of sway.

“Yeah…” Emilia whispered, listening to her friend’s breathing even out as she fell into a short sleep. Short, because several minutes later, Rin bolted upright, immediately cringing and clasping a hand to her ribs.

⸂I think I broke a rib,⸃ Rin hissed, which was slightly amusing as hissing required breath.

Once they got out of here, and had a few moments of quiet, she was going to have to ask around—to the few people who could understand her, anyways—about whether some of the ways in which their aethervoices worked were based on custom. If they had once been capable of speech, it made sense that some of their pseudo-auditory habits might be based on a remembrance of what it was like to speak with their vocal cords.

Emilia leaned over and poked at Rin’s ribs, trying to feel out any bones that could be sticking into an organ. “Maybe,” she said when she came away feeling nothing. “Could just be a crack. I thought you guys had healing magic?”

Rin nodded, eyes squeezing shut as she began to focus on her energy, slowly spreading through her rib cage. Small tendrils of aether circled her, seeping into her and joining her own energy. ⸂Our healing techniques focus on external injuries,⸃ Rin explained as she worked. ⸂Internal injuries require more concentration to heal.⸃

“I see…” Emilia sighed as she watched Rin work, trying to glean as much about her healing magic as she could. Without system access, she couldn’t gather aether to herself yet—not without blood, anyways—but she still sent her energy twinning out towards her own cracked rib.

She was almost done, and already thinking that perhaps Rin wouldn’t notice her attempts to heal herself, when the other girl frowned and looked over at her.

⸂Where did you learn to do that? And why are you injured?⸃

“Ah…” Emilia glanced away, nervously admitting that Rin had elbowed her pretty hard on the second fall. She did not mention that the angle of her fall had just about knocked them both over the edge. Her friend already looked horrified enough that she’d injured her, she didn’t need the added guilt that ignoring Emilia’s instruction to backtrack and grab the correct hold had almost killed them.

⸂I am sorry,⸃ the girl said, an actual expression of remorse crossing her features.

“It’s okay,” Emilia assured her. It wasn’t, but she had a feeling Rin was the type to internalize these kinds of mistakes. With any luck, that internalization wouldn’t be needed, and they wouldn’t run into anything that needed climbing in the near future. No stairs. No rock walls. No ladders. No cute boys. Nothing worth climbing.

With any luck, the next time she gave the younger girl some advice, she’d actually listen.

“Well, shall we?” she asked, stretching her arms above her head and trying not to grimace at her shitty rib healing job.

They rose and Rin took the lead, peeking into the doorway, a spiral of energy circling out of her and down the passage.

Emilia peeked around her, finding only darkness waiting for them. “Dark,” she said, for lack of anything better to say.

Rin, on the other hand, chose silence. A few moments later and her energy sparked back into her. It was formless, merely a blur across the world. No gold glitter like the energy that Emilia had accidentally lost and regained on her trek there—not that the energy she’d been using to search occasionally was golden. She was curious about it—about core energy in general—however, and found herself making notes on how Rin’s looked and moved.

Eventually, she was going to have to ask someone about the colour some of her energy had acquired. Not now, but eventually. She’d have to find the right way to ask, though, in case she had massively fucked up and wrecked her core or done something illegal—not that her Risen Guard babysitter had mentioned any such rule. Then again, she had no idea if any other visitors were ever able to access their cores. Virtually all platforms circumvented such direct core access for safety concerns, instead using the system to create something different enough from real-world cores that heroes couldn’t learn how to use their cores in game, then leave and accidentally fuck their cores up.

Or blow something up.

If not for the fact that she already had some experience using her core in the real world, slight as it may be, Emilia might have assumed her “core” was just a fake version of the platform. It was her core, was the thing. Maybe not her real one, but certainly a digital equivalent. A digital equivalent that her Censor relied on to use skills while she hacked and was utilized by the systems of more standard platforms.

She really should have asked V whether he had any type of core access before they split up. Stupid her, having their weird food flirting moment instead of sharing information, and she wondered if he was out there, wandering through this maze, regretting their lack of actual conversation or—

“Whoa~” Emilia breathed out as the dark tunnel she’d been absently following Rin down opened into a giant cavern.

It reminded her of the cavern they had met outside of. Above them, giant stalactites glowed in a faint mix of pale pinks and purples, while far below, a giant sinkhole filled with aquamarine liquid lay, the colour so clear that Emilia could see that the hole seemingly went on forever without end.

⸂There does not appear to be a way down,⸃ Rin noted, her voice holding no amazement for the beautiful sight they’d ventured upon.

Emilia tore her eyes from the sinkhole below to look around as well. From what she could see, Rin was correct. They had come to the end of the tunnel and there was no further path, no sign of any further hidden path. She peeked over the edge, trying to see if there were any paths to climb down, but while she imagined she could potentially attempt the climb down, she was positive Rin wouldn’t make it. The holds had been designed to be travelled up, and given the way the edge jutted out, the portion under them would require hanging holds that even she wouldn’t be inclined to attempt unless she had to.

“Anything poisonous in this world look like that?” Emilia asked, eyeing up the liquid far below them. It was pretty far, but she’d fallen further.

Rin looked horrified when she realized what Emilia was thinking. ⸂You cannot be serious.⸃

“As a heart attack!” she laughed. “Or should I say, a heartcore attack?”

Rin didn’t understand her joke, and after a brief explanation of how heart attacks in the real world were often fatal, even the best medical treatment unable to reverse brain damage that occurred if the person’s heart completely stopped for too long, she also did not find the joke funny.

⸂You should not joke about such things.⸃ Rin glanced away, seemingly choosing her words carefully, before asking what happened when a heart attack didn’t lead to brain damage.

“Depends on the extent of the damage,” Emilia explained. “I heard from my guard when I first got here that you guys don’t have anything like surgery—opening someone up to fix an injury—here?”

Rin shook her head, resolutely looking away from Emilia. ⸂No. If the injury is severe enough that we cannot heal it ourselves, we are taken to special locations to die.⸃

Emilia hummed, still eyeing up the sinkhole far below. “Are these the same locations pregnant women are taken?”

Rin nodded, explaining there were special carers who specialized in dispersing blood magic. ⸂Not much is known about them,⸃ Rin admitted, telling Emilia that most people hope to only see them a few times in their lives—only once, if they chose to never have children.

“Injuries are pretty common in my world, and our medical system is pretty good. Well, some people complain about the government putting caps on life extending care once your body decays past a certain point. For something like a heart attack, though, you can have surgery to repair the damage, or even get a new heart, if it’s too damaged. That’s all assuming you made it to a doctor in time, of course.”

Emilia nodded to herself, thinking of Faylyn’s father, extending his life long past the point that the government would pay for treatment, at his and his daughter’s expense. It was a complicated topic, deciding when to withhold care. Faylyn’s father’s care had reached the point, however, where virtually everyone would agree that he needed to accept his fate. The things she was sure he was doing to his body in knot therapy—the illegal kind, some backstreet therapist distorting his genes in ways that were wholly unpredictable if not outright dangerous, just so he could earn himself a few more weeks of life one giant bill at a time.

A life he was barely living, each visit leaving him frailer and more unstable than the last.

Emilia knew her pain and trauma were sometimes intense, but even as she lost herself in her knots, even as pieces of herself fell away, and she knew she was a ghost of her former self, there was still so much to love about life. To watch Faylyn’s father lose every bit of himself, to seemingly hate the world as the days ticked on and still cling to life…

She truly wondered why he bothered. The only thing he was doing at this point was running his family even more into debt, some sketchy doctor getting rich off him and—

“Huh…”

⸂What?⸃

“I just had a thought that maybe some guy I know who should probably just let himself die might be being manipulated by his doctor.”

It wouldn’t be the first time a knot therapist was caught adding in extra knots to mess with their patients, to make them more docile, more obsessive, more erratic. Most cases were relatively isolated and difficult to prove. Genetics were complicated and therapists messed up all the time, although usually those mistakes were small and quickly noticed and fixed. Most people probably didn’t even realize therapists could be so malicious, despite more than a few having been caught knotting their patients so they’d continue with expensive or experimental treatment they may otherwise have refused. Emilia herself only knew such cases happened because she had heard Olivier lecturing about it, during the days before her legal case really got started, and she’d snuck into his classes.

Virtually everyone in Baalphoria knew about the larger instances of a therapist non-consensually knotting their patients. The most recent case had been around the time she was born, in the Grey Sands. Even now, seven decades on, the consequences of what that man had done could still be seen in the people who had escaped him, in the families of the people who hadn’t.

Emilia looked back at Rin, who was no longer watching her, but instead glaring down at the liquid far before them. “What do you think? Safe liquid? Think you could make the jump?”

⸂Could you?⸃

“Sure. I grew up climbing this range of mountains near where I live. Even before I had skills—magic—fully under my control. Usually, monitors were around to catch you, but there were a few places where you were left to fall into the ocean.” Those sections were always the funnest during pink tides, although monitors had been around at those times to stop people from drowning in the high.

Rin seemed to sigh, annoyance and exasperation flooding out of her. A second later, the aether was surging upon her and then bolting downwards.

Emilia watched as whatever magic Rin had used scooped up some of the liquid and brought it back to them. It glowed slightly, although she couldn’t be sure if it was a result of the glowing stalactites above them, or just more noticeable now that it was so close.

Her friend sniffed delicately at it, energy leaking out of her fingers to poke the liquid. ⸂I believe it is water,⸃ she said after several long minutes, during which Emilia had wandered away and taken to glaring out at the world, looking for any secrets they may have missed.

“Great! So jumping it is, then?”

Rin released the magic holding the water, letting it fall back home. ⸂You can go first.⸃

“Don’t want to jump together?”

⸂No.⸃

“Why not?”

⸂Because, as you have repeatedly said, you cannot permanently die in here. If you jump and die, I will simply turn around and search for another exit.⸃

Emilia laughed as she hurled her bag towards a small ledge near the sinkhole. It wasn’t going to make it, but luckily Rin was already reaching out her magic to help it along.

“Thanks!” she cheered, turning her back to the sinkhole and backing towards the edge. “Wish me luck!”

Another step back, and the world disappeared from under her feet. Emilia screamed or whooped or made some other noise of careless freedom that she hadn’t heard herself make in years. Everything but the wind whipping by her fell away, if only for mere moments, as she fell, twisting and spinning through the air. She rolled, arms extending above her head, and then she split the surface, her body enveloped by the calm of water so clear and pure that when she opened her eyes she could see jagged, sparkling rocks extending into the darkness far below her, the surface glowing far above.

Her legs kicked. She hadn’t been swimming in forever, and like so many other things, she suddenly found herself missing it, even as her heart clenched in remembrance of the people she had last swum with.

Remembrance of the person she had been, way back then.