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Arc F1.8 | Chapter 1: Bodies Where They Shouldn’t Be

Never—that was when she was going to give up.No. Full stop. She was not, in fact, the sort of person to give up.

That’s right! She was the sort of crazy person to try and try and try and never give up!

Yeah! Clemence was right: that sort of never-give-up mentality suited her!

How rude! It so too was a good trait! If she weren’t a go, go, go, never-give-up sort of person, Emilia wasn’t even sure where she would be—nowhere good, that’s for sure! Would she also not be, well, stuck at a seeming dead end within this playground of deathly intentions? Yes, but also! She was not giving up on figuring out how to get out of this place! She had just hit a small snag, was all. There to be a way through. It was simply that she hadn’t found it yet.

Had she collectively spent more time in this dead end than she had throughout the rest of the playground? Also yes. Unfortunately, turning back wasn’t an option unless she was going to release her willbrand and attempt to brute force her way in one direction or another—she was undecided if she’d go back to her friends or forward, towards the other side of the playground.

A rude snort escaped Vern as he muttered that a sane person , starting off a conversation about what he meant by

Did he mean Yes.

Did he mean —which according to Rayleen were actually the 17th holding cell? That might have been helpful to know before—thinking of the place as was easier than At the same time, Emilia hadn’t really needed to know that Fräthk had at least sixteen other buildings with at least holding cells, if not other dungeons, for his captives scattered throughout the city. The other option in Vern’s wording, of course, was that he thought her stupid for descending into Falmíer in the first place. Given that the last few times she’d visited Lüshan’s capital bad things had happened—fights with Cameron, letting herself get kidnapped by traffickers, and now this—Emilia did, in fact, think she wouldn’t be visiting for a long time.

Was it possible she’d change her mind, if only Wander were to ask if she wanted to help go through the dungeons of the various holding cells? Possibly. As much as she hated it down here, Emilia still wanted to make sure no one who hadn’t been infected by were trapped down here—also, she wasn’t supposed to be thinking about

Unfortunately, what she was getting out of there. Emilia couldn’t figure out to do so, therefore, she went back to gently banging her head against the wall. It was helping, in a way. It was also giving her a bit of a headache. She would not be stopping any time soon.

For a long moment, Jerrial was silent before saying that he thought it did.

There was an awkward moment of silence, followed by a few hums of acknowledgement, and while Emilia knew her new friends were keeping things from her, she didn’t think it malicious; rather, whatever they were keeping from her, it was something bad—it was something bad, and instead of talking about it, they were keeping their conversations about it confined to notes on the xphern.

Emilia called, ceasing her banging and turning her head towards her friends, barely visible through the mess of metal death traps.

Tilting her head, Emilia let {Hidey Hole} press against the metal panel she’d been banging her head into, illustrating that while her friends had been able to use the skill in the cave system in order to shift atoms to the side temporarily, it wasn’t working down here.

Knocking her fist against the panel, Emilia explained that the playground was made of so many different sorts of metal that the skill was running into issues with figuring out to shift atoms temporarily—that was, after all, why she assumed the skill worked on the cave system: it was a shifting, rather than something permanent. Nothing—or so the stories went—could alter the Lowdouran’s creations, but if it wasn’t a true altering, it seemed like they could be affected—that was her current working theory, anyways. With her Censor struggling to map all the metals and set a course for them to be pushed aside for a short period of time before snapping back into perfect, unaltered existence, she couldn’t use it to get in or out of the playground.

That said…

In the background, the other three—Rayleen rarely contributed anything to the conversations—continued chatting, mostly trying to work through what she’d said. Annoyed with the situation as she was, Emilia hadn’t bothered bringing her explanation down to a level where people who knew little about skills or even core abilities could understand more than the basics of it.

Shifting, she looked at the map of the area’s internals that her Censor had been creating while she beat her head against various parts of it—there had actually been a point to that, thanks. As her recon skills couldn’t see inside the machine, due to it being so… weird, Emilia had instead been using the shifting sounds that came from within the machine to map out what have been inside it. To say this had resulted in less-than-impressive results was an understatement—it wasn’t like she had much experience with knocking against materials in hopes of determining lay inside them, after all.

Still, she and her friends had built a treehouse as children, and they’d later built an entire, up-to-code house. Emilia knew enough about architecture and design, as well as physics and a thousand other subjects, to make some guesses as to what was hollow, what filled with wires that likely led to whatever was controlling the playground, what completely solid.

Oddly, even the solid parts were composed of dozens of metals—not a true alloy either. Instead, it seemed to more be a case of various metals winding their way through the main metal each component was made of. It reminded her a lot of the inside of the spire, with its rivers of minerals and ores pouring down the inner structure in beautiful mosaics. The types of materials each were made of were quite different, however, their bonds and malleability different; hence, {Hidey Hole} accidentally worked on the cave system and didn’t work on of the playground.

After a bit of searching, however, Emilia did manage to find a single place in her dead end where it did work: one of the panels that covered a seemingly hollow section. may have been a bit of an over exaggeration. In reality, despite like a singular piece of metal, the panel’s appearance was a lie; in reality, it was still composed of dozens of similarly coloured and textured metals, all weaving their way through the panel at seeming random. Through a little bit of tinkering with the skill, however, Emilia was able to move two of the different metals aside in a small section and peek inside.

It was dark, was Emilia’s first, very stupid thought—it was inside a machine, the only bit of light coming in through the small hole she’d managed to make. It was also a hole that her head was largely blocking, ergo, of course it was dark!

Being in here—down in this stupid city with its stupid conflict—had clearly rotted her brain.

A second later, a light was flickering out of her and Emilia was stumbling back because WHAT THE FUCK WAS THAT AND—

Emilia screamed when her elbow hit and the panel she’d just been peaking into popped open, a mop of red hair tumbling out, and she’d been wrong! This place was a death trap with bodies stuffed into the walls! This was terrible! She didn’t want to end up trapped down here, stuffed into a wall and oh, oh, oh! How many other dead bodies had she passed? There had been blood of course, but she’d mostly been ignoring those fingerprints, compartmentalizing the spatters and smears because even she’d left some genetic material behind—and okay, she really hadn’t. Emilia knew the power of blood and wasn’t about to leave her blood behind, so it was now tucked into a little bottle in her shorts and—

And the body the mop of red hair in front of her belonged to had no blood inside it. That was… weird. Even when bodies were completely bled out, blood still remained within them, dried up within organs and blood vessels. Without the use of a few highly specific core abilities or skills that she’d designed for her and Baylor’s exclusive use, actually removing every drop of blood from the human body was nigh impossible, so…

Emilia, after taking a few breaths and ceasing her screaming like the scared child she had suddenly felt like, realized she was, once again, an idiot.

The small body that had popped out of the panel was, quite obviously, a doll. With that much hair on such a small body—which, if she had to guess, must have been the size of a newborn, although it was proportioned more like a child, with long limbs and a slim body—it was obviously a doll. A really fucking creepy doll, but a doll nonetheless.

Rayleen called, freezing Emilia’s reach towards the doll, her fingers grazing its cool black skin, a shock of reaching through her.

Well, as her fingers were already touching the thing, the suggestion that she not touch it was a little late.

The sigh her admission was met with was truly impressive, especially from such a generally contained woman.