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Arc F1.8 | Chapter 22: Wake Up//Pass Out

“Olivier?” a voice called, distant and muffled. “Olivier de la Rue?” Weird, that—for someone to be calling him by his full name. All the Lüshanians he had met had called him , the sound of his name skewered on their tongues because despite the sheer amount of syllables the Lüshanian language had, his name didn’t quite come out properly.It was fine. There was something soft and sweet about the children in particular mangling his name, Xavier especially, with his inexperienced mouth and tongue, each syllable a slur over the world and every ear graced with its soft—

Olivier gasped back into full wakefulness, the only thing stopping him from bolting straight upright the scream of pain, running like a live wire through his entire body. hurt. His brain and Censor. His spine and every muscle. His core was a dim ache within him—and really, he thought the only reason it didn’t hurt more was simply the overwhelm of so much pain.

A groan escaped him, as he tried to move, a shudder running through him—not through his muscles or bones but something else, something deeper.

“I think someone attacked his core,” a voice said, different from the first voice—that first voice, now asking if there was anything to be done to help him, was distinctly Baalphorian. Someone from the Penns, based on the soft accent of it, Olivier’s brain supplied—or was it his Censor? Was his Censor even working?

Everything felt heavy, like he was underwater. Bubbles of consciousness popped, somewhere amongst the pain of his everything. His mind flickered with the pops, dragging his awareness from one spot of pain and suffering to another.

It was so much—so very, very much, until suddenly, it wasn’t.

“Move slowly,” the second voice said, heavy with an accent Olivier couldn’t place—not Lüshanian, at the very least, nor Seerish, Lan’za’s accent still stuck in his head from hearing her explain this or that to his students the day before. Only a day before—or had it been a zi’huta accent? Only a day before—it was so long ago. Halen had been there with them. His hands had felt nice on the boy, when he’d pushed him off the Huss’tra.

He was nearby, wasn’t he? Would he end up on the airship with them?

It would be nice to have Emilia and Halen in his bed—they’d be perfect there… maybe, or… was something, someone, missing?

A laugh bubbled through the air, slipping out of one of the men kneeling beside him. Probably, he should be panicking a bit more about two strangers sitting beside him when he’d just been unconscious. No longer in so much pain or not, Olivier couldn’t bring himself to panic—not when one of the men was a Baalphorian around Emilia’s age. One of her friends, he assumed. Maybe he was wrong. He was too tired to not assume.

“You know you’re speaking aloud, right?” the not-Baalphorian man laughed, Olivier’s eyes shifting to him and cataloguing his features—or trying to. Someone from around the Cyrenix Desert, maybe. It was difficult to tell, especially with how out of it he felt, with how dark it was.

“I’m not sure if Halen is into men,” the Baalphorian man—boy, really—noted, his head tilting, thick blonde eyebrows pulling together. “I don’t know if he’s into men, either. I think he’s only into Emmie.”

“Doesn’t that count as gossiping?” the other man teased, glancing at the Baalphorian man before turning back to Olivier and asking if he wanted help sitting up, the Baalphorian saying that it didn’t count as gossiping as,

“If Emmie knows, it really isn’t gossiping,” the Baalphorian concluded.

“It could count,” Olivier managed to say as he was helped to sitting, his back leaning against the grimy city street as the world spun. “If Halen is… only attracted to Emilia, it could imply a specific… sexual orientation that leans towards asexual.”

The speed at which the Baalphorian’s expression turned outright horrified would have been amusing were the world not spinning, Olivier’s Censor attempting to come back to life, his heart trying to not collapse in on itself at the reality that he had no idea how long he had been out for—how long ago Xavier had been taken.

“You can’t tell anyone I said that, then!” the Baalphorian man demanded, looking between Olivier and the other man, who had pushed Olivier’s hair, matted with dirt and the drool and tears of children, aside to look at his neck.

“Fine, fine,” the man replied with all the energy of someone who knew a million secrets and had never once let one slip by accident, casting a glance back at the panicking Baalphorian—really, it was perhaps a bit too much panic. Was potentially outing Halen as leaning into asexuality not ideal? No, but it had clearly been a mistake? Evidentially, the comment about implied the Baalphorian didn’t gossip, ever.

“Who are you?” Olivier managed to ask after nodding his agreement that he wouldn’t go spreading this around.

“Oh, shit! Sorry!” the Baalphorian man—boy? young adult?—said, introducing himself as Mikhail Al’ren, a school friend of Emilia’s. Immediately, he insisted Olivier and he use first names—

“Zavriel,” the other man replied, before asking if he could try to remove the oil that was blocking Olivier’s Censor from accessing the aethernet. “I’m not sure it will work, but I can try.”

Considering Olivier was pretty sure the man had been the one responsible for removing his pain, Olivier opened his mouth to agree before closing it. Realistically, it was impossible to know what sort of blowback he would have when he reconnected to the aethernet, especially in his current state of weakness, his Censor a flickering thing in the back of his mind, there and yet not, as though whatever that woman had done to him had affected it. It was coming back, just slowly, and he probably shouldn’t try to get back onaether until it was fully back.

“No,” he managed to say. “Censor… weird, and… kids.” Fuck did every breath, every word from his mouth, feel like dragging energy from the bottom of his soul.

“Oh!” Mikhail said, kneeing his way closer, apparently unconcerned with the rough cobblestones that spread throughout the alleyway. “Levi found the one! Porsq? They’re on their way here—a couple minutes out. They don’t want to move too fast. There are bad people in the area, we think?”

Olivier let out a shuddering breath. That was something, at least, for Porsq to have been found—to be safe, presumably.

“Xavier?” he asked, tilting his head to blink down the way the women had disappeared.

In the background, Mikhail was summarizing what Porsq had told them when he was found, what his information and everyone’s assumptions about the situation and Olivier’s personality had led them to believe had happened.

It was so accurate, Olivier wanted to laugh—wanted to smile at the reality that Emilia had been telling her friends about him, that through the Hyrat boys watching him and his brief meeting with Halen, they had all come to the right conclusions.

In no world would Olivier have left Porsq unless he felt he had to. In no world would he have let Xavier go without a fight. In no world would losing either not break him.

“Do you know… what happened… to Xavier?” Olivier asked, eyes slamming shut when his Censor began to scream back to life. Hands pressed to his head, the ache falling quiet as Zavriel did “And the… others?”

“The others?” Mikhail asked, his voice so far away, as Zavriel replied that he thought Olivier was referring to the other adults.

“Another person—Codeth—found two of them. The silverstrain and blue-haired girl,” Zavriel said, tacking on an apology that most of the information was coming through on everyone’s Censors, rather than the xphern, so he kept forgetting names.

Beside him, Mikhail made a noise that Olivier couldn’t decipher—something like annoyance? It didn’t feel like the Baalphorian was annoyed with Zavriel for forgetting names, though?

“Codie is headed this way as well. We got access to the chat Fräthk’s group is using. They’re looking for Porsq still. No one wants to stay in that area too long.”

“Didn’t you say the rest of your friends are still headed that way, to the holding cells?” Zavriel asked. “They wanted to find your other friend? Emilia?”

“Emilia is still down there?” Olivier asked, trying to focus on the time his Censor was now showing and failing, each flash of over his vision fading away before he could catch it. “Do you know how long… since I was knocked out?”

“Not long,” Mikhail replied. “Assuming it was when you and the kid, Xavier, were separated? Emmie sent us all the skill for tracking that,” he added, motioning at Olivier’s chest and the splatter of aether there, a giant, Xavier-shaped hole over his heart. “I can share it with you once your Censor is working again.”

“Assuming Zavriel can get the oil off,” Olivier noted, his eyes finally opening to more than slits. His Censor was still being , but he wanted to get moving—wanted to get looking for Xavier, and they were wasting time.

“Hm? No?” Mikhail said—asked? It felt like a question. “I’ll just use an alternative communication protocol to give the function to you—a few other functions, too. Halen was working on cancelling out Emmie’s ability to stalk you. Instead, before we left, he extended that stalking function to everyone. I can give you that, so you can find all of us. That’s aethernet only, so it won’t work unless you’re onaether. I can still send it to you while you’re offaether.”

The guy’s head tilted as Zavriel asked if he could now try to remove the oil—Olivier agreed he could.

“You know… Emmie and Halen have spent a long time complaining about how terrible and lacking Baalphorian education is. It didn’t really affect our class. If you don’t even known functions can be sent with alternative communication protocols, I think they undersold how bad the more general education is.”

Beside him, Zavriel laughed, muttering something about how, in certain cultures, that could be seen as “This might take a moment—this oil with really weird? Seriously… how does this stuff even come off under normal circumstances?”

A ripple of brushed over Olivier’s skin. It didn’t feel like a skill or core ability, but something else entirely—some irregular deviation, perhaps, which he knew could feel quite distinct from either.

“You never said if you knew what happened to Xavier,” Olivier noted, trying to distract himself from the not-quite uncomfortable, not-quite- uncomfortable feeling of whatever Zavriel was doing. A spark of a thought shot through him—a question of whether he should be trusting these men or not. It was a fleeting thought, slipping away just as fast as it had come—in no world would he not trust people Emilia trusted.

“Nothing good,” Mikhail said, his words a sharp knife through Olivier’s heart. “Emmie is going after him.”

“What? How? And also, you didn’t tell me that? Was that in those messages that my xphern was getting a bit ago?” Zavriel asked, turning a hard glare on Mikhail, who had the decency to look a little put out and guilty. “Why not? It’s not like I have a Censor to tattle on her? How is she even going to do that, given she’s underground in those dungeons?” he asked, shuddering, as though the very mention of the was enough to bring a surge of revulsion through him.

Considering that, of the captives Olivier had helped get out of the holding cells, no one had even dared suggest they attempt to get those who might be down in the dungeons out…

Shifting like a guilty child, Mikhail pulled out the xphern hooked into his pants and planted himself beside Olivier. “Do you know how to use one?”

“Not really.”

“Me neither! This one is Zavriel’s. He doesn’t know how to use it well, either.”

“Why are you using it then?”

Nodding to Olivier’s neck, Mikhail explained that not only had they been using it to connect with a few of their Free Colony allies, but Emilia had been hit by the same oil he had—that was why they’d immediately assumed the reason he was offaether was the oil on his neck.

Glancing down, Olivier watched Mikhail struggle with the xphern before managing to pull up a message thread. Having little experience with xpherns—he could use one, badly, in an emergency, something that would likely horrify Emilia, given he had been bringing his classes on these trips for a while—it took a moment for Olivier to figure out that unlike the chat that Mikhail had first opened to—which had seemed to be a giant group chat—this one was between Emilia and this xphern alone.

That was… Olivier didn’t know what that was—nor did he have time to think it through, his Censor connecting to the aethernet and the world falling black.