Chapter 646 Arc F1.10 | Chapter 18: A Full Reset (is one of the only options)

Things that were easier said than done: deciding whether to turn the city’s xphern transmission network back on or not. They could do it—they could flip the switch, easy as that, a combination of Euphenial and Simeon’s knowledge coming together with information from Seer’ik’tine until they could reset the entire system, and after a few minutes of it doing its thing, the city’s xpherns would be able to communicate again.

The question was now if they should turn allow that communication or not

“What right do we have to say if the network shouldn’t be turned back on?” Leerin asked, and it was actually a reasonable question. Halen still couldn’t see the two of them becoming friends, but he had gained so much more appreciation for her since they’d entered the bloodbath that was the Department of Communication and Propaganda’s Mechanical Division that… honestly, he wasn’t sure what to think of the situation.

Leerin was annoying.

Leerin was also good at following directions when it was actually important.

Leerin was also surprisingly good at offering alternative perspectives on things—often, they were exceptionally negative perspectives, but they were still interesting perspectives nonetheless.

“The majority of the network was shut down by a faction who isn’t actually in control of the city,” she continued, fingers rising as she counted off each point in her argument that they should turn the xphern transmission network back on simply because it wasn’t actually meant to be off. “By keeping it off, we are actively going along with a plot to overthrow the government. While I agree that, more than likely, the negatives of turning it back on—the chaos, the ability for factions to communicate with one another, and so on—far outweigh the positives, we are guests here.”

“Considering we aren’t even legally supposed to be here, do we even count as guests?” Rafe asked from where he was peering out one of the few windows the room had. According to Euphenial, as the department was considered essential for the management of the nation, it had a long history of being attacked; hence, fewer windows, thicker walls. At the same time, having no ability to peer out into the world was apparently bad for moral and mental health.

Halen didn’t see how being able to peer into the darkness of Falmíer could increase moral. Sunlight? Sure. Ocean views? Absolutely. The dark city? He didn’t think so, but maybe it was something that had just been normalized by being born in their place? Or the result of some knot or something? Unknown. Even if locals could be reinvigorated by such views, he still wasn’t convinced that anyone’s moral would be bumped up by that pathetic excuse for a window.

“Okay, we are illegal entrants,” Leerin corrected, easy as that. The girl did roll her eyes, which… yeah. Rafe was just being a grumpy boy, pointing something so pedantic—not that Halen could blame him. They were all worried, their stress coming out in strange and snippy ways, and really, they should be more worried—Halen, after all, hadn’t told anyone that Emilia had vanished into the sewers to get Xavier.

He’d thought about it, of course, but… well, there were only a few of them who knew what she was doing to begin with, and between the lot of them—himself, Codeth, Mikhail and his group, Levi, Olivier, Baylor and now Valor, Darrian, and the handful of Lüshanians who knew about the situation—they had decided to keep the situation quiet until they knew more. Between those of them who knew what she was doing, only Olivier and Mikhail’s groups, Vtraní, and their friend Sireth knew she had possibly reached the kid, all of them worried and hurrying along.

Even their groups, so close to Emilia and yet so far away, could do nothing to help her; there was no point in panicking everyone else.

Still, everyone was worried as the group Emilia was supposed to be with finally escaped the dungeons. Halen had been messaging with the girl, Clemence, quite a bit while they worked their sprawling group up through the holding cells.

The girl had a black knot and had seemingly become obsessed with Emilia upon their first meeting—and seriously, what was up with Emilia attracting black knots like she was some sweet treat? Regardless, Clemence had been some mixture of heartless and concerned with what Emilia would think of her if she killed the few guards who Emilia had taken down when she’d been with them.

“She mentioned that… that she didn’t like the idea of leaving them alive? She didn’t think they were right in the mind, and said something about how ‘no one deserved to be left like this…’” the teenager had said into their chat and it was hard. The girl was a teenager, and it didn’t matter that she had a black knot: asking her to kill the two people Emilia had left trussed up wasn’t something nice.

Halen had still told her to do it.

It remained unclear to him what exactly had happened, but the two guards were now dead. Something told him that at least one of the other Lüshanians who had descended into the dungeons with the teenager and Emilia had helped, not wanting Clemence to have to carry the burden of murdering people herself, even if Halen agreed with Emilia that killing them was a mercy.

Still, telling the teenager to kill them was a weight on him as well. The girl’s black knot didn’t matter, nor did the fact that it seemed she had killed before; the people with her saw it the same way Halen did: as something unfair to put on the kid.

Now, the group was moving back up through the holding cells themselves, and it was inevitable that they would eventually run into trouble with Fräthk’s people. As inept as those people seemed—everyone in the drop group agreed the ones they’d fought so far were all idiots, fighting for the best kills and escaped-captive retrievals at the expense of communication and cooperation, and in the end, their lives—the group coming back up was in rough shape.

One teenage black knot who had more training in medicine than anything. A Lowdouran who was dying of olthagri and had a questionable amount of training and might not even reveal his abilities in combat, according to Emilia; the man himself had never given her permission to share that he was a Lowdouran, but she had thought someone should know about his abilities. Rayleen and whatever the fuck was going on with her. Then, all the people who had been living in the dungeons and were half dead.

Baylor’s group really needed to get down to them quickly; if they didn’t, it was possible none of them would be getting out of there and—

Rafe’s eyes flicked away from the window to meet his, something knowing within them, and fuck the stupid vitals function. It really did show too much, and Halen had no idea what Rafe was seeing within the way his vitals were shifting about, but clearly, the other boy saw something.

Luckily, the conversation about morals and ethics and obligations was important enough that Halen was able to push down his contemplations of the dungeon group and how much Emilia would hate herself if her going after Xavier led to all of their deaths in favour of pointing out that, due to their communication with Miles, they were some mixture of outsiders and people who were invested in the situation.

“I don’t think we can decide this ourselves,” he noted, turning his gaze to Euphenial, the woman swaying like a thin tree being battered by the wind. “It would be one thing if you weren’t here—and I think in that case, Leerin might be correct in that we would be best off resetting the system. At the very least, we’d potentially be able to reach Wander Fulbrun to ask what he wants us to do. Otherwise… I think we really could argue that, by keeping it off, we are implicitly supporting the faction that turned it off, and our connection with the Secretary General might inherently mean that decision lands back on the Baalphorian government. It’s much easier to argue we were only undoing what a faction was doing, rather than argue that our leaving it off was actually for the best. I might think it better to keep it off at this point, knowing chaos and information—correct, fabricated, and mistaken—will spread quickly, but that’s because I know what’s happening and don’t generally agree with shuttering communication systems.”

“Really? Is that because of what happened with Alaric’s parents?” Simeon signed, the text box above his head shifting to show the question in Lüshanian—something that had taken a small amount of tweaking on Halen’s part, as it had defaulted to displaying Baalphorian when any of them signed. Simeon, insane child that he could sometimes be when it came to their sign language, had stated that, with how many Lüshanians were likely returning east with them, they might need to create a sign language that was more Lüshanian than Baalphorian.

This both made sense and didn’t.

The sign language they all used didn’t directly translate into Baalphorian. It had different rules for, well, everything—that was part of why virtually no one who wasn’t actively taught it was ever able to grasp even the smallest amount of it. At the same time, the majority of the people who contributed to its continued development were native speakers of Baalphorian, Grey Sander, or Dionese descent. This, of course, impacted how their minds worked.

Over the years, the few of them who knew numerous languages had tried to bring some the mentality of those foreign languages and the cultures that had shaped them into the sign language. There were so many ideas hidden within the way a language worked, those differences making them fascinating and difficult to learn, something as simple as growth in one language being connected to the trees, another to the mind and evolution of thought processes, and to the tides and erosion. Some languages took a growth throughout life approach, while others thought babies brilliant and every bit of knowledge dropped into them a growth towards death. One language had no words for the decay of aging and death; another leveraged growth as something natural, everything about aging without grace seen as a slight against the person for not taking can to grow properly.

All of these difference added up into entirely different mindsets, and sometimes, Halen thought that the way their sign language worked was part of the reason their own mentalities had skewed the way they did. Their language was so inclusive that thinking in terms of coming together and acceptance were entirely natural—and yes, many of them inadvertently found themselves thinking in their sign language.

This was all to say that he understood Simeon’s desire to potentially create a different sign language—or perhaps simply a dialect of their already existing sign language—that would be more inclusive to the mentality of the Lüshanians who would no doubt find their lives permanently entwined with their own; at the same time, Halen was pretty sure it might be easier just to integrate more of the culture and understanding of Lüshanians into what already existed as their default dialect.

Something to consider later—really, he was just trying to distract himself from the reality that Euphenial didn’t seem to have the strongest of opinions on… anything, really. As a result, she was as torn between turning the xphern transmission network back on and leaving it off as the rest of them were. None of them were holding it against her; this was the sort of decision that was impossibly unfair for anyone to need to make, and it was easy to imagine even Wander Fulbrun struggling to decide what was best.

Either choice could lead to more harm than good, and there was no way to know how things would end up until the dust settled, no way to ever really know what decision would have been the better one.

It would have been so much easier if whoever had shut down the system hadn’t fucked it up. It remained unclear if that fucking it up had been accidental or on purpose. Either way, the system was fucked and needed a full reset. They’d tried troubleshooting it with the help of the probable-criminal back in Seer’ik’tine, but nothing had worked.

In a perfect world, they could have allowed select xphern exchange numbers to start receiving messages again. In that perfect world, they could have gotten no one but Wander Fulbrun’s xphern working again; then, they could have left it to him to decide what to do… assuming the man was alive, as he still hadn’t given any indication he was receiving the messages from Seer’ik’tine. Presumably those messages were going through the ancient network of pneumatic tubes that Halen wasn’t supposed to know about—actually, he’d forgotten that he’d once read about them in one of the Grey Sander books Emilia had lent him until he’d learned that Miles was using some secret communication method to try and reach Wander.

Usually, the silverstrain girl gave him fiction books, but this one had been a non-fiction thriller, accounting for a short conflict between the Grey Sands and Seer’ik’tine several centuries earlier. The book probably wasn’t meant to be taken as non-fiction, but if one knew what to look for, it clearly was; both he and Emilia had known what to look for, and Halen wasn’t convinced the girl hadn’t given it to him as a test to see if he would notice those small signs that it was actually a non-fiction account of a legal case.

Regardless, the book had included a mention of the pneumatic tubes to warn Dion that a terrorist attack might be coming. As old as the book was, both he and Emilia had actually assumed the network no longer in use, and while he could be wrong in his assumption that they were being used to try and reach Wander Fulbrun… it was likely that was exactly what the group back in Seer’ik’tine were doing.

It wasn’t working—not exactly shocking, considering how the tubes must work—and there was no way to contact the man, no way to turn only his number back on because while they could reset the system and try to quickly turn the xphern transmission network back off for virtually everyone else, it would take several minutes to do so.

The moment the system was up for even a few seconds, messages would start sliding through the system, the backlog of messages that had been undeliverable falling through the network. Given how slow the system was, it was unlikely every message would make it out, but some would, and there would be no going back, once those messages were buzzing through xpherns throughout the city. No matter how few messages made it through, news of the conflict would spread, and then…

They didn’t live in a perfect world; instead, they lived in one where leaving the entire system down or bringing the whole thing back up, even if only for a moment, were the only options, and unfortunately, Euphenial was the one who needed to make the decision because as much as there were diplomats in other nations they could get opinions from, to ask was to risk diplomatic blowback—to risk someone accusing Miles of doing something to encourage the situation one way or another if things went badly.

It would be far more difficult to accuse Euphenial of doing anything but her best, even if they were helping her work through the various ways things could go. Unfortunately, it was clear she didn’t want this responsibility any more than the rest of them, and they were wasting time.

They were wasting time, and eventually, someone else was going to come looking to fix the xphern transmission network and they definitely didn’t want to be there when that happened.