[Can't Opt Out]

Arc F1.10 | Chapter 19: Glory Be To Bathroom Breaks

Glory be to bathroom breaks! Let the god’s of the aether be blessed for granting him the sweet relief of emptying his bladder.Wander prayed as he idly watched the water of the toilet slip away… somewhere. Honestly, he had never been too sure on the of plumbing up in the Stands. There were no pipes heading down into the city below, but sucking water and waste back into the roof of the city before funnelling it seemed like it must take quite a lot of resources? Then again, it wasn’t like he even knew how the Stands—or the city as a whole—had power… or air… or anything, really.

Probably, he had learned it in school at some point. This had probably been back when he was quite young, which would explain his complete lack of remembrance on the topic. Probably, if there was a civil war coming, he should learn a bit about how such things worked? Supply lines, and all that.

Really, it seemed like knowledge of such things should probably have been part of some supplemental course on being a high-ranking Drinarna—after all, shouldn’t he and those directly under him have been able to understand things like, say, how power to a specific city block could be cut off and what the overall consequences of doing so would be? Was he meant to rely on someone in a different department to inform him of such things? It was exceedingly unclear, and as he washed his hands, Wander was left wondering when the last time such information had been needed was.

Usually, incidents in the cities were relatively self-contained, their forces able to shut down travel in and out of not just the city, but entire districts with relative ease. Every so often, some criminal or another would hole up in a building for a while; eventually, their strike teams would go in. Occasionally, someone died; usually, it was the criminal.

They had been lucky, he thought, to have suffered so few incidents that knowledge of how to smoke someone out of a hiding spot was unnecessary. At the same time… it was a bit odd, wasn’t it? For there to have been so few incidents that would require innovation on how to manage the situation. From everything he’d heard, this wasn’t generally the case in other nations, where new skills, core abilities, and technological innovations were always making things more complicated.

Was this simply not the case in Lüshan? Were their people stupid? Lacking the motivation to change anything of the world that they didn’t much like? Allegedly, criminals were supposed to always have a hand in such things—he knew from Emilia that, in Baalphoria, the skill and function industries were largely powered by hackers, most of them at least dipping their toes outside the law. Without the criminal aspect, nothing would move forward.

In no world did Wander think there no criminals in the city, but… it was strange, wasn’t it—that they had fallen so quiet in the years since he had become chief officer?

Perhaps, if he couldn’t slip free of Majörniel, currently lingering outside the bathroom because Wander had patently refused to let the man come in with him, he would head over to the archives, rather than his office, and look up older cases—see if there was a pattern of quiet within the criminal activities of the city, or if he had been an idiot, and something else was going on.

The way things were going, Wander couldn’t say he would be surprised to learn if some faction within the Drinarna was cooperating with criminals and covering up everything they were doing.

Wasn’t that just the happiest thought in the world.

his once-friend called through the door, Wander unsure of what to do once he was inevitably forced out of his momentary safe haven.

he called back, falling quiet while he listened to Majörniel tell some officer who was passing by to head to the cafeteria to grab them some food. Wander hated cafeteria food. Even when he had been a low-ranking officer with little money to his name, Wander had rarely eaten at any of the cafeterias that were housed within the various Drinarna stations. Usually, he had only done so when too busy to go to a restaurant, or after he was married, when he’d been avoiding going home.

His ex-wife had, quite soon after they married, become someone he rarely wanted to spend time around. Had she not become pregnant so quickly, Wander often thought he would have divorced her much sooner—before either of them could form so much animosity between them.

In no world did he regret his grumpy daughter’s existence. If she could find a little more happiness, that would be great. If she didn’t, he would keep loving her until his dying breath. At the same time, Cameron had kept him with his wife longer than he would have liked—not wanting to see his wife or not, Wander had always wanted to snuggle his daughter, had never wanted her to feel like he was abandoning her to his ex-wife’s mercurial moods.

His daughter deserved to know that he was always thinking about her—that he always wanted her to be safe.

It was perhaps this thought, more than anything else, that had him antsy and unsure what to do.

If he returned to his office, there was a chance he might be able to keep Majörniel out long enough to check the messages that had been coming in for him. It had been a long day, and there was technically a bed, which popped out of the wall, in his office. The that, somehow, Majörniel was claiming they knew about, aside, his office was one of the most well protected locations in the Stands.

Majörniel needed to sleep, and while the man was unlikely to leave him unguarded… could he insist they both get some sleep while having a guard change? There were a handful of officers with irregular deviations aligned with his former friend’s faction—people powerful enough to control him, if need be—who were definitely the sort of people Majörniel would choose to take his place.

This could put Wander in a better position—Majörniel knew him and his tells, while Wander had to admit, betrayal or not, the idea of killing his former friend weighed on his heart—or a worse position—he also knew Majörniel and could more easily manipulate the man than some stone-faced babysitter who might not even let him use the bathroom.

Alternatively, he could head down to the archives. Less safe there, and he’d be cut off from all of the previous messages that had been sent his way. There was, however, another pneumatic tube location there, and it was within a reading room that Majörniel didn’t have clearance to enter. The man could demand not enter it either, but while the archives as a whole were less secure than his office, that particular room had been built to withstand practically anything. Majörniel attempting to argue that room wasn’t the safest place in the city would fall flat.

From there, he could get and send messages to whoever was trying to contact him—figure out what was happening and potentially make a plan. While he didn’t want to get any of his friends in trouble with their own governments, if any of them were willing to even just to find his daughter for him, he would be grateful.

That was the other thing he could do: insist that, danger or not, he was done waiting for news on his daughter. While Majörniel had sent a younger officer off to ask around about the girl a while ago, they had yet to hear back. Regardless of the xphern transmission network being down, the fact that no one had even come to tell him what his child had been assigned to do that day was strange, and Wander was increasingly convinced that had happened with his request.

The officer could have been part of Majörniel’s faction and known that the request for information was meant to die on his tongue. The officer could have asked the wrong person and either been sent off on a wild chase for information that didn’t exist… or simply been killed for asking around his child.

While they’d walked to the bathroom, Majörniel chatting as though nothing were wrong, either between them or in general, part of Wander had wanted to flag someone else down and send them off in search of information regarding Cameron’s whereabouts. At the same time, he had no desire to send some poor soul off to their death or dismemberment.

Could he spin his request to go look for information on her personally with that? Claim that, while it could be nothing, as the situation as to the xphern transmission network being down was still unknown, the fact that the previous officer hadn’t returned be nothing but also indicate that was quite seriously wrong. Obviously, they should go check on things themselves! What if the officer needed them!? What if his daughter needed him!?

Wander could already hear what Majörniel would say—something about how, as Chief Officer, his life was worth more than either the random officer or his daughter’s, and that they should, therefore, simply recruit someone else to go investigate while he resequester himself in his office, possibly without further bathroom breaks.

Wander would suggest some people for the job—people he trusted.

Majörniel would suggest others, then flag down yet another officer as they scurried through the Stand. His once-friend would give them the list of names, along with instructions to see who they found first, give them the information request, then get back to work.

It would be impossible to say whether that carrier was someone aligned with Majörniel or not, whether the person would ever be seen again.

On and on the twist of getting information would go, until, finally, Majörniel would snuff his life out—after all, what if the man was specifically choosing people who had no allegiance to faction, in order to kill off people who might support Wander himself, and therefore, oppose him!?

No, no, no! Risk or not, Wander was going to need to that he be allowed to go and seek answers as to his daughter’s whereabouts. From there, he could perhaps also do a turn about to his office in order to , and then sneak a peek at those messages—although, perhaps he would go look for his daughter first. If he started at the apex of the spire, he could borrow some paper and preemptively write out a message for Zitra’za and Miles, courtesy of a Emilia had taught them when she was younger.

How that child had managed to create such an excellent code at such a young age, they would perhaps never know. Non-dev or not, some of the things that came out of her head were a little too strange—a lot too advanced for her.

Regardless, as long as the message was coded properly, he could claim it was nothing but a note to himself or his daughter if Majörniel insisted on looking at it—and really, trying to maintain the facade of not knowing the man had betrayed him or not, Wander was getting to be quite done with his former friend! This was just too much! And there was a difference between and

Fuck! Wander left like he was married again, his ex-wife having become exceedingly paranoid by the end, always asking to see every message on his xphern, even the ones she wasn’t cleared to see, and huh. Maybe she had been trying to use him for that little bit more of information, knowing their relationship was about to end and she would be sent away?

Contemplating this, Wander moved to the bathroom door, only to slam up against it—when had Majörniel barricaded him in!?

Majörniel said with all the conviction of someone who truly believed there to be a problem. As his former friend was currently interfering with many things in his life, including his attempts at using the bathroom, Wander was not inclined to think that that would take only to fix was anything worth hiding in the bathroom for.

Hence, Wander blew the door off.

he gasped, playing up his acting skills into something so ridiculous that many people seemed to simply believe him a bit of an idiot—that was fine. Let various foreign leaders think he had stumbled his way into his position.

There had, in fact, been no scream. Majörniel stared at him from where he had been blown up against the opposite wall, courtesy of the blast that had taken out the bathroom door—sorry, whoever came along to use it next—while down the hall…

Wander said, somewhat baffled as to why his grumpiest district head had made the trek up there—the woman was notoriously hard to get into the Stands, even for the most important of meetings. Fawnreen was also the sort of officer who, despite being quite intelligent, was… less talk, more do. In other words, the entire city could be on fire, him completely oblivious, and Fawnreen was the sort to send another officer to check on him.

The officer would be so low ranking they would be hard-pressed to reach him, their attempts brushed off because they were barely more than a child. In other words, her actually being there was quite a bad sign of how things were going.

Fawnreen was also glowering at Majörniel, which… yeah, given the man had just attempted to barricade him into the bathroom, that was fair—plus, the pair had never gotten on well, even when Majörniel had actually been his friend. Despite her propensity for using her fists and abilities before her mouth, Fawnreen wasn’t an idiot, and she definitely knew that was weird with Majörniel.

Behind the muscular woman, her deputy poked his head out, eyeing the pair of them up dubiously.

How bad must the situation be for Fawnreen to have come all this way have brought her strange little deputy with her?