Apartment Arrest

Day 16, Month 12, 415 RVY

For someone who wasn't well studied in magic, the aether tunnel seemed like nothing special. It was just more magic, so why should it be any different from other magic? Everything Entela did, from helping citizens to causing problems, used magic in much the same way.

Inra, on the other hand, had studied magic. She was deeply familiar with how dumb it can act sometimes. Every piece of Entelan technology she could unlock was like receiving a message directly from a God. Everything she replicated represented ages and ages of hard work. It meant that any device she made that was consumable was something she had to be real sure she wanted to use.

Today's expenditure: capturing the head engineer. These plates, the 'return tunnels', were relatively new even by Entelan standards. They could act as a one-time escape plan for any number of people — as long as they could all touch it — even on planes that didn't have tunnels set up. The Entelans used them liberally for their 'explorative' missions. The magic in them was kind of simple, once you knew how it worked. The real challenge was getting it to talk to the tunnel here. Theoretically, it was supposed to use one of the two big ARF tunnels, the ones that could quickly change targets without 6 engineers working on it. Unfortunately, those were both Entelan controlled. Instead, she had to figure out how to reprogram this tunnel from the other side.

The tunnel they had arrived at was a free-standing structure in a park, in the middle of a large city. Much like newer cities of Daira, this city had towers that went high into the sky, and even the low buildings were expansive. This place had never been under Entelan control, but it had problems that it wanted solved. Just as Entela had done to Daira, Daira offered this plane the chance to join their new empire, where they could freely share technology and magic. And this world, while it had some technology, was desperately lacking in magic.

Inra'd never been here for long. She had no idea where she was, or where she was going — the only thing she had ever done here was work with the tunnel. "Alright, so where to from here?" She let herself look at their prisoner, and roughly as she expected, their prisoner was staring back at her.

"We got a place, don't worry," Arvy replied. He also looked at their prisoner, and then nodded to Ora. "Ya can let her talk, by the way, everyone here knows who we are."

The moment Ora uncovered the girl's mouth, she shouted something in Volarian with enough vitriol that Inra probably didn't need to bother translating it for everyone else. Good for her. She deserved it once in a while. After a moment's pause, in which Hannah took a deep breath to calm herself, she started speaking in Arghivi like the people around her, in her heavy Entelan accent. "Sorry. Kind of, not really. What the hell, guys?"

"Needed a bargaining chip," Vin added in. "Not gonna hurt you, we just want to hold onto you until Entela agrees to meet our demands."

"And those're, what, free trade?" Hannah asked. "Did you really need to go to war for that?"

"Also lookin' to pick up the arf on Agahia."

"Oh, that's never gonna happen. You would've needed to grab someone important for that."

"You not the head engineer of the whole thing?"

"Yeah, but they've got other engineers, they can afford to hold on until they can force you to give up on it. All you're going to do by grabbing me is panicking my Karina."

"Really sorry about this capturing you thing, by the way," Inra said. Arvy started walking somewhere, so Ora went about dragging Hannah over there too. Mercifully, she was following along. "I know we, uh, betrayed you and stuff.”

"Really, now that I know you four can’t be trusted, I’m over the betrayal thing.” The truth hurt more than Inra thought it would.  “Now I’m just annoyed that you’re putting me in a box and sending Karina into a panic.”  The girl smirked at Vin.  “Maybe there’s still time.  If you let me go now, you might not end up with a ticked off god on your doorstep.”

“Not happenin’,” Vin replied. “What kinda god you got on your side?”

“Oh, you haven’t heard?” Hannah asked. Arvy withdrew a key and opened the main door of one of the many large buildings, motioning for everyone to follow him. “I’m the only one stopping Karina from turning into a murderous time god. At which point she’ll probably destroy everything and everyone in her attempts to get me back.”

Arvy motioned everyone into an elevator. The ones on this plane were way fancier and way quieter than any of the ones on Daira. After about thirty seconds, in which Hannah had stopped talking to let her message’s weight hang in the air and no one else wanted to breathe the weight in, the door opened into a hallway. There were glass windows on the short ends, allowing Inra to see the true expanse of the city that went on way too far. Anywhere on Daira, there would be ocean long before the horizon from this high up. Here, there was no ocean to be seen.

The doors on this floor were labelled L101 through L116. They all had little mail slots, round door handles with locks, and tiny built-in windows. The floor was carpeted, and though it was clearly in need of a wash, there weren’t any major stains or damage.

“Aaand, you know, if it turns out you guys kill me, that might just be the end of the war for you,” Hannah added. She was definitely exaggerating that bit. “I bet she wouldn’t let any of your planes get free from the hell she’d bring to you.”

“Already said we’re not gonna hurt you." Vin replied. "You planning something?”

“No, no, I love my Karina too much to let myself die just to spite you,” Hannah added. “That said, I’m really excited to see how you try to take care of a Volarian, because I don’t really trust you to keep my internal energy within reasonable parameters.”

“All we’ve gotta do is keep an eye on the numbers, that’s not hard,” Vin reminded Hannah.

“Yeah?” Hannah asked. “How’re you gonna do that? Because, you know, my transceiver has a function for that.”

“Yeah, not a chance you’re getting that back,” Vin confirmed. “Couldn’t even if we wanted to.” Arvy opened one of the many doors on this hallway and motioned for Ora to bring Hannah in. Unlike the other doors, this one had a much more complicated lock, and the outside had a number of devices attached to the wall. Hannah’s gaze followed them when she walked past. Then, Arvy followed, waving to the rest of the group to come with him. Inra was the last one in, and she closed the door behind her.

The inside of this door was an entire suite of its own. The short hallway lead past a kitchen to a living room. The living room had a sofa, a chair, and even a TV and game console with a pile of around 5 games next to it. That console would've been expensive to smuggle into Daira, and now there was just one sitting there. Two doors from here lead off into a bathroom and a bedroom, in which the bathtub and bed seemed to be roughly the size of a noble's.

“This place is nicer than my god damn apartment,” Inra observed.

“We tried to keep this as pleasant of a house arrest as we could,” Ora noted. She unwrapped Hannah's wrists from the platinum chains. Inra was expecting the girl to bolt, but it seemed like she had more sense than that. “I bet the games’re gonna do wonders for keeping her occupied.”

"Great, so when Karina finds me dead from running out of aether, at least I'll have the record on Escape from Arcania or something."

"It's in the pile," Ora pointed out, a smile plastered on her face. "Thought it might be one you'd like."

“I guess I haven't changed all that much.” Hannah looked around. “It is nice, but it’s… still missing my Karina. She’s the most important part of my living arrangement.”

“Yeah, well, we couldn’t do that, so you’re gonna have to make do,” Arvy pointed out. This girl really just kept going back to that Karina. Was that how it was gonna be like living with her? Was she just trying to guilt Inra into letting her leave?

The following moments were filled with silence. Hannah took in her surroundings, and no one else seemed to want to interrupt her. She was their prisoner, but she was also their former teacher. She could take a moment getting used to it.

Eventually, Arvy broke the silence again. "Here's how this is gonna work. You're mostly gonna be here alone.  We've got surveillance and comms hooked up to our transceivers, so if you try to do any shenanigans, we're gonna know about it.  We'll be in a couple times a day to make sure we all eat and we've got a pretty good budget for it.  Otherwise, you can kinda do what ya want if you're not breakin' out."

Hannah sighed and flopped herself onto the sofa. "Alright, can't really leave anyways. I have… no clue where your tunnel leads, and there's no chance I could recalibrate it under pressure.  Especially not— mm, no, I'll try to avoid listing off all of its flaws."

"Girl, you were looking at that thing for five seconds," Ora interjected. "It that bad?"

"It's, uhh… well, it definitely wasn't made by an Entelan, can tell you that. The chamber was damaged, the transmitter relays are misaligned, the ignition conduits need replacements…  I shouldn't be able to see all that, by the way, that's supposed to be out of the weather—"

"Rude," Inra cut Hannah off before she could denigrate her work any further. "I worked for ages to get that thing barely working."

"Yeah, so anyways when you get lost it's better to stay in one place, so I'll stay here waiting for my Karina to find me. Did you figure out a way to keep track of my aether?  Because if you stick too much in me, I’ll just get aether sickness and that can be bad.  But, with too little, I get exhausted and then all my proteins stop working, and I need those.”

Inra looked around to see if anyone knew what she meant. Nope.

It looked like Hannah noticed too, because she gave an exaggerated roll of her eyes. “Great, not gonna live past a month. Guess you’ve got some research ahead of you.”

“It’ll be fine,” Inra said, “They’ll reach an agreement and we’ll get you back in a couple days.”

“Pfft,” Hannah laughed. “They’re not giving you Agahia. That’s where Karina and I live. And it’s really Karina’s, they can’t just give it up like that without ticking her off.”

“Really confident in that, huh?” Vin asked.

“You bet,” Hannah replied. She had started to distract herself looking at the ring on her finger. “I’ve spent almost 45 years of my life around Master Sara and Seiva. They’re not gonna take this war sitting down, and they’re definitely not gonna give up something so big.”

"Looks like you're gonna be here a while then."

"Yeeeah," Hannah agreed with a sigh. "What's your transceiver's model? It's EnTech, right?" Hannah tilted her head a little bit, just to look at Inra and her version of the device. Hers was dyed with yellow and green, with a sun etched into it in the pattern of the Church of Solari. She originally did it to show support for a friend, but decided she liked it and never wanted to change it. "Looks like Mark 6?"

Yes? No? It was, right? Inra was supposed to be the one to know about transceiver models. "Yeah, yeah, that's the one," Inra agreed. "Good eye."

"It's got the pattern, you couldn't do that on a Mark 5. That could tell you my energy numbers.”

“Already told ya we can’t give you a transceiver,” Vin noted.

“I can’t even activate yours. It won’t read my commands. And even if I could, you’re all watching me, what would I get done?” Hannah rubbed her ring a little bit with her shirt.

"... guess we could do that," Ora suggested.

While everyone was looking at transceivers, a message came through from the High Princess of Daira. She was put in charge of the entire attack plan while the emperor was busy with politics. She's the person whose command Inra's party was under.

[The initial strike failed. The anchor is active. We will win Agahia, but we need time. Sources suggest they have a planeswalker, she'll probably be looking for their head engineer. Be careful.]

"Damn it," Vin exhaled.

"Told you so." Hannah was still looking at her ring. Did she even see the message? "Need me to tell your future on anything else?"

"Nah, but you could maybe tell us why you're lookin' at your ring so much," Arvy mentioned with a growl in his voice.

"Black knows," Hannah replied, looking up at Vin. Why didn't she just answer? Inra looked expectantly at Vin.

Vin looked back at her with a totally blank expression. "It's nothing special, it's her wedding ring."

"Then why the hell's she making it sound like a big secret?" Inra asked. Vin shrugged.

Inra turned back to Hannah. Without even looking up, Hannah answered, "I forgot the word for wedding."

No one said anything. For far too long. Long enough that Hannah had to check to make sure no one had left. "What? I'm Volarian, we don't really do weddings."

Arvy sighed. Inra would have joined him, but was still caught up on the fact that she had a wedding ring without a wedding. "Right, we'll… leave you to it, I guess," Arvy decided. " Dinner's in 3 hours. We'll be back up in two to start getting ready."

"Whatever you say," Hannah replied. She closed her eyes and let herself sink into the couch. Inra hoped her friends were right. If this was over quickly, maybe Hannah wouldn't have to be here too long. If it wasn't, Inra was going to be the best bet for keeping her alive, and she had no confidence in doing that.

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The High Princess