Outer Olympus

Outer Olympus Chapter 8

Upon arrival to the kids' makeshift hangout in the backrooms of Magellan Mechanical Administration Centre 37-C, the first thing Rune had done was ask to borrow a pair of pajamas, (which Viola had happily supplied) and gone straight to sleep. In the week since she had been captured, she guessed she hadn't been allowed to be asleep for longer than three hours at a time, and with her adrenaline crashed she had passed out the second her head hit the pillow.

It had now been twenty hours since she went to sleep and she was showing no signs of waking. A full nights' rest had passed for Viola, Taroh, and Geode, who were now pouring out the remains of their breakfast supplies (synthetic milk, some grainy cereal, and a handful of frozen berries) into their bowls while shaking off their sleep.

"Out of milk," Geode noted. Viola groaned. She had known this was coming, but they were also supposed to suddenly have an influx of cash to deal with it.

"I'm going to rob a grocery store," she claimed. Taroh went to grab a laptop, before Geode stopped him.

"Viola's joking," Geode clarified, "well, mostly joking." Stealing food wasn't that uncommon for them, but they tried not to steal enough to attract attention to themselves.

"I mean, we could. We need to do something," Viola complained, "why must me live in a world that makes us suffer the brutal consequences of our heroic deeds?" Geode rolled their eyes.

"Speaking of, what do we think her deal is?" Taroh asked. "Got a whole kinda weird thing going on, doesn't she?" He was shoveling cereal into his mouth between words.

"Obvious, isn't it? Some sort of rebel mystic. Got captured at that science station battle HNN is always talking about," Geode replied, stirring their cereal and waiting for it to get properly mushy.

"You say that like some rebel psychic taking out Kase like that was the most normal thing you've ever seen," Viola scooped up spoonfuls packed with more berries than cereal. She paused, spoon inches from her mouth, and blinked, suddenly saying, "wait, do you think Kase is dead?"

"We're not that lucky," Taroh answered, "but like, she's a big deal, probably? I hear the Hegemony arrests all children they suspect of being mystics and turns them into super-soldiers." Viola laughed.

"That's like, a spy movie plot point. There's way too many people for the Hegemony to get all of them. They aren't like, going to remote villages on backwater planets and testing people's blood. There's gotta be hundreds of free mystics floating around," she pointed out, "not too unbelievable there's one or two with the rebels. One of the Twenty Traitors was a mystic, right?"

"It's hardly saying someone's not a big deal if you are comparing them to one of the Traitors," Geode retorted, "and she came in a Nightcrow shuttle. She's probably dangerous."

"Yeah, but in a cool way, where she shoots Enforcers with lightning." Viola conceded.

"Also in the way where Enforcers will want to shoot us with blasters for saving her," Geode added, "besides, you can't do a blood test to test if someone is a mystic. You can't believe that Hegemony propaganda about magical bloodlines. It's a thing people are trained in, not born with. You go to a Lightbringer temple and learn to move things with your mind."

"No, that can't be right. If anyone could learn to be a mystic, why do we have regular Enforcers and not a million psychic super soldiers?" Viola asked.

"Because it takes two years to train an Enforcer and twenty to train a Lightbringer. It's about the economics of it," Taroh answered, "But that would explain why so many nobles are mystics. They can afford to take a decade off to go get trained."