voidtreckerexpress | Many Things to Do

Entry tags:

Many Things to Do

Who: Little One and open (with some closed prompts)
Where: Various- please see prompts
When: Month of Jelly, Day Eighteen and Nineteen
What: In which Little One and Koumyou hang out and clean weapons much to Devero's horror, A-Qing comes to Little One to ask for her asistance in training her Vulpix, two young girls teach a small pokemon violence and then Little One does some chores.
Warnings: Guns (specifically a small child handling guns), talk of violence, maybe actual violence.

For Koumyou Sanzo and Devero. Sleeper 3, Cabin C

Since her roommate had moved out two weeks ago she had seen him less, which was a pity because she liked the priest a lot. But he had promised that she could visit him any time, so she would take him up on it. It has been a busy time, the mission had been stupid and weird and then there had been another platform.

But she makes her way to his cabin, guns in tow. They needed cleaned and whereas there were other people who could teach her this was a good excuse to visit. She knocked politely and when Koumyou answered he would find her there, barefoot, red hood pulled up over her hair, rifle over her shoulder and an anticipatory grin on her face.

For A-Qing. Luggage

She has a few different luggage forts, some have to be abandoned as they are found and it's never smart to stay in the same place for long. But this one is one of her oldest and most well hidden. Only a couple of people know about it, people she doesn't mind visiting.

She is currently lying on her stomach on a pilfered beanbag with a blanket thrown over her, using the torch of her SCA to read. She's In this House You May Scream for the fifth time. It's by far her favourite book in the library, the others are boring in comparison.

A noise makes her freeze and her light goes out as she goes still, listening...

Open: Training Gym Both Little One and A-Qing will reply here

Anyone wandering into the training gym will be met by an interesting sight. In one quarter the training dummies and other equipment have been moved out the way to be replaced by two teddy bears- train mascots wearing red and blue hoodies, three balls and an... interestingly drawn picture of a smirking man with red eyes.

A short distance away stands a small Vulpix, flanked by two girls.

"Do we be being ready? You do be needing to be killing them all this time, properly." One of the girls was telling the pokemon, hands on hip.

Open: Kitchen

Avocados were stupid. Stupid to cut into, stupid to eat, stupid with their stupid stones in the middle. "Urgh." She stabbed a knife directly into one of them and sighed dramatically. "Do anybody even be liking these anymore?"

She yanked the knife out, a lot more in control than she perhaps looks as she glares at the offending fruit. "Last month did be being better, we should have been keeping the honey."

Despite her words she was actually working, a huge pile of avacado skins were piled next to her and a mixing bowl was over half full of avacado flesh ready for smashing, another bowl was filled with discarded stones.

Perhaps they should be finding out who could use a slingshot, the avocados could at least be useful in yielding weapons.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

She listened to Devero even as she focused on putting the gun back together, it takes a bit of thinking as she remembers which piece goes where.

"Ludds do be being the people who do no be being part of your World Government? Do they be being your enemy?" An enemy of the whole world?

She clicked the last piece in and handed the pistol silently to Koumyou with a polite bow of her head.

"...Kind of. It's. More complicated than that." How to explain without going into torturous detail?

He actually takes a moment to mull it over, starting to speak again as she's handing the pistol to the priest. "Most of the people on my world are citizens of Gov-- that is, the World Government. But there are some folks who choose not to be, and live as outsiders. Most outsider communities are harmless; they're just people who want to do their own thing away from everyone else. That's fine.

"Ludds are people from outsider communities who want to make everyone else do their thing too," he continues, his expression darkening. "And since they can't force Gov to conform to their small, outdated, hateful ideologies, they just attack our operations whenever they can. Steal supplies, destroy equipment-- and kill people." And that? That's the actual problem.

"You see, that's where you lose me. I don't understand using non-lethal force with them, if they're going to start it..." Koumyou says of Devero's description, even as he checks the pistol over with a knowing eye. It may not be a specific model he's familiar with, but a gun is a gun, at least when it shoots actual bullets.

He checks the slide action and then nods, and hands it back. "Good job!"

"Yes." Normally she would be a little more carefully, but here is the priest with a piece of the power of a god saying what she is thinking and so she feels she can speak, carefully.

"If they do be killing people, if you do no be killing them, they will just be doing it again."

She's slightly impressed though, most light addled people have no problem killing those who they saw as wrong or bad. It is rarer for them to extend no killing to their enemies as well.

"Where I come from, every single life is important," Devero says quietly, looking between the two of them. "Even the lives of stubborn, selfish, hateful terrorists."

But he feels like he owes them more of an explanation than that. He thinks about it for a moment, scrubbing one hand through his hair, then says, "Do either of you have any idea what the term 'genetic bottlenecking' means?"

He's pretty sure he knows what the answer is but just in case--

"I can guess from the words themselves, but... when someone is willing to kill, that isn't likely to change just because you spared them. Spare one, and they may kill five. Or more."

As the priest says all this, he's carefully disassembling the rifle in his hands. This slides free of that, this pin comes out like so, revealing that. He sets each part down as he puzzles it out.

"Spare someone who wants you dead, and they'll just learn to try to kill you another way. All you're teaching them is how to be better killers."

He pauses, and shrugs. Maybe the nature of things is really that much different, where Devero is from? So he adds, "At least, that's how it is where I'm from. What about you, Buttercup?"

Team murder?

Every single life? Even his enemies? Even those who hated him? That's either the most stupid or the most noble thing she's ever heard. On the one hand it's stupid, for all the reasons the Sanzo is explaining. On the other, if you were going to claim to not like killing, it was best to not be a hypocrite. She shakes her head at Devero's question though, she doesn't know what genetic bottlenecking is.

She is quite enjoying listening to them talk. It's rare, unheard of in her world for two people with such differing opinions to speak of such things as this.

But then she was suddenly and abruptly put in the spotlight. She froze, looking between them. Usually she could just agree with whoever she was speaking with, but when they thought different things. She likes Devero, she likes the Sanzo too and he is powerful...

"I..."

She scowled. "I did no ever be thinking about it before."

It's perhaps the worst lie she has ever told. She doesn't even deliver it well as she learned to lie before she could speak full sentences.

Perhaps if Devero wasn't so distracted with trying to explain his philosophy-- not to mention such a damn bad liar himself-- he would have picked up on that. But Buttercup's off the hook, at least from his side.

"There are less than three hundred million people alive on my world," he says. "--Which might sound like a lot, but you have to understand that the population before the Apocalypse Plague was over 8 billion. Ninety-nine people out of every hundred died before the vaccine was developed and we were able to get the Pathogen under control.

"Not only did we lose-- untold amounts of information, and skills, and cultural knowledge when all those people died, we lost genetic diversity as well. There are-- are conditions, congenital diseases, that were rare Before but have proliferated by my time, because we went from having so much genetic diversity to so little.

"The Outsider communities-- even ones full of goddamn ludds-- are-- are an insurance policy against further genetic deterioration. Every one of them who dies at our hands is another individual genome lost, possibly before it's been passed on."

He sighs, carding his fingers through his hair again. "--And beside all that, they can only get to us out in the wild, on expeditions and at encampments. It's not like they're air-dropping into our cities and mowing down hapless civilians. The only people at risk of being attacked by a ludd are people who knowingly sign up for that risk."

"Can't you just, I don't know, take material from the ones who try to kill you, and grow more humans in a lab somewhere?"

That's a normal thing to guess, right? Definitely nothing ethically dubious there.

She has no idea how many people are on her world but three million people sounds like a lot. But also there was an apolcalypse plague and ninety nine people out of every hundred died?

So they kept the people alive because they were useful. They stopped more.... genetic diversity from being lost? She only understands about half of what he's saying but she memorises words. She can ask Peter later. Peter is safe to ask things from, he doesn't laugh at her.

But she understands the concept, keeping their enemies alive because their usefulness outweighed their threat.

But then the Sanzo spoke and she turned to stare at him. "Growing them? On a tree?"

Hadn't there been that one man on the ICP talking about growing babies on trees?

"...We do," Devero admits. "Well, take some samples to preserve, anyway. But there's more to it than that. What if another Pathogen breaks? What if our cities fall? Those Outsider communities may be the only people left to continue the human race."

Buttercup's question is a welcome distraction from a topic that is, in fact, hotly debated on his world, at least in certain circles. "Nothing quite that exotic, I'm afraid," he tells her with a lopsided smile. "Couldn't believe that one myself, when I heard it."

"Dev-chan's world doesn't have enough magic for that sort of thing," Koumyou tells Buttercup, like the idea of growing people -- clones, really -- on a tree isn't all that far-fetched to him. In fact...

"Ukoku was telling me about an idea he had for something called a 'Jingko tree'," the priest tells them both, like he's sharing the most innocent gossip, "it would be a mix of magic and science, and it could take someone's DNA with the smallest scratch of a branch, and grow a clone -- a physical copy -- of them. Isn't that fascinating?"

"You could be growing twins of people?"

This conversation gets more a more bizarre. Devero talking about growing people but claiming it not exotic. Growing twins. Mixing science and magic. She at least knows what DNA is from her lessons with Tony.

Honestly how people were created had seemed ridiculously far fetched to her when Peter had told her but adding twin growing tree science just took it to levels beyond what she could even imagine.

This conversation has just gotten weird, and Devero looks at Koumyou with an expression of profound uncertainty. His world has some questionable ethics around genetic harvesting sometimes, but that sounds-- sounds--

"Why?" he has to ask, glancing uncertainly at Buttercup before returning his attention to Koumyou. "Why would he want to create something like that?"

Koumyou nods at Buttercup's question, and touches his chin with one hand at Devero's. Like it needs deep pondering. "Why... to see if he could, I imagine."

Obviously.

She just looks confused honestly. Growing people, on trees or otherwise sounded weird but Devero seemed worried as well as confused, he doesn't understand either. But something about it worries him and she doesn't understand.

"Would it be being a bad thing?" Neither man is the type to get angry at questions, so she voices hers, because as strange as other worldly ways of making people are... She doesn't see anything really different. A person was just a person, right? No matter how you made them?

"Would it be being bad? To be making a person on a tree like that? Do people who do be being made with science trees be being different than people who do be being made by sex?"

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Many Things to Do

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cw: discussions of reproduction, cloning and general ethical questions