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In a bar, there is a girl.
She looks like she has saved up all of her decadent and slothful impulses for a solid decade and is indulging them all at once. She is sprawled on a couch with a book she's only half-reading, and an ice cream sundae, and smiiiiiiling.
kithabel and milan in milliways
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ertia
no-return
He shrugs and smiles. "Getting put in charge of the country wasn't exactly what I was aiming for, but if I'm gonna do it, I'm gonna do it right, you know?"
ertia
"One of my few practical as opposed to ethical limits is that I actually can't transfer the omnipotence or Milan would already have a copy," says Kithabel. "I can get you into the magic system in which I am omnipotent but then you'd have to work very hard for a very long time to get any good at it. I suppose we could theoretically resurrect a unicorn and see if they can identify a potential source-of-omnipotence-person for you but it's sort of an extreme solution and you'd have to be astonishingly convincing."
no-return
"Well, here's how things look from my perspective," he says. "Panem is enormously fucked up. I didn't have much to work with, so I decided to get out of the game the best way I knew how. But now here I am all surprisingly not dead, and you're talking about who should be taking over the country, and it doesn't look like you're getting any other volunteers. So sure, I'll take it. And I'll do the best I can with it, and that means if I can become omnipotent first, I should."
ertia
"The bar for me trusting you with omnipotence is at least an order of magnitude higher than the bar for me trusting you with a country and some magical tools to keep it under control."
no-return
"But we have all the time in the world, right? So there's no rush, I don't have to convince you in the next five minutes."
first-and-final
"I do like your style, what little of it I've seen so far," says Milan.
ertia
"It's true, there's no rush, although I'm not sure how you'd best convince me that you're suitable for omnipotence with the stakes available here in Milliways."
no-return
Jewel shrugs. "You're the one who's omnipotent. Can't you read my mind or something?"
ertia
"...I guess not, although I would definitely want you to be quite sure, I can't un-read your mind in the same way a resurrected suicide can say 'thanks but no thanks'."
no-return
"It's not the kind of thing that's a big deal to me, and it seems like the fastest way for you to figure out if you trust me or not."
ertia
"Well, I suppose. Unless you're the sort of person power corrupts and I can't figure that out by looking because I've never read a mind before except briefly, involuntarily, and surface thoughts only."
first-and-final
"I can read his mind too and then we'll have two perspectives on the question," Milan suggests.
ertia
"That sounds like a useful extra layer of precaution, if Jewel doesn't mind..."
ertia
"I don't actually know how much momentum it takes to do, this isn't a conventional milestone or something I ever felt motivated to look up before," Kithabel says to Milan, "so if it turns out you aren't there yet I can probably just forward what I read to you."
ertia
"And whose fault is that?" she grins.
She turns her attention to Jewel. Who the heck is this dude and what would he do with a planet and the power to travel to arbitrary other worlds and, generally, omnipotence?
She turns her attention to Jewel. Who the heck is this dude and what would he do with a planet and the power to travel to arbitrary other worlds and, generally, omnipotence?
no-return
Jewel is pretty much as advertised.
He was raised as a Career tribute, trained to kill in the arena so that he could volunteer at seventeen or eighteen when his chance of victory was highest, and knew from a very young age that fuck that noise. The exact plan took shape gradually over the course of his years in training. He played the role of a child-gladiator, learned every necessary skill, honed them to perfection, demonstrated his prowess in front of the judges impressively enough to earn the highest possible score... and then threw it all away with deliberate theatricality, leaving no doubt in anyone's mind that his death was a refusal to play the game even with all possible advantages on his side. That he died because he didn't want to kill anyone, not because he couldn't.
And now?
If they're serious about giving him a chance to take over the world... he can't turn that down. Or, more precisely, he won't. He has a choice, and he chooses to take responsibility for his country - or planet, if there are more people on it than he thought. He doesn't yet know what exactly he's going to do, but he knows what he wants: as many people as possible safe and happy and well-fed and leading flourishing lives. Even the ones he hates, if he can manage it. Under the unaccustomed pressure of potential omnipotence, hatred falls away with surprising ease. If he can do anything, then what he'll do is help.
He was raised as a Career tribute, trained to kill in the arena so that he could volunteer at seventeen or eighteen when his chance of victory was highest, and knew from a very young age that fuck that noise. The exact plan took shape gradually over the course of his years in training. He played the role of a child-gladiator, learned every necessary skill, honed them to perfection, demonstrated his prowess in front of the judges impressively enough to earn the highest possible score... and then threw it all away with deliberate theatricality, leaving no doubt in anyone's mind that his death was a refusal to play the game even with all possible advantages on his side. That he died because he didn't want to kill anyone, not because he couldn't.
And now?
If they're serious about giving him a chance to take over the world... he can't turn that down. Or, more precisely, he won't. He has a choice, and he chooses to take responsibility for his country - or planet, if there are more people on it than he thought. He doesn't yet know what exactly he's going to do, but he knows what he wants: as many people as possible safe and happy and well-fed and leading flourishing lives. Even the ones he hates, if he can manage it. Under the unaccustomed pressure of potential omnipotence, hatred falls away with surprising ease. If he can do anything, then what he'll do is help.
first-and-final
"...Yep," he says, blinking. "Wow. Have I mentioned I like this guy's style?"
ertia
"I am impressed with the discernment of your whimsy," Kithabel remarks to Sherlock. "It's possible, though, that we can't actually omnipotence you, Jewel - requires a certain compatibility with a person who wants to at least temporarily turn into a dragon, installing the omnipotence has some mind-affecting effects that I predict may not bother you at all but might disturb candidate dragons, and I suspect that my omnipotence doesn't reach as far as determining dragon-compatibility in a foreign magic system so we'd be crossing our fingers and hoping a resurrected unicorn can do it. Maybe I can just open the door to that world and ask a unicorn if that's possible at all first."