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summer camp!
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"I think I feel kinda better now that we don't have to stage a paramilitary uprising or anything. That would've sucked. - you know, I bet if you're like an investigator person then we could get you some kind of salary for it, and then you could stay in hotels and stuff? I guess there's the invisibility thing, but maybe if you wore enough clothes? Or like, wrapped yourself in bandages so people thought you were a burn victim or something. Maybe then you'd be able to check into hotels."

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"The government suggested a personal assistant and had one on hand but - I don't like men."

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"Ohh." So she actually can't just fling Alex at one hundred percent of her problems. "Did you ask them for one who wasn't a man?"

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"No because I didn't want to tell them that."

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"Fair. Well. I bet we could get you a salary, anyway. I do not have miraculous solutions to nearly as many problems as I wish I did, but I do have friends with money."

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"That'd probably help. I could team up with some other girl who was homeless and she could do the interacting with society and stuff."

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"Yeah! I bet that'd work. - thanks for helping with the investigating and stuff. I know it didn't turn out to be anything super dangerous to us personally, but I don't think we could've known that going in, really, and - I dunno. I was just cool of you."

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"Anyone would've helped you out if you'd asked them."

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"Maybe. I think most people wouldn't've been as good at it."

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She doesn't say anything in response but she skips just a little.

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She ducks her head and smiles.

(Maybe she is not completely hopeless at the making-friends-at-summer-camp thing.)

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The next day they get a serious lecture about how, yes, they're able to get away with a lot here since it is a superhero summer camp after all, but really, if you sneak out and go into town and get drunk and get lost on the way back and Very Important people have to be called in to use magic to find you puking in the bushes, you will get sent home.

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That's probably a vaguely sane policy to have.

She makes it through her classes and through afternoon sports without ever really approaching abject misery. She sort of has her waterfall stuck on now, out of habit, but she doesn't bother to make it play music, and this improves her mood a kind of substantial amount. She's able to go for as long as multiple hours at a time without irrationally worrying that all of the rooms are bugged and people are analyzing everything she does.

So now there's just that whole thing about how the government is maybe torturing tons of people.

She sneaks out at night, not because she can't sleep, but because she really doesn't even need eight hours anyway and staring at the ceiling is boring. She heads for the lake. She makes a little pile of rocks that are good for skipping, and then doesn't try to skip any of those, limiting herself to rocks that aren't shaped quite right to be skipped. This mostly results in rocks plopping disappointingly into the lake. She fails at skipping rocks for, like, an hour.

 

 

Paging Matt Carter. I guess. Actually maybe it's rude to do that at whatever hour this is.

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That's very thoughtful of you but I just wouldn't hear you if I were sleeping. Everything all right?

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I guess.

 

Tyelcormo said I should ask you about why the government lobotomizes demons.

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Ah huh. We're not trying to. We're trying to figure out an implant for habitually violent species and for violent offenders in other species that'll let them go about their lives except that if they try to do serious harm to anyone they will fail. There's magic that is intent-triggered, that's the easy part, the hard part is something that immediately disables them without doing long-term damage. If it doesn't disable them instantaneously they can still murder people, they'll just have a headache afterwards, which isn't really the intent. The other hard part is that it has to be impossible to remove.

 

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I guess that makes sense.

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The alternative is killing them, so we're going to keep trying. We do kill them if they prefer that.

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Ah.

She tries skipping one of her good rocks, and it plops right into the lake just like the others.

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If you'd like, you can have your own clearance and read up on everything yourself.

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I guess that'd be good. Probably won't help, but thanks.

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It's pretty awful.

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I guess.

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You guess?

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It's not like I'm in any position to take, like, a moral stand, or anything. I just kill people and then feel bad about it. 

I don't even super know what I thought the point of this conversation was going to be. It's not like it was going to go, 'hello, Mr. Carter, are you doing Nazi science things?' 'oh, yes, Karen, very astute, we thought that doing Nazi science things was a great idea.' 'oh, well you see Mr. Carter, you're probably like a million years old, and so I guess it makes sense that they didn't cover this when you were in sixth grade history, but actually the Nazis are the bad guys.' 'oh gosh, Karen, I had no idea, I'll inform the government right away that we should change our policy from doing Nazi things to helping blind orphans and teaching all of the vampires key kindergarten morality skills, like 'sharing is caring' and 'genocide is bad'.'

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