Sera's Dialogues
"Does killing even make you feel anything still?"
"Depends, I think."
"On what?"
"On the person and the situation. You?"
"Not really."
"Hm."
"I am sad, I think. Despondent? I used to be a very moral person. It is strange how much can change in a year."
"I think we just grew up and responsibilities piled up."
"Grew up? Somehow, I doubt that. You are still just as short as when I met you."
"Not my fault I don't have your long legs. Besides, I meant, like, psychologically."
"I know what you meant."
"Anyway, I can't imagine you being anything other than yourself: a lawful evil person."
"Pfff. You should stay away from Regent if that's what he's teaching you. People are complex; they don't fit easily into alignment charts."
"Oh, shut up. D&D is amazing. Where else can I be a rogue/bard that slays bitches and lays witches… or was it the other way around?"
"Are you calling me a witch? Or a bitch?"
"…"
"Just for that your cookie privileges are revoked."
"What? No!"
"You can have them after you apologize."
"Argh! Do I need to get on my knees? I don't want to get up from the bed."
"I can think other ways to apologize that don't need you getting up from the bed."
"… Really?"
"Hmhm."
"Like what?"
"Surprise me."
:::
"It's a boring book full of complicated stuff that was written on purpose to be as obnoxiously dense as possible. It's like it was just made to be thick, like a university student padding out pages just to fill the word quota on their paper."
"You have strong feelings about it."
"Look, I have very little time to read for pleasure nowadays. I picked it up because its been on my reading list for a while. The content was interesting but it took me a while to decipher it all… I ended up having to see a video on the net and then reread it to actually understand it all."
"Well, if you want next rest day we'll go shopping for another book. If I like it we might even read it together."
"Really?"
"Eh. I'll listen if you read it aloud."
"I am not an audiobook."
"Aww. But I like your voice!"
"…"
"You blush so cutely."
"Shut up."
"How can someone so deadly be so cute?"
"I am sexy not cute."
"Sure, you keep telling yourself that."
"…"
"…"
"Stop that."
"I wasn't doing anything."
"You keep brushing your fingers on them."
"Not on purpose, I assure you."
"Just… fine."
"I like them."
"I don't."
"Why would you not?"
"It's awful. I just… I was never pretty and now I look like this. I…"
"Shhh. It's alright. I like them. You look beautiful."
"I was a frog on legs and now I am a disfigured frog on legs."
"Take that back."
"Wha-"
"Take. That. Back."
"Fine! Just… release me."
"Oh, Taylor. You are beautiful without compare. I simply can't get enough of you."
"…"
"…"
"Don't strain a brain cell. That pick-up line sounded like it burned a few."
"Pf! Nah, still have two more."
"Pick-up lines or brain cells?"
"Yes."
"…"
"…"
"…Why do you like them?"
"It reminds me you survived. You are alive and breathing. You are a fighter Taylor, a warrior, a commander. These? There are just battle scars."
"You have scars too."
"Small in comparison."
"Misery shouldn't be compared."
"Mhm. Maybe. Bad things are bad things but what happened and what the person felt during what happened are two different things."
"Bad things… I just hope we aren't going to have more bad things in our way with all this. God, sometimes I wonder why we even started all this."
"You wanted to own the city. Control the crime, protect the city. Zaun's national motto."
"What a terrible fucking name. Was I drunk when I named the gang?"
"I remember when you were reversing names for yourself. The great and powerful Baron Shimmer!"
"I was not that jubilant when I told you that name."
"It's for the drama."
"Take over the city, huh? What a joke. Can't even keep myself together most of the time. My emotions run a mile a minute. Is that how insane people think like?"
"Probably not. I heard something about how insane people don't think themselves as insane. It's just the Shimmer, Taylor. I´ll give you your next dose in a bit."
"God, Aisha, the shit we have done. I wonder what mom would think of me. What dad would think."
"Taylor, don't start thinking too deeply on those things. They are your parents, they would keep loving you with all their hearts even if you took over the world."
"…Even if I wanted to take over the world I wouldn't. Too much trouble."
"Of course, don't mind the fact thar the true reason you wouldn't is because you dread bureaucracy."
"Whoever invented it better be suffering in Hell."
"…"
"…"
"Can you kiss me now?"
"You are very demanding, my little imp."
:::
"On one side we might consider ourselves the victors of this conflict. And as the saying goes we can write history. Let the public stew in whatever we tell them happened. Our version will be the only version of events that anyone would know about."
"What about the PRT?"
"The video is already circulating. They will have to respond fully not just make a half-assed confirmation of the contents of it. But! We did put our version of events first into the spotlight and since not even the villains know for sure what happened the only source of info is us."
"Welp, I am still a bit mad that I didn't show up on the video."
"I'll reward you some other way. Did you like the ending?"
"Neat trick with Brian's power."
"Speaking of Brian…"
"He's off talking to Jack I think. Something about coordinating unpowered members with the parahumans."
"I hope you didn't go out naked just to find that out."
"Nah, had a bathrobe on me. Besides it was only Bri and Tats in the office downstairs."
"…what."
"A) I am his sister and B) Lisa is a girl, it isn't anything she hasn't seen before and C) she is asexual. So don't go there doing moony eyes to her. You'll only inflate her ego. Besides I needed to refill our jar of cookies while you napped."
"Being asexual doesn't also make her aromantic by definition."
"True. It probably doesn't make her incapable of appreciating the human form either."
"On a purely aesthetic level, I presume. With her power I highly doubt she wants to get close enough to someone in other ways."
"Most likely… Can you imagine using her intuition powers during sex, though? She'll cold read you and then play you like a fiddle. It would probably be equal amounts of terrifying and mind shattering."
"Ok, wow, enough talking about that, please. Not when we are like this at least. Anyway, they were downstairs?"
"Yup, Tats was doing thinker things and Bri was brooding. But like I said he is off somewhere else by now."
"I hope he is having a civil conversation with Jack and whatever agreement they come to they'll discuss it with me later."
"I am sure they will."
"…"
"…"
"…What are you reading, now? Can't you simply enjoy doing nothing for a while?"
"I was thinking about the girl that Coil wanted. It made me curious enough to read a few books about precognition. I'll probably read a few other theses on Thinker powers in general later."
"That explains the Fates on the cover."
"You know who the Fates are?"
"I am your girlfriend."
"Of course. Anyway, it's pretty fucking woolly over all. The majority of parahumans currently known who are exclusively precogs are vague at best, way too specific at worst. Although several non-thinker type capes have been recorded has having a sixth sense, specially relating to combat. Which you know, gives even more credence that powers seek conflict since these small add-ons are usually coupled with high damage dealers, like brutes and blasters."
"Doesn't Watchdog keep a leash to those special Thinker types?"
"Yup. The PRT's personal Think Tank and surveillance department. It's the reason I have been keeping mum about exploring legal commercial options. NEPEA-5 plus this regulatory agency keep pretty much any parahuman with a business sense afraid."
"I heard about that. Some story about a tinker that transmuted gold got stomped on by them."
"Again, yup. But that's an extreme example but is also pointed as proof that parahumans need regulation and oversight. The dude kept selling gold and the price tag pretty much tanked. That was in the beginning when parahumans started showing up so there wasn't much legally written out about the subject. Imagine what a Thinker like Tattletale can do to the stock market. I am pretty sure she has a few stocks in some companies but they are negligible and spread apart so I haven't said anything."
"That's the reason the Elite were founded. To free the proletariat, I mean parahumans, from the oppression of the ruling class, I mean the government."
"Ah! Fighting for economic freedom might have been the initial goal but they are way pass that. They still do have a prosperous commercial and financial sector to their organization, however. For villains, their banking system, in North America, is second only to Number Man, after all."
"Fighting for freedom feels like a strange thing for villains."
"Everyone fights for something. Besides, they only became villains after the government decided that any parahuman who could serve as a producer and purveyor of goods needed to sit still and get hammered in."
"A good fight then but like what happened with the Elite it can get not good pretty quick. Thw way to Hell is paved with good intentions. Whatever the intentions of the founders of the Elite had they have long since disappeared."
"They are not the only ones. But just because of that we can't disillusion ourselves. That fight is still worth fighting. Heck, I can summarize the entirety of History as a fight for freedom. A constant human struggle to achieve a higher level state of being. We build things to free ourselves. Walls and laws to free ourselves from violence; farms and breeding animals to free ourselves from hunger; and so on and so forth. While the more advanced we get we gain different worries, other problems arise and we work until we get rid of those too."
"Yeah. Honestly, on this topic: I hate precogs and everything they come with. The idea that all of that struggle is futile? That somehow all of that would happen, one way or another, simply because some metaphysical rug told it would be so is… disheartening. No matter what we do, stuff still happens?"
"All those decisions we took and everything we have done so far? Predetermined? Hmhm…"
"Yeah. It is hard to believe we live in the best of all possible worlds."
"The existence of Earth-Aleph puts that theory to rest, I believe."
"It is even stranger when you are in that line of thought and you consider precogs, like our little Pythian Oracle. It might not be the best of all possible world but is it the only viable possibility? What would philosophers think of a deterministic world being proven?"
"I think everyone here is a bit preoccupied surviving to stop to consider all the consequences of such a thing. You have to talk to some Earth-Aleph professor for that. I hear some people there still think we are all suffering of some mass delusion or that our world isn't even real. Besides, I don't think the world is deterministic. At least, not fully. Even with the precogs running around. Especially, those like the Simurgh."
"Hm?"
"Think about it. You know that saying? Life is like a box of chocolates. It's a funny saying from a movie but the underlying motive isn't wrong. In my mind, life is like a game of chess."
"What? I hope you aren't saying that people are pieces in that game?"
"Nothing so callous."
"Then?"
"Imagine this: you are the player in a game of chess. You have a set of pieces you can move but you can only move them in a certain predetermined way when it is your turn to play them. The amount and quality of your pieces and the state of the board is also already predetermined. If you are born poor in Africa then you get a very shitty board with few poor quality pieces. You may gain more pieces and they can upgrade in quality and the board may change. All depending on how and when you move your pieces. You may gain riches and a good life or you may end up being eaten by Moord Nag's beast."
"Alright, I can see it. You are proposing a limited… well that a very limited amount of free will exists."
"Yes. But the scenario isn't over. A game of chess isn't complete without an adversary. That adversary, however, is ever changing and sometimes unknown and its pieces mutable as is his side of the board. If you want I can personify that adversary. That is Chaos."
"So, let me see if I understand: you are stating that there is no such thing as a collective free will. Only a type of personal free will exists, but that free will is extremely limited both by events outside of your control but also by other wielders of personal free will, whose own decisions might or might not impact, either directly or indirectly, your own decisions and their consequences. Therefore, only an extremely small amount of free will actually exists."
"Yes."
"How do precogs enter the analogy then?"
"Well, I haven't thought much on the subject but I can theorize that in this analogy they can see the adversary and the movements of its pieces."
"Alright, but what about the changes they make?"
"Again, the previous analogy still functions. They still act inside their limited amount of options despite the glimpses of Chaos's movements. The Simurgh still has to choose a domino piece to topple for all the others to follow. I imagine the true power of the Endbringer is both the accuracy in choosing which piece to move and the detail it can see the consequences of its movement."
"Damn. There is a physics based thing I could probably quote, right? Something something quantum."
"Probably. But I am a literature geek not a science nerd."
"I can see you lent a lot of thought to this topic even before this conversation. Let me guess, you are suddenly worried that all those pieces you moved and when you moved them weren't the best moves you could make?"
"Yes."
"Look at it this way, then: if your mother hadn't died, and if your best friend hadn't betrayed you, and if she hadn't start bullying you, and if your father hadn't fallen into a coma, if Panacea hadn't been a bitch and if you hadn't triggered, if you hadn't started tinkering funky liquids and consume them, if your father hadn't then died at that moment, if you hadn't then met me because of the bullying, and we partner up against the Merchants and ended up killing them, if we didn't start a gang, gotten rich, bought a warehouse and made a club of it, and if we hadn't kissed and now revealed ourselves to the world…" Aisha recited calmly "Then we wouldn't be here, lying together on a mattress soaking up the spring sun eating chocolate chip cookies with no obligations but to ourselves."
"And yet…" Taylor responded picking up another cookie. "We must cultivate our garden."
Author's Note:
Hello people of !
Thank you all so much for reading this fanfic until this point!
I have been reading all you reviews and I thank you all dearly for them, as well for favoring the fic or simply following it! I am very happy its being well received! It is my first fanfic ever so some things can get a bit disjointed as I explore my literary capabilites. Like this chapter for example: it's comprised entirely of Pillow Talk between Aisha and Taylor but I made it this way to try and flesh out their relationship even though I should continue onwards with the plot. This fic also contains a lot of experimental chapters as I try stuff to push my creativity, again like this chapter where I probably butcher the entirety of Voltaire's philosophy, or at least his take on Optimism. Unfortunately, I am an Historian not a philosopher, my degree only forced me to read Hegel, Focault and Voltaire with an historian's perspective in mind so the deeper stuff in their books probably went over my head; but the point is: I tried to do something different and write down my own thoughts on shit.
Now with all that explained, I like to point out that I am far more active on SB and AO3, mostly because, while holds a special place in my heart, I find that the other two allow me to interact better and easier with readers and commenters. But don't be dissapointed: I am still reading all your comments - even just the "Wow"'s xd - so you are very welcomed to continue to review. Also, one of the reviws asked about Hex-tech on this fic and the answer is a fat maybe. I have said I probably won't and keep myself to Zaun stuff but with new League lore saying Hex-cores can be created artificially, stuff can get complicated. I'll burn that bridge when I come to it.
Love ya'll! See you guys next chapter!
