[Scene: The Hen Tie park. Umino and El are walking, eating gelato and discussing time travel.]
Umino: Oh. I concede. You've made your point.
El: Oh? [brow furrows] What is my point?
Umino: That time travel is a really bad idea and people should leave well enough alone and try to make the most of their cards life has already dealt them.
El: So you're saying that you wouldn't back in time and assassinate Queen Victoria if were certain it would end your own life?
Umino: I never wanted to assassinate her to begin with!
El: Yeah...I guess that's a problem...
Umino: Problem!? Why is that a problem!?
El: I'm working on a story and was hoping to get an objective opinion... but I guess I haven't made the stakes high enough...
Umino: Oh, no. It is an interesting concept. Stop one woman from injecting her flawed genes into the Dynasties of Europe, to prevent two World Wars, several assassinations, a few pandemics, and save countless millions of lives. But that would be Eugenics, and isn't Eugenics an even greater evil? And anyway, according to you, things would possibly stay the same, or even get worse. So shouldn't it always be wrong to murder people, even with the noblest of intentions?
El: ...I guess.
[Umino looks over and sees she is finishing her gelato and looking bored out of her mind.]
[He checks his arm]
Umino: So..um..where are you from...originally...I mean before you came to England.
El: Some fleabag orphanage in the middle of some war torn hellhole where my brother and I got dumped off in a pillowcase back when we were babies.
Umino: What country?
El: I don't even know. All I remember is it was a place where blue eyes don't occur naturally, since those immediately identifies you as some enemy soldier's rape baby, and you're immediately targeted for extinction by all the other children in the orphanage.
Umino: [looks over] You don't have blue eyes.
El: No, but my brother does. [Umino shudders] Don't worry, he had me to protect him from the worst of it.
Umino: But you must have been tiny!
El: [shrugs] I don't mind, it toughened me up a lot... We had to take turns sleeping, curled together on the same cot, so that one of us could always be on watch...but toward the end it got so the others were far more afraid of us than we were of them...besides, it was only a matter of time before our Daddy came to adopt us-after his wife's gigantic baby bump turned out to be a cancerous tumor- and Devon and I happened to look like a cross between them. [Looks over at Umino] I'm sorry. I'm a pretty morbid date, aren't I? I should just stop talking.
Umino: No, it's ok. I want to know everything there is to know about you...it's just amazing that with all that, you turned out as normal as you did.
El: Normal? Just a few minutes ago you called me a creepy robot girl.
Umino: That was my social anxiety talking. You're a lot more normal than I am.
El: [smiles] Good. Because I feel a lot better having someone like you to talk to.
[Umino turns bright red and feels like he is going to pass out.]
[El realizes how she's strayed from the story she agreed on with Dev.]
El: You won't repeat any of this, will you? Most of my family doesn't know we were adopted. It was her dying wish, you know. For him to find a pair of needy orphans and bring them back to the nursery they had decorated back when everyone thought she was pregnant.
Umino: Mum's the word.
El: Thank you. [gives Umino a thoughtful look] You really want to hear one of my stories?
Umino: Of course.
El: I'm working one now called "Zero Gravity Sex Bomb"
Umino: I like it already.
El: It's about a girl. She was grown in a lab by an evil corporation, and given superpowers so she could grow up to be the ultimate assassin. But she was rescued from the lab by a big tough soldier guy who took her to his home, and he raised her as his own daughter.
Umino: Strong female protagonist. Sounds commercial viable.
El: In time she learned that the evil corporation had used his wife as a test subject, so she ran away from home to avenge her murder. But here is the twist. Along the way she learns the man who raised her planted a small nuclear warhead in her belly, set to go off if she ever returned to the GPS coordinates of the laboratory where she had been created.
Umino: Why would he do that?
El: Don't you see? It was all a trick. He never loved the little girl. But he saw how desperate for affection she was, she he pretended to care about her in order to manipulate her into taking down the people who killed his wife.
Umino: So what does she do when she finds out?
El: She goes into the lab and blows herself up, of course.
Umino: What? Why?
El: [closes her eyes and turns away from Umino as a couple of tears escape]] Because she doesn't want to live in a world where the man who brushed her hair, and taught her to tie her shoelaces, and rocked her to sleep whenever she was having nightmare would put in a bomb in her belly and trick her into blowing herself up.
Umino: That wouldn't work.
El: Pardon? [eyes open and she wipes her tears]
Umino: You won't be able to get it published. American readers don't like stories where the POV character ends up as a corpse.
El: I'm not an American.
Umino: Americans are the biggest consumers in the world so you may want to rethink your ending.
El: So enlighten me. How could a story about a man who tries to trick his own daughter into self-destructing possibly have a happy ending?
Umino: ...I know. Along the way she meets a boy. Someone who convinces her of how wonderful she is and she decides she has everything to live for...Yes, that would add an element of romance and make it much more marketable!
[El looks at him]
El: No. That would be lame. This isn't that kind of story. This is the story of a child's unconditional love for her father. Adding a boyfriend would only mess everything up.
Umino: [shrugs] Ok. It's your story. [finishes his gelato.]
[El gives him a mischievous smile]
Umino: What?
El: Are you sure you don't want to kiss me?
Umino: It's not that I don't want to. It's just that I don't know if I could kiss you without passing out.
[El kisses him]
El: Now you know.
[El laughs as Umino passes out]