godsfire

[onwhatwingswedareaspire]

It is dark.

((Warning: Contains traumatized characters and other content that should be warned for. We will attempt to start keeping up-to-date specific warning list soon))

Comments

[dotted_lines]

"Uh. That's what friendship is, I think? People liking each other?"

[onwhatwingswedareaspire]

"...I do not know. Maybe. People are complicated."

She does not look any less confused, but she seems calmer about it now, and starts off investigating the perimeter of the room. "But, then, why do you consider me a friend at all?"

[dotted_lines]

He follows her to the wall and inspects the intricate paneling for a few minutes.

"You're, uh, really nice, and helpful, and you're a good person, like, you actually went to go help people, in a way that could've saved a lot of lives if things had gone worse."

And she cares about him. Probably best not to say that out loud though.

[onwhatwingswedareaspire]

Thorn seems to find this somewhat puzzling. "Emergency response is kind of a decent portion of my job. I have actual training for it. I -- am not sure how that makes me a good person, especially given how many--" her voices catches. She swallows, and continues, "I do not keep a count of it, so I could not tell the exact proportions of people I've saved to those who are dead because of me. But one does not make up for the other."

[dotted_lines]

He continues walking the perimeter of the room, looking for any differences between the panels.

"Lots of people have emergency response as a part of their job, but you actually did even though you didn't have to."

He walks a little more in silence. "I'm pretty sure they don't balance away, but I think it probably means you're good as long as you still care? And, like, try to do the better thing, when it's possible?"

[onwhatwingswedareaspire]

Thorn seems very tense while she waits for him to respond, but relaxes some when he does. "Emergency response is a reflex; at that point am not sure if it is relevant.

She is silent for a moment. "Perspective is important," she says, after a moment. "I have to care about those people and -- about that whole city -- or I do not know if I will try." She rubs at her eyes again, and reaches out her hand a little ways in his direction, before freezing for a second, and then letting it fall back to her side. She keeps moving, trying to focus on inspecting the panels.

[dotted_lines]

"But, people aren't less helped by it being a reflex, they're more. Reflexes make you better at doing something. I don't know the specifics, but I think you are a good person."

At the hand motion, he pauses. If previous examples hold true... "Would you like a hug?"

[onwhatwingswedareaspire]

Thorn makes a thoughtful noise at his statement about reflexes. "...do you want me to tell you why I consider myself to not be a good person?" she asks quietly.

Pause. "A hug would be nice," she says.

[dotted_lines]

He starts to nod, then stops. "If you want to say, I'd like to know, but you don't have to."

He reaches out to hug her.

[onwhatwingswedareaspire]

Hugs. Shivering. "I expect you to find out eventually. If you would prefer to hear about it from me I can do that. ...Maybe not right now, though, right now I would like to get out of here."

[dotted_lines]

Squeeze. "Not now, then."

He unhugs, and resumes walks a little bit to inspect the next wall. "There should be some kind of meaning to these, there are differences between the panels but they don't look like anything."

[onwhatwingswedareaspire]

"They could be a strange abstract," Thorn says, "but somehow I doubt that it has such a simple explanation. --hm." This last is at the partial body. "I am not picking up anything that seems like a cortical stack, but I should check, just in case. I can explain how a stack extraction works while I do that, if you want?"

[dotted_lines]

He nods, and walks a few feet to the side of the body for a better view of the procedure.

[onwhatwingswedareaspire]

Thorn explains as she works. Eventually, she gets to the join between the brain stem and the spinal cord. "And there should be a small slippery cylinder -- about this big --" she demonstrates the size with her hands, "here, but... he doesn't seem to have a stack. Damn it."

She sighs, and turns slightly to start absently cutting out chunks of the brain and feeding them to a cuboid she has retrieved from somewhere.

[dotted_lines]

He nods along with her explanation. "Anything else I should do once I've got the stack? And what are you doing to the brain? I don't have one of those, is there something else that would work instead?"

[onwhatwingswedareaspire]

"Put it somewhere you would not potentially lose it, with insulation if possible, but that tends to only be very important in the presence of large amounts of ionizing radiation; they are fairly durable. Destroy the brain if you can, although in cases of brain-death or infection that is less relevant -- egos can be uploaded for two hours after death, or more if properly preserved. --I do not know what they can get off of a partial brain, but it seems best not to find out." She has been continuing to feed chunks into the disassemblers as she speaks, but at this point she looks up at him.

"I know," she says, worriedly. (He might, by this point, be familiar with the expression she makes when she would like a hug. This one is 'I would like a hug but I am currently extremely unsanitary, that is a bad idea')

[dotted_lines]

"I can do that, yeah."

He notices the expression, realizes she thought he meant a stack, that's, really nice for her to be concerned about, she needs a hug.

...She is still kinda bloody, yeah. He looks around the room again. "I don't see any sources of water in here. Do you have a plan to get that off? I know a minor chant for getting blood out of things?"

[onwhatwingswedareaspire]

"Disassemblers are the best way to do that, but severe trauma is better than nothing," she adds, absently.

"I was going to transform the gloves, and," Thorn inspects herself, "everything else that got some on it -- into something that wouldn't hold that. Although if the chant also handles cerebrospinal fluid that might be more convenient." She seems to realize what expression she was making, and adds, "This should not take too much longer."

[dotted_lines]

"Good. It should work, it works on ichor and hemolymph, and some ectoplasms, which are a lot less like blood."

[onwhatwingswedareaspire]

Thorn nods, and silently finishes her task. Then she wipes off her knife and stands, stepping carefully around the body and her still-working nanofabricator.

"This is on the same scale as the shield you were doing earlier, right? --and you do have a way to handle blood contact?"

[dotted_lines]

"Right." He pulls the bloodstone out of his pocket, then ducks down to dip the rock and his uninjured hand into the convenient pool of blood on the floor.

Slowly, to make it clear what he's doing, he reaches out and smudges a bit more blood on the back of each of Thorn's gloves with the stone, then chants a few words in another language. The blood and cerebrospinal fluid on her clothes faintly red and slowly falls off of her and into the puddle on the floor.

[onwhatwingswedareaspire]

That is much simpler.

Okay then. Can hugs happen now?

[dotted_lines]

Yes. Yes they can.

[onwhatwingswedareaspire]

Then they will.

And Thorn thinks about that thing. If something happened -- Aisilian could apparently recover egos, but that might be interfered with by whatever the reason is that they have not even been contacted. The keeper -- exists, which is a whole concern of its own. There are a few other forms of immortality floating around the forum, but they all require being connected to that system.

"You are not allowed to die, okay?" she whispers, just loud enough for him to hear.

[dotted_lines]

That... that was concern and determination, not a threat. He hugs back.

He nods very slightly, hopefully too small a movement to be picked up by anyone but Thorn.