Murder Mysterium - 10IV

[idolpro]

[ Your unit-colored alcove has its own seating—benches, rather than any specific number of chairs, line the green bushels. It's wide enough to comfortably fit all of your unitmates if necessary, though it's likely not all of you will be here at a time. You're aware, somehow, that the space is soundproof; you could say whatever you like here and it won't be heard by anyone but your unitmates.

At the center of your "room" is what looks to be a marble table, but upon further inspection you'll note that the surface is actually electronic, a touch screen that mimics the visual texture of marble. Here, you have a number of options of things to choose from, and you can even pull up a keyboard or write with your finger for a certain freeform answer section. ]

Comments

[salientfacts]

..............I have to admit you're not quite pulling off the "not being perceived as weird," here, not that I terribly mind.

Then again, I was never very good at convincing anyone of anything, largely due to not trying, so perhaps I can accept that you're more knowledgeable about it than I.

[bofa]

I keep getting told that I seem weirder when I'm trying to be normal than I do when I'm not so I've started to figure it's just Fate punishing me for stepping out of line.

[salientfacts]

Fate seems to have rather a predilection toward that.

[bofa]

Oh, yes! That's literally how it works. It's all very fascinating.

[salientfacts]

Who was responsible for that, anyway?

[bofa]

Endings, remember? Not Secrets. Wrong department for that question.

[salientfacts]

Ahaha.

...well, I suppose my cohort rather deserved what we got, in a lot of ways.

1/3

[bofa]

Oh, you shouldn't really think about things in terms of what you deserved or not! I understand that it feels like that sometimes, but it's actually always just a matter of special circumstances colliding in such a way that potential effects arise which require a cause.

So, for example, imagine you're a bystander who has come across a heavily damaged remote control mechanism for an out-of-control warstrider. You're too far away to actually do anything meaningful to stop the warstrider , but you can input one movement command that will change its course. Now as Fate would have it, the warstrider would crash and detonate inside a village that happens to contain the entire current population of Creation as well as all important structural mechanisms keeping Creation in operation, killing everything that currently exists instantaneously. But you've been granted this once in an existence chance to press a button which will direct the warstrider onto a path where instead it kills 300 people who are apparently completely incapable of not breaking various laws of reality (many of which they are not even aware of or capable of comprehending!), which ultimately would save more people in the short-term except the warstrider doesn't actually crash in this case so...

[bofa]

[bofa]

Oooooh, that plan was even stupider than I thoooought...

[salientfacts]

Um.

Just to be clear, is this a metaphor for "we had all of you killed to save Creation, except Creation kept having problems?"

[bofa]

Right, but none of them were yooooou!

(I'm doing my best to salvage this line of thought!)

[salientfacts]

I'm not really mad, just disappointed.

[bofa]

I would like to reiterate that I thought it was kind of stupid at the time, too! It just wasn't a very good ending, you know? I did all I could to fight back against it, which wasn't much because I was still shadowing and was already also written up a few times for poor conduct.

Have you ever heard of someone being fired from Yu-Shan? I haven't, because it's ontologically impossible for a situation to arise in which that can happen!

[salientfacts]

Why does the celestial bureaucracy sound like such a nightmare?

...also, what kind of thing even constitutes "poor conduct" up there? Embezzlement?

[bofa]

Oh, you know. Wasting celestial resources, tampering with regulatory mechanisms like the Loom, carrying out or enabling any form of interference in Creation without filing the proper paperwork, defying Fate, making a superior think you might be planning to defy Fate, embezzlement...

Really though, every single one of those is okay if enough people agree on it and the paperwork is legitimate, except the defying Fate thing. Oh, and the embezzlement. Paycheck politics are our primary method of conflict resolution amongst ourselves.

[salientfacts]

...I didn't expect it to actually be embezzlement, somehow.

You know, I suppose I should have expected that it wasn't all merely the disgruntled Dragonblooded. Not that they couldn't have done it, but that it all fell into place so well.

[bofa]

When you do things right, people won't be sure you did anything at all! Someone famous probably said that somewhere, once.

[salientfacts]

I'll just have to take your word for it.

...so, you're trying to return, then?

[bofa]

Well, I figure I have to try. I'm cut off from the Loom and this place seems to exist outside of Fate, but I think if I'm not supposed to make it back then I won't. So it's better to try and fail than to not try and miss out entirely, right?

Besides, I was actually sort of hoping I'd make it to retirement age. I only had a couple hundred years left in me, I think. It has this kind of narrative justice to it - Chosen of Endings takes longest possible route to reach an ending!

Aaaand I'd really like to apologize to everyone for pulling a few thousand years of accumulated strings to try and fix the whole needing to kill every Solar again problem. I still think it would've been a really smart plan if it had worked out, but dying like that probably left a lot of messes for everyone to clean up. Wonder how that circle I put together is doing now, actually.

[salientfacts]

Well, I'm not really intending to return, myself, so—

I don't suppose I could prevail upon you to actually say what your plan was? Because you've built it up quite a bit.

[bofa]

Well, you know how after we had most of you killed at a party we shoved your sparks in an unbelievably powerful artifact prison and shoved that unbelievably powerful artifact prison into the deepest and darkest chasm where no living thing dares tread, celestial or otherwise?

[salientfacts]

Uh. Sort of.

I didn't actually know that last part.

1/2

[bofa]

Of course you didn't! You won't remember it if you ever go back to Creation, either. Since I'm capable of being honest with you in this place, I can tell you most of the history surrounding that period of time aside from "it happened" is completely inaccessible by anyone, including us! Sure, everyone in Yu-Shan knows we had something to do with it, but even something like "we had most of you killed" is unprovable by any entity (existing or otherwise), under any circumstances, and much like our existence in general can only be inferred via a contrivance of circumstantial evidence.

(Do you see what I did there?)

[bofa]

Oh, but anyway - it turns out the important part of that is that the phrase "no living thing" does not, in fact, preclude the possibility of things that are not living treading in the aforementioned chasm.

Soooooo the unbelievably powerful artifact prison was stolen. In our defense, there's only a hundred of us and Creation is really big and always on fire we just really thought nobody would figure that one out so watching it wasn't really a priority.

It's fine because it broke in transit. Well, fine for you. Not fine for us, because some of those sparks were still stolen and that's why we have reverse Solars now, and also the rest of them went back to empowering mortals when we were barely able to deal with the ones we missed in the first place.

So not really fine for you either. Or your spark's current holder as of my current temporal frame of reference, since yours was one of the stolen ones. Really it actually wasn't fine for anybody and I lied to make myself feel better about it.