idolpro | 531 Monstrosity & Morality: Dividing Lines of the Self and Other, Section 1

"I suppose you could say..." She clicks her tongue, lightly. "I thought I always knew... what I wanted to do with my existence. But I've lost... so many things that I counted on."

Such as?

"My sister. My mother, in a way, even though I lost her long ago. My faith..." She frowns even more deeply. "My trust that all will be well, and that the people I admire will know the right way."

Her bottom lip wobbles a little bit. "I wanted to do good things for the world... but so many of the things I loved about it are gone."

Your sister... and your mother? Were they- vampires?

"I..."

A pause.

"I suppose so. I think... it must have happened to my mother after I was taken from her, as a child. I barely remember her."

Do you have their names, at least?

"Well, my sister—Sam..." She looks at you. "You said you met her?"

She's in the Primary Sources section.

"Ah—"

She looks like she's feeling a mix of hope and pain—grief, maybe. "If she's here—" She scrubs at her face a little bit more. "I don't know... if I can face her like this. I told her that I'd keep her safe..."

Another wet sob.

Do you feel like you failed her?

With a bitter, mirthless laugh—

"Of course I do. Or... maybe I was foolish to think I could do anything for her. I don't know, anymore."

What happened?

"If you really have met my sister, you know—she's a monster. But so am I, so—I wanted to try and see if I could teach her not to harm people."

And she couldn't help herself?

"I wonder..." She shakes her head. "Grace... had a lot of hope for vampires, near the end. She thought they could be better than what they were. I wanted to trust her, and—I felt responsible for Sam."

What happened with Grace?

"Well—"

She gives a brief, light and mirthless laugh.

"I still... want to believe in her. But Sam became something distant and strange, and the vampires that Grace had been instructing used her to trap and kill another vampire, and killed her, too. And I couldn't..."

Did they give a reason for it?

"Well—she was a monster, they were afraid of her, and just... to them, something they could use and discard and feel victorious about, I suppose." Her lip twists. "There's a lot of that in the world, I suppose, but..."

She looks at him, and at Nyx. "You've both been very kind, at least."

Then there you have it.

If they weren't really interested in learning to begin with... it isn't so much proof that "all vampires are monsters" so much as "those ones had no interest in being anything else," isn't it?

[We are not addressing that last part.]

She reaches a hand out and ruffles his hair. "Maybe I've spent too much time dwelling on the monstrous side of the world, in a way. There are still good children like you both, after all."

And she also gives a slightly downcast Nyx a hug, and—

"And don't forget to accept compliments from your elders, young man."

Suddenly, she's—that woman you saw at the front desk, except a little more professionally dressed, like she's going to work. All black.

Edited 2021-08-28 03:11 (UTC)

[...Ah.]

Was that an acceptable submission?

Oh, I'm not the professor! Just a professor, I suppose. You'd want to talk to Hope for that. I'm Grace Yi.

Ah, so it's like that...

In that case, maybe I should ask: is that an acceptable conclusion?

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