Author: incanted | There are now one dozen Bells.
They and most of their friends are all here on Planet Rainbowsand II, to celebrate the addition of Sarion, the elf one, and Aurora, the one with a sister. |
Author: cardistry | A while after the Jokers have their conference about being everybody's porn, Brilliance wanders out of the orgy chambers with the vague notion of finding Aurora. |
Author: incanted | Aurora is over here! She has just finished up touching base with Lexi, who has discovered that riding a unicorn isn't infinitely fascinating if the unicorn doesn't happen to wander near the conversations you want to participate in and is now on her own feet, over there, investigating some Tony. |
Author: cardistry | "Hey, you," says Brilliance, hugging his Bella. |
Author: incanted | Hugs! "Hi." |
Author: cardistry | Hug hug.
"Alice stopped being a vampire," he mentions. |
Author: incanted | "Oh. Well. That's probably my fault." |
Author: cardistry | "...Fault?" |
Author: incanted | She waves a hand. "Causal responsibility, I didn't mean to imply, like, a value judgment." |
Author: cardistry | "It would've happened eventually without you," says Brilliance. "He kind of needed not to be one. He just didn't know it yet." |
Author: incanted | "If he needed to not be one I'm kind of surprised his native magic thingamabob didn't just completely shut down the process." |
Author: cardistry | "I don't think his power knew," says Brilliance. |
Author: incanted | "Why did he need it? I mean, Stella's reasons turned out to be partially sketchy, but didn't he know what vampires were and how they worked first anyway?" |
Author: cardistry | "The sketchy reasons are why he needed not to be one." |
Author: incanted | "How does that work?" |
Author: cardistry | "Because it just - he was okay with it in the first place because he asked her if the sketchy reasons were her reasons and she pretty much said no," says Brilliance, frustrated. "That shit matters, you can't just force somebody to be in love with you forever, there's lots of ways it can be okay to turn somebody into a vampire, even one of us, there's parts of it he liked, but he couldn't stay one when he knew that was why." |
Author: incanted | "...Uh, I'll tread carefully, and I agree it was sketchy of her, but unless she outright lied to him, and given that all the features of vampirism are a package deal and there are plenty of other reasons to want the other parts, doesn't that just about boil down to penalizing her for having the wrong thought cross her mind? It would've been good to bring it up, it sure seemed like she had been misleading in some way, but - like, if she literally just thought he would have fun turning, if nothing else about it occurred to her except for basic safety checks, if she did not notice that particular thing that she was inclined to identify as a perk - then it would've been fine?" |
Author: cardistry | "...I'm not sure," he says. "It's - well, it's not complicated exactly, but it works the way we work, not the way you work. I think... as long as she was going to think about it the way she thought about it, then someday he was going to have to stop being a vampire. And maybe even if she wasn't. And I wasn't there, but if he asked her a question and she made him think the answer was something it wasn't and that's why he was okay with it, I don't really think any of us would care whether you'd call that lying or not. It's still not okay." |
Author: incanted | "Okay." Pause. "Does Jellybean know about how Bells define lying, because Cam's got that aura..." |
Author: cardistry | "I don't know," says Brilliance. "I don't think it matters that much. How you define lying is not the problem, the problem is that tricking somebody into agreeing to something they wouldn't agree to if they knew the whole story is a really shitty thing to do, especially when the something is big enough to change how your whole mind works." |
Author: incanted | "I would not have Charlie's permission to skip off to uninhabited planets with you if he knew the whole story," Aurora points out. "I mean, you could say that he wouldn't be entitled to stop me regardless, but I am technically a minor child under his custody and the fact that he does not have the wherewithal to prevent me isn't relevant to whether it's his business. And obviously that's a smaller issue than changing someone's species, but the general 'tricking' thing..." |
Author: cardistry | "You don't make any sense," says Brilliance, wrapping his arms around her waist and dropping his head on her shoulder. |
Author: incanted | "I make sense to me," Aurora says. |
Author: cardistry | "You don't make sense to me. I don't understand why - I don't understand anything about this weird thing you have with Charlie, where you pretend we're not fucking so he won't tell us to stop, but if you know he would tell us to stop and you're not stopping then why would it matter if he did?" |
Author: incanted | "As long as he hasn't actually said it," Aurora says, "then I'm not actually defying him. What he has actually said is we can't be in my room with the door closed. So we don't do that. He hasn't been more specific - he doesn't even want to be, he doesn't want to produce a list of actual things he doesn't want done, he doesn't want to live with me demanding to know why and having a long pseudolegalistic argument with him, he mostly feels like it is the duty of the fathers of teenage daughters to usher them into adulthood without any practical understanding of sex. He hasn't bothered to update his model of the world that says that people have sex in bedrooms and not on uninhabited planets they teleport to, so that's what the rule is about. If he changes the rules so it's actually about something I care about being able to do - well, it'd probably depend on how he tried to justify the rule, he's decent enough not to attempt anything serious by pure fiat, especially since I could move back to Renée's anytime and he probably suspects she'd be fine with it. But anyway, things would become so much less pleasant in my relationship with Charlie if that had to be an actual conversation we had. And I will not actually lie to him - I will not tell him 'Yes, Dad' if he lays down a rule that I'm going to ignore. So that rule would turn into a mess. I am avoiding that mess." |
Author: cardistry | "That is weird," says Brilliance, "but I think it's mostly weird because of my trust issues, so whatever, not the point. I forget what the point is. Do we still care about the point?" |
Author: incanted | "I think I know enough about your end of the point to not mess it up with you, at least not about anything important like altering your species. Up to you if you want to quiz me about my end of the point." |
Author: cardistry | "...I don't really know what your end of the point is," says Brilliance. "What's your end of the point?" |
Author: incanted | "Lying is bad. Not the worst thing ever, but bad. Lying by omission - isn't the same thing. People have a right to limit what information exits their heads, if they want to. And 'I refuse to answer that question' is information, 'let's change the subject' is information, and if that kind of information is something you want to keep to yourself, then you get to dance around it to keep it safe, I think. It's not always a good idea. It was sketchy for Stella to do what she did; considering that she's supposedly in in love with Alice it was especially bad. But - I wasn't there but I seriously doubt he asked her point-blank and she responded with a sentence that was in fact false." She closes her eyes. "Obviously it was an issue anyway since it turned out to matter very much to Alice what she was leaving out. With this cautionary example, I'm going to be more careful than she was. But that doesn't mean a complete open book policy, I can't do that, it would destroy me, we know that now -" She gestures vaguely at Sarion. |
Author: cardistry | "We need to know stuff sometimes," he says, "not a lot of the time, not all stuff, but. My end of the point goes something like. If somebody knows something, and they think that if I knew it that would change how I act in ways that I'd like better but they'd like worse, so they make sure I don't find out, then they're not my friend and if I trust them I need to stop." |
Author: incanted | Aurora thinks about this.
And then she says, "That puts a floor on how much goal structure you have to share with anyone you want to be friends with." Pause. "But basically I agree with you." |
Author: cardistry | "Oh. Good," says Brilliance, and he hugs her again. |
Author: incanted | Hugs!
"Of course," Aurora murmurs, "if telling people true things routinely makes them act in ways I don't like, then they aren't my friend, and I shouldn't trust them." |
Author: cardistry | "Well - yeah," he says. "That too. But, I dunno, there aren't a lot of ways people can act that I don't like that aren't about trying to control me." |
Author: incanted | "I'm curious about that," says Aurora, leaning her head against his shoulder. "I don't want to be controlled either, but it sounds really - fundamental to you." |
Author: cardistry | "It is really fundamental to me. It's really fundamental to all of us, but I'm far and away the most fucked up about it." |
Author: incanted | "What else can you tell me? I'm worried I'll - say something wrong about something important and you'll wind up feeling like I'm trying to control you, and then we'll be stuck with a terrible situation where I've gone and misframed the whole thing and all the okay results for me are no longer okay results for you because of that framing." |
Author: cardistry | "...I mean, I'm not saying that it would be fun if that happened," he says, "because it really wouldn't, but I've stuck around this long through you saying a couple of scary things, I think we can figure it out. I don't know exactly what you mean by 'framing', but I don't think you can make something that would've been okay be unfixably not okay just by saying the wrong thing." |
Author: incanted | "I don't have an example in mind to explain what I mean about framing," Aurora sighs. |
Author: cardistry | "I don't think I could end up feeling like you were trying to control me and then stay that way unless you were actually trying to control me," he says, "and I don't think you'll do that, because I think you've figured out by now to try asking nicely instead." |
Author: incanted | "If I were - scared or angry or I misunderstood something you said or if I correctly understood something alarming you said, I might not remember to try asking nicely first," says Aurora. "If it was sufficiently desperately important and asking nicely didn't work, then - I don't have an example, but it's not like it couldn't happen, I have been handed the keys to the universe and you've got a grip on the other end of my keychain, I will be handling high stakes sometimes." |
Author: cardistry | "...it needs to not happen, though," says Brilliance. "It needs to not happen or I need to get out of this universe and never come back." |
Author: incanted | |
Author: cardistry | He hugs her gently, shaking his head.
"That's what happens," he says softly. "Not if you just make me scared of it by accident once in a while, I get scared a lot, I can handle being scared, but if you force me to do something, or force me not to, I'll leave. I'll be really sad about it. And I will run away as far and as fast as I possibly can." |
Author: incanted | "So - what does that leave us with, just hoping really hard that you don't run into any of my dealbreakers where given the choice between you bolting or whatever you'd be doing if I didn't use force I prefer the former?" |
Author: cardistry | "If I thought that was ever going to happen, I would've run away already," says Brilliance. "I don't know what I could possibly want to do so badly that I'd still do it if you asked me not to, that would also be the kind of thing you'd fuck me over like that for if it came down to it. I don't think there's that many things you would, and most of that's probably stuff I already don't wanna do all by myself, like blowing up planets." |
Author: incanted | "It admittedly does help my comfort around this that you demonstrably don't want to blow up planets." |
Author: cardistry | "Like - I could see us arguing about you not wanting me to do stuff," he says, "sure, probably. But I don't think there's anything I need to do that you need me not to." |
Author: incanted | Aurora nods slowly, once. |
Author: cardistry | "And arguing isn't going to make me run away," he says. "And as long as we're arguing about something, I'm not doing whatever it is and you're not forcing me not to. And if you decide you really can't stand whatever it is happening, and I decide I really can't stand that you really can't stand that, then - I can just go hang out with Queenie until we both calm down. Okay?" |
Author: incanted | "'Cause she's so cuddly?" asks Aurora weakly. |
Author: cardistry | He laughs.
"She is, I can see why the Joker wanted me to hang out with her if things got fucked up with us." |
Author: incanted | Aurora snuggles up to him. "So the emergency procedure, if there's ever a desperate hurry and no more time to argue, involves having Jane banish you to Origin?" |
Author: cardistry | "That's... probably the best emergency procedure if you really feel like you absolutely have to do something right away. I won't like it much, but... I'll hang out with Queenie and wait for you to come explain." |
Author: incanted | "Okay. And with any luck it won't come up." Snuggles. |
Author: cardistry | "...The only way I can think of for it to come up is if we were arguing about something and got interrupted by something else," says Brilliance, "in which case you probably don't want me to go hang out with Queenie, you want me to stick around and help you deal with the emergency." |
Author: incanted | "Would you do that? With the argument still unresolved?" |
Author: cardistry | "Um, yeah?" |
Author: incanted | "Okay then." |
Author: cardistry | He hugs her. |
Author: incanted | Hugs! |
Author: cardistry | Huuuuuugs. |
Author: dark_light | Amariah wanders by and conjures a little golden trophy, cup-shaped on a wooden stand, and deposits it into a bewildered Aurora's hand and wanders away. |
Author: cardistry | "What the fuck," giggles Brilliance. |
Author: incanted | Aurora peers at the trophy, then checks for an engraving.
It says For Excellence In Grownup Problem Solving.
She sporfles. |
Author: cardistry | Brilliance also sporfles! |
Author: incanted | "Wow," says Aurora. |
Author: cardistry | "Should we maybe ask her to explain that," wonders Brilliance, "or should we just put it on a shelf somewhere and admire it occasionally?" |
Author: incanted | "I have no idea. I don't even have a shelf that I would consider suitable to hold an award of this magnitude." |
Author: cardistry | "Also," says Brilliance, "important question for Amariah who is apparently eavesdropping on us, is that award for us or just for you." |
Author: dark_light | [Both of you,] says Amariah from her just-barely-within-earshot vantage point. |
Author: cardistry | "In that case, thanks!" |
Author: incanted | Aurora laughs and puts the trophy down someplace out of the way - it's not like anyone's going to steal it - and then gives Brilliance a kiss. |
Author: cardistry | Brilliance kisses back. Mmmmmmkiss. |