Alright. I've gone this far only really nipping at the corners of the topic as circumstance demands, but I suppose it's time that I finally talk directly about the Great Interplanar War. It's not that I've been avoiding it, it's just not exactly fun history, and has never really felt personally or politically relevant to me. I guess that speaks to the success of the Grand Alliance's efforts to minimize its cultural presence when I was young, or at least my own lack of social consciousness about things that aren't directly relevant to me.
In the year 457 COVENANT, a group of arcanists, lips still relatively wet with knowledge direct from the teats of the Ironworkers, decided to modify the Great Lamp. Because light and electromagnetism operates differently in the Remaining World than the home plane of humanity, the composition of the radiation it emits is more 'narrow' then the original sun, a strict set of particular frequencies rather than the entire spectrum of light, which - as I talked about a while ago - is subtly noticeable, and was even more so in the beginning. In addition, because of the manner by which the lamps travel across the sky in an arc, with seasonal shifts only occurring as a result of the angle of said arc oscillating forward and backwards, there are segments of the world at the periphery of the Elysian Pangaea that are borderline uninhabitable because of how close they approach to the surface during the summer. Barely seeing any light the rest of the year, for a few scant weeks the Great Lamp comes so close to the lands furthest up the bowl's curve that temperatures can soar beyond 50 degrees, obliterating all illusion of earthliness.
In the halls of the Guild of Runesmiths in Ysara and the House of the Cycle in Mekhi, an alternative was envisioned where the Great Lamp was larger, more distant, and moved independently, resolving these issues. What records remain from the time indicate they did not consider this endeavor anywhere near as risky as it proved to be, though why that was the case is the subject of much debate. Conspiracy theories abound, the most historically popular being that the true nature of the operation was one of maintenance, that whichever Ironworker had put it together had elected to force their initial assumption that the generation which first colonized the Mimikos in the Exodus would be the last. Although lately it's become fashionable to blame the Duumvirate instead.
I digress. Whatever the reason, it ended badly. The incantation that sustained the fires failed, and for more than 10 years the Mimikos was swallowed by eternal night. The oceans froze, and the nascent high civilization of the First Resurrection nearly died. Arcanists, previously a class of specialists or mystics operating at remove from society, became essential for survival, precipitating a magocracy that would dominate the world until the end of the Tricenturial War-- An irony, since they'd caused the problem to begin with.
Most used the Power to create great shelters and wait out the crisis, which initially was hoped would be resolved quickly. In the latter part of the period, however, more extreme measures began to be taken, including fleeing the Mimikos altogether. The first demiplanes were raised in this era, and some even fled into the Empyrean, taking refuge in the habitats of the Lluateci. But most saw a lower-hanging fruit.
They went to the Lower Planes.
The first stop was the Atelikos, but few had the luxury of staying there. I told you before that the plane was 97% ocean, but what I neglected to mention was that this was not the design of the Ironworkers, but later settlers - some from the very era I'm describing - who erected landmasses for their own purposes. Originally, it was 100% ocean, its entire disk without so much as a single rocky protrusion. The few islands that had been wrought at the time quickly filled to the brim, and the only way to go was down.
The Diakos, in contrast, had no shortage of land, but... actually, I'm approaching this in the wrong order. Let's go back.
I think I've told you most of this before in bits and pieces, but here's a quick review. The Diakos, the 5th plane of the Remaining World, was the point where the Ironworkers gave up on truly recreating the old world and shifted their goal towards a workable approximation. Accordingly, it is the first plane it is possible for a normal person to stand in without any special equipment or infrastructure and not be dead within 10 minutes. However, this does not make being in it pleasant. Alongside matters of aesthetics like there being no such thing as a sunset - only an unmoving lamp obscured intermittently by stone plates - the physics are not quite right. Heat and mass do not quite travel as they ought to. The air is bitterly cold and yet painfully humid; the slightest uptick in heat can quickly kill you. And all fluid drags just a little more than it should, including within the human body. Without protection from an artifice, what begins as constant nausea ends as organ failure within a few months.
The Ironworkers, realizing this, instead repurposed the plane to serve as a testbed for the copper-based life that would come to inhabit the Mimikos, shaping their forms and minds, at first most closely related to octopodes (natural hemocyanics, if you didn't know) into something more familiar. And when they were done, they left their prototypes behind, persisting over the eons in which they allowed life to propagate over the Mimikos before finally waking their charges.
In those unnumbered days, something happened which the Ironworkers neither expected, nor arguably even noticed. In the vast-yet-shallow cenotes that dotted the uneven jungles of the Diakos, where the waters were warmer and clearer than the frigid oceans, an offshoot of the Nautilidae family developed a unique ecological niche. Beginning as parasites akin to barnacles, they began to take a function more akin to artificial organs, sharpening the chemical reward systems of their hosts and helping filter toxins from their blood. Soon, they developed the ability to communicate with others of their kind at a distance using noises at a pitch inaudible to most animals, coordinating to forewarn their hosts of threats by spiking their adrenaline.
Millions of years passed, and evolution did its work. By the time human history resumed two planes overhead, the creatures had diversified into the group of species we now refer to as the Wyrm, symbiotes capable of comprehensive organ substitution and augmentation, though when people say 'Wyrm' they're usually talking about the Anthupalos Telenkefalos, which enclosed the spine and was sympathetic with the brain. (It also looks sort of like a worm, though this is not where the name comes from.)
There are a couple misconceptions about the Wyrm that nevertheless persist in popular culture. The first is that they were the 'first sapient non-human species discovered'. Setting aside how questionable it is whether humanity was even the only sapient species on the Earth, technically speaking, the Wyrm are barely more intelligent than oysters in isolation. Because their bonding works in part by replicating the cells of the target organ, their minds - and the intelligence thereof - take on the nature of their host. Removed from a body, their Cambrian nature returns within a day at most.
...I'm not saying this to argue that their sapience 'didn't count', for the record. I'm not one of those people.
The second is that the Wyrm were a 'hive mind', sharing one vast intelligence with no conception of individual free will. While they did have some eusocial traits, capable of communicating basic needs at a distance and creating a small degree of biological empathy between their hosts, they remained largely independent, the nature of their society being only downstream from those facts. Direct communication was only possible between the brain and its symbiote in specific.
More controversial is the claim that they mind-controlled whatever they were attached to, dominated them into doing what they wanted. It's true, at least, that they never stopped using chemical incentives to alter the preferences of their hosts - to make them want them there, to find their presence aesthetically and conceptually wholesome rather than upsetting, to desire food and drink that served their livelihood rather than their own. But one could make the argument that all organs essentially demand resources and reward being a good sport in the same way, and how much they truly influenced higher cognition remains much more ambiguous. I've heard the argument that the opposite is true, that the imposition - transplantation - of human values, human will, ultimately made the Wyrm deviate from their self-interest far more than the reverse, abetting tremendous harm to their own kind to serve their new masters, their new siblings of selfhood. I suppose it becomes a bit of a philosophical question, which intuitively makes me find it kind of annoying.
In any case. While many groups managed to eke out a painful existence in the Diakos during the Interluminary Strife, it's known that the one which encountered the Wyrm first originated from the west of the Orphaned Continent, one of the smaller states that huddled in Irenca's shadow at the time. No one knows exactly how it happened, but what is presumed is that one of the settlers discovered that bonding with a Wyrm - or several - allowed them to better endure its environment. I can't really imagine how they would have progressed from that to 'let's let one of these sea creatures crawl up my foramen magnum'. Maybe things snowballed, or maybe it was an accident.
If you'll forgive a personal digression for a moment, there's a part of me that's always been deeply curious about what it feels like to have two minds interlinked, but still separate. I know I-- Well, I just can't conceptualize it, how it wouldn't all just collapse together. Was it just like talking over a logic engine for them? I've read some of the books, and the way they describe it feels far more intimate than that, talking about communicating through concepts beyond words. But maybe that's just the shared nervous system, and it's not really that deep. Maybe the Wyrm never had a will in the same way humans do to begin with, and the whole thing was a square peg touching a round hole, separation through alienation.
Still, I can't help but wonder. What was it like, for the first person it happened to, who didn't know it would happen? Were they terrified? Was it wonderful, just to be known?
And what did the Wyrm feel like, to suddenly exist, ex nihilo, no context?
After the Tricenturial War, the great powers of the Liberating Army (and the Arcanocracy, after possibly the best-timed political betrayal in history) were hungry to turn the industry that they'd used to crack open the Empire for more hedonistic purposes, but found themselves wanting for low-hanging resources. Not knowing that the perfection of replication arcana was not too far around the corner, or perhaps too eager to shoot something with decades of constipated military hardware to care, they ventured afield.
It's another more recent myth that they didn't know the wyrmkin were there, that it was some big first-contact-moment shock when it finally happened. But of course that's nonsense; it's not like arcanists stopped going to other planes for 700 years. They knew they were there, their settlements spreading slowly across the vast moors and jungles of the Kernuin Highlands, the most hospitable region of the ring. But they were treated like a curiosity, almost beneath attention.
No. The surprise came when they started encroaching on their land.
Like the Atelikos, time passes differently on each of the Lower Planes relative to the Mimikos, though to different degrees. Time on the Diakos moves significantly faster; an hour in Old Yru is nearly 90 minutes in Xiacavn. For this reason, by 1138 COVENANT - when the Ysaran Consensus established its first outpost on the Diakos - almost a millennium had passed on its surface since the first bonding had taken place.
In that time, much like the Mimikos itself had grown from less than 100,000 settlers to a civilization of billions, the wyrmkin now numbered over 600 million people, and twice as many intelligences.
People like to play up the body horror aspect of the whole thing, but I've seen pictures, and on the surface they were still recognizably human, the only visible difference being desaturated, paled skin and meager, symmetrical carbonate growths in areas where the Wyrm were most vulnerable. Internally, however, were varied ecosystems of alien organs. While not in any sense straightforwardly superior - evolution, for all its strengths, was still no match for Imperial Era anima scripting - the second greatest advantage the wyrmkin had over regular humans was their modularity. Individuals could be specialized on a physical level, to be more durable, faster, restless, focused. They could take wounds that would undo a normal animal just by swapping in a new part.
But that wasn't what truly alarmed the nations of the Mimikos, nor was it even that their knowledge of biology and certain types of Geomancy had eclipsed their own, as by and large their use of the Power and their engineering was still regarded as primitive. But what did provoke concern was the first greatest advantage, which was that the Wyrm had adapted the blood of their new hosts to their own. The wyrmkin had taken the step the Ironworkers had refused to, and no longer were the pure sons of Helios sustained by trickeries of physics. Though still married to the human genome and Seeds for the time being, those were just technical limitations. They could change.
The wyrmkin were not a united people; if anything, they were even more fractured than the Eight Parties, their lands a patchwork of small city-states. But even still, after they'd scared off the first expeditions that hadn't even considered their borders a serious concept, they had little difficulty seeing off the token forces sent in the aftermath.
Thus, the signatories of the Covenant found themselves faced with an antithesis that challenged their collective vision for humanity following the collapse, proving that the human experience, so carefully reconstructed, perhaps still had room for improvement. That offered a different future for the species. And that was growing more powerful at a rate they could never hope to match.
And so, in the long tradition that began with Cronus, they reacted with the same level of logic and compassion that most people do when faced with their potential replacement.
"Phi, you're here!" Kam said, putting her hands together as we entered. "That's good. I was a tad bit concerned from your wording that you were being sardonic in your message."
"No," Ophelia said. She was sitting somewhat rigidly, her hands rested on her lap. Her eyes kept shifting intermittently from staring at me to pointedly looking away in discomfort.
"Well then." She extended a hand, ushering me into the room. "Shall we all take a seat?"
Hesitantly, I obeyed her direction, stepping into the half-light of the hall. I know I was just saying this about the Everblossom a few minutes ago, but this was perhaps the least accurate representation of the sanctuary so far, though in this case it was less about incorrect details and more about what wasn't here. The shelves, in reality packed densely with boxes, here were entirely barren, making the chamber feel much larger and airier than I remembered. Bereft of its original context, it felt like we were in some kind of low-budget evil church.
Kamrusepa noticed the direction of my gaze. "We don't know what was in the boxes, so it was elected to omit them," she explained.
"I could have worked that out myself," I mumbled.
"Why are you whispering?" She asked, not whispering.
"I-- I mean, the atmosphere is weird." I glanced at Ophelia, who was still as she watched us approach.
"Things are only 'weird' when you let them be, Su. Stop being neurotic."
We approached the induction bed, Kam waving her hand and conjuring two more chairs for us both. The idea of using it as a table felt a little unpleasant to me, as did doing this while being stared down at by the faceless, genderless god of death, but beggars couldn't be choosers. Even if we were probably rushing things, I needed to build bridges with the others as much as I could if this was ever going to work.
More than that, if I'd really done something so terrible to Ophelia... Well, she seemed a lot more willing to share speculation about my potential motive than Kamrusepa or Ptolema, who were more invested in treating me gently. And that was something I really wanted to know, even if it also made me uncomfortable.
Kam's eyes darted quickly between the two of us. "We don't have to talk about anything too serious right off the bat," she said. "Let's... start by breaking the ice a bit, eh? Just chat."
I blinked. "O-Okay."
"Su," she began, based on the obvious reality that I was the one more willing to actually talk. "Why don't you tell Phi about what you've been doing since you became aware of yourself here in the afterworld? How you found yourself back with us again after so long, and the life you've been living over in the Crossroads."
"Um." I pursed my lips. Every time I attempted to meet Ophelia's eyes, she looked away, so I quickly gave up on the idea, staring down at the reflective surface of the bed instead. "Well, up until a couple months ago, I thought I was living in the year 1608. I'd, uh, moved to Deshur - the new superstructure the Mekhian government built, you probably know about it. I'd been... working in academia, but one day I went in for a regular check up, and it turned out I had--"
"Why..." Ophelia hesitated, swallowing. "Why do you look like that."
Her tone was a little different than it had been in Samium's room. Slower, more measured and guarded, in a way that was closer to how I remembered her. But it still lacked most of her characteristic gentleness and meekness, making it almost too neutral. Empty.
I expected Kamrusepa to explain the whole situation before I even had a chance to open my mouth, but she just inclined her head towards me, so I cleared my throat. "I-I'm trying to be careful about my identity," I said. "I don't really know if I want to commit to... to all this, yet, and I don't want the people here to get, uh, too excited."
For a moment, she offered not even a hint of a physical acknowledgement to my words, to the point that I wondered if she somehow hadn't heard me, but then said: "You should turn back to your real form."
I frowned. "Um."
"It's alright," Kam said smoothly. "I'll seal the room to make sure no one can spy on or bother us."
She waved a hand, which did not appear to do anything, but presumably did. Was it an incantation? A use of her powers as a person in standing in the Domain? A functionless gesture meant to make me feel better? A never-answered question.
I gave Kam one last wary glance, then reset my body.
As soon as I did, Ophelia's expression and posture went through several rapid changes. First her eyes widened, and she lurched back a little bit sharply, as if stung by an insect. Then a subtle shudder passed through her body, and her lower lip twitched and tightened. The muscles of her arms and hands hardened, and air escaped her nose as her mouth briefly formed into a frown before returning to their original state.
The predominant emotion was one I recognized well. It wasn't anger or even fear, but the kind of existential panic that comes when you pick at a traumatic scab, an aversion that's become hardwired into one's lizard brain like learning to recognize the stripes on a tiger. I'd been looked at with exhausted discomfort, hatred, profound disappointment, and even disgust. But if only in the second it happened, this felt viscerally the worst of all. Being looked at, for something that I hadn't consciously done but apparently existed within me, like I was some kind of monster. It felt like...
I don't know.
Finally, Ophelia met my eyes, looking like she was trying to force herself to do it just to become accommodated with the notion. "I... It really is you," she said.
"Y-Yeah."
"How can you be here, too?" She asked. "Even after you..." Her eyes fell again. "After what..."
"I don't--"
Suddenly, Ophelia stood up and reached out her hands and leaned over the induction bed, her grip spread wide. It was the exact posture she would use if she intended to strangle me. Beyond the more indulgent rationales I'd observed already, I assumed that Dilmun culture would tolerate incredible violence as a legitimate means of emotional self-expression to a far greater degree than reality, and in a sense I even preferred this to the current feeling in the air because it muddied the situation and let me feel more like a victim myself, like I was being persecuted by someone not in control of their wits. (At last, the ingrained stereotype of the hysterical woman working for rather than against me!)
However, mid-point into her hands closing around my neck - Kamrusepa quickly rising from her chair herself to attempt to diffuse the situation - they suddenly stopped like the muscles had gone on strike. She held them there, trembling slightly, as I stared up at her somehow still-averted, unnatural eyes. Occasionally her fingers would flex a little, as if she were throttling a larger ghost or aura that terminated about a half-foot away from my actual body. Her face flushed and her breath quickened, making her look almost embarrassed.
It was probably this that gave me the confidence to speak up again. "I... I'm sorry," I said. "I mean... I don't know what Kam said, but... We don't have to do this if you-- If you don't want to. You don't have to force yourself... I'll leave the Domain if you want." I swallowed. "I'm sorry for whatever happened. Even if I don't remember."
She squinted slowly as I spoke, but otherwise didn't respond. After a few more moments, I glanced to the side at her outstretched left hand, and somehow this seemed to break the spell. She turned away suddenly, pacing towards one of the shelves, facing the wall.
"...it isn't fair," she said quietly.
"Ophelia, calm down," Kam said, sighing through her nose. "You're acting ridiculous."
"The one comfort I had about the nature of this place was that you weren't here," she continued. "That at least I... That at least we weren't trapped here with the person who put us here in the first place."
"I didn't trap you here," I said without thinking.
She looked back in our direction sharply. "You're the one who-- Who killed us in the first place!"
"You know that's almost certainly not how it worked," Kamrusepa said patiently, crossing her arms. "Seth didn't even die on the day he recalls, and yet he's still here with the rest of us. And regardless, it wasn't even this instance of her that did it to you."
"This instance-- As if it's a different person." She scoffed. It was a brittle sound coming from her, almost like a sneeze. "As if there's any that weren't trying to do the exact same thing!"
"I really wasn't," I uttered weakly.
"You... How dare you!" she hissed. "To lie about this to my face, even now!"
"I'm not lying!" I denied, raising my voice.
Ophelia turned sharply in Kam's direction. "Don't tell me you believe a word of this."
She sighed, clasping her hands together. "Whatever she may or may not have intended eons ago is completely irrelevant."
I blinked, looking to her. "Wait, do you not believe me?"
"You of all people, Ophelia, ought to know that it's absolutely pointless to be judging one another based on our actions back then," Kam continued. "You've heard just as many accounts as I have, and they cover none of us in glory."
"You can't possibly be making that comparison!"
"And regardless, we're all very different people than we were back then. Acting like this simply isn't rational."
Ophelia's posture stiffened in a way that made her seem outright angry for a moment, like she was about to leave again, but then shook her head sharply looking back towards me. "Why."
"I-- Why what." I shrunk uncomfortably.
"Why did you do it," she said, taking a step closer, but still remaining in the shadows of the room.
"I'm serious!" I exclaimed. "I really don't know!"
She took another step forward, and now I could see her face again, her lip now curled into a deep, unsteady grimace. "You're a liar. Someone doesn't go from being a normal person to just deciding to do what you did in the course of just a single day."
"I don't even know what I did! I was hoping to learn that from you!"
"You tortured us!"
"C-Can you be more specific?!"
She was silent, looking down at me in judgement.
"I..." I adjusted my glasses, getting used to them being back on my head. "I don't know what to say. If it really is like that, then someone must have been impersonating me or something. Or-- Or maybe I was drugged, or I somehow found out what was going on wasn't real..."
"You're just ashamed," she said sharply. "You don't want people here to find out about you. Maybe that's why you went into hiding to begin with."
"No, that's seriously not it." I mean, I would totally pull something like that if she was right, but that's neither here nor there.
She stared at me for a moment, then half-turned away, her expression growing more distant. She folded her arms, the long sleeves of her robe flopping over her waist.
"This has all become rather melodramatic," Kamrusepa said, now perhaps a little irritated. She pulled out her resonator idly. "Ophelia, your message said, and I quote. 'Fine. I'll do what I have to. Bring her here.' Did you not mean that? Do you want this or not?"
Ophelia held her position for a moment, her breathing unsteady. She closed her eyes for a moment.
"Get out, Kam," she finally said, softly.
Kamrusepa sighed exorbitantly. "Wonderful. Well, Su, we'll have to--"
"No, just you," Ophelia clarified. "...leave us. Wait outside."
"What? No, absolutely not." She frowned deeply. "This is clearly a far more raw issue to you than you've ever given the impression, and Utsushikome is still emotionally fragile herself, murderer or not. I can't have the two of you bloody well tearing into one another and spoiling everything."
By spoiling everything, she means she's worried you'll get upset and won't be able to tell her anything more useful.
Ophelia took a heavy breath. "I can't have you here, while I'm trying to... While I'm trying to do this. It makes it too hard to think."
"What does that even mean?"
"Kamrusepa."
Kam stared at her for a moment, then glanced at me. I responded with an anxious, exasperated look, which she somehow interpreted as acquiescence. She clicked her tongue, then rose from her seat.
"I'll be right outside the door, and if I hear any raised voices, I'm coming back in. Please try to act civil, Ophelia. Don't shoot yourself in the foot." She glanced to me, lowering her voice. "And you, Su, you... I don't know, try not to get too indignant. Be mild."
"Mild?"
But she was already heading for the exit. She pulled it open, then quietly closed the heavy door behind her. I pursed my lips, feeling more than a little frustrated with the situation.
Ophelia stood where she was for several more moments. ('Ophelia stood where she was for several more moments.' Oh, the failures of the medium of language, that I can describe the situation accurately while being so completely unable to capture the feeling it evoked. Of suddenly being alone in a dark, perfectly quiet room, staring at the figure who just requested to be alone with you not only refusing to look anywhere near you, but standing like a statue for a solid 30 seconds. While sitting under a creepy statue. With your hands resting on a device made for existential lobotomy.) Then, finally, she walked back towards the 'table' slowly, pausing for another moment before taking a seat.
Now almost expressionless, she looked... In my direction. Past me, but adjacent to me, enough that I could look directly at her without it feeling weird.
Is this really Ophelia? Despite Kam's assurances, part of me refused to believe it. Even her mannerisms were changed. She felt nothing like the person I knew.
I expected her to say something after that, but she just... didn't. She just kept on staring. Occasionally her breathing would grow a little heavier, as if she were about to speak up, but then it just died down again moments later.
I don't know how much time passed, but eventually it became too much for me. I had to say something.
"Um." I looked down at my hands. "I saw your paintings. I-- Ptolema let me, I mean."
Her lip twitched slightly, but otherwise she offered no response.
"They were really good. Very... striking, evocative. Impressionist, I think is the right word." I half-coughed. "Kind of... creeped me out, honestly. Especially the one with the monster."
Once again, silence.
I started to feel strangely angry. There was a part of me that wanted to cry, but a larger one that wanted to yell something in frustration and walk out. 'Whatever!' I'd say, like a teenager given the cold shoulder at dinner after a bad grade. Was this all it took to regress me to that state? Spending five minutes with someone who didn't like me for a reason that felt unfair?
Perhaps it was this that motivated me to say something arguably more passive-aggressive. "So... you're not wearing your, uh..." I gestured to my neck. "Your Radia. The, uh, loop," I added, as if I needed to explain her Principist iconography, the symbology of her own fucking religion, like she was a toddler.
No response.
"I've never seen you like that before," I continued. "Did you give it up? I mean... You know..."
She squinted a little bit.
I blinked. "Sorry, I didn't m--"
"Are you stupid?"
The words took me off guard. I stammered. "I-I'm sorry?"
"Are you some kind of fucking idiot," she expanded.
"I... I didn't mean..."
"We're living in a world in which it's impossible to die," she spoke softly, "and you're asking me if I still believe in God. In the grand design, in salvation through our return to the source."
It was my face's turn to flush. I glanced downward uncomfortably. "Y-Yeah. No, I... I guess that was stupid."
She paused for a beat, glancing in the direction of the statue, then continued. "My earliest memory, other than my ones from the real world, is from more than 300,000 years ago, though there might be ones even older than that which I'm mistaking for dreams, " she said haltingly. "I was trying to Dream, like you claim you were, trying to find a perfect moment I could lose myself in. I'd studied meditative techniques for decades, and it wasn't enough. Filled my flesh and blood with a cocktail of every soothing and numbing agent I could find, and it wasn't enough." She opened and closed her mouth a few times, the shadow of a stutter. "I remember smashing my head against brick, feeling the damp down my face, my mind starting to break down. Believing for a moment that it could really happen, if I believed. I..." She stopped suddenly, closing her lips.
"I-I understand," I said.
"You don't." Her cheeks twitched. "Belief in anything is useless here," she said bitterly. "Because nothing changes. Nothing can change."
Her tone sounded utterly defeated. Nihilistic. And yet I couldn't help but think:
If you believe that, then why are you here?
I didn't have the confidence to voice the question at first, and then, whether through coincidence or unspoken registration of the same contradiction, she beat me to it.
"What do you want?"
"I..." I paused. "I thought Kam said. To hear your account of the weekend."
"No," she said quietly. "I meant, why are you here. What are you trying to change."
"Oh." I bit my lip. There was probably a lie I could have told here that would have greatly enhanced the prospects, but I had never the guile nor will to do so. "I, uh, I want to change it so people can't pretend to be people they're not," I said, and suddenly vocalizing this so bluntly felt self-revealing and hypocritical to the point of comedy, though I suppressed an uneasy laugh. "And, uh, probably to get rid of Tertiaries. Or at least change the way they work."
She looked incredulous. "People already can't pretend to be someone they're not," she said. "Has no one shown you the Spectacting method?"
"No, they have," I said. "But... well, I'd want it to be more complete than that, I suppose. Make it so people can't just change how they look whenever they want."
"...like you did a moment ago."
"I." I cleared my throat. "It's, uh, hard to explain."
"And that's all."
"Well, I'd probably change some other things too. I... don't actually know much about what it lets you do. Or. If anyone even knows that." I wiped my nose. "I'd, you know. I'd make it so people could die, probably. If they wanted."
Do you even mean that?
Ophelia sat back just a bit, as if taking me in from another light. I imagined her bursting out laughing, for some reason.
Instead, she looked away again. "...you don't even really care about this." She grit her teeth behind her lips. "I can't believe Kamrusepa brought you here already."
"Y-Yeah," I said, and tried to smile for some stupid reason. "Well... you know how she is..."
She was silent again for a few moments after that. I thought I caught her mouthing something under her breath, but I wasn't sure if I imagined.
Then, suddenly, her gaze snapped directly to me.
"You want to hear what you did?" she asked darkly.
I hesitated, but then nodded.
She nodded back, the motion slower and more ponderous. "...I suppose you would." She set a gloved hand on bed. "Fine."