middleofsomewhere | The Will to Fight: Conclusion

The Will to Fight: Conclusion

The battles rage loud and ferocious at the gates of the city and off in the ruined wastelands of Erda, and on the walls a struggle of a different kind occurs. The team who stayed behind at the towers are small but determined as they move stoically across the walls to right the stones that have become misaligned, even as their friends battle not too far away.

The city begins to hum. It's a quiet hum, not loud enough to be heard out where the others are fighting but it vibrates even through stone. The recovering monks assure them that it is done, the wards are back up and no demon will be able to enter the city.

Eventually the battle is won, all three battles. The demons fought back and killed, a major blow to their gate system that will keep them back for hopefully a long time. Those waiting in the caverns return to the city and by the time they get there the illusions are gone. Everyone can see the world for what it really is.

But despite the ruins of their world the people are relieved, the adrenaline of the fight coursing through their veins and the mood is one of hope. They will build again, their people will survive.

All Voidtreckers please return to the Voidtrecker Express. Departure will be in a few hours

It has landed not too far from the city, cloaked to make it unnoticeable to the citizens, for all the good that does. No one has been particularly subtle this last week. People can begin regrouping, packing up the camp and getting any wounded not already healed to the train.

However roughly half an hour later another message appears on their SCA.

Passenger Persephone has requested we remain on system System #86525656412355 for an additional day to further assist the people of Erda. The Voidtrecker Express will depart on the morning of Day Fifteen of the month of Kazoo.

The train remains where it is, so the voidtreckers can use its facilities. There is definitely a lot that can be done to assist those of this world and the citizens will welcome any helping hands.

After an extra day they finally depart, returning to the void once more.

(OOC Note: Once the wards are up any characters who are demonic in nature will not be able to enter the city either!)

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"Share the day," she says in greeting, though she sounds distracted.

She passes a hand over her face, her expression clouded, then rubs her eyes. "No. It was not. It breaks my heart that it ended as it did. Are all these missions so... so violent?"

Because if so... she doesn't know what she's going to do.

"That seemed particularly bad to me." Senku agreed, leaning against the wall of the car.

"But usually there's some degree of violence." He wouldn't lie to her. That was what made him the worst at being empathetic. He didn't sugar coat things. "Orange team sees it the least though." That was true enough.

He exhaled. "Soldat told me about you. Not liking violence. No one's going to make you participate in that." He wanted to assure her of that. "There are people who can't fight. But..." He frowned. "I'm not sure you can avoid other people engaging to protect you and everyone else who can't."

She raises an eyebrow. "Soldat is surprisingly intent upon protecting me." Which is strange, since from her perspective they've only recently met, even if the truth is more complicated than that.

Merwen gives a sigh, though, and waves a webbed hand in invitation, if he wants to sit down between the rows of plants like she is. It reminds her of home. "It is a sickness," she says, her voice flat, "and appropriately, it shares sickness with me as well. And it shares things I would rather not think of."

Senku was somewhat surprised by the invitation but he decided to accept it. He didn't want to offend her for offering it, even if he wasn't really one to sit very much.

He settled down carefully so as not to disturb any plants, stretched out his legs and crossed one over the other, listening.

"I don't think it's a bad thing he wants to protect you." He said with a bit of a small smile.

He considered that. "You feel some sort of illness when you're around combat?" His brow furrowed. "Is there..something that can be done to at least, ease your discomfort?"

"No, Soldat is a good soul. I know that shares truth. Our relationship is just... complicated, at the moment." She gives a wan sort of smile. "But I don't know if something can be done about it. I think violence only shares harm, and the scale of what happened on that world... it reminds me of things that I don't want to remember. It opens scars that have hardly healed. I went into that mission with hopes of doing good, but..."

Merwen pauses, swallows hard. "I only want peace. For myself, and for everyone. Is that so hard to understand?"

"No." Senku answered softly. "It's not hard to understand at all." He responded before looking up a moment, thinking. "It's...a nice thought. I think you'll find a lot of people here are good people. They aren't fighting because they like it."

"Negotiation doesn't always work, unless you force it to." He breathed. "In my world, in our Kingdom of Science, we have an ethos that killing just isn't acceptable. When we had our first conflict, it was a bunch of people who didn't want to hurt anyone and finding...finding an ally on the other side to help deceive people was key. His condition was that nobody died."

He exhaled. "Do you know how difficult it is to subdue people who want you dead when you aren't willing to kill them? So I understand. We use deception and illusions over force, but that's just my world...I don't know about this one."

For a moment, Merwen just stares at him, before letting out a puff of sad laughter. "You think I'm idealistic and naive," she guesses. "A hundred and thirty thousand of my people, more than half of us, died because we would not share violence when it was shared with us. I spent long months in the Valan place of stone, in a cell, because a male thought that it would, as you put it, make my people 'subdue' to his. Yes, I know how difficult it is. I know."

She drops her face, covering it with her hands, and the shudder of a sob can be heard in her breath.

Edited (my math was wrong, I realised) 2021-03-29 03:39 (UTC)

"No. Idealistic, perhaps. Brave." Senku said, just as softly. "No more naive than we are to believe we can get by without killing anyone. It takes a great deal more work to persevere without taking the easy route."

He exhaled a little bit. "I didn't mean it quite in the same way. It was a different conflict with different goals, but horrible all the same."

"I'm sorry for your losses." He knew as much to say that.

"I was luckier than many," Merwen says through her hands, "but I'm not sure I'll ever not share grief over it."

She takes a deep breath and looks at him again. "We're Sharers. We share. To share violence is to harm oneself as much as you harm the target of your rage. We could have hastened the death of all of them, but then how would we be any different?"

That's not the point right now, maybe. In a softer voice, she says, "It sounds too much like Shora in those days, out there. It shares so much pain with me."

"What I know about grief, so far, isn't that much, but..." Senku considered. "I think while it lessens in intensity, it doesn't ever really go away. Logic can't do anything against that pure emotion."

He was listening to her, nodding his head a little bit. "It really was more brutal than it usually is."

He pressed his lips together, considering. "And you had to share all of it. Maybe-" He was a problem solver, that was what he did.

"If you want to avoid that, if something like this happens again, you can evacuate to the train. It would keep you safe and it would keep you away from the worst of it. It might still hurt, knowing that whatever's happening is out there, but you wouldn't have to bear witness to it."

"You share truth," she says. "Grief is a lifelong scar, isn't it?"

Merwen listens to his suggestion though, and she makes a face. "Is that better? To wall myself off like a coward and let others share in violence freely? I don't think my conscience could bear it. I don't want to ignore it, I want to prevent it.
I just.... don't know if that's possible, here."

"It seems to be. I've only lost one person- well one that mattered anyway, and even though I've known about it for three years, and his death was so long ago, none of that matters when it comes to how I feel. If it wasn't like that, it's quite possible that I...wouldn't feel like I do." Senku said softly. One person might not sound like a lot, but to him it's the meaning behind it. Byakuya was a huge part of his world, almost all of it. The loss is incredibly deep and painful.

"I missed out on a lot of this mission...caught up in the illusions." He explained. "But from what I've gathered there were no...factions. No one to negotiate with. In this world, the violence was probably inevitable. I'm not sure it will always be the same though. I agree with you though, I'd rather seek peace and compromise."

He wasn't a violent person, at all actually.

"I don't like the idea that violence is ever inevitable," she says. "At least not between two thinking beings. Why can we think and share speech if we can't use that to share with each other?"

Merwen's almost helpless. "You can't share speech with a storm, or a sea swallower, or a flesh borer. But another soul?"

"I agree, we should be able to talk, but some people don't like to listen to words." He sighed. "That's how we ended up in conflict on my world - and we're talking less than a hundred and fifty people in the country and we couldn't just get along. The other leader wanted to kill innocent people for being, in his opinion, too old and too corrupt while they were at his mercy as stone statues. He figured that he'd just never wake them up, he'd smash the statue and kill them while they had no idea."

Senku frowned a little bit. "I disagree with him. I'm not interested in being some kind of guy who plays god, deciding who deserves to live and die...I want to save them all. So. We had to fight. I couldn't get him to listen to me. We came in with a bluff to catch his men off-guard, which worked fairly effectively, and while people held him off I made a weapon that was dangerous enough to cause serious injury. It causes an explosion. Gen made a paper airplane and we blew up a tree."

He paused a moment and then glanced at her again. "It was a serious threat, a show of power, that if he continued, I'd have to do something drastic and he couldn't be sure I wouldn't do it, so he asked me what I wanted. All I wanted was to negotiate. Which we did. We resolved the conflict like that. At least, between us." He exhaled. "So unfortunately, these things don't come easy."

She bows her head. "I can respect a technique like that. I don't think the Valans would ever have believed us capable of such a thing, though we certainly could have. They thought us children. We shared with them our breathmicrobes, made them immune to their medicines, but I don't believe they would ever have thought we could share anything that would hasten death with them, even as they turned as purple as we are."

It turns out a patriarchal culture doesn't take a society of naked women and children very seriously, especially when their technology is biological and invisible.

"You took a drastic chance, though. I'm glad it worked for you."

"I did." Senku agreed with a nod. "If my bluff had been called, I wouldn't be here today. The truth is, he wanted something. Everyone does. I might not be able to tell what it is offhand, but everyone wants something."

He wondered if he should tell the rest or not, and decided maybe it wasn't the place for that. "So while I can't say I've been strictly non-violent, I'm definitely anti-killing and in favour of peace and negotiation. It's my belief if we try hard enough, the entire population of the planet can find a way to survive."

"That's a way of thinking I can appreciate, if not share," she says, heavily. "It's better than some philosophies I've encountered. Still, it weighs heavy on my heart that a show of force should ever be necessary, in any way."

She pauses, then adds, "Where I am from, there are entire worlds poisoned, or radioactive, or melted by the actions of the ancients in their wars against each other, so long ago no one can say what they shared violence for, and they all perished in their own war long ago."

"When humans were in abundance on my world, that was very much a problem. Not in my region, not since a good sixty years before I was born, but there were other conflicts in different parts of the world." Senku commented. "Some people find it difficult to get along, and when politics gets thrown in..." He sighed.

"I know there will come a day when these things are likely to happen again, but the best I can do is advocate for a peaceful resolution. That's what I can do with my power. My allies, they all feel like I do. If they didn't before, they do now. We've swayed them."

Senku smiled slightly. "It's much much harder path to walk, but I think it's more rewarding."

"You share truth," Merwen says, with a puff of breath. "On both counts, as it truly is a difficult current to swim."

But, honestly? She feels better, having talked it out, and it shows. "I don't know why it should be difficult for any of us, even if I've seen it play out before."

"I really don't know. I'm not really great with my words." Senku admitted. "Things I say get misinterpreted a lot and I don't always catch what other people mean, when they don't say what they mean."

He sighed. "I'm not a human behaviour specialist."

"Is anyone?"

Merwen is serious for a moment. "I can't really claim to be the most knowledgeable of human behaviour, but I'm counted a Wordweaver, among Sharers. When I share speech, I do it well, and with wisdom, or at least I have done so enough in the past that people are willing to listen to me. I have no such reputation here, but I can try."

"As far as people I know? The Mentalist." Senku responded with a chuckle. "Gen, I mean." He was getting in the habit of explaining himself because people knew him as Gen.

"He's like that, when he speaks people listen to him. They listen to me too, but I'm not as good at saying what I mean." Senku admitted with a fond smile. "I get too technical. I'm not exactly encouraging. I probably speak too much truth if anything. He's much better at appealing to people's emotions."

He looked at her seriously. "I'm willing to listen to you. I'm willing to listen to anyone anyway. Everyone has their own wisdom."

She smiles, faintly. "You are a kind sister," she says. "And you share your own wisdom, certainly. Thank you for reminding me of that."

There's hope in that thought, that maybe she might have allies in this, that she's not completely surrounded by violent-sick people.

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The Will to Fight: Conclusion

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