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Codebreaking Conversationalist
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 Posted: Mon Jan 16, 2023 2:44 am
"Oh, I mean us Earthan types have compunctions. I don't think many of the aliens do," she offered a bright smile despite the seriousness of the topic and rocked back and forth on her feet as they talked, seemingly in unstoppable perpetual motion. She listened about Solaris -- a soldier! She couldn't help but think that was valuable—a set of experiences they probably desperately needed if they had to be trapped in a shitty war. "I'm sorry she, and you, had to experience that. Fighting in wars by force just isn't something we've ever asked for." It seemed, though, that Cybele and Anser diverged on a vital point. She understood, conceptually, that Cybele had been in the Negaverse by force. She understood, that even under that veil of Chaos, Cybele was fundamentally a good person. It was not a divergence that spoke of their difference in approach, necessarily. Anser chose violence, generally, and Cybele did too. But it was an interesting divergence. "I don't know. You, people like my brother's record with purifications-- I know in theory some of them can be rescued and were therefore were either probably good guys the whole time or were successfully converted to it. But for the majority, they're pretending to be good and reading more like those serial killer true crime shows on television I sometimes catch my classmates watching instead of paying attention. He was such a good guy while he murders ten guys in the basement." Anser struggled to see the good in anyone in the Negaverse, because even the nice people tended to be deluded. And that was a problem. "It is a complex situation and I don't disagree with that. When do we judge when to hold back?" She took another sip from her drink. "Gotta stop them from torturing and draining and killing humanity either way. I think we can."
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Posted: Mon Jan 16, 2023 5:00 am
" Earthan types," repeated Cybele with a tiny, almost teasing smile. "You sound like your brother." She probably would have gone with humans, herself. She didn't know that any of the people from other worlds claimed that word, but perhaps she should ask next time she ran into one. That wasn't really the point of this conversation. "I don't think it's really like that in most cases," said Cybele, pressing her lips together. "Where being a good person is this mask they take on and off while they laugh in the basement about doing war crimes. Of course some of the sociopath types do gravitate towards the Negaverse, where the Chaos makes them even more dangerous, but I don't think that's the majority." That wasn't what Faustite was. That wasn't what Sylvite was, and she thought it was important for Anser to understand that. If she wanted to fight them, Cybele supported that, but she needed to know the way their thought processes actually went. "A lot of them are in the soldier mindset, not the serial killer one. They think that the White Moon are these self-righteous conquerors and that everything they're doing is necessary to save the world. Sometimes they're scrambling to find morals in that. A lot of them don't like taking starseeds, for example. Sylvite was like that. The brainwashed soldier type." Cybele's voice went a tad colder. "She was obsessed with being good, and with saving the world. Super sweet, gave people cookies, but she also thought corruption was the kinder, more efficient option over just killing people because it saved their life and bought the Negaverse a new soldier. Not everyone has her exact priorities, but you can see a pattern of rigid but twisted morality." Cybele's fingers curled into a fist at her side, but she moved on. "And that leads to the third type, the victims of that, the ones who are forced or tricked into the Negaverse. Most of them are new, but of course sometimes they're corrupted at higher ranks. They find out the truth about the Negaverse or about what happened to them and they hate it. They're only there out of fear or because they don't know where else to go." Cybele looked over at Anser. "Those are the ones worth saving, I think, and they're easy to see once you get used to looking. They have this blank look on their face?" She didn't know how to explain it to someone like her friend, but Cybele knew it when she saw it. "Or they're scared."
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Codebreaking Conversationalist
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Posted: Mon Jan 16, 2023 7:01 am
"I do see him a lot," responded Anser, wryly. "I think he forgets he's not also an alien sometimes." She knew he had a fairly close link to his past life at this point. Or just his world. She did too, obvious by the glow on her skin, but her relationship with her world took a different bend. While she was meant to protect Anser or guard it, she was still very dedicated to the humans she had been born to. She knew it was the same way with her brother, but it wasn't quite the same. He spoke as if he could one day restore sentient life to the world. Anser did not. She listened, keeping quiet and doing her best to not interrupt as much as her mind was swirling with thoughts that she projected in the way that she seemed to keep endlessly bouncing like a toy that worked off solar power alone. She supposed there was something to the soldier mindset versus the serial killer mindset, and the deluded soldier as well. They were both still bad and dangerous, and she couldn't necessarily see it as much better or worse but perhaps just comparing an orange to an apple. "I'm familiar with blank looks." She was. It was an odd admission, and she wasn't sure how much of it was really her story to tell so she said not much more of it. "Not from the Negaverse though. People who have been tortured by them, though." Anser took another sip from a near empty cup almost out of an anxious impulse moreso than thirst. "If we're proposing them as soldiers, then the Negaverse is committing wide-reaching war crimes. They're also like," she fidgetted, "conscripting people, torturing people, literally taking the life force from civilians, murdering them, mutating them." She glanced toward Cybele. "Maybe it's not a serial killer documentary for all of them, but a war doc isn't much better. We gotta stop them." And try and pluck out the ones who had looked like Ignacio had way back when.
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Posted: Mon Jan 16, 2023 3:30 pm
When Anser mentioned torture, Cybele's expression shifted into the one that they'd been taking about, just like that. She stopped walking. Her breath caught halfway through an inhale. Her lips pressed thin, and her eyes stared emptily somewhere too far into the distance. "Corruption is torture," she said, and her voice was low, gravelly, dead serious. She'd experienced firsthand just about every sort of atrocity the Negaverse could commit. What Faustite had done to her had shaken her. Her feet would never be the same. She was probably traumatized. She couldn't sleep in the dark anymore. Corruption, though? Corruption had shattered her. Whoever she'd been before that day no longer existed in the same way. Whatever the Negaverse had been trying to build her into afterwards hadn't wanted to exist, either. It had taken breaking free of that to be anywhere close to happy. Don't, Cybele told herself as she felt a tightness creep close to her chest. Five things I can see. A building. A tree. A stoplight in the distance. Anser's glowing markings. Her own shoes. "That's why I give everyone one chance," she said, forcing her foot to step forwards and her hands to uncurl by her side. "Outside of emergency situations, of course. I try to get a read on people, to find out where their loyalties are, what their stories are. If they choose loyalty to the Negaverse, I won't hesitate to use lethal force if I see them again, but I've already found a few people who aren't like that, who were either forced in or slowly starting to see the organization for what it is."
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Codebreaking Conversationalist
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Posted: Mon Jan 16, 2023 4:13 pm
Anser didn't quite stop moving when she saw the shift. Instead, the movements escalated like a perpetual motion machine that had gone haywire, and she felt the echo to a face she hadn't seen in a long time. The cut inhale. The gaze into a far off unreachable else. She looked down at her cup, realized there was nothing she could see through the gap, and chewed on the edges of the plastic. Cybele wasn't wrong. Anser agreed that corruption was torture. There wasn't much else other way to describe ripping someone else's memories from them, to the point where they never had a chance of being restored, and then making them work. Honestly, sounded like the kind of thing she'd read in some intensely tagged fanfiction... "You're right," she agreed, quietly, into her cup primarily though she was speaking to Cybele. Anser hadn't really disagreed with her at any point. It was a complicated issue and Anser didn't much think there was a good answer, only the most necessary one. She turned around to wait for Cybele to resume her walk, waiting for her to catch up before keeping an even pace next to her. "Guess I struggle with that kind of measured approach." Anser spotted a trash can and convinced herself to chuck her empty cup into it instead of continuing to give it a vice grip. "It's a good approach to take. I just know the human," she glanced toward Cybele when using that instead of the more Ignacio-like "Earthan," "consequence of letting any of it continue. It often ends up being an argument of one person potentially being okay underneath it versus many other people living." She fidgeted. "I'm glad you can find it in you to give everyone one chance after what they did to you. And I'm glad you're back here. I'll defer to you when we come across new Chaos together." It was easier that way, if Cybele already had a system. Unless Anser already had a clear picture of someone from prior meetings, perhaps it was best not to interfere with it. She beat gazing up at distant eyes as Ignacio not-quite stared in the direction of their father as he dropped something loud aside with a loud gulp as she continued. "Just want it all to stop."
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Posted: Mon Jan 16, 2023 6:31 pm
Cybele nodded, calming enough that she was able to at least hide whatever extra tension had crept its way into her body. "Like I said, I don't think purification is often the practical choice, or even the kind one. You're right. Putting the time into saving someone who's in deep means that others will die." If she were being honest, someone probably should have killed her back when she'd been the Negaverse's hunting dog. She didn't mention this to Anser, though. She didn't talk much about her time in the Negaverse with her friend, who seemed to prefer to gloss over it. She certainly didn't talk about the things she'd done. With Anser's black and white thinking, Cybele was not sure how she'd handle it. "But I also can't write it off completely. Purification saved me. It saved both of my partners, and a lot of my friends. It saved the healer who is the reason I can still walk. My girlfriend is very passionate about it, and it's hard for me to think that her work is stupid." She made her way side by side with Anser at that point, sorry that the girl's emotional support drink was gone. "So, I do my best to be logical without being cruel, measured without being naive." A beat passed. "I appreciate your approach too, for what it's worth. I can always trust you to be direct." She smiled, and it almost came to her eyes. "I'm glad I got to come back to be with you, too." Whatever shattered part of her was left.
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Codebreaking Conversationalist
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Posted: Mon Jan 16, 2023 8:02 pm
It was validating that Cybele said she was right too, and that her approach was appreciated. Anser knew she took a more extreme path than some other people chose. She took a more extreme path than her brother, even, and it was a discussion the two of them had before, too. (He had ultimately taken the viewpoint that she wasn't wrong, either, he just wished she didn't feel like she had to, or something like that. He took the path of defense only, she took the path of the best defense being a good offense.) "And I won't deny that it sucks." Anser wrung her hands. "But nothing has ever really been bright and hopeful in war, really." She heard people talk about the times before the Negaverse, and to be honest, she couldn't relate. Even if she didn't have a name for them until later, their presence was all she had ever known. She couldn't recall a time in her life where she wasn't watching people break from their operations. She couldn't recall a time where she wasn't watching people die. She was eighteen. Her first solid memories were of that aftermath. She had been four or five at most. "That's fair. You do know a lot of people that have been saved by the purification efforts of others. And yourselves, too," she offered Cybele a smile, "since purification is something you gotta agree to and all. I can see why you at least try with them, even if it's a different approach than I usually end up taking." She couldn't. She couldn't let any more people die. Too many had, already. This war had taken too many, and was likely still taking many as they spoke. It was good to have Cybele walking alongside her. It didn't stop the endless jitters, but it seemed to calm them, at least. She kept squeezing her fists as if she needed something to hold despite, but she kept walking forward. "Maybe we can help other of the people with distant looks get out of there, if you think they legitimately want to get out. Seen," she swallowed nothing, "that face too many times. "For my part," she chuckled quietly, a sound without any real mirth, "guess I'll keep being dependable. The team will need someone with the harder approach, right?"
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Posted: Tue Jan 17, 2023 7:53 pm
There were, Cybele thought, bright and hopeful moments even in times like war. Not because of war, no. Certainly not because of Chaos. Still, it seemed like this was another place that she disagreed with Anser. Cybele's life was war. She'd been born in Axinite's office with someone's hand in her chest, and even then she'd had the reflexes of a soldier from her lost years, what felt like a past life. She'd been raised around monsters and generals. Even once she'd purified, there was still so much struggle. There was still so much blood. There was still so much death. Her life was war, and yet her days had more good in them than bad. Her moments had more kindness in them than cruelty. If she woke up in a cold sweat after a dream about Faustite, she had her lovers to talk her through it, or her family, or her friends. Then there were moments like this, simple moments that she was happy to be alive. She didn't think she could just say that to Anser and have the girl believe her, though. She was going to have to show her, through actions, the good things that could come out of terrible situations like this. Hopefully, the team would help with it. That was the point of it, actually. It was relationships that had helped her to find light in the darkness. She wanted to pass that on. "I don't think you'll be alone in the harder approach," she said instead, with a smile. "Just because we have different enough experiences that we can have talks like this doesn't mean I ever want to stop kicking chaos butt with you." Cybele froze once more, but this time it was because her extended auric range had picked up on something. "Speaking of," she murmured, squinting into the distance. "Found a youma."
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Codebreaking Conversationalist
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Posted: Tue Jan 17, 2023 8:15 pm
"Appreciate that," she was honest about that, too, even as she couldn't quite the energy in her body to calm down. Part of it was inevitable. Part of it was the anxiety. "I'm glad we can work together. I know you don't remember those times and that's fine, but," she chuckled, "think you were worried when you came across chibi me who insisted on patrolling alone to kick chaos a** even at thirteen." At thirteen, she had already seen enough. Anser would have done it again even knowing what she did now and having the growth she knew she had now versus when she was a preteen, but she knew conceptually that finding people to work with was the better approach. She had through that experience, though, made herself an incredibly strong fighter. Cybele was looking elsewhere for a moment, and Anser's brows rose in curiosity, but then she said the magic words. A youma.Anser's eyes danced at the concept of something to fight, especially together with Cybele, especially a youma. It wasn't quite the excitement for the battle, but it was exciting every time she and Cybele could work together, combining their forces to be something she felt couldn't be beaten. And it gave her something solid to focus on, something different than the tormented souls she had been seeing cross her path far too many times. "Lead the way!" With a team, she thought, they'd be unstoppable.
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