high-energy physics

[warpfairy]

Federation political prisons are not particularly uncomfortable. She's not going anywhere, but she can read, she's considering taking up an instrument, the only really awkward thing is that she doesn't particularly want to be supervised while she's sweating her way through her next pon farr one way or another but that's years off. That and she wishes she'd taken longer to get caught. But she was running out of the really low-hanging fruit anyway.

This is what she signed up for. She makes up imaginary profiles of people on the planets she got to, people who can live longer fuller lives with the stars in reach, one per day. One per day and she'll have loads of estimated impact left unused when she dies. Perfectly reasonable tradeoff and she can still read books.

Someone wants to interview her about Vulcan; they don't want to lose anything that anybody remembers; she gives the interview and then picks up some poetry.

Comments

[lintamande]

"I'd have done that," Fëanáro says. "That's probably why there's no version of me in Materia."

[subtly_artistic]

"Maybe your Materia version would be very, very lucky and be a dragon or a demigod or something and survive to adulthood on that kind of birthright clout."

[lintamande]

"Or the Emperor's son? Would that do it?"

[subtly_artistic]

"Not in the right way, that's political power, not epic power - it's a little boost, you hear about a disproportionate number of princes and princesses making it that far, but I don't think it'd cut it for your kinds of hazards."

[lintamande]

"Well. I was born in Valinor and I was fated to die but only once I was grown up, and in Valinor if you die you can come back."

[warpfairy]

"Fated?"

[subtly_artistic]

"Eldar - and Maiar and Valar - technically 'don't have free will'. Which means they can swear unbreakable oaths and there are some reliable prophecies about what's going to happen to them. Then I showed up and now everything's all wacky."

[lintamande]

"I wonder if oaths work here," Rúmil says.

"I swear that -"

"Fëanáro!"

"I was going to test it with something like 'as far as I know I haven't lied in the last five minutes', don't worry!"

[subtly_artistic]

"- please don't play around with those but would that even do anything? Would you be able to tell?"

[lintamande]

"You feel it when you make one, yes, at home," Rúmil says. "I agree with not playing around with those."

[warpfairy]

"If I'm being deputized into telling Fëanáro why things are a bad idea should I have more context on this?"

[subtly_artistic]

"Oaths are unbreakable and not in a, a friendly narrativey way where you turn out to have accidentally fulfilled them even if you were trying to do something else, or in some neutral cosmological force way, it's more like compulsion plus intolerable psychological consequences for digging in your heels -"

[lintamande]

"We very rarely make them, and take them very gravely," Rúmil says. "Don't we, Fëanáro."

"My mom swore to kill me - she didn't mean it, she was giving birth to me and it really hurt and she said something she didn't intend - and it nearly ruined all our lives."

[warpfairy]

"Oh no."

[lintamande]

"Bella helped fix it."

"Oaths compel you to try. Making the task you've sworn to do literally impossible makes the Oath - not absent, but it can't get its hooks in."

[warpfairy]

"How did you...?"

[subtly_artistic]

"Patient confidentiality," sighs Bella. "Doesn't affect what they can say, just me."

[lintamande]

"Subtle arts lets you do all kinds of things," Fëanáro says, "like make it impossible for people to do a thing. And if it's impossible for my mom to kill me then the Oath lets her wait. Forever."

[warpfairy]

"That's, um."

[subtly_artistic]

"Nice for her but creepy that I can do that?"

[warpfairy]

"Yes, exactly."

[subtly_artistic]

"Well, I don't just go around doing subtle arts to people."

[lintamande]

"She gave the whole continent a lecture about therapeutic ethics," Rúmil says, "That provoked picketing of a major deity."

[warpfairy]

"...what was the major deity doing?"

[lintamande]

"He was responsible for bringing the dead back to life, and he was fixing them first. With consent, but Bella felt it wasn't very much consent if they had to work with him to stop be dead."