Unethical alternate solutions

[aestrix]

In an estate in the twilight belt of New Kystle, a group of mages have become annoyed with the Third Bloodline. Their lack of children, their continual refusal to have them - and the clock is ticking. They're worried about what happens if another half-blood's born, and there's no one to stop them from their rampage.

So they research alternate solutions.

They do some scrying, planning to summon whatever something interesting when they find it. Predictably, they find something interesting. Also predictably, they summon it.



------------


With Lazarus and Kolya.

With the Admin.

Comments

[darkest_evening]

"I can use you to aim for the plane, but I might not be able to put you in a particular place in your domain without a large amount of work."

[ending_of]

"I can transport myself without a problem; could you follow me easily if I did? If not, it will be no trouble to move you once you arrive, although I couldn't transport you from here to there without considerable further thought."

[darkest_evening]

"Hmm," says Prime, and then he waves a hand and attaches a marker to her clothes. "That will let me follow."

[ending_of]

She disappears, leaving her chair behind.

[darkest_evening]

He dissipates the shield, and then he follows. Getting back will be a bit troublesome with his mana levels, but - he'll manage. Or he'll ask her to fix it. One of the two.

[ending_of]

And there she is, sitting in a chair very similar to the one she left in New Kystle, at the top of a very tall tower that stands between the halves of a split sky - moonless night on one side, sunless day on the other.

"You are presently unable to descend below the level of this floor, and repairing the tower if you destroy it will be inconsequential. Shall I alter your proportion of fae?"

[darkest_evening]

"Thank you. Yes, please."

(He's only a little nervous.)

[ending_of]

She looks thoughtful for a few seconds.

And then he is half fae.

[darkest_evening]

"Nnnnh," is his reaction.

He was absolutely correct about the information overload. Suddenly he understands why scrying comes so easily - fae must always have a rudimentary version of it going at all times. He looks at the window, and sees six, and a dragon in flight, and three suns and a moon and thousands upon thousands of trees and there's a person over there who's screaming and he doesn't know why and he can't hear him anyway so is he really screaming? There's a girl over there who's flying upside down and laughing about something - wait, is she laughing with the dragon? He can't tell, it's hard to see the differences between them, are they on the same plane, or-?

Ugh, there's something else, something inside him that feels icky and wrong and he doesn't know what it - wait. Wait he does know what that is. He's aging, slowly, ever so slowly that no one would notice at a glance, but to him it's the most obvious thing in the world. It feels horrific, it feels wrong, and there's nothing he can do about it, nothing he can do to stop feeling like he's slowly dying. Because he is slowly dying. It's like dread and anxiety and nausea all rolled into one, like a sound at the edge of hearing. And if he pays attention, it's slowly getting louder.

Adarin tries to distract himself - he needs to focus on one thing and make some proper observations, see if there's a way to cope with this - understated hell. He can still scry, scrying the easiest thing in the world (easier, now, he'd compare it to breathing) and focuses on this plane in particular.

Thousands of people, screaming in agony, begging for a release, dying over and over and over and over and over and there's no end to it. And it's wrong on every level because things should not die. There's a feeling of terror in the plane itself, fear of what would happen if you leave the house and what if a torturer finds you? Belatedly, Adarin realizes that he's got a vague empathy, now, he can feel the emotions of those around him and it makes him feel sick and horrified.

"No wonder they all went insane," hisses Adarin, in a moment of clarity. "I wouldn't wish this on my worst enemy..."

[ending_of]

"That effect is unexpected," she observes. "Interesting. I wonder if this will help?"

Around the time she finishes the sentence, Adarin stops aging.

[darkest_evening]

His body stops screaming that it's dying. He's - not dying anymore. That's good, he can stop feeling like he's about to throw up constantly.

The empathy and constant scrying is still a problem, though. There's - just too much, and he has trouble telling what's his and what belongs to the person below who's being tortured by someone named 'Chainsaw' and the person slightly less below who is baking cookies and - where is he, in all of this? Where is the tiny little drop of Adarin in this giant sea of - of everything on the plane?

Scrying, he can still scry. Let's just - aim it at himself, now. Maybe figure out which one he is. There's so much screaming, why is there so much screaming and pain and fear, the woman is arbitrarily powerful, his constructed and functioning system isn't perfect but it doesn't involve large-scale torture.

"I think," he mutters, "that you should make me a quarter-fae again."

So that this can stop, so he can think and process and he can't do that when all of everything is screaming at him.

[ending_of]

She does that.

[darkest_evening]

He takes a few precious second to enjoy the silence.

And then, because he's still himself, he pulls himself together and forms proper observations.

"... Major information overload, coupled with an empathy that made it difficult to figure out who I was in comparison to - everything else. Also - until you did the - whatever that was, I felt myself slowly dying. It was unpleasant."

[ending_of]

"You now have some of the benefits of being dead," she explains. "Including not aging, and unlimited long-term memory capacity."

[darkest_evening]

"Thank you," he says, sincerely.

[ending_of]

"And you can't die, so the residue will not be a problem for you in particular. But the solution I used there does not generalize easily."

[darkest_evening]

"Uh - can't die in what way?"

[ending_of]

She considers possible wordings for a moment, then says, "You are infinitely renewable."