text; un: sai

[daimeinashi]

[Sai hasn't entirely worked out how to use this whole magic jewelry network thing yet, but the thought-typing is relatively straightforward enough. So:]

is it truly wise to be rescuing the qorral ?
should a significant number of them perish, it will be far easier to complete our secondary mission of stopping the mining efforts

Comments

[ex_adept136]

So you say. But if we think the way you suggest, who's to say that someone doesn't find you injured someday and consequently makes the executive decision that leaving you for dead is more efficient than tending your otherwise lethal wounds?

Particularly when faced with a combat situation, someone could be placing themselves at greater risk by stopping to help you. Provided you want to live, though, you might hope that they would decide to take that course of action even though it's not the more "efficient" course.

Destroying lives without reason, or letting them be extinguished because it seems convenient at the time, doesn't make us that much of a team. It promotes a mentality of "us" versus "them". And you don't ever know when you'd become the out-group yourself, for any number of unanticipated reasons like the one I described.

[daimeinashi]

[There's a pause in the thought-typing, then. Probably, Sai has taken off the jewelry for a moment to get his thoughts together, because this entire line of reasoning is foreign to him, as alien as this planet. And yet...it's familiar. ]

i would not begrudge any person who chose to fulfill the mission above my individual life

[Before he met Naruto, that's exactly what he would have done in that same situation. But now he knows there's that one kind of exception, one he doesn't fully understand but which is important to people nonetheless.]

not long ago, i would have said that if i was in such a state, i had clearly failed in my duties, and my usefulness to the mission had expired

however, i understand that such things are different when it comes to one's friends, due to something about the nature of the bonds shared between them

are you suggesting that we view all of the qorral as our friends?

[ex_adept136]

[My, he can only wonder what sorts of experiences his associate has had. Although Haise has been treated as a living weapon, had it hammered into his awareness that he is this above all and should expect death should he not fulfill expectations, that's never muted a desperate wish to continue existing.

He's tacitly accepted every job that's been placed before him, no matter how dangerous, but he always struggled to live on]

I'd say they're just as deserving of life as any of us are. Personally, I'd want to keep on living, and I wouldn't want the people around me to die if there was anything that I could do about it.

[Perhaps because he knows what it is to so fervently wish to keep existing]

If it's easier for you to view them as people who aren't expendable, maybe that's the way to look at it. You might benefit from spending some time among them; it's easier to see someone as a person if you get to know them.