text, un: lucina ( backdated to a day before their escape )

[tolight]

Hello, Audentes. For those of you I have yet to meet, my name is Lucina. I come bearing news.

I have spoken to a Zymandis agent. They are here, alone, and the jewelcomms are what notified her to our presence; she was willing to answer my questions, and in return, asked the same of me. The following is what I learned:

They seem believe that the Timeline is ill; the multiverse no longer has the energy to sustain itself, and will eventually meet its demise. Given this, their mission is to destroy everything, so that the Timeline will be reborn stronger. [ Those familiar with her should know there's a certain level of anger in her tone, text or otherwise. ] At least, this is what their Timeline.exe has told them— not only so, the original Timeline.exe, as well as its "update", were created by the same individual: Theodor Arbatel, their "Leader".

If anything requires clarification, I will try my best to answer them.

( ooc. the thread is here for the curious. while i've gotten a lot of info the thread is currently incomplete, so there may be delays in getting to questions from characters!! otherwise feel free to threadjack / etc. )

Comments

[ofobedience]

Whichever way you look at it, we're still deciding the fate of other living beings. Such as the time we steamrollered in and killed the Goddesses of Nalawi. I don't recall any of us ever asking the people of that world whether that was what they wanted, whether they would have preferred to go down with their Goddess rather than live on without Her. What gave us the 'right' to take that decision from them?

[He never has stopped having a bee in his bonnet about that one.]

[tolight]

Unfortunately, I had been recruited during the mission in Perdition's Rest. However, if I could still answer the question—

Inaction would have taken the decision of life away from them. If one individual had wished to continue living without their Goddess — should their life be sacrificed for the rest of the population? Does that not mean we are regarding their life as "lesser" that of the many? Have we not robbed them of the decision?

We do not have the right to take any decision from anyone. However, ALASTAIR allows a world to decide their own fate by at least ensuring their continued existence. Zymandis does not.

[ofobedience]

Perdition's Rest was, in some respects, even worse. But I'm not going to go over that again. Not when I'm already aware that my opinion will be discounted.

And by your way of viewing things, it seems you're saying that the wishes of one should outweigh the wishes of the many. That makes no sense at all. Not every life can, or even should, be saved. Sometimes sacrifices have to be made. Life is not sacred, it's just an accident of evolution or - in my case - something artificially manufactured. None of us count for anything, ultimately.

Besides, it was less a case of inaction and more that their opinions on the matter were never sought out. We made those decisions on our own, without consulting them. And so taking a decision from them is exactly what we did. In the end they were a passive lot who didn't seem to care what we did or did not do. But if some alien troop came to my world and declared that they were going to kill my goddess, I would have reacted very differently, even if it did lead to eventual oblivion.

If Zymandis is right, and the multiverse must be destroyed in order for life to continue anew, and the alternative is everything eventually collapsing in on itself with no chance for life to begin again, then our actions would be destroying more lives than theirs will.

[He's not even against it, particularly. He'll do whatever ALASTAIR expects of him because that is the only way he knows how to behave, following the command of a higher power regardless of his own wishes. But from his perspective, the logic being used here is inherently flawed, and he doesn't understand it.]