w7 not-curfew: everyone confess your crushes to ylfa.

[rewriter]

[we are depressed. we are in ikea. we are depressed in ikea.]

Comments

[camena]

They could have maybe been a little more concise.

[squirt]

[ all of us pausing our tags to read ]

You know they only mentioned Nightingale once?

[camena]

Guess they figured we'd get an explanation from them directly. Didn't want to take up any of the time they spent repeating over and over to not tell Ruby things.

[squirt]

Or arguing over how much we should punch her.

[ the priorities are evident ]

Even if they repeated it a bunch, I did still want to believe Ruby.

[camena]

I like her as a person. And I kind of get why she's doing this. Like, in theory.

So I don't want to punch her.

[squirt]

I get it... broadly. [ as in, he empathizes, but they are the 40 people who would be wiped out, so it's hard to agree with this plan ] I don't want to punch her. But we can make her a rhino. Or a clown again.

[camena]

I talked to her about the idea of like... trading lives. If someone has to die, picking who. And I talked to her about making decisions as a group instead of as one person.

And it's weird, because she'd always kind of argue from a position that would be, like, defending the opposite of what she's doing.

[honkinbigteeth]

She asked me once, if I had to pick, if I'd save the people or if I'd save their worlds.

I think that must be what she's thinking. Maybe we all die, but it causes such a disruption that they aren't erasing whole worlds.

[camena]

It's just the friggin' trolley problem again.

[honkinbigteeth]

Yeah. But you know, when she asked, I was pretty scared it was a real question that I was going to have to answer at some point. And - I think I realized when she asked that the answer for me is to save people. Like, logically, it's completely crazy to save one person instead of a whole world, but I think also - the only reason I even want to save my world is to save certain people.

Thinking about it so abstractly as a universe full of these empty worlds made up entirely of strangers is a horrible way to think.

[camena]

... No, I agree. I'd rather save my friends than my world, if it was between the two. I know that's not exactly what the situation is pitting against each other, but. You know.

[honkinbigteeth]

But maybe there's a part of Ruby that feels that way, too. She's convinced herself it's not logical, but that doesn't mean she doesn't feel that way.

[camena]

That's kind of what I'm saying. It's like she already knows this is the wrong choice, she's just... too dedicated to it to change her mind.

[squirt]

Yeah. ...We talked about the possibility that all of us were alive when we came to this game. And she seemed genuinely angry about it.

I don't think she wants to kill us. I also don't think she's the kind of person who would let that stop her.

[camena]

So... How do you talk someone out of doing something that they already didn't want to do?

[squirt]

Dunno. Should be easy. [ he would take any excuse not to do stuff he has no personal interest in? ] But maybe we'll have to fight her.

[camena]

I think it makes it harder. Because they already decided to do it even though they don't want to. So all the reminders of reasons why they shouldn't want to are things they've, like, already overcome.

... But I also don't want to fight.

[squirt]

[ he sighs. ]

...Yeah. I hope she'll give up once her weapon's depowered. But like you said. She's got that conviction to end things already.

[ he's not optimistic. ]

[camena]

Give up for this game, maybe. But it's not like we can stop the cycle as a whole. So I wonder if she'd just try again.

[ shrugs..... ]