11:33 <banana> It's a big-screen day. Melanie's not exactly catching up on the games she missed - that would be flat infeasible for NBA, let alone NFL. She often has 2016-2019 highlights on while working though, the kind of recommendation you dig up from weird blogs or any game with the Ravens (masochism). 11:34 <banana> What this means in a largely empty Wherehouse is that she's leaning on the sofa, half-watching yet another punt but with a little more attention focused on her Chromebook. The crowd's jeers are louder than her lackadaisical typing. 11:36 <VoxPVoxD> There's the sound of an elevator door dinging and the Wherehouse's portal admits Stewart, dressed for the weather and carrying a heavy-looking bag of apples. But he's got a way of making whatever he's carrying look heavy. "Hey, Melanie," he says over the jeering and the typing before he sets the apples down in the kitchenette. 11:37 <banana> Melanie closes the laptop and smiles. "That's like two whole crumbles." 11:41 <banana> (Gerry Sandusky - the other one - is calling the play. The Ravens have possession but it's 4th & way-too-many.) 11:42 <VoxPVoxD> Stewart hangs up his coat, buffs an apple on his shirt, and settles down on the sofa opposite the end Melanie's leaning on. "There was a deal on honeycrisps at the market. They're really good for eating raw but I bet Tony or Maggie could bake something amazing." 11:42 <VoxPVoxD> He looks at the screen. "Football, huh?" 11:44 <banana> Melanie briefly entertains weird feelings about eating an apple raw. Would that be cannibalism? "Last season, just before the playoffs. Do you, um." 11:44 <banana> "Okay, I'll try to think of a nicer way to say this." 11:44 <banana> "Stewart, do you know what football is?" 11:44 <VoxPVoxD> Stewart blinks. 11:44 <banana> It sounds like a joke. 11:44 <VoxPVoxD> "What was the mean way to say that?" 11:45 <banana> "Ah, crap. There has to be a way to do like.. a thing with your voice where people can tell that you're laughing with them instead of at them." 11:46 <VoxPVoxD> Stewart waves a hand. "It's fine, I'm not offended. I'm really curious about your heuristics, though, for stuff like that. Yes, I know what football is." 11:47 <banana> Melanie: "I feel like I used to know a trick like that.. or maybe I always was laughing at people. I was just, you know, with the videogames. Instead of ballgames. That's how it goes sometimes!" 11:49 <VoxPVoxD> Stewart: "Yeah, I get it. I'm not, like a big sports guy. I followed them more before- when I was younger. Football a little bit but mainly baseball. My dad's a big Orioles fan." 11:51 <banana> Melanie: "I don't know a ton about baseball, though it's obviously the most American. It's a cool game... I wonder." 11:51 <banana> She makes a little grumbling noise. "The thing is, you can play pickup anywhere, and every school's got their football, sometimes hockey and wrestling. Baseball feels more.. remote? Like an elite thing, if you're not from a big city." 11:53 <VoxPVoxD> Stewart: "It's got a higher infrastructure floor, I guess you'd call it. Like the minimum amount of space and equipment you need is more. But I dunno, I think it's partly just that kids do pickup games less than they used to. My dad used to talk about just taking a bat and a ball to an empty lot, marking off bases with chalk on the ground..." 11:57 <VoxPVoxD> "Football's very American too. Different concepts of America." 11:59 <banana> Melanie: "That's cool. We didn't have anything like that in Westminster, just school fields and one big park the county rented out. There wasn't a lot of, um.. I can't imagine Westminster kids taking the initiative to set up a game like that?" 11:59 <banana> "Like you said it might be a modern thing. We mostly had Whatsapp, church, dances and football the adults organised." 12:00 <VoxPVoxD> Stewart: "It's probably a generational thing. People take as much initiative as they have to, and there's a lot more stuff being pushed on kids than there used to be, even when you or I were kids, nevermind in The Past." 12:03 <banana> These are not memories Melanie was aware she retained. It's turning out to be a lot easier to pull things from the flow of conversation, particularly when relaxed or drunk, than it is to stand alone and strain to recall. "In the city you'd also have stranger danger, parents not wanting kids outside in case they like, join gangs or go to rainbow parties or whatever the news says this year." 12:03 <banana> "Of course both of us have as a matter of reality joined gangs." 12:05 <VoxPVoxD> Stewart: "Yeah, that sunk in for me around the third or fourth police officer I was an accessory to the murder of." 12:06 <VoxPVoxD> "Now I'm engaging in criminal conspiracies, buying a gun... I've turned to a life of crime. No two ways about it." 12:07 <banana> Melanie: "Do you really need a gun? That's, like, the most salient reliance there is. You'd be telling the Wyrd something new about who you want to be..." 12:11 <VoxPVoxD> Stewart: "...I dunno. Like, my job takes me a lot of weird places alone, where you guys aren't around to protect me, and there've been times I was in for-real danger. I don't know if a gun would've made me safer, but it's easier to think of times I'd regret not having a weapon than times I'd regret having one. Maybe it's just nerves talking. This Huntsman stuff is really fucking with me." 12:13 <banana> Melane in 2014 would have been horrified by the idea of attacking a police officer. By 2016, not so much; she made a lot of new friends at college and she was starting to get an inkling about the way the world really is; it's still never something she'd have done herself. 12:13 <banana> In 2019, those first shut-in months after coming out the other side of centuries' forgetting and dissociation.. by the time she'd reacquired any sort of sense of common humanity she'd read enough to realise cops don't share it. 12:13 <banana> "That's what they do I think. Okay. Advice.. a gun might be useful, but you're really fast, do you have a reliable way to escape stuff?" 12:14 <VoxPVoxD> Stewart: "You mean besides what we all do?" 12:17 <banana> Melanie: "Yeah, like a way to get away from things that are swinging a weapon instead of trying to tie you up." 12:17 <VoxPVoxD> Stewart: "Not... yet. I'm working on something, actually. Maybe I can--" 12:17 <VoxPVoxD> Stewart makes a small but complicated gesture and his skin gets all fucked up. Like he breaks out in a dense yellow-brown rash, ridges like gills or scars flaking all over his face and hands. He strains, and every atom of his body quivers... and then he returns to normal, slumping against the sofa. 12:17 <VoxPVoxD> "Not yet." 12:17 <banana> Melanie gestures at Joe Flacco on the television. "He's got an arm, but if he could run it wouldn't matter so much that all the receivers are garbage." 12:17 <banana> "Who'd you make a deal with for five-second leprosy?" 12:18 <VoxPVoxD> Stewart: "It's Royal Autumn. I'm supposed to turn into a bunch of leaves and fly away." 12:18 <banana> "OH that would be so cool." 12:19 <VoxPVoxD> "Right??" 12:19 <VoxPVoxD> "I can't quite stick the landing, though." 12:19 <VoxPVoxD> "More practice." 12:19 <banana> Melanie looks excited, but guilty. "I'm.. sorry though. Leprosy. That's a bad joke, I don't know how to be funny without being mean. Forgive me?" 12:19 <banana> "Again." 12:20 <VoxPVoxD> Stewart: "Melanie, I spend all day on the internet professionally. Nobody knows how to be funny without being mean." 12:21 <VoxPVoxD> "Anyway, like, running only saves *me*. What if there's something I need to stand and fight for? What if there's someone I need to protect?" 12:21 <banana> "So the autumn wizards teach you real.. stage magic stuff. Are there illusions which can deceive an attacker more generally?" 12:22 <banana> "Like, to protect, airquotes," Melanie makes the airquotes with stick-fingers that bend impressively, "someone." 12:23 <VoxPVoxD> Stewart: "Yeah, you know, a completely hypothetical, random person." 12:23 <banana> Melanie: "She'd be prettty lucky, if she was real." 12:24 <VoxPVoxD> Stewart snorts. "I wonder." 12:24 <VoxPVoxD> "Like, I told you about the Lord Sage, right? The guy with the ridiculous title. I'm sort of... apprenticed to him." 12:24 <banana> "We're all going to help, all the courts, that's what we're for, but you've got motivation and you're good at pretty much everything." 12:25 <banana> Melanie: "It's a serious tactical-romantic advantage." 12:25 <VoxPVoxD> Stewart raises a finger. "You know the flip side of not fully appreciating when you come off as mean is that you can be really disarmingly sweet sometimes." 12:26 <banana> "Eh?" 12:26 <VoxPVoxD> "Nothing, it was just... that's really nice of you to say." 12:26 <banana> "Well, it's true. What does a Lord-Apprentice do?" 12:28 <VoxPVoxD> "Mostly whatever the Lord Sage says. Basically in addition to the King I have another boss, which is a little unusual. Like we're a court of specialists, is how it was described to me, and everyone's sort of an expert in their competence. Lauren's a tech genius and Gerald's like a tier one operator security guy. But outside of their competencies no one really pulls rank on anyone else. It's 12:28 <VoxPVoxD> not that kind of org." 12:29 <VoxPVoxD> "I worry, though. Like Santander, the Lord Sage, is really cool. He's smart and charismatic and unflappable and funny, but he's not so funny you can't take him seriously, which is a real accomplishment considering his whole deal." 12:30 <VoxPVoxD> "He doesn't wear a wedding ring, though. Like that's none of my business, obviously, and there's a billion different explanations." 12:30 <banana> Or it says it isn't that kind of org. Summer put Melanie in some kind of weird power-philosophy struggle from day one... 12:30 <banana> "Well, yes." 12:30 <banana> "But?" 12:31 <VoxPVoxD> "But with Lauren and me, we're... like I don't want to jump the gun or anything, but we're not goofing off. We're actually doing this, uh, relationship-wise. And I look at the higher-ups in the Court, I look at the guys whose, whose career track I'm on, and I wonder... am I in the wrong line of work to be in a relationship? Is it impractical? Is it unwise? Is it cruel?" 12:34 <banana> Melanie finds a remote and mutes the TV. It's not like the Ravens are going to make back fourteen points with five minutes on the clock. "Okay. With the caveat that my ~romantic experience~ is.. very complicated, and I haven't exactly had a real relationship, probably, come on, what the heck?" 12:34 <banana> "Can I be blunt here? The number one danger to you or Lauren comes from faerie monsters sending robot assassins! They don't give a shit whether we're happy!" 12:35 <banana> "If you can delve into occult secrets and wield magycks beyond the ken of man then all that's gonna do is give you both an edge!" 12:36 <VoxPVoxD> Stewart: "I mean you're right, but like, you're also kind of not. One of the first things Santander ever said to me, was, I asked him what it takes to be a great magician, and he said, 'you must become intimate with folly, failure, and death, without becoming a fool, a failure, or dead'." 12:37 <VoxPVoxD> "And part of what that means, that I've noticed so far, is that no matter what I learn, no matter what I see, no matter what I do, I always, *always* sit in the shallow end of the pool." 12:37 <banana> Melanie: "So you're worried about taking the risk we already live with and making it riskier?" 12:38 <banana> "That's not impractical, because the risk has rewards but.. I get what you mean about cruelty." 12:38 <VoxPVoxD> "Yeah! Like it's one thing to say that the world is full of wonders and terrors, it's another to deliberately, repeatedly expose yourself to them on a professional basis. We didn't invite the Huntsman. I kind of did invite Society." 12:39 <banana> "You really can't blame yourself for that guy, he's out there. It's not like you're wrong, but.. can I ask why?" 12:39 <VoxPVoxD> "I didn't *realize* that was what I was doing, and I'm taking zero responsibility for the fucked up shit he does and did." 12:39 <VoxPVoxD> "Why what?" 12:39 <banana> Melanie: "Sorry, give me a second to phrase this." 12:39 <VoxPVoxD> Stewart listens. He's got an apple to finish. 12:41 <banana> It's important to get this one right. She's really not sure Stewart is wrong, but... "Why do you expose yourself to these things, leaving Lauren aside? If she's a reason to lower your risk or a weight that holds you back... what about yourself? Why would it be okay for you to lose yourself otherwise?" 12:42 <VoxPVoxD> Stewart thinks about this for some time. 12:45 <VoxPVoxD> "I mean... it isn't, right? That's kind of-- like it is stupid and selfish for me, on some level, to do that work. I've got a great job, a great girlfriend, great friends, and I'm part of a community that works tirelessly, despite all its differences and all the little pains and stressors that arise, to take care of each other. By any objective standard I have a really great life. And shit, 12:45 <VoxPVoxD> if I want trouble, like you say, trouble finds us whether we want it or not." 12:45 <VoxPVoxD> "But..." 12:47 <banana> What if Lauren is a millstone around Stewart's neck, a tie to the world who keeps him from an alien greatness and from the dangers that would grant true power? On some level, Melanie wants to shake her hand for it. But that's just one construction of the facts and it might not be the ideal narrative for a Reader. 12:48 <VoxPVoxD> "But it's out there, you know? All that stuff is out there whether we correlate our contents or not. So how do I not do that work? How do I turn away from that? It's dangerous and it forces you to constantly re-schematize and see yourself as a smaller and smaller piece of a greater and more awesome whole... but it's so irresistibly compelling and fascinating that I don't understand how 12:48 <VoxPVoxD> anyone who knows this stuff is out there doesn't dive into this work full time." 12:48 <VoxPVoxD> "I play video games for a living. Do you have any idea how many bricks 15 year old me would've shit if I could go back and tell him I play video games for a living?" 12:49 <VoxPVoxD> "And it's just... it's just the thing I do so I can sustain the other thing." 12:49 <banana> Melanie: "..you know, you should probably check if that's something she loves about you." 12:49 <VoxPVoxD> "It's not okay for me to lose myself. I don't want to lose myself. But if that's the bet I have to put on the table to do this work, then I'll do it." 12:50 <VoxPVoxD> "Like if it wasn't for Lauren, if you'd told me in advance that getting that token would've put me on Society's radar... I still would've done it." 12:50 <banana> "Like, I am not really in Lauren's mindset here for a variety of reasons, but it strikes me that she wants you, and you are describing an essential part of who you are, that someone, who is she, would want." 12:51 <VoxPVoxD> Stewart makes a face. "I can't talk to her about this stuff when there's a gun to our heads. 'Hey babe, just want to take a quick time out from worrying about the creature that got enslaved and possessed by the monster that stole you away to hell to double-check that you're cool with how weird I am'." 12:51 <banana> Not that anyone would specifically be attracted to assaults by a metaphor that causes cancer. 12:51 <VoxPVoxD> "Like you're right, that's a conversation we need to have. But this is so not the time." 12:52 <banana> Melanie: "So we'll deal with the terminator first." 12:52 <VoxPVoxD> Stewart: "Yeah, as soon as I find out what John of the Falls's fucking problem is." 12:53 <banana> "There's a bunch of cliches out there which are like, actually you should always talk about things! It's healthy! But that's Hollywood movies and advice columns? I'm really not... sure." 12:53 <VoxPVoxD> Stewart: "I don't want to keep secrets from her." 12:54 <VoxPVoxD> "Sometimes I have to, right? That's inevitable between any two people, even people who love each other." 12:54 <banana> "There are probably things in, um, relationships like everything else where there's something you can't deal with yet but can put off, and that can't always be the wrong decision." 12:54 <VoxPVoxD> "But I really hate keeping secrets from Lauren." 12:54 <banana> "Well, good." 12:55 <banana> Keeping secrets from yourself is much easier anyway. 12:58 <VoxPVoxD> Looking at the screen: "Oh, the Ravens lost." 12:59 <banana> Melanie: "Oh, I know. It's a 2018 game." 13:00 <banana> "They lose in such a calming way, like it's pretty hopeless from the start instead of struggling like a pathetic fly in the web. And.. they're the hometown boys. It's our loss." 13:05 <VoxPVoxD> Stewart: "Yeah." 13:05 <VoxPVoxD> "Oh hey speaking of ravens, did you know Poe is still alive?" 13:05 <VoxPVoxD> "Like, Edgar Allan." 13:06 <banana> "Edgar Allen who?" Knowledge gap or memory gap? It's still hard to be certain sometimes. 13:08 <VoxPVoxD> Stewart: "Edgar Allan Poe! He wrote the Cask of Amontillado, Murders in the Rue Morgue, Fall of the House of Usher. The Ravens, the Bells, Annabel Lee... he was one of the best American writers of the 19th century. A master of short horror fiction, basically invented the detective story, wrote a lot of poems that are super fun to read out loud... also kind of a creep." 13:09 <banana> Not ringing a bell, though detective stories are great. "If he's survived this long.. another vampire?" 13:10 <banana> "Pity it's not Mark Twain!" 13:10 <VoxPVoxD> Stewart: "I'm not sure. It might be some other kind of occultism." 13:12 <VoxPVoxD> "I could look up Twain sometime... maybe he's still alive. I looked up Poe cause he's local. His 'grave' is right around the corner from Lexington Market, outside." 13:12 <banana> We've left confidences territory, but that's fine. Stewart's also a good source of information, as long as you like your information weird. "There seem to be arbitrarily many, right? You could drive yourself nuts with systematisation- I mean feel free to, maybe that's Lord-Sagacious. But like, the way I see it it's, um, suspicious." 13:14 <VoxPVoxD> Stewart: "What do you mean?" 13:15 <banana> Melanie: "All these overlapping spirit realms and ancient deities and magical energies. Chi, willwork, sekhem, blood magic.. what it means, the relevant meaning to human beings, is that beyond the world which we've mastered and over which we squabble is.. darkness, something requiring inhuman illumination." 13:16 <banana> "We live in Plato's cave and the shadow puppets are HD, 3D, VR. It's still a cave, a prison cell. The darkness is freedom- freedom isn't safe." 13:18 <banana> "I don't want to go out into the darkness and contend with the weirder-than-wyrd, though I admire you doing it- I'd like to- to turn around. To stand between the fire and the puppetmasters, make sure their shadow play is PG-rated. Keep people from being burned or blinded." 13:19 <banana> "There's no sense complaining that the real world outside the cave is bigger and stranger than we could believe, but we really seem to be able to, um, limit encroachment. Straddling that line gives us power over it." 13:22 <VoxPVoxD> Stewart: "Where do you draw the line, though? Like the darkness isn't where the cave opens up. It's just where the light stops. But if there are people out in the dark, who see by their own lights, who tell their own stories, who can be kin to us... shouldn't we want to reach out?" 13:22 <VoxPVoxD> "I'm thinking of the vampires again." 13:24 <banana> Melanie: "Hmm. I think those guys pretty much choose whether they want to live inside the cave." 13:25 <VoxPVoxD> "So, not our responsibility either way, you're saying?" 13:25 <banana> "No I mean, in or out is fine, but you can't stand behind us and occasionally snatch someone away into the dark." 13:26 <VoxPVoxD> Stewart: "Yeah... it's interesting. There's a sense that a lot of them are like us... but some of them are like Them." 13:26 <banana> "If they're going to make accomodations with this, Nels called it the 'Doctor of Sciences'.. that's not a functioning society. There's holes in it." 13:35 <VoxPVoxD> Stewart: "Yeah... though to be fair to them it sounds like a matter of necessity than desire. Like from what I heard they're not sure they *can* kill him, and if that bet goes wrong things get much, much worse." 13:36 <banana> "As excuses go, it's one." 13:36 <VoxPVoxD> Stewart: "What do you think we'd do if like... a Keeper moved in." 13:37 <VoxPVoxD> "Like just, moved into town, and was... around." 13:38 <banana> Melanie frowns. "Die." 13:39 <banana> "It would be very very unpleasant! And it's unlikely or impossible." 13:39 <VoxPVoxD> Stewart: "But if it did happen, you have to think, the paramount poliitcal concern would be trying to tie it down in as many oaths as possible, and making sure as many people as possible stay as far away as possible." 13:41 <banana> "Maybe.. I don't know. I think a lot of people would just fight to the death." 13:41 <VoxPVoxD> Stewart nods. "Yeah... it's not a perfect analogy." 13:42 <banana> Melanie: "A society formed around something like that.. I don't think there would be a Summer Court." 13:42 <VoxPVoxD> Stewart: "Vampires wouldn't need one of those anyway." 13:42 <VoxPVoxD> "Like, all else aside, the... ecosystem is different." 13:43 <VoxPVoxD> "Forming a Summer Court is a prey response." 13:43 <VoxPVoxD> "Vampires are super not prey." 13:43 <banana> "Are there more vampires than the other kinds of dudes, or are they just really.. prominent? Harder to ignore?" 13:43 <banana> Melanie: "You know, if we're talking kinds of dudes." 13:45 <VoxPVoxD> Stewart: "Some of it's geographically contingent. Like I gather that vampires tend to favor urban areas because they can blend in easier and hunt easier, and the high population density also makes organizing and self-policing easier. Vampires also have a unique impact on the community. If you added a hundred willworkers to the city of Baltimore tomorrow, there might be more suspicious 13:45 <VoxPVoxD> explosions? If you added a hundred vampires, you're talking about blood in the streets." 13:45 <VoxPVoxD> "Out in the rural areas, that's more commonly werewolf territory." 13:47 <banana> Melanie: "My question would be whether this is cross-cultural. With the arbitrariness... do they have werewolves as we know them in India? The werewolf legends seem like they're pretty accurate, but they're also local. Central European imports." 13:47 <VoxPVoxD> "Ah, see, now you're thinking like a Lord Sage." 13:48 <banana> "This has got to be comprehension bias, but the Wyrd makes more sense than the rest in that context because it is arbitrary, contingent, born of the unconscious..." 13:49 <VoxPVoxD> Stewart: "You could build a whole discipline out of studying the way culture shapes and is shaped by the supernatural. A sort of, cryptoanthropology." 13:50 <banana> Melanie: "Augh. It is fascinating, but also exhausting. Like.. this conversation makes me tired, like hard work." 13:50 <banana> Melanie: "Augh. It is fascinating, but also exhausting. Like.. this conversation makes me tired, like hard work." 13:50 <banana> "I don't mean that I'm not having a good time, please don't take it like that!" 13:52 <banana> "It's just weird, because like.. I could talk forever basically? About football or about your girlfriend or about Nickel and Heidegger, whatever. But there's something in the sagely stuff which feels too.. something." 13:52 <banana> Does Stewart know what she means, because Melanie doesn't. 13:52 <VoxPVoxD> Stewart: "It makes you try to operate at both your speeds." 13:55 <banana> Melanie would have been pretty upset by that idea a month ago. Today, she still is. But she's still here, and she's not about to send Stewart into a cycle of failure-to-manage. "Yeah." 13:55 <banana> "Like it's a problem to deal with, a battle." 13:56 <banana> "Supernatural intrusions, I mean. They happen, that's fine, but I want to.. deal with them. Put it aside. Become real again." 13:57 <banana> "How the heck do you do it?" 13:58 <banana> "How do you study-per-se this stuff without becoming detached and unpersonal?" 13:59 <VoxPVoxD> Stewart: "I don't. Like I don't deal with it. I don't put it aside. What I want is to *integrate* it. Like... you're Melanie Lucas, right. You were born Melanie Lucas. What happened in between... that was something that was done to you. Your life was interrupted. Massively, brutally so... but because of the way time bent around when you were taken and when you escaped, it *was* an 13:59 <VoxPVoxD> interruption." 13:59 <VoxPVoxD> "You have the ability to... to reconcile the before-and-after." 13:59 <banana> "Jesus, that's news to me." 14:00 <VoxPVoxD> "I don't. My... I can't have my old life back. It's someone else's life now. I don't want hardly any of it. I wouldn't know what to do with it if I had it." 14:00 <banana> Melanie shakes her head with a slight rattle. "Like I thought I was doing pretty okay with having them both.. happened, actually reconciling? I appreciate the idea, lol." 14:00 <VoxPVoxD> "That is reconciliation." 14:01 <VoxPVoxD> "There was, um. This is going to be the kind of story that makes someone half-jokingly ask if I know what football is." 14:01 <banana> "I want to hear." 14:02 <VoxPVoxD> "But Lauren and I watched the most recent Star Wars movie the other night. There's a new one coming out. And it's, you know, it's fine, whatever. It's watchable in the way big movies nowadays are basically all watchable. But there was a bit in this one that really stuck with me." 14:03 <banana> Oh yeah, that might be worth watching at some point. Lasers whoosh etc 14:03 <VoxPVoxD> "There's the bad guy, and the hero, and they're sort of into each other. The bad guy is trying to get the hero to join him but she's resisting, because it goes against everything she thinks and wants to think about herself. She thinks that the key to moving forward is to connect with the past. The history of the Jedi, her own family, stuff like that." 14:04 <banana> "Oh, so it's that thing where like a fifth of all media seems like it's about us, if you're feeling down enough." 14:05 <VoxPVoxD> "But the bad guy sees it completely differently. He like, rejected his family, rejected his teachers, rejected his own name. He says to her, 'Let the past die. Kill it, if you have to. It's the only way to become who you were meant to be.'." 14:08 <VoxPVoxD> Stewart: "My old life is over. The person I was died eleven years ago. The man who picked up that torch is someone I barely know. And I'm unrecognizably different from both of them." 14:09 <VoxPVoxD> "But everything I see, everything I learn, everyone I meet... it all casts a little more light on where I am now. It lights the path forward." 14:09 <VoxPVoxD> "This is how I learn who I am. How could that be impersonal?" 14:11 <banana> Melanie: "Well, that's not the word I used. But I'm certain you're gonna learn that you are a person, beats me which one." 14:12 <VoxPVoxD> Stewart wipes his eyes. "Yeah. Like if you'd asked me a month ago what I'd be doing now, I would... not have guessed basically any of this." 14:13 <VoxPVoxD> "Two months ago I wouldn't believe you if you'd told me I'd made this many new friends, nevermind everything else." 14:13 <VoxPVoxD> "I don't really know who I am, I guess. I'm finding out as I go." 14:14 <banana> Melanie: "Same. But I would probably have believed you if you'd said I was some kind of temporary ghost." 14:15 <VoxPVoxD> Stewart: "But one of those really badass ghosts that can throw beds around and tear the furniture up. A real haunted burial ground kind of ghost." 14:16 <banana> "Sure, at least the kind which would argue with you while haunting you. I'm not arguing now, because there's no reason this stuff should make the same sense between people, but I wouldn't... characterise the difference between lives as you have." 14:17 <VoxPVoxD> Stewart: "What's it like for you?" 14:19 <banana> "I'm not interrupted, I'm changed. I know who I was meant to be. She's right there, which is kind of amazing, and occasionally really weird. I'm glad someone's there to be almost-Melanie, but *I* can't do it. I don't want to. I was trash mostly, she's.. done things right." Melanie sits on the sofa arm, eyes closed in contemplation. "I have to be someone else, nothing's meant anymore, 14:19 <banana> I get to pick which is.. actually really hard, but." 14:20 <banana> There is apparently no conclusion to this. 14:21 <VoxPVoxD> Stewart: "Is there nothing from your old life you miss at all?" 14:22 <banana> "There was." 14:22 <banana> "I mourned those things and let them go about a hundred years ago. Some things maybe I shouldn't have moved on from but, you know, mental self-defence." 14:23 <banana> Melanie: "I don't know if that's true. What I just said." 14:23 <VoxPVoxD> Stewart shrugs. "Is it useful to you?" 14:26 <banana> Melanie: "I used to be worried all the time and now I'm often confused instead." 14:27 <VoxPVoxD> That makes Stewart laugh. 14:27 <VoxPVoxD> "That's... that's a pretty good deal, from where I'm sitting." 14:28 <banana> And Melanie in turn. "I function better confused. I'm not indecisive, I can do things and not know whether they were right instead of, like, not doing things at all." 14:29 <VoxPVoxD> Stewart: "Gerald calls that MAPing. It's an acronym. Maintain, Assess, Proceed." 14:30 <banana> "I've seen that, along with OODA loop. I've got a book about squad tactics on here somewhere." She gestures to the laptop. 14:32 <banana> "Emotionally the thing I miss is being good at basketball- you'd think it might be family or something but that's one of the ways she's influenced me I think, an estrangement or something- anyway I don't miss playing it because I wouldn't be any good anymore." 14:33 <banana> "Intellectually- skin, I think, was probably good. I genuinely do not recall, but it must have been pretty good and I do sometimes think about that." 14:33 <banana> "Maybe not, though? Maggie's fine." 14:34 <banana> Melanie opens her eyes again. 14:34 <banana> Well, honestly, in the context of the conversation: eye-shaped wooden sockets. But by convention, 14:36 <VoxPVoxD> Stewart: "In a lot of ways, if you take it as a point-to-point comparison of objective traits, I came out way ahead. I lost a ton of weight, I don't seem to have asthma anymore, it takes a lot less work to keep my skin clear. I picked up-- I kind of, learned a little bit about a lot of different things." 14:39 <banana> "There are a lot of random upsides. I know how to think now, which is honestly a blessing. I'm stronger than I ever was, even though I used to work out every day. Probably never have to burn carbs again." 14:40 <VoxPVoxD> "I miss... something I do whenever I get the chance to is, I ask people who've been back for a while if, after everything they've seen, everything they've done, everything they've been through... if they had the chance, if they could... undo it all. If they could go back to the moment they were taken and just live their old lives forward, to wherever that led, would they do it?" 14:40 <banana> Melanie: "Are you asking me?" 14:40 <banana> "It's ok if you are, and ok if you aren't." 14:40 <banana> It wouldn't be ok if someone else did. 14:41 <banana> Maybe a couple of people. 14:41 <VoxPVoxD> Stewart shakes his head. "No. No, not you. I mean like... I asked the King. I asked Santander." 14:41 <VoxPVoxD> "I wouldn't ask Lauren, even." 14:42 <VoxPVoxD> "But no one I've asked has ever said 'yes'." 14:42 <banana> "Well, now I don't want to volunteer it and break your streak!" 14:44 <VoxPVoxD> Stewart: "If you want to tell me I'd be happy to listen! It's just, you know, I think of us as within the same cohort, even if we were gone for way longer. It's about how long we've been back." 14:44 <VoxPVoxD> "What preoccupies me is what kind of peace we make with this shit as time goes on." 14:44 <VoxPVoxD> *even if you were gone for 14:46 <banana> Melanie: "I want to move forward from where we are, no matter what it takes. I want to make sure other people can move forward. It's one of the few simple things." 14:47 <VoxPVoxD> Stewart nods. "Yeah." 14:47 <VoxPVoxD> "Yeah."