trans_9 | Enchanted Aquatica---the Prom [WIDE OPEN Y'ALL]

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Enchanted Aquatica---the Prom [WIDE OPEN Y'ALL]

The day had finally arrived for her big event, and Starfire couldn't be happier---or more nervous, actually. She was certainly not an expert on the inner workings of a prom, but it couldn't be too terribly complicated, right? As long as the people could eat, dance, and talk, it should be a reasonable success.

With that in mind, her decorations sprung from her mind into the large dome all around her, transforming a grey Sensorium into a beautiful underwater world, one with clear waters and free from the possibility of a shark attack.

The first change was the scent of the air, shifting into the comforting salty scent of the seas. Then the ground beneath her feet became a hardened sandstone, maintaining the gritty texture while remaining easy to walk upon---except for the smooth dance floor, of course. The grey dome transformed into a flowing bluish-green, rippling all around with fish of all colors passing in the background. Some of the 'sky' faded into a violet tone over the dance floor, lit by glowing circular lights in every color. Suspended in midair, they almost looked like motionless fireflies, though they sometimes swayed in tune with songs.

Tables arose from coral in all colors, rising from the ground and twisting to provide a flattened surface on the very top---rounded ones for guests, and long tables off to the side containing shell-bowls of food. Chairs were large floating clam shells with well cushioned interiors, some large enough to hold two people. More comfortable spongy places to sit were also littered across the area, notably by the large shell-shaped enclosure that was the promised swimming pool. It too was lit by the floating lights, providing what she hoped was a romantic atmosphere.

Finally, the glowing stage above the dance floor couldn't help but attract attention with its chairs. Six royal thrones and one plush chair of all colors directly in the middle rested in the back of the stage, leaving the front open for announcements. Just off to the side of the stage stood the DJ's table, with even that machine painted to match the soft underwater glow of the scenery.

Everything finally seemed pleasing to Starfire. With one last change, dressing herself in the formal attire of the prom, she sent out the signal to everyone and waited. She hoped they would have a wonderful time.

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She tilts her head at him. "Some things are beyond me. Hard to imagine, I know."

"In my home dimension, there was a sign language people used to convey body language between species - because it's tough to show sincerity to a species that does so by spreading their wings on high if you don't have any wings. And translations could always end up being imprecise, or misinterpreted, or just flat out wrong."

"Don't steal my head tilt. That's just getting creepy." Besides, he does it so often it's almost signature.

"How does that sign language translate to people who can't sign? Like sentient puddles of blood and that stuff?"

She opens her mouth to point out that her head can't tilt as the same angle as him (different neck vertebrae) but decides not to. Instead she answers, "And you'd better not start imitating my smile, either."

Not that he really could without surgery.

"With a sentient puddle of blood we'd probably use text-equivalents. The issue isn't something that looks very different from you, because your mind automatically tells you that their body language is different. The issue is something that's close enough to you that you can recognize each other's gestures, but they don't have the same meaning.

"If a blood puddle waves its cilia in a way that means 'I don't like you,' you probably won't be upset. But if someone who looks just like you except they have four eyes does this," she draws her finger across her neck, "because that means 'I so respect your opinion that I would give you my voice' and you read it as 'I'm going to cut your throat', well, that's an issue."

"Yeah, don't worry about that." As much as a mouth like hers could be useful when gorging on food during nightly binges. Or eating raw flesh, if it came down to it.

"Besides, that'd have to involve me actually smiling, and everyone else around Medical says I scowl too much." He still maintains that a smirk counts as a smile.

"Oh, I get it. Like how the peace sign if super offensive in Britain."

"Bad idea anyway. Your gums would probably dry out. And you'd get cheek-aches, and the last thing you want to do is wander around asking for a cheek massage."

Cheeky!

She nods. "Exactly. So they came up with 'glinting,' which is an emotion hand-signal language. And even there, I know the five-finger one-thumb two-symmetrical-arms version; there's subdialects for people with no thumbs, or asymmetrical limb arrangements."

"I don't like people touching my face enough as is. No need to add cheek-aches to that reason." Or touching any part of him, mostly.

He nods, listening close. "And what do the people with tentacles do?"

That makes perfect sense; after all if someone stuck their fingers too close to Anwei's face while she was distracted, or about to sneeze, they would probably end up pulling back a stump or five.

"Most species with tentacles just would press four together to designate two arms and least and greatest fingers. The weirdest one I saw - I can't remember the species name - but they had just one tentacle, growing out of their front, and they insisted they didn't have any other limbs. Turned out their antlers were flexible, and they could glint with those, but it was totally taboo to discuss their antlers or even say they had them when they were about to shed them.

"So it would just stand there with its one tentacle pointing at you, and its antlers wriggling, and you would kind of roll one eye," she demonstrates, "to see what the antlers were saying."

And see, with Howard they'll just end up getting scowled at.

He shakes his head. "And everyone's fluent in this glinting? It seems like it makes more sense to just work on translator chips. Your planet seems advanced enough."

What with the decapitating people and keeping their heads alive on pikes and all.

She laughs, mouth yawning wide. "My planet? No way. The Empire didn't care what other species might be feeling; if it couldn't be said in our language, it wasn't worth listening to.

"Glinting was for the species outside the Empire, the ones that cared about negotiating and coexisting and working together, instead of just crushing everything in their path. Explorers, pirates, mercenaries, long-term investors: they invented glinting. The Living People just didn't care."

He should have figured that. He feels dumb that he didn't.

"Here's an idea. When we save this whole universe, we stick your world and my world in the ring together and let them duke it out. Your world wins, of course, because like, technology, but maybe Space Jesus can take a few of your winners out too."

The Empire was huge; it was easy for the people inside of it to pretend that everything outside was a thin line of barbarians waiting to be overrun instead of 'the rest of the universe.' That smug, self-centered view of reality carried over into its subjects, no matter what side of the line they happened to be on.

"I'd prefer to keep our universes from ever meeting, if possible. An Imperial AI might crack open your FAYZ and let everyone go - or it might keep you there to play with. They can be quite sadistic, obviously, seeing who created them."

"Is Space Jesus the one that's four hundred feet tall?" She wasn't very informed on Jesii.

"As long as we can keep them both restrained, I really don't care. They want to destroy all the kids in the FAYZ? I'm not gonna stop them. Can't say I'll miss them," he says darkly. Some days he's more charitable than others, but he's in a mood to entertain the thought of everything he hates about his home getting horribly destroyed by Anwei's.

"No, it's the one in the mines. Brainwashes you into killing people, leaves you totally crazy when it's done. It's cute."

She droops her eyelids at him, her eyes darkening. "Were none of them innocent, ever? What about other children, who might be trapped in other FAYZes - would you condemn them as well? The adults if they were still alive somewhere, the animals, the plants, the Earth itself - nothing was worth missing?"

Because the Empire would drop an entire planet full of sentients into a sun, just for fun. She'd seen it done. She'd seen it vidstreamed, for entertainment.

"A Jesus in the mines," she scowls thoughtfully. "One who didn't rise up and fly away to Heaven, I guess. I'm not that familiar with gods; the ones in my universe were either benign or so evil you kept your distance. Sounds like you got stuck with one of the second." Hopefully this 'Space Jesus' wouldn't come popping out of the pods any time soon.

"Well, when you put it that way. Jeez, Anwei, am I not allowed to fantasize about having stuff I hate go burn in a fire?" He gets defensive. He hadn't been serious. Mostly.

"It's not actually Jesus. It just mindfucks you into thinking it's your god and you have to serve it. Then it makes bug armies that eat all the kids." And as ridiculous as that idea is, it's not one Howard wants to dwell on. He helped clean up the massacre afterwards. Hundreds of dismembered bodies. Limbs dragged hundreds of yards from their owners. Blood on the ceilings. He feels a bit faint.

"I'm all for getting your hate on, so long as you tell yourself it's only a fantasy. Pour it all out and be done with it. That way you'll be nice and relaxed when you see the thing you hate again, and can enjoy destroying it - ah, if that's the way your mind works," she adds hastily. "And if it actually does deserve to be destroyed."

For all her talk of innocence, some things were better off dead.

"Ghastly." The best cure for faintness was, obviously, more food. She offers him a shrimp tail, then pauses and turns it into a beef shish kabob. Handing him a bug right now seemed like it might be - iffy.

He shakes his head. "I don't destroy things. Not enough of a major player to, even if I was the type. I just want to get by."

And all these forces, spaceships and alien jesus and giant bubbles and the inevitably of human need, keep getting in the way of that. At least Anwei had a choice, he figures. At least enough choice to recognize wrong instead of just wallowing in it.

He takes it and swallows it, stabbing himself in the lip with the shish kebob as he does so. A little blood dribbles onto his chin, but he doesn't seem to notice. "Thanks."

"I think that's all a lot of people want. But here we are," she gestures at the ballroom, and by extension the ship around it. "Who knows what we're going to be asked to do in the future. Reassemble our universes from scratch, maybe. And wouldn't it be tempting to just leave a few pieces out?"

She stiffens for a millisecond at the sight of the blood, then relaxes. If Howard looked more like one of her species, she might have reacted more strongly. But of course he wasn't trying to be seductive. That wasn't Howard's way.

Instead she conjures up a pad of gauze, suitable for applying pressure. "Here," she says, offering it. "You got your lip. If you injure your mouth, you might have to slow down on your eating. And we wouldn't want that, now would we?"

Howard fidgets with the edge of his sleeve. Now that Anwei's called him on it, he feels self-conscious about the morbid comments he made. In a way he wants to tell her that obviously he wasn't being serious, but then again, there was a grain of truth in all that bitterness and hyperbole. "Yeah. It would."

He takes the gauze pad from her and uses it, blushing a bit. He doesn't like attention called to his strange eating habits, but he supposes he picks at Anwei's enough, so it's only fair. "I guess not. Thanks again."

She tilts her head back and stares at the ceiling, lights rippling as though seen through water. "Tempting...I once did the math on the theoretical results of just taking Fle right out of the picture. Coring out the heart of the Ninth Empire. But there's seventeen billion people on Fle, and the projected death toll was in the fifty T's, so I decided to go back and work on the math some more." She broods for an instant. "That's the problem with working out all your solutions down to the last fraction: someone can sneak up on you while you sit there, trying to decide which choice to make. When there is no good choice, only bad, worse and worst." In her case, the Ohm had snuck up on her, apparently.

She looks consideringly at him for a moment. "I've often thought that it must be nice to have blunt teeth. Teeth for chewing and grinding, not just for slicing. Being able to sneeze without worrying that you're going to slice your lip off."

He squints at her, scrutinizing, and lowers the piece of shrimp he was about to eat. "Which choice to make? Meaning if you crunched the numbers long enough and got an answer you thought was acceptable, you could actually go through with it and delete an entire race?"

Because, if so, whoa. Still waters and all that.

"Yeah, it's a real blast. Every day I wake up and thank God for my nice blunt chompers."

She nods slowly. "There is a device called an anti-inertial projector; it neutralizes inertia. You can point it at a planet and if you get the tidal forces just right, it will go ZIP! right off into its sun. Or more slowly, if you prefer. So yes, I had the power to do it.

"The will to do it...is a trickier question." A sigh. "To kill seventeen billion, and free one point seven quadrillion from the Empire - is it worth it? Is it a choice that I am entitled to make? Or is there another answer? If I had the power to just put the whole planet in a stasis field, leave them frozen until the civilizations around them evolved to the point that the Living People were no longer a threat - well, that would be the coward's way out, I suppose. Letting some future generation decide what to do."

"Squint hard enough, and you can always find something to thank your creator for. Or curse them. Thanking is usually easier on the mind."

"And what, you just pick these anti-inertial projectors at the local drug-store? Or do you need a concealed weapons license before you can carry around the ability to incinerate whole planets?" Although, if he thinks about it, he guesses people don't really need to get permission before they wind up with ridiculous superpowers that can kill anyone. It still sounds excessive and dangerous, though. "How do people not just live every minute thinking they're about to get zapped into the sun?"

His expression gets a bit grave. "The coward's way out? You could stop them living their awful reign without killing anyone, and that's the coward's way more than killing them?"

"No, they're fairly difficult to construct. And it's very easy to make something that neutralizes the neutralizer, and then you get that Earth cartoon effect, where the wolf runs into the cliff and goes splat." She meant a coyote, not a wolf; but the slap of one hand against another is sufficiently Wile-y. "They're mostly used for high-speed shipping. And Fle is circled by layer upon layer of defensive grids and energy fields and neutralizers. No chance of getting that weapon in range."

"If I have the courage to decide their fate, I should have the courage to decide it once and for all - not just hand it off to some future generation to worry about. Although I wonder - maybe I could move Fle into another universe? One where they were the only sentient life? And put a big sign outside saying Do Not Disturb?"

Because a universe populated solely with the Living People would not be tourist-friendly.

"So it was just hypothetical thinking." He wonders if she's getting her hand gestures from him and the other humans too, or if it's something that comes naturally to her. And he thinks that if he were to make a list of people he'd want with a planet-destroying weapons, Anwei wouldn't be too high up on that list. He thinks back to all those calculations he saw in the Sensoriums, once.

"Handing it off's better for the people in the present. They'd thank you for it."

"Ah, but you see," she holds up her little finger for emphasis, "all those neutralizers are under Imperial AI control. Those AIs are supposed to be incorruptable, but I know they aren't. I broke Horanckk's control codes, and he survived. So if there was an occasion where there was going to be a lot of high-speed transit to Fle - say, a coronation - AND I had Horanckk study and subvert and seduce every AI controlling those neutralizers - AND I was able to get a large enough projector made, and get it into position at just the right time - then yes, I could do it." Her shoulders slump. "But then either Horanckk needs to keep his control on them - setting up a new AI dictatorship in place of the old - or release them, with their controls gone, and hope that none of them go insane.

"Overthrowing a dictatorship is never as easy as it looks in the vids. There it's always 'You defeated the evil emperor, we'll all be fine now' while reality has war, famine, blackmail, hate-hunts... It's like disassembling a building, while it's toppling, and assembling a new one out of the bits before it hits the ground."

"No," she shakes her head. "I could never take credit. It would be too damn suspicious - one Living Person left, everyone would think that I was going to set myself up as a new Empress, with the AIs under my control. Everyone would be out for my head. I'd have to be anonymous all the way, maybe get surgery to change my race, or just transfer myself into dataspace as an AI. There'd be no thanks for me. Curses, more likely, from everyone who was at least fed while they were under the collar, and now everything falls apart and they have to scrabble."

Enchanted Aquatica---the Prom [WIDE OPEN Y'ALL]

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