trans_9 | When One Thinks Too Much, They Realize A Truth (Open)

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When One Thinks Too Much, They Realize A Truth (Open)

It was a beautiful sight in the Sensorium. A bright blue sky with just enough clouds to be peaceful, but not depressing. The door would lead right into a group of trees the faded to a cliff outlet that could see all across green the sight below sky was forest covered Rocky mountains. Specifically in the Colorado region.

Many could call it breathtaking, to be perched on the edge of the cliff.

Which was where Dani was sitting. Which might not seem odd in itself, until someone took another look. First was there were rocks around Dani, seemingly set there purposefully. One was a rather large boulder, about half of Dani's size. Another was a rock that was covered in moss. These two were on her left. On her right were another took. One rock was malformed; it looked like two rocks had fused together, one smaller than the other. The second was just a normal rock. Not huge, not oddly shape, and all one color. A perfectly normal rock.

The second was, despite the beautiful sight, if one got a look at Dani's face, all they would see is a distant, depressed, guilty look on her face. If one were adept at reading body language, they could see it in her back even as she sat on the cliff edge.

Though the most surprising thing might be this was all deliberate on Dani's part.

Not that she planned to let people know, of course. She was hoping no one would come in (not knowing Sensoriums could be locked) and see the sight, but it was something she had to do. For you see, Dani had a lot of time to think back home. She was on her own for the better part of a year and without knowing what else to do besides hiding from Vlad and finding a way to stabilize herself, all she could do was think. And other than thinking of what she was studying, she could only think of that first part of her life with Vlad to when she said good bye to Danny.

Which meant thinking about the other clones. It hadn't come at first, not until she thought about things completely. She had been told she was 'better' than them. That they were 'experiments' and she was a 'result.' She was a better clone. She was a daughter, family, a child. She was not like them. They were weak and not good enough. So it was all right to destroy them for the chance to get Danny. Then she found out she was just Vlad's tool in his eyes. And then she remembered what Danny said that made her different. She wasn't 'mindless.'

It was about two weeks after she left Vlad that it finally hit her.

She knew the clones like neither did. They weren't mindless. She knew that. She saw how loyal they were to Vlad, she saw the fear in one of their eyes as he died. They had emotions. They could feel. No, the difference was she was smarter and her body allowed her the ability to transform without dying. But that didn't make them mindless. That didn't make them...

That didn't make them not people.

And it had been on that day she realized she had killed her own brothers. After all, what else could they be called? They were people just as much as her. She just got lucky to have enough intelligence to keep her body intact and rebel. They were stupid and naive and she had ignorantly went along to kill one directly with her own hand and allow the others to die. It was her fault. She hadn't done a thing and she should have realized it was wrong because she was smart enough to. They didn't deserve it. Not the ones who were made before her and not the perfect clone either. After all, he couldn't help Vlad wanted to make him. She could have tried to stop it...and she didn't.

Not that she blamed Danny for any of it, of course. Danny was just defending himself. He had every right to resist. He couldn't help they wouldn't stop until one of them gave and he was just more enduring. And the perfect clone wasn't even his target, just caught in the crossfire when he didn't make the realization that she hadn't made till later. No, he had reason to be blamed. And she would keep the truth of the matter secret so he never felt any guilt about it.

No, this...this she and Vlad were to blame. Vlad for not seeing them at all and her for being too arrogant to allow herself to see. Which was why she was here now. Because she was the only one who did see the truth right now. No one would remember them like she did. Though she had wanted to do this a year after she realized the truth, it was hard to keep track of dates. So she decided to do it now.

They deserved to have someone mourn for them.

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"I promise."

Well too bad, because he's holding it out again.

"You hook your pinkie around mine. Symbolizes a pact."

"Oh," Dani said. Now she gets it. Sometimes she can catch on. Other times...need a freight train for her to get it. She hooked her pinky around his.

Allen grips her pinkie, shakes her hand once, releases it.

"Okay, it's official." He nods at her successful pinkie-promise. "We'll work on poppin' and lockin' it later."

The white and nerdy is practically oozing from his pores.

She gives that look of not understanding, but doesn't ask.

She looked out at the scenery again, silent for a few minutes, looking to be thinking before she finally speaks.

"What's worse? Killing a person when you accept they're a person, or killing them when you think they're below you enough to make it okay?"

Allen considers the question, but true to his prediction, doesn't appear offput by the insinuation that Dani has killed.

He's had an interesting life.

"I don't know. I can think of a couple of situations where one would be worse than the other."

He has a few more questions he wants to ask - but people tend to give you a lot of information when you just let them talk, so he stays quiet.

"I was told...I was better than them. That because I was closer to being perfect, that I was his daughter. They were just failed experiments...so it was all right to destroy them if we could complete the experiment," Dani said softly and bowed her head.

"And I believed him. I believed I was better, that they were just experiments and I was human...and it took me two weeks to realize how wrong I was...because he saw all of us as the same....and Danny said what made him think I was better than them. That I wasn't mindless."

She shuddered again, closing her eyes. "But Danny didn't know...that they weren't," she said, her voice choking a bit from tears held back.

Allen sorts through the information. True to his word, he is not an advice person. He is an interpreter of data. He solves equations. And people are interesting, but they are not equations. They aren't easy. So he thinks good and long before responding.

In the meantime, he puts his hand on Dani's shoulder and rubs it comfortingly.

His words have been a little mechanical. His thought process is very mechanical right now, because this is an important discussion. But the gesture is warm and comforting.

"Your creator, acting as your father, mislead you for his own purposes, it sounds like. You're not the first kid to have been convinced to do wrong things by their parents. Don't worry about that." he ruffles her hair a little bit. That last bit WAS advice - he thinks a little more before responding.

"And now . . . you feel bad for killing other variations on the cloning process, worse because you've come to see them as people, and worse because your friend hasn't, and you don't know if you want him to, because it hurts to think of things you've killed as people and know you can't do anything about it now. Yeah?"

"I know I don't want Danny to know. Danny was just defending himself. He didn't know anything about the situation and if he knows how I saw it, it'd eat him up inside. And...I don't want Danny to be hurt. It's better if he thinks they were just drones, that they could only follow orders, instead of feeling guilt for doing something he couldn't help," Dani said softly, but seriously. "That's why he can't ever know..."

"I was smarter than them. Because of that...I think that's why I seemed so much more advanced at first glance. Because my mind was stronger, the ecto reacted in a way that I was a completely human body instead of deformed. I could afford to transform. The ecto could make a human side. But...just because someone is stupid, doesn't mean they aren't human," Dani said, moving up her legs to the edge of the cliff, wrapping her arms around them.

"They had emotions. They could feel and think, even if it wasn't well. They had the same motivations as me. They loved Vlad...and they wanted to please him because he was our father. I knew that. I KNEW they could think, I knew they could feel. I just...chose to listen to Vlad instead. I chose to believe they weren't human, solely on his word, not on how I felt. I let one fly to his doom. The second...the SECOND gave me a SIGNAL that said he WASN'T GOING TO WIN, so I was to come in and destroy him to get Danny's trust. And the third...it was him that made me really question Vlad. Because I saw him stare at me...."

She paused, her shoulders starting to shake. "He was trying to get Danny to change and used too much energy and I saw him look at me after Danny escaped the first time and he was....he was TERRIFIED. He was scared and terrified and he MELTED in front of me and I know how it feels and his eyes kept haunting me even as I went after Danny, even after I finally realized Vlad was lying, and they did until I finally realized why they did and that I WILLINGLY AND BLINDLY WENT ALONG WITH A PLAN TO KILL THOSE WHO WERE ESSENTIALLY MY BROTHERS!" Dani cried, a sob following shortly after.

Oh man. That sucks. That sucks a lot. Allen considers this carefully as Dani gets more and more upset, filing away information on this father of hers as he gives Dani's shoulder another comforting squeeze. Vlad, clone pawns, morally disputable.

"I'm sorry all this stuff happened in your life already," he says, eventually, considering Dani's disproportionately young age. "It's not fair and you've got a lot of reasons to be angry and sad."

"I know...I know it's not all my fault..." Dani said, her body trembling. "I know Vlad is to blame for most of it, but I'm not innocent in this. I was the only one with the chance to really question it and I chose to be ignorant..."

"Yeah. And that was bad."

Allen chooses his words carefully.

"But you're questioning it now, now that you're a little older, and you've had more time to think about things on your own terms, and rather than accept what your creator chose to tell you as fact."

He looks at her, or tries to, because she might be very determined to look away.

"You know what that tells me about you? That you're a person who wants to do the right thing, and that you're smart enough to differentiate between what someone tells you is right and what is right. But, being born without knowledge, you had to learn it for yourself."

"I've been trying," Dani said. "I want to do the right thing. I don't like hurting people. I know in comparison to other kids, I'm pretty stupid about things that should be easy. And...I've been wondering what I can trust."

She didn't look at him, just staring out across the scenery as tears continued to fall. "And I don't know how I'm supposed to learn without it hurting...I thought after Vlad, I knew how to deal with people who weren't trust worthy...that I wouldn't be taken in again...so there was never a point where I blindly hurt people...but then I did it again...I chose to be ignorant to what should have been obvious when Valerie captured me...I don't even know how Danny got out of it! I guess it was because Valerie was being played by Vlad, but still! She had captured me and was gonna had me over and I believed she was a Danny Phantom fangirl!"

"Hey, I've seen your test scores. You're far from stupid."

Especially considering she's only been alive . . . what, one, two years?

He sighs before going on. "The part I hate to tell you is that life never stops being hard. You never stop learning lessons that hurt. The only way to stop from being hurt is to learn not to make the same mistakes twice. And that can be hard, with people, and learning to trust them. Most people spend their entire lives learning who to trust, and when."

"But I'm not as smart as my mental age should be," Dani said, burying her face against her arms. "And common sense...I mean, even if people do weird things, I miss a lot."

After the first outburst, her voice had calmed. It was just the first time she'd said it out loud. She'd cried enough over it where she reached hysterics that it went away far quicker. Even if she was still upset and crying, she was at least rational.

"Then how do you know who to trust, if it takes that long?"

"You're fine. You'll learn. Look at it this way - when I was your age - your physical age, not your chronological age - I was learning college-level physics for fun, but I couldn't sink a basket to save my life." He raises his eyebrows. "And I was already six feet tall by then. That's SERIOUSLY embarrassing - being tall and sucking at basketball."

A little humor, he's found, can do wonders to alleviate unhappiness.

"I bet you can play basketball with the best of them."

He ruffles her hair again before going on. "It takes a while. You learn who you trust - your friend Danny, for example - and you watch how other people treat him. You learn how other people treat each other, what to watch for when people are talking to you. A lot of it has to do with figuring out what people want from you."

He pauses before going on.

"You also have to figure out who a person is before you can trust them. What they want, not just from you, but from the world. There are certain people who will sell their grandmother out for a dollar. There are others who wouldn't give up the comfort of someone they barely know for their hearts' desire. You can hang out with, even work with both those people, and in a way you can trust both of them - to do what you expect, that is. And it's hard. People aren't simple. But you'll learn. I did."

"I've never played basketball. I haven't gotten to play a lot of games," Dani said with a shrug. "And it would depend on forms. I'm a lot more klutzy as a human than a ghost." She wasn't quite sure why. She thought it might be something to do with weight or something. Or maybe the flight thing. She did give a small smile though. "But at suck feet...isn't that tall enough to just toss up the ball a bit to get it in sometimes?"

What people want from her? "....are there a lot of people, who'd sell out their own grandmother for a dollar?" She asked. "Are there...really a lot of people that bad?"

Jeeze, is he going to have to to do this with his daughter too, if she ever gets born? Pre-inure her to the horrors of life by spoiling her innocence with a long lecture about how much everybody sucks?

Wait, his dad did that to him when he was 6. So yes.

"Yeah. Yeah, I'm not gonna lie to you, there are a lot of really selfish, nasty people in the world. Sometimes they're easy to spot, but not always. And they'll do whatever they can to get whatever advantage they can from you, especially if you've got something good to offer the world, especially if they can use you to get something they want - but you know what, it isn't all bad, because I swear, no matter how many utterly selfish, cruel bastards are out there, there are still a ton of people who are truly good doing whatever they can to put back a little of the good that person took out of the world back in it. I don't really know your buddy Danny too well, but he seems like one of them."

"Danny's a hero," Dani said. "A superhero. Even though people don't usually like ghosts, she's been saving Amity Park from all the bad ghosts mostly on his own. Since he got his powers, I think."

"So...there are a lot of people like Vlad? Why? Isn't it really lonely to be like that?"

"I don't know Vlad, but the most evil person I did know didn't really care about loneliness. I don't know what she cared about, beyond doing what she wanted. Some people just don't care about other people at all. It's called sociopathy, but even people who have attachments can do some nasty things."

"Look, I . . . I don't want to get you all depressed and convince you that the world is a bad place. I have no solid conclusion on whether the world is primarily a good place, or primarily a bad one. Good things happen to bad people, and bad things happen to bad people, and most people are just going about their lives, trying to find happiness for themselves, and maybe if they can, do a little good for somebody else on the side. If they set out to do evil, they set out to do it in very small ways. Nasty comments to their neighbor to make themselves feel better. Leaving their dog's crap on somebody else's lawn. Your creator sounds like an extraordinary guy - extraordinary in the negative sense of things, and there are a few of those, just like there are a few people like Danny. I know a couple of them. I'm married to one."

He smiles, for a moment more animated than he has been this entire conversation.

"But as for loneliness, I suspect that's one of the reasons behind the things he does. I suspect he wanted company when he created you and your brothers."

Dani was silent for a few moments as she thought over what he said. "I don't know why people would feel better about doing bad things to people. I mean, usually when I vent frustration, the person deserved it," she said.

She shrugged and glanced at the rocks. "But...evil seems lonely. I mean, ghosts haunt things by themselves usually...so that's lonely. And Vlad..." She looked at Allen. "That was precisely why he made us. He said...he wanted love. He just...didn't accept it from the people who would give it to him," she said and looked out at the scenery. "He wanted Maddie and Danny and because of that...anything other than them, he wouldn't accept even if it could rid of his loneliness."

"Messed up people do messed up things to get what they think they want. The world isn't perfect. It messes up a lot of people. But it sounds like you're on to something there."

"Onto what?" Dani asked.

"Your creator guy's problems. Trying to get specific people to love you when they don't is a pretty surefire way to make yourself miserable."

Pause.

"Aaaand, if you're an evil genius, screw up a bunch of other peoples' lives."

They've been talking for a while, so he adds, "Hey. How are you feeling? You okay?"

"I know what his problem is. He's obsessive, thinks only about himself, and doesn't want to acknowledge anything he doesn't think is perfect," Dani said with a sigh. "And he's...very, very lonely. Like he might as well be a full ghost instead of half of one."

She was silent for several moments. "I dunno," she muttered. "I guess less tense than I did when I came in here."

"Most lonely people don't have the resources to make clones to keep themselves company. And I like to think most of them are intelligent enough to realize that probably wouldn't go as they wanted it to."

Then again, sometimes, people are staggeringly dumb. Especially to Allen.

"How do you feel about yourself?" he asked, somewhat out of the blue.

When One Thinks Too Much, They Realize A Truth (Open)

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