do: read; don't: visit 214

[giftedandtalented]

Mehitabel reads a lot.

She starts calling herself "Tab", for short, not that anyone calls her anything apart from Kers. She writes suitably encrypted emails to Aelise about ideas for fixing the world - mostly she asks questions, to start, forming a picture of the exact problem she has to solve.

She misses her parents, but not very much. At least she got to say goodbye.

When her brain won't absorb new information, she bounces around in zero-g.

After six months, Aelise visits again.

Tab says, "Anybody you store up here must be important somehow. If I don't know about the other secret person, I won't know how to come up with ideas that work with them being important however they're important."

Comments

[alicornucopia]

"How do you know there aren't any good ones?" Tab insists.

[pythbox]

"Because I need things I cannot possibly get," he says. "I need to be home, I need to be somewhere Chelsa isn't, I need to be around people who don't care about her - there aren't enough people who don't care about her in the fucking world, and there aren't going to be, there's no way she's going to let go, do you get me? If you get rid of her everyone is going to be devastated about it, and I will want to set them on fire, I hate her so much—"

He starts crying into his pillow.

[alicornucopia]

"If you got here randomly maybe someone else could too, or you could randomly co somewhere else. Maybe I'll think of something good enough and Aelise will get rid of Chelsa. Maybe it turns out Chelsa doesn't work perfect over broadcast and blind people or something don't like her but they keep it quiet 'cause they know what's going on better than I did and they could come live up here, I don't know because I only found out about this problem a couple of minutes ago and haven't asked yet. Help me think of stuff! I hate her too, we could get rid of her if we could think of something!"

[pythbox]

Right this second, he is too busy crying.

[giftedandtalented]

Tab waits.

[pythbox]

Eventually:

"Look, trying to solve the problem makes it worse, okay? Because it means I have to think about Chelsa and the entire planet fully of people she's got wrapped up in her snuggly mind control blankets, and I can't even get my head around that, and when I try I just want to hurt myself until I can't think about it anymore. At least when I'm thinking about something else, I go nuts slower."

[giftedandtalented]

Tab thinks about that.

"So," she concludes slowly, "you can't help me and I can't help you?"

[pythbox]

"Pretty fucking much," says Harley.

[giftedandtalented]

Tab hugs her knees, then picks up her tablet again and thinks on it.

"I wish the vampire empress me was here," she sighs after a minute.

[pythbox]

Harley snorts.

"Yeah, me too."

[giftedandtalented]

Tab opens her mouth to ask him something else, but then decides against it.

[pythbox]

He hugs his pillow and sighs.

[giftedandtalented]

Think, think, write, write, think.

"You do want me to do what I'm trying to do, though, so before you go do a terrible plan and maybe depending what it is I can't talk to you again, can you tell me stuff? Even if it sucks to talk about?"

[pythbox]

He sighs again.

"Yeah, okay."

[giftedandtalented]

Tab sits ready to take notes. "I don't know what all you know so I don't know what's maybe useful."

[pythbox]

"I don't know what's useful either," he says. "You have a bunch of alts. The one I've met is a vampire empress, there's more that are other kinds of empress, basically all of you end up taking over the world somehow or other but there's different kinds of taking over and 'empress' isn't always it. Um - vampires in Aurum used to all eat people, now they mostly eat fake blood instead, the ones who eat people tend to get violent with each other and you usually couldn't get more than a group of three or so to hang out for long without somebody ripping somebody's head off and setting them on fire - Chelsea, our Chelsa, she was a vampire and she worked for the previous vampire government making their employees all like each other so they could stick together and not fight."

[giftedandtalented]

"This world is already taken over," frowns Tab. "How do they take over their worlds? Do they have to do anything horrible like Chelsa-ing people to do it?"

[pythbox]

"I think one of them blew up a building once or something," he says. "But the rest just set up colonies on Mars and stuff."

[giftedandtalented]

"How would blowing up a building help?"

[pythbox]

"I should know? I just heard it from somebody once," he shrugs.

[giftedandtalented]

"Well, how do they run the worlds once they take them over, then?"

[pythbox]

"Pretty well, I guess."

[giftedandtalented]

"No, I mean - what do they do? They've had more time to think of ideas than me, maybe they have good ones I can copy?"

[pythbox]

"I should know?" he repeats, frustrated. "I don't follow Bella around all day watching her empress."

[giftedandtalented]

"Oh," muses Tab.