Barbara Gordon (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
bodilesswarrior) wrote2014-11-08 01:44 pm
bodilesswarrior) wrote2014-11-08 01:44 pm
Entry tags:
32 - Video - Backdated to 3rd
[She's never felt so small.
It's the sort of thing she would hide, usually, but not today. Her shoulders are slumped, and her expression is worn, and her voice is dull.]
Everyone I know - I'd just like you to check in.
[Iris, of course, has been at her side since they got back. It's helped - it always has, holding her close - but it can't overcome everything else.
She made a promise.]
[Emperor]
You, especially.
[A strained, bitter smile.]
You can say "I told you so" if you want.
[Spam! Open to All]
[She needed to get out. Out of her tower, out of her head.
She's dressed in an old black tank, hair pulled back in a short, low ponytail. Her hands are wrapped in frayed strips of cloth.
As soon as she gets to the gym, she picks a punching bag and starts wailing on it. It's not about precision, or stamina; she'll pummel the leather until her hands bleed.]
It's the sort of thing she would hide, usually, but not today. Her shoulders are slumped, and her expression is worn, and her voice is dull.]
Everyone I know - I'd just like you to check in.
[Iris, of course, has been at her side since they got back. It's helped - it always has, holding her close - but it can't overcome everything else.
She made a promise.]
[Emperor]
You, especially.
[A strained, bitter smile.]
You can say "I told you so" if you want.
[Spam! Open to All]
[She needed to get out. Out of her tower, out of her head.
She's dressed in an old black tank, hair pulled back in a short, low ponytail. Her hands are wrapped in frayed strips of cloth.
As soon as she gets to the gym, she picks a punching bag and starts wailing on it. It's not about precision, or stamina; she'll pummel the leather until her hands bleed.]
[private]
[private]
[private]
One day, I'll figure out this entire goddamned system and all of its rules, and maybe then I can make some kind of actual difference.
[private]
Did that work for you at home?
[Real question.]
Re: [private]
[private]
Tangents, though. Those he can do.]
Barbara, how much do you know about the British East India Company?
[private]
Started out as a joint-stock company, ended up ruling swathes of India with private armies. Shockingly, it got very corrupt.
[private]
...wait. Don't answer that.
[He can't help a skewed, sheepish smile. It was a semantic question rather than a moral one, but he heard how it came out; he is not incapable of laughing at himself.]
The point I meant to make - there was a clause in the company charter. If the company failed to turn a profit for three years running, it would be dissolved. It's that institutional hunger, the literal insatiability of it, the constant need for new resources, like Rome's endless need for new lands to settle its previous generation of legionnaires, that, and no oversight, that always yields a certain blunt flavor of force. The impatience and sloppiness and overkill of it. Opportunities are lost, but enough are exploited, there are always some results.
Sometimes the admirals remind me of it.
[He thinks of the Rix, and their hunger; he thinks of London below, cast into his sister's roughly translated role, an aesop as subtle as a blazing comet.]
[private]
It fades as she listens, and considers.]
I can see that. As far as we know, he's not accountable to anyone. He's not - there's no management, not really. He does what he wants.
What he wants does seem to be a good thing - broadly speaking - but that's not always enough.
[private]
And yet. The machine of it churns on and on, and I feel chewed up and stuck in the gears and - I wonder, sometimes. What his clause is.
[private]
[private]
When we were in Oxford, did you know about Dust?
[private]
[private]
[private]
I suppose every level has its predators. Do you think it's malicious or just instinctual?
[private]
[No, he doesn't think it's malice. They are too demonstrably beneath him.]
[private]
[private]
Necessary; perhaps even with proprietary fondness for successfully cultivated varieties. But to be spurred and fed and starved as makes them useful, discarded when they produce inadequate results beyond the limits of his patience.
[private]
Still - ]
That'd make sense if it was consistent. But we've had Inmates well on their way to graduation disappear, and others who've been here for years without much progress.
[private]
Certainly his occasional snide comments give the impression of an emotional creature, and one rather affronted at being criticized by his uncooperative tools.
I'm a bit reminded of the end of Job, loathe as I am to admit it.
[private]
Job was an experiment, really. Do you suppose the Admiral is trying to prove something?
[private]
[He frowns, face scrunching slightly in, interrogating his own instincts.]
It's too open-ended. Proof of concept, perhaps, but it seems to have gone on long enough for that. But the turnover of the population, essentially stagnant graduation rates with no apparent major variables introduced or removed over time, and the trundling half-rudderless along, going by how often we crash - well designed experiments need definitive ends so that conclusions can be drawn.
It was a bet, in Job. So perhaps a question of stakes. Maybe the end is already set, but arbitrary.
[He wonders what happens to them if they outlast it, inmates and wardens alike.]
[private]
It'd help if we knew when this all started. I've been cataloguing the network, but it's a long slog - and there's no way to tell if the last entry I'll find was really the first.
[private]
[But his mind does gnaw on it, given time to waste. And he has so much time here.]
[private]
[private]
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[private] i couldn't resist icon paralells
[private] beautiful
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