bodilesswarrior: (If This Doesn't Work)
Barbara Gordon ([personal profile] bodilesswarrior) wrote2014-11-08 01:44 pm

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.]
heisrisen: (horizon)

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[personal profile] heisrisen 2014-12-05 08:11 pm (UTC)(link)
Can you be corrupt when you're the one making the rules?

...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.]
Edited 2014-12-05 20:15 (UTC)
heisrisen: (Oxham told the secret)

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[personal profile] heisrisen 2014-12-05 08:23 pm (UTC)(link)
He gets his results. Zane, Morgana, David. I can't deny what's been done for them.

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.
heisrisen: (puppy eyes)

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[personal profile] heisrisen 2014-12-17 09:19 am (UTC)(link)
[He doesn't respond right away, reticent because it really is a guess, a wisp of suspicion, too surreal and too trite. He doesn't have anything so rigorous as a hypothesis, nothing really vast or alien or subtle enough. But he has a guess.]

When we were in Oxford, did you know about Dust?
heisrisen: (slouch)

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[personal profile] heisrisen 2014-12-25 06:31 am (UTC)(link)
I think maybe he eats them.
heisrisen: (slouch)

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[personal profile] heisrisen 2014-12-26 04:33 am (UTC)(link)
One has malice for other people.

[No, he doesn't think it's malice. They are too demonstrably beneath him.]
heisrisen: (ease)

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[personal profile] heisrisen 2014-12-29 02:02 am (UTC)(link)
As a baker thinks of yeast, I imagine.

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.
heisrisen: (haggard)

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[personal profile] heisrisen 2015-01-05 06:17 pm (UTC)(link)
Perhaps some graduations are less tasty than others. Or perhaps he's irrational - stubbornly invested in one project, not in others - or simply careless.

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.
heisrisen: (frustration)

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[personal profile] heisrisen 2015-01-10 09:04 pm (UTC)(link)
I - no.

[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.]
heisrisen: (Default)

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[personal profile] heisrisen 2015-01-11 08:25 pm (UTC)(link)
I'm sure if I even want to know. Part of me resents cooperating enough as it is.

[But his mind does gnaw on it, given time to waste. And he has so much time here.]
heisrisen: (slouch)

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[personal profile] heisrisen 2015-01-12 06:58 pm (UTC)(link)
Don't.

[Tightly.]

If I'm going to fight him, I'm going to fight him. And a lot of me still wants to.
heisrisen: (frustration)

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[personal profile] heisrisen 2015-01-14 04:50 pm (UTC)(link)
And what would they be?

[Other than 'don't break my ship'.]
heisrisen: (Rix killed the Reason)

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[personal profile] heisrisen 2015-01-16 09:30 pm (UTC)(link)
I'm not looking.

[Not scheming, not trying to engineer opportunities. But he doesn't know that he can promise not to take one, if he finds a clearer chance than the mirror barge offered. If he could promise, honestly, to forgo such a thing in favor of trusting the process, he'd probably be graduated and then some.]

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