unknownseas | FOURTH TRIAL

Entry tags:

trial,
week 5

FOURTH TRIAL

Alright, that's quite enough time. Move along towards the trial, if you would all be so kind. You know what's coming.

[ It's routine by now - go to the vault door, get let into the elevator by Angel, head down to the trial room... it's hard not to notice the losses on the ride down by now, though. Your numbers are starting to really dwindle, even if you're often spread out enough not to notice as much normally. The trial room and its podiums, too, seem more than ready and willing to remind you of the same. The red glow of the empty spaces is constant, potentially unnerving. ]

Remember that as there are two victims to consider, up to two votes may be counted at the end of proceedings. As always, I am but a direct address away, however rude you choose to make it.

Find the party or parties responsible for the deaths of your comrades. And to those parties: Good luck.

[ The screens rise!

Welcome to your fourth trial. ]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

So, what you are saying is that the motive is useless. You would not go back to normality, to the life you would have wanted.

So not only was one life was wasted, two were, for this selfish endeavor?

Oh no, you'd go back to that regret changed. You could even change it yourself, if you wanted. ...But what if that regret was far in the past? What if that regret was something that shaped you?

Would it really be your life, if you hadn't lived it? Just stepped into the shoes of another person?

...If it's a regret bad enough, does that matter? Just because you wouldn't forget it doesn't mean it isn't worth changing.

You could still save someone's life, if that's what you wanted. They wouldn't have to know what could have happened.

How would you step into that life, though? You would be an outsider. Always pretending. Always acting like you knew that person, when you didn't.

You would.

[BOY BEING AN OUTSIDER WHO PRETENDS ALL THE TIME SOUNDS AWFUL, GOOD THING SHE DOESN'T KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT THAT]

It's exactly what I was going for before this, anyway. Even if only the people still involved remember the truth, the world would still be the way it should be. That's more than enough. But the way I'm going to fix that has nothing to do with the Professor.

Or a lot of people's lives, depending on what it was.

If our culprit is selfish enough, or if the impact would be big enough, the fact that they would still remember everything as it was might not matter.

Yet here they are, sitting in the present waiting for us to die for a false promise. A cowardly fool that does not wish to admit their mistakes.

[ Rin sighs. ]

We can sit here and moralize at them all you want, but that doesn't change that whatever they killed for means more to them than all our lives put together.

Of course it would not be. The past is fixed.

I don't know about useless. It's not that different from time travel: you still remember what happened, but your choices affect the future.

...No. Della's correct.

That future might be one utterly alien to you. So altered that the world itself may as well be nothing like that with which you were already familiar.

[Nova rolls her eyes.]

Sorry, you're right. Of course, there's no reason why someone would want their choices to make the world different. "Oh, you can't change the past, because trauma made you who you are, Nova."

[She's clearly imitating someone, but it's not anyone you all know.]