lifeaftr | [closed] Making your way in the world today takes everything you got

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[closed] Making your way in the world today takes everything you got

Who: Michael (

a_shadow)
What: Michael acting as a bartender for Tex, who needs advice
When: After the volcanoes event
Where: At the Denny
Warnings: Probably a little language, mentions of intoxication, mentions of a sexual encounter

Considering all the goings-on of the past couple of weeks, Tex should have a lot more to worry about than shitty human things like relationships. But the minute the Ingress pulled her into the Moira's universe and cloned this human body for her, it seems, she'd become stuck dealing with that sort of stuff. So here she is, drinking alone in the Denny, pondering what it means to have fallen in with Church—again—and whether or not this means she cheated on her boyfriend.

She sees Michael when he comes in. She doesn't say anything to him, just tracks him with her eyes. He's one of the first friends she made when she arrived here. She's shared enough about herself now that he probably has guessed that she's an AI. Would he care enough about her current dilemma for her to unburden herself on him?

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Michael, for his part, came to the Denny to feed his new food addiction. It doesn't seem like he has to eat all the time like humans, but that hunger sensation was really off-putting. He's not eager to experience it again.

Right now, he's perched behind the bar just eating a mango. There's no reason for him to be back here; it just feels kinda comfortable. That conversation he had with Eleanor was probably his favorite trip to Earth. Plus, people hide things behind bars, and he likes to dig around and see what they are.

Looking up, he makes eye contact with Tex and waves. Hey!

She smirks, rising from the booth she's sitting in to join him, sitting across from him at the bar. She's slightly drunk, so she sort of walks gingerly as she makes her way across the room. But she makes it safely, and sits on a barstool, setting her glass down in front of her.

"You look right at home back there," she says. "Can you top me off?"

"I spent a little while bartending on Earth," Michael explains, casting around until he finds the right bottle. "Just a few days, until I could catch a friend of mine in there, but it was interesting. Nowhere better to observe humans!" There were fights, parties, people who wanted to talk to him about their problems. Gotta love it!

He tops off her drink and leans forward against the bar, taking another bite of mango. It's messy; he dabs fussily with a napkin. "Guess I've gotta eat now, but I still don't seem to get drunk unless I feel like it, which is handy."

"You can decide to get drunk or not?" Tex asks. "That sounds handy."

She takes the glass after it's been topped off and sips at the alcohol inside. She's not distracted completely from the things she had been thinking about before his arrival, but she enjoys being with him now. Much better than drinking alone.

"So," she adds after she puts the glass down. "Did you catch your friend?"

Edited 2019-04-21 01:52 (UTC)

"Yeah!" Michael nods. It had been a moment - something precious to him, after so long without seeing her. Without seeing any of his humans. A year's not much in the grand scheme of his existence, but he'd spent three hundred around them in one way or another. At the time, he'd thought it was the last he'd speak to Eleanor before she died again.

But things worked out for the best. That plan was doomed from the start, he knows that now.

"She just needed a little push in the right direction, that's all. Didn't have a lot of good influences on Earth." He pauses, and adds: "Little weird calling myself a good influence, but I'm not even convinced her friends there liked her." They were quick to ditch her on her birthday.

She smiles slightly as he speaks. At the last bit she tilts her head and studies him a little. "What changed you, anyway?" she asks. "You're always talking about doing good and stuff."

She doesn't really know exactly that he changed, but someone who calls themselves a demon must have been a lot more evil at some point, right?

Michael sighs. "I had to strike a deal with the humans to cover my ass. They knew they had the upper hand in the negotiations, made me go to all their ethics classes with them."

He's never quite understood why Eleanor did it. Did she really believe, only a week into that reboot, that someone like him could change? Or did she just want to keep an eye on him? At the time, he just figured she was twisting the knife; it was the kind of thing he'd have done, and he sort of approved. It was always like that with Eleanor.

"It wasn't the classes, exactly," he clarifies, pushing her glass over and getting out one for himself as well. "But they meant I spent a lot of time with everyone. That's why." The lessons mean something to him now, but they wouldn't have if he were alone. You need people to owe something to. "They were a lot friendlier than you'd think, given they all knew I was a demon who'd tortured them for years. Guess they didn't have a lot of options either."

"Ethics classes," she says, sounding somewhat impressed. His friends seem to be fairly clever people. "I mean, what would you do in that situation? If you knew the guy in charge was torturing you and you could do something to help yourelf?"

She drinks another draft of her drink and rests her chin on her hand.

"And in the end y'all ended up pretty good friends. So it seems like it was the right thing for them to do, doesn't it?"

She ponders that for a moment.

"What do ethics classes consist of, exactly? Just them telling you right from wrong?"

"It wasn't a great position for any of us. Best thing they could've done back then might've just been to drag me down with them."

He's thought about that a lot - specifically during the day or so he spent with Shawn, planning that awful farewell party with no earthly clue what the humans were thinking. Selling him out would've been the logical thing to do. It wouldn't have saved them, but logically, he couldn't have blamed them for trying. But even thinking about the possibility now makes him feel sick.

Michael takes a drink to pull that train of thought back on track. "Oh, no. My one friend, Chidi, he was a professor of ethics and moral philosophy when he was alive. Lots of reading and papers. He'd say that the point of philosophy is that there is no one right answer - you're just learning ways of thinking about things. Although they did stress a lot with me that human lives had value..." But then, you probably do need to make certain absolute rulings when dealing with a literal demon.

"Makes sense to me," she says. "The thing about no absolute right or wrong, I mean. And the thing about human lives having value."

She traces a ring of a knothole on the bar with one finger contemplatively. She herself had killed a number of humans, but that was different, and besides, she'd been trying to change that somewhat. Besides, the war against the aliens had been more important.

"I suppose that the aliens in the war I was in would have seen it the other way around though, you know? That alien lives have value and human lives have none."

She frowns to herself and takes another drink. That was one thing she and Church had disagreed on deeply—how to win the war, whether it was to be done at any cost.

"I don't know if I'd have said demon lives had much value either, other than mine," Michael admits idly. Technically, they're kinda aliens, but he doubts they share much with your average extraterrestrial species. Mortal things tend to put more value in looking after their own kind.

Steepling his fingers, he tilts his head a little as he watches Tex drink. She's bothered by the war, then. Of course she is; most humans are. It's only right of them. Still, if it's killing enemy combatants that she's worried about...

"War's different though, right?" he ventures. He's on something of unexplored territory here. Chidi had geared his material towards his students; war wasn't particularly relevant to anyone there, so they hadn't exactly done a deep dive. But he figures it must be different. "I think most people would agree that killing in self-defense is justified, and that's what happens on a battlefield." If anyone should be held responsible, Michael doesn't imagine it's the individual soldiers.

"The aliens were genocidal against humans, so yeah," she says. "I think we would have been okay making alliances if they would have been, but no, they decided we all needed to die."

The aliens discovering humans was one of the worst things that could have happened with them believing the way they did. Tex doesn't understand much about the diplomatic situation involved, but she knows there's not much diplomacy with a species that wants you to die because you're you.

"I believed the war needed to be won at any cost," she adds after a beat. "I saw an opening and I took it. It wasn't important to me if others thought it was unethical. Church thought it was. He tried to stop me."

Michael just inclines his head a little. Wars of defense seem reasonable enough, and he can't really speak to any alien species and whatever they've got going on.

"Did you think it was unethical?" he asks, because she only mentioned what she thought needed to be done. People can think things are wrong and still know they're necessary - okay, maybe not everyone, but most people. He knows he'd do a lot of things that he's sworn off, if it would keep his friends safe, no matter what Chidi had to say about it afterwards.

Tex frowns.

"It definitely would have been if the kid had been human," she says slowly. "See," she adds, "we were going to use the kid to take over their religion from the inside. Get rid of the religious fanaticism about killing humans and they'd stop. That was the theory, anyway."

She turns her gaze on him.

"I can't bring myself to feel guilty about it."

She doesn't, either. The action she took was drastic, but at that point in the war humans were very close to losing.

Huh. As far as extreme war actions go, that's actually a lot tamer than Michael was expecting.

"Seems reasonable to me," he replies, shrugging. "I mean, I see where people would find it unethical, but no one died. And...I don't know, I do like the idea of giving them a chance to do something else with themselves."

Demons don't have religion, but demons have a purpose. What's he, except somebody who was convinced not to follow his species' traditional way of life anymore? It's hardly a one-to-one match - he'd never say he was manipulated - but the idea still resonates with him in a way.

But then, who's he to say what's ethical and what's not. "Not that I'm an expert."

She smirks.

"Well, I'll take that as an endorsement anyway." Just in case it comes up with Church again sometime.

Not that she's exactly on any normal kind of terms with Church. Her smirk fades as she goes to take another drink. After slamming it back she puts the glass down and tilts it a little, back and forth, to watch the way the blackberry wine clings to the glass.

"Church didn't hold a grudge about that, anyway," she adds belatedly. "But if it comes up. I'll tell him you approved."

Michael knits his fingers together, leaning his chin on them. "You really want that endorsement?" He's smiling, but also like - literally the devil.

Tex snickers, smirking again. But she seems to think a moment, and lifts her glass again.

"It hardly matters when we're not really speaking, does it?" she says, then lifts the glass to her lips and sips. This sip hits her a little harder—she's really well on her way to being drunk, she realizes. She puts the glass down and gestures toward him.

"Do you think you could get me some water?"

"Of course." Michael turns to fetch another glass, and figure out where the water is kept. They aren't so lucky as to just have plumbing in here, of course.

Once he finds it, he turns and fills the glass, and then pushes it towards her. "Why aren't you speaking?" He's not entirely clear on who Church is to her. Some friend, presumably; Tex seems to have an awful lot of friends around here.

"Thanks."

She takes a drink of the water. His question, which followed logically from what she had said, leaves her fumbling a bit to explain. There's one thing that works in her favor here, at least—she's drunk enough to have lost her inhibitions about telling the tale. She pauses, sighs, and rubs one eye before speaking.

"Church, is... Well, you remember what I told you about my creation? He was the one who created me. He didn't do it on purpose, he just...as far as I can tell he was just thinking about me really hard when he was created. They completely fucked him up, though, they...they tortured him and made him forget everything that had happened, so he made up some stories in his mind to explain why I wasn't around and stuff. He likes to think of us as boyfriend and girlfriend.

"Before I came here, I was in another universe, kind of like this one, for about a year. When I got here Church was really glad to see me. And I was glad to see him, to be honest. But in the universe where I came from before here, I already had a boyfriend. So I got here and...and we..."

She pauses again. She sort of grimaces a bit before continuing.

"I don't know. Is it cheating on your relationship if you're trapped in another dimension and you can't get back?"

Michael - whose hands had gone rather still at the mention of torturing people and making them forget - turns to occupy himself with refilling his whiskey glass. He seems unaffected by the alcohol; this isn't a good time for him to be getting drunk, too.

Human (AI?) romance is a welcome change in subject. "We don't really do that kind of thing," he replies with a shrug. At least, he doesn't; he's always just kinda figured any demons who did were just doing it to be obnoxious. "But if you really can't ever get back, it's kinda like he's dead. Or you are. People are usually allowed to move on after that, right?" From his point of view, that's basically what human death is, just leaving Earth and coming to his dimension, where the afterlife is. As far as he knows, humans don't consider remarriage to be bad.

"You know, I didn't really think of that. It's like I've died to him, isn't it?"

She takes another sip of water. Then she tilts her head a little, pushing her hand through her hair.

"What if he comes here, though?" she mutters. "That's most of what I'm worried about. I'll have to tell him what happened if he does."

"Normally, I'd say that was statistically unlikely," Michael replies, "but you seem to have a lot of people who know you here."

It can't be truly random, he figures, or that would never happen. Honestly, he's a little bitter it couldn't have been him - how simple, to have his friends whisked off to a universe where they're finally, really safe! Knowing what he knows now, he couldn't leave the afterlife as it is, but if he could just have everyone else safe...

Well. He takes another draw of whiskey, enough to burn for a few seconds after it goes down. No sense dwelling on that now.

"What do you think he'd think?" Maybe he'd be angry; maybe he wouldn't. Michael thinks anger would be a little unreasonable, but humans so often are about these things.

"Well, he'd be upset," she says. "He's the jealous type. I know that much."

She reflects on that, looking down into her glass of water, and then grabs the wine to take another sip of it.

"I think I will have to take that as it comes," she says. "No point putting everything on hold just in case."

Michael shrugs a little, nodding. That makes sense to him. There's every chance the guy would never show up at all, and she'd just be waiting around for nothing.

"Not like you've gotta date Church right away either," he observes, just because he's not totally sure why that's immediately necessary. Because she likes him or something, presumably? But it could just be one of those dumb things people do when they're horny. "If you're feeling weird about it."

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