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16. Siamese
[Public]
In your opinion, when does an object lesson become so on point that the example in question begins to lose all credibility? Or to put it another way - when does the merely relevant become obviously contrived, when everything we are subjected to is the product of artifice to begin with?
[Spam for anyone likely to come by his cabin; if you want to be in on it, you are, etc.]
[It's been a very, very long time since he had to tend his own garden. Even the barge's facsimile is largely self-maintaining, but he finds himself restless with it. He needs more flowers, for hive of bees the whimsical reasons. So he's digging up some of the stranger and more picturesque plants, the bioluminescent ferns and the elaborately geometric succulents. All his plants are hardy things, designed and bred for resilience - no death touches his realm but what he allows, or so the catechism goes - so he has to pry up every centimeter of the root systems, has to kneel down and get his hands dirty. The blisters on his hands will fade fast, but in the meantime he savors the sting. It feels good to be killing things, even if it's only his plants.]
[Private to Hannibal]
How did you fare in London?
[Private to Sylvanas]
We were wondering if you'd be willing to look after our cats for a few days. Melchior and Lirath already get on.
[And the teacup persian kitten he got for Christmas is too much of a narcissistic fluffball to cause trouble.]
[Private to David 8]
How frequently does the barge make you human? Or anything that thinks dramatically differently from your normal idiom.
[It's not that he thinks David doesn't deserve politeness. He just thinks, given David's nature, that it's more polite not to waste his time with pleasantries.]
[Private to Bruce Banner]
I might need. A few days leave.
[He's not sure he trusts himself with patients, right now.]
[Private to Barbara Gordon.]
Anastasia was there.
In your opinion, when does an object lesson become so on point that the example in question begins to lose all credibility? Or to put it another way - when does the merely relevant become obviously contrived, when everything we are subjected to is the product of artifice to begin with?
[Spam for anyone likely to come by his cabin; if you want to be in on it, you are, etc.]
[It's been a very, very long time since he had to tend his own garden. Even the barge's facsimile is largely self-maintaining, but he finds himself restless with it. He needs more flowers, for hive of bees the whimsical reasons. So he's digging up some of the stranger and more picturesque plants, the bioluminescent ferns and the elaborately geometric succulents. All his plants are hardy things, designed and bred for resilience - no death touches his realm but what he allows, or so the catechism goes - so he has to pry up every centimeter of the root systems, has to kneel down and get his hands dirty. The blisters on his hands will fade fast, but in the meantime he savors the sting. It feels good to be killing things, even if it's only his plants.]
[Private to Hannibal]
How did you fare in London?
[Private to Sylvanas]
We were wondering if you'd be willing to look after our cats for a few days. Melchior and Lirath already get on.
[And the teacup persian kitten he got for Christmas is too much of a narcissistic fluffball to cause trouble.]
[Private to David 8]
How frequently does the barge make you human? Or anything that thinks dramatically differently from your normal idiom.
[It's not that he thinks David doesn't deserve politeness. He just thinks, given David's nature, that it's more polite not to waste his time with pleasantries.]
[Private to Bruce Banner]
I might need. A few days leave.
[He's not sure he trusts himself with patients, right now.]
[Private to Barbara Gordon.]
Anastasia was there.
no subject
Actions have consequences.
[Lightly enunciated, sure. His eyes open again.]
It wasn't a moment of resentment or disappointment. But we think perhaps it might have been, if we had experienced emotions there, and that may have...hmm, sublimated into his natural casual cruelty. You denied him something, so for a moment he denied you. He had little sense of proportion.
And there was also an element of playing with fire, as boys will. You might have alerted the market, and had him torn apart. But he saw you as a fellow predator too, and too proud to name yourself anything else to bring it down on him.
no subject
Do you consider yourself one now? [He can see the yes, as he can see the no: all men who place themselves above, beyond, better than others are predators in their way. And yet a ruler must be above even that, to be just and effective.
And of course, predators do not often offer up their skin and organs to another.]
no subject
[He isn't any of those things any more. But.]
Everybody needs a doctor.
no subject
From time to time. Yet I think if you wanted to mend all man's ills, you would not still be here.
no subject
So many of them are in man's blood.
[And consequently require some less than hippocratic measures. He means this both on the symbolic level and the literal one, the impulse to anarchy and destruction as well as the genetic deficits wrought on his people by their greedy and short-sighted ancestors. So many things which require correcting.]
no subject
[The smile stays level. He understands the Emperor's meanings, finds them wanting. He is a man in which the impulse to anarchy and destruction has become something more, greater, and he would not see it corrected.]
no subject
[He has a parasite in his spine. It is oddly reminiscent.]