I think if I live to be twenty I will have derived enough benefit from having my bot to be worth the experience of triggering!

What happened?

You sure you want that one a minute and a half before class?

 

Professor's not here yet, still halfway across campus. 

 

I can check that without reading for other stuff,  if you were wondering.

I'm sure your professor appreciates that.

You said you could hear her from a long way off, so I assume you've heard her at all. I was maybe twenty feet away from a wingtip at times, trapped under some debris that definitely wasn't going to kill me by itself. When they walled off Lausanne I thought maybe they should have just - carpet bombed the place - at the time I'd thought for security but when I was in London I could feel myself peeling apart and I wasn't sure I'd even be able to kill myself after

stop me if this is excessive I've never written it out intending to share

No it's okay.

So best case scenario was Dad insisting on whisking me away to live in a box and be given books now and then and never matter in any way because if I did I would do so negatively and I would have to cooperate with living in a box insofar as I even could and I couldn't even coherently plan on that, or maybe I'd just be stuck with a million other peeled-apart people in London for however long I'd manage to live with a broken leg and who the fuck knows what people trapped in Simurghed cities do for fun maybe they set people with broken legs on fire, or maybe something else would fall on me and then at least I'd just be dead. He didn't even know where I was he looked in my hotel but I wasn't there.

She was really loud.

There was a moment where she was loud enough that I couldn't think about anything else but the singing and then she moved or something and I had a thread of lucidity to notice that that had happened and then suddenly it was just singing not - the thing she does. Just awful loud singing.

And I had my cellphone and some random trash and I made a sort of radar screamer. Dad has a secondary thing where he gets radar impressions of where he lands so he's not totally disoriented. He found me and he got me out.

Then powers testing.

They could've waited a couple of days. I'm sorry.

They couldn't really. They couldn't let me talk to anybody who wasn't checking me, I was too wired to sleep - they even tried me on a sleep power, didn't work - wouldn't have been a fun couple days.

The not being able to affect the world ever because you could only do harm is the worst thing I can possibly imagine.

Yeah me too.

His professor arrives; he doesn't put his computer away. 

Thank you for telling me.

Thanks for listening. I avoid letting people on the team know about it and I don't want to freak Dad out or anything but that leaves me with a bot, which, great as it is, is not a person at this time.

I thought they made you all get therapy or something. Not that I was clear on what human therapy is like.

They do. I have a therapy resistant personality.

The Valar do therapy by just changing how happy you are or what you remember or whatever. It sounds kind of creepy, I wouldn't trust them if I had a problem.

Wow, yeah, that's intensely fucked up.

I mean, for the people who got horribly tortured it can be the only thing that works. But it doesn't fit with the way I relate to my head at all - I should go, professor glaring.

OK, have a good class.

He does! And then he goes and reviews the code Tinkers send him and sends revisions and requests and puts in five hours on his artifact when he's stuck and stops mid-block when he has a good idea for how to cut six hundred lines from the emerging mortality solution and sketches an outline of an opacity artifact and puts in eight more hours on the artifact and does the mechanical engineering homework and hums to himself in Bengali the whole time and then it is a break and he goes to get whatever-meal-it-presently-is from the cafeteria. 

I think it's probably time to start thinking about what artifacts could take an Endbringer but I don't understand them well enough to even guess.

They're holding back, I think. They don't go in and do as much damage as they're known to be able to dish out but they also don't seem to be operating under meaningful energy limits until Scion kicks their ass and they go rest.

Why.

If I knew that there would have been more to the email.

Okay, what are the possibilities? They're expecting some kind of retaliation if they go all out? They think they're playing? They're trying to create conflict, rather than exterminate humanity? - Melkor did that. He'd send monsters to fight with Elves, and they'd have axes and swords and bows and arrows and he's a god who can take the form of a volcano. He wanted the fight, not the outcome.

That feels concordant with the capes being conflict prone thing but I feel like they could optimize harder for it if they wanted.