mayfield_rpg | (no subject)

[phone]
Oh, marvelous, it's August again. My favorite time of the year.

Students, I hope you've been working on your summer assignments. Adult men, I hope you're prepared to be perfect gentlemen when we all find ourselves floundering in that ghastly hotel. Anything else to expect this month? No? On to business, then.

I'm sure we're all very distracted by talking pony parties and pool parties and platter parties and inpourings of perpetually perplexed new populations, but has anyone made any effort whatsoever to sort out that business from last month or are we still playing the game where we ignore all interesting information in favor of smashing random objects we find in the dairy? I don't mind that game; of course, quite invigorating, good for the vasculature, but it might be worth trying a different approach at some point in time. I venture to suggest today, if no one's too busy holding competitions to see who looks the most absurd absent their clothing.

[action, 726 Anderson Lane]
[Susan can be found hanging up black cloaks and other assorted clothing in uniform crepuscular shades around the house where garish green was all there was formerly to see. A welcome change, in her opinion; she'd missed her wardrobe from home, even if everything looked exactly the same as the black cloak she had commissioned here in Mayfield.

Still, she pauses for a moment as she handles an emerald-green cloak, never worn, hanging in the hall closet since the previous Christmas. ...It goes back on the rack after a bit. And she'll only push it back behind the others an inch or two.]

[action, park]
[A rather unusual sight in the park later on that week. Somehow, Miss Susan the English teacher has been cajoled into reading a nice story for a small group of drones.]

And so, adding conspiracy and first-degree murder to their trespass and property damage charges, Hansel and Gretel pushed the old woman into the oven and ignored her anguished screams as they left the house of gingerbread, naturally taking all of her valuables with them as they went. With these illicit goods, they reunited with their criminally negligent father, but not, surprisingly, their 'wicked' stepmother, who had mysteriously vanished in the space of the two nights in which the children were gone, leaving the father sole keeper of his property and remaining funds and raising suspicion as to who it was had devised the plan to leave the children in the forest in the first place.

But it doesn't matter, because they all lived happily ever after.

The End.

[The drones seem quite pleased with her recitation, at any rate.]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Them? They haven't taken away anything apart from grass stains on their pants.

[Susan stands with a world-weary expression on her face.]

It isn't as if they're people.

They might not be conscious as you or I, but I think they're still people. Still children.

[She takes her responsibility to the drone boy in her house very seriously.]

They're virtual meat puppets with a rudimentary personality. They haven't got souls, and they'll kill you if the town ever decides to go haywire again.

However they might act now, they are still children. They could have been like us once, they could be again one day.

They really aren't.

You're frightfully wrong, but if it assuages your sense of humanity to think so, far be it for me to undeceive you. It hardly matters either way, given how rarely they do go haywire.

My daughter here, Winry, told me that droning is a punishment and what happens to people no longer here. How can you be sure that these people are not like you or I, just under punishment?

You really wouldn't understand.

...Shall we simply say I've been here long enough to know who is and who isn't a native of the town?

Whether that's the case or not, ma'am, it's no reason to completely dehumanise them.

On the contrary, it's extraordinarily dangerous to humanize them. Unnecessary sentimentality impairs judgment; it's why revival nowadays takes so much effort.

I'm sorry, I don't understand what you're referring to?

[Revival? Effort? What?]

I'm referring to a farce.

A complicated rigmarole wherein a large number of people who would probably be geniuses if they had anywhere near as many brains as brawns decided they ought to destroy something they found in the dairy, under the assumption that it was a machine powered by the souls of those who had been droned. This is exactly as idiotic as it sounds.

Instead, they destroyed the machine that allows us to automatically revive upon death.

The souls of the departed aren't anywhere in Mayfield. Not floating about in an afterlife, not in a machine, and certainly not in these bodies. The sooner everyone stops pining over these mockeries of life, the better.

[Shit, this woman was a lunatic.

She still doesn't buy this whole death revival thing, it's ludicrous, and now Susan was babbling about souls in a machine. Madeline hadn't thought of it as souls and bodies at all, she had just assumed the drones were people who had suffered some brain alteration, not... soul removal.]

You're talking nonsense, listen to yourself. People don't return from the dead and souls can't just... leave bodies behind.

...[Susan sighs in exasperation to herself.]

Naturally. I've been wasting time arguing with someone new to town. How silly of me to actually care.

[She seats herself again and opens her book.]

Do come back in a month or so when you're marginally less ignorant. Until then, have fun with the drones.

[A little hot-headed at what she perceives to be cruelty towards the children, even drone children, she nods stiffly.]

Perhaps I will come back in that month, but I assure you I will still feel the same way.

Yes, I'm perfectly sure you will. Being in Mayfield is simply stagnating on personal development and pre-existing morals, after all.

...Good day, then.

[Back stiff, she practically stalks off in a temper.]