shitposting rave 5: discount rejects from every genre

Be th´best at traffic?

 

"Drive into this wall! Now into this other car! Waitwaitwait, here comes a jet, quick, smash into the window!"

Yeah, I don't see it.

 

FRAGGIN HUNTER KILLER CAR zooom GONNA RUN YOUR AFT OVER!!!

*pats Scope's head twice*

*in a small voce* beep beep

 

You're a doll, anyone ever tell you that? [He drapes himself over Req lazily.]

 

-snrk-

Yes, th terror of th roadways!

 

Valiska turns to see what Ford is looking at.

Her clone-sister. This might be a thing she can help, but maybe not, because she can guess what Lissa is thinking about and Lissa knows she's got kits in her. "Valisseira," she says softly. "Valisseira-kiya, breathe. Everyone here survived." She is speaking Talassani with the intention that only Lissa will fully understand it, but she knows that anyone who wants to will anyway, and maybe that's okay. "What happened is in the past. You're safe here now. And so is Updraft."

She doesn't dignify Ford's comment with an answer. Of course he would say that. He never knew her family. Lissa was an exile. She considered briefly asking if he'd have left Stan, since they seem to be close in their world, but she won't.

And Church is being an idiot, too.

"The problem is that you felt the need to make an issue of her species," Valiska says quietly. "And you are really lucky something else upset her so much that she's not processing the abotaru spoor that just came out of your mouth. Robot porn? The Transformers hate being called robots. Catgirl threeways? She's a woman, not a fantasy trope!"

When he apologises again, she thinks that's better, but he's going to have to do it again. And he should. Because he needs to apologise after he understands what's wrong.

 

[Much more seriously, now he's done snickering with Scope:] No, it isn't an excuse. Because there isn't one. As I've said... four million years is a long time, even for us. I was never married to the Cause like some Decepticons, but even I can see how far we've... how much we've changed. The MTO projects were far from the only tragedy.

 

Valiska smiles a little. "I swear this place is like fifty shades of PTSD. I can't think of anyone here right now who's not from a world with a tragic history. I'm just determined that my world won't go back to where we were before. It's really all we can do, any of us: clean up the mess that's in front of us as best we can."

 

...as best we can. Quite. [Even for the topic, he seems a little somber. Someone's feeling guilty.] I wish you the best of luck with that, wherever you are.

 

*sighs* ... oookaaaay, I really, really wasn't thinking then. Got it.

And I guess I was falling back into old habits there. Describing shit as dismissively as I can, pretending I don't care, and that everything is either annoying, funny or both. Trying to hide that I have the softer emotions by acting superior and laughing at everyone. *sighs* I should know better, I really should.

 

"Thanks. You too." Valiska smiles a little warily. "If it helps, we may have achieved peace through tyranny, but we don't want to have to maintain it that way. It's just that in our particular case, we felt we needed to put the infrastructure in place to take care of everyone from the top down, because the people who were buying the elections had convinced a lot of the voters that it would never, ever work. When in fact it turns out that people who are healthy are more productive, people who can choose jobs they actually like are better workers, and when people who really can't work aren't forced to make the attempt, the work that gets done is done right. And that poverty has a lot to do with why there is crime. Now that we have a population mostly composed of people whose lives got better and people who would be horrified by any suggestion that we go back to the way things were before, we're experiencing a huge backlash from the descendants of the people we ousted...but I think they have largely lost their hold on the imagination of people who can no longer be convinced that they could get rich and become oppressors themselves under the old system, or that making it possible for others to simply live means it won't be possible for them to be successful."

 

Ford has wrangled Lissa back into his arms and is holding her, her back against his chest so nothing can brush against her spine, with consistent pressure, and has just judged it safe to lightly trace the planes of her cheekbones with one finger. There is a spot between her eyebrows--yes. Her ears are no longer flattened.

"Tell her that when she's calmer and you've thought it through for a bit," he says to Church. "And don't make it about your emotional problems. She needs to hear that you're sorry. She doesn't need you to try and garner her sympathy. She's got too much of that as it is and it's half my life's work to teach her to use it on people who actually give a shit about her."

To be Babalon. Not the fucking Madonna.

 

As long as you haven't started setting hit squads on people who peacefully remove themselves for your system, you're already a league ahead of us. [He smiles back, but the movement seems especially... robotic.]

 

No worries, I'll have fraggin' presents waiting for y'all when you catch up to me. [His single optic winks.]

 

... oops. And alright.

*she looks calmer now?*

*and ford didn't have to do much to achieve that?*

*church is amazed*

 

Valiska smiles. "I think the beauty of our system is that if you're in our territory, you're part of it, and if you leave our territory, we actually really don't care, unless of course you're leaving to tell our secrets to our enemies, but we also have a lot fewer secrets than people think we do."

Then she realises he's more uncomfortable than he's showing, and she's sperging out about politics and the way the Damned Few put it all together again. "And we don't have to talk about this if you don't want to. I was just feeling that kind of enchantment one does when one thinks one is reading a book by someone who thinks the way one thinks people should think...and the disappointment from finding out that they didn't live up to it, quite."

 

Lissa breathes out long and slowly, then wriggles around in Ford's arms so she can press her forehead against his chest. His forehead would be ideal, but he's too tall for that. Why this and not porn?

"Ford," she says, "thank you, but you were kind of an asshole when you implied that Valiska should have been willing to abandon her family to go off with Ford to some other dimension where things were better by your lights. You keep forgetting that I was able to go back to the Falls with you when they put out the hit on me because I didn't have anyone else on the world where you met me."

She kisses his chest through his shirt, and breathes out again.

Then she glances at Church. "Maybe you should go sit in the corner and think about what you did," she says, in much the same tone she'd have used with one of the kids when they were little kitlings just learning to read and write and do sums. "When you can tell me why you should be sorry, then I'll believe that you are."

 

[Arsenic-sweet, and with a much more genuine-looking smile:] Oh, please do, you'll make Slipstream's day.

The early bits do look good on paper, don't they? But no, my moods are certainly no fault of yours, though I thank you for the concern. It's nice to hear the general concepts can be put into effect more positively than we managed.

 

Ford sighs. "Okay, Valiska. Lissa is right. That was unkind." He strokes Lissa's hair and ears, so grateful that she sounds like herself again. "I apologise."

 

*winces*

Corner. Got it.

*she's calmer but still mad and he's still not gonna risk shit*

*he retreats*

*the rave is rather lacking in corners, being an infinite space, but he manages to find somewhere that he reckons fits the spirit, if not the letter, of what she said*

*and sits down*