THE SQUAD DOES AN INTRO: GROUP MEET UP - [modplot] [event] [free-for-all]

[wildermods]

THE SQUAD DOES AN INTRO: GROUP MEET UP
OOC POST
The Green's binding spell finally works out its kinks and the entire group is teleported into the same area in the center of the city, near the statues of the Tin Man, Cowardly Lion, and Scarecrow.

Everyone in the group feels a tingling sensation as the magic sets in place and binds them. Anyone that tries to leave will now find themselves being teleported back if they wander too far. The group will have to try to stay together when it moves now.

They have a little bit of time to figure things out.

---

OOC INFO
✦ Post in actionspam format. Plots and mod-run events in the game are meant to be in actionspam format to keep a brisk pace.

✦ Free-for-all Post. This event will be in "free-for-all" format, meaning that threadhopping is encouraged and that threading should be treated in the same conversational way as network posts.

✦ By now, the language magic should be fully in place. By now, everyone should have magically learned Sylvaen so that everyone can speak it fluently and understand each other.

Comments

[awfulcer]

[He probably wouldn't get most of it even if she did. Evil is very mundane in Dixon's closed-off world. He has no personal experience with war or genocide or exile. Even if he understands the words and concepts they remain sketches, something uninformed and uncolored by personal experience or weight.

And damn, he thinks, all he did was throw an innocent person out a window because he was having a bad day.

He kind of sprawls sideways and rests his head on his hand.]

My mama'd watch a TV show about that and call it unrealistic. [He shakes his head. He thinks of Revan's life as some kind of opaque mystery, shrouded and impenetrable by the sheer breadth of difference from his considerably more mundane and sheltered existence.] Things aren't really life and death where I'm from. Well, I mean, they are, but not like that. We shot all our genocidal dictators.

[He really doesn't watch international news.]

[therevanchist]

[Not the worst thing you can do with a genocidal dictator, honestly.]

Not everyone will have to make life and death decisions, but everyone can choose to be kind rather than cruel.

[She remembers that poor desperate widow on Tatooine, how five minutes of Revan's time brokering a sale had changed that despair to hope, the joy blooming in the other woman like a flower over a few hundred credits. In the horrid days since she found out her true identity, Revan's clung to little moments like that. In the long watches of the ship's night, she thinks they might be all that's keeping her from being swept away by the howling darkness.

But Dixon doesn't need to hear that. He wants Revan to play the Jedi Knight, calm and collected and dispensing wisdom. Fine, she can do that.]

Small things matter. A gentle word today could be what gives someone the strength to endure a tragedy tomorrow. An angry one might be just enough to drive them to despair in the face of that same tragedy. Every action you take ripples out through the universe, like stones dropped into a pond. You can't know exactly how the ripples will spread, but you can choose which rocks to throw--

[Wait. Revan purses her lips.]

Okay, that metaphor got away from me.

[awfulcer]

[He chuckles.]

Little bit.

[He's felt scrambled since the fire, and her words tilt his unsteady feelings about good and evil on an axis. He doesn't usually interpret it as kindness and cruelty, more justice and injustice, innocent and guilty. That's why this morning he was getting in a car to go kill someone he didn't even know in the name of trying to be a better man.

And, hell, why he's even a little energized to go fight on some quest to save the forest or whatever. It's a clear way ahead that doesn't involve the weird calculus of kind and cruel, gentle and vicious, righteous and just plain vindictive. There's just an easy right option to take, no actual decision-making required.]

But let's go with it. Do you always choose the right rocks?

[Whatever her answer, he's going to keep shoving her up on that moral authority pedestal. That "tell me what to do so I don't have to think about it" throne.]

[therevanchist]

Ha.

[Dixon, you don't even know.]

Of course not. Nobody does. Not me, not my crew, not the Jedi Council.

[Really not the Jedi Council lately.]

No one's perfect. We're always going to fall short somewhere, and insisting on perfection just gives you an excuse not to try. Progress is the goal. Be a little better tomorrow than you were today.

[Jedi will talk endlessly about this sort of thing, but Revan didn't have Dixon pegged for a deep thinker. She wonders what happened to him recently that's making these questions of morality so important.]

[awfulcer]

[He's been in a Oscar-bait Flannery O'Connor homage is what happened.]

[It's a good answer. Airtight. He purses his lips a little and nods. A little better now than before is a pretty low bar. Don't throw people out windows for looking at you funny. Maybe don't torture people because you're pissed off. That seems straightforward.

It's just where to go from there that's tricky.

Calm. Calm.]

I'm betting some of the people in this group [ahem] weren't heroes on a quest to save jack before they came here, so that seems like a step up over yesterday.

[He absently moves his fingers over the engravings on the front of his shield, which he has half-lying on his knee. It's about then that he notices that the front of the shield is an oversized version of the Ebbing Police Department badge, and he feels his stomach tighten to the point of nausea.

He can't explain to her the whole sordid story; in a way he's still trying to endear himself to her, having now positioned her in his mind as someone whose opinion merits some weight and consideration. She sounds like she has the secret to inner peace. She makes it sound easy, even as she says it's hard and imperfect.

Even aside from that, he's enjoyed the conversation, the fact that it hasn't rapidly descended into hostility like so many of his other interactions with people here.]

I gotta go. [This small, group, everyone-in-the-same-boat setting makes coming up with an actual excuse unlikely, so he hopes that just sounding brusque and a little inexplicably angry will cut short any questions about why he suddenly gets up and takes off.]

[therevanchist]

[Yes. Some people. People who are certainly not Dixon. Revan doesn't even know why that thought occurred to her. Speaking of small kindnesses, there's nothing to gain by tearing away that painfully thin veil, so all she says to his departing back is a quiet:]

May the Force be with you.

[He's going to need it. They all will.]