damned_institute | Day 46: Sun Room

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Day 46: Sun Room

Peter woke up suddenly, his body twisting in the bed and then forcing him to catch his breath in pain. Pain, which was coming from his middle because of the thing that had scratched him last night, and after that...

After that, Zach had jumped in front of him like some kind of martyr, like the exact opposite of everything Sylar stood for, to take the next hit for him. It got pretty fuzzy after that, so night must have ended right around then.

The man let out a pained grunt as he straightened himself up in bed. For some reason, he got the feeling that he'd slept in. There was no way for him to really tell without a window in the room, but he just knew. The fact that Sam's bed looked long since vacated was another clue.

Sam, but was he Sam again? Had the brainwashing worn off, as he and Roland had hoped, or was he going to have to go through this nightmare for even longer? He didn't know how long he could handle "Zach" and "Harrison" before he started going batty himself.

Pulling himself out of bed, Peter lifted his shirt and saw that he was tightly bandaged. The scratch most likely wasn't nearly as bad as the bite that "Zach" had received, but it still smarted. He let his shirt fall and then had to deal with a nurse chiding him for sleeping through the morning announcements. Not that Peter really cared at the moment. He was too busy thinking about last night and the fact that in a way, he now owed something to Sylar. Except it hadn't been Sylar. That was something he was sure of now.

Lost in his thoughts, Peter reached the Sun Room right as the rest of the patient populace was trickling in from breakfast. Sighing to himself, he headed over to the bulletin board and then saw a note written in familiar yet unpleasant handwriting. Holding his pen in a vice grip, Peter scribbled out a reply and then stalked over to an armchair and fell into it with a huff.

While Sylar was maddeningly frustrating, there was one good thing about the fact that he was himself again. It meant that Nathan was too.

[For Spock!]

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"I wouldn't say sole purpose. More like a fringe benefit." Sole outcome, sometimes. And others just ended up like Thoreau -- a few skipped tax payments and he would be boring high school students and activist pow-wows with self-congratulatory antisocial bullshit until humanity had left Spaceship Earth so far behind no-one knew what a pond was any more.

He let himself be tugged, and sat down. "Trouble in paradise?" She'd talk if she wanted to; advice was out of his league, but listening he could manage, especially when it wasn't his girlfriend and thus whatever had set her off was unlikely to be his fault.

"What paradise?" the ninja grumbled, letting go of S.T.'s sleeve. For a moment, she looked like she was considering sitting on the floor behind the couch before she plopped heavily down on the couch and leaned forward on her legs.

"So if that's not really the point behind civil disobedience, what is?"

"Nonviolent social reprogramming. Societies -- capitalism, communism, monarchy -- they all boil down to a small number of people running the show. Doesn't matter if it's by accident of birth, lottery, financial acumen, whatever. It's a giant Ponzi scheme with us as the patsies." He glanced around at the nurses, making no secret that he was doing so. "Any one of them can screw over you or me any time they get bored."

One of the nurses slid into his peripheral vision at precisely the wrong time; the muscles across his shoulders went into lockdown. Like hitting the brake after passing the unmarked cop car -- simultanously futile and instinctive. She let him off with a warning glare.

"But something happens when you add more people. Critical mass, the whole thing turns on its head. Any one of us gets up and heads for that door, and he gets a shot of downers and a comfy chair. But if we all get up, at some point they'll run out of syringes and Sylvester Stallone wannabes."

Sheena listened, actually understanding what S.T. was talking about. Sure, her base of knowledge was Meltokio and the nobles, but it seemed like that mentality would carry over to other systems.

The ninja raised an eyebrow when S.T. tensed up, feeling no danger about them, but didn't say anything. The guy had some quirks.

"The problem with that idea is that it was already tried once. At least that's what I heard. It was before I got stuck in this damn ranch." Sheena pulled her knees in and rest her chin on them. "I don't know the details, but it was sometime during one of the meals, a riot, and then after a bit everyone just passed out. Like at the end of the night."

That was some powerful magic.

"Huh. Do you know if anyone's still around that saw it?"

Ranch. That was a weird one. The To Serve Man theory wasn't one he'd bothered exploring. Especially not they'd started dicking around with his genes. People ate all kinds of toxic crap when it was shrinkwrapped and irradiated. S.T. was one of the few who knew exactly what he was eating and hadn't ever felt the need for a fruititarian phase.

"O.K., so it only works when the bad guys don't have superpowers. Or when you can get someone with a camera to cover it -- uniformed flunkies going after unarmed civilians, even long-haired unwashed hippies, is totally mediapathic."

"I dunno if there is. There's probably still someone who's been trapped here that long about."

Sheena wasn't sure how having a camera around would stop Landel from sleep spelling them all whenever he wanted to, but she didn't come from a land of free press. She came from a land rather thick with discrimination and class structure. And magic. She really didn't know what a hippy was, but she didn't want to ask.

"So how does this all end up with a bunch of tea and stuff?"

"O.K. So the United States started out as a rag-tag bunch of colonies. European countries sent boatloads of religious minorities, thrill-seekers, and toxic bacteria over, where they drove out the natives and built churches. Your basic colonial setup. When some of the colonists started to turn a profit, the Home Office decided taxing them was a good plan; at least that way the riots were on the other side of an ocean, and no-one had invented airplanes."

He folded his feet up under him so he was sitting Indian-style, and pulled out his notebook. The basic geometry of BosWash in the pre-Interstate days, complete with a smiley face in the general vicinity of Jersey was easy. Tracing out something resembling Europe would have been more difficult, if he hadn't decided only England and France needed to be more than amorphous blobs, and he skipped Africa entirely. History classes did that all the time; India only showed up because the tea had to come from somewhere.

"Needless to say, the colonists were pretty pissed, and stopped buying shipped-in crap. Eventually all the taxes were pulled except the one on tea, which had gone black-market by that point." Why the fuck they didn't have a similar trade in tea and other caffeinated beverages here was an open question. "So people just kept on drinking whatever they'd found in the woods. Until some idiot decided the East India Company needed a government subsidy and a monopoly, just to get Americans readdicted to tea and taxes. We, being Americans, told them to fuck off and go home, except in Boston. Insider trading -- the Governor had friends in the tea business. So a ship got in, couldn't get out, and no-one would buy the tea."

In this case, civil disobedience looked more like a frat party running into Sox fans on Lansdowne -- nonviolent, maybe, but civil was only true in the legal sense. "Bunch of agitators put on war paint -- unconvincing even by the standards of the day -- and threw the tea in the Harbor. Three years later the Revolutionary War broke out."

Leaning over, Sheena watched S.T. draw and nodded as he talked. Okay, so this tax thing sounded a lot like tithes the Tethe'allan towns (except Mizuho - ha!) paid the king for a bunch of stuff like protection, the bridge, research, repairs and other things she never bothered to pay attention to. Those usually didn't bother to actually benefit the common people; the ninja was glad Mizuho didn't pay if only because no one could find their village to enforce it.

She still didn't get why tea had still been taxed. But there was tea and apparently a bunch of people thought it'd make a good statement to dress up like a bunch of bushmen and throw away tea some single noble wanted to have around just to piss him off? Huh. Some people really had too much time on their hands and clearly too much sake.

"Is there any real connection between the tea thing and the actual war or did you tack that on for the hell of it? Cause the tea thing doesn't sound like it really accomplished anything other than pissing off one noble just because it made him look bad. And he didn't even sound like an important noble. I mean, it's not like they spat in the king's tea."

"Naah, the tea was just the flashpoint. Symbolic bullshit, but the problems were real. It got people moving, gave them something real they could pick up and throw, made a good story. Newspaper heroes in un-politically correct facepaint."

That was condensing a hundred years or so of British imperialism and a half-dozen different movements into one, but some good old coalition-building never hurt. Even retroactively.

"But there are better examples. Sit-ins in South Africa and here at home -- what's more American than fast-food for everyone? No war needed, and twenty years later segregation is something kids only see in textbooks." Politicians still tried to spin Culture War soundbites, but those rang as fake as Nancy Reagan's smile. "We do it all the time -- a couple cute young co-eds in Save-The-Whales t-shirts can stop an outflow pipe better than a dozen bags of concrete, and with less work."

O.K., so he'd be out of a job if that were 100% true. When the day came that all they had to do was show up in a GEE van and hand out stickers, he'd hang up his toxin-spattered high tops and retire. Take Debbie on a long vacation, until he'd figured out what to do with a decade's experience stopping pipes and pissing off CEOs and not fitting into corporate culture. It was the only kind of unemployment S.T. wouldn't argue with.

Sheena could understand needing to throw something to make herself feel better, make herself feel important. She was human, after all. So, a lot of what S.T. said made sense if she pulled the references she didn't understand. One thing did stick out, though.

"No segregation? Really?" Surprise and wonder was clearly written on the ninja's face. That was what her and her friends were fighting for back home if it was looked at with an altruistic eye. "How did you manage that?"

It looked like racism went on the list of universal interworld constants, along with sex, war, and megalomanics without a sense of humor. Bummer.

"When a dozen people walk into a restaurant and sit there taking up space until someone will take their money from them, eventually greed trumps prejudice. And once everyone's sitting at the same soda counter, people talk. And once two guys are playing armchair quarterback and bullshitting fishing stories, at some point no-one cares whose ancestors enslaved whose." Except when their kids get caught screwing in the back of their indistinguishable pickup trucks, but even that was changing.

"...but how were those people even allowed inside the tavern?" Sheena blinked, trying to picture it. "I mean, how did they do it without repercussions? Thrown out, at best, imprisoned or killed at worse."

There was no way a group of half-elves could walk into any tavern in Tethe'alla as things stood right now and not have bad things happen to them. Sheena was lucky she was even allowed in half the inns of Meltokio.

"There wasn't a law about them coming in. They could even get food. Just not at the counter. So they just took one more step and sat down. Pushed a little at a time. No-one served them that day. So the next day, a few more showed up. And what would they tell the police? A couple of teenagers asked for a burger and fries, so can you arrest them, officer?" Made spot-the-asshole an easy job, even before they turned firehoses on school kids.

"The cops did show, and stood around scratching their asses and looking official, but there wasn't anything they could do if no-one got violent. Cute kids and little old ladies make great spokespeople." Black men still took crap from everyone, but kids could walk to school with only the usual crap from their peers. It was an improvement a white guy like S.T. could pat himself on the back for living through and ignore the rest of the time.

Sheena's world sounded like it hadn't moved past the scalping/lynching phase into the part where protest songs and banners didn't make convenient targets. "If driving while black -- or whatever it is on your world -- is still an arrestable offense, maybe you need to start smaller. What's the deal?" Sangamon Taylor liked problems with solutions. Messy, long-term, low-success-rate, it didn't matter. What mattered was that he could sleep at night because he'd done something. Even if it was just to listen to Racism 101 a la Tolkein or Spielberg or whatever.

She supposed if there wasn't a law, there wasn't any really horrible consequences. That didn't work in Tethe'alla with the caste system they had. Sheena kind of wished she understood the specifics of it better other than where she fit in the whole thing (which was barely tolerable).

"Tethe'alla has a very strict caste system, established by the Church of Martel and approved, or whatever it's called, by the king," Sheena explained. "Basically, the richer you are, the higher up you are, so the nobles are at top with only the King, the king's family and the Pope above them. Then it goes to, like, the researchers, then merchants, then the poor people, and then Mizuho - that's what I am."

She scowled a little and shook her head. Mizuho were only as low as they were because they were so much different than the rest of Tethe'alla. "And then, at the very bottom, are the half-elves. They're not slaves, per se, but that's not really saying much. Almost all Tethe'allans are raised to believe that half-elves are inferior to humans, bastard offspring of a human and an elf. It's against the law for half-elves to do a lot of common stuff, and most of them are kept 'in service' to the Crown, the Church or the Research Academy."

She sighed. "Anyone that gets arrested is given a genetic test on the spot to determine if they are half-elf or not. Some half-elves can really blend in with humans and hide their heritage. Half-elves don't get trials; they get executed. It's... disgusting how they're treated."

Fuck, he'd been kidding about the Tolkein part. Elves. Humanity made made crappy kids-book metaphors about race and then this place brought them to living color. Literally. A Indian (subcontinent, not 'Native American' or whatever they were being called this week) caste system complete with elven lepers and a Pope grafted onto the system. And a little splash of capitalism for good measure.

"So what happens if a half-elf, or just a Mizuho -- wins the lottery or whatever. Can he buy his way up the scale? Marry up? Or does the social ladder only go one way?"

Genetic testing post-dated the civil rights movement by a margin Sangamon thought was healthy. Geeks like Dolmacher stripping kinky hair and melanin production into a scientific litmus test for human rights was an image that would have kept him up at night. If the thought of Dolmacher and his PCP-shitting Grail hadn't been a more terrifying specter to begin with.

"Whatever they can do, what would happen if all of them took the next step? Lots of them at once. Whether that's riding the city bus or walking in the park or not asking, just taking one day off a month."

Sheena grumbled. "Nothing. Even if I were to marry a noble, which I wouldn't because they are shallow idiots that don't actually care about anyone but themselves, I'd still be Mizuho. They just wouldn't treat me like complete dirt in front of my husband. And half-elves are always half-elves. They can't buy up or anything, cause no human noble would dirty himself like that. Hell, even the Pope's own half-elf daughter is locked up doing research for the Academy. It might be better to think that the half-elves aren't even part of the caste system, but below it." Which kind of made Sheena uncomfortable because then that would actually put herself at the very bottom as Mizuho.

"And with the way things stand now, there aren't enough half-elves in Tethe'alla to really do anything like you're talking. They're such a low population that if they push, they'll just get killed. It's wrong, horribly wrong, because everyone should be treated equally - humans, half-elves, elves, dwarfs, ang--" Her voice faltered a moment before she reminded herself that they were all enemies. "and angels. They can't control the circumstances of their birth and no race is inherently inferior to another just because they have magic or whatnot."

It was still a little weird to Sheena to see the power structure so reversed on Sylvarant where the half-elves thought they were superior to the humans and lorded over them because they did have magic and humans did not.

"Creating a world where everyone if treated equally. given the same right to live and be happy, accepted for who they are, is what me and my friends are fighting for back home. It's like this place - there's too few half-elves to enact change on their own by generally rising up without help from people who are part of the larger populace, part of the power base, working with them, being sympathetic."

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Day 46: Sun Room

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