damned_institute | 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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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."

Day 46: Sun Room

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