fandomhigh | Getting Out of Scrapes

Entry tags:

scrapes

Getting Out of Scrapes - Fast, Friday

"Congrats, you're still here," Atton drawled. He sounded bored. "This time around, we're going to go with a real classic of a scrape."

They were in a classroom. There were papers on every table.

"You're in Anakin Skywalker's class, you haven't studied, and now he's hitting you with an incomprehensible ethics test," he said. "Get out of this one, folks."

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

... exams?

Stare at your sheet of paper.

Can you wing it?

A rebel who has threatened to explode several bombs in crowded areas has been caught. Unfortunately, she has already planted the bombs and they are scheduled to go off in a short time. It's possible that hundreds of people may die and the authorities cannot make her divulge the location of the bombs by conventional methods. In exasperation, some high level official suggests torture.

The rebel is talking about how many cats she has to feed. Also, she's poor, blind in one eye, her mother is gravely ill and needs taking care of, she's got five baby eopies and her father won't let her have her trust fund unless she bombs things. A lot. Oh, and she's crying.

a) Torture her to get the information.
b) Torture her and her family to get the information, kill the cats, the mother, the baby eopies, throw the father down a well, and throw Skywalker's haircare products down after him.
c) Retire to a nice island somewhere. Bring the cats, the mother, the baby eopies, not the dad, and marry the rebel. Start a butterfly farm.

You have a friend whose homeworld has long since been embroiled in a civil war. The war has gone on for generations, and there appears to be no end in sight. However, your friend and some of their companions back home believe they can put a stop to it by getting in between the warring factions. Do you intervene, despite having only one, biased, second-hand account of the war and what might be fueling it, and you have mega super terrible powers that will probably attract lots of people with other mega super terrible powers that will make the entire planet worse and probably turn this entire sector of the universe into a hellhole full of repeating endless war?

a) You go and fight. You're loyal to your friend, and don't want to see them or their world suffer. You'll sort out the complexities later. And by 'later' we mean 'probably after you're dead', and by 'complexities' we mean 'you upsetting the entire balance of galactic politics and plunging the sector into a full-scale war'.
b) You go, but you only provide support, such as setting up a hospital or attempting to mediate between the factions. All of your friends die, so do their puppies, the entire planet plunges into poverty, but you do get to sit on the sidelines and look very sad for a while.
c) You try to reason with your friend. Are they sure they can simply fix something that has been broken for so many generations? Perhaps they need to take a step back and find another way to solve the problem. Like bowling, or feeding the entire planet to an Eldrich superpowered God, or maybe going on a merry quest to go confront yourself and find the true meaning of inner peace or something.
d) You refuse to intervene at all. It isn't your fight. All of your friends die, so do their puppies, the entire planet plunges into poverty, but you do get the warm satisfaction of moral superiority and the knowledge you haven't at least actively made the universe worse. Five years later, one of your friends turns out to be alive, but they're very angry and very evil now and they murder you in a back alley. How sad.