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Morality of Action, Wednesday Afternoon

Kreia had not wished to be here. She had been whisked away from her chosen fate and deposited here like a package, moved around by the hands of fate, her own choices stripped away from her with the simple flex of a multiversal finger.

In other words, the disdain she radiated as she faced the class was nothing personal.

"I did not choose you as my students," she began. "You were forced upon me by powers far greater than any of us. I suppose that in and of itself is an object lesson: that to enact your will on one weaker than you is to strip them of their agency and their power. To take their destiny in your own hands and mold it as you see fit. It is the way of the galaxy that such things occur."

She folded her sleeves together; one clearly held a functioning hand, the other did not. "In this class, we will primarily speak of the considerations that come with wielding such power, but it will not weaken us to consider what it is to be the one against whom power is wielded. How we endure it placing us within conflicts we did not choose, or taking from us challenges that were rightly ours to face."

She considered the faces in her class. "Have you ever been stripped of such choices?" she said. "You all must have. Did it weaken you? Or did you find within it some conflict, some new choice of your own, that made you stronger, more capable?"

This one had certainly made her feel weaker. Intolerable.

"For however long I remain here, teaching in this abominable place, we will discuss what this means to you and your victim, to you and your victimizer. But you will also be tested. Many grand words and declarations are spun, only to perish in silence on battlefields and Senate floors. Be ready. I will not warn you in advance."

Which, by proxy, meant that this class, at least, would be free of tests. You were welcome.

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Have you ever been stripped of your ability to choose? Did it weaken you? Or did you find within it some conflict, some new choice of your own, that made you stronger, more capable?

... and your name, too, if you want to. Kreia will remember it, but she will not care.

If Arden hadn't already been intimidated by World's Scariest Grandma, she might have snorted. Stripped of her ability to choose? That would suggest she'd ever had it to begin with. The only choices she'd ever had - at least for the ones that mattered - hadn't happened until she'd run away from Callista.

Which was a pretty good place to start, she guessed.

"Umm, well, when I was living with my legal guardian, she told me that when I turned eighteen, I'd become responsible for all the money she'd spent on my care and well-being since she'd adopted me at seven. She didn't want money, she had ideas about how I could be useful to her and that would be my life, for however long until she decided that I'd paid her back. Anything I'd wanted to do, any hopes for my future, any chance of me making my own choices as an adult...well, fuuu--erm." She coughed. "Ah, forget that. It was what she wanted that mattered. So, I, uh, chose to run away instead. I think that if she hadn't said that, I would have ended up doing it anyway? Because I hadn't given my future much thought, and I probably would have just drifted into it. But when she told me that my life and my future belonged to her, that's when I stopped drifting and started planning."

Did that count?

"Ah, an unforced error on her part," Kreia said, tilting her chin. From another, that statement may have had some sense of approval or disapproval. From Kreia, it sounded like a statement of a fact. "She made the conflict visible to your eyes. Tell me, did it cost you to make this choice? Did you struggle with the concept of having one at all?"

"Oh goddess yes," Arden said fervently. And then had to backtrack a little, choose her words carefully. "My world was very small. It had to be, to keep me safe. Or, um. So they said. And suddenly I was out in the big world and there was nothing to catch me if I fff--screwed up. No safety net. No one to rely on or ask for help from. There were a bunch of times when I thought it would be easier and safer to just go back. At least there I'd be safe. Safer. Because at least then Callista would have reason to protect me. I'd be an investment.

"Even now, things can be rough. The world is big and sometimes it's not even whether the thing I'm doing is right or wrong, good or bad, it's just trying to pick a thing at all. A lot of my friends know what they want to do with their life and, me? I still sometimes spin out just trying to figure out how to narrow it down."

"Why do you continue to choose to go forward?" Kreia asked. "It would not be difficult, to return to the servitude you once knew."

"Because I can't go back to being that small again," Arden said. There were all sorts of fancy ways she could put it - birds and eggs, clipped wings, even trying to put on clothes that were too small for you - but she didn't think Kreia would appreciate them. So she just stuck to the basics.

"It's easier that way? Like, having someone tell you what to do or where to go or what to think. Way easier than trying to figure out all this shit on your own. But it also squishes you down into whatever shape they want you to be. I might not know what shape I wanna be yet, but I'd rather figure it out than let her shape me into something she wants."

"Hm," Kreia said. "So I see."

And with that entirely cryptic statement, she moved on to Liliana.

As per usual, Liliana was not lacking for answers to the questions here, but was held up deciding which answers to share, and in what measure.

He stood right in front of her now, looking up into her eyes, his clawlike hands upraised as if they, not his spell, were holding her in the air and squeezing the life from her.

"Join me, Lili," he said. "All the torment of the Void will be ours to share forever."

Yeah, see, we would not be sharing that with the class.

...Weird how she was disinclined to share stories of the times she was weakest and most vulnerable.

"Liliana Vess," she said. "And yes, I have. More times than I'd like to consider, and once by the Multiverse itself. That one permanently weakened and changed me from a purely power standpoint, but I learned how it felt to lose it all and I learned what I'd do to gain as much of it back as I could. Knowing what you're willing to do is almost as important as knowing what you're able to do."

"Sometimes pure power in and of itself can be a weakness," Kreia noted. "A way to deprive you of other levers of power you might have learned to use in its absence."

Yes, but oh had Liliana enjoyed that pure power.

"No matter what form it takes, the only power that matters is the type that keeps you from being put into a position where you are stripped of your agency," Liliana said. "Power dictates who succeeds and who fails; who commands and who submits; who lives and who dies. As you said, whether the weak see it or not, they are at the mercy of the powerful. Whether magical, political, or physical, power is power because it allows you to enforce your own will. But considering that sometimes that power shifts and slips from your fingers in ways that you can never predict, what is better? To be a jack of all trades? Or a master of one? Do you put your all into one aspect of your potential to master that? Or do you diffuse your power along several axes, never reaching the culmination of your potential, but having a few other avenues of power to fall back upon?"

She found herself actually interested in Kreia's answer.

Edited 2024-09-04 08:35 (UTC)

"An inquisitive one, are you?"

Did that seem vaguely approving? With Kreia it was hard to tell, but there was a hint of it in there.

"One must always be able to walk away from power," she said, "For if you cannot, then that power controls you, can dominate you as much as you attempt to dominate with it." Her head moved, as if she was looking elsewhere, though her eyes remained hidden from sight.

"My greatest student was once faced with a choice," she said. "She held great power within, but it is a power that wields others as much as it is wielded. A grand tragedy occurred because of her actions, its consequences rippled through this power and all who laid claim to it. She and all those with her had to decide: to let these ripples twist them into something else, or to lay down and die with it. She was the only one with the strength to choose neither. She was the only one with the strength to simply let it go. Had she pursued this power, that potential at the cost of all else, she would have become stronger, but lesser. She would have let it steal all other potential."

Edited 2024-09-04 08:46 (UTC)

"Always," Liliana said, and her grin was sharp. "Learning is another form of power. Not for any twee reasons, but the more you know and understand, the more options you have, the more efficiently you can bring your power to bear."

I learned I will never stop learning, not if I can ever help it. And that is sometimes a wonder and sometimes a misery and that it often leads to pain. But I cannot, will not stop. Because there's always something more to learn and that is a siren song.

...Besides, focusing on that question made it easier to ignore what Kreia said next. 'Walking away' sounded too much like giving up. Her hand fell to her side, where the Chain Veil dangled, and she frowned a little, curling her fingers away from the silken metal.

"And what has all that other potential gotten her?" she asked. "Where is she now? What is she doing?"

Liliana didn't have to think twice about which option she'd take. She wasn't the type to lay down and die for anything. And who was to say that with enough power, she wouldn't be able to twist herself back? When you lived long enough, there was always the possibility to claw your way back to the top.

*Vessel of destruction...*

Edited 2024-09-04 09:03 (UTC)

"Rebuilding the Order she once walked away from, now that all her compatriots - those who succumbed, those who were not there, those who changed - have found their inevitable doom," Kreia said. "Her students will carry her voice forward into the future, with all other voices extinguished."

And then Meetra was going to run off to get killed for Revan, but we tried not to linger on Drew Karpyshyn in this household.

This seemed like not the time to point out that Liliana planned to do her own voice carrying into the future. Who needed a legacy when they were immortal?

"There are worse things one can do than found a school," Liliana said, thinking of Strixhaven and the dragons who had founded it. "Though just because her voice speaks in single-voiced purity now, there's no guarantee it will for always. In fact, the closest you can get to a guarantee is that it won't."

"Are all our voices not ultimately a drop in the river, viewed on the grand scale of history?" Kreia asked. "To aspire to own, eternally, its shape and direction is the height of hubris, both for one's self and for an everchanging universe. But to fling a pebble and have hope that one's actions may have played some small part in diverting its flow, ah, that is another thing."

Liliana already had changed things, on the grand scale of history. Several times. Though, she supposed, those were histories of individual planes and not the Multiverse at large.

...Don't you worry, Liliana. You were gonna get your shot.

"Considering I'm still dealing the consequences of someone who did, in fact, change the grand scale of history, I think I'll pass on the experience," Liliana said. "Though, I assure you, Urza was not lacking in hubris."

Before he spoke, Graham took a moment, head slightly bowed in reverence as he breathed out. He lifted a flat palm of his hand in front of him, pressed his other fist into it softly, and folded the fingers of that first hand around it. Another exhale and he dropped his hands, blinking up from his little...prayer? Mudra? Sign of respect? He wasn't sure exactly what to call it, but he looked up from it with a nod and a distant smile, sent a nervous sort of sputtering look over toward Arden, but then focused back on Kreila.

"I don't know," he admitted, "if I've ever really been in a situation where I didn't have a choice, but I'm sure I will, one day. I have been in situations where the choices I was making were being..." His throat tightened, and he swallowed it roughly down before continuing, "...influenced without me really knowing or realizing it....until it was too late. And had I known, I'd have made very different choices, I think, and things would...well, they'd be..." He rubbed the back his hand under a nose getting a little sniffling, "better. Sometimes, I think we think we're making the right choice, but it isn't always, so when you mess it up, you have another choice, to try and make it better. Or at least better next time, and to learn from it, and to be better about knowing what might be behind the choices we have that we can't see...and how they might be your choices, but they don't only affect you..."

Another hard lump, another failed attempt to swallow it down, and his eyes had drifted downward as he spoke, but then they lifted up again hopefully.

"You know?"

Arden looked at him with soft concern. This was a vastly different Graham than the one she knew and she was already resolving to drag him off sometime and get him to talk.

Kreia raised an eyebrow. One couldn't see under the hood, of course, but the sense of an eyebrow being raised remained.

"Did you make a choice you regret?" she asked. "Was it carelessness? Or simply a lack of information?"

Graham thought about it for a moment before he answered, his sheepish smile a bit embarrassed, but mostly just sad. "Both," he said. "Definitely both. And...well, you could argue that the lack of information was from my carelessness. I didn't have a lot of information...or, rather, I was sort of being, um..." His eyes wanted to dart toward Arden again, so he just kept them pointedly down for a moment before he could just look back at Kreia again, "lead a certain direction, I think. Nefariously. But I was so caught up that I just carelessly rushed in without thinking, and..."

He cut himself off with a deep breath.

"A lot of mistakes were made. A lot. So, yeah," he slipped his cap off his head for a moment, holding it between his hands as he looked down at it, "I regret it. A lot."

"And what, then, have you learned from this mistake?" If Graham's nervous contrition meant anything at all to Kreia, it did not show. (It likely did not.) "How would you prevent yourself from rushing in carelessly again?"

Actually, it would be entirely possible she'd make him write the answer on the blackboard a hundred times, at this rate.

"Lana Beniko," she introduced herself. "I don't believe there's ever not a choice. There can be choices you find reprehensible and would never consider, but even if you have to do something or die, that is still a choice. That said, there may not be a viable choice or a choice you could live with yourself making.

"I've been in those situations. Sometimes I've found a new choice. Sometimes I've made the choices I had to. Sometimes I've regretted it in the short term, but I've understood more about myself each time, and that has made me stronger."

"Whether or not there is a choice in any practical sense is hardly relevant, is it?" Kreia said, lifting her chin. "If someone offers you a choice between death by drowning and death by blaster, then death remains the only possible path."

"I'd probably choose to try jumping them," Lana admitted. "But method of death is still a choice." She thought about it. "I'd probably choose drowning. It gives you more time to think of a way out of it."

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