a city and a mint who sleep very little between them

[self_composed]

Bella bikes to the airport on Friday. She gets a little reading done on her flight, then sleeps-on-purpose through the remainder of the trip, waking up precisely when the plane touches down. One nice bonus that she didn't even explicitly build into the power is that she can sleep at will in virtually any position; she doesn't have to get comfy if that's not convenient.

She steps off the plane, backpack full of her things over her shoulders, and stalks into the halls of LaGuardia, eyes peeled for Libby.

Comments

[prima_sequentem]

"Because you're powerful, and 'someone' covers a very long list of people you could potentially inconvenience without ever knowing it. You could only manage not to get in anyone's way by being very unimaginative, and you don't strike me as unimaginative."

[self_composed]

"Do you classify mints in general as 'very powerful', that way, or do I only count because you think I've got imagination?" Bella asks.

False dichotomy is fun.

[prima_sequentem]

"No," says Libby.

[self_composed]

"What, then?" Bella says, unfazed. False dichotomy is fun but it doesn't always work.

[prima_sequentem]

"You have the tightest anti-spying ward I've ever seen. For example."

[self_composed]

"I don't like being spied on. I don't know if Bridget told you, I took it a bit amiss when I found out she'd been doing it." Bella sips her drink. "How did you see my anti-spying ward?"

[prima_sequentem]

"By trying to get around it, of course."

[self_composed]

"Of course. But doesn't that strike you as a bit rude?"

[prima_sequentem]

"Sure it does. But I am absolutely willing to be rude if it will help me protect my people."

[self_composed]

Bella is not quite sure how to communicate the disconnect between Libby's take on this and her own. Bella is also not sure if she wants Libby to understand the way in which this is not okay, though, so she doesn't try very hard. Instead she says:

"The way Bridget talks about you makes more sense now."

Because it really does. Humans are mostly designed to care about people being team players, not about people adhering to abstract ethics or rule of law. Libby is - or can produce a very convincing front of being - a team player.

[prima_sequentem]

Libby raises her eyebrows. "Oh?"

[self_composed]

"Yes, she was adamant that you were definitely oriented around being helpful to her and others in the network, and kept taking exception to the 'sinister' description."

[prima_sequentem]

"Why do you insist on calling me sinister?"

[self_composed]

"Because you were spying on me," Bella says tiredly.

She is not sure why this is so complicated.

[prima_sequentem]

"Comes with the job," she says, unapologetically. "Someone has to make sure nobody destroys the world."

[self_composed]

"How did you get this job?" Bella asks.

[prima_sequentem]

"I figured out that nobody else was doing it."

[self_composed]

"And prior to that time, the world remained undestroyed," Bella points out.

[prima_sequentem]

"Lucky world," says Libby. "I'd rather not leave it to luck anymore."

[self_composed]

"Have you averted many near-apocalypses, then?"

[prima_sequentem]

"You say that like you think it's funny," she observes.

[self_composed]

"Even if I assume you began doing what you do sometime during elementary school, you've had two decades tops working on it. Did you take over from someone else? Has there been maybe one, more likely zero, arguable potential apocalypse you've been in a position to intervene with over that entire period? Are you operating in ignorance of other persons, forces, or organizations with the same goal who've been around longer than you? Are you using this as a cover to make yourself sound altruistic while you mostly work on something else? Is the world in negligible danger and you're paranoid? All of those possibilities are more likely than the world having always needed someone doing what you do and only having just recently gotten it, previously persisting only by luck."

[prima_sequentem]

"Anyone with the powers you or I have could easily cause massive widespread destruction if they happened to feel like it and no one was around to stop them," says Libby. "Are you going to argue with that?"

[self_composed]

"I could destroy stuff, if I wanted to," Bella says. "Sure. But the history of the world does not look like one in which mints and the natively empowered routinely decide to destroy lots of stuff. Magic can accomplish extremely precise, unnatural, abrupt effects, and will by default unless people are trying to hide, and the widest-scale disasters have been none of those. People willing to destroy lots of of stuff and kill lots of people and who have magic to burn on that project have little, if any, reason to deliberately cover their tracks."

Like, for example, if Alice had gotten minting powers without her around - the results would not look like "volcano erupts" or "tsunami hits". It would look like "suffocating rain of jellybeans".

[prima_sequentem]

"So... because it's obvious that it hasn't happened yet, it's probably not going to happen in the future? I'm having trouble following your logic here."