Voicemail

[callbacks]

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Please note the date and time of day for me!

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[crouching_sin]

After. The Harmonizer boots up with the summoning program.

[callbacks]

phew ok
so its kind of like getting your starter here
and then you use that one to fight and get introduced to other ones you might like better
yeah?

[crouching_sin]

Basically, only you have to punch your starter into submission before you can use it.

And not everyone survives that part.

[callbacks]

r
right
i guess thats kind of a different experience

[crouching_sin]

It's not as if I didn't try to remove that part, but... well.

I was under a somewhat tight schedule without a firm deadline. 'Within the month' doesn't tell me if I have five days or four weeks.

[callbacks]

yeah time crunches are tough
and
well
i mean
i guess its fair
for the demon to have a fighting chance at deciding if it wants to listen to some punkass summoner dragging it out of its business stabbing pitchforks into peoples asses or whatever
but um
did
you tell the kids you gave the comps to about that before you gave them the things

[crouching_sin]

[And there's the million dollar question, Dave.]

I told the organization that I made them for that it would happen. They didn't spread the word as much as they probably should have. Then again, they were pushing for Belberith to win the War and remake the world into whatever sort of hellish setting he was imagining.

My cousin wasn't part of that so no. He didn't get the memo. I knew he'd get through that easily, though. It's not like I wasn't looking out for him.

[All of his plans hinged on Kazuya reacting as expected. ... And then things went off the rails.]

[callbacks]

[Dave doesn't answer for a little while.]

you said he was seventeen?

[crouching_sin]

[Oh no. Oh no no no. He does not like where this feels like it's going. He can't justify it. Not to anyone. How could they ever understand?]

Yes. And my brother.

A fragment of him, anyway.

[callbacks]

[Wherever Naoya thinks it's going, it takes Dave some time to get there. The words come haltingly, one by one.]

my brother
was a lot older than me
and it seems like maybe he knew what was going to happen
to our planet i mean
he trained me
and made sure i could handle myself
but

he never did tell me anything
and
he could have

thats all im saying i guess

[crouching_sin]

[At least it didn't jump immediately to 'I hate you'. This... he can handle. Maybe.]

I'm sure he had a reason. I don't know him, but...

... If he cared about you, which it sounds like he did, I'm sure he had a reason for what he did.

[callbacks]

yeah
what was your reason

[crouching_sin]

[There's a bit of a pause on his end. There's no good way to put this kind of thing. But he'll try.]

I wanted to make sure he had grown as strong as I thought he did. To make sure that he was ready. He couldn't rely on me forever. I wanted him to know that he could do it.

I wouldn't have let him die. His first fight happened fairly close to my apartment. I was counting on him to get through it, though. He was the only human capable of wining the War. Letting him just die there would have been stupid.

[callbacks]

i guess
bros reason couldve been something similar



hes dead now so i cant really ask

[crouching_sin]

I know how that feels.

You want to just yell at them and ask them why the hell they did something, but you can't.

It's a weird feeling.

[callbacks]

ahah well i cant really imagine yelling at him
but yeah it would be nice to just
you know
know
what his reasoning was for a lot of things he did
but chewing on it hasnt gotten me anywhere for the past three years so shrug

[crouching_sin]

True. Some things you have to just accept that you can't know.

People are confusing. And they always have been, honestly.

[There's a reason he's spent so much time with demons other than for revenge.]

[callbacks]

hear hear
i mean
i was wondering if it was just me since i spent so much time in the company of aliens given that earths population was reduced to absolute zero
but if you say its true then im happy to concede bafflement

[crouching_sin]

No, it's not just you. I thought I knew what was going on but even after a few rounds of reincarnation I started realizing that no, maybe it wasn't just me, people are hard to figure out.

Some people, at least. Others you can read like a book because they fall into the same patterns.

[callbacks]

what kind of patterns?
like do you mean the same people get reincarnated a lot or is it more a types of people thing

[crouching_sin]

Well sometimes you meet someone who was probably someone you knew in a past life because whoever's in charge of reincarnation seems to have a stupid sense of humor.

But mostly it's the types of people thing, yes.

[callbacks]

what kinds of types of people
like nice people and shitty people
something more complicated than that right

[crouching_sin]

Let me give you an example.

You're at a bar and you see a guy walk up to a girl and ask for her number. You've been watching both of them for a bit and the girl has a boyfriend who's in the bathroom, but the guy doesn't know that, and his friends have been egging him on to ask her out for five minutes and the guy is slightly drunk.

The girl politely declines to give him her number, and says she has a boyfriend. The guy proceeds to list off why he's better than some boyfriend he's sure she's making up just to get him to go away. Then the boyfriend walks up behind the guy hitting on his girlfriend and tells him to leave, but the first guy is too drunk for sense. So he hits the second guy in the chest, and the first guy hits him back, and then either it gets broken up or they keep beating each other depending on what kind of bar it is.

And you've seen the exact same exchange happen so often that you could probably recite each line by heart with only slight variations. The guy who's overconfident and thinks he's amazing, the girl who wants to just stick to her boyfriend, the boyfriend who's overprotective...

People can change, but it always feels like there's a tendency for people to fall into roles, and it's like you're watching the same plays over and over and there's just different actors who are reading the same script and the only differences are them putting slight personal touches on the characters. Different voices, different posture, but the same character.

[He's old.]

[callbacks]

i
THINK i understand



its like
people learn how to be people from other people i guess
from the stories they tell each other about how theyre supposed to be and from movies and tv and music and shit
like with the example you just gave
how many fucking times does that exact scene play out within the first ten minutes of a feel good piece of celluloid americana
so when youre the boyfriend and you see someone making your girl uncomfortable of course the first thing you think to do is play hero because thats what youve seen a million heroes do before you
but after you get your shit utterly wrecked you just got to think
im not the hero
im not even A hero
theres no such thing in real fuckin life
but no one ever tells you how to live a real life they just give you story after story until you got no choice but to pick what handful of lame ass character tropes you want to die by and hope it wont suck too hard

[crouching_sin]

Exactly.

And I have the distinct 'pleasure' of having part of my own life incorrectly retold over and over in a book that people take to be absolutely infallible. And people have made countless books and movies and plays and video games and everything including my story and they all get it wrong.

It's incredibly frustrating to see people talk about your own life and just cast you as some grand evil and not even consider that you might have had reasons for what you did.

[Don't even get him started on what the Mormons did to his story.]