callbacks: DREX (tikkity type)
dave mamahecking strider ([personal profile] callbacks) wrote2015-11-07 07:54 pm
Entry tags:

Voicemail

text . voice . video . action

Please note the date and time of day for me!
crouching_sin: (hmph.)

[personal profile] crouching_sin 2016-02-27 10:43 pm (UTC)(link)
[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.]
crouching_sin: (why... ?)

[personal profile] crouching_sin 2016-02-27 10:54 pm (UTC)(link)
[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.
crouching_sin: (unkempt and alone)

[personal profile] crouching_sin 2016-02-27 11:22 pm (UTC)(link)
[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.
crouching_sin: ([Cain] reap what you sow)

[personal profile] crouching_sin 2016-02-27 11:34 pm (UTC)(link)
[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.
crouching_sin: (hey i just met you)

[personal profile] crouching_sin 2016-02-27 11:41 pm (UTC)(link)
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.
crouching_sin: (unkempt and alone)

[personal profile] crouching_sin 2016-02-28 12:10 am (UTC)(link)
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.]
crouching_sin: (stop irritating me)

[personal profile] crouching_sin 2016-02-28 12:27 am (UTC)(link)
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.
crouching_sin: (but here's my number)

[personal profile] crouching_sin 2016-02-28 12:35 am (UTC)(link)
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.
crouching_sin: (unkempt and alone)

[personal profile] crouching_sin 2016-02-28 01:35 am (UTC)(link)
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.]
crouching_sin: ([Cain] reap what you sow)

[personal profile] crouching_sin 2016-02-28 02:04 am (UTC)(link)
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.]
crouching_sin: ([+ MC] we are tainted souls)

1/2

[personal profile] crouching_sin 2016-02-28 02:58 am (UTC)(link)
[...]

I'd ask 'shouldn't you be going to bed about now?' but you're old enough to make your own decisions, aren't you?

All right. Settle in, I suppose.

In the old days, when the land was still green and fairly new, and the only people I knew of were my mother and father, we lived somewhat happily, if a little uneasily. I knew my parents had done something to offend God, but I did not know at the time. My parents were still somewhat like children - all they had known was the Garden of Eden, and the little they'd learned once they were cast out.

My mother had a baby boy, named Abel, and we grew up as close as you can imagine. I learned to take over the work of the fields, and Abel learned how to tend to the sheep. I sometimes saw what he did with the old sheep, how he culled them, and I knew that the plants I harvested no longer lived, but I did not connect that to the idea that the same could happen to people. How could I? I had never even heard of such a thing, and neither had my parents.

One day, God told both myself and Abel to prepare a tribute to Him. I selected my finest crops, carefully washed them so they would look their best, and placed them on the offering altar. Abel had killed one of his finest sheep and dressed it, but it was still bloody. This, evidently, was what He wanted. He had asked both of us for a sacrifice, but what He really wanted was blood. Blood does not run in crops, so He set me up to fail intentionally. He even had the nerve to ask me why I seemed upset, which as you probably know is never the way to make someone less upset.

... I had never felt anger like that before. It was all-consuming, and I was unable to calm it no matter what I did. So I invited my brother to walk through the fields with me, and I made a decision, fueled by that unnatural anger inside of me - anger that I came to realize later really was unnatural, stoked there by Him. I picked up a rock and killed my brother, there in the field. God could take my offering, because there was nothing else I could offer that was more precious to me than my own brother.

The fire died out after that, and I realized what I had done. I was ashamed, ashamed that I would let even anger manipulate me into something like that, and afraid, because I had never seen a dead person in my life. I hid him, and later God came to speak to me and asked me where my brother was. I lied, and said that I didn't know. Why was I supposed to keep track of everything he did? And God said that He could hear Abel's blood crying from the ground, and cursed me.

First, I was cursed to never be able to grow anything again. (And now you know why I don't have any grass-type Pokemon.) Then, He cursed me to be a wanderer forever. I said that anyone who found me would definitely kill me, so He said that he'd put a mark on me so that people knew they'd be cursed if they killed me.

I left home, and I eventually did find more people. I had a son named Enoch, and then I built the first city, also called Enoch. And I died when my house collapsed on me, and I learned that 'wanderer' didn't just mean that I was going to wander from place to place until I died. I woke up and I was born again, and when I was a few years old I started remembering my last life.
Edited 2016-02-28 02:58 (UTC)
crouching_sin: ([+ MC] lullaby and goodnight)

2/2

[personal profile] crouching_sin 2016-02-28 02:58 am (UTC)(link)
It took a few lives to realize that He meant I would wander through multiple lives, across the world, until the end of time. And when people started writing down what they were told was a true and accurate description of the stories that came before them, I realized that my story had been changed, and anything from my side had been taken out, because He wanted an example. I was the person people could point to and claim to be evil, to be blamed for things like murder and for people to see as something to be held up as 'do not be like this person'.

As for Abel... his soul was shattered when I killed him, and it was scattered amongst humanity. Various people inherited shards of his soul. I learned even later that Abel wasn't originally his own soul anyway - he was a split off portion of a demon called Bel that the one called 'God' defeated a long time ago. The demons called Abel the 'Bel of the Human World'. A human who has a shard of Abel in them has the potential to absorb the powers of another Bel demon if they defeat that demon - just as the other Bel demons would absorb the power of another Bel demon if they defeated them. In this way, Bel would become whole again, and become the King of Demons once more.

Of course... the fight for that was a long way off. And should any other Bel demon win, well... you can imagine the kind of ruler most demons would make. There's only one acceptable winner of that fight, for the sake of humanity.
crouching_sin: (why... ?)

[personal profile] crouching_sin 2016-02-28 04:18 am (UTC)(link)
[It's strange, to say all of that, all at once, to someone who might possibly get it. To someone who might understand, or at least is trying to. Someone who genuinely seems to care, even if there's no way he can get all of it, because the human mind isn't built for this kind of thing.]

[It's enough to make Alice come over with some tea, and he insists that no, he's not about to cry, so there's a pause while he drinks the tea and ponders his response to those five words that Dave sent back.]


The Shomonkai - the group that worshiped Belberith - was the group that commissioned the program from me. I could tell that the War was going to happen soon because of various groups moving forward with plans I was keeping an eye on.

I won't pretend that I didn't have an interest in my cousin winning outside of not letting the whole planet become a hellscape. I still want to go after God. I still think there's a twisted kind of irony for God's favored child to be the one dealing the deathblow to Him.

But in a way, yes. I don't want humanity to have its free will stripped of it. Trying to force them into a narrow box and say "this is the only way you can behave" takes away everything that makes humans human. And that kind of world... while many of my lives have been largely boring, there's always something new that people come up with that can surprise even me. A world without that would just feel... empty, and stale, and boring, and just not human.

(no subject)

[personal profile] crouching_sin - 2016-02-28 14:33 (UTC) - Expand

(no subject)

[personal profile] crouching_sin - 2016-02-28 18:36 (UTC) - Expand

(no subject)

[personal profile] crouching_sin - 2016-02-28 19:04 (UTC) - Expand