Chương 44: 43. I'm Confident Now That None Of Y'all Matter

Emily rushes us quickly inside, shutting and locking the door behind us and grumbling under her breath. Her apartment is quite a bit more of a mess than the last time we were here; pizza boxes, empty bags of takeout food, scattered bits of trash, and several carpet stains litter the room. She kicks some of it to the side and scrapes various discarded items off of the couch before motioning us to sit down.

"Make yourself at home, lovely to see you again, all that shit," she says.

"I assume by the fact that you fucking brought her here that Tall, Hot, and Handsome knows what I can do?"

"I'm flattered Emily, but—" Peter starts, and she throws a bit of pizza crust at his head.

"Not you, asshole. Who is this, Julietta? Dumping me already?" She gestures angrily at Maria, who mostly looks flustered, confused, and overwhelmed by the whole thing.

"…Yes, she knows everything, and therefore she knows you're my sister and we aren't dating," I scowl.

"What the hell happened, Emily? Does living in a rotten pigsty not shorten your life expectancy at all?"

"Maybe it would if most of us weren't going to die in three years anyway," Emily snaps back.

"But we are, so no. It doesn't." What the hell? Where is all this hostility coming from? Is she mad that I told Maria about her? Maybe, but that wouldn't explain why she's let herself go so much. This has to have been months of not cleaning up after herself. She's usually so particular about this kind of thing, though. She would always help me clean up after our brothers. A distant pang of grief bubbles up in my chest, and I realize that I'm an idiot.

I've been pretty damn busy training for and fighting in a war with most of the people I care about, but Emily? She's been living alone this whole time, in the aftermath of everything that happened. She has no one to turn to in her time of need but the motherfucking god of Failure. No wonder she's a total mess. She's alone at one of the lowest points in her entire life. I'm so fucking stupid.

"Sorry," I nod.

"Dumb question on my part. Let us help you clean up, at least. Christine, do you mind…?"

"You couldn't stop me if you tried," Christine grunts, expanding her domain to cover the room and shifting all the different kinds of trash into individual piles. Immediately, everything looks a lot cleaner.

"Wow, thanks for moving all of my stuff around without asking me," Emily scowls.

"So are you going to introduce me to your new friend, or what?"

"Right, sorry Emily," I apologize again.

"This is Maria. Maria, this is my sister, Emily. I promise she's not this bad once you get to know her."

"I promise I am," Emily grumbles.

"This is all of you getting to know me. Welcome to the real Emily. So out with it, already. What did you all drop by here for?"

"Emily, you're being really mean," Anastasia accuses.

"Yeah, what the hell?" Christine agrees.

"We came here because we care about you. Chill out for a second."

"I'm sorry, do I not have the right to be a little pissed off that you guys shared my secrets with some girl I don't even know?" Emily demands, gesturing at Maria. Okay, I feel bad about it, but there's no way I'm going to let that one slide.

"You should have thought of that when you inexorably tied your secrets with mine," I tell her.

"Because I do have a right to share who I actually am with people I care about, and if that means they figure out what your deal is, then that's just too bad. If you don't like it, you can find someone else to impersonate your dead girlfriend. I have put a ton of work and effort into making sure you can continue to live here instead of joining up on the front lines, so the least you can do is be polite to my friends."

I make a point of shapeshifting out of Lia's body as I talk, swapping back into the gestalt form I used the last time I was here. My tentacles squirm as they grow to replace my hair, the constant stimulation fading into the background just enough to help me calm down. I don't know what it is about octopus neural structures that makes grabbing things so gratifying, but I like it a lot.

Emily opens her mouth to protest, but thankfully she takes a couple moments to reconsider, eventually collapsing back on her couch with an annoyed huff.

"…Okay, okay, you're right," she admits.

"Sorry. I'll try to stop being a bitch."

"Thank you," I nod, sitting down next to her.

"So what were you freaking out about when you first saw us?" She sighs, rubbing the bridge of her nose with two fingers.

"Well, that's part of why I'm so pissed," she admits.

"The only thing worse than being stuck hanging around someone I know is going to die is having to figure out how to break the news to them." My blood runs cold.

"Who?" I ask.

"What can we do about it?"

"Your new friend Maria, obviously, and if I knew the answer to that second question this wouldn't really be a problem," Emily answers. Maria, who until this point has been about as calm and polite as one can be when entering an unpleasantly aggressive stranger's house, finally changes her posture from 'awkwardly hoping the conversation ends without her input' to 'becoming frightened enough to override her social instincts.'

"What do you mean I'm going to die!?" she says.

"When? How?"

"Sometime in the next three months, and I don't know," Emily answers succinctly.

"I've been trying to think of shit we can do to improve your chance since you got here, but I'm coming up blank."

"When, exactly, in the next three months is this going to happen?" I ask.

"If I knew that, I would have told you," Emily shrugs.

"The probability is just kind of spread out over the duration. There isn't any particular time that I could say is the most likely, but taken collectively, yeah. You are probably going to die within the next three months. Unless we stop it, obviously, but I have traditionally not been super great at that!"

"Oh god," Maria starts to panic, "Oh god, oh god." I glance at Christine and flick my eyes towards Maria. Christine grimaces and pats the girl semi-reassuringly on the back.

"Isn't it kind of odd for the chance to be spread out so far?" I ask Emily.

"What kind of thing could maybe kill you anytime within the next few months, as opposed to just killing you when it happens?"

"A lot of things," Emily shrugs.

"It's common with people who are very sick, for example. A bunch of very small things can potentially change the death date of a person who is already dying by a few days or weeks in whatever direction. But any extended exposure to a dangerous situation can potentially give me readings like this. Like say, I don't know, being on a battlefield for a long time?"

"But we're all probably going to be on a battlefield for a long time," I point out.

"And you're not acting like any of us are likely to die in the near future."

"Not as likely as her, sure, but I don't really want to think about any of your chances, either. Even if you only have a one percent chance of dying on any given day, a hundred days from now…?"

"I thought you didn't get specific probabilities," I press.

"I don't. It's just an example," Emily waves me off.

"My point is just that—surprise, surprise—war is deadly. None of you are likely to die on the battlefield by the standards of someone who's hanging around a battlefield, but Freckles over there is, unless we figure out how to stop it. So, yeah, I'm a little upset. My life was sucking enough when I didn't have to worry about this shit. I could just hopelessly wait for the apocalypse all by myself." … I frown. This is starting to feel oddly familiar. She's depressed, isn't she? Badly so.

Oh god, I need to treat this how I used to treat Christine, don't I?

"…When was the last time you ate?" I ask.

"I don't know," Emily grunts.

"It doesn't really matter."

"It does matter," I insist.

"It objectively doesn't," Emily dismisses, waving me off.

"I am not at risk of starving myself to death anytime in the next three years."

"Okay, but things can affect the quality of your life as well as the quantity," I point out, a little annoyed that I have to at all.

"It's no wonder you're in such an awful mood if you can't even remember the last time you ate anything. We're ordering food. Now."

"Knock yourself out," she shrugs.

"I'm going to keep trying to figure out how to save your girlfriend's life, but if you think my diet is more important, you do you."

"First, she's not my girlfriend, second, you're going to think a lot better if you eat, and third I am tolerating your bitchiness because I know you have been grieving alone for months, but even I have limits. Everyone is going to be happier if you don't test them."

"God damn, Jules. You are way more fun when you're assertive," Peter says, grinning happily.

"Is that so? You want me to be assertive? Fine," I snap.

"Call me Jules one more time and I'll shove tentacles so far up your nose you won't be able to use a tissue without having a panic attack."

"Ooo, I'm so scared," Peter says mockingly, and I am officially fucking done with this shit. I get up from the couch, walk over to him, and stare him right in the eyes.

"Look at me," I order, "and name one time I have ever bluffed about anything." He pauses, returning my stare in silence.

"One time," I challenge again.

"We've played poker before?" he tries. My finger starts splitting apart, twisting and elongating towards his face.

"Do I look like I have cards in my hand, Peter?" His eyes glance back and forth between the tendrils and my eyes.

"I am almost tempted," he admits, "to say yes. But I'm also kinda hungry, so how about we order Chinese and I'll just snort a noodle?"

"Sure thing," I agree, shifting my hands back to normal.

"Let's do that." I get to work, deciding on a place to eat, assembling everyone's orders, choosing for Emily when she doesn't choose for herself, and gathering trashbags to turn the piles Christine made into properly thrown-away trash. Anastasia offers to help wash the carpet, and I agree before realizing that her plan is to cut herself and bleed all over the floor, scrubbing down the individual fibers and dissolving the stains in a rather unconventional cleaning fluid.

There's a hard limit to how much dust and hair she can gather up until her power stops considering her blood to be her blood anymore, but she seems quite familiar with the limit. And while her methods hurt me to watch, I can't deny that they are very effective. I try to form some of her blood myself to let her use that, but she just yells at me and refuses to take it. No matter how much I try to explain that it doesn't hurt me to create it, she's having none of it.

I guess the blood I gave her while we were under attack from that Angel was a special case. Once the food arrives, I make sure to force Emily to start eating it before we continue any conversation about her powers.

"Okay, first thing's first," I say.

"What if we just defect?"

"I'm liking where this is going," Peter says, sticking a noodle up his nose, inhaling, and coughing a bit.

"Wow, this is unpleasant."

"That just makes survival bad for most of you, rather than just her," Emily answers.

"The military destroys any threats they don't control. That's kind of their thing."

"Obviously, but your power deals with hypotheticals, right?" I press.

"We don't necessarily have to ask the question 'what's the best way to save Maria' at this juncture. We can ask it about various future possibilities in order to narrow down what, exactly, is going to kill her. If running away means she still dies, then whatever kills her might not be related to our military service at all."

"Or, it means you successfully get recaptured by people with mind control powers or some other form of coercion and forced to fight anyway," Emily counters.

"That's the problem with hypotheticals: I can never actually know what the results were in enough detail to be reliably helpful."

"Well, I can work with unreliably helpful just fine, Emily. Frankly, I have a lot of experience with it," I scowl.

"Hey," Christine complains.

"Not you," I assure her. She wasn't helpful at all until relatively recently.

"So how do her chances change if we defect?"

"They change in all kinds of weird ways, Julietta," Emily groans, shoveling fried rice into her mouth.

"You think I never thought to try this? Some stuff is more likely, some stuff is less likely. I can't make sense of it.

'You decide to defect' is way too broad of a possibility space. My power is strongest when dealing with imminent threats of death. The further away a likely death is, the more possible deaths there are, and the less sure my power is about anything. And for some fucking reason that goes double whenever you're involved!"

"Too broad a possibility space, huh?" I mutter, shoving food into a mouth I grew on my chest so I can talk and eat at the same time.

"Someone in the Army mentioned offhand that other precogs were having trouble predicting me, too. I wonder if it's a god thing."

"God thing?" Emily asks, quirking an eyebrow.

"Please don't tell me all the brushes with death have made you religious."

"No, but the brushes with alien cultures may have," I admit.

"I can speak with aliens, actually, and they told me—""Oh no, here we go again," Maria groans miserably. I lean over a little and nudge her with my shoulder.

"Even if you can talk to aliens, why would you believe them?"

"They told me, and I have independently gathered evidence to corroborate, that powers are the direct result of being chosen by one of several gods," I say.

"Considering that my patron deity is called Possibility, the idea that I'm a little more unmoored from fate than the average person actually checks out."

"What the fuck?" Emily asks, furrowing her brows.

"Are you high? You couldn't talk to aliens back in the incursion zone, and you were one half the time."

"I could, actually!" I tell her.

"That's the thing! My entire trick of knowing where all the Raptors were was me subconsciously tapping into their communication network. By the time I started to figure out how to do it on purpose, we were already running from an Angel and had more important things to worry about. And from there it just… never really came up again. I mean, that Angel and I didn't say much to each other outside of death threats."

"Huh," Emily says, looking thoughtful.

"Okay. That seems… handy. That changes things, actually. The survival chances for hanging out in alien territory can be unexpectedly high sometimes. If we… huh. Huh! Yeah!"

"The hell do you mean 'unexpectedly high?'" Christine protests.

"You'd better not be suggesting—""There are several locations in alien-controlled territory where Maria is basically guaranteed to survive at least until the apocalypse," Emily announces happily.

"If Julietta goes with her, there's even more."

"What?" Maria flinches.

"No!"

"But yes, though!" Emily says, excitement building in her.

"God, we could almost pick a direction! …Almost. There are definitely a lot of things that could kill us, but based on the timeframe… Jesus, yeah, the military couldn't touch us! This is perfect, Maria!"

"No, it's not!" Maria protests.

"That's not perfect at all!" This novel's true home is a different platform. Support the author by finding it there.

"But this opens up so much!" Emily says.

"Don't you get it? We might not be fucked! I lost the thread to beat the apocalypse while trying to escape a Queen's domain! If we just go back—""I am not going back and living in a fucking incursion zone!" Christine insists.

"Well, you don't have to come," Emily says, waving her off.

"I'm confident now that none of y'all matter. Julietta, Maria, and I, though… we narrow down the best spot, head out to lie low for a few months and save Maria's life, and—""We said no!" A half-dozen Marias say in unison, manifesting in a blinding flash of multicolored light. The various fairies swarm around the central body, which glows with a white light, radiant wings fluttering behind it.

She stares at Emily with a concerned furrow to her brow, while the other, smaller fairies of various colors all glower with varying degrees of irritation. Emily gapes at them, her eyes flicking between them all in startled confusion.

"We have been very polite because this is your home—" Yellow starts.

"Too fucking polite," Orange growls.

"—but I am officially tired of you talking like I don't get any say in this!" Blue finishes.

"No means no!" Pink insists.

"You seriously think we're going to abandon humanity and go live with aliens!? That's not just treason, that's completely insane!"

"Even if you're right and we aren't killed on sight, what will we do there? What will we eat? How will we live?" Green asks.

"W-we'll find a way," Emily insists, finally recovering from the shock of sudden hot girl multiplication.

"Haven't you been listening? It doesn't matter how we live, the whole point is that we will. Near-guaranteed!"

"That isn't the point at all!" Pink insists.

"What is the matter with you!? Even if your powers are right and we won't get slaughtered by the omnicidal monsters—""Which is the biggest fucking 'if' in the entire goddamn universe!" Orange chimes in.

"—there's no way we'd ever agree to abandoning humanity to side with the aliens! I get that you're all the least patriotic group of people possible without being outright criminals, but we have a duty to use our powers to help others. Others, in this case, being our entire species!"

"Our entire species is going to bite it either way!" Emily insists.

"Don't you get it? The war doesn't matter! No one can win! No one you save matters! Not unless we can figure out what the apocalypse is and stop it! God, even I'm more likely to live if we go into alien territory. Julietta, what did you do?"

"I met some aliens and then killed them," I answer.

"Which they mostly liked, for some reason. Their culture is very strange."

"This could be it!" Emily says excitedly.

"This has to be it! This is why you matter!"

"Wow, thanks," I deadpan.

"I'm not kidding! This is important! The closer we get to doomsday, the less meaningful any of our decisions are. There are a few threats to my life between then and now, but most of them are probably In-Joke and I'm used to that. The only important thing left is the end of everything, and until just now I've been completely out of ideas!"

"Which is why you've been so depressed and irritable lately?" Maria's body speaks up for the first time since the split. I guess her name would be White, going by the pattern. I guess that's technically a name. Feels kind of weird to just call someone 'White' out loud as their name, though.

"Duh. The world is doomed and I failed to save it. But now we've got another shot! We can succeed this time!" Oh. Oh, no. Given what I know now…

"Emily, if we're relying on your powers to guide us… I don't think we can," I say.

"What the hell do you mean?" she demands.

"I'm the only reason any of us are alive!"

"Emily, what are the actual odds that Maria will die if we stick with the military?" I ask.

"I told you, I don't know that!"

"Ballpark it for me," I insist.

"If you had to put a number to the feeling, what would it be?"

"I don't know… I guess—""And don't ask your power which number to tell us," I catch myself quickly.

"I mean it. Not even a little. Whatever fractions of a chance it might earn you aren't worth it in this case, okay?"

"You can't just say that and expect it to be true," Emily snaps.

"Don't act like you know my power better than I do."

"Emily," I press, staring at her intently.

"I'm pretty sure I do know more about your power than you do. Trust me. Trust me over it. Give me a number."

"I don't know, Julietta! I guess… eighty percent?"

"Eighty percent, huh?" I hum.

"That's not bad."

"Uh, it sounds pretty bad!" Green says.

"Emily, what were our survival odds when I flew off to rescue Christine from that Angel?" I ask.

"You seemed pretty adamant that it was a suicide mission."

"I don't know, I don't remember!" she answers, waiting just a little bit too long for her statement to be believable.

"Think," I demand.

"And trust me. Please."

"I don't know, okay? It was like… seventy? Seventy-five?"

"So around the same?" I clarify.

"Oh my god, Julietta, no. You're smarter than this!" Emily accuses, gesticulating angrily in my direction.

"That's not how probability works! You can't just say 'oh, well, I won on twenty percent odds last time, so obviously I'll win on twenty percent odds this time!' Even if you had ninety percent odds, just the act of rolling the dice starts to add up. Twenty percent twice in a row is four percent. Twenty percent three times in a row is zero point eight percent. You're not going to keep getting lucky every time, and the first time you bet wrong you fucking die!"

"And that is how your power is tricking you into constantly fucking up," I declare, pointing back at her.

"That is what you don't get about it. Your power is convincing you that survival is a bet. A game of odds. But it's not, and I think it's constructing this lie entirely by design." Because why wouldn't it be? Gods grant powers for a reason. Maybe it's to venerate themselves. Maybe it's a gift to those who represent their values. But one way or another, they want that power to be used to further their domain. It's the only thing that makes sense.

"Your power was granted to you by the god of Failure," I tell her.

"It wants you to constantly wallow in everything you can't accomplish. It wants you to look at the future and think you don't have a chance. That's why it presents itself to you in this way. It wants you to think of your future as a roulette wheel, as a binary state of winning or losing that you have to blindly chase after. But it's not a perfect predictor of your chances. It can't be. We already know that your odds are constantly changing based on the actions people around you take.

Your power isn't trying to focus on being an accurate predictor of the future, your power is focusing on keeping you constantly aware of how you could fuck up, no matter how unlikely. If it could happen as a result of your decision, even if it would require future actions that make absolutely no sense, your power probably factors it into the 'odds' it gives you. But I didn't get lucky when I saved Christine. You of all people know I'm not fucking lucky.

I saved Christine because I made the right decisions at the right time to get us out of that hellhole. So yes, I can keep beating the odds. Over and over, as many times as necessary. And that's what I intend to do." There's a bit of an awkward silence after that. I suppose I raised my voice a little. Shouldn't have done that, rookie mistake.

There are already a dozen caveats and qualifiers I want to add to my speech, the silence driving an instinctive assumption that I've failed a social interaction, but I keep quiet. I can't be the one to speak up next, or else I'll lose my shot at making this awkward silence seem like a dramatic pause instead.

"Fuck yeah," Orange says, which is the perfect follow-up, thank you Maria! That should get the momentum going in here.

"I feel like that's making a lot of hard-to-verify assumptions," Green says, which… okay, slightly less thank you Maria, but whatever.

"Can we maybe not frame the context of this conversation around gambling over my life specifically?" Blue asks.

"I'm not gonna say you're wrong, but it's still close to giving me an anxiety attack."

"What are you even talking about, Julietta?" Emily sighs.

"Green Tinkerbell has a point. What's with this 'god of Failure' stuff?"

"It's part of what I was talking about before," I explain.

"In addition to Possibility and Failure, the gods are Reciprocation, Legion, Division, Blasphemy, Perfection, Silhouette, Bliss, Contradiction, and Nothing. Maybe there are more, but those are the ones I was told about and every power I've encountered so far falls into one of those categories. Ana's Reciprocation, Christine is Division, Maria's Legion, Peter's Perfection—""I never thought you'd admit it," Peter preens.

"—and you're Failure. This is not like, a personal attack on you or anything. It's just how the aliens understand powers and the more I look into it the more the framework makes perfect sense. Your god just happens to be one of the shitty awful ones."

"How can you even tell who's who?" Emily asks.

"I mean, my power is literally telling me about future possibilities. Wouldn't it make sense if I was also a Possibility super?"

"Well, we can tell through that domain qualia stuff that Anastasia and I can sense," I explain, "but as for your power specifically and for powers in general, it's not so much about what they do so much as how they do it, best I can figure. Like, this other guy we know, Ed—his power feels the same as yours, but the effects are completely different. He empowers people in his domain, and the strength of the effect increases the more people in his domain have been harmed or killed.

He is literally empowered by failing to protect those under his charge."

"And you think my power isn't really about surviving, but about failing to survive," she concludes.

"Exactly," I nod.

"I mean, think about it. You could just as easily use your power to kill people instead of just keeping yourself alive. I wouldn't be surprised if the whole thing became a lot more cooperative if you started doing that, but I don't actually know the direct degree of influence gods hold over powers they bestow.

There isn't really anything preventing them from doing whatever they want, assuming they're as powerful as I suspect they have to be to break reality the way they do, but the only evidence I have of active involvement is resonance and dissonance effects. Even that might just be automated."

"Wait, you think you know what causes resonance and dissonance effects?" Emily presses.

"Divine pissing match," I answer with a nod.

"If two gods are particularly competitive or antagonistic, they power up any domains that they think are in conflict with their enemies. Conversely, if two gods like each other—or if two people share the same god—their powers get weaker to discourage the two of them from fighting."

"Huh," Emily says, and suddenly I feel a new domain manifesting around me, as if it had always been there but was so thin as to be translucent, unable to be seen. It feels like a bitter hope for life struggling and succumbing to the inevitability of death. Immediately, my hackles raise, and my power blooms with strength. Resonance, just like with Ed.

"So my god doesn't like your god, huh?" Emily hums.

"My god is the god of infinite futures. Yours is the god of tragic ends. They are somewhat invariably at odds. I can't think of anything more antithetical to possibility than a foregone conclusion." Emily is quiet for a while, her eyes flicking around and looking at nothing the way they so often did back in the incursion zone.

"…You asked me how the chances feel to me. What numbers I would give them. Just as a heuristic. Our chance of dying when you went after Christine was seventy percent. Our chances of dying to the apocalypse I'd put at ninety-nine point nine. Repeating."

"So it will be very difficult," I say.

"That doesn't mean it will be unlikely."

"I take that to mean you aren't going to escort me to go live with the inexplicably safer man-eating monsters?" Emily sighs.

"Not unless the Marias want to go," I answer.

"What do you guys think?"

"I think you should be concerned about your sanity for even needing to ask," Pink answers.

"We just got back from slaughtering hundreds of them. This is not even in question. No," Green agrees.

"I'm a little concerned at the implications if all of this stuff is true, but even if we could live peacefully with the aliens it would be disrespectful to just run off and abandon everyone else to save our own lives," White says.

"If there's anything you can tell us about staying alive, I'd welcome the information, but I knew I might die ever since this started. I don't want to, but that's how it is." I give her an approving nod. Personally, I'm a bit conflicted on the matter. If there's one thing to say about living in alien lands, it's that I'm damn curious about the matter. And Emily's right: it might very well be our best chance to discover how to deal with the moon.

Hell, the solution probably requires some level of cooperation between aliens and humanity; only the aliens might have some idea of what the moon is at this point, but they don't seem to be capable of getting anywhere close to leaving the atmosphere, let alone actually going there. But on the other hand, well…

one look at everyone else in the room, particularly Anastasia, and it's easy to see what everyone else's opinions are on living with things that have been humanity's greatest enemy since before any of us were born. Because well… yeah, obviously. Nobody else can talk to aliens, let alone give themselves a brain structure instinctively predisposed to find them aesthetically appealing. They're gross murderous monsters to the rest of the world.

The practical concerns can't be brushed off as easily as Emily wants, either. We've been in an incursion zone, and while the murderous aliens are the defining feature there's also no electricity, no plumbing, and no staff for the small-town grocery stores. I'm sure there are answers to the questions of 'what do we eat,' 'how do we stay warm,' and 'where do we take a shit,' but I can pretty much guarantee no one is going to be happy about any of them.

"I can respect your sense of duty," I nod to the Marias.

"I get that it's probably a little disturbing to hear us all talking about treason like it's no big deal."

"Hey where's this 'us all?'" Christine asks.

"Anastasia and I have been nice and quiet."

"I think Maria is right," Anastasia says softly.

"Well I don't, but I wasn't speaking up about it," Christine says.

"Fuck the military."

"How can you say that?" Blue asks.

"I'm not going to act like the government is perfect, but there's a reason our society has been united by a common cause for this long. We need unity, we need leadership, and as regrettable as it is, we need sacrifice. If everyone was just looking out for themselves we wouldn't have even what little of our world is left. We got to grow up and be kids and live safely with our families for as long as we did because the military is out there fighting to keep that peace. It's our turn to contribute to that."

"…Even if it did come a little too early for some of us," Orange says, glancing at Anastasia.

"And I don't disagree," I tell her firmly.

"I hate the military, but I'm not going to act like abandoning our public responsibility is justified because of that. Not when we're this close to extinction. But that's the thing—we are close to extinction, and the source of that extinction isn't going to be us losing the war."

"Yeah, the aliens die too," Emily nods.

"Or at least, any of the aliens I've been near. The event is too sudden and too simultaneous for it to be a result of the war. Conventional war, anyway."

"Then we should be working together with the military to save the world! All the brightest and best minds working together, and all that," Pink says.

"Well, I'm not sure I agree with 'all the brightest and best minds,'" I hedge.

"The longer an organization exists and the larger it is, the harder it is to keep the right people in the right place. Fundamentally, being the person best at getting promoted does not mean that you are the person best at doing your job. Those are completely separate skill sets entirely, and so inevitably the selfish bastards who want power for its own sake will rise above anyone who actually deserves their position over time.

But more importantly, Emily's power predicts bad things will happen to us and to her if we tell the brass about the end of the world."

"Weren't you just talking about how her predictions aren't necessarily going to be accurate? The people in charge need to know what threats they should be defending us from!" Green insists.

"Oh, absolutely," I agree.

"And there's no way in hell they don't know."

"What?" Yellow asks.

"How can you be sure?"

"Well, I can't be a hundred percent sure, but Emily knows about it, and In-Joke knows about it, so it stands to reason all sorts of powers can get their hands on that information. And we know for a fact that the military has entire intelligence divisions full of precognitives. I'd eat my own arm if they don't have some idea that shit gets fucky in less than three years."

"Well that doesn't mean anything, you eat your own body parts all the time," Peter points out.

"Not the point," I glare at him.

"I'm just saying there's no need to tell them. Some of their insane decisions might already be explained by relying on precognitive support. My guess is that they already know and they're just keeping it top secret. If we go to them and talk about how we know, we're not going to accomplish anything other than suffering the consequences of having learned something that they didn't want us to know about. And like, the military sends me to get vivisected without anesthetic when they're not mad at me."

"Wait, you got vivisected?" Christine gapes.

"Not if anyone asks, I wasn't supposed to say that," I wave her off.

"It wasn't even that big of a deal, don't worry about it. My point, if I were to summarize, is just that I have a mixed degree of belief in the competence of the people in charge. Right now, they haven't completely tipped me over the edge where I'm just going to grab Anastasia and run off somewhere safer with her, but if our ultimate objective is the safety and security of everyone we care about, I'm not excluding the chance that we may have to take that into our own hands.

I need to meet with more aliens and get a better understanding of what's going on, and ultimately I need to be able to communicate what I learn to the people in charge without getting dismissed as crazy. For now, I think continuing to work with them is going to be better than trying to get them to listen to a supervillain, but ultimately I'm just going to play it by ear." Maria sighs, all of her various bodies glancing between each other before wordlessly recombining into a single entity.

Though the glow diminishes to nothing, her physical body's eyes stay white.

"I just… I think we have a duty to do the right thing. To help as many people as we can in the way that we were helped. I can't… we can't, in good conscience, abandon that duty." I smile, my tentacles squeezing each other in an attempt to distract me from the uncomfortable, bubbly joy I feel at listening to her say that.

"Absolutely," I nod firmly.

"Everyone has a duty to do the right thing for other people. There's nothing I believe more than that. That's why, in good conscience, I won't hesitate to abandon the military if I think it's the right call."

"Isn't that a bit… I don't know, arrogant?" Maria asks.

"How can you believe you know better about how to save people than most of the rest of the entire country?" I shrug.

"I don't know if I can tell you how," I say. It's a bit of a lie. I could. Honestly, thinking I know better than everyone else is the easiest thing in the world.

"Maybe it is arrogance. But I won't just wait around following orders if I'm confident it's not the right thing to do. I won't let anyone else decide my future for me, no matter how much of that future they can see." Perhaps it's my imagination, but I almost feel my domain hum in agreement.

"Okay," Maria nods.

"Alright. We'll support you."

"You've never stopped saving my ass," Christine says.

"I would prefer not to have to live out the rest of my days drinking alien nutrient slop, but I'd probably be more comfortable in enemy territory with you than somewhere safe without you."

"What are you, gay?" Peter asks.

"Yeah? Obviously? Though I think I'd go insane if I actually tried to date Julietta," Christine answers.

"Yeah, she's denser than osmium," Emily agrees.

"Among other flaws," Christine nods.

"Um," an increasingly red-faced Maria says.

"Well I, for one, support any and all of my sister's relationships because I'm sure they would all be very funny," Peter declares.

"A true ally," Christine deadpans.

"I feel like we're getting slightly off-track here," I say, trying to move the conversation on to anything but this.

"Yeah I don't wanna talk about this," Emily agrees.

"You can decide whether or not to fuck my sister in someone else's house. You guys are here on vacation, right? Did you have any plans or did you just want to eat my food and lounge on my couch?"

"Well, we're on liberty for the time being but that could end at any time. Still, yeah, relaxing a little wouldn't be a terrible idea," I agree.

"Ooh! Let's play Monopoly!" Peter suggests.

"Sure," I say at the same time everyone else simultaneously yells"No!"

"If we're going to lose to Julietta we can at least pick a better board game," Emily grumbles.

"I have a couple more. Anybody up for Catan?" Well. That's slightly better. By the end of the game, however, I get the impression no one will ever want to play this again with me either.