[ wash is clearly the quieter, more thoughtful type, and a good listener -- he listens closely, attentively, and there's a real sense that he's not just engaging in conversation but actively absorbing any information given to him, because really, he is. he'd be able to recite any of that word for word back if he had any reason to. he's a quick learner, adaptable and pragmatic, and is mostly working in his mind to fit together all the pieces of information he's learned before to draw a picture of crais, who he is, his world. sebaceans he gathers from context to be his species ( he looks incredibly human to wash, but what the fuck does he know ), maybe more of a nomadic and spacefaring species with either a kind of self-importance or an appreciation for irony judging by the name peacekeepers. a more militarized culture? based on technology or physical aptitude? hard to say. clearly with an emphasis on perceived mental fortitude, if what he's saying is true.
another bite from the apple. there's more than three Armor People, there's actually lots of 'em here, but he won't say that, because of course he won't. ]
Military is military, wherever it is. [ another bite. they're all deliberate, spaced out to give him time to process and choose his words. with lots of pets for the kitty. ] I wouldn't say we were conditioned to be psychopaths, but there's some of that in every army, I suppose.
I guess that's why you don't really give a shit about the morality of psychopaths or whatever else?
[ Excuse you, he knows there are others here, he just hasn't finished building his collection, yet. He might not even get the full set, depending.
He keeps peeling his orange, stacking the peel up neatly on the table. ]
From what I can tell most of what you were conditioned to be is paranoid. [Dryly, but believe it or not Crais can also be that. Or rather has been that, before violently rejecting everything about the Peacekeepers. ] I don't give a shit about other people's morality because much of it makes no sense to me, seems to often be arbitrary and contradictory, and has no impact on me or anyone I care about in a concrete way.
[ if you go collect the full set you will have to find them yourself okay.
he's still turning over information in his mind. fifty thousand is an large crew complement, far larger than unsc or covenant, which even in the upper ranges tended closer to twenty thousand -- but they sound like a nomadic or at least mostly spacefaring species who really lived their lives on those ships, and that more or less tracks. and as for that, well. ]
I can respect that. [ it's genuine. wash is ultimately pragmatic, and has learned to care less about who is and isn't a good person and instead more about who might or might not hurt the people he cares about. it doesn't stop him from immense guilt and the unshaking belief that he's far from a good person, but still. ] And it's not for me to question who you might care about.
[ . . . even though he is kind of questioning it just by saying that. its fine. ]
Paranoia and psychopathic tendencies kind of go hand and hand with the military mindset, though. You didn't get any of that?
Of course I did. I wouldn't have survived if I didn't.
[ Matter of fact. There's no guilt there, but also no evasion. He's tortured, he's executed, he's casually killed for convenience.
He starts splitting the peeled orange into segments. ]
I left the Peacekeepers a few years before I died and showed up here. I've been here more than a year. [ He eats a piece of the orange. ] I'm a terrible person but I like it here and I have had ample time and space to... reprioritize.
[ a little dryly, followed by a slight pause. was that rude. probably. good time to see how crais handles that kind of thing he guesses, his impression so far is that he's probably forthright and direct with everything.
in his lap the kitten is getting some good tummy time tickles and pets. wash manages to maintain an absolutely neutral expression regardless. ]
[ now that's something. a kind of smirk and a shift in his tone that he absolutely recognizes, too. the triumph of having survived something he was forced into, something he must have loathed. would that wash could say the same, he sometimes thinks he didn't really survive it at all. but it's something he recognizes, nonetheless.
that has his interest, right now. he'll circle back around to the whole holy shit you've been here more than a year? thing later. ]
Them. Your Peacekeepers?
You survived them, got out, but went back to destroy something of value to them.
[ your ship. the one with the mother. who tried to kill the mother. yeah that part's still weird. ]
[ It's weirder than it sounds - there are two ships, but that's not a thing he's thought to clarify. The second one died with him blowing up the first one. The second was alive and had a name. The other one was just a ship. ]
I went back because they had technology onboard that would have wiped out entire inhabited planets and that they had worked hard to get. I had nothing left to lose personally and a lot of rage that needed and outlet.
[ a slightly amused sound, here, the first real break of something that isn't wash's otherwise controlled mask of ambivalent neutrality. aside from the kitty. he doesn't know the details of it, but he doesn't need to know to hear that tone in his voice, to hear some of those words and perfectly understand. nothing left to lose, a lot of rage. go back and destroy everything. ]
I bet it did.
[ it'd just apparently worked out better for crais than it did for wash. good on him. ]
Was the fact that it got rid of planet-destroying technology more of a bonus than a motivation?
[ aka were you more motivated by wanting to potentially protect innocent people from getting killed or more out of spite. ]
[ Better, is his one and only thought on that faint glimmer of something behind the controlled mask. With most people, Crais would immediately pry at that 'crack' - not with bad intent, but simply because he gives no fucks and if he wants to know he will ask.
He actually uses a little more discretion this time. Uses his willingness to answer questions about anything and lay his cards out on the table for something other than an act of defiance against previous conditioning and an aggressive display of confidence.
He uses it as a means of being trustworthy, even knowing trust is months (at best) in the future and requires a little actual vulnerability on his end, since there is something in here that resonates with Washington. ]
I don't know the answer to that. There were a lot of... intersecting circumstances and I think they all had to be in place to lead to that particular outcome. Talyn - the ship I was interfaced to - was increasingly unstable and I was out of options for him. The neurbleedback through the interface was becoming increasingly worse as his mental state declined; I couldn't control him and it was killing me, anyway. I'd been alone for the majority of time for years, and had enough time to start to figure out how to be a person. There was the technology. If any of those were missing I would have looked for other options - including the outlet.
[ wash is continuing to make assumptions here, in that the ship has a name and is being referred to with an actual non-object pronoun, the only way he makes sense of it now is to think of talyn has the ship-based ai. he listens, just as attentively as before, giving the kitten another little gentle ear scritch. neurbleedback is an unfamiliar term, but it's not exactly a difficult one to guess the component words of, and pilots using neural interfaces to interact with ships was standard in the unsc. neural bleedback, he assumes, must be some effect of the ship ai affecting the pilot -- or captain, in this instance. he doesn't know if he'd also be a pilot. the ai was unstable ( rampancy, that makes sense ) and it was killing him. crais mentions being alone. without interfacing with the ship, perhaps.
he nods. quiet, absorbing, connecting lines in his head. he notices, too, that crais isn't just rambling off at his usual rate here, not just listing off paragraphs of personal life story like it's nothing. there's a little more hesitancy here. he's still talking, but there are pauses, and it's less a listing of information and more about some things that happened to him personally, how he felt.
wash has gone this entire time managing to say absolutely nothing about himself, he didn't even say his name, just asked if crais knew it. he will continue to say absolutely nothing about himself. but it's clear that something about this resonates with him, that he recognizes it in a way. ]
Perfect storm of circumstance. Guess that happens.
You designed the interface, but it was killing you as your ship -- as Talyn -- got more unstable. You ran out of options to prevent him from endangering others. [ he's using the exact same words that crais did in their earlier conversation. absorbs information real well, clearly. ] It helped that you had some personal stake, anger and a need for an outlet. And now you're here.
[ in other words: and then you killed yourself, and died, and now you've been here for more than a year. ]
[ The precise wording being used back at him gets Washington a bit of a look from Crais. It's a little unsettling but hey, he definitely knows he was heard. ]
[ he was heard very well. don't tell him anything you want him to forget, okay.
to his credit, wash doesn't noticeably lock up, mostly because his guard had been on when he came in here and it's not been let up, and he doesn't stop giving the kitten all the pets it wants and deserves. but there is a bit of tension, there, a subtle shift in the look in his eyes. ]
Which one did you hear about it from?
[ and how much did you hear about it. most likely felix, he's assuming, who's done extensive research into the freelancers as a whole and had access to their evaluations and profiles. sharkface might've had access to them too, but he doesn't know if he's the type to have really gone through them. ]
[ They haven't specifically - he thinks - talked about names and the very precise varied ways the implants can go wrong.
It's just that he's heard things about how frequently those things go fucking wrong in general, and in various ways. He's also taken, and seen, some pretty damn advanced medical scans of Ephemera (with a tricorder) and had the guy having seizures at his feet. ]
[ interesting. ephemera likely wouldn't have as much detail as felix might, depending. he doesn't know him well enough to guess at why it might've been brought up, and there's a part of wash that kind of hates that it was, not even just on a personal level, but implants at all. ingrained paranoia from their time in the war. technology and knowledge about it could make all the difference, sometimes.
he nods, taking another bite of the apple, he's mostly done with it by now. ]
Then it's probably unsurprising to you that I'm not exactly keen to talk about it.
I'm always at least mildly surprised when anyone doesn't want to talk about anything.
[ He hadn't exactly been asked, but he's certainly going to act like he was. It's the truth, too. He is now firmly engaged in a conversation rather than talking at Washington, as he'd been earlier.]
It doesn't make logistical sense to me. It does make emotional sense.
[ both contribute to how decisions are made. a human thing, maybe, except crais has already spoken about how his decisions and morality are driven by emotion more than logic, so he doubts that needs explaining. ]
Doesn't change anything about it, either way. Ephemera [ still a little weird using the name, he really doesn't know him that way ] doesn't know about it because I told him about it. Still don't particularly want to talk about it.
[ look you've told him a Lot about yourself today but wash has never indicated that this would be a mutual exchange, and you have in fact seemed incredibly insistent that you can and will just tell him anything without any consideration to privacy or otherwise. he's not like that. he doesn't really talk about it with people he knows, let alone with someone he just met who's thrown him into a bizarre series if situations. he might talk about it sometime when he gets to know you a bit better, but right now he's quite content to be completely unsubtle about preferring to stonewall you about it. ]
I don't particularly care what you do and don't talk to me about.
[ Just tossing that out there. Is he interested? Yes. Will he ask questions? Yes. Will he get offended or dig in when he doesn't get information? No. Not unless it's something that's going to bite him directly. There isnt' enough investment there for that.
It's taken him how many months (more than 12 of them) to learn some things about Cyram? And his investment there is much, much higher. ]
The cat's name is Slyvester and he will take your apple core and half your hand with him when he thinks you've finished eating.
[ the directness is easy enough, something that wash genuinely appreciates as much as he is kind of bewildered by it. he knows how to navigate more delicately if and when he has to, but there is a refreshing ease in being this. he doesn't want to talk about it, and that's that.
cat, though. he will absolutely talk to you about cat. he makes a quiet sound, amused, glancing down at the kitten again. ]
He can have it. [ not the hand, though. he will look back at crais just to make sure that giving the kitten the apple core is actually fine by his measure, and if it is he's more than happy to just directly give it to the cute little thing. ] Cat thing works well, by the way.
[ He nods in response to the look to give permission, after which point Sylvester will grab the core to gnaw on. Hey, kitten is teething and it's a pretty valid option for things to chew on.
Then he cracks a faint, quick, grin.]
It does. It wasn't my intention when I took him in, but he's been helpful in disarming people and even the more violently inclined tend to be more careful when they're holding a cat.
The duplex is warded by the guy next door, by the way. Anyone with intent to harm won't make it through. Or so the person behind the wards insists. [ Not a threat or warning, just information that is relevant.]
[ wash had still kept up his guard even with a kitten dropped on him but it definitely had a disarming quality and he can't ignore the kitty. maybe a different person would've managed to, but wash really, really likes cats, and kind of stood basically no chance. he watches the kitten gnaw at its new reward with noticeable fondness. he's happy to let sylvester jump off and take it somewhere else to chew on if he wants, but right now is clearly happy to have him here. what a good kitty. ]
Warded. Like what, with magic? [ a slight raise of an eyebrow. it's not disbelieving, he's just -- new here, and he's not used to these things yet. he's seen enough to understand that there are plenty of people around who can just do that, but it's still strange to him. crais besides sounds like he comes from a world at least tangentially similar to his own, but maybe there was magic there, too. ] None of that where I'm from, and I'm still kind of new here.
[ you've been here over a year, huh. wash still isn't sure what to make of that. ]
[ He has yet to meet anyone who is not at least confused into better behavior for having a cat thrust into their arms. He may meet that person some day, but like the absolute fondness Wash clearly has for the kitten -- they'll be on the outside of the curve.
Just in the other direction. ]
There's none of it where I come from, either. I've been here long enough that it's stopped making me twitch. When did you arrive?
About a week before [ he makes a bit of a face ] that Heritage Week thing.
[ so only a couple of weeks as of felix's death, and he would've taken quite some time just in his own mental torment before eventually reaching out to ephemera. ]
Not exactly much time to get used to -- any of it.
[ and no being thrust into a series of alternate memories did not at all help. ]
[ He wonders if Washington was dead before he turned up here. Felix and Ephemera sure were, but he's actually not going to ask. ]
Their idea of what dominants and submissives should be pisses me off more and more as time goes on. Otherwise it is... not terrible once you do get a chance to adjust to it.
[ He's actually happy here. Of course when your dead and came from where he is, the bar's pretty low ]
[ wash wasn't dead and also is basically why the two of them were dead! it's. a whole thing.
crais has clearly gotten used to things and made a life for himself here, and it doesn't take too much to guess that he might dislike what the city pushes as dominant and submissive, he isn't entirely against the idea in general. the collar isn't exactly subtle. wash has nothing against consenting power exchanges, enjoys it a lot, actually, but the way this city has done it, the way it divides people almost arbitrarily, the way it turns into something that's about class all of sudden. it sure does leave a bad taste in his mouth. ]
You seem to have adjusted just fine, in your fourteen to fifteen months. [ and apparently, no way out -- or maybe nothing to go back to, since crais has talked straightforwardly about being dead. ] The dominant and submissive thing seems hard to ignore around here if you don't like how they do it, though.
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another bite from the apple. there's more than three Armor People, there's actually lots of 'em here, but he won't say that, because of course he won't. ]
Military is military, wherever it is. [ another bite. they're all deliberate, spaced out to give him time to process and choose his words. with lots of pets for the kitty. ] I wouldn't say we were conditioned to be psychopaths, but there's some of that in every army, I suppose.
I guess that's why you don't really give a shit about the morality of psychopaths or whatever else?
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He keeps peeling his orange, stacking the peel up neatly on the table. ]
From what I can tell most of what you were conditioned to be is paranoid. [Dryly, but believe it or not Crais can also be that. Or rather has been that, before violently rejecting everything about the Peacekeepers. ] I don't give a shit about other people's morality because much of it makes no sense to me, seems to often be arbitrary and contradictory, and has no impact on me or anyone I care about in a concrete way.
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he's still turning over information in his mind. fifty thousand is an large crew complement, far larger than unsc or covenant, which even in the upper ranges tended closer to twenty thousand -- but they sound like a nomadic or at least mostly spacefaring species who really lived their lives on those ships, and that more or less tracks. and as for that, well. ]
I can respect that. [ it's genuine. wash is ultimately pragmatic, and has learned to care less about who is and isn't a good person and instead more about who might or might not hurt the people he cares about. it doesn't stop him from immense guilt and the unshaking belief that he's far from a good person, but still. ] And it's not for me to question who you might care about.
[ . . . even though he is kind of questioning it just by saying that. its fine. ]
Paranoia and psychopathic tendencies kind of go hand and hand with the military mindset, though. You didn't get any of that?
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[ Matter of fact. There's no guilt there, but also no evasion. He's tortured, he's executed, he's casually killed for convenience.
He starts splitting the peeled orange into segments. ]
I left the Peacekeepers a few years before I died and showed up here. I've been here more than a year. [ He eats a piece of the orange. ] I'm a terrible person but I like it here and I have had ample time and space to... reprioritize.
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[ a little dryly, followed by a slight pause. was that rude. probably. good time to see how crais handles that kind of thing he guesses, his impression so far is that he's probably forthright and direct with everything.
in his lap the kitten is getting some good tummy time tickles and pets. wash manages to maintain an absolutely neutral expression regardless. ]
How long have you been here?
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I survived them. What I didn't survive was going back and destroying the ship that was my command.
[ The kitten rolling over like that is a good sign. Washington's response to it's pretty nice, too, actually. ]
Fourteen or fifteen months.
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that has his interest, right now. he'll circle back around to the whole holy shit you've been here more than a year? thing later. ]
Them. Your Peacekeepers?
You survived them, got out, but went back to destroy something of value to them.
[ your ship. the one with the mother. who tried to kill the mother. yeah that part's still weird. ]
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I went back because they had technology onboard that would have wiped out entire inhabited planets and that they had worked hard to get. I had nothing left to lose personally and a lot of rage that needed and outlet.
It felt good.
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I bet it did.
[ it'd just apparently worked out better for crais than it did for wash. good on him. ]
Was the fact that it got rid of planet-destroying technology more of a bonus than a motivation?
[ aka were you more motivated by wanting to potentially protect innocent people from getting killed or more out of spite. ]
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He actually uses a little more discretion this time. Uses his willingness to answer questions about anything and lay his cards out on the table for something other than an act of defiance against previous conditioning and an aggressive display of confidence.
He uses it as a means of being trustworthy, even knowing trust is months (at best) in the future and requires a little actual vulnerability on his end, since there is something in here that resonates with Washington. ]
I don't know the answer to that. There were a lot of... intersecting circumstances and I think they all had to be in place to lead to that particular outcome. Talyn - the ship I was interfaced to - was increasingly unstable and I was out of options for him. The neurbleedback through the interface was becoming increasingly worse as his mental state declined; I couldn't control him and it was killing me, anyway. I'd been alone for the majority of time for years, and had enough time to start to figure out how to be a person. There was the technology. If any of those were missing I would have looked for other options - including the outlet.
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he nods. quiet, absorbing, connecting lines in his head. he notices, too, that crais isn't just rambling off at his usual rate here, not just listing off paragraphs of personal life story like it's nothing. there's a little more hesitancy here. he's still talking, but there are pauses, and it's less a listing of information and more about some things that happened to him personally, how he felt.
wash has gone this entire time managing to say absolutely nothing about himself, he didn't even say his name, just asked if crais knew it. he will continue to say absolutely nothing about himself. but it's clear that something about this resonates with him, that he recognizes it in a way. ]
Perfect storm of circumstance. Guess that happens.
You designed the interface, but it was killing you as your ship -- as Talyn -- got more unstable. You ran out of options to prevent him from endangering others. [ he's using the exact same words that crais did in their earlier conversation. absorbs information real well, clearly. ] It helped that you had some personal stake, anger and a need for an outlet. And now you're here.
[ in other words: and then you killed yourself, and died, and now you've been here for more than a year. ]
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He was also miserable.
How badly did your implant go wrong?
[ He's heard (general!) stories. ]
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to his credit, wash doesn't noticeably lock up, mostly because his guard had been on when he came in here and it's not been let up, and he doesn't stop giving the kitten all the pets it wants and deserves. but there is a bit of tension, there, a subtle shift in the look in his eyes. ]
Which one did you hear about it from?
[ and how much did you hear about it. most likely felix, he's assuming, who's done extensive research into the freelancers as a whole and had access to their evaluations and profiles. sharkface might've had access to them too, but he doesn't know if he's the type to have really gone through them. ]
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[ They haven't specifically - he thinks - talked about names and the very precise varied ways the implants can go wrong.
It's just that he's heard things about how frequently those things go fucking wrong in general, and in various ways. He's also taken, and seen, some pretty damn advanced medical scans of Ephemera (with a tricorder) and had the guy having seizures at his feet. ]
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he nods, taking another bite of the apple, he's mostly done with it by now. ]
Then it's probably unsurprising to you that I'm not exactly keen to talk about it.
[ he gives the kitten a little chin scritch. ]
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[ He hadn't exactly been asked, but he's certainly going to act like he was. It's the truth, too. He is now firmly engaged in a conversation rather than talking at Washington, as he'd been earlier.]
It doesn't make logistical sense to me. It does make emotional sense.
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Those don't have to be separate things.
[ both contribute to how decisions are made. a human thing, maybe, except crais has already spoken about how his decisions and morality are driven by emotion more than logic, so he doubts that needs explaining. ]
Doesn't change anything about it, either way. Ephemera [ still a little weird using the name, he really doesn't know him that way ] doesn't know about it because I told him about it. Still don't particularly want to talk about it.
[ look you've told him a Lot about yourself today but wash has never indicated that this would be a mutual exchange, and you have in fact seemed incredibly insistent that you can and will just tell him anything without any consideration to privacy or otherwise. he's not like that. he doesn't really talk about it with people he knows, let alone with someone he just met who's thrown him into a bizarre series if situations. he might talk about it sometime when he gets to know you a bit better, but right now he's quite content to be completely unsubtle about preferring to stonewall you about it. ]
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[ Just tossing that out there. Is he interested? Yes. Will he ask questions? Yes. Will he get offended or dig in when he doesn't get information? No. Not unless it's something that's going to bite him directly. There isnt' enough investment there for that.
It's taken him how many months (more than 12 of them) to learn some things about Cyram? And his investment there is much, much higher. ]
The cat's name is Slyvester and he will take your apple core and half your hand with him when he thinks you've finished eating.
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cat, though. he will absolutely talk to you about cat. he makes a quiet sound, amused, glancing down at the kitten again. ]
He can have it. [ not the hand, though. he will look back at crais just to make sure that giving the kitten the apple core is actually fine by his measure, and if it is he's more than happy to just directly give it to the cute little thing. ] Cat thing works well, by the way.
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Then he cracks a faint, quick, grin.]
It does. It wasn't my intention when I took him in, but he's been helpful in disarming people and even the more violently inclined tend to be more careful when they're holding a cat.
The duplex is warded by the guy next door, by the way. Anyone with intent to harm won't make it through. Or so the person behind the wards insists. [ Not a threat or warning, just information that is relevant.]
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Warded. Like what, with magic? [ a slight raise of an eyebrow. it's not disbelieving, he's just -- new here, and he's not used to these things yet. he's seen enough to understand that there are plenty of people around who can just do that, but it's still strange to him. crais besides sounds like he comes from a world at least tangentially similar to his own, but maybe there was magic there, too. ] None of that where I'm from, and I'm still kind of new here.
[ you've been here over a year, huh. wash still isn't sure what to make of that. ]
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Just in the other direction. ]
There's none of it where I come from, either. I've been here long enough that it's stopped making me twitch. When did you arrive?
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[ so only a couple of weeks as of felix's death, and he would've taken quite some time just in his own mental torment before eventually reaching out to ephemera. ]
Not exactly much time to get used to -- any of it.
[ and no being thrust into a series of alternate memories did not at all help. ]
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Their idea of what dominants and submissives should be pisses me off more and more as time goes on. Otherwise it is... not terrible once you do get a chance to adjust to it.
[ He's actually happy here. Of course when your dead and came from where he is, the bar's pretty low ]
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crais has clearly gotten used to things and made a life for himself here, and it doesn't take too much to guess that he might dislike what the city pushes as dominant and submissive, he isn't entirely against the idea in general. the collar isn't exactly subtle. wash has nothing against consenting power exchanges, enjoys it a lot, actually, but the way this city has done it, the way it divides people almost arbitrarily, the way it turns into something that's about class all of sudden. it sure does leave a bad taste in his mouth. ]
You seem to have adjusted just fine, in your fourteen to fifteen months. [ and apparently, no way out -- or maybe nothing to go back to, since crais has talked straightforwardly about being dead. ] The dominant and submissive thing seems hard to ignore around here if you don't like how they do it, though.
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