Considerations on Guilt and Moral Responsibility for Actions of Others, Early 21st Cen

On the outside, you are the picture of grim calm, as you accompany Iris in leaving no stone unturned as to the fate of her adopted sister Sam, only frowning slightly when she calls that abomination to ask if she's heard anything—

—on the inside you are screaming internally and trying to figure out some way, any way, that you can make this all okay. The problem is that you cannot, because several hours earlier, Max showed you the footage he recorded of Sam's death,¹ and when Iris finds out she is going to lose her entire mind.

He explained their plan very calmly and reasonably and you felt increasingly ill the whole time, never mind that you can't get sick. You thought then, and still keep coming back to now, what Despond said—why are you so sad, when you planned to kill her yourself? You still keep thinking, that… maybe it would have been kinder if you'd done something sooner. You keep thinking that's Iris's sister, disintegrating under the electrical burns.² Her body, anyway; they'd used her as a trap for the elder vampire who'd possessed your young protegée who shares a name with you.

Where's that confidence that everyone loves you for?

"Maybe, ah—maybe we could ask... even if Claudette didn't know—"

"Iris," you say, swallowing thickly. "Iris, I'm sorry."

She's always been quick on the uptake. There's only a brief flicker of confusion before horror dawns on her face. "What—but, you can't mean—"

You bite the inside of your lower lip, try to keep your voice measured. "I only found out afterward. Max told me—just too late."

"You let me just go on, thinking—" There's rage in her voice like you haven't heard in a long time. And never directed at you. "Why?"

What else is there to say but the truth: "...I didn't know how to tell you."

Iris reaches up to the crown of woven white roses on her head, flexing it between her hands—staring down at it with a frown on her face. "You told me they were good. That they were different." A pause. "The last thing I told her was that I was going to protect her."

She makes an uncharacteristically jerky motion, and hurls the crown at your feet, eyes red-rimmed with tears of blood, and with one last betrayed look at you, stalks off into the night.³

"Iris—" you start to say, but.

Well. What else is there to say.

[1] For the first time, Yi wondered if Despond had been right (see On the Nature of Predators, Early 21st Cen), as she had quietly watched and asked a minimum of questions; she knew that if they were already starting to cut her out of the loop, that they were starting to consider her something apart from one of them, and she was so close to accomplishing her ends.

[2] She could not, in that moment, find any way to justify the actions of those whose studies she had nurtured this last half century and more; how long had this festered under her nose?

[3] Later, Hope would learn that Iris had met her final death, unable to take the strain of continued existence after what she had experienced. Was this the last straw, for her?

Studies in Efficacy of Non-Lethal Resistance Against Vampires, Mid 20th Cen

Damian Silvanus is a shitty bastard man, but the problem is that he's the Prince Sterling Engelhart's childe, and unfortunately he wants to believe that Damian will be better-behaved after a talking-to, because he is too nice for his own good.¹ You're quite certain that it will mean he'll just get stealthier, but your hands are tied, publicly.

On the other hand, for this one you have help, because you don't even need to tell your new protegée² about your extracurricular activities; she's excited to take down her sire for the personal reason of "he's awful."

Silvanus has a lot of hobbies, such as art collecting. Shame that his imports keep getting impounded, or disappearing, or declared forgeries—weird how they keep showing up in the Ordo Dracul's Academy instead. It turns out that you can mess with someone quite a bit with the right skills of paperwork and knowing who to call. The interior decorating gets a lot more exciting around the place. Your colleague from the Sworn of the Dying Light, Xin Fields, jokingly suggests that you might have missed a calling as a museum curator.

The women he chats up also start having a strange habit of ghosting him after a few days—suddenly leaving town, going into the career life, just declining to call him back and picking up stakes, thanks to you keeping tabs on who he's seeing, and Eve having very candid chats with them. Women who come to Los Angeles on their own aren't stupid; now and then one is a little too head-over-heels daydreaming to be convinced, which is… unfortunate. But if they can keep any away from him, that's a net good while she works to find a way to blemish his name enough.

Pulling off your outer layers from a night of tailing him and rubbing your temples, you wonder not for the first time why you even care. You could just kill him. It would be easier. Is your cover, and the stability of the city under the Engelharts, who are otherwise quite good—is that reason enough to stay your hand?³

Are you slipping?

[1] In retrospect, Yi would wonder if instead the issue was that Engelhart was simply overlooking the reality for his own convenience.

[2] Eve was quick to leap to vengeance; at the time Yi had considered it to be a good trait, since her own desire for vengeance had fed the fires of righteousness within her heart. For Eve, however, it resulted in vampire society turning into more of a place of safety and power—a place she fit into easily.

[3] Hope would wonder how many other times she had been convinced to stay her hand, and how many times it had actually been a good idea.

?????

You gather up what little you can carry—your mother stares listlessly at the floor as your younger sister follows you around, and for once in your life… well, you're not sure what to do. It's not like you don't understand your mother's despair.¹ Even if you pack up and go—where? Who will take you in? Where will your family be safe? Your father and uncle—you ran by the mens' quarters to look for them, and they were heading to help fortify the defenses. To buy you more time, but women traveling without men—it's going to be difficult.

"Are we going to die, jiějiě?" your sister asks, and you're not sure what to tell her. She's—well, she's not unlike you. She's perceptive. So you squeeze her hand, ruffle her hair, and tell her:

"We are going to do our very, very best not to. Have you ever seen me let anyone get in my way?"

And your mèimèi at least has enough hope left to laugh quietly, so there's that. So you throw what food will keep and a couple changes of clothes and a handful of other necessities in a satchel, grab your mother by the arm, and pull her toward the door. It's never been your way to just lay down and die.

You're not alone. The streets are full of people trying to find some way out, but even as you try and push your way through the crowd, the screaming starts—

It takes very little time for the streets of your city to fall to bloody chaos, the Imperial Army having broken through the defensive line at one of the gates. Smoke and the smell of gunpowder rises through the air as buildings burn, and you realize that… you're running really low on plans.

"We've got to hide!" you yell, holding tight to your little sister's hand, before glancing back to your mother—except your mother isn't there anymore. You can see her head in the crowd, getting buffeted right and left in the panic.

"Mother!" you yell, but it gets lost in the din, and then suddenly you're shoved from the side, shoulder jamming hard against the wall of the building nearest you, and you register one of the Qing soldiers bearing down on your sister, bayonet raised, and you react on instinct—which is to say, you slam yourself bodily into him, uninjured shoulder first.

The soldier curses—you took him off his feet, but he's bigger and heavier and stronger than you, and topples you over sideways to try and scramble up. You swing your knee up between his legs, and get clocked upside the head for your trouble while your sister wails. He reaches for his sidearm—

Someone speaks. It takes you a moment to resolve the words because they're accented, like someone not quite used to making the right sounds, but: "—that a bit much, friend? She's just a young girl. This isn't what you're here for."

The newcomer is golden-haired—European, you think, although not like the missionaries; dressed in black, with strong but open features and pale skin that ends up looking a little sickly in the grey sky. Suddenly you… can't stop looking at him.²

You dimly recall him getting into a brief argument with the soldier, who stalks off to wade back into the fray—which has receded from your mind, mostly. The only thing in the world is his voice, when he says to you: "You're a brave girl. Come with me; you shouldn't die in a place like this."³

You follow, hanging on his words—this stranger, he saved your life, he's saving your life again, and there's something fascinating about him, and you want to get to the bottom of this mystery—

—and it's not until much, much later, when you come to your senses, that you realize you left your sister behind.

[1] Despair was not something that came easily to Miaoshan; even in her worst and unhappiest moments, it was often more an extreme kind of frustration and anger that came to her. As much as she often professed that once she felt her work was complete on earth she would happily meet her end, it was not in her nature to give up.

[2] She would later understand that this was the vampiric power known as "Majesty"—the power to arrest one's attention, to draw the eye, to generate obsession. Even as a vampire, she refused to use it herself.

[3] In later days, on rare occasions when she was feeling particularly charitable, she could consider this well-intended, on his part—an attempt to be merciful, to save something he thought deserved a chance, to spare her from the carnage that would follow. He had seen something in her that sparked interest—made him sympathize, for a moment. Even thinking optimistically, she would conclude that she likely would have died without his intervention. Yet, she could never be glad of it.