nothing is perfect, but your imperfections are quaint

[diomedea]

Who: AN ENTIRE BLOODSPORT AND ANY VISITORS
Broadcast: Nope!
Action: On the Bloodsport!
When: 6/14-6/21

[WELCOME TO THE BLOODSPORT HICCUP don't mind the crew. They're. Uhh. Unique.

Enjoy your pudding! What's the crew up to this week?]

Comments

[killedwithlove]

I knew Cole. He was young and scared and dying and alone. I came through to be with him and then I became him.

He's dead. But I'm alive. I live for him. It's all I can do.

[pompous_today]

[Simon was a little touched by the story- but saddened, as well. Young men shouldn't have to die scared and alone.]

So you are now Cole, and you are living the life he was robbed of. What... what happened to him, if I may ask?

[killedwithlove]

[Cole rocks on his feet briefly and hums.]

He starved to death in a cell. They forgot about him. He drank the moisture from the moss and drips, but the moss didn't stop his stomach from curling, coiling, knotting and kneading...

[pompous_today]

[Simon shivered at that.]

Starvation... is such an awful way to die. [He knew the biological processes, what happened when the body was forced to consume itself in a desperate attempt to gain the nutrients it needed, though he knew just as well that it was hard to conceptualize how it felt unless someone lived it.] I hope having you there during the last moments was some sort of comfort to him.

[killedwithlove]

[Cole rests a hand over his own stomach. He's not as thin as he used to be, but there is a perpetual gauntness to his face and stomach which Cole's death goes some way to explaining.]

It was. He wanted to not be alone. That was why I came to him.

[pompous_today]

[Simon felt a bit of relief at that, but it still felt... heavy. Sad.]

Good. Easing another's suffering... well, you know that's one of the things I live to do. Small comforts are sometimes all I can give, but I still give them when I can. Death is inevitable, and we can't always stave it off, but we can do everything we can to ease it.

[killedwithlove]

Death is inevitable. Suffering doesn't have to be.

[He understands. He's an assassin, but that doesn't mean he's ever cruel.]

[pompous_today]

I agree. It is why I was so curious as to what happened on this ship... to those bug creatures.

[killedwithlove]

Because you didn't want there to be any more suffering.

[pompous_today]

[Simon nodded.]

I've been through something similar before... when we came across a ship full of people who had been killed by Reavers. [An image comes clear in his mind- beings who are clearly humans, but have heavy piercings and facial modifications, who are dressed in rags and sewn-together pieces, carrying all manner of nasty weaponry.] They were all dead by that time, but I still stayed to help give them a proper funeral of sorts, to ease their passage into wherever they may have gone next.

[killedwithlove]

[Cole doesn't understand why funeral rites matter. But then he feels the comfort they get from it.]

It... helps. To know someone cared.

[Not them. They're gone. But it helps the living.]

[pompous_today]

Yes- and to give people dignity they may have been denied in life. My job is to help the living, but we were taught to respect the dead, too- because they once had a life.

[killedwithlove]

[Cole might never understand that, but he understands it matters to the living.]

In Thedas, we burn the dead. So demons don't get into them.

[pompous_today]

[Simon bowed his head.]

Can the demons bring them back to life? Or some semblance of it? [It seemed wrong, to Simon. The dead should have stayed that way. For all their advances in techology and medicine, by his time, they still had not found a way to conquer death- and as far as he was concerned, he was just fine with keeping things that way.]

[killedwithlove]

Demons can get into bodies, puppet them. It's not like a living body, they can't reshape it properly, but they can interact with the world through it.

It's not... life. The body is dead. The person is gone.

[pompous_today]

Still... that is very unsettling. I would prefer my remains to be burned if that were the case.

[killedwithlove]

So the dead are burned, to stop spirits coming across and using them.

Mortalitasi also use them, reanimate them.

[pompous_today]

That... just seems unnatural to me. The dead should stay as they are. Not even our technology can make that not so. [He shook his head.] Not that I mean to disparage your world, of course.

[killedwithlove]

They stay dead.

But they're not still.

I don't really like necromancy, but don't tell Dorian I said that. I don't want to hurt his feelings.

[pompous_today]

I will keep that in mind. Is Dorian someone from your world? I don't believe I've spoken to him yet.

[killedwithlove]

Yes. Dorian was in the Inquisition too. But not my Inquisition. Jove was his Inquisitor, but she wasn't mine.