WEEK 3

[akudamods]

On Saturday, it is relentlessly sunny. Sunday too. Monday will be the same but with a lot of wind. For now, you get a new area: Old Shinsekai, the den of depravity surrounding the police station. Will you venture into the unknown and seedy? Or retreat into the familiar pods, keep bothering your overseers?

Maybe you plan something else altogether.

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Comments

[your_best_friend]

...It's because I have no SOUL.

...And that means no empathy or compassion or even emotions.

[thefifthchild]

...Well, that's stupid.

If you didn't have any emotions you wouldn't do anything except survive day to day. Boredom, curiosity, malice, cruelty, all of those are emotions.

[your_best_friend]

You can't just arbitrarily decide what are and are not emotions. Besides, if you consider those emotions, then why can't I feel anger? Or Happiness? Fear, sorrow, guilt, frustration, sadness, love, hate...

I can't even feel envy.

[thefifthchild]

If you truly feel nothing, why do you care about that fact? Why inflict all that suffering only to take it back, wasting all of your time?

I can't speak to your motives or experiences but it seems to me like you're using the fact that you lack a soul as a smokescreen when in actuality you're just suffering from some kind of clinical depression.

Empathy, compassion, I can't speak to those. I barely understand them myself.

[Damian, projecting onto a flower, claiming he has no idea what empathy is.]

[your_best_friend]

Buddy, I already undid every single one of my genocides and murder sprees. That's what LOADing to an earlier SAVE point is. My last run, I...

...I managed to break the barrier entrapping all monsters Underground. Now, they're living on the surface. It's my Golden Ending. I wanted to stay behind in the Underground because I know I'd ruin it.

That's why I want emotions and compassion and love back. Otherwise... I'll just have to stay as the only inhabitant of Mt. Ebott for the rest of my existence...

...

You know what LOVE stands for? It's an acronym, different from love. It stands for Level Of ViolencE. It measures your capacity to hurt others. I'd gladly take clinical depression so bad it crushes me under its weight just for a chance to lower my LOVE to 1... and my love and compassion to more than 0.

What's your Level Of ViolencE?

[thefifthchild]

[He can sense a losing argument when he sees one. He nods along with what Flowey's saying. He gets it, kind of.]

My world doesn't have ways to define that via statistics. From birth I was raised and groomed to kill, conquer and take. My blood is split between two legacies, the hero, Gotham's guardian angel... and the Demon's Head, a megalomaniac hellbent on destroying the world to save it, who indoctrinated and abused my mother and my cousin, and sought to corrupt my father's mission.

[His expression turns a bit more to the wistful side as he continues.]

But I've been trying to be better. Trying to act the part of a hero. I've helped a lot of people, saved a lot of lives, even managed to get through to people who were in similar circumstances to where I was.

It doesn't matter. My father is a good man, a great one in fact, but his approach doesn't work. He sets himself up to wage a war that will never end, and he will never lower himself to the level of his enemies so no matter how much they take from him he never takes the same from them. It's not 1, in other words, but I'm not sure it's as high as it was when I started.

[your_best_friend]

...

[* Flowey manages to droop.]

...That's the difference between you and me. You can lower your LV. I can't.

[* His voice is devoid of any sort of emotion.]

[thefifthchild]

...

I can't change my nature. I don't believe evil can be cured entirely. I could lie and say that all my worst actions were done when I didn't know any better, but the truth is I killed and tortured over a dozen people just a few months ago.

It's in my blood. That can't change.

[your_best_friend]

[* This time, it's Flowey's turn to give a bitter laugh as he perks up.]

...At least you have that chance. At least you have people looking out for you, and people to look out for. All you can strive to do is to be better, is it not? My chance was taken away the moment I turned to dust.

[* Some subtle hinting at there, huh?]

[thefifthchild]

And Frisk has... what? Abandoned you?

[your_best_friend]

Frisk isn't cruel. I told them to forget about me. Just... someone they knew for a little while.

...It's for the best if everyone forgets about me. But enough about me. You have so many reasons to live, to ACT on what you're determined to do. This may feel ironic coming from a monster incapable of caring about others, but...

Just don't waste your life. Be better. Make things better. One step at a time.

[thefifthchild]

[...It's too late for that. Far too late. But he has to remember that he does have things worth fighting for. His father, his siblings, Jon, Maya, Maps, Steph, the old woman who insisted he stay for tea before going back outside into the chill of a winter's night, the little girl who cried tears of happiness when he returned her cat, the man who would have jumped and his cat who Damian used to sneak expensive catfood to.

He didn't expect to be talked down from moral defeatism by the asshole flower, but... well, it happens.]

I haven't given up on making things better. That's really the only thing that I believe in. Maybe killing is always wrong, maybe pacifism can't save the world, I don't know. But... I do want to find a way. [He's still absolutely going to participate in massacaring that police station though.]