IC Inbox

[vrdantwind]

"Hey, this is Claude! Pretty sure I'm doing this correctly. You can leave me a message here, and I'll get to it as soon as I can. Talk to you soon~."

Comments

You're gonna kill me

[strings_theory]

[Right, deep breaths. Calm. Demon stirs a bit in her lap, pink and white ribbons gently wrapping around her wrists. It helps, he knows it as well as she does. Her getting as riled up about these things as she tends to.

How does she even explain this shit? It's... a whole mess in the best of times.]

There's a difference between making your own fortune and being born into it. And it seems those two were. Which is far closer than how used I am to those types than I'd care to admit. [Even if her own family was technically loaded, but she never really saw any of that money. For. Reasons. That she's not really mad about anymore.]

I just. I don't know. There's gotta be some kind of ulterior motive there, people don't do "nice" shit or "selfless" shit without some kind of other motive behind it. Even goddamned fucking religion, those who are supposed to be "close to god" or whatever can be just as fucked up as everyone else. [There's clearly something to go to there, but she doesn't seem too keen to bring it up on her own.]

[vrdantwind]

Well, I can't actually speak for how they made their fortunes one way or the other. I don't really know enough about them.

That said...I do take your point. Even the one about religion, which I know some people would think is contentious, but I know there are religious figures who've gotten up to some sketchy things even in my own world. [And Claude had been constantly prying and digging, trying to find out what they'd hidden, what the deal was...he'd never really gotten the chance to crack the mystery wide open before the war broke out, though. And then, well...even if the archbishop hadn't vanished, other things had taken priority.] And some healthy suspicion usually isn't a bad thing.

That said...I do know some genuinely good people who do good for good's own sake. They do exist. So I can't agree with you that there's always some sinister ulterior motive, when that hasn't been my experience. So even for a born skeptic, I think you've got to temper suspicion with reason, or you risk slipping right into paranoia. Suspicion can protect you from being blindsided, but all the false alarms paranoia will give you can actually make it just as hard to see the truth as any amount of naiveté.

[strings_theory]

[For the longest moment she remains quiet, one hand quietly petting Demon while she contemplates her words. How does she even explain all this? There's an amount of "too much" information that she's not sure would even make sense without context. Or if it'd make any sense here. But the other part of her wants to at least say something.

But at the same time she's pretty much being called as paranoid and that just doesn't sit right with her, either. Obnoxious.]

Humans are shitty, you know. Paranoid ain't the word for it, but being guarded from getting blindsided or being used. Because if you don't trust people outside of who you know, then they can't take advantage of you.

[Fuck it, might as well.]

Fuck religion, seriously. Maybe I'm biased when a supposed fucking priest basically destroyed everything around me, including myself. Not that the asshole was a real priest at the end of the day, given he was doing all this shit for some vampire bastard that had a beef with my family.

[vrdantwind]

I mean, you're right in that there's a big difference between paranoia and precaution. That's why I was specifically talking about extremes - when you're jumping at shadows anticipating an attack not because you've got any solid proof there's going to be one, but just because you've fallen into a mindset where that's all you expect. That is a form of blindness, isn't it? Seeing not what's there, but what you expect to be there?

Anyway, believe me, I know exactly how unpleasant people can be, and I've had plenty of reasons to be paranoid in my own life. I've had to deal with assassins coming after me in my time. I'm not saying you should trust Riegfried and Soy; I'm just saying that it might be a leap too far to assume that their hosting this contest is somehow sinister. If there's any evidence of that, I haven't heard it. But there's plenty of evidence these guys love throwing big parties and glamorous events just for the fun and pageantry of it. So...isn't it likely enough it's no more or less than what it looks like?

[Claude listens to her screed against religion with a slightly cocked head.] Sounds like your problems go way beyond anything we had to deal with back home...at least, that I was able to find evidence of. The church I'm thinking of back home - it's a pretty powerful entity. It presents itself as a force for good, and in some ways it seems to be, but...well, let's say it engages in a lot of information control. Enough for me to not be too sure whether the church is as good as it claims to be, or if they're just really good at controlling the narrative. There's a lot of mysteries there I would have loved to dig into...but, uh, a lot of more pressing matters sidetracked me before I could get to the bottom of any of it.