Of Councils and Conspiracies

[memoryandtheft]

We managed to make it in and out of the Council offices in one piece.

[That's the sort of statement that should sound celebratory. It doesn't. Even with the flattened affect provided by the psychic network's rendering of tone, there's an undercurrent of carefully restrained anger.]

The plague's gone. The plague's been gone for almost two hundred years. The Council's been keeping quarantine all this time in order to keep from having to admit they've been drugging people blind for no good reason for centuries. Their biggest concern right now is the fact that more and more kids are being born resistant to their drugs.

That's where the Duskling population boom is coming from. And the kids born on the wrong side of twilight - apparently, immunity to one side doesn't guarantee immunity to the other, and they aren't all that careful about making sure their shipments don't get mixed up, since an adult probably isn't going to notice any change after a few doses of the wrong thing.

Comments

[naturaltwohands]

Well, at least the plague is gone.

[Drizzt has gotten skilled at dripping his mental voice with sarcasm.]

[memoryandtheft]

At the low, low cost of drugging ninety percent of the population, and poisoning half of the rest.

[Your math is off, Toby.]

[naturaltwohands]

[It's close enough by Drizzt's estimates.]

A price that they cannot be asked to continue to pay.

[memoryandtheft]

No, they can't. Whatever else we do here, this has to stop.

[canbebrave]

Is that what we're here to do? To let these people know they've been lied to, by the people they trusted?

[memoryandtheft]

It's the only thing we can do. It doesn't matter why we were sent here, we can't just sit back and let them keep living a lie.

[leftbehindagain]

Rather than clutter things with a separate update: I grabbed Helena-san and Minako-san to work on the plague test Matthew-san got instructions for, and do some work on the food. As far as we can tell, the food additives... well, they're as permanent as anything we can pick up from jaunts is. It's difficult to say more than that, but if you're having vision difficulties and want to hedge your bets, stop eating contaminated food as soon as you can. It takes a few weeks for the effects to set in or wear off.

There's always the chance that once we're not here, the effects will be the kind of thing you can turn on and off at will, like the alternate forms from Questing Country or space. But we have no way of knowing that now.

More importantly, we did recreate the test. I'm in favor of making the council explain this by calling their bluff.

[memoryandtheft]

What does the test involve? Is it something that could be applied on a city-wide scale, if it comes to that?

[leftbehindagain]

Oh, easily. Get a spit sample, put it in the solution, and if the solution changes color, the person is infected.

[memoryandtheft]

Sounds like the biggest challenge would be making sure it isn't tampered with.

[virioncomplex]

So what would be the most effective way of exposing all this pakshit to the whole city?

[memoryandtheft]

Kerosene, some matches, and a map to wherever they're keeping the shit they're dosing people with.

Or if we want the less destructive option, according to the avalanche of memos, they're holding a public meeting next week.

[comebewe]

They probably keep it at the guarded facility in Gritta. That's where all the food comes from.

On the flip side...that's where all the food comes from. We could torch it, sure, but then we'd get to be responsible for the following food shortage.

[virioncomplex]

Telling people is the easy part. Getting them to not think we're completely out of our minds is another. We need to prove it, even if we fake it enough to get their attention.

[comebewe]

And then there's the guy who's evicting people for bribes!

Classy people.

[memoryandtheft]

I'm pretty sure that's just business as usual in--

[There's the briefest of pauses.]

Government.

[comebewe]

Probably. They're politicians, being bastards is practically part of the job description.

But we're still going to hand all these interesting little documents over to Riddick and see what happens!

[dreamingking]

I am ensconced as a continued spy as of present, so I may need to keep this brief.

I searched around the Tithe Collector's office. Matthew has graciously passed on what he learned about the history of the Tithe, but I can confirm it's an exile now, apparently of undesirables or trouble-makers. I took a risk and kept a few very important papers. She'll know as soon as she looks, of course, but with any luck, she'll think she just displaced a whole pile until the next sunrise and will be so grateful she's found it that she won't search too closely through it right away.

[Toby will be able to easily guess how he pulled that off.]

Anyway, I know that she's requisitioned supplies for a one way boat trip for a single person. She's looking into smugglers, mostly, it seems, but she's recently took a sharp interest in the influx of new Dusklings at Twilight Hall. Namely, us.

[memoryandtheft]

If we can do it without all of us winding up in lockup, maybe one or two of us should encourage that interest. We're not locals. We don't have anything to lose if we're exiled.

[dreamingking]

Indeed, we might even learn something interesting out there. I wouldn’t mind volunteering, but it would require vacating my current position as a spy.

[He’s fully confident he could make it back to the city, or to Liminal for that matter, without any trouble.]

[gotabadfeelingaboutthis]

I'm glad the plague is gone.

I really don't like that stuff though.

I think the rest of the place needs to know. And we need to find a way to stop the whole thing. I hate having kriffin' who knows what put into me...had enough stuff forced into me back home thank you. I've been eating as much liminal as I can, but still, I hope we can do somethin' about it.

[He still hates to remember the stuff the Imperials jabbed into someone before they started torturing them. Pain enhancers, stuff that screwed with the mind...and he still hates the thought now.]

[memoryandtheft]

The Duskling market should be safe. Enough of them are allergic that there'd be a public health scandal if it wasn't.

Letting the locals know is the first step to putting a stop to things - and the more people there are to spread the word, the harder it will be for anyone to sweep this under the rug again.

[gotabadfeelingaboutthis]

Yeah, good point.

I suppose that's always how it starts. A few people find things out, spread the word, and things pick up from there, 'til no one can ignore them anymore.

[neverfeltthatway]

...They're keeping the quarantine to cover up that they've been drugging people blind for centuries. That makes sense now. But why did they continue the quarantine and the drugging in the first place, back when the plague was newly purged?

[memoryandtheft]

It kept them in power, for one. If there aren't any Lightsiders or Darksiders, there isn't any need for a Council to be made up of an even split of both.