by Yerkan of Elish » Sun Sep 15, 2013 3:01 am
I turn to face Ptah, my eyes shining with poisoned blood.
"Now let me tell you something straight, boy. You might be able to sit back completely passively and watch the world turn with your time tricks and your eternal line of lattitude, but where I come from, people die if you don't act. Then I went to a different place. Here, world's die if you don't act. Sometimes you mess up - sometimes you tear a rift in a world. But when you do that, you learn, and you find the way to keep world's going. You don't m**l about in guilt because you messed something up. When I destroyed Thrash's southern continent, I didn't hide. I went and found the best of the best, to make sure the world kept turning. When I failed upon discovering Dunia I didn't run away; I fixed things, and as far as I know I never would have known half as much as I do now if I hadn't maimed that planet. Billions of lives found refuge because of that mistake. I took Dunia and made it into a point of refuge for people lost on Thrash. Wandering about, dying of thirst and hunger, they found Dunia, and with it, prosperity. Billions.
"Here we're threatened by massive sslugs. This isn't some political squabble or moral issue. This is the case where it's about as darn well obvious as it's possible to be that standing by and doing nothing is going to be the end of lives, and possibly the end of worlds.
"And if you question my altruism, go ahead. Maybe I don't care about the lives of these people. Maybe I would sacrifice my culets for some silly experiment. But if nothing else, I'm not gonna abandon a world, a Facet, a universe. I've maybe got my own ways of surviving, but survival's boring if there's no one to know.
Don't encourage inaction, boy, it'll be the last thing you do, and you'll be doing it for many, many fruitless millenia."
enuma eliš la nabuú šámamu
šapliš ammatum šuma la zakrat
gipara la kiissuru susaa la she'uú
enuma dingir dingir la šupuu manama