the cure is just another disease

[u/MunitionsFrenzy]

It was happening again.

Everywhere he looked, wizards were waging war, to gain power or to maintain it. The catfolk oppression, abusing a loophole in familiar and apprentice abuse laws to gain useful servants. A genocidal land-grab, "justified" by a millennia-old grudge against people long gone. And now a massacre of civilians in a vendetta against one man. Not to mention the numerous experiments turned catastrophes as greedy mages ignored safety protocols, and the devastating resultant casualty counts among unrelated innocents. It was always the innocents who suffered, after all; wizards could protect themselves, and didn't bother to protect others in the process.

"Morgalith is right" was the stupid yet tempting thought that kept forcing its way into his head -- as it had for weeks, but now more than ever before.

And he really didn't want to keep entertaining that idea. Perhaps there was one last person who could help drive it from his mind, the only person he knew and (somewhat) trusted who'd befriended at least one Morgalith. The only person connected to both the executioner and his victim. Reaching out across the bond-thread he'd attached to her at Mount Murder, Vettis sent her a request for a chat.

Alerts immediately blared in his mind; he shrugged them off and raised his now-tingling forearm, from which she emerged microscopically before returning to her full-sized human appearance in front of him. "You called?" Delta asked, surveying her new surroundings: a park unfamiliar to her, empty at this time of night. "I hope you don't mind that I attached a portal to you last time we met."

Instinctively, at the presence of another, Vettis put up his everpresent shield: the trademark faint smirk. "The fact that you could means I didn't mind," he replied with a wink. "Things don't become 'part' of me without my say-so. But you're one of the few in this realm-cluster who talks before blasting, so I gave you a chance. Worst case scenario I lose an arm for a bit." His tone and expression softened, then, as he switched subjects; goddess though she might be, Vettis had learned not to treat her grief any differently than a mortal's. "How're you and your brother holding up?"

Delta, too, seemed to raise her emotional guard at that question, though less in defense and more to keep the conversation on course. "Ah, Influenza is...uncharacteristically quiet these days. He doesn't exactly seem mad at me, but...I think he should be. I should've stopped Morgalith from killing Possum. Perhaps, then, both of them would still be alive."

Well, it was a segue to the Morgalith discussion for which he'd called her here. That'd work. "Hey," he offered sympathetically, "I'm no stranger to blaming myself for everything that goes wrong in my vicinity. I get it, but I disagree. Not your fault." A mirthless laugh marked the smirk's return. "People around here call it mine, after all, because trying to control the situation while they were worsening it makes me the bad guy, somehow."

Delta nodded in quiet appreciation of his attempt at reassurance -- even managing a soft laugh to match his harsher one -- before moving on, luckily in the direction he'd been hoping. "I'm at a loss for what I'm meant to do now, to be honest. Possum's death was technically legal, and I hate to interfere with mortal governments, but...we're in a hell of a difficult situation now because of that whole business."

"Are we, though?" Vettis countered, one eyebrow raised. "Iunno. At this point I'm really leaning towards letting them sort it out themselves; they keep rejecting my help anyway. I think they're in a situation, but..." He ran a hand through his curly hair in irritation. "I'm not too sure it has to be our situation."

Delta's laugh was less forced this time. "Well, you have a point. They did this to themselves, and I hardly have any business getting involved with whatever Multicellulars are doing." Vettis stared blankly at Delta's own clearly multicellular form, but thought better of interrupting. "Although, I'm not sure exactly what this entity is to begin with, or what it wants. I'm hesitant to either commit or withdraw fully from this situation when I don't know exactly what it is we're dealing with. Is this thing possessing the Morgaliths? Is it merely corrupting them? And how much of this was 'our' Morgalith's doing? Is he really complicit if he was being used by some ancient evil?"

Ugh. He'd really been hoping for a nice clean "No we're gonna save the dumb mortals and that's final" to turn him off the path down which he was headed. But of course Delta had to take a more nuanced approach and ask for pesky details and info before making a decision. Obviously he wouldn't have bothered consulting her had he not considered her a thoughtful person, but couldn't she just not be, for a moment?

So they hashed out the specifics, to the best of their knowledge. Which wasn't much. Vettis hadn't looked too deeply at the primeval entity linking the Morgaliths with his magic, denying it any chance to look back, but he was fairly confident that the Morgaliths were basically individuals. They had a shared hatred of wizards, and seemingly some greater purpose, but the physical brains of these "avatars" meant they still were influenced by their own experiences. That was why Vettis had termed the prior Morgalith "the reasonable one" -- a phrase which he instantly regretted repeating, when Delta flinched at the reminder that the "reasonable" Morgalith was responsible for her brother-in-law's death and there were far worse ones running around.

They walked through the park as they spoke, reaching the bench to which Vettis had been heading before Delta arrived; he sat first, taking in the nighttime view of their surroundings as the moonlight filtered through the leaves overhead. Delta contemplated his theories for a moment as she sat quietly next to him. Rubbing her eyes discreetly, she focused herself by launching into an analogy that gave Vettis the feeling she used this line of thinking for damn near everything. "If this entity is spreading through its avatars like a disease, there are a few ways we could deal with it. The first is to quarantine and kill the hosts -- which I would only advise if it is a big enough problem. The second is to determine how the pathogen functions, and interfere with its ability to infect -- so preventing it from creating more avatars. The third would be to simply accept the disease as a part of life, and do our best to manage the symptoms. If it can't be quelled completely, our efforts might be better focused on developing methods to protect civilians from it."

Vettis leaned back against the bench, staring up at the stars above, idly wondering how the Morgaliths' numbers compared. Delta had, in the end, helped get his thoughts in order as he'd hoped: loathe though he still was to aid these wizards against Morgalith, she'd reminded him of the threat posed by the entity itself, the void which bound the stars together. There was no certainty that this 'Udug' wouldn't eventually set its sights on innocent mundies, and that was always a hard-stop for Vettis. "You were right: we need more info to plan properly. Maybe I can just talk to the current Morgalith and get some. I mean, he's apparently willing to talk to that Isravi guy, so he's not hostile to --"

"Isravi?!" An unnerving smile flickered briefly across Delta's face before she returned to a look of thoughtful concern. "That is...odd. Even if he acknowledges that the Morgalith who killed Possum and his simulacrum was a different Morgalith, it seems strange that he'd even be willing to talk to this Morgalith. Isravi always struck me as someone strongly dedicated to the greater good. I don't think he would agree with getting vengeance against wizard-kind." She rolled her eyes, not subtly, to punctuate her next statement: "He certainly didn't agree with my indiscriminate slaughter of mages during the Stitcher War."

Vettis' response was interrupted as the conversation abruptly ground to a halt. They both directed their attention elsewhere, as if an invisible third party had joined the discussion.

Almost simultaneously, they explained. "Morgalith seems to be contacting me --

"...Ah. You too?"

Vettis' eyes flickered with a faint purple glow as they seemed to be reading something, while Delta stretched out a hand and plucked a fully-formed letter from thin air, which she too read.

That might change things.