selfhelp | [Voice/Action] Forward-dated to the afternoon of the 9th

[He should have seen this coming- it's like it's some kind of retaliation for what he'd done on Teddy's birthday. He still manages to be surprised when Teddy shoos him out of the apartment some time after breakfast on the 9th, barely given time to grab his coat and stuff his laptop into a bag before he's been officially banished from his own home.

...Well then. Looks like he's in the wind today. First things first: while he isn't usually the type to announce this kind of thing, thanks to having the afternoon to himself (whereas usually his birthday is filled with doting parents and obnoxious little brothers vying for attention) he's feeling indulgent enough to go for it, and he remembers something in particular...]

Okay- first of all, question for everybody. Now that I know about that whole... Valentine's Day thing that's supposed to happen every year, does anyone know how to avoid it? Or should I just lock myself in my room for a few days and hope for the best?

And second, to the X-Men? If the team training is still on for today, it's probably safe to go ahead and assume I won't make it. I'm allowed to have plans on my birthday. But happy birthday to Logan whenever he gets back- 180 is a pretty big landmark, right?

[Hopefully he won't get killed for that one, but he just couldn't help himself. Even if the accuracy of that number is questionable.

The rest of the afternoon will be spent in the following ways: goofing off in the Battle Dome with some self-indulgent hologram scenarios blatantly ripped out of Star Trek, wasting time in Seventh Heaven with excessive amounts of coffee and his laptop like a proper teenage hipster, and then, when his battery's running dry, returning to building #5 to bully Teddy into feeding the laptop's power cord under the door, at which point he'll be curled up on the floor outside his apartment playing Minecraft or something while he waits for his boyfriend to finish... whatever he's doing in there.]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I wonder if anyone would bother comparing the appearance of their reaper in the afterlife.

[In the history of the world and all the people who've died, there's gotta be at least one who tried.]

Well, our dress isn't for you people. You're all meant to be properly dead without so much of a glimpse of us. But Death is quite the little business, or bureaucracy. ...One of those two.

...Do you get paid? Are there like, Spirit Bucks in the afterlife or something?

You're very curious, aren't you? Why is that?

Huh? Oh, geez, I don't know. This is just something I didn't really think about that much until now.

Is this rude? I can stop if you want.

So long as you never tell a soul that I'm the one that told you. I had one suspension already. I'm not keen on another.

It's simply curious to me. Most humans here get rather touchy when the subject of death as a business comes into conversation.

I wouldn't know who to tell, anyway. But yeah, you've got my word on that.

I guess it's just something I've wondered about, since... death is kind of weird on my world. People die and come back sometimes.

Much obliged.

[....Ew. That's gross, Billy.]

....Unnatural. No offence, but your bureau must be quite lax or run under different rules from ours. The only ones I know who came back did so as unthinking soulless monsters or use demonic powers to do it. Neither option are kind upon your eternal soul in the end.

I'm not so sure we even have a bureau. Some people just have the power to revive the dead- or revive themselves, even. And there's some magical objects that can do it too, I think...

[Nngh]

What a mess. When people like that get involved, it all goes rotten as far as we're concerned. How are we to tell when a person is supposed to be truly and well dead if they keep bouncing back and forth?

Noooo idea. Though I can't imagine anyone would be unhappy about a friend bringing them back from the dead, so maybe it's just a problem on the reaper's end.

You would be surprised.

Can you imagine, being somewhere perfect, at peace, without a single care or worry, no pain, no sickness, death or imperfection? No need to fight any longer? Being at absolute, complete peace.

And then being ripped back into the same conflict that killed you in the first place?

The mind can heal, but the Soul never can. It will forever record that moment of bliss - and the resulting horror as that perfection is torn from it. The rift it causes can destroy a person from the inside out.

It isn't pretty to watch.

...Geez. I didn't know my curiosity would give me nightmare fuel.

[Well, it is supposed to kill the cat and all that jazz...]

Welcome to my everyday life, darling. We're not as bad as some people like to think we are. We just do things that people don't like.

I can kind of see the lack of appeal, though. For people, I mean- we have a tendency to assume that doing something we don't agree with makes someone else bad.

And sometimes it does, but- a lot of the time it's just disagreeing.

It's a narrow way of thinking, but that is how He made you. Free will and majesty aside, humans have no idea just how much grey is in their monochrome world.

[There's no helping it really, and the more Grell interacts with humans, the more she realises they make absolutely no sense whatsoever.]

Part of being human is all about discovering that, I guess. At least that's been my experience. We become more aware of that grey area the older we get.