[b]Dyssia![/b]

Gemini has been training. Sort of. She's been trying to train. It's hard because she's not [i]really [/i]made for it - she's not really a Ceronian, she just looks like one for the purpose of murder. She's certainly not capable of keeping up with a determined Azura on flat terrain.

Her and... every single bystander in the corridor, though? Well, maybe. You'd better figure that out real quick Dyssia because every Lantern deckhand, Beri songstress, Stone Tribe brute and apologetic Pix have suddenly found their brains telling them that it'd be super cool and good to crash tackle a creature more than twice their bodymass. The upside is the corridor isn't [i]that [/i]crowded, and the attempts are kind of halfhearted and impulsive. 

But then, you've got this magic sword! And it doesn't seem to hurt anyone you cut - if anything, it makes them snap out of whatever mojo Gemini hit them with and back off. So, how does that go for you?

[b]Dolce![/b]

"It doesn't have to be so," said Demeter, turning over leaves one by one. An old instinct, searching for fungi, insects, discoloration - elements of chaos that she is still vigilant for despite having long banished them from her garden. "Here is my advice: If you love something you should care for it. This is basic morality, and like all morality it can and should override physical law. 

"If you were to raise a horse on your farm then you could love and tend it, nurse it with your own hand, raise it taller and stronger than any of its kind could ever be, give it a paradise to exalt in. Yet at any time a flaw in its brain structure might cause it to leap the fence, gallop off into the uncaring wilderness where it will sicken and die alone. No chance of freedom - domesticated racehorse biology requires a caloric intake that cannot be supplied by grass, they need processed grain. That is a disaster! That is an obsolete, broken quirk of genetics. It causes heartbreak and tragedy - and to what end? To what value?

"Take that thought further. Consider your wife; how she struggles with attraction to other people inside the bond of your marriage. No matter how well you care for her something in her brain might make her leap that fence and bring your story to a tragic end. She hates it as surely as you do, but you're both powerless because that's just how things are - but what if it wasn't? What if a little medicine could cure her of that desire? How is that different from setting a broken bone or cleaning the parasites from a rose bush? 

"What special value does 'pure' desire have? What special value does 'true' love have? We have seen Aphrodite's face and his cruelties, we have seen where he takes people and how he works in the breaks in evolution's design. Why look at an overgrown forest full of tangled, feral, disease-ridden desires and call it better than a tended and ordered garden?" she smiled. "A sentiment all the more ridiculous given that you, and she, and every other creature in this galaxy are [i]already [/i]tended gardens. Biomancy has been used to architect everything you love and hate from before your planet was built. 

"And now you're here with an assassin who was built to be an insane hyperfixated murderous psychopath, whose brain was assembled in a lab like this with nothing but contempt for her and the target that aches in her bones. And you suggest that she is in any way capable of making her own decisions? Who are you respecting in that situation? Her, or the Biomancer who added an empathic camouflage subroutine?" she sighs with frustration, clanging her metal leg walking stick on the ground. "Civilization has been so [i]slow [/i]to adapt its morality to the technological reality of the modern age. The simple fact is that individualism has no basis in reality now, if it ever did; organisms cannot be separated from their biosphere. I think that the smallest coherent moral structure, then, is the family - and a family member does not need to seek permission before doing what's best on behalf of its members."