Action | Thursday 8/4

[singlelogbridge]

[On Thursday August fourth, anyone who wanders into the mess hall will find a large platter filled with thin deep fried pastries on one of the tables. The pastries consist of oil, flour, sugar and honey, and have been carefully molded into very simplified flower shapes. There are several dozen stacked on the large platter and they’re accompanied by a handwritten note with the following:]

Once a very long time ago, there was a boy named Niulang, a simple mortal cowherd, and a weaver girl named Zhinhu who was the daughter of a powerful immortal goddess. Uncaring of their differences, Zhinhu and Niulang fell in love. Zhinhu and Niulang married and had children together, and they lived happily until Zhinhu’s goddess mother found out that her daughter had married a mere mortal.

When Zhinhu’s mother found out, she took Zhinhu back to the heavens with her and cast a river of stars into the sky to separate the heavens and earth to keep the lovers apart. Unknown to Zhinhu’s mother though, the magpies had seen the love between Zhinhu and Niulang and they took pity on the lovers, using their own bodies to form a bridge across the river to allow them to cross.

After seeing what the magpies had done for them, even Zhinhu’s mother was moved by their love, and so Zhinhu and Niulang were allowed to meet on that bridge. Since that day, the lovers have met on that magpie bridge once every year on this day.

It’s said that eating qiaoguo brings luck to the couple and helps them to reunite, so please enjoy these and think of Zhinhu and Niulang.

[The note is not signed, but the contents of the message can certainly only be from a handful of people. Anyone who had spent any amount of time in the kitchen the day before will have seen Wei Wuxian, Itachi, and Gwen in there for hours, mixing dough, carefully pushing it into various shapes, and pulling things in and out of the oven. A select few might even recognize the traditional Qixi pastry and know what it’s all about without being told. Anyone is welcome to help themselves!

Wei Wuxian will be coming and going from the mess hall all day, peeking in to see if people are enjoying the pastries, but also feel free to threadjack or mingle over pastries!]

Comments

[callada]

[Rosinante meanwhile is just casually ignoring the pastry in his hand, having had only the one bite, and leans against the wall out of the way to listen.]

Sounds like she's the sort willing to take a risk. Good for her.

[legalcy]

...She wasthe sort.

[A grammatical correction to hide the sadness memories of her brings to Minimus.]

[callada]

[Oh, damn. Well, that makes him pause in a solemn bit of silence. But they've all agreed to this for a reason, haven't they? Many of them have lost someone. He should have guessed.]

I'm sorry, I didn't realize. ... You two must have been close.

[legalcy]

It's been almost a thousand years. I knew that she would not be around for long.

[He would come back to Earth after a decade only to see that she had changed. Verity turned into an old woman before his processor could understand what was happening. Eventually, she grew too weak to get into the same trouble as she used to, and then her undying fighting spirit came only in the form of verbal barbs.]

...She used to call me "uncle". It's a title either given to blood relations or a person one regards fondly, is it not?

[callada]

[Well now. That, he couldn't have guessed - that Minimus is, by his standards, ancient. The woman he knew and the war she was escaping was many human lifetimes ago. At least that implies she might still have had a long and healthy life, rather than his initial assumption that hers had been cut short far too early.

He nods at the question, and can't help but smile a little, gently.]

It's true. Family doesn't have to mean you're related by blood. It's just as valuable to have people you meet along the way, and yet who become so close that you regard them as family anyway. Maybe more valuable, sometimes.

[There is sometimes no love between people who share blood, after all.]

[legalcy]

We Cybertronians have no such bonds. We have mentors, we have mechs that teach us life lessons we can never forget, the lucky few have spark-siblings, but "uncles" and "fathers" do not exist in the literal sense. Figuratively...I can see it.

[He's been called a "dad" by several members of the Lost Light crew when said bots learned of the Earth term.]

The bonds we forge during our lives - the ones made by choice - are necessary for Cybertronians. It's almost everything that we have.

[callada]

[Wow. On the one hand, he understands in a way - for the father he was raised by for most of his life was not the father he was born to. But little examples like that are in no way fully comparable to an entire group of people having no such biological ties, and making every connection by other means.

Maybe it's a little sad, but it's also quite beautiful, he thinks. Freeing, certainly, to choose the ones you're with rather than feeling obligated to someone based on blood.]

Do you talk about that much with the others here? I think humans take the idea of family by birth for granted, even if we don't all stay with those same families for life. It's different to imagine everything having to be made from the ground up. But... In a good way. Because I know there are a lot of us who place high value on the family we've chosen to be with, related or not.

[legalcy]

[He shakes his head - not vigorously, but controlled, knowing just how much movement is enough to convey his answer.]

Verity did not speak of her biological family, thus out of respect for her privacy, I did not pursue that line of conversation.

[It was only fair that if he did not share anything about his personal life, neither would she. Even if back then, he had to hide his true identity and any details that could destroy the illusion of Ultra Magnus.]

It would be in poor taste if I were the one to talk about the pitfalls of birth-forged bonds. I have a twin brother, and the others Cybertronians on board do not.

[callada]

I just mean in general. Not pitfalls, nothing to do with biological siblings, just the value you and your people find in choosing your own family. I think people would find it comforting to share those stories, you know?

[He's talking empathy, not asking whether Minimus is an authority on a topic, but maybe that kind of heart to heart is itself a foreign concept for the Cybertronian? He can't be sure. It feels like there may be a translation issue at play, but it might just be that Minimus is a very serious fellow who takes himself and others very seriously as well, and if so, that's good to know, he'll just have to tailor his own responses to suit.

Which is fine, it's what he does best, once he understands the angle he needs to approach from.]

[legalcy]

It's all normal in my perspective. If anything, having a twin is an oddity among ourselves. I supposed you humans are asked many questions about how and why you live with those with whom you share no genetic nor intimacy-based relationship, do you not?

["Spark twins" are wonders of nature, thus there is plenty of romanticization of a bond with someone born alongside you. The constant comparisons get annoying, even if they were each other's last defender in a hostile society.]

Granted, for four million years, most of our "family" developed into military squads.

[callada]

[He just shrugs at the initial question there. He doesn't get that many questions personally, but he'd like to keep it that way. Others might get asked regularly, he wouldn't know. Neither of those things was really his point, and he doesn't feel strongly enough to try and press more. Maybe he's the only human here who feels that strongly about creating a new family from nothing, anyway. It's all he's been able to do for most of his life, and he clings to those two who he's found.

Instead, he's about to reply to the rest when that number hits him.]

Four million years? I... don't think I can even picture how long that really is. Were your people at war that whole time?

[legalcy]

More or less. There were periods without direct combat and periods dedicated to spying and resource extraction, but they were all part of the great, continuous Cybertronian Civil War.

[He returns to the stovetop.] It was the inevitable part of life. We Autobots were to destroy the Decepticons at all costs and break them down to unconditional surrender. Although, for me, my main task was in damage control, dampening the worst of our impacts on the other civilizations.

[callada]

[How much damage can be dampened from a four million year war? He doesn't ask, he's just glad that they tried. Sounds futile, but probably better than making no effort at all to protect those who had no relationship to the war except as potential collateral damage.]

What were the aims of each side?

[legalcy]

Should I go over their initial goals, their mid-war aims, or where we ultimately ended? Then again, you would have to ask Megatron what was the ultimate goal he had for the Decepticons. In my mind, Autobots were simply trying to take down the other side before too much damage had been done.

[callada]

I know there must be a lot of political details on each side considering the duration of the war, but is it possible to summarize in brief? Why did the war start in the first place?

[Surely, there must be general broad aims. Otherwise, why keep at it for so long?]

[legalcy]

It started with the Decepticon uprising that overthrew the Senate. I do not denounce them for that - it was an inevitable conclusion with their restrictions and upholding of distriminatory laws. The first fights were done by miners and gladiators, and others joined their ranks.

The Autobots were the security force for the Senate. Now, their first reaction was to quell violence, but they were not so popular. Unfortunately, after the initial revolution, the disagreements on how to move forward propelled a planet-wide division between the two factions. It quickly devolved into maintaining control and destroying the other faction, with ruling Cybertron as a secondary issue.

[And that's a summary of only the very early history.]

Everything spiraled out of control for the next four million years.

[callada]

[Damn. But this is the problem with revolutions, isn't it? Or one of them, anyway. There are ways to fix governments without violence. Peaceful opposition might mean slower change, and he's sympathetic to those who are left in a bad situation in the meantime when the change doesn't happen quickly enough to help them. But the chaos and violence when things spiral out of control never help anyone - and four million years of that is an extreme example. How many lives lost, cities destroyed, civilizations set back and opportunities wasted because of an unending war? It hardly matters who started off right or wrong; by the end of it, both were plenty guilty of moral crimes against their people whether they realized it or not.

He contemplates this quietly for a moment. It's hard to know what to say.]

And the end result? How do things stand now?

[legalcy]

The war has been over for centuries. We've assimilated to a civilian life as best as we could - though not without infighting and outside threats in the meantime.

[It's almost easy to call himself a noncombatant instead of a soldier. It's taken many, many years to acclimate to a life without fearing for his life every day, but it's happening. It's a process.]

We've grown tired of fighting, or at least most of us have. It's finding a place where we feel fulfilled that's the difficult part of life.

[callada]

I've heard of that happening to people who chose to leave military life for one reason or another. That finding a new way to move forward can be difficult. But that's a challenge for an individual, and it sounds like your people have that challenge as a civilization.

[Four million years. He can't get it out of his head. How much would it take for a people with four million years of war to try and make something new and peaceful for themselves?]

[legalcy]

It's never-ending challenge, but we are managing. I am managing.

[With his new purpose, with coming to terms to the people he lost. It's a blessing that Cybertronians live long enough to work on just about every personal demon they're facing.]

I have an important job now, overseeing the newest generation of Cybertronians. They've never experienced a society centered on war, and we hope it remains that way.

[callada]

Good. That's important. And under-valued back home sometimes, I've found.

[He speaks with firm conviction. This is what he does - maybe not in the same way, but the goal is the same. Protect settlements that don't even realize they need protecting, keep them peaceful. Bring normal lives to people who deserve to live them, and maintain normality where it already exists. And he knows from experience that it's a far more difficult job than it sounds like.]

We have a number of islands back home that have been through war, some civil and some between each other. They come out the other end with a lot of challenges. It's harder to rebuild than to tear it down in the first place.

[legalcy]

That certainly is the truth of the universe. [He folds his arm, but keeps one hand tucked under this chin.] It's easy to destroy a society during the process of rebuilding, usually through politics.

[That is why he spent the first several years out traveling and networking instead of dealing with the situation that led to Starscream being elected leader of Cybertron. The headache of trying to understand the new rules and laws of their home planet would have been too great for the order-obsessed Minimus to stay behind.]

I take it you are from one of said islands that recently went through a conflict?

[callada]

Not recently, no. But I see a lot of it in my work, as a Marine. It's a constant effort to try and keep the peace, and since my generation's the unlucky one to have been in what they call a "golden age of piracy" since birth, well... pirates don't make that job any easier.

[He doesn't bother keeping the frustration out of his voice as he says it. The World Government has always had a lot on its plate, whether that was intervening in island conflicts or trying to protect its member kingdoms from their rivals, he knows history well enough to know that. But the world is now more chaotic now than it ever was, surely.]

[legalcy]

You're a lawman?

[Minimus wasn't a member of the old Autobot Guard, only the rebranded military group, and his position as Tyrest's enforcer wasn't the same thing as Prowl the police detective. But the similarities are there.]

Pirates. [A scoff.] Murderers and smugglers, the lot of them. It's horrid what they've done to neutral planets.

[callada]

["A lawman" - it's funny, maybe it's just the translation, but it reminds him of the terminology they had used in Scorpion's Bend when he had assisted the sheriff and his deputy. It isn't what he'd call himself exactly, but it's close enough, and so he nods. Better to leave it at that then have to go into - or fabricate - details.]

Oh, so you know the type. They're a plague no matter where they go. People have enough to worry about already without adding piracy to their list of troubles. Guess I'm not surprised your worlds have them too, though. The end of a war must give vultures a lot of opportunity.