Nerves and The Greater Good (Cheri)

Many things were going on in Papaya Island, and quite a few of them Cheri was involved with. The Tenka'ichi Budōkai, for one, was the grandest tournament in the galaxy, and one she had signed up for with the express purpose of scouting out powerful and morally-driven warriors so as to convince them to assist in the defence of her people, as opposed to the fights, the pride of victory or mere currency. Also there was a bit where she was there to find her daughter, but, well, that didn’t end too splendidly, so mostly the first point. She had found the list of everyone who’d signed up for the Tournament and had been going through, doing some rather extensive (if mostly automated) research on the most interesting or notable of those names. Certainly, it could save some time to take grander priority in those warriors of greater power levels as determined by their fights… but, most of the participants hadn’t fought yet, and Cheri would have detested wasting time waiting for the Prelims to begin.

So, alas, after running a random number generator through her list of names, she’d come up with… ‘Ward’. She wasn’t familiar with the name, so she presumed that, in all likelihood, this ‘Ward’ was an Earthling. Well, OK, first step done: now all she needed to do was figure out where they were (alas, she had names, not pronouns, so for now ‘they’ it was). Well, let’s see… looking through the past satellite imagery, taking note of everyone who must have been in the sign-up building at any point during the (admittedly quite long) sign-up period, keeping track of them forward and background through time, comparing to any unsecured scouters hearing the name ‘Ward’ (weighted to be more significant when the scouters were sensing larger signatures) or any purchases made under the same name, etcetera. There was quite the list of things Cheri could do to attempt to identify or locate this ‘Ward’ and it was all put through a series of algorithms so clever that, in the end, not even Cheri was entirely sure of its exact method. What mattered was that, if her algorithms worked, she had found this ‘Ward’...

… And, for whatever reason, they’d been moving to and fro, moving between a few tasks, switching every few hours, though mostly in not too large an area. And it was on Papaya Island, too, which was a good sign— especially given that she was already there, having a few hours before talked with her last fighter. She would move closer to where her algorithms told her this ‘Ward’ would be when she got there, her scouter constantly on the ready the whole way there. She made sure to be open; she had no idea who they were, not in species (presumed Earthling), gender (presumed masculine) or appearance (probably had white hair, but low-res top-down satellite imaging was prone to tricks of the light).

When she found someone with a decent Power Level and whose hair wasn’t dark, she’d ask, ”Hello, don’t mind me. Are you Ward?”

And she’d keep to that, giving a nice sales pitch if she thought it’d work if they said no, but ultimately would keep at it until she’d found the ‘Ward’ she was after.

”There is.”

Ah, so this was ‘Ward’. Judging by appearances… white hair, yes, that was definitely accurate. Gender… seemed masculine, but best not to assume. Light skin disqualified quite a few alien species. Pointed ears, perhaps Konatsian? The hair style, and fashion sense, though, Cheri had no way to place. Sure, she had seen similar hairstyles, and similar manner of dress, but particularly in this exact style, and together? For example, those ear-rings, she’d never seen their like. Was this some strange Earthling culture, where a race of their people had pointed ears, or was this ‘Ward’ a member of an alien race Cheri simply wasn’t familiar with? She’d assume the latter for now.

She’d sit down nearby on the grass, though with a comfortable distance between them. She was not the sort to meditate, as she’d never been taught how, but she did know how to sit still and silently. ”I am General Cheri. I represent the tuffles of Plant.” She introduced herself, her words measured, confident, slow and well-chosen. ”I have come to participate in the Tenka'ichi Budōkai not for the zeni, the fight or the glory, but to scout out the powerful and morally-driven warriors such a tournament attracts.” She would wait a few seconds in a dramatic pause, to allow Ward to think on her words and if he, himself, were those things Cheri sought in a warrior. ”For there is an invading force of saiyans fully able to genocide the entirety of my race of scientists and scholars, without intervention. Does such a grand quest interest you?”

‘Met in Hell’... ‘half-saiyan’... well, no, it couldn’t have been, it was too much of a coincidence. Wait, didn’t he say ‘unpleasant creature’? Oh, then that was definitely Rosemary! So this Ward fellow had met Rosemary? That itself was a bit amazing, but somehow more amazing was the implication that he’d been to Hell and back. Was the implication that he was some sort of demon or devil, perhaps in disguise? She could not yet ascertain. Of course, Cheri’s expression did not let slip that any amount of this was surprising, or even news to her. Ward had developed his poker face through hundreds of years of life; Cheri had developed hers through an intense almost three decades of constant cut-throat politics, military work and being held up as a public figure and a doomed people’s beacon of hope.

”Rosemary, I am familiar. She is one among many, an invading saiyan.”

He started to pace, though Cheri was still sitting still and silent.

Apparently, where he was from, there was no such conflict, so he must not have been from Hell. And, yet, he spoke of the mortal realm as if it was not his own. Where could he have possibly been from? Certainly mythologies spoke of an afterlife as a reward for a good life, a ‘heaven’— was this Ward, perhaps, an angel of heaven? Or one of those ‘shinjin’ Qarinah described?

She let him pace in peace.

But then, the way of talked of these ‘mortal affairs’ as if they were so much lesser, somehow less real than what he was used to dealing with… she hid it brilliantly, because of course she did, but it angered her. This was how gods talked, wasn’t it? Her culture hadn’t really developed myths of gods, but they were a common theme in other cultures, and apparently sometimes they were as arrogant as this Ward lad here was being now.

”Mortals are not a monolith, not a single culture. This war is the tuffles’ first, but possibly their last.” They were not the warring sort. It just wasn’t something they were wired to engage in. ”We are the intellectual, peaceful sort. We invent, we craft, we trade. The death of the tuffles is a loss for the galaxy.” Compare and contrast with the saiyans of Vegeta, members of an inherently destructive warrior race as bad as the Herans.

”Though you aren’t of the galaxy, are you?” The answer was ‘no’, she already knew that. But it prompted him to speak more, and for her to learn more than even what he’d say.

Alas, power was attracted to power. Perhaps it was some innate law of the universe, or maybe just caused by a variety of other factors and not 'coincidence' or 'fate' at all, but all so often happenstance would have it that two people, each above and beyond the norm, were far more likely to meet each other than anyone else where a far grander gap in power or significance between individuals might have been present. The scientific explanation, of course, was that powerful individuals tended to go to the same events (like this tournament), tended to be able to sense either with a scouter or as a learned ability the great energy signatures of others and, through their power translating into speed and occasionally with the ability to fly, they were each able to cover far greater distances in a given amount of time with which to detect those very signatures. This, paired with the necessary rareness of extraordinary power, made the impossible seem a lot more likely and, furthermore, in the increased notability of the powerful, one was far more likely to take note of and remember such a thing. But, hey, maybe it was some cosmic tendency in destiny as programmed into reality; if anyone would know about such a thing, it would be a shinjin.

He spoke of balance as if it was somehow the goal. "It already is imbalanced, and we're trying to right it:" She knew there had been loss before, after and especially during her life, and it wasn't something she didn't like hearing. That was just life. "The Vegetans made it to Plant after their original planet, Sadala, was rendered uninhabitable by extreme weather that came in so quickly it could have only been caused by an external force. At the same time that Sadala was rendered uninhabitable, the same disturbances started to appear on Konats. If your concern is retaining cosmic balance, we are already beyond that point. There is an unnatural force bringing strife across the galaxy, seeing a violent warrior species invade a young technological species and, soon, turning the Konatsians' paranoia and distrust of the Kvatchians into conflict that ought not have been."

Ward's image of balance, it seemed, was self-justifying. It was not the means to anything greater, but rather it was the end that all other means strove for, inherently self-limiting. But, Cheri knew, Ward's image of balance was no balance at all. How, she wondered, could an entity that had lived for so long remain so naive? "Perhaps one could chalk it up to philosophical differences, but I'd like to think that, if balance were a good thing, it would not merely subsist or stagnate, but progress, improve. Be done with the worst of it to fill in its space with the better. In such a case, it is only right to limit the unpredictable and destructive element, and allow the xenophile technologists to propagate."

... Right, from a place called 'Otherworld', which contained Heaven, Hell and no doubt numerous other realms. He mentioned 'kai' and 'shinjin', the latter term she'd only heard from Qarinah and the former term she was familiar with from her studies in comparative mythology, where different cultures held them as creator gods. For now, she'd have to assume that Ward was either a kai or a shinjin.

...Hm? He understood why mortals would feel an imbalance but, truly, there was none and such a thing can simply be realised by enlarging one’s perspective? Put on its own, that would make sense and it was even something that Cheri would agree with. But, then, after enlarging one’s perspective on the question, one would see that such an answer came into a whole new meaning once one considered the concern it addressed. That external, unnatural force which had ruined Sadala and was now ruining Konats… was itself some natural, perhaps divinely-ordained force of destruction? And Ward knew about it? That… that was so much worse… Hopefully there was just some miscommunication along the way, though, and Ward was not actually advocating for an actively malicious ‘balance’.

The shinjin had seemed quite antsy, continually moving his hands, standing straight or straighter, changing expression. Thankfully he’d returned to a right state.

So he was not the best to ask. ”Fair enough.” She did not want to insult him, if he would even take this as an insult at all, but she did not suppose Ward was of the ‘helpful’ sort.

Of course, the affairs of mortals were remarkably important indeed. Not only in totality, she suspected even Ward would admit that mortals as a collective whole were quite important indeed to be the canvas across which the state of the universe was expressed. But, she held, in their little subdivisions, their cultures, their families, and even in individual mortals, they were important still. Not in the objective sense; Cheri’s philosophical upbringing, education and continual deliberation had brought her to the conclusion that there was not truly such a thing as objective morality, no such thing as objective worth. All of those things were significant because they were subjectively held to be significant. Next to that, how significant any of it was to the cosmos at large was thoroughly irrelevant.

Ward kept saying ‘what you don’t realise’, which was a smidgeon annoying given that, in every case so far, she had realised. ”I am familiar with your concept of balance. It appears often in comparative mythology.” Quite common was the concept of three forces: a force of creation, a force of destruction and a force of balance, quite often personified (or, rather deified) into various shapes, forms, people; sometimes with quite a few limbs, sometimes with ten thousand hands, sometimes actually just a nuke, and sometimes expressed through the power of anime waifus. There was an internestling: balance within creation and destruction, as that which prolonged the having-been-created until the point of destruction (ultimately moot, as destruction comes all the same) and destruction within balance as a wider, holistic cosmos which maintains its balance by destroying parts of itself to create there instead.

”But, in creating and destroying indiscriminately, it fails to accomplish anything. Such a balance does not lead anywhere; it is ultimately pointless, no better at any point than at any other.” With a cycle of creation and destruction necessarily tied to a cycle of life and death, under the Buddhist understanding, one would try to reach enlightenment to escape such a horrid, inherently unjust saṃsāra filled with duḥkha. ”I suppose the apple of discord that marks our fundamental disagreement is that I believe that balance is a means one maintains to keep the cosmos stable with so that the universe may be enjoyed, or observed, or whichever end one pleases, whereas you believe that balance is the end, the inherent goodness of which justifies itself. Would you agree with such a summary? Surely, I say, it is best for a balanced state of being to move towards a greater state.” She was not saying that balance itself was a necessarily ‘good’ thing. It was important to note the difference, moreover, of the ‘good’ that was opposed to ‘evil’ and the ‘good’ that one could find in the thesaurus entry for ‘great’. ”Perhaps into a cosmos worth living in.”

Intuitively, this might have seemed like a disruption of the balance between good and evil, but, with her philosophy of subjective morality, that was no balance at all; a lie at worst, a euphemism for the balance between creation and destruction at best.

Even if he wasn’t likely to be helpful, at least in the direct sense, at least he was respectful of some rather deep (in the sense that one had to dig through some layers of thought to get there, not in the #deep sense one might find on a Zinstagram deepdive) philosophical differences.

Ah, just as she feared. Ward’s balance was continually self-perpetuating, incapable of progression; according to much of the comparative mythology she was familiar with, such a thing was torturous and the fate for all until one could surpass the cycle and finally be eternal/nothing. In other words, ideal reality as Ward described it was something that mortal cultures described in their religions and cultures as something that it was best to escape. Cheri had a hard time thinking that such an eternal cycle of torment (again, drawing from mortal mythologies) could ever be what one would want of the cosmos; at that point, the only philosophically meaningful resolution to the torture would be to just end it all, whether by ascension or the highest possible form of suicide.

The tuffles did not share these religious traits (indeed, it didn’t really have any religious traits at all), so Cheri had a different perspective. Their culture was born around the tuffle proclivity to investigation, to technology and to problem-solving; no god of the gaps was required. Those cycles of nature, such as the cycles of the seasons which agriculture depended on heavily, which a primitive culture might have seen and extrapolated onto grander conceptual levels, the tuffles were simply able to see, understand and exploit for the sustainable benefit of all. Certainly, there was a cycle of reaping and sowing that fit with the cycle of how the sun moved in the sky… but then, innovation hit, and they came up with crop rotation. Through innovation, limits were surpassed and the need for the cultural motif of a cycle never became useful or necessary. It was always onwards and upwards. Any culturally important cycles they did have (such as the cycles of the seasons for agriculture and the cycles of the scientific method) were not limitations but tools.

Ah, so kais were a subset of shinjin, the highest among them. That was consistent with the information she’d received until that point, at least. Furthermore, Ward’s perspective was not popular among the shinjin; she supposed that was a good thing, to think that the celestial custodians might have wanted good of the situation?

”You say balance is not about ‘going somewhere’, and that it’s only about keeping it going without being destroyed.” Ultimately, various mythologies might have posited that this was pointless, given that the destruction of the cosmos would simply lead to the creation of a new cosmos, but Cheri did not know if that held up to the cosmic truth as it seemed to be. ”And yet you see the merit in tragedy breeding innovation, thus supporting a ‘good’, and also see too much peace breeding complacency as a ‘bad’; would such a cycle not progress towards more total innovation?” After all, a people’s innovation did not die with those people, it could be and was spread memetically across the galaxy. The average life now was a whole lot better than the average life was many thousands of years ago and was balanced all the same with far far more accumulated knowledge. ”If such progression is permissible, and it must be, given that it’s happened, would it also not be permissible to prevent such a grand source of innovation to not die out prematurely?”

Oh? If Ward’s balance did not allow for a continuing progress always moving forwards but rather considered progress to be the bob of a pendulum that itself moved to and fro, would it not mean that, at some point, it would begin to move back? Even the ‘dark ages’ of history were no dark ages at all, where technology and culture progressed forwards even then and, given the memetic nature of useful technological information, such negative progress would have to be galactically-spanning and would likely have to prevent communication and trade on a galactic level. Like some sort of Deluge Myth but on a galactic scale, or any other of the various apocalypse myths and eschatological legends that rather often popped up in comparative mythology. It must have been a remarkably vast pendulum but, if there was truly a pendulum of progress, it must have effectively ended galactic culture with every swing. A balance like that, Cheri could not support as meaningfully worthwhile to keep swinging. (And that was the thing about pendulums; they lost energy and, in time, would lose all of their energy and become still.) If such an apocalypse, or return swing of the bob, could only be triggered externally, perhaps divinely, how could it be said to be a part of balance at all? And, in such a case, if Ward’s balance was still balance, was this not an admission that reality itself tended to ‘imbalanced’ progress, and that ‘balanced’ was not the state reality tended to as a default but, rather, an external thing forced upon it? Unless, of course, there was something in the system itself that made sure to ragnarok it up every once in a while, which was not placed there but was simply an inherent aspect of physical reality… were the disturbances of Sadala and Konats an early warning of such a thing?

Oh? A deity guardian to the balance of the cosmos, who was philosophically dedicated to that balance and presumably lived for what Cheri could only assume was millions and millions of years at the barest of minimums, seemed to have grown impatient with the topic and sought to move back to the original. If Cheri were arrogant, she might have thought she had been pressuring his philosophical position and making him uncomfortable enough in his inability to defend it that he sought to move onto another topic, but, alas, she was not, and she recognised that he’d undoubtedly spent much time on his concept of balance and would have already come to a self-consistent theory of it with the millions and millions of years Cheri assumed shinjin must have lived for.

Huh. Cheri wondered who was stupid enough to offer what amounted to a god political power. And… wait, scarred face? This wasn’t Yangcong, was it? She supposed she could thank him later, for this was the second time he’d made poor arguments to recruit someone to make her own arguments seem more impressive in comparison later on.

Still, he wished to know more, and Cheri was possibly the best person in the whole galaxy to give that information. ”Will you be learning more by going to Plant, or do you wish to ask me?”

She was getting quite into this sitting still business, but she knew it was time for a step beyond. She moved into the lotus position, which she saw once on a poster. As such, it wasn’t entirely accurate to how a lotus position normally went but, all the same, she held it well.