[M&M 3e] Defying the Future IC

[Quellian-dyrae]

"...Well, no teacups, so I've got nothing," Lily said after looking through the containers and such. Lily was more book-smart than street-smart, and lacking any particular hypothesis to start from, she didn't really have any priors for the evidence at hand to adjust. Giving up on that effort quickly, she headed over to Kal, laying her hands lightly on her injuries. Kal would feel a momentary damp warmth as Lily covered the injuries with her nectar, but it would evaporate away in a couple seconds, as the stored energy within it both unlocked and heightened its medicinal properties and boiled it away, taking pain and trauma along with it.

She nodded along as the pigeon explained itself (as the person speaking through the robotic pigeon explained himself, whatever, it was more fun this way). That was...a non-trivial amount of clarification and hedging, but not so much that it cancelled out the general point, and the pigeon did seem to be sincere, best she could tell. She wouldn't begrudge someone being precise with their wording. And...you know, she'd be honest, it was kinda refreshing to see someone else appreciate what her powers were capable of. All told, she was feeling fairly positively disposed.

And then the pigeon introduced itself.

And anger ignited in Lily's heart.

"You're on our side!?" she spat back ven- venomously? But venom's from animals so...toxinous...toxically! She spat back toxically! "You're the entire reason the League is here in the first place! You're their freaking leader! You- You gave them their powers!"

Okay, to be fair, the evidence was...kinda unclear on all of that. Like, there was a lot of circumstantial evidence pointing to it, sure, and some kinda wink-wink-nudge-nudge suggestive statements on the subject, if you could even take the words of supervillains at face value in the first place. There were reasonable arguments to be made that the observed facts were not sufficient to confirm that Watcher bore full personal responsibility for the evils perpetrated by the rest of the League.

Lily Woods was a scientist. She did not deny the state of the evidence. But neither did she think she needed a p < 0.05 randomly controlled study to make judgments under uncertainty. It was still the most reasonable conclusion to draw from the evidence at hand.

And even if it wasn't correct... "The obelisk is yours! The dome is yours! You trapped an entire town - thousands of innocent people! - with a super-powered street thug, a magic-wielding anarchist with delusions of grandeur, a mind-raping psychopath, and a civilization-destroying dryad! You trapped us here with no way to call to help! With no way to escape! With no way to fight back when they decide they want to do things to us!" Lily's voice...may have gotten a little wild there, as her condemnation kinda slipped into her own personal experiences, and her eyes took on a faintly golden hue as tears of nectar came to them unbidden. Lily had come to appreciate her new powers...but she also hadn't forgotten the horror of Manchineel's attack on her lab, of those first few days living in a body that was not her own. And she was the lucky one. The others working in that lab had all come out of it strictly worse than she had. That trauma was not even close to fully healed.

"So go ahead, Watcher! Tell us again how you're on our SIDE! Give me one good reason I shouldn't go straight to the media with everything you've said, reveal your opposition to the League to the rest of them, and then chalk up every one of you monsters that the others kill in the infighting as a victory!"

Somewhere in the back of Lily's head, a calm, rational voice was telling her that that wasn't how heroes worked. But right now, facing the man she felt was fundamentally responsible for everything she and her family and her friends and her neighbors had been through over the past month, the voice of rage and vengeance was orders of magnitude louder.