Quote:Nene looked up from where she was resting on the futon as she heard a plate set down on the beat up coffee table in front of it. Her head hurt, both from her earlier telecommunications session with Kitbash and Athena, as well as her dry heaving when she'd seen Chris Wood run through and taken out of the fight. As soon as things had settled down, she'd stumbled into Starbug's common room and fallen over onto the futon.On the "sufferage fee"... read that as being basically the "bare minimum microtransaction fee to keep exchange of services as legally not a gift".
"Nene?" She groaned, once, and shifted enough to see what had been put on the table. Jeph had apparently turned down the cabin lighting, so it didn't feel like someone was jamming a white-hot rod into her eyes, just red hot needles, but she could see that it was indeed a plate, with a slice of recently reheated peach cobbler.
The universal painkiller of cute blonde or redheaded hackers the multiverse over.
She levered herself up, took the proffered fork, and began eating as Jeph slumped onto the futon next to her. There were a few moments of silence as she ate.
"Nene... was it wise of me to tell Lisa she was free to kill them?"
She paused in her eating, headache partially forgotten, and she looked over at him. He was looking subdued, more so than one would expect for what had happened.
"Jeph. We... we're both survivors of The Battle for Serenity Valley." She took another bite, chewed, swallowed, as her eyes got a little wet at the memories of all the loss they had suffered only a couple of years before. "Would you question that of someone else, under the same circumstances, the knowledge that Chris might have merely been the first of dozens of casualties otherwise? Hundreds?"
Jeph looked at her, then looked up at the ceiling. "No. You're right. I... I just... I'm sometimes never quite sure where the bounds are, especially when the circumstances... get past me like they did today, and all I can do is react to the results. I watched Glear almost kill someone I actually respect, for little more than doing something right rather than something smart."
Nene put the empty plate down. "So... what are you going to do? Or are you going to try to hide behind the 'simple businessman' routine again?" Jeph gave her a look. "What? That's what Lisa, Malcolm, Kate and Athena all say about you and your desire to not throw your political weight around." Jeph snorted.
"You know I have my reasons for that. Mostly because I think they all do their individual jobs better than I would trying to take over. I'd just get more in the way. Besides, I happen to *like* being the simple businessperson. It's nice. All I have to do is worry about the wellbeing of the people who work for me, and achieving satisfaction with the people who contract us." A deep sigh sounded from him. "I don't really like the idea of handling all the literal life and death decisions, anyway."
"So... when do you think you'll need to have a meeting with Malcolm?"
"Give me a day or two. I need to make sure my head's back on fucking straight before I go in there. Two things, though. First, I'd like you to message Kitbash, offer JMC services if they need them to get their contracts fulfilled... for the nominal sufferage fee."
"OK. They'll probably need the help."
"And secondly... how many emails are there already in the SMOF and BNF lists?"
"Ummm... you really don't want to know. They're coming in faster than we can download them, though."
"Crap."
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"You know how parents tell you everything's going to fine, but you know they're lying to make you feel better? Everything's going to be fine." - The Doctor