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Girls with Guns [Wednesday after classes]

It had been a while, so Triela had gone the extra mile and brought food today. Tea and tasty little cookies and things. Not that she would eat many herself, too much sugar, but she hoped that others would enjoy them.

"Nothing special on the agenda today," she told people as they arrived. "We're just going to spend the day getting back into the habit of shooting. As always, you can borrow one of my guns if you need one. And, please, drink some tea and eat some food. Because I have to figure out what to do with anything that's left over."

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Triela made a face. "No. I didn't."

Dinah nodded, then said, "So how are Rico and Claes and the other girls? Or didn't you get time to see them?"

"They're fine." Triela grinned a bit in memory. "And I always make time to check up on them." She was their big sister, after all.

"Cool. Glad they're doing okay." And by extension, Triela, from not having to worry too much. "I was visiting Jak all weekend at his home. Waaaay fun."

"Oh yeah? What's his world like? I've never been able to get him to tell me."

That might have been a joke right there.

"Pretty! So pretty. Tropical, with, well, giant sand crabs. And huge platforms left behind by the last civilization before Jak's people, and ruins, and it was just cool. Not busy or anything, but still lots to do." Dinah grinned. "Plus Jak has a flying motorcycle thing."

Soulmates. Soulmates in adrenaline.

"Sounds right up your alley." Triela knew allll about Dinah's adrenaline thing. Mostly because it was super-obvious.

"Yup! Dream vacation." Dinah grinned brightly. "Are you going anywhere over Thanksgiving?"

Triela shrugged. "I don't have any plans."

"Though," she mused, an idea sort of beginning to form in her head. "I might try to convince Karla to let me visit her world. With a sniper rifle." She'd been meaning to do that for a while, anyway.

Dinah sobered, eyes going grave. "Not alone. And not just with Karla. And..." She sighed. "I don't know, I keep thinking there should be due process, public acknowledgement, but God, the justice system there is so messed up-- I don't know that there's enough bullets, Triela."

"Politics is the same everywhere," Triela countered. "You just have to find the right place to exert pressure..." That was code for shooting people in the head.

"It isn't the same everywhere," Dinah disagreed. "Some places, I don't know, some revolution might help. If it's the will of the people. Maybe it's the only way to get evil out of power. Other places, you don't know who'll move in to the power vacuum. And other other places it's just wrong to mess with it." Not that she expected Triela to believe her on that. "I think Karla's is the second case. There's just so many people contributing to the problems. And she's not ready to be Queen yet. Too many variables." She grimaced. "But bodyguarding Karla, if she ever goes back there before graduation, that can't be a bad idea."

"It can take time," Triela admitted, "but if you keep shooting the bad ones, eventually people catch on." They'd taken out three corrupt police commissioners in as many months once.

Dinah facepalmed, whatever agreement she'd been feeling wobbling back the other way to oh hell no. "Or maybe they just get terrified in general?" She sighed, knowing they were not going to resolve this one soon. "Anyway. Point with Karla's is: too many with too much magic. You're important too." Although, it was kind of ... encouraging, that Triela wanted to help out Karla outside of any orders or Conditioning from Rome and her agency.

"Magic, yes, but complete lack of experience with guns." Triela smiled cruelly. "They wouldn't even know how they were getting killed."

"This," Dinah said seriously, "is a bad idea. On multiple levels. I totally sympathize but I'm telling you what I think here. It's wrong to start down this road, Triela."

Triela cocked her head curiously to one side. "Why?" It seemed to work just fine, at laast in some situations, back home.

Flail. Okay. Breathe. Think. Don't get emotional about it, Triela really wanted to know, so.

"Laws and authorities are supposed to be approved by citizens and subjects, right?" Dinah paused, thinking. She frowned, then slowly said, "Ideally, anyway. The Agency, when they give you your orders, they don't have that. But I'm guessing they already have figured out what the consequences are going to be. To your safety, to whoever has to step up now that someone's gone, to the population of Italy. I don't think that makes it right, exactly, but I'm willing to believe they're trying to do a good thing, even if it's in a wrong way, without it hurting anyone more than it has to."

"Okay," Triela nodded to indicate that she was listening. And that she was still waiting for the ojection.

"You don't know any of that about the situation in Glacia. You don't know if there's a system in place to replace anyone who suddenly dies, or if it sparks off a street war or a real one. Which are always worst on the bystanders." Dinah waited to make sure that sunk in, and said, "You don't know if the person who would win is worse. You don't know if they'd use an assassination as an excuse for a pogrom on anyone that tried to oppose them. Totally aside from the moral questions-- and there's a lot of them-- you don't know if this would actually achieve the goal of making Karla's world safer and saner."

Triela lifted one eyebrow just a bit. "From what I can tell it can't very well get worse."

"It can always get worse." Dinah thought of what she'd been told about Briarwood, compared to Glacia. "Right now, it's an uncomfortable, nasty place to be. But it's not out-and-out the worst it can get. You're only one person. Why do you think Karla's not back there right now, even though she's got more magic than her uncle? And legally, she should be the ruler?"

"Because she's too nice," Triela answered easily. And if she thought Karla was too nice...

"She'd stay there if she thought she could win. She can't. Not right now. She's too young, she doesn't have her full magic strength, and the governments there won't let her be in charge. And she's not strong enough-- nothing to do with nice-- to force acknowledgment through by herself." Dinah was quiet, then said, "She's the one that has to stay there, deal with all the fallout. And she needs those people to trust her, to want her to be in charge. If they're too scared of her, or think she's just like her uncle, that won't work. They won't listen, even if she has the best ideas and intentions."

Real war, mob war, street war, it was all the same.

Triela considered that for a bit, frowning.

"I still think a few well-targeted assassinations would do the place a lot of good." She didn't sound petulant, but that's because this was Triela.

Girls with Guns [Wednesday after classes]

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