Owner	Pose
Terry O'Neil	That Terry and Gar had traded places in the Cheshiring is, likely, no surprise to Troia. After all, she was there, holding the portal open when he was hauled in by Victor, out like a light. It has been a full day of sleeping, followed by some talking with Gar and Kian and... other things beside. Like informing Lois that he would have to work remote for a bit because he had lost the ability to Rabbit Hole. Still feeling like a drained battery, the young redhead goes through the rigmarole of the different doors and finally arrives at Troia's throne room, a box of goodies under one arm. "Trooooia?" he calls out, "Are you decent? It's your favorite mortal coming to pay a visit!" he says with a little smile. Well, at least he still has his sense of humor. And his delusions.
Donna Troy	"Decent?" Troia asks curiously, from right behind Terry, where she certainly wasn't standing a second ago. Still, at least it means he's spared the weird disembodied voice thing. "That's a value judgement. How I judge myself is not necessarily relevant to how you would judge me. Therefore I cannot answer your question."     She comes around from behind Terry to take her seat, smirking just enough to show that she did understand what he meant after all. "Yes Terry, I am here. Which I assume is what you were really asking, though you chose to use other words to ask the question. You and your friends always come and ask if I am here, as if there were any chance that I was not. I find it..." she blinks a few times. "Endearing, I suppose."     "Is there something I can help you with? Or did you come to see if I had made any progress? Or were you once more intending to persuade me of the value of some form of entertainment that you find pleasing?"
Terry O'Neil	Terry lets out a chuckle, "You already know me too well. There is some of the entertainment... since ABBA puzzled you, I thought you might enjoy someone who is somewhat akin to a modern bard of sorts." He slips out a couple of CDs for the player, "Her name's Loreena Mckennitt, and you can listen to her at your own leisure... but what I wanted to bring was something else." He looks at the box, and then up at Troia. "I told my mom what happened this morning, and by noon she had made this as a care package... I thought you might enjoy it. It's something mom's kinda famous for. Tiramisu bites with Irish Cream..." he puts the box down near Troia after opening it, "I figured sharing consolations with a friend is better than eating in misery alone in the bathroom while sad music plays in the background, right?"
Donna Troy	"It's an odd reaction," Troia says. "You feel some degree of emotional discomfort, and you attempt to address it by indulging in the consumption of food that satisfies primitive biological cravings. Sugars, fats. Simple triggers the body recognizes on a fundamental level as being necessary to life, and therefore rewarding when obtained. When you feel a form of pain that derives from being a sentient and complicated being, you hide from it by retreating into your animal self, and seeking solace in the more primitive comforts."     She tilts her head sideways. "Nevertheless, I will try these Tiramisu bites with Irish Cream if it will make you feel better to consume them in company."
Terry O'Neil	"It's... more along the lines that someone you love spent some time making something you like because they were thinking of you. Mom can't exactly be here right now because she's in the middle of a big case and... well. I told her not to come. She would have taken the day off and I am not actually ill or in danger. I'm sure you'll see her soon enough." He offers her a bite, "I brought them over so you could sample them, too. Although your way of analyzing things makes me wonder if you aren't actually the goddess of anthropologists?" He finds a seat and exhales a little, the fatigue still showing some. "Man... did I make a mess of things yesterday. And it was my first time taking charge, too."
Donna Troy	Troia is slow to answer. "I don't have a lot of experience with people," she says eventually. You... you /Titans/..." she smiles wryly at the word, "You're the first mortals I've ever met. I am simply trying to understand things that are new to me. "     She takes a piece of tiramisu, studying it carefully for several seconds, before causing it to explode outwards into a cloud of vapor that floats in the air in front of her for a few more seconds. When she's done studying, the cloud shrinks back into itself and reassembles itself into tiramisu, which she pops into her mouth and chews thoughtfully.     "I am unable to detect any psychic residue indicative that you were in the mind of the person manufacturing it," she concludes. "The comfort you take from the fact it was made by someone who you love and was thinking about it in fact derives wholly from your own mind. This is merely a symbol you use to remind you of something you already know. It would be advantageous to you if you were less reliant on such reminders, but I think you struggle without this type of external validation because you doubt your own attempts at internal validation. It does however taste very pleasant."     "I am not really aware of what happened yesterday. In what fashion did you make a mess of things? Granted, some events took place which are inconvenient to you, and perhaps also to others. But that is not necessarily the same thing."
Terry O'Neil	Terry smiles a little. "The love isn't /in/ the object, but it's in the act of making it. It's in them and in you. Mom took time from her very busy day to set up time for me and make something she wanted me to have because she knows I like it. These reminders..." he gestures to a bite, and then grabs it and eats it, "We are very temporary creatures compared to the immortals. You live indeterminate millennia, we are here for a blinking moment in time. Marcus Aurelius said that death smiles at us, and all we can do is smile back. Well..." chomp chomp chomp, "We try to treasure the moments we have. The things our loved ones leave behind to remind us of them. The gestures. The thoughts. The kindness. Because sooner than we know, they will be gone and the memories remain." He blinks a little. "I guess that's what this is, you see." He holds up the bite, "This is a memory. One day I will remember mom made these for me because she was worried about me and wanted to give me something made by her as a gesture. And I'll remember all of the times she did things like that. And the times she would hold me when I was little and I was afraid. And the time I broke her vase... and then, because memory is funny like that, I'll remember the time she found out I dyed the water in the swimming team pool red and flooded it with tampons in protest and she didn't know if she should be outraged or to laugh...." He chuckles. "Complex things. When people are gone, those things bring them back to us, make them present. Reminds us of the meanings." He gestures to the bites, "And in sharing these with you, you are now a part of my memories. And I think about how sorry I am that I had to leave before that Twister game got well underway, and I would have greatly enjoyed it. So here I am, sharing another moment with you, which will be gone soon enough." He looks at the window, "Ichi Go, Ichi E, as the Japanese say." He muses, and glances at Troia. "Well... I wanted to show I could be a good leader. Instead, I ended up getting my Cheshire soul ripped from me. Or almost. Gar saved me. It was... /terrifying/."
Donna Troy	"What you say is not really any different from what I said Terry," Troia says. "You are filling the air with explanations that simply say 'this is in my head'. This tiramisu is not in fact a memory. It has no data storage capability, especially not once you have consumed it. Everything you are saying is merely repeating my own point. The things you describe are all internal to you. That's where your memories /are/. You utilize this cake as an artificial aid to fool your brain into being allowed to remember things you have trouble accepting. You associate the cake with being loved. So when you find it hard to believe that you are loved, you eat the cake and thus bypass the dysfunction that rejects the knowledge."     There is a definite similarity with Donna. It's very likely she'd make a similar point in this situation. She'd certainly make it in a very different way though.     One that sounded a lot less like a Vulcan god of anthropology, for a start.     "So. You lead a mission, and something bad happened, therefore you conclude that you are a poor leader, is that what you are saying? Hmm. This seems to be a common thread amongst you people. Caitlin Fairchild said something not entirely dissimilar to me. Tell me Terry -- do the people who you lead feel that you failed them?"
Terry O'Neil	"I don't know, actually. I've been sleeping all day. The only people I've talked to so far are Gar and Kian, and we had bigger problems- trying to keep Gar from wandering off in a blaze of chaos and curiosity." He smiles a little, rubbing the wound on his arm absent-mindedly. "I just thought... you know. Wonderland is /my/ world. I thought I'd be able to be good, you know? Make the older Titans proud of me... Vic, Dick, Donna..." He rubs the back of his neck and chuckles, "But I guess that's all in my head too, right? I remember how you said once that you thought we might have false memories of Donna. Do you still think that?"
Donna Troy	"It seems to me that mortals have an extraordinary capacity to dissociate causation. You accept responsibility for things that are beyond your control, and divest yourselves of responsibility for things that are entirely within your control." Troia leans back, crosses her legs, and stretches her arms comfortably on the arm rests of her throne as she studies Terry.      "You presented two items of information. The first, that you wished to be a good leader. Or at least that you wished to /show/ you could be a good leader. Those are not necessarily the same things, but that is beyond the scope of this discussion. The second, that you got your 'Cheshire soul' taken from you. You present these two items of information in a manner that implies they are mutually exclusive. Your use of the word 'instead' implied that. Yet there is no connection. Obviously somebody could both be a good leader and at the same time have their 'Cheshire soul' torn from them. You are intelligent enough to be aware of this, yet your words indicate a pattern of thoughts behind those words that draw conclusions based on the notion of mutual exclusivity you know to be fallacious. "     "Caitlin employed a very similar form of non-sequitur justification of her self-doubts. Perhaps this is a characteristic of mortal minds. To be able to ignore the fact that your conclusion does not follow from the facts you yourself have stated, to give yourself an excuse to believe something. I find it hard to understand why you would choose to deny reality for the purposes of justifying an unjustified criticism of your self. It seems to me a very strange thing to choose to do."     She tilts her head to the side. "Perhaps you think that there is a limited amount of pride in the universe, and by refusing to take pride in yourself, you believe there is more pride left, that can be allotted to you by Vic, Dick and Donna? I am certain that if you think about it for even a moment you would realize that is not true."     "It would be incorrect to say that I /think/ that is the case," Troia says, waving an arm to dismiss the prior subject. "It would be more accurate to say that it an explanation that fits the facts as I have so far been able to determine them. You have memories of Donna. Yet there is no Donna. That they may be false memories is a parsimonious explanation at the very least. But it fits certain other facts of the matter too."
Terry O'Neil	"Well, if mortals didn't have a knack for doing that, psychologists wouldn't be able to earn a living. Someone has to keep those poor people employed, you know?" Terry says, giving Troia one of his smiles. "But... I think it stems from the fact that a lot of us grow up being told we're not good enough. And it's something that's kinda hard to unlearn- you know, we're creatures of habit. We're not divine. Oh, if only we were divine and could change our nature as easily as a god can change shape. Wouldn't that be wonderful?" He sighs a little, "It's definitely an interesting point. And how much of that means that even some of us might not be real?" He seems to entertain this, and glances back at the titan, "Have you started hypothezising on that? What would I give to be able to see the universe how you must see it, all that garden of forking paths. I exist in a very localized point." He raises an eyebrow, "That is, if I exist at all, right?"
Donna Troy	Troia gives a short nod of her head. "You are not a stupid mortal, Terry O'Neil. Indeed, if that particular theory is correct, that this distortion, the labyrinth -- if it is indeed a tangle of potentialities that encompasses both what is real and what is not real, there is the possibility that the nature of what is not real extends further. I already presented the notion to Caitlin and to Victor. Neither of them took the suggestion well. I'm afraid for all that insight you envy, I have yet to learn how to communicate difficult possibilities to mortals without upsetting them."     Her eyebrows raise and lower, and she drums her fingers on the arm rest. "And yet here you are, calmly presenting the possibility to me yourself, without the benefit of being able to see the skein of reality that implies it may be so."     "I don't have an answer for you yet, Terry. It is possible you do not really exist, and that when this knot unravels, you will cease to be, cease to have ever been. But it is only a possibility. I believe there are more patterns compatible with what I have been able to determine where you do have a reality beyond this tangle than where you do not. There is a considerably higher likelihood that you do exist in manifested reality, but not in exactly the form you currently believe. At the very least, given the initial working hypothesis, you would be someone who does not have the experiences you believe yourself to have had with Donna, and that would necessarily imply you would not be entirely the same person."
Terry O'Neil	"My experiences have made me ponder some pretty incredible things. I learned everything I thought about myself wasn't exactly as I knew it- I was the Cheshire cat, I found out. Wonderland is real, I found out. Since then, I've seen some pretty crazy things." He shrugs a little, "If I suddenly turn out to be the dream of a dragonfly a Zen Master was looking at while unsure whether he was dreaming of the dragonfly or the dragonfly was dreaming of him?" He shrugs, "It wouldn't honestly be out of the range of ridiculous things that could happen to me." "Have you ever heard about the Brain In A Vat argument? Some schools of Earth philosophers tried to question reality by asking how could we know that reality was truly real? What if everything we experienced was nothing more than the hallucinations of a disembodied brain in a vat, manipulated by some external force to hallucinate?" The young man smiles a little, "And a lot of ink has been spilled on that. A lot of anguishing about What Does It Mean? Does Anything Mean Anything Then? But one of my favorite answers to that question came from a woman who said 'Hey, we might not actually be able to have the tools to know as of yet. So until we do, the best thing we can do is to live our little maybe-brain-in-a-vat lives as best we can, as happily as we can, and act as well as we can. So... I might just be a little brain in a vat right now, figuratively speaking. Might. But that's not going to stop me from being here in this moment." He reaches over to touch Troia's hand in a comforting gesture, "And it's ok about upsetting Cait and Victor. People with a lot of caring can get upset. Cait has been angry because of what she sees has happened... and I'm sorry. She really is a very wonderful person. She's very warm, passionate. Also insecure at times. She cares a lot. She recently went through a very hard time where a divine creature infuenced her to fight against her friends for it, and I'm sure some guilt from that is still running through her."
Donna Troy	"More than a little, yes," Troia says with a nod of her head. "She believes herself to have failed all of you, because she made a mistake. It was, granted, a significant mistake. I attempted to point out to her that it is inherent in making a mistake that one's judgement is at fault, and therefore the scale of consequences of that error should not be deemed relevant in judging the individual's propensity to making mistakes. "     "You all look up to her. I have seen that. She feels you should not, because at one time she made a mistake. I tried to point out the irrationality of this viewpoint. Is it wiser to follow a leader who makes the correct call ninety-nine times out of a hundred, or one who makes the correct call one time out of a hundred? It is very clearly the former. Yet, suppose by pure luck the consequences of those ninety-nine errors are very minor, and the consequence of that single mistake outweighs them. Does that change the equation? To believe so is to believe that the quality of leadership is not determined by the judgement of the potential leader, but by external circumstances that may be entirely beyond the control of that individual. Perhaps this same form of judgement is what plagues you. Maybe it's just how mortals think."     She gives a shrug, and stares out of the window at the stars. "I didn't like her getting upset. And I... I wish she would not get upset at me for not being who she expects me to be rather than who I am. She displaces her dissatisfaction with reality onto me. Diana does the same thing. It is not... fair."     She stares a little longer in silence before turning back. "This... Brain in a Vat argument... it strikes me as being somewhat simplistic. It presupposes a binary distinction between what is real and what is not real. Such a presupposition would imply that a thing cannot be more real than another thing unless the other thing does not exist at all. That makes no sense. There is a gradation of reality. The fact of consciousness implies a degree of reality. And yet the fact of self-identification implies that reality is not the ultimate reality. Thus it is all just a matter of degrees."
Terry O'Neil	"Right, it is simplistic, which is why I like her answer, which is a big 'so what?' What we experience, we experience. Isn't it more important that we try to be good in whatever it is that we experience? Then again, there are some people who play videogames and act in ways they wouldn't normally. Like, killing innocent civilians in make-believe world, go on murder rampages..." he blushes a little. "Actually I kind of got made fun of because I never got into Grand Theft Auto. Like, I'd play the games but I was a lot more interested in driving around and looking at the cool things. But every time I ran over someone by accident- because those controls /suck/- I kind of felt bad." He smirks, "Even though they're just... pixels and polygons and pre-recorded audio. They're not /real/ by the standards of humans, but they seemed real enough to me that I felt bad. So I never did that stuff on purpose." He frowns and looks over at Troia. "And yeah. It isn't fair. I know I can't apologize /for/ them, but I'm sorry that was done to you. I like you. Even if you do dissect me with finely-honed scalpels and lay bare all of my ridiculousness," he winks, to indicate that he is joking. "I... know you're not Donna. You're Troia. I miss Donna, but you are also here, and it's one of the reasons I've tried to get to know you, to know you for yourself." He glances around the room, "And... I know what it's like." His voice gets quieter. "I know what it's like to feel lonely. To feel apart and that nobody understands you, that you have no peers to relate to you, and nobody to teach you. Not to the degree you've experienced it... but just enough. Don't get me wrong," he gestures, "The others do too. We are all misfits in one way or another, but I'm the freshest one. They all had this as a family for years, I only finally discovered it two years ago. My wound is fresh. Sometimes the lonelines still aches through me- it comes back every time I feel I have disappointed them- I fear I will be alone again." He exhales a little. "It's silly, I know. But sometimes the things that haunt us can feel so real when they're not. And then, sometimes, someone gives you a hug and tells you you are being an idiot, and everything feels right again." He chuckles.
Donna Troy	"Ah yes, I see. The hug and being told you are being an idiot is like the Tiramisu," Troia concludes. "Even though the knowledge is there within you, your mind frequently refuses to accept it. Thus you require an external memory to bypass the dysfunction that causes you to be unable to accept a fact you already know. It's very obvious to me, looking from outside, that you are quite central to this group. I suspect that when you are able to consider the question dispassionately, you are well aware of the fact. "     "It is interesting that you can so easily accept the abstraction of your brain in a jar question. That you can say to yourself 'why not', and simply ignore the doubts as irrelevant to your experience. Yet you are unable to ignore the doubts that you are a part of this family. In the first case, you deal with a question you have no answer for, and yet you find it easier than the second case, where you know the answer. I think... I suspect that must be a large part of what it is to be a mortal. But I suspect it is also something that you can... repair? Is repair the correct word to use here? I'm not sure. But it is not a division in your mind that is universal. It applies in some circumstances and not in others. You would have to determine what is specific about the types of thought where it occurs, and be aware of it. Perhaps that awareness would be enough. That way you would perhaps be inclined to doubt your doubts, when those doubts occur in doubtful situations."
Terry O'Neil	"Are you usually able to consider things dispassionately?" Terry asks, glancing at the inky blackness of space outside the window, "I notice... you don't really talk about what it's like. I mean, yes, you convey the factual data of what happened... but not what it feels like." "Someone very wise once said that some things are like a piece of grit that gets caught in your dentures, and if you don't get it out it rubs and rubs and it turns into a sore, and then you have to eat cream of wheat for a week..." He pauses and frowns, "Actually, that was a Golden Girls episode. But the principle still stands." Green eyes look at the Titan. "It's ok to talk about how something feels, you know. Being able to think about it dispassionately is a virtue. But so is expressing it." He takes another tiramisu bite. "Even gods feel alone. Otherwise Aphrodite would be the goddess of stoic self-sufficiency."
Donna Troy	"Do I lack emotions, you mean?" Troia laughs, a laugh of genuine amusement. "No, gods have emotions just as much as mortals do. Perhaps more, I'm not sure. We make foolish mistakes because of those emotions all the time. What would the history of the gods, of Olympus be, if all its inhabitants had acted dispassionately? Very different. Perhaps everything that is good and everything that is bad that any god has ever done comes from passion. I think were we truly dispassionate, no mortal would ever of heard of us."     "Certainly, were the gods to be able to think dispassionately about everything, then there would have been no war between Olympus and New Kronos over my birth. But then a dispassionate Phoebe would not have had a child to engender the conflict in the first place. "     "Yes Terry, I am lonely." Troia shrugs her shoulders again. "This is a fact. I do not feel a need to hide that fact. Nor do I feel a need to express it. A rational need, at any rate. There are times when I express it against my rational will. Because gods have emotions just as much as mortals do."
Terry O'Neil	Terry confides. "There's a part of me that still feels like that. I don't know if it'll ever go away." He says. "What we do is risky. At any moment any one of us could die. Everything can change." The young man stands up and walks around the room, pacing a little. "But is there really much sense in believing in the worst possible outcome when it hasn't happened yet? Why would I torture myself like that?" he asks, biting off the last of his small Tiramisu bite, ending close to Troia. "This is the part where you say I'm silly."
Donna Troy	"I could call you silly if you want me to, Terry." Troia curls one side of her lips up into a half smile, an expression that could so easily be Donna's. "But I do no think that it is true."     "There is a lot I don't understand about mortals still. About the... the inconsistencies in your ways of thinking. About your inability to see the whole of yourself at one time, but only to focus on individual sections of your self.. But in the time I have spent with you, I have learned that is a struggle that all of you face. I have talked at some length with you, but also with America, and Caitlin, and Vic, and Sarah. You all do this same thing to yourselves. So... yes Terry, you are silly, if all mortals are silly. It's a valid perspective I suppose."     "But I think you are quite a..." she pauses to find a suitable word. "You're an /impressive/ mortal, Terry. You seek solutions. Often strange ones, often in overly convoluted ways, but you seek solutions because there is part of you that sees more clearly than most mortals seem to. For example, as you said -- you see that I am not Donna. I think of all of you, perhaps only you and America have truly seen that. And rather than dwelling on this fact, or regretting it, you engage with it. You seek to show me games and music and movies because these are fundamental to how you relate to the universe you find yourself in, and thus by displaying those entertainments that speak to you, you find a way to help communicate a sense of who you are which you could never really put into words. I do not think that is silly."     "You care. You care about your friends, and about people who you have never met. You even care about lonely gods. That is not silly."     "You recognize your weaknesses, and though it is silly that you exaggerate them to yourself, you look for ways to overcome even that exaggeration. You recognize that being told you are silly is an answer to one of your flaws in self-perception, so you seek it out, and ask a god to call you silly. And you recognize that cake is an answer to another of your flaws in self perception, so you eat cake."     She picks up another piece of Tiramisu. "That's not silly. It's quite tasty in fact."
Terry O'Neil	"I guess tasty choices are better than some!" Terry lets out a good-natured laugh at this, "Trust an immortal to give me the kind of perspective I wouldn't quite see. I have made some strange attempts at solutions in the past, that's true... including making out with my evil twin from another dimension..." he puts a hand up, "Long story. I'll come back to tell you about after I take care of a few things today, though. But I'll be back- I've got to show you my favorite movie yet, it's called "The Last Unicorn" and I'm sure some of the others would love to see it again. It has some very catchy music." He grins, and starts his way towards the exit. But then he seems to remember something and turns back. "Oh... there's one more thing."
Donna Troy	"I never gave a lot of thought to mortals before, Terry. But since meeting all of you, I have come to suspect that it may be the true purpose of gods to give perspectives to mortals that they can't quite see. And perhaps also the true purpose of mortals to ask gods questions they would not think to consider without a mortal around to ask them."     Trioa smiles softly, the smile perhaps half to herself, and nods her head vaguely to Terry by way of farewell.     When he turns back, she looks up again from the thoughts that she had already become half subsumed in. "Hmm? What's that?" she asks.
Terry O'Neil	Terry walks over to Troia with a smile and, unless she resists, there's actually a hug coming in. "You're cool," he says in that lighthearted lilt he sometimes has, "And you are going to have to teach me how you do that starry thing with your hair," he says by way of a joke, hoping he won't get blasted for following his impulses and trying to hug a goddess.