Amaranth Games - My Forum Entries

Re: Uncertainty Principle- A Runaway Bride ending story (eventual RxL)

Subject: Re: Uncertainty Principle- A Runaway Bride ending story (eventual RxL)
by Blurble on 2009/7/9 17:24:41

Uncertainty Principle:

The thing about seeing the future is that, because you can never judge the velocity and mass of a particle at the same time, you can only ever make rough estimates, probability predictions of what will be.

The Oracle doesn’t tell anyone that, though. She likes being omniscient. All she needs to do is choose the options with the highest probability. The orphan girl with a 90% chance of using the fairy dust, for example.

Talia Maurva had just been a case of necessity- no one else with a higher rating than 42% of preventing Ahriman from being raised was being born anytime soon and if she had waited much longer there would have been a 94% chance of her carefully maintained world ending rather… painfully.

And after the world is saved? The Oracle was a very generous person. She didn’t leave her noble heroes adrift to make bad decisions; she did, after all, owe them a debt of gratitude. And so she always gave them the decisions she saw would work best, and was pleased at their glowing smiles of gratitude as they accepted her wisdom and embarked on a new life.

---

Rhen smiled gratefully at the Oracle, accepting the wisdom she had been granted.

Her cheeks ached from the effort of maintaining the expression, and behind the slight, modest tilt of her head her mind was racing furiously.

What she wanted was a moment or two to properly consider her options. But the Oracle wasn’t granting that- her steely gaze held Rhen pinned.

What should she choose?

Dameon? Oh, a thousand hells no. It came with a price tag, for one thing- and she didn’t want to be queen, she didn’t want to be queen at all, the thought of being forced into associating only with nobles for the rest of her life (not an entirely bad breed, nobles, merely a mostly bad one) made her feel an immediate need to jump off a cliff. And Dameon himself…

She was furious at him. They could probably be friends again when she got around to forgiving him, but she needed time to do that, not a hastily imposed marriage. Actually, marriage would probably ruin any chance she had of reconciliation. And they weren’t going to be more than friends any time soon, because friends could betray you and be forgiven but more-than-friends were held to higher standards.

And in any case she would have to start being friends with the real Dameon now, not the fake one he’d been using all this time to- She shuddered despite herself- seduce her. She had no idea who the real Dameon was. She didn’t want to find out only after a marriage.

So. Not Dameon, then.

Marry Danny? Not that she couldn’t understand the possibility- she still felt a warm fuzzy glow when she thought of him, it was just… that she hadn’t, in fact, thought of him for months now. She’d found his vampire-drained body and revived him, and that had briefly brought him back to her awareness- she appreciated his coming to save her, she did, really, even if he had come too late. But he belonged to some other, completely different life in which a girl that she was not, anymore, lived happily and peacefully in a small town.

Sometimes, frankly, she forgot he existed. And while it wasn’t like she was a romantic or anything (except she was, deep down)- she nevertheless had a hunch that marrying someone who only with conscious effort existed in your mind was probably not the most… exciting thing in the world, to say the least.

Option three didn’t involve marrying anyone.
It could have been a wonderful option.
She had an extremely strong suspicion the Oracle didn’t want her choosing it.

It was just the way she sensed certain choices being weighted. Like when she had a choice between the sunscreen and the 200 gold- who in their right mind would have taken the gold?

That was the vibe she was getting here. The Oracle probably liked marrying people off.

Because otherwise why in the seven heavens would the only non-marriage option involve living in seclusion for the rest of her life??? That was basically what hermitage amounted to. What, had single-ness become an infectious disease that needed to be quarantined off from the rest of humanity? And she didn’t even necessarily want to be single, she just wanted more damn time. To get things straight in her head. To rinse off the blood.

There were only three options. The silence had extended for too long, everyone was shifting uncomfortably, probably wondering what was taking Rhen so long- Oh, easy for you, she thought sourly, you’re not the ones deciding the rest of your future- and the Oracle was still smiling that benign, patronizing smile. Probably convinced that these were the most wonderful options in the world and Rhen just couldn’t decide which was the most wonderful.

(Rhen decided that she had probably started disliking the Oracle way back in the chamber of the Empress when she and Talia had made a wonderfully obscure, cryptic pair, like the world would end if someone actually went to the trouble of explaining things properly to Rhen. Actually, when had she become so bitter? She'd used to be a bright, cheerful girl… Oh right. Then Talia had shoved a priestess ring on her finger without any explanation and she’d been shipped away from her family and enslaved on the other side of the world to a fat nasty woman and her bratty nasty son. Nevermind, then.)

Think, Rhen Darzon, use your lovely brain. There must be some way out of this.

She took a deep breath, and somewhere at the end of a tunnel a light began to glow.

“I’d like to marry Dameon”.