Break Time

As the saying went, those in glass houses should not throw stones. It was a good moral, a good idea. Sort of like a secular let he who is without sin cast the first stone, only less extreme. Don't be a hypocrite, and all that.

Angelo felt like a hypocrite. There was really no way to not feel like a hypocrite thinking about what he was: The pardon system. People in Manta Carlos got in regardless of what they'd done in the past. People on Manta Carlos believed in forgiveness. Considering he'd gotten in himself due to that very pardon system, he'd never given it much thought, but faced with the facts as he was... well, Angelo hadn't been sleeping well.

Lingering in the breakroom, Angelo looked like he was stewing. That kind of far off look that didn't bode well as he waited for the coffeemaker to finish its work. He looked like he was distracted, and anyone who knew him even slightly would be able to tell something was bothering him as he waited for something to drink.

Angelo responded with a polite nod of his own almost out of sheer instinct. He wasn't really thinking about it, and it took him a few moments to realize that it was Roldan, his head coming up properly to give him a wave.

Roldan looked even more tired than he did.

"I'm fine," Angelo said. "Just... thinking about things. It's been a lot the last couple weeks. I think about the only half decent thing that happened was your wedding." It had been a light--a very hectic light--in a very tiring period. Angelo didn't think it was relaxing by any metrics, but at least it was positive.

"You ever think about the pardon system the island has?"

It was probably for the best he hadn't asked. If he had, Angelo would have just gotten embarrassed. He'd gotten drunk at the wedding and been looking at the exact wrong person, and the less that was said about that, the better.

"It's probably hypocritical as hell for me to say it," Angelo said, "but I feel sometimes like it's a mistake. Or maybe... I don't know, that it should be scaled back? Like there should be some kind of metric beyond 'we'll forgive everything'."

Maybe Manta Carlos was simply too accommodating. They'd let people who still considered humans prey in without much thought.

"Some people," Angelo said as he stepped back from the coffee maker to let Roldan fill the cups up, "might not be able to be changed." It was a controversial idea, to say the least. "You can't rehabilitate someone who doesn't want to be rehabilitated. You can't rehabilitate someone who intrinsically looks at others as prey, or as lesser creatures. You can try and educate them, but what if it's an intrinsic thing? Like, supposedly there's a fae--probably more than one now that I think about it--who need to insult people to live. That's harassment. It's illegal. But if they don't, they die. How do you correct that? How do you fix it? We've made huge steps with setting up flesh and blood supplies, but that only works for some."

But that wasn't the issue that was on Angelo's mind specifically. "Right now we'll take more or less anyone. That's how I got in, even though I was a criminal in New York. But it feels like there's... I don't know, an important different between a vampire who had to kill to survive and someone who decided not to commit genocide on a coin flip."

Angelo looked terribly serious, a strange look for him.