Private Finished When a God Questions their Beliefs

There was campaigning to be doing, but here Riley was. Staying home. Using the laptop the school gave her to watch youtube videos of stuff blowing up in slow motion. She hadn't even written a speech yet, and she was thinking of skipping out on the speeches this semester, just like she did last time.

Ugh.

It started out as a joke: she'd campaign for student government on the platform of abolishing all government. Then she liked the idea enough to sign up for the elections. And now - she was really thinking about what it was her parents wanted her to do, when they were raising her like this. Wiping out all the cities and modern civilization to bring back a mythical age - was that even a good thing? It seemed like it should be such a stupid question.

Riley hated the idea that her parents could have been using her. Almost even more than that, she hated the idea that everyone around her could have been right about her parents being terrorists or bad people. Because all the people who were telling her that? They sucked. She hated them, and she didn't want them to be right about anything, much less about her parents.

The other day, Dalia had offered to talk about it. So, sitting in her room, Riley called out to her in her mind.

"Hey Dalia. Can I... talk to you about stuff, now?"

@Kada

"Remember when I said I was thinking about some stuff?"

Riley went to lay down in her bed to keep talking to Dalia. Or maybe mind-calling was the right way to describe it.

"My mom and dad used to tell me they had a prophecy about me. I was supposed to destroy a bunch of stuff holding the world back, and that was why my soul chose to be reborn here, and they said they talked to it and they were gonna help me do that stuff. But what if... all the stuff my last self wanted to do was stupid? And deciding to be alive here was a mistake?"

She felt a kind of fear and despair that she'd never felt before. It might have even been worse than when she first got sent to the islets.

"But..."

She sat up in her bed, head in her hands.

"I actually kind of wanted to become that person. I used to think that was what was supposed to happen, and they'd sorta take over and I'd fuse with them, and I was excited about it, but now I don't know anymore. Being friends with you guys actually made me not want to destroy as many things, 'cause you need those things, but what if I get taken over by something that doesn't even care about you?"

The more she thought about becoming one with her past selves, the more it felt like a death sentence. But putting it into words like this now, that made it seem real and worth worrying about in a way that it wasn't before. She was scaring herself now, thinking about these things.

'I don't want to stop being your friend,' she told Dalia after a while.

'Maybe we can... Find a way to fight it. In case something like that tries to take me over when I don't want it to.'

She wasn't even sure what that would look like, or what that would mean, or if it was even possible. But it made her feel better to say that they could try to fight it.

'But I don't wanna stop being a destruction goddess either. It's the only special thing about me.' Moving to the island saw her transition from having a literal cult following to being locked away like a loser, with nothing. She thought that remembering her destiny was the only thing that kept this island from breaking her.

Dalia's defiance, her confidence that they could fight it and that Riley was cool no matter what, was both comforting and saddening. Dalia was a great friend. Riley didn't want to let her down by becoming someone else.

But...

She was basing her fear off of what her parents had told her, and they were probably wrong about a lot of things. Maybe her mind wouldn't get tangled up and carried away in the mind of an old god. Maybe it would just be kinda like what happened to Dalia. Dalia didn't become a second Malara or anything.

After what must have been a half minute of silence, Riley responded:

'What was it like when you were getting some of your mom's memories? Were they... scary? Or confusing?'

She wanted to compare notes.