Chapter 83: Feasible Bullshitting
"No."
Basil’s voice cut across the room before the boy could get his mouth open, and he put himself in between the two of them, brows furrowed deeply at Dion.
"You’re not feeding an unknown glowing thing off a poisonous plant to a kid who can barely stand up. I won’t have it."
"Basil, hear me out."
"I don’t care what your reasoning is." His voice had climbed, and the people crowded into the doorway pulled back from the sharpness that was in it. "He’s a child. He looks up to you, and has come to you because he is scared and sick, and your answer to that is to use him to find out what a plant does? What could you possibly have to say that justifies using him as a test subject?"
The rain hammered against the window behind the desk, and the fruit went on pulsing in Dion’s hands while Basil stood between him and the boy with his fists closed at his sides. The few windows in this room had not been directly hit by the worst impacts of the rain, so they thankfully had not been broken through.
For several moments, as he thought about how he could try to best get what he was feeling across, Dion had remained silent HIs eyes briefly went back to the boy, then to Basil once more.
"I’m not recklessly trying to use him. Before I touched it, I wouldn’t have thought about doing this, but now that I have, I know it won’t kill or hurt him,"
’If I thought for even a second that the thing would hurt him, I wouldn’t have opened my damned mouth.’
When Basil had held the thing, he had moved so quickly because he really didn’t know what it would do to the man holding it, especially when looking at the way that coming into contact with the prana saturated rain had affected all these people. But now? He didn’t feel like it was anything bad.
"On what basis are you saying that?"
"Instinct is really the most I can say."
Basil stared at him with an exasperation and frustration growing on his expression.
"That’s not a reason, Dion," he said. "If something happens to that boy, it’s on every person standing in this room, and I’m not living with that for some instinct based experiment."
’And what, I’m supposed to tell him it’s an attribute? Then I have to figure out how to work around questions about what else I know about prana and how I know about them... That curiosity isn’t something I can afford right now.’
"You know, Anton didn’t trust my instinct either."
Basil’s jaw tensed faintly, while Madeline, standing away from them, pursed her lips, and the people around who had before this been none the wiser to what he was talking about glancing between each other in wonder about what he was talking about. Thereafter, Dion kept going.
"None of the others believed me when I told them it was going to rain hard. And where do you think they are right now? They’re somewhere out there clawing their way back through all the animals that are transforming because of the rain, and everything else out there trying to reach a building they never had to leave in the first place."
"That isn’t the same thing."
"Basil, It’s exactly the same thing. Let’s not pretend otherwise."
Dion lifted the pot slightly, and the flashing yellow-green of it moved across both of their faces.
"The problem isn’t that I don’t have a reason, Basil. It’s that the reason sounds like nonsense to you, and because it does, you can’t make yourself take it. Birds the size of grown men came through those windows tonight for a fruit that grew from being dead on an office desk, within thirty minutes of the rain starting. None of that answers to the logic you’re holding me to. That logic belonged to a world that’s already been, and is being actively torn apart by everything happening out there."
Now of course, Dion was bullshitting.
Or, at least he was partly bullshitting.
He was fairly sure that the fruit wouldn’t kill whoever ate it, and it wasn’t wrong to call that instinct either, because that was exactly what it was; the feeling had come to him off Adored by Prana.
And that same feeling had been telling him something else the whole time that he had been holding it, which was that eating the fruit himself and letting somebody else eat it were not going to give the same result.
That sensation that he was feeling with his soul sea didn’t feel anything like desire. It felt more like a familiarity, but at the same time, even with that familiarity, it felt... lesser, as if it was inadequate.
Dion briefly looked at Madeline then, and said, "If there is anything that might help you understand what I’m feeling better, then you would be the best one to understand it. I have a very high Perception dimension. From the name of it alone I’m sure the lot of us can tell what it entails, right? But it’s not as if I can say anything more about it than I can feel it, because that’s all perception comes down to, isn’t it?"
Every face packed into that doorway turned to look at her at once, and Madeline’s hands came together in front of her.
"I..."
Her eyes went to Basil and came off him again just as quickly.
"He’s, um. He’s right about that part. When I awakened, even though I didn’t understand anything, the awakened can... feel things differently, like our mana, and it must be because of it, and... even though I can feel these things, I still couldn’t explain any of it to you if you asked me to."
She swallowed, and her fingers were working against each other.
"It’s like how you know where your own hand is without having to look at it. That’s the closest I can get. I’m sorry, I know that isn’t much."
Basil’s jaw tensed and loosened briefly. He didn’t say anything to that, and he didn’t take his eyes off Dion either, but the fists that had been closed at his sides opened a little.
Dion looked back at the teenager who had stayed quiet through the whole of the argument being had over him.
"What’s your name?"