The walk to the living quarters was a short one, and it passed mostly in silence.
By the time they arrived the clone had settled on "Place" as the name she'd think of herself as until a more permanent one could be found.
Place had mostly kept her eyes forward but every time a door opened she instinctively looked to see if a threat might be coming through it. What she saw in those glimpses gave her more to think about than she really wanted.
Shego said something about the room not being well furnished, but Place wasn't really listening. She was thinking about the other rooms she'd had glimpses into. None of them were well furnished. No personal touches, or at least not much in the way of them. Not much point in making your quarters into a home when some teenager could show up at any moment and blow the whole complex up.
That was a disturbing thought for Place. Evil lairs were places where people lived. Granted they were mostly henchmen who could transfer to a different location, but that different location would be another evil lair. Another place that a "hero" might destroy. Stopping someone from taking over the world was important, obviously, but did Kim really need to bring about utter destruction? Did she really need to go around blowing up people's homes?
How many of them were like Shego, working this job only because they knew that the world was never seriously at risk? How was what they did any different from any other private security force?
The Middleton Space Center routinely housed things that could be used to take over the world, how would Kim react to someone blowing up the security guards' homes?
There was no question how someone who did that would be viewed, and the word to describe such a person wasn't 'hero'.
And all this brought up another thought. If one thought of the henchmen as simply hired security, which technically they were, then how were the villains operations any different from that of various "legitimate" businesses that destroyed far more lives and yet always seemed to avoid prosecution.
Drakken threatens the world and everyone on his staff is sent to jail after seeing their home blown up. A "respectable" business actually damages the world, causing immeasurable harm to hundreds or even thousands of people, and the CEO never seemed to take a fall for it. Certainly not the security guards.
While she wanted to tell herself she was nothing like Kim, the memory of the fight in the rain still looming large in her mind, Place knew that the only real difference was that she was looking at things from an outsider's perspective for the first time. Since she knew she wasn't Kim, she had nothing invested in seeing Kim as being right. She was free to judge as harshly as she wanted, and she was content to judge quite harshly.
The larger problem, though, was that her entire personality had been built on the ideas of good and evil, right and wrong, villains and heroes, the law abiding and the law breakers... in short: black and white. The world now seemed exceedingly sepia.
Place had no idea what to do about that.
She located the bedroom and collapsed on the bed.
She curled up in a ball and waited for darkness to take her.
-
Perspective.
ReplyDeleteLooking forward to more of this.