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If one black liquid had been part of the problem, then let another be part of its solution.

• You know, thinking about how what a large part of the problem clashes between Muslims, Jews and Christians are makes me sick to my stomach, Eli. I can't reconcile what I see out there every day with the kind of respect for life I've been brought up with, but I have to admit, it makes some of the things you've said to me ring true.
• Deep down, religions are all the same, Mano. They can all cause exactly the same kind of damage. I know it's hard for you to deal with, but a large part of the reason for which I came here was that you saved me from fanatics and I think I owe it to the world to try to do the same for others in return.

Elizabeth had been a debater, speech writer, public speaker and editorialist, meaning that she worked with the information she was brought, and Mano being more of an investigative journalist, she was more used to bringing information than to working with it afterwards. Just being able to come back alive after going out there to try to get recordings, interviews, videos and snapshots every day often meant pushing her extensive survival skills beyond their limits. She was shocked to see the ideals of honor she'd been brought up with taken advantage of or trampled underfoot, and began to believe that courage may not have been all it was cracked up to be either, given how many people wanting to prove they had it were ready to kill or die to do it. Sometimes when things got too out of hand she just had to run, and she was ashamed of it at first, because what kind of reporter did that make her? It was only much later that she'd relate her situation then to one of Klein's favorite sayings: only the cliff faces the storm, meaning that when faced with overwhelming odds, the smart thing to do is run. She'd learned from hearing about the Boxer Rebellion that no amount of mental or physical training could make her bullet-proof.

"Am I the only person on the planet who's ever even heard of the concept of personal space or something?"

When she'd come back from the battlefield after a day's work, mind numb and muscles aching, Mano had really felt like she'd been overdosing on negativity. Elizabeth, in the meantime, had been spending the whole day watching and reading the news and, being the opinionated and outspoken person she'd been, had always been looking forward to finally having someone to discuss them with.

• I didn't need to watch the news, I was there.
• Exactly. You know a lot more about them than anybody else, so if you don't talk about it, who will? They deserve to be talked about and you owe it to yourself to remain a complete thinking person, not just an extension of your tools.

• Okay, I have to admit I have been feeling a little as if my eyes, ears, arms and legs have been turning into cams, mikes, cords and tripods a lot lately, but my three hearts need breaks from pounding. I've seen enough anger on the faces of soldiers shooting at each other out there today to welcome even more from pundits even if I agree with them.

  • Today's pictures look too blurry to really see anything. Can you hear anything on this recording? I can't. Dammit, I wish we could get our hands on some real news every once in a while.

• Hey! I've only got six hands, you know.

• Ugh, I wasn't saying that to criticize your work.

• I know, that's just what it felt like there for a minute.

• Well, okay, it was. You don't have to act so singled out, you know I believe in applying critical thinking to literally everything.

• I know, it's just that I have to work around a lot of people on both sides who don't want the public to know what's going on, Eli. It's not easy. You don't know what it's like out there.

• Thanks, I really wasn't feeling guilty enough about being afraid of crowds, fat and lazy.

• I didn't mean it like that, Eli.

• If you want me to forgive you for offending you isn't it only fair you'd grant me the same courtesy?

• You're right, you're right.

• What was that all about?

• It's just that I'm so wiped out right now, I don't feel like I have the energy to defend an opinion right now. Right now I need to be able to make myself believe that bringing people some facts is enough.

• Defending opinions is my entire life, Mano. Are you telling me you believe it's all pointless?

• Of course not. I know it's useful and necessary work, it's just that it's your work, and you do it because it's something you're good at.

• I think "leave it to the experts" is the kind of mentality which got us into this mess in the first place. If I trusted the experts to do what they're doing here right, I wouldn't think people like us have to be here to keep an eye on them.

• Fine, if we're going to be arguing, we might as well move on to a more constructive question than "to argue or not to argue". So, what'd you want us to talk about...?

Elizabeth hadn't made leader of her debate team without having had a certain persuasiveness about her.

Mano had begun to grow uneasy.

"If you're not going to walk around me then could you at least give me enough time to get out of your way?"

Elizabeth had been a very emotional person. When she'd watch or read the news, she couldn't just reassure herself that at least they were happening to people she hadn't known in countries which were far away from her to distance herself from them like she'd realized that most other people could - to her, it'd been personal, all of it, and it'd affected her as deeply as if it'd all been happening to her directly. They'd made her shake, scream, slam her fist down on tables and break down in tears right where she'd been sitting. Mano hadn't been able to stand to see the person she cared about the most suffering like that, but when she'd suggested that they temporarily stop watching, Elizabeth would take offence and refuse, categorically.

• If you'd looked away from my suffering, Mano, I probably wouldn't even still be alive right now. Others who suffer deserve better than for us to bury our hands in the sand too. Opinions may be just as subjective as emotions, but to me that says something good about subjectivity, not something bad about opinions. No stimuli, no emotions, no emotions, no opinions, no opinions, no debate and no debate, no natural selection and evolution of mentalities. The best poets have all been emotional wrecks, and I only do this job because it's the only thing I can do.
• I don't have anything to answer against any of that. I just wish there could be a way you could remain the kind of person you want to be without having to suffer so much. You deserve better than that too, you know?

Yet the days had kept on passing, and the help she'd hoped their work would bring had kept not materializing. The desert had been fresh out of wish-granting djinn lamps lying around, their Arabian nights had brought only nightmares and their respective moods had been sinking like careless explorers in quicksand. The world had seemed like an ugly place which it'd just felt more and more beyond their means to bring any beauty in at all, like a sinking ship they'd have been trying to get water out of with only teaspoons in their hands.

Elizabeth had been dissatisfied with her creative output also. Solitude for writing was one thing in a cabin on a seashore where the possibility existed just take a break to go out for a walk and explore around if it struck your whim whether you chose to take advantage of that possibility or not, but quite a different one when the place you lived in practically felt like a bunker you'd had to barricade yourself in during a nuclear holocaust and didn't feel safe coming out of, and not nearly quite as conducive to imaginative fertility. There simply had to be better places for her to learn to come out of her shell and face the outside world.

She'd always believed that as much good faith as they were approaching personal growth with, people, like turtles in tanks, could only grow as much as their surroundings, and by extension the situation they were in, allowed them to. She'd become increasingly worried about Mano's safety when she went out to risk life and limb every day, and one evening she brought up the topic of looking for ways of helping others which didn't entail such high probabilities of getting caught in a crossfire. Eventually they came to a common accord that Brazil was far enough away to make them feel like they were really leaving the Middle East behind for good, had enough social problems to keep them working for several lifetimes and that the greenery and humidity there would be a welcome change of scenery.

"I'd give so much to be able to get out of here right now, you have no conception of how much."

Mano's subconscious began to realize which direction her train of thought was taking her in but since it realized it couldn't make her stop thinking about her past, it chose to gently steer her away from the chronological approach and bring her back to when Elizabeth and she had first met each other.

Elizabeth's father had been a respected diplomat, her mother had been a real name in commerce and she'd always felt like the former had basically sweet-talked people while the latter had screwed them over. Although there had to have been some reason for which two people who didn't even seem to like each other had gotten married in the first place, she'd thought bitterly to herself. Given the past relationship between her native England and India, she hadn't been able to believe that they'd been willing to even show their face there, let alone force her to move there along with them as a child leaving her every rare but cherished friend behind. It had been for work-related reasons, but they'd welcomed a chance to take her away from people of lower social classes whose strange ideas they hadn't wanted her to become contaminated by to begin with. She'd had an uncle she'd been told it'd reflect badly on her family for her to say anything about whose visits she'd learned to dread above everything else, and whose death in a car accident she deeply regretted reading about in the newspapers years later because it'd taken any chance she might have ever had to do him in herself away from her.

They'd had some rich guy in mind for her to end up marrying and running the business with since before she'd been born, and the fact that she'd never showed any interest in guys in her life hadn't affected that decision, not one little tiny bit. Since they'd needed her alive for their own purposes, they'd made sure to have her genetically engineered for nearly invulnerable health and physical resistance while intentionally leaving the traces of both family lines' wide and varied array of forms of hereditary dementia completely intact so they could combine into one nasty walking psycho-emotional mess, because after all, that was their personality she was inheriting from them and they did want her to be a chip off the old block. As far as she'd been concerned, given that, the people who'd dragged her to church every cold and dreary Sunday morning had had no business telling her about how important the salvation of her soul had been supposed to be. To make a long story short, all of her family's spectacular wealth had only bought her a childhood of suffering in silence while having to grin and bear it and it had left a mark on her which nothing had ever been able to erase. After she'd escaped she'd vowed to herself that she'd grin and bear it never ever more.

Mano's mother had been a mechanic who'd worked on just about every existing kind of vehicle conceived by anyone and her father had been a botanist, gardener and herbalist. She'd taught her how to take most things apart then to put them back together, how gender and caste only meant anything if people decided that they did, and how to take care of herself with a self-defence system loosely based on Kalaripayattu but heavily adapted to make the best of the cephalopods' unique body type. He'd taught her how to contort her body into just about any position imaginable, about the sacred puja and the myriad gods populating the heavens she should have been proud to have the same number of arms as, and about all the things which took root, blossomed, flourished, grew and crept. In the West they'd have been categorized somewhat below middle class but given the economic context they were in, they considered themselves lucky anyway. The only genetic alteration she'd gone through had been the newly established Hindu ceremony of having an actual third eye physically put in at age 16, and going under the knife had been her idea. They'd used the recent official façade of their country's break with legislated morality as a social excuse not to arrange any marriage for her, and they'd financially and morally supported her decision to go for a major in investigative journalism, as much as they'd regretted how different it'd been from both of their respective careers. At first it hadn't landed her a job in her field at all and she'd had to make a living stripping beached shipwrecks for parts despite all the health and environmental hazards she'd been fully aware it'd represented, and then Elizabeth's parents had hired her father as their gardener, her mother as their Porsche mechanic and Mano herself as hired help around the house.

Family was a topic which, given the disparity between theirs, Elizabeth had never enjoyed having to talk about at all, and Mano had understood why well enough to keep her homesickness to herself.

Elizabeth had been the only one in her family who'd ever taken an interest in Mano's life beyond her role as an errand girl and cleanliness engineer, and she'd ended up taking that interest in her further than anyone in either one of their families would have ever seen coming.

"Gahh! Why do people have to keep popping out of nowhere like that?"

Mano had asked her mother what she and her father had really cared more than anything about seeing her accomplish in life on the night before running away. Her mother had said that the only thing her father and she had wanted for her had been for her to be happy. Mano had sighed, and had admitted that although she hadn't been able to promise them that in good conscience, but that she'd always do what she thought of as the right thing. Her mother had simply said that if that was the kind of person who she'd wanted to be, then she wished her that doing the right thing would bring her happiness more often than not, and had bid her good night for the very last time.

It had torn Mano apart to leave them behind, but she'd known that Elizabeth's need to leave had been stronger than her own need to stay, and her own need to stay with Elizabeth had been stronger than her own need to stay with her parents also. They'd made many sacrifices for her while she was growing up and she'd learned from them to put her own feelings aside when that was what it took for her to be able to help others also. The loss of their company would only have to be one more.