Participants:
| Scene Title | Memoirs |
|---|---|
| Synopsis | Alister starts his morning with some introspection. |
| Date | March 4, 2018 |
Staten Island Trade Commission
Alister's swanky 3000 square foot penthouse.
Overlooking some of his workers down below, one Leonar- no, Alister Black stands at a window in his penthouse.
Rihanna's Bitch Better Have My Money blares throughout the room.
He holds up a digital recorder, speaking into it. "The one thing that I'd like people to understand, about my time in the Civil War, is that I regretted very little. Sacrifice had to be made, for the freedom of man, the ascension of our species. I bloodied my hands time and time again, felt the bones in a man's neck crack as I applied just that extra amount of pressure required to end his life. Indeed, choosing the abhorrent side that they did, suffocation was too good for him, it had to be viceral."
For the good of mankind.
One has to wonder what good the war did either side. One side run by raving lunatics and madmen, the other side by would-be freedom fighters with so much power but the inability to usurp control from a powerless mankind.
Truly, his visions of Evolved supremacy, a new future, something he could be proud of, were burned to ashes. The Evolved people weren't superior, they were human like anyone else. What made him great, what made Leonardo Raphael Maxwell, great, was his mind, his resilience, his ability to seize victory from the jaws of an undeserving Death.
Death was a poor soul who owned nothing but the cast-offs of life. Leonardo, now Alister Black, would not be one to lose to one so pathetic such as Death. Alister Black sees the things he deserves, and then he takes those things. When things are taken from him, he takes those things back ten-fold. And Death… a pathetic figure, a creature often depicted as nothing but a robe and some bones, and a farmer's scythe, would not be the thing that would come for him.
"People didn't understand. When dealing with enemies, with people you want to influence, you have to show strength. 'Putting a man's head on a pole is too far' they said. I said 'How many of us have they crushed with their machines, tortured, captured alive and subjected to horrors?'. I further added, 'I will put their heads on pikes and I will remind them that Death is our slave. It might escape us and act in their favor at times, but us, we own it, we will not be overcome by it'."
Indeed, smaller minds would never understand. These people and their kind hearts. Alister Black, he has a kind heart at times, but that kindness has a time and a place. These people believed themselves to be righteous, believed that there was a limit, a line that we don't cross, a point at which we become the other.
He walks from one window to another, stopping to look over the Hudson. He can't help but consider the thousands of fish in that water. Fish who have no concept of a big picture, no concept of their greater ecosystem. They'll be eaten, poisoned by pollution, possibly swim into a boat's propellers. But if one fish rose up and said, enough, this is what we have to do now, would the other fish not continue swimming to their doom?
"People know war, they know death, but what do they know of life? When people are trying to kill them, they try to avoid death, and they try to deal death to others. But they rarely feel comfortable exploiting death to perpetuate the existence of life." Alister inhales through his nostrils, closing his eyes as the smell of breakfast makes its alluring siren call of the senses. "They were good people, but if they could have stopped that for about a year, less people would have died."
He turns around, and starts walking toward his dining area. Indeed, his penthouse was something to behold. He was a man who had fallen from grace, but slowly he gradually crawled up from this hole. He has a foothold into a new life, a foothold into reclaiming what is rightfully his: money and power.
These things, many would say that money is something that you aren't entitled to, power is something that has to be earned. These things, they're technically true, but he has already tasted these things, he is a powerful person, a rich person. He could have so much more again, and that he had it before, that it was robbed from him… that is precisely why he deserves it.
"Manifest Destiny." he says out loud, heading for his dining area. "I would call it a doctrine of ignorance, but looked at in terms of my own life, it is indeed my inevitable destiny that I will achieve and reclaim my power, my money. The very universe itself, my virtue of my very existence, the survival of my hardships. It proves that to m—"
He stops, and stares down at his wet carpet. "Eileen you goddamned infuriating stain on my life!" He grabs a newspaper, then starts to roll it up to go after the ocelot. The ocelot does not run, it instead hisses and starts to wildly swipe at him. When he tries to hit it with a newspaper, it knocks the newspaper out of his hand and steps on it, growling up at him in a staredown.
"Do what you want!" he throws his hands up, then goes to sit at his modest dining table where his cook has left a nice English style breakfast.
Before he eats, he makes a call on his cell, saying, "Yes, it's the damned cat again. I need a carpet cleaner up here." he requests, as Eileen furiously claws at a leg of his oak table with wild abandon.
"I hate you." he says down at the ocelot.
And, back up at him, she delivers a hissssssssss.