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Tanya gazed out the window of her office, onto the mountain side below. The snow practically glowed in the moonlight, striking a balance between eerie and peaceful. She absorbed as much of the peace as should could, before turning around to her desk. It had been cleared of all paperwork, all objects of any kind. Except for a golden staff.
She touched the Staff, and summoned the Spirit of Creation.
There were two chairs, one on her side and one opposite. Ambrosius ignored his chair, and sat cross-legged on the desk. She would be annoyed, but as far as she was aware it was perfectly hygienic.
“Mr. Ambrosius. As you are aware, there was an incident in lab four earlier today. An explosion injured five employees. The Staff of Creation was found to be undamaged, but I wanted to check with you personally to make sure you were unharmed.”
Ambrosius snorted. “I'm a primal spirit. You could serve me antimatter soup and I wouldn't shed a tear unless you used too many anti-peppers. Nothing on Remnant can hurt me.”
Then he grew suspicious, cocking his head to one side. “And isn't a first aid check up a little beneath you, Boss? And I don't remember you having any training in this.”
“This meeting has several purposes, one of which I was deemed to be the only member of the Silver Company with enough rank to accomplish. Mr. Ambrosius, it was an engine you created that exploded.”
Dr. will require a prosthetic eye, and I'm informed that Miss Tenebre will likely have a limp for the rest of her life.
“I did exactly what Tenebre asked me to do. I can show you the blueprints and list the modifications she requested, but I suspect you already have them.”
“Recordings of the even suggest Miss Tenebre asked for a seven gram reaction. Seven grams is obviously unsafe, above the energy levels that lab is rated for, and outside the range specified by the testing document, provided to you beforehand.”
“Yeah, I remember that document. I also remember being asked for a engine that would deliver seven grams a stroke.”
“Yes, and it was the seventh engine you had been asked for during the test, and given that engines one through six specified one through six milligrams respectively, were you surprised that this engine was suddenly working with one thousand times the fuel?”
The spirit crossed his arms. “I created what was asked for. That is my job, my nature, and my literally divine commandment. I couldn't have done otherwise.”
“Do you have experience with engines?”
“I am the most experienced artisan in every discipline on Remnant except for scroll programming and a specific form of pottery.
“So you were aware you were creating something unsafe.”
“I have three rules. One thing at a time, no resurrections, and no direct destruction. I'm not forbidden from creating things that destroy, which is quite fortunate for your war effort. I swear, half the time mortals hear they can create anything they can think of, and the only thing they can think of is abusing that loophole.”
“Mr. Ambrosius, this conversation is reflecting very poorly on you. I realize my negotiating power is limited, but it would behoove you to take this seriously.”
At that, his body language changed on a dime. He uncrossed his arms and slammed his palms on the desk, leaning forward. It wasn't an intimidating gesture, though maybe it was trying to be. It didn't look like he was trying to loom, despite his massive size, it looked like he was trying to beg.
“You can't take the Moon from me! You promised, you signed the papers! I've done everything I said I would, that is what I've always done.”
Tanya blinked. She supposed that this made sense. This was, despite his age and experience, his first job. And it was an extremely public one. The Moon being repaired would act as stellar advertising of a successful contract. If it ended in a debacle, he might never be able to make this sort of contract again. The pieces were falling into place—
Tanya pulled the brakes on her train of though, bringing the whole line of reasoning to a screeching halt. She looked at him. Actually looked at him. He wasn't calculating, he was distressed. He could be faking his body language to get an advantage. But body language was reliable because people usually didn't do that.
Consciously, Tanya uncrossed her arms. She took a deep breath, and tried to take the steel out of her voice. It seemed this conversation about personnel was about to be a conversation about the personal. “Ambrosius, why do you care about the Moon so much.”
This problem was caused not out of laziness, it was because Ambrosius didn't care about his co-workers. Possibly, he didn't care about mortals in general. But he did care about the Moon, and learning why might be a key insight into cooperating with him.
Ambrosius hovered off the desk, and placed his hand on the window pane. With his finger, he traced the lines of its many pieces.
“Because its mine.”
“You... you are aware that I refused your initial offer? I will help you repair it, but I can't actually give it to you.”
“Its already mine.”
“How did you acquire ownership of the Moon?”
“The normal way.”
Good lord. He was an idiot, and some con artist had managed to sell him the Moon. She had an odd but tremendous respect for the individual with enough ambition to even try that, much less succeed.
He saw her look of confusion, and laughed. “What? I created it. Whats so odd about that?”
“You created the Moon.”
“Yeah.”
“You are only capable of creating one thing at a time.”
“I am now that I'm in the Staff. I'm the Gift of Creation, limited so that the gift will be valuable. But I'm older than humanity and the faunus. And before those things, I was just the Spirit of Creation. I didn't have those limits.”
“So repairing the Moon is proof that you can surpass the limits that have been imposed upon you?” If he was trapped in a situation that he resented, that was inherently dangerous. He couldn't be released from it without disastrous consequences, the debacle with Jinn had proved that.
“No... I like being the Gift of Creation. I am tied to every artist, every engineer, every child that ever made a snowman. Its wonderful. But the Moon...” He sighed.
“The Moon was the first thing I ever created. Father made me. He taught me about the world, and my place in it. It was filled with amazing things, and my responsibility was to make more amazing things. When my training finished, he said the planet needed a satellite. He said to make it beautiful.”
“There is a majesty to it. But why change it now? Its broken state is its most distinctive feature, have your artistic tastes changed?”
“I didn't make it broken!” He snarled. “It was a perfect sphere, except for the jaw dropping peaks and valleys. They made calming, smooth shapes when viewed from a distance. I made it bright, and gave it a predictable orbit so that every living thing, once there were any, could use it to tell the time of year and find their direction. The phases synced perfectly to the seasons and the years.”
He sat down on the floor, and his voice was quiet. “I made it white, so it would reflect the light of the sun, and the world. Father's works. Because... because...”
He trailed off.
“When I showed it to him, he smiled. He said I had made him proud. I thought he understood all the effort, all the meaning I'd managed to glean from three words.”
Tanya made a deliberate effort to stop assuming things. The emotions of this conversation had already swung wildly.
“Later, I become this Gift of Creation. A long time later, the Staff is made corporeal, and I get summoned. And my Moon is fucking broken!”
He slams his fist into the window. The whole room shakes but surprisingly, nothing breaks. Or perhaps unsurprisingly, nothing is destroyed.
Tanya patted his arm sympathetically. “It can be devastating, to have your work undone. Starting again despite that takes strength. And we can probably deal with whoever did this, if we can find out who it was.”
“I know who it was. It was Uncle, throwing another fit. It is not about that. Destruction and I spent millennia undoing each other's work. We got used to it. What pisses me off is that Father didn't fix it! It would have taken him a day! Maybe less! He would have had the time! And I know he knows about it, because its his power keeping the center of mass stable!”
The blue man ran his hand through his hair.
“Did he not care? Whenever Uncle or Destruction broke something on Remnant, he always sent me to make it again. But it was always his work that he was sending me to repair. My work, my first and most important work, the one I thought he loved? He never bothered too.”
His shoulders slumped. “We're too pure. All of us. A mortal would have had other parts of themselves to fall back on. They would have gotten over it by now. But Creation is all I've got, its all I am. Fourth oldest being in the world, and I'm still throwing a hissy fit because Daddy threw my drawing in the trash. The part of me that isn't a primal force fell to pieces when my Moon did.”
Tanya was pretty sure already, but she needed to ask, just to try and put this conversation back on the long forgotten rails. “And is there a relation between this and the insistence on exact instructions only?”
“I swore I wasn't going to do anything he told me to do until I got an explanation. Which I'm never going to get, because he's dead. But I can't actually go against my nature and refuse to create. I don't even want to. So total, blind obedience is the only rebellion left to me. I will do exactly what is asked of me, and nothing else. I'm never going to be tricked again, and put my soul into something that will be discarded.”
Malicious compliance was a tricky problem to deal with. Firing an employee who hadn't made an error you could specifically point to was bad for morale. Ambrosius wasn't an employee so much as an equal partner. The problem was ultimately one of motivation.
Providing further motivation to someone you had literally promised the literal moon was difficult. Time to the trickiest part of Human Resources. Dealing with humans. Or spirits.
“I am... familiar with some aspects of the situation. Powers you can't control laying claim to your destiny. Effort and sacrifice being demanded and then discarded. Of beings demanding total devotion, and doing nothing to earn it.”
“I really don't think you understand.”
Dammit, she was not a psychologist! It was in the healthcare package, but she needed this solved now, not six months from now.
“Fine then. Please correct my errors as I go. There is an association in your mind between the Moon, and your worth as a person.”
“Thats not—”
“—The Moon is broken, therefore the God of Light doesn't care that its broken, and therefore he doesn't care if you are broken, and the knowledge breaks you.”
“Yes, fine, you've proved your point, I'm assuming he doesn't care, and that assumption might be false.”
“My point is not yet stated, and that isn't it, not in the least. His actions seem to prove his apathy beyond reasonable doubt.”
“You don't know that! There might be something, some circumstance that could have explained it. People are complicated; gods even more so.”
“Maybe I am wrong. But even if I'm right, it doesn't matter. You didn't make the Moon beautiful for him.”
“What?! Yes I did!”
“No you didn't! You made the Moon beautiful because you like making things.”
“Because father made me that way!”
“So what?”
“What do you mean so what? Its my nature!”
“Yes, its your nature. The God of Light doesn't own Creation, he doesn't own the Moon, and he doesn't own you. You are the rightful owner of at least the latter two, and possibly all three. He doesn't get an opinion on how valuable any of them are.”
“Father could literally make any of those things with a thought, and unmake them just as easily.”
“The power he wielded while alive is not in question. I have no doubt he could kill you, or obliterate your soul, or rewrite your mind, or do any number of horrible things. But the fact remains that your soul is yours, and it doesn't matter if he doesn't care. He could hate you, and that would not change your worth a single cent, because he isn't buying and you shouldn't be selling.”
Ambrosius stood up
“How are you less human than I am? I can't just decide I don't care what he thinks. He's my Father. That isn't some empty word, or some abstract term of reverence. He raised me. He's who I talked to when I fell for a mortal. I followed his advice and those were the happiest decades of my existence. You don't know his wisdom, and you didn't see the care he put into every crawling thing in this world. We once spent three days debating how many scales a fish should have.”
“Did you ever win these debates?”
“Occasionally. More often, we were able to find a solution that neither of us had thought of initially.”
“Then...” Then what? The God of Light was hardly everything he was advertised as, but he was not the scum that Being X was. Or at least not the same sort of scum.
“Then I don't understand. I don't understand you, I don't understand your father, and I don't understand why the Moon being broken means Miss Tenebre is going to walk with a limp for the rest of her life. Rationally, you shouldn't be doing anything out of protest if the person you're protesting is no longer even capable of responding. Rationally, either value what he wanted high enough to do it properly, or value what he wanted low enough to not care what he thinks and do what you want, which is to do it properly! You are caught in a fine tuned and contradictory set of desires.”
Ambrosius stood taller. Literally taller, he could choose his own height.
“You do not want to get into contest of rationality with me. I have millennia of experience watching the mortal races. If I see one more inventor trying to build a bigger weapon in the name of stopping war, I am going to do absolutely nothing, because otherwise I wouldn't have time to do anything else. The contradictions in me pale in comparison, and have caused far less devastation. I don't get to tell you to just stop making war, you don't get to tell me to just get over my issues.”
Tanya glared.
“You know what? No. I do want that contest. We entered our contract as equals, lets fight it out as equals.”
Ambrosius blinked. “Alright. Lets do this. You are literally fighting a war for peace. It is the most transparent, most basic lie ever told. To themselves or anyone else. I agreed to help because you're the only party willing to give me anything I want.”
“False. I am fighting a war for survival. If all four Kingdoms immediately made war on each other after Salem is stopped and the Silver Company disbands, I will shrug and retire to a distant island.”
“False again,” Ambrosius said. “I am the Gift of Creation. I may not be linked to your soul, but I am ancient. My memory stretches back before writing, before language, before fire, before sharpened rocks. Do not think you can lie to me about what you are trying to create. You could retire to that island right now, and live out your whole life before Salem got to it. You are another general trying to create a better world. Through war. It never works.”
“I do not take kindly to beings claiming to be greater than me telling me what I am or what I should do. I'm not familiar with the history of this world, so you'll have to fill me in. Did it really never work? No rebellion has ever replaced a tyrant with something more just? No coalition has ever stopped an aggressive regime from consuming all in its path? You condemn war, but Salem has made her position clear. The status quo is unacceptable.”
“The status quo is all any mortal born on Remnant has ever known, save two. Your war will cause escalation and devastation, above and beyond what is normally suffered. And you will certainly fail, like every other attempt before you. You know this. Rationally, either abhor devastation and suffering enough to avoid this war, the war you claim to hate, or be apathetic enough about devastation and suffering to avoid this war, the war you claim to hate. You are caught in a fine tuned and contradictory set of desires.”
Ambrosius look inordinately pleased at turning her words against her. “And your homeworld, unless I am greatly mistaken, does not have a Salem. Is it truly so pure and good a place? A great number of people have spent a lot of time creating the weapons you carried with you for it to be some idyllic paradise.”
“Earth is decidedly imperfect. And with honesty, I am personally one of the more glaring imperfections. Hundreds killed directly. Thousands by my command. Most of it for my own survival.”
“But this war?” Tanya said, gesturing sharply at the ground beneath her feet. “Here, we've both established that I'm after more than my own survival. I am fighting because I cannot accept Salem. My only option is to fight this war and win it. Maybe after I've won I can go about being peaceful and safe. My belief that there is something better on the other side may be irrational, but it is the belief that I have.”
“And maybe once my Moon gets put back together and I can pretend it never happened, I can pretend I'm fine.”
“Why would you want pretend it never happened?”
“...Because it was deeply unpleasant, and behavior has been shameful?”
“There is a craft from my homeland. Broken objects are repaired with gold in the cracks. It highlights where the damage was, because the damage is part of the history of the object.”
“So its more beautiful for having been damaged. Huh. We don't have that here.”
“You know, I always saw it a different way. If it really made it better, we would smash working objects and repair them, but everyone agrees that defeats the purpose. Its a battle scar. Having one proves that maybe you didn't duck in time, but also that you were strong enough to live anyway. An object that has been repaired is something that was valuable enough to be repaired, and the gold is drawing attention to the proof. Its like the object is shouting to the world that the forces keeping it together are stronger, more important, more real, then the forces trying to break it.”
Ambrosius sat quietly, bathed in moonlight as it fell through the window.
“...How much gold do you think it would take to put the Moon back together?”
Tanya blanched. “That... what?! I don't think there's that much gold on Remnant!”
“Yeah...”
Scrambling, she tried to think of something. “But... maybe there is some beneath the surface tectonic plates? With your help, we might be able to mine the mantle.”
The spirit raised an eyebrow. “Won't that crash the markets or something? People keep getting weird about gold. You need a lot but not too much, or it won't be valuable.”
“Rarity doesn't give value, only expense. It would be better if gold were abundant enough to use as wallpaper, but there is so little that only the people who are willing to pay the most for it can use it. Its actually a technique that cartels use, artificially restricting supply to dramatically increase per unit profits.”
“Cartels do that. Huh.”
He got up, and brushed the non-existent dust off his legs. “Right. Well, I want what I said earlier. Enough gold to put my Moon back together. I'll help you get it. And... and now that I realize I'm only being payed in promises. I want something else. Something now.”
“More gold than has ever been mined, too much for anyone to even guess how much is needed, shipped to the literal Moon, which you also want, and you want more?”
“Yes. I want, once week to be handed to an artist. They use me to make whatever they want for a few hours. No weapons, no armor. Nothing for making weapons or armor. I want you to be honest on this, not just literally interpret my words and look for loopholes.”
“Thats... fine.” The cost for that was likely negative. Any number of creators would pay through the nose for the opportunity, or she could have it as an employee bonus.
“But still, this started as a disciplinary hearing, and I can't help but notice you are walking away with a raise.”
“That reminds me! I need a few days with a forge, a smith, and these materials.”
Tanya's scroll buzzed, and she went through the list.
“Five pounds of metal debris from the explosion, and a few ounces of gold?”
“Tenebre is a good engineer. She trusted me, and I broke that trust. I can't fix her limp, and I can't pretend I didn't cause it. But I can at least show that her trust means enough to me to at least try to repair it. I'm going to make her a cane, but anything I make with my power will just disappear when I make a new thing. So I'm going to guide a smith as he creates it for me.”
“I cannot guarantee this gift will be well received,” Tanya said cautiously.
“And I can't guarantee you will win this war of yours. Lets do our best and deal with the fallout.”