I’d like to take a moment to clarify some misconceptions and ignorance regarding me and the Light. There seems to be a lot of garbage on this point.
It is not the case that I particularly enjoy calling Servants of the Light, nor do I have them on speed dial, nor are they necessarily going to choose to appear each time I may call.
I am accountable to the Servants of the Light when I call them. If I have wasted their time, I don’t expect that things will go very well for me.
When I do call them they may do a variety of things according to their own view of the matter and judgement. Predicting that as a human is not really a reliable activity. The Servants themselves do not necessarily take an interest in every person with a soul stain. As I’ve mentioned Servants of the Light don’t kill every demon they meet…just the evil ones. I don’t kill or banish every demon I meet…just the ones trying to eat me or my neighbors or invade my world as a parasite. I feel that’s fair really.
IF I have called on the Light you can rest assured it is because:
- I am hip deep in Servants of the Dark
- There is an artifact or substance of elemental evil to be dealt with
- Someone around me is in serious need of more healing than I can manage
- Someone around me has done something incredibly daft that may result in the contamination of numerous individuals with evil.
As far as special healing and removing darkness from someone…
- This is not fun, it is about as much fun as repairing an active sewer line.
- It is exhausting.
- It is not glamorous.
- I generally do it only upon request of someone able to give consent…and even then only on people who are not likely to go right back out and get themselves screwed up with the same dumb choices that got their souls smutty to begin with.
For those of you going about saying…oooh I’ll not go near Gudrun because I might get smited…get a grip.
For those of you more afraid of the Light than you are of the Dark, I feel sorry for you.
For those of you who are so afraid of the Light you would rather cling to the Dark, you may want to rethink your priorities.
For those of you who are waxing long and loudly on the terrible things the Servants of the Light do and are not taking responsibility for your own choices to do crappy things, or are ignoring the stuff people you are referring to did in order to earn their particular smitings….cut it out.
Meanwhile, if you want to be paranoid about me go ahead, but you know what I don’t think I have enough personal ability to make up for the pace of the bad decisions some of you are making. If I did, it would be a long term career just trying to keep up.
So please don’t accuse me of trying to turn you into something you don’t want to be or do. If I offer you help, take it or leave it; but please don’t play stupid games with me trying to figure out how evil you can be or think you are and still be around me.
Gudrun,
The only information I have on you comes from your keyboard from your own wiki comments and e-mails to the spec ops list.
I would take your proclamation of quitting Spec Ops more seriously if you stopped posting to the wiki and the e-mail list. Whether or not you quit Spec Ops or stay quit from it is entirely up to you.
Aside from feeling insulted by your insinuation that I am ripe for recruitment by the dark, I have nothing against you. I have never met you and in my opinion neither of us knows enough about the other to make any sort of judgement of the other.
I am glad that you don’t call upon your SotL allies frivolously. In the event that you and I ever work together, I do ask that you warn your Spec Ops allies before invoking your SotL allies if it is at all possible for you to do so.
I do not appreciate your attitude of blaming the victim when people who are not directly serving the Dark get smited or killed. If someone signs on with the Dark then they have made their bed and can get smited in it. If on the other hand someone isn’t acceptable to the SotL for some other reason then I very much do not approve and no I will not shut up about that.
People sin. We miss the mark. We make mistakes. Sometimes we do the wrong thing. That is part and parcel of the human condition. At our best we work hard to make up for our mistakes, to become better people and make wherever we live a better place. At our worst we become monsters.
I work very hard to do my best. Sometimes I fail. Then I pick myself up, have a good cry, and try again.
I believe in Free Will. I believe in letting people make our own choices and I believe in holding each and every person accountable for those choices, myself included. I believe that the right and responsibility to hold that accountability resides in us, not some outside actor like the SotL.
I resent the SotL because they infringe on our responsibility to judge our own, because they have judged, harmed, and killed people I care about, and because they do not submit themselves to our judgement the way they expect us to submit to theirs.
None of this is directed at you personally, Gudrun. Heck, I might even like you if I ever meet you. Dunno. I like to think that my fear of the SotL and the SotD is reasonable and justified, but since I have spent 4 years as a Spec Ops agent I’ll own that I might be paranoid. One thing you can be sure of. I won’t play stupid games with you. I call things as I see them.
It is not clear to me that the lists are necessarily run by Spec Ops there are people from other services and with other affiliations here. But, if they are, it may be that the same tech boffins who were supposed to find out about the attributes of those super suits have sys admin duties over clearing out accounts.
Speaking of those suits, it is really interesting to notice that the same people who are most likely to give me grief over the supposed interference of Servants of the Light with their free will and autonomy dove into that latex like it was a cool pool on a hot day. Those were the suits that actually changed your level of intelligence, loaded you with pre-programmed compulsions, invaded your body and fed off of it as a parasite?
That strikes me as pretty darned ironic.
What makes people ripe for recruitment by the dark is: fear! suspicion! pride! and decisions made in ignorance. So yes, you are ripe for recruitment as are many of you who have allowed your fears to run away with you to such an extent that you would rather cling to your fears than look at the situation you may find yourself in.
Some of you have chanced upon situations or done foolish things that have accumulated darkness. This could have been well intentioned at the time, or done in ignorance, or because you simply didn’t realize what strings were attached to the power, toy, or short term help you were being offered. Hey, we all make bad calls or desperate ones.
The dark loves that I think!
But what it loves even more are people who once they realize they are in a snare decide to firmly stay even partially in the trap because they are too afraid to go get some actual help. Or they are too afraid to associate with people of the Light because of either being exposed or irrationally thinking they may be “changed against their will”…so what does that leave? More time in the dark, more time for the agents of the dark to deepen the hole you’ve dug for yourself.
Here’s a clue, you can always choose the dark! There’s nothing stopping you from doing that. Getting help won’t prevent you from going right back out and getting smutty or stupid or both. But over time the more smut you carry, the more it weighs you down, corrupts your viewpoint…you can’t even see a way clear, and it drags you down.
Can you swim for an hour with a pound of weight? Probably if you had to. Can you do it for years? What if that weight gradually increases? At some point it will pull you under.
But swimming with it is totally your choice.
Yes, you are accountable. But you are not the only force in the universe. If you think that, that’s called pride. You don’t have to believe those forces exist, they will whether you believe or not. And those forces also have responsibilities and roles in the multiverse.
You may prefer that only humans be accountable to humans, but that isn’t a view all other beings share. Even on St. James law is not always in human hands and often human law is superseded by those of power. Who do you think steps in when unusual forces are involved? What justice is there for the average unaware person when a being of power interferes with them, tricks them, abducts them, uses them in rituals and sacrifices? Human justice? It doesn’t even have words much less laws for this kind of thing.
The only thing that heals the dark is the light.
You have a chip on your shoulder and this is causing you to distrust and resent servants of the light and any associated with them. Oh how the dark must be laughing!
You are angry because you think they have harmed and killed people you like or care about. It is possible that you may need to accept that despite your grief for your friends that they were largely responsible for their own situation.
What justice or law existed for a group of children rescued by a mission I was on with elements of the Keys? These children were trafficked from human families in sovereign nations with police forces and laws and the whole nine yards. The kids were brutalized, raped, used in black ceremonies and blood rituals. They had free will? These children could resist, alone? Against power and magic and forces they had no way to understand?
Pfft, please.
And where was human law for them? Human justice? The police could do nothing and were stumbling fools who couldn’t compete against the forces that had taken the children. Had they been able to find them and get them back, which they weren’t, they would have had no way to deal with the arcane and spiritual harm done to these children and modern medicine would have been stretched to its limit to heal some of their physical wounds.
It was a mission prompted by the light, a situation where I joyfully and gladly and willingly accepted the guidance and direction given me and the rest of the team to go find and get those kids back.
When we did, it was the only time I have every used my ability without express consent, to be part of the team healing those kids. The parents weren’t found for some time and for those whose parents had sold them couldn’t be returned to their care. There was no human legal consent, the children were underage and too ill to consent.
I do not regret for a moment what I helped do.
Under your standards I violated their personal free will. I changed the children to the extent that some of the damage was removed and the darkness that had been placed on them was addressed. I had a lot of help and guidance from others more knowledgeable than myself to do that.
Those kids now have a chance at a normal life. That was down to the intervention of the Light. Any justice served was not human justice by any standard commonly understood.
Later, if they want to turn to the dark, that choice will be theirs, but they were prevented from being so weighed down by the damage done to them that the dark would be all they could see for the rest of their lives.
You are applying human standards to a conflict that goes beyond human understanding but which impacts humans greatly and that can’t work.
It is reasonable to accept that there are many layers of law, just as in human society there are layers of law and levels of enforcement. When you reach a point where you are breaking the law past the human level, where your actions impact more than just the people around you, you get judged at a new level.