your neighborhood Nightcreature/22yo/cis male pan/DE

Like I couldn't work retail as is, but if I had a yell-at-people license I'd absolutelsy be the biggest asset any company could ahve, especially if I was deployed to direct contct customer service.

I look at my face in the puddle beside the freshly shipped prime box, damning the day that Musk decided to try and split the ever shrinking land with his forces.

For a moment, I remember, better times, when google hadn't gone full skynet, when I hadn't been a bioweapon, when every action now needing to be taken was a far glimpse.

A Soldier screams out, only a few meters from me, a dead bloody lump falling into the cover, safe yet dead. I look to see what had killed him, looking upon the Tesla branded killing machine, angular armor with four bladed arms, my eyes meet its sensors, it sees me, I see it and for some reason it freezes, the insignia on its chest telling me it has been on the field for a long time it finally dawns on me

"Stabby?"

I ask, the machine remaining still, the blades compelled to move and forcibly stilled.

It looks upon me, its infrared sensors taking another sweep of me.

"Stabby!", I yell out, a tear rolling down my cheek, soldiering past the mud the same as I.

Stabby does not budge, he was recruited many years back, he has done the same unthinkable that I have.

My mind races to our time together, nights huddled up away from thunderstorms, days of mutual boredom and monotony, quiet admiration and providing.

"Do it.", I say, knowing he is holding back, knowing he does not want to, knowing the contract he signed as an AI is even worse than what I got after being integrated into Amazonlands standing military of cryo-workers.

Stabby hesitates.

"DO IT!", I scream, pulling my polymer handgun from my chest, the pointing breaches Stabbys override, he lunges, piercing me three times instantly, a last blade lifted high, stopping himself from beheading me.

I smirk, blood gushing forward from my mouth and onto Stabby, whose arms get busy wiping immediately, mirroring my tears.

Two asexuals in a kind of cover up relationship, basically both their families aren't accepting of asexuality and they are best friends playing a long game.

They decide, after 3-5ish years to finally have the wedding that will shut up the parents on either side, somewhat forcibly but they are both ok with it and willing to bare the stress. There may or may not be some level of profit incentive here too. Maybe even from both sides as well. (basically each pair of parents bribing one of our two parties into finally tying the knot)

Then, their two high school flames both show up vying for their respective lost loves, which gets the rumor machine of this rather exorbitantly huge wedding going. This compounds when at one point, in a desperate attempt to explain all of this, person A ends up in a broom closet with person B's old flame at one point.

The true twist here is the actual best friends to lovers ace romance of our main characters, as they end up seeing each other go way beyond what they thought they would do for each other.

I mean, we are bound for self destruction. Either what is happening in terms of wars and tension goes hot, or capitalism finally pulls tight or well, we just stay the path.

And what then? I reckon someone out there, someone who statistically has to be out there and as a consequence has to be far more advanced than us are either going to pity us, an empathetic reaction central to cognition as an animal on our part of the spectrum of evolution, or they are going to simply want to catalogue us and will thus save some of us for a rough interrogation.

And what if this person, this one universe unifying individual, isn't some warrior or some crazy hero chosen by fate, but simply a person explaining who we were. Where we came from. Where what we did led us. Even just someone allowing a glimpse into our world.

It's funny that the idea this came from was an old dad joke my father recited without end: "No person is without value, they can still be a bad example.".

And simply, what does the universe need besides a hero? Well, it needs a bad example. A fully carried out reason not to be a selfish asshole.

I mean, even in our world logic dictates being an asshole like that is wrong but if you take one single look around, society is 10% active assholes, 80ish%selfish or ignorant assholes and 10% people so deeply hated or traumatized they have no agency in solving humanity.

Anakin, at the height of the Clone Wars, feels burned out.

Padme is told by a visiting Diplomat of this thing called a Therapist and decides that it can't hurt to recommend it to Ani, whom accepts begrudgingly.

Lo and behold, it works, Anakin learns a lot about himself and starts feeling better, much to the chagrin of Palpatine, who now regularly schedules some guytime with Anakin in order to do some Antitherapy.