(no subject)

Peter and I finally got hold of someone who could do a proper divination the other day- Aughra, the seer from The Dark Crystal. She's fascinating. Anthropology and parapsychology and xenopsych all rolled into one... anyway, she had us do a sand painting for Peter's sake, and she got a bit of a lead on what's shot his shields all to Cleveland. External influence putting something really subtle into his skull. Very nasty. I'm going to have to learn divination myself at this rate, if only so that I can trace these things down when they happen again- and they will. They always do. Isn't that the way the world works, at least for me and mine? A few minutes or hours or days of relative peace and then it just starts all over again. The disease organisms exist in isolation and never do anyone any harm until the day comes when someone puts up an HVAC unit, and then all of a sudden the ones that need to live in water of a certain temperature have what they came for, and BANG! Legionnaire's disease- and fighting it strengthens the ones that're left. But you can't stop fighting, because if you do the ones that were there when you started come roaring back. It doesn't even stop the escalation, because if you stop, no one's killing any of the germs, so everybody gets infected. It doesn't help to stop. You just have to get better at it faster than the other guy.

Anyway. Uh, I need to learn how to deal with this kind of stuff, but that's cool. I can do that. Peter's going to be on a manhunt for the guy who messed with his head, I think, which is probably good since it'll give him a sense of accomplishment when he finally runs him to ground. Me, I'm just kind of boggled by the fact that I got a revelation out of Aughra's sand-painting too. Wasn't exactly looking for one and these things never work for me anyway, but this time it did, and what I got was- this place isn't the terminus of infinite universes. There aren't infinite universes. There's enough universes that anyone who tried to count them would probably sit down and cry and declare the number to be infinite just so that they didn't have to count any more, but infinite? No. Infinite universes would require that every single choice be made, somewhere, eventually. And they're not. There are some paths never taken and some decisions never made because in order to make those decisions, the person presented with the possibility would have to be someone else entirely to make a particular choice. There is no universe where certain people do certain things, because if there were, they wouldn't be them. Human choice- sentient free will- matters.

All the Myriad Ways is wrong.

This is heavy stuff. I think I need to talk to Master Qui-Gon about it.

(Ironically enough, my mp3 player just randomly launched into "All This Time", by Sting. Which, I might note, ends with the following lines:

All this time
The River flowed
In the falling light
Of a Northern sun
If I had my way
I'd take a boat from the River
Men go crazy in congregations- they only get better one by one...

That they do, Mr. Sumner. That they do.)