A Shadow of Yourself [OPEN}

[im_pancake]

Who: Twilight Sparkle and YOU
What: Twilight decides to face her Shadow and confront the unsettled problems she has.
Where: Palitutu's lab
When: 11/14
Warnings: None ATM

Twilight let out a sigh. She really didn't want to do this, but she had to. There was a lot of unsettled things she needed to solve and she needed to start somewhere. And that somewhere had to be facing down her Shadow. Others had done it so far, so now it was her turn. In Palitutu's lab, Twilight stood with her Moogle, Mooglton.

"Is everything ready?" Twilight asked.

"Everything is all set and ready to go-kupo!" the Moogle replied, nodding.

"Well... let's get this over with. Start it!" Twilight said. With that, the Moogle initiated the process to bring about the Shadow self. She was glad that she could still feel her regular magic - if it took her Custom Job when it came out, she'd be helpless.

"Well, well. I see you're looking quite chipper." the Shadow said, a virtual carbon copy of Twilight herself.

Comments

[im_pancake]

The Shadow Twilight just couldn't help but laugh.

"Oh, if it was only that simple, really. Back in Ponyville, things usually could get straightened out in, oh... thirty minutes at the very minimum. Maybe a song or two in-between. Here? You're lucky not to have someone's head lopped off!"

"She's right." Twilight said, hanging her head. "It's not that simple. Not when you have such extremism with life and death here. When you have people like Jack advocating saving everyone because it may tie to saving this world and you have people like Deadpool advocating just... killing everyone and letting the world sort it out."

"I've had to fight before coming here. I don't like it, but I have. But, I can't advocate either of their mindsets!"

Twilight's head shot up once more. "Killing everyone is too easy and trying to save every living thing on this planet is too naive. I feel like... if I'm going to get over all of this, to solve all of this, I... I need to take a middle path."

[neverfirstclass]

Cloud nodded in agreement. He wanted to save everyone he could, but he knew that the world wasn't a golden place. He'd heard about the end of the Wutai war from the other ShinRa grunts and he fought against their last gasp attempts at victory in Midgar. He lost friends fighting against the more radical cells of AVALANCHE. He knew what was going to happen to his hometown if he were to return to the point he left.

But he also knew that undoing those events, preventing them didn't necessarily solve the problems. And that the solutions that would come would have as much pain as they had hope. But people kept moving on.

"You're right. There's nothing wrong with hoping for the best, but the middle path is important. We need more Heroes like you Twilight. To keep us from making bad decisions out of anger or getting too wrapped up in hope." He smiled now, "You're not the only one that thinks this. And we need more people to talk about it or else we're just going to get into arguments every time something happens."

He knew his words might seem a bit sharp to Sora and Namine, but he didn't think he was going too far to say it. If you tried your hardest to save everyone but couldn't, that wasn't a failure. It would only be a failure if you gave up the fight because of that dilemma. The Heroes needed to be able to keep moving forward in the face of their troubles.

[skyofreverie]

The words are sharp but it isn't a lesson that Sora needed to learn in this moment. Maybe the real Sora could save everyone, could defeat the bad guys and still end up saving them somehow like how Axel became Lea again. Maybe he would be forced to take Xehanort's life in the final battle, maybe he'd fail to save someone but he wasn't that naive person anymore. He's failed to save people more than he'd like, certainly, but Sora doesn't see the world as light and darkness anymore.

"A middle path. Sometimes you can walk a path that would save everyone and maybe there are times when you can't save anyone at all. But that isn't the only option. We can hope to save as many people as we can but we're not perfect. Accepting one path over another isn't going to bring peace - someone is always going to protest because we're all so very different and have different opinions. We can't make everyone happy with one decision."

Sora shrugged lightly, smiling at Twilight. "Hope is important to have when these kinds of things happen, sometimes people cling to it so tightly that it's hard to see that what they want might be impossible. Am I going to do everything I can to save everyone I possibly can? Yeah, sure. Am I going to be upset when I fail to do just that? Absolutely. But I'm gonna keep going because giving up just isn't an option for me. Everyone is going to have to choose which path they want to walk and at the end of it all, you're the one who has to be okay with you did. Don't let yourself have any regrets about what your choice is. Don't let your choice change you in a way that you end up disliking. Speak up when you disagree, argue and fight for your beliefs because no one is going to do it for you. As far as I've seen, no one I've met here so far is gonna hate you for sticking to what you believe in."