Grrl Power #1052 - Dateus interruptus

Thank you for the support! You guys are awesome! 

Some mixed opinions on Deus's extra-judicial cleanup crew for the last comic, though we can see here that Deus does have some fairly strong feelings on the nature of thresholds, vis-à-vis innocence.

The thing is, while Vale isn't... entirely capricious when it comes to killing, at the same time, she's also the kind of person who might not remember each and every single person she's killed. So imagine Deus sitting her down and making her watch an hour of video about a little girl growing up impoverished in some African village, hiding a coloring book under a piece of scrap corrugated siding so she could look at pictures of animals she'd never seen before, barely surviving measles due to endemic childhood malnutrition, then struggling through school, joining one of those "keep other criminals out of my neighborhood even though my gang does some crime but it's pretty mild compared to some of the other gangs which is how we justify it to ourselves" gangs, yadda yadda yadda, and Vale impatiently tapping her foot, demanding to know why she has to watch this, and juuuust as she is barely starting to root for the young woman, the video cuts to a picture of Vale slicing her in half.

Not in some sort of collateral damage incident, but in a capricious, "get out of my way, brat!" way during an incident when she was chasing down some guy who emptied an AK-47 at a Doctors Without Borders convoy that Deus was meeting with.

And then to really twist the dagger in Vale's side, the video says "Now, let's learn more about little Najwa's short life."

I would initially question where would Deus dig up 10 hours of footage about some girl living in some extremely poor village, but as he's been steadily improving Galytn for a decade, by now most of the tiny country does have electricity and most citizens have cell phones. Not like, the $1,200 top of the line latest Galaxy Ultra Pro Xtreme or whatever, more like the ones that are $300 but still do 90% of what the top end do, they just don't have 9 cameras built into them and they have 4GB of ram instead of 256.

My next question would be, did he put the presentation together himself? Cause running multiple businesses and developing a country and running a war or two, plus Alari diplomacy and presumably wining and dining US Congressmen or whatever else goes on in securing business interests all over the place probably keeps him pretty busy.

The real question is, why would Deus put up with a henchman who capriciously kills innocents if he's a stickler for not killing innocents if at all possible? Well, she's fiercely loyal to him for reasons yet unknown, and is insanely dangerous. And let's be realistic, it's the same reason you don't brig Maxima for breaking some soldier's hands before handcuffing him (possibly but almost definitely not an accident given how strong she is) when she caught him mid-rape. She has the same value to the military as an entire naval battle group, so she gets a little extra leeway, no matter how vociferously some people in command yell "give her an inch..." Similarly, Vale is one of Deus's special projects. He's hoping to focus her more psychopathic tendencies and aim her at appropriate targets.

Also, if she had killed a little girl and not some slightly morally gray gang member, it would have gone down differently.

On a lighter note, while looking up regional Mozambique foods, I came across piri-piri sauce. As that area of Africa has echoes of Portuguese colonization, piri^2 sauce can be traced back to there. I ordered some from Amazon on a whim. It's... okay? I'm not a big hot sauce eater, mostly because a lot of hot sauce is 95% vinegar and sodium, and the sodium I can do without, and I don't ever put vinegar on food unless it's malted vinegar and the food is fried fish. Piri piri is smokier. It's better than tabasco, but I don't tend to eat a lot of food that would really benefit from hot sauce outside of the occasional bit of tex-mex, and I have taco sauce or salsa for that. So I have a 4-pack of fairly mild hot sauce with nothing to really put it on. Ooh! I know, I'll make red beans and rice. That'll be a good use for it.