tushanshu | [video] the real tragedies of life occur in such an inartistic manner

[It's video, so it's clear that Dorian looks the same. Still the bright roses of youth on his cheek, still the crisp dark curls on his head. The candour of youth in his face, and 'youth's passionate purity' in his smile. To look at him, you'd think he had kept himself unspotted from the world—even if all that the blue smoke around him is from one of Lord Henry's opium-tainted cigarettes.

But that is the visual half of things. As for the audio half?]

1986. The summer. [For audio, there is something torn in that low and musical voice, something of electrohouse's wretched distortion ripping the guts out of the base and leaving the jagged beat in its wake.

Dorian laughs.] It was 1986, it was the summer, and Highlander came out for UK audiences. Crooned over scenes of loss, Freddie Mercury asks a question he'll never need to answer: "Who wants to live forever?" [The cigarette held away, conductor holding the note to let the question hang.]

[And callously, we're back.] Contemporary efforts in medicine might suggest 'just about everyone,' but in stories about immortals, the weariness is always more loss of people than loss of time. It's more that you're watching your granddaughter's funeral than it is that the shop beside the graveyard is a chain electronics place instead of the private member's club where you met her grandmother decades ago.

[Another drag of the cigarette. He is still smiling a pleasant, youthful smile.] But it occurred to me, speaking with Rebecca, that that sense of loss, of friendships brief as mayfly lives, is one we all get to share here. It's not a curse of immortality, something known only in a long term. It's frequent, repetitive, and to all intents and purposes, mundane. We foreigners just lose people, over and over and over and over, and there is never any resolution to any of it. Like the workroom of a perfectionist, it's a slaughterhouse of unfinished stories, and the corpses just keep piling up. Only corpses would give more closure than disappearances, and we aren't likely to be here ourselves by the time we can hold a funeral.

So we get used to it. We cope and we carry on. [Cigarette between his fingers, he gives a salute that somehow doesn't come across as sarcastic.] Congratulations on all the recent efforts, and good luck to everyone still with us in the future.

[Dorian holds up a mobile phone (circa 2007) with all lightness of touch and tone.] Does anyone have anything to for a mobile's battery? I left the charger in the 21st century, and I'd like to get my music off of this, but it gave out.

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[Oh, Vanessa. For her sake, he switches to private.] But there has been sufficient circumstantial evidence, I'd hazard.

[He laughs a little, unable to help himself.] The Emperor is clearly capable of moving souls around. Who knows where ours might end up placed? There could be a dozen identical bodies of Dorian Gray, but only one soul. That is the reality. Everything else is empty imitation.

[She appreciates it.] There have been rumors and guesses, and I'm sure people have found out the same way that I did or through other means. [A beat.] But I don't think everyone even knows that it's a possibility.

[He's right, of course, and she's thought about that. A lot.] Yeah, but... If the soul is in that body, - [She pokes her finger into the screen, at him.] - doesn't it make that body you?

It can be a sensitive subject. I hope I haven't ruffled any feathers speaking of it publicly. [He won't be terrible upset if it turns out he has.]

[The light little smile persists. It is hard for it not to.] As long as the soul resides there, yes. But if the soul finds a new home—another body, for example—well then, that becomes more complicated, does it not?

[Somehow, she doesn't quite believe him on that.] I doubt people will really notice. They'll stick their heads in the sand and pretend it's not happening. [She doesn't sound bitter about it, just sad.

There's a joke she's missing here, isn't there?] I'm not totally unfamiliar with the idea, trust me. I've seen people possessed with two souls and people just... having their souls sucked out.

A little more pessimistic than I expected from you, Vanessa. I thought I'd have to play the cynic in this one. [Sorrow is cousin to resignation, in Dorian's genealogies. At least bitter cynicism contains an anger that might fight back.

And yes. Yes there is. One he isn't offering up immediately.] Have you? I've seen a little of the former—not as much of the latter, but often intimately enough for both that I couldn't call myself unfamiliar. What does that sort of thing do to a person, where you're from?

I'd like to call it more realistic than pessimistic. I was like that before, the ostrich. [Not so much now. Now she just faces things and figures out how to deal as she goes.]

I guess it would depend. On the kind of person that you are, and what you experienced. [She's quiet for a moment.] I had mine taken before, locked up somewhere I would never have been able to escape. I'd like to not lose it again.

[He knows all about hiding your head in the sand. Soft smile, and a shake of his head, and he focuses on the second half of her words.] Of course. To be torn from your soul—in any universe, it must be a miserable experience. I am glad you found it again.

[Vanessa makes a face.] I didn't find it. The guy who took it, he just... gave it back to me.

[A pause. People don't do that, in Dorian's experience.] Change of heart?

[She shifts around a bit.] Kind of. I did something kind for him, and he wasn't allowed to harm me any longer.

That sounds like a long and rule-bound story.

[It sounds like fairylogic and questions of the old ways, really.]

It's... Sort of? On both counts.

[video] the real tragedies of life occur in such an inartistic manner

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