Chapter 229: Bullshitting

Rith listened to Evin's reasoning and assumed a pondering pose.

'She seems to have calmed down a bit?' Evin thought as he observed the Cosmic.

"And what would be considered acceptable and not acceptable in such communities?" Rith asked after a pause.

"Who knows? But I'm pretty sure it depends a lot on how you act as well. For example, if your job record is exceptionally clean, everyone around you will always demand excellency from you. They'll expect you to do your job perfectly, to never fail simple tasks, and for you to be adaptable to any and all situations. But, sadly, you're not perfect. You will fail some task in your life, and then you'll be exposed to the judgmental stares of those people that praised and lauded you. Your colleagues that once praised you will look at your direction with a look of schadenfreude, reveling the fact that you've finally fallen to their level," Evin spoke without reservations.

"In my opinion, it's much better to look incapable. For example, if you always act like an incompetent loser, no one will find your failures unacceptable. They'll simply chalk it off to your ineptitude and move on. And oddly, most of the time, they blame themselves for entrusting a task to the incompetent you, instead of blaming you who failed it in the first place. Your colleagues will joke about your failures and perhaps even offer to help you. From what I noticed as a certified invisible ghost; people rarely act hostile towards others that are just slightly inferior to them."

At this point, Evin was just talking about something random, completely forgetting why he was talking about these things in the first place.

"Hmm, so they would act hostile against someone way below or above their current level?" Rith asked.

"Yep, if you're one of the richest people in the World, you'll never look at a stinking homeless on the streets and register them as an actual human being. You'll just try your best to avoid them and hope they don't bother you. But if you're a struggling student of some sorts, trying to make ends meet, you'll see the homeless as just some unlucky group of people, who were simply a bit more unfortunate than you. Of course, this will not apply to every person on the world."

"After all, for better or worse, everyone is different. But for me personally, I'd be happy if people didn't expect anything from me," Evin sighed, almost tired from all the sentences he just spewed out.

"He-he, I don't think people will expect anything less than revolutionary from you," Rith joked.

"Ugh, then I'll just have to play the selfish villain card. I'm pretty sure someone from my home world will condemn me for hoarding information about Earth, even though could potentially help Alvox develop in leaps and bounds. Though obviously, I'd choose to ignore them because I don't mind being called a selfish fuckface by random strangers. Moreover, it's not like I know everything about Earth, I just know about the successful ideas and the finished end products. If someone asks me how to create them in reality, then they'd be met with an impassable wall. And besides, I don't want to talk about them in the first place, so there's also that," Evin shrugged.

'That was kinda good…' he thought as he finished speaking. This way, he made his stance about Earthen knowledge pretty clear – he'd refuse to speak of it. This meant that Rith didn't have to worry about pestering Evin to speak of Earth.

Like he hoped Rith's expression seemed to soften up a bit, compared to stern and almost desolate one she assumed a few minutes ago.

"Sometimes I forget you're 300-years-old… So wise and experienced," Rith chucked.

"I really don't feel wise and experienced, though I do know a lot of random things. Sadly, I don't really know anything extensive about most of those topics, only some surface level trivia," Evin shrugged and said: "Besides, always having to act wise and learned like the profoundly mysterious master of an art is too pretentious, I'd rather act like a dysfunctional idiot of some sorts."

"Is this about that lowering the expectations of others that you speak so dearly about?"

"I guess so... But in the end, just remember that everything's pointless and life is meaningless. We're all gonna die someday and aside from our children and our contributions, society won't really remember much about us. Even if you become an immortal like the Empress, perhaps the universe will implode one day and wipe everyone out of existence. It's better to just sleep and worry about what you're going to do tomorrow," Evin said and fell onto his bed after shutting the lights off.

Rith looked content to sleep on Evin's bed, as she made herself comfortable on one of the corners. Silence ensued in the dark, as Evin's brain happily jumped between topics, making Evin feel like this was one of those sleepless nights that occurred more and more frequently as you aged.

"Now that I think about it, how old are you anyway?" Evin suddenly broke the silence.

"I'm not quite sure, but I think I shouldn't be older than 50," Rith said after a brief pause.

Evin could see why the Cosmic didn't know her exact age, as he wasn't very sure about his own age either. But he was interested in one thing.

"Then why do you seem so socially naïve sometimes?" he asked. Surely the Cosmic was smart enough to infer some details about how society worked at this point in her life.

"You're just being rude at this point," Rith answered.

'Well, sure, but you didn't answer my question. Or is that a roundabout way of refusing to talk about it?' Evin grumbled in his mind.

"I've actually never heard about how the Elmes Group worked in detail," Evin asked randomly.

Rith's body made some noise, as the Cosmic seemed to look at Evin briefly. Evin could then hear her head plop onto the bed again and she answered the question.

"It's nothing too secretive. You'd be able to learn about it pretty easily as long as you have a friendly enough Cosmic on your side."

"And? Aren't you going to speak about it to me? Or am I not friendly enough for your standards?" Evin asked.

"I'll tell you about it later. For now, let's just sleep," Rith refused with a sigh and rustled on the bed once more.

'Ugh, so ungrateful. I worked my head off trying to console you and you just shrug my questions off like nothing happened,' Evin complained, and focused on falling asleep.

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