Challenge #02400-F210: From the Ashes
Who comes to the aid of someone marked as "bad"? Where is the villain's hero? -- Anon Guest
Morality is not a binary switch. One does not flip from 'good' to 'evil' or vice versa. There's a sliding scale of evil that moves from refusing to tip your restaurant waitstaff through parking in disabled parking spaces to outright deciding that hungry people need to deserve to eat before one can give them food. After that comes definite evil, like not paying employees enough to live through to the next paycheque, overcharging rent, and believing genocidal actions are completely justified against anyone Not Us. Actual murder of innocent people is somewhere in there, but gradual murder[1] counts.
Nevertheless, despite the slow and insidious evils of the world, good exists. When the meteor wiped out most of New York, those good people came to the fore. Risking life and limb to rescue those in greater peril, forming human chains to remove the rubble. Forming bucket chains to put out the fires. Opening their homes to the homeless, giving their food to the hungry, loaning what small power they had to those in need, regardless of whether or not they were deserving. Many of those rescued were not.
Pauschia Danervries was among those who didn't deserve the effort it took to spit on her. She had spent a literal lifetime with an entourage taking care of her every want, and not acknowledging her needs as anything more than peripheral benefit. She was, in essence, a spoiled, rich brat who had never had a problem in her life. Now she had problems beyond counting. The meteor strike had taken out all the upper-class areas of her city. All the hotels, all the shopping emporiums. All the cute little bistros, restaurants, and coffee shops where she had spent most of her gifted existence. It had also taken out the stock exchange, all the banks, and most, if not all of the records that said she was a billionaire. It had taken out the data farms that could have verified her as an Instagram Influencer, Someone Famous, or even just Someone. Her purse, a bag big enough to carry two three-year-olds, had been lost in the wreckage, so she was without her phone, her social media accounts, and her father's credit card. In brief, she had lost everything.
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