Hah!

What world do you live in? Can I be goddess of that one?

Of course not. Humans are boundlessly selfish. All they think about are more efficient methods of destroying the world. So chopping down trees doesn't cut it for your village? Let's crosscut entire forests! What, your war isn't destructive enough? OK, let's raze everything in our paths! As long as my enemy dies, who cares if all of nature dies with it!

The people here are... I guess they're OK, on a whole -- don't you dare tell anyone I said that -- but even they're completely blind to their own faults.

You know what they say when I tell them they'd better learn to change? They say it's none of a god's business. Humans are the dominant race, and they can do whatever they want, however they want, and forget the other 10 million things living on the planet.

[That's fine because Viridi can go on about this for hours. She practically writes a dissertation on it once daily.]

And you know the worst thing?

We created them! We thought it was such a good idea! Make something like us. Make something with the capability to love and honor us, to love the world they were given, and to use what they had to achieve the greatest of heights! Of all creatures, humans were the most blessed.

You were supposed to be so much... more.

[A sigh. Viridi sounds intensely bitter and unhappy.]

...Anyway. That's enough of that. No one ever wants to listen to the truth, anyway.

Let's go on to Question Two; I'll give you a bye on the first one.

OK, Question Two!

So you're walking in the woods and you see a guy with a gun and an angry bear with her cubs. Oh no! He's raising it to shoot! What do you do?

A: Shoot the guy and feed him to the bear.
B: Hit the guy with a rock and feed him to the bear.
C: Hit the guy with a rock and then divide him into pieces so the cubs can feed more easily.
D: Leave well enough alone because you're a total wuss who doesn't want to get near a bear.
E: Help him kill the bear and then leave the cubs to die without their mother to protect them, you horrible monster.

[Viridi seems to have the miraculous ability to transition back into her bizarre idea of conversation without skipping a beat.]

...Eh.

Too many nuances just complicates the questions. The important thing is to establish which side you're on so I can decide whether or not to spare you in the coming apocalypse!

[She's joking. ...Probably.]

And, again, if you think that, I'd like to move to your planet. Do I need a green card or something? I'm pretty much the definition of green, anyway.

The people brought here are 'heroes', ostensibly, but they're still hopelessly self-centered as a species.

None of the other animals complain about their lot. Does the fish think, 'gee it's not fair I have to swim underwater I wish I had lungs'? Does the antelope say 'why am I a prey species, I never asked for this'? Nature is nature. The world doesn't exist for the benefit of humans; you're just another form of life on the planet. Call it cruelty, but you're putting labels on something that doesn't fit inside your labels. It just is. And it doesn't care what you think. It's the way it's been since the beginning of time.

The only reason you're special is that you have the capacity to call it 'cruelty' at all. When you try to fit the world into the limited concepts that make sense in your head, you come up with all kinds of fantastic excuses about why you should be allowed to make horrible choices. But that's all they are. Excuses. The cycle of life continues, and no other creatures besides humans try so darn hard to destroy the very world around them for their own gain.

This is the way the world works. Humans have a choice - to destroy it, to tolerate it, or to work in harmony alongside it. 99 times out of a hundred, you choose to destroy it for what you think will benefit you. In the short term, this works out. It's really no wonder that you decide on this path. It makes life easy, minimizes pain and it's just so much more fun than being responsible; anyway, there's always more forests to tap into, more oceans to fish! What you don't see is that in the long term, you herald your own destruction.

A thousand years pass in a blink of an eye, and only I can see where things are headed. Twenty generations of humans come and go, and no one remembers the way things used to be. The way things are supposed to be. You think, 'well, it's only a little worse than it was before', but if it only ever gets worse, how in the world is it supposed to be sustainable? The humans who have the foresight to understand don't last much longer than a few decades, and then it's back to the decay and destruction.

I'm not here to level this city. It's counterproductive. But I'd like to point out that what you think humans have 'built up for themselves'?

Meat produced in slaughterhouses where animals are massacred daily by the thousands. Gas and oil and coal being siphoned from the earth, depleting all resources and draining it dry. Factories that churn out toxic chemicals, plants that create pollutants that eat the atmosphere, and mounds and mounds of waste piling up in landfills to rot.

That's what humans have created here.

The sad thing is that you all think it's totally normal and you couldn't survive without any of it.

Take your time! The mass pollution isn't going anywhere!

We'll start with Question 3 the next time we talk - I hope you know your microbiomes.

Oh.

That's almost... sweet.

[Viridi makes a 'hm' of curiosity before the mental link breaks off. Ginko will probably be relieved to feel that his mind is his own again.]