Cohost writing prompt: @Making-up-Monsters — Monster who can't do this again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Ag
"The Khroneion," the skinny lady with the tired eyes says, "is a classical sort of monster. The dream-logic of a fairy tale, the arbitrary disproportionate vengefulness of ancient Greek myth, that kind of...vibe. The Khroneion punishes people for avoidable failings, by making them re-live their mistake over and over until they manage to do better."
"So is it, like, more of a Furies thing?" Opposite her in the diner booth, the student idly stirs her coffee. "The designated enforcers for specific crimes? Or more of a, like you said, fairytales, more of a Grimm thing. Meet the — what was it, Khroneion? — meet it on the road, and if you cross it, get the curse upside the head?"
"Sometimes," the lady says, and rubs her eyes, "It's hard to remember."
"What kind of crimes does the — what did you say it's called?"
"The Khroneion."
"I never heard of that one. Ancient Greek, was it?"
"Something like that."
"I'll have to look it up in the library." The student's brow wrinkles momentarily, as if some kind of doubt has touched them with the edge of its long shadow: when did they last go to the library? "Anyway! What kind of crimes does it punish? Like, specific ones? Or just, you know, it's judgin' time, whaddaya got?"
The lady pinches the bridge of her nose. "I don't know that crimes is the way to describe it, really," she says. "More — times you let yourself down, as much as anything? But in a way that hurt other people, too."
"So more of a hardline Jiminy Cricket with a reset button. Do it until you get it right, young lady!"
"...A what?" the lady says blankly.
"So more of a — hang on." The student cocks her head, as if listening to something far away. "Huh. Do you know, I think I must have heard of this thing somewhere before? I'm getting wicked déjà vu over here. The Khroneion's, like, a disappointed parent, right? You let yourself down. Do it again."
"Sort of," the lady agrees tiredly.
"But. I mean. How does that work? Do the people it judges know they're being judged? Do they remember how they acted the first time? Otherwise they're not really learning anything, it's just brute-forcing the possible outcomes until you get one you like, right? But surely if they do remember everything, you risk leaking, I dunno, knowledge. That they couldn't have gleaned from what ends up being the canonical outcome. This doesn't sound—"
"Look, it's mythic. It wasn't exactly devised to withstand the intellect of the Youtube plot hole critique generation."
The student grins. "Hey, don't get grumpy," she says, and nudges one the lady's feet under the table with her own.
"Have we—" the student frowns over her coffee. "I dunno. Have we met before? I could almost swear—"
"I don't think so."
"Maybe a lecture where the professor got sidetracked into talking about Greek myth? I could swear—"
"As if a student ever learned anything from a lecture," the lady says, grinning lopsidedly.
"No, look, ACAB, right? It's fucking typical of Greek myth, is what it is." The student points her spoon accusingly. "The Greek dieties are a bunch of reality-TV-grade dirtbags, but at the same time they have the self-conferred and absolute right to be judgey about other peoples' shit. Bam, you're a tree. Bam, you're a, I dunno, fig? Bam, gonna fuck your wife. Who gave Doctor Whomst'd've the authority to haul people before a jury of one?"
"I think you're applying a very different cultural contextual standard to the Khroneion than it would apply to itself."
"Well, fuck its cultural contextual standard. That's what I'd say, if I found myself cursed to a self-improvement time loop. Fuck your time loop, how dare you."
"How many sugars are in that coffee?"
The student shrugs.
"You can't apply that kind of reasoning to a mythic thing, though," the lady says, half to herself, staring out of the diner window. "It's a force of nature. It's definitional to the monster, that's why it's a monster. It can't doubt what it does. It can't be repurposed or recontextualised or — or rehabilitated. You can't teach it new tricks. There's no changing the paradigm."
"Old myths get repurposed and reinterpreted all the time," the student says. "Serial numbers filed off. Names unglued and passed around. Shticks transplanted to whoever else is trendy this century."
"No, but — that's myths. If the monster was a real, a literal thing about which myths happened to have been constructed, the reframings and repurposings wouldn't feed back to the object."
"Whatever we say about the vegetable lamb of Tartary, the cotton bush grows just the same," the student agrees. "But we're talking about myths."
"Doubt," the lady says, "would be a dangerous thing to introduce to an elemental force of summary judgement."
"Well, it would certainly be a knock to your self-esteem, if you suddenly converted to the viewpoint that your entire existence of sentencing people to community service was insupportable cop shit," the student agrees.
"Worse than that," the lady says, staring outside, eyes haggard. "The cop shit, as you put it. The sentencing. That's in the nature of the monster. It's just what happens. It sees your failing, the avoidable failing you committed, and it sentences you to it again until you can do better; so if it sees itself as, in making the judgement, committing an avoidable failing—"
"Well, that's not fair, is it? If the judgement is an involuntary process, but it's judging itself as if it did it on purpose."
"Well, it's just had its world rocked. It's just comprehended cop shit as a concept, and complicity."
"Well, shit, that gets recursive, doesn't it, though? Because it's sentenced to do it again and again and again until it chooses to do it differently, but every time it comes to it, it involuntarily does the only thing that's in its nature to do, and then it judges itself for that again—"