“Do you ever stop wanting to burn down everything you see?” Siena asked Salamander as they cleared the dungeon.

“Do you ever stop wanting to torture people?” the fire spirit answered with a question herself.

“Do you ever stop repeating that conversation?” John, slightly annoyed, added.

After splitting, the two of them had found some mutual understanding in the fact that they both had a very dark impulse that they regretted they couldn’t live out at any given moment.

While John was happy that Siena was actively partaking in social activity within the group, the repetition of these topics made it slightly annoying. “We get it, Salamander dislikes that I don’t allow her to burn stuff at any given second and you dislike that I won’t let you cut open rats. You both need other hobbies!” he said.

“You are forcing me into learning that terribly fragile instrument,” Siena reminded him.

“And how is that going?” he probed with genuine interest.

“Terribly,” Undine sang and earned herself an annoyed glare by the shadow spirit in return.

“I do not appreciate getting ratted out after keeping your secret for so long,” she hissed.

“I do apologize,” Undine mumbled, “but it probably would have been better for all of us if you hadn’t.”

“I am not here to fix your problems,” Siena crossed her arms.

“Instead, you manipulated her into doing what you thought would be the best solution,” Salamander spat out. “So much fucking better.”

“All I ever want from people is to learn to fix their own mess,” the shadow spirit defended herself. Previously, she would have dropped out of the conversation by now; it seemed the fusing and Salamander’s offer had thawed her walls quite a bit. “I wouldn’t have had to make a very forward recommendation if little Undine had been able to just decide on a course of action instead of needlessly lingering in her own misery. It reminds me too much of all the prostitutes I saved,” Siena continued on. “Useless hags.”

“Wait, what now?” John said; he had dug through her memories, but that was more of a shallow deal; “I thought you just murdered pimps and rapists because they were the interesting kind you couldn’t control.”

“What originally attracted me to these individuals was indeed infatuation,” Siena’s heels clacked over the stone floor of the dungeon. “It is hard to find proper indomitable souls that aren’t ruined by ‘morality’. Much to my displeasure, I had to learn that these kinds of people usually turn into pimps and rapists. A total turn off.”

“So, you are saying you aren’t totally evil?” Salamander cackled. “Fucking unbelievable. Literally, I cannot believe it.”

“Rich coming from the spawn of war,” Siena taunted right back. “Aside, I didn’t kill them myself most of the time. I possessed whoever they tortured and made them do it.”

“Now we are right back at aggressive manipulation,” John noted.

“What is your proposal, just let them continue being miserable?” Siena hissed at him; “All I wanted is for them to learn to take care of their own problems.”

“Out of interest, how many of them became anything but mental wrecks after your ‘help’?” he asked.

The shadow spirit opened her mouth in retort but found none.

“That’s what I thought,” John mumbled; “Perhaps you should consider changing your way to go about things? I get your logic ‘Help people to help themselves’. The idea is good, your execution is terrible.”

“…Perhaps…” Siena seemed to endure physical struggle as she pressed out these words.

“I don’t see what’s so hard. If they are bad guys, we punch them!” Sylph palavered into the fairly serious conversation, repeatedly pulling her arm back and then hitting the air. “Punch, punch, punch.”

“Sylph’s stupidity ignored,” Salamander groaned as the air spirit flew around them, still chanting that word. “Why do you even care, Siena? All you want to do is torture someone, anyone really.”

“What?!” Siena clawed at the flying blaze elemental, fishing her out of the air; “You think there is satisfaction to be had in just torturing anyone? It is entirely ungratifying to pluck a random target and just inflict pain upon their mortal shells. True pleasure is finding that one asshole who really deserves it and then slowly peeling his skin o-“

“Okay, I have heard enough about your methods,” John interrupted her, the mere hint of what she planned to do to people was already more than he needed to know, “but I want to understand you and your reasons better right now.”

 “You have been letting me down in that regard,” Siena said as she let Salamander go, “although I do love you so dearly.”

“You are so thoroughly twisted a woman,” John groaned. “How can you say you love me, and even have Observe confirm it as true, while your declared wish was to stab me in the eye not too long ago.”

The answer came after a minute of silence. “I mistakenly assumed you to be like everyone else who I ever fell in love with,” she confessed. “A right and proper bastard. Even worse is that you got all of these powers for basically free. Ah, you can’t imagine how great it feels to cut down those who think themselves invincible.”

“As someone who has played God of War, I will have to tell you that I do know that that feels great,” John said, “but did I just hear you right that you admitted to being wrong for the second time in a conversation?”

“Yes, I will not kill you.” The whole group stopped and looked at Siena, who took another two steps before she even realized that everyone’s gaze was on her.

“T-to think..,” Gnome mumbled.

“We finally did it, hurray, yay, hurray,” Sylph chirped.

“I am a fucking god amongst negotiators,” Salamander, sure that this was all thanks to her, shouted into the labyrinth.

Undine just slowly clapped with a deadpan look on her face.

“I will slice all of you open from neckline to womb,” Siena threatened while the other elementals cheered her on as if she had made a Nobel-prize worthy discovery.

“This is… such a happy moment,” John couldn’t help himself and add to the mocking by wiping away an imaginary tear. After weeks of having to keep Siena under wraps, there finally was some actual progress in her mindset.

“I would still give a lot to just torture you,” Siena whispered with a dangerous glint in her eyes. Progress didn’t mean that she was anything but a complete and utter maniac still.

“I guess I can play the sub once in a while, as long as we stay fairly vanilla,” John shrugged.

“That is not what I…” Siena groaned, her overly sexual tone breaking in frustration only to recover when she next opened her mouth. “Fine, we will play some naughty little games then, you and I.”

“But before that, you answer what I wondered about earlier. You say you don’t want to torture the innocent, yet…”

John scrambled his mind for examples of who or what Siena had tortured that had not deserved it. Janna, the information broker, had been upon his own request, and she had been stalking him and others, selling people’s privacy for a profit.

Then there were all the monsters she liked to kill in gruesome manners. While John abhorred senseless torture, he could not deny that the argument of innocence was hard to make for things whose only expressed goal was to kill John and, by extension, banish Siena from this world.

If her memories were to be believed, she also really only ever had killed proper assholes. Before just now, he had assumed that had been before they were just the kind of people she was attracted to and love seemingly ended in plain murder with her, but it seemed it just took someone who was the right combination of powerful, dominant, selfish and still morally stable person to come along for her to not want to murder that person.

As it so happened, that was John, although her logic was still all kinds of warped. She had fallen for him after he had won using his glove on her, effectively tricking her into servitude. Only after weeks of showing he wasn’t a complete douchebag to girls was she now willing to admit that she wouldn’t kill him. Torture still was some expression of affection in her mind but also what people rightfully deserved if they were fucked up.

John tried to make sense of this with his, largely, civilized brain. Her actions were consistent with her personal morals, which seemed to stand on two main principles: everyone should just stand up for themselves already, and the evildoers deserved to be punished. These were not bad by themselves, but her chosen solutions (namely: manipulate people when they were vulnerable to do what she thought would be best for them and to inflict untold torment, to maim and to kill those who had wronged her personal sense of morality) were just unhealthy.

To be more exact, it was brutal, self-serving justice where Siena played judge, jury and executioner, even if she sometimes handed the axe to someone else.

“…Nevermind, I think I understand you way better now,” he finally said when his thought process had come full circle.

“Is that so?” Siena asked and brute forced her way into his mind to see what that understanding was. He shoved her out with an angry glance, just to make clear who was in charge here, before inviting her in.

If he was wrong, he wanted to learn now. This whole day seemed to culminate in getting Siena properly acclimated to the group. What she found apparently shocked her as she pulled away a moment later. Now it was John’s turn to look into her mind, and unlike her, he would not be denied.

What he found was a vortex of old ideals and new doubts conflicting. “You have done this whole murder routine for so long that it has properly ingrained itself into your being,” John mumbled and reached out to Siena. For the first time it was a gesture of caress, the kind he always had been willing to extend to his other elementals.

She looked at the hand closing in like a mouse stared at a cat, waiting to flee. Then he gently caressed her cheek and brushed her greyish purple hair aside. “You know, I was afraid I would have to break what you are in order to make you someone we could get along with,” he told her, “but if you are willing, I think we can mend you instead.”

“There is nothing to mend,” Siena spat out and swatted his hand away. “I am who I want to be.”

John sighed, there was only so much progress that could be made in a day.

“Let me put it bluntly. The way you currently go about things will never see what you want achieved. Every person you torture will only be afraid, they will not learn. Every person you manipulate will regard what you did to them as wrong in hindsight. Nobody will ever trust you, nobody will ever come to seek your counsel, and nobody will ever love you, if you continue as you are. You will keep spreading misery to those around you, and you will never build anything that will last,” he told her all of this in a matter of fact tone. “Nothing will come of it. All you ever did was remove one shitty person and traumatize a victim. You made no difference, and unless you change, you never will.”

Siena looked at him with wide eyes. “You can be properly despicable,” her whisper was ghostly, as that lecture put into question all her methods she had ever believed in.

“I am what I need to be in order to make you a better person than you are, Siena. I can see that you aren’t evil, but you are twisted. I think you aren’t beyond repair, though,” John turned to continue down the labyrinth. “I hope one day you will show me an error in my ways. You, me, Gnome, Salamander, Sylph and Undine, we are all part of a bigger us. Let’s try to be better than we were yesterday.”