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Note: For those who are wondering why I am adding dash to the links after chp 193 and onwards well apparently webnovel admins like scre wing over writers so they made that if a link is posted normally it will not appear this is what I had to come up with for it to work
( "Have you ever just… given up? I mean really, just, looked at how you were doing and stopped? 'Thrown in the towel and walked away and all that? Well I have. One day I just stopped, looked back on everything that had led up to that point, everything I still had to do just to get what I wanted — and what did it matter? It wasn't a matter of whether it was worth it or not. I had a plan, ya' see? It may have not been the best plan, I'll admit, but at the time I was playing the cards I'd been dealt and there was no folding to try for another hand in this game. Or so I thought. I hadn't considered the option of just not playing." -- Karl Heisenberg )
#01 Sunk Cost Fallacy
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— RE —
"Alright, one question. You've earned that. And no yes/no nonsense ."
"Why? That is what you ask? Come now, are you tellin' me with everyone in the big ole bureaucracy backing you up, no one's figured out something by now?"
"Alright: Why. Oh, where to even start."
"The beginning? Oh no, no, that's terribly boring; just a whole mess of pain and anger and angst. So much angst. No, lemme start by asking you a question in return: Have you ever just… given up? I mean really, just, looked at how you were doing and stopped? 'Thrown in the towel and walked away and all that?"
"No? Ah, no, I don't expect that someone like you would have, you're a big damn hero after all — but you know what I mean, yeah? You're in a leadership position, you've got men under your command. Gotta keep an eye out for that sort of crap, yeah? Don't want your soldiers reaching their breaking point at a bad time and all that."
"Well I have. That's what happened to lead to all… this. One day I just stopped, looked back on everything that had led up to that point, everything I still had to do just to get what I wanted — and what did it matter?"
"No, no no. It wasn't a matter of whether it was worth it or not. I had a plan, ya' see? It may have not been the best plan, I'll admit, but at the time I was playing the cards I'd been dealt and there was no folding for another hand in this game. Or so I thought. I hadn't considered the option of just not playing."
"No. What started as a simple bit of bookwork made me realize I was just digging myself deeper in the hopes I'd pop out in China. Real textbook sunk cost fallacy crap. After a certain point — like I said, I'd made a plan. After a certain point it was all I had and dammit if I wasn't sticking to it with my nose to the grindstone, just pushing through the shit like my old man taught me. There's an old expression originally by a German writer that your American politicians are fond of, you know? Pull yourself up by your bootstraps. Total shit, it's used to describe an impossible task, not do something on your own like its used these days… and that describes exactly what I was doing; trying to pull myself through an impossible task. Right up until I decided I wasn't going to do that no more, and, well, you know the rest."
"If I had to put it down to one thing, I'd say it was a matter of perspective, and of eventually going so far around the bend that you circle back to where you started. You could say I was able to look at the problem with fresh eyes."
"I mean, that isn't to say I didn't want to go medieval on the bitch, but was it worth the cost? In time and effort, that is. You know, basic cost/benefit analysis and all that. I'd been working on how to kill her for good for how long though? And for what, to get my life back? Hell, I've lived more in the time since I left than the decades before that."
"Right, yeah. Finding a way to kill her was the right thing to do. Gonna say straight out that I was more interested in revenge. Good ole spite, that's what kept me going. That bitch had spent decades wanting to resurrect her little spawn that the thought of denying her what she had worked towards for so long sounded like the greatest thing in the world. That is what kept me going. Until it wasn't. I crush her dreams and ambitions… and then what? Where would I be then after spending so long working toward that one thing?"
"So yeah, re-examining the situation I decided that my starting thesis was flawed, and I decided to go with a clean slate. To start fresh."
"Well to start with I was playing her game and at the time thought the only way to win was to keep playing. I don't even remember if I considered it an option to stop playing. It happened so long ago. I couldn't flip the table, she was too powerful for that, but I realized that I could damn well leave it. Once I reconsidered everything, that, as the people say, was that. Of course, I really ought to have known by then that no plan goes to plan."
— RE —
Karl Heisenberg, Lord of the Four Families, 'son' of Mother Miranda, so on and so forth, stood unsteadily at the railing of a platform overlooking the cavernous depths of the old mine his family's factory had been built atop and the foul feeling that had settled in his stomach grew heavier. It had started as an accounting, a progress check, but puting to paper how he'd been progressing... His eyes searched through the space a conveyor meant to bring up coal occupied and his mind filled in and revised it to something more reminiscent of something suitable for a meat packing plant that he would need to design in order to bring an army to the surface that could hold back Miranda's failures and buy him time.
Time.
His lip curled as he stared out at it all, taking in what currently was and what would eventually be.
Eventually.
The Soldat were crude yet, but the advances in technology he'd been able to smuggle in through the good Duke's contacts were promising; not there yet, but he could see how the technology would develop in the coming years if developments continued progressing at the current pace. Layer upon layer of infrastructure development that needed completing and an army that couldn't be built yet with the technology available, made over decades to buy him minutes… minutes.
It had been the work of decades at this point, how many more until he would be ready? How many more after that until he was certain he'd be ready? Surely he could accelerate the timeline, compromise on the foundational material for the Soldat. Living neural tissue, that would resolve the control issues without needing to rely on technology. Tempting. So very tempting. Yet that would only bring him down to her level. No, he had time; of all she had done to him when she had implanted the Cadou, it hadn't been without some benefits, Karl would grudgingly give her that. He had all the time he could ever want if his studies of his own mutations were accurate.
But spending decades more on it all? And what did he expect that would that buy him? Minutes. Minutes, and not even a guarantee of victory, just better odds.
The big bitch was a problem. Her daughters, the abominable things, could at least be contained with the right weather conditions. Not her, not if she got desperate enough to help her precious mother. The big bitch was as big a problem as her ass was big.
The freak was on the other end of the scale. Pitiful as he was, slipping further and further into something more fish than man, the brain damaged doctor was only a few depth charges away from being less than the pond scum he sucked on.
The shut in was nothing more than a normal person if she couldn't dose a victim with her hallucinogenic crap. Fire would suffice.
Irony of ironies, it was those most disappointing failures that would pose the most danger: the Lycans. They may have been dumb as a bag of bricks with how little of the mental faculties remained, but there were numerous, strong, and they'd be coming the moment Miranda called for aid.
All of them together?
His lips further pulled back in a snarl as the platform around him shook.
He was one man. There were ways around them all, it was only a matter of taking the time to devise and implement a solution. That was more time though. Yet more time to buy time.
And what was to stop her from finding more things that could get in his way? He had to build — if slowly with the scraps he had to work with — whereas she only had to get lucky.
If that wasn't a stacked deck, he didn't know what was.
Karl slowly breathed out and grasped the railing and tried thinking back to the last time he had thought about all this. Too long. He couldn't remember how long it had been. He couldn't even remember what year it was.
The railing sheared away from the walkway and the plating under his feet buckled before he reeled in the magnetic fields and tamped down his temper.
Karl fumbled a cigar from an inside pocket and lit it, breathing in a soothing lungful of smoke that warmed his chest.
Right. There was the reason he hadn't thought about all this in so long. He just had to stick to the plan and keep moving forward.
He just had to stick to the plan.
The plan.
Karl stared down into the depths of the mine and the plans in his mind of what was yet to be vanished for the stark reality of the present, and everything that had been driving him until that point suddenly seemed… so crushingly pointless.
And he couldn't forget it now that he'd realized it.
Rolling the 'Cuban between his fingers, he exhaled as he stared into the burning embers. And idea took root as he stared at the glowing end; like a mold, one might say.
"Fuck."
— RE —
As his old man used to say, the best time to strike was while the iron was hot. Well, in this it was more to not give himself time to back out, but something was definitely going to be getting hot.
Karl chuckled at his own joke and drew on his cigar. There was no backing out now.
Hauling himself up and onto a rocky outcropping high above the valley, the slabs of steel serving as his portable stairway between traversable parts of the mountainside settled around him and he turned to look down upon the factory and lands that had been in the Heisenberg family for generations. It was different, looking at it from on high; smaller, less important, and just… lesser.
He glanced across the valley to the spires rising out of the fog. He'd hand it to the bitch, a castle was still a castle. A factory...
"What a truly miserable place."
It was pathetic, barely more than a dilapidated ruin from this high up. A castle would be a bit much. Maybe a nice manor, with a great big workshop.
Karl squeezed the detonator.
There was a delay of fractions of a second for the signal to travel, fractions more for the receiver to translate the signal, fractions more for an arming signal to propagate throughout the extensive spaces of the factories facilities and mine, and so on.
It had been shoddy work, done in a rush, but sufficient. Good enough.
Within moments of receiving the signal, mining charges throughout the factory detonated and the above ground structure shattered in a detonation that blew away the morning fog. Conveniently, the explosion gave him a clear view of the grounds surrounding the factory that the tunnels of the mine ran beneath, an unobstructed line of sight that let him watch with his own two eyes as rifts in the ground were torn open; great, gaping cracks billowed forth smoke and steam and excess methane that caught fire as it escaped, turning his family lands into a smoldering hellscape. And it kept spreading.
Further and further out from the factory, the ground around it heaved, buckled, and split while the area immediately around the factory began collapsing in on itself to fill the gaping wound his family had carved into the earth. All the while, the damage spread further and further, the ground heaving and collapsing, breaking open in places as fire tore through the earth, igniting pockets of methane, and putting down roots in the remaining coal veins that would never be extinguished.
His lips spread into a vicious smile.
Even he didn't know exactly how far the tunnels went. He knew the mold was rife in them though, some maybe even reaching tendrils of the main mass of the megamycete itself. The thought that — long as the odds may have been — the subterranean fires that would be spreading for weeks and months and years to come might possibly burn out the lingering consciousness of Miranda's dear daughter made it all the sweeter.
"Ahhh. I should have made myself homeless decades ago. Good riddance."
And turning away from the village he'd trapped himself in for decades, began the long, arduous trek back to the wider world.
— RE —
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A/N: So this is a little thing I'm playing with at the moment. No idea where it might go with no idea how it might end in sight, but here it is. I have to say that I find it funny how my brain works at times. I say this because I've not actually played RE8, just watched a playthrough and not even recently at that. No, what sent me down this rabbit hole was a damn playlist of all things (this one https://youtu.be/_ZVmXxiC-t8?si=8_qLm6vhwn0LVoD4) and hearing that first line in turn made me remember the character, which in turn made me remember myself thinking: "My dude, you are quite literally the definition of a sunk cost fallacy. Why didn't you just, ya know, leave." So that's what I'm doing. Where will the maladjusted antisocial asshole with straight up Magneto-lite magnetism superpowers go from here? Who can say.