The 7 Deadly Sins

1 | Wrath

"Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels, it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it."

- Terry Pratchett, Reaper Man

The busy campus rung with voices, some loud and some quiet. It was just another day at JKU, specifically for Isaias Blackford - another boring day on a campus filled with morons who'd rather party than actually strive for a future. Unable to focus, Isaias smacked his book shut and set it down, trading it for the cup of coffee resting on the table. As he tilted his head back to let the coffee fall down his throat, he caught a familiar face sneakily approaching him out of the corner of his eye.

"Aren't you supposed to be working, Eris?" Isaias stopped Eris in her tracks.

"Well, technically, yeah. But I wanted to bring you lunch." Eris set a brown paper bag down on the table and shrugged. "Is there anything wrong with wanting to spend time with my boyfriend?"

Eris sat down in a chair next to Isaias and leaned forward with an almost expecting look on her face. Ignoring her puckered lips and closed eyes, Isaias reached for bag and set it on his lap as he looked inside to find a salad, mixed with bits of steak blue cheese ranch dressing. This was the same salad that he had bought when he had first met Eris in his senior year of high school.

She had ran into Isaias, causing him to drop and spill the salad all over the floor. Offering to buy him another, they ended up sitting together and talking, where one thing led to another. Before they had known it, they were dating quite seriously and moved in with each other following Isaias's graduation.

"Shouldn't you be eating this? You know how easy it is for cops to get fat." Isaias cracked up after using the played out stereotype. "Donuts aren't good for you."

"Funny." Eris blankly retorted, further leaning towards Isaias and planting a quick peck on his lips. "We should do something later, it's been such a long time with work and your classes."

"Can't." Isaias looked up at Eris. "I have Math and then I have to write my report when I get home."

"Which report?" Eris inquired, reaching for the bag with the salad in it. "The one on the long-term risks of artificial intelligence, or--"

"No, I finished that a long time ago." Isaias practically shook his head. "This one's on the possibility of global existential risk in the next fifty years."

"Existential...risk?" Eris seemed to be dumbfounded, in the most literal sense.

"In layman's, it's anything that could hypothetically cause extinction. Total war, nuclear warfare, nanotechnological weaponry, pandemics, and again, hostile artificial intelligence." Isaias spoke the equivalent of Greek to Eris. "And if I have time, I'd like to delve a little into survivorship bias as well."

While Eris wasn't the dullest tool in the shed, she wasn't the sharpest either. Her job, whilst a priori in nature, could take a number of routes to solve a crime. Brute force was her be-all and end-all, it was her answer to everything in life. Surely, while Isaias could criticize the inefficiency of brute force, he couldn't deny that it was a tried-and-true method of getting answers or information, both in life and in the workplace.

Following her vacant stare, Eris quickly shook her head to and fro. "Anyways, I'm having a hacker friend at the department looking into any clues about who your parents are."

"Don't waste the poor guy's time." Isaias's lip curled as he looked down to the face of his watch. "I don't want to be involved with people who threw me away onto someone else. They obviously didn't care about me, so why should I care about them? I bet people like them are already buried six feet under."