#just the facts

[image description: A woman in a blue tunic and a white lab coat sits at a desk, one hand on an open book, the other holding a pencil. Her thick red brown hair is twisted back and held in place by another pencil. She looks at us over her old-fashioned dark-rimmed glasses. Text reads, “188, EVA DENCE • the small god of JUST THE FACTS”]

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People think she’s a static god.  That because she stands for the facts of the matter, she is incapable of change.  What they don’t understand is that facts are not always understood in an instant: they evolve.  They are uncovered.  She is, in her way, an archeologist, sifting through layers of rumor and falsehood and misunderstanding to hit the bones of the matter.  And yes, sometimes, those bones are buried too deep to ever come fully to light; sometimes the most that can be hoped for is a few scraps of truth, a few immutable conclusions.

Sometimes that can be enough.

She checks her facts; she verifies her sources; she collects the shining specks of evidence and she studies them long into the night.  She finds the truth.  Whether she chooses to share it is more variable.  But people think she’s a static god, and they don’t understand that some truths are evolving even as she digs them out of the bedrock of reality.  Understandings change.  Things can be true without being complete.

People think she’s a humorless god.  That her insistence on accuracy means she doesn’t deserve their fellowship or their compassion.  They think she can’t be hurt as long as the accusations hurled at her are accurate.  They’re very wrong.  Truth is truth and spin is spin, and the truth hurts while the spin seduces.  She does her best.  She understands that she can’t always be popular.  She just wishes people wouldn’t take her insistence on accuracy as an indication that she doesn’t have a sense of humor.  She does.  She always has.  She just wants the world to understand itself.

Give her a mystery and she’ll pick it into pieces and hand them back to you, neatly labeled and ready to be put away.  Give her a conclusion accurate to all current known scientific facts, and she’ll see that it spreads.

Just don’t call her a liar when you don’t like what she has to say.  That’s the one label she has never earned.  That’s the one title she has never once deserved.

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