hadriel | 006 [Video]

[So, the event's officially over, everything's back to cave-normal, and Lance has had some time to sort out his thoughts on everything. He's also had time to debate with himself on whether he should address something bothering him or just ignore it.

Although he's decided, finally, on the former, it took quite a bit of mental debate; he probably wouldn't have said anything at all if he weren't a psychologist, and weren't concerned that other people might be seriously negatively affected if the issue weren't brought up. Regardless, he's still not exactly looking forward to this entire thing because he can't see it going over all too well, but then again when does anything go over well here?]

Now that the event is over there's something I wanted to address, regarding it and others in the future. I expect there will be disagreement, which is fine, but it would be nice if that disagreement could be discussed in some sort of reasonable manner.

[In other words, not with yelling or threats or murder. He has high hopes for you all!!!]

I'm not going to go into a lot of psychological details and reasoning unless anyone is actually interested, but to summarize: although the idea of simply resisting a compulsion is theoretically appealing, it's not exactly that simple in practice. It also has no correlation at all with being weak, feeble-minded, a failure, or any other negative descriptor I've seen used so freely lately.

[Which he's none too pleased about, even if it doesn't bother him much personally.]

Considering that so many here have so much to worry about and are under enough mental stress already, adding blame for something caused by an outside influence is not exactly helpful, especially in the long run. I'm also just generally unsure that being angry with each other over something caused by an event is the best use of everyone's time and energy.

[Especially when things done by people while completely in control of themselves tend to be overlooked entirely, but he's not even going to touch that topic right now.]

That said, if anyone who has been here for some time has any sort of advice or strategy for identifying and attempting to control an event-caused mental effect, that would be useful. I don't doubt that there might be some techniques that could help, depending on the individual and the specific nature of the event.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Sure.

[...yeah, Nate's gonna call bullshit on that one, Lance. You look like the opposite of okay.]

Been good. Got through the event in one piece - no new shark bites for you to deal with, so. A win.

[He gives Nate a look for that first comment--he's the only one allowed to call people out, okay!!!--but doesn't address it, moving on to the next.]

Good, I've been enjoying my break from performing medical procedures that I'm woefully unqualified for.

[He says it completely deadpan, and he definitely means what he's saying, but it's also a joke all the same.]

It seems like a lot of people made it through the entire thing, although it's difficult to say how many were actually competing.

[And therefore just how many people now have shiny guns and a lot of bullets.]

Ha ha, cute. And good question. Maybe like...half of us? I feel like I didn't see too many people out there.

[Those he did were met with swift reprisal, by which the narration means, they were slammed with dense balls of paint that left painful welts. At least the gods didn't hand out real bullets, even though it was pretty concerning to see people crumple to the ground after taking a contained blob of high-velocity pink paint to the kneecap.]

Kinda nice to do something unrelated to that looming robotic threat, though.

It's difficult to tell if that was because they were avoiding being seen so as not to lose, or truly not participating.

[But he agrees in general. And yeah, at least the gods saved handing out the real bullets until after the event, although that's not necessarily going to be good going forward.]

That's true, although I wish we had some other options for while an event isn't going on. Even just some readable books would make a big difference.

[Because right now it seems like if you're not stressing over events, the only other things to do is stress over the Null issue or whatever else is going wrong at the time.]

[Some of us are comforted by bullets, Lance. Maybe shooting up a bunch of mercs is the only thing that makes you feel alive!!!]

Oh, my God. Right? I tried to parse out some kind of language that makes sense and it's just a bunch of gibberish, and I'm- look, I'm good at that stuff, but the library's a mess.

[Now do you see why Nate went swimming in the lake?]

[Lance might have to suggest therapy again, Nate. 8|

But meanwhile, about the library, it's so frustrating!!!]

I wonder if most of them are written in the language of the beings that were here before? Maybe Hope could provide us with a translation key or something.

[It'd definitely give them all something more to do; translating books would take a lot of time and focus from a lot of people. It'd be a nice distraction.]

[He'll go to therapy on a cold day in Hell, Lance.]

They are - I asked Hope about it, thought he might throw out a key or two just so we had somewhere to start with translations, but he didn't say squat.

[A fact which is clearly grinding Nate's gears.]

I don't know what kind of conventions to assume, either. If it's a direct-equivalent, or based on sounds that have meanings, or the images themselves are pictographs versus letters.

[Huh. How distinctly unhelpful of him. Then again Lance is also pretty sure Hope isn't fond of Nate for the whole lake incident, so Lance might try asking him later himself.]

Do they seem to even be in the same language? Several languages on Earth use the same writing system, so there's that on top of everything else.

[And although good with languages naturally, he hasn't actually really studied any and certainly isn't a linguist; the idea of trying to sort out and translate a language with no information is far more ambitious than he's prepared to be.]

I dunno. Arrangements look similar, but without a point of reference it's hard to tell.

[It's possible that Hope might have given him nothing to work with simply because Nate was being a pain in the ass, but who's counting that kind of thing??????????????????????????

(Gods are. Nate wouldn't be surprised if they refused to bring him back if he died.)]

We could try working an answer out of one of our benevolent deities. Even a basic alphabet would help.

006 [Video]

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