A totally legit announcement

[breakaleginhalf]

Okay, so, what even happened on that one?

Besides, like. Everyone getting mad at Fuckface McGee and proving Jean-Paul Sartre right on the whole "hell is other people" thing. Or one of the Princes knowing about Travelling and Arcana now.

[Gil you can't just slide that in there like literally anyone except you and Raidou knows that--]

Oh, actually - don't go busting in on Arcana spaces without knocking first right now, 'cos apparently you're at a very real risk of being turned into flash-frozen helium, according to Magician.

Comments

[desperate_times_right]

[Yeah, it's probably a more painful situation where Lovers is concerned to be here with your actual SO knowing that she can creepily spy on your relationship, you have her sympathies there]

Plagues? That a 'friendship with the Devil' thing?

[capital_asset]

[Raidou mostly tries not to think about it. He does not always succeed.]

Possibly, although her initial claiming Jaunt took place without Devil and still included a disease of sorts.

[desperate_times_right]

Huh. The only one of hers I've been here for is the Hollywood one, I think, and there wasn't really anything like that there.

[Unless you count the plague of gerbils]

[capital_asset]

[...That might actually count, in a sideways manner.]

Her first Jaunt took place in a high school where people were learning to use powers granted to them by a disease. The second one was her match against Hermit, which featured a disease that originally turned mermaids into cannibalistic berserkers but started spreading to the human population as well. And either she, Devil, or both of them together created a virus that they unleashed on a different Jaunt world where Hermit was temporarily imprisoned - even he was capable of being infected, although he ended up transferring into an uninfected body later on.

[desperate_times_right]

Ah yes, I'd heard about the mermaids. Not the plague, though.

My impression so far has been that their physical bodies don't mean a particular lot to them. Though I suppose the intention there was to incapacitate him temporarily, rather than kill him outright. Can't imagine the others were pleased about it though.

[capital_asset]

The plague was... messy. Sirens could usually keep the Stricken - the mermaids' name for the infected - from losing control with their Songs, but the Empress they'd fled from sent out an infected whale whose song incapacitated the Sirens and made the disease easier to spread. Luckily, the Investigators were able to synthesize a cure, but...

[That had been a painful Jaunt in a lot of ways.]

I don't think their physical bodies are quite natural to them, although they do make it easier to communicate. They also change their aspects every so often, although I'm not sure how frequent it is.

The virus didn't so much incapacitate those infected with it as attempt to alter their minds. That... likely extended to Hermit too, or would have if he hadn't managed to fend it off long enough to switch bodies.

[desperate_times_right]

I get that this is a terrible thing that probably would have happened anyway, and that our people helped out as much as they could, but I can see why locals on these worlds aren't exactly thrilled when they find out that their crisis is a game board.

[capital_asset]

I don't think the gameboard aspect comes to light as often as the rest of it, but even when it doesn't, I think the majority of the worlds who know of us would probably consider us a mixed blessing at best.

[desperate_times_right]

I remember my overlay at the college was pretty miffed that we came for such a short time, caused all that chaos, then left. And what happened there wasn’t really even that bad.

[capital_asset]

We're sent into Jaunts lacking context for the situation we're supposed to be facing, and while some people do have the ability to glean information about a given world immediately, that's only going to help up to a certain point even if they are themselves and capable of passing that information along. That's a recipe for potential chaos on its own, but in a world like that one, where not following the 'traditions' can get you hurt or worse...

[desperate_times_right]

Gets others hurt too, maybe. Going into these places with our own cultural mindsets and trying to change things, even if we think we’re doing the right thing, can have lasting effects.

[capital_asset]

And unless we get sent back on a later Jaunt, we're not even going to see those effects, much less have to deal with them the way the people of that world do.

[desperate_times_right]

Right? It’s not like I enjoy being infiltrated, but the level of responsibility that comes with investigating freaks me out.

[capital_asset]

It's even more nerve-wracking when they turn out to be return Jaunts and we don't know or realize until too late.

[desperate_times_right]

Is that why everyone starts panicking when we get the preview?

[capital_asset]

Generally, yes, especially when the signs seem to be pointing towards a world where the previous Jaunt either didn't go well or had various complications.

We've also gotten burned by return visits that we didn't realize were return visits because the initial Jaunt took place before Moebius. Nova Venezia and to a lesser extent Newport were more difficult than they might have been, because we didn't know about or remember them, while they remembered us perfectly well.

[Granted, Nova Venezia had had... other issues, such as people not taking the Jaunt seriously or flat-out telling Infiltrators about the psychic network.]

[desperate_times_right]

I realize this is obvious, but if no one remembers the previous visit, we won’t be able to guess from the preview, anyway. And there’s really no way to be prepared for what going back to a world we do remember will be like, since we don’t usually stick around for the consequences. What’s the use in worrying about it now?

[She’s not really a ‘plan ahead’ person]

[capital_asset]

I think people just don't want to take chances, especially given some of the worlds we've been to and some of the entities who inhabit them. And a return visit often has us dealing with the consequences of what happened last time - Purgatory's the most recent example of that.

[desperate_times_right]

Didn’t really sound to me like all the fretting prepared us for that, either.

[capital_asset]

I think that depends on the Jaunt. For Harrogate, it allowed us to make preparations for a worst-case scenario, because a Harrogate return was almost guaranteed to be dangerous in specific ways.

Purgatory was harder because we had less idea of what conditions we could expect, and complicated by the fact that the original Jaunt was a failure and left an entire segment of the population in uncertain straits. So emotions around it ran higher.

[desperate_times_right]

Not to mention that most people seemed to blame the signs on other circumstances. All that Hell stuff, you know, when they were already cross with us.

[capital_asset]

[Raidou thinks about that.]

They were, and presumably still are, but the pre-Jaunt Liminals almost always have clues to the next Jaunt, and I don't think the last one was an exception, regardless of their feelings about us. Whether sending us to Purgatory was also a sign of their displeasure rather than chance is another question - chance might be in accordance with Fortune's design, but then the last Purgatory Jaunt was immediately after the first Grid Jaunt, where Magician sent us to find and rescue Hermit against Lovers and Devil's wishes, and Magician definitely did manipulate things so she could send us there, so there's no reason none of the other Arcana could do the same with other destinations.

...Of course, between that and one of the competing Arcana being Justice, they could easily have been saying both things at once. Justice was one of the investigating Arcana, after all.

[desperate_times_right]

Could be it had nothing to do with us and Fortune herself wanted something from there. First competing Jaunt post-resurrection in her own game, it’d make sense if they bent the rules a bit and let her pick. Particularly if it aligned with Justice’s desires as well.

[capital_asset]

Or the Arcana as a whole could have wanted something - like last time, actually; they wanted the piece of the Name of the Divine that we ended up not retrieving for them. I think that might have been Judgement's idea - Magician once mentioned something about the last time they let "Penuel" plan a heist not going well.

[desperate_times_right]

Doesn’t help that everything’s under fifteen layers of metaphor all the time. If they want us to steal shit, they could just ask.