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Okay, the next time I say anything like ‘this will go fine’ about an upcoming jaunt, each and every one of you is welcome to come find me and punch me in the face. Oh my god.

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Oh, absolutely it isn’t, considering things ended relatively well.

I feel like that one and like, Harrogate Mark Two are the ones I've personally seen that've gotten closest to Total FUBAR.

That thing where everyone decided to antagonize the ocean could have ended really badly.

I mean yeah, absolutely. But like. Eldritch horrors escaping into a universe and turning the entire dimension into an unlivable hellscape, and mass genocide of an entire group of people who got put in that situation against their will and doing the same thing to another batch of people while the entire remaining populace watches without caring because they don't think it's real, is like.

A different scale to 'ocean falls city-slash-possibly-country dies', I think?

You ever think about how fucked up it is that we have scales for that kind of shit now.

... Yeah, this was my highest stakes jaunt so far, and as much as it sucked, I’m so glad I wasn’t investigating. Sure, I almost got a lot of people killed, but that would have happened that way even without me along for the ride, you know?

[She’s only investigated once, and even with the relatively low stakes it was a lot of pressure for someone who actively avoids responsibility.]

The almost is definitely the keyword here. I doubt your first thought back here would be 'oh cruel irony' if you-slash-your-overlay was the instigator of murder.

I mean, she did kill people, but it was before we got there so I didn’t have to watch it. Suppose this kind of thing’s always easier to think about in the abstract.

From personal experience, death in the abstract is a lot easier to handle than death in the first person.

Hm. It depends.

[It’s not as easy for her to assume here, but between the two of them Chloe likely has the bloodier hands.]

Death of a stranger’s easier to handle than someone you know, but even that gets muddled on jaunts.

[Gil had a lot more blood on his than you'd expect, as it turns out.]

Yeah. You never know when a stranger on a jaunt is gonna turn out to be your best friend as a Traveller. It sucks.

Or an enemy. There’s definitely a few people back home I’m glad didn’t see me like that.

On the other hand, maybe there were parallels for them, and Circe killed them already.

... Yeah. One of them, anyway, a rival for head actor. Circe was so smug about it, too. But only I remember it so it’s fine.

God, if there wasn't some fucking Traveller intervention on that one Cain and Circe's bullshit would've had a wildly different outcome.

She already thought that’s what he was there for. I don’t think it ever really occurred to her that he wouldn’t want it.

It definitely didn't occur to him that people would want it. But then, like. Spend a year getting tortured and you're not gonna see the good in anyone.

If seeing the good in people was a requirement of the position she wouldn’t have been able to do it either.

Yeah. Those were the ones that didn't tend to last, huh.

[He has lingering memories yet, muted as they are, of Cain-- of Graham watching runs on TV of people not making it more than a few months, or a year tops, trying to be kind and getting screwed over by it at every turn.]

Edited 2019-07-18 14:20 (UTC)

I don’t know how any of the actors who thought of the Folk as people from the start lasted for more than a week.

Fuck knows how well Cain would've gone, then. He was half convinced everyone here had suffered like he did, he was... too full of empathy, almost. Didn't know how to back down. That would have bitten him a lot worse in any other circumstance.

Branch volunteered because he thought he could make their lives better and then spent five years forbidden from doing basically anything. Hell, I think Circe only lasted as long as she did because she really thought that eventually she’d get to go home.

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