cancry | Avaritia Arrival Log

[There's the sound of soft footsteps, slowly approaching where Chiron's huddled in an alley, and the faint sloshing sound of water on glass.]

Oh!

[Abruptly, the rain cuts off as Medic leans over him, peering curiously at him for any sign of injury. Her umbrella covers them both.]

Are you... enjoying the weather? [She's not sure, but that doesn't seem quite right.]

[Where some times during his previous memory he could be jumpy and hurried and startled, now he is slow to come to. Slow to look up. He's filled with the sense that she should not be here, and yet a sardonic tone still seeps out of him.]

Give it another few hours and I may yet float away with all the flotsam and-- [His teeth clack together as he sucks in a breath.]

Ah...forgive me, I don't seem to... [He knows where he is and yet he also finds he doesn't, slipping between worlds of here and of memory.]

Hmm, would a whole person be flotsam or jetsam? I can never remember the difference...

[She tilts her head, looking curious and mildly concerned, but not hurt or frightened. Any bitterness in his tone has flown largely over her head.]

Are you not feeling well? [She's a healer, after all. Priorities.]

...No. No, I'm afraid my mind is rather afflicted with troubled memories. I am feeling...

[He coughs out something that seems like it should be a laugh.] I am most certainly feeling.

Ohhhh. [She pauses for a moment. Rapidly flips through her mental filing cabinet for anything helpful or appropriate to this situation, and only comes up with one response.]

...Do you want to talk about it?

[Third time's the charm, hopefully.]

Ah. Er. Now may not be a good time. [She's really very dear, but he's also dissociating into a few dimensions over. He shakes his head and at least seems a little more present than when she first found him.]

Actually. Could you do the talking? I think it...is helping.

[urge to kill...lowering...]

[Some people might have questions about that request. Then there's Medic.] Okay!

[She holds up a medium-sized glass jar for him to see. It's about two-thirds full of rain and has a label reading Avaritia precip. sample 03, which has been heavily covered by clear plastic sticky tape for waterproofing purposes.]

Today I'm doing chemical analysis on the water supply for the three layers we have unlocked. Did you know each one of them has a slightly different mineral content? The drinking water here comes out exactly like I'd expect for this rainwater if you ran in through a standard home filter, but it's noticeably different from the tap water in Invidia, and they're both different from the water in Limbo!

All three of them are safe to drink, but it's a big enough difference that I can tell which layer an unlabeled sample came from just by testing it!

[Perhaps for some people, this would be boring, irrelevant, annoying. But Chiron tries to hold fast to knowing someone is talking to him about something at least vaguely interesting and trying to keep him tethered to the here and the now, whether she is aware of it or not.]

That's fascinating. [It is!] I'm going to sit for a moment. [Aaaand down he goes, sliding his back against the wall until he's sat on the ground, head leaning back to brick. He blinks a few times. Crouched in the rain waiting for Phoenix to wake up so he can--

Here, now. Drinkable water.] Perhaps the imaginary building materials differ enough to alter it? Expectations of reality, more likely.

[She doesn't know why he needs this, but she understands that he does. That's enough for her.]

It could be! It looks a lot like the differences I'd expect to see between samples from different geographic regions- more of one mineral seeping into the groundwater because there's more of it in the soil, less of another because there isn't as much industrial pollution...

[She sits down beside him, propping the umbrella up between them to keep the rain off.]

The water in Invidia has a surprisingly high sodium content compared to the other two! I don't know why sodium, specifically.

[Maybe it's because Esme was so salty.] There isn't much fluoride, though, so I guess no one's adding it to the water supply here. The conspiracy theorists are going to have to find something else to be weird about, I guess!

[Does... does Eos even add fluoride to the drinking water? Do they know what fluoride even is??? Who knows, that's certainly not stopping Medic.]

[PROBABLY BETTER NOT TO ASK THESE QUESTIONS-]

Expectations of reality, then. Of a sort. Perhaps an Authority has influence as well. What they were familiar with in life.

[His face scrunches, trying to think in a manner that keeps him present and not flying off somewhere else.]

Did Limbo not have an Authority? We merely had to solve something of a puzzle to unlock the fountain.

It sounds like each layer has one of the... seven? I think it's supposed to be seven deadly sins. [Catholicism is honestly pretty obscure in her time, but she had internet access and an ongoing goth phase, so she's encountered the concept at least in passing.]

But Limbo didn't really have a specific sin. Maybe if there's no theme for the Layer, there's no Authority? [She's frowning, though.] But the absence of evidence isn't the evidence of absence...

Seven? Deadly, wherever did such a concept come from? [he may be fantasy jesus but he only died for bahamut's sins] That seems quite restrictive and incredibly implausible.

And I don't see a purpose for there to be a layer beneath Limbo full of monsters if there's, hm, nothing to move past, I suppose.

[Medic shrugs.] It's not my religious tradition. ...I was never really clear on why seven, either.

And why do we have greed and gluttony? That's basically the same thing except one happens in the digestive tract!

...maybe Limbo is just the one for all the other sins that didn't get fancy Latin names and their own layers. [The spiritual equivalent of a file marked "miscellaneous", if you will.]

Then, with all the souls still lingering about up there, one has to wonder if anyone is truly free from sin. In this arbitrary setup of what 'sin' means. [Gluttony??? That's not sinful it's just gross and rude. Unless you're a glutton for punishment. Maybe.]

Perhaps...that is the point? If the end of all of this is reincarnation through the Gears, perhaps everyone does move through. Some would simply have an easier time than others. [If one considers this The Afterlife, rather than something apart from other better/worse afterlives?]

I guess almost everyone would have some sins, even if they were really small ones.

They wouldn't want anyone to be stuck here forever, right? Sooner or later, you'd have some resource problems. Maybe it's not making people completely perfect and sinless, just sinless enough to make it through the Gears without... sticking? Getting caught in the machinery?

...To be honest, forming hypotheses about this is very difficult without knowing whether the Gears are a literal structure or a metaphor. It's very unclear.

Why would there be resource problems? No one needs to eat. Even if they think they do. I can take a bag of chips from the store and the next day it'll be replaced. Expectations. Unreality.

[He feels a little unreal, sitting here. Chews on his lip for a moment. Considering the implications of this place is a good distraction.]

I'm afraid I belong here. I may not know exactly how I have sinned, but I'm...reasonable sure that I have.

Yes, but how does Purgatory create the chips? From the substance of itself? From the thoughts of the departed? What is the mechanism of existence? [She has so many questions.] Not to mention space to fit everyone, and ways to keep people entertained- the dead still need enrichment!

[Have we tried rolling a pumpkin full of meat into Purgatory?]

I think I probably did, too. The odds just seem in favor of it.

[He blinks down at her, a little baffled, a touch bewildered. Ah - perhaps as the scientific type, she thinks everything must be literal? Physical? That seems--

--familiar?--

--impractical.]

Is it not enough to simply be? Must it be a mechanism, rather than simply...ethereal?

[She frowns in the vaguely grumpy manner of someone encountering a recurring pet peeve and gestures with her hands as she talks.]

Ethereality is still a form of reality- it might not work how we expect, but it has to work somehow. Matter doesn't go by the same rules as energy, yes, but energy is still a thing that exists. These chips exist.

Even if the whole thing ends up being more like philosophy than physics, I still want to know the philosophical underpinnings. ...and if there's deities handling it, I'd appreciate the courtesy of at least a five-minute interview.

[SHE WANTS TO KNOW THINGS, DARN IT.]

Do the chips exist?

If they do, I'm going to find out.

[Her determination is powerful.]

...Huh. I suppose if the physical existence of the afterlife means that much to you, then that's something to work toward.

Mm-hm! It's nice to have a goal in mind. [She's staying positive.] I've already confirmed the existence of myself, as a consciousness, because I'm capable of asking myself that question! Although, of course, you can't take my word for that.

And yet I certainly do trust you on that point. I think this is all getting a bit philosophical now... [MORE than a bit!] But I suppose we are in the afterlife, with our immortal spirits, talking about the idea of sins as some mutable property.

If we turn out to be characters in some kind of self-aware morality play, I hope I'm a metaphor for something interesting.

[Well, at least she's taking existentialism with good grace.]

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schardynfreude - 2021-01-31 04:14 (UTC) - Expand

Avaritia Arrival Log

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