STOP! ... QUESTION TIME.

[squirreledaway]

It's been 3 months to the day.

Ask me things.

About Emilatosk, Mako, and John Egbert.

Bonus Nimue as well.

Comments

[squirreledaway]

That is not cute is a legit feeling.

No, John's pretty horrified that the game happened. He's just being John about it, and not focusing on the fact that it made all his friends, and most of his teammates sad. He's focusing on how he can help, or how he can at least focus on something that wasn't the game.

Because Aliens is a great movie in theory, when you know it's fake and no one actually got hurt from chest-bursting monsters. But it's a different thing entirely when it's real people, with real monsters bursting out of their chest. And then she didn't even bother to heal them most of the way! N... No, that's not cool. Not cool at all. I'm just. Not going to focus on how not cool it is, because I figure it's kind of really obvious by now.

How does Sol feel about the game, or about which teams were chosen to die? Is he aware of all the knights dying?

[silverbulletkun]

I went over most of his game feelings on plurk, but it essentially sums up to not okay. I can never stress enough how jarring it is for him to have had any sort of conscious hand in killing people; for him, taking a life is the absolute worst thing you can do. The chestburster thing was just the icing on the cake to make the nightmares worse, really; he's used to seeing death, but not quite that unnecessarily gruesome. The fact that he couldn't find any loopholes or ways around the game mechanics made him feel very trapped, and that's not something he's used to- he's a detective, he should always be able to find a way out- and yet even in a situation that goes so against his very being he turned to the one thing he could do: helping to protect his team. So he did participate in the game, if only minorly. So now the problem is that the game is over and he was able to help the injured a little and all but he still feels trapped. There's no way out of this guilt, for him. He can only take the time to suppress it.

In each round there was one team that died that Amethyst had played a stone on. Granted I think it was only Iolite that actually died from an accumulation of stones from multiple teams as opposed to bussing themselves/being bussed by another team, but he took note of it. It isn't something he's planning to talk about, but he's going to remember that he had a hand, however small or inconsequential, in the deaths of Citrine, Iolite, and Peridot. However, due to the nature of the game he feels like everyone bears some guilt for everyone that died- we were all murderers in that game, essentially. He didn't have a lot of personal attachment to any of the teams that died, but he didn't need to- one of the things that first threw him about this game was his team promptly picking out which teams they didn't want to target, and it just baffled him that they would so quickly pick favorites when they really had no right to take anyone's life. There was Berry and Star, but even with that he was able to keep his distance. With how independent he is, he just hasn't been around long enough to make many strong connections.

He is aware of all the knights dying; Amethyst didn't place any stones on knights, but he saw when they died. He isn't fully aware of the pre-existing tension to do with some knights feeling like they're disposable to teams, but even without that he can kinda gather that it really looks that way from this game. That implication does bother him some, but one game like this isn't enough to prove to him that this is the case and that it wasn't just one or two teams deciding to target the knights.

How did Mako feel about the game (besides in horrendous pain)? I saw Bolin found out, how is that working out for him?

[squirreledaway]

MAKO HATES EVERYTHING ABOUT THE GAME. I also wrote about this in my plurk, but Mako's pissed. He hates the games where there's no choice: someone will die. This has only happened twice in Aather, and both times traumatized the hell out of him. There was CFUW where his best efforts to minimize the number of people killed failed. Badly. And blew up in his face in a way that he wasn't emotionally prepared for, that he still has a lot of anger and guilt left over.

This time, he doesn't have as much to be guilty over, but he's angry. He's angry that there was really nothing they could do, and he's angry that pretty much all the knights were left to die. And that the fact that they were left to die wasn't even about them. And he wants to be angry at the people who made that choice! But he knows how much it sucks having that anger directed at you when. You really don't want it to be. So. There's that.

There's also that Mako hates dying. This. Was a traumatizing death! No lie. But it was also not burning to death, losing your dead father's scarf in the fire, and having horrific flashbacks to your parents' deaths. So while not being healed fully, and realizing you were about split in half is a hard thing to think about, Mako can keep that part separate from "But I died." And the "But I died" part is as freaky and unsettling to him as anything about the death. This death just has less horrific, specific to Mako, trauma buttons so he can't get completely overwhelmed like he did with CFUW.

Then, finally... this game makes him think of CFUW.

That is enough to make him want to shut down, which Bolin ran smack into. Bolin has the problem that Mako does want to protect him, and therefor was never completely honest about what happened in CFUW. So when Bolin got angry, justifiably, at Mako for hiding his death again, Mako couldn't do much more than. Yell at him to get out and then shut down.

It's. Not going well for him.

Sol's opinions on Mako and John?