the oldest and strongest emotion of mankind

under-the-enchanted-sun

This is bullshit.

He's been on the Boston Mythos Squad for fifteen years, which means he's gone through twenty-nine screenings for Mythos exposure disorder, and every single time it has turned out that he doesn't have it. At this point, he's clearly immune or something, so they should stop making him go to therapy when he could be dealing with the, you know, numerous cults bent on summoning extradimensional monsters.

(He needs a shot of whiskey to wake up in the morning. It's fine. No one winds up making a deal with Nyarlathotep because they're an alcoholic, and if he lives long enough to die of liver failure he'll count it a win.)

(Everyone who was on the force when he joined is dead or disabled or retired or insane. They've started to call him the lucky drunk.)

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under-the-enchanted-sun

He flops onto the couch.

"What you should know, doctor, is that I'm dyslexic."

mind's-mechanisms

"I can see how that would be an advantage in your line of work. And it looks like you've been on the force fifteen years last month, congratulations."

under-the-enchanted-sun

"You know, I've done enough of these that I could give the right answers even if I was crazy, so there's really no point and you can just give me my Certificate of Not Crazy."

mind's-mechanisms

"I'm sure you could, which is why I'm not just launching into a questionnaire. I'd like to try to persuade you that it's actually a good idea for you to tell me the truth about how you're doing."

under-the-enchanted-sun

"Hit me."

mind's-mechanisms

"I'm not just here to declare people 'crazy' or 'not crazy'. I'm here to help you with anything that's making your job or your life harder. If you broke your arm, you'd want to get it set properly and splinted so it healed well, right? It's the same deal if some messed-up thing you run into on the job tries to take a bite out of your brain."

under-the-enchanted-sun

"Right, but you retire people, and I don't want to be retired because half the people on this force think Cthulhu only disturbs people whose balls aren't as colossal as theirs are and half the people on this force want to repeat the Innsmouth genocide. Sometimes they overlap."

mind's-mechanisms

He is unfortunately not all that wrong, there.

"I would only recommend that you retire if I believed that the alternative was you dying or becoming a cultist, neither of which would do the force any good either. If that's not going to happen, and I'm inclined to believe it isn't, you have nothing to fear from me."

"That said, you are going to have to retire eventually. It needn't be this year and it needn't be next year, but humans don't live forever."

under-the-enchanted-sun

"Me? Retire? You're very optimistic."

mind's-mechanisms

"In some ways, that's my job. To make it possible for someone like you to have a long career that helps a lot of people, and then a pleasant and well-earned retirement. To be optimistic enough to look for the actually good option among the variously bad ones.

But yes, it is also possible that the department will eventually have to get by without you for worse reasons."

under-the-enchanted-sun