“There must have been a moment, at the beginning, where we could have said -- no. But somehow we missed it.”
- Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead
“There must have been a moment, at the beginning, where we could have said -- no. But somehow we missed it.”
- Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead
YES. PRACTICE IS REQUIRED. If you want to be good today you need to have already practiced yesterday and probably for a while earlier. You would think Carissa Sevar would understand this even if it was about torture instead of Spellcraft.
Carissa is not confused about this she's just not sure if, being in fact unpracticed, she should've refrained from hurting Maillol. Well. She'll try fixing him and learn something from that.
Every Project section should get priorities for the next week and next month, and notes on under what circumstances they can be promoted.
Pilar will be charge of discipline/researcher safety complaints. Routine mindreadings will include asking whether people sabotaged anyone else's work, or acted against what they understood to be the interests of the Project.
The new ilani will get a morning lecture on corrigibility and an afternoon lecture on using probabilities to think.
And an emergency tailor should be brought in, to get Carissa's outfit fitted such that Avaricia has nothing to say.
When Carissa emerges from her bedroom (or demands food be brought to her, should she be so inclined) she'll be told that Aspexia Rugatonn requests word by Project Lawful's evening Teleport on whether this expedition is to occur tomorrow after dawn, or later; Lady Sevar can make an appointment with the Queen if she has matters to discuss, else a Teleport to Project Lawful awaits her.
Oh, and here are some of the Queen's private notes on torture. Nobody's ever understood them and the Queen has given up on trying to explain to anybody.
Oooohh, that sounds like a challenge. Carissa loves challenges.
She is ready to return to Project Lawful and begin her preparations.
A very respectful Security wizard will escort her, then. He doesn't turn into pudding in Carissa Sevar's presence; he's also been exposed to the Queen a fair amount, and Carissa Sevar isn't that much scarier.
Carissa remains blissfully ignorant of the full force of the rumors spreading about her in Egorian and does not think to ask the Security wizard for tips on not melting into a puddle. It does occur to her to summon some slaves when she gets back to Project Lawful and ask them.
Well, she'll summon them and then ask them to tell her how they avoid turning into a puddle around terrifying people. She's in a hurry, she's not planning to make this complicated.
This first slave seems to have interpreted Carissa Sevar's question as a demand to know why they aren't more scared of her, and has prostrated themselves on the floor frantically babbling about how they meant no offense they only do their jobs they are very terrified they will always be very terrified from now on, since that apparently is what is being demanded of them.
Well that's totally unhelpful!!!!!! No! She doesn't want them to be more terrified! She wants to know why they aren't!
....she hasn't given them any training in believing her when she says things, has she. They have literally no reason to do that. It sounds so incredibly inconvenient and time consuming to convince them, she didn't even succeed at it with the Project students....
...probably you cannot be terrifying enough that no one dreams of crossing you while not being so terrifying it impairs them in doing their jobs. Inconvenient.
Lessons for facing Dispater: probably he would like it if Carissa was terrified of him and not impaired thereby. Since this is what SHE would like.
She tells the slave they can go and paces. She feels - deeply unhappy, somehow, and she hasn't even talked to Maillol yet. ...she should get all the Project stuff squared away so she can definitely go do this tomorrow, she thinks further waiting won't be salutory.
Maillol won't seem very... functional, when she goes to check on him. He'd maybe be capable of making administrative decisions on autopilot, that looks to be about it.
Right. This is an outcome she deliberately tried to achieve because she wanted it, it would be pathetic to have feelings about it. She is not that pathetic.
...she does mindread him in case there's more going on there.
Looped despair, a sense of unevadable punishment and that he cannot live up to Sevar's ever-increasing standards, Project Lawful is impossible to manage and when he fails people torture him and there's no realistic prospect of his life being anything else, has to pull himself together or they'll just send him to Hell - he wants to be back at the Worldwound wants to be back at the Worldwound it was hard but he was adequate to his tasks there he knew what to do -
(Abrogail's notes say that the sort of torment meant to accomplish a shaping of action and effort, within somebody, should leave them a defined way out of what is unendurable, a sense that the hardship will fade to only endurable torture if they take some mental action internally available to them. There's an exasperated note scrawled beside the previous notes saying that you can mind-read people while they're being tortured and talk to them if they're not thinking the right things.)
Well, she wasn't really paying attention to Maillol, right, the point was that she wasn't paying attention to him, it's what Subirachs told her when she first really hurt a Security, the lesson is for the benefit of everyone else. Abrogail's doing something different than all the systems in the country she built. Abrogail's trying to sculpt people. They're just trying to warn off other people.
She doesn't actually think a disconnect like that could have happened if Abrogail didn't want it that way.
Bad line of thought.
Hell doesn't hurt people intimately and personally to craft and shape them, it just lets them lie in the fires of Avernus suffering -
-- even worse line of thought. Bad Carissa. Stop that.
Some fragmentary sentences, broken bits of a stream of consciousness, go through his mind; Maillol still has curiosity, but it's not that he's been scared out of it, more that a link between that and action has been severed at least temporarily. He doesn't ask why.
(Abrogail's notes: when you hurt people enough, even if you were trying to hurt them in order to make them do something, they are liable to start freezing up instead, if the thing is at all complicated. The instinct to get away, or if you can't get away, freeze up in the presence of the person who deals pain, is very simple in people; that instinct starts to dominate if you've gone and smashed the more complicated behavior you were trying to get.)
This is upsetting and she wants to run away from it but if she can't handle this she's really going to melt about Dispater.
"I ...wondered if you had thoughts on whether I should put Abarco or Olegario in charge."
He doesn't need to think about that question to answer it. That's good. "Abarco and Pilar advise Olegario."
- nod.
I didn't mean to break you
I don't really mind if you go to Axis
I know I don't know how to do this yet but I will figure it out
"I wouldn't punish most people for not trying as hard as possible to get my desired results; I can't expect that of most people. I don't intend to place you again in a role where I do expect that."
please make clear what you expect of me, says the part of his mind that knows how torture works in people, that knows this is what Sevar should've done before this started
but he cannot say it in words for some deep instinct in him does not want to risk saying anything that causes the torment to begin again. if it seems like the torment might begin again then he'll start saying things that will make it stop. there is no reason to speak while the torment is already not happening, that would be stupid.
"I expect you to try to manage the Project, or advise those managing the project, so as to make progress and not have disasters, and not so as to serve as an avenue for corrupting me personally, and not in whatever way involves the least inconvenience for you personally."
oh. she's reading his mind.
maillol will stop having thoughts then.
well there'll be starts of thoughts but not finished ones.