PaRARGdox 55
Regrettable news…: Back on Magellan Island, things are going very poorly for the cadets…
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Next update: Wednesday 5 August: Olaf. There is consensus.
Euphemism of the day: “I have regrettable news”. I guess it is an attempt at being emphatic, something that may not be her forte – Rochelle seems to have average emotional intelligence, but at least she understand the concept.
Also, under her cool demeanor she also look a bit shocked.
Actually, I think it is mainly due to her being a bit shocked that she is speaking less matter-of-fact-ly and with more pause than usual. She is not a psychopath, she does grow attached to at least some of the people she spends her time with. I’m quite sure that Nadine and Fatima, along with Kaycee and Sioni, are fairly important to Rochelle! But she wouldn’t say it, I doubt she fully recognizes it.
(theorizing and/or projecting own experience here)
When your MO is to objectively, logically, analyze and strategize everything then things that are rooted in emotional matters becomes extremely difficult to understand and handle. Not so much when the emotions are not your own neither those of a person you care about (e.g. insult Lyta, to make her angry, causing her to act based on that), but when you do care, you can’t seem to figure it out. Why is it so? Because emotions are not only a bit abstract, uncertain and unpredictable – this can often be accounted for – but, crucially, emotional outcomes are ridiculously hard to put a value on, to weigh them against each other or against practical outcomes. Sure it feels good when your friends are doing well and bad when they don’t, but how much of your time is it worth spending on helping them out? What are the repercussions of that decision? Is it even important to have friends? It seems yes, but then how many and how close? How important is it to feel good? …in various ways, about various things, to what degree?
These are questions that people such as myself, and likely Rochelle, get caught on. It might seem a bit weird to even consider these questions, but if you’re trying to include emotional matters in analytical decision-making they seem unavoidable. And to someone an order of magnitude more in touch with the analytical part of their brain than the emotional part they are, as mentioned, ridiculously hard to answer. It is not that emotions are not important to us – it is that we can’t put our finger on how important they are. And when we don’t we fail to properly include them in our decision-making.
TL;DR: Emotions are important also to people who are not good at emotions.
This is pretty accurate, I wanted to show that she was going to deliver the information as if it were mere fact but realised she was emotionally struggling with doing so. 🙂
ITYM ’empathetic’ – ’emphatic’ means “with force or emphasis”. I mean, I suppose you might mean that Roche intends to emphasize the fact that the news is regrettable, but I don’t think you were going for that, more that Roche was attempting to soften her normally harsh rigor during a time of grief.
You are correct in your premise. Empathetic was what I was going for.
I really, really hope that time travel saves some lives here . . .
Mostly Fatima’s at this point. I mean, not that I have anything against Nadine, but Fatima is one of my absolute favourites!
*watches with intensity*
. . . also, thanks for teasing Olaf! I was really starting to wonder how Olaf was going to operate, if at all, during the Power Drain. I was honestly just expecting the body to lie limp while the orb was shut down, considering all the spellslingers on the island seem to have lost their mojos.
*watches with EVEN MORE intensity*
*watching with similar intensity*
For much the same reasons, though the fates of Fatima and Nadine both are more important to me than whether Olaf functions or not. (of course the latter may seem crucial to the former at this point, but given the earth exploding problem that we’ve seen will happen very soon, I’m fairly sure we need more than Olaf to save the day)
Wait Olaf can bring people back
Maybe not after the power damper blast.
Rochelle is not the best person to hear bad news from, but she tries to appeal emotionally. I know she’s stunted due to her intellectual distance from her peers causing her to not interact with the same level and therefore not having the same emotional development, but I know from my own experience with isolating myself from those around me (mine being due to depression) that you go long enough and empathy becomes near impossible.
There are two paths you can go by, but in the long run, there’s still time to change the road you’re on.
I just realized: Ambrosia is disoriented, and she gets that way after a time jump. It could easily be just disorientation from the attack, but could she already have jumped from the future? Would be an interesting place to go back to, rather than the beginning of the attack or the like, but still she can only go back a minute, anyways…
While that’s true, I’d say she’s more disoriented from having a building collapse around her… 😉
With the cadets and everyone else powerless,a memorial service is not far off….
Not really – memorial services are for survivors, and there won’t be any of those, at this rate.
I was thinking of Olaf’s actions after the EMP/power suppression blast.
Yasmeen: Don’t just lay there. You have to get up!
Olaf: We are unable to stand without our prior levitation ability. The consensus is to request assistance to regain uprightness.
Yasmeen: You are asking me for help? I guess. Okay, put your arm around my shoulders and … Sun! Help me stand Olaf up. And up we go. [ Olaf is now standing between the two women, with an arm around each woman’s shoulders. ] Just because you can fly around, you never worked on building up your body?
Olaf: The suggestion was made to engage in physical strength training, but consensus was not reached, therefore it was not pursued. The matter is currently being revisited but it will not assist us in the current situation.
Rochelle: Olaf, we need your help over here. Can you return them to health?
Olaf: [ Touches the limp body of Nadine ] Restoration of these is currently beyond our ability.
Rochelle: It was a long-shot. I was hoping that your resurrection ability was not suppressed, along with the special abilities of the rest of us.
Olaf: You misunderstand. We are unable to return her to life because …
Fatima: [Straining, from under a block of concrete ] Help me! [ Fatima is laying on her back with the several of her tentacles holding up the block, but some tentacles and her left primate arm are trapped under a steel girder. ] Nadine hit her head with cement and is bleeding.
I love the idea of Rochelle being wrong about these news.
Has anybody thought about what happens to the future timeline when Ambrosia leaves it by time-slipping? Does it immediately cease to exist? Does it just sorta fade away? Based on p31, the Magellan wonks believe that it does not create an alternate timeline, but HOW it doesn’t might be of interest. In less stressful circumstances, I’d guess Slow-Mo would be a helpful person to have on a team investigating such arcana.
I see it more as a form of foresight – she ‘sees’ a potential future, but only one timeline actually occurs, where she acts to prevent what she saw. It’s gonna be rough when she gets older, as she’ll remember events happening that never occurred.
Perhaps it’s a bit late to put this request in, but I don’t want to see any of our heroes die, please. Like, I know this is a superhero world with time travel and magic involved, so there’s probably multiple ways to reverse or negate death, but right now, right at this moment, this is really bad. Fatima is a favourite of mine as well, for what it’s worth.
Yeah, it’s admittedly not been a good year to dive into an alien invasion massacre story. If someone had told me nine months ago we’d be heading into a pandemic clusterfork I might have changed direction… 🙁
I mean, it could be worse. We could be living in the year that humanity actually makes first contact.
THAT would be awfully awkward.
Why did you kill off Fatima? She was such a cool character!