002. text // i say it is, then it's true

[manufactured]

This is another of those questions in which I'm not explicitly asking for details, if you don't care to share them; I've simply found that shouting into a void is useful, if not a productive use of my time. But now that the matter of our souls has been brought into question, I suppose this feels more relevant than it would normally.

As time goes on and you have more and more memories forcibly shoved into your head, do you find yourself having difficulty keeping your thoughts and reactions separate from those of the person whose memories you're recalling? Or to put it a different way, do you ever feel the lines blurring – do you understand things that you previously thought you never would, or do you find yourself relating to things that you suspect you shouldn't?

And if so, has that sort of shift in perception changed what you believe you deserve?

Comments

[explodosafe]

I'm having some serious crisis over it, but I'm more concerned that these new urges are gonna make me kill myself before I have a moral shift.

[manufactured]

[...]

In what way do you mean?

[explodosafe]

My reflexes think nowadays that I can block usually deadly things with my bare hands. You know, like blades. Or cars.

[manufactured]

...I can see where that might become a problem, yes.

I'm assuming that that isn't quite the case, then, despite what your reflexes are insisting?

[explodosafe]

Very much not. I got a really nasty cut over this before, I was lucky we had a healer around who took care of it.

What bothers me most is that it's really going against what I'd usually choose to do, but each time I'm not thinking about it I just end up wanting to leap into harm's way rather than out of it. Which is NOT normal!

What about you? You're not asking questions this specific if it's not somehow relevant to you in a way.

[manufactured]

It's nothing quite that physically detrimental, in my case. However, there are certain impulses and tendencies that I've been noticing that are slightly on the concerning side.

I wasn't nearly this predisposed towards violence about six months ago, for example.

[explodosafe]

Violence like simply enjoying fighting or violence like worse?

[manufactured]

Primarily the former. Anything worse is restricted to intrusive thoughts, and those stay in my head where they belong.

[explodosafe]

Good. Make sure they stay that way. As for the other, there's some fighting rings and clubs in the city where you can work that steam out of your system. It's not perfect but better than letting it build up.

[manufactured]

I've no interest in allowing it to progress beyond that. At the same time, I feel less inclined to keep it a secret from people because at least this way I can be held accountable.

As for the fighting rings, I'm not certain whether that would be any sort of stress relief, or if it would just encourage that sort of thing further.

[explodosafe]

That's the manly way to do it! Even if it's some outside force that's messing with you, it's still your decisions what you do and you're owning them like a real man!

You could test it in a friendly spar? How did you feel about fighting those weird things that kept coming after us in the last weeks?

[manufactured]

[...Wh...at does he do with any of that first part.]

Well, it's good to know that I have someone's approval, at any rate.

[Nailed it.]

As for the visions and the instances in the fog, I liked it, for the most part. It depended on what they were, granted, but that's likely to be expected.

[explodosafe]

Knowing that there's somebody out there siding with you can help sometimes, so I'm happy if it does? No pressure, though! I'm just speaking my mind.

Sure is! We had a faceless dude with wires coming out from his head come after us and that wasn't fun at all, but half of that was probably because we wouldn't have had a fighting chance against that thing. What did you get?

[manufactured]

Some horrendously mutated version of someone I knew back in that other life. I'm not sure whether I'm pleased or mildly appalled to know that the fog didn't just make all of that up, given that I remembered later that he apparently just does that sometimes.

[explodosafe]

Seems like the horribly mutated people who know you have high season right now...

He just does that sometimes -- Is that a good thing or a bad thing??