text ↪ un: dostoevsky

[dissemblance]

Can we all take a moment to admire the fact that 2801 technology still supports emoji functionality? 🤩 👍 🕷 💁 🩰 💫 🍆 🧊 💅 👁‍🗨 🎯 🤡 🔋 🐈 💲 🧙‍♀️ 🐦💋 🐜 👽 🕶 ⚡ 🕵🏻‍♀️ 💦 💦 💦

It seems like they're pretty set on calling us 'Hatchlings', so... hello, fellow Hatchlings, I'd like to play a game.

Two truths and a lie. I'll start.

  ① Starbucks makes the best lattes.
  ② I've never watched All Dogs Go To Heaven all the way through.
  ③ My birthdate is May 21st. What year? Every year. 😉😉😉 But my party in 2018 was 🔥🔥🔥.

Comments

[brosbeforeprose]

[oh no, mops, you're adorable. he's flustered!]

🤷🏾💦 It's mostly a matter of having the time to sit around and get it done. Nowadays...or should I say, until this week... I had to make the time. Hard to sit on your ass doing nothing when the town's falling to hell and people keep making you go to meetings. Those two things might be unrelated.

[Look at Varric using the sweating emoji like it's meant to be used. He'll be using it in the worst possible way by next week.]

You could be on to something with escapism, though. I've never been much for the wild and fantastic, but hell, I write about crime families and your rugged everyman turned unlikely saver of the day. Maybe there's some viscount out there reading my books and thinking it might as well be a crashed ship from outer space.

Ever met any unpublished writers? I'm sure there's some hidden gems among the people who don't want to deal with people like my agent.

[cleaningsolutions]

I didn't know you could do that. Scheduling is the hardest part? I'm impressed.

[She's a little intimidated actually. Mops is very smart for a cured human, but she's the sort to labor at length over an after-action report and struggles to imagine just creating.]

Some of my crewmates on the Pufferfish write as a hobby. We haven't had anyone interested in fiction since Elizabeth Tudor transferred back to Stepping Stone, though. He had a particular genre that wasn't to my taste, but he put a lot of work into it.

[Cured humans choose their names from a database of famous humans (and some fictional characters) and do not care if the genders match, so this is a running thing.

...She is very tactfully not saying that Tudor's stories were monotonous and always about he and his friends, but mostly him, performing feats of ludicrous heroism while people he had some disagreement with failed at basic tasks and either died or were rescued and repented. Writing is hard! He'd only been at it for like three years and he wasn't a person before then!]

[brosbeforeprose]

Well, you need the time to write, don't you? The ideas can come any time, but you need the time to sit down and get them out. And I don't have these fancy machines where I just press buttons - where I'm from, it's all ink and paper.

[There's a growing list of things about this camp he could get used to, and being able to write out your thoughts with just a few taps of the fingers is at the top. Showers come second.]

Then you definitely know more writers than just me. Anyone's a writer - they just have to have an idea and get it out. You could be one if you wanted.

[cleaningsolutions]

Oh - hand writing. Does it hurt? I've read books that say it hurts to write a lot by hand. Or does developing the muscles make it not hurt anymore? I've never understood that.

I'm not sure. I've been using speech-to-text because it's easier to talk than it is to know what to write.

[brosbeforeprose]

I'm sure it would hurt like hell if you hadn't been doing it your whole life. But imagine you've never seen any of this technology before and the only way to get anything down was handwriting. You'd get good at it without hurting pretty quickly.

[In other words: yes, it's the muscles. Why say it with four words when you could say it with 45?]

Shit, you can do that?

[Brief pause before the next message.]

Andraste's tits, I've been missing out. Wasting whole seconds of my life tapping on a bit of glass.

[cleaningsolutions]

These were monks who transcribed books, because they hadn't invented the printing press yet. I'd imagine if anyone was used to it it would be them, but I don't actually know much about monks. Maybe someone was always writing but it wasn't always the same person.

Now comes the part where you hide that you can do that, or you'll have fans saying if you can write any time...

[and then, because she's been thinking about this:]

What's it like? I mean - hurting. Pain.

[brosbeforeprose]

That's how it works in Thedas - where I'm from. Monks or anybody paid well enough with hand muscles of steel writes copies of books. Even mine, although I would bet money that no monk ever copied a book of mine. My publisher handles all that and she would probably spontaneously combust if she walked into a Chantry.

[He likes her, but she's literally in a criminal gang, so it's true.]

You don't know what it feels like? A lot of people would be jealous of that.

Let me see... Pain is your body crying out to you to stop doing what you're doing. It has a lot of tones of voice depending on what you're doing and how intense it is. Sometimes it just grumbles dully, or nags you with its whiny voice. But there's pain that's like scraping a sword on stone, you know the way the sound makes you wince? It can throb, stab, wash over you like acid.

Sometimes it grounds you and lets you think clearly enough to act when you need to.
Sometimes it's so intense your body doesn't know what it's feeling, it just screams at you to stop.

[cleaningsolutions]

You don't have the technology to replicate text quickly. That sounds difficult. Your books must be rare and expensive.

[which also, to her mind, means he's probably a bigger deal than she'd assumed when she expected printing presses or woodcuts. Whichever came first. She is not at all sure.]



That's very poetic. No, humans - cured humans - don't experience pain. I have something like a dull pressure or tightness. Sometimes, like when an organ ruptures, I also feel my heartbeat throbbing around the area, but it's not exactly precise. My uniform was designed to log damage and inform me or I wouldn't know most of the time. It doesn't feel very important.

It's a tradeoff. As far as I've heard pain exists to tell you not to do something. I've known people who walked into fire or with broken legs and hurt themselves further or died. It's part of why we're so feared as fighters, though.

[brosbeforeprose]

They're not cheap, that much I can say. But then, I've seen copies in the damndest places, so there's probably a thriving secondhand market I'm not seeing any take from.

[He's not complaining. Today's secondhand buyer might be tomorrow's firsthand buyer.]

Your uniform tells you? How so?

You'd have to be very aware of those throbbings and pressures, and of how much your body can take, to be able to go into dangerous situations with permanently damaging yourself.

I guess it depends on how desposable your superiors find you if you ever find yourself in battle

[cleaningsolutions]

I don't really know how the technology works, but my uniform has a network of tiny sensors. Whenever one senses a puncture, for example, it automatically seals and sends a signal to my monocle, which even without Doc can make sense of all the signals and tell me how bad the damage is. If I had my team here and all in uniform I could have Doc monitor all of them.

It does take training. Infantry and anyone else going out in the field wears combat uniforms too. Those have more robust systems of detection and monitor our bodies more precisely than SHS - that's Shipboard Hygiene and Sanitation.

It depends on the officer, but the Admiralty keeps us in mind and reprimands the ones who don't care. Some things are worth the risk of death, and in any case we're hard to kill.