Thanks for commenting!


Thanks.  It's... not out of the question.  I might post something soon, actually.  I don't know.   

 

......

 

 

...Returning to previous policy of reading end first.  See you in a few days.

Or: How do you figure out you can make people hallucinate fire and throw themselves to their deaths?

It's one thing for a guy who boxes left-handed to realize his left hand has gotten unusually strong, or for a woman who knows how to go about steering men to get really good at steering men, or for a girl to fire a gun she believes is functional, or a woman to cast a really-bad-luck spell she believes in, or a cop to get really good at subduing people.  It's not too hard to envision the man who thinks everyone should feel what he does -- oh, now they do, or the woman who knows it's very important for it to be quiet -- good, now it is, or the quite a lot of people with unusually effective 'I wish you were dead!' feelings.  Some abilities seem to function independently of conscious control; you just have to notice you're sucking all the calories out of people or making everyone forget you, or other people have to notice they're in an immersive illusion while you're in a coma.

But:
How do you realize you can make person X forget person Y?
How do you rationalize giving your self-defense class your combat flashbacks, especially the writing part?
How do you realize you can project someone else's appearance?
How do you figure out you can make people hallucinate fire and throw themselves to their deaths?

(I'd add 'How do you realize you can act as a remote control?' but we saw that in the smashed toys.  We don't see how he got from that to arson.)

Even a lot of the sudden-death anomabilities raise questions about how they first manifested.  Did Clemson McCain know he could kill before he did kill, or did he take out someone by accident, or what?  Did Felicity Tabor go to the school that day planning on killing everyone?  If so, how did she know she could?

(And while I'm throwing questions out, what's Roger Weathers's manifestation, anyway?)

I'm good, but Chloe's requesting earplugs and I think Lexy may have gone to stock up on fire extinguishers.

Nothing to see here, move along!



Hee. 


Thank you!


What an... interesting blog.  Thank you for the link.  <goes to think up evil plans>

There need to be more of these!  My angstoholic sister refuses to read Shadow Unit until she has seen photorealistic pictures of all the characters!

What elephants? 


Thank you!

I'm not sure whether this is a story or a themed collection of snippets, but...

Normality is subjective

All comments welcome.


ETA:  I've decided: It's a story.  It's a stealth story.

Thank you!

...And it's not like we ever went back and checked out the bedrooms and diaries of most of the gammas, did we?  With most of them we're trying to guess the mythology from manifestation and victimology, and in Felicity's case that would not have led me to unicorns.

Some of them seem so one-note and straightforward -- like Eddie, everything's about the left hands, or Melinda Grossman, who obviously found a Gonne, or Betty Johnson, in whose head everything was terribly tidy in a totally wrong sort of way.  I guess it's easy for me to forget that some of the other mythologies are not organized.  At all.

Soooo... which gamma has had the most complex mythology which does not break down like a bad trip?



Also, I was going to say that I clearly move in very boring circles, but then I remembered that one person who said he was a Paladin of Aphrodite. 

It's like someone threw a bunch of mythologies in a blender.

Well, popular doesn't make it coherent. 

No -- those poor artificially schizophrenic kids in "Knock on Coffins" are still schizophrenic, just no longer actively hallucinating the gamma's personal flashbacks.  Some of the damage may heal, but it didn't magically go away.  The impression I get in general is that gamma mindfuckery is either transient -- in effect only while gamma is present and actively projecting -- or lingering -- inflicted and then hangs on indefinitely.


Not the first time the gamma's ability hasn't quite clicked with what seems to be his/her mythology.  "Endgame" guy was a walking radio remote controller seeking revenge/penance.  (And I am still somewhat perplexed by Felicity Tabor's mythology, which we found out a lot more about than we did with this guy, but which was not terribly coherent when looked at all together.)

Well, I think when the host understands what's going on, it gets more flexible -- that showed up in Chaz and Hafidha experimenting with their abilities, too.  In a gamma, flexible=nasty.