engineers | pc catchall | superhell

[ NOT MY IRIS

this is a lot. there's the strangeness, then the corpse - then the voices of the mother and the little girl, her scream of pain and agony and her apologies that twist up in his chest in the way someone in trouble always hurts him. it's not something he's intimately familiar with, this particular kind of suffering, but he's too empathetic not to feel it, and, frankly -

frankly, he'd way rather focus on that than his own memories, so he's a little relieved, if very, very confused, and all date gets is a - ]

What in the world...?

[ :thonk:

and, well. ouch. he doesn’t like being reminded of failures — who does? but this one is fresh and niggles under the skin a little. not being able to pull mizuki out of her trauma, not doing the right things in her Somnium to unlock the seals that her psyche had placed on her heart.

stepping out and knowing he hadn’t managed to cure her aphonia, and the niggling discomfort and fear of what he’d seen making him worry about iris just has much…

… mm. ]

I could ask you the same thing.

[ hm

deflects ]

It was a long time ago. [ that's a whole ass lie ] Does your world always look like that - is that sort of thing normal...?

[ he senses a deflection in the abyss. ]

No, it’s not my world exactly. And no, my world doesn’t look like that.

...I think even I'm having trouble trying to figure out the context of this one.

[ help. let's talk about you date ]

I'd be surprised if you could.

[ just stares at him. no. ]

[ hm? ]

I think I would be, too. Not going to explain at all...?

We're both dodging pretty hard here, aren't we?

...I think, with a falling merry go round, a corpse, and your AI friend, I am allowed to have questions.

[ JUST SAYING ]

None of it was real.

[ ... he tilts his head. ]

Well. None of it there was real. That's a Somnium.

[ O: ]

Somnium? Like a dream?

Like a dream, sort of.

It's a dream influenced by memories that you can access through a specific machine, and working through the memory locks in the Somnium can help them remember something, or help soothe a trauma.

I see... so, a bit like therapy?

[ whoa. that's fascinating - his nerdy little brain wants to understand that immediately and ask about fifteen thousand questions about the actual machine, but he will not do that to poor date. ]

It sounds like the sort of thing we would use. Or, at least, the kind of thing that might be a part of Eden. Do you work with it often?

If you're thinking of "therapy en route to solving crime", then yes. The girl who that Somnium belonged to found a body -- and traumatised herself mute in the process.

[ :( ]

...

[ he briefly looks amused. ]

It's in my profile. It's my job.

[ a little teasingly: ]

I meant the therapy part. [ considering all those questions he was asking before trying to make him Talk About Things!!!!!

but now this. ] ...So, was the body in the Somnium the one that she found...?

[ a shrug. ]

That's a side effect of the investigating. Sometimes we focus on it though. [ he'd be a terrible therapist though. ]

No. That was a surprise.

I see...

[ well, that kind of makes sense. this he can contextualize - if it's someone's brain, then yeah, maybe they wouldn't see the same body, but someone else they just knew...? who knows. he won't pursue the line of questioning though, instead just pursing his lips briefly, thoughtful. ]

...Did you end up helping her?