It's an easy gesture to miss, or to miss the significance of. It's a folding of the arms, a gesture of self-protection, of self-soothing. Atem's ears swivel back, once, as he thinks about how best to approach this -- what angle he should come at it from, to help Trish understand, without hurting her unnecessarily.]
Being a monster in Ryslig is a life of having to make difficult choices. Choices where, no matter what you do, somebody gets hurt. You can choose to control who's hurt, or you can give up that choice, and let the dice fall where they may...usually, causing worse destruction than you meant to. I'm talking about hunting, but the choice I made was something similar.
[He pulls in a deep breath through his damp, canine nose, then lets it out.]
The mind has limits to what it can take. Even mine...even though I thought I never would, that I could handle anything this place did to me as long as I could predict when it would end...I reached my limit.
It happened in January.
[Red eyes rimmed with gold fur fall. No, he's not quite ready to tell the story, not yet. He switches back to the impersonal, to a more detached discussion.]
When someone suffers enough...their mind takes steps to protect itself. I don't know if you've experienced it. I hope you haven't! But..it's possible, sometimes, to stop making memories, when something bad is happening to you. A friend of mine called it "checking out." He said that if he didn't want to be experiencing whatever he was experiencing, but couldn't leave physically...then, he'd leave in his mind, and his body would move on its own! When he came back to himself, he was out of the trouble...and he felt that, if he didn't remember it happening to him, it was like it hadn't happened at all.
I...don't agree. Because I'm a monster, with a monster's instincts and hungers...it's dangerous for me to be out of my own control. It's not a convenient escape for me. He might not care if someone got in his way, when he was in a state like that, but I do. Especially since...
...
...all of this came about because I attacked another monster while I wasn't in my right mind, and as revenge, he tortured me.
cw discussion of dissociation, depersonalization, mention of torture
It's an easy gesture to miss, or to miss the significance of. It's a folding of the arms, a gesture of self-protection, of self-soothing. Atem's ears swivel back, once, as he thinks about how best to approach this -- what angle he should come at it from, to help Trish understand, without hurting her unnecessarily.]
Being a monster in Ryslig is a life of having to make difficult choices. Choices where, no matter what you do, somebody gets hurt. You can choose to control who's hurt, or you can give up that choice, and let the dice fall where they may...usually, causing worse destruction than you meant to. I'm talking about hunting, but the choice I made was something similar.
[He pulls in a deep breath through his damp, canine nose, then lets it out.]
The mind has limits to what it can take. Even mine...even though I thought I never would, that I could handle anything this place did to me as long as I could predict when it would end...I reached my limit.
It happened in January.
[Red eyes rimmed with gold fur fall. No, he's not quite ready to tell the story, not yet. He switches back to the impersonal, to a more detached discussion.]
When someone suffers enough...their mind takes steps to protect itself. I don't know if you've experienced it. I hope you haven't! But..it's possible, sometimes, to stop making memories, when something bad is happening to you. A friend of mine called it "checking out." He said that if he didn't want to be experiencing whatever he was experiencing, but couldn't leave physically...then, he'd leave in his mind, and his body would move on its own! When he came back to himself, he was out of the trouble...and he felt that, if he didn't remember it happening to him, it was like it hadn't happened at all.
I...don't agree. Because I'm a monster, with a monster's instincts and hungers...it's dangerous for me to be out of my own control. It's not a convenient escape for me. He might not care if someone got in his way, when he was in a state like that, but I do. Especially since...
...
...all of this came about because I attacked another monster while I wasn't in my right mind, and as revenge, he tortured me.
[He glances up. Is Trish with him so far?]