Akin (aka Curls) (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
akin2squidrats) wrote2011-08-01 09:28 pm
akin2squidrats) wrote2011-08-01 09:28 pm
Entry tags:
Essay: Pillar Trauma Time!
So, Akin is really Not Okay.
Yes, I know, few people in Sabra are truly okay. But we have a number of factors lending to the Not Okay-ness.
First, let's talk the Pillar/Old Man. Generally speaking, those Sabrans who have been in the Pillar fear it the most*. Akin’s first memories are of being inside the Pillar for an indeterminate amount of time, having his mind wiped clean and being eaten alive. And he pretty much repressed it to survive in Sabra. First there was novelty (strange things! moving! new teammates! Ursa!) which helped a lot. And, well, Canis hadn't lost anyone for a while -- Iggy/Sundown is the only one Akin would have personally known, and the last three people to leave have done so via Good End. More on that later. And he hadn’t been in the East Block long enough to internalize the ‘South Block means the Judges are one step closer to giving up on us and leaving us to be eaten by the Old Man’ warnings that the other teams had gotten.
So this was a reminder that no, you’re not safe. Everyone got that. There were other factors, though. The first is that Akin remembers living in an Oankali town and an Oankali ship. Living in an organism, one you are constantly taking nonverbal cues from, means that the more Akin remembers, the more the place is hitting his Uncanny Valley pings. Thanks to his senses, he can tell the whole place is alive, and it is unhealthy -- not on a conscious level, but about the same way that a human would feel disquieted in a hospital ward. Normally Oankali and constructs don’t bother much with clothing -- they have good temperature controls and live in ships which can temperature regulate anyway. When you have vision and taste/smell all over your skin, clothing is like wearing an eyepatch. One that pinches in all kinds of uncomfortable ways. Plus, no nudity taboo. More it’s a way to make humans feel comfortable.
Originally this was Akin’s reasoning. He needed the bracer, and something blue to mark his team, but he could have got by with his boxers. But wearing the shirt and pants helps confirm he’s a normal part of the team. He’d leave any layers off that he could -- his shirt is unlaced, the belt only is worn when he needs the belt pouch, and the boxers**, leather jerkin, socks and shoes are left in his room as ‘in case I wreck my uniforms’. Once he got his healing memories back, he thought about trimming the sleeves off his shirts and converting his pants to shorts because skin contact helps him work. Basically clothing has always been a war between Akin’s comfort and ability to interact with his surroundings, and his sense of fitting in on Canis and in Sabra.
Now he’s reminded that the ground is Not Safe. Or at least that it isn’t as deeply asleep as it was, and he can easily link in with it, even without meaning to, via his feet. Cue in paranoia. As he mentioned to Jace, shoes seem like a better idea now. He’ll also refuse to touch the earth (and water) with bare skin if he can help it, which means making (or trading with Ophi for) a pair of gloves. He’ll be all right with plants and animals for now, because their own lives will drown out Pillar pings. He’ll also be less likely to swim, since he does remember what happened to poor Waterbearer and that the East Block lake was contaminated.
Honestly, he’s deeply frightened now, and I’m surprised he didn’t try to sting the ground. (What would enough corrosive neurotoxin to give a human a Bad Day do to the Old Man? I don’t know.) But, team is acting as a sanity bridge.
Akin’s social state is a bit odd. Supposedly male human-Oankali constructs are supposed to be loners, but Akin is more about making friends in many different places -- it’s not quite a loner state, since he’d go batty if he wasn’t around people, but he doesn’t need to stay around one group. He travelled a lot as a young man, trying to Learn! All the! Things! but part of that was knowing he was equipped to deal with it.
He wasn’t in Sabra -- no new blank can survive on their own. So it was ‘natural’ to bond to his teammates and do the whole team = family thing. And assume those who were there first -- Jace, Masamune, Poppy, Bones, Flames and Sundown -- were people who were knowledgeable about Sabra to some extent. (As in, Jace, Masa and Bones were the only actual adults, but the others clearly knew things about the area.)
I’ve mentioned a few times that Akin doesn’t see things in terms of leaders and followers, because the Oankali are consensus-builders -- they don’t do hierarchy. Which works fine in a group as small as Canis, and when the ‘leader’ is also the veteran and magical expert (on a team which doesn’t have many mages right now, and in an environment where magical knowledge helps), and isn’t someone who needs followers. So, Akin weights Jace’s opinion heavily because Jace has probably seen things like this before, either in his pre-Sabra life or his time in Sabra. Similarly, he’d regard Bones’s opinion on medical or biological matters heavily, since Bones was a doctor -- he’d offer his own opinions as he learned and remembered things Bones might miss, but not Bones’s fault he doesn’t know Akin’s biology.
But Canis has shifted a lot recently -- not to the degree of, say, Lepus, but has had everyone Akin remembers on his wake-up, except Jace, leave. And Akin is now one of the knowledgeable ones. Not only is he now Team Healer and he’s always been Team Gardener. But he also acts as some of Canis’s institutional memory. He’s not too comfortable that Jace hasn’t mentioned the whole ‘we’re planning to act against the Judges to the other teammates’, because it shouldn’t be Jace’s call, but he’s willing to defer it until they have more information. If Jace acts on it, Akin will consider it necessary for Canis to know the truth and agree on what to do with it. Especially if Jace is injured, because Akin knows Dawn is starting to show magic stuff, so she now becomes their expert. That and... well, he thinks the best decision will come from all of them working to cover the others’ blind spots.
And all of this is what’s keeping Akin sane. The Pillar scares him nearly beyond rational thought, but he has something else. Also Jace being a telepath and any ability to pick up that normally Jace is in mental contact with all of Canis though his bond with Jace is reassuring. Akin would love the ability to talk to humans at a distance, because knowing that the team is there and safe is an anchor for him. Heck, being one of a unit like everyone around him is kind of something he’s always wanted -- Akin was part of a family and a village, but because he never bonded properly with Ti thanks to being kidnapped, it was like growing up as the only singleton in a society of twins. Which marked him as an outsider, even if no one was mean about it.
So, expect some nervousness about making sure everyone in the team is coping***, and Jace will probably notice Akin deliberately trying (in his non-telepath-but-used-to-mental-contact way) to keep some of Jace’s telepathic attention as a security thing.
Akin will probably just pass out from mental and physical exhaustion. If any of Beardog gets eaten by the ground soon, be very worried about fallout -- there may be BSoDing.
* Perhaps followed by those who have lost a lot of friends and teammates to it, especially if they saw their teammates being eaten by the ground.
** No external genitals or waste orifices means that wearing a second layer to protect your crotch is silly.
*** Different from ‘all right’. We’re in a dying planet that wants to eat us, forced to play games that involve death, maiming and mental fuckery to appease the gods what may be keeping us alive, and our one shot of freedom may kill us all. IF YOU ARE ALL RIGHT, YOU ARE NOT PAYING ATTENTION.
Yes, I know, few people in Sabra are truly okay. But we have a number of factors lending to the Not Okay-ness.
First, let's talk the Pillar/Old Man. Generally speaking, those Sabrans who have been in the Pillar fear it the most*. Akin’s first memories are of being inside the Pillar for an indeterminate amount of time, having his mind wiped clean and being eaten alive. And he pretty much repressed it to survive in Sabra. First there was novelty (strange things! moving! new teammates! Ursa!) which helped a lot. And, well, Canis hadn't lost anyone for a while -- Iggy/Sundown is the only one Akin would have personally known, and the last three people to leave have done so via Good End. More on that later. And he hadn’t been in the East Block long enough to internalize the ‘South Block means the Judges are one step closer to giving up on us and leaving us to be eaten by the Old Man’ warnings that the other teams had gotten.
So this was a reminder that no, you’re not safe. Everyone got that. There were other factors, though. The first is that Akin remembers living in an Oankali town and an Oankali ship. Living in an organism, one you are constantly taking nonverbal cues from, means that the more Akin remembers, the more the place is hitting his Uncanny Valley pings. Thanks to his senses, he can tell the whole place is alive, and it is unhealthy -- not on a conscious level, but about the same way that a human would feel disquieted in a hospital ward. Normally Oankali and constructs don’t bother much with clothing -- they have good temperature controls and live in ships which can temperature regulate anyway. When you have vision and taste/smell all over your skin, clothing is like wearing an eyepatch. One that pinches in all kinds of uncomfortable ways. Plus, no nudity taboo. More it’s a way to make humans feel comfortable.
Originally this was Akin’s reasoning. He needed the bracer, and something blue to mark his team, but he could have got by with his boxers. But wearing the shirt and pants helps confirm he’s a normal part of the team. He’d leave any layers off that he could -- his shirt is unlaced, the belt only is worn when he needs the belt pouch, and the boxers**, leather jerkin, socks and shoes are left in his room as ‘in case I wreck my uniforms’. Once he got his healing memories back, he thought about trimming the sleeves off his shirts and converting his pants to shorts because skin contact helps him work. Basically clothing has always been a war between Akin’s comfort and ability to interact with his surroundings, and his sense of fitting in on Canis and in Sabra.
Now he’s reminded that the ground is Not Safe. Or at least that it isn’t as deeply asleep as it was, and he can easily link in with it, even without meaning to, via his feet. Cue in paranoia. As he mentioned to Jace, shoes seem like a better idea now. He’ll also refuse to touch the earth (and water) with bare skin if he can help it, which means making (or trading with Ophi for) a pair of gloves. He’ll be all right with plants and animals for now, because their own lives will drown out Pillar pings. He’ll also be less likely to swim, since he does remember what happened to poor Waterbearer and that the East Block lake was contaminated.
Honestly, he’s deeply frightened now, and I’m surprised he didn’t try to sting the ground. (What would enough corrosive neurotoxin to give a human a Bad Day do to the Old Man? I don’t know.) But, team is acting as a sanity bridge.
Akin’s social state is a bit odd. Supposedly male human-Oankali constructs are supposed to be loners, but Akin is more about making friends in many different places -- it’s not quite a loner state, since he’d go batty if he wasn’t around people, but he doesn’t need to stay around one group. He travelled a lot as a young man, trying to Learn! All the! Things! but part of that was knowing he was equipped to deal with it.
He wasn’t in Sabra -- no new blank can survive on their own. So it was ‘natural’ to bond to his teammates and do the whole team = family thing. And assume those who were there first -- Jace, Masamune, Poppy, Bones, Flames and Sundown -- were people who were knowledgeable about Sabra to some extent. (As in, Jace, Masa and Bones were the only actual adults, but the others clearly knew things about the area.)
I’ve mentioned a few times that Akin doesn’t see things in terms of leaders and followers, because the Oankali are consensus-builders -- they don’t do hierarchy. Which works fine in a group as small as Canis, and when the ‘leader’ is also the veteran and magical expert (on a team which doesn’t have many mages right now, and in an environment where magical knowledge helps), and isn’t someone who needs followers. So, Akin weights Jace’s opinion heavily because Jace has probably seen things like this before, either in his pre-Sabra life or his time in Sabra. Similarly, he’d regard Bones’s opinion on medical or biological matters heavily, since Bones was a doctor -- he’d offer his own opinions as he learned and remembered things Bones might miss, but not Bones’s fault he doesn’t know Akin’s biology.
But Canis has shifted a lot recently -- not to the degree of, say, Lepus, but has had everyone Akin remembers on his wake-up, except Jace, leave. And Akin is now one of the knowledgeable ones. Not only is he now Team Healer and he’s always been Team Gardener. But he also acts as some of Canis’s institutional memory. He’s not too comfortable that Jace hasn’t mentioned the whole ‘we’re planning to act against the Judges to the other teammates’, because it shouldn’t be Jace’s call, but he’s willing to defer it until they have more information. If Jace acts on it, Akin will consider it necessary for Canis to know the truth and agree on what to do with it. Especially if Jace is injured, because Akin knows Dawn is starting to show magic stuff, so she now becomes their expert. That and... well, he thinks the best decision will come from all of them working to cover the others’ blind spots.
And all of this is what’s keeping Akin sane. The Pillar scares him nearly beyond rational thought, but he has something else. Also Jace being a telepath and any ability to pick up that normally Jace is in mental contact with all of Canis though his bond with Jace is reassuring. Akin would love the ability to talk to humans at a distance, because knowing that the team is there and safe is an anchor for him. Heck, being one of a unit like everyone around him is kind of something he’s always wanted -- Akin was part of a family and a village, but because he never bonded properly with Ti thanks to being kidnapped, it was like growing up as the only singleton in a society of twins. Which marked him as an outsider, even if no one was mean about it.
So, expect some nervousness about making sure everyone in the team is coping***, and Jace will probably notice Akin deliberately trying (in his non-telepath-but-used-to-mental-contact way) to keep some of Jace’s telepathic attention as a security thing.
Akin will probably just pass out from mental and physical exhaustion. If any of Beardog gets eaten by the ground soon, be very worried about fallout -- there may be BSoDing.
* Perhaps followed by those who have lost a lot of friends and teammates to it, especially if they saw their teammates being eaten by the ground.
** No external genitals or waste orifices means that wearing a second layer to protect your crotch is silly.
*** Different from ‘all right’. We’re in a dying planet that wants to eat us, forced to play games that involve death, maiming and mental fuckery to appease the gods what may be keeping us alive, and our one shot of freedom may kill us all. IF YOU ARE ALL RIGHT, YOU ARE NOT PAYING ATTENTION.
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no subject
And just... well, he can't expect Jace to explain everything of magic he knows, any more than he can explain everything about botany to Jace. Especially since most people aren't used to absorbing info via mental link. So some things are a matter of 'do it on your own and tell us what we need'. But major decisions need to be explained and agreed on.
(Also, Akin wrote a list of games he remembered in the team journal. OOCly, I skipped a few loser games that he might not have known about, but he'd probably show it to Jace.)
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Yeah, I got it in my inbox. |D Also randomly, because I missed the point, Jace will be fine with keeping a constant link up for Akin; he's already kind of planning on doing it anyway, for the conservation thing.
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