i mean this as non-judgemental as possible, but perhaps "stunted their growth" on the Ghost poll would be better...?
Oop, I was still in science-speak. Sorry if that made you uncomfortable, I've been reading a bunch of papers on developmental delays for my new job and had a meeting wth my PI to go over future projects with it, so I was still using really technical terms in my brain. Hadn't mentally code-switched yet
'Growth retardation' isn't innapropriate though, it's the fancyspeak medical/scientific way of saying 'stunted', so I don't necessarily think it's an overstep. Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong here, but seeing as I'm not using the word as a defining label in a dergatory context (like the slur), I think it's still okay. I'll likely use 'stunted' 99.9% in the future if it comes up- unless I'm put on the developmental delays project and need to write a paper in the fancy formal language
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literally every aspect of this page is hilarious
1) the cat scratching seb's face
2) sebastian uncaring about his scratched face as he realizes there has been a change in ciel's presence
3) him just going 'okay the plan (which is the same as every plan we come up with) is going swimmingly the young master put himself in harms way and it worked'
hes about as concerned about ciel's situation as he is about the scratches on his face. tbh hes more put out than anything. will bocchan PLEASE come up with a plan that isnt 'put self in danger and due to contract now i (seb) must go ''rescue'' him'
we all wanna talk about oh how clever o!ciel is but literally all his plans are “make sebastian deal with it”. which tbf IS clever he is working smarter not harder. but its sooo funny bc sebastian can't NOT do anything he is bound by contract to follow ciel's orders and to make sure nothing happens to ciel
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settings person in the aftermath of nick's parable bc i got. possessed 😔
You can do a lot, with the settings of a game, if you know what you're doing. They've been performing triage as best they can whilst the Narrator meticulously vivisects himself, but the Parable is still dying.
Maybe they're just postponing the inevitable. Maybe they should just let it happen, let the Narrator and Parable (and the Curator, and themself) alike disintegrate byte by byte, until there's not so much as a line left of any of them.
They can't bring themself to, though. It's not like they've got any affection for him — they've found him more or less contemptible for about as long as they can remember — but they can still have a sense of self preservation.
....If they frame it that way, as self preservation, they don't have to think about the Parable using them for its own sake. They have to keep the wheel turning after all, they have to, they have to, but this is the first time it's been rendered so wholly their responsibility — the Narrator had kept it going for a long time without needing them to intervene.
Turning the wrong direction, maybe. Or... off-axis? Something. The point is, it's been eroding for eons; forced to move in a way it was never meant to. Stanley still had the scars to prove it when he left. But they didn't have the power to make it turn correctly again, and it was still moving, so they just didn't have that internal imperative to do something.
....Maybe if they had tried to, somehow, they wouldn't all be in this mess.
That other Narrator, stealing away Stanley.... okay, he might have technically sparked this, yeah, but. If they're being honest, things were probably always heading this direction anyway. At least like this, one of them can be spared the aftermath.
It wasn't like Stanley was particularly thriving in this environment.
(That was the first time they'd seen him smile in.... okay, they can't remember that, either. It wasn't like they really knew him or anything — they're pretty sure no one except maybe the Curator even knows they exist in the first place — but he was still the closest thing to a friend they had, so. It was nice to see him smile again, before he made it out. ....God, they hope he made it out.)
They're not sure how cognizant the Narrator is (or even can be) of what he's doing, at this point — they kind of suspect he doesn't know how to do anything else anymore, his obsession the last real piece of him remaining. For every line of code they manage to stabilize, he's tearing at three more, faster than ever. They're losing ground. They're losing coherency — they're part of the Parable just as much as he is, and they can feel their own code within it starting to fail. They think, somewhat hysterically, maybe they could just, somehow, cut themself out of the Parable entirely, before he can pull them apart with him, but.... Something intrinsically woven into them won't let them so much as try.
(They don't.... want to die. They aren't sure if they can, if they're even alive enough for dying to be the right word. But, whether dead or some other word, this is going to mark the end of them all the same, and they're. Terrified.)
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