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--- plot:mawne:2025-06-14 [2025/07/12 15:22] – Today's stuff pinkgothic
+++ plot:mawne:2025-06-14 [2025/08/02 16:51] (current) – Today's stuff pinkgothic
@@ Line 54: / Line 54: @@
 <color #884400>"A few months later I quit my shipboard job, and took up a role in Ehqaj port instead. That was nearly eight years ago."</color>
+~Why,~ the luminescent pokémon began to ask, making no secret of its displeasure. ~Did you decide to circuit?~ It was asked in the kind of deadpan manner one asks about a mistake that reveals itself to be deeply flawed and stupid in hindsight - like 'why did you decide to stick your hand into the bee hive, exactly?', or 'precisely when did you begin to think it was a good idea to diligently paint over the window pane?'.
+The question erupted some opaque vocal chittering between the crimson-scaled menace and the sharp-edged electric spectator, like a heated sequence of gnashing, whimpering and barking of dogs. It died down quickly, and the pokémon speaking with her made no impression of having engaged with the squabble at all, to the point where it was unclear whether it had even noticed it, or its laser focus had blotted it out.
+<color #884400>Adelaide grimaced. Even without the pressure of a trial, this wasn't exactly something she was proud of. Nor one that portrayed her in a good light. She could only hope that Jagdish could stop those two Legendaries from eating her.</color>
+<color #884400>"A large percentage of the guests on the S.S. Anne were partial or even full circuiters in their own regions. As were quite a few of the staff on board. As one of the few front-of-house staff from Sehto, I was constantly asked about our circuit and met with incredulousness when I said it wasn't really... done, here. I faced frequent exhortations to circuit myself, musings about foreigners coming here to circuit themselves, and a great many tales of the lovely time various trainers had had on their own rites of passage - their phrasing - and how beneficial it was to their teams.</color>
+<color #884400>"So when I was on a long stint of shore leave, it seemed like a potentially engaging way of seeing parts of the island I'd never had a reason to visit. And-" this was the part that was going to hurt, and she fought not to wince at her past foolishness,"-that if I could prove I'd done it, everyone would //shut up// about it."</color>
+The crimson-bodied creature with its needles and hairpins and all abruptly made a motion as if to stand, but the smaller sharp-edged electric critter beside it reached up with the speed customary for its type, grabbed an arm, and pulled on it, first awkwardly unbalancing the larger creature's posture, then making it sit back down.
+The glowing pokémon's eyes had shifted visibly to look toward the motion, but it had otherwise not moved. Now its attention was back on Adelaide, and it asked: ~You went on the circuit so the other humans would 'shut up'?~
+At this point, Jagdish gestured to Adelaide for quiet. With his left hand's thumb hooked into the edge of his trousers, his fingers playing out some practised, tension-reducing gesture mostly out of sight of anyone else, he said: "Granted that the wording she's choosing may be somewhat incendiary, but as established in numerous prior trials, the human species is a social one, with its members greatly interdependent of each others' opinions and mores. We've discussed peer pressure before in these halls; not to absolve Adelaide Mawne of her individual choice, far from it, but I suggest you substitute that what she was seeking was social acceptance in an environment that continually pushed to normalise circuiting behaviour."
+A collective bristling was remarkably quick to die down - it was clearly not something her audience //liked//, but it was perhaps more palatable than 'I wanted them to shut up'. It was Psynateh who spoke to her next, brimming with some opaque emotion that could hardly be good: ~Why did you, when given the choice between the circuit-discouraging culture of Sehto and the circuit-embellishing culture of this S.S. Anne, choose to embrace the latter, rather than remove yourself from it?~
+A question much like 'why did you choose to stay with your criminal friends, even though you could tell they had different values than the environment you had grown up in' - and almost equally impossible to answer.
+<color #884400>"Removing myself wasn't-" Adelaide paused and corrected herself, making herself keep her eyes on Psynateh and not on the clearly furious crimson Legendary. "At the time I did not feel that removing myself was an option. Abandoning the ship would have left me stranded in another country with no resources, so I never truly considered it. While I knew that the people around me were biased and embellishing the 'benefits' of circuiting, I assumed that the people of Sehto were likewise exaggerating the harms of battling. It is... a known trait of many human cultures, to take points of differentiation and strongly emphasise them. At the time, I thought that meant the truth was somewhere in the middle."</color>
+The personification of the light of the full moon was clearly the Council leader of a sort - a judge, perhaps, in rough human analogy - and seized upon what Adelaide had said to protest: ~And yet you were clearly in Sehto when you chose to circuit, spending significant time ashore to do so, during which you could have also done //nothing at all// and choose to absolve yourself of the preposterous idea and cease your involvement with the environment on the vessel at next opportunity.~
+For a moment, it seemed as though it might not care about the second part of her elaboration at all, with a silence lingering almost long enough to become a prompt for comment, but then its voice swelled in her skull once more, now rattling with exasperation: ~Explain to us in what way you believed that the Sehtoan custom of discouraging forcing your pokémon to inflict and endure violence to and from other pokémon could possibly be an exaggeration.~
+The crimson-scaled one snorted derisively, burning its gaze into Adelaide, but did not make as if to leap forward, simply tensely bundled beside the glowing ring leader.
 ✘ **IN PROGRESS**
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