we_meet_again | Phone inbox

Not at all! Thanks for coming!

Want some tea?

[nods twice]

Thank you... Oh, there's snacks too! Are these for us?

Yeah! Help yourself!

[Cobalt pours tea, hands out the cups and sits down.]

Okay! So! This might seem like a weird thing to talk about over tea and snacks, but we need to go over death and how it applies to this place, and to our unit.

As you know - if you saw that part in the handbook, Dawn - death is not permanent here. Out-of-game violence is rare, 'cause people tend to be pretty chill, all things considered. But in emergencies, one of our unit abilities is the power to revive people within 24 hours of death. Which is honestly pretty cool! But there are some things you need to know about it.

First, we don't have the power to actually heal anyone, just bring them back to life. So if someone died of an injury, for example, if you don't heal the injury before reviving them, theoretically they will only stay alive for an hour before dying again.

Fortunately, we've never had to find this out by trial and error! But for safety's sake, if someone ever did die, the first step would be to ask someone from sensitIV, the unit with healing powers, to heal the body before revival.

We've got a lot of ground to cover, but... any questions so far? I think this part's pretty straightforward.

So, that's how it works...

[It's a little bit daunting.]

I kind of thought it just meant if someone was unconscious. Do people just - call us, then? If they need us, I mean?

Pretty much!

"Energy Recharge" also works on unconscious people, too! Or people who are just sleepy. It is guaranteed to wake up anyone for one hour, no matter what state they may be in!

Personally, I use it on myself when I'm getting up early. More effective than coffee!

[well she's going to have some snacks, snacks are important]

In the case of an emergency, if we're pressed for time and we can't find anyone from sensitIV, can we revive someone and reset the 24-hour limit that way, so we have 24 more hours to find someone to help them even if they die again?

[<-- video game mentality]

Edited 2019-03-22 05:28 (UTC)

Would that work, though? It seems a little bit like cheating... and wouldn't it be hard on the person, if they had to die twice?

Edited 2019-03-22 05:31 (UTC)

But if it doesn't work, wouldn't it mean that we can't really revive anyone? If our ability depends on a different unit's to work, it wouldn't be fair since we're supposed to compete with them normally. No one dies for no reason, so there should always be something to heal.

And hmm. I thought it would be better to die twice but have a chance to be revived than to die once but for good, but am I missing something?

Yes, theoretically you could do that - revive someone just to let them die again. It would be pretty cruel, because you'd be forcing them to live for an hour with a mortal injury, so that should be reserved for an absolute crisis when the 24-hour limit is about to expire, and not until.

Also, if nobody from sensitIV is available, there's a guy named John on LiliS who might be able to help, too. He's an actual medic, as far as I can tell.

Anyone who's not revived within 24 hours somehow gets sent to a demon named Lilith. She will revive them for a heavy price. From what I understand, there's some amount of torture involved, and the person will suffer some kind of permanent change, like having their limbs replaced with doll parts, or growing horns, or losing their reflection or something. Weird supernatural stuff.

So, forcing a person to live for an hour with a fatal wound is cruel, but letting them die is also cruel. Hopefully none of us will ever have to make this choice.

Oh, no... not Lilith again?

[Wednesday shudders in spite of herself, she gazes down into her cup, and pulls a face.]

That's - kind of what I was afraid of. I think dying must be awful. Waking up knowing that it was going to happen again must be worse. And - we're not really healing anything, are we? Just bringing back life. So they'd - they'd really be hurting, wouldn't they?

Yeah, it... it would basically just be torture. An hour is a long time when you're in pain. So let's all do our best not to ever do that if we can help it! Okay?

Mm. Definitely.

[nods]

This ability sounds like a big responsibility. Does this sort of thing happen often? You said it's rare out-of-game, but what if we count games too?

Unfortunately, some of the games force us to hurt each other, even when we don't want to. Most people will do their absolute best not to hurt others if they can help it, but there's often some amount of non-preventable violence.

So far, anyone who has died in a game has been revived at the end. The exception is people who either kill themselves or allow themselves to be killed in an attempt to avoid playing -- they get sent to Lilith. Our current understanding of what, exactly, counts as "avoiding the game" is kinda shaky, so a lot of people will play along and pretend they're playing harder than they actually are, so if they do die, they won't be punished. Does that make sense?

More or less. How do you pretend to be playing hard without doing it? Is it like putting an act for the cameras?

Pretty much. For example, instead of fighting, just play-fighting in a way that looks convincing but where nobody actually gets hurt. Or being prepared to sacrifice yourself but never openly admitting it. Anything that gives you plausible deniability when it comes to whether or not you were trying to throw a game.

I don't know if it actually works, but it's worth a shot.

I - heard words count.

You... don't actually have to really do anything for them to decide you're trying to throw a game, Dawn. I - my second game I was by myself, and we had to... oh, it was ridiculous. It was a murder mystery, except the body wasn't real. Just a plastic skeleton in a dress. But we had to decide what units had killed her - it - and if we got that right then the 'killers' would die, and if we didn't, the 'detectives' would. It was four units or eight - seven, and because I was alone... I said they should pick us as killers. So fewer people had to die. Well... it didn't work.

[She sighs. Shakes her head.]

I got a friend killed instead. She died so - so they wouldn't say I was a suicide, and I wouldn't have to go to Lilith. And a lot of people warned me, but only after I'd spoken up... and that was all I did, but a lot of people think it would have been enough.

We don't know for sure if words count, which is why everyone is erring on the side of caution. One person was sent to Lilith after he died by accident in a game. Presumably if that counts as suicide, expressing a desire to die and then dying might count, too. We just don't know at this point. So please do be careful.

Any more questions about this topic before we move on?

[shakes her head, listening quietly for now]

Okay, cool.

The next thing we need to talk about is pep!pep!'s revival policy, which requires a little bit of backstory to properly explain.

[he takes a drink of his tea]

For whatever reason, our whole unit showed up more than a month after everyone else. Before we arrived, there weren't any units with the power to revive people. Nobody knew about Lilith back then, either.

On our second day here, there was a bad game where a couple people died in a bad way and everyone was really angry about it. Everyone started threatening each other and words like "blood feud" started getting thrown around as whole units threatened to murder and counter-murder each other. It was really stressful!

Fortunately, everyone chilled out eventually and nothing happened. But we were all really worried that people would use our presence - and our ability - as an excuse to kill each other, since suddenly now death could be "fixed."

Now, most of the people in pep!pep! tend to be young and... pretty gentle folks, and having a bunch of people slaughter each other and expect us to fix it would have been really hard on us, psychologically. And, obviously, it would have been really bad for sensitIV, too. And the whole community in general!

So we started brainstorming ways to discourage something like this from happening. SensitIV has its own way of discouraging people from abusing their healing powers: they charge people 300 points to perform healing. That way there's at least SOME cost involved, to remind people not to just use them for any random reason. To try and keep themselves from being used as an excuse to hurt people.

Oh, by the way, this is also why it's a good idea to try to keep at least 300 points in your account for emergencies. But if you are ever in a pinch, just call me and I'll help.

I-I'll save, I'll definitely save!

How does our unit discourage people from, er, killing others?

Well... we made a policy...

[hands her this paper]

About a month after we arrived, there was the first out-of-game murder. It happened during a Live, so everyone saw it, and right before the murderer killed the victim, he said "they're going to put you back together anyway, so I might as well get some satisfaction out of this." And then he killed the victim in... a really bad way. A really bad way.

Of course, this was our nightmare scenario -- that someone would do this level of violence because they expected us to fix it. We were furious. In our anger, we drafted this policy and announced to everyone that we'd be charging 1500 points per revival, and that we wouldn't revive anyone from the murderer's unit until it was paid. The idea there would be that murdering people would create an inconvenience for both the murderer and their unitmates, to keep it from being too easy.

Once we cooled our jets, we took another pass at the policy and decided some of it was no good. So we changed it.

[reads...]

Is this how things are currently being handled by our unit?

Theoretically.

We're not doing the parts where we refuse to revive anyone in the murderer's unit any more. At most, we may refuse to revive the murderer themself if they don't pay the fee, if we choose to exercise that option. However, this has never really come up so far, because none of us have charged even a single point for a revival before. There's never been a fee to pay in the first place.

After that first murder, we made a big announcement about the policy. Then we changed it on the downlow, which most people don't know about. It's not a secret or anything, so you're welcome to talk about it with anyone who asks. But we thought it would probably be a bad idea to publicly announce that we had chosen to be more lenient about murders, you know?

Edited 2019-03-30 08:25 (UTC)

Mm. But then... It's like what you said about the games? We're pretending to charge to discourage people from killing others, but it's only for show?

Edited 2019-04-02 20:00 (UTC)

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