Inara:
Well-- my return is likely to be delayed a little, regardless, unless and until I can acquire a computer upgrade.
Can anybody recommend a good line of laptops for Eve, if not other types of gaming? I realize its requirements aren't horrible, but I've also had lousy experiences getting it to run on "business" machines (like the one I'm typing on now) and gaming laptops are, as a category, right out of my price range.
The thing with Aria and the State is a matter, partly, of getting her character dredged out of the uncaring abyss she's been slowly sinking into. Her insistence on her own inhumanity has always been a method of hiding from herself, and from the fact that she is one seriously emotionally scarred/disturbed little Achur. Unfortunately for her, the more she has reinforced that barrier and distanced herself from the person she was "in life," the less reason she has had to involve herself in the affairs of others in any way.
This was gradually making the character unplayable. This would make her an interesting, hermit-ish NPC, but not a good PC-- and what's more, Aria is too compulsively self-aware to remain wholly blind to what she's been doing to herself.
She first tried going to one extreme, spending months in a sensory deprivation tank so as to navel-gaze more effectively. Having thereby nearly driven herself crazy, or crazier, she tried the other extreme and went baselining planetside, an extended vacation from which she has yet to return.
To paraphrase Heinlein, Aria is not and never has been a rational animal. She is a rationalizing animal. She has been reluctant to face this fact because to do so is to come nose to nose with her guilt, but her own logic has been painting her into a narrower and narrower corner.
A couple realizations on her part are necessary to crack that shell, which are pretty readily available upon extended experience of reality from the viewpoint of only one body:
1) There is, in fact, a distinction between the capsuleer's existence piloting a ship and "piloting" a clone: while all sensory input from a ship "body" is intended to convey information in a usable form, the clone's experience of life is not purely functional: it can experience non-"functional" extremes that can debilitate or incapacitate. Aria might have been able to dismiss such experience such a distinction as "vestigial" while isolated from much of human experience, but that becomes much more difficult after multiple months of interacting with the world "as a human."
This is an insight that kicks the legs out from under Aria's sense of herself as something removed, something alien. The capsuleer's existence is still not purely utilitarian-- a capsuleer is more than a tool, and is not so different from a human as to justify full isolation.
2) Although she's cloaked her rhetoric in the language of equivalent "difference," she's demonized the capsuleer and idealized human society, particularly the Caldari State. In her eyes, she was corrupt and it was pure, something that should be protected but which she would sully by involving herself with. She's concluded that she's really not much worse than the average Caldari murderer-- of which there are many, and many of which are quite useful to the State.
Aria has always been loyal to the State. Her willingness to wander is a product of her perceived unfitness to participate in Caldari society: she has been an outcast in her own mind. To her, you have to be human to be a participant in a human nation-state. Being a monster meant being unfit for service, but also not responsible for choices made. Such actions can be explained as "just my nature."
Being human, in her case, means facing having failed to live up to what is expected of humans. Of course, that becomes a much more comfortable prospect if nobody else has been living up to their responsibilities as human beings, either.
This shift in perspective will likely flip her understanding of capsuleer dementia from a sign of "difference in kind" to a sort of workplace hazard. It's unlikely that Aria will see the Demented as worthy of pursuit: to her, it's like declaring war on PTSD, or carpal tunnel.
It also shifts her perspective on the State, from something ultimately pure and protective to something very "human" in the sense that it is abusive and corrupt-- but then, so is everything else. And the State is the corruption she calls home....
One very jaded, cold-blooded, somewhat fragile Caldari loyalist, comin' up (as soon as I can acquire better hardware).
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Topic: (OOC) Semi-Reformed Pirate seeks Caldari RP Corp for committed relationship (Read 5647 times)