lovedanime | Week 4 Saturday Afternoon (SPOILERS)

[He clenches his left fist and looks down at his wrist before looking up and calming down again.]

Yeah... Though, oh, just to be clear, I wasn't in the game I describe. It was just... broadcast... and related to my work at the future foundation.

[Nothing on the wrist but the fitbit, pal.]

God... It was broadcast? I hope nobody enjoyed having to see that...

Well... No. But it spread despair. Obviously the people in that game had loved ones out there watching, or were already famous, and so on...

Oh...

[... He sighs.] Lemme guess, you think that whoever's really running this game is in it to cause despair or something?

Oh, no, of course not. It's obviously far worse than that.

[He spreads his hands, vaguely indicating a wide area.] This world is allegedly besieged by an epidemic of D-756, that induces homicides, suicides, or both, on anyone who sets foot into a certain area, with no cure. I really think they're mostly just trying to find a cure, and in their despair they stumbled upon this... terribly cruel method.

Ah... That...

[Sigh. He crosses his arms and focuses on the ground.]

Yeah, that's assuming the D-756 thing isn't just a cover up for some bigger conspiracy. There's gotta be a reason why they can just mess around with our brains, right?

Well, curing psychological conditions is very difficult, and it's much easier to induce bad conditions than reverse the damage and induce a good condition. For example, there are many people who lost their ability to read after suffering a blow to the head, but far fewer people who didn't know how to read - or, say, didn't know how to read a specific language - and suddenly learned after getting something injected into their head. Both technologies could theoretically exist, but it's not at all surprising they'd have the former and a much more limited form of the latter.

[he's not even anxious that Amami will disagree with him, though - it's a topic he's so confident about that he's comfortable with an intellectual debate]

["Suffering a blow to the head."

Rantaro can't blame Mitarai for not realizing it, but his example hit way too close to home. He instinctively rubs the back of his head, feeling for any scar tissue under his hair. If... If he really did die from getting bashed upside the head, he should have had something knocked out of his skull upon revival. Hell, he still didn't know if they could truly revive people like that...]

[Then he thinks back to that motive. That one where he couldn't say a word.

Maybe he could go without spoken words for a little longer...

He looks back up at Mitarai. There's something about his seemingly calm expression that feels a bit stiff, maybe a bit intimidated...]

Mitarai, have you heard that one quote about insanity?

...doing the same thing more than once and expecting a different result?

[He's fascinated... He feels really connected to Amami in this moment of discovering they have so much in common, even though there's still so little Mitarai actually knows about him. It's hard to explain.]

Yep. Now apply that to the metaphorical head-bashing and think about it for five seconds.

[On the other hand, Rantaro isn't really sure about this guy.]

Well... as terrible as it sounds, the administration is clearly targeting different psychological areas with each motive.

... Go on?

I think the human brain is like... a table.

[he's making loose diagrams on his tablet to help him organize these thoughts. no eye contact]

Any given table might have its own strong legs and weak legs. Each motive is designed to knock out a different leg of a table. Well, when I put it that way, it sounds like a percussion instrument.

[Wow... the talk of music is actually making him really sad. He's learned so much from the death of 2-D. It's a very bittersweet victory and the contradiction between epiphany and grief is evident on his face.]

You know what it's like? A piano!

Edited 2018-09-12 03:09 (UTC)

[Rantaro just stares in bewilderment.]

... What?

The core mechanism of a piano is a set of hammers corresponding to a set of strings. Any given piano might have one or two weak strings. Any given song you'd play on a piano would use some notes more than others. If you played that song on several different pianos, only one piano would have a weak string in the same area with the most used note of that song, and the string would break from the strain of so much hammering. But you wouldn't have learned how to prevent strain on every single area of a piano. You just would have observed the physics acting on that one string. To get a more complete picture, you would have to play many different songs that used a wide range of notes. To an extent, the range of notes that actually gets used in music is much smaller than the range of all possible sounds. Just like the range of wavelengths that are visible to the human eye is a much smaller range than the total range of all possible wavelengths.

...I'm sorry if I'm talking too much. You're just the first person I've really trusted with my knowledge about the effects of stimuli on the human brain... I'm sure it's relevant to the tragedies occurring here...!

... Ooookay. Now I get the metaphor. For a second I was wondering how you made the leap from brains to pianos.

[Kinda fishy, but he ain't gonna rat him out just yet.]

Where'd you manage to learn all that stuff?

Edited 2018-09-12 03:32 (UTC)

It's... the beating heart of my anime. I study the effect of sound, color, and motion on the human brain. We truly are suspectible creatures, I think—

[but now that he thinks about it, it's really in his best interest to gloss over this]

So I really... I have trouble wanting the "culprits" in this terrible program to die, as much as I don't want any murder to happen and will do what I can to prevent it. I feel very confident it's really just a result of the stimulus from the Administration.

... Yeah, must be.

[Is there a way to lose friendship points? Because Rantaro will remember that.]

So, I told you a little more about my talent, Amami-kun... May I ask about yours?

Oh! Right.

[Yeah, this might be a little awkward because...]

I'm called the Super High School Level Adventurer because I tend to travel all over the world to help my dad's business and all, but in that Monokuma game I told you about, I think I forgot my talent somehow.

[He got something else, but he doesn't trust Mitarai with the info.]

[Nodding, not really taking it badly]

The same thing happened to Kirigiri Kyoko-san... at first she was known as the Super High School Level Detective, [past tense... melancholic] but they used memory wiping technology - as they had on every participant to an extent - and she went by Super High School Level Question Mark Question Mark Question Mark for a while instead.

Huh... So Shuichi Saihara-kun isn't the only Super High School Level Detective... [If it makes Mitarai feel any better, Kirigiri-san might have a successor. Sort of.]

But if they used memory wiping on that class... And maybe my class too... Then what stops the folks here from using something similar on us?

...nothing at all. If anything, it's practically the same as "removing our functions".

The only evidence against it is the assertion at meetings that they didn't intend us to lose our memories and hired a doctor to look into the cause of the problem. Hiring an entire additional person just to mislead us seems like an... unusual allocation of resources...

Hm... That's assuming if the rest of the staff are totally in on what's going on, you get what I'm saying?

You have a good point... In particular, incomplete knowledge does make sense for the administrators who act like our "moral support".

Week 4 Saturday Afternoon (SPOILERS)

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

blanket cw for lobotomy / brain surgery / brain trauma / drug use / altered mental states

1/2 + DRV3 spoilers

2/2

no subject

assume that Rantaro used Honorifics like someone who isn't in love with Mitarai.

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject