Kasimir

[TAG: DISCUSSION, 256 words] [OOC: Can you do me a favour? It's been a while and I don't want to dig in LG95 to find it. Can you link me to an E game you feel you played well in? I kind of think there's something you did in this game that doesn't feel very consistent with your E play as I recall it. Part of this has to do with the fact that I'm not sure I can rule out that you were the DK and then got recalled. Being more willing to rule you out would help me in making sense of the situation. I'd also appreciate if you could clarify if you got recalled - since recall chances are independent of each Turn and it's known you're a Noble, I don't think too much hinges on it. @Archer, same for you. Yeah yeah sorry guys and this is where I can kind of get what Sart's doing because I know I'm supposed to write and I have 44k right now but I'm also excited enough to go ham as I feel this is usable information and pretty helpful at that >> I will say prima facie that this points me back to STINK in general as I feel that it'd be kind of weird for an Elim team to give the kill to Mat or E!you/E!Szeth/E!Archer unless something very weird has happened/they're short of good options. But I need to run more analysis on this and I'd like to hit 50k somewhere along the way as well.]

[OOC: Ngl everytime Sart is this erratic pretty fecking insane, I both think V!Sart, and bite back the temptation to slap all four of my votes on him just to not have to deal with that erraticness anymore.] [OOC: Uh, isn't the logical answer there just getting his teammates to put in a kill? Meta-washing is still possible, here. Not saying I am fully convinced of V!TKN, but I don't understand this line of reasoning either.]

[TAG: DISCUSSION, 439 words] [OOC: Why should this be surprising? It's obviously me - I literally told y'all in thread I was sus of Mat and went to bed. I don't remotely understand what you think to achieve by pressuring Ash for this, and the fact you're deliberately ignoring a lead on a SD is weird. You're erratic enough I'm starting to seriously consider voting you just so I don't have to keep thinking about you or dealing with you making seriously insane moves.] [OOC: The way to frame it is that if the write-up doesn't mention a sabotage, then they either targeted someone untargetable, or they were roleblocked. The one loophole I can see that I forgot about is if they targeted someone in <you, Szeth, Archer.> But I'd argue Szeth isn't really target material, due to him basically being inert, you were attracting negative attention and had zero elevations, and Archer is a possibility, but hitting a noble has two risks: H&F-related risks, and recall-related risks, so I am doubtful that Archer was targeted. In the absence of claims, I do think this points to an Ankers roleblock, which raises the odds that Mat is Evil, but also almost seems to indicate that STINK is a very likely accomplice (was lashed, therefore could not take any actions last Turn.) TJ and Sart are also Ankers candidates IMO, but probably less likely. If there's a player I forgot about who fits this description, feel free to add them to the list.] [OOC: Tfw I think Mat is Evil and I actually agree with him.] Edited to add: I suppose there's also a world where the Elims have a Noble and got the Noble to put in the sabotage and then the Noble was recalled. I have positive reason to V!read Archer which I'm standing by, so if so, that's a <TKN, Szeth> pool. Edited to add 2: I'd almost argue STINK being an accomplice seems to be pretty likely even in an E!Noble world - due to the risk of recall, I struggle to see the Elims getting their Noble to put in a kill unless there's something else they'd rather be doing with their actions (???) and given team size, still seems to be pretty indicative here. @Szeth_Pancakes Were you recalled? Yes or no?

[TAG: ANALYSIS, 665 words] [OOC: I could ask the same of you. Do you expect to keep reads static all the time? Has anything changed your opinion? I think it's worth looking for whether there are organic, fog-of-war reflective shifts/evolutions in your thoughts, or whether they're low commitment parked votes that could be more indicative of Elim complacency.] [OOC: It's seriously interesting to me that not a single person here seems to be remotely interested in the fact there is no sabotage. This is something extremely big mechwise and should be investigated because the most probable outcome is that this implies that the SDs, for whatever reason, were prevented from sabotaging in the first place. If it's because of a roleblock target, then that's functionally soft evidence we've found a SD. Let's be clear about what we know: If the sabotage had been prevented by a protect (whether item or protective action), it would've been reflected in the write-up. This seems to indicate the sabotage failed altogether. This pretty much indicates that one of the following had to happen: <Physicking detain, Medica Emergency, nahlrout roleblock, tenaculum, sympathy, Ankers.> Which is big pool in some respects, not so big in the sense of others. Ankers is unlikely and points largely to Mat as there are no other Ruh left. It's possible that one or two of the more frequently complained-about players had difficulty meeting tuition, but given the chance of actions failure, it's unlikely SDs would willingly choose Ankers unless they had pressing financial issues. (There are other implications there: if Mat is putting in the kill, it suggests something weird about the other Elims - what were they doing that they needed the action slot? I assign low weight for now because this almost requires a Steel* team and that's a bit ???) I am weakly inclined to think that a player putting in a roleblock should just claim, whether in thread or in a PM to say, Wonko or JNV, who can take the claim to the thread for them. Preferably JNV unless Wonko shows up, as I'm concerned he's busy at his conference. I accept there's a possible risk of Linguistics 3 interception - if that's the case, unless I've missed an elevation count, the only culprits are within <TJ, STINK>, as neither Ash nor I have the requisite Linguistics elevations. And for what it's worth, if either of them have it, I'd consider them more likely to be Evil. I think the likelihood of it being the Medica Emergency is pretty low, due to the limitations of the ability at anything below El'the level. I'll note that I had a longer section here analysing the likelihood of H&F targeting but have been told by the GMs that despite the text of the H&F saying there's a 50% chance of kills and sabotage failing, it counts as a protect rather than as some kind of action failure. In other words, it'd have been reflected in the write-up too. tldr; I think we have a decent Elim shot here and it's worth looking at it. If you roleblocked someone, please do consider claiming in thread, or if not, to JNV. I think someone very likely found an Elim here, or Mat is Evil. (And if he is, again, it's quite indicative of who his team might be. Potentially includes a teammate who got lashed and could not put in an action.) If none of the above, then something very weird happened in the Elims lives last Turn, such that no one put in an action. It do be that way. *Steel team doesn't feel too viable IMO - Steel has a habit of going inactive in games; more so as Village as he tends to be dgaf as a Villager and performatively present as an Elim. Functionally, I'd say that if he doesn't have an exciting role, or something he considers exciting, he's more prone to peace out, so the chances he's a Villager are much higher here.

[TAG: RP, 1007 words, DISCUSSION, 215 words] [OOC: Agree that it'd be pretty kayana for you and Sart to be E/E. (I guess there's a paranoid layer where you did spread your votes, so potential distancing. Muddled quite a bit by the doubly probabilistic nature of the exe, though I'd say that risking you as the more vulnerable Ruh SD would've been really rough on you and IDK if that's the move to go for, so kind of lean against it anyway. Doesn't feel like a layer I wanna open rn. Need to recheck how willing Sart was to vote for you besides the M1.) But I think I can see an Araris/Sart E/E world, due to Araris's protectiveness of Sart. (But I admit I wasn't unconvinced by his argument, either.) Lol seriously part of me just wants to think all of you are V and I literally saw this damn dynamic play out in my LG where due to no flip it's in the interests of the voted out Elims to act pretty Village to confuse the kraem out of everyone anyway, and in LG95 where TKN literally yelled at me over trying to pull off Elan over tonal reads but wonderful, I'm lost. Genuine appreciative 'gj guys' if any of you are Evil or Village I suppose.] [OOC: Huh. That's...odd?] lvii. embers Kevan stared at the thick stack of papers, all of them copied via the sympathy press, and tried to feel any sense of excitement about going through it. Some of the El’the had talked about it: how you seemed to lose momentum as an El’the because there was so much you had to go through, and progress felt glacial, as though he were chipping away at a mountain with a sculptor’s chisel, a little at a time. The path from El’the to graduating with your own guilder was long and arduous, and he wondered if their words had carried a hint of implication, of resentment. After all, he and Issal had both stormed through the ranks to El’the. It was only fair they spent their own share of time waiting, assessing, and trying to make progress with their research projects. He wondered how Issal’s own studies were proceeding. So much had happened in the University, and yet he felt disconnected from it all. Resterford and Jenali were both discharged from the Crockery. (Some whispers said they’d broken loose, that they were the second coming of Tarbolin the Great or Kvothe the Arcane, that the ground before the Crockery had split asunder, allowing them to pass. Kevan didn’t believe any of it. He knew what they’d said about Issal. He knew what they said about him. The reality in all likelihood lay somewhere between the whispers of discharge and the more fanciful rumours about Tarbolin-type sorcery.) The truth is always greater than the words we use to describe it. He was so bloody tired. The truth was, historical work was painstaking. Sometimes, too painstaking. He felt his focus wandering, and not for the first time, wondered if he had the aptitude for it after all. Or at least, the heart for it. He knew, objectively, that it was a good research topic to have embarked on, though perhaps Master Alys would’ve been a better sponsor than Master Bob in this regard. His training in historiography was not as complete as he’d like, and Master Alys had remarked as much when he enrolled in a history of medicine class she was teaching, figuring it’d offer him valuable context on his research project. “It’s a pleasure to have you in my class, Kevan,” she’d said, but then, with a directness that didn’t particularly surprise him, “Though I was a bit surprised. You’re really more of a philosopher by inclination than a historian.” He smiled, wryly. Strange how you could do so by reflex; treading water. “Master Alys, I think your history of technology class taught me quite a bit about methodology and historiography.” He remembered asking her about the assignment for the midterms. “Master Alys? I have a question,” he’d said, then, uncertain. At her nod, he’d gone on. “I'm a little worried that the way it's framed and we're approaching it, all our attempts to answer it are basically going to boil down to whether or not we have a commitment to historical and technological determinism. We could argue that it was possible the invention of the sympathy press didn't happen, but our arguments for that might rely on an understanding of contingency that is unfair to the proponents of its inevitability, and they really wouldn't buy it.” She’d blinked owlishly at him, then, and then sighed. “E’lir Kevan,” she’d said, running a hand through her tied-back hair in exasperation. “I’m not asking for the moon. I just meant you should look at the existing technologies and examine if the emergence of the sympathy press was organic: was it a natural step forward, from the printing press? From scribes? If Master Artificer Huren hadn’t been obsessed with the need to transmit knowledge efficiently, could the project to develop a functional sympathy press have succeeded? What about the confluence of factors: a supportive Master Archivist, a series of talented El’the who specialised in machining parts and applying the needed sygaldry, and the patronage of the Aturan Duke?” He’d gotten that, really. But it wasn’t what he was asking. “Master Alys, I get that, I do. So my question is: can it be an issue with the way people do history as well, though? If it seems that the emergence of the sympathy press was not an organic development, or at least that it was powerfully driven by the strong personality of Master Artificer Huren, then we'd almost have to ask if the primary role Master Huren plays in the given readings is a matter of the historian applying that lens after the event, shaping the narrative.” “E’lir Kevan, this is a class for E’lir. I’m not going to discuss historiography or methodological questions in tutorial right now.” But then she unbent enough to add, “Come by during office hours. I think I have some readings for you.” Now though, it was an old chestnut, trotted out time and again. He was fascinated by the epistemology of it all, and the way contingency and necessity was woven into each other, into the stories the historian chose to tell, and where narrative met evidence. Where the historical reality was much more complex than anyone was willing to believe. Unless you were a historian, he supposed. He liked the history, liked the process of discovery, feeling as though you’d uncovered something that had been lost to the world, whether it was a tiny fragment, or something significant. He just could not seem to make himself forge on with the research project. He didn’t know what he was going to say in his progress report to Master Bob. What Master Bob would say. Didn’t want to disappoint the Master Physicker, really. But that was what was going to happen, wasn’t it? (He wished he was less of a disappointment, just wished he didn’t feel so inadequate to the task.) Didn’t know if it was better than that feeling of numbness, the soft blanket of snow wrapping his mind.

[TAG: RP, 405 words] [OOC: Sadly nope. You have El and Wilson to blame for this, though apparently Devo says she's blaming it on Volatile's sleep deprivation. The longer answer is I was given an absurdity by the GMs among multiple absurdities and I'm committed to resolving it. This means the main solution has been to put Kevan through a significant downward trajectory to explain certain character decisions made later thanks to the GMs, who I think are laughing at my suffering/commitment to resolving their absurdities. Don't like it, don't read it man, I certainly don't expect anyone to read my RP. Tehlu knows the GMs don't.] [OOC: So why don't you be the change you want to see? What are your reads? Are you a vampire do u need an invitation if so consider this ur invitation but also I have garlic and a flamethrower and the WHEEL OF TEHLU smhhh] lvi. cracks Kevan reported to his shift at the Medica. Didn’t have rounds until the end of the span, so that was something at least. The Re’lar, too, took the bulk of the shift work, and he was too newly-elevated to be placed on call, which felt like some sort of blessing. He wasn’t sure he trusted himself on call. Wasn’t sure how he would force himself to confront another failure. Strange how the day passed in flashes, interspersed by moments of emptiness, in which time seemed to flow like cool honey. The sterile scent of the Medica, the harsh sensation of the unscented soap they used. Cold water against his skin, as numbly, he cleaned up, watching the fall of water, corkscrewing down the drain. A few routine cases that Kevan handled automatically; somehow remembering what needed to be done. Setting a broken arm. Treating someone who’d gotten knifed in the alley, and for a precarious moment, his mind went numb and blank as he applied pressure to the wound with a thick cloth pad. One of the E’lir reminded him—Kevan didn’t remember her name, probably knew it at some point but the names weren’t sticking in his head, not right now—and he let her apply the pressure, set to preparing the needle and fine cotton thread for stitches. The needle had to be sterilised, and the patient had been given something for the pain, which meant they at least didn’t need to tick that box on the checklist. Laid down the stitches in a neat, quick line once the bleeding had slowed down, leaning on training that persisted even if the mind wasn’t…quite there. Wasn’t quite in the present. Nothing felt quite real. It was as though he was looking at the world through glass. Someone caught him by the shoulder. Idris, who’d made El’the just recently, said, “Are you alright?” and there was an emotion in her voice, written on her features, in her frown, and he was too damned tired to process exactly what it was. “Yeah,” Kevan said. “I’m fine.” The first story of Aethe’s stories, in Ademic thought, states that the Lethani cannot be captured by words. (If the Way can be expressed, it is not the transcendent way. Experience, reality, whichever you like: the shadow on the walls, or the thing-in-itself outruns experience and the words we use to describe it only point to the shadow, the echo, the ghost.)

[TAG: RP, 712 words, CW: dark, depressing, loss of father] lv. broken sleep In his dreams, pink swirls in the saltwater and his father staggers. He’s bleeding, and Kevan is wading in after him, crying out, begging him not to leave, and he knows those wounds, the ones his father traces with bloodstained hands: the knife wounds aren’t the worst, it’s the trauma wounds that will be etched in his mind forever, he has a good memory, sharp enough to cut himself on, and he’s bleeding out now, as he watches the trauma wounds he couldn’t treat, because who the hell thought making fragmentation broadheads was a good idea, much less allowing them in city limits? Blood in the water, too much for him to stop, and then the boy slips away on the operating table, and Kevan wakes up, gasping, still drowning, even on dry land. He lies there, staring up at the ceiling of his room. Still the same maddening shade of bright white that Soren and Valerra had criticised, so long ago. (Not so long ago, but it feels as though it’s been forever now. He was someone else, then. All these things hadn’t happened yet. And maybe there was a certain freedom about being an E’lir, something he can’t quite seem to remember how it felt, to be so light, with all his future at the University laid out before him. Even further back: Tirnagh receding into the distance, becoming a distant smear on the horizon, and then nothing. The Aturan roads leading him to the port of Caillimh, and then beyond that, the bright blue waters of the Reft, separating Yll from the Commonwealth and the mainland. The sense that he might go on to make something of himself, to leave his own mark on the world.) Probably should talk to someone, he thinks, but the truth is the pain is so private, so deeply-felt it feels impossible to articulate, or to burden someone else with. Re’lar and El’the struggle with loss at the Medica all the time. Knowing the rules—knowing Master Bob’s rules—doesn’t make it any easier to take the first step. As far as he can tell, beyond the window lies darkness. If he’d just get up and go to the window, perhaps he can make out some of the lights at the University, or of Imre, even at this hour. (Probably. He reckons it’s still late at night, but he probably isn’t going to get much more sleep. Really, he’s tempted by the thought of getting up, crossing the room, sitting at the desk and making more headway on the translation project but the tiredness has sunk deep in his bones and he can’t seem to bring himself to do that, either.) In his dreams, his father says, “You can’t save everyone,” and sea water tinged with blood drips from his hands at his side. And Kevan knows that, knows that acutely, because at the end of the day, neither the innocent love of a child nor his mother’s love saved Jair, in the end. Neither of them were enough. (And it tastes like brine, the knowledge. Balanced against the memory of his father sweeping him up into his arms, closing off the world within their circle, his father saying, “You know, I want you to know that you can talk to me about anything. As you get older, you know. Whatever it is you do.” In the end, it wasn’t enough for any of them. Not love. Not the hook in the heart.) And then he’s in the Medica, as Master Bob briefs the entire room of El’the during rounds, and Master Bob is saying, too, “You can’t save everyone,” and he knows, intimately, to his very marrow that he cannot (an intimation of mortality) but it doesn’t stop him from failing, hurting, falling; infinitely mortal, imperfectly human. Daylight slips in through the window, the sunlight on his skin but it doesn’t warm him, and dark hollows under his eyes, Kevan shivers past the tiredness and forces himself to his feet. Wonders about just…giving up. Lying back down. Classes to teach, he reminds himself. Books to read, and always, ever rounds, and perhaps something in them will lead him back to himself, if only for a short while. For the moment, the sense of duty wins.

[TAG: RP, 989 words, ANALYSIS, 358 words, CW: dark, depressing, alchemy] [OOC: As you yourself have said, the day I stop trying to legislate/work out/doubt myself all the way down to rollover or whenever I have to go to bed (apparently, 7AM+ on a weekend) is when I'm probably Evil. Not hardKasing doesn't mean I don't want to get it right, or at least I don't want to be voting a player that I could've worked out was Village if I'd just tried a bit more or and Sart wasn't cooperative until the last moment. Which yes, I do find frustrating.] liv. nigredo Kevan washed his hands in the cold rush of running water from the metal tap. Watched as streaks of red swirled in the basin. The mind was drawn to patterns, the way the blood circled about, spiralling down the sink until it was gone, draining out through the pipes. The icy shock of the cold water felt distant against his numb skin. As though it was happening to someone else, a stranger. The water had been red at first, then it grew increasingly pink-tinged. He picked up the soap and began scrubbing. When you went into the Medica, you were taught how to do it, if you were expected to be performing any kind of surgical procedure: all the way to the elbows, with the brush for under the nails. You did each finger, one by one, and he went through it now, mechanically, as though he was still preparing, even though it had long ended. The soap was harsh and it stung his skin. Master Bob’d always wanted a Re’lar working in chemistry to figure out something that was gentler on the skin, that didn’t leave you feeling half-raw when you were done with cleaning up. No one’d cracked that mystery just yet. He guessed there was an El’the elevation hanging on that. It still didn’t feel real. The water still looked faintly pink and his hands stung. It still didn’t feel real. He remembered going out on a lake in winter: balancing precariously on the thin ice, feeling the ice groan and creak beneath him. One of the kids, someone two years younger than him, had drowned in the lake the year before, the ice giving way. There were always ice warnings, and one of the adults had to measure and check the ice thickness, but it didn’t stop them from doing foolish things, things they should’ve known better than to do. It was that same sense now: as though he was on ice, cracks spiderwebbing their way beneath his feet. The crystalline moment before solid ground gave way to freezing water in an instant. He’d never drowned. Stupid thought to have, really: you never survived drowning, unless you were lucky, or someone was near enough to save you, and knew how to administer compressions and rescue breaths and to deal with hypothermia. Sometimes, even that wasn’t enough. Sometimes you could drown on dry land, water still trapped in your lungs. Kevan wondered if that was how his father had felt, one way or another. Drowning, even on land. He realised he was bent over the washbasin, his skin raw and stinging, and tears in his eyes, his breath coming out in heaving gasps. Maybe he’d been drowning, all his life. He’d just taken a while to realise how deep he was in for it. The water was still tinged with pink. He didn’t know if it was his blood, or the patient’s. Didn’t know if it mattered. Inside, there was the hollowness. Aching, crushing. Threatening to engulf him. His lungs felt as though they’d been scraped out, scoured clean by ice. He was used to failure. He’d told himself this. He was used to being awful at Artificery, had laughed off the comments he was the despair of Master Artificer. You had to do this: to accept the pain, to make it part of you, so people couldn’t use it against you. So people couldn’t hurt you. He’d thought he could do that. There was something like that in Ademic thought, about the double arrow. About how holding on to your sense of loss, or your pain, was just driving the arrow deeper into your own flesh. He couldn’t seem to let it go, couldn’t seem to assert any sort of control over his breathing. Dissolution. You couldn’t assert the dominance of the self over the pain. There was only pain, and he existed in it, forsaken, forswarn, and so terribly lost. Desolation. You could be used to failure, and you could still hurt so terribly when you weren’t good enough. When you thought you’d done everything you could, but you just— You just didn’t have it. (You ruined everything you touched.) “El’the,” Master Bob had said, kindly, and his words were incomparably cruel, “He’s gone.” And Kevan should’ve realised it: should’ve realised it at least ten minutes ago, but you never wanted to stop trying, and Master Bob had warned him about this, about the tendency to get attached, about leading in with his heart and not his head, and desperately, futilely trying to stop the bleeding and suture the wounds and deal with the trauma injuries even though the patient had stopped breathing, had bled out on the operating table. Pink swirling into the water. Probably bleeding. He didn’t even know the patient’s name. He’d only been a child. All of that, ended. Easy for tunnel vision to set in, for everything to narrow down to the few wounds you were trying to treat, to try to resuscitate a patient, even if the patient was bleeding out, even if vitals had been lost: there wasn’t a pulse, wasn’t breathing. Even though the patient had slipped away minutes ago, and you hadn’t even realised it, all of you hadn’t, because you were supposed to do your best, and to take that fight against death, even if it was hopeless, even if you weren’t sure if you could succeed, even if every time you tried and you failed, you bled yourself out a little more for it. (“You have to learn to set aside the patient, El’the,” Master Bob was saying, but there was no critical distance here. He’d never been very good at the Heart of Stone, had never mastered it. Maybe that was why he’d been an average sympathist at best, indifferent at worst. He was going to have to carry that weight with him.) Alone in the washroom, Kevan wept, and hated himself. Edited to add: [OOC: Ah, fy faen. Ok. Been running some brief scenarios to see how much leeway more we have - obviously, we have anywhere between 3-4 SDs. I think we are more screwed than I thought we were and I guess I only have myself to blame. [DYSTOPIA] Assume four SDs, and that both Mat and Araris are Villagers. At least I don't think this world is implausible. Steel has decided he doesn't want to play the game after all, which really shouldn't remotely be surprising to anyone who has been playing the last couple of games in SE and I probably should be less salty about it but I'm really still very done with LG94. JNV, Wonko, and Drake all count as already having been sabotaged. So effectively, subtract them for now. That leaves us with nine players, meaning a five V : four SD ratio in this world. I think they win at outnumbering, meaning that we ML (ME?) one of us this Turn, and then that's it, gg. Effective ratio is a bit weirder as JNV ( @JNV ) and Wonko ( @Wonko the Sane ) can vote (please, please do, you two!) and Steel and @Szeth_Pancakes will presumably continue to Nichtstun, meaning it's still effectively 5:4, minus weirdness with any vote shenanigans. So the big question is: are we in [DYSTOPIA]? We have more breathing room in [DYSTOPIA-] but only just barely: this is a three SD world, where the SDs sabotage someone and then we expel someone else, so we go from 6-3 to 4-3, and then need one more Turn to get to lylo. If Mat and Araris have at least one Elim between them (this boils down in part to a question of whether you believe the Ruh are entirely clean, as I think one should have very high V!JNV credences), then we do have a bit more breathing room than the [DYSTOPIA] or [DYSTOPIA-] worlds. Part of the problem is that I don't really have a strong E!read of either of them, so RIP. ...I hate that I got scammed into playing a bloody flipless game on stilts smhhhhhh >> ]

[TAG: DISCUSSION, 205 words] [OOC: Dashing this off quickly as I have gaming session with Wyrm, then the dash to 50k while still alive : @Ashbringer - wrt your last Turn's post: With Sart, it's just a tonal read + the fact I generally tend to think that if he sounds kayana, he's probably Village, due to the fact that V!him usually exasperates me in terms of how he acts. The fact he's doing a voter shoot kind of felt like that to me because I disagree with not even giving a damn about...everything else. The context is important when doing voting analysis. I guess you could argue that it's not really Sart kayana. IDK. Jury's out I think, but in an E!Araris world, I feel Araris's defense of Sart is noteworthy, but then need to relook M2 in light of trains (and there's arguably a TKN connection there in terms of voting to dilute for Sart's benefit.) So IDK if there's a global re-evaluation of Sart: I at least did because my read of him oscillated a lot. Willing to revise TKN as I don't like his backing down wrt STINK et al - I feel he has a bigger tendency to 'no u' when voted when Village.]

[OOC: There's still point insofar as V!reading you, I think. If only because it helps establish whether it's worth just taking your suspicions at face value or doing a lot of kayana circling and paranoiding about them.] [OOC: Wonderful! Crockery breakout! Crockery breakout! Looks like no one got hit this time? Sounds like it was a roleblock - that's noteworthy. Any sabotage that got stopped should be reflected as an 'attacked and survived'.] [OOC: Huh.] Edited to add: [OOC: @DrakeMarshall smh slacker get out of there damnit >:( ]

[TAG: ANALYSIS, 1364 words] K this whole thing is just gonna be OOC. Someone called for a textwall so I came. Last, best effort because I don't wanna ML Sart if he's V and I sort of don't wanna vote Mat if he's really a Villager having a Very Bad Day. Feelsbad in either situation. Would appreciate if people don't expect further hardVillage things though I guess I'm just gonna die this cycle but whatever. I don't know if I can in good conscience keep putting my RP spree above saying what's pretty much been on my mind and...sigh. It's selfish but whatever if it happens it happens I'll just have to get over it. This can be solved/responded to in a few ways: -Mat isn't the sharpest on rules (sorry not sorry), and Drake argued contra me that he found Mat sus and also that he would not be careful about claiming Villager until LA and Plum Bob come into play. -Archer and Mat could be teamed (note I don't believe this) -Wonko and Drake were also threat kills. Drake pushed Mat, whereas Wonko seemed to soft Namer, and Mat has shown he's capable of picking softs up. -It was a one-off question that he never came back to. -What's the point of noting if you ain't gonna do anything about it? Mitigating factors: -I could see V!Mat being genuinely upset/taking Sart's vote personally because finances are tight for the Ruh and he ended up in what's functionally a gameplay death spiral of expenses due to the suspicion that never died. (But this doesn't address the passive posture and lack of WiM/other points I raised tbh.) I get a tonal positive read off Sart, and a tonal negative read off Mat's attack on Sart - it didn't feel like good faith; Sart's panic felt a bit genuine, and a bit raw, and I kind of think E!Sart tends to hide the panic more in the doc. Like, look at this viz I have of game posts distro. Seriously. Yes, I know, I post a lot. I'd like to think I delivered my share of analysis too, even if I went kayana with the RP. The thing is, look at basically the next top two posters. Most of Mat's bandwidth this cycle was spent defending. In light of that, the lack of evolution of thought is wild, as is the lack of driving anything. I'd argue the TKN vote almost appears opportunistic, in light of STINK already pushing TKN. I don't think TKN gets off really well either because for the second top poster, he doesn't really say or do anything too constructive, so there's that as well. Functionally I guess I'd be willing to hedge my bets: Mat STINK Out of respect for the V!Mat world where he's having a pretty damn bad game. Between Sart and STINK, I'm probably a bit more willing to see an E!STINK world at this juncture. But yeah. I'm going to take off that hardKas hat now. Appreciate if I'll be able to yeet it for good. I really just wanted to RP and I mostly got that I think. Goodnight, everyone. I'm done.]

[TAG: ANALYSIS, 305 words] [OOC: Yeah the swearing just now. Let's take it back. For the Elims to be ok with the state of the results, we need certain estimations about their risk appetite. My read is that since TKN's vote on me came out at the last second, it's reasonable to see something like this: <Archer, Drake, Sart, STINK> - at most one Evil, and I'd argue it's between Sart and STINK. I am...decently willing to give Sart a chance at this juncture. At most one Evil given otherwise low tempo seems to suggest Elims are ok with the spread and the lead, and which means I am better off not voting in this set. (Though I honestly still think STINK could use pressure.) (I'll note that contra Sart, I always prefer to do analysis on trains first, then voters: voters are better off with vote shift analysis, as trains and your reads of the trains are better at IDing where the incentives are and therefore what the more likely Elim disposition is. But I don't feel this disagreement is alignment indicative, more just Sart being Sart and being perpendicular.) <TJ, Mat, Szeth, TKN, Steel, Ash> Based off my current credences, it's between Mat and Szeth. Steel ruled out for obvious reasons, very light reason to V read TJ and Ash. Mat Mat Possibly willing to rethink TKN for muted response (sometimes feels TKN harps a lot about one thing that he hasn't said anything about so far at this juncture) but pretty much would like sleep sometime soon. Despite the analysis, might be willing to pressure STINK, not sure, depends.] Edited to add: TKN thing being how much TKN harps when V about Elims loving to vote him and it's interesting he was chill with backing down earlier this cycle instead of bringing it back up again.

[TAG: DISCUSSION, 370 words] [OOC: Why would it? Or rather: why can't they side-train? The hypothesis that the lead train has one E isn't unreasonable but it's equally likely they went side-train in a V!Archer world (Archer is my strongest V!credence right now) - and it's just as plausible the Elims would be happy to let the Village make their own mistakes, given the Archer v Drake throwdown and just vote and get $.] [OOC: I'm interested in where the poor gut read is originating from, since you're phrasing it as something that exists independent of your read of the voting. I think there's independent, activity-based reason to V!read Archer.] Edited to add: RIP, sorry. Definitely not my intention, just wanted insight into your thought process. Edited to add 2: [OOC: Right, sorry, tired - forgot to add that I do think it depends on your view/read of the landscape, but if Elims weren't significantly endangered, then there's no reason not to just be participatory either, and not draw flak. Let me put it this way: if you are V, then you know that three of the lead trains on M2 are all Village. In that landscape, why do the Elims care if they are not under significant pressure? Going back to the count: This minimally makes it a three Villager lead, with the last (?) depending on Wonko. TKN adds me in by voting me at the last second, which doesn't really do anything due to the fact I hide behind the Pony but in a world where TKN and I are V/E, this is arguably either major DGAF or vote dilution, and could for instance make sense in an E!STINK world or E!you world, though the fact STINK didn't bother voting might be a positive indicator on his part. I don't really think it would be weird for TJ to be Village, but neither am I strongly sold on V!TJ. But I don't really know how/why you want to pull that statistical argument when the trains were so damned diluted that it seems to indicate there was no strong convergence, and that the Elims were just fine with the main candidates, which... Well, kraem. Ok, I guess...Time to make El grumpy. Ish but also not.

[TAG: RP, 2717 words] [OOC: Look, is there a way you can articulate your TJ read? Because that's really what it's about for me. I'm willing to believe there's a V!you world and just really want better ability to formulate a read on you at this juncture. If given more reason to believe V!Sart, I at least am willing to shift my vote. Expulsion won't kill you - that analysis can wait. I just need a way to read you, more or less. I'd like to think I've had a decent run of IDing V!you in past games. Definitely don't want you losing your analysis, just, yeah.] [OOC: Also, I can neither confirm nor deny having taught this repeatedly as a tutor for the Logical Problem of Evil in Introduction to Philosophy to the point I am well used to both student expressions and the damned questions they will ask me >> As well as the great lengths I have to go to to explain propositional logic to arts students writhing and screaming >> ] liii. explosion “Master Kevan sir?” “It’s just Kevan, Sera,” Kevan corrected the student who’d addressed him. “I’m a R–an El’the, not a Master.” Fortunately, no one seemed inclined to call any attention to his slip. It felt strange, being addressed as though he were a Master, when he felt as though… It was a strange sort of perspective. For all he felt inadequate, the students struggled with the basic concepts of Rhetoric and Logic. It was possible to understand that there was a gap there: between his facility with the subject, and their ability to grasp the rudiments he was trying to impart to them. It made him feel as though he could handle this, tutoring these students. He didn’t feel so lost, so out of his depth. He could do this. And maybe, just maybe, if this gap really existed between him and the students he was tutoring, then it was possible to think that Master Anders hadn’t been mistaken after all. (And if Master Anders wasn’t mistaken, perhaps Master Bob wasn’t mistaken, either. He reflexively shied away from the idea—practically recoiled from it, and the visceral knowledge of his inadequacy, but it was at least a thought he could entertain for a moment.) “Si—Kevan,” Sera managed. “Why do we care about non-contradiction? Why is it a law of logic?” “I mean,” said another student, “What would it even mean to say something like ‘water is wet’ and ‘water is not wet’ at the same time? How does that even work? It just doesn’t make any sense at all.” “Yes, but…” Sera frowned. “It feels like we’re just making arbitrary rules about how logic is supposed to work. Nothing says the rules have to be that way. We just made them that way.” “It’s a social construct,” said yet another student. Kevan swore to Tehlu he was going to ban that damned word from his classroom. “Well,” he said firmly, stepping in. “First, let’s be very careful about the term ‘social construct.’ We don’t really want to go into debates about mathematical realism here, so we’re better off bracketing this issue for now.” “Sir, what’s bracketing?” Merciful Tehlu, was he ever this bad as a student? Kevan wondered. “It’s a technical term,” he said, with a silent apology for having slipped into it. “When we say ‘bracket’, we mean we’ll treat it as a given, as true for now. We don’t want to interrogate too many things at once because if we do, the class loses focus.” He was greeted by dutiful murmurs, so he went on. “Another thing to keep in mind is that social constructs can be meaningful. Your grades, for instance, are a very good example of a social construct. As is the entire Admissions process. Anyone here wants to volunteer stories about Admissions nightmares?” He got a few chuckles out of the E’lir and the Re’lar, and a few late-term students. “Watching Master Herkimer suddenly show up to your Admissions slot wearing nothing but a kilt and asking you what he’s got in his pocket would give anyone nightmares,” E’lir Pashan muttered. “Ugh, my eyes,” said someone else. “Honestly I’d file a complaint and see if I could bring him on the Horns. Try my luck.” “He’s not that bad to look at! I mean, would you consider even Master—” Kevan cleared his throat. “Maybe let’s leave how attractive the Masters are out of this,” he said, warningly. “We’re getting too far afield. So we’re bracketing questions about the ontology of the laws of logic for the moment. Well, there’s an epistemological dimension. We want to know—and this is what Sera is asking—what grounds the laws of logic, such as the law of noncontradiction.” On the chalkboard, he scrawled, “~(P & ~P).” “Why should we think you can’t do something like this? And this is where the talk of it being arbitrary comes in: when Varice says it’s a social construct, what she means is that it’s a convention. We could just as easily choose to make this illegal instead.” He added ‘~(P ^ ~P)’ next to it. “It’s a grounding challenge—we’re interested in the justificatory basis of these laws.” He looked at them, trying to figure if he’d lost them, and then forged on. “Noncontradiction is an interesting case, and one that’s a bit fun to demonstrate. Makes for a good party trick, even if it’s less flashy than sympathy.” Oh, he certainly had their interest now. “Has anyone in this class heard of the Principle of Explosion?” A large majority of students were shaking their heads slowly. “How about the phrase ‘anything follows from a contradiction’?” A small minority of students nodded, and Kevan called on one of them. “Synthia. Why don’t you share with the class what you know about this?” “I…I don’t really know,” Synthia muttered, staring at the floor. Some of the class laughed, and Kevan skewered them with a stare. “It’s alright not to know in this class. Sometimes, even I don’t know the answers to your questions, but I’ll do my best to look up the answers and get back to you on them. The point of this class is to learn, and if any of you knew all the answers, then you shouldn’t be taking this!” There was always more to learn, though. Even on his second time taking the introductory module to Rhetoric and Logic, Kevan’d so many questions, so many things he still didn’t understand. Sometimes, it felt like learning didn’t so much answer questions as equip you to ask different, even newer ones. Master Anders had told him, more than once, that he’d felt that you’d succeeded in this subject when you discovered you’d asked a good question. It wasn’t about the answers. It was about the questions; the questions were what drove you. That and the journey seeking answers to them. He scrawled, ‘1. Water is wet and water is not wet,’ on the top half of the board. Next to it, he added the translation, just for the sake of completeness: ‘1. P & ~P.’ “To see why this is a problem, we’re going to do something called a reductio argument, which is the short form for ‘reductio ad absurdum’, but ‘reductio ad absurdum’ doesn’t roll off the tongue as well, and if you say it too quickly, some student might think you’re saying something about abs. So, we’re doing a reductio argument here. That is, we’re going to just assume that it’s fine to have a contradiction. Then, we’re going to see why that creates problems for us, at least within the confines of classical logic. I’m going to be using both the logical form and writing it out in terms of statements as I know not everyone is on board with the logic yet. We’re aiming to get you there by midterms.” Next, he added, “2. Water is wet,” right below the first line. Next to it, he added a simple, ‘2. P.’ “This move,” he explained, “Should be pretty uncontroversial. If it’s true that water is wet and water is not wet, then it’s also true that water is wet. We can derive it from the first statement. This follows from how ‘and’ works, logically-speaking: for an ‘and’ statement to be true, both halves of the statement have to be true.” He hadn’t lost them yet; some students were frowning at the chalkboard, but he saw enough nods that he felt confident making the next move. Then, he wrote, ‘3. Water is not wet,’ below the first statement, followed by a ‘3. ~P.’ “If you understood the previous step,” Kevan said, “This one is more or less the same thing. From the first statement, we can also derive the statement that water is not wet. Once again, this is just about how the connective ‘and’ works.” “This is where it starts to get interesting,” he warned them. The next line he wrote was, ‘4. Water is wet or Master Herkimer’s kilt is on fire.’ He heard the roar of appreciative laughter as he finished off the statement, and then added the translation next to it. ‘4. P ^ Q.’ “Anyone want to take a guess at why we can do this?” “Because Master Herkimer’s kilt is a monstrosity, sir?” asked one of the students. “Loredan, I’m telling you that burning it off him is not an improvement,” said another. “Apart from that,” Kevan said, firmly. He got a few students shaking their heads before one of them ventured, “Is it…does it have anything to do with the truth of an ‘or’ statement?” “Good,” Kevan said, absently realising that Master Anders was coming out automatically now when he opened his mouth, which probably said something fairly dire about his state of education. “Can you say a little more about that?” The student in question, probably another Yllish, from that lilt and that true-red hair, hesitated and then shook her head. “Not even a try?” Kevan prompted. But the student would not budge, and he wasn’t about to put her on the spot. Sometimes, you had to give them time to get comfortable, he figured. He’d classmates like that, in any case. Sometimes, he’d felt that way too. “What’s your name?” “Aife,” she replied, her voice soft enough that he’d had to strain to catch what she was saying. “Well, thank you, Aife. Aife’s given us part of the key to understanding this move. Does anyone else want to help Aife out?” A ruddy Cealdish student with solemn eyes raised his hand. Kevan acknowledged him and he leaned back in his seat, exuding confidence. “Well, it’s how it works, right? ‘Or’ statements are true as long as at least one half of the statement is true.” “Exactly so,” Kevan said, approvingly. “Thank you…?” he let his voice trail off in a question. “Staven.” “Thank you, Staven. So getting back to the statement, ‘Water is wet or Master Herkimer’s kilt is on fire,’ we can see that this is a true statement. We’re allowed to make this move. Because we already have this line, right here—” He tapped his chalk next to the second statement. “Since we’ve asserted P, that water is wet, we can simply tack on a second clause using the ‘or’ connective for free. The resulting statement ‘Water is wet or Master Herkimer’s kilt on fire’ is therefore still true.” Some of the students looked far more confused now, so Kevan paused a moment to let it sink in. “Remember,” he added, hoping this would help them out. “Each step so far has to preserve truth. Logic is about truth-preservation, after all. We know from an ‘and’ statement that it’s safe to infer both P and Q, or both that water is wet, and that water is not wet. This is because the move is truth-preserving. We’re doing the exact same thing here: we’ve already deduced that we can assert that P, or that water is wet. So if P is true, then P or Q is true. Or to put it in terms of another example: if it’s true that you are admitted to the University if you are extremely intelligent, then it’s also true that you are admitted to the University if you are extremely intelligent or in possession of a kilt. This will be a bit clearer when we go through the truth table for ‘or’ next week. I’m just trying to give you the intuitive take here.” A few students looked less confused. Kevan decided it was as good as he was going to get. Now for the move that would really upset them. “Here’s the problem. We’ve discovered we can infer that Statement Four is true. That is, either water is wet, or Master Herkimer’s kilt is on fire. Now let’s take a closer look at this statement again. We also know that water is not wet.” He tapped his chalk next to the third statement. “Remember, we’ve inferred this from our starting statement: that water is wet and water is not wet. This is fair game so far.” Right below, he scribbled, “5. Master Herkimer’s kilt is on fire,” and next to it, “5. Q.” Silence. He watched them process the move, trying to make sense of it, and waited for the objections. “You can’t just—” one of the students gestured vaguely. “—do that.” “Why not?” Kevan wanted to know. “We’ve inferred 4. As far as our system is concerned, we’re allowed to use 4 to generate more inferences. Since water is not wet, which is Statement 3, if we combine Statement 3 and Statement 4, we get Statement 5. Recall that for the statement ‘water is wet or Master Herkimer’s kilt is on fire’ to be true, at least one half of the statement must be true. We’re using the result that water is not wet. This automatically entails that we’re committed to the second half of the ‘or’ statement being true instead: that Master Herkimer’s kilt is on fire. There we go, we’ve just shown that Master Herkimer’s kilt is on fire, and everything so far has been perfectly legal.” He watched them try to wrap their heads around that. Remembered what it was like, being a student and being shown this. Being dead certain some form of trickery or chicanery had just taken place, but being unable to point to where the trick was. “The reason we say anything follows from a contradiction is because you can substitute anything you like here.” He drew a circle around the last statement. “Just keep it consistent. You can say something like Master Volatile really detests coffee, or that the sky is green, or that the moon is made of blue cheese. Anything is allowed, as long as you keep using the same Q statement throughout the entire reductio. Some of you are thinking this is a cheap trick, and that something’s gone terribly wrong here.” He looked at the sea of nodding heads. “You’re right that something has gone terribly wrong here. For one, it’s patently absurd that I can trivially prove just about anything this way, including what’s very much false. For another, I want you to hold on to the feeling that this is just broken, that I’ve somehow cheated. Let’s take a brief detour, and suppose we’re all in a game right now.” He waited, giving them time to adjust to the change of tack. “Let’s say I’ve figured out a loophole in the rules of the game. It could be corners, it could be tak, it could be some form of social deduction game. Here’s the question. Say I exploit the loophole and I win, and absolutely overwhelm you. That sounds pretty broken and pretty absurd, yeah? Do you think I should be allowed to do that?” Some nods, some shakes of their heads. “Maybe, intuitively, some of you would think, ‘Well, then the rules of the game are just screwed.’ If you’re still thinking that the principles of logic are just a fancy game we’re playing, hold on to that thought. Even if it’s a fancy, arbitrary game, we want it to be internally consistent. We want it to make sense. We don’t want it to be absurdly broken, with loopholes that any canny player can exploit to large extents. And that’s sort of what’s going on here, because ‘explosion’ happens. You can prove anything at all. This also goes back to what Master Anders told you in his introductory lecture about logic as a path to knowledge. If you can prove just about anything, then logic is pretty rubbish as a way of reasoning about the world. Because all statements can then be shown to be trivially true. But that’s not what we’re after, is it?” He set down the chalk. A good place to end the lesson, to give them food for thought. To situate and recontextualise the point of it all, what Rhetoric and Logic was really on about for all of them. “Class dismissed. Please, remember to do your readings, and work on the problem sets I’ve assigned you. We’ll discuss them in the next tutorial. And keep the questions coming—remember, Master Anders and I are here to help you. If you don’t understand something, please ask me. I can’t tell just by looking at you.”

[TAG: RP, 622 words, DISCUSSION, 600 words] [OOC: Aight. Sart's viewed the thread a couple of times, but no response, and since I have not been offered anything that can really affect my read on Sart which has been all over the place, I'm going to call it a night as it's almost 0530hrs and I'm dead tired. Also, I've finally broken the 40k+ mark, which is a relief as I'm almost there, and having the time to dedicate to writing is so good >> And I feel like a god of words tbh. (Seriously guys, is it so fricking hard to just say more and help people read you? If you're Village I really don't want to kill you, yes I'm not hardKasing but I don't like MLing findable Villagers. F's sake. I'm annoyed because I legit think there's a chance of V!Sart here but he just feels like a black hole I don't know which way to lean on: V considerations being apparent complete dgaf about defense or the votes on him and the E considerations being the fact his voting just feels like a thinly-veiled CC.)] [OOC: You were all Villagers. The point I was making is the same point I made in LG95 when I was trying to stop the Village from exeing our leader, which is that Szeth tends to do pretty counterintuitive things as a Villager. The fact that so many fellow Villagers (you, Xino, and Mat and Stick (last two admittedly observers) in the dead doc) had their hackles raised by him points IMO to the fact that I don't take the PM start TJ is flagging to be something indicative of E!Szeth and actually...see, the thing is that I wouldn't be surprised if TJ didn't pick up on it because it didn't affect him in that game (and I don't think he pushed Szeth for it there, which could be good here.) I do think E!Szeth has a slight tendency to be a bit more careful with initial thread presentation but I don't feel strongly about this. Just believed this was a pertinent point and wanted to see if I could get TJ's reaction to it, but yeah that's not happening. IDK I suppose I have a 'what's the point of that question?' back at TJ. What's the point of asking that? Szeth be that way, so how AI is it really? You were there for it too. It's consistent with both wanting to just get a feel for people, and to spider/go under the radar (but then why PM everyone and apparently just disappear?) What I find more ??? is the passive approach that Szeth has taken to this game, in contrast with how actively he participated in and RPed in QF66 (also RP-centric game) and how much he functioned as a game driver in LG95. Agree it's overwhelming, but almost wonder if it's a deliberate under-the-radar approach because like...again, bread-and-butter right? Same with LG95. Same with QF66. It doesn't matter if it's a vanilla game or a complex game, @Szeth_Pancakes. Basic bread-and-butter analysis sort of still applies? Etc. But full disclaimer that I had a gut V read I can't justify on Szeth and the fact I can't really justify it doesn't make me too happy. I just feel (I guess) that the dgaf Sympathy request sounded pretty good, and I do wonder if an Elim would've been more careful about revealing that capability. I do think E!Szeth is capable of counterintuitive decisions, though. It do be that way sometimes. Oh wonderful Sart posted @Sart yo what are your suspicions/reads at this stage of the game thanks] lii. tutor They were all watching him: some of them students, and a few E’lir. According to the attendance rolls Master Anders had given him, there was an El’the in Artificing in this class as well, and Kevan wondered why he was taking the introductory module to Rhetoric and Logic. He set down the stack of handouts on the table. He’d worked on it, mirroring Master Anders’s syllabus. They were covering basic logical principles in lecture, so this tutorial was meant to clarify some of the concepts where students were likely to stumble. He figured he’d gotten some of them, like the truth table for ‘if’, and probably’d missed a lot more. (“Always be honest with them,” Aksel had advised. “Students can respect when you don’t know something but are willing to admit it.” “I should know though, shouldn’t I?” Kevan had protested. Aksel smiled. “Think about it,” he said. “How many times have one of us told you ‘That’s a good point, I don’t know, let me check and get back to you’?” He was right, Kevan realised. Of course he was; Aksel’d taught so many of Master Anders’s classes that he’d become almost as much of a fixture in Rhetoric and Logic as Master Anders himself. “The important part,” Aksel pressed, seeing he’d gotten Kevan’s agreement, “Is that you absolutely have to uphold your end of the commitment. You aren’t expected to know everything. But you are expected to make a good effort of looking it up and sharing with the student what you’ve found. The whole reason you’re a tutor is because we think you’re capable of doing that sort of basic research, and probably more effectively than the student asking in the first place. And it doesn’t compensate for knowledge of the basic material!”) He took his time selecting a piece of chalk and scrawling on the chalkboard, his back to them, listening as they filed in, slowly. Alone, in pairs, in one case, in a group of four. “RHETORIC & LOGIC,” he scribbled on the board, and underlined it a couple of times. Figured they may as well remember they’d signed up for this class. As they watched him, Kevan felt his heart hammering in his chest. The worry was already setting in: despite Master Anders’s words, he wasn’t certain he’d prepared enough, or that he even knew enough. He heard a few of them whispering: “...got promoted to El’the…second term…” and felt that old sense of inadequacy unfurl in his chest, spreading strands like sea kelp. The last student filed in and took her seat. Kevan drew in a deep breath and began. In that moment, the fear, the fretting and the anxiety: all of it melted away. There was no room for it, not here. He had to focus on the task at hand, and the job Master Anders thought he was capable of doing. “Welcome to the introductory class for Rhetoric and Logic,” he said. “I’m Kevan, and I’m your assigned tutor for the module. If any of you haven’t signed up for Rhetoric and Logic or have gotten turned around—I know Mains can be a labyrinth at times—” Laughter. Everyone knew how cursed the corridors in Mains could get. The building was designed such that you could take easily twenty minutes to move between classes, even if the rooms were right next door to each other, due to how unpredictably the corridors and hallways turned about or led to dead ends or rooms that had been bricked off and sealed. “—or if any of you are experiencing buyer’s remorse, now’s your time to escape this classroom.” More chuckles, but no one moved. Good enough. “No one? Well then. Let’s get started with the principles of logic.”

[TAG: RP, 787 words] [OOC: That's the point.] [OOC: Wow did you have to bring Singapore's Parliament into this Presented with minimal comment. Reactions are, as obvious, negative: ] li. offer “I’d just like you to consider it,” Master Anders said, calmly. Kevan held on to his texts with a white-knuckled grip, and wondered if the Master Rhetorician had gone stark raving mad. Maybe this entire University was mad, he thought. There was no way in Encannis’s hells he was remotely qualified to teach anything at all pertaining to Rhetoric and Logic, and Master Anders had gillers of his own. “Aksel could do it,” he said, mindful of the strangeness of referring to Aksel by his given name for the first time. (Less strange: El’the Aksel had always invited them to use his given name and had always stressed he was still a student at the University, just like them—only that they were at different stages of their studies. Referring to Master Bob and Master Anders with their given names, as though they were colleagues was a mental transition that Kevan was still struggling to adapt to.) “Aksel’s graduating this term,” Master Anders said, waving that statement off. “And one way or another, I think it’s useful for your education—this is an introductory level class. It isn’t particularly difficult, and I expect even an E’lir in good standing would be able to teach it.” Kevan hesitated, torn. He didn’t feel… That was always the problem, wasn’t it? How you felt. The world as it appeared to you. Postulate an external reality: and then there was the world as it appeared to you, and the world as it existed, as it was. Given, always in experience. Structured by perception. You could never run away from your self. (A terrifying thought.) “Well, at least help me cover a few spans of the class,” Master Anders said. “You’ve taken the introductory class, and I know you excelled at it, and then you had to do it twice because of the clean-slate readmission, so if you think about it that way, of all the El’the around, you’re uniquely qualified to teach it.” “Even with the Medica?” Kevan regretted asking. The question had just welled up, come right out of him. All the misgivings, and his wondering if he had made the right choice. He could have turned Master Bob down. And maybe he should have. How often did the University let you diversify, or become an El’the in two subjects rather than one? Your specialisations narrowed over time as you developed research interests. You were expected to refine both your expertise and interests. In a way, he’d felt more free as an E’lir: free to explore the classes that interested him, to take anything he wanted to without worry of what it might do to his responsibilities and scheduling. Master Anders said, “The world isn’t divided into departments, Kevan. Certainly, you know you can’t study intellectual history without coming to grapple with the concepts and the ideas that drove them. And that means you have to do philosophy, one way or another. You can’t run from it.” And he didn’t want to. And maybe that was the problem with his research. He’d hit the wall, or at least, a wall he’d have to chip slowly, bit by bit, and at the end of the day, it simply wasn’t…anyone with a decent grasp of Siaru, and the right meticulousness and the ability to piece information together given historical context, and a foundational grasp of experimental technique could do it. Sometimes, you wanted to find your place in the world, to find a place you could leave your own mark, carve out your own unique niche. And maybe he’d felt that doing history of medicine, with a focus on improving his work in the Medica, had been the way to it. And now he wasn’t sure. “It’s the same way doing history of medicine can affect your physicking practice,” Master Anders went on. “Or how understanding chemistry works with physicking. Disciplines interlock and interconnect in surprising ways. We don’t like to acknowledge it, but it’s true all the same. Sometimes, we get a little too protective of our disciplines, and knowledge suffers for it. Or as Aksel likes to say, interdisciplinary work ends up upsetting both parent disciplines because the purists will say you’re tainting it and that’s not how it should be done, but purists will be purists. Your training gives you a unique perspective to bring to bear. This is always true, even of Artificery.” We are written into one another, Kevan thought. “I’ll do it,” he found himself saying. Suppressed his doubts. Master Anders beamed. “Good. I’ll send you the syllabus and the assigned readings for the last year—you’re free to adjust as necessary, but you’ll be teaching the tutorials so you needn’t worry about leaving them with too little guidance…”

[TAG: RP, 808 words] [OOC: ngl this sentence made me lol ] [OOC: What's your current Araris read?] l. research Kevan glared at the manuscript he was poring over. This particular reading was a sympathy press copy made of the writings of a Cealdish physicker who’d spent time as a travelling physicker in Modeg, and contained accounts of Modegan materia medica, and far more fertility poultices and remedies than Kevan’d ever wanted to know existed. The thing about focusing his research on translating accounts of materia medica was that there were, in all these gleanings, hints of something valuable that had been lost. And then there were things that were just outright outlandish. There were mentions of the use of a mixture of the gall bladder of a hare and honey, mixed together and applied to the eye with a feather over the course of three nights to treat a condition referred to as ‘web of the eye.’ There was a layer of translation there too: what was ‘web of the eye’ anyway? He had to cross-reference it with other texts that mentioned it, and to try to identify what a contemporary physicker might have named the condition, only to realise it was very likely cataracts. The Medica had discovered, a short while back, techniques to treat cataracts surgically. Kevan struggled to see how hare bladder and honey were supposed to successfully treat cataracts. Sometimes, you didn’t know what you didn’t know. But it didn’t do to be overly credulous, either. He only had so much time to conduct research—the larger picture, though Master Bob had assured him he was only beginning his career as an El’the and therefore technically had a significant length of time to go. He could afford to take the time to sift the sources carefully in doing his research. There were remedies that seemed more promising, or worth testing. The Leechbook mentioned a poultice of garlic and another allium (he’d spent almost a span referencing that, before he discovered it was onion or leek, and that was another pitfall in reconstruction: you had to ask what plants they meant, and if the same sort of plant existed; Soren’d told him that there was a whole dispute in Modeg about what they meant by silphium, and whether that was the same plant as the descendant asafoetida, but Soren was a goldmine of botanical information, and Kevan liked listening to him go on about plants and the history of plants, the way Soren’s eyes lit up, or he’d gesture animatedly as he talked about people Kevan didn’t know trying to rediscover lost herbs.) The mixture had to be finely chopped and crushed in a mortar for two minutes, and then wine had to be added. Kevan had stopped there, frowning. Modegan wine, or just any kind of wine? Did the wine matter, or—as was fairly likely—they’d needed a clean alcohol base for the poultice? (“It’s a popular myth that many people weren’t aware of the need for water hygiene,” Master Alys’d said, back in that class on the history of technology as they studied the hydraulics of empire: aqueducts and aquifers and wells and public paths—the means of controlling water, and therefore, the necessities of life. “Everywhere in the Aturan Empire, they had laws regulating the construction of wells and clean systems for obtaining water.” She paused. “In Modeg, for example, the sixth High King of the Brevoy line had already made mandatory sanitation laws, and laws meant to safeguard the integrity of the water supply. Those caught poisoning or fouling water sources of a town or city were to be fined at least thirty strehlaum and lashed across the back no less that five times. Bathing houses were required to be constructed independently of the water supply as well.”) Finally, the recipe called for cow bile, which Kevan’d stared at, but alright, this was materia medica, and the mixture of garlic and allium at least seemed potentially promising, even if he wasn’t sure about the cow bile. And how was he going to go about getting cow bile to test in the first place… He yawned and stretched, trying to work out the knots in his back. He liked it, he supposed. The slow process of translation, that brief moment of enlightenment, of illumination and discovery. It was meticulous and slow-going work, and part of him wondered if that was what he really wanted to do, one way or another. It could be worth doing, he told himself. If he found something, the way he had with the cinhallin project. And yet…And yet he didn’t know. Doubt lingered, as a shadow, at the edge of his mind. Research was supposed to be this way: slow, painstaking. You wandered down blind alleys, found wrong turnings as you mapped out your terrain, and figured out where you wanted to be. But still, Kevan wondered about sticking with this for the next five or six years.

[TAG: RP, 1267 words, ANALYSIS, 258 words.] [OOC: Alright. Some comments on what I've seen so far. I wish I had time for light, non-hard Kas analysis, but I just got off the week of suffering and conferences and meetings and admin BS and am probably going to spend this evening and the weekend recovering and finishing 50k as I'm almost there. Sadly this kraem week slowed my progress and I was forced to scribble in my breaks, but I can probably just crunch out 15k over the next three days-ish, putting me in the weird position of having finished a NaNo in slightly over a week. (The last time I finished it in a week, it was a much steeper slope and harsher rush despite my being free as it was the sem break. I remember being so sleep-deprived things got psychedelic, e.g. I was dreaming/hallucinating writing chapters I hadn't written, never do that guys, it was Wild. Anyway: Not really thrilled with Sart's decision that suspicions on him will go away if he says nothing and ignores them. In that light, feel Sart deserves more pressure. Feel that Araris's point on Sart only holds water in a world Sart doesn't vote and Sart absolutely did. I'm going to channel my inner Drakebro here and say I don't feel like I want to unvote until I have anything that gives me reason to formulate a better read on Sart beyond the fact he's trending towards his E!tell rather than V. Agree I don't have a strong E read on Sart, but. @|TJ|, did you cancel Araris's vote on you? Wonko can't answer that. But it'd be good to get a sense of the distribution. Will not vote TKN and Archer and Ash this cycle, in order. Very mild V read on TJ, ok with pressure to TJ but not really feeling it either tbh. Sort of ambivalent so won't vote him, won't save/defend him. No strong read on Mat. Feel that there are some light V considerations for Mat. But these are also defeasible, so wcyd. Probably not inclined to vote him this cycle. Ok with Araris's STINK push. Feelsbad though. I dislike voting bros. Steel is beyond our concern. Unclear what to make of Szeth's reticence. Kinda gut V for Szeth but IDK how far that goes. Back to RPing >> The GMs hate me, I swear, what with throwing down with me for the weirdest RP challenges I have seen in a long time...] xlix. shifts An intimation of noise. Kevan startled awake. Blearily, his sleep-mazed mind went through a few seconds of dislocation before he remembered he recognised the ceiling, painted a faint blue that somehow reminded him of the waters of the Centhe Sea in the morning light. Talin had said something about one of Master Bob’s Re’lar having made a promotion to El’the by doing a research project on how colours affected both perception and the mood of the Re’lar on shift duty. Kevan wasn’t sure that El’the was right. By this point, he was certain his mind had begun to associate that shade of blue with the stress of shift work. Within a few spans of being introduced to Medica shifts, Kevan had begun to hit a sort of pattern, a sort of rhythm to how he approached it. He learned to just doze whenever he could, to go from weary exhaustion to sleep, and from sleep back to something that passed for awareness—grabbing a cup of tea from the sympathy kettle, just for alertness, and then shuffling back on shift. Things changed when you were an El’the. He felt…more alone than before. It was one thing to be the E’lir who was readmitted to the University. He talked to some of his old classmates from the Fishery when they ran into each other; most of them were glad for him. He hadn’t been referred to as ‘Master Artificer’s Despair’ for no reason, and pretty much everyone’d watched him struggle through basic studies in Artificery. Once he’d taken to Rhetoric and Logic as a fish to water, he’d found new friends, and kept old ones through effort. Soren, Jarvik, and Owyn—the original gang from the bunks in the Mews—they all stayed friends because they took the same classes, made the effort to stay in the same circles. It didn’t matter that their studies didn’t overlap as much: that Soren was putting in hours in the Fishery, or that Owyn took every and anything he found fascinating, or that Jarvik did things with Arithmetic that Kevan thought were frankly unnatural, if not outright disturbing. It didn’t matter that Valerra was, as far as Kevan could tell, extremely proficient with Alchemy and sought to open her own distillery one day. (“Please, don’t ever practise alchemy near your brews, I’m begging you,” Soren’d told her. “I don’t remotely trust anything that’s been near an alchemist’s still.”) It was easier, when they were all E’lir together. The cracks’d really started to show only when he’d been elevated by Master Bob for what Kevan still considered…something he didn’t feel had been too much a display of skill or proficiency. Another thing to be the student who’d made Re’lar sometime after the midterms. There was so much to catch up on, so many things to juggle, and he felt obligated to prove Master Bob hadn’t made a mistake, and the same old sense of obligation to keep a promise made in gratitude. (He didn’t want to let Master Anders down, not after Master Anders had done so much for him.) And now, there they were again, as though they’d arrived in lockstep: Issal and himself, making El’the before the next term had really begun. How did you handle it? How did you handle that prickle between your shoulder-blades; the steady sense that so many eyes were on you: watching, envious, evaluating, resentful, or worse still, with the blankness of hero-worship. He didn’t want to be whatever they were making of him. He wanted to learn. He still wanted it, so badly. He wanted to do his best; felt the need to live up to what Master Bob and Master Anders had seen in him. And he wanted to be Kevan, son of Jair, to do whatever he wanted to do, and he didn’t want all that weight on his shoulders or whispers or stares or envy or resentment or hero-worship. He didn’t want to be more. He just wanted to be. He really wondered how Issal was coping. As an El’the, there were more things to memorise, more processes, more knowledge he had to cram into his head, as though he was memorising vocabulary for Siaru exams all over again. And in the Medica, being an El’the meant you were expected to follow Master Bob on rounds, which required its own amount of preparatory work, and reading through the case histories of the patients currently in the Medica for treatment, and then collective session discussing your assigned reading cases in the meeting room, and then the actual physical rounds of the Medica, which involved talking to the Re’lar on shift and the team treating the patients, and issuing correctives where necessary. Master Bob was perfectly willing to pull you aside on these rounds, and to put you on the spot with questions about the patient’s treatment and your observations. And then, when you’d finished your first year as an El’the in the Medica, you were put on call, which meant you had shifts, still, but were given a device that was supposed to work via sympathy (sygaldry, of course) and which went off at the worst possible times and you had to drop everything and respond as quickly as you could because that meant you were needed to attend to a patient, and sometimes lives were on the line. Shifts and rounds were already causing Kevan to crash on the cot in that small backroom. If it wasn’t a tired Re’lar sleeping in there, it was a sleep-deprived El’the who was prone to jarring awake at the slightest sound and frantically grasping at their pager, trying to see if they were needed. “You get used to it,” one of the El’the was telling him. She was going through her fifth year in the Medica and was looking forward to being done and graduating with her guilder. She was bright-eyed, somehow, impossibly so, with dreams of opening her own practice in her hometown. “Or at least, you learn to sleep it off whenever you’re not on shift. Bob isn’t unreasonable—you get two off-shift periods to sleep off the exhaustion before you come in for your next shift on call.” “What about classes?” Kevan asked, reflexively. It was a startling thought, and mildly upsetting, that he might be locked out of a whole array of classes he’d want to take due to the ensuing timetable jigsaw madness. “I remember when we were all this young and naive,” muttered another El’the who was half-drowning his exhaustion with a mug of thick Medica tea which would’ve been better off as a tankard in a tavern. “Classes don’t exist when you’re on shift,” he said. “Really, you’ve just got to drop everything. Or play timetable jigsaw. You’re at the University, you’ve made it to El’the, you know how timetable jigsaw works.” He couldn’t manage to hide his yawn. “The most basic skill a student needs just to survive the kraem that’s classes on conflicting slots, classes on the wrong side of Mains, classes that are oversubscribed, classes that a Master demands you take before he’ll remotely think of sponsoring you—” “—classes with conflicting project presentation and defence dates that are somehow incredibly important despite Admissions existing so you have to deconflict and drop one of them—” “—classes that are terminally undersubscribed so the Master or the giller drops it because they don’t want to teach just three students—” “—so much kraem. Being an El’the and especially being an El’the in the Medica is all about timetable jigsaw. Welcome to the first year of hell, Kevan, and good luck to you.”

[TAG: RP, 546 words] [OOC: Agreed, but good tonal read as well. Slight positive on TJ but don't mind TJ facing pressure.] xlviii. tea Valerra took one sip of the tea and gagged, choking. “This isn’t tea!” she objected, looking for a moment as though she’d rather spit it out than force herself to swallow it. “Merciful Tehlu, it’s barely drinkable! What did you do to it, forget about it for an entire span?” Kevan shrugged by way of response and poured himself a mug of it from the pot. He watched the steam curl upwards from the hot black tea. “I was talking to Idris about how Ma—how Bob makes it. She said to go for about a quarter a block of tea, minimum. Master Bob mostly does half a block. Sometimes, someone’s doing a back-to-back marathon because they traded slots around, and then they dump a few honey discs in there for energy and then the whole thing’s so thick it practically becomes porridge. Sweet enough to rot your teeth on the spot, too. To be honest, I now feel like tea doesn’t taste right if it isn’t that strong.” “He’s ruined you,” Soren said, shaking his head. “I think it’s something most of the Re’lar have in common,” Kevan said, cracking a yawn. He sipped from the cup, feeling the bracing bitterness wash over him. It wasn’t a subtle tea: it felt like the sort of thing that pummelled your mind into wakefulness if only because of how thick and strong it was. By now though, Kevan figured he was sort of inured to it. “Damage to their tastebuds?” Valerra asked, acidly. She’d given up and tipped the rest of the mug out the window, just barely missing the succulent. “Hey!” Soren complained. “Watch out for the succulent!” “Don’t worry,” Valerra said. “I wouldn’t inflict this tea on Plantinga.” She patted the clay pot affectionately. “Plantinga especially deserves better than whatever Kevan here thinks passes for tea.” Soren pushed his untouched mug away, and the black tea inside sloshed slowly against the sides of the mug. “See, this is why I didn’t even bother touching it,” he said. “You drink scutten.” “Yeah, I’m going to draw the line right there,” Soren said, eyes narrowing. “Scutten absolutely doesn’t deserve to be compared to Kevan’s cement.” “Well, I don’t think anything deserves to be compared to Kevan’s cement.” “I’m right here, you know,” Kevan said drily, sipping his tea. It was hot and bracingly strong, and that was what mattered, when he was still feeling the aftereffects of having come off his shift. “You’ve killed the flavour,” Valerra said, reproachfully. “This is Cealdish Black, isn’t it?” Kevan nodded. “Get them in bricks from the market, and then scrape about a quarter brick per pot each time.” “Are you crazy? People scrape off bits of Cealdish Black to drink per cup! Cealdish Black is supposed to be smoky, with hints of honey and malt. You’ve just—this is all smoke and nothing else.” Valerra buried her face in her hands. To Soren, she said, “You deal with him. I can’t deal with him.” Soren shrugged, classic Modegan, in the ironic tilt of his eyebrows, the quirk of his mouth. Strange how he could make the gesture so elegant, almost sensual, Kevan thought. “I think it’s too late for him. Master Bob ruined him, and he has no sense of taste left.”

[OOC: Busy today again so a quick note - I don't think that's how R&L works, no. Can say from personal experience, as I cancelled TKN's vote on me that Month (M1?) for kraem and lulz since that vote was gonna disappear anyway. The disappeared votes are pertinent and should be asked @little wilson @Elbereth @Devotary of Spontaneity I think it's worth asking.]

[TAG: DISCUSSION, 224 words] [OOC: Sounds like basically the entire current pool of elevated students - this should be TJ's second, STINK's second, my third, and Ash's third. Subtract Wonko for pretty obvious reasons. Well yeah, it is - but they'd have to go for Naming, Alchemy, and Archives. We currently do have a pretty high casualty rate in prospective Namers. I don't disagree on the strat though I've set aside analysis for the moment until I've made enough of a wordcount buffer, and anyway I'm still not hardKasing. But I think my question was more about what this does for your suspects now. In plain Aturan, to put it a tad bluntly, I am not sure I'm convinced you're Village, have generally not wanted to consider the implications of that too much and have deliberately avoided thinking too hard about you or pressing the issue, but wonderfully I can't do anything about the fact you've been expelled and what this does for SD!you so now that the issue has been forced, I'd rather be able to get a read on you in order to decide what sense to make of the past Term. I think the best way of putting it is I just get mixed vibes off you and being able to read you here and now since there isn't a flip would still be helpful.]

[TAG: RP, 903 words] [OOC: My bad, it's supposed to be -28.3 Talents, my tracker is a bit off as I didn't do the reference and call correctly.] xlvii. water He doesn’t realise, until that trip north of the University, how much he’s missed the water, or perhaps the memory of the water; growing up where the bright jewel of the Centhe Sea adorns the vivid green cliffs of western Yll. His father, teaching him to swim, and holding him when the water was too deep for him. (“The first men,” writes Daviyd Hahn of Vintas, “Even had their reasoning abilities been perfect from the start, could not have inferred from the fluidity and transparency of water that it could drown them, or from the light and warmth of fire that it could burn them.” Kevan remembers fragments of his childhood, before they moved: the glittering lure of the Centhe Sea, and, he will subsequently suppose, a certain kind of innocence. He remembers, as well, the first time they attended to a student who’d slipped off the Stonebridge and into the Omethi at the Medica: the visceral realisation that water can kill too, that humans aren’t meant to breathe water. That the Omethi was magnificent, and even the Omethi would drown you, if you were careless, no matter how the water appeared. The Re’lar team—and he was an E’lir, back then, still beginning to take part in shift-work at the time—kneeling by the patient and administering chest compressions to the count. (You didn’t have to deliver rescue breaths, Re’lar Talin had said, but some people did all the same, and it didn’t hurt, but what mattered was you had to keep the same pace, the same depth of the compressions, because if you could preserve circulation, you could keep the victim alive, if not attempt resuscitation.) Water sluicing out from the student’s mouth as he performed the compressions, and the realisation, bone-deep, of mortality: that you drowned, that water killed you, even as it kept you alive.) There is a small stream, an offshoot of the Omethi northwards, a short enough distance away from the University, and they all steal out that day in the calm following Admissions, with food and drink and plans to have a quiet day by the river. Even as an offshoot, the Omethi is calm, even inviting, in the daylight, and a welcome relief to the warmth of the day. Kevan dives into the Omethi and the water fractures about him, droplets spraying like rain, falling away from him, and the cold hits him first, like a shock of cold wind to the face in winter. He is sinking, further down, and further down, and he just lets himself do that, allows himself nothing but the illusion of falling, the illusion of descent, and feels the worries and tasks and anxieties and burdens of life at the University slough off, one by one. (They can’t touch him here in the water.) He doesn’t realise how much he’s missed this, until his feet touch the sandy bottom of the stream bed and he kicks upwards again. (There is a hesitation there he doesn’t allow himself to articulate: a temptation to remain, a temptation to starve himself of air and breathe in even though he knows he’ll drown, and then he lets go and moves back, up towards the light. There is a moment of perfect suspension, at the bottom, a tight knot in the core of his being coming just a little undone. And then it is lost, elastic recoil as he snaps back up to the surface, a creature of air and water.) “Crayle, kist,” Jarvik swears, slipping back into Siaru by reflex. “What did you even think you were doing, damnit?” Kevan says, “Enjoying the cool water.” There is no explaining this. He doesn’t even try. “Enjoy it without staying down so long,” Jarvik curses. “I think you scared the kraem out of me.” Soren says, glancing over from where he’s been lying on his back, “Look, no one wants to have to drag you to the Medica. It’s way too far here, and I’m not that strong a swimmer. Leave the weird crap to Owyn, okay?” “I still think the prank was inspired,” Owyn begins, lazily, but Jarvik dunks him under, and he comes up spluttering and cursing and threatening all out war. In the middle of all that, Kevan looks at him, looks at Soren, at the worry written into his pale eyes, and something about that moment sticks with him, right there, water still trickling down his neck. The way the sunlight gilds Soren’s dark hair with a faint crown, the way the light slants onto his olive skin. He wants to take Soren’s hand and apologise for causing them all worry, and— And he looks away, and says, quietly, “Sorry. I think the stress is getting to me.” “El’the in a single term?” Sonder scoffs, lightly. “Either the attention gets to you or the stress does.” There are stories on Yll, told in villages that still remember their folk songs and ballads of what happens when the land meets the sea, and how the sea never forgets, never forgives, and all the Yllish, descended from that first to forsake the sea for the rolling green hills, have since felt her grudge, filling their lungs, drowning them when they put themselves at her mercy. (There are other stories. Faerie stories, not the sort meant for children. But those who are educated, those who know something of the world know better than to believe them.

[OOC: -17.8 Talents El says it might be a record for the first case of negative Talents, though I think Hael got there first. No, AFAIK from Hael, I'm not supposed to get more money for this so I just broke the M'Hael's record for kraem and giggles.] [OOC: No, not really.] [OOC: What's your view on where we should go from here?]

If philosophy were not concerned with what is ethically right and what is ethically wrong, what is goodness, really and truly, and what is badness; the 'meaningful' life, the 'authentic' life, the 'life well lived', the foundations of human knowledge and human experience, with what positions are epistemically well-grounded (or epistemically 'right', if you prefer) and which positions are epistemically ill-founded (or epistemically 'wrong', if you prefer), about words and their meanings, about conceptual clarity, about shedding a little light, at the end of the day, on all of these: Then commit it to the flames, for it can contain nothing more than sophistry and illusion. Goodness. If all of philosophy required this as an evidential standard, much less a methodological standard, we can fire everyone except the Descartes specialists working in history of philosophy, and the Chinese and Indian philosophy specialists can certainly close shop now as they are not doing philosophy

[TAG: RP, 2067 words] [OOC: Thank you for posting so I can post more RP This next 2k+ long piece of RP is dedicated to RNGesus and the GMs @Elbereth and @little wilson. Don't get me wrong, I really love the elevation and it's what I wanted. But it also puts me in the bloody nonsensical position of having to sensibly RP an average non-genius student who has somehow elevated nearly three times in a row within two semesters >> It has taken exactly 2k to make sense of this and honestly I think it works if you ignore the fact it's nonsense on stilts. Thank u for the RP fodder.] xlvi. el'the There were only so many times Kevan had entered Master Bob’s office—not the one he held office hours in, as part of Mains, with the offices of the rest of the Masters. This one was the one the Medica students thought of as Master Bob’s real office, at the heart of the Medica. You said what you liked about Master Bob, and Kevan had heard gossip about him: mostly to the tune that Master Bob was too superstitious, too down-to-earth, too easygoing (and whoever had said this had clearly never taken any physicking classes under Master Bob, or botched a simple procedure when Master Bob could see!), or too sentimental and foolish, but he cared for his students and he cared for his patients. It was something Kevan hadn’t seen in every teacher at the University (some of them explicitly regarded students as a nuisance coming between them and research) and he felt…fortunate. Master Alys was always willing to humour him in questions about historiography and methodology. Master Anders had taken Kevan under his wing, and fought for him. And Master Bob was teaching him to treat injuries, to heal. Building his own bridges, to the world, Kevan thought. (“Well, what do you think the Medica does, E’lir?” Master Bob had asked, amused. “We treat people,” Kevan had said, cautiously. “Without stint, without prejudice—” “Merciful Tehlu, not that, boy! We are a bridge. A long time ago, they burned arcanists at the stake. We’re not so eager to repeat that experience. Relations between the University and Imre have always been—” he made a gesture with his hands, almost reflexively. “—Carefully balanced.” Which was another way of saying they’d always balanced on the edge of a knife. He knew that. It was the weight of the history they all shouldered. Kvothe the Arcane, for all his genius, for all his cunning, had not endeared the University to Imre. Not exactly. You couldn’t love a legend, couldn’t work side-by-side with him, and drink with him, and then amicably part ways and go home. And then the skindancer incursions. The bone tar bombs. How the history of one place intersected another. How we affected each other. The story of our lives, our selves. “We are a bridge,” Master Bob repeated, excitedly. “We show them that there is value to the University. They take their sick, their wounded here, and we treat them with compassion and with respect. And we build, and we build, and out of that goodwill, we make foundations on which all future relationships are built.” Kevan could see it, the slow, painstaking way the Medica built reliance, and from reliance, slowly, a sense of trust, of belonging. The University couldn’t stand alone. It never did. He liked that thought. It wasn’t Aturan roads, wasn’t bridges, wasn’t the intricate engineering he’d come to the University, dreaming of. But it was a certain sort of engineering, building the ties that bound the University to Imre, and Imre to the University. Building trust. And he liked it. It felt like the kind of thing he’d wanted to do, something that changed the world, however small.) He knocked on the door of the Master Physicker’s office. It was just slightly ajar, which meant Master Bob was expecting him. “Come in,” Master Bob called out, and Kevan pushed open the door and stepped into the office. There was something to be said about how the space seemed to reflect each Master’s personality: Master Anders’s office was stuffed full of books and papers—his shelves were crammed with books, and his desk had an in-tray which was flooded with papers, and the last time Kevan had come by, even the desk was crammed with a precarious tower of books almost twice as high as Master Anders was tall. Master Bob’s books were stacked onto the shelves: not neatly, but without the implicit disorder that seemed present in Master Anders’s office. There was a detailed anatomical drawing, labelled, of the human body, with cut-outs that zoomed in on different sections, beautifully inked, while he had an intricate wax model of a person on his desk. (His Re’lar had named the model ‘Doug’, and Master Bob had run with the name; he’d used Doug in a number of demonstrations from the blood fever to complex spinal fractures.) Some of the masters swore by coffee, imported at ruinous expense from outside the Four Corners. Word was that the Master Alchemist was fully prepared to elevate to El’the anyone who could work out how to make coffee grow in the University’s climate. Master Bob, however, almost always had a pot of tea on his desk, brewed thick enough you could use it for cement. Kevan’d always thought it was a condition of life in the Medica: you grew used to the tea, or the tea grew on you. You needed to be able to keep awake, and the tea worked wonders for that, and the taste coated your tongue even hours later. “Well,” said Master Bob. “I’ve been reading your project report on the use of cinhallin as an antipyretic. It’s an interesting approach, as I said when you proposed it. A number of patients will often present with allergic reactions to willow bark concoctions or claim they taste disgusting. It’s rare I see a Re’lar take a historical approach to their projects at the Medica, but most Re’lar will take classes in chemistry or Alchemy to supplement their physicking.” Kevan shook his head, quietly. “I understand,” Master Bob said. “It was not a rebuke, simply a remark that your educational trajectory is…quite rare, for a Re’lar in my tutelage.” He didn’t like the Arcanum, Kevan thought. He really didn’t. It did the opposite of building bridges: it erected huge walls about knowledge and then set the select few apart, select because they told themselves they knew important secrets about the nature of reality and arcane arts. “I’ve passed the basic chemistry classes, sir.” “So you have,” Master Bob mused. “Will you be continuing with this?” “Sir?” Master Bob tapped the written report on his desk. “This. I had no idea we had such an extensive reader on Cealdish materia medica, much less that these materials have yet to be extensively translated. To think of all that medical knowledge, going undiscovered, and unused…” he trailed off into silence. “Possibly, sir,” Kevan said, hesitantly. “There are also Yllish story knots held in the Archives, mostly untranslated. If any of them contain records of Yllish medical traditions, there could be more to rediscover.” He felt the old ache, the old ambivalence, but also the thrill of translation and rediscovery. You could, he told himself, allow that the ancestors had discovered things, that the foremothers had, over generations, preserved and transmitted and experimented in their own right, because they’d been doing just fine before the Aturan Empire (something he and Eithne argued about, on a regular basis), for some given value of ‘just fine’ since there weren’t recorded mortality rates but most tribes had oral histories, recorded lines, and you could trace some version of a mortality rate from there, with the proper demographic splits, if you really wanted to. Master Bob seemed to come to some sort of decision. “Well, congratulations, El’the.” Kevan did not understand. He really did not. He stared at Master Bob—practically gaped, flummoxed. As if affirming the consequent, or denying the antecedent had suddenly become deductively valid forms of inference. As though the sky had fallen. “Sir,” he managed. “Nobody makes El’the in their second term, I don’t know enough—” and sweet, merciful Tehlu, he was going to panic and hyperventilate right in Master Bob’s office, wasn’t he, because of course, he was just going to give his sponsor the worst impression all over again, though Master Bob’d had a whole term plus change of his kraem and clearly it wasn’t stopping him, and dear sweet Tehlu he’d really torn it now, he was swearing in Siaru of all languages, and Master Bob was pressing a cup of tea into his hands and telling him to breathe and Kevan bent over it, felt the warmth of the tea in his hands, and inhaled the comforting scent of the thick as bricks tea that they all survived on, in the Medica, and suddenly he was breathing again, or at least calm enough that images of disaster weren’t screaming through his mind at high speeds. “Nobody does,” said Master Bob, calmly. “You’d need more clinical practice, of course, which means more shifts, and perhaps a longer time as an El’the, but that’s not something that most students see as a problem.” “No, sir,” Kevan managed. It was not. “You have a good memory, and steady hands, if you can keep your cool and not get too flustered. I don’t need to tell you not to do a thing—or to do a thing—more than once. You’re careful, and the rest of the book knowledge will come with time and hard work,” Master Bon continued, enumerating his points on his fingers. “And I think this is a good research project, if larger than what a typical Re’lar would handle. You’d need to pitch it more broadly as a survey of the Cealdish or Yllish materia medica—the Yllish project would probably be more impressive, but you have done good work with the Cealdish already…you read story knots, I presume?” “Some,” Kevan admitted. “This is good, yes,” Master Bob said. “There have been times when the University has had Masters with that proficiency. Those days are gone now.” He looked over at Kevan, still nursing the cup of hot tea. “Well, what do you say then, Re’lar Kevan?” “I…” Kevan swallowed, tried to find the words. He thought, yet again, of Master Anders, of the fact he felt torn between the Kevan who studied abstract thoughts and concepts, and the Kevan who worked in the Medica, and who tried to save lives and build bridges. How did you build a bridge between those two selves, those two Kevans? He thought again, of Master Anders, telling him to choose what made him happy, what he found fulfilment in. The work had to be its own reward, at the University. He hated feeling as though he had to choose. Both completed him, in ways he hadn’t known he was lacking. “It would be a great honour, sir,” Kevan said. “But I don’t feel it’s earned.” “In spite of my just listing out why I feel it’s deserved?” Master Bob asked, shrewdly. “Re’lar, do you think I just hand out elevations as though they were candy?” There was really no good answer to this one. “Sometimes,” Master Bob said, “Others see more clearly what we cannot. I think you do not have the best assessment of your self or your own worth, Re’lar. And I think it is important—even if you take nothing else away—that you learn to see yourself clearly.” Kevan’s hands tightened about the cup. Dark waters there, running ever deeper. You never wanted to go there, you’d drown. Maybe you had to accept that you would never feel right, never stop feeling as though you were an exile cut off from the world, or as though you never quite fit in. “I have many Re’lar,” Master Bob finished. “I have some very talented Re’lar working on projects at the intersection of chemistry and physicking, or alchemy and physicking. I do not have very many working on the intersection between history and physicking. And I think that this is a good project, a unique project, but also a promising one, that needs time and space to flourish. And I think you may not be fully ready, but you will be ready, and by the time you are done, you will have earned your guilder and the El’the rank twice over. Will you do this, then?” A chance to do something of value, Kevan thought. Wasn’t that what he wanted? He didn’t know what he wanted. Or he wanted too many things. You got too greedy, sometimes. Or you set yourself up too high, and life knocked you back down. He felt the old panic stir in a corner of his mind and forced it back down, roughly. “I’d be honoured, sir,” he said, quietly, setting the cup back down on the table. “You’re an El’the now, Kevan,” came the reply. “It’s just Bob.”