Hookay, let's clear some stuff up:
First and foremost: Saki is fully aware (and, if you've been paying attention, you should be too) that Lord Grasp would not just sit there and "be a bathhouse" as an act of charity. Lord Grasp is COMPASSION
1. He'd be doing this for his own amusement, and thus would be an
active participant in the cleaning, with everything that entails (and/or send her mental images). On top of
that, he'd probably need a whole host of explanations of what is and what isn't appropriate behavior by the PRT if Saki wanted to avoid harassment lawsuits. (And then he'd probably try to push those limits for his own amusement.)
That is what framed her initial "ew" thoughts, and a bit of why she was she also thought that prettier people might possibly be acceptable for that experience (more on that later).
- Lord Grasp was deliberately created back during the Primordial War to be a weapon-servant to Exalted. He is not a human being with our standard wants, needs, and impulses, he is effectively an uplifted camping tent covered in guns and sharp objects with a similarly-odd mental architecture. He IS fully sapient, however, and as we have seen he has no problem voicing his objections vocally and physically if he disagrees with something Saki does/says if he feels strongly enough. This was an errant proposition, more lascivious on his part than charitable, so he wasn't that invested in the idea. There's some space for a morality discussion about whether it's okay to create an artificial, non-human servant/slave race (because with AI rapidly approaching in real life, it's going to be a talk we'll need to have in our lifetime), but as he is now Lord Grasp is quite content with his lot in life and would object to being told his existence is morally reprehensible (likely with violence).
- Saki is a traumatized teenager. Her base personality was that of an introvert in a middle-class family originally from Japan; her tolerance for strangers for most of her life was very low, even in the best of situations. In stressful situations, we humans tend to fall back into more deep-seated behaviors and right now Saki has been constantly been hammered with the reality of Enemies Can Be Everywhere and I Am Vulnerable. As a result, while she is still motivated to help restore Philadelphia and protect/help its citizenry, she still isn't yet fully comfortable opening herself (or a part of herself, which Lord Grasp
is) to be vulnerable to total strangers to this degree. Yes, consciously she's aware that Lord Grasp is probably more than capable of subduing or punishing anyone that would get rowdy in his pagoda-self. Irrational fears are irrational.
- Saki is a bit bougie, yes. Pretty people are generally more acceptable to her than non-pretty people. However, if Saki and Lord Grasp did get placed in one of the Relief Shelters that sort of mild prejudice would quickly fall away in the face of the dismal living conditions there - she's got a high enough Compassion that she'd see how things are there and start hustling everyone in herself. But in the abstract... well, she's not Compassion
4.
- This was all brought about by Saki and Lord Grasp's discussion of what to do while she's at school since he can't exactly ride around on her shoulder there. Ultimately, it was decided that his continued education of Ciara (and occasionally Accord) was a higher priority, especially with the current rainstorm making 'cleaning' not the biggest priority for the shelters at the moment. In addition, Saki would rather have Lord Grasp parked in her Safe Space while she's surrounded in a densely-populated school filled with transfer students - she was fine with sending Lord Grasp out on his own before, but that was when she either was surrounded by fellow Wards or ensconced within the PRT HQ.
Hopefully this helps clear things up a bit. Saki's got her own flaws, so I'm not saying she's perfectly in the right here - there are many things she and Lord Grasp could be doing with her time that'd be seen as more charitable by the populace - but my primary intent of this throw-away line was that Lord Grasp was being more pervy than charitable and Saki called him out on it. If people have suggestions for how I might tighten up the language of that line to make this clearer, please feel free to PM me with them.
Apart from all THAT, some other responses:
I can only hope we can actually get something useful out of the shards we vacuum up. It'd be so disappointing if we don't...
I forget, what ever happened to the Butcher? Because if it hasn't been taken care of yet, we now have the perfect tool for the job.
We'll certainly be getting something, don't worry.
The Butcher is... still around.
Given their sheer size though, I wonder what the limit on that is. If this is some kind of combination space between Saki's shard and the body of Auto, there is likely some kind of practical size limit they can handle. Shards are big enough physically that that might become an issue eventually.
Autochthon's world-body jotun is arbitrarily large dependent on his whims, and MUCH bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. Similarly, Saki's original Shard was designed for imprisoning hostile Shards, but... well, it was limited by physics (bullshit physics, yes, but still). Charms aren't limited in such a fashion, only by the Essence costs - she can hoover up any number of Shards, but her Charm has a finite supply of Essence. We'll see more on this later.
Does anyone have an epub? I wanted to read this but fanficfare can't download this without either a proper index with all the chapters, or all the chapters threadmarked in a single thread..
edit: Ok, you do have a story only thread threadmarked, it's not up to date but I can deal with having two files
I deliberately keep the Story-Only behind one full Chapter to drive more people to the discussion threads. When I finish with 10.6, I'll post Chapter 10.5 to the Story-Only threads, and so on and so forth. Which... well, since you're here, I guess that showed it's working?
