Heh. I can't be the only one who finds Piggot's snipes at Taylor to be incredibly annoying and infuriating? I mean, especially with the OOC knowledge available to us -- we know how Piggot and the PRT manipulated Taylor in having her join the Wards, and how they hid the full situation from us.
It's just... I don't get why Piggot (it feels like) is taking every opportunity she can to knock down Taylor. She never lets extenuating circumstances (Taylor not being at 100% in the initial meeting with the PRT; having Taylor's initial room not have computers and thus no connection to the outside world; those come to mind most) get in the way of putting Taylor down.
And, heck, it feels like she also finds things to complain about even if Taylor
didn't do anything wrong. Cook something good? Take it to Tinkering review. Make poor tea?
Threaten to dock Taylor's pay. Stumble upon corruption/infiltration in the PRT? Bitch about a newbie Ward not following security procedures.
Just... what really gets to me, is that it seems like Piggot feels like Taylor's entire existence is just something troublesome to her, and that Taylor's abilities (i.e. Tinkering), willingness to bend over backwards for the PRT, willingness to forgive and forget and move on, willingness to take a bullet for the other Wards, uncovering of PRT corruption/infiltration etc, are not even a positive factor to think about.
Like Taylor is... not a
Ward or even a person but just a
burden.
Take a bullet for a teammate during your debute? Well that's just another PR clusterfuck that Weaver is at the center at! And why the hell didn't she make sketches of the snipers ASAP? Just another irritation.
Obviously I can't get into Piggot's head for this, of course.
Maybe she got a gut feeling about Taylor that makes her think there is far more to her than meets the eye, and that that causes her to distrust Taylor.
Maybe she really
is impressed by Taylor's cooperativeness and helpfulness, but that she's decided to push and test Taylor to see how she reacts and if she is really committed to the cause and so on.
Maybe she thinks Taylor's Trigger Event gave Taylor tons of neat stuff and even drastically swung her social status to boot, like as if it solved many of old Taylor's problems and improved her status all across the board, and thinks it might go to Taylor's head.
Maybe she's dealing with a lot of stress from the events that were set off by the Locker "murder" and then by the attempted assassination of Weaver.
Maybe there's just something about Taylor's personality that pisses her off.
But is it just me, or has Piggot been unusually harsh on Taylor specifically as compared to how harsh she is on the other Wards?
Is she like this to everybody?
---------------------------------
One reason to think about Occult being useful; it's probably the Ability that can tell us how our Charms work, what they can do, and how they interact with Earth physics.
And that's something that will
always be handy.
And it is not something we can just leave off to Iris, because he is focusing on learning many things and because we can't telepathically talk to him and because if we ever run into a surprise or new situation and have to figure out how the mechanics interact? We're going to be relying on
our knowledge of physics and Essence.
On that note... It might be worthwhile to make some kind of device, or come up with some system, to more easily communicate with Iris when we're away from him. We had a bit of figuring out how to talk to him when we weren't there in person.
Oh, and... We should also consider just asking Iris as much about Alchemical Exalted as possible. He is a major source of knowledge about Alchemical Charms. He can probably tell us all the basics about the Charms and what we can expect from them!
It would be so much more efficient for Taylor to advance her understanding of her own Alchemical self by relying on Iris, rather than just slowly discovering everything as we go along.
We've talked to him about Essence and now even stuff like geomancy for our workshop.
But how about just simply asking him to tell us as much about Taylor's Alchemical Charms, and the personal physics she runs under, as possible?
Does Taylor even know about Hardness and Ping damage being a thing yet?
For that matter... What does the Iris know about Endbringers? Especially the Simurgh.
Taylor worried about the Simurgh -- and that was just when she thought she was merely an incredible Tinker!!
(Though, not quite sure how to tell the Iris in ways that don't panic him.)
Still, the Endbringers
are a Big Fucking Deal, and we should prepare more for them. Or at least think more about them.
We can stunt these actions under the interact-with-Iris actions;
- Ask Iris for help on understand what our Alchemical Charms are, do, how they work, etc. And also to understand what physics Taylor is running under, with her being Exalted.
- Tell the Iris about Endbringers, especially our worry about the Simurgh.
Jinnt said:
I think we will have less of a problem nipping this in the bud early then leaving it to fester.
That is not how recovering and moving on from trauma works. People cannot "nip this in the bud" when it comes to problems.
Unless you consider "repressing the shit out of it and trying your best to forget it entirely" to be "nipping it in the bud".
Even if that is how Grom feels I don't actually think it HAS to be the case.
Well, IIRC it's also what current data about trauma and psychology says too.
As far as I can tell at worst we had our head equally as scrambled as it would have been by the shard and lost a few memories. The fact that Auto was also implanting a soul in us means this is as good a continuation (for lack of a better word) of self as could be hoped for. Even if we aren't 100% Taylor we should be as much of her as we still can.
Taylor's old life
sucked. Thinking on it would be actively detrimental to one's mental health.
Trying to be as much the old Taylor would also be bad, because that Taylor was experiencing a year+ of bullying from her best friend. That is not a good head-space to be in.
Also, if you think that
not trying to be the old Taylor as much as possible means that old Taylor is dead... what is your opinion on canon!Worm, then? Because the Taylor post-Trigger Event changed a hell of a lot from the old Taylor. By your metric, this would have been a bad thing and Taylor should have tried to be herself as much as she still could.
Except canon-Taylor distanced herself from her shitty life by trying to be a cape. She did not
want to have a sucky life.
Losing all of Taylor to EOA means she definitely is dead.
As I said above -- by this rubric, Taylor in canon deciding to distance herself from her pre-Trigger life, meant that the old Taylor was dead.
If we were to dwell on the old Taylor's life...
It sounds a bit like this would touch upon our Trigger Event. Because if we are focusing on "the person we were before Trigger/Exaltation", then we would also be thinking about "
how the Trigger Event and Exaltation changed us".
And that's
bad. It's not a good thing to focus on horribly traumatic memories or sources of PTSD.
And aside from the fact that this would be necessity touch upon the locker... ... it would also touch upon our family. Our dad -- who is now vanished -- and our mom. Who is dead. And the horrible betrayal that Emma did. And the year+ of bullying.
... Shit, I was only thinking "it might bring up bad memories because our dad has vanished and our mom died" but then I remembered "Taylor's life before the Locker was
absolutely shit." That canon-Taylor actively used the idea of becoming a Cape as escapism as a way to deal with her life.
The things that most Taylor the way she is, happened in the past year-ish, and those were all really bad events. And if you go further back to when there were good things, it... still would probably be melancholy at best because we would be thinking back to times with Emma (a backstabber), our mom (dead), and dad (vanished).
-------------------------------
You know what? It might be better to not think of the old, bullied, betrayed Taylor at all.
Gromweld said:
Taylor Hebert is a cold, dead corpse in the PRT Headquarter's Morgue. You are Enduring Order Administrator, who happens to work entirely off of the soul of Taylor Hebert and possesses an identical recollection of her memories. Whether that also makes you Taylor Hebert, her reincarnation, or something else entirely is... not something I'm going to spell out.
Jinnt said:
There you go it's up to us to determine what this means about ourself. I think that means we should decide to try and be Taylor AND EOA.
Ooorrrr we could decide that the current Taylor now? IS Taylor.
Is Taylor not allowed to change herself? By this rubric, any person who goes through an incredibly life-changing experience should do their utter most to be as similar to the way they were before the experience and that to do otherwise would be as if the person had died.
Instead of deliberately choosing to psychologically sabotage ourselves (which is
exactly what
purposefully dwelling on horrible events would do to a person) to satisfy your own perception of what personhood is.
Why can't you interpret Gromweld's statement another way?
You seem to take it as confirmation of a separation.
I, on the other hand, looked at the "work entirely off of the soul of Taylor Hebert and possesses an identical recollection of her memories" bit and concluded "
Yes, we are fundamentally Taylor Hebert".
Think of what makes a person a person IRL. It's things like memories, desires, feelings, and so on. That core? It is still in Taylor Hebert.
