Tattletale Sorts the Mail

I wonder what the reaction of Lisa's shard is to all this is? And whether or not it survived this.
Even if it did, Lisa's mind is gonna be a bit smokey. The Correspondence is not a gentle language as befitting the tongue of Suns.
I have an answer, but I'm not sure exactly how I want to convey it. So please, speculate a little more, so that what I write can either answer your speculations or fall in line with your suppositions. What is the shard's reaction to the language of Judgements? How does it compare to [BROADCAST]? What does that mean for Tattletale's shard (I'll call it [NEGOTIATOR] if reason to comes up again)?
 
The bluntest thing it can mean is that Correspondence is literally burning inside Lisa's head. Just one sigil is going to mean her eyes are going to redefine the term 'smoky stare' or the phrase 'steam coming out of her ears', and at its tamest she will never have eyebrows again because just looking at a sigil burns your eyebrows away permanently.

The Shard alone is basically branded with something that is highly-viral and yet is a treasure trove of meaning. Correspondence packs more meaning in single words than entire libraries and it would make Broadcast look like a ham radio trying to phone-phreak. Host and Shard both are branded, either with the same sigil or different ones but the fact remains is that they are branded and nothing is going to remove those brands.

If The Captain fails to properly upgrade The Bedraggled Know-It-All, the most common result of this branding is that Lisa is going to spontaneously combust in the unknown future. And I would hope she survives long enough to see the Gate open and London move out into the High Wilderness, and long enough to enjoy a nice life in The Reach or in London.
 
It won't cause any issues. I'd like that.
I'll post it as a reply as well as editing it into the original post.
Text is found at the .gamepedia wiki of sunless seas. The format can be confusing,
Spiral on spiral on spiral
The descent is long and slow. You count the turns at first, but the time comes when you can't see the square of light from the door above, and can't mark how far you have come around the spiral. You exhaust one candle after another.
At the end you come to a place where the ramp opens onto a bowl-shaped floor. The cavern must be hundreds of feet wide, here. You light your flare, but even that does not show the cavern walls.

The floor is carpeted with - at first you think it is gravel, but no, it is broken shards of clay and stone, all scribbled over in words too old to read.

At the centre of this space is a needle of deep black rock, glossy as resin, glittering with ice, inscribed with three arcane sigils that hurt to look at. You feel a meaning in their presence: a prohibition, or a commandment. That all things must come to their destined place. That what cannot be delivered immediately must be saved against a future date. That a message that goes unheard is a tragedy.

That the signal must be carried, no matter how far, no matter through what darkness, no matter whether the sender still lives nor whether the recipient can even read the language of the writing-

The inscription resolves itself and is known to you.

NO WORD LOST.
Spirals ablaze
At the outset, you ration the sunlight, letting out only a glimmer at a time. The descent is long and slow.

Finally you reach the bottom, and throw the box open. The air blazes. The floor is carpeted with shards of clay and stone, a mosaic of tans and reds and glittering obsidian. The ceiling is so far away that you can barely make it out.

At the centre of this space is a needle of deep black rock, glossy as resin, glittering with ice, inscribed with three arcane sigils that hurt to look at. It takes the sunlight's glow and blossoms with it: this is something that once knew that light. You feel a meaning in their presence: a prohibition, or a commandment. That all things must come to their destined place. That what cannot be delivered immediately must be saved against a future date. That a message that goes unheard is a tragedy.

That the signal must be carried, that the light can traverse any darkness, that all languages can eventually be translated-

The inscription resolves itself and is known to you.

NO WORD LOST.

The sunlight is spent. The cavern goes black.
Spiral on spiral on glittering spiral
The descent is long and slow. You count the turns at first, but the time comes when you can't see the square of light from the door above, and can't mark how far you have come around the spiral. The illumination you have contrived gets dimmer the further you go, until you come at last to a floor whose base you can barely see.

The floor is carpeted with - at first you think it is gravel, but no, it is broken shards of clay and stone, all scribbled over in words too old to read.

At the centre of this space is a needle of deep black rock, glossy as resin, glittering with ice, inscribed with three arcane sigils that hurt to look at. You feel a meaning in their presence: a prohibition, or a commandment. That all things must come to their destined place. That what cannot be delivered immediately must be saved against a future date. That a message that goes unheard is a tragedy.

That the signal must be carried, no matter how far, no matter through what darkness, no matter whether the sender still lives nor whether the recipient can even read the language of the writing-

The inscription resolves itself and is known to you.

NO WORD LOST.
Too dim
Your contraption of fires and mirrors is clever, but insufficient. By the twelfth spiral you are walking in darkness, and there is no knowing what might be waiting for you below.
The main difference between events is the first line paragraph, with sunlight having slightly written


more afterwards about the rock.
"Visions? Dreams?"
You relax against a shelf. It isn't comfortable at all, as the edge of a metal box is prodding you between the spine and the shoulder blade, and somewhere off to your right is a sound like hoarse breathing. It doesn't matter.

In the dimness you see, or remember , or dream, a silver tree growing in a courtyard. The reverie lasts only a few heartbeats before you're properly awake again.
you are at the Dead Letter Office again
The Shard alone is basically branded with something that is highly-viral and yet is a treasure trove of meaning. Correspondence packs more meaning in single words than entire libraries and it would make Broadcast look like a ham radio trying to phone-phreak. Host and Shard both are branded, either with the same sigil or different ones but the fact remains is that they are branded and nothing is going to remove those brands.
In light of what happens to the Captain going through the same events, I can't help but disagree with you on the intensity. Canon consequences for seeing these sigils? Strange visions, burnt hair, a Searing Enigma (a rare and useful 'item' with discrete worth) and perhaps some Fragments. Slightly more than a trigger event.

Now, if the Sigils were something like the in game Navigator, I'd say absolutely. But definition matters in the correspondence. If the navigator's is Almost Never Remembered or some related variation, then that one will make a person forget, but even tattooed onto his skull it wasn't until the rite at Kingeater's Castle that it consumes him, part of which is 6 more copies used.
The rite
The power that presides over Kingeater's Castle bears witness - your pact is not with it, but with your Navigator's sigil. You open him up and remove the parts he doesn't need anymore. He laughs in exultation as each one goes wetly into the stone basin.

You carve six more copies of the sigil inside him, then close him up. He sits, smiles, stands, speaks. "Thank you, [Addressed As]. I am at home." The thing that follows you back to your ship is not the Navigator. But it has his skills, and his face (though the right half is blotted by the sprawling sigil). The crew edge away.
So the correspondence vs shardspeak. Is one more powerful than the other? Perhaps. One manages to broadcast its intent despite being a passive color/shape change, while the other is compact communications actively sent at mind-bruising amplitudes. But neither are an instant/guaranteed death on processing, by my understanding.
If The Captain fails to properly upgrade The Bedraggled Know-It-All, the most common result of this branding is that Lisa is going to spontaneously combust in the unknown future. And I would hope she survives long enough to see the Gate open and London move out into the High Wilderness, and long enough to enjoy a nice life in The Reach or in London.
Unfortunately for this tale, Sunless Skies has been on my wishlist for about as long as I've known of it. A Related sequel is beyond my understanding if it is not covered in my previous reading of thefifthcity.fandom.com, though now I've got some more pages to read to see if I can fit that in at all.
 
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