- Tibor: You’re nothing but skin and bones. You have to eat more again!
- Scarlet: I’m not hungry. Everything tastes awful anyway.
- Tibor: You’re starving yourself to death!
- Scarlet: It’s not that bad.
- Scarlet: Then again, maybe I’d see Julius and my parents again that way.
- Tibor: Don’t say something like that! I love you, and I don’t want to lose you!
- Scarlet: I love you too. But… except for you, this world has taken everything from me. And I’m not one step closer to restarting the Machine.
- Tibor: We knew it wasn’t going to be easy.
- Scarlet: Grondar’s army is four times larger than ours. Kirelia only still exists because Avernum wants a buffer zone between itself and Grondar.
- Scarlet: I’ll never be able to return to Milik.
Machine Girl 004
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10 thoughts on “Machine Girl 004”
CE
For anyone who doesnt know, what she’s doing is regaining control over the situation in destructive ways:
Blaming the death of her parents and love on her finding the machine, and the gods punishing her for it: this way she can at least blame someone for it, otherwise the grief can be too deep, too heavy. Remember that she is still very young, and even adults would drown in the grief if they were in her situation
Eating too little and losing that much weight: Grief takes away the taste of food, even something delicious can lose all flavor if you eat it while crying, and the food on this planet is not even yummy. Just imagine having 2 main meal substances for the rest of your live, no sugar, no fruit, possibly no spices.
Also, sometimes the food you do not eat is the only thing you can control
And if the chapter image is a way of portraying her behaving robotic/blocking out emotions: that is also a coping mechanism when emotions are too strong, too painful, too much to handle. To switch off emotions. Or dissociation
Melkior
Your comment sounds like you have at least some experience with such emotions, whether first or second hand. I can attest that a horrible experience can completely kill your appetite, to the point where you can only drink water, and I’m sure that even deeper depths of despair exist where even drinking water feels impossible.
Crystalgate
She is one small step closer, she and Tibor did successfully survive as hunter gatherers, under the worst circumstances even. This is very useful for traveling without needing a lot of founds and also allows her to access areas that otherwise cannot be accessed without the use of an ancient truck, which considering the use of horses, has to be somewhat rare. As for Grondor, she has to consider options like sneaking into her home village at night, pretending to be a citizen of Grondor and so on. I do not think that it would be easy to do either, but it does not seem impossible. Not that she’s acting rationally though, but I think a previous post covered the psychology better than I’m able to anyway.
He time is ticking, she has to make a partial recovery soon or she dies.
Poyntre
She can’t. If she dies, story ends. In Gaia any character could die (in fact some did), theorically all of them. A lot of things can happen here, but that one can’t.
Vicious Sand
Scarlet with her shirt off? Rare sight for a winter world. It’s not like there’s going to be a Beach Episode. Eat your sandwich, girl! As for her evaluation of Grondor, that sounds like a dare to me. Yeah, it’s a situation, but she’s not being aggressive enough. The larger the army, the more cracks there are to slip through. She just has to get to the farmhouse and back. It’s not like she’s infiltrating the capitol. Or stealing a tank. Or burning a supply depot. Just because Gron has four times the army doesn’t mean that there are 4 armies in her way. Just some border patrols. S and T just need to be able to explain why they’re coming from the wrong direction.
HKMaly
… in few chapters, she will be riding stolen tank into capitol.
There MIGHT be army in way, if there is trench war for whole time. But somehow I consider it unlikely. So yes, she only needs to infiltrate, not destroy the army.
HKMaly
… I wonder if she would be able to resist sandwich from OUR world.
Paul
I think it’s refreshingly honest how the topic of depression and trauma is handled here. No glossing over, no “everyone is happy again after one page”. Gripping story telling.
Shadow Threat
Don’t ever give up like that, Scarlet. You’re still young, full of life! 🙁
Melkior
What Scarlet needs is to start a religious movement which believes in “Starting The Machine” and which is so strong that it moves beyond political or national borders so that the leaders in all countries pretty much have to allow her to do what she wants, so long as she doesn’t interfere with their political ambitions.
Poll
Characters
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