Annotated 49-50
With HR dead, our priority was denouement: resolving what needed resolving, handing out the happy endings to everyone we felt called for one. But still, Shanna’s story would’ve been incomplete without a moment like this.
Any version of Shanna is someone who seeks structure in a disordered world. In Fans, she had superscience and the supernatural shoved into her face by page 5 of the first story and freaked out about it early. She eventually forced herself to cope, first to support her ailing mother, then to fight for justice. You could argue that the pursuit of justice is a higher, more rewarding form of structure-seeking than chanting to yourself that extranormal things can’t really exist.
This version of her has had most of those basic experiences, but in a different order. She could handle it, barely, when she stumbled into HR’s “discount Matrix” and his body started radiating purple light. She’d been hardened from life on the run and shooting JJ…and she knew that keeping her head together was her only chance to survive.
And she still went mostly catatonic after things reached a certain level of weird. She recovered enough to deal with the bodies and Carol in the aftermath…
But now it’s all catching up with her. Gravity was arbitrary in there. The ceiling was starting to mutate. The physical laws of the Earth can never be fully trusted again. She’s overdue for a freakout. Xan’s calming presence and the fact that there is still work to do are helping her manage this one, so it’s not as bad as if she just started screaming on the street until her voice cracked. But part of her mind wants to do just that, and she’s got to compromise with it a bit, or it’s just going to drive her all the way over the edge.
FB: Some nights, it feels like they look back.
Unlike Fans’s Shanna who pretended very hard to be “normal” and composed but once had marvelous flights of fancy and wonder which she shuttered down to become very adult, this Shanna was a full-on, “normie” to the bone. It’s understandable that being faced with the supernatural, this Shanna has a harder time adapting.
Still, I think Shanna may be your greatest creation, T. I always enjoy seeing her wherever.
I think I’ve seen it brought up before by other people, but this seems like the most relevant place to bring it up again: do the Sepiaworld residents have some sort of natural defense against the universe being fundamentally unknowable? Do they just muddle through the strangenesses and try to deal with it, or do they actively repress the knowledge of weird stuff? I think I know which side the story is on (muddling through), but Shanna’s freakout (and to a lesser extent, Carol’s subconscious freakout about the five being dead after HR’s influence over her faded a bit) do indicate that the strangenesses have a pretty negative effect on people, if nothing else.
I’m not sure I understand what strangeness we’re talking about, because for most of the story, no one in Sepia World knew anything about magick or Arkerra being a real place except HR and Carol. Shanna knew Carol believed in magick, but she just figured HR had turned her head around so much that she was seeing things and talking nonsense. Even when Shanna considered that the Five might have indeed been taken to some experimental realm, she was thinking advanced VR, not dimension-hopping.
So Xan and Shanna encountered the supernatural here and, as we can see, are both kinda rattled afterward. They’ll be okay in the long run…lots of people are fine after a strange evening they can’t explain in our world too. But as involved as they were with the missing persons case, its supernatural side affected them only briefly. The only others who experienced the supernatural were Ferris, who didn’t survive doing so for more than a minute or two, and HR and Carol, both of whom ended up pretty damaged in the end.
Flying, purple halitosis warping solid matter, either purple stuff murdering people in tubes or illusioned corpses in tubes, maybe magic weather, magic voice/noise, glowing eyes, colored pieces of attire in a world that lacks color. That’s definitely more than one strange thing, even if it’s almost all contained in one room and one is just a stylistic choice.
Sure, but also almost all that was confined to the people I mentioned. I feel like you’re asking “How do Sepia people cope with the supernatural,” and the answer is “Mostly they don’t have to.”
The big exception on your list in terms of affecting the world outside those 4 people is the weather. That freak storm is going to concern a few meteorologists. But it’s California and it’s the age of climate instability. It’ll be mostly forgotten in a week.
The only other time we’ve seen the supernatural directly affecting the people of Sepia World is when the gamers talk about the weirdness of their game. And there, as with Xan and Shanna here, I guess it’s kind of a combination? Figuring out what they can and discarding what doesn’t seem to make any sense?
It is possible that the supernatural forces HR was playing with will affect Sepia World again at some time in the future…the government may take an interest in his research, for example…but if that happens, it’ll be beyond the scope of our story.
“about 23 minutes”, lol.
I got called out when I said it took me about 22 minutes to walk to my office. ‘about’ and minute-level precision clash for people.
It’s actually 23 +/- 3.16 minutes, depending on how long they have to wait for the elevator, how flaky the WiFi is, and whether the VPN can connect on the first try or not, so that deserves an “about”!