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Mar. 8th, 2016 08:59 pmUser Name/Nick: Steph
User DW:![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
knights_say_nih
AIM/IM: UndrwO
E-mail: underwater.owl@gmail.com
Other Characters: Ricki Tarr, Furiosa, Quentin Coldwater, Alfie Solomons.
Character Name: Rustin Cohle
Series: True Detective
Age: Thirty something.
From When?: Right after the scene in ’95 where he helps Marty cover up murder.
Inmate/Warden: Despite being police, Rust is going to be coming to the Barge as an inmate. He has a bad history with police brutality and violence. He beats up sources to get information he wants, and once emptied his gun into a man while on the job, presumably killing him. He breaks the rules, steals and uses drugs from the evidence locker, and can’t get along with absolutely anyone. That said- he is redeemable, because his journey in the series is the hero’s arc. Presented with a murder, he goes to the ends of the earth to solve it. Rustin is someone who tries to stop bad guys; he’s just a little overly intense about it, at times.
Abilities/Powers: Rust’s a standard human. Dangerous, with hunting/tracking experience, mind you, but depowered.
Personality: Everything from here on out contains a content waring for violence, drug use, child abuse, murder. I’ll play Rust with an opt out post and a healthy and fleshed out permissions page.
The very first thing we learn about him in True Detective is that Rust Cohle is a man who would “pick a fight with the sky, didn't like its' shade of blue." At the point I’m bringing him in, he’s a bright young homicide detective with some reoccurring substance use issues, a penchant for taking far too many notes at his crime scenes on the grounds that you never know what the little detail will be that breaks it, and a reputation for being a son of a bitch, but smart. In his first three months in homicide he catches two cases, and has them both closed inside of a week. On his third month, he catches a very bad murder, that opens up a whole whack of behaviour that he’d made an honestly good try at leaving behind.
Rust is intensely philosophical and has a lot of inner focus. He lives in a house that he basically fails to decorate- when his partner visits he remarks ‘you do know you have an upstairs here?’ referring to blank white walls and unfurnished rooms. The living room, his main room, is full of meditative tools- small mirrors on walls, and a crucifix- not that he’s religious, but that he likes to contemplate the choice to go up onto the cross.
Gradually, the space fills up with work he’s brought home for himself, too. He obsessively lives his cases, litters the floors with books of criminological theory and is up on criminal profiling and psychopathy and the like. Newspaper clippings and witness statements crawl up his walls and the tables and counters become littered with liquor bottles, because Rust drinks while he works.
Rust is a terrible philosopher and an absolutely brutal pessimist- though he refers to himself as a realist. When his partner Marty asks "What's the point of getting out of bed in the morning?" Rust answers him, "I tell myself I bear witness, but the real answer is that it's obviously my programming, and that I lack the constitution for suicide." He’s also bad about shutting up about things like this once he’s on a roll- he’s hard to kick off on it, Marty really has to push to get him going, but once he does it’s difficult for him to shut up.
"Given how long it has taken me to recognize my nature I can't figure I'd forego it on your account, Marty."
Substance use is also one of the problems Rust deals with. He worked for a number of years undercover in drug trafficking, and not only suffers PTSD and sleeplessness, but chemical flashbacks and other symptoms of neural damage. Over the course of the show he uses cocaine cut with who knows what in the field, and buys Quaaludes for personal use to try to deal with the sleeplessness. He also struggles with alcoholism, was shot in the line of duty, and previously spent four months in the Northshore Psychiatric Hospital back in Texas- which he jokes is funny, because everyone in Texas belongs in a mental hospital, which is a perfect example of the irreverence and bluntness with which he treats all of these issues.
As well as chemical induced hallucinations, Rust also has synesthesia. He awkwardly corrects people about it when they misunderstand the condition, a part of his consistent pedantism. Rust is the kind of guy who can’t hear a small mistake without correcting it.
He’s brutally intolerant when it comes to different perspectives of his own, and a real jackass about it, particularly when it comes to religion. He declares, to Marty, who is religious; “Some historians think religion is a virus, that rewrites pathways in the brain and dulls critical thinking.
One of the nice, complex things about him is that Rust has a weird system of ethics when it comes to going after someone vulnerable. He’s gentle with confidential informants when he interviews them if they’re vulnerable- kind with the sex workers and reasonable with the handicapped, nice and easy to talk to with kids and nonjudgemental and very kind with the gender-nonconforming trans person he deals with.
He is, however, a tremendous jackass to the people who he thinks deserve it- even after he’s coaxed them to show him their throats. In one particular incident, he goes to interview the ex husband of one of his murder victims. The man cooperates with the interview, tells Rust that he’d shown naked pictures of his wife to an old cellmate. Then, he asks if he’s going to get some kind of help at his parole hearing for cooperating in the interview. Last, he asks if Rust thinks that he had something to do with getting his wife killed- to which Rust replies that yes, he probably thinks so, just absolutely devastating, destroying him. When Marty calls him on being a jerk for kicking him when he’s down, Rust replies that the husband had asked about HIMSELF first and the parole board, so fuck him.
It’s the same with the mother he interviews who kills her infant children in a case of Munchausen by proxy- this cases is actually past the point where I’m taking him from, but is very characteristic of him. Rust talks with her patiently for hours, waits until she’s poured her heart out to him on the record, gently holds her hands through it, and then when she asks what’s going to happen to her, he calmly advises her that prison is bad to people who hurt children and that if she gets the chance, she should kill herself. She’s predictably shocked and devastated, and he walks away from her without batting an eyelash.
Rust has definite damage with people who hurt children. His own daughter was killed in a car accident when she was a toddler, so in addition to his ‘Marshland Medea’ case, he has a few other instances on his record like that. Most memorably, he has an incident on his record where he discovered a man who had injected his infant daughter with crystal meth. Rust shot him outright- emptied his whole clip into him, and narrowly avoided being sent to prison for murder.
Although he tacitly avoids using racist language, Rust hangs out with a lot of people who do for work, and isn’t moral crusader enough to correct them on it. He is pretty explicitly sexist- not in a ‘women can’t be police’ or ‘women are worth less’ kind of way, but referencing being able to ‘smell crazy pussy’ when talking about a partner’s ex. Working undercover with the Iron Crusaders (a motorcycle gang) gave him a higher than average tolerance for casual violence and disgusting bullshit, though he won’t be deliberately provocative along those lines himself- just unflustered and over-exposed to it.
Barge Reactions: Rust will be a change of inmate pace for me because he’s grounded enough as a law enforcement officer to not immediately go on a murderous spree when he lands. Maybe he’ll be confused at first and possibly throw a few people around in panic, but he’s most likely to go into a philosophical nihilistic death spiral about how human beings are an accident of nature anyways, and kind of float around on the edges criticizing until he develops enough human connection with someone to get involved.
Path to Redemption: There’ll be a few things that need to happen with Rust to work on his redemption: one, someone has to break him of the standard ‘the ends justify the means’ business. Two, someone should hone his social skills to slightly above ‘wanton sadism and insensitivity.’ Three, someone should model obsessive casework in a way that involves sobriety and not beating witnesses for information and personal balance. We’ve seen from canon that he’s actually a lot better when he has strong interpersonal relationships, and the boat is great for that. All in all I think he’ll be a crabby, stubborn, but mostly safe and workable inmate.
With the ultimate goal of treating people a little less cruelly, and incorporating less physical violence in his work, I think redemption is definitely attainable. The standard mechanisms of the barge will be good for him- ie, meet people, get thrown into the crucible of hell with said people, eventually form pro-social bonds and develop respect for a small section of the population, begin gradually to absorb their advice and seek their approval. He'd be a slow goer- but maybe not, if someone can get their hooks in deep and shake him up fast enough.
Last of all, being out of the police and gang culture around drugs and alcohol will be a big step in the right direction for Rust. It's a difficult one to count because after the involuntary period of drying out on the barge, he'll have to decide to mean and commit to his own sobriety and strategize how to stick to those plans back home, but with the right help on board that's certainly doable.
History: Rust was a toddler in Galveston with his mother, who dumped him in his father’s lap when he came back from the war and then promptly disappeared off the face of the earth. His father took a young Rust to Alaska, where he was trained in survivalism and tracking. When Rust decided to move back to Texas, his father viewed it as a betrayal, and the two stopped speaking, effectively leaving him an orphan.
Rust joined the local police force and got married, and had a daughter. He worked robberies for a few years, until his daughter was struck by a car and killed. Then, he transferred to narcotics, and threw himself unhealthily into the work. He divorced his wife. Rust was working narcotics when he killed a man who he’d found injecting his infant daughter with crystal meth, and so was transferred to undercover work under dubiously ethical circumstances- sort of an ‘either do this for us or go to prison.’ Officers are supposed to spend no more than eleven months under cover, and he was there for nearly four years. He developed worsening mental health, as well as PTSD and a drug habit. It ended with him being shot three times in the side and then committed to a psychiatric hospital for four months.
Fresh off the heels of that injury and commitment, Rust pulled in some favours and got transferred to homicide in New Orleans, where he partnered up with Marty Hart and eventually pulled the case that’d be the central plot of the first season of True Detective; a cult murdering people in the name of the King in Yellow. In the early days of this investigation Rust both begins drinking again, and starts illegally purchasing downers from his confidential informants to try to sleep at night.
The investigation goes slowly, aided along by Rust’s brutality with witnesses. They discover that the key might be a meth cook who actually have ties with the Iron Crusaders, one of the gangs Rust infiltrated during his spate of undercover work back in Texas. Without the department’s knowledge, Rust takes several kilos of cocaine from the evidence locker at work (actually hacking into one with a hunting knife and snorting a bit right there off the blade to test it for purity before he pockets it and walks out, remarking ‘we need a better system for this stuff’) in order to get in with the Crusaders.
He approaches his old friend Ginger (posing under his previous work name, ‘Crash,’) and says that after he was shot he skipped across the border where he now works for ex Mexican army types. He wants to trade some of their ample supply of coke for meth, and he hears Ginger can hook him up with a good cook. Ginger is suspicious, and gives him a line to snort, cut with who knows what. Rust takes it. Ginger says he needs to come along on a job that involves ripping off a stash house, and in exchange, he’ll set him up with the cook. Rust agrees, and comes along, but the heist goes wrong and several people are shot. Rust kidnaps Ginger from the fray, throws him in the back of Marty’s car, and bullies him into setting up a meeting with a biker who’ll take them to the cook.
The biker senses something is up, and blows Rust off, but Marty is on hand to follow him, and Rust follows behind him, with Ginger bound and gagged in the back of his own pick up. Rust throws Ginger into a ditch on the way to get rid of him, and pulls up behind Marty, using his own survivalist skills to track the biker through grenade-rigged and landmine filled woods to get to the meth cookhouse.
At the place, they arrest and cuff the cook, and Rust stands guard over him while Marty goes around to clear the house down. He finds two captive children who have clearly been the victims of horrifying abuse, and storms back out to shoot the cook in the head, where he kneels, handcuffed. Rust then tries to shoot the biker, who has just emerged from a shed- but the man ends up fleeing and killing himself on one of the landmine traps the place is rigged with. Marty is horrified at what he’s done, but Rust, once he’s seen the children, comments "Oh, fuck him. Good to see you commit to something." He helps rig the scene so it looks like they shot the man in a fair firefight, and lies to the shooting board.
After that, the case is temporarily closed. The series goes on past this point, but any indication that these two men weren’t their killers won’t come for another seven years, long past the point where I’m apping Rust from.
Sample Journal Entry:
The idea that there is some kind of objective morality is, it’s fucking needless to say, ridiculous.
[That’s how Rust starts. This isn’t an open network post, he isn’t this preachy without being goaded into it, but buried deep in the comments, he eventually does go off.]
No action that takes place has any inherent value associated with it, be it positive or negative. All social meaning comes from the presence of social structures. Lately they happen to be focused on life-preserving and non-interventionalism, but that’s a fad, a conceit of twentieth and twenty first century thinkers that will be as far from fashion in a millennia or so as, I don’t know, deific binarism was to everyone before Zoroaster.
You know that, right? That we can trace in the world the moment where we began to think about good and evil?
How can something that we know when the idea first came about be inherently natural? This isn’t like a rock, a tree, a hand or a foot, this is a theoretical framework whose origins we know.
And if it’s not fucking natural, then how can you expect it to be universal, never mind, never mind inherently correct?
Sample RP:
Rust arrives on the Barge from the back of an ambulance bed, where he’s jut laid a tiny little dead boy down. His head is still buzzing with the cocaine, his gut is a knot, and his eyes keep burning in a way that he wants at once to blame on the kids to his coworkers, definitely not the drugs, but on the drugs to himself, and definitely not the kids. Maybe it’s neither. Maybe it’s just one long night, three dead bikers, two dead serial killers, one dead boy.
He can usually tell better than this when he’s hallucinating. Rust thinks that the eliminate the impossible style of detecting is a gross oversimplification, in this wide world, but when the lights start flying at his face or the sky opens up in a tornado of crows flying in perfect spiral tessellations, well, it isn’t much of a leap. He’s never seen anything so vivid as a boat, before.
Someone is standing right in front of him and talking to him. The proximity of their kneecaps tells him he’s sitting on the ground. He can smell liquor, sweat, and blood- all on himself. He has fresh track marks up his arms and he shivers with every exhale.
State police, he deliberately does not say to this samaritan, because who the hell would believe him?
User DW:
knights_say_nihAIM/IM: UndrwO
E-mail: underwater.owl@gmail.com
Other Characters: Ricki Tarr, Furiosa, Quentin Coldwater, Alfie Solomons.
Character Name: Rustin Cohle
Series: True Detective
Age: Thirty something.
From When?: Right after the scene in ’95 where he helps Marty cover up murder.
Inmate/Warden: Despite being police, Rust is going to be coming to the Barge as an inmate. He has a bad history with police brutality and violence. He beats up sources to get information he wants, and once emptied his gun into a man while on the job, presumably killing him. He breaks the rules, steals and uses drugs from the evidence locker, and can’t get along with absolutely anyone. That said- he is redeemable, because his journey in the series is the hero’s arc. Presented with a murder, he goes to the ends of the earth to solve it. Rustin is someone who tries to stop bad guys; he’s just a little overly intense about it, at times.
Abilities/Powers: Rust’s a standard human. Dangerous, with hunting/tracking experience, mind you, but depowered.
Personality: Everything from here on out contains a content waring for violence, drug use, child abuse, murder. I’ll play Rust with an opt out post and a healthy and fleshed out permissions page.
The very first thing we learn about him in True Detective is that Rust Cohle is a man who would “pick a fight with the sky, didn't like its' shade of blue." At the point I’m bringing him in, he’s a bright young homicide detective with some reoccurring substance use issues, a penchant for taking far too many notes at his crime scenes on the grounds that you never know what the little detail will be that breaks it, and a reputation for being a son of a bitch, but smart. In his first three months in homicide he catches two cases, and has them both closed inside of a week. On his third month, he catches a very bad murder, that opens up a whole whack of behaviour that he’d made an honestly good try at leaving behind.
Rust is intensely philosophical and has a lot of inner focus. He lives in a house that he basically fails to decorate- when his partner visits he remarks ‘you do know you have an upstairs here?’ referring to blank white walls and unfurnished rooms. The living room, his main room, is full of meditative tools- small mirrors on walls, and a crucifix- not that he’s religious, but that he likes to contemplate the choice to go up onto the cross.
Gradually, the space fills up with work he’s brought home for himself, too. He obsessively lives his cases, litters the floors with books of criminological theory and is up on criminal profiling and psychopathy and the like. Newspaper clippings and witness statements crawl up his walls and the tables and counters become littered with liquor bottles, because Rust drinks while he works.
Rust is a terrible philosopher and an absolutely brutal pessimist- though he refers to himself as a realist. When his partner Marty asks "What's the point of getting out of bed in the morning?" Rust answers him, "I tell myself I bear witness, but the real answer is that it's obviously my programming, and that I lack the constitution for suicide." He’s also bad about shutting up about things like this once he’s on a roll- he’s hard to kick off on it, Marty really has to push to get him going, but once he does it’s difficult for him to shut up.
"Given how long it has taken me to recognize my nature I can't figure I'd forego it on your account, Marty."
Substance use is also one of the problems Rust deals with. He worked for a number of years undercover in drug trafficking, and not only suffers PTSD and sleeplessness, but chemical flashbacks and other symptoms of neural damage. Over the course of the show he uses cocaine cut with who knows what in the field, and buys Quaaludes for personal use to try to deal with the sleeplessness. He also struggles with alcoholism, was shot in the line of duty, and previously spent four months in the Northshore Psychiatric Hospital back in Texas- which he jokes is funny, because everyone in Texas belongs in a mental hospital, which is a perfect example of the irreverence and bluntness with which he treats all of these issues.
As well as chemical induced hallucinations, Rust also has synesthesia. He awkwardly corrects people about it when they misunderstand the condition, a part of his consistent pedantism. Rust is the kind of guy who can’t hear a small mistake without correcting it.
He’s brutally intolerant when it comes to different perspectives of his own, and a real jackass about it, particularly when it comes to religion. He declares, to Marty, who is religious; “Some historians think religion is a virus, that rewrites pathways in the brain and dulls critical thinking.
One of the nice, complex things about him is that Rust has a weird system of ethics when it comes to going after someone vulnerable. He’s gentle with confidential informants when he interviews them if they’re vulnerable- kind with the sex workers and reasonable with the handicapped, nice and easy to talk to with kids and nonjudgemental and very kind with the gender-nonconforming trans person he deals with.
He is, however, a tremendous jackass to the people who he thinks deserve it- even after he’s coaxed them to show him their throats. In one particular incident, he goes to interview the ex husband of one of his murder victims. The man cooperates with the interview, tells Rust that he’d shown naked pictures of his wife to an old cellmate. Then, he asks if he’s going to get some kind of help at his parole hearing for cooperating in the interview. Last, he asks if Rust thinks that he had something to do with getting his wife killed- to which Rust replies that yes, he probably thinks so, just absolutely devastating, destroying him. When Marty calls him on being a jerk for kicking him when he’s down, Rust replies that the husband had asked about HIMSELF first and the parole board, so fuck him.
It’s the same with the mother he interviews who kills her infant children in a case of Munchausen by proxy- this cases is actually past the point where I’m taking him from, but is very characteristic of him. Rust talks with her patiently for hours, waits until she’s poured her heart out to him on the record, gently holds her hands through it, and then when she asks what’s going to happen to her, he calmly advises her that prison is bad to people who hurt children and that if she gets the chance, she should kill herself. She’s predictably shocked and devastated, and he walks away from her without batting an eyelash.
Rust has definite damage with people who hurt children. His own daughter was killed in a car accident when she was a toddler, so in addition to his ‘Marshland Medea’ case, he has a few other instances on his record like that. Most memorably, he has an incident on his record where he discovered a man who had injected his infant daughter with crystal meth. Rust shot him outright- emptied his whole clip into him, and narrowly avoided being sent to prison for murder.
Although he tacitly avoids using racist language, Rust hangs out with a lot of people who do for work, and isn’t moral crusader enough to correct them on it. He is pretty explicitly sexist- not in a ‘women can’t be police’ or ‘women are worth less’ kind of way, but referencing being able to ‘smell crazy pussy’ when talking about a partner’s ex. Working undercover with the Iron Crusaders (a motorcycle gang) gave him a higher than average tolerance for casual violence and disgusting bullshit, though he won’t be deliberately provocative along those lines himself- just unflustered and over-exposed to it.
Barge Reactions: Rust will be a change of inmate pace for me because he’s grounded enough as a law enforcement officer to not immediately go on a murderous spree when he lands. Maybe he’ll be confused at first and possibly throw a few people around in panic, but he’s most likely to go into a philosophical nihilistic death spiral about how human beings are an accident of nature anyways, and kind of float around on the edges criticizing until he develops enough human connection with someone to get involved.
Path to Redemption: There’ll be a few things that need to happen with Rust to work on his redemption: one, someone has to break him of the standard ‘the ends justify the means’ business. Two, someone should hone his social skills to slightly above ‘wanton sadism and insensitivity.’ Three, someone should model obsessive casework in a way that involves sobriety and not beating witnesses for information and personal balance. We’ve seen from canon that he’s actually a lot better when he has strong interpersonal relationships, and the boat is great for that. All in all I think he’ll be a crabby, stubborn, but mostly safe and workable inmate.
With the ultimate goal of treating people a little less cruelly, and incorporating less physical violence in his work, I think redemption is definitely attainable. The standard mechanisms of the barge will be good for him- ie, meet people, get thrown into the crucible of hell with said people, eventually form pro-social bonds and develop respect for a small section of the population, begin gradually to absorb their advice and seek their approval. He'd be a slow goer- but maybe not, if someone can get their hooks in deep and shake him up fast enough.
Last of all, being out of the police and gang culture around drugs and alcohol will be a big step in the right direction for Rust. It's a difficult one to count because after the involuntary period of drying out on the barge, he'll have to decide to mean and commit to his own sobriety and strategize how to stick to those plans back home, but with the right help on board that's certainly doable.
History: Rust was a toddler in Galveston with his mother, who dumped him in his father’s lap when he came back from the war and then promptly disappeared off the face of the earth. His father took a young Rust to Alaska, where he was trained in survivalism and tracking. When Rust decided to move back to Texas, his father viewed it as a betrayal, and the two stopped speaking, effectively leaving him an orphan.
Rust joined the local police force and got married, and had a daughter. He worked robberies for a few years, until his daughter was struck by a car and killed. Then, he transferred to narcotics, and threw himself unhealthily into the work. He divorced his wife. Rust was working narcotics when he killed a man who he’d found injecting his infant daughter with crystal meth, and so was transferred to undercover work under dubiously ethical circumstances- sort of an ‘either do this for us or go to prison.’ Officers are supposed to spend no more than eleven months under cover, and he was there for nearly four years. He developed worsening mental health, as well as PTSD and a drug habit. It ended with him being shot three times in the side and then committed to a psychiatric hospital for four months.
Fresh off the heels of that injury and commitment, Rust pulled in some favours and got transferred to homicide in New Orleans, where he partnered up with Marty Hart and eventually pulled the case that’d be the central plot of the first season of True Detective; a cult murdering people in the name of the King in Yellow. In the early days of this investigation Rust both begins drinking again, and starts illegally purchasing downers from his confidential informants to try to sleep at night.
The investigation goes slowly, aided along by Rust’s brutality with witnesses. They discover that the key might be a meth cook who actually have ties with the Iron Crusaders, one of the gangs Rust infiltrated during his spate of undercover work back in Texas. Without the department’s knowledge, Rust takes several kilos of cocaine from the evidence locker at work (actually hacking into one with a hunting knife and snorting a bit right there off the blade to test it for purity before he pockets it and walks out, remarking ‘we need a better system for this stuff’) in order to get in with the Crusaders.
He approaches his old friend Ginger (posing under his previous work name, ‘Crash,’) and says that after he was shot he skipped across the border where he now works for ex Mexican army types. He wants to trade some of their ample supply of coke for meth, and he hears Ginger can hook him up with a good cook. Ginger is suspicious, and gives him a line to snort, cut with who knows what. Rust takes it. Ginger says he needs to come along on a job that involves ripping off a stash house, and in exchange, he’ll set him up with the cook. Rust agrees, and comes along, but the heist goes wrong and several people are shot. Rust kidnaps Ginger from the fray, throws him in the back of Marty’s car, and bullies him into setting up a meeting with a biker who’ll take them to the cook.
The biker senses something is up, and blows Rust off, but Marty is on hand to follow him, and Rust follows behind him, with Ginger bound and gagged in the back of his own pick up. Rust throws Ginger into a ditch on the way to get rid of him, and pulls up behind Marty, using his own survivalist skills to track the biker through grenade-rigged and landmine filled woods to get to the meth cookhouse.
At the place, they arrest and cuff the cook, and Rust stands guard over him while Marty goes around to clear the house down. He finds two captive children who have clearly been the victims of horrifying abuse, and storms back out to shoot the cook in the head, where he kneels, handcuffed. Rust then tries to shoot the biker, who has just emerged from a shed- but the man ends up fleeing and killing himself on one of the landmine traps the place is rigged with. Marty is horrified at what he’s done, but Rust, once he’s seen the children, comments "Oh, fuck him. Good to see you commit to something." He helps rig the scene so it looks like they shot the man in a fair firefight, and lies to the shooting board.
After that, the case is temporarily closed. The series goes on past this point, but any indication that these two men weren’t their killers won’t come for another seven years, long past the point where I’m apping Rust from.
Sample Journal Entry:
The idea that there is some kind of objective morality is, it’s fucking needless to say, ridiculous.
[That’s how Rust starts. This isn’t an open network post, he isn’t this preachy without being goaded into it, but buried deep in the comments, he eventually does go off.]
No action that takes place has any inherent value associated with it, be it positive or negative. All social meaning comes from the presence of social structures. Lately they happen to be focused on life-preserving and non-interventionalism, but that’s a fad, a conceit of twentieth and twenty first century thinkers that will be as far from fashion in a millennia or so as, I don’t know, deific binarism was to everyone before Zoroaster.
You know that, right? That we can trace in the world the moment where we began to think about good and evil?
How can something that we know when the idea first came about be inherently natural? This isn’t like a rock, a tree, a hand or a foot, this is a theoretical framework whose origins we know.
And if it’s not fucking natural, then how can you expect it to be universal, never mind, never mind inherently correct?
Sample RP:
Rust arrives on the Barge from the back of an ambulance bed, where he’s jut laid a tiny little dead boy down. His head is still buzzing with the cocaine, his gut is a knot, and his eyes keep burning in a way that he wants at once to blame on the kids to his coworkers, definitely not the drugs, but on the drugs to himself, and definitely not the kids. Maybe it’s neither. Maybe it’s just one long night, three dead bikers, two dead serial killers, one dead boy.
He can usually tell better than this when he’s hallucinating. Rust thinks that the eliminate the impossible style of detecting is a gross oversimplification, in this wide world, but when the lights start flying at his face or the sky opens up in a tornado of crows flying in perfect spiral tessellations, well, it isn’t much of a leap. He’s never seen anything so vivid as a boat, before.
Someone is standing right in front of him and talking to him. The proximity of their kneecaps tells him he’s sitting on the ground. He can smell liquor, sweat, and blood- all on himself. He has fresh track marks up his arms and he shivers with every exhale.
State police, he deliberately does not say to this samaritan, because who the hell would believe him?
