#Earthspirit does a lot of complaining yes

[raisengen]

Quick summary of Earthspirit's operator record, because I know 99.5% of you won't E2 her (for a good reason, she’s quite possibly the weakest operator in the game):

We open on Provence dropping in on Earthspirit (ES) and finding she’s teaching Eyjafjalla (or Adele, as ES calls her) to play the piano on her miniature pipe organ. Eyja is making good progress off her natural talent. As a Lethanian, ES prefers this as a downtime activity, and might take more students in the future. She notes also that musical education is prestigious but hard to come by in Leithanian Infected ghettoes, so this should help Eyja hide her status if she returns to Leithanien.

Provence remembers why she’s here, and dumps a bunch of urgent analysis work on ES, courtesy of the Doctor (or “that jackass”, as ES calls them). ES complains that RI hasn’t enough geologists and no geology lab to make this doable in the timeframe given. However, when Eyja offers to help she immediately declines.

ES instead tells her to rest up for her upcoming mission, just like she’d told her she needed a break from piano practice. ES will get some rest too – what about all the work?, asks Provence. ES says that rest and entertainment are important for giving 100%, all the more so for research work where a tired worker could go in circles for days on a problem that would take half an hour with a clear head.

Well since ES has that all under control, Provence dumps more work on her, this time her own Catastrophe Messenger (CM) work. ES grumbles some more, complaining that she only ever sees Provence for work.

Provence says this is one of those times, as she’s still got work to do herself and starts to leave. ES asks if she has any requests:

Eyja queries

why

you’d want an illegible report, and Provence explains this is mainly an ass-covering exercise for CMs. Rather than taking all the responsibility of the call on whether or not a city should relocate to avoid a catastrophe upon themselves, they can present reports commissioned from scientists as supporting evidence; the actual content is less important, as long as it’s proper.

As ES grumbles about her workload some more, it is revealed that it was ES that originally suggested this strategy to Provence in the first place. ES explains that she doesn’t want anyone else to repeat the tragedy of Professor Bachmann the Wise, Earthspirit’s mentor and the person she looks up to the most.

Bachmann was primarily a scholar and musician, but also did a little work as a CM. She was commissioned by a noble to assess whether a Catastrophe would occur, and they demanded an explicit yes/no answer. Known for her caution, and not known for her political nous, Bachmann made the call that they should evacuate the citizens. However, predictions are only best guesses, and the Catastrophe never emerged. When the citizens returned they found their crops ruined from neglect – famine. As the nobles collected what little was left, they made sure to scapegoat (npi) Bachmann, putting all the blame on her calling it wrong. As a result, the citizens formed an angry mob and burned Bachmann to death what the fuck?? Earthspirit are you OK? Have you talked to someone about this?

Damn. Well.

As a result, ES is providing this service to CMs so they aren’t forced to shoulder all the responsibility alone, a burden that breaks more than a few of them. But no, she tells Eyja, this isn’t the reason why she likes geology. It’s not that geology lets her help others, it’s that geology helped her in the first place.

Earthspirit was a smart kid, the sort that reads lots of books and is ahead of the curve in school: in this case on basic Arts and theory. Her parents pinned a lot of their hopes on her progress, but ES explains that unlike Eyja, she found she had no talent when it came to actually using more complex Arts.

She skirts around the topic, but it seems like hitting this wall as a university student with all that pressure on her really did not go well. It was in Bachmann’s geology lessons that she found solace, as she could make progress here on academic understanding alone. Her progress in geology helped her drag herself out of depression, and she could now see a future for herself.

Provence disses geology but ES doesn’t take the bait, and instead talks about how to her it is an endless library that tells the story of every land she can visit. A library that sometimes whispers to her, but let’s not worry about that. Eyja chimes in that lab work and reports isn’t really geology to ES, what she really enjoys is field work (she’s been using her field kit as a makeshift lab in RI). ES is where she is needed, but not where whe wants to be. Come to think of it, she’s been getting more and more requests from CMs she barely knows…

Ah, you see! I, Provence, have been spreading word of how good you are! An excellent geologist and a great Catastrophe Messenger, you know what’s needed from both sides! You’re a legend! “The Master of Fraktur”, they call you! Everyone wants your services! You– hm actually looking at your face reminds me I need to go take a shower quick OKbye–

We close on Provence fleeing for her life as Earthspirit limps after her (leg cramps? It’s not entirely clear) and Eyjafjalla offers to “hunt her down” in her stead, to exact vengeance for all that extra work…