#anyway this au is driving me mad and i love it. it's so horrendously messed up and it's wonderful

[ghostieblotts]

So @missholloween made some incredible art (go and check it out!!!) of Ms. Larvernor and Owen C. in the spyverance breakroom scene and posed a question in the caption of the post: how long would they be there? So I decided I was going to find out. Unnecessarily long ramble imminent.

There are a few different factors that affect just how long the whole thing would take. The key pieces of information I'm starting with is the full text of the compunction statement, taken from the original show, and @smytherines' suggestion that Owen C. would have to repeat the statement 1147 times. Working around that figure, the key questions become: how long does each reading of the statement take? How long between repeats? What other factors affect the total length of time taken?

Factors that would shorten the total time: faster runs of the statement and false starts/paraphrases counting towards the total. Lengthening factors: slower runs of the statement, false starts/paraphrases not counting towards the total, any extra interaction/hesitation/argument/pleading that doesn't affect the counter or achieve the goal of sounding 'sincere enough'.

I timed the statement with a slow pace and emphatic delivery (if your goal is to sound like you mean it and you don't know when it's going to end, you're probably going to try to make most attempts count) and got 25 seconds. Because there seem to be more potential lengthening factors, this was rounded up to 30 seconds per repeat to account for extra interaction. As a figure for the amount of time in between repeats, I went for 10 seconds, as an in-between of the torturously slow pace of the original scene and a more efficient pace to ask someone to repeat something. This gives a rough estimate of 40 seconds per attempt.

1147 attempts, taking 40 seconds per attempt, takes about 45880 seconds in total. This works out as 12 hours, 44 minutes, and 40 seconds. Add an extra 20 seconds for whatever Ms. Larvernor says when she deems the final attempt satisfactory, and we get a nice round figure of 12 hours and 45 minutes.