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phati-sari · 4 years ago

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Hello Phati Sari. I asked the question about the suicide attempt. And I just saw the answers about Arnav’s abuse. That is what I am getting at. I feel like he reflected on his feelings for Khushi and realized her innocent or not didn’t matter because he loved her. But I’m not sure he ever reflected on how his actions drove her to the state of mind where she would carefully plan a suicide based on the reasons she gave. And jumping from a one story building could have caused multiple broken bones.

This continues my earlier ask. Couldn’t type anymore. Besides broken bones, head injuries and lacerations could occur. I am at a disadvantage because I don’t speak Hindi so depend on blogs for translation and analysis sometimes. He does say sorry on the way to remarriage but in the light of the real abuse he did I am not sure it showed effectively enough his understanding of that. I just discovered the rewinds where he reflects and I understand he does show it there sometimes but I can find no

To continue. Sorry so long. I can find no English translations for his dialogs in the rewinds. Is there a place you know where some might be available or can you throw some light on pieces of his dialog that shows some deeper understanding of how his actions were abusive and he takes ownership for that abuse aside from Khushi letting him off the hook because she knows he loves her and her tears hurt him too. Sorry that isn’t enough for understanding even in fiction. Please edit ask if need. Than

Hello!

Firstly, I have to say that I think I’ve answered your question already. I realise it was not to your satisfaction, but in my mind I’ve already given my answer. I’m going to answer using specific quotes from your ask to make this a little easier because I think you’re actually asking a different question entirely.

But I’m not sure he ever reflected on how his actions drove her to the state of mind where she would carefully plan a suicide based on the reasons she gave.

But explicitly on-screen, no.

And jumping from a one story building could have caused multiple broken bones. Besides broken bones, head injuries and lacerations could occur.

Well yeah, I wasn’t minimising what could’ve happened. Your earlier question, however, explicitly asked whether Arnav could chalk it up to drama, and I said he could.

That you didn’t like the answer doesn’t change my outlook -- yes the outcome could’ve been serious but a man who thinks he was duped by this woman’s faux innocence, that she was always trying to entrap or confuse him, could absolutely have come to the conclusion that she was faking her attempt at suicide because she wanted something from him.

To clarify, I’ve never thought her attempt was anything but serious, and have written essays about how much I disagreed with the track being given a comedic treatment.

I just discovered the rewinds where he reflects and I understand he does show it there sometimes

Does he though? I mean, Arnav spends most of his time spouting poetry in the Rewind, not genuinely reflecting on his behaviour. I’ll admit to my bias -- both EJ and Rewind strike me as out-of-character bullshit that I enjoy if the mood strikes me, but they’re not canon in my eyes.

Is there a place you know where some might be available or can you throw some light on pieces of his dialog that shows some deeper understanding of how his actions were abusive and he takes ownership for that abuse aside from Khushi letting him off the hook because she knows he loves her and her tears hurt him too

You’re not going to find this in the canon. I’m sorry, I understand why you’re looking for it, really I do. The closest we get are vague statements in EJ and in the Rewind.

(This turned into a bit of a live-blog on the Rewind.)

In Episode 1 of the Rewind, Arnav reflects on their first meeting. He says that he was angry at Khushi because his show was ruined. He says that he rained upon her like lava. (Lava?? That’s taken straight from fanfiction my God.)

Arnav: “Aaj yaad karta hoon toh lagta hai ki kitna bura bartaav kiya maine uske saath uss din.” -- When I think about it now, I think of how badly I behaved with her that day.

He admits to wrongdoing but as it immediately follows a justification, I’m not convinced it’s particularly reflective or deep. He always knew he was wrong -- the countless flashbacks to this meeting showed this in the canon.

In Episode 2, when he talks about the release of the video footage, Arnav smilingly tells the camera that he didn’t realise it would ~complicate~ Khushi’s life so much. This one action invited Shyam into her life and he smiles while he recalls it???

Ugh, this is the episode with the naaaaaavvvvvvv. Naaaaaaaavvvv. Fuck me dead I hate the Rewind so much, anon you’d better send me loads of virtual potatoes for this!

Episode 3, in which Arnav reduces his abuse of the employer-employee relationship with Khushi to a video game in which one has to defeat their opponent.

At least she apparently took the raksha bandhan seriously.

OH MY GOD THE MUG I’D FORGOTTEN THE MUG, BLISSFULLY WIPED IT FROM MY MEMORY. MY EYES. MY EEYYYEEESSS.

In Episode 6, Arnav admits he feels guilty when he thinks of the things he said and made Khushi do on the night of the photoshoot. His punishment is taking his wife to eat parathas -- a punishment Arnav admits is inadequate because he made so many mistakes.

In Episode 7, Arnav admits that regrets many of his decisions in his and Khushi’s story. But he hedges, saying that his mind wasn’t listening to his heart at the time. And then tries to justify his anger by bringing up that she told everyone about Lavanya.

In Episode 8, Arnav says that he gets goosebumps when he thinks about something happening to Khushi at the guesthouse. He says he still gets tears in his eyes when he thinks about how her arm was hurt. And yet, no examination of physical abuse.

In Episode 9, he admits that he’d crossed too many lines and Khushi’s anger was justified when she resigned. He admits that he made her life miserable, that he was “torturing” her. He says that he’d never send her where her life was in danger, though, and that she was wrong in saying that.

Ahh I’d totally spaced on him saying that he’d heard his dhak-dhak for the first time on Teej.

In Episode 14, Arnav reiterates that he regrets how he treated Khushi, and he wishes they knew what they know now: that they were falling in love.

And then Arnav disappears from the Rewind. His behaviour in the contract marriage and beyond is not reflected on.

I’m not seeing anything in the Rewind that constitutes Arnav showing a deeper understanding of his abusive behaviour and taking ownership of it and its influence on Khushi. I mean, it’s there in the edges of what he says, but it’s not actually what he says. And what he says was always in the serial -- in his monologues, in his flashbacks, in his moments of introspection. It should not be news to anyone.

When I say IPKKND is set in a fantasy world where Arnav’s behaviour is not coded as abusive, I don’t mean and so we shouldn’t examine it through that lense. I mean that the characters will not admit to it being abuse any more than Aragorn is going to comment on the lack of women in LOTR or Aslan is going to say “I’m actually Jesus.” The conclusion that his behaviour is abusive is external to the serial, internally he’s driven by the trauma of the Tragedy and has the blessing of Devi Maiyya.

And so, there is no examination -- internally -- of this behaviour. Even in Lavanya’s case, Arnav never mentions the gross power imbalance and her ready acceptance of his abuse as reasons for the breakup. The show is silent on the topic (though my recaps aren’t) and the audience is left with the genuinely absurd idea that it was about how he didn’t love her. It wasn’t -- he knew he didn’t love her when they first broke up lol. It was about their interaction at the poolside where she admitted he’d never been nice to her. Ever. And that she just accepted as it as a given in their dynamic. Even in the Rewind, Arnav emphasizes that he didn’t love Lavanya, that he only saw her as a friend, instead of admitting he was emotionally abusive.

Coming back to Arnav’s reflection -- Arnav always, always, will be able to justify his point of view. Everyone is the Hero in their own story -- the entire thrust of this blog is to show that.

Now, I don’t need Arnav to say he was abusive -- I know he was, but I also think the redemption he was offered in the serial was fine (I’m qhsahil in that exchange, but I reckon you will agree with the others). I think it was in keeping with the characters shown in the serial and I have absolutely no desire to see any come-upperance or vengeance on Khushi’s behalf.

In conclusion, I get where you’re coming from, and I even understand why you want to see him say and admit these things, but I disagree that we see (or ever will see) them in the canon, or that we even need them in general.

Thanks for asking!

#ipkknd #iss pyaar ko kya naam doon #arshi #arnav singh raizada #khushi kumari gupta #analysis #anon ask #answered

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sidhewrites · 6 years ago

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Chapter 2A, which I accidentally deleted last night. Approx 2300 words. Previous Installment found here. As always, feel free to send Asks or Messages about what’s written or anything you’re curious about.

Content Warning: Hospitals, minor gore.

The first thing she was aware of was cool air on her skin. Nothing like it should be, with the midsummer heat wafting in from the west, and the humidity from the ocean in the East. An the smell… lavender. Lavender and citrus, smelling salts, and the sharp tang of Santecants at work. She was in the third floor of Saint Moriel’s hospital building, where victims of demon attacks were cared for. Her own shoulder hurt still, a sharp, throbbing ache.

Winnie had spent two months here back when she was twelve, and she would never forget the scent. When she opened her eyes, she would see the white curtains pulled back, exposing her bed hidden to rest of the room, and the gossamer drapery wafting in the massive windows letting in sunlight.

Sounds slowly came into focus next. The boys were snoring lightly off to one side, Duva humming quietly to keep them asleep. A fly buzzed quietly somewhere in the room while someone tapped their foot quietly on the floor. Agnes? She hoped it was Agnes. And somewhere, far away, birds sang and people chattered, down in the city below.

Slowly, Winnie made herself open her eyes, and look towards the tapping, that stopped as soon as she moved her head. Agnes was there, dark circles beneath her eyes, and she jumped from her seat. “Winn --” It was a strangled sound. Duva stopped her humming as well, though the boys began to stir a few seconds later, and she resumed her song -- that strange, unearthly song she used to put people to sleep. She was a weak Maitressant, but it made her lullabies irresistible.

Winnie made herself sit up despite the pain in her side. “Good afternoon,” she said, quietly and politely, though it rasped against her throat and she coughed roughly until Anges brought her a cup of water. She offered a choked word of thanks before drinking, emptying the cup in seconds. It felt like like someone had turned her throat to sawdust and ash -- like she’d been screaming.

“Sorry, ehm…” She looked at her hands for a moment, and the frills of a borrowed dressing gown. This one she recognised as Agnes’, at least, and she glanced up with a forced smile. “What time is it, exactly?” She hated not knowing the time, almost as much as she hated borrowing bedclothes and houseclothes.

“About half three,” she said, but her voice was small, and she was still slightly pale, worried about something still.

“I’m sorry -- You know I don’t normally sleep past dawn, much less into the afternoon....” What had she been up to last night? Winnie knit her brows together, searching for a memory of what had happened the night before. It nearly winded her when she found it.

Blights had been there. Demons. And … and Rafe. It had to have been Rafe. With that white hair, and beautiful, sharp features. He hadn’t aged a day. Who else could it have been?

And…

And people had gotten hurt.

Horror settled icily into her stomach, and she pressed a hand over her mouth.

“Winn, darling?” Agnes bent down, trying to look Winnie in the eye. “Winn, do you know what happened to you?”

She nodded. She remembered the pain. The yellow teeth sinking into her shoulder, the circle she had seen. Rafe. Demons. She’d not seen him since her parents were killed, since the Maitresse had come into her home and filled them with blights. She thought he’d been killed along with them...

She looked at Agnes. At the other beds around her. Three were occupied, though only two slept. The third patient sat up, leaning against a loved one. They talked quietly together as a Sanctecant tended to the bandages on the patient’s arm. Was that a bite? She couldn’t tell.

Agnes was still waiting for her to answer. Winnie finally looked back over, stone-faced and pale. “There were blights last night. One of them bit me.”

“Last night? Oh… Winn, dear, I’m so sorry...”

“Sorry? About what?”

“It...Winnie, dear, it hasn’t been just one night, it’s…”

Winnie said nothing as Agnes mulled over the words, ultimately looking to Duva for help.

Duva stopped her humming and took a moment to answer, translating the words in her mind before speaking up with her thick accent. “It has been three days, Winn. The Sanctecants worked almost all the first day to get the poison out.”

Her heart fell to the floor, and Winnie looked away again, pressing her lips together. The first spark of shame came from remembering the hat due to Comtesse Sylvia yesterday. She’d surely never gain the countess’s patronage again, no matter how reasonable an excuse hospitalization might seen. Agnes waited patiently, failing to hide her concern the longer the silence went on. Finally, she spoke, “Did anyone else get hurt?”

“No. Well -- yes, a few, but, ah…” Agnes looked to Duva again.

“Nobody outside this room was bitten.”

Winnie nodded, and looked away. She’d seen blights up close before, but only once -- and it had been too close. Just before she had come to Merveaux, just before she’d been taken in by Moriel’s Secondary School for care. Winnie hadn’t been the only orphan in the school, much less the entire university. Any child whose parents had attended the school were automatically accepted into the program, of course. But it had felt like she was alone, more often than not. She was too quiet and too shy, and the other children ultimately learned to live around her, like she was a ghost no-one quite knew how to get rid of.

And now, another ghost was here. Rafe was in Merveaux somewhere. Or… he had been, three days ago. “Did they find out who did this?” she asked roughly, not sure which answer she wanted to hear.

Agnes grit her teeth. Duva looked away and went back to humming. It was answer enough.

Winnie still wasn’t sure if she was relieved. It couldn’t have been Rafe, of course, but if they accused him, he wouldn’t be brave enough to plead his case. He had always been too gentle and soft-spoken, afraid to even put mouse traps down for fear of hurting the mice.

He’d be taken in, cut off from his magic. Unmade. She felt ill just thinking about it.

Or perhaps it was the drop of Blight venom still running through her veins. It took nearly a month to get it all out the first time. She’d be coming back here to meet a Sanctecant for the next four days, if they even allowed her to go home. She had a feeling Agnes would put up a fight if they didn’t.

“It was a weak mage, whoever it was,” Agnes finally said. “The Blights dissolved quickly. We’ll be fine. And you need to eat, Winn. How are you feeling?”

Nauseated and dizzy. “I’ve been better.”

“I heard the side effects of Blight poison is nausea. Luckily half the stuff they have here is tasteless and meant to settle your stomach. Here.” She held out a slice of bread.

Winnie took it only reluctantly. Even eating seemed to be more than she could handle, but Agnes was watching too carefully for her not to at least try. With a heavy swallow, she took a bite, mouth twisting unprettily as she chewed.

Her stomach twisted. She turned to the side, damn the searing pain that shot along her ribs, and heaved.

A man behind her stammered.

Winnie froze. She knew that voice.

“Should I come back later?”

She cursed under her breath. Of course Sacha would show up the second she made a mess of herself. Winnie forced herself to sit up, face tinged pink with shame, and face him. “Hello, Monsieur.”

Sacha cleared his throat and bowed politely. He seemed to be as uncomfortable here as she was. “Mademoiselle Ashley, good afternoon.” He shifted from one foot to the other, while Lavanya, his fabrichat, regarded Winnie with her piercing two-toned eyes, golden fur and iron collar shining in the afternoon light.

Agnes leaned in to whisper, “He’s come twice a day since Mirinmas to see if you were awake.”

Winnie’s blush grew deeper. He looked almost as worried as Agnes -- about her no less, and whether it was from the grogginess, the hunger, or simply the shock of it, Winnie forgot how to speak.

“I’m glad you’re awake,” he said, shifting to one side. “And I like how you’ve done your hair.”

A hand flew to the top of her head. Normally it was pulled back into a severe braid but now … Dark curls flew everywhere, no doubt making her look like a bog witch at best. It would take an hour to brush out, and …

“Is that you, Monsieur Francame?” one of the other patients asked. A pretty young woman who’d been sleeping when she first took in the room sat up now, arms around her knees, and beautiful brown hair the same shade of her skin, somehow managing to be elegant even now.

Sacha’s attention turned as well, and he made to greet her at a more respectable distance, Lavanya at his heels. They spoke like old friends.

Winnie wondered if it was a good idea to have woken up at all.

Agnes struggled for words. “He’s worried about the other patients, too, of course, but…”

Duva had stopped speaking around the time Winnie had leaned over to empty her stomach, and the boys finally roused themselves, slowly and groggily. Winnie had a few seconds to brace herself before they realized she was up, and pounced. They’d intended to shower her in affection and stories of their goings on during the time she had been asleep, but Winnie fell back with a sharp cry as the pain in her shoulder and side redoubled at even the slightest touch.

“Off, off, you two. Gett off.” Agnes pulled Henri off one side, and Duva took Tomas. They wriggled, complaining until they were sternly shushed. “Winnie isn’t healed just because she’s awake. Be gentle with her.”

Henri apologized, eyes on the floor.

“Tomasine?” Agnes prompted sternly.

“Sorry, Aunt Winifred.”

“Tomasine?” Winnie echoed quietly.

“Hasn’t wanted to drop the name since Mirinmas. Thinks he wants to be a girl forever.”

“Oh. Hm.” She fidgeted, looking back at the children. “Don’t you mean she then?

“Ah -- right. I suppose that makes sense.” Agnes grimaced.

“It’ll be alright. He -- er. She’s an understanding girl, isn’t she?” Winnie smiled at Tomasine, who managed to nod enthusiastically despite her bashful grin.

“Children, do you think you could go find Sanctecant Perrine, please? Let her know Mademoiselle Ashley is awake.”

They agreed with a nod and took off towards the door, rounding a hall to ask a page for help in finding the Sanctecant, leaving the women behind. Agness left her eyes on the door a moment too long, and a stiffness settled over her. She pressed her lips into a thin line and looked back to Winnie.

“They cried when you didn’t wake up,” Duva said, reaching forward to take Winnie’s hand. “They worried for you.”

She offered a sad smile. “I’ll be fine, I’m sure. It’s far from the worst I’ve seen.”

Duva frowned. Agnes and Winnie might have laughed awkwardly at the memory. They’d been fifteen that year, and Blights had been accidentally summoned in a Fabricante’s practice room besides the library. Nearly twenty students had been wounded, and security and supervision had doubled down after that on all Pourricants in training, as well as those studying the subject as well. Sanguicants had similar restrictions until they had better control, but the Grand Fabricantes made at least a vague effort towards ensuring the Pourricants weren’t blamed for what had turned out to be a genuine amateur’s mistake, rather than any malicious intent to harm the students and staff of the largest university and hospital in the country. A vague effort, anyway.

Not even Agnes, fearless and brash, was really comforted when she heard what had happened then.

A heavy silence filled the space between them. Agnes shifted, starting to speak multiple times before stopping herself before she ever got any sound out.

Ultimately, Winnie looked down at her hands. Where were the clothes she’d been wearing? Where was that blue handkerchief now? Was it with her things? Had she dropped it when the Blights chased her? Had they attacked Rafe?

And was he even in the city anymore? How would she find him now?

She hardly noticed the children return triumphantly, followed by Sanctecant Perrine enter, an older, serene woman with fewer wrinkles than her grey hair might have suggested. Her crows’ feet became more pronounced when she smiled, making her way to Winnie.

“Miss Winnifred Ashley-Raffine?” Perrine’s voice was gentle, motherly, and her smile matched it perfectly. The accent was unusual, though -- from the south of Davenish, no doubt. Despite her distinctly Noques name, Perrine sounded as if she’d grown up in the small kingdom to the northwest of Noques. The two countries had never quite gotten along as well as they could have, and it was rare to see someone from Davenish so far south, much less working among the Sanctecant’s in Moriel’s.

“Yes, that’s me,” Winnie answered, feeling her muscles tense at the sight of the tray in Perrine’s hands, and the cold tools on it. A sample of her blood would have to be taken and tested to see if any of the poison remained, as well as a physical. Color burned her cheeks at the idea of being examined with Sacha in the room, even if a curtain would be drawn around her for privacy.

Tag List: @fearlings-lament @maitretmaitresse @purpleshadows1989 @madammuffins @timetravelingpigeon

#wip #writing #writeblr #original fiction #creative writing #ashes #ashes draft #ashes draft 1 #ashes chapter #ashes chapter 2

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deadskepticfiles · 5 years ago

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THE DREAMING PROPHET, EP 8, THE LANGUAGE OF BODIES

[PODOMATIC LINK]

As terrifying as Speak-as-One can be, we can't beat them unless we understand them - and their creepy doom harp. A special research project episode.

Talking points: The Song, The Instrument, Audio design, Musical science, Architecture, Anatomy and Language of the Maze. Featuring cohost, Xaviul. Spoiler + Content warning begins at 1:09. Content warnings: None.

Links:

nathan moody on bandcamp: https://nathanmoody.bandcamp.com/music

interactive sound and fury: https://www.interactivesoundandfury.com

bloody disgusting interview: https://bloody-disgusting.com/interviews/3580174/interview-system-shock-2-follows-helped-create-co-op-horror-blackout-club/

harry bertoia's sound sculptures: https://youtu.be/YfQ3624z36Q?t=121

using resonant frequencies to break glass: https://youtu.be/Oc27GxSD_bI

effect of sound on the human body: https://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2012-11/acoustic-weapons-book-excerpt/

harmful sound levels on healthlink bc: https://www.healthlinkbc.ca/health-topics/tf4173

orfield labs anechoic chamber: https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/orfield-labs-quiet-chamber

lore masterdoc: https://tinyurl.com/tbcloreguidev2

lore comics: part 1: https://twitter.com/JustJellyJammin/status/1172704758337101827?s=20 // part 2: https://twitter.com/JustJellyJammin/status/1176862814675361794?s=20

TDP twitter: http://twitter.com/TheDreamingPC

transcript masterdoc: https://tinyurl.com/tbctranscripts

The Blackout Club Lexicon, for player/game lingo & terminology [on Google Docs]: bit.ly/TBCLexicon

Credits: - lavanya: host, transcript, video editor, asset artist, speak-as-one's #1 fan

astriferal: host, audio editor, puncher of things

be11amy: advertising - xaviul: host, moral support

special thanks: olive & coolguy

intro & outro music, "ringing bells": a weirdly handsome individual

transition audio clips, music, voice lines: the blackout club/question games

vibraphone clip: krol111 on wikimedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Vibraphone_music.ogg)

the blackout club: question games (https://www.blackoutclubgame.com)

LAVANYA: Good evening, dear listeners, and welcome to the Dreaming Prophet. Tonight, we have a very special topic - that great unknown instrument whose winsome sound fills up our whole town and lifts up our spirits!

LAVANYA: And tonight, even better, we have our very own conductor to lead us through this magnificent journey into our vast Song. So, dear listeners, I have a question for you tonight. What's the difference between a conductor and a god?

LAVANYA: The answer, of course, is that Speak-as-One doesn't think they're a conductor.

LAVANYA: My name's Lavanya -.

ASTRO: And I'm Astro -.

LAVANYA: And welcome to the Dreaming Prophet.

ASTRO: This is a Blackout Club show for Blackout Club players with minimal speculation all law and a focus on the known facts.

ASTRO: Our topic of the day is the instrument.

LAVANYA: As for a spoiler warning: for today, you can consider yourself a rich kid at Christmas, Hanukkah, Diwali, or whatever seasonally appropriate holiday you want to cram on in there, because tonight, you are going to be spoiled~.

LAVANYA: Our discussion tonight covers the map and various details of it. It covers, partially, the history of Speak-as-One. It covers what the Song is in itself, and how it is treated and translated.

We will be discussing the game. We will be discussing the sound effects. We'll be discussing some of the people who have worked on the sound effects behind the scenes, in so far as they are credited.

We are basically just dipping our fingers in every single pot! So if you are allergic to spoilers, just tap on out on this episode.

in terms of content warnings, there is surprisingly little. As long as you don't hate sounds, music, joy or human nature, you should be fine.

ASTRO: So, Lavanya, you know I've been wanting to cover this for a while, but I can't do it without help. Firstly, I'd like to extend a special thank you to Olive and to Cool Guy, who have helped me process the vast amount of information and research we've done for this episode.

LAVANYA: And when Astro says Cool Guy, what they mean is "Cool Guy", because that's his name. If you open up the dictionary and you look next to the definition of Cool (comma) Guy, you will see his picture there. We have personally gone through every dictionary in the United States and stapled a picture there, just to ensure that this is true.

XAVIUL: Man, you guys have a lot more free time than I thought.

LAVANYA: Who let you in?

ASTRO: And as you've discovered, Lavanya, we have a guest today. Also, welcome back to the show, Xaviul.

XAVIUL: They let me in once, I haven't left since. Now they have to deal with me

XAVIUL: I will leave to get more snacks, though.

LAVANYA: So, we're going to start off with the Song!

This was loosely discussed in episode 7, which hopefully, you all listened to and internalized and adored - but just in case you didn't, because you're godless heathens - I will go ahead and explain what it is for you!

The Song is both a hive mind and an audible sound. When I say hive, mind what I mean is that it contains all of the memories and individuals from the past that make up components of Speak-as-One. The Song was once easily heard and understood by humans, but now, not so much. This is probably because of the Word, which we discussed in a great deal more detail in episode 7 and episode 5.

So you should go back and listen to those!

LAVANYA: While the Voice interprets the Song, not everyone has this ability. This is a special aptitude that is found in certain individuals that can allow them to be the Voice: for everyone else who doesn't have that special Song in their ear, the Song needs to be amplified, which led to the question.. well. What do you do when you have a mystical magical brainwashing Song that half the population can't hear?

Which, of course, leads us to build a giant fucking instrument.

ASTRO: The instrument is a giant tunnel network under the town, equipped with massive scale parts of one huge instrument. It can be played by many people at once, and requires constant maintenance. It's constantly being expanded. We see this in rooms like new growth and 920 observation.

Dax also calls it the maze, which is information from bells in the prologue, and it's kind of both: no part of the instrument is an exact one to one with in real life instruments.

However, many parts contain elements of instruments that we know.

LAVANYA: Thee-I-Dare says that the instrument is old: very old. However, we don't have any exact date or age,much like we don't have an exact date for humans being in Redacre.

He specifies that the tech inside of it is fairly new. You can see this on the screens, and in the labs, and a lot of the fiddly fiddly details. And as you can see as you're roaming around the maze l, a lot of the tech inside it looks pretty fucking old: straight from 1950s in the 1980s, whatever difference there may be between those two eras, in those giant LCD screens and everything else.

Which leads to the interesting question: does the instrument pre-date Redacre, or is the Redacre just really fucking old?

XAVIUL: Kind of the chicken and the egg question.

LAVANYA: Smash the egg, embrace the freedom of revolution!

XAVIUL: I thought that was the opposite of what your whole spiel was.

LAVANYA: I'm flexible.

ASTRO: Some parts of the maze contribute directly to the Song and some don't. It would probably be more accurate to refer to all the music making parts as the instrument, and everything else as the maze. However, we are going to use them interchangeably here, especially since even the non music making rooms often have music making parts in them.

XAVIUL: The instrument is played by a mass of people. No one individual can play it. It's just too darn big. So everyone must work together. There are several parts of the instrument which have control panels on them, which explicitly connect to the sound making parts and plexus. There are panels surrounding the giant airbags at the base, and under the walkway at the far side, and between String relay, Signal Relay, and Host Conditioning. They all have two terminals in them. Old Growth’s basement has one terminal.

ASTRO: There are many other parts of the instrument that contain controls such as this, but we're not getting into all of those right now. It would be honestly too many to count!

Information encoded into the Song is shared with all parts of the Song. This is why sometimes a choice is made to stop encoding. We can see this in the Madi-Shaw logs in the journals: encoding is an intentional action, not passive. Information won't be encoded purely by accident. Information you might not want encoded might be encoded, if you're sleep talking, but that's because consent is a lie and choice is a poison according to SAO.

LAVANYA: However, encoding information is treated as the default choice. Refusing to encode information scares the Watchers! And it is treated as taboo: the Song is supposed to be the truth.

LAVANYA: If you're excluding things, that's lying by omission!

ASTRO: the watchers sometimes take it upon themselves to make this kind of judgment. They will at times choose to withhold information from the Song themselves.

ASTRO: Encoding is done by chordists. When you are referring to a chordist who is encoding at that time, they are considered the CHORUS to perform it. So, let's say that you're a kid in the Blackout Club - crazy, I know - you're on a mission and you commit a sin.

ASTRO: So what sin do you guys commit? Xaviul, you go first. (Xaviul is an expert on the types of sins that can be committed.)

XAVIUL: Wow this is a lot of perjury and I won't hear any of it.

ASTRO: Okay I do need a legit answer to continue with this -

LAVANYA: Assault.

XAVIUL: Assault. I put the ass in assault!

ASTRO:Thank you, complimentary Laugh-Last follower. You attack an enemy. Let's say you attack a Lucid in-game. Here's what happens. Lucid reports sin to their Dispatchers.

We aren't sure exactly how this is done, but it's likely done using phones: Lucids have their phones with them. You can see them using it as a flashlight, and you can also see them typing on their phones when they pause in their tracks.

XAVIUL: Makes you wonder who's the real parasite: SAO, or technology.

LAVANYA: This isn't a game about friendship. This is a game about the dangers of social media. So turn off that computer and turn off that phone, kids.

XAVIUL: right.

XAVIUL: Don’t they need the computer to listen to us?

LAVANYA: Stop asking questions.

ASTRO: You know too much.

ASTRO: Lucids report sins to the Dispatcher through their phones. Sleepers can also report sin, but we're not sure if they use the same mechanism or a different one.

Sleepers do have their phones on them at all times, because when you prank call them, they respond. They ask: is this the Voice or is it music?

This is conjecture, but phones often absolutely record voices and things happening around us. We've seen this recently in our own real smartphones, and it's entirely possible that CHORUS phones do the same thing, which may be why Lucids say speak out loud for the Voice.

The Dispatcher dispatches.

DISPATCHER, QUOTE: More assault. Inform the voice.

ASTRO: The Dispatcher will send out information to the other agents in the field, which include the Lucid and also the stalker. When you are playing in stalker mode, you can hear the Dispatcher's voice in your ear, telling you about the things that the kids are doing. Chordist Lucid, or what I like to call D.J. Lucid, receive information from the Dispatcher and play strings at the terminal. This is a very rare interaction, but if you are very lucky and you happen to be in the right place, at the right time, a Lucid will go over to a terminal - in any of the rooms that have terminals - and will play the organ keys there.

It creates a very specific pattern of notes that is then sent off into the ether to become part of the Song. The Song tracks the player's sins over the night: by the time that information reaches the Chordist Lucids, and becomes part of the Song, everyone in the Song knows about the assault that you committed. They know that you've attacked a Lucid. They know where and they know that you're still out there.

And when that's amount of sin passes a certain threshold - say, that you tackle a few more people, you do some prank calling, you kick in a few doors -The Shape will come out, and he will use the Song to prioritize who he needs to hunt, while hunting players who are seen by anyone in the Song. Sleepers, Lucids, stalker-shaped Kids, they will have their exact location reported to the Shape.

LAVANYA: This leads us into our next section design of the Instrument, and design of the video game itself. Now in the spoiler Content Warning, I said that we'd be speaking of the gameplay systems. This is one instance we're going to be discussing the audio system that underlies the Blackout Club, and various aspects of it which means that we're going to be stepping away from the lore for a moment, and we're just going to be digging straight into the nitty gritty.

As far as we can tell! Because, unfortunately, we don't have access to the engine code.

ASTRO: Let's talk about the audio design of the game. It's really good. Good audio design immerses you so much that you don't notice it. If you notice it, something has gone wrong. This is why audio designers rarely get noticed for their work, unless they are extremely exceptional in very obvious ways, like making a specific sound or an iconic piece of music - or really bad.

And this is true across all disciplines. It's not restricted just to game design: you can find this in the theater arts, you can find this in the music industry, pretty much everywhere.

LAVANYA: And when Astro says that the sound design in this game is really good, they are not fucking with you. The sound design in this game is fucking amazing! Most of the game can be played with eyes closed. And as someone who, personally, first thing that I do every single time I load up a game is I disable all sounds - if you actually do that in the Blackout Club, you are basically cutting your own hamstrings. You will be playing at half speed the entire time, because it's not only really great to listen to, but it's actually pretty vital to overall gameplay.

ASTRO: The sound design of the Blackout Club gives you critical information, as Lavanya mentioned. Surround sound, when you're using headphones, means that you can hear exactly where enemies are on a two dimensional plane. In real life, our ears hear only on a two dimensional plane. Each ear receives information independently. If information reaches the left ear before the right ear, our brain registers that that sound is on the left - and all of this happens in an instant.

XAVIUL: Each enemy makes specific sounds on all types of terrain. Recently, this has gotten a amplified effect in the game to.. we'll call it mixed reviews. But sleepers have heavier footfalls than the Lucids do. The sleepers elites have boots, while the regular sleepwalkers have bare feet.

Makes you wonder why they don't wake up, wondering why their feet are covered in cuts and mud.

But sleepers and Lucid also have different voices, and voice lines that they will say through the night. Camera drones buzz constantly as they move, thouhg mounted cameras are silent.

ASTRO: You also subconsciously receive information about things further away from you. The way your own footsteps and other sound reflect off the environment and back to you tells you more about where you are.

Even player voices are affected by sound reflection. If one player is inside a cave - say, an exit cave, or even some parts of the Instrument - all of the players voices will echo and resonate, as if they were inside that cave. All entry or exit caves except the one behind 922 Hoadley will do this.

You can contrast this sound with times that you enter soundproof rooms, such as Subliminal Media. Inside Subliminal Media, all sound is more muted. There is no echo at all, to the point that it's kind of unnerving. This information can tell you roughly how big the room is, how close you are to the wall, and what the texture of the wall is. It's less reliable if you're playing blind, due to many different factors, but it still gives you more information which builds your mental profile of your surroundings. And this leads us to one critical fact in most cases. You can tell where you are in the map solely by sound.

So, we are going to play a little game. I have prepared sound clips of different areas of the map, and I would like you two, my lovely co-hosts, to tell me where you think they were taken.

XAVIUL: A competition. I can't wait to grind Lavanya into the ground.

LAVANYA: There is nothing I love more than listening to loud versions of the sounds that usually I keep at 5 percent! I believe in myself utterly.

ASTRO: All right. I've sent you an easy clip to start us off. Go ahead and listen to this, and tell me where you think it was taking.

LAVANYA: Now some of us may think something as foolish as, “oh, this could be the Plexus!” But I want all of you to know I recognize the sound personally from the -

XAVIUL: It’s the Airway.

LAVANYA: God damn it, Xaviul, don’t snipe me in the middle of my monologue.

ASTRO: All right, let's listen to another one.

XAVIUL: This is the Plexus.

ASTRO:You are absolutely correct.

XAVIUL: Can't miss those airbags.

ASTRO: And one more for good measure.

XAVIUL: Is this strings?

ASTRO: Close.

LAVANYA: Is this Somniliquoy?

ASTRO: Not even close.

XAVIUL: Oh, this is Nerve!

ASTOR: Exactly.

XAVIUL: Three out of three!

LAVANYA: This is why Xaviul is the one at the top of the leadership board with a thousand plus hours. or is it two?

XAVIUL: Now I'm almost at twelve hundred.

ASTRO: The theme song of the Blackout Club was made by an artist named Nathan Moody. We'll attach a link to his bandcamp in the description, so that you can hear all of the incredible music he makes. He makes all of his songs with handmade instruments. The theme song isn't something you can replicate, not perfectly with any conventional instruments we know.

Meanwhile, the general sound design of the Blackout Club was made by an artist named Patrick Balthrop. He also has a website that you can find in our description. His studio is called Interactive Sound and Fury. His position as sound designer means that he is responsible for what we hear in game: the sounds that aren't the theme and the voice lines. But he does control how we hear those sounds too. He worked on Bioshock, among many other things.

Bloody Disgusting had an opportunity to interview Null. They asked a question about sound design, and Null got an answer from Mr. Balthrop. We are going to break down that answer here.

PATRICK BALTHROP, QUOTE: Early on in making The Blackout Club, Jordan pitched me the giant instrument and I got to work. I began to think of architecture that would emit sound by existing in the world. I immediately began to think of Harry Bertoia’s sound sculptures and sent a reference to the team. Bertoia’s work was an influence on how I began to approach the sound design of the instrument.

ASTRO: So, in the middle of that section, there's a link to a video of Harry Bertoia’s work. If you haven't watched the video, what you see is a large room filled with a lot of things that make -and we'll call them instruments, but they don't look like conventional instruments.

In the Maze, we encounter these things called Danger Sticks, for lack of a better name. They are essentially steel rods that have been stuck into the ground that, when you walk through by or near them, produce a fuck ton of noise. However, even if you never interact with them, those rods are still making noise. Wind that passes through the maze will agitate them just a little bit and create a gentle musical sound. Harry Bertoia’s room makes music, and humans can act on it to make different sounds, but simply by existing, IT MAKES SOUND.

PATRICK BALTHROP, QUOTE: Once I established the palette, I set about solving how these sounds would work together musically in the game.

ASTRO: So this is like a color palette, but for sound instead of visual art. What kind of qualities, what kind of sounds does he want in this design?

PATRICK BALTHROP, QUOTE: All the sounds of the giant instrument are emitting musical notes in a pentatonic scale procedurally. I designed them this way so I could have them overlap one another, procedurally creating harmonies with each part of the instrument contributing to a larger piece of music. When the player is underground in The Blackout Club, they are playing through a procedural musical piece that is evolving harmonically and texturally.

ASTRO: So, I mentioned sound quality. Sound quality is any attribute of music or sound, and you can use this in different contexts. I can say a sound quality is clear - clear sound quality- or I can say organic sound quality. Different materials make different sounds. This has to do with the makeup of the material on a molecular level. What is it made of, how dense is it, how light, how smooth, and how rough.

LAVANYA: So, on a fun tangent! Yesterday, we were on the Airways, sipping our mild coffee shop lattes - available now from [BLAH] - remember, shop local!

XAVIUL: Do we get a choice?

LAVANYA: No, you don't have a choice. Choice is a lie, and one day, you will get used to that.

LAVANYA: Anyway, when I told Astro, “hey, listen to those trumpets go!”

- and then Astro knocked me into the ground, sat on me, and forced me to listen to them reading the definitions of woodwinds over and over and over again. So this means now I am properly prepared to explain what that means to you, my favorite listeners! So the sound thatyou get from metal is significantly different from wood, stone, etc.. So you can hear the difference when you're listening to them, in the way that the materials interact. Also create different sound qualities!

ASTRO: So, because I'm a percussionist by trade, I'm going to use my favorite instrument section to introduce this topic. Have you guys listen to an instrument called a vibraphone?

[VIBRAPHONE NOISES.]

XAVIUL: Sounds metally all right.

ASTRO: Now contrast this with this sound clip of a marimba.

XAVIUL: It got awfully Toy Story here, because this sounds Woody.

LAVANYA: Oh, fuck.

ASTRO: So, as Xaviul alluded to, these instruments are made of different materials. The vibraphone is made of metal, where the marimba has almost the exact same setup, but its keys are made of wood. Critically, the marimba is not made entirely of wood. It also has metal tubes under it.

But what you're hearing is a difference in the material of the keys. Even if you aren't familiar enough with these instruments to recognize them as soon as you hear them, you can tell that there is a difference when you listen to them side by side. And so this concept has been used to create new instruments out of things that already exist. For instance, Adolph Sax created the saxophone, and his goal was to combine the power of the brass section, such as trumpets and tubas and trombones, with the versatility of the woodwinds, who can play very gentle and very quick cadences.

So, there's another word that we need to define, which is pentatonic. Literally, this means of five tones. This means five notes per octave. Now, octave as a word is kind of misleading -because it means 8 Oct, of course, but there are actually only seven true notes in an octave, because the eighth note is the same as the first note, but one octave higher.

Similarly, pentatonic has five notes, and then the sixth note is the same as the first, but one octave higher. Pentatonic scales were developed independently in music around the world.

LAVANYA: I'm sorry, I tuned out for a second. Are we talking about Pentatonix? Because I love that band.

ASTRO: [laughter]

ASTRO: So, pentatonic scales were developed in Celtic music, in German music, and Nordic music, Turkish music Afro Caribbean music and many others beyond that. Bottom line is a lot of music uses these scales and you have definitely heard pentatonic scales before because they sound good. For instance, the song ‘Amazing Grace’ uses pentatonic scales. You've also heard them, because you play the Blackout Club.

The point of the decision to use pentatonic scales was to make a pool of - a palette, so to speak - where you could pull any two notes out and they would sound good together. And this was a really smart decision. The last thing we want to convey here is that this was lazy.! It isn't lazy, so don't use this new knowledge to insult the games team.

PATRICK BALTHROP, QUOTE: When the player is underground in the Blackout Club, they are playing through a procedural musical piece that is evolving harmonically and texturally.

LAVANYA: Now that we're wrapping up that quote, what that means is that the game is writing its own music as we play: the music generated by the game in the background is related to the action of the player. So like I told Astro, the first time they explained this all to me, it's like you're getting your own personal composition every single time. So that's pretty fucking nifty!

We have one more supplemental quote from Null, which is about the design of the maze.

JORDAN THOMAS (NULL), QUOTE: So we wanted it to feel timeless, like the vision of a mine that is far from human. The hope is that it feels like it transcends technology from our particular time or relies more on the blood and the sweat of the humans who occupy it.

LAVANYA: So, keep in mind, what this means is that the humans of Redacre are the powerhouse of the Instrument.

XAVIUL: Wasn’t this episode nerdy enough without making nerd jokes?

ASTRO: These two quotes have profound significance when you consider the Instrument and the Song that it creates. Instrument technology has not changed much in many years: as far back as we can find through history and archaeology, our drums are still material of whatever kind stretch over a hollow frame. Our stringed instruments still use tension and string length to create different sounds. And for literally thousands of years, we have made music in much the same ways, even though we've called those instruments different things and made different kinds of music with them.

And now, we need to talk about the language of bodies, after a word from our sponsors.

LAVANYA: So now that we're back from that stunning commercial break: the structure is what we are going to be covering next, because the thing to keep in mind is that the Instrument is not just an Instrument.

The Instrument is not just a tool for playing the Song and allowing people to hear. The Instrument is a location. All of the rules of the Maze were hand built and planned by the developers, so huge shout out to the team. All of the little details, everything that you see - these are not generic cave designs or maze or anything else! Everything in these rooms has a purpose and is there for a specific reason.

XAVIUL: They're meant to look and feel realistic, just a few degrees of separation from our reality. Like something you could really stumble into and lose all sense of individuality in! TBC is “low fantasy realistic”, as in air quotes, but deal with it.

LAVANYA: Fantasy? I don't know about that. Because can we say that eldritch gods really don't exist in our world?

Probably. But have you seen a squid lately? Have you seen them dance, even after they have embraced death?

XAVIUL: I live in Virginia. I haven't seen the ocean in years.

But part of the horror element is making you question that part of your known reality the Blackout Club straddles the line between real and imagined blurs it wherever they can out wherever it's more interesting.

ASTRO: So, because of this there are real design principles that came into play when sculpting the Maze. So, let's start with something we know - one of the things we've been told about the Song infection is that it doesn't just need to be heard have an impact, in an older Thee-I-Dare talk. A player suggested: why not use headphones to stop the Song?

And Thee-I-Dare said, unfortunately, it resonates in the whole body.

So let's talk about resonance. This is vibration. The continuation of sound resonating sounds similar to echoing, but there's one key difference: echoing bounces.

Resonating vibrates.

LAVANYA: Resonance is especially interesting, because eardrums are not the only way that we can hear. We can also hear through our bones, which sounds incredibly fake, but trust me, it turns out your bones can do a lot. To be super technical, even the way that we hear through our ear drums is really very tiny bones. They vibrate the sound vibrates through the rest of us and then we hear it.

ASTRO: No, that's - not how that works.

XAVIUL: Two hundred sixty five bones in the human body, and Lavanya is still tone deaf.

LAVANYA: Hey!

ASTRO: Our ears have three very small bones in them that interconnect to each other. And when the eardrum vibrates, it vibrates those bones. So, technically, all hearing happens through our bones. You can notice bone resonance in your own life, when you're at the dentist's office, or grinding your teeth, or clicking them together.

XAVIUL: Oh, that's horrible for your teeth.

ASTRO: Tuning forks also work this way. They're not great at vibrating air, but they can vibrate other materials, like your jawbone. The sound that you hear from that is that sound traveling through your jaw, to a place where your brain can receive it. Sound travels best through solids, because the atoms are closer together.

All materials have what's called “resonant frequencies”. This is the frequency of sound that makes it wiggle or oscillate, if it's not being affected by any other external force. This is why Glass breaks if you sing at it, which is a real thing that happens - which you may be inclined to chalk it up to cartoon logic, but it is something that you can feasibly do.

XAVIUL: They did a myth busters episode on it!

ASTRO: Glass isn't flexible. So, instead of bending or wiggling, it just breaks. But other materials can bend, like metal, and wood, and parts of the human body, have a couple of fun links in this section - which I'll attach in the description.

But there's an article on Pop Sci, which is an excerpt from a book called ACOUSTIC WEAPONS. Here's a quote from it.

Vic Tandy wrote a paper for the Journal of the Society for Physical Research, not my usual farem called Ghosts In The Machine, in which they describe how they got to the root of stories of a haunted laboratory.

People in the lab had described seeing ghostly gray shapes that disappeared when they turned to face them. Upon examining the area, it turned out that a fan was resonating the room at eighteen point ninety eight hertz: almost exactly the resonant frequency of the human eyeball. When the fan was turned off, so did all the stories of ghostly apparitions.

So humans can hear between 20 and 20000 hertz. On average, age can be a factor in this, and so can many other things. For a frame of reference, the sound of my voice averages at about one hundred seventy eight to one eighty Hertz. At lowest, I can hit about one hundred seventy Hertz.

XAVIUL: Brag about it.

ASTRO: Frequency isn't the only factor. Volume is also key. Volume is measured in decibels or DB. According to Health Link B.C.. normal conversation is about 60 decibels. A lawnmower is about 90 decibels. And a loud rock concert is about 120 decibels.

So, the reason I'm giving you all this information is so that you understand three things. First, your body will not shatter like glass if you listen to the wrong music. You're pretty safe.

Which leads into the second point. The magnitude of what we're talking about is absurd. The volume and the frequency you would have to reach to harm a human with sound is wild. But that doesn't mean that things couldn't vibrate because of sound

Three, we wanted to provide real examples of similar things happening, to give you a better picture of what we're dealing with.

Here's the bottom line. If a sound like the Song is big enough and strong enough, theoretically, it really could vibrate the ground and vibrate bodies to be heard. A better word might be sensed.

ASTRO: So, I know you're all dying to hear more about resonance, so let's keep going.

XAVIUL: Yay.

LAVANYA: [laughter]

ASTRO: Most of an instrument body is typically made up of what we refer to as a resonance chamber. For example, the wooden body of a string instrument like a violin or a cello residents chambers can come in other shapes and sizes.

For instance the Mirra, the Shona thumb piano, is often placed inside of a gourd. This acts as a separated resonance chamber for the instrument, which doesn't make much sound on its own. Resonance chambers work by bouncing the sound around inside. As mentioned before, sound travels best through solids. So we need to give it a little bit of a boost to travel effectively through air.

Sound reflects just like light, and it will bounce off any smooth surface. When it bounces, it doubles back on itself, reinforcing the sound and making it stronger or louder. So, this vibrating air that bounces around inside the resonance chamber needs some way to escape and get to your ears to be heard. If it stays inside a sealed rock chamber like the Throat, no one will ever hear it. This is why if you look up, you can actually see a large opening that seems let in a little bit of moonlight to the caverns below.

A real world analogy to this is the hole in the middle of the guitar, or the S shapes on top of stringed instruments. If these holes didn't exist, you wouldn't hear as well if at all, or the sounds that you make with your instruments.

XAVIUL: And on an added note, if you didn't have ear holesm we wouldn't be able to hear very well either.

ASTRO: The Throat has connection points to a lot of parts of the Instrument. There are holes to String Relay and arguably to Ingestion, som because of those connection pointsm the sound from those parts of the maze can reach into the Throat, bounce around and then eventually make their way to the surface.

On the flip side, the sound can be caught in between ridges and rough surfaces. Most of the Maze is probably smooth for acoustics, especially parts that contribute to the creation of the Song. You can see crossing from Instrument Supply to Ingestion or Crypto Library. There's immediately a difference.

In the terrain rooms, like 920 Observation and New Growth, they have a lot of rough edges and uneven surfaces. This isn't ideal for acoustics, but they're also new. The sound is getting bounced around in those rooms in ways that don't amplify it as well and it's getting a little bit scattered, but the same concept comes into play much much more with rooms like Somniliquoy and Subliminal Media. Soundproofing is full of rough edges, because sound will literally get caught in the crevices and fizzle up.

So, now we get to talk about something truly terrifying: the echo chamber in Orfield Laboratories in Minnesota. The background noise in this room measures in the negative decibels negative nine point four decibels. Regular soundproofing isn't this extreme, but they really wanted to make the quietest room they could. And if you look at this room, you will see that they have spared no expense.

XAVIUL: Oh, I hate this room. This is an especially cursed room.

ASTRO: It's a very cursed room.

Every inch of the walls and even the floor has been layered with sharp spiky bits of wall, and in-between these panels, sound gets caught and tries its best to bounce back and forth, but ultimately can't. The floor has been covered with netting so that they can put even more soundproofing under it.

XAVIUL: Is this the room where you can hear your own heartbeat?

ASTRO: Yes. You can. This room is so quiet that it's been theorized to make people go crazy.

LAVANYA: Oh, I love it.

XAVIUL: I just added some damp cave gas in your set.

ASTRO: So, whatever the cult is trying to hear in Somniluquoy, we either can't be allowed out into the rest of the instrument, or they don't want the sounds of the Song to be let in to allow them to hear more clearly.

LAVANYA: And what little bit we do know about what they're testing is mostly about that special special cave gas. Speak-as-One uses the gas as a means for listening to the first voice or whatever voice that they initially came from: essentially, the origin of the species of Daimons.

They do this by dunking sleepers within the gas, where they enter the deepest form of sleep, and then they go beyond this same form of sleep - which is what allows them to try and decode the names of the other Daimons. Speak-as-One states that truth can be found in the deepest sleep, which comes with the gas.

XAVIUL: The-Measure-Cuts has said that Speak-as-One is listening for something, but they're keeping quiet about it - so maybe the soundproofing is for both directions.

Who knows? It's a mystery.

ASTRO: So we've talked about volume. Now let's talk about pitch. In a stringed instrument, the length of strings changes their pitch. In the Maze, this happens in a room called String Relay.

In this room, strings move back and forth along tracks. The bottom track is completely horizontal. It's flat, but the top track is at a diagonal. This means that these sets of strings when they move are being not just moved, but stretched and relaxed. If you watch, you can see them thickening when they relax and thinning when they're stretched.

You can try this on your own. If you have a rubber band stretched between your fingers, the more you stretch it, the higher that sound goes. So these shorter relaxed strings make longer wavelengths and deeper sound, and when they're looser, they vibrate less. Tighter strings, longer strings make shorter wavelengths and a higher sound. They're stretched tighter. They vibrate more in the space of any given time.

In the real world, if you are familiar with any kind of instruments, when you tune guitar strings, turning the little keys stretches and relaxes the string. Similarly, the size of metal tubing impacts pitch. We can see this in the Plexus. Large organ pipes have a much deeper sound than the smaller ones. If you go over to the far sides of the Plexus, when you first enter from the Nerve Center, those gigantic tubes have a deep deep sound.

But if you stay closer to the center, where the smaller pipes are, you can hear the difference. Think about blowing across the lip of a bottle. If the bottle has more liquid and thus less air, the sound of the air inside it has a higher pitch. If you empty out some of that liquid the bottle will create a lower pitch.

LAVANYA: All right. So now we’re going to move down to architecture, as you were warned about in that ever distant spoiler warning. The Arches create a wind tunnel down from Dream Therapy. Basically, the way that it's setup, you can see from Dream Therapy to Subliminal Message, how the air and what that the sound waves would be push.

Traditionally and in a lot of houses, if you want a natural air conditioning, they'll have two large rooms with a window and each connected by a single hallway. This makes it where, if you open up one window and you open up a window on the other side, the cold air from one side will be pushed and drawn all the way through to the other one: cooling the entire house in the process. It carries the sound in the same way that, say, Georgian architecture carries air from one window to another.

It carries the sound down to it when you enter the Arches. You can hear a wind sound activate when you enter. This happens once per game. It happens every single time. Keep an ear out, you will notice that.

ASTRO: And now finally we can explain the weird ass title of this episode.

XAVIUL: Rooms in the bays are based on body parts. It might not be all rooms, but a lot of them are.

LAVANYA: SAO actually spoke to Astro and I about this to get clarification. They stated that the language of bodies is symbolic. The maze is structured like a body, not because it's a one on one match to everything in the Maze, but more because it comforts humans. It comforts them to know that, when they're stomping around downstairs, they're actually deep nestled comfortably into the organs of a strange, eldritch thing, because that's how we are, I guess.

XAVIUL: We aren't ready for the full truth, which is nothing but Lavanya just said, so. The language of bodies communicates to us on a more accessible level, according to SAO.

LAVANYA: One of the many themes of the game is communication, which Xaviul is not very good at, but we all have to learn. Another theme of the game is the many ways that information passes, travels, morphs and translates through out the process.

ASTRO: So what is language? Dictionary definitions follow language: they don't predicate it so we're not using those as a source in this discussion, but it is a very wide and far reaching discussion among scholars. You'll find people defining it different ways, but for our purposes, we can think about language as patterns that communicate ideas.

There are different kinds of these patterns: audible patterns like speech, and singing, and music, but there's also other things like physical patterns, like sign language, quipu, writing, dance, and Old Tongue, and structures and architecture.

And given this, we need to ask ourselves if the language of bodies is indeed a language - if the structure of the instrument, if that is a language -

What is it communicating?

ASTRO: There was a huge amount of content that we didn't get to talk about, because this episode was already very dense, so we're going to be releasing an episode eight point five. It will be mostly theory, but useful theory. The purpose of the Dreaming Prophet is to arm club members with the facts. Some of this information is really hard to find, and we've spent hours trying to pull it together. Therefore, we'll present what we have. You judge and you decide, but at least you'll have a place to start.

Cal, Archers Volley and Skegulium, has made a lore master doc. If you're new to the game, or if you know someone who is, please check it out. They're trying to source as much info as possible with transcripts and videos, compiling the disparate info of the community into something comprehensible.

Cass has made a law primer comic. This is a compilation of some of the latest in the lore field, broken down from an in character perspective, so check it out.

LAVANYA: And also, on the Dreaming Prophet Twitter, we have a new feature called Breaking News. It is a weekly compiled version of the latest news in the Blackout Club, in terms of what has happened this past week -

ASTRO: and it looks sick as hell.

LAVANYA: Feel free to retweet it. Feel free to look at it, if you can't keep up with the rapid fire nature of SAS, and get yourself updated on some of the basics.

ASTRO: You can follow the account at THEDREAMINGPC on Twitter.

Spoder-Man has made a transcript master doc. If you have transcripts or video links, please send them to him. Further information is on the doc itself, which is at TINYURL.COM/TBCTRANSCRIPTS. All of these links are in our description, so visit them as you please.

And finally, if you enjoy the Blackout Club, please leave a review of the game. If you already have, wonderful! If you haven't, time to get on that.

We'll be linking this store page in the description. After you've left your review, use the hashtag the Dreaming Prophet and hashtag the Blackout Club on Twitter to share your favorite Blackout Club memories.

The Blackout Club is made by question games

Our advertising director is Bellamy.

Our transcript and video is by Lavanya.

Audio editing is by me, Astro.

Spider-Man is our publicity guy.

Xaviul smells like blue paint.

#the blackout club #podcasts #survival horror #horror games

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