spilledbloodlines | Loook Intoooo My Eyyyyyes

So Spear totally just got accidentally Geassed by Royal! :D

The command was not to look at Royal's face. What this means is that any time you see Spear and Royal talking, Spear's gaze will be fixed just past Royal's ear; it's about a fifty-fifty chance which side, since lol ninja, he's pretty ambidextrous. In any case, the effects of the command are going to be pretty damn obvious, since he absolutely can't make any eye contact with Royal whatsoever, and his entire head will turn to accommodate that rather than strain his eyes. Feel free to mention this if or when you notice!

EDIT!: The command was not to look at Royal's face. If Spear should be trying to, then it will be fairly obvious to anyone looking as his entire head will turn to accommodate his eyes not being to move past the side of Royal's face, rather than strain his eyes. HOWEVER, in general Spear will be mostly avoiding trying to look at Royal, and indeed even avoiding Royal entirely (at least for now). In public, Spear will be carefully making sure that he never tries to look at Royal head-on, so as to avoid it being too obvious. For example, if he's doing something else while talking to Royal he'll keep his gaze focused on what he's doing rather than look up, or he'll position himself at Royal's side rather than in front of him while talking to him. I will do my best to remember to play this out, but if I don't specifically comment on it, just assume it's happening.

(For my reference: if Royal's eyes are obscured, Spear'll be able to look at the non-eye parts of Royal's face, like the chin, forehead, etc. He doesn't remember the glowy eyes nor receiving the actual command, just the horrible laughter and then Royal suddenly jerking away from him. However, he now has anecdotal evidence that the command happened. The glowy eyes can remain a surprise.)

Hilariously, when Royal first approached me with this idea it was because Spear was supposed to be the one who had the least chance of being severely traumatized by it. It wasn't until she was actually talking me through rping someone who had been subjected to Royal's Geass that I realized this was going to stomp all over some of his bad pings. :')

Well, it was high time something bad happened to Spear in Sabra. I was just expecting it to come from a game, not…his own teammate.

In any case, first let me explain some background before I go into his actual reaction. I recently did a long post about his nightmares and the imagery therein and what it all meeeeans, but the big points that need to be recapped for this particular essay are:

He knows he probably killed his entire clan, which he equates with "Lyvus, but much larger, and not as close knit"
He knows he can screw with people's heads via extremely powerful illusions within which he has absolute control of space and time.
He knows that he requires eye contact in order to do this.
He doesn't want to be the person he was pre-Sabra who would do such a thing, especially to people he cared about or didn't feel any real animosity towards.
He is afraid that if he continues to receive his memories, he may become the person he was pre-Sabra who would do such a thing.
He is afraid that if that happens he will turn on Lyvus the way he probably turned on his clan.
The projection of who he was/may possibly become that he sees in his dreams is strongly associated with imagery from aforementioned illusions that he has seen himself using.

So Royal having an eye power? That gives him the ability to force absolute obedience? Via eye contact? And warp the victim's memory of having been subjected to that ability? And using it on Spear? Who is his teammate? Basically trampled all over that.

As a result, he feels incredibly betrayed and more than a little unsettled, in a weird victim-of-his-own-fears kind of way. It's not exactly a rational reaction, which he is aware of and feels guilty for, because he's keenly aware that Royal didn't mean to and even tried to protect him from it, though that backfired spectacularly. But while Spear's usual reaction to things that trouble him is to think it through on his own in order to react intellectually rather than emotionally, a lot of what I listed didn't go through that vetting process, because he got the huge memory that contained a lot of that two days before he went down with fever, where the emotional reaction he had to that memory had time to take root and fester and express itself as his nightmares. So his reaction to being accidentally Geassed is largely influenced by his feelings of betrayal and outrage and also the resurgence of his fears about what he may become. Previously he'd been sort of determined to be ever vigilant and hopefully head off any major personality shifts at the pass (or at the very least alert the rest of Lyvus before it happened), and this…kind of undermined that determination by introducing the idea that it might not be a matter of him becoming someone else, but being forcibly remade.

Add to this the fact that Spear's eyes have been wonky every since he got into Sabra—he's got memories of having the Sharingan activated, though he doesn't know how to activate it yet, and thus he knows that his eyes can do…something…that changes the way he sees and perceives things. His eyes were also incredibly vulnerable during the Sabraplague, what with the exacerbated photophobia and the blurring vision. So he's already a bit wary about his eyes due to all this weird stuff that happens around them. Being Geassed via his eyes is sort of like having a hidden wound and then someone, totally by accident no really, punching him in it with the force of an angry Judge. So he feels really rattled and unsettled and vulnerable in the eye region, and would really like to figure out WTF is up with his eyes ASAP so he can get rid of all this uncertainty. Royal didn't know about the eye thing at all, which is partly why Spear feels kind of bad for feeling so betrayed -- it wasn't like Royal knew what he was doing or even meant to in the first place! ...Right?

Also stir in a pinch of Spear being Not Happy with the knowledge that the Judges have dicked around with his head via memory wipe and instinctive berry identification, or the knowledge that there are other Judges who may do the same to him or those close to him in the future. So the fact that Royal's power also screwed with his memory? Well, he recognizes that the intent is far different, but that doesn't really change his reaction to the effect.

So what will happen as a result of this?

Overall he'll be quieter and more withdrawn; partly due to the roiling mess of EMOTIONS!! this caused that he doesn't necessarily feel like he has a right to be having, and partly due to the frustration at his fifth memory, which just gave him a jumble of things from his pre-Sabra life and introduced a couple of disturbing questions about it.

Aside from that, the biggest change in Spear will be his relationship to Royal, since that…took a pretty sharp nosedive. He will likely forgive Royal in the near future due to knowing it was an accident and not feeling like he has a real reason to hold out on it (no, his personal discomfort and unhappiness and bad pings don't count as a good reason). So he will make understanding noises at Royal. However, I think it's going to take a while longer for him to really believe that he forgives Royal. As such, his behavior around Royal will undergo an obvious change, not counting not being able to look him in th face any more -- he'll be significantly less open around him, and will probably try to phase into doing chores that don't require him to spend as much time in the dorm. Less helping with the cooking and cleaning, more with the hunting and gathering. Overall, he's just torn between what he feels (betrayal!!) and what he thinks he should be feeling (forgiveness!!).

He'll also outwardly forgive Royal for two other reasons: because he doesn't want to upset Lyvus more than necessary, and because if he holds out too long he might have to explain why he's so upset and rattled and unhappy, and that means telling Lyvus about remembering his uses of Tsukuyomi and the high probability that he killed his clan. Which, no. They don't need to be burdened by his personal problems, when they already have so much to deal with, like Royal breaking down and Lucy's bad memory and Dagger's ongoing memoryrape by Mirror and the impending Ophi mission. By contrast, his personal troubles are some pretty small potatoes, as far as Spear's concerned.

The other major effect of being accidentally Geassed is that his nightmares, which had previously be sort of falling off in intensity and frequency ever since he'd recovered from the plague, are going to make a resurgence. For the most part they will remain the same, though the content will now be strongly skewed towards featuring Lyvus (i.e. his fear that he may eventually become his past self) rather than his family. There will, however, be a new variation on the theme popping up occasionally: being Geassed by Royal into becoming doppelSpear, and having to watch himself kill Lyvus over and over again from inside his own body (regaining some kunai mastery skills from his last memory is really not going to help this). Sometimes it's an accident, and sometimes it really, really isn't. In the latter case, he'll be Geassed by doppelRoyal (which is to say, inverted-monochrome-Tsukuyumi-colored-Royal), rather than actualRoyal. There will be lots of horrible laughter which was creepy as fuck, by the way.

So good job Royal, I think that's about it, are there any questions?

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From:

nevercomingback.insanejournal.com

O-oh fun.

Also hilariously the google ad I got while reading this was "Marriage betrayal - find out why women break their vows". Royal is such a noodlewife.

From:

Loook Intoooo My Eyyyyyes

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