#oloh erratica

Previously on R&D!

R&D is basically a dumping ground for smart people who should on no account ever be left on their own. The more useful parts of R&D deal with the technicalities of living in space - air & water recycling, waste disposal, Helming efficiency. A whole bunch of displaced jadebloods go into developing the drones - tending the mothergrub and eggs and lusii, of course, but also the harvester and mining drones that shoot fresh supplies into space from planets adopted into the Empire. Other people who really, really should not be left on their own or around other people or drink a cup of tea unsupervised work on developing weapons - which is interesting, given that the Empire is a cohesive whole and has not needed to fight against any other Empire colonising their universe.

The place is full of people who are extremely needful of having their Own Way of doing things, and is the only place in the Empire that even pretends at letting Other Ways exist after Ascension. Of course, all of these Own Ways conflict with everyone else’s Own Ways, and all of these people are high-ranking and have access to some incredibly dangerous shit, which means conflict turns bad quicker than a snap of the fingers.

(Do note whose fingers remains undefined.)

Anyway, this is why R&D has psychologists. I’ve already talked off rairii‘s ear about R&D psychologists, since she was interested in the only place in the Alternian Empire that had psychological staff, so I’ll pop what I can find of that here for you, summarised as much as possible because me an’ words are a dangerous combination:

R&D psychologists grew out of a tradition of psychological support rooted in casual concialiatory relationships - the very first psychologists were casually ashen/pale for pay in R&D and got overwhelmed by the demand, basically

because R&D is terrifying and will break people

The first generations of R&D psychologists were basically factions of scientists screaming at each other about what kind of support services net the most positive outcomes in the patient’s ability to contribute to the Empire long-term and that should just about tell you everything you need to know about R&D

Later generations started developing and trialling medications for mental health problems that presented more frequently - anxiety is the big one, for obvious reasons, and there were also a lot of experiments with sopor derivatives as part of treating PTSD.

the testing was exactly as ethical as you might expect from an empire that secretly tears apart and enslaves a significant proportion of the population as a renewable energy source

this was eventually discontinued because the Alternian Empire does not give a single shit about your problems, especially when your problems are expensive. 

Coincidence, sadly! I wish I could claim ownership of it. But here’s the reasoning behind each of Sollux’s quadrants when I originally planned them out:

Aradia: I ship them pale and have always shipped them pale. Ever since that hug and robosplode? God. My heart.

Terezi: I ship Sollux and Terezi in every quadrant. They have a gorgeous balance of playful and serious to all of their interactions that’s fuckin’ candy to me, I swear. I chose ashen in the end because, well, Vriska. I’m really not kidding when I say everything in OLOH is because Vriska. But the ties between Terezi and Sollux and Aradia and Vriska are so all-encompassing - and everything happened at a super formative time, when they were all discovering what pity and hate meant. Sollux hates Terezi, but can’t imagine life without her. And they were both instrumental in keeping each other from messing with Vriska even more. And so: ashen.

Eridan: The original promptfic was for flushed EriSol. I... I fucked up. (I had a hankering to explore blackrom dynamics, and, um, everyone at the time was all I DON’T SHIP ERISOL EXCEPT FOR XYZ EXCEPTION and any time someone says that my brain just goes “CHALLENGE ACCEPTED, MOTHERFUCKER.”

now everyone keeps insisting on telling me how and why they ship erisol

i don’t care man i’m not fuckin’ judging anyone read the fic or don’t just quit justifying it to me i don’t caaaaare

also i don’t care how you ship erisol because guess what i’m writing it how i ship erisol in this particular verse and y’all’s carefully-crafted headcanons can go live somewhere that is Not Here

yeah that bugs me. ANYWAY-)

Equius: I was sorting out the quadrant chart and thoughtfully said to my beta, “Hey, how about EquiSol?” and she said, “yeah I ship it,” and that’s how that happened.

That said, the fic is from Sollux’s POV, and he’s a very black-and-white thinker. He focusses a lot on Aradia’s half-robotness, because he sees her current state as his fault and keeps picking at it (the half-robotness, I must admit, was me giving in and pandering to the duality schtick). He also picks a lot at Equius’ divided loyalties, wanting them to be either one or the other - and totally missing that people can have a whole dang spectrum of opposing thoughts. He looks at Terezi as a balancing mechanism - either he’s keeping her sane or she’s doing the same for him, but never at the same time, there’s a balance that he’s keenly attuned to keeping. With Eridan, the split’s between who Eridan used to be and the present-day Eridan, which totally isn’t a painful subject Eridan spends a lot of time lying awake and contemplating! 

He finds these axes of conflict in the people he cares about and starts trying to Fix Them, because he himself has his own Good and Bad side and knows his life would be better without the Bad. If he could have that upswing forever, if he could renounce and erase every action he regrets, if he could optimise his life into something perfect. He’d find these dualistic situations in anyone he quadranted with, because that’s how he works. Bad things happening? They crack him in half, and one part of him keeps going while the other is relegated to Not Being Dealt With land.

who’s been sitting guiltily on this ask for a few days? meeeeeeeee

Anyway, basically what happened with Gamzee was the weirdness of the Game in the OLOHverse, again. The whole Lil Cal-Scratch-English thing has been short-circuited, leaving him bereft one (1) life purpose. He’s analogous to Terezi, who has spent most of her time since Pyralspite hatched waiting for the other shoe to drop. The both of them can tell that something is Wrong with the world - but Terezi relentlessly drove herself forward, while Gamzee moved from ‘frantically trying to reinterpret his religion’ to ‘using sopor to cope’. 

As with everything in OLOH, it was Vriska.

They’ve been... well, friends is a strong word, but the closest one that fits, so friends it is - for a long time. Since they’ve been living side-by-side, basically, longer even than Equius and Nepeta have known each other. Mostly this friendship is accomplished by maintaining a curt and professional manner.

Back when they were tiny, when Vriska had just started FLARPing in desperation and hadn’t met Terezi yet, had barely started to make Eridan’s acquaintance, she was still pretty shaken up by all the murder. Being Vriska, even a tiny, soft Vriska, this meant that she used to invade Equius’ hive with the blood of her victims still all over her and throw calculated, manipulative tantrums until he gave up and let Aurthour tend to her. Equius, being a tiny ball of miserable haemospectrum propaganda and soft-heartedness, started thinking of it as a duty of care he had towards someone lower on the haemospectrum.

He offered to FLARP with her. Vriska accepted, because even then, Equius was STRONG, and her lusus was hungry. Except, well, it was Equius. Equius, who is a vegetarian and a pushover, froze in horror when he crushed their first opponent’s throat and let the second get the drop on him. His horn got broken - cripplingly painful - and Vriska dispatched the perpetrator, packed up the bodies faster than should have been possible, and lugged him all the way back to his hive, only stopping when he needed to be sick.

Hm, well, I’m making this up as I go along, so let’s start prodding at some unanswered questions:

That first Ascension. Nobody took well to the idea of needing to relocate to space, forever. What kinds of harsh adjustments would have taken place?

Why are there no limebloods? What an excellent question.

What happens with a constantly expanding society in the first few sweeps, wherein a relatively tiny population has to co-ordinate raising these kids and bringing them off-planet from hundreds of millions of kilometres away?

How does the Empire balance the increasing number of psionics with the secrecy?

Alien life forms. What’s the deal?

R&D. 

If, upon reading OLOH and all the worldbuilding notes, you are squinting at the structure of the world suspiciously... just imagine the glorious messes on behalf of the Game trying to find a foothold, and everything ensuring it did not. The OLOHverse is like that one theory of time travel where, no matter what you change, the results always end up being the same. It leads down interesting paths.

The Alternian Empire has weathered a lot of storms, under Condesce. I love prodding at the bureaucracy that it must take to keep this machine in motion - especially given how, with that description, you’d expect this serious, square-jawed military society. And it is that, but at the same time, it’s so much scarier - because the Empire has grown to provide for every aspect of a troll’s life, until life outside the Empire is no longer conceivable. Imagine being the first troll to propose a media development program - so Karkat gets his shitty movies. Imagine being the trolls who looked at what Condesce could do with biowires and networked the planet, and then being the poor suckers who had to somehow replicate that across space. Imagine your official military posting being ‘bartender’. 

It’s pretty much the same! They’re not much of a concern to most of the cast, since they tend to hang out in the desert. They mostly subsist on the animal life in there and whatever idiot trolls wander far enough in to get got - they hang around oases for the water, which is why they’re not much of a threat out of the desert - they’re reluctant to go too far from a known source of sustenance, since they’re pretty dumb.