The Categorical Imperative In The Face Of The Unnatural

A Paradigm Skill for the Contemplative Open-Minded Rationalist Experiencing a Mad, Mad, Mad World

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Mechanics Description:
On successful use of the skill, character can switch one failed/hardened notch from Unnatural meter to one failed AND one hardened notch on another appropriate meter unless the Unnatural event that triggered the stress check can only be described as “altering a fundamental understanding about the nature of the universe”. This (typically) cannot be done at the time or scene of the stress check. Instead, it follows the same timeline as receiving psychotherapy, but requires no therapist and can be done during any time during which extended “quiet contemplation” can be performed. Once the action has died down, the skill can be used if desired. Not using the skill means the character has decided to just “go with it”. Every 6 months, the skill check becomes increasing difficult (Minor -> Sig -> etc.).

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Longer Description:
Sometimes they’re philosophers, anti-philosophers driven by the question “…and?”, utilitarian angle-seekers, nerds interested more by worldbuilding than plot or character, and sometimes they’ve simply been vaguely uncertain and skeptical about even the most mundane things, but they’ve all been open to the idea of ignorance and an interest in the implications (and applications) of new knowledge. Answers only breed questions, of course, it’s all very Zen, and being open to accepting the rules of Wonderland is very different than being OK with what you’ve learned.

A character with “But Consider the Implications!” is good at two things: Accepting the weird and questioning what they think they know. The value of this unexpectedly rare skill set is that, having made peace with uncertainty, experiencing the strange and the supernatural is less of a shock to any beliefs they may have had about understanding the world. For them, discovering that what they thought they knew was wrong causes less of an inflammation of confusion. The deeply bizarre simply isn’t a trigger for the same kinds of existential paranoia that the upsettingly surreal usually cause.

Unfortunately, while being open-minded about the big questions seems very, very adaptive (and it is, to be sure), uncertainty is a thing that breeds asexually. Accept a little of it into your worldview without putting your psychological immune responses to work is the surest way to become host to a growing colony of the what ifs and maybes, but this works differently for those skilled in BCtI. They consider, sort, and integrate with a minimum of anxiety. Still, all that uncertainty has to go somewhere and jostling it around like that? Well, you’re going to get bits of it everywhere.

Characters with BCtI can turn a failed or hardened Unnatural notch into a failed AND hardened notch on another meter. By considering the implications of what they’ve just been witness to, they can put it all into context. Unfortunately, maintaining a belief in a rational, consistent, and understandable (if largely unknown) universe means giving up being content with the assumptions they used to guide their lives regarding smaller, less important, less Big Questions issues. Issues like identity. Or pain. Or death. The enlightened live in a bigger world and, so, are smaller parts of it. The only exception to this is for those rare times when, well, the only real thing you learned was that you can’t trust anything you learn. Otherspaces. Incomprehensible but very very real visions of the Statosphere. Ascensions. Run-ins with the things from before this world’s time around. The stuff that goes beyond human, beyond symbolism and beyond anthropic principles. The deeply, truly Unnatural. But hey, what’s the chances you’ll run into stuff like that?

Being open-minded when the weird sh*t starts to fly (without any obvious source of propulsion) means equal parts “Oh well” and “Well, f***”. The Kansas that Dorothy came back to wasn’t the same Kansas she left. She’s seen color, she’s visited other worlds, she killed two women, she rode a tornado. Hard to care about finishing your chores around the farm after that. Hard not to feel strangely every time the weather turns.

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Example:
So the guy that set fire to the tattoo parlor can make you choke on your own teeth? So what? Bodies are fragile. Flesh fails everybody eventually. Besides, if that’s how he wants to play, then that’s how we’ll play.

So you met yourself yesterday going up the stairs to get your teeth cleaned (so that if you run into that damned arsonist again, at least you won’t get a throat infection when your molars are scraping up your esophagus) and found out there’s a whole family of you living in the suburbs: Two moms, two daughters, two dogs. They drive the same kind of car you drive. The license plate is an anagram of your license plate. So what? They’re likeable enough, you get along fine, and it’s not like they’ve been engaging in any ACTIVE identity theft. The girls go to school, the moms work at a couple of careers you’d thought about going into when you were choosing a major in college. It’s not like anyone REALLY knows their own history, right? Identical twins get split up all the time. There are plenty of animals that don’t need males to reproduce.

So while you were getting some identifying marks tattooed on (you can’t wait to see how Toothy McFirestarter flips out when you kick down his door with a brand new, body-purity-violating star permanently etched across your cheek) you got trapped in a time-loop, helplessly watching yourself and everybody else repeat the same couple of hours a few hundred times (after which point, the pain of the needle stopped meaning anything)? It’s over now, isn’t it? And it’s not like you had any control over how time passed before, right? Just get on with it.

So you walked into a doorway and ended up wandering through an endless, empty wasteland for a few months? So there were venomous bugs made of human bones and rabbits that bled newspaper headlines and snakes that turned to stone when you killed them? So what? (Actually, that shook you up a bit, but you survived, didn’t you? And you learned that you don’t need anybody else to get by. What would they have done if they’d been there with you, anyway? Not much.)

So you killed a guy wearing a hat with a buckle on it that was helping out McFirestarter? He sent you to the empty place. Sure, you killed him by taking all the important, full places in him and emptying them out so that he choked on nothing at all, but when you ran into him, the only thing you had with you was that spear you made with the empty-place wasp-fang on the end.

After you killed that pathetic ink-hating zealot with some bear hands you “borrowed”, MomYouNumberTwo (she says her name is “Karen”, but you like the rhyming, it fits, it means more than “Karen”) helped you make his teeth into watch. He had a gold filling, which was pretty ironic, probably. The watch doesn’t do anything, but the straps you had that mad underground shaman who never knows where he is (you know, the one with hippocampal lesion from when he ran away from home and fell into the sewers because he wasn’t looking?) braid out of the tanned skin of the mad tooth-loving bastard and his pilgrim-hat-wearing sidekick lets you feel where your body is and seems to help keep you in you, which is a bit of a relief. It gives you some peace-of-mind being able to double-check that no matter where you go, there you are.