Saint James Infirmary 578: Rolling With It.

[Daphne]

[jmundt29]

Three possibilities that I can see:

1. Weston gets "Adrian lucky."

2. Reka gets sucked into the memory vortex which might precede #1.

3. We're about to see the full results of the Coates Cheerleader Play Group and the SJI Harem with a new Watch back.

[mns_95125]

Maybe I'm just bad at facial recognition, but I'm not sure whether that's Hitomi, Raven, Miriam or someone else.  If it's Hitomi then from the look on her face I'd guess we're about to see a bit more of her agenda in action.

[Daphne]

Hitomi.

[mns_95125]

Oh.  Shit.

That's a plausible development with some foreshadowing, but I didn't see it coming.  I'm guessing jmundt29 is going to double-hate this one.

[Haight]

Well that was certainly *un*expected. Not typically a fan of... that, but this could go interesting places. Very interesting places. And the more 'master' and 'slave' I hear, typically the more intrigued I am.

Edit: for meaning

[lifmcs]

Or put another way, "This is relevant to my interests."

[laguna85]

ADRIAN some how is mind link to Erin?

[jmundt29]

It does seem like that, doesn't it?   

I'm choosing to desperately cling to an optimistic viewpoint for now.  This one bothers me a lot less at this particular second because

A. He hasn't actually done viral reprogramming yet.  Cait's still blissed out happy.  I think we're an installment or two away from me getting REALLY CONCERNED, though.  And as far as Hitomi, she's there to recruit Cait (and probably the other girls) to dancer's little play group.  So, am I upset that she's effectively getting bliss-bombed for interfering?  Nope.  Now, if the groupings were different,

If say Adrian's playmates tonight were Cait, Mallory, Jacqui and oh let's just throw someone new in...The Diner Waitress...yeah, I'd be very concerned.  He's flipped, almost like a switch flipped, and the person most capable of providing rescue is about to get fully swept away before she even realizes there's a problem.  As it is, Mallory, Rain, and Dani are still out there, and Adrian has enough character capital over the life of this comic that I'm interested to see how this plays out.  Now, if in succeeding months, it becomes obvious and undeniable that what we just saw was the moment of Adrian's permanent transformation into an asshole like Bertram...then yeah I will be quadruple hating this in retrospect.

[Foxrun]

I have always hated Adrian. He was given the world and wined about not being able to give it back. I would love to see Adrian pull a full dark side turn. He starts enslaving and corrupting the girls around him and its up to Dani to fix him with the watch. The challenge is that she has to hide what she is doing because he can stop her with a single order. This is their opportunity to fix All the characters and move all the pieces to where they need to be.

[GodWilling]

Hitomi is Caitlyn's roommate. She doesn't need to go to the SJI for access to Caitlyn. Her mission is surely either to get access to the house or to get access to Adrian. Or Astrid needs an agent to infiltrate the harem - but then it's very unclear why Imani would have referred to specific plans for Caitlyn tonight.

My sudden biggest concern about Hitomi is that Astrid was aware this was going to happen and she's sent Hitomi in to stop it and save the goody-goody harem. That would block off two potential sources of interesting mind control.

I wouldn't be too sure about Dani putting things right either. She was the final participant in the ritual that left Erin, Miriam, and Adrian mentally linked. And she's armed with the pendant, at least.

So is this the night of the botch? Will Hayley, Miriam, Raven, and Hitomi just have to be assimilated using the watch now? Who isn't in danger at the moment? I make it Mallory, Marliese and Jacqui. And Rain presumably.

[mns_95125]

I wouldn't be too sure about Dani putting things right either. She was the final participant in the ritual that left Erin, Miriam, and Adrian mentally linked. And she's armed with the pendant, at least.

So is this the night of the botch? Will Hayley, Miriam, Raven, and Hitomi just have to be assimilated using the watch now? Who isn't in danger at the moment? I make it Mallory, Marliese and Jacqui. And Rain presumably.

Danielle is currently with Amy, Hayley and Laura.  As you note, she was mind-linked with Erin/Miriam/Adrian and thus might get pulled in.  Is that why you consider that cluster to be in danger?  Danielle gets T&Hed by the mind-link and then pulls the other three in like Raven via physical contact?  I'm not sure it works like that; I thought Raven got pulled in because she was also a participant in the current spell, helping generate the sexual energy that Erin needed to drive it.  But I could easily be wrong.

Danielle had also repaired the Watch over the course of the previous day, but we don't actually know where it is.  Did she bring it with her or leave it behind at the Infirmary?  If the latter, Hitomi may be headed for a close encounter with it in the near future.

A lot depends on the nature of what's going on.  At this point I'm less convinced by my earlier theory that Erin's spell is just visually reconstructing memories.  It might have started out that way, but something different is going on now, and that makes it hard to know what the boundaries are.  If the effects are short-term and wear off on their own, we could wind up with a situation where Evil!Adrian used the Watch to mind-wipe Hitomi and then Regular!Adrian comes back and is appalled, and needs to do more research into the nature of the Watch and its capabilities in order to clean up his mess.

Second possibility is that the changes are persistent but reversible, in which case we are looking at a plot arc where Evil!Adrian is making changes to and/or expanding the harem while others try to figure out why he's changed and how to change him back.  When Regular!Adrian returns, he'll have to deal with the aftermath.  I think this is my preferred scenario.  Could be particularly awkward for Regular!Adrian if Evil!Adrian turned Miriam into his sex slave.

Third possibility is that we're looking at a new status quo, with Evil!Adrian charting a new, more sociopathic course forward.  I think this is unlikely.  To me this feels like a twist in the road, not a switch to a fundamentally new destination.

[GodWilling]

We seemed to have three distinct scenes being established and running concurrently: Dani and the twins; Erin with Miriam and Raven; and Adrian's first encounter with Hitomi. When Jakob appeared, we had a quick update on the other two threads before settling down to watch Erin's submission. It seemed to be important that we understood that these three things were going on. I saw it as the harem facing dangers on three fronts: it has been implied that Hitomi has a secret agenda; the threat with Dani et al was less clear.

This development now suggests two of the threads are not so distinct after all. So it seemed logical to me that the third might not be either. The link appears to be the ritual involving Erin, Miriam, Adrian, and Dani. When Adrian broke Miriam's duck, both Erin and Dani felt it. Erin and Miriam probably had to be together to start this thing off; Adrian is in one of the other scenes; and Dani is in the other. If Adrian is susceptible here then I'd say that Dani ought to be too.

It's not clear what threat Adrian poses to Hitomi, let alone Caitlyn. So in a sense Dani is more obviously a threat because she has the real pendant in her pocket; she doesn't need to drag the others into the mind meld to affect them.

Disregarding fate and coincidence, this is a story and there's a reason why this has happened while Hitomi is there. Or there's a reason why Hitomi is there while this is happening. Either way, I'm intrigued to know what it is. But thinking about it, if she is there because someone anticipated this happening, the intention could be to exploit the situation, which could actually be pretty, erm, interesting.

Your talk of Evil!Adrian got me thinking about Sexkylie, which is never a bad thing (and it doesn't take much). And that led me to the video for Confide In Me (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WSFDCmmsqEI), which reminded me of the New York harem. The circle of life.

Anyway, I think it could also be interesting to see the harem women being bound to obey Evil!Adrian even though he's not the man they fell in love with were programmed to obey. Would Caitlyn like to have her loyalty tested like that? Can she resent what he asks her to do if she believes she belongs to him? Will the apparently submissive Hitomi be a better slave than Caitlyn? (Could that be it...?)


EDIT: I meant to mention Kanti. I got the impression she was being positioned to possibly want to speak to Laura and Amy...

[jmundt29]

I threw Dani out there while grasping at straws.  Relying on Dani to save the day is problematic not because she isn't talented not because she hasn't already proven capable of revolting against Jakob's programming but as an audience we're never sure which parts of her personality will be active in a given situation.  It seems that our demonstration here is that the linkage between Erin, Dani, Pearl, and Adrian is still active.  It becomes a part of the problem is infected or subsumed into the memory of Jakob (which frankly has the potential to be far WORSE than anything I imagined) but it could also be part of the solution if someone or something else strums its strings before that spell dissipates.

It does look like a threat on several fronts (though what exactly Imani was pushing Hitomi to do is unclear) but the clearest danger so far seems to be Adrian falling into the Jakob memory pattern.  Jakob could win without ever setting foot in Kearsage.  He wouldn't get any of the benefit himself, but the outcome could end up being almost indistinguishable from his own version of a flawless victory.  I'm left hoping that either Rain or Mallory or Dani in another heroic effort or Adrian with lessons from Rain and backing from Dani and the Watch will fight this off and cure or ameliorate the effects.  It feels like this crisis, the first one since Erin was mind gamed into a suicide attempt by Cherry could be the event that convinces Adrian to get off the sidelines and use the Watch defensively (while still differentiating himself from Vik, Derek, Jakob, Johannes, Bertram, etc.).