PSTH: Chapter Twenty-Six (Patreon)

Toxic essence, or poison essence, or venom essence, or what I like to call it: pedantry essence. “Oh, anything can be toxic in a large enough dose, toxicity is a scale, not a binary”, yeah yeah, we know. But when you say something is toxic, we all know what it means. I’m not going to slap a sandwich on the ground and tell you it’s toxic, even though technically everything’s toxic. And by the same token, a toxic magian can’t reality warp through pedantry. It’s a great debuffer, poisoner, venomer – not sure that’s a word – and all that, though, so let’s delve into that…

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Intro to the tenth in a video essay series about essence types and their unique factors, 454 Modern-Era

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As it turned out, I was correct, but I was also wrong. When I returned to the room to see Gawain putting his sheets all back on the bed, I climbed up the ladder and began to strip my own bed wordlessly. Gawain said nothing as I began to take them to the common room to wrap around the table as well, but when I opened my augpad and pulled out the microphone so that I could set it up in a way that worked better for me, he scoffed. I shot him a look of irritation, and he rolled his eyes. 

“Most augpads have horrible audio quality for both recording and playback,” he stated, his voice matter of fact, and also a little annoyed. “Don’t torture your viewers by making them listen to that.” 

“Oh, come on, you have to know that’s a bunch of nonsense, right?” I asked, sighing and rubbing the bridge of my nose. “There’s barely a spec of difference between when I get from an audio note from Rane and when I listen to something done by someone in a professional sound studio. Sometimes there’s an echo, but that’s what the clothes and blankets are for.” 

“Are you using your augpad’s speakers?” Gawain asked, his voice almost dripping with judgement. 

“Well. Yes. Or my headphones,” I said, pulling the battered old cord from my bag. “But really, there’s not that much of a difference, even when I’m watching something on a projector or something.” 

Gawian’s lavender eyes focused on my pair of cheap but durable headphones, before he gave them a dirty look and walked to his bag. He riffled around inside for a moment before removing a pair of headphones of his own, then his augpad. A moment later, my own augpad buzzed as an unknown augpad attempted to send me something over the local network. I examined what it was before accepting – it looked like a link to a song. 

“Listen to it with your… headphones…” he ordered, and I squinted at him. 

“Why?” 

“Just do it,” he ordered. 

“No,” I snapped back, refusing more on principle than on any sort of logic. I didn’t like being ordered around on principle, especially by someone who was treating me like I was beneath them. Gawain glared at me, and I caught a spark of lilac light form around him for a second, like he was channeling essence. The feeling of weirdness around him surged for a moment, before dying down. He walked over to his bag and pulled out a smooth metal sphere, which slid around to reveal a microphone along metallic rails, surrounded by sound-dampening material, to allow a person to manually direct the area the sound was coming from. 

“You’re wrong. And if you can humor me and admit it, then I’ll let you record your first audios on this.” 

I eyed the recording sphere. It was fancy. Not quite on the level of ostentatiousness that made me think someone needed to be reported and investigated for fraud, but the quality of item that someone like Vince, a serious audiophile, or someone who worked with sound professionally would have. 

I really didn’t think there was nearly as much of a difference as he pretended, but I also couldn’t deny that there was a small difference, especially on really nice speakers or the like. I doubted anyone who used that sort of setup was going to be listening to my videos, but I could humor Gawain for a few minutes for this. It wasn’t like it cost me anything. 

“Fine,” I said, opening the file and plugging in my headphones. A moment later, I heard the blaring of a baseline, followed by drums, guitar, and a vocalist. They were loud, and the music was heavier and grungeier than I usually listened to, but there was something pleasant about that, as it rushed through me and shook my body slightly. The singer thrashed their heart out about loves lost and loves never had, and before I knew it, the song was over. 

In the space of the song, Gawain had stepped up close to me, uncomfortably so. It seemed like he’d been raised without any understanding of what a personal bubble was, because I could smell his oakmoss scent again. He reached up and took my headphones off, moving with surprising delicateness as he slipped on his own pair. They were heavier than mine, not by much, but just by enough to be noticeable. An instant later, the song was hammering out again, the slamming noise of the baseline impacting against my head and shaking the bones in my chest. As the music played, I could admit that there was a difference, though faint: the location of the instruments compared to one another was more distinct, the blows of the bassline were sharper, and some of the tiny gaps where the vocalist paused for breath were somehow a bit different. Was it the sound of their breathing? 

But for all that the difference was there, it was still faint. The music itself didn’t seem better or worse for having heard those little snippets, nor did it really seem altogether that different. When the song finished, Gawain pulled the headphones off me, again being surprisingly gentle. He put his hands on his hips and smirked down at me. 

“Well? Can you admit it?” 

“I mean, there is a difference. But I still really don’t see – or hear, I guess – that much of one. It’s not the difference between night and day, or a serrano pepper and a bell pepper. It’s more like the difference between boiling water and really hot tea. Both will still burn you.” 

Gawain frowned and squinted at me, his head tilted in such a way that his long black hair fell slightly over his shoulder. At first, I thought he was confused by my analogies – I knew a lot of people’s brains didn’t correlate things quite the same way – but that was thrown out when he actually spoke. 

“You’re serious,” he said, the words somewhere between a question and a statement. 

“Yes…?” 

“You really don’t hear that much of a difference? You can’t hear the water rushing over the tunnel they recorded in, or the fact that the echo wasn’t nearly as muted, or the fact that there’s less fizz in the background?” 

“No? I didn’t even notice there was fizz in the background. Or water sounds for that matter. I know I’m not a big audio person, though, so maybe that’s it?” 

“Hold on,” Gawain said, tugging my augpad and headphones from my hands. I yelped and scrabbled for them, but he was already re-starting the short song and putting my headphones back on. I strained my ears, trying to listen for the fizz or the lack of the echo that had apparently been there in Gawain’s headphones. Try as I might, though, I could really only make out the smallest amount of difference, mostly things I noticed already. I thought I might catch a faint… something… under the baseline, which might have been the fizz? But even then, I wasn’t sure if it was actually there, or if it was something I had made up because I had been told to expect it. 

Once again, as soon as the song was over, he was slipping my headphones off and his back on, and replaying the song, and again I strained to hear the water sounds, or the echo, or the lack of fizz. The only thing I thought I might have gotten was a faint bit of water rushing sound, but it also might have been the fizz, or maybe the echo, or the lack of fizz? I wasn’t sure, and I still was partially convinced my brain was playing tricks on me, picking up on things that weren’t really there.

“Do you hear them now? I know that I like music a lot more than the average person, but these aren’t esoteric things. Anyone could pick up on them, including my mother, who doesn’t care about audio.” 

“I… no?” I said, still unsure, as I took a step back from him, bumping against the wall as I did. “I might hear the river, but I might not? I don’t see how any of this really matters though. The song was good; sad in the kind of way that makes you angry. But it wasn’t different enough to justify spending that much more on an expensive microphone.”

Gawain stared at me for a long moment, utterly silent, before he threw up his hands and stormed over to his bed, flopping on it. Gryphon, who had been perched on the dresser and watching us, fluttered over to land on Gawain’s chest for cuddles.

“You’re impossible,” Gawain muttered. “I can’t tell if you’re messing with me or genuinely can’t hear the difference.” 

“Heart’s truth, I’m not messing with you,” I said, holding up my hand and slightly curling in my index finger and thumb, as if I was about to swear into office on an essence heart. Gawain just stared at me, again, and was silent for even longer this time. Finally, he groaned and gestured to the microphone, which he’d put down at some point when I’d been listening to the songs. 

“Just take it. I said you could use it, but if you’re really that bad at hearing things, then I’m not about to try and convince you to give me a false admission that I’m right – which I am, by the way.” 

I had been about to thank him, since there might have been more of a difference to most people than I’d given myself or others credit for, but his final comment made me bristle.” 

“Well. Good. And you’ve made your perfection abundantly clear.” 

With that, I scooped up the fancy recording orb and walked over to the table, sliding under it. Scales, who must have sensed my general irritation though our bond, wandered over and flopped onto my lap. Even Hex joined me under the table, though she didn’t touch me. I figured for her catlike nature, that probably was about as close to cuddles as I’d get unless Hex was in the mood to cuddle first. 

I spent a while with both of them, gently running my hands along Scales’ smooth, crystalline body until I was calm enough to settle in. I pulled up my notes for the videos and started recording. 

It took me quite a while, and I wound up with a dozen different audio files. One downside of freestyling my commentary was that sometimes I wanted to go back and add a point I’d missed, as well as being forced to redo anytime I was too repetitive. Even once I had all the right takes for all of the points, and spliced them all together, I still wasn’t entirely done, as I needed to sync the visuals to the audio, make sure I was using the right take, go back and redo parts, then listen to it all over again, before finally giving it a final watch and listen. It was only once everything was finally done that I was able to hit publish, and turn to working on the other breakdown video, this one for the overall challenge.