Exchange of Realities

I spent the last couple of days talking about differentiating between characters’ reactions to other characters, both in making different people’s reactions to the same character different and in finding ways for one character to react differently to different people. But most of those assume that you’re dealing with a situation in which a character can react as she feels, and that isn’t always the case. What might keep a character from reacting the way she ordinarily would?

Cultural mores are a big one. Sure, it might not be something you can always expect to affect player characters (often, they don’t know or they don’t care), but they’re still a good source of standardized reaction. In most fiction, this takes the form of cultures that expect visible emotion to be kept to a minimum, but why limit yourself to that? It might be that the situation calls for a certain definite and obvious emotion, or there’s a ritual way in which one is supposed to deal with another person of a certain sort. Set these sorts of situations loose, and watch the layers fall.

Dealing with people of different status. Going back to Buccaneer’s Guild’s comment day before yesterday, having someone of different status present can lead to wanting to stifle one’s first reaction for any of a number of reasons. If they’re higher status, the object of the game might be impressing them, and that doesn’t work too well if you’re reacting in a way of which they would not approve. Or they might, if they don’t like the way they’re being looked at, make life very difficult for whoever’s looking at them, directly or just by influencing the others present. And there’s always trying to inspire confidence in your ability to handle the situation: World going to pieces? We can handle it. A character might be trying to impress her equals by not looking all awestruck at the Powerful Person, or otherwise seeming to take something Big in stride. And then there are those people who insist on being distant with their inferiors so they will come across as unreachable, set apart, what have you. (Granted, it doesn’t always work…)

And of course, there are tactical uses for changing one’s apparent reaction. Hiding fear, feigning interest, squelching boredom—it’s all about keeping people from being able to use one’s real reaction, or possibly giving them a different reaction to try to exploit. It doesn’t even need to be limited to individual situations; a group that can at least feign a unified front looks a lot more formidable than one that interrupts its pronouncements as a couple of its members argue about their intent or bicker over semantics.

To further complicate scenes, consider how these restrictions on reactions are going to affect people’s internal reactions. One might resent having to project a different emotion than she actually feels. Characters seeing other characters’ socially acceptable or carefully chosen reactions might be favorably impressed… but on the other hand, might be frustrated because now they have to work with that. Just because the reaction isn’t visible doesn’t mean it’s not going to be relevant later, or important for you to know.

So when working with reactions, think about not just whether a character can, and whether a character would, but whether a character should. The result will be interesting, and there’s little that can’t be improved by making it more interesting.

Yesterday, I started talking about non-uniform reactions, or differentiating between different characters’ attitudes to the same person. But that doesn’t take into account internal variation—who says that one person’s going to have the same reaction to a whole bunch of different characters? Not I, not by a long shot.

I tend to take these on a case by case basis, since I’m usually trying to get into the reacting character’s head. It’s easy to start with the same sorts of basics as with differentiating multiple characters’ reactions: overall personality compatibility, shared history, that sort of thing. But once you’re through those, you’re going to want to get more closely into the character’s head, start figuring out who’s seen as different from whom and why.

One thing you might want to look at is qualities and priorities. Your reacting character probably values certain aspects of character and has little use for others, prioritizes some things and sees others as a waste of time. So sure, she’s showing disdain for both these characters here, but in one case it’s because she values loyalty and competence and he’s shown precious little of either, while she can neither fathom why nor respect the fact that the other one would choose love over duty in a heartbeat.

How do these different people interact with her plans? That’s likely to make a difference in and of itself. Often, a character will tend to have more positive feelings towards someone who can help her than one who can’t, and towards one who will help her as opposed to one who won’t. But then you have the times when that conflicts with the rest of her attitude: one character might be useful in the future, sure, but if she doesn’t like him to begin with that might only make it worse. As Buccaneer’s Guild pointed out indirectly yesterday, you’re also going to want to take comparative status into account: not just how the character reacts to the other characters, but whether her internal reaction matches her external reaction, whether it’s allowed to, and how she feels about that.

What about old debts and grudges; how do they play in? Sure, a character’s probably going to feel better towards someone who’s done something big for her…. unless, of course, they never let her forget about it, or won’t let her pay them back, or the like. How do her personality, her compatibility with the other’s personality, and/or good or ill done to each other in the past, affect her dealings with someone who should be a hereditary enemy or who did That One Thing that she feels she shouldn’t be able to forgive?

One important thing to remember is that there isn’t always an obvious link between one character’s feelings about another and the other character’s feelings about the first. Just because she loathes him doesn’t mean he has to hate her; just because she thinks of him as her favored apprentice and possible successor doesn’t mean he has to like her as a teacher. Not only do these imbalances make it more interesting, but they themselves can further affect the reacting character’s opinion of another character by interacting with her personality and the rest of the tangle-up. His unwillingness to mirror her hostility might soften her attitude, but it might also lead to further attempts to provoke him, or to something else entirely.

The end result, if you’re willing to do this for all the important character reactions, is a lot more depth and variety than you’d get from approaching everyone’s feelings towards other characters as being fundamentally the same. Removing the uniformity from the characters’ reactions to each other makes them more real and considerably more interesting. Give it a try!

This is another of those topics that branches from the idea that no two people are the same. Yes, this should be obvious, but it often gets lost in the rush when people are trying to juggle large casts of characters, and what results is oversimplified reactions. Perhaps an entire group worth of people are all reacting to one character the exact same way. Or everybody’s reactions to people seem to divide into “Like!” and “Hate!” This gets boring, and should be avoided if possible.

There are two approaches to non-uniform reactions—looking at the differences between the people reacting to one person, and the differences between the people being reacted to from the point of view of a single person reacting. I’m going to start with the differences between the people reacting: if you’ve got a single character (for this article, the focus character) standing there, and a bunch of people who’ve never shown up for more than cameos in the narrative whose reactions to her you’re going to have to figure out, where do you start?

Many differences go without saying. A person’s friends will generally have a different attitude towards her than her enemies will. People who are too different tend to have trouble getting along; so do people who are almost completely similar but with key differences in particularly important aspects of their personalities. Those who have things they value in common are likelier to get along… usually. Begin with generalities; sort these other characters out depending on how they relate to her, and assign them a general class of impression, something that can be summed up in one emotion word. Try to avoid just a loving/loathing dichotomy; look more for things like respect, envy, pride, disdain, you get the idea. This is a base reaction: how might each character view your focus character if they’ve only heard about her and never actually met?

Next, think about the general effects of whatever impact the focus character might have had on each reacting character’s history. You can still be vague here, but this makes your groups smaller, further differentiating them. Logically, this is where the time the two characters have interacted with or directly affected each other comes into play—wrongs or rights done, shared experiences, the like. But don’t forget indirect effects, where something the focus character did or was in turn did something that affected a situation involving one or more of the reacting characters.

Doing the above two steps is going to get you some pretty small groups. At this point, look at the people in the groups and try to find things that give them different versions of the same sort of reaction. Let’s say there was a grand courtly party, one of those things where everyone who is anyone is there, and your focus character is a relative newcomer trying to shoot to the top. You’ve got four people, all of whom considered her annoying even before the party, and who after that disgraceful mess involving the Earl of Chevar’s son and the punchbowl, now have no respect for her whatsoever. Here, you might decide that one had been dragooned into trying to teach her her way around the court, but the incident was in direct opposition to his helpful suggestions. Another just plain can’t take people who fly off the handle that easily seriously. A third deplores the waste of perfectly good punch, particularly since she hadn’t gotten a chance to have any of it and was about to when the incident took place. And the last didn’t mind any of those factors too much, but considers people who can’t insult with finesse to be below his notice. All the same general class of reaction, but all different flavors and thus likelier to react differently.

Tomorrow, I’ll look at it from trying to give one character multiple reactions.

Many games and stories feature characters who can turn just about any physical object into a weapon, regardless of any of the many sources of impracticality it demonstrates. And many people realize that this is Awesome and attempt to emulate it, resulting in someone who can explain how to foil an assassination at a high banquet just by using whatever’s on the table and then delivering one-liners about how nobody can say they lack subtleties. Particularly when they’re doing it just as much for Awesome’s sake as for tactics’ sake.

But that’s only a part of what I’m talking about here. Sure, “everything is a weapon” includes being able to smack people with anything in the solid state that shows a decent density, parrying with furniture, garroting people with their own neckties, you name it. But there’s more to everything than objects one can hit things with.

Terrain is a weapon, particularly if it’s terrain that you chose. Things like getting the high ground, giving your opponent unstable footing, and making sure the sun is in someone else’s eyes are logical. And of course, rigging traps is a popular and reliable means of further changing the battlefield. One can kick up dust, bring down scree, use one element of the backdrop to affect another element, put an element of the backdrop to uses for which it wasn’t intended… there are a lot of possibilities.

Allies are a weapon. And I don’t just mean fastball specials or the like, where an ally is literally serving as a projectile or a reach enhancer or a source of extra momentum. They can force an opponent to split his attention. One’s rapid-fire attacks can serve as a way to herd the target into another’s more focused strike. Synergy with their skills can lead to things one person alone wouldn’t be able to do, whether it’s taking advantage of one’s ability to provide lots of entangling vines or trusting another to be able to pop out of nowhere in just the right spot. Coordination is a powerful thing.

The enemy is a weapon. Granted, that’s usually obvious when he’s trying to defeat you. But how many swords have only one edge? A socially inclined character can bait the opponent into making a mistake, get him to lose his cool, or even just have him laughing so hard he can’t fight. One who understands the enemy’s psychology can use it to predict his movements and take advantage of the predictions. Even with natural physics, helmets and capes can be turned into opportunities by exploiting a lack of peripheral vision or sticking them to the ground. Weapons are a weakness in that they can be removed. And the closer you get to Rule of Cool physics, the more improbable you can make your exploitations of your enemy.

At first glance, this probably looks more useful for a gamer trying to impress the GM with his resourcefulness. But that doesn’t mean other people can’t use these tips. Maneuvers good for the player are good for the GM as well, after all. And a writer utilizing these tricks can both demonstrate that whichever of his combatants using them is quick-witted and resourceful (show, don’t tell!) and make for a far more interesting fight than people just running around generically bashing each other with big sharp things or colorful magic blasts.

Everything is a weapon. Watch it change your fights for the better.

Some plot twists just can’t get themselves taken seriously; just mentioning that a story ends in one is enough to make a hefty portion of its audience look for something else. “All a dream” is one such, and quite possibly one of the most reviled of the offenders. But that doesn’t mean that the basic premise, that the scene that just happened was just a dream, isn’t still usable. It just means that you have to be clever.

The first rule of “All a dream” is that you shouldn’t use it at the very end unless you have a twist to that twist. What makes “All a dream” such a reviled ending, after all, is the combination of two factors: one, that it’s so common as to be cliché, and two, that it’s a waste of potential. Sacrifices? Gains? Losses? All those motions of emotional intensity that kept the readers hanging so much? Not real even by the story’s standards. That subplot that could have been interesting if it’d been taken to its logical conclusion? Never going to happen. The plots won’t go anywhere, the emotions didn’t matter in the end; what’s the point of it? If you’re clever enough to find a new way to play with it, they might go along with it, but it’s going to have to be some pretty good artistry.

The second rule is that the dream should in some way matter to the story, even if it was just a dream. Does it push the story forward? Is it hiding something else that’s going to matter to the plot later on? What purpose does it serve? A dream without a purpose will likely be seen as filler, or [scene that could only have been possible through the dream] for scene’s own sake. You don’t want that.

Under normal circumstances, the third rule is that it shouldn’t be a way to try to dodge the implications of something that happened within the part of the narrative that was designated as just a dream. For one thing, it’s seen as cheating, and for another, sometimes people want to see where the new situation would lead. But this isn’t always the case. In a game, for instance, everyone agreeing that a certain situation is in nobody’s best interest can be an excellent reason to declare it a dream and carry on from there; likewise, people in semi-collaborative works (expanded universes and comic series usually) often use this as a patch to deal with differences in author style. (It’s usually more acceptable when a character’s creator is trying to salvage a serious case of derailment.)

And of course, if it’s not trying to be a twist, you can get away with a situation that’s clearly a dream easily; the characters might even seek it out.

I’ve seen a game in which “All a dream” was done successfully (if inadvertently): the GM had run a rather major plot twist that just about all of the players had some sort of problem with (power level, playstyle, general improbability, and a few other things), and midway through it was adapted into a dream sequence and finished as such. It led to some interesting results; the GM had to actively think about why we got the dream in the first place, one character was influenced to what we called “the shortest betrayal ever”, and we were using bits and pieces of the sequence as clues to later people’s behavior pretty much until the end of the replacement story arc.

Was it all a dream? Think about it carefully; answering yes may well be plausible.

In yesterday’s post, I mentioned that everyone has the potential to use dreams as exposition or foreshadowing. Unfortunately, not everyone does it well. There are a number of pitfalls that come from leaning on dreams to serve vital roles in a story.

The biggest mistake, of course, is not balancing the level of information with the needs of the overall story, either by being too blatant or a little too subtle. Too blatant, and it’s all figured out ahead of time; too subtle, and nobody ever gets it. If it’s just foreshadowing, you can get away with making it more obscure, since it doesn’t matter if people get it or not. On the other hand, if the proper course of events depends on people being able to make sense of that dream, you need to make sure it can be made sense of—in a game situation, if they can’t get it themselves, they should at least be able to roll for some sort of hint.

Not knowing your own dream metaphysics is also a dangerous path. Granted, dreams are a lot more fluid than the ‘real’ world, so a law or two of physics slipping isn’t going to draw near the negative attention that a law of waking-world physics or magic would. But if something’s been established as impossible, and it happens anyway, there had better be a very good reason.

One thing that most people don’t recognize as the problem that it is is not signaling what kind of expository dream they’re seeing. I talked yesterday about prophetic dreams, backstory dreams, and characterization dreams; though you often see elements of each in any given dream sequence, there’s usually one that serves as the primary purpose. Now imagine you’ve embedded an important facet of a character in a dream, or a vital clue to his hitherto-unknown backstory, and you’re waiting for the payoff as your audience realizes what it means. But you hang out where they hang out, either physically or virtually, and all you see is discussion about the significance of the fact that one minor character appeared brandishing a peacock feather on a stick. They won’t let go of it, they keep waiting until you think it’s no longer an issue and then asking about it, and as far as you can tell they’re fully aware that something vital went on there but they won’t let go of this “feather on a stick” thing.

Overanalysis of symbolism is the most common problem; people get so tied up with the metaphorical aspects of whatever holds still long enough that they miss the literal ones. But there’s also the risk that a too-realistic prophetic dream gets interpreted as a memory, or that throwaway dream intended just to emphasize the character’s mindset comes off as a portent of things to come. Therefore, you will usually need to signal a dream’s purpose one way or another—making memories more grounded in what is and has been than prophetic dreams, showing clear evidence that a dream of the future hasn’t happened yet, not putting so much weight on a characterization dream that it seems vital. Unless, of course, part of the idea is to make a mystery out of what kind of dream the dream is, in which case you should plant a few clues, have a couple hints ready, and see what comes of it.

And then you have use of too much symbolism in a dream. Not only does it annoy the audience to have to put in that level of effort to get an accurate read, particularly if every single bit of it is vital to understanding the dream as a whole, but it often results in the opposite problem later, when everyone expects Every! Single! Thing! to be symbolic and you’re just trying to get a few major points and not set off a full dissection. Sometimes a peacock feather on a stick is just a peacock feather on a stick.

So be careful—it’s easy to make the mistakes that turn a character’s dream into a creator’s nightmare.

Yesterday’s dreamscapes were pretty, but that’s only one narrative use for dreams, and one that practically requires lucid dreaming or a way to get into someone else’s head. Most worlds aren’t up to dealing with that, and even those that are sometimes want to do something else with their dreams. But just about everyone has the potential to use dreams as exposition, getting across important plot points or subtle foreshadowing.

Sometimes, this takes the form of prophetic dreams. A character sleeps, and they get something that might be a vision of the present or the future. It can be an explicit one, but it doesn’t have to be; in fact, people are likely to be more impressed with or at least more interested in the dreams that require significant interpretation. After all, it’s a chance to match wits with the creator, maybe show off their own skills a little, and it’s a sign that more thought was put into the dream sequence. When putting together a prophetic dream, it’s best to come at the subject somewhat obliquely, particularly if you want the characters or audience to have trouble figuring out what it means. I’m not going to say never use a direct reference when a symbolic allusion will do, and the symbolism shouldn’t always be as obscure as possible, but the important parts shouldn’t be too blatant; it makes it too obvious, and transparency isn’t a virtue unless you want people reacting to the dream immediately. If they don’t get it, the audience reserves the right to mock them.

On the other hand, a dream can clue in backstory by taking the form of a very vivid memory. This can be something the character knows that the audience hasn’t had a chance to learn, though it might also be something the character wasn’t aware of either—repressed, mindwiped, simply forgotten, the memory of a prior self who wants to make himself known, any of a number of excuses. In this case, you have every reason to be explicit; it’s not supposed to hide something, and there’s no reason why it has to be couched in obscure symbology. It can just be.

But why should every dream be Grand, Important Information? I think anyone who gets Big, Grand and Meaningful every time her head hits the pillow is going to go insane soon, particularly if she doesn’t repeat herself. Sometimes, a dream is just a dream, and the point is more to look at what it’s like than what it’s saying. Even without social relevance or plot importance, a summarized dream can say a thing or two about the character dreaming it—what kind of person they are, what they think about, what’s eating them, even what their favorite color is. One of my favorite dreams of this sort actually wasn’t a dream, but a PC’s improvisation for my game; pretending to wake from a fitful sleep, he shouted “No! Not the syrup! Put it down, I’ll deliver the antelope!” (Amusingly, he still managed to give me complete dream-context for this snippet, giving new meaning to “cover story”.) The symbols don’t mean anything, but it fits the character.

Some of the best dreams bear hints of most of the above. A prophetic element sneaks itself into a flashback, imagery reflects in little ways the mindset of the character.

So give it a try; let the dream push the story.

During yesterday’s riff on dreams, I mentioned the idea of a character’s dreamscape—a semi-constant world created by the typical dream-patterns of a single character. It’s one part alternate world, one part character exercise, and plenty of fun in its own right.

The first thing to consider is the dreamscape terrain; what’s a world if there’s nothing to stand on? For some dreamers, the terrain is a reflection of their history; you might see landmarks from their youth or places they might want to visit, and the landscape itself might resemble one they’re used to. Others can be based on personality; a character with a generally standoffish personality and a lot of emotional control may have a downright wintry dreamscape, while one who grew up on stories may have something downright fanciful.

Then there’s the question of what populates it. Sure, you can have normal people and creatures, but why stop there? The limit is in what the dreamer can imagine—do bits and pieces of the dreamer’s personality run around wearing her shape? Are there large numbers of creatures that seem as much like scenery as anything, like faceless ghosts or flocks of butterflies with leaves for wings? Some dreamscapes have their own guardians. These might be people or mythical creatures; they might draw from people the dreamer admires or fears, from legends, from the dreamer’s ideal self, from combinations of the above.

In some dreamscapes, even the laws of physics might vary with the dreamer’s personality. Imagine one where there is no gravity, or gravity is variable depending on where you are. What about a place where people’s physical abilities don’t matter, and it’s mental flexibility and force of personality that help you in a fight, because that’s what the dreamer values? Does it take a longer or shorter time to get from point A to point B? Might people be replaced by their shadows? Does conversation come out as music? In a sufficiently trippy dreamworld, who knows what might be possible? For a lesser version, people with more rigid minds might have harder dreamscapes to shape, and the more compassionate may have more habitable dreamscapes.

I had occasion to play with instant dreamscape creation last week, when my players were trying to learn how to function in my take on the dreamworld. I needed someone to let them practice in the mind of in a quick montage, and the logical choice seemed to be my hyper deathdealer, Ruby.

Somehow, the training ends up being in her mind. It seemed like a good idea at the time, since she was known not to have any Dark Secrets, Confidential Information or particularly disturbing bits of history that might crop up in there. On the other hand, attempting to practice fighting when surrounded by small fluffy things with melting eyes and six-inch fangs and occasionally in the distance seeing an enormous flaming squid frolicking in a tranquil sea, not to mention the almost blindingly bright color scheme, the perpetual clouds of butterflies, and the near-diabetic sweetness of a lot of it, was a bit… jarring.

Says a certain amount about Ruby herself, doesn’t it? That’s half the fun of a dreamscape; along with being an excuse to describe wonders that wouldn’t occur in the waking world, you can also sneak a little character exposition into your design. Have you given it a shot?

They’ve been used as setting exposition, foreshadowing, characterization, an excuse to play with the laws of physics, a way to cop out of a story that people couldn’t tell because of its ramifications to the setting and timeline, a visualization for mind-affecting magic, a place to ambush enemies, a way of delivering messages without worrying too much about the lag time, and a source of parallel worlds. And for all this, they exist in the real world, and we usually don’t care about them enough to keep close track when they happen to us. What are they?

They’re dreams: a valuable tool, though likely to veer into cliché if not carefully used.

In fantasy, the uses of dreams tend to run wild. People get prophetic dreams, dreams sent by magic to give them messages, dreams chock full of symbols. Characters with mind magic sometimes monitor people’s dreams to see what they’re like, shape the dreams to give a message, or even enter the dreams themselves for their own purposes. If roles are passed through reincarnation or metaphysical transfer of importance, it’s quite possible that a current character who needs to fill a previous character’s shoes will have a dream of that prior character and follow its instructions.

And then there are dreamworlds. Sometimes, they’re individualized, the interior landscape of one mind. Others, like Lovecraft’s Dreamlands and its many RPG imitations, are worlds comprised of the combined dreams of all of a species/civilization/other. If they’re individualized, their appearances often reflect the mental processes, loves, hates and concerns of the dreamer; when generalized, expect them to include manifestations of both the greatest common ideals and greatest common fears of those who dream the world. Sometimes, these are changeable, representing the dreamer’s subconscious control over her own mind, or boast improbable physics; some dreamscapes even do both at once.

But just because something isn’t in a fantasy setting doesn’t mean dreams can’t have their uses. As most psychologists will tell you, analyzing dream imagery can tell you a great deal about a person’s mindset and mental issues. Need to get across something that happened to a person in the past, and don’t want to deal with a flashback? Have them dream about it. Want to explore a couple ways a certain decision could go? Dreams. And if you don’t mind most experienced readers/gamers throwing rotten tomatoes at you (or if you and the group agree that something just doesn’t work as a plot twist and you need to get out cleanly), there’s always the old “it was all a dream” cop-out.

In short, for a bunch of random neurons firing, it’s a pretty powerful tool. But then again, isn’t our job as creators of stories, collaborative or single-narrative, to cause our own firing of somewhat less random neurons? I find rather little difference between a very immersive story and a strong dream.

This week, I’m going to be looking into some of the more amusing uses of dreams in stories and games. Come dream with me; who knows what you might learn?

A little over a year ago, I talked about heroes/adventurers and their day jobs; not everyone can support themselves by adventuring, and not everyone wants to. The problem with these sorts of jobs is that many people just don’t find them interesting; they might take time away from a game group, seem “too much like real life” (yes, I’ve had complaints about this), or just be hard to come up with decent events for. But if you don’t do something with them, they may as well not be there, right?

The answer, then, is to come up with just enough detail to make it a worthy background. Here are some things you might need.

What exactly is the job? If you can’t summarize it, it’s hard to get it across, whether it’s being a doctor, teaching, serving as the translator for the God of Prophecy (irregular hours, but the pay’s good). Which leads to three simple questions: what does the character do, when does he do it, and who does he do it for? (In some cases, “How does he do it?” may also be applicable.

What are the people around him like? Just about any workplace is going to have at least one standout personality. Usually, it’s the boss, since everyone pretty much has to know who the boss is; likewise, it might be a similar-ranked coworker, or someone responsible for the character’s training—basically, someone whose name, position or personality sticks out. Once that’s established, occasional references to that person doing that-person-ish things can give a feel without actually requiring being there.

Are there any interesting tasks it involves, that fit with the job but are outside its norm and thus notable for the character? Try slipping in references to those while summing up downtime. Take my library job. There’s not much point talking about standard situations, since libraries are pretty universal. But on the other hand, if your first time meeting the commanding general is when she walks in unannounced one Saturday morning when you’re the most senior employee on duty, and you’re having to figure out how you’re supposed to act and how you tell her she’s got a book overdue, it’s something you’re not likely to forget. An offhand summary of a situation like that can say a lot about the job without having to spend time on it.

Then there are the situations that happen at work but aren’t necessarily work-related—or at least, not related to the character’s work. They don’t say as much about the job specifically, but they say something about what can happen there, a little something about the world, and a bit about the people, particularly in how they react to it. “The boss locked his keys in his car and wigged out about it, and now we’re all stressed” or “One of the patrons told me a story about nearly being recruited by the CIA, and I had most of a blog post on it by the time I left” is one thing; seeing a coworker who was missing and possibly confirmed dead at lunch the next morning and everyone acting normal about this is something else entirely.

So what is it like working for these people or in this position? You don’t need to write or play out half the workday just to get it across.