[Game thread] Skull Ruins Pokerole

[Lord Windos]

He brushes Ventus's hand aside...

A moment of silence...

...

And then the depression is...gone.  Mostly.  It's still there, but to Nathan, it's now nothing more than a dull throb for the time being.  Kirlia looks and feels really worried for him again...he's never felt Nathan react like this before...he can barely tell Nathan's feeling anything right now...Nathan's not just put his emotions aside, he's shoved them out of the way almost entirely...

He stands up.

"...fine."  It's said in one of the flattest, most neutral tones he could possibly use.  Oh dear...

Dead. Still. Vacent. That is what Ventus detects within Nate right now....vacuous nothinginess. Its an emotional state of being that he was intimately familiar with, given his tumultcous past, and has studied up on it himself as part of his Sociology Major. 'In intense times of shock, distress, or trauma, a person's or Pokémon's mind just...shuts out all the offending stimulia. In some cases it leaves people comatose, others by blocking and walling off parts or all of specific memories...or in this case, causes total apathy by completely repressing their emotions. All of these conditions persist until either the stimulia ceases to be a problem, or until the person has the time to properly recover from what's happening. We generated such a great deal of stress on Nathan's capacity to function that, in order for his mind to function, it had to 'turn off' the problem, his emotions, in order for him to go on,' the researcher thought, taking a few steps back from Nathan to give the boy so much needed space...and time for him to think what he can do about this.

'....Reshirim damn it all, why did this have to happen. I didn't mean to do this to him with my rants, I just wanted him to realize what we were worried about. I can try to break through that wall and force him to process his emotional trauma, perhaps with Kirlia's aid to assist me...but that would just leave him back crumpled up against the real wall again. Raphael isn't equipped to treat depression with their aura of positivity, and no of us have time to sit down and slowly coax out his raw feelings and help dealing with them. My experience as a Pokémon Therapist and Consuler won't help me here either, as he's quite obviously a human, and I don't where to even begin in finding the root of the problem. Yelling at him to snap out of it will also not help, as much as I wish it would earlier. ....So in short, there is nothing that can be done right now. Nate has to remain calm and strong to survive down here, and if shutting off his emotion does that for the time being...so be it.'

Coming to the grim, stark truth, Ventus struggled not to sigh in abject sorrow and let his own stress with the situation weigh down on him like a Hippowdon, before he told Nathan : "Good. We are ready to head out then. Everyone, let's stick together, and we will pull through this to the end. Let's go."