Blake: Why don’t you tell me about yourself, Jany? What are your interests? How much experience do you have with the Game?
Jany: Well, um. I like a lot of anime . . . I wish I could do more cosplay, but it’s too expensive for me to really get into . . .
Blake: Uh-huh, uh-huh . . .
Blake (thinking): Note to self: ask Master to look up “anime”, “cosplay”.
Jany: I don’t know a lot about the Game at all. My gran never played, and I’ve only been in one battle, after we met a Being who said it would be good for Kara Lynn’s health.
Blake (thinking): There’s an interesting strategy . . . we may have to try it on reluctant Masters some time.
Jany: And it worked! Since then, she hasn’t had any blank-outs at all!
Blake (thinking): Wait, what?
Blake is independent enough to switch genders without a direct order as soon as they judge Jany as gay because the original order was “look like a James Bond, SO THAT she is nicely impressed”. Right?
… sooo, is this NEW for Ann as well?
If Masters go against each other as often as we seem to be shown, a being that blanks out or goes catatonic would probably be rare indeed.
*Giggle!SNORT* Well that hasn’t been a problem Blake has ever had. Apparently all Big Cat Not a Lion Being’s masters have made sure to play.
Well… even if it had happened under some previous master, ey wouldn’t remember, would ey?
Maybe maybe not. Blake remembered enough to read something really old for Walker and mistranslated it for everyone else.
I started thinking about this more, and remembered what Patrick said early on about reading: “You are the ones who keep changing languages, then writing them from right to left and from up to down” (paraphrasing). This might imply that Beings, for some reason, are slow to learn literacy (possibly connected to the name thing, and their programming language?). Patrick is implying that it’s hard for them to keep track of changing human languages and writing systems, but these changes usually take hundreds of years to be remarkable.
The conclusion of this is that the script that Blake read must have been around a long, long time, otherwise ey would not have learned it in the first place. This may also be the reason why ey still remembers the script after what is implied to be thousands of years: a long time of exposure means more lasting exposure. A day in ancient Rome? Not even a recollection after a while. A war lasting a few months or years? Pfft, a blink of an eye. Time spent under a specific master? Decades at most, eventually forgotten. Beings operate at such a large timescale, they only remember the long-lasting stuff. It’s like having a map and zooming out: the small details disappear first, and eventually only the biggest objects can be discerned.
That leads to another question: what if the Beings’ memories really work this way? What if their memories of distant times aren’t forgotten, but just not “zoomed out”, and not accessible from the present moment? And what if there’s a piece of magic that could zoom them in again?