entranceway | Astral Destruction

[ Clementine and Mae appear on the screen. It’s a little girl and a cat girl. They’re standing in a room on the first floor. Clem has a crowbar in her hand, slung over her shoulder. Mae has her trusty baseball bat and a very cat-that-got-the-canary grin on her face.]

Hey, so… Mae told me about how she breaks shit sometimes and how it’s… cathartic? [ that’s the word she used, right? ] And I tried it with a light bulb. It felt pretty damn awesome so we thought it might be cool to have an official place where people could break stuff whenever they needed to deal with bullshit.

[Mae immediately picks up the thread, grinning wide.]

So we are super effing pleased to introduce…The Destruction Room.

[She pans the camera over to the sign on the door. It’s generic and straight to the point. Then she pans the camera around to take in the room. There’s rows of shelves filled with china plates, vases, glass figurines and other fragile-looking items. Along the walls are dozens of light fixtures and free-standing lamps, as well as just a metric ton of lightbulbs, both fluorescent and incandescent. All of it is very precariously displayed and it looks like it wouldn’t take much to just knock some of these shelves right over.]

Isn’t it amazing? We stocked it with everything that could possibly go smash.

[Clementine gestures then to have Mae pan the camera toward the wall on the side which has a giant weapon rack with every blunt weapon imaginable from bats to maces to hammers and more. ]

Over on this wall, we’ve got every blunt weapon you can think of so you can really make the breakables crack into a hundred awesome pieces. Also, it’s on the first floor, room 4 so if you hit yourself in the foot or get glass stuck in your arm or something, the clinic’s right next door.

Yeah, we pretty much thought of everything. Because we’re awesome.

[Mae holds out her hand to Clementine for a high-five. Clementine leans over, high fiving her back, with a smile. Totally awesome. ]

Anyway, yeah, come on down and get your smash on. Work out some of that pre-event anxiety or whatever.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

There is a very large difference between something happening to you and getting hurt as a result of that, and doing something incredibly irresponsible and reckless and hurting yourself in the process.

If you want people to learn how to treat injuries, you could start a first aid class, and teach them. Monsters do not really have any need of it, but I have been reading up on it and would be happy to help you teach a class.

[Mae may be young, but she's not a child- Toriel really shouldn't have to be telling her this.]

Of course, that stuff is not- but if you condition yourself to break things when you are angry or frustrated, then there is a very good chance you will begin lashing out elsewhere, where you will be breaking others' property.

If people come down here then that's just the risk they're taking. I mean, I expect people to know there's a bit of a risk, like, that's part of the point. That's like, consequences.

[You break something, and sometimes it tries to break you back. It's an important life lesson.]

Well...why not teach a class then? I definitely can't.

[She frowns a little, because this is like being scolded by her own mother, but Toriel is not her mother. Mae is an adult, and she really doesn't like being talked to as if she's some little kid who doesn't get it.]

Dude. Toriel. All due respect? We're not animals. No one's conditioning themselves to do anything.

[Says the girl who once trashed a public bathroom because she got agitated not too long ago.]

Listen, like, the point is that people are gonna be breaking things that it's okay to break, that like...people aren't gonna get mad at them for breaking. Sometimes you just need to break something. And, and I don't like you implying that I just--have no self-control or something.

[She knows, she knows she doesn't have very good self-control, but she's also pretty sure that it's a lot harder for her than it is for others.]

I know that we are not animals. [And there's probably a joke to be made there, since both of them are kind of animals, but Toriel's in "overbearing and controlling" mom mode, not "loves bad puns" mom mode, unfortunately.] However, I think that you are still underestimating the kind of effect this kind of thing can have on people.

I do not know you that well, and I do not know everyone else here, either. Maybe it will not negatively impact you. However, I do not think it is unreasonable to assume there will be at least one person who will enjoy breaking things just a bit too much, and may be negatively impacted and become more violent.

Ugh, that's like saying that violent video games and loud music make people violent. No one believes that anymore.

This is not really the same thing. I do not understand either of those things but obviously you are not actually out there swinging things around, breaking things and making a mess.

Okay, can we be done with this now? Because the room exists either way and people are gonna use it, and nothing horrific is gonna happen just cause someone broke some lamps.

Fine. I still do not think that this is remotely a good idea, though.

Cool.

Astral Destruction

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