How do you think the IPRE reacted when one of their own died early in a cycle for the first time? Like some freak accident takes out Barry like week one of cycle 7, how do people react? Lucrecia gets sick with some crazy new virus and Merl can't heal her in time three months into cycle 40. How does Taako react the first time Lup leaves him alone for more than the time it takes to escape the hunger and respawn??
Oh wow am I really such a TAZ Blog™ now that people are gonna ask my opinion on this kind of stuff? That Umbrastaff post really brought attention to me, huh?
As to how the IPRE would react: think in a word, poorly. The very first time it happens is when it hits the team that this isn’t just something that happens when the Hunger comes, they’re actually dying and dead for the rest of that year. I think the first time this happens, just one of them has that one paranoid thought for just a second that maybe it IS only with the Hunger that they get to return, maybe they actually lost them, maybe they aren’t going to be brought back to the ship if they’re in the Astral Plane, maybe- and when the Starblaster moves planar systems that year everyone waits anxiously to see if the missing crew member comes back. They do, of course, and it’s tears and hugs and intense relief all around.
With Lucretia gone early for the first time everyone slowly realizes that, shit, who’s going to keep records now? That year everyone pitches in and writes down when anything interesting or possibly important happens in one of Lucretia’s spare journals. The next year when she comes back, they present it to her as a gift and she’s incredibly relieved and proud of her team for continuing an important part of their scientific mission even though it wasn’t their assigned job. She spends the first few weeks of the new cycle reading everyone’s journal entries, correcting spelling mistakes and illegible handwriting as she finds out both about what happened in her absence and about her teammates in general, since you learn a lot about someone when you’re reading essentially a group diary.
Also, they all must have seen multiple Astral Planes, right? Magnus nearly gets drawn into it when he’s dying in Wonderland, so they DO go there. How many reapers like Kravitz are there out there, hunting escaped souls who don’t even exist in their planar system anymore?
