Anyway. I couldn't sleep so I'm back on this bullshit again 👍
When it comes to Zahndrekh and how he perceives sex and things related, I feel like it varies significantly depending on the situation. How lucid he is that day, how much time he's had to adjust, whether his emotions might be influencing him more than usual; at the end of the day, my usual take on his delusions are half genuine engrammatic damage and half coping mechanism, which leads to them oscillating across a wide scale fairly often.
This can be both good, given it tends to make him more flexible and harder to manipulate, and bad, given it also makes how stable he is at any given moment a total game of russian roulette.
For the sake of this not being a novel, I will not get into the whole 'contextually relevant' side of things. I'm trying mostly to stick to the 'established' setting I'd mentioned the other day involving Obyron and Imotekh.
It's a bit tricky, because I believe sometimes, his delusions simply accommodate even some pretty drastic situations. Snapped flux tubes, deep scratches, limbs almost pulled from the socket; if he’s deep enough in a delusional state, or conversely lucid enough to mostly just be playing at it, it can be plenty pleasurable, especially in the event he’s expecting it. If he's expecting Imotekh to get a bit rough with him, the fact they're doing something pleasurable together means something he might understand as an injury were it on a battlefield would be something else altogether in the bedroom.
But vice versa, if it maybe comes on too quickly, or he’s in a more delicate, transient state of unawareness, scratches or dents might seem a bit too heavy handed, actual gashes or spots that will turn into welts, etc. And it can also depend on what he can actually see.
A large part in how he perceives things when like this are through visual cues, so if he has no idea the sensation he just felt was a flux tube being pulled but he’s having sex with someone he loves, it's going to translate as 'good', while conversely if he looks down as see 'blood' on his chest, he’s going to immediately think something is very, very wrong, since he also didn't feel the pain that should've preceded it.
I would imagine it's fairly easy to gauge where he’s at by testing a little before committing fully, but mostly the difficulty with Obyron is that he doesn't even want to test it for fear of Zahndrekh thinking he would hurt him like that. (He doesn't remember it anymore, but it's still a subconscious hold over from all the years working to deprogram Setekh's influence in the times of flesh, he desperately does not want Zahndrekh to go back to expecting 'pain' to always coincide with pleasure again)
Zahndrekh's unpredictability is the source of a lot of Obyron's anxiety, in general, but especially when it comes to this. I love when ppl have it so he can see what Zahndrekh sees through a link but I also don't personally hc it as working that way, so Obyron really has absolutely no idea just exactly how Zahndrekh perceives those experiences, beyond knowing it's something vaguely resembling what sex was like when they were flesh and blood.
He also knows from past experience that Zahndrekh only seems to notice damage some of the time. Sort of like some part of him thinks they're wearing armor, and if they're damaged, it's just the armor that's dented or cut. But then other times he sees it as a proper injury, and has even insist on Obyron going to the "medic", or believed flux to be blood, or complained of aches or stiffness he couldn't possibly have toward the end of a campaign.
Because of its inconsistency, Obyron (somewhat fairly) often worries about unintentionally inflicting damage that Zahndrekh believes significant, even if he seems to want it, even if he asks for it. The truth is that the majority of the time, Zahndrekh doesn't really understand what 'harder' or 'rougher' or 'not so gentle' really means to them anymore. And with his own newfound and unwelcome desire to be that kind of hard, rough, aggressive, he’s too scared to even attempt testing those limits.
