Panic
Recap: Send my muse a word and they’ll tell you something about their past related to that word (Angst Edition).
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It was so strange to see; so unfamiliar and incomprehensible; an experience he had no familiarity with and could not grasp, dancing just beyond his reach. It was something he had never felt but had seen countless times in others, baffling and bizarre. In theory, he knew. He learned, saw the evidence for it, and he benefitted from its existence. But he could not understand.
In his confusion he was mesmerized. Fascinated. Morbidly intrigued.
It became a habit to watch for it. He was somehow attuned to its presence simply by his interest; a sixth sense alerted him to its presence. More often than not, what he commonly saw were only weak tastes; taints of fear beyond thought, overpowering and chaotic. They all shared qualities: wide, too-clear optics, an alert twang to their fields.
Those tastes only hinted at the full reality. Buried underneath it all like a supportive slab, an epicenter of disease, was the real object of his interest… The unmistakeable ripple of that confusing reality: what others had taught him to call ‘panic’.
Only occasionally could he witness this raw foundation: a fountain of fear, driving into madness and irrationality — panic bared to his view.
Maybe it was sadistic to be so intrigued… He didn’t miss the reactions of those around him — how they shied away while he leaned forward to watch. How the mindless, desperate shrieks of a panicking mech seemed to send shivers down their struts, while to him it was a curious blend of irrationality.
Why? What point did it have? Why were they so afraid of it? Were they so easily terrified of a sane creature being made insane by fear? If you could drive a mech into it, could it not be an advantage? Why then were they so cautious of it, as though it were too ugly a tool to be used? As though it were contagious, and they might catch the plague of fear?
Perhaps it was a kind of sickness… A madness that turned thinking mecha into thoughtless forces. If so, it was strange that he had never caught it himself…
Panic. It was such a strange thing — even stranger that he could not help admiring its complexity, helpless to its unnatural mystery. Perhaps he would be wiser to pretend he understood why; to mimic the crowds around him and scream as though he were horrified at the sight of it, disturbed and unsettled…
…But he never did.
