Strange Growth

"There's no reason you couldn't do that," Jude pointed out. "Just vanish their weapon. I wouldn't recommend vanishing yourself though. The potential side effects of that would be... uh, bad."

You know, not being able to come back and all that.

"If I had to guess, I'd say you're sliding it into some sixth dimension, and you can't see that far. But who even knows. That's the nature of Eldritch powers. They're hard to figure out and impossible to understand."

"I don't know if you can fully understand it. The impression I've gotten all this time is that Eldritch stuff is like... a tunnel. You can get an idea of where you're located in the tunnel, but you can't get an idea of the scale of the tunnel without seeing the whole thing, and then you get into that whole... oops I'm seeing another dimension and it's an absolute mess."

He shrugged.

"Or something like that. I don't know. I sort of looked into it and then ended up letting Giltenn handle it with my sole serious encounter with the Eldritch. They were my shield, to keep me from going crazy."

"Not that I know of," Jude admitted. "I didn't even know I was getting the memory until it started, uh, naturally improving. I wouldn't be surprised to find something on the island that would help though. A drug? Just... keep in mind that perfect memories are undeniably useful, but they come with their own complications."

And boy, did he have experience with those.

"I wouldn't get rid of mine, but I had to learn to deal with it. My issue was..."

He paused for a moment, deciding how to word it.

"Memories naturally fade out over time. It protects you. People think about the details fading, so it's easier, but it's also the emotional content of it. Think about how angry and frustrated you were when something bad happened. Thinking back on it now, you think about it like something that happened to someone else. It's not fresh. The emotion's faded. But for me, it doesn't naturally. For me, something frustrating that happened months ago felt as real and fresh as something that happened minutes ago. It made it impossible to move on. Every time I thought about something that happened, I was basically re-experiencing those emotions."

Jude had been worried that Smokey would brush it off, but his fears were unfounded. It was obvious that they saw the fatal flaw with that, and Jude nodded.

"I didn't, to start," Jude said. "I kept getting agitated way too easily as things built up. I didn't have a perfect memory back at home, only near the end. So it was a new thing for me. I found myself snapping more. I couldn't forgive people for the things I'd done. But I found a way to solve it."

Jude paused, holding out his hand as if in demonstration.

"It's not something I advertise, but I can modify--or destroy--memories by touching someone who consents to it. The one who gave the power to me hated the implications of what they could do, and were relieved that I was going to have a good use for it. What I do is I manually strip the emotions of out of my day every night. Or lessen them, depending. I manually mimic what a human mind would do naturally."

It took maybe ten minutes every night, but it had become an important part of his routine. It was what kept him sane.