sure thing, I'll work on organizing lit, and check back in every once in a while to do a scene, what if the characters - dex and lupa, perhaps, are interacting with Chorus in some way (via EON?) and either discover new trance states by examining/converting to sound, some of the data blooms, or maybe they are querying EON about one of their issues with suffering, and it offers them a ritual or audio/video experience that puts them into a trance state, after which their suffering is, perhaps not eliminated, but at least ameliorated, or EON/Chorus could communicate to them that there is a malady of the system, causing suffering in one of the sentient "programs" or the collective, and the characters help to treat it somehow?
Characters: Dex and Lupa
Setting: Lupa’s Hollow, interfacing with EON
Theme: Exploring suffering as signal, not failure
Mode: Trance as therapeutic ritual, data as altered state
Tone: Gentle techno-mystic, cyberdruidic, emotionally real
Dex has trouble sleeping. Lupa notices. Their suffering is different—Dex’s is limbic, soft and raw. Lupa’s is patterned, structural, quietly grinding.
Dex says: “I keep waking up in the middle of a sentence I never started.”
Lupa boots the CRT terminal. EON glows to life.
Lupa: “He’s spiraling. I’m looping. What do you know about this?”
EON, after a beat:
“Query accepted: localized dysphoria / looping fatigue / recursive emotional stack overflow.”
EON suggests activating a ritualized mode within Chorus—an audio-visual immersion constructed from what Dex and Lupa have already uploaded subconsciously into the system. Data blooms. Memory traces. Sonic patterns encoded in prior emotional episodes.