"Gehenna is a world of war; it arrived from Nothing to attack the world in its time of weakness; it enslaves and mutilates and devours those souls which come into its power by any means. There isn't a civilized king in the world who won't shower you in gold for slaying their cultists or devils, the latter of which are made by stitching together parts of the souls of the people who are sacrificed by the cultists or captured by the raiding parties."

"Uh. Yeah. That." 

"And for clarity we should say that if the Winter Wolves capture you and feed you to their spirits then those will also devour your soul. This is the sort of thing which a good god doesn't do." 

That is the most horrifying thing he has ever heard in his entire existence.

an existence which might be finite

He desperately hopes it's a myth.

(...wait, that's what Marcus meant by getting eaten by a Wolf??)

"...no wonder you were all so concerned," he eventually manages to say, faintly.

Agrippa looks up from his lunch. 

"Now you've gone and scared the poor boy." 

Agrippa, perhaps, does not think of him as an interesting bug.

"...yeah, it-- sorry, maybe this was a bad time for me to ask these questions. But then, uh, there's never really a good time to learn this, is there."

He supposes it would have been less bad if it had been after he'd built a headspace, so that he could curl in a ball and cry without this using Marcus's tear ducts and ability to drag trees?

--on that note, he thinks he is going to cry if he retains control of the face for much longer, and he does not want to be seen crying by any of these people. (Agrippa and especially Marcus because it would be horrendously rude and hostile to lash out at their affective empathy like that; Luci because he does not like the thought of her observing the interesting bug in its moment of emotional vulnerability.)

He takes a step back.

Marcus takes a very firm control of the front. 

That being done.

:Are you okay?: 

He feels like he's on a slippery riverbank over rapids, some vast torrent of horror that he's about to fall into.

Like, it sounds like some bullshit, but so do giant bees! And-- he doesn't have all of Marcus's languages, he doesn't actually have semantic bleedover, it's all translation magic, the only reason he even understood that explanation is because of some fucking alien bullshit.

(Some fucking alien soul-altering bullshit, at that! Sure, if he'd been asked whether he wanted this language implanted in his mind, he'd have said yes, but the fact is that he was not asked. And he doesn't even understand what caused it to happen; he doesn't know under what circumstances something else might be implanted in his mind, something he wouldn't endorse.)

He'd kind of rolled his eyes at worries of black-ball-tech soul-destruction, figured they were just soothing-dread peddlers who'd gone too hard on the dread and neglected the soothing: obviously the lack of departed souls from high-tech-level civilisations is because those places invent immortality (and indeed, apparently this world's former high-~tech-level civilisation did invent immortality, and even kept it when they lost the other advancements). But...he finds, now, that he can't dismiss the idea that souls can be destroyed. It could be true. There's only so hard he can cling to the thought that maybe it isn't.

(Also, absolute bare minimum, there are people who departed believing their souls were about to be destroyed, and that's pretty bad just on its own.)

And as for the more immediate problems.

The thing is, crying is terrible! Crying helps nothing and makes you feel worse! The only reason crying exists at all is because it's useful in infancy, and retaining-the-tendency-into-adulthood wasn't detrimental enough for the selection pressure to breed it out of humans entirely!

But. It turns out that as terrible as crying is, it's even worse to be a passenger in a body that is conspicuously not crying or curling up into a ball, when that is what you would be doing with it if you hadn't paralysed yourself to prevent that.

he almost thought "the only thing worse than crying is not crying", and then he flinched away from that phrasing

He's not locked out of control of the body. He is not, actually, incapable of allowing his emotions a physical expression. He still could.

He isn't going to.

:No.:

(He's not sure if he can manage much beyond that, right now. He doesn't think he could talk anymore, even if he were fronting.)

Marcus doesn't know how to comfort someone so obviously upset in such a weird situation. 

In the absence of verbal communication, he sends through - not quite a memory, but a time-worn fragment of one, of being a small child and hearing about the horrors of the world and realising that in fact you were going to deal with these things. And of getting a hug from your father, who was as big as a tree and as strong as a mountain, and who was able to protect you for a little while longer. It's a sort of hug he hasn't figured out how to give people in real life but he wants to one day. 

He can't physically cling to Marcus, even if he wants to.

For a long minute, he doesn't answer. He is busy enduring, moment to moment.

(It's hard to parse the kinds of emotional pain involved, but he thinks he can detect some fear for his own safety; and something that is a little like if you mixed grief for a departed person with the loss from a beloved object's unexpected destruction; and the acute dissonance of feeling his body sit there largely calmly with its eyes open, as if the situation were merely kind of awkward.)

When you're about six or seven years old, you reach an age where you first truly understand that you are the only one who can protect yourself, and there will come a day when none of what you see around you will be able to support you anymore. One day you will lose your family, and your friends, and your home, and your world, and your body, and there will be nothing but the roll of the dice and your skills and your knowledge. And you need to be ready.

:How?: he manages to send, though you can almost hear the internal screaming in the background. :How do we--:

:--protect--:

:--everyone, but especially ourselves--:

:--surely there are *some* emergency protocols?--:

Well, Marcus isn't just sitting there doing nothing. He gives a sort of awkward gesture to his lunch companions and continues picking at his meal, since they'll need to move on sooner rather than later.

:All people are at war with Gehenna. Even their own citizens, in a way. More powerful people than we will ever be give their all to keep them contained, and the rewards for stopping their raids are generous and universal. Adventurers are heroic, because these are the things they fight.:

... 

:If you go down fighting they can't get you.: 

The saying goes that "emotional wounds don't heal, but they do scab over".

The bleeding hasn't stopped yet, but it has slowed down. There is somewhat more space to think, and especially to think about what to do.

:I will still be an adventurer.:

:I worry that my efforts to help this world will leave no mark, or perhaps even backfired marks; I worry about suffering from dangers beyond my comprehension; but I wouldn't be able to bear knowing that I didn't even try.:

:But. If someone tries to hire us for mercenary work with a *specific, known* risk of getting your soul destroyed, we are turning them down. And if they're like--:

:--'if you take my job offer, you only *might* be annihilated, and if you're *not* you'll have wealth and admiration and strength; whereas if you *don't* take my job offer, I will definitely kill you the normal way right now'--:

:--then they can fucking kill us.:

:(Even if one were *terminally* utilitarian, you said you don't have *much* contact with the afterlife (afterlives??), but you do have *some*. That there are some circumstances where the departed can talk to the living, or even visit them. So plans that require contact with the land of the living haven't failed outright if you depart: they just get much harder. But I can't help anyone if I don't exist.):

:Traditionally, people who risk capture by their enemies carry poison, secreted away on their person.:

:I...assume there is some sort of arms race going on there?:

:We have found, when we try to keep murderers and the like contained so that they cannot hurt anyone else, that it is very difficult to prevent people from taking the last train out^†, if they are determined.:

:Mostly we rely on making the day-to-day lives of prisoners pleasant *enough* that they dare not risk rolling the dice on a new life, but that wouldn't work for this.:

---

^†a bit of the literal meaning bleeds through here--Minaiyu's native language seems to have some metaphorical idiom for this involving boarding long-distance transport?--but the primary meaning is clearly "committing suicide in order to escape"

:There is not a quantity of money which will induce me to risk the existence of my immortal soul, or yours.:

:I am not actually familiar with the state of the art in this sort of thing. It's the sort of thing that's very budget-dependant.: