Tuesday, December 7, 2021

Another Time || Day 3: Benji

A message I sent to a very close friend of mine at roughly midnight last night:

"i have a norn named benji and while trying to teach him what food is he decided that food is also benji and now he's going around saying "Benji benji" and he's also taught the other norn to call food benji and i am going to lose my goddamn mind"

With Benny having died, I needed another male Norn if I wanted any hope of getting some foundation of a family going. The egg that hatched brought in a Banana Norn, who I decided to name Benji (in the spirit of... I don't know, having a name that sounds kind of like Benny, I guess). He was the last male egg remaining in my hatchery, meaning that if something were to happen to him, my run of this particular world would be toast! Well, at least until I do something to get more Norns or refresh the hatchery.


Calling Benji "distractible" would probably be an understatement. Benji wanted to look at everything around him, at all times, and the little window showing what he was looking at was jumping from place to place to place constantly. He played with the computer, wandered around a lot, and generally just wouldn't hold still.

Trying to teach him the names of any object became a challenge. Sure enough, some wires got crossed (whether they were mine or his, I'm not sure), and he decided to start referring to food as "benji". Then he started referring to himself as BoBo, and I'm not sure how that happened, so I'm going to blame the Grendel, since he had also been calling himself "bobo". Thankfully, hitting "register" in the Owner's Kit seems to immediately re-teach Norns their own name. Now Benji says "Benji benji" when he's looking for food. Charming.


The Grendel (who I'm going to call Bobo from now on) at this point was more of a nuisance than a real threat, and both Norns even fell asleep once while he was around. I was able to get them to hit him, but only briefly before he started getting a little bit aggressive with them. I tried hitting him myself (Sorry, Bobo! I just want the Norns to be safe here!), which did nothing. 

At some point during this whole encounter, both Norns caught a cold, which I'm pretty sure was Bobo's fault, but it cleared up after a little time (and I'd injected both Norns with "cough medicine"). I was struggling between trying to get the Norns to stop calling food "benji" - Darla had also picked it up at this point - and trying to get the Grendel to go away. I started looking for solutions in the Injector Kit, and it didn't take me long to come upon the "Grendel Scarer".

The Grendel Scarer approved to be pretty effective. I thought that it would just give Bobo a scare (y'know... Grendel Scarer) and make him leave, but it turns out that it teleported him away, probably putting him back by the Grendel Mother. Huh.

After several more minutes of wrangling and figuring out that "food" for some reason wouldn't take for either of the Norns - maybe it somehow got linked to something else, but I don't know what - I finally gave up and settled on a different name for food. 

It's called "eat" now, and frankly that's good enough for me, because now I can tell them to "eat" and they'll get food. And now I get to see "Benji eat" instead of "Benji benji", which is even better.


I was going to end the post here, but I wanted to quickly add this - while struggling with trying to get Darla to eat, she at one point fell asleep while standing up. She would turn her body to face my hand, but her eyes were closed and she was making sleeping sounds. Eerie...

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