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Yellow Jade Stone
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> : Wait. This energy. This... mindless aura of violence without intent...
>@Thranos
You know that feeling. You can recognize how she's acting.
The Unofficial Galactic Company Protocol Guide has this to say on the topic of the Grey Tide, though a reader who knows its essential truths will often skip it entirely.
The Grey Tide is a loosely-defined, poorly-understood phenomenon that occurs in space stations on the frontier or isolated in the void.
It can occur in groups or individuals. It can occur due to inciting abuse, or due to nothing at all. It occurs most often in various types of assisting or subordinate roles, but sometimes occurs in engineering, medical staff, scientific staff, and sometimes even security. It defies rules by nature, which sure does make it hard to write a guide entry about it. Thankfully, the editorial board of the Unofficial Galactic Company Protocol Guide know the truth about what causes it.
Education of crewmembers in the necessary skills for operating a space station is time-consuming and cost-consuming, often involving years spent at an academy, trade school, or university. It's hard to pay an honest man minimum wage to analyze deep-space anomalies, and harder to pay another honest man minimum wage to clean up after the first's spilled blood.
As a result, one thing nearly universal to corporate space stations is aerosolized neuroplasticity treatment. Instead of training employees, employees are made to train themselves. It is much cheaper to technically comply with workplace training requirements by contaminating the atmosphere with enough chemicals that induce a highly receptive brain-state. With that done, crew members teach each other how to run nuclear engines or perform complex organ transplants through an oral tradition or employee-crafted wikis, such as this one.
However, this receptive brain-state, when left in most forms of isolation such as maintenance tunnels, mineshafts, operating rooms, engine chambers, or other similar labor areas, begins to receive a different form of learning.
It's not possible to write what people affected by the Grey Tide learn in the dark, since one thing they learn to do is stop communicating beyond whatever's necessary to do what they do. However, the outcomes have a few common trends: Antisocial habits, violent tendencies, kleptomania, sadism, a disrespect for all types of spatial boundaries, and a disregard for pain or other deterrents. Severely Tiding individuals will break into or out of spaces, assault fellow crewmembers without much provocation or with none at all, and typically steal and stockpile valuable equipment, chemicals, and materials. Affected crewmembers will often claim that things "won't matter, eventually" or that "consequences are not real".
There's no universal indicators or behaviors, besides a few that are difficult to observe. The first, and most simple, is the fact that one Tiding individual will typically leave another Tiding individual alone, even when they have mutual stockpiling interests. The second, and most common, is a compulsion to gain access to any space they're intended to be prohibited from. The third is that every single individual affected by Tiding that has been interrogated thoroughly enough will discuss the "rising grey water". This is the source of the term "Grey Tide".
A little known fact is that entertainers aboard space stations, such as clowns and mimes, have a subculture of academic study on the topic. Due to their society being highly secretive in its nature, most of their knowledge can't be negotiated for by the editorial board of the Unofficial Galactic Company Protocol Guide.
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