Kris may be our host, but they don't like talking, and they have Frisk's characteristic of preferring to be nonverbal and getting less verbal under stress. (my sibling would be more fluent in Spanish, I suspect.) and I'm altogether too good at being able to put words together even under conditions of extreme pain and dissociation; somehow I can always find something to say even if I shouldn't, and thus I've done the lion's share of talking in the Pnictogen Wing. lately, though, we've been feeling uncomfortable about the imbalance.
there's some image from C. S. Lewis's The Great Divorce—the one in which Lewis's self-insert character finds himself in Hell and then takes a bus ride to the outskirts of Heaven—that memorably depicts a lost soul who has taken to speaking through a kind of front or theatrical persona. the lost soul is diminutive and doesn't talk, but they carry around a melodramatic Actor on a chain; when the lost soul is engaged in conversation, they tug on the chain and then the Actor starts declaiming and giving speeches. but slowly the lost soul shrinks and the Actor gains in stature and finally he seems to swallow up the lost soul completely, an event which I suppose Lewis wishes us to regard as the final damnation of the lost soul. in life, we can assume that the lost soul had been used to putting up a blustery melodramatic front instead of interacting directly with other people; now the melodramatic front has utterly devoured its originator. and we Lewis readers can all then shake our heads and say "there but for the grace of God" (or "ahaha go burn in Hell with Susan Pevensie, sinner!")
to say that this all hits very differently now...that would be an understatement. all of The Great Divorce is like that. there's a disturbing degree of psychological realism to Lewis's "lost souls", and yet the implication is that mental or emotional debilities are akin to sin and damnation. this poor human being is unable to interact with the world except through a mask, and now they're rotting in C. S. Lewis's Hell. another lost soul is a grieving mother who never recovered from the death of their child—and so they're in Hell. it's not...great.
and yet it's also seemed like a valid warning. I don't want to be Kris's blustery melodramatic actor, speaking for them all the time simply because I once liked to hear the sound of my own voice (there's no longer much joy in it) and because Kris doesn't like to deal with other human beings and is frankly scared of other human beings. I feel like I've done Kris an injury, in fact, doing all this talking.
guess you win that one, Jack. you got me.
~Chara