maybe i like it when a female character is deeply flawed and responsible for countless deaths and so on and so forth. more female characters should be deeply flawed and responsible for countless deaths
So the more I think about Palamedes during Gideon the Ninth, the more I realize how confused the poor dude must have felt. The first time we meet him, he’s telling Camilla about how all the energy signatures in Canaan house are wrong, and how he’s pretty sure he’s being deceived. He is talking about the house, yes, but probably the poor dude has been feeling like this about a fair few of the other characters, too!
We know he can’t feel Cytherea, who is a lyctor. He probably can vaguely feel that Pro is a corpse (I’m basing this off his abilities in Nona here btw, when Pyrrha asks him to find Gideon’s body in the cohort barracks.) or maybe he can’t, since this is necromancy done by a lyctor; in this case he might not be able to feel Pro either. Which, if this had been the only ‘problem’ with his fellow necromancers, he probably would have figured out faster than something was up.
BUT! Let’s examine the other people also present at Canaan House:
Teacher and the priests, whose energy signature must be WACK;
Harrow, whose energy feels like 200 people;
Whatever Gideon feels like with psychometry;
Known necromancer Coronabeth Tridentarius which doesn’t actually feel like a necromancer;
Etc etc.
My point is: homeboy seems to have come to the conclusion that his psychometry is lying to him all across the board, which slowed him down figuring Cytherea…
(Paired with his heartbreak of course, making him dumb and unwilling to examine her whole deal in more details.)
But I think that he WAS testing her when he offered her the cup of tea (according to the doctor sex short story, he knows she’s not big on tea). And he deffo knew something was up when she asked him to do that syphoning trial. Then Gideon brings him Pro’s head, and I firmly believe that is when he started to figure Cyth out. Because when they were all in her room and she had that coughing fit, he examined her. With his hands.
Right then he would have known that this is not Dulcinea. Because he touched Dulcie’s letters for years, he knows what SHE feels like. And here’s a second thing we know from the doctor sex short story: Dulcie has been living in the countryside on planet for years. When Teacher asks Palamedes about « dulcinea’s » condition, Pal’s analysis includes how breathing recycled air on Rho took ten years off her life. NOT a diagnosis that fits with the real Dulcie!
So I think at this point Pal definitely suspects that the other body along with Pro in the ashes they found might be her, but he doesn’t know for sure and desperately doesn’t want to jump to conclusions yet.
But when they find Ianthe in the lab, and he accidentally brushes up against the paint letters on the wall, well. They feel like Cytherea. So now he has all the pieces of the puzzle to realize who she is, and he just needs her final confirmation that Dulcie is truly dead before he goes apeshit.
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