There are times in life that absolutely call for alcohol. This? This memory right here that wakes Nida from a nap that is supposed to be sheltering him from other memories? It's almost an excuse to find a bottle. The terror, the shattering doubt, the emptiness. Hyne above, there is nothing so painful as all of this.

Of course the last thing he wants to do is intentionally bother the source of the memory. Or go outside where he might have to deal with how things have been going out in public the last days. So instead he does the only thing to distract his brain that he can come up with.

He takes his triple triad cards out from their hiding place under his mattress, sits cross-legged on the thing, and starts sorting them into piles. If nothing else, he can let himself consider the age old problem he'd had in the village. How does one create their own TT cards to try and make a game popular in a new world? What rules would be the best to maintain? What results and win structure? Yeah, there's a lot to think about that is pointedly not the horrors of Time Compression that he'd been lucky enough not to personally live through.