by Alicorn » Mon Mar 02, 2015 6:44 pm
Bells aren't by default particularly artistic in a way that the muse pathogen could use; I don't think they'd kill or maim themselves but to start out they'd only be functional in the constrained way that, say, Golden when she thought Edward was dead, was. The ones with no existing artistic outlet would instantly grit their teeth and collect one, exactly what would depend on the individual. The ones who start out good at some sort of art or music would lean on it hard, figure out how to satisfy the intense drive as efficiently as possible, collect whatever adequately-arty things they could manage to use from Muse to decorate their surroundings and not be in constant aesthetic torment, and then probably attack the problem as fiercely as they could with their remaining energy. One merely discovering the planet but not getting infected skips straight to that last. (It's possible that not every beMused person wants a cure; it does provide intense inspiration in addition to drastically harshening one's standards, and the population of Muse is descended from people who could cope well enough to establish a colony on half their expected manpower. Plus once you're used to it, it would be sort of like someone offering to make a baseline human enraptured by the glory of bat urine or something. But certainly developing a vaccine and a cure for those who want it is a priority.)