DE: A rose by any other name

[bjornwilde]

Since there's no DE yet, Imma gonna take it...another from herr_bookman :
What sense--standard five or otherwise--do your pups rely on the most? Are there any they neglect or lack outright?

Comments

[the_force_abides]

Ben uses his sight and touch most, touch in the sense of how solid the ground/chair/whatever he's about to put his weight on is.

Val uses her sight as well but also trusts her sense of space.

Jessica uses her sight and hearing.

Hank...I would guess hearing and touch as his attention is usually focused internally.

Anton is beginning to trust his sense of the Twilight above his normal senses but still relies on his sight.

Thalia sight, though now that she is a Hunter I imagine she will start to listen to her other senses.

Quin relies on his sense of the Force first, then his instincts.

Andrea is sight and smell, leaning more to smell since it's harder to fool.

[ceitfianna]

This is a really interesting question.

Of my pups, three of them come to mind of other senses that they rely on more than the other five.

Charles uses his telepathy in a lot of small ways to navigate the world. When he enters a room, it allows him to have a sense of the mood, if he closes his eyes, he can navigate from the minds and in a conversation, he takes advantage of being able to hear thoughts to smooth any awkward social interactions. In terms of the regular senses, touch is the one he treasures most, intimacy is a complex issue for him but his perfect spot is a mental and physical connection with someone.

Sameth can feel the Charter and also the Dead, but he doesn't rely on them, they're just part of how he sees the world. When he's working and making something, he spends a lot of time focused on feeling the Charter, listening to its hints of what will work and what won't. His Death Sense at home is more about keeping safe and as he's not Abhorsen-in-Waiting, he doesn't need to use it as much to keep safe, but he's constantly aware of the living and the dead. As a smith and an inventor, the next two senses he uses are touch and hearing, he can hear if a metal is bent too far and feel if something's too brittle.

Demeter doesn't have any extra senses but as a goddess, I always feel like she's can feel more. She's very attuned to all living things, plants slightly more than people, but its not something she uses. Its who she is.

Will, William and Moist are all alike in that they rely the most on sight and hearing. That's what keeps them safe in their various worlds which their dangers. Will knows Sherwood and when the forest sounds wrong. William can hear when the herd's getting restless or a storm's coming. Moist can spot when someone's nervous and its time to stop pushing on a job.

Jane, I'm not sure. My instinct with her is touch and hearing. She's good at observing her world and touch feels right.

Tumnus is much more focused on hearing, I'm going by the size of his ears. I imagine that the Narnia under the White Witch was a place where any change of sound meant you had to be extra careful since snow has a way of both magnifying and deadening sound.

The Pirate King is also another who relies on sound, because musical world and it just fits.

[a1enzo]

Sprites' thermoception is weaker than humans', although they don't actually lack it. Everything else is about the same as human baseline. In Milliways, however, as energy beings in a mostly-matter environment, they cannot smell most things but can smell energy-based phenomena such as magic and godly power. (This could partly be considered a form of electroreception. Heck, when they're at home, all their senses are technically electroreception.) Their sense of smell for things they can smell seems stronger than usual, since there's no background to pick them out from.

Enzo specifically has, thanks to his Guardian protocol, a rudimentary danger sense; one could think of it as his nociception extending to sense threats to the system, not just his own body. They have to be pretty significant threats, however, and even then, it doesn't get more specific than "Something's wrong, I can feel it!" *dun dun DUNNNNNN*

Other than that, Enzo has been trained in alertness, so his eyes and ears and even his nose are quite sharp, and thanks to his physical training, he has excellent equilibrioception and proprioception.

[jjprobert]

None of mine have any additional senses, or lack any. Three of mine are older men, so their hearing has faded at the top end, but nothing worst than that.

Jack would say he relies primarily on sight and sound. I refuse to make further comment, because spoilers.

Bean balances them all, but uses taste the least, because it's not healthy to just stick stuff in your mouth without a thought.

Max and Erik are both sight men in terms of greatest dependency, they enjoy reading. Also, experiments, but not being able to read is what they'd get annoyed about if they were to go blind.

Alfred is probably my most tactile asides from Bean, who's a special case, but that's not saying much, he still relies on sight and hearing more.

[gavin62truck]

Tommy relies on most of his senses on the job, although depending on the situation, some more than others. Sight for assessing how dangerous the environment is and for searching for victims. If there's too much smoke to see through, he has to rely on hearing for calls for help or potential structure collapse. Touch for how hot a room is getting and also for finding victims who may be unconscious. Smell for the type of fire, the location of its source, or any noxious fumes.

Taste is reserved for when Lou makes lunch or dinner.

[genarti]

River: Touch/kinesthetic sense. Sight is the one she ignores most; her hallucinations are mostly visual, secondarily auditory, and usually it's the visual cues she uses to identify that what she heard wasn't out loud either. (Which is not the same thing as "wasn't real," but other people usually get weirded out if she responds to things they didn't say, so she tries not to. With mixed success.) So if she's getting mixed signals from her senses, touch is the one she relies on to be accurate.

Clare: Demon-sensing... sense. There has to be a better way to phrase that. But yeah, that's the one that's the most vitally useful to her life, and the one that shows her important things that others don't. All the other senses are less important to her; I guess hearing probably comes next, but it's a distant second.

Trowa: Interesting question! Hmmm. I guess kinesthetic sense, like River; they're both very physical people who inhabit their bodies very consciously. But unlike River, he doesn't have to rank which senses he's ignoring in favor of others, or expect them to lie to him, or anything. I guess sight is next, then hearing? All three of these he uses a lot, though. (Unlike taste, which he mostly ignores.)

Regan: ...Sight, I guess? I dunno, there's nothing hugely interesting about her in this case!

Thor: Standard five plus a sense for... what's going on with the air and the atmosphere and electricity around him. And a limited ability to pick up on certain kinds of magic/power/etc, which is probably another facet of the same and which I'm deliberately keeping flexible and ambiguous. He pays attention to them all; I couldn't really rank them for you.

[not_my_sandbox]

I am guessing Amascut spent a lot of time in the shape of a lioness before she went nuts, so she's learned to lean on the senses that a predator does. Senses that let her keep tabs on her prey, such as binocular vision and binaural hearing. Smell is good for finding very generic directions but for pining down a location nothing beats vision and hearing.

She also probably has senses connected with being a Grim Reaper type-thing still available. A connection with death and time, maybe.

Evil Chicken probably has extra senses related to teleportation (sensing weaknesses in the fabric of reality or something like that) and most definitely has a really long range sense that is attuned to distraction and inattention. It also has a weird way of just knowing names.

Probably like all chickens and other birds Evil Chicken has a very good sense of space and position.

[sunbaked_baker]

Sunshine uses sight most, when dealing with most situations. It has been remarked before that she trusts her eyes too much, and it's true - and since she has gotten used to the weird things her Dark Sight does to her depth perception, she relies on her sight even more. When baking, she most heavily relies upon smell, touch, and taste, which are all highly developed. She doesn't rely on her hearing that much, oddly enough. It's not a sense she's had to pay much attention to developing - you don't hear them coming, when they're vampires, anyway.

Zelgadiss doesn't really pay attention to it, but his enhanced hearing has come in handy many times.

Yrael relies on... well, there are instances of him or Kibeth "tasting" a person's magic, and he can smell the Dead and at least once, "see time." Who knows what his senses tell that not'cat. He does have issues with his sense of taste, however. Due to his long imprisonment as a cat, Yrael has lost much of his ability to taste sweet things.

[cameoflage]

Thurlow uses their sight the most! The perception/intelligence stat in Fallen London is called Watchful, after all. (However, sight is one of the more treacherous senses in that universe as well; there's illusions and the occasional hallucination, but mostly it's because there's a fair few things that can hurt you just by looking at them, and rather fewer equivalents for other senses.)

I'm stumped for Aradia. She does have some additions to her senses, though -- she can hear the voices of the dead, and she has to have some sort of time sense in order to navigate while time-travelling.

A lot of my OCs have some kind of additional wacky senses. There's a telepath who can't turn her telepathy off, a guy who basically has the Shinigami Eyes from Death Note (so he can see everyone's name and lifetimer/countdown to death), and a Time Lady with the ability to sense how the timestream's moving and any time distortions that may occur. (Milliways might give her a headache, come to think of it. The Doctor seemed to handle it fine, but... she's new to this stuff.) Plus also a guy who's in a similar hallucination boat to River; his eyes tend to lie to him, and sometimes his ears do too.

I personally use my senses in a much more... balanced way, than most people. In addition to using my sight*, I get heavy practical use out of my hearing and somewhat less heavy practical use out of my sense of smell (both of these backfire on me a lot though), and I'm a pretty tactile person as well. I don't really find a lot of non-food-related uses for my sense of taste, though.

*I really don't rely very heavily on my sight at all, unless I'm focusing on details, but I do focus on details a lot. For navigating my environment, though, and performing familiar tasks, I mostly just need vague visual cues to orient me.

[hey35andholding]

Clem: uses touch. She LIKES touch. But she ought to rely most on hearing because she's a cop.

Juliet: Hearing, for sure, for the reasons listed failiciously for Clem.

Dix: Sound. She's a musician, of course!

Pinkie: Taste of course!