I never read that stuff, so I've been going with what I see here. A few people have encountered the Fairly Great Old Ones, and the Shoggoths are regularly interacted with. So I've been going with that the *average* person would go insane encountering one. Our heroes are generally not the average person.

Then there's the secondary theory - that certain types of people are highly analytical and logical, and others thrive on the creative and abstract. The analytical/logical types are the ones who are easily driven insane by a Shoggoth because they try to hard to resolve it in their minds.

Liu Xi is not only not the average person, but she is highly into the abstract and creative. If she wasn't, she wouldn't be able to deal with void, and probably not the elements either.

Lara is much the same, out of the same kind of necessity - a logical type wouldn't be able to handle the thought of zipping through the layers of space.

And Chiaki is a strange one, because she kind of straddles the line. She has a highly analytical mind, but her samurai discipline gives her more of a go-with-the-flow-of-things abstract look at the world.

The only one who might be in trouble is Yuki, who is very analytical, and always looks for the truth in everything.








That's why she doesn't.








Remember that movie Cast Away with Tom Hanks? He spent so long on that island that he couldn't deal with civilization right away. I imagine it like that, only it takes a few minutes and not months or years.








It's something I came up with based on the law of conservation of energy - that the universe has all the energy it needs, etc. I extended that to believe if there are multiple universes, each one would try hard to hang on to its own energy - meaning Lara would have to leave every universe almost entirely drained. She recharges quickly, but it weakens her quite a bit to expend that much at once.








If she couldn't purge it, it might. It's fortunate in her case that she does have the ability to purge the energy in her body.