Air Like Glass

The Great Houses of the Southern Nomads.

Every House is called a 'Great' House, no matter how large they actually are - this is basic courtesy. They are composed of extended family and kin groups, and the largest are around 2000 people, the smallest 30 or so. All of them have heraldry (usually a mixture of animal motifs, geometric and optical patterning, and stellar constellations, with cadet branches adopting variations on the main branch heraldry), and all will wear this as a flag-cloak (a practice that they share with the Northern Nomads), and get it tattooed on their body. They also get tattoos signifying great feats of hosting, hunting, raiding, and religious sacrifice. 

Like their northern neighbours, they keep chivalric traditions. In the south these focus on raiding and hospitality - where the Northern Steppe Errants go questing to get wisdom, the Southerners engage in feuds, kill their enemies, hunt the Ice People and other sea monsters, and vie to outdo one another in expensive sacrifices and feasting. 

They don't ride horses or keep cattle (no grazing in the south), although wealthy families sometimes buy these animals as status symbols and feed them with imported grain. They do keep dogs; big, aggressive, snow-white wolfhounds who work as pack animals and accompany warriors on raids. 

Southern Houses typically live semi-nomadically: they travel most of the year, and hunt, trade, and feud with one another, but each family will also keep a 'Seat' - a settlement/fortification that they can retreat to if needs must, and that they can winter in if the season is a particularly bad one, or the killing sunlight becomes too much to handle out in the open. In the northern regions these 'Seats' are small stone fortresses, usually built on the coast for access to fishing and seal-hunting, but further south they are said to become stranger: there are rumours of forts built from ice that never melts; of manor houses that float in the coloured fire that hangs in the frigid, crystalline night air; of iron castles that walk the land on iron legs; of ghost houses, of stairways that lead up into the vividly burning stars. 

The Houses are famously taciturn and difficult to impress, and in the North they have a reputation for brutality, cold-bloodedness, and cannibalism. Warbands and whole families are sometimes hired in Errant country, and even the Barony, to serve as experienced shock light infantry, where they are famously illusive and dangerous in rough terrain.

Re cannibalism: Southern Mentats do butcher and prepare human corpses (especially their organs), and this is accepted practice - part of the great and horrible otherness of that caste. There is also a general understanding among the Southerners that eating corpses is preferable to starvation, and they will partake when forced to. They are not (usually, exceptions exist, especially among the Ice Houses) actively or murderously cannibalistic, and the fears and horror stories of the Northerners are significantly tinged with xenophobia. 

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All Southern Nomads have excellent stealth and concealment and superlative survival skills when in their home territories. They roll all appropriate checks with advantage. They wear colourful heraldic flags when fighting in feuds against other Houses (a trait they share with the Errants of the North), but make forgo these and instead make effective use of camouflage when raiding 'barbarians' from other societies.

A 'medium weapon' below is usually a longsword - where Northern Nomads favour a cross guard straight sword, while the Southerners mostly use basket hilts, often insulated with fur. They will also occasionally use heavy bear spears, with wide, sturdy wings beneath the leaf-shaped blade.

Southern House Scion

As Bandit, equipped with: medium weapon, bow, light armour, cold weather gear, sun goggles, movement: as human, disposition: hunters and foragers, prideful, distrusting. 

Southern Raider

As Man-at-Arms, equipped with: medium weapon + shield or heavy weapon, bow, cold weather gear, sun goggles, medium armour, movement: as human, disposition: duelist, terror raider, prideful, distrusting. 

Raiders who roll max HP have been trepanned by their Mentat, and have a single gift from the list. 

A Raider-Captain has HD+1, and a 1 in 2 chance of carrying a Preserver from the Southern Gear list here. 

Patriarch/Matriarch

HD2-4, medium weapon, shield, bow, cold weather gear, sun goggles, medium armour, movement: as human, disposition: king or queen of a small territory, used to mediating disputes and making leadership decisions. Dressed in between 50 and 200s of whale and bear-bone jewellery. Will take respect, face, and decorum extremely seriously. Any raiding party that includes a noble will always carry a Preserver with them.

Southern Hound

HD1, bite as medium weapon, unarmoured, movement: as dog, disposition: well trained killers, will defend their human allies to the death. Easily frightened with explosives and loud noises. 

Hounds get +1 to hit and to damage rolls against panicking or fleeing enemies. If they move at least 20ft on the turn that they attack you, they knock you prone with a STR save to resist. 

Each House will usually only have one Patriarch or Matriarch, although exceptions are not unusual, especially for husband/wife or older parent/adult child rulerships. The House Raiders will usually be organised into an informal bodyguard for their leader. Every House will have precisely one Mentat - they are respected, feared, and distrusted by most right-thinking southerners, but they are also irreplaceable and untouchable.

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House Seats, Castellans, Sun Logic, Bravo Plays

Every House of standing keeps its Seat, a small fortress, ranging in size from a fortified house to a small keep. Houses of means will also keep a settled staff of Castellans at their Seats, to maintain them, exercise sacred hospitality to travellers in the House's name, and defend them from attack if necessary. 

Castellans are a cultural institution of their own - they are settled in one place for life, and they do not raid or feud. They mostly marry between one another (Castellans often betroth their children between Seats to secure alliances and goodwill, and this can serve as a sort of 'back channel' to normal raider politics and House feuding), and are considered strangely-gendered and strangely-sexed in mainstream Southerner society. 

Importantly, Castellans are also storytellers and actors - all Southerners are singers and dancers, but the Castellans are the ones who plot (in the sense of plotting a novel) and stage works of drama. Most Seats are also theatres, and Houses measure their wealth against one another by the quality of the entertainment their House can provide travellers. 

Southern plays are strange by Baronial standards: scenes are arranged into non-sequitors, and often start in media res, with minimal scene setting or props. The audience is expected to do quick and difficult interpretation of what is unfolding, and it is expected that different people may come to different conclusions and see or take away different things. The Southerners call this 'Sun Logic', and find Northern drama plodding and unimaginative in comparison. The White City has a great love of, and fascination for, the 'Southern Style'. A perennial favourite subject for the Castellan drama are the so-called Bravo Plays, which take Baronial Bravos for their cast, and which are famously lurid, violent, sexualised, and ridiculous. The Castellans vie to outdo one another in how insane they can push these Bravo Plots of betrayal, forbidden love, massacre, sex, addiction, drug visions, bathhouses and abattoirs, hot temper, cold calculation, etc. etc. etc. Bravo Plays are a great favourite with all Southerners, very few of whom have ever met a Baronial in person, let alone seen the capital. 

Southerners who actually meet Bravos are inevitably just slightly disappointed by the reality (like Paris syndrome), but they tend to be polite about it. 

When you eat with Castellans, you will always be served meat, seafood, blubber, oil, and salt, along with sweet fresh water. Anything less than this would be an insult, or evidence of poverty with your hosts. If you are in good standing, this fare might be augmented with imported grains, milk and alcohol, fruits, nuts, and berries from the North, and the strange, poisonous extremophile lifeforms that grow in their billions in the chemical vents that dot the region. These last must be very carefully prepared before eating, and are considered a delicacy, although nearly everyone from the North says they taste like shit. If you are an exalted guest or ally, you might be given sugar.

Southerners also love to smoke whalebone pipes, but make do with very little smokeable material in the region - what there is is mostly dried and powdered fungus, and, while the Southerners do have a tooth for it, it tastes a lot like dirt. They will pay very well for good quality smokeable drugs imported from the Barony - at least ten times what they are worth at home. The effects of these vastly more potent drugs on the lower-tolerance Southerner constitution is often a source of much merriment and hilarity for both vendor and buyer. 

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The Screamer Cult

The Screamer Cult is a mystery. The Southerners hate the Screamers more than they hate anyone, and a good portion of conflict and misery in the Southern Steppe is directly caused by Screamer hunts inside the Great Houses. The thing about Screamers is that they are, or could be, anyone. They are a secret society, and they live among the Houses in complete anonymity. There are said to be signs and mannerisms that they recognise between one another. They help one another where they can, and are significantly concerned with the getting and keeping of power in the Houses. They owe allegiance to no house, and exist in all houses. They are an enormously destabilising force in the South, and are spoken of (if at all, mentioning them unnecessarily is in poor taste) it is often in existential or apocalyptic terms. Many Southerners live in fear that a day may come where there are more Screamers than people, which would be the end of the world. 

If they are discovered they are put to death, and often tortured first, in an attempt to get the names of others. The torture rarely works, and Screamers often implicate innocents before they die, which has lead to many terrible tragedies and injustices. 

They get their name because, when they are discovered, and can no longer plausibly lie, something strange happens. They begin to scream with a horrible, vivid intensity. The sound is loud and sustained, and nothing at all like a person. They will then try to kill anyone around them with a hysterical strength. They don't seem to feel pain while screaming, and attack like beasts, battering and strangling with their bare hands. The screams are worldless. No one knows if the Screamers are a religion, an illness, a strange parasite from the sun or the stars, ghosts, demons, or what. Baronials who have seen them think maybe demons? It's not clear. 

Sometimes they will decide to kill someone to further their strange agendas. The typical scene goes thus: you hear the screaming, so horrible and so loud, and you run towards it, hoping to get there in time. You find the body of the victim, mangled to pieces, but not the Screamer. They are already back in your community, composing their false face, pretending to be a person again. 

The Southerners will tell you that the Screamer Cult exists across the world entire, in every race of people, but that their benighted territory is the only place so far where they have woken up.

Screamers have the stats of Commoners, Scions, Raiders, etc., depending on what they do. They are normal people, living apparently normal lives, with normal relationships and normal professions. They communicate by mundane means (notes and cyphers, secret hand signs and meetings, etc.), and have normal political motives and goals, so a determined investigation might unmask one, but they are extremely difficult to spot. 

While they are screaming they no longer feel pain or test morale, and take -1 damage from all physical attacks. While in combat with one, while you can hear it screaming, you take 1 psychic damage and d6 fear damage per turn, with a CON save for half (wax in the ears and similar will automatically pass this save). 

Hearing them scream from afar (outside of combat) is very unnerving, but deals no damage. 

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The Ice Houses

Even further south, where there is no land at all, live the Ice Houses. They don't have heraldry, Seats, feuds, or anything like that. They don't raid. They tend to move in small groups, even single families. They are holy people, close to the stars, close to the sun. They want nothing that we have. They are magicians and phantoms. Best to leave them to their obscure business, and grudge them not their sacred right to hospitality when they make their rare incursions onto the mainland. 

Stat Ice Houses as Raider bands with no metal, always accompanied by a single Mentat. All members of the band will be trepanned, and as such all will have a random gift from the table.

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The Killing Sun

The sun in the South shines for three months in the summer, without once dipping below the horizon. During this period, the Southerners call it the Killing Sun. Exposure without taking precautions is gradual, and then all at once - sensitive people get headaches and visual distortions, then start vomiting and lose their sense of balance, which makes walking and sometimes even crawling impossible. After a few minutes of this, you see white, and you do things that you can't remember. This can include taking all your clothes off and running into the icy sea, self mutilating, or trying to kill your friends. People maddened in the grip of the killing sun are called revenants, and their faces are mad with hatred and terrible to look at. 

Adventurers, even the sensitive ones, are hardy people. Whenever you are exposed to a high stress moment in the sunlight, you must save CHAR. 'High stress' here certainly means combat breaking out and taking damage (two different tests), but might also include certain tests and environmental challenges (jumping a crevasse, dealing with traps, high stakes negotiation).  

• -1 per day you have been exposed. 
• -1 per hp you have below your max. 
• -2 if you didn't sleep last night. 
• -2 if you have taken psychoactive drugs today. 
• -2 if you have any templates in Artist or Little Saint (-4 if you have both). 
• +10 if you are wearing sun goggles. 

If you fail this test, advance this tracker one step (two steps on a critical failure):

1. Roll all tests and saves with disadvantage, until you can get somewhere dark.
2. Reduce your movement to a crawl, until you can get somewhere dark.
3. White out. You are a (probably violent and dangerous, and potentially suicidal) NPC under the control of the DM for the next d4-CHAR mod hours (minimum 1). In this state, you no longer suffer any of the penalties from steps 1 or 2. When you snap out of it, reset the tracker to 0. 

Getting a good night's sleep somewhere dark and safe resets the tracker to 0. 

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Black Hair

The Southerners bury their dead in caves. Some of the Ice Houses weight the corpses and throw them into the sea. You have the get the body away from the sun. If you don't, they get up and walk back to their communities. 

Corpses who walk like this are called Black Hair (in plural and singular), because the hair on their heads grows extremely quickly and often completely obscures their face and shoulders. On older creatures it can easily reach the ground. Black Hair want to be with their family, and will hang around their House, trying to grab at people that they used to love, or force their way into their old home. They are not usually violent, unless they were killed violently, but even a benign Black Hair is a terrible thing. They smell awful and can spread disease (the cold often keeps them from rotting too badly, but are still sunburned, flyblown corpses), and they are horribly strong. You can't really kill them - while they exposed to the sunlight, every part of the decaying nervous system functions. You can cut off an arm or a head and it will keep trying to get at you. You can dissolve or burn Black Hair, but they typically respond violently to attempts to liquidate them this way. Most normally, you need to trick them into some place where you can cut them off from exposure to the sunlight. Black Hair are not stupid (they have the minds of the people they were in life, albeit distorted and fixated, and some of them can be horribly clever), but they are desperate, and will act like desperate people to get the contact they crave. Sometimes all you can do is wait for the sunset in two months time, and bury the body properly once it collapses again. 

Black Hair are another great mystery in the Barony. They appear to be genuine undead, ghosts or zombies, and not entities possessing corpses, which is how similar beings are produced in the climes further to the north. The Killing Sun is truly a wondrous and terrible thing. 

Black Hair

HD3, battering strength (as medium weapon x2) or strangulation (a special grapple that deals d10 damage per turn it is maintained, and silences its target), unarmoured but impossible to kill while in sunlight without laboriously cutting and smashing it to pieces (once HP is depleted, each attack that hits severs a limb or destroys an already severed limb), takes -1 damage from physical attacks. Movement: as the ghost in Ju-On or the girl walking towards the camera in Pulse/Kairo, disposition: varies wildly, depending on how the particular Black Hair died. Always fixated, miserable, persistent, and incapable of disengaging or learning from mistakes.  

The body of a Black Hair has a 1 in 6 chance of carrying a random disease. The skin often looks scorched and burnt. If a Black Hair is ever cut off from the light of the sun, its body immediately de-animates.

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The Vacuum Labyrinth

Built long ago by unknown hands. A maze of black, airless tunnels and shafts carved into the black bedrock. A very holy site, and a very bad place for humans. When the Old Capital came to build its facilities in the south, the Vacuum Labyrinth was already there. 

It was built as a habitat for something. The Mentats won't tell you what. Some Houses think it is one of the Star People - not their transient astral forms, not the projections of their great, buzzing intelligences - the body of the thing itself, huge and folded up in that void warren. Others say that it is from the sky (like all holy things), but not from the stars - that it is something else, more terrible, less ancient. 

There are known entrances inside several of the regional chemical pits. 

The Mentats will try to kill you if you essay it. 

The Play of the Dream of His Life

The weather is much colder now than it was—I need to protect myself just to make my way across the city.


I prepare by layering insulating, waterproof, and abrasion-resistant clothing. I am thinner these days and less capable of enduring pain. There was a time when I could not be hurt by other people, when they could cut or burn me without any response. But that was many years ago. There was a long period of uncertainty, it could have gone either way—and then I decided that I needed to change, because in some obscure way I was allowing myself to be killed. The death would have appeared painless because I had learned not to respond to pain, but the whole situation was violent and unbearably sad.


This is not how I live any more, and I am grateful for the shift, but it means that I need to protect myself from the cold, and also from things like the fumes of burning plastic, or mould spores in the rooms I live in. Invincibility as I have encountered it is an artefact of hallucination and projection, or the massive overcompensation of capital, or the impunity of legalistic, cop-like violence. I am vulnerable to illness and the infiltration of rot; of carcinogens, toxins, and tough, cutting fibres, in exactly the same way that I am now vulnerable to physical pain. I try to be careful. The clothing I use to protect myself in the city: thermal wear, cotton tops and trousers, heavy wool, fleece, kevlar. Especially boots that have been treated so that they are completely waterproof—for some reason getting wet while navigating the city makes it easier for me to be hurt. Each of these is important, and once I acquire a functional item I will wear it until it rots off me.


My body is a sealed unit out from which both vision and breath escape to form assessments and maps of the spaces I move through. I walk steadily. I take in air that is either fresh or polluted, but my body processes it without discrimination and my limbs can work on both. My body would steam in the cold air if it was not buried in protective gear. My skin is red and shining. My face and neck are exposed but they are tough appendages like smokestacks and lighthouses; they facilitate my breathing and my vision.


I think that the light in the city is very beautiful, even in the cold air of winter. When the sun is out it picks the details from the facades and trees and ancient churches, and presents these in perfect and undifferentiated clarity. The colour of this light that covers everything reveals the city as really a contiguous volume, like the working insides of an engine. Its hostile aspect is not the introduction of something new..


I walk and walk, and eventually I arrive at the building where I am working these days. It is a scrubbed-out maze of cheap timber cladding. All of the panel walls are painted to resemble different surfaces— concrete, brick, steel, or sometimes painted exteriors (fantastic exteriors, colours I have never seen before, pillars and fields of flame that are air and earth at once, a blazing world, a world of possibility and mutable form). From the back, all of the partitions are the same, so you are reminded that the entire territory is made of one contiguous surface. And not only the same substances (paint, screws, concrete floors, lighting systems rigged to micro-specificities of control), but also the same degrees of planning and instantiation. A robust, modular, and professionalised apparatus that can turn any surface and any series of rooms or maze-like corridors into any other; can create stand-ins for whatever you can imagine. What you can imagine also needs to be describable in terms of the maze of sheet timber and painted surfaces. There are some difficulties here, but they can, with professional effort, be disappeared or ignored. There are many ideas and even the good ones have a species of equivalence. The ideas are images that appear in formal series, and form a superstructure which, shaped by the contingency of surfaces, also consists of absolutely contiguous materials.


There are other systems of risk-mitigation. I could wear a cruciform, or one of the jackets I covet, laced with pearls, trimmed in chiffon, its texture and colour delicate; I might be able to enter into a seeming with others such that they would know me invincible. Would they know me invincible? It would depend on the seeming, the care and intention it was crafted with, my own capacity to nurture this craft, my energy, my access to the money I would need to fuel it, my capacity to ignore the pain of it, or to hallucinate the pain away. My capacity to once again assume an attitude of invincibility; to once again open myself up to, in some ambiguous sense, my own death. The choice of this.


There is some continuity here, but I do not have the training to perceive it. These days I also do not have the time. I know that the controls of this decision space are built from one flexible and invisible superstructure, but its nature and construction are obscure to me.


When I arrive I am dressed in new clothes. I am strapped into a harness with anchor points on my chest and hips, and fitted with rigid plates that protect my organs and sit firmly over my genitals and belly. My throat is likewise armoured, but not my head, which must remain unprotected for my movements to be convincing. The new materials are kevlar, steel, velcro, aluminium, fire gel. The lighting is harsh where the specialists swoop down to check everything and then soft again for the cameras. The painted timber surfaces pass behind me in succession. Pulp scenes: a stone cave that looks like a skull, emerging from a lake of boiling blood at the centre of the planet; some sort of human-built probe of black metal, drowned in a torrent of liquid coolant that sloughs away from it in opaque sheets of steam; the layerings of a city that houses millions, built dense and vertical to fit them all; a forest in the evening, when beneath the failing light, the trees are again like the earth that they grow from, and like the brambles between them, and like the insects in the brambles. And then from all of these images comes a single coherent song, a song without words or music, a song of the mind and of the vision. Some fantastic place of ease where people are free to love or hate one another without thinking of labour. The ocean, with its coldness and depth and fantastic clarity. All of them pass in front of me, each painted with precise, practiced skill, and I prepare myself for what must come next.




THE MATERIAL PLAY


Kevlar

Woven synthetic fibre, close-knit, tough; flexible substrate across which others may be layered. Protects against the abrasion of the skin where otherwise it would be rubbed away or torn open. Rated to high speed impacts with bitumen and concrete, but only minimal padding to protect against blunt trauma and impacts. To maintain its effectiveness, a kevlar shell is tied to the body at points of natural flexibility. Mine is fastened with heavy strapping at the throat and waist, beneath the armpits, around the genitals, and at the knees, elbows, ankles, and wrists. The fibres are dyed black, and when I hit the abrading surface at speed it leaves its imprint across me, traced in the softest white scoring.


Steel

Heavy and rigid, extremely hard. Painfully cold against bare skin. Here produced in fitted plates that are layered across areas identified as high risk—stomach, chest, groin, throat. When possible for the scene, the head is protected in a close-fitting, padded casque. Plates are always worn padded: sewn into a customised jacket or harness, or each manufactured with a bespoke strapping system. Will turn cutting and stabbing edges, but without padding does little to mitigate transferred kinetic energy and the associated trauma. You will still break bones and rupture organs. I hate wearing steel. It is perhaps the layer that best reveals the incapacity of the body it protects. A body of steel would be rough, cold, and heavy. It would hide nothing vulnerable. Its surface could be painted with anything at all.

Velcro

Synthetic universal fastening system, excellent sheer-hold but peels easily and quickly. A triumph of 20th century machined usability. Usually applied to strapping but can also cover large areas and act as a universal medium for attachments in arbitrary numbers and makes– most often across the broad area of a chest rig.

Aluminium

Bright, unpainted, light, hard. Light on the body, and in the sun it flares white like fire. Rigid but bends under force when worked thin. Used mostly for clasps and attachment points; sometimes for small mechanical clips and locking brackets.


Fire Gel

Thick and translucent, derived from the lighter petroleum byproducts. Low burning point, burns at a low temperature, does not emit smoke unless premixed with a specifically manufactured smoking compound; this burns black and oily and fierce, too hot for a body and too hot for a set built from timber sheeting. And the smoke obscures the vision, which is dangerous because of course the safety technicians may not be able to see the signalling from the body that has been set alight in the chaos and obscurity and opacity. So the gel will be used unmixed on me, smokeless, low heat. When they apply it, it is cold and sticky and viscous enough to hold its shape. The surface of the gel shows the rippled, oily, rainbow residues of spilled petrol, so faintly that they are almost imperceptible. Petrol colours across skin, clothing, harnessing, and also across the sections of the set that they have decided will burn with me when it happens. Each covered with about half a centimetre of the gel—on the set they have also installed a series of remote-controlled starters in case the flames wrapping my body fail to set the rest alight. I know that the starters will be unnecessary, but I don’t tell them this because there is no way that I can easily explain how my body and the others surfaces that will burn have entered into a kind of material co-contamination which completely ensures ignition.


Smoke

The gel will burn without opaque fumes of any kind. There will be fumes, as nothing combusts at such a low temperature without releasing gasses and particles, but these will be invisible and appear to the cameras as nearly identical to the heat shimmer that would envelop me if the flames were hotter. No smoke, so they have had to prepare further contrivances. There are aluminium canisters attached to something like a large glue gun, with a trigger that can be locked in place so that you do not need to keep it depressed manually. They have four of these with them. The nozzle of the gun needs to be lit on fire with a lighter or a long match, and then the compressed gas or fluid in the canister can be fired through the flame to create thick, black, oily smoke. They can be placed such that my body will be visible to the safety technicians. I will be framed in petrol smoke as I burn. In an interior like this, these machines can be used for fifteen-ish seconds at most, before the entire visual field is completely obscured and shooting becomes impossible. There is the frame of smoke and the second frame of the rapidly unfolding opacity that the smoke introduces. A frame made from smoke for a body that burns cleanly: foregrounding of formal artifice. After each deployment, the smoke must be cleared mechanically with a series of enormous turbine fans that have been installed like sentinels across the far end of the room. I have heard rumours that the fans will serve another purpose, more directly relevant for the framing of my burning body—that as the smoke is released from its four static generators, the fans will be switched on to introduce storm winds into the scene, to blow that thick oily vapour across, through, and away from me, such that it will catch and snatch at my limbs; that my body will be placed within a chaos of fire, wind, and vapour. But I can’t speak to this. It would seem to go against the comparatively staid set work of the timber panelling and the corridor. I know nothing about staging and cannot speak to this formal process of decision-making.


Fans

The turbines are about two metres wide, black steel and wire, mounted on collapsible steel stands. There are six of them, enough to fully cover a whole wall of the set, but I know that they have infinite stores of these machines in other places in the complex. There is no upper limit to how many can be deployed if they think that they are needed. They produce a solid wall or sheet of air that pushes through everything in front of them and introduces a directionality into the scene. A second, imagist directionality, after the visual, ray-like, POV directionality produced by the movement of the cameras.


Lights

What can I say about lights. The lights are everywhere, pointed at everything, spreading their friendly, precise, clarity of illumination without discrimination. If the cameras and the movements of their professional manipulators are the ones that create the picture it is surely the lights that police their creation; the archons and the executors.


The lights are of every conceivable size, from tiny handheld point-machines, to the truly monstrous assemblages that require industrial machinery to move and power– that can light whole sections of the countryside brighter than noon. I have seen them squatting at the edges of the set, and I have heard stories of their operation—each use its own monumental logistical exercise. The largest and brightest are arrayed inside steel scaffold attached to automated crane systems and tracked crawlers that look like mining equipment. The directional facing is made up of thousands of individual bulbs, and when they are switched on, they can only be used for two hours at a time because the filaments burn hot enough to melt the crystal. After each use every single bulb must be replaced, at truly unimaginable expense, because the casings develop microstructures in use and are vulnerable to bursting and raining molten glass over everything beneath them. Nothing like that in here, but the ghost of an arbitrary scaling-up hangs over the smaller machines. There are heavy Par Cans, LED banks, diffusers, reflectors, lenses and mirrors, projectors and various lasers and other pointal systems. If there is a chaos of flame/smoke/wind, if these things form a volatile sort of screen, then their interactions and relations will be: held in soft diffusion; cut through by laser projection and hard blue-tones; added to by the introduction of images across its shifting surfaces (what would the smoke frame, what would the fire frame); reduced to unreadability by darkness. All at the option of professionals whose faces and expressions will be invisible to me from my supine position in the smoke and wind.


What can I say about lights. The material play that my body has entered into—I can relate to that series of dependencies, can even talk about it. I can offer it my vulnerability, even wrapped in steel and kevlar. But the lights are above me and around me and I can offer them nothing. It is better to say nothing about the lights.


The Scene

The scene is simple. I will be attached to an industrial winch by a series of anchor points on my torso harness, then lit on fire and dragged across the floor at high speed, before crashing into one of the panel walls. Then I will lie still and burn until the cameras have their take, and I am extinguished. I understand that the camera angle will be static and that my burning body will be introduced moving laterally across the scene—I will appear, moving at extreme high speed, and be stopped just before I exit on the other side of the frame.




THE FUTURE


They attach the winch cable to me with carabiners, then they retreat to the edges of the set and signal using their hands. All clear? I go through a quick series of checks: I check that nothing will wrench or twist my limbs, and especially my neck, while I am dragged across the floor; I check the integrity of the harness, and that the carabiners have been securely locked. If one comes loose, then my (mostly intuitive, derived from experience, impossible to outline properly in language) understanding of how my body will impact and drag will be thrown off, and I won’t be able to guarantee that the forces will distribute safely. I check in with myself as well. I want to make sure that nothing in this scenario has any punitive flavour, any stink of suicide, in whatever soft, cloudy, distributed way. I am fastidious with my checks. I examine my motivations, my material circumstances, the resources that I need to live, the money I am making– but also the human contact that I will make with the engineers throughout the working day, and when I signal all clear. The woman who will light me on fire smiles at me, and I can see that it is with genuine friendliness. There are many other people in my life who would smile at me with that same ease and generosity.


I will give them the all clear that they are waiting for (all of my checks are go), but first, I want to take a moment for just myself. I am the only one who can give the all clear, and they will just have to wait until I am satisfied with the circumstances.


I said before that the timber board maze carried within itself an equivalence and an arbitrariness. I want now to take advantage of that, of what it allows. In me I think that it allows a transposition into the future; or if not the future, then a future. A future for me.


What are its qualities? It is framed in smoke and chaos, but at its centre is a calm place where the thing that looks out from behind my eyes has its peace and has its primacy.


The light that falls on me in the future is soft, although it is tinted red by the smoke. My body there is tall and strong and proud. My eyes are kind. I am capable of reassuring people with just a look, with a smile.


I am in no trouble, there are no material needs that I cannot meet. Especially my body is free from stress and the wear of it. I am healthy again, and my freedom from contingency allows me to practice kindness from a position of serene detachment.


Alongside these feelings, there is a noise that I think also comes from the future. It is like thunder but loud and continuous, rolling like artillery, shaking the earth to pieces.


I can feel that sound reaching back in time towards me from the best future. The sound is how I know that the future is coming—the shaking of the earth, the skin-feeling of its unstoppable approach—how I know that the smoke and the red light and the tranquility are real, that they cannot be questioned or denied by anyone.


Is it finally time for me to give the all clear? Am I prepared for the terrible force of the harness? For the flames, and the moment when I hit the wall and have to lie there, burning, while the cameras take what they need, before the engineers can extinguish the inferno?


If I tell you that I can hear the image of the future, coming closer to us day by day, hour by hour, second by second, would you affirm it with me? Would you tell me that this image is also your image, and this peace your peace?


What I am asking you is this: can I trust you not to hurt me in the time that stretches out between me signalling to you with my hands—between the all clear—and that distant place that I have seen, where the light is soft and kind and the air rings with sounds like artillery, and where we will be able to rest?

The Old Capital - Other Military Forces

 

See here for part one, detailing the Warbodies, Pilots-in-Dreaming, and Exterminator Orbs. 

Angel's Egg, Mamoru Oshii, 1985. Had the privilege of seeing this classic in cinema the other day!

Expungers

Highly trained and expensively equipped light troops, recruited from the state schools after a series of exams, and centrally trained. The second elite force of the Old Capital, after the Pilots. In peacetime, the Expungers are the bodyguards to the magistrates and nobles - each worthy so honoured is allocated a single Expunger by the state, their 'shadow', and often a skilled and highly-educated advisor, companion, and fixer, in addition to their official duties. 

In wartime, when the nobles and magistrates don warbodies, the Expungers are gathered into loose, autonomous groups led by the most senior among them. They are very effective skirmishers, infiltrators, assassins, and elite light infantry. They were known for their laconicity, and were stereotyped in their time as patriotic, insular, arrogant, and untrusting of democratic processes.

HD2-4, depending on seniority. Expunger Sword, black-bladed light misericorde, iron buckler, light armour and Dreaming, movement: as ninja, disposition: varies, but generally professional, direct, practical, and xenophobic. 

Expungers make two attacks in melee. 

The Expunger Sword is a blade drawn from the soul of the one who wields it. When dormant, it looks like a plain, black iron sword hilt. Someone with the knowing to do so can use this focus to produce a whining, sputtering blade of white light from their chest - you place the hilt on your heart, and literally draw it out of yourself. When an Expunger does this, they take d6 damage, and their blade deals [HD]d6 radiant damage. A non-Expunger can be taught to use it, but will have to choose how many d6s of damage they suffer when they summon the blade, which will correspond to how many d6s of damage it deals. The blade is functionally a plasma cutter, and can be used to cut open doors, locks, etc. It is about 4ft long, and weightless apart from the iron handle. 

Dreaming: like the Pilots, something terrible was done the the Expungers before the Old Capital fell to its enemies. It is hard to focus on their faces, hard to remember them when they're not in the room. If you kill them they are dead and then not dead again, like in a bad dream. What this means is that when reduced to 0 hp, they come back to life after a turn with d6hp. If this happens twice (and thereafter), the Expunger will come back as an insane, screaming berserker who can no longer use its Expunger Sword. They will resurrect in perpetuity, but can be tied up, locked up, pushed into bottomless pits, have their limbs shattered, etc. 

Myrmidons, Handlers

The Myrmidons were the professional standing soldiery of the Old Capital. They were pale, taciturn men and women, known for their distinctive white ruffs and pennants, and heavy black iron armour and weaponry. Each Myrmidon goes to war with their Handlers, three or four lightly armed retainers who are often family members or close friends of the Myrmidon they serve. They carry and reload weapons, cook meals, see to wounds, and sometimes fight next to their charge. 

In field battles the Myrmidons fight in close order with heavy pikes, but they are trained in the use of many weapons, and often take up looser skirmishing formations on broken ground, or in the endless tunnels beneath the earth, accompanied by their Handlers. 

Myrmidon

HD1+1, medium sword, heavy pike, plate armour, movement: as human, disposition: professional soldier. 

Handler

HD1, light knife, d3 light darts or 1 bola, buckler, light armour, movement: as human, disposition: professional soldier, squire, weapon loader. 

A bola is a thrown weapon with a range of 20ft that deals no damage. It entangles a target that it hits, making movement, fighting, and other applicable actions impossible until a full turn is spent dealing with it - this is automatic with a knife, but requires an INT or STR check without. 

Each Myrmidon is accompanied by 2d2 Handlers, who accompany them everywhere. The handlers carry one of the following heavy weapons, which they maintain, clean, reload, and carry, and which is typically passed to the Myrmidon for use. This is by social custom - the Handlers know how to use these weapons just fine, and will do so with the full support of their Myrmidon if their lives are on the line. Each weapon comes with d6 shots of ammunition. 

Heavy Weapons

1. Cooker. A large, shoulder-mounted, black iron 'rifle', carried and fired like an RPG. Its barrel is packed down with salt, which is consumed in its firing operation. All targets in a 20ft, 90 degree cone take 2d6 radiant damage (CON save for half) - flesh blackens and armour melts under the invisible heat ray. The Cooker takes two turns (or one turn for two people) and an INV slot of salt to fire again. 
2. Pilum. A medium iron javelin with an explosive charge in the tip. Thrown as normal, and deals an additional d6 blast damage to everything within 15ft of the target, whether or not it hits. 
3. Noise Maker. Another shoulder-mounted 'rifle' design - this one incapacitates living targets with high pitched, directional sounds waves. For each 'shot' fired, everything that can hear inside at 20ft, 90 degree cone must save CON or be stunned and knocked prone for a turn. Each successive hit on the same target increases the duration of the stun by one. Sonic Aggressors and dogs automatically fail their saves. Noise Makers also use salt as their ammunition, in exactly the same way as Cookers.
4. Stitcher. A long spike of hardened steel attached to something like a rivet gun. Functionally a heavy spear that ignores armour - it hits against AC 10, unless the target AC is coming from something else. This weapon does not need to be reloaded, but only has charges equal to the ammunition roll, after which it is useless.
5. Illuminator. A high-powered searchlight on a rifle frame. Never runs out of fuel, but can be destroyed by breaking the mechanism. Can be used to blind and confuse people, or to light up huge underground spaces with ease. Anything caught in it who has not encountered something similar before will test morale. 
6. Chakram. Given to Myrmidon Captains with connections in the nobility - city nobles in Warbodies throw them using telepathy, but the Myrmidons do so by hand. A Chakram is a heavy vorpal thrown weapon with a range of 20ft. It is about two foot across, and hurled from over the head or shoulder with both hands, such that it flies vertically. They can damage entities and other incorporeal beings, and deal double damage to beings of Law and Chaos.

Retainer

A professional companion to a city noble. Retainers were courtesans, singers, dancers, and often lovers to their charges, and were expected to act as bodyguards as well. A single noble might have kept many Retainers, and vied to engage those who were famously beautiful or intelligent. 

HD1-2, a medium scimitar, a bow with 12 arrows, one of the exotic weapons from the table below, light armour and 100s in jewels and finery in current fashion. Movement: as human, disposition: professional who survives on their charisma. 

All Retainers have expertise in dancing, singing, playing instruments, conversation, lovemaking, and recitation. They have excellent memories, and can remember whole a book perfectly given a day or two. Retainers never work for free under any circumstances.

Exotic Weapons

1. Jewel Weapons. Worn in rings and necklaces. As two light weapons that will not be found on inspection. 
2. Poison Teeth. Sharpened dentures of mother-of-pearl, or semi precious stone. Hollow, with small injector mechanisms built in. Can be used as a bite attack that does 1 damage, and injects the target with a random poison. You need to remove your teeth to have one of these installed, and they can be filled with whatever you like. 
3. Ceramic Sword. As a +1 medium sword that shatters on a crit. 
4. Ceramic Pistol. A spring-loaded weapon that fires wicked steel flechettes. d8 damage, range 20ft, fires silently, take a turn to reload. The spring must be replaced after 2d2 shots. 
5. Second Face. A lead mask that shows the face of a magistrate passing judgement. The wearer cannot be affected by gaze attacks, and deals fear damage equal to all other damage. They can also head-butt people for d4 damage in place of a regular attack. 
6. Locket. A pendant with a painted portrait inside. The Retainer who wears it never tests morale, and must be killed twice - the first time doesn't stick. 

Centipedes

So called because they burrow into the earth, and kill what they find there. The Centipedes were strange, tall, long-limbed men and women with paper-white skin, black, dead eyes, and unnervingly large mouths. They were grown in batches, and sent down into the underworld to fight until they were slain. Centipedes cannot speak, do not feel pain, do not appear to have desires or drives, and are totally loyal to their handlers. 

HD4, heavy black iron cleaver and brutality, 3 firebombs, heavy iron armour, movement: as monkey on all fours, as ambulatory scarecrow when upright, disposition: a thing that knows it's a thing. 

Centipedes take -1 physical damage from all attacks, and never test morale. 

Brutality: a Centipede can choose to attack twice with its cleaver, or once per enemy in melee range, whichever is higher. 

A Centipede can unhinge its jaws to swallow equipment and keep it safe in a storage bladder inside its body. They have 5 INV slots of room inside this space, and the items can be retrieved again by cutting open their corpse. A living human can be carried in this space (taking up the whole 5 INV), and will be uncomfortable and probably traumatised, but safe, for the duration. While carrying a living being, a Centipede must keep its mouth wide open to allow for air flow. The Centipede can regurgitate the contents of its storage bladder at any time. 

Beautiful Companion - Continued

More fiction in progress, continuing from here. I don't know what this is yet, but I am enjoying working through it. 

-

Ella Makes a Decision




In her room on the other side of the house Ella is awake and choosing what she wants to wear. Yesterday she was travelling, and dressed in anonymous, comfortable grey cotton, but today the others are arriving and they will be spending time together that night; actually this is the first real night of the trip, so she takes the time to think about how she wants to look and be seen by her friends. She generally approaches this question with an all-or-nothing attitude, and when she decides to take it on seriously she finds the whole thing intensely pleasurable.

She has bought with her: a mid-length dress made from pale chiffon, with thin straps that nicely frame her collarbones; a plain set of linen shorts and a matching top, light-coloured; a beautiful, wool-blend, box-cut jacket, with raglan stitching and pearls sewn in along the piping—the fabric of the jacket is mostly off-white, but offset throughout with thin red and blue threads, so that its colour shifts very slightly under changes of light. With this more elaborate piece she would wear less jewellery, perhaps only a matching set of pearls at her ears. No makeup. She also has a few sets of basics, cotton-synthetic sweatpants and tops, which go with anything, and which can be brought out as necessary. Today she will wear the dress. She considers layering the jacket on top, but decides that this is excessive, and that anyway it is much too hot. Since the dress is quite muted, she selects some jewellery to go with it. She chooses a short necklace that will nicely frame her collarbones, a chain of worked, flat silver sections, tarnished black in the deeper details but with its surfaces brightly polished. Then she puts on the earrings that go with it; small, silver rosebuds with the same tarnishing and polish, and the same hue of silver. Hair and makeup: her hair is dark brown, cut mid-length, she uses to clips at her temples to keep it off her ears so that it frames her face. Makeup understated, barely visible, the softest pink at the eyes. All of this sounds casual, and it is casual really, but it takes her almost an hour because she is having fun with it. She does not remember her nightmares from the previous night at all.

We have mentioned two pairs of earrings—the pearls and the rose buds—and one of her necklaces, the silver plateresque chain. In her bag Ella also has a very short necklace of pearls, nearly a choker, with a silver clasp, and a third set in gold, a thin chain without a pendant and two small hoops.

When she is done she heads out to the kitchen, sees Michael, and suggests that they make a concerted effort to locate the nearest supermarket—they walk up together, to a the complex that services this part of the town, and buy bread, cheese, fruit and vegetables, oil, coffee, and also paper towels, toothpaste, toilet paper, all the other necessities. They buy enough for seven of them, for at least a couple of days, and Michael makes a point to buy ingredients for that night’s dinner, when everyone will be together in the house for the first time. He asks Ella if she likes pasta and she says of course, who doesn’t like pasta? So they also buy expensive sausages, onions and garlic, ripe tomatoes, basil, roquette, and vinegar for a salad. They buy six litres of water and another six litres of sparkling water, and they buy four bottles of wine and a case of beer. Then they realise that they won’t be able to carry the whole lot back with them so they enter into a halting and mostly charades-based conversation with the cashier, trying to indicate that they will leave half of the shopping behind the counter and then return for it in fifteen minutes. The cashier shakes their head firmly, with an inscrutable expression. Take it with you, they say, in accented english. They look angry, for no reason that Ella or Michael can immediately understand. Before they can launch into another explanation of their situation, a second worker in the store, possibly a superior, tells them that it’s fine for them to leave it. The original cashier is absolutely stone-faced, and says nothing, won’t even look at them. Michael almost tries to address them directly in a conciliatory way but Ella stops this by grabbing at his shoulder, and they exit the store, confused, with half of their purchases in bags. The day is getting hotter. They walk back to the house together in a strange, disaffected silence, and when they get in they pack everything in its correct place, either in the fridge, or into likely-seeming cupboards. As she does this Ella says, almost to herself, that spending this amount of money on a place to stay should entitle you to at least some olive oil and some coffee, some salt. The kitchen is nearly suspiciously bare, like whoever owns the house actually cleaned out the essentials before they arrived, for reasons best known to themselves, almost certainly miserliness. When they are done they walk back up along the road to collect the rest. The air buzzes with heat, and they are now both sunk into their own distinct foul mood. Michael rallies a bit and tries to break them both out of it; he asks Ella about the story she is writing, how far along is she? What does she think the work still needs? But when she tries to answer Ella remembers her nightmares, and the conversation they had the night before, beneath the stars and the slowly tracking satellites, and finds that she can’t talk about it without slipping into a savage, almost deranged, anger of her own. She starts by saying that what the work needs is a programme, a procedure. That what it has now is characters and a plot, but that it has no structure that comes from itself. ‘Does that make sense? It has to suggest its own structure, it needs to develop this on its own terms; experimentation kills this. Everyone wants to experiment with form, but experimentation for its own sake is useless, actually worse than useless.’ Then she sees his face and immediately apologises and starts trying to explain that it’s not him that makes her angry, that she has a lot going on at the moment. Michael’s expression is placid as the Archangel. He could be carved from stone. He is polite and understanding; he even apologises to her for asking. Ella wants to scream, or to hit him, which is totally unlike her. She says ‘It’s totally unlike me to get angry like this for no reason at all. I’m really so sorry. It’s good to see you. And I’m sorry about last night, I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable.’ His composure cracks a bit, and he says that it’s fine, and that he understands what she means about structure coming from the work itself, growing out of its complex web of decisions and images. That this is actually exactly the kind of thing he looks for in fiction in his job as an editor. You can always tell when you’re reading a piece of writing when the writer is letting the work suggest things to them. Ella nods and they lapse into silence. They are now back at the store, standing out the front, and, since neither has anything more to say, they enter and collect the rest of their shopping, making sure to thank the cashier in their effusive, gestural way, for looking after it all.

The walk back is free from the influence of all of this strange energy and striving, which, when she looks at it from this calmer position in the future, which of course is now the present, Ella imagines must have come down on top of her from somewhere far up in orbit. She imagines the spectre of it floating up in the frozen air, like a heat haze, or like an invisible angel made from glass, outside the belts of terrestrial atmosphere, waiting to ambush her on her morning grocery run. She had no control over it at all—about this she is very clear. She asks Michael if he knows much about satellite weapons, which makes him laugh, and he says that he knows about them only in reference to science fiction stories; that when he hears ‘satellite weapon’ he thinks of the final scene in the film (or the first scenes, if it’s that kind of story), of beams of light that reduce skyscrapers to ash, or that kill things too large and durable to be dispatched with more conventional attacks. Ella says that there have been various plans from various states at various times to launch payloads up into orbit on satellites, mostly missiles and kinetic weapons, not beams. She tells him about tungsten rods, each about the size of a telephone pole, which she explains are massy enough that when you drop them from orbit they impart energy equivalent to a small nuclear bomb. Michael nods as she speaks. He is watching the sea behind her head. ‘You can get five or six of these rods on a satellite, and once you have enough of them up there, something like fifteen thousand, you always have ordinance in position over any arbitrary strike point, so you can drop one on any point on the planet immediately.’ He is still nodding, and they spend the rest of the walk back this way, her explaining, and him nodding along in good humour and letting her speak, watching the sea, watching the sky, letting his own thoughts out and up, into the bright and friendly sunshine.

When they get back, they see immediately that the others have arrived.

The Guests Arrive, Continued




The taxi is still in the driveway, and Caitlin is unloading suitcases from the back and talking to the driver, asking him if he takes payment by card. They wave as they approach and she waves back, smiling broadly. Caitlin is short, with thick glasses and huge quantities of thick hair that she ties behind her head and which, seen from the front, looks like a strange sort of halo. She pays the taxi and gives Ella and Michael a kiss each. Ella notices that there is still only one car in the driveway, and asks whether anyone has heard from Parvel yet, and Caitlin says that they haven’t, or at least she hasn’t, and that she guesses he must be getting in later that night. Then she says ‘I like your dress,’ which makes Ella smile. The strange Ella/Michael mood has almost entirely dissipated with the addition of a third party. Michael hugs Caitlin and says that Ella has been telling him about satellite weapons which makes her grin widely and ask which ones. Ella doesn’t quite blush when she says ‘tungsten rods’, but she does search the older woman’s face for something as she says it, possibly some sort of psychic assurance that she is not being made fun of.

‘Ah, yes,’ says Caitlin. ‘The classic.’

Inside, Sally and Simone are unpacking their own bags of shopping into the now extremely well-stocked fridge and cupboards, and Beth is standing by the sink with a glass of water, chatting, staying out of the way. When they see Michael and Ella walking in with even more bags of groceries all three of them start giggling. Sally says that they should have been in better contact about what the plan was tonight, but that at least now they have options. He makes a big show of not knowing where to put everything. Then he asks them if they have heard from Parvel and they say that they haven’t. Maybe he’s getting in later tonight? Everyone nods.

Once everything has been packed away the six friends head to the back garden to walk around and admire it, and then to sit beneath the canopy and catch up, talking about work, about projects, about love and desire and dating, about books, about films, about ideas, and about the state of the world, which they all agree is terrible and getting rapidly worse.

Sally is comfortably in his element. He is a tall man, dressed casually in a way that flatters his face and proportions. He knows how to do this, and how to be in his element, and has a lot of practice with both. He voice is loud and friendly. When he speaks he sounds like he is smiling. He is very careful not to speak over people, and sometimes gets excited and ruins this carefulness in his excitement. During gatherings with friends he will occasionally stop talking entirely (only if he feels that he has said his piece) and simply watch the others, content, free to reengage at any time, but happy for now to hold back. At the moment he is talking with Michael about magazine work, about what the ambitions are for the next few years in terms of the type of fiction it would like to publish, and Michael is explaining that his own position on this is different from the other staff—that because of this he is considering looking for somewhere else to work. He says that what he wants more than anything is for the magazine is to develop a taste that is recognisable but not predictable, and that their ideal reader might learn to trust and appreciate. This reader is not anyone in particular, it is the perfect reader of history. He would like to found this process in the development and promotion of a stable of writers whose trust he would earn over time, in the steady championing of their work, in its insulation from trends and other useless garbage. His is rueful: his colleagues are, apparently, only superficially supportive. Sally tells Michael that he has always respected his editorial taste. Sally is a painter, apparently a successful one, since he does not have other work that anyone here knows about. He has shows now and then, and pays rent, and, by extrapolation, must sell paintings.

Simone is Sally’s partner, and also a painter. In some ways she is like him: tall and confident, at ease in the company of her friends. She is always smiling. In other ways she is very different. She has cropped blonde hair and large, intense blue eyes. When you get close to her she smells of sweat. She gives, generally, the impression of being in less than full control of what she says—not because she is impulsive or stupid, but because she has practiced a nearly automatic process of thinking and expressing her thoughts, and has worked to make the lag between these two things essentially non-existent, with the result that she occasionally says things that upset people badly, but that she will also usually immediately and sincerely apologise for upsetting them, and explain what particular thought or chain of associations she was following to arrive at the offending position. Nothing in this chain is ever mean-spirited or bullying. She will assert a position, examine it after pushback, find it untenable, and then reject it, without this process causing any disturbance or tearing in her ego or internal processes. Because of this she is blunt and crude, and abrupt, but also very graceful. She does sell paintings, not in the sort-of-assumed way that Sally does; she has shows and sells paintings often in the city, loudly and visibly, for good money. She occasionally watches the people around her like a cannibal might. What does this mean? You know what it means. You know what that face looks like; its curiosity and its subtle calculation. It is not immediately clear what exactly she would devour, metabolise, and shit out again; probably not the body, but the body is also a possibility. She gets along very well with everyone, even when she offends them. She is much bigger up close than you expect her to be, and the smells of her body are more intense—you don’t notice the sweat-smell at all until you are right next to her, and then it is overwhelming.

Beth is a slight woman, and a quiet woman. Most of the time she seems serene and imperturbable. If you didn't know her you might think that she was tired; she has eyes are full of a strange, great fatigue, and also a great deal of humour and discretion. In fact she is probably the person here most capable of sustained, high-energy work. She is the only one of the friends who did not study art; she works in logistics, in shipping, procurement, transportation, and sometimes in production, operations management, roles like this. She is used to directing teams of employees. She is actually, right this moment, at a strange tipping point in her career—for nearly two decades she has been making a good salary, and, after putting in this time, and being good at her work, she is on the cusp of making much, much larger amounts of money. Her friends are only vaguely aware of this, and also only vaguely aware of what she actually does day-to-day—Caitlin is the only one with an applicable frame of reference for her job, but Caitlin and Beth sometimes have trouble relating to one another; troubling finding anything to say, Beth with a sort of beatific retreat or surrender into comfortable silence, and Caitlin with a good deal of frustration. Beth is neatly dressed; mostly in vaguely-professional black designer clothing, but with accents that work to signal her taste excessive to this persona (a necklace of cowrie shells)—her capacity to inhabit it without issue, and also to move beyond it whenever she wants. She has had many discreet surgeries—quite a few of the friends have actually, but she has had the most—without thinking much about it. By instinct she has avoided having work done on her eyes, which keeps her strange, infinite fatigue, which, it has to be stressed, has nothing to do with her work, which might actually lessen it. It is charming and disarming. Beth is a notably beautiful woman.

This is everyone, except for Parvel. Parvel the pornographer, the landlord. But Parvel isn’t here yet, so we will defer description to the appropriate time.

They are all seated. There is no food yet, but the light is bright and clear and the wind is sweet-smelling. It cools them, and the smell of it calms the nervous system. The atmosphere on sunlight island is so clear that any of them could look down the garden, along its structuring architectures, and see the ocean, the city, the buildings and signage and boardwalks traced out in crisp and perfect definition— small, difficult to make out, but no haze or distortion at all—or, with equal ease, look back upwards towards the black stone peak of the volcano behind the house, and see it the same way: crisp and perfect, framed in vivid and endless cornflower blue, its every detail traced as with the blade of a stylus.

Caitlin, who has seated herself next to Ella, tells her that tungsten kinetic weapons on satellites were never seriously pursued for cost reasons. It’s very expensive to put things into orbit, especially at the kind of scale imagined by the people that thought it up, who were actually science fiction writers. The benefits compared to a straightforward missile launch exist, but are minimal. Ella does blush then, and says that she is of course no specialist, and Caitlin laughs. She says that the more seriously pursued model is a sort of sheaf or beehive of hundreds of thousands of heavy, cheap projectiles made from lead or depleted uranium, each about twenty centimetres long. They are kept in ‘nest’ pods on the satellite, and fitted with a cheap and extremely rudimentary guidance system. They don’t destroy bunkers and cities, they are designed to kill a single person in a crowd—actually the satellites are designed to talk to intelligence analysis and targeting systems, to acquire and track specific people, and then to ensure that one of these projectiles is above them at all times, waiting for a kill order. You can give the system as many targets as you want, and it will work to make sure that all of them are ‘covered’ this way. They won’t go through concrete, but they will certainly go through the roof of a house or a car. ‘How horrible,’ says Ella, and Caitlin nods absently.

Then she asks how the book is going, and Ella says not very well actually, that progress has stalled. But that this always happens at some point, it’s to be expected. Her usual pattern is to work in long, sustained bursts of inspiration when everything is easy, and then struggle through fallow periods where she goes back and edits what’s already there, or just works on something else, or, occasionally, loses herself to despair. These periods can last for months sometimes, which of course is torturous. Caitlin asks what the issue is, why things have stalled, and Ella considers getting into it the way she did with Michael earlier that morning, talking about structure and formal experimentation, but instead finds herself saying ‘Sometimes I just can’t think at all. Sometimes I’m not capable of forming a single coherent thought, or even of arriving at a feeling or an emotion that is clearly anything. I feel like a doll, or like a corpse.’ Caitlin says that yes, she gets that way too every now and then, and then she smiles and says ‘But I wouldn’t have thought to express it in those terms, I wouldn’t have thought to say “corpse.”’ Ella checks the other woman’s face again and decides (courageously, in her own estimation) that she doesn’t believe her, though she doesn’t say this.

In Ella’s febrile and notably imagist imagination Caitlin is a type of avatar, nearly inhuman, and her face is a cypher for closeness to and the exercise of power. She has abilities and capacities that are nearly supernatural: she can borrow large sums of money as she needs it, and can organise loans like this for others; she can keep control of conversations with anyone-whoever; she can intimidate people if she wants to, she is impossible to bully. Her relationship to cruelty, violence, and brutality is that of a professional; her response to it can be modulated as necessary and appropriate. It is as though she can choose the distance from which she is affected. Nothing in her can be induced. Ella has told Caitlin all of this before, and when she did Caitlin laughed and said that she learned all of it in art school, at the same time as she learned how to paint, and how to talk about painting with collectors and curators, about how to place that practice and its production inside the great, glittering arcs of dispersal and transmission and mutual infection that properly frame it. Her later forays into professional life and consulting were built on that foundational education, which, she feels, was significantly concerned with power and its operation.

Ella imagines her friend as a soldier, a spy, a hitwoman, a trench raider and tunnel fighter; sees her engaged in lonely missions and contracts that are invisible to other people. Caitlin looks this way even in Ella’s memories of her as a much younger woman, during their degree, when they were all so much less capable of sober self-awareness, or any sophisticated understanding of cause and effect. Loneliness is a key component in this image, or perhaps alone-ness. So are detachment and humour—humour that is soft, self-deprecating, and self-directed.

There is something incomplete in this mental portrait of her friend, and Ella is aware of this. She is not sure if it is because she herself cannot see something important, maybe owing to lack of subtlety, or if Caitlin has decided to amputate or obscure something of herself; to make herself incomplete. She sees a reflection of a woman in a mirror, in a room growing darker as the light fades at the end of the day. The face is turned away from her. And she sees the back of a distant figure at the end of a long, long corridor, walking away from her and ignoring her calls (or perhaps unable to hear them), moving unstoppably into the future. She asks how work is going, and Caitlin grins and says that it is very busy, and a little depressing, but that this is nothing new.

Bard? Fool?

Youth is the semblance of strength, love is the semblance of peace. Neither youth nor strength nor love nor peace can be granted to me [...] nor can I accept such a gift.

-2666, Roberto Bolaño

Skills: none. 

Gear: an instrument that's easy to pick up and noodle around on: a harmonica, a tin whistle, a guitar, etc. 

Unlike most classes, you lose access to old templates as you get each new one.  

A: You play well enough that nearly everyone likes it, which means that nearly everyone likes you. No mechanical effect. 

You cannot be trapped or restrained against your will - cuffs come loose, binding ropes slacken, prison doors swing open. If you wish to leave, you may always do so. This doesn't stop people from killing or maiming you. 

You roll on the Death and Dismemberment table with advantage. 

B: You roll on the Death and Dismemberment table with advantage. 

When you have the time and focus to play properly for someone (you can do this over lunch, before sleep in camp, etc.), you can double the effects of any healing of any kind that they receive from a rest. Your playing can also guarantee a good night's sleep, which overrides spells, curses, and other effects that might prevent this. 

If you look directly into someone's eyes as you speak with them, they will find that they cannot knowingly tell a lie. Your mind cannot be read by sorcery, nor can you be scried on, located, or otherwise sensed using magic. You gain +1 to-hit with swords, the weapons of kings. 

C: If you look directly into someone's eyes as you speak with them, they will find that they cannot knowingly tell a lie. Your mind cannot be read by sorcery, nor can you be scried on, located, or otherwise sensed using magic. You gain +1 to-hit with swords, the weapons of kings. 

Your playing is now greatly famed. You can show people the truth of themselves as you see it - mechanically this means that you can redistribute HD between the members of an audience that you play for. You can add or subtract a maximum of [templates] HD to each individual creature this way, and any changes that you make last until midnight. The tyrant king is a fool and a coward, his champions are oafs, the good man is a giant, a paragon. You can shift these HD to yourself if you wish to. No one listening knows that it is you doing this, but they can feel themselves growing or shrinking. 

You know the secret names of things, which means that you can learn spells like a Magic User - though initially you have none of your own - and gain a single MD. If you give a sword its first name it becomes your ally, and counts as a +1 sword that gives you an extra attack when you wield it. 

D: If you look directly into someone's eyes as you speak with them, they will find that they cannot knowingly tell a lie. Your mind cannot be read by sorcery, nor can you be scried on, located, or otherwise sensed using magic. You gain +1 to-hit with swords, the weapons of kings. 

Your playing is now greatly famed. You can show people the truth of themselves as you see it - mechanically this means that you can redistribute HD between the members of an audience that you play for. You can add or subtract a maximum of [templates] HD to each individual creature this way, and any changes that you make last until midnight. The tyrant king is a fool and a coward, his champions are oafs, the good man is a giant, a paragon. You can shift these HD to yourself if you wish to. No one listening knows that it is you doing this, but they can feel themselves growing or shrinking. 

You know the secret names of things, which means that you can learn spells like a Magic User - though initially you have none of your own - and gain a single MD. If you give a sword its first name it becomes your ally, and counts as a +1 sword that gives you an extra attack when you wield it. 

You may now redistribute MD by stealing them from other Magic Users, in precisely the same way that you can redistribute HD. If you slay the Magic User so affected before midnight, the reallocation is permanent. You may still only invest a maximum of [templates] MD this way, which means that your personal MD cap at 5. 

Choose only one of the following:

• You learn the spells Wish, Power Word: Kill, and Geas, taught to you by the Powers you hold court with. You will not die except by violence or poison. Any who know your name can blind, silence, and bind you with it. 
• You play well enough that nearly everyone likes it, which means that nearly everyone likes you. No mechanical effect. Whenever you wish, you may give up your D template and regain your A Template. 

Paladin? Fool?

With a host of furious fancies,

Whereof I am commander,

With a burning spear

And a horse of air

To the wilderness I wander.

By a knight of ghosts and shadows

I summoned am to Tourney;

Ten leagues beyond

The wide world's end:

Methinks it is no journey.

-Tom o' Bedlam, anonymous

Gear: none

Skills: none

A: You may choose to attack thrice in melee, instead of once, at the cost of a point of fatigue. You have no weapons proficiencies. You can attack (and are sometimes attacked by) your own ideas, illusions, fancies, and phantasms - your attacks against these foes count as unarmed, unless you discover some means by which to arm your mind. 

You can choose one of the the following wagers to make per turn, while engaged in mortal combat (that is, against dangerous enemies who can fight back):

• At least one of my attacks will hit this turn. If it does, you gain +1 to-hit for the rest of the combat, which stacks if you make this wager more than once. If it doesn't you lose all stacks, and cannot make this wager again until you slay an enemy. 
• At least two of my attacks will hit this turn. If they do, you don't gain a point of fatigue, and gain +1 damage on your attacks. If they don't, you take a point of damage and two fatigue instead of one. 
• At least three of my attacks will hit this turn. If they do, you clear a point of fatigue instead of gaining one, and your attacks gain +1 damage and count as vorpal. If they don't, you take d4 damage, and three points of fatigue. 

If you ever gain truesight, or any other ability to see through illusions, you immediately lose, and can never regain, all templates in this class. 

B: You make always choose to re roll a missed melee attack, at the cost of taking an attack from every enemy in melee range. Enemy attacks are resolved first. 

You can choose one of the the following wagers to make per turn, in addition to one of those allowed by your A template, while engaged in mortal combat:

• I will kill a foe this turn. If you do, your next attack hits automatically (roll anyway, just in case it crits). If you don't, the next time you take damage it counts as critical. 
• I will kill three foes this turn. If you do, you clear all fatigue, and heal d6 hp. If you don't, you take d6 damage and double your current fatigue. 

C: At any time, you may sacrifice a point of max HP to:

• Turn a miss into a hit in melee combat.
• Turn a hit into a crit in melee combat. 
• Imbue a hardwood stick, fire poker, set of rusty shears, etc., with the properties of a +1 medium sword while you hold it. 
• Imbue a pot lid, window cover, etc. with the properties of a +1 shield while you carry it. 
• Imbue a theatrical costume, fool's motley, or beggar's robes with the protective properties (but not the weight or bulk) of medium armour while you wear them. 
• Heal d6 hp. 

Additionally you may now befriend your own ideas, illusions, fancies, and phantasms. Depending on their natures, they might choose to join you as companions on your travels. 

For every day that you go without rations or rest, you receive +1 to-hit and +1 to damage in melee - you still suffer the usual effects of starvation and sleep deprivation. 

D: You may always choose to make another melee attack in combat, as many times as you want, at the cost of taking an attack from every enemy in melee range. Enemy attacks are resolved first. 

You may make the following wager while engaged in mortal combat, in addition to any others allowed by your other templates:

• I will end the combat this turn by killing (or scaring off, befriending, seducing, etc.) all remaining enemies. If you do, gain 1 max hp. If you don't, gain a point of fatigue and lose a point of max hp. 

If you ever slay a giant, dragon, ogre, tyrant, or royal family entirely by yourself, you immediately gain d3 max hp.


Δ: Lie with a fairy or an illusionist, and gain their love. Break their heart. Whenever you slay something in combat all remaining foes must test morale. If you are in direct sunlight when you do so, you also heal 1hp.