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PLANET: A Survivalist’s Guide (19 of N)

Day Twenty-three, midday. Two days underground, by my estimate, and already I crave the sun on my face, and to walk once more in the fungus gardens of Planet’s surface. At least here and now there are no more spiders, though our dark work will demand the death of a great many eight-legged beasts before we finish the task.

In the chambers beyond the dark temple we witnessed sights strange indeed; down the lefty passage a hall – like the temple, neither natural nor properly artifical – where fungal growths had been twisted by some dark and unnatural magic into miniature mockeries of the Monolith. Within the chamber, a strange creature, all ooze and tentacles whipping, we found stuck to the ceiling. Gravity in this chamber was afflicted by queasy confusion as well; the walls and ceiling were as second floors, which at least enabled my comrades to close with the strange entity and hack it to bits.

Down the rightward passage, more unnatural “creatures” of the Far Realm – I will not bore with the details, as I am given to think that every Far Realm encounter must needs be unique, and the information would not be helpful to you who come after. But beyond them, in a high place, we encountered the Illithid, who greeted us by name (a parlor-trick for a mentalist such as it to pluck that information from our minds) and told us this tale.

The Illthid’s Tale

Eons ago, in a place which has no width, length, or breadth, where time is nothing, the Illithid and its mistress-master YRL dwelled, until some mighty cataclysm (the details of which the Illithid declined to explicate) thrust YRL from YRL’s spaceless space and into the crust of Planet, crippling or slaying it in the process.

Alone of YRL’s unnumbered servitors the Illithid survived this transition, and alone of YRL’s likewise unnumbered enemies survived a single spider of unknowable pedigree. This Queen of Spiders (I do not think she is any relation to the dead goddess of that epithet) birthed and continues to birth a tremendous progeny, that veritable ocean of tiny spiders and larger ones too, which forever gnaw at senescent YRL. These spiders feed on YRL, and the waves of psychic pain that emanate from YRL’s center have resulted in that perversion of Planet’s natural ecosystem that we call the Country of Spiders.

The Illithid believes that if the Queen of Spiders is slain, YRL will regenerate sufficient of YRL’s power to leave Planet. This would end the psychic emanations, leading one might suppose to the end of the Country of Spiders and of the illness that afflicts the leaders and central minds of the various colonies – the sleeping-sickness that took Zharroun, Yang’s megalomania, and the monomania which Irina asserted afflicted Zakharov (which, presumably, he shrugged off as Morgan usurped his authority and the psychic assaults began to target that villain instead).

This is the root cause of the disease: the great fungal superorganism on whose surface we walk stirs, and grows quiescent, and reaches out with a diffuse and massive mind, an inhuman and potentially divine intelligence, or potential intelligence. It grows new senses for the purpose of communicating, and with YRL’s splinter in its side, what it communicates is pain and anguish. Can a planet be said to have achieved sentience? The splinter causes it pain, but what is the pain of Planet compared to the pain I feel?

For millennia, the Illithid has attempted to free YRL from the Queen of Spiders. It is too puny to directly assault her alone, and on Planet it can open only small and transient gates to the Far Realm, pulling through amorphous mindless drone-creatures like those it tested us with. It waited and watched as the shadar-kai came, but they never pressed beyond the bordermarches of the Country of Spiders, and it waited and hoped while the New Hoplites explored the spider-infested forests. It claims sufficient precognition to know that we and we alone are the best, last hope for the Illithid and its master-mistress; it flatters us with praise and phrases plucked from our memories.

We have conferred, and agreed that the death of the Queen of Spiders is a laudable goal. Loathe though we are to trust the forecasts of a clear scoundrel such as this Illithid, its tale answers many of our questions. Our greatest fear is that YRL, freed of the Queen of Spiders, will either depart for the Far Realm with us still “inside,” or that YRL will take the opportunity to regain YRL’s full powers and assault the Planetmind, burn Valley to ashes, destroy all that we hope for and love simply because YRL can.

Is this a risk we can afford to take? The Illithid offers a demonstration of the immediate relevance of the task, proof that YRL is damaging the Planet’s quasi-intelligence. We will partake of this proof, and consider.

Posted in Fiction, Gaming, SMAC.

PLANET: A Survivalist’s Guide (18 of N)

Day Twenty-two, midday. My previous entry was cut off when I received an unnecessary sending from Luba which distracted me, and when I had resolved her request for reassurance felt it appropriate to nap. Now I have a scant few minutes before we press on. When we reached the bottom of the spider tunnel, we hoped to find a passage to the surface of the Living Ocean, or perhaps the dying god beneath its roiling “waters.” Instead, we discovered a seeming dead end; the large tunnel split off into myriad tiny cracks and holes big enough for my hand, or a spider. Grog and Throg hefted their hammers and prepared to mine their way through to the Living Ocean, but the cave floor beneath us opened up, and we plummeted down into darkness and a strange vault, where peculiar apparitions assaulted us. One seemed to be Santiaggro, but of course was not. Another had the appearance of one of Yang’s mutated sibeccai drones… these monsters from the id attacked our wills, and nearly killed us.

This vault is in the shape of a spider, with eight passages that loop around like legs. In the center is a pool of some strange purple-red liquid, which we have prudently avoided, and in a direction which we suspect corresponds to towards the dying god beneath the Living Ocean, a wide passage proceeds. The whole affair is lit by phosphorescent fungus.

Now, I am not a credulous man. I accept that the gods are dead, and I know that surely no humanoid hand shaped this spider temple; even if the shadar-kai ventured here (I remain unconvinced) . Was it formed as a side-effect of the emanations that spew out from the dying god and poison Planet?

Posted in Fiction, Gaming, SMAC.

PLANET: A Survivalist’s Guide (17 of N)

Day Twenty-one, evening. I curse all spiders and all spider-women with a mighty curse! These tunnels press in on us from all sides, and when I close my eyes I dream of home, hot showers, and F——’s bed. We crouch in a narrow cleft off the main tunnel, which spirals down from the surface to a point surely not far above or below the surface of the Living Ocean, and supplies ingress to the unholy chambers beyond. The stink of Luba’s repellent oils wafts off of Grog, and keeps the spiders at bay, yes, but also any joy or peace; I feel a mighty and insensate dread.

Let me back up. We headed southwest through the forest to the center of the Country of Spiders, to that strange vast canyon full of roiling black spiders we call the Living Ocean. Briefly we considered climbing down the thousand feet or so of clifface there directly, and trusting to the spider-repellent to clear us a path on the dying god’s skin, but this we all agreed was a reckless notion. Instead we began to circumnavigate the Ocean, staying within sight of the cliff-edge, seeking some landmark or easy way down.

It has crossed our minds that perhaps the shadar-kai Planet Cult does not fear and hate the dying god (as we would like to believe) but rather worship it directly as an avatar of Planet in their wrong and twisted theology. Further, our intelligence from Dhraz the prisoner included a vague reference to a Cult “brood pit” north of the Living Ocean, where perhaps they tame the mind-worms. We have operated under the assumption this brood-pit is a structure to the north of the Country of Spiders, somewhere in the fungal waste south of the mountains and New Hope, but it is not impossible that we will discover some vast shadar-kai fortress perched on the edge of the Living Ocean itself.

In our transit we saw no such thing. After a few hours of hard hiking (someday soon I must learn the ritual of phantom steeds to ease our way), we sighted a cleft in the cliffside, perhaps another ile ahead of us, visible as the canyon wall turns from west to southwest. Far more important to this narrative however, a veritable sea of spiders swarmed out of an inconspicuous hole in the ground and nearly consumed us all! Grog managed to save himself only by applying one of the four doses of Luba’s repellent. We blocked the tunnel entrance with alchemical fire, and I scorched the remaining spiders on the surface, but again we were left panting and sore.

With Grog’s repellent applied, however, we felt we had no time to waste recuperating, and, bidding Luba and Binch wait our return, we stuck close together and plunged into the depths. We ventured down slowly and carefully, and to our relief the repellent did its job: the spiders that covered every surface parted around us like waves around a breaker. In the shadowy light of my dark light we ventured on and down. I believe that the tunnel is a fortuitous geological formation, a natural cavern worked by flowing water, which likely predates the Living Ocean and the blight on Planet’s surface. At times we had to crawl, at times we used our ropes to work our way down twenty or thirty foot sheer drops. It was during one such tense moment that we all heard Luba, shouting from above and behind us.

Reluctantly we backtracked, and found her and Binch huddled together among the spiders, in the lee of her relic amulet. Apparently she had received a sending from a New Hoplite mercenary of her acquaintance, a dangerous man named Harper. Harper claimed that he had news, that Irina had been kidnapped (!) and that he was on his way to the spider cave (!) to meet us and escort us on a rescue mission.

Naturally we saw through this obvious trap. When Harper cast another sending on Rhogash, he suggested that the mercenary and his comrades descend into the spider tunnel to meet us – at which point we would ambush them, Valley style. Instead we received another sending from a new source, perhaps Morgan himself and perhaps one of his followers, indicating that he knew our mission and would be eager to bribe us into turning over any godsblood we obtained to him.

The petty machinations of the decadent New Hoplites bored us, and we disregarded their attempts at subtrefuge, choosing instead to simply press on down the tunnel. Luba and Binch we warned of Harper’s probable treachery, and set back towards the surface.

Finally at the bottom of the tunnel, where now we sit, we found a

Posted in Fiction, Gaming, SMAC.

PLANET: A Survivalist’s Guide (16 of N)

Day Twenty-one, midday. Early yesterday morning we set out for the Country of Spiders: Throg, Grog, Rhogash, myself, eager Luba, and her servant the dwarf Binch. Among the general hubub, the New Hoplites scarce noticed our departure, which I take to be a positive sign. Most of the privateers seeking Zakharov’s reward were loading themselves down with fungicidal pastilles, which implies that only we are on the right track. Our purchase of 2 000 feet of rope went unremarked upon; so much the better (and here is a time when the massive physical strength of Grog, Throg, and Rhogash too cannot be discounted). Yesterday, and much of today, was filled with hiking the fifteen miles or so south through the fungal wastes, and then another five miles across the perimeter, that region around the Country of Spiders where the fungus will not grow.

Once in the forest, we surveyed the region for signs of the Hard-ya-hara, and soon enough found tracks and spoor. In an especially dense thicket, we concealed ourselves – me up a tree – and when the matron-mother Hard-ya-hara approached, Throg and Rhogash attracted her attention by hurling their magical javelins. Then I cast a spell — icy grasp — which conjured forth a mindworm boil made of magic and ice, which latched onto the matron-mother and held her down while Grog, Throg, and Rhogash beat her to death.

Or rather, that was the plan. The Hard-ya-hara was far stronger than we had anticipated, and she ripped free from my icy grasp effortlessly, while knocking poor Grog back into (and over) trees. Eventually we overcame her, but by the end all of us were dripping with sweat and exhausted, our reserves tapped and our minds and bodies sore, bruised, and vulnerable.

Luba, the xenophile, then set to work. She extracted oils from the Hard-ya-hara’s glands and organs, mixed them with certain unguents she brought from New Hope, and brewed up four doses of spider-repellent. She says a single application will keep spiders at bay for a day and a night, but I doubt her recipe has ever been stress-tested upon the surface of the Living Ocean, a roiling sea of fingernail-sized spiders five fathoms deep, full of tiny maws chewing on the skin of a dying god.

We rest now, but before the sun sets we must venture on, to the Living Ocean, and find a way down to its surface.

Posted in Fiction, Gaming, SMAC.

ALEX PIZZA AND THE PEIKING DUMPLINGS

“Just so we’re clear,” said the Illegal Artist as she unscrewed the cap on the Thermos, “I’m only here under protest.”

“Uh-huh.” Alex Pizza, Secret Agent to the Stars, took the Thermos from her, poured himself a cup of coffee, and took a sip all in one smooth motion, as if it was the beginning of an elaborate dance routine. It wasn’t really coffee, but it was a genuine Thermos-brand dewar flask. Without even a glance in the Illegal Artist’s direction, he handed her back the Thermos, raised his binoculars back to his eyes, and resumed the Vigil of Seven Unavenged Murders.

“You’re not impressing me with your lame cool,” the Illegal Artist told him. She knew he’d find the phrase lame cool grating.

They were standing (in fact Alex Pizza was leaning against a windowframe, and the Illegal Artist was shifting her weight back and forth from one foot to the other) in the front bedroom of a two-bedroom, fourth-floor walkup somewhere in the North End. The apartment had been vacant for several years, because of the fire damage, but its windows still offered a decent view of the street below.

The Illegal Artist wasn’t about to spend more time staring at Alex Pizza than she had to, so she set the dewar flask down on the floor and surveyed the bedroom, as if she hadn’t already seen everything worth seeing. No visible fire damage in this room, at least.

Item one, ratty Venetian blinds in the two windows. One window Alex Pizza occupied, binoculars, staring down, jackass. The other window was in the other exterior wall, and faced an extremely rickety-looking fire escape and a narrow alley, on the other side of which was another brick building. The Illegal Artist had considered spying out that window, just to spite Alex Pizza, but there wasn’t anything to see as the third and fourth floors of the neighboring building were dark and empty-looking.

Item two, bare off-white walls and ceiling. In one corner the ceiling had sustained some nasty water damage, and looked like it might give birth at any moment. All the walls had at least one major crack, which someone at some point sometime tried to repair or disguise by, apparently, painting over it, as if they had misunderstood that spackle and paint serve different purposes.

Item three, big complicated chalk drawing in the center of the room, on the floor. No, wait. That was item four, the Illegal Artist decided. Item three was the floor itself, which was linoleum on one half and, for some reason, maroon-painted hardwood on the other half.

Item four, the big chalk drawing blah blah secret magic woo woo. She assumed Alex Pizza had drawn it, probably to summon Baal or turn spider’s silk and ginseng into mandrake root and deadly nightshade or serpent’s scales or something else ridiculous and pointless. The main point of interest here was that the chalk he had used – Crayola brand fat outdoor chalk – was still there, tucked back into its flimsy cardboard container.

She picked up the chalk and started drawing on the walls pictures of all her favorite cartoon characters beating up all of her least favorite cartoon characters. By the start of the third hour of the stakeout, a mob led by Pogo and Lisa Simpson was burning Mickey both in effigy and, in the corner by the water damage, at the stake.

“Ah ah ah ah!” cried Alex Pizza unexpectedly sometime during hour five. “He’s moving?”

“What?” asked the Illegal Artist before she remembered that she didn’t care.

“Come over here,” he said, waving her in without taking his eyes away from the binoculars.

“You’ll miss the good part…” he said, in a sing-song voice, after he realized she wasn’t coming.

With a theatrical sigh suited to an eight-year-old, the Illegal Artist set down her chalk and stomped to the window. “I see nothing unusual,” she said, looking down at the tiny people below. “Except that it’s really goddamn crowded down there.”

“Okay, that guy,” Alex Pizza pointed, probably at someone in particular, though the Illegal Artist had no way of knowing who, “is either the High Dragon of the Seven Unavenged Murderers or the Fire-Brother of Wind and Sky of the Rightly-Guided Caliphate Masonic Order of the, oh, I forget, something Greek and fake. That guy with him is Vincent Schiavelli.”

The Illegal Artist gathered she was expected to recognize the name. “Who?”

“Vincent Schiavelli, character actor, totem warrior – he faked his death in 2005 but it’s definitely him. They’re probably doing the second stage of the Third Unavenged Murder.”

The Illegal Artist nearly said “What?” but caught herself just in time.

“In a second, one of them is going to give the other one money. How much money, and we’ll know whether he’s High Dragon or the Fire-Brother… shit. Shit! They must have seen I was looking, they ducked into a Chinese place.”

“I could go for Chinese,” said the Illegal Artist. “Look, I’m going to go get some Chinese, you want anything?”

Alex Pizza requested some hot and sour soup, which the Illegal Artist decided to misremember as dumplings. She went down the three flights of stairs to ground level, but when she opened the building’s front door Vincent Shiavelli was staring her in the face.

“Oh,” the Illegal Artist said. “You were the gypsy dude from the second season of Buffy.”

He nodded, and showed her his handgun.

“Lame!” she said, and shut the door.

Posted in Alex Pizza/Illegal Artist, Fiction, Not Gaming.

ALEX PIZZA AND THE LOCAL (MANY STOPS)

“Attend to me, young apprentice.” Alex Pizza, Secret Agent to the Stars, paced the constellations as they waited. “This is a train-time, a liminal time, a magic time. Now is a holy moment.”

“You said that about when we got the coffee,” said the Illegal Artist. “Also I am not your apprentice shut up aleady about that. I’m older than you are and besides you’re a jackass. ‘Now is a holy moment,’” she repeated it a high-pitched “silly” voice.

Alex Pizza ignored her, or rather, he responded as though she had said something entirely different. “Indeed yes, all times are holy, but the magus’s secret art is knowing what times are auspicious for what deeds. This is true for both the internal clock and the external! And the train-time is simultaneously a moment in the world and a moment in the body.”

The Illegal Artist weighed her options, and decided against saying anything. There wasn’t much point in insulting someone who could hear as selectively as Alex Pizza. She sipped her coffee (which was already getting cold) and waited for him to finish his series of portenous statements.

To her mild surprise, he didn’t immediately continue, and the brief pause wherein she might have interjected some kind of insult stretched out to a long pause, and then a longer pause, and then the longest pause, such that as far as anyone could tell they were just having some quiet time, there on the train platform. Someone came over the PA system and said something garbled and unhelpful which, the Illegal Artist was pretty sure, ended in “blah blah blah.” At some point the train would arrive, and they would get on, and this whole long silent pointless scene would be over with.

A few feet to the Illegal Artist’s right, inside Alex Pizza’s head, a very different scene was going down. Alex Pizza had adulterated his latte with a twist of spider-time redleaf, which slid down his gullet and into his manipura, where his snakeform self ate it and grew powerful. As he inhaled the wet air, Alex Pizza felt his perception slipping away from the world as it was and into the world as it should have been — the main difference being that the Illegal Artist was hanging on his every word, in the world as it should have been.

He indulged his imaginary apprentice, since his actual apprentice was in a grouchy mood. Had she existed, the Imaginary Artist would have wanted to know more about train-time, and Alex Pizza’s assertion that it was a holy moment both within and without.

“The greatest moment is the moment of anticipation, when the future ascends to its highest potentiality and we in the present can perceive the heights it reaches, and therefore the heights which we are capable of reaching. When we see ourselves taken up to a greater level — in this case, when we anticipate riding the train and finessing our way beyond the limits of earthly conveyance, which is to say, walking? When we see ourselves taken up to the greater level, we naturally begin to crave that uplift, and we begin to divest ourselves of everything that weighs us down and which could prevent us from reaching that height. This is why airports are such numinous places, and why we must remove our shoes and jackets and carryon luggage before being permitted past the security curtain, cleansed and prepared for travel. All the greatest religions invented in the last fifty years were invented in airports.

“The train-time is a reflection of that, diminished by an octave because the train is inherently less magical than the airplane, but nevertheless an opportunity for purification. When you wait for a train, cleanse yourself of negative energy and make yourself receptive to the positive energy which flows along the tracks. You may benefit from conversation with a loved one, or reading an inspirational text like the Bible or the New York Times. A daily train ride — or, if you can manage it, two — will do wonders for your mental and emotional state. This is why so many people choose to commute.

“Of course, most commuters are incapable of cultivating their chi and therefore they accrue sin without ever disvesting, which is why so few commuters are able to reap the benefits of the lifestyle. In the coming Aquarian Age, the knowledge of the ancients who did not fear death and who mastered their higher and lower selves will, we all hope, once more be promulgated across the earth, and we will all sing and dance for ever.”

This unloaded wisdom radiated outwards from Alex Pizza on the imaginary level, and filled the ears of the Imaginary Artist. Unfortunately for her, the Illegal Artist’s state as a mystic grounding cable extended not just to herself but to imaginary analogs of herself in the local psychic neighborhood, which is to say, Alex Pizza’s wisdom shot across the train platform into the Illegal Artist’s brain, filling her with unwelcome knowledge, or at least unwelcome empty mystic bullshit. The wisdom proceeded on down her charkras to ground, but the damage was already done.

“Ow,” she said. “Stop it!”

Fortunately for both of them, the train down to Providence arrived right about then, and the train-time ended.

Posted in Alex Pizza/Illegal Artist, Fiction, Not Gaming.

The Return of the Illegal Artist 9

You also wouldn’t be expecting a strange man to suddenly leap up from behind a shelf of Young Adult fiction (Laura Ingalls Wilder to Roger Zelazny), snatch your bookbag out of your hands, and pull his own doppleganger out of its side pocket. Again with the not crazy.

The shock of seeing a badly-dressed version of himself appear so abruptly and yoink him away distracted Alex Pizza from his ester-infused physic-craft fugue state, and he rapidly unfolded himself back into the Secret Agent to the Stars. He attempted to engage his mysterious double in psychic combat, but found all his tricks useless — it was like trying to arm-wrestle an SUV.

Norway-Taft Baldwin-Basinger shrieked and fled, which both versions of Alex Pizza ignored.

“I’m you from the future,” said the other Alex Pizza. “This isn’t really happening. I was replaying this scene in my mind and now I’m inserting myself, Gary Stu style.”

“I don’t believe you,” said Alex Pizza. “If I wasn’t real, if I was just an idealized verson of myself created through the haze of memory, I’d know it.”

“Don’t you?” asked the other Alex Pizza.

“…well, shoot,” said Alex Pizza. He sighed and sat down on one of the school library’s many flimsy wooden chairs. “So yeah.”

The actual Alex Pizza, passed out on too much Miller High Life, hallucinated himself up something with better ergonomics, and sat down opposite his imagined/remembered duplicate. “I got a problem,” he said, “and the only person I can trust to talk about it is me.”

“Uh huh,” said the imagined Alex Pizza.

“This scene happened about a year, year and a half ago, and it was right after I decided to write the Great American Novel, so…”

“So you eventually took some time off to write, and found that you lacked enthusiasm or skill or maybe you’ve forgotten how pencils work, so you’ve conjured up me to invigorate your creative centers with remembered enthusiasm and overall awesome powers,” finished the imagined Alex Pizza. As an idealized version of the real Alex Pizza, he was nothing if not perceptive.

“Shit, I mean, that’s the thing,” said the real Alex Pizza. “I mean listen to your dialogue; it’s essentially me writing it and to my ear it sounds totally hollow. And that’s not fair to my creative process. I’m really second-guessing myself about the value of my ideas and my capacity to put them on paper.”

Imagined Alex Pizza scoffed. “I have an awesome outline all blocked out in my head,” he said. “It came to me yesterday while I was gathering spearmint under the light of the full moon for sacramental mojitos. But you know all that.”

“Sure sure,” said the real Alex Pizza. “But it’s all bland and empty when I go over it. Let me hear it from you.”

It’s basically a lesson story, with a structure pulled from the Great Gatsby (the imago Alex Pizza said). The protagonist is a young man who flattens carpeting as part of a construction crew. Someone else lays the carpeting down, and he rolls it flat with a heavy roller and makes sure the seams are straight and there are no visible bubbles or defects. It’s skilled labor, but not something that requires all that much of him mentally. At night he does something creative; at the moment I’m leaning towards he makes mashups of popular songs and puts them online. He lives in a shack on the roof of a supermarket with two roommates, and they pay almost no rent but he can’t exactly entertain, so his social life isn’t much.

He makes friends with a couple of professionals — she’s a lawyer, he manages a microbrewery — when they’re shopping in the supermarket under his shack and he overhears them arguing about whether the store-brand toaster pastries are better than the Pop-Tart brand toaster pastries, and he’s able to resolve their dispute by introducing them to Lucky’s Toaster Tarts. Our hero ends up joining the couple, as well as the brewer’s introverted sister, on a trip to the lawyer’s great-aunt’s summer house on George Alfalfa Island.

He suspects at first that the couple is trying to hook him up with the brewer’s introverted sister, but she’s so quiet he can’t get to know her. She reads thick volumes of Japanese comics, and on the rare occasions that she does speak, it is in cliche. For the first two days at the summer house it rains, but on the third day they go walking along the shores of George Alfalfa Island, and they bump into Gatsby.

I should probably name him something other than Gatsby. Archie, maybe. Archie and the lawyer used to date, a long time ago, and now Archie has made millions buying inexpensive rental properties and reselling them. He wants the lawyer, the lawyer is into him some, tensions mount all through the vacation. The introverted sister becomes a sounding board for the brewer to complain to, because the brewer and the lawyer are apparently having troubles. The lawyer comes to our hero late one night alone in his room and tearfully confesses that she feels nothing for the brewer, that she never has, and that she only married him because she thought she was pregnant and discovered too late she wasn’t but he knows nothing about that.

So our hero says hey, it’s modern times: if you feel nothing for the brewer you don’t need to stick with him, and the lawyer realizes that he’s right. As soon as they’re all back from the trip, she leaves the brewer. She doesn’t hook up with Archie right away, though, she moves in with the brewer’s introverted sister. Now the brewer has no one but our hero and a couple of other friends to turn to. He starts drinking heavily.

One night a few weeks later Archie shows up at our hero’s shack; he’s incensed because the lawyer has decided against hooking up with him at all, and he blames our hero for turning her against him. Our hero protests that he had nothing to do with it, and the brewer is revealed to have been sleeping in the shack, because he wakes up and kills Archie. Big climactic scene.

The brewer is arrested, Archie is dead, the lawyer moves to the other coast, no one is left except our hero and the introverted sister. The introverted sister, it is revealed at the end, has been writing a webcomic based on the events of the novel, in real time, except in the webcomic the character which is a version of the introverted sister and the character which is a version of our hero are lovers. At first this freaks our hero out, but he realizes that the introverted sister isn’t interested in him especially, she just thought that it made a better story that way. End of book.

“That’s the worst novel I have ever heard,” said the real Alex Pizza.

“You seriously don’t know what you’re talking about,” snapped the imago. “Of course it doesn’t sound as good as the novel itself will sound, that was just me talking. When it’s actually written there will be scenes, dialogue, characterization, and all that jazz. It won’t just be characters with one-word descriptions performing rote actions.”

“Yeah, well, that presumes I can write it at all,” Alex Pizza responded. “I’m just not feeling it.”

The imago leaned back in his notional chair, and considered this for a half-second. “What you need to do it sell the project to someone else. Me, okay, I’m already behind it. Call up whatsherface and tell her all about it, she’ll be skeptical, and you’ll start defending the project, and then you’ll have sold yourself on it in the process of selling her.”

“Whatsherface quit,” said Alex Pizza. “I think she’s married to Bono now.”

The imago made a dismissive gesture. “Somebody else then, look, this conversation is going nowhere fast and I can feel my ontological integrity decaying, so why don’t you wake up, dust yourself off, maybe clean up some of the Miller High Life you spilled on yourself, and then go find a real person to talk to? Or failing that, someone you know?”

“I don’t know.”

“No, but if someone calls you on it, boom, you will know, and you will know strongly, and you will argue on your own behalf until you’re blue in the face.”

* * *

“Sounds nice,” said Lisa-Marie. “Go on, if it will make you happy. I think you should go for it.”

They were in a Starbucks, which is where Alex Pizza liked to do most of his informal meetings with his non-celebrity, non-wizard, “normie” friends. Or, to be more clear, where he would have liked to meet up with his normie friends, if he actually had any normie friends. Lisa-Marie was the closest thing available, and she was neither completely normal nor especially his friend. She didn’t wish him any active harm, he was pretty sure of that, unlike the Illegal Artist.

When Alex Pizza had shown up on the heels of a full-bore crone assault, the Illegal Artist had made a gesture that you might make if you were going to throw down your cigarette in disgust but remembered after you had already started teh gesture that you had quit smoking. She’d gone stomping away from the bus stop, leaving Alex Pizza and Lisa-Marie standing there looking awkwardly at one another. In fact the Illegal Artist had assumed Alex Pizza would chase after her saying something witty or at least surreal; this was what he had done every other time he’d shown up and she’d stomped off.

She ducked into a Brazilian grocery store and waited for him to catch up, so she could start berating him about crones and the supernatural world and her place in it (or out of it, if she had her way). When he didn’t come in after her, she bought a pack of cigarettes.

Meanwhile (ish) Super Lucky cursed her mistakes. This is the real world, she told herself. There are actual people who can be hurt, she told herself. To her surprise…. Super Lucky has always prided herself on her callous disregard for people who aren’t biological simulacra of Ally Sheedy, which is to say, everyone else in the world. But now we see that she can, in fact, have layers; beneath her offhanded contempt for her friends and neighbors there is a basic nubbin of human decency which proves she is not a sociopath after all.

Things had been going reasonably well, under the circumstances. It wasn’t a position anyone wanted to be in, with the exception perhaps of John McClane (Bruce Willis in Die Hard, not the esteemed statesman with a different name), but Super Lucky had found that by accepting the unreality of her predicament she could, in fact, stumble along. Perhaps she had not been making progress towards rescuing the hostages, but on the other hand, she hadn’t gotten any of them shot, and time the terrorists or thieves or whatever the hell the bad guys actually were, time they spent shooting and shouting at Super Lucky was time they weren’t spending making things worse for the hostages.

And then she’d fucked it up. Maybe not insolvably, but seriously. Let this be a lesson to you, she resolved at herself. Don’t screw around when the lives of strangers (many of whom were elderly) lay in the balance, because then you will feel bad.

“Okay!” she shouted. “You win! Don’t shoot anybody else! I will do what you want!”

There was a delay in response from the other end, as if the criminals hadn’t been expecting that. “What?” one of them shouted, as if he thought he had misheard Super Lucky over the wailing of the gunshot hostage and the fire alarms and the hissing of the oily black water from out one of the sprinklers which had somehow gotten turned on despite being well away from the small fire which was in a matter of minutes very likely to turn into a medium-sized fire and then a large one. “What was that?”

“I said I’m surrendering because you people are psycho killers and I don’t want you to shoot any more hostages!” Super Lucky shouted back.

Perhaps someone with a gun and a short fuse had heard only the part where Super Lucky called him a psycho killer, because his response was to shoot another hostage — this one in the thigh, again probably survivable with prompt medical care — and angrily demand Super Lucky’s surrender.

Super Lucky grunted in annoyance. “I am trying to surrender!” she shouted. “Stop shooting people! I should not have been taunting people with guns aimed at other people! I get that now!” She stepped out from behind the slot machine she’d been hiding under, and waved her arms above her head.

“Shut up and tell us –” started one of the criminals, but another criminal cut him off.

“Stop moving,” said the other criminal in well-modulated tones, loudly but distinctly, “and walk slowly towards us.” No one pointed out the contradiction in his instructions, because the meaning was clear in context. Context was everything, to these guys. Let me tell you a little bit about these guys.

Context was everything, to these guys. Let me tell you a little bit about these guys.

You’re not going to believe me, I am pretty sure. Regardless of what I say you are going to think that I’m making it up, but I swear by the sweat of Poseidon Horsefather every word of this is either true or a really awesome lie that seemed like a good idea at the time.

First off these criminals are neither thieves nor terrorists. In fact they are, technically speaking, pirates… or victims. But let us go with pirates. Not the fun imaginary kind or the quasiharmless filesharing kind or the dangerous violent kind (at least they were not initially violent), but rather the reality-hopping scavenging kind. Check check it.

Say you have a machine which when you press a button on it transports you to a parallel universe you specify, and when you press another button on it, it transports you back. I realize this is a conceptual leap, but go ahead, take the concept for a whirl. Key, here, is that you specify the nature of the parallel universe you get transported to.

There’s an infinite number of universes. Now, okay, that doesn’t mean that anything we can imagine must exist. The set of numbers that goes 1, 2, 3, 4… is infinite in that there is no last number in the set, but it is a set that excludes one-half and pi and even zero. But let’s ignore Georg Cantor’s work and pretend that means that anything we can imagine must exist, because loads of sci-fi authors already have, and anyway who’s to say Georg Cantor’s set theory is a reasonable description of the set of all extant parallel universes? So in other words you could press the button on the machine and be taken to a world exactly like the current one, except that, to pick an example, a gold bar has just materialized at your feet. There are a lot of atoms of gold in the world, and while it is extremely improbable that one of them will experience quantum tunneling and whap into another one, and surely it is infinitesimally unlikely that enough would come together from across the universe to form a gold nanocluster which swells up into a whole gold bar, in an infinite universe anything is possible. But not really. But we’re ignoring that.

So you go from boring ol’ Earth-A to Earth-B, which is an alternate history of a kind; it’s one where a profoundly unlikely event just happened. And then you scoop up the gold bar and you go back to Earth-A, one gold bar richer.

But after paying hefty jeweler’s fees you may find yourself thinking bigger. Why not go to a parallel universe in which you are a rich and happy person who has never needed to resort to the decadent lifestyle of the reality pirate? Let us call this parallel universe Earth-C. Now the obvious problem is that there is already a parallel you on Earth-C. However on another parallel world, Earth-C+, this parallel you – you-C+ — has just ceased to exists, his or her atoms abruptly dispersed by the same eerie quantum miracles that, two universes over, netted you a gold bar. Then you could effortlessly step into the shoes of this parallel you.

And why stop there? Perhaps somewhere there might be a parallel earth with medical technology far in advance of our own, a world in which random people on the street are sometimes handed magic potions which cure all of their ailments and give them the bodies of fitness instructors and decathletes. And perhaps you can step to this earth – call it Earth-D – and accept such a proffered potion, and drink of it, and live forever.

I think you begin to get the idea. So imagine a group of three gentlemen, once reasonably honest sorts, who have by dint of their parallel-universe-box become impossibly decadent epicures of all the realities, ruthless and hardened pirates who plunder realities while cackling.

NOW, imagine three test subjects from a university lab who have been heavily drugged and subjected to carefully edited stimuli until they believe that they are three gentlemen in possession of such a universe machine. Give them guns from somewhere – perhaps wished into existence by their magic box, perhaps seized from police officers taken aback by how rapidly the seemingly docile test subjects became violent – and you begin to have a sense of what Super Lucky is up against.

There is more, but I will get to it later.

Posted in Alex Pizza/Illegal Artist, Fiction, Not Gaming.

JOE ON TUESDAY (2 of 3)

“I don’t believe we’ve met, Joe,” said the Devil, as he extended a hand. “See, I’ve changed. I’m not who I was.” The Devil smiled smug and self-satisfied, but he had only one chin it was true, and his hair was longer and thicker.

Joe could have walked away. The Devil couldn’t have stopped him; nobody living could ever stop Joe. But then Joe wouldn’t have seen it when it happened. So instead Joe just turned to the televisions and watched America’s finest classically-trained musicians play a arrangement of “Lord of the Dance.”

“It’s a brand new day,” said the Devil. “Night’s end, the reign of the superman. These are wonderful, exciting times.”

“Today’s a lucky day,” said Joe.

“Every day is a lucky day for someone, boy,” the Devil replied. “Today I think it’s mine. You know I put him in a wheelchair? Did you see that? Did you read about it in the New York Times?”

“What?”

“Cheney. Just a little kicker for the occasion, because I’m in a celebratory mood. Today’s a witching day, you’re right. Our man in Washington, going to be the new broom that sweeps clean, going to give us all a fair deal… smile, she’s taking your picture.”

Joe reflexively threw his hands up, but it came out as waving to the camera. She wasn’t really taking Joe’s picture; he just happened to be in the shot. She was mainly focused on the Devil.

“Wow,” she said. She leaned forward conspiratorially. “Shouldn’t you be in Washington?”

The Devil leaned towards her, too, and smiled. “Aren’t I?” he whispered. Behind him, the televisions all panned from Yo-Yo Ma, across the crowd of public figures up on the dais behind where it was going to happen, and the Devil stood also among them.

She half-laughed, half-gasped, like she wasn’t sure what the joke was, but she wanted to be in on it. The Devil winked at her, and she went on her way.

“Don’t you know her?” the Devil asked Joe.

Joe shook his head.

“That’s a shame. Listen, Joe,” the Devil said. “I was thinking about asking you a little favor – which I would return in kind – on account of this being such a witching day, but now, well, here I see you standing with your unearned satisfaction and your stolen extra shot…”

“The machine makes two,” Joe said.

“Yeah, no, that was a lie,” said the Devil. “She was just sticking it to me, you know how it goes. You don’t like your job, you don’t quit, you don’t try to make your life better, you complain because you like to complain, and you get passive-aggressive and you steal and shirk and that’s the American Way, God bless us.”

“Just today,” said Joe. “Can’t you leave me alone just today?”

“Today’s the day I get to start over! It was never me who was beaten. It’s not me who’ll be remembered with scorn. Today’s my day. Today’s the day I pick myself up, brush myself off. Today’s the day I look in the mirror and see no flaws worth mentioning, and I treat myself to something nice and I don’t get prosecuted for war crimes. It’s a lucky day,” said the Devil.

“Just for today.”

“I think I’ll be a cabinet secretary. Or chief of staff. Someone he trusts. You watch, he’ll flub it without me there to help him.”

They watched it happen.

“You see? He needs me. You all need me,” said the Devil. “Well, listen, it’s been fun. I can’t deny I like rubbing reality in your face, and I’m in a good mood today. Seeing you is always a little bit of a treat for me, boy, but I’ve got work to do. It’s not all fun and dancing.”

Joe looked at him then, stared as if seeing him for the first time. “Don’t move.”

Posted in Fiction, Joe, Not Gaming. Tagged with .

Joe on Tuesday

That morning Joe was in a Starbucks, because he wanted coffee, and when he voted with his dollar he voted for convenience and minimal corporate evil as opposed to small business owners and gourmet coffee and the total absence of corporate evil. There was a line, during which time Joe briefly toyed with the idea of buying a scone.

“I’d like a grande Americano,” Joe said, and paid.

While he was waiting for his drink he watched the barista work the espresso machine. She was old enough to be his mother, which struck Joe as atypical, and her skin was a couple of shades lighter than Joe’s, which was extremely typical. Nobody up in his neck of the woods ever seemed to have gotten enough sun.

“Would you like the extra shot?” she asked, surprising Joe. He could have run for the door, because she might have been trying to distract him, keep him from seeing the snipers. Instead he made sure she was talking to him.

“Excuse me?”

“The new machines always make two shots at a time. You don’t want it it’ll just go to waste.” The barista pointed (her slightly wrinkled hands were easily the oldest-looking part of her that Joe could see) at the espresso machine, which, it took Joe a moment to realize, was bulkier and shinier and presented fewer options than the espresso machines he’d seen in the past.

“Sure,” he said, not wanting to rock the boat. “Thanks.”

“No problem,” the barista said, adding the extra shot to his drink. “Everybody’s lucky today.”

Joe forced a smile and small chuckle. “We’ll see.” He took the coffee and left. There wasn’t a sidewalk, but it didn’t matter; he was just going across the street.

The street in question was six lanes, with a light but without a crosswalk – this part of town really wasn’t set up for pedestrians – and Joe figured he would have to cross halfway and stand in the turning lane and hope motorists noticed him. Instead the lights turned red as he approached the intersection, and he didn’t have to break stride as he looked both ways and stepped out into the road.

The asphalt hadn’t been resurfaced since Reagan was in office, and they hadn’t done a very good job of it then; the tires of countless commuters and shoppers had worn waves in each lane, rolling up and down, likewise sloping up to the road’s crown and back down again. Joe trod with care nevertheless.

The cars started moving again just as Joe stepped off the road and onto the grass strip demarcating the edge of the parking lot on the far side of the street; either he had just hit the light or else it had turned green while he was still partway over and the motorists had been forced to wait. Joe turned and would have smiled gratefully at the cars that he’d held up, but by the time he’d turned around they were all down the road and out of sight.

Crossing the parking lot took longer than Joe had expected; he was used to traversing small lots in urban centers with a lot foot traffic, or else big lots with a car. Still, he made it to the Wal-Mart with plenty of time to spare.

“Morning!” the greeter said to him.

“It’s everyone’s lucky day,” Joe replied, which got him only a blank smile.

Joe headed to electronics, where the televisions were already on and ready. He sipped his coffee and listened to the prayer.

“Help us, oh God, to remember that we are Americans, united not by race or religion or blood, but to our commitment to freedom and justice for all,” said the television.

“I thought I’d find you here,” said the Devil.

“Go away,” said Joe.

Posted in Fiction, Joe, Not Gaming. Tagged with .

Guilty Pleasures

1) The two National Treasure movies.

2) Rachel Ray.

3) 4X type strategy games — Master of Orion II, Sid Meier’s Civilization, SMAC — on a low difficulty level or with cheats.

4) Preaching-to-the-choir, self-satisfied political blogs and such.

5) DiGorno or rising crust frozen pizza. I say I’ll only eat half of it, but no, I eat the whole thing.

6) Most of the current Adult Swim lineup probably qualifies as a guilty pleasure.

Those are all the guilty pleasures I’m willing to admit to. Add your own!

Posted in Uncategorized.


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