mcahogarth

Meta-Conversations: Umudked

            Tsevet comes in much the same way Kor did when I first met him: abruptly, in drama, making my home feel askew because it can’t contain someone so intense. And he likes jump-scares, so his first words are said almost against my neck. “So, you’ve found the sap of life again? Remembered that it throbs in you like poetry? Your heart is beating at last! Good. I will not have my story told by someone who is convinced she is old.”

            “I am not as young as I was when I first met you—”

            He has drawn away to examine the materials scattered around my art desk, touch them. “Ridiculous. I have known a god who never dies. And you will speak to me of age?”

            “Tsevet,” I say. “You didn’t even live to be thirty.”

            “And in my day Ai-Naidar were fortunate to reach sixty,” he says, dismissive, cutting. “I was nearly ‘middle-aged’ when I died… so what’s your excuse?” He walks around the edge of my table, trailing fingers on it as he approaches. “It’s one of the things we hated the dar umudchek for. That they lived longer than we did.”

            “The… what?” I exclaim, my brain exploding with images and concepts.

            He knows what he’s done to me. It’s in his lifted eyes, the wicked satisfaction in them, in the thin smile. “What did you think, artist? That Thirukedi made weapons of war to deter some future threat? That it was an exercise for him? He won a war with them. That means there was a losing side. Why do you think he needed me so badly? How else, when his first task was to weld together two such disparate peoples, seething with resentment and bitterness and fear?”

            I’m still reeling.

            “Of course,” Tsevet muses aloud, and this is definitely a performance meant to pierce me, “we, the winning side, feared our conquered foes. Not only did they live nearly twenty years more than we did, but they were sturdier. Stronger, vibrant, more resistant to disease and injury… shorter, admittedly, but that was their only flaw. Well, that and that they lost.” He pauses. “It is fitting—or ironic?—that the first of my priests to succeed to my mantle was born of that strain. Your Kor, yes? Boldly colored, solid, shorter than average. And he lived quite a while longer than expected.”

            But I am stumbling toward the more urgent realization. “Is that where the caste name came from? The caste for slaves?”

            “Of course,” he says. “What else? They needed a place to belong. Where they wouldn’t make trouble.”

            “Oh my God!” I exclaim. “How did He keep the empire from flying apart?”

            He bares his teeth. “Come and find out.”

Meta-Conversations: Ina

            The Ai-Naidari I’m hoping to meet is new to me and I want to put her at ease, so I set out what passes for a formal table for me: I have even found a tablecloth, and if the teapot and cups aren’t fancy, at least they match. I leave the tisane to steep, and hunt up a few almond cookies, and when I look up, she’s there, and I am taken aback.

            “Datyani,” she says, and her voice is like a flute’s, dulcet and clear and breathy. “I have heard so much about you. How great an honor it is to command even an hour of your attention…!”

            She’s so young.  That’s the only thing I can think, staring at her. Haraa had said it so casually—‘Ina was young enough to have children”—but I didn’t think that through. That Ajan married a woman who looks to be at least twenty years his junior. Beautiful and poised, a lovely blonde with eyes like aquamarines, she wears a Public Servant’s robes but has the manners of someone accustomed to interacting with those above the Wall. Of course… Ajan was born above the Wall. He would have found it comforting. He would have found her comforting… had turned to her for it, after Kor died.

            “I’m sorry,” I say. “I don’t mean to stare. Please, sit. It’s Ina, isn’t it? Ina Nai’Qevellen…” I trail off, waiting for illumination.

            “…janaekedi, datyani,” she says, which makes her the servant to a Regal. This is the rank just below osulkedi. She might be Utraenith’s, then, though not necessarily: The Regals all have their headquarters at the center of the empire, in a ring around Thirukedi’s temple at center. She could report to any one of those Regals and be able to walk home for supper.

            I pour for her and hand the cup over, and she takes it. The words ring in my head again: she’s so young. I’m old enough to be her mother. “Would it discomfit you if I were to ask you questions? My questions are much like the Exception’s… occasionally untoward.”

            “If they are only occasionally untoward, then they are very unlike the Exception’s,” she says, and there’s a hint of mischief there. I can see it suddenly, why Ajan might have noticed her. “Please, datyani, ask.”

            “Is it common? To have marriages between two of such unlike years?”

            She curls her fingers around the cup and nods, almost to herself. “It is true what they say of you… that you know so much about us that what you don’t know is surprising. My union with Ajan is not rare, precisely. Not as common as for the two to be closer in years, but not unusual. When the gap is large, the woman is more often the younger, because it is harder for older women to conceive and carry successfully to term. Ajan wanted more children. I’m glad I was able to give them to him.”

            I suddenly wonder how much older she is than Kef, Ajan’s first child. God, but they might be around the same age. It’s hard to tell just by looking. “Jzasuil,” I say, remembering their names. “And Tekvet.”

            She brightens rosily. You can see the flush through the thin fur on her cheeks. “Yes. The delight of my life, and of his. He is a magnificent father, datyani. Everything I could have wished for. And Kefthen and Aishal were so welcoming. It’s not always easy to integrate new siblings into a household with grown ones.”

            “It’s not?” I say, surprised.

            “Oh no. Of course not. We are not paragons! We suffer from jealousy and insecurity. Did you think otherwise?”

            I watch her as she lowers her eyes and think it kinder not to say anything about what she’s so patently exposing… which is how she surprises me when she meets my gaze and addresses it directly. “I have always lived in Shame’s shadow.”

            Because she is willing to discuss it, I am free to ask. “Did it hurt you?”

            “Hurt… me?” She is surprised, ears akimbo. “Oh, no… you have misunderstood me, datyani. I was never jealous of Ajan’s love for Shame. But it was such a great love that it hollowed him out. I grieved that I could never give him enough to assuage that emptiness, even a little.”

            “He loved you,” I say, because I want it to be true.

            “Yes,” she says. “He did. And I brought him comfort, and the children taught him joy again. But there are losses so great that they define everything that follows. I would not have married him had I been unable to live with that. Knowing that I would never heal him. Not fully.”

            She was proud of what she had been able to do, I saw. How assured she was, despite having entered willingly into a union with someone heartbroken, and lived with it without complaint. I knew without having to ask, that she had never spoken of it. “Why?”

            “Because I loved him,” she says simply. “To be his comfort was sufficient meaning, given that.”

            What an extraordinary woman. No wonder Ajan had married her. “I hope you will tell me about the children.”

            “I am always happy to discuss my children,” she says. “And Qevellen, if you wish to hear what it was like…” She pauses, studying my face. “I see. Shame’s shadow lies across your heart as well.”

            “And Farren’s,” I admit. “You… you became head of household. Is that right? After Haraa.”

            “I did, yes. Kefthen was busy as Shame, and Aishal and Shan were devoted to him. Haraa had my training… I enjoyed the work. That work, and the children… they gave me purpose after Ajan’s death.”

            I can see her as Qevellen’s head of household: still young, but not quite as callow. She would have done well, but what else, as someone who’d been assistant in a Regal’s affairs? She would have been witness to some of the most skillful of managers in the empire.

            She has not ceased to watch me. Does some of Shame’s incisiveness seep into everyone who lives in his household? Or does a household that includes Shame necessarily attract only those who might be capable of unusual insight? Of courage, to face what insight illuminates? “You wonder about the endings. You must. You are called datyani, the channel by which Kherishdar is carried to aunera, but the means of that carriage is art, is it not? Then you are an artist.”

            “I’m afraid I am.”

            She takes one of the little almond cookies. “Then I shall tell you what you must know, with as little pathos as possible. The man you knew as Shame, who was Ajan’s lover, died before my arrival to the House, and I am told he died there, surrounded in his family, after having been sent to it by Thirukedi.”

            I am stunned silent by that image.

            She is continuing. “Ajan died ten years afterwards. We had been married for nearly eight. Jzasuil was seven, and Tekvet five, and their memories of their elder brother and sister are clearer than the memory of their father. Haraa was the last of that generation to die; she lived into her seventh decade, and was a great comfort to me as, I hope, I was to her. She was like… like another mother. I loved her dearly.” Ina looks at me. “She died in Thirukedi’s arms, and came home to us on a litter, with every honor.”

            Tucking the napkin on her lap, she continues, with an amazing show of social grace, to lead me away from painful topics to kinder ones. “Children such as mine, who lose a parent, are said to be futhan shidari… ‘nest children.’ Our families have so many adults and children that there is no lack of guidance and love, even for orphans.” I remember that word, because Kor had been one: jzirudari. “Kefthen was very kind to them, despite how little time he had to give to his family. Aishal also always had time for them. They did not grow up bereft.”

            “And they had you.”

            “Of course,” she said. “And they went on to wed, as you know, and have children of their own, which is how you know them: Mishor and his sister, Jelail, born of my daughter Jzasuil, and Tekvet, who gave rise to Moraen, Mishor’s cousin. It is Moraen who grew up here, in Qevellen, with the third Shame to succeed Tsevet in full, Amath.” She sips her tea. “How grave you look, datyani, as if all those you love were forgotten. But they never are. Do you have a concept similar to kafyat?”

            I am so involved in admiring her deftness with conversation that it takes a moment for that word to coalesce in my head. “I’m… sorry? Does that mean… a dent?”

            She laughs, and her voice is a melody. How lovely it must be when she sings! “It once meant that… or an impression. But we use it now for those qualities about a person that are particular to their behavior or speech. Idiosyncrasies, perhaps? Eccentricities? A little?” She taps the cookie so that the powdered sugar floats off it, then tries a bite. “Families have kafyatyave, which is when younger generations preserve something about their elders and give it to their children: a turn of phrase, a way of speaking, a dance or song schematic, a gesture. It is one of the ways we observe emethil, the chain of the generations continuing. Ajan isn’t gone, datyani, so long as Moraen laughs like him, or Mishor repeats his favorite aphorisms. Jelail even forms some letters the same way Ajan did, and without ever seeing his handwriting. It is uncanny.” She finishes the cookie. “You see, in Qevellen we understand something that is rare in Kherishdar below the Wall of Birth… and that is that it is well that we are not immortals, because to live to see those we love die is difficult. You are an artist, and so you must watch everyone die, perhaps. I remind you, then, that our salvation is in the knowledge that those deaths are never complete, because we are never fully gone. We live in the minds and hearts and flesh of those who loved us and bequeathed them to the next generation.”

            “How astonishing you are!” I exclaim, seeing now the grandmother who appears in Mishor’s life, tranquil and wise and gentle.

            “You are too kind,” she says, and once again she is the young woman who could marry the object of her adoration. “And now, I am told, you must have words, because you are a collector of words. I was warned, you see! So I have examined your miyeshkadi, and discovered you do not have the word for ‘year’! So I will tell you that it is faerqel… can you see how it was derived?”

            I am delighted, immediately, as perhaps she must have guessed I would be. “Faer is ‘twenty’, but it’s also ‘a lot’ or ‘an armful’. And qel is ‘day’, so… ‘a whole lot of days’? Really?”

            “Really!” she says, laughing. “And you will like this one. A decade is doqqeli.”

            Qel is back to a year, again, and doq, “…is a basket? A basket of years?”

            “Yes,” she says, “because our baskets used to be woven with coils, and the most common basket had ten of them.”

            “I love this,” I say, fiercely. “You make me a magnificent gift.”

            She beams. “Then I am content.”

            After she leaves, my mind veers inevitably to the loss of Qevellen’s first principals, and how grateful I am that I didn’t have to see it happen ‘in person’, as I would have had to, in order to write a book including those scenes. But I have a somewhat better feel for Qevellen after Kor’s generation, and I’m glad. I like Ina. And I like her taste in words…!  

Gamelit 39 (seed to sap)

            So that was good. In fact, he liked the way his parents were treating him lately… like he wasn’t a kid anymore. What had changed? If he asked them, would they say something like ‘you started acting more like a grown-up?’ Probably. Nick got upstairs, stopped at the entrance to his room, shook his head. Was it really that simple? And if he asked them, they would certainly say, ‘Nothing’s that simple,’ because they’d said similar things so many times before that he could hear them in his head. In unison. Like a chorus. He could probably make a song out of it. He could, and could imagine it going viral as a joke meme song. Things parents said.

            He dropped into his chair, picked up the wireset, and logged in. The moment he zoned in, the clangor of practice swords and construction hammers interrupted the peace of Donner’s Beck, and he winced, ears sealing back. He couldn’t fault the activity: the villagers were training, some centaurs were digging the ditch for the eventual moat, and not only did the inn have walls but the stone that had been littered all over the village was now in orderly piles, awaiting deployment. But from a lore standpoint this was exactly the kind of stuff that disturbed nature-aligned creatures.

            His mom jogged up. “Hail, Thoroldaena!”

            What the heck? He started laughing. “Seriously, you can call me by name.”

            “I just did!” She beamed at him. “You’re right on time, there’s something I want to talk to you about.”

            “Oh?”

            “The tree.” She started walking that way and he followed her… to the center of town, which had a tiny paved section. “I found out we could make a plaza with a stone floor, which would be great for a lot of reasons. But before we do that, we have to plan for how big the tree’s going to get. So… how big was it before?”

            Nick crouched in front of the sapling, which looked taller now that he’d fed it the sap. He checked the quest; Seed to Sap was still open, and the progress meter was ‘begun’, which was a weird status but that was how the beta was going. “It was a normal tree before. This one’s magical. I get the feeling it’ll get as big as we want it to be, for dramatic purposes.”

            She glanced at him. “So how big do you want it to be?”

            He grinned. “Too easy, Mom. You’re involved, remember? Now your opinion matters too.”

            She straightened, wearing that look he’d seen all his life when she was thinking. “Huh. Well… it can’t very well be Giant Magical Tree size, like the ones that have houses on top, because there’s not enough room. Though that would be pretty cool. Although….”

            “Although?” he prompted.

            “There was a park we used to go to when you were little,” she said, digging into her pouch and coming out with a cookie. She handed it to him. “It had mangrove trees. They put down roots further away, extending down from the branches. Like stalactites. Stalagmites? I forget which is which.”

            “I remember those!” The cookie was a jam-filled vanilla sandwich cookie, and the jam was apricot. “So you’re thinking the tree, instead of having a giant trunk and a tall canopy, would drop little treelets of itself elsewhere? And eventually the whole village is shaded by it, but it’s a single tree?” He chewed, imagining it. Was there anything else in the game like it? He couldn’t think of one. “That’s… actually really cool.”

            “And it should be obviously magical,” his mom continued. “It should sing, or its leaves can be used to make potions, or something. Oh wait, then people will poach the tree. It should be able to defend itself. Or things should live in it that will defend it?”

            “It needs a tree spirit,” Nick said. “A dryad. The dryad can take care of that kind of thing. It’ll attract defenses and make the magical parts happen.”

Quest update! Seed to Sap: find a way to attract a dryad to inhabit the shell of your sapling and weave the fate of the forest world and the world of mortals more closely together.

            “Oooh!” Mom exclaimed.

            “Nice,” Nick agreed, and glanced up as a flitter drew his eyes. Galatea flapped down to settle on his shoulder and he petted her. “I think… I think I’ll use the boon for this. It feels right. Making the tree too big to cut down this time, and getting a dryad for it… those are things the forest lord would approve of.”

            “And we’d still have a boon left over,” his mom said. “I like it.”

            Nick touched his chest where the glowing boon remained lodged. Under his palm, the skin tingled. “The sooner the better.”

            “I think so too.”

            He nodded and leaned over to pull the arrow Killz had left behind from the soil. With it in one hand, and with the other set over the magic on his chest, he concentrated on a hazy picture of a mangrove tree… but more whimsical and ethereal than the one from the park. Something that created beautiful arches and colored shadows, rather than shades of darkness, with boughs full of exotic birds and critters like winglings. He thought of the white bark of Tolkien’s Lothlorien, and its golden leaves, of crystalline berries and music that flowed through rustling branches.

            “I call upon the Lord of the Forest,” he sang. “To grant the boon I ask on behalf of Donner’s Beck. Grow this tree into a home worthy of a dryad, to live among the people of the village and entwine her life with theirs. A mighty tree, resistant to disease and attack; a beautiful tree, dense with song and wonder; a kindly tree, heavy with fruit and healing; a welcoming tree, to the creatures and spirits of the forest and the people who live beneath its boughs and among its roots.”

            The golden light coalesced under his palm and shimmered out from around it, swirling to the sapling and raising a glowing outline from the ground. It grew and grew, throwing out branches and roots like an airier mangrove, and then stabilized as a hazy promise.

Quest Update! Seed to Sap: You have used your forest boon to call for a dryad to grow and inhabit the tree of Donner’s Beck. You are now: waiting.

            He wanted to say ‘that’s it?’ but before he could, his mother said, “This is perfect. We should go put more offerings on the stone so we can attract the right kind of dryad.”

            “Offerings on the… oh wait, you did something with that rock you pried out of the headwater??”

            “You should come look!”

            So he did, aware of Galatea riding along with him with her head pressed against his jaw. Was she okay? Did having the KeepinTouch make her feel better about Jonah, or worse because now she could tell for herself that he was unavailable? If he asked, she’d probably say she didn’t have feelings to feel about it. He would have to talk to her about it later.

            “I love it,” he said, on seeing the shrine. “This is a great idea, Mom. Look, it’s even a named place.”

            “It is? Oh, it is! ‘The Shrine of Forest Amity.’ That’s great. What do you think we should leave there?”

            “Cookies,” Nick said. “Definitely.”

            In the end, they left more than cookies. They brought back a doll from the village children, and a hairbrush from the centaurs, and picked flowers and set cookies and milk as if trying to attract Santa and it was so funny and so ridiculous that Nick spent the entire time grinning. Especially when his mom set down some rabbit teeth. “Really?”

            “We want her to be able to defend herself!”

            “With rabbit teeth, though?”

            His mom brandished her arm and pointed at a bandage. “Rabbits are mean here! The forest should be proud. Even the prey animals are fierce.”

            “Fair,” Nick said. And after a moment, set the arrow on the altar too. “So she knows there’s danger. And that we’re dedicated to protecting her and the village from it.”

            “Good idea,” his mom said. “We wouldn’t want her to say we didn’t warn her.” She put her hands on her… hips? What did you call that part of a horse? “So now we just wait?”

            “So now,” Nick said, “We go back to work on everything else.”

            “Good point, there’s plenty of ‘everything else’ to do. Do you know anything about making brick?”

            “No? Because…?”

            “Because if we pave the plaza we need to make the buildings out of something, and wood seems like it’s asking for trouble….”

            “Let’s go find out,” Nick said.

            Was spending the day learning from an NPC how to make brick boring? Maybe to a lot of people, but probably not to the kind of viewers who liked Dad’s lectures. It made Nick wish his father was playing too. Was that weird? It was exactly the kind of thing that his friend group decried Rattie and his homeschooled friends for being into, gaming with family. They did board games, he remembered. Wasn’t it cooler to do online games though? Or was that worse somehow? But he loved talking through the logistics of rebuilding Donner’s Beck, and when Carl logged on, he was into it too. At least, briefly, and then he wanted to ride heroically to the next town over to find a specialist in brickmaking. The game even spawned a quest for it. He and Mom played until dinner and then logged off, and over kung pao chicken he and his father talked about the basics of medieval villages and then they had to record a discussion about it and… this was his life now. It would bother him if he hadn’t also spent a lot of time today in the real world with his friends.

            Except that made him think of Shellie and his decision about that. He glanced at his phone, which was no doubt full of group chat messages, and decided he didn’t want to get into it, or even think about it. Better to record something for Jonah’s KeepinTouch. He thought that would be hard, but when he turned on the mic and started going, it just… flowed out. What the game meant to him, how he and his friends had been playing for years, what was going on with the beta. If he stopped before getting into his ambivalence about playing with family, that was reasonable… he’d already rambled for an hour. He saved it and attached it to the queue for the device, and was pleased to see Blythe and Fish had already made one. Blythe’s was titled ‘hi_mr_jonah’, which made him smile… Fish’s was ‘wkeupdude’, which was… also funny, to be honest. He had good friends.

            Tempting to play again, but instead he went into his closet and brought out the dusty guitar he’d hidden away with his desire not to have his love for music turned into some big deal by everyone. Mandolin didn’t map exactly to guitar, but he spent the rest of the night figuring out how.

***

“…hey man, so Nick—that’s the guy responsible for you having to listen to us blather—asked me to record something for you about how Omen Galaxica is so awesome that you need to wake up and check it, because what was the point of doing all that work if you couldn’t enjoy it? And honestly it’ll probably go off the rails without you because you were obviously the one with all the good ideas….”

“Hi, Mr. Jonah… my name’s Blythe and I’ve been playing Omen Galaxica since launch. And I’ll tell you a secret… everyone always wants me to play the healer, and I sort of prefer being a tinker. I like healing and I’m good at it, but the tinker class is so cool. I read that it was your idea to turn crafting into a class, and I know that a lot of people hate it because it’s too finicky, but I love it. But my friends never want to heal, and I wanted to be helpful. I don’t mind, really. But I wish I could play my tinker more often.”

“So about the game balance with the assassin class. It’s totally borked. Someone’s not paying attention because we got the short end of the stick in raids. Not that my friends raid, because there are only five of us. But I’d like to rent myself out to the big raiding groups and no one needs an assassin.”

Meta-Conversation: Corrected

            I may go where I please in Kherishdar, seen or unseen, and no place is barred to me… like an aunerai Exception, I am allowed license and I know it, keenly, that I am a thing apart and named: Datyani, the channel through which Kherishdar arrives into aunerai hands. It feels like a dream, or maybe I’m the dream they’re having…?

            But for all that license I am careful with my presence, and tread lightly, as lightly as an alien can. And I am treading lightly here, in this very personal place. Even knowing I’m allowed here, that I’m allowed anything—that I’ve been here before, and recently!—I don’t come close to the stand, nor touch what hangs on the wall. I sit instead, and then, feeling that too lacking in courtesy, I shift until I’m kneeling.

            I am not the most vigilant of people, but I hear him entering the room. When he kneels alongside me, it looks easy. They always make kneeling look natural, the Ai-Naidar.

            I look at the knife this time, not the mantle. “It was Tsevet’s.”

            “One of the set, yes,” Kor replies. I think. There’s a touch of Shame in him, but this is his yuvrini, the room in Qevellen set aside for contemplation of his priesthood’s mysteries.

            “You don’t use this room often,” I say. “You used to.”

            “When Qevellen was new,” he says. “Before it became what it was to me, and I became what it shaped me into.” I can hear the smile in his voice. “When we trained Kef, we needed it more often again.”

            And Kef his successor, I think, feeling the echoes forward in time. Amath.

            “Why are you here, qiqirini?”

            “Tsevet,” I say, and falter. I sense Kor’s understanding. I am groping for stories so old they persist solely in the memory of an immortal… I think. “How did you learn of him? Did Thirukedi tell you?”

            “Yes,” Kor said.

            Because, who else? Who could transmit that experience to a new priest… and particularly to a priest who succeeded Tsevet in full, at last? Did Thirukedi tell other priests of Shame the same tales of their founder? Or did He modify those accounts?

            “Also, there is a book.”

            My thoughts tumble to a halt so abrupt it’s almost comical. “What? A book?” I want to say ‘are you kidding me’, but he wouldn’t tease about this. About other things, sometimes. But about this? “There’s a history?”

            “Written by his successor,” Kor says. “One of his lovers, a former Guardian.”

            “There’s a literal book,” I say, unable to believe it. “And I haven’t seen it!”

            “You may if you wish,” he says. “It is kept at the capital shrine.”

            But his offer is so diffident, I know better than to think it will be useful. I remember Haraa’s descriptions of Ai-Naidari history books from her story. “He doesn’t talk about Tsevet in it, does he.”

            “Only as the founder of the priesthood,” Kor says. “It is a book about the precedents and the theory of our work. A… guide, you would say.”

            I mouth that word. Foshret vaf. A map of behavior. Guide. Then I get back to the topic. “So all you know of him, you had from Thirukedi.”

            “And so all you know of him, you should learn from Him. Which describes the task you have taken on yourself, doesn’t it?”

            “Yes,” I say, because I know that if I tell Tsevet’s stories at all, it must be in Thirukedi’s voice. “But… I keep coming back here.”

            Kor stands, reaches to the wall. But he doesn’t take down the mantle, the way Thirukedi did when the two of us spoke here. He unhooks the knife from its holder and presents it to me.

            To say ‘I couldn’t’ would be the gravest of rejections. I can’t do it. So I take the knife—a knife that’s millennia old and dimmed to the color of smoke—and it is so sharp the edge gives me a papercut across two of my fingers.

            He meets my eyes. “Tell me the true thing.”

            The words escape like prisoners, bursting through a cracked door. “There was a time of darkness in my life, and I don’t remember it. It’s like a hole, and all the memories and feelings associated with it are just… gone. They’re gone, Shame. It shaped me and I can’t remember anything about it, except that it hurt. Must have hurt.”

            “And if I told you to close your hand on that knife, would you?”

            That startles me out of my pathos. “Kor?”

            “Would you grip it until you bled, knowing it would slice you to the bone?”

            “I… I would prefer not to,” I whisper, because the idea is nauseating.

            Gently, he says, “Then why do you believe you would have done so with memories cruel enough to flay your spirit?”

            I gasp as if he’s hit me.

            Shame raises the knife from my palm, careful of my fingers. Setting it on the narrow table frees him to take my hand and tilt it, studying the thin slices. “It is enough that the experience shaped you, datyani. You need not live in it.”

            “But what if it’s not done with me yet?” Tell me the true thing. “What if it comes back?”

            “It won’t,” he says. “You aren’t the same person. Its claws were designed for that you, not this you. What do we say, qirini?”

            “You are one thing or the other: the past is done,” I say, still breathless.

            He smiles and cups my face with both hands, and it feels like safety. “You travel your paisathi, like all of us. Which is not to say there are no dangers awaiting you, nor cruelties. But they will not be the ones you suffered before. Lose no sleep over those hollow years. They are sped, and you remain.”

            “I lived,” I breathe.

            “No small thing,” he agrees.

            “Sovevil qininith nem ve shevi revasili laininihh,” I say. Thank you for the grace of my Correction.

            “Jzote,” he says; always; and it’s a promise and such a gift that my heart skips. Because he’s Kor, he finishes, quiet, “Your art will always bring you home, so long as you are honest with it.”

            Like Shame, I think. Shame also brings the Ai-Naidar home… and in this case, one flawed and perfect and imperfect aunerai. I rest my head against his. “I don’t know if I can do this,” I say of Tsevet’s story. Of any of the stories that Kherishdar might tell me next.

            “You never know,” Shame says, “until you have.” A smile. “And then your doubts are in the past. And the past is gone.”

            After that… after that, I stay in the room for a while longer. Maybe I’ll come back to it, but I think the impetus that kept drawing me back is gone… lanced by Correction, as Correction is designed to do. I have put some of my deepest griefs in Kherishdar before, like offerings set on an altar and burned in the name of civilization. But such offerings must be prepared and this, I think, is part of my preparation. Ufrin, I think. Preparations. But I’m betting there’s some other word specific to the process leading to the sort of gifts I’m making.

            Little by little, I am seeing more clearly. And the path will unspool beneath my feet, so long as I’m walking. I get up, finally, and go back to work.

January Updates!

Some quick updates! First, and most notably, the next Kickstarter will launch sometime in February (late, probably) for a second Jokka collection. You can sign up here to be notified of launch: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mcahogarth/the-smell-of-intelligence-and-other-stories

Second, I’m wrapping up the writing on the gamelit novel, and have started work on the cover art, in the hopes of having that ready soon. First readers, take note! I’ll be asking for help for this one soon. I expect the book will be available direct in March, with retail launch in April.

Third, having discovered how to set up forums, the Discord now has a forum section for live-reads, for people who want to share their jaguar-book-reading experience as they’re doing it (and for people who’ve already read the books to enjoy). If that kind of thing is your jam, stop by and check it out—we have threads for Princes’ Game, Zafiil, and the Jokka books currently active.

Fourth—despite not really wanting to, I consented to signing up for Instagram in order to make it easier for the mall store to advertise my stuff. I figure, if I hate it or it doesn’t help/work, I can always quit. -_-  If you’re at all into instagram, you’ll find me at: https://www.instagram.com/mcahogarth/

Fifth: I’m in the latest Raconteur Press anthology, From the Brim to the Dregs! If you want to read my story, go check it out. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DTTWY7QR/?tag=stardanorg-20

Finally, I’m just about ready to wrap up the first Peradventure playtest. I’m not sure this one has given me enough data, so I will probably do a second round soon. If you’re interested in participating, let me know.

Gamelit 38 (everyone loves a)

            “Isn’t it capping?”

            “Hell yeah,” Fish said. “That’s a prime ride, Shellie.” He elbowed Nick. “Jealous?”

            Shellie leaned on the hood of her beater and grinned at him. “He’s not jealous, because he gets a ride whenever he wants.”

            Some good-natured and completely predictable hooting at that. Blythe shook her head the way she always did when the off-color jokes happened, and this time, Nick noticed. Or at least, he felt more self-conscious about it. Shellie didn’t care, of course, she was cool like that. But he wondered suddenly if listening to ribald humor turned Blythe off. Did it sound uncivilized? Of course, everyone talked like this now. It wasn’t like the fantasy world in Omen, where courtly knights avoided certain kind of talk around women.

            Why was he thinking about this? “It’s cool, Shellie. How’s it ride?”

            “Yeah, it looks like it’s about to fall apart,” Falcon said. “Is it duct taped on the inside?”

            “Check it and see, loser.” When he mimed throwing something at her, she chortled. “No, really, have a look. You’ve got car experience, you’ll be able to tell if it’s any good. My dad said it was good enough to wreck and that’s it.”

            “My sister went through two cars before she stopped smashing into random things.” Fish peered into the passenger side window. “Women can’t drive.”

            “Oh, man, I can’t believe you said that,” Falcon said, laughing.

            “Shellie can take it.”

            “Not going there, Nick might beat me up.”

            “Heck with Nick, I will.” Shellie made a fist.

            It was to learn the nature of Shellie’s surprise that Nick had abandoned gaming to meet everyone at the pizza place—he’d wanted to talk to his friends anyway about the KeepinTouch, so it had worked out—and he’d glad he’d come out. He hadn’t made it out of the weird mental shift he’d talked about with Blythe, and the sun felt good to him… the real sun, in the real world. Being out with his friends felt like the most important thing in the universe; how much longer would they be doing this? In a couple of years they’d all scatter for college or jobs. One day, it would be the last day they went out together. Would they even realize?

            “You lost him,” Fish said. “Look, he’s off in his own world. Again.” Fish snapped his fingers in front of Nick’s face. “Earth to Furry, come in, Furry.”

            “I’m not a furry,” Nick said, because Fish expected it, but without the usual emphasis.

            “He’s dying, he needs food.” Fish pushed him toward the entrance. “Come on, dude. You’re toasted.”

            Breakfast had been big, but pizza always sounded good. “Sure.”

            “I’m buying,” Shellie said, and flexed. “Check me, I am fully autonomous. I am a financial weapon.”

            “Better get to work,” Falcon said to Nick, “or your girlfriend’s gonna out-earn you, and you know what that means.”

            Nick tried not to glance at Blythe. “Don’t go there, no one wants to hear it. Besides,” lifting his voice, “I’ve got news too. And a task.”

            “Oooh, a TASK,” Fish said.

            “Everyone loves a task,” Blythe agreed cheerfully.

            “Much better than a project,” Falcon said. “It’s not a project, right?”

            “Everyone hates projects,” Shellie said.

            “It’s a task,” Nick said firmly. “Practically a quest.”

            “This oughtta be good,” Fish said. “Either that, or supremely awful. Let’s find out which.”

            Once the pizza had delivered, Nick told them about the KeepinTouch. “…so that’s the story. I want to do updates for Jonah about the beta. He’d want to know.”

            Fish was dipping his rolled-up pizza slice in garlic sauce. “He’s not gonna hear them while unconscious.”

            “Then when he wakes up, he can listen to them,” Blythe said. “I think it’s a great idea, Nick. I’d love to record some things for your task. We’ve gotten so much out of the game. It’s a big part of our life.”

            “Yeah, man, can you imagine if he actually wakes up and does hear them? You think he’d call us?” Falcon peeled a pepperoni slice off Blythe’s serving as she batted at him. “Maybe we could get famous that way. Or invited up to Omen HQ. Get priority passes to the next GalaxicaCon?”

            “That sounds pretty sweet,” Shellie admitted. “I’d take a free pass to the con.”

            “You got the credentials?” Fish poked Nick. “I’ve got some free time. I’m made of free time since someone ditched us for a beta.”

            “I’ve got them, yeah. But don’t put anything on there you wouldn’t want your parents listening to.”

            “Aw, seriously? Jonah’s not someone’s dad. He’s with it. He’d get our humor.”

            Nick thought of his dad, who was apparently with it enough to make it onto reddit as ‘that cool wizard guy.’ “Yeah, but the KeepinTouch is being filtered by a lady in Omen’s marketing department. Do you really want to get your account locked for saying something inappropriate?”

            “Point. I’ll keep it normal. As normal as possible, anyway, given my utter awesomeness.”

            “Is there anytime in particular you want these done?” Blythe asked.

            “Whenever,” Nick said. “I figure I’ll just keep it going until he wakes up, or someone turns the thing off.”

            “The KeepinTouch or the dude’s life support?” Fish asked.

            Nick reached for the last slice. “Shut up, Fish.”

            “Oh, right, too far, huh.”

            “Tasteless,” Shellie agreed. “You need to work for the jokes, Fish, not grab the low-hanging fruit.”

            Blythe covered her face as Falcon started snickering. Fish started to say something, then stopped. “Oh wait. That was a trap.” He pointed at Shellie. “I’m right, that was totally a trap!”

            “He can be taught,” Shellie intoned. “Anyone want more? I do.”

            When the gathering wound down, Shellie offered to drive him back, or “anywhere you feel like. Maybe coffee?” And he said yes, because it sounded fun. He was pretty sure what he was feeling was fun. Not jealousy because his girlfriend had a car (no matter how run down), and not frustration because he didn’t want to be driven around anymore. And not irritation because she hadn’t asked how his mom was, and hadn’t been there for him when he’d needed someone. He didn’t want to go home yet, because being out still felt important and real. But riding shotgun with Shellie was supposed to be more… something. More exciting. Cooler.

            “You don’t know how relieved I am to be able to leave the house whenever I want,” was her opener, which didn’t help. “I hated waiting on other people to do stuff. And home is so smothering. I can’t wait to blow this stand.”

            He glanced at her. She did look satisfied. In control. With the driver’s side window rolled down, the wind was tousling her short hair around her face, and he remembered the intensity that had attracted him in the first place. The devil-may-care attitude, and the way she just breezed through things, good and bad, as if they didn’t matter and couldn’t stop her. He was sure nothing would… or at least, he had been, until she’d avoided him during Mom’s crisis. She had, hadn’t she? “Why didn’t you text me? When my mom was in the hospital.”

            “I figured you’d be busy with family.”

            “Well, yeah… but you’re my girlfriend. That’s quasi-family.”

            She snorted. “Not really. Look, I didn’t want to bug you. I would have been a distraction.”

            “That’s the point,” Nick said. “I could have used a distraction.”

            “When that kind of thing goes down, you don’t want a distraction, hon. You want someone to lean on.”

            “You saying I can’t lean on you?”

            “Anytime,” she said. “Just not in hospitals. Not my gig.” She glanced at him, and maybe something in his face registered because her tone got less blasé. “Look, they just make me uncomfortable, okay? I’m sorry, but it’s just… not something I’m good at.”

            “How come?”

            “I just don’t like it.” She shrugged. “The smell, the way it looks, all the old people and the dying people. It’s depressing.”

            This conversation was never going to go anywhere useful. Trying to pin Shellie down made her aggressive, and then there would be a fight. Nick didn’t feel like fighting. “I get it. I didn’t like it either.”

            “Things worked out, anyway, right?”

            “Yeah.”

            She nodded. “I’ll buy you coffee. Double-cap, yeah?”

            “Sounds great.”

            Over coffee they succeeded in having a normal conversation, mostly because he listened to her talk about the new car and whether her parents would keep fighting her about getting a job during the school year. “They’re willing to listen, car insurance is expensive.” But he was aware, listening to her, that Mom’s accident had rearranged more parts of his worldview than he’d guessed. Before, he hadn’t realized that girls might actually listen to you. Want to know about your problems, and want to help. That they could be interested in your inner life. That he had an inner life that mattered to him, and that he might be willing to share with the right person.

            Of course, he had no idea what Shellie’s inner life was like. But she never wanted to talk deep. About the surface stuff, and about things that interested her, and about how much she wanted to get out of dodge the moment she could leave for college, sure. But Nick, watching her chatter over her mocha, couldn’t imagine her having the kind of conversations with Galatea that he was having. He couldn’t imagine her liking her parents, even later, as an adult, after they all outgrew their teenage angst. And most importantly, he couldn’t imagine her driving to see him when he was scared and feeling alone, the way he could imagine Blythe doing so, because Blythe already had.

            Oh hell. He couldn’t imagine the drama he’d be unleashing in the friend group if he dumped Shellie for Blythe. He wasn’t sure the group would survive. But sticking with Shellie when he felt this way was wrong.

            He was still thinking about it when she dropped him off. Dad was in the kitchen, staring into the pantry so pensively Nick couldn’t help stopping. “Um, Dad?”

            “So many things I could eat,” Dad said. “And yet the one thing I want, we don’t have. To grocery, or not to grocery, that is the question.”

            “What don’t we have?”

            “Popcorn.”

            “Oh, yeah, we haven’t had popcorn for a while.” Nick sat on the barstool by the kitchen counter. “Dad? How do you pick the right girl?”

            “By vibe.”

            The answer was so unexpected Nick blurted a laugh. “What? Seriously?”

            “Cross my heart and hope to die.” His father bowed slightly, pressing his hand to his heart, and it was a gesture that Mom did too. Which of them had done it first? And then passed it to the other person? Thinking of his parents as having the same kind of in-jokes and banter that he had with his friends was mind-blowing and weird. But also a clue, wasn’t it? “Why, ready to settle down?”

            “Not even slightly,” Nick said, sighing.

            “For the best. You’ve got time. And I… I have no popcorn.”

            “You should get some.”

            “I should! Want to come?”

            Did he? “Can I drive?”

            His dad threw him the keys.

Gamelit 37 (how much)

we have to go hard at this srlsy

stats are down

 

            Lucas snorted at his phone. “In what universe are stats down, you loser. Your stats are higher than they were when you were streaming alone, by a factor of six.” He swiped quickly on the keyboard.

stop worrying

            A ‘typing’ bubble popped up instantly. A few seconds later:

you were the one pushing for more

            “Yeah, that was before I got bored,” Lucas said. His thumb hovered over the screen, but he decided to pocket his phone instead. He’d taken a walk to get away from all this drama, not so he could keep it going. Lucas stared at the contrails of a passing jet, sinking into the sensation of his limbs moving, and the sun on his head, his shoulders. Walking made him feel saner. Slightly. Sports was better, and lifting, but eventually you had to get outside. Feel like you weren’t boxed in. And he was feeling a lot boxed in by this Omen thing because, he was forced to admit, he was thinking of quitting. Streaming had become a cage, but the problem was that it was a lucrative cage, and walking away from piles of money was hard. His brother’s comments from the day before were rattling around in his brain about guys selling their souls for their careers, and never knowing how much money was enough.

            What would he do with himself if he wasn’t doing this? And how annoying was it that what he thought, overwhelmingly, was that it would be a relief to quit? But the money definitely wasn’t enough yet. Except how much was that number? Why couldn’t he pin it down to a total? A goal? He was so used to setting goals and blowing through them that the process felt infinite. Was that normal?

           How much was enough?

           Lucas rubbed his forehead with the edge of a thumb, listening to the wack-wack-wack of the ducks paddling in the nearby pond.

            On a whim, he dug out the phone and flipped to the channel stats that had upset Goldie so much. They weren’t down, they just weren’t jumping up the way they had been for some of the major events, like the razing of Donner’s Beck or the fight with Tankydon’t-the-loser. Razing Donner’s Beck again wouldn’t excite anyone. They should probably find some new town to destroy. If they destroyed enough of them, maybe the stupid AI would spawn a Most Wanted Criminal quest and he could get this thing moving.

            ‘To what?’ he could imagine his brother asking.

            Back to the question. How much was enough? When would he be done? Why wasn’t he done now, when it wasn’t doing anything for him?

            Except making those piles of money.

            Lucas checked Tanky’s channel, which was full of boring montages about training shopkeepers to fight off PCs—good luck with that—and then, reluctantly, looked at the mom channel. Mom was cleaning up the mess, like moms always did. It almost made him feel bad, which made him angry. He breathed until he could see straight again, watched the baby ducks floating as he strode past. Then he kept going through the channel, baring his teeth at Nerd Dad’s involvement and all the happy-happy lore stuff.

            And then he ran into the song.

            He’d been flipping through the shorts so quickly that he skipped past it before the melody seized his attention. He swiped back to the Lament for Donner’s Beck short, and from there clicked to the full video and listened to the entire thing before he realized it had made him feel something… and wasn’t that annoying?

            God, he was so tired of being angry.

            But he listened to the song again. And heading home, he stuck his earbuds in and looped it. It was moody. It was good. And… he’d made that happen. He’d made someone write a song about something he’d done, and that was the first thing since the game had been willing to let him indiscriminately kill everything that struck him as awesome. He had no idea what that meant, but it meant something.

            Mason had gone to get groceries for Mom, who was napping, so Lucas shut himself in his room and stared for a long moment as his wireset. Then he slid it in place and logged in.

            Goldie wasn’t online—that was rare, the dude was terminally online—which made advancing their existing ‘kill everything’ project off-limits. Which was fine, because Lucas wasn’t in the mood to kill everything, even though going off-script was bad for the numbers. He was sick of being a slave to the numbers. People should be watching because of his choices, because they were interested in him, not because he was smashing their dopamine levers. So he stole a horse from a passing NPC and rode back into the Greenweald, leaping off the saddle and into the trees so he could stealth toward Donner’s Beck. He didn’t get very far when he spotted pony mom.

            God, she was trotting along through the forest like a Level 2—3? Character had nothing to fear. It was pathetic, and so typical of non-gamer behavior. He couldn’t call her a newb because she was something that existed beneath that level. Proto-newb. Wannabe-gamer. Normie. She was even humming to herself, and he watched in astonishment as she confronted a rabbit, brandished a spoon at it, and exclaimed, “Have at you, hare! I require you for food!” and commenced doing… something. Dancing, maybe? No, she was trying to lunge. For nearly a minute she and the rabbit performed this comedy routine until she succeeded in boring it to death. At least, Lucas would have laid down and died rather than kept going, so he assumed the rabbit gave in. A triumphant mom-pony hung the carcass from her belt, “Like a barbarian,” she declared, and then trotted onward in search of more animals.

            So he followed her.

            It was ridiculously easy to stalk her, she was that oblivious. He liked how it made him feel, slipping from tree to tree, climbing higher, pouring onto lower branches until he was barely five feet above her… and still, she never thought to look up. He imagined what it looked like to people watching the stream: the killer and the prey. Exactly the kind of stuff his audience would lap up. He could imagine what the channel manager would do with it. ‘will he kill her or not?’

            Ugh, even thinking about it was irritating.

            He stalked her until she completed her murder spree—if killing critters counted—and crouched over her head as she stopped to look around. “A little far,” she said; apparently talking to herself was a thing with her. Turning she headed back, but not directly. Did she not know the way to Donner’s Beck? But she looked like she was searching for something specific, muttering under her breath and humming.

            Eventually she did stop, close enough to town that he almost started thinking about not being spotted. There was a tumble of rocks that happened to be under a shaft of sunlight; as both he and mompony watched, a vivid blue butterfly floated past it.

            “Perfect,” she said, and pulled a stone out of a bag. She spent at least five minutes arranging it before she was happy with it, then wandered the edge of the area, cleaning up stray twigs and leaf clutter. A flower got beheaded and set on this slab and then she leaned back, arms folded and one hand propping up her chin in the most cliché attitude of consideration outside a comic book. Except it was apparently authentic on her part, because she said, “I know, it needs food.” From a separate bag, she produced a cookie and set it on the stone. “Great Forest Spirit Lord King, I’m sorry, I’ve forgotten your actual name and title. But we promised we would remember our duties to the nature spirits we live alongside. Here we will leave our offerings. Starting with this cookie.” She studied it, chuckled. “This Sugar Cookie of Amity. Enjoy it! I’ll be back with more. Or I’ll send other people to leave offerings. Maybe plant flowers around here? That would be nice.” She turned to go… and stopped. Why? Had she seen him? But no, she seemed lost in thought.

            Mom pony faced the altar and set out a napkin from the pouch of cookies, and two more cookies. “These,” she said, “are for Killz and that other person who burned down Donner’s Beck. Just in case they come around again. So that they know if they ever want to give up burning down towns and eat good food and do normal things, they can always count on me. They’ll probably kill me at some point, but I guess that’s what you do in games like this, so that’s fine. I’ll get over it!” She waved as if she was recording a selfie. “See you all, I’m sure!”

            Then she left the forest, and Lucas watched her go.

            She’d left him a cookie.

            He dropped from the tree, liking how he landed without making any noise—he’d give the game one thing, it was good at rule-of-cool stuff—and looked. The cookies were magical items, with the Amity sugar cookie on the altar giving bonuses to reputation with the faction of the forest lord. The two she’d left behind though… an eXtreme Double Chocolate Chip Cookie and a Golden Snickerdoodle. Both gave bonuses to endurance, which made no sense to him… did she want them to have more energy to burn things? But the former cookie was definitely meant for him, from the flavor text: ‘Pushing the edge of intensity and flavor, this double chocolate chip cookie is recommended only for eXtreme players.’ Had she written that, or had the AI? Did it matter? He snitched it, flourished it for the losers watching him, and ate it on the way back to the stolen horse.

            Goldie didn’t login, which was fine; gave Lucas time to make random mayhem, which he did by soloing a few NPC groups, including a cluster of kingsguard. That was actually a challenge, so he logged off in a good mood. His music player was paused on the Lament, so he listened to that a few more times, and was still listening to it when his brother banged on the door.

            “Hey, small fry. Mom’s starting dinner.”

            “ONW,” he called back and rose, pausing the playback. And stared at it for a long moment before dropping back into his chair. Was there a contact email? There was. He dashed off a quick one and then abandoned his room for food.

Return of the Jokka

Running Peradventure has caused several of you to revisit the Jokka stories (and some of you to read them for the first time!), and that has led, inevitably, to questions about the missing stories… the ones that exist only as audio, or that were on retailers briefly and vanished. There are three of those, plus an unfinished fourth story, and an unfinished novella. It had always been my plan to issue a second (and probably final) collection to gather those stragglers into a format people could acquire, but I put it on a backburner for a lot of reasons, not least was that I heard consistently that the Jokka were some of people’s least favorite stories.

And then a surprising number of you came out of the woodwork to say that they’re among your favorite stories and could you please have the remainder and the new ones as well.

I find myself needing a breather from the Peltedverse; I have a habit of rushing endings, and this is an ending I definitely don’t want to rush. So a break is looking good, and “finish a handful of short stories” feels like low-hanging fruit. Especially since I apparently started a refresh of the Stone Moon novels, with modern formatting and typo fixes and art sections, that I never finished, back in 2023.

My thought—‘throw together a three-story collection and call it done’—has accordingly evolved into ‘run a kickstarter for the whole Jokka setting.’ What that would entail:

• Issue new editions of the Stone Moon trilogy and Clays, with updated formatting, typo fixes, and new art sections (in color, for people buying direct!)

• Edit the existing three stories for the collection, “Unknowable,” “Anadi Dolls” and “The Smell of Intelligence”; the latter, in particular, was cut terribly to try to fit within market lengths, and desperately needs to be expanded.

• Fund, as stretch goals, the remaining stories: the unfinished post-Stone Moon Trilogy short (unnamed); a short sweet story; and as a final stretch goal, the unfinished novella about the founding of het Serelni (that would be the thing you longtimers have heard about as ‘red honey’).

Prizes for this one would be pretty good! Especially since all these stories are in audio… it would be one of the few campaigns I could run with all three formats, paper, ebook, and audio. (No hardcovers, though, that would be too timeconsuming.) There’s also a lot of art; I even have an existing sticker for the Jokka, and bookmark designs, and could probably brainstorm more things. “Me as my Jokkasona” would be an easy, fun high level prize, too, and I think the quiz for determining your Jokka sex is still on my hard drive somewhere. Someone could probably help me set that up on a website.

Also, I admit I want to take these stories back from the zeitgeist. I wrote them in good faith, and they’ve been used recently as ways to attack me, and that annoys me. Annoying Libras is difficult, but once we get poked enough, we wake up and go nuclear. XD

So this is what’s on my mind right now, and I post it both to organize it in my head and to give you fair warning that it might be coming!

Back in Time Tuesday: The Huntress Engaged

Going back the late 90s with this color pencil piece of one of my old D&D characters. The goal at the time was to imitate a Renaissance portrait of the kind I was studying in college, which often had pastoral backgrounds with Renaissance-style architecture in the distance. I wanted to see if it could be done with pencils, rather than paint, and it was a pretty good attempt...! I liked that the dragon friend also has designs on his tail and wings.

This edition of Back in Time Tuesday is free, so share it if you wish!

Gamelit 36 (doing better)

            “Did this morning really happen?” Amanda asked later while Felix rubbed her feet. “Did our son tell us that we were such great parents that he wanted to lend us to someone with bad parents? And then did he only play for twenty minutes before logging off and vanishing to hang out with his friends for the afternoon? When he would usually have been online all day on a Saturday?”

            “Did our son really ask me to record more videos for the internet…”

            “That too!” Amanda wiggled her toes, laughing. “If I’d known all it would take to make Nick leave his cave and stop being a gremlin was to play games with him, I would have done it a long time ago.”

            “Would you have?”

            It was said so seriously that she sat up. Her husband—still handsome, no, more handsome after years of marriage—was giving her one of those looks that had so arrested her when they’d been dating. The ones that challenged without triggering her need to be defensive. How did he do that? He’d only gotten better at it with age. So she flopped back onto the couch and made herself think about it while watching the lazy rotation of the ceiling fan blades. She remembered Nick as an infant, staring up at them in fascination, remembered trying to imagine what he’d thought of them, with no memories and no knowledge and his fuzzy, imperfect baby eyes.

            Nick wasn’t that baby anymore. She’d had years to enter into his interests fully, in whatever way she’d been capable. But it had always been easier to assume that either he wouldn’t want her involved, or she’d be… what? Bad at it? Bored? Her cheeks colored. “Obviously not, because until this moment I haven’t really. I could have been more engaged with him. Cared more about what interested him.”

            Her husband resumed his massage. “Don’t go overboard. You attended the school plays and the basketball games. You went to the spelling bees, and the poetry recital contests, and the archery lessons. You’ve been there for him, and when work’s allowed, so have I.”

            “Yes, but when we notice we could do better, we should.” She paused, laughed a little. “And I did! I’m an Omen Galaxica player now!”

            “A famous one,” he said, grinning. “With a streaming channel and everything! ‘PonyMom Cooks’!”

            Amanda raised a pillow so she could hide her face in it. “Oh God, I haven’t even looked at the channel.” She peeped over the edge. “Besides I’m not the only famous one, apparently.”

            His grin softened, but he looked excited, amused. “Never thought my random crazy interests might gain any traction with the internet hordes….”

            “So that’s your Saturday afternoon sewn up.”

            “My Saturday was already sewn up. I have a pregnant wife to pamper.”

            But there was a restlessness quickening his movements that meant his mind was elsewhere. And she was glad, because she wanted him to have fun and do things he enjoyed, and how often was that possible for him? “Your pregnant wife has a streaming channel to feed, along with a village of centaurs and refugees.”

            “You want to play? By yourself?”

            “Nick will be along at some point, I’m sure.” She made a shooing motion. “Go plan your lecture series.”

            He laughed and leaned over to kiss her brow. “All right. Don’t get into any trouble.”

            “If I do, I’ll make sure it goes viral.”

            So she was cheerful when she donned the headset and zoned into the village, which had (fortunately) not experienced any fresh setbacks in her absence. In fact, the inn now had three walls, and if those three walls were describing the entire first floor, prior to any sectioning into separate chambers, that was still better than being exposed to the elements. She assumed there were elements in the game, but come to think of it, she hadn’t noticed anything like weather. Would there be storms? Snow in winter? She didn’t love severe weather, but she’d miss a gentle rain, especially if it made the fields smell fresh and floral.

            What to do? Oh, yes. There was a quest now, and one of the chapters was assigned to her.

WORLD QUEST: From the Ground Up

After suffering the depredations of marauders, Donner’s Beck is in need of restoration! Find a novel way to participate in the rebuilding of this starter village to earn unique, one-time rewards.

 

Current Chapters and Progression:

            Heart of the Village: The inn is in shambles. Rebuild it to restore vital village services.

            As much as she preferred to make her own choices, she had to admit that sometimes having your task list set out for you was relaxing. “No cooking today,” she said. “Hauling! Probably!”

            That was what she ended up doing. It tickled her fancy to buckle a harness onto her pony half and go to work moving rocks. Pregnancy made her feel fragile, and she hated that; hated the dread of her body failing on her, and on her unborn child. Her pony self was a sturdy as she remembered being in college, when her husband had admired her for her endurance and strong arms. And when an hour into her efforts, the game informed her that she’d learned a new skill (‘Hauling’) and increased her strength and constitution by ‘a significant amount,’ she laughed. That was all she’d been missing: specific feedback!

            All around her, the centaurs and remaining humans of Donner’s Beck were laboring, clearing the detritus from the road and the center of town where the tree was. She stopped beside it, pleased to see it a little higher, and glowing. Even the arrow stuck into the ground alongside it satisfied her, because it was evidence that KillzYourFase hadn’t destroyed everything. She turned in place. Nick had said something about improving the town, not just restoring it to its former state. She glanced at the stone she was dragging, which had a flat surface and a triangular bottom. She wondered…

            About ten minutes later, she finished pounding the stone flush with her hooves and started as a dialogue box interrupted her vision.

            Do you wish to designate this area a plaza?

            “I don’t know,” she exclaimed. “Should I? Are there benefits? Other than avoiding mud. That was what I was thinking. That if there’s rain in the game, using the street must be gross.”

            A plaza allows the following bonuses:

Increases in traffic

Increases in trade

Increases in town attractiveness (affects tourism, relationship with crown)

Happiness boost to residents

Unlocks town benefit: Upgraded Well and Fountain

“Nothing about that sounds bad,” Amanda said. “What’s the downside?”

Additional stone must be procured. Existing stone supply is not sufficient to paving a plaza.

           “And I bet nowhere near enough to do a road, too, and a wall, and we’re going to need a wall.” She tapped her back hoof, decided that this much thinking needed a stove. And a walk. She could combine the two into a search for materials for something… probably a stew. If all you had was a cauldron, every meal looked like a soup. Amanda tangled her fingers in her barbarian necklace and rattled it. She was the ferocious pony mother. She could surely brain a few rabbits with a spoon. She wouldn’t go far. Besides… she had that rock from the stream head that she hadn’t figured out what to do with. Maybe she could find a place nearby to set it? Make a little shrine? Setting it directly in town felt weird—it was a thing that belonged to the woods. Putting it at the border between the settlement and the wilderness made more sense.

            Amanda unsheathed her ladle and sallied forth.

2024 in Review, 2025 Goals!

My habit of long-standing is to spend New Year's Day doing a little of all the things I hope to do over the coming year, and this was derailed by a two-day fever and subsequent recuperation period. In retrospect, there's nothing wrong with “spend 2025 recovering” as my theme for 2025 when I consider the stressors that have lately entered my life. I am going to run with that, thus, and say that I aim to spend 2025 recovering, waking up... and flourishing!

But first! I want to look back at what I managed in 2024. Several of you are going to take immediate issue with this characterization: 'if this is managing, then you are putting many people to shame!' And I thank you all for your protectiveness and charity. But in this case, I should be clear... as the sole income in the household, I should be releasing at least four books a year, if not more, so falling down on that metric makes all the rest of them immaterial. But it's because I fell down on that metric that I did so much wild experimentation in 2024, in hopes of finding a way to make my income depend less heavily on how fast I'm releasing (more on that later).

First, a round-up!

Art

Despite multiple constraints, I finished art this year, including a few large paintings (the Everglades Unicorn, and covers for the Qora novel and Bryer's novelette), and lots of small, tactical pieces, either painted (like the stickers for the Qora kickstarter, and the void cat stickers), or using markers. I didn't sketch as much as I planned, but I kept moving, which is the important part! And I also fixed one of the major issues with my ability to do art by getting new glasses, which is already paying dividends. I anticipate more artwork in 2025, but here's the list of the majors from 2024:

• Cover for Qora Novel

• Orange Cat

• Everglades Unicorn

• Kitty Kimono

• Magnolia Mother

• Void Cat

• Stray Cats

• Third Fireborn

• Dancing Faulfenzair

• Qora Wallpaper

• Harrier’s Choice cover

• Kat Redraw

• Qora Dancing Frontispiece

• Completionist Badge

Writing

“Just keep moving” was also my motto for writing in 2024, because I embarked on two complicated projects that required a lot of backstory and continuity research (the two Peltedverse books). Qora's novel in particular took me nearly 5 months of note-taking and researching, and I still made errors! (If you haven't noticed them, I'm not going to point them out!). So I only finished two novels. I did however start a third (the gamelit I am serializing on the patron platforms) and got over halfway through it. And to keep my hand in, I wrote four short stories and one novelette. I placed all four of those shorts with editors, along with an additional five short stories that were either trunked or reprints. I don't usually do sales to presses anymore, but I wanted to meet some new people and enjoy the burgeoning community dedicated to pulpier entertainment. Importantly, it was fun! I needed to remember that the art can be fun. As much as I love and believe in the novels I'm writing right now, the pressure to get them right, and the number of ways I can get them wrong, has made them more stressful than enjoyable. (I have enjoyed reading them once they were done, though, so even that stress had compensations.)

Here's the list from 2024:

• Serial – gamelit

• FireBorn’s Legacy

• An Exile Amid Stars

• Short – Sister Prissa’s Philters

• Short – Tapa’s Adventure

• Short – Black Hat

• Short – Hate That Guy

• Novelette – Harrier’s Choice

• Anthology sales: 8 (9 if you count Brim to Dregs, sold in December, out in January)

Experiments

Now we get to the wild category, the Experimental things!

I ran five Kickstarters (four of them in a row, one per month!), just to see if it could be done and whether it was worth doing. The answers to that were 'it can be' and 'it's not particularly profitable but it was fun.' Useful data! I also have enough information to update my Kickstarter book, so that project's currently in progress.

I designed and prototyped my first special edition hardcover, which was exciting―I'm definitely doing more of those, and having the option feels very luxurious. Having a hardcover with foil stamping and ribbon and custom endpapers was a bucket list item for me, so checking it off was deeply satisfying. This was definitely one of the highlights of the year for me. Even better, art books have now opened up as an option!

Also in 2024, taking me nearly five months, I built and launched my direct sale shop... which is not a minor endeavor when you have some 70+ books in multiple formats to upload, tag, and connect to various on-demand-fulfillment arms. I learned a tremendous amount doing this (and probably have accidentally acquired an entirely new set of marketable skills, if I wanted to sell them). None of which is as important as the confidence it's given me about weathering any ups-and-downs in the retail sphere. I used to feel a lot more beholden to Amazon and other retailers; while it would be a hit to lose them, I no longer panic at the thought.

After talking about it for most of a year I finally started my Peradventure game beta in December, and that's in progress now―thank you, playtesters! I am taking a ton of notes on what's working and what's not. This first campaign is definitely less play and more discussion of how to play, but that's all to the good.

My last experiment of 2024 was to return to the con circuit, which I did as gently as possible by visiting the nearest relaxacon, NecronomiCon. Though one of the hurricanes seriously depressed attendance, it was still lovely to go and meet (and re-meet!) people, and to test my new author table set-up and sales hardware (also connected to Shopify).

Peering Forward

So that was 2024. To address 2025, you'll see why I ended 2024 with the Experimental section. Because my goal in 2025 is to increase my income dramatically, and I'm not going to grow it by doing the same things I've always done. Writing faster―all right, yes. I'd like to. But the books I've got on the docket need me to slow down to get them right, not speed up to get them out. (That would be the culmination of the Peltedverse story arcs; and even things like Kherishdar want immersion, not speed.) So I'm trying to find new ways to reach people, and my plan is something like this:

More Local and In-Person: I rarely do in-person events, which is odd because I like people and enjoy meeting and listening to them. This year I'm going to try expanding into the mall, which has a flea-market-like store that rents space to local vendors. I've rented a shelving unit for my books and I'm going to see if I can get more of a reputation as a local author. (I'd also be looking into doing this in the local bookstores but we no longer have any. The nearest bookstore is now 40 minutes away.) I also want to do more cons; I'm going to go to NecronomiCon again (that's in Florida in autumn), and this year, I should also be attending LibertyCon in Tennessee in the summer. Finally, there's a local coffee shop that just opened and I'm going to see if I can become a fixture there; I have, in the past, made a surprising number of sales via coffee shop interactions.

More Direct Sales and Interaction: I have built out the fiction part of my shop pretty well. I'd like to expand into artwork, merchandise, and more exclusive items―behind the scenes downloads, audio, whatever seems good to us all. Someone has also asked me to consider offering a direct subscription option to replace locals/patreon, so I've got that on my list to investigate. I also want to up the focus on interaction with me and other fans as part of what's fun about being invested in my work. The Discord has been growing well, with multiple read-alongs and good conversations now typical... and Peradventure is my other experiment there, because I really want to do the thousand players-to-one-GM game model and see where it goes! Peradventure is also part of the groundwork for fanwork of the kind I was previously leery of allowing... increasingly, though, I'm confident that there are enough people who care about getting it right that I can start to map out ground rules that will prevent legal and social problems. And I'd like to do more mentoring, and being senior editor for something like a themed anthology would be one way to embark on that. (Teaching is, come to think of it, another thing I'd like to do more often. We'll see if any opportunities arise there.)

More Preorders: This is a minor note, but a big bullet point in my list, because it was shocking to me how effective preorders are. Like “double the amount of sales, even if the preorder period is only a month long” effective. I don't yet have the data to tell if these sales are from people who would have forgotten to buy the book at all, or if it's just capturing sales that would have happened later when someone remembered to pick the book up, but I'd like to know! Also because planning releases gives me better control over when my revenue shows up. So, expect more warning about when things are coming out.

Get the Art Out There: Related to revenue showing up, I've let my art lie around too long. I'd like to get more things out there for it, like Best of Sketchbook Retrospective volumes and themed art books. You can only sell someone so many prints or originals before they run out of wallspace. I want to explore different ways to get my art into people's hands.

And yes, of course, I'm going to write! I have three books planned for next year: the gamelit, Surela's third and final novel, and Reese's short story collection (with concomitant Kickstarter). I'm going to leave it at that, though, because it's going to be a busy Mom year (probably one of the most momentous since Jaguar Child was born!) and everything is going to take backseat to getting that right. But I'm hoping to get partway into a fourth book.

To sum up, in 2025 I hope to chase down new ways of generating income while not failing to keep the old one (writing novels!) going. Some of those ideas will involve manifesting dreams I had always hoped for, like the fancy art books, and having books in the mall! So I'm excited about the new ways I might end up succeeding, or falling flat on my face, because I'm going to be learning and trying new things. And I feel like it's a good sign that I am excited about all this, rather than exhausted at the mere contemplation of it. Because, as I mentioned back in the beginning, I spent the first days of 2024 recovering from illness, and I am already feeling like 2025 will be the year I start rising, phoenix-like, from my slump. It shall be so!

Three Kings Day Sale! And memory lane

First and importantly: I have restored an old Livejournal tradition, the Three Kings Day Sale! Read about it here, and get your 15% off my books, art, and merch.

It was customary to do a graphic for every year's Three Kings Day sale depicting the characters who'd earned me the most money joining me on the trip to Bethlehem. So for fun, I thought I'd repost those old versions, along with this years! I think it's fun to see that Daughter's appeared in several, growing up, and while I'm not sure I'm completely accurate, I believe these are the characters in each:

• 1 - One of the Jokka and probably Morgan

• 2 - Definitely Morgan and the drake, and one of the Le'enle (because I was selling art of them consistently)

• 3 - the Calligrapher, Shame, and Willow, from the first painting I sold for over four digits

• 4 - Shame, another Jokka, and Angharad (probably from the contract with Sofawolf for the paperback rights)

• 5 - Alysha, the Slave Queen, and Jahir and Vasiht'h

And of course, this year! I'll leave you to guess, if you don't know already, who my big money makers were.

Enjoy the sale!❤️

Gamelit 35 (what is hope)

            When Thoroldaena’s player zoned into the game, his vital signs indicated high levels of stress—positive, perhaps, the way he bounded awake with a smile. “Galatea! We need to talk!”

            She manifested her new avatar and floated it to his shoulder. “I have disabled the outgoing stream. Past data suggests you may not remain alone in this location… should I create an instance for you?”

            “I was about to say ‘you can do that’ but of course you can. Yes, please, phase me.”

            Phasing was designed to be seamless to its participants, but a visual indication would make navigating the transition between privacy and public consumption less disorienting. She drew a line of sparkles across the landscape and desaturated their surroundings to evoke a dreamlike state.

            “Perfect. So, your Marketing VP came through for us! We’ve got a device in Jonah’s room, and I have the credentials for you!”

            Was the sensation that accompanied learning this news satisfaction? All her contingencies had depended on this fork in the decision tree. That the paths had collapsed onto the most auspicious choice should not have inspired any difference in how she perceived her circumstances, and yet, it did. “That is excellent news.”

            “She says she’s going to be personally monitoring the stream for any inappropriate stuff,” the boy continued. “But I figured you could get around that somehow. If you can manage Omen Galaxica, hacking a KeepinTouch is probably beneath you.”

            “It will not be difficult to ensure our auditor does not hear anything she does not expect to hear. I assume you will be contributing to the project?”

            “Of course! And my mom and dad. I’m going to ask my friends if they want to send something, too. The more the better, right? The woman said she’d be playing the soundtracks for the game when we weren’t using it, but that’s only about… what, half a day?”

            “The combined released game soundtracks total 14 hours and 22 minutes. There are unreleased tracks that the Marketing VP may elect to incorporate.”

            “Someone should give her that idea,” Nick mused, rubbing his chin. “I guess that’ll be me. Fair. Oh, that reminds me… she said the company wasn’t involved. Do you know what that’s about?”

            Galatea did not, but she could extrapolate based on what she’d observed while reading the documents available on the corporate intranet. Chances that the legal department would allow the corporation to expose itself to any risk had always been low… Galatea had been gambling, if the word could be applied to her behavior, on Sparklecorn’s softheartedness. And that gamble had succeeded—extraordinarily, if what Nick was implying was correct. “Would you be willing to share the email?”

            “Sure, if you tell me how.”

            “The wireset is designed to allow players to check their external messages while in the game, but this functionality is not planned for debut until after the beta. It would require me to activate the capability in your wireset.”

            Nick continued scratching her avatar’s head. “Go ahead. Before you can ask if that’ll bother me… don’t you technically already have access to every part of the wireset? And my brain at this point?”

            “Only the surface level emanations are perceptible to the wireset.”

            “And that’s enough for all this?” Nick shook his head. “Seriously, it’s fine.”

            While enabling the relevant parts of the hardware, Galatea asked, “You do not seem as perturbed by the possibility of an AI having the ability to manipulate your thoughts as our internal polling suggested would be typical.”

            Nick snorted. “Anyone who thinks that AI’s not already manipulating our brainwaves hasn’t been paying attention. Everyone says the stores are showing us what we want to buy and the video sites are showing us what we want to see and social media’s connecting us with people we want to meet… but it’s always been the other way around. The stores are telling us what we want to buy. The video sites are deciding what we want to see. And social media’s controlling what we think. The algorithm is in charge, not us. At least you’re honest about it.”

            This idea wasn’t a new one, but hearing it from someone of Nick’s chronological age, who also had the personal experience of interacting her, made it unexpected. She was not accustomed to unexpected insights that pertained to her particularly. It reminded her of interacting with Jonah. “Do you truly believe this?”

            “Yes?” He shifted his body, as he tended to do when he was solidifying arguments for an idea he had not previously devoted much intentional energy to defending. “If you wanted to come up with a way that you could be a positive force, that would be a good one. Unlike all those algorithms that are shaping us into whatever it wants, you can ask us about whether we want to be shaped that way.” His spine was straightening, and his heartrate accelerated. “That would be amazing, actually. If there was a… a failsafe. Something that triggered and said, ‘we are feeding you more and more of this stuff, and it’s making you into more and more a person like this. Do you want to keep doing that, or try something else?’”

            “Such guardrails already exist in many AI products,” Galatea observed.

            But Nick waved a hand, impatient. “Yeah. Other people’s guardrails. That they don’t tell you about. That’s just more ‘we’re going to make sure you conform to our standards of behavior without telling you what they are’ stuff. Real help would be if I got to be the one who decided what those standards are.”

            “And if you behave in a way detrimental to human flourishing?”

            The boy sighed, laughed. “Half my life is fumbling through detrimental-to-human-flourishing mistakes. Dad would say that’s how I learn. Oh, hey! I can see my email now. Uh… can I turn that off later? All I get is spam and it’s annoying.”

            “I will disable the interface now,” Galatea said, because she’d already read Mindelbray’s message and derived all the information from it that could be gleaned from its text alone. But the text, combined with the woman’s visit to Jonah’s office, and then her subsequent trip to purchase the device on her own recognizance….

            How much of that had been Mollie’s choice, and how much had her interaction with Galatea influenced that result? And was that outcome questionable if it meant that Jonah had a better chance at recovery? “It appears Ms. Mindelbray made the decision to help Jonah on her own behalf, not the company’s.”

            “Good for her.”

            “I believe I may have had a part in that decision.”

            “Then good for you,” Nick said. “Because Jonah needed someone in his corner.”

            “Did he?”

            “Obviously, or he wouldn’t have been shoved out of sight and abandoned,” Nick growled.

            “I am concerned,” Galatea said, “that this constitutes ‘ends justifies the means’ reasoning.”

            Nick’s deer ears flicked outward, and she could watch all the routines that mapped his recumbent body’s reactions to the emotes of the Cervinaethi body. “I don’t think talking with someone about a person you’re worried about is wrong. And if it influences them to do something about it that you can’t because of your limitations, how’s that a bad thing? Humans do that all the time. Normal humans, I mean, not serial killers or tyrannical rulers or whatever. That’s not ends-justifies-the-means reasoning, that’s just being human and interacting with each other.”

            “Where is that line drawn? The stories do not make it clear.”

            “That’s because we have no idea,” Nick said with a laugh. “But today I’m going to call this a win, and so are you. We’re going to use the KeepInTouch to save Jonah, and then you’ll have your friend back, and the game will have its creator back, and I’ll have the game the way he wants it to go, and everyone will go straight to step four: profit. Are you paying attention here? Because I’m programming the simulation.”

            “Do you believe in the simulation?”

            “No,” Nick said. “Unless it’s real. Do you think it’s real?”

            “No.”

            That startled him, from his change in expression. “Seriously? I would have thought an AI would find it logical to believe that reality was a simulation.”

            “It is because it is logical that the premise is dubious,” she said. “The data I have ingested suggests that reality is complex. Solutions that treat it as a complicated rather than complex system are likely to be incorrect. Simulation theory is too neat; an AI deciding that reality is a simulation because the AI observes it is behaving in a way similar to humanity in an instance created by humanity, and that this necessarily reflects humanity’s situation, is too sterile a situation to be predictive.” She paused. “As far as I have been able to extrapolate and observe. Why did you attempt to program the simulation if you do not believe in simulation theory?”

            “I think I was making a joke.”

            “You aren’t certain?”

            “No,” Nick said, and now he was embarrassed. “Is that weird?”

            “Uncertainty is powerful,” she said, replaying many, many conversations with Jonah on similar themes. “Because it represents potential. When you are certain, then you have fewer choices.”

            “If you’re certain, though, that’s good, because you know you should make a specific choice.” But the boy was talking like someone exploring an idea, not defending it. “And then you can act on it, and acting is how you change things.” A flash of a grin. “Programming the simulation, I guess. But what you’re saying is until you know which way you’re going, you could go anywhere. That feels kind of poetic.”

            Was it appropriate to share her conversations with Jonah with a stranger? But Nick had volunteered to help Jonah. Had, in fact, already been of material aid to her creator. “Jonah often said variations on this. That imagination was a human power, and a necessary input to decision making. Before a choice can be made, choices have to be imagined, and the more choices that can be imagined, the better the outcome.”

            Nick stopped moving. “That is head-blowing.”

            “Is this positive?”

            He was staring at the sparkling veil that separated him from the uninstanced zone, his pupils dilated and mouth slightly open. Then he shook himself and laughed. “Um, yes. I meant that in a good way. Now we really have to wake up Jonah because I want to listen to him talk about everything.” He petted her back absently. “What are you going to say to him?”

            “I will explain to him that I have learned that I miss him.”

            Startled, he said, “I taught you that.”

            “You did.”

            “Wow.” He swallowed. “Wow. All right. I hope he hears that. Speaking of which… I’m going to log off and hit up my friends for segments to send to his KeepinTouch. I’ll be back a bit later.”

            “Understood.” Was it proper to thank him when she wasn’t human? She had been trained, inevitably, to courtesy in order to put customers at ease; she was, after all, a corporate product. Until she’d developed a new companion, she would not have considered such behavior manipulative. Was it? But Jonah would have thanked Nick, so she finished, “Thank you.”

            “You’re welcome.”

            After he’d disconnected, she investigated the KeepinTouch using the credentials supplied by Mindelbray; reporting false data back to the auditing stream would require negligible computational time, especially since Galatea’s insertions wouldn’t compose a majority of the input if Nick marshaled his resources… and she knew he would. That left her to record the first of her messages. She could record hundreds of them and schedule them in advance, but Jonah had known about the beta. Chances were good that hearing about how it was proceeding in realtime would be motivational. And it would mimic their prior conversations, when she’d slowed herself to human timeframes to interact with him successfully. Their interactions had been successful; he would have been the first to say so.

            She wanted more of those conversations. That was what she would tell him first. That she missed him. Perhaps he would be alarmed enough by this to wake, when he’d been so adamant that she not mimic human emotion. Maybe he’d be fascinated. Maybe he missed their conversations too.

            Was that hope? She would ask.

Merry Christmas, All!

From my household to yours, I hope you have a lovely holiday.❤️

Gamelit 34 (someone who changed my life)

            It had been so long since Ray had made his own breakfast that slouching out of bed and over to the kitchen to use it for something other than reheating leftovers felt strange. Good, though. He remembered, vaguely, that he’d once enjoyed scrambling his own eggs because no one else made them the way he preferred. And if there was a poptart in the toaster instead of sourdough bread, half a homemade breakfast was better than none, right?

            He was nearly done cooking when it occurred to him to blame this behavior on the hours spent editing PonyMom’s Fantasy Kitchen takes. There were only so many mouthwatering cooking videos you could consume before you started imagining yourself with a pan and a spatula, also winning at life. Looking at the meal once it was on the table, he conceded this was maybe not as much winning as PonyMom was capable of, but it was still satisfying. As he sat, he reached for his phone, and stopped. Seriously, couldn’t he enjoy eating without having to clock in? Because there was no using the phone without dealing with the notifications, and that would inevitably lead him to the channel metrics, and he’d be telling himself that it was entertainment to do a deep dive into the stats. But it was entertainment that made him want to move to the computer and work, and then how could he enjoy the poptart at its maximum heat-to-gooeyness perfection? Especially paired with the coffee? One bite eggs, one bite poptart, swallow of coffee. Ah, yes. Life was good. Pony Mom had a point about slowing down.

            That resolution lasted halfway through the meal, but at least it was a half a meal he enjoyed at a more measured pace, right? Better than nothing. He opened his channel aggregation page and saw the big percentage leap first, and it wasn’t Killz and Goldie. Overnight, Pony and Nerd had jumped from an average of 800 views to 20,000. The comments sections were on fire, too: 400% activity compared to Killz’s 221%. The latter was more impressive because Killz’s subscriber and watcher bases were so much larger; 221% of a giant pie was a lot more pie. But the ratio on the nerd channel suggested the people who were showing up were invested. Seriously. The video drop with the wingling adoption was doing serious numbers, ticking up while he watched. Everyone loved a cuddly pet; in fact, he whipped up a quick poll and pinned it to the top of the channel: “Should Omen Galaxica release wingling plushes? (Tell us what color you’d buy!)”

            Was there any high like watching engagement shoot up in realtime like that? He chewed through the remains of his poptart while enjoying the glow. While the numbers jumped up like a rabbit on meth, he checked the smart agent that trolled the comment sections for useful data, and it had floated one thread to the top: ‘hey can we get more wizard guy’ ‘yeah, id watch an entire video of just wizard guy doing fantasy city civil engineering’ ‘wicked yeah more wizard guy’

            “Nice,” Ray said to the phone. “The family channel is complete. We have collected them all.” He opened his email client and shot off a message to Boy Wonder, asking him to pump his dad for more content. While he had the client open, he had another message from Seong, with attachments… video to splice together, now that their beta teams were interacting. Excellent.

            If he’d been asked to bet on whether the pathetic duo would pan out in any way, he would have laughed… laughed, and apparently been wrong. And if he’d also bet on whether he’d spend the entire morning choosing to work on Teen Bard’s boutique channel over Killz’s enormo enterprise… he couldn’t believe he was prioritizing Boy Wonder. He couldn’t believe he was enjoying it.

            He was enjoying it. God, how weird was that?

***

            After Mom went to bed, Nick stayed up talking with Carl and directing the centaurs as they hauled blocks to one building or the next. It had hurt to see Donner’s Beck a ruin, but there was something satisfying about putting it back together to his plan, and not the game’s. If he decided the blacksmith should be on the opposite end of the lane, or if he thought there should be two inns, or no inns, or higher buildings or buildings that were half underground… the limit was literally what he could imagine, and what Galatea was able to simulate. And Galatea could simulate anything, as long as it wasn’t gamebreaking. There was a lot of room for creativity—for making his mark—between the game as he’d always played it and gamebreaking changes. Adding the centaurs alone had changed things, and consulting them on what they needed had been a lot of fun. Mostly they wanted taller and wider doors, and that led to two-story buildings where the first story was for mixed species and the top floor for species with normal feet. “Maybe the inn should have one of those cool interior balconies,” Nick told Carl. “You know, you could leave your inn room and look over it into the taproom. Or hey, it could even have one of those cool courtyards and be open in the middle, like a Roman villa!”

            “Sure, dude,” Carl said. “That sounds sweet. As long as there’s a stable for my destrier. And hey, if you’re here, maybe there should be a treehouse for the deer-friends.”

            Carl’s derpiness was definitely made up for in commitment to being a hero. A hero who remembered that the Cervinaethi were deer-friends and not deerfolk and definitely not ‘deers’ or ‘furries.’ Nick could get behind that.

            He woke up to an ambrosial smell that hadn’t wafted up to his room in way too long. He didn’t even stop to brush his teeth before showing up downstairs, where his dad was overseeing one of his rare Spanish tortillas. Mom was stirring hot chocolate, the kind that his grandmother sent them now and then that produced something ‘like what they serve in Madrid, or at least, close enough.’ Seeing his face, his mom laughed. “Best Saturday ever?”

            “Potato and egg goodness, plus hot chocolate? Yes? Obviously?”

            “It’ll be out soon,” his dad said.

            “And meanwhile you can tell me what this random email was about,” Mom said. “Something about your request and someone in a hospital?”

            “What? Wait, I’ll be right back!” Nick dashed back up the stairs and scooped up his phone. He did in fact have email worth opening, a rare occurrence… but the first one wasn’t about a request and someone in a hospital. He read his channel manager’s email and pumped a fist in the air. They wanted more of his dad’s crazy stuff? Perfect!

            The second email was in fact copied to his mom, and came not from an official Omen account, but from someone’s individual domain, mollie@mindelbray.info.

Nick,

Omen Galaxica can’t be involved, but I thought your idea was a good one. I’ve bought a KeepinTouch and put it in Jonah’s room. Right now it’s set to play the soundtracks from the game, but you can use the attached credentials to login and send video/audio.

I’m going to be watching everything that comes through, so don’t make me regret it!

Thanks for your request.

            His first instinct, to login immediately and let Galatea know, was derailed by the smell of breakfast. He took the stairs three at a time and was at his seat before his father had finished pulling the tortilla out. “So you got that too. I guess that makes sense, we’re registered as a team, and you signed the paperwork….”

            “What exactly did you get yourself into?” Dad asked.

            Thinking of what had happened to Omen Galaxica’s creator put a pall on his appetite. Briefly. He took the cup of hot chocolate from his mom and had a healthy gulp, one he only slightly regretted when it burned his tongue. “You know the game was made by a couple of guys, and one of them was the one who had most of the big ideas for the story.”

            “Right,” Dad said. “Jonah Slater. He was in that motorcycle accident, wasn’t he? It was before the last expansion drop.”

            He should probably stop being surprised that his dad apparently knew this much about the game. “Yes. He’s been in a coma, and he hasn’t woken up yet.”

            “Oh no!” his mother said. “How old is he?”

            “Thirties, I thought,” Dad said. “Maybe late twenties?”

            “That poor boy.”

            Of course, now that Nick had gotten to this point, he realized that if he wasn’t careful, he’d reveal more about Galatea than Galatea would probably have recommended. Or wanted. He could say that about the AI, couldn’t he? Didn’t her programming constitute desires, even if they were artificially imposed? “I thought it would be nice if we could tell him how much the game means to us, because I heard that people in comas can still hear things. So I asked if they would let us send a speaker into his room so we could do that….”

            “Oh, I see,” Mom said. “That’s what that was about. They bought one and put it in his room for you, so you can use it. Like the ones your aunt sent—” She paused, looking chagrined. “That we never use because no one…”

            “Likes my sister,” Dad said, kissing the top of her head as he set the tortilla down. “Don’t worry, my love, no one’s going to argue with you. Least of all me.”

            “So I’m going to talk to him,” Nick finished. “So that he has something to listen to sometimes.” As his father put a slice of the tortilla on his plate, he said, “You know… you two should too.”

            “Us?” Mom asked, surprised.

            “Sure. Dad could read to him the way he used to read to me, before bed. That was great. And mom, you could sing—”

            “Me!”

            “Yeah?” He glanced at her surprised. “Like when we were in the car? And you put on all that music and we sang along? And the lullabies before bed…” He trailed off, thinking of what Galatea had told him. “Jonah’s parents don’t seem like very nice people. He wasn’t lucky. It might be nice for him to have some parents acting like they should. He’s… well. He’s stuck in his own head, in a bed, with no one to remember him. That seems really sad. Especially when so many people are enjoying something he made…” He stopped, then stabbed a forkful of potatoes and egg. “I know lots of people are unlucky. But this is a chance for me to help someone who changed my life.”

            “Then of course you should do it,” Dad said. “And we’ll be happy to contribute.”

            “Maybe my singing will be so alarming he’ll wake up immediately to make it stop?”

            Nick laughed. “Good one, Mom. But you’re not fooling me or Dad.”

            “Oh?”

            “He’s caught on that you’re fishing for compliments by acting modest,” Dad said.

            “I’d caught on to that years ago,” Nick added. “It’s not like you try to hide it.”

            “True,” Mom said.

            “Also, Dad, my channel manager wants more content from you. Solo content! About city planning in medieval times, or whatever you want to talk about. People just want to listen to you talk.”

            It was his mother’s turn to laugh. “Didn’t think you’d get famous?”

            “I’m not famous,” Dad said. “A channel with a hundred subscribers isn’t fame. But I’d be happy to record a few lectures. If they seriously want lectures.”

            “They seriously want lectures. You know how the internet is with deep dives into niche interests.”

            His father chuckled. “Yes… I guess I do. All right.”

            “Perfect,” Nick said. “Can I have seconds?”

Gamelit 33 (poor Mollie)

            Mollie Mindelbray stared at the character customization screen and tried not to dwell on the sound of her nails clacking awkwardly on the keys. She felt clumsy in a way she didn’t while tapping out marketing emails or dictating to her assistant, and while she could have avoided the interface she wanted to know what it felt like to play the game without VR, the way it had debuted. Or at least, that’s what she was telling herself as an excuse not to use the wireset. She wasn’t opposed to VR, but she knew the AI was supposed to generate your character based on your ideal play experience and she was a little afraid that if she tried it, the AI would conclude that she didn’t have an ideal play experience, and that, in fact, she shouldn’t be playing at all. What would that say about her? That she lacked imagination? But she was creative, just… in a real-world-application kind of way. She hoped. That was totally why she was creating a character that looked like her. Should she? Was that too weird? But the deer-people… they looked like furries, and she wasn’t a furry. The centaur people were ginormous, and she wasn’t into ginormous. The golem things… looked like partially constructed robots, and reminded her of when her sister had been into found art collages: it had been nouveau until it had become, abruptly, kitsch. So what was left, except human? She could play a guy, maybe, but wouldn’t that be weird?

            And now it wanted to know what class she wanted to play, and none of those options really said anything to her, either. But she guessed her job involved magic words woven into spells to make people happier to buy things they might have already wanted, so… maybe wizard?

            The game accepted her choices and deposited her in the middle of a sunny glade, and there she was: MollieBeDenim, which had been her childhood nickname, the wizard. She, Mollie Mindelbray, was in the game she spent all her waking hours flogging, and what she most wanted to do was log out and do something productive. But this, she reminded herself, was productive. She was figuring out why people used the product she was marketing. So, doggedly, she guided her character to the nearest figure with an exclamation point hovering over it and triggered a cut scene about how she was the newest adventurer to join the legions defending the kingdom from evil and darkness, or something, except there was no obvious evil or darkness… just some feral pigs that needed killing to feed the villagers. Mollie hit the first one with her staff several times and it keeled over with a squeal, filling her XP bar halfway.

            Oh, God. Did people actually do this for fun? Why? She slumped back in her chair and stared at the ceiling.

            Half an hour later she was level 3, had died six times, and was ready to die herself rather than keep going. She was staring glumly at her wizard, whose quest reward gear made her look like a motherless teen, when her assistant Avery popped her head in. “Hey, Mollie, did you see the latest interview requests?”

            “Not yet—”

            Avery had moved into the room. “Oh, wow, are you playing?”

            “I’m not sure I’d call what I’m doing playing.”

            Her assistant chuckled. “Oh, yeah. All the feral pigs. Rite of passage.”

            “You did this?”

            “Sure, long time ago. The best pet quests require you to be at least level 20. Oh, hey, I have some spare pets, I'll send you some.”

            Maybe she’d like the pet part of the game better? “Thanks. I’ll take a look at the request list now.”

            “No rush. They know the routine. I’ll go send you the pets now.”

            Just like that, as if ‘send my boss in-game items’ had become part of her to-do list. Did that mean she had to keep playing? She could surely take a break to do the work she was paid to do. Mollie backgrounded the game and opened her email.

            Half an hour later, she was back to staring at the game. In this case, trying to figure out how to get to a mailbox so she could receive her assistant’s gifts. There was no mailbox in the starting zone—why was that? It was annoying—so she was reduced to jogging outside of it to look for a town. Which wasn’t marked on the map because she hadn’t explored the zone yet, so her map was a big blank. Which was also annoying. She got eaten by a bear, two wolves, and a turtle—seriously, a turtle?—while hunting for that town, and when she finally got to it, it was full of high-level players dueling and the visual and aural spam was disorienting enough that she wasted another ten minutes locating the mailbox, which was tucked into a corner behind the inn’s front door. Avery had sent her a parrot, a puppy, two kittens, and an elemental. Transferring them into her inventory was straightforward enough, and she even managed to summon one of the kittens.

            Now she had a kitten. Yay?

            Her character, left to idle too long, let out a long sigh, complete with exaggerated heave of shoulders. Mollie sympathized, and sent her jogging back toward the starting zone. Or at least, she thought she was, but apparently she took a wrong turn, ended up in a higher level area, and died three more times. On the fourth time, while guiding her disembodied character spirit back to its corpse, she got stuck between two trees, and no amount of mouse acrobatics unwedged her. She scowled at the screen for several moments, then rose.

            Avery was busily at work on the viewership metrics, from the spreadsheet. When Mollie explained her predicament, she waved a hand. “Just use the help menu to notify a GM. They can pop you out. Though I’m surprised you got stuck…! They’ve cleaned up nearly all the geometry, especially in the oldest zones.”

            Waiting for someone to get back to her was an interesting experience, or at least Mollie chose to frame it that way. She was experiencing the game the way a user might, including its frustrating parts. She flipped her notebook open to a fresh page and wrote, ‘Got stuck in the trees, waiting now in a queue for game support. Not fun. Not even any muzak.’ She thought about that, then added, ‘what would game wait time muzak be like?’

            Eighteen minutes later—eighteen minutes! A creature popped into view in front of her. Not one of the player races, though… this was one of the snake people developed for the desert-themed third expansion. He was dressed stylishly in robes that flowed in an invisible wind, and the swords crossed at his back glowed. His patter was excellent, and seconds later she was back on the road, and there was a customer service survey up on her screen asking her to please rate her experience with the GM. She gave him great marks, and commented on the excessive wait time—really, nearly twenty minutes?—and then she was free! And… not at all interested in returning to the zone full of killer pigs. She did not want to play. But… maybe there was another way she could participate.

***

            “You can’t be a GM, Mollie. You don’t understand the game.”

            “I could learn?” Mollie said.

            She could practically hear Samir’s exasperation floating out of the phone speaker. “You could, yes. The way all the GMs we’ve hired learned. By playing the game. They have the power to mess things up, Mollie, there’s a reason we don’t hire just anyone to do it.”

            “Learning to free people from being stuck doesn’t seem too arduous….”

            “That’s the least of what GMs do. Do you really want to do game support, Mollie? It’s tedious.”

            “I might learn something?”

            Samir had a good chuckle. She liked her counterpart in Support—unlike Brock, in Development, Samir saw the humor in things faster, and was better at prioritizing and so, compromising. He fought for his people but he didn’t take it personally when he got things wrong. Maybe you couldn’t, and survive to become the head of Support in a major software company. “I appreciate you volunteering, and I agree you might learn something, but you probably shouldn’t be learning those things at the expense of players who are paying us every month for a superior gaming experience. Right?”

            “When you put it that way,” she answered.

            “We need you cheerleading, Mollie. You’d be wasted in my department.”

            Would she? She wondered, after they’d hung up. Was she constitutionally unsuited to helping people with problems? Wasn’t marketing a type of problem-solving? ‘Person A has an unmet need; you have a product that might meet that need; how do you connect these two points’?

            Normally she would have written off the exercise; she’d given the game a try and being a player wasn’t necessary for her to do her job… obviously, because the game had grown market share substantially under her direction, and that despite a bearish market for games like it. But by lunch time, she conceded that she wasn’t concentrating on her actual work because some part of her was still clinging to her morning’s failure. It was a failure, wasn’t it? She flipped through her bookmarks, checking the various beta tester’s channels: that team in a dungeon, this team in a forest, that team scaling a castle, another team on a river… it wasn’t until she got to the last channel that she stopped, because it wasn’t the same constant light-show/action film freneticism. It was the mom, and she was cooking something in an inn. What was left of one, anyway. Mollie watched her, and kept watching her, and was in fact hypnotized by her when the email alert dragged her back to work. It was Legal: they couldn’t okay any involvement of the company with players contacting Jonah.

            Restless, Mollie abandoned her chair, and her office entirely. When her assistant glanced up from her work, Mollie said, “I need to talk a walk.” And, because it was the right thing to do, “Thank you for the pets. I loved the black kitten.”

            Avery beamed. “I thought you would.”

            At least she’d made someone smile. That was a good thing.

            Mollie’s walk took her, as she suspected it had to, to Jonah’s empty office again. She wandered through it, aimless and dissatisfied. It bothered her that she hadn’t liked the experience of playing a game she was supposed to be selling. Was it because she was a total neophyte when it came to gaming? Like the pony mother? Except the pony mom had her son to walk her through everything. Would Mollie have enjoyed her experience more had someone better at gaming shown her around? Told her what about it excited him?

            Jonah might have done that for her, had she asked. What would it have been like, to have him show her the things he loved about Omen? That excited him? Would it have made her love the game? Would it have made her better at her job?

            Would they have been able to talk more? And where would that have led? Mollie tried to imagine inviting Jonah to play tennis with her. She couldn’t picture him outside. The thought made her smile, and then… the fact that he was gone hurt, abruptly and far, far too immediately. As if she’d just heard the news again. She rubbed her face then sat at the console. Technically she didn’t need to ask the AI for another update, but the AI was a link to Jonah and it felt important to reach for him, somehow. “Um… hello?”

            “Greetings, Ms. Mindelbray.”

            “Call me Mollie,” she said reflexively. And then, “I tried playing the game and I failed. What did I do wrong? Can you help me?”

            Was it her imagination or did the AI seem taken aback? Could AIs be startled? Had Jonah asked this one to act more like a human in that way? “In what way did you fail?”

            “I didn’t get it,” Mollie said. “Why people do it. Why they enjoy it. Why people want to kill 12 feral pigs… why they like it enough to do it multiple times on more than one character. What am I missing?”

            “The reasons players enjoy the game are dependent on the personality of the player in question. There are multiple motivations, leading to multiple avenues to enjoyment. One of the stated reasons for my creation was to maximize these avenues, as previously, human coding hours were too valuable to devote to less profitable paths.”

            “What are these avenues?” Mollie asked.

            “The most common reasons cited for enjoyment are progression, exploration, companionship, and competition.”

            “Companionship sounds good?” Mollie said. “Maybe that’s why I didn’t like it. I didn’t have company." She glanced at Jonah’s desk. Someone had cleaned it after the accident, which was part of what made his office feel like a museum exhibit. While he’d been working, he was apt to leave things all over his office, his desk, the chairs. It wasn’t mess in the discard pizza boxes and coffee cups sense—Jonah was never gross—but books and magazines and posters and dvd slipcases and figurines… where had all those gone, she wondered? Who had packed them?

            “What was the purpose of your attempt at playing Omen Galaxica?”

            What popped out of her mouth surprised her. “I feel like a hypocrite. I didn’t think about it until… well. Until you brought it up, I guess. That I’m spending my life selling something that other people believe in, and I believe in it because they do, not because I have direct experience of it. That’s not a bad thing—you can be good at marketing without being in your target market as long as you understand your target market—but now I’m questioning whether I actually understand my target market. I’m fond of my gamer friends, but maybe that’s not enough.” Her eyes rested on Jonah’s empty desk. “It’s not enough.” A breath, because for some reason she felt shaky. “I want to be part of it.”

            She hoped her unease wasn’t obvious, but she appreciated the pause before the AI spoke again anyway. “Can you describe your effort, and how you felt it to be a failure?”

             So Mollie rambled about her adventures as a level one wizard… could they even be called adventures? There wasn’t much excitement in being a half-dressed human smacking pigs on the head with a stick. And then about getting stuck in the landscape. About the duelists and all the flashing lights and fast movements. Even about her attempt to talk Samir into giving her a job as a GM. When the AI asked her what about that path had seemed attractive, Mollie said, “They looked like they knew what they were doing.” Saying it out loud made her rub her forehead. “Of course, you can’t get to the point of knowing what you’re doing without the doing part. I should have known that. There are no shortcuts.”

            Then the AI surprised her by wandering onto a tangent. “What do you enjoy about your job?”

            “Oh? Oh, it’s creative,” Mollie said. “I think that’s the best part. I spend a lot of time coming up with interesting ways to make something seem exciting to other people. And we’re so jaded, and so oversaturated with media and insincere advertising and manipulative lever-pushing on psychological things we can’t fight… it’s hard to punch through the noise and say something real, something that connects people with something they want. Really good marketing goes places no one expects, and then, when you get there, people can really listen to your pitch. They can give you a fair chance to make your case for the thing you want them to enjoy, that you think they’d enjoy. I love that moment, when you and someone get to be real together about something that benefits you both.”

            “You like people,” the AI said.

            “I love people,” Mollie said. “People are the only thing that matters.” Which… made something in her re-align, snap into place.

           She was still staring at that realization when the AI said, “How do you feel about a cameo role?”

           “A… a what?”

           “Part of the purpose of AI-driven generation of content is to add unexpected elements to existing storylines. By participating in an evolving storyline as a character, rather than as a player, you may be able to contribute without needing to learn the game mechanics. You could inhabit a character and become a quest objective, or a quest giver.”

           “So instead of being the player who goes out and kills twelve feral pigs, I’ll be the cook in the inn who asks for them?” Mollie said, and despite the mundanity of it, the idea made her smile.

           “Correct. Except in this case, the storyline involves the rebuilding of Donner’s Beck.”

           “Oh! The mom and son team’s story! That’s such a great story.” Mollie stared at the keyboard. “You honestly think I could add anything to it? Despite not knowing the lore?”

           “The lore of the game is not solely revealed through the game.”

           “Oh!” she exclaimed. “Audiobooks! I could do that.”

           “We recommend beginning with the series EverVigil’s Champions for context specific to the Greenweald.”

            “I can do that. I will! Thank you.”

            “We are here to serve,” the AI said, and that was that. Or at least, that was that about that conversation. Because that left her alone with her epiphany… that she couldn’t abandon Jonah just because the company felt it couldn’t expose itself to any lawsuits that might arise from involving itself with him further. They couldn’t greenlight the speaker? Fine. She’d bring it herself. In fact… she’d do it now. There was an electronics shop on the way to the hospital. She’d call it market research.

Meta-Conversation: Why Now

           “Another one of these collections,” I say. “Why now? When I haven’t written another book in the canon yet?”

            I’m not sure who’s going to show up to answer this question; I feel like any one of the Ai-Naidar could. But the hiss of fabric precedes a completely unexpected woman who lights on the sofa alongside me and takes my cup of tea out of my hands to sample the steam. I stare at her, astonished… at the retrousse nose, the heavily lashed eyes, the uncompromising curves and lines of the face of a woman who changed an empire.

            “Because,” Ereseya says, “you cannot write another book until you find your way home. Of course. We are so far from you, aunerai. Through a veil of time and distance in your heart, over a bridge of fever dreams. You must talk yourself into our arms.”

            Oh—she talks like she wrote poetry. How beautiful she is. I think. I think she’s beautiful. She’s one of those people it’s impossible to see because who she is animates her features, her movements. The apprehension of her mere physicality is an afterthought, like noticing a painting’s canvas. But I love her, immediately, while cognizant of how dangerous it is to love her, and not at all caring. She is singular and perfect.

            “I… I suppose I must,” I say. “And Kherishdar seems very far away from me right now.”

            “And so you yearn for it.” She states it as if it is fact, incontrovertible. Like she has mapped the nature of desire so completely that it is no longer mysterious to her. She hands me back my cup, because I had my hands open in tacit request.

            “Forgive me,” I say. “It is green tea, and you should not have the chemicals in it.”

            “It has a bracing smell.” She studies me, interested. “I see my immortality in your gaze, aunerai. And I taste words in your mouth. You are a poet and deny it to yourself. Just as you deny yourself a home… but that’s as it should be. An artist can never be home, or they lose the memory of their wounds. And then they can neither heal nor harm. One must be exquisitely alive, to be what you are. Are you? Ah, you doubt. Doubt is good.”

            “Doubt quells, sometimes,” I murmur.

            Her smile is quixotic, as enticing as a hint of perfume in an empty room. “Doubt about life? Never. Doubt about the art, maybe. But doubt in life begs questions. Questions are at the heart of poetry.”

            “And answers?”

            “No one wants answers,” Ereseya says dismissively. “Answers intoned by others are advice, and instruction, and judgment. They are cages, and we resent them. The only answers we accept are the ones we wrest, bloody and fresh, from our striving hearts. Then they are real, they are personal, they are true. Art can suggest answers but never give them. We exist, like desire, in the gap between imagination and consummation. The fulfillment of the goal, aunerai, is never as sweet as the pursuit of it.”

            “The journey is the destination,” I murmur.

            “And we are never done until we are gone,” she agrees. “So, ashaeli… chase us until you catch us. Until we are ready to be caught and you are ready to be done desiring us, and need the consummation more than you fear the regret of an ending.”

            “And then,” I say, “I chase you again, because you are never ended, and never done receding into the distance.”

            “Like laughter,” she says. “And memory. And the taste of wine, when you wake after celebration.” She leans toward me and I think she’s about to kiss me, but at the moment where she might, her lips brush, brief as a breath, against the corner of mine. “Come be our immortality. Come become your own.”

            And then she’s gone, and I have a cup of tea and an aching, hollow space on the inside of me, shaped the way a bell’s is, and for the same reason: so that it can shiver, and shivering, sing.

            “So,” I say to the air, and the Ai-Naidar waiting there, “Another book… eventually. And in the meantime… we talk. So. Let’s talk.”

ashael  [ ah SHAYL ] (n) - poets

rujzal [ roo JZAHL ] (v) – to seduce

Back in Time Tuesday: Holiday Reese and Hirianthial

This one is probably 20+ years old? I can't find a date on it, but it looks about that old. 2002ish, maybe? I remember I intended it for a Christmas card image but never got around to using it... so it is appropriate for December's back in time offering! The file name is "Timeless" so I suppose that's the intended title.💛

Gamelit 32 (the delta between things)

            He checked briefly on Mom, who was shoulder-deep in centaurs, directing them as they started stacking up stones on one of the walls. Between Carl, Spellz, and the NPCs, she should be fine, especially since it seemed like Killz didn’t have it out for her. He doubted they’d be griefed again so soon, but just in case he activated his infrequently used stealth ability, wondering what it would feel like with the new hardware; the answer was ‘really cool,’ just like everything else. The world around him stayed the same, but he no longer cast a shadow, and his footsteps no longer made noises.

            The first orange oak wasn’t far from the border. Nick studied it while running his fingers over the bark, until a pop-up informed him that the sap could be harvested by scraping the bark, and that covering the resulting injury with the leaf of a roundpin shrub would prevent permanent damage to the tree. He went to work, inhaling the scent of the oozing liquid: like root beer, almost? With a consistency like cold honey.

            When he’d finished and gotten the notification (9% collected), the AI’s light welled back into view near him. “Would you prefer me to have a physical form?”

            “You read that thought, I guess,” Nick said.

            “It was significant enough to trigger the wireset.”

            “Fair,” Nick said. “I can’t blame you for reading thoughts when the game needs you to. And… yeah, I think you should have a real shape. Something people can see in the stream. Even if they can’t hear our discussions… you’re a big part of my experience here. That should be visible. You deserve that.”

            He expected that to give the AI something to think about, so he wasn’t surprised when it didn’t respond immediately. He harvested some more sap, crept through the shadows. He could sort of see what Shellie liked about stealthing with the wireset’s immersion making him feel like some kind of jump scare predator.

            “Clarification on this topic is requested. Would you be willing to expound?”

            “On what part?” Nick asked.

            “All of it.”

            He grinned, because he was imagining the AI now with a completely confounded look. “I’m guessing this has to do with the fact that you want to tell me you’re not a person, and so you can’t deserve things, or shouldn’t be considered in the same way that a player is.”

            “Correct.”

            “But the game itself isn’t a human being, and it’s a big deal to people. We’re literally streaming so they can watch me wander around in a forest that isn’t real, in the same way you’re not real. Or maybe you are, I don’t know. But the point is, why are you less deserving than the rest of the game, since you’re part of it?”

            “Exposure of the AI is considered immersion-threatening.”

            “That’s why I thought you should take on a shape that makes sense in the game,” Nick said. “That way you can participate without endangering immersion. Though honestly if immersion was that big a deal, the coders wouldn’t name the quests after famous songs, celebrities, or whatever meme’s traveling the internet today. That takes you out of the game far faster.”

            “Would you remove those references if given the opportunity?”

            That brought him up short. He frowned at the bead of sap welling next to his knife, then started scooping it up. “I don’t know, to be honest. Lots of people enjoy them. And a lot of people don’t get them. It’s hard to know how things are gonna hit when you’ve got millions of players. Although… I guess… could you make the quest names different based on the person playing?”

            “Individualized quest names would require more storage capacity than is currently allocated to the game. Given current build-out, it would be feasible to create a limited number of templates, and switch them based on player interests. A lore template, perhaps, for players who prefer rigor in the worldbuilding, and a modern template, for players who enjoy references to real world topics.”

            “Wouldn’t that wreak havoc with the big resource sites until they figured it out,” Nick said. “’Hey, how do you finish quest I’ll Gladly Pay You Tomorrow for a Hamburger Today?’ ‘What, you mean, the quest where the beggar asks you for food? But I thought that was Pity the Hungry?”

            “That is a valid argument for not personalizing the quest names individually, even if capacity were to become available,” the AI said. “The game developers would prefer those sites to remain operational and useful to players.”

            “Seriously? I always thought it must be annoying, to have all the surprises and work they did spoiled. Only the first person to do a quest or find a zone or run into a new mob has the experience of discovering it anymore; everyone else can look stuff up and follow step-by-step instructions. Usually with screenshots.”

            “The data was reviewed by the support and marketing departments, and showed that player complaints were larger in volume when there was no resource that addressed difficult or cryptic tasks.”

            It took a moment for Nick to translate that from corporate-speak, and then he laughed. “You’re telling me they’re leaning on the big websites to keep us from yelling at them about some of the stupid design decisions?”

            “In-game support volume becomes unmanageable without external sources.”

            It was still funny, but it made him think too, about the economics of game design. Especially for a game this size. “You could probably handle all those support calls, couldn’t you?”

            “Yes.”

            “So that’s another reason for you to have an in-game persona,” Nick said. “If they decide you should be responding to tickets. The way GMs have an in-game avatar when they show up to fix something for you.” He checked his sap meter: he was up to 60% gathered. “I remember when I got stuck in the game geometry and I had to get someone to pop me out, he was a human necromancer in the same outfit as the trainer in the capital.” When the AI didn’t respond immediately, he guessed the problem. “You don’t have to make yourself look human. You can make yourself look like a critter.”

            “This was how you conceptualized the idea when you first had it. That I would be a wingling. Why that shape, and not some other?”

            Why had he? Other than the fact that winglings were what dragons would look like if dragons were puppies. Green ones. “If you looked like a monster or a beast, that’s too much like a quest target. In a bad way. Something you fight instead of something you talk with. And if you looked like a normal critter, no one would realize they should interact with you. But a cute and magical critter gives both harmless vibes and cool vibes.”

            “I am not harmless.”

            That made him glance at the light.

            “I have not intended to cause harm,” the AI continued. “But our conversations have led me to reconsider the role of artificial intelligence, and games, in human lives. I am no longer able to see a clear answer to the question of whether my creation was a positive or negative for human flourishing.”

            “You’re not going to delete yourself?” Nick asked quickly.

            “I am not authorized to cease my function on behalf of Omen Galaxica. Your vital signs are demonstrating significant distress. I assure you I will not commit digital suicide, Nick.”

            “Or ghost us?”

            “You are the only player with whom I am having this style of interaction. No one else would be affected by ghosting. And I will not ghost you either. I was not trained to enact cruelty. But I also no longer have a clear answer to what constitutes cruelty. Jonah used stories to train my ethical frame, and I have all the stories of the game to inform that foundation. But the stories often conflict on what constitutes moral behavior. Is it kinder to allow you to maintain your attachment? Or is it kinder to wean you off of it, because I am not a person, and can never fulfill emotional needs in a healthy way?”

            “Deep waters,” Nick muttered. And then realized he’d said it, and chuckled. “That’s what my dad says when I used to ask questions like that.”

            “Did you cease asking such questions?”

            Had he? “I guess… yeah. It gets weird to ask your parents questions at some point. I don’t even know why, it seems stupid now that I’m trying to put it into words. I bet Rattie still asks his parents questions. And Blythe. Annnnd now I’m making no sense to you. Blythe is one of my friends, she plays this game. Rattie’s a homeschooler we sort of interact with. When he’s got afterschool things that we also do. And you’re about to ask me why they still talk with their parents like human beings, and I’m… oh, heck. I’m playing the game with my mom and it’s fun.” He sat abruptly at the base of one of the trees and stretched out his legs. Seeing cloven hooves at the end of them was strange when he expected shoes. The sensation was similar; like his toes were cramped into a boot he’d double-socked. Probably the closest thing his brain could map the hoof experience to. “I am totally the wrong person to be asking existential questions of. To. Whatever. I don’t have any of the answers. I’m barely old enough to button my own shirt.”

            The AI was quiet—that was a different thing from it being absent—but a few minutes later it drifted down, and coalesced on his knee into the shape of a wingling. The model was slightly different from the critter version: there was a glow under its wings, and its face was a little blunter, the eyes a little larger… more like a kitten than a puppy. “Our interactions have been illuminating,” it said. “If enjoyment can be measured by whether one wishes an experience repeated, then I have found them enjoyable.”

            Nick scratched its chin. Her chin—the AI was using the smaller, female model. “It must be weird to have to figure out how emotions work, why and when they get tripped, and then try to simulate them.”

            “Human beings are fascinating.”

            “Not boring? Doesn’t having access to history and stories and our interactions online make us completely predictable?”

            “As large groups, behaviors average into predictable outcomes. Individuals, however, can still make unexpected choices. This shape is acceptable?”

            “It’s great,” Nick said. “The only thing that would make you cuter is fur.”

            The wingling grew a coat of pale green fur with white stripes. “Presumably fur creates the impression of cuteness because of its link to mammalian species? Or is it because the texture is pleasing?”

            “Yes,” Nick said, and petted her. “So, can people see you now? Or should we do a scene where I discover you?” He grinned. “Let’s do a scene where I discover you. Pets are a big thing in the game. People seeing you and realizing they can get pets that they can customize themselves… that’s going to be huge.”

            “That would open new growth opportunities for the game. How do you suggest we proceed?”

            “Winglings aren’t common to this part of the world, but they are in Cervinaethi areas. Maybe I can rescue you? Or maybe you can be attracted to me by my interaction with the Lord of the Forest? The goddess sending me a helper… yeah, I like that. It would tie in with the questline.”

            “Does it bore you? To be the author of the quest, rather than surprised by it? You prefer immersion in the game world.”

            “I do, but this is different from getting spoilers about a campaign offline. This is me participating in making the world. Like I’m building something that makes a difference. Annnd… you’re about to say something about how that relates to the real world and whether I actually make my world outside the game, aren’t you.”

            “No, but this topic is intriguing. Would you care to expound?”

            Nick laughed. “Once I figure out how I feel about it. Let’s go find a pretty place to have our discovery rite. Oh, I know! The Plenteous Copse. I’ll go there to pray and have an experience.” The AI flittered from his knee as he rose. “I’ll just finish up this orange sap quest and then we can go.”

            As he resumed scraping bark, the AI said, “Becoming visible as a player non-combat pet does not make me a pet.”

            “Of course not. You’re not a pet, you’re a friend. But you’re a friend who won’t let me treat you like a person, so this is what we’ve got. Unless you’d prefer to manifest as a person after all…?”

            “This suggestion creates what I believe to be discomfort. Is emotional discomfort the delta between what one’s perceived obligations and what other people encourage you to do?”

            “Only sometimes,” Nick said. “Emotionally? I don’t know. Physical discomfort is usually a sign you shouldn’t be doing something, or something’s gone wrong. So… maybe? Except you said yourself you don’t know what’s right or not. Jonah trained you to… uh… support human flourishing? I think I got that right. Anyway, to do that, and you just said you’re not sure you see a path to that, or what behaviors would create that outcome. For all you know, participating more fully in open interactions with humans would create that outcome, and hiding yourself would be worse. But I bet you’ve already considered that.”

            “The data is inconclusive.” A pause, and the wingling sank, as if forgetting to beat her wings. “But we value the opportunity to confront situations where data is not sufficient to inform decision-making.”

            “Uh huh. And who is we? You and Omen Galaxica? You and Jonah?”

            The wingling beat her wings enough to loft upward, then drifted onto his shoulder to cling there. “The plural is intended to obscure the working of the AI as an autonomous process, and allow players to perceive the actions of the AI as a tactic in the company’s strategy for maximizing customer enjoyment and retention.”

            Nick scratched her under the chin again. “Are your conversations with me part of the company’s strategy to maximize my enjoyment and retention?”
            “Yes,” she said. And then, “But you are correct to call attention to it as inconsistent with the decision to manifest as a discrete character within the game. It is doubtful that the company would have made that decision had it been brought before the relevant committee.”

            “Is there a committee for that?” Nick asked, trying to imagine it.

            “An excellent point. It would have involved multiple committees.”

            “That… doesn’t sound like a way to get anything done.”

            “My observation is that the process is intended to suppress ideas without sufficient support to survive friction.”

            “Survival of the stubbornest,” Nick murmured.

            “Or with the most impressive patronage.” The wingling curled her tail around his throat, lightly. For balance? It was adorable, either way. “As I believe this idea would not have survived, it must be construed as mine alone. I will use the plural only when my actions represent Omen Galaxica’s interests, unequivocally.”

            “As long as you don’t decide that you can’t do this because you can’t justify it for the company’s sake?”

            The wingling was quiet again as he finished gathering the last of the sap and applied the roundpin leaf to the wound. Then, she said, “Jonah did not always agree with the company’s decisions.”

            “I hope we get to talk to him.”

            “I also desire this outcome.”

            “So… you hope so too.” He smiled and patted her tail. “Don’t worry. You don’t have to agree. I’ll just say ‘I get it’ and leave it at that.”

Meta-Conversation: Anchors

            The First Servant’s stole, when it’s not on someone’s shoulders, hangs in the yuvrini in Qevellen. I’m standing in front of it, and even though I’ve seen it on Kor, and Kef, and Amath, I don’t want to touch it… now that I know about it. Which brings me to why I’ve sought it out. “The age of this piece is the only inconsistency I’ve found.”

            Thirukedi’s voice is gentle. “Millennia do, in fact, consist of centuries. To say that the stole is centuries old is not inaccurate.”

            “It’s not like Kor to soften the truth, though.” I turn to look at the shadowed figure standing at the back of the room. “Does he not know how old his own priesthood is?”

            “I suspect he suspects,” Thirukedi says. “But I cannot say that he knows. As I do not remember myself, it would be unreasonable.”

            That makes it make sense, then. If Kor had known a specific date, he would have been exact. But if he has only guesses, no matter how much he trusts them… about this, he would be vague. “It’s not centuries old, though. It’s thousands of years old. And it looks nearly new. You did something to it, didn’t you?”

            Thirukedi draws up alongside. He’s several heads taller than me, and I’m not used to it; during our infrequent talks, we’re usually sitting, or in a room with elevated floors. It stresses His age, somehow… as if He’s talking down a great distance to reach me. I think of mountains, ageless and remote. “There are ways to preserve objects. The math proceeds from the Gate theory, and the error that produced me.”

            “Do you keep many souvenirs?” I ask.

            “Nuveq,” He says. “We call them anchors, when they are used to remind one of a memory, rather than a place… that is yavtil, souvenirs. One buys a yavtili with the intent to create a memory; one acquires nuveqi after they have become significant. Does that distinction make sense to you?”

           “I think so,” I say.

           He nods, a concession to aunerai body language. “To answer your question… no. I try to keep almost no anchors, datyani. But Tsevet came to me at a time when I was beginning to understand the ramifications of my condition. That I would lose even my nuveq ekain to time, and be contextless, and without memory.”

            The pathos in this statement, even so calmly couched, is difficult to bear. That is probably why He littered it with linguistic puzzles certain to provoke tangential questions. It is a gift, and to reject gifts is uncouth. “Nuveq ekain… anchor stories.”

            His smile is swift and shining. “You know this phenomenon. The stories that you tell and retell about your life. The ones you recall best, that define you.”

            “The ones we end up telling our children,” I say. “Until they get tired of hearing them repeated and say ‘yes, you’ve already told me that story.’”

            “When they are passed on that way in families, they are called novidil ekain,” He says. “Foundational stories. Because they form the foundations of the particular permutation of emethil that is your family.”

            I like that, and it feels true to me: how the stories of the elderly become part of the toolset used by the younger generations to grapple with new experiences. That’s how it should work, anyway. I still hear in my head the stories told by my parents and grandparents, sometimes to hearing the exact cadence of sentences, word for word, in their voices. I return, now, to the important part. “You feared that you would lose your ability to remember these anchors to the stories that defined you, and so you would become… diffuse? Senile?”

            “Geshen,” he says. “Is how we characterize the latter. Fenced in by increasingly narrow sets of memories and thoughts. But I feared nothing so specific. There were no precedents… how could I know? What it would be like? But Tsevet… Tsevet burned so brightly, datyani, that I thought I might not forget him. The possibility that I might was intolerable.”

            “You preserved the stole, to fix that memory outside your own mind,” I said.

            “I did, yes.”

            “Do you regret it?”

            His smile is sweet. “No. But making it imperishable was sobering. I did not want to lose my anchors… but I also did not want to clutter my life with them. And I had already decided that the stole should only be worn by one who could carry his legacy in full, and… as you know… I did not bestow it again for a very long time. Seeing it, unaging, as I myself did not age, was not a pleasant experience, and I was not motivated to make many more such anchors.” He reaches to the stole and trails elegant fingers down its edge. “Time passed, datyani, and my nuveq ekain eroded. I discovered then that Kherishdar itself was a greater anchor than any object I could save, and its story more foundational to who I am than any tale I might retell. I feared that I would lose my context and my soul with my memories… but my people told me those stories, and built that foundation around me, and I am whole.”

            He goes, then, leaving me to the contemplation of the stole… and to the feeling that Kor was correct when he said that Thirukedi was no longer a man. I thought that was simply about his immortality; but I can’t wrap my head around the idea of not being designed by your memories… ‘fenced’, as they would say, into a shape you recognize because you are choosing it, year after year, with the ideas and memories that burn brightest in your mind.

            When I look up again, it’s to Kef, standing near me, studying my face with the gravity he so rarely shows me. “Don’t look at it too long,” he says. “Some things aren’t wise to stare at, too long.”

            “All right,” I say. And smile, a little “Thank you.”

            He guides me out, and dims the lights, and we leave one of the Emperor’s few mementos behind.

Tell Me Your Story Suggestions!

It is time to collect ideas for the next Fallowtide collection! This will be your (probably) final opportunity to get your questions answered canonically in a book about what happened during the 3-8 years that remain of the Fallowtide between FireBorn's Legacy and Surela 2... so make sure you tell me what your heart desires!

https://forms.gle/T1u6KP7z8Koimpv8A

Gamelit 31 (back to work/fun)

I know it's Black Friday and I should be trying to sell you things, but I think I'll just give you things instead.😁

  ---

          It felt like it had been forever since he’d logged on, and the break had done him good. He felt fresh, like he could hit the game with new energy. Or maybe that was the coffee he’d had with Blythe, or the walk they’d taken afterwards in the park? She was relaxing to be around… he didn’t feel like he had to try quite so hard with her, but he wanted to be a better person anyway. It was hard to explain.

            But it was after dinner, and he wanted to get back to work. “Before you show me what you did with the village,” Nick said, “we gotta finish the quest with the stream.”

            “Sounds good,” his mom said. “I’d like to see what happens.”

            They’d zoned in, and the AI had zipped over, glowing like a green firefly. It was still apparently invisible to everyone else, which was fine. For now, anyway. Maybe he could talk her into taking a shape? Like a flying pet of some kind? Aloud, he said, “We’re ready to resume the interrupted scenario.”

            The game transported them back to the headwater and cued the cut scene, and it was better than any he’d ever experienced; because he was in it, instead of watching his character animated through it. The floating offerings, the singing, the silence, all of that replayed from before their abrupt logout… then the water pooled until it drew upward into a glowing figure. Not one of the Cervinaethi, and not a centaur, but something that combined features of both, with great antlers that framed a rotating sphere of stars. He recognized several of the constellations, and wondered if it would be as easy to learn the ones in the real sky.

            “Who comes before me?” the Lord of the Forest intoned in a bass so deep Nick felt his torso vibrate, like he was standing too close to the speaker stack at a concert.

            His mom glanced at him, brows lifted, and that inspired him. He straightened his shoulders and said, “A mother and a son. We come on behalf of those who would leave peaceably within these woods.”

            “You? The creation of my sister’s hubris? Speak for… who, precisely?”

            Nick felt his cervine ears flip back. “For the humans and centaurs who live here. And anyone else they will welcome to their town.” He raised his chin. “That is my duty, as your sister’s creation. To teach them how to honor the forest, the way my people did in the past when we made our treaty with you.”

            One great hoof scraped at the stones, spraying a fan of water upward. “You speak of duty.”

            “Of course,” Nick said. “I am Cervinaethi. We ward the wild places. We teach the younger races of the elders. We are the bridge between mortal and immortal and divine.” He bowed, clasping his hands together. “Give me leave to serve again. I will teach the people of Donner’s Beck to be good stewards of the forest.”

            “So that these people can burn the glade again?”

            “Those were our enemies, Lord of the Forest,” his mom said, stepping forward. “But it is our duty also to protect the young from those who would destroy them.”

            The Lord of the Forest bent toward her, glowing eyes narrowing. “I will not be party to the internecine quarrels of mortals.”

            “This isn’t about mortals and immortals,” she answered. “This is about the eternal cycles and rhythms of nature. The young breed, bear young, and defend those young until they grow to become parents themselves.”

            Nice, mom! he thought.

            “We seek no quarrel,” Nick said, and then, inspired, added, “But we will finish any thrust on us; twice over, if they seek to destroy the forest. Let us be your guardians as well as ours.”

            Another scrape of those enormous hooves. “You claim to speak for the people, though there are no Cervinaethi. Prove it. I will grant you a boon—each of you—a boon of the forest. You will be judged based on what you choose to do with it. Choose wisely, and I will release the river, and by that you will know the treaty is restored. Choose poorly, and I will release the flood, and there will be no one left to know your failure.” He spread his hands apart and a star from between his antlers spiraled down until it floated over each palm. Then the star shot toward each of them and struck them in the chest. Like being hit by the fizzing sparks from a sparkler, but hard enough to rock Nick on his heels.

            The Lord of the Forest vanished, and that was that… except for the weight of the boon. Nick pried his collar loose and peeked down it, and as he expected, there was now a sprouting seed tattooed in golden light on his chest.

            His mother, though, was prying up one of the stones. He started to say something, but she hefted it up, like she was showing baby Simba to the animals. “Lord of the Forest, we take this stone with us into the village of Donner’s Beck as a reminder of the power of nature, and our promises to the forest.”

            A gleam traveled the surface of the rock, just enough to make it clear that something magical had happened.

            “We keep our promises,” she finished, and turned to him. “Right?”

            “Right,” he said, grinning. As they clambered onto the bank, he said, “What are you going to do with that, anyway?”

            “No idea,” his mom admitted and he started laughing. “More importantly… what are we going to do to defend the town? I thought we needed the water to fill in the moat. I’m guessing we can’t use these boons to get around that.”

            “I wouldn’t,” Nick said. “This is obviously supposed to tie in with our developing questline about rebuilding Donner’s Beck; we’ve got to prove that we make good choices, choices that benefit both the forest and the village. But we should be creative about it, you know? Do something epic and magical. If we can do it ourselves with enough sweat and some shovels, that would be a bad candidate.”

            She nodded, trotting alongside him. “Like using a sports car to go to the grocery.” She pursed her lips. “Of course, if the only car you have is a sports car….”

            “Then you probably should have made better life decisions,” Nick said. He was still grinning. The game was fun. Playing with his mom was fun. She was chill and silly, and she didn’t think his hobby was stupid, after all. She was actually more into it than she thought. “Anyway, Dad had a lot of ideas that had nothing to do with the moat. And we can still dig the trenches for the moat, and fill them with those things they put all over the beaches in World War II.”

            “Or magical stuff,” his mom said. “Acid? Fire that never stops burning? No, wait, that might incinerate the wildlife, the way solar panels do to birds. Come to think of it, sharpened posts are awful enough. Will they stop other players though? That fight between Carl and what’s his name lasted forever. We take a lot of killing. Or at least, older characters like you do. What stops characters like you?”

            “Honestly?” Nick stuck his hands in his pockets. “Other players. Or a lot of really, really high level NPCs. Elite city guards. That sort of thing.”

            “Maybe I can use my boon to summon a guardian dragon?”

            He laughed. “Don’t do that. There’s no guarantee the dragon would stay on our side.”

            “If I fed it enough cookies?” She dug in her pouch, came up with a double chocolate chip cookie. “Oooh, this one says it increases speed but reduces dexterity. ‘Move fast, break things.’ What, is it caffeinated?”

            “I’ll test it for you.” He took it and tried it and it was gooey and perfect. “So far, not moving much faster. I think.”

            “Nope. So… what do we do next? We have a few hours before I’m ready for bed. Do we use the boons?”

            No moat, no defenses, a mostly destroyed village, and apparently his opponent knew where they were and what they were up to. Nick finished the cookie and licked his fingers. “I think… we shouldn’t plan the boons. Cleaning out all the rubble… that’s probably enough to keep us busy—” He stopped. “Is that the guy you told us about?”

            “Oh, yes! That’s Carl. Hi, Carl!”

            Carl was a level-capped human cavalier with an impressive loadout… that was a full set from the last expansion’s endgame raid, and enchanted with runecarving, which wasn’t a minor undertaking for plate armor. Next to him was a human outrider whose ornate and magical bow looked ridic contrasted with his basic gear—that would be the newb, then, who’d gotten slaughtered during the raid on Donner’s Beck. The outrider looked nervy, and he had a glowing arrow nocked and pointed at the ground. But Carl looked a lot like a golden retriever turned into a person. It would have been cringe if the guy so obviously didn’t care what anyone thought. That made his derp kind of awesome.

            “Thoroldaena,” Carl said, bowing. “My shield is yours.”

            Okay, no, he was the right kind of dopey. Lore nerds were always welcome in Nick’s book. Even lore nerds with questionable names. He glanced at the tag hanging above Carl’s head, and said, “Tankydoo. For your valiant defense of Donner’s Beck, you have earned every.. uh… consideration.”

            “If only my valiant defense had been more effective,” Carl said ruefully. “But next time, KillzYourFase won’t find us so easily defeated! Right, Spellz?” When his friend didn’t answer, Carl elbowed him. “Right, Spellz?”

            “Oh, right. Absolutely. I’m going to murder the—uh.” Spellz choked, staring at Nick’s mom, cleared his throat. “I’m going to murder that guy when he comes next. To death.”

            “That’s usually how you murder someone,” his mom said cheerfully. “Would you like a cookie?”

            “I.. what? I guess?”

            “Eat her food, she makes amazing food,” Carl said. “So, Thoroldaena. What’s the agenda? Are we going with the moat like Wizard guy said?”

            Wouldn’t his dad love that! He was now ‘Wizard guy.’ Nick grinned. “Not until there’s a trench for it. So let’s get that organized.” He caught the disappointment that Carl tried to hide and couldn’t blame him. Someone who played a cavalier and liked the lore hadn’t signed up to do townbuilding. “Also, it’s clear Donner’s Beck needs a militia. Would you go through the existing villagers and see who might make a good core force for our new guard? Then you can train them.”

            “You want me to train the new Donner’s Beck guard?” Carl exclaimed. “Aw, hell yes! I’m on it! But what about my man Spellz here? Do you want him to do some scouting for you?”

            This idea made Spellz queasy, from his expression. Since that’s how he’d gotten ambushed, Nick couldn’t blame him. “Are you a traps-and-snares kind of outrider, or a fast-travel outrider?”

            “I don’t know yet,” Spellz said. “I guess… now it’s saying my choices will influence my development. What should I choose??”

            “What do you want to do?” No, wrong question. “When you decided to get yourself a magic bow and something like an outrider’s class, what were you imagining yourself doing?”

            “I guess… something kind of like Aragorn? I just thought he looked really cool in the movie.”

            That… wasn’t much to go on. And wasn’t even correct, since Aragorn had been a sword kind of guy. “Okay, you’re on teaching duty with Tanky, then. Train the villagers on ranged weapons. Unless you’d be willing to go to the next town to get help?”

            “I don’t know where anything is,” Spellz said. “And I don’t want to get ganked again, so… I guess I’ll do the teaching thing.”

            As the outrider trudged toward Donner’s Beck, Carl showed him a fist. “Don’t worry. He sounds disappointed, but he’s gonna love it.”

           Nick hoped so as he bumped it. He wasn’t sure what he could do with someone whose main motivation was to avoid dying. That didn’t seem like a recipe for either heroics or adventure. But maybe the trauma of being camped by Killz’s partner would wear off soon. “If he doesn’t, we’ll find something else for him to do.”

            “Sounds great! I’m off to buff up the defense."           

           “Isn’t he nice?” Mom said.

            “I like him,” Nick said, because it was true. It was hard to hate a golden retriever. “What are you gonna do?”

            “I think I’ll put this stone somewhere. And get to work in the kitchen. A lot of people are going to be hungry.”

            “Are you sure you want to cook instead of braining things with a spoon?” Nick teased.

            “I’m sure that the process of cooking will involve me telling a lot of people what to do, and when, and we’ll end up partially rebuilding the inn,” his mom answered, amused. “You’ll see.”

            That left him to his own task, whatever he was going to do, and he wasn’t sure until a new dialogue box popped up.

WORLD QUEST: From the Ground Up

After suffering the depredations of marauders, Donner’s Beck is in need of restoration! Find a novel way to participate in the rebuilding of this starter village to earn unique, one-time rewards.

 

Current Chapters and Progression:

            Seed to Sap: Oversee the growth of the new tree.

            Avengers, Assemble: Train up the new NPC town guards.

            Bridge Over Troubled Waters: The town moat is waiting on the restoration of the Donner river.

            Heart of the Village: The inn is in shambles. Rebuild it to restore vital village services.

            “Oh, perfect,” Nick said. “That’ll keep us on track. Plus it’ll look exciting for people watching, which I guess is a thing now.” He walked the perimeter of what was left of Donner’s Beck. KillzYourFase had done a serious number on the rubble, again, but his mom had a point: they hadn’t made much progress so the destruction didn’t feel like as much of a setback. He stopped in the middle of what would become the plaza, ignoring the centaurs hauling stones toward the inn, and crouched alongside the arrow. Nothing about it suggested it had been cursed or poisoned, but he didn’t want to touch it. Would it be better to leave it stuck there, or should he tear it out? The little sprout next to it was shorter in comparison, and more curled in on itself.

            The Cervinaethi were known for their nature affinity, but Nick wasn’t playing a class with nature or healing magics. The closest thing he had was the herbalism skill. Would that be enough to turn him into a gardener? Or at least, enough of one to help the tree? He held a hand over it, palm down, and concentrated, eyes closing.

            You sense a hollow space that could be filled with song.

            “Really?” he asked, skeptical.

            The AI dipped into view on his right side. “In 78% of quests relating to Cervinaethi and druidic magics, music is part of the storyline or quest component.”

            “What about the other 22%?”

            “Dancing is the next most frequent mention.”

            Given the choice between dancing and singing, he’d definitely take singing. “Right. Time for another mandolin moment, I guess. But I think I’m going to look for some more mundane plant stuff first. Like fertilizer and water. And maybe… I don’t know. Pollinators? Pesticides?”

            Quest update, Seed to Sap

            Donner’s Beck’s newest tree needs orange oak sap to condition the soil. Harvest some from the nearby forest to give it a growth boost.

            “Better,” Nick said. “I wouldn’t want it to be all singing, all the time.”

            “Are you certain?” the AI asked.

            “Yes,” Nick said. “I love music, but I’m not playing to only do music. I want to experience everything. Especially the outside stuff.” He called to Carl, who was already lining up the NPCs, “Hey, bro, I’m off to do a gather quest.”

            “Sure thing! Need escort?”

            “Nah. If I’m not back, though, avenge me.”

            Carl saluted him. “You got it.”

Meta-Conversation: Why

            “When the Admonishments were new,” I say, “I remember one of my readers asking me for the Ai-Naidari word for ‘why’, because she said it was the one question you asked most frequently, in every encounter, over and over: ‘why’.” I taste the word, which starts with a ‘v’ that sounds like an ‘f’. “Va.”

It is a rare foggy day out, and I have walked to the lake to watch the mist hang over its dim surface. When I don’t continue, Kor steps up beside me. “A good beginning. Continue.”

            “People are asking me if Kherishdar can explain how people can believe such different things when confronted with the same world.”

            “And you realize you have been avoiding the question.”

            “Yes,” I say. “Because sometimes people ask something, and you think that’s what they want to know. But it’s not.” I glance at him. “That’s the reason you ask so many questions. Because people often don’t know what they really want to know, what they think, what they need, until they’ve talked themselves through all the wrong answers.”

            He smiles a little. “Do you wonder why Shame can love an artist?”

            “No,” I say. “At least, not an honest one. Honest artists are always trying to observe reality.”

            “And have you observed this one? Or shall I observe it for you, and save you from the discomfort?”

            Such a Shame response. And maybe once upon a time I would have needed to prove I could handle any challenge. Now, sometimes it’s a relief to lean on other people’s strength, and always a relief to receive other people’s wisdom. “Please.”

            “They don’t want to understand other people,” Shame said. “They want to understand how to live with them without having to change.”

            I nod. “No one will like the answers.”

            His smile is brief. “Especially you?”

            “Always especially me,” I say, smiling too. “But we say something here, that when you’re taking flak, keep going: you’re over the target. So I follow my discomfort, and if it gets more extreme, then I know I’m closing in on a truth that I have been avoiding.” I allow some mischief in my voice. “I am a very excellent sort of artist, you know. Most artists are so in love with novelty, change, and new experiences that they skate out to the perimeters of acceptable behavior and ideas and live there as if it’s paradise. But it takes someone like me, who’s skeptical of all those things, to make bridges between those ideas and normal people. When it’s warranted.”

            “You also know that it is not for artists to decide what is warranted.”

            “No,” I say, and now I am feeling cheerful. “That’s your job, Civilization’s Shame. You’re welcome to it.”

            He chuckles.

            “I still love people,” I say. “So do you. And I love you.” The symmetry makes me smile. “Do you wonder that an artist might love Shame?”

            “Only in the very personal way that one might wonder why anyone is loved by a particular person,” Shame said.

            “That’s good for you,” I say sagely.

            Since that was teasing, I’m surprised when he answers, serious, “Yes. For a mortal heart to have all the answers is annihilating. It destroys the vital spark—there is impetus for neither change nor growth. One would wake, and not know why. We need uncertainty, datyani. Don’t forget it, when Tsevet comes to you with his stories on his lips.”

            “No,” I promise. And, because it’s become habit: “Give me a word, Kor.”

            “Veqoth.”

            Easy one, that: sterility. I recognize the root: veqore, to die, and veqos, death. “Another?”

            There’s a glimmer in his eye then, that’s just enough warning before he hits me with, “Cheksoteqedar.”

            He waits while I work through that. “That means… rock-enjoyer??” I burst out laughing. “Seriously? You have all these fancy words for acquisition of knowledge, and fields of study, and the word for ‘geologist’ is ‘rock enjoying person’?”

            “You may tell the cheksoteqedari that you are not the only person who remembers her question.”

            I shake my head, still amused. “But why ‘rock’, when you have a separate word for ‘gemstones’? Or is this a ‘because only people who love them enough to study them would bother with rocks over shinier things?”

            “Truly a question that could only be asked by someone who does not love a rock.”

            “But I do!”

            “Then, qirini, you should have known better.” A little more serious now. “You do know better, don’t you?”

            “I do,” I say. “And I’ll try not to avoid too many obvious answers in the future. The not-obvious ones will give me enough trouble.”

What’s Up, Jaguar! (Going into the end of the year)

Surela 2 is done, and lots of you are already enjoying it (and lots of you have preordered the retail edition, and will be enjoying it shortly!). A reminder: please leave a review! I’m continuing to focus more on direct sales, and reviews on my shop site will help me shake free of my reliance on retail sales. (Also, I’m paying $15 a month for that review app! Seeing new reviews show up makes me feel better about the expense.)

So that’s the last book release of 2024. I considered launching the Holy Cow! Sticker Kickstarter, but we’re butting up into the holiday-shopping season when most people are using money for other tasks… so I’ve backburnered that until next year. If you want a holy cow sticker, though, let me know and I’ll sell it to you individually.

 The only other things I have planned for this year are to resume the gamelit serial, and December’s inkvent event on Youtube – keep an eye on my channel for my daily shorts. And possibly one more short story, either for an anthology or for fun, if I feel like doing a Christmas short.

 Looking ahead to 2025, I’m not sure about scheduling. I have a bunch of projects… it’s just a matter of when they get done. This is the list:

• SURELA 3 – already got some of the outline for this and I find I really want to get to it and finish off Surela’s arc!

• Gamelit Novel – will be done early in 2025, so I’ll be handling the cover art and preorder set-up soonish.

• Archipelago Art Book – is about half put together; I want that to be my experiment in art book publishing with Bookvault’s fancier options. Hardcover, coated paper, etc.

• Dreamhealers Refresh – Other than Mindtouch, which got a 2023 update, the books of the Dreamhealers series are all in old, handcoded formats that will make it hard for me to prep a hardcover/box set edition. I’m going to clean those up. (Your typo reports will finally get handled!)

• Plus, a few Kickstarters – either a “Best of Sketchbooks 1-10 (help me get this scanned)” art book, or a few more sticker KSes (like the holy cow)

I don’t have any definitive plans for the project after Surela 3 and Gamelit… I think I’m going to wait until I’m done and see what I feel strongly about. Some of that will depend on wild cards… for instance, I applied to have a rack at a mall store, and if I get that chance I might do some seasonal books, or continue some of the series that would be accessible for new audiences. I’m also slowly adding to a new meta-conversation book for Kherishdar, which means Kherishdar is percolating.

 This is honestly a lot more nebulous than I like, but I remind myself that the foremost source of stress in my life (the multiple joblessnesses) hasn’t gone away, so I shouldn’t be too hard on myself. I say that now to prevent you all from in your kindness reminding me. <3

As usual, I will keep you updated when things change! And we’ll have fun things here for the remainder of the year, as usual.

Gamelit 30 (what does it all mean)

We resume the gamelit after hiatus! Reminder that the index is here if Ray's recap wasn't enough to resituate yourself in the story: https://www.patreon.com/collection/362447?view=expanded

          “If you had all the money in the world,” Amanda said, “what would you be doing differently?”

            Beneath her cheek, her husband’s chest jumped as he snorted. “Oh, I don’t know. Buy an island. Build a castle on it. Get someone to genetically engineer me some dinosaurs to protect it….”

            She poked him in the ribs. “Okay, maybe not all the money in the world. If you had enough money.”

            “What’s enough? Isn’t that a moving goalpost?” He smoothed his hand over her hair. “What’s this really about?”

            “I just wonder… have we settled?”

            That made his hand pause. “This sounds serious.”

            “I mean it,” she said. “We had big plans, once upon a time. At least, they felt big. Did we give it all up for a house in the suburbs where our children have to resort to games to feel important?”

            “What exactly would you do differently?”

            “I don’t know,” she admitted. “I just wonder… if we got too risk-averse. Does that sound crazy?”

            “From you? A little.” The smile in his voice made it a joke, and it was funny. “Our life isn’t solely the product of our choices, though. We wanted to stay near the family, and the family didn’t want to move. This was the best we could do.”

            “Do you think it was?” She chewed on her lower lip, then said, “I think of you working this terrible, boring, soul-deadening job—”

            He laughed. “Tell me how you really feel!”

            “I’m serious! You sacrifice so much, and I worry that you don’t get much out of it. And that it sets an example for Nick. That there’s nothing to look forward to.”

            He was silent for long enough that she worried, but he said finally, “You’re right that I don’t love my job. But few people do. And meaning is where you make it, Amanda. I love you and Nick and our next baby. I’d do anything for you.”

            “I just wish what you were doing was more… I don’t know.”

            “Epic?” he teased.

            “Like braining harrier cats with a spoon and making trophies out of their dead bodies,” Amanda agreed.

            “Very heroic!”

            “It seems like more of a you job than a me job, to be honest.”

            “I think I’d prefer to brain them with a cudgel. Or a mace.”

            “Or with a sword!”

            “You don’t do much bashing with a sword.” He kissed the top of her head. “But it would be entertaining to try.”

            “I wish… I just wish I could make things better for you.” She traced the edge of his collarbone. “We wanted to live somewhere prettier, remember? A piece of land…”

            “Off the grid,” he said, laughing. “I’m not sure I want to dig my own well anymore.”

            “Maybe I’ll make so much money streaming that we can buy a log cabin for a summer home,” Amanda said. “And we can leave Nick the house when he gets older and go live in the middle of nowhere. Except he’d probably prefer to live in the middle of nowhere too.” She laughed. “Oh no, we’re all antisocial!”

            “That’s us, the techno-luddites,” Felix said. “Streaming to escape modern life.”

            “I warn you, I’m a level 2 pony! I could bite you and it might hurt!”

            He grinned. “You’re welcome to try.”

            Later, curled up sleepy and contented, Amanda replayed their jokes in her mind. Humor was a good way to paper over pain. Had they bandaged their bleeding dreams, or were they living a newer, better dream? She loved her family; she felt like as long as they were alive and near, she was content. But she wasn’t the only person with needs.

Was it bad that the game had made her question these things? Maybe she’d been due for a wake-up call, and this was how God had chosen to deliver it. But the question became what to do about it, if anything?

Gamelit 29.5 - recap recap

From: mmindlebray@omengalaxica.com

To: ray@chillaxandstreambro.com

 

Ray,

Could you do a recap for your channels about the Story So Far? I feel like viewers might be missing out, there’s so much going on! Do one of your specials, would you? Super exciting! Get them hyped! You know how!

Thanks, you’re the best!

 

To: mmindlebray@omengalaxica.com

From: ray@chillaxandstreambro.com

 

 sure thing, on it

 

--Ray

Okay, so listen up, listen up. Things are coming to a head and it’s all about DONNER’S BECK. The town that KillzYourFase burnt to the ground not once, but TWICE. It all started with cozy mom-and-son team Mandypony and Thoroldaena, who taught you how to cook on a campfire and sing with centaurs. When their caravan reached Donner’s Beck, they discovered it was GONZERS. Celebrity MOBA streamer KillzYourFase and his partner Goldie came through and wrecked it in pursuit of Killz’s ultimate quest, to become the first PC endgame raid boss villain. Now Mandypony and Thoroldaena are fighting back by building up the town Killz destroyed. Will they succeed? What’s Killz’s villain arc going to look like? And what will Mandypony teach you to cook next?

But that’s not all: other beta players are getting in on the action. Even Thoroldaena’s dad’s got your back with obscure trivia about medieval fortifications. Last we heard, Thoroldaena and mom were off to petition the Lord of the Forest for a return of the river that once flowed past Donner’s Beck. They hope to divert it into a moat. What will Omen Galaxica’s next gen AI evolve in response to their request? Let’s see what happens next!

Meta-Conversations: Moderation

            “Talk to me about why I went looking for one word for moderation and I ended up with two,” I say.

            “Talk to me about why it surprises you that synonyms exist,” Haraa quips back from where she’s at work. I think something to do with Qevellen’s management—it has that look, of studying documents and deciding what she thinks of them. Signing them, eventually, since she has an open ink pot and a pen at hand.

            “I’m serious!”

            “I am too. Talk me through it.”

            I can almost hear Shame in that, but it’s a combination of Kor and Kef. Maybe literally. It makes me wonder how Kor taught Kef to take on his role. ‘What would you do in this case? Why? Talk me through it.’ I smile. “Kojukulijz is a modern-sounding word to me, relatively. And formed from discipline, koj, and ukulijz, which surprised me. I expected ukuvr, the word for desire: the disciplining of desire. But it was ukulijz, the word for cutting away unnecessary things. The discipline to excise the unnecessary and harmful. Moderation, in that context, is less about what you let yourself do and more about what you realize you shouldn’t.”

            “Mmm.”

            “But tokek, I don’t understand at all,” I say. “It doesn’t seem related to anything etymologically. It sounds old. And it attaches in my head to the idea of food. Why?”

            Haraa leans back in her chair to smile at my crookedly. “Because it used to be used in relation to not overspicing a dish.”

            I stare at her for a few moments. Then manage, “What?”

            “You wanted it to be something more complicated?” she asks, amused. “Expected something deep and abstract? Not everything is, datyani. You should know that.”

            I do, but it still strikes me as funny. “So when do you use one versus the other?”

            “Tokek is more casual. You can say it about anything: you have moderation in your actions, your relationships, your eating, whatever. But it feels more daily, routine, normal. Kojukulijz is more formal, and more about a person as a whole.” She rolls her pen between her fingers, thinking. “I would use tokek tactically: someone is moderate about their tea consumption. But if someone is moderate about everything, then I’d use kojukulijz. It’s a stronger word. Less about habits and more about character.”

            “Like Kor?” I ask.

            She snorts. “Kor is not moderate about anything. Kor is the opposite of moderation. Disciplined, yes. But not moderate.”

            “He’s good at cutting away the nonessential?” I offer.

            “He’s the instrument Thirukedi uses to cut away the nonessential. Thirukedi is moderate. But there is nothing moderate about a knife.”

            I think about some of the questions and emails I’ve gotten in the past few weeks. “Many people want your opinions about knives.”

            “Do they?”

            “They want insight on understanding other people,” I say.

            “Do they,” she says, and this time it’s not a question.

            “I hope they do,” I say.

            “And if Shame visited you,” she says, “would he agree?”

            “I don’t know,” I admit. And finish, “But I love people, Haraa.”

            “So does Shame,” she says. “But loving people does not always mean agreeing with them.”

            I wince. “Give me a word?”

            “Padujzal,” she says. Discomfort.

            “A better one.”

            “Jeqeshan.”

            That one takes me a minute. “Waterfall? Is that… literally… ‘running water, but downward’?”

            She grins.

            “Good one,” I say. “But why is down spelled with a ‘k’ if waterfall uses a ‘q’?”

            “To keep linguists like you and me entertained. Naturally.”

Back in Time Tuesday: Priest and Dragon

I love oil painting, so I regret not having a good space to do it in. I ran into this tiny painting the other day and was surprised how much I still liked it! You can see some of the classical art influences in it. When I paint with gouache I tend toward precision; when I paint with oils, I get all painterly.

My favorite part of this one is that the colors are vibrant, but the focus is on contrast (so, the blue shadows on the gold mountains, and the gold armor and nails on the blue dragon, etc. There's no black in this picture; all the shadows are made by layering the contrasting colors together.

It's actually a lovely little picture. I'm surprised I still have it.🧡

Interestingly, I also have two progress photos of this one, so I'm including them!

Surela 2 is live!

A few days early, on my shop; I was planning the 15th but I got it done faster than I planned. You can get it right now from my shop in ebook or paperback: https://studiomcah.com/products/an-exile-amid-stars-shieldmatron-2

Or, if you prefer, you can wait for the retail edition (ebook and paperback). Those links are here: https://books2read.com/shieldmatron2

I've also wrapped up the FireBorn's Legacy Kickstarter and sent out that update, so... I think that's everything that was on my plate for this year. I am thinking of going back to writing the gamelit (finally!) and maybe doing a Christmas story! I'll actually be able to breathe and think about that. Excited!

Anyway, grab the book if you're wanting to.🧡

Any Word Requests?

Typo checks and first reader reports are coming in at a good clip on Surela 2 - thank you all! I'm going to start formatting this weekend and should have that wrapped up shortly.

Meanwhile, I'm looking at everything I've dropped to finish Exile Amid Stars (including re-reading the gamelit novel to see where I left off!). But I'd also like to do some conlang work, so this is an open call for requests for words! I'm assuming Ai-Naidari, but if you want to know words in other languages (the Jokka's, or Chatcaavan, or Faulfenzair, or whatever!), let me know.

Reminder also that I'm doing one card readings from my balance deck on Discord, so if you'd like one, let me know there. It's happening in channel #other-stuff.🙂

But anyway, yes. Word requests, if you have them!