Egress: Act 1, Act 1, Scene 5
[[At this point, I made some Oracle and Strive rolls to resolve Pony, Axel, and Ruby’s current situations and get this intro stage — Act 1, Act 1 — to a climax.
With Pony at the tea shop, I roll a random drama move: someone takes notice. I draw a motif to learn more: Summer. Passion (Exhaustion.) The hum of bees on the heated night air. Sounds charged. I decide it’s another Egress player, who might take a mutual interest in Pony.]]
And he’s tossed out into the world. Pony completes the tutorial and he’s on his own. People on the Salt Catalog forums said that Egress 1.0 had all these complex systems and hidden secrets that you had to discover on your own, so Pony figures that the Egress 2.0 beta will have even more. Too bad Convoke is still down, or he’d be asking Ruby and Axel what to try next already!
With the AR layer still active at the tea shop and Ms. Ban angrily sweeping a defeated Yellion out the door, an item sparkles into existence on Pony and his dad’s table. It’s a jar of blue honey. When he examines it in Capture Mode, it’s revealed to be a gift from another player: a peer-to-peer reward for claiming a Node for Cyan. So Egress is a strand game! And it rewards color-based team play, too…
[[Oracle: can players chat to each other within Egress? (these logistics were important.)
Yes, but: a mutual gift exchange is required first.]]
He captures the [BLUEHONEY], adding it to his Object Grid. A new icon promises a potential Egregore connection with the sender, if they accept it. Whatever that is.
Fox Dad asks if Pony has made a new friend. Pony wonders aloud if he should send them a gift in return, and Fox Dad blithely suggests that there’s plenty of cool stuff at the tea shop to send, however he does that. Pony thinks that’s a good idea, but doesn’t want his dad hanging around too close, so sends him to chat with Ms. Ban about the things a dad talks about with a pseudo-auntie while he slips away to wander the shop.
[[Strive with Escapist 1 to find something cool to capture without dad or Ms. Ban noticing him outright swipe something, disadvantage for their close relationship (hard to sneak around ’em.)
7-9: Success, but someone takes notice as a soft move.]]
Oh! Pony found a cute cool teacup on a high
shelf, a pretty patterned porcelain thing. He’d love to get this as a
gift, so maybe the other Cyan player would too. He takes out his phone,
locks on with the Capture Mode reticle, and captures it out of the world
and into his grid. As he goes to link back up with his dad (who fondly
squeezes his shoulder), Ms. Ban looks over at the tea set Pony was
“snapping a picture of” and frowns. Pony quickly suggests that he and
his dad head back home to digest!!
[[Another soft move to stir the pot: someone feels something.]]
Driving back in the afternoon drizzle, Pony sends the teacup as a strand gift to the other Cyan player. It floats from his grid to a spinning globe icon, waiting in the data ether.
Pony has a sudden feeling that this really is magic. The interface makes it feel like posting a photo, or trading an Eevee, but the physical teacup that someone molded and fired and glazed is gone. It’s information now, stored on some server rather than described in atoms. He has an intuition of just how big this game could grow to be. But what’s it building toward? What is Egress doing?
[[Conditions: Rueful Rolemodel •, Adversarial Ally •, Fatherly Follower •
Trauma: Overwhelmed •
Light Dice: [Theme Music], Dark Dice: 3]]
Pony: Be Axel.
[[Oracle: Did Axel make it to the top of the Fire Tower, find the dog, and claim the Node?
Yes, but: reveal an unwelcome truth. (Roll a motif: lashing out in pain.)
It turns out those imp game constructs can hurt you for real. Axel gets beaten up pretty bad by those papercraft-wielding brutes. Ze upgrades Scraped from 1 to 2 as ze’s bonked, bruised, and burned.]]
It’s a struggle, but the mission is virtuous. After a tactical retreat, Axel manages to evade and subdue the Magentimps and infiltrate the ranger station at the Fire Tower. Ze explores it for clues: there’s a battery-powered radio, but the signal’s all scratchy and fuzzy. And the ranger logbook doesn’t have any useful patterns or secret clues about Egress. It’s just weather readings and cleaning schedules. There’s some kind of metal hatch on the floor of the station, half-covered by a rug, but it probably just leads to some crawlspace full of spiders and mildew. Why is reality so boring?
Ze tosses a firecracker to draw the imps’ attention away from a steep and narrow staircase. Up in the rafters, ze finds the poor pup, huddled on a landing. Dirty and scraped and pissed off and relieved, Axel sits down to take a breath and pet him. Ze pours from the water bottle into zir hands, and the dog laps it up.
[[Axel clears Guilty-1.]]
But ze isn’t ready to leave yet. Not until ze makes it to the top.
It’s only once ze climbs a ladder to the lookout post, tired but driven, that the AR challenge ticks complete. A jingle of epic triumph plays from zir phone as ze gazes out at the arid Nueva Navarra landscape, like all the waypoints on the world map are about to light up as the title drops.
Except…Axel’s been up here already. Ze lives here. There’s the blacktop highway of Federal 7 past the trees and the pencil factory, there’s the Generimart on the far side of the killer interchange, there’s the A&A market with the giant clown looming, and there’s zir trailer, halfway up the park, undecorated. It’s just the same old world.
[[there’s that Pessimism.]]
Ze mutes the music and sips from zir water bottle. Sweat and dirt’s mixing with zir scrapes, and zir green highlights are faded in the sun. Ze checks zir messages with 💹, but there’s nothing new since 9:46 that morning. Still, those cryptic clues are what made Axel capture the binoculars first and come out to the tower to work out what’s going on with the power out and Convoke down. So ze draws the binocs out of gridspace, glitchy as it is, and looks out at the horizon.
What the hell?
North of West Clowncrest, out where the land is cheap, there’s a nondescript building that the big companies use as a data center. Trucks are parked outside and maintenance workers are coming in and out, but they don’t seem to notice the massive black UFO floating in the open sky 100 feet above them.
No, Axel realizes, the color “black” doesn’t do it justice. It’s an impossible color, a new color, like an iridescent shadow. It hangs in the air, spinning and gently bobbing, sometimes turning jagged or fuzzy or skipping frames like it’s glitching out, and it’s projecting some kind of beam over the data center. Every so often, the building itself somehow glitches out, too. The people working don’t even blink.
[[Sensing it will be important, I give this UFO the conditions Subtle-2 and Affect Data-2.]]
Once again, Axel pokes boundaries and experiments. Ze futzes with the Egress interface, looking for some way to interact with this thing. In the process ze notices that Egress has recorded a new Link to zir grid: the [HOUND of ARROWS]. It must have reattempted the glitched [??-Who?] capture at the first opportunity…Axel doesn’t even like dogs. But this Link is a new variable to work with. Using Methodical trial and error, Axel discovers how to extract a potent [HOUND’S ORB] from the [HOUND of ARROWS] Link, fuel it with Grist from claiming the Node, and use it to empower the [BINOCS] within the Object Grid!
[[are your eyes glazed over yet. good]]
Filled with the power of a true-sniffing hound, Axel peers through zir binoculars and fixes focus on the UFO. A Z-targeting reticle appears, and strange data streams across the HUD. Ze’s locked on! The current PYROKIND crackers Axel is using attract enemies rather than scare them off, but that’s going to be just fine.
[[Strive with Methodical 2 to get the UFO to move away from the data center with fireworks, risking drawing it to zir position, with double disadvantage from Scraped-2 and the UFO’s Subtle-2. I roll 4 dice and take the lowest 2.
7-9: Success at getting its attention, but the UFO is now cruising south toward the tower! I declare a new danger.]]
When ze locks on, the UFO must know exactly where the firecrackers are coming from and the Strife Axel means by them. It withdraws its scramble beam from the data center, spins rapidly, and extends a sweeping beam toward the Fire Tower! Axel eeps, turns off zir phone, bolts down the ladder, grabs the dog, and yeets on over to zir bike. With any luck, ze’ll be invisible to this thing’s data sniffers on the ride home.
[[Conditions: Perfect Pawn •, Resented Rival •, Glitched Grid •, Scraped ••
Trauma: Pessimism •
Light Dice: Gamer Dice •, Dark Dice: 4]]
Axel: Be Ruby.
[[Oracle: Did Ruby convince Ms. Wheeler to drop her concern and not call home?
Match dice, flawed question. +1 Dark Die for acting on it.]]
Ruby spends her school day collecting Motive Fragments on the [EMPRESS of THREADS], asking the right questions of other students and teachers to understand Ms. Wheeler better. She thinks it will reveal the perfect move to convince her that everything’s okay, but once she does the eavesdropping, gossip-collecting, and favor-trading in Chenoweth’s Social Labyrinth, all she realizes is the truth: her homeroom teacher was never going to snitch on her. A catty glee club treasurer pointed out that Wheeler is only the Program Head for Fashion Design because there’s one Fashion Design student left, and she wouldn’t put herself out of a job by jeopardizing Ruby’s enrollment.
That hurt; it was supposed to. Was she just a body? Would Wheeler not care if there really was bad trouble?
No. She doesn’t need Egress to know who Wheeler is. Her teacher has seen her dwindled cohort go through some real bullshit over the last three years, and she knows when to step in and when to trust Ruby to handle her own life. She wouldn’t have made it this long at Chenoweth if she couldn’t.
[[I decide that in the course of asking around, Ruby also learned about a larger problem at Chenoweth that she’ll have to deal with. What is it?
Motif: Messenger. (Mis)communicate. What price peace and safety?
Goals: secure a self-interest, secure a retaliation.
I start spinning this cotton candy onto some ideas I had already. The problem is coming from the golden boy Polite Young Man at the very top of the Social Labyrinth: the President of the all-powerful Student Council. He says that he’s doing the right things for the right reasons, and it benefits all the right people to believe him, and he’s so Nice, and he’s so fucking evil. Crawling the Social Labyrinth in hopes of toppling this dude sounds like a super fun backdrop for Ruby to play against.
Oracle: Does the Student Council President’s Office want full access to Chenoweth student communications? (all their messages, chatlogs, socials, texts — of course it’s all to promote mental health in this unfortunately sometimes toxic environment, and to prevent bullying, or even violence!)
[motif: Cross. (Dis)belief. The way only opens with sacrifice. Hey, that’s what the Ruler of the Hosts of Air is all about, too.]
Yes, but: The Safeguard program is a ‘voluntary sacrifice’ for now. Students can opt-in to the pilot program to set a good example for others (and scrape for the Council’s favor.) All of the Council, including the President, have opted in. But Student Council is lobbying their pet teachers and program heads to make it mandatory. They just need the right crisis to demonstrate its utility and inevitability: learning about this dangerous Egress game through surveillance would be perfect.
Oracle: Is the President in the Theatrical Performance program; ie, a theater kid?
Yes, and: he’s a big deal. He’s from a wealthy and connected family, he’s had representation for years, he’s already been in major productions, and he’s inevitably going to be a star. Graduating is just a formality at this point, but mentorship and making a lasting impression at Chenoweth is very important to him, and he’ll be staying involved until the very end. Because Doing Good Matters.
I give him two conditions to overcome: Socially Invincible-3, Honorable Facade-1 (he’s vulnerable to a Fashion Duel if Ruby can just get close enough to him…)
What sympathetic student is already affected by the Safeguard plan? Motif: Sun. Revelation (Blindness). A superior rival, challenged to single combat.]]
The Sun — I’ll call him Sully — is a former member of Student Council, but his faction was removed from power over winter break after a shock investigative report by the Chenoweth Eagle exposed their corruption, thanks to messages leaked by their ascendant rival faction. Most of his cohort either transferred schools in shame or quietly accepted flunky status under the winners, but the ignominious Sun has been campaigning all semester to be elected back onto the Council. It will never ever happen, but it’s admittedly pretty brave under the circumstances.
Sully gave his daily stump speech in front of handmade banners in the interior garden courtyard, railing through a megaphone against a culture of cliques and complacency and promising to fight Council overreach from within, and as usual people largely passed by without listening. Today, though, he dared to mention the President directly. In response, the two most feared and stylish Student Morale toughs (blue-dyed Benni and platinum Paula) hustle him off the stump immediately, glaring at the peanut gallery to disperse.
Ruby hangs back, arms crossed, but notices that Sully dropped his megaphone in the commotion. She picks it up from among the fallen banners once the courtyard clears, captures it to her grid, then leaps away like a fashion assassin.
[[Oracle: Is Ruby’s first Node at the Grimstone Branch of the city library?
No. Then where? Motif: Merchant.
Her first Node is at Block 11, the fancy downtown mall east of Chenoweth. She’s Imaginative and pictures hot deals on rare items spawning there.]]
She walks there after school via Lower Polk Street, the notoriously-confusing-to-tourists underground road that links downtown. It’s easier to think when she’s not in a foot crowd. Not remotely for the first time, Ruby wonders why she never learned to skate right. She could have been so much cooler and healed all the broken bones by now.
Lower Polk links up to a parking garage, where Ruby takes an elevator to an empty level. Some adequately-tailored boys are gathered around a lighting rig taking senior photos. They’re wearing the exact loose-shoulder fits the Menswear Wolf called out last week, so she figures they must be sunk-costing the suits before they burn them.
She brushes past them, cloak billowing, to a mural-lined walkway that takes her to another elevator, which takes her to the low-tier shopfronts on the bottom floor of Block 11 Mall. One of the billionaires who talks to media said he’d bore a tunnel from here to the airport, but it never materialized. There’s just a shuttered door that says COMING SOON and doesn’t go anywhere.
[[Oracle: Does Ruby claim the Block 11 Node by racing some imps from the bottom to the top?
Yes. You know how this goes by now. Find a site-specific AR waypoint, do the challenge, claim Node. I add the condition Cyantagonists-1 for her opposition.]]
“we are also imps.”
Egress reads the site, all its shops and merch and people, and its interlinked split-levels too. None of the people circulating in the mall find it unusual when Ruby touches a floating fast-arrow icon that’s appeared, or when a troop of cyan minions — Cyan-tagonists, Cyants for short — file into position, wielding…doorknobs?
At least it doesn’t give them any edge. Her sprint in sneakers is enough to outpace these goons, and they aren’t even trying to keep up! Their pathfinding’s busted; they just march across the floor, turn their knobs on the shop doors, and — walk right out of a door on the next level up. Aw, hell.
She runs like a demon to keep up, vaulting planters, tagging waypoints, YOUTH ROLL’ing past orange juice carts, racing up the down escalators so she doesn’t dodge as many people. When a line of cyan traffic blocks her on a fourth-floor straightaway, she summons the megaphone from her grid and shouts “MOVE IT!”
[[Strive with Mannerless 1 to win the race and claim the Node, risking harm from Cyants.
10+: Success! She beats the baddies and the target time and makes it to the top unharmed. I spend the 10+ bonus to clear her Unsettled condition; the adrenalin makes her feel ahead of everything. This was a 13+, so I also mark a Score die.]]
Her shout knocks ’em down like bowling pins.
Two more stories up, she practically flies through the last maintenance door. The knobbed Cyants on the stairs behind her poff out of existence. On the roof of the mall, a winner’s circle greets her with a welcoming glow.
Grist and XP fill her virtual coffers as she raises her fists to the sky and hollers. Her megaphone has been slotted in the Strife Deck for her SHOUTKIND Specibus, apparently. Once she gets her breath, she leans on an AC unit and looks up at the New Neo City skyline.
There is something in the sky that is not the moon. It has a bad halo, like an image fragment that’s being dragged and saved wrong in a new way with every heartbeat. It looms, uninvited.
The AC hums. Street noise carries. No one is running, no one is shouting. Ruby feels cold from the inside out.
Thoth buzzes. Ruby has a new message from the windy shield icon.
[[Conditions: Passive Protege •, Annoying Asshole •
Trauma: Grudge •
Light Dice: [Perfect Drip], Dark Dice: 2]]
[[Clock: 4, Score: 2]]