Egress: Act 1, Act 2: Friday Pm, Part 1
The first set of actions, for Friday AM, are done; the three PCs all got a turn. Now they’re all off work and school and they each get a full action (and a roll on the Cylic Frame chart for Play the Game/Live your Life/Take a Break) for Friday evening.
Lore 1, Grist 0, Friendship 0 | 1/3 Wins
(Note that the Needs are all low, which is a good thing. If they were 2 or 3, being Conditions, they would give disadvantage on rolls. But it means that the PCs don’t have to be reactive to scarcity and taking risks to meet their Needs, which is how I thought this part would go.)
Pony: Play the Game.
Pony ended his day at school by taking a new Coping Condition, Avoid, in order to stretch himself thin (Overwhelmed as usual) to get ahead on a school project (and take a Light Dice to help his gaming.) I decide that Avoid manifests by not thinking about homework or cello rehearsal or anything tonight, avoiding thinking about his many other obligations by having fun playing the game that’s destroying the Earth instead. Fox Dad mostly approves of this — finally, his stressed kiddo’s spreading his wings and enjoying himself out of the house! — but…he really should make sure to get that homework done by Sunday afternoon, okay? Wolf Dad will want to relax with Fox Dad and Pony Son on Sunday night. (He doesn’t have many evenings free, after all!)
Fox Dad knows about Egress, but doesn’t see any meteor in the sky, and doesn’t seem to remember any inexplicably magical(?) stuff happening at the tea shop. Pony was just playing some GO-type game with a neato rhythm component. (This is Egress’ Normalization-1 condition.) He still wants to spend quality time with Pony, so he drives him out to a new destination in the sleepy suburb of Forest Lake to claim a new Node: the Japanese Friendship Garden in the hills up west of town.
There’s trouble, though. It seems like Something Happened at the Garden earlier today, and the authorities aren’t sharing exactly what it was. It’s closed when they get there, and the entrance is guarded by private park security in their fake cop cars. Pony’s feeling Avoidant and meek, but Fox Dad is beaming with imminent mischief. He used to be a real scamp, it’s why Wolf Dad fell for him. He tells Pony he has the key to a maintenance gate (mini-Flash: flipping through Fox Dad’s enormous key ring), on account of how he “used to hang around here,” and presses it into his scandalized son’s hand. He’ll keep these thin green line knuckleheads occupied — go play while you’ve got the park all to yourself, this is a lucky break!
Most of this scene prep was through conversation with Hamhambone while we walked around one day, occasionally referencing motif charts or oracles on a phone pdf by having one of us guess a random number. Fox Dad thinks mischief and sneaking around will build character, he’s loving this whole situation. It’s fun to picture his dirtbag escapades before Wolf Dad domesticated him and they raised an anxious, bookish, Conformist teenager whom he doesn’t understand at all.
Peer pressured by his dad, Pony swallows his fear — it does sound pretty fun — and scampers off to the hidden back gate. Like Axel, he has a flash of insight about Objects and Links: combining the [KEY] and the [KNOB] with the mischievous power of the [FOX’S ORB] from the [FOX of CUNNING] Link (with a Strive +Escapist-1 and helping of grist for fuel), he manufacts the [PORTAL OPENER], a magical device that can open any entrance. He successfully uses it to let himself inside the Garden.
Pony will be using the Portal Opener a lot, it becomes one of his signature things. The name, and “opening portals” as an open-ended verb, references a capable demon named Surgat, Opener of Locks from the I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream point-and-click adventure game.
Pony got another clock hit on this roll, 3, so I rolled game-related motifs: eerie intelligence, secrets whispered in the dark, betrayal. This place is gonna be spooky as heck.
I roll Play the Game now that he’s in the park to see what he’ll face: it’s another 6. These were much more rare in my test game, and now we’re 2/3 sixes toward victory already. The text says “you find a resource, what is it? Reduce 2-Need.” But there’s only 1 Need left to reduce! I decide to reward this good luck with an extra benefit: not only can the resource here reduce Lore-1 by saying what’s going on, it will create an opening to knock out the new Tainted FAQ condition.
It turns out it’s very weird in the closed Garden, like creepypasta weird. The Garden is the same as ever IRL, just the water features are off and dry, and the only people are unwelcoming rent-a-cops in the distance. In AR mode, the whole area is reimagined as an abandoned castle’s walled botanical garden, overgrown and choked with megaflora weeds. Wilted meaty flowers mournfully puff air beneath crumbling platforms. Pony is puzzled: it’s already been claimed as a Node…? But the owning player is [NULL]. Is there another player in Forest Lake? It’s like a whole village-and-dungeon ecosystem has grown up here, but nothing has played with it. Little colorless game construct figures, not prompted by any Objects (unlike the papercraft magentimps or binocular yellions), huddle in the shadow of elephant vines and talk of a hero who hasn’t been back for 9999 months, and does Pony know where [NULL]’s gone? In the distance, something massive slithers.
Pony stealthily follows some of the IRL security around with an [ITEM FINDER] he likewise manufacts, trying to find out what happened and what they’re investigating. It goes horribly, because Pony doesn’t know how to sneak around, and he winds up frantically running from IRL security and AR monsters, dodging two sets of obstacles his pursuers can’t see and aren’t hindered by. A second full-failure in a row puts him in a desperate position, up a tree and spotted - “hey kid, stop!” - with the slithering thing coiled around the base and climbing. He can’t get arrested, he can’t, his life will be over, oh god oh why oh god — there has to be a way out!!!
I want a way out and forward from this unexpected spiral of failures on inconsequential moves, without ignoring the fiction. Pony moves Avoidant into a second Trauma slot, renamed as Escapism, representing a deeper and more pervasive unhealthy coping mechanism. Then I spend 3 of his 6 Dark Dice (he just earned 2 from those failures) to boost his Escapist trait from 1 to 2, making him better at doing things with that approach. His self-ness is evolving in tandem with Egress.
Oh, look. There’s a wide and gnarled knot in the tree trunk just below him. Pony imagines a key turning in this knot, like a keyhole, leading anywhere else. He takes the Portal Opener out from his grid and puts his fate in the hands of the game software.
Pony has had several mixes of his leitmotif, Actuate. This is an especially exciting-tension-clock’s-ticking one, composed in anticipation of this kinda thing happening at some point.
Pony tumbles inward.
“oof.” A bed of damp, decaying leaves, sickly-sweet smelling, breaks his fall. His arms crossed in time to keep his glasses from breaking. There’s a sound of dripping water and slow, deep breathing.
He doesn’t know where he is, or how it maps onto the actual geography of the Friendship Garden. In the AR layer’s abandoned overgrown castle garden, this place looks like a fantastical rain gutter, or secret bricked-off catacombs, a bonus dungeon at the bottom of the well. As spooky and musty as it is down here, at least he isn’t being chased anymore. But there’s no sign of a way out, either. With his Studious nature, he plays junior detective and looks around.
What happened here, and how does it relate to the null Node outside? Motif: Phoenix. (Rebirth/Destruction). It matters not how dark it is, I will be the light.
There are strange and beautiful flower varietals down here, growing among the detritus. As he passes by and studies them, some of the colorless blossoms repeat snatches of words and sounds. The “memory flowers” collectively play back an adventurous young man’s Brazilian-accented voice: “It should generate the last puzzle here…this is where the FAQ said to go, right? What does morningWard say…compursuit, compursuit…”
Then, sounds of a scuffle. A shout of alarm becomes a pained gasp, then glitches out and plays fast in reverse. Then heavy bootfalls. And a masked, synthesized voice that Pony hears as vaguely feminine: “get good.”
Pony treads through the overgrown tunnel. There are no other people here, but he finds stray items, Egress items, left scattered on the ground: a silky mudstained scarf — is that real blood? A studded hula hoop, dangerous-looking but useless to him — hoops aren’t his strifekind, according to the Grid. And splotches of blue honey.
Oh no.
The last memory flower plays a sound like a whistling, musical gust of wind, then silence.
Pony’s heart chills. He’s scared, but tries to think in game terms. His +Studious conclusion from the um, evidence puzzle, is that another Egress player — maybe the one who sent him the [BLUE HONEY] now stored in his Object Grid? — came here somehow, claimed the Friendship Garden as his Node, only to be led into a trap and backstabbed by some sort of…player killer! Is that how the Node became all glitched and timeless? But how? Why? Who?
He explores further as he puzzles it over, and almost trips on an abandoned pair of rollerskates. Inspecting them in Egress, especially easy in this fully AR pocket space, he realizes they’re a “magic item” like his Portal Opener or Item Finder: they’re [WARP SKATES], but they’ll need an Orb whose aspect resonates with travel to power them. He captures them to his Grid for now, wanting to bring something of the missing player with him.
Soon after pocketing them, Pony hears, and sees, that slithering again. Soon, he’s face to face with a huge colorless glitch-serpent at the bottom of the well, sprawling its endless coils through the tunnels and up above. Like a geometric ray, the impossible entity has an end but no beginning. Pony ends up talking to a tail hanging from a dark tangle on the ceiling, marked with cobra-like patterns that uncannily imitate a face without being truly convincing. The text in which its supposedly spoken words appear somehow sound like a hissing ventriloquist from another room.
“How are you…talking like that?” Pony asks.
In This Medium There Is No Other Way
, the [null] SERPENT replies.
Pony asks the looming serpent some questions about what’s going on. Things like:
“What are you?”
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The Sprite Of a Player Removed From The Session Without The Finality Of Death
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“Who was your player?”
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The Data Has Been Rendered Null
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“What’s a sprite?”
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The Evolution Of a Player’s Links
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“Like how combining items — I mean Objects — evolves their form?”
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Yes
-
“waoh. Wait, can you also evolve Nodes by combining them?”
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Yes
-
“Are you designed to answer questions like this?”
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Yes
-
“okay…but I’m not annoying you am I?”
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No
-
Pony presents his hypothesis about what happened down here. The [null] SERPENT finds it plausible.
“What happened to the Friendship Garden?”
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The Node Has Been Made To Artificially Develop Without Player Input
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“Why would someone do that?”
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Offer a Conjecture
-
Pony reflects on what he knows, and what Ruby and Axel have shared with him. Too bad Axel hasn’t been talking to him since last night…things were weird, and he’s probably been working all day, but ze could at least say hi.
I use Pony’s “Master Planner” Light Dice to declare in the fiction that he solves some things. Technically, I’m spending it to declare an answer to a relevant Oracle without rolling. His creative brain is still working and making connections from Mr. Sebastami’s consulting project.
“If you couldn’t feed Egress any fungible data from your capture grid,” Pony ventures, “but the software still had to generate something…it must have some stock templates it uses before the player grid data is incorporated.”
“So maybe,” he continues, building up steam, “if you let a null Node run and iterate on just itself for a long time, you could get insight into the unmodified mechanics of Egress itself? Like, parallel universes and half A-presses! You could see the code and speedrun the game!” Stars in his eyes!
The [null] SERPENT’s false head sways. Pony falls silent in troubling speculation.
“…How do you win Egress?”
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By Entering The Medium
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“What’s in the Medium?”
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What The Winners Bring With Them
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His brow furrows behind his round glasses. “What was your player doing here?”
The [null] SERPENT ventriloquizes its absent player’s voice in an excerpt from the memory flowers: “…this is where the FAQ said to go, right? What does morningWard say…compursuit, compursuit…”
“What is a ‘compursuit?’”
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An Endgame Quest To Assist Another Player In Entering
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“Who was your player assisting?”
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The Data Has Been Rendered Null
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“Did this morningWard person write a FAQ that led your player…to the player killer?”
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That Would Neatly Tie Loose Ends
-
Pony is troubled. If this is the player who sent him the [BLUE HONEY] yesterday, and to whom he sent a teacup in return…did he use those depowered Warp Skates to come here and do the compursuit for Pony? Or was it just random chance — checking off some master list of proto-Nodes geotagged in Egress 1.0? Is morningWard’s FAQ a honeypot for speedrunning griefers? And if this null Node is some kind of petri dish to study for wallhacks…
“Is the player killer coming back?” he asks, palms sweaty.
Offer a Conjecture
, the [null] SERPENT invites.
Pony begins frantically looking for an exit to this digital otherspace, kicking up rainy leaves and honey. “How do I get out?”
The [null] SERPENT twists its coils, retracts its tail, reveals a hidden passage. At the end of the flower-lined earthen corridor, a somewhat less wilted meaty flowerpad floats above a cistern in a shaft of light. The tail returns, bearing a wide blue flower in its false head’s pseudo-jaws.
An Object Without a Player Is Unclaimed Data
, the [null] SERPENT philosophizes.
Pony takes out the jar of [BLUE HONEY] from his Grid, feels its weight. Was that other player really trying to help…him? Of all people? Why? Why do people care about him all of a sudden? Or is he just getting the wrong idea and making it all about him, like always?
He swaps the [BLUE HONEY] for the offered gift, capturing the [LAST FLOWER].
Then he manufacts the flower with his umbrella in his Strife Deck, transforming them into the [PARAFLORES]: a sweet-smelling parasol with healthy petal-wing trim that can float on updrafts! He scurries to the cistern, hops onto the flowerpad, pops his Paraflores open, and (with a “woop!!”) launches up into the light!
That’s the dramatic climax of the scene — Pony escapes the Friendship Garden without further trouble, and links up with his dad again. Fox Dad asks “How’d it go? Did you claim the Node?” Pony, between Overwhelmed and Escapism, just withdraws and buckles his seatbelt. “um…it was fine.”
6: you find a resource, what is it? Reduce 2-Need. Reduce Lore by 1 for key information about how to play, and get a lead on reducing the enemy Tainted FAQ condition: the mysterious and deadly(?) morningWard! Plus, mark a second Win, this one for Pony! The PCs’ Needs are currently all at 0, with 2 out of 3 Wins. Can Ruby bring it home on day 1?
Lore 0, Grist 0, Friendship 0 | 2/3 Wins
In terms of the Cyclic Frame, Ruby is in a great position. No Needs to reduce whatsoever, and just one more Win (rolling a 6 on a d6 — we’ve had two in a row so far) to succeed at this phase and attempt a victory. But getting ahead so far so soon means the PCs haven’t actually accomplished very much in the fiction yet. In scenario terms, the Enemy – Egress itself — still has all its conditions (Hidden Allies, Gamification, Normalization, Tainted FAQ), and the players haven’t made any progress against the mysterious figure ?Who tempted them over chat, or the villainous Student Council President, or the UFO, or the Ruler of the Hosts of Air.
I wasn’t sure what to do, so I just framed a scene with Ruby, relying heavily on drawing motifs for inspiration, rolled on the Cyclic Frame tables, and saw where things went. This led to me getting writer’s blocked during this scene for like a month — I didn’t know what to do in the present tense! Motifs weren’t a substitute for having some kind of creative vision. If nothing else, Calypso’s frameworks can be an asset here, giving you something to grab when you ask what happens next and how it brings you to the finish line. But you still need to want to play.
Ruby: Take a Break.
The Social Labyrinth of Chenoweth really has her pissed off right now. The catty Glee Club treasurer she was hitting up yesterday for Motive Fragments stopped her in the hallway for the tea on her and Sully, conversations hush into giggles when she passes by, and her Trapbox is buzzing with new followers. (She waited until a break to lock her profile — rookie mistake.)
It’s a gray and shitty afternoon that can’t decide if it wants to snow or not. No one sees the meteor: looming, coruscating, frameskipping. She exits through the semi-exposed walkways of Lower Polk, thinking she’ll claim the industrial-chic terrain for a second Node, but when she scans it in Capture Mode and finds a rotating ⏩ icon for another racing challenge, her heart’s not in it. She doesn’t need to get run over down here stringing together kickflip multipliers. In the name of collecting passive grist, she keeps exploring until she finds a different AR icon for a kind of Simon Says rhythm challenge built around directing trains. She’s been done with it before she pixel-hunts the fifth hidden signal light, but at least she gets the Node.
Through the intersecting pedways she winds to the [CITY MALL] Node she claimed yesterday. It’s as busy as ever IRL, but in AR mode, it has more of a department-store commercial charm: the stores are populated by game constructs, in all shapes of monster and muppet but mostly shades of purple, hawking gadgets and potions and pieces of art. The grist in her wallet is ready for spending.
She gets some room décor, minor accessories, and esoteric buff candles. Most of the objets d’art look like filler, but a few weavings are kind of exciting. The merchants, in dialogue boxes and nonverbal barks only, say that the Magenta Moon is under siege and trading by a thread, undercut by the forces of Cyan and Yellow. Perhaps if a hero rises to aid them, they can import greater variety at ever more rewarding prices…!
Ruby speeds through. It’s cool that there’s lore, but she can’t get into it. She passes her evening playing minigames instead, weaving through IRL Block Eleven mall kiosks for the Egress NPCs who will trigger a kart race, or a balloon pop, or an orb-based strategy grid. At the AR version of the mall club shop’s indoor driving range, she plays virtual golf across the cityscape of a fantastical lunar metropolis realized in two hundred fifty six shades of purple. Lining up a shot on a sky yacht’s deck, with two burly magentimps lugging her clubs, she gazes up at the ocean in place of the sky. Clouds drift across its surface. Unlike the sky she sees above the Earth, the stars are bright and full, and there is no meteor.
This ain’t helping. She dispels the simulation (it vanishes around her like a color painting returning to sketched linework and then blank canvas) and passes her club to some girl with purple antlers next in line. Whatever this NPC’s deal is, she’s not in the mood. +golf XP, +sport grist flytext follows her head as she heads up to the roof, like she did last night.
She sits on the roof a while, out in the cool night air. Rude SMSes and Trapbox DMs are blowing up her phone, so she sends stringedMaven a quick update and mutes it, not in the mood for cryptic vampire lord bullshit over Thoth from windy shield anyway. It’s not like her Grandma’s gonna text her. Above the New Neo City skyline, the meteor looms, interfering with the clouds.
This game sucks.
Isn’t she supposed to be like, going on adventures? Doing quests? Immersing herself in .hack coolness? She’s just stressed as hell about school, literally hanging out at the mall by herself on Friday night, hasn’t even done anything or met anyone cool (sorry sM), and now there’s a huge planet-killing satan’s-middle-finger played-out-glitchcore meteor that’s bigger than it was last night and she has no idea how to stop it and she can’t even talk to anybody about it because no one else can see it.
Her eyes are hot. She pushes her shades up to rub them dry.
Before long, there’s a gust of wind. Heavy footfalls. A big, purple, sharply-dressed wolf sits down beside her.
The NPC’s digital mane, ribbons, and chest fur ruffle like a kite riding the breeze. He seems more self-aware than the game constructs running the AR Mall Node, but unmistakably made up of the same magenta light.
The scene started to come together once I rolled some motifs (I will + truthfulness | Ruler of the Hosts of Air | Armor (Overprotection) A knight, dying, offers a shield to a squire) and saw some fanart of Blaidd chilling with Ranni at the beach with his shirt off.
I buy Take a Break by raising Need: Grist by 1 (for the spending Ruby did at the Mall Node), hoping for an opening to heal the Rumored condition that’s causing problems for Ruby. I roll a 1: An opportunity to reduce a Need by 1 presents, with peril. Lose a Trait, Edge, or Key. Why is this aspect lost to you? Are you able to secure the Need?
So much for that. This is gonna hurt.