Egress: Act 1, Act 2: Friday Pm, Part 2

Wolf Knight? Menswear Wolf? Wolf Dad? What does it mean? fan theories (and art) blaze hot.

Ruby: Talk to Wolf Knight.

Ruby asks what this is all about. By way of answer, Wolf Knight produces a shield, seemingly heavy but made of the same magenta light as he is, bearing an emblem evoking a gust of wind. Ruby recognizes it: this is the symbol 🛡️ uses on Thoth. Wolf Knight explains:

Ruby meets Wolf Knight’s eyes. They are opaque. His mane floats on the breeze.

He looks at the moon. Then, rising to his footpaws, Wolf Knight looks back to Ruby and says:

This is Wolf Knight making an offer to reduce a Need by 1, Grist, by offering a useful item. I came up with this thinking it would be a layup: I want Ruby to duel people for stakes, the Ruler of the Hosts of Air messing with her has been a motif, this is a strong next step that would give her a cool iconic treasure and put her on a collision course with the Ruler. But once I wrote Wolf Knight’s gambit out on the page, I asked what Ruby would do beyond just being a game piece to move “the plot” (what plot?) forward, and I wasn’t sure she would play along.

Oracle: Does Ruby want the Shield of the Hosts of Air?

No, and!: (motif: Rose. (Thorns.) A beautiful gesture, but consider the source.) Ruby is Mannerless, Envious, bears a Grudge, and she hates all this talking and planning about her behind her back. She doesn’t trust this Hosts of Air creep, why would she trust his servant? Why would she just now start playing on anyone’s terms but hers?

Ruby’s fingers curl around the back of her phone. There’s gravity to this threat. The Magenta version card inserted into her phone’s peripheral slot is what enables her to play Egress and to access its lenses onto reality. Losing her Egress card would mean the end of the game.

Ruby’s willpower flares in a form that is legible to Egress. She blazes with vision and determination for what she wants, the challenge she’ll set for herself and how she’ll win it, and the [SUN’S ORB] from her [SUN of DEFIANCE] Link blazes with her. In a way that feels so natural as to make the interface invisible, the [CITY MALL] and [SUNKEN TUNNEL] fuse, creating a new virtual-actual metaplace beyond its own material sources. It’s a vibrant and exciting night city done up in CMYK colors, full of wide lanes and scenic landmarks more than specific people, like the Y2K cityscape of a Dreamcast rhythm game, built to be traversed at speed. More than anything it’s very Sayonara Wild Hearts. The Egress interface calls this new entry in its ‘Bastion Deck’ the [GLAMOUR LABYRINTH].

I invent a mechanic on the fly because it felt right. Ruby spends 2 of her Dark Dice on a tag for her trait Imaginative 2: Creation. In the fiction, she’s tapping into an ability to use the Egress interface to weave new things into existence, freely mixing the virtual and the actual. When she strives with Imaginative, she gets an extra bonus when she Creates new things. Trait evolution…!

Wolf Knight, a digital native sprite being, wasn’t expecting this kind of challenge but can configure himself to any game within the language of Egress. He returns the Shield of Air to a gleaming orb of magenta light, then reconfigures it into a flying wind motorcycle, the Steed of Air, that can outrace any falsehood. It’s badass and also sicknasty. How can Ruby keep up with his airtight turns and perfect fits…?

Wolf Knight has two obstacle conditions: Sprite-2 for his game construct abilities like speed and magic, and Fashionable-2 for his highly developed sense of personal style and modeling. Ruby will have to reduce one of these to 0 to create an opening to defeat him. But how?

With her new powers of Creation, Ruby rides the rush and Strives to create a new outfit worthy of dueling such a dapper opponent. She’s looking through the garments and accessories she picked up at the Mall, but thinking wider as well, like the Regency-style dress she made out of found fabric. It comes together when she remembers the [FLYER] paper-plane she captured…but even with Creation boosting Imaginative from 2 to 3, the roll is a failure! She uses her Shove It edge to nudge the result up to a bare success, but has to take a new Condition as the price: her stocks of grist are left absolutely Depleted as she “melts down” all her purchases to fuel a more complex work. (This puts her in a bad spot: Ruby now has 4 Conditions out of a maximum 6, putting her within spitting distance of being Taken Out, on top of the fictional problems of not being able to make anything new.)

But she’s left with something beautiful: empowered by the [EMPRESS’ ORB] from the [EMPRESS of THREADS], Ruby’s outfit is built around the [FLIGHT CLOAK], a magical garment of her own creation that lets her ride the wind and fly like a bird. It’s not subtle, but her best self never is. Creating her own outfit for the occasion also activates her Perfect Drip edge, giving her a persistent Light Die during the fashion race. She has all the advantages she can weave together. Will it be enough?

The fashion race is more vibes-based than strictly codified, but the Egress interface (with its Gamification condition) creates rules to follow anyway. Race to the rhythm through the Glamour Labyrinth, reach a scenic spot, prepare your outfit and strike the perfect pose while keeping momentum. Walk!

Whenever the interface screen tracks them across a perfectly scenic bridge or dramatic skyline, there’s a flash of Wolf Knight rapidly cycling through light-generated outfits like slot reels before turning in the perfect sharp-cut blazer, steel-toed clubwear, or soft scarf billowing in front of the moon. Ruby, who spent all her grist on one perfect garment, has to find new dimensions of her own fit to highlight each time, lest she be docked points. (How is Egress judging art on points, anyway?) She rolls with Envious 1 at first, wrapped up in complicated feelings about unlimited resources and big hairy silhouettes in menswear, but she’s playing catch-up until she has the dramatic realization — it’s fun to find the angles of a look she created herself! — and can start rolling with Imaginative 2 and her LD.

Over several clashes, Ruby reduces Fashionable to 0 without being bumped off. Wolf Knight, driven by infinite access to novelty as a costume-swappable game construct, is vulnerable to being caught in fits that don’t play to his strengths. Despite the Egress interface rewarding endless variety with points, Ruby and WK both know when he’s choking. Racing to keep up with her easy, twisting flight through a night market of lanterns and parasols, Wolf Knight flash-cycles through fresh looks and generates a too-casual tropical shirt and board shorts — his own Steed of Air judges him FALSE, throwing him off its back! He tumbles down through a construction hazard to the substreet infrastructure of the Glamour Labyrinth, and Ruby wheels in midair to follow him down and finish this with One Last Pose.

It’s not that simple. Unhorsed and dripless, Wolf Knight is glitching out, jagged around the edges and skipping frames. Ruby has him beat on style, they both know it, but he can still appeal to the interface.

[S] Ruby: Nullify. | Hamhambone

She can see the point highlighted, the industrial-chic spot where she’s supposed to pose. But Wolf Knight conjures some mask-off Air spell, a howling gust that becomes massive whirlwind of debris and junk data in the construction understreet, standing between her and the point she’s meant to hit to win.

Flying through girders, trash, rocky debris and traffic sent airborne, her perspective warped by glitch artifacts, Ruby makes one last Strive roll with Imaginative to find a path through the storm and unambiguously show she’s better at this than Wolf Knight. Disadvantage from the Windstorm and his powerful Sprite abilities, and she risks being seriously hurt or trapped in the substreet. She still has those 4 out of 6 Condition slots full, too.

I roll an 8. But that’s not good enough. Ruby wants an unambiguous win, so she pushes even further with Shove It, taking not just +2 (to 10) but +4 Condition ranks (to 12!), giving her a total bass-drop win, removing the Gamification formidable condition from the framework enemy (Egress itself), and a Victory Point for the final total. Along with boosting Depleted, she adds Sworn Enemy-2 for Hosts of Air trouble, and (even worse) Out Past Curfew-1, because it’s it’s been how long since she texted her Grandma? This takes her to six Conditions…!

The wind blows hard against her, one last obstacle thrown up by a sore loser, like an extra health bar for the boss. It bites and stings, but she keeps pushing, because she won, and she’s not letting a windstorm deny that to her, or a pouty wolf, or the points total that inexplicably has her behind him, or some glowing checkpoint that she shouldn’t even need to hit.

No, she doesn’t need to hit it. This is corny. She won. He’s beaten. She doesn’t need Egress to tell her that. Screw this. She has nothing to prove in a duel, and she tells Wolf Knight so.

At the height of her power, Ruby rides the cyclone and leaves her Glamour Labyrinth behind. She flies through the level geometry and gets spat out right back onto Lower Polk, the real Lower Polk, where the air is cold and the snowflakes drift through gaps between the rail bridge and the train station. There’s no background music, only distant honks and tracks rumbling.

She wraps her magic cloak tight and careens onto the slush like she was fired out of a cannon, wobbles to her feet to wipe herself off, slips again, yelping, giggling, cheeks hot. She falls on her ass and doesn’t even care.

Laying in the snow, Ruby takes her phone off airplane mode and sees a missed call from Grandma. Two missed calls.

“oh, shit.”

She’s already dead.

Ruby is Taken Out.

We’ll catch up with her when the interface does. She removed the Gamification condition from Egress, proving that the game itself can be challenged on terms other than the ones it presents. She refused the offer she was given to reduce a Need, so the Needs stand at:

Lore 0, Grist 1, Friendship 0 | 2/3 Wins

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The Egress interface isn’t sure what to do next.

The interface shifts focus.

Mdub Gaming, morningWard (unabashed she/her)

Flagbearer-2, Gamegrl-1, Mastermind-1, Teenager-1

Pro gamer with a trust fund and well-paid tutors, living with her older cousin in a luxurious manor that came at a strange and terrible price. She has cut ties with her family and doesn’t use their name for her; she goes by MW (or Mdub) socially.

• The Power of Hope: roll a persistent Light Die for an action that you truly believe will make things better for everyone. If you fail the roll anyway, increase your Optimism Trauma.

= = =

Mdub: Work on Your Egress Faq.

It’s Saturday night, April 15, in a coastal mansion some distance north of a New Zealand city called Stratheden. The ocean is dark and rumbling, the looming glitchstep meteor is somehow both black and brighter than the stars, and MW’s Cousin is out doing their evening yardwork in the hedge maze. As usual, morningWard is on the computer.

We see a panel of her in the zone, immersed in some deep theorycrafting illustrated by a complex diagram. (This is a goof and a spoof.) She explains at exhaustive length:

• “C/M/Y versioning is much more than the ‘gacha gimmick’ that certain Salt Catalog trolls have dismissed it as. (Cynical doomposting won’t get you into the Medium, guys!) Its design roots are in the tempaletting mechanic from Egress 1.0, but revised and expanded to profile and predict a player’s progress through the session. But if versions aren’t just a blind draw assigned on installation, what does being a Cyan, Magenta, or Yellow player mean?”

• “Magenta players (like me!) are associated with the social, the interpersonal Link building component of the session. That’s not wrong, but it’s more complicated than matching points on the O/L/N Triangle to the C/M/Y. Magenta players are weavers, planners, masterminds; the ones who draw things together. We pull the strings, getting people properly equipped and buffed and in the right place to reach the goal. High-impact Magenta players are just as skilled at keeping their rivals disorganized and scattered as we are at supporting our own side!”

• “Yellow players are associated with the intellectual, the exploratory innovation and iteration side of the session. From what I’ve seen of Yellow players, they’re drawn to experimenting, breaking boundaries, and creative play; they don’t take any aspect of the game or its interface at face value. This leads them to discover secrets both out in the generated AR world and internal to the players and their interface. Yellow players are at their best when they constantly try new combinations and builds, never letting themselves get comfortable (and predictable!) with one approach.”

• “Cyan players are associated with the physical, the moment-to-moment action that that drives the session forward. They’re the most straightforward, and apparently the most common version: the strivers, the doers, the ones who put the plans and openings created by Magenta and Yellow players into action. The best and boldest Cyan players are knights who play the board and earn the spotlight on their own terms — on the other hand, you can’t win the game without a few pawns!”

• “This brings me to complementary color theory,”

(Crash!)

MW almost spills her canned coffee on her bespoke t-shirt. Sounds like trouble outside. She’d better check on her Cousin.

She rolls her ergonomic gaming chair back from her wooden desk, carved with figures that can only be called TROLLFACE GROTESQUES. As she searches for her comb in vain, the viewer sees that her room is filled with just-so glimpses into her variety of INTERESTS.

• a HIGH-END GAMING PC, CUSTOM-BUILT and CRYSIS-READY, equipped with HIGH-END GAMING KEYBOARD, STREAMING ACCOUTREMENTS, and RING LIGHT.

• a RECORD COLLECTION favoring modern vanity releases by GRIMES, BECK, and DIE ANTWOORD, along with a box of SITTING FRIAR RECORDS vintage LPs representative of the local STRATHEDEN SOUND of 198X (a gift from her much cooler Cousin)

• several FLAGS mounted on the wall, representing both her aesthetic interest in VEXILLOLOGY as well as her PERSONAL AFFILIATIONS-

But there’s no time to look at every detail in her room! She hurries down the hall and the winding staircase, passing by an upsetting abundance of 9GAG EPHEMERA displayed like classical paintings. Something is happening in this house that is not good. In the mudroom off the professionally-appointed kitchen, she laces up her combat boots and dons the ICONIC BROWNCOAT of an open world action protagonist that only a truly elite gamer is brave enough to wear outside the home.

Like the other kids, morningWard has two of her six slots taken by Relationship Conditions: Me And Who (2) is her deeply entangled “collaboration” with the mysterious entity ?Who has been reaching out to players at 9:46 AM/PM, and Nifty Network (2) is the many other players she’s in contact with. She has a third Condition, Doubt (1), representing her squirmy unease that the ?Who doesn’t have her or humanity’s best interests at heart. Her starting Trauma is the mirror of Axel’s Pessimism: Optimism (1), her deep conviction that if she keeps facing forward and trying her hardest with the best intentions, things will ultimately work out for the best.

She goes out to her garden and summons her [BLAZING BANNER] from her flagkind Strife Deck, bearing her custom MW emblem, and uses it to perform a quick flag drill with a parallel toss and flashy saute. This summons her Sprite, and it’s a weird one.

I rolled a motif to see what it is: Phoenix. Rebirth (Destruction.) It matters not how dark it is, I will be the light. This is the second or third time I’ve rolled Phoenix and other flame/dawn imagery in connection with morningWard, so I decide this is Her Thing now and I’ll hold it in mind when playing her. She made this sprite by combining two Links: her relationship with her Cousin, the [GARDENER of REBIRTH]; and the glitched [??-Who?] Link that Axel has as well.

[??-PHOENIX?] is embodied as a flock of smartphones floating and wheeling in formation, all colored magenta, most every screen more or less cracked and glitchy and all of them displaying icons of birds. When the flock is disrupted, even more birdphones appear to replace it. It returns again and again, stronger than before, which only gets her in deeper with this strange and troubling entity.

There’s a hedge maze and statue garden adjoining the mansion. Granite sculptures of bygone reaction meme mascots leer between hedge narwhals and honey badgers that were never meant to be realized on this scale. She feels deeply ill at ease with this place, and so her Cousin does the required hedge-trimming and garden maintenance on her behalf. They say they find it meditative, but mW’s Cousin does a lot of things for her.

mW catches glimpses of a Cyantagonist Squadron (tagged with a level-1 condition), the little toy-robot soldiers newly equipped with floating umbrella-parachutes and doorknob-keys that open portals in the hedge walls. That’s no big shock — she made her home a Node, so of course it will be harried by enemy imps. She hears her Cousin in the maze, though, and she promised to keep them out of Egress trouble. With a gesture of her flag, she sends her phoneflock out into the maze to hunt and destroy the cyants!

Strive with Gamegrl 1 to defeat the cyant spawn without her Cousin being hurt. The Power of Hope edge applies, as it often does, because mW believes she’s the protagonist of reality. Even with that free Light Die, she just barely squeaks by with a 7. She chooses to avert the danger and keep her Cousin unharmed for now, at the cost of no success. This also triggers a Clock hit on a kept 2, so I roll a new motif and narrate a game event: Water. Healing (Imbalance.) I decide to show signs of something bad happening offscreen. Because mW has been glitching her game data so hard in cooperation with the ?Who, the Egress software has identified her as a threat — like old copy protection making the game harder for pirates. The game itself is turning against her!

She hears her Cousin shouting for her and rushes headlong into the maze. [??-PHOENIX?] is keeping the cyants occupied, slicing their umbrella-chutes and chasing them through their portals like shooting darts, but it can’t do that and protect mW at the same time. She’s soon set upon by a swarm of yellions, too — this spawn is combative and equipped with heavy steel pincers from some other Yellow player’s Grid. She sweeps them away with a flash-trailing swing from her Blazing Banner…!

But what’s this? Another force crash-lands behind her: she keeps the yellions at bay to turn around and see…magentimps? This spawn of buff standalone minions comes equipped with complex papercraft that lets them glide and hard-descend like paper planes. Reinforcements? This does look like it’s growing into a full-on raid, but she hasn’t observed this imp behavior…

The magentimps rush her! She only has a second to charge up a melee AoE flash pirouette — where is her flocksprite? And why is her own side attacking her?!

Another Strive, this time with Flagbearer 2, to find her Cousin without becoming stretched thin from the scale of the raid and vulnerable to a knockout. Cyant Squadron 1 becomes All-Out Raid 2, giving disadvantage. She rolls…snake eyes, even with The Power of Hope. That’s a failure no matter how high her modifier is.

I pause before I carry out the hard fail. She could tap another source for a Light Die, expending one level of her ?Who relationship for one LD representing the relationship’s words of advice and encouragement. She does so and adds it to the roll:

mW spins her flag and matadors a charging magentimp into the yellion swarm. She told me that joining with her would mean playing on hard mode. I can’t get salty about it now.

With the ?Who Advice LD, mW pulls out a 7. She neither succeeds at finding her Cousin or avoids becoming stretched thin, but she buys a bonus, reducing the All-Out Raid condition to 1 and slightly turning down the temperature. She takes a condition, Cornered 2, for the dire spot she’s in both immediately and more widely — the game itself has turned against her! Not only that, one of her snake eyes gives her another Clock hit, keeping a 1 and ticking the Clock to 0. Another motif to inspire a move: growth, learning, new life. Thinking of mW’s Optimism and her ?Who relationship, as well as that Phoenix of Rebirth and Destruction, I decide to use a character’s aspects against them.

She swipes and slays, and more of her flocksprite begins to burn into being around her, respawning from losses deeper in the maze. Their aerial slices form a shield, but there are so many that she feels like one wrong step would make them slash her, too. She isn’t even doing the fighting anymore, there’s no room to sweep and guard, it’s just [??-PHOENIX?] biting into enemy waves on autopilot, or remote control.

At the worst possible moment, backed into a corner of the hedge maze with those nightmarish faces looming and no end of imps in sight, 9:46 PM rolls around — every birdphone in the swarm starts ringing at once. Their cracked screens all show ? and demand an answer, though she only ever experiences communication with the ?Who as text. Her Cousin shouts and grunts from deeper in the maze, but — she has to take this. Frantic, tired, cornered, mW accepts the call. Her phoneflock circles and lifts her off her feet, above the fray and just barely out of danger. Could it always do that?

False Flag | Hamhambone

Like Ruby, morningWard now spends 2 Dark Dice (that I decide she has from “playing the game” before we met her) on Trait evolution. The gamebreaking glitch goddess power of the ?Who reveals a new Flagbearer tag to her: Semaphoria. The ?Who has taught her a complex symbolic language that uses her flagkind Strife Specibus to carry out arbitrary code execution within Egress. At her current level of initiation, it’s enough to buff and debuff game constructs, and maybe even pseudo-control them if she sets up the right status effects and circumstances.

She Strives again with the Power of Hope and Flagbearer 2 (3 with Semaphoria) to empower [??-PHOENIX?] beyond the buff cap, giving her corrupted flocksprite the strength and scale to purge the entire hedge maze raid at once - but she’s in danger of losing herself, succumbing to the power she channels and surrendering her own will. I roll…

12!! That resounding success is enough for another Victory Point. (Do they still count if mW wants different things than the main PCs? I make a note of it.) She endows her flocksprite to boss scale, and with her 10+ bonus and the ?Who’s coaxing, eliminates the Normalization formidable condition on Egress itself that prevents non-players (AKA almost all of humanity) from noticing what’s happening. If the game itself is trying to stop her, she’ll burn down its veils and turn the Earth against it. They’ll make a great distraction while she makes a run with the flag.

The flocksprite that is [??-PHOENIX?] grows and spreads to a truly unbalanced degree, burning new birdphones into existence in every corner before zipping out like Gundam bits to swarm and seek and slash. mW carries on her esoteric flag drill → ↑ 🎌 → 🌀 ↓ ← 🌀 ← ↑ ↓🏁 through the smell of burning rotary telephones, ecstatic, seeing the code and riding it, the possibility, the potential, the infinite ways that everything could go wrong and something wondrous could emerge from the wreckage, twirling and spinning and sinking –

-=# X-Slash #=-

With two clean cuts, the magentimp about to meteor smash her from above and behind is cleaved and despawns. mW is shoved out of her glitchcore reverie by her Cousin, wearing their ballcap and crop top and wielding an XXL pair of garden shears.

But how, says mW?

Cousin’s headphones are around their neck, their sunglasses are in their hand. They look genuinely worried. mW is astonished, relieved, guilty, and so very tired. But at least [??-PHOENIX?] is chewing them both a way out.

After all that action, I roll Play the Game for morningWard to see how the Needs change. How could it be otherwise? It’s yet another 6. That’s the third out of three!! That’s all they needed to win!! That measly Need for Grist-1 is squashed back to 0 as mW, empowered by a new endgame ability, has the grist reward from a massive raid brought to her on endless floating birdphone platters. All Needs are at 0, and the PCs have accumulated 3 Wins.

Lore 0, Grist 0, Friendship 0 | 3/3 Wins

My plans have gone up in smoke. I expected this to take at least twice as long. The PCs have barely gotten to do anything! (at least it felt that way at the time.) Per the Cyclic Frame rules, they now get an opportunity to escape the desperate situation that they’re stuck in — a meteor looming and a game offering them a way out. That spark will set off Act 1, Act 3.

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