Egress: Act 1, Act 3: Saturday
Act 1, Act 1 covers 7 pages’ worth of neat, tiny, multi-colored handwriting in my journal. Act 1, Act 2 covers 9 pages. Act 1, Act 3 covers 22 pages of dense incident, deeper characterization, and new elements being introduced, which is why I’m going to condense the whole thing down to two summary posts, like listening to a recap on 1.5x speed. I want to be done with these summaries and move on to Act 2, and my inner completionist won’t let me until I post some kind of digital record that catches the reader up and gives context for whatever comes next.
With the Cyclic Framework seemingly resolved, 3 Wins notched and all Needs at 0, Act 1, Act 3 is played with loose reference to Calypso’s 3-Act Framework to move things forward and introduce surprise. The first post covers Saturday, 4/15/201X. The second post will cover Sunday, 4/16/201X.
Content warnings for this update: “ironic” homophobia, an adult treating teenagers in a manipulative “chatroom creep” manner
What Happened Was This:
On Saturday morning, Pony looks for a new Link Orb that can power the Warp Skates that he found in the null Garden where another player was “removed from the session.” He finds one at the performing arts center, where he has rehearsals with the city youth orchestra. (Motif: Succubus. After Sun→Sully and Songbird→Sonya, I name them Buster.) Feeling brave and bold, he talks to an incredibly cool older “boy” he’s met briefly around the center before, a scruffy acrobat in edgy chaos clown streetwear who’s also here for a rehearsal — they invite/tell him to ditch his rehearsal and come hang with them, and shockingly, Pony does. The two of them talk about chaos, rebellion, music, going from transfem to agender, and the satyrical hip hop musical Bacchanalia. They have an AR-fueled jam session on cello and drum machine:
It goes so well that Pony establishes Buster as a Link: the [SUCCUBUS of FREEDOM]. It also gives Pony huge gay feelings, a flushed and confusing crush on Buster [[sparking the Ponybus ship in the early Egress fandom]], and a Kinda Emotionally Vulnerable RN condition that he’ll carry with him for his real challenge today: stopping the mysterious morningWard from publishing her player-killing Egress FAQ! He’s been trying to message Ruby all morning, but she’s offline, so after the jam session he swallows his pride and reaches out to Axel.
Pony explains what happened yesterday at the garden and this morning at the arts center.
Since we last saw zir, Axel has claimed the A&A Market as a Node, defeated its giant clown statue, and set up shop selling zir Woody Woodpecker Racing (for Game Boy Color) collection, ?-manufacting them to create bespoke cartridges with thrilling possibilities. A Clown’s Hell reinvented as a Gamer’s Heaven…in this moment, Axel is euphoric. Ze celebrates zir triumph by manufacting a new hoodie.
With the power of the [SUCCUBUS’ ORB], Pony pshooooes into West Clowncrest on the warp skates, leaving a fiery Earthbound trail as their power flickers. He has a walkaround flash at the A&A Market, meeting various colorful characters, including a guitarist who plays him a love song, a flop-sweating used lawn furniture salesman with Adult Despair, and another teen in tripp pants and a Count My Sheep t-shirt focused intently on the batting cages. He finds Axel running a glitzy-luxurious market tent like the baby from Twilight Princess, accompanied by the dog ze’s been hanging out with, plus a friendly nerd in a space exploration t-shirt leaning on the counter, who tells Pony her name is Lucia.
She pets the dog on her way out, and Pony is left smiling at Axel.
Pony explains the dastardly plot morningWard is behind, and that they have to stop her! Axel, for zir own reasons, does not share that ze already knows morningWard, but suggests zir mystery contacts can help them locate her. The two of them have a training montage at the Market, getting to know each other in person for the first time and strengthening Axel’s assertion that they are bros and can solve this challenge as a team. Then Axel climbs onto Pony’s back and they use zir information to warp skate to a coastline north of Stratheden, New Zealand, where it is currently Sunday morning and a titanic glitch-kaiju looms in the ocean. The second warp burns out the Orb power in the skates, again.
Pony and Axel infiltrate mW’s mansion via the hedge maze, boggling at its surreal played-straight decade-old meme statuary. What kind of nightmare is this? To overcome the empowered birdphone flock prowling the maze, Axel uses zir own Glitched Grid to hack zir pyrokind fireworks, producing endless silent rockets that put the swarm to sleep without raising any alarms. (Except from Pony, who is very suspicious about Axel’s null-garden esque exploits.)
with her flock taken out, mW doesn’t notice any trouble and is trying to upload the revised guide. but with the flock disabled, a magenta ogre knight — one of the hostile NPCs it was guarding against — slips in too
They make their way through the twisty mansion and its surreal Home Alone defenses, gaining context through photos and memorabilia as they explore for trap solutions. It seems like mW came from a rich family whose company was responsible for an environmental disaster, after which she competed as a middle schooler in a publicity-diverting cutthroat gaming event, [ROYAL GAME], hoping for enough prize money to break free of her family permanently. (From the looks of it, it was somewhere between Evo and Danganronpa.) She “won” the Royal Game, surely at a terrible price, and was rewarded with a (replacement) trust fund and the secluded coastal mansion she now lives in with her one good Cousin — on the firm condition that, per the prize contract and competition branding, they must maintain its frozen-in-amber meme trappings in perpetuity or lose everything. Whatever this place is, it isn’t freedom, and mW firmly, desperately believes she can and will escape again.
Pony is distressed about these revelations of harm and pain and guilt, his Overwhelmed trauma beginning to boil over, while Axel (still Flustered by mW after their chatlog) presents as unfazed: she was born rich and lives rent free in a fucking mansion she won; she obviously turned out okay.
The lawgiving ogre knight busts in, they flee through the trapped Meme Mansion in a Hanna-Barbera madcap chase (eyes peering through Scumbag Steve paintings, warping through doors with the Portal Opener, etc), Axel and Pony are separated, and while trying to avoid a massive crushing trollface stone trap (why is this in her house???) Pony gets whiffed from above by a weighted net trap. He has truly been trolled. As the axe-bearing ogre knight justiciar stomps toward him, mW finally appears in person — with a Semaphoria flag drill, inflicts it with the ??? status — and Axel, scuffed and smoky, stands beside her. Ze crosses zir arms and averts zir eyes from Pony. The ogre knight stands over Pony, not lowering its axe.
Just then, morningWard’s Cousin comes back in from the gym. Seeing that Mdub has guests, they bring her and her friends some snacks.
///
What mW wants, Optimistically, is to break the Egress program and create a (CMY+K) Key or Black Session, a “losers’ bracket” where players are glitched out of reality, then brought into the Medium en masse and with all their accumulated Grid data by the power of the Glitch Goddess, skipping the intended Medium entry mechanism entirely and escaping a doomed Earth. (“no no, we’re not going to kill anyone, they’re just in the shadow realm for a little while — like moving cards in and out of the graveyard!”)
What Axel wants, Pessimistically, is to Save The World in an action hero kind of way by “beating” Egress — not for the sake of the world as it is or sincere love for humanity in specific or as a whole, but because it feels like a satisfying challenge, and creating something new in the Medium even moreso. The Black Session appeals to zir desire for a clever third option that outwits Egress on their own terms.
Pony, Overwhelmed and Escapist and Emotionally Vulnerable, doesn’t know what the person called Pony would want. He wants to stop being the person that called Pony and be someone else, or stop being anyone. It doesn’t matter if he escapes the world, or saves the world, or builds a new one, because he’d have to keep being Pony no matter where he went, and that’s a choice he can’t bear to make. (Pony is deeply dysphoric but the tumblers won’t click in the lock.)
Surely the person called Pony would want to be a good boy who does the normative right thing, and if nothing else he’s afraid of losing his family and comfortable suburban home if the Earth is destroyed, so Pony wants to protect the Earth from the meteor and be good and not hurt anyone.
The three of them, freshly snacked but still mW and Axel (and ogre knight) against Pony, have a passionate battle of words. The AR layer animates it like Ace Attorney.
This was a fun instance of player-versus-player challenge in Calypso and really felt like a major turning point in the game! Each of them set a goal and got one Strive roll to pursue it against the others, and at the end I saw how things had developed and judged who was on who’s team for (what I thought was) the imminent endgame.
Pony tries to convince Axel to return to zir senses and help zir friend escape confinement.
Logic isn’t convincing — Axel can argue circles around Pony — but his composure breaks and he ugly-sobs at the thought of not being able to save his family from the meteor if Earth is sacrificed like a piece in a chess game. (I roll this normative appeal to doing the right thing with Conformist 2.) Axel’s heart squeezes seeing Pony so afraid, and ze comes to his side.
Axel, reconsidering the cost of the “Black Session” when theory meets reality and hoping to gain the initiative, tells mW that she can’t proceed as things are — it will lead to ruin. mW argues, particularly to Pony, that everything has been accounted for.
Ze tries to shake her Optimistic faith in the ?Who, and zir words resonate with her Doubt. She loses her cool and goes on the defensive, while Axel overcomes zir Flustered insecurity around her.
morningWard, a Mastermind on her home turf who does still have an axe-wielding ogre knight at her side, tries to persuade Axel and Pony to at least wait while she publishes the FAQ, so people can decide for themselves whether to pursue the Black Session route or not.
Just as she makes this argument — halfway through the Culmination.mp3 linked above — all of their phones ring at once as 9:46 AM New Zealand time rolls around. mW, visibly caught flat-footed and in a bad spot for her credibility, There are new stakes: Axel and Pony silently challenge mW to resist the ?Who and not answer the phone, and so will they.
On the last Strive roll, mW succeeds with a 7, and chooses — rather than achieving her goal of getting them on her side — to let the danger of breaking faith with the ?Who hit, and to Confront her Trauma, moving Optimistic to a Condition slot where it can be more easily overcome.
It almost brings her to panic. Not picking up when her patron calls is not an option. But with her faith shaken and another source of resistance at hand, she holds strong, and at 9:47 the phone stops ringing. Her heart is cold, her eyes are wide, her palms are sweaty in her fingerless gloves. Axel asks:
/// /// ///
It feels like the three of them are tentatively on the same side, for now. Mdub has the ogre knight cut the net free from Pony. He excuses himself to the nearest bathroom while Axel and mW cool down. It’s well-lit and luxurious, with fresh Derpina-print towels and a custom soap bar shaped like a cheezburger (sic). He washes his salty, puffy cheeks, eyes closed to avoid his reflection, and slumps onto the seat to try messaging Ruby yet again.
There’s still no response. When he returns to the parlor (skirting around the spinning blade wall traps), Axel is talking with Mdub about their experiences with the one ?Who has been pulling their strings.
Pony flops face-down on the big couch opposite from Axel.
Axel goes outside to examine the glitchstep meteor with zir Scan Binoculars’ z-targeting ability.
This is a Strive roll with Methodical to determine which dice Axel will roll to decide how many hours they have until meteor impact. I did this because I wanted to add concrete stakes and a countdown to Act 3, countering my bad habits of freeform wheel-spinning — being honest means accounting for how much time is passing between scenes compared to the hard deadline. With a bare success, ze rolls 2d20: 5 (!!!) + 19 (phew) adds up to exactly 24 hours! It must be around 10 AM on Sunday, April 16 in Stratheden, or early evening on Saturday, April 15 in West Clowncrest, Forest Lake, or New Neo City. (I compared a lot of timezones in this part.) Whatever the Egress nominees choose to do, they had better do it by this time tomorrow.
Pony goes out to the balcony, palms on the balustrade, and gazes out at the ocean. The meteor looms, closer and larger than ever, sparkling with dead pixels. On the horizon, a titanic kaiju head rises out of the water, strangely still. He’s feeling Overwhelmed and Emotionally Vulnerable and Coping badly and just plain lonely, and he wants to be anywhere else.
Summarizing a prolonged and introspective scene: Pony unconsciously calls out to his Links, the [FOX of CUNNING] and [SUCCUBUS of FREEDOM], and Egress manifests the Links (not the people, his conception of those relationships and their role in his life) as AR avatars in the abstract darkened-stage space where Links are established. A fox nuzzles his legs while a succubus jester chaotically pirouettes, and a voice he experiences as a tempter from within promises him things, the way he fear-fantasized Friday morning about the ?Who promising him things:
Pony opens the Pandora’s box of his heart (as represented by the Egress AR interface), giving the anticipated entity form but letting a suppressed inner Darkness out into his conscious mind with it — moved from Condition to Trauma slot immediately to avoid being Taken Out at six conditions. He merges his Links into a new Sprite: the [HARLEQUIN VIXEN], a genderfucky kitsune in a mask and fishnets and clowny hypebeast streetwear, both ripped and graceful like an acrobat, descends upside down on a rope to offer Pony her services. They talk. She promises she’ll be on his side always, challenging him to name what he truly wants and pursue it with his whole heart, ready to burn it all down with him as long as he’s brave enough to take the lead and doesn’t betray himself. She’s the empathetic Adversary that Pony’s heart says he needs.
Pony is now being followed around by a chaos clown kitsune encouraging him to be himself. She has two particular abilities I rolled on Calypso’s formidable condition tables, which can be a good tool for generating powers and assets. My Shoulder Devil’s My Biggest Fan (emotion, subtle, psychic) gives Pony a bonus to resist having his mind changed once he declares what he wants, And She Takes No Damage (circumstance, reactive, utility+martial) helps him avoid being hit in combat, always find a safe landing spot or handhold when he’s climbing, etc as long as he starts the task himself and keeps carrying it through.
With Harlequin Vixen’s guidance, Pony spends 2 Dark Dice and unlocks his Trait evolution, not on his starting Conformist 2 but newly-raised Escapist 2: Defiance. This tag applies when he acts to break out of a situation that someone else wants to keep him in.
Right now, what Pony wants is to see Ruby, and if Axel and Mdub don’t like it, they can shove it. Harlequin Vixen does a magic trick and offers him the [HARLEQUIN’S ORB], a highly potent Sprite Orb whose aura crackles with chaotic freedom. He slots it into the out-of-gas Warp Skates, empowering them to new heights — clicks his heels together, says “Ruby” — then vaults the balcony and warpskates out over the ocean, [in the exact way that an angry pink robot will do later].
Pony: Nyoooooom!!!
==>
Pony: Be Ruby.
yay Ruby’s back!! I hadn’t played her for quite a while in real-time so this was a lot of fun. I resolved her being Taken Out by reducing her Conditions to a manageable number, stepping up Rumored to Infamous (the Social Labyrinth smells blood), adding a new Trauma: Lonely (no one’s got her back, she’s stuck at home and can’t even go online), and adding a new Formidable Condition to a new Enemy: the Ruler of the Hosts of Air, whoever he is, gains Prepared-2 now that he knows her intentions are open war.
Ruby’s depleted Grist supply is no longer relevant, but her most dangerous Condition by far was Out Past Curfew. She didn’t text, she didn’t call, she missed Saturday dinner, and when she did come home — damp with slush! — she couldn’t even explain where she’d been, except for out playing that game on her phone. Her Grandma was not amused.
Ruby: Be Grounded.
It’s 7 PM on Saturday, April 15 in New Neo City, there are 23 hours left until the end of the world, and Ruby Goslyn is as grounded as it is physically possible to be. People have previously only been this grounded under laboratory conditions. She’s so grounded she’s giving the ascended masters headaches. They’re all coming back from astral projecting to work at the bank.
She can’t even keep up this riff with anybody because her Grandma has banned her from Online (all kinds) until she earns her PhD, and also, oh yeah, she doesn’t have any friends outside Online. This shit is so unfair.
Grandma has confiscated Ruby’s phone (and her haunty Macboo and her Dreamcast!!!) under lock and key in her own room, leaving Ruby without access to the internet, her messages, or the game’s AR layers over the world. Without the magenta Egress card in her phone, Ruby is at the mercy of reality and its wranglers. Today, that meant spending all day being chewed out by her Grandma for sneaking out, being chewed out by her mom via videocall (on Grandma’s phone), doing chores, cleaning the apartment, sprucing up the paschal figurine display, studying, reading books quietly, sewing quietly, cooking dinner and having a nice meal with her Grandma, and generally doing things that in the moment feel one thousand times less important than checking her DMs. She’s in withdrawal.
After dinner, with her ever-present guardian watching a screwball comedy in the living room with tea and biscuits, Ruby sees an opportunity to retreat to her room. At least she can listen to music in here, or fondly admire her Darkwing Duck fan art. Glancing out the window to the courtyard of her apartment building, from four stories up, she sees a boy she recognizes waving at her. It’s…Sully?
In a very Shakespearean scene, Ruby avoids alerting her Grandma by lowering a basket with her desktop stationery so Sully can write and she can reply via paper plane and they can have a silent conversation. The ensuing analog exchange is represented as a chatlog in the same form as digital messages in a gag that, like its author, is very witty and cute and fun.
Dramatic irony over the Romeo and Juliet balcony scene plays out during the conversation, and it becomes clear to the reader that while Sully is well aware the malicious rumors about a crush are false and Ruby is an ambitious schemer who just sees him as a pawn in her righteous heaven-toppling challenge to Student Council, he’s realizing he’s actually into that and does kinda want to be her stepping stone. Ruby completely fails to pick up on any of this, is utterly oblivious to his strange attraction, and assumes she’s just successfully shout-encouraged Sully into helping her.
The Sun of Defiance sends up an envelope in the basket — a steamy confession??? — no, he’s received a goodwill invitation for “Sully and Guest” to the Chenoweth Student Council Charity Gala, to be held tomorrow afternoon at the scenic Sky Lounge on the 99th floor of New Neo City’s iconic Presidential Tower. It’s a proxy [Student Council Calling Card], and as Sonya’s had hers, it has the emblem of the host — the President himself.
The President of Student Council’s emblem, she only now discovers, is the gust-of-wind symbol on Wolf Knight’s lapel, on the Shield of the Hosts of Air.
I shorthand this in my journal as the scene from Fire Walk With Me where Mike pulls up next to Laura and Leland at a stoplight, yelling a warning at her wild and loud and desperate over the discordant traffic noise “IT’S HIM!! HE’S RIGHT HERE!!!”
Ruby’s fingers crumple the envelope. Her pulse is throbbing in her ears. This feels like a bad dream. The ruler of the hosts of air is the president. it’s been him the whole time. he already knew about egress.
She starts writing on a new paper plane. That’s when Pony nyoooooom!!!s into her courtyard, clattering his and Sully’s sprites around haphazardly.
Checking to see if her Grandma is napping — she is — Ruby hustles down the fire escape to both of them. She makes introductions (“ruby!!” “pony!” “sully!” “sully?” “pony?” “ruby!”) and wraps up with Sully:
Ruby pockets the invite and sends a dazed but accommodating Sully home, telling him to look his absolute best tomorrow.
Like Axel this morning, Ruby and Pony see each other in person for the first time, nervous and excited.
The Harlequin’s Orb + Defiance works best when he’s breaking rules. Ruby’s just happily surprised to see a new side of Pony, one that maybe isn’t a total doormat. She hops on Pony’s back and they warpskate away in a burst of concentric rainbow portals — Harlequin Vixen lets him warp much better.
/// ///
They warp to just outside Little Ms. Tea Shop in quaint downtown Forest Lake, where a troop of cyan-colored Egress NPCs are busying themselves with healing tea items like the magenta shopkeepers at Block 11. Pony and Ruby just go inside to get real tea. He’s always wanted to bring a friend here, but he’s never had an opportunity before. It feels really nice to do stuff without his dads hovering over him. Ruby’s just glad to be out of the house, and seeing Pony’s hometown is cool, too.
Ruby tells Pony about getting [MiceTea] at the Snack Corner in her neighborhood, he introduces her to his pseudo-auntie Ms. Ban, Ruby praises her stylish scarves. She asks if the two of them are on a date: Pony’s about to hurriedly say no, but Ruby asks before answering if there’s a special if they are. Ms. Ban says she’ll give them the last of today’s macarons on discount. She nods at him.
[[Runy fanart production accelerates, to the annoyance of Ponybus shippers.]]
Pony and Ruby briefly catch each other up on what’s happened, but mostly they just have a nice time hanging out, talking about fashion/tea/school/family/Bacchanalia, getting to know each other IRL, and thinking about something other than this bullshit AR game and the looming meteor for a change. Both of them really needed this.
They each get a Strive roll to heal some emotional Conditions.
At a high point in their gamer date, the bell above the door jingles, and two new little weirdos walk into Little Ms. Tea Shop. The reader has seen these two before: the girl with purple antlers from Block 11, and the boy with a Count My Sheep shirt from the A&A Market. These are erstwhileImperatrix and orphanOuroboros, and they’re playing Egress to win, too.
There’s something very important about eI and oO that Ruby and Pony don’t know. They’re working with (or for) another player with secret game insights — the Ruler of the Hosts of Air.
The cyan tea-shop NPCs ready their defenses around oO, but with a gesture from eI, they relax. oO cracks a joke to eI that makes her blush. She goes up to order tea from Ms. Ban while he grabs a seat.
Pony and Ruby look at them and worriedly whisper to each other: “I recognize her from the driving range at the mall node!” / “I recognize him from the batting cage at the market node!” Pony has a fearful suspicion — “one or both of them might be the Player Killer!!!” Ruby says maybe, but cautions him to play cool: she doesn’t have her phone, her Grid, or any of the AR layers Egress grants her, and she isn’t prepared for a fight.
eI brings oO some milk tea in an elegant ceramic mug. Then oO moseys over to Pony, who tenses up, with eI watching.
Ruby’s heart hardens. The air crackles. It’s absolutely about to go down when
Pony leaps to his feet, draws the Paraflores from his Grid, and unfurls his umbrella indoors!
“My cafe isn’t turf, kids,” Ms. Ban loudly calls from the kitchen. “I don’t care what your app says.”
Pony makes a difficult Strive roll (making a normative rules-based argument with Conformist 2) to make oO and eI respect the shop as his Node at the risk of them formally challenging him for ownership of it, with multi-disadvantage from the Ruler’s Prepared-2 condition, as well as his wide variety of serious emotional problems. I was sure that this would lead to a dramatic showdown and test his new power with Harlequin Vixen, which is what I expected this scene to be. But when you leave things to the dice, you can be surprised: Pony somehow got a 10 despite the disads! oO backs off from a fight over Ruby, and Pony even gets Kinda Emotionally Vulnerable RN out of the danger zone from 2 to 1.
the funny part is when I make several Oracle rolls to find out what happens now, since a confrontation seemed imminent.
Does eI challenge Ruby to a duel directly instead? absolutely not lol. A blow strikes true unexpectedly.
Do they try anything else…? No, and: caution, hierarchy. They’re only here because the Ruler clued them in, they really don’t like him anyway, and they’re not going to risk resources and pain in a 2:2 brawl for his sake. They see an opening to slack off and they’re taking it.
Do they stay and chill a while? 12!! Love. Selflessness. They sure do!! Ruby and Pony seem cool, they’re gonna post up. So much for Strife!
There are 21 hours left until the end of the world and a bunch of teens from online are loudly loitering at a tea shop in the suburbs. It turns out oO and eI are named Beau and Iris, and that they’ve actually posted in some of the same threads on Salt Catalog – “omigod you’re orphanOuroboros??” Beau is a metalhead stoner and exuberantly unironic lambkin — part of the radioactive fandom of childrens’ cartoon Count My Sheep: Flock on the Block — who lives with his uncle (a legendary forum moderator) in a college town on the prairie called Harper. Iris is nice but reserved, outdoorsy, big into cars, and has an aura of Big Problems; she’s from a rural coastal town called Conch Cove, way up northeast across the border in Avalon. Beau and Iris met on Thursday via the item-exchanging strand system (like the Blue Honey here at the tea shop) and started playing in tandem right away; Iris had already started chatting with another player who knew a lot about the game, and their “patron” has been more than happy to point them toward quests and secrets for rapid level-up and grist accumulation. But it turns out the two of them genuinely just get along well and became fast friends, not their patron’s hit squad.
Pony helplessly nods along (what a good listener!) to Beau talking about Count My Sheep, Ruby talks to Iris about alt-fashion lookbooks, Beau and Ruby talk about melodic black metal, and they all talk forum drama and Egress secrets and manufacting recipes. Pony is curious about (and very attracted to) Iris and wants to get to know her better, but he’s unconfident and dysphoric and can’t get out of his own way, and their conversation stays surface level and awkwardly polite.
It gets late, they aren’t buying anything else, and Ms. Ban wants to go home, so she kicks them out. Outside, they say their goodbyes.
Iris pops a magic-looking lantern and a lavender golf putter from her Grid, while Beau materializes an amp that looks like it’s been manufacted with a V8 engine and a piece of solid crystal. It exudes HIGH LEVEL RAID GEAR. Beau strums his guitar.
Iris putts a [BEACON’S ORB] into her lantern, making it shine a bright rainbow bridge into the sky. Beau shreds a warp song. With an unearthly synthesized cry, the undulating [WIND FISH] swoops down to scoop them both in its maw and flies up and out along the rainbow, streaking across the meteor as it goes.
Ruby and Pony’s hair ruffles in the wind as they watch them go.
Through a blossom of concentric rainbow portals, they piggyback-warpskate back to Ruby’s apartment. Hurrying up the fire escape, Ruby peers inside and [10+ on the Strive to warp back with no trouble] hears her Grandma snoring. Safe for now.
Ruby climbs back through her window. With Pony leaning on the windowsill — Ruby advises he not come inside — they make plans for crashing the President’s Gala tomorrow.
Pony: Attempt to Remain in the Closet.
No good. This thing’s going up in flames.
They’re suddenly interrupted when Pony’s phone starts ringing. It’s 9:46 PM New Neo City time, and if the timing wasn’t enough, he’d know ?Who it was from the ringtone. His head feels even more woozy. He silences it right away when Ruby urgently gestures shush!, and shoves it in his pocket, unanswered. But there’s a creaking noise of Ruby’s Grandma stirring in the living room.
Newly equipped and sent on his way, Pony warpskates back to the bougie Forest Lake subdivision cul-de-sac which contains his house. He texted Fox Dad that he was on his way home and a friend was dropping him off — he’s catching up fast to this “lie to your parents” stuff.
Oracle: Is Wolf Dad’s car in the driveway?
No. He’s staying late at the office, of course. Pony’s heart hurts. Will we even meet this dude?
I draw a motif to find a mood for what happens next. Fairy. Despair (Hope). A soul, torn to pieces, and hidden away. I like this image very much, but I’m unsure how to use it. First I decide that with the Normalization condition removed by Mdub, news of all this weird Egress stuff is starting to enter mainstream awareness. Despair/Hope suggests that it’s very unsettling, and also that Fox Dad on some parental level has a sense of what is going on and about to hit.
Fox Dad isn’t happy that he’s home late. What is going on with Pony these past few days? Wolf Dad wants to spend time with the two of them, says Fox Dad — he wanted to tonight, but he had to work late, as always. Fox Dad makes yogurt rice with urad dal and cumin, their usual weeknight staple, since Wolf Dad isn’t home for something fancier. Pony tries to settle in and eats dinner with Fox Dad, who studies his son with eyebrows furrowed. He’s been half-listening to the news.
Fox Dad says he’s worried about the news he’s hearing about this Egress game, and all this UFO stuff is getting pretty weird. Pony, eyes on his bowl, says that he hasn’t really been watching the news. Fox Dad says he would like him to stay home tomorrow and have some family time with the whole pack, Wolf and Fox and Pony. No more Egress for a while. Besides, he has homework to catch up on.
Pony says yeah, he will. Fox Dad says that he means it. Make a promise, okay?
I’m challenging Pony’s Conformist Trait by pushing him to lie directly to his guardian about something important. The cost of doing this will be raising both the Overwhelmed and Escapism traumas from 1 to 2.
Pony says that he promises he will stay home tomorrow and not play Egress. Fox Dad nods.
His stomach hurts. He feels empty and sad and agitated. That didn’t feel like something the person called Pony would have done. Everyone can surely tell that something is broken inside him. It must be so obvious its readable on mouseover. He excuses himself to his room before very much longer. He’s never felt less connected to the so-called INTERESTS in this shitty barren bedroom. The mysterious FORMAL HELMET on the wall looms over him. Why did Wolf Dad ever think that Pony would want this in his room? Is this what the person called Pony who is Wolf Dad’s son is into? What a fucking loser. What a dork. What an idiot. What a creep.
He climbs under the covers and checks Convoke. Just as 9:45 PM Forest Lake time becomes 9:46, a new message from no particular sender glows bright at the top of his DMs.
This lady calls like you’ve gone to collections. Pony Strives with Conformist 2 (the trait for good boys who know right from wrong) to resist responding to her, at the risk of her getting her hooks into him anyway. This roll takes multi-disadvantage from her Tempter condition, plus his own Overwhelmed and Escapism traumas, which are now high enough to impact rolls directly. She scrambles his new sense of Defiance because he wants her to be a way out, not someone ?Who’s also trapping him — it doesn’t add to the roll.
Pony rolls a 6, a full failure. It’s different when he’s alone. He takes the bait and bites down hard, stepping up his Darkness trauma from 1 to 2 as well. For failing a roll against her, she adds a new obstacle condition, Got Your Number, that will make her harder to overcome. I also add a new formidable condition to Egress itself: Heart’s Desire, representing the allure of leaving Earth behind and entering the Medium despite the price. Egress is a space of seemingly infinite potential and possibility. You could do anything there.
he shouldn’t he shouldn’t he should just ignore it for one minute until it goes away but he starts typing anyway.
He hears himself laugh, tired and a little manic.
A dubious file appears in the chat from no particular sender.
The conversation closes.
He thumb-taps the file. It’s the easiest thing in the world to import it to Egress, a mere act of will.
He tosses his phone on the carpet and emerges from the covers. It feels in this floating moment as if there is more to him than being the person called Pony.