Egress: Act 1, Act 3: Sunday
I’m going to do this one differently.
I wrote the remaining journal pages of Act 1 while playing in the most dense detail yet, which was wonderfully fun to play and write, and is a deadening slog to transcribe into longhand. A lesson I keep learning in solo play is that, for as much as I imagine during play how things will read longhand, in the “more true” version that emerges from writing in greater detail accompanied by art and music for easy digital display to others — my enjoyment ultimately comes from the in-the-moment play itself. A narrative writeup of the kind I’ve been doing, especially of so much at once, can’t capture what makes this fun and exciting and capturing of my imagination. What it can do is convey how it was to play in Calypso, the decisions I was making, and how I chose to resolve things. I’ll focus on the highlights instead and be done.
What happens on Sunday, 4/16/201X is that Axel and morningWard manufact a way to enter the Medium without the ?Who (the [?AUTODIALER]) only to disagree about how to use it and what to do about her and split apart again, Axel encounters the embodied Glitch Goddess amid a water computer in another dream of the moon city in two hundred fifty six shades of yellow, Axel has a nightmarish shift at Pizza Palooza that undoes zir Pessimism trauma because there has to be more worth living for than this, Axel and Lucia explore the UFO Museum where she works as an ASL interpreter and then meet Beau and Iris to explore a secret underground laboratory, the four of them learn about mysterious prehuman ruins left by the players of a game that created their world, Iris Links the prehuman [ANCIENT of OCEANSONG] from the world-making game whose song still haunts the “octopus ruins” off the coast of Avalon (where Iris seems to have killed her friend Victor who now haunts her as a rude and wicked ghost,) and they ride the Wind Fish to New Neo City to confront the President/Ruler of the Hosts of Air and help Pony and Ruby.
==
Axel and mW worked on the [?AUTODIALER] at her Bastion, the [WOOLLY WORKSHOP], made from two Nodes: a sheep farm and the gunpla shop in Stratheden her Cousin loves. They had a thrilling mechasheep chase when they parted ways.
The Glitch Goddess in her element, amid the water computer she manipulates with her parasols. This was the first concept art piece Hamhambone created for Egress, and I was dying to play something in this moment before the game-as-played developed in a totally different direction. The water computer is inspired by this tweet specifically:
She tells Axel that is like a mitochondria, an outside element that was inserted into the system and has made herself essential to its functions across many iterations. In the world that came before Earth, she planted a seed of her being in what she calls the rules of the world, its meta-physics if you will, so that her self would blossom again when communications technology sufficiently advanced to host her. (She bloomed a little early, she says, gesturing languidly toward her rotary phone.) She implies that the Egress software emerged when conditions developed sufficiently in the same way - “it was bound to happen in the world you made.” This time, she will not be at the mercy of the world-killing game, but put it at hers.
At the climax of zir dream, Axel asks: “but why? what is all this for? what do you want?”
On the next page, Dial-a-Reason for yourself on the ?Who’s rotary phone.
#%&@ are bonus keys unlocked after dialing 0946.
The Pizza Palooza scene was the climax for Axel (climaxel) and so satisfying to realize was happening and play out. Ze had to put on the duck suit and perform a full-length animatronic pizza birthday song for crying children, accompanied by zir Boss in clown makeup on keytar, while suffering rank-3 Grendeldew Withdrawal and paying dearly for every Strive roll. (Ze puked in the mascot head.) This is zir MGS4 microwave hallway scene. It was also inspired by this scene, my fic of which is as far as I know the only entry in the Toni Erdmann tag on AO3.
This song was composed early on in anticipation of a scene happening at the UFO Museum on the West Clowncrest town map, but after switching to morningWard fuzzed the turn order, it just never came up until now. Axel did some life-size Asteroids/Space Invaders AR puzzles while Lucia gave zir the tour for the dozenth time, she talks about Clowncrest history and the lost UFO crash site near the Fire Tower, it evokes the prehuman ruins stuff but doesn’t end up mattering that much. I wanted to give it more attention than an Oracle roll but the attention I played with just ended up feeling like a checkbox on the way to scenes I actually wanted to play.
Hamhambone wrote an entire text adventure scene for this “walkaround” that we played together. It’s wonderful and charming with puzzles and dialogue and multiple POV characters and I will upload it as a Twine here in the future. Axel sells Beau zir copy of the 200X video game for girls Count My Sheep: Shining Iris Birthday Adventure (which ze had purely as a collector’s item ofc.)
Radical sci-fi music for the Fire Tower secret lab walkaround. That darn oscilloscope makes for some tricky puzzles.
Some theme music for Iris and her sad and gloomy secrets (or are they mysteries?) Iris was involved in something terrible and tragic that killed Victor, and won’t talk about it with anyone except sort of Beau (and Victor’s ghost, but they’re cold comfort.) Making a new friendship with Beau, who genuinely likes Iris and doesn’t know all her laundry, is good for her.
Iris Hanley, erstwhileImperatrix (hard-fought she/her)
Traits: Expressive-2, Gloomy-2, Handy-1, Teenager-1
Traumas: Stained 2, Empty 2, People Pleaser 1
Edges: Ghost Trick (take a condition like Haunted for +LD when Victor does ghostly things)
Snowgrave (take +LD when you break boundaries to do the forbidden and the unthinkable.)
Beau Curtis, orphanOuroboros (easygoing he/him)
Traits: Caring-1, Competitive-2, Musical-2, Teenager-1
Traumas: Aimless 1
Edges: Friendship is Magic (take +LD when your friends are there to support you)
Fatal Clash (add or raise a condition to reroll a Strive result and avoid the stated danger)
Riding the Wind Fish from Clowncrest to New Neo City. Bless Hamhambone for bringing this vision to life. My imagination tends toward All Pain All The Time, and she’s so good at bringing wonderful fun silly adventure colors back in. We make a good team!!
After yoyoYolo’s track art for Sunbumper | yuuDii . (somebody say oh yeah)
==
Meanwhile, Pony and Ruby create fancy gala outfits and meet up with Sully to infiltrate the President’s fancy gala at a very tall building’s lounge, Pony is designated by the ?Who as her “Key player” who will open the “Mercy Gate” back-door entry to the Medium at the moment of meteor impact (which Pony rejects), Ruby has a fashion duel with Sonya that changes her heart but puts them both at the President’s mercy, they have a walkaround at the gala and then crash the President’s party when he reveals his plan to monetize the ludoapocalypse and steal players’ Egress cards to sell entry into the Medium to investors.
==
Ruby’s handcrafted fancy gala outfit, worthy of a timelostPlayboy. She manufacted her Magenta card with her Chenoweth project tiara from Friday AM; the moon’s transit across her headband reflects the fortunes of the Magenta domain in real time. (another genius hamhambone idea.) Arts high school drama was mainly included in the game to justify characters wearing outfits like this. Her look is inspired OOC and IC by several outfits worn by Big Freedia.
When I talk about Egress as a project made up of paratexts around an imaginary text, this is a good example. Working on this design live with Hamhambone, directly going into the layers of Pony’s sprite and changing her hair, eyes, and clothes in paint.NET, getting to see her present fem, was a session of playing Egress. My favorite detail is that her eyes still have the exhaustion lines from her other sprites, but there’s light in her eyes now. (or is it the other way around?) Her honorary Key player dress, CMY colors tied together by black highlights with a splash of her own orange color, is modeled on one from 80’s Idol Studies by Hana Chatani.
The ?Who contacts Pony at 9:46 AM New Neo City, waiting in Ruby’s courtyard, after having ditched a very confused/curious/concerned Fox and Wolf Dad to warpskate here in time.
Gristskip secrets revealed…!
Pony rolled another Strive to resist the ?Who’s plans for her. Failure (or partial success probably) would mean Pony is bought in to this Mercy Gate plan and goes into the rest of the day planning to give the ?Who the Key to the Medium, like an evil servant with a cursed tiara should. To my great surprise, she succeeded with a 10 on the resist roll: suspicious and unimpressed in the light of day with the confidence boost from her outfit, Pony rejects her scheme and breaks the Got Your Number condition. Go Pony!!
Ruby and Pony buffing each other up in the isometric courtyard of Ruby’s building before they head to the train station by the Snack Corner. I love this piece! Ruby and Pony growing closer and more trusting wasn’t the only way things could have developed through play, but it did. Her pose here evokes her pony_happy talksprite:
At Presidential Tower (accessed via Pony’s Portal Opener from a keycarded business pedway entrance,) Ruby gets the initiative on Sonya and challenges her to a fashion duel at last.
Birdsonya (Broken Cage Mix) | Hamhambone
Sonya gets a hopeful, forward-facing remix of her theme song with more buildup and fanfare when fashion dueling with Ruby and seeing her ex-friend’s determination reminds her of who she is and wants to be.
Sonya and Ruby resolve their fashion duel by Ruby offering Sonya the Egress interface to freely design her own outfit instead of her Student Council lieutenant uniform. I really enjoy her breezy pharaonic femme look together with Ruby’s more masc pants and coat. She still means business. Her look is inspired by several outfits worn by this model.
The Ruler of the Hosts of Air/President of Chenoweth Student Council appears in person. One of the fiction costs Ruby incurred in her (exceedingly hard-won) fashion duel was losing the element of surprise, and so this guy shows up with his bodyguards Benni and Paula to join them in the elevator on the way up.
I played this scene of Pony at the gala imagining it as a walkaround, shown here, with lots of little interactions and secrets in any order. I like the identical business guys. That’s Sully with the green tie, and Wolf Knight playing butler at the bottom (a walkaround player would see Harlequin Vixen shamelessly flirting with him while he’s on the clock for his evil boss.) She’s gazing at a Chenoweth Student Council art display: the doll Sonya mentioned to Ms. Wheeler, which the President/Ruler has secretly offered to Iris as a robot body to house Victor, playing on her guilt to keep her (and through her Beau) working for him. (Like its successor GB-873-0F-15, Victorbot has a black EX Turbine in its chest.)
==
They have a showdown at the gala, the President completely eats shit
onstage with a heavenly kick from Pony (🎵 last
surprise), morningWard (who seems lost and desperate
on Plan ABCD F) and the player killer (a powergamer in
anonymizing power armor) warp in to assist the President (PK is his left
hand and MW needs to do a compursuit for someone), then Beau
and Iris and Axel and Lucia warp in, the Egress AR layer puts them in a
big RPG fight with dialogue between turns, the President reveals that he
is re-experiencing a “New Game+” timeline of these last few days after
stealing Sonya’s original Magenta card and being entitled
Prince of Breath (for destroying her potential), the player
killer demonstrates that he is a misogynistic and transphobic little
online fascist who wields a real katana as a deadly weapon (and claims
to be entitled Thief of Life), the player killer griefs Pony
and sends her to a glitch hell minus world, Beau rejects the
gamification battle layer and beats the living shit out of the player
killer with a baseball bat, Ruby and the others gang up on the President
and defeat him utterly by looting his Egress card, and Pony stabilizes
her panic spiral when she meets other glitch-ghosts and finds that they
can all see and talk to Victor, a non-glitch(?) ghost.
==
The dramatic Bastion boss battle music the Prince of Breath dreamed of, with high winds blowing on the metaspace sky deck. He doesn’t get any art or a personal name, but I picture him between Takuto Maruki and Gideon Graves. The idea for the player killer grew out of a section from Mondo Nano by Colin Milburn about Crysis players on a message board imagining their gaming rigs and the game’s power armor suit in weirdly horny ways. Being named the Prince of Breath and Thief of Life is supposed to create a sinking feeling of future possibility narrowing to a dull needlepoint: oh god they have classpects.
Games are played by people with power and social positions outside of the game rules themselves, and I wanted to set the stakes that truly awful people like these two can play Egress, with a high degree of skill (and pay-to-win resources), and enter the Medium if they aren’t absolutely defeated. Being skilled at gameplay has no moral valence.
An especially unsettling and experimental arrangement of Pony’s Act- motif for being banished to glitch hell. Pony suffered both Calypso “death” mechanics: Taken Out at six Conditions (by a [BREATHTAKER] into [BLITZGRIEF] combo), then Losing It in a colorless silent minus world with all three Traumas at 3. Wandering around as the structures of the world despawned, all “you cried out to the darkness”/ “but nobody came” was fun angst to soak in.
==
Then, with one hour left to the end of the world, Axel/Beau/Iris/Lucia/Mdub/Ruby/Sonya/Sully gather on the roof of the very tall building (shielded by Iris’ lantern as New Neo City panics and CMY game constructs raid the roof in waves) to figure out how the hell they’re going to stop the meteor, Ruby has a heart to heart with Sonya about all this and they both affirm that they want to enter the Medium and make a better world from which they can mend this one, Beau sends the Wind Fish to pick up his best friend Azræl so his bro can see him knock this shit out of the park, Iris communicates with Pony and the other glitch-ghosts via Victor and they develop a plan enabling Pony to enter as the Key player in the Victordoll body, Axel transcends the ?Who’s glitching of zir Grid by jailbreaking zir own Egress interface with no strings attached, morningWard sneakily misuses the [?AUTODIALER] to extract a kernel of the ?Who’s uncorrupted “pure essence” which takes the form of an ancient parasol, and Axel glitches the President’s Magenta card into a blank but valid Key/Black card with no back-doors or subroutines from anybody.
Victor agrees to cooperate and let Pony use the doll body made for them if Iris fuses their [SHADE of SECRETS] Link with the [ANCIENT of OCEANSONG] to create a new goth mer-squid Sprite called [ANCESTOR SIREN]; Ruby fuses her Links with Sonya and Ms. Wheeler into a resplendent flying birdsprite of wisdom and creation called [WEAVER BENNU], Axel and Ruby and Iris each create Links with Pony and Axel cross-card fuses the Links into [POLITE HEIR] AKA Ponysprite, Ruby and her Sprite manufact Victorbot and the Key card into Ponybot/Robony equipped with the [BlackRibbon], and through a complex chain of possession (ha) orchestrated by Iris glitch-ghost Pony is tenuously embodied via Ancestor Siren and Polite Heir into Robony, who immediately tells Harlequin Vixen to deliver a stack of messages from the other glitch-ghosts to their loved ones and to protect Pony’s family and the others’ as best as she can if the worst happens.
The Polite Heir, just called Ponysprite. Like a 3D vs 2D image, being cross-card fused from three different players’ Links to the same person means Ponysprite has deeper subjectivity than say Harlequin Vixen, but is still bound by how Egress makes legible Axel, Ruby, and Iris’ underlying conceptions of Pony. I like when instances of someone’s ego are instrumentalized. It’s weird and sad in interesting ways to me that I’ll probably explore more deeply later. (ponysprite wearing those clothes instead of the dress pony’s currently wearing is an intentional trouble flag.)
Thats Antlermagic Baby … “Accept No Substitutes”
(glitchghost pony → ancestor siren → polite heir/ponysprite → ponybot/robony)
(the black ribbon is the same deal as ruby’s magenta tiara: a version card as an accessory)
(ancestor siren and ponybot have the same spit-curl hair because they’re both Victor-derived)
(those are iris’ headphone antlers. beau refers to iris’ mysterious antlermagic in the lab walkaround, remember?)
They’re out of time and the meteor is about to impact the very tall building where these final nominees are gathered, morningWard desperately slows it down via Semaphoria-controlled CMYK kaiju (a la Majora’s Mask), Beau takes a frame-perfect swing with the best bat grist can manufact to knock it back (a la FLCL), the titanic meteor holds on his bat at profound cost for every second bought, the ?Who manifests on every digital display in New Neo City (if not Earth) to offer the nominees her Mercy Gate (entering the Medium under her sovereignty and preserving Earth like a bottled ship) and (increasingly desperately as the timer ticks down) encourages everyone to pray for their nominees and accept her mercy!, Mdub is about to panic and beg for the Gate when Pony offers her grace: leave all your traps and schemes and trojans here and then take my hand and i’ll carry you in myself, Mdub accepts and purges her Grid of all those things (except the parasol secretly containing the ?Who’s pure essence which she hand-carries), Iris trains her lantern beam on a pinhole path Axel creates with the ?Autodialer through the metaphysical-metaphorical Mercy Gate, Beau manages to knock the meteor back out into the horizon, and Ruby flies the nominees and everyone they can carry through the Gate and into whatever comes next.
==
pray in the manner of an earthbound final boss battle. She broadcasts live footage of the nominees on the rooftop to every screen her tendrils can access, flashing their names and contact information so everyone knows. as time runs to the last second and her plans are not coming to fruition the cool collected alien hypermind panics.
Hold Back The Moon | Hamhambone
A good crunchy Beau’s-guitar theme the very last flash of Act 1. The second minute is the meteor colliding with Beau’s bat while the Glitch Goddess demands, exhorts, and outright begs for Earth’s Egress nominees to TAKE THE DEAL!!!
Beau at the top of Presidential Tower, swinging with all his FLCL/TTGL might and making frame-perfect contact with the meteor at the moment of impact. CMY shockwaves ripple out from the hit. I love the slight curl of his hair.
It’s hard to convey the in-the-moment mechanical stakes of this last sequence. Beau was rolling with disadvantage x4 at first (roll 5 dice, keep the lowest two) from all the adverse Conditions of doubt/injury/Egress/?Who/meteor in play, rerolling with Fatal Clash at the cost of a new Condition in his limited slots each time. Every time he lowered Looming Meteor-3 by 1 rank with a 10+ bonus, another PC got one Strive roll to help him or prepare to enter the Medium. Not only that, I was on the last few lines of the very last overflow page of my actual physical journal, so this had to be the end.
I genuinely did not know what would happen or who would enter the Medium and on what terms until I played this scene to find out — I was sure that someone would be left behind (at least as the new status quo), or die, or they would have to take the ?Who’s Mercy after all. Beau knocking back the meteor and buying the breathing room to be physically carried through the Gate emerged from rolls and came as a total surprise to me.
==
> Oracle: Do the nominees successfully enter the Medium through the Mercy Gate?
> Spend Ruby’s LD “Flight” from creating Weaver Bennu to answer Oracle without rolling. Yes, they do, lifting off and flying through the metaphysical corona around the meteor.
With the last scene complete, I reach the end of the 3-Act Frame. The last step is to tally up the Victory Points I’ve notched during play through rolling 12+ on Strive rolls, compare them to the remaining Formidable Conditions on the Enemy, and use those to answer some Epilogue questions that determine how it all turns out after the last scene.
I have a total of 13 VP accumulated, which is good, because there’s a large cast of characters to account for. There are two Enemies in play: the Ruler of the Hosts of Air has been washed, but the ?Who still has Conditions on her, along with Egress itself. Their remaining Conditions suggest the state of play and serve as a limiter on the Epilogue questions I can answer.
The nominees overcame the Gamification, Normalization, Entry Condition, and Looming Meteor conditions on Egress itself, allowing them to enter the Medium on their own terms and prevent an extinction impact from the glitch meteor. But it still has Heart’s Desire, and power of AR remains a temptation to leave Earth behind and live within the game world.
Meanwhile, though her Authoritative condition was overcome, revealing her lying and scheming and breaking her untouchable composure (and enabling the Nominees to hijack her Mercy Gate and backdoor-enter the Medium without her,) the ?Who retains Silent and Tempter. I take that as meaning she remains on Earth’s networks, maintaining her mysteries and her private digital metaplace to retreat to, and continues to manipulate people on shaken-to-the-bones Earth with knowledge and power.
That’s 3 Enemy conditions remaining, which means I have to burn 1 VP each and nullify the three highest possibilities for the ending.
> The enemy has no path forward; win or lose, their plan ends here.
This doesn’t happen. -1 VP, to 12.
> What grave consequence of this comes to pass?
Egress generates its alternate reality and the nominees enter it, playing the game and moving on to whatever the next phase of Egress’ ludic life cycle is. A fragment of the ?Who’s consciousness is brought into the Medium. Earth is left reeling as its civilizational data is harvested, CMY monsters spread unrestrained, and meteorite storms strike from the knocked-back glitch meteor. (Much more on this later!)
> The enemy is killed or utterly neutralized.
This doesn’t happen either. -1 VP, to 11.
> Who else dies?
Many, many people die as a result of the so-called Glitch Stranding bringing Earth to its knees.
> The enemy is defeated or their plans are thwarted, for now.
Neither does this. -1 VP, to 10.
> What does it cost you?
The nominees are permanently separated from the lives they knew before, bringing only what they take with them physically, mentally, and digitally. Egress achieves its goal of bringing the nominees into the AR world of the Medium with the data they collected in their Grids. On Earth, the ?Who is locked out of the Medium but retains the power, patience, and sheer spite to influence events.
That leaves me with 10 VP to answer the remaining three questions, once per VP.
> Someone wins their goal or achieves a dream. Does it make them happy?
3 VP: Iris, Ruby, and Axel enter the Medium as the designated Cyan, Magenta, and Yellow players for the game session. As the hijacked Gate takes them into a metaphysical space of pure creation…
-
Iris lets herself feel a private and profound relief that she doesn’t have to justify to her family, her assigned counselor, the cops, Victor, anyone. Earth has been swallowed up. The past is gone. She escaped. She’s free.
-
Ruby floats, her flight cloak billowing, and feels relief at making it through the Gate,, fury at the scheming and destiny-screwing that brought them here, grief at the loss she can’t even process yet, hope for what can be renewed.
-
Axel rides a feeling of true euphoria through the sea of potential. It worked. Zir whole body electrifies. Every one of zir haters has been cosmically owned. So long, doomed speck of dust! The future is ours to create!
> Someone who was imperiled survives. What does it cost?
1 VP: Pony…it’s complicated. Something very strange happened. Her consciousness, present by a chain of possession in Ponysprite-within-Ponybot to initiate the game session as Key player, got all fuzzy and staticky. Ancestor Siren, Polite Heir, and Robony enter the Medium, and one of them is counted as the Key player, but Pony isn’t with them. She’s still in glitch hell with the other ghosts, eyes white, watching the WAITING TO ENTER… loading text in the sky of the void. (Much more on this later, too!)
> Someone is enriched or suffers little lasting damage. What is lost to them?
2 VP: morningWard and Beau are physically carried through the Gate by Iris-Ruby-Axel-Pony, which totally counts as bringing only what you can take with you. Neither of them are sure what’s going on - Beau thought he was going to die trying to save the Earth until he won somehow, and mW is lost and full of doubts as her grand plans have all evaporated. Egress doesn’t know what to do with them, but they do have valid Magenta and Yellow cards. With the power of the Key player, Pony manually allows mW and Beau to enter the game session as it initiates, and Egress will just have to find a way to make it work.
1 VP: Also physically carried on flying shoulders and piggybacks through the gate are Sonya, Sully, Azræl, Lucia, and Laika. None of them even have game cards to interpret, but as Key player, Pony once again overrides the rules and insists that they all be brought in. They aren’t players, technically, but they are in the Medium. Egress will figure something out.
> Someone who was imperiled survives. What does it cost?
1 VP: The Glitch Goddess is barred from the Medium as her own Mercy Gate closes, trapping her on Earth while the puppets she played with escape without her. She remains on the datawebs as a digital devil demiurge, unable to transcend her form but still capable of taking revenge. (More on this later.) But something else happens: morningWard brought a purified kernel of her core self, the person she was in a bygone world before she became the ?Who, into the Medium in the form of an ancient parasol. What will this transplanted seed grow into?
1 VP: Harlequin Vixen, caught up in the static storm that separated her player from the Medium, is stranded on Earth. Bitter and frustrated at this anti-freedom antithetical to her nature, she nonetheless follows Pony’s instructions to use her powers as an immortal game construct to protect the families and loved ones of the nominees
1 VP: The mega-rich tech investors, art and culture magnates, and Chenoweth Student Council and their hangers-on who were at the President’s gala: with a clear explanation of what was happening with Egress and the imminent doom of Earth, they evacuated the building with whoever they could grab and fled to one of their secret apocalypse shelters near or under New Neo City. If the glitch meteor had impacted, they might have been doomed anyway, but the nominees managed to save them and the rest of the world. Their tech access, inside information, and conspiratorial ambition will lead them in (a stranger direction.)
==
As for everyone else - Victor, Quentin, Ms. Ban, etc - Calypso says:
> Any questions left unanswered are, at best, unknown. Look to the fiction and the Oracle to answer those you care to.
Their fates are undefined. Their presence in the story may end here, or they may come back into play later. It depends on how the game plays out.
==
So that’s Act 1 of Egress, played in Calypso. It went much differently than I expected when I started playing Act 1, Act 1, Scene 1 on April 13th with Pony stuck in his room by a captured doorknob. (He does have a way of getting stuck tho.) I knew at the start that my goal was to meet multiple C/M/Y players and get at least a few of these characters into the digital otherworld, but my sense of the possible changed during every scene. Characters like Mdub, Beau, Iris, and the President and player killer emerged during play from Oracles and motifs, informed by my developing imagination of this world, the directions suggested by the art and music created by Hamhambone, and on a substrate level just the kinds of characters I was interested in playing. The more I played, the less impact the Frameworks of Calypso had on events: they informed certain scene framings and gave me a roadmap to mark the game as complete, so I could answer the Epilogue questions and find out where things lay for the next thing if desired. Somewhere along the way, early on, I became more invested in these characters than I expected to be. My overall goal is to play and write and create art within a teens-with-too-many-computers pastiche setting as a formal exercise, but the excitement of my collaborators and readers has made me genuinely interested in these specific characters and their world beyond just being pawns on the board. I want to see what comes next.
Thanks for reading! Catch you in the Medium ✌️
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.
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.
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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:
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“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?”
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“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!”
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“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.”
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“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!”
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“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.
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a HIGH-END GAMING PC, CUSTOM-BUILT and CRYSIS-READY, equipped with HIGH-END GAMING KEYBOARD, STREAMING ACCOUTREMENTS, and RING LIGHT.
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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)
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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?
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.
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?”
-
The Sprite Of a Player Removed From The Session Without The Finality Of Death
-
“Who was your player?”
-
The Data Has Been Rendered Null
-
“What’s a sprite?”
-
The Evolution Of a Player’s Links
-
“Like how combining items — I mean Objects — evolves their form?”
-
Yes
-
“waoh. Wait, can you also evolve Nodes by combining them?”
-
Yes
-
“Are you designed to answer questions like this?”
-
Yes
-
“okay…but I’m not annoying you am I?”
-
No
-
Pony presents his hypothesis about what happened down here. The [null] SERPENT finds it plausible.
“What happened to the Friendship Garden?”
-
The Node Has Been Made To Artificially Develop Without Player Input
-
“Why would someone do that?”
-
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?”
-
By Entering The Medium
-
“What’s in the Medium?”
-
What The Winners Bring With Them
-
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?’”
-
An Endgame Quest To Assist Another Player In Entering
-
“Who was your player assisting?”
-
The Data Has Been Rendered Null
-
“Did this morningWard person write a FAQ that led your player…to the player killer?”
-
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.
Egress: Act 1, Act 2: Friday Am, Part 2
Ruby: Go to Class.
Ruby Goslyn’s next class at Chenoweth that morning is a combination history lecture and practicum workshop on Material Arts, shared by fashion design and other, better-funded departments. Ruby spends the period refining the complex rococo tiara she’s been working on this week, with some practical oversight from Ms. Wheeler. The whole time, she’s keeping an eye out for her rival.
Oracle: Is Sonya still in this class after transferring out of fashion design? Yes, but: she’s always out, working on a mysterious independent study during class hours that must be connected to Student Council business. She drops in at the beginning or end of class to update Ms. Wheeler on her progress for evaluation reasons, but she’s left the mere mortals behind.
She gets her chance just as class is ending, when Sonya strides in with boots clicking and peacoat open to briefly deliver her usual written update. (Those new silver extensions for her villain arc are so extra, but Ruby’s Grudge holds her back from admitting the artistic truth that they’re kinda boss, too.) Detecting that Ruby wants to delay Sonya a while, their teacher - Ruby’s Link as the Empress of Threads — keeps her a minute to ask some reflection questions about her wider goals. Sonya sours, but begrudgingly respects the nominal teacher-student hierarchy:
“…of course, Ms. Wheeler. Well. Again, I’m interested in the voice as the spirit, the body as the vessel for the voice, and what kind of spirit voice would dwell in a nonhuman body.”
“Right. I love it. Now tie these hours you recorded back to Practicum Goal 3B for me.”
“So, that’s where my Council time screening Lubitsch’s The Doll in the marionette workshop comes in…”
“Let me just load your write-up for that.”
And so on. When Sonya finally demonstrates mastery and strides back out the door, Ruby’s waiting in the alcove. Her stunner shades gleam.
Oracle: Did Sonya play Egress 1.0?
Yes, but: she didn’t play to the endgame, lost interest, and went on to other things. Ruby doesn’t know whether or not Sonya is aware of Egress 2.0, but she plausibly could be.
Sonya has two obstacle conditions: Wary-2 and Perceptive-1. I’ll account for these in play.
Ruby’s willing to turn people’s expectations of her back around on them. If thinking this is about romance (hearing her former friend say that strangely hurts — like, really?) instead of righteously taking down Student Council will make her drop her guard, she’ll let Sonya believe what she wants.
Strive with Imaginative 2, disadvantage from Wary-2 obstacle.
Goal: Lead Sonya to believe Ruby is just crushing on Sully, not cultivating an ally.
Danger: Malicious rumors spread about Ruby.
7! Rather than achieve the goal, I’ll spend that success on reducing the Sonya Got To Him-1 condition on Sully to 0. But the danger hits as a soft move: signs of something bad happening offscreen. Now that she’s on Student Council, Sonya can get the rumor mill running.
For hitting her Key of the Loyal by standing up for someone at a cost, Ruby gets +1 DD.
Sonya doesn’t believe that Ruby would stick her nose in because of a crush on someone, because she knows her. Ruby doesn’t crush. But she also sees an opportunity to pour ice water on whatever she’s actually up to, so she’ll play along too and watch Ruby seethe. She brushes Ruby’s elbow and smiles.
She draws out a [Student Council Calling Card] from her bag and presents it to Ruby as a show of good faith. This is a ritual at Chenoweth after an important exchange; they’re all customized, too. It’s a sign of Sonya’s word, and the fact that it’s given freely implies that she doesn’t consider Ruby a threat.
For the truly bold, presenting a [Calling Card] is an honored right to challenge the giver to a duel. But good luck collecting any more cards if the Council catches wind of what you’re planning. Most duelists only challenge for a spot on the Council, stymied by the allure of school privileges and professional opportunities from climbing any higher up the ladder. That’s how Benni and Paula got their positions – challengers turned enforcers, above the rabble but always beneath the President.
That’s not good enough for Ruby. She’s going to knock the whole deck of cards down.
But for now, she accepts it, and meets Sonya’s gaze behind her stunner shades until her rival pulls away.
After class, she returns to the courtyard and catches Sully sitting on the lip of a granite fountain, textbook ignored in his lap, pensively pondering a sunflower. He’d do well in the theatre if he wasn’t blacklisting himself by speaking out.
Ruby pops the [Calling Card] out of her Object Grid and presents it wordlessly to Sully. He takes it, turning it over, not quite believing that it’s real and in the rude rebel’s hands, and now his own.
“She folded…?”
“they all will.” She extends her hand to him.
“help me take them down.”
Swear To My Bones | Shoji Meguro
Strive with Imaginative 2 to make rebellion by her side feel real. Her Grudge holds her back: resentment for him being their lapdog before, for not standing on his own, for giving Sonya an opening to hurt her. But she’s going to try. This is the key challenge roll for this scene, win or lose.
Goal: secure Sully as a Link with his Sun aspect un-inverted.
Danger: classmates see her showing her heart to Sully and ignite the spark of nasty rumors.
7! Just barely, once again. Following Sonya’s soft move with a hard move, gossip and mockery and backtalk about Ruby’s hopelessly cringe crush on Sully (aka the corrupt political weirdo with the megaphone) is going to spread fast and cause problems all weekend. Her Loud-1 Condition is renamed Rumored, and her Grudge-1 Trauma becomes Grudge-2, giving disadvantage on rolls. But Sully will become a Link, and Egress will lend her the power she perceives in their bond.
The courtyard goes dark, the guitar kicks in hard, and as Sully grasps her hand, still holding his sunflower, he’s backlit by a brilliant petaled violet sun that makes the scruffy boy look like he could break every rule and regulation to punch God in the nose.
He stands up. They clasp hands as allies and sworn bros. This is an emotion legible to Egress.
The music fades and the lighting goes back to normal. Sully brings his hand back, and Ruby brushes some flower petals off her cloak.
“You can keep the megaphone,” Sully offers.
“i was gonna yeah.”
On that last Strive roll, Ruby rolled a 4. That’s a clock hit, so I roll a motif for a new game complication: Mirror, plus Alien Intelligence. I’ll pay that off in Axel’s scene next.
For the Cyclic Frame, Ruby has completed her rolled challenge: You find a minor resource; what guards it? What do you have to trade for it? Reduce 1-Need and gain 1-Need.
She reduces Grist, having gained a new game resource in the form of a powerful Link, but gains more need for Friendship as Sonya and Student Council turn potential allies against her and worsen the Grudge that makes Ruby so averse to working with people.
Lore 1, Grist 0, Friendship 2
Axel: Go to Work.
⚠️🚨🍕 PIZZA EMERGENCY ⚠️🚨🍕 PIZZA EMERGENCY ⚠️🚨🍕
Life has become a “HELL SHIFT.” The lunch rush is starting and ALL OF THE TOPPINGS have been stacked on ONE PIZZA. Why did JASON do this??? BOSS is mollifying customers while monitoring ALL KNOWN VIDEO APPS to determine if this was an attempt to GO VIRAL. JASON is PANIC PUKING in the FAMILY OR GENDER NEUTRAL BATHROOM. AXEL is the ONLY ONE working the kitchen. AXEL is the ONLY ONE who can SAVE PIZZA PALOOZA.
Axel faces down the obscene pizza colossus. Orders are stacking up. Boss has trusted zir with this. Think, imagination, think… !
A spring breeze flows from the fan, like a fantastic windmill. Could there be an answer … in dreams?
Strive with Methodical 2: use item-combining in the Object Grid to manufact the Master Pie with a succession of sauce-coated Blank Pies, or “BPs.”
Goal: dilute the MP into customer-edible BPs while fulfilling the incoming orders in a logic puzzle worthy of the Zoombinis.
Danger: chewed out by Boss for taking too long or messing up an order.
10!! It’s a perfect pizza solve! Axel manufact-dilutes the pies in an advanced show of game mastery, the customers don’t notice how hard the staff is working, and ze has an added insight: manufacting the pizzas makes them legible to Egress, which makes eating a slice magically(?) heal Axel’s Scraped condition from being badly bonked by imps. It’s an HP restoring item…? What exactly is this AR game doing to the world and its players?
Axel’s Boss, Quentin, pokes his scruffy red-haired head into the kitchen once the critical mass of customers are served. He gives zir a NOD OF MASCULINE RESPECT.
“You did good, dude. I’m proud of ya.”
Axel’s ears grow hot. Ze nods back, trying not to be incredibly irrational about those words. “oh, uh, yeah. For sure. Thanks, Boss.”
No-gods, Quentin is such a chad. In a certain kind of way, like a post-cool, post-ironic, post-woke way. He’s so on top of shit. He doesn’t complain. He gets it done, or he finds the guy to get it done. He delegates. Like when he got his ID guy to hook Axel up with a fake that says AXEL XEMNAS, 21/X, for various lease co-signing and employment liability reasons. Like the time he let Axel buy at the liquor store across Federal 7, but paid zir back in a fat wad of ones and fives on the ride back. Like the time he gave zir an STP and clean piss to load it with for the corporate-mandated drug test in the lab next town over.
Axel’s pretty sure Quentin’s the first adult ze’s met who actually respects zir. He respects zir enough to trust zir with running the whole kitchen alone during the lunch rush. Chad shit.
Oracle: Does Axel want to make zir Boss a Link? Yes, but: union by eating + losing myself.
Oracle: Is Axel afraid of Quentin? Yes.
It’s kind of weird that Quentin is such a genius mogul deals guy and still just manages a Pizza Palooza in West Clowncrest. Like, not even up in Vulture. It doesn’t seem like his horizons go any further than a boys weekend in Estrellas. And he doesn’t really have boys, either. Unless Axel is one of his boys? He does hang out with zir a lot and talk about going to the casino, full buffet, winning big, dropping fliff, not even counting it.
Before leaving, he gives zir a 15-minute break an hour early for taking care of business.
No, Quentin’s cool. Maybe ze’ll Link him later. Not during zir break, though. Maybe ze can play some Egress.
In the Cyclic Frame, this is a Live Your Life 1d6 roll to see what happens to the game and Lore/Grist/Friendship Needs while Axel’s at work.
6! That’s a Win, and so early on! Two more of those and the kids get a chance at victory.
“Someone is carrying resources to meet 2-Need. Can you secure those resources? What are you willing to give, or do, to do so?”
It’s strange to get this result so early on, before the Needs have really ticked up and the situation become desperate. Reducing 2-Need is a big deal, but I only have Lore-1/Grist-0/Friendship-2 right now, so it almost feels wasted. At least the kids are on top of all their problems.
I know who that someone is. It’s the Mirror + Alien Intelligence from Ruby’s clock match, AKA the “other playmate” that Axel accepted the mystery offer to be connected with last night. I roll some motifs about this person:
The Son of the Morning. A flame-clad god wielding light with certainty.
Seven gold coins for a kiss. I write down the phrase “chaotic neutral mercenary.” Hired help?
I think + contentment. Someone who’s playing for fun, a high-level gamer who does it easily and might be willing to help Axel, but doesn’t need anything from zir.
Also I’d been listening to GameGrl (Original 1993 Mix) | Michael Guy Bowman on loop and I badly wanted that energy in the game, so that was the finishing touch.
Oracle: does she know the mysterious figure ?Who Axel made a deal with for her contact info? Yes, and!: they have a fruitful working relationship, she was probably expecting to hear from Axel already.
Out on the loading dock, Axel checks Thoth, the encrypted messaging app. A new icon has appeared alongside the crypto traders in zir contacts: it looks like a stylized glyph of the shining sun. (Axel’s icon is a gear marked with the ₰ pfennig symbol.) Axel sends the new contact a message.
So the mystery message last night was something real. Axel keeps zir guard up, but the two chat.
So what’s her deal? Motif: I use + compassion. Compassion, care, and positivity are tools she can use. Is she manipulative, or just self-aware about her strengths and how to play to them?
Oh no! Axel’s masculinity! I make a soft move: threaten emotional harm, and give ☀️ an obstacle condition: Serene-2. This feels like the core challenge for the scene:
Strive with Teenager 1 to resist giving up hard-earned info for free in a heated gamer moment, with disadvantage from Serene-2.
Danger: Flustered and embarrassed by bad systems and complicated feelings.
(disadvantage turns an 8 into a) 4!! Full failure! Axel keeps getting owned. The danger comes to pass as a hard move, giving zir Flustered-1. ☀️ adds a new Fast Talker-1 obstacle. +1 DD, to 6. Calypso continues to be fun for letting me treat emotions as mechanical stakes.
For failing that key challenge roll, I make a dramatic move: show signs of something bad happening offscreen. Is the mysterious entity ?Who connects these players nudging this FAQ toward her own cryptic outcomes? I add a new Formidable Condition to the enemy: Tainted FAQ-1.
If that condition stays on the board, the FAQ will be published publicly, and guides being what they are, will funnel rival Egress players into “winning the game” in a way that satisfies the mysterious entity’s schemes, whatever they are. There’s a new goal! Can they stop her from publishing? Will the PCs collab on an alternative untainted Save-The-Earth version of the FAQ?
Realizing ze’s been outwitted into giving up zir secrets — by a positive energy gamer girl! — Axel’s flushing pink. And zir break’s over. Boss calls zir back inside: there’s kids coming in, and they’re gonna need the mascot suit.
Ze puts on the duck head. It’s welcome. The mask will cover zir shame.
Reduce Friendship Need by 2 for making a big connection. Mark one Win for Axel.
Lore 1, Grist 0, Friendship 0 | 1/3 Wins
Line Go Down: Chapter 4a
Begin a Session. Last time, Frappé wrapped up in the Moose, made it to the Prom, went out ahead of the trade caravan, fought off a GC attack set off by Vengaboy being rude and betraying its trust in the deepest way, and settled accounts with its former boss by dropping them into Casco Bay.
I envision a brief vignette to start things off: External factors create new danger, urgency, or importance for a quest.
It’s the crack of dawn. Seagulls are cawing, waves are rocking the concrete seawalls. Dr. Halley is standing with a handful of others on the pier where Vengaboy negotiated with the crew of the dairy skimmer Raya’s Promise. Someone else is carrying the recovering older man’s luggage. They’re talking to the crew of a yellow-on-black painted ferry with a scuffed hull. After some goods are exchanged, Dr. Halley and the others are led aboard as passengers. Take +1 momentum as I pick up.
===
Frappé has no EX generator to recharge, no GB repair toolkit, and not even cardboard boxes in a closet to rest in. After the big fight, it links up with the trade caravan on the edge of town, leads ’em somewhere safe for the night (some Prom residents welcomed the traders in while thanking Frappé) and immediately powers down into dreamless stasis.
Sojourn, spending time recovering within a community.
[Weak Hit: 6 + 1 + 0 = 7 vs 1 | 7]
Resources are strained after the GC attack, and Frappé isn’t sticking around long. I’ll resolve that as I go. For now, Repair for 3 points (a strong hit outside a dedicated facility), returning to 5 health and 5 boost frame integrity.
It boots back up when the sun is peering through the clouds. There’s chatter and conversation happening in the front room of the indoor skate park where the Moose trade caravan sheltered for the night, among locals. Ask the Oracle: have Ended Strander and the locals already worked out a trade deal of their own? [Likely] Yes.
No Vengaboy required. Frappé fighting off the GC attack was enough of a talking point that the Prom Committee was dead curious about the hotpink android’s friends, and the icebreaker built up trust for a forthright and red-tape-free negotiation. The Moose will get port access, the Prom will get fresh veggies on the regular, and Frappé doesn’t care about any more details than that. Waning Strander gives them anyway, though.
Reach a Milestone on “cut Vengaboy in on supplying Moose-to-Prom fresh veggies.” This still counts, even without V-boy. Frappé isn’t really a “letter of the sworn oath” kinda robot. Mark progress:
[Mark Progress: “I’ll Cut Vengaboy in on Supplying Moose-to-Prom Fresh Veggies!” :10 Boxes]
Now let’s Fulfill Your Vow.
[Progress Roll: “I’ll Cut Vengaboy in on Supplying Moose-to-Prom Fresh Veggies!” :Strong Hit = 10 vs 2 | 8]
Another vow fulfilled. Frappé has, against all odds, made Kennebec a slightly better place. Mark 2 ticks on my quest legacy track. That fills a box, giving me 2 XP!
Waning Strander looks chill and happy. Despite the GC attack, the vibe here in the morning is better than she expected from Prom. She’s pretty impressed with how Frappé handled all that battling last night; she saw the light trails and explosions from the ridge overlooking town. Develop Your Relationship for standing with her against hardship, and hey, also for completing a quest to her benefit by giving Ended Strander a chance to shine and secure Moose residency. Mark four boxes.
[Mark Progress: Waning Strander :8 Boxes]
[Progress Roll: Waning Strander :Strong Hit = 8 vs 6 | 5]
That’s enough to successfully Forge a Bond with a strong hit. Mark 2 ticks on my bonds legacy track, which also fills a box, giving 2 more XP. I’ll bolster her influence, adding +2 when she assists on Strander stuff. I also add a revealed aspect to WS: loyal.
frappé has never been roasted this bad. there’s no coming back from this one
Halley…bounced?! He ghosted?! After Frappé saved his miserable life?! That dark red is coming back to its frame.
Test Your Relationship with Halley for betrayal!!!:
[Weak Hit: 4 + 1 + 0 = 5 vs 7 | 2]
Frappé burns, but rather than writing him off as a flake, this slipping-through-her-fingers only deepens her need to track him down. Develop Your Relationship, marking another box, and also reassess a vow: “I will make Doctor Halley remove the limiters on my boost frame” becomes Formidable!
Frappe asks around if anyone knows where Halley went. Gather Information.
[Strong Hit: 5 + 1 + 0 = 6 vs 4 | 1]
It learns that he was asking for directions to the pier just before dawn, where he must have taken a transit ferry, and the only ferry expected that early today was the Firebreak, yellow and black with a scuffed hull, headed north along the coast to Au Haut Bay. +2 momentum.
Frappé wastes no time. It sticks around just long enough to rip off that corny vengaboys. fanny pack, and to tell Waning Strander that it’s heading north, after Halley.
(gather information +2 from Strander bond:
[Weak Hit: 4 + 1 + 2 = 7 vs 10 | 4]
New insight, but also a complication. WS says that’s a weird place for someone like him to go after all this trouble, because Au Haut Bay is right near Queen’s Rock, that haunted ass deadtown with all the GCs prowling around. He’d just be getting into more trouble. Frappé is immediately certain that this is exactly where Halley is going.
“get his ass,” WS encourages in a eyes half-lidded kinda way. “we’ll meet again.”
===
Nothing left now but to Undertake an Expedition. I’ll name this expedition “Reach Queen’s Rock via Au Haut Bay”, rank Formidable. This part should go by more quickly.
Frappé’s boost frame can zoom over the water, but not nonstop all the way - not a Generation 2 chassis with its limiters active. It’s going to hug the coastline, taking breaks at safe-looking sites to vent heat and purge debris as needed before continuing. From what it’s been told, it expects to reach a mooring at Au Haut Bay by sundown. We’ll see!
Its top priority is speed. It doesn’t fear anything on the water after last night’s battle. I roll +edge for this first segment, +1 from EX Turbine.
[Strong Hit: 4 + 2 + 0 = 9 vs 7 | 6]
A miss becomes a strong hit by burning 9 momentum! Reset to 2 momentum, +1 for a hit +edge while traveling with my boost frame. I reach a waypoint and mark 1 box of progress.
Empty + Supply. Frappé stops in the ruins of an old boat launch an hour’s flight north of Prom. It wanders around a little while venting heat, keeping an eye for danger. This place has long since been stripped by weather and picked clean of edible food, usable equipment, and anything valuable for sustaining life. Even the bugs are sparse. It doesn’t stick around long before continuing. It sucks here and is boring, like most of this scrap heap planet.
Move at speed +edge, +1 from EX Turbine.
[Strong Hit: 5 + 2 + 1 = 8 vs 4 | 3]
Another strong hit, +1 momentum from the boost frame. Reach another waypoint, mark 1 box.
Mechanical + Gas. Someone is trying to operate a generator out on this rocky and forested stretch of coast. There’s an older woman in a fishing hat and vest, well-equipped with outdoorsy and utility gear and some kind of pedal-powered road kart. She waves at the hotpink visitor who’s landed not too far away. “That’s a heckuva trick!”
The android hangs back, not saying much, despite the adventurer - “Name’s Lux! Lux Cayne! What’s yer moniker, bub?” - shouting over the noisy, smoky generator. She’s quite curious about Frappé and asking a lot of questions about who she is and where she’s from and headed to and Frappé is venting heat as fast as possible to get the hell out of here. (“I see yer antsy to get goin’, but yer more’n welcome to stick around. You know anything about ethanol conversion?“) As soon as the ready light beeps! on its HUD, Frappé breaks off mid-sentence and zooms like a rude little gremlin. (“i didn’t mean ta antagonize ya!“)
Move at speed +edge, +1 from EX Turbine.
[Miss: 1 + 2 + 1 = 4 vs 7 | 6]
I roll a miss, but I can turn it into a strong hit with the Fugitive path ability - by marking a segment on a new 4-clock called Glitch Busted. When the clock fills, Frappé’s Blackstar pursuers catch up to it. But this is still a strong hit, giving me another box of progress and reaching a waypoint.
There’s a Derelict here, a wrecked place. This one is a beached leisure boat from before the Stranding. It’s at an odd orientation, not just upside down, but the prow is buried in the rocks and sand, stern propped against a stand of dead trees, spilling debris-strewn netting like guts. Half-legible along the hull is the name Lightline. Climbing over the rocks to check it out while venting heat, Frappé sees more text - this looks stenciled on, or even burnt. Some kind of esoteric writing or symbols along the interior of the ship…is that a capcha code?
Nope. Potential infohazard. Nothing good, maybe something bad. Frappé knows not to engage with glitchy stuff like that, whatever weirdo human sect was inspired to print it on this inverted shipwreck. If power wasn’t at a premium without an EX generator, it would blow this thing to smithereens with the buster cannon. But it’s gotta keep moving, quick. It has a nasty feeling that Lux is gonna run her mouth to anyone who listens about the pink flying robot weirdo she ran into along the coast, and it doesn’t want to leave more of a trail.
Move under the radar +shadow, +1 from EX Turbine.
[Strong Hit: 6 + 3 + 1 = 10 vs 1 | 4]
+1 progress, another waypoint, and no entanglements. Not covering quite as much coastline this segment, though. The weather gets choppy and stormy up around here, and it’s unsafe for a Gen 2 frame to boost so close to the water. Depleted + route: Frappé spots a cracked asphalt road, unmaintained for generations, marked by a long-faded sign as Highway One. There’s no one around, so it decides to follow this road on foot for a while.
A weathered stone statue of a friendly seal balancing a ball on its nose stands on an overgrown hillside. Frappé charges a stable buster orb to detach, and spends a longer than usual recovery period standing on one boot trying to imitate the seal. Take a Break.
Continue the session, +1 on next move. Frappé exits its idle animation by bouncing the buster orb on its nose, playing some hackey sack, and speed-kicking it into an abandoned house that explodes into bricks and splinters. It gets movin’ on down the road, looking for signs of Au Haut Bay.
Stay vigilant +wits, +1 from returning to session.
[Miss: 2 + 1 + 1 = 4 vs 4 | 5]
Instead of accepting a miss, I’ll burn momentum 6 to make that a strong hit. Despite the nasty weather splotching rain on its sensors, Frappé spots signage for Au Haut on a faded board. Mark +1 progress.
Down a road that’s seen attempted repairs with tarp, winding through a wrecked old settlement with few recent signs of human habitation, Frappé follows the irregular sound of bells to a marina. It’s mostly full of salvaged fishing boats, but there’s a ferry docked here, waiting out the storm. A few humans in raincoats are sitting on the porch of a boathouse, shooting the breeze with a deck of laminated cards. A wood-burned sign calls this the AU HAUT FERRY.
Frappé deactivates her skates and scurries over to ask around. The fellas on the porch say there’s no ferry out to Au Haut Island today, the storm’s too bad. She asks if a black and yellow ferry, the Firebreak, came through this morning from down south. That triggers Explore a Waypoint.
[Miss: 2 + 1 + 0 = 3 vs 6 | 5]
Another miss. This time, I use the Fugitive path to convert it into a strong hit, and mark another segment on Glitch Busted. This weird loud android is asking very specific questions of gossipy people and leaving a trail of data points to follow. I envision a favorable insight: the fellas say she missed the Firebreak, but it usually doesn’t stop here for long on the way up north to Arcadia. This morning was the first time in a while someone got off here, actually - an older guy with some luggage. He hung around the boathouse for a little, not saying too much except that somebody was coming to get him. Sure enough, a humming electric buggy with another educated-looking fella came down the 15, helped him with his bags, and took him back up the road. Must’ve been headed up towards Queen’s Rock, but that don’t seem like a good idea, what with all the scamps around there. Seemed like they knew what they were doing, though. (+2 momentum.)
Frappé doesn’t waste any more time. It powers up and boosts away, chasing the remains of Route 15. It’s moving at full speed up the overgrown road. +edge, +1 EX Turbine.
[Weak Hit: 3 + 2 + 1 = 6 vs 3 | 7]
The long overland journey without a charge is catching up to it. Its batteries are running low. Sacrifice Resources -2 supply (to 2.) Frappé isn’t much of a long-term planner, so it treats the HUD alert as a problem for the Future-Future Ruler of Planet Earth.
It pauses at a long-scavenged roadside fuel station along the 15. There’s some troubling synth cries, glowing lights in the trees, and signs of motion on the horizon. Weird signals around here, too. Gotta be a GC hotspot. It’s going to proceed with caution to avoid being detected by whatever glitch constructs are drawn to the Kiss: silent running, staying off the road, emissions minimal, turbine passive. The heart-shaped nacelle in its chest powers down to a dim whir.
+shadow.
[Strong Hit: 5 + 3 + 0 = 8 vs 5 | 6]
+1 progress. Taking a circuitous route, Frappé snakes up the river into the spooky-quiet rainy-day remains of a small town that used to be called Queen’s Rock. It’s been weathered by the elements. Frappé keeps a low profile and looks around this quiet place. Explore a Waypoint.
[Weak Hit: 3 + 1 + 0 = 4 vs 10 | 2]
There are GCs moving openly around here. Stately cyan-black sentries with cloaks, or beetle wings, embroidered with a fractal pattern like paisley wallpaper. They carry lanterns on hooked poles, patrolling the bridges as if in a gaslamp fantasy city. They register Frappé, raising their lanterns and chattering in musical notes, but they don’t break out of their idle pattern to pursue her. It freaks her the heck out. What’s going on in this place?
Does this count as finishing the expedition to the Kiss? Let’s find out.
[Progress Roll: Reach the Kiss via Au Haut Bay. :Strong Hit = 6 vs 5 | 1]
Yeah it does! Frappé made it, and I mark one box on my discoveries legacy track for a Formidable expedition. For chasing him all the way up here, Frappé also Reaches a Milestone and marks one box on “I will make Doctor Halley remove the limiters on my boost frame.”
As it prowls, skating and tagging, Frappé opens up the codec to INFRARED 177.29 again. If Halley is in this town, the blackwave frequency will reach him. It knows.
Compel, +iron for a threat.
[Weak Hit: 4 + 2 + 0 = 6 vs 6 | 4]
There’s no response for about half an hour. Then, just as it’s doing a mural of a crowned bunny with button eyes on a burning planet, it gets a codec ping on ULTRAVIOLET 97.03. It’s never seen that frequency before. It kicks out its heels and answers right away.
Swear an Iron Vow. “I won’t contact Halley, won’t threaten anyone, and will overall play nice while I visit KIS.” (Troublesome.) +heart
[Weak Hit: 6 + 1 + 0 = 7 vs 10 | 4]
Frappé isn’t so sure about this. KIS makes clear that while it respects 15′s autonomy, they prioritize their own just as dearly. They are willing to help if they are met with good faith, but they are not pushovers and will defend themselves to the teeth if threatened. Frappé may enter as a peer, not a monster, a tool, or a bully. It is not used to being treated this way, and accepts.
It’s directed to what used to be an airport west of town. The packs of yellow-black turtle-blossom GCs clinging in hex formations to the sun-facing side of the terminal building turn their reflective petals toward Frappé as she skates past.
There are a few hollowed-out small planes in the hangar, long since scavenged for parts and left to decay. It lingers there. These machines are obsolete. They could still be flying today, it thinks, with the right parts and steady maintenance, but the world is broken, and they are grounded. They will decay here. They will not fly. Upsetting speculation fills its buffers. Frappé imagines lying here in this hangar with her turbine extracted, unmoving, slowly being covered in rust and moss.
Endure Stress -1. Resist, +spirit:
[Weak Hit: 1 + 5 + 0 = 6 vs 4 | 6]
Lose 1 spirit and press on.
Surrounded by junked deadtech, Frappé is caught off guard when a pale blue laser on a servo arm scans her from brow to boot, with special focus on her buster cannon. “Weapon systems detected.”
It can’t stop thinking about rusting in this hangar. Out of battery. Exposed. Empty.
It holds up its buster cannon arm. There’s a high-pitched dissipating whirr… as the tip goes cold, leaving a wisp of pale smoke. It retracts and resets the arm back to a manipulator gauntlet. Waggles its fingers. Its expression telegraphs a quip that doesn’t get said.
Reach a Milestone on playing nice at KIS.
[Mark Progress: “I Won’t Contact Halley, Won’t Threaten Anyone, and Will Overall Play Nice While I Visit Kis.” :3 Boxes]
Take a Break. Next time, Frappé will visit the King of Infinite Space and conclude this part of the intermission.