The awakening comes horribly, like for a man held too long underwater and gasping for breath. My body feels completely exhausted, yet my feverish mind pulls me up, as alert as ever. It is not morning, but afternoon, considering the direction of the shadows in my room.
The events of last night, they had to be a horrible dream. I am in my own bed at the Ruby Dancer, so it must have been. Yet I am sleeping in my clothes of yesterday and have no recollection on how I got in here. Trap-lines and defences are also absent. That daydream got shattered quickly.
The bag that held the jewel is nowhere to be seen. An anxious search through my belongings also reveals to me that the real jewel has vanished as well. It must have been that Vansittart -fellow.
I rush to call the floor servant, and he squirms under my heated questions. As he wasn’t in the shift last night, he has to call in for others until I finally get my answers. Afterwards I drive them all away from my room in a fury.
It seems I have arrived in late hours of the night, with a merry band who half-carried me with them. They had told the workers of the inn that they are my friends and insisted on delivering me safely back to my room. From thereon, the story becomes vague but it doesn’t take a genius to figure it out. They must have been Vansittart’s men, or Daag’s, and deftly after escorting me to my room they took care of searching through my belongings for anything interesting.
I bury my head in my hands. I am a again a pawn in a game played by predators and forces beyond my grasp. Of what Daag and Vansittart represent I know, but I wonder whether they understand what they are meddling with. I put my hopes on the fact that the jewel is empty from its previous inhabitant, yet I have a nagging feeling whether the Magus will ever leave the gem truly. From everything I know about the him it might be that his presence overlaps time and causality.
When everything else fails, go back to basics. Breathing first and build up from there.
It seems Papak is still here. No wonder, I remember taking Bending Spirit last night, before darkness fell. So, he will be around for a while still. My body feels like I haven’t slept in a week, yet sleeping will not help, until I can get rid of the Spirit from my bloodstream. But there are other ways I can rejuvenate myself, just ask Papak said.
I undress all of my mechanical aids. This I do only rarely, but deep meditation like this is something where one needs to be all alone with his own body and mind. Slowly the pile of accessories next to my bed grows and grows. It is like a beginning of a ritual for me, and rarity brings with it meaning and focus.
Papak just sits there and observes, without commenting. It is lot of him that is involved in what I am about to do.
I need to get into sweat for what I am after. So, I start with my usual routine of bending and weaving, twisting and stretching. Unassisted by my mechanical aids it feels raw and bare, brutal even. After this I continue into shadow-swordplay, disposing imaginary enemy after another with equally imaginary blades but with real footwork, timing and body movements. I strive to move without a sound, focused utterly on what I do from moment to moment, yet keeping all of my senses open. I can hear the floor servant moving about, coughing of some other resident behind a wall. I smell the lunch that is soon to be served downstairs. All of this I note, and let pass on through me, like a waterdrops fall from leaves. It is sensing without reasoning and with this comes true separation and freedom.
Afterwards I kneel on the floor, body sweating, chest heaving. I feel my presence like I haven’t felt for a long time and let my mind wander freely.
Body and mind are one, if you use one, the other will be used. If you relax one, the other will follow suit.
Papak is still here, even though I don’t see him. No matter.
Conscience doesn’t make me a good man. It just tries to prevent me from doing more harm. Without a proper cause I am nothing more than what I was.
I feel the repulsiveness of it all again strongly in my veins. My presence in this world has surely been a negative influence. Whatever I do now does not change my past, and continuing in my path can only bring more sorrow or death in my wake. Would it be better to end my life now, before all of this happened. I take a stern look inside. Could I do it?
The thought of leaving it all from yesterday comes back strong. I have knowledge of ancient perils beyond the grasp of humanity. If power-players like Vansittart or Daag could just comprehend the pitiful pebbles they are compared to the threat of the Magi or what they represent.
Direction of this thought embraces me. It manifests almost physically. My long travel has prepared me for this without my knowledge or understanding, I am not to live in fancy taverns with dancing exhibitions and expensive wines. I am to follow the trail of these ancient mummeries to their source and to fight them as long as I live. Here I am just wasting my efforts that could be better spent elsewhere.
Later I check out from the Ruby Dancer, and manage to haggle back most of what I deposited for my prolonged stay in the inn. The keeper is surprised and hurt, asking continuously what other tavern has won me over or of what have they done wrong. I am not sure whether I convinced him that nothing of this sort is going on, but rather that I am to take a trip that could last a while.
I will go and meet Master Plotkin and tell him everything there is to tell about these ancient forces. No more half-truths and covered facts. I will then ask his permission to travel to Vicenza as a novice of their order in pursuit of more knowledge of these dark forces that were from their great library. If he believes me or not, I do not really care, as long as I can start the quest.
But before I go, I will get back the jewel. Preferably sooner than later. If Master Plotkin knows something about this, then all the better. If not, then, perhaps I must visit Daag or Vansittart with grave intentions.
I roll 3
Hero dice: 4, 4, 2, 6, 2, 3
Monster dice: 4, 4, 3, 1
Derak in the Scarlet City 
Well, this is quite a turn of events!
I have been getting more and more forward and honest in these comments, and I’ll keep that trend going – let me know if you want me to dial that back in some way.
There are things I really like about this entry, and things that, on first glance, at least, seem jarring.
I love the introspective angle, and how it humanizes Derak, giving us insights into his psyche. Each time this happens in these narratives, it makes me enjoy them ever more.
This quote is really lovely – I personally love literature which has such little nuggets of psychological insight, and this one is a perfect example of that: it’s relevant to the character, and teaches us about him, but it’s also relevant to the reader, which makes it poignant.
“Conscience doesn’t make me a good man. It just tries to prevent me from doing more harm. Without a proper cause I am nothing more than what I was.”
I’m less sure about the abruptness of the entry. Cutting from trialogue to being dragged back to the Inn is a shock, and I’m not sure it’s quite the right thing – it doesn’t flow naturally. However, sometimes these things end up feeling “right” in retrospect. I might be won over by the story after the fact, in other words. (I suppose filling in some of that gap later in the narrative could do a lot to make this less jarring – like if we learned that Daag actually gave Derak drugged wine, or that this was part of some other kind of plan which had been put into action earlier, or some other such thing.)
Also, I wonder if it’s a bit of a hard Go from a game perspective – for Eero, it might be hard to pick up on what elements you’re interested in, how it connects to the previous Go, and what exactly Derak is doing now. The final lines suggest that he is taking up the Daag/Vansittart invitation, but the context of the story (and the abrupt “cut” back and forth) makes it seem likely that the invitation would no longer be extended. (Also, if there was a bounty on Derak’s head, why would he be deposited safely at the Inn?)
Just some thoughts. I fully expect many of them to be off the mark.
I really liked the character-building and introspective aspects of this entry – very nicely done!
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That is really interesting.
To me, cutting a scene like in the beginning of this entry is just like cutting a scene in a book, movie, or a narrative game like Tales of Entropy for that matter. For me the problem is quite the opposite of your taste – I feel that we do too little scene cutting and instead always strive to continuing narrative.
When preserving continuity we actually limit our possibilities to cut out material we don’t want to address or skip to something that feels interesting enough for us to tackle in the text itself. It will be an interesting challenge, if we prefer to edit this material further some day: whether to include more scene cuts like this, or strive for continuing narrative.
About the difficulties for Eero after this turn. I feel that the clear, near-future goal of Derak is to go to Plotkin and share his soul with the man. In this state he doesn’t really want to hold anything back. Perhaps the old man thinks Derak is a raving lunatic, but hey, this is what supernaturally touched, troubled individuals may be. The longer-term goal then is to get the jewel back. This means either to take part in the masquerade, or to infiltrate their manors even sooner. Derak hasn’t really shown his skills in this story too much, so this would be an opportunity to get some steampunky wire-fuing included.
I took the dice for the decision that Derak made here, to leave fancy taverns and high life behind in place of a purpose-driven hard future. Future that probably includes travelling, begging, teaching swordmanship to random merchants for food and other stuff what RPG characters generally would do. I feel this move (if Derak can hold on to it, he has a history of backpedalling) actually makes him an adventurer of traditional rpg scene. Not really difficult to invent adventures for him, unless this world is one of Call of Cthulhu and this just begins a downward spiral towards madness and death.
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Yes, I agree entirely with all of that in principle. I suspect that cutting “hard” between scenes might be harder to manage in a You-Go, I-Go format without stepping on each other’s toes, so it has happened pretty rarely.
It’s a good device, for all the reasons you mention, and it may even turn out to be the perfect choice here. It’s just completely out of character with the Derak story so far.
My concern is that this tack may be hard for Eero to handle – Derak going to visit a minor character and threatening to leave the arena of the action – just when the story is starting to gain a clear direction.
But it all depends on his reaction: perhaps this will inspire him with some clever new ideas, and this is actually precisely what the story needs! We will see.
I am just voicing my concerns, for the sake of being a diligent commenter. :)
It’s like when you’re watching a film and suddenly there’s a scene which seemed to come out of nowhere. The initial reaction is, “Hey, what’s going on?” However, depending on what happens next, that may turn to, “Ah! I see what they’re doing now. Very smart!”
As a reader, this raises a question mark in my mind – but that doesn’t mean the question might not have a good answer, in other words.
…
(I also misread this a little: I read the entry again just now, and it reads better than it did last night, for whatever reason. For instance, I thought the visit to Plotkin had already happened “off-screen”, whereas in fact it’s clear that it’s something Derak intends to do. I would enjoy that conversation very much! The arcane mythology of this story is pretty opaque and any development of it further is very welcome to me as a reader.)
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I agree, we are using it very sparingly and it is possible that rarity kind of increases its effectiveness, or abruptness depending on how the reader feels about it.
I have done few of these in this story, but for example the last one was in mid-turn of my own: I cut the scene and then continued from where Derak was going to Daag’s with the fake crystal. I have a faint recollection of doing it once before this, but I can’t pinpoint where it was exactly. In Lucie’s story I did it at least once: when Lucie and Besnik were going to the Kryfis men, I framed the scene directly in the lair of them and had the central characters arriving to the scene little later. I very much like these kinds of techniques and when considering this is also literary practice, this presents chances to see it through.
It is just like this in this scene cut as well. Derak had a moment of unconsciousness (or lack of awareness at least) and this allowed me to try a scene cut and then a reveal of some of the events that must have taken place in the “dark” between the scenes. Because Derak had a memory lapse, this reveal could be woven into the fiction itself, when Derak frantically tried to investigate what had happened.
If I know Eero, I think he doesn’t have the slightest fear of Derak leaving the stage before he has had his say :). We will see. Nonetheless Derak needs to get the crystal from the lair of the monster anyway, so plenty of opportunities to drive his stuff in the spotlight.
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