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Jeff Wikstrom

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[May. 5th, 2008|08:49 pm]
So yesterday I ended another game, my Arcana Evolved/Ptolus game. We went from level one up to level 10, which was about where I'd wanted to be. I'd planned originally to end it after one more session, but I got carried away as is my wont and things escalated and boom, no more game. Overall I'd give it a B- -- not my best game, but not the worst I've run by a long shot. The last couple of sessions really suffered from my inability to prepare properly -- if I'd had a few extra hours the day or a couple of days before yesterday, I'd have been a little better-prepared and could have ended the game a little stronger. However I am there talking about the last seven percent of the game, which wouldn't have pushed up its letter grade even I'd pulled it off flawlessly.

I don't think in the future I'm going to try to hew to a published setting/set of adventures in the way that I did for the first 80% of this game. I found the mega-adventures more chafing than anything else, which isn't something I've experienced with running smaller adventures (out of Dungeon magazine for instance). Probably that affected my ability to prep properly -- especially once I was only a couple of sessions out from the end, I felt less inclined to prioritize working on the game because I was ready for it to end. Still, I can't look to any specific disasterous event that ruined the game. Definitely there was some interpersonal strife in the group, and I dunno whether that particular group is going to get together in the future or not (nobody who was in the game needs to comment here about interpersonal strife saying anything like they are sorry for their part in it, or that I am exaggerating or anything like that, let's let it drop ).

I hope so; if nothing else I have a free spot on my calendar now (especially as Jake seems less interested in picking up his Exalted game).

So next time I run D&D -- and weirdly, running this game has made me more interested in running a 4e game ASAP; I feel all the more acutely the various D&Disms that I've grown impatient with and which 4e is supposed to get rid of while introducing a whole new raft of problems -- next time I run D&D, I'll try for shorter and more discrete adventures. Actually I would like to structure it like a TV show, with mostly self-contained episode-sessions and an indeterminate amount of downtime between each adventure, with the occasional two-parter but nothing like the long long no-down-time slog which was the middle third or so of this game.

I could go on, but it'd be pretty random, so I'll stop.
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I am not even getting into Nightbane-who-was-Arcanagos [Apr. 17th, 2008|03:23 pm]
HERE COMES THE WOW POST HERE COMES THE WOW POST AND I SAY IT'S ALL RIGHT
LITTLE DARLING IT'S BEEN A LONG COLD LONELY WINTER
LITTLE DARLING IT FEELS LIKE YEARS SINCE IT'S BEEN HERE
HERE COMES THE WOW POST HERE COMES THE WOW POST AND I SAY IT'S ALL RIGHT
LITTLE DARLING THE SMILES RETURNING TO THE FACES
LITTLE DARLING IT SEEMS LIKE YEARS SINCE IT'S BEEN HERE
HERE COMES THE WOW POST HERE COMES THE WOW POST AND I SAY IT'S ALL RIGHT
WOW WOW WOW HERE IT COMES
POST POST POST HERE IT COMES
LITTLE DARLING I FEEL THAT ICE IS SLOWLY MELTING
LITTLE DARLING IT SEEMS LIKE YEARS SINCE IT'S BEEN CLEAR
HERE COMES THE WOW POST HERE COMES THE WOW POST AND I SAY IT'S ALL RIGHT
IT'S ALL WOW POST

So you're standing in the tenements of Shattrath, which is a place where refugees from all over the ruins of the wrecked and demon-haunted Promised Land, there to buy apples from a vendor or maybe to smelt some ore, and a beggar approaches you in a bar named for the apocalypse. His name is Tasserel, and he stands bewildered by the secular world and cosmopolitan Shattrath. "Do you remember Karazhan?" he asks you, and your ears hear for the first time that sacred name. He seeks aid in reaching Karazhan, and he cleaves to you over everyone else in the city, as the person to help him in his task.

Spurred on by his request, you make the long journey from Shattrath to Deadwind Pass, worlds away. There a small cabal of adepts stand at the gates of Karazhan, the Ivory Tower, where once the greatest magus in this world's history wrought his greatest works: Medivh, the last guardian of Karazhan, who nearly destroyed the world, then died saving it a generation later.

The spokesman for this cabal of gawkers, this Violet Eye who seek to pore over the secrets of their better, is a man named Alturus. He bids you speak to his superior, the head of the order, a grandmaster named Cedric. Cedric is not in Deadwind; he dwells miles away in the company of an enormous egg, Dalaran-that-Was.

So you make the trip to the unhatched egg, which rumbles sometimes at night as if whatever is inside might still burst forth one day, and you meet Cedric, and Cedric takes one look at you and knows that you are the person he must send to find a way into Karazhan. The tower has been sealed up since the last days of Medivh, and them whom the Violet Eye have impelled in to brave its trials have not returned.

"Two keys were made," explains Cedric. "One for the master, one for his apprentice. The master is gone, but find the apprentice and you find the key."

You find the apprentice, Khadgar, where he dwells in a temple stripped of its idols and occupied by angels. Khadgar remembers Karazhan, and wants nothing to do with the place. He introduces you to his angels, but will not give you his key, for he no longer bears that burden.

"Evil came, and I broke the key into three parts, and cached each fragment in a different holy site where they would be safe. Then evil came again, and conquered this demon-haunted land. Return the fragments to me, and I will reconstruct the key."

You venture forth into the broken world and find the key in three parts, scattered and hidden in the holy places. You bring the fragments back to Khadgar, and Khadgar admits his understanding is flawed; he lied. He cannot reconstruct the tripartite key to Karazhan: that power is possessed only by Medivh, and Medivh is dead twice over.

Here your quest would end, save for the fact that you are inside a spell. Magic is happening around you, speeding you on your way and smoothing the path before you. By seeming chance, you have already fallen in with a mystic order of chronomancers, who seek to preserve the web of history by interfering in a picked handful of events, and they ask you to travel through time to the day Medivh tried to destroy the world, and help him. Upwards and outwards you fly, ascending to the singular event of Medivh's failed apotheosis, and there you come face to face with a shard of the Master of the Tower himself.

"Who are you and what do you want?" asks Medivh, but his demeanor softens when you show him your broken key. Immediately he sees it for what it is -- the Apprentice's Key to Karazhan, ruined and needing reconstruction -- and you for who you are. He takes the Key of the Apprentice from you, and with a wave of his hand makes whole what had been sundered, but he does not give you the remade key. Instead, he declares, he will pass the key on to his apprentice whose possession it rightfully is, Khadgar, and for you he has a different gift, something he will not need where he is going: the Master's Key to Karazhan.

Thus anointed, you return to the present day and demonstrate your prowess by displaying the key to Khadgar who stands with angels.

Khadgar, who stands with angels, bids you enter the Tower. It is, he says, the greatest repository of magical knowledge and the home of miracles.

Alturus, who stands at the foot of Karazhan, bids you enter the Tower. It is, he says, the focal point for all telluric energy on the planet; it is where all the ley lines meet.

Cedric, who stands by Dalaran-yet-unhatched, bids you enter the Tower. It is, he says, the gateway to the infinite and a beacon of wisdom visible from the Heaviside Layer.

Leryda, who stands in the shadow of Karazhan, bids you enter the Tower. It is, she says, the fixed point, unique along all axes, sole systematic absence in the world lattice.

Darius, who stands under the apex of Karazhan, bids you enter the Tower. It is, he says, only the outer reflection of the hidden Inner Tower, inverted and underground, where everything in the world unites into singularity.

And so you enter the Tower. You are the bearer of the Key of Karazhan, and only you can enter; you open a gate sealed since Medivh's departure decades prior. The first place you see within the Tower is the stables, where unquiet dead walk in silent ignorance of the evil that permeates them. Below there are only beasts and distractions; above there is everything. The ruler here is Attumen, once master of Medivh's hounds and Karazhan's huntsman. There is a threshold that separates Karazhan from Not-Karazhan, and Attumen stands upon it, guarding with his bare presence. Attumen rides a black horse, for he must traverse the infinite fractal space at Karazhan's edge.

Ascending from the stables you leave behind the unquiet ghosts who do not seek rest and encounter those who understand their position somewhat better: shades of memory and long-ended celebrations forcibly embodied. To reach the apex of the Tower, you must withstand every form of temptation, and thus temptation takes physical form. It does this for you, because this is all about you.

In the midst of the hedonistic spectral celebrants stands Moroes, Steward of the Tower, guardian of every secret and master of ceremonies. In his train are reflections of former guests -- living and dead -- banqueting and toasting. Though they appear barely past the gates of Karazhan, they celebrate their ascension and flatter one another with false praise. No progress can be made until this cotillion is ruined, for it is an empty pageant which distracts the aspirant from rising further in the tower.

Rising further within the Tower, you trade one set of carnal delights for another more basic. Where once stood the Tower's guest quarters now has been placed a bordello-ambiance of pornographic obscenity. Lust, forced into humaniform shape, endlessly patrols the bedrooms of the Tower, climaxing in a physical representation of the Maiden: a woman forty feet tall, Virtue standing above Sin.

With Sin defeated and Virtue triumphant, you ascend to the highest level of the lowest portion of the Tower. There you cut through distraction and avarice to enact a mystery play, demonstrating with dramaturgy your mastery over Wrath, Sloth, Gluttony, and Lust.

Further progress requires leaving the boundaries of the Tower and approaching from a new angle, because access to the Upper Realms cannot be forced and must be finessed.

Ascending the Broken Stair to the higher level, you soon find yourself at the entrance to the great storehouses of Karazhan, Secret Kingdom of the Invisibles. Here there are no revels and no revelers: the temptations of the upper halls hold a higher tenor. Instead you must encounter and surpass magic forced into the shape of monsters, magical horrors and living footprints of long-dormant spells. The lights, the colors, and the smells are illusory; their purpose is to distract you and make you lose your way.

This is the Menagerie of Karazhan, where longago exotics and archaic grotesques once dwelled. Now the exhibits are gone, but Medivh's Curator remains, a massive construction of metal and mana who blindly follows obsolete instructions and will not temper its logic with emotion. Irrational and doomed, the Curator patrols empty halls and represents the blind obedience to authority that you must overcome.

Beyond the Menagerie lies the library proper. Here you encounter more cautionary tales. For the first time echoes of them who will follow you present themselves. You possess Medivh's anointment, and the Master's Key to Karazhan, but self-proclaimed agents of the Violet Eye and their ilk haunt the upper galleries of the library. They followed you, came after in search of hidden lore. But Karazhan is timeless, and exists outside history; those who become seduced by its secrets lose touch with the world outside and time's ebb and flow. Wravien, Gradav, Kamsis: they will never leave the Ivory Tower.

Here too you find thieves of knowledge, unreal denizens of the library who burn its books and loot its secrets. They are not real of course, these ethereals: they are merely physical representations of the temptation to steal, to plunder, to loot the Ivory Tower of its power and its glory.

The ascent into the Secret Kingdom is fraught with peril on all sides; you climb on the edge of a knife, and to fail even a little is to plummet into the depths of depravity. No better example stands than Terestian Illhoof, satyr, who in ages hence will enter the Tower seeking Medivh's lore, and fall into hubris and self-destruction, turning away from the face of God and towards blood sacrifice and degradation in service to lower powers. He cannot truly die, for he does not yet live, but nevertheless you must defeat what he stands for if you seek to fully master Karazhan.

In a high place where once Medivh stared up into the heavens and witnessed the dance of angels, the dead dragon Netherspite embodies a very different kind of corruption. Barely conscious, the entity once commanded primal nether and made the stars dance to its whims, but now it is an addict, incapable of resisting or withstanding the dark magics that infuse it. For Netherspite, there is only the rush of magic, and the pangs of withdrawal as the rush ends. Once it was a majestic lord of creation, flying through the Twisting Nether. Now it is a husk, a discarded thing, and you must take care not to let the same happen to you.

Authority attacks one final time as you continue your ascension. This time it is not the empty orders of the Curator, but rather that which Medivh called authority's true face: his father Nielas Aran. Aran himself is years dead, but inside the Secret Kingdom of the Invisibles time has no meaning, nor does life. As the son surpassed the father, you must follow in his footsteps; the path up the Mountain of Rigor is through the dead man's bones.

Beyond the library, the Tower falls away as you progress further into the Secret Kingdom of the Invisibles. What it is you are climbing collapses into symbolism, as you play chess with Medivh. Madness and emotion swell and rise and overcome, and in the darkness at the top of Karazhan among the castoff flesh of them who have moved on into the world of spirits, you duel Malchezaar the Imaginary, Prince of Demons, General of the Burning Legion, and claim your place in the sky.
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STARS 42 [Apr. 3rd, 2008|02:59 pm]
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Management apologizes for the delay.

You're prepared to have to hold onto an IV drip stand to steady yourself, and wobble gently down darkened hallways with, if necessary, the night's breeze flapping at your knees and the paper hospital gown barely keeping you decent. The actual event proves considerably less unpleasant, though, as you aren't hooked up to an IV, you find you have the wherewithal to stand unaided, and somebody thoughtfully put your suitcase and its clean clothes in your room's corner.

Actually, half of your room is blocked off with a heavy blue curtain and your bag is on the tile floor next tot hat. It's not impossible that someone is trying to sleep on the other side of the curtain, so you repress a sudden impulse to scream at the top of your lungs, and merely dig out some clean socks and stuff and put them on.

The act of lacing up your sneakers takes a little more out of you than you expected, but you don't feel any better after spending a few seconds yawning and rubbing your eyes and cracking your knuckles and stretching and yawning again, so nothing for it. Up and at them.

No alarms sound when you open the door out to the hallway, or at least, no alarms you can hear. There could be a silent alarm, or a buzzing off at a nurse's station a long ways down the hall, but you don't detect any immediate panic. The hallway reeks of antiseptic hospital smell, in contrast to your room, which was (though you didn't pay much attention at the time) lemon-fresh. Flickering fluorescent lights -- the worst kind of fluorescent lights -- bathe the hall in dim light, which is several steps up from the relative darkness of your room, but not so intense as to hurt your eyes.

The flickering lights immediately give you a headache.

The hallway runs in either direction for a couple of hundred feet before reaching a turn. There are red EXIT lights at either turn, which is remarkably unhelpful. More helpful: at the bend in the hallway to the right, someone has installed a coffeemaker with Styrofoam cups on a little cart. You had no idea how much you wanted a cup until you saw that coffeemaker, and immediately start down the hall.

You pass maybe a dozen closed doors, with numbers like 617, 619, 621, et cetera, and about that many open doors. As you pass by, you can see empty beds and bare floors in the open-door rooms, but you don't stop until you reach the coffeemaker.

There's something in pink packets that isn't really sugar, and there's something that doesn't need to be kept refrigerated that isn't really cream, but it's actual caffeine-laden coffee and you see zero signs saying things like PATIENTS NOT ALLOWED COFFEE or THIS COFFEE IS NOT FOR PEOPLE FROM THE RUMP SOUTH or IF YOU HAVE A HEAD INJURY YOU SHOULD NOT DRINK THIS or NURSES ONLY THIS MEANS YOU PRAIRIE DAWN or anything like that, so with a hearty "screw you anyone who doesn't want me to take some coffee" you take some coffee. Just holding the Styrofoam cup in your hand and feeling the weight of it makes you feel like a human being again. The fact that it's actually decent coffee, even with inferior coffee whitener and sweetener, that's just icing on the cake.

Coffee in hand, you take a look around. What you had thought at first was a bend in the hallway is actually the end, marked with a window looking out onto a starless light brown sky and the roof of one wing of the hospital and an almost completely empty parking lot. You scan for your canary-yellow rental, and then you remember that it's almost certainly in a body shop somewhere.

The red EXIT sign is actually pointing towards another red EXIT sign, this one over the door to a stairwell.

Sweet.

Down six flights of stairs you go, every step bringing you closer to your goal of getting out of the hospital ASAP, until you're at the landing at the bottom of the stairs. At first you think something terrible has happened to your vision, or that the coffee was drugged with something besides saccharine and caseinate, but then you realize it's just that someone has painted the whole landing an ugly aqua shade of green. The flickering fluorescent lights don't help matters any, either.

A painted metal sign warns against using the stairwell to keep your bicycle in, under uncertain penalty, but this doesn't seem to have dissuaded at least four cyclists. Only one of the bicycles is chained to the railing; the other three cry out for thieves and rapscallions to abscond with them. Absconding would be so easy, too, given that there's a heavy metal fire exit type door here at the bottom of the stairwell, with a big (green this time, not red) EXIT light over it and a red lever with DO NOT OPEN EXCEPT IN CASE OF FIRE ALARM WILL SOUND on it.

There's also an interior door, under which seeps bright non-flickering light, and the sound of voices and gales of hearty laughter that cuts in and out with frightening regularity.


You...
Grab a bike, open the fire exit and git.
Don't grab a bike, do open the fire exit and git.
Head back upstairs in search of something less boring than a stairwell.
Try the door with the laugh track.
Pray for guidance.
  
Free polls from Pollhost.com

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STARS 41 [Mar. 20th, 2008|10:24 pm]
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(late because I didn't like it the first two times I wrote it)

"Hey, Prairie Dawn! You all right, Prairie Dawn?"

Someone, you gradually realize, someone is trying to get your attention by waving a flashlight in your face and calling you Prairie Dawn.

"Psst-hey, Prairie Dawn! Prairie Dawn!"

Their voice, or rather his voice, his voice has an odd cadence to it, like he’s in unconvincing community theater. "What? Yes. Yes, I’m all right," you say, despite evidence to the contrary.

"You were pretty out of it there, Prairie Dawn, you maybe got a concussion?"

"You sound like someone on bad television," you tell the voice, or (to be more specific) the shadowy figure generating the voice. "Talk normal, why don’t you?"

"Yeah, no, Prairie Dawn. You got a concussion, that means you hit your head, okay? Yeah." The figure coalesces abruptly into a paramedic. "It’s okay, you not at fault, we just gonna take you to the ER, okay? Like on the TV, you got a TV, Prairie Dawn?"

"What? Yes, no, what? Why are you calling me Prairie Dawn?"

"Don’t space out on me, Prairie Dawn," the paramedic says, as if his end of the conversation were entirely reasonable and it was only you who wasn’t talking sense. "What’s your name, Prairie Dawn? You got any ID?"

"Oh my God," you suddenly realize. "There was an accident! I should go, I should call my mother, she’ll freak out, where’s my car?" You wrench your gaze off the paramedic. Behind him swims an ocean of flashing lights and wet pavement and reflections off metal. With effort you pick out a police car, which is bad, and you nearly panic, but then you remember (clever you!) that the LAPD and the Paradise City police are completely separate organizations. Then you wonder whether the cop car is LAPD or some other municipality, since the greater metropolitan area encompasses a number of communities, and then you have to sit back down and concentrate on being okay.

* * *

Hours later, you’re on the phone.

"No, Mom, I’m fine. They just want to keep me overnight, you don’t have to –"

"No, Mom, no, that’s okay. It’s got ‘minor’ in the name, ‘minor head trauma,’ I don’t –"

"I’m at Citrus Valley something something Hospital, I don’t know, let me check." You put the phone down and look around for something with the hospital logo or letterhead. There’s a cocktail napkin, under your screwdriver. "Orange Valley, sorry, Orange Valley Research Clinic. I bet you can find it online, they have a great beverage service, so look for the one with the good beverage service. No I am not drunk, Mom, I have a concussion!

"Minor head trauma, I have a minor head trauma. I can sleep and eat and everything normally. I’m fine, I’m just in a hospital.

"No, look, if you – can we talk about this later? I don’t want to talk any more. I was in a car wreck, Mom, do I have to talk to you too right now? I love you. I love you, too, Mom. And Dad.

"Hi, Dad. Yeah. No. Yeah. I’m okay. Yeah. No, I don’t think so. Yeah. I love you, too. Bye, Dad."

You turn the phone off and lean back in your bed. Your drink is tantalizingly out of reach. "Hey fellas," you address the empty air. "Could you pass me my screwdriver?"

No response. You lift your head up and crane your neck around, looking for the telltale air motions that mark the presence of the sylphs.

"Aw, fellas," you tell the empty air. "Where’d you go? You were right with me, I remember, when I got here. You probably went out of the room when I was changing clothes, and you didn’t come back, and now I’m just talking to myself instead of my invisible friends."

You sink back into your pillow, and debate your next course of action.

Then you fall asleep.

Then you wake up, and it’s dark -- the clock on the wall says "4:47 AM" in big friendly red LEDs.


What's the plan, Stan?
Get out of bed, go looking for the sylphs.
Go back to sleep, look for the sylphs in the morning.
Go back to sleep, eat breakfast and watch television in the morning.
Get out of the hospital ASAP.
Pray for guidance.
  
Free polls from Pollhost.com

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STARS 40: WE ARE ALL LYING IN THE GUTTER [Mar. 6th, 2008|01:10 pm]
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"Anyway I don't know. I only planned as far ahead as getting here. I'm not sure what happens now. Also, this city is way bigger than I thought. I had the idea that, like, it would be like a really large and mostly puppet-free version of Sesame Street, one of those old cities where people walked around and said "sirrah" at each other... and all the buildings would be five hundred feet tall and there would be rooftop gardens and zeppelin hitching posts and geodesic domes everywhere, and all the famous Los Angeles sights like the Hollywood sign, and... okay, I'm sure there are famous Los Angeles sights besides the Hollywood sign.

"I don't see the Hollywood sign. It's night, we're finally here, and we come up over a hill and then there's just this ocean of lights, stretching out literally as far as I can see. I mean that I can't see where the lights ended, they just go out to the horizon, streetlights and the headlights of cars and buildings and on and on, spread like the stars in the sky. Which, in fact, I can't see. The sky is just beige, featureless, except for some glowy spots from searchlights and some airplanes. It's like the stars came down from the dome of the heavens to live in a city full of wet streets and smelly people.

"If I stood on my head things would make more sense, because then the stars would be above and the muddy ground down, but I can't go around the city walking on my hands, people would think there was something wrong with me, and also my hands would get numb and eventually I'd fall and I wouldn't want to fall on someone, which if I was in a city I would totally do, people are everywhere in cities. Like ants.

"So no, is my answer to the issue of standing on my head the whole time I'm in LA. What do you think?"

Your friend the whirlwind (actually a colony of Kansan dust devils you liberated from slavery in a town of heretic Christians a few miles off the Interstate, out in the Plains) doesn't respond, which doesn't really surprise you; it doesn't have any way to talk. It just blows in the passenger seat, rustling the napkins you stuffed on the dashboard, and rippling the lukewarm half-a-Styrofoam-cupful of melted ice and Mr Pibb. If it was mad could throw things at you.

You drive in silence for several more minutes, then the scope of the highway changes subtly. It begins to cut into the earth, not sloping down but instead remaining level while the ground on either side elevates. Concrete barriers appear, holding back avalanche and disaster, and the road widens first to three lanes, then four. Soon enough you are driving down a wide shallow trench, with medium traffic and no view of the sky below. Out of the corner of your eye, you see a fifth lane full of serpents (some larger than a semi) but when you turn your head and try to focus, it slips from your vision.

Thus you are distracted when a grimy hatchback suddenly swings from two lanes over to right into your left front tire. The jarring collision is followed by another one under a second later, as a sedan just behind you and one lane to your right crumples your right front tire when you serve into it.

Things go downhill from there.
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STARS 39: Interlude ends [Mar. 2nd, 2008|03:38 pm]
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You end up spending almost a week in the Mountains. Though it isn't really your bag, you can't justify tourism in Colorado Springs that doesn't include a visit to Pikes Peak, and then you drive west into the Basin, reaching Cardboard Flats, Utah, just in time for the annual Freestyle Rap Festival, before heading south around the Mountains' western spur.

Skirting the edge of the desert, you reach Templar in the evening of your fourth day in the Mountains. Here you and Marian prepare to part company -- she has a cousin living there -- and to your surprise the goblins announce a decision to stay with her, rather coming on with you. Your fifth day is a Sunday, so you stay in Templar overnight and attend ecumenical morning services at the Temple of the Divine Experience, followed by shish kebabs and beer with Marian's cousin Florence.

Monday morning, bright and early, you and your invisible friends (they are much stronger for their convalescence, and you can feel their cold breath when you sweep your hand through the space they occupy) pile into your canary-yellow Ford and, waving farewell to the librarian and her library goblins, accelerate towards the ocean. I'm sure, by now, you realize where I'm going with this. Sit tight, it's the last one.

THE LEFT COAST IS AS FAR AS YOU CAN GO

The Left Coast is as far as you can go before you hit water. In other ways, too, it is extreme. It is always sunny on the Left Coast, except when it is pouring down rain. It is always pleasantly mild, except when it is scorchingly hot or numbingly cold, sometimes both in the same day. The people are friendly, when they aren't screaming for blood. And the cuisine is delicious, unless you don't like cilantro.

Everything is extreme on the Coast. They brew their coffee strong here, and they will drink it only one of three ways: black and bitter and scalding, richly creamed and sweetened with strange-flavored syrups, and chilled to just above freezing, with lemon-juice and shaved ice. Everyone wears sunglasses, even indoors, even at night, and they speak loudly there, and flash rows of whitened teeth.

Scratch them, whisper some fearful inlanders, scratch them and you will see they do not bleed red human blood, but a vile ichor transfused from sharks, which some years ago it was fashionable to keep coursing through your veins in lieu of hemoglobin. Starve them, and as the fat and muscle erodes from their bodies you will see lumps of sand and oils implanted inside them, replacing (in some) entire skeletal systems.

These are all lies, of course, or exaggerations, for while cosmetic surgery is at its zenith on the Coast (especially in the southern quadrant) the people of the Coast are by and large the same as people anywhere, with their own hopes and dreams and a fondness for cilantro and extremely strong coffee. The Coast gives rise to jealousy in others, because it is a bastion of culture, and art, and wealth, and vision. The hammer ever falls on the proud nail.
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STARS 38: Interlude IV [Mar. 1st, 2008|06:43 pm]
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It’s not quite the middle of the night, by conventional standards, when you finally pull into the parking lot of a Holiday Inn Express Motel somewhere within the municipality of Colorado Springs. You have a brief, but unexpectedly stressful, argument with Marian as to the number of rooms and the extent to which you and she are expecting the other to chip in, but you end up putting a double room on your AmEx and hoping that your secret Wal-Mart/Mrs. Leeds patrons were sincere when they said all expenses would be paid.

This is also the point at which Marian finds out about your contest and trip and you’re in the middle of telling her about how you seceded from conventional Sunday School in favor goblin theological education when you fall asleep. Mid-sentence, even, which is a feat I must say. Marian, not nearly as physically exhausted as you, amuses herself watching Conan O’Brien, then falls asleep herself.

Neither of you think to set a wakeup call, and the goblins (who hide in the closet, more out a sense of habit than anything else) have little sense of time. When Marian wakes up at seven-thirty the next morning she correctly guesses you wouldn’t want to be woken up, so lets you sleep while she heads out (on foot) to seek a toothbrush and a change of clothes and various other items. She wakes you up when she gets back, because she knows the checkout time is noon, but she’s forgotten that her watch is set to the wrong time zone and you aren’t ready to leave until just before one.

As such, you end up staying an extra day in Colorado Springs, showing the goblins mountains and feeding crisp mountain air to the sylphs and bonding with Marian over a trip to Van Briggle Pottery and then the American Numismatics Museum and Library (it turns out she is a lifetime member of the ANA and spent three years training in their Library under a vow of silence, which the way she tells it is a very funny story). She explains how she came to be head librarian for Church County, Kansas, and you pick up with your life story, repeating yourself on a few times. It’s a much more pleasant day than the previous one.

While you eat chicken dinners and watch the sky darken, let me take a moment to talk a little bit about the Mountains, the region you now visit, and the fourth world on our list.

THE MOUNTAINS ARE THE SPINE OF AMERICA

The Mountains are the spine of America; they hold the West and East together and support the softer spaces with rigidity and order. The Mountains start far to the north, where no one wears a watch and there are more wolves than people, and they grow and grow until they split off the Sierra Nevadas, that western edge of the Mountains, while the Rockies continue southwards, growing larger and larger. They explode in the southern border states, Arizona and New Mexico, where their earthiness transcends physicality and infects the noosphere and the very air with the Mountain spirit: hard, gritty, and above all dry.

Between its two arms the Mountains cradles the great Basin. Together, the Mountains and their Basin are home of hundreds of splinter churches and political colonies. Id is here, and Trunktown, and the Mormon communities, along with an uncounted number of communes. The anthropologists of the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, that storied home of scholarship, have cataloged seven thousand five hundred and sixteen different socioreligiopolitical sects already, and their teams continue to scour the Mountains today; they describe a new community or sect an average of twice a week. Of course not all enclaves survive; most inhabitants of the Mountains join and eventually break away from five to ten sects over the course of their lifetimes. It is a region rich in rhetoric and ritual.

Not uncommonly, travelers pass through a village full of heretic Christians who venerate Elvis as the second coming, then on the return trip discover that the Elvii have been discredited and scattered and the town is now in the hands of a militant offshoot of the Society for Creative Anachronism. For beliefs are liquid things, and the Mountains shelter and nuture them, making for a vibrant marketplace of ideas. The Mountains are the political center of America, with the East lost, and the religious center too. Prophets, salesmen, zealots, and marketers spring fully-formed from the stone, ready and eager to fight for their beliefs until a higher bidder comes along.

In the desert, however, things are different. The rich humidity of ideas that so permeates the northern Mountains dries up completely there, pushed out of the mind by the severity of the landscape. Those believers who become a burden to their brethren are sent out into the dry landscape to meditate, and purify themselves, and to develop doubts. In the desert zealots become cynics, and cynics become nihilists, and nihilists are shot for the good of the world we live in.
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STARS 37: Interlude III [Feb. 29th, 2008|03:44 pm]
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What it looks like, as it gets darker, is that somewhere far above a family of giants were re-graveling their driveway and they accidentally dropped a sack of gravel and it spilled and some of that gravel fell in a rough line running north-south on the edge of the plains. It was giantish gravel, with each individual rock thousands of feet high, and over time bits of the gravel's faces eroded and dirt deposited on it. Or, alternatively, it looks like back in prehistory a time-traveler with a growth ray (the opposite of a shrink ray) visited what would one day become Colorado, and grew a large number of pebbles very large, just for laughs. That's what it looks like. It's pretty, with the last bits of sunset turning the sky pink, but it's not what you're driving for.

To your left is a land you've never considered, because I know what interests you and it's not the Great Plains. So you probably will tune me out now, because I'm about to lay down some tracks.

THE GREAT PLAINS ARE BIGGER THAN YOU

The Great Plains are bigger than you. They are bigger than life, larger than sex; the Plains dominate what was once the central United States. They stretch from the edge of reason, called the Mississippi River, on one side, to the Rocky Mountains on the other. North of the Plains there is only ice and misery and Canada. Their West Texas spur wraps them around the Rump South. They choke out geography like crabgrass in a garden; some fear they will one day cover all the Earth.

Some have lit candles, rather than curse the darkness; a few communities persist in the endless rolling prairie. Lubbock, in West Texas, Kansas City, in Missouri, Lusk, in Wyoming, and Des Moines, in Iowa, are perhaps the best-known, but the human spirit endures even in the face of yawning emptiness, and community theater groups and bridge clubs can be found throughout the vast howling madness, if you know where to look for them.

Below a certain threshold (scholars debate its value) communities are susceptible to what is sometimes called the manitou curse, or the big-sky curse, or the anarchy curse, wherein citizens wander from their homes in the night, walking out into the empty prairie with their gaze focused on the stars above. Whole counties have been depopulated in this way, with the few survivors found half-dead of exposure days or weeks later, their eyes fixed on the day-ball or (if they are found at night) on the day-ball's treacherous bride and their million million children.

Reports of roaming packs of sky-coyotes eating whole townships' worth of people are simply not credible, and few today still believe that the Plains are cursed by the divine. They point to the region's unassailable agricultural prosperity, to its many monasteries where devout Northerners chant prayers and beg the day-ball for mercy, to the many zoologists who proclaim that the sky-coyote has been extinct for decades. Because this is the world we live in.
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STARS 36: Interlude Continued [Feb. 28th, 2008|03:44 pm]
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What is the matter with Kansas? You flee it as quickly as the Eisenhower Interstate Highway System will permit, seeking a fresh start and a new life further westward, where even now the sun slides behind mountains that might mark the edge of everything, and glare makes you squint and flip down the visor of your rented car and wish you were already away from Kansas. But Kansas is long and the highway is straight and there are many miles to go before you reach Colorado and sleep.

While you drive, consider another of America's regions.

THEY CALL IT THE RUMP SOUTH

They call it the Rump South. Georgia, the Carolinas, Alabama: these and other names are gone now, passed into legend and song. Only a few of the Southron states remain: Louisiana, Arkansas, East Texas. This is your homeland, of course, and it would be presumptuous of me to attempt to tell you about it. You remember dust and mud, dry creekbeds and huge clouds of dirt kicked up by cars on gravel roads. You remember riding shotgun in a red pickup truck with fishing poles in the gun rack in the back window, and watching the tall grass collapse as the truck carved a path through it on the way to the pond. You remember a television that only picked up four stations, and two of them were round-the-clock perennial telethons begging money to fund missionary work and Superbook. But I am not speaking to you alone.

There is more to the Rump South than your quasi-rural childhood. It is the home of New Orleans, and Houston, and populist politics. It is the smallest of the regions, and it is the region with the strongest sense of identity. Fusion jazz comes, famously, from West Memphis, and Southron cuisine is popular the world over, or at least parts of it. You can't go wrong with a shrimp po'boy, they say, and it is true.

Some say the Rump South is backwards: backwards-looking, with its endless fetishization of a long-defunct culture now irretrievably vanished into the history books; backwards-facing, with its low per capita wealth and low per capita taxation; backwards-leaning, with its highest-in-the-country per capita churches and its attempts to legislate progressivism out of existence. And in many ways they are correct. Traditionalists to the end, Southrons are perhaps too much like frogs in slowly-heated water, dying too gradually to notice and leap away.

But this is a short-sighted view, and itself looks backwards. For despite its flaws, the Rump South abides, and remembers past glories while waiting a brighter future. NASA is here too, in Houston, and technocrats rub elbows with old family names at church picnics and war reenactments. Wal-Mart comes from the Rump South, and so did the Clintons and their kind. The river bottoms and marshes of the Rump South support the largest known bigfoot colony, the national Boy Scout Jamberoo is held here each year, and the Space Elevator in Austin promises to bring Southron culture to low orbit at a fraction of past costs. And this, too, is the world we live in.
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STARS 35: An Interlude [Feb. 27th, 2008|11:08 pm]
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So you head west, with your new friends the air elementals and the goblins and the librarian whose name you've finally learned. That is fine, and I'm not going to object to it, but I would like to take a moment to provide context about the country through which you travel. I know, this is a story about you, but try to have some understanding for those who crave deep background.

AMERICA: LAND OF REGIONS

Some call Wales a land of regions. Others, Spain. Still others, India. However only one country is made up of the specific mixture of regions which makes up the United States, and I am sure that you have guessed which country that is. Pay close attention as I review the six regions which comprise America.

EAST OF THE MISSISSIPPI THERE IS ONLY DARKNESS

East of the Mississippi there is only thunder, and dark clouds. Legends speak of a fabled mythic East, where ships of the line docked laden with Oriental treasures in the harbors of Annapolis, New York, Boston, Dol Amroth, Pensacola. Since the end of history in 1973, however, ghosts and rainstorms are all that inhabit the time zone called “Eastern.” Black barges, derelict and with no apparent means of propulsion, are still sighted on certain moonless nights along the Mississippi River’s shore, but they do not put into port and their cargo of mysterious shipping containers (marked only with suggestively ancient ideograms) remain one of the great puzzles of our time.

The confusingly named University of Washington at St. Louis has in your lifetime become the primary center of academic study on the topic of the East, with its College of Arts and Sciences supporting a Department of Easterly Studies. However even the few Easterly Studies majors who matriculate each year will confess (once their inhibitions have been dampened through alcohol or exhaustion) that they have learned almost nothing about the dark and windswept place that blocks Missouri from reaching the Atlantic Ocean, and that their choice of major was influenced more by a desire to keep a full social calendar than by scholarship.

Sometimes a man comes forward (almost always a man) claiming to be a resident of Bridgeport or Atlanta or Walt Disney World. He has a fabulous tale to sell to Random House: the howling winds and lightning that consumed his storied home, the torrential rage of angry Poseidon, and him only escaped alone to tell thee. Invariably he appears on talk shows, and makes enigmatic statements about the black barges, and the strange black 737s which sometimes appear in the sky, and he smiles an enigmatic smile and asserts you will have to wait for his book for the whole story.

It is all a sham of course: none of the handful of actual refugees from the great doom are fools enough to admit it. Too well do they remember when the great gates of water above opened up, and washed away whatever credibility and coherence the nation had left. Unwilling to draw attention to themselves, they moved quietly westward, living under assumed names and with assumed professions. The soft-spoken gas station attendant, the taciturn hotel clerk, the mild-mannered middle school civics teacher: these are all that remains of the once-proud East. Sooner or later the false Easterners, the bold and straight-faced liars, are exposed as the frauds they are, and their books are remaindered and their interviews never air in reruns. And this is the world we live in.
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STARS 34 [Feb. 20th, 2008|10:45 pm]
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Your gaze moves from the librarian, to the goblins, back to the librarian, back to the goblins, to the empty space where your sylphs ought to be. "No one has any ideas?"

"Pick a direction," hazards a goblin, "and put one foot in front of the other."

"Okay I am going to chalk that up not to sarcasm but to your state of grace which must surely color every process of your thoughts and make it difficult to truly know the mind of a sinner like myself," you retort. "Fine. Okay. I have to make the stupid plans anyway so here is what we will do. Wait." You turn to the librarian, who has situated herself behind her desk and is keeping her mouth shut and her face inscrutable. "You. Madame librarian, Marian, what is your name? I can't just call you librarian, which I think I have been doing like all day but it is time to make a change."

"My name is, in fact, Marian."

"Paroo?"

"No. Arbroath. Ms. Arbroath."

"And I bet! I bet! I bet!" You repeat 'I bet' a couple more times, because you forget what you were going to say next. Then you remember. "I bet you have led an interesting life, and you could share it with me and there would be drama and revelations, but we are still not doing that. Maybe later. If you want to go west with me and the sylphs and the goblins." You try to look hopeful and inviting, like a child inviting her grandmother to drive her to a toy store and just browse. "Do you want to?"

"What? No. No." The librarian -- Marian -- looks surprised you've even asked. "I've lived here for thirty years. This place would collapse without me. The county library board deserves better than that."

"Oh. Okay," you say. "I hadn't really thought about it one way or the other, I just thought I should make the offer --"

"Really it's presumptive to imagine that your status as Friend of the Library entitles you to --"

"Okay! I said okay. It's fine, forget it, you will probably be happier here without all the goblins underfoot." She looks away, and you turn back to the goblins and away from her. "So guys. This is what I am thinking, is, it would be hard for us all together to walk to the impound lot, since I don't know where it is, and get in my car? Better idea, is, for me to --"

People keep interrupting you. "Impound lot? Nonesuch place!" interjects a goblin.

"You may as well seek Mu!" agrees another.

"Oookay. Well, I told the police about my car when I was being booked, so I assume they picked it up and moved it someplace."

"Yes but no!"

"You might think!"

"You're saying it's still in the Wal-Mart parking lot? How would you even know? I'm not saying I doubt you, but..."

"Air has eyes!"

"Air has ears!" The goblins -- all of them, not just the two who have been speaking -- point simultaneously towards where they say the sylphs are.

"Oh. Okay. That makes sense. So, change of plan. No Marian. No impound lot. Just me fetching car. I will be back very soon. Wait here. Time me!"

Before anyone can interject, you sweep out of the room.


FOUR HOURS LATER


"Okay, that could have gone better," you mutter to yourself. "But we made it! We're out of Church County right... now," you say as your canary-yellow Ford passes a WELCOME TO TEMPLE COUNTY KANSAS sign. "And nobody died! That was my favorite part, when nobody died..."

"Do you remember when I said that the library would collapse without me? Do you remember that? It was not a literal statement. Or to be more technically correct, it was not intended as a literal statement." Marian says from the passenger seat.

"I said I'm sorry!"

"Actually you haven't."

"Sorry! Jeez. It wasn't really my fault, anyway."

"Yesterday I had a library."

"Are you going to be like this the whole time?"

Marian hushes, and pulls a library-bound copy of Herotodus from somewhere.

"Hey!" you say, forgetting you and Marian are at odds. "I know a story from that. The one about the first treasury and the smartest people who ever lived?"

"Mm-hm." Marian, plainly, has not forgotten.

You decide against offering to tell the story of the first treasury and the smartest people who ever lived. Another time.

"Goblins alright in the back?" You can't see them in the mirrors, but that's nothing new. They bark affirmatives.


Pick a direction, and put one foot in front of the other
West through Colorado in a straight shot over the mountains
Northwest past Nebraska and into Wyoming, that screaming gulf
Southwest into the very latest Mexico, and beyond.
North into the libertarian Plains
South through Oklahoma towards Texas
  
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STARS 33 [Feb. 14th, 2008|01:09 pm]
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You're jolted awake as someone, the librarian, shakes you by the shoulders. "Rsst!" she hisses. "You were in here for almost an hour. You fell asleep and didn't respond when I knocked. Your boy went home, and a dozen officers of peace searched this site."

"Wait, what? I was over the city..." You jerk your head around in an attempt to identify your surroundings, and nearly bump it on a stall wall. Your knees feel slightly numb from being so long in one position.

"All managed to overlook the little girls' room, which I had thought was your intention," the librarian continues. While you're in this awkward sitting/squatting position you and she are about the same effective height. "But when I knocked, after they left, there was no answer and I grew concerned."

"Yeah, I, uh, I must have fallen asleep," you say, and rub your eyes. "Sorry to scare you, I didn't get a lot of sleep and," you pause, remembering that the librarian had watched you drink two cups of coffee, "caffeine doesn't really have that much of an effect on me..."

"Mmm. Youth," the librarian says in a well-rehearsed tone. She takes a few steps backwards, so you can stand up, and soon you once more tower over her.

You stretch and scrape your knuckles on the low ceiling. "Okay. Okay. Hold on. It's all coming back to me."

"What?"

You sweep past the librarian and back out into the children's library. It seems as deserted as ever, which actually depresses you a bit: when you were a child you spent many a happy summer afternoon reading old magazines and comics and novels at your local library, and it pains you to think the children of Paradise City don't enjoy the same habit. It is however probably safer this way.

"Goblins! Yoo-hoo, goblins. It's me. Come on out, it's safe," you call. You glance at the librarian, who's rolling her eyes almost imperceptibly. "It is safe, right?" you ask her.

"As houses," she mutters.

"See?" you call. There's no immediate response, no slow trickling out of goblin faces or goblin ears, but you're undeterred. "I need y'all to do me some favors, things only goblins can do here and now. I need y'all to help me honor Christian ideals and I need y'all to help me with a holy task."

This gets their attention, and soon you and the dozen spindly-limbed little people are sitting crosslegged on a rust-colored reading-circle rug.

"We go through life blinkered," you say to the assembled goblins. "It's a human thing. But you see everything, don't you? You see everything there is."

"We saw you," confirms a goblin.

"You were doing well," says another. Probably these are the same two who acted as spokespeople before, but you can't exactly tell.

"Then I wasn't dreaming?" You ignore the librarian's attempt to serve you an interrogative stare.

"Are you dreaming now?"

"Did Daniel dream?"

"Daniel was a prophet," you say slowly. "I just had good Sunday School teachers."

"This isn't your question."

"You aren't here to ask us about your faith."

"Well, now my interest is piqued," interrupts the librarian. "I think I'm entitled to an explanation. What are you people talking about, and why are the police involved?"

"You know the history of Paradise City," the one goblin tells her.

"You wrote the book," agrees the other.

"Can we do one thing at a time, please?" you ask. "And we need to hurry, at least, I think we need to hurry."

"Time is always critical."

"No man may know the day nor the hour."

"I don't appreciate shabby treatment," mutters the librarian, but she gestures at you to continue.

You turn back to the goblins. "Okay, so, first off, the little guys, the suit of lights, are they okay?" you ask.

"They are at your right hand," says the one goblin.

"In that hand they hold a whistle," says the other.

You look to your right, but see nothing. Not that you have the power to peer into the spirit world. You wave, awkwardly, at the empty air beside you, then turn back to the goblins. "And Van Heflin, and the other cop, and the helicopter?"

"I'm sorry, helicopter?" asks the librarian, but no one acknowledges her.

"Battered but unbruised."

"Wounded pride takes longest to heal."

"Okay, okay, good. That worked out, then. I was worried that I dropped him." You feel yourself relax muscles you hadn't noticed were tense.

"We said you did well."

"It was the first thing we said."

"Right. Now... can you tell me who or what the little guys are?" You gesture vaguely off to the right. "With the whistle?"

"Dust devils," says the one goblin.

"This is still Kansas," says the other.

"No longer shackled," says the one goblin.

"Very nice work," says the other.

"Oh! Oh. Like Windy," you say, remembering the whirlwind that caught your mother. "But they must be so weak..."

"Overworked and undernourished."

"Time heals all wounds."

"They'll be blowing about again soon enough."

"Provided they aren't recaptured."

"Then I'll take them with me," you say. "I mean, assuming they're willing to come westward?"

"Indeed yes."

"They wish little else."

"And I ask you, goblins, once again: will y'all come with me westward and leave behind this unholy place? Will y'all translate for the little guys? This is a bad place to be, no offense."

The goblins exchange glances, and the librarian looks extremely quizzical.

"You did very well," the other goblin finally says.

"Every flock needs tenders," nods the other, indicating the space to your right presumably occupied by a colony of air elementals.

"Awesome! Okay. Okay. We need to get out of town, and I want my car back."


(Once again, in lieu of offering five options, I would like to open the floor to suggestions.)
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GATSBY THE BARBARIAN [Feb. 8th, 2008|02:05 pm]
What is the greatest joy in life?

To be cool.
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STARS 32 [Jan. 31st, 2008|01:17 pm]
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Your mother told you there'd be days like this.

Not specifically like this. She didn't tell you there would be days when you would be woken up in the middle of the night by a townful of hypocrites celebrating their supposed righteousness, arrested, escape, become a Friend of the Library, meet local goblins, try to give a troubled teen good advice, and then leave your body and enter the spirit world and find out you can fly in the spirit world and encounter a cop who crazy-hates you and who has fog holding him up and doing his dirty work. But she did say there would be days you just wanted to skip over, and that sounds about right.

Officer Van Heflin rises up towards you, apparently his plan really is to get his hands on you and then rip you apart, but you're not having any of that, and you swing around behind him, banking through the air not unlike Peter Pan. He slowly turns around to face you, all the while mumbling about how much he hates you and how you're a bad person. He's actually more colorful than that, with some phrases becoming almost lyrical, but a little bit of ignoring him goes a long way.

You turn your attention instead to Van Heflin's aura, the wispy objects or entities that support him and hold him up. "Hey, guys," you say to the suit of lights. "Are you well? Are you guys having a good time? I mean it doesn't look like you're having a good time, you're holding up Captain Asshole here and I know, right? You'd probably rather just set him down, I bet. I know I would, that sounds more like me and my style."

Van Heflin lunges at you, and you slip away again, gaining altitude on him. He's all blah blah blah with the misogyny and the rage. If he was rounder and older, maybe you could goad him into a heart attack or a stroke or something like that, but it's not a realistic option here.

"Come on, tell you what," you say to the suit of lights. "Just set him back down and you can come with me to the West! I've got a big car and already I'm planning on taking along some goblins, so you could hang out with them."

He is moving faster, though. His maneuverability seems to be improving with practice, just as yours did, and his top speed is rapidly approaching yours. You cajole the spirits of the air (or whatever they are, you're still not sure) with increasing desperation.

"C'mon, guys, it'll be fun, it'll be an awesome fun time, I promise and I know from fun --"

You yelp as Van Heflin gets his right hand around your left ankle, and then you yelp again as the aura around the cop abruptly departs him: the fog slides off him and collapses into a single wispy point about the size of a tennis ball, which hovers near his head.

Then both you and Van Heflin yelp, as he starts to fall back to earth. His grip tightens on your ankle and he flips down, spinning you by the foot until he's hanging from you like a hot air balloon's gondola. You both start to sink back to earth.

Don't drop me bitch don't you dare drop me

"Let go of me!" You try to kick Van Heflin in the head, but can't reach. All you accomplish is getting his body to swing back and forth like a pendulum under you, which does nothing to forestall the continuing sinking.

With his free left hand, Van Heflin fumbles for his whistle, but it tumbles out of his grasp (thanks at least in part to you distracting him by throwing a pencil at him, which pencil you had in your pocket and had forgotten about) and down to earth (the pencil also falls).

I swear to God put me down do not drop me

The little glowy tennis ball thing that had been Van Heflin's suit of lights wobbles in the air and pulses, as if to attract your attention.

"Hey, guys, hi, great work on the whole letting go of him thing," you tell the glowball with some forced joviality. "But as you might have noticed we are losing altitude at an increasingly alarming rate? I'm hoping you can pull one more favor for, so we can get out of here, right?

Please please don't drop me


"Can you...
....get Van Heflin to let go of me?"
...fetch me that magic whistle?"
...go to the library, tell the goblins I need a hand?"
...get Van Heflin down to earth without hurting him?"
...help me hold Van Heflin up so we don't lose any more altitude?"
  
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STARS 31 [Jan. 29th, 2008|11:03 am]
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"Okay, you know what? Flying is the best thing ever and it makes the otherwise painfully lame spirit world a lot less lame all by itself. I am extremely tempted," you add, accentuating the statement with a midair flip, "I am extremely tempted to go totally apeshit and try to tear you guys and your whole town up, but that would probably be wrong and I'd slip into hubris and self-righteousness and then I'd be just as bad as you."

Van Heflin, lamest nemesis ever, tries to say something, but your ability to manipulate the spirit world (improved with practice) allows you to mute him. Instead he lunges at you. This doesn't work at all, because you can fly, so all he manages to do is prove himself a fool. He blows on his whistle, but as he's been muted, you hear nothing.

"I am not done talking yet! I was going to say," you continue, "I was going to say that what I could do is establish a beachhead of progressivism and tolerance within your community, convert the young people, and tear down your wrongheaded social structures in a nonviolent way? But that would be the work of a lifetime, and I seriously need to get west.

"Did I mention that I can fly? You can't fly, how sad for you... All right, I'm gloating, and it's a short slide from gloating to worse evils, so I'll stop. I don't expect you to thank me. but --"

You break off in surprise; Van Heflin has from somewhere gotten himself a whole passel of wisps of glowing fog, the putative angels you saw before. They cling to him like a suit of lights, and he rises slowly up in the air towards you.

I am going to break your arms you worthless bitch is a sentence which coalesces from everywhere around you. I'll beat the sin out of you I swear to Christ

"That doesn't sound at all Christlike," you mutter, but this totally fails to dissuade him. He's slower than you, seems like, at least at the moment -- he might be picking up speed, but that might just be your panic talking.

Below you, the other cop from the helicopter -- Van Heflin's partner -- looks about as surprised by this turn of events as you are. He shouts something about this being crazy, but otherwise has nothing useful to add.


And then you...
You fly up, hoping to outlast or evade Van Heflin.
You fly down into the library, hoping it's sacred enough to help you.
You decide it's on, hubris or not, and attempt to use aggressive magic, hoping you don't damn yourself in the process.
You swoop down towards the helicopter, looking for a way to counteract Van Heflin's whistle, hoping that's not a wild goose chase.
You fly down towards the second cop, hoping he's more likely to listen to reason.
  
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STARS 30.5 (that was fast) [Jan. 24th, 2008|10:36 pm]
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“What would Jesus want with a helicopter?”

Well, duh. Neither of them is Jesus, and their cold lumpy gray bodies can’t fly like you. You soar towards them – hey, astral flying is fun! – and burn a little more brightly. You smell fertilizer and vines.

“I said,” you call out a little louder, “‘what does Jesus want with a helicopter?’”

They don’t react, or at least they don’t react other than to continue to hover near you. From inside the helicopter, you realize, they almost certainly can’t hear you. But you can fix that: the whumpty-whumpty-whumpty of the helicopter warps and becomes your voice. Your question echoes all around the two figures in the helicopter.

They don’t open fire on you, which it occurs to you might be an option, but maybe not. Maybe they’re unarmed. They land the helicopter instead, in the middle of a big intersection downtown. If you squint you can see all the cars passing right through the ‘copter.

The two men get out of the copter and wave frantically at you, shouting phrases along the lines of stop it you crazy bitch and what are you doing you and various nasty words and get down here. Any impulse to swoop down to them, which under happier circumstances, might have considered allowing to flit across your consciousness, is quickly squelched by their obscenities and by your recognizing one of them as a sweatstained and befouled reflection of your personal nemesis-of-the-day, Officer Van Heflin. He doesn’t have a gun, but he does have a dog whistle.

Then…


Then...
Then you fly down into the library.
Then you call upon angels of the sky and demand they murder your enemies.
Then you swoop down to speak to the men.
Then you swoop down to tackle the men.
Then you fly over to the clutch of cops near the library.
  
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STARS 30 [Jan. 24th, 2008|01:14 pm]
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The spirit world is wetter than you would have expected, hot and damp like the inside of a greenhouse. As you make that analogy, you feel it growing warmer around you and your nostrils fill with the familiar aromas of potting soil and tropical plants. It's illusory of course; you were vaguely aware going in that perceptions in the spirit world are subjective, but still it takes some getting used to.

Time is also subjective, so after a few subjective minutes of blinking and wiggling your astral fingers and focusing on the mundane world around you, you're able to center in on your physical body, slumped over and snoring, sitting on the very low toilet seat. You look somewhat puffier than you would like but the snores probably sound louder than they really are on account of you're outside your body.

It occurs to you that it's just barely possible you haven't left your body at all, that you fell asleep in the stall and you're dreaming. Then you think, hey, no, when you're dreaming you don't think you're dreaming. Then you realize that you've mixed up dreaming with being a psychopath, and abandon that whole line of thought.

Movement requires a whole nother set of practicing, but soon enough you're strolling through walls and flying up through the library roof, up to a high enough altitude you can scope out the spirit-world side of Paradise City. It looks much like the mundane Paradise City, except for the perpetual twilight, the lack of cars or people, and all the fog.

"Well this is a little low-budget," you mutter to yourself. "I mean, it's not even rainbow-colored fog." Some patches of fog -- mostly up over your head -- are lighter than their surroundings, as if they're glowing slightly. As if in an attempt to please you, the fog in your vicinity shimmers slightly, and if you squint you could convince yourself it was multicolored, but it's not very exciting. "Lame. I was hoping for giant mushrooms or like strange-flavored lightning or fairies or something, this is just a greenhouse smell."

With effort, you can shift your attention to the mundane world, and see sunlight and cars and so on, but all that looks even less mystical and fantastic than the spirit world. In the real world it's a glaringly bright, sunny day.

You think back to your lessons, lo those many years ago, when your Sunday School teacher was instructing you on astral projection. Holy places, including but not limited to churches, were supposed to be lit with fires that neither gave heat nor consumed fuel, like a 24/7 Pentecost. You spot a church steeple a few blocks over, but it is if anything darker than the surrounding buildings. Stupid evil town.

The only light sources you can see (other than you -- with a start you realize you're glowing probably bright enough to read by) are the library -- which glimmers in a half-hearted fashion beneath you -- and the various wisps of glowing smoke high overhead, which, you realize, are probably spirits of some kind. Armed with that context, you're able to spot other probably-spirits down on the ground, including a large assemblage of them a block over from the library in a drugstore parking lot. Peering through to the mundane world you count four cop cars in that parking lot.

Suddenly you're distracted by the noise of a helicopter, which it takes you a minute to focus in on but no sure enough there is a helicopter in the spirit world. It's a ways off, in probably the direction of the Wal-Mart, and you're fairly certain it doesn't exist in the real world.


What now?
Investigate the helicopter.
Investigate the cops and assembled spirits.
Investigate the high-altitude spirits.
Pray for guidance.
Screw this, go back to your body.
  
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STARS 29: PRAYER [Jan. 19th, 2008|04:59 pm]
[Tags|]

(cf Matthew 6:6)

"Is there a bathroom down here?" you ask the librarian.

"By the stairs," she says. "But you probably want to use the one upstairs, it's scaled for grownups."

"Either way," you say, and duck out of her office before she has a chance to say something cutting, past Josh who is still sitting in a charmingly undersized chair and leafing through a vintage issue of Penny Power magazine, into the very little girls' room.

The librarian wasn't kidding; there are three stalls each about two-thirds the size of a normal stall, and sinks which jut out from the wall at almost exactly your knee-level. This must be what it's like to be seven or eight feet tall. Anyway, you cram yourself into one of the stalls -- they smell like lemon and pine had a fight and cut each other up pretty bad -- and briefly you consider kneeling but there's really no space so instead you sit on the toilet, which is like sitting on a shoebox.

"Are you there, God? It's me, your pal with the feet," you mutter aloud, which is how you've started off every prayer since you were six years old. At one point there was a funny story behind it, and then it was a boring story, and then you forgot it. In a few years maybe you'll make an effort to remember and it'll have evolved into a heartwarming story, but in the meantime you've got bigger fish to fry.

Okay, you think at God. I'm trying to do the right thing, here, and it's not easy because of how fucked up this place is. You're confident God doesn't mind your use of the f-word; you and He are buddies. Unless you were all like fuck you God! that would probably make Him mad. So there's this kid and I feel like I should help him because it's not his fault he's fucked up right? And there are these goblins who have problems like nine thousand times bigger than middle school angst, and they don't even have sins, so if Josh deserves my help then they do too, but I don't know how to help them because they don't want to leave, and the librarian is getting on my nerves because she's all I-know-something-you-don't-know but it seems to me like she's just sitting around watching all this crap happen in re the goblins, and I haven't had any lunch or any breakfast and I got like two hours of sleep last night and that was in my car and I don't know whether my car has been impounded or what and Officer Van Heflin and the evil police are probably looking for me and maybe they'll pounce on me as soon as I leave the library, and what kind of sacred asylum-granting space is a damn library I can't stay here forever I am supposed to be going to the west coast and God have I just messed everything up what the hell am I going to do?

You stifle a sob, and then you abjectly fail to stifle another sob, and then you have a quiet cry by yourself in the little girls' room and think things over.

It could be worse, God, and I thank You for the blessings that I have, I'm not saying You aren't helping me all the time. Ever since, like, before I left home, I've felt that You were guiding my actions and that right was on my side, even when I was breaking out of prison. But I don't know what to do now, and I feel like everyone is counting on me. Which I realize is crazy presumptuous but if I can't be honest with You then there's no point anyway.

You wipe your teary face with scratchy single-ply institutional toilet paper, and run over your priorities in your head.

Number one, I have to get to LA. Number two, I have to help the goblins. I don't feel like it's my duty to convert this whole town away from their perversion of Godliness, or even to revenge myself or the poor drunk-from goblins upon Officer Van Heflin.

So what I need to do is get my car, get the goblins into my car, and get my car onto the Interstate. The librarian can come along if she wants, but only if she tells me her name. Josh can't come, because I don't want to break federal laws by moving a minor across state lines.

The goblins don't want to leave, because they say that it's their land and the townspeople are squatters and they won't be pushed off their land. Maybe I can, I don't know, convince them somehow. Or hit them with dictionaries and stuff them in a sack. But right now I feel really bedraggled.

Suddenly something -- either the word "bedraggled" or divine intervention -- sparks a memory in your mind, of your late preteen or early teenage years, when the goblins in the First Freewill Baptist Church were teaching you how to extricate yourself from the natural world and, all connections to the physical realm suspended, travel freely through the numinous plane for a while, interacting with the elementals and spirits and angels and demons there, spying on the mortal world and those in, before eventually returning to your body. It's a difficult practice, and you never master it, partly because the goblins who instruct you exist simultaneously in both worlds, and cannot demonstrate the act.

"The problem is one of motivation. Someday," one of the goblins had told you, "you will be bedraggled and exhausted in an unholy land, hunted by heretics, seeking to help others and yourself, tearful in the bathroom. When that day comes, you will need this, and you will be able to do it with God's help."

At the time, you thought it was being cryptic and elliptical, the ways goblins usually are, making some kind of allegory or metaphor or something, but no, turns out it was speaking the simple truth.


How best to utilize this miracle?
Try to convince the goblins, in the spirit world
Explore Paradise City via the spirit world
Spy on the librarian through the spirit world
Recruit spiritual aid in the spirit world
Find your car in the spirit world
  
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STARS 28 [Jan. 11th, 2008|08:04 pm]
[Tags|]

Atypically prompt voting plus looking-for-something-to-do-that-isn't-work me yields faster STARS.

You open your mouth to speak and it turns into a yawn, but then you stretch, and pretend there was no chance the fourteen-year-old boy was staring at you, certainly no chance that was worth noticing, and stand up.

"Come, uh, come into the back," you tell Josh, and gesture towards the librarian's office. "There are some... people... I'd like you to... meet." Josh bites his lip, and then you're seeing the whole scenario from his perspective, so you change your mind.

"Better yet, sit there, I don't know, read From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. What's-her-face, I bet it's on the shelf, and I'll be back in a second." You back over to the counter and then on into the librarian's office.

In the librarian's office, the librarian herself still sits behind her desk, sipping coffee from a mug with WORLD'S KANSAS'S CHURCH COUNTY'S PARADISE CITY'S BEST LIBRARIAN on it in hand-painted letters, which is probably a funny story you're in no mood to hear. The goblins however are no longer sitting where they were. Presumably they went back into whatever hidey-holes they live in, when you went upstairs.

"I forget --" you start, then close the office door so Josh can't overhear. "I forget what boys that age are like. You're talking to them, everything's cool, and then suddenly you're extremely uncomfortable. I thought it was me, I mean, I was in eighth grade too? But no, it's totally them."

The librarian, whose name you remember you still don't know, gives you a pensive look. "I heard you talking out there. Would you like me to talk to him, or are you capable of handling it?"

"It's fine, it's fine, it's just draining, having to..." You gesture vaguely. "Where did they go? I want him to meet them."

"They're in the stacks," the librarian says. "It's where they spend most of their time, in the spaces behind the books on shelves, or under the shelves, or in the spaces behind the shelves. The boy won't see unless they want to be seen, which they don't."

"He's not a bad kid," you say. "If he met them, one on one... I know they helped me out a lot when I was, well, I was younger than him."

"Hmmf."

"And I resent this town and its ill-treatment of goblins," you continue. "Maybe if Josh met them, he'd realize, and tell others..."

"If you like," says the librarian sourly.

If you would like to go back out into the children's library and ask the goblins to come out, turn to page 843.
If you would like to take the opportunity to ask the librarian about herself, turn to page 4.
If you would like to tell Josh to go home, turn to page 314.
If you would like to pray for guidance, turn to page 76.
If you would like to use magic to force the goblins to reveal themselves, turn to page 1016.


You turn to page...
843
4
314
76
1016
  
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STARS 27 [Jan. 10th, 2008|11:29 am]
[Tags|]

You sigh a long and slightly overly dramatic sigh, and wave Josh towards the staircase. "C'mon, let's sit downstairs. You've plainly got something on your mind." Downstairs you'll be closer to the goblins, which could be beneficial if a) there's a chance they might be impressed by your willingness to minister to the needs of snuffly pasty over-privileged white boys like Josh here, or b) if Josh flips out and tries to kill you or something, and you need backup.

The kid hesitates before descending the stairs, but he does follow you, and soon the two of you are sitting in comically undersized chairs in the low-ceilinged children's library basement. Over Josh's shoulder you can see the door to the librarian's office, but no goblins are in evident residence.

"Okay," you say brightly, and realize you don't know how to proceed.

Josh, for his part, looks uncomfortable.

Each of you waits for the other to speak for a few seconds, and then the short pause becomes a long one and then you find yourself speaking some more just to fill the air. Youth counseling is not one of your skill sets.

"So, okay, okay, here's what I, this is what I'm hearing," you say. "You have something on your mind because you're here looking for advice, and this is a library, a place of wisdom, and I pledged to disseminate that wisdom to the best of my ability. What I don't know, this is why I'm a little stymied, what I don't know is what it is you want help with.

"I think of a library as someplace to go for help related to, like, school projects, and when I'm trying to remember who was in which movie, and that kind of thing, which they can do with computers now? But before you were asking about love, and now I'm just going to throw the ball back in your court and hear what you're saying, okay?"

Josh rubs his chin (which has a surprising amount of acne, or maybe not so surprising under the circumstances). "Um," he says, and then you're back to the long uncomfortable pauses.

When you were in elementary school you were sent to the school psychologist a few times for reasons that were never clear to you, and you vaguely remember playing boring board games with her and not wanting to answer questions about your home life. There are, however, no boring board games here.

You're on the verge of asking Josh if he wants to play Twenty Questions, when he starts talking at last. He's not good at telling stories; he starts scenes too early and he finishes them too late, and a couple of times he goes on digressions that are neither themselves inherently interesting nor do they go anywhere thematically related to his overarching point, and a couple of times you have a question or a comment but he won't let you interject until he's finished his thought, which conclusion takes long enough that your question is no longer relevant by the time you're able to ask it.

However, you make an effort to listen, and altogether you glean the following.

1. Josh's parents are married and he lives with them in what seems like a stable arrangement.
2. He's the younger of two children; his brother joined some kind military organization and is serving somewhere outside Kansas.
3. His family is distinctly less religious than you would have assumed based on your knowledge of Paradise City; they go to church only once a week.
4. Josh is a student at the local middle school, which is named after Orval Faubus for some reason. He was present, in fact, at the big overnight celebration that woke you up so very very early this morning, though he like most of his classmates didn't arrive until after dawn (around the same time you were being booked for assaulting an officer, although you don't tell Josh that).
5. While there, around the same time you were escaping from lockup, he saw a girl he's attracted to, named Emma, whom he has several classes with.
6. This girl, Emma, was apparently holding hands or something with some other boy, named Nate. Josh is unclear on the specifics but it sounds pretty chaste.
7. Josh believes Emma is aware that he's attracted to her, though he presents no evidence of this.
8. Further, he believes that he is a millstone around her neck, preventing her from enjoying perfect happiness with her fated lover Nate.
9. You are able to determine, when you ask, that Josh and Emma haven't shared more than forty seconds of conversation in the last year.
10. When he saw Emma holding hands (or whatever) with Nate, Josh was deeply disheartened and rode his bike home, where he poured over his collection of paperback novels. According to Josh.
11. Then he rode his bike here to the library, seeking an explanation for why fiction lied to him, and met you.
12. And you told him (this is how he describes it, even though you were there and remember it differently) that some people (ie Emma and Nate) were destined to live happily ever after, and others (ie Josh) were destined to live their lives out cold and lonely and die alone with no loved ones to mourn them.
13. So he rode his bike home, again, and then decided to turn around and go back to the library.
14. He doesn't say so, but it looks to you that after sobbing essentially nonstop for about four hours, give or take, he's all cried out. Josh seems more tired than weepy.
15. He doesn't say this either, but telling this is something wouldn't ordinarily do, especially under the circumstances (you being a total stranger and a non-hideous fully grown member of the opposite sex to boot), so perhaps the library was a good choice of venue after all, qv your quest for local sacred spaces.
16. Just telling all of this to someone else seems to have calmed him down, also see point number fourteen.

You give him some boilerplate advice about how in fact most fourteen year old girls do not have magic powers that allow them to magically sense when fourteen year old boys like them. You leave out a funny/bittersweet story about yourself at that age, and your various classmates, and some tricks that you learned from your goblin tutors, because it'd give him the wrong set of ideas.

And how generally dying alone isn't something he needs to worry about at his age, and how what you meant to say with regards to romance before was not at all what he heard, and all in all it's highly unlikely that any of it sinks in, but at least he's no longer sobbing or shouting expletives at you. Exposure to that much teen angst is draining, however, and by the time you've advised him to the best of your abilities, you're feeling drowsy. It's been a long day and it's barely noon.


You...
Lose the kid, find the goblins.
Bring the kid to meet the goblins.
Head back to Wal-Mart, look for your car.
Take a well-deserved nap.
Question the kid about Paradise City, goblins, et cetera.
  
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