Author: alexanderwales

I was almost out the door by the time the afterglow started fading and I came to my senses. I’d been acting on half-formed ideas and baked-in instinct, not actually thinking about what I was doing. Without any thought applied to the matter, I would have left Raven’s home with sword in hand and commenced […]

It took me a long time to get as many editions of Amaryllis’ books as I did, not just the focused meditation to get their information, and the work I needed to correlate that information to the schema and map it to a physical location within the Library, but actually trekking through miles of corridors […]

Skill increased: Library Magic lvl 30! New Virtue: Bookish Instinct! Bookish Instinct: Through focused meditation, you can learn the qualities of the book you’re looking for, so long as it exists within the library, and so long as the quality is part of the current schema. The more qualities of the book you know, the […]

I made it to the soft cap of lvl 20 before the end of the day, at which point I had an instinctive feel for the books and their place within the schema. I would still need the catalog that the librarians were in the middle of constructing, and probably a map (also under construction), […]

It wasn’t Raven who came back, but Xorbus, the goblin. I had gotten my Library Magic up to level 8 while I was waiting, but stopped as soon as I saw someone’s torchlight joining my own. “Getting anywhere?” asked Xorbus with a toothy smile. “Some,” I said. “I was expecting Raven.” “Bah,” said Xorbus with […]

By ‘married’, Bethel apparently meant ‘I am going to irrevocably swallow him and our essential natures will merge’. There were a few equivalents across Aerb, species that would merge with each other and lose individual identity as part of pair-bonding, or who would take on parts of each other as part of the process, but […]

Gemma took the Egress, which apparently belonged to Pallida, but before she did, we took a few crates full of stuff out of it. “These are good times for renacim. We weathered the storm of the Second Empire far better than most,” she said as I helped her haul the crates up the hill to […]

“I don’t really understand the distinction,” said Tiff. “The DM controls all of the characters.” “DMPC is Dungeon Master Player Character ,” said Arthur, putting emphasis on the last two words. “It’s true that the DM controls all the characters, but the DMPC occupies a role as a player character in a way that NPCs […]

Pallida showed up with Heshnel and Gemma right around dawn, the earliest that they could have come and still claimed to have waited a day like we’d wanted them to. Their metallic bean-ship came down in a field half a mile from Bethel, and I walked down the path a bit to go say hello. […]

“I wanted to talk about,” I began, before Amaryllis raised a hand. “Ten minutes,” she said. She’d led me to the room we’d been using as a time chamber, and had a brief conversation with Bethel along the way. Bethel understood the purpose of us going off together like this was so we could get […]

“So what, precisely, will happen if we start shipping out televisions?” asked Amaryllis. She was pissed off, for a number of reasons. She was pissed off at Bethel, naturally, for both the foul play and the break in communication, especially against someone who was probably an ally. She was pissed off at me, for taking […]

I opened Bethel’s front door slowly and looked out at Raven with a raised eyebrow. She was dressed in black from head to toe, a concealing outfit that went so far as to keep her neck covered. Her hair was the same way Maddie had usually worn hers, bangs cut to just above her eyes, […]

There wasn’t much to say about Maddie. She was Craig’s shadow, as much as he would let her be, which meant that I’d known her about as long as I’d known him. On the rare occasions that I would go over to their house, she would bring chips or drinks for us while we played […]

“No,” said Arthur. “I’m saying it’s a numbers game, and only once you know the numbers can you play the game.” I slid into the booth next to Tiff with my food. Ruttles’ had a burger bar, full of fixin’s, and whenever we ate there, I always spent a lot of time making sure that […]

I spent some time staring at her body, her corpse, the flesh that had contained her but now did not. It felt like the weight of her death settled on my shoulders and then stayed there, pressing me into place. It probably wasn’t all that long, since Amaryllis moved over to Fenn and pointed the […]