When the bats showed up, my first thought was, “Oh, of course there are bats.” We had never done a giant, multi-legged kaiju in my games, but if we had, I would have included mooks like that, because you have to have mooks. Because Mome Rath was so tall, and probably wouldn’t be taken down […]
Worth the Candle, Ch 155: Mome Rath
“Alright,” said Arthur as we sat in the theater, waiting for the movie to start. “Dumbest possible cinematic universes, go go go.” It was his third time seeing Captain America: Civil War, and my second. I had been feeling weird about our friendship, mostly because I was seeing Tiff behind his back. Every time it […]
Worth the Candle, Ch 154: Above From Below
“Assume people know what they’re doing” is often a pretty poor heuristic, but I didn’t really have much of a choice as far as meditation went. The instructions I’d been given were vague, describing the pillar and saying that I should keep it in mind for the duration. Because that was all I’d been instructed […]
Worth the Candle, Ch 153: The Temple
Long ago, the Li’o’te Temple had been buried by people who had wanted to put an end to still magic and couldn’t get around the temple’s inviolability. When the still mages had recovered the temple, they had left it where it was, deep underground, and done little more than excavating down to it, largely because […]
Worth the Candle, Ch 152: The Time to Talk
There was a hiccup in the Demon-Blooded Festival, right at the last second: apparently the prisoner that they were going to execute escaped from custody shortly after what I can only assume was an absolute farce of a trial. The committee decided to instead use an entad, helpfully donated by Oberlin, but everyone was well […]
Worth the Candle, Ch 151: The Mind’s Eye
Arthur had always been a fan of pointing out time compression in media, wherever he saw it. There was a part in The Dark Knight Rises, Batman escapes from this big pit somewhere in either India or Morocco, and then has to travel back to Gotham City. He probably has enough time to do this, […]
Worth the Candle, Ch 150: Than One Innocent Suffer
The sun had gone down while we ate dinner, but Li’o seemed no less busy, and the temperature hadn’t seemed to move all that much, thanks to a warm wind that was blowing through the streets. Amaryllis and I had talked to the lawyers earlier in the day, enough to get a sense of what […]
Worth the Candle, Ch 149: I Have to Hand it to You
Dinner went … okay. There were questions and answers, but we avoided talking about some of the bigger stuff, like the narrative, and the exact nature of Uther Penndraig. How Reimer hadn’t made the connection to Arthur … well, he’d grown up his whole life knowing about Uther Penndraig, the mythical figure who had done […]
Worth the Candle, Ch 148: Sing For Your Supper
We sat around the big table together, with everyone assembled. Dinner was coming, and I was stressing about that, but we had a few hours to kill until Lisi and Reimer showed up, and that meant that it was time to debrief. Hopefully, I would get some information out of our elders. “I have nothing,” […]
Worth the Candle, Ch 147: Good Vibrations
The phrase “full English breakfast” apparently didn’t have an analog on Aerb, but the idea had apparently tickled Bethel’s fancy. She had started with the traditional full English breakfast, then moved on to other Earth nationalities (apparently other countries had their own take on it), and once she’d exhausted those, she had moved to making […]
Worth the Candle, Ch 146: Terrors of the Black Age
True to his word, Reimer had mailed us (actual physical mail with stamps and everything!) more notes on the system, including more of the virtues he knew, and notes on the campaigns that he’d played in, the ones created by the Aerb version of myself. I read through them, naturally, and even with the Reimer […]
Worth the Candle, Ch 145: Freshman
I sweated over it a fair bit, but Amaryllis and the others came back safe and sound at around four in the morning, but without the manual. They had met my double’s dad, who was close enough to being my dad, a helicopter pilot for the Anglecynn military who had left after a decade of […]
Worth the Candle, Ch 144: Skewered
“Did this ever happen to Uther?” I asked Raven. “Did he ever meet people from Earth? Not the dream-skewered, but, um –” “No one matching the names on the list my father was holding at Speculation and Scrutiny,” said Raven. We were still standing around on campus, having not moved too much, even after Reimer […]
Worth the Candle, Ch 143: Manifold Paths
“I — yeah,” I said. My mind went briefly to my vambrace, which would switch me into full combat gear. I was on edge, obviously, and while Reimer (or whoever he was) didn’t look like a threat, there was a chance that could change in a hurry. I could feel Amaryllis tense up beside me. […]
Worth the Candle, Ch 142: Sound and Silence
Sound and Silence, a Brief History, by Juniper Smith The original discoverers of the Li’o’te Temple were never recorded, but the tradition of still magic dates back at least ten thousand years, making it one of the earliest ‘formal’ magics. While control of the temple has changed hands innumerable times, the temple itself is inviolable, […]