#pilcrow

Pilcrow is the essence of stillness. She often wears a tuxedo. Her black hair is of a moderate length and is perfectly groomed. Her whole affect is to point away from herself and her own body, and her body language probably shows that. She looks like the perfect servant. One eyebrow may be ever-so-slightly lifted as she notices something not quite right.

She speaks less than she thinks.  She watches and takes it all in.  You get the sense that there is something going behind her eyes that she is concealing from you, but her placid demeanor denies it.  Is it stillness, or is it waiting?  Is it the quiet of someone trained to serve perfectly, or the quiet of a spring coiled up?

Is it not that she does nothing.  Is it that she has done it already, uncannily so.  Have you ever seen her leave her station behind the bar?  She must go home.  She must sometimes have to purchase supplies or clean things or do laundry.  But no, no, as you rack your brain, you cannot remember such a time. 

Paige once said, after a few too many, that Pilcrow is in fact some sort of “genius loci,” a spirit of a particular place, and her place is the bar—indeed, that she cannot leave the bar.  But then she began to quote Alexander Pope’s Epistle IV, to Richard Boyle, Earl of Burlington and had a tremendous barrage of breadsticks and crumpled-up bits of newspaper flung at her.  And so this theory has never really taken off.   Particularly since you know for a fact that she attended the boxing and dining competition at the arena.  She can leave.  She just doesn’t.

One topic, hotly debated at the club, is whether Pilcrow is her first name, her surname, or some sort of nickname, or whether it is in fact some sort of title.  One staggers at the notion that she may be named something as mundane as Pippy Pilcrow or Penelope Pilcrow or Petunia Pilcrow, but equally unlikely is the notion that she is named Pilcrow Jones or Pilcrow Brown.

One cannot stump her.  She has already provided you with the special liqueur you desired, even when you forgot the name of it and cannot describe it.  “It tastes like, well, rather unusual, and when you add the other thing to it, it gets that funny color.  A bit, mmm, it has that spice flavor.  A funny sort of savor to it.” 

“Yes, sir.  I took the liberty of ordering you your sambuca last week, and arrived this morning.”

“Wonderful, yes, that’s it!  How do you do it, Pilcrow?”

How indeed?  Does Pilcrow have some sort of sixth sense, or does she stay up late, late, late into the evening when all is quiet in the club and there is only her, and Merle the raven at the bar, thinking and anticipating your every need?  Does anyone think about her needs?  Does she have any?  The notion is preposterous.   It would be roundly scoffed at if you spoke that question aloud at the club.

Pilcrow is the bartender at the club, and one of my favorite characters.  She is not a romance path in this game. 

And yet, she is not not a romance path.  She is something in between.  She is someone that you can grow closer to, if you dedicate yourself to that path and spend time on it, and there will be a deepening of the relationship, but it is not a traditional path.  There’s not as much time and words here, not because I don’t like spending time and words, but because I like Pilcrow’s path being a little different, because it should be.  I want your interactions with Pilcrow to constantly feel like you are bouncing off something, but if you bounce off it long enough, you’ll start to put cracks in it, and maybe you’ll break through something in the end.

In Tea and Scones, you will have the chance to spend time with Pilcrow, both in her place of power at the bar, as it were, and elsewhere, and have conversations, and learn things—about your own character and about her. 

(have I mentioned my Patreon? Probably not:

I recently became aware of a whole bunch of obscure punctuation marks that I never knew existed.  As a result of this discovery, I’ve created a series of images that honor these obscure punctuation marks. Not sure anyone will ever actually use these punctuation marks but you could try to using them now and again. Nobody will know what they’re for and they’ll be too afraid to ask.  And if that’s not smirk-worthy, nothing is.  

The Pilcrow is a current-day proofreaders’ mark that is used to identify a paragraph and to point out where there ought to be a paragraph break. In editorial production, the pilcrow typographic character is also known as the paragraph mark. 

The Pilcrow’s original Greek form, a simple horizontal line in the left margin of texts, was called a paragraphos. Later, symbols representing the paragraphos, including the pilcrow, were translated into Old French as paragraphe and then pelagraphe.  Somehow, the Middle English word pylcrafte turns up somewhere in the mid-15th century. Even more arbitrary than the centuries-long change that turned paragraphos into “pilcrow,” though, is the scattered development of the contemporary symbol representing The Pilcrow.

Like some other specialized pieces of punctuation in my series of Punctuation Art, The Pilcrow cannot be found on a computer keyboard. Guess you never expected to learn a thing or two while rambling through some guy’s Abstract Art Tumbler page, did ya?  

So there you have it. Chances are small that you will ever use The Pilcrow in your day to day life but should you suddenly find yourself on a TV Gameshow and this thing pops up as a Topic or in a Question - use this knowledge freely and march forward with confidence to the Lightning Round.  You’re Welcome!

Alright so I gotta preface this with the fact that I'm not an expert - just some lowly fool who got too invested in Wikipedia articles. I don't do this stuff for a living and I sure as hell can't absorb everything a wikipedia article is saying. That being said lets launch into the random ass things I've learned from my journeys online. this one's a real long one so to protect your dash I'll give a list of topics here and leave you to decide if you want to keep reading.

Copyleft

Pilcrow

Ordinal Indicators

Ampersand

(something really special)