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I wanted to lend some context to a bit that I was talking about today!
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So
So, the “Literary Fiction” quest set in Glitch was originally about Filimer Sarus.
The way I figured it was, if I ever wrote a series of books about Filimer’s life, which I’m really not likely to do, but, you know, what they would look like ...
They might go like:
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Prologue
Filimer Sarus lives in a hidden realm and purveys ethical blindness. He’s one of the “Unclean Kings,” and every day he encourages Powers to abandon their own ethical judgment and the service of their Imperators and instead immerse themselves in echo chambers of scorn and outrage. Every day he encourages inattention—not acceptance, not even true apathy, but unwillingness to face—the suffering of the world.
But increasingly he faces his own blindness.
One day it’s just too much.
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Book One
He goes out to find truth. He goes out to find ... a reason why the wrongness of the world endures. To find something beyond his own revulsion.
He meets someone whom he almost idolizes. It’s a very spiritual journey, very Illusions (by Richard Bach).
He faces a flare-up of his disease that tears the world around him apart. He loses his grip on his realm. In the end, he realizes that the world is hard.
He is dying of ... presumably he is being devoured by the earth? That’s his sickness. That’s the thing he’s dying of.
The world is eating him.
It’s a hard thing, sometimes.
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Book Two
He is back in the world, living a new life. He has shed his high position and has decided to live an ordinary life as a rail inspector.
It falls apart when the world begins to swallow him again.
He becomes fascinated with the idea of binding the world together and down with railway and postal lines. With the stomping the world flat, or the maps of it at least, that people do these days.
But ultimately he doesn’t think that he has time.
What can he even do? No matter what he does, no matter how he lives, it just keeps happening.
In the end, he remembers why he decided to live—the thing in him that he found that moves even when turned to stone. The filament that he named himself Filimer for. The life.
He chases a great railway-spirit horse and ultimately tames it, finding a moment of laughing freedom before he dies.
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Book Three
He spends a while in Ninuan, only going into the world to get the coffee he likes and see his friends from afar. But a Power tracks him down and is all, look, we know you’ve turned, we want your help to get the new guy.
He goes back into his old faux-Chancel, now revised into a new, weird Filimerverse by his replacement, “the new guy,” whom he eventually confronts ...
And who turns out to be a false him.
A ... Mimic him? Should that even be possible?
He figures out eventually that it’s not, that it’s a Mimic taken from some force of malleability that’s simply been pushed into his shape, a mud-Mimic, but it’s still impossible, or at least ought to be impossible (he feels, anyway), because, like, it just rubs his nose in everything; and also, it makes him feel ... kind of responsible for it?
Like, just killing it would be somehow cruel.
Eventually, he decides that it’s a fine Filimer, an acceptable Filimer, a Filimer that can be the new Filimer now, sure, and he won’t “take it down” like the Powers wanted, but he’ll speak against it and what it’s doing. He’ll, y’know, oppose.
He steals back some of his own great artifacts, and eventually finds, in the stave of morality, the ability to make truth. He thinks ... that might be it. The tool against the new guy, but also, against the world.
He holds a grand colloquium on what the right thing ought to be.
... and ultimately, decides.
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Aside
If I actually wrote this, I’d have to make a little more sense, for clarity; like, I’m not saying that this is a model of clear plotting or writing.
It’s just the shape of his story.
He’s drafted to fight the replacement him, he goes into his old faux Chancel, finds the guy, decides to let the guy be a Filimer, steals his stave of truth, and holds a colloquium.
Making the emotions of “let the guy be” and the metaphysics of the stave work would be a thing I’d do when actually writing the book---
So if they confuse you, that’s why!
That work isn’t yet done.
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Bonus Aside
Within Attaris’ “Seal of Time,” the world divides into a thousand thousand paths. The concept is a notional one, reflective of the present and not the future; while one may explore down those branching paths to find a superfluity of mystery and wonder, in the end, only one leads to the actual Fourth Age that is to Come. The moment one steps off that specific path and explores the road not taken, one deviates from the actual story of one’s life.
— from A Tourist’s Guide to Creation, by Jasprite Sherrard
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There’s a version of this quote in Glitch, but I had to trim it down a lot, IRONICALLY, to fit. :(
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Book Four
Anyway, as of the end of book three, the world is no longer wrong, since Filimer’s declared what is right; at least, not there, in that location, it isn’t wrong any more; but it is slowing. It is congealing.
The world has become locally right, but nonfunctionally so.
Filimer decides that this is a dead end, and walks into the Seal of Time to return to another path.
He becomes fascinated with the mechanism of time and possibility—with Attaris’ thousand thousand paths—but in the end, the shifting ground unnerves him. He finds himself wanting to return.
He can’t.
He’s lost.
In the scattered timeways, he chases the riddle-beast that lives there, and ultimately finds the song-law that can chart the way to a golden world.
Will he go there?
He’ll walk ten thousand silvered paths before, instead.
Fin.
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And So
That, you see, was the story set that would eventually be boiled down into Glitch’s “Literary Fiction” quest set.
That was the story set that you ... walk in the footsteps of? as it were?
When you take those quests.
... and part of making those quests, accordingly, was thinking a lot, like, a lot a lot, about what “chases the riddle-beast that lives there” actually looks like, would look like, in a mystery/Immersive Fantasy-type game.
It couldn’t be about a bunch of exciting chase scenes. Honestly, that wouldn’t even work well in a book.
It had to be ... subtler, and more lyric, than that.
... and one of the best set of scenes that I saw when imagining it out was the pauses in the conflict, like:
* [[BLUE]] [[RED]] sharing a camp or a fire with something unusual—often, a mythical creature with a stylized manner of speech
... which could be other things, other kinds of creatures, but for Filimer, was likely the very beast he chased.
I didn’t particularly want to illustrate Filimer, but that moment, that sitting at the campfire, only with a random PC-stand-in Strategist instead of Filimer?
I eventually decided it should be the illustration for that quest card in the book.
