A World With No Extras VI: Effort Over Time Stacks Up

I am going to forego the links to previous WWNE posts.  At some point I'll make an index.  Probably.

I have set a few goals for myself in terms of writing - one poem and one story per month, and this bent-ass version of Dungeon23 I'm doing where I make a character every day instead of a room.  Goals have been met. I wrote my poem for the month early; I wrote a couple of them, actually, but am split on posting them. I have been working on my story for the month, something semi-autobiographical, and I'm actually happy with the total output (over 10k words) but I’ve gotten to a point with it where I feel kind of blocked and am reconsidering my approach – I may do just random vignettes sewn together from bits of my existence that I find myself compelled to revisit because they evoke such strong emotions in me without trying so hard to string them together in a way that creates a meaningful overarching narrative. Or I may reframe it in third person - that might free me to access some of the emotional content I'm having a hard time with.  Bah. I don’t know. In the meantime, I’ve done something I often do when I feel kind of blocked up in one art, which is to switch up. I’ve been working on some visual art – kinda trippy pen and ink stuff, hopefully I’ll have something to show for it in another couple of days.

It really is interesting to note how consistent effort stacks up over time. The below bit just sort of touches on the relationships between a few of the characters I wrote up this month – there are a lot of other characters and a lot of other connections – I found the bit here almost effortless to write because it had all basically been done for me already, little by little. Maybe I really will do a novel at some point, lol.

The place I’ve written about this month is called Shattering Stone, an area of Red City that is, if anything, even more heavily disinvested in than Devil’s Torso. There’s a small patch of woodland in the center of Shattering Stone where a tent city has sprung up. The folks living there are often referred to as the Troglodytes, or just the Trogs. Most of these folks are simply not functional. They are deep in mental illness or substance abuse and live mainly in their own pain.

Wayne Copeland has been experimenting with entheogens for most of his life. He grows Salvia Divinorum, Fly Agaric mushrooms, and Morning Glory on a muddy patch of land behind the tents. He is no longer grounded in consensual reality and lives more or less in his own world where he communicates with numinous powers. While he is very rarely violent, he is unpredictable, and he scares Elia Landry, who stops by the Trogs encampment with some regularity to check on her brother Makai; every time she does so it hurts her to see the state he is in, but she cannot stop. For his part, Makai is grateful for his sister’s attempts to help him, but he is determined, along with Marshal Callahan, to drink himself to death.

Marshall was once a pretty conventional person; he worked at a salaried position, was married, had children, the whole thing. One of those children went missing, only to turn up dead months later, her poor body used and abused beyond reason. The stress wracked the marriage. Initially there were recriminations on both sides. This drove a wedge between him and his wife, and thus, when the body was found, they were unable to trust each other and could not grieve together. Instead of sharing and lessening it, each retreated inward with their own hurt, where it grew and grew. At the end of the marriage, they had not only not spoken to each other for several months, they had stopped even acknowledging the other’s presence. One day, Marshall wandered out of his nice house and into the street without a single backward glance. He has been trying to kill himself with booze ever since.

The Trogs are mostly older – kids who are homeless often wind up at Rack House. This is an abandoned mansion, a remnant of older, more prosperous times. There is no electricity and no running water, but as one of the kids that stayed there said, “Who the hell needs that shit anyway? We have each other.” They are runaways almost to a one, almost all of them fleeing from some intolerable circumstance at home; some of them have gone from the frying pan to the fire – Alana Merritt, a pretty girl with piercing blue eyes and raven hair who is a budding alcoholic, is being carefully targeted by a woman named Kaiya Fleming. Kaiya is a procuress. She was the one who kidnapped Marshal’s daughter, who was sold to Johnny Sharpe for the entertainment of his most distinguished clientele. She is a predator through and through, though it is only her experience as prey that made her so good at finding the right levers for exploitation.

While all the people who stay at Rack House are kids, Rocco Manning is really still a child. He’s thirteen years old and ran away earlier this year after finding out that his father, Luca, is a crew boss for the Red Cartel. Rocco despises his father and what he does for a living so much so that he would rather take his chances on the streets than accept having to live under the same roof with a man he considers a beast.

One of the ironies of Rocco’s relationship with his father is that he has run away to the neighborhood his father works in, though neither is aware of the others presence. In an abandoned factory in the middle of Shattering Stone there is a secret trap door. This leads to a facility where the Red Cartel manufactures and prepares drugs for traffic, a place Luca thinks of as “the office.” Luca has regular meeting with Quinton and Kiss Barnett, but he also sells product to Gabriella Riva’s Grey Disciples, to Dylan Faulkner, and even to Lee Riggs from time to time. Luca is highly trained in chemistry, and though he never talks about it, his initial motivation for learning was to help others; he wanted to develop new drugs that might have saved his mother, who died of cancer. Her sickness forced him to drop out of school to take care of her, and he had a series of low paying and demeaning jobs that barely supported the family as she got sicker and sicker. Watching the progression of the disease, combined with being denied his dreams began to twist him, and when she died, he broke altogether. He was an easy target for the Cartel leadership, and compromised himself willingly, seeing the drugs he ships as one of the only things that grants surcease from pain of existence. Luca’s people are working on several strains of benzodope, everything from “tranq” which relies heavily on xylazine and turns those who use it into something resembling the walking dead complete with rotting flesh, to “grey death,” a mixture of heroin, oxycodone, benzos, and carfentanil that looks like powdered concrete.

This is all produced under the auspices of Jace Blanchard, who is part of Cartel leadership. Jace does not fear being caught. He has a pet assassin, a woman named Luna Owens. Luna is a true psychopath. She simply does not feel empathy and does not see anything wrong with killing. She is physically strong, but more than that, she has an instinctive understanding of leverage, and knows how to get maximum power out of her frame. Her preferred method of attack is ligature strangulation; she wants to feel you die. She finds the sensation pleasurable and it makes her feel powerful. This is innate to Luna; it’s simply how she was born. She may have gone through life without ever actually killing anyone though, were it not for coming into contact with Blanchard, who recognized instantly that Luna was acting in a socially acceptable way; the key word being acting.

Next up: Sovereign Mount. This is where many of the folks who really run things live, the four noble houses – so I might actually characterize the Duke a bit, though I’m not sure about that yet. I know I will be characterizing the Duke’s assassin cadre – Blackmouth being one of these, along with a man named Dust and at least two women – Grandmother, who runs the show, and Darling, who is only six.

Oh!  And I am working on a totally homegrown dungeon as the penultimate encounter area for the players in my current campaign.  So that will probably be coming sometime in April as well (FINALLY SOMETHING GAMEABLE!)!!!!