A World With No Extras VIII: Life is a State of Mind

It has been a while since I’ve posted - you can thank the Cook County Sherriff for that (to steal a Joesky line). In all seriousness, I’ve managed (I think!) to get together a group to play Lacuna Part I – so most of my available brainpower has been...

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...so the main blog-related thing I’ve been doing this month is working on my d23 project; I’ve finished off The Chop. Here, I set out to do “more normal” characters, Just Regular Folks, you know, and instead I wound up populating it with freaks yet again. And yet again, some of the characters from my fiction have shown up. I’m really glad I’ve decided to do this with a wiki-style tool – the webs of relationships have gotten exceptionally complicated, and I’m winding up with a six-degrees-of-separation kind of thing. This is sort of intentional – if you have been following this project, you will recall that one of the things I was trying to do with it was make a web of NPCs such that when the PCs took an action, the effects would ripple through the entire community in some way, and would even have recursive effects as what the NPCs did in response to the PC action caused their own ripples. I am starting to wonder what it would be like if I wrote a book where I just had a single character do one thing and then followed all the ripples and recursions out ad infinitum. Might be interesting! Or, quite possibly, it could also bore a reader to tears. I shall have to be quite careful if I try it not to be too precious about it.

Anyway, on to some of this month’s freaks.

First is Rebel Cell 94 – there are a few characters from the fiction here, one named Eli who I expect most of the folks familiar with this blog will know. Some characters who were only names in the past have been fleshed out a little. For example, there’s Christopher Trane, for whom I took inspiration from Ted Kooser’s poem Tattoo:

What once was meant to be a statement—
a dripping dagger held in the fist
of a shuddering heart—is now just a bruise
on a bony old shoulder, the spot
where vanity once punched him hard
and the ache lingered on. He looks like
someone you had to reckon with,
strong as a stallion, fast and ornery,
but on this chilly morning, as he walks
between the tables at a yard sale
with the sleeves of his tight black T-shirt
rolled up to show us who he was,
he is only another old man, picking up
broken tools and putting them back,
his heart gone soft and blue with stories.

I’ve been reading a lot of Kooser recently – he has a kind of quietness to him, but that doesn’t stop his poems from being like dripping daggers held in the fist themselves.  And that poem captures the essence of Christopher Trane far better than I could, I think.

Rebel Cell 94 tries to operate in total secrecy, but they have been betrayed – Richard Darian and Harv Stroud grew up with a man named Thomas Byrd, and he was accepted into the cell on their word. He is a spy for the Cruel Duke by way of one of his retainers, Camryn Ramsey, who may be familiar from the last post about Sovereign Mount. Thomas has sold them all out both for fear and for monetary gain, and thus this particular rebellion is doomed, though they have not met that doom quite yet in this version of the city.

Another group that calls the Chop home is Ars Diabolicus – a group of artists who are obsessed with extremes, with transgressive art and achieving the sublime through excess. They create material meant to shock those who consume it into different modes of thinking and to take a long hard look at the conventional wisdom of the day. In addition to Faolán Delaney, another character from the fiction, we have Mallory Compos and Elyse Bradshaw, lovers who have formed an avant-garde jazz ensemble called Succubus, and the visual artist Harrison Stephens. His work is exceptionally disturbing – sometimes because of the material it depicts, babies being branded with hate symbols by smiling wolflike beings, an infant in an amniotic sac being injected with some puzzling substance by a sinister, hooded, skeletal revenant, half human half insectoid things feasting on decaying flesh, the world depicted in repeating tessellations of cock and cunt, and on and on. But even when his subject material is much tamer, his work still radiates a sense of menace. A burning refrigerator – what’s inside? A window into an empty bedroom at night. Harrison’s works are both prized and loathed by the critics.

Making up part of the Cross Street Merchant’s Guild, brothers Felix and Alex Mendoza look very similar but could not be further apart spiritually. Felix is an honest businessman, the older son who inherited their father’s business and who works as a tailor, taking both custom fittings for good clothes and mending clothes that are falling apart. His brother, Alex, meanwhile, is both a money lender and launderer. The kind of people that come to Alex for a loan are the kind that can’t get a loan anywhere else, and his rates are usury. But: he is connected. He knows Jace Blanchard from the Red Cartel, and helps convert Jace’s funds into “clean money.” Because of this, he is also afforded a bodyguard from the Cartel – a man named Brixton Orr. Brixton is beautiful, the kind of prettyboy that many men dislike and envy on sight, all ice blue eyes, square jaw, smooth but muscled model’s physique, and the sort who obviously spends hours on personal grooming. The pretty boy brooks no insults however, and is a supremely qualified combatant, skilled in all types of weapons as well as unarmed fighting, and is not in the least bit afraid to defend his honor.

Any or all of these people might be found from time to time in Blue Heaven, one of the Chop’s seedier drinking establishments. Blue Heaven also features live entertainment – sometimes it might be music, and other times it might be a strip show. Blue Heaven is not picky about its patrons, and both male and female strippers are featured in different parts of the establishment. The bouncer, a man named Zion Walters, has an impressive collection of tattoos, all done by Ryder Duran (who you may or may not remember as one of the residents of Shattering Stone). The dancers that work at Blue Heaven love Zion – there isn’t a single one of them he hasn’t extricated from some fucked-up situation with a patron who thought touching went with tipping.

Rounding out these places is a church – the First Church of the Holy Gyre. This is a place of contradictions – it’s run by a con man named Bexley Hunt, who is a classic grifter, and the operation itself really was set up to be his ultimate grift. However, by fate or by some dice of the gods, he has had a living saint, a real living saint, take up residence in the church. This man is Chance, and he is a humble gardener. He spends his days tending the garden in the inner courtyard of the church. Every now and then, a parishioner is sent in to seek advice from him. Chance has a way of putting someone completely at ease, and no matter what question they ask, he seems to be able to reply using the garden as a metaphor for the infinite circumstances of life. People who come to him seeking wisdom leave with the tumult in their hearts stilled, replaced by the idea that life is a state of mind, and their mind is at peace.  The idea that Chance may be incapable of understanding anything at all aside from his garden simply never occurs to them; His statements somehow manage to convey the essence of being present, and being mindful. In short, those who speak to him understand that they should focus on being there, fully present and engaged in one’s life.

Next up for WWNE: Heliotrope Hill, an arts and theater district..