Node One
All right, luvvies? Anyone remember me hinting at something sword-related and September-related many moons ago? Well, no need to hint any more: that something is Driving the Point Home, a short story coming out on 19 September in Of The Sword, a Swordtember podcast project, and the "creator I admire" is Tal Minear, producer of Someone Dies In This Elevator. I was excited for the chance to work with Tal, and happy they liked my idea for a sword-based short story! Keep an eye on Tumblr and Instagram, where I'll be shouting about my episode when it comes out (as well as all the other episodes by cool writers and actors I'm excited to share the bill with).
running order
prologue: generating a character with Spindlewheel
tonight's performance: in which Mari is late to the party
asides: what's new with Merely Roleplayers, what else I'm making and enjoying, #pinspiration
fin: ?
prologue: Marielena
Just before we launch into this month's instalment of our story, I want to switch perspectives – so let's get to know Callum's big sister Marielena a bit better.
This is a Spindlewheel spread. Spindlewheel is a deck of oracle cards you can use in various roleplaying and storytelling games. I'm using the core deck by Sasha Reneau, shuffled with two of the Kickstarter expansions: Folk Engine by Caro Asercion, and Looking At The Winter World And (Yearning) by Ray Felix Carter.
Here's how you interpret the different elements of the spread:
What this spread tells me – adding to what I already know about Marielena from parts 1 and 2, which is that she's Callum's big sister, she's well connected, he feels like a burden on her sometimes, and she's late to the part – is that:
Mari's known as someone who always has a plan, but she's overworked and bitter; that bitterness is eroding her heart and she's running on fumes
Compartmentalisation is her primary coping mechanism
She yearns for something that reflects her own desires for once, instead of delivering for other people, and believes she just needs ONE! BIG! STRESSFUL! PUSH! to finally get there
When we meet her in the story, to her, everything seems to be turning out according to her most pessimistic and resigned predictions
She's driving towards an end where she'll be undone or overtaken by greed, perhaps because someone else opportunistically exploits those desires of hers
Spindlewheel is fun for a story like this, that I'm finding as I go along. I can accommodate some random elements, because it's not all planned out yet. But oracle cards tend to be open enough to interpretation that just as often as they add new random elements, they reveal and solidify decisions you've already unconsciously made.
All righty, let's meet the woman herself...
aside the first: see—be seen
Interactive Soup is back this coming Tuesday, 12 September. Grab your ticket if you haven't already!
I've got a short audio story about a sword in Of The Sword, a podcast of short audio stories about swords. It's called Driving the Point Home and it has a wizard, a warlord, a tragic hero, and of course a unique and storied sword. That story is being released on 19 September, but you should follow the show now for a whole September's worth of cool stories by cool people about cool swords!
In November I'll be back on the Actual Play UK Twitch channel, running two sessions of Heart: The City Beneath. We'll be live from 8pm GMT on Fridays 3 and 10 November. I'm doing a character creation and planning session with the cast in a couple of weeks and I can't wait to find out what they'll be bringing into this nightmarish heaven...
feature presentation: the exception to the rule
Two texts from Callum. That was restrained, for him. He had to have been waiting an hour or two at least. Maybe he was learning a bit more appreciation. Or maybe he was biting his tongue.
Marielena was the crucial first node in the network of connections Callum’s life depended on. The first to introduce him to another person. The only person in his life he’d never needed to be introduced to. The all-important first and only exception to the rule. Exactly why that responsibility had fallen on Mari, both of them had their theories, but neither of them agreed, and neither knew for sure.
It might have made more instinctive sense if they’d been twins, acquainted in the womb, but they weren’t even full siblings. Mari’s dad was Callum’s dad, but his mum wasn’t hers. Mari was six when the two of them met, and seven when Callum was born. Old enough, apparently, for Callum’s mum to ask if she wanted to be there, to hold her hand and watch the midwife work and be the first besides the parents to meet the baby.
Callum was his mum’s first baby, and she’d gone against the midwife’s advice and insisted on having him at home. A happy family occasion, all holding hands and welcoming Mari’s baby brother straight into the house they’d all share together. In the event, it was a complicated and exhausting birth, and that house was only Mari and Callum’s home for another nine months.
In between the panting and the screaming and urgent murmurs of the grown-ups, Mari remembered the kind midwife taking enough time out to tell her that the baby was having trouble finding his way out, and that he was also having trouble keeping track of the baby long enough to lend a helping hand. A slippery little character, he’d called the nearly-born baby. There were lots of problems a mum and a baby could have when it was time to push, the midwife explained: the baby could get tangled up or twisted around, and it could be hard to figure out exactly how from the outside; but it wasn’t usually hard to figure out where the baby actually was. That was a new and puzzling challenge, indicating that Mari’s brother would most likely turn out to be remarkable in some way, the midwife mused aloud, with a frankness seven-year-old Mari felt like he would probably put more of a lid on when talking to her dad.
This was already a pattern she’d noticed in her life; grown-ups unburdened themselves to her unprompted, possibly in the belief that it would go over her head, or that she could shrug their anxieties easily from her young shoulders.
aside the second: the world's a stage—& we're all Merely Roleplayers
Now playing in the Main House: Vigil: Chief/Exec, a supernatural mystery in 5 acts
Ancient wisdom and modern politics clash as the witch Jinny Greenteeth declares war on Lundor Group, and the Morrigan enters Sherrydown's mayoral race.
Coming next
in the Studio: The Office Party, a heroic fantasy team-building exercise starring Natalie Winter, Strat, Chris Starkey and Dave, compered by Josh Yard, playing Quest
in the Main House in January 2024: Vigil: Fear Itself, with Alexander Pankhurst as Graham, Ellen Gould as Jess Butterworth, and Chris Starkey as Cameron Jarvis; and we just recorded the following Vigil production as well!
feature presentation continues
By the time baby Callum emerged – quiet but unmistakably keening – his mum was pale and crumpled, like a collapsed paper lantern. The midwife, almost without thinking, maybe ruthlessly prioritising, maybe just following the pattern, deposited the baby in the only empty pair of hands in the room: Marielena’s. She froze with the bundle balanced awkwardly across her forearms and palms, tense and unsure of herself, as the midwife efficiently clipped the cord and attended to his other patient.
While the midwife saved Callum’s mum’s life and Mari’s dad fetched and carried, Marielena drifted to a laundry-covered chair in the corner and tried to mimic the way she’d seen people holding babies before. Visiting friends of her dad’s, and mums on TV. She looked at the baby for a lack of anywhere else to look that wasn’t in some way alarming, and wondered if she’d been that weird colour when she was brand new, or if that was only boys.
A note of panic in a grown-up’s voice startled her out of it. Just a note among many – confusion, exhaustion, concerted calm and forced jokey good cheer – but unmistakably the first note of a phrase ending in full-scale hysteria.
“…pretty sure there ought to be a baby around here somewhere?”
“Here,” said Marielena, but “No,” the midwife dismissed her, barely glancing her way, “you’re not a baby any more, my love – I’m here to deliver a baby, your mummy definitely just had a baby, there should be…”
“Yes, here,” said Mari sharply, insistently, annoyed at yet another example of the grown-up habit of handing off things to her that she didn’t know how to carry yet. It was late, she was tired and it wasn’t her job to take care of the baby; it was time for her dad or the baby’s mum to take over. She carried him to the bed, ignoring the flapping, shooing, panicky hands of the midwife, and said, using the formula she’d learned from TV, the words she’d expected Callum’s mum to say to her before she was ever expected to say them to anyone else:
“This is my baby brother.”
The midwife hesitated mid-shoo, as if struck by a sudden thought. His attention fixed on the baby for the first time. He breathed out. “There you are.”
“Where…?” said Callum’s mum, reaching.
The midwife took Callum from Mari and settled him in the reaching arms. “Here. Safe and sound.”
“Where…?” Callum’s mum seemed to register the weight in her arms but nothing of its nature.
“Gave us a few scares there, but you’ve got a healthy looking baby boy,” said the midwife.
Callum’s mum freed her arms from under the baby, leaving him to roll and wriggle on her chest, and reached towards the midwife again. Her eyes were open, Callum was revving up to a full bawl, but “Where?” she said again, more urgent this time.
“Right there,” said Mari, thoroughly fed up with grown-up nonsense and starting to worry that holding the baby would fall back to her if this continued. “Here, this is the baby, your baby.”
Callum’s mum jerked like Mari had just dropped the baby on her from a height. Her arms curled round him. “Look,” she said to Mari’s dad, “it’s our baby.”
And that was the beginning of the network.
aside the third: create—consume
Writing: Dead Weight episode 2
Reading: Four Roads Cross by Max Gladstone (reread), The Idiot Brain by Dean Burnett
Listening: Of The Sword (Tal Minear/Realm) (of course! I'm in it!), The Silt Verses season 3 (Eskew Productions), Operation Mincement Original Cast Recording
feature presentation concludes
Mari’s little brother didn’t exist. At least not in the same way as other people. His was a potential existence. That was how she came to understand it.
For another six or seven years, she didn’t understand it, not consciously, not intellectually. She just lived it. Worked with it. It was how the world worked. She didn’t need to understand it, the rules of it, any more than she needed to understand gravity to stay on the ground.
She was thirteen or fourteen when she first thought to step back and consider it, to figure it out more objectively. Maybe she hadn’t had the tools before, or maybe she’d known it would sound absurd when put into words.
Callum only existed for certain people: people he’d been introduced to. The person doing the introducing, naturally, needed to be someone he’d previously been introduced to, by someone else he’d been introduced to, and so on and so on, back through the network – to Mari. Callum’s first node, his patient zero. The one who’d given him his introduction to his own mother, without which she would never have acknowledged his existence. Without which he’d never have survived. Mari hadn’t understood that at the time, but the weight of it had attached itself to her nevertheless. She was far more aware of it than Callum himself seemed to be. The precarity of his situation never seemed to unbalance him. He let precious connections drift and fade away, safe in the knowledge that Mari, his original, would always be there, solid and constant. Another burden for her to bear; as if the ones her seniors placed on her weren’t enough.
Alone in the corner of the pub round the corner from the party, she read his texts again. At least he’d got himself inside. At least he wasn’t freezing on the doorstep while she steeled herself. This was the introduction that could free them both, but if she made it, there was no going back. Vivian Hithercombe wouldn’t fade or drift. He’d be stuck with her. And Mari with the knowledge that she’d done that to him.
She imagined Callum haunting the house on Bronze Street, as it filled up with people. Eyeing each other. Making each other laugh. Needling each other. Sharing themselves. Mari imagined her brother alone among connected people.
She down the last third of her vodka tonic, paid her tab, set her shoulders, and walked round the corner to ruin her little brother’s life.
aside the last: accessorise—advertise
Pins appropriate for how I devised Marielena, and for her general demeanour. Left is from the Literary Tarot by the Brink Literacy Project – it's a metal pin approximation of the design on the backs of the cards. Right is by Marc Ellerby.
fin: readers—writers
That's plenty from me; now it's your time! Do you use any divinatory tools like Spindlewheel, tarot or other oracle decks? Do you check your horoscope or pack an umbrella when you wake up with your knees aching? Where do you look for hints at what comes next? Tell me in an email (just hit reply) or tag your answer on the socials with #FoggyOutline.