A huge risk taken because of desire?

We’re going to follow Nantz, a character played by Nantz in our mini campaign, Into the Dust, The Electric State RPG. A frankly odd idea for an RPG: a road movie RPG. We travel through a post-Civil War USA that is rapidly regressing to a broken, messed-up society anesthetised by its technological advancements. Nothing like the real world then.

Act I Desire

Nancy “Nantz” Alvarez was a typical Outsider, travelling across the Electric State with her books, her notebook and a Dream: to write the Great American Novel. Which, to be fair, is quite the big Dream. The problem was she didn't have much of a story. Just attitude personified.

Then came Littleville. People were disappearing, Neurocasters were involved, and something calling itself the Archangel Gabriel was wandering around, trailing worshippers in its wake.

Nantz and Willy's entirely reasonable response was to steal a Jeep and repeatedly ram it into what turned out to be a twenty-foot military drone. Afterwards, Nantz began to wonder whether there was some intelligence behind the machines. More importantly, she had found her story. Perhaps even her route to literary immortality. The Great American Novel was out there. She just had to survive a few more chapters.

Act II Dissolution

And there was plenty more material on the road. Murder, strange childlike drones, Neurocaster addiction and an America that disintegrated around them. Nantz kept writing it all down, but somewhere along the road she started to wonder whether she was really documenting the fall or justifying an escape into the Neuroscape. Was writing the Great American Novel really any different from everyone else's attempts to escape the Electric State?

Worse still, for an Outsider, she was getting attached to people. Cade, Willy and Billy-Lee had stopped being interesting foils for the book and had become friends of a kind. She gave Billy-Lee her old Vietnam lighter, worried about soft-in-the-head Cade and watched Willy grow up. “I'm getting soft,” she wrote. By the time they reached Soleri, Nantz wasn't standing outside the story looking in any more. She was part of it.

Act III Deliverance

Soleri was only supposed to be another stop on the road to the Blackwelt Exclusion Zone.

Dust. Heat. Concrete. Half-finished dreams. Neurocasters. Cultists. Drones overhead. Music. Guns. Burning cars. Burning people. A Coachella for the end of days.

Except Nantz found herself struggling to think of a reason to leave. Cade stayed, closing the festival with Voidfire Dominion. Willy stayed, best mates now with drones Aubrey and Hachiko. Billy-Lee still had his own Dream to chase and eventually climbed back into the Buick and drove on towards Blackwelt. Nantz watched as the dust rose, then turned to walk towards her friends, smiling. Her notebook, left behind in the dust.

We pursue our desires believing they will change our lives, only to discover that getting there requires us to lose something of ourselves along the way.

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