The Gaming Outpost

I rode my Harley out of the shimmering and rippling silver light of the interdimensional gate, and right into a camera’s metal flash stand.

It tipped over, and I skidded to a halt.

I heard vituperation behind me, and I spun around to see a few people, an old lady being helped to stand by a young woman, a photographer, and a guy with a notepad computer.

Notepad waved his device, and flagged me down.

“Your name, and can you confirm or deny that you are indeed an actual extradimensional?”

“Who are you?” I replied.

He introduced himself as star reporter for the Weekly Spot, a national newspaper of great renown.

“I’m Tadeusz, and yes, I’m an extradimensional. Do you know anything about getting home?”

“Sure, and iffen we can’t find it, then are we not the ones to find it anyways?” The Irish accent of the girl who came up after delivering the old lady to a van, and her cheery red hair were distracting. But so was the way, they both hopped on back of my bike.

“The old lady, top-notch seer, said you would give us a ride. We took the taxi out here from the airport.”

Evidently the photographer was a local with his own transport. These two were recently married, which was just as well since the girl was too nice indeed.

They yelled against the wind, and told me in detail all about the wedding. Elvis had sung their wedding march, and the Pope had officiated, that is the real Pope, not the robot android most people see. The android was a security precaution, and they really hated they said with subdued glee what would happen to the next jerk who tried to ice the Pope.

We arrived at the airport, and my bike got put into baggage, and we all flew off to the big city, and their office.

It was tabloid heaven I saw as I walked past pictures of twenty foot aliens shaking hands with Bob Barker, and the real John Kerry in a stasis field created by the Ancient One, an Atlantaen magician, to hold back the Senator’s superpowers, not the mannequin they wheel out for his public appearances. There was a cherry tree, the lineal descendant of the one George chopped down, and next to it, pieces of a black helicopter shot down by the Roswell aliens with a Chicom earthquake generator tuned to shoot death rays through the air.

Some of it was interesting, but most not. I scorned this type of stuff. And then the two saw me with that face, and they were infuriated.

I got lectured, and yelled at. They protested their sincerity so much that I started to wonder if I had been wrong, or they were simply not liars, but nuts.

So they showed me a picture. It was kept in a vacuum chamber, and it was a Polaroid of me, the Fire Child, Lil and her husband, and the Alchemist, and some Pharaoh looking guy taken under the light of twin suns.

We were in a single sun system, I had checked.

“We found this in an ancient Egyptian pyramind of King Tut. On the back is written in hieroglyphics. ‘Thanks to my friends, sent by the sun god Ra, I recover from my illness, and spend many decades bringing prosperity to the land they call Egypt.’ It is thousands of years old.”

“I remember…” I muttered, and so I did. The Pharaoh had been a decent guy for his time, and quite young, and so we showed him how to survive his illness in exchange for certain concessions. Like he took up the Law of Hammurabi, and taught his people how to have clean water. It ended up making his nation the hyperpower of its day since none could stand against him since his armies did not wither from disease like everyone elses did.

So, I provisionally accepted that this was all on the level. Elvis was entertaining on Mars right now for a delegation of Grays from the Sculptor Galaxy, and Amelia Earhart had discovered a gateway to a place where you could fly your plane forever, if you wanted to.

And that the reporters of the Weekly Spot were, while they did not look it, actually the very best reporters on the planet.

After we got that settled, they took a few minutes to search for my request. It took a bit, some searching of Nostradamus, and some divination with tea leaves, and Googling which they seemed to find the most fantastic and it got me to what I needed, a name of a man.

We took my bike again since they had wrecked the car chasing a vampire donkey off-road last week. The thing had turned about and drank their radiator, and oil empty.

The man was a magician. I could tell as I walked across his very densely arranged lawn. Signs of magic in use lay in the design of the walkway, and in the choice of herbs, but mostly the sensation pulling at my soul became stronger, and I could only escape by throwing up shields.

He was not a nice magician either, I could tell.

The door opened of its own accord,and we walked in.

“So the Spotty have recruited a paladin. Whoever you are, you would be well advised to throw in your lot with me, rather than with the Spotty family.”

“Thanks for the advice.” I said sarcastically.

We fought magically, but I was in his place of power, and he was far more familiar with the strictures on magic in this world. He wasted no time trying something that would not work.

I was losing, but then the girl bopped him on the head with a frying pan. And the magician sagged, and we won.

I took the map of alternate worlds, and thought it might help me get in the general vicinity of the world I wanted.

And then the magician surged for one last strike. I swatted his bolt of magic aside, and thus lit the pitiful yellow curtains on fire.

A more direct attack, and I finished him until he went to dusk. But in so doing, I had taken a fatal bolt or two from my enemy.

I had what I wanted (I hope), and I had helped some people.

Now it was time for my next world.

Tadeusz

I woke under the rustling branches and bright moon of forested country. Scooping up my stuff, I looked about into the near abyssal blackness, but only faint wolf howls in the distance came back to me.

Not wanting to break my leg in a weasel hole, I fished out my flashlight which barely worked. But it gave me enough light to see leaves, and the fallen branches I gathered to make a campfire.

A campfire lighter that had journeyed with me across dozens of worlds lit the fire, and soon I was warmer and could see better as I cooked some dried rabbit and some chili in my extendable pot.

Still feeling a bit unnerved, I made a pointy stick barrier of spear like sticks lodged in the soft ground around my campsite. And I made a second barrier around where I intended to sleep.

?Smells mighty tasty.? A man in a rough, fur cloak said from across the fire and just beyond my barrier. In the dimness, I could barely see him, but I nodded, and stepped toward the fire inviting him to join me.

?Don?t mind if I do, stranger.? He said, and lifted a heavy log from beyond in the dark to use as a stool. He pointed out when I asked where another one was which I got. I deliberately picked a large one to show my strength for he seemed a large and forbidding man with a wild aspect to him.

Despite claiming to have just finished a really good meal, which he said with a peculiar emphasis, we shared the stew, and he offered, a bit grudgingly I thought, some goat cheese to add to it. I could see the similarity between us despite his fairly primitive clothes for we both were large and quiet and at home in the wilds, but he seemed a bit of a moocher. Still there are much worse crimes than that.

?These woods frighten you?? He asked with a laugh as he finished out his bowl.

?Not much.? I replied truthfully, looking up from my spoonful of rabbit chili that I slowly ate, although the woods did seem unfriendly and the trees seemed to soak in the light of the campfire. It gets hard to frighten a verser after a while.

?I guess business must be picking up, another expansion is probably coming.? He said fishing for information I thought. Unfortunately, I did not know what he was talking about, and I did not totally trust him enough to ask for clarification.

So I shrugged.

?I mean with you here as well as me, unless there is more game in the woods, why we?d be having a problem, you and me.?

?So you?re a woodsman?? I asked doing a little fishing of my own.

He jumped up offended.

?I, I a woodsman? I don?t follow that cult, not I.? He stood seemingly taller than before with an odd line to his jaw. I studied him, and then reached out clairvoyantly and telekinetically to my backpack and my sword, a Roman style gladius.

?So what are you?? I put it to him.

?I, I am a wolf.? And he raised back his head and howled in a near-ear piercing song of destruction and hunger and loneliness. And his expansive stomach rippled in several spots.

Staring in horror, I saw what looked like faces pressed against the underside of his fur coat for he continued to transform now being a man-like wolf of near seven feet in height.

He looked down at his stomach, and he burped.

?Dinner. Right tasty. But I got to digest them some more.?

?Who?? I asked dry mouthed.

?Why, who else, children of course.? He looked befuddled at me, and I crouched to my feet, and swung a boot through the fire lofting burning logs into his face and all around him. My leap that followed through from the crouch landed on his chest while he still batted the flames aside, and the gladius sunk into his heart.

A black corrosion oozed out of him, and I yanked out my blade before it could be damaged.

Ordinarily, I seek confirmation before I attack, but I felt influences both bane and boon upon me. Love and hatred joined into one, and I killed the wolf with no doubt that I did the right thing.

His stinking body lay amidst the burning brands which I rapidly snuffed or tossed back to the fire by force of will and quick fingers. Then I took the blade and sliced open the wolf.

Out popped two children. Alive and somewhat hysterical, but after rolling the wolf into the dark, and whipping out some more food, some emergency rations they calmed down enough to introduce themselves and tell me their story.

Becky and Kevin Chance were from Chicago, Illinois and they had run away from their parents in a ratty mall turned discounter?s paradise, and they found a broken mirror in the back of some store. The mirror healed under their eyes, and they touched it, and now they were here.

They had run from witches, and avoided the troll under the bridge by going into the Verboten Forreste, and they met a nice man, sort-of, who then changed to a wolf and swallowed them.

Kevin, looking rather mischievous, decided to show me some magic. He willed a branch into glowing, and then he waved it at me. His slightly older sister rebuked him, but I shrugged.

Kevin apologized saying the light had hurt the wolf. Then Becky said she could do something magic as well. She could hear the birds talk if she touched her teeth with her tongue.

About this time, the wind rose, and the trees creaked with their branches shuddering in menace, or so it seemed to the children. So I laughingly told the trees to back off.

Instead the branches started moving against the wind, and coming toward us all.

I considered my fire, but I did not want to start a general forest fire even as the children crouched behind me in fear.

Giving them one more warning did little but inspire something that sounded like laughter. So I called to mind the example of Christ and the fig tree, and I pointed at the closest one, and spoke a curse.

It felt like a shudder ran through the earth, and I saw the tree wilt, and then crack open with a greenish fire consuming it from the inside until only ash remained. Shocked at the efficacy of the miracle, I bowed to give thanks, yet keeping my eyes open for new threats. By this time, all the trees had bent back their limbs, and frozen in position.

Kevin and Becky started laughing a bit that the trees were now afraid of them. But then they stopped, for we could all feel alien thoughts and feeling impinging on our minds.

Fear, terror, Woodsman, go away, Prophet, go away! echoed in our brains. So I stopped the fire with the kids help, and we made for the edge of the forrest by a wide and easy path that closed in behind us. The Verboten Forreste wanted us gone with all its vicious little heart.

I might have stayed to get answers, but I had two pre-teens to take care of.

Just beyond the forest, I could see a road that led down into a valley to my left, across a stone bridge and into a small hamlet. To my right, I saw a twinkling and happy looking hut on top of a hill, but already I mistrusted the appearance of kindness in this dark land.

Reminded of such a thing, I cast a spell in subterfuge to see the true appearance of the kids and their spirits. Neither were saints to be sure, but they were kindly humans, and not monsters in disguise I discovered with gladness.

We set out toward the village. On the way, I discovered some bones much gnawed upon, and a very nice quality axe. It fit my hand well, so I took it up.

Nothing bothered us at the bridge, and so we came to the wooden walled town which had its gates closed against us. I asked for the opening due to some kids needing rest, and I cajoled and offered money, but to no help. The guard was not going to open the gate, not at night.

?Fine, I?ll just set up a tent out here.?

?You can?t.? The guard replied to which I asked him how he was going to stop me. That shut him up since he had no intention of coming outside the wall.

My tent went up quickly, and the two went to bed, and thence to sleep in five minutes while I pondered things by another smaller campfire by the roadside near the town.

I got out my notebook, and sketched out a spell, and then another. First we needed to find the gate, then verify that it was the right one, control it, and open it. Two hours later, and I needed a new notebook, but I had my spells, plus some variants for other situations.

?That won?t do.? The man on horseback said from behind his thick cloak, and under his tall hat. I leapt up, and spun around looking for ambushers, and finding none. Sword still in hand, I turned back to face the man, if that was what he really was.

?I?ve killed once tonight.?

?Silence.? He barked and waved a gauntleted in leather hand. A ball of brilliant light was created and sped toward me. With telekinesis and magic I sent it back to him which he reversed, and so we stood there trying to shove this beauteous ball of energy back and forth. Then he sagged, and it smacked into him knocking him off his horse.

I vaulted over the horse, and came down in a gymnasts? landing next to him with my sword over his body, but by the time I came out of the splits, he had regained his feet, and drew a longsword.

?Hold.? He cried as I advanced. So I stopped, and looked under the horse to check on my tent.

?I apologize for my tone. I guess I?m used to dealing with less demanding and impatient heroes than you versers.?

?I?m an American, so sue me. And you are???

?I am the wizard who is to aid you in your Quest by giving you information in accordance with the general rules of such things.?

Remembering another wizard who had compelled me, I asked what would happen if I did not.

?Suffering and lamentations for many would continue. But no doubt, the Land would reward you well. Verser, you must not give up. Or be satisfied with merely saving these two. There are many that suffer. This land needs to be purified. I have no means to compel you, other than your conscience. Have you no feelings, man??

?What is this place?? I asked ignoring his insults.

?A place where a king a long time ago, for power and life gave his kingdom into the hands of the Dark Poet. A fairy tale kingdom that takes children from other lands as sacrifices to keep its hold on power. And these children become the rats that swarm, and the soulless servants of the Poet unless they escape or master the Land, and few do, few do indeed.?

?Well then, this seems an appropriate place for me. Tell me how to find this Dark Poet.?

The wizard sketched out a map for me, and agreed to come with me and the two children as I dared the castle. But first, I would have to brave three challenges.

The first was the impassable Verboten Forreste. It had been planted by the Poet, and it served as a redoubt for wolf men, and other even more unseemly creatures. And all the forces of the forrest would come to contest our passage.

So, since, I am a sledgehammer, I thought to avoid slipping through the forrest, or fighting my way through. Instead, I waited until morning, and then marched into town with the children following me, and the Wizard enchanting any guard who raised a staff to pummel me.

Upon reaching, the center of town, I saw a beaten down and fearful populace. They chose accommodation because they thought they had to. Weakness makes appeasement of evil to be wisdom.

So I told the people that I wanted to hire them for a day?s work, and that I was too busy and lordly to explain it to them. They were peasants, and they could take my money, or face my wrath.

Only a few gold coins sufficed to buy three hundred people?s labor for a day.

Then I took them out, and set them to gathering brush. And then, I had them put it in line along the edge of the forest.

About this time, the peasants began to be frightened for they could see my aim. I sent the Wizard out to remind them of their promise, and the penalties attached to oath-breaking in this world.

The young girl told me as I asked that none but her and her brother had come into the forest in the last two weeks that was not evil. And the birds after telling her that also told her when a strong, steady wind would come.

So we lit the brushfires, and as commanded, the peasants began to toss burning branches at the forrest. The trees fought back. They shrieked, and moaned terrible threats while a good singer led the peasants in a song about being warm by the fireplace. Then the trees started tossing branches back.

But the branches coming back were easily dodged, and did little damage in the open field. Not so for the flaming branches, the peasants hurled. I just stood there, occasionally using my telekinesis to rescue some fellow about to be beaned on the noggin, but that?s it.

Soon, a wildfire bloomed, and then it raced eastward.

Through the night the fire burned, and as morning light pierced the tent walls, the Verboten Forest shrieked its evil last.

The next morning, the peasants stared at the battlefield, and I could see some realize that they had lived in fear for so long when a little work might have rescued them. I left them arguing about how to divvy up the new land.

We walked across the smoking ashes of the forest, now made clean by the purifying fire, and after five miles, we came to our next challenge. A stone bridge over a rushing mountain stream, and underneath it hid a horrendous troll.

No goats were around, and watching his extremely long arms flash out to snag a fly with inhuman speed and accuracy made me respect his combative skills.

He hid under the bridge because long exposure to the sun would crack his skin, and he would evaporate.

So we traveled down the stream a mite, and I borrowed the girl?s mirror. And then we aimed it so that the reflection of the sun landed on the troll.

He screamed, he cursed, but eventually he was forced to run for it, and the sun caught him in the open as a cloud dissipated, and he evaporated.

The passage over the bridge went well, but we stopped to do as the boy suggested. We put up signs explaining the troll?s demise, even as we warned people to double-check just to be safe.

The third block showed a continual thunderstorm which threw wicked jabs of lightning onto a torn landscape.

No doubt, if we walked out there, we would all be struck by lightning.

Well, I figured what the only thing to do was. I lifted myself by telekinesis, and at near ground level, I flew into the storm. And promptly, I was hit by several bolts of lightning, and since I did not offer a conductor?s path to the ground, it did very little to me, at all.

After passing through, I started to use TK to grab the others, and help them through. Or at least that was my plan, and then I wondered.

This is a faerie tale kingdom. Maybe, each person should have, and would have only one chance to really use magic to help. The girl had helped me twice already, once by magic, and once by mundane means which meant I probably had the same upcoming for the boy.

I wanted to reserve my own skills as some sort of trump card for the final ?poetry reading? as it were. The kind of reading where you tell someone?s future by reading their entrails. I?d be sure to make it rhyme.

So I asked for help, and the Wizard stepped forward with trepidation.

?It is my test.? He said severely and with a deep dignity, he walked out into the thunderstorm, and raised his wizard?s staff to the sky.

Lightning bolts began to pummel his ?lightning rod?, and I saw him stagger, not once, but thrice, until he regained his feet, and began to sing to the storm in a triumphant voice.

Full of glory, he beckoned us on as he sang the storm to its rest. Laughing we passed him, and he turned to follow us. Feeling a doom about, I turned back in time to see the earth swallow him up.

My magics did not send him free, and the storm looked to be rebuilding itself, so we pressed on sobered by the loss of our trusted guide.

As rain began again to generally fall from the sky, and not just in a blocking passage, we came to a door to a castle gatehouse.

I had hardly begun to ask the children for aid, when the boy whipped out a credit card.

He then began to jimmy with the door while his sister confided that Mom was a space cadet who always was locking herself out of cars and the house, and so her little brother had learned how to break into like, almost anything.

Within five minutes, we walked in, and crossed the moat while dark things writhed under the water. Once inside, the door behind us slammed shut, and all the doors in the Great Hall did so as well.

Fear flooded the room, but I laughed.

?Really now, you have to do better than that.? And a disgruntled Poet left off his song of fear. Instead, he conjured darkness, and eating things in the darkness.

The things in the moat rose into the air, and flew through high windows to darken the room, and chill the soul with their horrid cries.

The boy held out a stick, and it began to glow, and the shadow?s held back from him. But it was not enough. I could feel myself, and the girl weakening under the shadow?s steady and unnerving regard.

So, I asked the boy if that was the limit of his power.

?I can make wood glow. That?s it.?

I pointed out all the wood trimmings in the room, and asked him to make them all glow at one time. And before the shadows could flee, a brilliant light shown all about the Hall, and it began eating the Shadows. Within moments the Hall was empty, except for Light and us.

And then the doors on the far end of the hall slammed open, and a man in black armor and armed with a great sword walked out. I told the children to back away from me and the warrior. He asked me why I had messed up his beautiful art that he had made.

I snarled at him. Those with beautiful plans, who do not have to live with the consequences of their plans, are infuriating.

My attacks rained down on him, and then my spells fell all about him, and nothing hurt him as he chased me around the room. Until finally, I reached for the axe which was a pitiful weapon I should think. Its first blow severed the sword. By the fourth blow, all hope of his victory was gone.

?You have come to the end. Turn aside from your wickedness, and embrace mercy.? I begged him as he kneeled on the stone floor.

?No, and never.? He said, and then he thrust the broken sword into his own throat. Aghast, I backed up, and tried to shield the children?s eyes.

And then he was gone, leaving bit of dust in the air, and a pile on the stone floor. Suddenly, I realized a hideous truth?The Dark Poet is a verser, and I shall meet him somewhere else.

And then the floor cracked open, and the castle fell down all about us with no harm to any of us. The wizard rose out of the ground bearing a glass coffin.

Inside, a prince slept. Becky got all fluttery looking at him and exclaiming how cute he was, and wishing she was older.

“Come back when you are an adult, child. My older brother, the foolish boy who asked for long
years of life in exchange for his crown from the Dark Poet, he got his wish. Many years of life, sleeping in a deep sleep. Many times I have heard him cry out in his sleep that he wanted to do differently, but until now, I could not rescue him.

He and I can wait a few years for his queen to come back. We have already waited centuries.”

I thought the wizard was being a bit presumptuous, but then I looked with clear eyes at Becky, and I saw what the wizard saw. Some people are meant for each other.

Around us, in the ruins of the castle, birds landed bearing seeds, and the overcast sky was blowing away to reveal a bright, blue day.

And so we walked across the enlivening landscape, dealt with an ogre, and met a cat who made fast friends with the boy. Naturally, the cat could talk, and he started to give the boy apparently silly advice on how to deal with the bullies at school.

After our ten mile procession that stopped in several villages where the relieved people turned out to cheer the Sleeping Crown Prince, and the Princess, and the Clever Prince, and the Noble Woodsman (that would be me), and the Wizard, we came to a mirror in a glade near a road.

Through the mirror, we could see a shop. Antiques and such crowded uncomfortably atop each other, and laden with dust.

And beyond on the wall, a clock showing that ten seconds had passed for the Chance kids.

The kids and I stepped through.

And up swooped the shopkeeper with a sneer, and a harsh word about letting kids play in antique shops, and vague threats of making me pay full price for valuable objets d’ arte that looked like junk to me.

I sent the children away to their parents.

Something about him disturbed me, and so I spoke words of compulsion.

“Now who are you? What are you?”

He replied with an avidness, and an evil that shook me with horror and then rage. He was a collector of things valuable, and quite willing to trade children to the Dark Poet for them. He knew all along about the mirror.

Wrathfully, I told him to sign over his shop to me. With bitterness in his eyes, and with a shaking hand as he tried to fight my magic, the shopkeeper sold me his shop for one dollar.

But I was not done with him yet.

“Menes, menes, tekel, upharsin.” I spoke, and he fell over, quite mad, and trying to chew up the plastic flowers in a display case.

After he was taken away, I then set about cleansing the shop. First of malign influences, and then of dirt.

A gift of gold from the Wizard in the Tale Kingdom, and we greatly expanded the size of the shop. Added a restauraunt, and a number of child-friendly items.

And I kept in contact with the Chance kids until I found out that they were having to leave the city. Dad had lost his job.

So, I offered him management of the store as long as he listened to the advice of his son (who had a very smart and devious cat as a guidance counsellor). Bewildered and overjoyed, he accepted.

And I got to watch kids come in, wander the aisles, and some stopped, and saw a mirror in plain sight that never got sold. When they came back from the Kingdom of Magic an eyeblink later, they were wiser, kinder, stronger.

Content, I left the shop, and had my share of the profits donated to Ronald McDonald House.

In the wide world beyond, I found magics in small places. Ghosts in haunted mansions, and fortune tellers with the Sight, and rainmakers who had wonderfully good records of success, and so forth hiding almost in plain sight while the Establishment laughed at it all as mere fakery.

Years passed, and I learned magics from various teachers as I wandered, and then the message came by a passenger pigeon who found me, and landed on my shoulder inside a diner on Rt. 66.

“You are invited to the marriage of Prince Charming and Princess Rebecca Chance by her parents and the Wizard. RSVP.”

I smiled at the boggled customers. Paid my bill, walked out to my Harley, and booted it around toward Chicago, and the Shop, and the Mirror.

The wedding was grand, and afterwards, the Land suddenly glowed even more. For this is what the Land had been waiting for. The True King sat on the Throne, and his Queen sat on her Throne beside him, and the Chance parents looked on happily along with the Wizard and about two thousand of the locals.

During the party, I chanced on the brother who was looking well.

“Are you going to stay here?”

“I’ll visit, but no. I find Earth more interesting. I’ve got an idea…” And he sketched out a plan to revolutionize the computer industry. It would end with him taking out Microsoft which was not a bad thing at all.

“That’s going to be tough.” I said.

“Yeah. But Gates does have a serious problem.”

“What’s that?”

“He doesn’t have a cat with boots.” And the brother picked up his near-constant companion who merely looked terrifically smug, even for a cat.

At Midnight, the party ended, and I found myself atop a tall tower looking out over the friendly darkness spangled with campfires and windows lit below and stars and the moon above.

The Wizard walked up to me.

“And they lived happily ever after, Hero.”

“Good. I’m glad.”

“But you are restless. You want to find your home. I’ve sought a way to help you, and so has the Land. This is the best we have. A step or two in the right direction.”

He offered me a Ring with wishes, and a gate shining in the night to a another world which should be pretty close to mine.

Once there, I might find help. They could not be sure. But it was a surety that I would find those who needed my help.

So I stepped through the gate, and found by magic my Harley going with me. And so I rode off into the glimmering light, and into another world.

Tadeusz

  I am persuaded that the most difficult alignment in Dungeons & Dragons™ both to understand and to play is neutrality.  I understand good as Beneficence, and it’s easy enough to see how its opposite, evil, is ultimately about being Selfish, but where’s the middle ground between doing something for myself and doing something for others?  Similarly, I can see how the lawful is most interested in promoting and protecting Societies while the chaotic is solidly behind individual Freedom, but ultimately don’t we all have to put one of these as more important than the other?  If I’m neutral, if my alignment is none of these things, then what, really, are my Beliefs?  If alignment is the true religion of the game, does the neutral then believe nothing?

  I wrestled long with this.  Even after running games for most of a decade, I was of the opinion that neutrality was an interesting game fiction with no correlation to reality.  I’d never seen anyone play a neutral character as a neutral character.  Always these were something else, usually chaotically opposing any law over them while selfishly taking the evil path when they could have done good.  No one understood what neutrality was all about, and I didn’t either.

  However, I played a couple of characters (remember, for a very long time I was always behind the screens, so my opportunities to address alignment were limited to running non-player characters and passing judgment on the actions of the players), and explored some of the possibilities.  I created my alignment quiz and was working on a growing referee aid for character generation that ultimately became my Character Creation web site, so I had to deal with neutrality, and I had to figure out what it was.

  What I discovered was that neutrality had at least three faces, one of which itself had two expressions.  I named these, so I could explain them.  The two forms I saw that were not well expressed in the game text I called oblivious and pragmatic, while leaving the third to bear the name it frequently wore in the game, druidic.  It was druidic neutrality that demonstrated two forms, a standard or balanced form, and a cross-principled variant.  Each of these approaches neutrality in a distinct fashion, yet each succeeds in being truly neutral.

  The pragmatic neutral is simple to understand.  He takes the view that the two sides of the coin are not values in themselves, but tools to be used to further the values he holds.  So for example the pragmatic neutral good will say that whether by law or by chaos, we will further good; we will make better the lives of as many people as we can, whether we do so by building stronger societies or by breaking them down in the name of freedom.  Law and chaos do not matter as such, but are recognized as means, not ends, ways of achieving the goal of good.

  Similarly, the pragmatic lawful neutral does not care whether actions are generally good or evil, whether they spread the wealth around or concentrate it in the hands of the few in power.  What matters is that society is preserved, order is maintained, and law is established.  If that is accomplished by making the lives of others better, then doing so achieves the goal; if it is necessary to torture the innocent and drive the masses into poverty and starvation to maintain order, it’s all the same.  Good and evil are just tools; they are not values.

  This sort of neutrality has a certain fragility to it.  If our lawful neutral comes to the conclusion that good is usually a better tool than evil, he may still be neutral; but if he goes beyond that to realize that good has value inherently, he is no longer neutral but good.  The neutrality is maintained only as long as the character can weigh good and evil actions entirely on whether they promote law, without any bias based on whether they are good or evil.

  The question arises as to whether someone can be pragmatic neutral neutral, that is, regard all of law, chaos, good, and evil as tools to be used in the pursuit of the true values.  It is difficult to imagine such a thing, particularly on the scale of life.  After all, if none of these things are values in themselves, what values can they support?  Yet I have seen a character, albeit a rather two-dimensional non-player character, for whom this appeared to be his alignment.  He was the innkeeper at the most respected inn in a very dangerous city.  He had one value in all he did:  to run the best and safest inn in town.  If that meant giving free food to adventurers down on their luck, he would do it.  If it meant hiring an assassin to retrieve a kidnapped guest, the fate of the kidnapper would not be pretty.  He cared nothing for law or chaos, good or evil; he only cared that the guests in his care were safe and comfortable, by whatever means he had at his disposal.

  This is distinct from the oblivious neutral.  This character takes the position that the values touted by others do not exist; that is, to be neutral on the moral axis is to hold that there is no good, no evil.  To act in your own self-interest is to make the world better, and so to benefit others; to act in the benefit of others is to make the world better, and so benefit yourself.  Good and evil, as argued by those who hold these views, are so much sophistry.

  My chaotic neutral attorney was such a character.  He believed in freedom.  He believed that people in that city had the right to pursue whatever lives they chose, and that as long as they weren’t preventing others from exercising similar rights, no one should stop them from doing what they chose.  Arguments about whether their actions were good or evil were, from his perspective, efforts to evade the only issues that mattered:  whose freedoms were being impinged, and how could that be corrected?

  It is harder for me to imagine a character who holds an oblivious neutrality on both axes.  To fail to recognize anything as good, or evil, or lawful, or chaotic; to see no value or meaning to any of these; strikes me as requiring a mindlessness suited only to animals.  Yet it is in animals that we find this sort of oblivious neutrality.  They do not understand the values we hold.  Herd animals in particular act in ways that mix selfish self-preservation with beneficent protection of the herd, shifting between the importance of the group and the importance of the individual without any recognition of the difference.  They have no sense of this at all.

  More significantly, it is quite possible for someone to be pragmatic or oblivious on one axis, and druidic on the other.  Unlike the pragmatic and oblivious neutrals, the druidic neutral values neutrality as a thing in itself.  He can therefore pragmatically use neutrality in one dimension as a means of pursuing neutrality on the other.  To understand this, though, we must understand druidic neutrality.

  The druid believes that there must be balance in all things.  He believes that every person must do some good and some evil, every place must mix law with chaos.  It would seem that most characters do this.  The noblest saint does not starve himself; the wickedest villain finds it necessary to be nice to someone.  We saw how societies and individuals were so dependent upon each other that a thorough belief in the primacy of one at times demands support for the other.  But the druidic neutral goes beyond that.  It is not to say that sometimes the needs of individuals are best promoted by building society; it is saying that at times the needs of society are more important than those of individuals, even if it crushes those individuals.  It is to say that stripping some individuals of all their rights so that there will be slave labor to work in the fields is a good thing, and at once to say that conscripting serfs for the armies is an unjust imposition on their freedoms, despite these being two applications of the same concept.  It is to say that no value can consistently bring the right answer, and that the right answers are only achieved by constantly changing the values on which the decisions are made, sometimes favoring society and sometimes individuals, sometimes urging charity and sometimes selfishness.

  This is why such druidic neutrality is compatible with pragmatic and oblivious counterparts.  A character could regard law and chaos mere tools to be used to maintain the balance between good and evil; he could regard good and evil as distractions raised to take the focus off the important balance between law and chaos.  It is not the beliefs of the druids, but it is neutral in both dimensions.

  It is also why druidic neutrality is so hard in play.  How do you maintain the balance?  How do you decide when law and when chaos, when good and when evil?  If you pass through a leper colony healing the sick, are you then obliged to flame strike a playground?  The two common approaches to druidic neutrality have been the extremist and the minimalist.  The extremist does great good and great evil, supports oppression one moment and anarchy the next.  The minimalist believes that small forces are easier to balance than large, and so opposes any great good or great evil, any strong society or fierce individualism, preferring to have everything stay near the middle ground.  The extremist comes across as insane, an erratic man with split personality who will give you bread and gold one day and kill you the next.  The minimalist comes across as bland, unwilling to do anything that expresses commitment one way or the other, truly seeking moderation in all things.  It is very difficult to play with any range that remains sane.

  There is a solution to this, a simpler approach to druidic neutrality, which avoids the erratic extremes while maintaining a strong sense of value.  The cross-principled neutral achieves balance through strongly held beliefs that are not, from the perspective of the other alignments, consistent.  Such a character compiles a list of key beliefs, and attempts to follow them as well as he is able.  Such a list might say that the king must always be obeyed, that slavery must always be opposed, that the sick should be healed at no charge, and that enemies should be tortured into giving information.  For each principle of law there is a corresponding principle of freedom, for each good there is an evil–not in direct conflict, but of similar magnitude, and capable of coming into conflict in the right situation.  Such a character now has strong beliefs, and can act boldly to defend them, yet finds himself sometimes friend and sometimes enemy of each of the other alignments.  He achieves true neutrality in the druidic way, through balance; he achieves balance not by random acts nor by removing all the weights from the scale, but by placing heavy weights on each arm thereof.

  Aristotle counseled moderation in all things.  In some ways, neutrality would seem to do the same; yet it can be the most immoderate alignment through the very act of seeking moderation, meeting extremes with extremes, even within the same act.

  Thus neutrality proves to be the richest and most diverse of the core alignments, having the greatest variation within itself, and some of the most interesting possibilities for character development in play.

  There was once a druid character in one of my games.  He was a misfit in a party comprised mostly of goods, rarely chaotic.  On one occasion, however, the party turned to him for a task for which they considered him particularly suited.  In an outpost on the edge of the civilized world, the head of the local government had been poisoned; the party had taken charge, identified the villain, held a fair trial, and sentenced him to be executed.  The druid was to be the executioner.

  The villain was bound, his head placed on a block, and the druid approached with his scimitar drawn.  Reaching the block, however, to the surprise of everyone, he sheathed it.  Instead he pulled his staff of withering, and struck the villain on the head with this.  It was a dreadful execution, but a just one.  The player whose cavalier had exercised the authority in these proceedings commented that this was the perfect neutral act, simultaneously lawful, chaotic, good, and evil, and a wonderful example of balance in action.

  I can see it; I can’t explain it, but there it is.  For that moment, the character had achieved balance.  True neutrality was served.

  Next week, something different.

—–

M. Joseph Young is co-author of Multiverser and Vice President for Development at Valdron Inc.  His many contributions to online literature are indexed for convenience, and he looks forward to discussing these things by e-mail or on our Gaming Outpost forums.

  Someone recently asked me if he was the only person who didn’t have a cellular phone.  I’m sure there are many people who don’t have this modern inconvenience; I, however, am saddled with one.  My wife is of the opinion that there are people to whom I don’t want to talk at all who should have the power to contact me at any time and any place, interrupting whatever I am doing with their concerns, concerns which they think should be more important to me than whatever it is I happen to be doing at any given moment.  Specifically, she wants the schools to be able to call me whenever they want.  So I have a cell phone, and I often have it with me, at least when I can’t get out of it.

  What interests me about it, what caught my attention about it even before this question arose, is that mine is of the prepaid variety.  I have to buy time in advance of using it.  Compare this to the land line service I have in my house:  I pay for calls I’ve already made, after the fact.  The phone company sends me a bill telling me what I owe them, and if I’m negligent in paying for services rendered, their chief recourse is to prevent me from making any additional calls until I’ve settled my account.

  It occurs to me that there are many things for which I pay in advance, and others for which I pay after the fact, and that there is not all that much of a pattern to these.  For example, I have for decades heated the house with gas, and gas heat means that the gas company charges me regularly for the gas I’ve already burned.  Those who have oil heat, on the other hand, must buy it to have it, or they can’t burn it.  The truck pulls up and fills the tank, and they pay for what they want, in the expectation that they will use it eventually.  In that sense, their oil is like my prepaid telephone service, and my gas heat is like my land lines.

  Of course, there are many things that you get when you pay for them.  I pick out my groceries and pay the checker before I take them to my car.  In a sense I’m paying for them before I use them, but I am taking possession of them.  However, there’s no inherent reason why my groceries couldn’t be prepaid, why I couldn’t transfer funds from my account to the grocer’s and then at my leisure pick up what I need charged against my credit balance.  Similarly, there’s no inherent reason why the store couldn’t keep a running tab on what I take and bill me at the end of the month for it.  In fact, those who use credit and debit cards are doing something very like that, but that generally there is a middleman who handles the transaction.

  Similarly, I start using the gas in my car as soon as I pull away from the pump, and may well obtain the next tankful at another station; there really isn’t a practical way for me to pay for it as I use it.  But compare most diners to most fast food restaurants.  In the former case, you order your food, eat it, and then when you’re done you pay for it.  In the latter, they’ll have your money in the register before they’ve finished fouling up your special orders.  At one time doctors sent bills to their regular patients for services previously rendered.  Today some forms of medical insurance (such as the HMO and IPO models, but also the original Blue Cross model) have patients paying in advance for services they might or might not need.  Most doctors expect payment at time of service, but will bill your insurance company if you’ve got traditional insurance, which means they’re paid later.  They’ll also bill you, if your insurance didn’t cover it all.

  There is no particular method to the madness.  Generally you pay bus fare, train tickets, and airlines before you ride; but you pay taxi drivers when you reach your destination.  The toll booths for most bridges and tunnels that lead into New York City (they have one-way tolls into New York) are all on the New Jersey side, before you cross; those crossing the Delaware River (also one-way tolls going toward Philadelphia) tend to be on the Pennsylvania and Delaware side, so that you pay after you’ve crossed.  You pay to get on Philadelphia’s High Speed Line, but you paid to get off the MTA’s similar service in Boston, as a song famous in the fifties highlighted.  I can, if I like, take each letter to the post office when I need to mail it, and pay to have it delivered at that time, but most people buy stamps in bulk so that they can send letters when they need to–clearly prepaying for delivery service they expect to use in the future.  Today I can buy service agreements for many of the things I buy, in essence paying in advance for repairs I might never need, and so getting them at a discount if I do need them.  Too bad I can’t get this on my car; but that’s because it’s an old car–service on new cars is often included, prepaid.

  What appears through this is that there’s no particular reason why something should or should not be prepaid.  Certainly we can focus on individual cases and see why these are one way or the other.  Heating oil is delivered like gasoline by any of several competitors, so charging me for what I take is easier than charging me for what I use; gas, on the other hand, is piped through the ground to reach me, and is more easily metered and billed as I use it–I can’t easily change gas companies.  Yet I could pay in advance if I switched to bottled gas.  Similarly, there’s no reason why a taxi couldn’t charge in advance, or an airplane take payment on arrival.  It’s just the way it’s done.

  Since it is nothing more than the way it’s done, it presents opportunities to consider how it might be done otherwise.  If the characters check into an inn, does the innkeeper want his money before he arranges the room, or will he bill you in the morning?  Do the mercenaries you hire want their coin before they leave town, or are they willing to trust you to pay them on their return?

  Put the shoe on the other foot.  Will the merchant who hires the characters to escort him safely to his destination pay them up front, or will he insist that they succeed in getting him there before he’ll impart their earnings to them?  Can they persuade the stranger with the map to trust them to share whatever they find if he’ll let them take it, or will he part with it only if they pay him the small price he asks for it?

  Consider the possibilities in the future.  If food comes from replicators or other dispensers on the ship or space station, do the characters receive bills at the end of the month for the food they’ve eaten, or do they have to pay the food service at the beginning of the month for the amount of food they expect to consume?  Is there a monthly life support bill, and if you don’t pay it do they shut off your service?  Do you pay for site-to-site teleporter use, and if so when do you pay?

  While you’re thinking about how your economic system works, you might take a look back at some of the earlier articles in this series which have touched on it.  Value talked about the fact that no object, not even a diamond, has an inherent worth, but is dependent on whether people want it, something well within the control of the referee in the game world.  The history of money, and the many forms it has taken over time and might take in the future, was the subject of Cash.  Shares wasn’t too far afield, as it discussed various means of equitably dividing the material rewards a group of characters received for their efforts.  Although Opportunity Costs is more about budgeting time than budgeting money, it is definitely about resource allocation, and part of our economic thinking.  There’s a lot of material here to help build the financial systems of your worlds; this is one more piece to the puzzle that can make it more interesting, more alive.

  We have a tendency to manage these things pretty much the way that is familiar to us.  That is exactly the wrong way to do it, in most cases.  We are in unfamiliar worlds, and should expect the unexpected.  We should give some thought to how this world does things.  Different is good.

  Next week, something different.

—–

M. Joseph Young is co-author of Multiverser and Vice President for Development at Valdron Inc.  His many contributions to online literature are indexed for convenience, and he looks forward to discussing these things by e-mail or on our Gaming Outpost forums.

I woke to a smell of coal smoke, and grease, and ozone. A shrill steam whistle woke me, and I jerked up from my leaning against a flattened “V”-shape of bolted iron.

My feet clattered on the metal floor, and I looked about to see a small room with windows overlooking air. Up front, a small crowd of perhaps twenty-five humans in dark suits, starched white cotton shirts and suspenders, and the females wore crinoline skirts and whalebone corsetted blouses, and nice flat hats.

“Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the capitol of the world, London, and the …” A click, a shudder, and a whistle interrupted the attendant’s prepared speech at the front of the crowd, and he paused expertly, and then continued smoothly. “…docking tower atop the London Crystal Dome. You have now been to the top of the tallest structure in the world. Congratulations. Come back soon to fly on Victoria Imperial Dirigibles.”

They left in decent order, ladies first, and the children in tow, and displaying good manners. Then a door to my right opened, and out came a line of second-class passengers. They wore much the same style clothing as ‘their betters’, but it was of lesser quality, and more rough-used.

But along with the attendant in a resplendent red coat, and dazzling array of brass buttons, it assured me I was in a place of formal clothing. This was unfortunate, since I tend toward less formality in attire. Still I slipped into the crowd of second-class passengers, and walked out into open air.

A walkway of fine metal grating extended from the belly of an iron-armoured dirigible to a tower atop a giant sparkling Crystal Dome that covered possibly a hundred square miles of space. The tower was a good two football fields high, and I felt terrifically exposed and high up with only a metal wire grate between me and ker-splat if I slipped off the walkway which swayed in the breeze, or make that occasional gusts.

Icy cold, and shockingly powerful gusts and vortices spun off that giant dome below us, and moved the whole dirigible and the walkway when the winds felt the will to do so.

And looking back, I was impressed with the turretted weapons dotting the dirigible, and the heavy iron armour until with an almost audible clunk in my head, I realized the dirigible should in no way be held stable and not crushing, much less flying.

Any reasonable support structure would collapse under the weight of the sheathed and jointed iron armor. The thing should be a collapsed pile of iron on the ground.

And the guns looked odd as well. I’ve seen a lot of projectile systems, and even understand a fair bit about them, but this looked like nothing like that.

A polite murmur got me moving again, and we descended an elevator to one of the Common Levels near the level of the ground where public business could legally take place. The Private Levels were barred from business, and used as homes.

Steam-powered trolleys spun by in a vast station. We transferred to horizontal transport and split to our separate ways. I headed toward Trafalgar Square Trolley as it was the only name I recognized.

On the noisy trolley, I surreptiously studied a newspaper. It was May of 1895 Anno Domini, and the Queen, no name included, was to address the country on the anniversary of the Wales Incident at Trafalgar Square.

It seemed many of my companions were from Press Street from the way they scribbled and eyed each other. I would have expected some open sarcasm, but either good manners forbad it, or something else was going on.

We got there, and Queen Victoria, an old, dumpy, but good and very powerful personality on whom authority rested easily spoke to a crowd. Her words were relayed by phonograph records, and replayed to large crowds in other cities.

She spoke movingly of the deliberate, unprovoked, and unwarned explosion of the hospital ship, the Princess of Wales, that had been on a mission of mercy. The Sheikh of Upper Hyderabad whose domains touched the Empress of India’s seemed to have been responsible, and he had been harried from his country by British Redcoats, and gone into hiding to foment more mischief.

Even now, the King of Spain dawdled between two foreign ministers. One desired to hunt down this barbarian who scoffed at the civilized laws of war, and the other sought to make terms with the barbarian and shunt the load of protecting civilization onto the British Empire which stretched from Siberia to Vancouver to Mexico City to New York to New Delhi, and beyond. If so, then he declared himself a child unfit for an adult’s burdens, and would be treated as such by an annoyed grandmother, Queen Victoria.

A great fire had been set in Madrid we were told, exactly nine hundred eleven days since the explosion. Hundreds were dead, and yet in this very capital, the ambassador of the Sheikh came to talk with the Queen.

“In my wrath, at this despicable attack, I would desire to shorten the ambassador by a head, but I am bound by my given word. He shall suffer no harm here. Once he gets home, however, he and all his bandit kin shall be hunted to extermination!”

This got a great cheer from the crowd except among the press who sat glumly on their hands. After the speech, I talked to them, trying to find out the source of their discontent.

They felt the Queen was not listening to them. From what they said about frequent meetings with the Queen, it sounded like she listened, but did not agree. People have that problem, they think if you listen to them, you will agree if they feel passionately about something.

The Queen was a hard, but fair woman I would say. I felt sure after seeing her that she gave all sides a hearing, and then made up her own mind.

They claimed that past transgressions caused the rage of the Sheikh’s people which he only expressed. To this I asked them if this justified murdering a thousand nurses on the way to help a plague-ridden city. They had no reply that made sense.

Saddened at the nature of humanity, I walked away and sought consolation in good food and drink. Feeling better, I walked into the dimly lit streets with their jutting blasts of steam coming at me at odd angles as I strolled the now nighttime, and mostly deserted street.

Hearing cheerful noise, I headed toward it aware that later I needed a place to stay. However, my gold from Conan was readily accepted in this cosmopolitan city.

A great display, apparently free to the public after being donated by a local lord, of iceskating mixed with acrobatics on rings near the rink, and interspersed with singing, and coloured with the most frivolously wonderful and gaudy streamers to delight the child in all of us greeted my eyes. It was like a three-ring circus in its intensity; there was literally too much going on at one time to see it all.

I found a seat and was given some popcorn, “Courtesy of Lord So-and-so”, and relaxed. After a bit, I realized I had not done what I usually do upon entering a world, which is to sense for versers. So, since I was already receptive, I did, and found four.

Disturbed, I sat up and heard a child wake up next to me in a tram. The young girl of maybe eight spoke to her mother.

“Mother, I had another one of those dreams. The angel came to me, and told me something.”

I waited for Mom to scoff or to politely listen with hidden disbelief. Instead, Dad, and older brothers leaned in to listen with worry evident. A strange world that had heavier-than-air dirigibles, vastly heavier, and angelic visions sent to little girls.

“The Stormlord has come. The King of Spain will choose to offer false friendship to the Sheikh, but the Sheikh will not be foolish enough to accept it.”

The father nodded.

“Makes sense, Mother, the Sheikh wants half of the Spanish kingdom. He’s not going to be put off by some paltry gestures, that’s just going to make him think his opponent is weak.”

Mother spoke softly.

“Maybe he was lying. Male braggadocio as my little sons have been guilty of a time or two.”

“Maybe.” Father said while looking at the dark eyes of his little daughter who shook her head in sad negation.

Chills ran up and down my spine. Sweat broke out on my forehead, and I just had to get up and walk about. Brushing past some people with the best courtesy I could manage which was poor, I walked about the inside track of the stadium while the ice show went on unnoticed by me, and one little girl.

For I was the Stormlord. On a distant world, a god had prophesied that I would come to a world and rain lightning down on the wicked, and darken the sky with their burning. Trembling, I leaned on the inside rail when I got to a block of people in the path.

I prayed desperately for this to be ‘not true’.

I felt like praying ‘Father, let this cup pass from me.’ But I shrank from comparing my minor suffering to the Lamb of God’s pain.

Finding the crowd moving along, I moved with it without thought or consideration.

Looking up nearly fifty stories, I saw painted clouds on the ceiling. I pointed them out, and people about me grimaced. The ordinary folk of this crowd knew the deficits of living in London Dome. It was crowded, it was fake, it was noisy, but it was also a good job, enough money for the necessities and some extra joys for almost everyone who lived here, the best medical care within minutes, great spectacles, the excitement of being near the center of the world, and the widest possible markets with goods from everywhere on Earth available for cheap prices, and work that uplifted humanity was available here.

London Dome was not perfect, but on the whole only the deliberately blind or the raving partisan of the country would claim it was a bad place to live.

And then I found myself shunted between armed troopers who were searching people, and up some steps. They never searched me for some reason.

And I found myslelf at the top of the steps, and standing on the edge of a marble stand fifty yards across its radius. On it were inscribed the nations and cities of the Earth. The British Empire in royal blue held over half of the planet’s surface.

And atop England, and in the center of the circle sat a throne which held a dumpy and grumpy woman who did her social duty and greeted her subjects. Actually as I stepped closer to her, I was surprised to see that she actually enjoyed this. She only faked her grumpiness.

And then I stood near the center of the circle and waited while around me important men and woman stood about waiting upon or visiting or trying to hold a conversation with the Queen of England. The ‘yeller’ or herald announced each person as he saw an opportunity, but it was manifestly clear that most of the court wanted us, the commoners gone, and we served primarily as a diversion for Victoria.

When she got bored with her ministers of government, she chatted with a few commoners. When she wanted to signal her displeasure, she cut off a minister, and chatted with a few commoners.

I told the herald my name. Tadeusz.

And then I was announced to the Queen.

“The Stormlord has come. And his entourage.” The herald spoke in a strange voice.

And I terribly wanted to spin around, instead I did my verser sense trick and felt versers behind me. But it is simply not done to turn one’s back on the Queen, so I let my back itch while the most powerful woman in the world studied me with pitiless precision.

She waved me closer.

“Where are you from?”

“Outside the universe, majesty.” I replied with my head now clear of shock which I was beginning to suspect had been the point of the little girl. Someone with a capital “S” had wanted me here, and had yanked my strings hard to achieve that.

She nodded as if that was the only answer that made sense.

“I and my ancestors had my preachers praying for a sign over every infant born in the last two hundred years. Nothing. I had hoped for more warning than this.” She sighed.

“The thousand year prophesy is come to fruit in my lifetime. ‘A storm will come upon the People of the Islands who stand at the helm of the World, and a lord of storm will come to them, and deliver them by destroying the storm, and with him will there be four messengers.’”

She motioned the other four up, and I saw the four versers I had last seen on a dead world in a near-finished universe. They had been punks, but Someone afflicted them with permanent empathy as a curse for their crimes. They looked the same physically, but the clothes and the eyes were different.

Pain had etched itself into their souls, and each had responded differently. But all had been improved. The girl looked a tower of strength who had found herself and pity. The first of the boys looked wounded like he had been in a long battle with Good, and finally surrendered. One still looked cold, but he nodded formally for he had accepted Good even if he would not let concern for others touch his heart, still his head knew the virtue of, er, virtue. And the last looked a little broken in the head, but with a manic fervor for righteousness. The last thanked me for my part in cursing him.

One punishment, and each reacted differently. Its one of the reasons it is hard to make public policy. You have to try to aim your policy at the center mass of the bell curve knowing as you do so that you alienate some at the far edges of the curve.

And then a storm of protest descended on us. A group of the peers of the realm protested my presence in sneering tones suggesting that they were much smarter than the others who might support me.

“He will inflame the Shiekh. You must cast him out, and let the Shiekh know you put no credence in this false prophecy. This will show your goodwill, and at last we can be friends, and repair the damage we have caused to the Shiekh’s country.” The man who spoke wore authority and wit well with the kind of patrician benevolence you want in your aristocracy, but something about him smelled.

And then the girl shrieked.

“How much did he pay you?” And she fell over crying on the ground while I studied the man with narrowed eyes. For a second, he looked guilty, but then he manifested outrage.

I could not say if it was real or fake. The others hissed at this shocking breach of decorum on my team’s part until Victoria cleared her throat.

“I would need proof.” She said softly like dirt falling on a coffin lid. Absolute silence rippled out from her throne to still the crowd down the steps into stillness. And suddenly I became aware that Victoria might be more of an absolute than constitutional monarch unlike her doppleganger.

The girl on my team rose to her feet, and stared with a tear-stained face at her target. He laughed uneasily, and she began to look disgusted. Then she spun, and pointed at another woman who wore nearly five pounds of silver.

“In her purse is a letter with blue ink and something called Jennilaire perfume dousing it.”

More protests and scorn and the letter was produced. It described a meeting between the Shiekh and the woman and the man where they discussed means to influence the monarchy and the below-market sale of coal which the Shiek’s country had in abundance to companies which were associated with the man and the woman.

“Anyone else?” Victoria asked into the sudden silence. And the girl on my team, and in fact the whole team began to study faces.

They picked out eleven of the forty. I recognized one of them as a newsman on the trolley I had ridden on.

Suddenly one of the guys began to shout in a strange voice at Victoria.

“You cannot do this, your majesty. I run the largest paper in the country, the Times. I’m its editor. We decide what’s good for the nation.”

Everyone looked confused for a moment until they realized the empath was channelling the thoughts of this editor.

“No, I decide. You are supposed to report as honestly as you know how.” Victoria said.

“You can’t do this to us, we are the important people. I have friends in all the right clubs, the smart clubs, better than those idiots on the other side who just want to break things, just like a man.” It would have looked humorous to see a football player sized man channel a thin, but hard-edged woman, but it did not, not in these circumstances.

“I’m sorry for your embarrassment, but did you think your oath when you put your hands between mine, meant nothing?” Victoria replied with her face grown strange and desperate.

“Please, people, its just one woman, an old woman, can hardly stand up. Why must we be destroyed, all of us, please.” The whimpering pleading shamed the man it channelled although I found it completely understandable. These Victorians were harder than me.

“Captain of the guard take them away, and see that the men receive a pistol with one bullet, and the women a pill.” Victoria ordered, and grim-faced guards with drawn swords took away the flower of the pacifist movement to be tried and executed or found to have committed suicide and thus regained some measure of honor.

Once they were gone, Victoria collapsed to her knees and whispered to the girl. The girl nodded in the negative, and Victoria pulled herself together.
Still, she looked ten years older, and stricken.

Traitors are not merely hated for the weakness and defeat they bring, but for the pain of exposing and punishing them which wrings the heart.

With permission the girl relayed to me Victoria’s suspicion of a cousin. The girl had cleared the cousin who merely had a soft head and an astonishing lack of logic, but not a traitorous heart.

The loyal members of the court, and my team escorted the Queen to bed.

The next morning I woke in Buckingham Castle, and frowned. The setting was glorious, but the cause of my being in the setting was hateful.

Over breakfast, we heard the King of Spain had chosen the foreign minister known for supporting peace with the Sheikh.

A week passed, and we strengthened the defense of the realm, and I familiarized myself with the strange steam-based technology that seemingly defied logic.

And I was introduced to a Secret of the Realm. A ray that would detonate with insane fury any hydrocarbon. The hydrocarbon in coal would release its chemical energy which would make it possible for the nuclear energy in the coal to be released, at least a small fraction of it.

It was a raygun that with a proper target could overawe Hiroshima.

And then I asked them if the leader of the program was one of the Traitors. Worse, I found out he did not need to be, for the secret was out to many other nations.

And then we heard that the Sheikh was giving up his requirement for half of Spain, or at least that was one way his statement could be read.

Secret agent work by my team found out that the Spanish had offered technologies for this raygun to the Sheikh in exchange for their safety. But when the King was in private rebuked by the Queen, he explained that it was no matter. They had only sold part of the technology, and they knew the Sheikh did not have the rest.

The Queen replied with some bitterness as to whether he knew that the other tribes such as the Sheikhs had these other technologies, and that if they shared, they could have a working device? The King blustered and left to go home happy to have put the bullseye on someone else.

Over the next year, we tracked things like the movement of monies and weapons and secret labs, but there were so many little fires that we could not attend to them all. And one of the worst was that we could not directly attack the Sheikh’s rich relatives because they were “our loyal allies” even as they financed the attacks against us in overseas bases.

The problem was that it was politically sticky to attack them, might actually provoke some mass uprising. And so they messed with us by raising the price of coal and financing terror against the outskirts of the British Empire, and they used Spain as a safe zone.

We would chase enemies who if they could would race for Spanish waters. Even if the Spanish caught them, they would just find a pretext to release them. Meanwhile, the immigrant population of Spain that was the same as the Sheikh’s got more and more restless, and the Spanish King kept having to kiss up to them with some new law or the other.

But worse than Spain, or the financiers of terror/our loyal allies was a small country up in Central Asia where they quietly created a business market for Hydrocarbon Rayguns, and then built a design that any half-competent technician could build.

See, it had been a difficult challenge, and now any guy with five years of experience and a free year’s salary for a working man could make one. But we found out about this the hard way.

A great boom startled the Queen and the rest of her court at tea. Reports filtered in. Liverpool was gone.

We started frantic rescue efforts. And investigation efforts.

The next day, Glouchester went up, but we had a witness even if he was blind. A coal ship had come into the port, and a Hydrocarbon Raygun had risen from its hold and blown the fully loaded ship and the city to bits. The witness had been in a lighthouse looking at the harbor with a telescope.

They took him to the Temple of Athena. That was another oddity. I expected Christianity, but these Victorians were devout worshippers of Athena. And their figure of evil was Ares.

It was interesting, two gods of war in the same pantheon. One cunning and wise, and the other, a great brute and often incompetent, but random destruction rarely requires much skill. The official position of the Court was that the Sheikh was a servant of Ares even if he claimed to be a follower of Zeus.

We might have had a hard time completely piecing things together, but an ambassador from the Sheikh explained it to us.

“Now, you cannot protect your cities. Even if you blockade, you need that coal. The Raygun is small and easily hid. Eventually we will get another one shipped in, and another. You can surrender to the Sheikh who will be merciful. You will be offered the chance to convert, if you do not you will have certain legal rights, not as many as a true believer, but enough. And your laws will need to be changed. This blasphemous policy of letting woman discuss who they marry, and of letting woman have the vote, or property will halt.” He spoke on with swelling arrogance. For a while after the Purge of the Traitors he had been timid, but not now. And all the while he spoke he ignored Victoria, and spoke to the men in the room.

“I rule here.” Victoria said when he started repeating himself.

“Not anymore.” The ambassador sneered which had several dozen hands go to swords or pistols, until Victoria raised her hand.

“No, despite his barbaric ways, we are Englishmen. We will not break our sworn oaths. None of them.” She added the last with peculiar emphases, and turned to look at me.

“Well Stormlord?”

The Ambassador snickered, and swaggered about to look at me. And suddenly a simple plan that I could start in a few hours occurred to me.

I smiled which has stilled tougher men than the ambassador, but he made a raspberry, and I wrinkled my brow in perplexity until I found myself speaking.

“The pieces are played. Let it ride.”

And suddenly a look of inhuman malevolence shown in the Ambassador’s eyes.

“All right, Lady. I’ve made my play. Let’s see You match it.”

I found myself shaking my head. Poor Ares still thought He had won.

And then She was gone from my head leaving me free to act.

“Turn from your path, sir. You know whom you serve now. Please.” Maybe the “please” did it; maybe the asking for mercy strengthened the ambassador’s confidence. He shook his head.

I looked at my team, and nodded, and they got the foldable ATV’s powered by a turbine they had. It would be a relatively simple matter to reconstruct them, and turn them into flying ‘horses’ for my Four Horsemen. I started to work, and two hours later was finished.

“Don’t make us do this.” I asked the Ambassador.

“Do what?” He asked, and then sneered.

“Destroy you.”

He laughed a great belly laugh.

“My empaths have been scanning the mood of the people of the Sheikh’s country and roundabout. The leaders and the people are ready to follow blindly and kill us all to the last Englisher. But they also are willing to change their mind if one man, known to all would come out, and say he was wrong, why things might be avoided. You, Mr. Ambassador are probably the second-most famous of your countrymen in the world. You can stop this. But if you don’t then no one can. The empaths are clear, you support this, even without a word, and it will crystallize. There is no word we can say that will reach them now. Only you can reach your people and save them.”

The Ambassador sneered again.

“Save them from you? I shall enjoy having you as my house slave.”

I bent over, and began to cry. Great gasping sobs rang out from me while the other members of the court looked on in sympathy except for the Ambassador who chuckled and bellowed for some wine to be sent. It was in the same spirit that one gives a dying man his last request.

“Put them on.” I ordered, and Hydrocarbon Rayguns were mounted on the flying horses.

I turned to offer one last chance, and he threw a bottle across the court at my head.

“Mount up, and do it. After you are done, if you wish, I will ask for removal of the curse.”

They, my team, nodded, and mounted the horses and flew away. Slowly at first up the hallways, and then they were grateful for the heavy leathers as they shot forward at hundreds of miles per hour.

The Sheikh’s country was extraordinarily rich in hydrocarbons. The same with the nations and tribes near him.

We heard the explosion on the other side of the planet. We, no me, had just instituted the hoof-and-mouth method for dealing with terrorism. Nuclear genocide. Hitler was a piker.

I watched uncaring as the Ambassador ran at the Queen with his hands outstretched in claws, and a guardsman’s sword swung in a precise circle that separated the Ambassador’s head from his shoulders in one smooth movement.

If there was anyone left alive over there, I’d tell them that you do not provoke people who have the power to kill you by promising to kill them, and then depending on their forbearance.

I walked out, and did something I almost never do. I got drunk as fast and as hard as I could. My horsemen never came back, not that I could have looked in their eyes anyways.

And then a grey-eyed girl walked through the door of the bar I had ripped off the hinges.

She sat down across from me.

“If you want to blame someone, blame me.”

“Can you do this? Appear in physical form?”

“You are unconscious. Remarkably little tolerance for alcohol. We can appear in dreams.”

“Why?”

“Why what? Why evil? You know why. Human freedom. Why you? You fit the job, and you would survive it which is a plus. You’re not going to go crazy like you think you are. Some bad days and hours are ahead, but you’re too tough, too unimaginative, too grounded to crack for this.”

“Why are people so stupid?”

“Ah, well there are reasons. Let me explain it to you.” Said the goddess of wisdom as she began to talk and weave a healing spell with her soft words.

Tadeusz

  Last night (as I write this), I uploaded last week’s (as you read this) article; and for the first time in the nearly three year run of this series, I do not have an article drafted to run in the next week’s slot.  That is, this article did not exist a week ago when I uploaded last week’s Sounds Like; there was no article for this week one week ago.

  That’s not to say I’ve run out of ideas.  Even with the culling I did for Treats last Halloween, in which I pulled a batch of ideas that had been on the ideas sheet for too long without going anywhere and turned them all into one article of shorts, I still have nineteen numbered ideas; one of those is a reminder that there are at least three more articles in the alignment miniseries.  I’ve got the heart of the next free quarterly wrap-up drafted, on memories.  There are a lot of ideas there which eventually will be articles.  It’s only that there isn’t one drafted for next week–rather, this week, today, as you’re reading it.  I’ve drawn a blank, as it were–I have nothing prepared.

  I could give excuses.  I was very focused recently on preparing for convention demos, and they went extremely well, I thought.  I’ve been trying to squeeze more into my week, working on several books, covering forum posts, developing worlds.  None of that matters.  My excuses do not justify a failure to produce an article.

  I have frequently talked about my preferred answer to writer’s block.  I keep several irons in the fire.  When it’s time to write, I have the novel series, the world books, several games in development, the Faith and Gaming series, occasional articles for other sites and e-zines, and this series, and I can always find something I can write, as long as I’m not falling asleep at the keys (and sometimes even if I am).  That’s good; but that doesn’t help.  I’m committed to having an article here, and my ability to write something else doesn’t help that in the least.

  None of which is your problem.

  Yet you also have this problem.  You are, I expect, a gamer.  Most of you also run games.  That means that there are regularly scheduled times when you’re expected to be ready to run the game.  For some of you it’s only a couple times a year; others are called to the task several times a week.  Perhaps you have such a creative mind that you’ve never had the experience of coming to the game with no real idea what you were going to do.  All I can say is don’t worry.  You will.  We all do, one time or another.

  So the question is, what do you do when you get to the table, and you don’t know what to run?  How do you referee a game when you are not only unprepared but completely without any ideas?

  The odd thing is, the answer is you don’t necessarily need to have a clear idea in mind in order to start.  You just have to start somewhere.

  E. R. Jones (whose math skills often were quite imaginative) chose to have bias in Multiverser run from a high of fifteen down to negative fifteen so he could randomly set the bias by rolling a thirty sided die.  I don’t recommend this.  Apart from the fact that it doesn’t actually work the way he thought, negative bias requires a lot of thought to run effectively.  However, the core idea behind it is well worth recognizing:  it doesn’t matter where you start so much as that you start.  Make up a starting point of some sort–any sort, anything you can imagine–and start there.  Let the players respond to it, and see where they’re going with it.  Respond to what they do.  Sometimes give them what they expect; sometimes use what they expect to surprise them.  Multiverser provides the wonderful GE roll from which you can build entire universes merely by figuring out where the player wants the world to go and using the dice to see how close to that it actually comes; but even without this mechanic, your perception of what the players want and expect can become the drive and definition of what you offer them.

  I once played a game of Twenty Questions with a couple guys.  It was my turn to guess, and I started asking questions.  Yes, no, no, yes, um…that’s also yes, they answered each of my questions.  In the end I was stumped.  What was it?  They had no idea.  They had decided they would just randomly answer the questions and see whether anything came of it.  That time, nothing did–but Twenty Questions is a lot tighter than a role playing game.  More than one referee has told the tale of the time he didn’t know what he was doing so he let the players create what they thought was happening and used their guess to build his solution.  Some have told of the time their players’ guess was so much better than where they were going that they changed the plan on the spot to go there.

  A lot of what happens in games, and whether they work, depends on those of us who are referees.  We are in some ways the creative minds that drive the games, the organizers that keep them running, and the judges who settle the disputes.  So much depends on us that we sometimes forget something very important:  we are not the only creative minds at the table.  There are several other people here, each of whom has ideas that can be folded into the mix to create something more wonderful than we could on our own.  Tapping into that resource takes very little talent beyond paying attention, listening, watching, noticing what they’re saying and doing.

  I worked with a Cubmaster years ago whose slogan was, ideas come in books.  Whenever we had to create a ceremony, a game, an activity, he pulled out the books and read them.  He and I taught a class to cub leaders on skits, in which we showed them how to take a joke out of the back of a magazine and turn it into a skit for their meetings.  One of those skits started showing up at scout meetings after that.  I have a lot of ideas; you probably have many ideas, too.  Yet the success of the game shouldn’t depend entirely on us; and it doesn’t.  Ideas come from other people, and recognizing and utilizing them, incorporating them into what you’ve already got, is one of the best ways to develop something better than you could have created on your own.

  Next week, something different.

—–

M. Joseph Young is co-author of Multiverser and Vice President for Development at Valdron Inc.  His many contributions to online literature are indexed for convenience, and he looks forward to discussing these things by e-mail or on our Gaming Outpost forums.

  Kelly wrote to me the other day.

  It was not, I am sure, Gaming Outpost’s own Kelly Tessena; it was an e-mail from someone self-identified only as Kelly, and other than the question Kelly asked (which I have now forgotten) I know nothing more.  It was not any of the several Kelly’s I know currently, in any spelling of that name, and I probably will never know more about this Kelly than I do now.

  Interestingly, all of the people I know today named Kelly, or Kellie, or Kelli, or however it is spelled (save the one for whom it is a surname, not a given name) are girls.  However, it happens that the very first person with that name that I ever knew was a boy, Kelly Semple, and I was probably at least ten or eleven years old before I knew that it was also a girl’s name.  Similarly, I was no doubt in high school before I knew that Gayle was a boy’s name, and names like Terry, Chris, and now even Bobby and Sam have this inherent ambiguity:  knowing the name does not tell you the gender of the person.  Even as I write, I am not certain whether to refer to my virtually (in both senses) anonymous correspondent as him or her.  I would normally default to using him, in no small part because languages descended from Proto-Hittite tend to use the masculine pronoun for an antecedent which is personal but of unknown gender.  However, I’m not so sure I’d be as likely to do so if the name had been Tracy.

  I did have a character in one of my games in which this was an interesting aspect.  The character was a female drow cavalier (I’ve mentioned her before) whose given name was Lorianna Syleen Thalanar; she never removed her helmet, and she always went by Lors Thalanar (although if she wrote it, it was LorS).  The misdirection worked well, because after a while the other players (who were in the dark as much as their characters) worked out that Lors was actually a woman, but it was a very long time (and an encounter with another female drow) before they worked out that she was a drow.  By disguising two facts, Lors was able to keep one of them secret a very long time.

  The villain in the Tom Cruise film version of Mission Impossible used this sort of occlusion to help hide her identity.  She was known only as Max.  That film used another name to good effect, suggesting that Job 314 was not a job number but a verse from the book of Job (which is pronounced with a long Oh such that it would rhyme with robe, not cob, for any reader not aware of that).  I’m not certain what that particular verse from the Bible had to do with anything, but if it was merely a coded countersign that could make sense.

  Of course, that last is an example that only works in print.  Sometimes there are such things that only work in print, while others only work to the ear.  In the fourth Harry Potter book, his friend Hermione Granger makes a big deal about her idea for founding an organization called S.P.E.W.; his best friend Ron Weasley keeps calling it spew, and it leads to some humorous bickering between them.  However, at one point Rowling refers to “a S.P.E.W. badge”, which confuses me, because if that’s not an S.P.E.W. badge then I don’t know the difference between the sound of S.P.E.W. and the word spew.  It might work to the eye, but it’s bad as dialogue because the ear can’t hear the difference.

  Sometimes, of course, differences the ear can’t hear are very funny, or very useful.  In an old Get Smart episode, Agent Smart has just met the villain, an Asian who dramatically displays the metal claw that has replaced one of his hands, and announces through a thick accent, “I am de Craw.”  Max, completely missing the significance, replies, “Pleased to meet you, Mister Craw,” and the next minute is spent with the frustrated villain trying to communicate, “Not de Craw, de Craw,” while waving the metal appendage around uselessly.  I haven’t seen that show since it was in first run episodes, but the humor of that moment has stayed with me for decades.

  But useful applications are, well, more useful; and I have one to offer.  I have it in two versions, and you can choose whichever one works better for you (or even see if you can catch them with the same ruse twice).

  The players are given verbal instructions from someone who tells them they are seeking someone named Quentin.  Because this is spoken, the players will hear it as a familiar name, and will probably write it down somewhere to remember it; they head out to the populated area where Quentin is alleged to be hiding, and begin their searches.

  Early on they are befriended by someone of some influence whose name is Siege.  He makes himself helpful, telling them what he knows about the area and the important people in it, even though he doesn’t think he can help them locate the person they seek.  In fact, no one here seems to know anyone of that name.

  Siege is an intriguing name, of course; the player characters might even go so far as to ask where he got it.  It’s simple to casually write off such a thing.  “It’s silly.  My initials are C. G., and they used to call me C. G. all the time, but it kind of got shortened to Siege.”

  What doesn’t appear immediately is that the C stands for Cuenton.  This is the villain they’ve been seeking, and he’s been right in front of them the entire time, guiding them everywhere but where he is.

  The alternative version uses the name Quincy, to the ear, but it’s really Kwince, the nickname being Cage, a shortened form of K. G.  It works the same way.

  In my mind’s eye I can see my old gaming friend Bob groaning as the light dawns, as he realizes that the solution to that clue he’s been carrying around all this time has been right in front of him since he got here, but he didn’t catch it.  I think he would love it.  I hope your players do, too.

  Next week, something different.

—–

M. Joseph Young is co-author of Multiverser and Vice President for Development at Valdron Inc.  His many contributions to online literature are indexed for convenience, and he looks forward to discussing these things by e-mail or on our Gaming Outpost forums.

I landed in a room poorly lit by a flickering fire at the far end. The walls were stone, and mostly covered with wooden wainscotting, and the ceiling was low enough that I had to lower my sword which pointed up into a narrow stairway.

The sounds of breathing, and snores caused me to wait until my eyes adjusted to the dimness.

The wooden ceiling was black-stained with soot, and all over the floor, men slept under blankets. It looked impossible to leave the room by the front door without waking at least one person who blocked the door, so I sat down, and despite my thrill of adrenalin at being in a new universe, I forced myself into a watchful trance.

Hours passed quickly, and as roosters crowed outside, the room started to awaken. Lamps were lit, and window curtains parted, and grouchy fellows started to ask for their coffee. With my cloak on, I was able to blend in even though I did not wear the commonplace knee-high shorts or the large buckled shoes.

Servants came in, and pulled out boards and sawhorses and chairs, and soon the room resembled a pub. This took place while the sleepers went around back to the privy, and pulled out their pipes and enjoyed an early morning smoke.

They talked of politics, and they seemed cheerful as if they felt themselves to be on the winning side.

I was accepted since I had slept here for this inn on the Coast road was known as a hotbed of the Principled. And I was glad to hear their principles.

“All men are created equal!” They shouted as the dawn finished breaking, and their leader, a fine figure of a man with a nice pigtail, and a blue velvet overcoat with many silver buttons then spoke in a good orator’s voice about the need for all men to join together, and thrown down the unprincipled compromisers.

And then they invoked the evil name of their arch-enemy, Ben Franklin, and I felt a sudden chill rush down my back. Old Ben had his faults, but there was no doubt he was a canny man, and anything he was against I was well-advised to be wary of. Of course, there was no guarantee that this universe’s Ben Franklin was anything like mine.

We walked back in to a hearty breakfast, and my gold coin engraved with the picture of Conan got a look, but no more, and I took my change in silver bearing the names of Massachusetts, and New Hampshire, and Rhode Island with each coin a bit different in size from that of other states.

The Rhode Island penny was evidently worth twice a New Hampshire coin, since the Islanders had purer silver.

After breakfast, they scattered to bring back friends to join in the great rally to be held at noon. I was given an assignment as well, after I assured them I was good on a horse, and adept with a sword.

I rode with the leader and a few of his others. My turn to be studied it was. The leader, Samuel Charity Higgins, land surveyor, privateer for a season until a British ship hulled their vessel, then prisoner in the Hudson River prison ships, and after escaping cannonneer in the Revolutionary Army under Washington, then judge, and now delegate to the Constitutional Convention was easily manipulated to talk about himself, and so he gave me abundant information to make up a partial tale of my life.

I did not lie, but I’m sure he picked up the wrong impression. When I said, I’d been advising a leader for the last five years, I think he thought I was an executive secretary to a mayor instead of court sorcerer to Conan the Barbarian.

He was easily assuaged since he needed supporters. The Compromisers had the edge in the Convention. So he reached for a dramatic gesture.

We rode into the woods about five miles south of Philadelphia, and found a cabin. In it, a mature black male waited for us.

His name was Ezekiel Tanner, and he was a very impressive man even before I heard his life story. Tall, big-boned, dignified, and well-muscled with a voice to match Higgin’s own.

Born a slave, he had escaped, and taken ship to London as a stowaway. There he got himself admitted to Oxford due to native brilliance and the good fortune and courage of saving a Duke’s son from some highwaymen.

He graduated a Doctor of Theology, and began to write under an assumed identity as “The Voice Crying in the Wilderness.”, and became quite popular in the papers, and sold many broadsheet pamphlets.

Then touring he went to America, and had the misfortune to fall sick due to what would later be called Montezuma’s Revenge. In so doing, a particular birthmark was exposed, and word reached a powerful slaveowner who had owned him as a child.

Now the man wanted his slave back. The Principled had smuggled Mr. Tanner out of the hospital, and to this cabin where a nurse tended to him until he got well.

They could have finished the job by taking him out of the country, but both they and Mr. Tanner wanted to make a point.

They wanted to smuggle Mr. Tanner into the Convention, and seat him as a delegate in place of one of their own who would falsely plead illness, and offer Mr. Tanner as a substitute.

This would render the “foul compromise of regarding each Negro as three-fifths of a man as the cheap sham it is!” Higgins emoted as we all sat around the table in the cabin’s main room.

Tanner nodded with hope, and then he asked if he might pray before they set out.

Halfway through his obviously sincere and wise prayer, he stopped, stuttered, and jerked.

We all looked up, and I saw him staring at me.

“You!”

I patted my chest blankly.

“You are the sign the Lord told me was coming. The Man from the Future who would tell me what I ought to do.”

I gulped as all sets of eyes focused on me. What to say?

Rough hands landed on my shoulders, and without thinking I twisted wrists and bounced off the stool to my feet while my would-be assailants scattered on the floor about me.

“Hold, I say, hold!” Mr. Tanner said in a commanding voice. “This is my house, and no violence will you do to this man.”

“Its our house.” One of the Principled said drawing a knife.

“Then I will leave.” Tanner replied reaching for his coat.

“No, no.” Higgins said. “Please everyone sit down. Mr. Tanner is quite right. He is the master in this house, and he has the right of it. We were just startled thinking our new friend was a traitor to the Cause.”

They looked calmed down except for the man with a knife, but he put it up with a hard look from Higgins.

I felt sickened. The three-fifths compromise had definitely been based on pure political calculation, but perhaps that had been necessary at the time. If they had not, the Nation might never have been born. The Founding Fathers chose to confront the issue later, and maybe they, the wisest collection of men in American or almost any history had been right.

“I may be a traitor to your cause, Mr. Higgins. Maybe I’m here to tell, Mr. Tanner that the time is not now.”

Mr. Tanner looked at me with a kind and understanding eye which only made it worse.

“This is garbage.” A young hothead shouted, and I drew a quarter from my pocket.

I flipped it to him, and he caught it.

With disbelief on his face, I told him to read off the date.

“1995.” He said.

“In the future I recall, the Three-fifths Compromise went through, the Constitution was born, and in the 1860′s a great Civil War where tens of thousands of Americans died decided once and for all that Blacks were free. But I do not know if I am to avert that, or to cause that future. I think it was a good future on the whole, even with its many flaws.”

There was much subdued discussion which ended with two announcements. One by Mr. Tanner to me that I should pray about what course would be best, and the other by Mr. Higgins which pointed out that unless they moved quickly they would make a decision by ommission. They could change their mind later, and back out if desired.

So we gathered our stuff together, including the wig, and the white face cream, and our proposed delegate, and with Mr. Tanner riding in seclusion with Mr. Higgins in a curtained stagecoach, we escorted on horseback the two into Philadelphia, and to a townhouse which was a secret base for the Principled.

Tadeusz