21:18 <VoxPVoxD> "So what was it like?" Stewart asks this of Maggie out of the blue, at this point weeks after the fact. He's working through a ham and cheese sandwich she insisted on making him when he came in to the Wherehouse admitting he hadn't had lunch. "Taking in the Icon, I mean." 21:22 <dammitwho> Maggie leans back in one of the comfortable chairs surrounding the TV (turned off). "Hoorm. It didn't really feel like anything, going down. Like a sugar sculpture under a waterfall, it just sort of dissipates into nothing in your throat. Remembering... it's not like a big slideshow of everything you forgot. Or at least it wasn't for me. It's just you'll think of something you couldn't 21:22 <dammitwho> remember before, and now you can. Or a memory you don't remember having will pop into your head at the strangest time, and you'll go 'Oh, right! That happened to me!'." 21:23 <dammitwho> "I'm sure I still don't know everything I know, if you know what I mean." 21:24 <VoxPVoxD> Stewart: "Do you feel any different?" 21:26 <dammitwho> Maggie: "A bit. A little less cotton-y. Huurm, that's no help. Uhh... like I've got a better grip on things." 21:27 <VoxPVoxD> Stewart: "Huh." 21:30 <VoxPVoxD> "Have you tried any exercises? Memory exercises. Some people recommend that for, uh, lost time." 21:33 <dammitwho> Maggie: "Huh. Nope!" 21:34 <VoxPVoxD> Stewart: "I've been trying some of that lately. Cause of the... cotton, I guess? I've been noticing it more." 21:38 <dammitwho> "That's no good. You okay?" 21:40 <VoxPVoxD> Stewart: "Yeah, I'm fine. Everything's going great! You know, there's... I've got no complaints. It's just, you know, when I'm not working on something sometimes I get kind of... foggy." 21:43 <dammitwho> Maggie: "Well, that's no good. What kinda memory exercises are they?" 21:57 <VoxPVoxD> Stewart: "I've been trying to flesh out things I do remember. Grab onto a memory, put down as many details as I can. Stuff from- from when I was a kid is hard, basically impossible. Just fragments, like dreams. So a lot of what I've been working on is from when I was gone." 22:00 <VoxPVoxD> "Did you-- was it all stuff from before you remembered?" 22:01 <dammitwho> Maggie: "I think so. It would be hard to tell, though... it was pretty monotonous when I was away." 22:06 <VoxPVoxD> Stewart looks down at his plate, which he rotates gently until the bite marks in the sandwich face away from him. "Yeah. That makes sense." 22:13 <dammitwho> "Your sandwich alright? You want some mustard? I think we mostly have Tony's dipping mustards..." 22:15 <VoxPVoxD> "No, it's fine." He picks it up and bites it from the other side. "...so what have you been working on? I saw the greenhouses outside." 22:16 <dammitwho> Maggie: "Sleeping potion." 22:17 <VoxPVoxD> Stewart: "Really? Like to sell or?" 22:19 <dammitwho> "Maybe," Maggie admits. "If there's enough that I can have a decent stock for Freeholders as ask for it, I might try Notgnixel and sell off the rest. I'm not gonna charge other changelings for a good night's sleep, though!" 22:19 <VoxPVoxD> Stewart: "Have you been having trouble sleeping?" 22:21 <dammitwho> Maggie: "Now and again, if something I et disagrees with me or I have a headache or something." 22:30 <VoxPVoxD> Stewart's taken to eating his sandwich in a spiral, nibbling around the edges and leaving the center intact. There's a nearly perfect circle of fluffy bread staring at him from the center of the plate when he finally says, a few minutes later, "Do you remember, a while ago, I was telling you about some games I played and I forgot they weren't real?" 22:31 <dammitwho> Maggie: "I figure everyone has that now and again, if not harder troubl-- hmm? Oh, sure. The one about vampires in the arctic, and the other one with the teenagers in the flying ship." 22:39 <VoxPVoxD> Stewart: "Right, yeah. I've been trying to focus on those, because video games have a lot of details packed into a small, like, experience window." 22:40 <dammitwho> She raises her eyebrows. "Oh yeah? Anything good?" 22:43 <VoxPVoxD> Stewart: "They were really good! As far as I can remember, anyway. Sometimes with games you liked you forget the stuff that was boring or didn't work right. The arctic vampire one, you could like- there was this game in the real world called Dragon Age: Origins, and it had a bunch of different ways and places you could start the game depending on your character's background. Or like, this 22:43 <VoxPVoxD> game called Pathologic, which I haven't played but saw a long video about, where you pick one character and play through the same sequence of events from a wildly different perspective." 22:44 <dammitwho> Maggie: "And the vampire story had something like that?" 22:45 <VoxPVoxD> Stewart: "Yeah! There were three paths you could pick to start, and if you followed them along, new characters would appear and you'd get a little popup that said you could start the game over from *their* perspective." 22:46 <VoxPVoxD> "And they'd start in wildly different contexts at different points in the, bigger story. And they didn't all make it to the end." 22:50 <VoxPVoxD> "And basically this is what the game had instead of letting you make your own character, which is what games like that tend to do." 22:52 <dammitwho> Maggie: "Huh. So what kind of origins were there?" 22:56 <VoxPVoxD> Stewart: "So like, at the start of the game before you've played at all you have three options: you can play as 'The Magnate', 'The Monster', or 'The Mastermind'. The Magnate is a vampire with a lot of money and skills but no real political connections who had to ship out of his home to go to the Arctic. So his story is about sort of building an empire from the ground up. You get henchmen 22:56 <VoxPVoxD> and do deals and schemes. Someone throws you down an elevator shaft, you pull a platinum-plated assault rifle out of your sports car, stuff like that." 23:02 <VoxPVoxD> Stewart: "But as you go along, you'd get to do stuff like-- so your first henchman, a big mean German guy who carries an invisible axe on his back, he gets a path. Then later on this like, British college professor lady comes in and asks you to do this insane construction project for her, and that unlocks *her* path. Then you get this sort of Charlie's Angels team of sidekicks and one of 23:02 <VoxPVoxD> *them* gets a path." 23:03 <VoxPVoxD> "And these all interweave with the other paths. Like the Magnate has a rivalry with the Mastermind, who is also rich but more connected... except she's like, a slave to her, uh, mom-boss." 23:04 <dammitwho> Maggie: "Mom boss?" 23:04 <VoxPVoxD> Stewart: "Like, her direct superior in the vampire Mafia, but who also made her a vampire. It's very weird." 23:05 <dammitwho> Maggie huuurms thoughtfully. "Do you mind if I write this stuff down? This is interesting." 23:05 <VoxPVoxD> Stewart: "What? Oh, yeah. Don't... if you're gonna show it to people don't tell them where it's from." 23:08 <dammitwho> Maggie: "Oh, lord no." She bustles into her room and comes back with a sketchbook. 23:08 <dammitwho> "So tell me more about these opening origins." 23:15 <VoxPVoxD> Stewart: "Well, like I said, the Magnate's story is about building an empire from the ground up, and how the scale of your rivals changes. You start out with suspicious falls down elevator shafts and end up having this fucked up, like, stocks duel where you try to move money around to impoverish this other insanely rich vampire who's doing the same thing to you. And you're both standing 23:15 <VoxPVoxD> in the room, typing on your Blackberries or whatever, but all the 'fighting' is happening in computer banks in Switzerland and New York." 23:20 <dammitwho> Maggie nods, scribbling in her book. 23:23 <VoxPVoxD> "The Mastermind's story arc is more psychological - in terms of like job and money she's in pretty much the same place at the end of the game as in the beginning. Her story's more about control: losing it, getting it back, surrendering it... early on she has this really graphically violent meltdown where she gnaws a guy's head off. Then she gets her own German henchman but hers is like the 23:23 <VoxPVoxD> Babadook, and he runs around doing stupid shit she has to deal with. Then she ends up making a friend, and turning her friend into a vampire too... but she's still got the mom-boss problem." 23:25 <dammitwho> Maggie: "The babawhat?" 23:25 <VoxPVoxD> Stewart: "Like a storybook monster. It's from a movie, I haven't seen it, but like-- think 'boogeyman', I guess." 23:29 <VoxPVoxD> Stewart: "Anyway, The Mastermind twigs onto the mystery plot that the Monster's deep into, and ends up spinning it off into her own thing where she goes into her own mind and fights Vampire Lavos, and it's like, this big symbolic vision quest of self-mastery. If you finish it, toward the end of the game you find out your friend got a posse together to go kill your mom-boss, and there's 23:29 <VoxPVoxD> this huge insane boss fight in like a castle carved out of a glacier. When you win it just starts falling into the sea." 23:30 <VoxPVoxD> "Then she like... becomes master of time? I don't know, her ending was kind of abstract." 23:32 <dammitwho> Maggie's writing frantically. "Vampire... Lavos?" 23:33 <VoxPVoxD> Stewart: "Right, okay, sorry, there was this game called Chrono Trigger that the vampire Arctic game makes a lot of references to, I guess it's an homage kind of. In Chrono Trigger the main thing you do is save the world by time travel from this multidimensional slug monster called Lavos, and you can fight it at a lot of different points on the timeline and the ending changes based on 23:33 <VoxPVoxD> when you do." 23:34 <VoxPVoxD> "The Mastermind has a name for the Lavos but I don't remember it. It was from a movie, maybe, or a poem? I don't know. But I just remember it as Vampire Lavos." 23:38 <dammitwho> "Hooorm. Do all the origins have names? Or do people just refer to each other by appellations like, uh, the Weary Customs Agent or the Seedy Explorer?" 23:40 <VoxPVoxD> Stewart: "The paths have titles, but the characters all have names like regular characters. So besides the starting three you have like, 'The Knight', 'The Nightmare', 'The Penitent', 'The Semiotician', stuff like that. But their names are just regular people's names, I can't remember them all." 23:45 <dammitwho> Maggie nods, still working. "So... the rich guy gets a big fella with some axes... and the rich lady gets the boogeyman... kind of like this here?" https://i.imgur.com/6iIB4XE.jpg 23:47 <VoxPVoxD> Stewart: "Hey, that's really good! How'd you guess she was blonde?" 23:48 <VoxPVoxD> "Though the boogeyman was built different. He was real short and sort of... like you remember the bad guy from Popeye?" 23:48 <VoxPVoxD> "All chest and arms and no legs?" 23:48 <dammitwho> It's a black and white drawing... 23:49 <VoxPVoxD> Her hair's not colored in! The universal symbol for blondeness." 23:49 <dammitwho> "A real barrel-shaped guy? Gotcha." 23:49 <VoxPVoxD> "Yeah." 23:51 <dammitwho> "What about the Monster?" 23:55 <VoxPVoxD> Stewart: "The Monster is weird because it's like, the weirdest playthrough of all but also you get the impression it's sort of like the 'default' one? You play one of the few characters that's actually native to the place the game is set, and he's a vampire scientist. Except, it's vampires, so it's vampire mad science with blood and terrible experiments and weird occultism. He's part 23:55 <VoxPVoxD> of a college of vampire scientists which was founded by literal, did-the-Holocaust Nazis. And, basically, he's got a weird shitty job, and his bosses suck, and he's always doing favors for people." 23:56 <VoxPVoxD> "You have sort of the least control over your character because you have to take every order someone gives you. It's not until like halfway into the game where you even get the *option* to say no to a quest hook. But at the same time that means you're the one who sort of... sees the whole picture. You cross over with the most other stories and you build connections with the most other 23:56 <VoxPVoxD> characters." 23:56 <VoxPVoxD> "Also, you're the strongest? Like you have the best stats, you get discounts on your stats, you free XP that no one else gets for some reason..." 23:57 <VoxPVoxD> "Anyway, the Monster just wants to be left alone. But there's this woman he kind of loves and they're both laboring under this even-worse-than-being-a-vampire curse, and the only way he can see to get out from under the curse is to master weird vampire scientist, so he goes to work for the, again I stress this, literal Nazis." 23:59 <VoxPVoxD> "His arc is about him sort of unpicking each of his obligations and weaknesses one at a time, super methodically, turning into this horrible alien big bat dragon thing in the process... but one without any of the weaknesses of his curse, or any real obligation to vampire society. Even his shitty bosses start to see him as a shitty peer." 00:06 <VoxPVoxD> "So at the end of it all he's finally free to do whatever he wants, whenever he wants... but he doesn't really want to do anything in particular, because he's got no real friends or goals anymore. So he just sits around, surviving, gradually getting stronger." 00:06 <VoxPVoxD> "And that's it, that's the end of his story." 00:08 <dammitwho> Maggie: "That sounds like a real vampire thing to be." 00:09 <VoxPVoxD> Stewart thinks about Lister. "I guess it is, yeah. Being so strong and scary no one can tell you what to do is like... the dream." 00:09 <dammitwho> Maggie: "But also the part of spending all your time on being strong and scary, so you don't have anything else." 00:10 <dammitwho> "Hoorm. I've got some ideas but none of these seem quite right." https://i.imgur.com/UmcgcsO.jpg 00:11 <VoxPVoxD> Stewart: "Hmm. That top-left one is the closest, but it was more batlike. Legs and wings and so on." 00:12 <dammitwho> She bites her tongue, leaving a bit sticking out of her mouth, and scribbles frantically for a few minutes. "Like this?" https://i.imgur.com/60Qnpcg.jpg 00:14 <VoxPVoxD> Stewart: "Yeah, that looks a lot like how he looked in the middle of the game. Later on it was a lot sleeker and all the extraneous stuff sort of folded away. It reminded me of the - do you remember the turrets, in Portal?" 00:15 <dammitwho> Maggie: "So, like a bat... dragon... iPhone?" 00:17 <VoxPVoxD> Stewart: "...yeah. Yeah, okay, that works." 00:17 <dammitwho> "I'm gonna have to noodle on that one a bit. Go on." 00:21 <VoxPVoxD> Stewart: "And these are all just the playable characters. There's a ton of- of side characters, too, like a whole vampire Mafia for the Magnate and the Mastermind, and all the mad scientists for the Monster. There's a head vampire, who was a French Nazi collaborator, who dreams of using his geek girlfriend to control time itself. There's Big Sister, who is the only nice vampire. There's 00:21 <VoxPVoxD> a guy who gets really into using vampire yams to solve hunger, there's all these side events like the Mastermind goes to her stuffy all-girls boarding school for a reunion with her friend. One of them starts beating her at tennis so she starts using superpowers to save her pride." 00:23 <dammitwho> Maggie: "Yeah, I can see that." 00:24 <dammitwho> Maggie: "So when you say vampire Mafia, do you mean, like... eyyy! Youse mugs! I'm drinkin' blood ova heah!" 00:25 <VoxPVoxD> Stewart: "No, I just mean like a feudal crime syndicate. Hardly any of them are Italian, and the Italian ones aren't really Mafia Italian. They're more like, 'I fixed the election of the last six Popes' Italian." 00:26 <dammitwho> Maggie: "And the, uh, Mom Boss is one of those?" 00:26 <VoxPVoxD> Stewart: "How'd you guess?" 00:42 <dammitwho> Maggie: "Didn't you say? One of the vampire mafia?" 00:42 <VoxPVoxD> Stewart: "Oh, no, I mean, she was Italian." 00:43 <dammitwho> Maggie: "Oh! Right. So the Mastermind was too?" 00:45 <VoxPVoxD> Stewart: "No, she was German. Vampires aren't usually like... genetically related." 00:46 <dammitwho> Maggie: "Sure, but I wouldn't think vampires did a lot of traveling. Heck, maybe they do." 00:49 <VoxPVoxD> Stewart: "Well like I said, in the Arctic pretty much everyone was an immigrant from somewhere. Some moved after World War 2, some moved later than that. The Nightmare actually just hid in a cave for a hundred years in what he thought was the middle of nowhere but then woke up and there was this whole thing around him." 00:52 <dammitwho> Maggie: "Yeah, where is this anyway? Oslo?" That is the only city in Scandinavia she could confidently name. 00:55 <VoxPVoxD> Stewart: "North of that. Waaaay north. Like at the tippy top of Norway. It was called... Sørøya." 00:55 <VoxPVoxD> "You'd write those vowels as like, o's with slashes through them." 00:56 <dammitwho> Maggie: "øøø! Very atmospheric." 00:57 <dammitwho> Maggie: "So... what's your favorite part?" 00:58 <VoxPVoxD> Stewart: "Hmm..." 01:00 <VoxPVoxD> "So my favorite part of the game is in the Mastermind run when you get your, like, vampire ward, who's this weird nerd with no friends who was getting abused by the Nightmare. You have to like... take her in, and civilize her - but not too much, you lose sanity if you do it too much because of your repressed hatred for being civilized - and also protect her from all your enemies, who are her 01:00 <VoxPVoxD> enemies now, and even more importantly, protect her from your mom-boss." 01:01 <VoxPVoxD> "But that's not the *best* part of the game. The *best* part of the game is when a bunch of American vampire hunters invade and attack, and they get completely wrecked, and the one survivor gets taken in front of the leaders for questioning and is like 'we're going to pay you back for turning all our corporations into bloodsucking engines of profit and corruption!'" 01:01 <VoxPVoxD> "And the boss of the vampire Mafia is like, 'uhhhhhhh'." 01:02 <dammitwho> "Heh." 01:17 <dammitwho> "Weird nerd vampire ward... kind of like this'er?" https://i.imgur.com/liFNpP7.png 01:19 <VoxPVoxD> Stewart: "Yeah, that's exactly the right energy." 01:20 <dammitwho> Maggie: "What story would you play, if you had the chance right now?" 01:21 <VoxPVoxD> Stewart: "Maybe a run of The Ward, I never actually did her story. I didn't like her much at the time." 01:23 <VoxPVoxD> "But then the Semiotician run is cool, and very different from the others. It only touches the main story at a couple of points, but they're really important." 01:24 <dammitwho> Maggie: "That would be a heck of a video game. I mean, would you even really be able to do anything at the beginning, until you get to be a vampire?" 01:25 <VoxPVoxD> Stewart: "As the Ward, you mean?" 01:29 <dammitwho> "Right." 01:32 <VoxPVoxD> Stewart: "Well she starts out as the ward of the Nightmare, and you have all these jobs to do - in video games we call them 'fetch quests', like gofer stuff - and if you do them wrong he'll berate you or hit you. There are bits where you have to teach him things about the 20th century, which he missed entirely, like an evil Nels. And he says these really vicious things to her, but you 01:32 <VoxPVoxD> get the option to say really vicious things back. Beneath the nerd shell she's got this terrible mean streak and the more time she spends with vampires the more she lets it out." 01:32 <VoxPVoxD> "I think this is why the Mastermind befriends her. Not because she's mean exactly but because the hidden nature reads to you as like, a spark of potential." 01:34 <VoxPVoxD> "Anyway I stopped my playthrough of that because there's a bit where you have to explain the Nazis to this 500 year old incredibly racist German nationalist serial killer." 01:34 <VoxPVoxD> "And I just... didn't want to." 01:39 <VoxPVoxD> "What about you?" 01:42 <dammitwho> Maggie: "Hoorm. I'd want to try the Monster my first time, since I wouldn't wanna turn down quests anyway." 01:42 <VoxPVoxD> Stewart: "Yeah I think the Monster is the best first playthrough, it's the most like a standard RPG." 01:45 <dammitwho> "Say, I just realized!" 01:45 <dammitwho> "If Sørøya's that far north, why... a quarter of the year the sun wouldn't come up at all!" 01:45 <dammitwho> "And another quarter, it wouldn't go down..." 01:46 <VoxPVoxD> Stewart: "Yeah, I think that was the... like nothing is original in there. It couldn't-- it didn't have original ideas. It just absorbed things and remixed them. There's a story called 30 Days of Night which is about vampires going to Alaska to take advantage of a sunless winter, and I think that was part of the formula." 01:48 <dammitwho> "Huh. So where does Dracula come in, then?" 01:49 <VoxPVoxD> Stewart: "The vampire mad scientists are nominally disciples of Dracula, and Dracula himself shows up briefly at the veeeery end of the game. He's a huge dick and doesn't really help anyone or do anything." 01:50 <dammitwho> Maggie nods firmly. "That sounds like Dracula." 01:51 <VoxPVoxD> Stewart: "I wonder if Dracula's real in real life." 01:53 <dammitwho> Maggie: "You could ask a vampire. I wonder if they'd tell the truth, or make up a shaggy dog story." 01:53 <dammitwho> Maggie: "Hm. Don't tell me if he's real, though." 01:53 <VoxPVoxD> Stewart: "Yeah, maybe I'll -- why not? 01:54 <VoxPVoxD> " 01:57 <dammitwho> Maggie taps her sketchbook with her pencil. "Welllll... I wanna turn this into something. A story, maybe. If you're okay with that." 01:57 <VoxPVoxD> Stewart's silent for a moment. 01:58 <VoxPVoxD> "Yeah, sure, that's fine." 01:58 <VoxPVoxD> "Worried about, like, copyright?" 01:58 <dammitwho> Maggie: "No, I don't want to accidentally put any real facts about vampires in." 01:59 <dammitwho> "For, y'know. Pretty clear reasons." 01:59 <VoxPVoxD> Stewart: "That makes sense." 01:59 <VoxPVoxD> "Might want to run a draft by a vampire at some point then." 02:15 <dammitwho> Maggie: "Sure. You know a guy?" 02:16 <VoxPVoxD> Stewart: "...kinda. I don't really know him well enough to ask him to sensitivity read someone's story. I'll run it by him maybe." 02:28 <dammitwho> LATER IN THE EVENING: 02:29 <dammitwho> Maggie stares at the blinking cursor of the word processing program, chewing her gum thoughtfully. She puts her hands on the keyboard, takes them off again, and hums to herself. 02:29 <dammitwho> Again she takes to the keyboard, and this time begins to type: 02:30 <dammitwho> DEAD SNOW 02:30 <dammitwho> Ch. 1 02:30 <dammitwho> Late December of 2009 - the coldest time of year for the northern hemisphere. There's no place more northerly than Sørøya - or not as far as the creatures of the night are concerned. 02:30 <dammitwho> It's a special, dark time. The city's glimmering lights and vague political problems all take a back seat to the moon and the stars, perpetually visible in the month-long polar night, and things come out to play. 02:30 <dammitwho> Most Sørøyans wouldn't believe it if you told them, but their city is infested, with hundreds upon hundreds of immortal, superhuman cursed predators. These vile creatures lurk beneath every den of vice and hide in every dark alley, and they even form their own social groupings like ants or bees. 02:30 <dammitwho> Some of them even think they're human.