Getting There - Into the Pit (Storytelling Game Playthrough)

[radiantfracture]

sabotabby and I played that mini-game I made for my creative writing class, and the results were so deliciously out of control that you get to see it on our journals.

The game is a dialogue created by asking and answering questions. I've removed the questions here, but kept the dialogue format.

Feel free to try the game with a friend and post the results in the comments, if you feel inspired.

Into the Pit - A Playthrough of Getting There

Driver

The alleged car is a new type of EV, but designed by techbros who were far more interested in a grift than in making a functional vehicle. They were also, as it turns out, amateur occultists. The battery works, in theory, but in addition to charging, it on occasion requires a blood sacrifice. Not a whole human, necessarily. Just a little blood.

Passenger

We're late because your biomechantronic arm caught a virus and went all evil hand and kept swerving us into the ditch. We had to pull over and have a long argument with it about fate and destiny and being a part of something larger than itself.

It's partly your fault for not downloading the software updates and partly whoever set loose the virus, and partly me for starting a conversation about free will with it in the first place (I was bored and stressed out), so everyone's in an extra bad mood now, and also it's possible we're too late to stop the pseudoSingularity which might, as we explained tersely to your rogue arm, render all this free will more or less moot.

Driver

We brought the runic silicon chips, which carry on them the ancient invocation that will debug the pseudoSingularity, but did we remember the manual for their deploy and operation? We would have, if you had ever been the sort to read the manual.

Passenger

You're not wrong about me and manuals.

We're going to the Pit, that toxic junkyard of discarded magitech a thousand stories deep, with a seething lake of heavy metals and vampiric data spectres at its heart.

That's where the Sibyl sent us after a very rushed and expensive divination. There's at least a 50% chance that she's in the pay of the BludDies anyway, but we're out of options.

I'm frantically chanting every incantation I know in case one of them is the right one, so occasionally the windshield wipers start up, or flames shoot out of the hand-of-glory hood ornament.

Oh, and we're running low on blood.

Driver

Running my biomechantronic fingers over my scab-studded human one, I consider whether it's time for another blood draw. My nano-monitors are edging into the orange territory on the anemia marker, but what good will a normal WBC count do me if we stall out on the highway and get our eternal soul data devoured by ferals?

After all, the High Queen of the BludDies is an old friend and sometimes lover, and I wouldn't want to disappoint her.

Passenger

I bowl out of the bloodEV with the silicon runes rattling in my hand as the howling hypotheticals come screaming out of the pit.

And there's the High Queen between me and the edge, her void eyes glittering, information streaking down her limbs like mercury, but she's not looking at me. I might as well not be there. In a minute I won't be.

I'm just the means to this end, you and this dead-eyed glory burning like a phosphorous flame.

It's never been you and me, not really. It's always been you and her, and it's you and her now, here at the last showdown before the next showdown.

And maybe you didn't even know what you were going to do when you got here, until you got here. Maybe you were teetering between hero and heel turn.

But you know now.

{rf} / sabotabby