March 13, 2015

From “The Wandering Daimyō of Kyūshū.” by Nokin Kobeyashi, translated and adapted by Irene York

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As has been known since time immemorial, the reikon—the soul—departs the body upon death. If disturbed, or if it was a violent and unsettled death, the reikon may become a yūrei—a ghost—doomed to wander and haunt until the cause of its woes is addressed.

There are myriad categories of yūrei, from the noble goryō to the motherly ubume, but none is more dangerous or more misunderstood than the tsuihō, the banished. They are living reikon stripped from their bodies without death, for the purpose of filling the soulless bodies with demons to form a supernaturally efficient fighting force and binding the souls to power dark constructs.

It is typically a fate worse than death. The soulless bodies are consumed in battle or eaten from within by corrupting demonic influence, while the expelled souls are consumed as fuel in the bellies of mechanical horrors. If they escape that fate, the enraged and confused reikon turn on whatever is nearest, ripping it apart in an orgy of destruction. Only the truly mad or the truly desperate sorcerer or daimyō has ever attempted to create tsuihō, and they have been feared and reviled throughout the home islands as a result.

One can easily recognize a tsuihō; unlike most yūrei, they are not white but black, a deep and impenetrable black that absorbs all light and all warmth. No features save the outline of a humanoid body may be discerned, and due to their untimely separation from their mortal shells, they have full use of their arms and legs.

Towering above all other tsuihō in legend is the Wandering Daimyō of Kyūshū. Once daimyō of a small clan, he and every man, woman, and child in his realm became tsuihō as the result of a rival’s machinations. With the soulless army thus created, this evil man sought to wipe out one of his enemies and create a force that could march on Kyoto and install himself as shōgun. Instead, he was torn to pieces by the forces that he hoped to marshall, his wailing reikon carried off to parts unknown by infernal powers.

The tsuihō thus released ravaged the countryside for a year and a day before gradually dissipating…save one. The Wandering Daimyō alone among his family, courtiers, and clansmen was able to retain his will. Fashioning a suit of armor in the likeness of his former face, with plates reflecting the visages of those he had known and loved, he took to the wilds of Kyūshū.

His mercurial rage became well-known among the farmers and peasants there. If the mood strikes him, the Wandering Daimyō will aid passersby. If it does not, he will slay them without mercy and consume their soul to extend his time in this world. It is said that if he approaches with his mask down, revealing the likeness of his former self, he will deliver aid; if he approaches with his mask up, revealing the indecipherable depths of darkness that truly make up his form, he will deliver destruction.

One man met the Wandering Daimyō when his mask was half-raised, revealing only the barest glimpse of the horror below. This is his story.

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March 12, 2015

From “The Final Gibberish of Abigail Stearmann” by Francisco Nab

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“At one point does one give up? At what point does one concede that screaming into the void, no matter how eloquently, is still futile?”

That short note, on hotel stationary, was the only intelligible writing found in the hotel room of Abigail Stearmann when her body was discovered. Her body was found in bed, her death having occurred not more than four or five hours before its discovery, and the coroner ruled it a suicide inasmuch as there was no evidence of foul play. Indeed, Stearmann was found to have died of dehydration despite being not ten feet from a working faucet with potable water.

The more compelling mystery was what Stearmann had apparently been working on in her six months’ residence at the hotel. She had regularly gone out for paper and ink, and those that knew who she was assumed that the author had at long last begun her second novel or second short-story collection.

Instead, investigators found 10,983 pages of…markings. Some have described them as scribbles, some as glyphs, but all agree that there was absolutely no meaning to be had from them to the casual observer’s eye. “It was as if someone had rewritten the Voynich Manuscript in the very messy cursive of a medical doctor,” said one of Stearmann’s closest associates at Southern Michigan University.

The author’s notoriety—increased tenfold after her strange death—led to a number of increasingly sophisticated attempts to find meaning in her last writings. An early attempt, in 1985, was touted as a “lost” Stearmann novel. It was generally ridiculed at the same level as The Tragedy of Anne Boleyn that Elizabeth Wells Gallup claimed to have found in cipher among Shakespeare’s plays. The most sophisticated effort, a computer-aided statistical analysis published in 2012, found no meaning in the whole but allowed for the possibility of a representational cipher in some places.

An equal number of people saw Stearmann’s supposed suicide note as explanation enough. In the throes of a depression so deep, so all-consuming that she had considered not just her writing but all writing to be insignificant on a grander scale…what greater cosmic joke could there have been than to bequeath gibberish to posterity?

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March 11, 2015

From “City of Simulacra” by Camila Sur

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I…I don’t think it knows what it’s creating. Not consciously, at any rate. It’s like an unconscious echo of things once known and cherished.

You’ve seen the impossibilities, just like I have. Shells of buildings without interiors. Subway tunnels where no train will ever run because they have no exits. People, or pieces of people, seemingly carved out of white marble, out of pearls. Sometimes a whole figure, sometimes just part of one trailing off into nothingness.

Nobody goes there anymore, and I don’t blame them. Anyone who’s seen the new constructions, how unsettling they are, or even the messy pangs that birth them…no, I don’t blame them at all.

We’re not sure of what’s in the center, what’s causing it. But I think it’s obvious that they are…or were…like us. And, like I said, I don’t think it knows what it’s doing. What we’re seeing are mere dreams, echoes, of a life it once knew.

If archaeologists could excavate the depths of your dreams, if little men ran over your naked subconscious looking for meaning, what would you do? What would I do?

That’s why we must be cautious.

That’s also why we must know.

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March 9, 2015

From “Mothers of Steel and Fathers of Flesh” by Leth Fessel

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The contest between flesh and steel lasted for many months and many years of months. Each side took upon itself to improve its arsenal with greater and more potent means not only of delivering death but of planning the delivery of death. Thus the side of steel built the massive computer banks that have since become known as Mothers, and the side of flesh bred titans of bone and brain and steel that they called the Fathers.

In time, steel won the contest, and all the great Fathers of the flesh were torn down. Without their thoughts, conveyed through a powerful psychic wind, many of the armies of the flesh were useless. Those of the flesh who could do so moulted their arms and armor and surrendered, while those who could not were slaughtered. It was not without a touch of irony, incidentally, that the mechanized troopers of the steel were themselves deactivated and slaughtered soon after, so great was the threat they were seen to pose to steel without an external enemy.

The final Father of the flesh, though, was not destroyed. He was instead pulled from his citadel by the forces of steel and the glands that made his psychic commands audible across vast distances were smashed and destroyed. Dead Fathers rapidly crumbled to dust, so the forces of steel were careful to keep their trophy alive. He was installed in a great tank, filled with recycled nutrients, as part of the innermost ward of the city of steel.

But there was something that the Mothers of steel had failed to account for.

Steel did not heal, but flesh most certainly did.

Inspired by this.

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March 8, 2015

From “The NPC Local 983” by Colt Chaplen

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Are you sick of people barging into your home or place of business and ransacking the place without a word of explanation?

Are you tired of being asked the same questions over and over by armed interlopers?

Is your business buckling under the financial strain of customers who demand payment in cash for stacks of 99 crisp basilisk urethras, even though you don’t run a pawnshop?

Then we have good news for you!

We are now accepting applications to join the NPC Local 983, a very special kind of trade union dedicated to curbing the abuses of self-proclaimed heroes and adventurers. Membership is open to all small business owners and employees, local homeowners, police and private security guards, as well as loiterers and hangers-on. Anyone who wants to get on with the business of living their life without interference by outside interlopers is welcome!

Our recent successes include:

– NPCs working at a Pizza Hut on Starbase 37b successfully opposed the efforts of a group of three malefactors in powered combat armor who tried to talk themselves into being given the contents of the cash register.

– An NPC family in Hearthburg was able to lock and bar their home to prevent entry by a man in plate mail after he had entered their property on several other occasions to smash jars and steal anything of value.

– The staff of the Rosina Arsenal was successfully able to refuse to purchase a stack of 99 Cockatrice Scales from a customer who demanded that they be accepted in trade for a brand new Falchion worth 2500 GP. This success was especially noteworthy given that the customer was in fact the King of Rosina and demanded a discount.

Don’t delay! Unionize, fight back, and together we can forge a more equitable shake for the working NPC everywhere.

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March 7, 2015

From “The Enigma Moth” by Levi Paris Schroeder

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The larva of an enigma moth is more commonly known as a riddling worm or riddleworm. They thrive on riddles, puzzles, and conundrums posed by others, but aren’t able to pose any of their own. They tend to congregate in bookstores, libraries, college campuses, and debating societies. Anyone who’s ever handled an old book of riddles has probably seen their empty egg casings and the spidery filaments of doubt they leave behind.

Once enough small riddles–or perhaps just one great corker of a riddle–have been devoured, the riddleworm will spin a cocoon from the threads of stories and pupate, emerging as an enigma moth. They are so named because they must pose an enigma before the end of their ephemeral life, requiring the ensuing raw confusion to lay their eggs much in the same way that the riddleworms feed on it.

Enigma moths whisper their conundrums quietly but so insistently that most cannot help but hear.

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March 6, 2015

From “The Galactic Failsafe” by Bernard S. Roberts

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Civilizations tend to destroy themselves. You’ve noticed this, haven’t you? For every empire of a thousand years a hundred fall, and length is no guarantee. Easter Island supported 10,000 people at its peak, the Roman Empire was 1500 years old when the gates of the Hagia Sophia were battered down, and the Empire of China was heir to 2000 years of intrigue when it was toppled by a few flags in the street.

It doesn’t take much, does it, to project those onto a global scale?

This is as unavoidable as it is inevitable, as the civilization of your choice is always prey to the capricious whims of a few, the lowest and base, who would see everything ground to dust for their own reasons. On a planetary scale, it means that civilizations are inevitably doomed regardless of their level of technology or expansion.

It seems like a closed system, a foolproof system. But what if it’s not? What if there’s a chance—however slight—that sapients might avoid the cycle that has seen galactic empires crumble and the mighty R’de laid low?

Someone, something, has seen to that, too.

There are three possible states of a universe: stasis, growth, and contraction. We know that the former to are untenable given our observations, and a cursory examination of the Vyaeh archives reveals the same. The universe is expanding, and that expansion is, against all that we know, accelerating.

The Vyaeh know this at the highest levels of their Orphaned Court, as do those of them with half a brain. But they, like us, are too busy fighting over the ashes to recognize the conflagration that surrounds and envelops them. Their manifest stupidity prevents any serious inquiry, though I’ve reason to suspect that perhaps there are forces acting upon them, and upon us, that cannot be fully understood.

But the R’de…the R’de are different. Why were they destroyed and enslaved by the Vyaeh? Why, when our scientists, and theirs, insist that there is nothing to learn from them? Their worlds are not strategic, they contain no natural resources of value.

Don’t you see? They were destroyed because they were too close to unlocking the secret. The ultimate failsafe that will prevent intelligent life from thriving and spreading: the heat-death of the universe.

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March 4, 2015

From “Wisdom of the Pulp” by Elwood Fipps Thum

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Our corrected interior accepts the wisdom of the pulp.
How does my editorial sense slip words into structure?
Why is a logical statement logical within the syntax?
Why can’t the referendum smell?

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March 3, 2015

From “The Illusive Elusive Sparrows” by Sandra Cooke Jameson

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In what became an internet sensation, an ornithologist once wrote about a colony of sparrows who, due to a genetic mutation exacerbated by the founder effect on their small offshore island home, could not sing within the range of other sparrows’ hearing. Forced to inbreed, their population grew smaller and smaller due to infertile eggs and the slow arch of time.

These birds–the “loneliest sparrows on the planet” were the subject of a documentary, a Kickstarter, and even some internet innovations aimed at making their high-pitched songs understandable to mainland sparrows (who could presumably then flit over and add fresh new blood to the isolate population dynamics). But the sparrows proved elusive; the island often varied from description to description, and those islands matching the descriptions often contained no sparrows. Those that did typically featured thoroughly natural birdsong audible to human and bird alike.

There was a reason. The ornithologist’s piece had been a fabrication–they claimed it was a piece of fiction, though they’d had no qualms about basking in the adulation of internet denizens.

The elusive sparrows were in fact illusive sparrows, more a metaphor of the longing of human nature to fit creatures into anthropomorphic narratives than anything else.

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March 2, 2015

From “Toil’s Cultivation” by Caitlin Volo Titus

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Should deeply planted and long-cultivated toil fall to its opposite in the great race? Many of history’s most illustrious successes, and even more of its noblest attempts, came from those with the disadvantage of moving quickly, impulsively, without forethought. The masses have oft seen this as undesirable, preferring that success be the reward of toil rather than that of rashness. The swampy morass of history is difficult to read on the matter, its arenas bubbling throughout with echoes of the disunifying clash.

The answer has always been there. You have but to grasp it.

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