Off the prompt "cuddles."

Nearly had a screaming meltdown on--late Friday night, early Saturday morning? I think? I've been at niqaeli's since then, aside from a brief run by my house for textbooks. I should probably think about going home. I have a small spot of homework to do in the next twelve hours, and I'm thinking about sleeping.

I want to be creative. I fired up Final Cut but that didn't really go anywhere; I opened up googledocs and thought about writing Sanctuary fic--I'm all caught up and have this ridiculously detailed plotbunny in my head about the intersection of the sexcapades of Helen Magnus and Vampire Nikola Tesla (with other people) that I'm actually kind of ashamed of, oh my god, the things that live in my head, I don't even.

But what came out was more Echo Bazaar fic. I'm sort of... I don't even know, this fic can't decide whether it wants to be game-play fic or narrative fic. At least it's settled on first-person for the narrative sections.

( bit of what I wrote tonight )

I really want to have some art in the story, it feels wrong not to have art in Echo Bazaar fic. I sent a message to someone asking if I could use some of the beautiful stuff I've seen go by on my droll (*waves*), I sort of flailed and dorked around incoherently a lot so you know, hopefully I don't come off as completely illiterate. *facepalm*

It is everysecondtuesday's fault I play Echo Bazaar. Therefore I'm going to blame her for how melancholy I am tonight.

I had a friend--an acquaintance--in the game, not even a player, just a character, which makes this super ridiculous, but--so in the storylet, how I met her was she was a music-hall singer who was going to elope with a devil, and for some reason I was investigating the matter--I think I was investigating the devil, but I never got around to reporting back to the Brass Embassy about him, because I felt it more urgent to trip her up and spill her bags and make her late for the ship she was sailing off on with her devil lover, so that he left without her. And when I talked to her about it, yes, she was a little scared he might take her soul or something. And so she was relieved I'd interrupted matters and gotten her out of it.

(And you may as well know, I'm a hypocrite: I've been accepting Brass Embassy invitations and trading souls off the bazaar and advice on everything from cooking to poetry for the admiration of devils and devilesses; my Hedonism recently hit 9 and I've been fighting with Scandal, and to my amusement, attending church reduces my Connected to Hell not a whit.)

Anyway, as a result of my nosy rescue, the music-hall singer became someone I could visit, and I did, a lot, sort of all the time really. It was a stupid, repetitive little storylet--there were only four options to it, and one of them was a sure thing. I could drop in for a chat, whereby I reliably got better Connected to Bohemians and Criminals and acquired a handful of secrets.

(Secrets, by the way, are one of the most frustrating things in this game. I collect them compulsively, but the game never shows me their content. I got enough Whispered Secrets to cash in for Cryptic Clues and enough Cryptic Clues to cash in for Appalling Secrets and enough Appalling Secrets to tip my Nightmare quality into a trip to the Hotel California, and I still don't know what any of those secrets are. They're a commodity, not actual information.)

The next option was to end the acquaintance, which I never once thought about doing. The third option was to seduce her; I did that a few times, because my character is a slut, and curiously it could turn out as a fantastic one-night stand or an awkward one-night stand but it never turned into a love affair. And I could always mend our damaged friendship by dropping by to chat a few dozen more times, which was no hardship, because I liked her.

I really honestly did, I liked her. All the bits of storylet combined were maybe a few hundred words that I read--skimmed--over and over again between button presses, and an utter lack of information in secrets passed, but I did, I liked her. Maybe it was the saucy avatar or maybe it was the fact that I could never get her to fall for me. But I really liked her. Embarrassingly, I was halfway to imagining her as an actual player whose Opportunity Deck was constantly spitting up a "Your Friend, The Interfering Busybody, Has Dropped By For Tea Again" card, and wondering what she got out of clicking the button on me.

But the fourth option sat at the bottom of the page and mocked me. The fourth option was to use one's persuasive powers to swindle her out of a pack of moon-pearls.

It wasn't like I needed moon-pearls. There was nothing I was saving up for, nothing I really wanted to buy on the bazaar nor route it would get me that much closer to opening, and I already had enough moon-pearls to lark about the Carnival 'til kingdom come, which I imagine is much longer in Fallen London than in places that haven't fallen into the near vicinity of Hell.

But tonight, that "What does this button do?" sense of gameplay made me try it. I thought she'd be pissed off. I thought I'd have to work my way into her good graces again with a whole day's worth of turns. I didn't think she'd give me the moon-pearls and then vanish into the night, never to be seen again.

So I'm melancholy about it, about losing my friend. But not Melacholy, no, the in-game quality that got a boost was Ruthless. It was that more than anything, sitting there gaping at me being Ruthless--me!--that made me realize how hard I'd fallen for an NPC.

And then wtf'd at myself for having the term NPC in my brain, because apparently even though I don't talk about gaming with anybody I've nonetheless managed to absorb terminology as it flew around over my head when my friends fell facefirst into new releases of WoW and whatnot.

And then I went back to being melancholy enough to write this whole stupid entry, that I'm contemplating not even posting because frankly if it were any of my friends I would mock the shit out of them for this, if I even bothered to read it at all and didn't just glaze over and skim past upon realization that it was about some game.

But if I could talk to her again--well, even if I could, if there was that option in the game, I'd never get to shape my words to her, it would be two, maybe three choices with Go! buttons next to them--but if I could write a letter, maybe, I'd say:

My Dearest Sardonic Music-Hall Singer,
I'm sorry. I didn't mean it. I don't want the moon-pearls. I would have given them back. I thought we'd be able to laugh about it. I can still give them back. Do you want them back? How about this fucking ridiculous diamond bracelet somebody gave me--seriously, it's like, thirty diamonds, and you can't even buy them on the bazaar. I'm not trying to say you're materialistic, I just mean, if there's anything I have, anything I can get, anything I can do for you to make it up to you, it's yours, I don't care. I miss you. I hope you haven't run away with some devil--gracious, woman, you don't have to run away to do that, you can sleep with them in town and then gossip with me about it, isn't that what I do? This is ridiculous. It doesn't even make sense. You're going to run away from where you live in Spite and where you sing for your livelihood to hide from me over a couple hundred moon-pearls? Why didn't you refuse me? Why didn't you scream in my face never to darken your doorstep again, if it upset you that badly? Why did you leave? What happened? Was it me? Or was there something else wrong, and I never knew? Did you whisper hundreds of secrets to me and keep your own troubles hidden away all this time? Is there anything I can do? Please tell me. Please come back.
Faithfully yours,
The Interfering Busybody

• the FTM!Party Poison story involving misappropriation of BLI drugs, self-inflicted top surgery, and other moves of desperation


• Stab the Cat lyrics and script


• blueprints for the Land Sail


• Stab the Cat budget sheet


• the Echo Bazaar plot bunny that doesn't even have a named protagonist, DAMN YOU SECOND PERSON


• Ivan Vorpatril's very pointed commentary on things ongoing in my real life, wtf

/me curls up in a ball and cries