Audience of Strangers

Zero Summer identifies itself (quite honestly) as a wordy Western RPG. It's a free browser-based game, that uses (almost) the Fallen London engine. It's fairly grindy at times, which is usually really not my thing. I cope with it for the writing; I actually think that the amount of text helps me slow down and not click through it all so quickly.

Here's the thing: there are individual stories (as opposed to the repeatable mundane actions) which cannot be repeated. You play them once, you read them once, and then they are gone forever, unless you care to start over again with a new character. So when I run across a step in the story that reads in part (yes, in part; I did say it was wordy):

What does it say? It says: under clear skies and the fresh fingernail moon and the bright brilliant stars when the world was young there was the masterless Dog. And still he howls. His voice freezes the blood. His tongue is warm and wet. His pelt flea-bitten but strong and golden. His ears hung with carved wooden rings. His eyes too-human. His paw outreaches. A mark is left.

Suddenly Jim is on you, wrestling the book away and slamming it back onto the shelf where you found it. Real panic in his eyes. A high unexpected color.

"What did you see?" he says. Demands. "What did you see?"

Under a fingernail moon, there was a hound. Under the clear sky he reached out. Under his paw there came a mark. It itches and burns. It weighs on your heart.

...when I come across that I stop, and reread, because I know there are no save points, no rewinds, no YouTube captures, no wikis, no-one I can ask for an explanation. (Okay. Technically I could go poking around the Failbetter forums and see if anyone had theories, but it's not like sitting around a gaming table and troubling a Storyteller for clarification, you know?)

It's oddly lovely, and no less so for being so transient.

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ETA: Aaaaaaand I just got a message related to that specific storylet. I'll, uhm, be shivering gleefully, visiting the Scrublands, and dealing with the Jackal-Caller now. :D