Hearsay Horizons

“Someone has to stay and take care of the flowers.” You try talking to Asriel again, but that’s all he’ll say. There’s no option to SAVE him, and no reaction from Toriel when you call her in the room where you fell. Asriel—and to a lesser extent, Toriel and Asgore—are the only ones who don’t get a happy ending. This is it. You’ve talked to everyone, and heard all of their hopes and excitement for the future. You return to the final room, with all of your friends arrayed there. You talk to them all a last time.                        You finally head east to watch the sunrise. When Toriel asks whether you want to stay with her, you say yes. You stare fiercely at the credits and the cutscenes. By the time the special thanks pop up, you have tears in your eyes. You turn the game off and head to bed hours late. Everyone is finally happy. They’re just NPCs, but you can’t bring yourself to start the game up again. You’ve heard how F...

Back when I was in full Gothic swing, my husband sought to run a torches-and-pitchforks Transylvanian sort of game where the PCs were humanity's last bastion against the things that go bump in the night. Complicating that was the makeup of the party: mostly things that go bump in the night. We discarded the default stats on the fantasy races species in favor of our own write-ups.                    The race species list included deadmen (ranging from Frankenstein's monster to mummies), werewolves, vampires, wraiths, humans, and my own creation--the animates, which are the nonorganic answer to Frankenstein's monster. I wanted an opportunity to play a gargoyle (I'll find the right place for a gargoyle in my ideas, someday) but I also wanted to play Marina , the glass golem from "Aurics and Animates." I may post some of the other bits later.

This room had once served as a small chapel, and it still had one or two of the old wooden pews left to show it. Those pews were now covered with sequinned cushions. The empty space overhead under the vaulted ceilings was filled with colorful streamers. Heavy, colorful curtains hid darkened stained glass windows depicting bleeding saints and leering demons. A small child’s bed sat to one side against the wall, and a vast, circular carpet took up the rest of the room. On the carpet sat a table, and on the table sat abandoned teacups and cake crumbs. A long push cart was next to the table; a stained tablecloth hung down to its wheels. The chairs around the table hosted a number of stuffed animals and one living man. Sitting in a child’s chair, the man’s knees almost touched his chin. That chin wagged as he ate scraps of cake, but his eyes were focused, in a dazed way, on the young woman standing before the chapel’s massive door.               Her cloth...

A statue walked along an opulent hallway. Both porcelain statuary and stone hall were dressed in beautiful, rich drapings—deep blue and purple robes decorated his marble skin, and his bespoke slippers treaded plush carpets. He was, to all appearances, created for the palatial castle in which he walked: a gifted sculptor’s magnum opus come to life. There was something in his glazed blue eyes, though, that tied him in kinship even further to the hallway in which he wandered; behind its warm tapestries and plush carpets, this place was a fortress. This hall told those who passed through it that the building was not a romantic castle, and could never be one. The masses of streamers and pennants outside the edifice could not brighten its squat survivability. Like the fortress, there was something unmovable and stubborn in the porcelain statue’s face.                 His colorless lips moved a little as he spoke to himself. This statue, this caryatid,...

Tamora wrinkled her nose at the sight of the dark hearth. The inn was empty. The chairs rested on the tables, the floors had been swept, and the lingering scent of alcohol had been disguised with cleaning solvents and potpourri. Like all more-or-less public places at such times, there was an eeriness about it. She jumped despite herself when Gallerian’s fine boots scuffed on the floor. She turned and frowned into his radiant presence.              “No fire?” she asked. His shining brow quirked; she saw the way his eyes watched her hands when she picked up a cup drying beside the sink. She turned away from the unspoken questions in his eyes. Her fingers traced the simple pattern carved into the wooden goblet.              “We can both see in the dark,” he said. She heard the tired amusement in his voice.              “Not that there’s much of that, with you around. What about th...

Cali stopped outside the exam room where she’d left her patients. She swept her tentacles from her face, and then she flipped through her clipboard. Again. These tests, and these results... this was impossible. It must be some malfunction with the scanners. No one in this hospital—no one in the Underground, as far as they’d been able to reach—knew anything about any processes of this magnitude. Their only expert on SOULs, the royal scientist herself, had no explanation for this. It would have involved a massive amount of power and equipment. There would be no way to keep this secret. And yet... it was as though they’d come out of thin air, and they’d always been here. Cali didn’t have teeth with which to chew the lip she also didn’t have, but she fidgeted all the same. She forced herself to knock. No answer, but she didn’t really expect one. She slipped inside the room.                The small room was cold for her , and Cali was used to water ...

I woke up full of vertigo. I hated when they drugged me. It always took forever to remember how to move, how my arms and legs worked. What was real, and what wasn’t. Being here, now, in a truck leaning against Eric and drooling on him, that wasn’t real.          “Eric?” He glanced down at me, and then quickly back up.          “Hi, Gail.” I pushed myself upright and looked around. It was dark, but that never bothered me. House with peeling paint, dogs barking. Eric, beside me, failing at looking calm and failing at not staring.          “Where are we?” He looked at me. Unease crossed his face, and he looked away again.          “Uh. My house. I can’t—we can’t stay here, but I don’t know where to go. I couldn’t leave you there. I couldn’t leave you with them.” I frowned, but something wrong popped in my jaw. Eric had the windows down, and I felt the air—cold, the way water can feel...

I was ready to burst into her room, but Henry grabbed me before that. There were new black stains on his scrubs.          “What’s wrong? They’re just trying to clean her up,” he said. Gail was still screaming:          “Please stop. Stop! Stop, please, please. Please!” I pulled away from Henry and stepped inside Gail’s room. I felt her screech behind my eyes, and in my teeth. She had an orderly nurse on either arm, big men, and they weren’t enough to hold her; she kept pulling free, scratching them, punching them. Another nurse was holding Gail’s head by her ratty, snarled hair. The nurse was scrubbing her face with a soapy cloth.           I saw why Gail screamed, why she didn’t bathe: each swipe of the cloth was scraping away skin, leaving behind blackness that seized and trembled, tendrils that snaked out of the wounds and spread black filth across the flesh that remained, like some perverse creature hidi...

I don’t know how I’d ever missed it. Every night she wasn’t medicated, Abigail Cooper did these readings. It wasn’t always the same kids, but Sam was a common attendee when we couldn’t give him another dose of Larazepam sleep aid. I was used to seeing Abigail screaming about things she couldn’t have anything to do with, flailing in her sleep, sobbing her conviction that she was a threat to everyone around her and that “it” needed to stop. This quiet peace was something else entirely. My rounds took me through the play area, and every time we were both there I stopped to listen to her for just a few moments. It was a sign that these people weren’t wrecked forever. If she could sit here in peace and read to kids, who sometimes weren’t asleep, and a nurse, who always was, maybe we could help her get over her delusions and paranoia. Maybe she could be a real person.           I stopped one night to listen to her read an old fairytale, listen to that full-volume w...

Angela jumped; someone was standing in the doorway, leaning against the frame. "Hey, Matthew." He stared at her. She felt very aware of her jet-lagged face and lank hair. She needed hairspray, a change of clothes, and sleep.                 "What are you doing?" Angela lifted the untidy sheaf of papers in her hand.                 "Some work I brought with me," she said. Matt considered the pages.                 "What do you do for work?" Angela made herself keep her eyes on his face .                 "I’m… a marine biologist. Studying how we can feed our growing population in the world sustainably. This—this is a report a colleague gave me about a new kind of crossbreed fish that s...

I took the boys for burgers at the arcade. I had more tokens waiting for them whenever they ran out. Joe fell asleep on the ride back. Matt looked at me over Joe’s bowed head.           "Do you have her number? Her address?" I kept my eyes on the road. I took as long to answer as I could get away with.           "Whose?"           "Hers. Angela’s." I sucked on my teeth to give me time to think.            "No," I said.           "Why not? I want to talk to my mother. I want to call my mom, I want to see her, I want to know why she wants to be there, why she wants to freeze her boobs off and, and probably whore herself out to oil rig guys, why—"           "Angela is a marine biologist," I said. "She’s doing...