Inventory Management
Mar. 9th, 2017 01:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sadoeuphemistPLAYERNAME! The world wants you dead, PLAYERNAME! You have died so many times, and you will die so many times more!
Your spirit has wandered, restless, rootless, clutching at the dirt with eyes fixed on the horizon, and now finally you have been born into paradise. You will make your way to the center of the world, and there you will find Death waiting for you. You have never before felt so alive.
You were born empty-handed. You were born clenching your hand into a fist. You raise your head to the sky and listen to the howls of the wind. You strike flint against steel. You make fire. The flickering flames light the crumbling walls of dawn. We live in the ruins of Empire. We crouch between the rusted-out husks of war machines, skulk through sunken labyrinths whose purpose is lost to time. There are treasures down there, the discarded dreams of gods. The world is overgrown, our parents dead, the wilderness come creeping in through the cracks. We live upon the carcass of some great beast, and we have built houses of its bones, picking away at the flesh. We are a carrion generation. We trace the boundaries of fallen walls and cross them easily, lightly, marveling at our lack of restriction. We wander. We take in the sights and marvel at our dreams come to pass.
Our dream is a fire, a moment to warm ourselves by, and a world that requires moments of warmth. Our dream is a torch raised against the dark. Our dream is a bent tin cup that fits in our hands, and a river to fill it from. Our dream is an ancient and broken beast of war, lurching across the landscape waiting to die, its eye bright and deadly as we crouch low and follow its tracks. Our dream is the strain of a bowstring drawn taut, the line of sight down the arrow to a quavering heart. Our dream is a herb to quell the bleeding, another to inflame the blood, combining in the desperate rush and fever of battle. Our dream is a weathered armory: broadswords, daggers, battleaxes, spears, all unearthed from the ground or pried free from an enemy's fist, lovingly adorned in notches and rust. Our dream is everything we can carry on our backs, and all the world waiting for us to harvest.
You take circuitous routes; you uncover. You discover names from a previous life. PLAYERNAME! You have lived a life before this, have you not? You have journeyed far to reach here. You have come seeking your death.
Here is the backstory, here is the secret: You are a child of Empire. You were born from here, indubitably, born of the same impulse for conquest. These dead war machines once warred in your name, in lands far, far from your sight. You have felt the weight of Empire upon you, the records and the registers, the rows of ordered streets, the cogs of the machines that once built your life. The soldiers kept you safe and the Empire extracted your weight's worth of toil. You earned a salary. You walked through these once-lit halls, these labyrinths, these intricate interlocking grids, and at one point in your life made sense of them as if you had been born and bred to do so.
You knew your place, your position, your purpose. You were numbered and weighted according to your worth. You labored secure in the belly of a great beast, scurrying through its veins, as it strode across the world and razed it clean. There were no wolves or dragons or crows to menace you then, merely the churn and metabolism of the machine - the prospect of demotion, unemployment, a slow and ordered obsolescence. You sat at your workstation and you dreamed. You dreamed of paradise. You dreamed of death.
This is what you have sought, is it not? The end of civilization. The end of security. All the walls that once restricted you come tumbling down. In the end, the empire that built all this could no longer sustain its own appetites. You have witnessed the decline of the ages of man. Here, at the end of the world, we own only what we can forage, what we can take for ourselves, what we can carry on our backs. There are no more machines to partition out our meager shares, no more rules or accountings. You have seen your masters killed, you have seen your coworkers massacred in the thousands, and you thrilled at it, at all the new possibilities. This was not an empire worth saving. Now there is birdsong. Now there is a space for you to call your own.
You are pulled between the corners of the world. You move through the countryside and reap the remains of the dead - teeth and pelts and arrows and pouches of jingling coins, crudely-drawn maps and lists of instructions, boots and cloaks and tunics too commonplace to wear. You slit a throat. You uncover a bounty. There is a hole in your heart that you despair at ever filling. It is impossibly deep, bounded by the lines of a grid. It is a void. It is a blueprint of a house of empty rooms.
At first you picked mushrooms, herbs, fruit, wildflowers, everything that grew freely in the countryside ready for the taking. You stripped dead bodies clean, weighing new weapons in each hand, judging their heft and weight. You took everything that sparkled, everything new, everything that shined. You delighted in discovery, that a vole's fur could be used to line the inside of your boots, while a fox's could make a hat. That bristlewood burned quick and that asphodel drew spirits to its warmth. That the green mushrooms would keep you from death while the red would make you swift. You made a rainbow of bottled potions. You jangled with empty bottles that you hoped to eventually fill. Your coats grew thick. You bulged with possibility. You were at first amazed by all that you could carry, and then gradually frustrated by the limits of it once you came to take your capacity for granted. You would find a new trinket and lack the space for it, wasting accumulated hours sorting and resorting, choosing what to discard. Why had you ever harvested so many vole pelts to begin with? What purpose did they serve? There were so many better things to own, better things to accumulate.
You grew stronger by possession, and then stronger still. You unearthed the weapons of our ancestors. You bore the weapons of the Dead. Now you wield a flaming sword, bear a quiver of gleaming arrows that can pierce the heart of steel. You have bottled aether that renders you impervious to harm, impossible to touch. A resurrection stone pulses in your pocket, a second heartbeat. Your armor is dragonbone, twisting outwards into serpentine coils like evil taking root, impossible to ever fully destroy. Your steed can chase the four winds and trample them beneath its hooves. What have you left to desire? What have you left to fear? The flowers of the earth are useless to you now, as are the fruiting trees and the delicate creatures that scamper across the soil. Everything you own is parceled out, judged fit for use, classified, sorted, valued, and ultimately discarded as inferior to what you already carry. You have only ever interacted with the world via possession.
You cannot conceive of the wily fox without accounting for its pelt, its meat, its tooth and fang, the arrow used to kill it. You cannot understand a tree without the axe you used to fell it, the wood it provides. A fire is the wood, flint, steel, or a torch or an elemental flame or an explosive to light the spark. A human being is what they have to sell, what they will buy from you, what you can give them and what they will give you in return, and now they have nothing left that you need. You have discovered paradise and through your works rendered it worthless. This is the inescapable disease of your soul. You have been born into a world without restriction, and yet you only understand it through accounting. You only understand the world through Inventory.
The Empire is dead, murdered by your desire, and yet you have brought its blueprints forward with you. You have reproduced the beast in miniature, ever rapacious, mindlessly acquisitive. You have conquered the world. You have weighed it and found it wanting. You have resurrected the war machines of the dead, and you stand poised to destroy. What now, PLAYERNAME? What further progress can be made from here?
You abandon your caches, your hidden stores of goods. You wander into the wilderness. You will find your way to the center of the world, and there you will find Death.
Do you hear the song? Do you hear the voices of the damned? They sing for salvation. They sing for retribution.The world will turn, the cosmos will complete another cycle. Everything we have earned and known is lost. You will forget. You will begin again.
PLAYERNAME! The world wants you dead, PLAYERNAME. You have died so many times, and you will die so many, many times more.
Your spirit has wandered, restless, rootless, clutching at the dirt with eyes fixed on the horizon, and now finally you have been born into paradise. You will make your way to the center of the world, and there you will find Death waiting for you. You have never before felt so alive.
You were born empty-handed. You were born clenching your hand into a fist. You raise your head to the sky and listen to the howls of the wind. You strike flint against steel. You make fire. The flickering flames light the crumbling walls of dawn. We live in the ruins of Empire. We crouch between the rusted-out husks of war machines, skulk through sunken labyrinths whose purpose is lost to time. There are treasures down there, the discarded dreams of gods. The world is overgrown, our parents dead, the wilderness come creeping in through the cracks. We live upon the carcass of some great beast, and we have built houses of its bones, picking away at the flesh. We are a carrion generation. We trace the boundaries of fallen walls and cross them easily, lightly, marveling at our lack of restriction. We wander. We take in the sights and marvel at our dreams come to pass.
Our dream is a fire, a moment to warm ourselves by, and a world that requires moments of warmth. Our dream is a torch raised against the dark. Our dream is a bent tin cup that fits in our hands, and a river to fill it from. Our dream is an ancient and broken beast of war, lurching across the landscape waiting to die, its eye bright and deadly as we crouch low and follow its tracks. Our dream is the strain of a bowstring drawn taut, the line of sight down the arrow to a quavering heart. Our dream is a herb to quell the bleeding, another to inflame the blood, combining in the desperate rush and fever of battle. Our dream is a weathered armory: broadswords, daggers, battleaxes, spears, all unearthed from the ground or pried free from an enemy's fist, lovingly adorned in notches and rust. Our dream is everything we can carry on our backs, and all the world waiting for us to harvest.
You take circuitous routes; you uncover. You discover names from a previous life. PLAYERNAME! You have lived a life before this, have you not? You have journeyed far to reach here. You have come seeking your death.
Here is the backstory, here is the secret: You are a child of Empire. You were born from here, indubitably, born of the same impulse for conquest. These dead war machines once warred in your name, in lands far, far from your sight. You have felt the weight of Empire upon you, the records and the registers, the rows of ordered streets, the cogs of the machines that once built your life. The soldiers kept you safe and the Empire extracted your weight's worth of toil. You earned a salary. You walked through these once-lit halls, these labyrinths, these intricate interlocking grids, and at one point in your life made sense of them as if you had been born and bred to do so.
You knew your place, your position, your purpose. You were numbered and weighted according to your worth. You labored secure in the belly of a great beast, scurrying through its veins, as it strode across the world and razed it clean. There were no wolves or dragons or crows to menace you then, merely the churn and metabolism of the machine - the prospect of demotion, unemployment, a slow and ordered obsolescence. You sat at your workstation and you dreamed. You dreamed of paradise. You dreamed of death.
This is what you have sought, is it not? The end of civilization. The end of security. All the walls that once restricted you come tumbling down. In the end, the empire that built all this could no longer sustain its own appetites. You have witnessed the decline of the ages of man. Here, at the end of the world, we own only what we can forage, what we can take for ourselves, what we can carry on our backs. There are no more machines to partition out our meager shares, no more rules or accountings. You have seen your masters killed, you have seen your coworkers massacred in the thousands, and you thrilled at it, at all the new possibilities. This was not an empire worth saving. Now there is birdsong. Now there is a space for you to call your own.
You are pulled between the corners of the world. You move through the countryside and reap the remains of the dead - teeth and pelts and arrows and pouches of jingling coins, crudely-drawn maps and lists of instructions, boots and cloaks and tunics too commonplace to wear. You slit a throat. You uncover a bounty. There is a hole in your heart that you despair at ever filling. It is impossibly deep, bounded by the lines of a grid. It is a void. It is a blueprint of a house of empty rooms.
At first you picked mushrooms, herbs, fruit, wildflowers, everything that grew freely in the countryside ready for the taking. You stripped dead bodies clean, weighing new weapons in each hand, judging their heft and weight. You took everything that sparkled, everything new, everything that shined. You delighted in discovery, that a vole's fur could be used to line the inside of your boots, while a fox's could make a hat. That bristlewood burned quick and that asphodel drew spirits to its warmth. That the green mushrooms would keep you from death while the red would make you swift. You made a rainbow of bottled potions. You jangled with empty bottles that you hoped to eventually fill. Your coats grew thick. You bulged with possibility. You were at first amazed by all that you could carry, and then gradually frustrated by the limits of it once you came to take your capacity for granted. You would find a new trinket and lack the space for it, wasting accumulated hours sorting and resorting, choosing what to discard. Why had you ever harvested so many vole pelts to begin with? What purpose did they serve? There were so many better things to own, better things to accumulate.
You grew stronger by possession, and then stronger still. You unearthed the weapons of our ancestors. You bore the weapons of the Dead. Now you wield a flaming sword, bear a quiver of gleaming arrows that can pierce the heart of steel. You have bottled aether that renders you impervious to harm, impossible to touch. A resurrection stone pulses in your pocket, a second heartbeat. Your armor is dragonbone, twisting outwards into serpentine coils like evil taking root, impossible to ever fully destroy. Your steed can chase the four winds and trample them beneath its hooves. What have you left to desire? What have you left to fear? The flowers of the earth are useless to you now, as are the fruiting trees and the delicate creatures that scamper across the soil. Everything you own is parceled out, judged fit for use, classified, sorted, valued, and ultimately discarded as inferior to what you already carry. You have only ever interacted with the world via possession.
You cannot conceive of the wily fox without accounting for its pelt, its meat, its tooth and fang, the arrow used to kill it. You cannot understand a tree without the axe you used to fell it, the wood it provides. A fire is the wood, flint, steel, or a torch or an elemental flame or an explosive to light the spark. A human being is what they have to sell, what they will buy from you, what you can give them and what they will give you in return, and now they have nothing left that you need. You have discovered paradise and through your works rendered it worthless. This is the inescapable disease of your soul. You have been born into a world without restriction, and yet you only understand it through accounting. You only understand the world through Inventory.
The Empire is dead, murdered by your desire, and yet you have brought its blueprints forward with you. You have reproduced the beast in miniature, ever rapacious, mindlessly acquisitive. You have conquered the world. You have weighed it and found it wanting. You have resurrected the war machines of the dead, and you stand poised to destroy. What now, PLAYERNAME? What further progress can be made from here?
You abandon your caches, your hidden stores of goods. You wander into the wilderness. You will find your way to the center of the world, and there you will find Death.
Do you hear the song? Do you hear the voices of the damned? They sing for salvation. They sing for retribution.The world will turn, the cosmos will complete another cycle. Everything we have earned and known is lost. You will forget. You will begin again.
PLAYERNAME! The world wants you dead, PLAYERNAME. You have died so many times, and you will die so many, many times more.
