"The glow penetrates everything in the room. There are chains around it, but you see through them like they’re glass. It is alive."
The Affable Explorer has returned from the far Unterzee, with a new wonder to display to the great and the good. Attend the auction on his island mansion. Learn about the Specimen, and your fellow bidders. Just who is the Self-Declared Heiress? What ailments trouble the Angular Butler? What will any of you do to get your hands on the Explorer’s precious treasure?
Hello in the storylet “The Butler sets the specimen on a podium” the Heiress comments “Bellisimo”. The correct form for that word would be “Bellissimo”.
Well this was a very solid story, playing with some aspects of lore I haven’t seen for a while.
Was there a hidden option for the Affable Explorer somewhere? I didn’t have enough connection with him to attempt one challenge and I’m not sure where I missed a check (I went as an old rival and danced with him for example).
Also very curious as to what happens if you don’t hatck the egg, but couldn’t pass up the opportunity to Frostfound a place.
That was indeed an exceptional story! Very solid plot (felt like a cthulhu mythos story in some points), amazing narrative, enjoyed the lore and still the mysteries remain to further expand in the future. Also, the pacing was very natural, never felt like a waste of actions. I liked that appearance played a part in the story, as in my opinion it is one of the most important aspects of the Fallen settings. Nice thumbnails too.
It was one of those stories that I wish I could play through all options!
Hope to see more like that in the coming months, bravo to the team and the writer, Anna Anthropy (Anthropos -ανθρωπος- means human in greek).
Huh. I think I just didn’t get it. I got that the thing inside the egg was a Judgement about to be born (since the game remarked on the similarity to my Judgement’s egg), but I never got why it was there or what it wanted or how the explorer fit into all this… it also felt like it ended abruptly, I tossed the egg out the window expecting there to be a chase or for that to buy time to explore the mansion to find out what’s going on or something, and then it turned out that it just hatched outside, the explorer vanished, and then everyone except me forgot about everything that happened for some reason?
I’m quite confused about what actually happened in this story and why.
My read: this egg was not, exactly, a Judgement’s egg, but a Judgement who was an egg - that is, a Judgement who realised she was trans, shed the male parts of her identity, and sent the rest away to reform into a woman. The Explorer found this egg and became obsessed with her, keeping her captive and preventing her from hatching.
Ah, that makes sense with the parallel to the Heiress, who escaped her father to be a woman. (Was that just a parallel, or were they one and the same or something?)
…but why did everyone forget everything involved after the egg hatched?
I think the egg drew the Heiress closer in recognition of shared experience. And the Explorer and his party were blotted out of everyone’s memories by the egg - possibly in revenge for having kept it captive?
My understanding is that a Judgement was murdered on its throne, and on its deathbed, it threw a part/clone of itself into parabola. As the parabola bordered Iremi, the explorer found it there and brought it back.
My take on why people forgot:
Judgements aren’t just powerful. Their light literally rewrites the world. So when the Judgement imagined a world without the Explorer in it, to escape her prison, she destroyed the world as it currently existed and created a new one in which there was never the Explorer. Thus, it’s not such much that people forgot as that he was never real (this is also a self fulfilling prophecy since one of his motivations for imprisoning her was his Irem won knowledge that she would destroy him). The player and the heiress remember because they are at ground zero for the judgement coming into being, a position that only makes sense with the explorer to bring them there.
I think this is why the heiress refers to reality as a dream in her final letter. We’re running on a logic of ‘The universe is real because God is observing it’, which is a consistent feature across Fallen London that explains plot decisions like the impermanence of death, the fatal nature of sunlight or so on.
I enjoyed this ES more than last month’s, although I wish this one could be longer though . And since I am not familiar with the lore of FL , seeing the discussion here is very helpful!
Echo request: listen to the voices. Thought I would get a chance later, mistakenly.
The Specimen’s vision had an artwork reference to The Stacks. I think it Redacted the Explorer, Firmament-style. The Editing process seems to allow some discretion in how the world closes over the absence, which we’ve also seen.
I really loved the story, so I wanted to look up the writer in the failbetter website. Unfortunately, Anna’s name doesn’t link to her website, so here it is https://w.itch.io/
. And since I am not familiar with the lore of FL , seeing the discussion here is very helpful!