I’m not sure about any of the following.
I’ve just finished the Blind Pianist story. I can’t make head or tail of what happened. It has a lot of things in it that I don’t recognise presented as if I ought to know them. I was away from the game for a while and finished the Blind Pianist story afterwards, and maybe I’ve forgotten some. But there’s so much in it that I don’t recognise that I wonder if it was rewritten between when I started it and when I finished it and I played half of the previous version and half of the new version.
I advised the Pianist to rescue the spy rather than create a new outpost of Hell in Parabola, but mainly because I’d only heard about two sentences about the Dynamite and it occured to me that absolutely nothing had been said about what exactly it was they meant by ‘creating a new and better Hell’ and whether or not that would be better for humans. And letting Hell into Parabola seemed like a very bad idea since Parabola has access to human dreams.
I know next to nothing about Parabola anyway, and as far as I know, at the time I left the game that’s about as much as a player at an early enough stage to be playing ‘The Blind Pianist’ would usually know. I know it’s all over the place now, but the fact that it was being mentioned as if the player would know all about it in a story that’s available at pretty low level was another thing that made me suspect a rewrite.
There was some talk about ‘Law’, whatever that means.
The Dawn Machine was on stage and off again within about half a dozen actions. Now, I’ve heard the Dawn Machine mentioned on the forums and there seem to be more things about it than mentioned there, notably something involving the words ‘E SUN THE SUN THE SUN THE SUN TH’, so either there’s another story it appears in or it’s been cut drastically.
I rescued the spy, and he said he was going to ‘warn the Surface of Hell’s true nature’. Fallen London’s version of Hell seems to be a bit unusual anyway - it happened that I’d just been growing Recusant Marigolds in the Flit, from which I learnt the puzzling information that Hell has white-painted walls and is full of flowers. But evidently the ‘truth’ he was going to warn them about wasn’t that they were better than people had thought, so that’s not it. And it’s presumably something other than the fact that they’re basically cannibals, because you’d hardly need to send a spy into Hell to find that out - anyone in Fallen London could tell you that.
Am I missing something? If so, what? I’ve heard someone say that there’s another wiki that has lore stuff, but if so I can’t remember where it is.
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Don’t worry, we all had the same impression when FBG suddenly decided to end this story after few years it was hanging and forgotten.
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I’m not sure about any of the following.
It seems like, that makes sense - it wasn’t rewritten but the later part was written much later than the earlier part - I hadn’t realised. Thanks! From what you say, it sounds like it’s a bit abrupt anyway, though, unless there’s other stuff about the-Dynamite-not-to-be-confused-with-the-other-Dynamite that most players know but I don’t.
Is the Dawn Machine from Sunless Sea? It looks like, that’s almost the only other mention of it on the Fallen London wiki, although it gets talked about a lot on the forum.
Playing the Coilheart Games was a bit weird to me, on account of knowing next to nothing about Parabola. I know that it’s a stable or stable-ish area in dreams, and that it’s also reachable through mirrors and I assume it connects to the Mirror-Marches, and that very expensive linen grows there and that Clay Men do not grow there, that’s the other place beginning with P.
I was going, both in- and out-of-character, ‘Oh, the tigers can mirrors? Oh, the tigers mirrors all the time and they thought everybody knew this? But they’re also ashamed of it. And there are things called Fingerkings there, which are bad and mustn’t get out, or at least the tigers think so. And they’re snakes. Then why are they called Fingerkings? Snakes don’t have fingers. I wish I could ask the Detective about this beyond one clue, given his habits he probably knows the Mirror-Marches better than I do. Hey, are the snakes and the tigers what the cat means when she says ‘Don’t you know they’re fighting a war with fire and water’? Oh, we’re going to the Mirror-Marches, nice. I like the Mirror-Marches. Can I take a picnic? Please don’t anyone tell the tigers that I don’t know what Fingerkings are’. It was rather funny thinking what it would look like from an in-character perspective!
I know a tiny bit more about it now, because I’ve been playing the Wars of Illusion and have got up to finding out what the conjurers are up to although I haven’t put on a show myself yet but I didn’t know even that while I was playing the Coilheart Games. (Jonesion is just casually using the fact that things can be posted through mirrors to make his conjuring tricks work :-D :-D :-D The fact that the Fingerkings are snakes suggests a nasty thought about why so many small animals go missing during these tricks).
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Loredump, with various spoilers of a cosmic nature:
Yes, the Dawn Machine really only shows up much in SS. It was an attempt to create an artificial sun; suns (a.k.a. Judgements) in FL lore are living, intelligent (though somewhat beyond human comprehension) entities that radiate Law as light, imposing their will upon reality. This is one reason why the Neath is so strange — it’s shielded from sunlight, and therefore the laws of reality are more flexible. Many Neathy things are destroyed by sunlight, like glim, prisoner’s honey, and people who have returned from the dead. I think the reasoning behind creating an artificial sun was to be able to create and enforce your own Laws (Hell has its own Law Furnaces that seem to do something similar), but the Dawn Machine developed a mind of its own, along with a penchant for mind control.
Parabola is the place behind the mirrors, the place where dreams happen. It is the Is-Not, where lie the things that are not allowed to exist (or cannot exist) in normal reality — such as Fingerkings, the lords of dreams, always seeking a way into reality. All cats can travel into Parabola, although they usually take the shape of much larger cats, the better to fight their ophidian enemies.
Devils were once the servants of the suns, cultivating souls for consumption according to the sun’s tastes. Then they rebelled, and fled to Parabola, creating prisoner’s honey along the way as part of a deal with the Fingerkings. They founded Hell on the borders of Parabola, and just sort of… keep revolting, continuously, against themselves and reality. Even though they no longer serve the Judgements, they retain their interest in souls, though apparently only as collector’s items. Also, devils are bees.
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Very very nice!
I just KNEW you were building up to that final line. :D
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