As a young man running games of TMNT after school, I wanted (desperately, like most young men) to be liked. This meant that every day was Christmas for the brutal emus, toads, and mutated serpents in my charge. I would spend my lunches in the library hatching well-appointed, poorly defended laboratories for my parties to scour and claim as their own. Like the earthly avatar of benevolence, I dispensed hovercrafts. I dispensed HE Washing Machines for efficient cleaning after daring operations. These first two were jokes, but I did in actual fact give them a dirigible at one point, with an armored balloon, mechanics shop, comfortable berths, clone vats, and over forty-five distinct hardpoints. It could also, um… travel through time. Time travel wasn’t even its most noteworthy feature.
I could go on.
Those days are gone, the wick burned down to the plate - now, the player is my enemy. When I reach for my dice, I want a wave of nausea to crash over them. When I fix the skull clasp of my midnight cloak, I want to see quaking, rodent fear. And when my blade descends, the table falls in twain.
I’m currently up in the frozen north, writing the second episode of Precipice whenever I am not eating mice or vindicating wolves. I was able to get through the border without being molested by one of their bear-women this time, which I’m calling a plus. They had me stew in their purgatory for as long as they possibly could last time, their haunted no-place situated outside any civilized nation, refusing me access to the bathroom so I wouldn’t shit out all of my heroin.
So much of the confusion stemmed from what I do for work. She couldn’t believe anyone would actually pay me for this, which is understandable. I sometimes have a hard time believing it myself.
(CW)TB out.
of the sadness, of the woe
