Save · Vs.

Joe was perched with his knees on the armrest, face pressed to the rain spattered window, watching the knot of army men milling grimly outside. Beyond and below, the smokey gray river lay quiet. The passengers were allowed off in little groups to take the air, but few were availing themselves of the opportunity. The train had sat on the bridge for a tenth hour now, gripping the track with a hundred steel fists. No word as to when they would move again; the conductor had told them there had been some mayhem by the docks; all of London was shut down.

"And she goes over the king," Phillip said, laying the queen down with a mechanical snap, attempting to catch Joe's eye.

"Because she's red," said Joe, not looking back. The glass fogged around his cheeks, and he wiped it with his wool cuff. Unsatisfied with the results, he slumped down into his seat once again, sighing at his cards.

"Because she's red, yes. Then you can move the jack and all the others below him over her --- and then..." Phillip scooped up the whole row of cards, flushed their edges, and dropped them to the wicker sugar basket beneath the dining-car window. "Gone."

Anna's eye's flitted up over her book. "I wish you wouldn't teach him all of your bad habits. I'm sure he'll find a path to lowly behavior and carousing all on his own. No need to rush it."

Conspiratorially, Phil leaned over to his son, whispering loudly "Your mother just called me riff-raff. That's another point for me. I'm up two since breakfast, -- you'd better catch up."

"She called me a nit this morning for dropping the jam on the bedspread."

"Half point. A nit is only an egg that becomes a bug. A proto-pest. You don't get a full point until your a full grown louse."

"Boys," Anna cursed.

"Ha. I think that one's worth two for the both of us. Well done, sir." He shook Joe's hand vigorously. "Now I'll let you to your game." Phillip stood up into the tight aisle, plucking his topcoat from the wall hanger. "I thought you wanted him to spend time on his maths."

Anna continued reading, or at least kept up the appearance of it. "Mr. Flowers, we all know how brilliant you are, everyone in this car. But there are no verbal pas de deux you can choreograph to convince me that that..." she pointed, not looking, "...is scholarly."

Phillip smiled, patting down his pockets.

"You're going to smoke."

"I'm going to think. Much more dangerous."

The wind was stiffer than he expected, like ice water pouring over this skin, and he yelped involuntarily as he stepped off the train . Fishing in his pockets for gloves got him nowhere. Instead, he produced his cigarette case, flicking it open with a practiced snap. Zukünftige Welts, very stylish, very Berlin. Anna said she hated them; that these machine-rolled novelties were a bit too a la mode to be respectable, but Phil believed it to be an act. After all, she had bought him the case -- flat, gold-finished, etched with the rectilinear pock-marks of a punch card.

No matches either. Had he packed anything? He put the case back and shouldered into the spitting air, shambling towards the gray cluster of passengers ahead. A young couple, already smoking, only looked at him in confusion when he asked. Then suddenly, the man seemed to bloom with understanding, and began chattering away in German, pointing to the cigarettes excitedly, making little mechanical clock-sounds. Phil nodded, jah-jahing them and smiling back as if there were a real conversation going on. He gave them a short wave good-day, and stepped away. They waved back, both smiling now. Germans, Phil thought. Little wind-up people.

“You were looking for matches.”

Phillip turned. The figure that greeted him was head-to-toe ensconced in rumpled woolens, gleaming belts with fine chains leading to a smattering of epaulettes. His eyebrows peeked clear of this mummification, but only because they quite clearly could not be contained. His gently framed glasses were speckled with frozen mist that came in broad gouts from the scarf below them. His hat was fantastical, as if a ham had been wrapped in a bolt of felt and pinned with doorknobs.

“Allow me, please.” The gentlemen began the mach-excavation at first with two hands, then, frustrated by snagging sequin, pulled one furry mitt off, and dug solo. The other he held out to Phil, who shook it, at a bit of a lack for words. “Viktor Von Latchkey.”

“Phillip…”

“Dr. Flowers, yes, yes.” Then, with a jerk, the big German froze, looking skyward, closing his eyes. He continued to squeeze Phil’s hand. A scuttling sound came from his pockets as the tips of his bare fingers brushed the matchbox deep within, but failed to seize it. “I have…read…your…ach! Bumsen eine Ente…” Without warning, the hand erupted again, the rattling box clutched tightly. “Ha!”

Phillip hurriedly went for his Welts, popped one in his mouth, and accepted the struck matchhead held out in Von Latchkey’s furry hand. As Phil toked, the German continued, “I have read your papers. It is very good luck that I meet you on this train! Very, very strange good luck. Whatever were you doing on the Continent?”

Struck dumb momentarily by the rush of the smoke and the spectacle of Von Latchkey, Phillip could only stutter “…thank you…I was, that is, my wife Anna and I…we were taking our son Joseph to see the grounds of his new school, or what we hope will be his new…” He shook his head to clear it. “I’m sorry, are you Viktor Von Latchkey of the Hohenzollerns?”

“Servant to the Engines of König von Preußen Frederick William IV, yes, yes.”

Phillip felt compelled to shake hands again. “Sir, an honor…your work on the Mark III computational....”

“Ach, nein, nein. If we are going to trade complements, it’s only acceptable to do so over warmed brandy. Luckily, I believe I have a bottle or two in this coat, and I assure you that will be warm enough,” he laughed. “So please, we will linger as you finish your cigarette, and take in the glory of the English landscape.” He looked around, the icy rain flecking his lenses. “Well, enough of that.” He stalked up the high steps and into the belly of the car.

Phillip only realized his hand had gone numb when the Welts had burned to the knuckle, and he shook his hand madly at the burn. Down the bridge, two little gray silhouettes waved back.

A crack and flash of powder, and billions of points shot into the blue, winking and rolling in the morning sun...redwhite, redwhite...their relative positions seeming to form the briefest images, like the moment of a photograph, then disassembling. Curtains, octopi, shooting stars, dainty fingers and dripping wax. Yes, thought Sophie, those plumes of confetti look heavenly, fluttering their way down to to the deck of the incoming Lovelace, but all mulched up around your shoes, it looks like clownshit.

She was about to say as much to Dickie; she didn't appreciate having to truss herself up in this foolish silk-and-whalebone torture suit, let alone stand in it since four in the morning, waiting on this sour-smelling quay, and she didn't mind if he knew it. But best not to distract him -- though, turning to him, it was clear there was little chance of that -- from his slack mouth, Sophie could tell the calculations were taking up the bulk of her brother's mind.

This was the least embarrassing he was in public, when his noggin was churning numbers like cream: eyes slipping and darting, wide and black-pupiled, occasionally chirping 'oh!,' cuckoo-clock fashion, as facts were successfully assembled behind his brow. Meanwhile, Dickie's hands were tucked up into the worn pockets of his rumpled brown coat with innapropriate tightness, gripping his round belly in surprise, as if he were a tourist who had just sipped from a Morrocan well. Finally, to add worry to wonder, it was in these fugues that he was most desperate to record his thoughts, and would tap away on that belly, or more precisely, on the mechanical vestment that encased it, with all the fury of Chopin at the keyboard.

At his social nadir, however, Dickie went beyond the pale*, tripping lightly from this merely garish awkwardness to a performance of fumbling, stuttering, half-muttered/half-finished off-color jokes, gaseous toots, ululation, and rambling apology so intricate and dizzying that bordered the abstract. The former was Dickie in Thought. The latter, Dickie in Conversation.

Crack! Another tun of pine and paper exploded midair, keeping the sky stocked with fresh color, matching the stew of fabrics below. At this, music began from one corner of the docks, mixing with seagulls and cheers as the last ropes were secured and the quartermaster of the Lovelace gave the order bring out the landing ramps. Sophie reached back with one gloved hand to tug at Dickie's elbow, leading him into the press, then stepping behind him to shove him the final distance through a clutch of pink-frocked young ladies, rude and bustling, that formed the crest of the greeting wave. Dickie was instantly swarmed by these lusty young math lovers, angry at his eclipsing of their view down the ramp. But he only hooted and tapped away, off on his number-planet, as his body was roundly beaten. The girls whacked his legs with closed parasols and thumped their mouse-sized fists against his broad back with all the force of a viciously served shuttlecock, but to no avail. Dickie, when thinking, was a mountain . It was almost a shame, though -- this was likely as close as he would come to female companionship in his life, yet he was absent for it. She smiled for him, a little sad, a little prideful. He was a wonder, Dickie was. And had not always been this way. When they were children, before he found books, before Father had packed him up to school, he was the most dashing thing. They would call the cairns pirate ships, fighting with sticks and throwing peat for Greek Fire, come home stinking and bruised. Whatever happened to you, Dickie? In his calmer moments, he tried to describe to her the worlds of equations he saw, but though she nodded at his enthusiasm, it was as opaque to her as the punch-spooled coils onto which he recorded his thoughts.

She found herself shaken from her own fugue: a man, a looking back at her, deeply into her eyes. And a policeman by the look of it; the very last thing they needed, having come this far. Damn it, she must seem just like one of those fool girls, a doe.

Thankfully, the ship's ramp connected, and at the sound the throng swept in, closing off the copper's view. But she could see, even in that moment, the glint of suspicion in him -- his eyes had snapped briefly to Dickie...but then he was gone.

Lovelace's round white bulkhead had swung wide, disgorging sharply dressed grenadiers. They put a bit too much show into their deployment, raising their rifles dramatically, taunting the crowd as if the natives may rush them at any moment. They took their positions, the music-from-nowhere now taking on a military tump-te-tump. Sophie looked to her brother. The girls around him frozen in a tableaux of anticipation, but he was still blind with thought. "Dickie!" Sophie yelled, and his head jerked up, waking. This movement stirred the already cross bunch around him, and they returned to berating him with knifelike whispers. He began a litany of pardons and sorrys, but too late -- sensing Someone of Importance was about to appear, the masses lurched forward in a heavy wave, and locked Dickie in place, the girls pressed into the leaves of his coat like flowers in a book.

As the sharp-cut figure of this dashing Mathist, this Lord Rickard De Fontaine, stepped from the darkness of the Lovelace, the ecstatic release of emotion from the dock, from these poor lesser lords and ladies, their flushed daughters and admiring and jealous sons and husbands, it was as if every lung on the quay were squeezed tight by the wounded hands of Christ Himself.

It was a bit embarrassing. To be sure, aside from this pre-dawn commencement of foreplay, of waiting, crushed together amongst a thousand other fanatics for hours as the ship slid, teasingly slow, to the pier, the city was in a heightened state to begin with. For months prior, all the rags -- morning and night editions both -- had doled out crumbs of melodrama to their ever more impassioned readers. From the breakthrough calculations that even Babbage couldn't decipher, to the unveiling of the final machine before the Empress herself. A whirlwind of pennybooks circulated, complete with tawdry etchings, about theer romance, her tragic death of malaria, his manly grief driving him deeper into his work -- to the brink of madness! -- to perfect his designs before they saw the field of glory; and all culminating in the ferocious Battle of Bombay!

A sweaty tale indeed.

Still, Sophie had to admit, he was a spectacularly handsome young man. If more a girl herself, she could imagine being quite taken with him. Tall and not too thin, graceful and confident...though with the slightest blush showing beneath his dark eyes, his face framed with slender sideburns and wind-tousled bangs. Stepping out into the sun and breeze, he turned his head down slightly, letting his short, fine hat fall into his hands, rolling the motion into the smallest bow, feigning shyness.

"London..." De Fontaine began, instantly muting the crowd. The patter of paper rain was suddenly his sole accompaniment.

Well that, and the rustling of Dickie's coat as her brother dug for the slim brass tube in his pocket. He, they, had come a long way to present this to the famous mathematician: the spool that contained all Dickie's revelations. It would change the world. Sophie didn't understand it, but she believed it. They had waited years for this, and for once, she saw, Dickie had blessedly forgotten himself as he looked down the long white path to his hero. His face was as open and happy as when they were young.

Lord Rickard took one firm step forward, and smiled. "I am returned."

The rifleshot responded before his audience could.

----
*Sophie, having been in point of fact born beyond the Pale (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pale), knew exactly what she was talking about. In short, Dickie embarrassed even the Irish.

Short Bottom Tom heaved in a cradle of steam and black smoke, cables running back to the hulking Lovelace as she led her down the throat of London. Tom's nose rode high over the grey water of the Thames, but the passage was slow; There's a Good Lass and Duchess' Dowry worked to either side to keep Lovelace trim, but Tom was the main horse, as usual, and this liner was a well-fed pig.

The piers, coming or going, were normally a-team with well-wishers, wives and thieves. But this morning, Captain Boothe noted, it was positively seething. As he watched, a man in his Sunday best was pushed off into the drink from the press of the crowd that lurched and thrummed beyond the guano-festooned pilings; a floral sea of parasols, golden barrels of hair, a forest of top-hats shining like spools of black thread. Idiots. Bedlam's inmates would show more sense in their dress, and likely a deal more taste. So much lace lined the quay the Pope would think it was his bedchamber, if only there were a few more young Maltese boys.

He could imagine such a reception for a King. For a hero regiment back from the Sahara, perhaps, after a bit of what-ho against the Hottentots.

But for a mathematician?

The world had moved on, Boothe thought; oh, for the days of the Young Queen. He had been blessed to be presented to her when he was only a promising ensign, months before her murder, years before the battle of Bombay soured his career. She was truly immaculate then, not Immaculate as she was now, frozen forever in glass and brittle petals, but a real and perfect living thing. The life of England.

Now he was a tug captain, crawling the mud of a river fouled twice over, and the country was a steam-burnt boil.

Bollocks to integers, bollocks to the algorithms and calculus of the new government. Weather clocks for Queens. Machine-looms for Presidents. "A harpsichord for Prime Minister!" he shouted suddenly to the quay, laughing. The bosun turned, looking at him with open embarrassment. Boothe reddened. He must be drunk, more so than he thought.

Bollocks to all those bastards, and God save that poor dead bitch.

God save us all.

Alright: how does this sound?

1) The whole game is in text or pictures, so it can be published here.
2) Nothing is true until it's published on the blog. Strings of semi-true stuff can happen in email or IM, but until it appears here, it is changeable. Both players and the GM can publish directly to the blog if they want. First to publish wins.
3) The GM can write about anything, anywhere; the players can write only about what they do.
4) Players can have as many characters as they want, and start them whenever they want.
5) The GM is the only one who can advance time globally in the blog.

You can publish on the blog at any time.

I'll publish the world starter sometime today.

Maybe there's some way to round-robin the writing/running duty?

The simplest way to go, I think is the Chinese Postman model -- everyone makes up characters, you tell everyone about them (and tell me any stuff you don't want folks to know via email), I write up the intro, you tell me what you want to do based on that, then I write up what happens. Rinse, repeat. The questions then are, how much, if any, ruleage do you want; and how much can you put up with reading my novelization of stuff?

Other than that, is anyone familar with play by mail games? I am not, but it seems like they must operate under the same restrictions. However, I also assume that they lean heavily towards rules, and less towards story. I've also heard about something called Blue Booking that might also be a model. I'm also sure that having read that, Andy can't type fast enough to keep up with the jokes that just exploded in his brain.

If nothing else, I'm prepared to start with the above concept next week. I would update it week-to-week, and people can write up whatever they want and send it to me via email at any time prior to publication.