Writing Challenges
This week's Odd Prompts writing challenge at More Odds than Ends was from Becky Jones: The ghosts drifted through the crowd topping off champagne glasses.
That could be anything from fantasy (perhaps a grown-up version of the ghosts of Hogwarts) to spooky but not outright horror. And given that my mind's going to the Chaffee Artilect 'verse a lot, I immediately thought it could be a light-horror game in "NPC's."
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Ghost Service
As horror games went, this one was The Addams Family of gaming. Unsurprising that Sierra should head for it, Roger reflected. People whose mundane lives were ecure sought out the sort of thrills one got from that new Lovecraftian game Toni was developing. People who were struggling with the sort of things Sierra was dealing with would prefer charmingly spooky oogie-boogies.
Think a never-ending Halloween party in a theme park.
Candles floated in the high vault of the ceiling, casting a shifting and uncertain light over the tables. Based upon years of experience in camping by firelight, as a Boy Scout and as a hunter, the effect struck him sloppy, superficial, rather than an actual modeling -- but Roger doubted most of the players would even notice the differences. Like as not, the only candles they saw were on birthday cakes - and from some of the things Toni had told him, a lot of those would probably be electric lamps that simulated a flickering flame.
If this had been a Digital Dreams game, Toni could've checked the code, but this one was by an indie game developer called Nightshade Games. Unsurprising, given that the devs for Magic Garden were looking for Sierra as hard as her father's goons were, so she'd want to stay as far away from Digital Dreams servers and IP.
Roger scanned the crowd, wondering how many of the guests represented actual players, and how many were NPC's, like the ghosts that floated above the tables, topping off champagne glasses as the human characters drank.
Or perhaps one should say the characters that were supposed to have corporeal bodies, since one of the characters at the next table over looked like a werewolf, or maybe some kind of wild man. On reflection, his own sartorial choices might have been questionable, given Bela Lugosi's iconic portrayals of Dracula. At the time he'd set up his avatar, he'd thought he'd be going into a somewhat more aristocratic venue than it had proved to be - but at this point, trying to alter his avatar to tone down the vampire trope evocations would serve only to draw unwelcome attention to him - and make it that much harder for him to gain Sierra's trust when he did locate her.
At least he'd kept his features unchanged, the same face that looked out from all those historical pictures pinned to the wall of Toni's cubicle in the meatspace part of Digital Dreams. Maybe a little more tidied up, his skin paler and less weathered than his usual outdoorsman visage, without any hint of the five o'clock shadow he tended to get by mid-afternoon. But sufficiently the same that Sierra should be able to recognize him as one of the programmers she'd been talking to when her father ported in with his snarky line about her being “talkative,” then put that nasty piece of illegal control software on her.
***
Sierra had lost track of how many games she'd passed through in her flight through cyberspace. Every time Little Brother would ping her an alert, she'd flee in search of a new place, preferably by a gaming company she'd never dealt with before, although that made things complicated as she was having to go to smaller and smaller companies' works.
She was changing her avatars with equal abandon, hoping it would prevent casual observers from connecting them, while keeping a careful watch over the control panels of the various security packages she was running. Most of them were more like an upgraded version of Little Brother, but a couple were grayware, borderline illegal in most jurisdictions and banned in a few.
Right now her biggest risk on that front was knowing the physical location of the servers, since in most places that determined what government's laws had jurisdiction over a game's virtual spaces. Sometimes that was public knowledge, and other times all you could find out was the location of their corporate headquarters.
Some of her software was supposed to identify the location of the servers on which a game ran, although that was not a sure shot, given that a lot of the heavy hitters in the industry had multiple mirroring servers to prevent downtime. But this game was by a small company, apparently based in New Hampshire, so restrictions on personal watchdog software would be pretty light.
Drawing up a suitable avatar had taken a moment of thought. This was a horror game, but not one that took itself overly seriously - but this was supposed to be a high class establishment she was visiting, not a cheap dive bar on the waterfront.
Elegant, but not too high-flown. Think Morticia Addams or Lily Munster, not a royal court of Nineteenth Century Europe. This was a chance to emphasize that she was indeed an adult, not just a kid playing at being grown up.
Making small talk could be tricky, especially when she had no idea who might be just a random player hanging out, who might be an NPC run by the game's character engine, and who might be someone here on a mission. She'd gotten several pings on the way in here, although she was pretty sure her beefed-up Little Brother had been able to confuse them and give the searchers no useful data.
She hoped she was sipping the champagne with suitable elegance as she chatted about the weather - in-game as near as she could tell, since it didn't seem to jibe with any meatspace weather reports she was aware of. And then a movement attracted her attention: a man whose black evening coat and bearing suggested any of several portrayals of a vampire, particularly an aristocratic one.
Except the face wasn't any of the actors who'd portrayed Dracula - not Bela Lugosi, not Christopher Lee or any of the less iconic ones right up to the present. Where had she seen those thick eyebrows - no, they didn't look right for someone trying for a Groucho Marx version of the prince of vampires.
Sierra knew the physical responses of fear were the product of the software creating her avatar, but they were sufficiently intense that she could not simply dismiss them. Could this be one of her father's goons, tracking her down? Or worse, one of the devs from Magic's Garden. They'd understand the code they were using, rather than just treating it as an appliance.
The trick now was to extract herself without creating a ruckus. Make it look like an emergency had cropped up in meatspace, one that absolutely required her mundane persona's presence to deal with it, and then politely excuse herself. Then activate her various protections so nobody would be able to trace her as she left.
***
Roger had no more than noticed the slender, waiflike figure in the long black dress before a gentleman - clearly an employee of the establishment, and thus an NPC - came to her side and whispered into her ear. She nodded and said a few polite words before rising to depart. Even as Roger activated his tracking software, it was rebuffed by some form of privacy software he rather doubted was authorized by the gaming company, although it was likely legal in their home state of New Hampshire.
Toni's backchannel comm pinged. ::Crap. She must've recognized you just enough to think you were someone who'd been pursuing her.::
::That's what I was thinking. Which means that if I'm going to make a connection with her, I'm going to have to let her know who I am, so she knows she can trust me.::
::And in the process let out information that could be used against both of us. Her dad plays hardball.::
===========================================================================================
One of my big limiting factors in developing this scene is not knowing yet exactly how it's going to fit into the larger novella. In fact, I'm seriously thinking of writing all these scenes afresh as I actually put "NPC's" together, rather than just cutting and pasting the text in to the files.
As always, if you'd like to participate in Odd Prompts, just send your prompt in to oddprompts@gmail.com to be assigned a prompt of your own. Or if you're not up to the commitment of trading prompts, you can always check out the spare prompts and see if any of them tickle your creativity.
In the meantime, keep writing.
That could be anything from fantasy (perhaps a grown-up version of the ghosts of Hogwarts) to spooky but not outright horror. And given that my mind's going to the Chaffee Artilect 'verse a lot, I immediately thought it could be a light-horror game in "NPC's."
============================================================================================
Ghost Service
As horror games went, this one was The Addams Family of gaming. Unsurprising that Sierra should head for it, Roger reflected. People whose mundane lives were ecure sought out the sort of thrills one got from that new Lovecraftian game Toni was developing. People who were struggling with the sort of things Sierra was dealing with would prefer charmingly spooky oogie-boogies.
Think a never-ending Halloween party in a theme park.
Candles floated in the high vault of the ceiling, casting a shifting and uncertain light over the tables. Based upon years of experience in camping by firelight, as a Boy Scout and as a hunter, the effect struck him sloppy, superficial, rather than an actual modeling -- but Roger doubted most of the players would even notice the differences. Like as not, the only candles they saw were on birthday cakes - and from some of the things Toni had told him, a lot of those would probably be electric lamps that simulated a flickering flame.
If this had been a Digital Dreams game, Toni could've checked the code, but this one was by an indie game developer called Nightshade Games. Unsurprising, given that the devs for Magic Garden were looking for Sierra as hard as her father's goons were, so she'd want to stay as far away from Digital Dreams servers and IP.
Roger scanned the crowd, wondering how many of the guests represented actual players, and how many were NPC's, like the ghosts that floated above the tables, topping off champagne glasses as the human characters drank.
Or perhaps one should say the characters that were supposed to have corporeal bodies, since one of the characters at the next table over looked like a werewolf, or maybe some kind of wild man. On reflection, his own sartorial choices might have been questionable, given Bela Lugosi's iconic portrayals of Dracula. At the time he'd set up his avatar, he'd thought he'd be going into a somewhat more aristocratic venue than it had proved to be - but at this point, trying to alter his avatar to tone down the vampire trope evocations would serve only to draw unwelcome attention to him - and make it that much harder for him to gain Sierra's trust when he did locate her.
At least he'd kept his features unchanged, the same face that looked out from all those historical pictures pinned to the wall of Toni's cubicle in the meatspace part of Digital Dreams. Maybe a little more tidied up, his skin paler and less weathered than his usual outdoorsman visage, without any hint of the five o'clock shadow he tended to get by mid-afternoon. But sufficiently the same that Sierra should be able to recognize him as one of the programmers she'd been talking to when her father ported in with his snarky line about her being “talkative,” then put that nasty piece of illegal control software on her.
***
Sierra had lost track of how many games she'd passed through in her flight through cyberspace. Every time Little Brother would ping her an alert, she'd flee in search of a new place, preferably by a gaming company she'd never dealt with before, although that made things complicated as she was having to go to smaller and smaller companies' works.
She was changing her avatars with equal abandon, hoping it would prevent casual observers from connecting them, while keeping a careful watch over the control panels of the various security packages she was running. Most of them were more like an upgraded version of Little Brother, but a couple were grayware, borderline illegal in most jurisdictions and banned in a few.
Right now her biggest risk on that front was knowing the physical location of the servers, since in most places that determined what government's laws had jurisdiction over a game's virtual spaces. Sometimes that was public knowledge, and other times all you could find out was the location of their corporate headquarters.
Some of her software was supposed to identify the location of the servers on which a game ran, although that was not a sure shot, given that a lot of the heavy hitters in the industry had multiple mirroring servers to prevent downtime. But this game was by a small company, apparently based in New Hampshire, so restrictions on personal watchdog software would be pretty light.
Drawing up a suitable avatar had taken a moment of thought. This was a horror game, but not one that took itself overly seriously - but this was supposed to be a high class establishment she was visiting, not a cheap dive bar on the waterfront.
Elegant, but not too high-flown. Think Morticia Addams or Lily Munster, not a royal court of Nineteenth Century Europe. This was a chance to emphasize that she was indeed an adult, not just a kid playing at being grown up.
Making small talk could be tricky, especially when she had no idea who might be just a random player hanging out, who might be an NPC run by the game's character engine, and who might be someone here on a mission. She'd gotten several pings on the way in here, although she was pretty sure her beefed-up Little Brother had been able to confuse them and give the searchers no useful data.
She hoped she was sipping the champagne with suitable elegance as she chatted about the weather - in-game as near as she could tell, since it didn't seem to jibe with any meatspace weather reports she was aware of. And then a movement attracted her attention: a man whose black evening coat and bearing suggested any of several portrayals of a vampire, particularly an aristocratic one.
Except the face wasn't any of the actors who'd portrayed Dracula - not Bela Lugosi, not Christopher Lee or any of the less iconic ones right up to the present. Where had she seen those thick eyebrows - no, they didn't look right for someone trying for a Groucho Marx version of the prince of vampires.
Sierra knew the physical responses of fear were the product of the software creating her avatar, but they were sufficiently intense that she could not simply dismiss them. Could this be one of her father's goons, tracking her down? Or worse, one of the devs from Magic's Garden. They'd understand the code they were using, rather than just treating it as an appliance.
The trick now was to extract herself without creating a ruckus. Make it look like an emergency had cropped up in meatspace, one that absolutely required her mundane persona's presence to deal with it, and then politely excuse herself. Then activate her various protections so nobody would be able to trace her as she left.
***
Roger had no more than noticed the slender, waiflike figure in the long black dress before a gentleman - clearly an employee of the establishment, and thus an NPC - came to her side and whispered into her ear. She nodded and said a few polite words before rising to depart. Even as Roger activated his tracking software, it was rebuffed by some form of privacy software he rather doubted was authorized by the gaming company, although it was likely legal in their home state of New Hampshire.
Toni's backchannel comm pinged. ::Crap. She must've recognized you just enough to think you were someone who'd been pursuing her.::
::That's what I was thinking. Which means that if I'm going to make a connection with her, I'm going to have to let her know who I am, so she knows she can trust me.::
::And in the process let out information that could be used against both of us. Her dad plays hardball.::
===========================================================================================
One of my big limiting factors in developing this scene is not knowing yet exactly how it's going to fit into the larger novella. In fact, I'm seriously thinking of writing all these scenes afresh as I actually put "NPC's" together, rather than just cutting and pasting the text in to the files.
As always, if you'd like to participate in Odd Prompts, just send your prompt in to oddprompts@gmail.com to be assigned a prompt of your own. Or if you're not up to the commitment of trading prompts, you can always check out the spare prompts and see if any of them tickle your creativity.
In the meantime, keep writing.