Black Book
A fragment of the Garden of Remembering
Original character: Ense Vardaman
- Age: 13
- Trade: Assistant to his mother, the village hag
- Homeland: Iliesk - small state on the Hieriacca coast of Cerris, tropical climate, very pleasant all-year-round. Pre-industrial age, but magic and gods play a major role in daily life.
- Hometown: Varta (about a day's journey by foot to the nearest port city)
- Background: Always working to help make ends meet for as long as he can recall. No father or other family, just him and his mother and sister. Picked up a lot of basic skills - cooking, herbology, construction, medicine, animal husbandry and tracking. Mother always telling him he was meant for greater things, that he would one day go to Abearanoth and serve the gods directly; when she was killed in a pirate raid, he and his sister sold everything they had to try to start over and also send Ense on his way.
- Problem-solving approach: Apply grit and determination to see things through. Don't stop fighting, no matter how impossible the odds.
- Medical problems: Various common childhood ailments. Got pneumonia bad one year to they point where they had to get outside magic to fix it; were fortunate to be able to afford it at all. Rather small for his age as a result.
- Travelling experience: Prior to getting passage to Abearanoth on a trade ship, none.
- Weapons: Knife. Semi-capable in a fight, as much as a rather small boy with no real training can be.
- Vices: Pride - does not respond well to slights or insults
- Socialness: Somewhat of a loner, and awkward in social contexts. Good at small talk, but also very to the point, sometimes enough to alienate people. Does not make friends easily, but always remembers who they are.
- Hates: Does not like to be challenged. Despises those who consider themselves better than others, especially without any understanding of what those others go through. Hates nobles in particular.
Stand-in replacement: Jennifer Mar
- Age: 28
- Trade: Software engineer and designer, writer, miscellaneous hobbyist
- Homeland: Wyoming. Hot summers, harsh winters, thin air. Wind and grasshoppers possibly the prime inhabitants. Also contains some cities.
- Hometown: Casper (middle of nowhere; has a local airport, but it's tiny and very expensive, and the closest hub is about four hours away by car, so people usually just do that and save 400$)
- Background: Degree in software engineering, with studies in psychology. Grew up always reading and making things - drawing, painting, sewing, building little tiny huts for fairies. Had a difficult time getting into the job market due to unusual background - emphasis on open source and volunteer system administration and development, and the fact that as a software designer, she didn't actually have a degree in anything 'design-related'. Would constantly complain about how stupid this was because actual design degrees often didn't cover any of the important stuff - the software itself, or the psychology of the users. Puttered around doing freelance for awhile, then finally actually tried to make an actual job with grants, pulled it off, and loudly declared her life on track. Most of her spare time spent playing videogames, making stuff, writing, and surfing the internet.
- Problem-solving approach: Set things in motion and then wait and see what happens. Alternately, just step back and wait and see what happens. Pretty common for the field, where even the smallest changes can have unexpected impacts, and even the most successful propositions begin with essentially a gamble.
- Medical problems: Light sensitivity; can't see well in full daylight without sunglasses. Can't wear shoes unless it's cold. Possibly has various psychological problems, but never bothered to see anyone about it. Has trouble at high altitude getting enough air when doing anything remotely strenuous and has taken this to mean she's horribly out of shape, but is really mostly just fairly average. Often gets colds when travelling.
- Travelling experience: Occasional road trips, a few flights per year to visit friends, mostly in-country, a few in Europe. Ski trips, hiking trips, random trips on trains. Conferences all over the world. Has gone gallivanting off into random other countries just because she had a day to kill and no idea what better to do with it.
- Weapons: Six-foot pole (steel or pvc depending on mood/importance of not breaking anything). Mostly just carries it around using it as a walking stick, balancing aid, thing to poke stuff with. Sometimes has to smack wild animals with it. Also various knives and a sword, but these aren't really used as weapons.
- Vices: Laziness, apathy (somewhere along the way lost the ability to take deadlines and the like seriously and has major struggles with motivation), stories (can't put them down until she sees them through to an end), potted plants, especially ferns
- Socialness: Quick to make friends, but even quicker to totally forget who they are. Doesn't much care for normal socialising or small talk and prefers to focus on practical, interesting, or productive things. Very loyal to friends if something does come up (and she happens to notice), but unlikely to be the one to even ask about personal matters.
- Hates: Doesn't hate people. Doesn't even usually become angry with people, but will become unreasonably angry at poorly-implemented code, processes, tools, etc when she has to work with them and they cause problems, which can spill over into yelling at their creators. Takes far more issue with incompetence than directed ill-will, but also understands that people can just plain screw up at times.
- The only things she really hates are very specific products such as macromedia flash.
INT. House entryway downstairs - morning
It's a house. It's not terrible. It's full of plants. Someone upstairs, MORRIS, is yelling at his computer.
MORRIS
(upstairs)
NO! That is not what I told you do to!
There's some clonking at the door, and then a somewhat bundled-up woman, JENNIFER, manages to get it open and stumbles in with some bags. She drops the bags on the floor, kicks off her shoes, and hangs her coat and scarf on top of another coat on the wall.
A cat slinks out of another room and sniffs at the bags, nearly trips Jennifer as she picks them up again, and then wanders off.
MORRIS
(upstairs)
AGH! What?! No! Don't fucking do that now! Fuck you, don't... on top of... FUCK YOU!
A woman's voice responds, also upstairs, SHANNON.
SHANNON
(upstairs)
Hey, are you okay? What is going on?
MORRIS
(upstairs)
NO I AM NOT FUCKING OKAY! THIS FUCKING DATABASE JUST FUCKING DELETED ITSELF!
Jennifer fishes around the bags in the meantime and pulls out a large book. It's a thick volume, with ageing pages bound in black, looking like some sort of menacing fantasy thing. Its only label is a silvery symbol of a tree set into the spine.
INT. House upstairs - morning
The kitchen is also full of plants, mostly hanging, and also some actually useful-looking herbs and such on the counters/sills.
Morris is at the kitchen island/bar-thing with his laptop. On its screen are some tmuxes, a browser with something like a hundred tabs, the current one open to mysql documentation (the page on something really basic like JOIN or DROP), and some random videogame in the background.
He's staring at a tmux blankly.
Shannon is standing nearby, holding a pineapple, staring at him blankly.
SHANNON
(after a somewhat long pause)
That doesn't sound like something that's supposed to happen?
MORRIS
(loudly)
NO IT ISN'T.
SHANNON
(putting the pineapple down)
Could you please stop yelling?
MORRIS
NO.
Sorry. What?
Shannon shakes her head and gets out a frying pan and some random ingredients.
Jennifer comes in and clonks the book down on the counter next to Morris' computer, shoving a potted plant out of the way.
JENNIFER
(leaning over right next to him)
HAVE YOU CONSIDERED USING THE RIGHT COMMANDS?
MORRIS
(leaning right back, putting his face right in front of hers)
NO. NO I HAVE NOT.
JENNIFER
Just tell me this wasn't production.
(sitting next to Morris)
Also why are you up here?
MORRIS
Egh.
(indicating Shannon)
She bribed me. Said she'd make me breakfast if I came upstairs for a change.
JENNIFER
(opening the book)
But you haven't even gone to bed yet.
MORRIS
What's your point?
SHANNON
Nice book. Want some pancakes?
JENNIFER
Yeah, sure...
Jennifer flips through some of the pages, skimming them. Most of them don't really have much on them, though others are quite covered in various texts, symbols, maps. She stops on one page, flips back to the index, and then looks back at the page. It reads as follows:
Backstory. Sidestory. Supposition, the antithesis of practice. Nevermind practice. This isn't practice. This is a treatise by the narrator, an examination of could-have-beens, an aside from the GM. We can talk about anything. Let's talk about anything.
You, for instance. Who are you? What do you dream? How far would you go? Do even you know yourself, or will you be just as surprised as all the others when, after all of this, it turns out it was all for jackfruit? For my own part, I can really only speak for me... and maybe, just maybe, for you.
Shall we go, then, you and I?
This isn't the important part.
Morris mutters incoherently and starts cloning a backup database.
The frying pan sizzles as Shannon ladles in some batter.
Jennifer turns the page. This one contains even less.
He was your favourite, your least understood. His world is yours, and yet he no longer is. Can you take his place? They will know you to be him, so long as you don't give up.
She turns the page again, finding only a name.
Ense Vardaman.
And then everything goes dark.
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Notes
