[Please read the Instructions before jumping in]

He hasn’t done enough to calm down, Lucien can see that much as he looks at himself in the mirror. He doesn’t even look like himself. Oh, the physical is there — his soft red hair, the hard angles of his face, the dark, dark circles under his eyes, too heavy for how young he is. He’s only in his twenties; how long, he wonders, can he live like this?

No, he can’t let himself think that. He needs confidence. He’s about to step out on stage, where every eye—so, so many eyes—will be on him. He pulls a face in the mirror and is slightly relieved when it pulls the same one back. It’s him, but it needs to become a better him.

Confidence, as always, comes from the outside. He gets the kettle on, and sits back down in front of his mirror. Normally he’d wait until he was at the theatre to put on his stage makeup, but he does it now instead: rouges his cheeks and his lips, lines his eyes to make them stand out. Human features blur on the stage without measures like this. He could be anyone without it, but he must be his character.

Lucien slicks his hair back and puts his hat back on top of it. The kettle is boiling, and so he pours it over into a cup to make his coffee. He stirs sugar in, hesitates, and then adds a splash of something harder. Not too much, but he needs to relax, needs to feel inspired. Besides, depending on which of the Lords are there, he might please them by appearing with just an edge of intoxication. Poisons fall under the portfolio of several Lords, after all.

He drinks his coffee and imagines the peace of the stage, the moment when he steps on and all the pre-stage fear falls away. The lights will be bright and hot; the crowd will be one living creature, breathing and recoiling on his command. And everything will be right. He trusts the other actors, trusts them to do their part as always.

Finishing his drink, Lucien smacks his cheeks, the rouge hiding the flush he knows the drink has brought to them. He slicks his lucky charm into a pocket—an old brass key that he has never found the use for, but which he held onto through that terrible time and so has become some sort of symbol to him—and heads out the door.

When he walks in through the actors’ entrance, he is greeted by what he first takes as another mirror, but when it raises its hand and he doesn’t, he realizes it’s just Shuni. He’s still not sure which of them was cast first, him or Shuni, but Shuni looks enough like him that they could be twins. Of course, that’s useful in the show, but it’s never stopped being slightly strange.

Shuni comes over, draping his arms over Lucien’s shoulders and kissing both his cheeks. “Cutting it close, aren’t you?” he murmurs. “Let’s move along quickly, now. You should know that there are going to be three Lords watching today.”

“Three of them?” Lucien murmurs back. Everything worked; his heart is calm. “Which ones?”

“Lord Crow the Carrion Eater, Lord Vine of the New Growth, and Lord the End,” Shuni says. He slides his grip into a casual arm around Lucien’s shoulders, leading him back. “Is there one of them you want to please most? To speak to? You’re spoiled for choices tonight, but I suppose that has its own risks.”

[Please leave a suggestion for Lucien in the comments.]

[Next Day]

[Previous Day]

[Please read the Instructions before jumping in]

Lucien Iomorphe wakes with a start, alone in his narrow room. For a moment, he doesn’t know where he is. The air is heavy, the sky dark. Long shadows crawl across his room as the moon stares in through his curtainless window, creating shapes that seem too real, too solid.

Trying to calm his racing heart, Lucien scrubs sleep from his eyes. He cannot fully remember the dream he was having, but he knows it was a dry dream, a cracked dream, a dream where nothing could grow, and because nothing could grow nothing could live, and because nothing could live, nothing could die.

An unpleasant dream. 

He dismisses it from his mind. Tonight is going to be busy; the play opens tonight. It will run unfinished every night until the conditions are met and the final act can be performed. It’s going to be such a run, he thinks, trying to distract himself. It’s full of things the audience will adore. Mistaken identities, betrayal, love, monsters—always monsters, of course. What’s a play without a monster? And more besides, things he won’t know about until it’s time for them to happen.

He needs to get dressed. He needs to get ready—from what he’s heard, several of the Lords might even be in attendance, and he does not dare put on a poor show in front of them due to something as commonplace as dreams. He is an actor; the play must go on.

Still he hesitates on doing the things he’ll need to do—food, drink, even clothing all seem like something for someone else right now, not him. He walks naked to the window, throws it open so he can see out properly. The lack of curtains might let the moonlight in, but the thick distorted glass makes it impossible to see the outside world.

The lamps are being lit outside, the faint smell of gas fumes and ozone almost lost in the heavy, smog-tinted scent of drizzling rain. The moon hides its face, clouds traveling back across it and carrying a thicker drizzle with it; he leans out almost far enough to fall onto the slate shingles beneath him and lets the dirty rain trickle down his skin, bead in his hair. For a moment, he is only balancing on his hands, on the tension of his extended arms and tensed muscles, and if he leans any further he will tumble straight down into the streets, naked and, presumably, broken.

He eases himself back into his room and dresses in a suit of reasonable quality. He drinks some water, eats a cold meal, and then takes his time doing up his necktie, finding a hat. 

Lucien’s heart still hasn’t calmed. He stares at himself in the mirror, convincing himself it is time to go.

[Please leave a suggestion for Lucien in the comments. If nothing else, please
describe him:  one physical trait, and/or one emotional one.
For example, I might suggest: He has curly brown hair and is reckless.]

[Next Day]

It’s that ‘choose your own adventure’ time of year again! My yearly Halloween Interactive Fiction begins tomorrow. It’s gonna be spooky, gonna be queer, and gonna be driven by you!

Here’s how it works:

• Tomorrow (Oct 1) I’ll put up the first section of a story. 
• You leave a comment to the post with a suggestion to help the protagonist. 
• Get this comment in by no later than 4 pm PST of the next day (i.e., if a post goes up on Oct 1 —> You have until 4 pm PST on Oct 2 to comment). 
• Please only comment on the most recent section of story — if you comment on a section I’ve already posted the follow-up to, I won’t be able to fold the suggestion in.
• You can comment more than once to add details you forgot, or +1 other people’s ideas. I’ll be counting unique suggestions by user ip address to round them up into one suggestion.
• After 4 pm PST on the next day, I will begin to write the next section of the story. It will get posted between approximately 5-9 pm PST that day (depending on how intense the section is to write & also if I have other things going on that day).
• This will repeat every day through Oct, culminating in a Halloween Climax!
• Feel free to check out the previous Halloween games I’ve run for examples.

Suggestions are to be aimed at the protagonist, not at the narrative generally — you can’t tell the villain to surrender, for example, but you can tell the protagonist “Beg the villain to surrender.” If two suggestions are contradictory (ie: Break the vase/take the vase with you), I’ll pick either the one that gets the most people suggesting it or, if a tie, what seems most likely for the character so far. As well as the obvious ‘do this, do that’ suggestions, you’re welcome to suggest things that explore the character’s personality or past.

This structure only works if people participate, so please don’t be shy — jump in! Remember, even if someone’s already said what you want to say, by repeating it you make it more likely for that thing to happen. 

To be alerted as soon as the post’s gone up, make sure to add your email to the “Subscribe to blog” form in the sidebar to the right.

A note on this year’s game:
This one’s going to be a little different tonally/stylistically from previous years, both to celebrate the 5-year anniversary of doing this (Five years!!) and because 2020 is hard and I need something that will lend better to being flexible and short-form. It’ll be less heavy on traditional narrative investigation and more immersive, focused, and surreal. Think, oh, Fallen London meets the Last Door.

Let’s get started – your first comments!:
Our main character is going to be an actor. Comment to this post with a thing you want to see happen in the play he’s starring in I’ll start: “A murder”.

If you think it could happen in a play, you’re welcome to suggest it! Some other examples (and you are free to use any of these if you can’t think of one yourself) might be: An affair, a betrayal, a secret identity. These may not appear in Day One, but will appear throughout the work as a whole.

(The small text: I reserve all rights to this work. If I eventually get this published in any form that requires me to take this version down, I will send copies of this online version, with comments left intact, to everyone who contributed suggestions, if I am reasonably able to get in contact with them.)

[Day One | Day Two | Day Three | Day Four | Day Five | Day Six | Day Seven | Day Eight | Day Nine | Day Ten | Day Eleven | Day Twelve | Day Thirteen | Day Fourteen | Day Fifteen | Day Sixteen | Day Seventeen | Day Eighteen | Day Nineteen | Day Twenty | Day Twenty-One | Day Twenty-Two | Day Twenty-Three | Day Twenty-Four | Day Twenty-Five | Day Twenty-Six | Day Twenty-Seven | Day Twenty-Eight | Day Twenty-Nine | Day Thirty | Conclusion | Author Notes/Story Q&A]