#cursed rail networks and their guardians

[honourablejester]

Heart: The City Beneath

For reasons, I’m assuming because I’ve been watching actual plays of various ttrpgs lately (Legends of Avantris playing D&D 5e, Nobody Wake the Bugbear playing Mothership, several others), I was recommended a video on a game called Heart: The City Beneath. Just a basic overview video, themes, tone, talking the game up a bit. But it sounded interesting, so I went to look up what the 9 playable classes were, just to see what kind of ideas we’re working with, you know?

And. Just from that online write-up. There was one particular class that caught my eye enough to go buy the actual game. Now, having read in more detail, there are several other classes that also sound really cool, but I still want to talk about the thing that caught my eye.

The Vermissian Knight.

Now. I would not ordinarily go for a very martial class when magical-type classes are an option. It’s just not usually how I roll. But the classes in Heart are all very, very setting-related, and all very, very weird, and the thing with the Vermissian Knight …

Okay. The setting for this game is Heart. The, well, City Beneath. There is a mile high surface city called the Spire, and then there is a vast living beating realm of something beneath it, called Heart. It is alive. It may be an extradimensional benevolent parasite. It might be a god-cocoon. It might be a seed of terraforming fuel. It might be a lot of things. But it’s definitely alive and weird and warps reality the further down into it you go.

The city above it, Spire, was run for ages by arrogant elves. And at some point, those elves decided that the city needed a mass transit system. A railway network, called the Vermissian. Right? But it wasn’t working, it was a lot of infrastructure, and funding was complicated, and power supply was an issue, and they wanted a way to hook the whole thing together and power it mystically. Right? So, what did they do? What does any arrogant race sitting on top of a magical weirdness bomb do when they suddenly need power? Yeah. They decided to core down into the Heart Itself, this mystical, weird-as-shit, possible god parked under their city, and they decided to hook their mass transit passenger network right the fuck into it.

It went, as you might imagine, horribly wrong. The reality-breaking weirdness of the Heart smashed up through the transit network of the Vermissian and nearly corrupted all of Spire above, save that the warding glyphs on the transit tunnels kept it confined. Within the system, time and space and reality got smashed and thrown about higgledy piggledy, and batshit monsters crept about the tunnels. The entire network was cut off, the stations abandoned, and Spire did its best to pretend there was never an attempted transit project to begin with. Just shove the whole mistake behind some condemned signs and pretend it never happened, boyos!

But the network is still there. The tunnels, the trains, the monsters. It’s hidden in Spire, but down in the Heart, the stations stand unguarded. Stuff leaking out. And people venturing in.

And the Vermissian Knight, as a character class, is someone who seeks to understand and patrol that network, to explore it and protect people from it. The class is built around armour, armour built from scavenged parts of eldritch trains. And the class builds …

Okay. In Heart, all characters are doomed. It’s a whole thing. This is not a long-form campaign sort of game. You will not last. Your character will die. So levelling is … you’re not building towards power, you’re building towards a climax. You’re building towards a spectacular end. Not necessarily death, but something that will take your character very dramatically off the board. And the Knights. Their Zenith Abilities, their capstone, dramatic ends, should they survive long enough to reach them. They can either bind themselves to a landmark, potentially a station on the line, or they can become a techno-organic titan, a biological perpetual motion machine that stalks the Heart and can be summoned by your surviving party as a deus ex machine, OR …

Or they can cast a death rite that summons the last surviving Vermissian train to tear its way through to them and crush them under its wheels, while also wiping out anything else in its path. Like. Your last, taking-you-with-me stand as a Vermissian knight is summoning a hell engine from a warped extra-dimensional transit network to plough through your enemies.

That. That is just so cool? Just. That whole concept. It’s so cool.

There are other classes in this game, and they are also pretty cool, don’t get me wrong. The Deadwalker, a person who died and came back haunted by the personification of their own death, able to potentially slip into the afterlife while living and bring people along for the ride. The Deep Apiarist, a person so determined to fight against the living chaos of the Heart that they have allowed themselves to become colonised by a megaconsciousness of order-inducing bees, in the most body-horror way possible (the bees go in through your nose and convert at least one of your organs to wax and paper to inhabit your body)(the Sunless Sea vibes are so strong with this one). The Hound, a group of mercenaries aided (and potentially possessed) by the spirits of the cursed survivors of a massacred army once sent to invade the Heart. The Junk Mage, magic addicts that eat scraps of power and make bargains with eldritch entities. There are a lot of cool classes in this game.

But the train knights. Just. The train knights. The image just enchants me. A cursed railway network, a twisted tangle of tunnels and weirdness, and the armoured paladins who seek to explore, understand, and protect those who encounter it.

I love it so much. I’m not fully sure why, what it is about that concept, that image, that so bowls me over, but …

I wanna play a train knight. A gnoll train knight, seeking enlightenment. Answers. I’m down here, in this strange, twisted place, because I want to know. What is it down here, in the Heart, that could do that to our network? What actually did happen to the network? I want to explore and I want to know.

(The Calling system is what you’re down in Heart looking for. Your class is what you are, your calling is what you want. There are five options: Adventure, Enlightenment, Forced, Heartsong, Penitent. You came for adventure, you came for answers, you came because you were forced to, you came because the Heart itself called you, or you came because you fucked up very badly and this is the only way to make up for it. Each calling gives you story beats that you can choose from along your quest for a suitable climax, and they’re really cool, and many of them encourage you to act, shall we say, incautiously. You’re not going to survive this, honey. Nobody comes down here who’s sane or sensible and likely to live long. So do something mad and dangerous and interesting with your time here. I actually really like that part of the system a lot).

Yeah. A Vermissian Knight, seeking Enlightenment. I would totally play that.

This is a boss-ass game, you know that? The setting is really cool.

[words-writ-in-starlight]

also 9, 18, 29, and whichever other one you have the most potent Idea(TM) for, for leverage/dishonored au~??

GOD I love that AU so much yeah let’s do that.  Starring Empress Parker, Lord Protector Eliot Spencer, and Natural Philosopher/Inventor Hardison. I lost this in my drafts, sorry about that.

9. What is the most embarrassing thing they have done in front of each other?

Hardison has blown himself up in front of his Empress and her bodyguard so many times that he should be over getting embarrassed by it, but he isn’t.

Parker knows she didn’t actually die--admittedly, the recovery time from jumping over the rail, sorely wounded, and landing badly in the water below the overlook was long enough that she doesn’t hold it against everyone for thinking otherwise, to say nothing of the rest of it--but she hates knowing she lost that fight.  It was an attack she couldn’t have hoped to see coming, literally out of nowhere, and if even Eliot couldn’t stand against it, she didn’t have a hope in hell, but.  She hates knowing that she lost that fight, and she hates knowing that she lost it in front of Eliot, and she hates what happened afterward, and she hates what it did to her people, and she hates what it did to Eliot, condemned to torture in Coldridge for a regicide that didn’t happen, what it did to Hardison, left lying to save his own life in the new court so that he could try to prove Eliot’s innocence, and it’s not embarrassment, it’s so much worse than that, but--  It’s close.

Eliot is both extremely embarrassed and not remotely embarrassed about falling more or less to pieces, when he finds Parker alive.  On the one hand, he’s her guardian, he’s not supposed to look weak in front of her, it’s literally his job.  On the other hand, she’s been dead over a year, Eliot and Hardison have been mourning her like a severed limb for over a year, and now she’s here, scowling and rubbing her wrists where he cracked the cuffs off her after handling Moreau in a very permanent fashion, and--

He’s entitled to a little bit of a breakdown, he thinks.

18. When they fight, how do they make up?

So...Coldridge changed a lot.

It wasn’t actually Coldridge, it was everything, but if you asked any of them, it was Coldridge.

Eliot and Parker have had some fucking arguments in their day, mostly early on, when Parker was a recently corralled and unwilling imperial heiress and Eliot was a Lord Protector that she picked because she thought he would be easy to convince into slacking off.  Unfortunately for her, Eliot has never slacked off a day in his life, and the first time he caught her sneaking out via rooftop, he shouted at her like no one had dared shout since she was crowned.  She yelled right back at him, but--

Ultimately, the thing is, he was only angry with her when she put herself in danger.  She learned to think a little more carefully about what was likely to get her killed in a way that Eliot couldn’t protect her from, and Eliot learned to let her run a little wild, for her own sanity, as long as she took him with her and didn’t do anything actively stupid.

Eliot and Hardison bickered constantly, of course, and if either of them crossed a line, they’d go out of their way to make it up to each other--Eliot would leave one of Hardison’s favorite meals on the table so he’d remember to eat while he worked, or Hardison would build Eliot some new inadvisable gadget and invite Parker to come watch them test it for an hour or three.  On the rare occasions that Parker and Hardison really fought, Parker would hide for a few hours and then Hardison would corner her and they’d have an emotional conversation about it and then they’d be fine.

And then...well.  Then Parker was murdered, and Eliot was blamed for it, and Hardison was forced to lie for a year to stay alive in Moreau’s new court, and--

A lot’s changed.

Parker just wants things to go back to normal, as if she’d never been presumed dead for a year--she can’t bear the way they treat her like glass.  Hardison is being eaten alive with guilt for what he said to the court, the lies he told to survive--he can’t let himself be angry with Parker or Eliot, under any circumstances, when he feels so much more to blame for everything.  And Eliot--Eliot can’t speak.  Can’t sleep much.  Doesn’t like to be touched without a warning, doesn’t like to be alone, doesn’t like having his coat taken away from him, never goes anywhere without three knives.  He hates teaching them sign language, but he hates not being able to talk to them more.  Parker suggests bringing in a tutor, someone who knows the Serkonan sign language Eliot learned as a teenaged sellsword, and he scowls deeper and deeper until finally he just.  Walks out of the conversation.

Parker is in possession of what could be called interrogation records, if you wanted to make the understatement of the century, so she knows that Eliot’s voice is gone for good.  So does Eliot, if he’s forced to admit it.  Too much damage from that time he almost cut his own throat, from his tongue being cut out, from screaming until he tore all the tissue to tatters.  He just--hates it.  He hates it.

He takes a few hours to pull himself up onto the roof he used to yell at Parker for crawling on, and just sit there and mouth curses in every language he knows.  Then he takes some deep breaths, and climbs back down, and goes back and finds the Empress again.  

29) Why do they fall a little bit more in love?

After they fix things--as much as they can fix, dragging every one of Moreau's lies into the light and scorching the fucking earth on his entire network--Parker sits up late at night, in the darkness of her quarters lit by the dull glow of the city below her windows. This isn't particularly new. None of them sleep all that well anymore. God knows she woke up from a nightmare. But tonight is...quiet. She's the only one awake.

Hardison is still asleep on the lounge, a sketch for a new kind of crossbow open under his hand and his head tipped toward the bed. Eliot is asleep on the bed, his back to the wall--Parker made them move her bed into the corner, after she came back, after probably decades of the imperial bedchambers being unchanged. He's curved toward her like a parenthesis, and he slept through her waking, something he hasn't done since she returned. The dim blue light of the city softens all the scars of the last year and a half, until Hardison's hands are clear of burns and Eliot's throat is unmarked. Parker can see them both breathing, slow, almost perfectly synchronized.

It's only because she's watching so closely that she sees Hardison stir and grimace, flexing his pencil hand and cracking all the knuckles. She holds a finger to her lips, and he nods, and she gestures him toward them.

That does wake Eliot up, the motion of the mattress sinking down as Hardison settles on her other side, and her guardian jolts up automatically. He makes a gesture toward the pair of them, not sign but an obvious pantomime of switch with me.

"You gotta sleep, man," Hardison says quietly, gently, and Eliot's face goes forbidding, and Hardison reaches out across Parker, moving with a syrupy half-asleep slowness that's probably at least half genuine, but also gives Eliot plenty of time to knock him away. Eliot doesn't, and Hardison pinches Eliot's sleeve and tugs on it like a kid, the way he used to when Eliot was ignoring him.

Parker blinks at Hardison's arm, stretching over her, and grabs Hardison by the wrist. He lets her manhandle him without a fight. She sets his hand on top of Eliot's, and then wriggles down until she's lying down between them, their joined hands on her belly, rising and falling with each breath.

"There," she tells Eliot. "This way, if we move, you'll wake up."

Eliot's hand is clenched around Hardison's fingers so tightly that it makes his knuckles white, and Hardison squeezes back, and Parker wonders if maybe it's not worth it, if maybe they should just let Eliot go back to watch and stop trying to honeypot him into a full night of sleep. But then--then Eliot lets out a breath and visibly forces his fingers to relax, and rubs a thumb over the burn scar on the back of Hardison's hand.

He nods, and Parker nods back.

She doesn't know how much Eliot managed to sleep, by the time they wake up in the morning, but his drawn, grey pallor is a little less in the sunlight.

[touristguidebuzz]

Hotels in China Don’t Benefit Much From the World’s Largest Travel Event

Because of staff shortages during Chinese New Year, the owner of the boutique Orchid Hotel in Beijing says he has to choose between staffing the hotel or the restaurant. Pictured is a dining area on September 16, 2014. The Orchid Hotel

Skift Take: Hundreds of millions of people in motion during a holiday period should mean big bucks for the travel industry. But in China, technology and tradition are holding it back.

— Steven Schwankert

Editor’s Note: Skift  launched a new series, Gateway, as we broaden our news coverage geographically with first-hand, original stories from correspondents embedded in cities around the world.

We’ve started with regular reports several times per week from Beijing, Singapore,  Caracas and Cape Town. Look for us to add other cities, as well. Gateway Beijing and Gateway Singapore, for example, signify that the reporters are writing from those cities although their coverage of the business of travel will meander to other locales in their regions. Read about the series here, and check out all the stories in the series here.

The Christmas holiday period in the United States in 2016 saw about 100 million people in motion, setting a record. But half a world away in China, transportation officials chuckle at the quaint idea of a mere 100 million trips during a holiday period.

While certain events, such as Thanksgiving or Christmas in the United States, or the annual Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca, seem like massive movements of people, it is the annual Chunyun, the Spring Festival travel period, as Chinese New Year is known locally, that represents the world’s largest annual migration. The annual 40-day period strains the nation’s transport system while creating the occasional opportunity for travel industry operators.

In 2015, Chinese took some 3.6 billion trips and spent $100 billion on shopping and dining during the 40-day period, The Guardian reported.

Spring Festival, or Chinese New Year, as Westerners know it, is celebrated based on a lunar calendar, and can appear as early as January 22 or as late as February 16. Officially, the entire nation is given a seven-day public holiday to celebrate. White collar workers may augment that time with annual leave; manual laborers, especially migrant workers for whom Spring Festival represents a rare opportunity to reunite with family, generally take more time, with building sites in big cities shutting earlier and re-opening later.

Travel Operators Aren’t Taking Advantage

Amidst all this movement it should offer great opportunities for the travel industry, and yet, hoteliers and other professionals don’t view Chinese New Year with the same glee as the October 1 week-long national holiday.

With transportation systems such as airlines and rail lines operate at full tilt, the traditional nature of the holiday and its focus on both family and home present two challenges. Many service industry staff are reluctant to work then, given both their desire to participate in China’s most important cultural holiday, and family pressure certainly increases that unwillingness. At the same time, business owners must offer double pay to those willing to work, inducing many to operate with skeleton crews.

That’s just on the business side. Tradition dictates that families stay together, shunning hotels and instead taking up available sofas and even doubling up on beds, although younger, urban Chinese, especially those who have lived abroad, may politely decline the homestay option.

Hotel Restaurants Welcome the Holiday

Increasingly, the big winner during Chinese New Year is restaurants, including outlets attached to five-star hotels and major international chains, where dining will be seen as prestigious or at least expensive. Eating is the national pastime in China even during non-holiday periods, and except for rural areas where restaurants are uncommon, even the most enthusiastic home chef will likely welcome a break after three or four days of almost constant cooking.

“Shanghai Disneyland has been surprisingly good during Chinese New Year so far,” said restaurateur Alan Wong, whose 10 restaurants include an outlet of his Hatsune Japanese restaurant chain in Shanghai’s Disney park. “Chinese New Year is a blessing and a curse, as [regular] customers leave, staff leave, but people that stay get peace and quiet in a normally bustling city.”

“For big city hotels, it is a quiet season. Only low-rated tour businesses are available. For the conservative, it is probably more financially prudent to run a skeleton crew and let the rest of the staff have a good holiday,” says Christopher Chia, vice president and general manager of Shangri-La’s China World Hotels in Beijing.

However, Chia clearly doesn’t place himself in the conservative ranks. “But for the go-getter, let’s pack the hotel with tours or family package deals. Also, restaurants should also be able to be filled with guests especially for reunion dinners. It is sad to have a cold and empty hotel on such occasions. The holiday spirit is more important than a lesser profit margin than usual,” he said.

Staff the restaurant or hotel?

“We’re going to lose half our staff no matter what.” said Joel Shuchat, owner of The Orchid Hotel, a boutique lodging and restaurant in Beijing. “I essentially have to choose which one [the hotel or the restaurant] to keep staffed.”

Even in normal times China’s skies remain overcrowded, and the increased passenger ranks during this holiday season result in delays on many routes after the first few flights of each day.

Another factor is bonuses and monetary gifts, which are often used to fund Chinese New Year expenses, including personal travel. Most employers who offer bonuses to staff do so right before Chinese New Year, providing many with a cash boost. Also, while the Christmas-style giving of physical gifts has become more common in recent years, the traditional present remains a hongbao — a decorative red envelope with money in it. Gift cards and gift certificates are almost unknown in China so travel providers have not been able to tap into any potential there largely because of distrust of many retailers.

Technology is increasingly playing a role with the most popular mode of transportation – China’s superb and expanding high-speed rail network. While formerly passengers wishing to take the train had to stand in line no more than a week before their departure to buy a one-way ticket to a destination, now the system is computerized, and available 60 days in advance. However, some feel that technology has now gone too far.

New “ticket-snatching” software allows some consumers to bypass the traditional queues, including China Railway Corp.’s rickety official website, and also rail tickets offered by large travel sites including Ctrip and Qihoo360.

Seen as a means of ticket scalping, even some of the travel sites appear to use it to help their customers gain advantage and increase buyer loyalty. Although sites may only charge a RMB 5 service fee (about $0.73) per ticket, given the volume of travel during the period, it still adds up to big bucks. Given the demand for tickets and its desire to keep the Spring Festival period orderly, the government has declared such apps to be illegal.