[SPEAKER_00]: Happy Holidays, everyone!
[SPEAKER_00]: This is Brian and we are currently deep in post-production for our next season of My First Dungeon, where I will be running Parals and Princesses.
[SPEAKER_00]: For cast that includes Daniel Radford from Dimension 20, Bridget Jeffries from the Miscatonic University podcast, and two favorites from My First Dungeon, Abby Hepworth, and Shinnick to Sarah.
[SPEAKER_00]: that will all be premiering January 1st, but in the meantime, we wanted to give you a few presents and share some holiday cheer and what better present could there be than introducing you to your next favorite TTRPG podcast.
[SPEAKER_00]: One of the biggest things that we did this year at many-sided media was add a bunch of spectacular new shows to the many-sided network.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think that it is high time to forgive them a proper introduction.
[SPEAKER_00]: So over the course of the next week, we are going to be doing a little podcast advent calendar.
[SPEAKER_00]: and introduce you to a new show each day.
[SPEAKER_00]: To start, I wanted to share the single podcast episode that had the greatest effect on me this year.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that is an episode of DICE Exploder called After Image City of Winter.
[SPEAKER_00]: On each episode of DICE Exploder, Sam Dunawald and a rotating co-host take a single RPG mechanic and a breakdown is designed as deep as they can.
[SPEAKER_00]: They've done episodes on exploding dice mechanics, on powered by the apocalypse, on 10 candles, on question oracles, on zenithubilities from heart, so many different episodes, except sometimes, on special after-image episodes of the show, Sam instead writes long-form explanations of something that happened during play.
[SPEAKER_00]: In this particular episode, Sam tells the story of his city of winter campaign and how it echoed out into the rest of his life.
[SPEAKER_00]: It is an incredibly moving piece of audio that feels like a actual play report if done by NPR.
[SPEAKER_00]: So sit back and enjoy this episode of DICE Exploder titled After Image City of Winter.
[SPEAKER_02]: Dice exploding after image, number two, city of winter, and the braid.
[SPEAKER_02]: I have a box full of memories that lives in my closet.
[SPEAKER_02]: A pair of drumsticks, a half smoked cigar, an empty eltoids container wrapped up like a gift that never opened.
[SPEAKER_02]: a thimble full of sand from beach I've never been to.
[SPEAKER_02]: An ugly bucket hat.
[SPEAKER_02]: If I passed away and you were cleaning out my closet, you would look at this box, and you would know it was important, but you wouldn't know why.
[SPEAKER_02]: You wouldn't know who's funeral I played out with those drumsticks, or on which rooftop in my hometown I smoked that half a cigar.
[SPEAKER_02]: but you would feel their weight all the same.
[SPEAKER_02]: There is the unmistakable feeling of meaning, density around these objects, packed as they are in a small, the bulging cardboard box that struggles to contain them.
[SPEAKER_02]: You would speculate on them.
[SPEAKER_02]: You might be speculating even now, but especially so if and when you held them in your hands, feeling the texture of each one between your fingers, you would speculate, and at times, you would be right.
[SPEAKER_02]: And in that way, a part of how I see the world would live on through you.
[SPEAKER_02]: City of Winter comes in a box like this.
[SPEAKER_02]: Inside are a long and slender rulebook, oddly shaped, to fit inside the long and slender box.
[SPEAKER_02]: A small wicker bag, itchy to the touch.
[SPEAKER_02]: Five heavy coins, each laden with symbols.
[SPEAKER_02]: 224 cards, in nine decks and four colors.
[SPEAKER_02]: And of course, a five-foot-long hand-printed scroll with a map on it, like something out of a storybook.
[SPEAKER_02]: It almost feels like the fingerprints of whoever printed this scroll could be there if you looked hard enough.
[SPEAKER_02]: When I was with my friends and ready to play, we sat down and we opened for box.
[SPEAKER_02]: Ready to speculate on everything it held inside.
[SPEAKER_02]: Play in City of Winter is not complicated.
[SPEAKER_02]: You play as members of a family destined to become immigrants to the titular city of winter.
[SPEAKER_02]: Your character has just a name, a couple of relations, and a number of dots representing their age.
[SPEAKER_02]: You exist as a coin on the map, a spec in this world, much larger than yourself, and you carry in your hand a number of traditions, one for each dot of age, each a small play in card with that tradition's name.
[SPEAKER_02]: Perhaps, who eats first?
[SPEAKER_02]: Why we braid our hair?
[SPEAKER_02]: With a lion's roar.
[SPEAKER_02]: On your turn, you look at the location your family is in, then you encounter a tradition.
[SPEAKER_02]: Either you play one from your hand, describe how you share it with another character and pass the card to them, or you've witnessed a new tradition.
[SPEAKER_02]: You've described yourself in the world, and you ask another player to draw a new tradition card and incorporate it into the scene.
[SPEAKER_02]: My name was Harmony.
[SPEAKER_02]: Newly a proper adult, but unsure if I was really ready for the mantle.
[SPEAKER_02]: Born to the cloud-cited out at its people, I sometimes wondered if there'd been a mistake, or people were brave, loud, we were steadfast, and certain, but I was not certain.
[SPEAKER_02]: I would go to the Hall of Bones and look at the towering arches above me every inch inlayed with choice bone from some long past ancestor, and I would feel lost.
[SPEAKER_02]: I knew what it meant to save a person's 10th rib instead of their femur, but none of those bones felt like me.
[SPEAKER_02]: The echoes of monks singing hymns in the depths below only made things worse.
[SPEAKER_02]: One more thing I felt left out of.
[SPEAKER_02]: My father, glory, was a kind but distant man.
[SPEAKER_02]: He'd met my mother during the war, and then she passed, and he had little to say about any of it.
[SPEAKER_02]: He had little to say about anything at all.
[SPEAKER_02]: He felt safe, but beyond that, what life I had put together for myself, I had mostly constructed for myself.
[SPEAKER_02]: I was nearly 17, but I still went to school, still played in the yard with kids half my age, while felt more worthy than I did.
[SPEAKER_02]: We would play Lions Roar, a game where one child, the Lion, puts on a lion mask and chases after others until they're all caught.
[SPEAKER_02]: I was twice the size of these children, and still I was afraid of that lion coming towards me.
[SPEAKER_02]: The face of the mask just life like enough to invoke some buried prey instinct, but just false enough to be uncanny.
[SPEAKER_02]: It was only reads and cloth I told myself, but it wasn't.
[SPEAKER_02]: It was the lion, this beast, this mass of teeth, this unstoppable force right on my heels, that I dared not turn in face.
[SPEAKER_02]: I always let them catch me before the end, I didn't want to be last, to have to take up the mantle of lion myself in the next round, and put on its mask.
[SPEAKER_02]: But one day, I remember the day I lost track of myself, I was the last person standing, and the lion came to me.
[SPEAKER_02]: They put the mask in my hands, I felt the itchy fibers of its skin, the fingerprints left by whoever had woven it into being.
[SPEAKER_02]: And as I placed it upon my face, the world went dark for a moment, as my eyes tried to find the lion's eyes.
[SPEAKER_02]: And there, searching, I fell into a hole inside myself.
[SPEAKER_02]: I could hear my breathing, labored through the decoration of the main.
[SPEAKER_02]: The school yard giggle it around me, muffled through covered ears.
[SPEAKER_02]: down here is where the lion lived.
[SPEAKER_02]: That labored breathing, it's breathing.
[SPEAKER_02]: The darkness, it's darkness.
[SPEAKER_02]: I was in its den, I coward before it, but it did not move.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I could tell it was waiting, waiting for me.
[SPEAKER_02]: When I did move, it moved.
[SPEAKER_02]: When I breathed, it breathed.
[SPEAKER_02]: The lion was my reflection.
[SPEAKER_02]: It was a part of me.
[SPEAKER_02]: And when I opened my eyes to the schoolyard around me, I chased the absolute hell out of those kids.
[SPEAKER_02]: I was a most ferocious lion.
[SPEAKER_02]: And for once, I felt at home here with my friends.
[SPEAKER_02]: One reason I play roleplaying games is that, at their best, a whole scene like that, harmony and the Lions roar, will just pop into my head fully formed all at once.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's like a magic trick, or divination, like those of us around the table have worked some spell to open an invisible portal to another world as real as our own, and I'm looking in as clearly as I might look into a member.
[SPEAKER_02]: Like any good magic trick, this is built on excellent craftsmanship.
[SPEAKER_02]: Harmony and the Lions were our did not appear in my head up of nothing.
[SPEAKER_02]: The scene came from a dozen threats laid out by the game, the hand-printed drawing of the Cloud said a Dell on the game's role.
[SPEAKER_02]: The Lion theme of our people.
[SPEAKER_02]: The name Harmony, the coin I was using to represent her, and, of course, the tradition card itself, the lion's roar.
[SPEAKER_02]: A dozen details entwined with my own life, my own experiences, brought together by the physical token I held in my hand, all building to that moment when the portal opened in my mind, and I could see her standing there holding the mask, feeling its fibers in her hands.
[SPEAKER_02]: I could almost feel them too.
[SPEAKER_02]: It was not long after that when the unbrew began to grow.
[SPEAKER_02]: We kept it buried for centuries deep in the earth beneath the citadel.
[SPEAKER_02]: Our singers would playkate it with old hymns and the oily black tar of it would keep to the bottom of its ancient well, soothed into domesticity.
[SPEAKER_02]: We fell asleep to those songs as they echoed through the halls, almost bone shaking in their gravity.
[SPEAKER_02]: Until one day, the songs gave out.
[SPEAKER_02]: The Emperor started rising, with no regard for its partner longstanding agreement, it rose and it rose slowly over weeks and months.
[SPEAKER_02]: Until it threatened to fill our citadel to the brim.
[SPEAKER_02]: Some wanted to stay to fend our home, but there was no staying.
[SPEAKER_02]: We escaped by airship into the skies.
[SPEAKER_02]: I remember my father as he ushered me on to our ship.
[SPEAKER_02]: The very last one, it was crowded.
[SPEAKER_02]: And behind me, he pushed aboard some other child, Abel, the son of a distant friend or relation.
[SPEAKER_02]: Abel's mother had insisted on staying, and my father had rescued Abel, were taken his mother from him, was that his choice to make, and what kind of a man thought he was allowed to make it.
[SPEAKER_02]: We lived on skyships for a few years.
[SPEAKER_02]: There were people who had always done this, and I grew close to one in particular, a car, a rockist young man who wanted to see the whole world, not just his family's local sail and route, he wanted to be far from his home, at well our reasons were different, so did I. I saw him a way to find joy in the act of travel, I needed that.
[SPEAKER_02]: I went to my father, the only adult I trusted to know.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I asked him to show me how to braid my hair in the way that would show I wasn't love.
[SPEAKER_02]: We sat on his bed together, silent, but comfortable while he watched me through it.
[SPEAKER_02]: Abel took to a car too.
[SPEAKER_02]: A car showed him a little boat magic, a family secret, of the crow's nest of our ship, a way to hold your hands in the wind that would turn it into light.
[SPEAKER_02]: A way to summon a little Aurora between your fingers, like fireflies, dancing in your wake.
[SPEAKER_02]: Like you were driving down some Los Angeles highway with the windows down, bobbing your hand in and out of the wind behind the rearview mirror.
[SPEAKER_02]: Abel loved it.
[SPEAKER_02]: It was beautiful.
[SPEAKER_02]: Maybe in this beauty was a life we could settle into.
[SPEAKER_02]: Time passed.
[SPEAKER_02]: Harmony and her friends travel, searching for some new home.
[SPEAKER_02]: But on our heels, the Emperor always come in.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's in our real lives.
[SPEAKER_02]: Time passed just the same.
[SPEAKER_02]: We added a new player to our group.
[SPEAKER_02]: A new year turned over.
[SPEAKER_02]: Like grandfather, fell and broke his hip and left his home of 60 years for the last time.
[SPEAKER_02]: We settled for some years in a forest full of towers.
[SPEAKER_02]: My father settled down with a girlfriend.
[SPEAKER_02]: Able found work as a barkeep in a cook.
[SPEAKER_02]: A call and I had a child.
[SPEAKER_02]: And my grandfather, my father's father, became her man.
[SPEAKER_02]: My grandfather hated himself.
[SPEAKER_02]: He felt useless, no longer able to sing those old hymns to keep the Emperor at bay.
[SPEAKER_02]: He felt betrayed by his son, who he knew to be a war criminal.
[SPEAKER_02]: Repentant or not, he had fathered a man without honor, so he believed.
[SPEAKER_02]: And he saw the devil in Abel, by now his proxy grandson, who represented some change in the world he didn't understand and could not tolerate.
[SPEAKER_02]: He scared Abel.
[SPEAKER_02]: He hurt my father.
[SPEAKER_02]: I tried to get my father to talk to him, to resolve things between them while there was still time, but that wasn't my father's way.
[SPEAKER_02]: He let it be, he always let it be, always sat in the fog of the past and let me search for him.
[SPEAKER_02]: And then, suddenly, my father passed away.
[SPEAKER_02]: It wasn't traumatic, just gone in the night, likely the result of some old war wound.
[SPEAKER_02]: Gone along with all the traditions he still held that he hadn't found time to share.
[SPEAKER_02]: I looked at a card in my hand, how we prayed our hair.
[SPEAKER_02]: That was what I had left.
[SPEAKER_02]: I wanted more.
[SPEAKER_02]: Even as I knew that I didn't have space, even as I knew it would have meant discarding with a lion's roar and every other card that meant something to me.
[SPEAKER_02]: We mourned.
[SPEAKER_02]: We took our time.
[SPEAKER_02]: The game gave us plenty.
[SPEAKER_02]: Years, even.
[SPEAKER_02]: It was still a shock.
[SPEAKER_02]: Death is shocking.
[SPEAKER_02]: It broke my grandfather.
[SPEAKER_02]: Or maybe that was the return of the Emperor.
[SPEAKER_02]: It was me and Abel who found it down by the river, an infected corpse frozen in the ice, headed in torso rising out of the water like a mushroom ready to be plucked,
[SPEAKER_02]: When we told everyone what we'd found by grandfather blamed the locals, the people of this forest in its towers who had welcomed us into their home.
[SPEAKER_02]: He called them devils and some agreed with him.
[SPEAKER_02]: Abel knew he needed to say something, to stand up.
[SPEAKER_02]: But he was still so young, just coming into his own.
[SPEAKER_02]: So, I made him a lioness.
[SPEAKER_02]: I remind him of our childhood games of Lion's roar.
[SPEAKER_02]: I shared my tradition with him.
[SPEAKER_02]: I handed him its card, offered up that piece of myself, and in it, he found the same courage that I had found.
[SPEAKER_02]: It was hard for me.
[SPEAKER_02]: I had hung on to that card for years in fiction months in real life.
[SPEAKER_02]: It was meaningful not just a harmony, but to me, to Sam.
[SPEAKER_02]: Sometimes I needed to know I was still holding on to that courage.
[SPEAKER_02]: I needed to feel it, hold it close.
[SPEAKER_02]: But I knew someone else needed it too.
[SPEAKER_02]: I knew how much getting a card from my dad had meant to me.
[SPEAKER_02]: So Harmony shared it with Abel, and with her courage, he stood up to the old man, cast him out, marked him a trader, and my grandfather took those people who believed with him, walked into the snow, and was never seen from again.
[SPEAKER_02]: Just like my father, he took his traditions with him to the grave.
[SPEAKER_02]: But this time, I was happy to see them forgotten.
[SPEAKER_02]: The tradition of a lion's roar is a magic trick built on excellent craftsmanship, a dozen threads laid out by the game, but also a dozen threads from my real life.
[SPEAKER_02]: When I was three, I threw a tantrum, rage against my bedroom door as my parents held it shut.
[SPEAKER_02]: In high school, when I struck my teacher in the head with an army helpman,
[SPEAKER_02]: Later, when I sat, alone, realizing how afraid I was of that part of myself, that anger, and the promise I make to never get so angry again, it had taken my grandpa's 60 years to get his temper under control.
[SPEAKER_02]: It only took my dad 30.
[SPEAKER_02]: I was okay by the time I left for college, but I still feel it in me now, waiting for me to call on it.
[SPEAKER_02]: I missed a session.
[SPEAKER_02]: To go home and visit family, while my grandpa was moving into a long-term care facility, and my dad was figuring out how to feel about it.
[SPEAKER_02]: I stood at the kitchen island in my parents' home, as I listened to my dad talk on the phone, with someone at a hospital.
[SPEAKER_02]: I watched him brace himself against the counter as he spoke, hands pressed against the edge, deep in concentration.
[SPEAKER_02]: I looked down at my own hands, pressed against the edge of the counter, just the
[SPEAKER_02]: When I returned to City of Winter, my real-life friend, who had been playing my father, was now playing as my son.
[SPEAKER_02]: And the friend who had been playing my grandfather, took up my newly born daughter, and suddenly, I was the oldest member of this family.
[SPEAKER_02]: Once again, we left our home behind.
[SPEAKER_02]: This time finding our way to a wandering village built on the back of mechanical legs.
[SPEAKER_02]: We traveled with it for a while, big, loud, like nothing we'd seen since we'd left the Citadel.
[SPEAKER_02]: By the time I'd found us beds to sleep in here, my son, Mao, nearly 12 years old, had been inside half the walls of the village.
[SPEAKER_02]: He would climb through the machinery of this place like a monkey, making friends with traders and enemies of older kids, those jealous of his independence.
[SPEAKER_02]: I tried to keep Mao's safe, how I tried to get him just to come home for dinner, but he went where he wanted, and that was anywhere but home.
[SPEAKER_02]: His father didn't help.
[SPEAKER_02]: A call was out more often than not, up in the sky's traveling, ostensibly trading.
[SPEAKER_02]: Father and son both restless, neither interested in building a proper home, neither interested in learning about the Citadel, about who eats first, or how we break our hair.
[SPEAKER_02]: I wanted to be understood.
[SPEAKER_02]: I would have settled just for someone to carry on the traditions most meaningful to me, my own and my fathers.
[SPEAKER_02]: There would have been understanding enough in that.
[SPEAKER_02]: One day, Mao was in a fight.
[SPEAKER_02]: Not unusual.
[SPEAKER_02]: He was a scrappy kid, but always up against kids twice his age.
[SPEAKER_02]: It didn't go well for him.
[SPEAKER_02]: He was hurt.
[SPEAKER_02]: He was mad.
[SPEAKER_02]: He was scared.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I tried to comfort him.
[SPEAKER_02]: I tried to care for him to teach him something to say anything, but who cares what your stupid mom has to say.
[SPEAKER_02]: It was able, who took him out to the highest tower in the village, looking out over the
[SPEAKER_02]: with a lion's roar.
[SPEAKER_02]: Abel taught him how to take all those messy feelings and to face them, to feel them, to make peace with them, but just wearing a mask, to do the same just by imagining the feel of it on your face, even when the mask itself is far away.
[SPEAKER_02]: And now, for once, this,
[SPEAKER_02]: And in this way, my tradition had passed to him.
[SPEAKER_02]: He might not have ever been interested in me, but the tradition card most important to me had still made it to him, just with Abel in between.
[SPEAKER_02]: years later, or months for us in the real world, we made it at long last to the city of winter.
[SPEAKER_02]: We rolled up the traveling scroll, a map of all the lands outside the city, and we unfurled the city map, an enormous thing full of colors and transit lines and twice as many locations all in one place as we'd seen in total thus far.
[SPEAKER_02]: I was completely overwhelmed.
[SPEAKER_02]: Mau loved it immediately.
[SPEAKER_02]: We lived in all kinds of places those first few months.
[SPEAKER_02]: In Glowtown, at a boarding house, run by an owner of Slan Lady and her absent husband, then the Holy Well, a simpler place inside this staggering city, Mau moved out when he found work in under town, and my increasingly ex-husband spent all his time in the drift.
[SPEAKER_02]: I met Mao in Glotown to the Spring Festival, a celebration of when the Glow changes.
[SPEAKER_02]: We sat on the lip of the strip mine there.
[SPEAKER_02]: I brought a picnic blanket from home, and we've watched the colors of the glowing rocks below, as they shifted from their wintery greens and blues to the orange and pinks of summer.
[SPEAKER_02]: It was the first time I'd seen Mao in weeks.
[SPEAKER_02]: It was barely 16 and already he never came home anymore.
[SPEAKER_02]: He was growing up so fast,
[SPEAKER_02]: I wanted him to know why I was braiding my hair differently, that I changed it from a braid for a married woman, to that of someone single, but not looking.
[SPEAKER_02]: Still, I knew being too forward would just drive him away.
[SPEAKER_02]: I didn't know what to say, and laying there, watching the glow shift.
[SPEAKER_02]: I just braided his hair instead.
[SPEAKER_02]: And as I did, I passed his player the card, how we braid our hair.
[SPEAKER_02]: The same card he'd given to me, back when he was my father.
[SPEAKER_02]: The same card, but changed.
[SPEAKER_02]: My father taught me how we had braided our hair for hundreds of years.
[SPEAKER_02]: My son didn't keep his hair at all, just tolerated me playing with it, and but gradually accepted that he liked the result.
[SPEAKER_02]: The tradition had changed, but the card stayed the same.
[SPEAKER_02]: Later, we went to a holiday festival at the five temples.
[SPEAKER_02]: Great big markets, people bustling children running around a hodgepodge of faiths and cultures mixed together in different colors and flags blowing in the wind.
[SPEAKER_02]: We at Ice Cream, saw a puppet show, thank Bruce Silent for an interpretive dance.
[SPEAKER_02]: The dancer was from Rivertown, and in her way she told us the story of her life, a rival in this city after flight from the Umbra, and a home torn up by war.
[SPEAKER_02]: But able, a little drunk from the festivities, recognized something in the dance that I did not.
[SPEAKER_02]: Stories from my grandfather, about my father, about the people he'd killed during a war against this dancer's home.
[SPEAKER_02]: There was a portrait here of my father from another angle.
[SPEAKER_02]: A man I loved who'd done things I couldn't recognize, things I couldn't reconcile with the picture of him in my head.
[SPEAKER_02]: On the way home, I thought about the way his mouth was better off not knowing about everything I'd gone through, better off without all of my traditions.
[SPEAKER_02]: I remember I was a kid.
[SPEAKER_02]: We went up to visit my dad's sister in Duluth, Minnesota.
[SPEAKER_02]: My grandfather, my father, myself, and the rest of the family, spent the weekend making small talk and watching movies like we always did.
[SPEAKER_02]: At the end of the weekend, we went to a diner who sat down and we were chatting about rom-coms, what all of a sudden someone was crying, my dad was yelling at my grandfather
[SPEAKER_02]: Ten minutes later we were on the road on the hill overlooking Lake Superior as the fog rolled in and my dad was crying I'd never seen him cry before.
[SPEAKER_02]: I didn't understand what had happened
[SPEAKER_02]: Today, I have some idea.
[SPEAKER_02]: I better understand how my grandfather was and remains an asshole.
[SPEAKER_02]: I see how much my own struggles with anger, dismissiveness, or fighting against a nature I'd inherited from him.
[SPEAKER_02]: When he never cared to push back against himself.
[SPEAKER_02]: But I knew his childhood was a world away from mine.
[SPEAKER_02]: I have remember some story about he and his mother and his brother living in a cardboard box.
[SPEAKER_02]: pretty sure.
[SPEAKER_02]: I looked down at Lake Superior and the fog was just so beautiful.
[SPEAKER_02]: I couldn't help but say this might be a bad time for it but the lake is very beautiful.
[SPEAKER_02]: My crying parents informed me that it was in fact a bad time for it and home we drove in silence.
[SPEAKER_02]: My ex-husband passed, and then April, he was too young.
[SPEAKER_02]: We all are.
[SPEAKER_02]: Mal moved me to Spiral Alley, his new home, so he could keep an eye on me.
[SPEAKER_02]: It was homeier than the monastery had been living at.
[SPEAKER_02]: A friendlier neighborhood full of people I might even know from the citadel, from the towers in the forest.
[SPEAKER_02]: Still, I fought at every step of the way.
[SPEAKER_02]: I was so tired of moving.
[SPEAKER_02]: I had spent my whole life looking for one single place I could call home.
[SPEAKER_02]: A place I could sink into and love with my whole heart.
[SPEAKER_02]: A place that didn't feel at times like I was about to slip away into nothing.
[SPEAKER_02]: I did not navigate the city.
[SPEAKER_02]: I lived here for years, but never got uncomfortable.
[SPEAKER_02]: Never understood how the little tickets worked to get on the train.
[SPEAKER_02]: And so one night, I arrived at Nowsdore, and I asked him to see me up to the drift, the skydawks.
[SPEAKER_02]: The place where my husband had flown to so often while we were living outside the city.
[SPEAKER_02]: And the place he had spent so much of his time after we'd landed here.
[SPEAKER_02]: The place where he'd eventually remarried.
[SPEAKER_02]: And now, walked me to the top of the docks, to a sky-ship wreckage, buried into the side of a hill, crow's nest sticking up over the rest of the city, like it was reaching up to touch the sky.
[SPEAKER_02]: And up there, I remembered Abel, I remembered a call.
[SPEAKER_02]: I stuck out my hand, wakled my fingers through the air, like they had used to, trying to summon some spark of Aurora in the wind.
[SPEAKER_02]: None came, we sat there for hours, silent.
[SPEAKER_02]: I don't know what Mao made of it.
[SPEAKER_02]: I asked him, finally, did your father ever teach you how to do this, the thing with the lights in the sky between your fingers?
[SPEAKER_02]: He said, yeah, maybe one time, I don't really remember.
[SPEAKER_02]: I nodded, but I couldn't help it.
[SPEAKER_02]: I felt like I had missed out.
[SPEAKER_02]: There was magic in this world.
[SPEAKER_02]: There was a tradition card that had never passed through my hands.
[SPEAKER_02]: There was something that occurred and able new and understood, but now that they were gone and all I had to remember them was a hazy memory of dancing lights.
[SPEAKER_02]: I would never be able to touch for myself.
[SPEAKER_02]: I thought about with a lion's roar and the mask and the way the player behind now had discarded that card some turns ago.
[SPEAKER_02]: It was gone and harmony was so old and the game was almost over and we would never see that card again.
[SPEAKER_02]: mouth walked me home.
[SPEAKER_02]: I slept on his couch because sometimes you'd need to feel young.
[SPEAKER_02]: And in the morning, mouth put the kettle on, and I shuffled around, moving quickly to get out of his hair.
[SPEAKER_02]: And then, as he handed me my morning tea, he asked me, hey, what was it like back then when you left your home flying around with a car and able when you were my age?
[SPEAKER_02]: And I,
[SPEAKER_02]: I was overcome.
[SPEAKER_02]: For months of play, for decades, for harmonies whole life, this was all sheet and I had ever wanted.
[SPEAKER_02]: I described to Mausplayer how harmony broke down in tears.
[SPEAKER_02]: And even he is a player of startled, taken back.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's just been an idle curiosity for me.
[SPEAKER_02]: And now, had he done something to upset harmony?
[SPEAKER_02]: No, no, of course not, I said to him.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's just that all I've ever wanted is for you to be curious about me, to share myself with you, and for you to learn from me and flourish.
[SPEAKER_02]: He understood, he listened, he stayed.
[SPEAKER_02]: Later, his player would describe the wave of emotion he was hit with.
[SPEAKER_02]: I thought about my dad.
[SPEAKER_02]: I thought about a lyric from some Lord song.
[SPEAKER_02]: Spend as much time as you can with the people who raised you.
[SPEAKER_02]: She sings softly and with regret.
[SPEAKER_02]: And so we spent the whole day in Mao's apartment, harmony just telling stories.
[SPEAKER_02]: When Mao's boyfriend came calling to drag Mao out for some fun, Mao quietly told him that he, he had a van, and was busy.
[SPEAKER_02]: He shut the door and off the boyfriend went.
[SPEAKER_02]: We made masks together, lion masks.
[SPEAKER_02]: The card for with a lion's roar may have been gone out of my hands, but I still have the tradition to share,
[SPEAKER_02]: It was a moment built from a dozen threads laid out in advance, the hand printed drawing of the city of winter, the name, Mao, the month of play building up to this, and of course the long-gone tradition card itself, a dozen details, entwined with my own life at experience, my feelings about my nieces and nephews, about my grandfather, recovering out from a second hip surgery, and by other Grandfather, who I'd never known.
[SPEAKER_02]: all building to that moment when a portal opened to our minds around this table, above this hand-printed map, and I could see harmony there with her son weaving a mask, feeling its fibers in her hands.
[SPEAKER_02]: A little magic between her fingers.
[SPEAKER_02]: It was a magic trick built on excellent craftsmanship, not drawn from the ether but from people, Ross Kalman, the games designer, from Doug Keith, the illustrator, from the unknown hands and fingerprints with a person who had printed these scrolls, from what they had offered us with their game, and what we had taken from it, and made our own.
[SPEAKER_02]: And now, from me, to you,
[SPEAKER_02]: I still haven't told you about Harmony's daughter, and the place I hope she gets to perform it.
[SPEAKER_02]: I haven't told you about the man able killed in a duel, where the delicious ash cakes he perfected before he passed, on the opening night of his restaurant.
[SPEAKER_02]: How I'd rewritten the Citadel's old hymns, turned them into traveling songs, and then arrived at the city of winter to find our countrymen, who'd gotten here before us, had already made some versions of their own.
[SPEAKER_02]: There isn't time for all of that.
[SPEAKER_02]: There is never enough time, and my memory is already going.
[SPEAKER_02]: There are things that I have told you today that I am half guessing at, half remembering.
[SPEAKER_02]: Hoping are true, as I try to hold onto them, press them into your ears, hoping that you will learn from them, for remember all this, and flourish.
[SPEAKER_02]: Just as I try to press all those memories into a small card, labeled with a lion's roar.
[SPEAKER_02]: I take that card from its home in the box that holds city of winter and I place it in the cardboard box that lives in my closet.
[SPEAKER_02]: This was Dysik's Flutter after image number two.
[SPEAKER_02]: But we could go, I privately released it on the Dixx Flutter Patreon.
[SPEAKER_02]: Four days later, in this past Saturday, I got a call from my dad.
[SPEAKER_02]: He let me know that my grandpa, his dad, had died.
[SPEAKER_02]: It sounded on the phone like my dad was taking it pretty well.
[SPEAKER_02]: It was, as always, nice to hear his voice.