On the other hand, I have been busy. I assembled a bunch of short stories to self-publish, (not conventionally saleable since they’re about gamerly things so I figured, what the hell) ran some excellent 100 Millionth Day AD&D sessions and caught up on a number of creative projects. A new supplement for Aeternal Legends is edited and nearly ready for layout, and I’ve been continuing to work on (the admittedly delayed) Knights of the Hidden Sun.

Anyway, I feel like writing now, so here we are! I’d like to tackle the question of creative leadership in tabletop RPGs because I think it’s a major factor in the bad stuff. I’ll do more Toy Dogma, write about more about the 100 Millionth Day game, (I’m three sessions behind and after a recent, awesome combat scene, the players want me to set it down) throw up more short fiction, and maybe talk a bit more about media. We’ll see.

Depends on if I feel like it.

“Going into space with Shatner’s face.”

“Bullshit. No, wait – you’re going to get a mask made?” Barry checked the edges of his own: a latex Charlton Heston/Brad Pitt fusion thing.

“I mean his actual face. During the Panic some nerds froze him so he wouldn’t cross over, and it just so happens the current owners are just as nerdy. Greedy, though. It’ll blow my savings to get it but what the hell, eh? I’ll be gone for two years anyway.”

“Doesn’t that mean you could, uh . . .?”

“Be Shatner? Nah, some rich asshole in Oakland has dibs on his brain. I’ll make do with my own cheesy impressions.”

“Chang’s not going to like it. It’ll make the whole mission look like a joke.”

“Are you kidding? Don’t you want to see Captain Kirk on Mars?”

The party ran long. Most of them do now that we’ve lost the knack for sleep, but fumble through old breather schedules. I said goodbye to Barry and went home on foot, but even though I stuck to the alleys they spotted me. Shamblers. They weren’t violent, just persistent.

“Brains.”

It’s not their fault. There just aren’t enough brains to go around. When the Panic hit, some of us were better, luckier predators. Jordan Jacek (God knows I changed that after the revolution – I don’t remember being that person anyway) got bit, didn’t get eaten, and managed to scarf down enough brains to graduate from shamblerhood. Swallow the brains, swallow the person. Their little fragments knock together, give us rough identities.

My frags still argue.

Back in the day, Shambler Jordan ate a really smart physicist. Now I’m so valuable they’ve scheduled me for a Neuro-Plastic Learning session the day after tomorrow.

“Brains.”

Lewontin was the tech that day. He’s thorough; we had to watch interviews with the breathers. I know pure NPL doesn’t always pass everything along but I still hated seeing them talk, push their lungs, blink. After that I couldn’t dig in without thinking about the literal act. Frags scream in your head. They used to breathe.

At least I got a better idea of how important this mission is. Two of those breathers were farm-grown twentysomething savants but one was an old, bona fide pre-Panic astronaut. If they were willing to lose her they must really want us on Mars.

In case you’re wondering, the actual NPL session tells you nothing about the source’s age, sex or anything else. They’re just slices of grey hard boiled egg stuff in what looks like a bowl of borscht. Chew, chew.

I wanted some kind of silver cryonic capsule, with Shatner’s face reverently spread over an artificial scaffold. I got a dirty beer cooler. I drove that thing right to the shop.

The body guys and I designed the procedure to turn me from your typical urban demi-rotter into a virile, judo-chopping, gold-shirted Shatner. Shatner Prime. It didn’t cost as much as you’d think. The space program paid for silicone plastination, but left the aesthetics up to me.

Two hours in, the formaldehyde/heat regimen had left my skin a wrinkled mess. They expected that. I still had some rot from the early days. They flayed me to muscle and bare fat from the neck down, except for my feet and hands. My frags twitched. I thought I felt pain, but once I concentrated on my still heart I felt like a fool. It went away.

I went for painted latex replacement skin, fake nipples and all. But that had to wait until after plastination, when they’d cement and seal it over everything. They cut off my breasts and started rearranging the fat to create a more Shatneresque waist (thicker, but not too thick!) and shoulders. They even built up the triceps, staring at photo references and playing around.

“It’s just for mapping,” said Clevon. He was the plas artist. “The process replaces your fat with selected polymers. Vacuum sucks out all the moisture. You’ll be left with the lipid cell structure, but we can make it as firm as your real muscles.”

They spent the most time on the face, bringing a youthful poise to its flesh. A living Shatner never would have survived the procedure.

“Do you want to attach it now, or after plastination? Afterward is safer.”

“Now.”

I felt ten points of penetration as the staples went in.

They showed me a mirror. It was a young actor’s death mask.

Then vacuum, like the journey to Mars. We don’t need air or pressure, just something to fill our empty spaces along the way.

• This coming week I’ll be interviewed for the Darker Days Podcast. You can ask me questions at this link. The podcast should be posted shortly after – I’ll let you know when that happens.
• I drop by Chuck Wendig’s Terrible Minds pretty regularly. It’s a miscellany that covers fiction, games, pop culture and whatever else Chuck wants to talk about.
• Also, give Eddy Webb’s Whitechapel Project a go. The Project is episodic weird fiction in podcast and blog formats. I tend to check it out in binges.
• David A. Hill’s Machine Age Productions is currently full of development notes for his Terminus Est RPG project. It uses a d4 as its basic resolution die, which is a brave choice out of the gate.

Now there are tons of other great things out there – enough that I should really work out formatting quirks with my blog to get a proper blogroll in (I’ve tried, but the theme acts odd.) This is just the stuff I wanted to talk about this week.  There’s Jess Hartley and Jet Pack and Shadowstories and more: a real wave of creativity coming from a community that I kinda sorta know. I say this to accurately describe my relationship with these folks, not to be clever. I don’t have much more than a “fellow freelancer” tie to them, but I do like their efforts a lot.

Markus twitched and shifted so Jude’s partner (T-something or other – some fake-ass Midwest gangster handle) tightened his full nelson up, but that was a misunderstanding. It wasn’t the hit. Markus just hated it when his cock scratched right up against the denim like that. He grunted and wiggled his hips.

“Say again?” Jude smiled and bunched a fist again; the stomach punch hit like a mallet on a taut drum. The force bounced down to Markus’ perineum and up sweetly to his crown, bursting into the outline of a flower on his skull. “Where’s my product?”

The hot flower in his mind bloomed and Kira was with him, crowned as well, tipping a skull of wine down his throat while she straddled him.

“Well I tried your shit, J,” said Markus, giggling in the rush, “But it was so pure. My heart stopped. That’s what happened to those kids, right? You barely cut it. Heh. I flushed the rest.”

“A very, very wrong answer. I’m gonna feed your fuckin’ heart to my dogs.” Out came the cleaver. “You’re one ignorant bitch, son, ‘cause yours won’t be the first one they ate.”

“Not big,” said Markus, then he barked out laughter. He was drowning in the wine now and her tusks cut his cheek.

“What the fuck are you talking about?” Jude slapped the flat of the cleaver against his palm.

“You play big, think the people you fuck up carry an indelible mark, like you own them, right? But they’ll get better. You’re little.”

“So? You’re dead.”

“Yes? Yes.” Markus didn’t struggle with the man holding him but dislocated both shoulders around the other way. He popped the wet bone knives and entered the Goddess in his memory and death, death death stained the sweet air of one long, orgasmic exhalation.