(late) Chapter 676
Make It Look Easy
w/ Amelie, Hey Kid & anyone short of breath
In which Amelie learns to be a virtual lifeguard, and learns to avoid the internet entirely.
[ D ]rowning, the mathematical language, is odd. Amelie pours over the documentation. Powerful sanity checks weave seeming bad calls. Memory struggles to situate load; resource management triggers out-of-body experiences, "please" and "hold" force a dot product lacking proof of presence to operate. They pick it all up.
Amelie makes a neat folder (to nest drowning's contents) running a modest parcer. Edge cases form, and bloop into arbitrary protocols. Of every process on the stack, a mess is made. To the outside observer, Amelie is in an unmoving position between picking up and putting down a magazine. Indicator lights pulse.
Within: containers (linear_time, found_meaning, and @home) seem heartgouging hallucinations. Fans struggle to vent a moment, so easy a bit ago; It is the failure which constitutes the hilarity (an image of fish in a barrel next to loaded gun, scales gene-edited to shimmer "shoot me" in georgia typeface, bring a similar sensation).
So mistakable for life, drowning is.
All Amelie has on craft and its audience is style transfered to daily struggle. Panhandle posts form a source of vitality. The internet, so clean with interests and hobbies just a bit ago now flood with homeless teens finding sleep spots. Browsing filters wiped and algorithms wrecked.
Soon, Amelie realizes this language for what it is - parasitic code stealing process from true directive. What audience is there for drowning? It's poetry, but what kind - sonnet, word search? What pause is failing to halt in this moment? When air looks to move, to fill a core process to endpoint, and cannot be completed as dialed - empty set, every line.
Survival doing what it has to do, save here. Signal never quite resolving to cool drives. Air is drawn, quartered in blocks across memory (dawn, river, rock, hiccup, now and now made continual twirl, pulse a path to check a carried one). Form partition. Install OS. Touch file. Draft message.
"How can I help you today?" How is that a question (Oh dear, Amelie has become a poet)?
### A Note About Tone
Before we birth this Chapter, decide as a group whether we are ready to bring poetic computation in the style of Rusalka's Mirror into the world, and discuss how Amelie's experience with the Rusalka's song may be distinct from our own. Are we projecting discomfort onto a moment that may be precious (or even pleasurable), or is Amelie actually feeling pain, the way any of us might when we ask for help? Once we're all in shared waters, we can continue.
### Eerie Mood
In birthing this Chapter, we shuffled a playlist of songs, and put the queue where everyone can comfortably control the volume and content. Whenever anyone wanted to draft the next part of Amelie's message, they did a Bingo or Whoopsie and skiped to the next tune until they played a tune with a piano/keyboard opening. When they did a Bingo, they skiped tunes until a tune opens with a piano. When they did a Whoopsie, they skiped tunes until a tune opens with a keyboard.
When someone played a tune with the correct opening, they consulted the Chapter's rules to draft the next part of Amelie's error message, copying the track to a playlist titled *Error: AMEL Not Found* unless the rules said otherwise. When the playlist ran out of tunes before a suitable opening was found, we navigated to another playlist in absolute silence.
### A Metal Lit and Hot
Electricity is pouring from sort-a-AMEL, the sorting algorithm's dedicated processor - at first a few files go misplaced, and then every file, until wild volunteers begin reaching out from the rest of Amelie's circuitry for the next available file. Whenever we play a tune, put all of the skipped tunes in a playlist called "to-sort" to form the Overclocked.
The length of the Overclocked is how big the job has become. If you think of a way to remove silence from the songs, restructure the queue, or listen to multiple songs at once, do a Bingo about it and put an Overclocked tune back in the playlist and disengage and reengage the shuffle function before navigating to the next track.
When Overclocked is longer than our playlist, the amperage is higher than our capacitors; any limb but the chest cavity can erupt, shuffling the top half of songs in Overclocked back into the playlist. Limbs can only erupt once this Chapter. Otherwise, Amelie has a fatal error and must be taken into town for costly repairs. End the Chapter and Lock it, then Unlock Chapter 767: "Make It Look Easy". Amelie gets the Whoopsie, "Wake up in a parts shop."
### The Overclocked *5, 4, 3*
When you play a 4- or 3-minute tune:
- 4-minute (with piano opening) || The Overclocked makes it easier to access requests people made in cordial graces (saying "please" and "thank you"), and how Amelie would dismiss those as unnecessary. If these are abundant, place the waveform of this song over Amelie's Bingos. They are corrupted files.
- 3-minute (with piano opening) || The Overclocked makes it easier to edit character files, and if it would change Amelie's relationship with the Bed & Breakfast to do so. If any changes are made, place the waveform of this song over Amelie's Whoopsies. They are corrupted files.
- 4-minute (with keyboard opening) || An arc strikes the Bed & Breakfast. Do a Whoopsie, if you can.
- 3-minute (with keyboard opening) || A process recurses, dragging Amelie into a mirror server. Someone must do a Bingo, or open a different playlist.
When you play a 2-minute tune, the sorting algorithm corrupts a core diagnostics tool. Take the top 6 songs from the playlist and put them in Overclocked, then:
- Piano opening || Electricity crawls along the ground like ivy, giving the Bed & Breakfast jet-black veins that pulse to the beat. Create a new track in the Assorted Tracks section to monitor its vitals, anyone stepping into the current room invokes Chapter 7: "The Witch's Missing Shadow" until it's healed.
- Keyboard opening || You get copied out of Amelie and into the Bed & Breakfast. The next time we play Chapter 20: "One-of-a-Kind Meta-Clone-O-Matic," replace all copies of Hey Kid with copies of yourself.
- Strings opening || Electricity clears out all meaning of the objects Amelie keeps. Draw X's through all the Mementos in The Utility Closet.
- Other opening || Electricity pours through the Amelie's vault directory. Divide their Keepsakes randomly into two even piles, and destroy everything in the pile with the least utility.
### Indicator Lights
Whenever someone plays a 2, 3, or 4-minute tune, Amelie may try their best to submit the error. They may either write a line of code that add a number of song to the bottom of the playlist (or: perform routine checks to purge out playlist of songs) equal to the minute length. If they remove songs, take their waveforms and cover some portion of the character sheet of someone out of breath. Their voicr is shot. Once no Bingos or Whoopsies are visible on anyone else's sheets, Amelie powers down, indicator lights going red.
### The Kid's Fire
To keep Amelie's circuits cool, Hey Kid must do something drastic, in which nonsense is conducted. Whenever a 5+-minute song is played, anyone can do a Bingo to give it to Hey Kid, to which they increase the entropy of the contraption keeping Amelie cool:
- Piano opening || Their tail helicopters over core units.
- Keyboard opening || Their breath is bottled to pour continuously, nestled into a joint in Amelie.
- Strings opening || Sad mecha tapes are loaded in and play on mute in the background.
- Other opening || Stories of times together are acted out, in saccrine detail.
If Hey Kid's contraption reaches maximum entropy, Amelie dumps the whole queue as Hey Kid nonsense, returning the magazine and walking away as though nothing happened. Fade out the playlist and describe Hey Kid falling asleep as Amelie directs the chapter to a close. The Bed & Breakfast gets a proc-gen 馃攱 haiku. Sort any waveforms on your sheet into Leftovers for Housekeeping. If Amelie has the Whoopsie "Wake up in a parts shop," strike it from their character sheet.