"—All a bad dream my dear, a bad dream, it's all a—"Bad dream, the end of the gilded age; they've told you time and time again, to look for a successor, and you've been slacking on the job, as you do; dreaming, longing, golden locks on your face, sunlight on your heart, the pitter patter of some velvet passerines on the ground, or the roof of a shack maybe, or perhaps tropical birds, yes, oh yes, little parrotlets above chittering somewhere—someplace—else, anywhere but here, dear god in heaven, ahimè-The tinny dolcetto from the radio ends with a swell of static, you hear hollering in the distance; there's clapping somewhere in the building: the longest running interactive radio serial has wrapped up. Fifteen consecutive years of write-in ballots, endless scurrying to and from the mail room, making sense of sloppy, illegible handwriting; drunken notes, even drunker nights, threats of many forms, sizes, objects, many a disgruntled wackjob barging into the offices, "Lady Marny would never! she would never!" and how you'd have to arm yourself and the other bastards in the bureau; one feller holding an umbrella, another a broom, "put his head in this 'ere bucket," a troupe of clownish hoplites, holding the line praying the cuckoo wagons would get there fast enough, or lest you'd have to explain to the higher ups as to why you dared bother the Saints, the Moneymakers in the writers' room. "Every second they have to spend away from the typewriter," Donamara used to say, "comes out of your chow money, understand?"You'd rather have some nutso rain blows upon you than try and come up with an explanation, as to why He (or she? you've never stepped foot in there, how can you know?) had to look up and be plugged right out of the realms beyond; justify yourself to God on the 6th day, as to why you had to interrupt all the sculpting and life-breathing, and run the risk of leaving Man himself, half-made, half-formed, unfinished, ruined, the spark all gone and the leering from the little pockets of darkness, from rival presses, trying to come up on your turf.That's exactly what you're going to do right now, in this very moment; and although you have been slacking it's been for a very good reason, you're left to condense seven eons of divine creation, in little over three hours.Your job's (theoretically) simple; you're in charge of the drafts, the other stories that get shunted to the lower, cheaper frequencies, the ones that net around five to ten bozos writing in, the snobs that think they're above "Gilded Patina," it's just noise in the airwaves, but the higher ups like that; the less frequencies DDV and C&D and Q&T have access to the better. You've pitched some stories, some have been picked up, others—that is to say, the great majority—are cast out into the outer darkness, never to be seen or read again; you'd be called a "tastemaker" in other, more couth professions, but to the animals here you're "Bell-boy." >cntd.
And thus, you must present a worthy successor, to the most successful interactive radio serial in history, or so help me God-1) your PERSONAL STASH of rejects, dejects, projects and abjects is DOWN IN THE MAIL ROOM, a small but considerable collection of IDEAS that have piqued your interest, made your face contort in all sorts of shapes, and made you sigh the sighs of an overworked, equatorial donkey.2) NEXT to the MAIL ROOM is the STORAGE ROOM, wherein the shelved, abandoned, and shafted reside in eternal uneasy sleep, ideas not fit for production, or cut down in their prime, be it for budget or popularity reasons, or were simply snuff'd out by lack of oxygen, from the bright, risen flame of the Millennium's Most Marvellous Story; you can ask Bolliere for the key and maybe perhaps some assistance in your mythical(ly doomed) task.3) ALTERNATIVELY, you can just sit here, and finish the nap, maybe you catch an errand thought, a real winner for a story, maybe... perhaps... mmm... oh divine blue... slow waves...It's cold out, real cold; infernal shivers out in the bare wind, in the mudpuddles and spitbuckets, rooming with hoboes and other such creatures; forgotten by time and the presshouses and radiohouses and coffeehouses, shining shoes or bellboying for another radiohouse or a rundown motel for one quarter of your proper pay; could earn an extra shilling or two if you mention your vague involvement in the Belle Époque arc, or how you came up with the character of Mister Dundley—used thrice then swiftly replaced and forgotten—but for that to work they'd have to have listened in... voted perhaps... maybe the logistics will work out when you get there, or maybe you'll find the next monolithic culture-shaper, somewhere in a pile, or stashed away; mushed and crumpled under dusty prose and radioplays with no actors to interpret them anymore.
>>64768633) ALTERNATIVELY, you can just sit here, and finish the nap, maybe you catch an errand thought, a real winner for a story, maybe... perhaps... mmm... oh divine blue... slow waves...When in doubt, sleep on it.
>>6476899One can't delay the inevitable—as it is often said—surrendering oneself to orphic waves for example, is inevitable, as is the upcoming judgement; 'Top the award winning epic?' absurd; better to lay down and accept the thud at the end of the fall; they say those last ten feet, you don't even feel a thing, it's like drifting back to sleep... oh yes sleep... Oh serene noise, caustics dance in the opal blue... she's in there somewhere, just have to concentrate. That'd make for a better story, you and her, somewhere beyond the pale and the blue and the electromagnetic, forever...Forever! was all you could make out that day from the muted pandemonium inside the Holy Place of Writing; your higher ups had barged in, glum looking and distressed, bunch of other faceless pitbosses behind them, scowls and frowns and pouts, a mean looking tercio just ordered to storm a trench; and that's all you could hear, something about It Lasting Forever, you surmised It stood for the golden darling of the airwaves, what else could it be? That and the paycheck, you continued to assume. You had overheard many a times, discussions about extending this one final arc, maybe, another sub-arc? a flashback there at the very end? use a write-in as a supplementary story; you remember one time this guy, Valerio came up with a plan: faking a fire, and broadcasting the final death throes of the radio actors, end it all on a high note, forever immortalized at their peak, a period of national, or maybe even Imperial mourning, all over the territories, snatching the crown, forever, and ever; and then all hell broke loose, not at the crassness and utter insanity of the scenario, there was no conscientious objection or moral outcry, but a general consensus of the floor, who was in almost unanimous agreement at this suggestion. You didn't see the radio actors in the mess hall that day, or the day after, or the day after that, it wasn't until a week and a half later where you'd see that sorry ensemble, trembling like dogs.Shit, you can't do this, not like this at least; they'll find a clause in your contract and send you somewhere arid and scorching, to break rocks in perpetuity, feed you to the dogs and then feed those dogs to even bigger dogs, you have to put up a semblance of a fight, at least that way you'll be able to dream, splayed out on the sideway, lulled by spirits, root spirits, grain spirits, all sorts of spirits...1)2)Maybe someone else in here can help, but who?
>>6476948>You slept wrong - try again, like a thief in the night, to steal ideas from the shores of dreaming. Keep a dream journal, hell, have some of the staff in on it - turn this dream burglary into an idea heist!
>>6477524Just a fluke... perhaps a bit of proper stillness will do the trick; legs splayed, arms at rest, breathe in—hold—and out; a cushion of sorts for your neck would be ideal, but in such dire situations you have no other resort but to adjust to the austere and the stiff and the maple slab cradling you whole.Shit... the stream is broken; whatever dreamland She was in is no longer in your reach, that door's shut for the time being, but the peace is welcomed; it's probably the last bit of proper rest you'll get before they kick you to the curb.Flashes of phosphenes lead your mind down to the superficial layer, that tightrope between wakefulness and deep slumber; it's where all the signals converge, all the noise and frequencies, mixing together, unable to be tuned and cataloged; those knobs and dials no longer in your reach, you'll have to do the decoding yourself, another chore on top of it all, great.Your first memories of that dreaded devil-box lay somewhere in here; golden rays from the window, You on your father's lap, or maybe your mother's? you can't quite recall; trying to make sense of the little grooves and numbers on the device, the infernal screeching giving way to fragments, strings and brass below a thick foggy layer of noise, rancorous laughter, a small audible keyhole towards this weird, unknown world, a party perhaps? a world of parties, of endless parties and fun, of fear and loathing, of risks and rewards. You can't really recall what the first audioadventure that you heard was, it was something about, a talking cat? or was it a bunny? oh yes it was! and you had to guide her throughout this, industrial maze, of white tiles and all sorts of contraptions, the rest has been lost to the vast entropic sea of faded, half-remembered moment, but you remember that day, with a bit of glee, snatching some paper from the study, readying your small, fragile hands to draw long, winding strokes and traces, way longer than anything you had been taught at school up'til that moment, getting ink all over your fingertips, and begging your maid to please, oh please mail this to the Glenford Glens on Tegeach Street, oh please?Oh those years, before the Golden Witch took the airwaves hostage for fifteen goddamn years, there was a bit more freedom in the radiostudios; independent, ragtag copywriters out of formal employment, pooling together copper wire and batteries to power their own broadbands, with no other incentive beyond not letting their hypos get to them, a bit healthier than spending it all on card games and drink. A small yet colorful garden, of all sorts of weeds, sprouts, shrubs and chaparrals, all razed over and replaced with those, unbearable, white lilies and carnations.There's a bit more in there, in that wave, but the signal's a bit dim now, interference coming in from the outside, the distant din's getting closer, oh lord, what else now...
> Oh lost thermidor days... keep following that wave, maybe we have to return to the basics, the founders, the trailblazers, the wild and the free.>That won't do, we need something fresh, something revolutionary, something to break new ground, nostalgia won't do.
>>6477642>That won't do, we need something fresh, something revolutionary, something to break new ground, nostalgia won't do.A quest quest? Interesting...
>>6478681"The only way is forward," phrase you've heard many times, from the exaggerated lieutenants with stiff upper lips commanding troops in the fiercest of simulated audio-battles, to the saccharine falsettos of the "youth adventures." Oh what dreck, couldn't even find proper actors to act out the roles, so you'd have the unmistakable gangster tenor of Malbolgo the Etruscan trying to sound twenty years younger on the microphone; you remember one time, you stumbled 'pon a station that tried modulating the timbre and pitch—you do not remember how exactly, but you theorize that they had probably meddled with some circuitry in the recording booth—and the end result was anything short of utterly ghastly, one could not focus on the bog-standard coming-of-age plot when the Voices of the Damned boomed and swirled 'round in the background and forefront, you assume that sort of thing would make a laudanum imbiber sit and stay straight for centuries. You surely were scared straight that time.Oh... what else is in here....hmm that day, with the Voices of the Damned, as you tried modulating and messing around with the knobs on your devilbox (thinking in your complete disbelief, that the hellish cacophony had to be a spontaneous defect of your little mahogany box), you sat and listened for a while at this other tale, pretty anemic in plot, something to do with the dread pirate Blauveldt and his booty, but the quest directors in their utter brilliance, had painted quite a vivid picture; the whole plot of the radioadventure was not only being broadcasted but acted out LIVE, by performers out in the street! the very same radio actors served double duty as both street-actors and voice-actors. Leaving a skeleton crew behind at the station, delivering the actions and the voting options via dry narratorial voices, who demanded the listeners to go venture forth! and gather somewhere near the coppiced woodland and the gravel park to witness the eternal drama between the corsairs and the dread-pirate engaging in all manner of sword fights (tin, faux-rapiers, some suspect stolen from the local theater) and cannon fights (repurposed trashbins set ablaze, the source of the gunpowder, as far as you're aware has never been determined, so you assume it was all home-made), of course this sort of debauchery drew the ire of the local authorities, so the whole adventure also became a massive game of cops and robbers (or rather, pirates) chasing each other as the actors improvised plotbeats on the fly, with a rapier in one hand and half a handcuff on the other.
The third and most peculiar aspect of this all though, was the treasure hunt, which was the central draw of this whole circus: pieces, of code, torn map bits, scattered about, hidden inside glass bottles, cached away in such esoteric places that seaching for them all alone was simply not plausible, you needed a small hunting party, plugged in daily and nightly, pouring over the details from the radio narration, the way the dread-pirate danced and pirouetted towards a specific direction during that one battle, occult arithmetic applied and divided and multiplied to interconnected clues, and maybe, just maybe, you could find a beaten, scratched up emerald, with a small slip of artificially yellowed paper in it, with the next session's plot all written out, and a small, little cypher at the bottom of the whole thing, could be relevant this next session, or the one after that. You tuned in like, three times to that program, and saw a session from afar one time on your way to the Academy, and then no more; you have no idea how that whole business ended, or where the actors are today, you stopped tuning into random frequencies after you got the job, your life revolved around proofreading and spitballing, copying, writing, writing and copying, day in and day out... for fifteen years...Could that work? a mish-mash of it all? get one of those new radios with interchangeable bits and circuits, modulate frequencies, raise the dead, send the listener to theater plays and egg hunts and impromptu riots on the street? You're not sure if the budget would allow for all of that, specially that radio, that sort of equipment is lab-worthy, and unless you managed to convince the treasurers and utterly impress the Writers, you'll have to make do with the cheapest and the fastest and the most viablePromising still...>Is that all? you surely have to remember more from that era... pirates and cacophonies, you absolute dunce, we're surely out of a job now, dream harder!>Nothing but entropy beyond this point, but maybe the archives have that adventure filed away somewhere, maybe the poor bastards pitched it to the Company in a moment of weakness, you know that sort loathes "selling out," but everyone compromises, eventually...Enough dreams! to your stash you go! you shall sink with the ship, you shall present your little collection of shilling-dreadfuls to your superiors and face the firing squad head on
>>6476862wrong tripcode, apologies
>>6478811>Is that all? you surely have to remember more from that era... pirates and cacophonies, you absolute dunce, we're surely out of a job now, dream harder!
