The Future of the Sense of the Sleight-of-Hand Man

[dorchadas]

I've been going to a lot of theatre lately.

On Friday, lisekatevans invited me to see Prometheus Bound, the show she's performing in, but I had to tell her that I had already bought tickets to another show, so after going home and devouring my curry leftovers, I walked out and took the bus down to Wicker Park to see Future Echoes.

It was...hmm. Spoilers from here.


The first half of the play was excellent, with a group of friends uniting for a dinner party and reminiscing about old times, though with some tensions evident between them. Strange things start happening, though--ghosts that only some of them can see, that look like them with fatal wounds. The sightings increase until all of them can see the phantoms, and then a late member of the party arrives. He doesn't believe any talk of ghosts and doesn't understand why people are so nervous, and the act break starts with a gunshot.

I was especially fond of the one ghost who started spelling out H-E-L in blood on the wall and they thought she was asking for help, but then she finishes it H-E-L-L and vanishes. Like the bit in Event Horizon where LIBERATE ME becomes LIBERATE TUTEMET EX INFERNIS.

Unfortunately, I didn't like the second act nearly as much as the first. Act One was seriously creepy, with the ghosts and the low rumble during spooky moments, and while Act Two was also creepy, it was in an entirely different way.

To cut the explanations short, there was an experiment. I knew where the mentions in act one of the lab and research were going, since I've played Half-Life and read "The Mist," so when science and time travel came into the plot I wasn't surprised. It went wrong and froze time for everyone except Eamon, the person who was late to the party. And then the plot turned into creepy stalker territory, which is also horrifying but in a different way. Eamon is obsessed with Allie and uses frozen time as a way for them to finally be together in a world were they can do whatever they want, and Allie wants no part of it.

I've had people obsessed with me for months or years after the end of a relationship, but I never felt like I was in danger. I've also been the person who ruminated on the end of a relationship and what I could have done differently, but not to the point of breaking the new boundaries established. So I understand the horror here, the horror of taking things much too far, of seeing something in an interaction that the other party never intended and acting based on that. Of trying to control someone else's life based on what you think would be best for them when it's really only what you want. But it does feel a little like a bait and switch, a change of focus that I found much less creepy. It's a problem with a lot of horror, that after the revelation, the real reason is more mundane that what you imagined it would be.

Also, the explanation for stopped time and time travel doesn't leave any room for the ghosts that kept appearing, so it retroactively damaged the first half. A noble effort, but it could have been better.


I liked Wildclaw's production of The Shadow Over Innsmouth better, but it still had the same problem with failing to stick the ending. It maintained the creepy aura for much longer, though, and that counts.

After the play, I came home and went to bed. Some people were going out for drinks, but I never heard back.

On Saturday was the first session of mutantur's new Call of Cthulhu campaign now that we're done with Horror on the Orient Express. This time it's The Sense of the Sleight-of-Hand Man, based on, or at least named after, the poem by Wallace Stevens. The PCs all started out as opium addicts in dept to the Tongs in New York, and we were all collected and driven to a meeting with one Mr. Lao. He offered us his hospitality and a special kind of opium which he said came from his homeland of Leng, and after smoking it, the PCs were transported to new bodies in the Dreamlands. My male Irish poet woke up in the body of a South Asian woman (played by Shruti Haasan, at least in my mind), and after escaping Sarkomand, we made our way overland to Inganok, where we got equipped--I picked a spear for my character, since swords are so overrepresented in fantasy warriors--and were told by the Inganok council to go to the Oracle on the Plateau of Leng and ask whether Inganok should expand to the east. When we were attacked by ghostly warriors in the wilderness, that's where we stopped for the day.

I like it! It's a lot different than the paranoia and frailty of our characters in Orient Express. We're a bunch of well-armored warriors now, and while Call of Cthulhu's system doesn't encourage high-flying heroics, the Dreamlands makes it easier to survive since magic points become a secondary reserve of hit points. It's also not on rails (), and a lot depends on what we want to do and where we want to go. I think it'll be a nice change!

I mentioned that I wanted my character to become the Queen of the Black Coast, but no one got the reference.

I'm not going to write about it as extensively as I did Horror on the Orient Express, though. That took a lot out of me.

I was originally going to see L.I.V.E. Entertainment's show tonight, but I think I'm going to stay in and get some coding practice in instead. I haven't done a lot of it since Wednesday when I finished the last project I was working on, a random quote machine. I've been focusing a bit more on Japanese since then, like with my article translation. It's not going to be easy trying to learn both of these things at once, but, well. What choice do I have?

Hope everyone else is having a good weekend!