It gets easy to become enraptured with busy work. You set up a series of menial tasks that need doing, start doing them, and before you know it, you are mechanical in your approach and your brain has gone on vacation. Sometimes you need that, particularly when the work you must do requires a great amount of mental and emotional energy. However, not all busy work requires the mechanical approach. As much of what goes on behind the scenes deals with properly documenting all the changes occurring in each and every project, including data entry and analysis, and much of it is repetitive, we’ve gone and built systems to automate the lot of it. Now, only the work which absolutely must be done by hand is done by hand and not by a python script.
Mind you, none of the writing itself is included in the “menial work.” This is far from menial. This is the meat and bones of our production! The building of our attractions, the very heart of our Carnival of Calamity, this is done by hand with great pleasure! We work to automate everything else so we can focus on the attractions themselves.
Speaking of attractions, our current attractions are taking interesting turns. Edgar spends some time observing the Beings from his little hidey hole high up in one of the skyscrapers. You can find out what he determines—if he determines anything at all—in this edition’s installment of A Vampire’s Vengeance. Solomon has been warned time after time he is meddling in something he knows little to nothing about, and those warnings may come calling in this edition’s installment of House. For our guest attraction, a concerned sister watches as her brother devolves, but in what way? This is up to you to discover, in The Novel of the White Powder. And Griselda wraps up her tale in our installment of Bus Driver.
Let’s get into it →
House may be the first of attractions out of the trio in this volume to see a polished version go live. While all three attractions—A Vampire’s Vengeance, House, and Bus Driver—have been migrated to the new editing workflow and are being reassembled into chapter themes after each installment is published, House is currently moving well ahead of the others. It helps that House will end up being substantially shorter than A Vampire’s Vengeance and slightly shorter than Bus Driver. Still, it is exciting to consider how quickly it is being set up for a complete editing pass once its serial of installments has run its course here, Backstage.
In other news, more time has been in study and research for other attractions half-finished. Rise of the Warlock Queen surfaced briefly, and the Conglomerate continues to receive attention, though this has slowed some as we are focused on migrating all attractions, research libraries, etc etc to the new system we’ve devised. While there is not yet a date set for the release of those attractions waiting in the wings, we are steadfast in our approach to working on each one. They will come to light soon enough.
In the meantime, please enjoy the attractions we have to offer you here, and now, Backstage, below ↓
Edgar watches the Beings for some time and walks away with more questions. Understandable. We have a lot of questions as well, Edgar. Read the new installment of …
Solomon may finally be coming around to realizing he’s in a bit of a bind in this week’s installment of …
Not all chemists and apothecaries operate with the same judicious attention to detail. A hermit’s sister discovers too late the ill-effects of a medication he was prescribed in …
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A patron falls prey to the whimsical magic of a touring artist. Currently available only on Apple Books.
Welcome to another installment of Bus Driver! We were all very captivated by Griselda’s story in the last installment, leaning forward and listening closely along with the bus driver, his passengers, and the residents of the outpost, weren’t we? If you weren’t, you can catch up with Part XXVIII here. Now, where will Griselda’s story take us? What will we learn? What terrifying things has she seen? Let’s find out →
"What did we see? We should have run then. We should have run before then. We should have never went that way. We should have listened to the people in the pass."
Griselda paused. The room was silent. Everyone waited patiently for Ol' Grizzy to continue. Whether they had heard the tale before mattered not; they were all invested. With a deep breath, Griselda continued.
"If we wondered about what was happening, we did not wonder long. the surface began to bubble, slow at first, then like boiling water. Then the water rose like you see when a whale or shark swims near the surface, like a mound, right in the middle. The lumpy flying things all began to circle over it, as if waiting for something. The mound grew and grew, becoming a bubble, and then the bubble burst.
"I still find it hard to believe what I saw, because it was the first time seeing it. We watched the lumpy flying things swoop down and grab onto the fat and putrid thing that looked like it was not fully formed. We figured out it was a sac of some kind. The flying monsters worked together to carry it to the dirt, where they dropped it. It broke apart when it fell, and out came the most horrific thing I have ever seen: a fat, giant, putrid, monster with many arms and tentacles for teeth. We stood downwind and could smell the rotten thing.
"Then my companion Alicia screamed. Others started screaming and shouting too, as if her voice broke the curse of silence over us. It was wrong thing to do. Every horrid creature around the lake turned their eyes on us. The flying things, as sluggish as they looked, moved faster than any of us would have ever guessed they were capable of. They charged our way. The infected persons all turned and began coming toward us as well. And the monster that broke out of the sac? It too came charging.
"So we turned to run. We ran as hard as we could, dropping everything behind to get away. But we were not fast enough. Alicia and I were close to the front of the group, and one of the flying things got her first. I tried to reach for her, to grab her, but the flying thing was too fast. She was already high up in the air being flown back to the lake. I watched, helpless, angry, and scared. Others around me got picked up too. At first I was too upset at losing Alicia to notice. Then I was confused why they were flying past me. Then I realized they were chasing the runners and screamers. Maybe they could not see? It does not matter. I watched a large amount of our people get thrown into the lake before I realized the giant monster was almost on me, with a small army of infected close behind. I tried to run, but I was frozen in place. Stuck. I stood there and cried, doing nothing, feeling helpless, and that saved my life. The flying things, the monster, the infected, they all went right past me, left me alone. And they killed or took back to the lake everybody else.
"Night fell, the infected were back at the lake's edge, and the flying things were busy pulling sacs from the center. My people, all gone, dropped into the lake and given new life as monstrosities. The lake was swarming with them now. Quiet as a mouse, I went and collected what I could carry of our supplies, and then turned away from the lake."
Griselda finished her tale with a heavy sigh, then fell silent.
A lake that makes monsters. Hmm. Well that was unexpected. Or, well, it would have been had you not been paying attention. But you knew this was coming, didn’t you? Because you’ve been keeping up. Still, must be quite the shock to the bus driver to know something like this exists in the world. Will he continue on, knowing what monstrosities lie in wait in the more isolated regions of the land he traverses? Only one way to find out what happens next! Come back next week!
We have quite a mix of disaster, absurdity, and profundity, do we not? It’s lovely how each attraction delivers something different. We can all enjoy appreciate something here, can we not? What attractions are you keep up with? Please, do tell. Reply to this email, leave a comment on this post, or use any of the buttons below. We would love to hear from you!
Until next time, my dearly appreciated guest!
Cordially,
Mad Alex
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