Game Rules: Scene Basics: Flows

Flows

The other part of a scene is its flow.

Every meaningful encounter, every important experience, begins with a querulous uncertainty—something is wanted, something is asked, some ambiguous matter arises that must be resolved. There is a question or a challenge: what do I do about this? or can I achieve this? Something is happening; how will it end?

Scenes happen, and people do things within them, because something is unresolved.

The path from the tremulous emergence of a question or challenge into the world, through its flourishing as something fully-realized and pressing, and finally unto its realization, is named a flow. It is a story or a catechism, it is the creation and resolution of a dilemma, it is a koan that answers itself through time. It is something happening.

It may be as simple as: there is a party. What happens in it?

It may be as brutal as: I want to kill him. Do I succeed?

It may be as complicated as: how do I live with the suffering in the world?

Each of these converges on the others in the course of play. Simple questions like "what happens at this party" look for a spearpoint of drama, something that focuses the generic potential into something with real and brutal relevance. If it never happens, if the answer is, "nothing happens, we mill around and then go home," then it's a kind of all-around failure: the characters were hoping for something, but never managed to sharpen their interest to a point where they knew what they were looking for, and so in the end they just wasted their time. The world, in turn, failed to produce a flow distinguishable from the doldrums; part of the meaning of life failed in its flourishing. And while it's possible that the players and GM had fun at the party, it's certain that any rules stuff they did involving the flow was wasted work, since nothing happened. So, to avoid this failing, flows like "there is a party. What happens?" tend towards "I fall in love at this party. But can I win a date?"

Complex questions and issues, too, resolve towards the simple ones. In the long course of your life you may hope to determine how to live with the suffering in the world; in a given scene, the best hope is that it will crystallize into a personal and internal crisis that you may resolve with either catharsis or a new and useful approach. "How do I live with the suffering in the world?" becomes "I'm struggling with my feelings about this. What happens?"

And the brutal questions will become more complex. In something as simple as a duel to the death, other issues will arise; a spectator may have cardiac arrest, or your teachers may get involved, or the story of two lovebirds at a nearby party may get irrevocably tangled in events when the duelists crash through the wall. "I want to kill him. Do I succeed?" becomes "There is a duel next to the party. What happens?"

But in all of this there is a questing something that begins with the beginning of the flow, an uncertainty, a thing that wants for answers; and the flow carries forward the scene; and the scene ends when that flow is resolved.

On most occasions the flow for a scene will echo the dramatic impetus for the scene. That dramatic impetus is what holds the scene together even if the individual characters and connections scatter; ergo, the flow is the thing in the game world that does the same. Sometimes fairy magic will mess with this, e.g., "resolving" things that are in no reasonable sense resolved. That's fine; the dramatic impetus, cut off from events, falls flailing and blinded down into the background sea of experience, or the deeper flow that is the characters' lives; from there, no doubt, it shall return.

The nicknobs, summerkin, and fireworks have an intuitive connection to the flows; other fairies find them a bit unwieldy.

Character Splat: Firework Fairy

It has the character of a light bursting into being in the emptiness; that flare of light characteristic of the best of fireworks, when night transforms to beauty. Then in unending succession there flow marvels, changes, instances of pattern, brightness, and color: then there is a feast for the mind and senses, then there is the vast inexplicability of beauty, only herein made. That is the appearance of the firework fairy.

Now it is said, and so much is true, that if you should catch one at rest or in a room already bright—such that the impact of their explosions was muted or resolved down to sparkles—that the firework fairy should have the most typical of fairy forms, that is, the androgyne child, shrunk small as an acorn or a mouse, in either case to fit within a hand, and winged with butterfly or raven wings (and in some cases the wings of dragonflies or multicolored birds; but these more rarely). But even in such cases it is best remembered that the key to a firework's presence is the bursting of numinous experience into the ordinary, the pulse of magic intruding on the simple world. Thus if you should encounter a firework having this precise form, but dull, then it is sick, weak, dead, or some other thing entirely; while if you should see something ordinary as a thimble or a hat, and it should intrude thus upon your senses, you may rely upon the belief that a firework is within. The only time, in fact, that a person may look upon a firework without its presence registering is when that person dwells already within a daydream or somnolescent state; then the vibrant colors of their dreams and the dissociative power that separates the dreamer from the world may give the firework camouflage and allow it to pass unnoticed by the eye. The remainder of the occasions where a firework may escape notice, as in the experiments of my colleague M. Ambrose, are cases where the firework is seen but actively denied; "that cannot be," says the uninitiated spirit, "therefore I will take no notice of it. Later, I will reassure myself that I did not see, and afterwards forget entirely."

The persistent character of the firework fairy is to break the stillness of the ordinary and echo what is given to it—to cast back the visions of the world around it in a new and brighter and more magickal of forms. Thus, one may imagine a miser, dwelling in meaningless misery upon their hoard, saying, "Look, I have enough to buy food for all the starving people of this town," and allowing that statement to fall flatly and without interest on the unechoing walls of their chamber; then a firework calls back, "Look, here is enough to buy food for all the starving people of this town!" and it is suddenly a notion. And thus with the Wright Brothers and their creation of the aeromobile, and also the enactors of many great follies such as the house of M. Ogilvie.

— The Manual of the Fey, by Stacio

Firework fairies are charged to break the stillness of things. It is their duty to stop the world from moldering down into the ceaseless soulless ordinary—to trouble the faceless bureaucracies, to waken the disillusioned, to remind the children of magic, and to guarantee that there is in all situations and in all circumstances the hope of change.

It is their power to make other people and things beautiful, to love them, to adore even the bleakest and cruelest things and places; and the people too, though they are not required in that love to serve or aid the Wicked.

It is their power, in short, to make and find beauty and power and change in even the unlikely places, but never to be confined by them.

These are the standard invocations of the firework fairy—the powers they use when brightening the world:

• I am that which breaks the stillness
• I am a thing which moves
• I am the opening of eyes to wonder
• I have found a thing worth loving
• I echo what is given me by others.

Example: "I echo what is given me by others. If this hellhound is going to breathe fire on me, it's getting a face full of fire back!"

Firework fairies have a +1 bonus on Invocation rolls. They are never disoriented by the rush tokens that represent things moving too fast to keep track of, and on a Praxis roll of 23+ they can add 1-5 such tokens to a scene.

Famous firework fairies include Emily Wright, adventuring duo Rachel and Benjamin Starr, and Seraphine (who found the soul of the world). Also notorious is the Wicked firework Jenny Constantin, who steals children from placid homes, and the Rebel, a nameless avatar of unrest. The Johns Hopkins University has a master's program for firework fairies seeking to refine their technique; many of the better known fireworks are either graduates of the program or associates with honorary degrees who occasionally give seminars or talks.

You should play a firework fairy if . . .
You want to be in love with the world, to be drunk on sunsets and sunrises and the beauty of things. If you want joy and madness. If you want to change lives for the better. If you want to be larger-than-life. If you want to think fast, move faster, and laugh at the trouble life throws at you. If you want to get into trouble and out the other side. If you want to be the engine of the world. If you want to be illogical but cool, silly but triumphant, charming but infuriating. And if you want to be a brilliant flare of magic in a dull and dreary world.