Ra-Ra-Rasputin

 

Ra-Ra-Rasputin

He found himself humming it again, a krovavyy earworm. He knew it was an earworm because he was a mystic, and that is the krovavyy word as it came to him, as many things did, as he was a psychic.

Ra-Ra-Rasputin, Lover of the Russian Queen

Now this was interesting. He knew this to be true. She did love him. Yet he did not love her either. The tune again, or was it a song, he could not tell, seemed prophetic in its telling, for he was quite the ladies' man.

Ra-Ra-Rasputin, Russia's greatest Love machine

The power, the influence, the rule, again all true, he danced kazachok wunderbar for sure. But bible was his book, the healing in the song he knew not to be prophetic, but rumours spread by him. Was this song simply a krovavyy recall?

Ra-Ra-Rasputin

Krovavyy earworm, won't you go away, you're occupying my mystic mind with things I already know. Yes, the queen believes the rumours, I know, the rhythmic tune affecting his thoughts, as he pondered the boy's disease and his dilemma.

Ra-Ra-Rasputin, Lover of the Russian Queen

The power he had attained was wondrous. No longer sleeping under bridges, he was within a palace, not so grand as the queen's, but a palace many dukes had never seen, sipping a wine brought to him by the high and mighty, those above him.

Ra-Ra-Rasputin, Russia's greatest Love machine

And then the earworm revealed its true prophetic yield; the wine he drank was poisoned by the high-ranking genteel who had gifted it to him. This thought came into his mind, just as he took the last gulp from his chalice of wine.

Krovavyy Earworm

Maddow Monologue

Scene opens, the anchor dressed neatly in a black sports coat, classic cut black t-shirt underneath, thick dark-rimmed glasses, black hair in a messy pixie cut. Contrasted by a red silhouette cityscape on a painted blue sky. She picks up a tight ream of papers, holds them, tapping the bottom edge on the bench top — click, click — and lays them flat. Leaning in.

'Really happy to be here tonight, and we have got a show for you, but before we bring our guests on, I want to start with some facts. In 1846, the British government passed what is known as the Gauge Act of 1846. This act declared that the country's railway tracks would be exactly four feet eight and a half inches apart.

Why, you may ask? Well, let me tell you that, my friends, the axle width of a horse-drawn carriage, and let me be precise, a two-horse-drawn carriage. It was, in reality, the width of two horses' arses. Isn't that amazing?

Well, what's more amazing is that measurement, four feet eight and a half inches, dates right back to Roman times. A long, long time. Until, until, the arrival of the motor car. And that was it. The horses' arses were put out to pasture. These beasts of burden, a primary form of transport and heavy lifting for centuries, retired near overnight in 1908 when Henry Ford introduced the motor vehicle as the everyman's car.

That, my friends, was a phenomenal technological advance.

Now let me tell you of another, more recent one. In offices across the industrial world, men in shirtsleeves were doing ledgers by hand, and boy, they were impressive. Horizontal lines, double vertical lines, numbers, words, tallies and totals, all done by hand. Through wars and factories and more, these skilled men worked laboriously.

Then, in 1979, the first computer spreadsheet came into existence, VisiCalc. Quickly followed by Lotus 1-2-3 in '83, Excel in '85, and by the mid-to-late 1990s, yes, that recently, the spreadsheet became ubiquitous with today's office space.

This one, though, it snuck up on us. And not only did it sneak up on us, but it also didn't put all those white-shirted, short-sleeved fellows out to pasture. No, not at all. I would say many of you know exactly what I am talking about, even if you've never used Excel yourself; you've definitely been the beneficiary of its existence in some manner.

Anyway, two different inventions, two different times, two different outcomes. Not so good for the horses.

Arthur C. Clarke, yes, that Arthur C. Clarke, the science fiction author, had made some rules about technology, even before spreadsheets were a thing. They were interesting rules, in particular his third. Arthur said, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

The steam train, the car, and the spreadsheet are all magic. Now, though, we have the magic of all technology magics, AI, artificial intelligence.

The question, though, is whether AI is an automobile or a spreadsheet?

Before we get to that, we need to talk a bit about the magic of technology, because that, to me, is where we've been getting ourselves into trouble ever since we started inventing. And now it's just coming at us faster and faster.

I remember the black-and-white TV coming into the house as a kid, yes, I am that old. My first home computer was a TRS-80 in the '80s. Then the World Wide Web, in the '90s, '91 to be exact. Social media. Then the iPhone and its clones landed in our pockets in 2007, amplifying the benefits and effects of the internet and social media.

We did all of that in a little over two decades. From the steam train to the demise of the horse: 83 years, eight decades. It's impressive.

The upside of all this? All sorts of things, connection, access to information, democratisation of information, the Arab Spring, Wikipedia, the spread of education and literacy, advances in health and home care. As the pendulum swings, though, the downside: our algorithmic bubbles, the polarisation of politics, doom scrolling, and the addictive nature of social media. And bafflingly, the upside of connection is also the downside of loneliness and isolation. Bullying, doxing, harassing, it goes on and on.

Are we now moving so fast down the technology path that this new technology, this magic, or so the media and the big companies pushing and investing in it would have us believe, is going to cause a job apocalypse? Are we going to be so enamoured by the magic, fed through those same algorithmic bubbles, that we will fall into this blindly, fall into it like a sheep at the wheel of a magical machine?

Well, to explore this, to answer some of these questions, we are joined tonight by…'

Warforged

Brenn walked towards the enclave. It was definitely bigger than the last time he was here. Greener even, though that was untrue; it was just the contrast to the greyness, the fog of war of the Mournland. A lush green canopy, some thirty metres above thick oaken trunks, aged and deeply creased bark emphasising the resilience of the space.

He pressed on. The path, clearly landscaped, led the way, first through a darkened passage where the canopy let no light in, then into a clearing streaked by light, casting split shadows across a low, wide stone building at its centre. Two solid stone slabs formed the walls; a steel-hinged door stood front and centre.

Entering, eyes adjusting to the change in light, the room was bathed in a magical blue glow. Open, with two forges burning hot, one to the back left corner, the other opposite on the far right, anvils, metalwork, pincers and other tools all orderly placed around the space, several smiths working.

One broke off from a conversation with another working on some iron. A girl with a thick, dark, curly head of hair framing a young, pretty face. Although she wore workers' leathers, she did not have the grime of the forge upon her; instead, a large green emerald hung from a leather thong, marking her as an Artificer.

Young, thought Brenn, as she walked towards the bench, holding customers at bay from the dangers of the forge. "Morning, Captain, how can I help?"

"I'm here for a new soldier." He thrust his papers forward for her to take.

Taking them, she read for a moment. "Dare I ask what happened to your last one?"

"Disappeared."

"Disappeared, what do you mean?" A look of curiosity passed across her face. "What denomination?"

"P1c. He was in battle with us, took some damage, he was down, but before one of the crew could get to him, he simply disappeared. His body was there one moment, and gone the next. Vanished."

The girl looked at Brenn for a moment, thinking. "P series, that's before my time." Without looking at him, she bent, pulled a ledger from behind the counter, opened it and ran her finger down the page, stopped, looked to the paper, back to the ledger.

"Right then, I am Jedda. I'll be helping you today. I suspect things have changed since you were here last. We don't just push our soldiers out the door; we introduce them. Come with me, please."

Moving to the corner of the counter, lifting the hatch, she walked past him and back out the way he'd come in. Turning left from the doors and left again, she moved to the back of the stone building, not pausing, not looking back, assuming Brenn would follow.

The two of them plunged back into the dark of the forest, leaving the sunlit clearing behind them. Brenn had not been here before. The last time he'd turned up, they had Pick lined up with several other soldiers, and he had simply chosen him. Or had Pick been chosen for him? He couldn't quite remember. It was so long ago.

As they proceeded into the forest, Brenn noticed paths leading off at right angles to their own every hundred, hundred and fifty metres or so, many of them ending at a hedged wall. After about ten minutes of walking, eight hundred metres by Brenn's calculation, this place was massive. One of the side paths did not end in a hedge; rather, the hedge was pulled aside as if a door had been opened. In the alcove beyond, he saw one worker moving about an opening, a small enclave walled by thick trunks, closer together than he'd seen before.

Stopping, Brenn squinted, trying to see what the fellow was doing. At the base of several of the trees he could make out the black sheen of metal, adamantine. Stacking them, like a frame of sorts. The couple he could see, already completed, looked oddly like a skeleton; just much simpler in one sense, just bars of metal and hinges, not connected but placed in position. "What's going on there?"

Jedda had stopped several feet ahead. "That is the first stage of formation. Come, I'll show you the process, that is why you are here." She walked on.

At the next right-angle turn to the left, Jedda turned down, stopping to pull aside the hedge. Brenn was impressed to see how easily it moved, yet there was nothing mechanical enabling it, no frame, no hinges. Nothing mechanical, yet it moved. Beyond, the two of them looked upon another enclave, its oaken walls close, a tangle of roots and branches bursting from their base into the clearing.

Again Brenn adjusted his sight, trying to discern what was going on, and then, amidst the tangle of leaves and branches, he was able to make out a humanoid figure, patches of black adamantine visible. "So you see, we don't build them, we shape them. We provide the framing, and then the forest provides the muscle, the sinew. We just provide the scaffolding, the merging of metallurgy and nature. Come."

Leaving, shutting the hedge behind them, the two walked on again, further into the forest. Ahead, one of the paths to the right was alight, a bright clear light spilling out onto the path. Stopping on the path, there was no need to go in for a closer look. Within the enclave before them, a lone figure stood at its centre. The trunks of the trees were clear, the branches and bracken of the previous enclave gone. Sitting in their place were six large humanoid figures of wood, barked in a manner not dissimilar to the trees themselves.

"What are they doing? Why the light?"

"Training, or what we call training. When they reach this point we start to pour knowledge into them. They don't learn as we do; they don't learn by doing, but by absorbing. As a tree grows through absorption, so do the Warforged. It is here we teach them things like healing, protection, fighting and so forth. More extensive than when we trained your Pick."

"Do you train their personality? Pick seemed to have a personality of his own, of a nature not taught."

"You are correct. There is a randomness to the process that we cannot quite deduce. Like I said, we provide the conditions, the knowledge, but what a Warforged turns into is somewhat beyond us. They are sentient beings. An intelligence grown."

"Well, that explains the Lord of Blades." Brenn stated it matter-of-factly, then went on: "So what you're saying is it was pure luck that Pick was a good one?"

"Well, yes and no. They are forged by humans, they learn and absorb, and much of that learning will come from you and those around them. Yet again, that is no guarantee. They are sentient, intelligent beings, and they have motivations, some of which we may never know, or, in the case of the Lord of Blades, find out too late."

"Great."

"You say Pick turned out well. Come, we are nearly at your soldier." Jedda turned and walked on, not bothering to wait or look back for Brenn.

The two walked on in silence for several minutes. Brenn was deep in thought about what he'd just learnt, missing Pick. Pick had been good, a solid member of the squad, personable, humorous even in his own way, reliable. He'd had no idea how he had been grown, trained.

His reverie was broken by Jedda: "We are here." She turned left and into an enclave. Here the two of them found yet another worker, clearly a metalsmith, fitting a helmet to a lone Warforged seated in the enclave. No others in sight.

"Brenn, this is 0AK, the newest member of your squad."

A final click, and the metalsmith stood back, stepping clear, giving them space. Silently, the Warforged stood. Standing a good foot taller than Brenn, it turned its head towards him, crystalline eyes shining a bright white.

Jedda spoke to Brenn without looking at the Warforged. "You have eye contact. Name it."

Brenn did not speak. He stood there looking at the Warforged, it at him. The frame, now fully clad in armour. Its stillness. The cut of the metallic face. He thought of everything he had just learnt, of what he had seen, and he thought of Pick. The way the soldier stood before him, its stance, how it held itself, the space it occupied.

"Oak."

Puppy Delivery

Maret stood and watched her master, the aged wizard, standing behind a butcher's block, the sleeves on his red robes pulled up over his elbows, a meat cleaver in his right hand, the hock of the hind leg of a butchered goat held in his left. She knew he knew she was there; this was part of the ritual. As rare as it was, she knew he had an errand, and undoubtedly it was a delivery.

Chopping, he separated the goat leg, placing the cleaver on the block, lifting the two parts, occupying one hand each. 'So Maret, I have a delivery.' His voice sounded raspy, as if he'd been shouting. He hadn't; that was just how he sounded. Throwing half a leg into a cage on the far side of the butcher's block, he heard the meat slap to the cold floor, then the barely audible pads of a large beast moving to where it fell.

'There is a Mage, Human Kost to the west, that has secured the tithing for one of my Puppies.' Maret strained to hear what her master had said, his voice barely audible across the room. 'You will take it to him, and return with his Tithe.'

'Which animal, Master?'

'Bargst. He is ready. You've been involved in his training; this will make the trip easier.' Having dispensed the second part of the goat into another cage, Valdris moved towards his servant, looking at her: red-brown leathers of a wizard's thrall, shaved head, and a faded tattoo on her left temple.

It was the tattoo that tugged at his mind at that precise moment, reminding him, not confirming his thinking. If she did this, he would release her to continue her studies elsewhere. He was too old and did not have the energy to train another just now. He would not tell her this, of course.

'It will be a long journey.' He stopped only three feet in front of her, holding her gaze. He admired her as much as he admired one of his puppies; the communication in those eyes, like the eyes of his Emberwights. His puppies told him a lot. She was loyal, not so much to him as to the situation; she needed him, or his situation at least. 

'You leave immediately. One of the dread warriors will travel with you to the port; from there you will board a vessel to travel across the Moonsea, into the Sea of Fallen Stars, landing at Westgate, taking the overland to Iriaebor, and down the river to Baldur's Gate, and north to the Triboar Trail, where you will seek out what is called the Old Owl Well.'

'How am I to travel with Bargst, Master? There is no way I could make such a trip with an Emberwight.'

Valdris held forward a gold necklace, the chain grasped in his hand, a black pendant, table-cut, the clasp at its base causing it to hang upside down. 'The Puppy is within,' he let it drop into her hand. 'You'll wear this inside your clothes. None are to know you have it.'

'That trip, Master, is further than I have ever been before.'

'I know. It is all right. You travel a populated route; you will meld into the other travellers. Do not bring attention upon yourself. Your protection is your plainness, your ability to simply be one of the commoners.'

'And if I fail?'

'You won't.'

----

NOTE - this is a scene inspired/related to an Emberwight, a D&D 5e creature of my creation.

Dice Day - 24 In.

The door to the inn opened, the fresh cold air of the evening flowing in intermittently, jarringly -- it had not been opened for an hour or two, as everyone who would be here was here already. Entering were two fellows in their 20s, middle-aged, some would say. The first, wearing studded leather armour, a sword at his left, a dagger on the other side, a pack slung over his right shoulder, his right hand holding it in place. Followed by a second fellow, this one not so attired -- he wore a grey, plain cloak, sleeveless over a plain white shirt, a beanie with a top point sitting enough above his head as if it floated there, pointed skyward unnaturally.

They entered, not a word, stood, scanned the room. It was packed, beautifully, and oddly, a lone table stood to the far side, two seats, close to the heart of the fire, unusually vacant -- although looking at how the crowd was clustered, deliberately, as it was distinctly not in the mix, the fray of the social interactions of the room.

The grey-cloaked fellow stepped forward, pointed at the pair's destination and nodded towards the bar. The first, the leather-clad fellow, went where he was nodded to, whilst the other wove his way through the crowd to their eventual destination.

Moving to the bar, the leather-clad fellow bellowed, loud enough for all to hear, as he was not here on secret business -- and why skulk when a declaration will keep more at bay. "Two tankards of your best, good man."

Not hesitating, Gilbert, the proprietor of the bar, simply nodded. He was a man of few words, economical in his audible traits, some would say, turned, pulled two beers and put them upon the bar. "Any food with your ale, friend?"

"What have you got?"

"We do a fine mutton stew, carrots, tatoes, slow-cooked with some meat. 'Tis a fine meal. Drop me a silver and three copper a piece, covers your first drink and the feed."

"Done." And with that, the leather-clad flipped a single gold coin onto the bar. "We'll take lodgings as well."

"Can do, can do, friend. How many nights?"

"One."

"That'll cover it." And with a swift hand, the gold was gone, leaving the two ales sitting alone, handles towards the newcomer.

Leather-clad moved through the room, following the path of the cloaked one. No one looked up. Oh, they knew there were strangers amongst them, but did not acknowledge, not even a glance.

"Done. Room for the night, meal's on its way."

"Good. Settle in, friend, the Jester is not here yet."

"You certain he'll come?"

The cloaked one looked at his friend. "He'll be here."

"So, you're saying this fellow has the details, the location?"

"Better than that, he has the map we require. He's obtained it from the Hag in the pines -- no doubt some deal has been done, something thankfully you and I are once removed from, a deal he will have done. We have to wait, see what he has and then go from there. All I know is there's a throne in a tower atop a hill. And..."

"And?"

"It'll be worth our while, that's all. Now, be quiet and wait. He needs to be here tonight as the ship is set to sail tomorrow."