Nor am i The Bad doctor, and their nocturnal, nautical, tender, abyssal world
This is just an ode to their work.
Just trying to put out here what this intersection conjured inside my skull.
Something took hold.
I cannot conjure worlds with poetic prose. And I can't work in either's dark, warm, cold reality or latex sheen.
I'll just have to do in the way i can. In between the lines of procedures, pictures, and statements.
I feel, looking at my text, that it is blatantly referential, nearly too direct, but that is how it has got to be.
I never believed in back to the nature. But i love solarpunk. And in some sense, I think it is about learning to see what ecology one is part of. Nature and science mixed.
What about if that ecology was as full of death as ours, but more directly visible. That invisible necrotic side made blatant?
Disco Elysium,in a sense.
But first the center of the world.
The River.
THE RIVER TAKES HER CUT
The river doesn’t care about the titles.
Or the deals.
Or the blood in your mouth.
You can still wade into Her.
You can still lie down and whisper shame.
You can still ask to forget what you’ve become.
And She will oblige.
Gently. Like a blade drawn slow.
You’ll rise again.
Lighter.
And less.
No one dies clean anymore.
You wash up in Death City—half-submerged, choking on your old name, your old wounds rinsed raw by a tide that gives no sermons.
Around you, skyscrapers twitch. Neon trickles like blood down charred glass. Sirens wail. Yes, literal sirens.
Somewhere, someone is laughing with a mouth full of rust and blood.
The last laugh of this unlife.
But here, in the shallows, there is still quiet.
The River Styx is the only thing that has not changed.
She does not care who you were.
She does not care if you are Ford, or Anubis, or the bastard who made God bleed.
She spat them all out here, too.
She bears no conflict at Her edges.
Or rather—those spat out arrive at a time and place of peace.
(No spawncamping.)
She receives all equally.
She launders death.
She forgets you, if you let Her.
THE RIVER IS NOT MERCIFUL
—but She is not cruel.
To be washed was once a sacrament.
To become weightless, sheared of the threads that dragged you back to pain.
To be freed from what memory does to the soul:
A monstrous outgrowth made of vengeance, of malice, of memory, of flesh remade for war.
What the lords of Limbo now call a RIG.
“You may rest here,” it used to mean.
Some still do.
Some lay in the water and let it take everything.
They re-emerge quiet. Saints, perhaps. Or ghosts. Or shade-children who walk without names but with a certain peace.
Or now just the destitute dead.
But most of us—
We don’t want peace.
We want reckoning.
THE CITY BUILT AROUND THE RIVER
Styx does not barter.
But those who wait at Her banks do.
Death City spirals out from the river’s edge like an ulcer.
Slums cling to Her gutters.
Debt agents kneel beside the mud in suits stitched from cadaver-hair.
Sometimes, when you rise—still dripping, still dizzy—they offer a towel, an Obol, and a smile.
“Welcome back. Sign here.”
Obols are the new sacraments.
Hacked from the underworld’s currency.
Stamped with the faces of gods who no longer get invited to board meetings.
And when you die—and you will die— your answer to this question on that contract will matter:
“Will you pay in memory, or in debt?”
If you pay in debt, you owe them: Favor, labour, your body, your time. You are in their feifdom.
They front the Obol. You keep the memory.
If you pay in memory, a thread unspools from your soul and sinks.
That new Obol will end up in someone else’s pocket, trawled from the river.
You cannot walk away whole.
Write that choice on your sheet.
On the next death, it will matter.
OBOLS & CONTRACTS
An Obol isn’t just a coin.
It’s a compressed moment—
a memory pressed into metal,
a death deferred,
a favor still sharp with need.
It is curse, and blessing, and sacred contract.
When you carry one,
it hums just under your ribs—
like a secret too heavy to say aloud.
To accept an Obol and renege on your side of the contract invites the ire of death itself. (make cool shit up, it should be really really bad)
Problem is, the necrocapitalists can stave of death. It's more than a minor inconvenience to them.
But they are willing to take a calculated risk.
When you want something in trade, and you have no Obol to give, you must choose:
❖ Make an Obol of your memory
Erase something on your sheet—distill something true into payment.
❖ Or do not get what you want
The door closes, the hand withdraws, the contract remains unsigned. Womp-womp.
When you die and have no Obol to offer,
the river takes payment anyway.
She will make one out of you.
You forget why you were crying when the Styx spits you out.
But damn, do you cry.
Something inside you was unmoored,
ripped out clean,
against your will.
But you’re dry now.
You’re whole again.
You can walk.
Something’s missing.
But you’ll remember that later.
Or not
Necrocapitalism did not kill the river.
It couldn’t.
Styx does not bleed.
But it set up shop on Her banks.
It built towers of onyx and obsidian.
It monetized the difference forgetting makes.
It taught the dead to hoard memories.
To fear release.
To make remembering precious—
and the present moment worthless.
It made salvation into damnation.
Turned rebirth into recurrence.
So it could sell the act of rising.
FREELANCE DEATH OPERATIVES
You’re not a slave.
No-no-no-no-no-no—You’re independent.
No leash. No master.
Just a growing pile of contracts.
Side gigs.
Debt markers.
Blood bonds.
Old favors coming due.
You work not because you must, but because you can.
Because you think it’s what you want.
Because there is still vengeance and reckoning to be doled out.
Because you want to reclaim what you lost.
Because it feels good to kill the thing that made you die last time.
Because only hustlers get what they want.
This is the lie of freedom that keeps Death City spinning.
This is the gospel of the so-called free dead.
This is the contract everyone signs, eventually.
This is how the wheel turns.
Third time this week.
an Obol pressed into her palm.
It was better that way.
Her body was beyond broken.
That made it no easier for either of them.
Her skull imploded.
Back caving into her throat.
Indescribable pain.
Something emptied out her nose and mouth.
Twitching.
A hand held hers.
She barely felt it.
It kept pouring out.
Thick, red, and agonizing.
The river coughed her up at sunrise.
No fanfare.
She broke the water—teeth gnashing, wailing something horrid.
Staggering up the bank, coughing golden mud.
The Obol was gone, her clarity as monstrous as the gleam of Death City.
Placed there by her lover.
“That’s some apology,” she winced, picking up the gun, steering towards the nearest rave to blast the taste of blood and brains out of her mind.
“To another night in Death City.”
Thank you for the river.
ReplyDeleteHey Kyana! Thank you - I want to give more, but -
DeleteI hit a bit of a dry patch (dry riverbed) so to say, with how to wrangle making my world playable. I think i found out how to carve it out into smaller modules and bric-a-brac pieces. More to come soon.
death city baby drink deep
ReplyDeleteOh I do want to drink deep.
DeleteThis gameworld sprang from the want to just forget, and how i could turn the boring crapsack dystopia of modern (un-)life into something at least a bit more colorful.