00:06 <VoxPVoxD> This was a mistake. It's too late in the day and the bar's too crowded and noisy. Someone he doesn't know is tuning up on the bar's venue stage. Someone else he doesn't know is passing him a drink. Stewart doesn't even LIKE drinking. He should've stayed home.

00:08 <VoxPVoxD> Also, his feet hurt.

00:09 <dammitwhoa> "Hey there!" Maggie says cheerfully. "You're a new fella, aren't you?" She's passed him a glass of some heavy stout or other.

00:10 <VoxPVoxD> He takes the glass before looking to see who handed it to him. When she speaks he realizes he has seen her. "You were at the icebreaker, right?"

00:13 <dammitwhoa> "That's right! Maggie Bakehead." How tall is Stewart?

00:17 <VoxPVoxD> Mayyybe 5'10? It's hard to tell with his posture. His Mask is pasty and lank, his Mien fair and graceful. "Stewart. Is this place always so loud?"

00:21 <dammitwhoa> Maggie's shorter than him, then, and gives him the vague impression of an old wood-burning stove turned into an anthropomorphic cartoon character. "Pretty much! You ever hear of this thing they do here? 'Karaoke'? They came up with it in Japan, they say!"

00:22 <VoxPVoxD> Stewart pauses a bit, unsure exactly what level of irony this lady is operating on. "Like where you get up and sing?"

00:26 <dammitwhoa> "Yeah! Heck of a thing!"

00:27 <dammitwhoa> Her Mask looks like she has never operated on any level of irony in her life.

00:28 <VoxPVoxD> It's weird, right? It's weird to strike up a conversation with this lady after basically ignoring her twice. Stewart's being weird right now. "What'd you sing?"

00:30 <dammitwhoa> Maggie: "An old Stan Rogers bit, the Mary Ellen Carter. It's surprising what comes back to you in the right situation. So who picked you up, Stewart?" She squints at him. "Autumn? Winter?"

00:31 <VoxPVoxD> Stewart looks briefly skittish, glancing over Maggie's shoulder to make sure no one is eavesdropping. "Autumn. You?"

00:35 <dammitwhoa> "Spring! I guess you can kind of tell, huh?"

00:37 <VoxPVoxD> Stewart: "Do you know who got the tree lady?"

00:37 <VoxPVoxD> It's hard to forget a tree lady.

00:40 <Crion_> This early in the evening there are only two other Lost in here: a bored looking goat-guy out of Spring tending bar who did little more than nod disinterestedly in your directions when you came in, and a guy who looks just like the man Maggie saw at the rec center telling off the cops...except angrier, and with a Summer mantle. Harlan, Amelia, and everyone else are either not in yet

00:40 <Crion_> or not coming.

00:42 <dammitwhoa> She shakes her head. "I haven't seen her since the icebreaker."

00:44 <dammitwhoa> "So what do you do for fun, Stewart?"

00:45 <VoxPVoxD> Stewart thanks Maggie belatedly for the drink and takes a sip. This tastes like dirt. He takes another sip. What do you talk to people about? "What do... what do you do?"

00:50 <dammitwhoa> Maggie, pleasantly: "Oh, you know. This and that, fiddling with car innards, doing some baking..."

00:52 <VoxPVoxD> Stewart: "Which is harder?"

00:54 <dammitwhoa> "Well, I don't know that either one is particularly hard as such... what about you?" He evaded the question the first time, and the best way to deal with someone being evasive is to ask again!

00:59 <VoxPVoxD> Stewart hesitates. He can't really make like he didn't hear the question again... "I'm a str•••" He wipes his mouth as he answers.

01:00 <dammitwhoa> "Hmm?"

01:01 <VoxPVoxD> Stewart: "I'm a streamer."

01:04 <dammitwhoa> "Oh! ...what's that?"

01:05 <VoxPVoxD> MAYDAY MAYDAY WE ARE LOSING ALTITUDE "I m- I play video games for an audience."

01:08 <dammitwhoa> Maggie looks thoughtful for a moment, clearly considering and discarding a vision of Stewart literally playing games on a stage in a concert hall somewhere. "You mean... through the internet? You can do that?"

01:13 <VoxPVoxD> Stewart nods. "Yeah, I do it from home."

01:13 <VoxPVoxD> Which is why I haven't gone outside in a week.

01:19 <dammitwhoa> Maggie looks away and frowns for a second. "Now, Stewart, I understand that this is a lot to ask from someone I've just met. But maybe you could do me a favor? I'm pretty sure computers and such are after my time, if you get me. I took classes at the library to understand how to use 'em, but beyond that I'm clinging on with my fingernails. Do you mind helping me out with a few

01:19 <dammitwhoa> questions? Uh, maybe somewhere a little quieter? You look a little uncomfortable." She pats his hand reassuringly.

01:20 <VoxPVoxD> Maggie can see the gears turning in Stewart's head as he stares. It feels longer than the few seconds it is before he says "...sure."

01:22 <dammitwhoa> Is there a quieter section or something?

01:23 <Crion_> There's an upper stairs secondary bar that's not open yet, but changelings of the Court basically have the run of the place; the bouncer won't stop you.

01:25 <dammitwhoa> Nice; Maggie will head in that direction.

01:25 <VoxPVoxD> Stewart will follow.

01:31 <Crion_> Bar's free for court members too, within reason. Coming in and going through a case a day of imported beer, for instance, will get you a stern talking to both about taking more than you're giving back, and your obvious drinking problem.

01:31 <Crion_> To give a totally hypothetical example, from eight months ago.

01:33 <VoxPVoxD> Stewart has mainly put the Sidereal out several glasses of ginger ale, and this one beer Maggie got him.

01:33 <dammitwhoa> AN OPEN BAR?!?

01:37 <dammitwhoa> Once they've gotten settled at a booth or something, Mags will pull out a small literal paper notebook. She doesn't wear glasses, even though the aesthetics of the situation make it seem like she should adjust them at this point, but anyway she examines what she has written: "Alrighty. What are the stats of a computer? I mean cars have miles per gallon, top speed, zero to sixty, that

01:37 <dammitwhoa> sort of thing. What numbers do I look at to see whether one computer is better than another one?"

01:39 <VoxPVoxD> Stewart blinks.

01:43 <VoxPVoxD> Stewart: "...okay so, the first thing to keep in mind is that a computer isn't like a car. Computers don't roll off the line at a plant somewhere and get shipped to dealerships. Every part of a computer is made by a different company, from the drives to the processor to the case all the other parts are in. Then those parts are assembled, either before it's sold as a premade PC, or

01:43 <VoxPVoxD> piece by piece to people building their own machines."

01:44 <VoxPVoxD> "So you don't really compare computer to computer, right? You compare part to part."

01:48 <VoxPVoxD> "Different parts have different, they're called 'benchmarks'. You make every part do the same test, like make the same calculation or render the same image, and you measure things like how fast it takes, how much power it draws, how hot it gets. Different people use different sets of tests - so you might want to compare two parts using multiple different tests. I can- there's links I

01:48 <VoxPVoxD> could give you..."

01:50 <VoxPVoxD> He looks up at Maggie. Is he communicating any of this clearly? It's so hard to tell.

01:52 <dammitwhoa> She's carefully making notes of what he says, at least. "That would be handy! Hmm. Alright, now... why do they call it a disk 'drive'? What does it drive?"

01:56 <VoxPVoxD> Stewart: "I actually just looked this up myself the other day. Originally a 'drive' was the machine you put the storage thing onto - a disk, a spool of tape - and then spun them around."

01:56 <dammitwhoa> "Ah, that makes sense!"

01:56 <VoxPVoxD> "Eventually they stopped doing that, and the data storage part and the spinning part got fused into one box that you don't take apart."

01:56 <VoxPVoxD> "And we call those 'drives' now."

01:58 <VoxPVoxD> "Nowadays there's SSDs, which are hard drives that don't spin. But we still call them drives, so the original meaning is now entirely behind the horizon."

01:58 <dammitwhoa> Maggie: "Now, the 'central processor'... it just does math, basically? Is that right? It all boils down to doing math on things?"

02:00 <VoxPVoxD> Stewart: "Yeah, basically. I don't know enough math to know if everything a CPU does is math, but basically."

02:07 <dammitwhoa> "Lord of mercy. The things they come up with... Okay, this is kind of a toughie. A bit of a delicate quesiton. Now, from what I understand, you can watch movies and television on a computer? Without having to pay for a cable hook up or rental?"

02:07 <dammitwhoa> She looks at him. "Stealing, I mean."

02:09 <VoxPVoxD> Stewart: "How do you steal something you can make infinite copies of for free?"

02:12 <dammitwhoa> Maggie: "Well now I'm not so concerned with the wording, you understand. Can you teach me how to do it?"

02:17 <VoxPVoxD> Stewart seems to be recovering more confidence away from the crowd, on a topic he understands. "Trivial! How's your home connection? I could set up a, it's called a 'media server' for you, like a special computer that with movies and music and TV on it. I could get you into private trackers with extensive libraries. Some places abide by a strict ethical code, reified in the Ratio:

02:17 <VoxPVoxD> take only as much as you give."

02:23 <dammitwhoa> Maggie nods approvingly: "What a good way to run a community! Now that's very kind of you, Stewart. I don't have much by way of a thank-you gift, but I could make a meal that could put some meat on those bones."

02:25 <VoxPVoxD> Stewart perks up. "What do you cook?"

02:28 <dammitwhoa> Maggie: "Oh, just about anything, I'd imagine. I'm no four-star chef, and they have trucks on the street these days selling things I've never heard of - good though! I like that spicy chicken curry - but if you give me some time and a cookbook I don't think it's bragging to say I can turn out something pretty good."

02:28 <VoxPVoxD> Stewart: "What's your favorite food?"

02:31 <dammitwhoa> Maggie: "Breakfast. Simple, but I like it. Pigs in a blanket, some hashbrowns, bit of bacon..."

02:35 <VoxPVoxD> Stewart nods. "Eggs, scrapple, toast and jelly..."

02:36 <dammitwhoa> Maggie: "Mmmm..."

02:39 <VoxPVoxD> "So why Spring?"

02:42 <dammitwhoa> Maggie: "What do you mean?"

02:49 <VoxPVoxD> Stewart: "I don't really understand it. I understand what Autumn does, and I understand what Summer does... but Spring and Winter I don't get at all."

02:51 <dammitwhoa> Maggie: "Did you ever listen to Stan Rogers?"

02:51 <VoxPVoxD> Stewart shakes his head. "Is he a country-western guy?"

02:57 <dammitwhoa> Maggie looks briefly, faintly, offended. "Stan Rogers is maybe the greatest Canadian folk singer who ever lived! And the song I sang to join up with Spring, Mary Ellen Carter, is his best. They're all pretty good, though."

02:57 <VoxPVoxD> Stewart: "You had to sing to join?"

02:59 <dammitwhoa> "They 'party you in'. I don't think it was a test of my singing ability or anything like that. I'm sure they let you in if you can't carry a tune. Anyway, not my point." She leans forward, conspiratorially. "The Mary Ellen Carter was a ship, see. During a gale, she struck a rock and went under near the shoreline. The ship's owners, they got the insurance payment and wrote the ship

02:59 <dammitwhoa> off. Twenty years of work, and it wasn't worth it to them to salvage her."

03:00 <dammitwhoa> "But the five men aboard? They decide they're going to bring her back up, on their own if they have to."

03:01 <dammitwhoa> "The first part of the song is just telling that story. But then, at the end, the singer tells you why they did it, and it's the part that everyone remembers, once they hear it."

03:02 <dammitwhoa> She clears her throat, and recites rather than singing, like poetry: "For we couldn't leave her there, you see, to crumble into scale / She'd saved our lives so many times, living through the gale / And the laughing, drunken rats who left her to a sorry grave? / They won't be laughing in another day. / And you, to whom adversity has dealt the final blow / with smiling bastards lying

03:02 <dammitwhoa> to you everywhere you go / Turn to, and put out all your strength of arm, and heart, and brain / And like the Mary Ellen Carter, rise again!"

03:03 <dammitwhoa> "Rise again! Rise again! Though your heart it be broken, and life about to end! No matter what you've lost, be it a home, a love, a fried! Like the Mary Ellen Carter, rise again!"

03:03 <VoxPVoxD> Wow.

03:04 <dammitwhoa> Maggie: "Anyhoo, that's what Spring feels like to me."

03:05 <VoxPVoxD> "That's really nice."

03:10 <dammitwhoa> Maggie: "I think so! It was either than or Autumn. I'm a go-straight-along kind of gal, so learning the, uh, squiggly twisty secrets of magic sounded like it'd be helpful... but Spring won out."

03:13 <VoxPVoxD> "They still teach you magic in Spring, though, right? Like everybody gets magic."

03:17 <dammitwhoa> Maggie: "Oh, probably. Deals and contracts and such. But you're the viziers, right? The spooky wizards." She waggles her fingers halloweenly.

03:21 <VoxPVoxD> Stewart: "It's a lot more boring than it sounds. Our magic's all bound up in these agreements, right? So it's very fiddly and technical. You're almost more like a lawyer than a wizard." Oh shit, the law firm. He just got it.

03:22 <dammitwhoa> Maggie: "Who's to say those aren't the same thing?"

03:24 <VoxPVoxD> Stewart: "Most lawyers' job is to make rich people even more money. Imagine if magic was like that."

03:26 <dammitwhoa> Maggie: "Most wizards used to work for sultans and kings and what have you. I'd guess it's different now."

03:30 <VoxPVoxD> Stewart: "It's all so small-time, too. I've been practicing magic for weeks but if I want to help someone the best I can do is still fix their computer."

03:31 <dammitwhoa> "Oooh!" She replies excitedly. "What can you do?"

03:33 <VoxPVoxD> Stewart: "Nickel and dime stuff. Bypass security, summon lesser elementals, become invisible, learn someone's deepest desire."

03:41 <dammitwhoa> Maggie: "Lesser what nows?"

03:42 <VoxPVoxD> Stewart looks around. "Do you think it's safe up here?"

03:43 <dammitwhoa> Maggie sighs: "They'd probably say it was rude if you actually did it here."

03:45 <VoxPVoxD> "Ugh, I'm not going all the way outside. Come over here to the corner." He'll park at a darkened corner booth in the still-empty upper level of the bar.

03:47 <dammitwhoa> Eagerly, Maggie'll follow Stewart over.

03:49 <VoxPVoxD> Stewart takes out a Bic lighter with the colored wrapping picked off and a pocketknife. "Do you know how to use one of these?" he says, pushing the lighter across the table to Maggie.

03:55 <dammitwhoa> Maggie: "Sure." She flicks it on experimentally.

04:02 <VoxPVoxD> The lighter ignites with an ordinary orange flame and an ordinary smell of butane. "Light it and leave it going." Stewart holds his right hand over the flame, inaudible muttering slowly growing until Maggie can make out the words. "...with steel until the battle's ended; with blood until the debt is paid." He pricks his palm with the pocketknife, and a trickle of blood

04:02 <VoxPVoxD> flows down, dripping directly onto the lighter's flame.

04:06 <VoxPVoxD> Autumn's mantle draws tighter and brighter around Stewart as the pact is sealed, and he plucks the flame from atop the lighter and stretches it like rubber between his fingers. The flame doesn't burn any brighter or hotter; no one's skin singes, the table doesn't smoke. But he sets down a creature the size of a large tarantula that moves with the flickering inconstancy of a flame

04:06 <VoxPVoxD> that won't be blown out.

04:08 <VoxPVoxD> Freed from Stewart's grip, it skitters across the table and comes to perch on a salt shaker between Stewart and Maggie.

04:11 <dammitwhoa> Maggie: "Awww, what a cute little fella! Hey there, little guy!"

04:12 <VoxPVoxD> The spider wriggles with apparent pleasure before tipping its head enough to lift its front two legs off the ground, which it proceeds to wave in the air as if it just didn't care.

04:24 <dammitwhoa> "Well, let me see here. I can't whistle up a fire-spider, but..." She stands, and eyes the wall nearby. She dances from foot to foot, then charges directly toward the wall! Just before reaching it, she lifts a leg to the wall and continues onward, jogging as if it were the same flat ground. Up the wall, onto the ceiling, until she reaches Stewart again - albeit upside down.

04:24 <VoxPVoxD> "Wondrous!"

04:30 <dammitwhoa> "Hup!" She does a little hop, and manages to to curl such that she lands, stumbling awkwardly, on her feet again.

04:30 <dammitwhoa> "Not much use in day-to-day life, but it's fun!"

05:11 <dammitwho> "Ooofah." She levers herself back down into the booth.

05:12 <VoxPVoxD> Stewart: "Being able to stick to walls gets you about a third of the way to being a superhero."

05:14 <dammitwho> "Bleah. Wonder how many of, uh, us have tried? You know, out of Summer?"

05:15 <VoxPVoxD> Stewart: "I don't know. It seems like a bad gig. The attention and all."

05:15 <VoxPVoxD> "Autumn was a little iffy about my job, and I'm only slightly famous, to a very specific group of people. I'm not going to be on the news or anything."

05:16 <dammitwho> Maggie: "Yeah, I wanted to ask about that. Is there a big audience in 'streaming'?"

05:26 <VoxPVoxD> Stewart: "Last night I peaked at about 4,000 concurrent viewers. On my Youtube channel I average about 200,000 views a week."

05:26 <VoxPVoxD> "It sounds like a lot but there are people with way bigger audiences."

05:27 <VoxPVoxD> "Enough people watch me that I can do it for a living, though. So that's good. I can put money back into the freehold."

05:38 <dammitwho> Maggie, eyes widening: "Two hundred thousand people! Golly." She ponders that astonishing number for a moment. "What sort of video games do you play?"

05:41 <VoxPVoxD> Stewart: "I play Path of Exile, mainly, but the seasonal release pattern means I can play a lot of different games. Fortnite, FF14, whatever's just come out..."

05:42 <dammitwho> Maggie: "Now, what are those about?"

05:43 <VoxPVoxD> Stewart: "They're all very different. Path of Exile is a modern reimagining of Diablo 2, the sequel to Diablo, which was itself a modern reimagining of games like Nethack and Moria."

05:44 <VoxPVoxD> The way he says it makes it SEEM like that should make sense...

05:48 <VoxPVoxD> He goes on: "Fortnite is like a fusion of Minecraft and PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, FF14 is an MMO like World of Warcraft but filtered through the aesthetics and motifs of the Final Fantasy series of Japanese RPGs."

05:50 <dammitwho> Maggie: "Stewart, please don't think me ungrateful for you explaining all this, but could we pretend for the moment that I have never seen or played a video game before?"

05:51 <dammitwho> "My next question to you is probably going to be 'what sort of video games should I play, and what computer should I get to play them on', by the way. Just keep that in your back pocket, there." She chuckles amiably.

05:51 <VoxPVoxD> Stewart looks sheepish. "Sorry."

05:54 <VoxPVoxD> "Path of Exile is a game where you make a character and fight monsters and pick up the items they drop, and use those items to fight stronger monsters, and pick up those items, and so on. But everything from the monsters to the items to the areas you move through are generated from scratch according to a specific set of rules, so every time you play is different and you can theoretically

05:54 <VoxPVoxD> keep playing forever. The system for making characters is *very* robust and complicated and while it takes a long time to learn, you can make it do a lot of interesting things."

05:55 <VoxPVoxD> "You sort of... the goal is to pull on a slot machine, basically, but you have to build a machine that will pull the slot machine however you want, as fast as you can make it go, as many times as you can stand. And it's totally free."

05:58 <dammitwho> Maggie: "Like building a wheat thresher out of scrap metal."

05:58 <VoxPVoxD> "Right! But instead of wheat it's orbs."

06:01 <dammitwho> "Ah! Orbs." She nods, as if that makes the whole thing make perfect sense.

06:02 <dammitwho> "And Fortnight," Stewart can just tell she's spelled it wrong verbally. "and what I assume is 'Final Fantasy' Fourteen?"

06:03 <VoxPVoxD> Stewart: "Fortnite is like... imagine being dropped from a plane on an island with a hundred screaming kids, and you all have to fight to the last one standing. You all start with nothing and have to scavenge for weapons and tools, and you use the terrain and build structures to protect yourself and slow the other players down. The whole time you're fighting and gathering and

06:03 <VoxPVoxD> building, the area of the island it's safe to be in is shrinking and shrinking, so eventually everyone will have to face off."

06:03 <VoxPVoxD> "Imagine in this scenario that you are also a screaming kid."

06:04 <dammitwho> Maggie: "I think I must be missing something. Do you have to be a screaming kid?"

06:05 <VoxPVoxD> Stewart: "You ever see one of those mugs that's like, You don't have to be crazy to work here... but it helps!?"

06:07 <dammitwho> "No."

06:07 <VoxPVoxD> Stewart: "You don't have to be a screaming kid to play Fortnite... but it helps!"

06:11 <dammitwho> Her face clears. "Ohhh, so the players are mostly actual children, just hooting and hollering and building forts and throwing... I don't know, computer grenades at each other?" She chuckles. "I guess kids never change. That's cute."

06:11 <VoxPVoxD> Stewart: "Right, exactly."

06:12 <VoxPVoxD> "Since kids like to play it, kids also like to watch it... it's mostly not my audience, but I think it's more fun than the other games in the same genre."

06:15 <VoxPVoxD> Stewart: "Now, Final Fantasy XIV is an MMO - that's an acronym, Em Em Oh - or a Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game. You make a character and play through a story where you explore places and talk to other characters and fight enemies. There's a big overworld where you can meet up and talk to other real-life players, and join them on their fights - big fights can take

06:15 <VoxPVoxD> 4 or 8 or even 24 players. And there's also PvP - that's player vs player - for people who want to compete directly against each other."

06:16 <dammitwho> "Hmm. You want another... whatcha got there. Soda? I'm gonna see if Amelia keeps any teabags behind the bar for the jittery types."

06:16 <VoxPVoxD> "Ginger ale, yeah. I don't really like alcohol."

06:17 <VoxPVoxD> "Thanks!"

06:21 <dammitwho> Doesn't like alcohol? Well, it takes all kinds. He's probably gotta be cool and calm for his video games, though.

06:22 <dammitwho> It takes a few minutes, but Maggie comes back with a can of ginger ale and a hot mug of tea. "Now then - what is Minecraft? Something to do with mining?"

06:26 <VoxPVoxD> Stewart: "Minecraft has environments like Path of Exile, randomized according to specific rules, that let it simulate all kinds of different environments. Except in Minecraft everything is rendered in this big cube tiles. Like a tree will be five cubes high, a hill will be a staircase four cubes tall, that sort of thing. You're dropped into one of these environments and you have

06:26 <VoxPVoxD> to fend for yourself."

06:27 <VoxPVoxD> "You start by punching a tree until you get wood. Then with the wood you make a workbench. Then you get more wood and use it on the workbench to make wooden tools. Then you use the wooden tools to start gathering stone. Then you make stone tools. And so on up the line. It has a day/night cycle and monsters come out at night, or underground. Anywhere it's dark. And those monsters exert

06:27 <VoxPVoxD> pressure on your building and your exploring."

06:27 <VoxPVoxD> "You have to build shelters, you have to smelt yourself armor, you have to catch food to eat to heal yourself if you get hurt..."

06:29 <VoxPVoxD> "If you're careful and you work at it you can build some really spectacular and impressive things."

06:30 <VoxPVoxD> "Also very popular with kids, it's like a" does she know Legos? "It's like a sandbox but you don't get any in your socks."

06:31 <dammitwho> She nods. "Alright, one more question before we get to the big one. What is the story in 'Final Fantasy' Fourteen like?"

06:36 <VoxPVoxD> Stewart: "The story of Final Fantasy XIV is of a hero rising from humble beginnings to become the most powerful fighter in the world, making and losing many friends and enemies along the way. It's pretty long and there's a lot going on, but it hits a lot of the same narrative notes other games in the series do. It has a kind of... primitivism to it. Business, religion, imperialism,

06:36 <VoxPVoxD> an overreliance on technology... these are all set in contrast to a sort of natural sacred earthly essence, a world-spirit who we have to champion and defend."

06:38 <VoxPVoxD> "So an empire invades, and starts putting the boot to local populations so they start praying to their gods. The power of their prayer causes the gods to take a kind of life, but it disrupts the natural flow of energy and it's tremendously destructive and dangerous and crushes people's wills. So you have to crush the gods. THEN you have to crush the empire that started it in the first

06:38 <VoxPVoxD> place. Then there's an expansion where you have to crush an organized religion, and then there's another expansion where you have to crush the empire again, and now there's a third expansion where you have to crush a holy empire."

06:39 <VoxPVoxD> "All of this to basically protect or heal the world at a spiritual level."

06:41 <dammitwho> She ponders. "Golly. So it's like one of those books where spacemen use crystals to throw things around with 'psionics', or like that Tolkien fella? I suppose that's why they call it 'fantasy'."

06:42 <VoxPVoxD> Stewart: "It is exactly those two things. Like Tolkien but with crystals and Japanese influence."

06:52 <VoxPVoxD> Stewart: "What do you like to do for fun?"

06:55 <dammitwho> "Fun... well, to tell you the truth, Stewart, I haven't been back long enough and my noggin is fuzzy enough that I'm not really sure. That's why I was asking you about the video games... something nice that I could spend an afternoon and a cup of tea with. Maybe something with puzzles or mysteries, that I have to use the old noodle?"

06:55 <dammitwho> She waves a hand. "Put it like this. Would you say I look like a Maggie? The, whatchacallit, Mask I mean."

06:56 <VoxPVoxD> Stewart: "That sounds like the kind of thing it'd be easy to take the wrong way so I don't think I would say it. But if someone else said it, I wouldn't argue."

07:01 <dammitwho> "No no no. It's just, that's what that sweet girl Samaritan said. She said I look like a Maggie or a Mags. We agreed not Margaret though. And I picked Bakehead, because that's a fireman, the guy who stokes the boilers, keeps the engine running. Before that..." She purses her lips. "You know, before. I had a different name. The hobs and such called me-"

07:02 <dammitwho> She makes a noise, like the click-click of white hot expanding metal and the hiss of escaping steam. Put to paper, it would be this: Kek'Tungsssha.

07:03 <dammitwho> Maggie: "But that's hard for you fleshy types to say, isn't it? So you can call me Maggie. And I'm trying to work out what it is I do for fun." She doesn't seem to have been made upset by this talk- she's as mom-amiable as ever.

07:04 <VoxPVoxD> Stewart flinches a bit at first but his expression smooths out as the enunciation goes on. "Maggie's good. It's nice to meet you, Maggie."

07:13 <dammitwho> "Cheers, Stewart." She raises her mug and then takes a sip.

07:13 <VoxPVoxD> "I have three game recommendations for you."

07:15 <VoxPVoxD> "They're mostly quite old or simple, I can build a really cheap PC for you that'll be able to play them all great, -and- hold all the movies and TV you want to steal."

07:15 <VoxPVoxD> He writes them down on a napkin in the kind of languid, flourishing hand you might expect from someone signing a royal proclamation.

07:20 <dammitwho> "You're a peach, Stewart. I don't know how me watching your streams makes you money, but I'll try to do that." She almost said 'I promise', but caught herself in time. The Wyrd takes such things seriously.

D> He writes them down on a napkin in the kind of languid, flourishing hand you might expect from someone signing a royal proclamation.

07:20 <dammitwho> "You're a peach, Stewart. I don't know how me watching your streams makes you money, but I'll try to do that." She almost said 'I promise', but caught herself in time. The Wyrd takes such things seriously.