I was a candle

Riding Immortal on the Seeking Road

Or: Seeking, an Oral History / Dying Historic on the Seeking Road / I Went North And All I Got Was This [REDACTED] / Six Years, Seven Candles / Dehumanising Myself And Facing To Bloodshed: A Memoir / I’m a Candle, And So Can You!

I did it. I went the whole way NORTH. All of it.

This has been a long, long time in coming; I started playing this game six entire years ago, in 2010, and started Seeking in mid-2012; late August, I think, though the exact date has been lost to time. I figured, as someone who’s been around for most of the history of Seeking, it’d be cool to write up an account of everything that’s happened with this weird obscure punishing side-story which attracts a far bigger crowd than anyone would ever expect. Buckle up for about four years worth of Instances and Happenstances; I can’t promise it’ll be earthshattering, but hopefully it’ll be entertaining, or at least informative. There’s even an origin story or four.

You may also enjoy NiteBrite’s autobiography from a while ago, which covers a lot of similar ground.

(This is terribly long, and Tumblr has played merry hell with the formatting. Some of my images don’t seem to want to port over, too. If you want to read the original, it’s here. The formatting’s mangled there, too, but in a way that adds character. There is also a gif of a goat getting owned, so it’s objectively superior.)

The Early Days

It is begun, it is begun, it is begun…

I started Seeking because I was bored. It was a thing to do, I was approaching the content boundary, and it seemed neat. Why not? There’s not particularly much of interest to say about this, really; at the time, the content boundary was Stains, Scars and Chains, with nary a whiff of a Candle. You pretty much drew cards and injured yourself horribly slowly, but surely, over the span of about two months; the biggest roadblock was probably getting Starveling Cats, needed to stain your soul. The community was much smaller back then, and the cat economy much reduced. I got my cats by asking politely on an unofficial spinoff forum, called Inquisitive Friends; the website went down years ago, but it does hold some significance to this tale. More on them later. At the time, the whole of Seeking really was just extracurricular cardflipping where you lost some stats or got some menaces now and then.

Marsh-Mired

Mr Eaten would like to send you a dream of long-ago injustice

So, by October, I’d finished Staining, Scarring and Chaining myself and had hit SMEN 8. I’d mostly run out of things to do, having finished even the thing people turn to in boredom-induced desperation. A trip to Polythreme was in order, I decided, because I’d never actually picked up an Unfinished Hat.

I still don’t have one.

Halfway through the zee-journey, I just kind of got bored and wandered off. A bit of context; back then, you had 10 actions in your candle, 20 if you were an Exceptional Friend. It took much longer to get anything done, and zee-journeys were about twice as long as they are now to boot (especially to Polythreme). Anyway, I didn’t touch the game for about a month.

On a rainy day, while waiting for a bus, I kind of absentmindedly checked Twitter on my trashy tiny mobile phone, only to discover something fairly startling.

Hmm. (Context, again; back in the day, you could get notifications through Twitter through the slightly janky medium of a direct message to yourself. I don’t think this happens any more.)

As you can imagine, I logged onto FL with a renewed fervour, and very slowly started making my way back from the Sea of Voices. It took me until the next day entirely to make it back to London, where I was presented with A Dream of Dark Water. You may recognise that card as the current source of Weeping Scars; back then, though, it was the gateway to Saint Arthur’s Candle, and an entirely unexpected addition. Playing the Dream of Dark Water netted you a level of Marsh-Mired in Dreams of Sustenance. This quality tracked your progress on gaining St Arthur’s Candle.

So, fairly spooky and ominous all in all. It’s not every day you get an invitation from Mr Eaten, after all. There were quite a few other people in the same boat; there was a forum thread for anyone experiencing the same thing. You can read it if you want, but not all that much remains; posts started being edited by an emptiness, turned into ominous Eaten-esque snippets devoid of any information. Anyway, we eventually figured out that anyone who was Scarred, Stained and Chained got the Mr Eaten action (I genuinely cannot remember if it was an actual Social Action or something Living Story-esque).

Mr Eaten’s Twitter actually made a tweet for the first time in the history of ever around this time. That was pretty exciting.

The Bone Candle

Which is first? Saint Arthur’s candle. The bone candle.

Soon after, a new card started appearing in the Opportunity Deck, the road to the first candle, St Arthur’s. The core of it; send social actions to other people at the cost of a Searing Enigma and some other expensive gubbin- if they accepted, they’d start Seeking and you’d get a level of Marsh Mired. If they didn’t… welp, guess you wasted an Enigma. Enigma sources were fairly scarce back then; I ended up doing the Affair of the Box again to get some, and the rest came from the Fidgeting Writer. Heists were added like two weeks after St Arthur’s Candle was introduced, but I don’t think anyone really appreciated them as a source of Enigmas at the time, and they ate up the cards you needed to be drawing anyway. The Truthbreaker Turbine did not exist.

Free of the Name didn’t actually exist at first, so I got a leg-up by making some alts and betraying them a couple times. Didn’t last long, though; Free of the Name was added basically specifically to curtail this kind of behaviour. Still, I blazed a brief trail to the front of the pack, discovering fairly swiftly that progressing in this new Seeking World got you some menace cards for your trouble; these cards still exist, as Knight of Feasts and Knave of Regrets. I actually managed to run into an unfinished card, simply called TODO, which just gave me some Wounds and Nightmares. Apparently three menace cards was considered too harsh, but Alexis forgot to lock the unfinished third one.

Communication on the official forums was often tricky, with the emptiness, as a roaring lion, walking around Seekers, whom it may devour. This is where the Inquisitive Friends forum came in; as it was free of the emptiness’ dread glare, posting was free and easy. I was induced into the sacred mystery of a Seeking Document, which still exists to this day; you may find it in the silence between the tick and the tock of a grandfather clock. It’s relatively unimportant to the grand scheme of things, though, only that it existed as a grand reservoir for the efforts of many Seekers, a secret holy bonfire of community spirit, unbowed and unbroken. I think it was probably fairly obvious that people were collaborating to record all this content, but nevertheless it was kept in utmost secret.

A small anecdote; I complained lightly on the forums about getting poor luck with card draws, and then when I tabbed back over to the game I had an unexpected St Arthur’s Candle card right there and then. This was back before I was an individual of any real note, before Rats, before any of that. I don’t know if anyone else got this, but it was very cool. 

St Beau and Saint-Arthur

“I seem to ‘ave mislaid me sense of yoomour. I 'ad it a moment ago, I swear. Just before you started talkin’ out of yer arse.”

So, anyone who progressed far enough and betrayed seven people (after waiting for some bugs to be repaired such as the game crashing if you tried to open the St Arthur’s Candle card after your third betrayal) got their Candle, losing 20 whole levels of Dangerous and Persuasive in the bargain. Back then, stats were only 50CP a level, but it was still a pretty hefty loss; before that, the roughest thing was probably losing 500CP of all four stats after getting 7 Scars, Stains and Chains. Anyone who had St Arthur’s Candle quickly noticed a new card showing up in their deck, for St Beau’s Candle. This took you to the wonderful world of the Nightmare Carnival, where the goal was to raise your Nightmares to exactly 7 by using weird messed up versions of the carnival storylets, where tickets cost an awful lot more than usual.

I was one of the first to go through the Carnival, though I was lagging a little bit behind the cutting edge. I noticed that one option in particular let you raise Reputation: Abomination, a quality I’d picked up from poking at the menace cards I mentioned earlier, so I mostly stuck with it. At the time, Reputation: Abomination was a linear quality, like Boxful of Intrigue, so I gained 1 whole level every time I played it. It has since become Pyramidal, using changepoints like most other qualities, so levelling it has become much slower; in that Carnival tent, I gained a worse reputation than any player today could ever hope to accomplish.

At the end of the carnival, there’s a brief conversation with Mrs. Plenty, during which you get the opportunity to justify to her exactly why you’re bothering with Seeking in the first place. I went for the option I was pretty sure nobody else would: It’s cheaper than a divorce. Her response is the quote at the head of this section.

For the candle, I gave up all my Connections; I noticed it didn’t actually eat Connected: Docks, so I bug reported that, just to be dutiful. The other option required you to give up all your Lodgings, though there was a bug that stopped it from consuming Bazaar lodgings. That bug went unreported for quite a while…

Still, the “no connections ever at any time” doctrine for efficient opportunity deck usage was born that day; I noticed that it was much easier to get at the “good” cards with no connections at all, since I didn’t have to sift through massive piles of conflict cards. Sometimes strategies come from strange places.

Anyway, I promised an origin story, so here it is; at around this same time, the secret Mind of the Long Dead God area was discovered, basically by accident. I created my Tumblr initially just as a throwaway to Spread the Word of its discovery, since it was neat and I knew there was some form of Tumblr FL community. I wasn’t entirely satisfied with just making one post ever, though, so I figured I might as well do something else, and wrote up an entire guide to Seeking; at least partially in the hopes that I might encourage some people into letting themselves be betrayed, helping others towards St Arthur’s Candle. So I, uh, did that; I don’t really know if it had any major positive effect or anything, since I was already done with betrayals. I tried, at least!

A Ratty Interlude

“You silly bugger. I 'ope you like your candle. Don’t let the rats eat it.”

After this, things were fairly quiet on the Seeking front for a while. Seekers collaborated, secretly and diligently, to compile the entire text of the Carnival with all its branches. We watched, we waited, we consumed. The very first lacre-fall happened, and the Twelve Days of Sacksmas, and it was good and cool. Mr Eaten was there, and we got a glimpse into his motives and learned his Name for the first time.

2013 happened, very suddenly; this was the Year in which it All Happened. But we’ll get there later.

Here is another origin story; how exactly the rat business got started. I was bored (again), and so to amuse myself I decided to bother Alexis on Twitter, asking him how many rats I’d have to send him to get news of a SMEN or Ambition update. This was in, like, January or so. His response, which may some day be written in letters of fire above the ruins of Proto Neo London, was “*what is the number*, that’s always the question”; so, of course, I set out to send as many rats as I possibly could.

In March, towards the end of the Feast of the Exceptional Rose, a vast quantity of rats suddenly appeared in my inventory, along with a message on Twitter from the Bazaar. (this whole incident has since been immortalised on tvtropes, I think. But this is my historical account, so I’m including it anyway)

As it happens, I’d basically run out of rats at the time. Most people would nod sagely at this and then continue on with their business, rat-joke forgotten; but not I. This just renewed my vigour for ratsending, and I vowed to continue sending rats until I had repaid the entire 50k rat-debt, plus interest.

This took me a while.

The Price of Cerise

There is that ancient bargain, before the Shame was locked in the Mountain (if it ever was), before the waters were divided (if they were ever whole).

Besides rat nonsense, not much happened from January to about March related to Seeking. (Not to say nothing happened, of course, but recording the entire history of FL is another endeavour entirely).

Knife and Candle began to claw its way out of the mists; access was initially given to anyone who solved the Mirrorcatch Box puzzle, which you can read about here. I was among the first twenty or so to get it, and managed to kick off some forums drama by hinting a bit too liberally at the solution on the Inquisitive Friends forums; but that’s tangential and, frankly, inconsequential. My Mirrorcatch Box was stolen instantly, anyway.

Anyway, Knife and Candle came back. It was a wild and roaring time, with rules and mechanics changing on a near-daily basis, new rewards and methods of murder being included on a weekly basis, occasional leaderboard announcements, and so on, and so forth. I managed to get a fair amount of usage out of my blog by releasing a weekly K&C changelog; there was often quite a lot to talk about.

It was a bit of a lark, to say the least. I somehow managed to get involved with not one but two separate gangs of Candleers, bonded together by a mutual pact of non-aggression. I leaked information wantonly from both sides; Forms, plans, vulnerabilities… basically purely for the hell of it. It was, as I say, a bit of a lark, and an extremely wild time. I swear I’m not actually a chronic backstabber.

Still, it wasn’t fun and games for long; a new, ridiculously expensive reward showed up, requiring 77 Silver Prize Tokens; the Waxwail Knife. Shortly thereafter, an option appeared on the Restitution menace card, requiring 77 Iron Knife Tokens; the price of St Cerise’s Candle. The cap of 50 Iron Knife Tokens was unknown at the time, so I basically merrily continued stabbing people and getting medals. I recall saying to Alexis on Twitter “77 Iron Knife Tokens is a bit of a pain, but at least it doesn’t require that Waxwail Knife!”

Shortly after that, an option to trade a Waxwail Knife for 77 Iron Knife Tokens showed up, and I rammed straight into the cap of 50 Tokens. Getting the knife would take some serious doing, and the plot to achieve it was fairly frickin’ convoluted; fortunately, I’ve already written about it. I actually streamed the entire Waxwail tradein and Candle acquisition for my co-conspirators, which was probably the most second most exciting livestream of Fallen London ever. Not the most exciting?, you ask, incredulously; that one comes later on.

Something I did neglect to mention was that Mr Eaten’s Twitter got in on this, too; it tweeted out a list of people who were vulnerable to the Prize Token theft option (i.e. anyone who had St Arthur’s Candle and Silver Prize Tokens); about 31 people in all, I think. Those tweets have since been removed, but they did exist.

The candle didn’t have a description until about four or five months after I obtained it. It was just entirely blank when moused over in my inventory. Still, the text when obtaining it had left an impression on me; I didn’t really want to tell a soul I had the candle, lest some option to steal it present itself. None ever came, but I was worried. An echo of this appears later on, but nothing comes of that, either.

A whole two weeks after I got the Candle, the price for a Waxwail dropped to 44 Prize Tokens, making things much easier. True fact; you got a free Elemental Secret with your Waxwail Knife when it cost 77 Tokens.

Rats, Vol II

jellyfish

It’s quite a while before the next SMEN update, but when things start happening, they really start happening. Still, the resolution of my rat tale happens somewhere during the summer; I finally manage to send Alexis 77777 rats. Admittedly, the numbers were fudged quite a bit, because I’m fairly sure I lost count at least twice and also I counted rats sent through the Restitution card as 1000, even though only 100 ever make it to the recipient. The 77 came from Scuttering Squad boxes, which I arbitrarily decided contained exactly 11 ratty saboteurs, so that’s canon now. I made sure to include some form of completely daft message with every rat parcel I sent, absolutely all of which have hopefully been lost to time itself.

Anyway, to cap off the 77777th ratsending, I wrote an absolutely massive rat post, which has since been described by Alexis as “about 7000 words of liquid insomnia”. This is basically accurate, though it’s actually closer to 3000 words.

I was, ostensibly, trying to test the character limit of the FL message box (it is, for the record, much much less than 15000 characters), but, mostly, I just got carried away. This marked the end of ratsending for quite a while, because I figured he deserved a break, and I didn’t want to disrupt the perfect sanctity of a notional 77777 rats sent.

Some months later, I went on to create Rat Sending Simulator, partially to get to grips with the underlying wiring behind Storynexus (and so, by extension, Fallen London), and partially for lols. It originally ended at the Rat King crowning, and was an excuse for me to send people copies of Bad Rats. (check out this screenshot I stole from someone else) It had very little actual content; nowadays, it’s much larger and more terrifying.

Arthur II, and the Sun

You ascend into the light and are gone.

In May or thereabouts, St Arthur’s Candle was reworked a bit; basically, it became much more like it is now, with the ability to betray Spouses and Midnight Matriarchs rather than other players. I wasn’t really involved much with this, being well past Arthur at the time it was reworked, but it bears bringing up. The rework was slightly buggy at first, though; there was at least one report of someone’s Midnight Matriarch quality being set to -1, somehow, so they had to buy 2 Matriarchs from the Bazaar just to have a net total of 1.

I think, during the “dead period” between Cerise and Destin, all three of the infamous Scorched by the Sun incidents occurred. The Nightmare Carnival’s Beneath the Neath storylet offered you the opportunity to spend 50 Fate to have your character deleted; except, well, the character deletion didn’t actually work. You lost access to your Storynexus friends list from within FL itself, but that’s pretty much it. Anyway, you may already be aware, three entire people- Mac Trilby, NiteBrite and Victor Gulenko - decided to play that option, and at least one of them bug reported the fact that they didn’t actually experience any lasting harm from the option. Seekers, eh. The Scorched by the Sun quality was awarded to those three absolute madmen for their services to self-destruction.

Destin-y

This is how Drownies, you think, and then the thought is lost in a rush of salt.

Fast forward to Hallowmas. Nothing really Seekery has happened for quite a while; Emptiness ate some posts, Mr Eaten sent out some waves of Marsh-Miring, about once a month. Then, suddenly, a new seasonal event is announced! Everyone is excited.

Bearers of St Cerise’s Candle especially; at this point, there were quite a few of them, and the candles were not kept quite so secret. You see, an option requiring a Cerise had appeared on the seasonal event storylet; bizarrely, with variable difficulty. You could get odds somewhere between 4% and 11% of succeeding on it, with the odds recalculating on every refresh. It didn’t do anything particularly exciting on its own, though; you could get Night-Whispers out of it at the cost of Watchful and a chunk of menace, but that’s it. Still, it heralded Change; change was both terrifying and exciting in equal measure. An option also opened which allowed Seekers to sell their soul; anyone who did so and then went to the Forgotten Quarter was in for a wild time, as the devils get very upset and forcibly jam your soul back into you, making you go extremely mad and extremely dead (all the way to menace level 14) and also lose all your Infernal items and also all your Echoes.

Change, when it came, was indeed terrifying and exciting. The first Hallowmas marked the introduction of Destinies as a concept; I lunged upon them as soon as they opened, reduced to using terrible bus wifi on my morning commute to university just so I could see what the heck was going on. Here’s exactly what the heck was going on; I merrily chopped off my own arm and was rewarded with St Destin’s Candle and the Torment Destiny, which gave -3 to all stats. I still have Torment, to this day; I could easily have removed it, but that wouldn’t be very Seekery of me. Now that I’ve gone North, Torment is all that remains.

The Year Where It Happened

Time. I used to think it was a wheel. The Fingerkings say it’s a flame. Coolest at its heart. But wildest at its edges.

After St Destin’s Candle, Seeking started to get very, very busy indeed. This was late October; Seeking was put on hiatus in December. While the rest of the year was defined by large gaps between SMEN content, after Destin was added, things happened practically on a weekly basis. Plenty of other things happened around or before this, too, like the Sunless Sea Kickstarter and the creation of the FL IRC channel. The second half of 2013 was a bustling time to be an active FL player, especially a Seeker. Chronological ordering of things may start to get hazy from this point on, as it’s tricky to remember (a ton of stuff happened) and it’s rather hard to dig up some records, since many threads were basically nuked from orbit. So; any incidents listed from now on up until Winking Isle may not be in precise order, but you’ll get the gist of it. Treachery of Clocks???

The Many Roads to Destin

Damned by deed and damned by destiny. Drowned and driven. Debased. In the depths.

The first source of St Destin’s Candle was Destinies, but the item description promised seven sources in total. In the end, I think maybe four or five were actually implemented. Someone on IRC jokingly suggested, I think in a support ticket, that the description should get longer every time a source was added. This suggestion was actually taken onboard; the candle’s description increased in size with every source added. I think the final description was something like;

This is the candle that does not yet exist. There will be seven distinct ways to obtain it. Each is worse than the last. This is the candle that does not yet exist. There will be seven distinct ways to obtain it. Each is worse than the last. This is the candle that does not yet exist. There will be seven distinct ways to obtain it. Each is worse than the last. This is the candle that does not yet exist. There will be seven distinct ways to obtain it. Each is worse than the last. Some things will not come to pass.

The first source, Destinies, you already know of.

The second came shortly afterwards; during Confessions at Hallowmas, the follow-up event to the Destiny business in early November. The initial Confession-sending period had a Seekers-only Confession option; this did absolutely nothing but tank both parties’ stats by a full level, while implying that only one person would ever actually complete the Search

The path you are set on is narrow as cheesewire. No room for two.

During the second phase, when Confessions could be betrayed or kept secret, an actually functional option showed up; it would allow you to share St Destin’s Candle with someone who had trusted you, at the cost of half your stats, as long as you had at least 77 levels in all four. The receiver would lose 5 levels of all stats, as well as half their second chances.

One of NiteBrite’s self-inflicted goals was to send out as many St Destin’s Candles as possible. This was achieved through a little bit of trickery; Tier 3 Professions had just been released, but they were slightly buggy, and you could manage to have several of their Profession items at once. This made the 77-stat requirement easier, and NiteBrite managed to send out a total of 9 candles; two on an alt, and seven on their main. Personally, I didn’t actually send anyone a St Destin’s Candle at all; too fond of “actually having stats”. Though old-Seeking had plenty of savage stat loss, I somehow managed to escape the worst of it.

The third source required you to forsake your Notability and Connected: Society, as long as you had 7 Notability, 7 Making Waves, 77 Connected: Society. Back in the day, Notability was much, much harder; you lost 1 point per week, no matter what, and you weren’t guaranteed to gain a level from the Amanuensis, either. Gaining Notability required you to succeed at a Making Waves challenge (difficulty 20 + 4*Notability - BDR; i.e. the same as the current unlock requirements). Success would zero your Making Waves and give you 1 Notability; failure would halve your Making Waves. Nobody really liked Notability, it was awful and terrible just to maintain it, never mind make forward progress. Getting to 7 Notability was no easy task, though a few people managed it eventually.

The fourth source was Winking Isle. More on that place later.

The repetitions in the description indicated a fifth source which was never actually found, if I recall correctly. In any case, Sources 6 and 7 weren’t implemented before the hiatus. Even though each source was supposed to be worse than the last, I can’t help but feel the first was the most savage by far. Notability may last a week, but Torment is for life.

A Failure to Communicate

Just an aside about the Emptiness’ post-manipulation, since it hit a fever pitch at around this time. Basically any significant discussion of current Seeking content was likely to be deleted or edited into ominous snippets which would bear little resemblance to the original content of the post, except when Alexis was feeling sassy. As mentioned above, some threads basically got totally wiped out, all their posts replaced with the same sentence over and over again and their titles changed to something ominous. Additionally, some word filters were put in place, which would instantly delete your post without warning if triggered; I don’t really remember many of the banned words, but at least one of them was literally just the number 7. Some of the censored words are hidden in this crossword.

This was, to be honest, a bit far, and some people protested that it was unfair. Alexis basically agreed, and admitted that the whole emptiness thing was eating up more time than it probably should have, so the forums became a free haven for discussion once more, mostly.

Gawain, The Hell Candle

You will never achieve this candle, and even if you were to do so, you would lose the very head from your shoulders.

I will preface this segment by making something very clear; I got owned. I got super owned. Really, ultra super wonderful owned.

As you may recall earlier, I sent Alexis seven Boxes of Saboteurs to round my rat total up to 77777. These lay unopened for a very, very long time; then, one day, for no real reason, he opened all seven at once. This was a fairly big surprise, but not as surprising as the two social actions which came after.

As you can imagine, I freaked the heck out at this. For all I knew, this was in all full seriousness an actual Thing that was Happening. I turned to the IRC channel for advice, getting a range of responses varying between “do nothing” and “do everything”. I made exasperated noises on Twitter, and Alexis said I had until midnight to do something about them, or they’d be withdrawn. I may have panicked slightly.

So, I resolved to set up a livestream so that the general public could watch me in my death throes. The order of operations I decided on was to accept the Candlecurious, then the Gawain, since if there was a correct order that would hopefully leave me with no candles except Gawain’s. The world waited with bated breath as I accepted the Candlecurious…

The game locked up for almost a solid minute.

I accepted the Gawain’s Candle, barely even taking the time to register the acceptance message for the Candlecurious. The game locked up a little bit again, but not for very long in comparison.

The results of these social actions were not what I expected.

Still, Alexis chimed in over Twitter, telling me to look at the maximum length of a living story in Storynexus; it had previously been one week, but new options all the way up to 4 weeks had been added. So, I thought, the lagspike when accepting the Candlecurious had been because this was weird new tech, and I was actually subscribed to a living story, for realsies. For the next 4 weeks, I resolved not to make any significant progress in Seeking, lest something terrible happen. So, even though at one point I had enough Searing Enigmas to play the Cyriac option, I dallied, waiting for my four week timer to pass, just to make sure.

In case you’re wondering, absolutely nothing happened. Nothing at all. The entire thing was a giant prank, and I fell for it, hook, line and sinker, like a goldfish. By the time the four-week timer had run out, Seeking was already being locked away and put in stasis.

Hithes, Trithes, Mercenaries, Lizards

You soaked your hair with tears and dressed in white. Your enemy found you at the seeking-place. You fought. Both lost blood. One lost fire.

Around the same time as all of the above was happening, some new options appeared on the Restitution opportunity card; competitive social actions, allowing for the transfer of Searing Enigmas.

Hithes required and transferred seven Enigmas; trithes, three. They required both parties have Reputation: Abomination. Hithes needed 100 Dangerous, Trithes 150; sending a request reduced Dangerous somewhat. Hithes gave both participants about 7cp of all four menaces; this is important, keep it in mind.

So, with hithes and trithes, the cutting-edge Seekers had a way to transfer Enigmas willingly or steal them from the unwilling. The exact metric used was uncertain, though we were fairly sure it was Dangerous. At some point, we noticed Alexis was a valid target for Hithing/Trithing, and that’s when things started to get a bit silly.

My memories of this are actually a bit foggy, but a Twitter snapshot of the event exists here.

Nitebrite and I had a sort of mock-feud going on based on relative successes/fails at enigma transfer through hithing. At some point, Alexis got dragged into this, but he hoovered up Enigmas like the research team for the world’s toughest cryptic crossword. Many people tried to rob him of his Enigmas, but few succeeded. I poisoned him, which he responded to by trithing the bejesus out of me. After this, he claimed to have de-geared, so I boldly went forth and tried to get my enigmas back. I failed, I succeeded; which is to say, I didn’t get my enigmas back at all, but I did manage to murder him, drive him mad and send him to prison simultaneously. This is, in its own way, a triumph, even if he just devhaxed his way out.

The resolution of all this; some people got social actions to accept Primeval Instruments of Plated Vengeance (actually lizards); NiteBrite managed to get most of the Enigmas back from Alexis; some people who asked politely got Boxes of Exploding Misery, containing enigmas or lizards, depending on how Alexis was feeling. Personally, I got another goddamn Candlecurious, though the text was different, indicating that it actually contained Enigmas (7, in fact). In the end, I think my enigma-count mostly just equilibrated; whatever I didn’t get back ended up in NiteBrite’s coffers. Some other people got Boxes of Exploding Misery that just contained lizards.

.

This was not the only menacing social action of its day. Some time before this, I woke up in the morning and checked FL to discover I’d been hit by Alexis with a social action I’d never seen before, which gave me approximately 1 frick-tonne of Nightmares, as well as decreasing my Reputation: Abomination. I was mildly bemused, but didn’t think much of it. At about the same time, emptiness posted a big list of Seeker usernames on the forums, with no real explanation; Mr Eaten’s Twitter posted a link to this list, too.

A few days later, I got hit with it again, this time by an absolute stranger. I sent them a confused letter, and discovered this was due to a new option in the Royal Bethlehem. Anyone could play this action, Seeker or no, and it allowed them to harass anyone with an Abominable Reputation and give them hella Nightmares in exchange for Memories of Light and a fairly sizeable Nightmares drop.

I was mercenary-contracted a few times while the option existed. Not, it has to be said, particularly often, but every now and then I’d suddenly get like six levels of Nightmares out of nowhere. The joys of being a Seeker.

Cyriac

Seek, and ye shall find.

On November 21st, Mr Eaten’s Twitter account woke up from a brief hibernation to produce a single-word Tweet; “Cyriac”. The assembled armies of the forum and IRC started theorising frantically to work out what the hell he was on about; the solution was found fairly quickly. A branch on the God’s Editors card appeared, requiring 77 Searing Enigmas and SMEN 7, and bearing a Warning.

What exactly passed for the right quantity of Proscribed Material? Nobody really had any idea, though most guesses involved varying amounts of sevens. Some sharp-eyed Seekers noticed some text had been added to an option one one of the Seeking menace cards, though.

For I was hungry, and I ate you. I was thirsty, and I drank you.

This pointed at a passage of St Matthew… or, more precisely, two different passages of St Matthew; 25:35 and 25:42. They were both strong guesses, but I was fairly convinced that 25:35 was the right one, for reasons I no longer remember. My plan was to amass 77 Enigmas, using the new (at the time) Truthbreaker Turbine and Hithes, then try playing the branch. If it turned out I didn’t have the right number of Material, I could just pop over to the Bazaar tab and buy/sell some to see if I could get the right answer. At around that same time, though, Proscribed Material’s price in the Bazaar jumped from 0.08e/unit to 1.01e/unit. This was a bit rude, and it made some people fairly antsy as it was pretty much a barb directed at Seekers which had a knock-on effect on the rest of the playerbase, but the change has persisted to this day.

In the end, I never got around to playing this branch, for reasons which I’ll go into a bit later on. Maybe my strategy would even have worked, or maybe not; the Cyriac content does still exist in New-Seeking, but it may well have been changed since then as part of the rework (At the very least it costs only 7 Enigmas, rather than 77).

Winking Isle

What a blasted, desperate speck. What a stony, hopeless reach of nothing.

In December, the Acquaintance/Influence system was added, introducing the Calling Card social action to the game. One brave and/or foolish soul, Alexander Feld, decided to send a card to none other than Mr Eaten. This began the chain of stories that led to the downfall of the old Seeking order. How did that happen? Well, it’s a long story; a story I pretty much only observed from the sidelines, to be honest (remember the Candlecurious!). If you’d like to read the account of the person actually at the heart of it all, it’s here. I’ll probably be using a lot of the same screenshots, if anything.

A minor anecdote of note, though; I had similar plans to send Mr Eaten a calling card, but was hamstrung by my only internet access being shoddy public transport wifi, which cut out on me before I could do anything. The Fates willed against it, I suppose.

Anyhow, the introduction of the calling card into the ecosystem caused no small amount of panic and excitement. There was a bit of a lull before anything happened, though, because, as you can see, accepting the card was ridiculously harmful. These effects only applied to the very first introduction of the Calling Card into the world; future card transfers didn’t touch stats or give menaces at all. There were other complications, though, but we’ll get there.

If you want an absolute recap of all Winking Isle had to offer, I recommend clicking that link above, as it is fairly comprehensive. The isle was basically being worked on as it was being explored, so there was a fairly tangible sense that things needed to be hurried along.  

At its core, the island worked like this; you could spend 10 actions to try a 50/50 luck check which would either increase or decrease your Fasting and Meditating quality by some amount. Certain rare items could be thrown down the well for guaranteed progress, occasionally with a lessened action cost. If you managed to get to 77 Fasting and Meditating, you could claim a candle. You could get St Destin’s, at the cost of half your stats; St Cerise, at the cost of St Destin’s; or St Fortigan’s, at the cost of both Destin and Cerise.

A further wrinkle was quickly introduced in the form of menaces; the Fast and Meditate option initially had no negative effects, but before long it was adjusted to dish out Nightmares and Wounds, fail or succeed. If your Nightmares or Wounds grew too high, you became unable to do anything. The intended method of progression, then, was probably that you’d go to the island, try your luck at Fasting and Meditating, return before your menaces grew too great, then repeat.

Things didn’t exactly go to plan, though. The playerbase rallied forth, bearing weapons against the cruelty of the Isle; cheery, festive weapons. Christmas Cards, in fact. They could be sent anywhere, with no restrictions on location, so they could be used to salve the menaces of anyone on Winking Isle. This allowed for longer stays and faster progress than possibly intended, but I don’t think this was a particularly glaring design flaw or anything; Christmas Cards and Winking Isle were introduced at practically the same time, so it may well have even been intentional. The mental image of a beleaguered postman hauling a giant, sodden sack of cheery festive mail all the way to the desolate hellish Winking Isle is a pretty great one, though; if I hadn’t already come up with Nuncio at this point, that probably would have been a big inspiration for it.

Anyhow, Alexander Feld progressed through the island, throwing the dice on Fasting and Meditating to try and get the full set of required candles. The menaces weren’t the only thing that changed along the way; the action to travel from Wolfstack Docks to the Isle

Impatience started to mount at the slow progress; Feld received at least some Fate to speed things along. Fortunately nobody got too discourteous, but there was certainly some amount of fear that Winking Isle, and everything that came with it, would be entirely temporary, and that we’d have to hurry through things as quickly as possible. All the “Seekers are enemies” fluff from the social actions only served to add fuel to this fire.

There was a waiting list drawn up, with priority based on the number of candles and traitor-status; if you’d ever betrayed someone using the Prize Token-theft, you were placed lower on the list. Of course, I did all my betraying through proxies, so I was basically top of the leaderboard; but I deferred my position to NiteBrite, so I could work on the Cyriac option (and I was still worried about Candlecurious, of course).

Alexander Feld was reassured that the arts and armies of the Seeker playerbase could help him get a Cerise fairly easily in London, so he resolved to leave shortly after obtaining St Fortigan’s Candle. This happened on the 9th of December, 2013; a Monday. By my reckoning, the Candlecurious, if it truly existed, would fire off on Friday night, and then I could go do the Cyriac option and see what lay behind it.

NiteBrite got the calling card and went to the island to poke around. I went to bed early, but I saw a post on the forums; something about losing all progress to a Nightmares menace storylet after spending lots of Fate and even a Veils-Velvet. According to people on IRC at the time, he was fairly devastated at getting owned that harshly (and unexpectedly, as Feld hadn’t run into the Nightmares menace storylet) by the Island. I got a fairly incomprehensible PM, which should probably accurately convey the atmosphere of the situation.

I didn’t get this until the next morning, because I’d just seen his post while checking the forums from my phone, in bed. While I slept, things escalated even further.

It was discovered that the card duplicated itself when sending; instead of removing 1 card from the sender, it gave 1 card instead. This sort of viral propagation was fairly clearly buggy, but with St Destin’s Candle using a similar system only a few weeks before, it may have seemed plausibly intentional. I think about six whole people ended up on the island at once, with some quantities of Fate bouncing around to complicate matters.

In the morning, the duplicate cards were removed; NiteBrite was left with the only Mr Eaten’s Calling Cards, and anyone on the island got shunted into the Mirror-Marches. Things turned from bad to worse, though; someone threatened to sue over the Fate they’d spent on the island; it quickly emerged that they’d never been on the island in the first place. Still, there was still a fair amount of tension even after that, involving complications with Fate refunds or some such; eventually, Alexis decided the best thing to do was just to freeze up all the content and come back to it at some later stage. At the time, it seemed like the hiatus might have lasted only a few months or so… but, well, you know how that worked out.

I accepted NiteBrite’s card invitation a few days after things died down. It did nothing except give NiteBrite another card, for some reason.

In the end, the Cyriac option locked before I could ever play it. The Candlecurious was, of course, a joke. If you’d like to read further into this whole thing, the final page of the Mr Eaten discussion thread has plenty to read, as well as Alexis’ official blogpost about the incident.

The First Ratmas

<&Spacemarine9> this is my revenge for candlecurious
<&Spacemarine9> invoking the playerbase to fling rats

Chronologically, this actually takes place about midway through the Big Well Incident, but that’d be tricky to convey without making things very messy. Anyway, I kind of arbitrarily decided to make the 7th of December an officially unofficial rat-based holiday, to cap off a year filled with rats and ratsending and Rat Sending Simulation. Also, as the quote above indicates, I wanted to get back at Alexis for causing my heart to miss no less than 77 consecutive beats with the Candlecurious business.

So, off I went, writing up a big forum thread about rats, proclaiming far and wide (i.e. IRC, Tumblr and the Skype group that I haven’t mentioned at all in this history) that all and sundry should come and send Alexis rats on a string, as is tradition, because Ratmas is definitely traditional and not something I made up on a whim.

About nineteen hours later, the assembled ratsenders got their just deserts; namely, Rats of Glory, those menacing yet wonderful rat-candles. They’ve been domesticated a little since their original incarnation; at first, there was an option to spend 77 Fate on a guaranteed success at lighting it. I played it, for some reason. It was relatively unexciting. There was also a fairly ominous option involving St Fortigan’s Candle. This spooked Alexander Feld a little, but I reassured him; after all, it’d probably never unlock. (It never did.)

“This is no betrayal.” Is that what you told yourself? Submit to the wolves that came in across the darkened sea, save bloodshed, and win yourself allies against the North? It was so long ago. If this option ever unlocks, it will likely allow you to steal St Forthigan’s Candle from another. However, it will probably never unlock.

On Twitter, Alexis claimed that he was planning on giving them out as a Christmas present anyway, but Ratmas accelerated things. And, perhaps, worsened them; he claimed that the sleeper-agent functionality originally didn’t exist, and that it was added as Ratmas revenge. It is up to the reader whether or not you want to believe this. The item description promised that the candle could awaken at any time to devour Saint’s Candles; it would be a very long time before this paid off. But it did, in the end.

This incident also caused the instatement of the Ratness category; apparently, it was always supposed to be there, but it hadn’t been properly implemented until I came in and started causing a big ratty ruckus. Alexis also gave himself the quality Accepting No Further Rats, preventing him from accepting any further rats. This was very sad.

The Between Times

The cold Between is not a winter cold. It is the electric cold of the curved places.

So, Seeking went away. Plenty happened in the times between, of course; this is largely a Seeking history, but I will fill this gap with some tales of what happened in the times between, and also maybe one or two silly things that happened in the time before. Some of these may have some payoff later on in this historical retelling, so you should probably read them.

The mysterious Destiny that had been hinted at since Hallowmas, Passion, was found basically through a string of accident and coincidences. Still, it’s an interesting Destiny, and finding things is cool.

In that very same week, the trail of clues leading up to Ambition: Enigma was found, and several people managed to crack the code and get all Enigmatic. Ambition: Enigma had shown up in a few places before this, largely as a joke; on developer mantelpieces or the House of Chimes intro option. Having be an actual Real Thing For Reals was a bit of a surprise; nevertheless, it is indeed a Real Thing For Reals.

Anyone with a SMEN quality of more than 2 got presented with a big threatening warning storylet, giving them the A Bad End item if they decided not to quit Seeking there and then. This opened a storylet in their lodgings, promising that Seeking would return “Soon, but not very soon”; this storylet was pretty much the placeholder work-in-progress version of the current Seeking Road, and basically every option on it then still exists now, though usually with altered costs.

I got married to a rat.

Anyone with Unaccountably Peckish more than 10 was presented with a storylet which set their Unaccountably Peckish to 10 exactly; a cap was put in place so it couldn’t go any higher. We were informed this was for our own good.

Flyte, the previous owner of the IRC channel, went off to work for Failbetter, and passed the prestigious Host position to me. I promptly ran the entire channel straight into the ground and it has never recovered since.

http://ubergoatcluedispenser.storynexus.com/s

Someone managed to stumble across a previously-undiscovered Seeking option in Mahogany Hall, which required that you had a Marsh-Mired quality of exactly 8 (i.e. you’d betrayed 6 people exactly on your way to St Arthur’s Candle). It just gave 1 Marsh-Mired at the cost of some connections; it’s kinda weird, and I have no idea how long it was lying there before someone found it. Let’s be real; who the hell does anything in Mahogany Hall?

Sunless Sea came out, and Nuncio was put into it. Nuncio is very cool and rad, and I’m not just saying that because I came up with it.

Rat Sending Simulator grew ever more complex and vertiginous. It may still be growing, for all I know.

At least several Ratmasses happened. I made a Twine game for one of them, because I could, and directed the Masses to send Rats to any and all FBG employees I could track down.

I did an internship at FBG over the summer of 2015. I put the ‘ship’ in ‘internship’ by tweaking zee-journeys; however, I avoided internment. While I was there, I received three model rats from Alexis himself; they are now the totems of my ultimate power, and one day I will use them to initiate Ratnarok, the twilight of the gods.

Stuff happened

Things, too.

A Heptagoat was born through the sheer magic of clearly announced intentions.

Alexis showed up in the IRC at the very start of 2016, with things to say about the Treachery of Clocks and other such things. He mentioned that it was unlikely that he’d write any substantial FL content in 2016, and that it might be 2017 before Seeking returned.

Fast forward a few months, and Alexis announced his intentions to depart Failbetter and go ronin.

Fast forward a few days, and…

The Return

A reckoning. The bill is almost due.

On June 2nd, 2016, Mr Eaten’s Twitter rumbled back to life after a long, long silence. I was in the middle of my final exams when this happened, so I stumbled into IRC, yelled angrily that Mr Eaten was getting in the way of my studies, then left again. I kept the Seeking Road storylet open in the meantime, though, so I could keep an eye on any activity. Sure enough, things started to shift around; new options were added, existing ones were tweaked. Then I hit Perhaps Not, and discovered that the Seeking Road had disappeared from my Lodgings entirely, so I lost out on my little porthole into the heart of the action.

After a few days of cryptic tweets, Seeking began again in earnest. Fortunately, I was done with my exams by then. There was no great fanfare, no announcement; it came upon us like a thief in the night. Cards unlocked with Unaccountably Peckish flung themselves merrily into your hand, menacing the bejesus out of you with their black borders and their actual menaces. The Seeking Road reappeared after its brief absence, replete with new and exciting options to increase your SMEN quality and ruin yourself.

The SMEN quality itself behaves very differently to how it did in the old days; previously, it slowly increased as you played cards, acting as a sort of very classical progression tracker. Now, however, it’s something you increase a level at a time by spending vast amounts of resources on challenges that become ever harder and ever more demanding. When you hit a milestone, you get the opportunity to maim yourself even harder in order to achieve something, like a Candle.

Mr Eaten kept cryptically tweeting all through this. I figured out pretty quickly that he made scheduled tweets several times a day, always at X:56. Anything that wasn’t tweeted at that time generally heralded an update of some form.

Progress was slow going at first, though. The Seeking Road options seemed sadistically difficult and expensive, and I was convinced there must be some other way to go about doing things. I spent about two days messing around with SMEN cards and Unaccountably Peckish, trying to find something of interest. I ended up in the Mirror-Marches a lot accidentally, wasting even more time. Eventually, I realised that I was just wasting time; the Seeking Road was the only road, so I’d just have to walk it. It seemed like sinking vast amounts of cash into Appalling Secrets was the only really feasible option to progress.

But not before I set some fires.

Not To Be Postponed Indefinitely

So, really, the core of Seeking progress was not terribly exciting for a while. Just buying Cryptic Clues at the Bazaar, converting them up, and trying (and often failing) to level SMEN through the Seeking Road options. I was towards the head of the pack, but not at the cutting edge; bjorntfh had raced ahead, committing to the road of Appalling Secrets while I was still faffing around.

We didn’t really have any specific goals to aim for; we were just pushing, pushing, pushing ever onwards. I managed to knock myself into the Mirror-Marches again after fumbling my Nightmares reduction gear. While I worked my way out, I ran into something rather heart-stopping. A Rat of Glory had awoken.

This was, I have to admit, fairly terrifying. I don’t know why I keep falling for this stuff, frankly; if Alexis sent me a scarily-worded email trying to get my bank account details I’d probably end up forking over a tiger’s ransom before my brain turned back on again. As you may have guessed; yes, the detonation was indeed a hilarious joke. I tried playing the Breath of the Void option, but it didn’t actually matter. For my trouble, I got a free level of SMEN, which was nice, and the We’ll always have Paris quality; you may recognise this as the quality you got for sending Alexis rats on the Final Ratmas, if you engaged in that activity.

;)

Camphor; crushed flowers; ice.

So, forward progress continued apace. I eventually managed to coax bjorn into getting a Rat of Glory from someone else, since it was free progress and all. I think that put bjorn in position to do the Lower Mysteries option on the Seeking Road, which I was intensely curious about; truth is, it’s not terribly exciting- it’s a cheap point of SMEN and a signpost to the Cyriac option, which has been intensively discussed above. The revived Cyriac option cost only 7 Enigmas, rather than 77; the correct number of Proscribed Material turned out to be 2542. The whole point of the thing was to get a Mr Eaten’s Calling Card, though the option to get it comes with a luck check. The odds of success are only 10%, and nobody has managed to see what you get for succeeding at the time of writing. When bjorn got the calling card, the option to use it was locked, so forward progress stalled for a little while.

I was lagging a bit behind, but not too far. I had a Plan, very specifically laid out; I’d get to SMEN 24, then burn my old, hard-won St Cerise’s Candle to get the materials needed to Light a Taper, an expensive option giving a guaranteed 2 SMEN. This would let me get to SMEN 28 and reclaim my Cerise; the new costs of Cerise were mostly known, since Alexis posted a picture of the goat murder options on the forums. While I was doing this, NiteBrite sent me the last remaining Calling Card from the olden times of 2013. In doing so, 3 other Calling Cards were lost; sending the Card set the Card quality to 0, so NiteBrite went from having 4 cards to none.

The calling card action opened; bjorn was nowhere to be found. I was too worried to play the branch, lest it consume the card. After all, this was the Bona Fide Original Mr Eaten Card, and if I burned it and wasted it I’d be terribly upset. I put it to a vote in the IRC channel; should I use the card, wait, or throw my computer out the window?

Throwing my computer out the window won, by a single vote, so I complied.

Don’t worry, it got better.

After some time, bjorn logged in; it was discovered that the option to use the Calling Card did not consume it, and instead let you go to visit Winking Isle. I eagerly rushed in and noted down exactly what the hell was going on there. To get onto the Isle, you need A Question, available at SMEN 12; ‘What is Due?’ (the Hate path) or ‘What is Forgotten?’ (the Grieve path). However, the requirements revealed a third, mysterious Question we didn’t know anything about; ‘Who is Salt?’. This will be important later.

On my first trip to the Island, I didn’t accomplish much; you need to complete a set of Preparations with stringent requirements to really do anything at all, and I was obviously unprepared. I did manage to stumble into one particularly tricksy option which didn’t require Preparation, though. If you’ve been paying attention, you may be able to work out what it did.

Indeed, I lost no candle. Which is to say, I lost St Destin’s Candle, the candle which does not exist. I did at least get a point of SMEN out of it, giving me the 24 I needed to enact my Plan.

Goatal Recall

Just because I don’t do things by halves.

So, from SMEN 24, I sacrificed my St Cerise’s Candle, 2 Master’s Blood, 2 Veils-Velvets and 2 Impossible Theorems to get to SMEN 28. Burning - literally burning - that much stuff in one go filled me with a kind of ecstatic fervour, and I followed it to the Forgotten Quarter, where St Cerise’s Well awaits.

Sacrificing an Ubergoat where an Overgoat will suffice is entirely, entirely wasteful, for several reasons. Not that I let that stop me. The goat went down the well, and I regained St Cerise’s Candle, along with 2 levels of SMEN. I noticed, though, that the storylet hadn’t actually locked; so, in the interests of science, I dumped a Classic Short Story down the well too, getting a second St Cerise, as well as an extra point of SMEN. (I also tried to sacrifice a Starveling Cat, but it doesn’t actually work) I later went and rustled up some goats, but the bug had been fixed before I could dunk them too.

With a SMEN value of 31, it was back to Winking Isle for me.

Efficient Estrangement

Earth-crawlers. Bazaar-slaves. They won’t tell you what you want to know

Winking Isle, Winking Isle, Winking Isle. There’s a lot to be said about how different it is from the old incarnation, but I’ll save it for later. At its core, it’s still mostly about gambling and luck checks to succeed, but the balance is much less savage. That savagery was instead invested into the requirements for entry; there’s a long, long list of items you cannot possess if you want to get onto the island proper, and if you’re holding onto any of them you need to head back to London and get rid of them at the Bazaar. It’s a bit miserable. There are seven steps in all, totalling 7 actions and 7 different sets of requirements; past that, there are five entirely optional extra steps, but more on those later.

One of the requirements is a Connected: Society score of less than 7. My Society score was very high (more than 300), largely due to the number of Opportunity Cards that provide it ambiently. Getting rid of that much Society in a hurry proved to be rather a problem; in the end, I came up with a fairly ridiculous play to eliminate it. I switched my Closest To away from Revolutionaries (losing 300 levels of Connection with them in the process; but there are no comrades in the North), then switched Closest To to Society, then abandoned my Closest To again, setting my Society score to 0. It was a bit silly, but it did work; and it consumed some items I’d otherwise need to sell at the Bazaar, to boot.

Red as Hearts

The first descent was that which was given for that which was promised.

I’ll be honest; I didn’t really progress at a terribly quick rate on Winking Isle, because, astonishingly enough, I wasn’t actually doing things very efficiently. For any readers out there with prospects of being a Seeker; just press the Circle button a whole bunch, and don’t do anything else unless you have to.

At some point, I left the island to grab St Destin’s Candle, to replace the one I sacrificed. I had Notability 11 already; to get Destin, you need Notability 12. I used my Salon normally to hit Notability 12; then, in an act of glorious, exaggerated wastage, I summoned the whole Captivating Princess to my Salon solely to get enough Making Waves to force-draw the Amanuensis. I mean, it worked; it’s not like there’s any use for Scheme: Salon in the North anyway.

Bjorn’s lead over me was quite substantial by this point, not least of which because of a giant Fate-based speedboost. That’s just how things are going to be from now until the end, I’m afraid. Still, we did have at least several Agreements; I’d take whatever fork in the road bjorn didn’t, as soon as I got there. Most of this proved inconsequential; not all, though.

St Erzulie’s Candle hides in the Nadir, available once you’ve got SMEN 42. There are two ways you can get it; you can pay the price that is asked, but the game also provides you with a ‘Cheat’ option, which claims that you’ll get the candle immediately with no change to the story and you’ll never be afflicted in any way. I agreed to choose whatever option bjorn didn’t; so, bjorn decided to pay the price in full. The cost, in all: Tattoos, Destiny, Ambition, Ambition: Enigma, Notability, Profession and the loss of the ability to ever get any of those things again in the future. Pretty rough.

I went with the Cheat option. Here’s a net total of what I lost in doing so:         nada.

Yeah.

Basically, the game shows you two doors. It promises to only tell the truth. You ask it about one door, and it tells you that behind that door is an exit, but to reach that exit, you must crawl through a pit of serpents. The serpents are covered in spikes, are on fire, and have guns. Behind the other door, it tells you, there is simply an exit. No strings attached.

Do you believe it when it says it’s telling the truth? More importantly, which door do you go through?

Ratmas 3.33: Fourth Impact

A rat!? Like Mickey Mouse!?

Alexis’ departure loomed fairly close at around this time; I thought it was on the 16th of June, but, in actuality, it was the 15th. In the small hours of the morning on the 14th, I wrote up a post calling for an Emergency Ratmas; I had been informed that a small coalition of spies and agents had managed to strip Alexis of Accepting No Further Rats, righting that great wrong. Here’s a picture of my Rat Posting Station during those final hours.

The end result of this; Alexis received many, many rats, a total of 170 social invites of some form. Anyone who sent Alexis a thing got a level of the ‘We’ll always have Paris’ quality. Accepting No Further Rats became Full of Rats (Thank You!), probably a hat of some kind, which you can see on Alexis’ profile.

Decap, Recap

For he holds up the head in his hand, truly, Turns its face toward the noblest on the dais, And it lifted its eyelids and glared with wide eyes, And the mouth uttered these words, which you shall now hear.

So; plenty more Winking Isle happens. Bjorn races ahead as far as the Chapel of Lights to get Forthigans, in the hope of finishing the entirety of SMEN before Alexis wakes up, but runs into a content barrier. When the barrier was removed, getting Fortigan’s Candle was just a matter of some heavy action expenditure. Bjorn then proceeded to go South, on the quest for Gawain’s Candle. This quest ends with your decapitation in the Chapel of Lights (or, if you’re a scrub, the decapitation of someone else), letting you become St Gawain’s Candle in the flesh. Everything in the proper order, as intended.

When I went to get St Fortigan’s Candle, things did not exactly work as planned. Namely, instead of letting me get Fortigan, it skipped ahead to St Gawain’s Candle, for some reason. I got decapitated, went home, sailed back across the zee in a confused headless mess, and got decapitated again. The third time I arrived at the Chapel, they let me in politely and did not attempt to remove me from my head at all. I never actually equipped My Own Severed Head, despite the game’s stern warning to never take it off; I replaced it with an Order Ovate medal instead. I like to think my head was an egg for about twelve hours.

Anyway, I sent in a support ticket and they sewed my head back on, so that was all well and good.

Who is Salt?

saudade; hiraeth; a horizon spritz

Decapitation over, back to Winking Isle. Two major things happened while I was slowly building up my SMEN quality on the Isle.

First; Bjorn blazed a trail the whole way to the Avid Horizon with one final Fate injection, becoming the first to successfully go North and finish Seeking, and therefore Win Fallen London (Technically, Sorta). Shortly behind them was DemonicFerret, who started Seeking with the advent of nu-SMEN and used a probably-ungodly amount of Fate to keep pace. Bjorn brought Grief to the North; DemonicFerret, Hate.

Second: on their journey South, as part of the Gawain’s Candle quest, bjorn spotted a requirement for a previously-unheard-of quality, The Sun Beneath The Sea, attached to a particular question; Who is Salt?

The secret to getting this quality, as it turns out, was hiding on Winking Isle the whole time. If you completed all optional preparations, you got this quality, which could be used to set you on the hidden third path of Seeking. Sackville/vswest was the first to discover this, but they were well behind the cutting edge of Seekers; for whatever reason, the third of the five optional preparations didn’t actually show up for about a week, so everyone at the bleeding edge had missed it entirely.

At around this time, there were two Seekers getting precariously close to going NORTH; myself, and Dharlome. Dharlome resolved to take a bit of a detour in order to obtain the The Sun Beneath The Sea quality in the interests of Doing A Science, to discover what exactly it did down South and if it had any effect on the ending. I was personally resigned to just slowly plinking away at Winking Isle until I hit SMEN 77; then I’d go get Gawain’s Candle and go NORTH in one fell swoop. Getting The Sun Beneath The Sea would require a fairly awkward detour, so I decided not to bother with it.

This decision didn’t last particularly long. NiteBrite had asked me to give a heads up about the narrative trajectory of the SMEN endings; given some of the text in the South, it seemed like you were merely being manipulated by a higher, Non-Mr-Eaten power, which Nite wasn’t entirely down with. I mentioned the whole Who is Salt business, which seemed to be pointing at a third, unexpected ending; but mentioned that I was still a few days away from getting to the end myself, and that I didn’t really want to go for the Who is Salt ending personally; I was slightly ahead of Dharlome at the time, and I’d feel bad if I swept the rug out from underneath him and became the first Salty Seeker at the last moment.

To cut a long story short, I ended up with a big chunk of Fate, and a renewed resolve to actually go for the Who is Salt ending after all; I’d just let Dharlome get it first. I said as much to Dharlome over IRC; we ended up basically doing some DBZ-esque powerup-yelling at each other back and forth until we both ended up powering all the way to the NORTH in one giant Fate-powered rocket of destruction.

I used the Fate I got with NiteBrite’s assistance to accelerate my final rounds at Winking Isle. Returning to London, I sold almost absolutely every single thing left in my inventory; about 60k echoes in all by this point. What did I do with those Echoes? I did as tratidion demanded. After annihilating my inventory, I returned the OG Calling Card to NiteBrite; I was actually going to send it back to Mr Eaten, if I could, but sadly he wasn’t eligible.

Going South takes a lot of actions; you’ve gotta row (row, fight the power) a boat the whole way down Adam’s Way; before I made it to the end, I ran out of actions. Rather than pester NiteBrite, I just bought more Fate on my own. Somehow in the excitement I managed to buy 10 Fate twice. Mourn the £2 that was lost.

Anyway, after reaching the Mountain, you get teleported to the Chapel of Lights to get decapitated (for the third time, in my case). After that, all that’s left is to set sail to the NORTH, where the end waits. I posted a screencap of the King of Ways, posted it on Tumblr* **, and set forth to the Finale. All the glories of the horizon.

The game makes a polite request not to reveal anything that happens beyond opening the Gate; so far, every Seeker, including myself, has complied. A part of me hopes every future Seeker does, too, but I doubt it. If you’ve wondered why this section of writeup has been a bit looser and less concrete than the rest, the spirit of that message is at least partially to blame.

After the end, there’s not much to do with your character. I forgot to cancel my Exceptional Friendship subscription, so a few days ago I spent £5 to ensure I had a month’s worth of 40 actions, with which I can do nothing, along with 13 Fate I can’t use either. Mostly I just keep logging into FL and then feeling fairly foolish. Sometimes I change my Mantelpiece around a little. It’s possible for me to accept Parabolan Kittens and, for some reason, invitations to share Scientific Research.

*I still had about twelve hours left of answers in my queue, so there’s now kind of a big dramatic sendoff post flanked by fairly mundane questions and answers. Then I didn’t answer anything for like half a week, because I was too busy writing this. So it goes, so it goes.

** I spent a good ten minutes trying to find a good gif from the ending of Cowboy Bebop just for this, also. It’s important to get these things right.

What Comes Next?

If you consume something greater, then you may incorporate it: unless it incorporates you.

Since I went NORTH, I’ve had quite a lot of people ask whether I plan on making a new character, or if I’m done forever, or what. Anyone who frequently hangs around IRC already knows my answer and my reasons; if you don’t, buckle up for the Big Reveal.

As I mentioned before, I did an internship at FBG last summer. This wasn’t particularly anything I kept secret, but nor was it something I particularly drew attention to. Anyway, this is the follow-up to that; on of July 6th, I’ll be returning to FBG to work in a more permanent position.

What will become of my Tumblr? Frankly, I’m  not sure myself, but I doubt it’ll be canned entirely. Similarly, I’m unsure if I’ll remain Host of the IRC Channel; I may pass that role on to someone else, as Flyte did before me. Perhaps that person will go on to work for FBG later on; one person is a coincidence, two is a Pattern, right?

Anyway, such is my Fate. Seeking proved a nice capstone for six years of goofy nonsense in Fallen London; now I ascend to my place in the Sun. If, in the future, you find yourself waist-deep in rats, you know who to blame.

Comparisons

Mortal, machine. The heart is destiny’s engine.

We’ve come this far, the end of our story; I think I’d be remiss if I didn’t provide some form of comparison between Old-Seeking and New-Seeking, as someone who saw it all, or at least most of it. The short of it is that I don’t really think Seeking has been ‘defanged’, but I could perhaps accept “domesticated”. Mechanically and atmospherically, old and new Seeking share a lot of similar ground, but the overall ‘feel’ is quite different.

The easiest case study here is Winking Isle; it exists in both iterations of SMEN, but the two versions aren’t too similar except at their very core.

Old Winking Isle was a pretty bleak, oppressive place, both in terms of text and mechanics. The island itself was basically a rock with a well on it, surrounded by skulls, bleak and dismal, wind-torn and forlorn. It does seem to actually exist as a Physical Place, and you need to get a blind boatman to take you there.

To progress, you needed to increase Fasting and Meditating through repeated luck checks, while weathering a storm of menaces and progress loss on failure. There was a big component of sacrifice, too; you needed to throw rare items down the well to get guaranteed successes, and to get the Candles at the end of the island, you needed to sacrifice even more (other candles, or your stats). Almost everything cost 7-10 actions, too, so you could only do anything at all once every two hours, approximately. If you want to leave, it’ll cost you 10 actions, and you’ll need to succeed at a luck check; once you’re on the Isle, it’s hard to even get off of it.

New WI isn’t quite so bleak; it’s much more surreal. The island is only accessible through dreams. It floats on a sea of stars, with the actual sea in the sky above. It has a lighthouse, which does not exist, has no entrances and emits no light, which flashes nonetheless. The summit of the island is a lawn, two dozen paces across, with a well of black brick in the centre. The island is covered in dark grass; black, or a very deep green; the scent of the grass is something like camphor, crushed flowers and ice. This gets mentioned a few times, for some reason, so it’s probably significant but I don’t know what it means. New Winking Isle’s atmosphere always makes me think of Phendrana Drifts’ theme, for some reason. Maybe it’s the ice.

As mentioned before, to actually do anything in Winking Isle’s newest iteration, you need to pass through a series of Preparations; a set of branches which can only be played if you lack certain items. The full list of things you’re not allowed to have is pretty frickin’ long. You don’t just throw everything down a well to progress; you have to sell things at the Bazaar yourself, in London. If you forget to get rid of anything or you’re unaware of the requirements up next, it’ll take you an awful lot of actions sailing back and forth between Winking Isle just to get started (it takes a minimum of 8 actions to even get there at all). Having the Isle set possessions to 0 would have been easier, arguably; it’d have felt very different, though. This way, you’re entirely complicit in your own destruction, and you have to carry it out with your own hands.

When you actually get in, there are (by and large) no menaces or anything to worry about; just a bunch of options with luck checks, increasing Fasting and Meditating on success and decreasing it on failure. It’s just a matter of sitting there, rolling the dice over and over and over again until you succeed enough to progress. It’s weirdly contemplative, but also ridiculously frustrating. Your fate is in the RNG’s hands, and it will gleefully erase an entire day’s progress in a blink of an eye. There’s nothing to be done about it. The option to leave is available at any time, and costs only one action; but you’ll choose to stay, to fast, to meditate, to a foolish end.

I feel like the new Winking Isle is more generally effective from a design point; it’s still cruel, slow, luck-based and sacrificial, but it’s a bit more elegant about it. Old WI feels a bit sloppier; high action costs on top of menace-management, but you can’t effectively leave to manage menaces, feels a bit clunky. There’s also an aspect Guy Scrum pointed out on the forums; while Old-WI demanded expensive, rare items if you wanted guaranteed successes, those items had no other use. So, effectively, for a long-time player who’s hoarded things for years, those options finally gave your expensive trophies an actual purpose; and, hey, you got cool text too! New WI just shakes its head and demands you throw your trinkets away, for no gain at all, not even a textual reward; you’d have been better off never getting them in the first place

Take all this with a grain of salt, mind; I was never actually on old Winking Isle.

—

One other thing; the social aspect of things, and how they relate to being a full-time Seeker. Old Seeking had plenty of social actions; St Arthur betrayals, prize token theft, Cerise’s candle in general, Hithes, Trithes, Mercenary contracts, the threat of Fortigan theft, Destin propagation and passing the Calling Card. The main goal of most of these actions was to try and turn Seekers against each other; though some are co-operative in nature, and some were co-opted for collaborative means. You also basically needed to engage in these social aspects to keep pace; at the very least to gain Cerise’s Candle. Social actions were originally mandatory for St Arthur’s Candle, but that was relaxed eventually. Still, if you were an advanced Seeker, you never stopped Seeking; at any moment, someone might try and steal your Enigmas, your Prizes, or you might get menaced to hell unexpectedly. Some other things compounded that, like the ever-present Restitution and Contretremps menace cards (though, frankly, they were fairly gentle as menace cards go). Seeking; it’s for life, not just for Sacksmas. All this served to form a Seeker community which was fairly tight-knit but also pretty high-strung; there was some amount of drama over anti-betrayal Seeker conclaves and their recording of Seekers who had betrayed others, if I recall correctly, but not much.

New-Seeking is much gentler about this. Some social things still remain; St Arthur’s betrayals and Calling Card transfers, mostly. Nobody can suddenly march up to you and steal your Enigmas while you’re off doing Ambition stuff or something, and you won’t wake up to discover you have Nightmares 17 or something. There are plenty of menace cards, but they’re tied to Unaccountably Peckish, not SMEN progress, and UP is fairly trivial to manage. If you want to take a break from Seeking entirely, you pretty much can, no matter if you’re at SMEN 6 or SMEN 76. There are some nasty permanent consequences, like Obscurity or decapitation, but they can be circumvented entirely with no real effort at all. Of course, if you get to the end of New-Seeking, you face the most permanent consequence of all, but before that, you won’t face them unless you want to.

—

To conclude, I’ll borrow a fairly strained metaphor from myself; old Seeking played dirty, and tried to cut you with an old, rusty dagger, even when you weren’t paying attention to it. New Seeking is much more refined; it holds out a sharp silver rapier and invites you to impale yourself on it.

Shoutouts Zone

The fifth will live on in the heart of the Sun…

I’ve come a long way in the past years, but I couldn’t have achieved a nerdery of this potency alone. So, in no particular order, the Shoutouts

•             The entire very small active userbase of the Inquisitive Friends forums, if any still persist, for providing me with the flint and steel needed to ignite a giant bonfire of.. Uh… Fallen London documentation, I guess? I dunno.

•             The FL Tumblr Skype, now Discord, for giving me a place to hone my power and become stronger, also a place to natter about spacebats before IRC existed.

•             The IRC, as a concept and as a userbase, for not throwing me down a well years ago for all my terrible posting. The past is a far country, but it is full of good jokes and fun memories, all crafted in the crucible of an Internet Relay Chatroom.

•             The Secret Inner Circle of the IRC, for being secret, inner, and circular.

•             Failbetter Games, for doing the Failbetter Games Things, like making exactly one Story Nexus and that movie, London Has Fallen.

•             Seriously though, for reals, y’all are cool.

•             NiteBrite, for putting all the bad ideas I came up with into practice for some reason, and for funding all my own bad ideas in turn. Seriously, the dude’s sent me like about a billion Fate, on top of bankrolling Nuncio.

•             Everyone in the Bronze War Machine. You know who you are, if you still are anyone at all. Pour one out for the demise of Knife and Candle.

•             THIS SHOUTOUT IS DEDICATED TO ALL THOSE CYBERPUNKS WHO FIGHT AGAINST INJUSTICE AND CORRUPTION EVERY DAY OF THEIR LIVES.

•             Bjorntfh, DemonicFerret, Dharlome and Sackville, for Services to New-Seeking Science.

•             Alexis Kennedy, who gets a separate shoutout as he is no longer being an FBG, for doing the Alexis things, for accepting rats without setting fire to my house, for actually giving me some actual rats for real, for real, and for managing to only include a small amount of typos in Seeking content despite being a tiger and not having actual fingers as such. Also, nice hat.

•             The Jovial Contrarian, for being the best mayoral candidate. I am in no position to vote any more, so I’m counting on you all to make the Correct Choice.

•             [This shoutout was consumed. Dark water. No ripples. Fox only. Final Destination.]

•             Everyone who’s ever sent me a message of thanks, via rats or gems or Tumblr asks. I rarely respond, but I always appreciate them.

•             You, the Reader, for sitting through actually literally a novella’s worth of Seeking words.

•             Unless you skipped to the end. In which case, you don’t deserve this shoutout. Cheaters rarely prosper.

•             its okay i don’t really mean it.

•             If I forgot you, I’m terribly sorry. This shoutout goes to anyone I forgot to mention. Look, I went into the Nadir; like, way into the Nadir. Cut me some slack.

Final Thoughts
Cry out for the horizon.

Old Seeking was good.

New Seeking was also good.

2013 was a good year to play Fallen London.

Arthurian myth is everywhere.

Rats live on no evil star.

Vote Contrarian.

Who is Salt?