AP: (The Luxor) Rose Colored Glasses--The WTF Happy Feel Good Session!

Previously, at The Luxor

Six months later....
Ammanual has retired to safety on her little satellite with EOS, whatever their relationship is. Mox visits occasionally. Rose sent her +1 barter's worth of tools, and since she doesn't remember sleeping with the Harholder, she has no idea why. Oh well.  Life goes on

And apparently it goes on pretty well. The holding is doing very well. I levelled up last sesion and increased Rose's hard to +2, and rolled a 10 at the beginning! Everything's right with the world! Mox is running a state of the sick bay in the marketplace, courtesy of EOS. The marketplace is booming. A rival warlord visits frequently. His people guard the perimeter because the Luxor is a cornucopia of good food, good sex, and health care.

Get this: a Brainer's set up house. A nice Brainer. His name's Brace. (Elizabeth's new character.) He makes his own paints. He's an artist. He counsels the Pregnant Ladies, who are pregnant no more, through the trauma of going crazy, miscarrying their unborn babies, and coming to their senses. He painted a sweet picture of Baby Pumpkin, which hangs in the sick bay. Speaking of Baby Pumpkin, she's the cutest thing you've ever seen, sitting in a gated area in The Garden, knawing on a bone (she's teething) or a ball of twine. Someone even made her a stuffed pumpkin toy.

Do and Keeler watch over bustling marketplace with their feet propped up on the railing of the balcony. They're bored. Everything's fine. They get to talking about what they could do. Go raiding or maybe just go check out what's outside the Luxor. Then Do asks, "You wanna get married?" It's unclear if he's asking her if she wants to marry him or if she wants to get married in general. It gets a little awkward. He says he doesn't to her. There's an odd pause in the conversation. Finally one of them says, "Let's go to The Garden and get some dessert." And they do.

They chat with Rose and gush about how cute Baby Pumpkin is. Keeler offers to go out and get any supplies that The Garden or the Luxor need. It'll help keep Do from getting too antsy. Rose consults with Oh, the new manager of The Garden. She needs the usualy: more luxe food, meat, some more employees. She's having to turn people away because she doesn't have enough people. Rose asks Keeler to go out and get some luxe food, meat, and to go to Been's place and get some luxe prostitutes. I had "I owe been for it [The Garden]" on my Maestro D's character sheet, so I figured Been runs a brothel where Rose once worked. So they agree to go pick up the supplies.

But Rose wants to know what else is going on with Keeler and Do. Not much. They're bored. Rose asks what else they're thinking about doing. Well, there's that short discussion about getting married. Not to each other, of course. And of course Rose wants to know who they'd marry, or who they're into. Um, well. And Rose is asking because he wants to see if he could help blossom a romance. He doesn't know that he's the object of someone's affection. He asks Do to tell him who he's into. Do can't say. But why? He just can't. Now I can't remember how the conversation shifts, but it takes Rose a while to figure out that Do is into him, but when he does he asks if he wants to go into his room and, you know, do it? Do's happy about that. Rose calls Mill, his slave who acts like (and is treated like) his girlfriend and her sister Exit. Exit is Baby Pumpkin's mother, and apparently in the past six months she's also acting like (and being treated like) Rose's girlfriend. They all go to Rose's quarters and have sex. Good times.

Part 2 of this session to be continued tomorrow, and/or by the other players?

Part 2

Meanwhile, Brace comes in to The Garden and talks to Mox for a while. Brace is a nicely dressed, very handsome young man who employs a tailor! As I said before, Brace is a nice Brainer. Which I think makes him all the more creepy. He's more like a psychoanalyst than just a psycho psychic. He and Mox agree to work together to help the Pregnant Ladies work out their shit. Brace gives Mox the portrait he did of Baby Pumpkin and OMG isn't she just the cutest thing? Yeah, the Brainer is going to work with the Angel to help people. Things are going really well at the Luxor apparently.

A couple hours or so later, Rose, Exit, Mill, and Do re-emerge. Rose gives Do a little trinket (+1 barter for sex with the Hardholder), and still being tone deaf to Do's affection, tells him he should give it to someone, maybe that sexy Brainer if he's as into guys now as he seems. Do guards it. Rose remembers again that Do's into him. Do leaves before Rose does that thing where he goes from hot to cold. Rose offers to Do that the foursome (and twosome) can be a regular thing, and Do is happy to accept.

Rose gets Brace something to eat, and oh shit. Rose still has the Maestro D' sex move--procure something for someone and their sex move goes off. Rose shifts uncomfortably in his chair as Brace asks him some very pointed questions. For what does your character crave forgiveness, and of whom? and What are your character's secret pains? So I made this up on the fly, and as Rose had a surprisingly difficult time admitting it. It didn't come out as easily as I can type it and I'm filling in some of the details I couldn't articulate as Rose: Before Rose became a man, she had a regular customer who was probably someone important somewhere. She still lived in a brothel at the time, but her brother Amethyst actually lived with this customer as his concubine or slave or something, and Amethyst was his favorite. Amethyst was probably not cut out for the life and hated being the favorite, and was quite miserable. Rose and Amethyst figured out a way to help each other out. Now we still don't know how it all happened, but Rose and Amethyst merged or Rose took over Amethyst's body, or something. The way Rose sees it, s/he helped Amethyst get out of a dire circumstance, and positioned herself to go live with the customer and be his favorite.

Maybe Rose gets his tone deafness when it comes to love and affection from Amethyst, but the customer was not happy with the new Rose/Amethyst combo and rejected him. Maybe the rejection was harsh. So Rose did another thing he does. He poisoned the customer, and later realized that Amethyst  was not so much the concubine/slave, but the customer's beloved. Rose felt guilty for screwing everything up (and for losing a great customer). Maybe Rose the woman actually loved the customer, but Amethyst hated him, and when the two combined, their feelings got all screwed up. Who knows? I think Amethyst manipulated Rose in some way, and Rose really thought she was helping her brother get out of a bad situation.

The answer to the other question is a little less complicated. Rose wishes he had been there to see his mother die. He didn't mean to kill her, and he knew that the way he "accidentally" killed her was pretty harsh and nasty. It pains him to think that his mother, as much as he hated her, died such a wretched death and he didn't get to hold her hand at the end.

Brace offers to continue to counsel Rose. He declines. He's not really the self reflective type. Brace offers to get his tailor to make Baby Pumpkin a little kimono out of one of Rose's old kimonos. Rose agrees to that.

So Keeler sits with Rose and Brace after their conversation. Rose wants to know who Keeler would marry. She won't say. Rose and Brace both read her. Rose blew it, Brace didn't. By the end of the conversation, Keeler knows that it frustrates or turns him on that Keeler is unavailable to him. Brace gleans a bit more information. Keeler isn't interested in marrying anyone, but she does have an occasional friend with benefits.

Rose decides he'd like to marry Exit and Mill. Maybe someone else? Keeler isn't out of the realm of possibilities. Neither is Do. Rose goes down to the marketplace and buys Mill and Exit flowers and rings. He dresses in his best clothes and presents his gifts to the sisters, with an awkward proposal. "Would you two like to be my wives?" Mill is ecstatic, overjoyed, thrilled, and happily says yes. This means she won't be his slave anymore, unless she wants to, maybe occasionally. She's happy to do that, too. Exit is a little more reserved...

Sorry, dinner time. Part 3 to come shortly.

Part 3

Oh--So why is this called Rose Colored Glasses? That's a drink they serve at The Garden. Rose asks for a couple of shots of vodka and opium (which is essentially laudanum) with a shot of grenadine when he's getting the deep brain scan sex move from Brace the Friendly Brainer.

So Mill is all happy to be getting married. Exit is a little more reserved and asks a ton of questions. When? Two weeks, and we'll have a big party. Rose and Exit negotiate the marriage contract. Rose can still sleep around since it helps with business negotiations. Mill and Exit can have a say in whom he can't sleep with. Rose won't make them have sex with anyone they don't want to--of course! And they can have sex with other people as well, although Rose can veto their partners. No sex with Ammanual. Mill is happy that Do will still join them. Rose may take another wife or husband.

Then there's a matter of children. Exit was once part of the Pregnant Lady cult where the women had their husbands or baby daddies cut off their hands, as instructed by the Voice of EOS. Exit's first husband, the late Vonk the Sculptor cut off his hand. Exit's worried that the same thing would happen to Rose, so she doesn't want any more kids. Rose is a little disappointed, but Mill wants babies, so Rose agrees to find out from Mox if he can father children. Rose had a son when he was a teenage girl. Rose really wants more children, and OMG isn't Baby Pumpkin just the cutest thing ever?

Now what of the wedding banquet? What to serve? Exit informs Rose that where she comes from they don't eat people, and she does not want there to be human meat on the wedding banquet menu. But Rose is a trained gourmet cannibal chef. He's is a bit disappointed. He really likes being a cannibal. He hadn't eaten people for years and then he killed and cooked Kettle to make a point to Vega, and his taste for human meat came back. Still he agrees to a human meat free menu, and they'll discuss whether he'll be permitted to continue to be  a cannibal after the wedding.

Those will be some strange vows.

Meanwhile, Brace the Friendly Brainer taps into the psychic maelstrom and finds out that it really wants there to be human meat at the wedding banquet.

So everyone's all happy and getting hooked up or married or both at the Luxor. This was like a first episode, since we moved ahead in time and met Brace. Prosperity, love, health care, and a depraved hedonistic cannibal Hardholder is settling down, getting married, and becoming a family man. Because OMG Baby Pumpkin is so damn cute. What could possibly go wrong?

There was a funny culture clash moment in a conversation between Rose and Brace. Rose says to Brace, "You remind me of me brother, Pallor. He was a mindfucker. He used to work for me. Some people are into that. Mindfucking." Elizabeth looked shocked as if I'd made a racist remark, but she was trying to be polite. Pallor was my first PC in this game, a Brainer. Then Vincent showed me the Maestro D' splat, and I created Rose and made Pallor his youngest brother. Pallor became an NPC and went from Brainer to mindfucker. Apparently it's not PC to call a Brainer a Mindfucker.
Other players, chime in, please???

Nice write-up, Juila :)

And yeah, happy peace and prosperity Luxorites - let's see if it lasts.

One thing I liked a lot about this session is the sense of jumping levels it had. We've kind of got the holding settled (for the moment) and that lets us put our heads up and look around at the bigger picture. We need a bigger scale map, with the old hanger, the Luxor, Harridan's Wall, maybe the crash site where Daff met up with the PCs...what else?

Mox is very interested in working with Brace to help even more people. It's a good professional relationship. He doesn't entirely understand what Brace does, but it seems to work, so it's all good. Mox is keeping a eye out for trouble, because he knows from his old Biker old days that trouble generally comes sniffing around peace and happiness. On the other hand, and also from his old Biker days, he knows the truce of an oasis or medic is pretty solid. He's enjoying his occasional visits with Amanual, but since she's living with Eos now, he's put her in a different place in his heart, on the 'not actually an option' shelf. Yeah, he had a bit of a possible thing for her. He's mostly over it.

Keeler's feeling really good about having a solid crew again, and to have that little tension between Do and Rose worked out this way instead of the shooty way. It's nice and all, this calm spell, but heck, there are only so many pigeons you can shoot before Oh says 'no more pigeons today, Keeler'. Heading out on a shopping run is going to be good. Maybe we'll stop in at Harridan's for a quick card game on the way back.

We need a bigger scale map, with the old hanger, the Luxor, Harridan's Wall, maybe the crash site where Daff met up with the PCs...what else?

Been's place. Been has been this mysterious name on a character sheet since the beginning of the game, and Rose owed him for The Garden. Now Keeler and Do are going there to shop for prostitutes. Shudder.

So I'm excited to map out the landscape. I want to know who the other warlords or hardholders are. If the Luxor is bustling with food, health, sex, and it's peaceful, I imagine people might travel pretty far to conduct business.

Both Keeler and Rose apparently spent time away from the Luxor, I'm curious about what brought them both back. What's out there that made the Luxor a place to go home to? And where did Brace come from, and why is he here?

I almost forgot. Rose plans to ask Mox to officiate the wedding/s.

I think it's interesting that we're all playing cross gender, too, and the notion of male-ness takes on different forms.

I think that 'where did Brace come from and why is he here' is interesting, too.

I am already enjoying the hell out of Brace, which is surprising considering I've only played him for one session: normally it takes a couple to really get into a character for me.

I need to figure out where he's from; I'm guessing he used to be part of Harridan's crew, but when he found out that everyone was coming to the Luxor to be healed physically, he figured a lot of them could probably use some mental and emotional healing as well. And like— when I play him, I'm thinking about some of my favorite grifters and con artists and how they work, the ways they instill confidence and gain trust and make people like them. The idea is, what if Brace IS the kind of guy grifters pretend to be? It makes him really fucking suspicious-looking, for one thing, but then when you investigate and get to the core of him, you find out he really is just this super nice guy set on helping people. He's a gentleman, a bit of a dandy, and completely guileless. But he's a brainer, and we've already established in the fiction that that kind of mental and psychic ability is sort of disparaged and feared, so there's a level of prejudice going on too.

And it's also kind of an experiment to see how non-creepy you can make a Brainer, on a meta level. I'm not sure how long the lack of creepy can last as a Brainer advances, which implies some fun things for his character arc.

I didn't realize we were all now playing cross-gender until Parthenia said something! So we are. I'm really excited to see where Brace's relationship with Mox goes, and how it develops. Shreyas and I have been obsessively watching the TV show Merlin for many reasons, one of which is that it's one of the only really strong portrayals of male friendship we've seen in the media recently. You'd think there'd be more, but it's hard to find one about mutual affinity and trust, as opposed to nailing chicks or drinking a lot or revolving around a specific sport or activity.