Literary UPICK || Town Edition

Pop! Out of of the egg came a tiny and very hungry caterpillar.

PLOTSTICKERS The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle __________ On Night 0, you ate through one post. But you were still hungry. On Day 1, you ate through another post. But you were still hungry. EACH PHASE, YOU CAN CHOOSE ONE POST IN THREAD TO EAT. The post cannot be a host post. You will chew a hole through the post, and it will become difficult to read. When you have eaten seven things, you will build a small house, called a cocoon, around yourself. The cocoon will KEEP YOU SAFE FOR ONE KILL ATTEMPT. You cannot continue eating while you are a cocoon. If you are killed any time after you have built a cocoon, you will die. After two phases, you will RETURN TO THE THREAD as a beautiful butterfly.

I prepare for my new life as an adult like some people prepare for the apocalypse.

ARDONYE Hyperbole and a Half by Allie Brosh __________ A few times a year, you spontaneously decide that you’re ready to be a useful mafia. You don’t know why you think this. You are always pretty useful as mafia. It’s probably a combination of modesty ingrained after years upon years of social blunders and lack of self-confidence ingrained after years upon years of social blunders. In any case, you sit yourself down and start drafting a few abilities that a useful mafia would have. Since the universe has laws and mafia games have balance requirements, you can only use one of these abilities each night. But they’re still useful. You think. SEND A MESSAGE TO A PLAYER THROUGH THE HOST. But Ardonye, you think, mafia can already communicate with one another. What possible use could they have for sending messages to other players? Well. That is a good question. Maybe it will make you look more town. This is the story you go with, over the actual story, which is that the hosts liked the thematic fit. PROTECT A PLAYER FROM NON-LETHAL ACTIONS. This one is actually useful. Through the powers of fiscal moderation, it protects you or maybe a teammate from stuns, jails, investigations, and anything else that does not involve dying. Awesome, so you can use it to keep your night kill sender immune to blocking actions, right? No, not awesome. Not right. You CAN’T TARGET A PLAYER WITH THIS ACTION IF THEY SEND IN THE NK THAT SAME NIGHT. There is some semblance of balance in this game. JAIL A PLAYER. You might be asking why you need this when there is a house that traps people and also sometimes kills them. Well, maybe sometimes you would like to protect yourselves while also stunning yourselves and not dying. Incidentally, if you use your protect on a player trapped in the house, it will save them from the jailing part but not the dying part. I don’t remember our reasoning for making groceries a jail. It might be because shopping carts look like jail cells. I made that up just now. I just asked the other host and the other host said that this is because you send people out to get groceries so that they can’t act or be targeted. I like my previous idea better. HIDE ALL INFORMATION ABOUT A PLAYER UPON DEATH. So here’s how this works. You target a player and then clean all the things. Their alignment appears in rollover as “...?” If anyone tries to investigate their corpse in any way, they turn up nothing. You are a highly efficient bleaching machine. Due to a shortage of cleaning supplies and general lack of motivation, you only get to use this TWICE IN THE GAME. If your target doesn’t die the phase that you use this ability, you watch them like a serial killer or a middle school girl with a crush, and clean up their corpse when they eventually kick the bucket. And finally, if you’d like to keep being a good mafia and doing mafia things, you need to INCLUDE AT LEAST ONE IMAGE IN ONE OF YOUR POSTS EACH NIGHT YOU WANT TO ACT, or else your action just won’t happen. It doesn’t have to be a hand-drawn image, but there has to be an image, and it has to be in a post. At night. When you want to act.

And then the nightmares will begin.

NAUTILUS House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski __________ experiments conducted by child development expert Jean Piaget, who theorized a series of six stages of object permanence. In the first stage, an infant of 0-1 months of age is a creature of sensory automation. He understands the world around him in bright lights and warm touches, in flickers of motion punctuated by laughter. The extent of his universe is ephemeral. Without the cognitive equipment to house a concept of past and future, the infant’s existence can reside only in the now. His is a world that changes suddenly and all at once, with no anchor to bind its similarities to its previous incarnations. By the third stage, a child will reach for an object that is partially hidden, such as a stuffed toy tucked under a blanket, or a ball just visible behind a bookshelf. If the object is completely obscured, however, the child loses interest. The unseen object, denied authenticity through ocular confirmation, vanishes completely from the child’s reality. It is not until the last of Piaget’s sensorimotor stages that a child comprehends that the concealment of an object does not imply its molecular dissolution.127 The reaction of Navidson’s friends and family to his plunge into the stairwell has been noted with interest by a number of cognitive researchers as a reversion to this infantile state. Karen’s shouts when Reston closes and locks the hallway door reflect a terror that, out of sight, with no method of communication, Navidson might simply dematerialize altogether. Jeremiah Holdstead writes, Severed from reality128, UNABLE TO PERFORM ANY OBSERVABLE ACTION OR BE ACTED UPON, ANY INDIVIDUAL WHO ENTERS SUCH A HALLWAY MIGHT SIMPLY CEASE TO EXIST. Indeed, the entrant enters a state not unlike quantum superposition, where though upon return to observable reality, he can thusly be pronounced living, an entrant who never returns from the hall CANNOT WITH CERTAINTY BE PRONOUNCED DEAD.129 In such a space, one that transcends the common understanding of the 127Jean Piaget’s The origins of intelligence in children. Vol. 8. No. 5. New York: International Universities Press, 1952. 128It’s in here. I can feel it in here with me. No amount of locks will keep it out. I got another set of deadbolts for the main door, taped more cardboard in the windows. It helps, I think. Doesn’t keep it out. I don’t think anything can keep it out. Maybe I’m trying to keep it in. I tried to fight it earlier today. Had a crowbar in one hand. Couldn’t tell you how it got there. I’m in the bathroom of some seedy bar. Doesn’t matter which. They’re all the same. All smelling like shit and antiseptic and the depravity of the human condition. Well I’m on my knees in a grimy stall praying to the porcelain gods, when that godawful taste hits the back of my throat, and this time it isn’t just bile. I retch. Was already in the middle of retching, anyway. It doesn’t do anything to clear the taste, sharp as rust, thick and dark and rotten. And the temperature drops to freezing. Well, I have this crowbar. Veins still pumping with whatever liquid courage hadn’t yet been chucked up, I heft it in one hand, raising it like a deadbeat father about to hit his children, and I turn. And it’s there. It’s there with fingers. Long fingers. Like a dead and clawing grasp. Eyes. Red. Just all red. Red as blood, pooling my vision. It uncoils from the darkness, it is darkness, uncoiling, just winding closer and closer and reaching out towards me with its icy corpse touch. I’m not going to say I wasn’t afraid, I was scared shitless. Literally evacuating my bowels, but I swing. I swing the fucking crowbar like I’ve never swung anything before, and I hear it hit with a sick crack like bone splintering, and there’s a sucking sound, like mud or quicksand, and I have never heard quicksand before but I imagine it sounds like that, like the earth quivering and slurping and swallowing everything whole. I yank the crowbar and it pulls loose with a pop, and all I can do is just keep hitting it, keep swinging, like the goddamn Tasmanian Devil. And then it’s gone. And that’s when the pain hits me. I have just enough time to look down and see my own broken legs, bone jutting out like shattered teeth, blood painting the floor and the sides of the stall, pooling in my shoes and clawing up my clothes, and then I hit the cold tile floor, and all I see is stars. Then just like that, the taste is gone. The world spins back into focus. I never noticed til then that it was out of focus in the first place. I reach down to check my legs but they’re fine. They’re whole. I’m on the floor of this bathroom stewing in who knows what questionable liquid, but none of it is my own blood. Sweat, maybe, cold beads of sweat pebbling on my skin, but no blood. There’s no crowbar in sight, either. Not sure what the deal was with that. Anyway, I guess I’m writing this all to say that you can’t fight it. You can swing all you want until your muscles turn to jelly, but in the end it’s just your own bones you’re breaking. You can try killing it, if you want, if it can even be killed. Maybe you even succeed. But EVEN ONCE IT’S GONE, even when the shadows stop stalking you with yellow teeth and pale bone-like fingers, nothing matters anyway. You’re marked. YOUR DAYS ARE NUMBERED. It might be one day. Maybe two. But eventually, without thinking, you’ll aim a pistol at the back of your throat and just before you pull the trigger you’ll look into the darkness and it’ll stare back at you with eyes the color of blood. And that’s how it’ll get you. 129Jeremiah Holdstead’s “Schrödinger’s House” University of Iowa, 1994, p19.

“She looketh well to the ways of her household; and eateth not the bread of idleness."—Proverbs, xxxi. 25-28.

EZZELIN Mrs. Beeton's Book of Household Management by Isabella Beeton __________ BOILING WATER 1118. INGREDIENTS.—1 message “role names” or 1 message “actions” Mode.—PM the host with a message that you would like to act, and select to receive either role names or actions. If you are not stunned, you will receive a list of all role names that acted, or all actions that occurred. Time.—Every other night phase. Sufficient for 24 or more persons. PREPARING MEALS 1119. INGREDIENTS.—1 name of mafia member, can include self Mode.—PM the host with the name of a mafia member for whom you would like to prepare a meal. For each meal a player has eaten, it will require one extra vote to lynch them (with the exception of plotstickers, see Note) Time.—Every other day phase. Sufficient for 1 player. Note.—Until plotstickers becomes a cocoon, any meals prepared for her will subtract one from her required food count, rather than affecting votes on her. After she has become a cocoon, she will respond to meals in the normal way. WRITING RECIPES 1120. INGREDIENTS.—1 post Mode.—Each phase that you plan to act, at least one post you make during that phase must contain a recipe or be written in recipe format, or else your action will not go through.

“Unclose your mind. You are not a prisoner. You are a bird in fight, searching the skies for dreams.”

CHINOMI Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murakami __________ It was hard for those who’d never attempted the procedure to understand your method of calculation. The right side and the left side of your brain kept separate accounts, and when they were brought together, they could process information so fully as to realize previously obfuscated information, such as THE TITLE AND EMPLOYMENT OF AN UNKNOWN INDIVIDUAL. It was by no means an easy matter to hold such information in parallel, however, and so whenever you were interrupted by a visitor, you lost concentration and failed to finish your calculations. You didn’t spend too much time thinking about it. These revelations SIMPLY CAME TO YOU ON CERTAIN NIGHTS. In the evenings, you returned to your apartment and take off your generic business attire. At night, you appeared to all the world as MAFIA. Your job is to read old dreams from the skulls of great horned beasts. You spend your days in the Library, an old stone building with iron grilled windows, unlocking secrets about the Town’s inhabitants. You don’t choose the information you learn, you simply take a numberless skull and read. On CERTAIN DAYS, when not interrupted from your task, you might pick up more solid information such as their NAMES AND OCCUPATIONS. You are a newcomer, and consider yourself more and more an outsider, but in the golden light of day, those around you recognize you as TOWN. You want to leave, but someone is searching for you, and so you will wait. Here, in this Town, with its two plazas and towering timepiece, you will wait for them to find you. On the fifth day, if they do not come, you will seek them out for yourself.