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The Foxfire Correspondent
The Aldermere Valley is eleven miles long with one road in and no road out, and eleven small settlements in it, and at the middle of the valley, in the village of Ellet, there is a press that prints four pages every twelve days.
- ~43 min (estimated)
- 9636 words
- 36 scenes
- 4 branch points
- 4 endings
37 recorded plays (one per visitor per day)
Cover art · art review pending · listing metadata: listing.json · counts: authored
About
The Aldermere Almanac. In this valley a report makes a thing true: a thing described accurately stops happening, and a thing described wrongly becomes a problem people can point at, argue with, and act on. Nobody outside the valley has ever audited this. Vess Colmar, 32, they/them, has set the copy for one hundred and fifty-six issues in six years without a correction, and the valley believes the paper the way it believes the weather. This quarter the almanac is expected to run a story about the drove road at the upper farms, where a wall has been opening for eleven months and three men are alive behind it and can be heard, and Vess Colmar is the reason that story has a shape. The man who walks up to the press three days before the copy is due is Ash Rooke, 24, who is not missing and did not leave. He wants a paragraph. He wants the almanac to report him missing, by his own request, with
Content notice12 topics · tap to review
- A true report that functions as a lie
- A man who destroys himself on purpose
- Three men alive behind a wall, described as lost
- A request that a living man be printed dead
- A fourth person who knows and says nothing
- A false report that stopped a killing
- A death following a report that no man was hurt
- A mill closed and a village emptied by a printed line
- A house burned over a man who was not in it
- Detention on a priest's word
- Coercion by custom and by reputation
- Chosen adult company, non-sexual, fades before anything is depicted
Cast
- V Vess Colmar The correspondent of the Aldermere Almanac and viewpoint character no portrait yet
- T Tilda Brae The valley's one appointed surveyor, and the debt the whole story is measured against no portrait yet
- A Ash Rooke The drove-road hand who is not missing, and the name the valley is being asked to hold no portrait yet
- F Father Dunmo Hedge-priest at the valley mouth, the almanac's best source for nine years, and the man who sends the true page no portrait yet