Upon The River: Carlston Dale, August Maybe [English Eerie] [One-Shot]

An oddly red-headed bird with odd markings about its head.
Art by Doug Bolden but see Credits for more explanation.


Previously...

Geoff has died due to a strange illness. Jules has ceased responding. Ivy is now refusing to leave the river's side. Strange piping can heard. The constant damp has decayed the food. Carlston and Ivy turn to each for companionship, but after Carlston has learned the stars are wrong, his grasp of reality is shattering.

About Upon the River

August 1921: Carlston Dale takes his dying fiance on a trip down a idyllic river so they can have the honeymoon they will never get to experience. Things go wrong when they wash up upon a riverbank where the rules have changed and things move in the constant fog that always blocks the horizon.

Content Warnings: Mild tobacco use, mild drinking, death, some cosmic dread...

Upon the River is played using English Eerie scenario "The Lost River" (with obvious nods to Algernon Blackwood's "The Willows," as will be obvious). No additional oracles or tools are used. It will be played in one-day-per-day style format.

Any errors in geography, history, or language are all mine. I do my best.

This "one-shot" will be played In-Line style.



CARLSTON DALE

3 Spirit :: 2 Resolve

The son of shop owners in Bicester, moved to London after a war injury involving a landmine occurred in the very final days of The Great War. Became an undertaker and got engaged to Julia "Jules" Harcourt. She has been diagnosed with an incurable heart condition and is not expected to live past the end of year. She refuses to marry Carlston, now, so instead they take a trip with two of his friends—Mary Jones and Geoffrey Rose—as well Mary's friend Ivy Prairie. Meant to be a chaste honeymoon and likely Jules's last outing.

Distinguishing Features: Red hair, deep scars on right arm, walks with a notable limp.

Fears: Silence, Deep Water, and Being Trapped.



Morning Card (22nd): Secondary Character Harmed (4+1).

Jules starts to spasm but is saved by Carlston (roll succeeded)

Evening Card (22nd): Gray Lady

Ivy throws herself into the river as sacrifice. The piping grows nearer.



August Maybe


I feel like there is a joke here. When is it cold in August? When the stars are silly billy goats wearing masks and pretending to be stars.

Not funny! I know, I know. Nothing much is, now. The air pushes down on me with the weight of years ever minute. The only laughter I hear is the laughter in my own head while trying to make sense of the strange shapes pretending to be the stars and moon each night.

Ivy is dead. Mary lives by consuming enough alcohol to pass out and then wakes up and talks some nonsense about needing to clean the house.

Maybe all that nonsense is in my head. If I had a choice right now, I would take whatever sanity I had left and give it to whatever sanity Mary had left and let her try to leave this accursed place.

Now that's nonsense.

Ivy is dead. I mentioned that. I did not mention how.

I spent the morning helping Mary to repair the boats. She saw my face after I saw the stars and she heard my gasps as I wrote the previous journal entry. It felt like I spent hours putting ink to page but going back it was just a couple of pages and weird splatters and scratches. I think I was trying to draw these wrong stars. Trying to show you.

I started to write this to show Jules because I had hope she would recover and the doctors were all wrong. I kept writing this because I imagined showing it to someone else. Even if that someone was just a future me who maybe found happiness again.

We were working on the boats and I heard a gasp from the tent. We called it the girl's tent to start, almost coyly. Boys and Girls Adventure. Now it is just the tent. Where the three of us sleep while Ivy prays to the river outside.

Jules told me when she was seven she saw lions at a local show and she said she spent the next six months day dreaming about being a lion tamer and wearing a safari outfit but then she also spent the next six months having nightmares about lions trying to eat her and both of those things I think was kind of her processing a religious experience.

I lay in hospital bed with the sound of death in my throat and the sound of life in my teeth and I had a religious experience not unlike heartburn.

I wonder why we

No, I have to keep it in. On track. Jules gasped. I first had that lion-tamer day dream and then it became the lion-fodder nightmare. She was not trying to get our attention, only she was, she was dying. Her body was rigid and her mouth was clamped around her tongue.

Brown brown gray and way.

I forced her mouth apart and got her turned on her side and river water came flowing

Ivy stood up shouting the sounds of a river in the evening and she was so talented I thought maybe she should go on a show. IVY PRAIRIE, the RIVER TALKING GIRL!

out and out and out and out and out and out a world in a drop and a drop in a shout

IVY arses over elbows tumbling in the river like a gymnast the sun

SLAPPING. I was slapping Jules on the back as she was an entire lake of water and then she calmed, slightly, and I saw her eyes and they were so beautiful and it was all a joke

Mary screaming I screaming the pipes screaming so close

so I told a joke of my own. When is it cold in August? When the stars are silly billy goats wearing masks and pretending to be

I do not know how long ago I wrote that last line. Any of that, really. I am using up what has to be some of the last fuel I have in this lantern just to stay up. All those extra bottles of it was lost on that first night. Well, all but the lantern hanging up in the tent where Geoff died. I will get that in ah I guess no the morning no no

Mary sleeps curled up next to Jules pretty much all the time. Both of them have cracked lips and sunken faces. The shadows are so long, here we see the ancient sight of Judea and what

After Ivy leapt into the water the piping came back. Closer and closer as the sun set. Then, well, I think then the sun did not

Only those stars which are the wrong color wrong place wrong movement and that moon which is just oh so wrong

We have no food and very little water and no way to know if this is only a few hours later or days. My head thinks AUGUST loudly but the air is cold all the time and there is no sign of summer on any of the trees.

Mary is trapped because she refuses to believe Ivy died spinning in the water like a wheel, laughing. Crying. Begging. Praying. I do not know what or why

I am trapped because Jules lives and I cannot

Thus it must be August because anything else is


Been a couple of days since I have been able to "play" a day and look at what I get up to, eh? To tell you the truth, I thought about going even more stream of consciousness.

Partner and daughter have been sick and I've been helping so it kind of helps to nail that sense of exhaustion and tiredness. I have it much better than poor Carlston, though. I suspect it will not end well for him. Alas, alas.

CREDITS

Upon the River is played using only Scott Malthouse's English Eerie, Second Edition and a regular deck of cards built in the instructed manner. For this playthrough, no other oracles or tables will be used.

The picture at the top is something I created using a few settings and tools in GIMP. I just wanted a bird that was like a bird but also off-putting. I accomplished this by starting with "Bird Tree, Black and White" by Kytalpa and then started by removing all the parts that were not black and white, ran it through filters to make it more like a stencil of the the original photo, and then blurred and warped it a bit. I took that version and color-swapped to red and then cloned in the bits (which were further blurred and warped) until I got what I wanted. Only, it was not weird enough. 

I took this public domain sketch of a bird head and then warped it and fitted at the wrong angle on top of the other. The eye and feathers and such line up incorrectly and that is 100% on purpose.

It's a quick fix and super big thanks to Kytalpa and OpenClipart-Vectors for uploading some sources I could use. 

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