This is the ideal episode of Roseworld to me. It is connected to the broader story, but it works well on its own. It incorporates horror and the retrofuturist trappings of the setting to great effect. I’m pretty proud of this one.
First of all, I have to credit my friend Tim Harrington for helping me come up with the family at the center of the story. I wanted them to feel realistic and I was coming up blank, so I asked for suggestions in the group chat, and he helped come up with the character archetypes the story revolves around. We have our mom and dad, a businesswoman and her husband who is becoming increasingly jealous of her success and suspicious of her relationship with her work friend. There’s the angsty teenage daughter, who was dragged along and would rather be absolutely anywhere else, but for her little brother (who I threw in for good measure). Can’t forget the salt-of-the-earth working-class uncle who ends up being the first to go.
Our antagonist in this episode belongs to a group I’ve written about before. The Animal are a faction of malevolent aliens from my Varicose Vaults series who pilot extradimensional torture labyrinths around the many worlds, scooping other beings up and toying with them for millennia until they get bored and either dump them somewhere else or stash them away in a corner of their bulk to go mad and rot. You can read another story about one of these bastards here. Since they’re capable of crossing universes, I had no reason not to use one here, and its inclusion might end up being really important down the line. It was a great monster for this little bottle episode and I think its supernatural evil fits well with the previous episode’s weird creatures. Unlike my earlier Animal story, the episode ends with a fate worse than death for most of the Sutherland family, affirming the total power of this dark invader and the hopelessness of ending up in its grasp.
This story gives a lot of context for the larger narrative too. We start off with the first mention of a Titan - Utica, named for the city in New York - and another reference to “slurry,” this time as some sort of disastrous global event. There is a time before slurry and a time after slurry. Infohazard as a concept comes up again and is given a name. This story’s framing is really important too, since it’s the first time we’re hearing about an AI from its own perspective. It has its own strange way of referring to the world around it. The “little heads” terminology from the first episode comes up again. I felt like this detached, omnipresent narrator was the best viewpoint from which to tell this story.
There’s not much more to say about this one. It’s the only one I’ve written so far that doesn’t revolve around some historical event or location. Just some folks on a boat having a really bad time. Fun stuff!