Snippet day! I have one this time! Still working on chapter 3 of my WiP, and this is pretty early on in that, but I’m happy with it for a first go.
Summary
“Lock that traitor up, Yvin!” Ordric yells, fist hoisted into the air. “You brought all this here! $!{pc_name} could have been killed; do you even care?”
“Don’t you dare,” Yvin says darkly, her voice low and careful. “We don’t yet know what—”
“We know plenty,” Ordric returns, loudly still. @{dis At least here, in the privacy of the inner chambers, his shameful passion cannot be seen. It isn’t lost on you that he wields it in your defense, but even still such an open display among the public, among the Eidans—the mothers would curse his weakness.|Only here, in the privacy of the inner chambers, could anyone—let alone a man, even a man of Ordric’s position—speak so openly and with such unrestrained passion. If only the rest of the world could be so.}
“No,” Anatole says. “We do not.”
“And you,” Ordric says, voice turned to venom. “You shouldn’t even be here. This is a private affair, an internal matter. You ought to be dragged out of here by your hair and tied to the cliff face, let the harvesters get those sharp beaks into you and tear out your innards!”
“If you take issue with my presence,” Anatole begins, voice calm and careful, but hardening with each word. “Then remove me, Ordric.”
No one moves. For a moment, no one speaks. The tension swells in the air.
*page_break It doesn’t break, only lessens, evaporating far too slowly.
Yvin looks briefly to Anatole before closing her eyes and pinching the bridge of her nose. You look to Anatole too, but ${athey} maintains ${atheir} composure, expression placid.
“Prove to me you didn’t do this,” Yvin says. Considering she has not drawn a sword and put it to Anatole’s throat, you believe she must be very hopeful of that—if not already wholly convinced. Still, her voice is almost desperate.
Anatole doesn’t waver. “I cannot,” ${athey} says, shaking ${atheir} head, hair tumbling over ${atheir} shoulders with the movement. “Anything I say can be countered. The means, motive, and opportunity are all easily supplied, Om Kepa; you know this. I have no defense, only my word, leaving you in the precarious position of whether or not to trust it: I did not do this.”
“You know that isn’t enough.”
“I do.” And yet, ${athey} seems wholly unbothered. “When the assailant has been recovered, perhaps we will have our answers. Disinclined to believe it you all may be, but I have questions of my own.”
I’ve also been plodding away at my Halloween Jam entry (which I have accidentally titled Haloown Jame, very impressive of me and at this point I refuse to change it because it makes me laugh every time I see it) buuuut to be honest I’ve kind of lost steam on it for now. Maybe I’ll pick it up again later, idk.
I’ve been thinking of it as a general partial demo and/or alpha, I guess? By “beta” I mean the version I’m going to send to my beta testers for testing. So: full game, polished, all mechanics implemented. But there’s probably lots of ways to use the term.