Weather Factory

I came to the upsetting conclusion this week that I’d written almost 2% of the likely final word count of Travelling. Less upsetting than you’d think, because we spent most of the last few months setting up infrastructure and tooling, and writing now goes at a much livelier pace. It’s still basically a year of solid writing minimum (just writing! never mind the other stuff!) but the even less upsetting news is, I enjoy that, and I s’pose you lot are also interested in that or you wouldn’t be following this weird little indie artefact.

‘Less upsetting.’ I’ve spent a lot of the last week in alternate 1948 Antibes, some of which is notably upsetting. It’s under the thumb of the French State, for starters, whose motto is not LIBERTÉ EGALITÊ FRATERNITÊ but TRAVAIL FAMILLE PATRIE. None of those are bad things in themselves, but priorities, you know? The French State, aka the Vichy regime, no longer existed in 1948, but the Secret Histories in Travelling are in several respects more visibly alternate than they were in previous games. Look closely at this war memorial:

There’s a reason for the variation, but it was also very useful when I was working out Spencer’s timeline, to make sure he could plausibly get out of the seminary before the war ended, so he could serve as a chaplain-exorcist and start struggling with his faith. An early version of Spencer, btw, had him as a strayed member of the Shepherd Society, our Jesuit-alternatives, but oh my days, have you seen how long those guys train for? He couldn’t have packed that in alongside fall from grace, semi-failed writer, semi-successful stage magician (“Father Brass”), Bureau investigator, disgraced medical student, Légion du Seuil medic, Worm hotel. As it is, his CV is very full and it feels right that he’s bumping into old friends and adversaries all over Europe.

Back to the Histories. You might be familiar with the Darlan Deal – when a Vichy admiral in Algeria defects to the Allies, changing the course of the war in North Africa. This is controversial, to put it mildly. Darlan is a high-level collaborator in a parafascist regime about which the kindest thing you could say was that it deported fewer Jews. In our own History, this controversy is somewhat tidied when Darlan is assassinated the following month. On Christmas Eve, by a royalist Resistance fighter associated with a plan to restore the monarchy, in the person of the Count of Paris, Henri d’Orléans, who is at this time enlisted in the French Foreign Legion in Algeria… because honestly actual history is much more inventive than me. Meanwhile Hitler decides the Vichy regime has outlived its usefulness, the Axis occupy Vichy, and in 1944-5 occupied France is liberated as a single entity.

But in Travelling’s History, enough of Darlan survived the assassination to keep working with the Allies, developments on the Eastern Front mean that the Axis can’t execute Case Anton with enough force, and France remains divided at the war’s end. Darlan’s anti-icarian sympathies win American recognition for the French State. The regime is still a hive of ex-collaborators, but Darlan has held elections – banning Gaullist and Icarian candidates for ‘security reasons’, but reluctantly allowing women to vote – and reversing les Statuts de Juifs. Even the most vigorous Vichyist hard-liners are more hysterical now about raveleurs, tarasques, the Carapace Cross, and other hybridities which are not only immoral but also contagious.

Which brings us back to ‘some of Antibes is noticeably upsetting’. Reconstruction, in this History, is more than just (‘just’) feeding the starving and rebuilding from rubble. If you want to rebuild, you may need to send a shovel-gang first to cleanse the bomb-crater of what the G.I.s call ‘Puppy Mike’, and you’ll want the shovellers to wash with caustic soap afterwards. It means that if you can see stars through a hole in the ground, you need to watch for sticky widows, when most people can’t even see sticky widows. (Spencer can. There are a couple of possible reasons for that.) It means that if you enjoy a tumble with the likely lad passing through, you need to worry not only about pregnancy and social diseases, but also the risk of growing teeth and hair in the wrong places. It means that ‘dead’ can be a matter of degree – this was true in our 1948 too, of course, because ‘lost’ ‘presumed dead’ ‘changed name and secretly remarried’ ‘lost memory and living in a fishing village’ were somewhat interchangeable. But here one can walk around with significant bits of one’s soul missing; or you can be something that would like to be alive, and nearly is.

The Incorporates of the West (and the Ministries of the East) can provide protection against this sort of thing. Eighty years on, even before the advent of  Trump and Vance, the heady complexities of the European attitude towards America – parvenu but cool superpower, late but essential ally, flattener of local difference, bringer of jazz and chocolate and hope – those complexities have become tired and blurry. We wanted to relineate the complexity. In Travelling’s 1948, the sanctioned officers of Incorporates are conduits of Coronal (celestial, or irradiate, or heretical) power. Nail a dollar bill to your door lintel, and the sticky widows might pass by. But there are reasons someone might balk at nailing up that dollar.

Your engagement with complexity in Travelling at Night is through Spencer. Born in Paris, raised in Kerisham. How French is he, how British? How human? How closely is he prepared to work with the Office of Onteiric Coordination? Is he sympathetic to their concerns about the Carapace Cross? If he gets into bed with them in the short term, will he betray them to the Ministry of Spires later? And so on. All the kind of choices you’d expect. To match the back-lighting.

In Antibes, where Coronal influence is very strong – that is, around the Sanitarium Aujourd’hui – the sun literally shines brighter. The terminator between the two sides of Antibes is very clear. (Our composer – of whom also, more later – has given us two versions of the Antibes theme to fade between as you cross it.) The infected wounds in the buildings have closed. There are still starry abysses, where the skin of the world parts under too much tension, but the air has the glossy texture of the best advertisements, and the dappled rose never grows.

Which is to say, if you drop by our Steam page, there are fresh screenshots. And if Antibes is in some parts upsetting, Caen is downright alarming. I haven’t even talked about the ‘daffer’ that Ysien insidiates offer, but in Caen, you can see some of the benefits of accepting it.