Act IV

Themes

Crossroads, transitions, transitional animals, borders
Lethe, memory and forgetting
Chaotic transport, diffusion and “low energy” transport
Tragedy contrasted against reconstruction

Timeline

At each destination, the player can choose whether to go ashore or to stay on the tugboat. In the following river scene, there’s a text vignette of either a story about the river by Will or a recap of what happened ashore if the player stayed on the boat.

(Note: the “~” lines indicate where the riverworld scenes happen; the ~s is Shannon’s solo dinghy riverworld adventure)

Lake	Ashore	Tugboat
-	n/a	Tugboat opening. Will works on the mammoth. Junebug comes on deck and they chat.
-	n/a	(Act 4 titles, then -) Tugboat deck. Shannon walks around the deck (360 degrees) and talks to Cate, Conway, and Junebug/Johnny/Clara on the deck of the tugboat. Ezra comes above deck and tells Shannon he’s found some cards, and wants to teach her a game in the dining room. Shannon follows him below deck, where Ezra teaches Shannon and Conway a card game about boats on a river.
-	~	~
x	Floating Gas Station	Will shows Ezra the map room.
x	~	~
x	The Rum Colony	Shannon browses the video archive and discovers the video of Weaver. She talks to Will and Cate about it.
-	~	~
-	Phone Room	The dogs hang out in silence for like 30 seconds.
-	~	~
-	Research Lab	Ezra teaches Cate and some others a card game about memorizing the deck.
-	~	~
x	The Iron Pariah	Someone napping on the tugboat; a modal appears after a short while to wake up the player
x	~	~
x	Telephone Exchange	(offer the player a tugboat vignette but then quickly interrupt it and lead them into the exchange scene instead)
-	~s	~s
x	Sam and Ida’s	(none; Shannon rejoins the boat + crew at the restaurant)
x	~	~
x	Clara’s Performance from the shore	Clara’s performance from the boat. Clara talks to Ezra about her uncle Andrius, and invites him to perform with her in concert.
-	~	~
-	Mail drop	(none; Shannon and crew disembark with the truck and head to the ghost town)

Scene brainstorming lists

Scenes can be archetypal. Below are tentative brainstorming lists. Concrete ones can be moved to the more descriptive list below.

Memorials

Stephen Bishop (statue, plaque refers to “S. Bishop”)
Memorial for Elkhorn Miners
Historical photographs of patrons and architecture at a bar/restaurant
Rest stops describing historical development of the area
Yard sale describing the objects accumulated by a family or things left in a house over generations
Some place with shipwreck paintings of rafts, dinghies, houseboats, beacons, canoes and other floating oddities lost to Lake Lethe (a shipwreck memorial painting shows some sort of vessel in stormy weather being inundated by waves); maybe the civil war battleship is one of them

Border disputes

Borders & border-crossings could be an interesting way to talk about the kind of “transitional” character of the Echo River. Border disputes could be over non-political, mundane, or abstract borders:

A disagreement about where one person’s garden ends and their neighbor’s begins
A dispute over which part of a hybrid bar/liquor store is the bar & which part is the store
A wedding & ensuing discussion about how each family is now constituted

Music venues

Motorbike garage (noise show)
A scene where you can mess around with modular components
Impromptu jam sessions with musician friends (tonal quality driven by dialog choices?)

Skeleton encounters

Titanic Canoe Rental (and firewood shop), where skeletons peddle whiskey to adventurers.

Character specific

Flora’s paper boat floating somewhere, or beached somewhere.

Locations from “Here and There Along the Echo”

Cluttered Place (see elementary school debris)
Flooding Place
New Königsberg
Any islands that are not presently underwater (see Island Names)
Silo of Late Reflections
Monument to something that we don’t remember what it is
Sam & Ida's (seafood restaurant, see Sam and Ida's)
Consolidated Auxiliary Switch Number 30, formerly the Echo River Central Exchange (see Telephone Exchange)

Character development

Tugboat operator? Based on the Kickstarter postcard, they run a CB radio station and is known as the Mucky Mammoth? Maybe a relative of Carrington? Vaguely a psychopomp, maybe based on Hecate. Could be a midwife as a dayjob.
Chester is maybe the cat that has appeared in the Bureau. Needs to be returned to the battleship or something?
Conway becomes distant, you don’t control him or pick what he says? Often you find Conway talking to skeletons that appear at different locations and you don’t catch what they’re talking about (he could be alone, and when he disappears offscreen and when you walk back he’s wrapping up a convo with them: spooky). Conway has given his jacket to Shannon since he’s feeling flush (those electronic whiskey bones, man) and Shannon finds the river chilly. This reveals some ink he has (which is dictated by player choices).
Junebug & Johnny know a lot of folks on the river who they met along the way because as musicians, they’ve traveled around and encountered many people, and it could become clear that they know the Zero well. For them the experience could be reconnecting with people they haven’t seen in a long time. Would be nice to introduce a side of the Zero that’s not estranging or gloomy. Also there is a continuation of their outfits changing and matching the setting.
Ezra could have separation anxiety from Julian and he could be working through those feelings throughout the act?
Shannon could focus on Weaver more, and maybe challenge the validity of the Distillery’s claims to Conway, sort of the indignation K. has in The Trial or something?
Cat has the same function as the hound. You can name it, and it follows you out of the maildrop.

Scenes

Tugboat

“The Mucky Mammoth” is a tugboat that operates as a ferry, garbage hauler, and mail carrier for the Echo River area.

Tugboat Characters:

Cate — Cate’s day job is as a midwife.
Will (organist)
Clara — A musician who Junebug & Johnny know.

Maildrop

A train-track style mail drop that the ferry moves by. This has something to do with the ghost town and the source of the letter from Dogwood Drive.

We also talked about this being the ending scene. In which case some sort of transport exchange or transition needs to happen. Could be a visual quotation of Fitzcarraldo.

Battleship

Civil war-era iron-clads were pretty small, so this could be a place to play with impossible spaces. It’s in the center of Lake Lethe and has maybe become a trash island with other debris getting stuck to it. We talked about there being a whirlpool/vortex that the ship is working against (cats are still running the ship), or maybe the ship has caused it in the first place (like stirring a glass of water).

Could mirror the visual style of the Tugboat scene.

Elementary School Debris

School desks, chairs, books, and other things float down the river. You see some TVs that are still broadcasting as they float in the water. (In “Here and There Along the Echo,” this is the “cluttered place”).

Description from “Here and There”:

There is a place always cluttered by debris, floating along the water. Otherwise, it’s unremarkable — in fact, the only way to find it is to notice that there happens to be more trash there than anywhere else around. I wonder why that is.

Sadie’s House Boat

You could visit Sadie and her houseboat from the Museum in Act 2.

Floating Gas Station

Like the one we saw in Vancouver.

The Rum Colony (Tiki Bar)

Junebug & Johnny could have a short impromptu comedy routine.

You can order drinks from the bar and it’s a system like the mixologist bot on Twitter (complete with procedurally generated name, ingredients, and model).

Phone Room

A phone on a tiny island in the river. There’s a phone book with entries for a few places the player can call. This is how the player reconnects with Carrington in this act, if applicable. They can also access some conversations or recordings that connect with the interlude, by calling numbers they’ve come across in the interlude somewhere.

Could be a good opportunity to lean on the multiple-playthroughs structure: you get a phone number from some time/location that you can only reach after the phone, then try dialing it on a subsequent play.

Or, instead of being a phone, it could be something more surreal like a tiny island with a phone & a notebook on a desk, and nothing else? Could be the same as the downloadable version of the next interlude.

Titanic Canoe Rental

A canoe rental and firewood shop. A place for the skeletons to appear, peddling flasks of whiskey to renters.

Elkhorn Mine Memorial

A memorial to the miners lost in the accident. Some people are visiting, paying respects. Shannon is frustrated or finds it ironic that there’s no memorial above ground.

Research Lab

A lab where experiments are being carried out on memory. The effects of light & darkness on memory, something like that? An opportunity to have the player participate in some weird experiments, and also to explore some past and present scientific conceptions of memory as related to the theme generally in act iv.

The lab could be funded or operated by the university that Lula, Donald & Joseph worked at, maybe with a grant from the power company.

Photo exhibit

(Marked for text-only river vignette.)

A collection of photographs of the town in Act 2, before it was converted into the Museum of Dwellings. Could be sort of photo-essay collaboration between a writer & photographer, like "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men."

Bureau Surveying Site

Not sure what this should be, but Mary Ann at reception in Act 2 mentions “Wanda is out on a site.” So the Wanda character could be here somewhere doing some surveying.

Owl house shop

There are many owl house features to choose from, in order to precisely attract different owls.

Taxidermist

(Done as text-only river vignette.)

People are bringing in things to be stuffed — pets, dead animals they found, maybe somebody just has a couple feathers and the taxidermist is frustrated they don’t have more to work with.

Grave marker shop

(Done as text-only river vignette.)

This shop sells handmade headstones & other grave markers. It looks a bit like a cemetery, with headstones on display. This could be a nice echo of the previous two cemeteries — at the Marquez farmhouse & above the distillery — both of which are also not real burial sites, and a foreshadow of the horse funeral in Act V.

Sam and Ida’s

A seafood restaurant out somewhere in the water on Lake Lethe. Maybe floating, or perched on a tiny island? They specialize in freshwater seafood from creatures that live deep underwater. Sam and Ida are an older couple — Sam dives, Ida cooks. When the party arrives at the restaurant, Sam is bringing in the night’s haul. He dives at night to fish underwater in a large diving bell-like structure. Could be like a diving bell large enough that it can fit a small fishing boat in it?

Sam invites the party in to have an early breakfast (Act IV is probably around 4–5 AM in game time, since Act V takes place at sunrise).

Trash Barge

Solo scene with Ezra running around the trash barge. The rest of the party has gone ashore. Ezra could interact with some birds picking through the trash, maybe talking to them about their “flock” or observing how they function as a collective & as individuals. When the party returns, they describe in broad strokes some adventure they’ve had that the player has no other access to.

Telephone Exchange

Once the Echo River Central Exchange, this phone exchange was purchased by Consolidated Power years ago and re-imagined as Consolidated Auxiliary Switch Number 30. Consolidated attempted to replace the telephone operators with automation but approached the project out-of-order by dismantling the old system before building the new one. The only remaining employee/operator is Poppy.

Rad 1951 AT&T video about telephone switches — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZePwin92cI

(Ways the player can access/reveal/discover different parts of Act IV)

The Echo River has a weird topology, like the Zero. It reconfigures itself somehow, and the player gets drawn along by shifting currents, navigating by dropping the boat’s anchor at specific locations and waiting for the current to change. (?)

Could have some kind of radar/sonar visual treatment, and a way to visualize the current maybe.

Tracking number of playthroughs

Some scenes only appear on the 2nd, 23rd, etc. playthrough.

Chaotic movement to different segments

We also talked about some system that would be pretty chaotic but intuitive. We probably should fudge it a lot so after a bunch of consecutive playthroughs you hit all the important areas we want players to reach.

Choices that echo across playthroughs

Choosing something in one playthrough might have an effect on the immediately subsequent playthrough (or all subsequent playthroughs).

Island names

These are all the island names referred to in Here and There Along the Echo. These could be small vignettes that appear conditionally only when they are not submerged according to the guide’s random number generator. Or we could just pull from this list indiscriminately whenever we need an island name.

Slate Island, The Red Island, The Green Island, The Blue Island, Island Number 8192, The Uninhabited Island, The Entire “Seven (Plus or Minus Two) Islands” Archipelago, New Konigsberg, Skeleton Keys, Fancy Island, Tearless Rock, Part-time Island, Murphy’s Weather Station Rock, Whippoorwill Islet, Rock of Magnets, Island of Trivia, Island of 60 KHz, Island of 350 and 440Hz, Island of Interfering Tones, Island of Eusapia, Despina Dockyards, Baucis Keys, Fish-Jaw Coral, Angled Island, Islet of Distraction, Endless Island, Soggy Island, Jerry’s Island, Ted’s Island, Nelson’s Island, Serious Island, Island of Ringing, Undocumented Island, Overdraft Island, Islet of Overemphasis, Island of Heartsickness, Dog Shit Island, The Beasley Keys, Hermit Thrush Island, The Missing Island, Island of Cones, The Undefinable Island, Beton Island, Bear Island, Implied Island, Rock of Boredom, Loose-Tooth Rock, Water Tree Keys, Chorus Keys, The Doubtful Island, Island of Negative Space

Scrambled Template Applications

In VHS library, text on the back of the box or stuff scribbled on the label
Magazines could be cool, something like that art assignment bot
Could be those craft/maker projects you find in magazines
Floral arrangements
Modular synth patches
Yoga positions
Still life arrangements for an art class in an elementary school
Junebug could describe custom bikes she’s seen or worked on
News headlines on the radio
Jerky recipes
Recipes for disaster
First-hand accounts of paranormal experiences / ghost stories
Forgotten people (ex: “you remember Carl, he used to work at the casino, long hair, always had his shoes untied...?”)
Lost pets

Tugboat Vignettes

These vignettes get inserted before/after other scenes, without the player doing anything to prompt them.

Shannon explores the video archive, and finds a video of Weaver. She asks the other people on the boat and learns something that points her in the direction of the mail drop.
Ezra teaches Shannon, Clara, and Conway a card game.
Ezra teaches Junebug and Johnny a card game.
The dogs hang out.