AutumnRain Writes

Mostly a doll. More than a little bit Witch. Definitely plural. TF29. She/Her, It/Its. It would like to share some stories here. Of dolls. Of the dead. Of lost things. Of war. Please, sit with it and enjoy this hour.

[prokopetz]

Look, I get what you're saying, but sometimes you've gotta reach for the low-hanging fruit. Let's get you a proper meal, refill your meds, and unfuck your living space as best we're able; if after that you still want cute girls to kill you with axes, you'll be in a much better physical and mental place to pursue that goal.

[prokopetz]

Did you play AD&D? I can't remember how old you are, so hopefully that's not too offensive. If so, was a typical game really as hostile as people say it was?

That's one of those question where the answer hovers somewhere between "no, with a couple of massive caveats" and "yes, but not in the way most people think".

A lot of AD&D 1st Edition's GMing practices are pretty hardass by modern standards; however, they need to be understood in the context that the game's authors were writing for a target audience who mainly played the game in college wargaming clubs, where players would frequently transfer between groups and group sizes tended to be very large – six players per GM was considered a bare minimum, and up to a dozen player characters in a single party was by no means unheard of!

In particular, players would often bring their character sheets with them when hopping between groups, and it was considered a faux pas for a GM to reject an incoming player's existing character or request any substantive changes be made, so managing expectations could be quite challenging; even as late as 2nd Edition, the Dungeon Master's Guide contains extensive discussion of how to gracefully handle players bringing existing characters with them who aren't necessarily a good fit for the present game's tone or resource economy.

The upshot is that the culture of play these iterations of Dungeons & Dragons are targeting inherently obliges the GM to take a much firmer hand to keep things on track than a pickup game that draws players exclusively from within the GM's established friend group might – and to be sure, some GMs abused these expectations to act like petty tyrants, but some contemporary GMs do that, too.

A big part of the modern perception that 1E and 2E were extraordinarily player hostile, meanwhile, has nothing to do with the previously discussed GMing practices; rather, it emerges from the transition away from that culture of play in a slightly unexpected way.

In brief, back when D&D was mainly played by wargaming clubs, it was fashionable to run pre-written adventure modules competitively at conventions; the competition wasn't between players, but between parties, with multiple groups running the same adventure in parallel to contend for prizes. Tournament play sometimes chose its winners based on the fastest real-time completion of the module in question, or set specific objectives within the module which would award points when completed, a bit like speed-running or achievement-hunting in a video game (though neither practice existed yet at the time).

It was the survival module, however, that quickly emerged as the most popular tournament format. In a survival tournament, each player would provide or was furnished with a binder containing a fixed number of pre-generated character sheets, switching to the next character sheet in the set as each preceding character died; the winning group was the one whose last surviving character's corpse hit the dirt furthest from the dungeon entrance.

Many of 1E's most popular adventure modules, including the infamous Tomb of Horrors, were originally written as survival modules to be run at tournaments in conventions. As such, they were designed to kill off player characters both quickly and efficiently, so as to reduce the likelihood that the tournament would run overtime and get kicked out of the convention venue. When they were later cleanup and repackaged as commercial adventure modules, their text rarely bothered to explain any of this – who doesn't recognise a survival module when they see one?

The answer to that question, of course, is kids who didn't come up through the mentorship system of the college wargaming clubs, but taught themselves how to play D&D from first principles using books they bought at their local hobby stores – and when D&D's popularity unexpectedly exploded in the early 1980s, there were suddenly rather a lot of them!

These kids purchased the repackaged survival modules along with all their other D&D books; having no frame of reference, they assumed that these represented what a "standard" D&D adventure was supposed to look like – and since they weren't experienced players with whole binders full of pre-generated backup characters at their fingertips, the result was a lot of seemingly unfair total party kills, and a lot of kids concluding that the previous generation's GMs must have been objectively insane.

[stephenleasheppard]

There is an additional amusing point of order here, which is the answer to the following two questions. I once had a discussion with someone in Gary Gygax's gaming group, who was involved in early TSR work a bit. Allow me to paraphrase my questions and his answers.

Why publish survival modules as your primary format of published adventure?

"Because that's what we had -- they were already laid out for publication. Why not publish them and make some money off it?"

Did it ever occur to you at the time that publishing adventures like these would shape the larger D&D culture's expectations of what play was supposed to look like?

"No, why would it?"

[sabotflask]

One of my favorite anecdotes about early D&D, from Blog of Holding:

"It’s hard to get that context just from reading the original Dungeons and Dragons books. If nine groups learned D&D from the books, they’d end up playing nine different games.

"Mornard told us about an early D&D tournament game – possibly in the first Gen Con in Parkside in 1978? Gary Gygax was DMing nine tournament teams successively through the same module, and whoever got the furthest in the dungeon would win. You’d expect this to take all day, and so Mike was surprised to see Gary, looking shaken, wandering through the hallways at about 2 PM. Mike bought Gary a beer and asked him what had happened – wasn’t he supposed to be DMing right now?

“It’s over!” replied a stunned Gary Gygax.

"Gary described how the first group had fared. Walking down the first staircase into the dungeon, the first rank of fighters suddenly disappeared through a black wall. There was a quiet whoosh, and a quiet thud. The players conferred, and then they sent the second rank forward, who disappeared too. The rest of the players followed.

"The same thing happened to the next tournament team, and the next. Players filed into the unknown, one after another. And they were all killed. The wall was an illusion, and behind it was a pit. Eight out of the nine groups had thrown themselves like lemmings over a cliff; only one group had thought to tap around with a ten foot pole. That group passed the first obstacle, so they won the tournament.

"Gary and his players couldn’t believe that the tournament players had been so incautious. But, to be fair, none of those tournament groups had played in Gary Gygax’s game. They had learned the rules of D&D, but they had no experience of the milieu in which the book was written. Of those nine groups that had learned D&D from a book, only one played sufficiently like Gary’s group to survive thirty seconds in his dungeon."

[prokopetz]

#ngl survival module sounds fun as fuck. maybe i gotta torture my current group a bit (via @nadaismus)

It's worth bearing in mind that tournament-style survival mode developed in the context of a version of D&D where you can create a new character and hit the ground knowing everything you need to know to effectively play them in just a couple of minutes. 5E isn't structurally terribly well-suited for the binder-full-of-backup-PCs approach, and it's definitely a recipe for disaster in 3E or Pathfinder unless your entire group consists of a very particular flavour of high-effort masochists.

[gondorrevealparty]

my wizardgirl keeps mage regressing during the big boss fight, throwing out level 1 Ice Bolt and giggling like we're supposed to find it cute. I know this bitch can do a level 12 modified Frosthammer Vortex. It's not even hard for her. But the Wyvern Queen, who we're supposed to be killing, keeps going "Wow, that was a really big spell for you! good job giving me -1 speed! You're soooo powerful!" and my fuckass mage is beaming at her with those big wet eyes. I don't care if you get "level dysphoria" from your gigantic big-girl mana pool I'm about to die out here

[prokopetz]

Why weren't TTRPGs popularized centuries before video games? Large scale printing for complex rulebooks needed the printing press, but even then, it wouldn't justify taking off as late as the second half of the 20th century

A lot of it boils down to dumb luck. Hobbies resembling modern tabletop RPGs have come and gone before, but none of the ones that came before Dungeons & Dragons ever managed to blow up into a broader cultural phenomenon.

For example, tabletop American baseball simulators that use rules tech very similar to that of modern indie tabletop RPGs – complete with d66 rolls and Big Stupid Tables full of increasingly improbable random events – have been around since the 1880s, and by the mid 20th Century, dedicated players were using them to simulate entire virtual leagues in a way that would be instantly recognisable to modern indie RPG fans as a form of solo journalling RPG. Robert Coover's 1968 novel, The Universal Baseball Association, J. Henry Waugh, Prop., dramatises the hobby in a way that strikingly pre-figures the later Satanic Panic's fearmongering about D&D players becoming so immersed in the game that they lose touch with reality – pre-dating D&D itself by over five years.

It never went anywhere from there. Such games still exist, but the hobby remains insular to this day; it just never stumbled into the right combination of time and place to grow beyond its roots. And it's not even the first time a niche hobby had approached something like modern tabletop RPGs and just never taken that final step. We can speculate about the whys and wherefores, but ultimately, a lot of it – ironically, given the subject matter – boils down to a cosmic roll of the dice.

(One of my favourite counterfactuals is speculating what the modern tabletop roleplaying hobby would look like in a world where it kicked off half a century early by growing out of tabletop American baseball simulators in the 1920s rather than historical wargames in the 1970s. Imagine!)

[believerindaydreams]

as an aficionado of the US Naval War College, their version is that they encouraged the 1970s version out of spite when their support apparatus in Rhode Island was shut down for, ironically, military minmaxing efficiency. Handing the general public technology that let you predict nation state developments had previously been kept under wraps

they will, obviously, deny it if you actually go to Newport and ask them, but this is old news to the town itself

[prokopetz]

I'm not saying I find any of this in any way credible, but "tabletop roleplaying games became a wider cultural phenomenon at the time and in the place that they did because the global military-industrial complex had been deliberately suppressing tabletop RPG 'technology', until the US Navy let the cat out of the bag in the 1970s due to an inter-departmental pissing contest" is a fascinating conspiracy theory.

[irishshauna]

[marmotini-of-the-world-unite]

Learning this was an intentional genocide changed me.

[fighterkimburgess]

I know most of those following me know this, but just to make it super clear. An Gorta Mór (The Great Hunger/the Great Famine) was a deliberate genocide of the Irish people. There was enough food grown in Ireland to make sure everyone was alive and healthy and survived. Instead it was exported, sent to England and elsewhere for profit while men, women, and children starved in the streets. While the English landlords fucked off and evicted starving families who couldn’t afford rent. While babies were too weak to cry and died at the side of the road.

They tried to kill us, but they did not succeed. And we owe so much thanks to the other oppressed peoples, in particular the Choctaw Nation and the Masai, who sent money and grain to us.

Let me repeat that. The Choctaw Nation who had just gone through the Trail of Tears sent us money to try save Irish lives. It’s led to an understanding between Irish people and Native American tribes, most recently when we donated to the Navajo and Hopi fundraisers for COVID-19 relief, because while it may be a different tribe, Irish people will never forget those who helped us and we’ll help back.

The entire population of the island is less than seven million people. We’re still a million less on this island than pre famine. And it’s not that long ago. My grandmother’s grandparents lived through it. We’ve told the stories, it literally changed the DNA of the country. We have a national fear of renting, because so many people were evicted. People joke about Irish people always offering loads of food, but it’s because there’s that cultural memory of not being able to.

They tried to kill us, but they did not succeed. We will not let them take our lives, we will not let them take our language. We lost so much, but we will not lose it all.

[saltedweather]

This is why I get so angry when people say “it was the potato famine, it was because of monoculture/microbes.”

Nope. The potatoes were the only thing Irish people were allowed to fucking eat, because as pointed out, the rest of the crops they were growing were for their landlords to ship to England. So when the one “worthless” crop they were allowed to eat rotted in the field, the English crown, empire, landlords, all shrugged and carried on. People starved to death lying next to productive fields.

[dollzcomix]

(Wokely) They should replace gender options in narrative games with "rapist" and "victim"

[frostgears]

names are important

the girl who introduces herself as "The Scent and Sound of Catalytic Decomposition in Hydrogen Peroxide Triggered by Human Blood" is telling you something about herself.

so is the girl who ruffles that girl's hair and refers to her as "my little Roxie".

[cryptotheism]

Fromsoft games clearly associate transness with overwhelming divine power and a willingness to break any and all boundaries for the sake of personal apotheosis and if you don't think that's the tightest shit ever get out of my face.

[cavegirlpoems]

in two years of a labour government my rights as a trans person in the UK have been reduced far more than in fourteen years of tory majorities, which in fact did not noticably reduce those rights.

my conclusion, therefore, is that the labour party are worse than the tories. I am no particular fan of the tories, but frankly I am rooting for them over labour at this point, because I want labour to fucking burn.

[zie1]

Hey, I'm handing out magical girl artifacts that grant mysterious and untold powers. All I need you to do is choose your element of power. It's-

No you can't all choose darkness. Or shadows. Because either you're joining the bad guys or you're going full chuuni with that option. Pick again.

Crystal? Good stuff, can't fault a classic.

Water? Girl, ok but let's work on that self esteem. Where's your main character energy? Water is sidekick stuff.

Can you- sorry? Did you ask for your element to be *guns?* Are you Rob Liefeld? I don't care what Homura did, you're supposed to be healing hearts and fighting darkness, not capping asses. Back in line.

BDS- wait what?! You can't do that on this show. I don't care what kinds of magical girls you're gushing over! And no whips!

Yeesh. Ok then. Who's next? You want... the endless void? Goddess dammit, no chuuni stuff! You're getting stars.

Who else? You want fire? Just regular fire, not all-consuming hellfire, not flames of lust? Finally! Take two.

Next!

[thydungeongal]

I have posted before about how sometimes well-meaning attempts at running D&D without some of the more unfortunate dynamics can often backfire but in a way where most people don't even register it backfiring. Because when you take the step of "oh D&D's various 'evil humanoids' don't just exist in a vacuum and given the renfaire colonialism on display it's kind of impossible not to read them as somewhat racialized" many people will then go "okay but we still need some people who player characters should be allowed to kill guilt-free, so let's replace 'orcs' with 'bandits' because killing bad criminal people is perfectly ideologically neutral." At that point it's like "okay so your characters are no longer the racist kill squad, now they're just the Tough on Crime Vigilantes."

But I feel I should make clear that D&D the game itself is not exactly at fault here: like, okay, it is sort of at fault in the sense that it is a game of fantasy killing people with swords and magic. And it is easier for people to accept the killing with people with swords and magic part when they can imagine that their characters are at least to a degree justified. That is sort of just built into the game (and the game has built into its lore varying levels of making the fantasy of killing certain types of guy justifiable).

But D&D is not at fault for making people go "okay so it's bad when you kill orcs simply because they're orcs. It's better when you kill people who are bandits, who are a class of evil criminals where killing them is actually wholesome and sensible." Like, yeah, most people probably don't think about it that deeply, but the reason people don't think about it that deeply is ultimately ideological.

And the ideology is basically "it is bad to be racist but it's good to be a tough on crime vigilante."

[krongbly]

I don't disagree with this post but I do think there's an important element being left out here which is that 9 times out of 10 players are engaging in combat primarily as a form of self defense. Most of the time it's less of "we can kill these people because they're criminals and that makes it ideologically neutral" and more "these NPCs are trying to kill us and the most effective way to stop them right now is to reduce their hit points to 0 which, if they fail their death saves, means they will die."

I think "vigilantes tough on crime" is actually kind of a bad descriptor for how most parties operate. This definitely varies wildly from table to table but I think for the *average* table there's honestly a solid chance that either your players are friends with at least one criminal NPC or even that they themselves are criminals. There's even an entire class who's fantasy is "criminal."

[thydungeongal]

I don't think the self defense point actually holds true in a meaningful sense.

In older editions of D&D, which were much clearer on the expected gameplay being "go into the dungeon and steal the stuff," there wasn't really this layer there. The rules for combat were generally quite harsh on player characters so combat was certainly something they didn't want to get into too casually, but ultimately the player characters were just going into the dang monsters' house and stealing their stuff. The monsters were arguably the ones acting in self-defense (but they're evil so who cares).

But in the WotC editions the self-defense justification is still fraught because modern D&D especially is an action game. It's a game where characters mostly have access to various methods of visiting violence upon their environs and where the gameplay itself rewards them for violence, because combat is the main source of experience as written in all WotC editions of the game and characters primarily grow in combat effectiveness.

The self-defense angle I feel is not supported by the game's rules itself, but is more of a narrative contrivance introduced by groups to make their characters feel more heroic.

My friend @tenleaguesbeneath once described it as, and I am paraphrasing, "characters hunting things for sport but the things attack them first so they can claim self-defense." Characters want to get into fights (because that's where the rewards are), characters primarily grow in terms of being able to get into cooler fights, but because getting into fights on purpose isn't heroic there's an angle of "those goblins started it" to make the characters feel more heroic.

I don't think this is a bad thing per se. It is one way to make the power fantasy of D&D feel less like the characters are violent thugs and more like heroes. But like it is basically a group of mercenaries going into a warzone, they can't really say "well we didn't really expect to have to kill anyone on our mission, but sadly, circumstances conspired against us." Fighting is what the game wants them to do and I don't think anyone is wrong for wanting to portray the player characters as engaging in self-defense, but it's only self-defense through a very crooked lens imo.

[lumpout]

Linking this to the modern "revenge porn" action movies like John Wick and Nobody.

The self defense/revenge motivation is a fig leaf for indulging in gleeful violence. While modern DnD fictionally positions the party as the righteous castle-doctrine empowered heroes; we should at the very least be critical of why it is doing that. It's functionally identical to the fantasy of "what would I do if a bunch of terrorists/bank robbers burst into the room?" Just because there's an in-universe reason as to why you get have to murder all those people in flashy and fun ways does not mean that it isn't what you (the player) sat down at the table to do.

[jambeast]

And the key thing to remember is that violence is awesome (in fiction) and we don't have to justify it to anyone.

[brazenautomaton]

Yeah this post is horseshit and the ideology behind it is soul poison. If you demand a Maoist struggle session for your D&D campaign for its ideological implications then 387.44 million miles of wafer-thin circuits is not enough to express the extent to which you need to go fuck yourself. The assumptions and demands you make are based in a concept of human experience that only exists to serve your politics. This is not how human beings engage with art, this is not how human beings engage with stories, this is not how human beings engage with games. You are suffering under this monstrous worldview and you are monstrous in attempting to inflict it on others.

You are not revealing a secret pro-vigilantism argument, you unfathomably vast stumblefuck. You are revealing that you have conditioned other people to be afraid of speaking up against you and they're unable to fight your openly malevolent bad-faith attacks, so when you threaten them with Unpersoning for some game mechanic or setting detail you don't understand, instead of standing up for themselves and telling you to fuck off they shuffle to the closest equivalent of it that they think won't get them yelled at.

[thydungeongal]

I'm sorry you feel that way. I personally enjoy playing D&D and thinking about stuff like this. :)

[general-cerberus]

why do you enjoy playing a combat oriented game when you think combat in the game is morally wrong? Like theres none violent tabletop games you could be playing instead

[cavegirlpoems]

i mean what's wrong with just... playing a game as a bad person? I for one *love* playing games where my PC is not really a good person. See, eg, most Vampire (and World of Darkness) games. Once you lose the assumption that your PC 'should' be a good person, a whole lot of gameplay avenues open up.

But then again I like playing Sabbat games so maybe I'm just weird.

[josephbrassey]

“Haha remember when murder-hornets were gonna be a thing? What a nothingburger.”

Yes, because the Washington state government activated like a sleeper-cell and ruthlessly, systematically hunted them down and annihilated them.

“Y2K came to nothing amirite?”

Yes because an army of software engineers working around the clock, losing sleep, and busting ass till the last minute prevented it from happening.

“Remember the hole in the ozone layer?”

You mean the one that was fixed through rigorous world wide government action?

One of the root problems of our society is a refusal or inability by media to articulate that all those “it’s gonna be an apocalypse” disasters were not disasters because we collectively did something about them.

The good news is this is actually quite correctable. I maintain my firm belief that we as humans are capable of solving almost all of our problems, when we decide to do so.

And I still think that’s going to happen. I don’t know when or how, but I do know that abandoning hope won’t help bring it about.

And I refuse to let the cynics own a chunk of my heart.

[gudamor]

Happy Smallpox Eradication Day

[lilactransbian]

sometimes it feels hard to indulge in ab/dl b/c like I'm 99% silent and sleepy i cant brat for shit and i'm not whiny enough i am the most boring ass little ever

[lilactransbian]

aaaa omg i woke up to like 99+ in my activity tab due to this i feel a lot better abt being low energy now, so thank you for everyone who said something nice <3

[milk5]

Plot Like A Eunuch Fuck Like A Emperor

[frostgears]

accidentally putting on another trans girl's hoodie and adopting her personality and agenda by way of her pocket inventory. taking her pills before you realize they aren't yours. floaty and chemically confident. D-padding through her antique digital camera, wishing you were pretty enough to have taken these selfies with these people. maybe you are. maybe you'll give that style another go.

you've always hated cherry jolly ranchers but there's a neat little zip bag of them in there and you're waiting for the train and you're not hungry per se but your vape is only god knows where and you need something to keep your mouth occupied and they're. not so bad? you hold up the mirror on her eyeshadow palette (a device totally alien to your pockets) to see if your tongue is red. it's red. so are your lips. stained with somebody else's tiny vice and looking good for it. you line yourself up in the camera's selfie mirror. *beep*.

you meet up later, to unentangle yourselves.

"i was wondering, Riley," she says, "because you vape. i know that. but why is there a lighter? what is the lighter for? what is she doing with the lighter? until i got home. and there was a letter from my dickhead drama king of an ex — an actual letter, on paper. and then i knew."

you nod. "the lighter is for lighting things." □

[witchpassing]

The fascist kneels beneath a cathedral sky.

Moorland stretches to the horizon, boundless, pitiless. It is a beautiful place to die, and though she'd not have chosen it, this death will be beautiful too.

"My name will be remembered," she says aloud. One of the trannies - the little ratlike thing, the one carrying the shovels - starts humming. "By my people, yes, as leader, theoretician, hero. But most of all by yours." She permits herself a smile, tight and drawn, grim as fate. Wind stirs her hair. "I will," she begins again, and is shot in the back of the head.

The sound of the gunshot wanders away across the moor, more pop than bang. The bigger of the two women puts away her gun, and her wife, shifting her ditty from hum to whistle, starts to dig.

[longstringofnumbersandletters]

Peeling off the broken breastplate of a stoic knight who only fights and never speaks, just to realize there’s nothing in there. Not metaphorically—the armor is literally empty. It doesn’t appear to affect him. If the armor stays mostly in the shape of a knight, he just gets back up to keep fighting. But with the chest plate off he just sits there, equally impervious to curiosity as I reach up into the cavity where his body might’ve gone. Stubbornly, no answers are found anywhere in there.

So I forge him a new breastplate and on the inside, because I know he has plenty of room, I put a little pocket. Not big enough to hold anything functional of course. Just a little extra piece to see what he’ll do with it.

He comes back next time with some grievous injury to his nothing, presumably from the massive shredded gash across his thigh plates. He sits and waits. I fix it for him. He is still nothing in there. I decide to add a drawing on the inside, of the type of beast I imagine could rend metal into scraps with a single blow. He puts it back on. He no longer moves as if he is injured.

Over time the interior of the knight becomes decorated with whatever odds and ends I could think to attach to the inside of a guy who’s got room to carry it. What really gets me is that he never removes any of it. Never requests a change. Not even when I installed a curtain rod for a small tapestry, or a bud vase to carry roses for his beloved, or an accordion folder for letters. He didn’t say a word for any of the many, many drawings of mythical beasts that now fight forever inside of his shell.

There are plenty of other forges. I’m not entirely sure why he keeps coming back here anyway. We’re pretty popular, but he could get his armor fixed a lot quicker (and with fewer ridiculous modifications) literally anywhere else. I asked him if I could get a look at his nothing again. He flipped up his visor and nodded his head so I could take a look. It was the same as it had been, filled with drawings and trinkets and weird little fixtures I’d put in there. I asked if he was annoyed by it, or liked it, or felt anything at all, but he literally only ever says nothing, so I’m not sure why I asked.

There’s not much room left in his nothing now. When he comes back for repairs I’ve had to fix my own foolish additions. Some of these pieces are intricate and irritating to repair, but I fix them anyway. It feels wrong to take any of it away from him now, even though I’ve been rudely encroaching on his nothingness to the point where it’s barely even there. How he squeezes his nothing back into a body so full, I’ll never understand. But it’s a game to me now, finding a spot not yet filled and putting something there. A dark part of me wonders if he ever gets filled up completely, if whatever sorcery holds the nothing-knight together may break, and it will all clatter unceremoniously to the floor.

When he hands me his breastplate yet again, it is so shockingly disfigured that I wonder if being made of nothing has somehow kept him alive. No ordinary knight could sustain such injuries. So I fix it. And he waits, unmoving, in a quiet corner of the forge. It’s like he’s watching, even though I know the reading glasses I put inside his helmet were just for fun. I’m careful to put it all back exactly the way it was when he last left. There’s no room to add more this time.

He examines the breastplate, and pauses before putting it back on, like he’s looking for something. Is he worried about the fit? But it suits him just as it always did. He calmly points to a little space, about an inch, between a miniature shelf and one of many pockets. There’s nothing there. I ask him what’s wrong, and again he points. It’s the most emotion I’ve ever seen from him, and it’s barely anything at all. I take it to mean he wants something there.

I spend some time engraving a little snail in the gap. He watches, as much as nothing can watch. When I’m finished he holds the breastplate, but he doesn’t put it on right away. I ask him if something’s still wrong. He says nothing, and puts it on. I tell him I can’t add anything else. Even if he could ask, there’s no room left.

Next time he comes back, there’s nothing wrong with his armor—he lets me check to make sure. I ask him what he’s doing here. Out from one of many pockets, he retrieves a tiny rusted knife. It’s in miserable condition, barely worth saving. I tell him I could make him a nice new one, but I’ll fix it if he likes. He puts it away and reaches around to find something else, a needle and thread. Better condition, but I’m not a sewist and I tell him as much. He puts them away. He then retrieves a little twisted piece of wax paper. I open it. It’s candy. I ask if I can eat it. He says nothing. I eat it. It’s flavored with cinnamon. I’m surprised he let me take it.

He keeps bringing me candy now. His armor is the most laborious to repair out of every client my forge serves, but it’s my own fault so I can’t complain. Sometimes he keeps me company while I work. I wonder if he is trying to tell me something when he hands me mints. I wonder again at the lemon lozenges. He stares at me when I eat, as much as nothing can stare.

One day he brings me a little jar of honey. I thank him, I tell him I’ll save it for dinner. He watches me work, he puts his repaired armor back on, and he stays. My shift passes slowly, and when I finally pack up to leave it’s dark outside. He follows me out of the forge. I ask him where he’s going. He points to the jar in my hand. I ask him if he wants to watch me eat it. He says nothing, but the nothing-knight clearly wants something, so I open the lid and dunk my finger in the honey. I try not to get any on my chin. He stands there, inches away, watching me try to consume this jar of honey without a utensil. It tastes like clovers. About half the jar is left when I’ve finally had enough of pretending to be a bear, but he doesn’t move to leave.

I ask if he’s going to follow me home. He says nothing. I tell him he can if he wants to. Again, nothing. I start walking, and he follows at my side. I know he’s not going to say anything ever, so I fill the silence. I tell him I’m grateful for the sweets, I tell him about how his various components are made, I tell him I’ve never met anyone made of nothing before. I tell him it’s a rare opportunity for a smith to work so much on the inside of something. He says nothing. I tell him again how much I like the candy.

It occurs to me that maybe filling me with sugar is as close as he can get to filling someone else’s empty armor with trinkets. I’m not sure if that’s really why he does it. I tell him I don’t have room to be filled with anything on the inside, not like him. I’m not a container for much besides food. He offers me another piece of candy. Maybe he likes containing something, the way I like to feel full. Maybe it’s nothing at all.

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I didn’t edit this even a little bit. Thanks for reading!