Realis 02: Feast at the Citadel Bein 01

Join Austin, Dre, Jack, and Janine--a hang-gliding town crier, a swineherd, a golem, and a... bush dog, respectively--as they travel with a mysterious Magus across a world that is slowly losing its mystical energy. This was definitely one of our favorites so far, and we hope you enjoy it while we take some time off to prepare for spring! If you like what you hear and you're able to, you can support us over at friendsatthetable.cash! Donating at the $5 level gives you access to an entire year's backlog of Live at the Table (and everything else at that tier!)

14 Sep 20183h 27min

C/W: Discussion of physical and emotional child and spousal abuse 2:12 to 2:15 The Twilight Mirage Post Mortem is here which means the season is really, truly, finally over. Thank you for all of your support this season, thank you for listening, and thank you for all of your questions! We got over 250 which was so, so much more than we were anticipating! Thank you! We had to a lot of cutting to narrow down questions but still ended up talking about everything from Foucault's social theory to our character's fursonas... which maybe isn't that wide of a gap, but hey! A fitting close to the season none the less. Goodbye to the Twilight Mirage! Just to repeat some announcements here: -We're taking some time off to focus on patreon catch-up and focus on Spring in Hieron but for the next three weeks (starting this Thursday!) we'll be playing Fall of Magic. Previously a patreon exclusive, Austin, Janine, Jack and Dre sat down to play Fall of Magic live and it's very fun and good and we hope you'll enjoy it! -Friends at the Table is going to be at SHUX 18, this October 12-18 in Vancouver, BC! This is very short notice and it won't be the whole crew, but if you're interested in coming to see is play a live game (!!!!), you can get more details here: https://www.shutupandsitdown.com/shux18/. If you can't make it, PLEASE DO NOT FRET! The panel will be on Shut Up and Sit Down's YouTube in the future! Hosted by Austin Walker (@austin_walker) Featuring Janine Hawkins (@bleatingheart) Sylvi Clare (@captaintrash), Ali Acampora (@ali_west), Art Martinez-Tebbel (@atebbel), Jack de Quidt (@notquitereal), Keith J Carberry (@keithjcarberry) and Andrew Lee Swan (@swandre3000) Produced by Ali Acampora (@ali_west) Cover Art by Craig Sheldon (@shoddyrobot) ---- How far is a light year? How far is a light year? A second

10 Sep 20183h 27min

Exigency Register A-TM-V-742 - Total Record of Events, Entry 001 To whoever finds this message: My name is Keen Forester Gloaming. I am, at time of this recording, the Chief Intercessor of the Rapid Evening in the Quire System and Primary Observer of the Twilight Mirage. I speak these words on the eve of Crystal Palace's arrival and the scheduled deployment of a limited scope stellar combustor to destroy the divine Volition and its'.... Well shit, I guess I have no idea if any of those words mean anything to you. Alright, let me start from the very top: My name is Keen, and I come from a place called the Principality of Kesh. It is a collection of hundreds of worlds, tied together by a lesion in our history: A long time ago, my people spent eons enslaved by a technological tyrant, extraction exalted. And then, by luck, we found ourselves freed and empowered. And using that strength, we faced our oppressor down. And in the generations that followed, we learned that the galaxy was filled with other threats just as--if not more--terrifying. The stars were as a forest, and it was on fire. And so we had a choice: Look away, and let our faces feel the heat from the safety of our veranda at the treeline, or intercede. And we would not turn our backs as trillions burned. But our efforts to save others cost us dearly, and in time, our wills shook. No terror defeated seemed lesson enough for the galaxy at large. There was always some new case of unchecked ambition, the arrival of a monstrosity we could not comprehend let alone predict. And so, somewhere along the way, we built a machine that could uncover what our eyes could not. It is a collection of axles and algorithms, pulleys and passive dynamics. It is a structure that reveals structure. We called it the apparatus that sees the world as it is. We called it Crystal Palace. And it told us that, with this new information, we would save a great many more people. And we did. But Crystal Palace does not lie, which means that it also told us the hard truth: that we could not save everyone, that there was a distance beyond which its own predictions would falter. And so like armadillo curling into shell, society itself bent into permanent shape, hiding inside armored plates of reliability, and, for those deep in the populous heart of the Principality: repetition, too. Some folks think Crystal Palace started the cycle, but I don't buy it. There is… something beautiful about a watch that winds itself. Which is probably why those living beyond the cycle line didn't even notice it for those first few, beautiful loops: 2000 years set to quartz-rhythm, gliding over and over again in pendulum precision. An arcing dance of lives: a deliveryman, a gardener, a crankish politician. People found themselves in roles, not lives--repeating the steps of someone millenia their predecessor. And as is our paradoxical way, when those Off Cycle finally noticed this happening, they interceded. The loop was modified, just in the way Crystal Palace told us it would be. A system was put in place. When someone On Cycle comes of age, they step off the dance floor, climb to the balcony, and see the ballroom for what it really is. And they are given a choice: Join the Rapid Evening off cycle, in a world that carries always the rare possibility of the terrible improbable. Or return to absolute certainty, to the heart of Kesh. But this system, this mirage, has proven treacherous to reality itself. And so the Cycle is broken, and what comes next for Kesh is not beautiful clockwork. It's a factory fire. I have been a member of the Rapid Evening for a long time, for decades. I have done things I regret, and which the apparatus has told me I will always regret. And yet the first time in my life off cycle, that I truly, really, deeply wish that Crystal Palace would be wrong. But I know better than most that wishes do not hold back tomorrows. And I know that when it all happens, regardless of what I want, regardless of what I think is best for the galaxy, I will be standing in its halls of glass and steel, helpless. Just five or six steps away from where I will stand, a spark will catch the tinder of the galaxy, and I will be the only one close enough to stop the blaze. And I will fail. This week on Twilight Mirage: Futura Free Pt. 4 Turn back, turn back Turn back, turn Back, turn back, turn If you've never been in love Hosted by Austin Walker (@austin_walker) Featuring Janine Hawkins (@bleatingheart) Sylvi Clare (@captaintrash), Ali Acampora (@ali_west), Art Martinez-Tebbel (@atebbel), Jack de Quidt (@notquitereal), Keith J Carberry (@keithjcarberry) and Andrew Lee Swan (@swandre3000) Produced by Ali Acampora (@ali_west) Cover Art by Craig Sheldon (@shoddyrobot) A transcription is available for this episode here.A full list of completed transcriptions is available here. Our transcriptions are provided by a fan-organized paid transcription project. If you'd like to join, you can get more information at https://twitter.com/transcript_fatt. Thank you to all of our transcribers!!

30 Aug 20184h 4min

Dispatch 717. Satellite… I mean, Grey. Sorry, just feels more natural to say 'Satellite' when I'm out here in this tin can. Nostalgia for a different life. Not quite the good old days… I'm so much happier now, with you, with the Brink But things were more certain then. Now, I look at the data that's coming in, and I don't know what to think. No. That's wrong. Things are just as certain as ever, it's just that now instead of just knowing what's coming next, I'm scared, Grey. Every day, I'm scared of tomorrow. The truth is that, while I might disagree with what Crystal Palace is doing, it's right about this system: The Twilight Mirage is boiling over. Volition is literally bubbling right now. Even with Signet's successful sortie against it, It's continuing to create new Axioms at the sort of pace that only comes with absolute safety or total desperation--and with the destruction of its shield, we know it doesn't have the former. Which leaves the question: What makes something like Volition desperate? I wonder if it feels a rivalry to the splice, Our Profit's perfect little virtual utopia. Volition wants a world where ideas are more important than physical reality, and Our Profit's given it to everyone in a form they actually want. And now Tenderness is trying to put Anticipation into the mix… Meanwhile, everyone on the ground is vibrating with angst and anxiety. A quarter of the damn Qui Err have already boarded Rapid Evening ships out of the system, and the rest are hoping beyond hope that Seneschal's Brace is actually going to keep their word about giving up some territory. Which is hard to do when they're busy stealing a Divine and handing it over to a former war criminal like Declan's Corrective. Hell, maybe our time with the Rapid Evening makes us war criminals, too. How many people did we sit and watch die with the knowledge they were in danger? Ugh! Crystal Palace makes me so mad. I hate it, Grey. It just sits and watches and spits out a wall of predictions and people like us, people like your dad, we sit there and go "oh okay, I guess this has to happen." And here's the real thing I'm scared of: That doesn't make special. That makes us just like everybody else. Places like the Divine Fleet--places where people learned over thousands of generations to actually care about one another? Those are blinks in the long stare of an amoral universe. They're exceptions to a world of principled disinterest in the well being of others. A world where any alibi not to intercede is transformed from an easy excuse into a natural law. So when you look at someone like... Grand Magnficent, all holed up in some safehouse in the snow, praying that someone will come help him? That's not rare. He didn't get himself trapped. He was always trapped. We're all trapped, Grey. You and me have the good fortune of being trapped in here together. But none of us can get out. When we were deciding whether to stay Off Cycle or go back onto the loop, we were so focused on this limited idea of freedom. We wanted to be at the border of Crystal Palace's range so bad, where things get just a little fuzzier, where there's a chance that the data misses something, misses us. We knew the terrible things it successfully predicted about the worlds Off Cycle--suffering, slavery, death--and we hoped that maybe those things just didn't happen beyond the periphery. Without data, anything could happen, right? Wrong. There wasn't any data, but wherever society is, there are always people. Backstabbers. Oppressors. The selfish and the scared and those who have no sympathy for either. That's what scares me. Not Volition or the Splice or politics or Crystal Palace or your dad and his bomb. People. It's just… people. This week on Twilight Mirage: Futura Free Pt. 3 I care for you still and I will forever That was my part of the deal, honest Hosted by Austin Walker (@austin_walker) Featuring Janine Hawkins (@bleatingheart), Sylvi Clare (@captaintrash), Ali Acampora (@ali_west), Art Martinez-Tebbel (@atebbel), Jack de Quidt (@notquitereal), Keith J Carberry (@keithjcarberry) and Andrew Lee Swan (@swandre3000) Produced by Ali Acampora (@ali_west) Cover Art by Craig Sheldon (@shoddyrobot) A transcription is available for this episode here.A full list of completed transcriptions is available here. Our transcriptions are provided by a fan-organized paid transcription project. If you'd like to join, you can get more information at https://twitter.com/transcript_fatt. Thank you to all of our transcribers!!

24 Aug 20183h 52min

A letter from Grey Gloaming, Exile of the Rapid Evening and Operations Chief of the Brink, delivered to Keen Forester Gloaming by secure courier. Dad, I don't know if you remember this, but when I was just a little girl, just after you first took me Off Cycle, we got into a big fight about Crystal Palace. I didn't understand how a thing like that could exist--it didn't make sense to me--mostly because I still didn't make sense to me, but I knew that I made sense to it. It knew what I would do, even if I didn't know what I would do. And you worked for it. I yelled at you and I cried, and because you wanted to appease me you told me something very important much earlier than you wanted to: You told me that sometimes Crystal Palace gets things wrong. You said that its predictions were like an endless field of perfect poppies: From a distance, they were a billow of pure red in the breeze. Yet if you looked closely, you might find other colors too: the green of stems not yet ready to bud; the yellow and blue of wildflowers dropped by passing birds; the damaged burgandy of petals crumpled under an animal's foot. The glinting copper and silver of a gardener's tools. The field was the field, you said, a glide of sweet scarlet over hill and meadow. There would never be so many other colors as to change that. But they were there, too. I was there, too. This is me telling you that the Mirage is Me. The Mirage is the broken stem and the stomped flower and the foreign strain of blossoms. I am… we are the exception to the rule. So, I don't care what string of words they found inside of Crystal Palace this time: the Twilight Mirage isn't annihilation waiting to happen. This place has problems. Lots of them. But look around, dad. People are working to fix them every day. Every day, Ioota Pretense, the Qui Err Coalition, and her allies in Echo Reverie and Gig Kephart find new ways to bring people together, whether through stitches, broadcasts, or literally lifting a city and transporting across the mirage itself. Every day, the Waking Cadent, her Beloved Nights, and the excerpt Signet help people who want to leave this place, just like you want them to. Except they do it because they want to, not because you're forcing them. Every day, the members of Seneschal's Brace push back on the dominance of the Hegemony and the Free States. The Cadent. Declan's Corrective. Even. Fourteen. Tenderness. They're not perfect, but they aren't Volition either. Every day Demani and I use our training to help people who pass through the Brink, and the many who can't even afford to do that. And we aren't alone, because every day, even under the nose of groups like Advent, regular people are finally trying to do more than save their own hides. And more and more, under the shadow of Volition and in the face of your ridiculous announcement, people are realizing that they need to work together. So, throw out whatever Crystal Palace told you because that fact changes everything. It might be the case that you don't notice all the other colors in the field of red, but that's only because they're spread apart, one-in-a-thousand. Bring them all together though? Put the violet next to the white next to the green and yellow and orange? Then look close, dad, because the field disappears. Suddenly, just in that one little place, just right here in the mirage, what you'll see? It isn't a field at all. It's a Garden. This week on Twilight Mirage: Futura Free Pt. 2 It's quite alright to hate me now When we both know that deep down The feeling still deep down is good Hosted by Austin Walker (@austin_walker) Featuring Janine Hawkins (@bleatingheart) Sylvi Clare (@captaintrash), Ali Acampora (@ali_west), Art Martinez-Tebbel (@atebbel), Jack de Quidt (@notquitereal), Keith J Carberry (@keithjcarberry) and Andrew Lee Swan (@swandre3000) Produced by Ali Acampora (@ali_west) Cover Art by Craig Sheldon (@shoddyrobot) A transcription is available for this episode here.A full list of completed transcriptions is available here. Our transcriptions are provided by a fan-organized paid transcription project. If you'd like to join, you can get more information at https://twitter.com/transcript_fatt. Thank you to all of our transcribers!!

17 Aug 20182h 28min

Once, floating in the sunset-hued safety of the Twilight Mirage, the Divine Fleet hummed and pulsed, its ships bright beacons of culture and technology in an age when both were under threat. All through the fleet, organic and synthetic citizens worked side by side to protect a utopia that the universe thought impossible. But today, in the wake of Independence, and Volition, and the Miracle, and Our Profit, and Schism, many who once called the fleet home have now found their idealism grounded. It has been complicated by contact with others, by paralyzing self-doubt, by wavering faith, by the promises of others, and by the simple desire to survive, together. And some still dream yet, and those who do now confront a hard dilemma: What does a more perfect world truly look like? And how might we get there? It has been one month since the Feast of Patina, 300th Divine of the Resonant Orbit's fleet. In that time, tempers have cooled, though borders remain firm. While the NEH and the Divine Free States maintain their status as the system's most major powers, Seneschal's Brace--now backed by the pirate republic of the Rogue Wave--has gained official recognition as a third sovereign state, giving Even Gardner, Fourteen Fifteen, and the excerpt ⸢Tenderness⸣ one more chance to unify the fractured Mirage. The Qui Err Coalition, meanwhile, continue to push for decolonization of the system, and they have gained allies in the fight: Allies like Gig Kephart, Echo Reverie, the Sailors of the Ark, and, perhaps surprisingly, the Waking Cadent, whose own efforts to leave the system have been foiled, thus far, by the sheer impermeability of the Mirage's interior walls. But with the recent arrival of ⸢Signet⸣ to Kamala's court, doors once thought permanently sealed now creak open. The boundaries of the Mirage had not been a problem for the plunderers at the Advent Group, whose special catapult can launch goods (and, as Grand Magnificent knows well, people) beyond the borders of the Quire system. But in the wake of Our Profit's attack on the Rapid Evening, and with connection re-established with Crystal Palace during the attack on Schism, Keen Forester Gloaming authorized the group's final contingency plan. The message was sent, and, of course, before it could be received, the plan was already set in motion: A blockade of specially armed capital ships patrols the border of the Mirage, destroying any vessel that tries to escape. Each day, their weapons become more accurate, their patrols more precise, their strategies more prophetic. All of which can mean only one thing: Crystal Palace draws near. This week on Twilight Mirage: Futura Free Pt. 1 New beginnings Wake up The sun's going down Hosted by Austin Walker (@austin_walker) Featuring Janine Hawkins (@bleatingheart) Sylvi Clare (@captaintrash), Ali Acampora (@ali_west), Art Martinez-Tebbel (@atebbel), Jack de Quidt (@notquitereal), Keith J Carberry (@keithjcarberry) and Andrew Lee Swan (@swandre3000) Produced by Ali Acampora (@ali_west) Cover Art by Craig Sheldon (@shoddyrobot) A transcription is available for this episode here.A full list of completed transcriptions is available here. Our transcriptions are provided by a fan-organized paid transcription project. If you'd like to join, you can get more information at https://twitter.com/transcript_fatt. Thank you to all of our transcribers!!

10 Aug 20182h 57min

Crystal Palace, in all its endless worker-bee wonder, clacks and whirs its way across space, and now, as it nears the destabilizing stain of the Twilight Mirage, time as well. Even now, in transport, it is thinking, predicting, prophesying: Its pulleys spinning with magnetic unison, decks of hole-punched cards flipping through its designators, a pleasant coughing of gears and pinions. This is how it knows everything. But it did not always: There was a moment before its creation--back when there was still time to divert the direction of the Principality--and a time during its bloody construction, when it felt the waves of the future but could not yet pass them on to us in anything more than a mechanical roar. And then there was the day it was finished, the very beginning of Guaranteed Events. This week on Twilight Mirage: Guaranteed Events, Or: An Accounting of the Time When We Built the Machine You dream of walls that hold us imprisoned It's just a skull, least that's what they call it And we're free to roam Written, Hosted, and Produced by Austin Walker (@austin_walker) Music by Jack de Quidt (@notquitereal) Cover Art by Craig Sheldon (@shoddyrobot) A transcription is available for this episode here.A full list of completed transcriptions is available here. Our transcriptions are provided by a fan-organized paid transcription project. If you'd like to join, you can get more information at https://twitter.com/transcript_fatt. Thank you to all of our transcribers!!

3 Aug 201834min

In the year after the Miracle, wonder and surprise appeared all throughout the daily life of the residents of the Quire System. Unfortunately, the composition of the system's political structures moved at a much more sluggish pace. Diplomatic gridlock and (well-grounded) fear of conflict leashed even the most aggressive states. The result was the vexing sense that the system had calcified in an imperfect shape. "To live in the Mirage," it was said, "is to see something unimaginable before lunch, but to be frustrated by the predictable before dinner." But the assassination attempt on the system's leaders, the attack of the Axiom Schism, the end of the Rogue Wave's civil war, and the heroism of the Qui Err Coalition seems to have shaken the system out of its stasis. Yesterday, even the Notion's patrons—the Cadent Under Mirage and Declan's Corrective—had little faith that their project of a unified system would come to fruition. But today, Seneschal's Brace has not only found recognition as a distinct sovereign nation in the system, but also has positioned itself to build an even broader bloc of ad hoc allies and smaller powers. But everything hangs on what comes next. A dinner. Some conversation. And a question: If you could remake the world, in whose image would you make it? This week on Twilight Mirage: The Feast of Patina All the things I didn't mean to say I didn't mean to do There were things you didn't need to say Did you mean to? Mean too... Hosted by Austin Walker (@austin_walker) Featuring Janine Hawkins (@bleatingheart) Sylvi Clare (@captaintrash), Ali Acampora (@ali_west), Art Martinez-Tebbel (@atebbel), Jack de Quidt (@notquitereal), Keith J Carberry (@keithjcarberry) and Andrew Lee Swan (@swandre3000) Produced by Ali Acampora (@ali_west) Cover Art by Craig Sheldon (@shoddyrobot) A transcription is available for this episode here.A full list of completed transcriptions is available here. Our transcriptions are provided by a fan-organized paid transcription project. If you'd like to join, you can get more information at https://twitter.com/transcript_fatt. Thank you to all of our transcribers!!

27 Juli 20183h 31min