We Are All Made of Stars
Dec. 16th, 2004 06:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
robotnik2004Next up in the Secret Santa Game Exchange: ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
narcissime. Enjoy.
We Are All Made of Stars
It is the world of the Starchildren. The world of Mother and Velvet and the Beautiful Fascists and Mary Pagan and Darling and Kai Summer and Clio and Jack Voltaire. Or it will be. Because this is the prequel, set forty years earlier, in the glittering skies of 2034.
Think of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. Think of the silver screen fantasies of Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire. Think of the glamorous and somehow tragic photographs of Horst P. Horst and George Hoyningen-Huene, if you know them. Think of Paris before the Terror, Berlin before the Reich. There is no Mother, no Ministry, no Hush Police—yet. This is the decadent civilization to which Mother’s stern hand will soon offer harsh correction. These are its final days.
The gulf between rich and poor, between red state and blue state, between puritan and libertine, grows uncrossable and obscene in the 2010s and 2020s. By the 2030s there is a new aristocracy. Not Starchildren, no, but the children of stars. They are an idle leisure class of vain and beautiful celebrity, descended from turn-of-the-millennium pop stars and the like: the Marquess Aguilera, the Graf von Timberlake, the dashing Lords Hilton-Kuchner and Beckham-Spice. Their lives are fabulous and empty. On gleaming silver zeppelins (why zeppelins? if you have to ask…) they toss back cocaine cocktails and shimmy to electronic jazz, partying ceaselessly as if to drown out the rising rumble of the proletariat’s discontent.
Our story takes place on the great zeppelin-yacht of Igor Volta, titan of electrical industry. Volta is a hunchbacked dwarf. He is not one of the beautiful people, and no amount of wealth will make him one. But his ludicrous wealth buys him the right to flatter the aristocrats, to throw them fabulous parties and pay their spectacular bills. His wife is the scarlet-haired torch singer, Vivian Volta, who Igor plucked from obscurity and pledged to make a queen. Viv is wild and reckless. She has cuckolded Igor with every beautiful boy and girl on board the zeppelin, yet still he dotes upon her. She is a determined social climber, but she has fallen passionately in love with the penniless musician Jack Valentine, for whom she will one day name a son. (Years later, Jack Volta will add an “-ire” to his last name to spurn his parents.)
The party goes round the clock. The zeppelin drifts through starry skies. Egged on by the jaded nobility, Viv pushes her behavior farther and farther still--while Igor’s tyrannical mother Magda plots against the harlot who has bewitched her son. Magda’s doctor, a mysterious little memeticist named Vibes, whispers the radical new doctrines of synarchy in the old harridan’s ear. And say, old chap… what’s that saucer-shaped light among the stars?
Tempers will break. Lives will be dashed. A child will be conceived. The band will play on. And when Volta’s magnificent zeppelin goes down in flames, the fire it starts will burn the world.
…
This started as a five-minute flashback scene for our Starchildren game, to address the mystery of Jack Voltaire’s parentage. It grew, in my mind, into a whole session and then a game of its own, as I got into the mood, and also realized that whatever had happened in 2034 was key to the circular secret origins of both Mother and the Mothership. And of course I hoped it would push Brant’s buttons: the glitterati, the doomed aristocrats, all that jazz. Now with Starchildren in stasis, even if we don’t ever get to play it, I can still make a present of the idea to Brant. Hope you like it.
But if we ever did play it… how great would it be if I could hassle him to run the Starchildren game?
narcissime. Enjoy.We Are All Made of Stars
It is the world of the Starchildren. The world of Mother and Velvet and the Beautiful Fascists and Mary Pagan and Darling and Kai Summer and Clio and Jack Voltaire. Or it will be. Because this is the prequel, set forty years earlier, in the glittering skies of 2034.
Think of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. Think of the silver screen fantasies of Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire. Think of the glamorous and somehow tragic photographs of Horst P. Horst and George Hoyningen-Huene, if you know them. Think of Paris before the Terror, Berlin before the Reich. There is no Mother, no Ministry, no Hush Police—yet. This is the decadent civilization to which Mother’s stern hand will soon offer harsh correction. These are its final days.
The gulf between rich and poor, between red state and blue state, between puritan and libertine, grows uncrossable and obscene in the 2010s and 2020s. By the 2030s there is a new aristocracy. Not Starchildren, no, but the children of stars. They are an idle leisure class of vain and beautiful celebrity, descended from turn-of-the-millennium pop stars and the like: the Marquess Aguilera, the Graf von Timberlake, the dashing Lords Hilton-Kuchner and Beckham-Spice. Their lives are fabulous and empty. On gleaming silver zeppelins (why zeppelins? if you have to ask…) they toss back cocaine cocktails and shimmy to electronic jazz, partying ceaselessly as if to drown out the rising rumble of the proletariat’s discontent.
Our story takes place on the great zeppelin-yacht of Igor Volta, titan of electrical industry. Volta is a hunchbacked dwarf. He is not one of the beautiful people, and no amount of wealth will make him one. But his ludicrous wealth buys him the right to flatter the aristocrats, to throw them fabulous parties and pay their spectacular bills. His wife is the scarlet-haired torch singer, Vivian Volta, who Igor plucked from obscurity and pledged to make a queen. Viv is wild and reckless. She has cuckolded Igor with every beautiful boy and girl on board the zeppelin, yet still he dotes upon her. She is a determined social climber, but she has fallen passionately in love with the penniless musician Jack Valentine, for whom she will one day name a son. (Years later, Jack Volta will add an “-ire” to his last name to spurn his parents.)
The party goes round the clock. The zeppelin drifts through starry skies. Egged on by the jaded nobility, Viv pushes her behavior farther and farther still--while Igor’s tyrannical mother Magda plots against the harlot who has bewitched her son. Magda’s doctor, a mysterious little memeticist named Vibes, whispers the radical new doctrines of synarchy in the old harridan’s ear. And say, old chap… what’s that saucer-shaped light among the stars?
Tempers will break. Lives will be dashed. A child will be conceived. The band will play on. And when Volta’s magnificent zeppelin goes down in flames, the fire it starts will burn the world.
…
This started as a five-minute flashback scene for our Starchildren game, to address the mystery of Jack Voltaire’s parentage. It grew, in my mind, into a whole session and then a game of its own, as I got into the mood, and also realized that whatever had happened in 2034 was key to the circular secret origins of both Mother and the Mothership. And of course I hoped it would push Brant’s buttons: the glitterati, the doomed aristocrats, all that jazz. Now with Starchildren in stasis, even if we don’t ever get to play it, I can still make a present of the idea to Brant. Hope you like it.
But if we ever did play it… how great would it be if I could hassle him to run the Starchildren game?
