Dreamlit Actor

Fools are quick to question the authenticity of an Actor's grief. The crying is but a stage direction, they say. So who can ever glimpse the truth beneath? In the long, grinding Interstellar Energy War, heeding the call of the Aeon of Elation, the Actors and the Fools took to the bone-strewn battlefields, where they unveiled their magic before the cosmos. The sky dome churned and billowed, shrouding the movements of the Legion. In a breath, the vast army had been transported to the other side of a wormhole. The soldiers exchanged bewildered glances, and one by one, set down their weapons. "Actors, the cries of war have already grown too many. What is it that you can offer?" A magnificent gondola glided in from the sea of stars, and a lilting melody swept across the battlefield. In the next moment, the stars went dark. The cosmos became a pitch-black stage, and the real war transformed into a sublime tragic phantasm. Soldiers and generals alike sank into a fevered dream of theater, living out scenes of mutual slaughter, the fallen unable to return home, the living left to bear the curse. "Villain who snuffs out all things, you have a mother too, don't you? You have children too!" The shattered mask wailed at the top of its lungs as they read this line out loud. "On the surface of a star, five hundred years from now, this bullet still burns red-hot as ever. But where will we be?" Beneath the silent subtitles, a blood-stained mask wept without a sound. "Bones by the river without a name, those who long for you still weep in your memory—" Countless masks sang the dirge in unison. ... Besotted Fools always fixate on the masks worn by those upon the stage. Perhaps the most infamous of all such thieves was one Carla Harper. She slipped secretly aboard the gondola and stole the Troupe Master's mask, intending to play a cruel joke: revealing herself as the Fool at the very climax of the tragedy. The curtain fell, and the soldiers recovered as from a dream. They saw the absurdity of war for what it was, and cheered as they withdrew, like survivors stumbling out of a nightmare. The Troupe Master gently removed Carla Harper's mask, only to find that she had long been weeping.

"The essence of performance lies in what you conceal." Iggie fanned himself with his folding fan and addressed the wide-eyed greenhorn among the Actors. "Ever heard of the Leviathan Theory? The only reason you perceive the leviathan as colossal is that it has merely revealed one ten-thousandth of its body to you." They say the folding fan in his hand is a Curio, and all those wondrous stories are written on the back of it. Aboard the Starfroster, some come and go with each port of call, some anchor their whole lives to the deck, and some sail out into the star-sea never to return. But Iggie always stays in that corner of the cabin, telling the story of the great expedition against the swarm disaster— "On that day, the Fools stole our gondola, and a band of the Nameless had stowed away in the hull..." "And where had the Troupe Master disappeared to this time?" someone asked. "That unreliable Troupe Master had wandered off with a wine glass in hand. Nobody knew where. In any case, the gondola was soon swarming with beings from every civilization imaginable: slime folk, bone dragons, the Silver Phantoms of Kopo'an... and then those insufferable Fools vanished the moment we reached our destination!" "I heard you witnessed the war among the Aeons?" "The Amber Lord's great hammer, Ena's tuning of the strings, the endlessly multiplying swarm... no one who saw the stars themselves tremble could ever forget it. And then, of course, there was Aha's entrance. An indescribable grand trick that turned even the Aeons into players in a comedy..." "There you go, singing Aha's praises again." The young Actor looked skeptical. Iggie laughed. "It's perfectly natural that you don't understand THEM. For Aha, the essence of any performance lies in what remains concealed. That way, the next surprise is all the greater..." Inspired by Iggie, some Actors penned tragedies that swept the cosmos, and others became masters of melodrama. They were convinced that even more wondrous stories lay hidden behind Iggie's folding fan. Then Iggie passed away, and among his belongings, people finally found that fan. The back of it was completely blank, save for two lines of nearly invisible text: "The essence of performance lies in what you conceal."

Among Actors, there is a prophecy known as Two Clowns and a Joke: At the story's beginning, two clowns told a joke, and the audience laughed louder and louder. In the middle of the story, one of the clowns died in the most ridiculous way imaginable, and the audience fell silent. At the story's end, the surviving clown stood before the other's grave and told the same joke. Only then did the audience finally burst into tears. Traversing the cosmos aboard gondolas, the Actors grew keenly aware: the Elation they once knew was no longer the same. Like the story past its midpoint, the clown's jokes grew harder and harder to draw laughter from. To break the silence of the crowd, ever-higher doses of dopamine had to be administered. A torrent called "Desire" swept across world after world, turning the suffering of others into punchlines, using happiness as an excuse for depravity... And so the Actors' songs grew ever more mournful, their most anguished tears shed for those who once smiled. In their wandering troupe's journey across the stars, they gathered the stories of fallen galaxies and wove them into vivid, living tragedies. They believed that such sublime art would purify the souls of their audience and lead them to reflect upon themselves. Yet costumes fray and masks shatter, and the traveling Actors find themselves cast as harbingers of death, omens unwelcome wherever they roam. When will the story reach its end? What will it take to move the numb audience? The Actors say nothing. They wait. They wander. They trust that the god they worship will once again weep for the world.

Actors wander the cosmos in their dancing shoes, and sometimes they wonder, is it the shoes that drive their wandering, or their own will? Regardless, legend has it that only the most gifted of children can truly master the finest pair of dancing shoes and bend them to their every whim. The aged actor would still recall the day that abandoned infant arrived at the troupe. They wept in succor for the child's unfortunate destiny, yet she answered their sorrow with laughter. "Ugh, I refuse to cry!" As she grew a little older, the mischievous girl dismantled a six-string lute to use as a prop, rearranged the Actors' hymns into rhapsody, and tossed her hastily made sweets into the sky, only for them to come back down as a little boat loaded with sweetness. Her dancing shoes carried her across the cosmos. In The Emperor's Expedition, she led her troupe in a silent performance, reenacting that hasty farce through the clatter of bolts and gears. The show was so moving that countless Intellitrons were forced to temporarily shut down, just to keep the anguish flooding their emotional modules in check. On the Xianzhou, she learned the local performance traditions, drawing tears and laughter alike from the long-life species with her melodious, lilting voice. The troupe even made it all the way to Punklorde, where a show called Gametown Forever racked up tens of thousands of comments that all said the same thing: "I cried so hard." Somewhere along the way, she began to disappear more and more often, until, in the end, no one could find her at all. Some say the Troupe Master never truly left, that any one of the people around you might be her wearing a mask. Some say she went off to live another life, as that is the only route to becoming a top-tier actor. And so, whenever the Actors lace up their dancing boots and set off once more, they always find themselves hoping... That she'll appear again just around the next corner, still smiling, beckoning them to join a grand performance the likes of which they've never seen.