Annotated 19-19
Yes, HR, it was definitely more interesting to send Auraugu after the Bough than to send anyone else; Auraugu makes everything better, and honestly, how smart can you be if you don’t know that?
HR’s frustration echoes Phil’s and my own, in more ways than one. We likewise had a plan for the encounter with the wood elves, large parts of which were demolished for reasons we ourselves could barely understand at times. And while we were happier with the results than HR is, our uncertainty about whether we could end the series well had never been higher, and our need to take that out on each other had never been greater.
And yet Carol echoes us too, because the only way to keep moving ahead with this big project to which we’d tied our destinies was to keep acting like everything was normal, no matter how many angry blowups were punctuating our discussions.
Do you know/planned or even barely thought about who should have been the thief if not Auragu? Or how did the fact that it was him changed HR’s plans?
I coulda sworn I’d said something about this… Yes, we did have a new character sketched out for the role that Auraugu ended up filling instead. Would’ve been a gnoll thief, not a pre-existing gnoll wrestler, despite HR’s implication that it would’ve been a different species.
Kidding aside, I don’t think Auraugu’s presence did much to get the ball rolling in favor of their survival. But that’s part of why HR is frustrated: if the only parts of his story that changed were the parts that would’ve directly led to their deaths, that’d at least be something he could understand and diagnose. But he can’t even do that.
… I want to give your past selves a hug. Your fatigued, grumpy past selves.
What does “non-embedded” mean here? PC? Or specifically a non-five PC?
By this point, I take it you had decided that Harky was no longer HR’s avatar? It seems like he, Bandit, and maybe Gr’zl and Kon’kr were the key agents in fouling up his plan.
The non-embedded player HR refers to is Bandit’s player Chrissie, a sepia-world person who, unlike The Five, is not in a tube.
That’s right! Not in a tube!
Players who, unlike the 5, are not actually embedded in the game – the ones who log off and go about their lives, instead of living their lives in Arkherra.