DISTINGUISHING

CHARACTERISTICS

YOON HA LEE

 

 

To those not familiar with the hobby, roleplaying games can seem utterly absurd – a gathering of people in which they pretend to be fantastical characters in a fantastical realm; for what reason? Yoon explores that sense of absurdity here in a Kafkaesque tale that is perhaps the most political piece in this anthology. ‘Distinguishing Characteristics’ is unsettlingly weird while also being completely on-the-money when it comes to exploring themes of invasion and the loss of identity.

 

 

YOUR CHARACTER SHEET has holes in it again. You feel them like a trickle, as of snow or ashdrift, down your spine. On the backs of your hands in their mittens.

You’re late for your Improvisational Tactics session, but the new government’s curfew is at the Hour of the Coalhound, and for ritual reasons the session goes on all night. If you don’t grab something to eat on the way, you’ll be condemned to the dreary vending machine fare: sticky buns in foil wrappers that make crinkle-crunch sounds like cicada shells underfoot. Soups that taste of uninspired kelp. Dried roasted cuttlefish, their eyes punched out; the absence disturbs you more than their presence would. Where do all the eyes go?

The best food carts are on Central University Promenade. It’s the sort of dull, utilitarian name the new Sthenner government has given all the streets in what used to be the Free Academic City of Poi Jiahl. Three years ago, as a newcomer from distant Mwaan, you would have appreciated the change. The Poians don’t believe in naming streets. But the local convention of navigating by landmarks took surprisingly little time to adapt to: a house whose fourth-story window is never repaired, a fountain where liquor-of-euthanasia is dispensed once a year, a winehouse where you can (illegally) bet on mirror-duels. Now, however, the Sthenner Fungus-Lion banner flies everywhere the Poian Crowned Heron once did. You hate the sight of it.

To distract yourself from the flapping banner, you look back down at the food cart where you’re waiting, huffing into the cold air, scarf scratching your throat. You’ve threatened to marry the cart. (Not the cart’s owner. The cart.) It specializes in a fried pancake called hattahk, which comes from a neighboring country’s cuisine. Hattahk are stuffed with brown sugar and plump dried fruits and pine nuts. Every bite oozes with a combination of warm-grit-sweet. The dough sizzles on the griddle, making holes in the surface as the bubbles pop. You lean as close to the warmth as you can without being pushy.

The owner flips the hattahk expertly one by one. He usually has six going at a time. Almost done, just slightly browned, the way you like it. You hand over a few coins, fumbling partly because of the mittens, partly because you’re not used to Sthenner currency. The coins are shaped like octagons with square apertures so you can carry them looped on a cord, although you just have them loose in a pouch.

“Here you go,” the owner says in his hoarse voice. He adds, “The two biggest ones just for you.” He wraps the hattahk in paper.

You’ve never been able to tell whether they really are the biggest. They’re so similar in size that you’d have to weigh them, and they never last that long. Still, you thank him, then hurry up Central University Promenade toward the winding street you think of as ‘between the gallows-shrine and the shop where they sell truncated noodles’ rather than Spindle Street.

The itching feeling has only gotten worse. No help for it but to get to the session as fast as you can.

 

 

YOUR CHARACTER SHEET lies before you on the table, creased in the center, greasy fingerprints down one side. You try not to squirm at the accompanying oily sensation down your ribs. Oil from the hattahk: you’re normally neater than this, but you’re terribly hungry. You haven’t filled the sheet in yet. Session leaders ordinarily provide character sheets and any other paraphernalia: charts, tokens, masks with eye slits almost too narrow to see through. All you had to bring was a writing implement, which you did, a mechanical pencil that tears the paper when you write too hastily, and an eraser that’s more gray than white.

The sheet should just be paper, but you always feel that unsettling connection between yourself and the one you’re going to be given. You knew about the holes in advance, for instance. One of the many quirks of academy life.

There are six people in the room, like sides of a die unfurled, including the session leader. Tonight’s leader comes from one of the city’s oldest families. Her full name is Mweren Ahm Roia Beniyat. Most people simply call her Roia Beniyat. You’ve seen her in the winehouses, watching the mirror-duels with eyes as cynical as old coins and long hair in pinned-up braids, elegant in a luxurious gray coat trimmed with dark lace. The brooch at Roia Beniyat’s coat was impossible to miss, a treasure of the city: gold wirework, large enough to be gaudy on anyone less poised, with beads of bone and jasper and carnelian that moved whenever she did.

No one blamed you for staring. It’s the only wealth she owns, they say, besides the genteelly decaying house she inhabits. Yet people buy her drinks or dinners, or defer to her at doors. The Sthenner governor paid her a courtesy call on his first day in the city, and citizens noted that she saw him to the door herself three hours later, smiling and quoting witticisms from Sthenner plays.

You sit almost directly across from Roia Beniyat, and your glance snags on the pen she has taken out of its understated leather case, in which there is also a matching mechanical pencil. They must be antiques: gold-toned, probably real gold down to the pen’s long-tined nib, so deeply engraved that it’s hard not to convince yourself that there’s nothing inside, no ink or graphite, nothing but a lacuna caged.

You were a last-minute addition to the group, your presence requested because of your ‘unique background.’ The Poians believe outsiders, as witnesses, have unique abilities of judgment. As much as it rankled to be counted an outsider yet, your curiosity prompted you to agree. Everyone else assigned to this session is a stranger.

You devise stories for the others to make them easier to remember. You can always revise the stories as more information comes to light.

The two men to your left could be brothers, or cousins. Say they’re brothers.

The taller one has a rip in the sleeve of his otherwise expensive blue satin jacket, which he hasn’t taken off, and he keeps tapping his foot nervously. He doesn’t want to be here. People expect him to fight because he’s big and why else would he be in Improvisational Tactics, anyway. However, he’s bribed an official in the hopes of getting reassigned to Propaganda. (It’s easier to remember something a bit unexpected, a bit odd.)

The shorter brother’s clothing is less lavish, and the brown of his knee-length coat is the exact color of pine bark, down to the odd threads of dull gold suggesting cracks through which sap bleeds. Since he’s sitting next to you, it’s tempting to reach out and touch the threads, see if they’re sticky like the melted sugar in your hattahk. (Only half of one left, with the crescent bite marks forming a ragged boundary between eaten and not-eaten. You eat fast when you’re hungry.) The man has a marked facial resemblance to his brother, light brown eyes in a dark face and a beak of a nose, but what draws your attention are his hands. He hasn’t taken his gloves off. Scars, you decide. A little later it turns out you’re right.

He’s the one who likes to fight, unlike his brother. They dueled once, and never speak of what happened. You leave the result a mystery, a maggot-question in the back of your head. But he smiles at people so that people smile back – you’ve already noticed how brilliantly he smiles, like a knife striking a knife-edge – and they don’t see the mirror-slashes on his hands, or in his heart, and the violence gaping open.

The woman to your right leans back in her chair. Her belt of pale leather has an empty holster hanging from it; you spotted it as she lowered herself into her seat. The Sthenners confiscated weapons from everyone except the city watch in the first weeks. You had expected there to be an outcry. Several Poian societies carry, as their badge, old weapons, forged bright and dark and deadly. You like to think that this woman handed hers over without complaint or comment because the Sthenners mistook the gun, rather than the cutting cold behind her eyes, as the real threat.

The last person, sitting next to Roia Beniyat, is an older woman. She can only come to winter sessions because otherwise she will melt in the sun, like the Poian story of the Gray Grandmother and her coal-eyed children. You are half-afraid that if it gets warmer in here – not that it’s very warm to begin with – her entire body will slump into an ambitionless larval mass, that all that motivates her is the memory of starvation winds and birds frozen into lakes, and in a time of plenty no one will listen to her warnings of famine.

Some of these stories are true. Most of them aren’t. They’re full of holes, just like the sheet you were handed. Your palms itch, and you resist the urge to rub your ribs. The effect is no worse than it has been in the past, and you’ve never been harmed before. Just a side-effect of your studies.

 

 

FIRST THINGS FIRST (says Roia Beniyat, after everyone is seated, in a voice like gunsmoke and demolished foundries). Decide upon a name for your instantiation in the evening’s world. You may choose anything you like, but the name will be shared with everyone in this room. Consider what it implies about you and your place in the scenario, which is this: a city-state has become the protectorate of a more powerful neighbor. The name need not reflect who you are, merely how you wish to be seen.

Instantiation is such a formal way of putting it. However, it’s no surprise that a scion of the city’s elites would speak thus. Even though you’ve scarcely said anything since entering the room, mainly to affirm that you’re the foreign witness, you’re self-conscious about your accent. You haven’t thought about it in a while – the way you talk is the way you talk, and your command of the language and its idiom (so they tell you) is excellent – but you’re taken back to your first days in Poi Jiahl. You’d repeat yourself to good-humored locals because they couldn’t understand your questions, and listen to them repeat themselves in turn because they talked too fast for you no matter how slowly they spoke.

You write down your character’s name on the character sheet in painstakingly beautiful looping cursive. The modern Poian script was hard for you to master; you like showing off your handwriting. The Sthenners have distributed all their texts in their native language, written horizontally instead of vertically, with stilted accompanying translations. So far you have resisted learning to read any but the most necessary basics.

The taller brother chooses an old-fashioned Poian name, Warau. It means sheltering tree and is, a lover told you once, the kind of name you would expect someone’s staid older sibling to have in a drearily unsubtle play. More telling is the lack of an accompanying family name, or string of family names, to indicate alliances of blood or coin.

The shorter brother, on the other hand, picks a name-of-poetry, used by courtesans or courtiers in the old days. It is abbreviated Nyen-moirop, or Undrowned; in actuality it consists of a quatrain in turbulent syllables, which must have made declarations of love during the throes of passion an interesting challenge. There’s something of a courtesan’s merciless wit in his eyes, at that. You wouldn’t have thought it of him. First impressions can be misleading.

The woman with the empty holster chooses a Sthenner personal name paired with a Poian family name, although she retains Poian name order, with the family name coming first: Yuo Keresthen. The others shift and murmur nonetheless.

The Poians have a name for people of mixed descent, dragon’s get. The old stories say this is because dragons are neither fully of air or water but move in both. (The Poians are delightfully wrong about elemental mythology. Dragons are creatures of fire and metal. But you have refrained from correcting them.) In their way the Poians are a cosmopolitan people, no doubt due to the Academy’s long history of accepting foreign students like yourself and the city’s healthy population of immigrants. The Sthenners, more prosaic, simply say mixed heritage.

Context is everything, however. Given recent events, Yuo Keresthen’s choice can only indicate her interest in stabbing through the evening’s fabrication and stapling it to reality. It hasn’t escaped you that she keeps glancing your way, smiling thinly. She must believe the Poian superstition that foreign witnesses are like lenses, focusing reality in ways impossible among themselves.

The shorter brother’s eyes flick to Roia Beniyat like a knife-draw. Whatever he sees in her untroubled expression displeases him. Did he expect her to object to something so trivial?

The last is the Gray Grandmother. She stared dully, obdurately, at the sheet that was passed to her while Roia Beniyat gave everyone time to choose. In her hand the Gray Grandmother grips an ordinary wooden pencil, much chewed. Filthy habit, and you try not to look, instead taking another tiny bite of your remaining half-hattahk to distract yourself with the cooling crystals of sugar. Her pencil didn’t move once. You imagine it growing deformed in her grasp, forming uneven depressions corresponding to the fingers, then bending like a stick of taffy, and finally no longer resembling a pencil so much as a pulped eel.

Roia Beniyat raises her eyebrows at the Gray Grandmother. “Old one,” she says, as politely as required and no more, “things cannot remain as they did during your youth. Pick a name.”

“I saw you dancing with the new governor the other night,” the Gray Grandmother mutters. “He’s pretty enough, but that was no Poian waltz. I should know; I danced them all as a girl.”

“Are you here to participate or to gossip like a schoolgirl?” the session leader says archly. “If your sharpness of memory is starting to fade, I’ll happily tutor you in the new dances myself.”

The Gray Grandmother’s face sags. She puts down the pencil, which is not distended after all, and heaves herself up. She walks out without rejoinder, and you stare after her. The woman with the empty holster coughs uncomfortably.

You go around the table to introduce your alter-selves. The brothers (close cousins) come from a family of leading industrialists. The woman with the holster is a magistrate. Roia Beniyat used her own name, and is the only one to have done so. She notes that, for the scenario’s purposes, she represents the occupying power, and then the game begins.

 

 

CHANGING THE NAMES of characteristics does not alter the nature of what is measured. The Academy’s character sheet chose the names of attributes by committee, with a standardized result that satisfied no one, even with the generous inclusion of fill-in-the-blank space.

It does not matter whether you call it Strength, or Force, or Ox’s Blessing.

Dexterity, or Finesse, or Grace.

Wit, or Cunning, or Way of the Fox.

Trauma, or Wound, or Gash.

(All of these are poor translations from the native Poian.)

Yet people argue as though the choice of label, with their subtle distinctions, their failures of isomorphism, was a matter of great importance.

Perhaps it’s not a coincidence that the main characteristic you’re concerned with, this session, is name.

 

 

HERE’S HOW IT works (Roia Beniyat says).

The person who has lived in this city the shortest period of time will begin by establishing one fact that elaborates upon the situation. (That person is you. You just entered the story, after all.) After that we will go clockwise, in the direction of entropy increasing.

Proceed.

 

 

SOME STORIES EXIST independently from the paper they are written on, the stone they are chiseled into, the skin they are tattooed across. Then there are the other stories.

Here is what you need to know about paper in the former city-state of Poi Jiahl.

Papermaking has a long history in the region. Fibers of mulberry, hemp, cotton, even imported banana leaves have been used. Sometimes red strands are included for luck, or else silken petals. Many Poians care passionately about paper and will debate the virtues of different papers while sitting on benches or standing in the shade of trees, the way other people might discuss wine or automobiles or tachistoscopes. Nevertheless, the mechanics of papermaking are well-known and need not be reiterated here.

Rather, of concern is the relationship between the city’s Academy and its food carts. Several generations ago, the Academy almost closed due to student protests. Accounts of the protests’ cause vary from new regulations on pigeon-hunting to a botched handling of quarantine during a plague. One of the Academy’s statues, commissioned some time afterward, depicts elongated dancing figures with their eyes and nostrils stitched shut and headless pigeons hatching out of their mouths.

In any case, during that time, the Academy’s head council decided that it needed to offload excess paper. Not blank paper; that would have been easy. The problem was paper that had already been printed on, brochures and maps and examinations; the latter included character sheets used in the ubiquitous roleplaying scenarios. The Academy’s mission is to develop character, although it uses a phrase from Archaic High Poian – mistranslated, it turned out, but by then the motto was so entrenched that the correction never stuck.

An enterprising gentleman, whose real name is uncertain, bought up the excess paper. Everyone expected him to pulp the lot, as he was suspected of being involved in counterfeiting and the paper was of high quality. Instead, he turned around and made deals with the food carts. Where feasible, he cajoled them into buying the paper to wrap food in, replacing the earlier practice of loaning cheap bamboo containers to customers: everything from carp-shaped pastries filled with red bean paste to riceballs wrapped in seaweed to hattahk. This being Poi Jiahl, different types of food became associated with different fields of study. The carp pastries, riceballs, and hattahk wound up with Nonrepresentational Illustration, Structural Materialism, and Improvisational Tactics, respectively.

The Academy survived this difficult period, but the arrangement stuck. People peruse the stained sheets of paper as they eat the way they would read the newspaper. In this way the Academy even educates people who are not, technically speaking, its students.

 

 

YOU KNOW A great deal about the evening and how it will end in bloodshed, if blood is measured in scribbles and translucent glass tokens rather than liters. At least, you can’t see how it would end any other way.

What reassures you least is that you had understood most Poians to be, if not enthusiastic about the Sthenner occupation, resigned to it. Initially you’d thought the Gray Grandmother’s objection was a function of generational conservatism, and that the others accepted the pragmatic benefits brought by the protection of the Sthenner military and bureaucratic apparatus. The Poian governing council invited the Sthenners in, after all. Say what you like about them, but the Sthenners have, in their three-odd decades of gnawing expansionism, been scrupulous about only attacking when attacked; only treading where invited. The very legalism of their interactions, however, seems to be a source of offense.

You thought you’d lived here long enough to gain some small insight into local attitudes. Poi Jiahl has survived since it gained independence from a now-defunct alliance by adroitly maneuvering through the politics of larger and more powerful states. Increasingly you realize that the Poians’ outward courtesy disguises a cynicism as well-honed and distinctive as absinthe. Perhaps, if you punctured the man to your left, the woman to your right, the absinthe would leak out and drizzle to the floor, leave the room steeped in a distillation of defiance.

The curfew bell tolls. It’s the same bell that has hung in the town square since you first arrived, and for an odd century before that. Yet you are convinced that the tone is deeper, wavering like sound heard through water, or something thicker and murkier than water. Is this whole session a convoluted loyalty test? You can’t imagine that the Sthenner authorities would look kindly upon it if they walked in, even if Roia Beniyat is on good terms with them.

You’re not the only one distracted by the bell, but the session leader taps the edge of the table with her pen, and you pay attention again.

 

 

ONE OF THE great arts of Poi Jiahl, better known than the Academy’s quirky method of disposing of old examination papers, is meat-carving. Visitors are either charmed or disgusted by the practice. Animals are hunted and brought upon platters of shiver-ice to great feasts, and cut up by master chefs. The chefs then arrange their limbs, their glaring bones, their ropes of intestine, into meat-sculptures in a deliciously temporary display. It is especially popular to transform prey into predator, or predator into prey: a flock of cranes into a dragon, a tiger into startled gazelles.

Sometimes the carcasses are eaten. More often they are burned without satisfying any hunger but the hunger for spectacle.

 

 

SOME GAMES ARE cooperative and some are competitive. Typically, however, a conflict of some sort is implied, even if only against an outside force: an hourglass with its trapped grains trickling earthward, the whimsy of tumbling dice, the players’ own growing boredom.

Narration proceeds clockwise, as before, with each participant owning a scene in turn. Your goal is to resolve the situation. What resolution entails must either be decided by consensus or imposed. If a consensus can be found, there is no need to invoke the conflict resolution framework.

(A description of the rules, which involve dice, tokens, masks, and the ritual consumption of a raw heron, follows. You have seen any number of peculiar rites at these sessions, which you must complete to be certified as a tactician, and even so the heron is new. It arrives borne by six masked figures wearing the emblems of the cardinal directions: North, South, East, West, and two for the up-down World Axis in the center. If you had known that you were going to be fed raw heron, you are not sure whether you would have brought more hattahk, to get the taste of red out of your mouth, or none, since the Academy is feeding you.)

Fixated on the heron-sculpture, the glistening meat and membranes and bones, you almost miss the most important part:

Every time you lose a conflict, you lose a part of your name.

(Everyone, even Roia Beniyat, wrote their name in pencil.)

Every time you win a conflict, you gain some of your name back. But you can never recover more of your name than you had to begin with.

 

 

THE NEW ADMINISTRATION takes no responsibility for disappointments of the following nature that may occur in the city or on the Academy campus:

Gasoline rationing.

A change in the flavor of beer.

The adjustment of concert tuning from mai-cho = 453 cycles/second to 460 cycles/second.

A shortage of lizards.

The increase of minimum sentencing for littering and graffiti from two days to two weeks.

The collection of bronze and tin spoons and chopsticks as resources for the war effort. These will be exchanged for wooden spoons and forks.

The reduction of the rainbow’s colors to six from seven.

The sudden failure of children’s chants to rhyme.

A profusion of fungal strands in bottles of ink, and the recommendation to switch to an approved brand of iron gall, especially for filling out official documents. The appearance of similar strands in bathtubs is not part of the same phenomenon, no matter what rumor may imply.

(The list goes on in this vein.)

 

 

YOU LIKE THE taste of the meat, whatever it is, better than you hoped. It’s hard to remind yourself that it’s not really a heron, when it looked like one owing to the unnamed chef’s artifice. Especially since you have no idea what heron tastes like. This is good, since you’ve had to consume quite a bit of the meat. Conflicts come up often, and each time you are involved in one, you must eat.

The Sthenners establish a cadre for the Poians, who thereafter wear the Sthenner Fungus-Lion badge and are given limited police powers. The dragon’s get Yuo Keresthen, having established this in her first move, uses her next one to join the cadre as a spy. Courtesan Nyen-moirop is her lover.

The taller brother, Warau – who is not Nyen-moirop’s brother in the scenario – joins the countryside resistance. It’s a coward’s act. Everyone knows that the country people are irrelevant, and from his lack of involvement in the scenes that follow, he knows it too. He just wants to get the session over with.

Your motivations are simpler: you will get more out of this evening if you go where the action is, so you go where the action is. Besides, it’s not as if Warau looks like he wants company.

 

 

WAYS THAT A resistance can discombobulate an occupation:

Bursting into song each time a constable rounds a corner. “My true love’s lips tasted of peaches, but yours like honey wine” is the most popular. The woman with the empty holster has a good voice, the others less so. You can’t tell whether the group is singing to mai-cho = 453 cycles/second, 460 cycles/second, or something else entirely; you don’t have perfect pitch.

Carrying guns whose firing chambers are stuffed with embroidery floss. Alternately, cloves.

Student demonstrations during finals week. (You have to do something drably expected once in a while. It keeps them guessing.)

Incubating locust eggs in the emergency silos.

Stealing and arranging the ties of railroad tracks so they spell out a riddle when seen from above.

The obligatory seductions and assassinations. The shorter brother has a gift for narrating Nyen-moirop’s escapades with just enough detail to be tantalizing but not vulgar. Mostly. You didn’t want to hear about the thirteen uses Nyen-moirop has for inkwells, but at least Roia Beniyat stopped him before he listed a fourteenth.

You do all of these and they aren’t enough. You keep losing tokens to Roia Beniyat with her coin eyes. She’s cleverer at every turn. There is a twisting logic to her countermoves. Rather than resorting to force, she leverages the tools that you yourselves have built into the scenario. But you know it’s truly lost when she spends four tokens to rename herself.

Rather, she renames herself, and she doesn’t: the same name, except in Sthenner order, the given name first and the family names after, so she becomes Roia Beniyat Mweren Ahm.

“Thank you for your participation,” Roia Beniyat says. “It will prove most useful in the days to come. Please use the proper order for my name going forward.”

There are holes in your sheet, new ones. You squint at the partly-erased name. For a moment the world tilts. You’ve written yourself horizontally, not vertically, the way the Sthenners do. You sneeze at the graphite dust, as persistent as spores.

Your head aches. You shouldn’t be hungry, but now that the session is over, you are suddenly ravenous. It would be improper to reach for the shredded remnants of the heron. Still, this is why you visited the best food cart on Central University Promenade, the one that sells hearty Sthenner meat-and-mushroom pies. And you have about a quarter of one left.

You’ve been chewing for half a minute, forever, there’s no difference in the longevity of distraction, when you realize there’s an odd, tasteless, fibrous intrusion in your mouth. You have been eating the paper the meat-and-mushroom pie came wrapped in. Without checking to see if anyone is watching, you hurriedly fish the sodden mass from your mouth and fling it to the table. Even so, you feel some of the fibers stuck in your throat, and your convulsive swallowing does not dislodge them.

With trembling hands you unwrap the paper. A form – a character sheet, in fact. There are faint smudged remnants of handwriting in a looping, beautiful, and unfamiliar script, barely visible over the rows of Sthenner type.