I had my phone in my pocket, actively recording, when the next session started. But then the next session wound up being something new.
“Today we’ll take a different approach,” Olivia said as I settled in for the ride. “We’d like to see how well you can pick up the new sequences after just a bare minimum of exposure to them. So I’ll say each one for you slowly, and you’ll repeat it back to me as accurately as you can.”
This got juicy pretty fast. Unlike yesterday’s sessions, she slowed today’s sequences down for me and used a more neutral affect, very much in the style of the game tutorials for new players. And the sequences today didn’t seem to produce unexpected psychological effects, which was both disappointing and reassuring at the same time.
But as I learned each one and repeated it for her—sometimes she let me repeat it a few times until I got it right—I seemed to develop an insight for how each one could be used, or rather, what spell effects would be appropriate for each one. Shorthand for that might be: healing spells use different combinations of vowels and consonants than attack spells, higher-level spells might take longer to enunciate than lower-level spells, and so on. If you were familiar with those general observations about diva-casting, then you could intuit how these new sequences might fit in the firmament.
We got to the end, and it all felt very anticlimactic actually. But then she said, “One last thing here. I realize you don’t understand what any of these sequences are supposed to do inside the context of the game. But I wonder if you could improvise a new sequence or two for me by combining elements of what you’ve just learned. And feel free to utilize your own style to punch up your delivery compared to how I was demonstrating them.”
Very interesting. A chance to show off for the SparkleCo dev team who might watch video of this session someday. Maybe one of my improvisations would become a canonical spell in the final game. As Queen of Sparkle Dungeon, I did like to make a mark on the Realm.
I began scatting, for lack of a better word, testing combinations quietly without really committing to anything in particular yet. I found myself drawn toward the more abrasive side of the spectrum, stringing together sounds that were jarring on their own, or putting sounds together that grated against each other in some way. This process developed a momentum of its own, as though I was on the scent of an actual proper spell that had been buried in the stack of components they’d given me.
Finally, a fully committed pattern exploded out of me, and after a few beats, I was inspired to let loose another one.
After the first one, in those few beats of silence, I made eye contact with Olivia, whose expression was clinical and detached.
My second sequence, however, jolted me as I delivered it, like a sharp electric shock with no precise target point on my body. Olivia seemed to feel it, too, as I watched her eyes suddenly go wide. And then, all four walls of the glass room shattered at the same time with a deafening crash, the blast radius expanding slightly away from us into the basement. I was too stunned at first to correlate my improvised sequence with an actual physical effect on those glass walls.
But Olivia’s ever-so-slight smile was informative.
“Did you … rig that to happen?” I felt obligated to ask.
“No, I believe that was all you,” she replied.
“Cool,” I said quietly. Then I asked, “Do I still get my thousand dollars?”