One woman and five people who never leave. Nobody ages, nothing explains it, and no character remarks on it — what changes over the centuries is the work.
Agelessness is a convention and it covers everyone. The same neighbour, the same merchant and the same skeptic are there in era 1 and era 5, wearing what the century wears and holding different opinions about what a show is for.
It costs the story of a collaborator growing old and buys a cast the player keeps. Because nobody is lost to time, losing someone is always a choice somebody made: they leave the trade, they take a ship, or they stop working with her.
The one who makes the light do something
| Silhouette | Short, wide-shouldered, hair bound up off her neck. Always carrying: the stack on her back is her outline. Sleeves rolled to the elbow in every century. |
|---|---|
| Wants | To see whether it will work, and then to show someone. |
| Era | What she is doing |
|---|---|
| 1. Shadows | Digs clay, shapes a lamp, hangs a sheet, and finds out that a hand in front of a flame is a bird. |
| 2. Glass | Grinds her first lens and stops painting what she remembers, starts painting what she means. |
| 3. Turning | Learns that twelve drawings in the right order are a living thing and eleven are not. |
| 4. Silver | Runs. Everything in this era is her running a dying plate to a darkroom. |
| 5. Celluloid | Stands behind a camera she built out of five districts and turns the crank. |
Five, each with a distinct silhouette from above and a want that is not the player's want. Hard history arrives as one of these people's problem in one specific project, never as an era-wide event the player watches.
| Silhouette | Heavy, stooped, always holding something that is lit. Soot on the forearms. |
|---|---|
| Wants | To sell her light, and to be the one who owns it. |
| Era 1 | Sells her the oil, and will not explain how he presses it. |
| Era 2 | Runs the lime kiln. Limelight is his, and he prices it accordingly. |
| Era 3 | Keeps the smithy's coal fire and cuts its iron into gears, springs and belts. Supplies the theatre: the first time he is a supplier rather than a seller. |
| Era 4 | Keeps the silver refinery's coal fire and the iodine retort, and boils bone down to gelatin. Warns her, correctly, that magnesium will blind a sitter. |
| Era 5 | Builds the dynamo. Sells electricity, which he does not understand and does not need to. |
| Silhouette | Tall, narrow, hands always in front of the body. Carries a flat case. |
|---|---|
| Wants | For the thing to still be made by a person. |
| Era 1 | Teaches her the first show. Three puppets, one lamp, and timing. |
| Era 2 | Says a painted slide is a puppet that cannot change its mind. |
| Era 3 | Keeps the drawing desk and the print shop. The best twelve-frame cycles in the game are his. |
| Era 4 | Builds the box cameras, because a box is carpentry, and prints the horse onto its disc. Refuses to photograph anything, and keeps performing. |
| Era 5 | Sits in the picture palace on opening night, in the back row, unconvinced. |
| Silhouette | Square, arms folded, weight on the back foot. Never carries anything. |
|---|---|
| Wants | To be shown how it is done, and then to still be impressed. |
| Era 1 | Tells the children the bird is a hand. They stop coming for two nights. |
| Era 2 | Finds the lantern behind the gauze and tells the whole fairground. |
| Era 3 | Silvers the mirrors and runs the theatre, counting the frames out loud. Becomes, accidentally, the guild lecturer. |
| Era 4 | Strings the wires at the racetrack and runs the gallery. Cannot explain the horse. This is the first time he goes quiet. |
| Era 5 | Sells tickets. He was always going to end up selling tickets. |
| Silhouette | Small, fast, always at the front of any crowd. Bare feet in every era. |
|---|---|
| Wants | To see it again. Then to see something else. |
| Era 1 | First paying audience. Pays in a shell. |
| Era 2 | Front row at the phantasmagoria and the only one who does not scream. |
| Era 3 | Turns every drum the toy workshop makes before it is sold. Breaks two. |
| Era 4 | Waits at the plate works and runs a plate to the studio for a coin. Holds still for forty seconds on a bet and is the first photograph. |
| Era 5 | Is in the film. Running, because she is always running. |
| Silhouette | Upright, coat to the ankle, ledger under one arm. Walks in a straight line. |
|---|---|
| Wants | A margin, and to be told what the next thing will be before anyone else is. |
| Era 1 | Lands the hides and the charcoal. Will not extend credit. |
| Era 2 | Lands sand, kelp and foreign glass. Now she will extend credit. |
| Era 3 | Keeps the toy stall on the Lane. Buys zoetropes in bulk and ships them somewhere the player never sees. |
| Era 4 | Keeps the chemist's stall and bench and the portrait studio's books. Sells timber and magnesium, and takes her margin on every likeness. |
| Era 5 | Lands the camphor the whole last era depends on, and knows it. |
| Silhouette | Still. Hands at the waist. The only person on the map who does not hurry. |
|---|---|
| Wants | The show to be worth the dark it is watched in. |
| Era 1 | Commissions a shadow play for a funeral. Pays more than anyone. |
| Era 2 | Closes the phantasmagoria for a week. Lifts it herself. |
| Era 3 | Keeps the paper mill, and asks for a strip that teaches a trade. The first commission with conditions. |
| Era 4 | Keeps the darkroom and the fixer bench, the one corner of the Quay where nobody hurries. Sits for a portrait and asks that it not be sold. |
| Era 5 | Watches the opening night and says nothing, which is the whole point. |
A fictional port, shaped by real history and standing in for none of it.
Ships bring equipment, performers, films and traditions from places the game never has to build. A wayang puppeteer, a lens grinder and a foreign print all arrive at the same quay.
Rule: Do not make it one real city in disguise. Every compression of real history is written down.