Hello, and welcome to a brand new episode format here on Dice Exploder: Afterimage. It's equal parts This American Life style personal memoir and play report. You're listening to this first episode on the Dice Exploder podcast feed, but it's also available on the new Dice Exploder YouTube channel, which I will be infrequently updating, and it's been available behind the Dice Exploder Patreon for several months now,
If you like it, there's already a second afterimage up behind the Patreon paywall about my experience playing City of Winter.
With that context out of the way, here it is Dice Exploder Afterimage #1: Yazeba’s Bed and Breakfast and the Kite.
Music by Blue Dot Sessions: https://app.sessions.blue/
Transcript
When I was in third grade, there was this cartoon that aired while I was coming home from school, so I could only ever watch the second half of episodes. I remember the cast... a big guy, a smart girl, a leader, and another one? I don’t remember much about the show now, but I can tell you what, by the time my Friday babysitter left the house, she knew as much about it as I did.
And I remember one time being sick for like a week and finding out that the show aired during the day. Two episodes a day! All week! It was the greatest thing that had ever happened. I was actually able to follow what was going on.
It felt so real, I think because I’d been dropped into the middle: these characters, my new family, they already had rich lives from who knows how many 26 episode seasons that had come before, and their futures were so full of possibility. And for one week I was there, riding along with them.
There was a moment that week where the main girl reached the peak of some ongoing plot. I didn’t know where she’d started, but I knew right now she was at a crossroads. Would she choose to stay with her found family? Or would she embrace her destiny?
I knew it was cheesy, but when she had to make that choice, and she chose her family, I cried. I barely knew her, barely knew what was going on, but it’s like I’d known her my whole life. It’s like I was her.
And then... I left. And I went back to school, and she continued on without me. They all did.
The name of the show was Yazeba’s Bed & Breakfast.
~
A year ago I saw Yazeba’s Bed & Breakfast - the game, not the cartoon - in person for the first time. I am very lucky to live close to a game store where every other Monday night, a dozen or more people will show up, pitch games, and play together until closing time. And on this night, a young Yazeba’s concierge walked in with their brand new copy that needed playing.
I’d brought my own game to run that week. I had a wonderful time. But I saw the Yazeba’s crew hootin and hollerin, and they all walked out smiling.
For the next year, the young concierge made sure Yazeba’s was in regular attendance, and we all knew: if you wanted to play Yazeba’s at the meetup, this was the copy you played.
Finally, one week last January, I was tired. Tired from the holidays, from the end of the year, looking at the world around me and into the future. I didn’t have it in me to pitch my own game.
And I sat down for Yazeba’s.
~
Here are some facts about Yazeba:
Yazeba is a witch.
She traded her heart for the Bed & Breakfast, which may explain her cold and sometimes cruel behavior. (“Not that that’s any of your business”).
Before she sold her heart, she wrote a couple of books about the magic of names. (“Neither of them particularly good—stop asking to see them!”)
She’s always busy with “witchy business”—although she doesn’t seem to work much actual magic. (“I wouldn’t expect you to understand.”)
She has a funny way of cursing, like, she always says “Foes afire!” or “Friends afire!” or something else that starts with F. (“It’s a curse. It’s not supposed to be funny.”)
Her preferred vices are expensive cigars, cheap cigarettes, and dusklit rides through the sky on her enchanted bicycle. (“That’s how I distract myself from you numbskulls.”)
Deep down, she really cares. (“Incorrect.”)
I know these facts because they were printed at the top of her character sheet when I picked it from among the 20 or more splayed out on the table before me.
But I knew these things even from the front side of the sheet: a portrait, equal parts chain-smoking grandma and Batman villain with her big hair and cloak billowing behind her. I’d known just from the glimpse of her I caught peaking out of the young concierge’s game folder as it overflowed with paperwork. I’d known the minute I’d heard the game’s premise, it’s name. I’d known since the day I was born. I knew I wanted to be her, just for a moment.
The Chapter we were reading, the episode of the cartoon we were writing and watching and retelling to our friends at school the next day, was Chapter 9: The Pancake War. In it, Hey Kid (who you already know just from their name) has founded a rival Bed & Breakfast made of cardboard boxes in the yard where they serve pancakes every day and zero mean witches can tell you you’re not allowed to eat pancakes every day. I, Yazeba, could not abide this. I would not allow my guests to be seduced by this child’s frivolous prank!
At my side was my loyal companion Parish, a knight turned frog turned father figure for the children. Joining Hey Kid was the Moon Prince, a charming youth still coming to understand how Earth works differently from their home up above.
We began with a war of propaganda. Parish and I offered lemonade to guests, even brought out a ukulele for entertainment. But Hey Kid and the Moon Prince made a pancake that was hard to argue with. As things heated up, so did our tactics. Children ran through my garden like vermin! Parish knocked over half their B&B with the removal of a single cardboard box!
At the peak of conflict, Hey Kid threw a pancake at my Bed & Breakfast, and I watched as it slowly slid down a window, trail of syrup in its wake.
And as Sam, I knew that we had more time to fill. Mechanically, the game of the chapter was barely halfway over. There was still so much mess to be had.
But I also saw in Hey Kid’s player the same look that Hey Kid must have been giving Yazeba, that look of a child who’s been caught in the act, who knows they’ve gone too far and is both terrified and tantalized by what might come next.
And in my own self, I thought “this person, at this table, whom I love because we’re playing here together, I know what they want.” And as I thought it, so did Yazeba. She looked at Hey Kid and she knew what they wanted.
They wanted a moment. They wanted a war. They wanted to play and love with me.
And so I, Yazeba, turned to the silent crowd of witnesses. And I declared, just as the chapter title had foretold, a pancake war. I donned my helmet (bucket) and took up my sword (garden rake). I charged straight for Hey Kid’s eyesore of a cardboard fort, and I let myself be pancaked in the face, toppled to the ground.
The crowd cheered. At our table, we cheered. Because while Yazeba would never admit what had transpired, I had shared her moment of internality with the table, and it had been exactly what Hey Kid’s player had been asking for.
~
“At the end of every chapter comes housekeeping,” the concierge told us as they dropped the heavy tome that is Yazeba’s onto the table and began to flip through its pages seemingly at random.
Our chapter ending had earned us an Original Hey Kid Artwork on a square sticker to place in the book wherever square stickers can be placed. The young concierge had us looking through the pantry, the garden, Gertrude’s backpack, Yazeba’s study, each full of empty squares such a sticker might go, but also a dozen unidentifiable tracks that we all had points we could put into, and Parish needed a new sticker for his sheet, and there was a whole new chapter we could play, and my what a whirlwind it can be to clean up sometimes!
I could feel the winds of change flying through the room, I could hear the coins cha-chinging into our inventory like a reward at the end of a video game. The world was moving forward. I wanted to play more, now, to feel more of this!
And I knew, if I wasn’t careful, I’d lose track of it all.
Because I could already sense how I’d feel at the end of the night, when the game was packed up and put away, I’d be left knowing that this whirlwind would continue on with out me next week and on weeks when I was busy or out of town, that of course I could never contain it, that I was just here to see this one piece of it. I was here visiting the B&B, just lucky enough to have the chance to leave a brief mark on this place.
~
For our next chapter, someone noticed that Sal had a song to share, and why not turn that into a whole thing? We picked the chapter Sal Puts On A Play and, just like Sal, began to cast ourselves in new roles.
There was the Moon Prince, struggling to accept the newfound limitations of a body meant for a planetoid with half as much gravity as this one.
Parish, comfortable now after years in this unwanted frog body, but perhaps now dealing with the realities of its growing age.
Sal and his uncertain creative ambitions. Amelie and their uncertain purpose and direction. Hey Kid and the uncertainty of who they might grow up to be. Or any of a dozen, two dozen other guests, each of them clear of character but always adjusting, experimenting, shuffling this way or that way. Who would any of them grow up to be? And of which did I want to have a say in their becoming?
I knew I wouldn’t again play Yazeba. It would be too fun to try on another role, another mask, and explore more of this place.But I worried about the way someone else might wear Yazeba. Would they treat her well? Would they take her where I would take her? Would anyone even pick her at all?
The concierge fretted in the same way over Gertrude. “I’m a Gertrude main” they said. “Maybe I should branch out.” And I saw my own thoughts in them, and I snatched up Gertrude. I don’t know if it was to push them, or to push myself, or just to offer the chance to get inside each other’s heads. I could see some worry on their face, the same worry I had about Yazeba. Would I treat Gertrude right? And what would the concierge do without her familiar mask? Or was I just imagining how they felt?
I would now tell you some facts about Gertrude, as I did Yazeba, but here, now, as I speak to you, I only have my own copy of Yazeba’s to look at, and the Gertrude sheet I was handed hardly resembled where it had started.
This Gertrude was in the book club, had asthma and a bottle cap collection. This Gertrude was good with a pocket knife, and was haunted by her memories of being trapped in the corn maze. This Gertrude’s sheet was covered in notes and scratched out text and accidental creases. When I would go to erase a mark on her sheet, I would feel how many times that mark had been erased and rewritten again, feel the thinness of the paper, how close I’d come to tearing through it.
I felt again the joy and the ache of being a child, home from school, sick, and stepping into the babbling river of this magical cartoon world for just a few episodes, just long enough to understand... But this time I could physically touch the river: every note on Gertrude’s sheet, every crease was a memory of something that had come before, a bit of lore that I might be able to hear about if I asked the right person, but only ever second hand. I would never be there, never be able to catch that episode in reruns, but I could put my fingers on those memories, these blemishes, these beautiful marks of love, inherited from some former player of this role.
And I knew how many of these must have come from the young concierge. What a privilege I had entitled myself to by snatching up this Gertrude. What a gift the concierge had given me by allowing me to do so.
And what a gift to Gertrude, to allow her the space to be more than just what either the concierge or I could bring to her alone, to be larger than either one of us, any one of us around the table. She had arrived at this place without so much as a name, only finding one by trying it on: “My name is Gertrude,” she said, and over the course of the sentence it became true.
As the chapter began, Sal cast me, Gertrude, as Yazeba, the character in his play. I, who had been Yazeba, was Gertrude, who was usually the concierge, but who was now me, and now was Yazeba. I was desperate for her approval. Their approval. I wanted to do a good job.
Of course I did a good job. Of course my friends approved of me. How could they not when my contribution, any contribution to the B&B offered in good faith, was by its nature an act of love. You could feel it thrumming through the book, through the stage of Sal’s play, and the table of ours.
~
Housekeeping again, then just enough time for one last chapter. We picked The Night Market, in which the dream merchant Monday invites Gertrude to the wondrous fairy market and offers to buy her heart in exchange for whatever she might desire.
The concierge pulled Gertrude over themself like a warm blanket, and I couldn’t help myself. I took up Monday.
We strolled through the market, and I offered deals to all the guests at the table. A lava-monster insecure about setting their friends on fire went home with a reverse-sweater that kept them cool. A Regular Business Man, saddened by his Regular Business, went home with a week of PTO.
And Gertrude...
Did she feel like she had a place she belonged? I asked.
Did she know what she wanted to do with the rest of her life? I asked
Did she know where she would go after she left the B&B? I asked.
Gertrude did not know these things.
And so I offered her the chance to simply be already at the place she was destined to go to, be the person she was destined to become, to skip the uncertainty and the self doubt and the journey of it all.
And after a moment to think...
She turned me down.
I made it clear the offer stood into the future, and I walked her back to Yazeba’s Bed & Breakfast.
~
One last time: housekeeping. This time, when the young concierge flipped through the book, it fell open to a page with a poster on it:
A picture of a child, facing away from the camera, golden light, a green backpack. Gertrude.
MISSING: This boy was last spotted outside the owl ridge megacenter on September 15th and is believed to still be in the area. Please contact child protective services at (555)-555-1000 if you have any information about his whereabouts.
There is so much sadness in that poster. So much empathy in it for people who perhaps do not deserve it.
It reminded me of Jay Dragon, one of the game designers behind Yazeba’s, and Jay’s breakout hit Wanderhome, a game about traveling a heartbroken world after the war that ravaged it has ended. But I don’t hear people talk about the war so much. I hear them talk about how you play as animal people, how it’s a pastoral fantasy, so cozy. Maybe I hear them talk about the transness inherent in the playbooks and the way animal forms feel like genders. I don’t hear them talk much about how much sadness there is in this game if you know where to look. I don’t hear them talk about how Jay was homeless while writing it.
Once upon a time, the world was cruel. I know it well. Even the worlds of Wanderhome and Yazeba’s, worlds governed by rules that demand no violence, no trouble, and low-stakes, even here sadness finds its way in. What hope does our real world have?
I have hope in a place, a home, a bed and breakfast, a great big family of people who love each other and want to play together, to make community together. Not a place to escape, not a place outside the reach of the cruel world outside or ignorant of it, but a place where we can care for each other despite that world, shelter from it, and remind each other that we are not alone. That we can make something essential, something crushingly beautiful.
This place of care is one answer to the sadness and the pain. It is the hope that I have for the world. It is the promise that there were people caring for each other through the darkness before us, and I can inherit some piece of that care. And then with the people I love around me, we can grow that piece into something magical and bigger than any one of us... and leave a piece of it for others to inherit after we’re gone.
~
At the end of the week, on Friday night, I asked the Dice Exploder discord if anyone wanted to play some games. I got one response: the young concierge.
We thought, why not play in person? Meet up at the game store.
We thought, why not play Yazeba’s? Just a couple chapters.
I didn’t want to miss an episode. I knew I would, I knew someone would soon come along and take the baton from my hands and run with it to new and unknowable places, I knew that everything here would be better for my having let go and let the B&B travel onward. But I also wanted to be there, to press myself into that world, just a little longer, while it was still familiar.
We played a chapter in which Gertrude and Moon Prince lay on a rooftop and look at the stars. I was Moon Prince, and I told Gertrude about flying kites on the moon, how the low gravity makes up for the minimal air. She told me about her constellations, what they mean, so different from my own.
We both wanted to stay there, on the roof, together. I felt weak, Earth’s gravity is so strong, and I asked if she would bring me a blanket so I could sleep on the roof. She obliged, then laid down beside me.
I doodled a little kite on Moon Prince’s character sheet. I wonder who will see it next, and what they will make of it.