> The earliest social arrangements of adventurers were informal alliances and partnerships. This was early in near-Fall history; society was still reorganizing into more sophisticated and integrated structures—there was little-to-no overarching political authority to manage them. A group would spontaneously form out of familiarity or complementary skill-sets, and just as readily dissolve. Inter-group competition was common, and there were few mechanisms for official censure of bad actors. As societal structures reformed, the pressure on those individual fortune seekers to eschew anti-social violence led to increasingly formal social-legal entities. These were the days of the guilds. Mutual support networks that encouraged training, mentorship, information sharing, out-wild aid, and profit distribution. While these structures were appropriate for their time, the inefficiencies inherent to their communalist structure were eventually their undoing. Institutions that chose to specialize found increased efficiency; some in the trade became insurers and information brokers, eschewing out-wild ventures altogether. The benefits of this model eventually became so apparent that their norms were supported by legal arrangements that offered additional subsidy and public support to any who followed them.
>
> Some critics of the fragmentary model argue that perverse incentives grew out of the newly adopted system, such as the tendency of firms to withhold safety information from the public as an incentive for clients to engage with them. However, studies have shown that the incentives have actually increased the quantity and quality of intelligence that is produced overall. While individual harms may occur due to the system encouraging withholding, overall there is benefit. Indeed, the market structures have produced greater prosperity for all.
>
> Introduction excerpt from “The History and Institutions of the Out-Wilds”, by Marc Stuge.
A true plan is more than just intention, no matter how sincerely meant. Jack had determined a general direction, an aspirant goal to pursue. Using the dangers of the wild as a catalyst to his second carding was a start, but it was details that would bring his lofty dreams into a concrete, actionable reality.
By his reckoning, he needed two things if the venture was going to be more than childish fancy: proximity to nobility and direction for his carding.
The former he delegated to Cass and Harmon. They would make discrete inquiries within the night-runners and among other colleagues for any outgoing expeditions that were expected to have noble accompaniment. That kind of detail wasn’t available publicly and looking for the information himself would draw unwanted attention.
For the latter, he knew it wasn’t enough to simply be in the wilds and do problem sets. He needed a focus. The nature of his family’s trade was one of information aggregation and risk management. They provided financial safety nets for ventures that went awry, but more importantly they could advise clients about the dangers of the landscape they would be entering, and broker deals between investors and expeditions.
There were innumerable details for them to consider: who was reliable and in what contexts; what regions had been profitable, or suffered losses; whether expedition proposals showed sufficient preparation for the dangers they would encounter, or whether their costs exceeded what they could expect in profit.
He hoped to card toward something that would provide him deep insight into these factors, and with this in mind he spent his time pouring over documents, trying to find that most elusive of things: an absence. A hole in the data. A distinct gap that could, if filled in, provide them with a competitive edge.
Such patterns were difficult to find. They hid in a sea of noisy information, and those that were easily found became quickly incorporated into existing models. He needed something that had both been missed and, ideally, something that could only be deciphered if he ventured into the wilds himself.
He spent a week in a fugue of deep focus, pouring over copies of ledgers and datasets. Daily updates from Cass and Harmon’s efforts helped him narrow his search, limiting it to regions and expeditions where nobility would be present.
Eventually he found something. The Meäl Foothills were a densely forested region abutting the Flowing Mountains. There had been an uptick in failed ventures heading into the region, the majority of them never arriving due to equipment malfunction or accidents en-route. Others had simply disappeared.
There were still numerous expeditions that had been making regular journeys there, and these successes had clouded the data, making it appear more normal. But Jack had looked closely at these successes and realized something: their public reports were abnormally similar, as if a lazy fraudster was copying their own work with minor changes.
It was not due to an unreasonable laxness on their part. A person would have to be nearly obsessive in their search for something hidden, desperate even, to piece together the evidence of a ruse.
‘Am I brilliant or stupid to have found this? Brilliant this time, stupid the other ninety-nine.’
Something was being hidden in the Meäl Foothills and he was going to find out what. His best shot for a powerful carding, that also suited his needs, lay in the wilds. He would leave the city, face true dangers, and observe the nobility to discover their carding secrets.
The following weeks were spent preparing for the venture by building familiarity with his new cards, and finding a group to venture out with. For the latter, he corresponded with several caravan masters, eliminating those that expected payment he didn’t have or favourable terms from the family business he couldn’t offer. It was a tall request he knew; on paper he was uncarded and unskilled in their trade, whatever analysis he could offer to their ventures would have to be offset by the extra burden he would represent.
Finally, he received a positive response. Cass had helpfully included his letters in correspondence to caravans still currently travelling to Calamut. The master of Wildberry Expeditions had replied and, of all things, asked about his willingness to provide tutoring...
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The efforts to understand his cards... were more mixed.
They were in a courtyard garden near the edge of the city, far from any residences where their efforts would disturb sleeping folk. A stonework gazebo stood central, looking out over the dimly lit shrubberies and pathways of the space. Just one of the many public gardens, if a somewhat unimpressive one.
‘That’s an uncharitable thought,’ Jack admonished himself, ‘someone loves this place.’
The truth of that was evident in small touches: the gazebo was swept clean; the gaps between flagstones plucked of weeds; the glowrock veins polished smooth.
‘And they’ve given me somewhere quiet and private. Thanks to the small gardeners and caretakers of Underwave for your efforts, I needed them sorely.’
This was the last opportunity he'd have to test his cards with the others before he might be venturing into the wilds. Neavie and him had been busy on previous nights, experimenting with and testing both Pivot and Vital Flow, but the unnamed dash card had gone unused until now, when Dart was available. Vital Flow had protected him from injury the last time, if under unusual circumstances but, without knowing if there were restrictions or limitations, he’d avoided testing it without the insurance she offered. Dashing from height a couple of times safely only to learn that Vital Flow failed on the third use... that would be a plainly foolish and unnecessary death.
The necessity of Dart's presence was clear, and Neavie had been with him from the beginning puzzling out how his cards worked. Racket's contribution was... less obvious.
"WoooOooOo! Birdboy ya move like ya were born to it!" Racket whooped.
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"Hush ya duffer. 'E did a few flips and nearly flummoxed his guts to display his dinner fer our viewing pleasure. Yar caterwauls would be better spent practicin' yar own cartwheels."
‘Dart's harassment is in top form.’
But it was true; Jack had just attempted some rapid spins using Pivot without the protective effect of Vital Flow. The resulting disorientation and nausea was only exacerbated by excitable shouting.
He was currently hunched over, eyes sealed shut, focusing intensely on the prayer that the world would stop spinning without him.
'On the upside, I don't think I can die from dizziness,' Jack thought, fighting down another surge of nausea. 'Other people's cards don't involve this much vomiting; they couldn't possibly. Society wouldn't function. At the very least, I'd expect to see more buckets.'
Even in the depths of his misery a cool, damp cloth placed on his forehead elicited a smile.
"Thanks Neavie," he said, looking up at her concerned face.
She sent a quick smile his way before glancing back at the squabbling pair to their right.
Racket was demonstrating his 'damn impeccable' cartwheel form to Dart's unrelenting critique.
"His form is actually quite good," Jack commented.
Neavie gave a simple nod, but replied, "I think Dart is enjoying the opportunity to tease him now that he's figured out he's in love with her. It seems only fair, the work she's been putting in to get him to notice."
Jack looked at her askance, that was news to him.
"I feel like I missed some developments."
"No, not particularly. I think Racket is still coming to the realization that she's flirting, but he definitely understands that he likes it."
Jack stared inquisitively at the pair, Dart was demonstrating her interpretation of Racket's cartwheel, a version that seemed to emphasize all four limbs remaining in continuous contact with the ground. "I thought Dart had it in for him, quite frankly."
Neavie left that statement unanswered long enough that Jack finally glanced her way to find an inscrutable look on her face.
"What?"
"Oh, just thinking about who's a bigger fool. Those who are oblivious or those who don't realize others are oblivious."
Jack didn't know quite what to say in response to that, and so hazarded "I think I'd hate to be the oblivious one more-so. At least in the other case it's because you think too well of someone to judge them ignorant."
Neavie laughed at that harder than Jack thought it had earned.
'I think I've missed something here,' was his first thought, 'but I'm glad to have made her laugh," the second.
Neavie finally settled and seeing that Jack was looking less peaked, suggested he write his card out.
This was the material outcome of the testing process, beyond building a familiarity with his cards, he was producing documentation.
It was a practice that went back as long as cards existed as far as anyone knew, long enough that whatever original terminology for 'cards' may have been used had been totally lost and superseded by the contemporary one.
The abilities derived from carding were complex, and writing out the information known about them was useful for both memory and articulating the logic behind an ability in detail. Making individual cards for them was a convenience when new cards were semi-routinely added, and for developing an intuitive sense of the timing of when specific cards might appear or seeing possible synergies between effects that would otherwise be obscure.
The metaphor to playing cards had been so convenient that the terminology became utterly dominant. Once the idea of describing the abilities they acquired through some otherworldly force as 'cards'; it soon quickly followed that the collection of 'cards' was a 'deck' when referring to the whole of them; and the set of abilities immediately accessible as a 'hand'.
He would write longer notes on his own, but the point of the physical cards was to have an easy reference. There were still enough unknowns about his cards that they would be significantly less detailed than he'd like, and the two crossed out pieces of card-stock labelled 'non-viable' were an unpleasant reminder of his miscarding, but on the whole he was excited to undergo this ritual, seen as it was to be something of a coming of age.
He spent a minute summarizing every detail they had extracted from their completed tests on two of the blank cards he'd prepared, and then several more with his more detailed notes.
[https://preview.redd.it/vz0gf2o0313b1.jpg?width=1000&format=pjpg&auto=webp&v=enabled&s=c497c434af47dd1aaa4092d32c002b8e5fe16837]
Text to speech/Audio Description:
An informational card depicting an athletic figure engaging in a dynamic and acrobatic back-flip. Curving arrows surround his body indicating axes of rotation.
Card text:
Card Name: Pivot
Play Limit: None Found.
Duration: 3.6 Seconds.
Effect: Ability to freely rotate self on any axis around a central point in the body. Vertical Axis at a maximum of 10 revolutions/second. Saggital and Frontal axes at a maximum of 3 revolutions/second, increases to a maximum of 8.4 when curling body up.
Warning: Requires use of Vital Flow to avoid disorientation due to rapid movement
In his extended notes he'd included the three unusual findings they'd found in their testing.
The first, that he'd already known, was that the 'central point' wasn't stationary. It shifted slightly with movements of his body, with potential losses in efficiency depending on wherever it was located and how he'd oriented himself. The best he could determine was that the point was located at either his centre of mass, or centre of gravity, but differentiating which of the two was an experiment he wasn't sure how to approach, or if it even mattered. The fluctuations were usually tiny, and for rapidity of revolution it meant that taking balanced, symmetrical poses seemed to be the most effective.
The second was how held objects reacted to the rotational force. Most of the time, they seemed to just rotate with him, caught in whatever effect was accelerating him, convenient for clothing. It was only when he'd held a heavy stone out in front of his body that they discovered the quirk. If the objects disrupted his balance when held, they seemed to fall out of the effect. The stone had dragged on his grip until he'd drawn it closer to his body, at which point it once again moved smoothly with him.
The final strangeness was the ease at which he maneuvered within the effect. Spinning rapidly should draw his arms from his sides, as the centrifugal force pulled on his limbs, he should need to expend strength to keep them close, but there was no such effect. If anything, movement became drastically easier while using Pivot as he could move a limb at speed and bring it to precise halt instantaneously without any deceleration. Neavie had described it as 'eerily graceful' but refused to elaborate when he'd pushed.
Vital Flow was conversely quite barren in its detail.
[https://preview.redd.it/z84mrzn0313b1.jpg?width=1001&format=pjpg&auto=webp&v=enabled&s=2bceb9efd4e4f373103961bdc0f01753c8c81acc]
Text to speech/Audio Description:
An informational card depicting a paper cutout of an anatomically correct heart.
Card Text:
Card Name: Vital Flow
Play Limit: None Found.
Duration: 30 minutes.
Effect: Eliminates or reduces strain from force of acceleration on body, seems specific to movement of bodily fluids. Can be replayed to extend duration up to a maximum of 12 hours.
Warning: Strictly necessary for use with Gotcha Dash. Recommended for use with Pivot.
He'd figured out the maximum duration by playing it twenty-four times in as many minutes before the card rejected another attempt to play it. Eleven hours and thirty-six minutes later he'd felt Vital Flow's effect wear off.
The exact mechanism at hand wasn't really clear, but considering the rather life-essential mechanisms that the card interacted with and it's origin as a broken card, he wasn't tempted to experiment too far with it. Similarly, leaving the effect on continually, while possible, seemed irresponsible.
'That's how I learn it's actually been subtly weakening my blood vessels, or coating them with a strengthening material that slowly poisons me in excess quantities. No... better to just play it when I need it.'
Both cards finished, written as neatly as he could manage, he handed them to Neavie for her own perusal.
She looked them over briefly, but of course they'd discussed them to such an excruciating level of detail that she had no comment beyond one.
"Still not sure what to call your dash yet?"
"Not sure I feel right naming something that I've only used once, to my immediate detriment. But maybe with this next bit of testing I'll get an idea."
And finally they were ready for the main event: testing the dash.