> Scholarly debate centred on the intentions of the carding agent has never resolved the essential question: does it mean us well? Or ill?
>
> Proponents of the former positions point to the immense utility offered by cards, their essential necessity for modern life, and the dangers warded by their use. Opponents need merely remind that many of those dangers originated from negligent or malicious use of cards.
>
> Of course, counter-arguments are made that it is not the Giver that is flawed, but us. These debates are unresolvable, but the uncertainty and contentiousness they inspire has precluded the existence of much organized worship. It is difficult to inspire adulation in alternatives when the effect of carding is highly present and worship of the Giver is ultimately confused by its alien nature.
>
> Indeed, that is a truth that is agreed upon by all camps. The nature of cards reveals an intelligence that fundamentally misunderstands our existence. This is most notable in ‘broken cardings’ where dysfunctional versions of regular cards show the limits of its comprehension. These effects are oftentimes stranger, sometimes more powerful, and nearly always more dangerous to the user.
>
> There is an implication however, in understanding the Giver to be a force outside our world. If it is not of our plane, does this imply an arrival? If so, does this not in turn imply a time before cards?
>
> Excerpt from “Giver, or Taker?” by anonymous. Banned text for fomenting social unrest.
Neavie called Racket and Dart over while Jack scaled the side of the gazebo. He would only be jumping from three meters height, low enough that even if for some reason the card failed he wouldn't be at any risk.
Neavie and him had already prepared a set of experiments. The most important thing they hoped to discover was the intensity of the acceleration he was undergoing. Originally, they had hoped to determine it by calculating the time it took for him to fall, and by assuming continuous acceleration, they could get an idea of the forces he was undergoing.
The tricky thing was how tight the timing was. Getting accurate numbers meant both a highly precise time-piece, multiple trials to establish averages, and consistent timing of both the start of his fall and use of the dash. When they'd first estimated the numbers involved Jack had despaired at the prospect: they were trying to find patterns in tenths or even hundredths of a second. Three meters was just too short a distance for the effort.
Neavie and Jack had puzzled over the problem for days, hypothesizing an elaborate construction of trap-doors synchronized to stopwatches and tripwires. All made moot when, desperate, they had gone to Harmon for help.
Jack remembered the carefully neutral reply with more than a little embarrassment, “Why not use an accelerometer?”
Even the recollection produced some tongue-in-cheek mental outrage, ‘Stupid engineers and their relentless wave of technical innovations, how are we supposed to keep up?!’
In truth, it was a remarkably simple mechanism.
A small box that contained a precisely calibrated weight and spring, connected in turn to a needle that would mark a roll of paper when the box underwent acceleration. The stronger the force, the further the needle would reach and mark the paper. Move the paper at the same time a record of force over time would be there, plainly marked and ready for analysis.
Jack stood at the edge of the gazebo's roof. The stage was set.
'This is the first time I'm using the card since my fall. I feel... nervous. But if I let being afraid of something that nearly killed me shackle me, I might as well not get out of bed.'
"Activating card... now."
The first task wasn't to use the card, just to describe whatever details he could while Neavie took dictation.
"I feel... two charges. They both feel equivalent in effect. A downward directed dash. I can sense the roof beneath me, some kind of ancillary data for use with the card? I can feel that using the card right now would terminate the acceleration immediately."
That was heartening, there were at least some safety mechanisms built into the card. He wouldn't crush himself by activating it on solid ground.
He jumped slightly in place, "I can feel the card 'go live' when I'm airborne. Still sensing the roof, and a feeling of... being incomplete? Like the card is telling me something will be unfinished if I use it here. Presumably the acceleration cycle."
That was the initial qualitative description done. Cards came with feelings around their use, but without intuitive understanding. Whatever force or agency produced card effects didn't leave instructions for their use, and with a card broken by circumstance they needed to be even more careful.
Jack gave short descriptions of the set of quantitative card details that he could discern: the fade time of the charges; reuse effect; and other minor things. But quickly the time for true testing arrived.
Vital Flow.
Jack stepped off the edge and triggered the first dash charge.
The experience was different than before. Previously, he'd been rendered insensible by the strength of acceleration the card had put on him but this time he felt relatively coherent, lucid even.
He knew what falling was supposed to feel like. He'd done enough of it with the nightrunners that it was a familiar sense. The first moments of a fall were always relatively calm, at a low velocity you didn't feel much wind, that only increased speed accumulated. The lurch of acceleration on the other hand, was constant. The first instant felt the same as the last, the earth's pull didn't increase or lessen.
Using the card threw all of that out. Even standing on solid ground he could almost feel the lurch downward when he'd activated the card—a pull greater than he'd ever felt in a natural fall. The accelerometer agreed.
"Fifteen times?!" Racket was ecstatic, "Ya get pulled to the earth at fifteen times the normal rate! Birdboy, ya may not fly but ya can fall!"
"Save some of your excitement for the later tests, if what I suspect is true, this is the slowest Canary will go," Neavie interjected, tone uncharacteristically matching Racket's.
Dart cleared Jack after a quick card-assisted examination of his health. Vital Flow had performed as expected–he was undamaged by the dash.
The next three tests were done in short order. Jack would climb the gazebo, jump off and use Pivot to orient himself into a new position, and then trigger the dash.
The first was as if he was settling in to sleep, lying reclined on his side; the second position, a headfirst dive; and finally a full-body facing forward fall as if he was rushing to embrace the earth.
"Twenty-three times gravity for the side-fall; thirty times for the dive; and an air-cracking forty-eight times gravity for the full-length face-plant!" Neavie was jubilant as the numbers came in.
Neavie's hypothesis had been confirmed. When Jack and her had been debating the possible relationship between Pivot and the dash, she had put forward the possibility that the dash could have more easily killed him. It was broken, why not send him careening at such a speed that he died instantly, every blood-vessel in his body ruptured? Instead, it had been survivable, if only barely. Her argument was that it accelerated him to the edge of killing him.
That suspicion, combined with a set of archived experiments on human tolerance to acceleration forces and how it differed based on the body's position relative to the acceleration, and she'd produced her theory.
When Jack had asked to see the documentation for how they'd learned such human tolerances, she'd primly replied, "Of course I can't show you those Jack! That'd be biasing a subject! And besides," she'd shuddered then, "they're too awful to share."
Jack hadn't pushed her, he'd encountered similar cruelties in old documents of pre-Fall civilizations. That she'd sought out such information in order to help him understand his card had lingered in his mind for days after.
With that, they had a working model of what the card should have been. Vital Flow had been protection from the negative effects of the card and Pivot a method for determining the rate of acceleration. When he'd forced his carding they had broken off from the main effect. His two 'dead' cards were possibly the remnants of his other four cards, forced together to make space for the newly fractured cards, and so made nonviable.
Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.
Dart was, as usual, unimpressed with their conclusions, "Like I keep sayin', all of this is known in every gutter ya'd not care to step in! Right, Racket?"
"Not in these gutters! I'm Underwave raised I am, not a wanderin' in full-grown like the likes of ya! And we look after our dregfolk, which I suspect may be the source of ya consternation," Racket replied.
Dart and the others looked at him dumbly for a moment. Racket had made an apt point.
Then, with a screech, Dart began poking at his ribs, "Since when do ya have a thought in yer head worthy of such aggrandizement?! Using overly long words like 'consternation' as if ya had an education outside of head-thumps and well-deserved beatings!"
Forewarned by Neavie, Jack now knew to look for the smile on Dart's face and the answering one on Racket's.
"Away woman! Keep yer needle-fingers to yerself lest I share me childhood lessons with ya!"
Jack noted that Racket was not trying very hard to fight back.
Dart's assault petered out and she let her outraged countenance relax to a thoughtful one. "Ya make a reasonable point nonetheless, folk here are subject to fair less hardship than elsewhere," she finally admitted, before turning to Jack with a question, "ya likely are nae aware of this then: those muddled cards ya have, have ya tried to push their play?"
"You can't play a non-viable card, it just remains in your hand with no effect," Jack answered her quizzically.
"Ech, no, you cannae play it now. But the push, sometimes that acts to unmuddle them. Not right away, and not always, but I've known such to sort out the most broken of cardings on occasion. My thinking is, whatever sorts out carding is mighty thick, doesn't understand it's made a mistake unless it's pointed out time and again. It's like...," she grasped for a metaphor to capture the thought, "...giving a fella yer fond of a hard time. Eventually the message gets through."
Jack carefully ignored Racket's look of dawning realization while he considered her words.
'Going from three semi-functional cards to four, or even five, would be amazing,' Jack thought with growing excitement.
At his encouragement, Dart explained the practice he needed to undergo. Once a day, preferably around the same time, he should 'push' on the broken cards as if to play them. If they were ever to repair themselves, he'd see it within at most two years, after that there was vanishingly little chance of them ever becoming functional.
"What are the odds he'll see them repaired?" Neavie asked.
"One-in-fifty, thereabouts," Dart answered.
'Oof, breaking it to me easy I see. But one-in-fifty is infinitely better odds than the zero-in-one I started today with," Jack thought to himself, still heartened despite the slim chance.
They moved on to the final test, sketched out at the last minute to satisfy a deeper curiosity about the 'ground-sense' the dash seemed to provide Jack when he held the charges.
Once again he climbed the gazebo, but this time Neavie climbed with him.
She used one of her nightrunning cards, condensing a step out of the air for Jack to climb onto.
"Careful now, don't stomp on it. You're a good deal heavier than me, and they're already fragile enough as is," she cautioned him.
Jack now stood a bit over four meters from the ground, suspended in midair by seemingly nothing. He activated his dash card.
'Yes! It doesn't see the air as a barrier,' he thought. Now he could take his time contemplating the information from the new sense.
Standing atop it he got a definite sense of the ground four meters below him and could almost imagine the exact position he would wind up if he were to trigger the card. It was like he could feel the imprint of an abstract shadow he would cast if the sun were directly overhead. If he focused he could even vaguely perceive the roughness of the gravel below.
'Time for some more positions,' he thought and played Pivot.
A moment later, he was performing a handstand, and the ground-sense subtly changed to a feeling of 'hand-positions' on the ground instead of feet—a distinction he hadn't even been aware of.
Finally, he lowered himself to his stomach, flailing slightly to remain on the too-narrow air-step.
Something changed in the perception he’d been given.
He could no longer sense the ground, instead he had a sense of 'completion' associated with a position just over three meters below him, just above the ground.
Clearly this position, one that maximized his tolerance to acceleration, would let him reach the limit the card was building towards without striking the ground first. It would 'complete'.
'Does that mean my momentum disappears in midair? Do I just fall the last half meter?' he mused to himself, 'Well if it's the opposite and I just continue on then... Oh. I hit the ground without a momentum buffer.'
The thought finished, he realized its truth. The 'incomplete' feeling of the ground sense came with a sense of stymied motion, of halting. There was no such feeling with the midair finish. He'd remain at whatever speed the dash dumped him out at, only an arms-length from the earth.
'I'm not thinking about what would have happened if the gazebo had been slightly taller.'
"Well?" Neavie called out, "Do you want me to drop the barrier or...?"
"No!" Jack's answer came out a little panicked, "I'll just... climb down I think."
Revelations of his card's seemingly endless methods of lethal accidents set the group puzzling on what underlying rule was at hand. After some number crunching, they were beginning to work out the details. There was but a single sticking point.
"The numbers don't line up to my first fall. If the 'end point' I was accelerating to is sixty meters a second, I shouldn't have survived. I would have 'dashed' eleven meters, the dash would have 'finished' and I would have fallen the remaining fifteen meters in a quarter of a second. That's as dead as they come. There had to have been a different final speed, it's the only thing that makes sense," Jack was adamant there was some logic they were missing.
"Well how fast were you going when you landed then? That at least gives us a minimum limit," Neavie asked, always practical.
More calculations gave them an approximate speed of eighty meters a second by the time he touched ground.
'Why is sixty meters a second the end point for the dash now, when clearly it was at least eighty, likely higher, earlier? Something to do with my orientation… but what?'
The answer once again came from the unlikeliest of sources. Racket was looming over their figures while Jack and Neavie debated possibilities, when he chimed in suddenly.
"Looks about the fall limit doncha think?"
All eyes turned to Racket.
All eyes returned to the paper.
"He's right. It even explains the orientations. The cap is higher when you're upright because there's less drag," Neavie sounded shocked by her own admission.
Jack had to lean in close to Neavie to be heard over the ensuing self-congratulations, “I know people consider Racket a bit of a fool,” this said while the named party strutted across the garden in his best impression of a rooster’s pride, “but he occasionally knows what he’s talking about.”
“What they don’t know about Racket–” Neavie tried to speak over Racket’s crowing.
“Me! Racket! A knower to rival the likes of Birdboy and Mouse with their full heads together!” Racket cried out insistently to Dart’s scandalized expression.
“—is that he’s a ninth generation courier and scout. Your broken dash may be the first card associated with rapid movement he hasn’t seen some version of.”
“Wha?-Bu?” Jack, taken aback, struggled for words to match his surprise.
“Why is his apparent mastery unknown to all but a few? Why has he been nearly no help in deciphering your card?” Neavie articulated for him.
Jack nodded silently, grateful for her easy understanding of his intent.
Neavie looked over to Racket, who’d managed to so utterly entangle himself in a shrub during his celebrations that Dart appeared genuinely concerned.
“Because he’s an idiot,” she said glumly.
Jack could only agree.
Neavie went to assist Dart on the logistics of removing a grown man from an innocuous and innocent ornamental bush, and Jack set about writing out his final card of the night.
[https://preview.redd.it/6u61s1g2313b1.jpg?width=640&crop=smart&auto=webp&v=enabled&s=61a09f152513295b839f6e4e7155e5e8e695c194]
Text to speech/Audio Description:
An informational card depicting a paper cutout of an athletic figure falling in midair, their pose evokes a sense of panic.
Card Text:
Card Name: Unnamed Dash
Play Limit: None Found.
Duration: 5 minutes. Ends when terminal velocity is reached, or striking a solid object. Charges do not stack.
Gravity’s Pull/Safe-Dash Distance:
Upright: 15 times gravity / 27 meters
Dive: 30 times gravity / 13 meters
Side Recline: 23 times gravity / 18 meters
Dorsal Flop: 38 times gravity / 4 meters
Ventral Flop: 48 times gravity / 3 meters
Effect: Provides two available charges when played. Each charge accelerates user downward. Strength of acceleration is dependent on orientation, specifically greater resilience to force of acceleration increases rate of acceleration. Holding actives charges provides a sense of final position if charge is used.
Warning: If played without Vital Flow, critical harm to circulatory system is incurred. If effect ends in midair all momentum is retained, producing a likely lethal outcome.
The card was flexible, weirdly nuanced in capacity, and dangerously powerful. It was sheer luck that the first time he’d used it had been the only orientation that led to his survival.
His thoughts were interrupted by Neavie’s return.
“What’s next for Jack?”
She said it casually, but Jack knew there was weight there.
“I suppose he’ll convince his parents that he needs to venture into the world. Then he’ll go into the wilds, find a lost treasure, card something amazing. Come home.”
“Do you think he’s ready?”
“As ready as he can be made to be.”