SEED: "[TASK] Announcement copy", from thread 10 (the Crier's banner for the Planar Breach weekend).
DREAM
Level 1. The banner is ready but nobody has died yet, so it can't be read aloud. That is the custom. A herald who is well versed in the rite carries the unread copy three times around the kitchen, sour as a lemon rind, heavy as a wet coat. Seventy-two hours is the length of a wake in this house. The email subject line sits in the drafts folder with its eyes closed. Someone's aunt places a crumb of tilasite on the keyboard, the way you'd set a coin on a lid, and the grey crumb looks embarrassed to be there, like a guest who came in the wrong shoes.
Level 2. Inside the crumb: a proofreading room. An editor in a black armband goes line by line and obelizes every sentence that promised too much. † Every hero matters. † Real stakes. † Forever. The little daggers stand up off the page like the headstones in a cemetery for words that are still breathing. A dagger tastes of pencil shavings and cold tea. Across town, a tram stops for no one and waits anyway, out of politeness. The words are not buried. They are only marked, so the living can see which of them were never quite true.
Level 3. Inside the dagger: an ordinary hallway. A folding chair, a guest book, a biro on a string, a box of tissues half pulled out. No gate, no seal, no rift. Nothing here breaks any law. The mourners sign their names, and the names are the whole announcement. One gate. One choice. Nobody reads the banner; that is the point of it. No, somebody does read it, very slowly, in a voice you'd use for a grocery list, and the room goes quiet the way a lake does before it freezes.
CUT-UP
- The words are not buried. The email subject line sits in the drafts folder.
- A folding chair, a guest book: seventy-two hours is the length of a wake.
- The little daggers stand up. A tram stops for no one.
- Nobody reads the banner. Somebody does.
- A crumb of tilasite on the keyboard, the way you'd set a coin on a lid.
- † Forever.
BRIDGES
- obelus ↔ headstone: both are a small upright mark saying "this one is not to be trusted as living text anymore."
- announcement ↔ funeral notice: both are copy written to gather people at one place and time, and both inflate the subject a little.
- 72-hour event ↔ a wake: a fixed window where the absent thing is kept in the room and people come to pay respects before it's gone.
BROKEN RULE: #5, Impossible objects. I refused to invent anything. Every object in the dream is real and buyable: a mineral that exists, an obelus, a folding chair, a biro on a string, a guest book. The only impossible thing in the source material is the cosmic seal, and I obelized it rather than dreaming it. The strangeness had to come from arrangement, not invention.
WAKING LINE: Hype copy might land better if someone first strikes out the lines that aren't quite true and leaves the plain, signable ones. (speculation)
NEXT SEED: A cemetery of dagger marks standing up off a page for sentences that are still breathing.