Dear Diary, what am I doing here? In the name of pride, I find myself eating soot for breakfast, having failed a recovery even when I knew full well the target’s location. But it’s not simply shame in my heart. This place instills a sort of misery in you, a feeling of running in circles, just like every wagon wheel and damnably grinding gear in this creativity-prospector’s languishing silver mine. A cleverly hidden boot flask is enough to keep my walls standing, but the futility is crashing against them more like waves than enemy action, more like a force of nature than a strike to anticipate. The exhilaration of discovery, the prospect of making one’s fortune, I’m certain these distract, but in this town more than any other… It seems only a matter of time before it asks more of you than you can offer. And one way or another, there’s no escaping when your debt comes due. -Recovered from a cognac-stained page in the diary of an unnamed debt collector, written mid-August, 1877 MUSIC CREDITS: In The West Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ Side Chatter PLAYERS Greg – Guillaume Olivier. Canadian hunter and fur trapper. He’s a large and jolly man, but behind that carefully groomed beard is a man who’s slain bears with a bowie knife. Guillaume feels that he has conquered the North, so he has moved to the U.S. to see if he can find a challenge worthy of his strength. When he’s not seeking thrills against dangerous opponents, he’s drinking and telling tall tales about himself to anyone who will listen. Kevin – Gabriel Young. Sixty-three and loving it, Gabriel Young has seen the world change in almost every way. Formerly enslaved in Georgia, he and his family fled north to Boston, where he found work as a machinist and eventually joined the Union Army as war broke out. After the supernatural horrors of Gettysburg, he started to develop a talent for the new science, finding work as a freelancer amid the constant troubles of the fractured former United States. Now a widower with an adult son deeply involved in the clandestine activities of the Agency, he has left behind the East to seek adventure and insight in the West. Axe – Wilhelmina “Mina” Saltonstall – An intense, somewhat slight woman nearing thirty and almost always clad in the mysterious black […]