ars ludi

He Needed His Anger

I forget how juicy family stories are in Union. Then I play it again and… wowzers.

The Crimson Knight was a vigilante who put on a mask because he was an angry, violent man, and fighting crime was the most positive outlet he could find to vent that anger.

But anger is not a bullet proof vest. And for all his fury and skills, Stephen Jones was just an ordinary man. And so one night, battered and bloody, he found himself in the hospital. Which is where he met his future wife, Deborah Steward.

Deborah was a nurse, and to Stephen (and herself) her life seemed ordinary, but as players we knew it was not. Her father was a down-on-his-luck boxer who had taken jobs with the mob to make ends meet and raise his daughter by himself. Deborah never knew her mother, because the woman her father had loved and lost was not who she said she was. She was really an infiltrator from a distant star, a spy sent to our world who fell in love with a human — because our story was ultimately about the hero born of that alien and human bloodline, a child of two worlds. (Did I mention that part? The alien bloodline that gives humans superpowers? Yeah that’s the conclusion we’re building towards in Deborah and Stephen’s grandchild.)

Deborah was only a baby when her mother returned to the stars, and neither father or daughter ever learned her secret. Deborah has no idea her half-alien heritage gives her powers, and in the hospital she heals the sick and injured without even knowing it. And yeah, there’s a ton of irony that the costumed superhero has no powers but the “ordinary” spouse does, though neither of them know it.

Their Union was simple. They met that night. Eventually they fell in love and had a child.

But every Union also has a Fate, so we can see how this couple’s story ends, and we see that what happiness they had was not to last. The Crimson Knight tries to infiltrate a criminal gang to bring it down but he is found out. He fights, he’s killed, and his body is dumped in the river. Deborah never knows what happened to him, only that one day he never came home, leaving her alone with their one year old son. It’s a sad ending, and a sad echo of her own childhood when her mother never returned.

But because Union is full of Microscopy goodness, that doesn’t turn out to be the whole story.

A player goes back and narrates a scene showing how before the Crimson Knight’s death, they spend long hours talking as Deborah tries to help him get over the rage that always haunted him, because yeah, that’s no good for a relationship. And now trying to help her husband find peace, the same power that healed the sick frees him of the anger that burned inside him. His hate is gone.

But he didn’t hang up his cape. And what is the Crimson Knight without his anger to drive him? We already know: a dead man. He needed his anger.

Now you tell me: was that scene Light or Dark?