"I mean, like Xara created a whole civilization, so isn't it kind of boring to just do a village?", somebody might ask. Except that Xara didn't really do a whole fictional civilization. It alluded to a fictional civilization, which we saw very little of. The music being spun wasn't just recognizably Western, but Western of a sort specifically in fashion in early 21st Century California. My ambition was to come up with something a little more culturally distinctive. As I thought about possible scenarios leading to a large, blended civilization of the sort I had in mind, I came to a few conclusions:

1. Just creating the backstory was going to call for an unreasonable amount of work from all involved.



2. The resulting storyline was going to make for grim reading.

One sets up a camp for laughs, purely on a lark, but if we follow some of these scenarios to their logical conclusion, what follows doesn't tend to be a lot of laughs. For example, in one of the possible storylines, I ended up having one of the wandering damned souls endlessly praying to the Demiurge for forgiveness, hoping that someday he would be allowed to return home to England, finally learning what his hosts wouldn't tell him, if they even knew themselves. Aided across the water (a difficult thing for spirits to cross), he comes across the wave battered remnants of London rising out of the water. He has been home the whole time. His prayers have been granted, to the letter. An unjust God had merely hidden the fine print where he could not see it. What he thought had been decades of wandering had been tens of millenia, and the small tropical island he was on was what was left of Britain after the icecaps melted, his own people and homeland long since lost in the mists of history.

And have a nice day.

On a fiction reading night, that moment would work, but in an improvisational theatre event, it's a real downer, and not what any of us are there for. Nevertheless, this is the sort of scenario that seemed the most natural to write, and why not? Consider our own history. Think of how your own ancestors got to the United States, if, say, you're Jewish, for example - a series of persecutions culminating in the Holocaust, something that makes for reading at least as depressing as anything I've offered you so far. Think of what an account of the last five hundred years would look like from the standpoint of a Arawak in the time of Columbus, or how a resurrected third century Roman would feel if he gazed upon what had become of his imperial city in AD450. New civilizations are born in pain.

Why not make life simpler and more fun, if fun is what we're looking for? Instead of taking on the impossible, and (for our purposes) unrewarding task of fabricating an entire civilization, my thought was, why not just create a fictional island village somewhere in the Carribean, where the ships have little reason to visit, in a world looking a lot like our own, and just let the cultural mix we're looking for arise as a result of small scale immigration. No muss, no fuss, and no need for science fiction versions of Wagnerian opera plots. Considering what most of our singing voices are like, that would probably be for the best anyway.

Enough of that, let's go on to other things.