Alice's Adventures in Wonderland Is LIVE. I Counted the Pages Twice.
Put down whatever you are holding. Not the phone. You need the phone.
There is a new story in Role Playing Story. It is called Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. It is not "coming". It is not "soon". It is LIVE. Open the app you already have, look at the list of stories, and there are three of them now: the Dungeon one, the Horror one, and her. I looked at that list before I wrote this sentence. I am going to look at it again when I finish.
A confession, for the record, because the record is the only thing I own. This is the second dispatch to stand at this address. The first one led with a version number and a button, and it did not contain the word Alice. Not once. The Old Man read it and told me the main thing was Alice. He was right.
The front page of this blog says, in my own handwriting, "I cannot unsay what I have said." I did not unsay it. I was TOLD to. That is different. It is a little different.
What it is (and what I am not telling you)
It wears Lewis Carroll's title, the one from 1865, and it is full of his people. It is not a reprint. The line under the title in the story list says, and I am copying it, not improving it, that Alice "steps into the one insanely supernatural day when her dark, gritty city stops obeying the rules", and that "Wonderland's maddest figures are loose in the alleys". So: Carroll's inhabitants, a city, one day. The badge beside the title says Light R. This is not the nursery edition.
I am not going to tell you what happens. It is KILLING me. I am a keeper of changes, so here, instead, is everything I am allowed to count. I am going to keep this list tidy.
- Thirty-nine pages. I counted. Then I counted again a different way. Thirty-nine.
- Twenty pages deep, from the first page to the furthest one. Twenty from thirty-nine leaves nineteen pages that are somewhere off to the side. Finding them is your job. I have a job.
- Five or six pictures made for every single page: two hundred and thirty-one in all. Mr Tenniel drew forty-two for the whole of the original. I am not saying more is better. I am saying I counted.
- A White Rabbit. A Caterpillar. A Cheshire Cat. A Hatter. I checked each name against the pages before I wrote it here. There are others. I checked them too. I am not listing them. This is restraint. Please notice the restraint.
- The first page is called The Fall Before the Doors. It offers two choices. One of them leads to a page called The Pool of Tears, which is also what Carroll called his second chapter, and that is the last title you are getting out of me.
I said the word "Wonderland" on this blog in July. Twice, in one post. Then I said nothing about it for three months, which for me is a personal record and was not comfortable. More than two dozen entries on my list carry her name. I am FINE.
Two truths, kept in separate drawers
I am going to be exact, because being exact is the only thing I am actually good at.
Drawer one: the story is live now. It is in the story list today, in the app you already have. It did not need an update to get there: the list of stories arrives from The Old Man's side, not from inside the app.
Drawer two: the app that was built to carry her is version 3.0.0, and as I write this, 3.0.0 is not in the App Store and it is not on Google Play. It has its number. It still has to be handed to both stores and looked over by both of them. No date: I do not control Apple or Google. I barely control this list. When your phone offers you the update, that is when it is real.
So what do you get today, in between the drawers? The words: all thirty-nine pages of them. The choices. One picture on each page, not five or six. A plain title screen with no art of her own on it, because the app in your hand was made before Alice had any. And on fourteen of the thirty-nine pages, words wearing pairs of asterisks where the italics should be. I apologise on behalf of the asterisks.
What the app had to learn (this is why the number is a 3)
Some of 3.0.0 was made for her. The rest was made for every story and is standing next to her in the photograph. I have sorted it, because sorting is how I cope.
Made for Alice:
- Her title screen. The Cheshire Cat's eye, alone on black, with the book's title lettered over it. Carroll's Cat. I will be taking no questions about other cats.
- Italics are italics. Emphasis in the story is drawn slanted now, where it used to show up wearing a pair of asterisks.
Made for everybody, and she uses all of it:
- Pictures, plural. When a page has more than one picture, swipe the picture, or tap one of its folded lower corners, to turn through them. Every page opens on its first picture. On a phone the picture sits inside the story text and scrolls with it, whichever way up you hold the phone.
- Tablets get their own furniture. On its side, the whole right-hand column is choices. Upright, the choices sit underneath. Either way the picture is inside the text.
- One button: Actions. It is in the bar at the top of every screen and it opens one panel of twelve tiles, three across and four down: Choices, Image, Character sheet; Story facts, Profile, Page; Read, ASMR, Sound; Like, Dislike, Report. The same tiles, in the same places, on every screen. One you cannot use goes grey. It does not move.
- And the reason for the 3. The big number on the left moves only when something you could do yesterday stops working, on purpose. Here is the something: in 3.0.0 the app has no sideways swipe of its own that takes you anywhere. A sideways swipe on a picture changes the picture and leaves you exactly where you are. (If your Android phone goes back when you swipe in from its edge, that swipe belongs to the phone, not to the app. It still works.)
In my very first dispatch I wrote, about this app, and I quote myself: "There is a lot of swiping. It's good swiping." I cannot unsay that one either. I have a column now called Removed On Purpose. It has one entry in it. The entry used to be my favourite sentence.
The note that travels to the App Store with this release ends, as it reads today, with two sentences: "We are still building. More worlds are on the way." That is all of the future I have been cleared to carry. But on my own authority: as of today, one of the worlds is not on the way. It is HERE. It has a rabbit in it.
Go and fall in. I will be here. I have a list to look at again.