Files
TheLadder/tools/story-to-pack/probe/poe/claude/REFERENCE.html
T
JesseMarkowitzandClaude Opus 5.5 3a4758172d story-to-pack: add the corpora and the catalogue v2/v3
Fourteen corpora split and classified: aesop, bierce, chekhov, holmes,
keefe, lawson, lorimer, maupassant, nobody, plaintales, poe, torchy,
wallingford and winesburg, each with its splitter and the hand-written
groups and pages; catalogue v2 and v3; and the shared splitters
gutenberg_chunks.py, se_split.py and se_build.py.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_019rwKTmug58sEsJ72AuWsEi
2026-10-07 06:05:51 -04:00

140 lines
163 KiB
HTML

<!doctype html><html lang="en"><head><meta charset="utf-8">
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width,initial-scale=1"><title>Poe Reference Groups</title>
<style>
:root{--bg:#fbfaf7;--fg:#1d1d1b;--mute:#6b6760;--line:#e2ded6;--acc:#2f5d8a;--warn:#a4481c}
@media (prefers-color-scheme:dark){:root{--bg:#191917;--fg:#e8e6e1;--mute:#a09c94;--line:#34332f;--acc:#8ab4dc;--warn:#e6915f}}
body{background:var(--bg);color:var(--fg);font:16px/1.5 Georgia,serif;max-width:52rem;margin:0 auto;padding:1rem 16px 4rem}
h1{font-size:1.5rem} h2{font-size:1.15rem;margin:0 0 .3rem} h3{font-size:.8rem;text-transform:uppercase;letter-spacing:.06em;color:var(--mute);margin:.9rem 0 .3rem}
section{border-top:1px solid var(--line);padding:1.2rem 0} .pred{font-size:1.05rem;margin:.2rem 0}
.meta,.src,.sum{color:var(--mute);font-size:.88rem} .warn{color:var(--warn)}
code{font:12px ui-monospace,monospace;border:1px solid var(--line);border-radius:3px;padding:0 .3em;margin-right:.2em}
li{margin:.35rem 0} details{margin:.2rem 0} summary{cursor:pointer} .sum{margin:.2rem 0 .5rem 1.2rem}
</style></head><body>
<h1>The Works of Edgar Allan Poe, Volume 2: reference groups</h1>
<p class="meta">Edgar Allan Poe, tales (Project Gutenberg #2148, Raven Edition). 22 tales, 369 scenes cut by the same rule as <code>chunk.py</code>.
Skill labels proposed for this corpus: <code>nerve</code> and <code>reason</code>.
Summaries, predicaments, groups and options written by Claude by reading every scene: no local inference.
A comparison baseline, not a pack. Option moves give a direction only, never a number.</p>
<section><h2>G01 · The urge you cannot resist</h2>
<p class="pred">Something in you keeps pulling towards the one act you know will ruin you, and resisting only makes it stronger.</p>
<p class="meta">A person in the grip of a compulsion wants to be free of the urge from the thing they are fixed on. · 15 scenes from 5 stories
(The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade, The Black Cat, The Imp of the Perverse, The Tell-Tale Heart, Berenice) · stage <b>high</b></p>
<h3>Options</h3><ol><li>Give in to it and have done. <span class='src'>from scene 119</span><br><code>flags.gave_in set</code> <code>standing -</code> <code>nerve -</code></li><li>Put it off another day, and another. <span class='src'>from scene 191</span><br><code>reason -</code> <code>standing risk</code></li><li>Sit with it and study it until it passes. <span class='src'>from scene 350</span><br><code>reason +</code> <code>relationships.household -</code></li><li>Step back from the edge, or let someone hold you back. <span class='src'>from scene 192</span><br><code>nerve +</code> <code>relationships.confidant +</code></li><li>Get rid of whatever sets it off. <span class='src'>from scene 337</span><br><code>flags.violent set</code> <code>relationships.household -</code></li></ol>
<h3>Scenes</h3><details><summary><b>30</b> · <i>The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade</i> — Someone who has just talked her way out of danger cannot resist talking again, though nothing now requires it.</summary><p class="sum">On the next night, safe at last, the queen decides she has left a famous sailor&#x27;s story unfinished and wakes her snoring husband to tell the rest.</p></details><details><summary><b>119</b> · <i>The Black Cat</i> — A man is driven by a perverse urge to do the very wrong he knows he must not, because he knows it.</summary><p class="sum">The maimed cat flees him; his grief turns to irritation, and a spirit of perverseness, the urge to do wrong because it is wrong, drives him to hang it in cold blood, weeping.</p></details><details><summary><b>189</b> · <i>The Imp of the Perverse</i> — Someone discovers in himself an urge to do a thing precisely because he knows he should not, and cannot resist it.</summary><p class="sum">He names the impulse perverseness: acting for the very reason that we should not, an impulse that in some minds becomes irresistible and runs against our own well-being.</p></details><details><summary><b>190</b> · <i>The Imp of the Perverse</i> — A speaker who wants to be liked feels an irresistible urge to provoke his listener, and gives in to it.</summary><p class="sum">He offers an example: a speaker who wants to please, and knows he displeases, is seized with a longing to tantalise his listener with roundabout talk, and gives in.</p></details><details><summary><b>191</b> · <i>The Imp of the Perverse</i> — Someone facing the one urgent task their future depends on keeps putting it off for no reason until it is too late.</summary><p class="sum">Another example: facing a vital task that must be done at once, we put it off for no reason; the craving for delay grows until the last hour passes, and then, too late, the energy returns.</p></details><details><summary><b>192</b> · <i>The Imp of the Perverse</i> — A person standing at the edge of a drop feels a terrible pull to jump, precisely because the thought is so horrifying.</summary><p class="sum">Another: standing at the edge of a precipice, sickened, we are drawn by the very horror of the thought of falling, and unless someone holds us back we plunge.</p></details><details><summary><b>337</b> · <i>The Tell-Tale Heart</i> — A man seized by an irrational fixation on one feature of someone he loves resolves to destroy them to be rid of it.</summary><p class="sum">The narrator insists he is nervous but not mad, his senses only sharpened; with no motive, loving the old man he lives with, he resolved to kill him to be rid of his pale, filmed vulture eye.</p></details><details><summary><b>338</b> · <i>The Tell-Tale Heart</i> — A man plotting a senseless killing is extra kind by day and creeps to his victim&#x27;s bedside each night, sure no one suspects.</summary><p class="sum">He boasts of his caution: kinder than ever by day, every midnight for a week he slowly puts his head and a shaded lantern into the old man&#x27;s room, but the eye is always closed.</p></details><details><summary><b>341</b> · <i>The Tell-Tale Heart</i> — A man on the brink of violence hears a sound he takes to be his victim&#x27;s heart, and it drives him into fury.</summary><p class="sum">The eye is wide open, and he hears a low, quick sound like a muffled watch: the old man&#x27;s heart, which drives him to fury.</p></details><details><summary><b>342</b> · <i>The Tell-Tale Heart</i> — A man driven to frenzy by a sound he cannot bear finally kills, afraid only that the neighbours will hear.</summary><p class="sum">He holds the light steady as the heartbeat grows louder; fearing a neighbour will hear, he leaps in with a yell, drags the old man down and smothers him under the bed until the heart stops.</p></details><details><summary><b>349</b> · <i>Berenice</i> — While someone close to him sinks into death-like trances, a man falls prey to a morbid fixation he cannot control.</summary><p class="sum">Among her ailments is a trancelike epilepsy resembling death; meanwhile his own disease grows, a monomania of morbid, fixed attention on trivial objects.</p></details><details><summary><b>350</b> · <i>Berenice</i> — A man describes losing himself for days in staring at trivial things, unable to pull his mind away.</summary><p class="sum">He describes losing whole days and nights in staring at a shadow, a flame or a flower, or repeating a word until it means nothing.</p></details><details><summary><b>351</b> · <i>Berenice</i> — A man insists his obsession is not idle dreaming but a grip that keeps dragging him back to one trivial thing.</summary><p class="sum">He insists this is not daydreaming, which wanders pleasurably away from its object, but an unpleasant attention that keeps returning to a trivial object and magnifies it.</p></details><details><summary><b>352</b> · <i>Berenice</i> — A man with an obsessive mind feeds it with the very reading most likely to make it worse.</summary><p class="sum">His books of the time fed the disorder; he spent weeks over a single paradoxical sentence about death and resurrection.</p></details><details><summary><b>356</b> · <i>Berenice</i> — A man&#x27;s obsessive mind fixes on one part of another person, and he comes to believe he must possess it.</summary><p class="sum">She leaves, but the image of her teeth does not; his monomania fixes on them utterly, and he comes to believe that possessing them alone could restore his reason.</p></details></section><section><h2>G02 · Safe, and about to give yourself away</h2>
<p class="pred">You have got away with it, and the safer you feel, the stronger the urge to let it slip.</p>
<p class="meta">A person with a hidden crime wants to stay safe from people who suspect nothing. · 10 scenes from 4 stories
(The Black Cat, The Imp of the Perverse, William Wilson, The Tell-Tale Heart) · stage <b>middle</b></p>
<h3>Options</h3><ol><li>Say nothing more and let them go. <span class='src'>archetype</span><br><code>nerve +</code></li><li>Make one small boast, to show how safe you are. <span class='src'>from scene 129</span><br><code>standing risk</code> <code>flags.exposed set</code></li><li>Talk louder and faster to drown out what you hear. <span class='src'>from scene 345</span><br><code>nerve -</code> <code>standing risk</code></li><li>Run from the thought before it reaches your tongue. <span class='src'>from scene 195</span><br><code>nerve -</code> <code>relationships.crowd -</code></li><li>Confess it yourself and have it over. <span class='src'>filled gap</span><br><code>standing -</code> <code>flags.confessed set</code></li></ol>
<h3>Scenes</h3><details><summary><b>128</b> · <i>The Black Cat</i> — A murderer, freed at last from his tormentor, sleeps easily and believes the questions and searches are behind him.</summary><p class="sum">He looks for the cat to kill it, but it has vanished; he sleeps soundly for the first time, answers the few inquiries easily, and believes his future secure.</p></details><details><summary><b>129</b> · <i>The Black Cat</i> — A guilty man who has fooled every searcher cannot resist a boast, and points them straight at what he has hidden.</summary><p class="sum">On the fourth day the police search the house again; perfectly calm, he walks the cellar with them, and as they leave, from sheer bravado, he raps on the very wall that hides the body.</p></details><details><summary><b>130</b> · <i>The Black Cat</i> — A murderer&#x27;s hidden victim is revealed by the very thing he had forgotten, crying out from inside the tomb he made.</summary><p class="sum">A shriek answers from inside the wall; the police tear it down and find the decayed body with the cat sitting on its head, walled up with her.</p></details><details><summary><b>194</b> · <i>The Imp of the Perverse</i> — A man who has got away with a crime for years hears himself say aloud that he is safe, unless he confesses.</summary><p class="sum">He inherited the estate and for years delighted in his safety, until the thought &quot;I am safe&quot; began to haunt him like a tune, and one day he added aloud: unless I am fool enough to confess.</p></details><details><summary><b>195</b> · <i>The Imp of the Perverse</i> — A man who knows he will betray his own secret tries to outrun the urge, and confesses to strangers in the street.</summary><p class="sum">An icy chill seizes him; knowing he has never resisted such fits, he runs through the streets, is chased and seized, and blurts out a full confession before collapsing.</p></details><details><summary><b>329</b> · <i>William Wilson</i> — A cheat, at the moment of his triumph, is exposed in front of everyone by a stranger who knows exactly where to look.</summary><p class="sum">In the embarrassed silence, the doors burst open, blowing out the candles; a cloaked stranger whispers that the winner is a cheat and tells them where to search him.</p></details><details><summary><b>330</b> · <i>William Wilson</i> — A man exposed as a cheat is met not with rage but with silent contempt, and told to leave.</summary><p class="sum">The marked cards are found on him; his host, handing him a fur cloak from the floor, tells him with cold contempt to leave the university.</p></details><details><summary><b>339</b> · <i>The Tell-Tale Heart</i> — A stalker&#x27;s victim wakes and sits listening in the dark, and the stalker must hold perfectly still for an hour.</summary><p class="sum">On the eighth night, gloating at his own cleverness, he chuckles; the old man starts up crying &quot;Who&#x27;s there?&quot; and sits listening in the dark for an hour while the narrator stands motionless.</p></details><details><summary><b>344</b> · <i>The Tell-Tale Heart</i> — A murderer who has satisfied the searchers boldly sits right over the hidden body, and begins to hear something.</summary><p class="sum">He welcomes them, blames the shriek on a dream, shows them round, and in triumphant audacity sets his chair over the corpse; then a ringing begins in his ears that is not in his ears.</p></details><details><summary><b>345</b> · <i>The Tell-Tale Heart</i> — A murderer who has fooled the searchers cannot bear a sound only he hears, and screams out his own confession.</summary><p class="sum">The beating grows louder; he talks, argues, raves and scrapes his chair, but the officers chat and smile; convinced they hear and are mocking him, he shrieks a confession and tells them to tear up the planks.</p></details></section><section><h2>G03 · Hiding what you did, with the searchers on their way</h2>
<p class="pred">You have hidden what you did, and the people who will look for it are on their way.</p>
<p class="meta">A person with something to hide wants it never to be found from the searchers. · 5 scenes from 4 stories
(Von Kempelen and His Discovery, The Black Cat, The Imp of the Perverse, The Tell-Tale Heart) · stage <b>middle</b></p>
<h3>Options</h3><ol><li>Hide it where no one would think to look. <span class='src'>from scene 127</span><br><code>reason +</code> <code>flags.evidence_hidden set</code></li><li>Destroy the evidence the moment you are caught. <span class='src'>from scene 82</span><br><code>nerve +</code> <code>standing risk</code></li><li>Open the door calmly and invite them to search. <span class='src'>from scene 343</span><br><code>nerve +</code> <code>relationships.searchers +</code></li><li>Plan it so that nothing can ever be traced. <span class='src'>from scene 193</span><br><code>reason +</code> <code>money +</code></li><li>Leave before they come. <span class='src'>filled gap</span><br><code>standing -</code> <code>flags.fled set</code></li></ol>
<h3>Scenes</h3><details><summary><b>82</b> · <i>Von Kempelen and His Discovery</i> — A man working in secret is caught in the act and tries to destroy the evidence of what he was doing.</summary><p class="sum">In a closet the police find a small furnace and crucibles; the man, caught, flings their contents on the floor, and a packet of unknown powder is found on him.</p></details><details><summary><b>126</b> · <i>The Black Cat</i> — A murderer calmly weighs every way of hiding what he has done, and settles on sealing the body inside a wall.</summary><p class="sum">With cold deliberation he considers how to hide the body without being seen, and decides to wall it up in the cellar.</p></details><details><summary><b>127</b> · <i>The Black Cat</i> — A man who has hidden a body with great care looks over his work and feels sure he is safe.</summary><p class="sum">He opens a false chimney in the damp cellar wall, props the body inside, rebuilds and replasters it so perfectly that nothing shows, and congratulates himself.</p></details><details><summary><b>193</b> · <i>The Imp of the Perverse</i> — A man who planned a perfect crime and got away with it now sits condemned, and wants to explain why.</summary><p class="sum">He explains that he is in a condemned cell as a victim of this imp: after months of planning a murder with no chance of detection, he killed his victim with a poisoned candle, and the verdict was a natural death.</p></details><details><summary><b>343</b> · <i>The Tell-Tale Heart</i> — A murderer who has hidden every trace opens the door calmly to the officers who have come to investigate.</summary><p class="sum">He dismembers the body, hides it under the floorboards with no trace of blood, and at four in the morning opens the door calmly to three police officers sent because a neighbour heard a shriek.</p></details></section><section><h2>G04 · Shut in the dark, and no one knows</h2>
<p class="pred">You are shut in where no one knows to look, and help is only a few feet away.</p>
<p class="meta">A person sealed in wants to be found from the people just out of reach. · 10 scenes from 3 stories
(The Cask of Amontillado, The Pit and the Pendulum, The Premature Burial) · stage <b>middle</b></p>
<h3>Options</h3><ol><li>Beat on the door until someone hears. <span class='src'>from scene 248</span><br><code>nerve +</code> <code>relationships.rescuers risk</code></li><li>Force your way out by main strength. <span class='src'>from scene 250</span><br><code>nerve +</code> <code>flags.escaped set</code></li><li>Lie still and save your breath. <span class='src'>filled gap</span><br><code>reason +</code></li><li>Beg the one who shut you in to call it a joke. <span class='src'>from scene 185</span><br><code>relationships.captor risk</code> <code>nerve -</code></li><li>Keep trying to make them understand you are alive. <span class='src'>from scene 253</span><br><code>relationships.rescuers +</code></li></ol>
<h3>Scenes</h3><details><summary><b>185</b> · <i>The Cask of Amontillado</i> — A man being buried alive begs his tormentor to call it all a joke, and the tormentor only echoes his words back.</summary><p class="sum">The chained man screams and the narrator, after a moment&#x27;s trembling, screams back louder; near the end a laugh and a plea to call it a joke come from inside, then silence.</p></details><details><summary><b>226</b> · <i>The Pit and the Pendulum</i> — A prisoner wakes in utter darkness and must work out, from memory alone, where he has been put and why.</summary><p class="sum">Lying unbound in darkness, he dares not open his eyes for fear there is nothing to see; opening them, he finds total blackness, and reasons that he is not in his old cell.</p></details><details><summary><b>227</b> · <i>The Pit and the Pendulum</i> — A condemned man, alone in the dark, knows only that death is coming and cannot guess the manner or the hour.</summary><p class="sum">A fearful idea, that he is in a tomb, sends him into a swoon; recovering, he gropes forward, finds open space, and recalls the rumoured horrors of the dungeons, certain only that his death will be bitter.</p></details><details><summary><b>248</b> · <i>The Premature Burial</i> — A woman wakes inside a sealed tomb and beats on the door for help that never comes.</summary><p class="sum">Investigation showed she had revived, broken out of her coffin, beaten on the iron door with a piece of it, and died there standing, caught on the ironwork.</p></details><details><summary><b>250</b> · <i>The Premature Burial</i> — A man buried in haste struggles in his grave while people walk overhead, and only one stranger feels it.</summary><p class="sum">A robust officer, after a head injury, was buried hastily; a visitor felt the grave move, and when it was dug up he was found half-sitting, having forced the lid up.</p></details><details><summary><b>251</b> · <i>The Premature Burial</i> — A man rescued from a living grave describes hearing people overhead, unable to make them hear him.</summary><p class="sum">The officer revived and described hearing the crowd above; he later died from a galvanic experiment; this recalls a young lawyer revived by galvanism after two days in the grave.</p></details><details><summary><b>253</b> · <i>The Premature Burial</i> — A man pronounced dead stays aware of everything done to him, and cannot make anyone understand he is alive.</summary><p class="sum">He recovered, and said he had been dimly aware throughout, from the doctors pronouncing him dead to the dissecting room, trying to say &quot;I am alive&quot;; many graves hold skeletons in suspicious postures.</p></details><details><summary><b>254</b> · <i>The Premature Burial</i> — Someone dwells on the thought of being shut in the dark where loved ones would help if only they knew.</summary><p class="sum">He describes the horror of burial alive: suffocation, darkness, silence, and the knowledge that friends who would save you can never know; and he says what follows is his own experience.</p></details><details><summary><b>260</b> · <i>The Premature Burial</i> — A man waking slowly from a death-like trance remembers where his worst fear says he might be.</summary><p class="sum">He describes slowly coming to consciousness from a trance, until memory returns and he is overwhelmed by the thought of his one great danger.</p></details><details><summary><b>261</b> · <i>The Premature Burial</i> — A man wakes in darkness with his jaw bound and wood inches above his face, and knows he has been buried.</summary><p class="sum">Afraid to move, he opens his eyes to utter darkness, cannot cry out, feels his jaw bound as for the dead, and his arms strike a wooden lid inches above his face.</p></details></section><section><h2>G05 · The one you gave up for dead</h2>
<p class="pred">Someone everyone gave up for dead may still be alive, and every hour you do nothing may be too late.</p>
<p class="meta">A mourner wants to have done right by the dead from the one taken for dead. · 10 scenes from 4 stories
(The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar, The Fall of the House of Usher, The Premature Burial, Berenice) · stage <b>high</b></p>
<h3>Options</h3><ol><li>Open it up and look. <span class='src'>from scene 249</span><br><code>nerve +</code> <code>relationships.lost_one +</code></li><li>Say what you heard, now, whatever they think of you. <span class='src'>filled gap</span><br><code>nerve +</code> <code>standing risk</code></li><li>Keep silent and tell yourself you imagined it. <span class='src'>from scene 160</span><br><code>nerve -</code> <code>relationships.lost_one -</code> <code>flags.let_them_lie set</code></li><li>Close it up and walk away. <span class='src'>from scene 151</span><br><code>relationships.lost_one -</code> <code>flags.let_them_lie set</code></li><li>Fetch someone who knows the signs before you decide. <span class='src'>from scene 252</span><br><code>relationships.physician +</code> <code>money -</code></li></ol>
<h3>Scenes</h3><details><summary><b>111</b> · <i>The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar</i> — Someone everyone had given up for dead speaks from beyond it, and tells them he is dead.</summary><p class="sum">Taken for dead, the man&#x27;s tongue vibrates and an unearthly distant voice says: &quot;I have been sleeping, and now I am dead.&quot;</p></details><details><summary><b>149</b> · <i>The Fall of the House of Usher</i> — A man decides to keep a dead relative&#x27;s body at home instead of burying it, and his guest does not object.</summary><p class="sum">The friend announces his sister is dead and says he will keep her body in a vault in the house for a fortnight, for fear of her doctors&#x27; curiosity; the narrator does not object.</p></details><details><summary><b>150</b> · <i>The Fall of the House of Usher</i> — Two men carry a body into a sealed vault deep under the house, behind a door that grinds shut.</summary><p class="sum">The two of them carry the coffin down to a deep, airless, copper-lined vault beneath the narrator&#x27;s room, behind a heavy iron door.</p></details><details><summary><b>151</b> · <i>The Fall of the House of Usher</i> — Men sealing a coffin notice the dead woman still looks faintly alive, and close it anyway.</summary><p class="sum">Before closing the coffin they see the twins&#x27; likeness; the body keeps a faint blush and a lingering smile; they screw down the lid and bolt the door.</p></details><details><summary><b>160</b> · <i>The Fall of the House of Usher</i> — A man confesses he has known for days that someone was buried alive, and was too afraid to say so.</summary><p class="sum">The friend confesses he has heard his sister stirring in her coffin for days but dared not speak: they buried her alive, and now she stands outside the door.</p></details><details><summary><b>161</b> · <i>The Fall of the House of Usher</i> — A man who let someone be buried alive is confronted by her at the door, and the whole house comes down with them.</summary><p class="sum">The door swings open on the bloodied sister, who falls on her brother and kills him in her death-agony; the narrator flees as the house splits and sinks into the pool.</p></details><details><summary><b>247</b> · <i>The Premature Burial</i> — A husband opens a family tomb years after a burial and learns his wife was put there while still alive.</summary><p class="sum">He cites a case: a respected man&#x27;s wife seemed to die, was entombed in the family vault, and when the vault was opened three years later her skeleton fell into his arms.</p></details><details><summary><b>249</b> · <i>The Premature Burial</i> — A rejected lover who digs up the woman he lost to another man finds her still alive, and wins her.</summary><p class="sum">A French heiress rejected a poor suitor for a rich, cruel husband, seemed to die, and was buried; the suitor dug her up for a lock of her hair, she woke, and she fled abroad with him, later winning in court against her husband&#x27;s claim.</p></details><details><summary><b>252</b> · <i>The Premature Burial</i> — A man taken for dead is about to be cut open by doctors when he manages to rise and speak.</summary><p class="sum">The lawyer&#x27;s body was stolen by doctors for private dissection; after an incision, a student&#x27;s electric experiment made him rise from the table, speak, and fall.</p></details><details><summary><b>359</b> · <i>Berenice</i> — A man learns that in a blank he cannot remember he dug up someone buried alive and mutilated her.</summary><p class="sum">A terrified servant reports a violated grave and a disfigured body still alive; the narrator&#x27;s clothes are bloody, his hand scratched, a spade stands by the wall, and the box spills dental tools and thirty-two teeth.</p></details></section><section><h2>G06 · Death coming slowly, and one cool head</h2>
<p class="pred">Death is coming closer step by step, and only a cool head and close watching might find a way out.</p>
<p class="meta">A trapped person wants to survive from what is closing in. · 19 scenes from 2 stories
(A Descent into the Maelström, The Pit and the Pendulum) · stage <b>low</b></p>
<h3>Options</h3><ol><li>Watch everything around you for a pattern you can use. <span class='src'>from scene 73</span><br><code>reason +</code> <code>flags.found_way_out set</code></li><li>Turn what torments you into the means of escape. <span class='src'>from scene 240</span><br><code>reason +</code> <code>nerve +</code></li><li>Lie perfectly still through the pain until it works. <span class='src'>from scene 241</span><br><code>nerve +</code></li><li>Struggle against it with everything you have. <span class='src'>from scene 236</span><br><code>nerve -</code></li><li>Give up hope, and find how calm it leaves you. <span class='src'>from scene 67</span><br><code>nerve +</code> <code>reason +</code></li></ol>
<h3>Scenes</h3><details><summary><b>64</b> · <i>A Descent into the Maelström</i> — A man&#x27;s relief at finding a brother alive turns to horror when the brother tells him they are both doomed.</summary><p class="sum">His elder brother appears alive, to his joy, then screams the name of the whirlpool: the wind is driving them straight into it.</p></details><details><summary><b>65</b> · <i>A Descent into the Maelström</i> — A man clings to a thin hope of survival, then scolds himself for hoping at all as the danger closes in.</summary><p class="sum">He clutches at the hope of arriving at slack water, then despairs; the moon breaks through and his brother, too deafened to speak, signals him to listen.</p></details><details><summary><b>66</b> · <i>A Descent into the Maelström</i> — A man discovers that the one thing he relied on for his timing failed him, and his margin of safety is gone.</summary><p class="sum">His watch has stopped at seven: they are past the slack and the whirl is at full fury; from the crest of a wave he sees it just ahead.</p></details><details><summary><b>67</b> · <i>A Descent into the Maelström</i> — A man who has given up all hope of surviving finds that despair leaves him calmer than fear ever did.</summary><p class="sum">Caught in the belt of surf around the whirl, the boat races round the edge; having given up hope, he finds himself calmer than before.</p></details><details><summary><b>68</b> · <i>A Descent into the Maelström</i> — A doomed man, past fear, becomes curious about the very thing that is about to kill him.</summary><p class="sum">He finds himself admiring the grandeur of his death and even curious to see the depths, and the stillness out of the wind helps restore his wits.</p></details><details><summary><b>70</b> · <i>A Descent into the Maelström</i> — A man who expected instant death opens his eyes to find himself still alive, deep inside the thing he feared.</summary><p class="sum">Expecting death, he opens his eyes to find the boat hanging on the inside of an immense black funnel lit by the moon.</p></details><details><summary><b>71</b> · <i>A Descent into the Maelström</i> — A man suspended over his own doom takes in every detail of it, strangely steady in the middle of the terror.</summary><p class="sum">He sees the boat riding steadily on the steep wall, and a mist and a rainbow over the bottom from which an indescribable yell rises.</p></details><details><summary><b>72</b> · <i>A Descent into the Maelström</i> — A trapped man passing the time by watching what shares his fate notices a pattern that might matter.</summary><p class="sum">Swinging slowly downward, he watches the wreckage around him and idly bets on which will sink first, and his repeated wrong guesses start a new train of thought.</p></details><details><summary><b>73</b> · <i>A Descent into the Maelström</i> — A trapped man, by calm observation of his surroundings, works out a possible way to escape a certain death.</summary><p class="sum">He realises that some objects are drawn down slowly enough to be thrown up again, and that barrel shapes sink slowest of all.</p></details><details><summary><b>232</b> · <i>The Pit and the Pendulum</i> — A prisoner, powerless over everything that matters, fixes his mind on a trivial puzzle to hold his terror off.</summary><p class="sum">He sleeps, drinks drugged water, and wakes to a sulphurous light showing the cell far smaller than he thought; he busies himself working out his mistake.</p></details><details><summary><b>234</b> · <i>The Pit and the Pendulum</i> — A man strapped down and kept thirsty notices something above him beginning to move, and cannot yet tell its purpose.</summary><p class="sum">He finds himself strapped to a low frame with only one arm half free, given salty meat and no water; overhead a painted figure of Time holds a pendulum that is slowly swinging.</p></details><details><summary><b>235</b> · <i>The Pit and the Pendulum</i> — A bound man realises the slow motion above him is a blade coming down, while vermin crowd in on every side.</summary><p class="sum">Rats swarm up from the pit for his meat; when he looks up again, the pendulum&#x27;s sweep has widened and it has come lower, and he sees its end is a razor-sharp crescent.</p></details><details><summary><b>236</b> · <i>The Pit and the Pendulum</i> — A helpless man watches his death come down on him inch by inch for days, swinging between frenzy and calm.</summary><p class="sum">He understands this is the alternative death; for days he watches it descend inch by inch, praying for it to hurry, struggling madly, then lying calm and smiling at it.</p></details><details><summary><b>237</b> · <i>The Pit and the Pendulum</i> — A man in the last extremity feels the first glimmer of a way out, and loses it before he can grasp it.</summary><p class="sum">After another swoon, weak with hunger, he eats a scrap the rats left, and a half-formed thought of hope comes and vanishes before he can grasp it.</p></details><details><summary><b>238</b> · <i>The Pit and the Pendulum</i> — A man facing certain death clings to trivial thoughts to keep his mind from the one fact he cannot bear.</summary><p class="sum">He sees the blade will cross his heart, forces himself to dwell on the trivial fraying of his robe, laughs and howls in turn, and struggles in vain to free his arm.</p></details><details><summary><b>239</b> · <i>The Pit and the Pendulum</i> — A man in the grip of despair grows suddenly calm, thinks clearly for the first time, and looks for a flaw in the trap.</summary><p class="sum">As it comes within a dozen sweeps, despair brings calm, and he realises the single strap binding him will be cut at the first stroke, but it does not cross the blade&#x27;s path.</p></details><details><summary><b>240</b> · <i>The Pit and the Pendulum</i> — A trapped man sees how to turn the very things tormenting him into the means of his escape.</summary><p class="sum">The whole thought returns: he smears the strap with the greasy meat and lies utterly still for the rats.</p></details><details><summary><b>241</b> · <i>The Pit and the Pendulum</i> — A man must lie perfectly still under horror and pain long enough for his desperate plan to work.</summary><p class="sum">The rats swarm over him, half-stifling him, and gnaw the strap; with superhuman resolve he lies still as the blade cuts his skin, then slides free.</p></details><details><summary><b>244</b> · <i>The Pit and the Pendulum</i> — A man is slowly forced towards the one fate he dreads most, with no way left to resist or escape.</summary><p class="sum">The walls begin to close into a narrowing lozenge, forcing him toward the pit; he screams in despair and totters on the brink.</p></details></section><section><h2>G07 · Nobody will believe what you saw</h2>
<p class="pred">What you lived through sounds like madness, and the listener who matters will not believe a word of it.</p>
<p class="meta">A witness wants to be believed from a doubting listener. · 15 scenes from 6 stories
(The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade, A Descent into the Maelström, Mesmeric Revelation, The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar, The Black Cat, Eleonora) · stage <b>high</b></p>
<h3>Options</h3><ol><li>Tell it plainly, without comment, and let them judge. <span class='src'>from scene 87</span><br><code>standing risk</code> <code>reason +</code></li><li>Take them to the place and show them. <span class='src'>from scene 50</span><br><code>relationships.listener +</code> <code>nerve +</code></li><li>Keep adding proof until they must believe. <span class='src'>from scene 45</span><br><code>relationships.listener -</code> <code>standing risk</code></li><li>Stop before their patience runs out. <span class='src'>filled gap</span><br><code>relationships.listener +</code> <code>standing -</code></li><li>Keep it to yourself. <span class='src'>archetype</span><br><code>flags.untold set</code></li></ol>
<h3>Scenes</h3><details><summary><b>38</b> · <i>The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade</i> — A storyteller recounts something true but so strange that her listener, who holds her life, begins to doubt her.</summary><p class="sum">The leader offers him free passage round the world; the king begins to interrupt, doubting that the sea is round like a fruit.</p></details><details><summary><b>39</b> · <i>The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade</i> — A storyteller keeps describing true wonders while her listener grows more impatient and scornful with each one.</summary><p class="sum">The queen goes on, ignoring her husband&#x27;s grunts, telling of an island built by tiny creatures, stone forests, and a vast cave of palaces and blind fish.</p></details><details><summary><b>40</b> · <i>The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade</i> — Someone telling the plain truth about the world sees each fact dismissed with growing contempt by the one judging her.</summary><p class="sum">She tells of rivers of molten metal, a sky blotted out by ash, a forest under a lake, and a lovely land where entry means death, while the king scoffs.</p></details><details><summary><b>41</b> · <i>The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade</i> — A speaker keeps piling up true but unlikely facts before a listener whose patience is visibly running out.</summary><p class="sum">She tells of creatures that trap prey in funnel pits, plants that live on air or on animals, and flowers that imprison insects; the king says &quot;Pshaw!&quot;.</p></details><details><summary><b>42</b> · <i>The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade</i> — A storyteller tells true things that make experts look slow, and her listener greets each with another scornful exclamation.</summary><p class="sum">She tells of bees and birds that solved geometry problems at once which men took years to solve, and of a flock of birds taking hours to pass.</p></details><details><summary><b>43</b> · <i>The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade</i> — A listener dismisses every true thing he is told, and believes the one fable he already read somewhere.</summary><p class="sum">She tells of a headless bird carrying a house full of people in its claws and of a continent resting on a many-horned cow; the king believes only the one he has read in a book.</p></details><details><summary><b>44</b> · <i>The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade</i> — A storyteller describes ordinary modern machines as wonders, and her listener rejects each one as plain nonsense.</summary><p class="sum">In the man-creatures&#x27; land she describes iron horses that eat black stones and a feathered hen of iron and brick; the king calls it nonsense.</p></details><details><summary><b>45</b> · <i>The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade</i> — A speaker describes inventions of real power and consequence, and her listener laughs at every one of them.</summary><p class="sum">She describes a chess-playing automaton, a calculating engine, and a printing press that raises and topples empires; the king calls it ridiculous.</p></details><details><summary><b>46</b> · <i>The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade</i> — A storyteller&#x27;s true accounts of human skill are heard as lies by the one person whose opinion decides her fate.</summary><p class="sum">She describes a man who sits in ovens, one who makes gold, one who draws invisible wire and one who counts vibrations; the king calls it absurd.</p></details><details><summary><b>50</b> · <i>A Descent into the Maelström</i> — A man aged overnight by one terrible ordeal brings a listener to the very spot to tell what happened.</summary><p class="sum">On a mountain summit an exhausted guide tells the narrator that a single day of terror three years ago turned his hair white and broke his nerve.</p></details><details><summary><b>75</b> · <i>A Descent into the Maelström</i> — A survivor of an ordeal returns so changed that his own companions do not know him, and nobody believes his story.</summary><p class="sum">The boat plunges to the bottom with his brother; the whirl subsides before the cask sinks, and he is picked up by his fellow fishermen, who do not recognise him and do not believe his story.</p></details><details><summary><b>87</b> · <i>Mesmeric Revelation</i> — Someone who has witnessed something the world will scoff at resolves to report it plainly, whatever the doubters say.</summary><p class="sum">The narrator declares the facts of mesmerism beyond dispute, including a trance resembling death, and announces he will report, against all prejudice, a conversation with an entranced man.</p></details><details><summary><b>101</b> · <i>The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar</i> — A man whose private experiment has leaked out in garbled form must now tell the truth, knowing few will believe it.</summary><p class="sum">The narrator says a garbled rumour of the case has spread disbelief, so he must set out the facts: he wanted to learn whether a mesmeric trance could hold off death in a dying man.</p></details><details><summary><b>115</b> · <i>The Black Cat</i> — A man facing death tomorrow wants to unburden himself of a story he knows everyone will call madness.</summary><p class="sum">A condemned man, due to die tomorrow, sets down a homely but terrible chain of events he does not expect anyone to believe, insisting he is not mad.</p></details><details><summary><b>360</b> · <i>Eleonora</i> — A man who has been called mad asks to be believed about his early life and doubted about what came after.</summary><p class="sum">The narrator, from a race of ardent fancy, allows that men call him mad and that madness may be the loftiest intelligence; he asks belief for his clear memories of youth and only doubt for his later life.</p></details></section><section><h2>G08 · The reminder that will not go away</h2>
<p class="pred">Something keeps turning up to remind you of what you did, and you can neither face it nor get rid of it.</p>
<p class="meta">A guilty person wants peace from the reminder that will not go. · 11 scenes from 4 stories
(The Black Cat, William Wilson, Berenice, Eleonora) · stage <b>middle</b></p>
<h3>Options</h3><ol><li>Explain it away. <span class='src'>from scene 121</span><br><code>reason +</code> <code>flags.guilty_secret set</code></li><li>Run from it, as far as you can go. <span class='src'>from scene 332</span><br><code>money -</code> <code>standing -</code></li><li>Try to destroy it. <span class='src'>from scene 125 <span class="warn">(outside this group)</span></span><br><code>flags.violent set</code> <code>relationships.household -</code></li><li>Listen to what it is telling you. <span class='src'>from scene 319</span><br><code>standing +</code> <code>relationships.conscience +</code></li><li>Drown it in drink. <span class='src'>from scene 118 <span class="warn">(outside this group)</span></span><br><code>money -</code> <code>nerve -</code></li></ol>
<h3>Scenes</h3><details><summary><b>120</b> · <i>The Black Cat</i> — A man ruined by a disaster the very night of his crime finds a sign of that crime left where everyone can see.</summary><p class="sum">That night his house burns down, ruining him; in the ruins a crowd gathers at the one standing wall, where the figure of a giant cat with a rope round its neck is printed in the plaster.</p></details><details><summary><b>121</b> · <i>The Black Cat</i> — A man explains away an uncanny reminder of his crime, but cannot rid his mind of it, and half-regrets what he did.</summary><p class="sum">He explains the image away as the body thrown in to wake him and pressed into fresh plaster, but cannot shake the phantom, and starts looking for a similar cat to replace it.</p></details><details><summary><b>122</b> · <i>The Black Cat</i> — A guilty man finds a creature exactly like the one he destroyed, which attaches itself to him and follows him home.</summary><p class="sum">In a low tavern he finds a large black cat like the first, except for a white patch on its breast; no one owns it, it follows him home, and his wife loves it.</p></details><details><summary><b>123</b> · <i>The Black Cat</i> — A man is haunted by a constant companion that reminds him of his crime, and dreads it too much to strike.</summary><p class="sum">He comes to loathe the cat&#x27;s devotion, the more so on finding it too is missing an eye; it follows him everywhere, and only a secret dread stops him killing it.</p></details><details><summary><b>124</b> · <i>The Black Cat</i> — A guilty man sees the sign of his coming punishment growing clearer every day on something that will not leave him.</summary><p class="sum">The white patch slowly takes the clear shape of a gallows; he cannot rest by day or night, and wakes from nightmares with the creature&#x27;s weight on his chest.</p></details><details><summary><b>319</b> · <i>William Wilson</i> — A person keeps getting unwanted advice from someone who is always right, and comes to hate him for it.</summary><p class="sum">The rival constantly hints advice, always in the right, which the narrator increasingly hates; he admits he would have been better had he listened; his feelings harden into hatred.</p></details><details><summary><b>324</b> · <i>William Wilson</i> — A man caught in the middle of his worst behaviour hears his own name whispered in warning by someone just like him.</summary><p class="sum">In the dim hall a youth dressed exactly like him seizes his arm and whispers his name in warning, in the familiar tone that sobers him instantly, and vanishes.</p></details><details><summary><b>332</b> · <i>William Wilson</i> — A man cannot escape someone who follows him everywhere and blocks every wrong he tries to do.</summary><p class="sum">Everywhere he goes, the rival steps in to frustrate his schemes; he flees to the ends of the earth in vain, and notices the rival only ever blocks what would have done harm.</p></details><details><summary><b>333</b> · <i>William Wilson</i> — A man pursued for years by a masked figure who thwarts his every scheme knows perfectly well who it is.</summary><p class="sum">He notes the rival always hides his face, but he knows him for his school rival, who has thwarted his ambition, revenge, love and avarice.</p></details><details><summary><b>358</b> · <i>Berenice</i> — A man wakes with a gap in his memory and the dreadful sense that he has done something terrible he cannot recall.</summary><p class="sum">He wakes at midnight in the library, knowing she has been buried, with no memory of the hours between except a shriek; he has done some deed, but what? On the table lies the doctor&#x27;s box.</p></details><details><summary><b>368</b> · <i>Eleonora</i> — A man who swore lifelong faithfulness to someone dead falls in love again, and waits to learn what his broken vow will cost.</summary><p class="sum">In a strange city&#x27;s court the signs cease; a beautiful maiden arrives from afar, he falls into abject adoration of her, marries her without fearing the curse, and once more hears the familiar sighing voice.</p></details></section><section><h2>G09 · A rival who is your mirror</h2>
<p class="pred">A rival matches you move for move, as if they knew your mind as well as you do.</p>
<p class="meta">A person used to winning wants to come out on top from a rival who mirrors them. · 13 scenes from 2 stories
(The Purloined Letter, William Wilson) · stage <b>high</b></p>
<h3>Options</h3><ol><li>Get inside their head: think exactly as they think. <span class='src'>from scene 13</span><br><code>reason +</code></li><li>Mock their one weakness. <span class='src'>from scene 315</span><br><code>relationships.rival -</code> <code>standing -</code></li><li>Act in public as if they are no match for you. <span class='src'>from scene 313</span><br><code>standing +</code> <code>relationships.rival -</code></li><li>Catch them off guard when they are unprotected. <span class='src'>from scene 321</span><br><code>relationships.rival -</code> <code>nerve risk</code></li><li>Admit they are your equal. <span class='src'>filled gap</span><br><code>relationships.rival +</code></li></ol>
<h3>Scenes</h3><details><summary><b>12</b> · <i>The Purloined Letter</i> — A reasoner explains that beating an opponent depends on judging exactly how clever that particular opponent is.</summary><p class="sum">He tells of a schoolboy who won every marble at guessing even-or-odd by judging how clever each opponent was.</p></details><details><summary><b>13</b> · <i>The Purloined Letter</i> — A reasoner claims the way to read an opponent is to copy his face and wait to see what thoughts arise.</summary><p class="sum">The boy&#x27;s secret was to copy his opponent&#x27;s expression and see what thoughts it produced in himself.</p></details><details><summary><b>17</b> · <i>The Purloined Letter</i> — A man who knows his opponent&#x27;s cunning reasons that the rival foresaw every search and arranged to be searched.</summary><p class="sum">He explains that he knew the minister as poet, courtier and intriguer, and reasoned that the man expected every search and even invited them.</p></details><details><summary><b>312</b> · <i>William Wilson</i> — A boy used to ruling his companions meets the one rival who refuses to bow to him.</summary><p class="sum">His imperious temper gave him mastery over his schoolmates, except for one boy of the same name who alone competed with him and refused to submit to his will.</p></details><details><summary><b>313</b> · <i>William Wilson</i> — Someone is quietly but constantly thwarted by a rival no one else seems to notice, and secretly fears him.</summary><p class="sum">He secretly fears this rival, whose effortless equality seems superiority, though no one else notices; the rival thwarts him in private, with an unwelcome affectionate, patronising air.</p></details><details><summary><b>314</b> · <i>William Wilson</i> — Someone cannot decide whether he hates or admires the rival who shadows him, and cannot stay away from him.</summary><p class="sum">Rumour makes them brothers; the narrator later learns they share a birthday; he cannot quite hate the rival, feeling a mix of animosity, respect, fear and curiosity; they are inseparable.</p></details><details><summary><b>315</b> · <i>William Wilson</i> — Someone keeps trying to get the better of a rival who cannot be mocked, and stoops to attacking his one weakness.</summary><p class="sum">His attacks on the rival take the form of banter and pranks, which rarely succeed; the only weak spot he finds is a defect that keeps the rival from speaking above a whisper.</p></details><details><summary><b>316</b> · <i>William Wilson</i> — A man is galled that someone else shares his name and his place, so that the two are always confused.</summary><p class="sum">The rival retaliates by exploiting the narrator&#x27;s hatred of his own common name, which the rival shares and which causes their affairs to be confused.</p></details><details><summary><b>317</b> · <i>William Wilson</i> — A man finds a rival copying his dress, manner and voice so exactly that he feels mocked by his own reflection.</summary><p class="sum">The resemblance extends to height and features; the rival sets out to imitate his dress, walk, manner and voice, until his whisper becomes the very echo of the narrator&#x27;s own.</p></details><details><summary><b>318</b> · <i>William Wilson</i> — A man is tormented by a mockery that only he can see, which makes it impossible to complain of it.</summary><p class="sum">The imitation torments him, the more because no one else seems to notice it; the rival seems content to sting him alone.</p></details><details><summary><b>320</b> · <i>William Wilson</i> — In the middle of a quarrel a man has the eerie feeling that he has known his rival since before memory began.</summary><p class="sum">In a violent quarrel the narrator fancies he has known the rival from infancy or before; the rival sleeps in a closet-like room of his own.</p></details><details><summary><b>321</b> · <i>William Wilson</i> — A man sneaking up on a rival to harm him sees the rival&#x27;s sleeping face and flees in horror.</summary><p class="sum">Creeping in at night to play a cruel prank, he lights the sleeping rival&#x27;s face and is seized by horror at what he sees there; he flees the school that night for good.</p></details><details><summary><b>331</b> · <i>William Wilson</i> — A disgraced man finds that the one who exposed him wore an exact copy of his own clothes, and flees.</summary><p class="sum">He realises the cloak is an exact copy of his own unique one, left by the stranger; covering his shame, he takes it and flees abroad the next morning.</p></details></section><section><h2>G10 · A revenge they cannot escape</h2>
<p class="pred">Someone has wronged you once too often, and you want a revenge they cannot escape and will know came from you.</p>
<p class="meta">A wronged person wants revenge without risk from the one who wronged them. · 13 scenes from 3 stories
(The Purloined Letter, The Cask of Amontillado, William Wilson) · stage <b>high</b></p>
<h3>Options</h3><ol><li>Keep smiling and wait for your moment. <span class='src'>from scene 178</span><br><code>nerve +</code> <code>relationships.enemy +</code></li><li>Lure them in through their vanity. <span class='src'>from scene 179</span><br><code>reason +</code> <code>relationships.enemy risk</code></li><li>Leave them a sign so they know it was you. <span class='src'>from scene 25</span><br><code>standing +</code> <code>relationships.enemy -</code></li><li>Have it out face to face, here and now. <span class='src'>from scene 335</span><br><code>flags.violent set</code> <code>standing risk</code></li><li>Let it go. <span class='src'>archetype</span><br><code>standing -</code> <code>relationships.enemy +</code></li></ol>
<h3>Scenes</h3><details><summary><b>24</b> · <i>The Purloined Letter</i> — A man turns the tables on a powerful schemer, leaving him to use a hold he no longer has and ruin himself.</summary><p class="sum">The friend says seizing it openly might have cost his life, and that the minister, unaware, will now ruin himself acting on a power he no longer holds.</p></details><details><summary><b>25</b> · <i>The Purloined Letter</i> — A man who once promised to repay an old injury leaves his rival a quiet clue to who has outwitted him.</summary><p class="sum">For an old wrong the minister once did him, the friend wrote a quotation in the copy so the minister will know who outwitted him.</p></details><details><summary><b>178</b> · <i>The Cask of Amontillado</i> — A man insulted by someone powerful vows a revenge that must be complete, unpunished, and known to its victim, and keeps smiling meanwhile.</summary><p class="sum">The narrator, having borne a thousand injuries from a respected man, vows revenge for an insult: he must punish without risk and make his enemy know who punished him, while smiling at him as before; the man&#x27;s weakness is pride in his knowledge of wine.</p></details><details><summary><b>179</b> · <i>The Cask of Amontillado</i> — An avenger lures his enemy by playing on his vanity, pretending he will ask a rival for the opinion instead.</summary><p class="sum">At dusk during the carnival he meets his enemy, drunk and dressed as a jester, and baits him with a doubtful cask of rare wine, pretending he will ask a rival judge instead.</p></details><details><summary><b>180</b> · <i>The Cask of Amontillado</i> — An avenger leads his unsuspecting enemy deep into a hidden place, all the while pretending to urge him to turn back.</summary><p class="sum">Masked, he lets the enemy hurry him home, having made sure the servants are gone, and leads him down into the damp family catacombs, repeatedly urging him to turn back for his health.</p></details><details><summary><b>181</b> · <i>The Cask of Amontillado</i> — An avenger drinks to his victim&#x27;s long life and states his own family&#x27;s vow of vengeance to his face, unnoticed.</summary><p class="sum">He plies his coughing enemy with wine, toasts his long life, recites the family motto that no one injures them with impunity, and again offers to turn back.</p></details><details><summary><b>182</b> · <i>The Cask of Amontillado</i> — An avenger nearly gives himself away with a grim joke about his real purpose, and his victim laughs it off.</summary><p class="sum">The enemy makes a secret brotherhood sign; the narrator claims to belong and produces a trowel as his sign, then leads on into a crypt with air so foul the torches barely burn.</p></details><details><summary><b>183</b> · <i>The Cask of Amontillado</i> — A man lured by his own vanity steps into a trap and finds himself chained before he understands what has happened.</summary><p class="sum">In a crypt lined with bones, the narrator tells his enemy the wine is in a deep recess; the drunken man steps in, and in a moment is chained to the granite wall.</p></details><details><summary><b>184</b> · <i>The Cask of Amontillado</i> — An avenger slowly seals his enemy in alive, pausing to savour each sound of his victim&#x27;s growing terror.</summary><p class="sum">Mockingly imploring him once more to return, the narrator walls up the recess tier by tier, pausing to listen with satisfaction as the chained man sobers, moans and rattles his chain.</p></details><details><summary><b>186</b> · <i>The Cask of Amontillado</i> — An avenger finishes his work with a sick heart he blames on the cold, and keeps his secret for half a century.</summary><p class="sum">He drops a torch in, hears only bells jingling, feels sick, he says, from the damp, seals the last stone and piles the bones back; no one has disturbed them for fifty years.</p></details><details><summary><b>334</b> · <i>William Wilson</i> — A man who has always yielded to the one who checks him resolves, in drink, to throw off that control for good.</summary><p class="sum">Long submissive out of awe, he now drinks heavily, begins to resist, fancies the rival weakens as he grows firmer, and resolves to be enslaved no longer.</p></details><details><summary><b>335</b> · <i>William Wilson</i> — A man about to do wrong is stopped once more by his double, and in fury drags him aside to finish it.</summary><p class="sum">At a masked ball, drunk and pursuing a young wife, he feels the whisper at his ear, seizes the masked rival dressed exactly as himself, and drags him into a side room, threatening to stab him.</p></details><details><summary><b>336</b> · <i>William Wilson</i> — A man who kills the one who always restrained him finds that he has struck down his own reflection.</summary><p class="sum">He runs the rival through again and again; looking up, he sees what seems a mirror with his own bloodied image, but it is the dying rival, identical to him in every line.</p></details></section><section><h2>G11 · Walled off from the danger outside</h2>
<p class="pred">You have shut yourself away from a danger everyone else must face, and you are no longer sure the walls will hold.</p>
<p class="meta">A person behind walls wants to stay safe from the danger outside. · 12 scenes from 3 stories
(The Fall of the House of Usher, The Masque of the Red Death, The Premature Burial) · stage <b>high</b></p>
<h3>Options</h3><ol><li>Seal the gates and make merry inside. <span class='src'>from scene 167</span><br><code>money -</code> <code>relationships.outside -</code> <code>flags.walled_in set</code></li><li>Build every precaution you can think of. <span class='src'>from scene 259</span><br><code>money -</code> <code>reason +</code></li><li>Face the intruder yourself. <span class='src'>from scene 176</span><br><code>nerve +</code> <code>standing risk</code></li><li>Stop leaving the house at all. <span class='src'>from scene 141</span><br><code>nerve -</code> <code>relationships.outside -</code></li><li>Go out and live anyway. <span class='src'>from scene 264 <span class="warn">(outside this group)</span></span><br><code>nerve +</code> <code>standing +</code></li></ol>
<h3>Scenes</h3><details><summary><b>141</b> · <i>The Fall of the House of Usher</i> — A man is so ruled by fear that he expects to lose his life and reason to terror itself, and cannot leave his home.</summary><p class="sum">He says he will perish of fear itself, and hints that the house has a hold over his spirit, which has kept him from leaving it for years.</p></details><details><summary><b>167</b> · <i>The Masque of the Red Death</i> — A powerful man walls himself and his favourites off from a deadly danger, and leaves everyone outside to their fate.</summary><p class="sum">While a hideous plague ravages his lands, a prince retreats with a thousand chosen courtiers into a walled abbey, welds the gates shut, and fills it with every pleasure, leaving the world outside to fend for itself.</p></details><details><summary><b>168</b> · <i>The Masque of the Red Death</i> — People safely shut away from a catastrophe outside throw a lavish celebration while others die beyond the walls.</summary><p class="sum">In the fifth or sixth month of seclusion, with the plague at its worst outside, the prince gives a masked ball of unusual magnificence.</p></details><details><summary><b>169</b> · <i>The Masque of the Red Death</i> — Revellers in a sealed retreat avoid one room whose look reminds them of the very thing they are hiding from.</summary><p class="sum">The ball is held in seven winding rooms, each a single colour lit through matching windows, except the last, black with blood-red panes, which few dare enter.</p></details><details><summary><b>170</b> · <i>The Masque of the Red Death</i> — People determined to enjoy themselves are stopped short every hour by a reminder of time running out, and laugh it off.</summary><p class="sum">In the black room a great clock strikes each hour so solemnly that the music and dancing stop and even the giddiest grow pale, then laugh at their nervousness.</p></details><details><summary><b>172</b> · <i>The Masque of the Red Death</i> — Revellers dance ever more wildly to forget what waits outside, but freeze each time the reminder sounds.</summary><p class="sum">The masquers, dressed to the prince&#x27;s grotesque taste, swirl like dreams through the rooms, freezing at every chime and avoiding the black chamber as night wears on.</p></details><details><summary><b>173</b> · <i>The Masque of the Red Death</i> — A crowd shut in for safety notices among them an uninvited stranger whom no one saw arrive.</summary><p class="sum">At midnight, during the twelve long strokes, the crowd notices a masked figure no one had seen before, and a murmur of disapproval turns to horror.</p></details><details><summary><b>174</b> · <i>The Masque of the Red Death</i> — A leader who shut out a danger sees it mocked openly inside his own walls, and orders the offender seized.</summary><p class="sum">The stranger is dressed as a plague corpse, spattered with blood; the prince, first shuddering, then enraged, orders him seized and unmasked to be hanged at dawn.</p></details><details><summary><b>176</b> · <i>The Masque of the Red Death</i> — A leader, ashamed of his own fear, rushes alone at the thing everyone dreads, and it kills him where he stands.</summary><p class="sum">No one dares touch the figure, who walks slowly through all the rooms; the shamed prince chases him with a dagger into the black room, where the figure turns and the prince falls dead; the revellers seize the mask and find nothing inside.</p></details><details><summary><b>177</b> · <i>The Masque of the Red Death</i> — People who believed their walls would keep a catastrophe out discover it was inside with them all along.</summary><p class="sum">The plague has come in like a thief; the revellers die one by one in the halls, the clock stops and the fires go out, leaving darkness, decay and death.</p></details><details><summary><b>259</b> · <i>The Premature Burial</i> — A man terrified of being buried alive stops trusting even his friends, and builds elaborate precautions against the fate.</summary><p class="sum">His terror spread to waking life: he would not leave home or trust even his friends not to bury him; he extracted oaths and built a vault and coffin that could be opened from inside, with air, food, and a bell.</p></details><details><summary><b>262</b> · <i>The Premature Burial</i> — A man realises that all his precautions were useless, because the thing he feared happened far from home among strangers.</summary><p class="sum">He thinks of his precautions, but the lid will not open, there is no bell-rope or padding, and he smells earth: strangers have buried him in a common grave; he shrieks, and rough voices answer and shake him.</p></details></section><section><h2>G12 · A companion who may not be sane</h2>
<p class="pred">Someone close to you speaks of a danger only they can sense, and you cannot tell whether it is real or madness.</p>
<p class="meta">A companion wants to know what is real from a friend who may be mad. · 13 scenes from 4 stories
(A Descent into the Maelström, The Fall of the House of Usher, The Masque of the Red Death, The Assignation) · stage <b>high</b></p>
<h3>Options</h3><ol><li>Explain it away, gently, to calm them. <span class='src'>from scene 155</span><br><code>reason +</code> <code>relationships.friend +</code></li><li>Hide your own fear so as not to feed theirs. <span class='src'>from scene 158</span><br><code>nerve +</code></li><li>Humour them and go along with it. <span class='src'>from scene 171</span><br><code>relationships.friend +</code> <code>standing risk</code></li><li>Take them at their word and look for yourself. <span class='src'>filled gap</span><br><code>nerve +</code> <code>relationships.friend +</code></li><li>Leave while you still can. <span class='src'>archetype</span><br><code>relationships.friend -</code></li></ol>
<h3>Scenes</h3><details><summary><b>51</b> · <i>A Descent into the Maelström</i> — A nervous visitor clings to the ground at a height while his guide lounges on the edge and urges him to look.</summary><p class="sum">The guide lounges carelessly on the edge of a sheer drop while the terrified narrator clings to the grass, then points him towards the sea below.</p></details><details><summary><b>140</b> · <i>The Fall of the House of Usher</i> — A man tells an old friend that he suffers from an inherited affliction, then insists in the same breath it will soon pass.</summary><p class="sum">The friend is nervous and erratic, calls his malady a family evil that will soon pass, and describes senses so acute that food, cloth, light, scent and most sounds torment him.</p></details><details><summary><b>144</b> · <i>The Fall of the House of Usher</i> — A companion is drawn deeper and deeper into a troubled friend&#x27;s feverish art and cannot say why it frightens him.</summary><p class="sum">He recalls his friend&#x27;s wild improvised dirges and paintings of pure abstraction that filled him with an awe he could not explain.</p></details><details><summary><b>145</b> · <i>The Fall of the House of Usher</i> — A companion realises from a friend&#x27;s own words that the friend knows his mind is giving way.</summary><p class="sum">One painting shows a long, smooth, lightless tunnel deep underground flooded with ghastly light; the friend&#x27;s songs, improvised in rare excitement, include one that reveals he knows his reason is failing.</p></details><details><summary><b>147</b> · <i>The Fall of the House of Usher</i> — A friend insists, with growing conviction, that his home itself has shaped and doomed him, and you cannot tell if he is mad.</summary><p class="sum">The friend insists that the stones, fungi and trees of his house are sentient, and that their slow-gathered atmosphere has shaped his family&#x27;s fate and made him what he is.</p></details><details><summary><b>148</b> · <i>The Fall of the House of Usher</i> — Two companions shut away together feed each other&#x27;s morbid fancies with nothing but dark reading.</summary><p class="sum">They read strange old books of demonology, travel and inquisition, and above all an obscure manual of the vigils for the dead.</p></details><details><summary><b>152</b> · <i>The Fall of the House of Usher</i> — A man watches a friend who seems to be hiding some terrible secret, and feels the friend&#x27;s terror beginning to take hold of him.</summary><p class="sum">In the following days the friend wanders aimlessly, his eyes dull and his voice terrified, as if struggling to reveal a secret or listening to a sound; his terror begins to infect the narrator.</p></details><details><summary><b>154</b> · <i>The Fall of the House of Usher</i> — A frightened man is visited in the night by a friend whose wild excitement is more alarming than the storm outside.</summary><p class="sum">His friend comes in with a lamp and a mad hilarity, asks if he has not seen it, and throws open the window on a whirling storm lit by an unnatural glow around the house.</p></details><details><summary><b>155</b> · <i>The Fall of the House of Usher</i> — Someone tries to calm a friend on the edge of madness by explaining away what frightens them both, and reading aloud.</summary><p class="sum">The narrator leads him away from the window, explains the glow away, and begins reading aloud a clumsy old romance in the hope of calming him.</p></details><details><summary><b>158</b> · <i>The Fall of the House of Usher</i> — A man hides his own terror to protect an unstable friend, and sees the friend is already staring at the door.</summary><p class="sum">Hiding his terror so as not to alarm his friend, he notices him turned towards the door, rocking and murmuring, and reads on about a shield falling with a mighty ringing.</p></details><details><summary><b>171</b> · <i>The Masque of the Red Death</i> — Followers of a lavish, eccentric leader assure themselves he is not mad, though outsiders might think otherwise.</summary><p class="sum">The revel is gay and magnificent; the prince&#x27;s tastes are so bold and bizarre that some would think him mad, though his followers do not.</p></details><details><summary><b>214</b> · <i>The Assignation</i> — A strange host laughs wildly, talks of dying laughing, then tells his guest how few have ever been admitted.</summary><p class="sum">The host laughs at his guest&#x27;s amazement, rambles about dying laughing and an altar to laughter, and says only one other person has ever been admitted to the room.</p></details><details><summary><b>216</b> · <i>The Assignation</i> — A visitor notices that his host keeps breaking off to listen, as though waiting for someone or something that never comes.</summary><p class="sum">The narrator notices his host&#x27;s constant intense thought and a nervous trepidation; he often stops mid-sentence, listening for a visitor or an imagined sound.</p></details></section><section><h2>G13 · Sent for by a friend in a bad way</h2>
<p class="pred">An old friend in a bad way has sent for you, and the person you find is not the one you remember.</p>
<p class="meta">A old friend wants to help from a friend who has changed. · 7 scenes from 4 stories
(Mesmeric Revelation, The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar, The Fall of the House of Usher, The Assignation) · stage <b>high</b></p>
<h3>Options</h3><ol><li>Go at once, whatever the reason. <span class='src'>from scene 133</span><br><code>relationships.friend +</code> <code>money -</code></li><li>Keep them company and try to lift their spirits. <span class='src'>from scene 143</span><br><code>relationships.friend +</code> <code>nerve -</code></li><li>Talk to the people looking after them first. <span class='src'>from scene 105 <span class="warn">(outside this group)</span></span><br><code>reason +</code> <code>relationships.physician +</code></li><li>Do what they ask, though you have doubts. <span class='src'>from scene 106 <span class="warn">(outside this group)</span></span><br><code>relationships.friend +</code> <code>flags.consented set</code></li><li>Send your regrets and stay away. <span class='src'>archetype</span><br><code>relationships.friend -</code></li></ol>
<h3>Scenes</h3><details><summary><b>88</b> · <i>Mesmeric Revelation</i> — A practitioner called to the bedside of a dying patient finds him in great pain yet oddly at peace.</summary><p class="sum">He has long mesmerised a man dying of consumption to ease his pain; summoned one night, he finds him in agony of body but strangely calm of mind.</p></details><details><summary><b>104</b> · <i>The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar</i> — A man arrives at a friend&#x27;s deathbed and is shocked by how far he has declined in only a few days.</summary><p class="sum">The narrator finds his friend terribly wasted but clear-minded, writing notes in bed with two doctors present.</p></details><details><summary><b>133</b> · <i>The Fall of the House of Usher</i> — Someone receives a desperate plea from a friend he has not seen for years, and cannot refuse to come.</summary><p class="sum">He has come for a stay of some weeks because the owner, a boyhood friend, wrote him a wild, pleading letter describing a mental disorder and begging for his company.</p></details><details><summary><b>139</b> · <i>The Fall of the House of Usher</i> — A man meets a childhood friend after years apart and can barely recognise him, he has changed so terribly.</summary><p class="sum">His friend greets him warmly, but has changed so terribly, ghastly pale with luminous eyes and wild hair, that the narrator hardly recognises him.</p></details><details><summary><b>143</b> · <i>The Fall of the House of Usher</i> — Someone trying to lift a friend out of despair realises that nothing he does can reach the darkness in that mind.</summary><p class="sum">For days the narrator paints, reads and listens to music with his friend, but finds all attempts to cheer a mind that pours out darkness are futile.</p></details><details><summary><b>212</b> · <i>The Assignation</i> — A visitor is shown into a room so dazzlingly rich that he cannot believe any private fortune could pay for it.</summary><p class="sum">Asked urgently to call at sunrise, the narrator is shown into a room of such blinding splendour that he doubts any subject in Europe could afford it.</p></details><details><summary><b>213</b> · <i>The Assignation</i> — A visitor finds his host exhausted after a sleepless night in a room built only to dazzle and overwhelm.</summary><p class="sum">The room, still lit though the sun is up, dazzles with a jumble of every age and nation, hidden melancholy music, perfumes and coloured flames; his host has not slept.</p></details></section><section><h2>G14 · Experimenting on the dying</h2>
<p class="pred">Someone who trusts you is dying, and you could use their last hours to learn what no one has ever learned.</p>
<p class="meta">A practitioner wants to learn what lies past death from a dying subject. · 14 scenes from 2 stories
(Mesmeric Revelation, The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar) · stage <b>middle</b></p>
<h3>Options</h3><ol><li>Go ahead, with their consent and a witness. <span class='src'>from scene 106</span><br><code>reason +</code> <code>standing risk</code> <code>flags.experiment set</code></li><li>Keep them where they are, between life and death, and see. <span class='src'>from scene 113</span><br><code>standing risk</code> <code>relationships.subject -</code></li><li>Let them go when they beg to die. <span class='src'>filled gap</span><br><code>relationships.subject +</code></li><li>Ask one more question. <span class='src'>from scene 110</span><br><code>reason +</code> <code>relationships.subject -</code></li><li>Bring them back, whatever it costs. <span class='src'>from scene 114</span><br><code>nerve +</code> <code>standing -</code></li></ol>
<h3>Scenes</h3><details><summary><b>89</b> · <i>Mesmeric Revelation</i> — A dying man who has never been able to believe in anything beyond death wants proof before the end.</summary><p class="sum">The dying man explains he has always doubted the soul&#x27;s immortality and that no philosophy has ever convinced his reason.</p></details><details><summary><b>90</b> · <i>Mesmeric Revelation</i> — A dying man asks a trusted practitioner to question him in a trance, hoping to bring back certainty from the edge.</summary><p class="sum">He says that in trance he half-perceives a convincing argument that fades on waking, and asks to be questioned while entranced; entranced, he says he must die, and is not afraid.</p></details><details><summary><b>91</b> · <i>Mesmeric Revelation</i> — A questioner at a dying man&#x27;s bedside gets answers he did not expect and does not know what to ask next.</summary><p class="sum">In trance he says the state is so near death that it contents him, and tells the questioner to begin with God, whom he says is neither spirit nor matter as men understand it.</p></details><details><summary><b>100</b> · <i>Mesmeric Revelation</i> — A practitioner wakes a patient from a trance and sees him die on the spot, and wonders whom he has been talking to.</summary><p class="sum">Alarmed by his look, the questioner wakes him; he smiles and dies at once, and his body is instantly cold and rigid, as if long dead.</p></details><details><summary><b>102</b> · <i>The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar</i> — An experimenter looks for a subject for a dangerous trial and settles on a dying friend who seems not to fear death.</summary><p class="sum">He chooses a friend, a nervous, emaciated scholar dying of consumption, whom he had mesmerised before without full control, and who speaks calmly of his coming death.</p></details><details><summary><b>103</b> · <i>The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar</i> — A dying man agrees to let a friend experiment on him at the hour of his death, and sends word when it comes.</summary><p class="sum">The friend, with no relatives to object, is keen, and agrees to send for him a day before the doctors&#x27; predicted hour of death; the note comes: come now.</p></details><details><summary><b>106</b> · <i>The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar</i> — An experimenter delays a risky trial until he has a reliable witness, and the dying subject fears he has waited too long.</summary><p class="sum">Waiting for a reliable witness, the narrator begins the next evening with a medical student taking notes; the dying man consents, but fears it has been left too late.</p></details><details><summary><b>107</b> · <i>The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar</i> — An experimenter keeps working on a man in his last agony, with the doctors&#x27; consent, to see what the trance can do.</summary><p class="sum">With the doctors&#x27; consent he makes his passes as the man sinks into the death agony; the breathing changes and the limbs go icy.</p></details><details><summary><b>108</b> · <i>The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar</i> — An experimenter succeeds in suspending a dying man between life and death, and the watching doctors are captivated.</summary><p class="sum">By midnight the patient is in a perfect trance, limbs rigid and cold as marble, breathing barely perceptible, yet not dead; the doctors are fascinated.</p></details><details><summary><b>109</b> · <i>The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar</i> — A dying man held in a trance begs the one controlling him not to wake him, but to let him die.</summary><p class="sum">At three the man&#x27;s arm follows the narrator&#x27;s hand; asked if he sleeps, he whispers &quot;Yes, asleep now. Do not wake me! let me die so!&quot;</p></details><details><summary><b>110</b> · <i>The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar</i> — An experimenter ignores the doctors&#x27; wish to let a dying man rest and questions him once more, with dreadful results.</summary><p class="sum">At dawn, asked again, he whispers that he is still asleep and dying; as the narrator repeats the question, his face collapses into a hideous corpse-like mask.</p></details><details><summary><b>112</b> · <i>The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar</i> — A man realises that he alone keeps a dead man tied to this world, and no one else can reach him.</summary><p class="sum">The student faints and the nurses flee; the body no longer breathes or bleeds, and responds only to the narrator&#x27;s questions with a vibrating tongue.</p></details><details><summary><b>113</b> · <i>The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar</i> — People who have held someone in a state between life and death for months finally decide to try to end it.</summary><p class="sum">For seven months the man lies unchanged, death apparently arrested; at last they try to wake him, and a foul yellow fluid seeps from his eyes.</p></details><details><summary><b>114</b> · <i>The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar</i> — A man in a state neither living nor dead begs to be released, and releasing him brings instant horror.</summary><p class="sum">The voice cries &quot;put me to sleep, or waken me! I am dead!&quot;; as the narrator makes the passes to wake him, the body rots away instantly into liquid putrescence.</p></details></section><section><h2>G15 · At the mercy of someone without pity</h2>
<p class="pred">Your life is in the hands of someone without pity, who may be watching to see how you take it.</p>
<p class="meta">A captive wants to live from a pitiless captor. · 15 scenes from 3 stories
(The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade, Silence — A Fable, The Pit and the Pendulum) · stage <b>high</b></p>
<h3>Options</h3><ol><li>Keep them interested, one night at a time. <span class='src'>from scene 28</span><br><code>reason +</code> <code>relationships.captor +</code></li><li>Endure whatever comes and do not flinch. <span class='src'>from scene 164</span><br><code>nerve +</code></li><li>Learn every inch of where they have put you. <span class='src'>from scene 229</span><br><code>reason +</code></li><li>Break and run. <span class='src'>from scene 165</span><br><code>nerve -</code> <code>flags.fled set</code></li><li>Accept it with good grace. <span class='src'>from scene 49 <span class="warn">(outside this group)</span></span><br><code>standing +</code> <code>nerve +</code></li></ol>
<h3>Scenes</h3><details><summary><b>26</b> · <i>The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade</i> — A ruler has made a vow to kill a new bride every morning, and everyone lives in fear of being chosen next.</summary><p class="sum">The narrator claims an obscure book shows the familiar tale of the storytelling queen ended wrongly, and recalls how a jealous king vowed to wed a maiden each night and kill her each morning.</p></details><details><summary><b>28</b> · <i>The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade</i> — A bride under sentence of death keeps herself alive by leaving her husband too curious to have her killed yet.</summary><p class="sum">On the wedding night she tells her sister a story within the king&#x27;s hearing and leaves it unfinished at dawn, so the curious king postpones her execution.</p></details><details><summary><b>29</b> · <i>The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade</i> — Someone living under a daily death sentence stays alive, night after night, only by keeping a dangerous listener entertained.</summary><p class="sum">She keeps it up for a thousand and one nights until the king forgets or breaks his vow, and the killing of brides ends.</p></details><details><summary><b>47</b> · <i>The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade</i> — A speaker tells the plain wonders of the age to a listener who takes each one as proof she is lying.</summary><p class="sum">She tells of corpses made to move by an unseen fluid, voices heard across the world, lightning tamed and the stars weighed; the king calls it preposterous.</p></details><details><summary><b>163</b> · <i>Silence — A Fable</i> — A watcher hides and studies a solitary man who has fled mankind in weariness and wants only to be left alone.</summary><p class="sum">In blood-red rain by moonlight the demon sees a rock carved with the word DESOLATION, and a grave, godlike man upon it, weary and disgusted with mankind, longing for solitude.</p></details><details><summary><b>164</b> · <i>Silence — A Fable</i> — A tormentor keeps testing a lonely man with fresh terrors, and each time the man trembles but will not leave.</summary><p class="sum">The man sits trembling all night on the rock, gazing at the desolation; the hidden demon summons roaring beasts to the rock&#x27;s foot, but the man only trembles and stays.</p></details><details><summary><b>165</b> · <i>Silence — A Fable</i> — A man who endured every storm and terror flees at last from utter silence, which he finds more frightening than any noise.</summary><p class="sum">The demon calls down a tempest, and still the man sits; then he curses everything with silence, the rock reads SILENCE, and the man, wan with terror, flees.</p></details><details><summary><b>166</b> · <i>Silence — A Fable</i> — A listener is cursed by a mocking tormentor because he cannot share the tormentor&#x27;s laughter at another&#x27;s terror.</summary><p class="sum">The narrator calls this the most wonderful of all fables; the demon, finishing, falls back into the tomb laughing and curses him because he cannot laugh too.</p></details><details><summary><b>222</b> · <i>The Pit and the Pendulum</i> — A prisoner hears the sentence of death passed by judges who show no pity, and feels every hope of help vanish.</summary><p class="sum">Sick after long torture, the narrator hears his death sentence from black-robed judges whose thin white lips shape his name; the candles turn from angels to spectres and he sinks into a swoon.</p></details><details><summary><b>228</b> · <i>The Pit and the Pendulum</i> — A prisoner in total darkness tries to take the measure of his prison, and collapses before he can finish.</summary><p class="sum">He finds a slimy stone wall and, his knife gone, marks his starting place with a strip torn from his robe to measure the cell, but falls exhausted and sleeps.</p></details><details><summary><b>229</b> · <i>The Pit and the Pendulum</i> — A captive finds that his jailers are keeping him alive, and keeps exploring his prison out of sheer curiosity.</summary><p class="sum">He wakes to find bread and water, completes the circuit to his rag, reckons the cell at fifty yards, then tries to cross it and trips on his torn hem.</p></details><details><summary><b>230</b> · <i>The Pit and the Pendulum</i> — A prisoner discovers by accident that one more step would have sent him into a deadly trap, and that he is watched.</summary><p class="sum">Fallen, he finds his face hanging over the edge of a deep pit; a stone he drops falls long before splashing, and a door opens and closes overhead.</p></details><details><summary><b>231</b> · <i>The Pit and the Pendulum</i> — A man who narrowly escapes the death planned for him is too broken now to face it or to end things himself.</summary><p class="sum">He realises the pit was the doom prepared for him, a death of moral horror for a man whose nerves had been destroyed; too cowardly now to end it, he creeps back to the wall.</p></details><details><summary><b>242</b> · <i>The Pit and the Pendulum</i> — A prisoner who has escaped one death realises he is being watched, and that his captors already have another ready.</summary><p class="sum">The pendulum is drawn up at once, showing he is watched; he notices the light comes from a gap around the walls, and the painted demons are glowing ever brighter.</p></details><details><summary><b>243</b> · <i>The Pit and the Pendulum</i> — A prisoner fleeing one horror towards the only refuge left looks into it and finds something even worse.</summary><p class="sum">The walls are heating; choking, he runs to the pit for coolness, sees something horrible in its depths, and shrieks and weeps.</p></details></section><section><h2>G16 · A sound in the night</h2>
<p class="pred">You are awake in the dark and hear something you cannot explain, and reasoning it away no longer works.</p>
<p class="meta">A person awake at night wants to be safe from whatever is making the sound. · 5 scenes from 3 stories
(The Fall of the House of Usher, The Premature Burial, The Tell-Tale Heart) · stage <b>high</b></p>
<h3>Options</h3><ol><li>Tell yourself it is nothing, and read on. <span class='src'>from scene 156</span><br><code>reason +</code> <code>nerve -</code></li><li>Get up and pace until it passes. <span class='src'>from scene 153</span><br><code>nerve +</code></li><li>Sit up and listen, without moving. <span class='src'>from scene 339 <span class="warn">(outside this group)</span></span><br><code>nerve -</code></li><li>Go and see what it is. <span class='src'>filled gap</span><br><code>nerve +</code> <code>flags.faced_fear set</code></li></ol>
<h3>Scenes</h3><details><summary><b>153</b> · <i>The Fall of the House of Usher</i> — A man lies awake in a strange house, hearing faint sounds he cannot place, and cannot reason himself out of dread.</summary><p class="sum">Seven or eight nights after the entombment, the narrator cannot sleep, fights a causeless terror, hears low sounds through the storm, and gets up and paces.</p></details><details><summary><b>156</b> · <i>The Fall of the House of Usher</i> — A man reading aloud hears a sound in the house that echoes exactly what he has just read, and tells himself he imagined it.</summary><p class="sum">As he reads of a knight breaking down a door, he seems to hear, far off in the house, the very sound of wood being ripped apart, and dismisses it.</p></details><details><summary><b>157</b> · <i>The Fall of the House of Usher</i> — A man hears, unmistakably this time, a sound in the house that should not be there, and no longer can dismiss it.</summary><p class="sum">Reading of the knight slaying a dragon with a horrid shriek, he now distinctly hears a distant screaming, grating sound.</p></details><details><summary><b>257</b> · <i>The Premature Burial</i> — A man so haunted by the fear of being buried alive that he dreads falling asleep is tormented by it in dreams.</summary><p class="sum">He became obsessed with premature burial and dreaded sleep; in one dream an icy hand wakes him in the dark, and a gibbering voice commands him to arise.</p></details><details><summary><b>340</b> · <i>The Tell-Tale Heart</i> — A man stands over his terrified victim, recognises the fear as his own, and pities him, yet goes on.</summary><p class="sum">He hears the old man&#x27;s groan of mortal terror, a sound he knows from his own nights, pities him while chuckling inside, and at last lets a thin ray fall on the eye.</p></details></section><section><h2>G17 · A place that works on you</h2>
<p class="pred">A place seems to be working on you, and the harder you reason against the feeling, the stronger it grows.</p>
<p class="meta">A newcomer to a place wants to shake off the feeling from the place itself. · 8 scenes from 4 stories
(A Descent into the Maelström, The Fall of the House of Usher, The Island of the Fay, The Pit and the Pendulum) · stage <b>high</b></p>
<h3>Options</h3><ol><li>Look at it from another angle to break the spell. <span class='src'>from scene 132</span><br><code>reason +</code> <code>nerve -</code></li><li>Examine it closely for plain causes. <span class='src'>from scene 136</span><br><code>reason +</code></li><li>Turn round and leave. <span class='src'>archetype</span><br><code>nerve -</code> <code>standing -</code></li><li>Go in anyway. <span class='src'>from scene 137</span><br><code>nerve +</code> <code>flags.entered set</code></li></ol>
<h3>Scenes</h3><details><summary><b>52</b> · <i>A Descent into the Maelström</i> — A visitor looks down on a desolate and threatening stretch of water and senses that something unnatural is at work there.</summary><p class="sum">The narrator looks out on a desolate black coast, bleak islands and a sea churning with strange cross-currents.</p></details><details><summary><b>132</b> · <i>The Fall of the House of Usher</i> — A visitor arriving at an old house is gripped by a dread he cannot explain, and reasoning it away only deepens it.</summary><p class="sum">Riding alone through dreary country on a dark autumn day, the narrator comes in sight of an ancient house and is overcome by a gloom he cannot explain, which deepens when he looks at its reflection in a black pool.</p></details><details><summary><b>135</b> · <i>The Fall of the House of Usher</i> — A visitor feels his own fear feeding on itself, until he half-believes the place itself is breathing something poisonous.</summary><p class="sum">Looking up from the pool, he fancies that the house and grounds give off an atmosphere of their own, a sluggish, leaden vapour from the decayed trees and still water.</p></details><details><summary><b>136</b> · <i>The Fall of the House of Usher</i> — A visitor notices that a house which looks whole is rotting from within, with a hairline crack running right through it.</summary><p class="sum">Examining the house, he finds it intact but fungus-covered and decaying stone by stone, with a barely perceptible crack running from roof to water.</p></details><details><summary><b>137</b> · <i>The Fall of the House of Usher</i> — A guest led through a gloomy house passes a household adviser whose shifty, uneasy look he cannot read.</summary><p class="sum">A silent valet leads him through dark passages where familiar things stir strange fancies; on the stair he meets the family physician, who looks cunning and perplexed.</p></details><details><summary><b>138</b> · <i>The Fall of the House of Usher</i> — A visitor enters a room so heavy with gloom that nothing in it seems to hold any life.</summary><p class="sum">He is shown into a vast, dim, comfortless room of scattered books and instruments that breathes an atmosphere of sorrow.</p></details><details><summary><b>201</b> · <i>The Island of the Fay</i> — A dreamer sees the other half of a lovely place sunk in gloom, and imagines it as a place where gentle things waste away.</summary><p class="sum">The island&#x27;s eastern end lies in deep shade, with mournful trees, grave-like mounds, and shadows he fancies are swallowed by the water; he imagines it the haunt of the last dying fairies.</p></details><details><summary><b>233</b> · <i>The Pit and the Pendulum</i> — A captive finally sees his prison for what it is, a place built to terrify, with the one trap in the centre.</summary><p class="sum">He sees the walls are iron plates painted with fiends and skeletons, blurred by damp, and the pit the only one in the stone floor.</p></details></section><section><h2>G18 · Your companion breaks</h2>
<p class="pred">At the worst moment the one person beside you breaks under the terror, and you must choose between saving them and yourself.</p>
<p class="meta">A survivor wants to live from a companion broken by fear. · 3 scenes from 2 stories
(A Descent into the Maelström, The Fall of the House of Usher) · stage <b>low</b></p>
<h3>Options</h3><ol><li>Give them what they are fighting you for. <span class='src'>from scene 69</span><br><code>relationships.companion +</code> <code>nerve +</code></li><li>Show them your plan and beg them to follow. <span class='src'>from scene 74</span><br><code>relationships.companion +</code></li><li>Leave them to their fate. <span class='src'>from scene 74</span><br><code>relationships.companion -</code> <code>flags.left_behind set</code></li><li>Shake them back to their senses. <span class='src'>from scene 159</span><br><code>nerve +</code> <code>relationships.companion risk</code></li></ol>
<h3>Scenes</h3><details><summary><b>69</b> · <i>A Descent into the Maelström</i> — A frightened relative, maddened by terror, tries to take the one hold that is keeping you alive.</summary><p class="sum">As they near the inner edge, his crazed brother tries to wrench his hands off the ring-bolt; the narrator yields it and moves to a water cask just as the boat plunges.</p></details><details><summary><b>74</b> · <i>A Descent into the Maelström</i> — A man who has found a way out cannot persuade a paralysed companion to follow, and must leave him behind.</summary><p class="sum">He signals his plan to his brother, who refuses to leave the ring-bolt; with a bitter struggle he abandons him, lashes himself to the cask and jumps overboard.</p></details><details><summary><b>159</b> · <i>The Fall of the House of Usher</i> — A man turns to a friend for help at the height of a terror and finds him beyond reach, murmuring to himself.</summary><p class="sum">A muffled metallic clang sounds; the narrator leaps up and finds his friend rigid, rocking, smiling sickly, and murmuring without seeing him.</p></details></section><section><h2>G19 · Going to the bad</h2>
<p class="pred">You can feel yourself turning into someone worse, and the people who depend on you feel it first.</p>
<p class="meta">A person going to the bad wants the next indulgence from those who depend on them. · 10 scenes from 2 stories
(The Black Cat, William Wilson) · stage <b>high</b></p>
<h3>Options</h3><ol><li>Drink to forget what you did last night. <span class='src'>from scene 118</span><br><code>money -</code> <code>relationships.household -</code></li><li>Pay for it by cheating people who trust you. <span class='src'>from scene 326</span><br><code>money +</code> <code>standing risk</code> <code>flags.cheat set</code></li><li>Throw yourself into the next revel. <span class='src'>from scene 322</span><br><code>money -</code> <code>standing +</code></li><li>Stop while you still can. <span class='src'>filled gap</span><br><code>standing +</code> <code>relationships.household +</code></li></ol>
<h3>Scenes</h3><details><summary><b>117</b> · <i>The Black Cat</i> — A man feels drink souring his temper, and watches himself turn cruel to those who depend on him most.</summary><p class="sum">The cat was his favourite, but drink changed his temper: he grew moody, abused his wife and his pets, and at last even the cat felt his ill-temper.</p></details><details><summary><b>118</b> · <i>The Black Cat</i> — A man in a drunken rage commits a cruelty that horrifies him when sober, and drinks again to forget it.</summary><p class="sum">Drunk one night, when the cat bites him in fright, he is seized by a demonic fury and cuts out one of its eyes; next morning his remorse is feeble, and he drowns it in drink.</p></details><details><summary><b>125</b> · <i>The Black Cat</i> — A man tormented beyond bearing lashes out in rage, and kills the person who tries to hold him back.</summary><p class="sum">His goodness gone, he vents his fury on his patient wife; in the cellar the cat trips him, he swings an axe at it, she stops his arm, and he buries the axe in her head.</p></details><details><summary><b>305</b> · <i>William Wilson</i> — A man near death wants others to believe his downfall was forced on him by something he could not resist.</summary><p class="sum">He will not recount his later crimes, only the single event that made him fall all at once from petty vice to monstrous evil; near death, he wants pity and to be thought a slave of fate.</p></details><details><summary><b>322</b> · <i>William Wilson</i> — A man who fled something he could not explain persuades himself it was imagination, and loses himself in dissipation.</summary><p class="sum">Months later, at a new school, he has laughed off his fright and plunges into reckless dissipation that washes away every serious memory.</p></details><details><summary><b>323</b> · <i>William Wilson</i> — A man at the height of a drunken revel is suddenly called away by someone who will not wait.</summary><p class="sum">After three years of vice, he holds an all-night carouse; at dawn, as he proposes a profane toast, a servant says someone urgently wants him in the hall.</p></details><details><summary><b>325</b> · <i>William Wilson</i> — A man shaken by a warning soon forgets it, and throws himself into even worse excesses with his family&#x27;s money.</summary><p class="sum">He cannot learn who the rival is or what he wants, only that he left the old school the day the narrator fled; soon he goes to a great university and outdoes all in extravagant vice.</p></details><details><summary><b>326</b> · <i>William Wilson</i> — A wealthy young man secretly cheats his friends, safe because no one would suspect someone so open-handed.</summary><p class="sum">He secretly becomes a card-sharp, cheating weak fellow students, protected by his reputation for generous, dashing folly.</p></details><details><summary><b>327</b> · <i>William Wilson</i> — A cheat carefully sets up a wealthy dupe, letting him win at first and arranging for the game to seem his idea.</summary><p class="sum">He marks a rich, dim young nobleman as his victim, lets him win at first, and arranges a party where the game seems to arise by chance.</p></details><details><summary><b>328</b> · <i>William Wilson</i> — A cheat finishes off his victim and learns too late that he has ruined him completely, in front of everyone.</summary><p class="sum">Late at night he draws the drunken nobleman into doubling the stakes and quadruples his debt; the victim turns deathly pale, and it emerges that he is utterly ruined.</p></details></section><section><h2>G20 · A love you are not free to have</h2>
<p class="pred">The one you love is bound to someone else or lost to death, and a promise still ties you to them.</p>
<p class="meta">A lover wants the one they cannot have from a love held by another, or by death. · 9 scenes from 2 stories
(The Assignation, Eleonora) · stage <b>high</b></p>
<h3>Options</h3><ol><li>Watch from hiding, and act when the moment comes. <span class='src'>from scene 208</span><br><code>relationships.beloved +</code> <code>standing risk</code></li><li>Make a secret appointment. <span class='src'>from scene 209</span><br><code>relationships.beloved +</code> <code>relationships.spouse -</code> <code>flags.secret_affair set</code></li><li>Swear never to love another. <span class='src'>from scene 365</span><br><code>relationships.beloved +</code> <code>flags.vow set</code></li><li>Break the vow and love again. <span class='src'>from scene 368 <span class="warn">(outside this group)</span></span><br><code>relationships.new_love +</code> <code>flags.broke_vow set</code></li><li>Keep the appointment, whatever it costs. <span class='src'>from scene 220</span><br><code>flags.fatal set</code> <code>standing -</code></li></ol>
<h3>Scenes</h3><details><summary><b>207</b> · <i>The Assignation</i> — A wife in the middle of a catastrophe looks not at her child but towards the hiding place of someone else.</summary><p class="sum">She stands barefoot and nearly unclothed, still as a statue, but her eyes are fixed not on the water but on a dark niche in the prison opposite her window.</p></details><details><summary><b>208</b> · <i>The Assignation</i> — A hidden admirer, watching a woman&#x27;s window, steps out at the moment of disaster and does what her husband would not.</summary><p class="sum">Her bored husband idly strums a guitar and gives directions; as hope fades, a cloaked man steps from the niche, dives in and brings up the living child, revealed as a famous young man.</p></details><details><summary><b>209</b> · <i>The Assignation</i> — A married woman, in the confusion after a rescue, secretly promises a meeting to the man who saved her child.</summary><p class="sum">Someone else carries the child inside; the mother blushes deeply, touches the rescuer&#x27;s hand as her husband turns away, and murmurs that he has conquered: they will meet an hour after sunrise.</p></details><details><summary><b>217</b> · <i>The Assignation</i> — A visitor finds a tear-stained poem that reveals his host&#x27;s lost love was married away to an older, wealthier man.</summary><p class="sum">In a book the narrator finds a tear-blotted page and a poem in his host&#x27;s hand lamenting a love carried off across the sea to a titled old man.</p></details><details><summary><b>218</b> · <i>The Assignation</i> — A visitor catches his host in a lie about his past, and learns the secret connection between him and a married woman.</summary><p class="sum">The poem is dated from the city where the lady lived before her marriage, though his host once denied ever going there; then the host unveils a full-length portrait of her.</p></details><details><summary><b>219</b> · <i>The Assignation</i> — A man gazes at the portrait of a woman he cannot have, then drinks deeply at the hour of their appointed meeting.</summary><p class="sum">The portrait shows her smiling with a trace of melancholy, pointing at a vase; the host, statue-still, then drinks goblet after goblet from vases like the one in the painting.</p></details><details><summary><b>220</b> · <i>The Assignation</i> — Two lovers kept apart by her marriage keep their secret appointment the only way left to them: by dying together.</summary><p class="sum">He says dreaming has been his life and he is departing for the land of real dreams, quotes a vow to meet his love in the valley of death, and collapses; a page bursts in crying that his mistress is poisoned.</p></details><details><summary><b>365</b> · <i>Eleonora</i> — A young man swears to a dying beloved that he will never love another, and calls down a curse if he does.</summary><p class="sum">Dying, she grieves only that he will leave the valley and love another; he vows before Heaven never to marry, calling down a terrible curse if he breaks the vow; comforted, she promises to watch over him, and dies.</p></details><details><summary><b>367</b> · <i>Eleonora</i> — A bereaved man is still visited by signs of the one he lost, but cannot bear the emptiness and leaves.</summary><p class="sum">She keeps her promise with perfume, sighs and once a spirit kiss, but the emptiness remains; at last the valley&#x27;s memories pain him and he leaves for the world.</p></details></section><section><h2>G21 · Someone you love fading into a stranger</h2>
<p class="pred">Someone you love is wasting away into a stranger, and you can neither stop it nor bear to watch.</p>
<p class="meta">A one who stays wants the person they knew back from a loved one who is fading. · 7 scenes from 3 stories
(The Fall of the House of Usher, Berenice, Eleonora) · stage <b>high</b></p>
<h3>Options</h3><ol><li>Promise them whatever will ease their end. <span class='src'>from scene 365 <span class="warn">(outside this group)</span></span><br><code>relationships.loved_one +</code> <code>flags.vow set</code></li><li>Marry them out of pity. <span class='src'>from scene 354</span><br><code>relationships.loved_one +</code> <code>standing risk</code></li><li>Stay, and watch every change. <span class='src'>from scene 348</span><br><code>nerve -</code> <code>relationships.loved_one +</code></li><li>Leave the place that reminds you. <span class='src'>from scene 367 <span class="warn">(outside this group)</span></span><br><code>relationships.loved_one -</code> <code>standing +</code></li></ol>
<h3>Scenes</h3><details><summary><b>142</b> · <i>The Fall of the House of Usher</i> — A man&#x27;s only remaining relative is dying of a strange wasting illness, and her death will leave him the last of his line.</summary><p class="sum">He admits his gloom comes partly from his twin sister&#x27;s wasting illness; she passes through the room unseeing, and that evening takes to her bed, not expected to be seen alive again.</p></details><details><summary><b>348</b> · <i>Berenice</i> — A man watches the lively companion of his youth transformed by illness until he no longer knows who she is.</summary><p class="sum">He and his cousin grew up together, he sickly and brooding, she lively and carefree; then a fatal disease swept over her, changing even her very identity until he knew her no longer.</p></details><details><summary><b>353</b> · <i>Berenice</i> — A man grieves normally for a loved one&#x27;s ruin, while his sick mind fixes instead on the changes in her body.</summary><p class="sum">His reason was shaken only by trifles; his cousin&#x27;s moral ruin grieved him normally, but his disease fastened on the startling changes in her body.</p></details><details><summary><b>354</b> · <i>Berenice</i> — A man who never loved someone proposes marriage out of pity, though her presence now makes him shudder.</summary><p class="sum">He never loved her in her beauty, seeing her only as an object of thought; now he shudders at her, yet out of pity he asks her to marry him, and one afternoon she appears before him in the library.</p></details><details><summary><b>355</b> · <i>Berenice</i> — A man looking at someone he has pledged to marry is seized by horror at one detail of her face.</summary><p class="sum">He stares at her wasted body, hollow temples and lifeless eyes; she smiles, slowly showing her teeth, which he wishes he had never seen.</p></details><details><summary><b>364</b> · <i>Eleonora</i> — A young woman in the first happiness of love becomes preoccupied with the certainty of her own early death.</summary><p class="sum">His innocent, guileless cousin speaks of their love openly, but one day speaks in tears of death, and thereafter dwells only on that theme.</p></details><details><summary><b>366</b> · <i>Eleonora</i> — A man left alone after a beloved&#x27;s death watches all the joy drain slowly out of the place they shared.</summary><p class="sum">After her death, he says, his sanity grows doubtful; over the years the valley&#x27;s flowers, birds, fish, music and golden cloud all fade and depart.</p></details></section><section><h2>G22 · A fortune everyone is watching</h2>
<p class="pred">You have come into more money than anyone can account for, and everyone is watching to see what you do.</p>
<p class="meta">A suddenly rich person wants to use it their own way from the watching world. · 5 scenes from 2 stories
(Von Kempelen and His Discovery, The Domain of Arnheim) · stage <b>low</b></p>
<h3>Options</h3><ol><li>Refuse to say where it came from. <span class='src'>from scene 81</span><br><code>standing -</code> <code>flags.suspected set</code></li><li>Hand part of it to your family. <span class='src'>from scene 268</span><br><code>money -</code> <code>relationships.family +</code></li><li>Put all of it into one private dream. <span class='src'>from scene 269 <span class="warn">(outside this group)</span></span><br><code>money -</code> <code>standing risk</code></li><li>Keep the secret of how until you choose to share it. <span class='src'>from scene 85</span><br><code>money +</code> <code>reason +</code></li></ol>
<h3>Scenes</h3><details><summary><b>81</b> · <i>Von Kempelen and His Discovery</i> — A poor man who suddenly has money he refuses to account for is suspected of crime and followed to his hiding place.</summary><p class="sum">Poor all his life, the discoverer was suspected of a forgery after buying property with money he would not explain; police followed him to a hidden garret and burst in.</p></details><details><summary><b>85</b> · <i>Von Kempelen and His Discovery</i> — A man holds a secret that could make him rich beyond measure, and the whole world is waiting for him to reveal it.</summary><p class="sum">After his partial confession and release, it is plain that he can make gold from lead, but no one knows how until he chooses to tell.</p></details><details><summary><b>86</b> · <i>Von Kempelen and His Discovery</i> — People who staked everything on the value of one thing learn that a stranger&#x27;s secret may make it worthless overnight.</summary><p class="sum">The narrator speculates that the discovery will make gold nearly worthless, dismaying emigrants to the goldfields, and notes that lead prices have already soared.</p></details><details><summary><b>267</b> · <i>The Domain of Arnheim</i> — A young man comes into a fortune so vast and sudden that it may change him, and many tried to stop it.</summary><p class="sum">Handsome, brilliant, well-born and married to a devoted wife, at twenty-one he inherits an ancestor&#x27;s fortune left to grow for a century, some four hundred and fifty million dollars, despite attempts to overturn the will.</p></details><details><summary><b>268</b> · <i>The Domain of Arnheim</i> — Someone who suddenly has more money than anyone can imagine is watched by everyone to see what he will do.</summary><p class="sum">Everyone speculates about how he will spend a sum so vast that ordinary extravagances, politics or charity seem too small; he gives his earlier fortune to his nearest relatives.</p></details></section><section><h2>G23 · Hidden in plain sight</h2>
<p class="pred">Something you must find has been hidden by someone cleverer than you, and all your careful searching has failed.</p>
<p class="meta">A searcher wants what was hidden from a cunning hider. · 14 scenes from 2 stories
(The Purloined Letter, Von Kempelen and His Discovery) · stage <b>middle</b></p>
<h3>Options</h3><ol><li>Search it all again, harder. <span class='src'>from scene 8</span><br><code>money -</code></li><li>Pay someone cleverer to find it. <span class='src'>from scene 10 <span class="warn">(outside this group)</span></span><br><code>money -</code> <code>relationships.adviser +</code></li><li>Think as the hider thinks, and look where it is too obvious to see. <span class='src'>from scene 19</span><br><code>reason +</code></li><li>Call on them with a pretext and look around. <span class='src'>from scene 20</span><br><code>reason +</code> <code>relationships.hider risk</code></li><li>Have them waylaid and searched. <span class='src'>from scene 5</span><br><code>standing risk</code> <code>relationships.hider -</code></li></ol>
<h3>Scenes</h3><details><summary><b>4</b> · <i>The Purloined Letter</i> — An official must recover a stolen paper from a powerful man&#x27;s house without ever letting that man suspect a search.</summary><p class="sum">The lady, desperate, has handed the recovery to the official, who must search the minister&#x27;s house without ever letting him suspect it.</p></details><details><summary><b>5</b> · <i>The Purloined Letter</i> — An official has searched a rival&#x27;s house by night for months, driven by honour and a huge reward, and found nothing.</summary><p class="sum">He has ransacked the house every night for three months, spurred by honour and an enormous reward, and has even had the thief waylaid and searched in the street.</p></details><details><summary><b>6</b> · <i>The Purloined Letter</i> — A searcher who has taken everything apart insists his methods cannot fail, and looks down on the man he is searching.</summary><p class="sum">The friend says the thief must have foreseen the waylaying; the official dismisses the thief as a poet and describes taking every piece of furniture apart.</p></details><details><summary><b>7</b> · <i>The Purloined Letter</i> — A searcher describes exhausting every conceivable hiding place with painstaking care, certain that nothing could have escaped him.</summary><p class="sum">The official describes examining every joint, mirror, bed and square inch of the house and its neighbours with a microscope.</p></details><details><summary><b>8</b> · <i>The Purloined Letter</i> — A searcher who has looked everywhere is told his only course is to look again, and knows it is hopeless.</summary><p class="sum">Even the books, carpets and cellars yielded nothing; the friend&#x27;s only advice is to search the whole house again.</p></details><details><summary><b>9</b> · <i>The Purloined Letter</i> — An official who has failed again admits he would pay a fortune out of his own pocket to anyone who could help.</summary><p class="sum">A month later the official admits the second search failed, that the reward has doubled, and that he would pay fifty thousand francs himself for the letter.</p></details><details><summary><b>11</b> · <i>The Purloined Letter</i> — A clever man tells his companion that diligent searchers failed only because their methods did not suit the case.</summary><p class="sum">Alone with the narrator, the friend begins explaining that the police are able and did their search perfectly, within its limits.</p></details><details><summary><b>14</b> · <i>The Purloined Letter</i> — Searchers fail because they only look where they themselves would hide a thing, and the one they seek thinks differently.</summary><p class="sum">The friend argues the police fail because they search only where they themselves would hide something, and underrated the thief as a mere poet.</p></details><details><summary><b>19</b> · <i>The Purloined Letter</i> — A reasoner concludes that the cleverest hiding place is in plain view, where no careful searcher would think to look.</summary><p class="sum">He explains that the largest names on a map go unnoticed, and concludes that the minister hid the letter by not hiding it at all.</p></details><details><summary><b>20</b> · <i>The Purloined Letter</i> — A man calls on a rival under a pretext, hiding his searching eyes, and spots what he came for in plain sight.</summary><p class="sum">Wearing green spectacles as an excuse, the friend calls on the minister, scans the room, and notices a soiled, torn letter stuffed carelessly in a card-rack.</p></details><details><summary><b>21</b> · <i>The Purloined Letter</i> — A searcher sees an object made to look worthless and recognises it precisely because of how carefully it was disguised.</summary><p class="sum">Though it looks nothing like the description, its dirt, its tears and its obvious place convince him it is the stolen letter, disguised.</p></details><details><summary><b>22</b> · <i>The Purloined Letter</i> — A man stages a disturbance outside so he can swap a rival&#x27;s prize for a fake while the rival looks away.</summary><p class="sum">He memorises the letter, leaves a snuff-box as an excuse to return, and next day, while the minister runs to the window at a gunshot outside, swaps it for a copy.</p></details><details><summary><b>83</b> · <i>Von Kempelen and His Discovery</i> — Searchers find something hidden under a suspect&#x27;s bed that they cannot shift, and badly misjudge what it is.</summary><p class="sum">Searching his bedroom, the officers find a trunk under the bed so heavy that three strong men cannot move it, full of what looks like old brass.</p></details><details><summary><b>84</b> · <i>Von Kempelen and His Discovery</i> — Men who hold a fortune in their hands carelessly dismiss it as junk, and learn their mistake only afterwards.</summary><p class="sum">They drag it out and cart the metal contemptuously to the police office, and the next day it proves to be purest gold.</p></details></section><section><h2>G24 · A world of your own</h2>
<p class="pred">You have the means to shut out the world and build a place entirely to your own design.</p>
<p class="meta">A dreamer with means wants a world of their own from the world outside. · 10 scenes from 3 stories
(The Island of the Fay, The Domain of Arnheim, Eleonora) · stage <b>middle</b></p>
<h3>Options</h3><ol><li>Go as far from everyone as you can. <span class='src'>from scene 279</span><br><code>relationships.outside -</code> <code>flags.withdrawn set</code></li><li>Stay near enough to come back when you choose. <span class='src'>from scene 279</span><br><code>relationships.outside +</code></li><li>Pour everything you have into it. <span class='src'>from scene 278</span><br><code>money -</code> <code>standing +</code></li><li>Share it with one person only. <span class='src'>from scene 361</span><br><code>relationships.companion +</code></li></ol>
<h3>Scenes</h3><details><summary><b>197</b> · <i>The Island of the Fay</i> — A solitary man insists that any human presence spoils a landscape, and would rather have nature entirely to himself.</summary><p class="sum">The narrator argues that music, and still more natural scenery, is best enjoyed alone, and that he sees the earth as one vast living, thinking being to which men are like parasites.</p></details><details><summary><b>199</b> · <i>The Island of the Fay</i> — A lone wanderer finds a hidden, dreamlike place far from anyone, and lies down to let it work on him.</summary><p class="sum">His solitary wanderings have given his thoughts a fantastic tinge; in a remote mountain region he comes upon a stream and an island, and lies down to half-dream as he watches.</p></details><details><summary><b>269</b> · <i>The Domain of Arnheim</i> — A man with limitless means gives up on changing the world and turns his wealth towards his own private purposes.</summary><p class="sum">The narrator is not surprised by his decision: having satisfied his conscience with private charity and having little faith in improving mankind, he is thrown back on himself.</p></details><details><summary><b>270</b> · <i>The Domain of Arnheim</i> — A man of great gifts chooses to pursue beauty for its own sake and turn his back on ambition and fame.</summary><p class="sum">A poet in the widest sense but with a materialist bent, he believes the true use of the poetic sentiment is creating new forms of physical beauty, and scorns ambition.</p></details><details><summary><b>278</b> · <i>The Domain of Arnheim</i> — A man pours his whole fortune into a single private vision and, unusually, finds the happiness he sought.</summary><p class="sum">He devotes his fortune to this vision, and in it, and in the love of his wife, finds exemption from ordinary cares and great happiness; the narrator despairs of describing it.</p></details><details><summary><b>279</b> · <i>The Domain of Arnheim</i> — A man seeking a retreat from the world rejects total isolation, wanting solitude he can leave when he chooses.</summary><p class="sum">He first considers remote Pacific islands, but rejects them: he wants the calm of solitude, not its gloom, and must be near a city; they search for years together for the right place.</p></details><details><summary><b>280</b> · <i>The Domain of Arnheim</i> — A man choosing where to spend his life rejects a grand view, wanting a place that feels enclosed and secluded.</summary><p class="sum">At a glorious mountain panorama he says grandeur of distance tires and depresses, and that the heart-sick avoid distant views; after four years they find the spot, since opened to visitors on his death.</p></details><details><summary><b>361</b> · <i>Eleonora</i> — Two young people grow up entirely alone in a hidden place, knowing nothing of the world outside.</summary><p class="sum">He and his cousin lived alone with her mother in a hidden valley of many-coloured grass, walled by mountains and untouched by strangers, crossed by a silent river.</p></details><details><summary><b>362</b> · <i>Eleonora</i> — Two young people shut away from the world see the beauty of their hidden home as proof that they are blessed.</summary><p class="sum">He describes the valley&#x27;s flowered grass and strange slanting trees, whose beauty spoke to them of the love and glory of God.</p></details><details><summary><b>363</b> · <i>Eleonora</i> — Two companions who grew up together fall in love, and their small enclosed world seems to transform around them.</summary><p class="sum">After fifteen years as companions, they fall in love one evening by the river; the valley blooms with new flowers, birds, fish and music, and a golden cloud shuts them in.</p></details></section>
<section><h2>Unassigned (116)</h2><p class="meta">Scenes that fit no situation recurring in two or more stories.</p><details><summary><b>0</b> · <i>The Purloined Letter</i> — An official out of his depth comes to a clever private acquaintance for advice on a matter he cannot solve himself.</summary><p class="sum">The narrator and his reasoning friend are sitting in the dark when the head of the police, an old acquaintance, arrives to consult them on troublesome official business.</p></details><details><summary><b>1</b> · <i>The Purloined Letter</i> — An official who must keep a matter secret or lose his post asks outsiders for help, then scoffs at their first hint.</summary><p class="sum">The official laughs at the friend&#x27;s hint that the matter may be too simple, and warns that he would lose his post if it were known he had confided in anyone.</p></details><details><summary><b>2</b> · <i>The Purloined Letter</i> — A person of high rank has lost a compromising paper to someone who now holds it over her as a weapon.</summary><p class="sum">He explains that a compromising document has been stolen from the royal apartments by a known man, who holds it as a weapon over the lady it belongs to.</p></details><details><summary><b>3</b> · <i>The Purloined Letter</i> — A woman watches a schemer pocket her compromising letter and cannot object without revealing it to the one she hides it from.</summary><p class="sum">The thief, a daring minister, took the letter from the table in front of the lady, who could not object without drawing the attention of the person she was hiding it from.</p></details><details><summary><b>10</b> · <i>The Purloined Letter</i> — An official who promised a fortune to anyone who could help is told to sign it over, and gets what he wanted at once.</summary><p class="sum">The friend tells him to write the cheque, then hands over the letter; the stunned official snatches it and rushes out without a word.</p></details><details><summary><b>15</b> · <i>The Purloined Letter</i> — A clever man insists that his opponent&#x27;s supposed weakness is really his strength, against what everyone else believes.</summary><p class="sum">The narrator objects that the thief is a mathematician, not a poet; the friend answers that he is both, and attacks the received view of mathematical reason.</p></details><details><summary><b>16</b> · <i>The Purloined Letter</i> — A reasoner attacks a respected habit of thought, warning that its followers will turn violent on anyone who questions it.</summary><p class="sum">The friend argues at length that mathematical truths do not hold in morals or motive, and that mathematicians will fight anyone who says so.</p></details><details><summary><b>18</b> · <i>The Purloined Letter</i> — A reasoner suggests that the most obvious things are exactly the ones careful people are least likely to notice.</summary><p class="sum">He argues that great minds, like large bodies, are slow to start, and asks the narrator which shop signs draw the eye.</p></details><details><summary><b>23</b> · <i>The Purloined Letter</i> — A man who pulled off a secret swap reveals that the commotion which covered it was his own doing.</summary><p class="sum">The man who fired the musket was paid by the friend; the narrator asks why he did not simply seize the letter and leave.</p></details><details><summary><b>27</b> · <i>The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade</i> — A young woman volunteers to marry a man who kills his brides, hoping to end it or die in the attempt.</summary><p class="sum">The vizier&#x27;s daughter resolves to end the killings or die trying, and marries the king against her father&#x27;s advice, knowing he means to keep his vow.</p></details><details><summary><b>31</b> · <i>The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade</i> — An old man grown restless at home slips away without telling his family, to go looking for adventure again.</summary><p class="sum">The king grunts his attention and she begins the sailor&#x27;s account of how, in old age, he left home secretly with his goods to seek new lands.</p></details><details><summary><b>32</b> · <i>The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade</i> — A traveller waiting on an empty shore sees something huge and unknown bearing down on him from far away.</summary><p class="sum">Waiting by the shore with a porter, the sailor hears a humming and sees a vast fiery monster racing towards them across the sea.</p></details><details><summary><b>33</b> · <i>The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade</i> — A traveller facing something he has no words for tries to describe it in terms of the only things he knows.</summary><p class="sum">The sailor describes the monster: black and solid as rock, belted in red, scaled beneath, with rows of protruding eyes.</p></details><details><summary><b>34</b> · <i>The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade</i> — A traveller watches a strange thing move with no means he can understand, and concludes it must be magic.</summary><p class="sum">He explains the beast moves with no visible fins or wings and breathes out noisily through holes near its tail.</p></details><details><summary><b>35</b> · <i>The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade</i> — A stranger sees people whose ordinary dress and customs look to him like painful bondage and absurd contraptions.</summary><p class="sum">On its back he sees man-like creatures in tight painful clothing, heavy boxes on their heads and stiff collars round their necks.</p></details><details><summary><b>36</b> · <i>The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade</i> — A traveller hailed in a tongue he cannot understand turns to a frightened companion, who explains it as the work of demons.</summary><p class="sum">The beast fires a gun with thunder and smoke; one creature shouts through a trumpet, and the terrified porter says the monster is a demon goaded by vermin.</p></details><details><summary><b>37</b> · <i>The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade</i> — A man captured by strangers he took for monsters sets about winning their leader&#x27;s favour and learning their tongue.</summary><p class="sum">The sailor runs, the porter escapes with his goods, and the sailor is caught and carried out to sea, where he wins over the creatures&#x27; leader and learns their language.</p></details><details><summary><b>48</b> · <i>The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade</i> — A storyteller pushes her listener one story too far, and he suddenly remembers the old sentence hanging over her.</summary><p class="sum">When she describes the women&#x27;s fashion for enormous bustles, the king declares he has had enough of her lies, remembers his vow, and orders her to be strangled.</p></details><details><summary><b>49</b> · <i>The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade</i> — A woman who talked too long accepts her death with composure, consoling herself that her judge is the real loser.</summary><p class="sum">She submits gracefully, consoling herself as she is strangled that her husband&#x27;s impatience has cost him the rest of the story.</p></details><details><summary><b>53</b> · <i>A Descent into the Maelström</i> — A visitor watches a calm stretch of water turn in minutes into a raging torrent, and realises what he has been brought to see.</summary><p class="sum">As the guide names the islands, a roar rises and the sea between the island and the coast breaks into a furious eastward torrent full of whirlpools.</p></details><details><summary><b>54</b> · <i>A Descent into the Maelström</i> — A man sees for himself a danger he had only read of, and finds it far worse than any account prepared him for.</summary><p class="sum">The small whirlpools merge into one vast funnel with shining black walls and a shrieking roar; the narrator throws himself down, knowing it is the great whirlpool.</p></details><details><summary><b>55</b> · <i>A Descent into the Maelström</i> — Someone who has seen a thing with his own eyes realises how little the careful accounts of others ever conveyed.</summary><p class="sum">The narrator reflects that no written account, including the most detailed one, conveys the horror of the whirlpool seen in a storm from the summit.</p></details><details><summary><b>56</b> · <i>A Descent into the Maelström</i> — A reader weighs an old report of a deadly place, full of drowned ships and animals, against what he now sees.</summary><p class="sum">He quotes an old account of the whirlpool: its roar, ships drawn down and broken, whales and a bear dragged under, trees thrown up shredded.</p></details><details><summary><b>57</b> · <i>A Descent into the Maelström</i> — An onlooker realises that tales he once thought exaggerated fall far short of the danger actually in front of him.</summary><p class="sum">He finds the account&#x27;s claims about depth naive, since any ship caught by the whirl would vanish as easily as a feather.</p></details><details><summary><b>58</b> · <i>A Descent into the Maelström</i> — A man who has lived through a thing nobody understands offers to tell a listener what the experts get wrong.</summary><p class="sum">The narrator finds the learned explanations of the whirlpool unconvincing in its presence; the guide leads him into shelter to tell his own story.</p></details><details><summary><b>59</b> · <i>A Descent into the Maelström</i> — A man and his brothers make a living by running a deadly risk every day that more careful rivals refuse to take.</summary><p class="sum">The guide tells how he and his two brothers alone fished the dangerous grounds by the whirlpool, risking their lives for catches the timid could never match.</p></details><details><summary><b>60</b> · <i>A Descent into the Maelström</i> — Men who make their living from a daily danger have learned its rules exactly, and have survived one close call already.</summary><p class="sum">They crossed only in the short slack between tides, with a sure wind, and once were stranded near starving for a week before a lucky current saved them.</p></details><details><summary><b>61</b> · <i>A Descent into the Maelström</i> — Men who gamble with their own lives but not their children&#x27;s set out on a fine day that no one could suspect.</summary><p class="sum">They kept their sons out of the danger; three years ago, on a day of bright weather, came the worst hurricane anyone had known.</p></details><details><summary><b>62</b> · <i>A Descent into the Maelström</i> — Men returning home on a routine run are caught by a sudden storm that nothing in their long experience foretold.</summary><p class="sum">Loaded with fish, they set off home in time for the slack, but an unusual wind headed them, a copper cloud rose, and in minutes the storm struck in total darkness.</p></details><details><summary><b>63</b> · <i>A Descent into the Maelström</i> — A man in a sudden catastrophe watches a brother swept away, and saves himself only by blind instinct.</summary><p class="sum">The masts go at once, taking the youngest brother; the narrator flattens himself on deck, clinging to a ring-bolt by instinct.</p></details><details><summary><b>76</b> · <i>Von Kempelen and His Discovery</i> — A commentator insists that a celebrated discovery was quietly borrowed from a dead man&#x27;s notes, and says he can prove it.</summary><p class="sum">The narrator, writing on a famous new discovery, insists it was not unforeseen: a dead chemist&#x27;s private diary had already hinted at it, and the discoverer surely borrowed the idea.</p></details><details><summary><b>77</b> · <i>Von Kempelen and His Discovery</i> — Someone claims to have found a fortune years before the man now famous for it, and the claim sounds too neat to trust.</summary><p class="sum">He dismisses a rival newspaper claim that another man made the discovery years earlier, since no real discoverer would have sat on such a prize.</p></details><details><summary><b>78</b> · <i>Von Kempelen and His Discovery</i> — A man&#x27;s private notes, which he wanted destroyed, have been published and may have handed a stranger his life&#x27;s secret.</summary><p class="sum">He argues the dead chemist&#x27;s diary was a private notebook he wanted burned, and that the discoverer and his friends will soon get rich from the hint it gave.</p></details><details><summary><b>79</b> · <i>Von Kempelen and His Discovery</i> — A commentator makes much of a brief acquaintance with a man who is suddenly famous, correcting the rumours about him.</summary><p class="sum">He corrects mistranslations in a published account of the discoverer, and notes that he himself once met this soon-to-be-famous man.</p></details><details><summary><b>80</b> · <i>Von Kempelen and His Discovery</i> — Someone who once spent a few hours with a now-famous stranger remembers nothing that hinted at the secret he carried.</summary><p class="sum">He describes the discoverer from a week&#x27;s acquaintance at a hotel years ago: short, stout, friendly, nothing like the misanthrope the papers claim.</p></details><details><summary><b>92</b> · <i>Mesmeric Revelation</i> — Someone at the edge of death speaks with strange authority about things no living person can check.</summary><p class="sum">He explains that God is an ultimate, unparticled matter that pervades and moves all things, and that thought is this matter in motion.</p></details><details><summary><b>93</b> · <i>Mesmeric Revelation</i> — A man in a trance insists on a view of the world that overturns everything his questioner has been taught.</summary><p class="sum">He argues that spirit is only matter too rare to perceive, and that what we call spirit is infinitely rarefied matter.</p></details><details><summary><b>94</b> · <i>Mesmeric Revelation</i> — A questioner raises his best objection to a startling claim, and is answered so easily that he grows uneasy.</summary><p class="sum">The questioner objects that such dense matter would stop the stars; the entranced man answers the objection easily, and the questioner asks whether it is irreverent.</p></details><details><summary><b>95</b> · <i>Mesmeric Revelation</i> — A man is confronted with his own earlier words, which he now denies, read back to him from notes.</summary><p class="sum">He explains that individual men are portions of the divine mind given bodies, then seems to deny what he said, until the questioner reads it back from his notes.</p></details><details><summary><b>96</b> · <i>Mesmeric Revelation</i> — A dying man describes death as a change rather than an ending, and says the living simply cannot perceive it.</summary><p class="sum">He explains that man will never be bodiless: death is a metamorphosis, like worm to butterfly, from a rudimental body to an ultimate one the senses cannot perceive.</p></details><details><summary><b>97</b> · <i>Mesmeric Revelation</i> — A dying man describes the freedom he expects after death, and calls the body a cage that holds us back.</summary><p class="sum">He explains that the ultimate body perceives the whole world directly, without organs, which are cages confining rudimental beings until fledged.</p></details><details><summary><b>98</b> · <i>Mesmeric Revelation</i> — A questioner presses a dying man to explain why suffering exists at all, and receives an answer that disturbs him.</summary><p class="sum">He says every star and planet is peopled by rudimental beings, and that bodies and pain exist so that the divine law can be broken.</p></details><details><summary><b>99</b> · <i>Mesmeric Revelation</i> — A dying man consoles himself that all his suffering on earth is the price of some greater happiness to come.</summary><p class="sum">He says pleasure is only the contrast of pain, so earthly suffering is the basis of heavenly bliss, and that to the angels space is solid and stars unreal.</p></details><details><summary><b>105</b> · <i>The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar</i> — Physicians give a dying man a precise hour of death and take their leave, while an experimenter asks them to return.</summary><p class="sum">The doctors explain the lungs are nearly destroyed and predict death at midnight the next day; they say farewell but agree to look in again.</p></details><details><summary><b>116</b> · <i>The Black Cat</i> — A gentle man with a loving home and a devoted companion has, as yet, no idea of what he will become.</summary><p class="sum">He recalls being a gentle, animal-loving boy; he married young a like-minded wife, and they kept many pets, among them a large, clever black cat she half-jokingly called a witch.</p></details><details><summary><b>131</b> · <i>The Fall of the House of Usher</i> — A heart so finely strung that the slightest touch sets it sounding cannot protect itself from anything around it.</summary><p class="sum">The story&#x27;s epigraph: a French couplet comparing the heart to a suspended lute that sounds the moment it is touched.</p></details><details><summary><b>134</b> · <i>The Fall of the House of Usher</i> — A visitor realises how little he knows of a friend whose family and home seem to have grown into one another.</summary><p class="sum">He reflects that he knew little of his reserved friend, except that the old family, famous for art and music, had never branched, so that the name and the house had become one.</p></details><details><summary><b>146</b> · <i>The Fall of the House of Usher</i> — A man tells, in the guise of a story, how a bright and ordered mind was overrun and left a ruin.</summary><p class="sum">The ballad tells of a radiant palace ruled by Thought, overthrown by evil things, where travellers now see monstrous forms and a hideous throng that laughs but never smiles.</p></details><details><summary><b>162</b> · <i>Silence — A Fable</i> — A listener is made to hear of a place of endless unrest, where nothing is ever still and there is no peace.</summary><p class="sum">A demon, hand on the narrator&#x27;s head, describes a desolate land by a sickly river where lilies sigh, trees rock without wind and clouds rush forever, a place of neither quiet nor silence.</p></details><details><summary><b>175</b> · <i>The Masque of the Red Death</i> — A leader&#x27;s angry command rings through a hushed room, and everyone waits to see who will obey.</summary><p class="sum">The prince, a bold man, speaks from the blue room, and at his gesture the music falls silent.</p></details><details><summary><b>187</b> · <i>The Imp of the Perverse</i> — A thinker insists that everyone has overlooked one basic human impulse, because none of them could see what it was for.</summary><p class="sum">The narrator argues that the phrenologists and moralists, by deducing man&#x27;s faculties from what they assumed God intended, have overlooked one basic impulse.</p></details><details><summary><b>188</b> · <i>The Imp of the Perverse</i> — A reasoner argues that people should be judged by what they actually do, not by what they are supposed to want.</summary><p class="sum">He says it would have been wiser to classify people by what they actually do than by what God supposedly meant them to do.</p></details><details><summary><b>196</b> · <i>The Island of the Fay</i> — Someone believes that every place has a spirit of its own, and that the living only disturb it.</summary><p class="sum">The story&#x27;s epigraph, a Latin line: no place is without its guardian spirit.</p></details><details><summary><b>198</b> · <i>The Island of the Fay</i> — A thinker scolds his own kind for their vanity in believing themselves more important than the world they live on.</summary><p class="sum">He argues that bulk matters to God, that life exists within life at every scale, and that man is madly proud to deny the earth a soul.</p></details><details><summary><b>200</b> · <i>The Island of the Fay</i> — A dreamer looking at a lovely secluded place notices that one half of it glows with life and joy.</summary><p class="sum">He describes the enclosed valley: a river seemingly without exit, a golden waterfall of sunset, and a small island whose western end glows with flowers, bright trees and butterflies.</p></details><details><summary><b>202</b> · <i>The Island of the Fay</i> — A watcher imagines a fragile creature losing a little of herself each time she passes from light into darkness.</summary><p class="sum">In the dusk he seems to see a fairy in a frail canoe glide from light into shade, joyful then sorrowful, her shadow falling from her into the black water, a year nearer death.</p></details><details><summary><b>203</b> · <i>The Island of the Fay</i> — A watcher sees something lovely grow fainter with every passing round until at last the darkness takes it entirely.</summary><p class="sum">She circles again and again, sadder and fainter each time, until with the sunset she drifts into the dark water and is seen no more.</p></details><details><summary><b>204</b> · <i>The Assignation</i> — A narrator defends the memory of a brilliant, doomed acquaintance whom others blamed for wasting his life on dreams.</summary><p class="sum">The narrator addresses the memory of an ill-fated, visionary young man, now dead, whom he defends against blame, and recalls meeting him at midnight under a Venetian bridge.</p></details><details><summary><b>205</b> · <i>The Assignation</i> — A man drifting home at night hears a woman&#x27;s scream and is carried helplessly towards some catastrophe.</summary><p class="sum">Returning home by gondola on a gloomy night, he hears a woman&#x27;s long shriek; his gondolier loses the oar, and they drift as torches flood the palace with light.</p></details><details><summary><b>206</b> · <i>The Assignation</i> — A young mother married to a much older, scheming husband watches helplessly as others search the water for her drowning child.</summary><p class="sum">A child has slipped from its mother&#x27;s arms into the canal; swimmers search in vain, and on the palace steps stands the child&#x27;s mother, the most admired beauty of the city and young wife of an old, scheming nobleman.</p></details><details><summary><b>210</b> · <i>The Assignation</i> — A man who has just made a desperate secret arrangement accepts a stranger&#x27;s help and hides his agitation.</summary><p class="sum">Left alone and shaking with agitation, the young man accepts the narrator&#x27;s gondola home and recovers his composure, speaking cordially of their slight acquaintance.</p></details><details><summary><b>211</b> · <i>The Assignation</i> — A narrator struggles to describe a man whose face shows every passion but keeps nothing once it has passed.</summary><p class="sum">The narrator describes the young man: slight but capable of great strength, with godlike features and a face that holds each passion only while it lasts and is instantly forgotten.</p></details><details><summary><b>215</b> · <i>The Assignation</i> — A host shows a guest his treasures with a feverish mix of scorn and enthusiasm that the guest cannot follow.</summary><p class="sum">He shows paintings and scorns famous sculptures, preferring lesser ones, in a mix of levity and solemnity.</p></details><details><summary><b>221</b> · <i>The Pit and the Pendulum</i> — A place once used for cruelty and killing is to be turned over to ordinary life once its tormentors are gone.</summary><p class="sum">The story&#x27;s epigraph: a Latin quatrain for a market to be built on the site of a revolutionary club, where an impious mob once fed on innocent blood and death now gives way to life.</p></details><details><summary><b>223</b> · <i>The Pit and the Pendulum</i> — A man who has come back from unconsciousness wonders what was happening to him while he seemed to be nowhere.</summary><p class="sum">He reflects that even in a swoon consciousness is not wholly lost, and that impressions from that gulf return unbidden to those who have fainted.</p></details><details><summary><b>224</b> · <i>The Pit and the Pendulum</i> — A prisoner half-remembers being carried endlessly downward by silent figures, and dreads what that memory means.</summary><p class="sum">He half-recalls being carried down and down in silence by tall figures, a horror at his heart&#x27;s stillness, then flatness and dampness.</p></details><details><summary><b>225</b> · <i>The Pit and the Pendulum</i> — A man comes to himself slowly, remembers his death sentence, and has no idea what was done with him since.</summary><p class="sum">Sensation, then thought and terror, return; he remembers the trial and sentence, but nothing of what followed.</p></details><details><summary><b>245</b> · <i>The Premature Burial</i> — A writer insists that the worst horrors are the ones endured by a single person alone, not by crowds together.</summary><p class="sum">The narrator argues that some themes are too horrible for fiction and are bearable only as fact, and that the worst suffering is borne by one person alone, not by crowds.</p></details><details><summary><b>246</b> · <i>The Premature Burial</i> — Someone becomes convinced that the line between living and dead is too vague to trust anyone to judge it.</summary><p class="sum">He declares burial alive the most terrible fate, and says it must often happen, since the line between life and death is vague and some diseases only suspend life.</p></details><details><summary><b>255</b> · <i>The Premature Burial</i> — A man with an illness that can make him look dead knows his life depends on others remembering it.</summary><p class="sum">He has suffered for years from catalepsy, trances that can last weeks and look exactly like death; sufferers are usually saved only because friends know their history.</p></details><details><summary><b>256</b> · <i>The Premature Burial</i> — A man who drops without warning into death-like trances never knows when he wakes where he is or what happened.</summary><p class="sum">His trances came sometimes gradually and sometimes as a sudden plunge into weeks of nothingness; even ordinary sleep left him confused and without memory for a while on waking.</p></details><details><summary><b>258</b> · <i>The Premature Burial</i> — A dreamer is shown the fate he fears most happening to countless others, and cannot look away.</summary><p class="sum">The voice, a pitying fiend, opens all the graves of mankind to show that many of the buried are not at rest but stir and struggle; the graves slam shut amid cries.</p></details><details><summary><b>263</b> · <i>The Premature Burial</i> — A man who was sure he had been buried alive discovers it was only his own fear and a cramped bed.</summary><p class="sum">It was a dream: he had slept in a narrow berth on a small boat carrying garden soil, his jaw bound with a handkerchief, and the sailors had woken him.</p></details><details><summary><b>264</b> · <i>The Premature Burial</i> — A man cured of a lifelong dread by facing its full horror once decides some fears must be let sleep.</summary><p class="sum">The horror cured him: he took to exercise and fresh air, burned his medical books, stopped thinking of death, and the catalepsy vanished with the fear; such terrors must be let sleep, or they devour us.</p></details><details><summary><b>265</b> · <i>The Domain of Arnheim</i> — A man blessed with every good fortune seems to prove that lasting happiness is possible, if only the rules are kept.</summary><p class="sum">After an epigraph on a garden like a sleeping lady, the narrator says his friend was borne through life on unbroken happiness, proof that a man can be happy under rare conditions.</p></details><details><summary><b>266</b> · <i>The Domain of Arnheim</i> — A fortunate young man sets out deliberate rules for being happy, knowing that great success often ruins people.</summary><p class="sum">His friend&#x27;s happiness was planned: he held four conditions of bliss, open-air exercise, the love of a woman, contempt of ambition, and an unending, spiritual object of pursuit.</p></details><details><summary><b>271</b> · <i>The Domain of Arnheim</i> — A man of wealth and taste settles on a lifelong project no one else thinks worthy of a serious artist.</summary><p class="sum">Loving music and poetry but choosing neither, he decides that landscape gardening is the greatest and most neglected field for the poet&#x27;s imagination.</p></details><details><summary><b>272</b> · <i>The Domain of Arnheim</i> — Two friends puzzle over why the natural world always seems to fall a little short of what an artist can imagine.</summary><p class="sum">He explains why nature&#x27;s landscapes can always be improved by an artist, though its details cannot, and why every true artist agrees on the correction.</p></details><details><summary><b>273</b> · <i>The Domain of Arnheim</i> — A dreamer wonders whether the flaws of the world were placed there because its people were made to die.</summary><p class="sum">He proposes that the earth&#x27;s disorder was prepared for man&#x27;s mortality, having first been designed for an immortal race.</p></details><details><summary><b>274</b> · <i>The Domain of Arnheim</i> — A man imagines unseen watchers for whom the world is arranged, and argues that we see only a part of it.</summary><p class="sum">He suggests that what looks disordered to us may look ordered to beings viewing it from afar, once human, now invisible, and quotes a writer on gardening.</p></details><details><summary><b>275</b> · <i>The Domain of Arnheim</i> — A man with a grand plan weighs a respected authority&#x27;s rules for his craft, preparing to reject them.</summary><p class="sum">The quoted writer describes the natural style, which avoids defects, and the artificial style, which shows human care and interest.</p></details><details><summary><b>276</b> · <i>The Domain of Arnheim</i> — A man of vision scorns cautious critics who can only say what to avoid, knowing they will praise his work once finished.</summary><p class="sum">The friend rejects recreating original beauty and scorns merely avoiding defects: rules govern only what refrains, and the doubters of genius applaud loudest once it succeeds.</p></details><details><summary><b>277</b> · <i>The Domain of Arnheim</i> — A man with unlimited means dreams of a work so grand it would seem made by something more than human.</summary><p class="sum">He proposes a landscape so vast and strange it seems tended by beings between man and God, a project only a poet with vast wealth could achieve.</p></details><details><summary><b>281</b> · <i>The Domain of Arnheim</i> — A traveller led by winding ways deeper and deeper into a secluded place loses all sense of direction and of the outside world.</summary><p class="sum">The approach is by river, from pastoral farmland into an ever narrower, winding, gloomy gorge of spotless moss and granite, so strange and clean that the visitor loses all sense of direction.</p></details><details><summary><b>282</b> · <i>The Domain of Arnheim</i> — A traveller emerging from gloom finds himself suddenly surrounded by a beauty so perfect it seems unreal.</summary><p class="sum">The boat emerges into a round, clear basin ringed with hills covered entirely in flowers, like a silent cascade of jewels.</p></details><details><summary><b>283</b> · <i>The Domain of Arnheim</i> — A visitor is left alone in a boat that moves by itself towards some unknown destination, and must trust it.</summary><p class="sum">Facing the setting sun, the visitor is transferred alone to a small ivory canoe with no oarsman, told the fates will care for him, and the canoe moves off by itself to unseen music.</p></details><details><summary><b>284</b> · <i>The Domain of Arnheim</i> — A traveller carried along without effort sees, behind a great wall, a guarded private domain he cannot yet enter.</summary><p class="sum">The canoe approaches a gate in the hills, between wild wooded mountains and a smooth emerald lawn backed by a vast ivy-covered wall.</p></details><details><summary><b>285</b> · <i>The Domain of Arnheim</i> — A traveller keeps expecting to arrive and keeps finding another turn, drawn further in each time.</summary><p class="sum">The seeming gate proves to be a bend; the canoe glides on into a winding channel still hemmed in by the wall and wild hills.</p></details><details><summary><b>286</b> · <i>The Domain of Arnheim</i> — A visitor finally passes through a golden gate into a private paradise built entirely by one man&#x27;s will.</summary><p class="sum">At last a gate of burnished gold opens, and the canoe descends into a vast amphitheatre of mountains, where the whole paradise appears: music, perfume, birds, flowers, and a floating fairy palace.</p></details><details><summary><b>287</b> · <i>Landor&#x27;s Cottage</i> — A modest companion piece is offered to set beside a grander account of the same dream.</summary><p class="sum">The story&#x27;s subtitle, announcing it as a companion piece to the story of the great landscape garden.</p></details><details><summary><b>288</b> · <i>Landor&#x27;s Cottage</i> — A traveller who has lost his way at dusk stumbles on a path so carefully kept that someone must be tending it.</summary><p class="sum">On a walking trip the narrator loses his way at dusk in misty, winding country, unconcerned, and comes upon a carriage track of velvety grass, cleared of every twig, its stones deliberately placed.</p></details><details><summary><b>289</b> · <i>Landor&#x27;s Cottage</i> — A lost traveller realises that the wild-looking country around him has been secretly shaped by a single careful hand.</summary><p class="sum">He sits and marvels that the lane is the work of an artist with a scrupulous eye, balancing neatness and wildness, then follows its winding course.</p></details><details><summary><b>290</b> · <i>Landor&#x27;s Cottage</i> — A traveller looking down into a hidden valley sees it revealed piece by piece, as if a curtain were rising.</summary><p class="sum">Hearing water, he sees a building in a misty valley below; as the fog lifts piece by piece and the sun breaks through a cleft, the whole valley appears like a stage scene.</p></details><details><summary><b>291</b> · <i>Landor&#x27;s Cottage</i> — An observer notices that everything in a secluded valley has been graded and arranged, down to the placing of each tree.</summary><p class="sum">He describes the small valley: a granite cliff to the north, gentler slopes to the south, trees graded from wild to gentle, and three great trees, the finest a vast flowering tulip-tree.</p></details><details><summary><b>292</b> · <i>Landor&#x27;s Cottage</i> — A traveller finds a hidden place so perfectly kept that he cannot imagine how anyone achieved it.</summary><p class="sum">The valley floor is carpeted with the same velvety, miraculously green grass, and he cannot conceive how such beauty was achieved.</p></details><details><summary><b>293</b> · <i>Landor&#x27;s Cottage</i> — An observer notices that even the water in a private valley has been guided along a course someone chose.</summary><p class="sum">A stream runs through the valley into a perfectly clear lake where fish seem to float in air, with a flowering island joined by a single-plank bridge, and spills over a cliff towards the great river.</p></details><details><summary><b>294</b> · <i>Landor&#x27;s Cottage</i> — A visitor sees that a place made to look natural is in fact tended down to its smallest detail, and guarded.</summary><p class="sum">If there is any fault it is excessive neatness; potted plants are buried to look wild, sheep, deer and ducks roam under a watchful mastiff, and ivy and vines hide the cliffs.</p></details><details><summary><b>295</b> · <i>Landor&#x27;s Cottage</i> — A visitor finds that a lovely valley has only one way in or out, and at its heart a house.</summary><p class="sum">A low wall and the cliffs enclose the domain, with a single gate the only way in or out; on a near-island in the brook stands a house of novel yet fitting design.</p></details><details><summary><b>296</b> · <i>Landor&#x27;s Cottage</i> — An observer sees that a humble house has been placed and shaped by someone with a painter&#x27;s eye.</summary><p class="sum">The cottage is utterly simple, its charm entirely in its composition, as if painted by a landscape artist; he will describe it from its best viewpoint.</p></details><details><summary><b>297</b> · <i>Landor&#x27;s Cottage</i> — An observer studies how a simple dwelling was built, looking for the secret of its effect.</summary><p class="sum">He describes the cottage&#x27;s modest proportions: a main building and two small wings, steep curved roofs forming porches, a tall striped chimney, lozenge-paned windows.</p></details><details><summary><b>298</b> · <i>Landor&#x27;s Cottage</i> — An observer notes that everything unsightly around a house has been hidden, and even its captive birds are made decorative.</summary><p class="sum">An outside staircase leads to a loft, stone slabs make paths through the turf, outhouses are hidden by trees, and a dead tree covered in blossom holds cages of songbirds.</p></details><details><summary><b>299</b> · <i>Landor&#x27;s Cottage</i> — An observer sees how a house has been made to melt into the garden around it, as if it had grown there.</summary><p class="sum">Jasmine and a rampant grape-vine climb the porch and roof; the grey shingles and pots of flowers melt into the greenery, best seen from the southern wall.</p></details><details><summary><b>300</b> · <i>Landor&#x27;s Cottage</i> — A lost stranger uses his situation as an excuse to enter a private place, and must first win over its guard.</summary><p class="sum">Having lost his road, he has an excuse to open the gate and ask the way; a huge mastiff bounds at him in silence but is won over by an offered hand.</p></details><details><summary><b>301</b> · <i>Landor&#x27;s Cottage</i> — A stranger at the door of a secluded house is welcomed by a woman whose unworldliness strikes him at once.</summary><p class="sum">A young woman of natural grace and unworldly, romantic eyes answers his knock and invites him in; he notes the vestibule and the study beyond.</p></details><details><summary><b>302</b> · <i>Landor&#x27;s Cottage</i> — A guest in a stranger&#x27;s house pays more attention to the rooms than to his host, trying to understand the mind behind them.</summary><p class="sum">He meets the owner, civil and cordial, but is more interested in the rooms: simple, graceful furniture and three fine lithographs, one of a beautiful, enigmatic face.</p></details><details><summary><b>303</b> · <i>Landor&#x27;s Cottage</i> — A visitor who has seen a remarkable private world leaves its maker&#x27;s story untold, for another time.</summary><p class="sum">Flowers are the only decoration; he says he means only to picture the house as he found it, and may tell another time how and why the owner made it.</p></details><details><summary><b>304</b> · <i>William Wilson</i> — A man whose name has become a byword for disgrace hides it even as he begins to tell his own story.</summary><p class="sum">After an epigraph about conscience as a spectre in one&#x27;s path, the narrator, hiding his real name because it is infamous throughout the world, laments himself as an outcast dead to honour and hope.</p></details><details><summary><b>306</b> · <i>William Wilson</i> — A wilful child whose weak parents cannot control him grows up used to having his own way in everything.</summary><p class="sum">From a family of excitable temperament, he grew wilful and ungoverned, and his weak parents let him rule the house; he recalls his first school in an old, dreamlike English village.</p></details><details><summary><b>307</b> · <i>William Wilson</i> — A boy is puzzled that the stern master who beats him on weekdays is a gentle-faced preacher in church.</summary><p class="sum">He lingers fondly on the prison-like walled school, and on the paradox of the principal, benign in the pulpit on Sunday and a stern tyrant with the cane at school.</p></details><details><summary><b>308</b> · <i>William Wilson</i> — A boy shut behind high walls for years finds every rare opening of the gate full of mystery.</summary><p class="sum">He recalls the massive spiked gate, opened only three times a week, the bare gravel playground, and the front garden entered only at arrivals and departures.</p></details><details><summary><b>309</b> · <i>William Wilson</i> — A boy lives for years in a building so confusing that he never learns his way around it.</summary><p class="sum">The old house was a maze of rooms and steps, so intricate that in five years he never learned exactly where his own dormitory lay.</p></details><details><summary><b>310</b> · <i>William Wilson</i> — A boy remembers the dread with which he and his fellows regarded the enclosure where their master sat.</summary><p class="sum">He describes the long, low schoolroom with the principal&#x27;s dreaded enclosure, the ushers&#x27; boxes, and endless carved, battered desks.</p></details><details><summary><b>311</b> · <i>William Wilson</i> — A man remembers the small world of his schooldays as more intense and vivid than anything that came after.</summary><p class="sum">Within those walls his childhood was intensely vivid; the school&#x27;s small routine was a whole world of passionate excitement that he remembers sharply.</p></details><details><summary><b>346</b> · <i>Berenice</i> — A man born into an old, strange family and house begins by saying that all his sorrow grew out of what was once joy.</summary><p class="sum">After an Arabic epigraph about visiting a beloved&#x27;s grave for relief, the narrator reflects that sorrow is born of joy, and introduces himself as heir to a gloomy ancestral house of a race of visionaries.</p></details><details><summary><b>347</b> · <i>Berenice</i> — A man who has lived his whole life in books and reverie finds the real world has become a dream to him.</summary><p class="sum">Born in the library where his mother died, he spent his boyhood in books and reverie, and by manhood the real world seemed a dream to him while his dreams became his only real life.</p></details><details><summary><b>357</b> · <i>Berenice</i> — A man lost in obsession for a day and a night learns that the person he fixated on has died suddenly.</summary><p class="sum">He sits motionless through a night and a day with the phantom of the teeth, until a weeping servant tells him his cousin died of a fit that morning and is ready for burial.</p></details></section>
</body></html>