Absolution
An Experiment in Immersive Storytelling
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Prologue

Late in December of 2016, I received a series of letters from my friend Zarina in the mail. She was out of town for family holiday things and had apparently sent it before hopping on a plane. Curious.

I opened it to find several printed screenshots of tweets from celebrities and an article from the New York Times.

Curious became odd, and so I politely texted her about it.

I love puzzles—it's kind of my thing. This one was a cryptographic one—definitely my thing. I had to find grammar mistakes, pull out information from the tweets around them, and then put it back together in a cryptographic puzzle. It culminated with discovering the secret name of someone, so I could banish him—a modern-day, Tweeted, Rumpelstiltskin. The journey from the piece of mail from Zarina to solving the final mystery was fun and totally unexpected. I needed a few hints along the way but eventually figured it out. Very clever, very entertaining. 

Handmade and hand-chosen gifts are the best kind, too. Some of my favorite gifts from people have cost little or no money. Real examples from around my house: handmade plushies, hand-drawn & painted kawaii artwork, an office nameplate that proudly declares my working title to be Epic Necromancer, a beautiful art print of a cat with a tail shaped like The Great Wave off Kanagawa, a hand-felted sleepy sun with a constellation cloak, and the list goes on. I also have a hand-crocheted voodoo doll Zarina made me—though I won't name who it's fashioned after.

As for the puzzle she created, I was inspired by it and wanted to gift her something back, something handmade, something...unique. Initially, I thought I might make a similar puzzle, but that wouldn't be unique, would it? After solving hers, my mind kept working on the idea, as it does, percolating on what I might create. The idea bubbled in the back of my brain, somewhere between conscious and unconscious thought.

The very end of 2016 rolled around, and the idea kept on percolating. I knew Zarina's birthday was coming up in February, so I didn't have long to settle on and do something. Then, one snowy afternoon, an idea came to me while rolling around on the floor with our old lady cat.

I snapped my fingers, catching my spouse, Tae's attention. "You know what would be...awesome?"

(If you've read Brandon Sanderson's The Stormlight Archive on audiobook, you better read that last sentence with Lift's voice via the fantastic narrator Kate Reading. I digress. Back to it.)

"You know what would be...awesome?!" I asked Tae. "Being inside a story!"

Tae raised an eyebrow. "Huh. That sounds cool. But—what? How would that even work?"

I thought about it a moment. "I have no idea, but Zarina's birthday is in like"—quick mental math—"two months. Uh, under two months. I want to write a horror story, make Zarina the main character, and play it out in real life. Immersive. Like she's in a book or an adventure game!"

Now, at this point, Tae and I both knew there was no turning back. I had an idea, and I had that look in my eye. I would take that idea and run with it, and come hell or high water—I'd make it happen, even if it was only through sheer force of will. It didn't matter that I didn't know what precisely the idea meant or how I'd accomplish it. One thing was for sure, though: it would be big.

You see, I have this little...quirk. I always go big—it's in my nature. I can't help it. When I decide on a path I want to take, I put everything into it. Work, hobbies, whatever. I knew this. Tae knew this.

I cleared the general idea with Zarina. After all, you can't do something big and insane that involves another person without first getting their consent. Lucky for me, Zarina is adventurous and trusts me.

And with that—I had just locked myself into an incredibly tight timeline with absolutely no idea what the hell I was going to do. My spouse, Tae, is my life partner; therefore, I knew she'd be up for helping. We work great together on everything, like coop dungeon crawlers; we even took on 5-player dungeons in our level range on World of Warcraft—with only the two of us. Of course, neither one of us knew just how hectic the time leading up to Zarina's birthday would be. The whole thing took a monumental effort to pull off.

The three of us, Zarina, Tae, and I, decided to share this story with the Internet several years ago. But, it was up to me to figure out how. Honestly, it took me a while. How do you retell an immersive story? It was hard enough to create and quite complex to pull it off. But, after reading a few books written in an unconventional format—and after finishing the first draft of my novel—I decided to give it a shot. Why not? I still haven't seen anything like it, and I'm working on the second draft of my book (editor mode), and I needed something to activate my writer mode.