"So James from Byron and Sons made me a proposition today," your brother Michael says. "A real hinky-ass proposition, but... I don't know. We might be desperate enough to take up hinky-ass propositions.
"Short of it is, they wanna cut the legs off corpses and give them to us so we could... process the meat and sell it in our shop. They figure that'd keep the town fed until spring when we can get back down the mountain.
"What do you think?"
[[What do //you// think of this idea?|What do you think?]]
[[Damn, that's genius!]]
[[Damn, that's ghoulish.]]"I think this proves everythin' I ever suspected about the Byrons. Whole family of morticians. It's creepy.
"All the same, I can't keep us stocked on hunting alone. The game are startin' to catch wise and it's gettin' harder to find anything. James ain't wrong that something needs to be done. I ain't entirely convinced it needs to be //this// but... well, it's more of an idea than anyone else has had.
"But they would want some of our personal meat stock in exchange, of course. They don't wanna be cannibals too. That's a bridge too far for them. But tricking the rest of the town into eatin' Grandma at her own wake? They're fine with that.
"Question is, are we?"
[[It's either this or let them kill and eat each other later on.|Yes]]
[[We //could// propose this to the town and see what they think.|Maybe]]
[[When it comes to that - and it will - they oughta be able to decide that for themselves.|No]]"I'll admit, it does have a crass sorta elegance to it. Long as they keep the bottom half of the casket closed and locked, won't no one be any the wiser. Still, it does put //us// in a dicey position, sellin' people their own dead to eat. On the other hand, though, people'll be eatin' each other anyway before spring. At least this way, they won't //know// they're cannibals and everyone stays fed and civil.
"But we'd know. We'd have to be okay with that.
"Are //you// okay with that?"
[[It's a burden we're gonna have to bear for them.|Yes]]
[[What if we called a town hall and asked everybody what they wanted to do?|Maybe]]
[[Nope. I can't have that on my conscience.|No]]"Oh, I know. I almost told James right off that he was fucked up for even suggestin' it. He's right though. At least in that we gotta do something or everyone's gonna starve before the frost lets up. 'Spose we can't be surprised a mortician comes up with idea like that.
"You want me to tell him no then?"
[[Yeah, I don't think we should get mixed up in a plot like that.|No]]
[[No, it's fucked up but I think we have to do it for the good of the town.|Yes]]
[[What if we called a town hall and let everyone vote on it?|Maybe]]"I don't like it, but you're right. It's better than waitin' for everyone to get hungry enough to take matters into their own hands.
"I'll let James know we're in."
[[Two months later...|Yes End]]"Yeah, you're right. It's grim, but we'll sleep better just lettin' the chips fall where they may. We can take care of ourselves if things get too wild.
"I'll tell James thanks but no fuckin' thanks tomorrow."
[[Two months later...|No End]]Things went well for a while. You rationed the "ground pork" so that everyone could get a little and the townspeople bought it.
Until one day, the town seamstress happened to visit unannounced and found Michael out back burning the unusable human feet. She screamed, dropped the scarves she knitted the two of you to thank you for saving the town, and ran away to tell everyone what you've been up to.
The townspeople converged on your butcher shop and slaughtered the both of you.
Ironically, if you hadn't kept them fed, you might have been able to fight them off.After a few more weeks, the townspeople started to get desperate. People started to disappear; their relatives claiming they had illnesses and were on bedrest and then claimed to have died quietly in bed. Arguments broke out and were settled with duels of varying degrees of rule adherance.
Curiously, despite all the death, the town stopped holding funerals in favor of memorials with no viewings. The Byrons were struggling and spoke of leaving town once the frost broke.
And your own sales were down too. It seemed you'd over-estimated the savagery with which the townspeople would eat each other; they surely were eating each other, but they were careful to keep it unsaid and out of sight.
Since eating one's dead was much cheaper than buying from your shop, you decide you'd better leave town too."I don't know. That sounds like a good way to get killed ourselves," Michael said. "And even if they don't kill us right then and there, it's definitely going to make them look at us differently. Do we really wanna be the ones who suggested goin' to the Donner party?"
[[Yeah, you're right. Telling them about it just puts us in the line of fire. We'll have to just be solely responsible for making that choice to save everyone.|Yes]]
[[They have a right to decide this for themselves.|Maybe Confirm]]
[[Yeah, that's a good point. If we're not brave enough to be the ones to suggest it, we shouldn't do it at all.|No]]You, your brother, and the Byrons called a town hall meeting and made your proposal. And the town was horrified by your suggestion. There were indeed calls for you to be executed for your heinous ideas and the crowd was getting pretty riled up when a loud, sharp whistle cut through the rabble.
Old Man Martins, the eldest man in town, had the floor.
"If I die this winter, and eating my legs would keep the rest of you alive, then have at it," he said. "I ain't even gonna be here so what do I care?"
There were affirmative murmurs around the hall as other elderly townspeople chimed in their agreement.
The younger townspeople were still skittish about it, but now it was a matter of honoring the wishes of the dead and so they had to seriously consider it. And unfortunately, the winter only grew more dire.
So as people died in the town, the living did eat them. To dull the guilt they felt, they held grand funerals for the dead in celebration of their sacrifice. You and your brother worked together with the Byrons to perfect new techniques to accomodate this tradition, ensuring that a viewing could still take place and the meat would be safe to eat and prepared attractively afterwards.
Eventually, eating their dead came to be part of the culture of the town, performed year round regardless of food stock. The townspeople thought of being eaten as a literal way of giving back to their community, an honor that they looked forward to."All right," Michael agreed, although he clearly didn't relish the decision. "We'll pose it to the town at large. But if they hang us for bein' creeps, I'm gonna tell you I told ya so."
[[The next day...|Maybe End]]"I love this btw, I think about it sometimes." - alexa
This game is inspired by a side quest in //We Happy Few//, "The Slaughterer's Apprentice". In it, you meet Reg Cutty, the town's butcher, who has started processing human corpses in order to continue providing meat to Wellington Wells which (unbeknowst to most citizens) is experiencing a famine. There is a brief dialogue exchange in it that I found very intriguing:
//Reg: The job we do is so very important to Wellington Wells. The fact is, we've run out of rats and ravens.
Arthur: Why don't you tell the Executive Committee? I'm sure they'd give you a medal.
Reg: That's just it! I don't think they would.//
But it gets blown by and the plot moves on to other things. The mission is about a lot of different topics and the story's about story about Arthur, who is not terribly interested in Reg's motivations. But that one line! I was like, " No, wait, let's go back to that. I want to talk about that!"
Originally, the game only had the two "bad" endings. I once interviewed for a narrative design job with Obsidian and their guys asked me what I would do if they asked for a third "less punishing" ending. Now //personally// I think all endings are rewards, but I recognize that a company's trying to sell fun experiences to people who maybe aren't pretentious so I added the third "good" ending.
The third ending is why alexa still thinks about this game from time to time. It based on this thing I heard somewhere, about some tribe that makes a jerky out of its dead that they eat whenever they miss that person.
The original idea I wanted to play with was just what sort of obligation does one have to their community and what might one do to fulfill it (even in the face of that community's outrage), but turning cannibalism into a sweet cultural ritual all fulla metaphors about sustenance and responsibility to one another? Yum!