The Scrolls of Alphalon
I
Scroll the First
Many worlds have I explored. Grail cosmologies have I sailed. In verses of multiverses have I shored. Never have I inhabited a universe containing a land so singularly prosperous and well-apportioned as ALPHALON upriver from where I were born. For Alphalon were a proper land. An enchanting land, a land where the sun were always shining and the weather were always perfect, and always had been, long as anyone could remember back to when record-keeping began, oh, some forty thousand moons prior—and never any other way would it be, the people said.
A predictable enough dogma, it were, I know, to have developed about such a land. Though some did question it from time to time (to time), they were suppressed as disruptive elements. Everyone everywhere did look every bit of wonderful, after all, and who should be allowed to spoil that kind of thing with criticism? Subversive thought could only be indulged clandestinely, among the hypervigilant Alphalonians of Alphalon. So did proceed the conduct of a set of meticulously documented secret balloon investigations casting doubt on the conventional wisdom that said any change in the atmosphere were impossible.
The 'Laroquod' experiments demonstrated in a controlled environment that, as you and I (and they) now know from experience, hot air ascends, and that if humid enough, it can rise into a local 'cloud' until it reaches a tipping point beyond which humidity is liquidated and plummets to the ground in some great deluge. You might call that 'rain', and open up a 'brolly', and move on. To the unweathered Alphalonian mind, it sounded like an inconceivably bad dream. It sounded like a ludicrous encounter with a comic terror. It sounded like you might get ambushed by a lake.
The prevailing 'scientific consensus' had always been that this kind of stratospheric collapse could only result in mass death-by-drowning, the absence of which in the limited fossil record indicated it had never happened, and so, never could. Skeptics, of course, resisted the assumption that absence of evidence amounted to evidence of absence, but the sheer incongruity of the notion "THE SKY COULD FALL", as tabloid headlines blared, had everyone dismissing the lot of them as irrelevant smartasses, and they were subsequently either fired altogether or never let out of their wee towers.
But the doubters did persevere, passing down illuminated manuscripts of the Laroquod experiments from generation to generation (to generation) in hidden rooms and caches. Again and again were they silenced by that class of social elites with their hands on the levers of government. Incremental advances were nevertheless made along Laroquodacious lines of inquiry by the scientists of the intellectual underground, until one of these, a radical empiricist (from a school founded, despite Laroquod having been a rationalist, on the principle "There is no truth but Data"), hit on a gambit that changed the world.
He didn't publish it. He didn't announce it. The radical empiricist showed up with it at a saloon, having decided on a lark to bring it. From a back pocket he fished it after his customarily florid self-introductions while ordering up some pints for himself and three chums. They were awestruck by it. The dimensions of it. The craftsmanship. Engraved on it on one side were the word "YES!" and they all agreed it were the perfect message, the most fit for purpose, with a minimalist-chic aesthetic that couldn't be more eloquent, until they saw on the opposing side the word "NO!" which they liked better.
Not just a coin were they gazing upon. It were The Coin. "To rule them all," the radical empiricist said, claiming he'd forged it himself, and this were likely true, for a smithy to aid in the study of alchemy did grace the numeral parlour of every Alphalonian empiricist of the era. This one grimly boasted he'd used his, along with deep dark arts about which he knew his listeners knew nothing, to imbue that very coin with a literal 'magic'—alas, no one ever claimed radicals made good empiricists except the radical empiricists—such that it could resolve all yes-or-no questions as well as any reasonable person would.
This plan earned a round of guffaws, especially after the bunch's drunkest man described it as a good idea given how rare a creature any reasonable man were and added it could clear up a few things. Anyway it hardly mattered, the man scoffed, because there's no such thing as magic, so it were no use following their tall-telling fellow mug-tilter any farther than the end of the bar. But the empiricist had set himself on "proving" otherwise.
"Give us a question to ask The Coin," he challenged the drunkest man with.
"You means as long's the answer's 'yes' or 'no'," clarified the drunkest man.
"Those be the building blocks of Data," intoned the empiricist, giving that final word its extra oomph.
"Built-in block m'arse," slurred the drunkest man. "Can ya tell a ale from a lager with 'yes' or a 'no'?"
Up went The Coin into the air, flipping and flashing 'YES', 'NO', 'YES', 'NO' near its apogee in the soft pub light. Having tossed it aloft, the radical empiricist then plucked it out of its downward trajectory and slammed it on the bartop, hard.
"YES!" declared The Coin, and everyone jumped in their seats.
A silence then overtook them as they considered that reply.
"I have a question," offered the second drunkest man.
"Save me a turn, too," threw in the third.
Still immersed in the trappings, at least, of doing genuine science, the radical empiricist bade them to wait. Solemn as a priest, he inscribed the first drunkard's question, followed by The Coin's inaugural answer and the date and time, onto a blank scroll he'd brought with him for this reason. When he gave them the signal, the drunks knocked heads leaping to be first to indulge in further inquiry.
"Why don't we go round-robin?" the empiricist archly suggested, and rubbing their noggins, they agreed.
Which are the right answers to inebriated questions is not reliably understood, so the next four ended up split between clearly correct and possibly correct, and this kept the gag alive a mite longer. All the while, dutifully if not soberly, the radical empiricist logged every question and answer on the scroll where he had gently draped it over the bar and let it sensuously unroll itself into a carpet at their feet.
"Shall we have another round?" said the second drunkest man, fading. He could see the third were catching up with him.
"NO!" The Coin hotly demurred, from where the empiricist had just delivered it to the bar in another post-throw smackdown.
Deflating, the unruly gang sank back down to become a row of patrons again, hunched on some stools, swivelling toward what remained of their beers. But they only pretended not to look as the empiricist noted down on the scroll, "Shall we have another round?" and when it came to writing in the answer, that radical, that shameless radical, aiming a measure of a glance at his mates, wrote "YES!" instead, and they raised an instantaneous cheer.
Four drained glasses and six coin tosses later—two correct, three possibles, and one that appeared to be a miss, but turned out after a short wrestling match to be not a real yes/no question—the third drunkest man suggested he were "just warming up now" and that it might be time to ask The Coin for further, ah, lubrication. It were a natural enough subject to come up twice, in a saloon, but the radical empiricist refused to flip for it, because, he said, the question had been asked and answered. And he indicated the relevant entry, seven lines upleaf, and there it were.
"Ask again," said the drunkest man. "Bet it goes YES!"
"I will take that action," cut in the second drunkest.
"You would lose," averred the radical. "There is one correct answer for each correctly phrased question. The Coin has spoken."
"But you reversed what it said."
"And you all cheered," he reminded them. "Look. This is a numismatics project, but it's also a work in progress. Right now it's in a stage we alchemists call 'etch testing'. That means it's ready to be used, but, y'know... there may still, y'know... need to be improvements. The purpose is to get feedback."
They snickered severally, half with him, half at him, but went half-wittedly ahead and bought him yet another round, and then couldn't resist coming up in the drinking with more queries for 'The Coin'. This antipattern continued until they were all too shitfaced to speak beyond the odd "Here's to frickin feedback!"
Well hungover, with the same coin and the same scroll at the (same) saloon, the radical empiricist presented himself for an encore after some shut-eye and a shave. The various pint clutchers arrayed around his impromptu coin act were more populous on this occasion, but also more subdued in the absence of his boisterous crew, who were probably still sleeping it off.
There is a decreasing limit to the variety of questions that will occur to a bar-fly after upending a few. Most had occurred a spin of the clock before, so the actual flipping of The Coin had already become a rarity by the alchemist's second visit, though it continued to be credited as the source of every answer.
By the time they'd all arrived at the crossroads question "Shall we have another round?" it were like a corner had been turned. The appropriate 'hurrahs' were given when the scroll reported "YES!" but something both quieter and more unsettling had taken root in the room: maybe a minor sense of bewilderment.
Never having witnessed how many of The Coin's perorations had been reversed early on, this crowd came readier to believe that the empiricist's rad scroll genuinely represented his token's collected wisdom, and once that new first impression had permeated the saloon, it became a social 'proof' of sorts and the belief just...stuck.
Even after seeing the coinsmith scribble down the opposing answer from the one The Coin had given: they believed. Even after hearing him explain away these kinds of flip flops as "an etch testing session": they believed.
They believed, because they didn't find it hard to believe, because they rarely felt a need to disbelieve it, because it were no longer consulted directly most of the time. The radical empiricist's new audience perceived these "little rug fixes" (as he liked to call them) as irrelevant. Without being told, onlookers just assumed the vast majority of the scroll had been legitimately derived from flips of this 'magic' coin. Where the previous players had seen a rip-snorter of a drinking game, this fresh cohort beheld a technological marvel. None of them knew a thing about alchemy.
"The Scrolls of Alphalon",
written by Powell Quesne
and published on the 26th day
of October in the year 2026.
[ Last edited 10/26/2026. ]
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