I wish I could have seen Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812 on stage. It’s as close to opera as I will ever get to enjoying (I passed the absolute hell out when I saw Carmen on stage years ago). The underlying story is melodramatic and the crew revels in it rather than trying to mask it under bashful self-awareness. The only self-awareness in the show is in the opening song, and it is not bashful, but winking and cheeky and kind of a bop.

I will try my damnedest to keep the places we call sacred from becoming a complicated Russian novel, but we might end up in its zip code. While my aperture is set to only three people, they each have their own supporting cast and individual cities that they call sacred and countries that influenced them. I want to talk about the three pillars of the manuscript, but I can’t without going over the original serial numbers. You have to know where you came from to know where you’re going after all, so let’s get into it.

If Patho was a novel, it would most certainly be a complicated Russian one, replete with a map in the front cover, and a family tree cast list, plus some space for you to make your own notes and observations.

Patho gets complicated because it plays with perspective. This isn’t just through the three characters you have to chose your gameplay routes, but in the way it tells the story itself. This is brilliantly demonstrated in its opening. Your first action isn’t to select a character to play, but to watch a play yourself. You, as the person sitting at your computer, are watching the scene, and you, as the nondescript character who drives the camera, have to move in order to start the animation. You, this unknown, unnamed perspective, watches from the rafters three actors on a stage delivering monologues to an empty theater. You are watching through the perspective of a nondescript vessel watch the actors perform, describing their perspective of the problem facing them and its solution.

You learn the Bachelor is driven by reason (the head), the Haruspex by action (the hands), and the Changeling, well, by miracles (the heart). They can see the problem, but are unable to reach consensus on its solution. Once the scene is over then you are allowed the option to pick your route.

I’m also linking this phenomenal animatic by casper pham, which presents the monologues brilliantly.

The Bachelor arrives from the distant Capitol in search of an immortal man. He is—you are—the famed thanatologist, Daniil Dankovsky, on a quest to defeat death itself. To the unnamed powers that be, you are a figure of infamy, playing with the very fabric of life and reality; to the town, you are an outsider, a stranger, a menace. However, ironically, upon his arrival, the immortal man is dead and so is man who sent the invitation in the first place, Isidor Burakh, a local shaman. They might have succumbed to a plague and people are nervous. Over the course of the game, it will be Dankovsky’s goal to develop a vaccine and to preserve the healthy and the town’s miracles.

Dankovsky is portrayed by the game as clever, headstrong, and blunt to the point of rudeness but never abjectly cruel, though another character does call him the “prickly prick who will bury us all.” Fanon (canon as adopted by the fandom) interpretations tend to lean heavily into his “prickly prick”-ness, but he is kind to children and compassionate to the sick and really trying to help the town as best he can. He is also curious and takes interest in the Kin, as demonstrated through his desire to learn words and phrases in the language as well as the trust he gives to the Haruspex. His effectiveness is limited to the town’s general unease with him and his inability to navigate social mores.

The current two (one day inshallah, three) Patho sequels are a “soft reboot” of the franchise. Patho 2 is from the Haruspex’s perspective, and through his eyes, the Bachelor comes off as aggressively arrogant, but as the story progresses, you see him as way over his head and eventually as a key ally in fighting the disease. Patho 3: Quarantine is told from Dankovsky’s point of view, so you get to see his life before arriving to the town. You see his lab, his fellow researchers, the capitol itself, but most importantly, you are also given entry to his mind. You see that his appearance of cool competence is a facade for a raging battle between mania and apathy, demonstrating that his mind is as much of a foe as the town and as the plague itself is.

Like his canon counterpart, I wanted my Dankovsky to be motivated by The Future, so fixated on what was To Be that he couldn’t see What Has Been (there’s a coconut tree joke in here somewhere). His arrogance didn’t come from fame and notoriety, but instead, a facade to keep people away. He’s in a new place under less than desirable circumstances. If he’s an asshole, that means people won’t ask questions and if people don’t ask questions they can’t figure out what your story is and realize that you’re actually, fundamentally a piece of shit.

We first meet Dankovsky in the Prologue. He’s been mugged and has been informed of an inheritance by the family’s lawyer, his deceased father’s friend, Boris Sergeiivich (original character). Boris Sergeiivich advises Dankovsky to let a local man buy it from him, but Dankovsky wants an out. He needs to get out of St. Petersburg.

I don’t go deep into where that want comes from. There wasn’t space in the prologue without bogging down the conversation flow, and the rest of the story is told through Artemiy’s perspective. This isn’t a conversation that arises organically, so to the margins with ye.

But one thing that Dankovsky is running from is living under the shadow of an oxycodone addiction (this does come up in conversation). It’s a fanon detail (and somewhat confirmed in Quarantine) that I’m playing with. Since the game’s aesthetics draw from the late 19th/early 20th centuries, a man of Dankovsky’s station should realistically know what opium is and have a problem with it ala Sherlock Holmes.

Since you have to work a little harder than just getting some soda to develop a heroine addiction, I had to develop that why.

Now, again, the details don’t fit neatly into the fic, but you come to learn that Dankovksy’s father was an Afghanistan veteran, and his mother is Chechen, born and raised in the steppe after her grandfather’s village was exiled by Stalin. Circumstance drives the young couple and their son to St. Peterbsurg. Having no tools to handle or to even understand that trauma, Dankovsky’s life is loud, confusing, frustrating, and that’s before he comes to realize his queerness. Drugs make things easier.

It comes down to unresolved family trauma, war, and forces that wedge you from mainstream society—as it so often happens in these complicated Russian novels.

There were limitations to writing the fic entirely from one perspective, the blurring of motivations being one of them, but as an original manuscript, The Places We Call Sacred will be told from Artemiy’s, Lyosha’s, and Maksim’s perspectives. Motivations can’t be handwaved away like before. I’ve got to make it clear, connect the dots, and stick the landing.

I’ll be using K. M. Weiland’s character model to form the character. I first came across her craft books from YouTube channel Lessons Beyond the Screenplay (rip to a real one), and I really like her approach. She provides a little bit more stability than the usual Want vs. Need question gets you. Her method contains: the lie, the ghost, the want, the need, the truth—

In A Christmas Carol, Scrooge’s Lie is that a person’s value is only tied to how much money they have. The Thing He Wants is to make as much money at any cost, but the Thing He Needs is to remember that love is the true wealth. His (literal) Ghost is that he had a rotten childhood from a distant and cruel father.

Key elements from the fic will remain:

Using Weiland’s framework, Lyosha’s character arc starts to look like—

Lyosha’s story is about no longer running from something and instead running to something. It’s one of my favorite stories to tell. Artemiy will have a similar arc, though her deal is about accepting the past as something you can’t return to. And Maksim, the character I’m drawing the most from scratch, is about staking your claim to stay put, even though everyone is telling you to run.

Until next time. Take care of yourselves and each other,
Sarah K.