Editing Game Log - Raphael (section)

==PROLOUGE: FROM THE GM==
(The year before the Pandemic began)

The shaggy man sat himself on a park bench in the fresh cool air of morning. The long bushy white hair might have been blond in his youth, or  brown, or red.    A long walking stick sits behind him on the bench.  A ragged looking large dog of some mongrel breed sleeps on his back below the bench, legs akimbo, showing that he is  without doubt an uncut male.  

Around him was the early bustle of a city in the desert filled with people of a familiar style; urban, technological, digital, and blissfully unaware at the dangers in the universe next door.  

A passerby sneered at his unkempt attire.  Uncertain if it was rags of a once proud uniform he kept his tongue.   
A woman with a child in a stroller and one on foot pass the ancient man without a second glance.  The walking child turned and stopped, looking at the man.    He hands her a twist of cord that she slips over her wrist absentmindedly.   Looking at the girl he sees down the paths of her life into tragedy and illness and crippling pain.  He nudges the cord to pulse on her wrist.  Looking down her life path he sees tragedy and a life of migraine headaches and drug abuse.  He pulses the cord again.  Her life path slips into frequent migraines, a series of cancers, and a fair career as a singer.  The cord pulses.  The life path includes occasional migraines, a bout of cancer that costs her a foot but also includes several happy children, a loving, if eccentric and occasionally unfaithful husband and a rich and famous singing career ending in a peaceful death surrounded by loving family, mourned by millions of fans.

"BETHANY!!!  Leave the bum alone and get back here."

The girl looks quizzically at shaggy man.  "Are you a bum?"

He smiles, "Trust not too much to appearances.  You will do well if you read a lot."

She feels the cord pulse.  He looks and her life includes migraines, family, fame, the eccentric unfaithful husband, and a lifelong obsession with reading she spreads to others through song and story.  He nods as the girl runs off to her mother, hiding the cord from her lest she have it taken away.

He withdraws an apple and chews it as people pass him, ignoring the old man.   As he gets up and walks on he spits the seeds casually, usually to the disgust of passersby and to the future annoyance of park gardeners who can't seem to dig the apple trees out, root or branch.  The shaggy man laughs as he thinks of the fruit trees he leaves everywhere he goes.  Knowing he can pass from plant to plant, world to world, through any plant he has spit out such ways.  

Stepping to a nook of bushes, he stands, looking around the park.  Some might think he urinates but they would be wrong.  When he leaves a small bronze gold replica of his foot is left behind.  Unnoticed by millions, and found by happenstance by one person who will soon tread paths they had never known before.