The Scrolls of Alphalon
II
Scroll the Second
Word of a metallurgic wonder wended its way through the streets of Alphalon, and longer and longer (and longer) grew the radical empiricist's hours at the saloon, as did the list of questions on his considerable scroll, and in the offing, more scrolls were needed to complete his repertoire. Ever the businessman, he made an arrangement with the proprietor of the establishment to receive a portion of a cover charge on the busiest shifts, to pay for paper, wood, and ink.
Despite this, no man were a machine, in Alphalon. On his time off, the radical sent in his old pals from The Coin's inaugural piss-up, having trained them to conduct its performances without him. It'll be understating things to say it weren't hard for them to pick up, as they'd been half-in on the... shall we say, convenient nature of the rad empiricist's gambit from the start. The truth is, they took to the task like pigs to a trough, skipping nary a beat before chewing up and spitting out malcontents or making the odd crowd-pleasing... adjustment to The Coin's... position, if necessary, to clear the way for commerce.
The bar became famous for it, and soon, it were more than just the cover charges. Newly dubbed 'The Alchemist Maverick', he and his crew were getting a cut of the beer sales for their labour—not to mention free pints!
It weren't long before other nearby entertainment spots and watering holes showed an interest in booking 'The Alchemist Maverick' too, but an informal agreement with the original saloon owner stood in the way, and besides, there were only one 'The Coin' to go around. "To Rule Them All," the sidewalk placard said, and the man who'd paid for that advertisement and collected most of the profits did not see an angle in lending it out to other establishments.
It appeared then, for a time, as if the phenomenon would end there, as a "one-horse novelty act that might lend a bit of local colour to a tourist map" the way one jealous rival put it. The radical empiricist, however, had a different plan, and looking to see it through, he'd held some cards up his sleeve: more radical empiricists. The more and more radical, the better (and better).
Leaving his drinking mates in charge, to the bartender's dismay, the coinsmith returned to his old peripatetic stomping grounds from whence he recruited a team of six alchemists, swore them to secrecy, and commissioned the fashioning of six more coins from a 'refinement' of his trade-secret formula (the result of "ongoing etch testing", he claimed), while he himself continued to perform his 'novelty act' with The Ur-Mint, referring privately to his original coin that way to keep It elevated above the moulds and measures of 'The Coin' each of his six new apprentices were putting to the forge that week.
Six great unveilings of 'The Coin' then followed, staged by the original Coinsmith at the six new sporting pubs and corner saloons with which he'd made franchise deals in other boroughs, careful never to let the multiple existences of The Coin be advertised or seen together, as this would clash with the "Rule Them All" marketing that had first put the whole claptrap in the public eye.
After the first hour of every 'debut', the empiricist handed off scribe and master-of-ceremonies duties to one of the other alchemists from his inner circle, promising to return after he'd "carried the New Data message to the masses", and then he held high his own bundle of copied scrolls to general applause, as, without revealing The Ur-Mint still tucked away in a belt pouch, he departed, leaving them all believing that the jewel of the enterprise were what he'd left behind.
It were as if he'd placed the entirety of knowledge itself uniquely in their hands for safekeeping. And he did it six times, from borough to borough (to borough) over the course of four weekends. Each of his replacements were, naturally, 'The Alchemist Maverick' too. Needless to say, the fury of the proprietor of the original establishment, who had enjoyed a monopoly on the brand, were a sight to behold, when he'd got wind of the situation after his numbers had fallen due to other venues undercutting him on entry fees.
Though they came near to blows, the radical empiricist and his enabler instead came to terms, after the former had impressed upon the latter the likelihood that rapid growth of The Coin's base of 'users' would float all boats. Especially persuasive were the empiricist's offer of a period of exclusive rights, under a written contract this time, to a new application for token technology he and his team of alchemists had head-stormed up; that being: Scrolls Of Drinking.
The proprietor didn't fully grasp at first what the Coinsmith were getting at, even after he'd heard him getting at it for seven or eight more sentences. His assistant barkeep had always handled the menu designs and printing, and he hadn't seen a problem with the results.
"What if your customers just made their own?" the empiricist had whispered over the bar.
"What's that then?" the proprietor had barked, leaning in to collect a glass or throw a punch.
"Them asking questions," had come the whisper again, even quieter, "to become, in the proving, invested in the answers, like they do? Wouldn't it be their menu? Their prices? Wouldn't they be less like to complain?"
"That'd be nice," he'd admitted then, elbows planted.
"Guided by my or my fellow alchemists' expert hands--"
"Your hands. Not your fellows'," had he demanded.
"Oh I'll be there. But with a team, I can--"
"Fine, fine," he'd agreed, still not quite getting it.
"We'll go one test group at a time..."
"Like the first week!" he suddenly realised.
"That's it, exactly," said the radical empiricist.
This last assured the owner that his menu selections and prices could not escape gravity, just in case he did not fully believe in the authentic power of The Coin's augury, which the radical well knew were a definite possibility, given they'd both been present from its first flips.
So were the six lesser 'Mavericks' summoned and put to work beside the first, drawing up a series of yes/no questions that might, in some conceivable universe, 'prompt' a series of coin flips to generate a reasonable drinks menu with included pub grub and souvenir shop. It weren't easy, as it required restricting questions to a graduated system, for which nobody had yet established a standardised method, never mind one that could be suggested casually to thirsty patrons. Nor could questions be asked in such a way as to fix numbers absolutely. Prices had to be able to change based on fudge factors that needed to be considered in separate questions.
Wary of tipping off eavesdroppers among the late-shift crowd, the Coinsmith and his intrepid alchemy team retired to a backroom with seven pint glasses, a keg, and an assistant barkeep lured for 'consultations' with double-time pay.
It were turning into a costly proposition for the proprietor, but after a marathon effort, they delivered. Out they came with splitting headaches and a sprawling system of interlinked scrolls such that you could get to the 'right' price within the theoretically minimum number of questions, as determined by a suitable whitepaper published by three of the subordinate alchemists in tandem, with the original Maverick advising.
Etch testing concluded successfully, though the first session had to be interrupted because the available participants, too aware of The Coin's local mythology, tended to ask trick questions to try to 'spin The Coin' with. The radical empiricist brought in the next group from another city-state, promising free beer, and made sure they looked younger, dumber, and ready to rumble like the original crew. This new testing approach worked better (and better and better), and soon the prototypical Scrolls Of Drinking were stocked up with The Coin's vaunted price wisdom.
The tent-poled outdoor launch gala for the Scrolls Of Drinking were thrice the size any of the unveilings for 'the pretender coins' had been, the old saloon owner liked to say. It packed them in at the old saloon to the walls for the next three weeks. The menu scrolls were popular. They were extremely popular. They were the most popular bar sport since topless waitresses had swung upside-down from chandeliers, and if you purchased a copy of your favourite subscroll, 'The Management' would throw in a free wooden replica of The Coin crafted by 'participating artisans'. These were homeless believers who'd pitched tents in a neighbouring walkway and taken to hand-carving totems to The Coin's reputed magic in exchange for sandwiches and weak beer.
That were the first sign, perhaps, that fundamental change had begun crawling from its crib in Alphalon. It weren't the street supplicants, though, that got the other salooners' attention, but the assistant barkeep losing his job—his former employer preferring to tend bar personally most of the time, and wait staff always available to cover the rest. Without fresh menus to design and redesign (and re-redesign), and with alchemists handling scroll production themselves, the business case for employing an all-around dogsbody had all but evapourated.
Blinded by impatient greed to how many hours were still being billed by alchemists in backrooms to keep the new scroll prices reasonable, the other owners could only perceive that the busiest bar in town operated with one less regular employee than they did because it were better at being a clown show. This would never ever (never) do, a determination underlined by a series of anonymous threats and unusual 'accidents'.
While defensive of his proprietary interests, the original salooner weren't looking for a war. Settled, then, he did, for a hefty cut of a franchise fee on the new Scrolls Of Drinking. Soon all the bars had 'Coin-iterated' menus, and their assistant barkeeps were either fired or had to wait tables on the side.
Seeing this first expansion of his licensing set-up sweep the bar industry in a single weekend, the once part-time bartender figured he'd 'arrived' as a business mogul. But his ambitions had long since climbed with his fortunes, for not exactly everyone frequented saloons. In the big picture, his were a niche category, and he had lately got the idea in his head that, if he could replace his assistant barkeep, maybe he could replace his provisioning service, too.
After all, 'provisioning' essentially amounted to ordering from a menu, but between businesses. Though the number of variables affecting the price of beer were relatively few, the increase did not seem like an insurmountable obstacle, so he gathered up the seven Mavericks in one of his backrooms for a second think tank, only this time, he gave them two kegs and paid them all double-time, and it took them over twice as long. Out they came again with the headaches, but also the remarkable Scrolls Of Provisioning, to join the Scrolls Of Drinking which had made such a splash in the pubs of Alphalon.
Since this latest backroom enscrolment took aim at 'the backrooms' themselves, this were the one that made every other Alphalonian business that had ever bought or sold anything sit up and take notes (and notes and notes).
Everybody and their creditors were calculating how many employee job descriptions could be summed up as a linked list of context-driven yes/no questions, so they could be 'scrolled away', out-of-work provisioners among the commonfolk said.
But nobody heard, and no two moons passed before importers and exporters, along with their interconnected clientele, got in on the act, which were looking less like a parlour trick and more like an economic plan, and an extraordinarily competitive one at that, the thinking went.
The Coinsmith then sent his rad coterie stomping back to those old grounds to recruit more alchemists by touting all the opportunities in the air to infiltrate every business in the land like some new nervous system entwining itself around the veins and arteries of Alphalon.
As whole industries followed their dominant trading partners into adoption of The Coin on at least a trial basis, the scrolls did not take long, under the tutelage of the radical empiricists, to accumulate enough reasonable-sounding 'answers' about each new domain that corrections became scarce and disappeared in the popular imagination. The resulting rolling-pin-wound palimpsests engulfed the performance of many lower-level tasks, from field to field (to field) of erstwhile professionalism, like some species-wide brain-eating amoeba, and with no apparent end in sight to its growth.
Newspapers were unrelentingly abuzz with the phenomenon. A few even printed articles in question-and-answer format, aping the new 'empirical' brevity—not purely with 'yes' or 'no' answers but with short ones, in a kind of "cargo-cult veneration of The Coin's technology", as the self-elevated radicals snidely sniped with (or rather, as they snidely sniped with an equivalent Alphalonian idiom, for there had never been a 'cargo cult' among the uniformly advanced city-states of Alphalon, unless one counted the radical empiricists themselves).
It were at this time that the scrolls were first heard said to be a record of the knowledge of the cosmos which it were assembling for itself for mankind, meaning, some claimed, that the answers were chosen by God. The Coinsmith did nothing to discourage such talk as it invariably led to him raking it in, wealthwise, but it's a decision he may have lived to regret. After that hypothesis had spent a bit of time in the press, somebody got the idea into their heads to "get serious" about using "that infernal coin" to determine real answers, to the so-called 'cosmological' questions.
That somebody nailed a list of same to the door of the original saloon.
The questions were, quite naturally, since nobody would ask them in the course of business, not in the scrolls. To answer them would mean flipping 'bare metal', a progressively infrequent practice that hadn't been on the front pages in weeks, and thus an opportune time for a ceremony, followed by a banquet, and then an musical number accompanied by laser show, and at last, the long-awaited lit-up-seven-different-ways unveiling of a newly built 'superior knowledge chamber' surrounded by amphitheatre, all for that somebody who'd asked such well-timed questions to step inside and flip that infernal coin himself.
What it decided there likely changed the course of Alphalonian history.
"Is evil bad?" began that somebody to establish The Coin's basic ethic, or perhaps meaning to spin it.
"YES!" affirmed The Coin, its image projected and magnified with lenses onto a convex screen looking down onto the amphitheatre from directly overhead, like some flying saucer about to land, but it were affixed by darkened top-girders to riflemen's flag towers forming an octagon around the oval seating area.
"Is God good?" added that somebody, maybe trying to ask two 'cosmological' questions at once, and failing.
"NO!" denied The Coin, mischievously unmoved by the blasphemy in its bulging, saucered sheen.
"Is God evil?" is the question that followed, ushering in a rise of murmurs from the amphitheatre.
"NO!" flipped The Coin next, perhaps reconsidering its position. Or, perhaps not. Another fail.
"Is evil good?" came the next.
That one made it obvious—as clear as the air through which The Coin were flipping end over end (over end)—that somebody were trying to spin it.
"Asked and answered," interposed a referee, snatching The Coin right out of its 'thought' process.
"Since when?" said that special somebody, empty palm there, still upheld at the tossing pedestal.
"It's a paradox," offered the ref, which were just a cunning way of dodging both questions at once.
"Let The Coin say!" from the crowd yelled some other somebody, and it didn't matter which. All went wild.
"Uh," elucidated the shrinking ref through his mic into the echoey soundscape. "We do not dishonour The Coin by begging to approve contradiction."
"You let me ask if evil is bad. Isn't that a tautology?" asked that somebody again, and the ref had to skip a beat.
After a short, sharp argument, they agreed that The Coin's genuine aversion to contradiction would be tested before proceeding further, by giving it a single opportunity to gainsay an undeniable 'cosmological reality' in a way that had not yet been answered in the scrolls.
Everyone present in the 'superior knowledge chamber' and amphitheatre were well aware that this were not in the program, but rather an unpredictable event that might not get a chance to recur in their lifetimes, what with the numbers of scrolls and indices (of indices of indices) of scrolls that were already filling every shelf and reading room throughout the land. You couldn't have dropped a feather in that theatre without being shushed at that moment, as the empiricist referee and that certain somebody conferred in low tones, until...
"Is the sky blue?" were the test question they'd eventually settled upon.
"YES!" answered The Coin triumphantly.
And there were sighs of relief all around the amphitheatre, which is when a different somebody, a bolder, impish somebody, called out what would have been generally perceived in Alphalon as the most natural follow-up question, albeit one that they'd have never let cross their lips...
"Will the sun fall!"
A renewed hush gripped the auditorium, for this question had been secretly wondered at by all the children of Alphalon who'd ever been too afraid to ask. Atmospheric changes were impossible, every half-respectable adult agreed, and you'd get a scolding as a juvenile delinquent or some shunnable Laroquodling for suggesting, even in jest, the sun might "fall"—the only way Alphalonians knew to conceive of a sunset, if they so dared, never having seen one.
Thus were they all too eager to know what would be The Coin's reply to Alphalon's original forbidden question. Surely, they need not abjure 'flipping bare metal' for it, if numismatic technology were only going to answer the way the oft-claimed 'any reasonable person' would? And they had indeed come here for "cosmological questions" had they not? A commemorative booklet sitting right in their laps offered dozens and dozens (and dozens) of suggestions. This question weren't one of them, but the empiricist 'in charge' could hardly have denied The Coin a chance to weigh in on it, with so many watching.
In all further such 'superior knowledge' sessions, direct questions from the audience would be preemptively disallowed, but this first seating had not been so warned, nor had the live broadcast viewers, and there they all were, arrayed expectantly around the 'superior knowledge chamber', and across the city-states. There were nothing for it but to go ahead and ask:
"Will the sky or sun ever... fall?"
And that rad referee held The Coin up above his head for all to see, and then he whacked it himself onto the tossing pedestal just as the overhead screen lit up and in the orchestral pit there crashed a thunderous gong.
"NO!" concluded The Coin.
And everyone agreed this were the final answer.
"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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