The participants, George Fifield:

Deviant: 'The Possession of Christian Shaw'. Donna Leishman
This is a journey into a world with many parts. My first impressions concern the illustration, the narrative form and the structure of the piece.
The drawing is beautiful. It has many antecedents for me including American comic book artist Jim Woodring and French artist Mobius (Jean Giraud) in its fantastic elements. It is fragile (childlike) and frightening at the same time. The figures are preadolescent, with eyes like Margaret Keene paintings or many Japanese anime. Throughout this reading I will refer to them as men and women, but it's hard to escape the feeling that they are all children
 
The exploratory narrative is an expansion of Ms. Leishman's previous work. While the narrative unfolds over time, nevertheless it requires a constant effort on the part of the reader to keep it moving. The visual hints and the changes in landscape over time are the clues to this process. It is sometimes frustrating, though a general concept in this kind of mapping interaction is that the frustration of puzzle solving leads to even greater relief when new pathways and new chapters of the story are discovered.
 
The structure of the work is in three parts. There is the town where some clickable nodes change the landscape momentarily but most take us to certain chapters where exploration throughout the various elements makes changes that bring a completion. These different parts within each chapter, usually three or four are connected and often use transitions that appear more like camera pans to different parts of a larger landscape. The third part is the three books scattered through the chapters.
I've assigned numbers to the various 'chapters' only to aid me in understanding the narrative. They are not part of the work at all, merely my own personal bookmarks.
 
I begin. It starts with what looks like a bunch of grapes.
There is a town. It's lies between a hill and great blue backdrop. There are certain glowing or colorful parts that attract ones attention, the cross on a church, the ladder to a tree house, the radar dish on an building and the tonal sounds that emanates from the four building when the cursor is over it.
 
At first I just move the cursor without clicking. Trees grow. Traveling from the facade of one building to another can make music, of a sort. One tree grows so high little fruit can be seen and made to fall to the ground.
 
1.1 I click the tree house ladder first and the screen fades slightly and the tree monstrously grows and starts to envelop the nearest building. Actually I got stuck here through a number of visitations. I don't know why but it is only much later that I discover that the huge vegetable suitcase that engulfs the Blue Lagoon contains the heroine and her diary. This explains a great deal. Our heroine's name is Christian Shaw. Her diary, one of two in the piece explains much about her. In the tree with her is a digital clock that can go to Chapter 2.
 
1.2 Next I click the radar dish. This brings that building to the fore. Each window changes as I scroll over them. There is (what looks like) a video surveillance camera on the right that is clickable. About a third of the way down the windows, scrolling over them makes the building transparent (in two parts).
 
1.2.1 I click the video camera and up pops a slice of building with seven people computing on laptops sitting on the floor. Later I find another floor with one man, the boss, watching the others while little 'marbles?' keep dropping to the floor. The structure beneath him seems to part of a whole. At the lowest level it looks like a tank of sperm that rises up through pipes finely spilling out on the highest floor. Is this masturbation? I'm attracted to the glow of the digital clock.
 
1.3 The cross on the church brings me to a priest sitting at a desk. Drawers open and different things are revealed. I find a bible that tells the story of the priest and his concerns about hollowed out, contains a voodoo doll of our heroine. Other drawers contain little creatures and the voodoo doll again. The digital clock takes me to section 2.
Major transition.
That takes me back to the town that now contains numerous new elements. The old elements are now dead. There is something aside the church. The road glows when crossed over. A twig aside one building. There is something pudgy by the Blue Lagoon and a flower and a glowing pot on the foreground hill.
 
2.1 I choose the glowing pot and in a (box) frame is Christian looking at two flaming pots. There are two clickable x's on the ground. I like the way that the town lightens and darkens as I scroll outside the box. Two buildings, one square, one round, which both grow an extra floor with patience. One x.
Our friend the grapes, now upside down and looking more like a shrub. It writhes and undulates under my caress, very sensuous. I feel like I'm making love to it. Actually I should note that I'm doing this on a laptop and using a mouse pad, not a desktop mouse. The sensual aspects of that device are highlighted in this work. I feel like I'm rubbing my fingers physically over these plants and creatures. Mmmm. Another x, then just an x. At this point I see that the town outside the box is clickable also. I choose the x.
Back to the woman and the two fires. This time I choose the other x. An old woman (sort of wolf like), the woman from Christian's diary, is standing in front of an unseen fire. . At her back are flowers that can lose their petals. Two clicks take me back to the two fires, but now there is a flower there which spins as I caress it. Back to the old lady. I work to remove all the petals from her flowers. I feel I've found it all. I click on the town.
 
2.2 Now the flower on the hill interests me. In a little box I'm looking down on Christian lying in the grass. If I caress her she moves slightly in response. Two x's. I click one. There is a single flower that can lose it petals and an x. Then we see beautiful strange flowers with human faces and spinning gear like petals. Two more clicks take me to a sad fetus like creature that bounces out of the picture.
 
2.3 Back to town. I click on the pudgy shape near the Blue Lagoon. The box, which appears first, shows me the Christian lying on the pudgy shape that appears to have eyes that spin. The x leads me to garden of frog flowers (underneath our friend the shrub) which hop when touched. That x leads me to the strangest place so far, a grove of trees. As I caress them each tree splits and little pink homunculi climb out and run away. This continues for sometime until, most of the trees having split, I start to disappear them. Slowly I get results until only crossed pair of logs remain. There is another flower garden on this path that slow caressing grows pink flowers on. Back to town.
 
2.4 The twig by the office building takes me through two x's to our heroine. She is just standing and talking (no sound). Surprisingly I find I can strip her naked. She has lesions on her body and her right arm is in a cast. Then as I move about various monsters are standing next to her and touching her body (including the old lady). Creepy monster therapeutic massage or torture? I don't know. Is this the temptation of Saint Antonia? I feel complicitous. Its funny, but when the monsters are touching her I feel it must be painful but the old lady's touch seems that it might be therapeutic. The next click takes me to a marshmallow creature that bloodily splits open to reveal a fetus that come out and sits on the edge of the wound. Different times I come here there are different attendant plants. In the final space the two growing building from the flaming pot turn to five which grow with fires glowing in two of them while homunculi run away.
 
2.5 The object next to the church takes us to a three-figure chapter. Our heroine stands looking at flowers. The petals can be knocked off. At one point she throws up. The x takes us to the Marshmallow man who hides behind a tree and then we go to a little frightened monster that does a jig.
 
2.6 I choose the road. Our heroine stands next to a larger man, with their backs to me. They hold hands and start to walk. This is her father. I open the door. They are in a doctor's office and she throws up a steaming pit that falls to the floor. Clicking on it takes me to Chapter 3
Another major transition! All previous portals are gone and now four Christians are hiding ominously. The town is starting to look shabby; the Blue Lagoon sign is flattened. The top of the right hand building is cockeyed.
 
3.1 I pick the one at the far back by the purple wall. In this chapter there are three elements. The first is our heroine looking helplessly at her cast on the ground. When I click on it, it flies up and settles on her arm. The other two are trees that can be manipulated but not permanently. They also change at various visits.
 
3.2 Moving toward the front, I click on the woman beside the road. This chapter has three nodes. In the first our heroine is flying tethered to a string. I can make clouds pass by, as she seems to move forward. Next we find the string connected to creature. Manipulating the creature, which wriggles and cries, makes the string fall off. Next is a packet watch, hanging by a string, which spins and rings at 3. Our heroine is released and flying through the sky. What is the string on the watch attached to?
 
3.3 The chapter of the woman hiding in the trees is very simple. The woman is standing very close to us, swaying slowly. She pivots her Margaret Keene eyes around to stare at me. The other two link are the trees from the first chapter. Later as I come back to revisit this one they also sometimes become different vegetation.
 
3.4 The woman behind the front hill yields a chapter with only two nodes. In one our heroine stands in front of a plant. Playing with the plant makes musical sounds and causes it to blossom. BUT touching the women cause her to fall backward bent in half at the waist, contorted. It's quite awful to watch. The other is a repeat of the trees and the homunculi from 2.3
 
Now I'm stuck. There seem to be only the four women (nodes). As I return to them the frame concerning the woman is the same but the vegetation frames sometimes change. I know I missed two nodes; one in phase one (the cross) and one in phase two (the thing beside the church).
 
There is in adventure gaming narrative a penultimate moment of great frustration, before the final climax, when not all the clues have been found and one knows a couple of the hardest are unsolved. That may be unfair as this is a work of literature, not gaming, but I feel as if the solution/ending is beyond my grasp. I revisit all the points I know. I discover slight new variations on them and see slight variations in their structure. But I can make no further progress in the story.
 
Help arrives in an email from Donna. I click on the sky and the final chapter unfolds. The little house appears large and a great staircase comes down. A room creates itself and a tribunal of sorts is in session. The center of attention is Christian. The doctor is present. A patch of grass forms on the foreground hill. Clicking on that leads to grass and a plant growing from the bottom of the frame. Manipulating the plant causes further growth. Finally the workers from 1.2 appear along with the little frightened monster. They are seized (with my assistance) and thrown in jail. As I follow the trail of clickable clues, I find that I am judge and executioner; they burn in a frightening fashion. The tribunal leaves and Christian Shaw is left looking into the pit where she caused five people to die.
 
What follows is a simple panel. Four petals hold four possible Christians. The text explains the historical context and an interesting set of hypotheses.
 
I still have some questions. Does the voodoo doll mean the church is causing these horrors to happen? Also there are some beautiful elements on the Deviant sketches on the 6amhoover.com site, are these going to make it into the final design? The crossed logs in the flying forest (version 1) are burning there and just lying crossed here. The glowing cross in (the sketch) is a powerful image and should be used in the final version.
 
The story is of great. We feel know the heroine and something about her hallucinations. She has been through great pain. She has lesions on her arm and body. She vomits steaming objects. She seems to have enemies in the church who use magic against her. The story also seems rife with images of pregnancy. Creatures are encased in womb-like trees. The marshmallow creature carries a fetus and other fetus-like creatures abound. Then there is that sperm building in the first level. Is our heroine Hester Prynne or Saint Anthony hallucinating everything?
 
January, 2004.