Everyone Sounds Like Someone

They all had the same mouth

You have talked to a lot of people in this world. Try to remember how any one of them sounded.

You probably can't, and it isn't your memory. Until now, everything the world knew about how a person spoke was two or three adjectives on a sheet — observant, patient, cautious — and it turned out nearly everyone had drawn from the same short list. Almost four in ten people you have ever met were some flavour of the same quiet, watchful, careful type. The barkeep, the courier, the priest, the smuggler. All of them measured. All of them thoughtful. All of them answering your question in the same well-composed paragraph and then waiting politely for the next one.

Nobody was ever short with you. Nobody rambled. Nobody was bad at talking.

Now they each have a voice

Every person in the world has been given one — not a mood, not a temperament, but the actual mechanics of how they speak. What their hands are doing while they talk. Whether they look at you. Which words their trade has worn into them. The tic you'd be able to imitate after five minutes in their company.

Four hundred and twenty-nine people were rewritten this way, and everyone born from here on gets it at creation.

What you'll actually notice

Some of them will not shut up. There is a harbour master who cannot answer a question without walking you through every ship he has ever seen with a similar problem, and he will keep going until you physically leave.

Some of them will barely talk to you at all. Three words is a long answer from certain people. Press them and you will not get more — you will get the same three words with less patience, and then their back.

Some of them are bad at it. Not everyone in this world is articulate. There are people who mangle their grammar, who use words slightly wrong, who lose the thread halfway through a sentence and never find it. They are not being mysterious. They are just not good at talking.

They will correct you. A guild scribe will interrupt to fix a distance you got wrong by two miles, apologise for interrupting, and then do it again.

And the world still narrates the way it always has. The prose around the dialogue hasn't changed. It's the people inside the quotation marks who stopped sounding like the same author.

You can read the file on anyone

There is a proper page for every person you have met now. Not the glance you get in the side panel — the whole record.

Their history at length, their bearing, what they want, what frightens them, and how they talk. What your character actually stands at with them: trust, respect, fear, and what each of those unlocks if you keep at it. What they remember of you, in their words, including the grudges. Their craft, their possessions, what they are known for, what is whispered about them, and the history of whatever changed them along the way.

What they are hiding stays hidden. Their secrets are not on the page, and they never will be — those are still yours to earn out of them.

And their purses aren't identical any more

A smaller thing, but it had been true of nearly everyone: whatever their station, whatever their trade, every single person in this world was carrying exactly fifty gold. The beggar on the dock and the caravan magnate had the same purse to the coin.

They don't any more. A magnate carries a magnate's money and a beggar carries almost nothing. Anyone you met before today still has the old flat purse until the world gets round to them.