Pailer Air

A project based on A Pail of Air by Fritz Leiber for the Short Story Worlds class I took at RISD.

Text Adventure Game

After the class concluded, I took the art and artifacts I created and made a Twine game. You can play it here! (Everything below could be considered a spoiler for the game, in case you want to play it first.)

Story Sequence

child with brown skin and short, curly brown hair in an old astronaut suit walks through a snow-covered abandoned city at night, with black sun blocking out half the stars, and three people with fancier space suits follow

a high-atmosphere space plane flies over an unilluminated Earth with the black sun blocking out stars in the background

three tall figures and one short one stand silouetted against the entrance of a domed building, with the light from within glowing blue

a woman with pale skin and short dark hair wearing futuristic formal robes stands at a podium in front of a crowd, gesturing at the child who is now wearing a long-sleeve t-shirt and jeans who is waving nervously

the woman and the child walk through a banyan forest with crops growing below the trees, illuminated by artificial lights above and next to the guard rails of a pit with exposed mechanics along the sides

the child falls into a pit with exposed wires and mechanics along the walls, and a blue glow coming from the bottom; the woman leans over the guard rails at the top of the pit and reaches over, trying too late to catch the child

the child falls into a tank of water that is glowing blue-green and contains a number of pipes entering a circular base - it's a nuclear fuel rod pool

the child stands dripping wet and eyes wide at the exit of a tunnel, with the glow of the pool coming from the other end of the tunnel, standing in a lab filled with super computer terminals, people wearing clean-room suits... and missiles

Ancillary Material

Map of the Los Alamos Compound

propoganda poster showing two people in space suits digging snow against a background full of stars except where the black sun blocks them out
Let's Conserve Oxygen / “Keep Los Alamos Breathing Easy” / Refrain From Excess Speaking - Laughing - Exercise

model with circular base that reveals clockwork mechanisms under a transparent floor, with paper people walking around, and a brass-colored semi-circular arc overhead has a light the moves along the arc
a close-up of the model taken at ground-level, showing the paper people walking around on the plaza
Model of the sun plaza from the Los Alamos Compound