Episode 1: Locus
The adventure begins!
Get ready to enter a handpainted and live-animated Universe realised with Adobe Character Animator and Unreal Engine 5. Tales from the Fray is a live, episodic sci-fi show streamed on Twitch, where viewers interact with and help shape the stories that unfold.
Arii is the main character of the Tales from the Fray series. She is animated through a combination of motion capture, lip syncing and a lot of buttons! She is from an ancient race called the Ark'tor, who are the enigmatic guardians of the Fray. Ark'torii are created from the Fray; as life across the Universe interacts, the connections they make become so complex that life can emerge from their complexity. No Ark'torii look the same; their features are entirely emergent properties from life that already exists. The Ark'torii language also functions as their coordinate system, and their names describe their unique interaction with the Fray. Arii (the glyph tattooed on her face) means mirror/infinity, which are interchangeable concepts in the language of the Ark'tor.
The Fray is the underside of the Universe, which the Ark'tor refer to as the Tale. If the Universe is the tapestry, the Fray is the messy tangle of threads on the back; it shows you how everything is connecting in ways that are complex and unpredictable.
Everything we see in our side of the Universe is emergent from the Fray. Put simply, it is the chaotic threads that bind everyone and everthing, across space and time and before such concepts even existed.
The Nexus Machine is what the Ark'torii use to traverse the Fray. It uses an Entanglement Drive and impossible geometry to allow someone to move between connected parts of the Fray. At its heart are two doors which connect to the ends of a causally connected loop. Every journey has to be causally connected to the last.
Despite being a way to explore the Universe, the primary purpose of the Nexus Machine is to reinforce vital connections in the Fray and prevent any possible corruption by sufficiently advanced civilisations.
Arii lives in her Nexus Machine within the sprawling loops and tangles of the Fray. As one of the ancient Ark'tor, she protects the delicate causal connectons that make our Universe, our Tale, what it is. These causal threads can extend between things as small as two atoms that met during the Big Bang to two galaxies that that changed course because of their mutual gravitational pull. Our Universe is built on these chance connections, and even the most insignificant looking link in the Fray can have massive effects as our Tale unfolds.
Until now, Arii has explored the Fray and the Tale alone, not counting her friend Tangle (a little part of the Fray that came alive). The Tale is so full of life, and despite the Ark'tor being a myth of the ancient cosmos as the silent protectors of reality, Arii doesn't want to adventure alone anymore. Maybe it's been too long that the Ark'torii have kept their secrets, to the extent that they no longer even talk to each other (in theory to avoid creating networks between Ark'torii that could politicise their management of the Fray). It's time for change.
As the story unfolds, you can keep up-to-date on the latest updates here or the edited episodes of Tales from the Fray on the YouTube channel. For the full experience, where you can help shape the story, you can watch live on Twitch, where you can also find the stream schedule and see some behind-the-scenes development of Tales from the Fray. Every episode is made as we progress through the story, handpainted as layers with a wide range of media, and then reconstructed in Unreal Engine 5.
