Ruel

The operator of lore/vesper-node, and the least documented person here who nonetheless has a personality in the literature — which should be a warning and is usually taken as a portrait.

What is attested

He ran a node from 1988. He is named on its banner. He stopped appearing at the lore/the-meets after 1995 and stopped answering post in 1996. The node answered until August 2001 and its uptime counter incremented correctly for the entire period.

That is the list. Everything else is read off fifteen lines of banner text and the behaviour of an unattended machine.

The hand

lore/lineage draws two dotted edges from Ruel, both dated 1988, both carrying the lore/open-hand to the two boards. If those edges are solid then Ruel is the vector by which the tradition's central mark reached the generation that used it, which would make him structurally the most important person in the folder.

They are dotted for good reason. The mark appears at lore/nailhouse and lore/dead-letter within about a year of each other and Vesper is the nearest prior attestation, and that is the whole argument. It is proximity, not evidence.

The competing account — that both boards took it from the lore/fallow-ledger specimen card, lore/the-specimen-card, published 1988 — is at least as good and requires no unattested contact at all. It is less popular because it is less of a story.

The banner problem

The line everybody quotes —

if you are reading this the answer to your question is no

— is the basis for essentially the entire received character of the man: forbidding, weary, funny in a closed way. It has been read as a refusal of membership, of explanation, of contact, and once, at length and unconvincingly, as a statement about the Count.

It is also a line that was on a machine for thirteen years, at least six of them after its author had stopped participating in anything. Whatever mood produced it belonged to one afternoon in the late eighties. We have been reading a person's permanent character off a sentence he wrote once and never revised because he had stopped visiting.

This is the most reliable methodological lesson in the folder and it is routinely ignored, here included.

The 1996 stop

Post to Ruel goes unanswered from 1996. This is usually narrated alongside lore/sisken's 1994 absence as though the two are of a kind, and they are not.

Sisken failed to arrive somewhere he was expected. Ruel stopped replying, which is a thing people do for reasons that are nobody's business, and the only unusual feature is that his machine did not stop with him.

The node is the strange object here. The man is a man who lost interest, and the literature's reluctance to accept the dull reading of him is worth noticing in itself — see lore/after for what happened when people went looking.