Sometime around the turn of the millennium, I ran across a Twilight: 2000 fanfic novel titled Black Winter. At the time, my T2k fandom was largely dormant. Everyone in my usual gaming groups was invested in the World of Darkness scene, GDW wasn’t publishing anything for T2k, and I didn’t have anyone to play it with. I took note of the work, read it, and promptly lost track of it.
A few years later, when I got involved with the Twilight: 2013 project, I went back to look for it. Couldn’t find it – I hadn’t bookmarked the site, and every search turned up a dead link. I didn’t find it again until the summer of 2020, when a random synapse fired and my need to resolve the question led me to archive.org’s stored copy.
Today, while scrolling through Reddit over lunch, I found a thread in which someone was inquiring about Black Winter. By the time I got home and was able to start formulating an answer, the original poster had answered his own question and posted a link to a PDF of the story. I grabbed it because I’m a digital packrat, and that’s when I had a bit of cognitive dissonance and no small amount of resurgent guilt.
The archive.org copy was credited to an author whose identity I never knew, posting under the address cadillacofthesky@ntlworld.com. The PDF, however, bore a handle I didn’t think I’d see again: Twilight2000v3MM.
Twilight2000v3MM was the nom de net of Max “Moose” Messina. Max had been a fairly prolific writer in T2k fan spaces in the early 2000s, doing quite a bit of design work for a proposed third edition of the game. He was a natural fit for the Twilight: 2013 dev team, and his contributions were invaluable. I can’t recall ever being aware of his fanfiction work, though, only his game design pursuits. Until today, I didn’t know the novel was his. I feel like a shittier friend for not knowing that. I wish I’d had a chance to tell him that I’d enjoyed it.
Max passed away on 10 September 2020, reportedly from cardiac complications after a too-brief fight with pancreatic cancer. He left behind a wife and two sons. His final contribution to Twilight: 2000 was as one of the advance readers on The Pacific Northwest. His feedback was still in my inbox when we lost him.
His novel is preserved below.