THE THINGS I GAVE YOU.
» THE BANK — INTRODUCTORY NOTES
District 2 is open, bringing with it access to new and interesting locations—including the city's main bank branch. The bank is a large building with a stone exterior, wrought iron grating on the windows, and large, heavy metal doors that take surprisingly little effort to open, their hinges silent and well-oiled.
Early in the day on July 19, characters in the vicinity of the bank will hear first a low, metallic creaking sound from inside the building, like metal straining against metal. This is followed by the sharper noise of locks disengaging, and then the large, heavy doors on the front of the building swing open slightly, enough to let a person through.
Directly inside the doors is the bank lobby, and beyond that is the main banking floor, with elegant marble flooring and dimly lit chandeliers. It would appear that this was once the main commercial bank of the city, although it is now completely empty, with no tellers behind the counters and no cash in any of the drawers.
You may rifle through the tills and filing cabinets to your heart's content, but similar to the files in City Hall, there is no useful information to be found—all the papers are blank, or are empty forms without any personally identifying information. There are no monetary devices to be found either; this is, after all, not a city that operates on a cash system, so there are no coins or paper bills in any of the tills or, indeed, anywhere within the bank.
What you might be able to find, though, is a rack of delicate, burnished brass keys on a wall toward the back of the main banking hall. Each of these keys is attached to a stamped metal keychain bearing a name on one side and a number on the other. Some of these may be names you recognize, and some of them may not, but they are all names belonging to current residents of the city, and each key corresponds to a safety deposit box within the vault at the back of the building. Can you remember what you stored in that box for safekeeping? Maybe you had better go find out.
At the back of the main banking hall is a vault secured with a large circular metal door. The door is currently unlocked and propped open; it can be closed, but cannot be locked (intentionally, anyway) from either the inside or the outside. The vault contains row upon row of safety deposit boxes, each locked. Participating characters who are in possession of a key can open their own safety deposit box, but it is not currently possible to force open any safety deposit box that does not belong to them. After August 1, players will be able to use their safety deposit boxes to store their own belongings, and break-ins will become possible with prior player permission and appropriate consequences.
Below sections detail the safety deposit boxes for both choose-your-own-adventure players and randomized players! Please see the randomized matches for this event HERE.
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IT'S TRUE, PEOPLE TAKE THINGS BUT RARELY.
» SAFETY DEPOSIT BOXES — A SELF-GUIDED TOUR
For some of you, getting into your safety deposit box is quite straightforward.
You take your key from the rack behind the teller's counter and make your way back through the building and into the vault. It's cool inside, the temperature well-regulated and the air dry. On the walls are rows upon rows of safety deposit boxes, and it may take you a moment to find the one that corresponds to the number stamped on your key. Does that number mean anything to you? It may, or it may not.
When you find your box, it takes very little effort to open it. A slide of your key, a quick turn, and the safety deposit box's door springs open to reveal the metal container within. You remove the metal box from the wall and bring it over to the table in the center of the room, clearly placed there for this express purpose. Maybe there are others around, or maybe you're alone. Do you remember yet, what it was you put in here? Well, there's no time like the present to check.
You open the safety deposit box to find—something that shouldn't be there. It's yours, that much you're sure of, but you didn't bring it with you to the city. You reach into the box to pick it up, and the surge of memory is immediate, sending your mind back to your strongest memory associated with the item in your hand.
Then the vault door swings shut, trapping you inside with whoever else has the misfortune of sharing the vault with you right now. No matter what force you try, the door won't open again. There doesn't appear to even be a mechanism that unlocks the door from the inside, and from within several feet of metal and stone, no one on the outside will be able to hear you shout. It seems hopeless—how long can anyone last, trapped in a place like this?
Should you turn back to the open safety deposit box, you might notice a slip of paper resting on the bottom. The paper looks aged, like it's been in the box for quite some time, and in printed text it reads: "Nothing is yours. It is to use. It is to share. If you will not share it, you cannot use it."
Maybe it means you should let another hold the item you've retrieved from the box… or maybe it means you should share the weight of memory. Try to interpret the meaning in whatever way you can. But should you decide to unburden yourself, and share with someone else the weight of the item you're holding in your hands, you may find that there's a means of escape after all.
Once you free yourself from the vault, for the next several days you find yourself feeling rather honest, like you may not be able to stop yourself from confessing the truth about the item you now carry…
Characters who wish to participate in the event, but who do not wish to randomize the contents of their safety deposit boxes, can open their safety deposit boxes to find an emotionally significant item belonging to the character—player's choice as to what the item is. The only guidelines are that it should be small enough to fit reasonably in a pocket and may not have any magical or weapon properties. Similarly, players are able to choose the memories associated with the items in the safety deposit boxes. The vault door will remain closed until the characters in the vault explain to each other the significance of their items and the memory associated with them, at which point it the vault mechanisms will disengage and the door will swing open as if it had never closed to begin with. However, for the four days following the event, characters who carry their safety deposit box item on their person will feel oddly compelled to tell other characters about its significance and meaning.
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A CRASH-SITE IS SACRED, WE'RE FAITHFUL.
» SAFETY DEPOSIT BOXES — A JOINT VENTURE
For others of you, the contents of the safety deposit box may be considerably more disconcerting.
You also take your safety deposit box key from the rack behind the bank teller's counter and make your way back through the building and into the vault. It's cool inside, the temperature well-regulated and the air dry. On the walls are rows upon rows of safety deposit boxes, and it may take you a moment to find the one that corresponds to the number stamped on your key. Does that number mean anything to you? It may, or it may not.
When you find your box, it takes very little effort to open it. A slide of your key, a quick turn, and the safety deposit box's door springs open to reveal the metal container within. You remove the metal box from the wall and bring it over to the table in the center of the room, clearly placed there for this express purpose. Maybe there are others around, or maybe you're alone. Do you remember yet, what it was you put in here? Well, there's no time like the present to check.
You open the safety deposit box to find—wait, what is that? It certainly doesn't belong to you. Tucked inside the safety deposit box alongside the item is a slip of paper with another name on it, as well as a cryptic message: "Nothing is yours. It is to use. It is to share. If you will not share it, you cannot use it." The item isn't yours, but it does appear to belong to another resident of the city. Maybe your safety deposit boxes somehow got mixed up? It seems like it would be a good idea to find this person and return their property to them.
Whether you encounter the owner of the item in the vault or elsewhere in the city, when it comes time to hand the item over, two things happen. One—the doors are locked tight, refusing to allow either you or the item's owner out until you both understand what the item is and what it means to the other. To unburden your heart is the only way to free yourself.
And two—as the owner of the item explains its significance, you find yourself oddly captivated, resonating strongly with whatever emotion the item's owner most closely associates with it. You may not be able to see the memory that the other person describes, but you can certainly feel the emotions they felt—after all, the easiest way to unburden oneself is to share the load with another. Isn't that right?
Once you free yourself from your enthralled state, and once you have your own belongings returned to you, for the next several days you find yourself feeling rather honest, like you may not be able to stop yourself from confessing the truth about the item you now carry…
Characters who opted to randomize the contents of their safety deposit box during the plotting post, or who plotted a joint experience with another character, will open their safety deposit boxes to find a small, non-magical but emotionally significant item belonging to another player character in the city. They will need to find the owner of that item and return it to them—this can either be inside the bank vault or in another location within the city. Regardless of where the meeting takes place, the character holding the item will find themselves unable to leave until the character who owns the item explains its significance; as they do, the holder of the item will find themselves swept up in the emotional highs and lows of the memories associated with that item, allowing them to share all of the feelings, regrets, joys, griefs, and rages that the owner experiences in the telling. Additionally, for the four days following the event, characters who carry their safety deposit box item on their person will feel oddly compelled to tell other characters about its significance and meaning.
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WILDCARD.
The city is by no means small, and there are plenty of things for you to see. There's no rush in exploring, so feel free to take your time looking around and peering into various nooks and crannies and alleyways—and don't worry, you're not very likely to find anything peering back.
If none of the above prompts appeal, feel free to check out the Locations and Maps pages and write your own freestyle prompt using one or many of the available locations.
This month's event headers come from "The Things" and "The Gatherer," two poems by Brendan Constantine. The text of the paper slip comes from Ursula K. LeGuin's The Dispossessed.
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citylogs2023-07-19 08:45 pm
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[ Especially when she briskly asks: ]
How long were you going to assume I couldn't cook?
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So when something is coming at his head at velocity, he immediately ducks. ]
Hey. C'mon, man. You're gonna put someone's eye out.
I just assumed you didn't know how. We never really cooked on Knowhere.
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[ Simultaneously the sound of someone who meant to make it hurt and also didn't mean to make it hurt all at once (she would have preferred the former). Clearly unphased by the potentiality of someone's eye getting poked out, someone should apologize but she won't.]
[ This is just Nebula. ]
You seriously think I'm going to eat whatever disaster Rocket's cooked up for five years?
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I mean, obviously not, but I'm pretty sure Drax had a stew he liked making. If you can stand your mouth being set on fire for, like, six years.
[ Peter glances back over his shoulder, spots the paper football – easy enough to do, considering how reflective it is – and plucks it up again to bring it back to the table. ]
You remember how to play?
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[ Maybe there's a reason they eat orloni. Maybe this is just shittalk. ]
[ Since he's not eating just yet, she'll just grab one of the skewers herself and take a bite of it. Watching him as she chews. It seems he's more interested in the stupid shiny football than she is, since he keeps trying to find it again. ]
I didn't forget.
[ With emphasis, like how can she forget? Her mind is half a computer. ]
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So when she eats without any seeming ill-effect (and without immediately spitting it out like unripe yaro root), he plucks a skewer up with one hand and tosses her the football with the other. He bites down on the meat to free up his hand, making a little field goal with his hands – thumbs touching, index fingers raised.
Around the food dangling from his mouth, ]
Prove it.
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[ Still chewing on the food as she catches it she scowls at him - like what's the point of this? Somewhere in the back of her mind there's a tiny voice, vaguely Stark-like, to have fun. Maybe they need some of that. ]
[ Thus, Nebula grunts as a response. Using her teeth to hold the skewer she moves to line up and take the shot - and she wasn't lying. She does know how to play. It's far from the perfect shot, but it doesn't miss either. ]
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She flicks the little football through the uprights, and he grins around the skewer. He moves out of the position, flicking the paper football back at her across the table to free up a hand. He takes off a bite of meat. ]
Good shot.
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I know what I'm doing.
[ Not because they spent a while playing and her learning until she got it just right. Knowing her at all and the perfectionism and what not being so meant, Peter probably could guess. But she doesn't linger as she shifts her own position, his going through. A moment, she chews on the meat and swallows before lining up for another shot. ]
[ As she flicks it across, it's met with a question: ]
How's it not broken?
[ The Walkman she means.]
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He unclips the Walkman from his belt, rests it on the table top. He pulls the headphones up and over his head, from where they've been hanging around his neck, and he leaves that, on the table, too.
With a thread of humor he doesn't really feel, ]
Fuck if I know.
Same reason why that— [ With a jerk of his chin toward the football ] —didn't get lost in the shuffle somewhere on the ship.
[ He takes another thoughtful bite as he regards the Walkman like it's liable to explode at any second. The weight was achingly familiar, and a cursory glance tells him the paint is worn away in the right places, the plastic scratched just so. It looks right, for all that his every instinct is screaming that it can't be. ]
Ego crushed it. [ And time and distance from the inciting event means that Peter can speak about it without having to pause from some rush of ugly emotion. ] It should be imploded into microscopic dust like the rest of that dickbag, but here it is.
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So two things that by all accounts should be destroyed.
[ For a moment, she wonders if reaching out to Gamora is worth it - ask what she's received. Rather or not she obtained something already, they all had something there. ]
To share.
Why?
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Granted, the motivations had been different – mostly, his immediate instinct had been to turn to Gamora and flip out. To vacillate wildly between crowing with excitement and falling into a dark, pensive hole as they hashed out the whys and hows – what made this possible, what it was their captors were looking to gain. All the smart things that Gamora would want him to examine before he let himself be too thrilled.
And to be fair, Nebula's doing the same thing, in her own way, but they don't have the shared history. She doesn't know Awesome Mix Vol. 1 nearly as intimately as the other Guardians do – having the misfortune of not being around when he blared it over the ship's speakers at all hours of the day – which means that she only has an academic sense for how much this fucking means to him. ]
On its surface, it looks like they're trying to get us to play nice.
Otherwise? Maybe it's a bribe. Or maybe it's a way to freak everyone out, let everyone know how much dirt they have on us.
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[ Not the clear delivery of items from the past. Especially not one that's clearly been made intent to both relive it and share it. The second part more than the latter was worrying. If they could do this much, that means they have more control over them than already imagined. ]
Why bribe people they already have at their disposal? Clearly, they don't need it. At this rate, it's only so long before they start using that fact against each other.
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[ He scoffs quietly, picking up the Walkman and turning it over in his hands. ]
But, yeah. I'm not really liking the idea that they're flaunting that they apparently know this much about us.
[ Not that it was any big secret how much his Walkman meant to him. His willingness to put his life on the line for it was clearly documented. ]
So we're banking on threat, then?
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[ Her specifically. Maybe her understanding of the Walkman is a little more clinical, but anyone in the Guardians knows how Peter feels about losing people at this point. Maybe her more, in different ways, since his drunken stupor in the Boot the other day wasn't the first time. That, and if he's in a mood, he tends to repeat-play the same songs until they all want to rip apart the music player. ]
[ She has no doubts that unless given more reason, Peter won't want to part with his own. He puts more emphasis on the objects because of that, she thinks, and while those moments on that ship were critical. The representation of the stupid object important, she could throw it away with only minor regret. ]
Was there ever any doubt it was a threat?
[ A threat that looms more each day, ] Someone suggested that the city shapes itself to whatever we deem is normal. What if it's the more it gets to know us? The longer we're here.
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[ He's joking, and he quickly holds up a hand as if to stave off any criticism. He's doing better about his drinking, these days; he'll indulge in a few drinks, here and there, but even with as catastrophic as his reunion with Gamora had been, even with how shitty this whole situation is, he hasn't really gone beyond maybe a bottle of beer or two.
He remembers well the regret he'd feel the next day, and remembers even more how shitty he had felt when he realized he hadn't acted fast enough to prevent all the damage Adam had done to Rocket. So consider his lesson learned. ]
I dunno what the hell we're supposed to do about it. They already got us. They already know our histories. It's not as though I've got any defenses against, like, psychic assault. Maybe you do, though. I don't know.
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Clearly not.
[ Said with a half shake of her head — She means Thanos and how he got to the future, because regardless the details of 'how did 2014 Thanos/Gamora become a thing' wasn't one you could avoid. Even if that was more mechanical than not, it's still a hard pill to swallow. ]
[ But they already have some control so she shrugs, ]
It's still information about how this place works. Information we'll need to act on if something happens.
[ 'Something,' is intoned with 'do something about the other if they decide to do the worst'. ]
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[ And knowledge is power. Or whatever. He pinches the bridge of his nose, hoping to ward off an incipient headache. Headachey is his usual state when he starts considering what a fucking mess this place is, when he starts thinking about how fucked they really all are. At least on their other jobs, their other missions, their other galaxy-saving feats, there was someone to shoot. Not so much in this place – or at least, no one's bothered to make themselves known yet. ]
This is starting to feel a lot like we're all lab rats in a maze, huh?
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[ Someone has to find this entertaining right? (And in this moment this conversation became a little too meta.) Whatever it was, there wasn't a chance she doubted danger was around the corner. Why wouldn't it be? No one takes away means of defending oneself without it. ]
[ A beat, and she adds: ]
There's a lot of children around here.
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[ And it comes out soberly, meditatively. Peter has never really considered himself a "kid person," despite being frequently accused of acting like a child, but it'd take a bigger dick than one Peter Quill to not be silently working on some game plan for what to do about the kids if things go horribly wrong.
Not that he has one, yet. A game plan. He'd feel a whole lot better if he at least had a gun. ]
If this is some kinda experiment, they're working with a lot of variables.
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[ Shakes her head and picks up the football again, ]
There's got to be a slip-up somewhere. Something this massive can't be airtight.
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[ A reassurance, as much as it is a declaration. Even with as few areas as they're allowed to explore, it's still a shitton of ground to cover for two people, much less one. They've definitely got their work cut out for them
Which, admittedly, Peter both is and isn't looking forward to. Aside from the shit with the vault, aside from the creeping disquiet that comes part and parcel with wandering around a deserted city, Peter has been bored. Barging into empty buildings and rooting through dozens and dozens of desks in bullpen offices isn't entirely his idea of a good time, but it's something to keep him occupied.
At least now he'll have his Walkman to keep him company—
Though even as he's thinking that thought, he's wincing at himself. His gaze involuntarily flicks to the Walkman, still sitting blithely on the tabletop. He shakes his head sharply. ]
Chances are, though, anything worth finding is in the districts or buildings we're not allowed into.
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[ Her eyes follow where Peter's go - to the Walkman. This idiot was overly sentimental yet, wasn't he? (Fond/Affectionate) She tears her eyes away and gives a slight tilting shake of her head: ]
Then we'll find them.
[ Said in the tone of 'there's no debate there'. Then ambling on, ]
Are you going to keep it?
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Then, he hesitates for the span of another breath.
Then, when he realizes he's hesitating for yet another breath, he deflates. ]
It's not like I can just get rid of it.
[ There's a tired sort of resignation in his voice. Yes, he's sentimental. He guards anything – anyone – that's important to him with an all-consuming intensity. One of his many faults, as much as it's one of his few merits. ]
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Does that include her Peter?][ Well, it's true, if Peter hadn't just brought the football back in it would have come back on its own unless they destroyed it. But she - they - likely don't know that strange mechanic of it just yet. She sighs, but it's more her sign of resignation because did she expect anything different? ]
[ The answer is no. ]
I'm telling you now, if you start acting strangely I'm destroying it.
Stranger for you.
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