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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[ shitty place, really!
somehow, "we fucked the creatures up too much for them to be good eating" is the most sensical part of don quixote's story so far. and in a way, the rest of it... does... sort of follow, if heine squints at it. ]
So the guy had some chicken-related issue that made him go crazy and turn into a chicken, and the way you fixed it was by cooking him something other than chicken?
[ like, objectively that makes no sense but also it does kind of make sense? maybe it's just because heine's head is still swimming from being mildly concussed, but something about the explanation kind of tracks???
he makes a noise of mild amusement. ] And justice was served?
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[ ... ]
A wondrous tale, is it not?! We were rewarded thusly with an adorable plush of the mascot!!!!!
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...
[ heine puts his head back in his hands, his shoulders shaking again. not with restraint this time, but with laughter.
by and large heine's sense of humor involves dry sarcasm and pointed barbs usually directed at badou, and it's unusual for him to laugh out loud—but something about this entire situation, the adrenaline, the fear, don quixote's absurd story, the fact that heine is sitting on a park bench being told a story by a woman who offered to make him her squire only a handful of days ago... it gets him good.
when he's done, heine sits up and leans against the back of the bench, exhaling a long sigh. ] Ah, fuck. I think that worked.
[ the dog is quiet again, at least for now. who knows how long it'll be before heine slips back into his depressive thought spiral, but he'll enjoy the quiet while it lasts. ]
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I am glad that it did, then. May we now speak of what ails thee? If thou accepts the offer to be my squire, then I should like to know more of thee.
[ at least she's direct and honest about it. ]
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Found a gift in the vault. [ there's no small amount of bitterness on the word "gift." ] To remind me of Lily. My sister.
[ sister in two divergent senses of the word: they were biological siblings, or half-siblings at least, experiments born of the same breeding, but lily was also the only person in the world heine has ever loved like family. he looks down at the flower in his lap, brow furrowing slightly. ]
We were test subjects together when we were kids. The same experiment that made me... how I am. [ functionally immortal, he means. ] I—murdered her. It's a long story.
[ up to donqui whether she really wants to hear the whole thing—not that she seems like she shies away from blood. ]
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[ someone else might've claimed that his story isn't so special, then, isn't that different compared to the crowd, but the sinners jut painfully from that like a cancerous lump on the elbow of the city. ]
I have both the time and heart to hear thee out, should it avail thee any! Rather, I'd like to. I'd also like to sit with thee better, but I know that I cannot and thus will my distance.
[ so she can do what she can, even if she isn't particularly good with this stuff talk wise she doesn't mind to lend an ear, particularly for an ally. ]
Is she perhaps the reason thee cannot be too close to women, speaking of?
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[ now that he's come down from the edge of whatever freakout he was about to have, heine's brain feels like little more than television static. it takes almost no effort to decide he may as well spill. ]
The scientist who made us, she called herself our mother. [ a word he says like it's a curse. ] She loved whichever of us was performing the best. She liked to... examine us. Touch us, hug us. [ this part of the story really does stick in his throat, so he leaves it there—it's the way his skin still crawls to think about angelika einstürzen's touch. ] She's most of why I can't be around women.
Lily was just Lily. My sister... probably biologically, I think we were all bred from the same line of genes. We were in the same subject group.
[ he touches the stem of the flower, more carefully than he's used to being with anything. ] When we were kids we used to think we'd been kidnapped off the streets and brought in for the experiment. None of us could remember anything before we were—seven or eight years old, so we just assumed they'd wiped those memories... Lily would talk about how she'd forgotten what flowers look like. I always told her that one day we'd see flowers again for real.
[ he smiles, humorlessly, then brings a hand up to tap the bandages wrapped around his throat that hide the metal collar still bolted into his spine. ] The thing about the Kerberos spines is that when you lose it, you lose it. At first it was rare, but it got more and more frequent the more they made us fight, and... Lily could never bring herself back. I knew one day that she was going to lose herself and never come out of it. So we started planning how to get out.
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words she doesn't get (mistress faust would, or maybe even yi sang) and ones she does, the implications of the unwanted rubbing poorly against her skin. the gentleness doesn't escape her, nor the story of their time together (kidnapping children isn't so uncommon, either; the only thing worse than being killed by a sweeper was being chosen as an "escort" by them), and don quixote watches with a quietness unlike the usual boisterousness she presents.
the kerberos, then, must be what was causing him such pain before, that he'd want her to talk through. violence wouldn't have worked, as usual as it had been to bring her back as well. don's eyes linger on his throat, hand reaching to her own. ]
Did both of thee manage to?
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[ that was the first knife, looking back. growing up the way heine had—in controlled circumstances, with no contact with the outside world—led to a certain naïveté about the various ways one could be betrayed, and at fourteen, full of himself and overconfident, heine hadn't recognized the signs until it was far too late. ]
I remember being plugged in to the machine... and I was in my own head for a long time after that. [ hours, maybe. it's hard to tell time when you're trapped inside your own consciousness. ] The Dog—the Kerberos spine—took over. I was out of control.
When I came out of it I was— [ it's like it's still there, a double exposure over what heine's eyes are actually seeing. the blood, the bodies torn limb from limb. giovanni, lott, arthur, the dozens of others from the other cohorts.
and lily. ] I was—I had... [ he swallows hard, but his voice comes out flat, almost robotic. ] I had torn her in half. She was still alive, too... we can't die. Right? So she was alive. I had to crush her skull. Destroying her brain was the only way to put her out of that misery.
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[ is all she'll say at first, in way of condolences. ]
We do die. That much is fact. If something were to happen to our Manager, they who are in charge of our lives, then we would remain dead -- but the pain we feel prior, however long it had lasted, remains as a stark memory of not to fail again. [ a slight exhale, but her voice remains startlingly even, remains loud enough to hear if barely for him. ] Many times have I seen my companions still breathing if barely, choking on their their own blood with half a functioning brain to their name. Many times have I see others strung up still alive, their entrails not unlike Christmas lights across spikes acting as poles. In that, we are alike -- we feel, we remember, we do not forget.
But for us, death is a minor detail, a minute's respite from the searing pain we may feel just prior. For thee, it is merely another moment of it.
[ because they can't die. because they're not allowed to. her hand drops and she picks at her sleeve absently, not unlike she did a wound she had only a month ago. she misses it, a bit. the pain. the reminder of life to be lived.
but sinclair would be terribly mad at her if it found its way onto her body again.
(living is more than that, after all)
her voice softens in tone next, indiscernible as it might be in distance. ]
It is a hard thing, to end someone whom thee care for's life knowing it will be the last that thou see of them. [ ... ] As much as thee miss her, and suffer for the guilt of loss, is it not some comfort that she will no longer have to survive as the two of thee once had?
[ because that
isn't living, really. that's not living. you're alive, but you're not living. ]
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it's... a little reassuring, in a way. comforting might not be quite the word. just a flicker of candlelight in the darkness, a reminder that someone else is out there. ]
Fuck, huh? [ he can hear the same too-evenness in don quixote's voice that he hears in his own.
she's not wrong, either, as hard as it is for heine to admit it. in the bank, badou had said to him, do you really think a flower would have changed anything? and somewhere inside, heine knows it wouldn't have. he knows that he made the merciful choice.
if only he could stop hating himself for it. ] It... is. [ quieter. heine leans his elbow on his knee, puts his forehead in his hand for a second. ] I just—if she had to die I wish it hadn't been down there.
[ but what is there for it, now? nothing. heine breathes in deep, exhales slow. he's always alive, but not sure he's ever really lived. ]
I told my friend about you offering to make me your squire. [ a change of topic, sort of. trying to lighten a little of the weight. ] He said knights are basically cops. What sayest thou?
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it is a hard thing to be open too, after all. it's enough that there's someone else she can talk to that understands the flippancy that comes with a lack of consequence, hear the same too-evenness when discussing carnage like the weather; they're part of the norm in each of their lives, and that isn't something most people have ever encountered here. not up close, not personally, maybe heard about it or dealt with it afar, but considering the reception she'd been given
some not at all. don quixote can't imagine that. ]
There are Fixers for every type of work, Ser Heine. Perhaps one is similar to this "cop" thee mention, but we haven't the same word for it -- so I must not agree until I know their purpose. Do they protect the weak without hesitation, with no reward at the end? Because it is their duty as a living being? If they can be bought to look the other way, then they are no knight.
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hell, though, imagine living in a world with no cops? (scratch that—if it's normal where don quixote is from to have her fellow fixers strung up on spikes with their guts hanging out, maybe heine doesn't want to imagine the world with no cops.) ]
Cops are law enforcement. [ ...scoff. back home, the security officers had mostly been on the same payroll as the pimps, and the ones who weren't were drowning in enough paperwork that they couldn't do shit about anything. ] Supposed to do all those things you said, probably. The idea is they enforce the rule of law and keep everybody from going wild, but in reality they'll turn a blind eye to just about anything for the right price.
[ he'd been too busy making indignant threats after being told he sounded like a cop wannabe to think about it too hard, but the cops heine knows do sound like... mostly the polar opposite of what don quixote supposedly stands for. ]
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[ they probably do though, in reality. but don quixote is ever determined to think highly of fixers. ]
Allow me a bit of explanation. Fixers, whom I consider valiant heroes and knights, are those who have passed a test set by the Hana Association to become such. From there, they look to see what various Offices and Associations may accept them into their ranks. I am part of a Company myself, though it is not for Fixers solely; many of my companions are not even such.
[ she might've mentioned that. she'll mention it again. ]
So I may sayeth [ haha ] that thy friend hath a bad idea of knights, who should never turn a blind eye to those in need whomever they may be. Why, one would even turn upon their superior if their principles were threatened in some way! I have stood up to others time and time again for such a thing, in fact -- it matters not how strong they are, for what I believe is more important than anything.