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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These are ghosts. This place (is this place real at all? Is he dreaming all of this? Hallucinating it? Is he dead?) is conjuring up ghosts — and they stare back at him from the flat object that Peter alternates between holding in his hands and tucking into the pocket of his hoodie.
It can't be real, but the ghosts still are. Peter feels them move within him, restless, cold and wailing. His eyes are wide and wet as he wanders through the city; he can't remember how to get back to the apartment. Then some time passes, and he stops trying at all, mouth tipped open, eyes glossy with an odd haze. Now he can't remember his name or anything about himself at all, but the ghosts press up under his skin and the boy keeps walking. He sniffles wetly on occasion, gives soft whimpers under his breath.
He stops walking at some point and just stands there, staring numbly down at the street. It's only when something suddenly appears so close, almost too close, that Peter reacts at all. Panic would usually be the default, except he's currently so out of it that there's no room to even fall into that, not just yet. No, the boy just gives a sudden inhale of breath, eyes going very wide, staring over at the other person.
Something does hitch inside of him, maybe starts tugging him out of his own fugue state. A sharp thing that hurts; it hurts to look at the other person, the state of him. Peter's a bit worse for wear himself, not quite as bloodied as he was when he first arrived here, but there's a bandage plastered across his nose, and dark bruises blossoming out from it. Eyes rimmed in purple, cuts on his face that are barely beginning to heal.
The appearance of the man scares him, he realises. Too familiar. (He thinks of something that's been cracked open and not stitched back up the right way.) Peter's suddenly taking a step back, head giving an odd, erratic little movement. Something that's supposed to be a shake. The words come mumbled, and he's not even sure what he means by them. Only— he doesn't want this stranger here near him. (Is the man with the bloody face real, either? Maybe nothing. Only a figment.) ]
No. N.... no. Please— don't.
no subject
(in the dreams, the blood is never anything but warm and wet.)
for a long moment he just looks at the boy, his gaze blank. he takes in the bandage and the black eyes, burst blood vessels, with an almost clinical detachment that allows him to register hurt without registering care. it's only when the boy opens his mouth to speak that heine's conscious brain even starts to boot up, and by the time he processes the words as language, the moment of silence has already stretched a little too long. ]
No... no. I'm not. —I'm not doing anything. [ how does one string words together into a sentence, again? maybe that safety deposit box to the brainpan rattled him more than he realized. (that's not it, heine thinks. his head hurts, but the concussion is almost gone.)
the voice in the back of his skull says, he looks like you. heine doesn't think the dog just means beat up. ]
You look like—shit. [ heine's not very polite at the best of times and when he's half-dissociated, even less so. still, one of the shattered little pieces of his humanity compels him to ask, ] You okay?
no subject
But other things are at play, here. The photograph, the dream-layer this place has pressing against him. He's meant to find someone else, to talk to them, and now he has, and on some level he's not fully aware of, the boy's torn between the impulse to run away and the compulsion to stay.
He hovers between those two thresholds, tensed back away from the man but not moving. 'I'm not doing anything' he says, and Peter stares wide and stupid, and doesn't flinch when told he looks like shit because he knows it's true and he feels like shit and he's clearly not the only one— ]
I don't think so. [ Comes the almost comically truthful reply. He can't pretend, can't say he's okay. What comes next is more bizarre honesty, voiced soft and still with that open-eyed stun. All of this feels like a dream. ]
You're not, either.
no subject
he sure feels like it, at any rate. at least his conscious mind is starting to work again, drawing him out of that little den of pain rage fear guilt horror grief and into the waking world. ]
Hah. [ the abruptness of the honesty earns a noise that would be laughter, if heine were a laugher and if this were the time for laughing. it was stupid to ask, when it's so patently obvious that the kid is not okay. and he's right—neither is heine.
he's not sure what it is that compels him to say, ] Nah, I'm not either. [ he reaches up to touch the place on his head where the wound used to be, now just blood drying into his hair. the skin has knotted itself back together and soon the scar will vanish too. ]
Told my only friend the story of killing my sister. [ what is it that makes his mouth say these words out loud? heine feels tired of talking abouut lily, and then immediately feels nauseatingly guilty for feeling tired of talking about lily. for now, he leaves out the part where he promptly lost it and tried to kill said only friend. ] It's been a—long day.
no subject
His eyes are slowly wandering the man's face, taking in each piece and part of injury. And wondering, with a quiet horror, what could've happened to him to make his eyes look like that, to leave blood sticky against his head.
Then come the words. And it'd be more merciful if his dissociation revved right back up, padded those words, made him feel like somebody else were standing there hearing them instead. Distant, numb.
But they don't. They feel— like a knife's been shoved into the center of himself. Sharp and quick and surrounded in thick wet. His bruised eyelids flutter; he gives a soft sound, pained. He doesn't want to ask, doesn't want to encourage whatever this fucking ghost is, this manifestation of his own guilt and shame and self-loathing, this man that stands before him like a monster. He doesn't want to know. He wants to run.
He can't. Maybe he knows he deserves this, not so far deep down. Peter stands there, the question moving through him with a convulsive shudder. ]
......You killed her?
no subject
but of course peter does ask, because why wouldn't he? ]
Yeah. [ fuck. heine covers his face with both hands, then slowly sinks into a crouch, like making his body a smaller target will somehow make this easier to bear. ] I didn't mean to. I was—possessed.
[ or something. neither body nor mind under his own control. ]
When I came to I had torn her in half. [ this part he really wishes he wouldn't say out loud, because who the fuck wants details like this, even heine doesn't want details like this although they live on endless loop behind his eyeballs every time he tries to sleep. ]
cw: attempted child murder with fire / child death
But for now, this moment, it's the other man's that come through. Peter stares widely, watching him sink downwards like that, like a thing losing itself. 'I didn't mean to. I was—possessed.'
It feels like being hit, those words. Not because Peter has any clear awareness that such a thing is extremely relevant to his own situation, but because it sounds like someone admitting something completely... out there, something almost laughably strange, made up. That's not real. Being possessed isn't real, that's— movies.
But there's no part of him that could laugh, not even in nervousness, not a single part. The boy just stares, his own bloodshot eyes as wide as saucers. 'When I came to I had torn her in half.'
He's crazy. He sounds like— Mom. Exactly like mom. Sleepwalking, or something fucking like it, roaming the house and then slipping into his and Charlie's bedroom (that was back when they shared one, and back before he learned to lock his door at night), and he wakes up covered in wet and there's a strange smell, and Mom acts like she doesn't know what she was about to do even though she was about to light the match.
This man's fucking crazy. Peter's nostrils flare with a swell of fresh anxiety, and he takes a slight step back. (But even now, this place won't let him run. Even now, something compels him to stay.
And the similarities persist. Torn in half. A small body in two pieces— he'd seen Charlie there, dark shapes.) ]
Did you know you were doing it? Even if you couldn't— stop yourself.
[ He feels distant from himself as he asks that trembling question. He wants to know, as horrible as all of this is, because... was that how it was for Mom? Was she aware at all? Did she black out entirely? Which way would be worse? Which way would hurt even slightly, slightly less? ]
no subject
he's afraid of you, the dog whispers. he should be.
would that possession was only in movies, but he's freshly back in the pilot's seat of his own body right now, so heine knows acutely that for him it's very real.
his head aches, and breathing too deeply gives him vertigo, but heine lifts his face out of his hands nonetheless. ]
No. When it takes over I never know what I'm doing. [ the dog is a berserker, and heine is in a small locked room in his own subconscious. aware enough to know that something isn't quite right, but it usually takes time for him to come to understand what exactly is happening. ]
no subject
But right now.... all Peter can think of when the man speaks is his mother and what she'd done. What she'd tried to do. How she didn't seem to know what she'd been doing, how she'd seemed just as terrified as he was to find herself standing there, hovering over her children with a match in her hand.
Peter's own guilt churns and swells and he feels sick standing there. After all, he'd killed his sister too, hadn't he? Even if it was an accident, even if he didn't mean to, he— ]
.....Did you always want her dead? Is that why it did it?
[ "It", the man calls the thing. Peter thinks it must be some part of him, or maybe another personality — like his grandmother had. But if it killed her.... it had to be because the man himself wanted her dead. Right?
Mom tried to kill him because she always wanted him dead. Somewhere inside of himself, maybe Peter's always known that. And in the face of this person, speaking of such horrifically familiar things..... he can't help asking more. Wanting to understand, as much as he doesn't want to hear these answers. ]
no subject
nonetheless, he answers: ] Not at all. I wanted to save her.
[ that was why he had taken the führer spine to begin with, why he had willingly asked for more power. because he wanted to save her—lily, and giovanni, and arthur, and lott, and all the others who had been bred in beakers and raised in the darkness of the city's underbelly. all the others who had been stolen from the streets and spliced together in cruel and inhumane ways.
he had wanted to save them all, but in the end what heine had saved lily from wasn't their existence in the underground, but from her very life itself.
narrowing his eyes a little, heine tries to focus. the world is still swimming, but he can get a clear enough look at the other man, asking him so many pointed questions about the worst thing that heine ever did. ] What happened to you?
no subject
I was trying to save you!)
He shudders quietly as he stands there, head dropping downwards, eyes staring at the tops of his dingy Converse sneakers again. The boy frowns, brow knit, mouth tight, confused. Confused by this man, and everything he's said he's done.
He's confused by all of it, but when the question comes, Peter finds himself answering honestly in return. Dazed and strange, but honest. ]
I— hurt myself. I didn't mean to. But something's... wrong with me.
[ That's what it has to be, right? He's lost his fucking mind, too. He's having fits, attacking himself; he needs to be kept somewhere small and safe.
And then, abruptly, a confession of his own, a mirror to this broken-up man— ]
I killed my sister too. It was.... an accident. But I— [ The breath comes out of him in a soft gasp; the words are too horrible to his own ears. It's the first time he's ever said it aloud. ]
—I killed her.