Homesick (Strangers Scenario 001)

An introductory scenario for Strangers. Action above all. It is written scene-by-scene to provide a spine. Be ready to break this spine the moment you need to.

It’s been a long time since you’ve been home last. The streets are swept with fallen leaves. Cobwebs gather in the gables of the houses. Chill wind blows through the alleyways. And there is a distance there, in everything. Thin film between you and your old surroundings. Old memories hang in the air like dandelion seeds, colored amber and grey by time, distance, new revelations, your shape. Profound alienation. Everything is as you left it. Nothing is quite like you remember it. If only you could just go back. If only you could just move on. If only you could just forget what you saw. But no, what’s broken can’t be remade, not really. Old ghosts in the street.

Under what’s real, the new forms of place, it’s exactly like you remember it — the world cracks like a split lip, exposing the sunlit belly, warm and rose-colored. Everything in its right place. It’s a poisoned recollection, fabricated as bait. A parasite dimension, hanging just underneath, feeds on the fermented flesh of animals and people brought inside, chasing illusions. The boundaries of thought and material slide apart. It’s all a slurry of wanting and remembering down here. Made monstrous by degrees, until it descends to feed collection of scalpel limbs coming like a stormfront.

Someone you haven’t seen in years. Someone lost entirely. Moments you missed out on. Places you wish you could go back to. Then also, things you wish you could forget, chasing you farther into what appears real but is, in fact, another fabrication. Sliding under the current. It knows your name, what you have lost, what you have seen, what you want dearly and desperately. Pretends to care.

Setup

• Ask: What’s your favorite memory of a place in your hometown?
• Work together to describe the town including a couple people you know.

Possible Scenes

Open on a fragile homecoming. Something is missing. An emptiness and longing hangs in the air.

Glimpse of a rose-colored past, a short way away. If you step in, the parasite has you for a while, gets to know your taste.

Find somewhere to hang out. Talk for a while. This person isn't real. It's a puppet, strung up to make you feel comfortable.

Step into an important memory, sweet and thick like honey, the rush of desire so strong it makes you sick, and the way out sucking shut behind you. You'll have to tear your way out. Rip a hole in the scenery, and slip away through a darkened catacomb full of scaffold and scenic equipment, water dripping from a faraway ceiling. Something here may hunt you.

Follow the smell of decay to a feeding chamber full of fermented flesh, human bodies, and the carcasses of small animals. Something hangs from a puckered hole in the ceiling, skeletal limbs slick with a mucosal layer.

Or chase faint light up the scaffolding. The shapes of familiar people and places hurling themselves upward to stop you. Emerge through a tight crawl to the real world. You hope.

There, someone important is gone, lured into the mouth. 

To destroy it, crawl back inside and burn it all. Gasoline will work. But you’ll need lots of it. And smoke will rise from the air itself, and the whole town will shudder, and bones and flesh will regurgitate from drains and gutters, pale and silky. And that, at last, will be the end of it.

Until anyone that was wrenched from its digestion dies, and an infertile colony will burrow and bloom between the worlds of the living and the dead.

Moment of rest. Hometown in the rearview mirror. Whole sky above and whole life ahead. A breathe of air unlaced with attractant.