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Harbor Hill Lights
🕑 Added 2024-11-04 18:25:40 +0000 UTCGunshots, an explosion, and the ensuing pungent cloud of smoke had chased all but the most suicidally unbothered locals inside. Many had sought shelter inside the theater and were now loitering around the lobby, sharing overpriced snacks, playing arcade games, and waffling between whether they wanted to actually watch a movie or not and, if so, which one. They joined the many who were here to enjoy one of the last Friday Evenings left in the year. The days were growing shorter as the season came on, and soon this hour would be reserved for Friday Nights.
I could barely recall the chaos of the world outside while in the lobby – could barely recall anything at all. There was an overwhelming but pleasant noise in here, the unintelligible sounds of mirth played to a backing track of Top-40 hits, that drowned out the dull drumming in my head. Had I been a teenager, I might have snuck past the bored attendant checking tickets, but I was an industry professional now. I had an obligation to support my local theaters. They were the last bulwark between movies meant to capture you for hours and ones made to be half-watched while scrolling on your phone. I wanted to feel something when I watched a movie, not listen to the same exposition for the third time in case I missed it while gaming on the second monitor.
I was waiting in the considerable line, idly watching two middle-aged Mexican men play god-tier King of Fighters on a cabinet nearby, when I remembered I had meant to spend my Experience before returning to the date. Any compunctions I had about seducing the teens had been splattered across the walls of Mugisha's – I couldn't even think of why I'd been reluctant to do so in the first place. I was okay with brutally killing my enemies, but I wouldn't have sex with two eighteen-year-olds who were throwing themselves at me? What kind of schizophrenic morality was that? Age gap discourse barely existed in this world; there were too many confusingly hot septuagenarians running around, confusing the conversation. That was a purely Alan hangup, and he was as exhausted as the rest of my conscious mind. As for the power gap – what, was I never going to have sex with a normal human again? Every day that passed moved me closer to myth than man. I had a responsibility for self-care that triumphed any paternalistic protectiveness towards Aminah and Shania, a responsibility I’d been shirking. This last week had my brain feeling like an overworked boiler; if I kept pushing it, James Li would go the way of the Overlook Hotel, potentially literally considering my Fire-natured Qi.
Having resolved myself to the seduction, the question was what I should buy prior to completing any Hidden Quests. Rewards for these sex Quests were usually related to my partner’s Skills and Attributes, which had been easily observable thus far. Not to reduce them to a few words, but Marianne was a nurse and single mother, Annie was a fitness influencer and grease monkey, and Maki was your typical Miko turned gritty loose cannon detective witch…Well, alright, maybe Maki was harder to profile than the other two, but the point was I had decent expectations for what their specific Quests would give me.
It was harder to tell with the girls, though. Aminah, at least, had a preternatural ability with animals—even I couldn't coax Smoothie onto my lap without touching him, and he was my Familiar—but Shania was too reserved to be more than a responsible older sister and diligent student. Her father had spiraled into bitterness and paranoia before the divorce and his subsequent mysterious death. In his crash out, he'd become verbally abusive, taking out his frustrations on those around him, even slut-shaming his eleven-year-old daughter because she reminded him of his dropping out of high school to help raise her. Marianne separated from him quickly after that, but the experience had lasting effects – Shania was shy around her peers and paralyzingly so around boys. A fundamental process of growing up had been arrested by the abuse, leaving her terrified of intimacy and her sexuality.
I was ostensibly here to fix that tonight, though I had to wonder if having me as a first time would do more harm than good in the long run for the girls. Whatever – there was more to sex than physical pleasure, and I was far from the only superhuman lover in the world. Even if I did ruin regular men for Shania and Aminah, surely there were cute, emotionally sensitive Immortal boyfriends out there for them somewhere in this lunatic asylum of a universe. Fucking everything else existed; it couldn’t all be bad.
Regardless, trying to conceive of their futures was largely pointless; neither girl had yet been given the space to develop. Aminah had explored her talent for animals in the context of a Science Fair because that was what was allowed by her strict parents. Who knew, maybe in a few years, Aminah would be into rodeo and Annie Oakley-style marksmanship, and Shania would be in Japan, having felt called to walk the path of a bonsai master. A lot could happen in your early twenties.
With that in mind, I decided it was best to prioritize the Attributes before the Skills. Both girls were intelligent and empathetic - not as exceptionally as Maki, maybe, but they were still notably so for average humans from non-Underworld backgrounds. Lucky for me, my Wits and Empathy had been hovering tantalizingly at 5 Dice for a while, which meant that this was a perfect opportunity to finally bump them up.
The ticket counter snapped me out of my thoughts. Behind the glass in a booth still stained from when they were allowed to smoke cigarettes inside, the clerk asked if I was sure I wanted to see the 6:05 showing of Chauncey Burn.
“It’s only 6:40,” I said, “there’s a chance you guys just started playing the trailers.”
The thirty-something with dyed pink hair and deep bags under her eyes grinned lasciviously. “For sure, there was an OD in the matinee show, fucked up the whole schedule," she said. "Nah, I was asking are you sure, because you could also hang out at the arcade for twenty minutes until my shift ends. You can watch whatever you want at my place – got a 4k TV and everything. Want to know what I’ll be doing?” She licked her lips.
That was probably creepier than she intended, but I appreciated the effort. “Thanks, but I’m meeting some people inside.”
She shrugged, having expected the response. “Figures. I had to shoot my shot, though. I’m sure you get it; you own a mirror.”
I shook my head, smiling as I walked away. It took a certain kind of person to work for peanuts somewhere in Harbor Hill that semi-regularly let you out past midnight.
Once free of the line, I gave the lobby a last scan for any visible threats and spent my Experience, dropping 120 to get up to 6 Dice in both Wits and Empathy.
[Hidden Quest Complete!]
Have 6 Dice in Wits.
Reward: Gain Special Feat The Download
[Special Feat] The Download
For you, Round 2 is when the fight really starts. Your unconscious mind continues to crunch critical decisions long after the moment, constantly envisioning alternate possibilities and solutions. Once you’ve engaged in conflict or competed against someone, you get an additional Die to face them in the same manner again in all subsequent scenes. This is highly aggravating to be subjected to.
[Hidden Quest Complete!]
Have 6 Dice in Empathy.
Reward: Special Feat Yearning Song
[Special Feat] Yearning Song
You have an uncanny knack for understanding what people truly want, whether they can admit it to themselves or not. The more time you spend with someone and the more intimate you get with them, the more you will intuit their deepest desires. They will attribute this to your natural talent rather than any supernatural cause.
I didn’t need the warning that came with The Download; I’d played fighting games online before. I knew the feeling well. However, even if it turned out that I was somehow supernaturally annoying to fight twice, that was still one of my least monkey’s paw-esque Special Feats. Yearning Song, like most Feats heavy on romance and sex, was apparently without drawbacks, though that last line had worrisome implications. Overall, they felt like the right purchases, and both would be useful going into the date regardless of whether I earned Dice in them afterward. That left me with a little over 80 Experience; I bought another 3 Dice in Animal Handling for a total of 5 and saved the rest for an emergency Style Maker Minor Feat.
I let go of all further thoughts about the system. That was it; I’d checked off all the little boxes and done everything I reasonably could to be safe. I’d even made a quick lap around the building to check for any surprise bastards hiding in the alleys before coming inside. I was set now. I could go into this without complicated concerns for future plans and just enjoy myself from here on. The weekend had begun.
Chauncey Burn was a historical drama based on an old novel about a young governess sent to the countryside manor of minor English nobility. With almost three hours of dry romance and stuffy accents, it wasn't my usual affair, but hey, it was nice to switch it up every now and then. I took the red carpeted stairs to the second level, where all the low-budget art movies were relegated to. The smallest theaters were up here, and outside of special screenings of Bollywood films, it was usually dead at even the busiest hours.
Tonight was no different. After sunset, you might see some teens on the second level, looking to get away from their parents to make out in the dark, but it was early for that crowd. Besides, it wasn't the Nineties anymore; people had streaming services and laptops. It was cheaper, safer, and far more reasonable to cuddle with a screen at the foot of your bed than it was to spend forty bucks to neck while ignoring some arthouse romance for three hours.
The difference in sound between the echoey lobby and the second-floor hallway gave the impression of a deafening silence despite the muffled orchestral scores coming through the walls. Between that and the emptiness stretching to either side of me, the space had a distinct liminal eeriness.
I stepped to the side as three EMTs exited one of the theaters on the way to my destination. They looked exhausted, overworked, and in no particular rush as they wheeled their unconscious, morbidly obese patient to the elevator. A part of me wanted to offer my aid, but what could I reasonably do in the situation anyway? They'd already done the hard work of lifting the guy onto the stretcher, and all my medical abilities required me to use Erotic Sorcery. No, this seemed like a routine call for an ambulance crew – not the place for a youxia.
I stopped mid-stride. An ambulance crew?
I'd been hyper-alert for any response, official or criminal, to what had happened in Mugisha's when I'd done my quick lap around the building. I hadn't seen anything. For the EMTS to be inside and working as I came up the stairs, the ambulance would have had to already be parked nearby. Usually, they backed the truck up as close to the doors as possible – Surely, I would have noticed that. In fact, no matter what my mental state was, I’d go so far as to say it was impossible that I would miss an ambulance with its lights on when I was actively looking for one. So, then…
A woman’s shoulder clipped mine as I turned to look at the EMTs. She was crying, coughing as she held her throat.
"Stop!" yelled a man, running after her. There was a beeper on his belt, meaning he was either a doctor, a drug dealer, or a time traveler. "Hey, fucking stop! Relax, alright."
He grabbed her by the arm and turned her around. She slapped him hard, and whatever paper-thin mask of contrition on his face vanished, revealing only rage.
“That was fucking rape,” she started to say between coughs, “I told you—”
The man grabbed her by the throat and slammed her against the wall. “You think that was rape, bitch? That was a blowjob. You’ll know when I’m fucking raping you, whore.”
Uh oh, guess I was doing a bit more killing today. Shame. “Yo! What is wrong with you—”
Glass crunched under my foot as I moved to intervene. I looked down to see a broken, dirty needle – no, needles, plural, I corrected. The floor was littered with dirty needles and glass crack pipes. The more I looked, the more I saw; they were everywhere. Barely an inch of carpet was uncovered, and those scarce inches were wet and stained with a brown muck that seemed to seep out of the threads. A sharp, sour sweet smell hit my nostrils like a flame, almost making me wretch. How had I walked through this without noticing?
I furrowed my brow and paused. Something was wrong. The mental static that had followed my killing of the mercenaries was back in full force, worse now than before. I had to help the girl, and quickly, but something…something was very wrong. If I could just think—
"No, please, no," pleaded another voice behind me. Two teenage crust punks who looked like they could have been sisters were crouched over a third. His eyes had rolled up in his head, and he was seizing on the ground, foam on his lips. The girl who had spoken was trying to shake him into consciousness. "Fuck, no, no, no, not like this."
“We need to go,” whisper-yelled the other girl, pulling at her shoulder.
“Get off of me, he’s dying! Dying!”
“He’s dead.” The non-hysterical punk grabbed her maybe-sister by the chin and hissed cruelly, “Because of shit you sold him, dumbass. Shit we sold ten other people tonight. Are you trying to get us sent to prison for life? We. Need. To. Go.”
Wait, I could maybe deal with an overdose, or at least keep the guy alive long enough for help to arrive. I’d have to use Love Doctor, and the guy would have a wicked boner, but I could keep his heart beating for a few minutes without too much difficulty. Hadn't there just been some EMTs here? "Hey, hang on," I said. My voice sounded confused and distant even to my own ears.
The psycho to the other side of me slammed the girl into the wall again. “Which is it going to be, bitch? You want to go back inside and finish what you started, or do you want to go in the bathroom and learn just what the fuck you’re accusing me of? Huh!?”
She made a horrible, wet, gasping sound of pure despair. I felt as though I'd been punched hard in the gut. The echo of her sob was going to bounce around the walls of my skull for a long, long while.
The Empty-Headed God swept through the visions like a strong wind, temporarily blurring reality as my mind tried to reject whatever was happening. Some instinct buried within me had made me slip into the Happy Idiot without conscious effort, and the effect of the mental defenses the Stance provided was immediate. My mind was twisting and ephemeral in this state, unshackled from responsibility and material concerns by blissful ignorance. Even still, when the wind passed, I remained in the nightmare – there were still needles littering the floor, and the two scenes of mundane horror continued playing out to either side of me.
But my thoughts were clearer, or as clear as they could be in the Happy Idiot. Whatever blinding caul that had been cast over me was closer to mesh netting now. I was suddenly aware of the tens of thousands of invisible floating presences in the air and walls of the hallway, flitting around and wishing death upon me with all of their feeble wills. Clinging to my back was the familiar and pathetic spirit that I had chased away from Pha Thet, much braver now that it had returned for me with its legion of allies.
If I hadn’t been in the Happy Idiot, I’d probably have listened to the first impulse to summon the Hakkotsu no Ha to my hand and stab through my shoulder into the thing on my back, killing it just as I had threatened to earlier. But I was the Empty-Headed God right now, and such violence was so not the weekend vibe that I needed right now. I'd lose my mind if I had to spend the rest of this date with Funikugami's sword hidden under my sweater.
Instead, I craned my neck and looked at where I could feel the spirit on my back. It was still invisible to my eyes, but I wanted to do this right. We were going to talk this out even if it killed me – maybe especially if it killed me. Did that make sense? I couldn’t tell. I was slowly losing the ability to parse my own decisions.
“No, thanks,” I said, politely waving it away.
I had no expectations of what would happen and was pleasantly surprised to feel the spirits and see the illusory world around me tremble, as though they, too, were suddenly unsure of how to proceed. How pitiful – Funikugami would have never. The little crow-headed shit would only be scheming harder in their position.
I sighed. “I get it,” I lied. I had no idea what was happening. “You’re like, uh, an evil dickhead born from evil dickhead shit. But listen, and this is probably antithetical to your whole steez, but there’s more to this place than all the worst things that happened here.”
Again, the world shook. The spirits swirled around me restlessly. Holy shit, was this working?
I gestured to the man now dragging the girl back inside the theater. “For example, I’d bet my life that orders of magnitude more nuts were busted consensually here than non-consensually. And these guys," I said, pointing to the punks. "Way more people have done an enjoyable, non-lethal amount of drugs at the movies than have overdosed tragically. I bet half the employees here are high right now! As for the dude on the stretcher, I mean, if the movie was good, that isn't the worst way to die. If I had a heart attack while watching Jackie Chan’s Who Am I? I’d have been alright with that, and that’s far from peak Chan.”
The system translated my words into an Affinity + Persuasion, generously granting me an extra Die for the argument. Luck was on my side too; I rolled probably just enough with a critical, giving me six Successes.
There was no sound or light show to represent my victory. One moment I was trapped in these collected nightmares of the past, and the next I was back in the hallway as it had been moments prior. The thousands of dirty needles were gone, as were the other people. I was alone again in the liminal space with yet another concern for another time.
[Hidden Quest Complete!]
Rebuff The Misery’s first attempt on your mind.
Reward: 10XP, +1 Insight
Bonus, Escape unscathed: 20XP, +1 Willpower
I stroked my chin and considered the pop-up. How fascinating. The wording all but guaranteed they’d be back for me another time and probably with a stronger attack, but that was future-me’s problem. What caught my eye, though, was the Bonus; I’d expected one, but for getting through it non-violently, not this.
What would have happened had I summoned the Bleached Bone Blade and attacked? I'd assumed that the spirits would break once they saw me kill a few of them with the cursed sword. Individually, they were barely more than gnats, and I had to imagine that confronting the fact you could die would shock any being who was learning it for the first time. But, in retrospect and being honest with myself, that line of logic had been entirely conjured up after the fact by a mix of bloodthirst and revulsion at what I was seeing.
If they hadn't been routed after the first round of combat, it would have been like fighting raindrops in a storm. In the limited range that Smells Blood gave me to sense murderous desires, I had felt thousands of little sparks moving around my head, points of hatred glowing like stars in the night sky. I couldn’t have fought that. Maki and I had been prepared to face the Egui, and I’d had the help of three other masters against the Flesh Puppet. You didn’t just throw down against supernatural horrors in this world, not by yourself, and not without knowing what you were fighting. Had I not received a Bonus Reward for using a non-violent method because the alternative was simply impossible?
The hairs on the back of my neck rose. Unbidden, I realized I wasn't alone in this hallway. Those shapeless, malevolent spirits hadn't left; they'd only disappeared from my senses. They were still here. They had been here before I'd come and would be here after I left.
I swept my hand through the empty air around me and thought back to Pha whirling around in the street with a knife, mad-eyed and possessed. The man was a trained fighter from one of the most hardcore martial arts in the world, lethwei, the Art of Nine Limbs. You had to have that dog in you to practice lethwei. Those lunatics hardened their skulls for headbutting. Training the Eagle's Talon had been bad; I'd spent long, awful months striking stones, breaking my hands, soaking them in Dit Da Ja for hours, and repeating every day without rest until I could use the deadly technique. They did the equivalent of that to their heads.
Pha was a strong-willed man, there could be no doubt of that. After who knows how many hours of fighting for control, he'd even seized his muscles up at the end. Yet, I had found him swinging at shadows, surrounded by his terrified family. Would that have been me had I drawn the Hakkotsu no Ha? Would Shania and Aminah have found me in three hours, fully battle-mad and insane?
There was a broader lesson to be learned here about escalation – to invite violence into your heart was to open yourself to The Misery that followed.
Ugh, I hated allegories.
More importantly, my decision to preserve the vibes instead of fight had saved me from possession, or worse. I'd followed a ludicrous impulse, and it had worked for once! Finally!
I put my hands on my hips and blew out a long breath. “Man, we’ve seen some rough shit lately. A lot of really…really bad stuff.” I sort of trailed off for a moment while nodding at an innocuous point in space.
“But,” I said, gathering myself again, “the vibes must be preserved, James. That’s the real takeaway here.” A smile grew slowly on my face as I continued to nod at nothing. “The Empty-Headed God was victorious, and the Carrion King and his little bitch-made sword were proven to be dumb as hell. Ha! What an idiot.”
I beamed. I might finally use the shrine in my meditation chamber just to rub this win into his nose. Or beak, I guess.
Hmm, what now? Could I really go back to the date after uncovering the spiritual poison corrupting the neighborhood?
What was I thinking – this was clearly a question for the only part of my psyche that had been proven effective against The Misery.
“O ye mighty fool,” I said aloud, stretching my arms wide in exaltation of the blind, idiot God within me, “What shall we do now?”
I pretended to think about it. In actuality, of course, I would simply declare the first thing that came to mind, but this was an important part of the process. Hemming and hawing, screwing up my face, staring hard at the floor, and resting my chin on my tightly clenched fist, I hit all the aesthetics of difficult contemplation. Were anyone to see me like this, they would have seen the Platonic Ideal of Thought. Rodin would have melted his statue down at the sight and started over from scratch.
Finally, I looked up as though I’d had an epiphany and imagined a big, old-timey lightbulb flashing above my head.
“I want to get silly with it, baby,” said the Empty-Headed God. “Let’s have some fun.”
I nodded. Yes, that was right. I had to slip free from the weight of the world if my battered psyche was to begin to recuperate. And I mean, jeez, it would be pretty rude of me to turn the guy down now, not after he’d saved my life.
“Okay, one last time for the people in the back. Now, the weekend has officially begun.”
AN: Some spicy content next week!
Comments
Evil Midnight Lurker
Throw the Empty-Headed God in with all the skills from Disco Elysium...
Blue Jay
Oh man, initially, I sort of disliked the empty headed god. But now, seeing it this way blew me away.
small_brain_boy
What a smooth operator. I love the Empty Headed God, it's just the greatest "skill" I've ever read.
