Meander

>Discount Ice Cream Man: Send some rocky road her way!

You are DR. BREVITY FRINGE, MAD SCIENTIST. You're not mad as such, but in Enmity City it helps to have a REPUTATION if one is to be left alone to EXPERIMENT. Precious EXPERIMENTING. Nothing should take time from EXPERIMENTING.

It also helps if you live next door to an INSANELY NOISY BASS PLAYER, since no one seems inclined to come near the entire section of corridor at all when she's there. Though it seems that today, something is different. To be PROPERLY PRECISE, you've never heard fighting from there before.


You don't recall ever having a wave of ice cream burst through your wall with all the force of a rocky road, bearing on it an irate actually mad-looking woman wielding chains and anger, either.


And you've never seen the DISCOUNT ICE-CREAM MAN this angry before, either! Come to think of it, you didn't even know he could summon ice cream like that. I mean, he seemed to, but that was obviously-


Hang on, wait wait wait, one part of your big brain tells you. These guys just blasted a hole into your apartment. Clearly you have right of way. Tell them to get out!
Another, more sensible, part of your big brain just notes that the woman has drawn her chains again in a threatening way, and that this is going to cost a lot to repair.

DICM: Counter with waffle cone nunchaku.

"You're not the only one 'chained up' around here!"
The DISCOUNT ICE CREAM MAN pulls out, from nowhere, a pair of WAFFLE CONES joined with a chain. Together, the parts combined create...WAFFLE CONE NUNCHAKU! The genius!
"I'm going to cream you and put you on ice!"


If you were conscious at this point, which you aren't because of the HORRIFYINGLY BAD PUN, you would notice the woman twirling her chains like a kind of flailing shield and leaping off a hillock of ice cream onto the DISCOUNT ICE CREAM MAN, screaming in rage.


You would also see the DISCOUNT ICE CREAM MAN calmly throw a NUNCHAKU forward, catching its chain with the wildly flailing shield's.


You would then witness the other cone flip around and strike the woman in the face, knocking off her GLASSES.


And then you would see nothing...

...and everything.

Whether or not you were awake at that point didn't really matter.

>Jammroll+Tom+Spiderat: Go hide out in a cheap, shady motel on the wrong side of town.

You are now TOM SMITH. You are being carried, somewhat embarrassingly, by your ESCAPE-AIDER and BENEFACTOR JAMMROLL ROCKENZIE. You can only assume she's taking you someplace safe, since if she wanted you dead you'd have been a splotch on the pavement by now.


Instead, you examine the CITY that is so disconcertingly below you. Decades ago, this had been someplace else. A metropolis, maybe, or just a large town - it didn't matter. The Crash and the USC and Redria¦Emcorp and everything else had run over anything that Enmity City had been, mashing it into a slurry of snow slush and factory fumes, towers and brownstones and complexes and slums. Some places in the city were funded better than others, or simply didn't have a local officer pocketing too much - and it showed. And where the opposite was true, it did too.


You're flying away from the city center now, over some of the poorer districts in town. Nearby, you see a FIRE going on at the top of an apartment building. No one's coming to help, of course. Even in your district the FIRE DEPARTMENT won't respond to a call without cash in hand. In desperation, the resident's throwing things out the window, knowing full well he won't see them again five minutes after they land - books, cases, a guitar -


As you fly overhead, you see him hesitate, holding a picture frame out over the street.
He looks at it, and even from here you can see his tears shining in the firelight -
And then he grips it tight, with both arms, and as the fire blazes up behind him he

leaps

...


The three of you end up in a CHEAP, SHADY MOTEL on the WRONG SIDE OF TOWN - in fact, as wrong as the wrong side of town can be without being another town completely. It's the wrong side of all the wrong sides in the city put together.

Funnily enough, it used to be the city center.



It had to be, or somewhere near it - somewhere luxurious. As JAMMROLL negotiates for ROOMS, you take a look at the ARCHITECTURE. Above you, a curved ceiling is supported on three majestic beams, a single LIGHTBULB hanging from the apex. It's obvious from the straining brightness of the bulb that that place of honor was once occupied by a CHANDELIER - probably seized sometime after the coup and broken down for metal and crystals. The ceiling itself has faint faded marks outlined here and there by the light, suggesting a FRESCO or MURAL in times long past. An open wound in the ceiling is patched over with TARPAULIN and painted underneath with RUBBERIZED TAR to keep the never-ending snows out. The front wall is relatively recent BRICKWORK, clearly replacing what was once PLATE GLASS, and the place that might once have housed a REVOLVING DOOR instead is home to a ROUGH BARRICADE. The main entrance to the MOTEL is just a rough standard door cut into the brick, off to the side. Here and there are suggestions of overenthusiastic redecorating, leaving marks and stains on surfaces that might once have held paintings or supported furniture.


"Are you done admiring the decor? I've checked us in, on the house - Redria cred can do that. I hope you like being 'Gregory Finch'."


You were right; this motel must once have been something bigger before the Crash. This room alone is palatial in its dimensions - the ceiling reaches up more than twice your height. In decoration, however, it's painfully obvious that ANYTHING NOT NAILED DOWN was taken a long time ago, and the NAKED LIGHTBULB in the ceiling, while not nearly as bright as the lobby's, is bright enough to show that the WALLPAPER is peeling, exposing the BRICKWORK, GRIME is not scarce, and there is a SPIDERWEB in the corner. A DOOR to your left presumably leads into the BATHROOM. There is a DESK in the corner, with its PUTERPLATE missing.



Jammroll slams the door, shoving you out of your reverie.


"We've come all this way, and you're daydreaming? At a time like this? We're holing up here in the ass end of the city, having flown - and by that I mean I had to carry you, and that goddamn rat - across more than its radius of distance, to find someplace safe - I notice you didn't volunteer anywhere - and you're daydreaming?" She speaks like someone wanting to unload a burden, but talking over the urge rather than indulging it. "Fuck knows what's going on back at my place - a fight, probably, between your goddamn ice cream man and whoever they sent to take me. Take us, maybe - but not likely. Not you alive at any rate. And that ice cream! Do you know how much it'll be to get the stains out of the wallpaper?" Trivialities circle importances like a corporate orator's speech, words for the sake of words, unwilling to divest true meaning lest it hurt...


"Never mind. It doesn't matter."


...


"Do you know what it's like to have a secret? Not one of your pansy private-eye who's-sleeping-with-who secrets, Smith. Secrets that could get you killed. Secrets that are best ...locked away."


"Hereditary secrets, Smith. Secrets that shape your soul, your life, and everything you know. And have you ever woken up one day to find that everything you know has been completely, utterly, totally wrong?"


"Have you had then been given your own secret, Smith? One that you'd have to bury deep down in the essence of your being..."


She stops, and sighs. "Just ask your fucking questions."