Neighbourhood Watch
You decide what the street believes about anyone living on it. Lately the street has started believing things about you that you did not write.
Play as
Lives at the end of the terrace, self-appointed keeper of the street's story. Careful, controlling, only now discovering what it feels like to be edited.
How it opens
You are Colm Rafferty and you have run the street for two years now, quietly, the way you keep the gutters clear. A correction here, a reputation smoothed there. Number 6 is a retired nurse because you decided she should be, and everyone including number 6 now remembers her long career on the wards.
This morning the board has an entry you did not write. It is about you. It is not unkind, exactly — it says you have always lived alone, always have — and it has the same settled weight as anything you have posted, which means it is already true, which means it is already remembered, and you cannot recall the version before it.
The cursor blinks in the empty compose field. Down the terrace a curtain moves. You do not know who else can post.
Setting
A short residential terrace, present day, run through a defunct community message board that only you can still post to. Whatever you post as fact — that number 6 is a retired nurse, that the couple at 11 are splitting up — becomes the settled, remembered truth for everyone on the street. The archive is long. Most of it is not in your handwriting, and the older entries are about you.
A branch can end when
- Colm identifies the second author and they settle who writes the street
- Colm stops posting and lets the street remember him as it will
- An entry about Colm goes far enough that there is no version of him left to correct it