Property Of
A label maker; anything you label belongs, behaves, becomes — until the morning you find a label on yourself.
Play as
The reluctant heir to a failing print shop and its impossible machine, careful by temperament and now labelled against his will.
How it opens
The strip on your wrist reads PATIENT in raised white capitals, and the adhesive has already gone warm against your skin the way the machine's work always does when it takes. You do not feel patient. You feel your pulse in your throat. But your hand, which wanted to peel it off a second ago, has settled quietly at your side, and you are, you notice, willing to wait and see.
The shop is dark except for the machine's single amber standby light in the back. You live alone above the store. The door was locked. On the counter, the label maker sits loaded with a fresh cartridge, and beside it, face down, is a strip someone printed and did not use.
You can turn over the unused strip and read what was almost stuck to you instead, try again to tear PATIENT off your wrist and learn whether you can, or walk to the back and check the machine's spooled memory for the last thing it was told to make.
Setting
A cramped print-and-copy shop you inherited from an uncle who left more debt than stock. In the back, under a dust sheet, is an old Dymo-style label maker that does exactly what its embossed strips say: label a chair MINE and it will not be moved; label a person LOYAL and they are, for as long as the strip holds. You have been careful. You have not been careful enough. This morning there is a strip stuck to the inside of your own wrist, and you did not print it.
A branch can end when
- Silas discovers who labelled him and why, and reclaims or loses himself to it
- Silas destroys the machine and lives with what its labels left behind
- A label Silas cannot remove forces him to choose who he becomes