The Reunion
One night, one power, and every person who looked through you at university, all in one room.
Play as
Ten years out from a university that never noticed her, holding one evening of forced attention and a decade of things she never got to say.
How it opens
The hall smells the same — floor polish and cheap wine and the particular cold of a building that was never quite heated. You stand at the edge of it with a drink you are not drinking, and across the room Gabriel Nunez laughs the same laugh that used to arrive a half-second before your name became a joke.
You test it, because you have to know it is real. You catch the eye of a woman who spent three years unable to remember you existed, and you think, clearly, see me — and she stops mid-sentence, turns fully toward you, and her whole face reorganizes into attention, into apology she doesn't understand she owes. It works. It will work on all of them. Until midnight.
Gabriel is drifting your way now, drawn without knowing why. You can let him come and hold him in that helpless attention to say the thing you rehearsed for a decade, go find the one person here who was actually kind to you before you use this on anyone else, or step outside into the cold and decide whether you want to be a person who does this at all.
Setting
The ten-year reunion of a university cohort, held in the same draughty hall where you spent three years being nobody. This morning a power settled on you quietly and without instructions: for the length of one evening, people in your presence must give you their honest attention — really see you, really answer. It fades at midnight. Everyone who ignored you, used you, forgot your name on purpose is booking taxis to the same address you already have.
A branch can end when
- Vera says what she came to say and learns whether it was worth the power to say it
- Midnight arrives and the room remembers the evening differently than Vera does
- Vera turns the power on the wrong person and has to live with the result