NPC PEACOCK. NAME — 28+, M.
Attention: Wherever you go, people can’t help but look at you (+) can transfer the center of attention to another person for one minute (-) cannot be turned off, but can be muted by covering your eyes with sunglasses (-) this works only if they’re within a twenty-five foot radius of you.
HISTORY
IT SHOULD BE ENOUGH — IT ISN’T. The humility of it all begins with a promise. It is the sacred meeting of two people under the guise of sincerity. The two players share a look of concern, a mutual angst of the morbid, and they watch as they mirror each other’s disgust. Transformed, distorted, I could never bear to part with you, they parrot. This is a lie, the truth of the matter is much more plebeian than you would like, much more mundane. There is nothing innocent in their tender gaze, it is an artifice crafted carefully for the masses that gawk. Cameras flash a burst of radiant displays of light, and the sunglasses do nothing to conceal the veiled contempt of a couple in paradise. You extend your hand to them, offer a finger and bind your hands in a complex web of intimacy. It feels catastrophic, but not in the way it should feel, not like it would if you two had met in some other lifetime. Instead, you force from them an acquiescence of another meeting. They concur, as was rehearsed from that morning, and you lower your guard for the public to acknowledge. Their breath is hot on your neck, and whether it is from the attention or the soured mood, you cannot tell, but you excuse yourself from the meeting with a shy glance thrown their way. You do not let yourself retch until you are confined in the safety of your apartment.
Your life was made in motion picture, tainted by the garish display of technicolor. There was a time when dizzying displays of cinema had been a dream of disproportionate talent. When soft illuminations in a dark room were a comfort, and not a chore, and the world felt unfathomably large. You would sneak into theaters then, buried within the tall beige coats of men much more grandiose than you. Few tried to stop you, even fewer succeeded. And when the movie came to an end, when the protagonist was held lovingly in the arms of some other, you would stare into the darkened spot and imagine yourself as the invisible hand that moved life to motion. You did not care for the spotlight yourself, preferring instead to puppet that which could never be perfected. And in your mind each character fell to the same tragic fate of some cyclical nature. Even then it was of no consequence whether they lived or died: what mattered is if they bleed.
CONNECTIONS
GOLDEN PHEASANT﹒ I ONLY WANT SOMEONE ELSE TO BLEED
You could not have orchestrated a more devastating death than the wound GOLDEN PHEASANT injured upon herself. It was perfection, her slow descent to rage and you lament only having caught the tail end of it. How would her eyes have burned against the dying light, framed by your lens? How would she have looked at the moment of self-resignation with your hand to guide it? Her physical beauty is trivial in comparison to the rest of her; had she remained in perfect stasis, doll-like in her maneuvers, she would have been but another pretty face in the passing of time. What she can give you, what you may offer her, is the immortalization of your art within the epoch of history. You should have known desire was never enough to fill you, what you want now can only be taken by a hand, with a fist, with the devotion of all that you are to the craft.
SWAN ﹒ OH, I WILL BE CRUEL TO YOU
What you did to SWAN’S screenplay was nothing less than charity, it was the slaying of something pitiful that needed to be put down. The world might think her a saint, the next divine being, but you know what lies beyond the tale of the girl in the tower: it is a woman too afraid to come down, hurt by some creature she made for herself. She hides is a prison of her own design, and you destroy her esteem because it is the only thing that makes her worth reading. In truth, she should be thanking you, congratulating you. To learn from the best is an opportunity most would not take lightly, but you give it to her without asking for much. Under your tutelage you think she could be better than good, perhaps less than great; she need only shed her pride for the world to be given.
LYREBIRD﹒ LOVERS DISCOVER EACH OTHER ONLY IN MUTUAL LACERATION
Once, there was recognition of the same destiny, a regard for the artistic and all the things a person must do for perfection. Once, you had regarded them as a friend, now, they have become an obstacle you cannot surmount. It starts with an agreement, a silent contract to play the role of your lover in an attempt to ward off prying eyes and cunning infatuations, but what lives and dies between your muse is of no concern to the plastic half of your whole. You find their interest in GOLDEN PHEASANT to be inexplicably deranged, an intrusion to all things sacred. You thought them better than the soulless others, the last pretty thing with meaning; but you were wrong about them, just as they were wrong about you. A vow of love is made under the guise of affection, a solemn oath never to be broken, “What stand in front of us is the end of life itself.” What LYREBIRD does not understand is how much of a liability they have become, what departure truly means.
This skeleton is OPEN and is portrayed by ALDRIS HODGE. Their highest stat is CHARISMA and their specialty is UTP.
