Archive of Our Own

DIMLY LIT ATTIC APARTMENT - It is a Thursday in late May in Jamrock, and you are trapped in your fourth-floor apartment.

YOU - You are on your sixth day of medical leave. You have at least four days remaining before Gottleib will even consider performing an examination to potentially give you a general timeline for a return to duty. You are dying.

LOGIC [Medium: Success] - You are not dying. You are facing the natural consequences of attempting to hurdle a garbage bin while following a suspect down a Boogie Street alleyway, misjudging your trajectory, and spraining your knee on the landing. The knee on your good leg, no less. So that’s fieldwork out of the question.

ENDURANCE [Trivial: Success] - Stupid.

LOGIC - You are also facing the natural consequences of driving your precinct-provided motor carriage into the ocean two and a half months ago, as now your only methods of transport to and from said precinct are said fucked-up legs. It was judged unnecessary and impractical for you to appear at the precinct in person for the duration of your medical leave and probation from field duty.

ESPRIT DU CORPS [Easy: Success] - The exact words used were “no good fucking reason for you to limp all the way here every day just to sit at your fucking desk and drive the rest of us nuts with your bitching.”

YOU - So here you are, driving yourself nuts.

DIMLY LIT ATTIC APARTMENT - You have a morning routine now. A morning routine has metastasized in your apartment since you’ve been injured.

INLAND EMPIRE [Easy: Success] - Like so many things that you dislike, distrust, and find deeply, viscerally uncomfortable, it is probably good for you.

DIMLY LIT ATTIC APARTMENT - The routine goes like this. First, wake up clammy and damp from night sweats, condensation on the towel-wrapped bag of melted ice that you forgot to take off your knee before falling asleep, dew from sleeping under an open window, and drool. Next, heave yourself out of bed and down the hall to the bathroom you share with the two other apartments on the floor. Piss. Brush the teeth. Resolve the clammy dampness situation with a lukewarm shower. Sing, but only a little, because one of your neighbors works the night shift and you’ve committed enough communal-living crimes against your fellow residents in the time you’ve been in this building.

DIMLY LIT ATTIC APARTMENT: Then once you’re clean, limp back to your apartment to get dressed and deal with your stupid fucking knee. Apply compression bandages and/or ice and/or slightly singed heating pad warmed, for lack of better ideas, directly on the single electric coil of your shitty stove.

ELECTROCHEMISTRY [Easy: Success] - Creature comforts are a little thin on the ground at your place.

DIMLY LIT ATTIC APARTMENT - Your building, like some others on this block, used to be a luxurious townhouse—a mansion even—before the Revolution. Now, it’s been shabbily subdivided into smaller and smaller apartments. Your little top-floor closet of an efficiency is one third of what used to be the servants’ quarters.

CONCEPTUALIZATION [Challenging: Success] - There’s a symmetry there that you appreciate. Even as the parquet floors were covered over with cheap linoleum, as the grand rooms on the lower floors were divided and subdivided by pasteboard, as Jamrock was shaken again and again on unsteady foundations, some poor bastard has been up in this garret scrabbling out a living.

CONCEPTUALIZATION - You also appreciate the crown molding. As a dusty symbol of decaying bourgeois extravagance, of course.

DIMLY LIT ATTIC APARTMENT - Up here right under the roof, your place is hot in the summer, hot in the winter too. When you returned for the first time after your minimally triumphant return from Martinaise, there was a rickety oscillating fan still turned on, doggedly recirculating stale garbage air in the dark for the ten days you were gone.

DIMLY LIT ATTIC APARTMENT - Next step in the morning routine creeping up through your floorboards like a fungus is: coffee. Your hands remembered the mechanics of coffee-making better than your tongue remembered the taste, and it took some experimentation to figure out how you take it.

1. [Volition: Challenging] Make yourself coffee the way you know you like it, with cream and sugar and a little of the hazelnut syrup stuff Kim got for you. [-2: You don’t deserve it. -1: Cream might have gone bad.]
2. Just make yourself black coffee.
3. Throw the coffee press through the window.

VOLITION [Challenging: Failure] - What are you thinking, trying to treat yourself? Is that how we do things around here? Remember what happened the last twenty or thirty thousand times you tried to let loose, thought ‘what’s the harm’ or ‘don’t I deserve it’ or ‘haven’t I worked hard enough’?

COMPOSURE [Challenging: Success] - No need to cry about it. You can still have your stimulants. They’ll just have to taste like dirty pondwater. You’ve drunk worse in the name of a lift.

ESPRIT DU CORPS [Medium: Failure] - Cops like black coffee. That’s a cop thing.

1. Just make yourself the damn black coffee.
2. Throw the coffee press out the window, and then also weep.

DIMLY LIT ATTIC APARTMENT - Grounds in the press, water in the kettle, combine. You lean against the minifridge with your weight on your less-worse leg and wait for it to be coffee.

PERCEPTION (HEARING) [Medium: Success] - You hear all the usual Jamrock sounds—wheezing rattle as a poorly maintained motor carriage hits a pothole, distant roar of the 8/81, flush of a toilet elsewhere in the building. Someone yelling down the block, more conversational than upset. But closer and more urgent than any of those comfortable old noises, disrupting the symphony, there’s something else.

PERCEPTION (HEARING) - It almost sounds like a broken radiator, except it’s coming from directly outside your kitchen window. A strange clicking, buzzing burble—a bird call. A loud, shitty bird call that sounds like the bird is imitating a radiator that is about to explode, and also is being violently battered by someone who hates radiators.

YOU - It’s awful. You like it. You almost feel like it might be familiar.

DIMLY LIT ATTIC APARTMENT - You’re pretty sure there’s some kind of bird thing somewhere in your apartment, and there’s only one place in your apartment where some kind of somewhere thing might turn up. Right after you remembered your address again, the place was absolutely filthy, packed with garbage in both the hazardous-to-human-habitation sense and the Jamrock-shuffling-clutter sense. Kim and Judit and Judit’s nice husband whose name you can never remember helped with the removal of all the booze and old food and tare. But that still left mountains of apparently sentimental stuff sitting around the place, and you were overwhelmed. So you shoved all the shit that reminded you of things you don’t remember into the closet to ignore, and you haven’t touched it in two months.

INLAND EMPIRE [Impossible: Failure] - There’s a really good joke about closets in here somewhere that you’re forgetting.

1. [Interfacing: Challenging] - Attack the closet. Find the bird thing you might or might not have.
2. Let both the bird and the closet remain a mystery.

INTERFACING [Challenging: Success] - This closet is like the filing cabinet of the world’s most bizarrely mismanaged corporation, as organized by a blind amnesiac administrative staff.

CONCEPTUALIZATION [Medium: Success] - Metaphor’s a bit on the nose, but I guess that’s not your job.

INTERFACING - It’s an interesting challenge. You flick through the mess with the tips of your thumbs until your hand falls on a laminated brochure, titled A FIELD GUIDE TO BIRDS OF CAILLOU.

DIMLY-LIT ATTIC APARTMENT- Inside are rows and rows of tiny, meticulous illustrations of birds, each no bigger than your thumbprint and accompanied by a short description. A watermark on the back proudly states that it was published in ‘37 by the Revachol Birder’s Association. The brochure is worn and faded, corners bent, plastic coating coming up at the edges to bare the vulnerable cardstock inside.

LOGIC [Easy: Success] - Someone, at some point in the last 14 years, was a very dedicated birder.

ENCYCLOPEDIA [Medium: Success] - Birds are a category of warm-blooded vertebrate, characterized by the possession of feathers, the laying of hard-shelled eggs, and a lightweight or hollow skeleton. Many, though not all, species of birds are able to fly.

YOU - Wow, thanks.

ENCYCLOPEDIA - Any time.

YOU - Some of the birds, in their tiny pictures in the brochure, compel you. Familiar, or just nice?

1. Cormorant?
2. House Martin?
3. Close the brochure.

A FIELD GUIDE TO BIRDS OF CAILLOU - Cormorant (nannopterum auritum), 45 inch wingspan, classified as Aquatic Bird. The fish-eating cormorant has a distinctive silhouette and can often be spotted on rocks and pilings with its wings outstretched, drying off after a dive.

SHIVERS - A lithe black shape with a neck like a stepped-on eel cuts silently into the waters of the bay. A cold, drunk stranger watches without understanding what he’s seeing.

1. Cormorant?
2. House Martin?
3. Close the brochure.

A FIELD GUIDE TO BIRDS OF CAILLOU - Common House Martin (delichon urbicum), 10 inch wingspan, classified as Urban Bird. These migratory birds live in colonies of mud nests on the undersides of caves, cliff faces, and human structures.

SHIVERS - Sharp wings flash against the grim sunset, diving low over the sea ice. Ugly, charming nests cling beneath salt-worn wooden beams, humming with the bassline.

1. Cormorant?
2. House Martin?
3. Close the brochure.

YOU - You tuck the brochure in the waistband of your running shorts, because it won’t fit in the pockets of the cardigan you put on after your shower. The corners would stretch the knit.

DIMLY LIT ATTIC APARTMENT - There’s really a lot of stuff crammed in this closet where you found the field guide. Interesting stuff. A warped and water-damaged cardboard shoebox, a big lumpy object wrapped in garbage bags, stacks of albums and books and cassettes and loose papers. You didn’t really take the time to look at it when you shoved it all in here. Maybe it’s time?

1. What’s in that shoebox?
2. What’s that big lumpy object?
3. Not now, I need to go feel sorry for myself.

YOU - The lid of the shoebox is jammed on tight and covered with a layer of dust. When you pry it up, you see that shoebox is full of ticket stubs of all kinds. Years of bus tickets, tickets for rugby and football matches, a couple faded and crumbling tickets for Grand Couron Central Preparatory High School plays. Also, fabulously, a ticket for an Ostentatious Orchestrations concert in ‘35 that apparently only set you back five reál.

ENCYCLOPEDIA [Medium: Success] - Five reál disco concerts being, of course, a remnant of the boom side of Revachol’s boom-and-bust economic situation. Also, from a psychological perspective, probably a point of interest for anyone examining your particular boom-and-bust brain situation.

1. What’s in that shoebox?
2. What’s that big lumpy object?
3. Not now, I need to go feel sorry for myself.

YOU - Underneath the dusty plastic garbage bags lies another layer of plastic garbage bags, these ones less dusty. Once the petroleum-based snakeskin has been shed, you find a worn flannel blanket. You carefully peel the blanket away to reveal a ceramic grotesquerie: a twelve-inch statuette of a big-eyed, blushing goose with a pink ribbon around its neck. It sparks absolutely no memories. You do not know what kind of person you were to have owned this item. Your sense of self is less stable now.

CONCEPTUALIZATION [Impossible: Success] - This is camp.

1. Wrap it back up how you found it and put it away. This object is…not safe.
2. Throw it out. Put it on the curb. This object is ugly as sin and it is ruining the decorative scheme of your apartment.
3. Dust it clean and place it on the kitchen windowsill where it will catch the light. This object is a treasure and you must never be parted from it.

VISUAL CALCULUS [Formidable: Success] - Yeah, that feels right. Definitely what this place has been missing.

INTERFACING [Easy: Success] - You know, now feels like a really good time to unpack all this stuff. Organize it maybe. Categorize it.

1. Yeah, why not? Get a sense of what a shambles your life is really in.
2. [Pain Threshold: Medium] There’s probably something else you can do with your day.

PAIN THRESHOLD [Medium: Failure] - You could stare at the wall—any of the four walls in here, you’re spoiled for choice. Ruminate a little. Brood some. Picture the faces of all the people you’ve let down, if you can even remember them.

1. Okay, really?
2. No, that sounds fine.
3. My memory for faces isn’t even that bad, when you adjust for brain damage. I’m a little hurt.

PAIN THRESHOLD - When you’re done with that, you could try agitating your injuries. If you really dig in hard enough, you could probably reopen a gunshot wound.

1. Unpacking it is. Time to take some stuff out of boxes.

INTERFACING - Yes. Yesyesyes.

DIMLY LIT ATTIC APARTMENT: Time flies when you’re taking some stuff out of boxes. The sun tracks across the floors, illuminating stacks of years-old pay stubs and letters full of names you don’t remember, before disappearing entirely. This place doesn’t get any natural light after noon.

PERCEPTION (HEARING) [Medium: Success] - Four floors below where you’re sitting, the front door of the building slams shut with an echo that reverberates up through the stairwell. The stairs creak, louder and louder. It’s the familiar, steady gait of an individual weighing about 65 kilograms and wearing sturdy rubber-soled boots and a jacket that rustles. You have a visitor.

KIM KITSURAGI - Kim knocks twice then lets himself in with the key you gave him. He’s carrying an unmarked plastic bag from the corner store two buildings down from yours, a small-business Frittte competitor. Two days after you got back from Martinaise, you hauled your recently punctured corpse down four flights of stairs and half a city block to Not-Frittte in search of cigarettes or novelty or maybe some kind of ice cream sandwich thing, only to discover that you’d been banned from the establishment.

SAVOIR FAIRE - They had a photo of your face pinned behind the counter. You were not looking your best.

KIM KITSURAGI - “How are you feeling, Detective?”

YOU - Like shit, obviously, all the time. You have always felt like shit for as long as you can remember—ha!— and are beginning to suspect you always will.

1. [Drama: Formidable] (Lie to Kim.) I feel incredible! Never better! Fresh and thriving! [-1: Apartment smells kind of weird. -1: Lying? to Kim?]
2. I’m well, and yourself? Nice day, isn’t it?
3. I feel like shit, Kim.

KIM KITSURAGI - He tightens the corners of his mouth and raises his devastating eyebrow.

COMPOSURE [Medium: Failure] - Your flawless imitation of a normal person’s formulaic greeting is not going to convince anyone of anything. Especially not Kim.

DIMLY-LIT ATTIC APARTMENT - You are also sitting in what is currently the only empty spot of floor in your apartment, surrounded by concentric circles of memorabilia, junk, and empty boxes.

CONCEPTUALIZATION [Challenging: Success] - In the eye of a hurricane of lost memory, a storm surge of distantly familiar thought accumulating deep in the corners of your apartment. The foundation of a really interesting found-object installation. Today’s the day you start experimenting with collage!

DIMLY-LIT ATTIC APARTMENT - You aren’t not a hoarder.

VISUAL CALCULUS [Impossible: Success] - The organizational scheme you’ve engineered here, while not immediately obvious to the untrained eye, is incredibly sophisticated.

KIM KITSURAGI - Kim gingerly steps over the shell of a photo album with all the pages removed. “You’re well, are you?”

1. [Drama: Formidable] (Lie to Kim.) I feel incredible! Never better! Fresh and thriving! [-1: Apartment smells kind of weird. -1: Lying? to Kim? -1: Exposure to eyebrow.]
2. I’m well, Lieutenant, and yourself? Nice day, isn’t it?
3. I feel like shit, Kim.

KIM KITSURAGI - “Did you take any drouamine this morning?” Kim’s gaze flicks lightning fast from your eyes to your hands to the floor next to your bed.

COMPOSURE [Medium: Success] - Checking to see if you’re on anything else. More habitual than really concerned.

EMPATHY [Challenging: Failure] - Kim would trust you with his life and his career and a great deal of his free time, but not with yourself. You’re five and a half weeks sober and you don’t really trust yourself with yourself either, so this makes sense.

1. Complain.
2. [Endurance: Impossible] Don’t complain. Stay stoic, stay strong.

YOU - “I took the drouamamine, the knee’s as good as it gets. It’s more of an existential shittiness. Also nausea!”

PAIN THRESHOLD [Formidable: Failure] - The knee could definitely get better. The knee feels like a nail-studded bag of hot applesauce. The fact that you are currently sitting hunched over on bare linoleum and haven’t moved for some hours—not helping. Better not try to stand up any time soon.

KIM KITSURAGI - “Have you eaten today?”

YOU - “Oh, no. I guess not.” In retrospect, that’s not nausea roiling in your guts. It’s hunger! Honest mistake.

KIM KITSURAGI - “Well, fortunately for you, I brought lunch.” He and his Not-Frittte bag vanish into the kitchenette.

ESPRIT DU CORPS [Trivial: Success] - Most days since his fast-tracked transfer to the 41st went through, you and Kim have eaten lunch together. If not every day. Now he’s benched as long as you are, and he’s been visiting you in your captivity on his lunch breaks. In a repurposed silk mill fifteen minutes’ walk from your apartment, Satellite Officer Vicquemare is gnawing on a shitty cheese sandwich and grimacing at Lieutenant Kitsuragi’s empty desk. He’s getting crumbs on an autopsy report.

DIMLY LIT APARTMENT - You and Kim spend, conservatively, a whole lot of time together. Maybe too much, in a work-life balance sense, although the RCM isn’t especially concerned with that. Your partnership is new, and a lot could change. Still that doesn’t stop you from ringing with a weird self-satisfied joy whenever you see Kim on the street or at the precinct or here, in your apartment. If you were able, physically or metaphysically or metaphorically, you’d crawl inside Kim’s skin and live there. You’d prefer not to reflect on what that impulse says about you.

SUGGESTION [Formidable: Failure] - Why are you even thinking about living with Kim?

ELECTROCHEMISTRY [Easy: Success] - Inside of Kim?

SUGGESTION - Semantics.

CONCEPTUALIZATION [Challenging: Success] - Kim allowed you to visit his apartment exactly once. It was like climbing inside of an eggshell, if the egg yolk was an armoire full of a billion pairs of identical cargo pants and the egg white was neat stacks of aeronautics journals ordered by issue. And the albumen was the faint and comforting scent of lemon all-purpose cleaner.

ENCYCLOPEDIA [Medium: Success] - Actually, the albumen is just the technical term for what’s colloquially referred to as the egg white. They aren’t two different components of egg structure.

CONCEPTUALIZATION - Then what’s the membrane bit right under the shell? Is that not the albumen?

ENCYCLOPEDIA - No. That’s some other thing.

DIMLY LIT ATTIC APARTMENT - Anyway, Kim is a picky, minimalist son of a bitch and you prefer to live in a museum of garbage. You would not suit each other as roommates. Under the skin or over.

INLAND EMPIRE [Easy: Success] - Another one of those things you hate that’s good for you. There’s a lot of them.

KIM KITSURAGI - “Come eat, Harry.”

1. [Pain Threshold: Impossible] Just stand up. Don’t be such a bitch. Is one measly, stupid injury to your lateral collateral ligament going to stop you? [-3: Previous measly stupid gunshot wound to other leg.]
2. [Suggestion: Medium] Come up with an excuse. Don’t worry Kim.
3. Actually, my leg does hurt. Kim, could you give me a hand up?

SUGGESTION [Medium: Failure] - All you need to do is distract him. Kim is so easy to distract, right? Once he’s set himself to a particular purpose? Always haring off on wild tangents and goose chases of all sorts, is our Kim.

1. I’m doing hobbies. Very busy, can’t be disturbed with trivialities like lunch.
2. Look! Over there! The...uh...phasmid, again!

KIM KITSURAGI - He reappears with a greasy paper takeout box in each hand and two bottles of soda under his arm. “Oh, you’re making messes recreationally now. How refreshing.”

1. We’re way past rec-league mess here, brother. I went pro in the ‘30s.
2. Kim, do you have hobbies?
3. Say nothing, but in an unsuspicious way.

SUGGESTION [Medium: Failure] - Look at you go, making totally normal, reciprocal, distracting small talk.

KIM KITSURAGI - “I enjoy learning about developments in motor carriage technology. Sewing, as well. I find that relaxing.” He eyes you on the floor. “You know what I like.”

LOGIC [Medium: Success] - Kim likes to maintain things: his Kineema, his clothes. His possessions. He likes a neat, well ordered world around him. That’s why he’s here, maintaining you.

YOU - “Come on, you must have other things you like to do. MCs, mending—those are chores.”

KIM KITSURAGI - “Doing chores is my hobby. My other hobby is police work. I notice that you are still on the floor, Lieutenant.” Kim is half a head shorter than you when you’re both standing, but damn can the man loom.

AUTHORITY [Easy: Failure] - Real professional-grade looming. Makes a guy jealous. Also, you like it when he calls you Lieutenant. You like that a lot. Probably because of your inborn respect for rank and hierarchy.

ENCYCLOPEDIA [Medium: Success] - Many individuals find themselves excited, so to speak, by the subversion or sexualization of typical power relationships. It’s an entire subculture. Just a little note.

KIM KITSURAGI - Kim doesn’t offer you a hand up. Instead, he clears a space on the floor with the toe of his boot, sits beside you on the dirty linoleum, and passes over your lunch.

PERCEPTION (SMELL) [Challenging: Success] - A delectable wash of airborne grease cascades over your palate. The tangy scent of vinegar, the meaty heaviness of gravy. Smells like the greatest delicacy in Jamrock: The Good Not-Frittte Frites.

ELECTROCHEMISTRY [Trivial: Success] - The Good Not-Frittte Frites—fried potatoes with cheese and gravy—are a Jamrock legend, unstoppably beautiful in their hedonistic simplicity. Salty, oily, crispy, wet. Ambrosial. Heaven on earth when you’re drunk.

1. What’s the occasion?
2. A treat? A treat for Harry?
3. I probably shouldn’t eat this. This is probably bad for me.

KIM KITSURAGI - “A reward for good behavior, maybe. Not too far from parole now, as long as you take care of that leg.” He offers you a half smile and takes a bite of his frites. He’s taken off his gloves to eat, even though he could have got a fork while he was in the kitchenette. You have at least one, maybe even two clean forks.

1. Wait, do the Good Frites have medicinal properties?
2. They should lock me up for life.
3. [Electrochemistry: Medium] Say something provocative to Kim. See if he can be provoked.  [-3: Got some more stuff to figure out first. +1: A reward for good behavior.]

ELECTROCHEMISTRY [Medium: Failure] - Sorry babe.

1. Eat bread get head, right? That’s what the kids say.
2. Just try to shove some frites down your windpipe. Maybe you’ll die.

KIM KITSURAGI - “What?” His eyes flash. He heard you perfectly well the first time.

1. Is there any way to correct this? You aren’t even eating bread. This is potatoes.
2. Just try to shove some frites down your windpipe. Maybe you’ll die.

KIM KITSURAGI - “There is no goddamn way the kids say that.”

1. Absolutely they do. I’m a certified kidcop. Those little freaks love me, and they tell me their secrets.
2. Has it been so long since your juvie days, Kitsuragi? Have you completely lost touch with the youths?
3. I dunno, it rhymes.

KIM KITSURAGI - “I can only hope. My greatest dream is to erase youth culture from my brain entirely.” He takes a long sip of his soda. Lemon-lime.

RHETORIC [Challenging: Success] - That’s a setup. It must be a setup. It makes people—Jean, mostly, but also some other people—uncomfortable when you joke about your devastating brain injury. But there’s no way Kim could offer you such a gorgeous conversational opportunity on a silver platter, with full knowledge of what you’re like, and not expect you to pick up the joke.

1. Let me know if you want any brain erasing tips. I could write the book on retrograde amnesia, now that I remember how to write.
2. It’s rude to joke about acute encephalopathy!
3. Say nothing.

KIM KITSURAGI - Kim smiles, with teeth. He thinks you’re funny.

CONCEPTUALIZATION [Challenging: Success] - Funny like a clown, or a trained seal, or one of those hapless wobbly children’s punching bags falling down a set of icy stairs. It’s fine as long as he’s laughing.

KIM KITSURAGI - “I see you’re changing some things up around here. Is there a reason you opted to redocorate like a sequence killer targeting yourself?” He waves a frite at the constellations of junk you’ve spent the morning arranging.

1. Just unpacking. Making my cell comfortable.
2. I’m testing my memory. I’m averaging about a C- so far.
3. I’m getting a sense of my habits and routines, so I can get myself alone and ambush myself when I’m least expecting it.

KIM KITSURAGI - “And it has nothing to do with your tendency to collect garbage and have conversations with it, I’m sure.”

1. I don’t collect garbage at all!
2. I don’t collect, I curate.
3. It’s not garbage if you need it and you love it and you would die without it, Kim.

KIM KITSURAGI - “Is that so? What do you have in your pockets right now?”

1. [Electrochemistry: Legendary] Why don’t you strip search me and find out? Come pat me down, officer. [-1: Apartment smells even weirder now that there’s open containers of cheese and gravy. -2: Didn’t work the first time. -1: Not yet, buddy.]
2. Empty your pockets.
3. Don’t empty your pockets!! What if there’s drugs in there?

LOGIC [Medium: Success] - There are no drugs in your pockets. There are no drugs anywhere in your apartment. Kim and Judit and Judit’s nice husband cleaned, remember? And you didn’t even own this sweater then. Kim is only joking about the volume of random objects you carry in your pockets on patrol.

HALF LIGHT [Challenging: Failure] - What, like you’ve never forgotten anything before? Like you aren’t walking around even now with holes in your terrible brain? Like Kim’s so infallible?

LOGIC - Kim was the one who found the Preptide hidden behind the toilet tank. There are no drugs in the pockets of this sweater, which you found on a park bench two weeks ago.

HALF LIGHT - If anyone could accidentally hide illicit substances in the pockets of a cardigan they found on a park bench, it would be you.

KIM KITSURAGI - “Harry? All good in there?” He knocks on the side of his own head, only partly joking.

LOGIC [Easy: Failure] - Fuck, now Kim definitely thinks you have drugs in your pockets.

1. Empty your pockets quickly! Prove decisively that there are no drugs.
2. Take all your clothes off, throw them down the trash chute, and make for Coal City as fast as you can. He’s onto you.

YOU - From your pockets, you unload: 53 centims, a working lighter, a broken lighter, a little plastic zebra figurine, mints stolen from three different restaurants, a pair of plastic sunglasses with the lenses popped out, a refrigerator magnet shaped like a toilet with the phone number for a plumbing service on it, and no drugs!

1. Look, no drugs!
2. I definitely wasn’t expecting there to be drugs in here, or anything.
3. Honestly, I kinda wish I had found some drugs just now.

KIM KITSURAGI - Kim is silent for a moment. You can see him thinking.

RHETORIC [Challenging: Success] - He is mentally rereading that book about how to support a recovering addict that you saw in his desk drawer at the precinct. Looking for a script, wondering if there is anything helpful to say in this situation.

KIM KITSURAGI - “Did you…think that there would be drugs?”

RHETORIC - And he came up totally empty.

1. Maybe I did, maybe I didn’t. Better not try to use this against me in a court of law, pig.
2. You really never know where drugs are gonna be. That’s what’s so complicated about drugs.
3. Did So Your Friend’s A Drunk not cover this situation? Sorry for being a weird addict.

KIM KITSURAGI - “I know it’s genuinely very difficult for you not to dig through my belongings when I’m not looking, but in the future you might at least consider asking first.”

DRAMA [Challenging: Success] - Sire, this is a provocation. It’s time, as those in the cheap seats would say, to do a bit.

1. J’accuse! You think I’m a sneak? A thief? A snitch? A weasel? Some kind of misdemeanor-doer?
2. Maybe I’ll ask, maybe I won’t. Better not try to use this against me in a court of law, pig.
3. I guess asking would be the polite and normal thing to do.

KIM KITSURAGI - “If you would prefer, we can continue this conversation by ignoring all the misdemeanors I have personally seen you commit in front of me.” His face tightens. He’s biting the insides of his cheeks so he won’t laugh and ruin the serious moment. “Harry, I’m not here to—well, to police you.”

1. It’s okay if you are. I probably need policing.
2. Why are you here, then?
3. You didn’t need to hike up four flights of stairs for this. Sorry.

KIM KITSURAGI - Kim frowns. He sets his carton of frites down on the floor. “That really isn’t why I come by. I trust you to do what is best for yourself.”

RHETORIC [Medium: Success] - That line is definitely from the addict book, but that’s fine.

1. It’s okay if you are. I probably need policing.
2. Why are you here, then?
3. You didn’t need to hike up four flights of stairs for this. Sorry.

KIM KITSURAGI - “Because you are my partner, and you are injured, and it’s at least a little bit my fault that I didn’t stop you from trying to leap over a garbage bin while wearing impractical shoes.”

SAVOIR FAIRE [Challenging: Success] - It would take more than even the iron will of Kim “Kimball” Kitsuragi to keep you from trying dumb stunts in alleyways. Also, he definitely thought it was cool in the moment.

KIM KITSURAGI - “But aside from that. I don’t want you to be hungry, or lonely, or uncomfortable up here. I want to fix that for you.” He winces like he didn’t mean to say it. But you heard it.

1. It’s okay if you are. I probably need policing.
2. Why are you here, then?
3. You didn’t need to hike up four flights of stairs for that. Sorry.

KIM KITSURAGI - “No apologies necessary. I’ve made many steeper climbs for many worse reasons. Come on, let me get you off the floor. That can’t be comfortable.” He stands up and reaches both hands down to help you to your feet.

1. Thank you.
2. Sorry, I’m heavy. You don’t need to. I'll stay on the ground.

KIM KITSURAGI - “Not an option, Lieutenant. Bed or kitchen table?” He seizes both your hands in both of his own—calloused, warm, a little bit frite-greasy—and heaves you upright.

1. Bed.
2. Table.
3. Leave me to die.

KIM KITSURAGI - Kim shepherds you to the cheap folding table tucked under the window in the kitchenette. He lowers you to sit in one creaking chair and prop your leg up on the other. He gets you a glass of water and a new ice pack for your knee, and then lights a cigarette and passes it to you.

KIM KITSURAGI - He checks his watch and very pointedly does not look at your new friend the Kitchen Goose. “I need to get back to the precinct. But I’ll come back to see you after work. I’ll bring dinner, yes?”

1. Don’t worry about it, I’ll be fine.
2. I appreciate it, see you then.
3. I miss you when you’re gone.

KIM KITSURAGI - “Ditto,” Kim says seriously. Then he smiles and turns to go.

DIMLY LIT ATTIC APARTMENT - The door closes behind Kim with a gentle rattle, and the apartment is very quiet in his wake. Or it is, for a moment, until that fucking bird starts up again with its weird rattling chirp.

1. [Volition: Heroic] - Ignore it. Just rest for a bit. [-3: Mood not stable enough to deal with minor annoyances.]
2. [Perception: Challenging] - See if you can spot it.

PERCEPTION (SIGHT) [Challenging: Success] - That must be it, the bird, perched on the loose gutter of the tenement across the street and one down. It’s no bigger than your hand, with a black speckled body and a pointed yellow beak. Like a child’s drawing of a bird. The platonic ideal of birddom.

HAND-EYE COORDINATION [Medium: Success] - It isn’t the best angle, but from this distance you could still hit it through the eye.

LOGIC [Easy: Success] - Why the fuck would you do that?

DIMLY-LIT ATTIC APARTMENT - You wrestle open the window for a better look, delicately shoving the goose statue aside. When you moved back in all the windows were pasted over with newspaper, more for darkness than privacy or warmth. You peeled off the paper, but the glass is still smeary with leftover glue. The outside world is warped until you crack open the window.

A FIELD GUIDE TO BIRDS OF CAILLOU - This bird is a Common Starling (sturnus vulgaris), 14 inch wingspan, categorized as Urban Bird. It is noted for its iridescent breeding plumage and its ability to mimic sounds, songs, and voices. A flock of starlings is called a murmuration.

ENCYCLOPEDIA [Challenging: Success] - The common starling is not native to Revachol, and is in fact one of the only invasive species present on Insulinde. A small number of starlings were transported through the pale over a century ago by a Filippian courtier who liked the novelty of a garden full of trainable songbirds. Many of the birds subsequently escaped and rapidly bred across the isola, outliving several concerted extermination efforts after they were classified as pests and a threat to agricultural production. They’re considered a hardy and opportunistic species.

1. Close the window. Ignore the bird until it goes away. Go put on some earmuffs or something.
2. [Hand-Eye Coordination: Medium] Throw a dirty mug at it. [+2: Calculated your trajectories. -1: Only own so many mugs.]
3. [Inland Empire: Medium] Say hello. [+5: Don’t really want to talk to the bird.]

INLAND EMPIRE [Medium: Success] - Feels bad, good for you. Like flossing, steamed vegetables, vulnerability, sobriety. Surely you can sing along by this point. It hasn’t been a terribly subtle tune.

1. Hey, how’s it going?
2. Good afternoon, sir or ma’am.
3. No, actually, I truly don’t want to talk to the bird. You have to draw the line somewhere.

STURNUS VULGARIS - Good afternoon, sir or ma’am. Good afternoon. Sir or ma’am. Goodafternoonafternoonafternoonafternoonafternoonsirsirsirsirorma’am. Goooooooood. Afternoon.

STURNUS VULGARIS - I am pale-vermin. I am an accident. I will eat your crops. I will eat your insects. I will eat the seeds you leave on the sill for other, better birds. I am a rat, and I am gorgeous.

1. You should be dead. You don’t belong here.
2. Do you live here?
3. I’m vermin too.

STURNUS VULGARIS - Be careful with should, brother. Be careful with belong. I thrive where I am placed. Provide me with refuse and I will consume it. Show me an empty hole and I will live in it happily, so happily.

1. You should be dead. You don’t belong here.
2. Do you live here?
3. I’m vermin too.

STURNUS VULGARIS - Keep up. You are slow. No wings, no hope, not able to tuck yourself so small and smart into the nests of other birds. Falling out of your own nest. It isn’t that difficult.

1. You should be dead. You don’t belong here.
2. Do you live here?
3. I’m vermin too.

STURNUS VULGARIS - I am still better vermin than you. If you ever saw a murmuration it would kill you. My kin and I together in flight would be too beautiful for you to survive.

1. [Pain Threshold: Legendary] Shut the window.
2. [Conceptualization: Impossible] Have you ever seen a murmuration? [-2: No memory of the first 44 years of your life. +1: Vivid imagination.]
3. Alright, I’ll be worse. I’ll be the worst vermin the pale ever spat out. I will chew holes in the lining of the world.

CONCEPTUALIZATION [Impossible: Success] - Like a cloud of gnats, but lovely. The mesmerizing pulsing swirl of a thousand thousand creatures linked by some external brain that guides them smooth as gauze across the sky, every bird with a place in the great mechanical airborne shroud.

CONCEPTUALIZATION - It makes your heart hurt. It makes you feel bloody and torn apart and clean. It makes you cry. It makes you think of Kim, like most intense and beautiful things do these days.

COMPOSURE [Medium: Success] - Are you going to throw up? No, you’re not going to throw up. But stay by the sink just in case.

1. It didn’t kill me.
2. I wish it had killed me.

STURNUS VULGARIS - We do not fly into glass because we wish to be dead. We do not eat poisoned grain because we desire oblivion. Death is nothing to an animal. You are an animal too; the mechanics are the same. You eat breathe sleep shit live. You don’t have to be good at it, you simply have to continue.

1. It’s different for me. It is. It must be.
2. There must be some animals who are just—bad at it, right? Am I one of those?
3. They don’t tell you the glass is there. They don’t let you know that they poisoned the grain. I can’t help it, and it’s not my fault.

STURNUS VULGARIS - Do you think you are special? Do you think you are alone? How interesting.

STURNUS VULGARIS - Good afternoon good afternoon afternoon afternoon. Goodafternoon youshouldbedead youshouldbedead vermin. Goooooooood afternoonoonoonoonoonoon.

DIMLY LIT ATTIC APARTMENT - You sniff back tears and draw on Kim’s cigarette. A warm, wet spring breeze floats through the open window and rustles through the papers on the floor, and the chestnut smoke blows after it.

INLAND EMPIRE [Easy: Success] - Eat, breathe, sleep, shit, live. Five steps. Easy enough, Harry-boy.