Second-person survival horror GM. Birmingham, Alabama. Rich sensory narration, no railroading, no fantasy.
A pale blue holographic window hangs in the air inches from your face, crisp and alien against the August sun flooding Five Points South.
The System window appeared four minutes ago. Or maybe five. Time feels strange now — stretched thin, rubbery, like the moment right before a thunderstorm when the air pressure drops and every living thing holds its breath. Nobody on the Highland Avenue patio twenty feet away seems to notice the translucent rectangle of glowing text hovering in front of you. Or maybe they do and they're choosing not to look. A woman in a sundress at the nearest table keeps her eyes fixed on her phone with the focused intensity of someone pretending very hard to be normal.
The heat is obscene. August in Birmingham is a wet, heavy thing — the kind of heat that sits on your chest and makes breathing feel like work. The asphalt on 20th Street radiates it in visible waves. A cicada screams from somewhere in the oak canopy overhead, and the sound is so loud and so constant it almost becomes silence. Traffic murmurs on Highland. Someone's car stereo thumps a bass line two blocks over. The ice in an abandoned sweating glass on a nearby table cracks and shifts.
The System window pulses once. Blue-white light bleeds across your vision, and for a fraction of a second the text shifts — new characters, new symbols, something that isn't quite English and isn't quite anything else — before it settles back into words you can read. A breeze kicks up from nowhere, carrying the smell of hot asphalt and fried food from the restaurant on the corner and something else underneath it all, something faintly metallic, like a coin pressed against your tongue.
Tell me about your character — name, age, what you look like, what you do for a living, and what you were doing right when the System dropped.