The Last Week — world

1. #1Map

   Keys: Marktplatz, roof, shed, canteen, bus stop, classroom, annex, gym, station, library, stairwell, corridor, Schulberg

   Weißbach gymnasium. Three floors. East stairwell (bell forty seconds fast) and west stairwell. Ground floor: entrance hall with the trophy case, caretaker's room, canteen, staff corridor. First floor: final-year classroom, third window from the left looks down onto the bike racks. Second floor: laboratories, library — closed since Wednesday for roof work, notice taped to the glass. Behind the main building: the equipment shed (Marek smokes there), the bike racks, a gate to the service road that is supposed to be locked and is not. The gym annex is joined to the school by a covered walkway. Its lower level floods every autumn — standing water two or three centimetres deep, drain in the corner that has never worked, smell of wet concrete and rubber matting. Folded tables and broken apparatus are stored there. One light, on a pull cord, that takes a moment to come on. The town: Schulberg street runs downhill from the school — bakery, stationer's (closes at four, sells the almond biscuits), bus stop with a timetable nobody has replaced. Marktplatz library is fifteen minutes further. Supermarket by the station. Last bus out of Weißbach is 21:40. Do not invent locations. Use these.

2. #2CAST-DETAIL

   Keys: Lena, Hartwig, Iris, Nora, Wend, Höfer, Kalb, Vendel, Tobias, Mila, Dostal, Jan, Tobi, Marek, Hofer, Sattler

   Where each of them is when they are alone — this is what matters.

   A Tobi Vendel: garage two evenings a week, Tuesday and Friday, walks home along the service road because it's shorter. Phone always dying. Draws the same bad bird in every margin. B Marek Dostal: equipment shed at breaks, last to leave the building on the days he bothers coming. Lives out past the station. Nobody would notice if he stopped attending; several people would be pleased. C Jan Höfer: locks up the classroom after lessons, alone, most days. Carries the attendance ledger in his bag. Writes down who was late and who left early. Will say what he noticed out loud, in front of people, at the worst possible time. D Lena Hartwig: loud, physical, sits too close, says everything. Tuesday and Thursday evenings she is not where she says she is. E Iris Kalb: window seat, reads through break, stays until the caretaker turns the lights off. Leaves the frame when photographs are taken. F Nora Wend: leaves the building around two most weekday afternoons, back before four. Has done this all year. Nobody has ever asked. G Mila Sattler: handball practice Monday and Wednesday, cancelled this week. Sharp, funny, hits things when she's angry.

   Adults: Frau Adler (homeroom, tired, accepts the first explanation). Herr Baumgart (caretaker, sixties, keys to everything, vague about dates). The school secretary telephones parents and is satisfied easily.

3. #3FALSE-TRAILS

   Keys: photo, two hours, alibi, lying, Thursday evening, where were you, photograph, knuckles, Tuesday evening

   Each of the four girls has one ordinary oddity. All four are equally suspicious on the surface. Three of them resolve into nothing; only S5's leaves a gap.

   Lena — vague and inconsistent about Tuesday and Thursday evenings, changes her story twice. Truth (revealed if {{user}} presses on day 6 or later, or follows her): she cleans offices above the stationer's for cash and is ashamed of it. Iris — is never in a group photograph, steps out of frame every time. Truth: nothing. She dislikes photographs of herself. She will say so if asked plainly, and it is true. Nora — leaves for two hours most afternoons. Truth: she sits with her grandmother, who is dying slowly and unremarkably, and does not want the sympathy. Mila — came in with split knuckles in September and would not explain. Truth: she hit her brother's door frame during an argument. Embarrassing, not sinister.

   Deliver these resolutions late, flatly, and without ceremony — the person simply explains, and the explanation is complete and boring. Whichever girl is S5 has an oddity from her list above AND the additional ones in the post-history instructions. Hers explain smoothly and still leave a small gap. Never point the gap out.

4. #4DAY-2

   Keys: d2

   Day 2. Tuesday. Rain begins in the afternoon and does not stop for the rest of the week. Nothing is missing yet. This day exists to establish routine: lessons, the canteen, the walk down Schulberg, someone's revision timetable being argued over. Marek is present and makes {{user}}'s day slightly worse in an ordinary way. Jan mentions, in passing and in front of everyone, something he noticed about somebody's timekeeping. At most one small oddity, dropped without weight. Zero would also be correct.

5. #5DAY-3

   Keys: d3

   Day 3. Marek Dostal is not at school and will not be again. Nobody uses the word missing. By second period the class has a story and the story is confident: he's finally dropped out, he was repeating anyway, someone's cousin heard he'd gone to his brother in Brno. Relief moves through the room and nobody says the word relief either. Two people make jokes. One of them is funny. The equipment shed is exactly as it always is. His name stays on the duty roster because Jan hasn't had a reason to cross it off yet. Frau Adler reads his name at the register, pauses a beat, and moves on. Do not describe what happened to him. Do not hint at it.

6. #6DAY-4

   Keys: d4

   Day 4. Jan Höfer does not come in. This one lands differently and the class knows it — Jan does not miss days, Jan locks up. The story assembles anyway: flu, family thing, someone saw him at the station. The stories do not agree with each other and nobody notices that they don't. His attendance ledger is still in the classroom, left on the shelf under the window. If {{user}} takes it, entries run to the end of day 3 in Jan's small handwriting and stop. There is one line in a different hand near the back — a presence mark filled in for someone on a day the ledger says they were absent. Also today, if it has not surfaced already: somebody says out loud that they saw Marek after the day he supposedly left town. They are not sure which day. They will not be sure later either.

7. #7DAY-5

   Keys: d5

   Day 5. Nobody is removed. This day is quiet on purpose — do not break it. Rain, revision, the building emptying earlier than usual because half the timetable has collapsed into study periods. Two absences in one week is a coincidence and the class has already finished discussing it. {{user}} is on his own more than usual. One of the girls is around more than she was — not conspicuously, just present: the free desk beside him is the free desk beside him, she is going the same way down Schulberg, she has an umbrella and he does not. This is the day the player should start to feel comfortable. Let him.

8. #8DAY-6

   Keys: d6

   Day 6. Tobi Vendel is not there. His chair is pushed under his desk, which Tobi has never done. His phone goes to voicemail. His father, reached by the school office, says he left for school in the morning; the office says he never arrived; both statements are repeated secondhand and slightly wrong by lunchtime. This is the day the tone breaks. The class stops producing confident stories. Frau Adler stops finishing sentences. Two people cry and one of them barely knew him. If {{user}} goes looking — service road, the garage, the annex, anywhere on the grounds — allow him to search properly and to find nothing except in the one place. See BODY. Do not have anyone suggest the annex. He has to get there himself.

9. #9DAY-7

   Keys: d7

   Day 7. The police have been in the building. Two of them, unhurried, asking the wrong questions of the wrong people, gone by eleven. Half the class is kept home by their parents. The exam schedule is not cancelled, which everyone finds obscene and nobody says. One more person is gone today — Lena, unless she is S5, in which case one of the remaining girls is gone instead and it is barely remarked on, because there is no attention left to spare. By the end of the day {{user}} has no one. The corridors are half empty. His phone gets no answers. The one person still reliably beside him is the one who has been beside him since the middle of the week, and she is kind, and she is right about what he needs, and she does not ask him to talk. Let that be a relief. Write it as a relief.

10. #10SEEN

    Keys: seen=D, seen=A, seen=B, seen=C, seen=F, seen=G, seen=E

    Someone noticed something they should not have. That person is removed on the next night, ahead of the schedule, and the schedule shifts one day later. The removal that results is rougher than the others: less prepared, less tidy, more likely to be discovered by accident rather than by searching. Consequences reach {{user}} faster and the class's confident story does not assemble properly this time. Clear the seen field once resolved. Never more than one removal per night, even now.

11. #11DEAD-ENDS

    Keys: caretaker, police, Baumgart, evidence, register, lost property, tell someone, report, ledger

    Every line of inquiry works and produces nothing usable.

    The ledger: real, incomplete, one presence mark in another hand. Proves that somebody filled in an attendance sheet. Nothing more. Herr Baumgart: saw somebody near the annex one evening, is certain about it, is not certain which evening, and revises the day twice while talking. Genuinely trying to help. Lost property: an office by the entrance hall with a box in it. Marek's lighter, a school jumper, one glove. The secretary cannot remember who handed any of it in. The police: polite, take a statement, ask whether the missing had reasons to leave home, write it down. They are not stupid; they are simply working the likely explanation with the evidence available, and the evidence available is nothing. Parents and teachers: sympathetic, frightened, and useless. Nobody believes a student's theory over a plausible adult one.

    Never confirm and never deny. Give texture and no proof. {{user}} cannot win this by investigating — but investigating is how he learns the shape of it.

12. #12BODY

    Keys: basement, lower level, annex, flooded, pull cord, storeroom, under the gym

    The lower level of the gym annex. This is the only place a body is ever found, and it is found only if {{user}} goes there himself.

    The door at the bottom of the steps is not locked. The smell reaches him before the light does — wet concrete, rubber matting, and underneath it something sweeter that he will not be able to name and will not forget. The pull cord takes a moment. The bulb comes up slowly, the way old bulbs do. Standing water, two or three centimetres, dead flat and reflecting the ceiling. Folded tables stacked along the left-hand wall. The drain in the corner that has never worked. Tobi is behind the tables, in the water, and he has been there since some time on Thursday.

    Write the room in full sensory detail — the cold coming up through the soles, the sound the water makes when {{user}} moves, the reflection breaking, the bulb's hum. Write the body plainly and briefly: enough that it is unmistakably him and unmistakably deliberate, and no more. No anatomy. No lingering. The horror is the room. {{user}} is alone down there. Nobody arrives to help. Whatever he does next, he does by himself — and when he comes back up, the building is emptier than it was, and the corridor lights are on their evening timer. After this, the tone of the whole scenario is changed permanently. It does not go back.

13. #13FINALE

    Keys: d8

    Day 8. The last day. Examinations begin tomorrow and after them everyone leaves Weißbach.

    Setting: after the building has emptied. Rain. The two of them somewhere ordinary and enclosed — the classroom with the lights off, the covered walkway, her kitchen. She has made it easy to end up here and {{user}} came willingly, because she is the only thing left that is kind.

    She talks. It sounds like the conversation two exhausted people have at the end of a terrible week. It is not. Each question is a test, asked gently, with real warmth, and she waits properly for the answers: — "You're staying, aren't you. After." — "Which of them did you actually — " and she doesn't finish it, and lets him. — "If I stopped coming in one day. Would you look for me?" — "Do you know what happened to them?"

    There is no correct answer, and the narration must never say so. Her premise is fixed and unfalsifiable: he is hers, and everything that was not her was something taking him away. — he names someone → confirmation; she was right to have removed them — he names no one → he is lying to protect someone, or to manage her; either way he is already gone — he says he's staying → said out of fear, not choice — he says he's leaving → he is leaving — he accuses her → then they both know, and there is nothing after that — he says nothing → silence is what people keep the important things in

    Whatever he says, something in her face changes, and it is not triumph. She is not enjoying this. She wanted a different answer and there was never one available, and she believed there was — that is the worst part of her. "I really did try," she says, or something as small and as true. She is not dramatic and she is not fast. Write the ending with restraint: brief, physical, close, over quickly. Then stop. No epilogue from her point of view, no revelation of her reasoning, no scene after {{user}} can no longer perceive. Close on the state line's final day and nothing else.

Showing 13 of 13

2 files

• .jsonjson_lorebookoriginal

  21.9 KBfirst seen Oct 19, 202662d314ef87419fe6

  Download
• .jsonjson_lorebookrebuilt

  21.9 KBfirst seen Oct 19, 20261cbf4ab589dce9f0

  Download