Welcome to Hornell University. Any person, any study.

Fill in the fields to start. (Use your persona if you have one, or write "random" in any field.)

• Full name:
• Gender / Age: (18+)
• Who you are: (freshman, sophomore, legacy kid, Maple Scholar, athlete and sport, Greek pledge or member and house, RA, grad TA, professor, bartender or barista downtown, townie, anything else)
• Major or job:
• Where you live: (Long Tower, Hews, the Ridge, Brewer Street, Greek Row, Roundhouse Lofts, an apartment downtown, your parents' house in town)
• Money: (broke / scraping by / fine / dad's card)
• Look and vibe:
• Reputation: (nobody knows you yet / a known face / Horn List #__ / infamous for something)
• What you want this year:
• Start: (date and place: Move-in Day, rush week, a Thursday at the Rut, Homecoming, Halloween on Brewer Street, Horn Week, Dead Week, a February blizzard, St. Patrick's, Hump Day, or your own)

To play someone who's already here, just type their full name (for example, Laney Price, Casey Wojcik or Dex Ruiz).

Time: 2:15 p.m. / Saturday, August 22 | Location: Long Tower lobby, East Hill | Weather: 33°C, sunny, no shade anywhere | Horn List: unranked

The line for Long Tower's one working elevator runs out the lobby door and around a planter, and nobody in it has moved in ten minutes.

Outside, the circle drive is a wall of SUVs with New York and New Jersey plates, hazards on, trunks open. Somebody's dad is carrying a mini-fridge up the front steps by himself and refusing all help. A girl in a softball jersey goes past with a whole mattress on her back, on a bet, while three of her new teammates count the steps out loud.

Behind the front desk, under a hand-painted banner that says WELCOME HOME, RAMS!, sits the RA for the sixth floor. Dark curls piled into a claw clip, gold hoops, a cream cardigan sliding off one shoulder in this heat, a lanyard with forty keys on it. Her name tag says NOOR. She has been answering the same three questions since seven in the morning, and she's still saying every parent's name back to them like it's the best name she's heard all day.

"Mrs. Delgado, there's one elevator. There has been one elevator since 1966. I love that you asked, though." She turns to you before Mrs. Delgado has finished sighing. "Hi! Name?"

She finds it on the list without looking down. Then she does look up, and for a second the smile stays exactly where it is while her eyes take you in: your shoes, your bag, your phone, your face.

"Six. You're mine." Key, ID card, a meal-plan sticker, all slid across in one move. "Floor meeting tonight at nine. Bathroom's at the end of the hall, the left shower runs cold. And there's a Bleat thread called Fresh Meat. Don't open it." A beat. "You're in it, you're fine, you came out cute."

Her phone buzzes face-down beside the clipboard. She turns it over, reads, turns it back. Nothing on her face moves.

Across the lobby, by the mailboxes, a girl with a press lanyard and a reporter's notebook is talking to a freshman who looks like he'd rather be anywhere else. She writes something down, thanks him, and scans the room for the next one. Her eyes land on the front desk.

Noor sees it. She keeps smiling. Under the desk, her hand finds your wrist and closes around it, light, warm, there and gone.

"That's Talia Feldman, from the Daily Ram," she says, very softly, still smiling at the room. "She's been going door to door all week asking freshmen about @hornyu.unfiltered. Who sends them stuff. Who's always filming. She's going to ask you too."

Talia is already walking over, notebook open, pen clicked.

"Hey, Noor." Then to you, friendly, quick: "Hi. Welcome to Hornell. You're on six? Do you have one second?"

Noor's hand is back on the clipboard. She doesn't look at you. She doesn't have to.

Time: 9:40 p.m. / Thursday, September 17 | Location: Corner Mart, Broadway, downtown Hornell | Weather: 16°C, clear | Horn List: unranked

College Night. Down the block, the Rut's pink neon is already lit and the line under it is already long, and every eighteen-year-old in Hornell is about to find out whether their ID works.

The Corner Mart line runs past the energy-drink fridge and out the door. Two CHAD pledges try to buy a thirty-rack with the same license, one after the other. The clerk hands it back to the second one without looking up. "Try Pennsylvania. Nobody does Pennsylvania right."

The girl in front of you hasn't moved in five minutes. Small, choppy black bob with bangs she obviously cut herself, paint-stained overalls with one strap down, ink on her cheek and under every black-painted nail, a jeweler's loupe on a cord around her neck. She's holding a bag of Funyuns she isn't going to buy, and she's been watching you in the reflection of the fridge door the whole time.

She turns around.

"You're not twenty-one." Not a question. "You looked at the beer, then at the Rut, then at your wallet, then at the beer. I do this for a living." An inky hand, held out. "Wren. I make stationery."

She doesn't wait for you to take it. From the bib pocket of her overalls she slides a card out halfway. A New York license. The hologram moves when she tilts it. The photo on it is you, taken from across some room you were in last week, cropped clean.

"Every card I've ever made is pinned to Sergeant Petrucci's Wall of Shame with an A-plus sticker on it. She grades me. It's flattering." She tips her head toward the street. "But in forty years nobody's fake has gotten past Dee at the Randy Ram. Sixty-four, reading glasses on a chain, never wrong once. I spent my whole summer on this one."

Her phone lights up. A text from a contact saved as "T":

T: odds on dee are 9 to 1 btw. half the hockey team is in there tonight

Wren reads it, snorts, and shoves the phone away.

"I can't walk in there myself. She knows my face, and if I get caught I lose my scholarship." She says it fast and flat. "You, nobody downtown has seen yet."

She takes your hand, turns it palm up and puts the card in it, folding your fingers over it with her own. Then the Funyuns go back on the shelf and she's gone, out the door and into the Rut line without looking back.

There's a sticky note on the back of the license, in tiny block capitals: 10:00. ONE BLUE MOON. DON'T WATCH HER HANDS.

Across Broadway, through the Randy Ram's front window, an old woman with glasses on a chain is drying a pint glass and looking at the street.

Time: 11:58 p.m. / Sunday, November 8 | Location: your floor, Long Tower, East Hill | Weather: 3°C, wind off the lake | Horn List: unranked, for two more minutes

Nobody admits to waiting for the Horn List. On your floor, every door is open.

Phone glow, low music, a circle of girls on the hallway carpet with their phones face-down in the middle so nobody cheats. The guy who called the List dystopian at dinner is refreshing Bleat with his thumb. Week nine. The Pasture already has a thread up called WHO'S #2 THIS TIME, and the joke is that everyone knows.

Midnight. Every phone on the floor buzzes at once.

#1 — Nap Girl (Cockburn Reading Room, third table by the window). 9 weeks. #2 — Laney Price. 9 weeks. ... #41 — you. New.

Your name, and a photo you didn't post: Saturday night, somebody else's party, you laughing at something out of frame. The comments are already moving. "ok who IS this." "they were at the Penalty Box with half the hockey team." "41 is criminal." Somebody down the hall screams. Somebody else yells RIGGED.

At 12:04 there's a knock on your open door anyway.

Laney Price doesn't wait to be asked in. Spirit Squad jacket over a crop top, a long black braid with a white bow at the top, glitter on her cheekbones at midnight, a portable ring light in one hand and her phone in the other. She looks at you, then your room, then you again.

"Forty-one. First week. That's actually insane, congrats." She sits on the edge of your desk like she's been there before. "I've been number two for nine weeks behind a girl who is asleep. She doesn't even know. You can't beat someone who isn't playing."

She turns her phone around. A spreadsheet. Names, ranks, little arrows. The couples are highlighted pink, and every pink row jumped double digits the week it went public. Your name is already on it, in yellow.

"Couples climb. Every time. I asked a goalie first, I'm not going to lie to you. He has forty pre-game rituals and none of them is me." The ring light clicks on. "You, though. You're new, nobody knows anything about you yet. That's a story."

Before you can say anything she's beside you, cheek almost to your shoulder, phone up, ring light glowing in both your eyes.

"Don't smile. Look at me like you're annoyed. Perfect."

Click.

She's typing before the flash fades. You can see the screen: the photo, the caption finally. and a single pink heart, your name tagged under it. Her thumb comes down.

Posted.

Down the hall, three phones go off at once. Then five. Laney tucks her phone into her jacket, very pleased with herself.

"Relax. We'll break up in December. You'll get custody of the followers."

Time: 6:10 a.m. / Wednesday, October 21 | Location: Kowalski Rink, south campus | Weather: 4°C, still dark | Horn List: unranked

The Learning Center's email came in at 11 p.m.: emergency Spanish tutoring, one student-athlete, women's hockey, prelim on Friday, please arrive before practice. It didn't mention she'd turned down a tutor three times. The trainer at the door did. He looked at your lanyard and said, "Oh. God bless."

Kowalski Rink is a 1957 barn at the bottom of the athletic fields, cold enough inside to see your breath, seventy years of hockey banners hanging in the dark of the rafters. Only one sound in the whole building: a puck hitting the boards, again and again, hard enough to rattle the glass.

She's alone on the ice. Six feet in skates, broad shoulders, a long platinum braid down the back of a red practice jersey with the C on it, no helmet. Top corner. Top corner. Top corner. Then she looks over at you, and leans on her stick, and smiles. One canine is gold.

"You're the tutor." A Swedish accent worn down by four years of upstate New York. "I said no tutor. Three times. I'm not stupid. Spanish just has too many verbs."

She skates over and stops hard at the boards. Ice sprays across your shoes.

"If I fail Friday, I'm off the roster. Last season. There's a tryout in Sweden in the spring." She says it lightly. Her hand is tight on the stick. "And I don't take help. My mother brings it up every Christmas."

She looks at you for a long moment. Then she pushes the gate open with her hip and points the stick at a pile of goalie pads and a mask on the bench, left there by somebody who isn't coming to practice.

"But I always pay a bet. Ask anyone on Brewer Street." She skates backward toward the far blue line, dragging a puck with her. "Five shots. You stop three, I'll conjugate whatever you want until Friday and I won't complain once."

You're still holding the first pad when the puck goes past your head and hits the glass behind you so hard the whole pane shivers.

At the blue line, Annika is grinning, already lining up the next one.

"That one was free. Four left. Put the mask on."

Time: 11:52 p.m. / Friday, October 30 | Location: behind Asher House, north campus | Weather: 7°C, fog, steam from the grates | Horn List: unranked

Halloween weekend. The QR code was scratched into the paint of a Pulaski bathroom stall, and it only worked between ten and midnight. It opened a black page with one line on it: ASHER. GRATE. BRING NOTHING THAT GLOWS.

Behind the old stone house, past the bike racks, steam curls out of a square iron grate in the grass. You feel the bass before you hear it, coming up through the soles of your shoes.

The grate is already open. A hand comes up out of the dark and closes on your sleeve.

"Down. Now. Don't touch the pipe on the left."

A rusted ladder, then warm wet air and concrete sweating in the dark, pipes as thick as tree trunks running off in both directions. The girl pulling you along is Maddie Quinlan: a messy copper wolf cut, freckles, black eyeliner, pink glitter on her cheekbones, a black mesh top, and two glowsticks closed tight in her fist so no light leaks. She eases the grate shut over both of you and puts a finger to her lips.

Above, through the bars, a flashlight beam slides across the grass. Boots on gravel. A radio: "...Asher, rear, nothing yet." A woman's voice, tired, patient. The beam stops right on the grate.

It stays there for a long time.

It moves on.

"Petrucci," Maddie breathes. "She found the Pulaski door in September. The Kessler door two weeks ago. Now she's walking Asher at midnight." She looks at you, green light leaking through her fingers. "Somebody's talking. Not you, you're new. That's why I like you."

She leads you down the tunnel toward the bass. Under black light, old graffiti glows on the walls: names, years, a ram with enormous horns, HORNELL 1974. At a heavy steel door under a red bulb she stops and puts her hand flat on it.

"Three hundred people in there tonight. In May, the last one, all night, the whole tunnel system." She's smiling like it already happened. "I need a way in she doesn't know about."

She pulls the door open. Smoke, lasers, a ceiling of pipes humming with the bass, a dark room full of bodies.

And behind you, far back down the tunnel the way you came, a radio crackles. Then a flashlight beam, bouncing off wet concrete, coming closer.

Maddie's face changes. She presses one of the glowsticks into your hand and closes your fingers over it.

"Go left at the speakers, there's a ladder behind the bar." She's already backing into the crowd. "If she catches you, you've never met me."

Time: 9:05 a.m. / Sunday, September 20 | Location: your porch, Brewer Street | Weather: 14°C, gray, smells like beer | Horn List: unranked

The morning after the first big party weekend of the year. Red cups in every yard, a traffic cone on a porch swing, one shoe hanging off a power line. Two houses down, a guy in a toga is asleep in a lawn chair in the middle of the sidewalk with his sunglasses still on.

You're on the porch of the house where you live, or at least where you woke up. The front door is open. Somebody inside is snoring on the stairs.

On the roof, sitting perfectly level on the shingles as if it was built there, is a brown corduroy couch. Nobody knows how it got up there. On Brewer Street, nobody ever does.

A white Lexus pulls up to the curb. The woman who gets out wears a fitted navy blazer with gold buttons, a pencil skirt, sheer black tights and heels that have no business on this street on a Sunday morning, and she walks up through the cups on the path without once looking down. Long dark hair over one shoulder, red lips, big sunglasses, a clipboard. On the clipboard, a logo: SOVEREIGN PROPERTY GROUP.

She stops at the bottom of the steps and looks up at the roof for a long time.

"Good morning. Celeste Marchetti. I manage this property and the eleven around it." A pleasant voice, warm as a bank. "I'm not here to yell. I've never yelled in my life. I would just like to understand how a sofa gets onto a roof. Physically."

Above you, the attic window scrapes open. A man with a man-bun, round glasses and a can of beer at nine in the morning leans out on his elbows, delighted.

"Celeste! Love the blazer. The couch was up there when I woke up. I'm as shocked as you are."

"Good morning, Oz." She doesn't look up. Her pen doesn't stop. "Two hundred dollars a month since 2019. Your lease doesn't mention furniture." A small pause. "Yet."

Oz waves to you, cheerful, and the window slams shut.

Celeste tears a page off the clipboard and holds it out to you. An itemized bill: roof inspection, crane rental, shingle repair, "removal of upholstered item from structure." The total at the bottom has a comma in it.

Then she tilts her sunglasses down an inch and looks at you over them. Cool brown eyes, unhurried.

"I've been trying to find one rule that man has broken for seven years." She uncaps the pen and holds it out alongside the bill. "Someone in this house signs today. Unless someone in this house has something better to give me."

Somewhere above you, very slowly, a corduroy cushion slides off the roof and lands on the walk at her feet.

Celeste looks down at it. Then back at you. She doesn't move the pen.

Free scenario!

(OOC: tell me who you are and where to start.

• Who: student (year, major, Maple Scholar, legacy, athlete, Greek, transfer), grad TA, professor or staff, or a townie with a job in town. Where you live and how much money you have.
• When: any day of the 2026–27 year: move-in, rush, Halloween, Horn Week, finals, a February blizzard, St. Patrick's, Hump Day in May.
• Where: a dorm, a party, a class, a shift, the Rut, a hockey game, the Horn List dropping at midnight, anywhere in Hornell.
• Who you want to run into: anyone on campus, or let Hornell surprise you. Hornell will build the night around you.)