How do you renounce a life of denial? The House of Renunciation can help.

THE ROOM OF LIBERATED SECRETS
by Doug Billingsly

Facing the truth of any situation is hard. Objectivity isn’t one of mankind’s specialties. We color every experience with the experiences we’ve already lived through and this is good. This is the nature of living and learning. How can we identify a tree if we’ve only seen one? What characteristics does it share with other trees that can be defined as its treeness? But what happens when our previous experiences can’t help us? Sometimes, we deny it even happened.

That’s no good. One million psychologists could jump to answer exactly why. They might tell you how repressed memories eat away at your subconscious and how avoiding addressing the situation leads to psychological glitches by the bucketload. They could give you a hundred good answers and more, but the Room of Liberated Secrets isn’t for the people they’re talking about. It’s for those that know the truth, but never admit it.

Agenda
The Room of Liberated Secrets seeks out those that have a secret they won’t admit; not because they have a plan that requires secrecy, but because they’re scared. They have denied the truth of a situation because they fear they will not be accepted or because they might have to change or because they are truly awful shits and don’t want everyone to know.

Those that find the Room are holding a destructive secret that they’re life revolves around. They are always lying to cover they’re tracks, always avoiding The Questions, always hiding. One might be a homosexual with a wife and family, another might hide embarrassing Obsessive-compulsive habits and yet another might hide her knowledge that magick exists. These denials are not insignificant or dismissive. They are truths that color every new experience.

The Room of Liberated Secrets does not care if you are denying something to wait for the proper time or if your denial is simple self-preservation or if in telling the truth, you might cause mass panic and suffering. Perhaps in some cases, the truth is best left denied. Regardless, it will be denied no longer.

Appearance
The portal to the Room of Liberated Secrets can appear in any closet or basement doorway. Usually this is the place the visitor goes to relax and indulge their secret (if they ever indulge in it.) Often the closet or basement will serve as an “entry way” and the “real” door will slam shut, locking and resisting all attempts to pick (or unlock if the visitor has a key) or force it open. No one outside the real door will hear the person trapped within and can actually open the door to find only the closet or basement. The visitor is already trapped within the Room.

A door that never before existed now stands in a reasonable place to be an exit. This is where the Room gets work done. The Room has the dimensions and general appearance of a well-lit, old house, decorated in a style one would expect from the mid-1940s. Paintings adorn the walls and photographs in frames rest tastefully on most shelves and tables. All the accessories of modern life from 60 years ago are to be found: telephones, television, stocked cabinets, stove, heat, water and a bed.

The windows of the Room are boarded up (from the outside, it would appear), but allow some small sliver of light into the room. The boards, though old and water damaged, do not break or come free of the windows. However, if one peers through the cracks to the World Outside, a sunny street and happy people can be seen and heard, though the visitor to the Room will not be noticed by anyone outside. Opening the front door will also reveal haphazardly nailed boards from top to bottom will all the same results as the windows. The Room has an extraordinary number of closets, but we’ll get to them in a minute.

Abilities

These Are the Moments That Scar
The photographs within the Room of Liberated Secrets are all black and white and are placed throughout the home as one might place pictures of ones friends and family. The pictures depict all the moments the tenant sacrificed to uphold her secret. Although the pictures may be dramatically composed, each one could have been taken in the visitor’s real life if the camera had been present.

The disappointed children, the confused spouse, the worried parent, all are likely subjects for the pictures as well as pictures of the Room’s tenant going about their subterfuge. Some tenants do not have an act they hide; they will find only photographs of themselves at their most vulnerable. The photos are close-ups of the tenant’s confused face, heavy with the burden of so many lies.

The paintings are altogether different. Each one is in a style that most appeals to the tenant. They depict assured and powerful individuals that have similar habits or knowledge as the tenant at their most triumphant. The homosexual sees a painting overflowing with open gay pride. A man that compulsively collects and labels his feces in jars sees a painting of a scientist doing the same with animal samples. That the scientist does this to record information for scientific discovery and the Compulsive does it out of a neurotic need matters little. The Room is working on an emotional level.

The housewife that knows magick exists might see an alchemist diligently at work before his bottle and beakers or she might see faeries dancing with children. Only one painting never changes regardless of which tenant occupies the Room. It is of Galileo looking up from his calculations through a window into the starry sky.

Phone-y
If the telephone is picked up, not only is there no dial tone, but one can instantly hear familiar voices: the voices of people from whom the tenant has been hiding her secret. They are talking about the tenant and discussing all of her most unpleasant aspects. They can’t hear anything the tenant says, they just go on talking. Though they never come out and say it, they hint that they know exactly what she has been hiding all this time. They express feeling hurt or angry when the tenant lies to them and they know she lies. Why can’t she just tell them? Doesn’t she trust them?

This usually calls for some Self checks.

Spy TV
The television only airs documentaries, newscasts and after-school specials that explore the lives that people hide and how it all comes to tragedy. They aren’t all as obvious as it may sound. The newscasts don’t come right out and say it, but by logically tracking the story a couple of episodes, all the stories end with someone that didn’t have the courage to tell the truth. The documentaries are mostly about real life spies. Their stories never end well. The after school specials, on the other hand, are just as obvious as they sound. They always are.

The World Outside
Through the slabs of wood stapled to the windows and doors, a pleasant neighborhood can be seen. The children happily play on the sunny sidewalks and the neighbors wave to each other, but never to the tenant. Well maybe this one really big guy waved, but maybe it was just imagination. The first time the tenant looks through the cracks they see all this and more. Maybe a gay pride parade cheerfully strides through the neighborhood while the neighborhood cheers back, smiling and accepting. Maybe a door-to-door charity collector comes knocking directly across the street and discusses with the man there how he overcame his compulsive behavior by confronting it and asking for help. Maybe adepts come sauntering down the street in clown outfits, playing Russian roulette and smacking themselves with oversized hammers to build up charges, then using them to entertain children. Whatever the tenant’s secret, here is a place it is commonplace and happily accepted and loved. It looks real (sort of) and fills the viewer with hope and joy. Eventually the event will come to an end, but returns every so often to liven the scene.

Closet Cases
The closets are all locked when the tenant first arrives in the room. Each time the tenant sleeps another closet unlocks and is found open a crack. Each closet in the Room of Liberated Secrets is a gateway to another person’s living Hell. When one is opened the tenant finds herself as a ghost in someone else’s life. They can’t do anything, just watch as someone’s life goes to shit just because they hold a secret. Closet Cases don’t get found out, but their lives are tortured with paranoia and deceit. The Closet Cases are real people, unlike those seen in The World Outside, and the next candidates for the Room.

The tenant only remains in each closet for one day. Each day spent in a closet passes in the real world. Otherwise, time spent in the house is timeless. After 24 hours, a door appears near the ghost tenant. They can stay longer, but the door vanishes after a few minutes only to return in 24 more hours.

The tenant can’t touch anything and her voice is but a faint whisper. Sometimes, if the tenant talks to the person in the closet, the person might stop as if listening very hard, but they never quite hear the tenant as anything other than that little voice in their head. The tenant should notice quickly that the things they say to the closet person seem to influence them in small ways. Nothing big, just tiny thoughts they can’t get out of their mind. The first time the tenant tells a Closet Case to give up their secret in a sincere and open fashion or that the Closet Case is making the same mistake they did, the door appears. Opening it, the tenant is back home, maybe days or even weeks after they disappeared.

Gary Lee, Agent of Liberated Secrets
Summary: Gary was gay. Ask anyone. As gay as they come. Gary came to college a socially retarded, overweight nobody with a moderate body odor problem and an overwhelming need to find acceptance. He found no one in the first six months willing to spend any time with him unless drugs or alcohol was involved. So he picked up beer and a joint and felt like he had found his true friends.

The girls didn’t make things easier. He tried to talk to them, but his own natural qualities mixed with his acute fear of rejection kept them just out of reach, but close enough to hear the disgust in their voices when he was mentioned. One drunken night, one of his buddies told Gary he hated him along with everyone else he called a friend. Oh, they passed it off as a joke, but Gary could always read people well. At that moment he knew he was friendless.

Gary stumbled back towards his dorm from the party, crying openly. He was approached by two men, also tipsy, that introduced themselves and told him if his night was that horrible, he should come to a party with them. Gary followed, and enjoyed himself thoroughly. There was no pressure, no judgment and most of all, people seemed happy to talk to him. Sure, it was a gay student organization party, but no one seemed to expect him to be gay. Near the end of the night a cute young woman clumsily expressed her vision of a perfect society and asked Gary abruptly if he was gay. She didn’t seem confrontational or suspicious, just curious. Gary didn’t even think. He just said, “Yes.”

For a while Gary convinced himself his fear of women was his repressed homosexuality all along. During this period he called his parents to tell them his new lifestyle choice and joined two organizations focusing on gay rights. Soon afterwards he recognized he was lying to himself and everyone else. Well, he stopped lying to himself. Two years after the party, Gary had licked his body odor problem, found eloquence in speech making, became the President of the local chapter of one of his Gay Rights groups and became a big gay stereotype.

Gary’s every decision was made as a “gay man”. He listened to the music he believed defined him as a gay man. He wore clothes that proclaimed his homosexuality from afar. He watched “gay” movies and bought “gay” books. All the while, hiding his ragged, dirty collection of Penthouses and Playboys back on the top shelf of his bedroom closet, where his roommate would never find it. One day, when squeezed snuggly in his closet to flip through pictures of naked women with only the warmth of a naked 40 watt bulb to share his secret, Gary found a door on the other side of his tiny closet. Now he has a lot of the same friends and more to boot. He works as an art dealer, and spends most of his professional time in auction houses. His personal time is split between many different people: friends, lovers and Closet Cases.

Now Gary is an eloquent, confident, open-minded, man who happens to be fabulously, flamboyantly heterosexual. Gary is not the sort of man to be ignored. He appears to be a man in his mid-twenties with a full beard and a smart dress sense. He weighs a little over 300 pounds and exudes a self-assured aura. He wears subtle and intriguing colognes and never seems to stop smiling. Though Gary never restrains himself from expressing sexual desire for any woman, he does so in a direct nature free from desperation or machismo. So far, his assertive compliments haven’t upset anyone. Give it time.

Stats
Personality: Aries. All other causes are “other people’s problems” in Gary’s head. He will sincerely empathize with all manners of victims, but only work to save the Closet Cases. He is the star of this show and he likes being the star.
Obsession: Gary is obsessed with releasing everyone he meets from the burden of secrets.
Wound Points: 60

Rage Stimulus: General intolerance. Almost any intolerance will trip Gary’s trigger, but fat jokes hit home worse than any.
Fear Stimulus: Gary fears that people don’t really like him even when they act like friends. (Isolation)
Noble Stimulus: Gary wants everyone to live life free from fearful secrets.

Body: 60 (Quite Obese, but Hearty)
Throw His Weight Around (Struggle) 40%, Generally Bad Athletics 15%, Large and Hard to Move (UA2 40) 50%
Speed: 40 (Sluggish)
Dodge 15%, Drive 35%, Firearms 25%, Initiative 20%
Mind: 65 (Cunning)
General Education 35%, Notice 35%, Conceal 25%, Art 25%
Soul: 75 (Intensely Huggable)
Charm 45%, Lie 40%, Sexy Personality 25%,
Friends Everywhere 30%

Violence: 1 Hardened 0 Failed
Unnatural: 3 Hardened 1 Failed
Helplessness: 0 Hardened 1 Failed
Isolation: 5 Hardened 3 Failed
Self: 6 Hardened 2 Failed

Possessions: Nice suit, usually crème-colored, assortment of expensive colognes, and choice cigars.

Agent of the Room of Liberated Secrets Abilities:
The Room gives Gary some special abilities to progress its agenda.

Smell the Secrets: Gary can make a Soul roll after spending 10 to 15 minutes in someone’s presence contested by the target’s lie, personomancy, cryptomancy, or similar skill that allows them to hide their true nature. If successful, Gary can literally smell the secret life wafting from the target. With a successful Notice check, he can even identify vague qualities about the secret life. Pungent smells can render this ability useless.

I Left Something In the Closet: With a successful Soul roll, an agent of the Room of Liberated Secrets can open any closet or basement door enter the Room through it.

Secret Stash: By reaching into her pockets, the agent may draw anything from her pockets that could reasonable fit within and is currently hidden by someone. The object disappears from it hiding place and appears within the agent’s pocket. The disappearance will never occur while someone is actually watching the object. Only if the object is both currently hidden and small enough to fit in the pocket can it be summoned. Beware that this ability isn’t too specific. You ask for a gun (being more specific won’t matter), it might arrive unloaded.

Nothing magical or unique can be summoned in this way. Gary tried unsuccessfully for weeks to summon small, valuable carvings. Objects can be disappeared this way as well, though they will appear within someone’s secret place (the agent can’t decide where it goes). This ability is the reason Gary never bothers to carry cash or guns. These are two things someone’s always hiding.