The best way to deal with your past is to face it head on…

Room of Past Revisited

Premise: People don’t like to remember bad memories, it’s a basic psychological fact. The human mind has proven itself to be incredibly effective at blocking out the painful and damaging events of our past. Many thousands, if not millions of people in the US alone have some kind of repressed memory.

The Room of Past Revisited has no time for such people. The Room concerns itself with a smaller subset; those who can recall events that others would lock in some dark closet of their minds, but still refuse to accept that these events affect their lives and the way they behave. They go through their lives, not realizing that the issues they ignore are affecting their very behavior, and refuse to address them.

Agenda: The Room of Past Revisited exists to push people towards greater awareness of their motivations and to potentially change those motivations. After all, if this is a universe founded on the acts of those who came before us and changed by the actions of those walking around right now, the universe would like to at least have those who are shaping it be cognizant of why the hell they’re changing it.

As stated before, the Room just doesn’t pick anyone with a repressed memory or three. If that was true, the Room would need a lot more Agents than it currently possesses. The extra bit that sends up a flag for an Agent of the room is that there must be multiple events or one extremely traumatic event that an individual must be aware of, yet absolutely refusing to address or even acknowledge as a potential cause of behavior, no matter how aberrant (and the more aberrant the behavior, the more likely the Room will pick you out). Since most people have seen enough TV dramas to know when to see psychological help for their issues, this number is never very large.

Appearances: The Room of Past Revisited looks like a run-down and dusty set from the “This is Your Life” TV show. A sign with the show’s name in the trademark golden script leans against the rear wall of the set, covered in dust and cobwebs. The carpet is torn and lifted up in parts, the curtains are torn, and a feeling of age and decay covers the entire set. The lights are very dim, providing just enough light to see around the stage. The seats are barely visible, but if you look closely you notice that all of them are filled. As the show progresses, the shadowy audience applauds and responds appropriately. A dusty yet still expensive-looking couch sits facing one way, while a row of chairs sits opposite the couch, facing it. Next to the couch is a table with a pitcher of water, a glass, and a basket of snacks and fruit. Both the pitcher of water and the basket never run out, which is convenient for some of the longer shows. The Agent who brought in the subject is suddenly dressed in an expensive suit or dress, holding a microphone, and apparently is hosting the show. The cameras, despite a healthy coating of dust, seem to be working and follow the subject and host about the stage. The subject is seated on the couch upon walking onto the Room, and then the show begins.

First, the host motions for a TV to be lowered down from the ceiling. The TV, also covered in dust, then turns on and starts showing one of the painful memories from the subject’s past, each one introduced by the host before they start. The segments are all from the subject’s perspective, and the subject is drawn to pay so rapt attention that they usually don’t notice the switch from watching it on the TV to reliving the experience themselves until it’s already happened. The entire memory is replayed, forcing the subject to relive it. For example, if the subject was tortured repeatedly and watched as their friends were executed in a POW camp, that is what would be shown on the TV. All stress checks that would apply to the event the first time are done again for the second go-round, but with only botched rolls having a permanent effect. After all of the memories have been showcased, it’s time for the next segment.

The host asks if the subject remembers anyone from their past that their decisions have affected. No matter how the person answers, the host then brings out either conjured versions of or the real version of all the people they know (or may not know) who they have severely negatively affected due to their refusal to address their psychological baggage. The host then asks the subject to stand and calls the guests forward one at a time to tell the subject who they are and how he’s affected them. All of them then embrace the subject, and then the subject is forced to experience the encounters previously described from the guest’s point of view. The guest then walks off stage and vanishes. This could either be a very short or very long process, depending on the amount of people involved. Our POW subject would be confronted by the children he alienated, the wife he abused, and friends he turned away because he was aggressive and cold from his experiences. Once again, all relevant stress checks should be applied, but this time both botches and successes add to the madness gauges.

Renunciation: After all of the guests have finished speaking to the subject, the last part of the show occurs. The host then escorts the subject through a set of doors that look like they lead to another set but actually lead to a scenario where the subject is forced to choose between making the hard decision of dealing with the problems in his past and recognizing his own behavioral problems or to continue ignoring the true root of his problems or even continue ignoring that he even has any problems to begin with. Our POW example would be faced with a situation involving someone he doesn’t know in desperate need of help, a situation where he would normally refuse to help, but could instead overcome his personal isolation and reach out to that person.

If the subject overcomes his problems and makes the other decision, then they lose all hardened and failed marks from their madness gauges and start again with a trauma-free psychological outlook. However, if they choose to not confront their problems and continue in with their old behaviors, they either completely fill their hardened or failed gauges, depending on how the subject behaves as a response to the unaddressed trauma in their life. Most importantly, the subject is also completely immune to any sort of psychological treatment, be it the Talking Cure or heavy pharmaceuticals. Once you choose to continue your path even in the face of the Room of Past Revisited, nothing can save you. After the final scenario, the subject is dropped off at their residence by taxi cab anywhere from a couple of hours to a couple of days after they entered the Room.

Abilities:

The Screening Board: Behind the stage, in an area that only Agents of the Room have access to, there’s a few Formica desks with standard office equipment on them and a large cork board hung from one wall, covering almost one entire side of the room. Files containing information on the next people to be put through the Room appear push-pinned to the board. These files contain basic physical descriptions, residences, phone numbers, and anything else that a standard police or business dossier would contain. Much like the Room of Bad Influences, if one of these files is carried through the door to the room, the Agent carrying it appears through the door closest to the person in question.

Camera Crew: This ability is tied up in not only the agenda of the Room they serve, but in the way it presents itself. Agents of the Room of Past Revisited can pop a blank tape into any VCR and replay or record their memories as far back as the tape has capacity for.

Showbiz Charm: Hosts of TV shows tend to exude a certain kind of charm, a friendly “Yes, I am paying attention to you specifically” look that really catches people’s attention, at least long enough to keep them watching to the next commercial break. As hosts of their own private TV show, Agents of the Room of Past Revisited get +10% to their Charm skill for all rolls.

Agents:

Vanessa Starling, Advertising Intern

Vanessa Starling used to be a fun-loving, popular, extroverted student at Harding High School in downtown Chicago. She went shopping with her friends, dated several guys, participated in her school’s cheer squad, and was basically your standard urban high school teenage girl. On Homecoming night her senior year, Vanessa was gang-raped by half the basketball team in a dirty hotel room, several of which had contracted AIDS by sharing steroid injection needles. The shocks of first being raped, telling her parents about it, and finally finding out that she had AIDS were extremely damaging to her psyche. The trial didn’t help either, as she broke down under cross-examination and all members of the team were acquitted. However, she decided that the best thing to do would be to continue on with her life as if nothing had happened. Everyone else in her life noticed the radical change from the fun-loving, cheerful high school student to the angry, violent and cold college student, everyone except for Vanessa, that is. She made no friends her first two years in college, and after one particularly disastrous night of drinking which ended with her punching a guy in the face for asking her out on a date, Vanessa was helped through her door by an Agent of the Room of Past Revisited.

After she returned from the room, Vanessa changed her major from English (she imagined that she could live alone as a writer) to Advertising, found the guy she had punched the week before and explained to him her past and why she had done it, and offered to take him up on his offer as a way of paying him back. The relationship only lasted a couple of months, but it was the first one she had even considered having in more than two years. She was now once again a friendly, fun-loving individual, but she tempered her attitude with her past experiences, a change that has helped her a couple times in both her student life and her life as an Agent of the Room of Past Revisited.

Personality: Vanessa believes that no one should suffer from their demons the way that she has, and she is relentless in her attempts to get people to acknowledge their problems and move forward to solving them.
Obsession: Helping people come to terms with the events of their lives.
Wound Points: 45

Rage Stimulus: People that are too set in their ways to even consider changes.
Fear Stimulus: (Helplessness) Being physically restrained. It brings back bad memories from her rape.
Noble Stimulus: Helping people face their psychological demons and deal with them in a productive manner.

Body: 45 (Slender Yet Sexy)
Speed: 55 (Light on Her Feet)
Mind: 60 (Quick-Witted)
Soul: 70 (Empathetic)

Body Skills: General Athletics 15%, Self-Defense Student 25%, All the Right Curves 35%
Speed Skills: Dodge 15%, Driving 20%, Initiative 28%, Firearms 25%
Mind Skills: Advertising 30%, Notice 20%, Public Speaking 25%, Acting 15%
Soul Skills: Charm 30%, Lying 20%, Agent of Renunciation 35%, Read People 15%

Violence: 0 Hardened / 0 Failed
Unnatural: 3 Hardened / 0 Failed
Helplessness: 0 Hardened / 1 Failed
Isolation: 0 Hardened / 0 Failed
Self: 1 Hardened / 0 Failed