Monsterhearts, Session 5

The Setting: Drawing, a large forested country town in New South Wales around an hour from the coast, at Saint Valentine’s Academy, a Catholic high-school.

Our Cast (this session):

• Brittany – an icy Queen with captivating eyes who leads a cultic clique who perform rituals they don’t understand at an old ritual site near the coast. (UPDATE: They pronouns) [Played by Kat]
• Kafka – a striking Ghoul with hollow eyes who was killed in a car-accident a month ago, bare days into the school year, but woke up afterwards confused and hungry. (He pronouns) [Played by Kaj]
• Sabrina – a brooding Witch with calculating eyes whose sanctuary from the stupidity of her classmates (an old and abandoned bathroom) is full of occult paraphernalia. (She pronouns) [Played by Jacqui]
• Mika – a distant Infernal with calculating eyes chosen to receive power and influence by an unknown patron who asks only the smallest things in return. (They pronouns) [Played by Liv]
• Floris – a dainty Fae with mesmerizing eyes who dreams of the King in the Greenwood from whom she stole her glamour and power. (They pronouns) [Played by Liska]
• Eva – a stiff Hollow with soulless eyes who was once a beast of the forest before gaining a new furless and two-legged form (She pronouns) [Played by Kettu]

What happened:

Flashback, the afternoon before: Waking up from their strange dream on the boat Brittany decided to check in on Jock, the injured member of their clique. Suspicious of the seemingly-occult cause of his condition they questioned him over the phone, getting a list of people who were annoyed at him that included Sabrina’s name.

Mika spent the night fitfully almost-sleeping, once again comforted by the Dark Power in its raven-like shape and infused with some of its power in order to replenish some of their lost energy and drive.

Kafka woke up in the woods  and headed towards his house, knowing he had to deal with Mika’s blood before he could show up at school. Reaching a road just as Sabrina was driving down it he managed to beg a lift and once back at his house took a shower while Sabrina snooped through his room. 

Noticing that Kafka had left his necklace of shells - made by Mika years ago, which he had never stopped wearing even after the friendship ended - when he put down his stuff before heading into the shower, Sabrina took it as a sympathetic token and Kafka failed to notice its absence around his neck.

At the school Brittany noticed Raven and Lauren having a whispered and slightly-charged conversation and, knowing about Raven’s connection to Sabrina, decided it was worth investigating. They directed their second-in-command Tiffany to move to a desk just behind the friends and eavesdrop and record the conversation on her phone. 

Kafka and Sabrina arrived in class, very late. Sabrina noticed the recording app open on Tiffany’s phone and made a notice of it, while Kafka had an awkward moment of eye-contact with Adam - looking fairly concerned given Kafka’s state the night before - before realising that Lauren was present and seemingly unharmed. The two took their seats, Kafka deciding not to make a scene and to talk to Lauren after class.

Naive and unaware of teenage hierarchy Eva attempted to befriend Brittany and got cruelly shut down and reminded of her lowly place in the high-school social ladder, though Brittany felt a strange guilt over treating her so harshly. Floris rebuked Brittany and they responded by calling Tiffany over to back them up and delivering a threat of social and mystical punishment, but the attempt at intimidation only roused the fey primal wildness within Floris and allowed her to frighten Brittany into a promise to leave Eva alone. 

The bell rang and class ended and Sabrina headed around the room towards Raven’s desk, stealing Tiffany’s phone (from where she’d left it) along the way. Sabrina reached Lauren and Raven and was about to talk to her emo tryst before being given an unspoken plea to give Raven some space and not complicate her already fraught negotiation of friendship with Lauren now that her feelings couldn’t be reciprocated even if she spoke up.

After Sabrina left the room, headed for her sanctuary and followed by Eva, Kafka struck up a conversation and attempted to feel out where she’d gone the night before. Her recollection was slightly patchy but Kafka was satisfied of her wellbeing and the two awkwardly put a label on their relationship (boyfriend/girlfriend) and planned a date in the library. 

Mika, having arrived at school a little earlier, was leaned up against the lockers outside the classroom waiting. They watched as various other students left and exchanged polite words with Lauren and then an uncomfortable moment of tension and unspoken grievances with Kafka. Lauren politely excused herself so they could talk in private, telling Kafka to meet her in the library once he was done. 

The intense tension between Kafka and Mika turned charged and erotic, Kafka pushing Mika up against the lockers they were leaning against and kissing them. Mika wrapped a hand around Kafka’s throat and marched them back into a janitor’s closet where the two gave in and slept together again. 

Sabrina took the phone to her sanctuary and listened to the recording - of Lauren realising that Raven had sex and trying to find out who as Raven attempted to shut down the conversation, unwilling to have that talk with someone she had reciprocated feelings towards - and began to put together what Brittany’s interest in it was. 

Eva chose between following Floris to the library to thank her for her help dealing with Brittany and catching up with Sabrina. Deciding on the latter, she came into Sabrina’s sanctuary and admitted how Brittany had bullied her and received a promise from Sabrina that she was working to shut them down.

In the afterglow in the janitor’s closet Kafka brushed off Mika’s attempts to communicate and trivialised the encounter they’d just had. Mika lashed out over the fact that Kafka wasn’t wearing the necklace anymore and told him to call Lauren next time he was ‘looking to have some fun’ before dressing and setting a fire in the corner of the room. 

The smoke alarm went off, prompting Kafka to hurriedly dress and get out of the room as the flames began to spread while Mika looked on dispassionately and without fear as the Dark Power expressed its approval. 

Rent and Ruined

Rent and Ruined is an upcoming campaign that I’ll be running over Skype from around the beginning of next year. It draws strongly from Avery McDaldno’s Monsterhearts as well as surreal ‘urban fantasy’ like Pan’s Labyrinth, American Gods, War of the Oaks, and Changeling: the Lost. It also draws from my academic interests in the anthropology of spirit-possession and witchcraft and in psychogeography, surregionalism, and animism. 

It sheds the high-school setting of Monsterhearts, but is still about monstrosity as a metaphor for queerness (or the other way around?) and about dysfunctional and petty behaviour and toxic ways of relating to the world and your peers

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It is a game about being marginalised and set apart by who you are and how you’ve been hurt. 

It is a game about scars and damage, about the ruined and forgotten people who have been failed by those they should have been able to trust and who have fallen through the cracks of society’s neglect. 

It is a game about profound hurt and trauma and its aftermath, about the wild magic that grows in tears and gashes in hearts and minds and souls. 

It is a game about the desperate loneliness of wanting to connect but having been burned and hurt before and fearing that vulnerability. 

It is a game about hungers that can't be named and discomfort that scratches under the soul's skin with every glance in the mirror. 

It is a game about places and their souls, and how they change when all the people are gone and stranger things come to live there.

It is a game about decay, about the reclamation of the familiar - urban spaces, industry, humanity, normative identity - by and the reversion of the familiar to the strange and alien. 

It is a game about spirit-possession and transformation and the eerie and uncanny and how these phenomena tend to align with oppression and radical self-empowerment. 

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It is a feral game. 

It is an occult game.

It is a queer game.

Monsterhearts, Session 3

The Setting: Drawing, a large forested country town in New South Wales around an hour from the coast, at Saint Valentine’s Academy, a Catholic high-school.

Our Cast (this session):

• Kafka – a striking Ghoul with hollow eyes who was killed in a car-accident a month ago, bare days into the school year, but woke up afterwards confused and hungry. (He pronouns) [Played by Kaj]
• Sabrina – a brooding Witch with calculating eyes whose sanctuary from the stupidity of her classmates (an old and abandoned bathroom) is full of occult paraphernalia. (She pronouns) [Played by Jacqui]
• Mika – a distant Infernal with calculating eyes chosen to receive power and influence by an unknown patron who asks only the smallest things in return. (They pronouns) [Played by Liv]
• Cera (Cerulean) – a bedraggled Selkie with far-away eyes who makes mixed-media art from beach junk and must investigate the nature of Mika’s patron if she wants her pelt back. (She pronouns) [Played by Andrei]
• Floris – a dainty Fae with mesmerizing eyes who dreams of the King in the Greenwood from whom she stole her glamour and power. (They pronouns) [Played by Liska]

What Happened:

Confused after the unexpected sexual encounter with Lauren and Mika and still ravenously hungry, Kafka let the other two fall asleep and began ransacking the house for food. Mika’s vegetarianism left the pickings slim although Kafka did locate the pile of bills and begin wondering how on earth Mika could afford such a lavish lifestyle. Revealing that they’d woken up, Mika – conflicted about this sexual encounter and its complication of their unresolved friendship with Kafka – tried to get Kafka to leave and instead received the unexpected news that their old friend was now one of the undead.

Finishing up an afternoon of tinkering with their art projects and cameras Cera headed out of Old Ernest’s hut and onto the beach, stripping off and donning a snorkel – made necessary by the theft of her gift of water-breathing along with her pelt – and swimming out to sea to commune with the ocean.

Noticing how hungry Kafka looked Mika invited them to go out for a bite to eat after asking the Dark Power to protect their house and the still-sleeping Lauren, for which it asked only that they make sure Kafka enjoyed a proper meal of raw and living flesh. Heading off to the forested side of town the two struggled through a tense conversation until Mika, noticing Kafka’s quickly-growing hunger, begged the Dark Power to provide a sleeping and helpless meal for their companion and was told the price would be that the meal would be still-living.

Floris, having taken the day off to sleep and recharge after a rough week, dreamed of walking through the thicker fringe of forest outside town and being followed by the sound of heartbeat-like drumming of hooves. Stepping off the path to hide from whatever creature was chasing them, they travelled from day to moonlit night and witnessed a monstrous and stag-like predator roaming the woods the silver-white eyes of which reflected a fey and inhuman version of their own face.

Heading out into the backwoods behind her house to get high on some psychedelics brought from Gail, Sabrina found herself lying on the forest floor trapped in a dream-like fugue for hours and eventually passed out after noticing a growing sense of watchful menace from the ancient and twisted trees surrounding her.

Arriving on the forested side of town Kafka and Mika spotted a juvenile deer grazing on an apple tree in a frontyard garden and Kafka gave into his hunger, leaping on the animal and ruthlessly beginning to rip chunks of flesh from the still-living creature. Caught up in the moment he unleashed his Darkest Self and decided to make Mika his next meal, tearing into his companion’s shoulder and throat before the struggling pair knocked into a parked car and set off the alarm and woke the whole street.

Floating face-down past the drop-off and staring down into the deep to commune with the ocean, Cera noticed an enormous sinuous form in the blackness the movements of which began to sway the tide into a growing violence. Fearful and seeking to escape, she made it back to shore and fled to the lap-pool at school, diving in and attempting to let physical exercise drive out the memory of the crushing weight of the awareness that had fixed upon her.  

Now struggling for their life Mika attempted to break free from Kafka but only ended up bearing the two of them to the ground, Kafka ready to tear and rip at their flesh. The Dark Power offered them protection at the price of an innocent abandoned in the woods and extended that offer to restraining Kafka until he recovered as long as the innocent was Lauren, and Mika agreed. The Dark Power, previously in the form of a raven, vanished and Adam appeared out of nowhere and tackled Kafka off of Mika, tying his hands behind his back and hustling him out of their in an iron grip before the waking residents of the street could intervene.

The session closed with a montage set to The Forest by the Cure:

• An unknown figure stepping towards the unconscious Sabrina, fungi and vines growing wherever its cloven feet touch, and stooping to take her necklace as a sympathetic token before departing.
• Mika heading back to their house, Lauren waking and bandaging their wounds before the two of them share an erotically-charged shower to wash off the blood.
• Adam in Kafka’s bedroom checking him for injuries, tenderness arising between them as Kafka admits the secret of his undeath and hunger.
• Cera swimming endless laps in the school pool as the moon slowly sets, fixing her eyes warily on the large drain at the bottom of the pool and the darkness beyond it.
• Adam and Kafka sleeping, spooning fully-clothed on Kafka’s bed until Adam soundlessly stands and departs through the open window.
• Sabrina waking out in the woods, realizing her necklace is missing and getting back in her car with fearful haste to drive away.
• Mika and a dull-eyed Lauren walking up the trail bare moments later, a raven watching with a satisfied gleam in its eye as Mika walks away.
• Floris in their bed, tossing and turning, their face increasingly distressed as they thrash at some unseen enemy or entrapment, dreaming of a tangle of leaves and vines from which gazes out a pair of great inhuman golden eyes.

Monsterhearts, Session 2

The Setting: Drawing, a large forested country town in New South Wales around an hour from the coast, at Saint Valentine’s Academy, a Catholic high-school.

Our Cast (this session):

• Brittany – an icy Queen with captivating eyes who leads a cultic clique who perform rituals they don’t understand at an old ritual site near the coast. (She pronouns) [Played by Kat]
• Kafka – a striking Ghoul with hollow eyes who was killed in a car-accident a month ago, bare days into the school year, but woke up afterwards confused and hungry. (He pronouns) [Played by Kaj]
• Sabrina – a brooding Witch with calculating eyes whose sanctuary from the stupidity of her classmates (an old and abandoned bathroom) is full of occult paraphernalia. (She pronouns) [Played by Jacqui]
• Mika – a distant Infernal with calculating eyes chosen to receive power and influence by an unknown patron who asks only the smallest things in return. (They pronouns) [Played by Liv]

What Happened:

The school bell rung. Kafka invited Lauren back to his house to hang out and talk about Frankenstein some more, but she turned him down because she had to be home by 4pm. Brittany refused an invitation to a sleepover from Tiffany, her second-in-command, and headed off home to her single father’s houseboat on a public bus after taking a roundabout route to ensure no-one would discover her poverty.

Mika headed out into the parking lot and had a conversation with Gail, a stoner often willing to sell weird natural hallucinogens he found in the woods and Lauren’s brother, and made a purchase. An interested Lauren considered going back to Mika’s place to safely do some experimenting with substances, but eventually decided it was too risky.

Sabrina pulled up beside Kafka and offered him a ride that quickly turned charged and uncomfortable as she confronted him about witnessing his crumpled body on the side of the road during the time between his death and resurrection. Brittany ran into Old Ernest on the beach and the elderly forager showed her and helped her capture a huge and strangely-iridescent crab that looked just like the rock-paintings at the ritual site her cult-clique discovered.

Mika arrived home to discover a massive build-up of bills and was offered assistance by the Dark Power in exchange for causing some heartbreak and suffering for it to feed on. A little later a knock on the door announced the arrival of Lauren, who had decided that she did want to try some psychedelics after all and ended up cuddled up to them and lazily making out due to a sudden craving for physical affection.

While looking Frankenstein up on Sparknotes so he could impress Lauren with his knowledge the next day, Kafka drifted into somewhat of a trance and snapped out of it with a premonition of what was going on at Mika’s house. Jealous of both his new sort-of-girlfriend and his ex-best-friend he raced over and, after a few failed attempts to hurl rocks at the house and break up what was going on, knocked on the door and interrupted proceedings. 

After a long and dangerously-charged moment in the doorway as Kafka’s hunger for flesh asserted itself, the interlocking strands of tension between Kafka, Lauren, and Mika resolved themselves into an unexpected sexual encounter.

On her father’s boat, Brittany stormed off into her ramshackle ‘cabin’ in the prow to escape yet another rant about grades and expectations, staring at the water and drifting off into a dream about a sinuous and abyssal blackness stirring in the deep.

Monsterhearts, Session 1

The Setting: Drawing, a large forested country town in New South Wales around an hour from the coast, at Saint Valentine’s Academy, a Catholic high-school. 

Our Cast (this session):

• Brittany – an icy Queen with captivating eyes who leads a cultic clique who perform rituals they don’t understand at an old ritual site near the coast. (She pronouns) [Played by Kat]
• Kafka – a striking Ghoul with hollow eyes who was killed in a car-accident a month ago, bare days into the school year, but woke up afterwards confused and hungry. (He pronouns) [Played by Kaj]
• Sabrina – a brooding Witch with calculating eyes whose sanctuary from the stupidity of her classmates (an old and abandoned bathroom) is full of occult paraphernalia. (She pronouns) [Played by Jacqui]

What Happened:

Homeroom. Sabrina clashed with a member of the Brittany’s clique named Jock who wouldn’t stop leering at her, while Brittany lost face when her command to him to stop was ignored. Kafka got in an argument with a goth called Adam over the deafeningly-loud volume of his headphones and realized that there was something off about his scent.

Kafka was approached by an indie girl called Lauren during English to help explain their assigned novel (Frankenstein) and the two of them struck up a rapport. Using her position as teacher’s pet Sabrina got out of her English class and snuck off to her abandoned bathroom, using a sweat-drenched towel she’d stolen days ago to cause Jock to break out in a rash.

The hex backfired and Jock ended up tearing at his own flesh until he bled and was restrained and taken to hospital  while Brittany, uncaring of her minion’s distress, attempted to feel out the best way to get the extremely wealthy Amber to join her clique.

On Kafka’s way through the cafeteria to eat lunch with Lauren he attracted Adam’s attention, but managed to ignore his insults and sneers until he started creeping on Lauren and physically intruding on her personal space. The confrontation erupted into violence when Sabrina, speaking in tongues, cast a botched hex that led Adam to out himself and admit his attraction to Kafka.

After Kafka brutally put an end to the fight by dislocating Adam’s arm (drawing an odd moan from Adam and a slightly flushed look from Lauren), he was sent to the Vice Principal’s office. Brittany followed along, intrigued and seeing potential uses for Kafka, and managed to convince Miss Williams to let Kafka off lightly.

Sabrina followed the sound of sobbing into a bathroom and found Raven, Lauren’s best friend, jealous and distraught. She managed to calm her down somewhat and an impulsive kiss led to a sordid tryst after which Sabrina left with another sympathetic token in the form of Raven’s underwear. 

Lauren and Kafka’s trip to the library on their free period to talk more about Frankenstein involved rather more straddling and making out than literary analysis, and Brittany made some definite headway into winning Amber over by blackmailing Dr Hill, the perverted Head of Science, into tampering with her grades.

Monsterhearts, Session 4

The Setting: Drawing, a large forested country town in New South Wales around an hour from the coast, at Saint Valentine’s Academy, a Catholic high-school.

Our Cast (this session):

• Kafka – a striking Ghoul with hollow eyes who was killed in a car-accident a month ago, bare days into the school year, but woke up afterwards confused and hungry. (He pronouns) [Played by Kaj]
• Sabrina – a brooding Witch with calculating eyes whose sanctuary from the stupidity of her classmates (an old and abandoned bathroom) is full of occult paraphernalia. (She pronouns) [Played by Jacqui]
• Mika – a distant Infernal with calculating eyes chosen to receive power and influence by an unknown patron who asks only the smallest things in return. (They pronouns) [Played by Liv]

What happened:

Sad and confused, Mika was left wandering through the empty streets and ruined industrial buildings on the western part of town as they begin to drift into a trance-like state. They felt the cold and damp of the night intensify as the sounds of a pack of hunting animals on their heels were accompanied by the appearance of a great dark golden-eyed hound in front of them.

As the hound let out a terrifying howl, echoed by the pack behind them, Mika snapped out of the vision and the fearful hunting hound was reduced to nothing but a mangy cur that slunk off into the shadows. Reaching an overgrown section of the industrial ruins nearer the south Mika had an emotional breakdown, sobbing and shivering, and turned to the Dark Power – in its raven-like shape – for comfort.

Half-waking to the realization that Adam had departed during his sleep Kafka was unable to get back to sleep and, prompted by his uncertainty as to whether his gravely-injured victim had survived, wandered over to Mika’s house to check in on them and Lauren. Finding the house empty and overcome with the realization of his brutal and monstrous actions, Kafka lay down on the floor and began to bitterly weep.

Driving home in a panic to escape whatever it was in the woods that had taken a sympathetic token from her, Sabrina arrived home and shut herself up in her room to do some desperate research. Spreading her occult books around her in a huge circle on the floor, she searched until her eyes were drooping and sleep was nearly upon her, but couldn’t find any hints as to what creature might leave the inhuman footprints she’d spotted when she woke up.

Staring at the tangled sheets and discarded clothing on Mika’s bed from his encounter with Mika and Lauren, Kafka’s concern over the absence of his almost-girlfriend sent a series of increasingly-dreadful scenarios through his mind that culminated with a too-real image of Lauren pale and bloody and pinned by a great iron spear to a treetrunk in the forest.

Falling into a deep and exhausted sleep, Sabrina dreamed. She found herself in a small clearing within a dark and tangled woodland, small dead animals spiked to the trees around her with iron nails and their blood pooling among the branches. From the shadows outside of the dim moonlight, within the trees, a dark and shadowy figure watched and then identified itself as the Hunter.

Speaking longingly of the days when born witches roamed its forest and kept fear and memory of its name alive, the Hunter offered to give Sabrina the power of a born witch and teach her ancient secrets if she would carry out its ancient rites and bring back the fear of the ‘mortal flock’ when they heard its name. Despite sensing that blood and cruelty lay down that road Sabrina’s desire for knowledge and power overcame her and she agreed, the Hunter mingling their blood to seal the pact before she woke in her room with her missing pendant back in her hand and leaves and dirt on her feet.

Dehydrated and with no more tears to shed, Mika let the Dark Power guide them back home with a side-stop so they could wash their face and clean up in a frontyard fountain. Arriving back at their home to find Kafka still curled up on the floor, Mika retrieved a knife from the kitchen and the two exchanged tense and guarded words as an increasingly suspicious Kafka demanded to know where Lauren had gone and an untrusting Mika tried to find out whether the real Kafka had in fact survived his death or if all that was left was a dead and hungry thing that wore Kafka’s face.

Unwilling to wait any longer, Kafka made to leave when Mika pinned him up against the doorframe with a knife against his throat to stop him. Leaning slightly into the blade to kiss Mika, Kafka manoeuvred them back into the centre of the room during a violent and angry series of further kisses before pulling back and walking away, leaving Mika confused and alone and turned on.

As Kafka left, Mika offered the Dark Power yet more influence over them if it showed them one of Kafka’s secrets and was given a direct impression of Kafka’s feelings for them and desire to regain some of their childhood closeness and intimacy. Still emotionally devastated from sacrificing Lauren to the Dark Power and Kafka trying to kill and eat them and confused from Kafka’s sudden abandonment of their kiss moments ago, Mika was overwhelmed by a sense of abandonment and helplessness to fulfil their wants and needs and became their Darkest Self.

Now willing to do anything to feel again, Mika smashed some plates and glasses before bed as the Dark Power suggested that maybe destroying something much larger – like a person – beyond repair would make them feel even better and then went to sleep. Outside Sabrina’s window, a great raven watched over her with unblinking golden eyes and delivered a scroll of cracked and ancient bark to the windowsill. And in the forest an increasingly fearful and desperate Kafka staggered through the trees shouting Lauren’s name until, exhausted, they tripped over a tree-root and fell at the foot of the ancient tree from their vision only to spot no sign of Lauren or anything stranger than the trees still-green leaves, unusually vivid and alone among the autumn reds and browns all around.