Walking down the hallway you don’t realize how warm it’s gotten until suddenly you notice sweat is running down your cheeks. You could turn around. You know it’s cooler back there, but then you’re no longer moving forward. If you go back to the benches, where the ceiling goes up an extra fifty feet and the concrete flooring is covered over by lineoleum, where they set up the man-portable fluorescent lamps and the ventilating fanwork, if you go back there and sit down and let yourself cool back down, maybe assisted by a nice cold drink of water trucked in from the surface, if you do that you’re just delaying the inevitable. Sooner or later we all go down the hallway. Maybe later rather than sooner, but it’ll only be hotter later, and then you’ll be back where you started, but older and sweatier.

If it helps, imagine that there’s someone stalking you. Someone not quite human, that they woke up when they came down here and started taking pictures. He’s taller than you’d think, given how low some of the doorframes are, and he’s almost totally silent when he walks on concrete. On the linoleum his feet (are they shoes or are those his feet?) squeak, but you can’t stay on the linoleum forever. You can pretend that he’s got teeth, sharp ones, big ones, and an oddly square jaw to match. Maybe the jaw can distend like a snake’s and he can swallow you up, or failing that maybe he can fit your whole hand into his mouth and bite it off just past the wrist. Maybe then he sucks the blood out of you, at the stump. You can imagine that’s what he’s really after: your blood, hot and wet.

It’s hot and wet walking down the hallway, but if you turn around and go back to the relative cool of the benches you might see him stalking you, and then there’d be nothing for it but to shriek and run and you could basically count your lifespan in heartbeats, then. Maybe you haven’t seen the rest of the team yet, their sucked-dry handless corpses strewn further down the hallway, just around that corner. Is your light flickering? Maybe you should turn it off, to conserve power, and fumble forwards in the almost-dark. At this point in the hallway you can still see light from the man-portable fluorescent lamps, back behind you in the gallery. When you turn the corner, that will be gone.

You slow down as you approach the corner. It’s only natural to fear the unknown. But you know if you stop moving, then the one who’s stalking you will strike. He won’t have any other option; this is how it is, down here. The best you can hope for is that when you turn the corner all the rest of them will be there, hale and hearty and no worse for the wear, a little sweaty but otherwise fine. You can hear something dripping, up ahead. Maybe it’s sweat dripping off one of their still-alive brows. Probably that is what it is.

“Hey there,” you say cautiously.

The stranger stares at you. He’s definitely glowing, but not in the way you’d expect an alien, angel, or elf to glow. He glows in the manner of someone wearing a phosphorescent jacket and phosphorescent pants. You can’t really see his face, which makes it hard to read his expression. Given the length of the pause preceding his reply, and its tone, he’s probably scowling at you, however. That’s a reasonable inference.

“You’re not supposed to be here,” he finally says.

You point towards your car. “I’m out of gas.”

If you are carrying two garbage bags, turn to page 823.
If you are carrying one garbage bag, turn to page 354.
If you are carrying zero garbage bags, turn to page 355.

823

“What’s in those bags?” he asks. One might conclude he suspects you of stealing his, I don’t know, gravel? That’s about all that’s available to steal.

“Nothing,” you assure him. “Just some laundry and recyclables. I got this stuff out of my trunk, in case, you know, I needed to… I don’t know.”

The man considers this, while you reflect on his odd choice of clothing. The phosphorescent garments make him easy to see in the rural darkness, but do nothing to make his face visible. From his voice you’re guessing he’s somewhere between puberty and senility, but couldn’t guess where along that spectrum he sits. He’s wearing, you realize, a hat with a bobble on top. That’s not his hair, as you’d at first assumed.

“You won’t be here much longer,” the man says thoughtfully. “Maybe I can sell the car,” he adds, apparently to himself.

“Beg pardon?”

“You… won’t… be here… soon,” the stranger repeats, slowly and carefully.

If you think the stranger is threatening you, turn to page 100 and LIKE this post.
If you think he is dismissing you, turn to page 603 and REBLOG this post.

You are FORGETFUL. You currently possess a white garbage bag filled with a change of clothes, a black garbage back filled with recyclables, a coin manual, a flask of probable scotch, a flimsy jack, and a shoddy spare tire. It’s all a matter of packing! You can carry 0 more items.

You pace around some more. It isn’t cold here, luckily; back home you’d need at least a jacket at this time of year. Visibility is low, however. You cut the lights on the car, and until your eyes adjust you can’t see your hand in front of your face; your eyes may be open or closed, your brain is getting the same information either way. You could imagine you’re back home, with your eyes closed, except of course for the sound of the wind in the trees.

In a reasonable world, there’d be something emitting light inside the gas station. A backlit EXIT sign, maybe, or the LED display of the timer on the coffee maker, or something simple like that. Here and now, however, nothing. No stars above, so either it’s overcast or else the stars have just all given up and gone home behind the horizon for the night.

You shuffle around the small gravel lot next to the gas station for several minutes, fruitlessly waiting for your eyes to adjust. Aside from some nondescript rustling from dead leaves scraping against other dead leaves, you hear only your shoes kicking up dust. Eventually you decide you can tell the difference between holding your hands over your eyes and not, and that’s about as much as you’re going to get, apparently.

Your quest for external stimului having gone so poorly, you stumble back to your car, with the intention of either sleeping in it or turning its lights back on, one of the two. This is the point at which you realize you locked your keys in, when you turned the lights off. Also, there’s a glowing man standing next to one of the gas pumps. Can’t imagine why you didn’t see him before. Maybe you’re hallucinating?
“Crap.”

If you would like to freak out and run away, turn to page 99 and LIKE this post.
If you would rather remain calm and greet the stranger, turn to page 103 and REBLOG this post.

You are FORGETFUL. You currently possess a white garbage bag filled with a change of clothes, a black garbage back filled with recyclables, a coin manual, a flask of probable scotch, a flimsy jack, and a shoddy spare tire. It’s all a matter of packing! You can carry 0 more items.

White plastic garbage bag with a change of clothes, check. Actually you’d forgotten you put this here, which means that every time you deal with your trunk, you’re like, hey, so that’s where my bright yellow t-shirt went. Coin manual, check. Silver (or silver-colored) hip flask with your initials engraved on it and what you’ve always assumed is scotch, check. Cruddy cheapest-possible jack and cruddy cheapest-possible spare tire, check. Stack of Clinton-era comic books you bought at a flea market last month and forgot about, check. Black plastic garbage bag full of paper products (old newspapers and broken-down cardboard boxes) for recycling which you put in your trunk and then, that’s right, forgot about, check.

Plainly you’re a person who forgets things a lot; go ahead and record FORGETFUL on your character sheet, under TRAITS. If you wish to keep any of the items listed above on your person, record them on your character sheet under INVENTORY, but be aware that the garbage bags are bulky and count as two items each.

Once you’re satisfied that you’ve achieved everything useful that you’re going to while staring down into the trunk of your car, you close it and pace around a bit, examining this rural gas station.

It’s dark out here in the middle of nowhere, but your car’s headlights permit you to note that while gas is advertised as unaccountably cheap, the pumps appear to be functional and have all the usual stickers on them. A sign directs you to prepay indoors, which you’d love to do if the station were open, which (just so we’re clear) it isn’t. No hours are posted, but peering through the windows you can see some candy-bar racks, a coffee maker, the usual stuff. You don’t recognize any of the brands, but that’s typical.

If you decide to break in, turn to page 93. If you decide to search around the exterior of the gas station some more, turn to page 173. If you decide to wait in your car until morning, turn to page 47.

The biggest drawback to not knowing where to go is that you can quickly get lost, and if you aren’t in the process of making yourself lost, you feel you’re doing badly. When you’re lost, you keep moving. You take right turns, because that’s faster than left turns, and you get on the interstate, because that’s faster than going through town. Next thing you know, you’re in the next state over and it’s raining and getting dark.

At this point, you realize that you’ve been way too far inside your own head, that you’ve been under highway hypnosis for what feels like forever, and you’re low on gas and hungry and last thing you remember eating was a banana for breakfast and now it’s dark, which, that can’t be a good sign. If you’d been smart you’d have brought along your little GPS system — with today’s modern cars you can’t get lost, not with all the silicon chips and such — but no, you couldn’t be smart, EXODUS forfend, you had to be dumb. Dumb, and almost out of gas. The little light on the dash is on, and has been for some amount of time.

Fortunately, there’s a gas station up ahead.

Unfortunately, it’s very clearly closed, and its pumps look to be about fifty years old, maybe more. In fact the gas station might not be open for business, because the posted price of unleaded is sixty-three and nine-tenths cents per gallon, which probably isn’t right even if you did end up in a different state.

You turn the engine off, and take a quick inventory. You’ve got all kinds of junk in the trunk.

If your possessions include a copy of the King James Bible, for emergencies, turn to page 112.

If your possessions include a flask of scotch, which you got as a present last year and forgot about, turn to page 24.

If your possessions include a bucket of 48 tennis balls, for playing fetch with your dog, turn to page 238.