#i noticed the increasingly egregious canadianness in the fiction and then just leaned in with my whole ass

[othernaut]

Character Creation Challenge, Day 23: Liminal Horror

Everything was foggy. Consciousness returned sullenly, like a teenager hiding under the blankets, unwilling to get out of bed. It was the cold that brought me back, the insistence of it, and with the upwelling of consciousness came the realization that I had been in a car accident.

My eyes snapped open. My steaming breath fogged the interior of my van, a private cloudbank. I was upright on the highway - somewhere in the newly-stirred sauce of memories, I was sure I had flipped at least once. The panic, then, when I remembered. I was hit from behind, hard, hard enough to snap my neck forward, spin the world on its axis, bring those paranoid certainties: Whiplash, internal decapitation. Everything went white, and now I was here, still on the highway, still upright.

The panic was horrible, sudden, explosive, but gave way quickly to a creeping unease when I realized that everything was dark around me. No streetlights or brake lights, no headlights, none of the flash and bother of emergency signals that I would expect after getting rear-ended at speed on the highway. The bulk of the cars visible through the frost on my windows were cold and dead, painted with the filmy white of blown snow. No one inside. No movement apart from thin gusts drifting sheer waves of surface snow down the flat plane of the highway.

I tried the ignition: nothing. No spark, just the click of the key turning. Cell phone showed 82% battery, no wifi, no signal. The chill crept along my cheeks, my breath steamed the inside of my windshield. I scrabbled, clicked away my seatbelt, got halfway out of my seat before I remembered the potential neck injury. I gave myself a quick once-over, like I'd been trained: No weakness or tingling in the extremities, no bruising or blood in my rearview reflection, no visible injury or deformity in my neck or spine. No way to tell if I was confused or concussed; I just had to trust. Carefully, monitoring my body for pain, I eased over into the back seat and retrieved my oopsie bag. The fact that I felt nothing wrong, saw nothing wrong, was another mote of incongruous unease - I had seen people hospitalized for less. Paralyzed for less.

Hefting the duffel onto the front seat, I unzipped and began digging around for a chemical warmer. The subject of vehicle emergency kits was a fraught one at the fire station, with some of the crew content to keep first aid and a window hammer in their glovebox and others maintaining full-on bug-out bags. Mine was a middle ground, a mix of loose road flares, salient car-extrication equipment, and gun shop MREs. I'd been sneaking loose chemical heaters to stuff down my jacket on cold nights. Only two left. Regret.

Activated, pinned beneath my underwire and glowing warm into my core, the heater provided the first bit of real comfort I'd experienced since waking up. The steam in my breath slowly dissipated as the inside of the van began to heat; frost faded from the windows and I could see the world outside more clearly. Not encouraging. Middle of the night and the traffic was stock still, dead silent, mausoleum dark. The brightest thing out there was the full moon, which looked lopsided and weird in the warp of my windshield. There were no tracks on the highway, tire or animal. The blowing snow had covered the road in a thin patina of undisturbed white. It was as if the cars around me hadn't driven here, but been gently placed down, like a kid arranging Hot Wheels on a playmat.

And maybe that had happened to me, too. Deep inside me, below the chemical heater, the panic began to flutter again. I checked my phone again, checked the ignition again. No change. I wanted to do something, I wanted to go somewhere. This wasn't a good place to stay.

All impulse, I threw open the door and crunched my boots down on the highway. Immediately, that deep unease magnified into something near-tangible in its intensity. The highway isn't something anyone should be standing on. If you're standing on the highway, something's gone wrong with your day. The highway shouldn't be quiet. Even in jams, there should be idling engines, people leaning against their cars having a smoke and complaining, entrepreneurs walking down the lines selling gas station snacks. I wanted to crack a road flare, scream for help. I got most of the way there, too, but the sound died in my throat, clamped down by a muscular surge of survival instinct too overwhelming to ignore.

I was still and silent as the world around me. There was no change. There was no relief. There was something wrong with the moon.

In the distance, somewhere along the edge of the jam where the cars thinned out into a snowy strip of empty road, I could just about see the bulk of a building. Pit stop? One of those ubiquitous fucking OnRoutes with the strung-out Wendy's managers and damp bathrooms. All dark, of course, but my drifting unease grasped that change in scenery with a fierce, hopeful pressure. It looked grim from here, but there might still be power there. There might be people, someone who could explain this situation to me.

I took two, crunching steps down the road, stopped, turned back to my van. Door hanging open, it was the only thing in this vehicular graveyard not covered in snow. Something imperceptibly sad about that, but I couldn't say what. I walked back, reached in for my oopsie bag, unzipped it again. I kept a hatchet in there, forty bucks at the Canadian Tire. Only ever used it to open beers. It felt good to have something in my hands. I zipped the duffel back up, hefted it over my shoulder, resisted the urge to slam the car door and clicked it softly shut instead. Stayed there a minute, my gloved hand resting lightly on the door panel.

I didn't want to leave her. Some abundance of sentiment. Felt like leaving your dog tied up outside a grocery store - no matter how you assure her you'll be back in ten minutes, there's always the worry you'll never see her again. When your car got stuck in a snowbank, you were supposed to sit with it and wait for rescue - heck, how many times have I said that very thing to underdressed teens kicking along the side of the road?

But what else was there here? I felt so big, so noisy out in that great silence. I felt like something was out there, something invisible out on the still and frigid grass or up in the curved plane of the sky. Something was watching. The natural state of the human creature was inside, maybe with a cup of coffee and a show on. Out here was the province of another form of life, something much older, much stranger than mere nature.

Step by fearful step, I eased through the boneyard bulks of the dead cars, stepping kitten-soft and dancer-quick. I kept my eye to the horizon, where the pale, plastic-sided bulk of the pit stop dented the uniformity of the plain. Once I got used to the sound of my lonely feet crunching in the flat drifts, I ventured to brush handfuls of snow off the car windows as I passed. Each interior was a still, dark snapshot of a life interrupted. Coffee cups, Tic Tacs, and stacked receipts in the cup holders. A big bag of goalie gear in the back seat, child size. Half-empty Dollarama bags, rifled-through for snacks. No corpses. Thank fuck, no corpses.

Easier this way, to focus on the human things. Step by step. Look up, now and then, to sight the pit stop, gauge your distance. Don't look out at the yawning emptiness of the icy, open plains. Don't look out over the unreal peace of the empty highway. Don't look back to the van, to the last, lonely little monument to your own life, your own individuality, now indistinguishable from any other dead car.

Don't look up to those far-distant stars, to whatever's pretending to be the moon.

*****

Name: Kataryna "Kit" Pankonin Strength: 11, Dexterity: 10, Control: 14 Hit Protection: 5 Background: Volunteer Firefighter Gear: Collapsible ladder (bulky), axe (d6), fire extinguisher, flashlight, bolt cutters, gas mask, lighter, flare x2, 3 days food and water, chemical heater x2, duffel bag, smartphone, $215 Details: Authentic vintage aesthetic, lost a loved one under mysterious circumstances, believes individuals can make a difference. Traits: Small but sturdy physique with a dimpled smile. Tolerant, but if you get to her, she'll never let it go. Gravelly voice (smoke inhalation is no laughing matter). Disowned by family. Connections: Good friend (significant person, only one to take her in after the family situation, kind of a disaster but i love her dearly, name: Tam), family member (contact, younger brother, works in government, advocates for services, only one of the fam to still talk, name: Julian). Vehicles: Big ol' van (Uber with it when not on call, can set it up for sleeping).

*****

Why am I like this?

While performing this exercise for The Dark Eye, I joked about those cultural touchstones that would be invisible to a native but obvious and charming to an outsider. Specifically, the method by which I made this joke was to expand it into a hypothetical situation where I, a Canadian, were to design an indie RPG, but then include a complex hypothermia table with real-time frostbite math, like the kind everyone does in their head whenever they've got exposed extremities in the cold, right? Right?

Why am I like this?

Liminal Horror is one of those itch.io bundle games, one that's been sitting unused and unviewed in my bundle inventory since, like, 2022. As a system, it's extremely rules-light, up there with Brindlewood Bay in having just as many mechanics as it needs to and no more. I wouldn't call it OSR, but it has a couple similarities, like the 3d6-in-order character creation and d-whatever weapons listing. Frankly, the mechanics are a skeleton, a basic set of material the game expects you to drape your own liminal skin overtop of. It provides guidance for how to translate liminality into horror, but doesn't provide a set setting for it - the game expects you to know and recognize the situations which conjure that eerie, empty feeling, to have something in mind when you go to build your game. Like, in my case, the unreal, oddly conspicuous feeling of an empty, snow-scattered street at night.

It's not like Liminal Horror doesn't have flaws. The simplicity of the system can sometimes get in its own way, necessitating bespoke, on-the-fly rules generation if you have to do something complex and specific. The lack of an example setting makes it difficult to picture the rules in action while you're reading through the book. Sometimes the lightness of the rules stray over the edge, dancing away from "getting out of the way of roleplay" and to "giving no indication of what to do". But another thing borrowed from OSR is the idea that each game is your own, you can hack it up, remove bits, or graft on your own, mutant addenda as pleases you and your table. Don't like the unequivocal mechanical goodness of the Fallout tables? Make your own, with blackjack (ie: the hand-held knockout weapon) and hookers (ie: monsters with meathooks for hands that want to string you up and bleed you dry).

The bit that tips Liminal Horror over the line into something I would (and will) fuss with again is that the absences I see in the rules aren't limiting, but inspiring. Now that I think about it, that's actually the most liminal part of the game. Liminality in horror comes, at least in part, from overlaying unmet expectations onto the unknown. It's like that painting (by Dragan Bibin) of the dog gazing through the open door. I... don't know if that was engineered in this game, or if it was something that arose unexpected from the lightness of the rules, but it's something I felt I needed to note.

Because halfway through writing this little bit of fiction, I stopped and went, "Wait, how WOULD I model frostbite in this system?" And then I did that, just like I joked about doing before. And then I expanded on the liminal horror of the cold and empty highway into what wound up being the skeleton for a functional module. Then I realized it would also function perfectly well as a solo module, and began making notes in that direction. And now I have half a solo module written for Liminal Horror about the thing I just fucking joked about doing, half a workday still left to complete and, as if to underline the absurdity inherent in the universe, a driveway to shovel.

Why am I like this?

If I ever do get this solo module into a completed state, I'll throw it up on itch. For free, because I want to. For now, I better get the fucking salt out before the mailman slips and sues me. Vive la Canada, something is wrong with my brain.

Next up: The stars my destination.