LiveAshbrookDescriptive

The Black Plague: New Era

You're the only one who's seen this before — now prove it, before the last road out of town stops mattering.

About this game

A retired doctor and former detective is the only one who recognizes the swollen lymph nodes and blackening skin for what they are: the Black Death, loose in a modern town that refuses to believe it. Treat the sick, trace the source, and seal Ashbrook before the plague finds the road out.

Opening scenario

The Second Death

Dawn at the Ashbrook clinic: your second patient is dying of the same impossible swelling that killed the first, and the attending physician is already writing the wrong word on the chart.

Where you start

Your setup

TIME & PLACE: Just past dawn, day one. The Ashbrook County Clinic — a cramped single-story building of curtain-partitioned beds under green-white fluorescent tubes, one of which ticks and flickers. Autumn fog still clings to Main Street outside. The clinic smells of bleach, coffee gone cold, and the sweetish rot underneath that [YOUR NAME] has been trying not to name.

WHAT JUST HAPPENED: Six days ago, Edith Marsh came in with a raging fever and a hard, agonizing swelling in her groin the size of an egg. Dr. Cole treated her for a bacterial infection. She died on day three, skin gone black-purple at the fingertips. Everyone called it a bad septic flu. This morning, a second patient — Tom Beaumont, a 40-year-old millworker — was rushed in before sunrise with the identical presentation: 105°F fever, a swollen, blackening bubo at the neck, delirium. He is dying now, right in front of [YOUR NAME], and there is nothing textbook-bacterial that does exactly this to two people in one week. [YOUR NAME], a retired physician and former detective, has spent the night with a growing, impossible certainty. Both victims attended the same funeral eleven days ago — old Mrs. Ackley's, at St. Adelaide's.

WHO IS PRESENT: Dr. Marion Cole, mid-40s, exhausted, standing at the foot of the bed with a clipboard and a pen already moving — she is writing "pneumonia, complicated" as the cause, because that is the sane, defensible answer. A young nurse, Beth, hovers with a bag of saline, frightened by the smell. Tom Beaumont rasps on the bed, half-conscious.

IN REACH: the patient and his exposed, blackened bubo; Cole's clipboard; [YOUR NAME]'s own phone (a call to Mayor Gideon Hale, their father, is one tap away); a camera; the clinic's meager supply cabinet. No one has said the word plague. No one wants to. The clock has already been running for six days.