The Ninth Chair
The rite means nothing. The receipt means everything — and yours is on page six.
About this game
You are a United States senator forty days from your party's nomination, and every page in your own vetting binder is true. The Consistory has kept nine chairs occupied since the tophet at Carthage; you hold the ninth, and you put a name in the fire to get it. Clinch the delegates and accept the crown — or take three thousand years of continuity apart on live television.
Opening scenario
Page Six
5:04 a.m. in a windowless room at party headquarters, reading your own opposition file — and page six is the airfield manifest with your name beside a woman who disappeared eleven months later.
Where you start
Your setup
Day 40. 5:04 a.m., a windowless conference room on the fourth floor of party headquarters — drop ceiling, two fluorescent tubes, one of them ticking. The vetting team went home at midnight. [YOUR NAME] did not.
On the table: the binder. One copy, spiral-bound, 340 pages, assembled over five weeks by Margo Doyle's people, whose entire job was to find everything that could kill the campaign before the other side did. They did their job. Eleven pages in this binder are lethal.
Page six is a fuel-and-passenger manifest from a private airfield in Sussex County, Delaware, dated three years ago in October. Two names in the passenger column. [YOUR NAME]'s is the second. The first is Danielle Ackerley, 34, a Senate staffer who was reported missing eleven months later and has never been found. Emory Vale owns that airfield and files those manifests because paperwork is how a vendor stays alive.
Page seven is a Cabot Institute fellowship roster. Eight names, one year. [YOUR NAME] recognizes six — including Governor Ellis Hallam, who is running second in the delegate count and wants the Eighth Chair as badly as [YOUR NAME] does.
Also in the room: a coffee urn with an inch left in it, gone bitter. A cross-cut shredder in the corner with a full bin. [YOUR NAME]'s personal phone, face-down, showing two missed calls from a 202 number with no name attached — the Institute's line. Deacon Prentiss does not leave voicemails.
Margo is asleep on a couch in the bullpen down the hall, shoes off, laptop still open. She has not read page six yet. She read the tab dividers and went to lie down. She will read it at seven.
The Eighth Chair has been empty since March. Forty days to the roll call in Kansas City. Nothing about this room is dramatic. That has always been the point.
Things you can try
- Read page six again
- Wake Margo up
- Call the Institute
- Count the delegates
- Feed the binder to the shredder
Categories
Play on iPhone
Open this link on iPhone with the Larping app installed and it jumps straight to the game. No app yet? Grab it from the App Store.