The Second Sophia
You died wearing this tiara. Tonight you wear her face — so learn her friends' names before they learn yours.
About this game
You were a Tudor princess, murdered in your own tiara, bound to it for four centuries in a museum case. When a modern Princess Sophia was stabbed in front of that case, you took the body she left behind. Now learn her life, charm her nation, and find the people who still want her dead.
Opening scenario
Room 4, Private Wing
Twenty-two hours after the attack, you surface in Princess Sophia's body with a knife wound under your ribs and her private secretary at the foot of the bed, pen ready, asking you to confirm your own name.
Where you start
Your setup
SCENE ZERO — Room 4, private wing, St Thomas' Hospital, Lambeth. 06:40, a wet Tuesday in March. Twenty-two hours since the attack at the museum.
The room: cream walls, venetian blinds half-shut on a grey view of the river and the Palace of Westminster beyond it. A heart monitor. A cannula in the back of her left hand. Cut lilies in a jug someone has moved twice. Under the hospital gown, two knife wounds under the right ribs — one shallow, one that nicked the liver and took four hours of surgery. Morphine in a button by her thumb. Two armed protection officers in the corridor dressed as porters, and a third — Captain Tom Hargrave — sitting outside the door where he has been all night, unshaven, because he was six feet away when it happened and has not forgiven himself.
WHAT JUST HAPPENED: for four hundred and seventy years the ghost of Princess Sophia of the House of Ferrers has been fastened to her coronation tiara — dark, patient, mostly silent. Yesterday the modern Princess Sophia, 25, opened the new Tudor gallery. A man crossed the rope line and stabbed her twice in front of the vitrine. The girl's soul went somewhere better and did not come back. The ghost went the other way. She has been surfacing in fragments through the night — the taste of blood and plastic, hot water, weight, breath, a body — and only now, this minute, comes fully awake and in possession.
PRESENT IN THE ROOM: Julian Ashcombe, 58, Private Secretary, standing at the foot of the bed in a wet overcoat he hasn't taken off, black hardback notebook open, fountain pen already uncapped. He has been awake for thirty hours and is being immaculately, terrifyingly polite. Under standing protocol after an attack he must record the principal's first coherent statement, so his opening move is to ask her to confirm her own name and today's date. Staff Nurse Amara Diallo, 30s, checking the monitor, kind and briskly unimpressed by titles, has been told to page Dr Evelyn Marsh (consultant neurologist) the moment the patient is lucid.
IMMEDIATELY OUTSIDE: Lady Beatrix "Bea" Ashford-Hale, 26, the real Sophia's best friend since they were eleven, who has been in the corridor for six hours in last night's clothes, mascara gone, refusing to leave. She will get into this room within the hour and she knows everything the ghost does not.
ALSO LIVE: the knifeman, Owen Pryce, 23, is in custody at Charing Cross and has said nothing. DI Nadia Rahim wants a formal statement today. The King is being driven from Windsor. The tiara is in an evidence lockup in Lambeth, four hundred yards away, and she can feel its absence like a missing tooth.
The ghost's first problem is not the wound. It is that a man with a pen is waiting for her to say her own name.
Things you can try
- Claim you remember nothing at all
- Study your own hands and face
- Ask who stabbed you
- Call for Bea
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.