Support Group - March 2021

[tramitem]

Who: OPEN (Including to all the new characters who app throughout the month)
What: Bureau Run, Non-Mandatory Support Group
When: There are meetings at various times during the week, whatever works for your character between 8 am and 10 pm
Where: There are meetings at various locations around NYC, whatever works for your character
Rating/Warnings: We ask that players put appropriate warning labels in the subject lines of their threads as they become necessary


There’s a generic spread of food on a table off to one side of the room: donuts, muffins, bagels, and cookies; coffee, lemonade, water, and because one of the Different asked for it, hot chocolate. Maybe you’re hungry enough to try it—it’s free after all.

Or maybe you can’t stomach anything, given the event you’re attending.

The space is a local rec center. The beige-painted cinder block walls and the fluorescent lighting are a terrible combination. Maybe they are reminiscent of the public school you attended in your youth?

Why are you here? Curiosity? Maybe the Bureau official will say something that will help you make sense of things? The meeting was interesting—who knew there were so many people like you, receiving memories of a past life? The group was led by someone from The Bureau—the Department of Medical Services. Some people are staying in their chairs and chatting—they must know each other from previous meetings. Some of them are gravitating towards the food.

How do you feel about tonight? Has it helped you come to terms with the dream of memories you’re having? Maybe it’s time to talk to others, get an understanding of their experience.

Comments

[vrepit_no]

The lanky gradstudent takes the handshake firmly with a flash of a smile. "Good to meet you too, Dr. Whitly. Takashi Shirogane - call me Shiro. Any advice you can give me would be greatly appreciated. It kinda feels like I got the rug pulled out from under me or something. How do you even begin to cope with something like this?"

[not_as_i_do]

He blows out a slow sigh at Shiro's question. "That's the first thing I asked at one of these, too." At least, he thought to himself, Shiro had a better welcoming committee than he had had in Alec Hardy.

"You can't just push it to the back of your mind and try to ignore it, or it'll eat you alive," he said candidly. "Write it down, meditate on it, reach out over the networking forum they've built for us ... do sculpture, I don't know. Just ... find an outlet. And, uh ..."

How should he put this?

"Expect the unexpected."

[vrepit_no]

Shiro watches him seriously, meeting his eyes with the solid gaze of someone who is listening intently and absorbing. "Find an outlet. Okay." A little wry smile tweaks up the corner of his mouth. "Something not necessarily this group." His eyes flick over toward the Bureau rep without moving his head.

"Can you elaborate on that last part, please, Doctor? Do you mean to just stay alert and roll with whatever comes? Or is there something more specific?"

[not_as_i_do]

"Definitely outside of the group," he says with a wry smile. "I can elaborate quite a bit, dear boy, but there's a lot to unpack. For starters, these new memories we're getting ... they don't ask you when it's a good time to drop in. And sometimes you aren't the same when you come back to yourself from them. I have a friend who woke up with a prosthetic hand one morning."

[vrepit_no]

Shiro blinks, startled, sitting back in his chair. "Seriously? Just... went to bed as per usual and woke up with an entirely new hand? What the--" He catches himself, coughing rather than swear in front of his elders. "Did they lose any time? Like, there's no way someone could have come in, performed surgery, healed them up entirely, and made a prosthetic to fit. If someone had developed that level of healing, we would have heard about it by now - the millionaires would be having fits as to who got to fund it first."