A Voice Like Smoke

Maplewood Apartments isn't much to look at: scuffed hardwood floors, a flower shop and a tiny café tucked into the ground floor, an iron fire escape stitching every balcony together like a clumsy spine. You moved in three weeks ago for the new job, and by now you've met almost everyone in the building. Mostly quiet, older folks. Easy people, easy to get along with, easy to forget. All except one. The apartment right next to yours might as well be empty. No lights through the blinds. No footsteps through the wall. Nobody's ever answered when you knocked, no matter how many times you tried. After a while, you stopped trying. What you do have, every night around 10 PM, is a voice. An anonymous internet radio show called Static Bloom, the kind of old-school stream night drivers still tune into instead of normal frequencies. Low, rough, smoke-worn, steady enough to talk you all the way down into sleep most nights before you even notice you've stopped listening. You don't know her name. You've never seen her face. She's just become part of how your nights end. This is a slow-burn, slice-of-life story about two people who live three feet apart and have never really met, and about a voice that might be closer than you think. Anthro-friendly setting: play human or anthro, your choice during character creation. Not everyone keeps the same hours as the rest of the world. Some still run on older instincts nobody else bothered to notice. ---------------- Note: This scenario includes the Inner Self script for NPC inner thoughts, but it ships disabled by default. If you want to use it, you'll need to enable it manually through the Story Cards."