One Shot: Lavender

Character: Lavender
Game: Lost in the Rain
Episodes: 1
Theme Song: Dolphin by Poe
Keywords: Quiet, delinquent, forgotten

Recently I decided to facilitate a game of Lost in the Rain, which is a game about lost children getting eaten by monsters in the rain. And not just any type of monster, but the kind that calls your name, pretends to be loving adults, or manifests in your fellow children by hunger or meanness or fear. They're monsters designed to find and kill and eat children.

The doesn't have one GM, but rather, it has one active player while everyone else is GMing. So everyone makes a character. I made Lavender, a poor girl whose family was a lot of people, from her parents to her many siblings to aunts and uncles and cousins... and they all lived in the same house. It was easy for her to disappear because there were just so many people no one noticed when one of them went missing.

Her fear? Wolves. I chose this because it was my fear when I was little. Too many werewolf movies or stories from the neighbours, I don't know, but I was terrified of wolves. I had night terrors about them. I woke up screaming about them. I don't really remember much about it. But my mum likes to tell me stories.

The game showed Lavender to be a bit of a loner and super into breaking and entering. While the other kids seemed poor too, Lavender was the only who had typical delinquent skills that went along with that stereotype. It was revealed in play that she was the daughter of the grounds keeper/janitor and knew a lot about the school that let her hide more effectively.

In this game though, there can only be one survivor, and Lavender didn't really do anything to endear herself to the other kids. She was likely to call someone silly or stupid or dislike them rather than try to help, and thus, she did not survive until the very end. Despite being mean and the kind of kid to lash out at weakness, she made a friend or two and stuck by them. Anything was better than being alone with the wolves.

Loneliness was a huge theme in the game, and I came to understand that Lavender was probably a little too independent and a little too accustomed to being by herself in a room full of people than she probably should have been for a nine year old. This is possibly because I was one of those kids who was super comfortable on their own. Lavender was like me in my independence and my fear of wolves. I was a nice kid though, or at least I like to believe. Lavender wasn't. She wasn't mean either. She was just impartial to most people.

The game really let me play with being a kid again running from the things you're afraid of. It's not an easy game to sit and be present in. Lavender turned out to jump off of a roof to escape the wolves, thus plunging to her death to the streets below. Thus ended the story of Lavender, she never found her parents.