You want to know what you actually do here. Not the lore, the Tuesday. So here is one week in the Bastion, the same week, read off three different ledgers, a badge, a crew boss, and a woman who runs a counter. Watch where their weeks touch, because those touches are the scenes, and in a year of playing here those touches are your whole life.
MONDAY. Payday. Everyone settles before 0600 or wears it.
RENN wakes with a citation already on her sheet, sixty creds for a knife she drew in Rust on Saturday. She is a Runner, gutter-born, and she runs product for a crew three blocks wide. She pays the citation, because an unpaid one compounds by Payday and she has plans that need a clean sheet. Then she does her rounds, collecting last week’s debts in Cal and cheaper favors, and one debtor can’t pay, which becomes a problem she will solve on Thursday.
OFFICER VOSS starts his shift by pulling the weekend’s citations and seeing which ones went to warrant. Three did. One of the three is worth chasing; two are worth selling to whoever wants the collar. He is Civil Authority, which doesn’t mean honest, it means licensed. His paycheck is his salary plus a cut of everything he collects, and Aurora calls that a collection incentive, and Voss calls it the reason he works the rich corners in Sputnik instead of the dead ones in Atomic.
MARA opens the Drip Core. She runs a cafe that’s also, quietly, the most reliable information exchange on her street, because everyone drinks and nobody watches the person who pours. She pays her protection Monday morning, to a runner from Renn’s crew, in Cal and a standing tab. It’s cheaper than trouble and it buys her something better than safety, she hears things first.
TUESDAY through THURSDAY. The week does its work.
Renn moves product. Voss prices the street, a citation here, a look-the-other-way there, a deal with a fixer who trades him a name for a dropped warrant. Mara pours for everyone and remembers all of it. On Thursday the debtor who couldn’t pay Monday offers Renn something instead of Cal, a memory shard, warm, sealed, provenance unknown, and Renn takes it, because a sealed warm shard is a lottery ticket and she is owed a win. It’s either worthless or the best thing she will touch this year. She takes it to a fence. The fence takes it to Mara’s counter to ask a quiet question about where it came from. The loop closes without any of them planning it.
FRIDAY. The amber, maybe. If the amber falls, the week stops. Everyone stands in it for the nine seconds everyone always stands in it, badge and crew and counter alike, faces up, and then everyone goes back to being who they were, a little more marked than Monday, and nobody mentions it.
THE WEEKEND. The city spends what it earned. The Hyperwire’s floor, the Dead Man’s Circuit running loud till the third shift stumbles in, the clubs in Chrome. The loungers in the residences, where the ones who can afford it lie back and live somebody else’s better day. The flesh market in the booths, the Sanguine with a waiting list, the drug corners doing their best trade of the week. Renn drinks with her crew. Voss works the weekend rate because the weekend is where the citations are. Mara closes early, goes home to a bought companion who is always glad to see her and always will be, and doesn’t think of that as sad, because in this city it’s not.
That’s the week. Notice that nobody in it’s a hero, nobody is questing, and none of them could get through a Tuesday without the other two. That’s not a bug in the world. That’s the world. Your character is a fourth ledger in that same week, and the moment you pick who you are, you will find you already owe two of these three people something.
The city doesn’t run on plots. It runs on Mondays.
[THREE LEDGERS CLOSE. YOURS OPENS WHEN YOU DO.]